Downtown Toronto Gothic, Part I
- You get on a subway car. Everyone is wearing a default black puffer jacket and athleisure pants. Nobody makes eye contact with you. You get off the subway and go into the mall. All the clothing on display is beige. All the clothing on display is grey. The floor of the mall is gleaming white tile and your footsteps echo loudly in spite of the crowds. You descend into the PATH, into the heart of the city-machine, the smooth-running, frictionless city of the future, the frantic, bustling labour of building and maintenance secreted away behind discreet janitorial doors, the gleaming white tile floors absolutely pristine after thousands have walked across them in their morning commute, shiny black beetles in their puffer jackets and slicked-down hair, the gleaming white wall cladding: so nice, so modern, so clean. You drift through the underground labyrinth and it doesn’t matter where you come out, because it’s all the same endless sparkling city.
- You walk into any apartment building – it might even be yours – it’s so nice it’s so new it’s so clean, the white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows an infinite vista of open future possibilities, you can feel the raised texture of the mottled grey floors on your bare feet, the steely cold rising up through your soles and into your metatarsals. You’re in the dark bathroom soaking in the tub like it’s the womb, vaping low-THC weed because you can’t even commit to really numbing yourself. Walk down the silent carpeted hallway, go work out in the gym, go for a swim in the pool: there’s nobody there, the water is motionless until you thrash up through the surface gasping for air. You’re in the birdcage staring out your floor-to-ceiling windows but the only way to go is down.
- You go to a bar. You order a cocktail. The surface of the bar is black and shiny. The bartender asks you with dead eyes and a commercial smile if you’d like that with bourbon or rye? You say, let’s do bourbon tonight. After an elaborate process, the bartender places a heavy glass with a single, perfectly clear orb of ice half-submerged in amber liquid in front of you. You take a long drink and look judgmentally across the bar at a man in a Patagonia fleece vest. It’s a mirror.
- You get on a subway car. Everyone has the face of someone you no longer talk to.