by Jay Hosking
I look at her, unimpressed. She’s wearing a crooked grin that, if the situation were a little different, might be cute.
“I only ask because I got word that somebody broke into your sister’s old lab. John’s lab.” She takes the lid off the cage and scoops up Buddy as if she’s had plenty of practice with rats. Buddy, that traitor, snuggles contentedly into the crook of her arm. That grin of hers again. “Bearded guy, from the tapes. Not that you’re bearded these days. Thing is, he didn’t take anything from the lab, not as far as anyone can tell.”
“Do you want to come right out and say it, officer?” I ask. “I’m tired, I feel like shit, and I have a million things to do.”
“Oh?” She hands me Buddy and I put him on my shoulder without thinking. “A million things? Your old boss tells me you haven’t worked for her in over a month.”
“For fuck’s sake. Have you interviewed my friends, yet? My ex-girlfriend?”
“Should I?” she asks. “Maybe later. Your mom says she’s worried about you. Says she hasn’t seen you for months.”
“My mother should be used to that.”
By now we’re two feet from one another, within each other’s personal space. She exhales and steps away from me to inspect the room, her eye quickly landing on the sheet of paper on the kitchen counter, the one with the tabula recta. She walks to it, picks it up, asks, “You coding or decoding?”
I cross my arms. “Why am I not surprised that you’re not surprised?”
“Anyone with an internet connection and a bit of free time could tell you all about it.”
I hold my hands out toward the room, palms up, as if to show her there is no internet here.
“Yeah, you don’t seem like the smartphone type.” She grins again. “What’s your cipher?”
I raise an eyebrow.
“The code,” she says. “The repeating word or phrase that you use to encrypt or decrypt the text. You know, first letter of the cipher for the first letter of the passage, second for second, third for third, et cetera ad infinitum and such.”
“It was a sentence,” I tell her, “but it only worked for part of the message. I haven’t been able to figure out the code for the next section.”
But she’s already moved on. She nudges the bag of broken mirror with the toe of her boot and runs her finger along the smooth edges of the wooden panel.
“Looks like you’re almost finished,” she says.
“Just waiting on the hardware store to get me a big enough pane of mirror.”
“And then what? Care to tell me what you’re going to do with your codes and your rats and your boxes?”
She is almost being polite but it bothers me. Her kindness irritates me. The sight of her in my living room irritates me.
I take Buddy off my shoulder and put him back in his cage. “Is there anything I can do for you, officer?”
She pinches her pretty face as if she’s going to spit. “Don’t you know what it looks like when someone’s trying to help you?”
“Help me with what? Sanding? Gluing the mirror to the wood?”
“This I haven’t seen before.” She nods at the box. Then, as though she’s shooting from the hip, she points to me. “This I’ve seen. I saw it last year, in fact. I gather you’ve seen it twice already, this sudden case of misanthropy and obsession. And look how it ended the last two times.”
She steps toward me again, close enough to be considered either intimate or pitying, but I’m not sure which. My spine straightens and my breath catches in my throat.
“You seem decent,” she tells me, her mouth near my shoulder. “A bit dopey, I gather, but decent. What I know of your sister is less flattering, and what I know of John is more pathetic. It’s a shame what happened to them, whatever happened to them. But it would be foolish if it happened to you, too, after everything you’ve seen.”
“I didn’t see enough,” I say to the top of her head. “That’s the problem: I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Pay attention to me, now.” She looks up at me and her eyes are a cold, hard, bluish grey, like a slab of concrete a few feet under ocean water. “Let them rest. Learn from their mistakes. Nothing good can come of following in their footsteps, not for you, not for anybody. Are you paying attention? If you keep following them, everything else will slip away until all you have are silhouettes in a reflection.”
I take a step back. “What?”
“This is the part where I leave,” she says, “and you thank me for coming.”
“Just a second. What did you just say?”
She smiles a crooked smile, turns, and walks to my door.
“Do you know something?” I ask.
She pulls open the door and leaves me standing in my living room.
—
It takes hardly a moment to put on my boots and John’s jacket, and while I’m clearly underdressed for the weather, I don’t want to waste any more time. The sky is saturated white with clouds and my ears burn in the air. She’s not up the street so I run down to Dundas.
I keep close to the edge of the Portuguese bank on the corner and lean out a little to look. Officer 2510 is about two streets away and walking without hurry. Her confident gait is unmistakable. I follow.
I make up a little of the distance between us, but not too much. She stays on Dundas Street, crossing Bathurst and following the southern edge of the hospital grounds. She slows for a moment to stare north into Kensington Market, toward the fruit shops and cafés, but then continues eastward. I stay behind pedestrians wherever possible, hunched and unassuming, but she never looks back.
She moves quickly through the Chinatown bustle, crosses Spadina and continues east until she reaches the southern parts of the university district, where she disappears down a tiled stairway into the subway. I hold the metal railing as I descend. Daylight fades behind me.
It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the artificial lighting. St. Patrick station is appropriately green, though it’s been dulled by grime and years of use. I dig through my pockets for change and find less than a dollar. The rush-hour gate is still open, despite it not being rush hour, and a tired attendant watches while people drop their money into the glass cube. I stall until a crowd of university students files through, then jam my change in with theirs and cross the gate. The attendant looks at me foully, knows exactly what I’m doing, but says nothing.
I can hear the deep rumble of a train pulling in below. I skip down the stairs as fast as I can and scan the platform. I don’t see Officer 2510 at first but then she takes a step backward and practically pops out of the crowd, about fifty feet to my right. The northbound train arrives and she gets on it. I get in, one car behind hers, the doors closing behind me with their characteristic three-note chime.
I weave through the standing passengers until I’m at the doors that separate the two subway cars. Though there are empty seats, Officer 2510 prefers to stand near the exit. She is staring through the doors’ windows, out into the black tunnel. Or maybe she’s staring at the reflections.
It’s only a few minutes, but it feels like forever. We pass a few stations: Queen’s Park, Museum, St. George. At Spadina station, she slips out onto the platform. This doesn’t make any sense. If she’d wanted Spadina, she could have taken a streetcar north from Chinatown. I’ve either let myself be seen or she’s been toying with me all along. I set my teeth hard and walk briskly to catch up with her.
But I can’t. No matter how quickly I move, she keeps ahead. She weaves effortlessly through the crowds while people seem to block my way forward. She glides up the stairs while I fight my way around shoulders and elbows.
I’m blinded by the white sky when I emerge from the underground. It’s cold. I look in every direction until finally I catch her rounding the corner onto Bloor Street, now heading west. I cut through traffic and hear car horns, shout some noncommittal apology. I reach the corner where I last saw her and scour the view in all directions. She’s gone.
I cu
rse. I continue on, searching for Officer 2510 in the crowds on the sidewalk ahead of me. Something tugs at my unconscious, something unsettled and agitated. The storefronts along Bloor Street become familiar and that feeling tugs at me harder until my shiver turns into a shudder and I’m hugging myself for comfort. As I look down the street at the Fortress, I can’t help feeling that something is very wrong.
And then it dawns on me.
John and Grace’s apartment is missing.
It’s as if a chunk of Bloor Street has been seamlessly removed and the two adjoining pieces fit together perfectly. The building, with its stairwell and sushi restaurants, has been cut out of the city. The fucking apartment building is gone. I reel, lurch, crouch near the pavement. Thick drool drips out of my mouth and I think I’m going to vomit, but it doesn’t come.
For a while I stay on one knee with my face near the sidewalk. I can feel pedestrians moving by me, some slowing, concerned but too hesitant or polite to ask if I’m all right. My head throbs until it doesn’t. I concentrate, spit a mouthful of saliva on the ground beneath me, and force myself to stand up.
I run my hand along the curve of my skull, through the centimetre of hair I’ve grown on my scalp over the last month. The wind picks up and bites at my ears a little. My huddled image is in the shop window that used to be just east of the sushi restaurants, and I’m no longer surprised to see my eyes in that gaunt and serious face.
And then I see her. In the reflection, not six feet from my mirror image, Officer 2510 stands and watches me losing my shit. Her eyes are fixed on me and her hands are on her hips.
“Oh, come on,” I say and turn around, but she’s not on the sidewalk. Instead it’s just the mindless bustle of Bloor Street, unaware of the events taking place or the absence of an entire apartment building. I take a breath before I look back to the glass. Officer 2510 is no longer in the reflection, no longer visible anywhere.
Some great tether is unravelling and my body is floating further and further from anything recognizable. I stand stock-still in the flow of human traffic, my eyes now on the pavement at my feet. It feels like someone is breathing on my neck, watching me.
Slowly, carefully, I extend my arm in front of me and curl my hand until it’s a fist. Then I extend my middle finger into a nice, rigid line. “Go fuck yourself,” I scream.
The pedestrians around me flinch as if they’ve just heard a gunshot.
A moan slips out of me, some scared and lost sound.
—
“Hello? Scruffy?”
“Shit. Sorry, Lee, I meant to call Brian.”
“No, no. You got the right number. He’s just out getting us some beer and left his phone here.”
“Can you leave him a message to check in on Buddy over the next couple of days?”
“Sorry? ‘Buddy’?”
“My rat. He’ll understand. Tell him my apartment key is under the mat.”
“Sure. You all right, young ’un?”
“Hmm. Yeah. Don’t worry about it. Big plans for you three tonight?”
“Two, not three.”
“No Steve?”
“That’s sort of exactly what I’m trying to say, young ’un. No Steve.”
“Do you mean ‘no more Steve’? As in forever?”
“As in ‘indefinitely,’ anyway.”
“Jesus, Lee. Are you all right?”
“Everything changes, Scruffy. It was a long time coming.”
“Listen. Can I ask you a weird question? You know John and Grace’s apartment?”
“Whose apartment?”
“Grace. As in my sister.”
“I don’t think I even knew you had a sister. You sure I’ve met her?”
A pause.
“Scruffy? What’s up?”
“Look, Lee, I have to go. Please just give Brian the message.”
—
There is only standing room on the subway heading south. I lean myself against one of the filthy chrome handrails and feel every bump as the cars grind over the tracks beneath.
At Union Station we spill out of the subway like a head wound, then flow up the stairs and into daylight. Every face is pointed in the same direction: upward, outward, homeward. I buy my train ticket out of town from the unremarkable lower floor of Union and make my way to the platform. There’s a free seat on the middle level of the train, the small section that connects the stairs between upper and lower decks. I sit facing east, shoulder to the window. The train fills but I don’t look at the other passengers. Instead I stare out the glass.
The sprawl doesn’t end, but instead shifts in form and function. Near to the train tracks are trees that whip past my viewpoint so fast as to make them phantoms. The background is industrial space, old factories that have been appropriated for beer and re-appropriated for yuppie first dates. We reach the edge of the city and the background changes to cramped residential neighbourhoods, their yards littered with the evidence of childhoods past: bicycle frames, rusted swing sets, swimming pools emptied for the year and covered in a film of dead leaves. Soon the landscape is changing again, this time into three-level townhomes that look like sanatoriums, the last of which bump against another block of industrial buildings. It is all manufactured hideousness.
And then, for a minute or two before we reach my stop, the train veers south and bursts from a layer of scratty trees and the only thing I can see is the blinding, brilliant surface of Lake Ontario, seemingly endless and capped with small diamonds of light. Across the lake, the sun has broken out of the clouds and casts intense beams across the water. There is the faintest froth where the waves rush onto the pebbled shore and the grass just beyond it looks alive and intensely green despite how cold it must be outside. An occasional tree still flickers past my vision, next to the train, but otherwise this image of the shimmeringly perfect and endless lake persists long enough for me to realize that I’ve been holding my breath all the while. Out there no fate is fixed and nothing is wrong with the world. Out there shows me that peace is a possibility. Then the gnarled and leafless trees swallow up the view and the train turns a little northward, toward the highway, and again the scenery becomes grey cement and empty transport trucks.
The next time the train slows into a station, I stand and exit. The scenery is still sprawl, but everything in the suburbs is wider, more spacious, somehow gaudy in its girth. I transfer onto a bus that takes me north, past the buzzing highway, the bloated mega-stores, the vast parking lots, and finally into the unending residential zone.
The bus leaves me on a corner next to a gas station. Here, the grass is dead and the sky is grey and the lake is far, far from sight. I walk off the main road and breach the heart of the suburbs.
It has taken about two hours to return to my mother’s home.
The house is an unremarkable structure, speaking both absolutely and relatively. It is grey brick and blue-grey aluminum siding, with the same blue-grey painted across the garage door. If it didn’t have an angled roof, it would be a box. There is a small wedge of lawn on either side of the driveway, too small for anything but a patch of ornamental grass. To the left and right of the property are exactly the same model of house, one in tones of beige, the other a ruddy colour, and their yards are similar in size and shape. My mother’s house is in the middle of a street that endlessly repeats and it would be nearly impossible to notice if it disappeared forever.
It was my home for years but still I choose to knock on the door, then ring the bell when my mother doesn’t answer. I peer through the thin pane next to the door, and finally I see her come down the stairs into the foyer. She is in a bathrobe, her hair is frazzled, and she’s practically screeching when she opens the door. “Jesus Christ, sweetheart, why don’t you visit me anymore?”
—
It doesn’t take me long to notice the changes.
I take off my shoes and jacket, mutter acknowledgement of my mother’s incessant chit-chat, and say, “Where are Grace’s things? I need to look thr
ough them.”
My mother is puzzled. “Whose things?”
I grit my teeth. “This is a three-bedroom house, Mom. Who lived in the third bedroom?”
She tucks in her chin, her eyes wide and surprised like Grace’s. “What the hell are you on about, sweetheart?”
I demand an answer with my silence.
“Nobody,” she says. “Why would I rent out the third room? This is our home.”
So now I don’t have a sister. I want to be more surprised than I am.
“Christ, you used to have so much fun here,” she tells me. Meanwhile she picks at something stuck to my shirt, loosening it with some saliva on her thumb and forefinger. “I wish you’d come home more. This is nice.”
She flutters around me and prattles away but I hardly listen. Any information I could have gleaned from this house has disappeared along with Grace’s possessions. Still, it may not be a pointless journey. I dig my hands into my jeans pockets and feel the nub of the flash drive demanding my attention.
I interrupt my mother mid-sentence. “Gotta check my email. Back in a sec.”
Before she can say anything I’ve left the foyer. I boot up the computer in my mother’s office and plug in the key. The Telemetrics file turns out to be a text file, full of mostly unlabelled numbers. Still, one piece of information is clear and pertinent: the computer’s timer shows that Buddy was in the box for a few minutes, whereas the readout of Buddy’s timer says he was gone for almost a day. The little rat’s data suggest a way to reach my vanishing sister.
I take a walk around the block to get some air. Outside, the sun has disappeared below the horizon and the streets are lit by the yellow glow of the lights above. I pass the park where I played as a child, the houses of old friends, and approach my old school. For a moment I stand in the teachers’ parking lot, where I got into my only fight and lost, and with a jolt it comes to me: Thornton. His name is a word I haven’t tried yet, a potential cipher, an obvious possibility that hadn’t occurred to me. I call a taxi.
“What the hell do you mean you’re leaving?” my mother says when I get back to the house. “No. You can’t leave. You only just got here.”