-Chapter 18-
Vancouver, Canada, January 20th, 1979.
We sat on the tumbling granite blocks of the seawall, pushed up against the fantastic greenness of Jericho Park on one side and a crescent of golden sand that looked gray in the cold winter drizzle on the other. It would stop soon though, Peder informed me, the rain ‘rarely lasted more than a couple of hours.’ I knew this was bullshit, but being the visitor I decided to heed my quasi-guide’s advice when it came to local meteorological eccentricities.
‘So, Angelina, how do you like UBC?’, he turned and asked the young woman beside him. She sat indifferent to the drizzle, nibbling hesitantly on a Panini from the Italian joint up the block, her crisp golden hair slightly tangled and wild beneath the drooping edges of a cheap umbrella. ‘Let’s walk up Alma to West Broadway’, she replied, deflecting the question partly because she was young, partly because she was beautiful, but mostly because she could. ‘Angie! Why you muzz be zo difficult to our fine young man here?’ Peder scolded, but I could tell it had nothing to do with me. There was something intimidating about this girls indifferent, placeless aura- she was kind, that much I could tell, but you had to slowly earn it; to unwrap her niceness from its shell. A decade of living in an apartment in projects of downtown’s eastside while her mother cleaned apartments in North Beach for wealthy Asian-Canadian families who treated her like some kind of expendable native had hardened her a bit.
The trip from Saint Petersburg had been perhaps the best handling of overwhelming stress yet in my life, I decided. From the moment we’d checked out of the hotel, Peder had been an inconsolable mess. Even when I’d showed him his ticket under a false name and the fake state I.D I’d paid some kid 500 rubles to make in an ally that morning, he was a man possessed by fear. He stuttered, he stumbled; he barely seemed to know himself. I suppose I could hardly blame him. Even the fake moustache, new clothes, and haircut/shave we’d arranged the day before seemed to do little to quell his terror. On the plane, our seats surprisingly plush for economy class, I remembered treating Peder like some sort of invalid half-uncle; not the former chemistry professor from Moscow he was. He’d managed to fuck up everything, I thought somewhat irritably, from the silence the passengers around him craved on the overnight flight to spilling coffee in his lap, his hands shaking uncontrollably. My sympathy and respect for Peder never wavered though- he was the tragic protagonist of a neoclassical Russian novel, his plight both absurd and a reflection on the degradation of the human condition by a culturally whitewashed state. It was only when we landed on Canadian terra firma that his tremors finally subsided. He was safe, he was safe- I’d told him this so many times now, but for once the reality seemed to have sunk in. We made our way in exhausted half-reality through the sinuous airport, other travelers cringing at our bleary-eyed ghoulishness, despite the relative norm of such a state amongst the people in the international terminal.
Upon reaching a payphone, he could barely control his fingers to lift if from the receiver, so I dialed Caroline’s number and asked for her politely. A tired, distant-sounding woman answered, probably expecting an indignant Japanese businessman wondering why his apartment hadn’t been cleaned well enough. ‘Caroline… Car… Caro…’ Peder whispered in disbelief, before collapsing onto the dirty white tiles of the little airport lounge. Several nearby travelers rushed to the scene, and for once I was sufficiently overwhelmed not to act with haste. A young man claiming to be a doctor revived him seemingly without the need of any medical knowledge. He’d simply passed out from the emotion, and possibly dehydration, he informed me blandly. No more coffee, I decided. I took the receiver and explained our arrival to Caroline, who was sobbing in deep gasps of gratitude and what was probably confusion. I handed the phone to Peder, feeling strange that so much pain could be channeled through this piece of grey plastic and wire, and they were able to resume their conversation. They spoke now in quick, hushed Russian. Her ability to keep up after all these years, not even a native Russian herself, was unbelievable and touching. Peder managed to hobble out to a cab, physically fine yet so wracked with extenuating turmoil, the joyful conflictions of reunion, that I treated him with the care and reservation usually reserved for the elderly.
We would not go directly to Caroline’s little apartment, as much as he needed to see her, he told me he also needed vindication, redemption from the all-consuming sin of doubt, so he called Mikhail. Mikhail was a realtor, an investor, and a dreamer, Peder informed me gravely. He was trustworthy, but he felt even trust had its own timelines, and the man he had trusted for two decades with the care of his prize apartment on the hip Kitsilano waterfront might now be renting it to crackheads or have it full of cats or something similarly awful. Mikhail was incredulous, as he probably should have been. Hearing Peder’s sad, muted cries of authenticity across the static-filled receiver, I could easily imagine Mikhail’s words on the other end. ‘No, this is not, I think you have the wrong number… no, no, that can’t be. Peder? Peder Zherov? Yez, yez of course zee apartment eez fine. Jesus, I thought you vhere dead in Kresty?!’ ‘When you have seen horrors like I have, everyzhing kind of go away when you vant it to’, he informed me as we pushed our luggage on an inadequate little cart. An amicable Pakistani man loaded it into the trunk of a waiting taxi and we were off into the great green cityscape.
Mikhail was in a meeting- the investors from his recent gold exploration venture were not happy, apparently, so he wouldn’t be able to meet us until 4. Some 2 hours distant, Peder informed me, as if I wasn’t looking at my watch. I liked that he cared enough, thought enough about me to let me know the obvious- our friendship was now something unspoken. Caroline had to work until 6, he said. As much as this might be the defining moment of the decade for her, she couldn’t ignore the defining moment of the week, which was paying rent on time for once to avoid the eviction call.
So, we met Angelina here along the dull granite blocks of the Jericho Park seawall, since she’d decided her intro to modern European literature class was less important than ‘meeting some dude who claims to be my father.’ ‘I still don’t know…’ she said skeptically as she walked arm in arm with Peder up Alma Street to the coffee place she’d told me I would ‘just die for.’ He could tell she knew it was him though- she quivered slightly when she walked, her eyes fixed on a distant vanishing point, hands in his like the little girl she’d never been allowed to be.
We sipped coffee and ate trim little pastries filled with some sort of midday food inside the apocalyptically modern space of Café Intelligensia. Angelina stared silently at her father, who, in doing likewise, seemed to understand that words or stories were no substitute for each other’s unfettered proximity. ‘Is your mother re-marry now?’, he asked her fearfully, but also with rational expectance, knowing it would not have been unreasonable of her to do so. ‘No…well, she was, briefly, you would have liked him, I think- he was kind, goofy in a endearing way, he was a landscape architect for the city…she always manages to attract these guys out of her league’ ‘Angie!’ Peder reprimanded sharply, but his eyes betrayed him, they seemed to know the kernel of truth in her words. ‘But… you know how she can be difficult sometimes.’ He nodded with glum acceptance. She was so smart, so inquisitive, his Caroline, she would have shone like the natural star she was if she’d had the opportunities. Peder still chastised himself for failing to push her into enrolling when they lived in Moscow where taught at the technical college- he had the money, she had the time. She seemed to derive some sort of grim pleasure out of the menial work that ebbed into the long hours of the day, or so Angelina claimed. She said it exposed people’s real person, he said it only wore her down.
‘So zhey no longer together?’, he asked Angelina with poorly-disguised interest. ‘Zhey no longer together’, she answered him in mock accent, his arm playfully batting hers aside. ‘Did you think I was dead?’ he asked more seriously, and she sat back in her little neon plastic chair for a minute, studying the drizzle outside acutely before replying. ‘Look, I thought of you a lot. That much is obvious. You’re my father and I’ve felt you not being there my whole life. But, when you’re stuck in the daily struggle for some food and a roof over your head, you have to push other things aside, no matter how important.’ ‘You have no idea how hard she works…’, she trailed off, lost in the hazy fog that butted up insistently against the window.
‘Angie, how your studies at UBC?’ Peder continued amicably, so consumed by the brilliant tangibility of her presence that her previous remark simply deflected off him. ‘Good… look dad, father-you-might-be, as I’ve never called anyone ‘dad’ before, least in recent memory- we can talk about all this later? Right now, we need to pay for this wonderful coffee and food, and figure out if the damn 6 bus to downtown is running on schedule again.’ All business, I thought- she’d make a hell of a wife for someone- not as a possession, I hoped I never contemplated such chauvinistic idealism, but as a companion of the highest degree, a compliment to someone who ‘didn’t fuck around’; the words spoken in her magical parlance.
She went up to the counter to pay, but I stopped her and fished out a foreign-feeling Canadian bill, waving her purse aside. The money felt crisp and alien in my hands, a symbolic token acquired at the airport Western Union booth, to be snatched back by the hands of authority when we were somehow extradited by the strong arm of mother Russia. She smiled slightly, as if to say ‘Thank you, but I’m still waiting for an explanation as to why this lone young man accompanied my father on a highly personal escape from a Soviet prison.’ I wanted to tell her, no- I wanted her just to know that I was a co-conspirator, an accomplice in this perpetual scheme of escape. That I had nowhere to go, and thus our paths had crossed because making myself hostage to someone else’s plans was easier than setting off into the great aloneness of the world. We did indeed manage to catch the number 6 bus across town, which she claimed had made life a ‘royal pain’ lately. Construction on the nearby major artery of Granville Street had diverted the course of her daily school commute some ten blocks to the south, and damnit if the world didn’t know her inconvenience.
I relished the feeling of being swallowed up in the vast machinery of a new city, to become another unimportant bus passenger or brisk pedestrian, surrounded by the wonderful apathy of strangers. The bus was indeed circuitous and crowded; it smelled vaguely of Asian grocery items, which hung in limp plastic bags around the wrists of elderly Korean and Chinese women, their mysterious chatter filling the narrow plastic rectangle. When we arrived at what Angelina said was our stop beside an unremarkable row of faded concrete apartment blocks on the eastside of downtown, Peder was beside himself again. He shook, he stuttered, he sweated, he was a man wracked with the nervousness of prolonging more than regret. One could hardly blame him, and our attempts to quell his fears did little. ‘Jeez, Peder, we ought to get you drunk down on Granville Street first’, chided Angelina, but I could tell she also had her reservations. Her eyes were large and moist; their pupils slightly distant and confused, as if eyeing a vague horizon line across which the sun might either rise or set depending on the occasion.
She led us down the stairs behind the squat ten-story building. Its unimproved brick façade was a sort of weeping wall for the downtrodden classes of Vancouver, judging from the collection of candles, flowers, trash, and various drug paraphernalia that littered the sidewalk along its broken edges. I wondered whether this was standard urban rubbish or some awful collection of makeshift memorials to recent street violence was unknown. Either reality was a stark contrast to the collection of hip, urban wealth I’d imagined the city. We followed her with the pained self-consciousness of impending confrontation; the way odd details of the present like a half-painted railing or a misspelled fire escape sign jump out when you are focused so intently on the near future.
Angelina opened the sinister looking double lock with bored efficiency, and Caroline stood perhaps 5 meters across the surprisingly large and airy room that compromised the majority if not the entirety of the apartment. She walked over to Peder deliberately, slowly, each step echoing the intent of the last one, and took him strongly in her arms. His shaking eased slowly, like an overinflated balloon deflating unspectacularly instead of exploding into pieces. There were no tears, not even words for the first few minutes, and I followed Angelina’s lead, awkwardly inspecting the cheap linoleum floor [it was spotless], then following her silently into the little kitchen alcove. She offered me a half-glass of warm sake and a few pieces of sashimi from the fridge [‘my one indulgence’, she said, though I sensed the Japanese businessmen who compromised her mother’s business gave her some for free].
The apartment was indeed a large room, a sort of drab basement studio cleverly partitioned into a half-bedroom with two small futons and a vague appropriation of a kitchen. It was too small to qualify as the real deal, but undeniably a cooking space. I felt it was easiest in times of emotional peril to loose oneself in physical details such as this. My evaluation was cruel and pedantic, noting the obvious such that I wouldn’t have to face the accusatory wails and cries filling the space behind us. Angelina did the same. Peder and Caroline carried on in a generally lost manner for perhaps another half hour, speaking an indecipherable blend of Russian, English, and the universal language of past-due emotion. When they finally turned to address the two young people before them, I saw in a sense the two halves of a soul stitched together again. Roughly, but undeniably of the same cloth- they smiled in strange unison, they laughed in the private way one laugh’s around loved ones, and I couldn’t help but smile at the wonderful absurdity of human life.
Caroline was indeed a beautiful woman, yet she seemed prematurely worn. Her eyes spoke of the awfulness of a subservient routine, a private unfairness carried out for the sake of her daughter. Peder seemed to understand that forgiveness, no matter how necessary, was not going to come overnight. She carried herself with obvious pride, though she knew the limitations of the world and the necessity of playing by its strange rules better than most her age, I suspected. Peder insisted we begin to move the next day into his apartment in Kitsilano, and the two women before him were both angry and compliant. They wanted him to know the years of stale sacrifice here; this was not just a place to be abandoned like some white-trash accoutrement of hard times. The burden of it had to be lifted slowly, deliberately. It was a wound that failed to close immediately, however hastened.
Putting off all these heavy thoughts of new beginnings or a closed past, Angelina, forever the mediator, suggested we go down the street to her favorite neighborhood dinner spot, which she called ‘ghetto sushi’. ‘Not that it’s bad or anything…I mean, this is Vancouver, it’s just, well…cheap’, she added with a laugh. ‘I come all za vhey from Russia to finally be vith my beautiful daughter zand vife, and you vant get cheap zushi first night?’ mocked Peder playfully, but he knew she ran the show. She was so strong, so resilient against the layers of bullshit the world heaped on her, he didn’t dare question his little girl who was now a young woman bent on defining the world by her own terms.
‘Zo, any nice Russian boys at your school, perhaps?’ ventured Peder to Angelina, who raised her chin to the sky for a few seconds, as if exalting the setting edges of the sun for an answer to this profound mystery, her eyes ablaze with fatal irony. ‘I’m a lesbian, Peder’, she replied flatly, then softened her tone and nudged his arm, towering youthfully over his rounded, hunched movements. ‘Do you even know what that means? I mean, those probably aren’t allowed in the USSR or something, right?’ She paused for a minute before adding with a sharp laugh ‘Well, perhaps as private entertainers for high-ranking KGB and comrades, we all know how much straight men love to fetishize that stuff.’ This got a genuine belly laugh out of him, and he put his arm around her without pretense or unfamiliarity. ‘Angie, golubushka, sweetheart… you know I’ll always love you.’ ‘Dad…’, she started, horrified a few seconds later at her unconscious use of the word. ‘It’s not a big deal, really. Some girls like guys, some girls like girls. End of story.’ ‘I…I never…’ he started in protest, but she dismissed him with a twist of her perfectly rounded shoulders. They were strong without being masculine, woven of pale European sinew that seemed to shine under her thin silver jacket, the shiny polyester a reflection of her effortless style.
The restaurant was a sort of hovel in a fading section of neighboring Little Japan. It was thoroughly removed from the trendy high-rises of the district’s heart, where various efforts in retail reality competed for space on the steel and glass grid work above downtown. Peder and Caroline hardly ate, lost in the translation of both recent and distant woes, and deservingly exhausted as well. Their company was enough sustenance for the night, it seemed. Angie and I ate ravenously. Great slabs of bright, wet fish glistening across a glass divider, the diminutive Japanese man behind the counter conversing animatedly with her about the recent turn of events while expertly taming a yellowtail filet- her presence was evidently a regular occasion here. ‘Try this’, she said suddenly, thrusting a slice of marbled red flesh towards my mouth between two slender chopsticks. I inhaled it in a smooth motion, noting the wonderfully complex aftertaste, the almost metallic tinge of the sea. The flavors, the odd blend of ocean-bound minerals brought back such strong memories of my first few days on the Stranger that I had to steady myself on the chair, Angelina trying to look away politely. I wanted this to be the logical progression, the next step in the future I’d determined was hopelessly unavoidable, yet somehow things weren’t right. The memory of the sea was fuzzy and warm; it recalled the way the water felt on a warm August night in Maine, black and opaque, encompassing my whole experience evenly.
Caroline was reserved; she knew she had the upper hand over Peder. Her hurt was a private affair that could be used to wield whatever influence over him she wanted, but I knew she wasn’t like this. Watching them converse in hushed urgency, lost in the exotic newness of their proximity, I couldn’t help but think of Max. The way I’d felt that night on the rocky slopes of Moysalen, hopelessly present tense. How impermanent someone can be if you don’t make it work; work the operative idea as well as action. ‘So, when do you want to start moving to Kitsilano?’ Peder inquired hopefully, yet Caroline’s eyes stayed unflinching and forward, chopsticks stabbing a slice of fatty tuna expertly. ‘You think it’s so easy to forget where I’ve been, to abandon my little home I’ve made for myself and my daughter without help from anyone’, she started coldly. Angelina mediated the tenseness with sudden clarity, her arm around her mother in a pose both conciliatory and protective. She knew the facts, the details were foreign and frankly unimportant, I thought- that she should give in again to his earnest love was inevitable. ‘So, what will you do here, Mr. Zherov?’ Caroline said is slight jest, a sly smile playing across her youthful face.
Her husband, former or present, responded with icy humility, his face taking the form of a man who knows defeat but still thinks in terms of possibilities. ‘Whatever I can find…I used to zhink knowledge was universal. Like algebra or the rain, it didn’t need a language of its own to be understood. But, I know there is sacrifice with zee freedom I’ve acquired, eh? I certainly vill not be first engineer or professor to come to zee ‘promised land’ to pump gas or sweep parks, but I think zhese people…zhese…’ He trailed off in a hazy blur of thought, his face neither sad nor happy, just accepting of the facts as they were. Determined and progressive as ever though, he forged ahead- he was unperturbed by Caroline’s bluntness. ‘We vill live in apartment in Kits Beach, I vind job zoon as possible, vich I think my good friend Mikhail can help vith… you, Angie, Clark, and myself.
‘Clark…’ he started, as if to deflect any doubt they had as to their new companion and my place in this personal drama, ‘Clark eez type of young man I zink I can say vith some authority from my teaching and traveling days eez becoming exceedingly rare in zhis vorld.’ I blushed reflexively at hearing my name, my sudden involvement, yet Peder’s words were also hollow in the light of my own stresses. I was tired of compliments that did me no good; that neither propelled me to self-improvement or strengthened the kinship I felt with half-strangers like Peder. In a way, his words now did both, but I felt so alien here at a shabby strip-mall sushi joint in a cold, rainy corner of the Pacific Northwest that the supposed straightforwardness of human empathy did me no good. We talked for another ten or fifteen minutes, the conversation obvious logistical chatter about the upcoming move. It was laced with Peder and Angelina’s infectious self-deprecation, the way they so bravely bared their supposed shortcomings to anyone who wanted to listen. Caroline was also in this group, I suspected- she’d internalized so much unfairness that things would always be skewed, always cast in the shadow of survival rather than the luxury of idle moments.
We walked in silence back to the little apartment. Our footsteps echoed dully through the hum of the city; the incessant drone of people doing things largely because they were told they had to do so. I slept poorly, which I felt had nothing to do with the fact that we were still some 8 hours behind Saint Petersburg time. It was more to do with the resetting of arcane internal mechanisms to this new place, the loss of the subtle Nordic aesthetic I’d become so fond of. It wasn’t the people, people were attractive everywhere, I thought resolutely, ugly too, both in their souls and their skin. It was the implacable details that eluded me; the way my thoughts of Max were always colored by the frigid teal waters of the Lofoten Islands, the hard edge of the little futon in his flat the resting place for these distant thoughts. My money was dwindling. The exact amount was always a mystery to me, in purposeful sabotage to practicality or planning. I wondered if I might find work here in something professional, something you could explain at a cocktail party or a bar without elaborate justification and gesticulating.
When he awoke, the sky outside was gray and boiling, lost in its own dreary thoughts of pending rain. I saw the stark modernity of downtown, the steel and glass islands to the west shining in terrifying 3-dimensionality. To the north, across a large train yard and some sort of ragged industrial carcass, the mountains of the infamous Coast range rose steep and unapologetic from the sea. Their flanks were a study in permutations of green. I felt the nervous excitement of freedom I’d first felt with Max, the idea that I could leave silently now and be on my own without further thought or consequence, however tied I seemed to these people. I made breakfast with quiet, mindless efficiency as they slept, delighting in their tired approval when they wandered into the little alcove that served as a kitchen, the position of the sun and hence the position of the morning obscured by the building clouds. Caroline drank a large cup of black, cheap coffee in a single fell swoop. Her eyes seemed set on the dull necessity of the workday ahead, from which she might gleam some detail of her condition, or at least a paycheck. She said she didn’t mind the work: that the pay was decent and the tasks simple, but I could tell her mind seethed in subtle conflict, the endless ‘what-if’s’ that haunted me also visited her.
The next week passed at a speed that was difficult to gauge. The reference points of reality these days were such that I couldn’t tell if I was on the train or merely watching it go by on the platform. Mikhail, who proved to be honest and clean-cut in the way of middle-aged men of limited means who have nothing to prove to anyone, helped us move into the 4th floor townhouse in Kitsilano. It felt like a tomb, its interior sterile and musty from a decade or two of planned neglect. God knows why they didn’t rent it out, but somehow I knew it fit the story; that it all had to be this way. Not that anything was planned at this point, I decided a few weeks later while watching the sun drown itself in the cold gray Pacific from the rooftop deck of our building. Angelina passed me the smoldering joint she held from the shallow end of the heated pool.
‘Thanks’, I mumbled, afraid to have my eyes directly on her; she was naked and the ‘closed to repairs’ sign was cleverly hung across the pool deck door. ‘You ever wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t met, if you hadn’t stumbled on Max in some fishing village?’, she pried. She was high and I tried to disregard her comment but couldn’t. ‘You know I don’t like to talk about him’, I protested meekly to her, refusing to see him directly in my mind, his name the thinness of my memories. ‘Yah, I know, love is terrible sometimes’, she conceded. ‘But it’s better to have had that realness; the shiny edges of the greatness you get from someone else, than to never have felt anything.’ ‘You get so weird when you’re high’, I chided, but I knew she was right. I hated how I felt I had to diffuse moments like this instead of letting them stew in their own strange momentum.
I dove into the deep end and came up behind her, mock wrestling into the shallow end and up onto the hardwood floor around the pool where little wisps of moss grew between the boards, the incessant greening of Vancouver. ‘You ever think you might be too cool for your own good?’, I pushed her. ‘Think about toning down a bit, you know, the girls are all afraid of you because you’re not accessible enough.’ ‘Fuck accessible!’ she sang, mid swan-dive into the pool. I laughed and could hardly blame her. Ours was a strange lot; caught between or own private greatness and our shortcomings, which lacked the definition, the cementing permanence of true adulthood.
I’d actually gotten several interviews that past week- one of Mikhail’s good friends was a consultant of some clout in the mineral exploration industry, and had passed on my cleverly elaborated but not untruthful resume on to a few colleagues. The truth was obvious enough, I’d decided, and my ‘B.S in geology at Brown’ was valid- life had just interfered with acquiring the damn piece of paper that said it was so. Still though, the guilt of being caught in a lie haunted me- the fact that the rules, no matter how inconsequential they were in the scheme of things, never bent to you; they only made you flex around their rigid forms. I bought a suit, a smart number that was a half-concession to the strict standards of the business world, I figured. When I walked down the steel and glass chasms of the financial district to my first trial, as I liked to call them, I only felt like a caricature to myself. The rest of the city only took note only of my classic looks and nervous gait, the slim leather shoes snagging on all the ridiculous appropriations I felt one had to perform in order to be taken seriously.
I was in fact taken seriously, despite my doubts- my first interviewer was a fellow nautical enthusiast and had a touch of my hopeless wanderlust, despite his stature as a minor pariah as far as the environmentalists and hipsters were concerned, he’d warned me jokingly from the get go. He was in fact an honest and straightforward man, 50-something if I’d had to guess. He had certain qualities of my father that I’d forgotten I missed so intensely. He loved his work and his people, and saw natural resources and the Faustian bargain man made in acquiring them in a balanced and thoughtful light. I couldn’t help but say yes when I got the offer in the mail the next week. ‘You know, this is primarily an office job’, Stephen, or Mr. Beckham, as I felt more comfortable calling him, warned me jokingly as he wandered the long hallways of Imperial Resources on my first day. The gears of my mind were busy processing the fantastic array of maps and aerial photos before me. ‘I know, Mr. Beckham, I just think Imperial has some great properties, I guess’, I answered in what I knew was a slightly lame reconciliation attempt, but Mr. Beckham chuckled again and failed to skip a beat.
‘Of course we have great properties…you are working for us now! But, bias aside, I’ve worked for a number of different junior mining companies, some great, some middling, and some blatant stock scams.’ His honesty to a green hand like me was both fascinating and intimidating. ‘This is most certainly the best. As an economic geologist, you are going to find in your career that it is important to know how to ‘play the game’.’ ‘I’m not sure if I follow…’, I started, but he knew I was partly playing up humility in the face of the new boss. The way a dog nervously sits beside its owner, both certain of its protection and caught in the neurosis of pleasing. ‘I suppose what I’m saying’, he continued, ‘is that you will learn many things, perhaps not a master of any of them -though some are- but versed in the language of the sell and the find.’ Stephen was a Canadian of solid northern Ontario stock. His thatchy blond hair hung in distressed clumps on a square, confident head; his shoulders slumped slightly from years of office tedium. Despite this, he was still filled with the purpose found in long, trying days in the field, pack heavy with rock samples and map boards. ‘We are sort of like modern day adventurer’s, huh?’, I answered in quiet contemplation.
‘Sort of…? Damn right we are. This might an office just like the Scotiabank or Canadian Tire hives across the street, but we don’t operate like them.’ [He loved bee analogies, I noted…though eccentricities aside, the cubicle and corridor world was rather hive-like, roles and spaces falling into neat little compartments]. I found the work fulfilling and purposeful, hive-dwelling aside. The following few weeks were both an exercise in the removal of personal freedom from doubt and showing the world I could do it; I could play by their rules convincingly. My map work was neat and meticulous; without the pained embellishments of a wandering mind I was generally so prone to. I’d begun to relish the 9 to 5 routine and the small one-bedroom apartment it afforded me a few blocks towards Kits Beach from Peder’s family. Sometimes I thought of Max at night, as I lay under excessive down comforters and crisp white sheets, the floral designs on my pillow an obscene and vaguely hurtful reminder of the world of strange patterns I’d left in Norway, the lingering guilt of a theft never truly amended.
I found myself settled into the bland wonderfulness of knowing roughly what one will do the next day, yet the absence of the people I felt I’d condensed a decade of intimacy into a chance encounter with started to wear on me. I saw Angelina occasionally- we’d gotten drunk and slept together perhaps 2 or 3 times. The occasions seemed hazy and distant, though my forehead pricked with nervous physical excitement at the memory. Her skin had been warm and expansive, ‘not what I had expected for a lesbian’, I’d chided her the first time they undressed together on the rooftop pool patio, the city lights reflecting on her firm breasts, the water bath-like and protective. ‘Great, now you think I’m one of those’ she exhaled in a single worried, drunken breath. ‘Haven’t you… haven’t you ever been confused?’, she followed with pleading lightness. ‘God…if only you knew’, I thought to myself, but I resisted the urge to spill the whole story to her, smiling and allowing a single nod to relax my comic stoicism. I felt safe inside her, our intimacy not love but a silent pact forged against the barbarities of an enemy world, a rainy cityscape that hassled us when all we wanted to do was find a place in it.
Angelina indeed became my closest confidant against the cold, rainy urban jungle, and we saw each other a few times a week. Usually we were engaged in something benign and public like a few hours conversation about the world’s unfairness over a double espresso or the sashimi lunch special down the block. At one rendezvous in early May though, when the cherry blossoms shone like waxy candy on the branches that hung over the downtown mall, she informed me with nervous excitement she had a girlfriend, a girl ‘like a vision.’ I was happy for her, but I could feel the intensity of their burgeoning relationship in the way she spoke of Katia, a Czech girl on exchange for the year from the music conservatory in Prague. As Angelina withdrew from me unconsciously and into her own new world, I distanced myself from her as well. At night in the sleek rectangular bed that sat squat and vaguely malevolent against the tall windows of my studio, I would lie awake and hold the bunched up edges of the comforter between me, the memories of Max fading as much as I tried to channel them. I did not think of him in the present, did not contemplate if he was incarcerated, released, escaped, or lost in some own fantastic vision of his own making. Rather, I decided it was silly and futile to dwell on Max, when only walking on alone could ameliorate all the fucked up uncertainty.
I was well liked at work considering my relative inexperience, and I felt the warm, unspoken approval of both my coworkers and the mysterious maps of the Yukon and Central America that hung watchfully over my desk. Lost in the pleasant distraction of a new routine, I’d almost forgotten how little time off I’d been given. Truthfully, it was probably my choice to stay into the bleary mid-evening hours, when adjacent buildings became lit like strange pieces of fluorescent modern art, random squares basking in the dull yellow glow of office productivity. I hardly ever ate or lingered at home- it was too easy and nice to become swallowed up into the translucent fabric of the city, to enjoy the private narcissism of recognition from strangers in a sushi joint or coffee shop rather than engage my problems head on. Every other weekend day I allowed myself to escape the city and drive or take the bus up to Squamish or Whistler, where I might meet a few friends for rock climbing or mountain biking. The deliciously moist greenness of the Coast Range draped over everything like a wet towel, and I felt people came here to either get lost or find themselves. I wasn’t sure which I fit into, but I loved the Northwest aesthetic and it’s unwitting rewiring of my life anyways.
Rock climbing had also begun to bring me the joy it used to, or perhaps just distraction. No, I decided firmly, it was indeed a passion and something I would cling to in times both difficult and easy. Still though, I refused to let myself become one of those infamous climbing bums I recalled reading about with such fervent jealously, the type who sacrificed everything for a life of steep thrills. Not that there was anything wrong with this reckless pursuit of happiness. I just knew it meant more to me when weighed in equal expenditure with the toils of an 11-hour day plotting drill intercepts on graph paper, the little colored pencils like devilish arrows, bent on spearing my muffled creativity. I wanted to be subordinate to something, in slightly wonderful fear of physical or emotional consequences. Climbing pushed these buttons in just the right way. I was strong but not invincible, amateur but not mediocre, skilled but not beyond making technical mistakes on the rock- the steep, bullet-hard granite walls or Squamish or the Eldred Valley like frozen waves crashing over the mossy forest.
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