Anyone Could Be Anyone | The Walrus

PEOPLE THINK private investigators are dirty. They’re oily guys with coffee breath, tattletales. On TV, private eyes cut past curtains with their telephoto lenses, dig in trash cans, stick their hammy hands in underpants drawers. Which is fake, of course. We’re not permitted to record anyone anywhere they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. So if I should look through your bedroom window, and I should happen to see you boiling up some meth, I’m not putting that in my report. There are regulations. It’s as dirty as any job.

On the way here, to keep cover, I ran reds, hung back in the corners, fast-braked into a culvert. Just kidding. What make of car did you park behind this morning? There was a man sitting behind you on the bus: what colour hat was he wearing? No one sees the people around them. No one notices the forty-three-year-old Chinese woman driving a dusty minivan. This is my great advantage as a private eye. I’m invisible, I’m interchangeable. That used to be cause for despair, but now I like it.

“How does anyone do this without passing out?” Davis asks.

We’ve been following a CTO claiming short-term disability leave on the basis of a frozen shoulder. We’re parked in a lot wide as a pizza slice, pinned between a subway station and a jumbo chain pharmacy, the type that’s taking the city block by block. In the not-distant future, Toronto is just one long Shoppers Drug Mart, a Canadian Shield of interlocking Tylenol bottles and insoles. Our subject is standing in front of the station, on a phone call via earbuds, so we’re sitting here, watching her talk. “You never done surveillance before?” I ask my young apprentice.

“Some. My last assignment was more . . . interactive.”

He’s not actually my apprentice. PIs don’t apprentice—the bar to entry is lower than that, below sea level. But I’ve been doing this eleven years, he’s been doing it for one. I’m middle aged, I love giving advice.

“Hollow your mind. Like a stalking cougar, or . . . a video gamer. Become so conscious of your physical circumstances, nothing escapes you.”

“A video gamer?”

“They can sit for hours.”

“My instructor said, ‘Pretend the subject is a baby in your care, always be watching it doesn’t get into the knives.’”

Surprisingly practical. My PI instructor was an old fart who only talked about how to pay for parking.

“The hard part is not observing,” I say. “You must empty yourself. Not only your assumptions, also your grudges. Imagine you are on your way to work. You want a coffee, but someone wearing an expensive parka cuts in line. Now you’re angry. You get on the job, and there’s your subject, for the first time, wearing that very same parka. Now you need him to be a dirtbag. You stop noticing reality. You see what you want to see, you miss everything else.” If Davis finds this profound, he doesn’t show it.

Four days of surveillance and nothing concrete proves the CTO is faking. Yesterday, she paced up and down the same Party City aisle of baby shower favours for thirty minutes, and then she spent eighteen minutes in the hair conditioner aisle at Marshalls, studying all the labels with loving care. Every day she got a ride, in her husband’s Porsche Cayenne or a rideshare. This morning, she suddenly gets a lift to the Kiss N Ride. Public transit. No more shiny shell. She’s a slug now, squishy, exposed, on the pavement.

“Did she make us? Is that why she’s stalling?” Davis asks.

“Nah. People are not that smart. If you’re made, you’ll know it.”

Rudy wanted me to be more invested. I’m invested. I’m training the young ones.

“Maybe she’s not going in. She’s in the neighbourhood to see a friend,” Davis postulates. He’s probably wrong. She’s changing a pattern: subway instead of car. This will be the day the case breaks. I feel that old twinge of disappointment. I prefer it when subjects give me nothing to snitch on.

I open my door a smidgen. The warning bell shrieks that the key’s in the ignition. If this was a BMW, it would sing me a sweet little song. I drive a 2011 Toyota Sienna, base model, so it screams. Sweetness costs extra. Sienna is the colour car. You could drive someone all the way to Ottawa in a Sienna and ask them at the end: What kind of car do I drive? They’d have no idea.

The subject enters the station.

“Wow, a foot chase,” Davis deadpans. I’m proud: he’s already dispensed with performative discretion.

If we really wanted to be discreet, we wouldn’t be capering around, departing our vehicle and passing through the turnstiles two paces behind her, because together, Davis and I stand out. We’re probably a decade apart, we’re not family—I’m Chinese, he’s Filipino. A few years ago, no Canadian could spot the difference, but the city demographics have changed, more eagle-eyed Asians everywhere. I’m in a utility jacket and jeans, Davis wears what looks like expensively cut pajamas. The more plastic it looks, the more it costs. But this client requested a two-man team. So at any moment, about 1.5 of us are a redundancy, even a giveaway. On the website, it says, “Every case is our highest priority,” which makes no sense, if you think about it.

We continue down to the platform, and the subject suspects not one thing. I study her hairstyle: honeyed, blown out, keratin rich, bouncing as she trots downward. No way to tell how she washes it, if it’s evidence for or against a frozen shoulder.

RUDY IS MY BOSS, also my oldest friend, also AWOL. A few months ago, she asked me to be partner once again. She requested an answer by the new year, which is now, but recent attempts to reach her have been unsuccessful. I get my caseload from a robot, and since Rudy moved out of my place eighteen months back, we stopped speaking every day. But incommunicado is not normal. The other day, I had the great idea to check her last-seen data. She hasn’t read or sent a message in four days. Now I’m worried, irritable, providing free training to co-workers when I shouldn’t work for free.

A leaving train sends a current of smell up to meet us: smells like school erasers, newspapers, lost time. That scent can never shake the sensation of the first summer I lived here, many lives past. Back then, Rudy had pink cherub cheeks like a cartoon girl on a Lunar New Year greeting, huge glasses, voice like a bullhorn.

We take a seat on a bench as our subject stands in the middle of the platform staring at her phone. Cellphones are wonderful for surveillance. As you gaze at your phone, white foam streams out of the cracks in the world and blankets everything save for that glowing rectangle clutched in your paw, until your pupils stretch to slits, and PIs photo your every angle.

“Okay answer me this,” Davis says. “What do you say when people ask what you do?”

“Private security.”

“And what if they ask a follow-up question?”

“They do not. I give an answer that sounds uninteresting.”

Of course, I’ve made the mistake of saying too much, got stuck defending a job that’s just a job that needs doing, like cleaning out the poop chute on an airplane, or math tutoring. But I’m not falling for Davis’s trap. It’s boring to complain, and it’s boring to reassure each other’s egos. If you don’t like the job, get another stupid job.

“You’re lucky. I have this one cousin who will not shut up about how PIs are the ‘parapolice.’” Here we go. “Meanwhile, the guy sells appliances! Has he been inside a GE factory? I’m sure it’s lovely, beanbag chairs and health benefits. Ever looked up the environmental rating of a French door fridge? PIs got bad PR. All I do is find if people are as good as their word. That same cousin, he rescues dogs!”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Probably.”

“What’s wrong with rescuing dogs?”

“Everything. It’s showy. Rescuing animals when humans are living on the streets.” He pumps a knee. “I’m just saying, people’s morality is so simplistic.”

The train comes and I’m relieved. Davis is a gone case. I can’t reform this level of investment in other people’s opinions.

It’s after lunch, a sparse crowd, people heading to the afternoon shift, or the unemployed trying to keep busy, visit grandma. We take a seat downstream of the subject, clatter through the tunnel’s permanent night. Davis reads a newspaper someone left behind, probably has lice. I lean my head back and pretend to sleep, keeping one eye on the subject.

My answer for Rudy is no, for the last time, to being her partner. I believe it will mean the end of my employment. It’s for the best. Business mixed with pleasure is a bad-smelling stew. It’s taken me years to accept it.

Each time the train throws its brakes, we lean forward casually, clear our throats, in case the subject disembarks and we must jump to our feet naturally. Three hours left on the day’s budget. If we don’t get something today, we start over tomorrow. It’s like a video game that resets after every “Game Over,” if video games were amazingly dull.

This subject has a tic. Whenever she says hello to someone—cashiers, her husband, her house cleaner—her eyebrows pinch as she smiles. It’s happening now as she offers a white-haired lady her seat though empty seats abound. Her face goes two toned, happy at her mouth and tormented up top.

“So you think she’s faking?” Davis asks without looking up from his paper.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“She just offered someone a seat.”

“So?”

“An injury like that rearranges your life. Constant pain. You don’t do unnecessary movement.”

“Maybe. But why?”

“Why what?”

“If she’s faking it, why fake it?”

“What do you mean?” I say. It’s always the same: they needed the money. Very logical.

“She’s rich, right?”

“I didn’t pull a credit report.”

“Yeah but the house, the car, the handbag.”

“She could be in debt.”

“What does the husband do?”

“He’s a life coach.”

“That’s code for ‘generational wealth.’ She’s rich!”

“Looks like.”

“Then why fake it? Not for the payout.”

“Maybe she wanted a break.”

“Then take time off.”

“Maybe she was out of PTO. More likely, she didn’t want to look like that kind of woman.”

“What kind of woman?”

“The kind who wants time off.”

“Why? Because she’d be setting a bad example for women everywhere? Yeah, the future of society depends on if she drinks oat milk or leans in.” He’s way too concerned. I have the itch to ask him exactly how old he is. But generationalizing him won’t help. Assumptions obscure.

“You didn’t like it when your cousin was in your business. Maybe she doesn’t want anyone in her business.”

“Well, now she’s got the opposite.”

I can relate to sneaky time off. These days, it’s a fashion to want to feel seen. Davis wants others to understand his career, recognize him. Me, I love the quiet. This is the job for me. I love to be mistaken.

FINALLY, AT ST. GEORGE, the subject detrains. We follow her up to street level, the university district, falling in step with the crowd of winter coats, splattered like cars, with white salt dropped to melt an ice storm that never came. All the coats are black: in Toronto, this is a rule.

The subject walks unremarkably along Bloor Street. It’s a January day, the sky is the colour of a cigarette filter, humidly hugging the street. Wonderful weather for your depression. I’m picturing my couch and a Halloween movie.

“I hate this neighbourhood,” Davis says. “These buildings are so ghoulish.” We pass one nineteenth-century heritage building after another, a mob of cornices and cupolas. “Bricklaying their way out of imperial guilt. The more glorious the masonry, the more monstrous the deeds.”

Why not be a partner? Some Februarys, I too would like to go to Cancún. I buy my groceries from the dollar store. The back of every door in my home is packed with bags, off-season wear, one-day-could-be-essential-doodads-that-would-cost-future-dollars-to-replace. Wealth is a bedroom door that swings freely open. No money means swaths of the world greyed out. But I do not want to send juniors to union-bust at the food terminal, or serve subpoenas to rage hounds, or fondle the feelings of HR investigation managers.

I ask Davis, “Is Rudy your mom?” I know she’s not. I said I love to be mistaken.

“She was our neighbour growing up. Babysat me.”

I remember the family with the little squirt who lived in the condo next to Rudy’s. His mom would stand on the balcony and shout instructions as he crossed the street to school. Where does the time go.

An athletics team from the university jogs past us, between us and the subject. I keep my eyes pinned to the subject’s hair until they’re gone.

“Is Rudy on vacation?” I ask.

“Better not be,” he says. “I sent in my vacation request a week ago and I’m still waiting on receipt of my message.”

“She didn’t write back?” I remain calm. Aren’t you, a private eye, embarrassed to discover a missing person in your own circle, right under your nose? Nope. Professional pride: scam.

But Davis doesn’t say, because the subject has departed the street. She’s gone into the museum, the one with the new addition resembling a crash-landed alien spaceship, frozen at the moment it eats dirt.

We look at each other.

“Single woman always less conspicuous than a single man,” I say.

He does a big sigh. He crosses the street and goes back the way we came. I give him my key. He’ll go back and retrieve Sienna. Maybe sit in a Burger King to pass the time. Poor fella. Staring at the wall in a downtown Burger King is the fifth ring of hell.

I trail the subject into the entrance hall, under a gold-dome ceiling that really stands on ceremony. I’m pondering the line item I’ll add for the cost of museum entry when an adult with the fanny pack and athletic build of a child care worker rushes past and hands the subject her two-year-old. This is the first time I’ve seen him outside the confines of his stroller. He is the size of a tree stump. The two of them are out the door before I can turn around and nonchalantly follow.

I keep a good half block between us. The subject and child go up Avenue Road, chattering to each other. It’s a boulevard of boutiques and Botox shops with no one on foot; the people are driven. I hustle a little, but not too obviously, keeping to the speed of someone late for the dentist.

Was Rudy kidnapped? Or: can she just not spare the time to return my calls? The drift of old friends: as certain as menopause. When she started the agency, it was just us, a cute pair in a strip-mall storefront on the edge of an industrial park. We’d share a Michelina’s for dinner and the cost of a microwave to heat its saggy tray, we shared our cigarettes and snow boots. Then she hired people, put in a reception. Every year, levels of management grew between us. When you climb so high, your job reflects something on you, and Rudy took pride in her business. I was proud she’d made a chunk of the world her own, but I don’t climb. I only do insurance surveillance. I watch driveways to see if anyone claiming dislocated shoulders can be observed skipping rope.

The basic premise of our twenty-five-year friendship is that we’re the same, kin among enemies. We had no experience in being opposites. Tongue-tied because even naming the rift felt shameful.

MY SUBJECT TURNS the corner, leaving Avenue, enters a side street, residential. I prepare to follow her: I pull a scrunched-up shopping bag out of my pocket, drop my phone and gloves and keys in it, hang it from my shoulder. With empty hands, you look like a narc or a layabout.

Rudy moved out of our apartment while I was away at my dad’s funeral. She was rushing to “start her next phase.” But as the one who pays my salary, she knew I couldn’t manage the rent alone. I’m sorry, she said, you turned down partner.

When I see Rudy in person, she is still reassuringly, three-dimensionally, herself. Out of sight, she becomes a mystery. She doesn’t reply to messages, or responds to a joke with a single “?” when we used to be fluent. She says alien things that flow from her mother’s mouth to her lips: “I’m worried about you, the window to get a foot in the market is closing.” I’ve stopped sending friendship messages. “Best friends forever” means a tiny agony that never ends.

I turn the corner and my subject is gone.

The street is narrow: one lane for parked cars and one for passing. Rundown Victorians loom, leaky windows and mould blooms no barrier to a sale price of two to three mil each.

I keep walking purposefully. I could act like I forgot something and double back. But most actions taken have a random bearing on outcomes, and staying true is less work.

I used to care about excelling. New here. There was no place for me. I definitely walked this very street, I walked them all because walking was free, keeping busy to not think about what was going to happen to me. Summer was the hardest: every corner a patio, every table reserved for pairs, quartets, or sextets of naked turned backs. I stayed to the side streets with the rats. But I could earn a place, within the great community of strivers. Fail, and there was no reason for me to exist.

You have a right to the bit of earth you stand on. Being here, doing nothing but breathing, you make everything more alive. It’s the grinding that makes things dead. Look at the sky. Look again. Today it is the highest white, the memory of blue, crossed with stringy clouds like the veins of a leaf. I used to see this sky on the way to work and think gross. Now I’m a seagull, city dropped on my head, against all odds enjoying life! Stealing french fries, revelling in the lake’s stink, eyes half closed as the sun rubs my face.

I’m crossing what I thought was a driveway, but it’s a laneway, and down there is my subject, toddler in arms, against the wrought fencing of someone’s garden. I stop, pretend to tie my shoe. A private eye must have laces. Boxwoods border the house and I snuggle into them. My jacket is a mute brown; I blend with moms, and shrubs. I squeeze the sides of the buttonhole cam in my breast pocket and it vibrates on.

He orbits to her right hip and she leans in so he can grab hold of the fluff of some pampas grass. They act with abandon, happily grabbing other people’s property, forgetting the rules. He gets the fluff but it doesn’t feel how he thought it would, so he yelps in surprise and lets go. It goes down like a bop bag, then springs back up, flinging yesterday’s rain in his eyes. He’s some kind of rare model because he doesn’t cry, he laughs. He turns to her to make sure she didn’t miss this wonder, lays his sopping fingers on her cheek. This time, all the parts of her face are in unison, one expression of joy. They sing a nonsense song together that he conducts and she follows: dadadeeda dadadeeda. I see it before they do: a chestnut head, poking between the rockwork. Bunny. She stoops. “Don’t put my down!” he screams, throwing his arms around her neck. This is a galactic love, so large it’s too large and they’ll forget it by the time he’s fifteen, sixteen. It’ll come back in pops and flashes, when he hiccups and she remembers the baby in her womb hiccupping, the swaying like a boat. It’s a good scam, child rearing. You get a baby but now you must work harder if you want to see the baby, you need to earn vacation days, the baby’s going to work one day too, you made another wheel for the machine. How to escape? You couldn’t expose this to HR’s crushing eyes. She wants time without permission, without being eyeballed by her calendar. Forge an injury, so mother and child can be together for more than forty mins at EOD.

I’ve got more than five minutes’ footage of her right-side-carrying a twenty-five-pound toddler. A frozen shoulder can’t do that.

We pass the backs of five houses, then someone at the sixth house unlocks a gate for them, squealing “Hi”s. I can’t tell from this angle if there’s a clear view into the backyard or if it’s screened by privacy trees or a flank of chimineas. I scooch up. Good news: you can see right in. Bad news: the trio of subject, toddler, and mom friend are staring right at me.

“HI HELLO,” I shout, taking an invisible phone call. I jolt past their property line, like someone who trips, then sprints, on the run from my own body. I don’t hesitate, even though I’m headed straight for a wall of dung-toned garage doors. When the lane dead-ends, I walk in circles, I’ve managed to get my phone out to more convincingly be on a call. I chatter, yes yes no really?

I listen. The voices of the trio have faded. I didn’t hear them leave the yard. The houses around me are dark, but there’s always the possibility of some miserable person staring dead eyed out their bedroom window, taking notice if I stall too long. I head back the way I came, scrolling furiously.

There comes a voice. “Stop!”

It is my subject.

I run.

I run slowly. Running draws attention. It’s animal instinct, one of the last left.

“I told you to stop!” she shouts.

I stop.

She’s about a car length away. She’s got her toddler on her left hip, and now she has a white garbage bag in her right hand. I’m calm. I’m a thirty-second dash from the street, and the subject is fully weighted. The toddler looks on with the special seriousness of a baby.

She chucks the white bag as hard as she can.

I’m not sure what happens, because I cover my eyes.

The bag falls at my feet with a familiar rattle.

“Don’t come here in the daytime,” she says. “When our kids are home, you scare them. Come the night before garbage day. It’s Thursdays.”

The white bag is full of cans. Empty beer cans. Steam Whistle and Michelob Ultra. Bagged and ready to be returned for the five-cent deposit.

As the subject watches, I pick up the bag. I nod my thanks. I try to look unreadable, thoughtful, as is expected of my people. Beer and backwash drip on my shoes.

The subject and her mom friend put their heads together on the way up the garden path, about me, intruder in the lane: what were my intentions? The subject must have felt so excited when it hit her: She’s collecting cans! An expert in the habits of the urban Chinese.

I walk west. I keep the bag in my grip. I could drop it by any garbage can I pass, but out of habit, I stay incognito until I’m behind a closed door. This is an old game, one that long predates my current occupation.

Once I’m clear, I have to hum so I don’t laugh. I want to call Rudy. I want to tell her how I cracked the case: all I had to do was show my face. I open my phone app and hover over her name, drunk on glee. And then I remember. That would be a friendship message. I put the phone away.

Thea Lim is currently working on a novel titled Anyone Could Be Anyone, from which this piece has been adapted.

Thea Lim is an author, a culture writer, and a creative writing teacher. Her most recent novel is An Ocean of Minutes.