The place where you first disembark from your ship in Vancouver is near Chinatown, and there is such a great throng of junkies there that you look around for trailers and catering trucks""surely they must be filming a movie? A movie about an alternate society constructed in an abandoned city, made up only of junkies""a junkie mayor passed out on a stone chair, a wasted policeman patrolling his beat in a tattered camouflage shirt, two young mothers crossing paths and conversing on the way to the open-air market.



They are filming a movie in Vancouver, British Columbia, but it is not about the post-apocalyptic culture of heroin and crack users surging around you""it is about you, the girl in the center of the city. You don't know it, though: you are blissfully unawares as you step out of the ship and survey the front of The Brickhouse, and not when you take a chance and toss your words over the front of the book in which the club's doorman is vacationing. However much he may try to mute his radiance with outward disinterest, this man is easily the most intensely attractive person in the bar, although his occupation surely makes him familiar with your kind""so you take it as merely an impulsive gesture of pedestrian kindness when he scribbles down the address of the warehouse where the party is going to be.



You still don't know that the movie is about you when you and your friend from home are inside the warehouse, craning your necks in a sea of strange twenty-somethings, and when your friend disappears up the fire escape to the roof while your immature fear routes you back to the drink line. You're every bit as oblivious of the cameras and lights, of the gaffers and grips, when he shows up and whisks you to the front of the line like a celebrity, like there is a Manhattan of the mind any place where looks and power are holding hands. His hands holding onto your bicep and shoulder, after you laugh together, and dismiss the party's other, opposite line, and walk together with wide, goofy steps down the alley next to the warehouse so he can stand guard while you squat beside the dumpster.



You don't wonder why there are no cars in the street as you comically balance his bike down the road, doubling drunk and swerving spirals along the double-yellow line. It doesn't cross your mind that only a writer would put the word "sleepover" in his mouth at this godforsaken, vodka-soaked hour.



And, at the time, you are too frustrated to understand the perfectly contrived nature of the night's penultimate and most agonizing scene: you, lying smoldering beside his unconscious body, going over again and again in your head the words to an arbitrary song you hear earlier that day in the car. He's right there, but you can't touch him. He is nestled up against your side, but you have to put it off and try to make your to unconsciousness as well.



And you certainly don't think of a director grinning into his viewfinder as the glorious, sun-stained denouement commences at dawn and sustains from his bedroom to the hotel a good walk away where your friend from home enjoyed an entire room to herself, to an earnest promise to meet again some day.



You'll only begin to see the sets and props and all the telltale signs of a stirring performance later on, after post-production has wrapped on the sequel, filmed fifteen miles north of Seattle. Before then, you will catch yourself occasionally wondering, like a fool, when the junkie movie might ever make its way to a theater near you, so that, caught 3,000 miles away, you might be able to put at least part of yourself back in Vancouver for an afternoon""or, ironically, considering the possibility that making this movie is your own destiny, and your own path to money, fame, stability, and dual citizenship for the doorman.



Of course, you have already made it""twice over, no less. You have spun around the country, but you have not moved far from the heart of Vancouver. The heavy, charmed euphoria you depart from a month later in Seattle is full of evidence that you never left there: a junkie queen with bus schedules and mileage charts grinding swiftly in her head, and a junkie musician, surveying the litter scattered across the hotel room floor.