won a Suzuki Foundation Award for developing a non-toxic fabric finish inspired by water-repellent lotus leaves. More recently he’d been obsessively studying the mako shark and its
Alex lowered the newspaper after rereading the same sentence about the doomed Inga Falls hydroelectric project on the Congo River at least five times. (Kimberly Lum never could write a lead.) “So what does Ernesto Jr. say about your latest mako calculations?” The millionaire Cuban American had started lowballing Rufus on materials almost from the word go.
Rufus, hunched over his laptop at the coffee table, the can of Red Bull at his elbow replacing his usual green tea, glanced at her briefly and shrugged. “It’s complicated.” He turned back to
Rufus just rolled his eyes. “It doesn’t work like that.”
Was it a trick of the light, or was that peach fuzz on his cheeks?
Alex missed her bionical man, as she used to call him, poking a finger into his softening gut. She missed their toilet conversations, the intimacy and vulnerability of a peeing man seated and talking earnestly about his aspirations.
Now, he often stood, aiming from the bathroom doorway in a jet stream. Singing off-key as he whizzed. He seemed happy.
Two of these things were facts. One was just her opinion.
NIGHT ON TOWN TRASHED
By Xmas Singh
Corinna D. and her cousins were just trying to have a good time.
They gone to see dj Jaspa at Viva.
“It was happening,” Miss D. said. She was wearing her new lickwid tights.
But some jerk left a pile of garbage in the middle of the road that allegedly turned out to be a dead body.
“Cousin Kevin was pissed,” said Miss D. “He just washed that car.”
The vehicle was a 2011 Mahindra Scorpio, “a kind of sick green,” according to a source.
None of the passengers was injured during the incident.
Richmond police were totally rude when asked for an interview.
Alex’s other students gave no indication that they thought Corinna’s story was news.
Her neighbourhood was changing so rapidly that if Alex stood without moving on the corner of East 1st and Commercial Drive, she would find herself at the still centre of a kaleidoscopic time-lapse movie. This is what her neighbourhood had become, a tone poem set to a Philip Glass soundtrack, punctuated with sirens, and drumbeats, and guttural shouts as the local unmedicated or overmedicated argued with themselves and each other while they ranged back and forth across the Drive, dodging cars, bikes, and elderly Italian and Portuguese Canadian jaywalkers.
After a period of intense gentrification, a mini baby boom, and the opening of three overpriced florists and a string of restaurants with daily fresh sheets listing boutique beers, there was a sense of emptying out. Her friends who feared the Kamper Kids, the garbage-bag rumours, and commercial rezoning that allowed a methadone- dispensing pharmacy to open within two blocks of the community centre/pool/rink/library fled to the suburbs where they had sworn they’d never go. “I’d rather have an infected needle jabbed deep into my right eye,” Alex’s neighbour Sasha had told her fiercely on more than one occasion. Now Sasha, her pierced labia, wife Marcia, and fouryear-old, Destiny, lived in a semi-gated townhouse complex in Port Coquitlam.
Others were going on spiritual pilgrimages to Varanasi or Amankora or joining the circus. In fact, all around the city children were abandoned to aging relatives or the newly minted private kiddie kennels by their thrill-seeking parents. The older children banded together, moving nomad-like from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, performing odd pantomimes for spare change.
Mainly, though, there was a lot of talk about moving off-grid. The grid, that matrix of power and telecommunications, heat and light on command, was something Alex could understand. She had a healthy respect for the grid. Like IKEA, like steel-cut Scottish oats and cargo pants, the grid represented common sense. She would cling to the grid with bloody, tattered fingers if anyone attempted to dislodge her. Alex overheard a couple in JJ Bean loudly debating the pros and cons of a $25,000 residential wind turbine or a bicycle-powered generator. The woman seemed particularly concerned about not losing access to Netflix. “If you want to get off the grid,” Alex found herself saying, as if offering advice on the daily blend, “try sub-Saharan Africa.” The woman called her an earth-raping, racist, Trotskyite bitch. The guy just winked and tongued the foam on his coffee.
Steel girders formed the roof of the heritage building across the street-an abandoned Free Methodist church turned award-winning performance space-replacing the rotting wood beams of the original. Piece by piece, what was meant to be a renovation had been slowly turning into a replica, like those museum reproductions of Bastet cat goddesses and busts of Pericles you could use for bookends. Now it stood neglected, the skeleton of some great beast washed ashore on a remote island and bleached to a pewter gleam by the sun.
And there was Alex with her free-floating sense of hollowness in her own rib cage. Her period hadn’t shown up for over six weeks, and her first thought was stress, then malignant carpet fibres. A single polymer thread clinging to her uterus, gathering her blood and tissue to it, a teething fibrous leech. She waited another week before even contemplating the alternative.
A child? It seemed she already had a child. A playmate for Rufus? There was an idea! Alex found she wasn’t as horrified at the thought as she thought she’d be. It could be
But the stick stayed white. No thin blue line.
Rufus asked: Do you ever wonder if we’re too straight? Too fluoridated? Too hydrated?
From: ‹ [email protected]›
To: ‹ [email protected]›
Sent: February 10, 2008
Subject:??
Hey Roof? You know the Janjaweed? They call them demons on horseback. There’s a guy here, ostensibly with Human Rights Watch, but he has some kind of “deep intelligence” (read: he has something they want). The word is that the Sudanese govt. is backing this raging Arab militia. It’s genocide plain and simple. So I get this interview with a demon “general”-this alleged war criminal who arrives at the rendezvous somewhere near his garrison on a camel. And the thing he wants to talk about is dental hygiene. He got his teeth fixed by a recruit who was a dentist in Dubai. Now he religiously uses whitening strips. “Like Hollywood,” he tells me. He’s supposed to hate the infidels, right? So I stand there dumb as a moth in my chador (de rigueur due to his Muslim sensitivities) while he asks about my dental plan and whether I prefer Crest or Colgate.
This is so hysterically not what I expected that my questions, all the anger that I’ve been stoking since I got here, go AWOL. And all this time he’s leaning in close, flashing these teeth like he’s a game-show host, and then he asks to see mine.
It’s just him, his camel, and me-and a circle of his men on their horses eyeing us from a distance. My “translator” has wandered off to take a piss. I lift my shroud flap up over my eyes and he makes this sound in his throat, almost like poor old Knob-Goblin’s purr used to sound when we snurffled her belly, and puts his finger, which smells like smoke and blood and goat, right into my mouth. He runs it back and forth and back and forth, from molar to molar, while muttering something I take to be, “Nice, nice.” I think, I do actually think this, I could bite his finger right off right now, bite down as hard as I can, trapping his filthy child-raping finger and then spitting it out at his feet.
He just keeps running his finger back and forth and so help me god I start to get hot and almost come right
