Prologue

… we seem to see

the people of the world

exactly at the moment when

they first attained the title of

“suffering humanity”

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti,A Coney Island of the Mind

I’m digging my feet into the gritty sand at the edge of the shore, my hologram toes slipping into sand, leaving behind no footprints.

When I look up, I can see lights on the horizon, floating toward the Toronto Islands on gentle waves. I recognize their lights. For so long, I thought light was all I was.

Wind blows dandelion fluff through my back and out my empty chest, making no landfall on this body that can’t keep the hardness I demand of it.

I leave no impression, no matter how hard I stomp down. The water vomits up a used cardboard container to claim the shores of the island so much faster than the island as a whole has allowed itself to be claimed by disrepair, but just as quickly as the water swallowed the legacies of me.

McDonald’s loves you, it says.

Once, the Toronto Islands had been full of playgrounds, full of beaches and docked ferries, harried airport travellers and hurried summer cyclists and heritage homes stuffed full. The islands were peopled, and then, just as quickly, the people left. They left as the city slowly bulldozed their heritage homes, throwing all those numerous things away. They left as the playgrounds fell into ruin and the beaches filled up with sludge and plans for a ten-storey student housing complex went into development and then dropped out of memory, leaving behind only construction kits and empty holes.

Only the airport remained. That’s where I was made – part of a guerrilla marketing program, projectors that scanned passport profiles to throw us back at them, to mix and match features to create friendly faces that were familiar without being specific. Our hologram-casters would lob us into crowded terminals, populating walkways with shades and projections and hybrid images of bodies in motion. Some, like me, were just meant to stand near a vending machine or a duty-free gift shop. I would take a sip of Coca-Cola or eat from a McDonald’s meal and smile and look good.

Other projections walked toward the bodies they reflected, bodies that would stop in confusion at those half-remembered faces and wonder about how nice they would look in that stranger’s clothes, in their designer shoes and watches, with their expens