All the Anxious Girls on Earth

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  She looked like someone who wrote intense graffiti on toilet stall doors. She looked like someone who might one day try to set herself on fire.

  Behind her wavered a sea of young people, all white-faced, black-lipped and elaborately pierced.

  “This cake is so good!” A middle-aged woman in black sweatpants, black flip-flops and black toenail polish beside Lewis licked her fingers with gusto and then stuck her tongue out. “Is my tongue blue?”

  It was. And so were her teeth, which still had bits of cake stuck between them and something orange as well that the woman must have eaten earlier.

  “Let me see yours.” The woman was one of those aggressively sociable types that often showed up at Lila’s causes. The kind that bullied people into participating.

  “Come on, open up.” Lewis opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue, but only because she was afraid the woman would actually try to pry it open with a saliva-coated finger if she didn’t play along.

  “Yours is blue, too!” The woman seemed genuinely delighted. Now they were sisters. Now they were of a tribe. All around them, people were sticking their tongues out at each other, blue tongues glistening in the sudden sunshine, and laughing loosely. What would be appropriate now, Lewis thought, would be to feel a surge of love for all these playful, well-meaning people. People who believed in saving things. Or at least in attending lawn parties with total strangers.

  Lila appeared at her side and squeezed her shoulder. “I’m so glad you could come.” She made two little fists and danced around, jabbing at the air. “I think we’re really going to do it this time. I think we’re really going to beat the bastards.”

  Unlike Lila, Lewis didn’t think you ever could really beat the bastards. You just got a chance to do some fancy footwork, get in a few punches, before you got KO’d. The problem was that you never really knew who the bastards were. Mostly you just fooled yourself into thinking they were over there somewhere. But Lewis suspected they were closer to home. Ich bin ein Bastard. Weren’t they all? A bunch of little bastards pretending everything rotten was someone else’s fault.

  “Come on, open up, let’s see your tongue,” the flip-flop woman commanded Lila.

  Lewis was distracted by the flash of something green and familiar behind a broken basement window at the side of the house, beside the loose drainpipe. She turned her head so fast her neck burned viciously. Dry heat rose in waves off her skin. She was sure that if someone looked at her now, really looked at her, they would see the flames rising from her collarbone and licking her right ear.

  A dragonfly zipped by, bottle blue and fat. The flip-flop woman said something about it sewing her lips shut, clapping her hand over her mouth and giggling that maybe there was really something to old wives’ tales. “Don’t I wish,” Lewis thought, looking right at her. She didn’t realize she’d said it out loud until the woman turned abruptly and stomped away, plastic sandals thwacking against her moist, pink heels, sending dandelion fluff spinning into the air.

  The little green-haired girl ate slowly and with intense concentration. She had been at it since midmorning, licking each flat wooden paddle clean before moving on to the next vat. A few customers drifted through the store, lifting samples to their noses, dipping their pinkies into the face masks and creams. Raspberry Buffalo, a new one, seemed to be a particular favourite. But when they saw what the green-haired girl was doing, they made a big show of giving her a wide berth, as if her weird hunger was contagious, or that in her dreadlocked rapaciousness she might actually take a bite of their own clean, lightly perfumed flesh. They glanced to see if Lewis was looking and narrowed their eyes, inviting her censure. They wanted her to do something.

  One older woman, with the blunt grey bangs and well-knit Cowichan sweater of a Point Grey matron—the kind of woman who could, no doubt, identify all the birds that arrived at the feeder on her back patio and had a handsome son studying geophysics at UBC, and a husband, faithful or not, who built their fireplace mantle by hand on weekends from granite they had quarried themselves en famille from Nelson Island, a place you could only arrive at by private boat—came up to Lewis at the counter.

  “That young woman,” she motioned towards the green-haired girl, “is going to make herself sick.”

  “You ate some.” Lewis made sure she smiled as she said this, a bravado smile flush with truth. And it was true. The woman had tried the Raspberry Buffalo. She had dunked her middle finger in quickly and then popped it into her mouth. And then went off into a reverie as if the taste reminded her of something but she wasn’t quite sure what. Happier times certainly.

  “I tasted it. Even a little bit of Lysol won’t kill you.”

  “She’s hungry.”

  “Well, I’ll go get her a sandwich. I’ll get her something from the Bread Garden.” She was already reaching into her canvas shoulder bag and pulling out her wallet. Lewis didn’t want to argue with this woman who seemed so well-intentioned, but it struck her, as though through layers of cold air, that the green-haired girl was hers. Hers to save or not to save. She was the bird at Lewis’s feeder, and this woman couldn’t have her.

  “She seems to prefer personal hygiene products.”

  “I’d like to use your phone, please. I’d like to call an ambulance.” Lewis admired how matter-of-factly the woman said this. The veins in her neck didn’t tighten and she didn’t sound the least bit testy. There was something very Lila-like about her and Lewis felt like crawling up onto the counter and resting her flaming forehead against the woman’s thick-knit bosom, which would no doubt have the sweet hand-washed smell of Woolite or Zero. This was the thing you did when there was a problem you couldn’t handle. You picked up a telephone and you dialled 911. You didn’t make jokes. You didn’t laugh. You didn’t pick up used syringes from the ground while you waited for the bus and jab them into the grub-like blue veins under your tongue.

  Lewis reached for the phone and was about to push it across the counter towards the woman. Then she pictured the green-haired girl in the stainless steel bathroom of a hospital ward desperately gulping generic shampoo from a litre bottle while she showered, or gnawing on bars of soap under the thin covers of her cot while the anorexic in the next bed quietly wept in her sleep, jerking at her IV so that the stand rattled against the floor. The shadow of the little man who thought he was a vacuum cleaner passed back and forth across the doorway of the room all night as he went up and down the hallway on his hands and knees, hoovering up any small debris the cleaner might have left behind, a cellophane candy wrapper catching in his throat and crackling loudly, like the loose corrugated metal sides of the shacks at a deserted research station on the tip of the Antarctic crackled incessantly in the wind although there was no one there to hear them.

  Lewis kept her hand on the receiver. “I’ll take care of it. She’s my friend.”

  She liked the sound of that. My little green-haired friend. As if she had a pal from Mars.

  Everyone knew that too little oxygen could be dangerous. When you were oxygen deprived your nose bled and when you reached dizzying altitudes the blood vessels in your eyes started to pop. But what about too much oxygen? Maybe at a certain point the health benefits peaked and began to tip into the red. At sea level, surrounded by so many trees, maybe they were all overdosing, Lewis thought. She felt heavier and heavier every day. She had this obscene sense of gravity.

  Up in the Entercom building, though, she felt lighter, as if the air was truly thinner seventeen storeys above sea level. If she pressed herself flat against the big living-room window, naked except for a pair of boxer shorts, so flat that her breasts pancaked out like during a mammogram, so flat that her eyeballs were almost touching the glass and her breath fogged the surface in a wreath around her head, it seemed as if she was actually floating in the air over the inlet, over the Taiwanese tankers filled with Polish sailors, over the glowing heaps of slag and lime and sawdust, over the whole twinkling mess down there where everyone seemed to be trying so
hard to prove they could be something if only someone else would give them a chance.

  If she pressed herself flat like that, when the nine o’clock gun went off in Stanley Park she could feel the cannon shot reverberate through her body. And after that, she could sleep. In clean, white sheets, surrounded by gallons and gallons of filtered, mineralized water, the fire extinguisher on the wall in the kitchen a sentinel over her dreams, its nozzle, in shadow, like a little beak.

  McSpadden Park was almost empty. Two guys in jeans and rubber boots played hockey on the cracked asphalt tennis court in the distance, having a very good time too, it seemed, throwing themselves against the wire fencing to see how far they would bounce back and hooting every time the puck tore another hole in the already tattered net or almost nailed a squirrel. Lewis sat on a bench, drilling the tips of her shoes into the dirt, waiting for Lila who wanted to show her something at the old house. Lewis watched a few dog men, as she had come to call them, circle the park picking up after their pets. They were nondescript men, neither young nor old, who could be spotted here in the early evenings, eyes to the ground, used bread bags in their hands. There seemed to be more and more of them lately. Lonely men circling the park with their plastic bags of steaming turds, their dogs romping off ahead of them and then looking back as if to say, don’t worry, I won’t desert you. Lewis tried envisioning the stories of their lives and gave up, deciding she couldn’t give them the benefit of the doubt, that their lives, at best, would have the makings of an Anita Brookner novel, an exquisitely wrought—but banal—tale of loneliness, false hopes, and inevitable failure. They wouldn’t even try to dodge the sucker punch, wouldn’t see it coming.

  “Lewis!”

  In front of her stood Guy Gregory, the golden boy of her film-school class. Even now, after almost ten years, he seemed to radiate that same weird glow that had made everyone want to throw themselves at his feet. People carried his lighting kits, gave up their editing suites for him, offered him free drugs, threw off their clothes. Even when he indulged these favours, he cultivated an air of asceticism that allowed him to hover slightly above the fray. When he looked right at a person, beamed his light on them, he could make them feel they were the most important person in the world. People basked in that glow. Then, just as abruptly, he would turn away and they’d be left in the shade, shivering. Lewis shivered now, remembering that although she had never belonged to his inner sanctum of groupies, she had once washed his feet.

  Guy Gregory was the kind of person who was always called by both his first and last names.

  “Guy Gregory,” Lewis said, and then wondered what else there was to say.

  “Lewis, Lewis,” he said, standing in front of her, blocking the last remnants of the evening sun. She noticed that she felt cold, and was surprised. Where was the warmth? There Guy Gregory was, beaming his light on her, and she sat on a bench in McSpadden Park shivering while a couple of morons played court hockey in the distance and the dog men shuffled along, dejected but ever conscientious. She wished he would either sit down or leave, but he just stood there.

  “So,” she said, “I heard you’re down in L.A. now. Doing TV.”

  “Yeah, well,” Guy Gregory said, and then looked towards the hockey-playing hosers. He watched them for a few seconds and then sighed. “I miss that kind of thing down there.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Real people.”

  Lewis almost snorted.

  Guy Gregory looked down on her like he wanted to pat the top of her head. As if she were a Pekingese with an unfortunate face and a bandaged paw or a cripple auditioning for the chorus line of Show Boat. “I heard about what happened to you. Jesus Christ. Or, HeyZeus, as they say at Taco Bell.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said, trying his studied nonchalance on for size, her rising panic a large insect in her throat, a scarab twitching.

  “Could happen to anyone,” Guy Gregory said. “You know, I think I slept with her once, but I really can’t remember for sure.”

  Lewis looked hard at the ground between Guy Gregory’s feet. There was a small fissure, a crack, a seam in the earth. Maybe if she wished hard enough, it would open up to swallow him whole like a python would a goat. Suck him in and spit out his bones and hooves for organic fertilizer.

  He crouched down, tugging at the knees of his khakis, until they were face to face. “What did it smell like, if you don’t mind me asking? All that hair on fire, that burning flesh.”

  Her hand swung out before she even realized what she was doing, propelled by a thick, sulfurous laugh that came from deep in her throat. A laugh edged in blue flame that should have melted the flesh right off his face. Lewis hit Guy Gregory hard in the nose with the heel of her hand, knocking him out of his crouch, and ran. She slammed into one of the dog men, wheeling him around, sending his bag of freshly gathered shit into the air. The mans chocolate Lab chased her up the street, yelping indignantly, but stopped obediently at the curb as Lewis jumped into the intersection, dodging a cyclist who was pumping hard, running a red. He shot her the finger. An aging VW microbus, dragging its back bumper, red long johns for curtains in the back windows and bumper stickers all over it (Hemp!—SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM—Hey, Magic Happens), slammed on the brakes. The driver stuck his head out the window and yelled in a reedy voice, “Move to Toronto, bitch!”

  Several blocks away Lewis finally stopped. She rested against a fence, wiped her hair away from her face, and saw that there was blood on her hand.

  “Did you feel it?” Lila asked. Lewis lay on the bed, the telephone receiver cold against her ear, trying to figure out whose voice she was listening to. “You weren’t at home or work so I figured I’d find you there.”

  “Lila?”

  “Did you feel it?”

  “What?”

  “The earthquake. You didn’t feel it?”

  “Maybe it was the nine o’clock gun.”

  “It just happened this morning. You’re not still in bed? Its after ten.”

  Lewis didn’t answer. She couldn’t remember how long she’d been sleeping. Days, hours, weeks. The sheets were damp. She had come straight to the Entercom building after running from the park. She showered for a long time, until the water ran like ice pellets down her back and the man downstairs cranked his Rachmaninoff No. 3—London Symphony Orchestra, André Previn conducting—up to full volume to show his displeasure, and then she crawled into bed without even towelling off, without looking out the window, without waiting for the nine o’clock gun, and plunged into a sleep of desert rest, a parched sleep during which someone tried to teach her how to milk a cactus, thrusting in a dull kitchen knife again and again. Now her tongue felt like a suede shoe, a Hush Puppy rammed to the roof of her mouth.

  “It was only preshock,” Lila said. “It’s all over the radio. The CBC had this guy on who said there’ll likely be another one. He sounded excited, like he was talking about hockey play-offs or something. They say to stay in a basement if you can. You know, sleep in a doorjamb. Oh, Lewis, I’m so worried about the old house.”

  “Why?” Lewis heard voices in the hallway. A nanny collecting the children of the couple in number 1732, her usually laid-back Jamaican patois strained to a terse, urgent staccato.

  “I went by yesterday, after I went to look for you at the park.”

  “Sorry.” Lewis wondered why Lila hadn’t called the flip-flop woman or one of the tribe of other jolly blue-tongued do-gooders.

  “I went by and I saw that someone was living in the basement, just as I thought. If a candle tips over, you know, that’s it. This, this person wouldn’t come out. I saw her flatten herself against the wall when I looked in with my flashlight. I yelled through the basement window, but she wouldn’t answer. I understand about squatters’ rights, you know, but this house, it’s so fragile. And the smell in there, it’s weird. Sweet and sour. I didn’t want to go in, not by myself. I don’t want a confrontation. I think I’ll have to call the police.”

/>   She felt Lila drifting away, like a helium balloon that slips from your hand when you’re not paying attention and tumbles end over end on a breeze over rooftops, growing ever smaller.

  “It’s not even your house,” Lewis said.

  The children at the school for the deaf are the first to sense that something’s happening. It’s recess and they’re out in the playground when they all stiffen for several seconds, even the girl hanging upside down on the monkey bars, her braids dragging in the sand. Then they start signing rapidly, little fingers fluttering, small fists smacking into palms. The birds rise up and darken the sky all over the city.

  Carnivores and lacto-vegans cling to each other as tectonic plates shift and groan beneath them. Chum salmon leap through the massive cracks in the concrete at the foot of the Cambie Street Bridge, chum that haven’t been seen here since the 1920s, chum the size of raccoons and grinning like gargoyles. The old polar bear, the only animal left in the zoo, left waiting there to die, scrambles for purchase as the warm slab of concrete underneath his nicotine-tipped fur buckles, and he slides into the churning moat, wailing as only polar bears can. The ocean spits deadheads, sending logs rocketing through the city like battering rams to crack open the massive walls of the new library, The Bay, GM Place, St. Pauls Hospital, splitting heads as they whistle by like heat-seeking missiles. All over the Lower Mainland, film sets collapse as the earth heaves and honey wagons shoot into the sky, their contents raining down like some stinking vengeance for a long-forgotten crime.