North of unreal
Needle Exchange
On our holiday beach, a man is sticking drugs into his arm. His back is to the ocean and he looks for a vein and he sticks a needle in his arm and then he howls. He’s quiet, and then he howls again.
My daughter is cutting the sand with seashells, and the howling makes her pause and cry. I want to tell her it’s a whale in distress, but it sounds more like a monster, or a man eating a bowl of jagged glass, spoonful after spoonful. And the whole thing takes a while, long enough for three slim yellow kayaks to slide by us on the lip of the sea. We are on holiday. And until the man on the beach started howling, the most distressing thing we’d heard so far was the lifeguard at the Second Beach Swimming Pool yelling “Hey! No sliding headfirst down the Seal Slide!”
My daughter’s watched her father slide headfirst before. He’s a diabolic diabetic, and when things get rough, he swallows a fistful of brown sugar or sticks needles into the tough, bruised skin above his hip. Sometimes my daughter tries to do the same. This morning, she stuck herself with the sharp end of the small paper parasol that was decorating the mango pudding at Dim Sum at the Pink Pearl Restaurant on East Hastings. We ate lions’ heads and shrimp dumplings and mango pudding, and then my daughter took the paper parasol from the pudding and lifted up her shirt and stuck the sharp end of the tiny umbrella into the soft skin of her belly.
On our way back to the beach, I raced her past Alibi Pizza, past the man in a fez who was carrying a steaming kettle in his hands. And then a tourist stopped us to ask if this was a street fair, because everyone in the Downtown Eastside was selling something out on the sidewalk.
My daughter has seen her father forget his own name before. She’s watched as I tried to pour orange juice and sugar into his mouth. And that time I swore, because the juice just pooled in the hollow below his neck and left little puddles in the sheets and I didn’t know what to do.
I called for help. The volunteer firemen got there first and they clomped in with their big boots and stood shyly around the bed, shifting their weight from foot to foot. One of them lifted my daughter into his arms while I stormed the pantry in search of sugar. I tore open a can of lychees and I fed it to my man with a baby spoon. And by the time the ambulance raced up to save him, I was already feeding him fruit and syrup and sweetness in a spoon.
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