It’s the coldest day of the year and somewhere within, each one of us feels a premonition of mortality shudder our bones. The foyer of the Western Hospital has more homeless people than usual. Mostly men with jagged, unfashionable beards, they curl into the hospital’s available lounge chairs. Shapeless under their winter gear and salvaged miscellany, they appear to be melting—whatever had lived inside, now collapsed and unsupported. These people, so candid, they doze all around us.
Because of the intense cold, my Pulmonary Rehabilitation class was sparsely attended. Pop music, meant to summon our younger, more vital selves, echoed in the mostly empty room. I looked at the cut-out articles on Bristol board that had been pasted to the walls as I walked on the treadmill:
SAVING ENERGY AND MAKING WORK SIMPLE
10 STEPS TO BECOME LESS ANXIOUS
IS IT THE FLU OR IS IT A COLD?
As the class went on, more and more people showed up. People with walkers, people on oxygen, people bent with age and other maladies, each one coming through difficulty. Each one still trying to keep that fire lit. As the class is ending, a video is played where an instructor leads us through a short, cool-down routine. Betsy is sitting in front of me. On oxygen. Perhaps 90 years old. Unaware that the video has ended on a stalled frame, she sits there with her arms outstretched, just like the frozen-instructor on the tv. She just sits there like that, anticipating more instruction. Betsy, she looks like an evangelist taking the stage and greeting her audience. Like an Olympic athlete about to dive off the high tower. Like a bird, waiting for the wind to come up from behind and gently lift her back to flight.
Middle-aged men, guys getting off work and who are still in their FedEx or Hydro uniforms go there. Each night, as part of a promotion, the bar host’s a card came which takes place at the back on one of those poker tables you can buy at Canadian Tire. The other night it was Texas Hold ‘Em they were playing, and although it’s a cashless game, since it’s poker, people felt heavily invested.
As I was sitting at the bar drifting through the sports section, a fight erupted at the back of the bar. It was extraordinary how quickly rage, explosive rage, swept in and over the table. Men, something now ignited within, had pushed back their chairs and were standing. Screaming and swearing, they waved their arms about and stiffened into fighting posture, fists clenched. A woman, who seemed to be at the centre of it all, had a voice that was a black, untranslatable hiss, more the unearthly vocalizations of possession than language. She threw a glass against the wall, her long hair waving in fury, as the men shouted. It seemed the very manifestation of mental illness, that from the collective interiors of these people, a dark, stormy cloud of violence had been summoned.
But the thing that struck me the most was how quickly it all passed, and how everybody seemed to enjoy it. It had been fun for them. What, I wonder, does that say about us? On a frigid, lonely night in February a group of strangers go out looking for something. They find one another at a card table in a bar, and what they needed was this, to wake up and experience that jolt of electricity spiking through their bodies, so that for a moment each one of them was alive in the streaming arteries, heroes on a battlefield, the lion’s roar that answered back to the night.
The man looked like a retired astronaut 
and the woman like she gave up her career some years ago and had now dedicated herself to traveling the world and running a marathon to fight breast cancer in each city she visited. She spun away and covered her eyes when she saw me, “Sweet Jesus, Anderson,” she whispered.
I stood there blinking.
Giving them a “this better be good” look, I asked, “WHAT?”
The man stepped forward, one arm back to steady his traumatized wife, “We’d like to buy your house!”
He said this like I had just won a game show.
I don’t own the house he wanted to buy. Rachelle and I rent the bottom floor of it.
“It’s not for sale.”
“Everything is for sale,” he responded like an Alpha Male.
“That’s obnoxious, “ I said.
He laughed. He’d handled my type before. Hell, he’d been in space. What was I to him?
“You haven’t heard our offer, “ he said.
“Look, the place is haunted.”
He laughed. There were ghosts in space. He feared no ghosts.
His wife was turned half way away from me and half way toward me, her eyes fixed on the floor.
“I’ll pay you two million dollars for this house, which I think you’ll agree, is far above market value.”
“Do you like ghosts?” I asked.
The wife now sighed heavily through her mouth, “Come on Anderson, this man is clearly insane, let’s go!”
But Anderson liked a challenge. Where others saw a roadblock, Anderson saw an opportunity.
“Tell me about the ghosts, I’m interested,” he pressed.
“They’re unpredictable, sometimes the energy is poltergeist in nature and others times it feels like a human presence. It’s hard to explain. We could do a quick Ouija board and you could ask them yourself, if you like?”
“Maybe later,” he said, dialing it down a notch, “ we can see we’ve caught you at a bad time and I’m sorry for that, but here’s my card. If you want to talk about the supernatural or maybe selling your home, give me a call, I’m interested in both.”
And then they left, two people determined to buy themselves the life they wanted, regardless of what it might cost anyone else.
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