Toronto Isn’t Real and Other Metropolitan Anomalies

TORONTO ISN'T REAL AND OTHER METROPOLITAN ANOMALIES

by A.D. Sui

Content warnings: drug use, suicide, mental illness

        ill see you at the top 
        or bottom
        your bottom

this better work…

        i did the math 😉 

        if i die in canada ill die in real life

        this isnt canada
        youre just seeing how far the rabbit hole goes

🙂

        🙂

•••

I pass the joint to Sandra, and she takes a deep drag before breaking into a cough. We both laugh, our backs flat against the warm roof of her apartment. It’s a perfect  muggy August night. The cicada screams blur together with the hum of the Gardiner Expressway.

“What would you do if you found out this was all a simulation?” Sandra asks. 

I put the joint out in the ashtray. “I would cut you off for the night. You’re baked.” 

“No, I’m serious.” She presses up on her elbows, “If you knew, with near certainty that none of this was real, what would you do? Would you still go to your shitty job every day? Would you try to break out? Would you set the city on fire?”

“Glad to know you think my job is shitty.” 

Sandra nudges me with a bony elbow. “You know what I mean.” 

I don’t have an answer. Unlike Sandra I’m perfectly fine with how things are, simulation or not. I’ve got no itch to scratch, no dissatisfaction to resolve. This world, this city, is the way it is, and I’m not prone to imagining anything otherwise. I turn and look at Sandra, who’s already fallen asleep. 

We have all the time in the world.

•••

I have one psychotic break and suddenly I’m a “threat to myself and others.” No shoelaces, no drawstrings, no long sleeves on hoodies. You’d think stripping someone down to their birthday suit and confiscating all their belongings would be worse for their mental health than whatever they already have brewing, but I’m no licensed specialist. 

Then there’s Ethan. Sandra’s Ethan.

He gives me a watered-down smile and signs me out of my forty-eight hour hold like a true gentleman. He brings a gloriously bitter coffee with him and if he wasn’t my dead best-friend’s husband, I’d blow him on the spot. Once we’re outside, he lights my cigarette and only then asks, “Thea, what the actual fuck happened?” 

I take a drag from my cigarette and stare at a passing streetcar. I have no answer I would voluntarily surrender to Ethan.

“You know how it looks,” Ethan doesn’t let up, “Cops found you on the bridge at four in the morning, clambering over the railing and yelling about how Toronto isn’t real, and we’re all living in a simulation. Ring a bell?”

I ash the cigarette and stare at the spot where I’d been biting the filter. “I’m not suicidal.” 

“Thea, it’s been a year. She’s gone, okay? You have to move on. I get it, of all the people in the world, I get it. I mourned her. I went to therapy. I got better. This is—” 

“I’m going home.” I chuck the butt into the sewer and pick up the pace until my strides are at their longest. Ethan is half a foot taller; he has no trouble keeping up. 

What Ethan is (very insensitively) referring to in the “moving on” department is Sandra’s so-called suicide a little over a year ago. I say “so-called” because Sandra had absolutely no reason to kill herself. Sandra, the eerily brilliant Sandra, worked for the Physics Department at the University of Toronto. She was working on turning the Simulation Hypothesis into an actual hypothesis instead of just a thought experiment that dude-bros toss around to sound smart over beers. Who doesn’t like to quote the Matrix and imagine that we live in a virtually simulated reality? 

The issue, of course, with the Simulation Hypothesis is that there is no tangible way to test it, making it more of a half-baked philosophical argument than a functional scientific theory. But with a little help from Bayesian statistics and a lot of late nights with the boys from the High-Energy Physics group Sandra was making some actual progress. 

“You should see someone about this,” Ethan says in a tone that indicates he’s said the same thing five times now and I give him a curt nod. “You’re not coping.”

So, you see, it makes absolutely no sense that Sandra took a swan dive off the Bloor Viaduct. It makes even less sense that a year after her death I got a text-message from her number:

        toronto isn’t real

•••

Halfway between Broadview and Castle Frank stations there are a glorious twenty seconds when train runs outside, along suspended tracks below the Bloor Viaduct, and you have reception. If you’re smart like me, you pre-type your messages to your boss (about being late) when your train is still inside the tunnel and then deploy them, like messenger pigeons, the moment you see sky. My finger freezes on the send button because I receive the impossible text:

       thea 🙂
       we need to talk

Sandra’s name pops up as the sender. 

Two lines, and then I’m underground again. Any other day I’d dismiss it as a prank. A gross attempt to prey on a grieving friend for a cheap chuckle. But the small hairs on the nape of my neck stand up and I get a feeling. It’s the sort of feeling that you get before an earthquake or a solar eclipse—something’s not right. 

There’s a bitter ache in my stomach, and I think I’m going to hurl. I jump up from my seat and sprint towards the doors. Right before the two halves close, I squeeze through and on to the Broadview platform. Up the stairs (never the escalator; it’s always broken). Two flights. Through the glass doors. Into the rain. The street smells of wet asphalt and grime. For a moment, I stare at the message like I’m illiterate. I type:

       thea 🙂
       we need to talk

leave me the fuck alone you creep.
show some respect

I fight the urge to block the number and shove the phone away. It can wait. I’m late for work and I never sent the message to my boss. And look, my Presto card is once again bone dry. 

I don’t tell Ethan about the message.

My one trip to the looney bin is enough to last me a lifetime.

I go to work. I prep the kitchen. I chop the onions, potatoes, and asparagus. I pickle more things than should be humanly possible to pickle. My reply does the trick and there are no more messages for me when I check after I clock out. The second message comes the next morning in the twenty seconds between Broadview and Castle Frank:

       thea 🙂
       we need to talk

leave me the fuck alone you creep.
show some respect

        ethan got wasted at the reception 
        puked in the bridal suite
        on my dress 🙁

The train is underground again, and the bitter ache is back with a vengeance. This time I don’t jump from my seat; I don’t run for the doors. I read the message like it holds the answers to the universe. Everyone knows Ethan got wasted at the reception. No one but me knows he puked on Sandra’s dress later that night. She never told anyone. She was too embarrassed some big-shot exec she had just married couldn’t hold his booze.  

I glance at the message and now it has two new lines to it. Delayed delivery:

        ethan got wasted at the reception 
        puked in the bridal suite
        on my dress 🙁
        toronto isn’t real
        don’t tell ethan. safety concern.

What kind of safety concern can Ethan, of all people, pose?

•••

The man in question takes a huge bite out of his sub. Meatballs and cheese. Every month like clockwork, Ethan and I have an established routine that hinges upon a mutual poorly managed grief and an overindulgence in shitty food. This time it’s Subway on the steps of a faceless office building where Ethan works, or something.

“Have you been taking your meds?” 

Rude. The meds are supposed to keep the psychosis at bay; but I am not psychotic, and the meds make me slow. I take the pill bottle from my pocket and rattle it in Ethan’s face. “Of course.” The bottle is as full as it was on the day the prescription was filled, but Ethan isn’t paying nearly enough attention to notice. 

He takes another monstrous bite of his sandwich. “She really liked you, you know. Sandra. She wouldn’t want you going about like this.” 

“Right.”

“No, I mean it. It was always Thea this and Thea that. Sometimes I’d think she liked you better than me.” 

I crumple my paper liner and wipe the grease against my jeans. Nature’s napkins, Sandra called them. “She always liked you better, Ethan. She married you.” I give him a pat on the back and I’m off. 

“Same time, same place?” he calls out after me.

I throw him a thumbs up. 

Still walking away, I grab my phone and type:

        toronto isn’t real
        don’t tell ethan. safety concern.

prove it. the toronto bit

Maybe it’s my best friend on the other end, maybe not. But whatever fucked up exchange is happening here is better than the year-long void Sandra left in her wake. It’s better than the numb calm the meds promise. It’s better than chomping down fast food with her husband. It’s better than missing her.

I walk back to the Bloor Viaduct. It’s an hour-long walk from Ethan’s office to the bridge and not something I’d usually endeavour in a pair of chucks. But I can’t help it, it’s a habit; a ritual. 

I smoke the whole way. 

•••

        toronto isn’t real
        don’t tell ethan. safety concern.

prove it. the toronto bit

        look for things that are always there
        look for inconsistencies that never go away
        look for rules that are too rigid 
        too unchanging 
        the one NPC that keeps walking after they hit a wall
        you know where to look

I look up from the screen. The Rosedale Ravine floods with the peaches and creams of the rising sun as the train rushes above it. I’m reading messages from my dead best friend. I have a cigarette tucked behind my ear for when I exit the subway. My coffee is still piping hot in my hand. For a moment, everything is alright. Then, the train slams underground without changing speed. 

Sandra’s messages come through only between Broadview and Castle Frank. She’d call it a temporal anomaly; I call it a shitty cellphone service provider. We’re getting better at shooting off blocks of text to each other every morning. I’m getting better at keeping them secret from Ethan and “forgetting” to take my pills. 

It’s a warm enough morning and I leave the subway at Broadview. I climb two flights of stairs running along the permanently broken escalator. When I turn left outside of the station there’s Joe. Joe’s a fixture of Broadview. He’s been sitting on the same piece of frayed cardboard for as long as I can remember. Joe smokes nothing but stale weed and eats nothing but the kindly purchased McMuffins from next door. 

“Joe.” I toss a handful of dimes into his hat. The tattered thing rests on the cardboard’s edge. I go next door and buy an extra-large coffee and the fattiest breakfast sandwich on the menu. I hold both out to Joe, “Answer me this, how long have you been sitting on this corner?” 

Joe looks up with glazed over eyes and takes the coffee, “Dunno.” 

“At least three years since I’ve lived here and you were here before that, no?” 

“Been here longer than three years.” Joe takes the sandwich and bites into it. He’s missing three of his front teeth. 

“So, then at least four years?” I fish out whatever cigarettes I have left and hand them over. 

“Longer.” 

Joe’s been on the corner rain or shine, snow or blistering heat for at least three years. He says longer. Is this what Sandra means by rigid rules? But Joe has nowhere else to go. The only rigid rule here is gentrification. The only rigid rule preventing the escalator from being fixed is budget mismanagement. I give Joe the remainder of my change and go to work. 

In a city as large as Toronto there are always impossibly rigid things. Entire streets go under construction that never goes anywhere but more construction. Building projects get abandoned all the time. Things and people, like Joe, fall through the cracks. Hell, I’m one missed paycheque from meeting the same fate. The city lives on. How many people and things need to fall through the cracks before the city can’t go on any longer? 

•••

I peel potatoes in silence when Cassie runs in. She’s late. She’s been late every single shift since she’s started. 

“Again?” 

She groans. “I don’t get it. It doesn’t matter when I leave, there’s always traffic. There’s always something.” 

I glance up at the clock. It’s 5:17 in the morning. 

Regardless of when Cassie leaves home, she arrives at 5:17. Cassie has arrived at 5:17 for three months now. Management is livid. 

“Why don’t you take the side streets?” 

“I did!” Cassie shouts from the walk-in freezer. She curses in a crystalline mezzo-soprano. “Where the fuck is the dough?” 

“Delayed.” I go back to peeling potatoes. Dough is scheduled to arrive at exactly five in the morning. Dough, not unlike Cassie, inevitably runs into a delay and arrives at exactly— 

There’s a knock on the window. 

“Finally.” Cassie throws her hands in the air and runs to receive the delivery. 

Like clockwork. Cassie will always run seventeen minutes late. The dough will run nineteen minutes late. I force my face still and throw another potato into a mounting pile. Rigid. Unchanging. 

Like Joe who can’t leave the corner, the dough can never get here on time. 

Like Cassie who can’t help being late. 

In a second, I will slice my thumb peeling potatoes like I do every Wednesday. 

Cassie yells something and I turn to face her. The blade slips and nicks the pad of my thumb. 

I don’t bother yelping. 

•••

        you know where to look

          it’s coincidence 
theres delays everywhere
it doesnt mean anything

        coincidence is the cadence of the universe

          bullshit

        look for coincidence and find the rhythm of the world

I have no idea what Sandra means by it. The rain lashes against the windows of the subway car before the tunnel greets it again. What the hell does Sandra mean by coincidence? Is that like when you want to see a Beetle car, so you start seeing Beetle cars everywhere? I chug the rest of my coffee and it scorches my throat on the way down. 

“Excuse me.” A lady squeezes past me and onto the Broadview platform. I only catch a glimpse of her, but she’s wearing Sandra’s earrings. Not some cheap ones you can get from Peoples Jeweller, no, Sandra got hers after a conference in São Paulo. They’re handmade, elaborate, and bright. She bought them from an artisan. The intercom chimes and the subway doors close. 

Coincidences come in all shapes and sizes. But Sandra was especially concerned with the ones that fit the “suspicious coincidences” category. When unexplained things happen, we generally interpret them as either chance or fate. It’s a spectrum. A normal curve. 

Most of these unexplained things are suspicious coincidences and they pile high in the middle of our graph. But when enough of these happen, it can push us into the fate category, the edges of our graph. The 5% we can’t attribute to chance anymore. Fact. Belief. Sandra wanted to understand “the cadence of the universe” and what made us believe something was fate and not mere chance. Her and Carl Jung would have gotten along great if they hadn’t missed each other by a handful of decades. 

I exit the subway and light a cigarette. Joe is still there on his cardboard despite the rain.

Sandra wants me to look for coincidences. But doesn’t that in itself prime me to see them everywhere? I pause before I cross the street. Sandra’s car turns the corner. Different license plate, but it’s her car. Same early 2000s grey Kia, same dent on the back right door (a parking job gone wrong in an IKEA lot). 

I cross the street. 

Sandra’s cat runs beside me. I could recognize that bell anywhere. I’ve heard it in my sleep, in the dark, almost every day for the past three years since she got the thing. This one’s an orange tabby, Sandra’s is black. But the bell, the bell is Sandra’s. 

The faster I walk, the faster the coincidences flood me.

Someone bumps my shoulder as they pass on the sidewalk. For a second our faces are level. “Watch—"

 I meet her eyes and it’s Sandra. Same cropped hair, same red lipstick. Just like the day she “killed” herself. I drop my cigarette.  The woman’s left eyebrow is interrupted by a faint scar. I see it because I know where to look. “Sandra?” 

But she’s gone. Pacing away to the fading Sweet Home Alabama from her over-ear headphones. I pick out another cigarette from the pack, steady my hands. I light the tip and chuck the match away. For whatever reason I pull out my phone and open our text-chain:

        coincidence is the cadence of the universe

          bullshit

        look for coincidence and find the rhythm of the world
        do you remember our song?

Oh, I remember screaming Lynyrd Skynyrd, drunk off my ass, in the middle of the night while we baked chocolate chip cookies. I stagger backwards until my shoulder hits a storefront window.

Why did she keep on walking?

•••

“And you’re still taking your meds?” 

Ethan and I sit outside his work, smack-middle of the financial district. The concrete radiates residual heat as we peel chicken wings bare with our teeth. 

I toss a picked-clean bone into the greasy KFC bucket. “I’m taking them.” 

“So, I shouldn’t worry?” 

My phone burns through the pocket in my jeans. The last exchange still fresh in my mind:

        look for coincidence and find the rhythm of the world
        do you remember our song?

          you didn’t stop

        i didn’t have time.  
        tomorrow, ill show you everything tomorrow
        same time. same place.
        trust me, thea

“Nah, everything’s gravy.” Ethan tosses a chicken bone into the bucket. There’s still meat on it. “How long have you worked here Ethan?” 

“Oh, I don’t know. Feels like forever.” 

I nod.  “What is it that you do again?” 

Ethan pauses on his drumstick. He gives me a long look, the gears in his head turning. “It’s nothing important. Just moving numbers around.” 

I’ve played enough video games to recognize the speech patterns in both Ethan’s and Joe’s replies. They’re both bound to a place, stuck, unable to move forward, only laterally. NPCs, or Non-Playable Characters, placed in a game to deliver information, to guide you through the quest. 

Or, as I now suspect in Sandra’s case, to slow her down. 

•••

Today is the kind of day where my shower is out of hot water at four in the morning. Midway through conditioning my hair I reach out for my phone, unlock it with a wet fingerprint and re-read the last message:

tomorrow, ill show you everything tomorrow

same time. same place. 

trust me, thea

I rinse, repeat, and towel dry. The pipes whine like they have something to complain about. Like they’re the ones who showered in glacial water. Sandra was never great at giving up all the information upfront. Once, we were halfway through a road trip before she finally enlightened me about where we were going. I was the driver. 

The walk from my apartment to the subway is ten minutes. I make it in six. By the time the right train arrives, I have a large coffee in my hand and a cigarette behind my ear for later. “same time. same place” can only mean the train. I know how to follow instructions. I step through the same train doors into the same car like  I always do. I take my seat. The leftmost of a two-seater right by the doors. I take my phone out and pretend I’m not choking on my heart. 

I’m alone. 

The train departs two minutes behind schedule like it has every day since I’ve taken it. 

The train hits Bay station. 

Bloor.

No one enters. It’s five in the morning. 

Sherbourne. 

My hands are clammy around the paper cup. 

Castle Frank. 

The screen on my phone lights up the moment the doors shut:

        hold on tight. 

Before I can reply, the train plummets from the tunnel and now I’m flying above the Rosedale Ravine. The sun breaches the horizon and the car floods with warm autumn light. There’s electricity all around me. I can feel it around my hair, raising the wet ends. I can feel it against my fingertips, running through the metal handrail. I’m on my feet.

The train comes to a screeching halt. My large coffee falls and goes flying, spilling all over the floor. The black liquid runs down the car, stretched by momentum. Sandra did tell me to hold on. I reach for my phone to reply:

        hold on tight.

now what?

The door ahead of me opens. Two halves of glass slide away with agonizing slowness until there is nothing ahead of me but crisp air and a hundred meter drop to the ravine. 

        hold on tight

now what?

        take a look

I take one step towards the wide-open doors. Then another. The breeze brushes against my face. The sunlight warms it. It’s not too bad of a morning. If I squint, I can make out cars driving down the Don Valley Parkway. Everyone’s always going somewhere in this city. How many of them are NPCs? How many people, families, are nothing but code at their core? 

I grab the railing and peek out the train. 

I stifle back a scream. My cigarette falls and tumbles through the air. Sorry, nature.

There’s nothing but air ahead of me—it smells like petrichor, the familiar scent of grass, ozone, and dirt right after a summer shower—but if I look a little down, I make out a faint train running exactly underneath this one. Like the shimmer of a mirage, the image bends and warps as air around it oscillates. The landscape before me splits along an invisible mirror. Still clutching onto the handrail for dear life, I peer out farther. Below me, blushing canopy and the grey, winding snake of the Don Valley Parkway bleed into the sky to meet their mirrored selves. The clouds, drifting lazily along the morning sky, reflect their translucent doppelgangers below my train. Their thin, wispy edges pass beneath and sometimes through the tracks, unfazed by metal. 

The world, as I know it, drowns in heavy silence; even the birds grow mute. It’s the sort of silence that prepares you for the inevitable metaphorical thunder that will split your reality in half. Sublime, the word that’s perched on the tip of my tongue is sublime. But I have little time to get all existential. I throw myself back inside and type, furiously; my fingers smudging the screen with sweat and spilled coffee:

      now what?

        take a look

                  what the FUCK?

       simulations get stacked, thea
       in some places they come so very close to one another
       if you run against a seam like this one it gets thinner 
       it’s almost completely gone
       it took me nearly a year but i wore it out

              simulations?

        torontos
        hundreds, thousands of torontos 
        all stacked on top of one another

I can almost hear Sandra’s voice. Jubilant. 

I peer out again. If I look far enough down? If I could see below my train-car, would she be there? Would she be in the same doorway I’m in now, in a different Toronto? 

        torontos
        hundreds, thousands of torontos 
        all stacked on top of one another
        i don’t know where I am but its not real either
        another toronto, one of thousands, i don’t know how far it goes
        but im learning. i can manipulate it a bit for you

      what does it take to break the seam completely?

       9.8 m/s^2

      convenient

        you always wanted to know if you could do what i did

  i meant physics, you moron

        did you?

Did I? Or did I follow Sandra like a lost puppy because at some point, I started to delegate every major decision to her frantic brilliance? Did I envy her? Hate her? Love her? Did I want to be her? My palms are clammy again. I pull out another cigarette but don’t bother lighting it. I chew on the filter and pace like a nine-year old in front of the dentist’s office, putting off the inevitable. Sandra knows this. Sandra knows me. She knows that the moment I read the first message I was in. In for a penny. 

Sandra knows me and Sandra knows physics.  She doesn’t bother asking me to do the obvious:

         ill see you at the top
        or bottom
        your bottom, my top

this better work…

        i did the math 😉 

if i die in canada ill die in real life

        this isnt Canada
        youre just seeing how far the rabbit hole goes

🙂

        🙂

And what’s the worst that can happen? 

I bite down on the filter so viciously my canine aches. What’s worse, the impact or pretending to swallow pills for the rest of my life? Pretending to be alright while everyone around me grows more and more impatient and bitter. Peeling potatoes. Every. Single. Day. Giving my spare change to Joe. Having a pity party with Ethan. In the end, what’s worse? 

I take a small step towards the doors. Then another. 

The sun is decisively above the horizon now and the shimmering train below mine ripples under its rays. Both ravines blush with pinks and oranges. Their surfaces ripple as well, matching the rhythm pounding at my ear drums. A step forward, into the bubbling river of the rising sun. A step forward into something worse, maybe, but something different. 

A step forward is all I need. 

A seam can only be worn so thin before something has to crash through it. 

Sandra is right. Sandra is always right. 

As I tumble through the air, I force myself to look back up long enough to glimpse a smear of red lipstick against the mirage train. 

I feel no impact.