Jericho (2 page)

Just then a man who worked at the hotel charged out with another man—his boss, it looked like—and began shooing them away. “The police are on their way,” I heard the original man say. The panicky girl looked even more nervous; the other one, I saw now, was too stoned to have any fear. Bishop and the two hotel guys got into quite an argument. It ended when the airport shuttle pulled up and Bishop and his two friends got on. Words were still being exchanged. I was only a couple of metres away by this time and I heard Bishop scream back from the safety of the bus as it pulled away, “Fucketh not with me, saith the Lord, for
I shall have thine ass on a kaiser roll!” I remember thinking that he had a scrawny excuse for a butt but nice long skinny legs.

Even in Vancouver a person like that stood out. I kept looking for him wherever I went, maybe to take my mind off the mission I told my sister Annie I was on. Eventually, when I saw him again, it was as if I was watching a play and he came stumbling onstage and became part of it.

I was coming back from one of my long fruitless searches on skid row far out East Hastings and stopped to rest awhile on the grass in Victory Square. The day was just lovely. I had been enjoying it for a while when a homeless woman came by. She was old, I couldn’t tell how old exactly, and she eased herself down on the curb in a deliberate kind of way, like she was suspicious of the place where she was about to sit. She was travelling with a supermarket cart full of paper bags. From a distance she would have looked like a simple customer who’d got lost on the way from Safeway while looking at all the coupons she hadn’t managed to use that week. At close range, though, I could see that she carried her reality with her everyplace she went, just like she did her possessions. I noticed a plastic bracelet around one wrist with computer writing on it.

“My name is Dennis and I’ll be your server this evening.” She spat out the words. “Sonsabitches!” Then a little later: “This is your final warning. Please pick up the white courtesy phone.”

That’s when Bishop appeared out of nowhere and sat down beside her without a word. He was smoking a cigarette but soon tore it from his lip and flicked it on the ground by her feet. She suddenly became alert and picked it up.

“Would you like a whole one?” Bishop shook the pack and one popped up, like a trick card in a deck.

After looking at his eyes and then at the cigarette, she decided to take it, though she seemed as if she still expected to get an electric shock when she touched it. Then she pulled her cart close to her and began rummaging in the bags. “Cheapskates,” she muttered.

“You’re welcome,” Bishop said back.

She was pulling things out of the bags: a change of old clothes, a swim fin without its mate, a coffee can, a broken barometer, a length of that flimsy brass chain they used in the seventies for hanging cheap lamps from. The cigarette went into the coffee can and she replaced the lid. “I keep all my cheapskates in here,” she said, and patted it.

“I’m a broker on Howe Street,” Bishop said to her. I wanted to laugh out loud. “This morning a guy comes into Reception and asks if I’m in, and Deborah says, ‘Who shall I say is calling?’ and the guy says, ‘Death.’ She says, ‘Do you have an appointment?’ and he says yes. And she says, ‘What is it regarding?’ and he says it concerns contributions. So she buzzes me and says, ‘There’s a Mr. Death to see you, sir.’ I ask what he looks like. Deborah says he’s tall, wearing a black suit with a bright red silk tie and, you know, cloven hooves. The last thing I hear as I’m running out of there is Deborah saying, ‘I’m afraid he’s in conference. Would you like to leave a message?’”

“There’s no president for that,” the old woman says after chewing the question over for a while. “There’s no legal president for that decision. It says so in the papers.”

She started pulling pages of old newspapers from one of the bags and then removed other pieces from inside her clothes.

“Now some people wear them first and don’t read them, but I read them first. Or
sometimes
I’ll read them, if it gets too warm.” She made a sound like gurgling.

I didn’t know if all of this was funny or sad. Looking back of course I’d have to say sad.

Not every day but several times a week I’d run into this strange guy I’m telling you about. When I finally got up close I saw that his shoulder-length hair was done with implants. One morning he got on the bus I was riding. He had barely come up the steps before he was having some kind of brief but interesting argument with the driver. I didn’t overhear all of it but it seemed to be a kind of verbal scuffle, the sort (I’d find out over time) that seemed to be what happened after he’d made his first impression on people. At the front of the bus, in one of the seats facing across the aisle, was a woman who was about eight months pregnant.

“Don’t worry, madam,” he said to her in a clear voice, a little too loud. “In an emergency situation,
I
can deliver your baby.” She looked alarmed and everyone else seemed startled but I have to say he made me laugh. “My first job in show business,” he told her, “was as a whorehouse puppeteer.” Now she was really frightened. On certain words he had some sort of an American accent like you hear on television.
Show business
came out
show bidnet.
He liked to put it on, I’m not sure why.

Without meaning to or even noticing for a while that I had, I’d turned into a kind of accidental spectator in this person’s life. Maybe that’s what prompted me to get off when I was sure that’s where he was getting off too. It was only a few stops from where I was planning to get off anyway.

I was following him, I have to admit it, because I was curious what he would do next or say. When he stopped at a newsstand, he made a big honking noise like he was talking back to the headlines on the newspapers. Maybe this was his way of sneering at the media. I looked at them too, but they didn’t seem unusual to me. I hesitated a minute, then trailed after him when he went into a coffee place a few doors away. He saw me looking at him and locked on eye contact (and like I’ve told you, when he did this it was like a magnetic force was involved). He could do the look all right, and it drew me over to where he was. He motioned for me to sit down.

“Are you the one from the other day?”

I said, “I guess so.”

He looked at me suspiciously. “I don’t usually do this.”

“Me neither.”

“But you sounded like you might be okay.”

At that point I realized that either we were having two different conversations or he thought I was someone else. I guess either way was a possibility. I got the feeling he was waiting for someone that was obviously not me, or at least waiting for me to say the magic password that let me into his reality, if that’s what you want to call it.

“I saw you in the park a few days ago with that homeless woman.”

Which park? Which homeless woman? He had to think for a moment. “Pigeon Park?”

No, I told him, Victory Square.

Then he remembered. “She’s an oracle,” he said.

“Oh.” I probably sounded dumb, but I didn’t know what else to say.

“She’s a wise woman, a wisdom-teacher. She foretells the future. She may be a healer too, though I never seen her heal. But she’s definitely an oracle.” He pronounced the word something like
awrickel
, rhymes with popsicle.

Until I learned how to listen to him, Bishop’s statements like this would often leave me not knowing how to answer. Over time, though, I started to understand that this was one of the reasons he spoke the way he did. He was a hermit who couldn’t stand living alone. He was a social animal with no small talk, not even much medium talk as far as I could tell. Just talk. All the same kind. His own. He liked acting outrageous, I think, because it kept conversations from happening, yet he kept talking all the time, regardless. Something had happened, some bad biology, that had left him this way. That sounds lame, but I didn’t have any other explanation for it. He’d say things out loud to see how they sounded and it frightened a lot of people. “I am a death provider,” he said once, and the people around him jumped out of their chairs.

Even during that first encounter in the coffee bar, he kept telling me multiple versions of himself. “I was born in the Year of the Rat,” I remember him saying grandly, “and was raised by circus folk—good people, much misunderstood.” The whole time I sat with him he glared at the front door, waiting for the other person to enter. He kept yakking but I couldn’t tell if he was interested in talking to me or giving the mystery person some more time to show up. He didn’t look at his watch, I noticed. Then I noticed he didn’t have a watch. Every so often he’d grip the end of his ponytail and unconsciously place it on his shoulder like a parrot. He caught me looking at him doing it and thought I was staring at the bad scar on the back of his left hand.

“The result of a freak accident,” he said. “I got in a fight with a freak. That was years ago, back in Snaketown.”

That was the first time I ever heard him use the word. I didn’t know where it referred to. I still don’t, though I now think I understand what it is, if not where exactly. The scar wasn’t recent but it was still very obvious, a large pinkish-white band of raised flesh like a parasite worm sleeping on his hand or something that should have a zipper underneath it.

He was smiling. “I got it playing anarchist poker. Have you ever played anarchist poker?” This wasn’t a question exactly and he didn’t give me time to answer. “In anarchist poker there’s no face cards. But there are twenty-six jokers. Everything else is wild. The first person with a winning hand enjoys the privilege of shooting out the lights.” He made that sound way back in his throat that sounded like it was coming from a baby or a crow.

We spent about an hour in there. A waiter was starting to give us looks. All the caffeine wasn’t doing Bishop much good. “Let’s get out of here,” he said finally. “I’ve been stood up without apology or explanation.” He always talked that way, which is why I don’t have any trouble remembering his words exactly. He started to leave and I left with him. Following him on the street was pretty crazy when I look back at it. But leaving with him was a turning point in my life—I can see that clearly now. I guess he hadn’t finished telling me whatever he was going to say, or I hadn’t finished listening. That would be weeks away. The waiter’s eyes locked onto mine as Bishop and I left in a hurry. The waiter seemed to say, “Good riddance.” I smiled back and made my eyes go as wide as they could and sort of shrugged, as if to say, “One never knows, eh?”

We walked and walked, I wasn’t sure where we were going; I thought maybe we were going in circles looking for the other person. Bishop’s long legs made him walk like someone in the country pacing off the property line. I had to keep pushing myself to keep up. Bishop paid absolutely no attention to the traffic that tore by. He was telling me things about himself that he thought I should know even though we had only just met and he hadn’t even asked my name yet.

“Like minor diplomats and the better sort of gigolo, I own my own tuxedo,” he said. “Someone gave it to me on his deathbed. Another thing. You’d find this out sooner or later. The increase in violence in our society exactly parallels the rise of painless dentistry. No, it’s true. You look back and plot the timelines. When anesthetics became available they started killing people’s souls.”

We turned onto Granville Street and hurried down the Mall past all the old theatres with crafts-sellers lined up outside with their goods. A couple of them recognized me and waved or nodded, which seemed to make Bishop suspicious. Then we were going down the hill towards the harbour but went east on Hastings, the street of broken dreams (and lost fathers?). Bishop took me into an alley off Carrall Street where old Chinatown, sad old Chinatown, began. It was a typical Vancouver laneway, the backs of old brick buildings, the street paved not very well and sort of listing to one side, hydro wires running every which way overhead. I was brought up short by the sight of two homeless men stripping a third one. The two doing the robbery scattered as we came near, leaving the naked man moaning on the pavement. I wanted to see if he was all right, but Bishop grabbed my
hand—it was the first time he ever touched me—and dragged me along, fast.

At the far end of the alley was something even worse: a young woman, a teenager I’d say, sitting on a bare, stained mattress, wearing only her bra and panties and rings through her ears and nose. A user obviously, and keeping business hours right out in the open in the middle of the afternoon. I expected Bishop to pull me along even faster this time, but I was amazed and a little frightened when he stopped to talk to her instead. He asked her where someone named Cynthia was. They had an appointment but Cynthia didn’t show up. The girl was too high to give a coherent answer.

“Tell her we’ll wait for her in the square, up there, you got it?” Bishop pointed, not very accurately but in the general direction, and began half dragging me again (I didn’t like it) back along Pender and towards Victory Square.

There was the oracle woman again with her Safeway buggy.

“How old do you think I am?” she asked us, or rather Bishop. She answered herself in a slightly different voice. “Well, it’s an age. I’ve got awards, citations.” She drifted away to different topics all the time. Listening to her was like trying to find a station on the radio that never really existed: little snippets of conversation every half-twist of the dial, all coming from different places in the universe. Now she was giving the news in brief. “They say the crime rate is going through the roof. They say there’s going to be war in the Middle East somewhere.” She let herself float away to different topics all the time. “They say pastels are fighting back this year. What do you think?”

I didn’t have a chance to answer even if I’d known what
to say. The oracle shouted at a passerby, an innocent man walking up the path. “Hey, buddy, you got change for an egg roll? I’ve been craving for some Chinese food.”

The man ignored her and she shouted after him. “You riff-raffs are all alike. Afraid you might put me in a higher tax racket.” She resumed her normal (!) tone. “Wouldn’t want that. She’s a genius with a penny, people used to say that about my mother. Think what she could have done with a dollar if she was alive today. But they’re all gone.”