Wild Awake

monk doing walking meditation in a garden of very tiny bonsai trees.
    Skunk makes me promise to call him at once if I am hit by any more cars, or if I have even the slightest suspicion that I am being followed by secret agents. We fix my brakes and he sniffs my hair like a flower. We listen to radio mysteries and I climb onto him like a branch. We read the Tao te Ching out loud to one another and suck on guavas. We ride bikes to English Bay and build a nest in the sand. We make love ten thousand times and then make omelets. I call him Bicycle Boy. He calls me Crazy Girl.
    Denny says, “Where are you always going on your bike?”

chapter thirty-one
    Since Lukas doesn’t seem to think we need to practice anymore, I spend the last few days before Battle of the Bands finals keeping a close eye on Skunk. He doesn’t like to talk about his paranoia-thing, but ever since my bicycle crash I’ve been noticing the ways it slips out when he’s not paying attention, like a foreign accent or a stutter he’s worked hard to tame.
    Sometimes when Skunk wakes up he’s really groggy and disoriented, and he squints at me suspiciously like I’m a Russian spy whose motives are not to be trusted.
    Sometimes when I show up at his house without calling first, I catch him standing outside smoking with a pile of cigarette butts at his feet, his face blank like an open document with all the text deleted.
    Sometimes when we snarfle he gets embarrassed, and when I ask him why he’s embarrassed, he gets apologetic and says he didn’t always used to be this fat.
    I tell him he’s my love-bison and to stop apologizing.
    I silently take note of all the things that trigger his paranoia and steer clear of them when we’re together. I do this so masterfully that Skunk thinks he’s the one looking out for me .
    “You should really wear a helmet,” he says, and I pat his big warm hand. “Oh, Bicycle Boy,” I say. “Most things in life feel better when you don’t have a chunk of Styrofoam strapped to your head.”
    We ride our bikes to the university and go to the Nitobe Memorial Garden and walk around looking at the little stone pagodas and drinking tea Skunk brought in a silver thermos. I make up stories about everything we see: This is the temple where the Frog King lost his teeth, this is the pond where the Riot Snake wrestled with a lightning bolt, causing daffodils to be invented.
    “Oh, Crazy Girl,” says Skunk. “I love to listen to you talk.”
    On the ride back to Skunk’s house I count all the billboards for new condo developments.
    LUXURY LIVING IN THE HEART OF GRANVILLE ISLAND
    LIVE. WORK. SHOP. PLAY
    AN EXCLUSIVE WATERFRONT LIVING COMMUNITY
    From the looks of the billboards, it appears that people who live in condos spend most of their time shopping, drinking cappuccinos, and doing yoga. As a matter of fact, the new condo developments are basically ashrams: billboard after billboard of slender white women in yoga pants doing the lotus position in front of windows showing blue-white views of the North Shore. Prices starting in the high four hundreds. Om Shanti Om.
    Later, at home, I Google the Imperial Hotel, and just as I feared, the top hit is for a yoga condo that will soon be taking its place on Columbia Street. A month ago this wouldn’t have bothered me, because the Imperial is a horrible murder-hole unfit for human habitation, but now that I’ve met Doug and found Sukey’s rooftop it feels like a profound injustice, and I immediately fire off an email to the developers, informing them of my objections.
    That night I sneak back to Skunk’s house very late, after Denny has gone to bed. I rap softly on Skunk’s sliding glass door, and he answers it a moment later.
    “Oh, Crazy Girl,” he says, and lets me in.
    We’re sitting in the radio temple, drinking pine-needle tea and taking turns reading the Tao out loud, when we hear footsteps creaking upstairs, and then Skunk’s aunt appears at the top of the stairs wearing those big-butt sweatpants I borrowed the first time I stayed over. I’ve never met Skunk’s aunt or uncle before, because so far we’ve managed to evade them. But here she is. She stops when she gets halfway down the stairs and stares at me like I’m an escaped baboon Skunk has been harboring in her basement.
    I’m about to offer her some tea, since she seems to still be awake at four a.m. anyway. But then I realize maybe she’s awake at four a.m. because the sound of us reading woke her