This is Atta. I met him in Dundas Square near the Yonge/Dundas intersection. Approaching through the crowds, this is what I saw: a slender man in a hoodie, sometimes still, sometimes moving with an exaggerated animation. He was laying pieces of paper on the pavement and fixing them in place with objects. Gusts blew the pieces of paper away and Atta chased after them through the square. Just as he bent to set his rescued paper back in its place, a gust would blow another paper away and he’d chase after it. In spare moments, he tried to entice passers-by to sit at his table and play chess. On the ground to one side of the pavement was an open wooden box.
To reach him, I had to push through the crowd, the usual chaos, a chaos that never wants to settle. A Chinese girl with a Canon 70-200 mm lens, flanked by two others with shorter lenses, shooting two women walking back and forth through the intersection, posing, strutting, smiling, obviously in love. Two women in hijab approaching from the south. The woman with the pink knapsack (homeless?) waiting as her man rounded the corner hauling a shitload of … well … shit. The man giving away free Korans. The proselyte screaming hell and damnation into his mic while a brother beat out a rhythm on his drumset and another handed out cards. Kids taking selfies. Long boarders trying to beat the streetcar. The usual rush of ordinary people keeping their heads low and doing their best to avoid eye contact.
Closer, I saw more details. The wooden box had two dimes in it. The papers were nature photos torn from a magazine, hummingbirds and shit. The man had an upside down teacup, a can of Red Bull energy drink, a Mars Bar, and a bar of Zest soap sitting on its side with a white chess pawn on top. Sometimes, I miss essential details while my eye notes the most trivial of trivialities. In this instance, I noted that there were eight white pawns on the chess board, meaning that the white pawn on the Zest bar was the ninth pawn. Nobody cares, but I still remember stuff like that. I don’t know why.
The man was scrupulous in the way he positioned the photos and the way he placed the objects on them. I asked him if all of this — I made a gesture that included the table, the chess board, the wooden box, the photos, the objects — was an art installation. He shook his head. No, but everything had to be in its proper place. And these objects? I asked. Everything has a special meaning, like this teacup, empty, like the emptiness inside each of us.
I asked if he’d mind me taking a few photos. He was okay with that, but, pointing to the wooden box, he said I should leave something for the homeless. I didn’t have any change. I put the conversation on pause, saying I’d be back, and ran across the road. The people at the Adidas store said they couldn’t open the cash register unless I bought something. I didn’t feel like buying a pair of shoes just to break a twenty, so I went downstairs to Shoppers Drug Mart and bought some mints instead.
Back upstairs and across the street, I dropped the change into the wooden box and we picked up the conversation where we left off. The man told me his name was Atta. I told him my name. Other trivial details struck me: Atta was missing some teeth and his nose was mashed a bit to the left as if he’d been in a fight earlier in his life. Atta wondered if I’d been born in Toronto and when I said yes, he pressed his hands together and bowed to me as if my place of birth somehow made me special. The gesture made me feel awkward. I asked where he was born. He said Afghanistan. He’d immigrated to the States. But later he’d moved north. I bet you’re glad to be here now, eh? I was thinking of Trump’s Immigration EO & promise to crack down on immigrants no matter what the courts said. (Note: Afghanistan is not one of the seven countries included in the EO.) You have no idea, Atta said. I’m so happy to live in Toronto. There’s no place like it in the world. He went on and on. I thought maybe the city’s marketing people should hit up Atta for a testimonial; he had no end of good things to say about the city.
I told Atta I wanted to go across the road and find out what all the noise was about. I was referring to the screaming proselyte and his drummer. Atta smiled. He knew the guy. Not a bad guy. They got along all right. But he didn’t like that believing in his stuff meant that other stuff must be bad. He didn’t think Muslims and Jews had to be horrible people just because they didn’t believe the way this guy believed. He’d tried talking to this guy, but it was no use. It was like talking to a wall. I looked at the orderly, almost Zen, way Atta had arranged his photos and special objects. If you talk to him, I said, the only thing it really does is disturb your sense of inner peace. He took my hand and shook it. You understand.
