Author: Allegra

“We’ll see,” George said. “I wish I knew for sure where the child is.”

“If the client’s as terrified of the husband as she acts, then the nanny and the kid are probably gone already.”

“Perhaps,” George said.  “I’m going to wait until Madam isn’t looking, though, and check.”

“I think we should mind our own business,” Jesse said.

“I think we should establish who it is we’re helping.  There’s something not right here.  Kid first, client next, staff next, husband last.”

“I hate to sound like a tired old leftie but I’d prefer it if the staff came before the client.”

“I hate to sound like a capitalist, especially when I’m not by nature, but I’m trying hard to remember who’s paying us,” George said. “I’m going to use the washroom,” George said, leaving Jesse to wrap and stack the chairs.  He walked around the house, which was very large and set on a steeply sloping lot, and came in through one of the doors that had been propped open.

He avoided being seen. The closer he got to the end of the hall of the west wing of the house the more overpowering the smell of blood became.

He found the nanny in a guest room closet. She had been stabbed in the arm and chest, incompetently bandaged, tied up tight and gagged. She made a strangled and fearful sound. George put his finger to his lips and said, “Do you want the cops to come?” Vehement head shake. “Do you want us to get you out of here?” Equally vehement nod. “I’m sorry, but until I can move you safely I’m not untying you.” Her eyes pleaded with him. Sadly, he shook his head.

The child was in a bassinet pushed up against the wall. From her breathing, George suspected she had been drugged. He scanned the colour of her lips and nails, checking his disgust for the people who would do such a thing, and saw with relief that she was probably fine.

To the terrified nanny, George said, “The child is okay. I’m going to go back and keep working, but we’re not leaving without you,” George said. He was careful not to say ‘both’. 

He heard Jesse yelling, put his finger to his lips again and slipped out of the room, putting his finger over his lips one last time and closing the closet door. He found an exit – the house seemed to have a million doors – and sprinted back to the truck, to find a Chinese man in his late thirties holding a gun on Jesse.

I see Daddy’s home, George thought. The suit the gunman was wearing would have made his cousin Michel exclaim with pleasure.

“Get down,” the man said.

Jesse swiftly complied.  George walked up, hands in the air, and said, ludicrously, “How can I help you, sir?”

“Unload the truck and get lost,” the man said. His eyes flickered to the front door.

“The nanny is tied up and bleeding in a closet, and the child she looks after has been drugged,” George said.

“Jesus,” said Jesse, taking his eyes from the gunman long enough to give George a wide-eyed stare.

“Shut up, both of you,” the man said furiously. “Don’t come back in the house,” he added over his shoulder, “Put everything on the ground and leave.”

“She owes us a thousand dollars,” Jesse called after him, not wanting to sound intimidated, and realizing too late what a bad idea it was. The front door slammed.

“A bit over the top,” George chided softly. “Okay, you unload the truck and I’ll go stand between him and the servants.”

“We’ve got to call the cops,” Jesse said.

“No, I don’t think so. If somebody who’s been stabbed and tied up in a closet doesn’t want the cops called, I’m inclined to go slow until I know more.  I suspect if we call the cops some of the staff are gonna end up in the CIC pokey,” George said, referring to the Immigration lockup.

“Fuck,” Jesse said.  He’d never had a gun drawn on him before and was now feeling rather hollow. “Fuck all rich people.”

“Not all rich people,” George said. “The man with the gun said, ‘Unload the truck!’,” George added. “Back in a minute.”

I’m not moving another fucking thing tonight, thought Jesse. Jam a gun in my face, you asshole, and see how fast I work once the gun is gone.

Thirty seconds later, the lights went out, including the yard lights. Jesse remembered his absent Maglite® and felt frightened and ill-prepared and uneasily relieved that it was George poking the bear, not him. There was more yelling, abruptly cut off, and Jesse developed a powerful urge to close the tailgate and start the truck, so he did.

The lights came back on.

After a moment the front door opened. George came out with the nanny and closed the door, and Jesse saw his brief thumbs-up. The nanny seemed dazed and the front and left arm of her white uniform was covered in blood.

“What about the kid?” Jesse called.

“Unharmed and not mine, so I’m leaving it with the parents. You can tell me I’m an idiot later, but the kid wasn’t bleeding… so. Anyway, there’s some good news. We can keep the contents of the truck for our troubles.”

“How the hell did you manage that?” Jesse said, almost squeaking. “I was expecting gunfire.”

“Gun jammed, as it does, when you spend all that time at the range and never clean the damned thing,” George said.

“Did it really,” Jesse said flatly. 

He and Jesse got the woman settled between them.

The nanny spoke for the first time. “My passport,” she said.

Jesse groaned. “Where is it?” George asked.

“It’s in the safe,” she said.  Her eyes were closed. She was sweating hard and panting.

“This should be fun,” George said.

Jesse never learned what George did to get into the safe, but after about five minutes he came back out to the truck with the passport – and the nanny’s BC Services Card, since the next stop was the hospital.

George gave the woman all the money he had on him, while Jesse scowled. They left her at the Lions Gate Hospital emergency department. The nanny said she intended to stay with a friend while she recovered, and that she would fly home the first chance she got. George and Jesse never saw the nanny, their unusual client, her unconscious child and her angry husband again.

Months later Jesse was still saying, “What the hell happened?” Sometimes he phrased it as, “So that Chinese guy took a shot at you and the gun jammed?” “How did you talk them into giving you the antiques?” “I wonder if we did the right thing, leaving the kid there. Who stabbed the nanny?”

George’s responses wandered around usefulness without ever arriving there, but the one that stuck with Jesse was, “Marriage is a highly variable human pastime.”

They unloaded their haul into George’s apartment. Jesse was late getting the truck back, and the rental guy angrily told him to find another supplier.

George didn’t get as good a price as he wanted for the antiques, mostly due to problems with provenance, but in the end, Jesse’s payday for getting a gun pushed in his face was thirty grand. He never told Raven, but she didn’t complain when he spent a little of it on her at Le Crocodile. He hadn’t even known it existed until he Googled “10 Best Vancouver Restaurants”.

When the food started to arrive, she once again wanted to know the occasion, and Jesse said, with an expression of brotherly indulgence, “Just because you’re you.”

“Bullshit,” Raven said, with quiet suspicion.

“Eat your carpaccio and shut the hell up,” Jesse said, and balance was restored to the universe.

At five minutes to two it rang, making both of them jump.  The silence had long since worn off; George was demonstrating his skill at making theremin-like music by squeezing his hands together. Jesse suspected trickery and could not determine exactly what the fraud was or how it might be executed, so after his initial start, he sighed in relief that they finally had a client.

“Where are you? He’s on his way from the airport!” George held the phone away from his ear. Jesse had no trouble hearing her.

With composed courtesy, George said, “Fearing some temporary communication trouble, Madam, we came across the bridge and are minutes from your house. Madam, we need your address.”

Silence. Only George heard her when she said, “I asked the governess to provide it. I’m so sorry for the misunderstanding.” She provided an address, which was, as promised, mere minutes away, and they rolled out.

Jesse whistled as he got out of the truck.  They’d never had such good access to a move site before; he estimated the turnaround was large enough for three tractor trailers and maybe thirty cars. Jesse did not get to bask for long. He and George were wordlessly greeted as the door was opened by a perfectly coiffed, groomed and uniformed maid whose fixed smile woke Jesse’s PTSD with a vicious blow.

This was no one who could help him or protect him. This was the face of someone terrified of someone else, and willing to watch you drown to stand on shore.

She led them into a smallish, comfortable room off the entranceway.

Jesse remained standing to make a show of respect and also to stay alert, as he had no intention of moving his gaze from the door. He managed breathing exercises while he did it. You’re a superstar. On the inhale! Silent affirmations please. On the exhale!

“What’s with you,” George muttered.  He was running a finger over a wooden sideboard, which looked like a splendid antique. “You sound like a bellows — puff, blow, puff, blow.  Having tummy troubles?”

“No,” Jesse said, and continued his breathing exercises. George acted like a social justice fellow traveller, but he had a marked distaste for a show of weakness from anyone, and beaked off if he saw it (and whenever else he chose.) It was a failing, and an instructive one.

George abandoned his antiquarian pose and stood next to Jesse.

The client entered and said, “Please follow me.” George made a small noise which could have been assent.  Jesse couldn’t have spoken, and walked, in a strange foggy state, after George. Even George seemed cowed by this woman; he’d never been this consistently servile with anyone before. It spun Jesse around, and it scared him.

He realized she would only speak with George, so he could zone out.

She was very polished; her hair was a shoulder-length brown cascade but Jesse thought, looking at her unmemorable beauty, if I look away I will not be able to remember her face, and does that make me face blind or racist?

George stopped dead and said, “Madam, I smell blood.”

The woman turned, eyes wide, and then said, “I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

“As you say, Madam,” George said. “You said it was a selection of pieces which you want moved.”

They had started late, and then they ran into the second snag.  It was a doozy.

It was a fifteen room house, and she wanted them to move something from every room. In each case it was an item no sane two person crew could manage. something antique and delicate. Or something really awkward and heavy. Jesse’s thinking, already slowed by unease, now slid into panic. They had maybe half a dozen furniture blankets. Not an issue, she responded.  She seemed amused for the first time, but the pleasant expression passed and a fixed glare replaced it.

She would supervise them as they were wrapped. She sent the maid to get tablecloths, immense swathes of patterned white linen, to make up the deficit.

Unlike every other woman they had helped so far, she would not touch a single item or pack a single box. She stood at the foot of the entryway stairs and directed traffic in a steady flow of Mandarin and some other language George couldn’t make out, and then the clear soft English.

“Does Madam expect your husband to arrive in the middle of the move?” George asked.

“Do as I ask,” she said, which was not an answer.  She quietly directed her maid to block two doors open, both facing onto the yard and away from the front entrance.

“Who is this person?” Jesse said under his breath as they moved the first piece onto the truck.

“I don’t know past her name and her pedigree, but I can still smell blood, and I could swear that whoever was bleeding is still bleeding,” George said. He said, “I wish I knew more about the husband.”

“I wish you could teach a course in how to smell things,” Jesse said. He didn’t want to think about the blood, and couldn’t understand why George would say such a thing to a customer, even if it was true, as was Jesse’s dark prediction.

As they spoke, they moved a brace of lacquered chairs. To Jesse’s mind they were hideous and impossible to keep clean but another thousand bucks awaited them if they helped this person, as requested, so Jesse was fine not expressing his opinion.

“It’s a gift, and a shitty one. Teach it? — that would be impossible! It would be no gift if I could, in the sense that you could merely take it from the box and use it when you were bored and wanted to do party tricks,” and George nodded to himself. “It’s no fun living in a metropolitan area and having a usefully precise sense of smell. The smell in the back of the van, for example, is not something you want in the Smell-O-Vision equivalent of Dolby Digital 5.1, with commentary track.”

“Let’s be thankful our host won’t get into the van,” Jesse said.

Jesse shook his head, and watched the kid as he wheeled out of sight, doing 70 at a bare minimum. 

He’d never seriously taken up the hobby, growing up 50 kilometres from the nearest skate park and 8 kilometres from the nearest paved road. He’d cadged an old beater of a board from a school friend, during that magical period when his mother was too fucked up to home-school and Rhonda refused to do all that and do all the exterior work, plus chickens, plus goats, plus riding, feeding, doctoring, mucking out and training horses. 

Working furiously on his chores so he could steal a few minutes away, he’d tried to set up a few minis. He worked his way up to a half-pipe, with Raven hammering nails alongside him with glee.

His mother, on one of her rare, and thus infuriating, forays out of the house and past the yard, had found boards missing and torched his two tiny ramps. He remembered Raven had shown more anger. Jesse knew it was safer for her to let it out, and he didn’t mind. 

All the parts that cared were going to die, anyway, or so he thought at the time; it’s easy when you’re twelve and your mother hates you (and every other man living), and your sister and co-mom are too intimidated by her cruelty, rage and spite to protect you. Nor had he grown ten centimetres and put on fifty pounds and lost all his wiry boyishness, and Ma sure as shit had not enjoyed him morphing into his father in front of her. Thinking of that made him smile, but it was not a happy one.

From his adult perspective, on a street a thousand metres above sea level, death was neither convenient nor romantic. He was lucky to be alive. He was lucky to be looking across Vancouver, ‘that breath-taking panorama of never-ending beauty and charm’, at least according to the most recent listing for the client’s house, which George had looked up on his phone.  “Oooh,” he had said, like a kid finding a double sawbuck in the upholstery. “A Zen garden. And there’s a hot tub.”

“I really don’t think I’ll get to soak in it after we load the truck,” Jesse had replied. “Isn’t calling it a Zen garden bigoted, unless it’s located where people are practicing Zen? Otherwise it’s a Japanese-style garden, but I guess the word Zen is worth money or it wouldn’t have been in the ad.”

The client sounded difficult, suspicious, fragile and frightened; Jesse had wanted to bail within seconds of hearing George’s description. Then he recognized his error.  If they were helping people leave abusive landlords, lovers and family, the only means test was, “Can you raise a thousand dollars cash?”

She was rich, and had not been in Canada long enough to get used to it. Her toddler had been born here, but citizenship didn’t mean much to the global super-rich. She’d lived a previous life as a magnate’s daughter in China  — another fact gleaned by George from the internet — but those were not reasons to turn down the job.  Rich women get knocked around by their husbands, and sometimes by their wives. She could be rich, and yet so isolated that hiring two gwai lo rounders had been her only option, when she needed to bug out.

George, with the prescience that Jesse was starting to find far too coincidental, had doubled their fee over the phone. She was to give him another thousand on completion.

The customer still had not called or texted. 

There was time to think. It was easy to frame the lesson he had taken from those crushing years before Raven rescued him.

In this culture you could not be a man until every soft feeling in you was dead and every hard feeling was yoked to the success of capitalism. 

Raven said, “Harsh!” but he didn’t hear an argument.

After they applied to become emancipated minors and fled to Vancouver, Raven said it wasn’t right to confuse his mother with capitalism; Jesse told her it made perfect sense. “Why not use second wave feminists to reinforce strict gender roles? Isn’t that what capitalism wants them to do, if it can’t shut them up or kill them? When they get older they are just as angry but way more tired, and they have all the prejudices of the generation, and hate it when you point it out.”

Around the last time his mother had gotten really sick, he’d told Raven he wanted to die.  Not to commit suicide, which still seemed foreign and messy, somehow. Just to disappear, never to awaken.

The kid on the skateboard was long since out of sight.

“If he comes off, he’s gonna have a really bad time,” Jesse said.

They waited in silence for George’s phone to ring.

George seemed to be obsessed with ranking their moving experiences. Jesse was perplexed. It was also not what he wanted to be doing while sitting in a truck in the middle of the night, waiting for a client.

“Da phoque, man.”

“Am I expressing something you find to be unnervingly non-normative?” George asked.

“‘Am I weird?’ covers all of that,” Jesse said. “Go for the short, not the long.”

“Your advice, then, is to experience the experience and then have the next experience, rather than perceiving a pattern, a useful pattern, in the succession of experiences and altering your behaviour in accordance with the pattern.”

“Experience to experience is the way life works, if you’re doing it right,” Jesse said, after an annoyed pause.

George did that thing with his eyes. He didn’t do it often, about as often as he genuinely laughed or smiled, but for just the shortest second you could swear his eyes were opening bigger than was humanly possibly and it was simultaneously sickening and cool and impossible to talk to George about.

Jesse looked away and down and gave himself permission not to react.  It felt too much like being with his mother, being in this mode, invisible, defensive, minimal. He set his ears to ignore George, and asked himself what was truly happening.

He’d take a breath to ask him to fill in some gaps, just idle talk, and George’d return something quiet and job-related or task-related. With a bump, Jesse was no longer in personal question land and had returned to man versus thing, or man versus cop, or man versus coworker (Jesse almost always lost) or, the ongoing ruling favourite and overwhelming nightmare, man versus client.

When he got to the end of the thought, Jesse mentally edited all appearances of man to person, and sighed.  Go for the short not the long is not great advice if you’re a settler talking to a native person. Please trim this name down for me, I’m used to English. Or French. Or Portuguese. Or Spanish. And it may not work for a woman, or transperson, or someone who’s young or disabled. We’ve fallen off a sociological cliff, pretending we’re not yelling ‘AAAAAAAAAAAH!’ all the way down. Nobody really knows what acknowledging equality will mean. What it will look like. How it will play. But we all can imagine who will try to stop us.

Jesse sighed again.  Our minds are structured by colonialism, and like hoarders, we unseeingly walk through, that being our walls and floors as well as our trash.

“You really don’t like it when I pop my eyes at you,” George said.  “I used to know people who loved it.”

Jesse shrugged.

“You were thinking about something else.”

“No, you were right, I don’t like it. You don’t look human when you do that, and if you have voluntary control over that behaviour, please don’t.”

“I could tell you were angry,” George said.

You smug son of a bitch, Jesse thought. “Want an Iron Cross for that?” he said. Since George never ate in front of Jesse, not once the two months he’d known him, there was no point offering him a cookie.  World War II was a very sore subject for George, though, and Jesse noted the hit.

George said, after a bone chilling pause, “I can’t always tell.”

George was rarely on the defensive, so Jesse pressed him. “And sometimes you know a little too well. How’d you know about the blood alcohol levels on those two clownbags?” Jesse folded his arms, awaiting the predictable spin.

George was affable. “What’s this? I didn’t. I told them I called the cops as they drove up, mentioning that somebody had been arrested for assaulting a cop at that address two nights ago and these two gents looked like more of the same. I mentioned that I mentioned I could tell from that last swerve that the driver, at minimum, was plastered. Then I advised our two visitors they should figure out which one of them was least drunk and then he could deal with the cops and the next thing I know they’d fired up the Lexus and bugged out. Wish I knew Punjabi, they gave me quite a farewell.” He seemed almost nostalgic.

At Jesse’s expression, George said, “But it was a good move otherwise,” which was an error, because then Jesse remembered the skunk.

“What about the skunk?” Jesse said suspiciously.

“Haven’t you ever noticed that if you speak respectfully to creatures they respond better?” George asked, in his greasy, self-flattering voice. In a more sensible tone, he said, “I don’t know what happened.  I expected to get sprayed, which would have been inconvenient; it didn’t run off at my command.”

“So. Nothing could be proven either way,” Jesse said.

“Please don’t tell me you think I have magical command over animals?” George said in disbelief.  “I mean,” he said, and you could see him warming up to the idea,“if I could do that I’d be at the track, don’t you think? And it’s been ages since I watched the wiener dog races,” he added fretfully.

“You don’t need the money,” Jesse said, and his jealousy was plain.

“Maybe I need the experience of spending it,” George said.

For a second Jesse thought of punching him hard in the face, but a few months’ experience watching George deal with jackasses left him in no doubt what such an attempt would yield.

“Jesus Christ,” said Jesse.  “Did you wake up last year in a cave, ignorant of the ways of ‘spending money’?”

“It was a castle,” George said helpfully. “In Romania, in Transylvania actually. The castle basement to be honest, and it wasn’t last year, it was,” deep breath, “a while ago.”

There might be truth mixed in with the lies.  George had so much ‘give’ to him.  No matter how hard you pushed or pulled, he would not move in any direction but where he wanted to go.

Jesse lashed out.

“You know,” he said, “It seems pretty obvious you were raised in an abusive home.”

George looked at him.

Time seemed to sag into a hole and lodge there.

“Is it obvious?” he asked.

“Not right away,” Jesse replied, scarcely believing he’d landed another hit.  Then he asked the question yet again. “Why are you helping people move?”

“It’s very complicated, and any explanation would depend, for context, on a better understanding of my current situation.”

“It’s something illegal, isn’t it?” Jesse said.  He still couldn’t figure out what.

That barking laugh again. “Yes, but that’s not the sticking point.”

“That a fucking fact?” Jesse said, once again experiencing the strong desire to punch the living shit out of George. “What am I looking at? Conspiracy?”

“Conspiracy, while it has a certain ring to it, also implies the benefit of a jury trial,” George said.

“Jesus iced fucking Christ in a bucket. So, terrorism and treason?” Jesse asked, his voice swooping upward in an unmanly way. He felt sick and cold, thinking first that George was lying, and then that he was telling the truth, and then that he was telling the truth but that somehow he’d fix everything.  Jesse had watched him fix many situations, at least long enough to secure an escape route.

George said, voice wavering, “Well, no. Hang on, let me check the Criminal Code of Canada. I’ve got the app, you know.”

“Shit,” George said after a minute. With a great show of cheerfulness, he said.“Well, let’s hope it never comes to that.”

“What have you done?” Jesse said.

“It’s not what I’ve done,” George said. “It’s how it’ll be interpreted.”

Apart from having to go the long way around with some of the furniture, the rest of the move went like clockwork.  They kept their voices down and the cops did not, in fact, come. Gulnaz and Aaliyah came back into the house after the last box and lamp was gone and found Jesse sweeping.

“You keep this place really clean,” Jesse said. “I don’t think your landlord knew how good he had it.”

“That asshole. He’s ruined six months of my life. He’s totally insane. I’ve never seen anybody like him, he’s a scary scary guy, way worse than those two brothers of his,” Gulnaz said.

“Yeah, thanks for the heads’ up on that,” Jesse said, using a piece of cardboard to hold the dust he’d swept up.

Aaliyah said something in her birth language, and Gulnaz made an exasperated sound.

“We should leave. George said you’d drop Aaliyah at her door. You will, won’t you?”

“Absolutely,” Jesse said.  He took the improvised dustpan out the door and carried it to one of the trash bins, with Aaliyah following him like a duckling. The security lights blazed as they triggered them.

Jesse said, dreading what was coming, “Get in the truck, you’ll feel safer if you’re up high.”

In a hoarse whisper, Gulnaz said, “Aaliyah, get in the truck!” finally re-admitting Jesse to the conversation.

“Safer?” Aaliyah said to Jesse.  “We could die tonight! They’re Sikhs, they probably went to get guns.”

“If they were real badasses – of any racial variant! – they’d have guns in their cars, o great perturbed one,” Jesse said. “Thanks to George they’ll still have to wait a couple of hours to sober up before they shoot my heinie all to widdy bits,” — here Jesse adopted a cartoon voice — “so quit worrying.”

Aaliyah was unconvinced. “Others could come.”

“Wow.  You need a life,” Jesse said.

Aaliyah stared at Jesse and didn’t say anything. Jesse shrugged and walked to the truck and got in. Gulnaz and Aaliyah slowly walked away from the apartment one last time and slowly got in the truck; Gulnaz because she’d rarely been so exhausted, and Aaliyah because her adventure was about to end and all that remained was the ritual humiliation of the joint and several scoldings her parents would administer, especially if they caught her re-entering the house.

“Where to?” Jesse said cheerfully.  Thank god, it’s almost over and I’ve already been paid.

Gulnaz and Aaliyah started a quiet dispute, not in English. After a bit, Gulnaz, who still had to help empty the truck and was one eye-blink away from melting down, said, “Fine. Aaliyah wants to help us unload.”

“Which would be —?” Jesse said encouragingly.

“A storage unit on Griffiths,” Gulnaz said. “You can drive the truck straight in, it shouldn’t be long. Take 14^th.”

She slouched and brushed up against George.

“God, you’re freezing!” she said.

“He is kinda clammy,” Jesse said.  He didn’t normally have to sit squished into George but there was an extra person in the cab. Aaliyah, of course, had been placed as far from Jesse as possible.

“I’m really uncomfortable,” George said. “Can I ride in the back?”

Wordlessly, Jesse got down, let him out, watched George scramble into the back with the furniture and boxes, re-secured the tailgate, and got back in the truck. With a ghastly screech and clatter, they were off.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Aaliyah asked.

Gulnaz made a protesting noise.

“What makes you think I’m straight?” Jesse asked.

“Are you and George a couple?” Aaliyah asked, eyes wide.

“I only met him a couple of days ago,” Jesse chided.  “I haven’t decided if he’s the man for me yet.”

George could be heard guffawing. Jesse mentally added ‘sensational hearing’ to George’s list of attributes.

Jesse slapped the steering wheel with both hands in mock annoyance. “Well, that does it.  We’ll have to just be friends.”

“You’re teasing me,” Aaliyah said.

“Yeah, and I’m enjoying it, too. I’m curious to know how you two are related.” He took his right hand off the steering wheel long enough to poke it in their direction.

“Half-sisters,” Gulnaz said. She was asleep but still able to talk.

“I have a half-sister too,” Jesse said, “but she’s three months older than I am.”

“Your father had more than one wife?” Aaliyah said, trying to work out what had happened.

“Not to my knowledge,” Jesse said. “In fact, I don’t think he ever even managed one.”

Aaliyah abandoned Jesse’s ancestry as a conversational wellspring and returned to a much more pressing issue. “Are you really gay?” Aaliyah said.

“Who cares?” Jesse said.

“Do you work out every day?” Aaliyah said.

“Four days a week,” Jesse said. “Plus moving.”

“Why do you have this job instead of a proper job?” Aaliyah said.

A well-crafted intersectional takedown of the previous sentence was simply more than Jesse could manage, the ethics of verbally whacking a tired child aside. So he replied, “Cause I’m allergic to the sun.”

“Nobody’s allergic to the sun,” Aaliyah said. “Darwin wouldn’t let that happen.”

Jesse hooted with laughter, startling Gulnaz out of her doze, and said, laughing his response into unintelligibility, “I’ll legally change my name to Nobody, then.”

Jesse straightened up. “Here’s Griffiths, where’s the… oh, I can see it.  Good thing there’s nobody else on the road to get mad at me for turning from the wrong lane. Gulnaz, do you have the passcode so I can get in with the truck?” She fumbled in her purse and gave him a piece of paper. Jesse drove through, located the storage unit and tried to return the code and unit instructions, but Gulnaz was now deeply asleep. He handed the piece of paper to Aaliyah and said shortly, “Put it in her wallet.”

George jumped down like an acrobat when Jesse opened the tailgate.

Aaliyah said, “Let her sleep.”

The three of them finished the unloading. When she woke up, Gulnaz cried in Aaliyah’s arms from sheer relief.

“Let’s get you home, kiddo,” Jesse said.

“She was going to stay in a motel on 6th,” Aaliyah said. “You should come home with me,” Aaliyah said.

“Your mother won’t let me in,” Gulnaz said.

“Oh, yes, she fucking well will,” Jesse said. “Rather than embarrass herself in front of two strange white men.”

Gulnaz made a sound. The two women laughed wildly for a few seconds, and then Aaliyah leaned forward and said, with a much more adult intonation than previously, “Thank you, Jesse.”

On the return trip to drop off the truck, blissfully client-free, Jesse said, “I sure hope they’re not all like this.”

George, who’d had quite enough of the peaks and lows of human ambition and emotion for one day, said, “Me too.”

Around midnight, a skunk wandered into the front yard.  Gulnaz screamed like she was getting paid to, dropped her box with a crash and scooted back indoors.  George came out behind her, and put his boxes down.

“Little one, you don’t belong here,” he said to the skunk. To Jesse’s astonishment, as he came up the walkway he saw George approach the skunk and point in the direction he wished the skunk to go. It bolted, tail bobbing, claws scrabbling briefly on the walkway, and vanished.

Jesse went back into the apartment, filing the event away for future analysis.

“Skunk’s gone, Gulnaz,” Jesse said.

“How’d you do that? I thought if you got close they sprayed you! Oh God.”

“I didn’t, George did. Let’s keep moving, okay?”

She was almost whimpering.“I’m so tired. I know he’s in jail but I’m afraid for all of us if his brothers show up.”

“There are brothers?” She hadn’t mentioned brothers to George, Jesse guessed.

“Yeah. It’s complicated,” she said, trying to be funny, but the bitterness poured through her words.

“One crisis at a time.  Take a break, have a cup of tea, we’ll keep going,” Jesse said sympathetically.

“You guys have been awesome.”

“Gulnaz?” came a little voice.

Gulnaz sat bolt upright on the remaining kitchen chair and said, in tones of horror, “Aaliyah!”

Jesse saw a strikingly pretty girl in an Ed Hardy hoodie and skinny jeans standing in the doorway. She was perhaps fourteen. His heart thumped a couple of times as their eyes met.

Gulnaz got up, grabbed the girl by the shoulders and shook her hard. “Go home!  This is no place to be.”

Aaliyah, shooting a glance at Jesse, said, “I want to help!”

They broke into either Urdu or Farsi, at a guess. Gulnaz spoke forcefully; Aaliyah was monosyllabic.

“Let her stay,” Jesse heard himself say. “George and I will put you both in the truck and drive away if there’s trouble,” at which point George came back in, waggled his lush dark brows at Gulnaz and said, “Like he said.” To Aaliyah, he merely said, “Grab a box.”

Gulnaz, with a tectonic eyeroll, threw up her hands and said, “All right.”

Things were proceeding well when George said, “There’s a car coming.” He casually returned to the truck and pulled the tailgate down.

A Lexus RX pulled up, parked so as to block the truck, and two very angry and somewhat impaired men, one with a turban and one without, got out and started threatening George. Then they saw Jesse and checked somewhat, but continued the abuse.

“How do you want to handle this, George?” Jesse said, when there was a pause in the yelling.  A neighbour’s front door banged open, and there was a witness, a sleepy-looking Filipino guy in cargo shorts.

“Errybody shut up or I call the cops,” he shouted across the street, and the door banged shut again.

While George was standing right next to the Lexus, the emergency brake let go, and the sport-ute slowly reversed the swooping maneuver which had positioned it behind the truck, and rolled back down the hill, narrowly missing three parked cars and coming to rest against the curb, facing into the street.

Cursing, the men tore off after their vehicle.

George said, “I lifted their keys while they were looking across the street.  Let me deal with this. Keep moving, we’ve only got the big furniture to go.”

“He’s the boss,” Jesse said. Gulnaz and Aaliyah looked terrified. “Gotta push on through or this night’ll never end, c’mon.”

Aaliyah said, “I don’t want to go out again until they’re gone,” and Gulnaz put an arm around her.  “Me neither,” she said.  “What a nightmare.”

There was a very loud yell, and then silence. After a moment, they all straightened when they heard tires squealing.

They heard the truck door roll open again and Jesse saw Gulnaz sag in relief.

“C’mon,” he said again.

“What did you do?” Aaliyah said to George in wonderment.

“Told them what their blood alcohol levels were,” George said.

And how the hell would you know that, Jesse thought. “Sikhs aren’t s’posed to drink,” Jesse said,

“What a puritan! I was raised not to talk to strangers, and look at me now,” George said sarcastically. “Let’s get a move on; we’ll be done by three at this rate.”

He was startled to hear from George by text two days later.

It read:

I don’t have a driver’s license so can you please meet me to pick up a credit card to rent a truck.

Jesse responded:

You have a customer?

The answer was offputting.

Unfortunately, yes we do.

George appended the time and address.

Jesse texted his sister.

I told you about George – just asked to meet me to rent a truck.

Raven’s response was predictable.

?! Make sure you get paid up front.

Kk

Apparently George lived in Gastown. He mentioned that his apartment was nearby, when they met at the Starbucks.  Jesse didn’t normally patronize chain coffee shops, but it was the only one open after sunset. Without fanfare, George handed over a HSBC MasterCard, and Jesse said, perplexed, “You’re just going to hand a credit card over to me.”

“You are not a thief.”

“There’s no way you can know that.”

“I’m sure you’d steal if you thought it was in your interest,” George said. “It’s a good thing your standards are so high.”

“Why don’t you have a driver’s licence?” Jesse asked, after deciding that picking a fight about his standards was not wise.

“My family doesn’t drive,” George said.

“Your whole family doesn’t drive,” Jesse said slowly. Then, with more curiosity than heat, he asked, “Where the hell do they live?”

“Oh, here and there, mostly in eastern Europe,” George said. “My cousin Michel is thinking of moving here from Montréal, and of course my mate lives nearby.”

“Your mate. You say you have girlfriends, but also a mate.”

“I’m serious about her.  We’re trying to have kids,” George said starkly. In a calmer voice, he added, “The same cannot be said of my girlfriends, who I think would be very angry with me if I tried to get them pregnant, not that I would without informed consent.”

“Nobody at the poly meeting has ever seen your ‘mate’,” Jesse said. He had checked, after George left.

“And they won’t. She’s shy of her appearance and has mobility issues,” George said.

Jesse contemplated the implications for a moment, and decided that George was either flat out lying or playing a game of misdirection.

“So I won’t meet her,” Jesse said.

“I’m not ruling it out. It’s her call,” George said. “She’s a difficult person in some ways, but in any substantive respect, she is without peer.”

Jesse had never heard a man describe his true love in quite those terms, but responded instead to the personal reference.“She knows about me?”

“Yes. I showed her a picture of you and she says you look big and strong,” George said.

A picture…?

George realized his error from Jesse’s expression, and added, “From the Facebook page.” “For the poly group,” he added.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, that picture.”

“She finds it comforting to know that if it came to it, you wouldn’t have any trouble carrying her. Not that you would have to, I can carry her, no problem.”

Jesse did not know what to say to this, and so turned to the business at hand.

“About our client,” Jesse said.

“She’s a friend of a friend of an acquaintance, and she paid up front.” George offered an envelope. “I already took out your share of the truck rental. Her boyfriend can’t help because he’s on a job out of town, and her girlfriends are all too scared to help, so it will just be us and the client.”

“Why does she have to move out in the middle of the night?”

“Her landlord gets out of jail in two days,” George said.  “He would have been out today but he was injured during the arrest.”

“Oh God,” Jesse said.

“Oh Montréal,” George said agreeably. Jesse didn’t recognize the phrase and stared at him. George continued, “Mr Landlord put cameras in her flat, assaulted her boyfriend, messed with her heat and hydro to give himself an excuse to enter the premises, and then he got caught going into her flat without 24 hours’ notice after her boyfriend set up a cam of his own.”

“So, he’s a scumbag.  Oh gosh. Is scumbag a gendered slur?”

George smiled.“Not in my lexicon.  I prefer clownbag, that’s what Michel calls people who shout a lot and hit people.”

“It’s ten o’clock at night,” Jesse said. “How do I get the truck?”

“We’ve got about half an hour to pick it up,” George said. “They’re going to want your driver’s licence but they won’t care whose name is on the credit card.”

After a short cab ride, they pulled up at a lot with a number of white cube vans. A harassed looking man came out of the shadows, put a Square on his cell phone, ran the card and handed over the keys.

“Drive safe and bring it back here for 6:30  —no later — or it’s big trouble.”

“M’kay,” said Jesse.

The brakes screeched and the gearbox was so stiff it took all of Jesse’s concentration to drive to the address in Burnaby George had given him.

They pulled up at a typical Burnaby monster house; it was big, it was ugly and it was beige. Gulnaz, their client, a thin woman with an eagle nose and two close-set brown eyes, ran out to greet them, “Thank God.”

George murmured for Jesse’s benefit, “As an atheist, I’m always pissed that God gets the credit for my heavy lifting,” and Jesse said, “Ha!”

Gulnaz had not been idle while she waited for them.  Everything was boxed, taped and labelled. A couple of times as Jesse passed her, going back and forth to the truck — which they’d had to leave on the street as the driveway was blocked by two cars with expired plates — she was weeping, and angrily wiping the tears away with the back of her hand.

Then George said, clearly knowing it was a strange question, “Do you think men should find other ways to signal mutual trust and fellowship than shaking hands?”

“We could get a tattoo to mark the occasion,” Jesse said.

“I like your style, but I balk at the commitment,” George said. “And then there’s the issue of the hazard involved, which is small, but non-zero.”

Jesse would not let it go. “Belly bump works for me,” he suggested.

“Damn,” George said, after a pause.  “Let’s do the checkbox.”

“The checkbox?”

“The checkbox. Suppose for the sake of argument that you want to substitute one custom for another, most particularly for reasons of health and safety.”

“Are you a professor of something?”

“Which meaning of professor are you using.” There was no question in George’s voice.

“Okay, so, no. Or no to anything but linguistics and philosophy.”

“I have audited university courses but I never got a degree,” George said. “Since you will not allow me to lecture you, perhaps you will permit me to divert the conversation. Do you envy people who have finished university?”

Jesse choked on his beer. After a couple more coughs, he said, “That totally depends on where they went to university and when. I would give not a pinch of chicken shit for the degrees I see guys my age chasing.” He sloshed the last of his beer around waving it in a gesture of dismissal and screwed up his face.  “I’m not like my peers, mostly because I don’t have any. I shouldn’t comment on what the functional millennials are doing these days to prop up end-stage capitalism.”

“You’re a dour young man,” George said.

“Chronic illness’ll do that to ya,” Jesse said.

“But you don’t look sick,” George said.

“And that does it to me too,” Jesse said. “‘Cause that was a dickish thing to say.”

“Was it? Let me get my bearings.” After a moment, George said, “I apologize for making an uncivil comment on your appearance without thinking, and I recognize that being easily killed by your environment must be a daily source of anxiety, which you alone best know how to manage.” During this speech Jesse drew breath and expelled it in disbelief several times, and he was winding up when George forestalled him.

“Within seconds of meeting you I could tell you had both character and capacity.  Please let me address an issue of your character, since you show signs of wanting to improve it.”

Jesse said, “What?” with piteous disbelief.

George said, “I don’t use gendered slurs, as I find it’s one of the ways I am colonized by English.”

“I used a gendered slur?”

“Slippery, aren’t they?”

“What, dickish? Dickish is a gendered slur?” An evil thought was sown, grew and blossomed in Jesse’s mind. He stood thinking for a minute, while George, his expression mild, waited for him to speak.

“English is not your first language?” Jesse asked, politely. It was not what George had expected Jesse to say. George’s English was lightly accented, but it was hard to say how.

“Oh no,” George said. “English is not my first colonization.”

One minute he sounds like a con man.

The next.

The next he gives me a perfect way to get up Raven’s nose.

Jesse was twenty-three, going on eighty, going on eight.

The conversation wandered into commonplaces. They exchanged contact details and then George excused himself, presumably to the restroom, but he was not seen again at the party.

Jesse, who’d seen everyone he wanted to, hung around for a while, looked for George and, not finding him, walked home. He expected nothing to come from George’s joking threat to start a company, but he wasn’t disappointed in the conversation at all. It was a pleasant evening, and he had a lot to think about, so the two miles seemed about right. He walked down Hastings and thought about gendered slurs. And the look on Raven’s face.

Jesse had been living with his sister up until the diagnosis. Watching her try to cope with his schedule was too painful. He often found himself watching her sleep, which center-punched the Venn diagram of creepy, sad and jealous, as Raven put it the next day when he finally told her. So he moved into a co-op house, sound-proofed and blacked-out his room and did his best to cope. He joined a 24 hour gym, bulked up as far as he could without drugs, watched a lot of movies, and tried to find work that would suit a vampire.

After six months he realized that there were no jobs designed around the absence of Sol, and he really was cast out of humanity. He applied for disability. It took for bloody ever to come through, and his aunt sold her second favourite horse to pay his rent for a couple of months. He ate so much packaged ramen he told Raven he thought he was turning into a solid lump of MSG.

He was written up in medical journals. He was interviewed by a woman who made a living from squeezing ad money from tragedy, and stopped answering his phone when it was a long distance number he didn’t recognize.

Each time he went out at night, depending on his friends and sister to buy him beer, young women and sometimes men would glimpse his blue eyes, dirty blonde hair and shoulder-waist ratio, and try to pry him out of his clothes.

Jesse enjoyed sex but a pattern emerged that drove him out of the market for a partner. He’d sleep with her without telling her about the atypical solar urticaria (Raven always scolded him when he did that) and then the woman would ghost once she knew. So he’d tell her in advance. Half of them bailed, since no matter how smart a human is they can have damned strange ideas about infectiousness and then again there’s the welfare of unborn generations to consider. The other half banged him out of curiosity and then bailed when they realized he wasn’t joking about the Evil Villain costume.

Or they realized he was broke, and he wasn’t good looking enough to support. (Raven always lost her cheese when he mentioned that.) Or his new queen would say something racist or sexist and Jesse would call her on it and then it was ass, meet snow.

He gave up, joined a polyamory group, (on his sister’s recommendation, which was kinda strange when he thought about it) and met dozens of cool people, layered with the usual assortment of assholes. He settled among a group of older and mostly unpartnered poly women, and told the Vancouver dating scene to kiss his dimpled ass. He was getting laid despite being unemployed and his mental health markedly improved.

He ran into George at a poly meet. They got talking, and the conversation wound around to unemployment and illness.

“I’m in perfect health until the sun hits me,” Jesse said.

“And then?”

“Generally the first thing happens is that the bags ‘round my eyes inflate to about 150 p.s.i., so driving can be interesting. Then I bust out in hives so bad I have to be restrained to not scratch them. Then I whip out an EpiPen® and eighty dollars later I can see.”

“But you’re okay at night.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve looked for night work,” George said.

“Yeah, but it’s never night work, not really. You’ve gotta work rotating shifts, or you’re forced to go in during business hours for HR or staff meetings or training or whatever-the-fuck and then I show up in my Evil Villain outfit and sad times are had by all.”

George considered him for a moment.

“You know what I did last night?” he asked.

“Just so’s you know, I’m a bit of a prude,” Jesse said.

George made a barking noise which might have been a laugh.

“I’m a bit of a prude, too, according to my family, but no, I wasn’t needing to brag.” He considered Jesse for a moment, a rueful smile on his face.

“One of my girlfriends is a sex trade worker,” George said. “She works independently and would like to keep it that way, but a pimp had a different idea. He decided to follow her home and beat her up.”

“Holy shit,” said Jesse. It was a great story, but that wasn’t what impressed him. George was unembarrassed to have a sex trade worker girlfriend. Jesse had never met another man who could utter those words in public, let alone squeeze it into a sentence which normalized poly to that degree. Jesse felt for the first time the tidal pull of George’s charm.

“Yeah.”

“What did you do?”

“Helped her move. As I was shoving things into the truck, by the light of the silvery moon, it occurred to me that there might be many people who need to move out in the middle of the night.”

“Yeah, but are they people who can pay?” Jesse said, and took a long pull on his beer. That was always the chokepoint.

“Desperation makes cash appear, in my experience,” George said blandly. “Perhaps you could start a business doing that.”

Never say you have a problem, the solutions folks offer are twistier than the problem. “I’m not really cut out to be an entrepreneur,” Jesse said. “I’m kind of a born employee.”

“Fine,” George said. “I”ll start the business and hire you.”

Jesse grinned. “I warn you, I’m a terrible employee.”

“How so? You just said you’re a born employee. Are you lazy? Tardy? Unsanitary?”

It wasn’t the words themselves so much as the way George enunciated them that made Jesse laugh.

Sobering, he said, “I beak off a lot.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I am not lazy. I probably have a better attendance record than most people my age, and I frequently shower twice a day.”

“You’re hired.”