Théodora Armstrong - Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility

That night we drank until the sun came up. Thom and Veronica rent the main floor of a ramshackle house off Fraser Street in East Vancouver. Above them lives a Korean exchange student and below them a construction worker in his early twenties. The air is always thick with the smell of kimchi and weed, and whenever I smell those two things I have an overwhelming urge to drink a large amount of beer.

In the backyard, Thom had set up two folding chairs on the plywood flatbed of the construction worker’s truck, with an overturned plastic bucket as a table between them. The girls stayed inside talking about whatever women talked about when there were no men around and Sophie was asleep on their bed, surrounded by a barricade of pillows.

“Your neighbour doesn’t mind you drinking on his truck?” I’d said, taking a seat in one of the folding chairs. There were cup holders for the beer.

“I’m letting him park in my driveway,” Thom said, passing me a can.

We settled back in our seats, the sounds of a city neighborhood around us, rush hour traffic down Fraser Street, ambulance sirens and the strains of Sepultura coming from the basement suite. I’d already grown accustomed to the quiet nights in Kamloops. Thom had dragged an extension cord through the yard and plugged in an electric campfire. It flickered as the night dimmed behind us.

“So, congratulations!” Thom raised his beer can. “To the wee one!”

We clinked cans.

“You need to get down here more often. Leave Ange and the kid. Come crash on our couch.”

“It’s not that easy,” I said, smiling. Sitting on the flatbed, we could look down the yards of much of the street, take in people through the lit windows as they busied themselves inside their homes. “One day when you and Veronica have a kid you’ll see what I mean.”

“Who said I want any part in that?” Thom took out a pack of cigarettes and lit a smoke. “Ver been talking to you, or what?”

The construction worker came out to get his lighter from his truck and Thom tried to score some weed off the guy, but he said he didn’t have any. My sense was maybe Thom asked him a little too often.

“If Ver wants a baby she’ll need to find herself some other primo donor,” Thom continued after the construction worker had gone back into the basement. “You can buy sperm on the internet now, can’t you?”

“You try to be miserable.”

“What do I have to offer? Look at me!” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew rings skyward. “I won’t be paying for it either. She better start saving, ’cause that junk ain’t cheap. ’Specially the ‘intellectual’ kind.”

“It’s self-sabotage.”

“God!” He pointed his cigarette at me and shuddered. “What if it was one of my undergrad students? Jesus! She’d want the highfalutin literary stuff. And they’re so hungry, I bet they’re all selling their sperm. Jesus, that’s going to be our world population right there. Oh, sure. I’m going to have to move north. Hey, maybe I’ll come live with you in Kamloops.”

“There is something wrong with you and we all know it, yet none of us are willing to help you. What does that say?” I finished my beer and dropped it at my feet, opening another can.

“I don’t have your straight-and-narrow vision.” There was a hint of a sneer at the corner of his lip. “My mind,” he said, tapping his temple. He gave me a significant look and took a sip of beer.

“You’re not making much sense tonight. And who says I’m on the straight and narrow?”

“Hah! You’re as arrow-straight as they come. Are you kidding me?” Thom laughed long enough that I stopped smiling. “What I’m saying is,” he said, drawing out the words, “my mind doesn’t follow that trajectory — love, marriage, baby. I’d shrink into a little itty-bitty man. I’d become petite.”

“So what do you see when you look at me?” I leered and waited, took a large gulp of beer.

“Atrophy.” He wiggled a pinky at me and chuckled to himself.

“You bastard.”

“Didn’t you used to write little poems?” He was smiling now too, like a kid with a stick.

“You’re basing your future on our sloppy pub-night pillow talk, both of us one wink away from passed out on the floor. It’s pathetic.”

“Hey, at least I still have a hope in hell of achieving enlightenment.”

“They have you on the same circuit,” I said, smirking into my beer. “Is a PhD so different? Don’t you think I know they have a hamster wheel at that university built especially for you? You get on that campus and your little legs are going faster than mine, my friend.”

“Yah, that may be. But didn’t I tell you?” He pulled a thread of tobacco from his lip. “I’m planning on being a monk.”

“No, you didn’t tell me that.” I laughed hard enough that I slopped beer down one pant leg. “You’d make a shitty monk.”

“I’m going to live in a state of perfection.” He tilted his can back and finished the beer, adding it carefully to a wobbly tower of cans next to his chair. “Nirvana.”

“I thought you’d already achieved that.” I smirked at him.

Thom laughed and made a weak attempt to disguise a belch.

“So where do you go to be a monk around here?”

“There’s a place near Mission.”

We talked well into the early morning, until the edges of the clouds turned pink and we were slumped over our chairs trying to grasp at a conversation slipping sideways toward total incoherence. We were talking about politics and great books and greater wars as though we knew anything about those subjects. Thom kept backing me into corners, pointing his finger in my face until I finally surrendered and stumbled up, knocking over my folding chair, and told him to fuck off. I don’t think either of us knew what it was over, but we both knew we’d reached that point in the morning where we hated each other. I found Angie and Veronica inside on the couch under a pile of blankets, talking.

“Are you crying?” Angie said. An arm came up from under an afghan.

“They’re just leaking,” I said, waving her away. There were tears on my cheeks, but it was impossible to tell what from, the booze or the anger. Angie crawled out from beneath the blankets and peered out the window at Thom. “You guys have been drinking all night.”

Veronica stood beside her. “Is he still out there?” She went about puttering in the kitchen and muttering to herself about the sorry mess in her backyard and the neighbourhood waking up to bear witness.

I leaned against the wall as I stumbled down the hallway to the bedroom. “If you wake her up I’ll kill you,” Angie called after me.

Sophie lay in the middle of the bed, chin tilted to the ceiling, mouth open, abandoned to sleep. There was something immensely pleasurable about staring at my sleeping daughter when I was drunk. “You’re so beautiful,” I said as the exquisite little breaths escaped from her mouth.

“Get out of here,” Angie hissed. Her hand came out of the dark and pulled me down the hall.

“When are you guys going to learn you’re not twenty anymore?” Veronica said from the kitchen. “Tea, Ange? What do you need, Wes? Some coffee?”

“He’s a stubborn bastard,” I said, wiping the back of my hand over my weepy eyes. It was certainly the booze.

“So he told you?” Veronica dipped the tea bag in and out of the hot water, steam drifting up around her face.

“Told me what?”

“That he dropped out of his PhD program,” she said. “Hasn’t left the house all week.”

TRAFFIC IS PILED UP along the highway. Sophie is crying, has been crying on and off in howling fits for the past two hours. The wildfire has closed part of the road, with escorts taking convoys of cars down the mountain. No one has moved for twenty minutes. Angie’s been halfway over the front seat, ass in the air, for most of the ride, and we silently agreed to stop talking to each other after the first half hour of arguing. Maybe she’s hot. Maybe she’s bored. Maybe she wants us to stop yelling. Kids hang limply out car windows. People walk along the edge of the highway, stretching their legs, taking their dogs for a piss, lifting their hands to shield their eyes as they stare down the long line of stationary cars. I’ve been sitting here fiddling with the air conditioning and thinking of alternate endings.