Michael Christie - The Beggar's Garden

Initially, his rise at the bank had been rapid, the position in fraud conceived by higher-ups as merely a way station on his ascent to more crucial departments like corporate finance or strategic initiatives. But Sam enjoyed fraud, the puzzle of it, the meticulous attention it required, this endless struggle to reduce loss, and politely refused the next two promotions they put before him.

That morning Sam sat through a gruelling project management round table on cheque security initiatives during which his head dipped twice. After the meeting he retreated to his office and redrafted a presentation he was to give at the national conference in Montreal the next month.

At lunch, he walked from the shadowy narrows of the financial district to an area consisting mostly of language schools and tiny eating establishments. Crossing Dunsmuir Street, he saw ahead of him on the sidewalk a young girl a few years older than Cricket, her face bright at the heart of a tempest of dark curls, walking hand in hand with her towering father. The sheer discrepancy of their heights was oddly delightful to Sam; the notion that two people could exist at such differing altitudes seemed immediately mystifying. Then an ambulance parked out front of a dollar pizza place whipped alive with lights and a piercing cluck of siren. Sam saw the girl recoil toward her father, setting her feet on top of each of his, nestling her back into the space between the solid timbers of his legs. They all watched the ambulance roar away, its on-board control somehow flipping lights green as it went. Sam was struck by the tenderness with which the man held the girl and the automatic way she’d sought him. They stood for some moments, the man whispering at her hair where her ear would be, until her face softened and they set off.

Sam went inside Top Choice Donair and ordered a falafel to the bracing sound of Arabic dance music, then stood on the sidewalk to eat. When he finished, he started back toward his office, balling the tinfoil wrapper tightly in his fist. He detoured into an alley, and after sidearming the foil into an open dumpster, he set both of his palms flat on the brick wall beside the bin like he was about to be searched and emitted a long, grinding sob.

The girl had brought back the way his daughter sought him in these situations of distress — not her mother, whom she consulted first in most other matters — the way she produced staccato blasts of sound and stood, arms outstretched, limp as a scarecrow, awaiting the vault into his arms.

“You all right, fella?” said an older bearded man, about ten feet to his right. Sam traced the man’s arms down to his belt and realized he was urinating with surprising force. Sam removed his hands from the bricks and said nothing. It had always seemed overly intimate to conduct a conversation with a man relieving himself. The man zipped and left the alley. Sam noted he was still pulling choppy, hot breaths high into his chest.

Emerging from the alley, he was met by a cold drift of exhaustion and decided to walk home. He started east. He and Anna lived in Strathcona, the oldest residential neighbourhood in the city, besieged in recent years by the young, progressive, and wealthy, who sought to live within bike-commuting distance of downtown and could stomach the neighbourhood’s close proximity to the riotous and hellish, but strangely contained, slum of the Downtown Eastside, through which was Sam’s shortest route home.

They’d married after grad school, he with an MBA and she a law degree. She passed the bar and did four months at a corporate firm in Toronto before discovering her complete lack of interest in the legal profession. Her family was appalled by her decision to quit, and at one point her father hinted that he might want reimbursement for the schooling. The west coast had been Anna’s idea of an escape. A few months after they’d arrived, an old friend offered her a position at a production company that specialized in American made-for-TV movies and commercials, and in a very short time that had led to her job as a casting director. At first, the city had been thrilling — as if their adventurousness, their willingness to scuttle the past, had been rewarded with their own earthly paradise, a temperate garden way out on the golden fringe of everything, far distant from the entanglements of her family and the yawning absence of his. Yet as years ticked by, something about the city nagged at Sam’s prairie sensibilities. Its beauty now seemed to him almost obscene, as if to build a glimmering city of glass by the sea, at the foot of an Olympian rack of mountains, was to invite calamity. And over time this doomed neighbourhood he walked through had assumed a symbolic station in his mind, an unsightly eruption that the city somehow deserved and couldn’t conceal. Much like his new backyard home, it was a tortured, unsettled dominion — a living monument to all unwanted things — and some part of Sam hoped it would be there forever.

He made his way past dismal blocks of vacant storefronts where sickened, twitchy people congregated like Antarctic penguins. He was offered drugs by palsied men who seemed nonplussed by his lack of response. He passed a vacant lot where two men stood over a large collection of VHS tapes laid out on a blanket, each holding the other by the hair, each pleading the other to let go.

After he’d walked awhile, the sun darted behind a ridge of cloud and the air fell cool. It was then he came upon a man sitting on the sidewalk with a yoghurt container before him. He was the man from the alley, in his fifties at least, lengthily bearded and swaddled in a ragtag assortment of dirty coats and vests; at his feet was a cardboard sign:

Spare Change? Drug/Alcohol Free, GOD BLESS.

Sam feared the man had attributed his silence to some prejudice he held, so he approached and plopped some larger coins in his cup.

“You startled me back there in the alley,” he said. “Not a problem,” the man said affably but somewhat confusedly, and Sam wondered if he’d been specific enough for a man who surely passed much of his time in alleys. He decided to spare him any further confusion and made a step toward his home.

“I hope you didn’t mind me saying that you look somewhat rough around the edges,” the beggar said. His voice reminded Sam of metal put to whetstone.

“Sorry?” he said, turning back.

“I seen the look before.”

“Look?”

“The one you got. Like a light gone in your face.” Sam grasped for a response to this.

“There’s this story around here, kind of a myth I suppose, about this fella who got hit by a police car and made himself a whole bunch of money, like seventy-five grand, for his damages, you know — broken femurs, skull, the whole shebang. He’s on welfare, never seen money like that in his life. So he steps out the hospital and figures he’ll have the biggest party anybody ever seen. He gets himself a nice suit and goes and buys all the drugs he can get his hands on and offers them to whomever and whoever he sees on the street. People knew there’s something screwy in his head, because of the accident maybe, or some other reason, but they didn’t care. He drew to him every nature of mooch, hustler, and wicked person there was, and of course this guy ends up broke after just three days, just the clothes they gave him in the hospital is all that’s left. He said to somebody that he didn’t care for this place no more and he’d decided to go on vacation. The next morning he walked on down to the docks and he hopped on the first container boat he saw. Well now, this boat ain’t bound for Maui, no sir, this boat turns out to be a non-stop to Alaska. So here’s this poor guy, just the thin grey sweatsuit they gave him and those cheap velcro shoes, no socks besides. So this guy sits there on the deck shivering and making a full-time job of freezing his ass off. Crew members walking past his little hidey hole, going inside the cabin and drinking coffee, listening to the radio and whatnot. But you know what? This guy? He don’t say nothing to them. This fella was so determined not to ask nobody for help no more that he went all sleepy and just froze himself to death right there between them stacks of containers.”