I recognize a couple of parkies right off the bat, and feel thankful. Ritt is still lurking around the snowed-over wading pool. I don’t remember if I ever paid him the remaining money I owed him. I’m sure he’s too shy to ask. I don’t have enough on me.
Miriam is staking out her territory beside the Kiever. New faces sit on the bench beside the white-capped Al Waxman statue. Bronze is a cruel material. It makes you look that little bit deader.
I cross to Miriam, crunching deep through the thin icy layer on top of the snow. The six inches of wet pack beneath it grabs my boot and tries to keep it.
She doesn’t recognize me at first. She gives me a hard, unfriendly look. “Can I help you?”
“It’s Jean.”
“Jean. Lord. From St. Mike’s.”
“No. We know each other from here. We’ve talked before, but I haven’t been around for a while.”
“Sorry, dear.” She glances off. “I believe you, but I’m not focused on names or dates anymore. Are you parked near here? There’s a recessed hydrant.”
“I’m on foot,” I say, and she looks down and notes my snowbound Blundstones. “Are you sure you don’t remember me? I was friends with Cullen and Jimmy. And Ritt over there.”
“I know Jimmy.”
“You do know Jimmy.” What would Miriam be in Ingrid’s dream? “Jimmy’s in CAMH. He’s been ill most of the winter.”
“Yes,” she says. “Poor boy. He’s missing a gene.”
“Is he—”
“When he gets drunk he produces masterpieces in electronic music, but by nature he’s a teetotaller.”
“I don’t know if we’re talking about the same Jimmy.”
“I’d be ashamed to be him, though.”
In the summer she was a keen-eyed opportunist with a talent for gab and a heart full of charity. She once told me she made forty dollars an hour in the summertime. She owned a boat in the port and slept there. It doesn’t look like she’s making a living now, though. Grey stuffing made of a synthetic material leaks from her parka.
“I mean thin Jimmy with the beard. Grey-and-black beard, although he—they—shaved it off. It’s okay if you don’t remember him. I was just coming over to say hi. Do you want a coffee?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Triple double. Come back I’ll give you something for him.”
I trudge up Augusta looking for coffee. So far it’s not too difficult being back here. Jimmy and Morbier would both be proud of me. Maybe if it were the same season when I first came here it’d be more frightening. But the cold and the monochromatism dampen the place’s power.
Kensington Market has the last bank machine in Toronto that dispenses five-dollar bills. I get five of them. I go all the way up to Pamenar to get Miriam an americano. They pull the best shot in the market. She’s told me on a number of occasions that she’s Turkish, so I believe her. She says she can’t get Turkish coffee in the market, but I doubt she’s ever looked for it. “You don’t want to meet other Turks,” she says. “If you see two Turks sitting beside each other and they don’t start arguing within ten minutes, it means one of them is dead.”
I give her the hot coffee. “How many years have you been here?”
“It’s 2015 now?”
“2017, actually. Happy new year.”
“1985, I came.”
“To Kensington or Canada?”
“Canada. You mean here outside the shul? Only fifteen or so. First I was a nurse, in neonatal units. At night, I drank to sleep. Then I drank in the day. I worked over there on University Avenue. Sick babies, happy babies. They came and went.” When she purses her lips to suck at the coffee, fissures appear in them, reminding me of my own grandmother, her red-lipsticked mouth pursing to kiss me and those lines appearing in a darker red.
“You don’t drink anymore?”
She shakes her head. “Oh no. No. It’s a very very very toxic dance.”
“Are you still giving out milk?”
“I have my people. I don’t have room for anyone new.”
“I can get my own milk. You don’t have many customers today. From the look of it.”
“Ritt drinks my milk. Cleone drinks my milk. As long as I’m here: milk.”
“Have you seen Cullen?”
“I don’t know a Cullen.” She goes up the steps of the synagogue and disappears through one of the doors. She returns with a couple of books in a plastic Loblaws bag. “Give these to Jimmy,” she says. The two books are Peer Gynt and No More Curried Eggs for Me.
“He lent these to you?”
“He did.”
“What did you think?”
“Peer Gynt was funny.”
The door to the synagogue opens, and a woman in a long black robe emerges. She looks like a drawing by R. Crumb, hair in tight black rings and a Sphinxy nose. She stops behind Miriam, leaning in to make herself known. “Hello!”
“Rabbi!”
“Sorry,” she says to Miriam and quickly to me, “Hi,” and she makes eye contact for an instant too long. Then she returns her considerable charm to Miriam. “Love, you’re blocking the entrance. Can you find somewhere else to collect your tips?”
“This is the sidewalk,” Miriam says, firmly planted. “It’s city property. Rabbi Shoshana, this is my friend.” She takes my arm in a show of solidarity I haven’t agreed to. “I’m giving her some books to give to a friend who’s sick. Which is one of the Ten Commandments…”
Rabbi Shoshana looks at me again and twigs. “Ingrid Fox!” she says. “I thought I was going crazy for a second—” She takes me in her arms! “Where have you been? I thought you were dead.” She half spins me back to Miriam. “This is the author Ingrid Fox. She talked to our writing circle, gosh, three years ago? Best talk we ever had. But of course everyone’s writing these days. So, listen—” she says, but I can’t hear the rest over the high-pitched squeal in my ears. She called me…
I’m going crazy. I’ve imagined this park, this synagogue, this lady rabbi, all of it! Or…there really is an Ingrid Fox, and Katerina is actually dead, and…Morbier? “You know August Morbier, don’t you?” She’s not listening. “Hey!”
“I’m having a fundraiser in five hours and the tables aren’t here and it turns out we don’t have some kind of certificate—”
“Do you know August Morbier!”
“—from the fire department, who?”
“Doctor. August. Morbier.”
“She’s from the park,” says Miriam, apparently in my defence.
“Mirrie, my kishkas are sweating from the stress. Do please be nice and go around the side.”
“Give these to Jimmy,” Miriam says, pushing the bag into my hands. She vanishes around the corner of the synagogue to stalk her quarry on Bellevue Avenue.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” the rabbi asks me.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“Who’s August Morbier?”
“No one.”
“There’s a fellow right here on Denison Square, a Dr. Mourguet. Do you mean him?”
“No. I made a mistake.”
Shoshana waits a beat, leaving space for me to keep talking. “Well, it’s nice to see you again!” she says at last. “When’s your next book coming out?”
“Soon.”
“You should visit us again—the group loved you.” She opens the synagogue door.
“Hey, wait. You know, I have some jumbled memories of my afternoon with your group.”
“Evening. And we’re a circle. A writing circle.”
“Right! I know this is going to sound fishy, but I don’t recall that evening very much. I had a bump on the head a year or so ago, and—” My mind is swimming.
“But you’re okay now…”
“Oh yeah. Much better.”
“You should come visit again. Except we do themes these days, instead of individual authors. You should come to Voice Appropriation in the springtime.”
“Yeah. Maybe I will.”
“Oh lord, he
re they are again. You fellas are back too soon, I don’t have the certificate!” She’s off to talk to a couple of palookas in a truck.
I walk briskly across the park, my legs stiff. By the time I get to Dundas, I’m half-jogging. How can she know Ingrid Fox? I’m out of breath running across Bathurst on the yellow, but I keep going. My thighs burn. I have no time to work this all out before it changes shape on me again.
The name of the pet store is Pet Project. I go in and set off a round of barking. I pretend I know what I’m looking for and start down an aisle of rabbit bedding. The rows correspond with the position of the shelves in Bookshop. Above me, the lights are the same. The switches are in the same places. A solid wall with two large windows in it occupies the space where I’d had sliding shelves. A door in the middle leads to the puppy and kitty room behind. Hopeful animals look out at me. Can’t help you.
“Ma’am?” someone says. “Looking for anything specific?”
The speaker is a handsome, middle-aged man in a collared Pet Project shirt. His nametag says Terrence. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I say.
“I’m sorry?”
“Was this a bookstore?”
“I don’t know. Not since I was here.”
“Which is how long?”
“Is there anything I can help you with?”
I look at him long enough to make the silence uncomfortable. Then leave without a word.
THERE WERE TWO STORIES on my Facebook feed this morning that seemed to be in cahoots with each other, and could have something to do with my condition. In one, a link to an article in the Guardian that went through the evidence in support of something called the “ancestor simulation,” which proposes there is probably a civilization in the universe with enough computing power to run a simulated reality with self-aware simulants, i.e., us. It’s real only to those inside the simulation; outside, it’s a form of entertainment or education.
In the other story, three media outlets, including a gossip website, sued the FBI for information on how they hacked the iPhone of a husband-and-wife terrorism team. Under this story, the comments were split. Half thought the media was obligated to report on how government powers hacked a phone, the other half figured the media just wanted to learn how to do it. If everyone knows how to do it, it’s not exactly hacking, is it? It’s first past the post, to the first hacker go the spoils. It’s the end of lying, the natural conclusion of the end of privacy, and the beginning of an evolutionary leap in which humans find new and different ways to hide from each other.
The second story makes the first so much more plausible. For what am I now but a hacked mind?
WHEN I’M NEXT at the hospital, they’re busy putting up their spring decorations. Because they’re a non-denominational public hospital there are no large pink cardboard eggs taped to the windows, nor addled bunnies dealing candy, nor, for that matter, the paschal lamb. Instead they’ve drawn flowers on all the windows and some are even coloured in, reducing the amount of light that reaches the lobby. Still, it’s a light of springtime intensity, nourishing and spirit-lifting everywhere it falls. Walking to the elevators, I slip on a wet teabag and pull a blue-gowned man to the floor with me. I apologize profusely and ask him if he’s hurt. “I’m not that sensitive,” he says, disentangling his hand from my hair.
I take the elevator up to three and sign in. They know to give me the key to the tenth floor because they trust me and because Jimmy is supposed to be discharged, finally, at the end of this month. I’m secretly relieved because I don’t want to have to keep coming back to this place.
“Longest inmate,” he proudly calls himself now. He’s been here seven months. After forming him a half a dozen times, they got a special order to keep him at their discretion. I can’t say he’s been thankful about it. He’s compared himself to a man on death row.
On my way to Jimmy’s room, a big man in a white overcoat comes around the corner. And holy god if it isn’t Cullen. I stop, stunned. “Cullen? Hey! Cullen!” He’s got a badge pinned to his overcoat pocket with the name DR. JOSEPH MACDONALD. The photo is not of Cullen. “I’m so relieved to see you! What are you doing here?”
“So good to see you as well! How have you been?”
“I’m good.” He doesn’t recognize me. “We know each other from the park. Jean.”
“Jean!”
“I was worried about you!”
“Oh, I’ve been buried in work.” He scuttles into a room and emerges with a clipboard. “I better finish my rounds. Are you being checked in?”
“No. I’m visiting Jimmy, actually. Have you been in to see him?”
We’re interrupted by one of the orderlies. “Is Mr. Gossage bothering you?” he asks me.
“Who?”
The orderly takes the clipboard out of Cullen’s hands and puts it into an acrylic holder screwed to the wall. Then he’s on to untangle the next mess.
“Are you a patient here?” I ask Cullen.
“Yes. Well, not always. I have a lab as well.”
“You told me once you’d worked as a chemist at U of T. You sounded like you knew your stuff.”
“Oh I know my stuff. Just because I’m off my tits, excuse the egyptianism, doesn’t mean I don’t keep working and I don’t keep learning. The learning never ends. I’m learning here, too.”
“What are you learning?”
“To take my meds!” He laughs and then starts coughing wet, deeplung coughs. “You visiting Jimmy?”
“I was coming to see him right now.”
“Hey…you have ward privileges, don’t you?”
“No. Ah, no. I can only take Jimmy. And that’s to the tenth floor, not outside.”
“Shit.” He beckons me toward the common room. One of the shopping channels is on. I count no one watching it. “Remember that thing I told you about in the park?”
“You told me a lot of things, I don’t remember all of them.”
“I have a couple lab assistants upping their dose today. They’ll feel better if I can be there with them. I’ve levelled out. I’m good now.”
“Just slow down. A dose of what?”
“You don’t remember.” The look on his face: I’ve really let him down. “This is the anti-Heisenberg drug. We’re in testing!”
I recall this, but I thought we’d been talking about Breaking Bad. “Are you making meth?”
He laughs heartily. “No, dear. It’s called—are you ready for this?—dimethyltryptaminetetrahydrocannabichomene. Uploaders call it No-mind.”
“There really is a No-mind?”
“Get me out of here after you see Jimmy. They’ll let you sign me out. And you can try some.”
“Why are you wearing someone else’s badge?”
He lifts it up and inspects it. “No, this is me. Look again.”
I look again. It’s a black man, and it’s not him. “That’s not you.”
“It’s my lab name. You think they’d still give me my funding if they knew I was insane?”
“I’m not sure I can help you. See you later, Mr., uh, Gossage.” His look sours. He follows me down the hall. “Wait, wait. You know the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC? Big steel donut under the border of France and Switzerland?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“You know what they’re doing down there? Detecting the smallest particles in the universe by looking for their waste products. They’re astrophysical turd hunters! They can’t see what they’re looking for, so they’ve got to infer it from degradation. When you get to the point where you’re hunting for garbage by inference, you might as well measure the inside of a soap bubble! You know what they’re looking for?”
“I thought they found it.”
“The Higgs boson? That piece of shit? That’s a swine’s tooth compared to what they’re really digging for. But they’re not going to find it with the LHC. The Chinese are building a collider three times the size, and they’re not going to find it either. But I can find it. You just have to get me out
of here for a few hours.”
“What is it?” I’ve had to stop walking. I don’t want to take this conversation into Jimmy’s room because I don’t know what kind of mood Jimmy will be in. And I’m still trying to figure out if Cullen is a genius or a lunatic. “You expect me to believe you’ve found something more important than what all those people underground have?”
He turns shoulder-to-shoulder in collusion, starts drawing lines on an invisible surface in the air. “You know how in the game of Clue you go from the conservatory to the lounge by a secret passageway?” Diagonal line. “And the study to the kitchen by another?” An up-and-down line in the air. “Imagine all the particles in the universe connected to each other like that.”
“Quantum, baby. Can I go?”
“You can map all of spacetime onto a single point—it’s true—and when you do, you can send a signal through that point and whatever’s on that signal will be carried everywhere all at once. It’s the intra-universal organic web, the transmission layer, I call it. But they need a particle accelerator from here to the moon just to see waste products from it, you know? Are you following now?” I am, sort of, with regrets. “This is where Heisenberg comes in. What if we cancel out the observer effect? Get rid of the looking but keep the seeing?”
“Oh, right. You did tell me about this.”
“See, you change the frequency of the observer’s perception with consciousness-altering drugs and yoke them to computers fitted with steady-state quantum microscopes,” he says, like he’s stating the obvious. “No-mind is administered in small doses at first. That allows the subject to acclimatize to super-high doses before they get any of the negative side effects like death or sporing. We’re trying to get to the exact balance of compounds needed to effect upload without degrading data or killing the uploaders.”
“Who are uploading to the transmission layer.”
“Yes, Jean, yes! To the hard drive of the cosmos. We put all of, of, of human culture and history, all of the experience, the expertise, the art, the science, the music—”
Bellevue Square Page 17
