You can do this.
Steady!
Give me your hand!
I can't reach!
No!!
What do I do?!
Here!
- Okay. September 4th, take two a long way home.
- Hey, coming in at the top of the charts this week
it's a new band...
- Come on...
- One day, in a little village close to where I used to live,
but far from me today, a little girl was born.
She was called vaysha.
A beautiful little girl, said the villagers.
Her mother looked at her with adoration.
How could this mother, leaning over the cradle,
imagine that her little girl's eyes would see things this way?
Little vaysha had been born
with a left eye that only saw the past
and a right eye that only saw the future.
When little vaysha grew up and began to talk,
she explained that she saw the sky like this.
And even though her eyes were open,
like those of any sighted person,
it was as though vaysha was blind.
"Vaysha the blind girl."
This was how everyone came to call her.
Everyone was convinced that vaysha's eyes
were the result of black magic.
A gaggle of old medicine women
paraded into the house to identify the spell
and attempt to heal the little girl of this affliction.
Drink the extract of blue thistle
for 40 days before the sun rises.
Place the gallbladder of a buzzard on the left eye,
the heart of a rooster on the right eye,
an oscillated peacock feather
and the tongue of a horned viper on both.
The old woman whispered that nothing would work
unless a way was found to reunite her eyes
and bring her back to this world.
All attempts to restore her normal vision failed.
In the courtyard, she advanced with outstretched arms,
and bumped into the cherry tree.
She toppled pots in the shed.
Ripe cherries or the pots to gather them -
these did not exist for her.
In her eyes, the present did not exist.
Vaysha grew up.
She became a beautiful young woman.
The fact that she had one green eye and one brown eye
only added to her beauty.
One day, a young man came to ask for her hand.
When she laid her eyes on him, this is what she saw.
- My goodness, what has
...his hair is all white.
Poor dear. My goodness, he smells like dirt.
His shirt is not tucked in his pants,
his knees are all scraped.
His time has come and he's asking me to marry him.
I could be his mother. It must be a joke.
- The same story was repeated with each suitor.
Vaysha was unable to find any man
who could unite her sight.
She rarely left the house.
In her eyes, the present did not exist.
Even at night,
while vaysha slept, she could not truly rest.
She had nightmares.
Like a serpent's tongue, her dreams would split in two.
On one side, she saw herself as a little girl;
and on the other, she saw herself already dead.
Sometimes the difference between the two eyes was slight,
only a few hours apart.
For the left eye, the sun had just risen.
The right eye was already seeing the moon shine.
But other times,
her left eye only showed her an abyss and a great void,
like that which preceded creation,
while her right eye could only perceive ruins and disaster,
after what could have been an apocalypse.
It was difficult for vaysha to live with her disability.
This is why one day, out of desperation,
she had the idea of tearing out an eye with her own hands.
But she didn't know which one.
If she chose to remove her left eye,
that would mean that she would live forever in the future.
And the future...
And the future, it scared her.
It was dark and depressing.
However, if she removed her right eye,
she could live in the past,
which is always more certain and reassuring.
But how to live with parents who are young children?
Vaysha could not be happy,
neither in the past nor in the future.
This story is a hopeless story,
because we cannot find anything in this world
capable of reuniting these two views.
And now, dear audience,
close your right eye.
How sad if, with your left eye,
you could no longer see any film or any story,
only the blank page preceding the story.
Woe to you.
And now close your left eye.
If you still do not see the film,
because it is already erased
and the images have become dust and white ash...
Woe to me.
Do we look at the world
with the eyes of vaysha the blind?
I received a Christmas card this morning.
It didn't come with the regular mail for some reason.
That was a bit strange.
It was also strange that it was addressed from my friend techno.
It read: "Hey rob, if you are reading this, that
means I'm dead.
I just want to say thanks.
I'll see you soon.
Go get drunk on me.
Techno."
Techno stypes.
What a guy he was.
He always said he'd never make it to forty.
A year and a half earlier, i was on a plane to China,
I was on my way to see techno.
He was at the military hospital in Guangzhou,
waiting for a new liver.
His father sent me with two clear instructions: One - gotta
get techno to stop drinking, at least long enough
to receive a liver transplant.
And two - get him back home to Vancouver.
Get techno to stop drinking...
That's not gonna be easy.
Cos that's what techno really liked to do...
Was drink.
And smoke.
And fight.
He was in no condition to fight.
He was sick.
He was really sick.
He was crippled from a car accident when he was seventeen,
but that's not how he lost his big toe.
He lost that in a motorbike accident.
Yeah, he was broken alright.
What was he fighting for anyways?
And what was he still doing in China?
I first met techno in the fall of 1978.
My first memory of techno was, we were playing soccer
on this field, and, the ball was coming right to me.
Right when I was about to jump for it, this kid jumped right in
front of me and he jumped higher than
I'd ever seen anybody jump before.
And he chested the ball, sorta trapped it, and then he
kicked it, from about halfway across the field,
and I'm pretty sure he scored....
Another time, there was this sports day at school,
and I remember he casually picked up this ball,
and he chucked it, right across the field.
And I remember going up after him, and thinking 'oh I could do
that', and I chucked the ball as hard as I could, and it only
went halfway across the field.
For the next little while, i went to that school on the
weekends and practised throwing balls, to see if I could throw
it across the field, and i never got anywhere near it.
But I'll tell you one thing.
Techno was fast.
Techno was the fastest human I'd ever seen.
When he ran, he just took off.
There's no way you could ever catch him.
And so there I was, I couldn't really Chuck a ball too far,
and I didn't really play hockey,
and I didn't really play soccer either.
All I did, all the time, was I used to draw.
And that's the one thing i could do that techno couldn't
really do, and so, we became friends after that.
One day techno said, 'hey, do you wanna go shoot some balls
around after school?' And I said 'yeah, ok.' In the middle of us
playing around, techno went berserk, he proceeded to break
about 20 windows at the school.
We were walking home, and we got picked up by a squad car, and I
remember thinking i really didn't like to be
in the back of a squad car.
I looked over, and techno thought it was great.
And that kind of explains the difference
between the two of us.
And we were only like twelve years old, and he used to tell
us these stories about fucking his girlfriend, and I remember I
didn't even have pubic hair yet like that's how young we were.
I guess that's the thing with him, it seemed like he could
always just pull it off.
Whether he was diving off a cliff,
or riding his skateboard through traffic...
It just seemed like he could always just pull it off.
Techno's daredevil heroics were the stuff of legend
to us regular teenagers.
To befriend techno was to board a thrill ride of some sort.
Techno pushed the limits of whatever situation he was in.
The greater the danger, the greater the thrill.
He loved to steal.
Cars, bikes, electronics, he didn't care.
He always had some sort of scam on the go.
And was always covering it with lies.
The stealing eventually got him in trouble with some of the
senior students in high school.
That was bad news.
Then he started stealing from his friends.
Then nobody could trust him.
It was around this time, that techno started hanging around
with a bunch of dickheads wearing alligator shirts with
the collars turned up.
I didn't really care much for these guys, but,
I have to admit, they were getting lots of pussy.
One evening, techno phoned me up and asked me if I wanted to go
to a party at the other end of town, with his dickhead buddies.
I declined.
It was the summer of our graduation.
We were seventeen.
Techno was completely in control, and completely
out of control at the same time.
An emergency crew showed up to the scene of the accident...
And techno was nowhere to be seen.
After some time they found him in a bush...
Fifty yards away from the crash site.
He was busted up pretty good, he nearly lost a leg
and there was some significant brain trauma.
He drifted in and out of consciousness long enough
to wave goodbye to me.
I was on my way to the airport.
I was off to calgary to become a realtor.
Techno had a very long recovery and his
friends gradually stopped visiting.
He'd burned a lot of Bridges right before the accident.
It must've been very lonely sitting in the hospital for the
better part of two years,
wondering where all your friends are.
But recover he did.
His speech was different, slower and slurred, and he had a limp.
I'd come by and visit him whenever I was in town...
This is right around the time he started to drink regularly.
One day techno announced that his
insurance settlement had came in.
This time he wasn't lying.
One and a half million dollars it took the lawyers ten years
to settle his case.
There were many points in techno's life where you could
say, 'this was the beginning of all his troubles', the car
accident was surely one of these points, the day his settlement
came in was another.
And that's when Jennifer entered the scene.
She was a damn drunk.
When she was done with him he too would be a damn drunk.
Techno was a funny millionaire.
He dressed and acted like a skid.
He smoked dog ends off the street.
His drink of choice was pear cider.
Techno asked me to be the best man at his wedding.
I refused.
His wife poured spaghetti on his head and burned his eyelids
with cigarette butts.
I'm not sure where this happens on the timeline, but one day
techno was riding his motorbike.
As he was looking back to merge onto the highway,
he ran into the merge sign.
The sign clipped the toe pedal right off his motorbike
and took his big toe right along with it.
This would add an even more pronounced limp
to his walk...
More time passed.
One day I went out to the bay where he lived to visit him.
I pulled over.
As he bent down to lean into the window I noticed he had
a really yellow complexion.
Apparently, he was given bad blood from the hospital
and contracted hepatitis c.
He would eventually sue the hospital for
another 600 thousand dollars.
By this time techno was very rich.
He always had an odd assortment of hangers-on available
to do odd jobs for him.
There was Freddy the freeloader, dump truck, Teddy two fingers,
and dogbreath...
This guy was a piece of work.
Most of them were crackheads.
Techno could stay up for days on end,
Polish off dozens of pear cider in one sitting.
He'd get drunk and get on the horn, and call everyone he knew
and invite them to parties at his buddy's warehouse.
He claimed celebrities would be in attendance,
like that douchebag from nickelback.
No-one I ever knew went to these parties.
Techno knew his days were numbered.
He carried on as if he just didn't care.
According to him, he had been right on the edge.
He wanted to live.
He loved life in fact, he just had so much pain.
Pain in his legs, he said the hep c was terribly painful,
he was always vomiting.
He loved to drink, and claimed this was the only thing
that relieved his pain.
The combination of drinking and the hep c wore out his liver,
in pretty short order.
The Canadian transplant society refused to put him on
the ten year waiting list for a new liver
unless he stopped drinking.
In ten years he'd be dead anyways.
Catch-22.
Later...
I was in China.
I received an email from techno's mother saying that he
too was in China, and perhaps I could go see him?
As it turned out, he wasn't far away from where I was.
He was there with his second wife.
What was techno doing in China?
Techno met Vince in some unlikely place
in Vancouver, in a pub.
Vince was in the business of organising transplant services
for those in need.
Techno was on his last legs.
These services did not come cheap however...
A quarter of a million dollars up front.
He promised that techno would be back home
in six weeks with a new liver.
We met him at the white swan restaurant in Guangzhou.
He didn't look too good.
He was totally sketched out.
I found it strange at dinner when techno ordered a cocktail,
that it met no resistance from his wife.
They both assured me that his old liver was shot anyways,
and that he'd be receiving a new one soon.
That all seemed perfectly logical to me,
and I also ordered a cocktail.
It was a perfectly festive evening...Techno's drinking soon
erupted into utter chaos, just like it always did.
He was making things more difficult, in spite of us all
there trying to help him.
We left secure in the knowledge that techno would soon be back
home with a new liver.
Months passed...
I got word techno was still in China, still waiting for a
liver, except now the situation had spun
completely out of control.
His wife left him there by himself,
he started drinking again.
It really didn't look like techno
was gonna make it home alive.
I met with techno's father, we cooked up this plan to try to
get techno back home one way or the other.
I phoned him up and I said 'look, I'm gonna come out there
and we're gonna try and get you back home again,'
and all he said was
'well hurry the fuck up.'
I really didn't want to go back to China...
So there I am on the airplane.
I could see the sprawling mass of Guangzhou
appear out of the haze.
And as the plane approached the runway, the real work
was just about to begin.
I passed through customs and entered
the main concourse of the airport.
There was a little girl there named flora,
holding my name on a card.
We exchanged greetings and she went off to look for techno.
After a while techno appeared.
He shook my hand.
His expression was something like 'thanks for coming here
man', mine was 'now let's get you the fuck outta here.'
back at the military hospital, I met dr Lee.
He explained to me that it was imperative that
techno quit drinking.
The sooner he quit, the sooner he was able to receive a new
liver, it was that simple.
And also, if I could get rid of that damn cat in his room.
I turned to techno...
'Ok, where is it?'
he knew exactly what I was talking about.
He produced a bottle of baijo, he was mixing it with gatorade.
'All of it' I said.
It took a while, but eventually he gathered up all his various
stashes of liquor hidden around his room.
Satisfied, I dumped it all out in the toilet,
he didn't like that very much.
On the way out I grabbed the cat and released it in the courtyard
in the rear of the building.
And then I checked into the hotel next to the hospital.
I set up my computer and scanner and got busy on my second book.
The next day I went to go visit techno in his room.
He was in the middle of his daily routine.
He was sitting on the side of his bed
vomiting into a trash bin.
Flora was there, fussing with his hair and
straightening out his shirt.
I busied myself with something.
I noticed the cat had somehow returned to the room.
I removed it again.
Techno was hooked up to an intravenous drip for
the rest of the morning.
We watched an episode of Seinfeld...
I'm not sure what was in that drip, but it surely kept him
alive all these months.
Techno rarely got going until mid-afternoon, and then we would
set out on our little adventure.
This was usually something simple like going for lunch.
He had the hospital address written on a piece of paper and
set in plastic.
This was tied around his neck with a piece of string.
It said something like: 'If you find me, please return me to
'dot dot dot'.' Simple but effective.
He had a collection of business cards from local restaurants
he'd show to taxi drivers.
On this particular day, we were going to the German restaurant.
He of course immediately ordered a cocktail,
which I had to confiscate.
I always felt like a fuckin cop when I was with that guy.
It was normal for him to shut down for a while after lunch.
This he did with much discomfort.
After about an hour he'd bum a smoke of some poor Chinese
fellow and then we would get back to the hospital and he'd go
for a nap back in his room and I'd continue working on my book
back at the hotel.
At night I'd come by for another generous dose of Seinfeld.
This routine would repeat itself like clockwork.
A week later my wife arrived, thank god.
I was already going nuts.
Back at the hospital, i continued to remove the cat from
techno's room every day, 'what the fuck.' Techno didn't know
what was going on either.
I brought techno food every morning.
He'd look at it and grimace and say something like 'ah I can't
eat that kind of lettuce' or 'i can't eat bananas without
sprinkles on it' or something retarded like that.
And so it went...
First it was Seinfeld, then friends, then we discovered
my name is Earl.
Other than that, there wasn't much to mark
the passing of time.
Techno had his good days, and his bad days.
He'd looked forward to a special meal for days.
Techno's immune system was so low, a piece of fish that was
slightly off or some other funky food would put him down
for a week or two.
That was sad when techno got sick like that.
One day we were in his room watching TV and he got up and
hobbled to the bathroom with the iv pole.
When he got out he said 'look, i dragged the iv pole to the
bathroom and I wasn't even hooked up to it.' We laughed
until we cried.
I think we were cracking up.
Just then the door opened and a hand dropped the cat
back in the room.
Things were getting tense back in Vancouver.
Techno and his father were having a
bitter dispute about money.
I saw techno cry that day, I'd never seen that before.
Thank god flora was there to put her arm around him, cos I didn't
know what the hell to do.
I was making great progress with my book.
I had no distractions in China.
Sometimes techno would come and visit me in the hotel room.
After a while he'd say something like
'i gotta go take my pill' or 'i gotta go get something from my
room.' I'd give him about five minutes and then
I'd go chasing after him.
I hated being a cop, but i was actually pretty good at it.
It wasn't hard to figure out what techno was up to.
God.
And then more time passed.
Except now, it was the three of us.
Three foreigners in China.
We each brought something to the table, but techno was the
undisputed leader cos he had the hospital address tied
around his neck.
Without that, we'd all be sunk.
Occasionally a liver would come in that matched techno's blood
type, we were careful not to get our hopes up.
We weren't supposed to know this but, the sad truth was techno
was waiting for a liver from some guy on death row.
I asked techno what he thought about some poor fellow dying
so that he could live.
'I don't care.' Techno's favourite answer.
Eventually a liver did come in.
A real quality one too.
Apparently, a fellow in his early twenties was about to be
executed and he had the same blood type as techno.
We couldn't help but get our hopes up this time.
Everything happened really quickly after that.
Techno was prepped for surgery in the morning and then we
wheeled him to the other building where they perform the
transplant surgeries.
I remember looking at a pile of rubbish in the corner of the
elevator and thinking how filthy this hospital was.
I'd never seen techno so scared.
The transplant ward had flickery lights and holes in the ceiling,
and then they wheeled him off through the double doors
and he was gone.
Kung and I walked back to the hotel.
That dumb cat darted out in front of us on the way back.
We were called back to return to the hospital.
Dr Lee wanted to show us techno's old liver
for some reason.
This infamous liver that's been the source of so much grief, I
had to take a look at it.
A couple of days later we saw techno in the isolation ward.
He was behind glass with some other patients.
He had tubes running down his mouth and he was hooked up to
all sorts of machines.
After a few more days, he had moved into his own room.
We had to wear hospital gowns,
masks to avoid him getting an infection.
He jumped out of bed and shook my hand, he was clearly pleased.
And then he went over to the TV and started adjusting
the angle on it.
The nurses were chasing him around the room.
He must've been high on drugs or something cos he sure regretted
doing that later.
Rejection was a big issue at this time.
It was amazing to see the transformation in him,
and it happened so quickly as well.
First his eyeballs became white,
and then his thinking became clear again.
Before the surgery it seemed like he was always bogged down.
It was an awesome thing to watch.
But, he still couldn't leave his room.
He had beaten the odds.
One day I was in his room, he was sleeping.
He was chewing, and putting handfuls of air
in his mouth and chewing.
He woke up and said 'ah man, i was having this great dream
about food.' I asked him on another occasion 'what does it
feel like to have a new liver?' He said 'it feels, it feels like
somebody removed a frozen lasagne out of my chest and
replaced it with another frozen lasagne.' Now it was time to
plan the exit strategy, but first we had to
pay off the hospital.
For some reason the hospital only took cash.
Techno's father had to organise a massive
western union transfer.
It was a big fuck up.
Western union didn't wanna transfer that much money.
It took all day, but in the end we had a big bag full of
one hundred renminbi notes.
It was a stack of notes over two feet long.
Me and two little Asian girls were my backup.
We returned to techno's room.
First we wanted to take a look at the piles of money,
I could see techno's eyes light up.
For a moment I had second thoughts about leaving all that
money in his room.
The next day was another split second timing day.
I had to collect the money from techno's room.
He was barking orders and being rude to everyone, I stopped
talking to him for a few hours.
I had plenty of other stuff I had to do.
First I had to go pay off dr Lee,
then I had to rush over and pay the hospital.
Everything went perfectly smooth, except one of the stacks
of bills was short a one hundred renminbi note.
I made the difference with my own money, then I rushed back.
Dr Lee had to explain how all the anti-rejection drugs had to
be taken, all of which was in mandarin.
Then I had to rush back and collect techno, who was having a
smoke by the lobby.
He had a surgical mask pulled down, he was wearing his black
cowboy hat and his white suit, which was two sizes too big.
I told him about the missing note and he said 'yeah I know,
cos I took it.'
long pause...
I was steaming.
'Let me get this straight, you stole a hundred renminbi,
of your own money?' Grabbed his cigarette, snuffed
it out on the ground and then we headed to the airport.
First I had to see kung off, and then techno and I had to
get a plane to Hong Kong.
And this is where the story gets really fucked up.
I'd over-stayed my visa by a couple months,
that's a big deal in China.
This caused all sorts of alarm bells to start ringing.
Then they took us to a holding room,
we were about to miss our connecting flight
there was no way techno was not going home on that flight,
so I turned to him and I said 'you go, and I'll meet you
in Hong Kong.' And that's the second time I saw fear
in techno's eyes.
He nodded and then I had this image in my head of him limping
away from me towards the gate.
Meanwhile, back in the holding office another guy showed up.
He said he needed money, he made a space between his fingers
about an inch and a half deep.
Hell, I had a wad about 50 inches deep the day before.
He had someone escort me to a couple of atms and they
shook me down for about seven hundred us dollars.
He was actually a pretty nice guy.
I was about one hour behind techno.
This is the first time techno was unsupervised
since he arrived in China.
We were too close to home to blow it now.
I arrived in Hong Kong and immediately scanned every bar
and smoking room all the way to the gate.
I finally caught up to him at gate one hundred and something.
He didn't look so good.
In fact, he never really looked good again after that.
He walked all the way from gate five.
I don't know why he didn't get a wheelchair.
At one point he sat down on a bench that said 'wet paint.'
he had black marks going across the back of his white suit.
We boarded the flight to Vancouver.
He had a business class ticket and I was in coach,
what the fuck?
I could see the top of his cowboy hat through the curtains.
I called the flight attendant aside and I said 'my friend
cannot drink under any circumstances.
He's also very persuasive, so don't be fooled.'
I was totally acting like a cop again.
And at one point, techno came back to coach
and sat next to me on the flight.
He seemed so calm and happy to be going home.
I hadn't seen techno this happy for a long time.
With all the commotion happening that day,
I can't remember if he took his anti-rejection pills.
He was supposed to take them twice.
This next part of the story is a little hard to tell.
It seemed like we had finally got home after this huge ordeal,
and I handed techno off to his folks.
I sorta thought I needed some time away from techno
for a while.
That night, techno made a turn for the worse, and went into
pure rejection mode, and began to turn yellow again.
He was rushed to the Vancouver general hospital.
Over the course of time his situation went
from bad to worse.
I couldn't believe it when I heard the news
that techno had died.
Techno was convinced that nothing could kill him.
The truth is, is that by this time, there really wasn't much
keeping techno alive.
His ashes were gonna be distributed out at the cliff
where he used to dive off of at lighthouse park.
His father said a few words and distributed his ashes.
Just then a big gust of wind came and picked up that big
cloud of ash and blew it towards this group that was about a
hundred yards downwind from us, and they completely got dusted
with techno's ashes.
And his dad said, kinda comically,
'son, even in death you're still giving me troubles.'
Max
Max?
Max!
Max?!
Mmh...It's him!
Today's my birthday and I'm treating myself
to a trip to the seaside, as I do every year.
I love sitting down to a meal of fresh grilled fish
with a little glass of white wine,
overlooking the wide empty beaches of the north coast.
Rats! There's that crackpot from the retirement home again.
She came for me this morning. She called me "mom."
She's clearly out to lunch.
"She'll take you to the seaside, madame Jacqueline,
don't you worry!" They told me at the retirement home.
Well, I do worry!
She's quite terrifying with her big staring eyes
like a Halibut!
I can take the train on my own; I'm not a child!
And I don't fancy traveling with a lunatic.
That chicken reminds me of a story.
The day my poppa brought home a chicken.
He had chopped off its head
but the creature refused to die.
Far from being resentful, it took quite a shine to my father,
who ended adopting it.
The creature followed him everywhere, like a dog,
even to the factory. He was the star of the neighborhood.
What was its name again?
Anyway, one day the cat got him.
My father was inconsolable.
He shut himself in the kitchen
and chopped the heads off chickens for two days straight,
hoping the miracle would happen again.
I can't wait to see the sea.
I used to bring my little girl with me back in the day.
Oh, I'd love some fish!
I'll have to remember to ask my grandmother
for her recipe for Dover sole.
The lunatic!
She found me!
What a nuisance she is!
My head?!
Oh, no! What have I done with my head?
- Mom, what's wrong?
There she goes again, calling me "mom!"
Honestly!
My head!
- Mom...
How are you doing?
- I'm fine, dear.
I'm just fine.
Marcus: What... what the?!
Noé: Er, ugh, major
Marcus: What is that?
Noé: What are we gonna do?
Marcus: I haven't come two million klicks eating steak
pills to get kicked out just arriving ok? Let's go!
Noé: Wait it could be dangerous!
Marcus: Don't worry, we're just gonna talk.
Noé: Ow, I don't like it when you get political.
Marcus: Gentlemen, would you be kind enough to vacate the
premises so we may properly finish our mission of creating
a new peaceful era for the human race.
Noé: Simpler, major, simpler!
They don't seem to understand
Marcus: Us here, you get out!
Marcus: Move or I'll kick your sick alien ass out!!
Noe: Ah major?
Marcus: It's crazy how much time you lose with formalities!