The Video Watcher (17 page)

“Terrible,” the other man said, and coughed.

 

That autumn, I saw Sadie only once more. It was the week before Halloween and I was in her area and I couldn't resist the temptation to drop in.

For most of the visit, I just sat on her bed while she took curlers out of her hair and watched
Wheel of Fortune
. At one point I asked her if she still prayed the prayer taped to the side of her night table. She said that she did. I began to explain that I'd begun to pray myself, but before I could explain why she asked me if I thought Vanna White's breasts were real.

Also during that visit, I told Sadie about Cam. I told her everything, except for the part where I accompanied him to the student's homestay house.

“Wow! Is he some kind of stalker?” she asked. She had her back to me and was cutting split ends out of her hair. “You're friends with this guy? He sounds really psycho.”

“No. I just know him. He's just an acquaintance.”

“My friend, Caroline—you know Caroline, right?”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Anyway, there was like this guy—look at this?” She showed me a split end.

Wheel of Fortune
had ended before she said, “What was I telling you?”

“Caroline. A guy liked her—”

“Oh yeah. This guy at work. He was obsessed with her. He was so crazy.”

“What did he do?”

“I don't know. He just, you know, tried to talk to her and stuff. Anyway, finally she had to get this restraining order. And then the guy, he killed himsel
f
!”

 

Just an acquaintance.

The phrase still haunts me.

 

The last time I saw him was in the Starbucks on Esplanade. It was sometime in November, about a month after Damien's funeral—the whole summer before seemed like an hallucination.

He didn't say much at first. We sat by one of the windows and he stared out at the rain. Then he asked if I had ever considered visiting a prostitute.

“Not really,” I answered.

He nodded, then gazing back outside told me a story about this guy he had met in the police station. The guy visited women who advertized themselves in the back of
The Georgia Straight
. So far this man had visited two. Both were Asian and lived in apartments in East Van. When the guy had visited the first one, she'd stood behind the door until he was completely inside, then closed the door to reveal herself. She was a lot older than she had said on the phone, and her frilly nightgown was see-through, and both he and the woman were embarrassed. She'd tried to suck him hard enough to get the condom on, but finally gave up, saying she was sorry and gave him his money back. The second one—apparently—was better. She had a very lithe body (that was how the guy had described her) and he screwed her for forty minutes.

Cam fell silent.

I was suddenly again conscious of our surroundings.

“…think I'm normally a patient person,” laughed the woman across from us. She was holding a baby on her lap. “But this was unreal. I finally had to…”

“Oh yeah!” Cam said. “This guy, he said that the second one could barely speak English, but she pronounced the word ‘Fuck'
pe
r
fectly
.”

“I guess it's an important word for her job,” I said, meaning the statement as kind of a joke, but Cam didn't seem to catch it.

“Also,” he said, “she ended up giving this guy most of his money back!”

Looking down, I rotated the sleeve on my coffee cup.

“Why are you telling me this?” I finally said.

At first Cam did not seem to hear me. He peered out the window and tapped his fingers on the table. But when he looked back, a conspiratorial grin creased his lips.

Earlier he'd told me that because he'd tried contacting the Brazilian with the letter, the judge had sent him to the hospital, and he now had to report to this officer once a week.

As he told me these things I remember wondering if the two mothers sitting next to us had heard a
ny of the conversation, and what they would have thought if they had. It felt strange to be sitting so close to them, to be living in the same city as them, and yet being so separated.

I also remember that when we left, Cam grabbed a
Georgia Straight
and flipped to the back of it and pointed to an advertisement, saying, “This one looks interesting.”

 

For a long time afterwards, I did not know what to make of that summer. From movies and from the books I read I had come to expect that events could be fit together into some sort of a narrative, that no matter how tangled or twisted the plots or varied the events might be, some theme and direction could be discerned. But here there appeared to be nothing, just random images, remembered sensations, bits of dialogue—it was how it is with an Al Adamson movie, stock footage and outtakes spliced together with only the briefest nod to coherence. (That at least was what I wanted to believe.) But years later, when I began to speak to the people around me about that summer (none of whom I'd known back then) telling them in hurried antidotes and little snapshots about what had happened, finding that one shot
would
lead to another shot, that one scene
would
fade into another scene, that even where the shots did not flow that
that
too was part of the story, I came to see the reason for my reluctance to view “the movie” as a whole, my wilful inability to grasp its significance—for it was only by the seeing it as a whole that my role came into view.

People always say to me when I tell them about Cam or Damien or Alex, “Wow, man, you really cared.” But that was not what I saw when I rewound and rewatched those six months in the late '90s (and consider the scenes that did not make this final cut: the scene where I told Cam and Damien to smash Tiff's Porsche, the scene in which I drove Cam to an apartment in East Van, the scene where Alex told me she was going to have an abortion and I remained silent.) What I saw was not someone that cared, what I saw was someone that frightens me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgements

 

 

I want to express gratitude to the staff and the students of the UBC Creative Writing Department who helped me out along the way: Susan Juby, Annabel Lyon, Lisa Moore, Annie Zhu, Trevor Corkum, Irina Kovalyova, Jessica Block, Jill Sexsmith, Jessica Michalosky, and Kristin Seeman.

I am particularly indebted to Lee Henderson, without whose initial enthusiasm for my work I may never have continued; Roger Seamon, who has been a indefatigable reader of my work over the years; John Metcalf for his enthusiasm for this novel; Dan Wells for taking a chance on it; and Zsuzsi Gartner, whose belief in me as a writer kept me going, and from whose editing I have learned much.

Finally I would like to thank Miho and our three children, Mina, Curtis, and Rachel for their patience, my grandma for her tireless proofreading and suggestions, my mum for various ‘literary' birthday and Christmas gifts (the money for my first Creative Writing class was one of them), and my grandfather for his financial and emotional support.

 

 

 

 

About the Author

 

 

 

Shawn Curtis Stibbards is a school teacher who lives in North Vancouver with his wife and three children.
The Video Watcher
is his first novel.