sketchbook: Tuesday 18 October 2011

TUE 18 OCT 2011 ca. 1:00 pm NORTH VANCOUVER DISTRICT LIBRARY

There's a plasticky smell here, exhalation of the naugahide chair. It's soft and cubic, a kind of nondescript taupe color, maybe a tad yellowish. There are four chairs in this alcove by the high windows. And now I'm joined by a retired guy opposite: tall in his white golf-shirt and ball cap, leaning on his right arm as he flips through Maclean's magazine. On the coffee table between us, a low rectangle of yellow-green wood, the color of French Canadian pea soup or of pondwater in sunlight, are strewn a few other publications: People magazine, Metro newspaper, and today's Province, with a full-page face shot of a young man with close-set eyes and the large superimposed headline "Charged," and in smaller type: "with the murder of four women". Each of these journals hangs partly off the edge of the table: a scene of hurry and carelessness.

There is a breathy hum of a large blowing fan, presumably the HVAC system. There are sounds of thumping and ruffling, objects being stacked or sorted or moved, out of sight. Sunlight falls diagonally across the nubby brown-green carpet. Out those high windows is the sunlit plaza, with its parked bicycles and steel chairs and tables belonging to a café. People amble toward the auto-sliding door of the library like wasps returning to a nest. A teenager has sat himself on the pavement by the bike rack, and is now joined by a friend who stands talking to him, hands stuffed deep in his jeans pockets, wool cap pulled down maximally over his head. Now they're joined by a third, hair in a long brush-cut, and they all stand idly talking by the door.

Inside, a sense of cedar and space: high concrete ceilings with great ribbed HVAC ducts running along it; large white cylindrical lamps hang down low, to just a couple of feet above head-height.

Now: sirens loud on Lynn Valley Road; they shoot past and quickly grow quieter. And a Chinese man, slim, middle-aged, troubled-looking, takes hold of The Province and settles into one of the chairs opposite: the one by the window.