Calderwood 27

Late Traces

By Fraser Calderwood

Marcy teaches a class to help adults relearn how to socialize. They gather Thursday evenings at Frankland Community Centre on Logan Avenue. She prefers to arrive early and walk a slow loop around the treed paths of nearby Withrow Park to compose herself for class, ready herself to play the character of herself and talk to so many people. She thinks, in another world, this would be ironic—that she, too, needs to learn to be more social. In the park only the dog people congregate; their pets vouchsafe them as decent humans. The dogless keep their distance.

Her lessons include: Reconnecting with Old Friends, Ordering Coffee, Going to a Bar. Never order a rum and coke, instructs Marcy. Not only is it a bad drink, but something that sugary, it draws suspicion. Everyone is nervous; you don’t want to invite suspicion. She teaches them how to approach other humans at the bar. This is a nice lesson because the first time some of her students, some of the men, learned this, it might have been the 1980s or 90s and they picked up some particularly gross habits. Other humans can consent to talk to you or not, she imparts. You have to accept this. You can’t linger and hope to wear them down.

Other topics: How to be perceived as a human being. They’ve all become so inured to seeing and being seen as talking heads on screens, noncorporeal. It’s a lot to encounter a real, three-dimensional human body moving around and not see it as a threat or an obstacle.

Sometimes a few students will arrive before Marcy does. They have to wait for her to unlock the space for them. She’s waiting for the gratifying day when she arrives to find them already socializing with each other, trying out things they covered in class. Comment on the weather. Ask about weekend plans. Compliment something the person has control of—like their choice of cardigan or their immaculate eye makeup—not something inborn, like their shoulders or their nose, which might be off-putting. But every Thursday she finds them silently perched on different benches in front of the centre, and when she unlocks the space and the fluorescent tubes flicker on, they file in and take desks as far away from one another as possible. The ones who used to sit poised up front in high school sit up front; the ones who used to slouch in the back slouch in the back.

It’s a multi-purpose room: the floor waxed smooth enough for a dance class, a belt of vinyl curtains at the midpoint to split it into two rooms if the centre gets more bookings. But there aren’t that many bookings. The caretakers leave the curtains accordion-folded at the sides of the room and distribute the tables evenly across the whole space with two empty metres on all sides, so everyone feels safe.

Other Thursdays, she stops to pick up coffee and baklava at the Greek bakery on the corner. It used to be one of three competing Athena Bakeries on Danforth, but now it is the only one to have weathered the shutdown—the sole heir to the name. She wonders what became of the other bakers. The shop door is locked, of course, but the many notes written in permanent marker and taped up, the chalked signboard set out on the pavement like a Track and Field hurdle, all proclaim they really are open: just knock and wait, please. She knuckles the glass and the woman approaches. The woman’s face is covered at first. They look each other in the eye and then the woman steps back and Marcy hears the reassuring sound of the door buzzer, the lock clicking open.

For some of her students, Marcy thinks, this hushed classroom is the most social interaction they’ve had in many months. At the end of one Thursday class, a man approaches the folding banquet table that she uses as both desk and podium.

When the class was still just an idea Marcy had, before she pitched it to the community association, this man wasn’t who she pictured would need to attend. True, his hair is retreating a little in sharp points, and even though she’s not exceedingly tall she can see a matching circle of scalp at the peak of his head. But he’s got a jaw that makes her think he should be a TV meteorologist or a small-time actor. Everyone’s having trouble now, she reasons, even good-looking people. And he could be a TV actor. Aren’t they always short, so they can be framed nicely in the shot with the actresses? She’s sure someone told her this.

He preserves a safe, respectful gap between them—just like she teaches—until they’ve made eye contact, and then says, “I’m Hasan.”

It’s good to meet him, she says. The rituals are strange to her, too: the distance, the wariness, the eye contact.

“I’m in your class.”

Makes sense that he’s here then, she replies. She offers him a warm smile to make up for the sarcasm.

“I wanted to ask,” he goes on, “if you’d consider expanding class to Tuesday nights as well.”

She really hasn’t, she tells him.

Or Mondays. Or Fridays. “I’m free most nights,” he says.

He’s so earnest, but at the same time he looks like he’s running on adrenaline. This is the longest in-person conversation he’s had in some time, and he doesn’t know where to go from here.

She’s glad he’s enjoying class so much, Marcy deflects. She’ll ask the community association about other nights.

Some of these people, they live alone and they’ve been alone all this time. Others live with their partners and they’ve seen only their partner for so long, they just want to get out and see another human being, a real human being. Marcy’s lucky, she knows, that the partner she was living with before all this was a person she could be confined with for such a long time and not feel compelled to murder. She’s lucky that Lucas is someone who can be relied upon even in this situation that no one could have foreseen. She wonders, Is this a thing you can intuit about a person ahead of time? Are there traits she can teach her students to look for?

Going out again, it’s like picking off a scab: it’s always going to feel a little too early. Marcy has a ridge of scar down one forearm from where she toppled off her bicycle and scraped her arm along a stone wall. It didn’t have to scar; the scraping wasn’t deep. But in her sleep Marcy would gouge off the scabs with her fingernails. Years later, their first night together, Lucas slid his finger over the bumpy terrain and said it was like the Andes on one of those globes with the mountains in relief.

Lucas is waiting up for her when she clomps up the stairs. His own work, all online, begins before dawn and ends before Marcy has even planned the evening’s lesson. He works as a journalist, his beat mostly science. The week Marcy’s class begins he’s writing on a species of ichneumon wasp that lays its eggs inside the bodies of live spiders, along with a chemical that takes over the spider’s brain. (If it can be said a spider even has a brain.) Its new neural chemistry causes the spider to spin a tight sphere of webbing round itself—a chrysalis. And then, after happily gestating through the cocooning process, the wasp larvae emerge and devour their host. The thing is, Lucas writes, there are more of these than entomologists first guessed: more than a hundred-thousand species, basically a wasp fine-tuned for every bug with a roomy carapace. His most-clicked-on article ever was about the meteorite, back when everyone thought it was a meteorite.

Mostly Lucas cooks their dinner. Tonight it’s high-fibre pasta with a white sauce and broccoli—also chosen for its fibrous quality. After all this time in such a compact space, they know each other’s gastrointestinal frustrations. “I missed you,” he says as she comes into view.

I was gone two hours, she laughs.

“I know,” he says. “It’s silly. It should have been freeing to have the place to myself. But that’s how I felt.”

That’s sweet, she tells him. She assumed that his Thursday evenings would be given over to some extravagant masturbation decathlon, as that is one aspect of their relationship that has fallen off in the months of confinement.

For months it had been only the two of them. The farthest Marcy risked in that period was to the produce stands down the street, just past the community centre where she now teaches her class. Lucas, in the early mornings, would sometimes do a bigger grocery trip by bicycle, coasting down Pape Avenue and then advancing through the aisles of No Frills like it was a network of enemy trenches. He would go running in the middle of the night when no one was on the streets. Marcy skipped rope—not in the middle of the night—on their balcony that overlooked the alley.

They tried to complete a thousand-piece puzzle of Mark Rothko’s Red on Red and almost killed one another.

They marathoned all the Sam Raimi-helmed Spider-Man films, even the third one with the alien costume and black eyeliner.

They plotted where they would travel when they could travel. They both want New Zealand, when such trips are permitted.

When at last they began to venture out and do normal things again, like taking the subway, they developed a little ritual. Both of them were continuously checking the news; they could recite how many human beings had been lost in a given week. So even though there were strict protocols on public transit, and even though the subway line was so close Marcy could feel the tremor of it while she waited for him in their apartment above a shop, she got into a routine of stopping Lucas on his way out, warning him to be vigilant, demanding he promise his safe return.

The first weeks of Marcy’s class are online, her laptop screen and the participants’ screens mosaicked with tiny, nervous people waving and gesturing and talking over one another. Halfway through the twelve-week session, they transition to the community centre classroom. It’s part of the socialization process. First you stay in your home, your personal fortress, and you talk to your fellow humans remotely. You look for signs. Do they do the thing with their eyes? Then you try leaving the house on Thursday evenings. Some of her students are also learning to take transit again. Some drive and learn to trust other drivers, a conversation of blinking lights and fluid movements that honestly seems to have improved since the before times.

She talks about expanding your bubble. You don’t have to let in the whole world at once. Go step by step. You can’t trust everyone. You couldn’t, even before. If you’ve been isolated by yourself or with only your partner, or your partner and your kids, try calling your mother, other relatives, long-time friends.

At home, she asks Lucas if he thinks it would be harder or easier for people with kids. Each kid is an extra trusted face, a face that looks like your own that you can talk to. It’ll keep you from getting fed up with your partner, Marcy suggests.

“Maybe,” Lucas shrugs. “Or would they more likely lead you to madness?” Kids are different day to day. You’d always worry.

It must have been agony deciding whether to keep them inside and miserable or risk their safety. When it was really bad out there.

It almost seems like they’re becoming each other. Or Lucas is becoming her. Surely he’s adopted more of her vernacular and her mannerisms in their confinement. Sometimes they’ll be working in separate rooms—there are only two rooms to work in unless you count the bathroom, but that’s designated for Twitter doomscrolling—and sometimes she comes out to where he’s working and demands a kiss. But she has a hierarchy of kisses: sometimes she compels a forehead kiss, sometimes a cheek. Then at the end of her online classes she requests a full-on lips kiss, tongue included. Lucas thought this was the stupidest fucking thing in the world but after being each other’s only human contact for months, he’s warmed to it. The other day he found her crouched over her laptop like some sort of remote-teaching goblin, and he stood over her and pointed at his chin where he wanted her to peck.

She tells the students, Ask your mother things about your childhood or about hers. See if she can answer. You can do this with old friends as well. Ask them something only the two of you would know.

She teaches them how to start seeing old friends, rekindling trust. Meet in a public place. I know public places themselves are scary, she says. It takes bravery, but this is how you slowly build your trust in the world. Feign confidence until it manifests. Keep your shoulders back. (Might as well teach good posture while she is at it.) Don’t look too defensive. Don’t pull any weapons. Pretend everything feels normal until it feels normal.

For some of them, “relearn” isn’t really accurate. Probably some didn’t know how to be in the world in the first place.

Marcy was a teacher Before, but not in a situation like this. The parents of the kids she taught, they would accuse her of things like promoting socialism. Now this was real socialism, she wants to tell them. Teaching people how to behave in a society. Some of the skills she taught before are transferable. Even when she was supposed to be teaching Civics to 15-year-olds, half the time you were still modelling okay ways to be an adult. They watched you for what was acceptable, how to be a person.

It is a tremendous struggle for some of these human beings in her class, after what they’ve all been through. They want to get out again, but who knows if it’s safe! They think, “If a thing like this was possible, what else is possible?”

She tells her students heavier things, sometimes. She thought she was lucky, Marcy expounds, because she’s had the same group of friends since high school, and they were able to keep in touch. Only on video chats, but that was still something.

They did all the things you were supposed to do, she reminds her class. They asked the stories behind tattoos and scars. Two of her friends in particular, Marcy says, Stef and Evie, they liked to go on trips together. They used to pick a city on the map and go for the weekend, just totally go wild. Nobody would think of acting this way now. One heavy drinking night, they Googled and found the only tattoo shop in this strange city that was open late and badgered the sole employee until he agreed to give them best friend tattoos. “She’s been my best friend since kindergarten,” Evie slurred to the tattoo artist. “I want her signature on my wrist.” Some days later they’d gone for brunch, stripped back the plastic strips that were helping speed the healing, and noticed that neither of the squiggly lines looked anything like how the other signed her name. “That’s not it at all,” Stef had said. “I don’t even really have a signature.”

Had they really been that epically drunk or was he a lousy artist? There was no knowing.

So this was what Evie brought up when they chatted, Marcy explains. It’s so awkward, like needing a secret password to be friends. She eased into it. “Remember the night we got these?” she said, holding her wrist up to the laptop camera.

“Not most of it,” Stef said.

Evie was relieved. “Think if I practiced copying this I could start posing as you?” she joked. “Forge cheques in your name?”

“Haha, probably,” said Stef. “I better call the police! Here’s yours, too.” She smooshed her own wrist against the camera.

“You still sign your name this way?”

“Hasn’t changed since I learned to write cursive.” Stef smiled.

It wasn’t just wrong, Marcy tells her class. The detail was too specific. Evie got off the call as soon as she could. Feigned a sudden nausea. Or more likely she felt suddenly nauseous. She called the tracers right away.

This is what you have to do, Marcy repeats to her students. When someone you know has been replaced, you must do this.

It’s a struggle, but Marcy has to prevent talk of replacements from dominating class. That’s in the past. The invasion—whatever it was—was unsuccessful. The interlopers have been rooted out, more or less, and now it is time to learn how to socialize again with other human beings.

And yet, inevitably, it comes up. One woman who comes to the class, Ruth, she’s sure any day now she’s going to discover the truth about her partner. She registered for this class specifically to see is there a difference between how her partner acts and how these people act. Are there tells? She needs to know for certain.

Some governments have been crippled: The US president was replaced and everything has been in turmoil there since. In Canada the government is intact but tracing has been sluggish. Every day—still! A year into the crisis!—there seem to come stories of late traces.

Queer people came out to their families—received good and loving responses, even—only to find out that it didn’t count.

Ruth hijacks the lesson on Tipping Etiquette. “Is it suspicious,” she asks, “that Ivan won’t tip baristas? Not that we go for coffee all the time, but I think, if they make you anything with foamed milk and the whole big clanking machine, you should toss them a loonie. Ivan says they’re already paid for their time. Is that a tell?”

Hasan speaks up. “He’s an old white dude,” he says. “Sounds pretty normal.”

Just as Marcy readies herself to retake the reins, another student, further back, asks, “Why do you want to know?”

“What do you mean?” Ruth turns to them, put out. “He’s my husband. I think he’s my husband.”

“If he’s been replaced, and you can’t tell the difference,” the student wants to know. (Marcy checks her roster—Zuri is the student’s name.) “If it were my partner,” Zuri goes on, “I don’t think I’d want to know. It took such a long time to find him.”

You want to look for signs, Marcy interrupts. If there are things you used to say to one another, sweet nothings, you know, and you realize you haven’t heard from them in these months.

It occurs to her that so much of what she and Lucas say to one another in their most intimate moments is meaningless, just “Hi,” in various intonations.

Hi, kiss.

Hi, a bite of collarbone.

Hi, burrowing in the valley of the chest.

Hi, breathed into the belly so that the translucent hairs bend like long grass.

Hi, nibbling hipbone.

Hi, inhaled or exhaled, in the hot damp singularity of your lover’s body.

Hi, looking up, grinning.

Hi, coming up for air.

Hi, inquiring.

Hi, pleading.

Hi, in gratitude.

Hi, in resignation.

Was this unique to them? Or were all lovers, faced with the enormity and the minuteness of what they were engaged in, this dumbstruck? Limited to monosyllables, mere greetings. Really, though, what were they doing but meeting and discovering?

She thinks, would the meaninglessness of this pillow talk, if you transcribed it, make it harder or easier to imitate?

Later in their semester together, so many weeks in that the last reddish light is still hanging on everything when Marcy finishes her lesson, she asks another student—Skyler—to share the story of their partner. She’d been acting a little off. If they argued—“And we’d been arguing a lot more ’cause of all these little things that were different,” Skyler says—she would beg Skyler not to leave the house after. “But I liked to clear my head,” Skyler protests. “That’s all.”

“She said she was afraid,” Skyler says. “Afraid I wasn’t going to come back at all.” Or that Skyler would be replaced.

It was late in the scare, when this behaviour took hold. They were even talking about ending lockdown by then. No more human beings were being replaced, it was thought.

“I still thought maybe she’d calm down when things got back to normal,” Skyler tells the gathered students.

A late trace, the website now describes Skyler’s partner. “My ex,” Skyler says.

The website operates as a memorial to the replaced. For a little while, right when lockdown was supposed to be letting up, they posted a handful of late traces from the city every day, it seemed. Enough that opening was delayed three weeks.

Calling their partner (wherever it is that she is now) their ex is not uncommon. It has emerged out of a Reddit meme and become common enough vernacular that even Lucas knows it. And Lucas knows no slang.

Lucas has dinner ready when Marcy shuffles up the stairs. Veggie chili and spinach salad: she’s been fatigued and he’s worried about her iron levels. Especially since they’ve gone vegetarian.

She hears Paul Westerberg being interviewed on CBC Radio about how his old band is suddenly dominating streaming services. “Honestly I think it’s in bad taste,” he replies to the host’s question.

They’re sitting down to dinner when she asks. A siren is moaning down the street below—ambulance, not fire. Right before he ladles the chili into bowls, he crosses the room and drops the needle on a record. Marcy doesn’t see which one but soon hears the familiar piano chords and Matt Berninger’s low voice mumbling, “Stay out super late tonight, picking apples, making pies…”

She told him not to buy it. Only new albums or true vintage stuff from the used record shop a couple blocks away: if they permitted themselves to buy records from the Oughts, from before they were cohabiting and accumulating records together—even a perfect sad-bastard record like Boxer by the National—where would it stop? But this is also what he played, on his tinny Bluetooth speaker, their first night together. If he remembers this, he’s the real Lucas.

Or has she brought it up these last few indoor months? She doesn’t know when it would have happened—the replacement.

Or has he chosen the album entirely at random?

She decides to brave it: she demands he answer honestly. Does he remember the scar?

“Down your arm?” he says. “Looks like a bad burn.”

When his finger meets the skin ridge, she flinches.

“You never told me about that one.” He puts down his forkful of spinach. Looks at his own reflection in the glass of a framed photo over Marcy’s shoulder.

They sit there, not talking, her knowing and him knowing she knows. The record fills in the silence: Half awake in a fake empire…

Then in a low voice he says, “I just wanted to stay.”

You fucker, she says. She’s looking at Lucas but he’s not Lucas. Lucas is lost. Her partner, her person, is lost.

“I needed a home,” Lucas goes on.

How long? She says this softly, afraid of being answered.

She needs to know how much of her life is a lie.

“I can’t undo what I did to him. It’s the way we’ve always done things.”

Is that supposed to make me feel better? Marcy retorts. Her thumb moves over her phone screen. We were supposed to go to New Zealand.

“I could have—we could have, you and me—gone our whole lives like we were,” says Lucas, or what looks like Lucas. “It would have been nice. Couldn’t you have just let it be? I didn’t ever want to have to do this.”

Marcy’s teaching the class again in summer. There are always more people emerging, wanting to re-socialize. There are always late traces being identified, and when that happens—not just the person’s partner or immediate family, but even acquaintances, neighbours, people who only nodded across hallways at them, or shared elevators—everyone sort of resets. They question the safety of everyone they know. They cocoon themselves. They’re afraid again.

The summer class is in person from the first day. Society needs to open up, politicians are saying. They gather this time in a Presbyterian church basement, a folding table set up with a coffee urn like a Star Wars droid steaming on top, a dish of sugar cubes undisturbed for so long they’ve fused into a block and she has to chip at them with the spoon to pry two of them loose from the sugar-berg. She takes a long sip and then it’s time to begin the lesson: How to attend a party. You can’t take home the wine you brought, even if no one drinks it. It becomes an offering, collateral for eating your body weight in fancy cheese, guacamole, olive tapenade. Practice your stories at home if you feel anxious. Ask questions even if you don’t care about the answers.

She doesn’t mention that her own partner has disappeared between semesters, that she’s moved apartments, started fresh, is now single and herself learning once again to socialize.

She wouldn’t want them to doubt her authority.

She wouldn’t want to invite suspicion.

Fraser Calderwood (he/him) is a writer and teacher who has lived in Vancouver and Calgary. He currently lives in Toronto with his wife and several unruly houseplants. His work has appeared in The New Quarterly, EVENT, and subTerrain.