When I was a child Dora told me that it was blasphemy to say the words “I Am.” Only God had the right to refer to himself this way. “I Am” was, in fact, the name of God. God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I Am has sent me to you’ ” (Exodus 3:14). It reminded me of the Gloria Gaynor song “I Am What I Am,” which you used to put on when you were dusting and which Ana and I later danced to in a gay bar. But it also struck me as profoundly petty and insecure of God to declare that only He had the right to assert his I-ness, and bordering on perverse that he forced us to subsume our I-ness once a week for his gratification, perhaps because if we were also I then He was not singular, not all-powerful.

Perhaps the terror of the dissolution of I into the indistinguishable group was that it confronted me with my own mortality. It confronted me with the inconsequentiality of my consciousness and identity. How easy it was to suddenly not-be. To be a body without a person. And not just in death, but the ease with which I could be rendered one while still alive.

On the way home from the Burtynsky exhibition we stopped at a pizzeria situated in the middle of a parking lot surrounded by big-box stores. After we’d spent a few minutes offloading our sundry opinions about the show onto one another in a subtle exercise of one-upmanship, a young man I recognized from high school came up to our booth.

“Hi, my name is Kieran and I’ll be your server for the night.”

The moment he noticed me something flashed between us — a choice to either acknowledge that we knew each other or pretend as if Kieran was just “our server for the night” and not a person who had been a grade ahead of me, not a person with whom I’d been to house parties and had friends in common. And in that moment we both decided to go with this latter option. Somehow that fiction was more palatable and less embarrassing. It was easier for us to let Kieran be a body without a person that night, serving us garlic sticks and pizza. As he returned to ask the requisite North American serving question “How’s everything tasting?” I wondered if all income wasn’t just compensation for dehumanizing ourselves in one way or another. And to that end, as we ate, you didn’t ask me how I was making my money lately and I think we both knew that was for the best.