Pineapple

I remember when breathing in Vancouver was normal. There was no pre-planning of the seasons back then. Now, I prepare as if for a voyage. At the summer solstice, smoke irons approach from all directions, the city at the centre of currents. Forest fire smoke flows down from the north, drifts ash over the reservoir’s blank eye. The twin sponges in my torso shrink. Before I know, my lungs know.

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           The night before I was diagnosed, five years ago, I dreamed about going around this apartment I share with my two tanks of fish, rushing room to room to room, trying to suck air out of objects. A hairbrush, a mug’s side, the wireless router. I had so few possessions. I pressed the plastic and ceramic against my lips. The objects gave nothing. I continued cupping my lips on things, some more porous—a rolled-up newspaper, a wool hat. Sucked in hard, expecting relief, woke up gasping, the bed’s dark field around me, a bent dream gripped in my throat. 

           That dream finally sent me to the clinic. 

           A doctor with a British accent in a white coat and green amphibious runners diagnosed me in seven minutes flat. 

           “Asthma?” I debated with him. “I’ve never had asthma before.”             

           “That is the meaning of diagnosis,” he said. He smiled, then handed me my first inhaler. 

           One dose and my lungs swelled, hummed—a puffer fish happy in a new chemical bath. Chambers opened rows of small doors, my gills glistened. 

           “Lots of new cases,” the doctor said. “It’s all the smoke. Chronic smoke, chronic inflammation. That’s all it is.” 

           I wanted him to ask me: Is there any other reason you are having trouble breathing these days? Instead, he flapped away in his bright shoes and white jacket, and left a prescription on the examination table like a receipt after bad table service.

           The steroid pills he prescribed opened up deep sleeves of green energy. I walked around for days looking for lampposts to scale, swallowing the elixir of oxygen—forgotten drug. I lay on my back on the chipped maroon tile of the bathroom in my shitty new apartment and stuffed my lungs and when I emptied them my breathing went slack down to a hard glow that waits below effort. I’d forgotten what breathing could be. How open, how satiating.

           The pills were just for seven days. I crashed into withdrawal. Lungs open, the ventricles on my chest’s surface exposed to the sun. I sucked the inhaler frantically like the terrified caricature I’d been in that dream.

           The inhalers were expensive. Now, part of my monthly budget was the price of living through smoke. However, I told myself: Now you have a solution. You have a diagnosis. That is something.

                                   ***

That summer, a new being pressed down over the city—it was called a heat dome. 

           On the street I passed people and recognized the sore, breathless whine. Asthma was everywhere—in the gasp of busses and trucks braking, in the hesitant chorus of computers at work, and in the air conditioning unit in the one cold room, the boardroom that I visited five times per day to lay out rows of printed reports, aligning the logos like long rows of eyes. I expected the old breathless feeling to return, and whenever I felt that fear, I gripped the inhaler in my pocket. The inhaler hissed like a tiny can of spray paint. Its spray met my throat’s pebbled inside wall. I developed a taste for it. Acrid, urgent, mineral.

           The news podcasts I played while making stir-fry most nights tracked the heat dome’s growth, describing its life cycle. The heat dome is taking the lives of animals and seniors. The heat dome is expanding over the ocean. It’s not known how long the heat dome will last. It needs to run its course. 

           I vaguely understood what a heat dome actually was—something about hot air getting trapped over the city, no circulation, mounting pressure. Something new. My apartment broiled like an empty soup can on the sidewalk and I took refuge in the water park nearby. Sprinklers painted up like palm trees showered groups of us. The city council left the sprinklers on into the night. A row of shopping carts full of clothing and tarps cast shadows. I rested on the pavement and allowed the feeble, alien rain to enrobe me. I couldn’t bear going back to my apartment. This wasn’t normal heat. I shook the inhaler. The inhaler helped less these days; the air was thickening, though once a gas, effortless, untouchable.

           “You look pretty out of it. You doing OK?”

           In the dimness, an older man in overalls sat with a huge backpack nested in his crossed legs.

           “Asthma,” I said, holding up my inhaler.

           “At least tonight there’s no smoke, just this goddamn heat.”

           “Doesn’t seem to matter. I can’t tell what sets it off.”

           “You’ve got that inhaler.”

           “The worst part is how dumb it makes me feel. Half my brain shuts off.”

           We lay around and chatted, waiting for the heat to break. Eric worked in landscaping. Now, the company he worked for had moved on to different species of plants—the plants that needed the coast’s summer rains could no longer survive. Last summer they’d planted a yard of ferns for a woman who insisted on her love for the plant; this week she threatened to sue them, her yard a clutch of withered brown hands reaching from the rock. 

           “We tried to tell her,” he said. “People can’t accept that things have changed. They want this whole west coast aesthetic vibe, you know, but the other day I was walking down the street and I saw this thing growing in someone’s boulevard garden, and you know what it was? A fucking pineapple. I’ve never seen a pineapple growing, but it’s this spiky thing that grows in the middle of the plant, like a head with tons of points on it. I just stood there and laughed. Who ever thought there’d be a pineapple growing in this city? Here, in the Pacific Northwest. Piña Colada Northwest. Anyways, how long have you had asthma?”

           I started to tell him about my dream.

           “Tell me every detail,” he said, intently. 

           I hadn’t told anyone other than that doctor, whose eyes had flickered with contemptuous dark blue around the edges of his pupils at the word “dream.” I told Eric the whole thing, listed every object: mug, stapler, newspaper. I couldn’t remember them all. 

           “That’s so fucked up, man, that’s so fucked up.”

           It felt profound when he said it, like recognition. Sweat swarmed my collarbone. I was lightheaded like the day before my diagnosis, when I felt stupefied, held a can opener in my hand and looked for a doorknob to use it on. 

           The sprinklers shut off. People were leaving. 

           “You couldn’t even breathe, you literally could have died.” 

           “No, no,” I said, resisting. “It wasn’t that bad.” 

           He was insistent. 

           “That dream was a message from your body. I am dying.” 

           Tears filled my eyes. I reached for my inhaler and sucked hard.

           “You know why it changed your life? Because you had a near death experience. That was a near death experience. There’re books about it.” 

           I turned my face slightly away from him. A woman and her young teenager were getting up stiffly, the last people other than us. 

           “Couldn’t help overhearing you,” she said. “Do you know about the breathing rooms?”

           “Mom, no, let’s go.”

           “Breathing rooms?” I asked.

           “Mom, no, I’m tired. Come on.”

           “They’re not in the news yet,” she said. “It’s a trial. It’s like cooling centres they have during heat waves, yeah? But instead, high oxygen. For people like you. Well you have to have a diagnosis to get in. I’m a nurse. There was an email a few days ago. Look on the health authority’s website, might be there.”

           The teenager began to tug at her left arm.

           Eric gave me his phone number and texted me the next day and the day after that and again a couple weeks later am I being a creep? I really liked you and I didn’t respond. I told myself I didn’t want to go on a date with a random man from a nighttime waterpark, but in truth, I was embarrassed by the memory of telling him my dream . . . the dream winding out, a long, tentacled arm laid bare on the wet ground.

                                   ***

I forgot about the breathing rooms until the next summer. A combination of forest fires in the mountains and another heat dome forced me to stay home from work for three days, shutters closed, running cold water into the sink and breathing in the spray—it brought relief and sprouted a wet cough deep inside me. 

           One morning I woke up on the couch and saw my fish drifting slowly across the white ceiling. I blinked, convinced they had died from the heat. They were circling to say goodbye. I blinked at them and thanked them for their company over the past year. They’d been my only companions while lying on my mattress, sitting at the table, reading and crying and drinking water until all the liquid in my body had been expelled and replaced. The fish sailed through the window in the direction of the ocean, a blue radiant flock. 

           The first breathing room I went to was down near the old port, a neighbourhood I wouldn’t walk in alone after dark. Cranes made crooked work in the sky. I showed my inhaler and prescription to the nurse at the front desk. She asked me for a doctor’s note. 

           “Doctor’s note?”

           She handed them back. “You need to bring a note, you can’t come in without a note.” 

           I told her I couldn’t get a doctor, I went to walk-in clinics to get another prescription every three months and the doctor who diagnosed me worked at the urgent care clinic up on Hornby and I couldn’t remember his name, I was practically delirious at the time, but couldn’t she look him up in her system? “He has a British accent,” I added, hearing my voice whine. “He prescribed me prednisone?” 

           She shook her head at her computer screen, as if agreeing with the machine’s disdain for human desperation. Respiratory – SHORT TERM RESPITE was printed on the bracelet she slapped around my wrist without meeting my eyes. 

           As I stepped into the breathing room, my lungs hummed, my hands fell open—this air was so different. The fluorescent lighting combined with oxygen, creating a juice that flowed outward from the peak of my brain into a white cup at the top of my spine. Oh. Oh. Oh. IKEA chairs and a few bashed-up couches were scattered through a long white room. The woman at the end of the couch I folded into slid a long smile towards me as I watched her slip in a mouthpiece and draw deeply from a metal tank wedged between her feet. She reminded me of my foster dad when he drank an entire bottle of Cointreau every year at Christmas. She nudged the bottle near her foot, tossed me a plastic tube. 

           When a nurse came around an hour later, I couldn’t take my mouth away from the tube. I wrote on the back of a receipt in my pocket: Asthma, can’t go back to my apartment, can I stay here for one night? 

           The breathing room’s lights dimmed around nine. The TV in the corner was left on. I drifted over to the semi-circle of people nursing their oxygen. I had a sudden memory of being a teenager, passing a bong around on a scratchy thin carpet in someone’s basement, the gurgle and laughter, the solid glass belly rumbling dirty, goofy smoke into my expanding skull. How strange, ten years later, to be in a ring of chairs, inhaling the opposite medicine. The massive flatscreen showed fires raging on the mountains. Helicopter bellies released torrents of water. A sweaty face told a story about a trailer and a dog. The red mountain sang. The burned face turned away. Three towns were evacuated today, close to where a town burned up, whole, two summers ago. I felt a low hum of fear and recognition around the circle—all of us were taking refuge in this place because of the smoke, the heat. 

           “How long have you been here?” I asked the person next to me, sitting cross-legged and stiffly upright in a La-Z-Boy. He wore a pale blue smock over black sweatpants, his thick red hair braided and wrapped into a hive over his sallow face. 

           “Five days,” he said, and wheezed. “Living in my van. Brutal.”

           “Sorry, you don’t need to talk,” I said.

           “No worries.” He wheezed again. “The ER sent me here. How’d you come?”

           “I heard about it from some woman, a nurse. Random.”

           “You’re lucky. People don’t know. You’re supposed to be referred.” 

           “Oh yeah?”

           “Yeah, or everybody would come. That smoke’s all coming down here. That fire’s out of control.” He shook his head and emitted a weak laugh that morphed into a bark. He drank steadily from the tube with his eyes half-closed.

           “I’m Kai,” I told him.

           “Jason.”

           Exchanging names gave us permission to ease into silence.

           Two women in the circle started to talk about how long they thought they’d survive living in the city. 

           “Gotta be somewhere better than this. Heat domes every summer, I’m not gonna make it.” 

           “Already going through an inhaler a week! It’s like paying rent on my lungs. But where am I gonna go? Maybe the north island. Cooler up there, but nothing to do.” 

           “Stay in the city and it’s air conditioning and meds for three months of the year.” 

           “At least there’s this place. There’s another one by the stadium, and I heard there’s another by the Costco on the way to Main.”

           “Five years from now we won’t be going anywhere in the summer, we’ll just be walking from breathing room to breathing room.”

           “That’s it.”

           “How about you? What’s your story? Kai, you said?”

           I sipped hospital air like pure sweet pineapple juice and told them about how sick I’d gotten in the last few days, the long low burn in my lungs, the feeling that no matter how much I breathed I could never get in enough, and when I did breathe deeply, the hard pain around my lungs, constriction. 

           “Your family know you’re here?” the shorter woman asked.

           I told them the truth, that I’d aged out of foster care, lived with a woman who controlled every aspect of my life for eight years, until one day I put the essentials in a duffel, left, and blocked her number.

           “God, you’re brave.” The woman coughed. “Now you got a good life?”

           “I’ve got my apartment,” I told her, “and I’ve got a job that’s boring but pays OK, and I’m figuring out my breathing.”

                                   ***

           The dome grew, strengthening its grip on the city. On bad days, I was convinced I could see the dome. A sheen, a vibration formed by heat—a second minor sky. I went to the breathing room every day to clear my lungs. The next summer, the dome returned. 

           “You’re beyond asthma,” a student doctor at a walk-in clinic told me. 

           I did what he told me to do and paid a private clinic for the paperwork to get me into the breathing rooms as a regular patient. I’m one of the lucky ones. 

           When I look up, I see a hard layer of light glistening between the sun and my eye, nearly silver. The dome lasts through September. Soon, October, they say. The heat clings. My lungs tremble, steady. I pass people on buses, in parks, on the sidewalk and by the sea, in all the city’s exposed places and I hear their breathing, its crackles and whistles and how they are being strangled from the inside. I feel the new grit of dryness released from all of our hands and faces, and I wait for the day the heat slides back through the pale throat between the black backs of the mountains, the last exhale.

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