‘I don’t know,’ said the girl, carefully licking a ribbon of gravy from her finger. ‘I guess. Yeah.’
‘I mean, because they keep saying it’s nothing, but you know there’s all kinds of people collapsing now, and if they’re all getting poisoned it could be like, you don’t know what’s going to happen in a week or two weeks or… ’
‘It’s stupid,’ said the girl. ‘Forget it. It’s probably just like, they have a problem with the pipes in the subway or something, they just don’t want to admit it so they blame the, you know, terrorists or somebody. That’s probably, that’s probably it.’ She knew that whatever she said would carry a particular authority, because she was the one who had fallen first; even Tasha would never have quite the same position, though Tasha had collapsed as well. Anyway, nobody really listened to Tasha to begin with. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
‘I just kind of think this is serious,’ said Nicole.
‘No,’ said the girl. ‘It’s stupid. It’s just stupid, okay?’ She pushed her hair back impatiently, the good tired ache in her muscles.
‘Sure.’ Nicole reached over and took a french fry from the girl’s plate. ‘We can definitely change the subject. It’s fine.’
It occurred to the girl that she could phone Zoe, but she knew that she wouldn’t, that she could never explain to Zoe what had happened, or what it had felt like, in that moment, to fall. She thought again about the woods at the back of the school grounds, the thicker woods deep in the ravines, about living out in the cold there, how dark it got.
‘That new science teacher? He’s a total babe,’ said Kirsty.
II
‘And that’s supposed to mean fucking what now?’
Alex bent over his contact sheets, biting his lip and trying hard not to listen to Chris and Susie, who were shouting at each other a foot away from him.
‘Look, don’t ask me, ask your boy toy Mike out there if you want to know. As if you really don’t know.’
That summer in 1989 the air was heavy with humidity, and the production room had somehow ceased to be public space, had turned into a heat-charged theatre for this escalating drama, everyone’s lives invaded by it. Alex could never be sure who he would find there or what would be happening, how long it would take to get an issue out and what would be torn or broken in the interim, Chris and Susie refined into their worst possible selves, insulting each other in front of the staff, staging petty battles, destroying small prized possessions. They had never seemed so close as they tore each other slowly to pieces, passionate and obsessive, no one else around them more than a stage prop. And even then they would go home together at sunrise, come back to the office for the next evening’s work. Return to their apartment, to whatever happened between them there.
Alex walked through it, quiet, an outsider, except that she would be there in his darkroom, she would touch him and lean on his shoulder and then suddenly leave; she would call him at midnight, meet him in a bar in the Market and tell him everything, and the next day he would be no one again.
He came to the office late at night, and he was in the parking lot, chaining up his bicycle, when he heard Susie-Paul crying in the darkness. He ran towards the sound, and saw the small outline of her, huddled by the wall, at the edge of the spill of a street light, barely visible.
‘Susie. Susie.’
She looked up, a streak of something dark and wet on her face, and a splayed mass at her feet. Lifted her hands. He saw the shine of the edge of a knife, a heavy liquid on her fingers.
He was on his knees beside her instantly, his feet tangling into the mess of Chris’s bicycle beside her, the tires slashed, the chain ripped off. She was covered with the oil from the chain. And he knew that he would have forgiven her anything, anything at all, there was nothing she could do that he had not in advance forgiven.
‘Susie.’
He pulled her into his arms, and she came, smearing oil in his hair, on his neck, the exacto knife falling to the ground.
‘I killed his bike,’ she said.
He kissed her then, really kissed her for the first time, their tongues pressing hard into each other’s mouths. They fell together in the shadow of the wall, the hot asphalt scraping his knees, her body moving against his, their legs entangled. But she slid away from him. She pulled herself up and staggered backwards, tugging down her dress, her lips swollen.
‘I can’t. Alex, no. I can’t do this right now.’
He sat on the asphalt breathing hard, smelling of WD-40. He wanted to say something ugly and childish – you could do it with Mike Cherniak – and it wasn’t love or kindness or even common sense that prevented him, just inarticulacy. But this too he had forgiven her, had forgiven her long ago. There was nothing else he could do. He was helpless.
There was no particular reason that Alex painted a giant bird across one wall of his room. He had been very bored one evening, and he had paint and brushes still lying around from his short-lived experiment with art school a few years before.
‘Is it a phoenix, then?’ asked Adrian.
‘No. It’s just a bird.’
‘Bird of prey? Migratory bird? Pelican? The pelican is Jesus, you know. Though if I were Jesus I might be offended by that. Well, obviously it’s not a pelican.’
‘I don’t know. It’s a bird. It looks like a fierce bird.’
‘I think it’s an osprey.’
‘If you say so. I was just thinking Jane would like to have a permanent bird to chase, but this one’s awfully big. I don’t think her visual field is up to it.’
‘There’s not a wide symbolic network around the osprey. I wonder why that is.’
‘I’m thinking now I could make Jane a little bird mobile, but it wouldn’t last long.’
It was a white bird with black and brown edging on its feathers, and a jagged turquoise line marking it off from the grey concrete wall, and it was somewhat larger than Alex himself. He didn’t much like it; there was nothing in it that was original or real. He’d never had the right kind of eye to be a painter.
‘What would you do for me?’ Susie said. She was lying on his bed, wearing a white lace dress and black tights with runs in them, smoking hash, and Alex was stretched on the floor, leaning his head against the mattress. He could hear Queen Jane growling in the far corner of the room, doing battle with a sock. ‘If I asked you. What would you do for me?’
‘Anything,’ he said. He didn’t know why she was there, she had turned up at his door, it happened sometimes. He didn’t ask.
‘But that’s not true,’ she said, exhaling and handing him the joint. ‘You wouldn’t kill somebody, for instance. And that’s good, I mean, I wouldn’t want that. But really. What would you do?’
I would sit here for hours and never touch you, he thought, sucking the smoke into his lungs. I would let you pull me towards you and then push me away again. What more do you want?
He held the smoke in for as long he could before exhaling, leaned his elbow on the mattress and looked at her, a distant and slightly mad expression on her face that was not just the hash. He could see the dark lashes surrounding her bottomless eyes; he was close enough to count every one of them.
‘I would stop taking photographs,’ he said.
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘I think I would.’ He passed the joint to her. ‘Do you want me to?’
‘No.’ She took a long drag, and a slow trail of smoke spun out from her lips in a complex spiral. ‘If I was very sick, if I needed someone to look after me, would you do it?’
He lay his head on the mattress, pushing his hair from his face. Patterns of light from the cars that passed outside shimmered across the wall. ‘Sure. I guess. I’m not a doctor.’
‘Not like that.’ She stared at the ceiling. ‘What if – what if I was sick in a way that changed me? If I wasn’t the person you knew. Would you still look after me then?’
‘But that won’t happen.’
She closed her eyes
. He sucked the last of the smoke from the roach and dropped it into an ashtray. Her hair in the light of his desk lamp was a hundred shades of pink and gold.
‘You’ll always be Susie-Paul,’ he said. She shook her head slowly. ‘I know who you are. I will always know who you are.’
‘You don’t know, Alex,’ she whispered. ‘You don’t understand.’
He felt a faint creep of apprehension. ‘Is there – Susie, is something wrong?’
‘No. Nothing’s wrong. Not with me.’
She lay with her eyes closed for what was probably a long time.
‘You still want to go hear the Spits?’ she asked at last.
‘If you do,’ he said.
‘Sure. Let’s.’
They walked up Bathurst Street in a cutting November wind, icy puddles soaking in through his boots. She was very quiet, and he knew that he had let her down in some way, but he didn’t know what he could say to make it better.
And then they were in the heat and crush of the basement, the music hugging them in, pools of brown water on the floor and the room filled with bodies, sweating, moving, someone climbing onto a table to dance, and the band almost invisible because there was no stage, only a strip of masking tape marking them off from the dance floor. They had a drummer and a bass player now, and the guitars were loud, high metal in his ears. He stood against the wall with Susie, sharing a bottle of beer and feeling the music shake through his body, wondering what it meant that they were there together, clearly together, and yet not really. The singer’s voice rising on a long line, sweeping him upwards.
The next song he recognized – it wasn’t a slow song exactly, but less fast – a song about UFOs and longing, about lights on the asphalt and aliens and escape, and Susie-Paul reached for his hand and led him onto the floor, and he wrapped his arms around her as she rested her head on his chest, swaying not quite in time with the music. And he knew this was something in her that was sad and nearly self-destructive; it wasn’t what he wanted.
Take me away
Take me away
The first set was over, and they walked outside again, to the sheltered yard of St. Peter’s Church where the sound of the traffic on Bloor Street was faint, like falling water.
‘I have to tell you something,’ said Susie.
‘I figured you did.’
‘I’ve decided to go away. I’m going to Vancouver for a while.’
He turned from her, leaning into a corner of the limestone wall. ‘How long?’
‘I don’t know.’
He ran his finger across the rough edges of the stone. It was almost glowing, in a diffused beam of light from somewhere. ‘Will you come back?’
‘I don’t know.’
He walked a few nervous steps in the frosted grass. ‘You don’t believe me,’ he said, ‘but I will always know who you are.’
She shook her head. ‘You think that, Alex. But you don’t understand.’
And when they went back inside, the bass player was leaning down, relentless, and the music crashing against the walls, fast and angry, the singer stretching out her arms and dancing, that ragged extraordinary voice.
Follow the light to where the little ones lie
Watch their faces disappear in the sky
The singer grabbed her mike from the stand and sang a long wordless cry and crossed the line of tape, dancing out into the audience and vanishing among their bodies.
Build ourselves a town
And then we’ll watch it all come down
Susie-Paul spun into his arms like a collision, and pulled his head down and kissed him hard in the middle of the dance floor. And it wasn’t what he wanted but it was the best he was going to get. He squeezed her against him and kept kissing her, the other people on the dance floor tripping over them, knocking them sideways, the night going on everywhere.
And suddenly nothing was urgent or desperate as he had thought it would be; as if the frantic pulse that had been beating at the back of his skull for the last year had abruptly calmed. He knew so completely that this was all he could ever hope for.
For a while they were kissing at the bus stop, muffled in their winter clothes, sucking warmth from each other, and when he drew away from her to breathe, the moisture on his lips began to freeze and sting.
He locked Queen Jane in the kitchen upstairs and unzipped Susie’s dress. The skin of her shoulders was smooth and slightly freckled and tasted like sweat and yeast. He went down on his knees and ran his tongue up her thigh. Their bodies slick and wet in the hot basement, the taste of her on his lips, her mouth sliding over him, and the borders of everything turned fluid, time and space and movement. Far away from himself and falling, broken open inside her.
And then sometime during the night he started up from the bed in quick panic, his heart pounding and sweat pouring down his back. Hypo. Grabbed at the can of Coke on his desk and drank it fast, spilling part of it on the floor, and waited for the shaking to stop, and nearly wept because his blood could never leave him alone, because he could never, not for one minute, be free of this.
Susie-Paul tossed and muttered, and he went back to her, his fingers reaching between her legs, and woke her slowly, and they slid into each other again, the heat of her skin.
She left in the morning while he was still sleeping.
He wasn’t sure what he had expected after that. But not complete silence. She had stayed in town for three more days, he learned later, but he never heard from her. When he called her house – he hadn’t ever done this before – there was no one there at first. In the end he reached Chris, and by then she was already gone.
He knew exactly when she had left because he found out from Chris, the two of them managing to establish a very brief and unsatisfactory friendship based entirely on having been dumped by the same woman. Chris believed that Alex and Susie had been lovers for several months at least, and Alex never bothered to tell him otherwise.
He did think that she would phone him sometime, or write to him or at least send a postcard. Not so much because they’d slept together. He could accept that this was an anomaly and meant very little; but they had been friends. And he wanted to know, he was worried about her, she had seemed so damaged, and talked strangely; maybe she really was sick somehow – and then he thought of AIDS, and was ashamed of the thought, but it was true that he had been wholly careless. And he was by no means sure who else she had slept with.
She wouldn’t do that, though. She was not the sort of person who would do that. He tried to keep this in the back of his mind where he kept all his other irrational fears about her – cancer, suicide. He didn’t know why she didn’t write. At the end of that strange awful year a man in Montreal picked up a rifle and went out hunting feminists, and fourteen women were dead, and he knew she had said she was going to Vancouver and anyway all the dead women were named, but he thought of that too, blood on her white lace dress. It couldn’t be true, of course. But he wished she would write and tell him so.
Dissonance came out less and less often through the winter, and finally stopped altogether. For a while he managed to increase his hours at SuperPhoto so that he could pay his rent, and borrowed money from his parents to cover his insulin, but he knew he would have to find a better job somehow.
Finally, in the spring, he heard at several removes – from Adrian, who had heard it from Evelyn’s cousin – that she was indeed in Vancouver, working as a canvasser for Greenpeace, and seemed to be more or less okay. He forced himself to go to the clinic and get tested, and he was clean, and he tried to believe that he had never expected anything else.
A few weeks later he was at the hospital to see his endocrinolo-gist, and there was a notice on a bulletin board inviting people with photographic expertise to apply for a job, and he tied back his hair and went for an interview.
There no was precise point at which he understood that he would not hear from her again.
III
In the indigo evening, a woman knelt
on her front steps with a rag and a tin of cleanser, her hands red and raw, scrubbing the stairs again and again. Every time that she started to think she was finished she would see a spot she couldn’t remember cleaning, and again her mind would fill with the possibility of contagion, of the people collapsing on the subway, and what they carried with them when they left and walked into the city. She would think of vials of Asian flu inadvertently opened, of sarin and tabun deliberately released, of some tiny particle borne towards her, tracked into the house, onto the floor where her children walked, some flake of poison, of illness, of malign intent. She poured more cleanser onto the rag, dipped it in a bucket of water, and scraped it again across the stone, weeping, exhausted, shaking with cold.
She was an intelligent woman, she knew that this behaviour was somewhere within the range of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. She knew that there was no possible contaminant that would cling to her front steps or kill them all with a single molecule. She knew, as well, that the burning pain in her shoulder was the result of tension and cold, not a heart attack, not the effect of a neurotoxin. But this knowledge was useless. Her knuckles frozen white, the skin of her fingertips chafed away till they almost bled.
Inside the house, the sound system was playing, the music meant to convince her that this was less than torture, a bearable household chore. Leonard Cohen’s vampire voice singing ‘Ain’t No Cure for Love,’ over and over. She dipped the rag in the bucket again, shook the tin of cleanser over the steps, wondered what breathing it in was doing to her lungs, as the night gathered around her.
‘You don’t mind me coming along with you?’
It was Friday afternoon, and Alex was kneeling by a butcher’s stall in St. Lawrence Market, under the high ceiling of the old hall, when Susie arrived. He had been photographing a man packing up trays of meat as the market closed for the day, working on the contrast between the slick deep redness of the steaks and the thin and papery skin on the man’s gnarled hands.
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