The Ear Hustler Magazine

Mike Sauve has written non-fiction for The National Post, The Toronto International Film Festival Group, Exclaim Magazine and other publications. His online fiction has appeared everywhere from Feathertale, Frost Writing, and McSweeney’s to university journals of moderate renown. Stories have also appeared in print in M-Brane, Black and White Journal, Palimpsest 2010, and elsewhere.

A Vaguely Culpable Man

Well, officers, I don’t want to be the rambling type who requires encouragement to get to the point, but some backstory really is necessary by way of context so as to make my actions seem like something other than cowardly.

So I will begin. I was in the middle of two weeks off and bored of my routine which was getting up in the morning and having a glass of orange juice and then beginning...

You’re right, of course. What I’d hoped to convey was that I had been sort of bored and lonely. So I was sitting in a greenhouse reading a book, an excellent George Saunders collection...

Of course. This pretty, you know, mocha, or chocolate, or it’s really difficult to describe these wonderful light-dark skin tones anymore due to the, I’m sure you’ve noticed, proliferation of terms like “mocha skin,” “chocolate skin,” and what-have-you in I don’t know, say the young adult fiction that passes for adult fiction among our sub-literate population, but really, that would be it; so a mocha-skinned girl, a colour of skin for which I have a real affinity by the way, approaches and asks me to take her picture. Now, normally, I am not the type to advance opportunistically on a situation like this, but she lingered so it seemed foolish to read my book in a stand-offish manner given the only reason I was reading in the first place was boredom and loneliness and here was an opportunity to talk to...

Right. So basically this rich Jamaican guy who actually hates the other black guys in the park, who, if you can believe it, this guy being obviously black himself, said, when Obama was elected, and here I’m quoting, said, “Why they going to let the nigger control all the money?” Imagine. Anyway this guy likes to talk to pretty girls as much as anyone so as I’m still in her vicinity he ends up talking to both of us about the state of the economy and the teacher’s pension fund and...

I told you I can’t “cut to the chase.”

Because in a vacuum my actions look, well, less than impressive. I’ll hurry though. So this girl mentions that she’s a writer, and since I am also a writer we end up going for a walk and talking about her self-published e-book which had just become available in print at Borders because it won some college competition. She mentioned book signings. It seemed like a genuine self-publishing success story.

Lately, you might want to know, due to a noted lack of interest from agents and publishers alike, I was wondering if I might convert my meagre online fiction following into some e-book prestige for myself, making the topic of some...

You people really don’t appreciate the art of a good tale. So we walk basically to this inner-city farm. She says she spent five years on a thousand-word short story now selling for $4.99 on Amazon; reasonable given the time spent, if not necessarily the amount of premium content delivered for $4.99. You probably know full well and I don’t have to tell you that most, you know, major, like 400,000 word novels from established novelists only cost $9.99...

Maybe you’re correct; maybe the business of electronic literature isn’t particularly germane to what happened to those Chinese girls and where they were last seen and when. But really gentlemen, trust me, by tale’s end I will have elucidated my own deep-rooted...

So we spend a long time talking at the park overlooking this sort of ravine. Later she feeds the chickens her whole ham sandwich, which I don’t think you’re supposed to do so I kept looking over expecting some inner-city farm employee to crack down on us draconianly and spoil our good time and I’d have had to you know either try to rebuke him like a big man or meekly accept his pointed and hyper-masculine barbs so it would have been a real quandary knowing what to do in the face of this sort of conflict which luckily did not manifest.

Then we’re walking back in the direction we came from and it starts downpouring and under an awning I say, “We may have to start a new life together here,” as in, under the awning, but also with a grander metaphorical implication... you know in addition to having pretty dark or mocha skin she also had very pretty white teeth and laughed a lot. Are you familiar with Zadie Smith? A generous laughter, which was what I really needed, need, continue to need, in my life. Let’s strike that. I can just see how those herky-jerky phrases will look on paper. Moreover, I do not want this transcript to read as maudlin. The press, not to mention future biographers—we’re talking field day.

Later that night we went out for dinner and I paid, not expecting anything in return. But she did give me something. She asked me to read my best short story aloud to her. It is 37 pages, so for a long period I’m reading this but except stopping when people enter the kitchen of the guest house, otherwise I would have felt ostentatious and...

I know as much about the guest house as you would if you sat in the kitchen for a little while. I never saw the Chinese girls inside the guest house. I met them on the porch the next day. The guest house was just really normal. An old lady literally in curlers came down and said, “He won’t be staying the night will he?” referring to me in a rude and insinuating way—again this romantic comedy clichéd unfolding of events. That’s it. No relation to the case.

Can I first just convey how valuable her feedback was to me with regards to the short story I consider my best short story and how rewarding the whole evening was?

Well, I have conveyed it even just by my previous statement, so there. The long and short is we make plans to meet the next day at noon so I can show her around the city. The next morning I wake up, have my orange juice, do 400 crunches like I do every...

Ugghh. So next morning at the guest house the two Chinese girls are out on the porch. Very pretty girls. The dark-skinned writer girl, whose name was Anita, well, still is Anita, had invited them to come along.

So right off the bat the Chinese girls want to go to the Art Gallery of Ontario and something called The Korean Park and I hadn’t planned on going to either of those places. In fact I’d had a fairly concrete plan...

There wasn’t any Korean Park. It turned out they were saying Queen’s Park and I’d misunderstood. So at first I’m miffed at both (A) my plan now being of little value and (B) not getting to spend more quality time with Anita. They all smelled very nice though. And Anita looked somehow twice as appealing as she had the previous day.

So we go to Queen’s Park, Kensington Market, and Tiff Bell Lightbox. Once in a while one of them would brush up against me. I could divide my attention between the three of them which was a real boost to my ego. I have suffered a deficit of female attentions lately.

No signs of distress. It was really an idyllic day of stress-free tourism. There was some ugliness at lunch however. Nothing major, but out of nowhere the diction of Evey and Elly, those were the two Chinese girls, as you know well by now after the dark events of the previous nights and days, became very clipped and rapid.

Elly inexplicably demanded cake and warm milk with... I mean: She’s in sudden hysterics. When these weren’t available she nearly burst into tears.

No one had been informed previously of her sore stomach, which she now advertised with a broad pantomiming of woe. Evey, in admirable defense of Elly, had an increasingly sharp sounding conversation with the also-Chinese waitress and then ordered a dish for propriety’s sake and said in English to us they’d be back after finding cake and warm milk elsewhere on Spadina...

I’m trying to convey their weird mixture of stubborn selfishness and their diametrically opposing need not to be seen as contradictory or impolite. They would nod when we talked them out of the expensive Art Gallery and then pout dramatically when the reality finally dawned on them. Not even like a passive aggressive joke, but like their whole expressive faces just dropped. So after all those sad and dropped expressive faces we agreed to at least go to the Toronto Reference Library with them even though it was late in the day and Anita was in a rush.

They wanted this very specific book on Matte printing which required a time-consuming stacks request. And Anita had to meet someone.

Whom she had to meet was never made clear.

They remained oblivious and kept insisting by means of more devastated-looking pouts that we stay until the book arrived. When it finally came we waited a few minutes and then tried to push them out the door.

They sort of shrugged, as if to say, “Goodbye then,” but we weren’t sure they could make it back to the guest house on their own. Their English was poor and they just seemed, you know, a little lost.

I’m leaving out an important detail I’ll get to in just one moment, but I’d like to say the best part of the whole day was when Anita and I walked home without them. Since she was a little steamed, we thoroughly mocked the cake/warm-milk-request and the other demands they’d imposed on us. A real warmth came between us then. She was sort of leaning into me again.

Okay, the detail was that earlier in the day I’d made plans with Elly and Evey to listen to some music at a bar later in the night. So I went home and contacted a friend saying, “Hey do you want to go out with me and two cute Chinese girls tonight?” And he made a big effort to mislead his wife, but then just as he came back online to confirm, a message from them ruined the plan. And I owed this guy because the last time we’d hung out there’d been this scene where I was really going off on the subject of...

Sure, here’s the first one I got. I had texted everyone a place to meet and they’d agreed. [Reading from Phone] Nick, lolol, our friend he rockstar and tonight we go to his concer. Come with us?” I was a bit concerned, knowing full well that many deviant types would be happy to convince an impressionable and low-TESOL-scoring-ESL-type of their alleged rock stardom when really they are, as you well-know, just deviants attending to their own sinister needs. So I say back, and here it is Is this someone you’ve known for a while, or a stranger you just met? And here they say He our friend. So who am I to actually telephone for clarification and ask a lot of quickly-enunciated questions? I mean these girls were really cute and sort of, excuse the impropriety given the grave circumstances, but sort of, appealing in a, fleshy type of... well, if you know what...

I had a hell of a time finding them because they gave me a totally incorrect address for the pizza place they were waiting at. I perspired under my bulky sweater until finally they gave me the right address. After sitting with them for a minute or two a real menacing native youth comes in stinking like alcohol and puts his arms around them. I couldn’t tell at first if it was the alleged rock star or just some stew bum. But they greet him and I notice he’s kind of handsome in the way where you know he’s got a couple good years left and then it will just be one atrocity after another, abrupt hospitalizations and the like.

Well, he didn’t take to me one bit. He probably thought of me as I did of him, like I was some interloper or something. And like me he had probably boasted to his friends about bringing two very pretty girls around. I think to him he was like the essence of rock and roll and I was some cartoonish bookworm accountant.

Well, first he says, “Where do you think you’re going?” when I stand up to leave with them. Then he stands in the doorway so I can’t pass. And like I said, I work out and was wearing a fairly bulky sweater that left all sorts of room to imagine me as some dangerous lineman and not the somewhat portly online fiction writer you officers see before you today.

So he’s staring me down and I’m staring him down and he’s saying classic fight escalators like, “Why you pushing me?” and I dispute with classic meekness, “You are standing in my way.” And finally he acknowledges the standoff so he and I start walking together with the girls behind, as though he hopes to somehow reconcile. But he continues to challenge me by saying really dumb things. He asked if my writing was trademarked. He asked what the first book I ever read was and I said somewhat dickishly that it was no doubt a children’s book and so then not particularly relevant. He made some dubious boasts about having a sponsor who is supporting him until one of his albums blows up. I could have suggested that it was probably his, you know, homosexual john, but again this guy was about a head taller than me, younger, drunk, and super aggressive.

Uh they were just like standing behind in their vaguely shy, oblivious way, but certainly they were aware of some conflict between us. They may have interpreted it as a sort of cultural or racial dispute or I’m not even sure. Strike that racial bit if you fellows don’t mind. I don’t want to convey race as being important here, but rather drunkenness and aggressiveness.

In the subway station he’s saying, “We could have a great night out man, all you have to do is apologize to me,” and like, no way I’m apologizing to this punk so I say, “You know what, I’m done.” And walk away.

Well there was more, you’re right. I’m editing out my awkward attempt at reconciliation. I offered him a type of high five [demonstrates hand-clasping type of high five] but he wasn’t buying it and wanted the full-on verbal apology. Then another intense stare-down and I felt at a disadvantage because I was wearing these very Burberry specs I’m wearing now, and so I put the glasses in my pocket which I know is a really dangerous, fight-inciting type of move. So it’s right after that, grateful he hadn’t already punched me, that I say, “I’m not doing this,” and leave.

I’m not sure whether I said, “You know what, I’m done” or if I said, “I’m not doing this.” Does it really matter?

I’m good at rationalizing, like, “Those girls are big girls they made their bed they can lie in it.” And they had lived in Shanghai and Beijing respectively so it wasn’t like they were provincial girls unaware of big city dangers and so on. But really, ya, I wish I’d have just said a couple words to them like, as in, “You know this guy might be dangerous,” but there would have been the language barrier and then the guy almost certainly would have punched me during the lengthy period Elly would have spent typing my verbal statements into her translator.

Yep, the last I saw of them. I didn’t even really look in their direction as I was walking away, such was my shame. I mean I know it takes the bigger man to deescalate in those situations, and also I am a legal office administrator in addition to being an online fiction writer so I’m not the kind of guy who gets in fights and then waits around subway stations for cops to show up and so on.

Well the first thing I did was text both their phones and, wait, here it is, That guy is trouble, get away from him first chance you get.

And then, having remembered his claim of playing at Grossman’s Tavern, I checked Grossman’s website only to find it was open mic night. So somewhat spitefully I also texted to both of them, He’s not a rock star it’s just an open mic night, anyone could go on stage.

Two texts back from them. The first seemed suspiciously like either he wrote it, or that he told them what to write, because it was what he’d kept saying to me in person, We could have had a great time.

The second message seemed more likely to have been from them, except for the notable improvement in usage. We don’t know what to say. We thought you were both good guys.

The work of an accomplice? Interesting question that I hadn’t thought of. And yes, it was the last.

Anita, who was a very caring person, and despite how annoying they had been to her, was most concerned. She kept emailing to ask if I’d heard from them and I kept saying no and we kept emailing like that until the police came by yesterday with those photos of those breasts in those bags.

Anyway, do you want to know how things ended up with Anita?

End of official transcript.

Personal Addendum to the Official Transcript—I am adding the necessary conclusion to this story for my own personal papers and all future generations who may one day find these incidents to be of literary importance a la the murder of David Kammerer with regards to Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs:

At the funeral Anita asked me to buy her five-years-in-the-making short story on Amazon. I eventually did only to discover it was of a very poor quality. Rife with egregious grammar errors (e.g., possessive apostrophes where no possessive apostrophes belonged) and syntax like a roller coaster with many missing planks.

I know how difficult criticism can be for the apprentice writer. Especially on a 1000-word story the girl spent five years on, claimed to have won awards for, had sat and signed copies of the collection containing it in book stores and foisted $20 self-published books on charitable arts supporters. We can all easily imagine how those experiences bolster the self-delusion of youth.

So all I say in response is, There is some nice Joycean language here. [which you can always say of gobbledy-gook] But there are quite a few grammatical mistakes and the syntax could be a lot clearer. I recommend The Creative Writer’s Style Guide and workshopping with people other than your immediate friends and family.

She didn’t respond to those the last words shared between us.

What really irks me (outside of how her decampment affects my loneliness since no longer having Anita in my life, who had been like a desperately needed breath of fresh air to a once-trapped coal miner; and how thoughts of her white teeth as she laughed will sometimes pop up unwanted and cause me to weep late into the empty night, write odes, perform dark incantations, try to remote view her daily movements...) is what this means for someone like me who might want to offer an e-book on Amazon. If any rube can have their so-called deliberately vague pure emotions up there, and it’s like a diary service, how will wheat be separated from chaff?

Perhaps more important is what happened to the girls. But you can look it up on Google. Anthony Syrette Double-Murder Dismemberment Trial is what you’re looking for.

Fortunately, I was always described as “a friend” and my deeper motivations weren’t investigated at all. At the crown attorney’s insistence I testified very briefly only that Mr. Syrette did not want me around and had threatened me with violence to this effect.

Of course the girls very literally haunt my dreams. Often, oddly, through texts: If you scared of him why leave him with us and similar condemnations I cannot answer. I see that their graves are kept clean (their bodies were not flown back to China because of prohibitive costs) and I send their parents annual Chinese New Year e-cards describing the great privilege it was to have known their daughters. Last year one parent wrote back, “We know you would have saved them if you could have. You were a good friend to them. We thank and honour you from the bottom of our hearts.”

My romans a clef on Amazon has sold 12 copies, and I know at least six of those were purchased by my mother’s gardening club. And I might have somewhat pathetically bought three or four one late night when the nightmares were haunting me most efficaciously; and anyhow, Anita’s book sold like 500,000 copies and became a major sensation, earning her a publishing contract with Harper Collins. They cleaned up her grammar very effectively and if you know anything about books you might even know exactly which Anita I’m talking about.