That summer, between volunteer shifts at a local women’s shelter, Ana managed to write and perform a one-woman show about her mother’s attempt to start a countercultural newspaper in communist Bulgaria. The initial run, at a local fringe theatre, sold out. In its second week it got a glowing, full-page review in Toronto’s arts and culture weekly, and the theatre brought it back for another two weeks in early September. I went four times in total, each time increasingly transfixed by Ana’s transformation into her mother. It went beyond posture or voice or mannerisms; beyond imitation. It was possession. It was as if Ana knew something about Fatme on a genetic level. Something about Fatme that Fatme didn’t even realize about herself. The cumulative box-office haul from Ana’s play just about covered her August and September rent, so in the lead-up to Halloween she began working at Screemers, a massive haunted house set up on the exhibition grounds by the lake.

“I’m getting fat and old and playing a fucking zombie for eleven bucks an hour with no paid dinner-break,” she said as we jostled towards our respective nighttime gigs on the Spadina streetcar. “The Juliet and Ophelia trains have left the station. I missed them. And now I guess I gotta wait on the platform for Gertrude to arrive.”

The streetcar was full, so we rode standing, gripping the overhead bar.

“I find it strange walking through the haunted house sometimes,” she said. “Like, even though I’ve been through it a hundred times I’m still uncertain now and then about which figures are animatronic and which are assholes like me in makeup.”

As we rumbled along, I thought of our lifelong journeys through the haunted house of people and things; thought about how mummies and effigies had once helped close the chasm between being and un-being and wondered whether animatronic ghouls and video game avatars and robotic vacuum cleaners did that for us now. And I thought about the pleasure we took in horror. Of being confronted with the dead and un-dead and of locating ourselves somewhere between the two.