Back On The Number Nine

I met a man on the Number Nine bus a couple of weeks back who still sticks with me.

When the encounter started I was waiting downtown for the northbound Nine to go home. It was really cold, as it tends to be in January. Very few people were outside like me, but there was this one fellow in a knit cap and ragged looking clothes with a heavy hockey bag who comes up to me and asks if the Nine has gone by. "No," I say to him. "I'm waiting for it too." The bus arrives a few minutes after that, and we pile on board.

The knit cap guy sits beside me, which I find a bit disconcerting. But there aren't many places on the bus where he can keep his bag away from people's feet, so it's understandable. Then he starts to talk to me and I really become concerned, because in my experience people who want to have a conversation with a stranger at 9:00 PM are usually drunk and those talks never go well. But no, this guy is sober. He talks in a normal way, without long pauses or repetition like drunk people usually do. But his voice is weak and he sounds sick.

Pretty soon he draws me in and I become worried for this stranger, instead of being worried by him. It seems he's going to the emergency ward at the Royal Alex Hospital (hence the bag with what must be a change of clothing and personal items), because he's suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning. Last night he was in some kind of shack, and burning kerosene to keep warm. But he didn't know that he was supposed to keep a hole open somewhere in the shack for ventilation. He had it all closed against the cold and overnight the carbon monoxide collected in the enclosed space, poisoning him. In the morning he was really sick and didn't know why, until a friend told him about carbon monoxide and said he should go to the hospital. But he had to wait until after work, which apparently meant nine o'clock at night.

We talked for a bit and he told me how he moved here from the East, and how it was so hard to get by in Edmonton. Apparently he'd fallen asleep more than once on the bus and had his cellphone stolen. (He clearly didn't have one now.) "People steal stuff in Edmonton," he said, in his tired, weak voice, and my heart kind of broke for him.

When we got to his stop, he got up and tried to leave the bus, but despite both him and me shouting for the driver to open the door, the driver didn't hear us and left without letting anyone out. But he let the man out at the next stop about a block and a half away. And so the knit cap guy said goodbye to me and I said "Good luck!" as he heaved his heavy bag out the door and onto the snow and ice of a cold January night, preparing to cross four lanes of busy traffic and walk five or six blocks to the Emergency Room for a condition that should have been treated almost twenty-four-hours earlier. I hope he's okay now.