Connor Walks the Musqueam by Harrison Kim

Connor moves his mind in rhythm to the speed of his travel, his thoughts whirl round, the city scene flows by his eyes.   That’s all it is though, a passing.  He keeps counting. He’s made seven hundred fifty-eight steps since he stepped off the bus.

He feels best swinging in his hammock home below the trees. The hammock’s sway copies a rocking cradle, and he feels a child again there, a kid in a twenty-four-year-old body.

 In his life, he’s made few connections, for nothing sticks, not even the gap between yesterday and today, he’s always on the move, makes no small talk, lives in the bush behind the abandoned railway tracks. 

In his hammock camp, there’s space between him and the trees.  He’s cocooned under green branches swaying, with a tarp stretched above him if it rains.  Every morning he leaves to do his day work picking up litter along the roadways, and every night he steps into the forest and moves through the dark places to find his home again.

Human contact causes pressure: that pressure needs release, and the night hammock frees with rhythm and sway.  These days, nothing is certain beyond awakening, and after consciousness rises, anything can happen. 

Today is his day off.  He approaches the Burrard bridge, the old span across the inlet that separates the residential areas of the city from the downtown.

There’s a short physical distance between Connor and other pedestrians crossing.  He dodges and glances into their faces.  It’s all too fast, this moment passing movement, blink your lashes and another one’s gone, the people flow, and the bridge narrows about them.  Girls sway by with daffodil open faces and tight curvy forms.

The skateboarders roll, the cyclists leg up, Connor hikes towards the skyscrapers, his legs spanning the arc between inlet shores. The whole world is carried behind his eyes and over that bridge.  He’s toting a brown bag with one chocolate bar in it.

As he approaches the crest, in the pedestrian lane, a police car speeds from the other side, sirens on.  “That sound is at least 92.5 decibels,” Connor thinks.

A moment later the same car U turns to screech up the lane beside him. Two police stop and burst out like blue blurs.  They block the way ahead. Their heads bend at curious angles trying to catch Connor’s expression, find his eyes.  He lowers his face, notices only their uniforms.

“Is it me you want?” he asks.

“Hands on the car,” says the tall rangy one with long skinny arms.

Connor’s walk’s been stopped.  He’ll reason it out later, now respect is necessary. 

“I’m hiking across the bridge,” Connor answers.

He puts his hands on the vehicle.  He does not elbow or bump.   He feels the air that separates himself and the law.  The touch of the search is quick.

“Get in the car,” says the long-armed officer.

“Why did you stop me?” Connor asks.

“In the car,” the officer repeats. 

Connor bends himself into the back seat. 

“Let’s see your I D.” says the short female officer on the passenger side.  Connor hands his wallet over.  According to what he’s heard, he’s allowed one call.  He looks at his phone but doesn’t call anybody.

The car bumps off a side road that goes under the bridge.  Connor sees the underside of the span, hears the roar of engines churning overhead.  The car lurches into another pothole.

The female officer hands his I. D. back, and he places it by his phone, on the seat beside him.  The police radio voice statics “the suspect has short black hair and beard, blue jeans and a white shirt.”

Connor has longish brown hair, no beard, brown pants and a shirt to match.

“Someone robbed a grocery store” continues the female officer.  “The suspect carried a blue bag, like yours.”

“Yes, my bag is blue,” Connor says. 

“Where were you going?” asks the female cop. 

“I was walking to the other side of the bridge” he says.

“What’s in the bag?”

“A bar of chocolate,” says Connor.  “See?”

The cop behind the wheel warns “Don’t hold that so close.”

The two police listen to a few more radio reports.

Connor focusses on the bridge pillar in front of him.  Over it spreads a huge black piece of spray-painted artwork in the shape of a sea creature.  “Welcome to The Musqueam,” says the inscription beside it.  He watches the sea creature for a few minutes, it seems the more he looks at it, the more it smiles.

.

After the cops let him go, Connor thinks “their eye whites appeared huge like the sea creature of The Musqueam, but their pupils were small like the stars far away.” 

He lopes along the beach towards the University parklands, moving along by the side of clay cliffs that rise above the sea.  He reaches down for his wallet with all his I. D. and it’s not there.  Nor is his phone.  He holds his head for a moment.

He left his things in the police car. He’s got to get them back.  The police headquarters is way down by Cambie, but he could ask at a fire station.  They could call for him.

“I believe a fire station is located in the Kitsilano area,” he says out loud.

He moves in that direction and thinks “I am not my I.D.” 

He is who he is, and he doesn’t have to show anything to prove it.  “That’s what I’ll tell them at the police station,” he muses.

Connor pictures himself focussing on the huge smiling image of the sea creature on the bridge pillar as the officers questioned him.  “What is The Musqueam?” he wonders.

He carries no money now, he’s free of its weight and worth. The firemen will help him at the station.  He focuses on where he’s going, because sometimes he ends up somewhere and he’s not sure how he arrived. 

Ahead of him there’s a dog, running free towards a boy, who’s backing up against the cliffs.  As Connor jogs the scene comes closer, he sees it’s a rangy dog with a whipsaw tail, the kid backing up is not making a noise, and the dog’s advancing.  It stops, it barks.  It steps forward. Connor runs up behind it and grabs its collar. A woman in green shorts rushes up.

“Why can’t you people control your animals” she yells. “Tyler, are you ok?”

“This isn’t my dog,” Connor says.  He shouts.  “Anyone own this dog?”

“It snapped at me,” Tyler shouts.  “Don’t let it go.”

The animal strains, Connor holds the collar tight, he feels the beast’s roiling neck muscles behind his fingers.

“I should call animal control,” says the woman.  “Does the dog have any identification?”

“Like I said,” Connor tells her.  “It’s not my animal.”

Connor imagines the dog’s name is Randy the Rowdy.   “I could take Randy down the beach a way,” he tells the woman.  “To find the rightful owners.”  Her eyes are jade green, she’s too thin, slight shoulders, bony hands.  Connor keeps talking.   “Tyler, if you want a chocolate bar there’s one in my blue bag,” because although he’s lost everything else, the bag is sitting right there beside Randy the Rowdy, who stinks like rotten seaweed.

 “That dog seems to know you,” the woman says.

“That’s because I have a grip,” Conner tells her.  “I’m here in the moment holding his living bag of flesh.”

“Don’t let go of the dog,” says Tyler.

“It’s okay to be scared” Connor tells him. “The police recently interviewed me under Burrard bridge.  They thought I did a robbery.  But of course, I wasn’t the one.”  He sees Tyler’s narrow, focussed concentration, and continues.  “I didn’t show fear, I did what they wanted, but I stayed relaxed, like I am now.” His voice rises to a shout.  “They realized their mistake and let me go.”

“You don’t look like a robber to me,” says Tyler.

“Can you hold the dog further down the beach while I call animal control?” the woman asks.  “Come on, Tyler.”

“I will do that,” Connor says and walks with Randy the Rowdy.  He picks up a piece of frayed blue rope and secures it to the dog’s collar.  Then he sits in the shade against the cliff and watches the woman talking on her phone.  She stands on the low-tide rocks, her willowy back against the sea.  Connor ties Randy to a log and lopes over.

The woman backs up a step or two.

 “Animal control will be here soon,” she says.

“I’m wondering,” Connor asks her.  “Do you know anything about The Musqueam? Or a sea creature that lived around here?”

“I have no idea,” she says.

“The police questioned me right by its pillar image,” he tells her.

“Take this,” The woman leans forward, hands out a ten-dollar bill.  “For your help.”

Connor takes the bill, stands staring at it, then he looks up and stares at the woman.

She waves and backs away towards Tyler, who is playing beneath the cliffs. 

“Thanks,” says Connor.

After a time, he walks towards the hill leading to the fire station.  He walks faster to keep up with his whirling mind as the green light flashes. Connor steps out to cross the street.  As he does an older model car with dents on the side cuts him off at the curb.  Connor stops.  He sees a white whisker-haired man in the car, with a wide and thin-lipped face.

Connor lifts his hand, then raises his arm to signal “Stop.”  The man looks at Connor, gives him the finger, then hits the gas, swerves past him, and disappears around the corner.

Connor lopes fast up the steep hill to the fire station, and as he reaches the next curb the same car surges out of a side street, halts with a screech and the driver jumps out. “I almost hit you back there.  Who the hell do you think you are?”  His huge shoulders bulge like his big gut and he’s beet red in the face.  His short pants end at hairless ankles.

“My identity is with the police,” says Connor. “I’m going to the fire station so they can help me pick it up.”

He points across the street to the station.  There’s a fireman power washing the parking lot.

The man looks at Connor.  His mouth opens. He leans forward, both hands on the car.

“I’ve lost my dog,” he says.  “I’ve been looking for him everywhere.”  He stands up.

Connor steps back.  He swallows and looks towards the man.  “What sort of dog is it?”

“Boston pit bull terrier mix.”

“It could be the dog I found at the beach,” Connor points downhill.  “Randy the Rowdy. Been rolling in seaweed. It’s tied to a log.”

“It’s brown,” says the man.

“Yes,” Connor says.  “I stopped it from jumping on a boy.”  He looks down at the sea, brilliant grey-white under the clouds.  “A woman wearing green shorts called animal control.”

“I can’t pay any fines,” the man says.  “It was none of her business.”

Connor pulls the ten dollars out of his pocket.  “Here’s all I’ve got,” he says, and plunks it on the car hood. 

“Get in the car and come down to the beach with me.” the man says. He grabs the ten dollars.  “Lead me to my animal.”

“Like I said, I’m going to the fire station,” says Connor.  “To find my I. D.”  He looks at the man.  “Do you by any chance know what The Musqueam is?”

“I have no idea,” the man answers.

Connor continues across the street, and into the fire hall.

He explains his situation to a fireman at a wide desk.  The fireman wears a name tag that reads “Jim Ernst” and Jim says “yes, for sure we’ll call the cop shop, hell I haven’t got anything else to do,” and the other men around him chuckle.

“You sure don’t look like a robber,” says Jim.  “They drove you under the bridge?”

“That’s where I forgot my phone,” Connor says.

Jim gets businesslike. “Check over at the main police office.  That’s where they keep the lost and found.”

“Do you know what The Musqueam means?” Connor asks.

The other firemen chuckle some more.  Jim holds up his hand. 

“I can google it,” he says.  He pulls out his phone and punches in letters with big blocklike fingers, and he tells Connor that The Musqueam was the Indigenous name for the city, before the bridge and the skyscrapers and the police. 

“I guess I’m in The Musqueam now,” Connor says.

“Yeah,” says Big Jim.  “We’re all in The Musqueam, technically speaking.”

Connor thanks Big Jim and walks from the fire station, down the hill and back across the bridge.  He’s moving in the direction of the police station but turns into the St. Paul’s hospital parking lot.

“Emergency,” flashes a sign.

 Connor walks to a small hill looking over this sign, and the big sprawling campus of the hospital.

He sits on the hill and watches the glass doors of “Emergency” slide and close, and the people and ambulances coming and going.  A woman wrapped in a blanket, smoking a cigarette, stops at the bottom of the hill and shouts at him.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. “Are you sick?”
“I might be,” says Connor.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sitting here to see if I’m in the right place.  If I’m not, I’m going to the police station.”

The woman pats her pudgy stomach.  “You’ll have to decide sooner or later if you’re sick or not.  Otherwise, you’re wasting your time.”

Connor knows, though, that anything can happen, and the emergency ward is the best place to be if it does.

He stands on the hill above the hospital.  He feels his mind turning around, sliding back.  He focusses on the sound of the beach lady’s voice “take this, for your help.”  and the ten dollars appearing in his hand.

By nightfall, if he doesn’t get to the police station, he might feel calm enough to hike back to his hammock, where he will awaken tomorrow, and go out into the world once more, merge into it and try to find his identification. 

“Everything’s becoming difficult,” he says to the pudgy woman.  “You can’t do anything without I. D.”

She watches him from down below.  “You better make up your mind soon if you’re sick,” she tells him.  “I don’t like people who can’t make up their mind.”

“Are you sick?” Connor asks the woman.

“Not as sick as the doctors,” she tells him.

Connor sees a police car pull into the hospital parking lot.  In the car sit the same two officers who stopped him earlier.  One officer hops out and stands beside the vehicle. The pudgy woman shuffles over to the officer and talks to him.  She points towards Connor. Connor stands, waves one arm, then decides to walk down to the officer and ask for his lost wallet.  If they want him to go to emergency, he’ll offer no resistance.

“I’m not a bank robber,” he’ll tell them, “But I need your help.  I left my wallet and phone in your car.”

He decides he’ll look friendly. He’ll smile at them like the smile on the face of The Sea Serpent under the bridge.  Connor begins jogging down the slope, counting as usual.  He’s now made seven thousand three hundred twenty-two steps through The Musqueam since he stepped off the bus.

Harrison Kim

Image by 12019 from Pixabay – Hammock strung between trees.