by Elana Steingart
I could have lived anywhere in the city. I could have gone down to the Eaton Centre, slept on a different bed in the Sears every night, diverting myself by playing with all the department store makeup that I could never afford. It’s probably warmer there too, a giant air pocket, all four levels of insulation, no windows to let in the draught. But I stayed in my shitty one-bedroom, with its shitty windows and shitty insulation. And I actually washed the dishes, with the water left standing in the sink. Before, I’d go weeks with dirty dishes. I lived in filth while the city outside went about its tidy business. I had carved out a little niche of filth, I said, this is my filth, this is my ineptitude, this is me stagnating. That was my defiance.
And now, my city, my beautiful city is crumbling, stagnating. Now, the whole city is my niche, because there’s no one filling the streets anymore. The filth isn’t generated by me, it’s generated by time and abandonment.
Serves me right for not rejoicing in humanity, for not being a part of it, because now I’m the custodian of the world I rejected.
I had to be the last person on Earth before I would clean my fucking apartment.
After I tore down the bird netting on my balcony, after I stared down the paltry three storeys that I thought of jumping, after thinking about lying mangled on the street without even a car to come by to finish me off, that was when I decided to break into the maintenance office and steal all the keys.
At first, I only opened the apartments with dogs howling in them, cats meowing and scratching at the doors. They weren’t hard to find. And soon I was the Pied Piper, jingling my keys with a troop of quadrupeds. Non-human creatures, domesticated and wild, were spared on this Earth, including me.
I tried sitting in the chairs of neighbours I’d never met, but I didn’t like it very much. Ikea shit with other people’s assprints in the seats. I just grabbed their cat food, their multivitamins, bottled water, and cookies, and brought it to the apartment next to mine, which I had turned into my little storage facility, my little shit hoard.
I collected Bibles and holy books of various kinds from every apartment I found, and used them as doorstops. The third floor is now one massive suite. “Open concept.”
Although I still close my front door. Sometimes I even put the chain-lock on. The one habit I couldn’t shake, the one terror that didn’t vanish in obsolescence.
The first night I spent in my old bed surrounded by rescued dogs and cats was the first morning I woke up without screaming. You have no idea how important it is to the psyche to hear something else breathing, slow and deep and calm. You need to feel heartbeats that aren’t yours once in a while. You need to look into living eyes. I’d had my fill of that, before. Just walking to get groceries, I’d get my fill of human contact, of people who don’t get out of your way when you’re walking, people on their fucking cell phones talking in my ear in Korean, psycho homeless people muttering nonsense at me. They looked me in the eyes when they talked psycho talk at me. That was plenty of eye contact for me then. I’d mastered the set jaw, the downcast eyes that say “I am too urban to talk to anyone”.
I got to name all the animals whatever the fuck I wanted. I didn’t even look at their kitschy little engraved collars before dumping them down the garbage chute. All the secret names I had in my heart, ideas for babies I dreamed of having with some man I hadn’t yet met, now they’re incarnated in cats. Because even the sperm banks must have gone rotten by now. The dogs, I named after superheros. It still makes me laugh, to call that little chihuahua thing “Spiderman”.
They all pile around me in my bed, and I’m curled in the middle, Lady Food Provider, with the softest of the cats positioned right against my nose. It must be -25 degrees Celsius outside today, and this – in bed, with the beasts – is the only chance I get to take off my winter coat. I lost track of the days so early in all this, I have no idea how much more winter I have to endure.
One time, I heard someone shouting. I have no idea how far away he was; sound carries so differently now, without the white noise of traffic, the buzz of electricity everywhere, without the background music of thousands of conversations. I really wallow in the memories of lost noise. Sometimes I sing to myself the sound of car alarms.
It was so funny, his shouts were bilingual. He’s looking for survivors in our broken city, our broken country, and he’s alternating, “Hello? Bonjour? Quel-qu’un est la? Is anyone there?” His French is as crap as mine, but he’s making an effort, hanging on to our national values. He could be the fucking Prime Minister for all I know.
I sucked in a breath to call back, sucked in a lungful of frozen air, and I felt my heart freeze with it. I felt a total lack of feeling. I felt the imperative to respond drain away.
This dude, best case scenario, is my age-ish, and not annoying. Best case scenario, we find solace in each other’s arms. Best case scenario, we fuck and make some doomed babies, now named after cats. We carve out a resigned yet optimistic life for ourselves in the shell of Toronto. Our children see us as their whole world, live with some twisted sense of ethics that is devoid of the concept of ’society’.
I exhaled, long and slow, through my nose, and watched my frozen breath curl away like smoke.
