prologue

There is a stretch of stops on Line One which feel like a sort of in-between. You are not in the city, but you aren’t out of the looming shadow of Toronto, either. These are my favourite stops—without fail, no matter how crowded the subway starts, when it gets to the end, it is always nearly empty. If you’re there in the middle of the day, as I tend to be, it feels like an alternate reality, a dystopia where people have disappeared but the trains still run. I am regularly late for appointments in the mid-afternoon, always underestimating how long it will take to ride to the end of the line and back again. It is possible, in the stretch between Eglington and Vaughan, to pretend that you have stumbled into a sort of alternate dimension, where the outside world ceases to exist. 

 

The subway doesn’t have the dated charm of the streetcars, the chirp of excitement when they cross paths. They will never collide—courtesy of the parallel tracks—but they never ignore each other. It is so different from the harshness of the subway, its cold isolation. 

 

Trains meet at nearly every stop, but they never speak. As a child I crafted storylines to explain it—the most detailed of which I concocted after my mother lost sight of me during a subway rush. She got off. I did not. I sat on the red-carpeted seat and kicked my legs up and down and up and down, wondering when she would get back on. As I waited, I began to count the number of times the trains would arrive at the station at the same time. On stubby fingers, I took careful note of each encounter—and became progressively sadder. Collision would be violent, but wouldn’t the connection be worth it? They seemed so lonely, former lovers so stuck in their own ways that they couldn’t see the other person was what they needed. 

 

I prefer the older cars—the ones that run on the Green Line—they are easier to hide in, individual silver boxes that will fill up like an overflowing bathtub in the right circumstances, but I find myself on the Yellow Line more often. I sit as far back as I can, watching as people come on and off. The never-ending hallway of the newer cars is a landscape in itself, the backdrop of a play with an unenthusiastic cast—a necessary evil on their way to other things. 

 

I am not like them, my relationship to the subway has always been mutually beneficial. If a situation were to arise—say, something which trapped me and the seven other people currently on this train car together—I would not have anyone to tell the police that I was missing. Unlike the others, I never had another reason for being there when it happened. I was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time because I had nowhere else to be. 

 

When the doors slid open, none of us thought much of the woman in all white. We each had different assumptions of why she would wear such an anxiety-inducing colour in such an uncontrollable city, but it was a passing observation. We went back to our own thoughts, our own plans. Nobody was focused on her. It’s funny how these sorts of things work out, how innocuous something appears until the moment that it no longer is.  If I were as desperate for attention as I was in my youth, I might have applauded such a bold gesture—even half-seriously considered replicating it in my own life. I am not unaccustomed to the extreme and I was always looking for new ways to make people pay attention to me. The truth is, it would have been effective. None of us looked at her, actually looked, until she shot the gun.