Excerpted: When the World Was Twice as Big

All Points North 

This bay smells like urine. That’s the thought occupying my mind as I stand here, waiting for the bus doors to open. This bay smells like urine. 

Over my shoulder, a bag packed with random things from which the rest of my life will spring. In my right coat pocket, a wallet with two twenties which have to sustain me until the rest of my life has sprung. 

In my left hand, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut. In my right hand, a ticket. Before me, a bus to Vancouver Island, and destinations due north. 

In my mind, fading in volume, the last words with Bill as I gathered the few remnants of my life from my bedroom, the artifacts to carry forward. A stilted goodbye while Tina Kubek laid on her horn. He entreated me to stay, but there was no fight left in him. We both agreed on the shapes of the clouds passing overhead. But he didn’t stop me. 

“This remains yours,” I said to Bill as I stepped onto the porch and handed him back his red umbrella. 

“I was looking for that,” he said, and I took it as his way of releasing me. 

Or he was too drunk to remember you took it. 

I’ll be charitable and think the former. 

Now, the memory of it all drowned out by earbuds giving counsel through Pink Floyd. Warning me: if I hear a crack, I shouldn’t be alarmed. I am simply crawling on thin ice. 

Tina drove me to the bus station and, as I extracted my bag from the back of her car, she pledged me to an oath. 

“You owe me,” she said. 

“I just spent all my money.” 

“Then you owe me a favour.” 

“Okay.” 

“Keep an eye on Larry. Make sure he’s okay.” 

I frowned at such an odd request. 

“Why do I need to keep an eye on him?” 

She took a moment to answer. “He’s got his own shit to deal with, is all. And sometimes he just needs a little help.” 

“I don’t want to help him deal with his shit,” I protested. “I can’t even deal with my own shit. I think I would only end up spilling his shit all over his shirt.” 

She smiled. “I think you’re a good person, Freddy.” 

–

As the first act in looking out for Larry is to find him, I start looking around for him, hamstrung by the realization I’m not sure what he looks like, given that I only saw him under dark circumstances. 

When the bus door opens, the driver steps out and says, “Put your bags over here.” 

Those of us randomly standing about move like cattle to line up our suitcases and twine-bound boxes on the curb. As the driver loads the luggage compartments at the bottom of the bus, I join the queue to board the bus. 

The driver closes the luggage doors. “Have your tickets ready,” he calls out, and the line spontaneously contracts as we take a few steps closer to the bus door. I pinch my ticket between two fingers and pull it from my pocket. 

It’s the first bus ticket I have ever held, the first time I have purchased anything that could take me away from here. 

“Are you in line?” a young woman asks me. A child clings to her like ivy on a trellis. I look at them both, then shake my head and step back. She moves past and boards the bus. 

I wait for Larry to appear and he doesn’t. My eyes begin to itch. A small panic arising in me. 

Eventually, the bus driver sounds the “all aboard” alarm. When I finally get on the bus, I’m the last one. The bus smells of something unplaceable, a light skim over the cline between urine and body odour and motor oil. No sooner am I on, edging up the aisle, when I hear Larry calling from the back of the bus. 

“Fred!” he shouts. 

I edge toward him, the young woman and her child taking their time, looking for two free seats. A passenger frowns when he sees her and gives up his seat to sit with different stranger. 

“Over here, Fred,” calls Larry. 

“My name is Freddy,” I tell him, sitting down. 

“Good,” he says. “I like that better than Fred. That name sounds like you’re going to fit me for a pair of shoes.” 

I had hoped that the next ten hours excluded sitting within inches of someone else. No such luck. Larry and I will have to be formally polite to each other for the next five hundred kilometres. But my disdain for close quarters is offset by my relief that I have a guide. Otherwise, I was alone on this journey. 

“They say it looks like rain,” I try to make small talk, but Larry is having none of it. 

“Go fuckin fuck a fucking fuckwad,” he growls at his seat as he tries to adjust it, hoping that the difference of two or three degrees in the angle of his back seat will transform the cramp into glamp. 

But it doesn’t, and Larry gives up and sits, staring straight ahead. After a few minutes he fidgets. 

“Why aren’t we going?” he groans. He looks at his bare arm, staring at the top of his wrist for a few seconds. He swears again. “I forgot I sold my watch.” 

Then he shakes his head. “Won’t need it where we’re going, am I right?” He pokes me playfully in the arm with his elbow. 

“I don’t know where we’re going,” I tell him. 

He stares at me for a good few seconds. 

“An adventure, Freddy,” he tells me. “We’re going on an adventure.” 

– 

This is what I text Saskia when the bus finally departs for the Horseshoe Bay ferry: 

I’m going to leave now 

This is what I text her when I step off the bus and go up to the ferry’s main deck: 

I’m on a ferry because I am leaving 

This is what I text her after the bus disembarks at Nanaimo to start the long, slow journey to the top of Vancouver Island: 

I’ve left 

This is what she texts me, each time: 

–

 The night falls and the bus is silent, dark, lit up by the passing lights of semi-trailers and logging trucks. Larry sits, looking out the window, stroking his chin as if he has a beard, speaking as if he is a sage.  

“Joseph Campbell wrote a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” he tells me, recounting what he calls his past life when he studied comparative mythology at UBC. “And every hero’s journey has the same arc. It begins with an encounter with the sublime, and then a call to adventure.” 

I think about the bear from the night before. But the only one doing the calling was me, and no one was answering. 

He taps himself on his chest. “I’m the call to adventure, not you. Jesus, get over yourself.” 

“I’m not going for adventure,” I tell him, “just a paycheque.” 

He points out into the night. “You can’t resist it, Freddy. It will only keep calling. Then you have to enter the dark forest. You can’t emerge victorious if you don’t descend first.” 

I don’t like that. 

“Your sister said I should keep an eye on you,” I tell him. 

He nods as if he isn’t surprised. “Joseph Campbell also said that you should follow your bliss.” He sighs. “Believe me, that was shitty advice.” 

After that, he speaks no more. 

– 

And now I’m gone. I’ve made it to eighteen standing. I close my eyes. And I’ll open them again after the days become weeks become months become years. 

Excerpted from Whe the World Was Twice as Big by Aaron Cully Drake © 2026. Used with permission of Nightwood Editions.

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