Showing posts with label Downtown Eastside. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Downtown Eastside. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

BUS PEOPLE: a novel of the Downtown Eastside - Part Five






This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.

Margaret Gunning


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside

Part Five

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel



Zoltán Levy

The day he found out that his twin brother turned into a piece of paper, it changed him forever, igniting a fire in him that would prove to be lifelong and inextinguishable.

They were already over here in Canada, it was after the war, Zoltán was fifteen years old and insatiably curious about all kinds of things. This is because nobody would ever tell him anything, adult conversations would stop just as they started to get interesting, and when nobody tells anything to a child with this much intelligence and need to know, his emotional antennae will grow and grow until they are almost monstrously long.

With these antennae, Zoltán Levy will pick up the most minute, nearly unreadable emotional signals in his therapy patients, things they aren’t even aware of in themselves, things they have buried so deep they pray they will never resurface. But all that is far into the future. Right now Zoltán is in the library in his parents’ stucco bungalow in Norbury, North Vancouver, trying to find a book that isn’t written in Hungarian.

He can’t. It embarrasses him to hear his parents talk, they won’t even try English with each other, and it’s even worse when they start throwing Yiddish words in, Yiddish is so primitive, like the smell of garlic and leather harnesses, so Old World, so old, and this is the New World and they’ve dragged their son all the way over here to give him a better life and more opportunities than they ever had, God knows, so why not ditch the shpilkes and the farklempt and the shlemazl and the kvetsh and talk like normal Canadian people?

Zoltán pulls out a volume at random, and begins to read about Lajos Kossuth, a 19th-century freedom fighter so remarkable and revered that they named a U. S. county after him, not to mention a town in Ohio and a post office in Pennsylvania.

Zoltán reads: “Kossuth envisioned a federation in the Kingdom of Hungary in which all nationalities participated in a vibrant democratic system based on fundamental democratic principles such as equality and parliamentary representation.” Zoltán is nearly numb with boredom.

He throws Kossuth to one side and pulls out a medical textbook, one of his grandfather’s old volumes, fascinating. He pokes around in it, staring at gruesome colour drawings of people’s insides, and finds a particularly grotesque exhibit, something called a lithopedion: a dead fetus which has calcified in its mother’s womb, slowly turning to stone. A lithopedion can go undetected for years, even decades, then show up later on an x-ray. Zoltán thinks this is about as strange as having a brick stuck in your abdomen, or even a statue.

When he has had his fill of medical curiosities, he pulls a third book down from the shelves, red-leather-bound, with gilt-edged pages. It’s poetry by Sándor Petöfi, his mother’s favourite poet, and he riffles through it listlessly, uninterested, until he comes across a very strange sort of bookmark.

It’s not a bookmark exactly, though it appears to be made out of some sort of dry, thick paper, like layers of rice-paper fused together. It’s strangely shaped, like an irregular cookie cutter or a gingerbread man with something suggesting arms and legs. The texture of it resembles dried fish, ribbed and dessicated, with something like fine bones barely visible inside.

He turns it this way and that. It’s about the size of his hand; he holds it up against his palm, comparing the size. He drops it, then picks it up again.

“Tán-tán!”

Startled, he slams the book shut and throws it into the corner.

His mother shrieks at him in Hungarian: Tán-tán, put that away. Put that away this instant.

“Mamele. . . “


“Put it down!”






He drops the strange piece of paper and flees the room, curiously ashamed, trying hard not to cry. Obviously, he has touched something he shouldn’t have, something he never should have seen, like the time he found his mother’s diaphragm in one of her drawers underneath all the nightgowns and underpants and brassieres. But this is even stranger than that mysterious object, even more forbidden to know about.

Next time he’s in his parents’ library, he looks for the Petöfi poems and can’t find them anywhere. The book, along with its strangely-shaped bookmark, has been confiscated.

The memory is booted to the very back of his mind, the gates are clanged shut, then double-locked. For good measure, he swallows the key.

Until. Until nearly 20 years later, when Zoltán Levy finally makes it to medical school and is studying up on obstetrics.

Vanishing twins. He pores over the article in the medical journal, describing a fairly common phenomenon: a woman becomes pregnant, ultrasound tests reveal that she is carrying twins, but she only gives birth to one baby. Where has the other twin gone?

The article explains that if the twin dies very early in gestation, its remains will be absorbed and simply disappear. But if it occurs somewhat later, several weeks or months later, something else may happen, something very strange indeed.

There is a name for this phenomenon: fetus papyraceous, literally meaning paper baby. Sometimes known as paper-doll fetuses, these flattened, mummified remains are sometimes found entangled in the membranes of the placenta after a normal delivery. The dead twin is pushed to one side by the growing, more viable fetus; the body gradually begins to dehydrate, to compress, until it is slowly flattened out into something like a thin, grotesque-looking cookie. He looks at the photograph accompanying the article, and the hair on his neck begins to prickle: he has seen this somewhere before. Beside it is an x-ray of a fetus papyraceous, revealing a tiny, flattened human skeleton, perfect in every detail.

And then, Zoltán remembers.

Holding his twin in his hands. Measuring him against his palm, turning him over, and thinking to himself that it resembled the dried, splayed wings of a large nocturnal insect.

No wonder Mamele was upset, but what would possess a woman to keep something so gruesome, to press her dead baby in the pages of a book like some particularly cherished autumn leaf?

It does explain a couple of things, such as why Zoltán always feels so guilty. Guilt has been a particularly faithful companion all his life, a slobbering hound dog that trails at his heels and won’t leave him alone even for a second. Zoltán wonders if he killed his twin, inadvertently of course, if he just wasn’t willing to share the womb with anybody else, so pushed him ruthlessly to one side, causing him to collapse like a deflated accordion.

He wonders if his mother named the twin – András, maybe, or Sándor, like her favorite poet? Why didn’t she bury it, or have it cremated or something – did she go crazy with grief when she found out her other son had died? But the craziness came later, after the mass insanity of the war, the paralytic depression, the suffocating guilt at having committed the unpardonable sin of surviving.






Zoltán had always assumed that before the war, before the entire world went crazy for those interminable six years, his mother was relatively sane. Now, with the mystery of the paper twin solved, he is not so sure.

Zoltán has always had a secret fear at the back of his mind that he would one day go crazy, just lose his grip and fall into gibbering incoherence. This has never happened, in spite of the juggernaut, the behemoth, the glacier of guilt that bears down on him daily, reducing him to something with the texture and consistency of fine powder.

A little craziness leaks out in odd forms. Mavis Potter has seen him steal CDs from Pegasus Classical Record Store, only a couple of blocks west of where he works. He sees one he wants, quickly puts it in his coat pocket, and walks away. The staff at Pegasus know all about it, of course. They don’t want to embarrass him, they know who he is, they know he’s a doctor and that he does a lot of good. He tries to ration himself and not steal too many, certainly never more than one at a time, and no more than two or three a month. The first time Mavis saw him do it, she was ashamed. He didn’t appear to be; he was in some place beyond shame, apparently, but Mavis just wanted to die, she was so embarrassed for him. It was so humiliating to see her hero act so human, so full of holes. She tried to put it out of her mind; maybe it was a hallucination, like Wayne Gretzky at the bank or Prince Edward at the Safeway store, but she hadn’t had one of those in years, the medication kept it all under control.

Zoltán does not listen to these CDs, but keeps them in their original wrappings in alphabetical order according to composer in a stacking CD unit in his living room: Adams, Arensky, Arnold, Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein, Boccherini, Brahms, Buxtehude, Cage, Chopin, Copland, Dvorak, Elgar, Fauré. . . It’s important to keep things in order. If there weren’t, chaos would swallow him, he is sure of it, the mad dogs would devour him and chew on the bones. He has always been afraid of “the labyrinthine ways of his own mind”, to paraphrase that poem, what was it called, The Hound of Heaven, speaking of being dogged. Yes: the labyrinthine ways of his own mind, which seldom stops spinning, having been given a particularly violent twist back in 1944.

It was as if for a time the world were turning the wrong way. The things that happened were beyond belief, so no one believed them, allowing the atrocity to continue for years. The evil was so intense, it was as if all the natural rules were being systematically broken, the laws of the universe subverted. And yet, so casually it happened, genocide becoming an everyday occurrence, just part of people’s day. Throw the switch; gas the Jews. Go home to the frau and the kinder and the family dog. People only pretended not to know, to make the knowledge bearable. Only a few cried out. Most were killed for their pains. The world was still reverberating, some sixty years on, from the shock of being turned the wrong way. One of his mother’s Yiddish expressions was, Drai mir nit kain kop - meaning don’t bother me, but literally meaning: Don’t twist my head. The war did worse than twist her head, it twisted her whole being, and malformed her son in some fundamental way, so that everything he did came out a little bit bent, a little bit strange. There was no doubting his intelligence, it was formidable from the start, his early teachers were amazed and even called him a prodigy, but he was a problem too, he couldn’t settle down, his mind was all over the place, spinning a thousand revolutions per minute faster than anyone else’s, making death-defying leaps that left everyone else lagging far behind. Now he has settled, after a fashion, but in a very strange place, down here among the loaded and the lonely. Like a leaf blown around in little circles by the gritty eddies of wind that scour the street, his mind spins and spins, and never sleeps.






The bus

The wheels on the bus go round and round. Round and round. Round and round.

Isobel Chaston jostles everyone in her path to get the best seat on the bus, using her elbows and even the pointy end of her formidable umbrella if necessary. Bert Moffatt groans inwardly whenever this old bird gets on, which is too often if you ask him, probably couldn’t get a driver’s license for love nor money, she’d be hell on wheels.

“You young people are good for nothing,” she says to a group of teenage girls in tight, low-slung jeans and cropped shirts that say things on them in glittery writing like Love Slave and Porn Star. “No respect for your elders, none whatsoever. And you want everything handed to you on a silver platter. When I was your age I was already earning a living working a forty-hour week. I didn’t ask the world for any favours.”

The girls look at each other, confused, embarrassed and angry. Every group of adolescents has an unofficial leader, and everyone looks at her now. Brianna Dawne Lester, this particular group’s alpha female, knows that she is expected to speak.

“Look, lady, we didn’t even say anything. We’re like just minding our own fucking business here. You’re, like, making a whole bunch of assumptions about us, hey? Just out of nowhere.”

“See? This is what I mean, bold as brass. In my day this never would have been tolerated.” Mrs. Chaston is now addressing the passengers from an invisible soap box that seems to have popped up from the floor of the bus. “No respect for authority, none whatsoever.”

“Respect goes both ways, lady. You want to get it, try giving it first.” Her friends beam at Brianna and at each other.

“That’s it, I’m reporting you girls to the transit authorities for verbal assault.”

“Oh, give me a break. Lady, we should be reporting you. Kindly get out of our faces and mind your own goddamn business.”

The girls’ grins escalate into titters of satisfaction. Then Mrs. Chaston elbows her way up to the front of the bus to harass the driver, who steadfastly attempts to ignore her.

Isobel Chaston doesn’t particularly look like a crackpot, she’s not messy or wild-eyed or deranged-looking, which makes her verbal tirades all the more surprising. In fact she is always decently turned-out in presentable, if old-fashioned outfits, co-ordinated tweed skirt-suits and knitted pastel twin-sets, her hair pulled back into a neat bun with tortoiseshell combs on the sides of her head, the bun neatly contained in a black lace snood. She looks like somebody’s harmless old grandma, belying the fact that she has been physically ejected from public meetings all over the Greater Vancouver Regional District. She considers herself to be a social critic.

“Here’s a fine example.” She points to Szabó, poor old Szabó who is just trying to make his way across town to get to his station, humming melodies from Die Fledermaus and The Gypsy Baron. “It should be patently obvious to everyone on this bus that this man should be in an institution.”

“Speak for yourself, lady.” A shout from the rear seats, causing a buzz of conversation among Isobel Chaston’s captive audience.

“Instead he’s left to fend for himself, and lives in God knows what sort of conditions. This is the kind of society we live in today, it’s just appalling how people pretend not to know what’s really going on.”

“The government!” the heckler calls out, provoking sniggers from the people sitting around him.

“You better believe it’s the government, Gordon Campbell is an asshole, a drunk and a fool, and while we’re on this topic, it’s time we had some policy in this province to keep out all the riff-raff.” She’s really getting into it now, working herself up into a pitch.

“The yellow peril!”






“Well I’m not prejudiced or anything, so I wouldn’t go so far as to call it that, young man, but don’t you think it’s reasonable to expect people to at least learn a few words of English and stick around to raise their children instead of leaving them with a nanny and taking off back to Hong Kong?”
“Ship ‘em all back to China!” This from a tough-looking young Asian guy with studs in his eyebrows, provoking a few hoots of laughter.

“Yeah – just stick ‘em in a container vessel and send ‘em right back. What’s good for the snake-heads is good for us too, eh?”

“That’s not such a bad idea, young man, I’m sick of people sneaking into this country under false pretences. Enough is enough!”

“Yeah, enough is enough, lady, and I think we’ve all had about enough of you.”

Bert Moffatt listens to this piece of theatre unfolding in the aisles and feels a certain satisfaction. The bus takes care of its own. Things equalize; they always work out. He has seen fist-fights break out, but someone always pulls the guys apart and restrains them until he can put one of them off at the next stop. (Not both of them, they’ll kill each other.) He has seen elderly passengers keel over from diabetic shock, and somebody always seems to be on-board at the right time, someone who has enough first aid training to know what to do. A blanket appears out of nowhere, and even someone’s glucose kit, conjured up out of thin air by sheer need. Like loaves and fishes, like a kind of providence, the right resources always appear.

The bus is a little universe unto itself, a rolling community, a microcosm, the Fellowship of the Loser Cruiser, the Fraternal Order of the Unlicensed, the toonie crowd, the lunchless, the luckless and directionless, the spun-around and ground-down, hounded by the downtowners in their elegant suits, suits of armour to those on the other side, the always-wanting side. There are two kinds of people in the world, the ins and the outs, and the bus takes care of the outs, takes them wherever they need to go for two dollars, so long as it’s on the route and within the zone.


Porgy

Porgy Graham, a.k.a. Sylvester (and yes, he was named after the man who invented the cracker, it’s part of his father’s warped sense of humour) stares at his computer monitor, something he does for hours at a time every day. But it’s nearly 2:00 in the morning now and he’s glassy-eyed with fatigue, his body crying out for sleep. He ignores his exhaustion, too captivated by what is in front of him on the screen to tear himself away.

What he sees is a giant stuffed colon in a glass case.

The dimensions of it, the diameter, the circumference, seem incredible: this particular colon grew to 27 feet in length, was 8 feet around, and its contents weighed 42 pounds at autopsy. Now Porgy knows the rumors about Elvis and John Wayne must have been true.

The site is a guided pictorial tour of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, a place Porgy can never hope to visit in person. Perhaps it’s just as well, as even the photographs of this virtual Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, this creepy compendium of Victorian medical curiosities is enough to make his stomach turn over.






There’s the Soap Lady: a grossly obese woman buried 200 years ago in a particularly acid kind of soil – full of lye, perhaps? – whose body slowly turned into a hard, brown, soapy substance called adipocere, through a mysterious process known as saponification. This is a vocabulary of the bizarre and extreme, words you couldn’t make up yourself: the process of becoming soap! He clicks on the next link and sees a gallery of non-viable human fetuses that mercifully died before gestation was complete, most of them astonishingly deformed, a single massive head with two bodies appending from it, a child with its brain outside its skull, a cyclops with one eye hole, and a child with virtually no face at all, just a blank disc, reminding him of poor old Szabó on the bus, only his condition was chosen, not forced by nature: “did God forget them?” the caption reads, and Porgy wonders sometimes, if Nature’s design is so very grand and perfect, how these human mistakes could have been made, even before the era of environmental toxins, the two-headed, the no-headed, the conjoined, the primitive vestigial twin sticking out of the thorax like a rubber chicken, its head buried somewhere inside: my God, Porgy thinks to himself, where is the design in that? Would such a twin have thoughts, ideas – how could it make a decision, its very existence parasitic and completely unwanted?

He feels something for the parasitic twin, he feels something for the Windbag, the man with 42 pounds of shit stuck in his colon who was so grossly distended he could only get work in a sideshow, he even feels for the Soap Lady, creepy as she is with her waxy brown flesh and her sunken eyes and her mouth wide open in a kind of astonishment at her own condition, her remains not decently buried, but exhumed, on exhibit, to be forever gawked at by thousands of horrified people, as if she is something less than human.

The Mutter Museum feels familiar, it reminds Porgy a little bit of Zeddyville, it has that same extreme, end-of-the-line quality, a stuffed colon in a glass case, a row of pickled punks worthy of P. T. Barnum, step right up and look at the freaks of nature, SEE how they live in a seemingly hopeless condition, and yes, they do live, after a fashion, though not very well, they can hardly thrive, the essentials of food and shelter are so hard to come by. Porgy is aware he is one of the lucky ones, he doesn’t have to live in a cardboard refrigerator crate that’s falling apart in the rain or eat thrown-out fries from the garbage can at Burger King, he doesn’t have to collect bottles and cans, he can keep himself going, fed and clothed and sheltered, he even has a computer, if a shitty one, a real luxury for someone like him, but for all that, Porgy knows he will never cross over, he will always be on that side of the line, the Mutter side, the Halloween side, the side of the strange and unstrung and compellingly ugly, the side that shouldn’t be but is, and is, and did God forget us or does it just feel like it sometimes? Nature’s mistakes, ejected: they congregate, they seek a certain level, even band together in a kind of ramshackle community. Porgy has seen the sign high up on top of an old brick building downtown: “Is It A Crime To Be Homeless?” He always associates it with the carved words on the side of the granite cenotaph, not a question but a statement, or perhaps an accusation, or even a summing up of all he feels about Zeddyville and its wandering strange: “Is It Nothing To You”.

The people pass by the cenotaph each and every day, whether on this side of the line or that, and in spite of its granite admonishment, they all remain oblivious. 





Mavis Potter

“Zeddyville” has another meaning entirely, quite apart from standing for Dr. Zee/Zoltán: it represents the War of the Zeds, something Mavis Potter has sleuthed out with her characteristic obsessive, single-minded zeal.

The last four names in the Metropolitan Vancouver telephone directory are as follows:

Zzypher, K. C.

Zzyzytrosky, R.

Zzyzzy, W.

Zzzyzyton, P.

This little war of names reminds Mavis of her grandma’s old autograph book, with its final entry reading, “By hook or by crook, I’ll be last in the book”: someone always squeezed in their signature under that final little rhyming couplet, just to prove them wrong.

“Zzy, zzy. . .” Mavis thought that it sounded a bit like Brahms’ Lullabye: “zed-zed-why; zed-zed-why. . .” But no one could quite explain the “why” of Zeddyville, except that it was a kind of human zoo, an ark of the covenant of survival, except that it was an Oz, an upside-down-and-backwards sort of place, like another kind of definition of Down Under, except that it was always called Down Here, and Toto, we are definitely not in Kansas any more, because in Kansas the usual laws of God and nature would still apply.

These laws seem to be mysteriously suspended in Zeddyville. It is Halloween, and the residents are looking more ragtag than ever, like something out of that old TV series Beauty and the Beast, the mysterious underground, except walking above-ground and blinking in the harsh daylight of October. Mavis has always believed that there is something medieval about the Downtown Eastside, as if it’s almost frozen in time: its atmosphere of chaos, of raggedness around the edges, of circus crossed with bedlam, is somehow reminiscent of the madhouse scene in Amadeus, with Salieri benevolently blessing the teeming throngs of the demented like some bizarre self-anointed crackpot Pope: “I absolve you. . . I absolve you. . . “

Mavis is in full costume today, dressed in a way she hopes will help her blend in. Her heart is pounding with barely-repressed excitement. It is as if she is going to meet a lover, or buy drugs, or sell her body on a street corner, something wildly illicit. She hopes to slip into the Portman virtually undetected, for a closer look at where Dr. Levy spends his days. She had thought of posing as a journalist and interviewing him, but the ploy seemed a little too transparent, besides which, the piece would actually have to run somewhere, wouldn’t it? Unless. . .unless she told him they killed it for being too controversial? No, it wouldn’t work. She was forced to come up with another method of infiltration.

So now she prowls the streets of the Downtown Eastside dressed in what she believes will pass for camouflage: several layers of old clothing, sweaters on top of sweaters for that knotty, mounded look. She lets her hair go wild, almost like dreadlocks. Her eyes match her hair, which helps her blend right in.

That morning, on the bus on the way over here, Szabó pulled his annual trick: instead of his burqa, he wore a Halloween mask, this time an eerily accurate-looking replication of the face of George W. Bush. The bus people looked forward to this, trying to guess who he’d be this year. Other Halloweens, he’d gone as Mother Teresa, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, but this year he gave himself over to true satire.

As he walked along Hastings Street flailing his cane, Dr. Levy caught sight of him and burst out laughing. This too was an annual event: for the good doctor seldom laughed or smiled, but generally went about poker-faced. One mask-wearer immediately recognized another.

Szabó heard; he knew who it was; and he accepted the compliment.

Maybe. Maybe next week, I go see him. And maybe not. He is good doctor, but scientist, perhaps will not understand my art. But he was there in 1944, everybody knows this, I don’t need to tell him what it was like. Is man of culture, yes, I think so, for I hear things on bus, people speak of him, how he steals those CDs of Itzhak Perlman and Alfred Brendel, they’re always Jewish, that’s what they say in the Pegasus store. So maybe he knows art, maybe not. I can teach him, perhaps?

Surprise. Boo! The effect of Szabó is even more alarming in the mask, for there is nothing behind those eye-holes except darkness. Mavis couldn’t wait to get away from him, dreadful man, I don’t care if he has a disability, jeez he creeps me out, the way he sings like that: the Dies Irae today, song of dread, ask not for whom the bell tolls, for Szabó is the Quasimodo of the neighborhood, a quasi-kamakaze surviving in the noisy bedlam of Hastings Street.

Mavis is beyond excited – she feels a little sick with anxiety, for she knows Dr. Levy is on duty today, she’s almost certain to see him. She has thought of posing as a patient, but doesn’t quite dare, and besides, those piercing black eyes of his would bore right through her phoniness, would spot it at once and expose her for the fraud that she is, and it could become very unpleasant.

She has studied the art or craft of loitering about, so adopts it now, the slow shuffle, head down, all the while alert for signs of Dr. Zee.

Anything of his would do. A dropped kleenex or a gum wrapper, even a used piece of gum. She wants something to take home, a trophy, to be taken out and toyed with like a little naked doll. Perhaps this time a sighting will have to suffice, something she can replay in her mind again and again like the dirty scenes in a movie.

Mavis Potter loiters in the lobby of the Portman Hotel, shuffling, hoping she is not too obvious. She will find out one thing today: this way of life requires endurance, for the days are a thousand hours long. Used to accomplishment, of doing and being in an active, socially-approved way, she now finds all the dynamics of her life turned on their ear. She will write about this one day, of course: the day I went undercover, or should it be more subtle, a book-length poem, perhaps? Waiting for Doctor Zee. She likes it, it’s catchy, it might even attract the kind of literary attention she has always craved.

And then. Fully two hours after she gets through the battened-down hatches of the Portman, a human bullet blurs past her sight: Dr. Levy, I presume? She barely has time to recognize, let alone acknowledge or react to him, as he has his Dr. Zee mask on, ha-ha, small joke, he always looks this way, grim and preoccupied, though it’s rumoured that he laughed once, broke his own rule. Mavis’s heart is in her gullet, but he’s already been and gone, out the door like a shot, and it would be undignified for her to follow. Yet he left some tracing behind him, something in the air, a certain electricity; like a person who hasn’t washed in a long time, he has a kind of aura that lingers on long after he has gone.

Mavis bathes in it, trying to make it last, to make it enough, at least enough for today. She’ll regroup, she will find another way in, this could get suspicious, this loitering about in old clothes and middle-aged dreadlocks. She pushes out the door just as a rather strange-looking, coffee-coloured young man pushes his way in. He’ll have a long wait, until Dr. Zee comes back from his house call, but finally, worn down by Aggie’s badgering and ground down by a certain depression that never goes away, he has made it through the front door, and taken a small but meaningful step towards his own salvation.  


Next . .






Bus People Part One

Bus People Part Two

Bus People Part Three

Bus People Part Four

Bus People Part Five


Bus People Part Six

Bus People Part Seven

Bus People Part Eight

Bus People Part Nine

Bus People Part Ten

Bus People Part Eleven

Bus People Part Twelve

Saturday, June 20, 2020

BUS PEOPLE: a novel of the Downtown Eastside - Part Two




This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.

Margaret Gunning



Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 

Part Two

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel


Aggie

Portman Hotel, Vancouver, B. C.
September 7, 2003

 

          Cylinders. The backpack was full of cylinders.  It was not full of junk.  Not not not.  And they’re not just any old cylinders, they’re Edison Blue Amberols, the best kind you can get.

     I have to find more Blue Amberols.  It’s just a habit, I can quit any time I want to, just a little quirk of mine, collecting.  I collect all sorts of stuff, birdcages made out of bamboo, salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like people, macramé handbags made back in 1973.  My room here is full of stuff,  the social worker doesn’t like it, she complains about it all the time and keeps telling me to clean it up, get rid of it all.  But it’s cool, there’s no rats or anything, it isn’t dirty, I keep order in the place.  Sometimes stuff falls down, there are loud crashes at night that disturb the neighbours, particularly Porgy who lives just under me and is a light sleeper.  But at least I know where everything is.

     I didn’t even know what a Blue Amberol was until I started going to flea markets about a year and a half ago.  I saw these ornate-looking canisters with flowery writing and ornamentation all over them – they were beautiful, and I just had to buy one of them, not even knowing what was inside.  It was only a buck and a half, what the hell, I’ll go without lunch tomorrow.  Maybe it’s snuff or something, I thought, something Victorian, or at least Edwardian, really old and maybe even valuable.

     But it wasn’t snuff at all.  It was a dusty old cylinder full of grooves.  Took me a minute to figure it out, that this was something like a record, or what came before records, the first medium for recorded sound.  I felt like I had seen one before, that I remembered it from somewhere.  I had Porgy go on the internet and do a search.  I don’t have a computer, I don’t know how Porgy can afford one, but he does and is obsessed with it.

     Anyway, he tells me that this isn’t just any sort of flea market hunk of junk  but a Blue Amberol, a particularly deluxe (back then) kind of cylinder recording popular in the early 20th century.  They weren’t the earliest recordings – those were made out of brown wax, with a few really early, rare ones made out of yellow paraffin, but even before that, they used tin foil.  No kidding – tin foil on a rotating cylinder, scratched with a needle that picked up vibrations.  The basic principles of sound recording.  Think of Thomas Edison at Menlo Park, bellowing into his new contraption:  “MA-RY HAD A LIT-TLE LAMB.  ITS FLEECE WAS WHITE AS SNOW. AND EV-ERY-WHERE THAT MA-RY WENT, THE LAMB WAS SURE TO GO.  HA, HA, HA.”  Cranking away at a variable speed, so the voice sounds freaky, all distorted like a giant’s voice, as well as tinny and really far away.





     When I was little, old records used to scare me.  I used to think. . . never mind what I used to think.  I had a hell of an imagination. It got me in trouble all the time, at school, but even worse at home.  My mother used to say that I made up stories, but to me, it was all completely real.  I thought the voices on those old 78 r. p. m. records had some sort of spooky power.  Like it was a kind of time capsule or something.  The singing ones were weird enough, they all had that muffled quality like the sound was coming out of a tiny little closet,  but the spoken word ones, they really freaked me out.  Used to make me run out of the room, but my Dad, he’d make me listen to them, listen to Caruso sounding like he was singing inside a cardboard box, or Dame Nellie Melba warbling away, or something called the Wibbly-Wobbly Walk – God, the Wibbly-Wobbly Walk scared the living shit out of me.  Couldn’t stand it, but my Dad made me stay and listen.

     It was his collection and he was convinced it was worth thousands, but now that I know something about early recordings, I can see that what he had was virtually worthless. Too many scratches, ticks and pops.

     Dr. Levy, the one they call “Zee”? He’s helping me deal with memories.  He’s good.  I mean, he’s good if you’re in pain or trouble, if you’re not, then forget about it, he can be a real hardass, it’s surprising how cold he can be.  But I’ve seen him deal with guys so far gone from AIDS, the shit was pouring out of them like lava, and he never bats an eyelash, just rolls up his sleeves and cleans up the crap like it was nothing.  I like Dr. Levy.

     But this guy on the bus today, this Szabó.  I know that’s his name, because people talk about him.  He has regular habits, I’ll say that about him.  I don’t know where he goes exactly, somewhere around the Sunshine Hotel area, the real asshole of Vancouver, Zeddyville they call it, ‘cause Dr. Zee cruises the place all the time, looking for broken people to mend.  It’s his habit.

     Mine’s Blue Amberols.  I’m glad this Szabó can’t look at me,  because I just hate it when people stare at my backpack, poke at it or ask what’s inside it.  I had fourteen Blue Amberols crammed in there today,  and never mind that I haven’t been able to afford a player yet, it’s only a matter of time.





     I guess listening to these things is going to scare the living shit out of me.  I take five hundred milligrams of Seroquel every day, Dr. Zee is trying to wean me off it, he says I might have been misdiagnosed, but I’m not so sure about that, I guess you could say I scare easily,  I was born minus a few layers of skin.  But this Szabó, he has no face, or that’s what they say about him anyway, even though he sings.  I’ve heard it, we all have.  He sings without words, of course:  “nggg, nggg, nggg” – it’s creepy, but you know something, he has a good voice, and a Hungarian accent, even with no words.  I wish he’d go see Dr. Zee, he’d be able to help him.  That guy could’ve helped Hitler get over his anger problem.  Maybe he could write things down on a piece of paper or a chalkboard, I don’t know.  Better than begging, which is what Szabó does for a living now that he can’t see to paint.  It’s sad.  I draw a disability cheque, it’s not much but it keeps me going, along with whatever stuff I can make or sell or trade, even though I’m not allowed to see my kids which sometimes makes me want to slit my fucking throat, just end this, end it now.  But Dr. Levy says don’t, Dr. Levy says don’t think that way, he says I’m valuable, he says there’s only one of me in all the world, that human beings are irreplaceable, so I guess I better trust his judgement which might be just a little bit clearer than mine.
     Anyway, Szabó gets on the bus this morning, it’s one of those stinky wet mornings when everything’s dripping, and he sits right down beside me like he’s done so many times before.  Like I say, regular habits.  And Szabó is clean, not like a lot of the people who take the bus every day; he doesn’t ever smell, he looks after himself. I don’t know how he does it, but he does. Pride.  He must have hair still, I mean, the back of his head must still be OK, just his face is missing,  no big deal, nothing serious, eh?  But then a guy across from us on the sideways seats says, “Hey, fucking freak, you on a pass from the sideshow? Gettin’ it on with the Schizo Lady?”  Street people have got radar, that’s how they can tell.

     “I beg your pardon, buddy, if you wanna see a freak, I think you should maybe try looking in the mirror.”  I’m usually not this bold, but poor Szabó can’t speak up.  Can’t defend himself, but he can hear everything.  It’s cruel.  This guy across from us, he looks like a bad bowel movement after too many blueberries, long and snaky and tattooed dark indigo all over every square inch of his skin.  He’s a living shit.  And he’s calling us freaks.  Jesus.  I keep trying to tell Dr. Levy what it’s like, but he just shakes his head.  Says people call him a Kike or a Yid or a Heeb sometimes, but it’s not the same, it’s not.  “Hey! Auschwitz!” one of them said to him once – and, yeah, he is pretty thin, looks kind of undernourished. How does that go?  “He hath a lean and hungry look.”





     So the driver, his name’s Bert Moffatt, I know him ‘cause I’ve seen him lots of times before on the Number 42, he says to me, “Lady, would you kindly can the comments, you’re being abusive here.”  I’m being abusive.  If a schizo lady raises her voice even a little bit, she’s being abusive, she’s out of control, while this big blue-tattoo shithead over here, he can hurl insults at anybody he likes.  Why? I don’t know, I guess he’s supposed to be sane.  Probably a pimp, probably a heroin addict or a child molester or sells his grandmother for a hit of crack, but he’s allowed to say whatever he likes.

     Fuck it, I’m going back to the flea market tomorrow and buy that cylinder player I saw, it was priced at $75.00 which for me is a bloody fortune, and it looked busted, the ones that work cost way more than that and are out of my price range, but you can usually bargain with these guys, and I have $50.00 scraped together already, it took me months and months of going without smokes, and then I found a ring in the washroom at the Tinseltown Theatre, pawned it and got nearly 30 bucks for it which goes to prove that there is such a thing as Providence.   Porgy keeps me going on smokes, enough to stave off the worst of my nicotene fits, he’s cool about things like that, even though he never goes out, he’s glued to the internet all the time, reading up on mucoid plaque and colonic irrigation.  What a nut.  But he’s still kind of sweet.





Zeddyville

     They call it Needle Park, they call it Pigeon Park, they call it Zeddyville because that’s where Dr. Zee hangs out:  and it’s not a park at all, but a vaguely triangular slab of cement crusted in pigeon shit, draped and clustered with people nobody seems to want around.

     It’s a loitering sort of place, an unplace.  A dislocation. Calling it a park is an impossible stretch, for no green thing could grow here.  Dr. Zoltán Levy barely notices it any more. He has a very fast walk, but it’s not so he can get away from the horrors of the neighborhood.  It’s so he can zip from the Portman to the Sunshine to the Waverley Hotel to get to his patients, the people who are usually on their last gasp.

     Dr. Zee doesn’t step on the bus very often, but it disgorges passengers right outside his home base, the Portman, an armoured truck of a place, fortified, barred, battened down like the good doctor’s own bleak, unsmiling face.  He makes himself available to people, people like Aggie Westerman the chronic schizophrenic, and Porgy Graham who has a strange  obsession with his bowels, and Dave the mutilator who has his lips multiply pierced and chained together, so he can’t even eat without pulling all the studs out.

     Things happened to Dr. Zee a long time ago, everybody knows that, or at least they suspect it, though no one has any specifics, and he isn’t talking.  He “doesn’t have time for a relationship”.  That’s what he says when he is interviewed, which happens quite a lot now, because slowly but surely, Dr. Zee is  starting to become famous.  At least, Vancouver famous, and maybe soon, Canadian famous,  then the world.  He is working on a book that is taking him forever to write because he really doesn’t want to finish it, it’s got too many secrets in it, and he hates to make himself so vulnerable.  Yet he loves the vulnerable, holds his hands out to them, thick-fingered veterinarian’s hands that look as if they could pull out calves and shoe horses.  He gets what it is to be this hurt, this lost, and to keep on going.

     People ask him, often, if the work is depressing.  What depresses him is the question:  the implication that he is dealing with the dregs of humanity, and not a whole lot of bruised little kids in adult bodies, people who were fucked by their fathers or whipped senseless by their mothers or told they were useless piles of shit so often they began to believe it, or told that they never should have been born at all.  It does a bit of damage when you hear it often enough; it can warp a life into a howling parody, heroin squirting up through the veins to blot out the self-loathing for just a little while, a protected, peaceful while, until it’s time to start hustling again. The abyss of the heroin state is welcome, oblivion being far more bearable than whatever is in second place.





     Tourists come to Zeddyville because the area is a little bit famous, too, kind of like Dr. Zee himself, and even the Governor-General came once, on a walkabout like the Queen Mother, her face in a carefully-composed mask of what she hoped was concern.  It doesn’t smell too good down here, it smells like rancid piss at the best of times, human vomit, pot fumes and other things you can’t identify.  It’s a  raw wound, the walls of the buildings splattered in gory-colored murals and gang graffiti impossible to decipher, the strange hieroglyphics of the street.  You have to keep your cool in Zeddyville, not show any fear.  It helps not to make eye contact, as you’ll stare into an abyss, a vacuum, an absence in the eyes of every stranger that passes by.

     “Spare change?  Spare change?  Have a nice day.  Spare change?  Spare change?  Have a nice day.”  It’s a sort of mantra for a lot of people, a way to make it through to the next day of spare change, spare change, have a nice day.  Of course some of the people here are crazy.  There used to be a place called Valleyview, but they closed it down except for the really hard-core cases, and shouldn’t these people be integrated into the community anyway and not just institutionalized and kept out of the mainstream, hidden away like they’re frightening or shameful?  Now the dirty little secret of mental illness is an open secret, like Szabó’s face when it was shot off and blown to bits all over the blackened walls of his torched studio.  The walking wounded don’t have their intestines hanging out all over the  outside of their abdomen, like in a war, but they do have spilled psyches, their pain hanging out, their loneliness hanging out, and it bothers people, the normies, the civilians. Their faces broadcast what they feel:  for God’s sake get away from me buddy before I see myself again, before I see what’s really wrong with me and why I cannot find a place in this world, before I see that this is where I really belong. 

     For no matter how good I look on the outside, I am part of this whole deal that creates a Zeddyville in the middle of a glittering, prosperous, showcase city on the coast of the best country in the world, then forces people to live in it when living is just a simple, bare act of endurance.
  
     We shove them here, we forklift, steamroll, corral, push, shove, cram, then clang the gate shut behind them and then say, what’s wrong with these people, why can’t they get it together, why can’t they make something of themselves?

     Get a job!

     Leave me alone!

    NO, I don’t have any spare change, and put that squeegee away because I am not interested in the fact that you haven’t had anything to eat for four days!  Jesus, these people.
     Dr. Zee sees, hears, senses it all the time, a palpable sense of dismissal and fear echoes all around him, the long antennae sticking out of his head pick it all up,  whether he wants to hear it or not, but he keeps on walking fast with his stethoscope going bounce, bounce, bounce on his chest.  He doesn’t really have one around his neck, it just appears that way, it’s his sense of purpose, so intense and focused, it’s almost a buzz.  He doesn’t carry a black bag either, but he will go where the trouble is, he will go where the pain is, and down here, there is more than enough to go around. 

Next. . . 




Bus People Part One

Bus People Part Two

Bus People Part Three

Bus People Part Four

Bus People Part Five


Bus People Part Six

Bus People Part Seven

Bus People Part Eight

Bus People Part Nine

Bus People Part Ten

Bus People Part Eleven

Bus People Part Twelve


Friday, September 16, 2016

Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART TWELVE (conclusion)





This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 


Part Twelve (conclusion)

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel


The bus

Bert Moffatt often thinks about taking an early retirement, he’s 57 years old now, and this driving business is a young man’s game, requiring a stamina he no longer thinks he has.

The things that happen on his shift are pretty disturbing. The other day two hookers got on along Hastings Street and got into a screaming battle about something, probably drugs, and actually started physically fighting on the bus, yanking hair and scratching faces, and had to be pulled apart. One of them was wearing only a bra, no blouse, and the other one, Bert didn’t know how anyone could be that thin and still be alive, she must be in the final stages of AIDS, it was heartbreaking to see.

He feels terrible about Aggie. It’s a shame when that happens, a woman just vanishing like that, he knew Aggie had some pretty serious problems, but he was fond of her, they had a real connection going for years, almost a friendship, and now she has just disappeared, wandered off somewhere in disorientation, or did something worse happen? Around these parts, you never knew.

The guy with the blanket over his head never comes around any more. Bert has no idea where he went. Nobody seems to know. But that young fellow, Porky or whatever his name is, he’s taking the bus nearly every day now, that’s a change, and he looks different, he has cut his hair for one thing, and it looks much neater, he’s dressing better too, but it isn’t just that, he’s standing up straighter or something, carrying himself differently, so that he almost seems like a different person.

Today on the bus, somebody tries to give him a hard time. But his reaction is so completely different, Bert is taken by surprise.

“Hey nigger.”

The old Porgy would have absorbed this, just taken it. Vester won’t take it.

His hand whips out, he grabs the young smart-ass by the collar and almost lifts him off his feet.

“Take that back.”

“Hey, don’t get excited, I was only kidding around.”

“Take. . . that. . .back.”


“Okay, okay, I take it back. Jeez!”

“Now apologize.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Apologize.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“Yes! Jesus, let me go!”

“You have to promise me one thing.”

“Okay, I will.”

“That you’ll never call anybody by that name, ever again.”

“All right, I promise.” 

“Now mean it.”

“All right! Christ! Let go!” He finally releases him, and he slumps into a seat, pale and shaky-looking. Vester Graham knows he has scored a major victory.

But there is still something left for him to do.







Vester

The progress he has made with Dr. Levy has surprised both of them. The depression that weighed him down for most of his life seems to be lifting at last, and

he feels different, just different in a way that is hard for him to explain or even comprehend.

He has talked about the foster homes. Anguish at first, and the flashbacks nearly killed him, but with Dr. Levy as his guide, he has been able to slay one dragon after another.

Aggie’s disappearance has been brutal. After a few months, the search for her whereabouts becomes a search for her remains. The police have found nothing – Vester doesn’t think they looked very hard - though the psychic they consulted claimed that she had “gone home” and was in a happier place, her soul finally at peace.

“Doc.”

“What is it, Vess?”

“Some guy called me a nigger on the bus today.”

Dr. Levy looks at him, his brows drawing together.

“I made him take it back.”

“Good.”

“I made him apologize. Oh man, I thought I’d never be able to do that.”

“That’s – Vess, that’s remarkable, I’m proud of you. You are doing so well.”

“Doc. That’s the thing. I’m not.”

Dr. Levy’s puzzled expression makes his insides squirm. But there’s no turning back now.

“There’s. . . there’s all sorts of shit I haven’t told you about.”

The pause that follows is loaded.

“Are you ready to tell me now?”

“No. Doc, I’m never going to be ready. If I say this shit, I know what’s going to happen to me.”

“And if you don’t?”

“If I don’t. . .if I don’t, then all this stuff that’s happened here, all these changes I’ve made, it just won’t mean a damn thing.”

“I think it’s time you told me, Vess.”

He rubs his eyes, takes a deep breath, and in a voice shaking with dread, he begins.

“When I was fifteen years old,” he says to Dr. Levy, “I started setting fires.”







Epilogue: Szabó’s Fire


The turning of the year is like every other year, with the usual milestones and markers, another spring with its torrential rains and surges of lush supernatural B. C. green, another summer of rides and cotton candy at the PNE, another fall with the kids piling on the bus to go back to school, then everyone dressing up for trick-or-treats, then the mad frenzy of preparation for yet another Christmas and New Year’s.

But like every other year, this one is unique. Powerful changes have swept through Zeddyville, some of them heartbreaking. Aggie is now an absence, another dotted-line void, just gone. She has disappeared without a trace, almost as if she never was.

Women disappear from the Downtown Eastside all the time, a bitter, unpalatable fact. Vess Graham can’t quite swallow it, and still holds out some sort of hope that they’ll find Aggie, or even some remains of her, something.

There are moments when he can almost convince himself that she found a way to put her hand through the veil. Then he dismisses the thought as just too fantastic. It’s impossible to get out of the time you were born into, you just have to deal with what’s around you, hard as it sometimes is. Dr. Levy taught him that.

Dr. Levy taught him a lot of things. One of the greatest lessons was about taking responsibility: after confessing the fires, which was the hardest thing he ever did in his life, he wondered if the doctor would turn him in, report him. But he didn’t.

He left that up to him.

It took him a while. For several weeks he didn’t eat or sleep. His guts twisted with anxiety and dread, and even though he knew what he needed to do, actually doing it was almost impossible. Wouldn’t he lose all the progress he had made over the past few months, all the changes, his newfound power, his freedom, his life?

Then one day it became too much for him to carry. Vess Graham called the police, and told them he had to come in and talk to them.

There were consequences, harsh ones. He knew there would be. Vess would have to serve time for his offenses, there was no way around it. But when he learned that the man who died had had a heart attack, that it wasn’t the fire that killed him, the relief he felt was almost worth the four years he had to spend in prison.

Though four years was bad, it sure beat ten. Dr. Levy saw to it that his sentence was

reduced. The full confession and the determined effort he had made to reclaim himself

had not gone unnoticed.

He made good use of his time. One of the counsellors suggested he train himself for a career in computer support: “You’re a techie, Vess, a natural for this industry. Think of it. You could be completely self-supporting then, and not have to rely on your father for handouts.”
“Really?” It sounded fantastic, too good to be true.

“You can start your education right here. Once you get out, we can arrange for you to take classes at BCIT. This is something you love to do, Vess, and you’re a smart young man, you could really make a go of it.”

This was kind of like finding out he had two heads and didn’t even know it, a complete and total shock, but – the more they talked about it, the more plausible and even possible it seemed.

Step by step, starting in prison, then carrying on when they let him out in only two years, Vess Graham began to build a life.

Mavis Potter did become famous, but not in the way she had anticipated. The story of how she broke into Zoltán Levy’s house and assaulted him made her into a minor celebrity, and for a time she was hounded by reporters. Excerpts of Eastside Story appeared in the Vancouver Sun, but finding a publisher proved to be impossible. The manuscript was over 1200 pages long, a rambling stream-of-consciousness prose poem too bizarre to be marketable.

Though he was deeply shaken, Zoltán Levy did not press charges. The woman was obviously sick, not a criminal. But he did insist she get some help. Mavis entered therapy with a Gestalt psychologist in North Vancouver, separated from Charles, and began to write a memoir about her experiences posing as a bag lady on the Downtown Eastside.

Dr. Levy’s year has been complicated. He made a good connection with Sandy Alexander, the young woman who had the baby in his office last winter. She would bring little Anton in to see him, he’d crawl all over the floor, and they’d talk.

One day, Sandy is playing peek-a-boo with the little boy, and he laughs out loud in delight.

Dr. Levy feels his heart turn over.

He has heard that laugh before.

He looks at the baby, sees the resemblance for the first time. He must have been blind before.

Missing pieces fly into place, slam together in shock, and the muddled picture in his brain jumps into sharp relief.

He looks at Sandy; she’s smiling a little. She knows, of course.

And she knows that he knows.

He feels a little faint.

“Welcome to the family. Or should I say – welcome back.”






Bert Moffatt did decide to retire, but not before finding out what happened to the guy with the blanket over his head. He should not have worried, for soon the name of Tamás Szabó will be all over the newspapers, not to mention the internet.

He remains secluded during the long and difficult process of the restoration of his face. But during that time, amazing things begin to happen in his new studio on East Hastings Street. Inspiration floods through and reanimates him: “The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose,” Dr. Levy says to him, quoting Isaiah. In this great second blooming he conceives an exhibit of sculpture depicting the third-world streets of Vancouver, a collection entitled The Kingdom of Night.

When the media get wind of the facial reconstruction story, Szabó’s fortunes take a huge upswing. With a little urging from Dr. Levy, the Vancouver Art Gallery agrees to host his exhibition, a one-man display of virtuosity pulled out of complete darkness.

Zoltán Levy is excited, and eagerly anticipating opening night. Szabó hasn’t let him see the results of the facial surgery; no one has seen it but the doctors. Mystery creates interest, and Szabó knows that the time has not yet come for the great unveiling.

On the night, the gallery is unexpectedly mobbed. A crowd was anticipated, mostly from the arts community, but not this. Excitement crackles in the air, cameras flash, and media people jostle, sensing a good story. Zoltán Levy gets there an hour early, but still has to push his way through a dense and noisy crowd.

A white limousine pulls up in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery at 8:15 p.m. Tamás Szabó gets out of the back, and his new assistant, an attractive dark-haired woman named Zoë, takes his arm to guide him up the steps.

No more buses for Szabó. Now he rides in style.

The scene is beyond surreal, and would be almost comical were it not for Szabó’s palpable dignity. With his head draped in a cowl of heavy silk, he would not be out of place in a medieval monastery. The crowd parts as he enters, everyone stepping back in awe. There he is, that’s Szabó, that’s the man who had no face.

The sculptures are all thickly draped, cloaked in black. One by one, Tamás Szabó walks up to them, stands before them a moment, then pulls the covering away.

The crowd falls deathly silent.

See.

A woman of the night, flesh pared down to bone, eyes staring ahead like inanimate glass. A panhandler with tattoos sculpted in relief on his body, his hands held up in a gesture of surrender. A gaudy gang mural with graffiti expressed in three dimensions.

One sculpture is modeled after the Cenotaph, the “Is it Nothing to You” motto carved into a giant tombstone. Another is of a great rearing horse.

The crowd is quietly buzzing, some of them commenting on technical merit, but a few sculptures make them stop talking altogether. The pieces appear to be breathing, subtly expressing a kind of movement, entwining familiarity and strangeness.

When the nine huge sculptures are all unveiled, Tamás Szabó ascends to the podium.

He stands there for a full two minutes. The tension is unbearable. No one knows what will happen next.

Zoltán Levy recalls that other unveiling, that day in his office when he let the blanket fall. But this time it’s different, this time he has hundreds of witnesses. He draws the heavy dark silk covering up over his head, lets it drop to the floor.

Behold!

The audience can’t help it. They gasp.

He lets them look, lets them take it in. He knows they are having difficulty believing what they are seeing.

The face is smooth and unlined, and looks eerily young for a man of sixty-seven. There are no Frankensteinian seams to disclose the fact that this is a man-made, manufactured face, not the face he was born with.

Working from photographs, the surgeons restored the bone structure as accurately as possible, the missing half of his lower jaw, his chin, his teeth, his nose, and though they are new, these features are all Szabó, they are his. The brilliant blue glass eyes are unsettling, like the eyes of a wolf.

The word the reporters want to use is “lifelike”, though it is obviously a facsimile, a fairly convincing replica of a “real” face. The colour and texture closely resemble human skin, minus any bluish waxworks pallor, but the surgeons have not yet learned how to age and weather a manufactured face. It somewhat resembles the portrait of Dorian Grey, a reflection of a man, his traumatic past burned to ashes and blown away.

A long silence; then someone begins to applaud. Then a few more.

Then the room comes alive with applause, relieving the crowd’s apprehension that they would be looking at a freak, someone to be pitied and feared. Words are coming together in the journalists’ heads, things like “miracle of modern science,” “quantum leap in surgical sophistication,” but media clichés will never express this phenomenon, this restoration of destroyed flesh.

When the applause and cheers finally die down, something happens that dwarfs even this bizarre miracle. Tamás Szabó begins to speak.

“My friends. I welcome you all to this day of triumph. For today I share with you my vision, a vision that was taken from me by a cruel twist of fate, then miraculously returned to me.”







Once the initial shock of hearing him wears off, the audience realizes he is not speaking in the normal way. How could he? Speech would never be possible for a man so deeply damaged. Then comes the slow recognition that they are hearing a speech synthesizer, similar to the device used by the disabled physicist Stephen Hawking.

Some genius has programmed it to speak with a Hungarian accent.

“When I lost my eyes, I lost my heart also, and my will to live. I became a beggar on the street, living on the pity of others, a cruel parody of my great dreams of success. My art was gone, I lived in total darkness, and yet God would not let me die. My pride would not allow me to hold my hand out for help. And so I suffered a hell beyond your powers to imagine.”

“Then one day I could carry the burden of my life no longer. A man touched me on the street that day, a countryman, he spoke to me in my own language. Though I did not know it, it was the beginning of my second life. I came to see him one week later, and – this man, this Zoltán Levy, he healed me. He healed me inside, where the scars were worse than the mess I had made of my face. He gave me back my soul.”

Zoltán Levy stands in the crowd, swaying a little, giddy with a feeling he can’t identify. He wonders if a new emotion needs to be invented to accommodate the strangeness of this day.

“Though the surgeons restored my face, for which I am profoundly grateful, Dr. Levy restored something far more important: my reason to live, my dignity, and my art. There are no words to express my gratitude to this man. He is remarkable.”

Suddenly the crowd’s attention shifts to Zoltán Levy; cameras flash, and applause swells again, this time for him. He feels a twinge of unworthiness; Szabó did this, not him, he only showed him the way. But he accepts the recognition, knowing that worthiness is not the issue here.

If it were, he is certain he would have perished a long time ago.

The exhilaration of the evening lasts about a day. Zoltán Levy cannot bring himself to leap back into the arms of his abandoned family. It’s not that simple. God knows he has told his patients often enough that they have to stop replaying those old tapes, get on with things, live forwards. But how to live forwards when you are afraid to look over your shoulder at the lives you have damaged and destroyed?

What right does he have to ask forgiveness?

So for a long time, Zoltán Levy does nothing. Sandy still comes in once in a while with the baby, and, incredibly, Dr. Levy bounces him and talks to him and makes him smile, as if everything were normal and this was just another chubby, healthy, happy baby, not the son of his son.

His work grinds along. Some days are gratifying, some nearly intolerable. He has started listening to those sealed CDs in his living room, something he thought he would never do. He even considers returning the rest of them to the store, but is just too embarrassed.

He decides he doesn’t need six versions of Don Giovanni and donates four to the public library, then starts to distribute the rest of his ill-gotten treasures to community centres and nursing homes, hoping they like Rautavaara.

Incredibly, for the people at the Portland anyway, he goes out on a date. Some of his patients see him with this intellectual-looking brunette with glasses who spends the entire evening lecturing about forensic anthropology. When they return from seeing a documentary called Sophie Scholl – The Final Days, an experience which is about as enjoyable as having major dental work, one of his Portman patients sees them and calls out, “Hey, doc! Gettin’ any?”

He feels ridiculous when he walks her to her door, says good evening and wonders whether he is supposed to kiss her or not. Remembers how awkward he was before he met Annie, and realizes he has returned to that state and can’t seem to break out of it. He makes an excuse about a sore throat and leaves quickly.







Transformations come slowly, for some people. Not everyone can be a Szabó, but we can take small steps. Or so he tells himself.

Because of the hazardous nature of his work, Dr. Levy must be tested for HIV at regular intervals. This has become so routine that he no longer considers the danger. Rubber gloves get punctured, it happens all the time. He doesn’t give it much thought.

Then one day, the young nurse in his office receives the most recent test result. For some reason she doesn’t want to give it to him. They run the test over again, to be certain there has been no mistake.

For years now, he has been breaking this to people: the test results are back, and I’m afraid it’s not good news. But now we can deal with it. Aren’t you glad you came in?

His own reassurances bounce back in his face, useless. HIV is no longer a death sentence. But it IS a life sentence, and it has to be treated on a continuous basis. You’ll have to live with this until we find the cure. He has said it a million times, and now he must say it to himself.

Suddenly, everything he has known has been thrown up in the air.

He sits with Sandy and the baby in his office, looking telescopically distant.

“Dr. Levy.”

“Oh, sorry, Sandy. My mind was wandering.”


“You know, you’re always telling me that every bad thing that happens has a hidden gift in it.”

“I said that?” He presses his fingertips into his eyeballs. “I must be a veritable fountainhead of wisdom.”

Sandy smiles. Anton, now a robust, unmistakably Hungarian-looking baby with dark eyes and curly black hair, babbles happily.

“Yeah, you are, except that you don’t know how to take your own advice.”

“Are you telling me what I should do?”


“No. I wouldn’t do that. But it looks to me like this test result might be a blessing in disguise.”

“I don’t see how it could be.”

“Dr. Levy.”

“Zoltán.”

“Zoltán.” It feels funny to call him that, but isn’t he her son’s grandfather?

“Anton likes to quote this line out of a Bob Dylan song: ‘When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.’ What have you got to lose in seeing him? What’s the worst that can happen? So, okay, maybe he’ll be furious with you and tell you to fuck off for abandoning him. But isn’t that better than nothing? Isn’t that better than dying without having the chance to see your son again?”
Zoltán Levy has always been amazed at the capacity of ordinary people to cut through all the bullshit and obfuscation and get at the truth.

But he doesn’t go to see his son. Anton does not appear to be interested, or still hates him. Why don’t their paths cross more often, when he seems to live in the vicinity of the Portman, his beat? Mysteriously, they live in two separate universes that overlap.

Then it happens again, the weird dodge-game that brought them face-to-face in the first place. They literally run into each other. It’s disconcerting to suddenly see yourself, to see a younger version/older version, mirrors reflecting mirrors.

But this time they both stop, glued down with shock.

“Anton.”

No response.

Dr. Levy impulsively reaches out and clasps his son’s bare forearm. Just holds on to it. Two pairs of black eyes lock.

Zoltán lets go of his arm, then gestures with his head towards the clinic, his body a question mark.

Anton stares at the pavement for a few seconds. Looks up at his father, straight into his eyes.

He reaches out, grabs his father’s forearm, squeezes it once, then sprints away into the night.



Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five



Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven


Bus People Part Twelve