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it ensured I’d get to sit all the way. Of course, my condition was obvious, so people often offered me seats. But unlike Blanche DuBois, I preferred not to have to depend on the kindness of strangers. As usual, I was carrying a Zip disk with work-related files in my briefcase, and I had some article preprints I wanted to read. But I found myself unable to concentrate.
    An alien had come to Toronto. An actual alien.
    It was incredible.
    I thought about it throughout the forty-five-minute subway ride. And, as I looked at the myriad faces around me—all colors, all races, all ages, the mosaic that is Toronto—I thought about the impact today’s events would have on human history. I wondered if it was Raghubir or I who would end up being mentioned in the encyclopedia articles; the alien had come to see me—or at least someone in my position—but his actual first conversation (I had taken a break to watch the security-camera video) was with Raghubir Singh.
    The subway disgorged many passengers at Union, and more at Bloor. By the time it was pulling into North York Centre—penultimate stop on the line—there were seats for all who wanted them, although, as always, some riders, having endured most of the journey standing, now disdained the empty chairs as if those of us who had scored a place to park our behinds were a weaker breed.
    I exited the subway. The walls here were tiled in white, much easier on the stomach than Museum station. North York had been a township when I was born, later a borough, then a city in its own right, and, at last, in another fiat of the Harris government, it had been subsumed with all the other satellite burbs into the expanded megacity of Toronto. I walked the four blocks—two west, two north—from North York Centre to our house on Ellerslie. Crocuses were poking up, and already the days were getting noticeably longer.
    As usual, Susan, who was an accountant with a firm at Sheppard and Leslie, had gotten home first; she’d picked up Ricky from his after-school daycare and had started cooking dinner.
    Susan’s maiden name had been Kowalski; her parents had come to Toronto from Poland shortly after World War II, via a displaced-persons camp. She had brown eyes, high cheekbones, a smallish nose, and an endearing little gap between her two front teeth. Her hair had been dark brown when we’d met, and she kept it that way thanks to Miss Clairol. In the sixties, we’d both loved the Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, and Peter, Paul and Mary; today, we both listened to New Country, including Deana Carter, Martina McBride, and Shania Twain; Shania’s latest was coming from the stereo as I came in the door.
    I think more than anything, I enjoyed that: coming home to the stereo playing softly, to the smell of dinner cooking, to Ricky bounding up the stairs from the basement, to Susan coming down from the kitchen to give me a kiss—which is precisely what she did just now. “Hi, hon,” she said. “How was your day?”
    She didn’t know. She hadn’t heard. I knew that Persaud, her boss, had a rule against people playing radios at work, and Susan listened to books-on-tape in her car. I checked my watch; ten to six—it hadn’t even been two hours since Hollus’s departure. “Fine,” I said, but I guess I wasn’t quite suppressing my grin.
    “What are you smiling at?” she asked.
    I let the grin flourish. “You’ll see.”
    Ricky arrived just then. I reached down, tousled his hair. It was blond, not unlike mine had been when I’d been his age; a nice coincidence, that. Mine had turned brown by the time I was a teenager, and gray by the time I was fifty, but I’d managed to keep almost all of it until a few months ago.
    Susan and I had waited to have a child—too long, it turned out. We’d adopted Ricky when he was just a month old, young enough that we got to give him his name: Richard Blaine Jericho. Those who didn’t know sometimes said Ricky had Susan’s eyes and my nose.