Girls Fall Down Read online

  ‘Yeah,’ said the other man, staring out the window. ‘They’re totally.’

  The metallic voice of the PA system interrupted to tell them that the train was terminating, and that they should go to Queen Street to catch a bus northbound. They joined the flow from the train and up the escalator, pausing on the next level. A group of people were gathered at the wall with the map of the PATH system, that complex underground skeleton of corridors and courtyards that could lead them into the malls or the banks, the bus terminal or City Hall, outlining the shape of the downtown core in concrete and tile.

  ‘It’s like they’re not even the same breed as us, you know?’ said the bass player, as they stepped onto another elevator.

  ‘Fuckin’ A,’ said his friend.

  ‘Somebody must of jumped on the tracks, eh? ’Cause it happens like every day, but they don’t admit it. It’s like a public policy they don’t admit it.’

  ‘Fuckers.’

  ‘Or it could be one of those, you know, Middle East things, you know, about the war with Iran or whatever.’

  ‘Iraq,’ said the other man. ‘They’re gonna have a war with Iraq is where.’

  ‘No,’ said the bass player. ‘No, I gotta tell you, man, I’m pretty sure it’s Iran.’

  They stepped out into the chilly evening, the corners of the wide streets filled, the tall glass windows of HMV reflecting the arms of people waving at the buses, pushing for space.

  ‘You know what, man?’ said the bass player. ‘Screw this, is what. I’m seriously going home.’

  Between Broadview and Castle Frank, one train waited, poised on the bridge over the ravine. A man with a briefcase took out a tiny silver phone and sighed impatiently. ‘Yeah, the train’s stuck again… I don’t know… I don’t know…’ Beside him, a pasty-faced boy in enormous pants stared solemnly at a piece of paper on which he had written the heading RAP SONG, and carefully printed I get more head than King Kong/My style is grim and… He studied the page for a few minutes, changed grim to grem, looked at it for a while longer, and changed it back again. In the seat at right angles to the boy was a couple, probably in their sixties, their faces pouchy and collapsed. The man was very drunk, a smear of alcohol fumes in the air around him, his eyes closed in half-sleep, his head on the woman’s shoulder. She was staring ahead, not smiling, not frowning, blank and still.

  Another woman looked out the window, down into the ravine, seeing a red tent half-hidden among the trees at the edge of the twisting river. She spread one hand against the window and watched the rain begin to fall, leaving tiny flaws in the water’s surface, thrumming against the sides of the tent.

  Even past Spadina, the traffic seemed locked in a permanent snarl, but when Alex got onto the Bathurst streetcar it was no more crowded than usual. There were no visible effects of the subway incident, but he thought that people did know somehow, fragments and rumours; he was not even sure why he thought this, except for a slight modulation in the atmosphere, a measure of silence, glances of quiet complicity between the Portuguese housewives and the Asian teenagers. He got off the streetcar at College and walked west in the darkness, the rain stinging his face, the fabric of his pants clinging to his knees and calves.

  Just past Euclid, a shape moved out of a doorway and into the pool of a streetlight. A man, a big shambling man, with matted red hair and a heavy beard, three layers of ravelling sweaters, his hands shaking, his feet crammed into a pair of women’s fur-lined boots that had split along the seams of the fake leather. ‘Excuse me, sir?’ he said, his voice soft and interrogative, surprisingly high-pitched. ‘Excuse me? I hate to trouble you, sir, but I’m being held hostage by terrorists, would you happen to have any spare change, sir?’

  Alex reached into his pocket and found a two-dollar coin, dropped it into the extended hand, a pale mass of flesh, blue veins standing out. ‘Thank you so much, sir,’ said the man, retreating back into the alley. ‘I wouldn’t ask, sir, only I’m being held hostage by terrorists.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Alex.

  ‘But I’m on cleaning systems now. It’s a lot better since I got on cleaning systems.’

  ‘That’s good, that’s great. Keep it up.’

  One day last month he had been walking in front of the Scott Mission, and two men were standing outside, men with bashed-up swollen faces and rheumy eyes, shouting, ‘No war! No war! Peace for the Middle East!’ He’d wanted to film them, send it to the news, grassroots political initiatives, but what happened at the Scott Mission was in a different dimension, he knew that, a borderline zone whose intersections with the world of agreed reality were tenuous at best.

  His apartment was just short of Grace Street, on the third floor, up a narrow flight of stairs; when he moved in, it had been above a cluttered little store selling saucepans and floral-print dresses to middle-aged Italian women, but now the store had been replaced by a café with pine tables and rag-painted walls, and his rent had risen precipitously. It seemed odd to him that he could still afford to live here, but in fact he could – he had a good job, he was a proper adult, there shouldn’t be anything so surprising about that.

  He unlocked his door and went in, shouldering off his wet coat. Queen Jane shifted vaguely on the couch and batted her tail a few times, then went back to sleep. He sat down beside her, absently stroking her grey fur and inspecting his feet for any blisters that might be forming.

  He took a small fabric case from his coat pocket, opened up his glucometer, unwrapped a sterile needle and looked at his fingers to see if any of them were developing calluses; the right index looked best today, so he pierced it with the needle and squeezed a dark bubble of blood onto the test strip. The sugar count was well within his target range. He slid out a syringe and a little glass bottle of insulin and carefully drew the clear liquid into the barrel, inspecting it for air bubbles, then pulled up his shirt and pressed the needle into the skin of his abdomen. He capped and broke the syringe and went into the kitchen, dropping it into the plastic bucket that he used as a sharps container, opened a tin of lentil soup, sliced a bagel and put it into the toaster.

  You would expect yourself to be more curious, he thought, when a thing like this happened. You could speculate, now and then, on just how you’d react to a genuinely important incident, but really what you did, it seemed, was to incorporate it almost instantly into the flow of daily life – the way he had gone on with his routine the day the planes flew into the buildings in New York, the way he had gone from his errand at the bank to his office at the hospital, had spent most of the day at his computer, and forgotten for minutes at a time that anything was wrong. The way you could spend the afternoon in what might perfectly well have been a poison gas attack, check your skin casually for a rash, and not bother with the radio. As long as no one you knew was hurt or sick, you were at least as interested in hearing about a girl you thought you were in love with fifteen years ago.

  He wondered if she still called herself Susie-Paul. Probably not. It sounded like she was using Suzanne now. Suzanne Paulina Rae.

  He chewed on the bagel and the sharp crumbling cheddar, mopping up the insulin before his blood sugar dropped too low, the intricate dance of chemical balance that he could never ignore, never leave to run automatically as most people did.

  There was a photograph he sometimes came across, loose among his files, not properly stored and catalogued like the others because it wasn’t one he’d taken himself. A loose colour print of a dozen people, arranged against the wall of the newspaper office, all of them in their twenties, clear-eyed, effortlessly beautiful. Susie-Paul and Chris were well into the final disintegration of their relationship by then, the paper nearly as far along the road to its own collapse, and the people in the photograph were each in their various ways tense, unhappy, embarrassed. Adrian, who was by no stretch of the imagination a member of staff, had been installed on the sagging couch between Susie and Chris as a kind of human Green Line; he was frowning and adjusting his glasses, o
ne sneakered foot curled up on the cushion beside him. Chris, in a heavy sweater and corduroys, faced the camera down, his face hurt and determined under a forced smile. Susie was looking away, apparently speaking to someone. She was wearing a little flowered sundress over a pair of jeans, and a torn brown leather bomber jacket; her hair, in a feathery bob, was dyed a startling pink, the camera emphasizing her large dark eyes.

  Looking out of the frame, he thought. As if there were someone beyond the picture who had a claim on her attention, more than any of the people around her. It had always been that way.

  And far over to the other side was Alex, the rarely photographed photographer, a slender young man in black jeans and a black cotton shirt, staring down at the floor, long sand-coloured hair falling over his face like a screen. Adrian probably assumed that Alex and Susie-Paul had been sleeping together when the photo was taken; a number of people believed this, it was one of the generally accepted reasons for Chris and Susie’s rather noisy and public breakup and the subsequent failure of the paper. Alex couldn’t remember now who had taken that picture – it didn’t look like a professional shot – but whoever it was, they or the camera had been more perceptive, had understood that Alex’s real position was then, as ever, at the margin, a half-observed watcher of the greater dramas.

  I don’t know, said the girl, lying on a cot in the hospital, her legs covered with a sheet. I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I don’t know.

  They had been doing nothing, her friends said, talking to the doctors in the hallway. They went to Starbucks. They walked in the park. They got on the subway and then she said she was sick, and they thought maybe there was a funny smell, and she said yes, there was this rose kind of smell, but she was too sick to tell them much, and then the other one fell down as well, and they could all smell it now, and somebody ought to do something because it totally wasn’t right.

  The white figures bent to the floor of the subway car, their heads lowered, their eyes intent behind the masks. They searched for traces of liquid or powder, greasy smears; they collected old newspapers and food wrappers and sealed them into plastic containers. The instruments registered no danger. The tests they could perform in the small metal space of the car told them of nothing, of absence. They would take their sealed containers to a secure lab for further testing. The girls in the hospital watched their blood flow into tubes that would be carried to another specialized facility, but the blood would say the same thing, it would say that it could tell them nothing.

  The rain was turning into a light icy snowfall now – not too bad, not impossible weather to work in. For a minute Alex leaned back against the wall, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness before he walked to the streetcar stop.

  He did not admit to urgency. He did not admit to himself that missing even a single night bothered him, that this was becoming compulsive. He had always worked on his own projects in his free time, legitimate creative projects that were exhibited and published here and there, and he would not grant that he was behaving differently now.

  He took his Nikon with him, and a shoulder bag with lenses and rolls of film. The digital technology was getting very good, he could see why a lot of people had made the shift, but he still preferred film for his own work, still liked the darkroom process, the smell of chemicals and craftwork on his hands. The Nikon was his standard personal camera. There was also the old Leica, but that was special – it was quirky, felt somehow intimate and tactile. There was a particular kind of photography that needed the Leica; he didn’t use it very often.

  He had always done this. Maybe not every night. It was true that he spent more time on it now. He’d broken up a while ago with Kim, a graphic designer he’d been seeing in a rather desultory fashion anyway. Sometimes the people in the imaging and computer departments of the hospital went out together, but missing these occasions seemed like no great loss.

  Instead he wandered – down to the junkies and evangelists of Regent Park, or up the silent undulating hills of Rosedale, taking pictures by the pale light laid down from the windows of the mansions. Through dangerous highway underpasses to the lake, slick shimmering water rasping on the shores by deserted factories. To the bus station, the railway station, the suburban malls where his footsteps echoed by shuttered stores in the evening.

  Tonight, perhaps because he’d been thinking about Susie-Paul and the paper, he went only as far as the university, got off the streetcar at St. George and started walking north. It seemed surprisingly quiet, the broad pavements almost empty. Maybe the students left the campus in the evenings. Or maybe students these days didn’t go out, maybe they stayed in their rooms and read books about management techniques – but he was showing his age, one of those old people who no longer complained that students were too wild, but that they were too good, they ate right and married young.

  Susie had been his grand passion, he supposed. The phrase amused him. A grand passion. Everybody needed one. Not the most serious relationship necessarily, or the most real – that was surely Amy, who had lived with him, who he might almost have married – but the one that burned you out, broke you to pieces for a while. At some point in your life before you were thirty, you needed to be able to listen to ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ and cry real tears.

  Outside the Robarts Library, he took a picture of a nervous girl buying french fries from a cart, then stepped back and shot a series of faint human figures, hurrying under the brutalist concrete shoulders of the massive building, blurred by the tall lights and the faint haze of snow. The wind whipped his scarf across his face as he walked up the broad curve of the stairway. He pushed open the glass door and went into the library’s forced-air warmth. He was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to take pictures here, but he usually managed a few, inconspicuously. A row of students awkwardly curled up asleep in the chairs; an elderly man in rubber boots, puddles around his feet, reading one magazine after another.

  He left the library and kept walking, east past the darkness in Queen’s Park, statues and whispering men among the trees, then the cheap bright flare of Yonge Street, ADULT DANCERS and VIdEOS HAfL-PRiC, the neon signs reflecting in nearby windows like flame.

  The white figures rose up from the station, the air judged innocent, uncontaminated, to the extent that the instruments could detect.

  This is the nature of safety in the measured world – you can be certain of the presence of danger, but you can never guarantee its absence. No measurement quite trusts itself down to zero, down to absolute lack. All that the dials and lights and delicate reactions can tell you is that the instruments recognize no peril. You can be reassured by this, or not, as you choose.

  It was later on that night, and Alex had come home, packed away his film and lenses. He was in the kitchen reaching for a jar of peanut butter, not thinking about anything in particular, when he caught himself blinking.

  There was something in his field of vision.

  He blinked again, and it didn’t go away. He shook his head quickly, knowing this was useless. No change. Tiny black spots, just two or three. Up a bit and to the right. He closed his right eye, leaning against the counter. Standing in the empty kitchen, listening to the sound of his heart.

  II

  In the hour before dawn, the city is private and surprisingly cheerful, optimistic; hopeful, in the dark, of the coming day, the sunrise a slow dilution of shadow, a grey wash over the sky, tinged gently with pink.

  On the Danforth, a handful of people sat in a coffee shop drinking espresso. A man and a woman, who met here every morning before work; he was bearded and aging, she was younger, black-haired, round-faced. Another woman in a second-hand army parka, reading a newspaper. A policeman buying muffins to take away. These were the ones who rose early and ventured out with the wind, at the coldest time on the clock.

  Across the river, among the towers of St. Jamestown, a Somali girl tightened her head scarf, zipped up her red jacket and set out on her bike to deliver newspapers, and on the stree
t an Iranian man who had once been a doctor cleaned vomit from the back seat of his taxi. A woman put a pan of milk on the burner of her stove, and stared at the creamy ripples on the surface.

  The subway began to run, the first train on each line half-empty, the second and third filling up as the rush hour gathered mass and density. Underground bakeries drew fresh pastries out of metal ovens, the sweet hot smell of dough and yeast touching the platforms.

  Alex left for work early. He had barely slept anyway. The floaters in his right eye were a shock, maybe more of a shock than they should have been, and he was far too anxious, too wound up to sleep, only skimming and plunging for a few hours through tangled twilight dreams. It was a relief to be outside, to drink hot tea with milk and sugar from his plastic travel mug as he rode the College streetcar, the world solidifying around him. On the northbound subway, a tall and muscular Buddhist monk, with orange robes and a shining round head, was fingering a circlet of wooden beads, a tiny secret smile playing over his lips, as he listened to three girls across the aisle from him having a nearly unintelligible giggling conversation on the general theme of chocolate cake.

  Alex arrived at the hospital during the hollow quiet of the morning shift change, his footsteps audible in the lobby, and went up to his office, unlocking the door and booting up the computer. When he checked his voice mail, he found a message already waiting for him – an unexpected work call from the cardiac OR, scheduled to start within an hour. He downloaded his mail, looked it over quickly, then collected his equipment and took the elevator up to the surgical floor.

  In the prep room, he reached into the rack for a green gown, tied on a mask and slid disposable gloves over his hands. Despite the gear, he would not be sterile, not fully scrubbed in; that was the normal procedure, the photographer only ambiguously part of the team, outside the sterile field. Thus the first and most unbreakable rule, that he and his camera must under no circumstances touch anyone or anything.