He shakes his head. “Not years, no. Do you think I would do this lightly? I’ve given it a lot of thought. All of the angles, keeping in mind my kids, my insurance, the business, everything. This is the best time.”
And suddenly I understand. “Things go better if you don’t die of the disease.”
“Yes.”
We put it away for the time being. We have our dinner. It is delicious in addition to being pretentious. Afterward we walk hand-in-hand down Robson Street, stopping to watch street performers. He asks if I want my fortune told by an old woman who is reading tarot cards at a table she has set up outside Muji. I decline. I understand that there is nothing in the future that I need or want to know.
That night we make love with a new ferocity. We are clinging to something that can’t be held, that’s how it feels.
I wake to strong sunlight and the call of seagulls. I get up before he does and pull the pieces of myself together. Then I pack my things. It doesn’t take long.
He wakes as I head for the door.
“Will I see you again?” he calls, his voice sounding suddenly weaker. Not from illness, I’m sure of that. But from something that wrenches my heart.
I don’t answer, as I leave his key on the sideboard next to the sculpture in the hall. What is there really to say?
I go to the airport. Get a rental. I only need it for a few hours. I park it safely, my stuff neatly in the trunk. I head out on foot to find what I need. It doesn’t take long. The car is long and old and perfect for my needs. It is solid, like a tree, and the ignition is broken easily.
From the time I sight the car to when I start it with a screwdriver is under five minutes and then I’m gliding around in a full-sized piece of Detroit steel that was old enough to vote before I was.
I don’t wait long outside his office. I know I’ve timed things well. We haven’t known each other long, but I have a handle on his routine and so I idle the big car down the block. Lying in wait.
When he emerges from the building, I try not to analyze the firmness of his step or the jut of his chin, the tilt of his head. I try not to think about how he is feeling. Is this a good day for him or bad? Is he in pain? Has he said all his goodbyes?
I follow him for three blocks before I see the right moment to approach. I wonder if he feels the shadow or the ghost of me, but I discard the thought. It is fanciful, and I have no place for that here.
I begin to accelerate as his feet leave the curb. I admire again the spring in his step, the length of his stride.
He is in the middle of the intersection as I reach him. It happens very fast.
Saturna Island
by Timothy Taylor
Kitsilano
1
Friendship. You know it’s real when it ends in blood.
Harris wasn’t sure who said that. Maybe nobody. But as he typed the sentence — fingers to the keys of his computer, hands shaking — it had the ring of truth.
Fifteen years gone. They were stupid kids not to see it back then. Harris typed that too: Saturna Island, that whole bohemian summer. We were stupid kids.
Drinking and arguing and fucking. Harris remembered rocky beaches, dense forests, steep cliffs, a TV tower, and an auto graveyard in the deepest part of the forest where they took morning hikes. He remembered the ferry from Vancouver every Friday afternoon they could get away, cutting the steel-blue waves. Their shared ritual, seeking freedom from jobs they hated. But didn’t all such cleansing rituals conceal a sacred violence in the end?
Harris typed: Sacred violence. He thought of Roen who ran the B&B on Boot Cove where they’d all stayed. Sitting at that big dining room table while the Szekszárdi and the weed went around. Arguing about film and music and their dreams for the future. Murch was going to quit lawyering, go work at Habitat for Humanity. Purma wanted to counsel teens. Harris was still a banker then, not yet having quit to become a writer — three published crime novels featuring a detective named Harvey Raven, a recently cratered marriage, broke and alone in a Kitsilano basement surrounded by empty pizza boxes and spent Tetra Paks of French Rabbit pinot noir, remembering.
Time to end this, Harris thought. Typing now: Time to end this.
Roen had been the leader: thin, handsome, Roman nose, dark hair flowing to his shoulder blades. A musician, he said, though plucking tunes for his girlfriend Calliope was the only performance anyone ever saw. The B&B was owned by a man named Jimmy. Biker, Roen said. Member of the Exiles.
Bullshit, Harris thought at the time, given the fact that things Roen said often were. But then it all turned out to be crucially true. Some boring Tuesday at the bank. Roen calls. He’s in town hanging at the Railway Club waiting to meet the man. Wouldn’t Harris like to join them? And Harris said yes, hating himself for his seeming vulnerability to whatever Roen might suggest.
No subtle clues required. Jimmy arrived wearing Exile colors complete with a One Percenter patch. And in the awkward fifteen minutes of small talk — before Jimmy downed two fingers of Maker’s neat and made his departure — Harris was mostly successful in not staring at the tattooed tear leaking from the corner of Jimmy’s right eye.
Roen of course had to spill everything soon as the guy was out the door. Jimmy popped down from Whistler every couple of weeks with a delivery, Roen said. Cash. Like twenty-five, thirty grand, dropped off in a briefcase similar to the one Roen then produced from under the table.
“Fuck sake,” Harris said. “Don’t show me that!”
But Roen knew he was curious. So here came all the details. The shrink-wrapping involved, the secret storage compartment in the old studio building at the bottom of the B&B orchard, the old key he then flourished on a key fob shaped like a guitar.
“All access, motherfuckers,” Roen said, tossing the keys onto the bar while Harris recoiled. “What? This is material. I thought you wanted to be a writer.”
Fucking Roen and Murch and their snickering about his pathetic ambitions. Roen the wannabe musician/crook. Murchma-fucking-Ghandi.
Harris at the table in his tiny kitchen, hands quivering over the keyboard. Of course he’d still been on the ferry that Friday, the whole gang as usual. Choppy seas on the voyage out, something changed in the air that he was not detecting. Purma and her friend Zach. Shanny, with whom Murch devoutly wanted to sleep. Her friend Jin, who Harris could still close his eyes and see, black hair shining in the dusty rays of sunshine coming in through a cracked window. How many crossings had been made by then? How many ritual cleansings to prepare them for that final night? On the ferry. Over dinner and all that wine and arguing and job talk that climaxed with an inebriated Shanny climbing onto a chair to announce that she could never be involved with a lawyer.
Harris took no pleasure remembering Murch’s humiliation. Something had been launched in that moment. Something Harris saw now in the dark clouds rolling to the top of the inlet. Gray rain approaching. Shanny poised in memory, working it through. You couldn’t trust lawyers, she’d finally announced, because lawyers were paid to lie. And thus was the entire law itself a lie.
Silence in the room. Pity for Murch who was red-faced and seething. Except Roen, who only twisted the blade: “Isn’t that true, me droogie? A lawyer will rep a drug dealer that he knows is guilty. He’ll rep a drug dealer who’s stashed away money somewhere, his proceeds from crime, money that will later be used to pay the lawyer’s own bills. Isn’t that what Shanny is saying, what makes the entire law itself a lie?”