“Ruuuuuuuuuuuuun!” he screamed.
You peered out the window. “Fuck! It’s Nolan! What is he doing?! We have to get him.” I put my hand on your chest. Something was about to happen.
“WAAAAAKE UUUUP! RUUUUUUN! EVERYBODY RUUUUUUUUN!”
Fanny scooped Sedgewick into her arms. “What happened to Nolan!?” Sedgewick barked. “Somebody has to go get him.”
“Do not go outside, Fanny!” I said. Fanny ran to another window to get a better view of Nolan.
From the horizon an armoured truck slowly wheeled itself along Church Street until it was twenty feet away from Nolan. I held my breath. I remember you squeezing my hand. We watched Nolan try to hobble away faster, just as a Boot aimed his gun and shot Nolan in the throat. His screams were only gurgles. Another shot to Nolan’s head.
Chaos.
We watched silently as seven more armoured trucks made their way along Church Street. The Boots began crashing the butts of their guns into each store window. Broken glass. Fire. Screams. A line of people with their hands above their heads solemnly walked to the orders of a Boot. They were made to kneel in front of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop. One was shot. Screams. The others were put into another truck and driven away. One tried to run, but a bullet sent her head snapping back and her body collapsed on the pavement. I shut the window.
“WHAT’S HAPPENING?! SHIT! WHAT DO WE DO?” Fanny was pacing the hallway.
“Fanny. You gotta come with us,” I pleaded.
“I can’t!”
“Leave the dog and run! Come on!”
“I can’t! I can’t leave Sedgewick. I have to hide here.”
I gave Fanny a hug that I wished lasted longer. You and I did as we had planned: we grabbed our small backpacks, got dressed and headed to the staircase. You grabbed my arm.
“Kay. You ready?”
“Yes.”
“You remember the plan?”
“You’ll find your way to Parkdale, get your mom, then find me.”
“You remember the address, Kay?”
“Yes.”
We kissed. We kissed. We kissed one last time. I watched you run into a back alley and disappear. Then I ran in the other direction down another back alley, thinking, 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood. 72 Homewood.
8
We march with Beck and Liv towards a clearing in the woods. Slung over Beck’s shoulder is a hockey bag, which he places carefully by a picnic table. Liv gestures for me and Bahadur to sit. Beck opens the bag and places two handguns on the table in front of us like he is serving us dinner. Bahadur looks back at the cottage where Firuzeh is still resting and takes a deep breath. A reminder of why we are doing this. Beck reaches into the bag again and places boxes of ammunition on the table. I remember Fanny opening her costume bag and placing various tools from her arsenal before me.
Razors. Bottles. Brushes. Liquids. Creams. I had begged her, as a fellow Black queen, to show me how to do my makeup. Wearing a pink velour jumpsuit and holding a cup of coffee, she told me to sit down. Fanny took one more sip of her coffee, then said, “First we shave.”
“These are Glock 40s.” Beck encourages us to pick them up. “Go on. Feel it in your hand.” I take one in my hand. It is heavier than I thought it would be. I have never held a real gun before. The closest I ever got to purchasing a gun was in the toy aisle at the dollar store when Nolan wanted us to dress as Bonnie and Clyde for Halloween. My fake pistol was made of purple plastic and came with a spinning wheel of caps that made an ear-piercing snap with each pull of the trigger. Beck takes the weapon from me and shows us a firm grip. “When you hold it, don’t be afraid. Hold it confidently.”
“Drag isn’t just about looking like any lady heading to her accounting job on Bay Street. It’s about fantasy,” Fanny said, both of us crowding her vanity mirror, both of our eyebrows glued over. “Even our contouring game isn’t natural. But who wants to be natural? We are supernatural, darling.” A base colour was applied, this time perfectly matched with my skin. Using a large palette of nude tones, a perfect science of light and dark illusion played on my cheekbones. Fanny assured me that in time, it would take only an hour to put my makeup on rather than three. “Now press that powder on. Don’t brush. Press.”
“What you’re going to do is press the bullets into the magazine like this.” Liv shows us how to load the bullets into the compartment. She hands the magazine to Bahadur, and they accidentally drop a bullet onto the pea gravel. They nervously apologize and pick it up. They try again.
“Now, I’ve seen your numbers.” Fanny taught me in her bedroom. It was like drag queen university, only the school was a three-by-three-foot clearing in her room where there were no shoes or clothes. “I mean . . . one thing you’ve got going is your lip-synch is bang on. Bang fucking on. But . . .” Fanny picked up a round hairbrush and placed it in my hands. “It’s so much more than lip-synching. Any closeted gay boy from the suburbs can lip-synch. This is drag, remember? Fantasy.” She struck a pose, her eyes full of wonder. “Where are you right now? Are you in Fanny’s bedroom? Wrong. When you come out onstage, I want you to imagine a five-hundred-seat theatre complete with a lighting rig, dry ice and a fucking trap door. You have to imagine it for the audience even though they’re all just sitting in some nasty-ass dive of a bar with five sticky tables.”
Beck leaves us for a few minutes and returns with two wooden posts and supplies. Using a metal fence-post driver, he positions the posts upright and three feet apart. He then nails a large piece of cardboard to join the two posts and draws the outline of a head and torso.
Liv instructs me to slap the magazine in and pull the slide. I can barely hear her with my shooting earmuffs on. “Now your gun is loaded.” I can feel it. I can feel the power of every bullet in my hand. “Watch your finger. Always think of your finger discipline.” She shows me how to keep my right pointer finger straight to avoid a misfire. She corrects my grasp of the gun so that my hands are hugging the weapon; my thumbs lie, one above the other, in a snug embrace.
“Look at your feet.” I looked down at my feet doing a clumsy step-touch to the tune of Paula Abdul. “Girl, you have gorgeous legs, but you need to be aware of how your body takes up space. Women learn from a young age to be small. But now we all have the freedom to play with that smallness and make it large. Pull your feet together and cock your hip. Now lean on the wall. Lean on things. Press into them. Play with your space.” I press into the wall and trace my knee along the surface coyly. “Yes, bitch. Yes. There you go. You’re almost there.”
“Widen your stance. Good.” I do as I am told. Beck shows me how to aim by aligning my front and rear sights. I thought the sight would look like a cross, but instead it looks like I have to line up a point in the front end of my gun with an open square on the back end of my gun. I line it up and can see the drawn-on shape of a person about twenty feet away. “Now, the trick is to press the fingers of your right hand into the palm of your left hand to create tension. That will help with the kickback. Now exhale and slowly pull the trigger.” I shoot. A thunderbolt of energy rushes through my body. A lightning current creates a ripple through the muscles from my forearm to my deltoids. A deafening crack. I hear a muffled cheer. Beck gestures to me to point my gun down and be mindful of my finger discipline. He walks to the target and points proudly to where I shot the target right in the head. “You okay?” Liv asks. I realize that I’m shaking.
“I want you to think of a story. You’re not some two-dollar performer up there singing along to some song asking for pittance. You are the queen of the stage. Do you have a crush on a cute boy in the audience? Are you on the run from the cops? Do you not fit in anywhere? What is the story?” I press play on another song, this time by SWV, and begin to experiment with feeling heartbroken. Fanny nods her head and does a slow clap. “There you go. You’re helpless around him. You don’t know what to do
without him. Yup. Keep going.”
Bahadur tries their hand at shooting, but they aren’t as successful. Tiny clouds of dust explode at random close to the target but not close enough. “Sorry! Maybe I’m not getting this right.” They speak louder than they need to on account of their earmuffs.
“Oh gosh, don’t even worry about it. You’ve got a good stance. So you’re ahead of the game compared to most people,” Beck says to Bahadur, who giggles sheepishly. “Everyone makes mistakes, and as long as we’re safe, we will learn along the way.”
“But what if my wig falls?” I said to Fanny while she rounded my newly shaven head with duct tape.
“Everyone’s wig falls at least once,” Fanny said while pinning my new lace front from the weave of the wig to the tape attached to my head. “That’s called a drag queen baptism. If your wig doesn’t fall off, you don’t get to go to heaven.” She laughed. “Just kidding. But really, everyone experiences it. No harm done. Make it part of your act. Start holding it in your arms like a baby. Make it your ex-boyfriend. Whatever.”
Beck takes a rifle out of the hockey bag. “This is an AR-15.” Bahadur and I take a step back at the size of it. “I will need you to learn this weapon because these will be carried by the Boots.”
I wave at Firuzeh, who is walking towards us, perhaps to watch us train. She does not wave back. Over the last few days her face has been, as expected, motionless and catatonic.
“Here, give it a try.” I cautiously take the rifle. This gun is different. Rather than front and rear sights, it has a scope through which I can see a pin-sized red dot. With the ergonomic butt of the gun against my shoulder, I aim, I exhale, I fire. I hear muffled cheers from Beck and Bahadur.
“Look! I got it again in the head!” I say. Suddenly I feel my grip on the AR-15 loosen as Firuzeh takes it from me. “Shit, no!”
“NO!” Liv screams. We collectively imagine Firuzeh pointing the gun to her own head, pulling the trigger, scattering pieces of herself onto our faces, the reverberation of her last moments echoing among the trees, anything to erase the horrors she has witnessed.
Instead, Firuzeh shoulders the gun, aims and shoots at the target several times until she hears the empty click of a used-up magazine. She screams. She drops the weapon and runs to the target, ripping it to shreds with her bare hands.
“FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK ALL OF YOU!” She collapses on the ground in a solid heap, wisps of cardboard littered around her tiny frame. Long, agonizing sobs. We stand witness to this opening, this tear in her fabric. We witness it until she is silent, her voice hoarse and raw.
9
In the main house’s living room, Liv and I sit on either side of Firuzeh and hold her hands. Hanna sits on the edge of the lumpy recliner and Beck leans on the door frame, both of them uneasy.
“How’s this?” Bahadur tucks a blanket over Firuzeh’s lap, then sits at her feet to listen.
“It’s good. Thank you.”
“Are you sure you feel ready to share? It’s like what you told me when we first met: ‘Feel what you want to feel. Feel when you want to feel,’” Bahadur gently says.
“Yes. I’m ready. I will stop if I need to. Thank you, aziz-am. I need to say all of this out loud. It’s like telling someone your nightmares so that they don’t come true. If I tell you this now, I know it will be in the past, far behind me.”
“I wanted to surprise you,” Firuzeh said to Bahadur before giving them a gift bag. “Today is supposed to be the first snowfall. I wanted you to be prepared.” Inside the bag were a striped Blue Jays toque she had found at the corner store and some spare winter gear she had sourced from one of her Facebook friends.
“I look like a marshmallow.”
Firuzeh laughed. “No! No. You don’t look—”
“Yes I do.”
“Okay. Maybe a little.”
“Let’s schedule you in next week, okay? We have to finalize the paperwork for your work permit, and I want to get that done sooner than later.”
She giggled watching Bahadur exit the Transgender Assistance Centre, trying to make sense of the oversized winter boots with each awkward step.
It was Friday again. Firuzeh made her way to the cafeteria and heated up her leftovers from yesterday’s Loving Kindness dinner. According to her research on YouTube, the idea was to craft a Loving Kindness meal meant for herself and no one else as an act of self-care in the wake of her recent breakup. She got to choose the menu, not her ex, who happened to be a critically acclaimed chef at a critically acclaimed restaurant. She did not need her ex to dictate menu choices or remind Firuzeh that her calorie intake was high. She did not need her ex to bicker with at the grocery store over organic or non-organic. The meal was just for her. And, since Firuzeh was not a critically acclaimed chef, the meal she had created tasted horrible. Firuzeh’s mother always said, “When you’re in love, make a feast. When you’re heartbroken, eat out.” But since she had to shoulder the entire rent after her ex moved out, eating out was not an option. She watched the bland quinoa rotate in the microwave and considered her options for yet another evening practising painful autonomy and liberation from co-dependence.
“Hey, are you coming to the party tonight?” asked her co-worker Kyle, holding a Tupperware of cheesy lasagna.
“What party?”
“Drew’s Queer anti-holiday party.”
“Who’s Drew again?”
“Remember Drew who hosted that anti-Valentine’s party?”
“I can’t. Too many past clients in that room.” Kyle nodded his head in agreement, knowing the usual conflicts of interest frontline workers face in the LGBTQ2S community. Firuzeh explained, “I’m facilitating the Trans Elders’ Mindfulness group, then heading home.”
Kyle nodded. “Cool.” He adjusted his suspenders over his unicorn T-shirt and sat himself down to eat.
“Yeah. Just trying to be independent. Know myself. Be with myself. I’m trying to be the person I would want in a partnership, you know?” The microwave dinged. Firuzeh opened the sticky door to the 1980s contraption and looked at the steaming bowl of beige grains and withered cucumbers. She smiled weakly at Kyle.
“Cool.” Kyle took another bite of lasagna and opened a magazine to read. Firuzeh understood his signal and gave up trying to start a conversation.
The recreation room still smelled like cleaning products when Firuzeh entered. She sighed and opened the window to help the smell dissipate. She’d told the custodian again and again to use vinegar and water since several of the participants had scent sensitivities, but he refused to listen. She laid out fifteen yoga mats in perfect lines facing one wall and placed a chair behind each mat, in case of mobility issues. She used to arrange them in a large circle to encourage conversation, but the elders became confused over their right and left depending on where they sat in the circle. She then shuffled the curtain over the mirror to avoid any confusion about directions.
“If you find your mind wandering, just guide yourself back to the breath. No judgement. Just watch your thoughts like they are clouds in the sky.” As part of the exercise, each elder pointed at their distracting thoughts, imagining them passing over their head. Firuzeh found it ironic that she was teaching these folks to meditate when her own thoughts crowded her emotional brain. She thought of her ex surprising her at work with flowers. She thought of her ex dancing with her under a bridge while a train passed overhead. She thought of her ex painting her toes on a lazy Sunday morning.
“Great work,” she told the elders. “Follow your breath from your nostrils into your lungs and back out again.”
After most of the participants had left and Firuzeh had put away all the mats, she noticed one elder struggling with his jacket. It was Said, one of her favourites, although she would never admit to having favourites. She adored how in class he would assist Firuzeh by showing his fellow classmates his versions of various poses and encourage them, sometimes a bit too aggressively, to follow along.
“Hey, Said! Did
you need help with that?” Firuzeh rushed to his side.
“If you don’t mind.” When she reached out to bring the sleeve closer to his arm, she noticed a scabbed-over scar running down his forearm.
“What happened? Are you okay?”
“My neighbours. They jumped out at me in the stairwell. All of my groceries fell to the ground.” He closed his tired eyes and shook his head before enduring the last push of his arm through the fabric of his sleeve. He groaned.
“What?! Why did they do that?”
Said smirked in contempt. “Why do any of them do what they do?”
“I’m so sorry, Said. I know you were just placed there recently.”
“Housing for people like me is hard to come by. I’m not complaining about the bedbugs. Not complaining about the constant noise. I just want to be safe.”
“Did you see the doctor? Do you need stitches?”
“No. Doctor told me to go home.” He managed to get his other arm into the sleeve and winced in pain. “The doctors keep turning me away. First it was my prescriptions. The doctor refused to fill them. Told me I had an addiction problem. Now this. They told me to go home and sleep it off. How can you sleep off a wound? Glad it has scabbed, though.”
Firuzeh’s throat grew warm. This wasn’t the first time she had heard of this happening to the Others. It was why the walk-in clinic at the centre was constantly full. With dry pursed lips, Said kissed both Firuzeh’s cheeks goodbye.
She closed up the recreation room, waved goodbye to Quin, the night security guard at the front desk, and headed home into the crisp winter air. Her head was full of worry about clients such as Said and Bahadur. How fragile safety is, she thought to herself.
Crosshairs Page 18