Beethoven on Bloor Street
by K. Zimmer
Zine #47 — November 2025
Say what is to become of me since my heart has turned such a rebel.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
"My Summer with Beethoven" is part of the Up:Rising Anthology, A Collection of Rebellious Imaginings from Authors with Lived Experience of Mental Health & Addictions, coming to Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness in November 2025
When spring of 2021 modulated to the summer key, the music in my mind crescendoed the manic conviction that I was Beethoven’s messenger. The revolutionary composer still had a lot of music to write, but given the inconvenience of being dead he needed someone to score his death-defying sonatas, and that someone happened to be me.
At 4:45 a.m. on July 27, I send my psychiatrist a 6,815 word email. I am hurtling and hurting through space at a manic pace as time escapes me. I am writing about quantum theory, the Great Confinement, hermeneutical injustice, my affinity for slugs, and the “iridescent explosion of Beethoven” in my spirit, amongst other casual topics. After hours of uninterrupted typing at the whim of hypergraphia, I leave my psychiatrist with this neutral sign off:
~ metaphysical slug ~ haha I’m a slug time to teach myself quantum theory I’m a slug!
The next day I leave my apartment to find where I’m going. I bring a backpack stuffed with notebooks, pens, three sheets of poster paper, seventeen neon-coloured Sharpies, Beethoven’s letters, Beethoven’s first volume of piano sonatas, and manuscript with empty staves to absorb the melodies in my mind. Earphones for music and cell phone in case the muse calls. I leave not knowing where I’m going but knowing that I won’t be coming back.
I stumble into the world holding my notebook, wandering the streets, roaming the trafficked roads. In the summer-sticky heat, I am looking for infinity and the moment whole in signs beyond street signs. I write while I walk, the pen outrunning my footsteps, my mind outrunning the pen. When I look up from my notebook, I’m in front of a Popeyes somewhere along Bloor Street. My god, there it is… Pop eyes OPEN. Sign urging us to wake up, to see how far we’ve strayed from life. The Book of Revelation, Popeyes edition. Drivers lean on their horns and out their windows, warning me to get out of the way. I conduct the klaxoned symphony of beeps and honks, car horns turned French horns, turned tenor and bass trombones, turned euphoniums, turned euphonia, euphoria—this is the orchestral swell of brass. Under the red stoplight turned spotlight, I take center stage in the middle of the crossing intersection between Bloor and Havelock Street. The heckling honks sound like applause as I revel in my manic rebellion against the motion of traffic, the pace of the city, the way of the world. I stand in the middle of the crosswalk, whose ten black and white zebrine lines draw a blank musical stave. I hop across three consecutive lines, my feet notating an undefined broken chord before launching intervallic leaps across the street staff lines, shuffling the chord from root position to first then second inversion in hopscotched arpeggiation. All the world’s a stave, and I am its composer.
After an interlude of madness along Bloor, an ambulance arrives. The paramedic takes my vitals. My blood pressure falls on the lower end of the spectrum, 90/62 mmHg, a dizzy but doable systolic/diastolic fraction. I am not worried. I am in the relief and reprieve of cold air and sunburn-cooling shade. I begin to worry when the paramedic attempts small talk about matters that feel anything but small.
“Alright, K. We’re just gonna wait here for some visitors to take you to CAMH.” He decorates a dark reality.
“Is ‘visitors’ a euphemism for police?” I ask without needing an answer. The paramedic nods slowly, almost invisibly. “Why can’t you take me to CAMH? I know how to get there! I can tell you where to go! Look, just go down Dundas and—”
After several attempts, the paramedic pierces my unravelling fear, “Paramedics aren’t allowed to take people straight to CAMH. It’s up to the police.”
A terrifying, imminent future unfolds before me. I look at his blue eyes and wonder if he can see the fright in mine. I say the lines I’ve come to memorize.
“Police aren’t trained in psychiatric care. Their intervention is always carceral, often violent, and sometimes deadly. You know that’s wrong, right?” A sad resignation swallows the splendor that swirled around me a minute ago. Again, the barely-there slow nod. “We can change that, you and me, right now. We could write to members of parliament, reach out to local and national news outlets and expose the truth—you bring the paramedic perspective, I bring the lived experience. We can’t do this work alone, but together—together…” Polemic possibilities open worlds of potential for us to potentially change the world. It would only take his trust. It only takes the shake of his head to close all prospects. I seem to forget that the world works against, not with, the mad. Note to self: don’t forget to remember. I am constantly miscalculating my odds at connection. There is no solution for now. The police are on their way.
In math, parentheses are the first order of operation. In language, parentheses hold the power of pause. I parenthesize my madness with first-order-of-operation urgency. Impossibly, I pause psychosis to access the rational. The police are coming for you. The police carry guns. You will see a gun today. Rein in your Eurekas, don’t ask them if they’ve “found infinity” (they haven’t), and for God’s sake, don’t tell them you’re talking to Beethoven.
The visitors come. Bodyguard bulked, uniformed, and uninformed, they did not come dressed for a crisis intervention party. The dress code was mental health professional, social worker, nurse, community support, anyone kind, anyone else. Ill-suited and uninvited, the police come with guns for hip flasks. BYOG. I know this isn’t really a party. But is this really a crisis? If so, whose crisis? Not mine. The police escort me out of the cool ambulance air and corner me into the back of their car. They lock my belongings in their trunk. If I need to call for help, my phone is beyond reach along with everyone else. In the back of the police car, I have only myself. I am apprehensive and apprehended without being understood, criminalized without having committed a crime. Unless.
I try to remember the crimes I must have committed and must have forgotten. Maybe I am psychotic. Maybe I’ve been living a delusion of innocence to blanket my mind from the unbearable, unspeakable harm I must have caused. I must have forgotten to remember the people I’ve hurt. Maybe I was never Beethoven’s scribe. Foolish delusion is one thing; delusional denial is quite another. Maybe my denial lies in the delusion that I’m a lover of words and wordplay and rhyme, of music and modal mixture and harmonic resolution after dissonant tension. Maybe I’ve never loved anything or anyone. Maybe I’ve been a monster all along. I close my eyes.
Sandpapery rub of eyelids over dry sclera, saline sting of sweat and tears. I never knew eyeballs could feel this warm.
I must have been in the still-unmoving car for fifteen minutes, but I cannot be sure.
Without my phone, I have no timekeeping device. If you cannot keep time, you lose the tempo and rhythm of music. And you run out of the thing you can’t keep. I am running out of time on offbeat, stressed metrical feet in a losing race against indifferent cops. The heat becomes unbearable. My knuckles knock on the prisoner partition that separates cops from criminal.
“Hey, it’s really hot in here… Why haven’t we left?… Why aren’t you saying anything, can you hear me?… Please, it’s really getting too hot… Say something back! Hello? hello..? hell. help. help!” At the helm of my ownership, the police steer and ignore me into invisible, inaudible waters. I tear off my mask and bang on the windows and scream until I am more howl than human. “Somebody help! help me! helpme!” This annoys the cops. The one officer looks over her shoulder to scold me.
“We’re giving you a free ride to CAMH. What else do you want?”
I want to cry. My mouth goes slack, stunned by her words. For a second, I’m almost impressed. If I weren’t burning, I would have burst out laughing.
“Are you gonna tell us what the problem is, or are you gonna settle down?” “Please turn on the AC, I’m begging you. It’s hard to breathe.”
“Well, the AC is on and it’s 23 degrees up here.” Free Ride cop flashes one of her fancy devices at me. “Look, see?” A big 23°C gloats on the screen as if to say, happy now? She seems to forget the plastic panel between us. Sheets like these are typically made of polycarbonate or some other greedy polymer whose insulating properties resist extreme temperature shifts. Or something like that. Chemistry was never my forte. The point is, none of the cool air reaches me.
“But there’s no AC in the back!”
The cops roll their eyes at each other, code for she’s just being difficult. I bang on the side window. She’s just being dramatic. Onlookers look in, innumerable pairs of eyes both intrigued and horrified. Strangers shrug their shoulders. Everyone looks sad before looking away. When the police are harming you, no one can help. In a cop’s car, no one can hear you scream. I might be in space after all. Then again, I might be an alien on Earth. I’m more convinced and terrified of the latter. My throat runs itself raw, vocal cords stretching along the chorus of an a capella solo with uncontrollable vibrato, voice trembling behind the bars of the treble clef staff. somebody help me, can anyone hear me - - - decrescendo - - - helpme, canyouhearme - - - diminuendo - - - help - - - tacet. Vocal folds resign; fists flatten into palms and slide down the sticky glass, leaving a condensation trail of defeat. This is my folding hot poker hand. This is the Greek origin of trauma, traume, meaning “a hurt, a wound, a defeat.” Trauma splits life into befores and afters. I am not the same person I was before being put in this car. The problem is, I don’t know who I am in the after. I am still in the car, and the car still hasn’t moved.
In the particle-scrambling heat and claustrophobic pressure, my mind spins a wheel of catastrophes. What-ifs asterisk the center. What if I can’t get out? What if oxygen runs out? What if I’m trapped in a space that life escapes?
I rest my forehead against the window and try to fictionalize a cooling surface against my brow. Pretend to temper the racing heart rate to an adagio tempo; imagine the smooth glass blunting the headache spike; beat your wings in a fight and flight of fancy; reach escape velocity with your mind. But the sun melts the wax of my wings. The fairy tale fails, and all I can do is fall. All I feel is window pain, the wound in the wound-up windows. Fiction was never my strong suit.
A woman and a young girl, maybe mother and child, pause outside the cop car for a moment’s fraction whose brevity somehow reaches timelessness, like a musical caesura suspending the beat, double-dashing time altogether. The mother looks at me almost apologetically, tapping a comforting hand on her daughter’s backpack-strapped shoulders. As if to say it’s just a scary movie, as if to say it’s okay. After the shoulder-patting interlude, the woman’s hand reaches for the girl’s. As if to say here, here… there, there. I won’t forget to remember the girl’s pink leggings, her pink Velcro running shoes, her glittery pink backpack reflecting endless specks of sun. She must have been about five or six. I remember when I was her age, when pink was my favourite colour too, when the scale of my struggles was relatively minor and the song of my childhood modulated to the relative major scale, like Beethoven’s relative E♭major emerging from his beloved C minor. Watching the girl walk away, I hear the first movement of life’s sonata: the rose-tinted capriccioso, sugar-sweet dolcissimo, tender-soft delicato song of childhood in a key that could lift life’s future minor chords, a key that could flatten the sharp notes in the following movements. A key like E♭major. Yes, there it is, and here’s the melody. I’ve unlocked the door to melodic escape. But the music decrescendos to a barely there pianissimo as the girl shrinks in the distance. Mother and daughter now two, faraway, hand-holding figures I could hold in my own. I closed my eyelids to the indelible image of the girl looking at me, young eyes seeing a stranger behind a tinted cop car window, a vignette of life without the rose tint. The stretch of distance snaps our shared line of sight. I stop hearing the music. My only glitter of hope fades with the last of her backpack’s glimmer.
Click of key unlocking ignition switch. The engine growls. I stretch the seatbelt across my chest and hold onto the diagonal promise of safety, but the promise refuses to hold me. My fingers fish for a buckle buried in the crease of the sunbaked seats, but the hot vinyl sting ejects my hand with flashback speed. I tap the partition cage with a tingling fingertip.
“Hey, how come there’s no seatbelt buckle?”
“There are no buckles in the back,” Free Ride cop answers, answering nothing. I bristle at her brashness, her monotone voice stuck in “scold” mode, her stupid tautology. Time for the Socratic method.
“Why not?”
“‘Cause that’s the way it is.” Argumentum ad antiquitatem. She fails to see the fallacy. “Then how do you keep people safe?”
Free Ride cop sighs through her nose. “We drive carefully.”
“But how do you keep people safe, since you can’t control how other drivers drive— that’s an example of polyptoton, not that you’d care.” The cop stops giving me non-answers and gives me the silent treatment instead. Without a corresponding buckle, a latch plate leads to nowhere, like a sentence that abandons itself, like an unanswered question. I let go of the seatbelt. Hiss of strap slithering back into retractor, safety retracted, redacted. “Serve and protect” in theory, severed protection in practice.
My muscles strain against the motion of the car, seeking stability in vain, in pain. I brace myself against myself because everything else is too hot to touch. I flinch every time my arms touch the seats, every point of contact a shock of trapped sun, black vinyl absorbing all wavelengths of light, reflecting none. Ultraviolent radiation. I am taken by the greed of this space that swallows all light and life. I begin to commiserate with the heat: we are both trapped in here. The hot air rises with me as I drift further from the rest.
Somewhere along Dundas, a primal pragmatism overtakes all matters of mind and my body semaphores mayday signals. Get out. Water quick. Dizzythirsty. Brain blink brain blank brain black. Hot pulse percussing ear drums. Sour taste and curl of nausea. Temptation to slip into sleep, to fall into eyelid-black oblivion, to rest at last. Don’t you dare. If I sleep, I might faint; if I faint, I might—fight it. I’ve fainted three times in the last year, orthostatic hypotension dropping blood pressure to 72/51 mmHg. Each blink casts a reddish glow, reminding me of that time I fell to the floor and couldn’t see for ten of the most terrifying minutes. The unbearable weight of eyelids. DO NOT CLOSE. My thirst reminds me of that time I needed intravenous rehydration. I fantasize about the steady drip of a sodium chloride solution. Mmmmm… IV fluids… Eyes close… PROP EYES OPEN! I anchor myself to awakeness. Whether or not I’m dying, I think that I am. But these are the facts:
On July 28, 2021, it is 25°C in the afternoon.
After two hours in 25°C, a car with closed windows and no air conditioning reaches an internal temperature of 50°C.
Google Maps tells me the drive from 1776 Bloor St W to CAMH takes 15 minutes via Dundas. The wait time in the parked car felt longer.
After 30 minutes in 50°C, the body risks hyperthermia. First signs: dizziness, weakness, nausea, headache, thirst.
I faint and come to, faint and come to.
The police park in front of CAMH’s emergency entrance and open my door. I throw myself outside and hurl spittle-flecked rage.
“You get in there and tell me if that’s humane!”
“I will not be getting in the car.” First words from Free Ride cop’s sidekick. “STICK YOUR ARM IN AND FEEL A FRAGMENT OF WHAT I FELT!”
Both cops cuff my upper arms with their hands. Their massive fingers overlap the 17cm circumference of my upper arms. I brace against the clench of capture, my feet planting futile roots in the infertile concrete, but the numbers are not in my favour. The officers maneuver all 158cm of my build, unmoor the 39kg anchor of my body, and drag me into the emergency department. I don’t know the officers’ measurements or proportions, but I don’t need a measuring tape to tell me their force was disproportionate. Disproportionate but not deadly.
The cops wait with me in the emergency room reserved for police-accompanied patients. I stand on the weighted chair, my manic hands orchestrating the music the cops can’t hear. My skin stings with rage and I’m mad as hell, but I am a symphony of feeling, alive in fortissimo, and when I play “Ode to Joy” on my phone at full volume, I swear Beethoven can finally hear his masterpiece.
About the Author
K. Zimmer (they/she) is a Mad/disabled writer, musician, artist, and performer. They have poetry and prose in The Vault, Lived Collective, Workman Arts’ Literary Anthology, and Feels Zine, where they are a regular contributor. Their live readings include Feels Zine, With/out Pretend, Issues Magazine Shop, and literary symposia at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, the University of Calgary, and York University. In their disability advocacy, they’ve presented their work about ableism in academia at several universities, work which featured in The Toronto Star. They are trained in classical piano and have composed music for independent production companies. Their artwork has been displayed at Show Gallery and Nuit Blanche. As an actor, they performed in “Passport to Madville” (hosted by Workman Arts), the Hamilton Fringe Festival, and the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival. They were the 2025 Workman Arts literary artist in residence. The Toronto Arts Council funded their book in progress.