One day last spring I saw a fifty-dollar bill flying in the rainy wind on Robson Street and no one else seemed to notice but a beautiful girl, and I kneeled there, the soggy bill in my hand, and breathed in this small dark intense being who carried herself like a warrior, and she helped me spend the money.
She was eighteen and had slept with tons of men. She wasn’t smarter than me, but she knew more about sex. We used the condo her parents paid for or we used her car or we used my parents’ barn. The farmhouse was out of bounds because of my sister in her wheelchair, my mother always pushing her along the hallways, and Dad’s ghost which, when it wasn’t haunting the horses in the pasture that belonged to the neighbour now, hung out drinking in one room or another. Jesse Green was into tats and piercings and crack and ecstasy, pushing herself at different obnoxious men, which I didn’t understand until it dawned on me that she loved testing her immunity to worship, admiration, cruelty, deviousness. And then one day she said she would quit drugs, alcohol, coffee, and would not fuck around, at all, ever, if I promised to go away with her. She’d been in and out of institutions and rehabs since she was twelve. Her parents, a banker and a psychologist, supported her from Calgary. She’d gone to school in England and now was registered at Emily Carr College of Art but never attended classes, needed only access to the kiln, where she’d fire different-sized variegated clay balls, and to be near the ocean, wandering Kits beach or the sea wall. “We’ll get lost in the summer,” was her phrase, and, “Keep me on track,” as we tried to switch from crack to crystal meth. She wore this cool kind of amazing protective, maybe inherited, kind of wild friendliness that intensified the reactions of those around her, to lust of course, but also confusion. Guys hitting on her often stalled as if the signals she was sending were impairing their lines and angles. I saw desire lines everywhere in Vancouver. She acted outrageous to bend light. She made everything equal and talked fast. It was hard to understand and impossible to know where things were going but everything seemed solid state, like no gaps between things, then no things at all.
I’d skip school and hitchhike from Pit Meadows into town and we’d fuck all day long in her condo, then read bits from books to each other. The fucking was like a star collapsing, or maybe the universe. Or she’d drive out to the farm and we’d borrow the neighbour’s horses and ride, the rush-hour traffic streaming alongside, the stag leaping across the road into swaying black firs a warning, she said, that any crazy moment might uproot trees and unscrew signs from poles and we’d be forever suburbanite ghosts. We were okay, she said, but danger existed. She got herself hired for a few weeks on the neighbour’s farm, and we rode and talked a lot, on and on, galloping and horny, and afterward we melted down in the old barn, poured ourselves out. The more we did the more she demanded, and I really didn’t want to be anywhere without her. There wasn’t anywhere that wasn’t her. That’s the truth.
Jesse Green was seriously moody when she was stoned on grass, and once we were lying on loose hay at sunset, watching bats twitching from the rafters and swallows swinging in and out the high barn door, and we hadn’t spoken for hours, when she said, in her faint English accent, “I’m upside down, I’m fucked,” and I stared into those green eyes amid the chaos of Dad’s barn and saw what she really was, and what I really was and promised her I’d go anywhere with her, though I didn’t believe for a second that there was anywhere to go. And I said so.
“You’re full of shite,” she said.
And the sun set red over the fields, the west sky, and she said we’d go, soon now, she’d take me.
I didn’t want any kind of change. We were eternal and boundless and we toked meth and I told the accident story and she zigged and zagged. She said she was done with crack and almost done with crystal meth and was pretty sure of getting off the oxy. That’s when the little fox was born, just a pup, inside me. I remember thinking about a world where all things might be variations, everything a version of the same ripple, and I hadn’t crashed the car in Nowhere, Alberta on my fifteenth birthday because Mom and Dad were too drunk to drive, pushing the gas, pushing the car out of control, and no one was dead at all, though my face was cut up, and the others seemed dead, all of them, till doctors brought my mom and sister back. And the sky would still be the same, the world just as safe or unsafe, everything the same, but I would see it differently. I’ve been back to the stretch of prairie highway a few times, different seasons, times of day, and there must be a defect under the road, a geological fault of some kind, because the land buckles on either side, and the gravel of the soft shoulder makes a wave, and despite the repair jobs there is always a new crack next to the holes already filled with tarmac, a new gap waiting to be filled, a cave where some creature might live, and I always crouch to peer in and see dust and darkness, and once I saw the small bones of a dry bird. And because in the old world my mother was barely alive and my father was dead and my sister in a wheelchair I loved Jesse infinitely, though I didn’t want sex nearly as much as she did, and because of all this, the fifty bucks, the accident, the drugs, the fox cub, the world became an enormous, undifferentiated place. And there was nothing to escape, and that gave us the escape velocity.