Of course I could agree with her. I just didn’t want to say it out loud.
“White people are happy to go on their social media and share quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. on MLK Day. But as soon as they have their back up against a wall, as soon as they’re about to lose something, or in the case of the floods, when things get scarce, they’re quick to mark their territory.”
I looked around us, worried people would hear.
“You’re getting paranoid.”
“Like, look at this place. At first I thought it was just bad service or something. But man, we’ve been coming here for years. They’re serving everyone else. I think it’s us. We might find spit in our food one day.”
“Come on, Nadine! We just ate.”
At long last, the waiter made his way to our table with a wireless credit card terminal to process Nadine’s payment. “Your card was declined,” he said, his face cold and unmoving.
Nadine’s face twisted. “That’s impossible.”
“It was declined.”
Nadine and I accompanied the waiter to the point-of-sale desk and tried her debit card instead.
“Declined,” the waiter said, righteously handing back her card.
Nadine snatched it out of his hands. “I heard you. Do you need to say it so loud so you can embarrass me, you punk?” I touched her arm, worried about the possibility of an altercation. “No, Kay. This is ridiculous!” I quickly reached into my pocket and sifted through a wad of bills from last night’s show. I paid the waiter, and he did not say “thank you.”
Under yet another downpour, we shared an umbrella and walked to a nearby bank to check Nadine’s debit card. Two ATMs sat in the foyer of a bank, with accordion doors dividing its locked main section after hours. Nadine slid her debit card into one of the machines, only to hear a crunching sound deep within. She slammed it.
“What the hell?!”
“It’s okay, Nadine. I’m sure it’s just a glitch.” I slid my own bank card into the other machine next to her to confirm that the malfunction was unique to that particular ATM. It ate my card too.
“Shit! No!” I screamed into the slot like I could call the plastic card back to us. I banged the surface of the machine and shook my head.
Two ultra-femme gay white boys came into the bank foyer and took off their raincoat hoods. One of them drunkenly pulled his bank card from his back pocket.
“Oh fuck. I don’t know if I’m sober enough to remember my PIN. Goddamn it.”
“Oliver, come on. Lucas just texted saying they’re already at Throb. Hurry the hell up!”
Nadine and I stood quietly and watched Oliver slide his card into the ATM and retrieve five crisp green twenty-dollar bills. They replaced their hoods, then the two danced and swayed themselves out of the bank foyer. At a distance from us, we could hear them singing a song by Lizzo, but we remained silent.
I looked at Nadine as we began to make our way along Church Street. She seemed to be foggy, as if in a trance. I followed her. We walked speechlessly into a corner store a block away. We entered and made our way to the refrigerated section. Nadine reached for a bottle of water and froze. I followed her gaze to the quarter-dome safety mirror in the upper corner of the store. A Black woman was arguing with the cashier.
“Try my card again. I know I have cash in my account!”
“You’re holding up the line, man. Move along!”
“I’m not a man!”
“Could have fooled me.”
Nadine stood there, immovable, her arm still outstretched, her hand still grasping the bottle, marked by the heat of her touch.
“Hey! You with the Afro puff!” the cashier shouted towards Nadine. “Close the fridge. I’m not paying to cool the entire store.”
Nadine shook her head awake and we left, empty-handed.
I returned to work the next day, prepared to ask Henry to issue me my payment in cash. I found Henry at the bar, clearing bottles of booze to make way for a large espresso machine. He looked at the instruction handbook and at the machine quizzically.
“Good morning.” I had a sad feeling in my stomach. Nadine was right. Things were changing.
“Good morning, Keith.” I hated the sound of that name. Why did he use it? Henry adjusted the spectacles on his long nose. He was wearing a surprisingly butch ensemble that day, full of sombre neutrals. He could have been mistaken for a suburban dad with his golf T-shirt and khakis. He leaned on the bar close to me, but not so close as to be intimate.
“Keith, we’ve made some changes around here.” I looked around. The stage risers had been dismantled and several more tables stood in its place. The LED had been cut from its wire. Henry’s vowels were clipped short in neat suburban dialect. “I’m afraid you can no longer work here. Epic is now a café.”
“I can still wash dishes at a café.”
“I will have to ask you to leave.”
“What?! But—”
“Leave. I do not know you.”
Nadine texted, urgently asking me to meet her at the same bank where we had lost our cards two nights before. A queue of people overflowed past the exterior doors. All of them Others. When I approached her, she didn’t even hug me or greet me “hello.”
“You are not going to believe this, Kay. I went back to this branch wanting to get a replacement debit card. There’s this huge lineup. I’m waiting for forever. I finally get to the front of the line, and the teller checks my ID and hands me this several-page document to sign. I had to put my name down, my Social Insurance Number, date of birth, names of my parents. It was detailed. I laughed and was like, ‘Lady, am I applying for a passport here?’ and she says, ‘You’ll need to fill this out to confirm you’ve received your Verification Card.’”
“What’s that?”
Nadine reached inside her leather wallet and pulled out a plastic card. The letters of her name were punched into the surface of the card in official blocks. Underneath was a number. “And then she tells me that instead of using a debit card, I can use this to deposit or withdraw funds from my account. I’m all confused because . . . I don’t know . . . is this a form of identification, or is this a way for me to pay for things? And she says, ‘It’s both. It’s a streamlining of our system to make things easier for you.’ I’m feeling all uneasy but accept it for what it is. She smiles and asks me, ‘Is there anything else I can do for you today?’ and I ask for a hundred dollars from my account. She hands me the money and a receipt of the transaction.”
Nadine’s head looked left and right, suspiciously, then at me. “Kay, I had half the funds I originally had. I watch that account like a hawk! I know something’s fucking us up, Kay. I know something’s happening. Look at everyone in the queue. I’m not imagining things.”
I looked at the lineup, this obvious cross-section of citizens. Deep in my belly, I knew, too, that something was happening, but residing beside that big something was a muscular reaction, a contraction in the fibres of my being telling me that this was impossible. Surely this was a dream. Surely we were imagining things. The use of these Verification Cards was just coincidence between people who happened to sit at the crossroads of race, gender and identity. These things didn’t happen here in Canada. These things happened elsewhere. These things didn’t happen without folks stepping in and stopping them from happening. The pages of history told us to never forget, to never forget the atrocities of the past, yet here we were in a city that was actively forgetting. That is why I kept my reactions, the waves of shock, from Nadine’s pleading eyes. My body was so stilled by this disbelief that we were unsafe, that I could not even bring myself to put a loving hand on her shoulder. She searched my face, from my eyes to my tight jaw, until she gave up and we began walking the streets again, silently witnessing the city falling apart.