1
Evan. My beautiful Evan. Here in the darkness of this hiding place, I write you these words. Without paper, without pen, I trace these words in my head, along the perimeter of your outline. Watch this sentence travel along the meat of your cheekbone. See my teeth dig into your flesh playfully. Watch these words ball into your hand along with a fistful of bedsheet, which you pull over us to create a tent. I imagine you now, lying across from me, improvising a silly song about the smallness of my ears. Ironically, you sing it half in tune, half out of tune.
“Maybe you’re the one with the small ears,” I suggest, and you scrunch your face in embarrassment. You’re talented at many things, but music isn’t one of them. Sometimes the image of you is clear, right down to the curl of your eyelashes. Sometimes, especially when I’m hungry, I recall the shape of your smile and nothing more. Watch these phrases ink across an imaginary page, a Whisper Letter, folded twice, placed in an envelope and mailed to wherever you may be. I will never forget your name, Evan. And I pray you will never forget mine.
If by some miracle my whispered words reach you, I want you to know that I’m safe on Homewood Street, where Liv has hidden me in her basement.
No room in Toronto is ever used in the way it was originally intended. That’s what happens in a city always trying to reinvent itself. Like it has an itch it can’t scratch. Like it has a commitment problem. This room was meant to be a cold cellar. A place where, before the invention of refrigeration, the woman of the house would have stored things like butter or eggs. That’s why even in the heat of the summer, the heat of this hellish summer, I feel like I’m swimming in the cold breath of ghosts. I’m wearing all the clothes I ran away in. Five layers, which you told me to wear. There is no finding me. At least I hope so.
To ensure that I am hidden, I have set up my bed beside Liv’s furnace. My bed consists of two layers of cardboard boxes cut to fit in the corner of space behind the furnace and a pile of Liv’s old winter coats, which I use as blankets and a pillow. The idea is, if I need to leave again and in a hurry, what remains behind won’t resemble a hideout for me: a Queer, femme Jamaican-Filipino man. Anne Frank, minus the diary.
It is here where I await news, where I hope for your arrival, where I wait for Liv to feed me or to tell me it’s time to run again. I am unsure exactly how long I have been here, as counting days is its own form of torture. Instead, I understand the passing of time by watching the moon’s cycle from the basement window. Maybe you are doing the same. Lunar crescents have grown fat, then thin across the night sky almost six times. And at the swelling of every moon, Liv has replenished my supplies. It is through this same basement window that I have watched a raccoon give birth, pushing those kits out, one at a time, in the space between the spiderweb-stained glass and the corrugated metal framing. I have been here long enough to watch them grow too large for the cubbyhole. Long enough to watch the mama bite the collars of each of her whimpering kits and carry them to the surface of the world, high above me.
In the dead of winter, under the light of a waxing fingernail moon, I jogged in place to keep my limbs from feeling wooden and numb. In the spring, when the flooding began once again, I would stand in ankle-deep filthy water. Under a new moon, with flashes of lightning as my only guide in the darkness, I filled buckets with flood water and passed them to Liv through the hatch to pour down the kitchen drain. Since summer has returned, and the moon is pregnant-round, I am thankful the musty smell of mould has dissipated a bit.
I can see the sky peeking through the opening of the basement window like a half-circle picture-perfect blue. I’m not sure what is better: to look outside the window and long for sunlight or to lie on my dark makeshift bed, close my eyes and dream of bicycling with you through the city, fast and free.
When I first arrived, I kept to my cardboard bed and wept, seeing the basement as my prison, my tomb while the Renovation unfolded at ground level. Then, as time passed, as the moon scratched a wound across the sky, I began to inch my way around the concrete to witness the untold history of the home with my curious hands and squinting eyes. At the opposite end of the basement, where a broken stove sits, just beyond the reach of its power cord’s coil, is a washroom rough-in. Three unfinished pipes poke through the solid concrete like necks without heads. I picture a couple in the early 2000s renovating the basement to create a separate apartment, then halting their construction as the stock market crashes. In the adjacent corner stands a dusty wooden bar and dysfunctional sink. I imagine a husband in the 1970s, wearing his paisley shirt, picking through the shelves in search of his favourite brand of whiskey. A mysterious series of headboards from several different time periods, from several different occupants, leans against the cold walls.
Every corner of this basement tells a tale and so too does every inch of my body. The landscape of every curve is a map of my traumatic experiences. Evan. Take your first two fingers and make a compass. Walk your compass between the mounds of my kneecaps to find bodies of water, deep with your touch, remembered. The distance between my belly button and my throat is measured in increments of kilometres run in my escape and the sequence of events that led me here, to this nightmare lived. The canyon of my palm is where I feel everything and everyone I have lost in the last several months. And constantly echoing through these vast mountain ranges of bones and sifted garbage heaps is the sound of first screams and final goodbyes. The cartography of memory. The navigation through valleys of scars.
Tonight, the light comes. I hear the kitchen table slide roughly across the floor and then the hatch is lifted.
“Kay!” Liv says to me.
The light is painful-beautiful. The light is ugly perfect. I squint my eyes and open them as wide as I can all at the same time. I want that light inside of me. It feels so good. As usual, when Liv opens the hatch, I stack the milk crates to raise myself high enough to reach her hand. Our hands touch and she hoists me out onto the ground floor. We land on our bums on the linoleum tiles with a soft thud and she begins crying. I usually hate seeing white folks cry because it means I have to assure them that I, as a Black person, do not think less of them. But Liv is different. I know she wouldn’t cry unless she had reason to do so.
“What’s wrong?” I ask gently. My voice is hoarse, speaking for the first time in ages.
She doesn’t answer me. She pulls her shirt up to wipe her wet face. I look around to see if there are tissues, but I don’t see any in the kitchen, so I let her continue with this sad wet-shirt business. Her breathing calms enough for her to let her shoulders relax finally. By then her shirt is wetter than her face. Whatever it was has passed, it seems. I am too scared to ask.
“Are you hungry? Can I make you something?” she asks while standing herself up. A few sniffles escape her mouth like hiccups.
“Yes, please.” My stomach growls. “Do you want help?” I say, knowing I have few calories to spare.
“No, no. Just chill.”
I sit at the kitchen table and chew my cheek. Once I taste the threat of blood in my mouth, I will myself to ease off, for food is on its way. The sound of a podcast transmits from Liv’s phone. A recording of ambient sound of an industrial kitchen, with the occasional calling out of orders, slowly cross-fades with a raspy voice. “My name is Khalil. I’m twenty-eight years old. I have been in charge of the kitchen here at the Don Valley workhouse for three months now . . .”