Something Missing
Krissy Darch
When a relative is missing there is no resolution, only what families have termed ‘continuous grieving’ or 'ambiguous loss.’
--Platypus Magazine, Edition 92, September 2006
Theorist Lauren Berlant’s definition of justice is this: something happens. At its minimum, its most basic, something is said, something is done, something is recognized. Something interrupts events. Suffering speaks.
I’m sitting in the courthouse, my face covered in a sheen of sweat from my graveyard shift. My runners are filthy on the new carpet. Women’s voices and drumming in the street charge the eerie business-as-usual of men in suits as they gather at the front of the room and take their seats.
It’s the first morning of the Missing Women Inquiry. I’ve come with a skinny, wild-eyed hope that something will happen, something will be said, there will be a shift or crack in the surface of things, an opening through which we can move on.
There is a woman sitting next to me who works at a rape crisis center. She is dressed in a black pea coat, with long tidy hair and conservatively applied makeup. I have mostly stopped talking to my radical feminist friends because I don’t want to have to tell them where I have been working. She asks where I’ve been working. When you occupy an untenable position, you don’t feel you have the right to speak. Unless you wear a good disguise. I am both done with disguises and completely dependent on disguises.
I have been working for a women-only, feminist organization that employs a harm reduction approach. That’s one way of saying it. I work as an on-call worker for a women’s housing program in the Downtown Eastside, out of old converted hotels with long gang histories. I walk the halls late at night, a bottle of anti-bacterial cleanser between me and fifty years of murder.
When I tell the woman in the seat beside me what I do for money, she grimaces. “But they’re dying,” she says.
As Commissioner Wally Oppal begins to speak, the old narrative takes hold, evenly through the microphone while the chanting outside shakes the floor. These women were loved, had mothers, were mothers, were sisters, friends, members of the community, loved and loving. Human in all the ways that everyone else is human. The fact that this needs to be said. The fact that this is still groundwork that needs to be laid. Quotes from family members about character that are meant as restorative justice but pull the skein of the old narrative tighter around us. Like the part of every news article about a murdered girl or woman where friends and family say, She was such a sweet girl. Always smiling. Never would say no to anyone. As though you have to smile all the time to deserve not to get murdered. As though our training to always smile isn’t in fact a gift to our murderers.
Women gather and scream outside of the courthouse while the country watches and listens to the CBC, and still, somehow, it seems like no one hears them. And Constable Steve Addison of the VPD goads residents of the Downtown Eastside to break our “silence.” As I write this, he has a twitter feed being promoted by Global and he is being followed by a film crew. Maybe it’s not so much that we are silent but that he is amplified, and is so used to being amplified and hearing other amplified voices that he can’t hear the truth when it’s a whisper.
I leave the court room, and stand with the women in a circle in the intersection. A woman at the center of the drumming circle leads the chant, What do we want? Her voice carries out strong. Justice! The answer seems flimsy. Something is happening. Each time she screams it out, it sounds different. At first strongly demanding, then strongly afraid, then strongly heartbroken. And each time the answer comes back it sounds terribly the same. Mid-question, she stops drumming and doubles over. The other women in the circle stop, run forward and catch her. The question hangs heavy without an answer. What do we want? What do we want? What do we want?
notes from the beginning of a friendship with a cop/ texting from work
This is the thing. The only people who really give a shit about rape and sexual exploitation are cops and radical feminists. We are natural adversaries, but, as Charles Bowden has said of cops and journalists, sometimes you have no one else to talk to.
I am intriguing to him in the way of a True Crime Novel. A guilty pleasure. I talk to him as an “in” to the world of criminal investigation. I use the world of criminal investigation as a way into him. After the first time we meet, I see him everywhere, even though it’s never actually him. Except for the time I was saying his name to myself, standing on a corner waiting for the light to change, and he pulled up in his car right then and gave me a ride home. Every time I see a car that color, my heart stops and I freeze like a deer looking down the barrel of a rifle. He tells me, have fun tonight. Things like that.
Krissy: I just got spat on by a john.
Cop: Did you punch him in the face?
Krissy: My coworker took care of it.
Cop: See if any of the women there, if they were threatened into working or moved against their will.
Krissy: Sure.
I ask the woman beside me, “Do you know of any girls here who were threatened into working or moved against their will?”
“Oh yeah. That’s how all of them got here. That’s how I got into the sex trade. My boyfriend would beat the shit out of me and tell me go stand on the corner. So I did, and I liked it because I'd be away from him.”
She says the phrase “sex trade” with a self-conscious irony that makes me imagine it hanging in the air between us, in quotation marks.
night shift
It’s late, but it’s hard to tell because there are no windows in this office. We feel the chill in the air as the women slam in and out the metal door. In the common room, the women huddle around the TV watching a crime drama -- a favorite genre. Every few moments, we jump up as usual when we hear a scream, check things out, and report back, Just the TV.
Red-light reports are posted by the front door on a bulletin board. A woman from another housing project comes in to read them carefully. She says, I just wanna see them to keep me off the street. A woman was beaten with a hammer. We post the picture of the one who died. People come in one after another. Oh my god, I saw her just last week, with a walking date. They share information with each other, warn each other about the latest crop of creeps.
Hannah stands in the entrance of the office, leaning against the door frame. Her hair is tied up in pigtails and she wears large hoop earrings and a leopard print halter top. She says she has just come back from a date, and she feels gross. She tells us that the man struck her genitals repeatedly, pissed on her, rubbed coffee creamer and chicken bones all over her. She smells like urine and her knees are shaking. Does she need a hug? No, that’s okay. She stands in the office door a little longer. Does she want to talk about boundaries? About saying “no” if she’s uncomfortable, about leaving? No. I gave him what he wanted. I gave him his fantasy. I’m a businesswoman. She pulls out a brick of cash. Look. She moans as she limps up the stairs to her room.
A tall, clean-cut, muscular young man with a soccer jersey sidles out the door, pointedly avoiding eye contact. He has been in the room of the youngest, most addicted resident. “That was a guilty look,” my coworker says, sitting up straight. I step out of the office and into the entrance way, as if trying to catch a scent of his intentions. On the floor where he passed there is a used condom. I step back into the office, put on some gloves, and tear off a section of paper towel. As I pick up the condom from the floor, I can’t help but reflect on my hourly wage, and what it is all for. A man unzips his pants and bribes a woman with an insulting amount of cash to get him off. An army of women lead the violence prevention workshops, the healthy boundary-setting focus groups, run the art therapy sessions, help treat the wounds, advocate for stable housing, support women in going to the police and through the court system for the worst of the rapes and beatings, and they do the majority of addiction treatment referrals and job retraining workshops. Men unzip their pants. What happens in and around that unzipping is up to the rest of us to sort out. I put the condom in the garbage pail.
distributing attention
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is in theatres, everywhere people are talking about it: at work, at school, my writer friends. The story hinges around a murdered girl as its tragic subject, Harriet: curious, bright, rich, white. Edgar Allan Poe once said that there is nothing more tragic than the death of a beautiful woman.
Tragedy. Heightened drama. A written form. Which subjects are worth writing about? Which subjects count for stories? And which subjects are not worth writing about in a similar way? The suffering of some women is newsworthy, the suffering of other women is not.
In the sorts of narratives that strike people as tragic, both in film and the media, whose deaths are worth writing about? Who counts as a tragic figure? Which women count as beautiful? Distributing attention is distributing cash. What has hold over our imaginations has determined which groups get funded and which don't. Which girls get found and which don't.
The suffering of some women is convenient, narratively speaking. The suffering of other women is inconvenient, narratively speaking. And when I say narrative, I mean also the social order. The suffering of some women is inconvenient to the narrative that a social order likes to tell about itself. The suffering of beautiful women is convenient for narratives of our social order. The white knight, dragging bad men out and beating them up -- this allows for social cohesion, for people to band together and defeat some sort of foe.
When Constable Addison is mad it is not political -- it’s moral, taking vengeance against wrong. When a middle-class or white woman is murdered, the response in the media is moral, universalizing: She could be my daughter, she could be your daughter. Universalizing female innocence and beauty. The defense of female innocence and beauty is a moral defense. Whereas the suffering of Aboriginal women, and women involved in the sex trade, is seen as political, seen as niche, seen as special interest. Not your daughter. Not my daughter. Not universal. The special interest, the political, does not rouse the group’s moral vengeance against wrong.
When you hear the word justice, where do you feel it? Justice is up here. A thought that has risen from a feeling. When you hear the word just, where do you feel it? Just is down here. In the stomach. A feeling from which the thought of justice has arisen. It is a deep and basic sense of what is right and what is wrong. White, middle-class women are the screen on which a society projects their feelings of what is just. The rest get justice. Not a real thing. Just an idea.
inquiry as usual
You can recognize the DTES feminist support workers at the inquiry because we all look a little like Lisbeth Salander. Art imitates life. The Missing Women's Inquiry has become sort of like church to my friends and me: a place that is open almost every day, outside of the regular flow of time and events. A clean and orderly space with ritualistic proceedings and row seating where we watch and listen for some sort of redeeming truth. A place outside of conditions.
The Commissioner is cross-examining a bunch of cops who were involved in the writing of a 2002 report on the RCMP's handling of the missing women files, to look into the rights and wrongs of the investigation. It is sparsely attended. It looks like maybe three friends or family members of the women. The rest, men in suits. White women with conservative haircuts and sensible shoes. Gentle wafting of expensive cologne. I look at the men and think about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, of them watching the movie, wishing they had their very own Lisbeth Salander to fuck in secret lamp-lit rooms.
"Who drafted the report?," the commissioner asks a tall, white man in a grey suit -- he's from the RCMP in Calgary.
I can't help but slump down in my chair.
"Did you split it up by sections?"
My body language is unofficial. My body is unofficial. One of the suited men turns around and notices me, and looks away when he sees me noticing him noticing me. I am one of these women: vulnerable. From vulnus: wound. Woundable. Injurable. Only I'm present, and alive.
"Who reviewed the report?"
In the corner of the room, a ceiling light falls like a spotlight on the poster of the women who died. The only way in which they are present.
"What's your own assessment of the quality of the report?"
From the spectator seating, the women appear as a series of vaguely rectangular blotches of color on a white board. Like a growing number of faces waiting for a train.
"Exhibit 56, tab 5 please."
I find the space comforting. So empty and clean. I slouch in the back of empty and clean. I feel like the only member of a Greek chorus that showed up today, and the drama is all about the procedures of this system and the agents of it. This system that has been acted out on me, on these other women. It has everything to do with me, and nothing to do with me.
"On December 16th, 2002, the report was received and called a job well done."
"Were you ever contacted by the Department of Justice to discuss your report?"
"Were you aware that this report would ever be made public?”
“Were you contacted by the RCMP with respect to your report?"
"When did you become aware that the VPD had drafted their own internal report?”
“Have you read the LePard report?"
The cop answers smoothly: "The report concludes that the RCMP acted appropriately and followed up on investigative leads in the investigation of Robert Pickton."
I'm hungry. I think about the pressure on my bladder. All I've had today is coffee. I think about all the pressure on all the bladders of all these men in suits throughout the entire inquiry, how many trips to the bathroom.
"Yes," the man in the grey suit is saying, "But maybe not to the full investigative ability that could have been done. Looking at it ten years later, there are some things that would have changed. If some things had changed, Robert Pickton might have been arrested sooner."
The questions continue: Who asked for the report? What was its purpose? Who sent the email? What was the deadline?
I think about how this "matter" has passed through so many indifferent hands. I think about my coworkers who can't afford the time to be here.
I think of work, my coworker and I sitting in the office looking through the file of one of the residents. She has a list of regular clients who she stays with, and often leaves for days at a time. On signing the program agreement, residents also must agree to how long we will wait before filing a missing person's report if we don't see them. Some agree to three days, some a week, two weeks -- some refuse. This resident had agreed on one week at the time she signed the program agreement. It has been longer than a week. We have called her emergency contacts, all hospitals. After exhausting all measures we could think of, we file the missing person's report.
That evening she calls us from a trick's place, enraged. She screams, What if I don't want to be found?
What could it mean to be missing, as a woman under patriarchy? Missing to whom? Missing to people who love you? Missing to someone who is trying to kill you? Missing to people who are tracking your every movement with log books and security cameras? Missing: vanished. Still existing, just not here.
missing (adj.) "not present, absent," 1520s, from prp. of miss (v.). Military sense of "not present after a battle but not
known to have been killed or captured" is from 1845. Missing link first attested 1851 in Lyell. Missing person is from
1876.
What if I don’t want to be found? What does it mean to be found? It depends on who you get found by. Women's bathroom stalls in bars across the country carry a common marking: the phrase, in black marker, "protect me from what I want." Which desires do I need protection from?
"What resources were given to you to work on this report?"
"We were given a standalone computer and a small office space."
“Any other expenses?”
"Only for accommodation and meals."
"How long did it take to write the report?"
"It was started in mid-September and it was done by early November."
"What sources of information did you use?"
The man in the grey suit cites Missing Person policy. They tab to page three of the report, and the commissioner asks about the selection of documents chosen for review. The afternoon sun pierces in cracks through the blinds. Shadows pass of circling birds.
All this procedure -- so reasonable. I slouch in the back; slouch into the contours of patriarchy. Middle-aged men glance at me with desire. A board covered in the faces of dead women in the corner of the room, faces waiting outside a window for justice to arrive. Another friend who has worked the sexual assault crisis lines says, At the end of the day, they will say "the investigation was adequate" and there will still be men gazing and women missing. But it is never the end of the day.
Lee/ what is missing in me
When I met Lee, I was taking Crime and Intelligence Analysis bridging courses at BCIT. My rage had led me to radical feminism, and alienation as a radical feminist led to silence, then research led me to criminology and policy. I decided not to tell the community about what I was doing, because if I followed through with it, it would mean I’d be working with cops. I couldn’t talk to the cop honestly about the state and violence. And yet we talked, and I held back, pulled punches. When conditions make it most appropriate to lie, the truth about one’s life becomes criminal. Only a trained forensic team is allowed to look at the bones.
And now, after a year of secrets, I was sitting in another meeting, ready to be part of another one of Emily’s “flying squads.” With paint bombs and spray cans and stencils, through Emily I float on the periphery of what is understood as activism.
We were meeting with a group of women to discuss how we might agitate around the former Vancouver police board member and billionaire David Ho, who had physically assaulted a woman he had met over the Internet, causing her to escape naked into the snow and break her ankle. The group combs over the details: a moat around his house, a fake police car outside his home, owns a golf club on Musqueam territory. At work, I also find out from some of the women who know him personally that he has a five-thousand-dollar crystal crack pipe. These are the details we savor.
Lee sits across from me, a livewire intensity in her as soon as Emily enters the space, and they kiss. I recognize this, because I have seen it in myself. What happens after prolonged periods of being spun at high velocity around someone else’s charismatic personality. The reaching reminds me of the search for justice, my long email threads with the cop trying to break down what I mean by “oppression” -- this wanting to be seen and heard by narcissists. Keeping you forever off-balance.
It’s the search for an elusive justice that leads me here, to this cafe with these women, and away from the classes at BCIT, the Geographic Information Systems for Crime Mapping class, where I choose a Baskerville font, draw a line curvature, and write “Here Be Dragons” on the edge of a map I am supposed to be geocoding for “thefts from auto under $5000.” The prof approaches and chuckles behind my shoulder. “Here be dragons...that’s funny.” He tells me how to properly format my work for the assignment and walks away. I turn back to the computer and can’t bring myself to delete it. Scrolling down through the police data for the thefts and break-ins, I come across a swath of charges under the label “PROSTITUTION.” Almost all individuals charged are women. This isn’t the side I saw myself on.
forensics
In Vancouver, a science is born out of finding missing women. Or not finding them, as the case may be. Outside of the support worker office, the pictures of women still missing remain, appear and disappear in a slow cycle. Sometimes the women are found, and we say practiced words of gratitude as we remove their pictures from the wall.
Approaches to Analysis and Reasoning for Crime Studies: This course covers many approaches to the task of discovering truth.
In forensic art, I begin to study the human face: it’s phases of aging, micro-expressions that indicate deceit. I have an overwhelming desire to make a composite sketch of the problem -- of the colonizer, the misogynist. If I make the composite drawing of all the people who engage in practices which are complicit, or colluding in these systems, I’m left with something blurry and indistinct. I still want something to point to, yet with so many things pointing in this direction, I still can’t point at it.
In an interview with a forensic artist, she mentions that looking at her drawings without the labels, it was very hard to tell who was the perpetrator and who were the lawyers, victims, and family members.
Victim and perpetrator are categories necessary to assign blame. They are necessary to reach a conviction: guilty or innocent. Perhaps it’s because of a legal way of thinking, the dominance of law as a mode of thinking about things. And we use it to think about everyday life. We apply it to extra-legal concepts. We try to reduce people to legal concepts. Law has transcended the court and turned into a way of thinking, permeating realms far beyond itself.
GIS for Crime Mapping: This introductory course provides the essential foundation for understanding what a geographic information system (GIS) is and what it can do, and how law enforcement are utilizing it.
Crime mapping -- the only use of it that I am interested in is finding men who prey on women. I don't care about grow-ops. I don't care about youth delinquency, whatever that even is. The joke of enforcing the law, when the law enforces the inequality between women and the state, which causes the problem. When your need for a person is coming from a damaged place, a place that hurts, a place of lost loss – this is the way women need the law. Can a geographic information system find what is missing in me?
You can find women's remains on a map. You can find patterns of certain kinds of activity. The likelihood, in an eight-block area, that there will be women negotiating with men whom they have never met, putting the parts of them in their mouths that doctors and nurses would not touch without gloves.
Downstairs in the basement, we keep the harm reduction supplies. How our society reduces harm to women: lubed, non-lubed, colored, flavored, tropical.
At Christmas at the women's shelter, we direct our attention to making decorations. I dig through a box of colored condoms, find red, green, and white. We blow them up, tie them in festive bundles, then hang them on the wall. We laugh as we admire our handiwork and wipe the odd tasting residue from our mouths.
interlude (or, a letter to an RCMP mapping expert on why I dropped his course)
When I started the bridging courses it was because I had a friend working in human trafficking who I had met through work I was doing at the time. He told me I should think of being a crime analyst.
The reason I wanted to work with law enforcement organizations is because they deal with violence against women. I've worked with women around the realities of violence in their lives for years, but in organizations that lacked funding and resources. There are lots of issues with police handling of violence against women in the DTES. I thought by going into Criminal Intelligence Analysis I could be part of the change I want to see in the world, so to speak.
While I'm interested in the content of the course, I need to correct an incorrect decision I made previously. I don't think I want to be a crime analyst. If I were to go deeper into it, I would say that I keep coming up against foundational concepts that I disagree with. Crime: against whom? Theft from a car under 5000? I've never owned a car. Theft from whom by whom? Truth: whose truth? “Prostitution”: Why are the women criminalized for something they arrive at often because of inequality? Delinquent youth: What does that even mean? It has never been clear to me that there is room to ask these questions here.
Thanks for asking.
provocation
I see a note in the log that some researchers from the Missing Women Inquiry have come by the shelter to ask if any residents or staff will speak with them. I contact the researcher heading up the project and tell them I’d be willing to answer their questions before my evening shift. Two researchers arrive, and I find them waiting politely outside the metal door in grey afternoon light. They sit with me at the table on bleach-spritzed vinyl chairs in the overnight shelter space. One opens a laptop. I hope you don’t mind if we take notes. I hadn’t expected this. It makes me nervous. The policy researcher types as fast as she can as I unleash the contents of my mind. At the end of the interview, they give me a print-out of a call for policy recommendations, if I’d like to participate in the public forums.
trying to find an apartment in Strathcona
A tall, middle-aged white man with a long grey ponytail greets me at the door of an old apartment building and shakes my hand. He leads me into a smoky smelling office.
“The room that you were asking about, it’s really just a room. I mean, it’s very small.”
“I know.”
“I think you’d probably prefer the one bedroom apartment.”
“I’d like to see both of them.”
“It’s very small...”
“I know. I’m trying to save -- never mind. That’s fine.”
He slides the application across his desk with an odd smile.
“So why are you leaving the place that you’re in now?”
“Um -- well, my roommate might be getting a job outside of Vancouver, so...I would need to either find another roommate or move.”
“I see. So is this roommate a friend or a boyfriend?”
My face flushes hot.
“Boyfriend.”
“And you’re not going with him?”
“Sometimes people go in different directions.”
I try to refocus on the application.
“This is a quiet place. We don’t like a lot of partying here.”
“I’m not really interested in partying.”
“You don’t look like someone whose partying days are over.”
I glance up from the application, then back down.
“What do you do for work?”
“I work in women’s social housing, not far from here.”
“And you like that? Helping people?”
“Um...I guess so.”
“These people get it all handed to them on a silver platter, while they throw it all away. It’s a waste. A waste of life. A shame. At some point, if you ask me, there’s got to be some accountability.” He leans over and looks at the section in which he has asked for a date of birth.
“Oh. You’re 30. You look younger than that. Most women around here have a lot more wear and tear on them at your age.”
This is one of the only places I could find that is in my budget. I leave his office, shaken.
and we sign the tricks in at the door
Handmade snowflakes and hearts decorate office windows. A pair of running shoes is slung over a tangle of electric cables outside. They spin in the wind like a pair of dispossessed chimes. Lee texts me from our apartment, “The internal voices have a sense that I've been hiding more than I've been showing up.” Since we moved in together, we still communicate as though it’s long distance. Her thoughts roll in like little waves, and the rocking makes bearable the hours of the shift, between the monkey tasks of pressing a button and changing the toilet paper and signing in the tricks.
All year I have been signing in tricks at the door for a young Aboriginal woman who is very sick and very addicted. The woman has now moved out, and her room has not been cleaned since she arrived. I sift through a foot deep of garbage and used needles on the floor, separating out the needles into a bio-bin. I find a note in her handwriting: Great Grandmothers, Great Grandfathers, Great Spirit, Help Me Please.
ambiguous loss
All the girls at work want to know: “What happened with the cop?” I can’t tell the story. I feel like a crime scene that he has wandered around in, made observations of, and left.
In the silence of the office while the women sleep, the pixels on the security camera view of the street flicker like a snowstorm. I decide not to send the message, I miss you. The phone still in my hands. I scroll down to Lee’s last text: “There is an eerie absence in the space that Emily has occupied within me. It aches. And what I’m left with is me.” Is it true -- how you feel about the other is how you feel about yourself?
I don’t know if the friendship is really dead because it just went missing one day. Missing: vanished, still existing, just not here. It went to the not here place. It went to a place where it could be. The place where women keep going. Where parts of me keep going. Where do I look to reclaim them, to grieve them? There is no body.
There are so many unknowns in making sense of what happened that details are both important and dangerous. The cop in the suit says, “I hope you are well.” He says, “I thought I saw you downtown.” He says, “Let me ask your opinion on this investigation.”
In dreams, the cop sweats power from the entire surface of his suit. His suit has a shine, he exudes a moist glow. His suit is slick, flapping with his stride, like he has just risen from a pool. Under pressure, power rolls from his grey suit. He glows with a painful glow.
Erase it. Erase him sitting there next to me in the conference room where we met. Erase the story. I can’t erase what happened, but I can erase the map, the pattern.
Somewhere in the gendered breakdown of the labor of protection, I have unlearned how to rely on myself. I have unlearned my instinct to invest hope in myself. What do I want? I want to show what I'm capable of. What I want is also what I fear most: to be seen.
Lee writes, “He is a signifier of what is missing in you, but he is not the thing that could make that part whole.” In her book Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson writes, “Who is the subject of most poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole. When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.” Lee writes, “The thing about lack is that we never had it to begin with. These love experiences illustrate that we were already in lack before them. They come to show us just where that lack resides and just how big the hole was. As a fantasy that desire was always deferred. Absent. Missing. The missing part is now at the level of consciousness. Before it was latent. It had a name. A face. It was real. It sat right in front of me. But her name only holds significance in the way she always did: missing.”
Some tall man in his well-lit chariot. Brown men are invited to be white knights, too. A brown man in a British colonial uniform, articulating policies that will always hate him for what he is. The multi in multi-culturalism will always be white supremacy, with everything else, including him, organized around it. He will only ever be an honorary member in Canadian circles of power -- in a way, like me. He is married to a beautiful white woman who shelters him from racism, allows him to white-ify himself under white supremacy. A beautiful tall man shelters her from misogyny, allows her to male-ify herself under patriarchy. We try to protect each other. As he wanted to tend to the injuries that were inflicted on me for being a woman, I wanted to tend to his. To go pull the arrow of ideology out of his chest. To kiss the wound.
After one year of studying criminal intelligence, I stopped looking for him in the streets. I stopped seeing his car at every corner. I stopped looking for justice in the system he works in. His name signifies what it always has to me: missing.
high-risk individual
I barely sleep the night before the policy forums begin. I have a bad feeling about going up. The policy analyst organizing the forums had initially thought there would be no media there, but corrects herself the day before the forum. I have been working on my recommendations but am not prepared to be quoted in the news.
I watch the morning session on livestream to get a sense of the vibe. A lot of media are there taking pictures. It seems like a bit of an RCMP lovefest, and this one officer keeps going on about "vulnerable women" and "high-risk individuals." This is code for drug addicted, "street entrenched" women. I remember my experience with the landlord. With rent the way it is right now in Vancouver, all low-income single women looking for affordable housing are vulnerable, are "high-risk individuals" -- or at least "at-risk individuals."
Triggered and angry, I walk to Cherry Bomb, pull down a black t-shirt from the rack, and ask for white lettering across the chest that says "HIGH RISK INDIVIDUAL." Within half an hour my t-shirt is made, and I walk to the policy forums. I enter the room, take my seat, and pull out my notebook, and I watch the effect ripple through the room -- a mixture of puzzlement and intrigue.
Commissioner Wally Oppal does a double take at my chest.
The next day, I come dressed in a jacket and new shoes. Some of the high-ranking RCMP officers from other provinces approach me and shake my hand. The cop who was going on about high-risk individuals says he liked my t-shirt. I say, Because any young, single, low-income woman looking for a place to live in Vancouver right now is a high risk individual. The cop laughs and pats my hand before releasing it.
I stand behind the microphone and read out my statement, my whole body shaking.
final days of the inquiry
On the last day of the policy forums, I am kind of sad that it is all over. I was getting fond of seeing Brenda and Elizabeth, the policy researchers, every couple of days. Fond of listening in on the conversations of the high-ranking police officers. Grazing over a table of muffins and tiny croissants with Wally Oppal. The opening prayers and songs, the introductions, We believe that everyone has wisdom. The apologies about the fact that we can’t do the talking circle because of technical issues with the microphone. The health breaks. The free coffee and ice water. The tall trauma counselor.
As I’m slouching in my chair, I realize that all of this is almost over and jolt myself into the present to take stock. Why has this been important to me? Why have I attended almost every session? Because I can’t think of any other context in which high-ranking police officers and members of the community sit together in the same room, in the same seating, eat the same food, follow the same rules, listen to the same speakers, go down alongside each other in the same report. I’m here because of hope, the hope that something will happen. It’s funny to think that for the high-ranking police officers, this is just a necessary appearance before being off to another plane ride, another back rub, another family dinner or vacation. The rest of us go back to the Eastside. The content of the inquiry, necessitating an in-house counselor for trauma triggers, continues to be the content of our lives.
The facilitator is beginning to make her closing comments when a woman in seating along the wall says, Wait. I have to say something. It’s Gunargie O’Sullivan, First Nations radio programmer and activist, who has been attending almost every session. The facilitator pauses, then says yes. O’Sullivan is already standing at the microphone. I have to say this now because this hurts my heart and I don’t want to carry this shit with me. I’ve been sitting here and listening all this time, and today, to listen to Chief Jim Chu not acknowledging the things that happened in the case he talked about -- this is bullshit! This has been going on all through this forum, and no one has said anything. It’s bullshit. I don’t want to carry this in my heart anymore. So I’m saying this now to all of you because I can’t carry it anymore.
She wipes her face and sits down. A Downtown Eastside resident claps, and the facilitator introduces the elder for the closing prayer. Then O’Sullivan stands up again. Can we do a circle? Can we just do this now? Before the facilitator answers, the group is forming an awkward circle around the row seating of the conference room. I head straight for a group of women in the corner, leaving a long line of cops in grey suits. One by one, people start holding hands. The cops bristle. Oh, come on guys, a family member of one of the victims shouts. The cops miserably take each other’s hands, all the way down to the end of the line, to a friend of one of the victims.
“Don’t worry, I washed my hands,” the woman sneers at the cop. He exhales with disciplined resignation, reaches out, and takes her hand.
I look around at the circle of family members, community members, restorative justice academics, policy analysts, and police. As the circle closes and the drumming starts, I feel something shift. In my stomach. Something that has been missing. Something just. Something happening.
My name shows up in the final report five times, with quotes and comments. In a peeling room in a house in Strathcona, I pull my hood up over my head as I scroll down the document to see what it says, the room tilting and swaying under my propped elbows. The fear: the fear of using my voice, and being found out, caught, captured.
When a relative is missing there is no resolution, only what families have termed ‘continuous grieving’ or 'ambiguous loss.’
--Platypus Magazine, Edition 92, September 2006
Theorist Lauren Berlant’s definition of justice is this: something happens. At its minimum, its most basic, something is said, something is done, something is recognized. Something interrupts events. Suffering speaks.
I’m sitting in the courthouse, my face covered in a sheen of sweat from my graveyard shift. My runners are filthy on the new carpet. Women’s voices and drumming in the street charge the eerie business-as-usual of men in suits as they gather at the front of the room and take their seats.
It’s the first morning of the Missing Women Inquiry. I’ve come with a skinny, wild-eyed hope that something will happen, something will be said, there will be a shift or crack in the surface of things, an opening through which we can move on.
There is a woman sitting next to me who works at a rape crisis center. She is dressed in a black pea coat, with long tidy hair and conservatively applied makeup. I have mostly stopped talking to my radical feminist friends because I don’t want to have to tell them where I have been working. She asks where I’ve been working. When you occupy an untenable position, you don’t feel you have the right to speak. Unless you wear a good disguise. I am both done with disguises and completely dependent on disguises.
I have been working for a women-only, feminist organization that employs a harm reduction approach. That’s one way of saying it. I work as an on-call worker for a women’s housing program in the Downtown Eastside, out of old converted hotels with long gang histories. I walk the halls late at night, a bottle of anti-bacterial cleanser between me and fifty years of murder.
When I tell the woman in the seat beside me what I do for money, she grimaces. “But they’re dying,” she says.
As Commissioner Wally Oppal begins to speak, the old narrative takes hold, evenly through the microphone while the chanting outside shakes the floor. These women were loved, had mothers, were mothers, were sisters, friends, members of the community, loved and loving. Human in all the ways that everyone else is human. The fact that this needs to be said. The fact that this is still groundwork that needs to be laid. Quotes from family members about character that are meant as restorative justice but pull the skein of the old narrative tighter around us. Like the part of every news article about a murdered girl or woman where friends and family say, She was such a sweet girl. Always smiling. Never would say no to anyone. As though you have to smile all the time to deserve not to get murdered. As though our training to always smile isn’t in fact a gift to our murderers.
Women gather and scream outside of the courthouse while the country watches and listens to the CBC, and still, somehow, it seems like no one hears them. And Constable Steve Addison of the VPD goads residents of the Downtown Eastside to break our “silence.” As I write this, he has a twitter feed being promoted by Global and he is being followed by a film crew. Maybe it’s not so much that we are silent but that he is amplified, and is so used to being amplified and hearing other amplified voices that he can’t hear the truth when it’s a whisper.
I leave the court room, and stand with the women in a circle in the intersection. A woman at the center of the drumming circle leads the chant, What do we want? Her voice carries out strong. Justice! The answer seems flimsy. Something is happening. Each time she screams it out, it sounds different. At first strongly demanding, then strongly afraid, then strongly heartbroken. And each time the answer comes back it sounds terribly the same. Mid-question, she stops drumming and doubles over. The other women in the circle stop, run forward and catch her. The question hangs heavy without an answer. What do we want? What do we want? What do we want?
notes from the beginning of a friendship with a cop/ texting from work
This is the thing. The only people who really give a shit about rape and sexual exploitation are cops and radical feminists. We are natural adversaries, but, as Charles Bowden has said of cops and journalists, sometimes you have no one else to talk to.
I am intriguing to him in the way of a True Crime Novel. A guilty pleasure. I talk to him as an “in” to the world of criminal investigation. I use the world of criminal investigation as a way into him. After the first time we meet, I see him everywhere, even though it’s never actually him. Except for the time I was saying his name to myself, standing on a corner waiting for the light to change, and he pulled up in his car right then and gave me a ride home. Every time I see a car that color, my heart stops and I freeze like a deer looking down the barrel of a rifle. He tells me, have fun tonight. Things like that.
Krissy: I just got spat on by a john.
Cop: Did you punch him in the face?
Krissy: My coworker took care of it.
Cop: See if any of the women there, if they were threatened into working or moved against their will.
Krissy: Sure.
I ask the woman beside me, “Do you know of any girls here who were threatened into working or moved against their will?”
“Oh yeah. That’s how all of them got here. That’s how I got into the sex trade. My boyfriend would beat the shit out of me and tell me go stand on the corner. So I did, and I liked it because I'd be away from him.”
She says the phrase “sex trade” with a self-conscious irony that makes me imagine it hanging in the air between us, in quotation marks.
night shift
It’s late, but it’s hard to tell because there are no windows in this office. We feel the chill in the air as the women slam in and out the metal door. In the common room, the women huddle around the TV watching a crime drama -- a favorite genre. Every few moments, we jump up as usual when we hear a scream, check things out, and report back, Just the TV.
Red-light reports are posted by the front door on a bulletin board. A woman from another housing project comes in to read them carefully. She says, I just wanna see them to keep me off the street. A woman was beaten with a hammer. We post the picture of the one who died. People come in one after another. Oh my god, I saw her just last week, with a walking date. They share information with each other, warn each other about the latest crop of creeps.
Hannah stands in the entrance of the office, leaning against the door frame. Her hair is tied up in pigtails and she wears large hoop earrings and a leopard print halter top. She says she has just come back from a date, and she feels gross. She tells us that the man struck her genitals repeatedly, pissed on her, rubbed coffee creamer and chicken bones all over her. She smells like urine and her knees are shaking. Does she need a hug? No, that’s okay. She stands in the office door a little longer. Does she want to talk about boundaries? About saying “no” if she’s uncomfortable, about leaving? No. I gave him what he wanted. I gave him his fantasy. I’m a businesswoman. She pulls out a brick of cash. Look. She moans as she limps up the stairs to her room.
A tall, clean-cut, muscular young man with a soccer jersey sidles out the door, pointedly avoiding eye contact. He has been in the room of the youngest, most addicted resident. “That was a guilty look,” my coworker says, sitting up straight. I step out of the office and into the entrance way, as if trying to catch a scent of his intentions. On the floor where he passed there is a used condom. I step back into the office, put on some gloves, and tear off a section of paper towel. As I pick up the condom from the floor, I can’t help but reflect on my hourly wage, and what it is all for. A man unzips his pants and bribes a woman with an insulting amount of cash to get him off. An army of women lead the violence prevention workshops, the healthy boundary-setting focus groups, run the art therapy sessions, help treat the wounds, advocate for stable housing, support women in going to the police and through the court system for the worst of the rapes and beatings, and they do the majority of addiction treatment referrals and job retraining workshops. Men unzip their pants. What happens in and around that unzipping is up to the rest of us to sort out. I put the condom in the garbage pail.
distributing attention
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is in theatres, everywhere people are talking about it: at work, at school, my writer friends. The story hinges around a murdered girl as its tragic subject, Harriet: curious, bright, rich, white. Edgar Allan Poe once said that there is nothing more tragic than the death of a beautiful woman.
Tragedy. Heightened drama. A written form. Which subjects are worth writing about? Which subjects count for stories? And which subjects are not worth writing about in a similar way? The suffering of some women is newsworthy, the suffering of other women is not.
In the sorts of narratives that strike people as tragic, both in film and the media, whose deaths are worth writing about? Who counts as a tragic figure? Which women count as beautiful? Distributing attention is distributing cash. What has hold over our imaginations has determined which groups get funded and which don't. Which girls get found and which don't.
The suffering of some women is convenient, narratively speaking. The suffering of other women is inconvenient, narratively speaking. And when I say narrative, I mean also the social order. The suffering of some women is inconvenient to the narrative that a social order likes to tell about itself. The suffering of beautiful women is convenient for narratives of our social order. The white knight, dragging bad men out and beating them up -- this allows for social cohesion, for people to band together and defeat some sort of foe.
When Constable Addison is mad it is not political -- it’s moral, taking vengeance against wrong. When a middle-class or white woman is murdered, the response in the media is moral, universalizing: She could be my daughter, she could be your daughter. Universalizing female innocence and beauty. The defense of female innocence and beauty is a moral defense. Whereas the suffering of Aboriginal women, and women involved in the sex trade, is seen as political, seen as niche, seen as special interest. Not your daughter. Not my daughter. Not universal. The special interest, the political, does not rouse the group’s moral vengeance against wrong.
When you hear the word justice, where do you feel it? Justice is up here. A thought that has risen from a feeling. When you hear the word just, where do you feel it? Just is down here. In the stomach. A feeling from which the thought of justice has arisen. It is a deep and basic sense of what is right and what is wrong. White, middle-class women are the screen on which a society projects their feelings of what is just. The rest get justice. Not a real thing. Just an idea.
inquiry as usual
You can recognize the DTES feminist support workers at the inquiry because we all look a little like Lisbeth Salander. Art imitates life. The Missing Women's Inquiry has become sort of like church to my friends and me: a place that is open almost every day, outside of the regular flow of time and events. A clean and orderly space with ritualistic proceedings and row seating where we watch and listen for some sort of redeeming truth. A place outside of conditions.
The Commissioner is cross-examining a bunch of cops who were involved in the writing of a 2002 report on the RCMP's handling of the missing women files, to look into the rights and wrongs of the investigation. It is sparsely attended. It looks like maybe three friends or family members of the women. The rest, men in suits. White women with conservative haircuts and sensible shoes. Gentle wafting of expensive cologne. I look at the men and think about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, of them watching the movie, wishing they had their very own Lisbeth Salander to fuck in secret lamp-lit rooms.
"Who drafted the report?," the commissioner asks a tall, white man in a grey suit -- he's from the RCMP in Calgary.
I can't help but slump down in my chair.
"Did you split it up by sections?"
My body language is unofficial. My body is unofficial. One of the suited men turns around and notices me, and looks away when he sees me noticing him noticing me. I am one of these women: vulnerable. From vulnus: wound. Woundable. Injurable. Only I'm present, and alive.
"Who reviewed the report?"
In the corner of the room, a ceiling light falls like a spotlight on the poster of the women who died. The only way in which they are present.
"What's your own assessment of the quality of the report?"
From the spectator seating, the women appear as a series of vaguely rectangular blotches of color on a white board. Like a growing number of faces waiting for a train.
"Exhibit 56, tab 5 please."
I find the space comforting. So empty and clean. I slouch in the back of empty and clean. I feel like the only member of a Greek chorus that showed up today, and the drama is all about the procedures of this system and the agents of it. This system that has been acted out on me, on these other women. It has everything to do with me, and nothing to do with me.
"On December 16th, 2002, the report was received and called a job well done."
"Were you ever contacted by the Department of Justice to discuss your report?"
"Were you aware that this report would ever be made public?”
“Were you contacted by the RCMP with respect to your report?"
"When did you become aware that the VPD had drafted their own internal report?”
“Have you read the LePard report?"
The cop answers smoothly: "The report concludes that the RCMP acted appropriately and followed up on investigative leads in the investigation of Robert Pickton."
I'm hungry. I think about the pressure on my bladder. All I've had today is coffee. I think about all the pressure on all the bladders of all these men in suits throughout the entire inquiry, how many trips to the bathroom.
"Yes," the man in the grey suit is saying, "But maybe not to the full investigative ability that could have been done. Looking at it ten years later, there are some things that would have changed. If some things had changed, Robert Pickton might have been arrested sooner."
The questions continue: Who asked for the report? What was its purpose? Who sent the email? What was the deadline?
I think about how this "matter" has passed through so many indifferent hands. I think about my coworkers who can't afford the time to be here.
I think of work, my coworker and I sitting in the office looking through the file of one of the residents. She has a list of regular clients who she stays with, and often leaves for days at a time. On signing the program agreement, residents also must agree to how long we will wait before filing a missing person's report if we don't see them. Some agree to three days, some a week, two weeks -- some refuse. This resident had agreed on one week at the time she signed the program agreement. It has been longer than a week. We have called her emergency contacts, all hospitals. After exhausting all measures we could think of, we file the missing person's report.
That evening she calls us from a trick's place, enraged. She screams, What if I don't want to be found?
What could it mean to be missing, as a woman under patriarchy? Missing to whom? Missing to people who love you? Missing to someone who is trying to kill you? Missing to people who are tracking your every movement with log books and security cameras? Missing: vanished. Still existing, just not here.
missing (adj.) "not present, absent," 1520s, from prp. of miss (v.). Military sense of "not present after a battle but not
known to have been killed or captured" is from 1845. Missing link first attested 1851 in Lyell. Missing person is from
1876.
What if I don’t want to be found? What does it mean to be found? It depends on who you get found by. Women's bathroom stalls in bars across the country carry a common marking: the phrase, in black marker, "protect me from what I want." Which desires do I need protection from?
"What resources were given to you to work on this report?"
"We were given a standalone computer and a small office space."
“Any other expenses?”
"Only for accommodation and meals."
"How long did it take to write the report?"
"It was started in mid-September and it was done by early November."
"What sources of information did you use?"
The man in the grey suit cites Missing Person policy. They tab to page three of the report, and the commissioner asks about the selection of documents chosen for review. The afternoon sun pierces in cracks through the blinds. Shadows pass of circling birds.
All this procedure -- so reasonable. I slouch in the back; slouch into the contours of patriarchy. Middle-aged men glance at me with desire. A board covered in the faces of dead women in the corner of the room, faces waiting outside a window for justice to arrive. Another friend who has worked the sexual assault crisis lines says, At the end of the day, they will say "the investigation was adequate" and there will still be men gazing and women missing. But it is never the end of the day.
Lee/ what is missing in me
When I met Lee, I was taking Crime and Intelligence Analysis bridging courses at BCIT. My rage had led me to radical feminism, and alienation as a radical feminist led to silence, then research led me to criminology and policy. I decided not to tell the community about what I was doing, because if I followed through with it, it would mean I’d be working with cops. I couldn’t talk to the cop honestly about the state and violence. And yet we talked, and I held back, pulled punches. When conditions make it most appropriate to lie, the truth about one’s life becomes criminal. Only a trained forensic team is allowed to look at the bones.
And now, after a year of secrets, I was sitting in another meeting, ready to be part of another one of Emily’s “flying squads.” With paint bombs and spray cans and stencils, through Emily I float on the periphery of what is understood as activism.
We were meeting with a group of women to discuss how we might agitate around the former Vancouver police board member and billionaire David Ho, who had physically assaulted a woman he had met over the Internet, causing her to escape naked into the snow and break her ankle. The group combs over the details: a moat around his house, a fake police car outside his home, owns a golf club on Musqueam territory. At work, I also find out from some of the women who know him personally that he has a five-thousand-dollar crystal crack pipe. These are the details we savor.
Lee sits across from me, a livewire intensity in her as soon as Emily enters the space, and they kiss. I recognize this, because I have seen it in myself. What happens after prolonged periods of being spun at high velocity around someone else’s charismatic personality. The reaching reminds me of the search for justice, my long email threads with the cop trying to break down what I mean by “oppression” -- this wanting to be seen and heard by narcissists. Keeping you forever off-balance.
It’s the search for an elusive justice that leads me here, to this cafe with these women, and away from the classes at BCIT, the Geographic Information Systems for Crime Mapping class, where I choose a Baskerville font, draw a line curvature, and write “Here Be Dragons” on the edge of a map I am supposed to be geocoding for “thefts from auto under $5000.” The prof approaches and chuckles behind my shoulder. “Here be dragons...that’s funny.” He tells me how to properly format my work for the assignment and walks away. I turn back to the computer and can’t bring myself to delete it. Scrolling down through the police data for the thefts and break-ins, I come across a swath of charges under the label “PROSTITUTION.” Almost all individuals charged are women. This isn’t the side I saw myself on.
forensics
In Vancouver, a science is born out of finding missing women. Or not finding them, as the case may be. Outside of the support worker office, the pictures of women still missing remain, appear and disappear in a slow cycle. Sometimes the women are found, and we say practiced words of gratitude as we remove their pictures from the wall.
Approaches to Analysis and Reasoning for Crime Studies: This course covers many approaches to the task of discovering truth.
In forensic art, I begin to study the human face: it’s phases of aging, micro-expressions that indicate deceit. I have an overwhelming desire to make a composite sketch of the problem -- of the colonizer, the misogynist. If I make the composite drawing of all the people who engage in practices which are complicit, or colluding in these systems, I’m left with something blurry and indistinct. I still want something to point to, yet with so many things pointing in this direction, I still can’t point at it.
In an interview with a forensic artist, she mentions that looking at her drawings without the labels, it was very hard to tell who was the perpetrator and who were the lawyers, victims, and family members.
Victim and perpetrator are categories necessary to assign blame. They are necessary to reach a conviction: guilty or innocent. Perhaps it’s because of a legal way of thinking, the dominance of law as a mode of thinking about things. And we use it to think about everyday life. We apply it to extra-legal concepts. We try to reduce people to legal concepts. Law has transcended the court and turned into a way of thinking, permeating realms far beyond itself.
GIS for Crime Mapping: This introductory course provides the essential foundation for understanding what a geographic information system (GIS) is and what it can do, and how law enforcement are utilizing it.
Crime mapping -- the only use of it that I am interested in is finding men who prey on women. I don't care about grow-ops. I don't care about youth delinquency, whatever that even is. The joke of enforcing the law, when the law enforces the inequality between women and the state, which causes the problem. When your need for a person is coming from a damaged place, a place that hurts, a place of lost loss – this is the way women need the law. Can a geographic information system find what is missing in me?
You can find women's remains on a map. You can find patterns of certain kinds of activity. The likelihood, in an eight-block area, that there will be women negotiating with men whom they have never met, putting the parts of them in their mouths that doctors and nurses would not touch without gloves.
Downstairs in the basement, we keep the harm reduction supplies. How our society reduces harm to women: lubed, non-lubed, colored, flavored, tropical.
At Christmas at the women's shelter, we direct our attention to making decorations. I dig through a box of colored condoms, find red, green, and white. We blow them up, tie them in festive bundles, then hang them on the wall. We laugh as we admire our handiwork and wipe the odd tasting residue from our mouths.
interlude (or, a letter to an RCMP mapping expert on why I dropped his course)
When I started the bridging courses it was because I had a friend working in human trafficking who I had met through work I was doing at the time. He told me I should think of being a crime analyst.
The reason I wanted to work with law enforcement organizations is because they deal with violence against women. I've worked with women around the realities of violence in their lives for years, but in organizations that lacked funding and resources. There are lots of issues with police handling of violence against women in the DTES. I thought by going into Criminal Intelligence Analysis I could be part of the change I want to see in the world, so to speak.
While I'm interested in the content of the course, I need to correct an incorrect decision I made previously. I don't think I want to be a crime analyst. If I were to go deeper into it, I would say that I keep coming up against foundational concepts that I disagree with. Crime: against whom? Theft from a car under 5000? I've never owned a car. Theft from whom by whom? Truth: whose truth? “Prostitution”: Why are the women criminalized for something they arrive at often because of inequality? Delinquent youth: What does that even mean? It has never been clear to me that there is room to ask these questions here.
Thanks for asking.
provocation
I see a note in the log that some researchers from the Missing Women Inquiry have come by the shelter to ask if any residents or staff will speak with them. I contact the researcher heading up the project and tell them I’d be willing to answer their questions before my evening shift. Two researchers arrive, and I find them waiting politely outside the metal door in grey afternoon light. They sit with me at the table on bleach-spritzed vinyl chairs in the overnight shelter space. One opens a laptop. I hope you don’t mind if we take notes. I hadn’t expected this. It makes me nervous. The policy researcher types as fast as she can as I unleash the contents of my mind. At the end of the interview, they give me a print-out of a call for policy recommendations, if I’d like to participate in the public forums.
trying to find an apartment in Strathcona
A tall, middle-aged white man with a long grey ponytail greets me at the door of an old apartment building and shakes my hand. He leads me into a smoky smelling office.
“The room that you were asking about, it’s really just a room. I mean, it’s very small.”
“I know.”
“I think you’d probably prefer the one bedroom apartment.”
“I’d like to see both of them.”
“It’s very small...”
“I know. I’m trying to save -- never mind. That’s fine.”
He slides the application across his desk with an odd smile.
“So why are you leaving the place that you’re in now?”
“Um -- well, my roommate might be getting a job outside of Vancouver, so...I would need to either find another roommate or move.”
“I see. So is this roommate a friend or a boyfriend?”
My face flushes hot.
“Boyfriend.”
“And you’re not going with him?”
“Sometimes people go in different directions.”
I try to refocus on the application.
“This is a quiet place. We don’t like a lot of partying here.”
“I’m not really interested in partying.”
“You don’t look like someone whose partying days are over.”
I glance up from the application, then back down.
“What do you do for work?”
“I work in women’s social housing, not far from here.”
“And you like that? Helping people?”
“Um...I guess so.”
“These people get it all handed to them on a silver platter, while they throw it all away. It’s a waste. A waste of life. A shame. At some point, if you ask me, there’s got to be some accountability.” He leans over and looks at the section in which he has asked for a date of birth.
“Oh. You’re 30. You look younger than that. Most women around here have a lot more wear and tear on them at your age.”
This is one of the only places I could find that is in my budget. I leave his office, shaken.
and we sign the tricks in at the door
Handmade snowflakes and hearts decorate office windows. A pair of running shoes is slung over a tangle of electric cables outside. They spin in the wind like a pair of dispossessed chimes. Lee texts me from our apartment, “The internal voices have a sense that I've been hiding more than I've been showing up.” Since we moved in together, we still communicate as though it’s long distance. Her thoughts roll in like little waves, and the rocking makes bearable the hours of the shift, between the monkey tasks of pressing a button and changing the toilet paper and signing in the tricks.
All year I have been signing in tricks at the door for a young Aboriginal woman who is very sick and very addicted. The woman has now moved out, and her room has not been cleaned since she arrived. I sift through a foot deep of garbage and used needles on the floor, separating out the needles into a bio-bin. I find a note in her handwriting: Great Grandmothers, Great Grandfathers, Great Spirit, Help Me Please.
ambiguous loss
All the girls at work want to know: “What happened with the cop?” I can’t tell the story. I feel like a crime scene that he has wandered around in, made observations of, and left.
In the silence of the office while the women sleep, the pixels on the security camera view of the street flicker like a snowstorm. I decide not to send the message, I miss you. The phone still in my hands. I scroll down to Lee’s last text: “There is an eerie absence in the space that Emily has occupied within me. It aches. And what I’m left with is me.” Is it true -- how you feel about the other is how you feel about yourself?
I don’t know if the friendship is really dead because it just went missing one day. Missing: vanished, still existing, just not here. It went to the not here place. It went to a place where it could be. The place where women keep going. Where parts of me keep going. Where do I look to reclaim them, to grieve them? There is no body.
There are so many unknowns in making sense of what happened that details are both important and dangerous. The cop in the suit says, “I hope you are well.” He says, “I thought I saw you downtown.” He says, “Let me ask your opinion on this investigation.”
In dreams, the cop sweats power from the entire surface of his suit. His suit has a shine, he exudes a moist glow. His suit is slick, flapping with his stride, like he has just risen from a pool. Under pressure, power rolls from his grey suit. He glows with a painful glow.
Erase it. Erase him sitting there next to me in the conference room where we met. Erase the story. I can’t erase what happened, but I can erase the map, the pattern.
Somewhere in the gendered breakdown of the labor of protection, I have unlearned how to rely on myself. I have unlearned my instinct to invest hope in myself. What do I want? I want to show what I'm capable of. What I want is also what I fear most: to be seen.
Lee writes, “He is a signifier of what is missing in you, but he is not the thing that could make that part whole.” In her book Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson writes, “Who is the subject of most poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole. When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.” Lee writes, “The thing about lack is that we never had it to begin with. These love experiences illustrate that we were already in lack before them. They come to show us just where that lack resides and just how big the hole was. As a fantasy that desire was always deferred. Absent. Missing. The missing part is now at the level of consciousness. Before it was latent. It had a name. A face. It was real. It sat right in front of me. But her name only holds significance in the way she always did: missing.”
Some tall man in his well-lit chariot. Brown men are invited to be white knights, too. A brown man in a British colonial uniform, articulating policies that will always hate him for what he is. The multi in multi-culturalism will always be white supremacy, with everything else, including him, organized around it. He will only ever be an honorary member in Canadian circles of power -- in a way, like me. He is married to a beautiful white woman who shelters him from racism, allows him to white-ify himself under white supremacy. A beautiful tall man shelters her from misogyny, allows her to male-ify herself under patriarchy. We try to protect each other. As he wanted to tend to the injuries that were inflicted on me for being a woman, I wanted to tend to his. To go pull the arrow of ideology out of his chest. To kiss the wound.
After one year of studying criminal intelligence, I stopped looking for him in the streets. I stopped seeing his car at every corner. I stopped looking for justice in the system he works in. His name signifies what it always has to me: missing.
high-risk individual
I barely sleep the night before the policy forums begin. I have a bad feeling about going up. The policy analyst organizing the forums had initially thought there would be no media there, but corrects herself the day before the forum. I have been working on my recommendations but am not prepared to be quoted in the news.
I watch the morning session on livestream to get a sense of the vibe. A lot of media are there taking pictures. It seems like a bit of an RCMP lovefest, and this one officer keeps going on about "vulnerable women" and "high-risk individuals." This is code for drug addicted, "street entrenched" women. I remember my experience with the landlord. With rent the way it is right now in Vancouver, all low-income single women looking for affordable housing are vulnerable, are "high-risk individuals" -- or at least "at-risk individuals."
Triggered and angry, I walk to Cherry Bomb, pull down a black t-shirt from the rack, and ask for white lettering across the chest that says "HIGH RISK INDIVIDUAL." Within half an hour my t-shirt is made, and I walk to the policy forums. I enter the room, take my seat, and pull out my notebook, and I watch the effect ripple through the room -- a mixture of puzzlement and intrigue.
Commissioner Wally Oppal does a double take at my chest.
The next day, I come dressed in a jacket and new shoes. Some of the high-ranking RCMP officers from other provinces approach me and shake my hand. The cop who was going on about high-risk individuals says he liked my t-shirt. I say, Because any young, single, low-income woman looking for a place to live in Vancouver right now is a high risk individual. The cop laughs and pats my hand before releasing it.
I stand behind the microphone and read out my statement, my whole body shaking.
final days of the inquiry
On the last day of the policy forums, I am kind of sad that it is all over. I was getting fond of seeing Brenda and Elizabeth, the policy researchers, every couple of days. Fond of listening in on the conversations of the high-ranking police officers. Grazing over a table of muffins and tiny croissants with Wally Oppal. The opening prayers and songs, the introductions, We believe that everyone has wisdom. The apologies about the fact that we can’t do the talking circle because of technical issues with the microphone. The health breaks. The free coffee and ice water. The tall trauma counselor.
As I’m slouching in my chair, I realize that all of this is almost over and jolt myself into the present to take stock. Why has this been important to me? Why have I attended almost every session? Because I can’t think of any other context in which high-ranking police officers and members of the community sit together in the same room, in the same seating, eat the same food, follow the same rules, listen to the same speakers, go down alongside each other in the same report. I’m here because of hope, the hope that something will happen. It’s funny to think that for the high-ranking police officers, this is just a necessary appearance before being off to another plane ride, another back rub, another family dinner or vacation. The rest of us go back to the Eastside. The content of the inquiry, necessitating an in-house counselor for trauma triggers, continues to be the content of our lives.
The facilitator is beginning to make her closing comments when a woman in seating along the wall says, Wait. I have to say something. It’s Gunargie O’Sullivan, First Nations radio programmer and activist, who has been attending almost every session. The facilitator pauses, then says yes. O’Sullivan is already standing at the microphone. I have to say this now because this hurts my heart and I don’t want to carry this shit with me. I’ve been sitting here and listening all this time, and today, to listen to Chief Jim Chu not acknowledging the things that happened in the case he talked about -- this is bullshit! This has been going on all through this forum, and no one has said anything. It’s bullshit. I don’t want to carry this in my heart anymore. So I’m saying this now to all of you because I can’t carry it anymore.
She wipes her face and sits down. A Downtown Eastside resident claps, and the facilitator introduces the elder for the closing prayer. Then O’Sullivan stands up again. Can we do a circle? Can we just do this now? Before the facilitator answers, the group is forming an awkward circle around the row seating of the conference room. I head straight for a group of women in the corner, leaving a long line of cops in grey suits. One by one, people start holding hands. The cops bristle. Oh, come on guys, a family member of one of the victims shouts. The cops miserably take each other’s hands, all the way down to the end of the line, to a friend of one of the victims.
“Don’t worry, I washed my hands,” the woman sneers at the cop. He exhales with disciplined resignation, reaches out, and takes her hand.
I look around at the circle of family members, community members, restorative justice academics, policy analysts, and police. As the circle closes and the drumming starts, I feel something shift. In my stomach. Something that has been missing. Something just. Something happening.
My name shows up in the final report five times, with quotes and comments. In a peeling room in a house in Strathcona, I pull my hood up over my head as I scroll down the document to see what it says, the room tilting and swaying under my propped elbows. The fear: the fear of using my voice, and being found out, caught, captured.
Working notes
This piece was lived and written on the unsurrendered territories of the Squamish, Tseilwau-tuth, and Musqueam people.
About the author
Krissy Darch is a writer, researcher and visual artist.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.