Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  ‘Alex,’ she said softly, sitting down across from him. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say hi before.’

  ‘No. ’Sokay,’ he said. He had a vague awareness that he was smiling at her like an idiot. ‘You were busy.’

  ‘Not so much. It was just too noisy, you know?’

  ‘I just said. It’s okay.’ He reached across the table and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back and didn’t let go. Adrian picked up his guitar and started to fiddle with the tuning.

  ‘I should’ve talked to you sooner.’

  ‘You can talk to me whenever you want.’ Alex no longer had a clue what was going on, but he wasn’t sure he cared. Her hand small and hot and soft in his.

  ‘I guess you saw…’ she waved her free hand in the air.

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t care, Suze,’ he said, slurring a bit on her name. ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’

  ‘I’m not really like that.’

  He drew slow circles on the back of her hand with his thumb. ‘It’s okay, Susie-Sue. It’s okay.’

  The bartender had put on a tape, some kind of quiet folk music that was meant to get people out of the building; it was playing behind them now. And then, without calling any attention to herself, Evelyn put her book down on the table, walked out onto the floor, and began to dance, alone among the broken glass. Dark and slender, a strange formality in her movements, her toes pointed, as if she might have studied ballet years ago. For a moment Alex felt like there were two different screens in front of him, foreground and background fluctuating, Susie’s eyes, her fingers touching his palm, and Evelyn dipping and bending at a distance on the empty dance floor, Adrian watching her intently and making no move to join her. The room filled with mystery. A slick sheen of light on Susie’s gold-painted fingernails, the barely audible singer on the tape invoking lies and dreams and windmills.

  ‘I’m glad you stayed.’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘It would’ve been awful if you hadn’t stayed.’

  Heat gathering between their two hands, a film of sweat.

  ‘I don’t want you to think…’ she went on.

  ‘Shhh. You don’t need to talk about it.’

  The song ended, and Evelyn walked off the floor, self-contained, silent, and Adrian put his guitar back in its case and got up. She stood in front of him and they looked at each other, nothing else, and left the room together.

  The bartender turned the tape off and began to collect empty bottles from the tables, the clatter of glass sending back a hollow echo. Alex sat very still, hardly breathing, his ears still humming in the absence of music.

  ‘They’re going to kick us out of here soon,’ said Susie.

  ‘We could go somewhere,’ he said softly. ‘If you want.’

  She hesitated, putting her other hand over his and stroking his thumb with her own.

  ‘I think I should go home,’ she said at last.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No.’ She drew her hands back, their fingertips still touching. ‘But… I think I should go home. I need to go home.’

  At the bus stop he put his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. ‘Susie-Sue,’ he whispered, as the Bathurst bus arrived, filled with the lost and desperate flotsam of the night city. She climbed on board and rode away. Alex found the pole where he’d chained his bike, fumbled with the lock until it came apart, and kicked off, weaving along the road. In a final grand gesture of self-destructiveness, he reached his house and passed it, kept riding into the blurred and shining night, further and further south until he reached the lake, passing empty buses and street-sweeping machines spraying water on the road, grinding their huge black brushes, spinning in darkness.

  It was nearly dawn, and he was halfway sober again, when he rode back along King Street and saw that he was, without any conscious intention, riding by the house where Chris and Susie lived. The light was still on in their apartment. He stopped for only a minute, one foot on the sidewalk, looking up at the window and thinking of their lives, of a deep and complex privacy that was going on without him, that he would never be able to enter.

  V

  When the bright young men released sarin on the Tokyo subway, the gas soaked into the clothes of the passengers. Many of them pulled themselves out of the subway and went to work, their pupils contracted, their breathing restricted, sarin leaking from their jackets into the office air. Others were lifted into cars and ambulances and sent to the hospital, and the nurses and doctors who treated them found their own eyesight growing dark, their own muscles weakening. This is mentioned as a risk in the literature on chemical incidents.

  The girl with the braided wool bracelet who had fallen on the steps at Jarvis Collegiate sat up in her hospital cot and watched a resident walking away from her stumble suddenly, grab for the wall to support herself, and slide to the ground.

  The young resident’s pupils didn’t contract. Her blood tests didn’t show the low cholinesterase that would signal sarin, or the blood acidosis of cyanide. Her white cell count was perhaps slightly elevated. Some of the others who worked on the girl said later that they felt sort of ill, not exactly sick, but not quite well.

  The resident had dyed blonde hair and long thin fingers and no known allergies or medical conditions. When she tried to describe the smell she spoke at first about exhaust fumes, and then about water and metal, but finally she could only say that it was not quite like that, that it was a smell like the absence of smell. The precise smell of nothing.

  Susie was doing interviews at the drop-in at a church on College – not far from his house, she told him. He knew the place, of course, a little red-brick building with a low slanted roof, but he’d never been inside. All things considered, he shouldn’t really have been surprised to arrive and find Evelyn, who seemed scarcely to have aged at all and was looking not especially priestly in jeans and an old duffel coat, coming out the side door.

  ‘Alex? Suzanne told me she was meeting you here. How are you?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said nervously. ‘Yeah. Not bad. You?’

  ‘I have to go to a meeting right now, I’m sorry, but everybody’s inside.’ She swung a backpack over her shoulders and climbed onto a bicycle. ‘Call Adrian sometime,’ she said, kicking off the curb. ‘He needs a peer group, nobody knows how to talk to him.’ But she disappeared into the traffic before he could think of a response.

  He opened the door that he’d seen her coming out of, and walked into a small hall filled with dishevelled men and a few women, lying or sitting on mattresses, a pile of folding tables stacked against one wall. There was a TV set in the corner playing Titanic, and some of the men were watching this and drinking from styrofoam cups, others reading crumpled copies of the Sun or Employment News. One man was sketching tiny painstaking patterns into an old notebook. Pinned on the wall was a bad drawing of Archbishop Romero, and pieces of cardboard with phrases written on them in capital letters. PLEASE SPEAK SLOWLY. I AM LEARNING ENGLISH. CAN YOU HELP ME FIND THIS ADDRESS? There was a strong smell of unwashed bodies in the air, cut through with overbrewed coffee.

  Adrian was sitting cross-legged on one of the mattresses, talking gently to a man with a twisted, tearful face and unpredictably moving hands; in the kitchen, a woman who looked roughly a hundred years old was slowly cleaning a pile of roasting pans, and a frizzy-haired girl, probably the Pereira-Sinclair child, was sitting on a stool frowning over a copy of Harriet the Spy. There was something bizarrely domestic about the whole scene, Alex thought. Dinner with friends in Bedlam.

  Susie was in a corner of the room, sitting on a folding chair with a clipboard and talking to an old man in a baseball cap. ‘So you’d say he’s a close friend?’ he heard her asking. The man shook his head.

  ‘Not close so much. But I’d say reliable, when he isn’t drinking.’

  Susie nodded and wrote something on her clipboard. ‘And does he know that other guy you were telling me ab
out, that Steve guy?’ Then she noticed Alex, and gestured him over with her pencil.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll wait.’

  ‘I’m nearly finished.’

  The man in the baseball cap was holding on to a clear plastic cane filled with dried roses, petals of faded red and yellow and cream, packed tightly together. Nearby, a grey-haired woman was pacing in tiny wired circles, strung out, shaking, oblivious to the world – crack or crystal meth, he thought. On the TV screen, the steerage passengers on the Titanic were singing and dancing and demonstrating their working-class virtues.

  ‘Filtered water,’ said the man in the baseball cap. ‘That’s what I told him. You drink filtered water, the skin problems clear right up. This lady gave me one of them filters for the tap in the rooming house, but the schizophrenic guy took it off because he thought somebody was watching him through it. Mr. Sandman, he tells me. Watching him through the water filter.’ He shook his head. ‘You could write a book, darling, I’m telling you.’

  Susie made a note on her clipboard. ‘So, is the lady someone we’ve talked about before?’ she asked.

  ‘No – no, I guess not. So she’d be another one on the chart, eh?’

  ‘Yeah… you know what, are you going to be up at Bloor tomorrow? Somebody’s waiting for me right now.’

  ‘Okay, well, thank the people here very much for the delicious meal, and I’ll see you then.’ The man tipped his baseball cap, then stood up and left the hall, leaning on his flowering cane.

  ‘Joseph’s quite interested in the project,’ said Susie, coming over to Alex. ‘And he’s got a social network like you wouldn’t believe. I could spend a year just mapping his contacts.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Alex.

  ‘We can go if you want. I think Adrian’s busy talking to Luis.’ She pulled the door open and waved at Adrian, who glanced briefly away from the tearful man and nodded quickly.

  ‘Luis gets very angry at Thomas Aquinas,’ Susie explained as they went down the steps. ‘He’s an ex-seminarian or something. He’d really rather talk to Evvy, but Adrian can handle him. Me, I just wave my hands around.’

  ‘What did Thomas Aquinas do to make him angry, then?’

  ‘I told you, it’s all beyond me. He’s just like, fucking Aquinas, I hate the stupid fuck, and I’m like, sure. You bet.’

  ‘Maybe they had a fight about a girl.’

  They stopped at the traffic light at Augusta, just north of Kensington Market. ‘Do you want to get something to eat?’ asked Susie.

  ‘No, I ate at home. Just a coffee shop’s fine.’

  ‘We could go someplace in the Market, if you wanted. I think the Last Temptation’s still there.’

  ‘Oh God. Please, let’s not.’

  ‘Your old house is a vintage clothing boutique now,’ said Susie, pressing the button for the light. ‘But you know what? They’ve still got that crazy painting you did in the basement.’

  ‘They must be ill,’ said Alex, though what he wanted to ask was why she had gone to his old house, how she had ended up in the basement there anyway.

  ‘How come you never did more paintings?’ They crossed College Street and went into the Second Cup.

  ‘Because I suck. Taking photos is the only thing I’m good at.’

  He ordered a camomile tea, wanting something as pale and bland and harmless as possible, determined not to be put off balance.

  ‘So, how are you?’ she asked, stirring cream into her coffee.

  ‘I saw my ophthalmologist,’ he said, and then clenched his nails into his hand, immediately regretting the words.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing much to say. She’s making an appointment for this,’ he cleared his throat, ‘this laser thing, but I’d actually rather… I’d rather not think about it too much.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘The only… there’s a small risk of a hemorrhage in the meantime. But that’s treatable. More or less. And it really is a small risk.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do… ’

  ‘There’s nothing anyone can do. It’s a bit like death that way.’ He stared down at the hot golden liquid. ‘I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be going on like this.’ He was starting to feel as if his identity was coming apart. The cool, dry, solitary person he had become was a real Alex, was perhaps always the part of him that had taken the photographs, but the hungry chaotic Alex that she had known had been real too, and seemed closer now than for quite a long time.

  ‘No, please. I mean, I’m glad you’re telling me things now. You used to worry me so much, you know. You remember when you had that seizure on Bathurst? Seriously, I thought you were dying.’

  ‘Oh. That time.’ He bent a stir stick in his fingers, searching the blank spot in his memory between the Bathurst streetcar and a hospital bed, the late spring night when his high-wire act with his blood sugar finally crashed. ‘Well, honestly, I don’t. Remember it, I mean. You know, insult to the brain and all. But I guess I could have been dying – I mean, I could have died – if you hadn’t been there. So I probably owe you some kind of apology.’

  Susie picked up her coffee and sipped it carefully. ‘Less than twenty years late, eh?’ she said with a faint smile. ‘No, really, thanks, Alex. I mean that.’

  He did remember waking up, not knowing why he was in that bed but knowing he had gone somehow way too far. That whatever he had done, it had been partly because she was there, because she was all sugar and danger to him, and he pushed every limit when he was near her. ‘What happened, even?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I know in general what happened, but I don’t think we ever talked about it. Did we?’

  ‘I did tell you after,’ she said. ‘I told you in the hospital. You don’t remember?’

  ‘The whole night’s kind of spotty. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t know. I probably should’ve noticed something earlier, but there were a bunch of us in this club – I was at the other side of the room, I think – and it seemed like all of a sudden you kicked over a table. There was just this crash. You were shouting, I’m not sure what, pretty loud, and kind of staggering – I figured you were on something, maybe. Or just really drunk. And it was weird because, you know, you were stoned all the time anyway, and I’d seen you drunk before, and you never got mean, so I was confused. Anyway, I thought the bouncer was going for you, so I took you outside. And I was trying to talk to you, but you weren’t making much sense, or actually any sense at all, and then you just slid down the wall and started seizing.’

  ‘Fuck. I am sorry.’

  ‘I was still thinking drugs at that point. I didn’t even notice your medic-alert bracelet till the ambulance got there. So I guess I could’ve done better. Given you some glucose or something, if I’d known what it was. Heck of a way to find out, by the way.’

  ‘Wow. I mean, I sort of knew about this, but – hell.’ He picked up his cup of tea. ‘So, I never really asked you, why did you even do that? I mean, why you specifically? You didn’t have to.’

  ‘I did have to, I think. That’s what… okay, this is going to sound like I’m changing the subject, but I’m not.’ She raised her thumb to her mouth and began to chew the edge of the nail. ‘See, I didn’t tell you the whole truth about why I’m doing what I do. My research, why I do it. I’ve been thinking about that. It bothered me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I mean, not that I have to tell everybody about everything, but it seemed like… it’s been bothering me is all.’ She bent down to her shoulder bag, where it lay against the chair, took something out and slid it across the table towards him.

  ‘This is my brother,’ she said.

  It was a cheap snapshot, overexposed. Susie with a version of her hair that he’d never seen, longer and brilliant red, sitting at a table with a man in a denim shirt and glasses. He looked rather like her, though without the brightly dyed hair, of course; his features differently proportioned but the dark eyes much the same, his express
ion somehow familiar. But something about him was wrong, the strained effort in his smile, the way his eyes evaded the camera. There was a birthday cake in front of them, and a single half-deflated balloon pinned to the wall.

  ‘Actually he’s not just my brother. He’s my twin. Which you would think would be weird enough for one lifetime, but no. Because the other thing is, he has a major mental illness. He’s schizophrenic, I mean, very seriously, for a long time. It’s been relatively unresponsive to treatment.’ She picked up the photo again, turning it in her hands. ‘This is our thirtieth birthday. It was taken on a closed ward at Queen Street. Good times.’

  Alex set his spoon down on the table. ‘How long?’ he asked softly.

  She nodded, hearing the unspoken part of the question. ‘Yeah. He had his first psychotic break a while before I met you. When we were twenty, I think. Maybe twenty-one? It’s hard to remember exactly.’

  ‘You should have told me.’

  ‘Oh sure. Because I was really comfortable sharing it with people. Because nobody ever reacts badly when you tell them you have a schizophrenic twin.’

  ‘I wouldn’t…’ he started to say, but stopped himself; of course he had no idea what he would have done, and it would be stupid to pretend he did. He felt the whole shape of the past trembling in his mind, like a picture turning animated, in jerky stop-motion. Susie at the pay phone, up the street from the office, biting her lip. ‘Still,’ he said. ‘Still. You should have told me.’

  ‘Okay. Maybe I should have. Anyway, I’m telling you now. So you see what I mean? I couldn’t just say, oh, Alex is flipping out, someone else should deal with that. It was just – something I was kind of used to. It’s what I did. It was already what I always did.’

  ‘Where –’ he started, and then thought that was probably the wrong way to ask the question. He didn’t know how you asked this kind of question. ‘How is he doing now?’