Drive-by Saviours (2 page)

WHEN THE RECEPTION FADES TO ZERO IN CHAPTER 2, TURNING UP THE VOLUME WON'T HELP

T
oronto is everything good and everything bad
about a city. It is everything intense, frenetic, and exciting, everything dull, drab and dreary. Everything fun and everything frightening can be experienced here. It is a place you can do anything you could do anywhere else: eat the food, dance the dance, hear the language of any culture in the world. It is segregated, sanctioned and compartmentalized. It is all things to everyone and it is fully satisfactory to no one. It is not exactly my home but it is where I was born and it is where I live.

I was awed and fascinated by the human scars on the streets of my city when I was wide-eyed and small, pre-cynical and innocent. I wondered at the filth of homeless people, asked my mother why it was I had to bathe and they didn't. She told me, “Because I said so,” or, “Because their mothers didn't care enough about them to make them have a bath and look how they turned out.”

I was never given free rein anywhere in the city, but was reined in and kept close at all times, hand-held walking, lap-sat on public transit. I was taught scepticism of strangers, not to talk to them. My very survival depended on this rule, yet I couldn't follow it and often engaged in idle chit-chat with random conventioneers on the sidewalk. My memory of what was said is murky, broken by a large, clearly feminine hand gripping my shoulder and pulling me back to the safety of my mother's Great Worry. And so, under the vice-grip of fierce protection, I learned to fear strangers and admire their fearful forms from afar. I fit in perfectly in Toronto.

Having never lost my fascination for humans, I studied social work. The ones who looked at me with a weird mix of longing and anger were the ones I admired most. I graduated summa cum laude and landed a job at a community health centre. I was quickly put to task compiling quantitative reports on clients served, and writing fundraising proposals promising grandiosity beyond human connection. No one would fall through the cracks thanks to a five-year strategic plan drafted by professional consultants. I had a knack for it and the more I wrote about clients the less I saw of them. When I did see them it was fleeting. They gave me the Coles Notes version of all their problems and I made suggestions, like a drive-by saviour.

I climbed the salary scale right to the ceiling in only four years, at which point I'd need a new career or a promotion to Executive Director to improve my financial status. I enacted creativity with language and numbers, and thanks to me we hired health promoters, nutritionists and social workers to help keep track of the stream of needy people who flowed rapidly and powerfully in and out of our doors each day. I was content when I was twenty-five years old.

It helped that I met Sarah that year. She was a dark-eyed intelligent fashion model—if you can believe my luck—who looked like she'd stepped straight off the cover of a Rolling Stones album. Actually she did mostly department store catalogues, but she was attractive enough that all my friends seriously wondered if I were blackmailing her.

I met her in an antique store where our perception, attention and gaze slowly shifted from the same set of plates to each other. “What do you know about these?” she asked me.

“They're Acton,” I told her. “Mid-nineteenth century, hand painted with oil. Great colour, medium condition; I wouldn't pay this price for them.” There is a meticulous and rigorous part of me that acquires and hoards these facts like precious stones, and keeps them at the ready to be shared in order to impress a devastatingly attractive woman.

“Really?” she said nonchalantly, holding the question in the space between us with her soft, studious brown eyes, wide as the plates in question. They compelled me to say more.

“Yes, really,” I said.

“Interesting,” she answered. She was unconvinced.

“They'd be from Cornwall originally,” I offered, unable to stop the mundane things exiting my mouth.

“Brought back on a trip,” she told me with more authority than my facts. It was the kind of authority that can be granted only by the imagination. “For a woman's collection of things that were kept in medium condition, just for spite.”

“Spite?”

“Spite. Every day she cleaned the house for him and made all his favourites for dinner from carefully selected and purchased ingredients. Little did he care. She laundered and pressed his clothing, took his messages, and typed his letters. Little did he notice her hard work. All he noticed was her decline.

“So what was her revenge? She didn't vacuum all the way to the edge of the carpet. She didn't wash the dishes right away. She didn't maintain the prize possessions.”

“Like plates.”

“Exactly. She neglected all the little things she knew he wouldn't notice anyway, but never the things he would. Never would she under-salt the sauce or overcook the pasta.”

“Not much of a revenge.”

“Vengeance wasn't her specialty. She left that to God and outlived her no-good husband by thirty years. They were the best of her life. Well, mostly. Those last few years when she was alone and too sick to clean at all, and her family plate collection sat gathering dust, they were difficult years. Poor woman died just last month during the ice storm. Here it wasn't as bad as in Montreal but it was bad enough for a ninety-four-year-old shut-in.

“So, the grandchildren swarmed the tiny apartment. They were amazed at the acres of junk stored in one tiny space where a small elderly woman had spent the last eight years of her living existence.

“They picked and nabbed and claimed bits and pieces here and there, some for sentimental value, some for kitsch and some for hopelessly optimistic financial value. As if.

“But most of an entire lifetime of acquired little materials ended up jammed into a Goodwill slot.”

“So, how did this plate get here?” I asked, captivated by her mind's wanderings.

“A keen-eyed collector saw it at the Goodwill,” she continued. “Bought it for a buck, and brought it here so it could enter another collection of random acquisitions in someone else's struggle with a mundane mortality, where material things are a temporary comfort.”

She smiled and gazed at me.

“That's the saddest plate I've ever seen,” I told her.

“No,” she said. “It's no sadder than any other plate.”

She was the saddest girl I'd ever met.

By the time of the power outage the ice storm's stories of heroism, tragedy, triumph and conception had been replaced with the myriad stories of September 11, the retaliatory oil wars, severe acute respiratory syndrome (
SARS
) and West Nile virus. These were the plagues of a vengeful God. Furthermore, Sarah and I had fallen in love, moved in together in an East End flat, and settled into a routine struggle with a mundane mortality without even the financial resources to maintain the mediocre comfort of material things.

I wasn't miserable mind you. Had I been truly miserable I wouldn't have needed
the power outage to free me. I was monotonous to other people, and a little bored myself, that's all.

THE CRUSH BEGAN AT 7:30AM ON A SOUTHBOUND BUS; STANDING
room only, glazed eyes on forlorn faces, shipped to our pens on the other side of the city. The crush got tighter at
7
:
45
, all colours and classes of crowded multicultural sounds and odours, all absorbed in a short series of words strewn across a long piece of paper: the
Metro Daily News
-bites for people on the go. Torontonians. West we went with more filing into the cargo box at each stop and people shuffling and sliding in the hopes of avoiding touch and conversation, while our engineer tried to keep us awake with alliterations on the names of the stops: “Swingin' Sherbourne is the next stop! Swingin' Sherbourne is next!”

An accidental touch here drew a glass-eyed glare, returned with a mumbled apology.

I stepped onto the northbound train where I could breathe and sit and read part of the paper, drink from my thermos, power nap or daydream of something other than report-writing and the needy people I can't help even though it's my vocation and occupies half my waking time.

I stepped off the train and onto a long ride on a long bus, from which I've watched the city develop over the past four years, through a long corridor of tall buildings, from the bottom of which I never see the sun. It is only visible there from
11
:
00 AM
until
1
:
00
PM
, when I'm in my office.

Eventually I reached my little health centre, situated by a pretty creek where dragonflies, birds and even deer can be seen in the summer. I went inside and sat at my computer with my coffee and began an eight-hour typing shift: social work.

My only client that day was Abdul, a Sri Lankan refugee claimant and a geneticist who was not allowed to work or attend school until his refugee hearing, to be held sometime in the next twenty months. Every time I met with Abdul he sighed deeply, shook his head, and told me the same thing: “I'm a hard worker, a very hard worker, and I can't even find volunteer work.”

That week, like every other week, I had tried and failed to find volunteer work for a geneticist. Every lab I asked told me about union troubles. Volunteer workers take away paid work. Besides, they wondered, how could they tell if a guy with three Sri Lankan degrees knows how to work in a Canadian lab?

I dreaded breaking the same bad news to him every week. Every week he sighed and shook his head and asked me what he should do. Every week I had no answer.

I wished I could spend the whole day with Abdul, show him the framed art in our galleries and the graffiti art in our streets, take him to hockey games, show him the urban expanse below the
CN
Tower, give him the therapy of doing something, anything, which he couldn't do alone on his ‘material-needs-only' welfare allowance.

But with reports due to the government funders that hold our existence in their godly palms, it was my lot and my time allotment to appease them with sacrificial reports and proposals, occasionally taking the communion of workshops on budget development, and doing the ceremonial dance of regulatory lingo. I had but thirty minutes available for Abdul, during which I referred him to several volunteer agencies, none of which were likely to have anything for a geneticist.

If I were a Christian, a true Christian, I'd have taken Abdul out and about in my free time, or given him some money at least. But my personal budget was carefully and strictly allocated to loan payments, rent, RRSPs, and scrupulously pre-selected registered charities benefiting from my benevolence. There was little left for handouts.

My time was equally regimented: forty hours for work, softball on Mondays, volunteer board meetings on Tuesdays, art class on Wednesdays, Thursdays were for writing a weekly piece I do for the social workers' newsletter, and Fridays were for Sarah. It was her insistence on quality time—during which we played cards or watched movies, though when we started we used to sing each other love songs until it got so hot we were naked on the floor, exhausted, with all the heat rising above us as sleep ensued.

My weekends were dedicated to the never-ending task of fixing up our fixer-upper house, the only one we could afford in Toronto despite renting the upstairs to students. It was an ongoing process of drywall, primer, paint, rewiring, re-shingling, spackle, tar, glue, hammer, sixteen different kinds of wrenches,
112
kinds of screws and drivers, a drill for tough jobs, re-spackle the mistakes, sanding through dust and fumes.

What time did I have for clients? Besides, you take one to a ballgame you gotta take ‘em all, which is well beyond my allotted charity budget.

Abdul left my cubicle with his head hanging as always, and as always I wondered if there was more I could have done. I put it out of my mind and returned to my budget analysis. Someone was spending too much on long distance phone calls.

At
4
:
30
, as I was drafting a memo outlining a new policy on long distance calls, the power went out. There was a collective groan from the cellblock at the interruption. Technical difficulties again? As if the computers weren't slow enough.

A strange silence set in, as if time had frozen. The steady hum of the computers and florescent lights had ceased. Now what?

One by one we staggered into the hallways, overwhelmed by the frightening possibilities of our newfound freedom. It was the freedom of nothing to do, or the relative freedom of plenty to do but no tools with which to do it.

“Power's out?”

“Look's like it.”

“Well, let's see.”

My manager, Sherry, and I strolled around the maze asking intermittently, “Your power out too?”

“Yep, should someone check with maintenance?”

Bill, our maintenance guy, fumbled around with the fuse box for a while as we stood around wondering aloud what could have caused a complete power outage.