Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  She tore a strip of thumbnail off with her teeth, then seemed to notice suddenly what she was doing and put her hand down on the table. ‘I shouldn’t have brought this up,’ she said.

  ‘Is it… I’m sorry. I don’t know what you want me to ask.’

  ‘I just don’t want you to – I’m not looking for sympathy, okay?’ She picked up her coffee cup. ‘Okay, short version. He’s disappeared. But I’m working on it. I’ll find him. It’ll be okay.’

  Alex frowned, running the bent stir stick in automatic circles through his tea. ‘I don’t think I’m quite getting this. Have you talked to the police?’

  ‘You know what? They really don’t want to know. You’d be amazed how much they don’t want to know about, about crazy people. Like you’re supposed to just, like it’s a usual thing to just lose track of them.’

  ‘How long has he… ’

  ‘Three months, give or take. After our mother – she had cancer, she died last spring. A little after that, Derek went off his meds, and he, he just got worse and worse, and then he was gone. He’s been on and off the street before, and he hadn’t spoken to either of our parents for years before they died, but he never cuts me off. Never.’

  She put the cup down again. ‘He’s my twin, Alex. He doesn’t cut off from me.’

  ‘You mean he hasn’t before.’

  ‘Let me tell you. When I went to Vancouver? He phoned me every day. Sometimes three, four times. In the middle of the night, whenever. He’s always – he phones me, he comes to my house, God, I used to wish he would leave me alone. I mean, Derek didn’t break up my marriage, I did that all by myself, but it can’t be much fun having your brother-in-law going through the fridge throwing out all the food that’s been injected with mind-control chemicals. But the point is, Derek does not cut me off. If he has – well, he has, this time he has, and that’s got to mean it’s really bad. I have to find him.’

  Alex stared at the table and took a breath. He thought of not saying what came next, what was obvious. ‘You realize,’ he looked up at her, ‘that he could be dead.’

  She looked back, not angry, just very concentrated, very precise. ‘Yes. Of course I do. I know that he hasn’t picked up his disability cheques. And it’s not like I have these twin-magic superstitions, like I would automatically know if he died. But if he were dead there would be a body. There’d be an unidentified body of the right age, with the right dental work, and I do have a missing-persons report in. If he were dead, I think I would have found him. I think he has to be alive to hide this well.’ One hand moved back towards her mouth, but she stopped it, and gripped the coffee cup instead. ‘I will find him. That’s not even the part that bothers me. I’m just – honestly, Alex, I’m scared. This is different than it’s been before. I don’t know what sort of shape he’ll be in, I don’t know what to expect.’

  Their hands were very close on the tabletop. She wouldn’t ask him for what she wanted. He would have to say it himself. And of course he would say it.

  ‘I could help you.’

  She pinched her lips together, as if this were something she wanted so much she could hardly agree to it.

  ‘Really?’ she said softly.

  ‘Sure. I could come with you. I don’t mind.’

  ‘God, Alex. Thank you.’

  ‘I mean, if you want me to.’

  ‘Yes. I really do.’

  ‘Well. Then obviously.’

  He knew he was a bad choice, a foolish complicating choice. He thought of Evvy and Adrian, the people who understood these things, who would have useful ideas. But he knew well enough why she hadn’t gone to them. Evelyn would have been perfect, she would have dealt with it calmly and efficiently and kindly, and she would have done it exactly the same way for anyone, anyone at all who walked through the door. Alex would do this, if he did it, not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was for Susie. Because still, even now, he would do anything she needed.

  ‘Are you taking pictures tonight?’

  They were standing just outside the door of the coffee shop in a raw wind, wondering again what should come next.

  ‘The weather’s a problem,’ said Alex. ‘It’s harder inside, I mean you have to get permission more inside.’ He folded his hands into his armpits. ‘Look. If there’s some other way I can help – trying to find him… ’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about that part. Really. I talk to so many people on the street. Somebody’s bound to have a lead on him eventually.’

  ‘Yeah, just, if I can help, you know?’ He felt the sting of freezing rain on his face.

  ‘You could do one thing.’ Susie reached into her pocket. ‘The last address I had for him was a rooming house around here, kind of your neighbourhood. You could just knock on the doors there and ask if anyone knows where he went. I mean, I already tried, but not everyone was home, so it’s worth trying again.’ She fished out an old receipt from a bank machine, and pressed it against the wall of the building to scribble an address on the back. ‘Anyway, I was thinking about your photos,’ she went on. ‘Harbourfront’s a semi-public space that’s indoors. We could go down there together if you wanted to.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Okay, sorry. I shouldn’t interfere.’

  ‘It’s not that.’ He thought again about what could happen if he touched her, and it was like a wave of vertigo, the abandonment of the rational world. ‘It’s really not that. I’m tired is all.’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t mean…’ She pressed the button to cross over to the streetcar stop, the car weaving towards them along its worn tracks.

  ‘Another time maybe?’ said Alex, as she flashed her Metropass at the driver. She was already halfway up the step, the doors sighing closed.

  ‘I’ll let you know when I find Derek,’ she said.

  Alex turned on College and started walking to the west, his hands in his pockets. He only meant to go home. But his route took him past the little church again, and Adrian was standing outside leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I thought you might come back this way.’ He exhaled smoke, rubbing one slender arm with his free hand. ‘I’m taking a break from my duties as hired muscle.’

  ‘I find it hard to imagine you as muscle.’

  ‘I’m about as close to muscle as we get around here. We’re the church of the tiny weak saints.’ He reached into his jacket pocket and held out a pack of cigarettes, but Alex shook his head.

  ‘You know I live just over at Grace? It’s funny I’ve never seen you in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘We’ve only been at this church a couple years,’ said Adrian. ‘And it’s not like anyone’s standing on the street with a megaphone.’ He dropped the cigarette butt and ground it out with his boot, and he and Alex stood for a minute in the wind.

  ‘I noticed a phenomenon at Mass on Sunday,’ said Adrian eventually. ‘Even before these latest girls at Jarvis. I noticed three or four people wouldn’t drink from the cup. There’s this little old lady who usually sits behind me, she’s the angriest little old lady in the world, and the whole time she was muttering, “There’s no excuse for this! It’s a terrible shame! Why don’t they use a disinfectant!” Because it would be very healthful to be ingesting disinfectant. But everything makes her angry. She gets angry because there’s singing at Evensong. “I can’t tell you how mad it makes me! All that singing!”’

  ‘I suppose it’ll only get worse.’

  ‘They’re going to be looking for someone to blame soon. That’s the aspect that causes concern.’

  ‘So tell me. What do you think is actually happening?’

  Adrian pulled up the collar of his jacket as a gust of frozen rain shrilled down on them. ‘My sense is that there’s a curse on the city,’ he said.

  ‘Okay, that’s original at least.’

  ‘Actually, it’s more early-classical. Like yellow fever as a consequence of civic wrongdoing. Somewhat Hellenic.’


  ‘And we’re cursed on account of what?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. Maybe somebody on city council killed his father and married his mother.’

  ‘I guess that’s as plausible as anything else.’

  ‘I have to go back inside soon,’ said Adrian. He folded his arms and scuffed the dirt with one foot. ‘You should stay in touch, Alex. I was sorry you kind of disappeared.’

  ‘I never did.’

  ‘Did so. Nobody knew where you were, even.’

  ‘I keep telling you I’m in the phone book.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s really not quite what I meant.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway. They probably need me for some manual labour. I’ll talk to you?’

  ‘Are you guys some kind of conspiracy?’

  ‘I hardly know Suzanne, actually. She and Evvy have got quite close, but I’ve never really known her. I did know you, though. And I was sorry not to see you. So I’m just taking advantage of a chain of circumstance.’ He pulled open the door of the church and ducked inside, glancing backwards. ‘Do try to stay in touch.’

  The girl who first fell was left behind by events now. She still felt less than well, still had tremors in her hands at times, attacks of fatigue, which her doctor said were due to stress, and which a medical person, who preferred not to be named by the media, suggested could be the after-effects of nerve gas poisoning. But she was no longer a focus of attention.

  She sat in her room and stared at the cover of her exercise book, where she had written Bible Themes in Literature, and filled in the circles of the B with her pen. Then she opened it to the first page and wrote Book of Genesis. Paused and checked her cellphone for text messages, picked up her pen again. Located in garden, she wrote. V. signif, then closed the notebook and picked up the phone.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Nicole.

  ‘Did you see the show last night?’

  ‘I cried. Seriously I did.’

  ‘If Luke and Lorelai don’t get together I’m honestly going to die. I’m not even kidding. Did you see where he… ’

  ‘Oh my God. I so did. I was like dead.’

  She doodled a heart on her notebook and wrote Luke inside, then scribbled over it.

  ‘So are you doing this Bible themes thing? Do you even get what this garden thing is all about?’

  ‘Well, sort of innocence and stuff, right? So when there’s, like, vegetation in literature it’s like this innocence thing? You know what I mean?’

  ‘Yeah, but I just think that’s kind of fucked up.’

  On the small TV across from her bed, which was playing quietly in the background, she saw, yet again, the footage of the girl with the braided wool bracelet, covering her eyes. She reached for the remote and changed the channel.

  She remembered how it felt to fall, the sickness and the narrowing vision; but as well, though she had no words to express this, the slow pleasure of her surrender to the body’s weight, a strange sweet chemical rush as her muscles released.

  Those who did not believe in the man with the poison gas had settled on iron-deficiency anemia as the meaning of her fall, and it is true that the girl’s hematocrit and serum iron were not in balance, that she ate french fries and drank Coke and avoided red meat and baked beans and multivitamins. But the girl herself knew something different. She knew she had been singled out at that moment in the subway. That she would always be, at least in some small way, the girl who fell down and started it all, and she knew there was a reason for that.

  But there was no one she could talk to about it, no one who would understand why, and though she herself had only said that she smelled roses and fell, the story about poison gas and evil motives gathered around her with no effort on her part. She allowed it to happen.

  Sometimes, in her room by herself, she considered other meanings. She thought that there would be a change in her life, not now, but someday, and this would be part of it. She took her iron supplements and saw, on TV, the others falling.

  The rain picked up strength and began to fling itself against the windows, washing the snow down into the gutters, eating away at the low, piled drifts. A little later in the winter, a few degrees colder, it would have coated the snow with a hard layer of shining ice, and in the morning the streets would have sparkled white and silver, tree branches like black engravings on the sky, but it was not yet that time, not fully within the season.

  The roof of Alex’s building wasn’t supposed to be accessible to tenants, but the landlord often forgot to lock the access door. And it hurt no one for him to be here, huddled against the icy rain in his coat and hat, looking out over the street lights and the trees, the peaked and gabled Victorian houses, the downward slant of College towards the Portuguese Centre and the little strip mall and the basement where the Apocalypse Club used to be. The lens of his camera dripping with water, the water becoming a part of the picture, streaking and smearing the yellow glow of windows across the darkness. The slick hiss of the cars below as they slid through puddles, someone running under a dark umbrella. He sat on the roof, sodden, focused, a single point, and the fugitive light fell through him.

  The next morning a man, a forty-five-year-old insurance broker, fell to his knees as he was getting off a train at the King station. He didn’t faint, but lay in a crouch in the doorway of the train, gasping for breath, his face turning purple. A man in one of the seats nearby grabbed at his own throat, and moaned, and slid down to the floor. Alarms began to sound.

  Bodies in Trouble

  I

  ‘Sedentary middle-aged men,’ said Walter Yee, standing by the operating table and watching one of his residents crack open a patient’s chest. ‘Both moderately overweight. You can’t tell me there wasn’t cardiac involvement. Were they put through complete stress tests?’

  ‘Two simultaneous cardiac episodes? Does that seem likely?’

  ‘Okay, I’ll grant you one psychosomatic reaction. But I’d like to see the test results on that first man.’

  ‘Dr. Ryvat in pulmonary thinks it was asthma,’ said one of the nurses. ‘Dr. Lissman in neurology thinks –‘

  ‘Okay, okay. When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. I’d still like to see the tests.’

  Thursday morning, and Alex was standing in a corner of the OR, waiting for the preliminaries to be finished before he moved in towards the table.

  ‘Wow,’ said Walter, peering into the chest cavity. ‘Talk about accidents waiting to happen. Alex, come on over here and get some horrible-example photos.’

  ‘People in general still think it’s poisoning,’ said the anaesthetist.

  ‘There is no such thing as people in general,’ said Walter. ‘It’s okay, Adina, you go ahead, I’ll just keep an eye.’

  ‘Of course there’s such a thing.’

  ‘No, that’s sloppy thinking. There are only many people in particular.’

  ‘Fine. Many people in particular think it’s poisoning.’

  ‘I’ve heard disease as well. There’s a bird flu theory floating around.’

  ‘Oh, give me a break.’

  Alex was standing near the resident, watching her hands, when she faltered and paused.

  ‘Really,’ said Walter. ‘You’re fine for this, Adina. You are.’ The resident looked up at him, looked back at the patient’s heart and started to cut, then her hands stopped moving and Walter jumped forward, pushing her aside, reaching into the chest.

  ‘Okay, okay. We can fix this,’ he said, and grabbed something from the instrument tray, his eyes on the opened chest. ‘Excuse me, why am I not getting suction here?’ he shouted. ‘Jesus Christ, people! David, why aren’t you clamping?’

  Alex saw the chest cavity filling with blood. He focused the lens and took a series of fast pictures.

  ‘We can do this,’ said Walter. And the photographs changed too, subtly, in their purpose, being part of the documentation now that Walter and Adina had done everything right as far as they could, that there were no gross errors but only the limits of the
body; or else that there had been preventable error, that something human had intervened and broken down in disaster. Alex himself didn’t know clearly what was happening, but he knew just enough to take the right pictures, pictures that would help to lay out the story when it would have to be told.

  Alex had not often seen people die. But it had happened – he was part of that strange elite in Western society, one of the witnesses. This man did not die, he was not exactly dead when he left the OR, but Walter was silent and grim, and whatever would happen over the next few hours, it was clear he expected nothing good.

  There was nothing different to do, nothing that had to be done but to send the photos to the hard drive by wireless transfer. Alex would hear, sooner or later, what was needed from them. He would sort and select the shots, isolate the particular details that were requested. He would know this man’s heart. He might not ever find out what happened to him.

  But the afternoon was lucky. Things could change like that; he could walk out of the OR shaky and sick, and then be sent on one of those assignments that was pure enjoyment, upbeat and playful. This time a girl with new prosthetic legs, a bright, opinionated kid with spiky black hair and little gold earrings who found the devices – her fourth set so far – to be totally excellent. She had never had such good legs before, she told him, doing little steps to demonstrate. The previous legs had sucked like a suckhole but these were much better, her old doctor didn’t know what he was doing, not like this new lady doctor who was absolutely cool. Completely aware of the camera, and flirting with it in a little-girl way, a necklace of rainbow butterflies around her neck.

  So he didn’t feel so bad by the time he got home, a light snow drifting around him. It wasn’t, in the end, what he would have called a bad day. It was just that he was tired, that it was too complex to absorb all at once.

  He picked Queen Jane up from the bed where she was sleeping and carried her against his chest to the couch, lay down with the heavy grey cat curled under his chin, her claws hooked into his shirt at the shoulder. It was not very comfortable, and he got tufts of cat hair in his mouth when he breathed, but it was easier than trying to move her. He would get up soon and make dinner; he would spend the night at home, working in the darkroom.