Fellow Passengers

The person who served you your coffee assumed that you were a doctor. He, a small, dark brown man with an accent you wouldn’t presume to place, said, “Will that be all, Doctor?”

Your brain had to make sense of the mistake before you could say, “Yes. Yes, that’s it. Thanks.”

You sat down at your regular table. Two actual doctors, a pair of old white guys, were sitting a few tables away. One of them was hunched over a Tupperware container filled with sliced fruit, the other was staring off towards the elevators and twisting his wedding ring like he was trying to unscrew it but the threads were stripped. A few children raced past and a man with a deep voice said something sharp and foreign and one child stopped running and turned towards the man, then back towards his sibling or cousin who was still zigzagging and laughing. A different man with a sharper voice, a voice that made the ring-twisting doctor flinch, said the same foreign thing and the second child stopped, sat down and cried. One man, you didn’t know if it was the sharp voiced or deep voiced man, walked over to the crying child and picked them up then led both children back to where their family—at least three generations of it—was crowded around two tables as far to the side of the dining area as they could get.

The coffee was too hot. It wasn’t bad coffee, had never been bad coffee, but it wasn’t good either. It was an excuse for you to sit here, that’s all.

A man and a woman got off the elevator. You pulled a newspaper out of your black bag and set it on the table. While the man stepped back to look at the signs above each vendor’s counter, the woman looked around at the people sitting at the cafeteria tables. She made eye contact with you and smiled sadly. You nodded and looked down at your newspaper. Your arms bracketed the folded broadsheet and you rubbed your thumbs against the pads of your index and middle fingers, but your eyes watched the woman walk up to the man and the two exchange hushed words. The woman put her hand on the man’s far shoulder and the man raised his shoulder nearest the woman so that he could gently extract then bring his elbow over her head and hang his hand off her far shoulder. You saw then, maybe in the gesture or in the shape of their hands or their postures, that they were brother and sister. They walked to the new Hero Burger—it opened early last month—and started reading the menu. The man asked the server if they sold veggie burgers then the woman explained to the server that she has a severe nut allergy.

The doctors at the nearby table stood at the same time. They weren’t even looking at each other and if they had exchanged some signal you missed it. One of them, the one who was twisting his ring, said, “Well,” to which the other one replied, “Well.”

You agreed with them, but you didn’t stand right away because, well, leaving with them would be strange and obviously—you don’t know—collegial? Like they might have started talking to you about some doctory thing and you wouldn’t know what to say and your cover would have been blown which would have been devastating because what would you have done, what would you do without the hospital?

It was a year earlier you started coming here.

Okay, not quite.

Not really.

You started coming here, like, let’s see, uh fourteen months earlier. The regular visits anyway. At first you were coming with your partner whose cancer had come back and come back in more than one place, not just their beautiful brain. The surgeon who’d seen it said it was beautiful. You knew it was beautiful in its operation, in its functioning, in its living state. Something about the surgeon’s comment—meant as a lighthearted, even laudatory Nice work!—conjured a brain in a jar, your partner’s brain in formaldehyde on some surgeon’s shelf, admired for its shape, admired as a specimen or a teaching tool. “This is where we dream. This is where your balance comes from. This is where your memories live. This part here helps you form attachments.”

Thirteen months ago you were visiting your partner here because keeping pain from hammering that beautiful, dying brain required intravenous opiates. You asked your boss to fire you so you could collect E.I. while you and your partner’s mother sat in the hospital room watching her child drift further and further away. Other family came too, of course. You would leave the room and go for walks. The ubiquitous nurses and doctors were like the staff on or even the engine of the impressive ship the hospital was. The patients were the ship’s passengers, suffering on their way to the shores of either the continent of life or the continent of death, their families, their loved ones, their people anxiously traveling with them.

When you were younger you loved, even still you love, taking the bus and observing the person across the aisle, reading over the shoulder of the man or woman in front of you, closing your eyes and listening to the music escaping the headphones of the person next to you, closing your eyes and imagining what that music might be calling up or washing away for them. Thinking about this communion calls to your mind a jug being filled with water from two sources simultaneously. Or hundreds, thousands of people walking the banks of rivers, to the shores of lakes and oceans and pouring out jugs and water bottles and glasses like it is some religious festival. With this image you experience overwhelming warmth somewhere near the center of you.

Just under twelve months earlier you stopped having a reason to come here. And right away you missed it. The day of your partner’s funeral in the suburb where they grew up, you were also surrounded by many people, but it was different because you had all gathered for the same reason, the same grief, the same difficulty and it was a pain that you were perceived to be one of the main bearers of. As a consequence, so many of the people grieving, carrying their own hurt, came to you with the sweet hope of sharing and easing your hurt, but with the side-effect of adding their suffering to it.

Your partner’s favourite drag queen had been invited to perform and she was weeping her way through a second rendition of “When Doves Cry” when you got up, whispered to your partner’s mother that you were going to the washroom and walked out. Your heels were bleeding into your dress shoes by the time you reached the train station. Your train had just left and the next one wasn’t due for nearly an hour. You bought a coffee and sat on the platform waiting and enjoying the emptiness. A train traveling in the opposite direction stopped and a stream of people with their own lives and worries and griefs walked the same direction for the length of the platform, took the same stairs and one of two tunnels before going to their own cars or to get into the cars of friends, lovers, mothers, fathers or to get on the bus that would drop them where they needed to be. 

Sometime between then and when the train carrying you home was splashed in a burst of setting sunlight coming through a gap between two mountainous skyscrapers, you had decided—or come to know, really—that you were heading to the hospital.

You bought another coffee from the man who had mistaken you for a doctor and again he called you doctor.

When the elevator came and opened its doors, you walked on, but you were so occupied trying to find a way to hold your coffee without a creeping burn finding its way through your skin that you forgot to press a button to tell the elevator which floor to go to. You heard a muted conversation before a set of doors at the back opened up and a caretaker with his head down wheeled a cart across a tiny gap.

“Excuse me,” you said.

“Oh. Excuse me. No, God, pardon me.”

“It’s no trouble.”

Behind him was a vast area with canvas bins and silver-barred shelves with bottles and linens, its cinder-blocked walls marked black from contact with rubber stoppers that protected the corners of things. A short man with greased hair, probably Filipino, watched you slide out of the way of the cart, then bent back to his task, his arms and part of his head disappearing into a sack of canvas hanging from a stainless steel frame on large, grey, rubber wheels.

“Nice weather lately,” you said. “Looks like we might have a summer.”

“Fly season,” he said. He pressed the button for the fourth floor.

You reached over and pressed the button for the fifth floor to see where the conversation would go. “What’s that?”

“Seen ’em fucking everywhere. Flies. I mean having sex everywhere. I’m not a vulgar talker. Don’t use the F-word for emphasis.”

“Okay.”

“Anyone you talk to’s all delighted the weather’s getting warmer again, but when you work with garbage . . . ”

“I can see how warm weather might be a mixed blessing.”

“Mixed nothing. What’s the blessing?”

“When you aren’t at work?”

“You think I’ve got A/C? There’s a nice time in the evening where if I happen to be by the lake or— Nah, you’re right.”

“I’m sorry?”

“No need to be sorry. I’m just in a bad mood’s the truth. The weather is nice. The flies agree.” The elevator stopped, the doors dinged open and the caretaker pushed his cart out. “You have a good day, you hear?”

“You too.”

On the fifth floor you got out and did a circuit, careful not to spill your coffee. Most of the doors were closed, but you passed one that was open. A hunched nurse was sticking electrodes to the chest of a topless, bearded man.

You took the elevator back to the first floor.

Whoever had designed the hospital’s lobby had, either by carelessness or design, used ramps and gardens to obscure sightlines. If you were eight or maybe ten feet tall you would have been able to see the whole vast multileveled open space supported by regular columns and partitioned for various purposes. There was value, you thought, or beauty maybe in the way that the walls and the green life here seemed to direct you down safe, quiet, known paths—to lead you this way to the front doors, this way to the pharmacy or that way to the small, private sitting area where just over a year earlier you and your partner’s mother had discussed the details of your deathwatch rotation.

You heard singing and you followed the sound up a long ramp to a small courtyard outside of the gift shop. The plants lining the sides of the ramp obscured your view of the performer, but you could see a woman crying in a dirty bathrobe with clear tubes up her nose, could distinguish a decent version of “Purple Rain,” could sense an inexplicable heaviness in your body as if your feet and your arm—reaching for the banister and holding tight—knew something that you too smugly ignored. When you cleared the last plant, a rubber tree reaching its waxy leaves out into the walkway, you saw, smiling welcome, then smiling recognition, your partner’s favourite drag queen, the one who’d sang “When Doves Cry” twice at the funeral.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. All of your partner’s people had developed relationships here, especially in the last months of your partner’s life. You’d never seen the drag queen here before, but there was no reason to think that they didn’t perform regularly to lift the spirits of who? Well, the lady with emphysema all folded up like she was smoking outside on a cold day. There was a man with a new baby, or a bundle of fabrics in varying shades of white that had taken the basic shape of a new baby; a bald person—a hairless person actually—of no clear sex and no obvious age; a woman whose body seemed tired, who had bags under her eyes, but who otherwise seemed well. Two boys too young to be alone sat up on the edge of one of the concrete planters. The larger boy, was hammering his heels against the wall he was sitting on. The smaller boy was pulling pieces of fern off the plant and dropping the pieces to the floor.

You didn’t feel like you could leave, but you were desperate to. How would the conversation with the drag queen go? “What are you doing here?” would certainly be a question, most likely the first one. “Oh, you know, this is what I do now. I come here.”

A man wearing Madras shorts and a sweatshirt with the hood up came out of the gift shop and handed the boys on the wall’s edge a package of wine gums each then lifted them both down simultaneously.

“Hey, you don’t pay,” came a voice from the gift shop.

The hooded man turned back even as he began walking down a ramp, his hand on the boys’ backs pushing them, guiding them.

“He no pay,” said the voice. The small woman who ran the gift shop with her husband came out the doors, looked at the crowd and pointed in the direction the man and his sons had disappeared in.

No one in the crowd moved.

You smiled. You stood. You walked past the drag queen, held your palms up and shrugged while mouthing the word “Sorry.”

“Hey,” the woman said. As you rounded the corner, you saw that she had spotted a security guard who turned towards her. “That man with two boy, again he no pay.” The security guard nodded, turned and ran in the direction the hooded man was walking.

You slowed down and took a relieved breath. Your heart was racing; you put your hand over your chest as if to calm it.

By the time you passed the security guard, he had caught up to the man and his sons and he was saying, “Well, why’d you bring them if you were going to steal?”

The hooded man mumbled something in reply.

“Well, this is not the first time you’ve stolen something here. You shouldn’t have brought them if you knew you were going to steal.”

You could see the glass doors to the street, students passing with their backpacks and side bags and white headphones, a businessman on his cell phone.

It was time to go home, for the day anyway.

Toronto, April 2016

Emoji sequence: Angel Rendal, writer, blogger, contributor to Vol. 2 of The West Enders

Story: Lee Sheppard

You, JL, part II

You, JL, part II

You are stripping the beds when your phone rings. It’s Lori from the airport calling to say that, “only three of four came through.”

You can feel the sweat beading at the base of your hair follicles. “Who’s missing?” rasps out of your throat.

“Mahmoud.”

“Thank you.” You hang up.

Out the window, nuthatches, pigeons and squirrels are noisily competing for the feed you spread on the ground to attract their company. It can be lonely after a group leaves.

The first thought that lands in your mind is that Mahmoud has been caught. You have some serious and reasonable doubts about that possibility, but still, something has gone wrong and you don’t know what so you are imagining. Police on the train maybe? Did he do something to draw attention to himself? He knows how important it is for things to go smoothly if he wants to stay in this country where things are safer and quieter. He understands, presumably, the importance of getting to a town where it is safer and quieter still, to a less major port where he can work the respectable, quiet job you found him, where he might blend in less, sure, but where fewer people are without papers so fewer people are looking for people without papers.

What has gone wrong? The men all knew where to disembark, which bus would get them to the airport.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

You take a deep breath, hold it for a five count then exhale, attempting to push all the bad air out. Keep cleaning, you decide. Keep cleaning because you can’t keep from worrying, but you don’t need to stop working, should never stop working.

You find a map in the bathroom garbage. Hand drawn, the dashed path leads from a house beside a stick-figure man with bulging muscles and stripped shirt (you), down a few neighbouring streets and into the great urban park a few blocks from your apartment. There is a heart sticker overtop of the X that marks the spot. In the top right hand corner, you can see that it had been stapled to another sheet of paper. You dump the contents of the garbage can onto the floor. The other sheet of paper is not there. You put the dirty Kleenexes and clothing tags and clumps of hair back into the bin. There is a trashcan and a recycling container in the kitchen. You bring them both to the bathroom and empty them there because the floor is already dirty. No letter.

You sit on the medicine ball by the window and look at the map. Someone gave it to Mahmoud, someone who knows where you live and knows when Mahmoud and the three other men were there. It did not arrive in the mail. Someone must have slipped it under the door.

The beautiful day clashes harshly with the discord in your guts. Normally exercise brings your thoughts, feelings and insides all into pulsing harmony, but today, with the birds singing and the wind and leaves whispering together, your furious, desperate pedaling is doing nothing for you. Following the dashed line through the park, you pass the castle playground, the animal enclosures and an obelisk honouring the dead from some “Great” war. You arrive at the foot of a large statue of a striding Nikola Tesla erected by the local Serbian community. The artist has managed to convey electricity in the up twisting of Tesla’s short hair, the intensity of Tesla’s expression and the torment in the wrinkling cloth of his pants and jacket.

After resting your bike against a tree, you sit down on the bench across from Tesla. “Did you see anything?” you ask the mute metal.

A tiny white dog leaps onto the bench beside you, his whole backside wagging along with his tail. Someone claps loudly and calls, “Jack.” The dog shoots off the bench, his body stretched out. You notice a fresh carving in the wood of the bench back.

SP ©’s M

You close your eyes. It is not your habit to monitor the movements of the men who pass through your place. This has nothing to do with your disposition: you believe that freedom from scrutiny is a dignity you are compelled to provide.

Mahmoud’s smile. You remember Mahmoud’s smile. Easier at your place than in the photo used in the passport. Still beautiful, still noteworthy in the passport photo, though. The passport photo taken in a studio in a foreign city you could only imagine. You remember wondering, actually, the effect this man had on the photographer. Did the photographer have time to appreciate Mahmoud, or was there a lineup distracting him, forcing him to work too quickly to appreciate the moment, the expression that he had just fixed, the man whom he had helped save?

It was the type of photograph a person could fall in love with.

You hop onto your bike and hurry home.

You are so out of breath from the ride and taking two stairs at a time, that T.J.’s partner asks, “Is everything alright?” when you ask to speak to T.J.

“Sorry, I’m— I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

“T.J.’s not here. It’s Saturday, Jack.”

Your chest is heaving. “I know.”

“He’s at the ponies.”

“Till when?”

“Usually gets home after dinner.”

You have a few hours.

“Should I have him call you?”

“No. Thank you.”

“Kay.”

“Does an S.P. work for T.J.?”

“Uh,” T.J.’s partner hesitates. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s nothing. Thank you very much.”

“You sure I can’t have him call you?”

“It’s alright. Thanks again. Goodbye.”

The whole way there, you are watching for Mahmoud. Each subway stop you change cars looking up and down the platform for any sign of him, then, between stops, walking though the new car looking at each person and making eye contact with anyone who happens to look up, smiling as reassuringly as you can muster—Don’t worry, it’s not you, but hello, nice day isn’t it? And those few times that the train emerges from its subterranean route, you scan the roads that run parallel to the tracks, hoping to catch sight of the escapee.

Man. Not escapee. He is not your prisoner, but there are arrangements that have been made. For Mahmoud, for the three others, for the others that had come before them and the ones that will come after, for their safety and happiness and wellbeing. For their benefit.

For you. For your sense of security because, after all, it is you and your associates who are doing something against the law.

You get on a bus. As you get closer to the racetrack and its neighbouring amusement park, there is increasingly heavy pedestrian traffic. The children going to the park are leaping with excitement, their parents turning nervously towards the vehicles racing by. The children leaving are less buoyant and bouncy than the balloons they are tethered to, and they have trouble keeping up with their parents who walk quickly despite carrying large or small stuffed animals or bags of garish, useless products they purchased after they or their children failed to hit the bull’s-eye or knock the cans over or throw the ring over the neck of a bottle. There are teenagers going both directions, holding hands or slowing down to kiss awkwardly as some family passes them. On the bus, there are four young men dressed in their finest tracksuits and team jerseys and talking about which scary rides scare them the least.

None of these people are Mahmoud.

An airplane passes low overhead and you check your watch, wondering if the plane is carrying one of the other men to some haven deeper in the interior of this relatively safe country.

The racetrack’s grandstand has its back turned to the road. An outline of a jockey on a horse, rendered in blue neon lights, covers four stories of the structure, glowing strangely in the daytime. The amusement park’s Ferris wheel rotates lazily just beyond the racetrack.

You traverse the vast parking lot and enter the grandstand, surprised no one is there to sell you a ticket. There is a wide set of stairs. You take them two at a time. When you see the lineups of people placing bets, you think, yes, of course, that’s why there is no admission fee—a different economy drives this show.

T.J. is under a straw fedora in the third section you trawl looking for him. Mahmoud is in none of these sections.

“Hello,” you say.

“Huh?” T.J. clears his throat and works his expression into something welcoming. “Well, if it isn’t Jack from the company.”

“It is.”

T.J. smiles briefly, exposing a rainbow of pastry sprinkles stuck on the border between his teeth and gums. “This business related?” With his middle finger, T.J. starts rapidly flicking the white betting ticket he has pinched between his index and thumb.

“One of our boys didn’t make it to the airport.”

His lips recoil from his teeth tellingly, the sprinkles now fully visible; there is a reason T.J.’s gambling spirit has found a home at the track and not around a poker table.

He places his betting slip in the breast pocket of his leaf-print shirt. He sucks air in through his nose, then abruptly bends in half. Your heart pauses before bang bang banging so hard that your hearing is affected. You tense, ready for anything. T.J. tries to say something, but the words get lost somewhere between his constricted diaphragm and his open mouth. He comes up holding a box of donuts. “Want one?” His fumbling fingers struggle to open the lid.

You are shaking your head, but he doesn’t notice so you say, “No, thank you.”

He keeps working the lid until it comes open, maybe determined for his own reasons to perform this simple act, maybe deaf to your refusal.

“No. Thanks,” you say again.

“It’s a new business,” he says. He looks at his hands, so deft at forgery, now struggling to close a donut box. “I bought a donut shop. I’m hoping to make that my primary—my only—business.”

Nodding, you think, Fine, fine, though finding a new counterfeiter will be an added challenge. “Is there an S.P. who works for you?”

“I’m using some of my Company staff at the new place,” he says, nodding.

You wait for him to go on. Down on the track, a jockey in shiny blue and grey satin leads a skittish horse with a shining coat back and forth in front of the grandstand.

T.J. stands up abruptly. “It’s nearby. The new business. At the amusement park. I think you should follow me.”

You lead the way out of the row of seats. T.J. hands the box of donuts and his ticket to an old lady sitting at the end of the row. She is surprised, but thanks him. T.J. leads you up the stairs and out of the grandstand.

Near the main gate to the amusement park, there is a small building marked SECURITY that interrupts the perimeter fence. You follow T.J. through its metal door. A woman wearing a navy blue uniform, her hair in a tight bun, looks up from a series of T.V. screens showing black and white images of the fence. “Hello, Mr. J.”

“He’s with me,” T.J. says.

“That’s fine.” To you, the woman says, “Hello.”

You walk out the glass door at the other side of the building and into a crowd of people hurrying left or right to some tempting amusement in their near future. T.J. finds a gap and you follow him into the flow. Soon you are lined up to take the gondola lift, its colourful cars carrying people to and from the castle on top of the iconic man-made mountain whose silhouette is the logo for the amusement park. You and T.J. don’t speak to each other, which is fine. A beautiful young boy and his lovely little sister are chasing each other between the fences keeping everyone else in line. You watch the boy notice a small garden growing on a raised platform beside the snaking line-up space. He stops and looks at the flowers. When his sister notices that he is no longer chasing her, she walks to where he stands. You watch him select and pluck two flowers, one yellow, one red. You watch him hold the red one out for his sister. Then both children flinch and turn abruptly towards an older woman who is bending towards them. The boy’s smile morphs into something pained, guilty, his eyebrows dancing anxiously. You watch as he drops the flowers. You watch as he cuts slowly back through the line towards his parents, crying, his sister following behind him and looking back towards the woman who is now standing straight up, her chin forward and her lips pressed tightly together, eyes fixed at some point past the heads of the people in front of her in line.

The girl and boy are still quiet five minutes later when they follow their parents into the yellow gondola and start up the mountain. There is room in the next gondola, orange, for you and T.J. The operator, his bright blue amusement park coveralls ironed and buttoned all the way up, says, “Hello, Mr. J. Nice to see you, sir.”

T.J. grunts something and holds his hand up in what is probably meant to be a wave. The operator looks at you like this rudeness is probably your fault and, you suppose, in some way it is. “Hi.” You offer a conciliatory smile, which the operator turns away from.

The gondola sways as it makes its halting progress above the crowds and amusements. T.J. stares off towards the racetrack. You catch a glimpse of the thoroughbreds with their tiny riders rounding into the final stretch. “Ah,” T.J. says.

You take a deep breath.

The gondola goes through a gate into a courtyard on top of the manmade mountain. T.J. steps out before you. “This way,” he says, walking towards the castle.

You follow him through two large wooden doors propped open with cinderblocks and into a food court. He walks towards a donut shop. “Hello, S.P.,” he says to the person in the bright red apron.

“Hello Mr. J.,” S.P. says.

“I’d like you to meet Mr. J.L.,” T.J. says.

“Hello Mr. L.” S.P. holds their hand out over the glass counter. 

You take S.P.’s hand and shake it.

“Mr. L. is from the Company,” T.J. says.

S.P. immediately withdraws their hand and stares at you angrily. Actually, angrily, is too mild an adverb.

“Where is Mahmoud?” T.J. asks.

S.P. turns their head towards T.J., opens their mouth then, without uttering anything, brings their eyes back to you.

“Mr. L. knows Mahmoud did not make his flight.”

S.P. bares their teeth. They open their mouth, like they might say something, before they close it again and inhale, their nostrils whistling and chest swelling. You are unnerved by the feelings behind the eyes S.P. fixes you with.

“Mr. L. is a reasonable man,” T.J. assures S.P. as he lifts up a section of countertop then opens a gate for you and he to pass through. “We can sort this out.”

Mahmoud is under a cowboy hat in the back room. He is reading Lonesome Dove. He drops the book and removes the hat when he sees you. “Hello, Jack. I’m . . .” He bows his head.

T.J. leads you, Mahmoud and S.P. to a tiny office. “Make yourselves at home, everyone. I’ll go work the front.” T.J. grabs an apron off a nail near the door. “I just want to say, Jack, obviously I was involved. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything, but I think that these two— Well, you’ll see. I think they make a strong case.” He runs his tongue nervously over his lips then turns to go.

You sit on the top of the desk and listen to S.P. explain how they had felt when they saw the photo of Mahmoud; how their love for Mahmoud grew as they spent time carefully placing the small picture in the fake passport; how S.P. had mustered the courage to ask Mr. J. for your address, a secret he guarded honourably; how once S.P. began to cry Mr. J. offered to bring the envelope with the letter to Mahmoud at your apartment; how Mr. J. asked where S.P. planned to meet Mahmoud, then made the map himself. Then Mahmoud explains how much he liked the city right away; how the letter—“This letter,” he says, pulling it out of his pocket—made him smile and laugh and feel at home; how he had followed the path through the park; how the birds had sung and flown about; how the chipmunks had scrambled between last fall’s leaves. How he and S.P. had held hands. How S.P. had given him the hat and Lonesome Dove, because S.P. thought Mahmoud would love the book and that the hat, they laughed, could act as a disguise. How they wanted, they do want to give things a try, to have a chance together, not because they know what the outcome will be, but because they want to and why not? Mahmoud does not want to move again and how is staying here, in this city, any different anyway?

They look up at you then. You stand. You crouch. You fold your hands as if in prayer and hold the tips of your index fingers between your teeth. You nod. You nod emphatically.

“Yes?” Mahmoud asks.

“Yes?” S.P. asks.

“Why not?” you say, nodding still.

They jump and hug and shower you with, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.

Before you leave, before you accept the box of donuts T.J. insists on giving you, before you ride the gondola down the fake mountain, before you navigate through the crowds and board a bus, then a train, before you go home to your apartment, empty of Mahmoud and the three other men who had traveled so far to you, you make sure that you take S.P.’s hand and look them in the eyes and thank them, make sure that you take Mahmoud’s hand and look him in the eyes and thank him, make sure you thank them both, thank them both sincerely, and wish them good luck.

Toronto, Dec. 2015

Emoji sequence: Nolan Dubeau

Story: Lee Sheppard

If you liked this story, read "You, JL, Part I"

This Other Time (Part 2 of at least 2)

It was four a.m. and your stomach was cramping from eating a bag of pita and a container of hummus. Well, it was cramping because in the tiny editing suite where you and Alice were editing your video, you were trying desperately not to release any of the gas troubling your lower intestine. “I’m going to step out for a minute,” you told her as she sought a seamless transition between a shot of a bathroom door closing and a close up of a beautiful troublemaker leaning in to kiss your main character against the sink. “Excuse me.”

You went outside. It was balmy and windless. The street was empty. Almost empty. There was someone standing under a streetlight smoking and reading a book. You thought maybe you recognized them so you were staring when they lifted their head, took a drag and turned towards you. Their nose was the first thing you recognized. You’d never been attracted to a nose before, but this person, this gorgeous boy or girl—you honestly didn’t know—this handsome androgyne had a sexy nose. The bridge bulged subtly just below their deep-set eyes and announced the presence of a bone, or cartilage that had bone-like distinction, that defined the shape of the nose as it descended to a narrow, gentle upturn. There was something equine about it, something muscular.

But wait, they were nodding at you.

You nodded back, worried, though, that at this distance your nod could be interpreted any number of ways, interpreted as cold even. You lifted your left hand and held it there while you nodded towards it as if to say, This is what I meant when I nodded a second ago, Hello.

The person with the gorgeous nose smiled, laughingly, but didn’t laugh. Harmony was their name, you thought. You tried to remember back to the Politics and Sexuality course you’d both taken in the spring semester last year. Harmony.

You were smiling now, too.

Harmony dropped the smoking cigarette to the sidewalk and stomped it out with a slender leather boot.

As Harmony walked towards you, you became aware of the bad smell hanging around your person, part flatulence, part sweaty sleeplessness. You wished for a gust of wind to whistle across the campus from Yonge Street and disperse your aura of bad air.

“Hi,” Harmony said.

“Hi,” you said.

Harmony held arms wide, welcoming you in for a hug. You grimaced a bit. “Never mind,” Harmony said.

“It’s not that.” You took a step back. “I’m just a bit gross. I’ve been up all night editing.”

“I’m here editing, too.”

“Oh, really? Are you in film or television?”

“Theatre. But I’m a dancer, too. Do you know Carson?”

“No.”

“Carson Martin?”

You shook your head.

“Carson made a video of me dancing.”

“Cool.”

“I’m pretty excited about it.”

You smiled. “I’d love to see it.”

“Okay,” Harmony smiled.

Then you both said, “What—?” at the same time.

“Sorry,” you said.

“No, I’ve been talking a lot.”

“I just was going to ask what you were reading.”

The book was deep in the pocket of Harmony’s long, broad-collared coat. Harmony handed you the book. There was a picture of a pitcher following through after a pitch, one leg planted, the other pointing to the gap to the third base side of the set short stop, his eyes towards the batter whose bat seemed about to make contact with the tiny white ball streaking towards him. Overwhelmingly, though, the photograph on the cover of The Summer Game by Roger Angell, showed the dry, mown grass and carefully groomed dirt and all the open space of a ball diamond. “He’s like, the poet-laureate of baseball.”

“Literally?”

“I don’t think literally. Does baseball have a poet-laureate?”

“That would be surprising.”

“Yeah.” Harmony laughed. “My point is, it’s beautiful writing. Really.”

“Cool,” you handed the book back.

“I was going to ask what you are editing.”

“A project for my production class.”

“What’s it about?”

The précis, the pitch version was something you were working on. It was a struggle, though. Your stories, the way you told them, tended to be about minutiae and moments, not big, sweeping changes in the lives of your characters, so, I mean, how? How sum it up in a few words? “My main character falls for this troublemaker, who is played by this tall woman with muddy eyes, and the two of them make trouble together.” You smiled, proud of your description.

“Sounds like a lot of fun. Mind if I peak my head in and take a look?”

You weren’t sure what Alice would think about that, but you couldn’t resist Harmony’s eager face. “Sure. Maybe closer to seven?” Seven was when they would kick you out of the editing suite.

“Alright.”

“And maybe I can come see yours?”

“I’d love that.”

The first thing you noticed when you returned to the tiny room where Alice was patiently assembling your video was that the staleness that had emanated from your body outside permeated the air here. Alice had a long list of questions for you. In your excitement about Harmony, you were able to ignore her irritation. Honestly, you even started feeling a little bad about abandoning her and not apologizing for it but by the time you were thinking that way it was too late to say sorry because Alice would be all like, Sorry for what? She seemed to have been lifted up a bit by your positive energy, though, so there was that.

Alice was fine-cutting the bike scene, where the troublemaker and the main character double to the ravine to carve their initials into trees and make out under the moon. The footage was grainy and making you feel a little shitty for not listening to your camera operator or for not changing your script, but it was what it was now, so you told yourself that maybe the story was beautiful enough to excuse the shoddy shooting and the fact that you chose poetic logic over the limitations that camera and budget placed on your project. 

You told Alice you’d be back and she asked if you could please be quicker this time.

You found Harmony and Carson in a room off the hall opposite the hall you and Alice were working down. On the screen was an image of Harmony suspended in mid-air above a field of tall grass you guessed was wheat. Muscles bulged here and there despite the tensor bandage binding Harmony’s torso. You were reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s story, “Harrison Bergeron.” “Hi,” Harmony said. You introduced yourself to Carson.

At Harmony’s urging, Carson showed you what they had cut so far, “Even though there’s no music yet and some of the cuts need fine tuning.”

“Where’d you shoot this?” You watched the screen carefully, waiting for the leap or bend that would press Harmony’s baggy pants against whatever was inside them.

“My family’s farm,” Carson said.

“In Saskatchewan,” Harmony said. “We stayed with Carson’s family for a week. It was so lovely.” Harmony smiled at Carson and your heart was set on breaking a little until you saw the way Carson turned back to the screen.

Harmony came back with you to your editing suite and watched what you and Alice had done. You felt gratified when Harmony laughed at the scene of the troublemaker arriving at the main character’s family’s home for dinner, especially when she hopped off her bike and let it glide into the carefully maintained garden beside the front walk.

“What a great actor that woman is,” Harmony said. “She’s— Oh, she’s just so perfect. And I love the story.”

You said, Thanks.

Harmony asked you to go to breakfast and you hesitated for just a second because you never stayed up this late and you were exhausted, but Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, you would love to. “You know what,” Harmony said, “I think you should go home and get some sleep, but,” Harmony looked around for you didn’t know what, “let me give you my number.”

Alice, long suffering and patient and so generous to you always, tore a sheet out of her notebook and, without turning from her work editing your video, she held up that sheet of paper and a BIC ballpoint and you watched as Harmony wrote out the area code and seven digits and said, “I might be meeting some friends later, but I might not, too, so I don’t know, I mean you could join us or maybe the two of us could go eat somewhere or go sit in a park, I don’t know.”

“Sure,” you said. Then you nodded and repeated yourself a few times before you said, “Okay, I’ll call you.”

You thanked Alice as the two of you parted ways out front of the Television and Radio Arts building. She told you to get some rest before your big date. You sputtered out what might have been an attempted laugh.

It was hard to get to sleep, of course, with the excitement piled on top of the over-exhaustion. The last you remembered looking at the clock it was after nine.

When the phone rang, it was just after two. Your best friend was going tobogganing with Pat. You were confused. How long did you sleep? Giant flakes of snow were piling up in front of your basement window. “No,” you said. “Thanks.” When your best friend asked if something was wrong you explained that you’d been editing through the night. You didn’t say anything about Harmony, but you were so distracted that you didn’t hear what hill your best friend and Pat were going to. 

You scrubbed the tub, then had a bath. You tried to read. You made your bed and tidied your room. You picked small but visible chunks of what?—socks, snacks, dead hair—off the carpet, because the vacuum had broken a few weeks ago and you and your roommates couldn’t agree on who should take it to the repair place.

You called Harmony. It was 4:02 p.m. “I thought you’d forgotten about me,” Harmony said. “That thing with my other friends fell through.” The two of you agreed to meet at Buddha’s on Dundas between Spadina and Bathurst.

When you arrived, Harmony waved to you from a chair by the window. Harmony hugged you and smiled and listened to you talk about the stress your latest video was causing you. Harmony ordered for you both—spring rolls, imitation duck, Singapore-style noodles, mixed-vegetables with cashew nuts and steamed rice. You talked more about your video before discussing baseball, dancing, T-shirts, blue jeans, snow, hometowns, the suburbs, favourite bands and ice-skating on frozen ponds. It was way too much food, a surprising amount of food, and you over ate even though told yourself you wouldn’t. You and Harmony agreed that the server should pack up what you hadn’t eaten, but when she arrived with the food packed up in Styrofoam and a white plastic bag, you discovered that neither of you actually wanted it.

The two of you stood outside the restaurant awkwardly. “Have anywhere you need to be?” Harmony asked.

“Nope.”

“Want to walk with me? I love this weather.”

“Yeah.”

In Kensington, there was a cluster of street punks with two beautiful brindle-coated dogs. They thanked you when you offered them the leftovers and Harmony even went into a Jamaican food place and got napkins and plastic forks for them. You and Harmony sat on a bench in the Market parkette, and an older guy in really bad shape offered to sell you pot. Your feet were cold and wet in your Chuck Taylors. You went into Last Temptation just to be somewhere warm. Neither of you wanted a drink. You each ordered tea and got one plate of French fries between you, just so the waiter wouldn’t think you were cheap. Eventually you ate the French fries anyway. Conversation turned to roommates and apartments and after you’d each finished your tea Harmony invited you home.

 Snow drifted lazy past the streetcar’s windows and the city seemed to have had its volume turned down. As the Dundas car rattled over Bay Street, Harmony reached out and held your hand. You looked out the window and involuntarily inhaled through your nostrils, your chest ballooning with happy air.

The apartment was up a narrow flight of stairs in a tall row house just past Filmore’s. Harmony’s roommate, Max, had a thin, scruffy beard and beautiful, feminine features. He took his guitar, ashtray, cigarettes and John Ralston Saul book to his bedroom after Harmony introduced you.

Harmony got you a glass of water and you sat facing each other on the futon with your legs crossed. You looked up at the clock. It was one a.m. Max was playing guitar somewhere in the apartment. Harmony reached out and held your right hand, opening it and closing it, tickling the palm and gently pressing your fingers. Once you were kissing, Harmony moved forward and you lay back, stretched out and cozy in the futon’s fold, Harmony playing with your belt.

You reached for Harmony’s top button, but Harmony gripped your wrist and moved your hand away before working on your buckle again.

Harmony reached down your pants and got you off. The familiarity, the certainty of Harmony’s hands, made you suspect that maybe whatever was between Harmony’s legs was the same thing you had. Have.

You reached for Harmony’s waist again, but Harmony said, “It’s okay.”

You were thinking about reciprocity more than curiosity when you persisted.

“I said, No.”

Max emerged from wherever he’d been, holding his guitar by the neck.

“I didn’t mean . . . ”

Harmony sat up and looked away. “You can sleep here, on the couch, if you need to.”

“Uh. I’ll go home, maybe.”

Max was nodding like you’d made the right choice. He turned and disappeared again.

You cleaned yourself up in the bathroom. Or maybe you didn’t. Maybe you got yourself back together right there in the living room, the whole time Harmony watching you without looking at you. You drank the last of your water. “Okay,” Harmony said.

“Maybe I’ll call you?”

“I’m sorry.”

The snow outside was melting, even though it felt like the air had gotten colder. On the streetcar, you sat by the heater, but your feet wouldn’t warm up. A black man with cotton-candy-pink hair got on at Yonge and sang silently, beautifully to himself all the way to Dufferin. The fact that you couldn’t make out the lyrics powerfully drove home your loneliness and regret.

When you took your pants off to crawl into bed, you still smelled of sex.

Even under the comforter, your feet were freezing cold.

Toronto, November 2015

Emoji sequence: Rhya Tamasauskas, co-founder of Monster Factory, writer and artist.

Story: Lee Sheppard

Note: This is part two of at least two stories. The first part is "This One Time".