‘Tell me.’
‘I don’t know. What can you say? He was never ordinary. He had this – there was this magic thing about him. Something… so bright and… strange – he had these giant diagrams he’d drawn, hung up on his walls – and I never understood hard science, but they were really beautiful. The structure of things. He understood that. And – I wasn’t alone. That was the thing. Derek was there. I was never – there was someone who cared about me. Always. That’s all, that’s… He was going to be a chemist. That’s pretty fucked, isn’t it, if you think about it?’
‘The difference between chemicals and emotions?’ Susie lifted her hand, palm up.
‘Neurotransmitters,’ she said. ‘The dopamine hypothesis. Serotonin. I know all about these things, Alex. The neuroendocrine system, I get that. But what does that mean? This is my brother. This is who he is. There is no real Derek somewhere else. That brain is real. And it suffers.’
‘I know.’ He could hear traffic in the distance, but the street was still and empty.
‘We’re all the same as Derek, you know. In the end, we are. We’re all just trying to hammer together some kind of self around the chemical reactions.’ She ran a hand across her eyes. ‘Look at us. You get angry for no reason when you’re going hypo. I stole a flashlight tonight because I got drunk. Is that real? Is that chemical? What’s the difference? You fell in love with me back at Dissonance because you were smoking too much pot.’
‘No,’ said Alex. ‘No. That wasn’t why.’
But the truth was that he had, back then, never known why, and never wondered; his emotions had been instant and opaque and he had expected nothing else. He had known so little about her.
‘Why didn’t you ever call me?’ he asked, his voice very low.
‘It was too hard,’ murmured Susie, staring out at the street. ‘It was just too hard.’
He raised his arm, and the motion had the weird dreamy slowness of an inevitable act. With the mingled hunger and sickness of someone going back to a familiar drug, he stroked her hair away from her face. He kissed her neck and tasted salt. She turned towards him and reached up, her mouth soft against his.
‘Oh no,’ he whispered, after a while. ‘No, this is a very bad idea.’
‘Yes,’ said Susie, running her hands down his chest.
He bent and touched his lips to her hair. ‘This is a train wreck,’ he said. And then he was kissing her again, she was sucking his tongue, pulling him further into her mouth, and it went on forever, and he thought that he could dissolve in this, in this sweetness, the joints of his body coming undone. Wrecked, addicted, gone.
In her bedroom they stood apart from each other for a moment, still fully clothed, hesitant, and he was much more afraid now than he had been in his twenties, older than he should be and far too aware of all the things that could go wrong. Then she moved towards him, and he lifted her small burning hand and licked the drying blood from her palm.
Plague Days
I
Derek Rae’s life in the ravine is, after its manner, a life well-organized. His time is measured by the regular catastrophe of the trains passing over his head, thunderous and dirty, an assault of noise. The days and weeks are shaped by weather, the poison sun and debilitating humidity of late summer shading slowly into the long cold nights and the sheltering snow.
He doesn’t know that the girls are falling down. It is a shame, perhaps, that no one has told him, because Derek is closer to the heart of the problem than anyone thinks. But this is how it is, he doesn’t take the subway, he doesn’t read the newspapers.
Though Derek is radically isolated, he is not in fact quite without human contact. He is known to the street nurses, for instance, who bring him the bottles of water and tins of Ensure that now constitute his entire diet; the nurses have not passed this information on to his sister because Derek does not speak to them, so they are unable to determine whether they have his consent.
Sometimes he comes out of his tent and sits in Chorley Park, but he does not think he will do that again after what happened the last time.
When it becomes most urgently necessary – no longer very often – he will cross over to Broadview and ask for change until he can afford to visit one of the city’s more desperate and undiscriminating sex workers. His library is made up mostly of books and magazines he has found lying in bus shelters or coffee shops, though in a few cases he has stolen them from the public library, because books are a singularly pressing requirement, the one thing left that resembles his vanished life. Sometimes he finds mittens and hats discarded on the hiking path, and these sustain him in the coldest weather.
None of this represents the truth of Derek’s existence, his passions and his miseries, the battles he wages all alone against pains and fears and the forces of universal gravitation. The raw courage that is required of him every day. His hard-won choice to continue living, when so many possibilities to stop are offered at every hand, the cars on the highway, the trains on the tracks, an end to the daily loss. None of this represents Derek’s soul, scraped bloody, howling, fighting always to hang on, a solitary superhuman ordeal, unacknowledged by the world, unrewarded.
These things are known. Somewhere, they are known. But they are not to be spoken of.
And up and down the city, people pursued their lives, their own small braveries and defeats; they walked dogs and drilled holes in the street, wiped the noses of other people’s children. At the corner of Bloor and Spadina, just before dawn, a shirtless man pulled out a knife and began to cut his arms and chest, spilling gouts of raspberry blood on the sidewalk, and as the police took him away he spoke of crimes against order, of the subway cars falling apart in rot and atomic disintegration, entropy calling them home.
Later, at this same corner, a woman would stagger and fall, and hives would break out on her face. The panhandlers who sat on the newspaper boxes, blind drunk at ten in the morning, laughed at first, and then watched her twisting on the street, biting her own lip until she drew blood, and one of them ran and pounded his fist on the window of the bagel shop until he saw the waitress pick up the phone to call 911. Then he ran, staggering and falling with his friends, to the park down the block. They lay on the dead grass of the park and laughed again and wept.
In the hospital, the burned man dreamed of paper snowflakes, clean-edged and white and cool, falling to cover his bed. His body a field, extending through space. He lay beneath the blue light of the dream, the taste of dirt and honey in his mouth, and the paper snow filled the concave vault of space, this man his own world in his opiate sleep, the fire on the far horizon.
The first thing Alex thought when he woke up was that he had to make sure Susie was still there; and she was, though she had pulled the covers over her head and was nearly invisible. Of course, it was her apartment, so the chances of her leaving in the night were minimal. He moved closer to her, in the warm envelope of the duvet, running one hand along the curve of her spine and pressing his face into the soft skin of her neck, but she didn’t seem close to waking, and his second and much more rational thought was that he didn’t know what time it was, and he needed to find his insulin kit immediately.
He pushed himself out of the bed with an abrupt silent movement. The bedroom was chilly and dark, a heavy curtain over the window; he found his underpants and jeans near the bed, then crept into the middle of the room, going more by touch than anything else, and located his coat, and the fabric purse in the pocket. There was more light in the hallway. He left the bedroom, easing the door closed behind him, and sat on the hall floor to check his sugar. It was too high for a morning level, and it must have been much higher in the night. That was no good. Not as instantly life-threatening as a hypo, but it was the high levels that did the lasting harm, that set the capillaries overgrowing behind his retinas, that threatened neuropathy, kidney problems, heart failure.
Acting automatically, he calculated his dosage, drew up the clear fluid into a syringe and injected, t
ucked the used needle back into the kit. But this was a whole new problem; now he needed to eat within the next half-hour, preferably sooner, or his sugar would plummet.
The kitchen at the end of the hallway was small and cramped and rather untidy, but there was a large window looking out onto the backyard and the alleyway beyond. A dirty dish and cup in the sink, a kettle on the counter, a coffee maker; some bits of paper stuck to the refrigerator door, reminders about dental appointments and books due at the university library. Tentatively, he opened the fridge. A bottle of cranberry juice and a carton of milk, takeout containers with noodles and leftover chicken wings inside, part of a loaf of rye bread, a cinnamon bun in a paper bag, plastic-wrapped chunks of havarti and feta cheese, some organic rhubarb jam from a health-food store. On a shelf nearby, a jar of peanut butter and a tin of cocoa. He took the peanut butter down and made himself a sandwich, poured a glass of juice. He would have liked some hot chocolate, but he thought he should cause a minimum of disturbance, he shouldn’t seem to be laying claim to her kitchen.
About ten-thirty, according to the clock on the stove. He sat down at the table and looked out the window into the backyard, chewing the bread and peanut butter. It was a very clear, still morning, the sky a low field of white cottony snow falling slowly. Someone ran along the alleyway with a dog. Looked like a Labrador. Some kind of big dog, anyway.
Floaters. He’d noticed them already, of course, though he couldn’t say exactly when. Sometime after he came out into the light. Floaters, impossible to count how many, dancing like burnt-out novas at the margins of his field of vision. Tiny hemorrhages, the possible forerunners of something much worse; stress-induced explosions of the proliferating blood vessels. He couldn’t let this go on, couldn’t go on doing this to himself. He had to tell her that this was impossible, he wasn’t able to climb into ravines in the middle of the night or crash his normal routines without warning, he had to stop following her everywhere. Even if every minute that he wasn’t touching her was a kind of disaster. Suzanne Rae, his personal crack cocaine.
He was still eating the sandwich when the bedroom door opened, and adrenalin shot through his body so he could barely swallow. She walked uncertainly into the room in a bathrobe, and he couldn’t make out her face when she saw him – she was grimacing against the light, one hand shielding her eyes. She went to the sink, took down a glass from the shelf and ran the tap.
‘I don’t normally drink like that,’ she said with her back to him, and swallowed the water quickly, leaning on the sink.
‘Yeah. I can tell.’
She turned around, biting her lip and frowning. ‘Oh. I didn’t mean to imply…’ She pushed a matted bit of hair from her face. ‘Alex, I’m really glad you stayed,’ she said shakily.
‘I’m sorry about…’ he waved vaguely at the sandwich. ‘I had to eat. I know it’s not very good manners.’
‘Sure. Much better you should just drop dead.’ She walked to the fridge and took a can of coffee from the freezer compartment. He could see her breasts moving under the bathrobe, pale skin half-shadowed and secretive. She fumbled with the can and started to spoon coffee into the machine, and then halfway into the process she dropped the spoon on the counter and put her face in her hands.
‘I’m so fucked up right now,’ she said.
He stood and put his hands on her shoulders, touched the back of her neck. She smelled of sex and stale alcohol, and she had bits of twig in her hair. There was no limit to this.
‘I guess it’s just as well you met Derek. It helps if you know.’
‘I don’t understand everything.’
‘No. Nobody could.’
His skin was goosebumped, without a shirt in this cold room. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see the floaters, and crossed his arms under her breasts, holding the warmth of her against him, the curve of her back pressed into his stomach.
‘Tell me something pretty,’ she said.
‘Tell me about one of your places.’
‘I’m not good at describing things. That’s why I take photographs.’
‘But try?’
‘I don’t know. Have you seen the terraced garden in High Park?’ She shook her head, and he felt the movement against his lips. ‘There’s these waterfalls,’ he said, keeping his eyes closed. ‘They built this series of waterfalls and pools down one side of the valley. It feeds into Grenadier Pond. There’s stone bridges over the pools, and this stone pagoda where the ducks live, little brown mallard ducks. And flowers growing in the rocks all down the hill. There’s, well, I don’t know the names of all the flowers. Lilies I know. Some of them are kind of pumpkin-coloured, and others are more yellowy, like, like the inside of a nectarine. And there’s, um, these pale flowers, white with a kind of wash of purple or pink, on long stalks, and the ones like bottlebrushes, bright red and yellow. And green, all this green falling down the rocks, little tiny green leaves and blue flowers, and I think some pine trees? I don’t know if I’m remembering the pine trees or making them up. I guess it’s actually kind of fakey and pretentious. But it’s still nice.’
She took hold of his hands and moved them further down, the robe parting slightly so he was holding the soft drift of hair and wet flesh. ‘Oh,’ he said, as she pressed back harder against him, and he felt his knees loosen as he dipped his head and sucked on the small lobe of her ear, his tongue against a nub of scar tissue where a piercing had healed badly. She turned around in an awkward tangle of legs and fingers, and he lifted her onto the counter as she reached for the zipper of his jeans.
Her body had no overlay of memory for him; that one sad stoned trembling night had been too brief, too long ago. His head bending down to her, mouthing her dark pink nipple, this was now, this existed for itself. The salt slickness of her cunt. Not the body of a girl, but a woman at the end of her thirties – a woman who had never had children, who was strong and fit, but adult, aging, skin and muscle loosening. Immediate and real.
They lay down on her bed, exhausted. Her eyes were bloodshot, and he was nursing a cramp in his calf. Skin on skin, clammy with sweat in chill air, and he felt the heat from her flushed shoulders like a coil of wire.
‘I’m sorry I shouted at you,’ said Susie. ‘Back at the rainforest place.’
‘The Cloud Gardens. It’s okay. You had a point.’ Though he could not even clearly remember, right now, what they had said to each other. ‘It’s a very tiny rainforest,’ he said, spreading his hand over her ribs. ‘Like, in an elevator shaft. It’s the oddest thing.’
She kissed him again, and even the sour taste of her mouth was too much for him, he wanted to draw every bit of her inside him, into his blood. Over and over, she could break him down.
The light was fading already in mid-afternoon, and snow was still falling, soft and slow, the kind of snowfall that never seemed heavy at any one time but accumulated into thick billows and drifts, pressed down on the sidewalk by pedestrians and melted into shades of tan and deep brown by the cars on the road.
Alex sat on the floor of Susie’s living room, drinking coffee and staring at a newspaper, where a picture of the burned man dominated the lower part of the front page. The man was, as it turned out, neither Muslim nor Jewish but a Portuguese Catholic, and was described by his family as ‘odd.’ He thought of phoning Janice Carriere to see what was happening, if the man was still stable, if he was awake at all.
Susie came into the room, dressed now in a sweater and skirt, and sat down in an office chair at a worn wooden desk with a rather expensive laptop resting on it. Ikea bookshelves around the walls, and a large map of the city taped up near the desk, with annotations in green and red ink, a scatter of shelters and homeless communities – the Scott Mission, Seaton House, the cardboard neighbourhood under the arc of Bathurst where it rose, just past the Gardiner. Bastard Bridge, she had written here. A yellow post-it note read prelim interviews only, revisit. On the desk, a thick sheaf of papers, several different pens including some stolen from hotels, a
glass paperweight with a sea urchin inside it. She looked up at the map.
‘That’s where he is, right?’ she asked. Alex stood up and looked where she was pointing.
‘Yeah. That’s it.’
‘There’d be much easier access from Bayview, wouldn’t there? I’ll try that next time.’
Alex frowned. ‘You’re going back?’
She looked up at him, surprised. ‘Not this minute. But yes. Of course I am.’
‘Do you think that really makes sense?’
She opened her mouth, then looked away quickly. ‘Well, it’s not like you have to come with me,’ she said.
‘That’s not what I meant. I’m just not sure it’s a good idea.’
She picked up her coffee cup with both hands and bent her head to drink. Her hair was wet and shining, the desk lamp picking out erratic highlights, a dark syrup stream. ‘That’s not your problem, is it?’
Alex tried not to feel as if he had just been punched in the stomach.
‘I don’t want you getting hurt is all,’ he said.
‘Schizophrenics are rarely violent. That’s a TV myth.’
‘I didn’t mean physically.’
‘I told you. It’s not your problem.’
He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling tension gathering in the air. This was bound to happen, he’d known that; the history and the hurt would come rushing back. They couldn’t talk about anything without the static in the way.
‘I’m sorry I involved you at all, okay?’ she said. ‘It wasn’t fair. I can deal with this myself, I always have.’
‘Susie-Sue. That’s really not what I meant.’
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