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.