Disappearing is easy in a city like Vancouver. A day, a couple of weeks, or for me, much longer than that. People don’t care, people forget. People leave you alone.

I can see out my window the same shit that was there before. The bus stop, the lady leaning on her cane; antiques parlour, vape shop. The stuff that I thought that I could ignore or outlast. No annihilation, no aftermath. Just the 8:20 running a little late, a couple chatting on the corner, a fruit vendor carrying a box to their stall, an idling van pushing tiny gusts of blue smoke from a corroded exhaust pipe. A dude with a tiny shivering dog setting up just far enough away from the Church’s parking lot to not get hassled.

Finding Sunset in the basement wasn’t exactly a surprise. He was, like most of us, an unemployable reject scraping by on dead end projects and under the counter gigs that relied on a willingness to keep your mouth shut. Roll a guy, lift some merchandise, deliver a truck stuffed full of heroin to a warehouse in Richmond. No questions asked, just take the money.

But finding him, or more accurately, being directed to his body, was something new. I’d been following him for years online across his various aliases. Funny, insignificant stuff. A story here, a rant there, evidence that he was still alive and working.

He had made a bit of a name for himself in the way that a person can do as a writer of serial pornography. He wrote long stories or novellas of speculative romance on Porn Hub and elsewhere.

Sunset, or as he’d become known in a more informal setting, Sug@rshaft106, wrote narratives of base lasciviousness that contained elements of lowfi science fictions. Malfunctioning androids, diabolical scientists, experimental substances that acted like flesh and could have a range of titillating effects on bodies. It made him a bit of scratch from lonely Yaletown trash and international scumbags with store bought credit cards that were attached to anonymous accounts. | @gregorymorizeau