I wrote this on Friday in Vancouver.
–

I am having a problem with displacement.

To leave one city and arrive in the middle of another without preface or enough time lapsed for my softened mind to come to equilibrium–this is displacement. Like a hangover it stays with me longer than I would ever want; hours, a day lost to something like another kind of gravity, this one in my heart and not visible. I want nothing. I see nothing but the grey wall of city, the matrix of windows and reflections that makes up the dark season skyline of Vancouver, BC.

Instead, for a day I sit dully in my expensive hotel and watch lights blink on and off, antlines of pedestrians with umbrellas weaving wetly around complex arrangements of poorly-situated cars, watching this foreshortened from my tenth-story vantage.

I left Portland International Airport in the middle of the day Wednesday, out to the Tarmac with just a few other travelers on our stair-mounted anachronistic propellered rattletrap, which smeared buoyantly through cloudlines for an hour while the pilot apologized and claimed to be seeking “clearer air.”

Every so often we’d make it to somewhere where the cloudtops became blue sky and the propellers would push out great swaths of mist and it was something beautiful and very, very clean.  At other times you could see, briefly, down through gaps in the white to the sea, parallel pewter lines and sometimes an angled grain ship or tanker, breaking the geometry.

Mostly we were white-blinded by weather. The noise was deafening.

The flight was nearly empty. Feel free to spread yourself out, the cabin crew explained. But you were only allowed to move backwards; you could not take a seat in front of where you started. Balance, weight, the two stewards explained. The plane’s manifest slowly moved backward. In a dream-like state I imagine passengers falling out of the tail of the plane, looking for better seats.

I don’t remember landing and I don’t remember seeing landscape. The white was close around us until we were on land and I was distracted by the abuse I received from the customs agents.

Flocks of serious travelers or immigrants stood in islands in the vast customs hall not speaking to each other. Everyone was wearing black. The men in suits, the women in suits. Between them wide manmade seas of white floor. It was very quiet/loud. Everyone I saw for several minutes was Asian, just arrived from somewhere far, far further afield than my own story.

Then I was waiting for and getting on the train. This happened quickly. I boarded the first one I saw, wagering it would move toward the center of population. Within several quick-paced stops it occurred to me that I had little sense of distance, or stop name, or ideas of how to double-check my work. The train was going east when I worried it should be heading north. A long curve.

The train gathered passengers. At one stop a man boarded, about my age in a bright orange safety shirt. He had bulbous work boots flung over with ancient white paint and an innocent disorganization in his features. I had the window seat; he sat down next to me.

I don’t remember what he said to me to start me talking, whether he knew immediately he’d have to coax me to explain my sorry disorientation.

I asked him his name.

“Norman,” he said.

“Norman. I like that name a lot,” I said, and maybe I sounded ingenuous enough–I was–because he seemed happy.

“Yes, like the Anglo-Saxon times,” (I nodded), “Like William the Conqueror.” His orange shirt had reflective white-and-yellow crossed diagonals that made him look like a flag.

Norman was headed for the same stop as I, and not only pushed me off the train in a timely manner but herded me past Robson Square to the intersection where my hotel loomed. He headed off down Robson Street and it’s quite possible he was whistling an honest tune as he went.

–

The hotel is the kind at which doormen hand out umbrellas as you head out. Not the flimsy pocket kind, but the full-length, use-as-a-walking-stick, hook-handled, tut-tut-looks-like-rain variety that make you feel like you have your own room or private carriage as you walk down dim sidewalks being rained upon. So protected.

The first night it rains with vigor. I am far immersed still in my displacement, despite the black five-hour nap I’d had, seasoned with a malleting headache that I could still hear like static as I convinced the concierge to recommend me a real restaurant, with real food.

A dark walk to the tapas bar under the umbra of my umbrella.

–

The training/conference is the next morning. After tapas a blank twelve-hour unconsciousness (how could I sleep so much?). The displacement fading.

But displacement is exacerbated by surreality.

The location of this training seems incredible to me. The Vancouver Art Gallery: A massive Greco-Roman stone edifice with the visual weight of a planet, monumental grey stairs climbing to a pillared (Ionic?) portico, stone, heavy.

The entrance I need to find was tucked beneath these stairs like a secret. A single glass door opened to a decrepit elevator. The elevator was very small and it was surrounded by concrete. I pressed the down button because it was the only option. The elevator went down very slowly. It always feels strange to take an elevator down into the ground.

The door at the back of the elevator opened and an improbable hive of modern classrooms, theaters and concrete substructure revealed itself. The classrooms had windows, as if optimistic to look out over something brighter than the subterranean hallways. Color-corrected fluorescent lights kept rooms from despair but the restroom was lit like a crypt. Impossible houseplants in some corners. No one else seemed to think anything was weird about this incredibly weird place.

I spent nine hours under there, mostly rooted to a swiveling chair that would later echo as a bruising memory in my tailbone.

During the last hour or so I felt a mounting panic, as if I were running out of oxygen, or even being gassed actively. The tiny elevator in its shaking shaft the only escape.

–

On the street everyone seemed to know where they were going or where they wanted to go but I did not have a direction. I came back to my hotel because it was entropic and stood for a few minutes in my room staring at that city view again, the grey one. Unbroken grey.

For lack of creativity I go to the hotel’s lounge and sit at the bar, a convex semicircle of wood and marble. The room is paneled. It is a place in which you know you only have so many minutes to gather your wits because something will require you to explain yourself. I feel too young, like a teenager in a country club.

I ordered a Bombay Sapphire and tonic. Because the drink is weak it tastes phenomenal. I push lime and ice around in my glass and keep untangling how I am going to explain this: I am spacially-temporally-conceptually disengaged. I am new to flying. I am far more alone than I have ever been. Everything is meaningless.

I cross my legs like a man in the comfortable and riveted captain’s chair. I am wearing jeans, but expensive ones, to hedge my bets.

Within a few minutes a middle-aged man in a very expensive grey suit sits to my left. Any minute now. My wedding ring is sitting on the bar on the ring finger of my left, my dominant, hand. It arcs through space as I take sips, a talisman. I hope it will knit a force field.
In time, I become engaged in conversation with the man in the suit somehow regarding the difference between Irish and Scotch Whiskeys. When I call the peaty-smokiness of Scotch “overstated, especially as of late,” he seems enthusiastic.

I order a Sidecar. I feel like we are moving backward in time.

The man has shoulder-length greying hair and gold rings in both ears. He speaks with broad gestures and a strong accent. His hands hit the bar at the end of most sentences. Business, he is in business! and he uses peanuts and a cocktail napkin to create a diagram of certain satellites he owns or makes money from. I throw in words like “geosynchronous” and “Iridium” from time to time so he will think that he is not just talking to himself, but essentially he is. I can’t decide if I am relieved or affronted that my existential conundrum never comes up. He does not ask me about myself.

As the satellite man from Montreal–he is French-Canadian–continues his self-admiration, I become aware that there are two more people at the bar now, this time on my right.

These two are of the fireplug, working-class London variety that sometimes exist in real life. The older one was actually named Tony and was actually a professional wrestler.

In homage to my comment to Montreal about the straightforward honesty of bourbon, I order a Makers Mark sour. I notice that at any point there are never fewer than two drinks in front of Tony and his mate, Mark. Tony, especially, can inhale booze with an awesome speed and enthusiasm that carries on without interruption for several hours. His attitude borders on fury when I eventually start refusing drinks–weak as they may be here.

Tony also enjoys a complete freedom from geographic understanding. He asks me twice, three times where I’m from.

“America? How far is it from here?”

I tell him twice, three times. He confuses Washington state with Washington, the capital, several times. I’m not sure if it’s his drinking, his personality, or a certain dreaminess.

The bartenders, lifers by appearance, are treated with a drunken bipolar intensity by everyone at the bar: sometimes there is kissing of hands (when the bartenders are women) and oaths of bonded affection, shots on the house; other times there is brandished snappishness that drinks are taking too long, taste bad; bartenders roll eyes at particularly inebriated demands, there are slurred accusations of neglect.

Montreal leaves in a huff when I finally build up the courage to tell him that dining alone with him at an expensive seafood establishment in the neighborhood, while it sounded quite lovely and, oh, yes, I’m sure you mean nothing of it and you respect the sanctity of my marriage, but wouldn’t that be a bit…weird? No? No, I’m sorry, I just…I think it would be a bit weird.

As soon as Montreal is gone the Londoners swoop in with that mannish cattiness born of testosterone and expensive lager.

“He wanted a piece of you, love, no question at that…on the pull, ah! Yeah, he had his eye on you, the bastard. You see that? What a laugh.”

Tony of Lambeth born and raised; he has five sons. Mark has five assorted issue himself. Tony considering himself lucky in love because his wife of twenty-something years, “She don’t moan. No, she lets me go abroad and she don’t moan.”

I find that I don’t know what to make of that.

I continue in a social state that requires extreme care, for hours.

Everyone in this paneled bar wants something, is building something, is selling something, is taking something. I feel alien in asking people about themselves, I am the only one doing so, but it seems to be my role. A glimmer of subdued light on a brass bowl of melons. Sconces, gilded frames.

Everyone uses the first person. Everyone interrupts.

Back in my room, I look out at the black world and find that the rain has polished the air into something hyper-transparent. The skyscrapers are in jeweled high-resolution; each window perfectly angled and detailed. Below me in an alley, a mattress leans against a railing, a vapor light snaps out.

–

I sleep horribly.

At five in the morning I wake from a third nightmare and am stuck awake. The terror doesn’t leave me. I open the drapes but it is still black outside. I try to read my novel but it is about frightening things. The previous night’s alcohol makes my heart beat sternly.

–

I woke up this morning and let myself wake slowly, treating myself with a careful gentleness because this was my vacation day, my day off.

Raining.

Sometime in the night down below, a black van has crashed into the mattress in the alley. It’s not too dramatic, in fact it’s hard to tell it was unintentional, even, until you look at the angles just right and see that the van’s bumper is pushing into a wall and the mattress and railing are bent into the passenger side. It all seems so anticlimactic.

I bathe and look again and the van is gone.

The day looms dim before me. The displacement has lifted but the city is still remarkably grim. It is the dark season.

Still, I go about the hours gamely. I try shopping but am repelled by the appalling exchange rate. I buy some books for my goddaughter in a momentary lapse from selfishness. I get a massage–that was successful, but fiscally ridiculous. I have high tea solo, my first meal of the day: cucumber-watercress sandwiches, scone with Devonshire cream, the whole rigorous ritual. I am still convinced that one day I will come to like marmalade. I sit with my fingers around a German china cup (Earl Grey, of course) and the whole scene is so ridiculous that the displacement descends again.

As I try to make my escape, a flutter of red sweatshirt catches my eye from over in the lounge.

Tony again.

“Would you like a tea cake?” I try, putting my carefully-wrapped leftovers on the bar.

He doesn’t, but he really wants me to start drinking and keep up with him.

This time at the bar there is another long-haired, middle-aged man who, like most here, is outrageously rich.

He and Tony are already friends. Friendships here are established on the order of minutes, and I can’t tell if anyone actually likes any of their friends.

This new friend, who is wearing an impeccable Lacoste sweater, puts down his mobile phone and explains that he’s just bought a quarter interest in a marine fuel center in a coastal town up north. His friend (girlfriend?) arrives a few minutes later, puts down an identical mobile phone next to his on the bar and explains that she has just clinched a deal regarding an $11 million vineyard. I figured it would be gauche to ask whether those were U.S .dollars.

I am clearly out of my league here, or in an a league I do not want to be in. I don’t want anyone to put their arm around me. I find that it is hard to convince everyone that I am serious about being married. I’m tired, metaphysically. I make a lame escape within a short while and abscond to my room again, to stare out at the black night, again.