Best Canadian Stories 2020 by Paige Cooper

Author:Paige Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2020-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

Phoenix

Alex Leslie

We sit in this office by the front entrance, Dom and I, and a nurse goes in and out restless with the need to be useful. Dom’s the front desk guy and he never takes a day off. I’m the support worker, which means I’m jack-of-all-trades for the endless minutiae of needs of the people who live in this hotel. A spreadsheet pinned to the wall shows the list of the residents in Dom’s shaky hand-drawn lines. In careful columns: who’s woken up in the past eight hours; for how long; who’s passed the eighteen-hour mark of continuous sleep, in which case they need to be roused with the bell Dom keeps hanging on the hook above his desk. I often wonder where he got that bell—a fat battered thing like a ship captain’s bell. I go with Dom to the doors of the red-flagged sleepers and he clangs that goddamn bell until the person in the room rolls over twice. The nurse crouches and checks for breaths, fingers held to the side of the neck.

I can’t figure Dom out. He’s worked at the hotel since forever, since before this was just another place for sleepers, since before the public health emergency was declared, before the poster campaigns on all the busses, before I took the support worker job here because catering got unbearable, walking around conference halls holding spoons of cold turmeric-yellow soup like a metaphor for opulent uselessness. Now I can’t make myself quit, because when a sleeper wakes up and looks me right in the eyes, I see a world orbiting in their pupils, and for a moment I feel what it would be to never panic again. When our first sleeper died—a sweet Dutch guy who used to run a bike repair shop before he got ALS—Dom shrugged and said, “Water runs downhill,” and I watched him, waiting for the rebound smirk that never came. Sometimes he’s just like that, blunt and inscrutable. His black hair is gelled and combed straight back, and his eyes are hooped in purple like a flower in bloom on the Adriatic at twilight. I can’t tell how old he is. “I know why they don’t want to wake back up,” he’s said to me a few times, and I just nodded. I dodge invitations to his backstory. I think that he protects the sleepers because he wishes he could be one.

I work in one of those hotels full of the sleepers over on Clark Street. Not one of the nicer private ones, just one of those places where the people are curled on mats or hospital beds in rooms like stacked shoeboxes. We watch them on the tiny monitor in the office—every now and then they raise their heads and look around. We see their eyes in the static, the half-darkness of a failing celestial connection. In our daily afternoon meetings, we discuss the sleepers in batches, triaged according to acuity. The nurse speaks bluntly of a young woman who told her yesterday that she wished she could just fall asleep forever.

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