The nurses found him elbow deep in the garbage can, sifting through the spent trash as if it were the soil of his native PEI. He was harvesting anything that felt like a potato to his hands,  and then dropping whatever it was on the floor by his hospital bed for later use.

Whether it was a sleeping dream he was having or a waking one no longer mattered. Lost on the rolling seas of dementia, Marcel had passed into the timeless overlap of memory where reality is nothing more than an unbidden chemical spark from deep within the mystery of his receding brain.

Marcel was harmless and never given to rage, and the nurses seemed to love him, treating him more like a pet than a patient. You could see the gentleness within him, the shapes of the men he used to be who now pushed against the diseased exterior: the fair trader, the husband, the guy who was always the first to dive in off the dock, the grandfather who did corny magic tricks and loved fishing.

Now in his mid-nineties, he wandered the corridors half-dressed. Like a poltergeist given form, he drifted in and out of the rooms on the 14th floor as if living all the lives contained therein, with each visit subtly rearranging the small articles he came upon, always setting this new house in order. The expression on his face that must have once been so clear was now lost and uncertain. He seemed blinded, a subterranean creature guided through these alien and unnaturally smooth corridors not by sight but by scent, called to this strange transit by a timeless ocean that only he could discern.

A kind of stillness presides, an unhurried ease and absence of pretence. Nobody we saw was lost into the world of their iPhone like so many people in Toronto appear to be, all of them attempting to project a narrative of velocity and importance to the strangers passing by. No, the conversations here came slow and easy– almost humidly– as if each encounter were expected to last weeks rather than seconds.

While in a somewhat matronly dress shop I overheard the two middle-aged women who worked there talking.

“ John keeps crashing the truck into the barn.”

“Lordy!”

“I know! He hasn’t done any damage yet, but geez, it’s only a matter of time.”

“You gotta paint a big, red stop sign on that barn, I tell you. You have to stop that man!”

On the street a woman of about 25, pretty but wounded, approached us and asked for some change. She gestured to her loose fitting denim shirt, “I’m pregnant and hungry.” Seeing her moving toward us I had already decided that if I had change in my pocket I would give some to her, but if I had to dig into my laptop bag, I would not. This was the calculus I had made, the line I had arbitrarily drawn in the sand. After checking my pockets I apologized to her, telling her I didn’t have any change and she trembled, about to cry.  Rachelle then dug into her purse and gave her a couple of dollars, as regardless of this woman’s articulated circumstance, her need, for whatever reason, was more immediate and real than our own.

Cutting through a park near a church we passed a group of about a dozen people seated in a circle on the shaded grass. One man, probably around 35, sat elevated from the rest in a lawn chair that might have been bought at a Canadian Tire in the 1980s. He looked a bit like Jesus, this man, and the resemblance didn’t seem accidental. Leaning back in his chair, he nodded beatifically as the people around him brought him their troubles. A 50 year-old, a round and pale dad wearing a floppy Tilley hat, frustrated, was speaking with his hands, “It seems that the kids today are so remote from both their parents and God, all they ever do is play video games and I worry about this disconnect.” Canadian Tire Jesus put his finger to his lips, composing a thought, while the young girls sitting in this circle of faith watched him so closely, their eyes shining with something they couldn’t quite put into words.