She began singing his name: Ming, Ming, oh Ming. You going to come see me when I have a band, Ming? I’ll sing your song. Ming, Ming, oh Ming.

No, no, he said. No song for Ming.

Oh come on, she said, everyone wants a song.

Not Ming, he said. Ming wants no song.

She looked bored. She paid for some cigarettes with the money she’d stolen.

She walked out, singing, Ming, Ming, Ming.

No song, he said.

What was her name? I asked him.

He hesitated, sizing me up. Justine, he said quickly. And then he walked back into his kitchen.

The dirty steam rose like fog lifting.

I followed her out. I don’t know why. What else was there to do? The fog turned to rain, and in the rain her torn skirt became transparent. I could see the line of her legs and the bones in her back. We left the red street and walked by drab gray two-story buildings with flat roofs. In the distance, I could make out the harbor, dwarfed by mountains and the masts of sails. The buildings beside me seemed pathetic by comparison, shoddy and doomed. A sign in the window of a furniture store said, CONGRATULATIONS! WE’RE GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Yates Street was a street where people congregated; it was where all the buses picked up and dropped off. She turned onto Yates Street and slowed down near the welt in the street where a store must have burned down. There was this big crater in the concrete; it looked horrific.

I really had nothing to do on Yates Street. I couldn’t catch a bus home. I didn’t live in Oak Bay or Royal Oak or Cadboro Bay or Cordova Bay, those quiet, gardeny places. Still, I sat down on a bench, as though waiting for a bus.

I watched her enter a dark, narrow alley. I didn’t know about the Red Zone yet. I just thought it was an alley, and she ran into it. It was funny to see someone run on a street downtown. I could see the tear in her skirt widen, and her heels kick off the ground, and she was gone. Then the alley was empty, and I could see the rain and the space like a hole.

Wherever she was running, I knew it wasn’t to a collapsing home with a pothead father or into the bushes with the burnout boys. Watching her run, I thought, Down is somewhere. You didn’t have to ascend off the island like some magazine model; you didn’t have to push yourself through veering, crowded, exotic streets. You could just slash through a shortcut, heading down, and the sky would stay like a hole.