Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  He took some more photos while Adrian and Evvy and a few others folded the legs of the tables and stacked them up, lay down mattresses, rolled out the TV. The movie was something about a comet destroying all life on earth, and the general level of interest seemed low, though Mouse said that there was a really excellent tidal wave later on, and the woman there died, and it was very sad and she’d cried like anything.

  ‘The fire next time,’ said Evelyn.

  ‘Nah,’ said Adrian. ‘Men in Black II next time.’

  Susie had set up a couple of chairs in the corner, and now and then he heard scraps of conversation. How many friends in this place, in that place. Would you say they were close friends? What kind of thing do they help you with, do you help them with? What word would you use to describe your relationship?

  Adrian squatted down on the floor beside him while he was packing up his camera. ‘Did you know Suzanne was coming?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it okay?’

  ‘It was a very long time ago,’ said Alex, which was such a blatant lie he could hardly imagine anyone believing it.

  ‘If you say so.’ Adrian stood up. ‘I guess I should see if I’m needed somewhere.’

  He should have told Adrian about the floaters. He could have told him that at least.

  Susie crossed the room towards Evelyn, and they spoke for a minute with their heads close together, and then Evelyn stepped back and laughed, and moved in a quick twirling step that made Alex think of her dancing. He tried to remember when he had seen her dance. Susie hugged Evvy lightly, and looked over at Alex, and he picked up his bag and came to her.

  They went outside, into a wind that was very strong now. ‘I have to remember to call you Suzanne,’ said Alex.

  ‘You don’t really.’ She played with the fringe of her scarf, and the wind blew her hair across her face, obscuring her expression.

  ‘So did you, did you get that paper finished?’

  ‘Well, it’s not like – it takes longer than that. I, ah, I did some work on it, I guess.’

  They stopped walking at the same time, and then he took hold of her and kissed her, pressing her against the wall of a bus shelter, half angry, half desperate, her hands gripping his arms. He didn’t consciously think that her mouth no longer tasted of hangover and bad sleep, but he took in the sugar trace on her lips and the smell of her breath. Reese’s peanut butter cups, a small cheap treat for herself, bought at the 7-Eleven or the newsstand in the subway. An innocent, silly thing.

  She had no mittens, and she was walking along the street blowing on her hands. He wanted her to be inside, somewhere warm. They ended up at the Kos Diner, piling their layers of heavy outdoor clothes on empty chairs; it seemed obvious that she was coming back to his apartment, but somehow he couldn’t say this, neither one of them wanting to take a step they couldn’t reverse. Susie ordered a coffee and french fries. Her hair, loose and disarranged, seemed to be a slightly different colour, a bit more golden.

  ‘I found a magic star last night,’ he said. ‘But Adrian tells me it has a mafia connection.’ He told her about the restaurant and the flock of balloons, trying to make it sound entertaining rather than grim, wanting her to smile.

  ‘Do you suppose it’s a sign of some kind?’ she said, shaking a blob of ketchup onto her plate.

  ‘Gotta be.’

  Susie dipped a french fry into the ketchup and sighed. ‘Derek sent me a letter,’ she said. She reached into her shoulder bag and took out two ragged pieces of notebook paper covered with tiny dense handwriting. ‘The street nurses gave it to me.’

  ‘Is this good or bad?’

  ‘I’m really not sure.’

  Alex moved his hand towards the letter and looked at her, and she nodded, so he pulled the papers over to his side of the table. The script was slanted, rushing forward on the page so that words ended up on top of other words, lines snaking up and down the margins. There seemed to be no salutation, nor anything resembling the beginning of a thought.

  i was talking to the doctor that time and he said have you thought about your hostelity, I could use the help. because the hired help, yes they do, the hired, the hived, the halt, the lame, they are always helping. okay that was not my point. so he said that about the hostile and i said, what the fucking shit, i can get hostile on your ass if you keep going on about it. so he fucked me up the ass that’s all the doctors do every day they’re back at it. i was bleeding from my anal passage because of the fucking of the doctors and that’s why I got the cancer in there and my penis also.

  but you find a safe place and be in it. because the sodium pentothal and others you may not beawar of, hypnium oxygenatium and also wood alcohol derivatives as such. this is why the kalorie intake. you see it is kalorie, not calorie as they tell you, kallos = beautiful but it’s a risk you take. but you find a safe place.

  baby sister we were born together in one bloody body and they say it isn’t the same dna but that’s a lie, on top of me and because they say we are not, no no, go away, but i look after you. they tried to do it again to you but i put my mysterious protection in place. you are very beautiful susie-paul. i will make it all right.

  not even to get into the subject of the suicide missions they are asking me to undertake, but i say, no, we are not going in that direction. to the undertaker ha ha. all in little pieces. with involvement of the following persons, mr kofi annan, mr vladimir putin = whore, mrs margaret thatcher + tony blair, mr president of the united stated union of holy matrimony which is to say fucking in the bleeding orifices. the oval orifice. ha ha ha.

  but it’s not my point okay okay. but only if you would come here and stay with me. that would be better.

  once upon a time there was a little girl. and the birds ate up her eyes. but she lives happily ever after at the end, this is my mystery power.

  but stopping the crying is a problem of our time, he cries too much.

  There was more, but Alex couldn’t keep reading. He turned the papers over in his hands and briefly thought that he might cry himself, watching Susie eating her french fries, eyes on her plate.

  ‘He spends a lot of time writing,’ she said. ‘This is on the coherent side.’

  Alex slid the papers across the table. ‘He’s in love with you,’ he said quietly.

  Susie shrugged. ‘That’s not the form of words I’d choose to describe it. I’d say I’m the focus of a lot of his obsessions. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s not much different from what normal people mean by love.’ She pushed back her hair, and Alex bit his lower lip. ‘He wants me in there with him, you know. I mean, not so much in the tent or wherever. In his world. With the plots and the brainwashing chemicals, inside that system. I even feel guilty sometimes that I’m not.’

  ‘Oh God. Susie.’ He wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, given the conversation up to that point, but he reached across the table for her hand. She moved away, in what might have been an accidental gesture, and he took a french fry from her plate instead.

  ‘But I’m not inside it, am I? And poor Derek’s not my bad angel. I have my own ordinary failures, and that’s a big thing, really. People don’t know.’

  There was nothing he could say – there was nothing he could do, short of kneeling and putting his head in her lap – so he said nothing. A flicker crossed the path of his sight, and he moved his head, and caught himself making a brushing motion at one of the floaters. She noticed the gesture, but she didn’t know what it meant, it had no implications for her. My eyes are bleeding.

  ‘Anyway. What’s the news in your life, aside from magic stars?’

  ‘Nothing much. Day-to-day stuff at the hospital.’

  My eyes are bleeding because of you.

  ‘I don’t want to keep you if you’re busy.’

  ‘No. I’m not.’ He watched the shifting highlights in her hair and wondered how long he would be able to see them. That was the kind of detail he might lose. ‘I got a good run of photos at the chu
rch.’

  They sat without speaking for a while, Susie eating her fries with her fingers.

  ‘I’d like to photograph you sometime,’ he said.

  ‘You already have. A bunch of times.’

  ‘Yeah, but ages ago.’

  Slowly, Alex was becoming aware of noises behind them. Voices at another table growing louder and more agitated.

  ‘Come on. I know you were taking pictures of me last week.’ He shrugged; it was true, though he’d been only half aware of it at the time. Susie in the darkness of the Cloud Gardens, looking at the ground. ‘But I mean properly.’

  ‘Yeah, okay. Sometime.’

  He saw movement, real movement, not black spots, from the corner of his eye, and heard a woman’s voice, high and scared, saying something about roses. ‘Oh man,’ he said, and turned his head in time to see her – in her thirties probably, in a furry green coat – crash heavily to the ground beside the door. Alex stood up from the table.

  ‘Shit,’ said Susie, and they both started to move towards the woman, but half a dozen other people had already reached her. As someone tried to lift her up, she vomited onto the floor, splashing her coat and a man’s shoes. Alex heard her saying the word poison, the word terrorist.

  ‘Let’s just go,’ he said. Another man was clinging to a table, his heavy shoulders hunched over as if he were barely supporting himself, red blotches appearing on his face. But Susie’s expression was lit up with professional fascination. ‘Oh no,’ she said, excited. ‘I have to stay, I have to watch this.’

  An ambulance had already arrived, then a fire truck. Two more people were sitting on the floor holding their heads. The paramedics were wearing masks that covered their faces, blue gowns over their uniforms and green plastic gloves, and they lifted the woman carefully to her feet. She staggered and fell against one of them, and he turned his head to the side as he held her up. Strips of bacon, neglected on the grill, began to shrivel and blacken, harsh smoke curling into the air around the counter.

  ‘This is really, really interesting,’ said Susie, moving closer to the centre of activity.

  The paramedics led the woman and the blotched man out of the restaurant, the firemen passing oxygen masks out among the crowd. The scorched bacon was spitting fat, and Alex felt a heave of nausea. A dark-haired waitress ran back behind the counter and scraped the strips of bacon off, tossing them into the sink. The deep fryer and the coffee maker were smoking as well, she turned them off, unplugged the coffee maker and threw it hastily into the sink. Susie moved back a step, took Alex’s arm and pulled him forward. He put one hand over his mouth, thinking he was about to be sick, a horribly familiar smell of burned meat in his nostrils.

  ‘Here’s what I want to know,’ she whispered. ‘Do the ERTS think this is a poison gas? What procedures are they employing for these incidents?’

  ‘I just don’t want to be taken in for decontamination or whatever.’

  ‘See, look at this, the medics have the masks but the firefighters don’t, and that doesn’t make rational sense. But it’s like… they have a kind of ambiguous response to this. Like it’s, hmm, liminal between real and imaginary, you know?’

  A fireman stretched an oxygen mask towards them, but Alex waved it away. He was afraid that Susie was going to put on a choking fit in order to get into one of the ambulances – there were two outside now – but she was busy with her clipboard and pen. Police cars pulled up at the curb, and then everyone inside the restaurant was being led out, standing for one shocking moment outside without coats, pressing against the wall for shelter.

  ‘They’re not sure what they’re doing,’ said Susie. ‘A lot of this is improvised.’ Policemen began coming out with armloads of winter clothes, purses and bags, dumping them on the sidewalk. He pulled his coat on, and his scarf, but he couldn’t find his hat. Susie had brought her bag outside with her, but she still had no coat, was hunched over and windblown, scribbling notes. A heavy man leaning against the wall seemed to have a nosebleed; he was clutching a wad of bloody tissue to his face, his mouth wide open. A cyclist with dreadlocked hair rounded the corner, staring at the crowd as he passed, and shouted, ‘Valium! Take Valium!’ as he sped into the darkness along College.

  ‘Susie. Aren’t you freezing?’

  ‘Just a second.’ She wrote another sentence, then bent down to a pile of clothes on the sidewalk and tugged her coat out. The woman who had fallen was being lifted into the ambulance.

  ‘… set up a decontamination tent?’ he heard one of the firemen saying, and then another fire truck arrived, and a white-suited hazmat team climbed down. A woman stood with her mouth partly open, pinned down by the sight of these swollen figures moving clumsily towards the door of the restaurant. Alex grabbed the sleeve of Susie’s coat and pulled her along the street, out of the light from the windows.

  ‘Can we go now? Please?’ He stood behind a newspaper box, separated from the crowd, his hands in his pockets. Susie looked back almost regretfully, but Alex started walking quickly west on College, and she came with him, trotting to keep up.

  ‘I’m glad I saw that,’ she was saying. ‘It really is a thing that’s worth studying.’

  ‘I just don’t want it happening around me all the time, is what I want.’ He took a breath, and the exhaust-filled air seemed clean in comparison, his nausea subsiding.

  ‘You notice it’s always just one or two people? It’s like a mass phenomenon that’s at the same time highly atomized, I think that’s almost unique. I wonder what they were talking about just before she fell.’

  ‘It seemed to come out of nowhere, more or less.’

  ‘Nothing comes out of nowhere, believe me.’ She blew on her hands again, rubbing her knuckles.

  ‘And why does that sound like a pop lyric?’

  He was walking more slowly now, safely away. As she drew level with him he reached out almost absently, and his fingers touched her shoulder and then moved back.

  ‘I’d like to talk to that first girl. She’s the real key to all this.’

  ‘She looked pretty ordinary, I have to tell you,’ said Alex, shrugging. ‘I don’t know, I think one of her friends had a pierced navel, if that’s any use.’

  ‘Gotta be useful to someone.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on that.’

  They had gone by Palmerston now. As they passed the streetcar stop Susie paused and made a small uncertain gesture.

  ‘Well,’ said Alex, ‘I live over by Grace. It’s just a few blocks.’

  She nodded, and as they crossed the street his arm moved around her waist, his hand running up and down the soft curve of her hip as she leaned into him for warmth. He could have told her that it wasn’t a good time, that he needed to be at work in the morning. He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about going to bed with Susie knowing that her twin brother’s chronicles of anal rape were folded away inside her shoulder bag. But it was like this, it would be like this, he had never been truly alone with her.

  Inside the apartment she stretched up on her toes, trying to touch the gold balloon above her head, car alarms going off on College Street.

  The fear had been always visible, the men with instruments appearing on television almost as soon as the first girl fell. But when real disease awoke in the city, it happened so quietly that hardly anyone noticed.

  It woke, like the fear, in the body of a girl, though a very different girl, a strung-out child with a push-up bra and a chronic cough and track marks, two miniskirts and some fishnet stockings and undiagnosed fetal alcohol syndrome. This girl began to feel sick, as if she had the flu. For a while she kept working, and it wasn’t so bad as long as she could get a line of coke from the guy who ran her, back in the parking lot behind the Salvation Army building, or even just some booze, but then he didn’t like his girls to be that far out of it, he’d smack you around if you got too wasted, but it was hard to work otherwise when she felt this sick. And then it got worse, and then a lot worse than that.

&nbs
p; She was lying in her bed and she couldn’t even tell if she was cold or hot except that it hurt, whatever it was, it was hurting. And bad dreams. Choking in her sleep, down her throat, jamming it, couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t get away from it, and she wanted to scream, but she was pinned down, too heavy, but it just hurt so much. Dirty girl. And some of the johns were freaks. The things they wanted her to do. The light scooping into her eyes like a jackknife, it was in her head now, it was all pain blowing up her head, and it was too heavy, she couldn’t move her, her, it hurt too much. And what they wanted her to do. Perverts. But when you spread your legs. Dirty girl. And it hurt, in her, in, in, and in her body, and it was shredding into black, dark dark, and her neck snapped back, and her body turned to stone.

  The guy who ran her came in, and then left. By the time her friend found her, hours later, and called an ambulance, she could no longer be woken. The ambulance came and took her away; and in the hospital she died.

  As she was still dying, the procedures for a meningitis outbreak were set into motion.

  The staff at Public Health acted quickly when the hospital phoned them. They placed a story in the local paper, they put up flyers in the neighbourhood where the girl had been working. But the desires of the street move so strangely, so covertly, and they follow no reliable pattern. The public health officers knew they would not reach everyone they needed to, and perhaps not anyone they needed to, but there was not much else they could do.

  The other girl, the first girl who fell, walked quietly into the kitchen of her house and opened the cupboards, searching through the canned goods, turning the tins around in her hands as if she were considering something. Tomato soup, stuffed vine leaves. A jar of peanut butter. She wasn’t sure how much she could take without an explanation, and she didn’t think that she could explain why she needed to do this. A tin of coconut milk. Finally she took two cans of tuna, hesitated, and put one of them back on the shelf.

  She picked up her coat, a rather expensive leather coat, and slid the can into her pocket.