Ottawa, August 27, 2020

The streets breathe in the suspended capital. The hordes of tourists no longer surge. The Ottawans walk in the vacancy, play hard to please in front of the empty restaurants, grab a beaver tail in passing – amphibious pastry dripping with sugar.

The beggars cluster around the Salvation Army: warriors’ beards, women fighters’ wrinkles, hard gazes that are bored, things smoked, powders snorted, bottles.

I settle at a table on the front terrace of the Château Lafayette, Est. 1849. Name too grand, age too venerable for what it is in reality: a drinking hole without lustre that draws the artists, the junkies and the alcoholics of the area. To do like the man at the next table, I order a bottle of Labatt 50. It’s served to me with a minuscule tavern-size glass.

At a table on the left are three old men – one the russet moustache, one the baseball cap, one the bandana –, an Asian woman in her fifties and a woman in her sixties with blue streaks. It remakes the world putting away bottles of Corona – a subtle joke, perhaps, a daredevil attitude in the face of the coronavirus? The men muddle history, talk about the British (“The British did this, the British did that…”), theorize that “the Koran is the same as the Bible”. The women get up every ten minutes to go grill themselves some Player’s on the sidewalk.

The musician has just arrived. He scrawls blues behind a plexiglass. Poor wretches file past on the sidewalk, beg change and smokes from the soaked ones on the terrace. A guy limps superbly: faded mohawk, combat boots, army-surplus camouflage fatigues, multicoloured cane with a knob.

At the table on the right are three guys joking, talking about girls, saying fuck every three words. One of them has on his head a bouquet of blond dreads held by a scarf. He has the wrinkles of one who has lived in blazing pleasure: the air old and young at once like a rocker with mileage. His companions talk about personal finances, say they have no savings, “No fucking savings”.

– I tried to save it all, says the guy with dreads, I just kept investing in this thing called cocain. I’d put it in my face.

I’ve finished bailing out my Labatt 50. I get up. I wander in the ByWard Market. The masked passersby throw me indecipherable glances. Beings with tanned faces lie on the sidewalks. As if the city, emptied of its visitors, were unveiling its reverse: a grimace behind a mask. A guy in his twenties, neat, black felt boater, wanders along the boulevard monologuing:

– The Spanish, the Portuguese... Maybe there’s more. They are all bitter, actually. We have to put them in jail first, the ones in control, to show the others...

I go back to my hostel, the Hi Ottawa Jail Hostel, former prison of the capital. I fall asleep behind bars, in a cell that – a plaque informs me – once housed a pyromaniac.

Alcohol burns the throats. The powder grills the cells. Delirium is a fire that nests in the skull. One has dreams like conflagrations.