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 line!” 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.