The View from Vancouver

By Barry Pomeroy

When Hillside Research offered him fifty dollars for his opinion, he allowed the drug testing company to sit him in a chair. That began his vengeful journey, as he discovered the depths to which they would go to protect their bottom line. His misplaced trust set him on the road to a cross-country revenge, led to his inadvertent fame in the downtown east side, and encouraged him to re-examine the city he called his home.
He initially imagined a confrontation with Hillside as thrown Molotov cocktails, but once he uncovered their more sinister plan, he began to suspect that mere vengeance would not satisfy him. Hatred and revenge were not enough, and he found himself re-evaluating his intentions.
In a Vancouver which hovers on the edge of riot and lockdown, where the police are incarcerating people on the basis of new quasi-legal claims of criminal activity like sitting in a public place, he has to decide between fight or flight. Should he confront those promoting human testing, rage and burn in a city where his violence will merely add to the growing chaos, or join the mass exodus of those leaving the city?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Dec 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781987922899

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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The View from Vancouver

by

Barry Pomeroy

© 2020 by Barry Pomeroy

All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

ISBN 13: 978-1987922899

ISBN 10: 1987922891

When Hillside Research offered him fifty dollars for his opinion, he allowed the drug testing company to sit him in a chair. That began his vengeful journey, as he discovered the depths to which they would go to protect their bottom line. His misplaced trust set him on the road to a cross-country revenge, led to his inadvertent fame in the downtown east side, and encouraged him to re-examine the city he called his home.

He initially imagined a confrontation with Hillside as thrown Molotov cocktails, but once he uncovered their more sinister plan, he began to suspect that mere vengeance would not satisfy him. Hatred and revenge were not enough, and he found himself re-evaluating his intentions.

In a Vancouver which hovers on the edge of riot and lockdown, where the police are incarcerating people on the basis of new quasi-legal claims of criminal activity like sitting in a public place, he has to decide between fight or flight. Should he confront those promoting human testing, rage and burn in a city where his violence will merely add to the growing chaos, or join the mass exodus of those leaving the city?

Table of Contents

Chapter One ~ Product Testing

Chapter Two ~ Dumpster Landing

Chapter Three ~ Prairie Skies

Chapter Four ~ Cold in Alberta

Chapter Five ~ The Drivers

Chapter Six ~ Killer Drives

Chapter Seven ~ A Clue

Chapter Eight ~ The Search

Chapter Nine ~ Quarry in Sight

Chapter Ten ~ The Confrontation

Chapter Eleven ~ Carcross

Chapter Twelve ~ Seashell Cabin

Chapter Thirteen ~ First Day of Work

Chapter Fourteen ~ The Mad Trapper of Rat River

Chapter Fifteen ~ The Right to Be in the North

Chapter Sixteen ~ Going to Town

Chapter One ~ Product Testing

I’d been on the street long enough that when I heard the rumours—and I don’t count the news as any different—about bums jumping out of Winnipeg windows I didn’t pay a lot of attention. For one thing, I wasn’t in Winnipeg, and even if I was, I didn’t know any of those people. I didn’t know anyone from Winnipeg, and I was hoping that would always be the case. And for that matter, there’s plenty of reasons that would drive someone out a window and I’ve never been one to judge another’s decision to let go or move on.

I had my own place in the world. I don’t go to North Van, where the cops will drive you out just for enjoying a smoke by the water, and I stayed away from the far east side, near the highway where people more desperate than me prey on anyone loose enough in their affiliations that they stand out. I’m more of a middle town person. I’ve lived off Main, and for one summer in Jericho Park, away from the beach, the boats, and the cheerful teenagers in the hostel. I lived amongst the blackberries and the bushes, avoiding Brian the groundskeeper and picking cans when I felt like it towards the end of the month. More recently, I’d moved out along Commercial Drive. I felt I was above Hastings, and the hippie silliness of the Drive suited me. It was one of the places in the city where when Velcro meets corduroy it settles into an uneasy truce.

My spot, for everyone has one—even the people across the street from the organics in the condos—was in front of the falafel place. I could be found around Desarts nearly any day, or in the park just below the organics, or over by the bakery off Venables. I drifted through the long summer afternoons doing a bit of dumpstering, although they were picked through already by people keener or more desperate than me, and asking people, as kindly as the years had allowed me, for change. I’d heard nearly every possible variation on get a job or quit freeloading that anyone could imagine. Although sometimes I racked my brain to figure out another way of saying it, I frequently, regardless for having been to college and all, came up empty.

Maybe that’s why, because I couldn’t figure out another way of telling off people asking for change, that I was so surprised when I found one. I was behind the Safeway off Broadway, in their parking lot helping people return carts for a loonie a pop when I was approached by a guy in a cheap suit. I usually avoid the type, although I’ve hacked them for a coffee before, the price of listening to their spiel.

Get lost, buddy, I’m working. I didn’t say it in a mean way, and I could have, but I gave him a tone that should have had him shoving off to someone else to tell about god. I’ve had more than enough gods. I’ve probably been in more temples and mosques and churches than nearly any religious pusher. The Baha’is have free food, and the Sikhs put on a good spread. Sometimes the Mosques, on Eid anyway, have food they share, and very occasionally the churches. Although the Christians put you through a howling at the sky to get to the table, their buffet style is old-timey, grandma food and worth getting frothy-mouthed over some Jesus.

The cheap suit didn’t leave so I was just thinking I might have to get inspirational when he said, I have a business proposal for you.

I took a better look. He was thin enough from being young but obviously had never gone hungry. His hands were butter soft and uncreased, the fingers slim like menthol smokes. The suit was off-the-rack, although I’ve never been the best at judging that, and his dress shoes were dusty from walking. He wasn’t threat-like in a cop sense, and twitchy like a nutjob, but something about how he’d singled me out made me feel less than special. Sometimes Kitsilano boys trolled the east side for easy marks. You get hired for easy money, a quickie in a car, and then you’d be found with the shit kicked out of you along the Sea-to-Sky Highway.

What type of business you in?

Product testing. You know Hillside?

I nodded that I had heard. Hillside did medical and drugs, and Holly was going there regular for eye drops that kept the pressure from building up. It was hours of checkups and measurements, but that way her meds were affordable. Human experimentation on the poor for a few bucks so rich people didn’t have to worry about glaucoma.

I’m not into drug tests. I skirted around him to pick up a cart from a woman who was stuffing the last of her reusable bags into her SUV’s automatic trunk. It had just started to close when I offered to take her cart back for her. Take care of that for you, ma’am?

She let go of the cart, it wheeled to me, and I spun it toward the corral. I only barely heard her thanks as she levered herself into the truck and began to back out. I waved when she passed and then looked to find another. The day was getting late, and business slowed in the evening. Not everyone wanted an eager hand on their cart in a parking lot that only featured two working lights.

I don’t mean to interrupt your business. The suit was standing to one side between a grey station wagon and a blue beetle. If I can just leave this card. He dangled it from two fingers and for a second it looked like he was smoking one of those long tan cigarettes from somewhere off.

I took the card just to get rid of him, jammed it into my back pocket and forgot about it. I watched just to see what he drove but he went into the SkyTrain station and was lost in the heading-downtown crowds.

I made another few bucks and then strolled over to Needle Park to see what was going on. It was a good time, for some punker kids had put together an impromptu concert they were calling a protest and before long the cops showed up. They couldn’t do anything but stare as two of the girls went bare-chested in some kind of political statement. The night was smooth by the water and even after the punkers left and I was alone with the bicycle guys cruising for dropped joints I was as peaceful as a seagull on a dump. There was plenty to go around and by the time the dew fell I’d found a hedge and was wrapped up in my sleeping bag.

If it hadn’t of rained the next day, I would’ve had nothing to do with the suit, but it was steady dripping through the hedge at four in the morning and by the time the commuters were pushing and shoving to work I was pretty wet and miserable. I was thinking I could use a few bucks for a room off Hastings so I walked along Main Street until I found the office. It was in the back of a Chinese joint, and the sweet green pepper smell made me want the money even more. I’d heard some studies paid fifty bucks for watching a movie and writing your answers on a sheet, and I was more than ready to get out of the rain. The humour of it was I probably would have followed a christer home if I thought it would make me a few bucks.

The suit wasn’t there, but I put my card on the counter and the woman squatting over the bench scowled at me and then pointed to a take-a-number machine. Oddly, her surliness put me at ease more than anything else. Scammers were generally friendly with everyone. Only legitimate businesses can afford to treat people like dirt. I was wrong about that, as it turned out. Maybe they knew that from some psychology study and so had hired her, or they might have picked the nastiest stump of a woman randomly.

I was almost desperate enough for Good Housekeeping when a man in a lab coat came to get me. I kept the sneer off my face, but I was thinking they were milking it pretty slim if they were thinking a white coat would convince me. He ran me through a few due diligence statements but I didn’t bother to read them. I wasn’t worried. If they killed me it wouldn’t matter pretty soon, and if I was alive I could sue them regardless of what I’d signed.

I’ve thought since that I should have at least kept some of the paperwork but they didn’t offer me a copy and I didn’t ask. The fifty bucks was already warming my pocket and they said I’d be done in less than an hour. I was already spending my money along the strip when they led me to an office down the hallway from the waiting room.

Soon I was seated and they’d strapped in my arms and chest. I wasn’t too freaked, although it was more Frankenstein than I’d been expecting.

Just don’t fuck with me too much, I joked as they put sensors on my temples and on either side of my heart. The techie grinned with too many teeth showing and then they left the room and turned on a buzz that reminded me of an X-ray machine.

Chapter Two ~ Dumpster Landing

I felt strange, like my bowels had been grabbed with soft red mittens and slightly twisted. I let go of the arms of the chair I’d been pushing into, and was looking around as though I would be able to get to a toilet quick enough when I realized I was falling. The air was dusty, and more quickly than I could account for, I was in a dumpster and winded from the crash.

Jesus fucking Christ, I yelled. If someone is messing with you it doesn’t pay to let them get away with it. They just come back to do it again. My friend Leroy had been tipped into a dumpster once when he was digging deep, and he’d come back up, mad as a hatter to hear him tell it, to find no one but some guy walking down the alley. I thrashed around in the doll heads and bags of kitty litter, the late-delivered kitchen waste and sugary syrup of soda cans, getting my breath and preparing myself for the inevitable confrontation.

I thought I’d come up from the pit with people looking on. The alley was empty, and I was nowhere near the Safeway parking lot. I’d been drugged, and had woken just as I’d been thrown into a bin. That’s what I figured at the time. Although I was hard pressed to explain why anyone would take the effort, I felt for the fifty and it was still there. I hadn’t been on anyone’s hit list for nearly twenty years, ever since I’d left behind my wife and bills and doctors and basically disappeared. No one cared enough about me to force-feed me drugs and I wasn’t too proud to take them if someone offered.

I pulled myself out of the bin slowly, just as my memory of the testing company came back. I was getting on thirty-three in a month and too old for that kind of bullshit. My friend Tip had already bowed out and had promised to be good to the church folks if they let him stay in a welfare basement with a couple of other bums who completed their little zoo of righteousness. I gave him a month, and when I told him that he laughed so hard he lost his breath. Cancer. I told the dry air. He’d been claimed by some god or another within two weeks and the do-gooders were shuffling for a replacement on the street before he was safe in the ground.

The feel of an individual city is most obvious from its alleys. Vancouver’s alleys are slightly precarious, as if everyone was tilting smack into the bay. There, stumbling in on a deal between Kitsilano bullies and downtown dealers might mean your life. The alley I’d found myself in after Hillside had a pungent smell of hopper juice. That meant that the rains had forgotten this particular street when they washed the smell of humans from the stale concrete and strange baby-shit yellow brick. Most of the garbage was residual, which would only happen in the most neglected of alleys or when Vancouver was in the middle of a garbage strike. I was pissed already, but now I was getting freaked out. I didn’t recognize the smell, and when I stepped into the open, under a bright hot sun, I knew I wasn’t in Vancouver anymore.

The license plates on the first set of cars that tried to run me down proclaimed Manitoba’s friendliness. Tourists, I thought at first, slumming on the east side of Main for a laugh. Then I saw a cop car. They slowed beside me and I got a good look. Winnipeg city cops. Manitoba plates. A skyline I didn’t recognize. I ducked back into the alley, trying to move slow enough not to alert the cops. They’re like dogs; if they see you run they can’t help themselves.

Winnipeg? What the fuck am I doing in Winnipeg?

What?

The tottering old man in front of me swam in and out of focus as he teetered on unsteady legs.

What do you mean, ‘what?’ I was in his face, my frustration boiling into anger now that I had a target. What the fuck am I doing in Winnipeg?

Can’t answer that one for ya, buddy. I’ve been asking myself the same. The grin that tilted out of his cratered face made me avoid his searching glance. Where you from, buddy?

Vancouver, I said reflexively.

Long way from home.

I left him calling after me and went automatically towards the west. I didn’t plan to walk all the way, but I was distracted by the dry air, the unfamiliar faces, and the impossibility of my situation. I’d almost convinced myself that I’d been on a bender, a terrible never-drink-again kind of binge that had somehow led me to the asshole of the world. Then I saw the date on a bus token which fluttered to my feet and then flew again when the breeze lifted into a wind. June 8th. Pretty near the same date as when I’d gone into the product testing branch of some office in Vancouver east. If I’m honest, I’ve never been one for hanging off a calendar so I didn’t know exactly when it happened.

On a hunch I checked the parking meters, and found, to my short-lived satisfaction, that even though I’d been in