Strangely I heard a stranger say: I am with you.
Rilke
The traffic along Cook
Street is discrete, continual, an urban stream thinly metalled.
Stream of sound similar to wind, waves. An early creeker, I like
the creek's faces, face. Down the street is realty. A sign
beside the road. The i is missing. People in the cars.
Faces. We are trafficking in realty. When the sun is out,
if I look as far as I can see down the street, the shining on the
cars is like the creek. A chip looks like a city. I'm studying
the machine's architecture. Two men, an Indian and a dwarf,
pedestrians, killed blamelessly outside my window not too long
ago. The logic of the street is partly to blame. But computer
simulations done by the Traffic Engineering department of the
traffic patterns on Cook between Caledonia and Pandora showed
nothing unexpected, produced no fatalities in cyberspace. These
were part of very careful, conscientious studies conducted after
the fact. The causes and reasons why are difficult to calculate.
I myself have wondered about the causes and the architecture of
the street, and how much they wanted to die, if at all. Nobody
was drunk. The accidents were not 'hit and runs'. No charges
laid.
The Indian man was hit at seven in the morning. The driver
shouting for someone to call 911 woke me up. The Indian was
motionless in the gutter on the other side of the street, his
blood trickling easily down it. They say he died quickly. I
called 911 and asked if there was anything I could do. "Just
make sure nobody moves him." No one moved him, and he never
moved. The ambulance attendants and police did what they could.
Later on, after he had been moved or removed, his brother
showed up on the corner. A huge man. Falstaff like, I thought. He
wore it well, and his colourful headband and vest suggested to me
that he might be a story teller. All he saw was the blood in the
gutter and I saw him looking at it. It was clear he was the
brother.
I had to write a
program that day for school. It was supposed to ask the user to
think of an animal and then ask questions of the user to which
the user would reply yes or no, leading the program down the tree
of questions until it reached an animal, at which point the
program would 'guess'. If it didn't 'know' the animal, it would
'learn' its name after conceding 'defeat'. I wrote it at home in
the morning and went up to school to get it going. I'd written
the code poorly though, and the program was repeating the first
question without end, screens and screens scrolling the question
"Does it live here?". It wasn't exiting from a loop
even when I had enabled a breakpoint within the program. Control
should have been returned, at that point, to the debugger. I
wasn't understanding it at all. The loop's control statement was
never coming true. An inadvertent engineering within cyberspace
of somewhere else.
I didn't get it debugged that day, though I studied the logic
of the code until midnight. When I left, I couldn't remember
where I'd put my car, so I tried to remember what the day had
been like when I'd parked it. But I couldn't remember what time
I'd parked it. Could have been weeks ago. I wasn't upset, had
been absorbed in writing the program, if frustrated debugging it.
I was more mystified than anything: the distance was what
mystified me. There he had been. There I was across the street
sitting where I am now. The distance had seemed very large. And I
wondered where he was. That distance and the difficulty of
communicating over it and even shorter ones.
I saw the brother on
the corner the next day. Standing on the corner where his brother
died and where I heard a young woman crying one midnight and her
lover's harsh words as he walked away. And where, until recently,
old people would stop and sit for awhile before walking on. Home
Hardware has removed the big flower box they'd sit on. So they
just keep walking now. There was basically nothing I could do,
but wanting to do something, I grabbed The Tibetan Book Of The
Dead, which I'd been reading for the last few days, and took
it across the street to him.
"Hi," I said, "this is something I'd like you
to have.
"What's this?"
"Oh, it's one of my favourite books, I thought it might
be of some use. I live just across the street, up there,"
pointing to my window.
"Uh huh. My brother was killed here yesterday."
Just the way he said it, matter-of-fact, no question in it,
no pleading, no surprise, completely what it was, gave me the
impression that this was not new to him.
"Yes. I know. I called the ambulance. I'm sorry."
"They say he was killed instantly," he said,
looking at me.
"I never saw him move at all." He nodded and gazed
off into the distance.
"I'd like to give you this book."
"What? Give me a book?"
"I don't know whether it would be any help, but it's one
of my favourites. I'd like you to have it." He took it and
looked at it with a disinterested curiosity.
"What's it about?"
"It's supposed to be read to or for those who are dead
or dying. But I've found it quite interesting." He looked at
the book, then at me.
"Well, we're all going to die sooner or later, aren't
we?"
"Yes."
"I'll read it."
We shook hands and parted. It took some time to cross the
street.
It was only about a
week later that John the dwarf was killed at the corner of
Balmoral and Cook, half a block down from my apartment. I was
walking home from town when I came upon the scene. Ambulances,
police, the street blocked to traffic from Pandora to Grant. I
saw a young blonde woman in the back of a cruiser being comforted
by a friend. I just saw the back of her head for a couple of
seconds, but her posture and the situation suggested that she'd
done the killing. Her head was entirely rigid, staring straight
ahead into the distance, not responding to the young man's
consolations.
The next day, as I was again walking home from town, I came
across John's brother on the corner of Balmoral and Cook. There
was a car idling at the corner on Balmoral and I had to cross. I
hadn't made eye contact with the driver and I didn't know whether
he was ready to turn or not, so I yelled at him to get his
attention. As I was crossing, the driver rolled down his window
and exclaimed "Thanks. People should do that more often. My
brother was killed here yesterday."
I went back to talk. We exchanged hellos and once more I
offered the customary and pointless apology. When we say we're
sorry what does it mean? That we were partly to blame? Or just
that we regret. Or a simple offering of condolence. All three, I
suppose, in various proportions.
I told him that someone else had been killed nearby just last
week. His response was that he would have to tell that to the
woman who hit his brother. She feels so badly, he said. Maybe it
would make her feel better, he said. An astonishing generosity.
And would he be able to sustain it over time, I wondered?
I told him that I'd met the brother of the other man just
down the street a few days ago, right after his brother died. We
were both puzzled. He turned to me. "What do you think he
was looking for, so recently, not so far away?"
I had speculated on this, could have elaborated. In the end,
I could only acknowledge to him that it must have been much the
same as what he himself was looking for. "That doesn't help
much though, does it?" He shrugged, bemused.
"Some sort of understanding... even a message.
You think of that." He turned to me, half jokingly:
"You're not the messenger, are you?"
It startled me. How could I be? The role was beyond me. Even
had I thought that he really wanted me to, I couldn't have played
it. "No. I've met two brothers, though. I don't have any,
but I'm wondering about brothers."
He glanced at me with a look of preoccupied disappointment,
checking also to see that's all I had to say. "Yeah,"
he said, "it doesn't make much sense. Maybe it does. I don't
know."
He was quite drunk. Had arrived in Victoria from Halifax that
morning. A man of about 45. He told me John was just walking home
from his job at Mcdonald's. I'd seen John around. Burly. Well
known in Fernwood. Lively character. Never met him myself. We
parted.
From a distance he cried out, "You could be the
messenger without even knowing it! Without me knowing it either!
Until later, perhaps! Or not! It's like that with
brothers--that's how it was between us! My little brother
John..."
He waved, rolled up his window and turned the corner, drove
off into the night.
A couple of weeks
later I met a guy in a bar who'd seen the accident. He hadn't
reported anything. He told me what had happened. There was a
subtle implication of speeding to the story as he told it. When I
asked him, he pondered his beer and said "Oh, I wouldn't say
so... no, I wouldn't say so." We took a pull or two on our
beers and looked at the scene in the bar in the abstract way of
taking in a bar's flavour, the women laughing the enthusiasm of
the slightly tipsy, the men thrusting forward into their fourth
beer and all that they have too to tell the woman, or just
relaxing, pleased to be having a beer on a Friday night and no
worrying now, possibly more pleased with themselves than they
have been all week.
"No, a pretty young woman like that. I saw her. She's in
a bad way. It wasn't her fault, really. It's a lousy spot. Made
for an accident like that. She'll have to deal with it, that's
all I can say. Here's to justice."
We drank a toast to decisions. Our little city isn't the sort
of place where people leave from fear of the place itself. We are
moderately famous for the moderation of the climate, the
magnificence of the wilderness we have left, and the quaint air
of British colonialism maintained for tourists and lack of other
vision. Though recently we were featured in The New York Times
for our practice of dumping raw sewage into the ocean. And
everyone knows about Michael Dunahee, the abducted little boy
from Victoria. Curiously, all of North America has responded to
this particular boy's disappearance. "If the little boy from
Victoria is lost after the war and more of the same, the boy is
very lost, is he not?", queried my acquaintance. You cannot
travel five blocks without encountering his picture. Yet he is
nowhere to be found. Somehow Victoria has been trafficking in
realty and parable for some time. The search for the abducted boy
and the blameless killing of the Indian and the dwarf. We study
this over another beer or two, the place closes. I haven't seen
him since. In fact I cannot remember his name.
When I'm home, I
ponder the street, its goings on, its logic. No signal light
between Caledonia and Pandora. Middle of a straight stretch.
Narrow street. Drivers can't see pedestrians sometimes until
they're in the street. No cross walks, a lot of parked cars, no
speed-limit signs. Treacherous, particularly since it was widened
to four lanes a mile away, bringing more traffic into the city.
No islands for pedestrians. Lots of people walking, living around
here, but it's not zoned residential. Maybe people who live and
walk here think it's so close to home it must be safer than it
really is. And so forth. As a suicide machine it would be a
conveniently pointless, blameless, and sufficiently risky way to
die. The noteless and possibly unwilling victim of an unforeseen
accident. No ugly question left for the living as to why. You
could do it any time in a second. I would not leave a note. Never
complain, never explain. But who could trace their actions,
thoughts? Perhaps they were dreaming of women, expecting rain.
I ended up writing a letter and going to a meeting of the
Traffic Advisory Council. The Engineering Department had
recommended a pedestrian island, one crosswalk, a turning lane in
the middle of the street at certain points, and adjustments in
parking regulations. No light. I said I thought a light was
necessary. So no decision's been made yet. They did listen to me.
They said they'd call me about a committee on it. Haven't yet. I
suppose I'd better phone them, now that I'm out of school.
Working at the Ministry of Transportation for the summer. Doing
something.
I also said that if removing the crosswalks had been a good
idea (as City Council had, to "remove the illusion of
pedestrian safety") then we should remove the stripes down
the middle of the road. A good illusion goes a long way. I said
this politely. There was at least one chuckle. I was very polite.
But nervous, damn it. Silly me. Machine architecture and
bureaucracy seem to occupy my speech these days. The poetry of
plan twenty-three slash two b. One genius on the Traffic Advisory
Council suggested that a speed-bump be put at North Park and
Cook. I presume she did not think of how high the cars might loop
through the air. But, then, Rob Waters writes a fishing column in
one of our community newspapers. John Savage is the provincial
minister of Indian Affairs. The street is not as dangerous as
comedy gone bad.
My civic responsibility made me feel better. Joe citizen to
the rescue. Is it possible, do you think, to engineer a chip or a
city in which the logic is not so harsh? As you know, I do not
remember my dreams. I look at a chip and see a city, look at the
city and begin to feel that I do not live here anymore. What do
the brothers make of it? Not this story. The Book of the Dead
says over and over again to the dead and the dying that it is
sufficient for them to know that whatever they may experience in
that passage is of their own making, is their own mind. And that
we are brothers and sisters in this though a little mortal fear
may linger. When we look into the future we do not look into the
distance far enough. What is the architecture of the soul, and is
that what we see on the street? Realty on what was, or is,
or may be Salish land. I wonder if the Indian man, as of old and
despite land claims, believed that it simply could not be owned?
Jim Andrews
Html created: 11/8/96
Last Modified: May 1999
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