Yet another Boots checkpoint was situated at the intersection closest to the centre. Firuzeh sighed and decided to take an alternate route home. Anything to avoid yet another pat-down by the Boots.
By the time the streetcar approached her home, Firuzeh had decided that, despite the cold, it was warm enough for her to sit in Riverdale Park and contemplate her new single status. She had a lot of time for this kind of reflection these days. She sat on a park bench next to another on which a couple was locked in a heated embrace, kneading their faces into one another. At the basin of the park, framed by a baseball diamond, Firuzeh could see another tent city alive with activity. Laundry hung on makeshift lines. Groups encircled smoky fires. Out of one of the tents, a Black woman emerged from the zippered door and braced herself against the brisk breeze. Ragged and weary, she made her way up the hill towards the public washroom with a tray full of dirty dishes and a half-empty bottle of dish soap. Firuzeh closed her eyes at the sight of the woman. These tent cities were becoming more common, with no solution in sight.
She took out the joint she kept in an eyeglass case in her bag. With each exhale, the smoke blurred the skyline. The CN Tower was changing colours from blue to red to green. Laser beams shot out from some event in the heart of downtown, an exciting event that did not include her. How fragile life is.
Firuzeh walked up the lonely staircase to her third-floor apartment, made a beeline to her bed and cried herself to sleep.
The next day, Firuzeh packed what was, thankfully, the last of that dreadful Loving Kindness meal and headed to work. A Boots checkpoint was set up at the intersection outside her apartment building. She casually waited in line with the Others. Raised her arms for a pat-down.
As per usual, the Boot opened her purse for inspection.
“And what is this?”
“It’s my lunch.”
The Boot winced at the container’s smell.
“Verification Card, please.”
The streetcar was, mercifully, less crowded than usual. She entered the Transgender Assistance Centre. She said hello to Justine, the daytime security guard at the front desk. Took the elevator to the third floor. Nodded in Kyle’s direction. Pumped some hand sanitizer from the dispenser on the wall and rubbed it dry. Sat at her desk and checked emails. Deciding that her emails would go better with coffee, she got up from her desk and headed to the hospitality station across the hall. She poured ground coffee into the filter and heard a noise. She peeked her head around the corner and saw seven Boots with leather jackets and shiny boots making their way down the corridor aiming their guns left and right. They were like an arrow. Swift. Graceful. They wore matching helmets and held matching rifles.
“Excuse me, sir?” said Jesse, the second-floor front desk administrator, to the man at the front of the pack. “Can I help you?” From far away Firuzeh could see one of the Boots in the back of the pack intercept Jesse, preventing her from following any further. Firuzeh couldn’t hear what was said but could see that it was a threat. Jesse’s hands went up and she stopped in her tracks; her face was red and she helplessly looked down the corridor. For a brief moment, she locked eyes with Firuzeh in a look of terror.
Firuzeh ducked back into the station and tried to put the filter basket back into the machine, but for some reason it wouldn’t fit despite her attempts to jam it in again and again. She could hear their footsteps getting closer. Firuzeh knew in her heart the feeling of impending disaster. She had felt it many times. She knew what it meant to run for your life. So she did. She dropped the filter, and the coffee grounds spilled like soil onto the floor. She ran to her office.
Through the wall, she could hear the Boots speaking to Kyle. They sounded calm. Quiet. Smooth. Barely discernible. But Kyle was pleading.
“I just work here . . . I don’t know! Please!” The sound of an overturned table. Or chairs? A slam against the wall. Another smoothly delivered sentence. Moaning. A cabinet opened. Paper being scattered. Shattered glass.
Firuzeh frantically searched for her cellphone; it always slipped to the bottom of her purse. She started a live video on Facebook and aimed it at herself hiding behind her desk.
The video caught the sound of a doorknob turning. Firuzeh covered her mouth and shut her eyes, willing the nightmare to end. Two legs from the knees down could be seen rounding the desk. A Boot crushing the cellphone into static, into a memory.
With Firuzeh’s hands up in submission, the Boots also pulled the landline phone from its socket. All of Firuzeh’s files were tossed to the floor, rummaged through and confiscated.
At gunpoint, the Boots gathered Firuzeh and all the staff together in the cafeteria, down on the ground floor. Jesse could not stop whimpering. Her makeup had streaked across her cheeks. Daniel, the custodian, was so stunned he could barely obey orders.
“Sit there. Look down. Sit there!”
Daniel’s body froze.
“Did you hear me, freak?! Sit your ass down or I will make you sit down.” One Boot made him sit down by slamming the butt of his gun into Daniel’s forehead. Screams. Now forced into a seated position, Daniel calmly touched his head, looked at his blood-covered hand and stared out into the distance.
Time passed. Maybe two hours. It was all a blur. Firuzeh needed desperately to go to the washroom but didn’t want to risk punishment. She heard the sound of sirens, and two cops in full riot gear coolly entered. They walked up to one of the Boots and shook hands.
At the sight of this exchange a ringing stung her ears. Firuzeh looked at her co-workers. What kind of partnership was this?
“You got this covered?” said one of the cops to the Boot. It was difficult to distinguish between one person and the other. They all looked and acted the same. Even their gestures and voices seemed identical.
The Boots escorted the staff to the front door of the centre, where a large armoured truck was waiting for them. Just as Firuzeh was about to step outside, she looked back and saw a pool of blood on the floor near the front desk; Justine’s hand protruded from the corner of the desk, unmoving. Firuzeh did not scream. They were all beyond screaming. They silently got into the truck and obeyed orders to sit side by side.
In queues several blocks long, every visible Other you could imagine—Brown, Black, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Trans, Queer—was standing alongside the harbourfront. Some were elders. Some were children. Some were crying. Some were listless. So many Others. Everyone, including Firuzeh, was shuffled onto a series of ferries, coming and going. One boatload at a time. Gusts of wind scraped across everyone’s faces as they stood waiting and waiting and waiting. But for what? Firuzeh didn’t even have her winter jacket, since the Boots had forced her out of her office. To battle the cold, she danced on the spot and closed her eyes against the downpour of ice pellets from overhead.
“Where are we going?”
“You can’t do this to us!”
“Please! Help us! She’s just a baby!”
The Boots responded to nothing. They simply paced back and forth, save for moments of discipline when people protested.
To the right of Firuzeh, a pile of canes, walkers and wheelchairs sat precariously by the edge of the dock. Through half-closed eyes, bracing against the unforgiving sleet, she looked around frantically, wondering about the owners of those mobility aids. Firuzeh swallowed hard, realizing that everyone in the endless queues was able-bodied. Icy waves crashed against the complicated lattice of metal and wood until some of the mobility aids fell into the lake. A Boot came by and, with one swift kick, managed to toss the rest of the equipment into the water. Simultaneously, armoured trucks drove off along Queens Quay West, with the sound of muffled shrieks within.
A Boot standing to the left of Firuzeh sprayed a crackle of gunfire into the sky, and people in her queue ducked for cover with their palms over their ears. Screams. One woman ahead of Firuzeh ducked a fraction of a second later, looking around in delayed fear. Confused, she got up and began pacing the dock.
“Get in l
ine!” the Boot demanded. The woman re-entered, but from the end of the line. “I said to get in line! Not there! Where you were before!” The woman stepped aside and tried to enter the line from the end again. “Are you fucking kidding me?! Get in the fucking line!” Firuzeh surmised that the woman was Deaf. She weighed her options, wondering if informing the Boot of this woman’s disability would risk the woman being shipped off to some unknown location, like the Others in the truck. The Boot poised the butt of his rifle to discipline her, and Firuzeh stepped out of line with her arms waving.
“Stop!” Firuzeh shouted. Firuzeh waved her hand at the woman and signed, “Are you Deaf?” The woman affirmed Firuzeh’s suspicion. Firuzeh turned to the Boot and said, “She can stay next to me. Please! I can interpret for her.”
What felt like a lifetime passed as the Boot looked back and forth between the two women, snow accumulating on his eyelashes like sand in an hourglass. The Boot filed both of them into the line. “Get her to follow instructions or she’s in the truck like the rest of them.” He began patrolling the other lines. Exhales.
“What is happening?” the woman struggled to sign with her frostbitten hands.
“I don’t know. But I need you to stay with me.”
At the front of each queue were small canopies, wavering in the wind. In the shelter of each canopy sat a Boot at a small desk.
“Next, step forward!” said the Boot at the front of Firuzeh’s line. This Boot was a woman with ruddy cheeks and lips that enunciated clumsily in the cold air. She wore a black parka over her standard leather jacket. Upon closer inspection, seeing the Boot’s light-brown skin and hearing the sound of her vowels, Firuzeh could tell she was also of Iranian heritage. They shared a split second of recognition, as though Firuzeh had interrupted her playing dress-up in Boots regalia.
“I said, ‘NEXT!’” The Boot shouted away the shame, still looking at Firuzeh. Her chin raised in defiance.
“No! One at a time, please.” The Boot shouted at the woman beside Firuzeh.
“She’s Deaf. I can interpret for her.” Firuzeh gestured towards her line-mate.
“Fine. I need your Verification Cards. Both of you. Get them out. Now.”
Firuzeh interpreted. They frantically pinched their cards from within their wallets, the frigid wind making it an almost impossible task. The woman finally produced her card with her name: Emma Singh. They both placed their cards on the desk.
The Boot struggled with the ink in her pen. She blew warm air onto its nib until the ink flowed once again in scribbles at the top of a page. She adjusted her clipboard and began entering the information from the Verification Cards in small fields, adding Emma’s and Firuzeh’s names to the columns upon columns of Others. Another clipboard was a spreadsheet of numbers. The Boot cross-referenced the spreadsheet, finding Emma’s Verification Card number of 2437 and crossing it out with a straight line using a ruler and her pen. She crossed out Firuzeh’s number of 1722. Ruler. Straight line. The Boot reached into an inside jacket pocket for her phone.
“Stand here, please.” The Boot pointed to a blue X taped to the dock, adjacent to the desk. The Boot used the camera on her phone to take photos of each of them separately, holding a dry-erase board with their Verification Card numbers. Flash. Flash.
Shaking violently with cold, Firuzeh and Emma boarded one of the ferries hours after the sky had turned lavender, squeezing in between a pregnant woman and a vomiting child. They encountered more lineups once they arrived at Ward’s Island, just south of Toronto’s skyline. The icy waves crashed along the shore as the arrivals were shuffled into more lines and assigned groups based on their physical strength and their obedience.
“Raise your arms. Open your mouth. Turn around.”
“You two! Come with me,” said one of the Boots to Firuzeh and Emma.
They joined a group of twenty other women and followed him down the road.
“Mama! Maaaaamaaaaaa!” a child screamed in their direction. Firuzeh could not tell who this child’s parent was, since they all kept their heads down, to avoid a beating. To avoid the child’s being beaten. “Maaaaamaaaaaa!” Emma tugged at Firuzeh’s sleeve to encourage her to look forward and continue marching.
Around them were the old homes of Ward’s. The island was once the most desired location in the city to live, since the quiet and calm of the islands was a short ferry ride from the hustle and bustle of downtown. Oftentimes people passed the deeds to their houses down from generation to generation, in an effort to keep the sought-after community tight-knit. Then the flooding began happening every spring. The homes became mould-ridden, and what was once a charming and quaint haven for the wealthy and artistic soon became a ghost town. Firuzeh could see that the homes were tragically damaged. Each one leaned to one side or the other, unable to stand on its own rotten base, spotted with black mildew. Despite the cold, the air was thick with the smell of decay as they finally made their way to a wide bungalow.
The Boot opened the door and entered. They all followed, thankful for the warmth. Sniffles. Stifled crying. They walked down a long hallway with its walls covered with art installations, now soggy from the damp. A saturated photo of the lake had a Black woman smoking a cigarette in the foreground, a curious shape from the smoke emerging from her exhale. The woman’s face had been crossed out with a black indelible marker. By a vandal? Or the artist themselves? Firuzeh couldn’t tell. A large textile drooped heavily on the wall, smelling like garbage. When passing the fabric, one could see it was made of the fibres of newspaper headlines, woven together to spell the phrase “The End.” Firuzeh realized this had been some type of artists’ residency centre before the floods. This was a public space.
The Boot introduced the Others to a cohort of four Asian women in purple scrubs, each of them holding a nightstick and wearing a look of determination.
“Line up! Line up! Line up! Line up! Line up! Line up! Line up!” They screamed at the Others, poking them randomly and aggressively with the nightsticks. Like sheep, the arrivals were ushered down another set of hallways, where there were dozens of small bedrooms with two beds each. Emma and Firuzeh bunked together. The Purple Scrub women slept in four separate large bedrooms, which were set at intervals between the smaller rooms so they could surveil the Others. While passing one of the large rooms, Firuzeh could see a group of children, presumably belonging to the Purple Scrub women, playing a game of Monopoly.
“You didn’t count the money right! Count it again!” said a small child, trying to fan out her Monopoly money with her tiny hands. One boy had tossed the dice too hard and was searching for the missing pieces under the bed. Another boy was jumping squares along the game board, whispering numbers under his breath.
“Mooooom! Sebastian didn’t count the money right.” The little girl poked her head out of the room and called to the Purple Scrub woman leading the Others at the front of the line. Without looking, her mother screamed something in Cantonese.
The little girl exhaled and shut the door. They turned the corner of the hallway. A cafeteria. Then a great hall with expansive windows facing the frigid lake. A sorrowful shadow of mould crept up the walls to where the water line once had been.
It was in this great hall, under the dim light of the hanging lamps, where Firuzeh’s head was shaved. Where they were all shaved down regularly by the Purple Scrub women while the Boots stood aside and watched. Unevenly. Haphazardly. Aggressively. Like the sheep they had become. Firuzeh sat opposite Emma, whose eyes were like a buoy in this sea of confusion. Look at me, her eyes said. Don’t let go. I’m here.
It was in this great hall that they were forced to sweep their own hair into terrifying heaps and bag each of their identities before trashing them in the refuse container outside. They were each given an oatmeal-coloured long-sleeved scrub as a uniform. It was in this great hall that they were instructed at gunpoint to sew various items, including jeans, parachutes, plush toys and uniforms for the Boots. With Emma always stationed beside her, F
iruzeh stitched heavy-duty zippers onto the fronts of jackets, wondering who would wear them, if a person wearing them would harm someone like her one day. It was in this great hall where, on occasion, a random beating would take place, for asking to pee, for sloppy workmanship, for passing out.
Each day, one of the Purple Scrub women paced between their sewing stations, all of her subjects silent.
“Stand! Stand! Stand!” the woman would say before the workers obeyed and recited the creed.
Through our work, our nation prospers.
Through our unity, we end conflict.
Through our leader, we find peace.
Through order, we find tranquility.
After long days, Emma would invite Firuzeh to sit on her bed close to the window to watch the moon thicken and thin across the night sky. It was the closest they could get to binge-watching television. Sometimes they would tell each other stories. Sometimes they would look at this physical, astrological manifestation of time passing in complete stillness. Sometimes they would lean on each other and weep. It felt good to communicate with each other in silence, without the patrolling Purple Scrub women interrupting them with their screamed instructions.
“I used to call this kind of moon a ‘fingernail moon,’ but then I visited El Salvador and my host told me that in Spanish it’s called luna sonrisa. A smile.” Emma’s face was wistful and glowing at this memory. “Fuck. I miss travelling alone. I miss being alone. My parents used to feel so sorry for me, thinking I would be this sad single woman all my life. I tried to convince them that I loved solitude, but they didn’t get it. They didn’t get me, ever.”
“Did you ever have roommates?” Firuzeh asked.
“Never!” Emma made Firuzeh giggle, slicing the air forward with a grimace. “Do you know how delicious it is to leave your dirty underwear on the floor? To watch television and eat chicken wings in your bed, buck naked? Being alone was awesome. No offence.” Firuzeh responded with an eye roll, followed by a smile.
“Maybe you should add ‘When I am alone, I get naked’ to this Renovation creed,” Firuzeh signed before pushing Emma’s shoulder.
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