the store. His life outside that front door will evaporate, and he will have wasted all those years he spent carefully building his uncontaminated freedom. He will grow immune to his mother’s dowdiness and his father’s sarcasm. The local schoolchildren will whisper about his face in the living-room window, pale and unsmiling, and make promises to each other that they will never approach, not even for trick-or-treating. His socks stick to the kitchen floor; perhaps it’s the spilled grains of cooked rice, or perhaps the house itself is clinging to him, pulling on any available part of his body. If this is home, then home is not what he wants.
“No, I’m sorry, Mom. I have to go.” He hurries toward the front hall, wiping his hands on his pants as he goes. He bursts outside into the humid air, not daring to look behind.
In that pre-dawn all those years ago, Danny took this same route, riding in someone else’s Cadillac as it drove too quickly down these same streets. His body braces, anticipates the bumps and pits in the road. The railroad tracks run parallel to the street and abandoned train cars sit to the side, some rusting from the top down, others settling into the ground, surrounded by crab grass and salal. Shadows move in the doorways of the warehouses and shipping companies. Danny doesn’t look closely at the people he perceives hiding in the evening dim. Men trading money for heroin or cocaine. Women trading all sorts of things for five dollars, sometimes ten.
He rolls down the window, and the smell of the fish cannery, drying weeds and salt blows into the car. He breathes it all in; after all, this fetid air means that he is driving away.
Turning down Davie Street, he sees that, even though the sun has not set, the night has already begun. Women stand on the sidewalk, fixing each car with looks of disdain or invitation. Their short skirts cling to their thighs and asses and stretch almost to ripping whenever they walk or shift their weight. In the doorway of a boarded-up restaurant, a group of uneasy men and women in walking shoes eye the prostitutes warily. One man fingers a stack of picket signs leaning against the wall behind him, seemingly unsure of the right time to begin marching up and down the street and screaming at the cars that slow down, “Shame, shame, shame!” Through the passenger window, Danny can make out one of the hand-lettered signs: JONNS GO HOME! And the cars keep coming, one after the other, with heads swivelling to see better out the side windows. The drivers sit in shadows, but Danny imagines they look the same: unremarkable; hair, eyes and skin all varying shades of brown and beige. In the apartments above the storefronts, curtains sway, moved by the wind or by the tenants hidden behind them.
Around the corner, huddled in a small group on a side street, six boys stand in their white T-shirts and tight jeans, their hands stuffed into their pockets. They, too, eye the cars cruising past, but look directly at a driver only if the driver looks first. Like a flight of swallows, they seem to be one pulsing creature, until a single boy, tall with dark hair, breaks away to lean against a lamppost and light a cigarette.
These boys stand like his eighteen-year-old self, the one who slumped and slouched down the sidewalks, watching how others conducted their public, street-level lives. Years ago, he might have sidled past them, maybe even asked for a light just so he could more closely study the way their hair flipped along their collars.
He turns right onto Jervis and eases his way into a parking spot, tight between two other cars. Looking up, he can see the dark windows of his apartment. His neighbour has installed two planter boxes, both filled with begonias and pansies, and her curtains—yellow with blue dots—are backlit by a soft lamp. As he reaches down to roll up his window, a brief muggy breeze blows through the car, raising the hairs in his nose. He looks up once more at the third floor before pushing open the driver’s door, stepping onto the sidewalk and walking in the opposite direction, away from the quiet of his apartment above.
This is Vancouver, the city that he loves for its very wetness, for the cool rain that trickles down awnings on November evenings, the slippery sidewalks, the inlet that promises escape to