Chapter 3
Rules of Engagement
Arjun
Casey Welling lives in a walk-up in Kensington Market.
Of course he does. The building is old Victorian brick, slightly crooked, wedged between a vintage record shop and a Trinidadian roti place that is pumping warm, spice-thick air directly onto the sidewalk.
There are bicycles chained to the railing.
A hand-painted sign on the door reads “PLEASE DON'T LET THE CAT OUT” in cheerful block letters, despite the fact that I am reasonably certain this is a no-pets building, which means either the sign is aspirational or the tenants are operating a covert feline underground.
It is a Sunday morning. The February sky is a flat, miserable grey, and the sleet from yesterday has hardened into a treacherous crust of ice on every surface.
I am wearing a charcoal cashmere overcoat, Italian leather gloves, and Oxford shoes that are inappropriate for Canadian winter conditions but are the only footwear I own that isn't surgical.
I look absurd. I am aware that I look absurd.
I look like a man who got lost on his way to a Mayfair dinner party and ended up in a neighbourhood that sells artisanal hot sauce out of repurposed shipping containers.
I check my watch. 10:02 a.m. I told Casey I would arrive at precisely ten. I am two minutes late because I circled the block four times in my car, conducting what I can only describe as a mobile crisis assessment.
Here is what I have determined during those four circuits: I have committed myself to a deception of staggering proportions.
I have selected as my co-conspirator the same man who once got a candy cane stuck in his hair during the hospital Christmas party and had to have it surgically extracted by a laughing scrub nurse.
I am going to bring this man to my mother's estate in Rajasthan and present him to eighty-plus members of the Kapoor family as the love of my life.
This is going to be an unmitigated disaster.
I press the buzzer for apartment 3B. A tinny speaker crackles to life.
“Yo!”
I close my eyes. “Casey. It's Arjun.”
“Yeah, I know! I can see you on the camera. You've been circling the block. Come up, the door sticks so just shove it with your shoulder.”
The door buzzes. I shove it with my shoulder. It does not open. I shove harder. It does not open. I am a neurosurgeon. I have separated fused cranial plates with micro-instruments. I should be able to open a door.
I put my full body weight into it, and the door explodes inward with a violence that sends me stumbling into a narrow hallway that smells like cumin and Tide laundry detergent. Somewhere above me, I hear a bark.
Not a bark. A detonation. A deep, booming, chest-rattling BOOF that reverberates down the stairwell like cannon fire.
I climb three flights of stairs with increasing trepidation. The barking grows louder, accompanied by the distinct sound of enormous paws scrabbling on hardwood and a muffled “Oliver, OFF, buddy, we talked about this, OLIVER” from behind the door of 3B.
The door swings open, and Casey fills the doorframe like a human barricade.
He is wearing grey sweatpants. The sweatpants are doing a great deal of structural work.
I make a brisk, professional decision not to perform any further analysis below the equator of this man and lift my eyes, which is a tactical error of a different magnitude, because his t-shirt, faded Toronto Maple Leafs blue, is stretched so tightly across his chest that I can identify the individual heads of his pectoralis major without the aid of an imaging study.
His blond curls are sleep-chaotic, pushed in seventeen different directions by what was presumably a pillow but might as well have been the hand of a benevolent god with a particular aesthetic agenda.
He has a mug of coffee in one hand that reads “WORLD'S OKAYEST DOCTOR” in aggressive block letters.
I am, I note with detached clinical interest, experiencing a brief tachycardic episode. This is a normal physiological response to climbing three flights of stairs. I have a medical degree. I know how cardiovascular systems work.
“Hey! Come in, come in.” He steps back, grinning, and I step over the threshold. Into chaos.
Casey Welling's apartment is the physical manifestation of someone who has never once in their life heard the word “minimalism” and thought, yes, that's for me.
Every single square foot of the small apartment is occupied.
There are bookshelves stuffed past capacity, paperbacks jammed horizontally on top of vertically shelved hardcovers, medical textbooks stacked beside dog-eared Terry Pratchett novels.
There is an overstuffed corduroy sofa in a shade of burnt orange that I suspect was purchased secondhand.
There is a coffee table buried under hockey magazines, a half-completed jigsaw puzzle of a moose, and a plate with the remains of what appears to have been toast. The walls are covered in framed photos everywhere: Casey in a hockey jersey, arms around teammates; Casey on a dock somewhere, sun-browned and laughing; a woman with the same warm blue eyes and chaotic blonde curls, who I assume is his mother, holding a pie.
There is also a blanket on the floor that is covered in so much golden fur it has achieved sentience.
And then there is Oliver.
Oliver is a goldendoodle who obviously didn’t get the memo about being hypoallergenic and non-shedding.
I know this because Casey has mentioned him approximately nine hundred times in the two years we have worked together.
What Casey has failed to adequately convey is that Oliver is not a dog.
Oliver is a geological event. He is enormous, easily eighty pounds, with a massive, curly golden coat, liquid brown eyes the size of plums, and a tail that is currently wagging with such force that it is clearing the coffee table of magazines in rhythmic, devastating sweeps.
He sees me. His entire body vibrates. He lets out another BOOF, this one pitched upward with an almost musical quality of unhinged joy, and then he launches.
“Oliver, no. Oliver. OLIVER.”
Casey's warning comes approximately one-point-three seconds too late.
Eighty pounds of ecstatic goldendoodle hits me squarely in the chest, and I stagger backward into the door frame, my leather notebook flying from my hands.
Oliver is on his hind legs, his massive paws planted on my shoulders, his enormous pink tongue making a concentrated, dedicated attempt to lick every square centimetre of my face.
He smells like peanut butter and wet carpet.
“Oh my God, I'm so sorry, he does this with everyone, he has no concept of personal space.” Casey is grabbing Oliver's collar, trying to haul him off me, but the dog has the approximate mass and determination of a small horse and is not going anywhere. ” Oliver. Down. Off. This is not how we make good first impressions, buddy.”
I'm pressed against the doorframe of a Kensington Market apartment by Oliver the goldendoodle, my cashmere coat now dusted with golden fur, and the meticulous architecture of my hair has been demoted to suggestion. And I am trying very hard not to smile.
Because Oliver is warm, and ridiculous, and he is looking at me with so much immediate, uncomplicated adoration that something behind my ribs cracks, just slightly, like ice in the spring.
“It's fine,” I say, and my voice sounds strange to my own ears. Softer. I reach down and scratch behind Oliver's left ear, and his entire back half goes limp with pleasure. His tail redoubles its efforts. “He's... enthusiastic.”
Casey finally manages to wrangle Oliver down to four paws, but the dog immediately sits directly on my feet and leans his full weight against my legs, gazing up at me with an expression of devoted worship.
“He likes you,” Casey says, and there's something in his voice, something warm and surprised and almost tender, that I absolutely cannot consider at this point in time. “He rarely picks favourites that fast.”
“He has exceptionally poor judgment,” I say, but I don't move my feet.
I pick up my leather notebook from where it fell, brush a small constellation of golden fur off the cover, and follow Casey deeper into the apartment.
I step over a chew toy shaped like a rubber steak.
I navigate around a laundry basket that appears to contain both clean and dirty clothes in a filing system known only to Casey.
I pause at the kitchen table, which is a small, round oak surface covered in medical journals, hockey magazines, a half-eaten box of Uncrustables (grape flavour, so at least the man has baseline taste), three different phone chargers, and a potted succulent that is, against all botanical probability, thriving.
“Do you want coffee?” Casey asks, already moving toward the kitchen counter. “Fair warning, I only have the big mugs. And the milk might be... let me check.” He opens the fridge, sniffs something, makes a face, and puts it back. “Alright, so we're doing black coffee.”
“Black is how I take it.”
“Right, I knew that.”
He says it casually, tossing it over his shoulder while he reaches for a mug, and the motion does something to the long line of his back that I have no business cataloguing.
The cataloguing happens anyway. Three years of anatomy lectures and a fellowship in microsurgical technique, and my brain has selected this moment to inventory the latissimus dorsi of a colleague in a faded Leafs shirt.
The information lands in the centre of my chest with the force of a thrown scalpel: this man, who seemingly cannot organize a laundry basket, has catalogued my coffee preference.
I have, apparently, been cataloguing things in return.
I had not previously been aware of this.