‘Alex.’
Don’t try to touch me, he thought. But she put her hand on his arm, and he flinched away.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered.
‘I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to be running around when I was ninety. I always knew that. Diabetes… it’s a chronic condition with a reduced life expectancy. Prospects are getting better, but that’s what it is, and you know my blood sugar control was a problem for a long time. Partly my own fault. Whether you have complications… glucose control counts for a lot, and then some of it’s just luck. And I’m not very lucky. It happens to be my eyes.’
He watched her hands, on the table near his own, and noticed for the first time that she bit her nails; they were short and uneven and ragged. There was a scar across the back of her right hand, a soft puckering of the skin, and he thought he remembered it from the days at Dissonance, her fingers resting on the keyboard of the old type-setting machine. She wanted to take his hand right now, he knew that, wanted to hold his hand in hers or put her arms around him, because that was what people did. People who had known each other, a long time ago.
‘I can’t talk about it, Susie. I’m sorry, but I just can’t talk about it.’
‘No. It’s all right.’
Tell me a story, he thought.
‘So this thing about teenage girls. You know, when I was a teenage girl I wanted to be a prophet,’ she said slowly, almost as if she’d heard him. ‘Which is pretty funny, because I wasn’t any more religious then than I am now. But I really wanted to, I wanted to be seeing lights on the road to Damascus and getting the word straight from God.’
‘What was God going to say to you?’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I? I never did get the word. Basically I just wanted everybody to stand around and marvel at me.’
‘Oh, they probably did anyway.’
‘Sure. Whatever.’ She shifted in her chair. ‘You want another beer?’
He paused and then nodded. Susie came back into his life, and instantly he started taking chances with his blood sugar. He couldn’t let this go much further. But one more beer was not a big risk.
‘Evelyn’s got the word from God, you know,’ said Susie, when she came back to the table with the glasses.
‘This we always knew.’
‘Did Adrian tell you what she’s doing? She’s a priest now, isn’t that something?’
‘Can women do that?’
‘With the Anglicans they can.’
‘And do the people marvel at her?’
‘Honestly? I don’t see how they couldn’t.’
These are some things that girls do.
In this city and in other cities, there are girls who cut their arms with the blades of razors. In the moment before they strike, all the anger and confusion in the world crumples up into their hands, sweat beading on their foreheads, and the blade slides into the skin with a sharp and accurate pain. The thick line of blood pours out like peace.
There are girls who starve, their hearts thin and pure, dreaming of the day when they can walk invisibly through the leaves in a trance of harmlessness. To do no damage, to touch no thing.
In Kosovo, girls fall down in their classrooms with headaches and dizziness and problems drawing breath, gasping words like gas and poison. Lines of cars stream towards the hospitals, filled with half-conscious girls with racing hearts, driven in by their terrified families, and doctors hand them sedatives and vitamins because they can think of nothing else to do. On the west coast of Jordan, Palestinian girls fall down in dozens with spasms and blindness and cyanosis of the limbs, stricken by some illness that can’t be rationally diagnosed, and they are given oxygen in the hospital until they somehow get better. On assembly lines in factories in Asia, girls collapse in convulsions, one after another, moving along the lines like a chemical reaction.
Then there are girls, sometimes, who gather in groups and choose one of their own to cast out, a girl like them but faintly different. Perhaps they surround her underneath a bridge by a river and begin to hit her, and her blood falls on their clothes, and in the nicotine air there is somehow no way to stop, and perhaps when she runs away they drag her back, and when she falls in the water for the final time they do not pull her out.
In little ingrown villages around Europe, girls walk into the fields and see the Virgin Mary, who has ditched her son and gone out to travel the world, whispering secrets to them that they must tell everyone, that they must conceal forever. The Virgin Mary wears blue, and hints at revolution.
‘Tell me about your dissertation.’ He was drinking his second beer very slowly, knowing that ordering another one was out of the question.
She opened a bag of potato chips she’d brought from the bar. ‘You’ll only make comments about academics.’
‘I won’t. I promise.’ He reached over and took a chip, then made a face when he realized it was barbecue-flavoured. ‘God, how can you eat these? Sorry. I am listening.’
‘Network analysis as such is nothing new.’ She ate around the edge of a chip as she talked, then broke the centre between her teeth. ‘But it hasn’t been applied so much to these really marginal populations. People think, I guess people assume they don’t have relationships as we understand them, that they’re not… they’re somehow outside the social world. Like they don’t – you know, that there’s no one they know or care about? But they do, they have a world that’s as complex as anyone’s. Hierarchies. Networks of acquaintance. I don’t know, people they love.’ He looked at her torn nails again as her hand moved on the table. ‘I don’t know what more to tell you. I go around and interview people. Fill out questionnaires with them. I doubt that this is going to lead to anything useful at all, but at least I’m providing them with a few hours of cheap entertainment.’
‘But do you like it? Is it what you want to be doing?’
‘It is, I think. Yes.’ She ran her finger around the inside of the bag to capture the last of the salty dust, then licked it off, delicately, with the tip of her tongue. ‘To me, it seems like a good thing. I don’t know why. But I’m surprisingly happy as an academic.’
‘That’s good. It really is.’
There was something she wasn’t saying. How did he know her well enough to know that? He shouldn’t be able to tell these things, but he could.
‘Maybe it’s not so different, what we’re doing,’ she said. ‘Putting together pieces of the city.’
‘Mmmm. I don’t know if I put them together, though. I think I just… watch them.’
‘Well, that’s all right. That’s all right too.’
An hour or more after midnight, the rhythms of the city change, the last subway trains running almost empty, the night buses beginning their schematic crossings of the major corners; the streets still crowded where there are clubs and bars, and elsewhere quiet, single figures walking alone, the streetlights detailing their clothes and hair.
Before the final train set out for its run to Kipling, a man walked by the McDonald’s inside Dundas West station, his pockets filled with sweet crumbling cookies flavoured with rosewater, and stood on the platform, his face shadowed with thought. In Kensington Market, a white limousine crept silently along the narrow street like a dog tracking a scent, gliding up to a house with darkened windows, a world of illegal need.
At Spadina, the police rolled up their yellow tape, the white powder pronounced harmless though of uncertain identity, icing sugar from a spilled box of doughnuts according to one report, though this could not be confirmed. The city’s sadness left untreated.
Alex couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to leave a bar because it was closing. It had started snowing again while they were inside, and the clusters of young people coming out of the clubs up and down the street were obscured by the white blur.
‘So where are you living, anyway?’
‘Danforth and Pape,’ said Susie, pulling her red hat down over her ears.
‘Yikes. That’s a long way to go this time
of night. You should’ve told me, I wouldn’t have kept you out so late.’
‘It’s okay. There’s buses.’
‘You don’t want to get a taxi?’
‘I’ll walk up to College with you. I’m fine with the College streetcar.’
The snow surrounded them, sealing them in a soft enclosure, so that anyone more than an arm’s length away was part of a separate world, the traffic hushed and smooth.
‘It’s not that I didn’t think about you, Alex,’ Susie said, her voice low. ‘All this time. I did. I hope you believe that.’
They stopped at College and Spadina, where he had to turn west, and stood on the concrete island where the streetcar would arrive, shifting from foot to foot. There was an edge of danger in the air, as if anything, absolutely anything, could happen next. He bent down so their faces were close together, his hand hovering near her shoulder – she was a tiny woman, really, though most of the time she made you think that she was taller somehow. He felt a rush of heat in his chest, a memory of desire nearly as strong as desire itself, the girl with candy-coloured hair who stood on a stool and wrote on the walls of his darkroom with a black marker, Watch Out, The World’s Behind You.
‘Call me,’ he said.
‘I will.’ She pushed back a bit of her hair, this new glossy mahogany, almost natural. ‘I’ll call tomorrow.’
‘Goodnight, Susie-Sue.’
She smiled. ‘I always used to know you were really wasted, when you called me that.’
‘I’m fairly sober right now.’
‘I know.’
There was no good way to leave, but he saw the light turn green and moved quickly, walking almost backwards and waving. ‘I’ll talk to you.’
‘Yes. Goodnight, Alex.’ Then he reached the sidewalk at the south side of College and the lights of the streetcar were arriving from the west, and he turned away, his hands in his coat pockets.
He had reached his house and was putting his key in the door when the red-haired man scuffled up the sidewalk towards him. ‘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?’
‘Yeah, I must have something.’ He rummaged in his pockets for change and found a two-dollar coin.
‘Thank you very much, sir. I wouldn’t ask, only I’m being… ’
‘Yes. It’s all right. How are you doing?’
‘Oh, I’m doing okay, sir. I could be much worse. But I think maybe there was a breakdown in the system a while ago. Like a malfunction, if you know what I mean.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, because it was a while ago, I know that, but normally the cleaning systems should prevent that kind of thing. I think the government’s working on it, though.’
‘I expect they are, in their way.’ ‘Because you don’t want that kind of malfunction if you can avoid it.’
‘No.’
‘But I’ll tell you what confused me, sir. What really confused me was when the pretty people were falling from the sky. We need to think about that in an analytical way.’
‘Yes,’ said Alex, suddenly so tired he could hardly stand, supporting himself with one hand on the brick wall of the building. ‘I’m sure we do.’
‘Anyway, thank you very much for the help, sir. Because you’ve got to add it up, you know? And when you get five dollars and seventy-six cents, that’s a very good one, because when you’ve got that you can get a breakfast. I’ll let you go now, sir.’ And he turned and walked away, his ankles collapsing in his ludicrous women’s boots, under the veil of the snow.
II
The Susie year, he sometimes called that time in his life; and he hadn’t thought of it all that often, not recently, but there were pieces of memory, now and then, so bright and clear they were almost like fiction.
He remembered this, waiting in the parking lot behind the newspaper office, Susie and Chris inside, fighting again about something. It was a warm September night, the sky clear, the noises of the street at a distance. He sat down on the hood of Chris’s old car and fished a joint out of his pocket, lit it up and waited. There was a steel band practising somewhere, and pop music leaking out of one of the student pubs, and if you listened to them long enough they gradually melted together into some quite new and original style, full of offbeats and strange harmonies.
He wasn’t sure how long he waited. He never paid attention to how long it took, because he knew that she’d come in the end. That she always did. He’d finished the joint and was reaching for another when he heard the soft thud of the back door, and Susie-Paul walking across the asphalt towards him. His medic-alert bracelet flashed dull copper in the small flame from his lighter.
‘When’s the last time you checked your blood sugar?’ she asked, pulling herself up to sit beside him.
He passed her the joint, exhaling. ‘This afternoon.’
‘You gonna check again soon?’ She took a drag and handed it back.
‘I’m not sure it’s necessary. It was fine in the afternoon.’
‘Check it, Alex. You’re working into the middle of the night. And you know you don’t notice when you’re going hypo.’
‘That’s not even true.’
‘It’s true enough. Jesus Christ. One ambulance ride was enough for me, thank you.’
‘I have no memory of this.’
‘Of course you don’t. You were having a fucking hypoglycemic seizure in an alleyway off Bathurst, for God’s sake.’
‘Oh well. That was like months ago.’ He sucked in the harsh burn of the smoke. ‘Anyway, my brain’s been through lots of stuff.’
She leaned back on the car hood. ‘Chris is such a prick sometimes.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Yeah, well. Never mind.’ She took the joint from him and held it up between her fingers, against the dark sky. ‘So, I got these two press releases today. One was from the police union saying this year’s Our Cops Are Tops parade is on the 27 th. Which, imagine them sending this to us, I just don’t know. The other one was from some of the communists, a talk they’re having about how great everything is in Albania. On the 27th. What this says to me is that a frighteningly large part of the population is actively longing for a police state.’
‘Mmmm,’ said Alex.
‘We could declare a day.’
‘We could what?’
‘Declare a day. You know, like an annual thing. We Want A Police State Day.’
Susie laughed. ‘No, it has to be more obsequious. Please sir, may we have a police state? Please May We Have A Police State Day. We could have T-shirts.’
‘A logo.’
‘Press releases from an untraceable fax number.’
‘I can quote you under an assumed name. You can be Ramona Albania.’
‘Excellent.’
He exhaled slowly, watching a small blue drift of cloud move behind the trees.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I have something for you.’
‘Mmm?’ He turned his head towards her as she reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a tiny origami fish, made from multi-coloured paper.
‘I found it someplace. I just thought you might like it.’
‘Hey. Thank you.’ He sat up and took the fish in one hand, its fragile brightness against his palm. ‘That’s beautiful. Thank you.’
‘Yeah, it’s nothing much.’
‘No, it’s lovely.’ He passed her what was left of the joint and sat with the fish cupped in his hands. For a while he said nothing, breathing the scent of leaves and tar in the air, the night moving like syrup, the slow stoned feeling that everything was surrounded with a penumbra of meaning, secretly connected at some deep level he could almost, almost grasp. She reached out and brushed her hand against his, the light touch moving through his whole body as she withdrew.
And then just as suddenly she was gone, dropping the roach to the pavement, the shades of pink in her hair shifting in the small light as she walked away. Up the street to the pay
phone, Alex still lying on the hood of the car, watching her in the aura of a street lamp, glowing at a distance. It was always that quick. He saw her pick up the receiver, dialling someone. Someone else.
You can be sure of the presence of danger, but you can never guarantee its absence.
She cheated on Chris, everyone knew that and presumed that Chris knew as well; there had been someone named Gord, someone else named Mike Cherniak. Not Alex. Never Alex.
Some days she would flirt with any random freelancer or bike courier who came into the building. He could see her turning it on like a power switch, the shimmer, subtle but radiant, the way she brushed back her hair, the arch of her neck. And there wasn’t any purpose to it; the next time the same man showed up she was likely to be absent and distracted, as if she had proved that this was within her power and had no more need of him.
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