Following an afternoon matinee of mindless violence, I boarded the LRT at Central Station and started heading south. The train was pretty full for a Sunday and I took the first seat available across from an older chap who was escorting a big box containing a new printer. I tried to concentrate on a book amid the dull rumble of voices and the occasional piercing shriek from the wheels as the tracks bent past mirror-plated Corona toward Government Centre.

“Excuse me,” said the kid, maybe 15 years old, whom I had barely noticed across the aisle. “Could either of you spare two dollars and 50 cents so I can get to the Youth Emergency Shelter?” He was dressed in a T-shirt despite the sudden wintry weather, with a dirty ballcap, jeans that slid down his bony hips, and laceless black Keds with white skulls on his feet. Upon closer examination, I noticed he also had blood on his face and clothes. 

The older chap quickly produced his wallet and passed the kid a five. The kid, meanwhile, continued to talk unprompted, which might have been what he really wanted all along.  Between drapes of straight black hair, pain and fear brimmed from his eyes and cut grimy tracks down his cheeks.

“Some guys just beat me up in Churchill Square,” he said, trying to retain the composure that his tears had already betrayed. “This is my first time in Edmonton and I never been robbed or jumped before or nothing like that and they hit me with sticks. They smashed my finger.” He opened the wad of fast-food napkins clutched around his right hand to show the pulp of his thumb, livid and juicy like a stepped-on strawberry. The words continued to tumble forth about how he thought his life was going to get better when he left Toronto, how these guys took his jacket and, once free of it, he ran away. Sore-looking bumps rose on his hands and forearms—“defense wounds,” according to the paperback police procedural I had brought to pass the time—and a daub of blood dried to brown at the corner of his mouth.

“You’re going to the hospital to get that looked at, right?” the older chap said and the kid quickly pointed down the tracks, “Yeah, Health Sciences...” Before he disembarked on the north side of the river, the older chap fished in his pocket and dumped some more change into the kid’s hand, “in case you need to make a phone call.”

The kid continued to sob and cradle his mangled hand as I sat steeping in the chill that had suddenly welled up from the pit of my stomach and flooded my limbs. I wanted to say something consolatory, soothing even, but all I could think of was to calmly inquire if someone was meeting him at the hospital. He said yeah and asked if he would have to pay at Emergency, and I told him he wouldn’t, but he might have to wait a little while. This seemed to alarm him and I felt bad that I’d said it.

We fell into silence again while he reached into his mouth to wiggle a tooth. I felt weak and useless—watching heads explode at the multiplex for 90 minutes had not equipped me for reckoning with actual senseless violence. What could I do? All my experience of artificial violence had taught me that bloody retribution was the only way to right this wrong. But vengeance fantasies were no consolation at all in this situation.

And what if I’d been there when this poor kid was attacked? Would I have been able to stand up for him then, or would I have let the will to violence have its way while I looked around for some officially sanctioned authority to intervene? Answerless, I looked out the window like there was something out there I wanted to see.

We got off the train into the bright sunshine and he asked me if I had a smoke. When I said I didn’t he turned and crossed 114th toward the hospital with his busted hand and his inner hurt scabbing over into anger and fear of our city streets, even in broad daylight.