DIALLO: You’re still the only person I know who carries a paperweight in her backpack.
RAYMONDE: It’s not that heavy.
DIALLO: It seems an unusual gift for a child.
RAYMONDE: I know, but I thought it was beautiful. I still think it’s beautiful.
DIALLO: That’s why you took it with you when you left Toronto?
RAYMONDE: Yes. Anyway, she gave it to me, and I guess eventually we quieted down, I remember after that we stayed in the dressing room playing cards, and then she kept calling my parents, but they never came.
DIALLO: Did they call her back?
RAYMONDE: She couldn’t reach them. I should say I don’t really remember this next part, but my brother told me. Eventually she called Peter, my brother, who was at home that night. He said he didn’t know where they were either, but said she could bring me home and he’d look after me. Peter was much older than me, fifteen or sixteen at the time, so he looked after me a lot. The woman drove me home and left me there with him.
DIALLO: And your parents …?
RAYMONDE: I never saw them again. I have friends with similar stories. People just vanished.
DIALLO: They were among the very first, then, if this was Day One in Toronto.
RAYMONDE: Yes, they must have been. I wonder sometimes what happened to them. I think perhaps they got sick in their offices and went to the ER. That seems to me the most likely scenario. And then once they got there, well, I can’t imagine how anyone could have survived in any of the hospitals.
DIALLO: So you stayed at home with your brother and waited for them to come back.
RAYMONDE: We didn’t know what was happening. For the first little while, waiting seemed to make sense.
34
“READ ME SOMETHING,” Jeevan said, on the fifty-eighth day. He was lying on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling, and he’d been drifting in and out of sleep. It was the first thing he’d said in two days.
Frank cleared his throat. “Anything in particular?” He hadn’t spoken in two days either.
“The page you’re working on now.”
“Really? You want some overprivileged philanthropist’s thoughts on the charity work of Hollywood actors?”
“Why not?”
Frank cleared his throat. “The immortal words of a philanthropist whose name I’m not allowed to divulge but who you’ve never heard of anyway,” he said.
What I like to see is when actors use their celebrity in an interesting way. Some of them have charitable foundations, they do things like try to bring attention to the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan, or they’re trying to save the white African rhino, or they discover a passion for adult literacy, or what have you. All worthy causes, of course, and I know their fame helps to get the word out.
But let’s be honest here. None of them went into the entertainment industry because they wanted to do good in the world. Speaking for myself, I didn’t even think about charity until I was already successful. Before they were famous, my actor friends were just going to auditions and struggling to be noticed, taking any work they could find, acting for free in friends’ movies, working in restaurants or as caterers, just trying to get by. They acted because they loved acting, but also, let’s be honest here, to be noticed. All they wanted was to be seen.
I’ve been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they’ll never truly die. I know that’s a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They’re all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.
35
DIALLO: What was it like, those last days before you left Toronto?
RAYMONDE: I stayed in the basement watching television. The neighborhood was emptying out. Peter was going out at night—stealing food, I think—and then one morning he said, “Kiki, we’ve got to go.” He hotwired a car that the neighbors had abandoned, and we drove for a while, but we got trapped. All the ramps onto the expressway were clogged with abandoned cars, the side roads too. Finally we just had to walk, like everyone else.
DIALLO: Where did you go?
RAYMONDE: East and south. Around the lake and down into the United States. The border was open by then. All the guards had left.