She found no word of their benefactor, online, in newspaper reports, no missing posters plastered to utility poles and newspaper boxes. Konstantinos disappeared without anyone noticing. Their elephant man lived a low-key, low-profile life, despite his quiet, belated sexual liberation, and now apparently nobody noticed his absence. Ready to confess her sins, Enola went to the family physician she found at a walk-in clinic in downtown Toronto when she first moved to the city. The doctor, hen-pecked, hurried, told her hush and diagnosed her as depressed. She prescribed Enola antidepressants and thought she should have lab tests for sexually transmitted infections.
On Bloor Street West, Enola found the pharmacy, near Royal York subway station, where Kiara worked as pharmacy assistant for her parents, who flew to India for her grandfather’s funeral. Enola walked down the narrow, crowded aisles to the back counter and asked for the prescription to be filled. Working behind the counter of the pharmacy, Kiara felt her heartbeat so rapidly she thought she would faint. She wrote on note paper, “Please go.” She handed Enola the piece of paper, along with her prescription, sliding them across the counter, hoping she wouldn’t make a scene.
“But I need this prescription filled.”
“Please go.”
“I need these medications.”
Whispering hoarsely, tearing up, Kiara pleaded with her former amateur co-star to leave her alone. Enola reassured her she wasn’t trying to cause her any problems or trouble. “I need the prescription for my medical condition.”
Kiara filled the prescription, put the bottles of medication, along with some candies for dry mouth into a paper bag, stapled the bag, and asked her not to come back.
Enola went down the stairs and escalators onto the concrete platform of Royal York subway station. While she checked the prescription in the train, she realized Kiara had given her the entire batch of medication in one dispensation, all the refills for the antidepressants for nine months at once. When the negativity of her words and actions sank in, Enola figured now Kiara had more power over her. She took the energy drink and sipped from the tall narrow can of super caffeinated beverage while she downed as many fluoxetine capsules as her stomach would hold. Then she took the sublingual lorazepam tablets, which she was prescribed to take on an as-needed basis.
Enola ended up taking the subway train back and forth along the Bloor-Danforth line, from Kipling station in Etobicoke to Kennedy station in Scarborough. Then she somehow managed to board the subway train at Bloor station, on the Yonge-University line, which she rode back and forth in a stupor. Somehow, Enola ended up getting off the subway train at Union station. On the narrow, crowded subway platform, she got into a shoving match with a postal letter carrier. This might have been of little consequence if she didn’t end up falling onto the tracks just as a subway train sped into the station and, despite the efforts of bicycle courier to rescue her, she was crushed. Then the debate began as to whether she was deliberately pushed or fell onto the tracks, a controversy which spilled over into the newspapers. This became a major story in the newspapers, the story of her life, the defining public moment in her life, the end— as Konstantinos’ demise was eclipsed. A part-time worker, a journalism student at Ryerson University, who worked alongside Kiara, filling prescriptions, said it seemed unlikely Enola’s demise would have received coverage from the daily city newspapers, if she committed suicide, without foul play, if it was a case of her deciding in her own conscious volition to end her own existence.
