It’s been over a month. But I needed to get this right.
It’s 24 December 2005. I’ve just arrived in Finch, Ontario, to spend the holidays visiting my parents and looking up old friends. Every year on Christmas Eve, we cross the road to visit our neighbours, the Hannas, for an evening of conversation, crackers, pickled eggs and whatnot. This year, someone mentions politics, and you can practically see young Sean Hanna’s hair change colour. He works for the government because he loves his country, and he hates voter apathy. “Just believe in something,” he says passionately. “Don’t just sit there and say that they’re all full of crap, get up and do something about it.”
“I do believe something,” I tell him, “I believe that they’re all full of crap. No, look. Seriously. I’ll tell you what I want from my government, okay? In no particular order, what I want is affordable public education, transit, healthcare, and then…”
I hesitate. Something was missing there. Then I remember, all in one thought like a flashcard, going onto Google Pedometer some time ago and showing my friend Owin the route that I’d been walking all summer, and how I got to the bit between Lawrence Square and the Yorkdale Shopping Centre, and Owin gave me an odd look and said Isn’t that the area where they’ve had all those shootings? And I blinked and looked at the map, which was just streets and names, and I thought, I never saw anything like that, I saw men and women out on their lawns and I saw packs of children walking home from school. It was just a quiet residential part of the city and I just walked through it, once a day for about three to four months, during the nice weather. Shootings? There were shootings there? I saw nothing like that, nothing at all like that. Just lucky, I guess. According to a comment elsewhere on my blog, I totally win at life.
“And keep me safe,” I finish. “Public education, transit, healthcare, keep me safe, and then sod off. That’s what I want from my government.”
The conversation continues, and I glance at my watch, not because I want to get going, but because The Christmas Invasion is going to be on CBC on Monday at 8:00 pm. The first full Doctor Who adventure since July, the first full story with David Tennant, Barty Crouch Jr., as the Tenth Doctor. I’ve been counting down the days until it got close enough for me to count down the hours. It’s now 24 December, 10:37. Do the math: 45 hours and 23 minutes left. I can hardly wait for Boxing Day, 2005. It’s going to be fantastic.
Do the math. I’m good at doing the math. Watch, I’ll count to three.
One: It’s the summer of 1990. I’m 18 years old going on 19, just graduated high school, and working at Upper Canada Playhouse in Morrisburg, Ontario. They’ve just moved into new digs after spending several seasons in a tent up by the highway, and there’s been a bit of a fooferaw, or perhaps a kerfuffle, with the new neighbours about noise levels. One of the bones of contention has been the sandwich boards that we stick out on the street to guide people into the parking lot. I don’t remember what the complaint was, don’t ask me to explain it; it’s been — do the math — over 15 years.
We usually pack up around 10:00 or 11:00 at night. Tonight, I go out, get into my family’s old pink Toyota, start to turn the key, and remember that I’ve forgotten to bring in the sandwich boards. Actually, I may have left them out all night once before; that may have had something to do with the kerfuffle, unless it was a fooferaw. I’m a little tired and I’m looking forward to getting home, so I sit in the car for about ten seconds, hoping that the sandwich boards will walk into the theatre all by themselves. But the impossible doesn’t happen just because I wish for it, so I sigh, get out of the car, pick them up and take them back inside.
Now I’ve got a choice. I can either go north from Morrisburg, cut along a side road up to Highway 43 south of Chesterville, and go east from there to Finch; or I can go east from Morrisburg, turn left at Ingleside, and go up north through Osnabruck Centre to Finch. The Ingleside route is marginally shorter, but honestly it’s 6.006 of one and 5.994 of the other. It takes me perhaps another five seconds to decide that I’ll go via Ingleside tonight.
It’s been dark for about an hour, an hour and a half. I drive east, turn left, drive north; 50 kph in the towns, 80 kph on the country roads. North through Ingleside, over the bridge, over the 401, then the road curves in an S and levels out just south of Osnabruck Centre’s single north-south street. The streetlights are on and a truck is coming south towards me; he dims his lights, I dim mine. I’m coming up on the village from the south, he’s coming down on it from the north; I slow to 50 kph, keeping an eye on my surroundings like I learned in defensive driving class just a few months ago, and the truck’s lights get brighter in the left side of my windscreen as I enter the
strobeflash: fur/teeth/shoulder/eyes in the righthand side of the windscreen snap WHUMP
According to the woman who let the dog out to run, it tried to dart across the road to chase the truck in the far lane, except that my car was in the near lane. She says she saw the dog flip end-over-end.
The house is on the northeast corner of the intersection at the south end of the village. My friend Becky lives down that road, to the east, or so I remember it; I know her from high school, but I don’t know that, now that high school’s over, I’ve seen her for the last time in 15 years. I remember two children on the stairs, crying, asking what was wrong with Bear; I remember the woman being calmer and far more understanding than I was as I gave her my name and address and telephone number and licence plate; I remember apologising, apologising, apologising.
Whenever I think about it afterwards, I remember those sandwich boards, and the ten seconds I sat in the car with my hand on the key, and the choice between north and east or east and north. And then, of course, there are all the things that I don’t remember; was I slowed by following another car, how long did it take me to slow down and turn left off Highway 2? And all the little decisions that the woman made, even the little decisions that the dog made, that I’ll never know about.
Tiny things, small things, irrelevant things. Two seconds to the left, two seconds to the right, and I’d have been halfway through the village or coming up on it with time to pump the brakes and swerve. Tiny things, adding up to one big subtraction. Vectors crossing; an intersection.
Two: It’s the first week of January, the second week of January, the third week of January. I’ve been out of my house for four weeks, when it was only supposed to be one-maybe-two. Owin and Irena have gone beyond the call of duty in opening up their home to me. I never felt less than welcome. I’m sure they’d have let me stay longer if it had been possible. Their guest bed was actually more comfortable than my own is.
That’s not the point. I’m a welcome guest, but I’m still a guest. I have privacy, but it’s the privacy of a room in someone else’s home. It’s still their space, not mine; I’m just borrowing it for a while. While I’m there, I tread lightly. Living, without leaving marks; existing without disturbing.
Three weeks, welcome but unsettled. It’s a place to wait, not a place to live. Not a place for me to sink into, not a place to be completely a part of, not a place where I can let go of things I can’t carry. I can sleep there, I can eat there, but without serious cause, I can’t cry. I can’t scream.
Three: It’s 17 December 2005; one week before Christmas Eve, seven days before I add, as an afterthought, that I’d like to be safe. In Brooklin, north of Whitby, the Dixon family has gathered for the Dixon Family Christmas. The hosts, Cindy and Brad and Kendra; David and Margot; Andy, Eury, and Callista; Frank and Olwen; and Cameron. Also, two cats.
Kendra is now old enough to work out that this is a Special Time of Year. At two and a half years old, her babyface has formed into something almost like my sister’s used to be. The middle generation isn’t exchanging presents, because Cindy believes that’s just one more damn thing to worry about; but Kendra’s two and a half years old, and I’m the uncle, and I mean, come on now. I arrive at the Dixon Family Christmas bearing two Robert Munsch books, a Looney Tunes DVD for the whole family, a mini MuchMusic shirt, and a plush toy Gund ostrich. Kendra hugs the ostrich by the neck and hardly lets go of it at all for the next six hours. She names it Ostrich. (Two weeks later, one week too late, when I move in with Owin and Irena, their daughter Maja — who’s roughly the same age — introduces me to her sock monkey, who is named Sock Monkey; her toy duck, who is named Duck; and her toy ballerina, who is named Ballerina.)
I meet the immediate family again on Monday for dinner at a Mandarin restaurant. On the way from the GO station, Mom tells me that when Kendra sat down for breakfast on Sunday, she insisted that Ostrich sit in the chair with her. Cindy explained that Kendra had to sit by herself, but that it was all right for Ostrich to sit in the chair next to her. Kendra nodded and accepted this, and, when everybody’s back was turned, she grabbed Ostrich and sat him in the chair with her.
The Mandarin restaurant is a buffet. I fill up my plate, and offer Kendra some noodles, which she enjoys, and some baby shrimp, which she turns down. She says, astoundingly politely, that she doesn’t like baby shrimp. She doesn’t cry when I eat it instead.
Cindy and Brad drive me back to the GO station at Pickering, and I sit in the back of the van, next to Kendra. I tell her that I’m going to catch a train, and make chugga-chugga-chugga-choo-choo noises until she laughs. I show her how to pull the string on the hood of my coat so that I’ll make the choo-choo whistle noise. I ask her what sound a car makes, and she pretends to turn a steering wheel while I make vroom-vroom noises. Cindy reminds Kendra to wear her hat, and Kendra tells me to wear my hat, and I tell her that I don’t have a hat and pull the hood of the coat over my face, hiding my eyes. “Where’s Kendra? Where’s Kendra?” When I look around for her, she can see my nose moving underneath the hood, and she shrieks with laughter.
Of course I’m seeing her at her best and then leaving, but for these hours she’s so enthusiastic, so bright, great to be around. She thinks I’m a fun person, a good person, and for a few hours I can be, without qualification.
It’s so easy, later, to extrapolate it forward. Easy to imagine her just as bright and enthusiastic, but experienced as well. Imagine her turning that excitement towards the real world, turning it on matters more significant than moo-cows and choo-choo trains. Old enough to know things, young enough to have more to learn; young enough for experiences to be new to her, old enough to understand them when they happen. Capable of anything, fully human, alive, a lifetime of achievement ahead of her.
Easy to imagine her as bright, athletic, 15 years old.
You know what this is about now.
It’s Monday, Boxing Day. My parents’ friends are holding a party, and I’ve been invited to attend. I spend the day wiring up their VCR so I can tape The Christmas Invasion, and then I rent a copy of the movie Serenity, which my father hasn’t yet seen and which he quite enjoys, even though I accidentally rented the full-screen version. The movie ends and we head out, arriving at the party just as it’s starting to get dark. It’s potluck and I work evening hours, so the first thing I do is sit down at the table and eat a bowl of stew. A good time is had by all. There’s a re-gifting lottery, and I win a DIY cardboard clock that Actually Works. I come back home before my parents do, but they arrive in time to watch the time-shifted Invasion with me at 10:00. It ends at about a quarter after 11:00, I stop the tape, we all agree it was a terrific show, and we make our separate ways to bed.
We don’t watch the news.
Tuesday night. My parents must have seen an earlier newscast, because they’d heard about it before I did. Terrible, just terrible, but it happened in Toronto and I’m not in Toronto now, I’m over 350 kilometres away, and my parents are in the same room, hearing about public gunplay in the city where I live, in a part of town that I walk through every week. They’re going to worry — downplay it, downplay it. I cluck my tongue sadly and wonder aloud what the media will make of this; after all, 6,999,993 people went out shopping on Boxing Day and didn’t get shot, and hey, remember that SARS “epidemic” when everybody who lived on television was wearing masks, and everybody who lived in the real Toronto wasn’t? Terrible news, just terrible. What else is on?
Wednesday, I met Becky for the first time in 15 years. We’d been in touch via e-mail and had arranged to meet at a restaurant in Long Sault. I met her two children — yes, someone I knew in high school has children, my sister has a child, God I’m old — and we talked for the entire afternoon. Catching up, telling stories, laughing, looking back on high school with the astonishment of hindsight (if only we could rewind, what things we would change!) and shaking our heads at the state of the world. Did you hear about the shootings at Yonge and Dundas? Terrible news, just terrible. You say you work for charity? What does that involve?
Friday, I met Derek Joyce again for the first time in about a year. Great visit. That night, I caught up with Matt in Kingston — do the math, hadn’t seen him for two and a half years. We went to the Kingston Brew Pub, and I drank an interesting cran-apple cider, and thought I’m going to have to ask if this is available in Toronto, and then drank another two pints of it and forgot to ask. I met Mike McGuire again, and Zach Stevenson, and I met Kevin Fox, who joined the RSC after I left and who put me and Matt up for the night, as it was obvious we couldn’t drive anywhere. We played a game called “Lunch Money”, which uses specialised cards to recreate a playground fight with all its poking, kicking and jabbing. It was the most fun I’ve had on a night out since, well, since Matt left Toronto, actually. Did you hear about that business at Yonge and Dundas? Terrible news, just terrible. What do you mean you don’t have my phone number? Well, why didn’t you call me and ask for it?
It’s not that I didn’t care, it’s that I didn’t think about it. I was busy. I can’t even remember where, or when, I heard the news about who’d been killed. I had other things on my mind. I was having fun.
It didn’t hit me until I was on the bus the next Monday, coming home, coming home, sitting on the bus as it turned off the 401 onto the Don Valley Parkway, back in the city, driving down south towards the terminal at Bay and Edward, just one block south and one block west of… The bus is turning left onto the Don Valley Parkway and the weather is grey, the weather is damp and drizzly; it’s not snowing, it’s not winter, it’s weather squeezed out of a sock, and one week ago, in a part of town that I walk through every week, a 15-year-old girl crossed the street to look at shoes and was killed by a bullet that wasn’t aimed at her.
I’m not using her name. I didn’t know her. I’m mourning an imaginary girl, a potential girl, the girl I think she might have been. Give them their grief who knew her for who she was. I never knew her.
Never will, now.
Life is fragile, don’t we all agree on that? In January 2002, I slipped while getting out of the shower, and pulled the towel rack out of the wall trying to stop myself from falling. Two inches to the left, I’d have cracked my skull on the toilet and died naked in my own bathroom, 30 and a half years old.
(January 2002 — do the math. She’d have been 11 years old, then.)
All I’ve got to go on here is the news. People tried to kill other people at Yonge and Dundas, they tried to end other human lives, take out whole universes of perception, whole unique ways of looking at the world and putting the things that were seen in a new, coherent order. They’d already been feuding, they just happened to bump into each other there. And the person who died had nothing to do with any of that. According to the news, she decided to cross the street to look for shoes and walked straight into the crossfire. Impulse; random chance; two seconds to the left.
She died because she was hit by a bullet that wasn’t aimed at her; it just ended up in the same place that she was, at the same time. Not so much an accident, because somebody chose to fire the bullet and end someone’s life; not so much a murder, because the person who killed her missed their target, didn’t want her dead, didn’t even know her. Vectors crossing. An intersection.
Four: I could have been there. I might have done something.
Back in September, the plan was for the contractors to start work on the house in October, or possibly November. Back then, I asked for vacation time on the week before Christmas, so I could drive back to Finch with my parents after meeting them at Cindy’s home, so I’d only have to buy a bus ticket one way, back.
I would have had to be back at work on Tuesday the 27th, at 4:00 pm. There was that party on Monday night, and I might have wanted to watch Doctor Who with my parents; I could have caught the early bus on Tuesday and arrived in Toronto at 2:30, plenty of time to get to work. On the other hand, I’d be better off with time to unpack and a good night’s sleep, and my VCR at home, unlike my parents’, is already set up to tape in stereo; so it’s somewhat more likely that I’d have come home on Monday. It could have gone either way. North then east, or east then north.
If the bus was on schedule, it would have arrived at the terminal at 4:20. I would have been carrying two big carry-on bags, full of clothing, books and gifts, so I probably would have taken the subway home… unless I was hungry, after spending five hours on the bus. The food courts would probably have been open at the Eaton’s Centre, if the Boxing Day sales were just starting. Or I might have walked further south to hit the Quizno’s Subs near King; I like the franchise, and I know where that particular one is.
Then, I still would have had two heavy bags to carry, so I probably would have taken the subway home from there… or maybe I would have decided to walk. I walk reasonably quickly, I like to get in some exercise, Yonge and King isn’t all that far from home, the bags aren’t all that heavy. It would depend on the weather, on how awkward it would be to carry the two bags all the way home. This is… unlikely. But possible. Just as it’s possible that I would have walked north along Yonge rather than zig-zagging along side streets to get up to the Annex.
Get off the bus, go down to a sub shop that’s several streets out of my way, eat, use the bathroom, start to walk north. Depending on the line-up, depending on the crowds on the streets, depending on when the lights turned green, maybe, maybe all that would all have taken an hour. Even then, I’d probably have been wearing my mp3 player. I’d have been listening to music, and I wouldn’t have noticed what was happening around me until it did. Be honest: even if I’d been there, I would have frozen up, not out of fear but out of incomprehension, my brain trying to disengage from whatever song it had just been listening to. Even if I’d been there, it’s unlikely I would have done anything useful. If I’d been there, I probably only would have gotten killed, or wounded, or worse: I’d have been there and seen everything and survived, unscathed physically, but I wouldn’t have been able to help or my being there could have gotten someone else killed.
The thing is… it’s possible. Not probable, maybe not even plausible, but possible. I could have been there, at the time, I might have noticed what was going on around me, if everything had lined up. Tiny things, small things, irrelevant things; two seconds to the left, two seconds to the right.
But the work got moved to the last week of December, and it only made sense for me to spend that week out of town, and on Boxing Day at 5:19 pm I was over 350 kilometres away, eating a bowl of stew. Completely unaware, completely uninvolved, completely incapable of changing anything, any little thing. Safe.
This is true: two days after getting back to Toronto, I dreamed of being on the GO train, the same relatively local service that took me to Whitby to see my sister, except that this one was taking me all the way to Cornwall to my parents’. As the doors closed, I realised that I’d left my silver carry-on bag on the platform, and that it had my ticket in it. I leapt for the doors just as they closed, but the train hadn’t started moving yet, so I pressed the yellow emergency strip above them. My bag was right out there on the platform (which looked more like a TTC platform from this angle); it would only take a second for them to open the doors, and I could pop out and pick up the bag and pop back into the train, or, hell, even catch the next one, and everything would be all right, except that the train started to move, and I pressed the yellow strip again, and again, and the train picked up speed, and I pressed it again, and a voice from the intercom said “Would the passenger pressing the emergency strip please stop,” and I grabbed the red emergency cord instead and pulled it out, and it slowly drew back into the wall like one of those cords you get on the talking dolls, except nobody was saying anything, and I kept pulling the cord and it kept retracting into the wall and nothing happened and the train just kept moving, and I could see the next one pulling into the station behind me, and the train just kept on going, and it was too late to go back, too late to do anything but wait for it to get to the next station and try to walk back.
It sounds too conveniently symbolic. But I dreamed it. This is true.
Over the next three weeks, I keep doing the math. I move back in with Owin and Irena, to the house they bought in 1998, when she would have been eight years old. I go back to work at Citytv, where I started working in early 2002, when she would have been 11 or 12. I’m cleaning up my house, unpacking books, including a copy of Downtime, which came out at the start of 1996, the same time I started working at The Shopping Channel, when she would have been five years old, five. She was born the same year I killed the dog by going east first, the last year I saw Becky until two days after Boxing Day. There’s an old episode of The Simpsons on TV, it aired back in 1998, eight years old; there’s a song I recognise on the radio, it came out in the ’80s, before she was born; do the math, do the math, do the math…
Thursday, 5 January; three days after I got back into town. There’s a lull at work, so I pull out my tape of The Christmas Invasion to show it to Trese and Brandon. About ten minutes into the show, Rose and Mickey walk past a brass band playing for a crowd of holiday shoppers; the musicians are all dressed up like Santa Claus, but there’s something odd about their faces, and just as Rose realises they’re wearing metal masks, the Clauses lower their instruments — trumpets, coronets — and begin shooting bullets out of them at Our Heroes. One of them fires a rocket out of his tuba. Zany wacky thrills. The crowd scatters in terror.
It’s exactly the same sequence I watched ten days ago, except last time I didn’t know what had happened five hours earlier and this time it looks… different.
I don’t say anything.
Two hours later, Doug leaves to carry his work over to VTR, and then comes downstairs and tells us there’s a drunk man asleep on the second floor. Apparently the security locks in the building have switched themselves off and somebody just wandered in off the street. The others laugh it off. Security has the situation in hand and the police are escorting the drunk man out of the building. Ah, life. Wacky zany thrills. Those silly, silly security locks. Makes a good story, though. After all, it’s not like anything really bad could happen.
I take my work over to VTR, put it on the shelf, go to the nearest bathroom, sit down in one of the stalls, wait until the rest of the room is empty.
I haven’t cried like this for over four years, not like this.
(She would have been 11, then.)
It’s been over a month now. It’s wearing down. I’d still give anything, everything, for things to be different, but the impossible hasn’t happened just because I wished for it and now it’s turned into a want, not a need. I don’t wake up wrapped in knots in the duvet, I don’t have to clench my jaw or my fists to stop myself from screaming FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT in public. I can write about it.
It’s just one person’s reaction to what happened, one person who didn’t know any of the people involved. Nobody has been taken out of my life, not personally.
It’s still wrong. It’s still obscene. It still hasn’t been put right, it hasn’t been made not to happen. If only we could rewind, what things we would change.
And it’s been 34 days since it did happen, and tomorrow will be Monday, and the day after that will be Tuesday, and the day after that will be Wednesday. Do the math.
They say there is no feeling on Earth worse than feeling powerless. I’m not exactly sure who ‘they’ are, but someone said it and it stuck with me. Probably because it’s true.
It eats at me every time I look at the senselessness of the world. How can I bear the fact that there are people who are killing each other for FOOD, let alone oil and good old-fashioned pissing contests. Let alone the fact that our Earth is roasting in a slow-cooker and no one seems to give a shit as long as they’re not paying out the ass to commute to work.
You want to hear something horrible, I just realized it, but it’s true. I remember hearing yesterday or the day before about that Canadian cameraman in Iraq who was nearly killed. I remember hearing about that story, hearing about that man and thinking “Why is this on the news? This is hardly newsworthy!”
Detached. Cynical. Jaded. Yeah, that’s me. But I have to be this way, don’t I? I mean, how long can I stand screaming about the fallacies and idiocies of my kind before I realize that no one is listening? Or, even worse, that they are and are just as powerless as me?