When they erected their first pop-up tents to treat the addicts who wandered in and out like living corpses, I thought: Sure.
When the newspapers ran article after article about the opioid addiction taking the city by storm, it was more along the lines of: No kidding. Nothing slips past you guys.
But when the mental health infrastructure became obsessed with the zombies, I had to put my foot down.
Nobody cared about my griping.
With all these people addicted to addicts now, where are the humble murderers of the city supposed to turn for our mental health support? I ask you. We have been reduced to complaining about it in our weekly meetings. Not that there are murder support groups in Vancouver. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Alternative outlets for the murderous of the city are sadly lacking. Private therapists can cost an arm and a leg—so to speak—and it’s not like you can find community discussion groups on the topic, either. The closest I’ve found is one for people with eating disorders, but I don’t expect people who have done terrible things to their appetites to understand that I killed a person or two last year. In self-defense, but still.
During my share, I settle for telling my fellow nutjobs that I feel like I’m being shadowed by my demons, and they nod in understanding. We are strangers who all know one another’s deepest secrets, bonded in the sacred circle of a urine-stained meeting room in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. They lift their anemic arms in polite applause afterward and we disperse from the collapsed circle. We are blessedly strangers again.
The feeling of being watched follows me from the low-income Eastside Vancouver neighborhood I frequent back to the swanky town house in Kitsilano that I now occupy some space in. I drive with the windows up because the air is thick with forest fire smoke from Vancouver’s north shore, smoke that has drifted here in pungent wafts and settled over the city. It doesn’t help that we are experiencing one of these new Octobers that doesn’t remember that there’s supposed to be a fall season and is almost unbearably hot for this time of year.
As I drive, I obsess over still another death. One that hasn’t occurred yet. But it will.
Soon.