Crosshairs

by Catherine Hernandez

  “That photo isn’t mine.”

  “Then why do you have it?” Ma fished the photo from her sleeve. The tissue came out with it and fell to the floor. She held the photo up to my face, almost touching my forehead. “Why is he seeing you after school?”

  “I stole the photo. I mean . . . I found the photo! It fell on the floor at school! It belongs to his girlfriend, Nadine! It’s not mine! I meant to return it!”

  “Why are you looking at this photo? Is Randell influencing you?” said Pastor Michael as he hiked up his pants.

  “No! Randell doesn’t even know me that well. We just have gym and social sciences together. His girlfriend dropped the photo and—”

  “You’re a liar.” Ma’s thumbs stroked the tops of my hands, gently, but her words were sharp. She cried as she would cry over a dying animal she was about to put out of its misery. “I can see you’re lying to me, Keith.” The rest of her church friends rose from the kitchen table and approached me in the hallway slowly, like I was an animal on the loose. What do I remember of them? One was a burly man in a white shirt with a red bank logo on it. One was a stocky woman with feathered brown hair pinned behind one ear. Another was a teenage boy, slightly older than me, whose determination carved two deep lines in his young forehead. Another was a tall woman who wrung her hands in worry. Ma backed into the kitchen as they proceeded to corner me. She cried over the sink.

  “Ma? Maaaaaa!” I tried to move swiftly to the side and fool them, but just as Coach Smythe had said during gym class, I was “too much of a gaylord to be an athlete.” They surrounded me, and despite my most sincere protestations, I was dragged towards a chair in the kitchen. No. No, Evan. That did not happen. What happened? Wait. I remember now. There were no protestations. No. My body froze, Evan. My body was still. In my mind I was dragged, but I was not. My body froze. It floated, compliant and limp, towards the chair in the kitchen. Slight pressure on my shoulders coaxed me to sit on it. My limbs were numb. A ringing in my ear. A swelling of my tongue. I stared at my hands, willing them to move. They never did. Red bank logo. Feathered hair with pin. Two deep lines in a young forehead. Wringing hands.

  My mother, my own mother, filled a glass with water from the tap. My own mother did not look at me as they zip-tied my hands behind the chair, poked and prodded me. My own mother shut her face off, shut her body off and spirited herself towards the apartment balcony. Look at me. Look at me. I prayed as they threw holy water on me. Look at me. Look at me. Ma. Look at me. I prayed as they shaved my hair and clipped my nails down to the nubs. Red bank logo. Feathered hair with pin. Two deep lines in a young forehead. Wringing hands. They screamed at me to repent, to change. Not until the sun rose in the morning did I finally, with my voice scratchy and weak from screaming, say the magic words. “I admit it. I have been walking away from God. I am a homosexual. I ask God for forgiveness. I am sorry. I will change.” My body was limp. My lips numbly gave them what they wanted. I had soiled my pyjamas. The exorcism, as they saw it, was complete. The burly man cut the zip-tie, and my newly repentant body was free to leave. I walked out into the chill of the early morning. I walked and walked past curious neighbours, through forests, under bridges, until I reached an old cemetery. I sat there among the dead until something deep inside reminded me it was time to join the living. I made my way to school.

  “Hey! What happened to the knots I put in your hair?!” Nadine passed by me in the school hallway and laughed. I was sitting on the floor near my locker hugging my knees. I began to cry so hard that I drooled on my lap, unable to contain the water within. “Jesus! Are you okay?! Where’s your uniform? What are you wearing?” She helped me to my feet and looked at the sad state of me in my pyjamas from the night before. I explained what had happened. This was my coming-out moment. She was the first person I came out to. In my pyjamas, in the hallway of our high school. Me crying into the hollow of Nadine’s collarbone. Nadine tied her curly hair back, gathered up the sleeves of her Catholic school uniform and wrote a note on a lined piece of paper: PLEASE NOTE THAT MY SON, KEITH NOPUENTE, WILL BE ABSENT AFTER LUNCH PERIOD. SINCERELY, GABBY NOPUENTE.

  She signed and dated it like an expert. Like a person who had done this many times before. I handed it in to the school office. I never returned home.

  Nadine lived on the twenty-second floor of a high-rise in Crescent Town near the Victoria Park subway station. Since her parents were in the middle of a divorce involving extra-marital affairs with younger people in international locations, Nadine revelled in perfectly quiet nights where she could invite over her boyfriend, Randell, or me, her newly outed homosexual friend Keith. On my first night living with her, still tender from the day’s events, we sat on two plastic stools on her balcony watching the subway trains head east and west.

  “You can stay for as long as you want.” My eyebrows rose. “No, really. My parents will do anything to please me right now. Each one wants me to love them more than the other. Plus, they’re always away on business. They feel guilty, but not guilty enough to stay home or work things out with each other. So I get what I want. It makes me sick to my stomach.” Nadine was half Black like me, but her dad was some dude from Australia whose work had him travelling often. I looked at the length of her legs pointing out from her cut-off jeans. The length of her curly hair, perfectly blond at the tips. Her breasts. Her makeup. She had grown in length and confidence since I drew her outline so many years ago. I ached looking at her, wondering what it would be like to be that confident in my body.

  “Where did you get your name?” Nadine changed the subject suddenly.

  “My dad. I never met him, though. Why?”

  “You don’t even look like a Keith.”

  “You don’t look like a Nadine.”

  “What do you want your name to be?”

  “Huh?”

  “If you could change your name, what would it be?”

  No one had ever asked me that before. My name was just the wish that was never granted, named after my father who disappeared.

  “What about ‘Kay’? So, like ‘Keith,’ but just the first letter, and the first letter but like a girl?”

  Kay. I liked that. Nadine made a crown of twigs left over from an abandoned pigeon’s nest on the balcony. In the last light of that night, she raised the crown above her head, above the subway tracks, above the rustle of the forest and townhomes below, and said, “I now crown you Queen Kay!” She placed the crown on my head. I became me. Me. The me-est me I have ever been. Me times a thousand. Me on full volume. The me you fell in love with.

  3

  It is mid-morning three days after I last saw Liv. Dawn has passed. And still no Grand Caravan. Toronto has traded in rainstorms for sweltering heat, and it smells like mould everywhere. I travelled from Liv’s house on Homewood Street westward towards Queen Street and Gladstone Avenue. The map of the city for me is different now that I have disappeared myself like the Others.

  I remember once, well before the Renovation, I saw a meme on Facebook showing what the city of Toronto’s transit system would look like if all the inaccessible spaces were deleted from it. Only thirty-four of the sixty-nine subway stops would exist, the map explained. As an able-bodied person, I remember being disappointed, clicking the “angry” button, and then, like a lot of able-bodied people, I did nothing about it. I probably watched a cat video right after. Maybe I posted a selfie. Something split-screen, before and after my drag makeup. I would have gotten tons of “likes.”

  Now that I have been Othered, I too have a limited map. And there is no one, alive or in hiding, that can “angry” button me out of this. No one has seen an image of me online in more than half a year. I can’t post a selfie asking others to bear witness to this invisibility.

  Because of Boots checkpoints at major intersections, where Others have been collected and sent to workhouses, we have traded in the main roads for parking lots and back alleys. As per Liv’s instructions, I follow coded green spray-painted shapes on brick
walls. A simple drawing of a stick figure kicking a ball left or right acts as a flash, telling me which direction to go along the alleyway paths. The tail end of a swirl shows me where I can find hidden food. Concentric triangles show me there are back doors to abandoned businesses where I can hide and rest for the night. We traverse the streets at late hours and early light, unaware of the time, since most of us have had our phones destroyed or confiscated by the Boots. In the three-day journey to this address, I have travelled by foot, dodging passing streetcars, sneaking into garages during rainstorms and raiding garden-grown raspberry bushes. I have stood perfectly still, with my grey hoodie on, in an alleyway while white folks, walking their dogs, greeted each other, unaware of my presence.

  My sweet Evan. If you are reading my Whisper Letter while still in hiding, I must warn you. Things have changed in horrifying ways since the last time you and I walked the streets together.

  Do you remember how we got used to being stopped for random ID checks, sometimes at gunpoint? Do you remember how our bodies developed a muscle memory until the cadence of starting and stopping became a dance, a wedding march towards our own erasure? In the six moons since I went into hiding, the Renovation has made animals of us, Evan, with saddles on our backs and bits forced between our teeth.

  On my journey through the city these last few days, I have seen, through windows streaked with condensation, lines of Brown men wearing hairnets and connected by chains at the neck. In front of them, on a conveyor belt, travelled a never-ending supply of tiny dessert cakes, which the men wrapped in cellophane packs tied with small yellow ribbons. I salivated at the sight of the cakes and wept at the sight of the men but didn’t dare risk being seen by the Boot on duty behind them.

  I hid behind a fuse box near a converted school. Through a caged window, I could see a gym below. White toddlers played and laughed while their Brown nannies observed their charges, silent and fearful. Despite two Boots pacing the perimeter of the gym, the nannies wore receiver collars that were triggered by a wireless fence. A child ran out of a designated play area, and when the nanny tried to retrieve him, an ear-piercing alarm erupted over the gym’s speakers. It was loud enough that I too had to cover my ears. The nannies took their tearful children into the centre, with eyes downcast and arms shaking.

  One night, one fraction of the endless nights of hiding, I ran into six Others who were dodging a Boots checkpoint at Beverley and Dundas Streets, in what was once Chinatown before the Renovation. Cylinders of light from the Boots’ desperately seeking torches managed to chase us down a darkened laneway. A father and his child were apprehended, but the rest of us dispersed like the cockroaches they believed we were into every crevice of every rundown row house. I managed to find a spot in the construction zone of an old playground. Within the perimeter of the yellow caution tape, a dented metal slide lay sideways, detached from the graffiti-covered, pyramid-shaped climbing walls. It was tempting to consider the climbing walls as shelter for the night, but that place seemed too obvious to me, like slipping into a closet during a game of hide-and-go-seek. Also, judging by the whispers within, Others were already setting up camp inside. Blue tarps weighed down by bricks draped over a large pile of playground mulch. I decided to take cover there instead, burrowing into the moist, soft fibres of the mulch. I punched the surface of the tarp up slightly to create a crude window, large enough that I could see around me and small enough to remain unseen.

  About twenty minutes later, the four remaining Others—a mother and a toddler and two young men—ran to the playground, straight towards the climbing wall. Without hesitation or remorse, they forced out two small children, who looked to be about three and five, from the coveted spot. The older child was a scrapper and attempted to re-enter the shelter by punching with her wee fists and biting with her baby teeth. The mother, with her toddler still on her hip, emerged from the pyramid and towered over the child. The woman grabbed the child’s face with one hand and pushed with brute force, as though the child were a basketball, until she was flung onto my tarp. The woman re-entered the climbing wall without a sound. This hiding and fighting for space to hide was always done in silence, with barely a whisper or grunt shared among us in fear of being found.

  The two evicted children wasted no time in finding another spot. Adjacent to the playground was a blue metal dumpster full of blooms of black plastic garbage bags. At its base sat discarded furniture. The children appeared to be sisters, with a similar swell to their cheeks and gait to their walk. The brown skin on their faces was covered in cuts and scrapes. Their long black hair hung to their waists, their wisps of bangs encrusted with filth. With an identical short-clipped scurry, they made their way to the furniture. They wordlessly assessed the potential of an overturned futon sofa by walking around it in their tiny running shoes. The wooden base of the sofa formed an A-frame, and the mattress created a soggy two-foot-high tunnel above the cold pavement. The younger sister took a wooden chair, unscrewed one of its legs and poked the centre of the futon. Sure enough, a rat ran from the interior, its tail pink and its fur a slick brown. She nodded to her older sister. The older sister helped the younger one reach into the dumpster to grab several tin cans. I watched in wonder as they carefully placed the tin cans around the perimeter of the futon. I assumed it was a makeshift alarm system to alert them of Boots or rats. They slipped into the depths of the mattress, folding themselves like origami out of existence.

  In fear for the children’s safety, I attempted to keep my eyes open, lying to myself that I could ever protect them, but the delicious warmth of the soft mulch lulled me into slumber. I slept until I could hear rain tapping on the surface of the tarp. I emerged into the cool of the darkness, passed the A-frame of the futon with a wordless prayer, and then continued my nighttime journey west along Dundas.

  At first I was confused by this address—32 Alma Lane. I wasn’t sure what day it was, but I was concerned that if it was the weekend, I would be found by those frequenting the Gladstone Hotel, which was nearby. I knew that since the Renovation the hotel had become a popular hangout for the Boots, a place to have a beer after the hard work of relocating the Others. The white hipsters who had once made the hotel their headquarters, for anything from poetry readings to dance parties, ended up fading into the background, despite years of cultivating a reputation for “progressive thinking.” Some joined the Boots. Some calmly witnessed what the Boots were doing and did nothing. But when the side window of the corner townhome unit slid open and a sandwich was placed on the ledge, I understood why I was told to come here.

  My dirty hand reached out for the food with caution, and I caught the eye of a white woman pretending to do her dishes. This red-headed woman with baby bangs and black horn-rimmed glasses flashed me the fastest of smiles. Barely a smile. Her lips turned up for a fraction of a second. Then she was back to doing her pretend task, banging about cutlery in the sink, splashing water, when in fact she was feeding me. She filled a small watering can and placed it on the sill after I had taken the sandwich. When I reached out for the watering can, her hand briefly touched mine. It was purposeful, intentional. A moment of kindness. She never made eye contact again.

  I hid behind this home’s recycling bin and devoured my gifted sandwich. I downed the water from the watering can in one long stream into my mouth. Then I peed, dark yellow and hot, behind the lilac bushes.

  That was yesterday, and the thought of that sandwich has my stomach aching for another meal. The kitchen window of this white woman’s house has since gone dim and the curtains are shut tight. This makes me wonder if the woman’s absence and caution are connected to why the van has not shown up. Around the perimeter of 32 Alma Lane is an uneven fence, protecting a small corner garden of tomatoes and zucchini. I press my face against the worn planks of wood to see a factory across Dufferin Street. Three cars are parked: a red Kia Rondo, a white Toyota Corolla, a blue Volkswagen Golf. No black Grand Caravan. I move my nose to another break in the fence planks. At the sto
p sign by 32 Alma Lane, a young white man in a suit clips on his helmet, unlocks his bicycle and rides away.

  “Hello!” A ball rolls towards the fence, and as the child comes to collect it, she peeks into the space between the wood. “I see you!” The little girl has just grown out of toddlerhood, with baby fat still present in her ankles and wrists.

  “Molly. No, thank you. I saw you, young lady. Crossing the road without Mama is not nice.” Molly giggles. “That’s not funny, Molly. I’m serious. Please hold my hand.” Molly looks at me again through the fence. I shift just enough that she can’t see me.

  “Mama, look!”

  “What is it?” Her mama reluctantly looks through the slit in the fence and sees nothing, since I hide from her glance, but I can tell by her silence that she senses me there. We are both quiet on either side of the fence. Me not breathing, the woman listening for my breath.

  “Okay. We’re going to go now,” the mother says, like an announcement, like she knows I am there. “Molly, take my hand please.” They leave. I exhale. I peer through the slit again and see child and mother crossing the street, Molly with ball in hand.

  I lean my head on the fence, looking through the opening, praying and praying for the van to come. My exhaustion and hunger make my eyes heavy, and I nod off. I turn my left cheek onto the warm wooden surface of the fence post, and I can easily imagine it as a soft pillow. I shake my head, forcing myself to pay attention. I cannot miss the van. Don’t miss the van, I tell myself. But my eyes are so heavy, and the sound of my grumbling tummy is muted in my slumber.

  In my dreams, I am six years old again. Ma comes home with a new Sony stereo system. The Wright family has upgraded their sound system and donated the old one to her. I watch as she places an album—also a donation from the Wright family—on the platter of the turntable.