Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  At the Healthcare Divisional Operations Centre, men and women sat around the table in an emergency meeting. Two paramedics who had attended at the College Street restaurant were off work, collapsing suddenly, their symptoms unclear. A flipchart by the table was scribbled with handwritten notes. Under the heading A) Unknown/fainting, written in blue ink, were the words Contact CUPE asap. Working quarantine possible?

  Then a slash across the page, and a second heading, this time in red, a pointer to an urgent fax lying on the table: B) MENINGITIS.

  In the crooks of the ravine, men and women reached out for survival, scooping water from the river, and at the shore of the lake someone walked through the small stone spirals of a garden, and saw the word FEAR on the side of a building across the road.

  The girl who had fallen went back to the park bench, and the can of tuna and the money had been taken.

  It could have been anyone.

  She walked to the bushes at the edge of the hill, and she thought of going past the line of trees, but the thistles caught at her clothes, and she stepped back.

  It was late when Alex left Susie’s house on Carlaw, late enough that the subway had stopped running. Late enough that he was expected at the eye clinic in a matter of hours, and he still had to develop the film in his camera bag. He walked down to Gerrard, turning off Carlaw to pass beneath the bridge, where snow and damp litter piled up at the edge of the wall, the smell of urine lingering on the concrete. He was tired, he hadn’t had enough sleep for days, maybe weeks.

  He leaned his head against the glass of the window as the bus travelled along Gerrard, and almost wished that he was twenty-five again, able to live on devotion and drama. To promise her he would do anything, for nothing in return, and to believe it was true. Give up, give in, whatever the state of his blood, though she was always poised in a doorway on the verge of departure.

  But he couldn’t; he couldn’t go on like this really, he would kick this, he would let it go.

  The hopeful phantoms of the city’s night passed briefly under the streetlights as the car turned onto Carlton – a large bearded man in a white tutu, a fat little Franciscan monk eating a burger from a paper bag, a woman with a shopping cart full of newspapers. He rode further, onto College, past the university and the frayed margins of Spadina, into the small shops and cafés of his own neighbourhood, and he got off the streetcar and stood at College and Grace feeling once again that the city was just about to give up its secrets, that point in the depth of the night when everything was transparent and lucid, one impossible step from a final meaning. When he saw the man held hostage leaning against the wall, he greeted him like a kind of colleague, a fellow worker in the fields of madness.

  ‘Thank you so much, sir,’ said the man, taking the two-dollar coin. ‘You’re very kind. They’re assembling the forces to protect me, sir. There’s been a great improvement.’ He hid the coin away somewhere among his layers of sweaters. ‘And the man you were looking for, have you had good luck in finding him?’

  ‘Oh. We found him, yes. Thanks very much for your help.’

  ‘It’s no problem, sir, I’m happy to do what I can. It was approved by the government, you see. It’s all part of a larger plan. The terrorists want me dead, sir, because of the pretty people falling from the air, so I have to keep on top of an intelligent strategy.’

  ‘It’s not easy,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t find it easy myself.’

  ‘But you’ve always been kind to me, and they’re sure to give consideration to that.’ He scratched at the hair around his ears. ‘There are different ways that a person could come to die, I guess. Like when blood comes out of the ears. But you could also die if you happen to walk on the subway tracks and a train arrives. Do you ever think about that, sir?’

  ‘I try not to.’

  The man nodded. ‘The terrorists try to put me in front of the trains. It’s pretty bad, sir. But I have the support of the military now. They’re getting the forces in position. So thank you for the help, and things are getting better all the time.’

  ‘No trouble. Really. And I hope…’ he shrugged, unsure what he could hope for this man.

  ‘They’re mobilizing the forces on the border, sir!’ the man called after him as he reached for his key and opened the door of his building.

  III

  This is what happened. Alex Deveney sat with his head in a box – though it was not actually a box, it was in fact a medical device of some sophistication, but he experienced it as a box, a metal box. And in the darkness of this device they fired lasers at his eyes, burning the overgrown blood vessels, and burning, as well, the tissue around them. This was unavoidable, the risk could be reduced but never eliminated; there would be some spontaneous repair, but also some permanent scarring. The lasers were a specialized type known as Argon Green, used in many similar procedures. More than one eye condition is treated with Argon Green lasers, but for proliferative retinopathy the burns are harsher, the number of burns is many times greater. It is an intractable illness, difficult to treat.

  Alex sat with his head in a box, repeating the words Argon Green in his head with each painful flash, about a thousand burns on each side, green knives of light from the dark ground. He lost, for a while, chronology and proprioception, existence distilled to the world of Argon Green and the small fluid arc of the eye.

  And the rest of the world went on, planes fell out of the air and diseases were quarantined, amazing rescues were performed from burning buildings, people married and died and played air guitar.

  In a biohazard lab, instruments scanned the single sheet of paper that had arrived from nowhere saying that it contained no anthrax, and again and again the machines proved the claim to be true. It made no sense, the only reason to deny such a thing was its ultimate truth, but the instruments ran the results again and returned the same answer. Nothing.

  On a late-morning street in the centre of the city, Alex Deveney leaned against the wall of an office tower, his hands over his face.

  He hailed a taxi and rode home trembling. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t properly see, everything was obscured by glare and blur, and his eyes were throbbing with pain. And he knew it wasn’t really so bad. He was blowing this out of proportion, he had to be.

  The blur would go away, the blur was not permanent damage.

  The permanent damage he couldn’t be sure of right now.

  The glare was probably lasting. He would have trouble with bright sunlight forever, he’d have to wear dark glasses or some stupid baseball cap. This intense lovely light of winter, the crystal drifts.

  He couldn’t really tell if his field of vision had narrowed. It felt constricted. He could be wrong. It was easy to imagine, hard to be sure.

  He turned out the lights in his apartment and lay down on the couch. It would get better. Of course it would get better. And he would go on taking pictures. He would go on as long as he could distinguish light from darkness and maybe after that. Perhaps he could make a living as a kind of inspirational novelty. Hallmark would put his photos on their cards, beside poems about how you truly see with your heart. But he wasn’t going blind right now, that was absurd, self-dramatizing.

  He had a vague memory of reading somewhere that if you drank a lot of water it would wash anxiety-causing chemicals out of your system, which seemed like probably spurious science, but he went to the sink and drank two glasses of water anyway.

  He remembered the tulips he had seen lying in one of the city’s concrete planters the past summer. Squirrels had got at the bulbs, dug them up and eaten them, and left the stalks, with the flowers still in the bud, lying scattered across the planter’s soil. But they had gone on growing, they had gone on turning red, the buds opening into distorted and burned-looking flowers, even bending upwards on the torn stems towards the sun, a futile and terrifying pantomime of vitality. He had wished that they would just give up and die, or that someone would throw them away, but he had never done anything himself, just gone on star
ing at them every day, at their horrible stupid post-mortem life.

  In the hospital, the specialists held their vigil over the burned man. They supervised the debridement of the dead meat from his body, watched the progress of the skin grafts. The man woke and slept again, and saw always the fire as it came towards him.

  He knew that he had not been a good man, not really, that he had failed in work and in love and talked to himself sometimes out loud. Speak to the bones, he would say to himself, thinking of her disappointed face and the carton of expired milk. Things happened badly. But no one could tell him why – how it was he had been burned like this, why he was the person that young men had chosen to hurt.

  The burned man could not remember their faces, those angry young men equipped with fire. When he saw them in dreams, coming towards him, he could not picture them clearly. These things he knew, that they had lighters in their pockets, alcohol on their breath, that they had tense, implacable muscle. That they were full of lack and desire, and they hated him because he was weak. Because he was no one.

  They were angry before these troubles started, these young men, and they would be angry afterwards, formlessly angry, and only rarely would they cross the path of the public world. They were not the city’s only threat, and not the worst, but in the burned man’s dreams they came to him, and he woke to pain and purple infection and the constant drip of liquid in his arm.

  Pray for us now and at the hour of our death, he whispered.

  Alex went down the winding slope of Grace Street and walked for a while in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, kicking at snow, throwing a badly formed snowball at a tree. Then the pain got to be too much for him and he went home and took a Tylenol and sat with his eyes closed, listening to the radio.

  ‘And phone in those pledges right now, people,’ the announcer on the campus radio station was saying, ‘because we are $15,000 behind on our rent, and if you don’t get on those phones, we’re going off the air at midnight!’

  He would have to remember to check the station tomorrow and find out whether they were still around.

  This is what it would be like, he thought, an aimless little life of walks and radios and pointless diversions. Because he couldn’t really believe that it would work out well, that they would arrest the disease with a few treatments and cause no major damage to his sight. His ophthalmologist, he suspected, didn’t really believe it either. It happened that way for some people, but it wouldn’t happen for him.

  The girl watched the late afternoon light move across her desk, deep yellow, the sun glowing orange behind the dark mass of trees beyond the window. Her notebook was open in front of her, a purple pen with gold sparkles lying across it. The English teacher reached for a dictionary and set it down on Zoe’s desk. ‘Okay. Definition and derivation,’ he said. ‘Read that part?’

  Zoe glanced at the page. ‘What? The whole letter B?’ she said teasingly. The teacher pointed at a line.

  ‘Beel… no way. You’re trying to make me look dumb.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said the teacher.

  ‘You read it.’

  The teacher shrugged and picked up the dictionary. ‘Beelzebub,’ he said. ‘Definition 1: the prince of demons; the devil. Now you read the derivation.’ He passed the book to Lauren, who ran her finger down the page and found the line.

  ‘Hebrew – oh, wow! Hebrew for Lord of the Flies! Awesome!’

  ‘Oh my GOD!’ exclaimed Zoe, putting her hands up to her face. ‘How did you even know that? Were you just, like, reading through the dictionary one day and you found it?’

  ‘Um, it’s just more like – general knowledge,’ said the teacher, who was a very young man, though he didn’t seem so to the girls in his class. ‘It’s a thing people know.’

  The girl drew a flower in the corner of a page, watching the rest of the class from the corner of her eye. Looked outside at the woods.

  ‘That is so awesome,’ said Lauren.

  The girl played with her pen for a moment, and then closed her exercise book and carefully inked the word FEAR onto the cover, in tiny, precise, very dark letters.

  ‘You know, if William Golding had kids, his kids would be totally upset reading this book,’ said Tasha.

  At the St. Patrick station, on the stairway leading to the street, a woman collapsed and fell down half a flight, breaking two bones in her hand. A dead smell, she said it had been, a dead, sweet smell that pulled her down.

  How could she be expected to do proper blood tests, asked the doctor in the toxicology lab, when no one could tell her what to look for, when all they could tell her was what they supposed it was not, not sarin, not cyanide, probably not a virus? Was she meant to search down to infinite degrees of abnormality? There could never be an end to that.

  In the storage rooms and passageways below the subway lines the hazmat workers moved, breathing through heavy masks, slowly searching each room, each corner, for traces of powder or chemical marks, for doors opened that should not have been, cigarette butts in forbidden areas, for any sign that someone had hidden here, waiting, contaminants in open hands.

  Other things happened that were innocuous and fairly ordinary, the little troubles of winter. A common enterovirus infiltrated several playschools and caused a large number of toddlers to start vomiting. Many adults exhibited upper respiratory tract infections. Some of them, remembering the men who had lost their breath at the King station, understood their symptoms to mean that they had been poisoned. Hospital emergency departments began to overflow.

  A man was admitted to one of the hospitals with a high fever, the transaction that had passed between himself and a dead girl breaking violently to the surface. This man got to a doctor in time; he was treated effectively with intravenous antibiotics. Public Health was notified, and began once again the process of tracing contacts, discovering those he had been close to, those he had lived with, those he had touched. Meningitis is fast, faster than organized plans, and the dead girl, the vector, with her weak immune system and her coded, hidden world, she was moving the authorities now in a way that her life could never have done.

  Alex went out again in the early evening with his camera, and tried dismally, experimentally, to take some pictures. That everything felt wrong was surely a function of his mood as much as the state of his eyes.

  Anyway, some of the photos might turn out all right. There was a quality of light and movement that he liked, outside the windows of the Diplomatico, a girl in the doorway of the Bar Italia, these might be okay after all. He had to believe that.

  When he got back to his apartment, there was a message on his voice mail from Susie. Asking how he was. He didn’t want anyone asking how he was. Telling him that she was going to see Derek that night, that she’d be leaving around ten, he could come to her house anytime before that.

  In theory, he could simply not turn up. She had left him that choice. She might even have been suggesting it.

  He could do other things. He could phone his sister, his pleasantly normal, dissatisfied sister, and listen to her stories of the folly of her co-workers. He could call in a pledge to that poor campus radio station. He sat on his couch stroking Jane and thinking about the things he could do if he didn’t answer Susie’s message, and then it was quarter to ten. He stood up and got his coat, put the photographs of her in a new manila envelope, and packed his insulin kit in his camera bag. He was halfway out the door when he turned back, grabbed the string of the balloon and brought it along with him.

  He would come when she called. Watch when she left. Lose her, lose his eyes. Lose the winter light, and end up with nothing.

  Two of the smaller restaurants along College had posted handwritten signs in the windows, announcing themselves to be Closed on Account of Illness. Whether this was the illness of the proprietors, or whether they were entrenching against the illness of the city, he wasn’t sure.

  He was late. She’d probably go ahead without him.

  End up with nothing.

 
He rode the streetcar up Bathurst, noticing that the gold foil star was sagging a bit now as the helium leaked slowly away. He didn’t look out the window, not wanting to know how much he was unable to see. As he got off the car at the Bathurst station, he saw the word FEAR spray-painted in big black letters on the concrete wall. He entered the station and caught the subway going east.

  As he arrived at the house he checked his watch – it was past ten-thirty. But when he went inside the front door, he saw that the door to her apartment, at the foot of the stairs, wasn’t actually closed. Slightly ajar, it swung open further at his knock.

  ‘Alex?’ she called down the stairs.

  ‘Yeah, it’s me.’

  ‘Are you okay? Come on up.’

  She was sitting at her desk chair, lacing her boots, but she stood up when he came in.

  ‘How are you? I tried to phone.’

  Alex moved away from her, slumping down on her futon couch, and fought back another irrational spasm of anger. He twitched his shoulders in a tight shrug. ‘They cauterized the blood vessels, I guess. I can’t really, you know, it’s too early to say if it’s affected my vision. It’s just the first round anyway. I have to go back.’

  ‘How are you feeling, though?’

  ‘It hurts. I’d rather not talk about it.’ He realized that he was still holding the balloon, and stretched his hand towards her. ‘Here. This is for you.’

  Susie took hold of the string and wrapped it loosely around the back of her chair. ‘Wow. Mafia balloon,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘Thanks.’ The star didn’t pull the string taut anymore, but hovered softly a few feet below the ceiling.