‘I know what you meant. You meant that I should just leave him there.’
‘Not exactly. No. I just don’t see why you have to go up there yourself. It’s too hard on you.’
‘And who the hell else do you think is going to? The prime minister? God? No one cares about him but me, Alex. No one else even tries.’
‘Okay, okay.’ He walked a few steps around the room, not sure where he was going, and stopped in front of a picture pinned to the back of the door, a child’s drawing, a stick person with strangely angled arms under a huge sun.
‘Miriam did that,’ said Susie. ‘Evvy’s little girl. Years ago, of course. It’s supposed to be me.’
‘I should think that’s an honour.’
‘Not really. Kids’ll draw anyone who passes by at the right moment.’
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I should go with you. You shouldn’t be alone.’
She shrugged. ‘That’s up to you. I’m all right on my own.’
‘You didn’t think so before.’
‘Yeah, well, that was stupid. I shouldn’t have asked you.’
‘Yes, you should. Of course you should.’
She sat under the desk lamp, broken reflections of light moving on the surface of her coffee, bright threads in her hair trailing down past her angular cheekbones. Her head turned away from him.
‘Maybe I should go home now,’ he said.
‘Maybe.’
‘I have to feed my cat.’
She nodded.
‘Will you tell me when you go to see Derek again?’
‘I suppose.’
‘I want to come. Really.’
‘Yeah, okay.’ She got up from the chair and hugged him. Her hair left a damp patch on his shirt.
‘I’ll talk to you soon,’ he said, his fingers digging into the fabric of her sweater.
‘Well, it’s all right. I should work for the rest of the weekend. I’m writing this paper for a journal.’
‘But soon.’
‘Sure. I’ll call you. Or you can call me. Whichever.’
Saturday evening on College Street, the sidewalks busy despite the snow, despite even the falling girls, people still determined to prove that they were the kind of people who went to College Street on Saturday night. The lights of the clubs and restaurants glowing against the cold as Alex sat on the streetcar, looking at the burned man’s face in a discarded newspaper. He thought again about phoning Janice, just to ask. Otherwise he might never know.
This seemed to be his place in the life of the city, and in Susie’s life too, somehow, a devoted observer at the margins of the crack-ups, the big stories. Susie and Chris, Susie and Derek. At least he had managed to miss the episode of her marriage, whatever that had been about. Someone else had presumably held her hand for that one.
… which could indicate the presence of a viral infection, said a side-bar to the story. The possibility of a large number of casualties, it said, in the hypothetical case of the deliberate release of H5N1 influenza, or bird flu. But the chances of such a release being successful are far from clear.
He imagined his murderous doctor striding through the snow with an oily package, thinking of love and killing, elegant, serious, sometimes uncertain. How many people in the street were carrying their own terrorists in their heads, and what shape did they take? Foreigners and police, dark men and angry children.
On College, a block from his house, the window of the little grocery was broken, chunks of safety glass swept into a pile on the sidewalk. It could have been a child playing ball, but everything now seemed to assimilate to the city’s larger narrative, and he assumed it was a crime of fear. The owners of the grocery Lebanese maybe, or Iranian, or mistaken for whatever.
Maybe it was just an accident.
For a little while he studied some contact sheets that he had left out on his desk, but the floaters were bothering him. And he was very tired, that alone was putting his eye off. He took a cassette out of the cupboard and slid it into the machine. One of Adrian’s old tapes – how long had it been since he’d listened to Adrian sing? It was another regression to the past, maybe, but one that at least wasn’t confusing or dangerous, just Adrian’s odd propulsive wandering songs, his inscrutable lyrics.
Queen Jane crawled up onto his chest, the weight of her pulling him down towards sleep. He shouldn’t really sleep on the couch, he’d just end up with a stiff neck, but he was disinclined to move. The tape clicked and began to replay. He should go by the church and see Adrian sometime, he thought, as he slid into a disordered space of dreaming.
The snow stopped that night, but the temperature kept dropping for days, the wind howling in white swirls up and down the streets. The floaters were persisting. Alex told no one at work, but it was a constant low-key struggle not to raise his hand to brush them away, not to blink and shake his head every few minutes; they were in the way of his focus, distracting him. And reminding him, reminding him as long as his eyes were open, of that bleak space breathing in from the future.
But they would recede, maybe they were already receding a bit, it was hard to tell. This time, next time, they would still go away. Probably damage to the retina would be minimal, for now.
On Monday night he was walking west on College, towards his apartment, with his hat pulled down to his eyebrows and his scarf over his nose, and then sirens were coming from all directions at once, and the street became a sea of red light, fire engines and ambulances and police cars all meeting at a point on the north side, a restaurant with a broken window. He didn’t want to know what it was about. In between the emergency vehicles were little groups of people, hugging each other and crying, and broken glass on the road. A man was holding up his hand, thin streams of blood running down his arm.
Alex didn’t want to know what it was about but he was reaching into his camera bag nevertheless, he’d need a long exposure for this, the light would be tricky to handle. He took a picture of the bleeding man, of the police entering the restaurant.
And he was packing his camera away when something came towards him out of the dark, shining and unpredictable, a fluttering thing, and before he knew what he was doing he had put out his hand and caught the string of a gold foil balloon in the shape of a star.
Then the whole cluster of balloons tied to the restaurant’s patio fence broke free and were swept up in the wind, into the bare branches of the overhanging trees, into the awnings along the street, a flock of golden stars reaching out of the damage. Alex stood in the street and held on to a string.
Sometime before the day that Susie had fallen from the stairs of the clinic, that Alex had caught her – though his memory was inevitably coloured now by what had come after – he had been sitting outside his house in the market, trying to fix the advancing mechanism on one of his old cameras, when she came down the street with a bag of potatoes in her arms.
‘Hi,’ she said as she passed the steps. ‘It’s Alex, right?’ He nodded, glancing up at her and then looking back at the camera. ‘Aren’t you cold out here?’
He shrugged. ‘One of the kids in my house dropped some acid last night. He’s been playing the same chord on his guitar over and over for, like, the last twelve hours. I needed a break.’ He lifted the camera up to the light so he could get a better look at the insides. ‘My definition of responsible drug use is if you’re going to play the same chord for twelve hours, you don’t inflict it on anyone else.’
‘Okay.’ She shifted the bag of potatoes on her hip. ‘I wanted to tell you I liked your photos in the last issue.’
He didn’t know what to say, so he shrugged again.
‘Sorry, you’re busy. I should get home anyway.’
‘No, it’s all right.’ He didn’t want her to leave for some reason. ‘You can sit down if you like.’
She put the potatoes on the steps beside her. ‘You fixing that?’
‘Trying. Not actually doing it.’
‘You could always go over to the Last Temptation,
it’s warm in there.’
‘I don’t mind. This is cheaper.’
He spent a few more minutes prodding the gears of the camera, Susie sitting beside him without speaking, her breath a white cloud in the air. He was slightly stoned himself, and not really able to focus on the task that well.
‘The thing is,’ he said, and was surprised to find himself speaking, ‘the thing is, maybe if I just sit here long enough, then…’ The sentence ran out on him and he stopped.
‘Then what?’
‘I don’t know.’ He put the camera in his lap and tucked his hands into his sleeves, thinking about wanting things that could never be named.
‘Well, if you sit here long enough, your toes could turn black and fall off. That’d be something.’
‘Yeah, I guess it would.’
They sat in silence for another minute. ‘Where does your family live?’ asked Susie.
Alex snorted. ‘What? You’re gonna call my mother and tell her I’m sitting outside without a hat?’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Susie, but she smiled. ‘I’m just asking.’
‘Kitchener. If you must know.’
‘Do you see them much?’
‘Not so much, but we get along okay. They’re all right.’
‘My family’s in Scarborough.’
‘Oh. Hey. I’m very sorry.’
Susie laughed. ‘Yeah, no kidding.’ Taking off her mittens, she pushed back her hair with one hand. ‘I was wondering,’ she said quietly.
‘Yeah?’
She studied her nail polish, the same pink as her hair. ‘If people – if anyone ever escapes from things. Gets away. I mean, do you think it’s possible?’
The size of this question confused him entirely. ‘I, ah, I don’t know. I mean, um, is this a person and their family?’
‘I suppose so. Yeah.’
‘So what… what’s the family doing, you know? I mean, is there a problem?’
‘Never mind. That was a stupid thing to say.’ She put her mittens back on and stood up, lifting her bag of potatoes. ‘I better get home.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Alex, and he meant it though he wasn’t sure what it was attached to.
‘Thank you, Alex. Maybe I’ll see you around.’
On Tuesday morning a woman collapsed at Kennedy station, and later she would say that it was the smell of flowers without air, of flowers that took the air away. Another woman would say that she saw a man with a beard, and something on his head, it might have been a turban, and he was standing by a pillar and watching them, like he already knew what would happen.
The hazmat teams descended with swabs, collecting fragments of matter far below the threshold of vision, which would be taken to protected labs and cultured. Trace elements would grow in the petri dishes, but there would be nothing that could be blamed, nothing that could act as an explanation.
Loose pages of newspapers, crumpled words, blew along the platform in the wind of the trains, respiratory symptoms, H5N1, variants of anthrax.
Alex rode home through a depleted rush hour, barely recognizable as such, the traffic in the stations thinned out and moving nervously. It had been last Tuesday night he’d met Susie at the church, and he was fairly sure that churches coordinated their meal and shelter programs with each other, that they each took particular days of the week. For all he knew, Evelyn had people sleeping in the hall every night, but it was more likely that her church was responsible for Tuesdays.
He walked east on College to the little brick church. It was dark when he got there, but still early evening, and the first thing he saw was a line of men and women stretching out the doorway; inside, he made his way past rows of tables where people sat over plates of lasagna and mashed potatoes, to where Evelyn was standing in the kitchen, staring at something on the counter and raking her fingers through her hair.
‘Okay,’ she was saying as he came in. ‘So someone has given us a casserole made from permafrost. This is just something I have to come to terms with. It’s all just part of the rich incarnational parade.’
‘Hey, Alex.’ Adrian came in through a side door, and glanced down at the frozen casserole, which was leaking trails of water onto a cutting board. ‘You didn’t get bombed out of your house last night, did you?’
Alex blinked. ‘What’s this now?’
‘That restaurant where the bomb went off. Don’t you live over that way?’
‘It was a bomb?’
‘A very minuscule bomb, though,’ said Evelyn, poking at the casserole with a knife. ‘And of poor quality. Nobody was really hurt. They don’t have access to the good explosives down at the low end of organized crime.’
A large man in a ragged jacket got up from his table, coming to lean in the doorway of the kitchen. ‘There’s something I can do to help, maybe?’
‘I don’t think so, Vojcek, not right now. You can collect the plates in a few minutes, I guess.’
‘Aye-aye, captain,’ said Vojcek with a brisk salute.
‘You’re kidding me,’ said Alex. ‘A bomb? Was this connected to, I mean, was it some kind of hate crime or… ’
‘Nah.’ Adrian bent down to turn on the dishwasher. ‘These two guys have competing establishments. They despise each other. It’s, I don’t know, who does the better calamari in mango sauce with chipotle reduction or whatever. So one of them hired somebody. This is what I’m told, at any rate. But I suppose it’s part of the overall municipal malaise.’
‘Is the terminal stage of capitalism,’ said Vojcek. ‘Soon we are a communist dictatorship, and I will flee to New Zealand.’
‘Attaboy, Vojcek,’ said Adrian. ‘Keep looking on the bright side.’
Alex left the kitchen and went back to the hall, where servers, at a table against the far wall, were scraping food out of the bottoms of the pots. A young woman with shining dark hair and the tense brightness of insanity in her face took his arm with a terrified smile. She was wearing a long orange scarf over her head, a blue sweatshirt that was slightly too small, grey pants that were slightly too large.
‘Is this a safe place?’ she whispered, and then laughed. ‘Is this a safe place? I have to face my fears, you see – there are people trying to drive me crazy, there are people out there trying to drive me crazy, and you have to ask why? Don’t you? Don’t you have to ask why?’ She held on tighter to Alex’s arm. ‘Are they benefitting financially, are they benefitting spiritually? Is it a question of the war? Everyone here knows my obsession, you see, everyone knows my weakness… and it’s hard when there are people all over the streets trying to drive me crazy, do you know what I mean? Is it clear? Do you think this is a safe place?’
‘I think so,’ said Alex. ‘Sure. I think it is.’
‘I have to face my fears,’ she said, and then turned her head as if she had heard something, and pulled her scarf tighter around her hair and crept into a corner, nodding and moving her lips.
The frizzy-haired girl he had seen last week slammed suddenly into the hall, apparently in some temper, and stomped past the tables into the kitchen, kicking off her boots and whining in a high unintelligible voice, Evvy’s own voice soft at first and then sharpening, and the child stormed away into some other part of the building. Evvy leaned back against the counter and ran a hand over her face, and Alex wanted to do something but he knew that he couldn’t. Adrian moved closer to her and touched her arm.
‘Domestic crisis,’ announced Vojcek cheerfully, picking up plates from the table beside Alex. ‘Is difficult child. Has poor sense of responsibility.’
‘Mmm,’ said Alex vaguely.
He didn’t know how much he really expected Susie to be there. Not much, he thought, though he knew he was unnaturally aware of every person who opened the door.
Evelyn had come out of the kitchen now and was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the hall, sorting through a box of old mittens. A short woman in a red hat walked across the room, and for a moment things were suddenly vivid and sharp at the edges; but
it wasn’t Susie after all, in fact she looked almost nothing like Susie. He went into the kitchen, where Adrian was turning an unlit cigarette in his fingers and staring at it with a vague suppressed longing.
Susie probably wouldn’t come. There was no real reason to suppose she would.
‘I was wondering about taking some pictures,’ he said. ‘I mean, I know I’d have to ask people. But would it be okay to try?’
Vojcek had no problem posing for a portrait, and neither did Joseph with the flowering cane; he spent a long time with Joseph, working on the textures of his skin, the fleetingly sweet expressions in his eyes, and trying to get the cane into the shots in the right way. Luis didn’t want to be photographed, and it was clearly a bad idea to ask the woman with the orange scarf. A girl named Mouse asked to be photographed with her ferret, which was living inside the sleeve of her coat.
‘Isn’t that a bit funny?’ asked Alex, slipping into the kind of easy patter he used with teenage patients. ‘A mouse with a pet ferret?’
Mouse grinned and chewed a loose bit of her hair. ‘I know a girl called Kat who has a hedgehog, what about that?’
‘A pet hedgehog?’
‘Yeah, but it kinda sucks as a pet. It can’t cuddle you or nothing. And it’s not very friendly. Actually it’s kinda mean. It really brings Kat down sometimes.’
‘Maybe she needs a better pet.’
‘Well, she don’t want to give up on this hedgehog. She thinks it can, you know, rehabilitate.’
He was focused now, working, and happy, and not even too bothered by the floaters, which were definitely diminishing, and then he heard the thud of the wooden door. Susie was partway into the hall, unwinding her scarf, when she saw him, and stood still for a second before she walked towards him.
‘I was just leaving,’ said Alex.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I think so, I think I should go.’ ‘I need to do some interviews, but if you could wait a little while… ’
He knew if he looked at her eyes he was lost. But really, he was pretty much lost anyway. He shrugged. ‘I guess I could wait.’
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