“You slept with someone else?”
“Yes, sorry”
“Why?”
“I don‘t know. We were at Myrtle Beach. He was cute. You were here. I just did it. I can’t believe I am telling you this.”
“hmm”
“Are you mad?”
Betty, Betty, Betty. Betty broke my mind more than my heart. The most stable person I had ever met turned my life into a labyrinth of love, hate, joyous jealousy, self-pity, and indulgent urges. I was a naked football player on the scrimmage line. She was she. Nothing wrong with her. An emotionally balanced twenty-one-year-old having fun. She was good at life’s mathematics – efficient - probably has a great pension plan now - while I was an emotional egg stuck in an egg carton, that cracked upon removal.
“Ronnie you should be mad.”
“Why?”
“Cause it’s normal to be mad.”
“What did he look like?”
“I dunno. I don’t know what to say.”
“Why did you sleep with him? Was it good?”
“Jesus. I was drunk. He was a soldier on leave. It was nothing.”
“hmm”
“Look. I am sorry. I was away. It was just for fun.” Her every word as rational and uncomplicated.
“What if I did the same? Slept with someone else.”
“That would be different” she stared at me with a tight smile.
We were in her bed. I was on my back. Betty looked directly at me. She was perched on her elbows. Her round firm shoulders – a given, lost on the young – framed her face (Today I can forgive myself for losing all self-respect in our relationship. She was beautiful; more beautiful than I had realized at the time). After her rebuttal there was a silence. It was awkward. Just as awkward as the stifled sex that prompted her confession - an inconclusive act filled with vacant emotions and intimate distance.
We had met nine months earlier. I was celebrating my first paycheck from my new job as an admin-clerk at The Mountain Life insurance company. I had tagged along with my brother to his university pub, where we were surrounded by the arty phase in his life before he went corporate. ‘The Pub’ was in the bowels of a Brutalist’s building built in the 1960’s. A room perfectly rectangular in shape. One wall housed floor-to-ceiling windows framed in commercial brown aluminum, while the other three walls were cinderblocks painted a semi-gloss grey. A row of eight- foot- long banquet tables, cafeteria style, lined the window wall, leaving room for an ironic 1950’s lightshade, was the only gift to ambiance. The room’s aesthetics did not matter, it was filled with a gaggle of avant-garde lady Macbeths, all dressed in flower pattern summer dresses and black leather jackets, bouncing in their Doc Marten boots to The Violent Femmes. The renegade boys put in far less effort on their appearance. Their uniforms consisted mostly of Sonic-Youth T-shirts, Trotsky/Lennon glasses, and Converse sneakers or Blundstone Boots. Few of the boys danced. Most opted for a demonstrative release of intellectual constipation onto the table, a wall of competitive tropes and ironic tangents jostling for a position amongst the beer pitchers and ashtrays. I could not make sense of any of their talk as I sat absorbing it all.
“These are my roommates. Bunch of freaks, but they are fun – Drama Students!” Betty told me later she saw I was dressed as conventionally as she was, ‘normal’ was her exact word, and therefore she deemed safe to talk with. We fell into bed that night, and it became a habit.
Day 1 is not the first day after we had slept together, that was nine months earlier. No, Day 1 is the day after her confession and the beginning of our end. The morning of Day 1 we stood in the entrance to Betty’s place, saying goodbye with functional and awkward small talk. Fifteen feet from us was one of her thespian roommates, sitting silently on the living room couch. For a moment I watched her. How she would slowly bring her cigarette to her mouth, take a drag, then drink her coffee, never releasing her gaze from the coffee table, as if she was watching a cat planning an attack. Betty and I were neither-on-nor-off the stage to her roommate. Betty seeing what I was witnessing, smiled, and said under her breath “She is like that. Sometimes people take a little longer to wake-up”. The roommate’s catatonic state matched my own shock at what just happened to my first adult relationship. I kissed Betty a pedestrian kiss goodbye and left for Wilson station and the long journey to Toronto’s downtown core.
Sitting in the subway car, I could hear its wheels screech as it carved through a bend. The sound unzipped the mental infrastructure in my mind, like a herniated muscle, permitting unruly thoughts to unfold and rise. My first mangled inner thought to surface, was a sense of failure at life’s basics: shelter, respectable income, and relationship. In my head these three elements had become a triangle of acceptance. A triad of tenets to indicate I was on the right path and living the ‘right life’. A foundation for all good things to come. An observable equation. A barometer of success. I believed if holy trinity was achieved, I would be expected to wear suits to work one day. I would have a nice condo. Perhaps on the ground floor of an old building, with living room painted a lite forest green with glossy-white moldings. I would in the morning find myself dressing beside a girlfriend, or a wife, as we readied ourselves for work - respectable jobs. She would be in a dark blue skirt, cut just above the knees, a baby blue blouse, and a matching suit jacket (shoulders not too puffed). I imagined her, I always did, putting on sensible high-heeled shoes in morning light. Slipping in one foot with a wiggle, lifting her arms gently for balance, then slipping in the second foot with a second wiggle. In evenings, we would dine together, in nice restaurants, and not get drunk. Simply tasting the wines – appreciating their subtle flavors. And, without fail, we would jog together at daybreak. What the career would be, or why I would want to do it, never seemed to appear in my daydreams. Nor why I would want such a predictable décor in my condo. My daydream girlfriend had no discerning features or character in my head. Appearing with only a generic face, or no face at all. And I hated jogging, still do.
Nonetheless. By the time I was somewhere between St. Clair West station and Dupont station, the rigor mortis (denial) of my freshly dead relationship began to loosen. I could see its corpse, relaxed and honest, staring at me. Betty’s Break was the last fissure to crack in what I had deemed ‘The Toronto Project’, the little triad checklist I had created a year earlier. By this time, my bachelor apartment’s rent was two months late, leaving the mice to being the only happily secured inhabitants as they luxuriated in its mess. My job, a painful daily reminder of all that I was bad at, was drawing to a slow contractual close, with no mention of renewal. And now my relationship appeared as a wink from the undead. This was my Day 1. Though I must admit I did not know it was Day 1 at the time. I only began to count the days after Day 5, when I realized I would not be seeing my Betty again. When I finally understood that Betty had said an unsaid and passively delivered me from our relationship.
Only when the subway car bent south to St. George’s station did I look up and notice the wall of unfolded newspapers being read. “WAR” was the headline on each one. I had never seen such a headline before. The word ‘War’ was printed with such zealous fetishism, that one could imagine an excited typesetter gleefully arranging each letter. The W, A, and R, all being placed with a sense of big history. Alas, it was only the first Gulf War, ‘Desert Storm’, which did not warrant such a dramatic headline. The war was over in a matter of days. A preface to much larger conflicts to come. However, on that day, my Day 1, the headline promised trouble for all. And all I immediately wished for was Betty’s Boy Soldier to be the war’s first casualty.
I arrived at St. George station. Exited the subway car. Began the transfer from the yellow line to the green line. Then decided to pull myself out of the stream of commuters to buy a newspaper. I read the first three paragraphs as I stood on the platform and believed I had a proper grasp of the whole global political situation. As a packed subway car arrived, I folded my paper back into shape and tucked it under my arm and I squeezed in. The subway car headed eastward. After two quick stops I exited at Yonge Street station. Continued eastward by foot along Bloor Street until I arrived at a very large manicured lawn surrounded by reaffirming gates. In the middle of the lawn was where I worked - the Mountain Insurance Company’s building. Built in 1925, in a “modern Georgian Renaissance Style”, with “Indiana limestone on pink Milford granite”, the structure breathed security and stability - just like its name. “You can trust us with your money, when Alive and when Dead” should have been written above its gate.
Each day I would pass through the gate and follow the hundred-foot cement path from the street that parted the perfect grass. I would arrive at a set of stone stairs with 19 steps (I counted – twice), and 32 feet in width (a guess), that led into the building. The steps themselves had an awkward lift; too short to ascend with a normal lifting of the legs, yet just high enough to prevent one from taking two steps at a time – as if they were designed to impede one’s progress entering the building, a gentle reminder of where one was. Once on top, between neo-classical columns, were the massive wooden front doors, highlighted by polished brass handles and hinges. Once behind those doors, the building felt hermetically sealed. The other side of a filter that clarified unwanted particles of the street – both sounds and people - producing a quiet homogeneity.
Once inside, a different set of rules were engaged. A hierarchy that was passively agreed upon. We all knew who the newspapers lined up at the front desk were meant for. We knew who we could and could not make eye contact with. When small talk was considered appropriate. What floors we were permitted to travel to. No one presented me with a rule book when I started at the Mountain. Everything was just obvious. Even amongst one’s peers, a busy posture was always to be had. A slight hurrying to the elevators, or a quipped ‘got to go’, to show one had important things to be done. The young guns never talked at the water cooler. They were too busy. For me, everything seemed slow. Urgency could not be seen or felt in the papers being passed around. I had experienced urgent work before, as a server in restaurants. I had seen a client thirsty for their first double vodka Martini with a lemon twist - that was urgent, a dead person’s claim was not.
Traveling to my desk I would walk through a landscape filled with beige partitions and grey wall-to-wall carpeting. In the center of the expansive area, the partitions were low, leaving the heads of workers visible. They would appear as small shrubs or polished rocks in a dry grassy field. Towards the windows, the partitions would grow in height and size, rising on a low grade, like a dull knoll. After walking through a maze of cubicles, I would nestle myself in the center of the field, the area reserved for 100-200-point level employees (my exact point level was 178, a number I imagined floated above my head all day long), surrounding myself with 48 inch walls. My direct supervisor resided at the beginning of the upward slope, having 60-inch walls, while her manager (the one who hired me) was a ‘72-incher’ with a window view. Finally, in the corner was the director, or ‘the Big 102” (102 being the height of her walls) as she was known. It all made for a self-explanatory hierarchal eco system that I admired and, at the same time, resented for its simplicity.
Just as I sat down at my desk, my co-worker Paul burst over our shared wall and blurted out “War” with a big grin. Before I could respond, Paul continued “This war is the beginning of the Rapture!” I had no idea what he was talking about, but without prompting he explained. “We, at our Church, believe that a war has to happen in the middle east to begin the rapture so we can be released and enter into God’s heaven”.
Surprised, and oddly relieved that I was not the only one who had a personal investment in this war - me wanting to see Betty’s Lover Soldier Boy dead, while Paul wanting to have everyone on the planet die, I asked, “What is your church?”
“Philadelphian Church! Only so many souls can get into heaven. And we are the saved ones! This war is what we have been waiting for”.
“There are a limited number of places in Heaven?”
“Yes! But we are guaranteed a spot”
I learned later the Philadelphian Church of God had only been founded in 1987, and generated its real estate in heaven just a few years before I met Paul. The church was a rebellious splinter group from a slightly older church, the ‘Grace Communion International’, which itself was subsidiary to ‘Worldwide Church of God’, founded in Edmond, Oklahoma, by Herbert W. Armstrong. It did not seem to bother Paul, or his fellow parishioners, that many groups claimed exclusive boarding passes to heaven. He knew, without a doubt, the Philadelphian’s had the right pass in their hands. Unfortunately for Paul, weeks elapsed, and the rapture did not arrive. All earth’s inhabitants were not extinguished, and Paul became sullen. But on that day, my Day 1, he was gleeful as I began to panic about my Beloved Betty.
I made my first call to Betty’s home at 10:37 a.m. No answer. I knew she was at work. However, my inner rambling told me she had decided to stay home. Too stricken with fear of losing me she could not leave the house. Or, perhaps, to take another lover? A Police Officer or A Fireman? I called again at 10:38 a.m., let it ring twenty times (she did not have an answering machine). Called a third time, and let it ring and ring. Then came a voice, with a worried “Hello”.
It was one of Betty’s roommates, the same one I had watched only a few hours earlier drink her coffee and smoke her cigarette.
“Is Betty there?” I slowly asked.
“No Ronnie, is everything o.k.? I came into her room because I heard the phone ring so much.”
“No, its not ok. Betty slept with someone else. Some fucking American soldier! And I am trapped in my head. War just broke out. And I just learned the Rapture is coming. Fuck!” Before those words emanated from my mouth, I paused and said “Yes, thanks. I just wanted to talk about the war”.
“War! What war? There is a War?”. Fortunately, for me, the war made the moment less awkward. Quickly I assumed the posture of a global affairs expert and re-hashed the first four paragraphs from the morning’s paper. Then I added my own hypothetical doomsday scenario caused by the American’s lustful action: a potential to forever scorch the Gulf’s soil and bring gloom and darkness to its spiritual hearth. Betty’s roommate responded to my prediction with a depressive “oh, that is not good”. After a short pause, we both quietly stepped away from the subject and hung up our phones.
I sat in silence, heard the office’s murmur, and felt trapped by Betty’s Strong Soldier Boy. Searching for an escape I turned and focused on Olga in my opposing cubical, a forty-year-plus veteran employee of the Mountain, who was nearing retirement. She was only a few points above me in the company’s hierarchy, with walls the same height as mine. She gazed back at me. I forced a smile. She did not return my smile. She simply exhaled and turns back to her computer monitor. The monochromatic green glow from the screen almost reaches her tired clerk eyes. Daily we would go through this routine, and it had often made me think the National Geographic. How it could do a photo essay about such eyes, documenting ‘Vibrance-Dehydration Syndrome’: a modern condition, caused by years of staring at screens filled with nonsensical numbers, extracting one’s vitality through the pores of the skin surrounding the eyes. Sometimes when Olga would look at me, she would slowly move her head from side-to-side; I was never sure if the movement of her head was a warning to me not to follow, or her tired way of showing discontent.
Paul could not see Olga’s predicament. He thought it was unnecessary to go to university or have any type of formal education. He believed the company’s in-house educational courses would be sufficient for him to rise through the ranks. “My dad started at Chrysler in the Sixties on the line, and he made it all the way up to director. He had no education. I see no point in university or college.” Back then did I see the connection between his two beliefs - rapture and anti-education? Why go to school if all is to be obliterated? I did not appreciate the reward in Paul’s nihilism, nor the act of faith it entailed. A suspension of tangled beliefs, sacrificing all he loved for a greater universe beyond ours. At the time, I only questioned the logistics of it all. Would it be a slow burn around the world? Or would it be a single snap of God’s fingers, instantly ceasing all existence, leaving us with no time or place to reflect on our lived lives. Nowhere to record our stories, nor a single person to read them. On Day 1, I took solace in God’s snap.
My solace did not last long. It was gone by the end of the peaceful thought, replaced by the tyranny of my Bosom Betty. I remained at my desk, imagining her in a cheap motel room by the sea. Sand on the floor. A thin off-green blanket layered over faded baby-blue bed sheets, covering a pragmatic mattress. A fortress of a man climbing on top of her. Thirty times a second, he climbed on her in my head. Each time a new object appeared in the room: an aluminum sliding window, a lamp, a night table. Sometimes the image was in the dark, other times in the morning light. Drunken. Sober. Humid and sweaty and fast. A duffle bag beside the bed! Was it his? Or hers? The image vanished too fast for me to recognise the colour and brand of the bag, though I could linger on what he saw. Her hair spread on the pillow. Her blue eyes. The quick giggle and delightful smile as things started. Then softness of her kiss. Oh, Betty, you taught me how to Kiss! I could feel a soft sweet breeze as it rolled in through an open window and caressed their naked bodies. Then, I would see him. Sometimes he had red hair and freckles on his back (‘Did Betty give me that odd detail last night?’. Why do I see that?). Instantly she is on top of him, his hands where I placed mine. I can smell the motel room, as I sit at my desk: sweet-must from their bodies, dank-must from the motel carpet. A smell of cigarette smoke is trapped in her long frizzy hair, with undertones of her hibiscus shampoo. There is rye whisky on the table. No - it is bourbon! But Betty is a rye drinker! Has my Betty gone to the American’s Bourbon? No! Again, and again, and again, they stumble through the cheap motel door laughing. From behind he grabs her by the hips and turns her around. She kisses him. She wraps her arms around his muscular neck, jumps and drapes her legs around his pelvis. It does not stop, as I sit in my solitaire, confined by my cubicle, and the self-induced tortuous erotic fantasies fervently loop through my mind.
Dear God! I need it to be lunch time.
Forty-five minutes later I am granted my wish. I grabbed my workmate Kathy and we headed to the cafeteria. We sat down with our food, and I then blurted it all out.
“She FUCKED him?” She whispered.
“Yes.” I answered
“Just like that.”
“I guess. She was on vacation.”
Kathy had started the same day as me. We had a relationship where we could confide in each other about anything. I think passively we understood our lives would never overlap outside of work, giving us permission to speak freely of others in our respective lives. Leaving our conversation to act like confessionals.
“And she told you just like that?”
“I know. I don’t know why.”
“Guilt. Maybe she could not stand the guilt. That’s what I think.”
“I’m not sure. She seemed surprised how much of a Killjoy it was.”
“Killjoy? Only a killjoy? What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Really? I would have gone berserk if Jeff did that.” Jeff was a colleague she began to date a few months after we arrived at The Mountain. He had 72-inch walls. His hair fell to just above his shoulders when it was not tied in the back. He wore soft blue and yellow button-down shirts and Khaki pants, and nice camel shoes. The Gap in the office, Grateful Dead on the weekends. He barely acknowledged my existence.
“So”, Kathy encouraged, “what are you going to do?”
“Not sure.”
“You’re going to break up with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did she ask for forgiveness and say she will never do it again?”
“No.”
“So how do you go forward like that?”
“I don’t know”
As I write this dialogue, I can now read properly the expression I saw on Kathy’s face that day. A tempered empathy for my pain, yet a reserved dose of sympathy for Betty – the one who had to endure this waffling young man that sat before her. As I now look closer, I also see a hint of self-congratulation in Kathy’s face. A confirmation that she chose well when she chose Jeff as her mate. Relief in the knowledge she no longer had to navigate with boys like me. No longer had to play in the pasty muck of half-formed male egos. She must have thought ‘Jeff would have dumped me, and that is a good thing. Clear limits and boundaries.’ Though, on Day 1, I only saw measured sympathy coming from Kathy. Much needed validation.
Kathy then spoke in a measured manner, “Ronnie. I think. You have to think. What is best for you. What she did was not cool. Vacation or not, she shouldn’t be sleeping with other people.”
“I know”
After lunch quiet trolleys continued to arrive at my cubicle’s entrance, often pushed by a seemingly wordless man. He would lift a bundle of policies, step forward with one leg, turn his right shoulder to fully extend his right arm - keeping his back straight, as if he was practicing yoga - and place the file on the corner of my desk. He would then recoil and move on to the next cubical. I was left to continue the flow of files. Like an eddy in a river, I would move the policies to the right side of my desk, read the requested adjustments, complete the necessary forms, re-stack the policies back to the left side of my desk and wait for another trolley to retrieve both the policies and the forms. From my desk the policies would return to central filings, while the adjustment-forms would head to data entry – a legion of workers who typed numbers all night long.
In the silence I tried to think of better times with my Lovely Betty. How I used to bring her offerings of food, like a proud cat bringing home a freshly killed bird to its master. How I waited all day long to be released from work, so I could joyously prepare a Beauty for my Betty. On those days I would pass through Kensington Market on my way home from work. I would be transfixed by the evening’s project, to cook a meal - a transformative endeavour. I would dip in and out of shops in a hypnotic fashion, constantly asking myself: “Buy? Don’t buy?”, “Do? Don’t Do?” Every counter of produce created a conundrum. Do I buy a rudimentary cauliflower, or an exotic looking leafy green with a heavy stock? I had no language of cookery at the time; I did not know how to articulate what I wanted. I did not have a ‘how to’, or a ‘what with’. I was a poet without words, possessing only a swirling set of emotions and impressions and the desire to see them on a page, or in a pan. All I knew was I was in love with seducing my Betty. To place salty sweetness on her lips and meaty fragrances in her nose. To look achingly into her eyes as she tasted my transformative endeavours. To receive her immediate response. I had no need for the food myself, it was in her I tasted my incarnation.
The next few hours were the most unproductive paid hours of my life. I waffled and dangled until the digital clock in the corner of my desk turned 4:33 pm. Then I began to straighten my papers, drawing out the closing of the day as long as I could. Once the clock hit 4:52 pm, I turned off my desk lamp and my computer monitor and exited my cubical. I walked past Kathy sitting at her desk, and she gave me a long sympathetic look – the sad face found in films. I paused, silently looked at her with a defeated face - playing my role in the same film before I headed to the elevators. By the time Day One had arrived, I already knew my days with Paul, Olga, and Kathy were numbered. My inaptitude at filling in forms meant I had metamorphized into a living, walking, breathing, computer virus. Every time the trolly man carried my handwritten forms to feed the mainframe, my inaccuracies bastardised the 1959 COBAL language operating system’s Data. I simply could not get the right number, into the right box, in the right order, on the right form. Approximated numbers in approximated places did not work. Balance sheets had to balance. My direct supervisor would enter my cubical every morning holding a stack of papers, freshly produced from a dot-matrix printer, linked together and warm. It was the previous nights processing run and it weighed three to four pounds. On the paper was a cryptic code (at least to me it was), that she would interpret for my benefit. Over time her reactions to my ‘work’ led from disbelief to dismay. She no longer was shocked I had sent Mr. Anderson’s adjusted premium payment to Ms. Delphine’s policy. Even though it was a misplacement my supervisor never thought was possible, she had become used to my free-flowing accountancy. After walking me though the problem, she would leave the office and return fifteen minutes later with ‘the fix’.
Both accounts would have to be backdated to the previous day, then a further adjustment had to be made to Mr. Anderson’s account to compensate his lost day of interest, while at the same time, we had to ensure Ms. Delphine did not receive any undo benefit from my error. All the steps were presented in a flow chart of form-filling that required three days and nights of processing forms to correct my misplacing of numbers.
By the eighth month of my contract the number of branches I serviced began to be reduced. By the tenth month, I believe to this day, they had me work on phony accounts. To isolate me from the ‘real system’. An effort to stave off the spread of the ‘Atchison Virus’.
When I arrived at my apartment that day, it was obvious Betty had not been in my place for a while, at least a few weeks before she left for Myrtle Beach. My small bachelor apartment resembled a city dump, or a depressed Frat house, with two paths cutting through heaps of dirty clothes and dishes. One path led to the bed, the other to the kitchen area. As I stood contemplating which path to take, the phone rang. I frantically burrowed through a pile of newspapers on my futon couch and picked up the receiver, turned, and sat on my futon bed.
“Ronnie!”
“Betty”
“You can’t call me like that. You freaked everyone out.”
“Sorry. But I could not stop”
Silence.
“Betty?”
“Yes.”
“I do not want to ask. I mean – I understand.”
“Uh. Ronnie. Listen, I did not mean to hurt you. I was on vacation.”
My stomach ached. My throat constricted. I was not equipped for this conversation. I was vulnerable. I was unable to throw words like ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ at Betty. Automatically I muted those words. Kept them in my chest where they created congestion and restricted my breath.
“What do you think of the war?” I was desperately trying to change the subject. Bring some normalcy.
“Lots of oil. Makes sense, I guess. As long as the war stays over there, I am ok with it”
Betty was not a hawk, she was pragmatic. Effortlessly reducing geopolitics and relationships to brute observations and simple actions. No fuss. Nothing hazy around the issue to complicate the matter. Hence, when she segued from the war to “I think we should take a break”, it seemed natural, rational, and reasonable.
“Maybe we can get together for a coffee Ronnie, and talk.”
“I would like that.” I said and hung up the phone.
By the end of Day 1 my mind had completely unravelled. I became a repellent, an aerosol can of insecurity, and I began to spray Bad Betty with an array of maddening questions. On Day 2, I demanded to know what soldier boy looked like. On day 3, I demanded his name. On Day 4, I asked what I did wrong, and I begged to know if he was better in bed than I was. Day 5, I asked if there were other soldier boys from other armies? I had no time for self-respect. By weeks-end I had become as secure as an ice-cube on a hot summer’s day. A puddle of water to be avoided. A sparrow’s song to be ignored. A hidden can of beans at the back of the cupboard. A lost sock under the couch. And Betty stopped taking my calls.
My Betty, My Betty, My Blessed-Betty, oh, my Betty, my Betty…. Boon-tangled Betty! So many sleepless nights when you did not answer your phone. Let me sleep. I beg of you let me sleep.
Finally, I did sleep. The sun rose and set. Day 10 turned to Day 11, then Day 23, and eventually it was Day 54 – my last day of work. I had promised myself I would stop counting the days since I last saw Betty-Blossom on day 60. But Day 54 now seemed like a suitable day to stop counting. I could place the whole year - work and relationship - onto one piece of paper, crumble it into a ball and toss it in a waste-paper basket.
On that day, my last day, Day 54, I sat down with my direct supervisor – the fixer. She was less than thirty, yet her austere face made her appear older and composed. We spoke as if we were in a job interview or at a distant relative’s funeral. We did not go through the false pretext of a possible extension of my contract, or the possibility of another place ‘on The Mountain’ for me (a turn of phase often used in the office as a joke, but often revealed a quasi-religious fervor for the company). For her this was not Day 54. If she had been counting days, it would have been Day 0 - the day the slate was wiped clean of my incomprehensible inabilities. Perhaps even more importantly to her was the next day, Day 1, the arrival of my replacement, and a new beginning, like a sprout with potential. Perhaps my replacement would hear of my short-lived existence after they had sat down at my former desk - freshly cleaned. Or maybe nothing would be said of my existence at all. In the end, my supervisor’s last words were sombre, a hesitant good luck, reflecting her pessimistic view of my future.
My director on the other hand, she got it. Standing in her doorway, she smiled and asked about my plans. I sheepishly said, “I hope to go to university”. She shot back “great” in an honest way. She thanked me, made no reference to my time at the Mountain, shook my hand, and out the door I was.
Heading home, I felt the nothingness of it all. I was leaving behind stacks upon stacks of policies - Jonathan Anderson (95231) laid on Ly Chan (87468), who was underneath Meredith Goldman (39523). I had only touched them once in their mid-stream of life at the Mountain Insurance Company, leaving a simple scribbled note or adjustment to their well-developed plans for life and death. Once Day 54 arrived, Jonathan’s, Ly’s, and Meredith’s plans were no longer of my concern. Nor did I have any use for what I had learned over the year. The language of insurance administration would become a lost tongue to me. I knew I would never read again a person’s life in such codified terminology. Reducing and valuing their lives to most predictable and profitable time of death. Nor would there be any reason to see my former co-workers, they had never transgressed into my personal life. No, all my experiences at the Mountain would remain in the building.
The building itself was like a petri dish, containing a culture of bacteria. A multitude of cells observed through a microscope. Each cell demonstrating clear behaviors and respecting well attuned parameters. Collectively cleansing invaders. My activities on My Day 54 may have been noted by a lab technician (perhaps my number was even 487-323-851). A single spore in a long line of other spores that were observed before my existence and after my extermination. Traced for 365 days and vanished. A disappearance noted by a scribble in a ledger.
The Mountain rapidly dissipated into a fog of memory. Each block I walked along Bloor Steet the structures began to shrink, from glass Skyscrapers and concrete Towers to drab high-rise apartment complexes built in the 1960s. Past Spadina avenue the buildings dropped down again, to three stories high. Shops, Cafes, and diners filled the locales. Their randomness makes the street feel warm and involving. I had walked the same route for a year. The changes of store fronts - a sad demise, and then a hopeful birth – were like paintings in an Art Gallery being removed and replaced, each space on the wall having its own curator. Bloor Street and the Annex had grown to be my home. A comfortable couch. On Day 54, the last day I would be walking this route, I stood at the intersection of Bathurst and Bloor, waiting for the light to change. A streetcar slumbered by, one of the many sleepy giants that roamed the streets of Toronto, as if on an endless search for Morning Coffees. As it passed by the ground rumbled and assured me of a connection between my perspective and my body. After I crossed Bathurst Street, I felt my mind has finding its polar axis once more, but differently, like a disorganized flow learning a new current. My mind had cooled, gone numb, and entered protective mode, just as the Gulf War had cooled by this time, leaving new terms of engagement for everyone.
I turned left, passed through the Palmerston Boulevard northern gate, and headed south to my apartment. For a quarter mile Palmerston’s Edwardian homes were wrapped with large verandahs, hiding tired brickwork and cracking window frames. The road and homes remained protected by a canopy of ancient trees – a plush green in the summer with lustres of orange and red in the fall, and comforting white in the winter. Its line of streetlamps appeared to be looted from an antique store, creating an oasis of time. Palmerston was not built for me. By the time I had arrived, the inside of the mansions had changed, butchered into small one-room apartments; bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms and cellars all had doors with lock and key. A simple hot plate residing outside a bathroom would often stand as the communal kitchen. The old grand homes came to shelter students and artists who scrambled for rent and meaning. Though the boulevard never lost its romantic lure, it still winked at the old inhabitants now dead, whose dresses once dried on clothes lines behind the houses, and who drank the fresh milk delivered by horse carts each morning. Their English gardens still lined the street with perennial weeds and flowers. In my building, in my apartment, Betty and I would lock ourselves in. Three-hundred square feet of friction and fun. Our tiny stage, with two chairs, a table, a bed and a couch, a bay window to see the city’s lights, a small bathtub, a toilet, and a sink. We would press ourselves against walls and floors. Dribbled our bodies on counter tops and clasped onto doors. We giggled as we drank from a leaking tap. We would feather our noses, tasting her lilacs and my roses. Tangling our elbows and knees as time lapsed. Breathing the other’s air for hours and days. In the mornings I would stare at the sun draping her hair, as she lay on unwashed sheets. Then later, in the dark, deep in the night, my Little Dragon Betty Blue would illuminate her face with her cigarette’s glow, then gently release graceful smoke into the air and hypnotize my heart. Dream upon dream, I would roll up under my covers, trying to find the reason why she held me like no other. All I knew was her laugh. All I waited for was her laugh. All I wanted was her laugh. I think all the women I have ever loved had great laughs.