The Crystal Ball in the Rain

By three in the morning the rain had polished the pavement until every streetlamp seemed to be standing upon its own trembling reflection, and Pawel Olhefsky had begun to suspect that the city itself was watching him.

He had been walking for almost two hours, though he could not have said from where he had come or where, exactly, he intended to go.

His coat smelled of cigarettes, wet wool, and the sour remains of somebody else's beer, spilled on him in a basement tavern whose name he had already forgotten.

There were mountains somewhere beyond the roofs, immense and indifferent, but the clouds had swallowed them.

At the mouth of an alley a woman in a silver jacket was arguing with a shopping cart, addressing it with the furious dignity of a queen betrayed by her cabinet.

A raven hopped along a telephone wire above her and uttered one contemptuous sound.

Such was Vancouver at that hour: ocean, glass towers, black mountains, wet cardboard, fentanyl smoke, expensive bicycles, flowering balconies, sirens, and human beings walking about as though each had misplaced something essential and was too ashamed to admit what it was.

Pawel stopped beneath an awning.

He was thirty-nine years old, unemployed, almost penniless, and for the past eight months had been living in a furnished room so small that when he stretched both arms he could nearly touch opposite walls. He had once worked in an office where people discussed spreadsheets in lowered voices and used phrases such as moving forward with religious seriousness. Then one morning he had simply stopped going.

Why?

He had explanations.

He had twelve explanations.

He could arrange them in philosophical order if necessary.

None of them satisfied him.

That evening he had spent his last thirty-seven dollars in a dive bar off Hastings Street, drinking rye and listening to a man named Lem explain how the banks were controlled by three families in Switzerland, one of whom, Lem assured him, had invented loneliness in 1974.

"You laugh," Lem had said.

"I'm not laughing."

"You are with your eyes."

"My eyes have always been sarcastic."

"That's the worst kind."

And Lem had looked wounded.

This had somehow made Pawel feel ashamed.

He always felt ashamed when he had done nothing.

Indeed, the less he had done, the greater his shame.

In the bar there had also been a woman called Marie who sold perfume samples from a plastic grocery bag. She claimed they were "department-store originals," though each bottle had a handwritten label, and one of them said CHANEL NO. 8 1/2.

"Twenty bucks," she told Pavel.

"I have seven."

"Ten."

"I just told you I have seven."

"Then it's seven."

"What is it?"

"Opportunity."

He bought it.

Even now the little bottle sat in his pocket beside three quarters, a receipt from a pharmacy, and a folded sheet of paper on which he had written, in large letters:

DO NOT BELIEVE ANYBODY AFTER MIDNIGHT.

He had written this at 1:17 a.m.

At 1:42, he had lent Lem twenty dollars.

Now Pawel stood in the rain wondering if stupidity became more respectable when repeated often enough to resemble a principle.

Across the street, painted over the brick wall of an old warehouse, was the mural.

He had seen it many times but had never really looked at it.

An old man sat in a wooden chair beneath a violet sky. His beard reached almost to his knees. In both hands he held a crystal ball that glowed pale blue, and inside the ball someone had painted a tiny city: towers, bridges, ships, mountains, apartment windows, even little red dots that might have been taillights.

Above the old man's head were the words:

YOU HAVE ALREADY ARRIVED.

Pawel stared.

"No," he said.

The old man stared back.

"No, I haven't."

The crystal ball shimmered with rain.

"You don't know anything."

A man sleeping beneath the mural stirred under three blankets.

"Shut up," he said.

"Sorry."

"You talking to the wizard?"

Pawel hesitated.

"Apparently."

"He owes me forty bucks."

The sleeper rolled over.

Pawel continued walking.

...

At Main and Pender he encountered the first miracle.

Or scam.

He was never afterward certain which.

A thin young man in a white tracksuit stood beside an electric scooter and wept.

Not metaphorically.

He wept openly, beautifully, almost professionally.

"My brother," he said when Pawel approached.

"I'm not your brother."

"Brother in humanity."

"That's already suspicious."

The young man pressed a hand to his chest.

"My mother is in Richmond General."

"There isn't--"

"Emergency. Heart."

He produced a phone.

The screen showed a photograph of an elderly woman lying in a hospital bed.

"I need twenty-six dollars for a taxi."

"I have seventy-five cents."

The young man's tears stopped immediately.

"Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"You look like you have more."

"Thank you."

"You know what I mean."

"Do you?"

The young man examined him.

Then, curiously, his expression softened.

"Man," he said, "you look terrible."

Pawel felt unexpectedly offended.

"I am merely wet."

"No. It's more than that."

"What?"

"You got that look."

"What look?"

"Like you're waiting for somebody to sentence you."

This was so exact that Pawel stepped back.

The young man shrugged.

"I see people."

"You scam people."

"Sometimes."

"You admit it?"

"Would you prefer I lied?"

"Yes," Pawel said after considering.

The young man laughed.

His name was Isaiah.

He was twenty-four.

He had, according to his own account, been a dishwasher, warehouse picker, apprentice roofer, amateur rapper, cryptocurrency investor, dog walker, and briefly "director of client relations" for a company that did not technically exist.

"Everybody's selling something," Isaiah said. "Some sell condos. Some sell fent. Some sell religion. Some sell themselves. Some sell the idea they're not selling anything."

"And what do you sell?"

"Urgency."

This impressed Pawel.

He disliked being impressed.

"That's almost philosophical."

"Nah. Philosophy don't pay."

"Neither does honesty?"

"Honesty pays sometimes. You just gotta know when."

They walked together.

...

Dawn was still several hours away, and the rain had thinned to a mist that hung in the streetlights like powdered glass.

They passed alleys where figures bent over small flames. They passed a doorway where a man rocked forward and backward whispering the same woman's name. They passed two tourists photographing a mural while, ten feet away, an old woman searched through a garbage bin for refundable cans. They passed an attractive and shirtless Aboriginal man sitting on his knees with his arms outstretched on a mattress, apparently under the influence of some substance or other.

Pawel noticed this contradiction and immediately hated himself for noticing it.

It seemed obscene to him that observation required nothing.

You could see everything and save nobody.

On Powell Street, a girl with purple hair sat cross-legged against a wall.

"Hey, Izzy."

"Hey, Mouse."

"You got smokes?"

"No."

"You lying?"

"Yeah."

He gave her two cigarettes.

She lit one.

Her hands shook.

She looked perhaps nineteen, perhaps thirty-five.

Pawel had begun to understand that exhaustion destroyed chronology.

Mouse looked at him.

"Who's this?"

"Professor Doom."

"I'm not a professor."

"You look Russian."

"I am not--"

"He's Professor Doom."

Mouse accepted this.

"Professor, you believe in God?"

Pawel stared at her.

Isaiah grinned.

"See? This city."

"What about God?" Pawel asked.

"I had a dream he was working at Save-On-Foods."

"What department?"

"Bakery."

"That seems plausible."

"He wouldn't give me bread."

"Less plausible."

She laughed so violently that she began coughing.

Then the coughing would not stop.

Pawel crouched beside her.

"You all right?"

"No."

"Do you need an ambulance?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"No."

Isaiah had stopped smiling.

For several minutes all three remained there, under an awning advertising luxury lofts from $1.4 million.

Mouse eventually caught her breath.

"See?" she said. "Didn't die."

"Congratulations," Pawel said.

"Don't congratulate me yet."

She looked at him with a terrifying cheerfulness.

"I got the whole day."

...

By sunrise Pawel had acquired, without intending to, a procession.

Isaiah walked beside him.

Mouse followed because she wanted coffee.

An elderly man named Walter joined them after accusing Isaiah of owing him twelve dollars.

Walter carried a plastic bag full of paperback crime novels and spoke with the grave authority of a retired judge, though he had in fact been a janitor at a hotel near English Bay.

"I know criminals," Walter said.

"You read crime novels," Isaiah replied.

"I've cleaned after businessmen."

"That's not the same thing."

Walter stopped.

"My boy, you have much to learn."

They found a diner opening near Commercial Drive.

Inside, fluorescent lights illuminated six empty tables and a glass case containing pies of unnatural perfection.

Pawel counted his coins.

Seventy-five cents.

Mouse had three dollars.

Walter had nineteen.

Isaiah produced forty-seven.

Pawel looked at him.

"What?"

"Your mother."

"She's recovering."

"You said she was having a heart emergency."

"Emotionally."

"You made forty-seven dollars?"

"I had eighty."

"You had eighty while asking me for twenty-six?"

"Capital preservation."

Walter nodded approvingly.

"Criminal."

They ordered coffee, toast, and eggs.

For twenty minutes they were almost happy.

This frightened Pawel more than anything that had happened all night.

Because happiness, he thought, creates evidence.

Once you have been happy even briefly, you can no longer claim with perfect sincerity that happiness is impossible.

It ruins despair.

Mouse spread jam on toast.

"You know what I want?"

"No," said Walter.

"A little apartment."

"That's it?"

"With a balcony."

"Luxury."

"And plants."

"More luxury."

"And one of those stupid little tables."

"What tables?"

"You know. Little balcony table. Two chairs."

"For whom is the other chair?" Pawel asked.

She looked at him as though the answer were obvious.

"Somebody."

That word disturbed him.

Somebody.

Such an absurdly modest ambition.

Not love.

Not marriage.

Not salvation.

Somebody.

...

After breakfast they walked west.

The city changed around them.

This was one of Pawel's grievances against it: its capacity for rapid costume changes.

Within twenty minutes suffering could become boutiques.

Within another twenty, boutiques became glass towers. And sometimes entire restaurants, discothèques, etc. rapidly disappeared, occasionally replaced by something just as good or much worse.

Then came seawall, beaches, wet trees, cyclists in expensive waterproof jackets, dogs with better grooming than Pawel had ever possessed, and beyond everything the mountains, finally emerging from the morning clouds.

Mouse stopped.

"Jesus."

The mountains were covered with fresh snow.

Across the water they rose impossibly close, blue-white and immense.

Cargo ships waited in Burrard Inlet like patient black animals.

Sunlight broke through a seam in the clouds and spread across the water.

No one spoke. 

Even Isaiah.

Pawel felt offended again.

Beauty had no right to appear here.

Not after the alleys.

Not after Mouse coughing beneath the luxury-loft sign.

Not after men sleeping in doorways while towers along the water sold views for millions.

The beauty seemed indecent.

Then he had another thought.

Perhaps ugliness did not invalidate beauty.

Perhaps beauty did not excuse ugliness.

Perhaps the unbearable thing was that both were true simultaneously.

"Professor Doom is crying," Isaiah said.

"I am not."

"You are."

"It's the wind."

"There is no wind."

Pawel wiped his face angrily.

Walter pretended not to notice.

Mouse smiled.

"Maybe the wizard got you."

"What wizard?"

"The crystal-ball guy."

Pawel turned.

"How do you know about him?"

She shrugged.

"Everybody knows him."

"No they don't."

"I do."

"What does the mural mean?"

Mouse became serious.

"He sees everybody's future."

Walter snorted.

"No mural sees futures."

"My friend Tasha says if you stand there at four in the morning high enough, he moves."

"Your friend Tasha should reduce her intake."

"She says he looks inside the ball."

"Naturally."

"And if your face is inside it, you're going to disappear."

Pawel remembered the rain sliding over the painted crystal.

For one second he had the absurd conviction that he had seen something inside it.

Not his face.

His room.

His little rented room.

Empty.

He said nothing.

...

That afternoon, Pawel tried to leave them.

He succeeded for forty minutes.

Then he discovered that being alone was unbearable.

This enraged him.

He had spent years cultivating solitude as though it were a moral accomplishment, and now three near-strangers and one con artist had ruined it before lunch.

He returned east.

On Granville Street, music poured from bars even though it was barely afternoon.

Outside a liquor store a man was screaming about an invisible dog.

Inside an alley two boys exchanged something quickly.

A woman in office clothes smoked beside a dumpster, crying silently while reading her phone.

A shirtless white homeless man stood and/or sat on top of the Golden Arches that formed the McDonald's sign.

Pawel passed a pawn shop and stopped.

In the window was a crystal ball.

It was cheap glass on a brass stand.

Thirty-nine dollars.

He laughed.

Then he saw the reflection.

The old man from the mural stood behind him.

Pawel spun around.

No one.

In the glass, however, the old man remained.

Pawel's heart began hammering.

"You," he whispered.

The old man raised one painted finger.

"You have already arrived."

"No."

"You have."

"This is delirium."

"Possibly."

"You are not real."

"What difference has that ever made?"

Pawel staggered backward.

A passerby bumped into him.

"Watch it."

"Sorry."

The reflection was now only Pawel.

He looked pale, wet-haired, exhausted.

He suddenly understood why Isaiah had said he looked as though he were awaiting sentence.

He was.

From himself.

...

That evening he found the others behind a bar near Gastown.

Isaiah was arguing with a man in a hockey jersey.

Walter was reading.

Mouse was gone.

"Where is she?"

Isaiah stopped.

"She left."

"Where?"

"How would I know?"

"You were with her."

"She doesn't belong to me."

The words struck Pawel with unreasonable force.

"Did she use?"

Isaiah looked away.

"Probably."

"We should find her."

"Professor."

"We should."

"You gonna search every alley?"

"Yes."

"Then what?"

"I don't know."

"Exactly."

Pawel seized Isaiah's jacket.

"You knew she was sick."

Isaiah's face changed instantly.

The lightness disappeared.

"You think I don't know people are sick?"

"I didn't say--"

"You think I don't know?"

Walter stood.

"Let go."

Pawel released him.

Isaiah stepped backward.

"My sister died last year," he said.

No one moved.

"Same shit. Same streets. Same everybody saying we gotta help, gotta help, gotta help. You know what help is? Help is Tuesday. Then Wednesday. Then Thursday. Help is boring. Help is calling somebody ten times. Help is they steal from you and you still answer the phone next week. Everybody loves emergency. Nobody loves maintenance."

Pawel stared at him.

Isaiah wiped his mouth.

"So don't grab me like you're the first person who ever cared."

Pawel felt the old, familiar shame entering him.

Only this time it did not feel profound.

It felt useless.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Isaiah looked surprised.

Perhaps Pawel was surprised too.

They went looking for Mouse.

...

They found her shortly after midnight beneath the mural of the old man.

She was alive.

Barely conscious, but alive.

A paramedic knelt beside her.

Another opened equipment.

Pawel stood under the painted crystal ball, shaking.

Isaiah was crying.

Walter held his paperback with both hands against his chest.

The old man in the mural gazed down upon them.

The ball glowed blue under a streetlamp.

Pawel looked into it.

For a moment--he would later swear to this--he saw not the painted city but thousands of tiny rooms.

In one, a man hid stolen wallets beneath a mattress.

In another, a woman poured vodka into a coffee mug at eight in the morning.

In another, two lovers screamed.

In another, an old immigrant wearing a medical mask counted coins for groceries.

In another, a wealthy man stood before a window overlooking the ocean and considered throwing himself through it.

In another, a child slept beside a stuffed bear.

In another, somebody was lying.

In another, somebody was forgiving the liar.

In another, a dealer counted bills.

In another, a nurse washed blood from her hands.

In another, Mouse sat on a balcony beside a tiny table.

There were two chairs.

Pawel cried out.

The vision vanished.

Only paint.

Only rain.

Only the old man's hands around the crystal ball.

The paramedics lifted Mouse onto the stretcher.

Her eyes opened.

"Professor?"

"I'm here."

"You look terrible."

"So I've been told."

She smiled weakly.

"Didn't die."

"Not tonight."

"Don't congratulate me yet."

"I won't."

The ambulance doors closed.

...

At dawn, Pawel, Isaiah, and Walter stood at the edge of the water.

Across the inlet the mountains had become pink with sunrise.

The city behind them was beginning another day.

Coffee machines started.

Buses groaned.

Dealers woke.

Lawyers woke.

People who had slept in alleys folded blankets.

People who had slept forty floors above the street opened automatic blinds.

Somebody stole a bicycle.

Somebody returned a wallet.

Somebody lied about needing bus fare.

Somebody actually needed bus fare and was assumed to be lying.

A gull tore open a garbage bag.

A church unlocked its doors.

Pawel thought of the words painted above the wizard:

YOU HAVE ALREADY ARRIVED.

Perhaps, he thought, the sentence had nothing to do with success.

Perhaps it meant merely that there was no other city waiting behind this city, no pure version of existence in which the contradictions had been corrected.

Here was the ocean.

Here were the mountains.

Here were the syringes in the gutters.

Here were the million-dollar views.

Here was Mouse.

Here was Isaiah, liar and friend.

Here was Walter, who claimed criminals could be understood through hotel housekeeping.

Here was Pawel himself, absurd and ashamed and alive.

He had spent years imagining that his real life would begin after some final explanation.

After employment.

After money.

After love.

After confidence.

After forgiveness.

After becoming somebody else.

But perhaps the old man was right.

Perhaps the horror was that he had already arrived.

And perhaps--this occurred to him with such sudden violence that he laughed aloud--the hope was exactly the same thing.

Isaiah looked at him.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing."

"That's suspicious."

"Very."

Walter sighed.

"Breakfast?"

Pawel checked his pockets.

He found the perfume bottle.

CHANEL NO. 8 1/2.

He held it up.

"I possess one luxury item."

"You got money?" Isaiah asked.

"No."

"I got twelve bucks."

Walter stared at him.

"You owe me twelve dollars."

Isaiah groaned.

"Man."

Pawel laughed again.

Above the water, the mountains stood bright and impossible.

Behind them, somewhere among the alleys and murals and towers and bars, the old man continued holding the entire city inside his painted hands.