Читать книгу Girls Fall Down - Maggie Helwig - Страница 10

He knew how it would go, Alex told himself as he walked up Bathurst Street. They would start out tentative and hopeful, full of kind feelings about the past. They would talk for a while about safe and neutral memories, about shared acquaintances, and then slowly the evening would shrivel into the dry, polite awareness that they had nothing in common anymore, maybe never had. It might be embarrassing and a bit sad, but they would walk away from it unharmed, freed from certain things. That was the way these things went.

He knew, in fact, not much about her. Once he had thought that he wanted to know her, wanted nothing more in the world, but it had never been true; whatever he had thought he felt, Susie had finally been not much more than a blank screen for his own longings. And he, presumably, had been the same for her, had acquired what identity he had from being simply not Chris.

BIRD FLU EPIDEMIC COULD KILL MILLIONS, said a headline in a newspaper box. Maybe this would replace the fainting girls, then; that would be a relief. He bent down, glancing at a photograph of the mass extermination of chickens in Hong Kong. The story stressed that the world was overdue for an epidemic. The virus biding its time, waiting to make a grand appearance.

She was in the restaurant already when he arrived, but she stood up from the table as he came in, and there was a moment of awkward shuffling as they tried to decide whether they would hug. They did not. It had crossed his mind that he might not recognize her; but of course that was impossible. He sat down at the other side of the table, under a tourist-office poster of Bangkok.

‘Alex,’ she said. ‘You look good.’

He was stung by the cliché, but this was what people said. He should have let it pass, said the same thing in return. He smiled a bit crookedly. ‘I look ten years older than my age.’

She tipped her head to one side and raised her eyebrows, not insulted or taken aback. Almost amused.

‘The grey hair’s hereditary,’ he added, feeling foolish now. ‘Other-wise it’s just my misspent youth.’

Her own face had lost the soft prettiness he saw in his old pictures, was angular and serious, her skin textured and finely lined, her eyes still large and very dark. Her hair, which he’d been genuinely curious about, was longer, past her shoulders, and a deep red-brown that was possibly her natural colour, though more likely not. A fine, complex face, a good face to photograph. But he couldn’t say anything about how she looked; he had managed to ensure that it would not be neutral or safe.

The next few minutes were temporizing, the business of studying menus, ordering, a pause in which neither of them had to think about what to say next. The waiter came, and left, and space opened up again.

‘I hope you don’t mind that I phoned,’ she said eventually.

‘Of course not. Why would I mind?’ He played with his cutlery, not meeting her eye and thinking, How long have you been back, and never called me? Why did you look for Adrian and not for me, never for me? He was more angry than he had realized.

‘It’s been a while.’

‘Quite a while. I didn’t know you were even back in the city.’

‘Yes. Well.’

‘I didn’t have any way to know, did I?’

Or maybe this was just the edginess of an impending hypo. He’d taken his insulin before he left home, and his blood sugar must be getting quite low by now. He picked up his glass of juice and drank half of it quickly.

‘Actually, I am in the phone book,’ said Susie.

‘Ah. Well, so am I. As I guess you found out this week.’

‘I can see where you wouldn’t have thought to look, though.’

‘I didn’t especially assume you’d be back.’

‘Fair enough.’

He could, yes, feel his anger diminishing, independent of Susie or anything about her, as the sugars in the mango juice settled his blood. Sometimes it was no more than that, a process of the body, disengaged from other people.

‘Alex,’ she said suddenly. ‘What are you actually thinking?’

He took another sip of juice. ‘Nothing.’

‘Alex.’

‘Nothing. I just was wondering about the difference between emotions and chemicals.’

Again she seemed prepared to accept his bizarre conversational gambits. ‘None, if you ask a psychiatrist.’

‘Yeah. It’s all blood sugar and serotonin reuptake.’

‘Trick of the light?’

He thought of Walter’s delicate cardiac work. ‘Maybe.’

‘Is that what you believe?’

This had become a discussion about something else, where either a yes or a no would have intentions that he didn’t want. ‘I don’t know what I believe,’ he said. ‘I was just wondering.’

The waiter returned with their food, chicken fried rice for Susie and vegetarian pad Thai for Alex. ‘You still don’t eat meat?’

‘I’m hardcore. In my way.’

‘You really are the most incongruous vegetarian, though.’

‘Well, the insulin comes from a lab now. Don’t have to slaughter livestock for it anymore.’

‘Okay.’

‘On the other hand, I’ve taken pictures of doctors cutting open freshly killed pigs, so I’m still fairly compromised.’ He wound the broad noodles around his fork; the sauce was sweet and ketchupy, entirely North American. ‘It keeps me from thinking too well of myself.’

‘Good Lord. That must be a fun way to spend your day.’

‘I don’t mean all the time. Not very often, really.’

If she had asked him what he did that involved pig autopsies, it might have gotten things back onto a normal course – professional information followed by edited personal details, a socially appropriate exchange. ‘Do you have to watch them kill the pigs?’ she asked, and he realized that Susie really was quite as odd as he remembered her being. Although he wasn’t presenting a very convincing picture of normalcy himself.

‘Well, yes. But it’s not particularly graphic. The doctor gives it an injection and it just dies kind of quietly.’ He poked a piece of tofu with his fork. ‘I’m a medical photographer,’ he added desperately, trying to steer the conversation onto solid ground. ‘It’s a research hospital, so they do have an animal OR. But it’s a very small part of my job.’

‘Huh. How did you end up doing that?’

Alex breathed a small sigh of relief. ‘I don’t know, because hospitals are like a second home to me? Basically, the job was advertised and I needed work. I still do other things, but I’ve stayed at this for quite a while now. It’s a pretty good way to make a living.’

‘And that’s it?’ She lifted a bit of chicken to her lips, watching him as he tried to keep his eyes on his plate. ‘That’s all it is?’

He felt another quick burn of irritation, but something else as well, the memory of her, knotty and actual, the girl with pink hair and erratic boundaries. ‘No.’ He cleared his throat. ‘No. I guess it’s not. It’s also a privilege, isn’t it? I mean … if you’re not a doctor, you don’t usually get to see, say, a person’s cerebral arteries being cut and repaired. Or a heart, the actual thing, the way it moves … I’m allowed to see this, I’m allowed to see this kind of extremity. And there is something in it – something beautiful.’ It was possible that he sounded crazy. He was increasingly unsure. ‘I don’t mean to be so dramatic. Lots of times I’m just taking pictures of electron microscopes for the brochures, or, you know, doctors pretending to discuss charts with each other on the cover of the annual report.’ He ate another forkful of noodles. ‘You call yourself Suzanne now?’

‘Susie’s okay.’

‘Yeah, but mostly.’

‘Mostly Suzanne.’

Have you ever seen a pig being killed? he thought of asking. Have you ever seen anyone die? Why can’t I decide if I’m angry at you or not?

Her eyes weren’t young anymore. They were deeper and shadowed, grown-up, the skin around them creased, and for just a moment he felt almost unbearably close to her.

‘So what are you doing now?’ he asked instead.

‘I ask people peculiar questions,’ said Susie.

‘Well, yes, I see that. I mean for a living.’

‘Like I said.’

‘What, and you get paid for this? By the Question Fairy?’

‘Pretty much, yeah.’ She ate a forkful of rice. ‘Okay. I’m actually a sociologist. Or nearly. I’m working on my doctorate.’

‘You’re an academic? Jesus.’

‘Come on. It could be worse.’

‘I guess. It’s not organized crime.’

‘It’s not international finance. It’s not the arms trade. Or retail sales. It’s really quite harmless, I get my doctorate and then I go and teach other people till they get their doctorates and go teach other people. It’s a little self-contained closed system, like a terrarium or something.’

‘An academic. Man. What a thought.’

‘You know, usually people just ask why I don’t have a real job at my age.’

‘I’m hardly one to be asking that,’ said Alex, and then realized that he did have a real job, had done for quite some time, though it had somehow never managed to penetrate his self-image.

He could have asked her what she’d been doing in the meantime, but it was exactly that meantime that he didn’t want to touch, how she went away and came back, the old scars. Behind his back he heard the sheer whistle of rising wind, outside the glass wall.

‘So you’re writing a thesis or something?’

‘Dissertation. Analysis of relationship networks among the homeless and underhoused.’

‘Okay, I can see that. That’s really interesting.’

‘Not so much. Not to anyone but me. Anyway, I had to kind of change the topic because my supervisor – well, never mind, it’s just one of those dissertation things.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

She bent over her plate, pushing at the remains of the rice with her fork. ‘So. Well. So there you go,’ she said, and then she looked up again and her face was cracked and vulnerable, a question in it he recognized, sore to the touch. Do I know you? Do I know you anymore? He felt something that he couldn’t name slip loose inside his chest.

‘I was worried about you, a bit,’ he said. The window rattled behind him.

She nodded slowly. ‘I was … I’m all right. It was just … ’

‘I thought probably. Probably you were okay. But I wasn’t sure.’

‘I know. I mean … What about you?’

‘I … I’m fine now.’ He looked down at his own hands, fidgeting with the cutlery, and couldn’t think for a while what should come next.

‘You know, hands are very interesting things,’ he said finally.

‘You’re still a pothead, aren’t you?’ said Susie. And this at last was something he could laugh at, unforced.

‘Really not. I’m just like this all by myself, as it turns out.’

‘That’s gotta save some money.’

‘I spend it all on tofu.’ But while he had been looking at his hands he’d also looked at his watch, and time was pressing in on him again, the handful of hours left in the evening. ‘Listen, Susie, Suzanne, I’m sorry about this, but I should go. Let me get the check?’

‘Oh. All right.’ Her face tensed slightly, a small nod as if she were accepting the blame for this. Understanding that it had been her fault.

‘I’m sorry, it’s not … I just have this thing … ’

‘You’re meeting someone?’

He wished he could say he was, it was the right excuse, free of hurt or judgement. ‘Not exactly. It’s … I need to take some photos. I mean, it’s a regular thing I do, after work I go out and … it’s a sort of project. I don’t like to – I know this sounds compulsive, but I don’t like to miss a night.’

‘In this?’ She gestured towards the window, and he turned and saw that winter had abruptly fallen, as shockingly as it did each year, the first sudden storm. Against the darkness, the wind was driving sheets of snow in a slanting diagonal blur, pedestrians slipping in their inappropriate shoes.

‘Oh, fuck,’ muttered Alex, brought up against the inevitable wall of Canadian weather.

‘Are you on a deadline?’ asked Susie.

‘No. No, it’s not an assignment, it’s a personal thing.’ He folded his arms and frowned. ‘I could do the PATH system. I’m going to have to think about the weather long-term, but right now I could do the PATH system.’

‘You really think you have to do this?’

‘I really do.’

She caught the waiter’s eye and gestured for the check. ‘I could come with you.’

‘What? You think I’m going to die underground in the blizzard?’

‘I’d just like to come. See what you’re doing. If it’s all right.’

He took the check from the waiter and reached for his wallet. No one ever came with him. It wasn’t the way he did this.

‘I guess so. If you really want to.’

They stood up on the subway, their hair beaded with snow after the short walk up Bathurst, neither of them able to accept the tight physical proximity of the narrow seats, appropriate only for close friends or complete strangers. Discarded newspapers lay scattered around the car, under the feet of dripping passengers, repeatedly and monotonously predicting millions of influenza deaths. Alex thought of telling Susie about his encounter with the girls and their poison gas, but decided against it; he was tired of the story already.

There was a wet draft of wind on the subway platform, crowds wandering up and down the stairs, but they pushed through the turn-stiles and opened the glass doors into a warm corridor with ivory-white walls that was nearly deserted, one man in a dark suit crossing a corner in the distance. The stores to the left were closed, metal grilles pulled down.

‘Isn’t this a funny time to be coming down here? I mean, there’s nothing going on here at night, is there?’ Susie unbuttoned her coat and tucked her soft red hat into her pocket.

‘Well, that’s the trick, I guess,’ said Alex, opening his camera bag. ‘I make decisions and I stick with them, it’s one of the rules. But this could work.’

‘I can see it during the day. When things are open. It’s not exactly picturesque, but retail’s part of the urban experience, I get that. But retail that’s closed for the night?’

‘Just let me see what I can do.’ They passed from one corridor into the next, walking by a man with an industrial bucket mop talking in animated French to a woman with cornrowed blonde hair and hoop earrings, and came out into a shuttered food court. ‘I like this.

The bones of the food court. Infrastructure,’ muttered Alex, moving around the kiosks, kneeling, adjusting the lens. The light was dim, but it wasn’t too dark, not so dark that he couldn’t adapt.

‘It’s interesting, the shape of things down here,’ he went on, a kind of half-conscious patter, not exactly meant to be listened to. ‘I mean, up on the surface the city’s so rectilinear, but down here it’s like this wild kind of maze. And they put up these signs … ’ he stepped back to take a picture of one of the glyphic, colour-coded signs that hung from the ceiling ‘… that make no damn sense at all, these weird triangles. I wonder about it.’

‘They disorient people so they’ll feel insecure and purchase more. Try to locate themselves through merchandise.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

In the next hallway there was music from a PA system, a woman in the uniform of one of the food court restaurants talking on her cellphone. A man walking by with a red balloon on a string.

‘Let’s go up this way,’ said Alex, gesturing towards a steep elevator, and as they rode up he tipped his head back in astonishment.

‘Oh, look,’ he said. ‘Oh, this is lovely.’

They were in a long hallway, with a high ceiling of white ribs, arching in a luminous cathedral curve above the darkened space, and set into the floor were panels of light, glowing in the dim surround. Alex knelt on the floor and leaned back, holding the camera upwards, almost lying down on the tile, then moved in a quick shuffle to the side, trying to hold the glowing panels and the arch in a single shot. ‘Isn’t this lovely?’

Susie was standing with her arms folded, half smiling. ‘It’s a bank, Alex,’ she said.

‘So?’

‘So? So it’s a bank. So this is just money trying to look good.’

Alex walked to the glass wall at the end of the hallway, seeing that they had returned to street level, and squinting out towards the street. He could barely make out a sheer black cone, slick with wet snow, and the angular glass edges of the facing building, and he took a series of shots, working on intuition, hoping that the tangle of reflections would come out the way he wanted it to. ‘I say again – so? People made this. They thought it would be beautiful, so they made it.’

‘You’re very easy to impress.’

‘Maybe so. But that’s a choice too.’

A small child ran onto one of the light panels, screaming in delight as his father ran after him, dodging and chasing in the scattered darkness, and Alex stopped thinking in concepts as he raised the camera, his fingers moving as he shifted the pictures around, framing, needing, taking in the shapes of their play, before they went down again to the underground passageways.

Some of the corridors were suddenly full of people, walking north from Union Station and branching off to the east or west at different points along the route. They passed Yogen Früz stands, candy stores with piles of maple fudge in the windows, shops that sold bottles of vitamins, or silk scarves and mittens, shuttered and dark. Into another underground courtyard, white marble, with banks of ferns and violets and tiny willow trees, a small waterfall at one end with the twisted copper shapes of salmon leaping in front of it. His feet were starting to ache; he sat down on the small stairway between the ferns, thinking that if he were by himself he could take his shoes off.

‘Where else have you done this?’ asked Susie, sitting beside him.

‘Oh, everywhere.’ He wiggled his toes and rotated his ankles, keeping the circulation going. ‘I mostly concentrate on the downtown, but everywhere I can get to, really. People think urban photography is all big-eyed kids in housing projects. Which, I mean, yeah, housing projects are part of it too. And police stations and stuff. But so is this … ’ he waved his arm around, ‘… this whatever. Is this a hotel?’

‘I can’t even tell. It’s all much the same down here.’

They sat on the steps in silence for a few minutes.

‘How long were you in Vancouver?’ asked Alex.

Susie took a breath before she answered, and looked down. ‘A year? A year and a half, I think.’

‘Ah.’ He held his camera on his lap, fidgeting with the lens. And he knew that she was aware of the same thing, that she had been back in Toronto for over ten years, and she hadn’t talked to him. She talked to Adrian. Not to him.

He reached over and rubbed the leaf of the violet beside him, thinking he would find that it was plastic, but it wasn’t, it was real.

‘Adrian and Evvy got married, you know,’ Susie said at last.

It took him a minute to place the name – yes, Evelyn Sinclair, the very quiet and faintly mysterious theology student that Adrian had been with, in some uncertain way, all those years ago. ‘Huh.’ He hadn’t expected that. ‘Well, I’m glad things work out for some people. They have any kids?’

‘One.’ She looked over at Alex. ‘How about you? You married or anything?’

‘Nah.’ He rotated his ankles again. ‘Came close to it once, I guess. But it didn’t happen. Basically I stick with my cat.’

‘Not the same cat, surely.’

‘Oh yeah. She’s very old now, but she’s still around. She’s like my life partner. What about you? Married?’

‘Was for a bit. Not anymore. It wasn’t a good idea.’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘Nope.’

Alex stood up. ‘Okay. We’ve been in retail long enough. Let’s check out Metro Hall and call it done.’

This meant another series of corridors, and a brief emergence into the damp clatter of the St. Andrew subway station, before they reached an orange hallway where the air was indefinably different, where there were no shops on either side. In the corner two figures lay rolled up in dirty sleeping bags on the tile floor, food wrappers scattered around them.

‘See, this I understand,’ said Susie. ‘We’ve moved from retail space to civic space now. It’s a less censored environment. Inclusive.’

Alex lifted his camera. He shouldn’t do this, shouldn’t photograph homeless people who were asleep, helpless to give permission, but his cannibal eye demanded the picture, and he didn’t really try to resist. They walked into another hallway, a glass wall down the left side; he knew there was a sunken pool outside, surrounded by granite boulders and pine trees, a tiny replica of the Canadian Shield down below ground level, but at night there was nothing visible, only thick black beyond the glass. Up a spiral stairway, and another man in a small foyer just a few feet from the cold, asleep sitting up, a grey blanket draped over his shoulders. Susie shrugged on her coat and pushed the door open, and then they were out in the wind.

The snow had stopped, leaving a sugared dust drifting and whirling across the pavement as they stepped outside. Alex squeezed his eyes closed and opened them again, not quite able to move forward until he had grown used to the dark, hoping that Susie wouldn’t notice this.

‘So you’re finished?’

‘I guess so. Yeah.’

‘Did you get what you wanted?’

‘I’ll have to wait and see. I never know till the pictures are developed if they’re going to come out or not.’

They stood on King Street, awkward, putting off the moment of leaving, not so much because they wanted to be together exactly, but because they didn’t know how leaving was supposed to go. A few yards away, a man in a blue suit with a paper bag over his head was playing a guitar and singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ a light frosting of snow on the top of the bag and the shoulders of his jacket.

‘He’s actually not too bad,’ said Alex.

‘What do you suppose the paper bag is about?’

‘Gotta have a trademark of some kind.’

Susie started walking north, for no clear reason, into the featureless side streets, and Alex followed.

‘There was that guy who used to play the accordion down by the church on Bloor. And he had that nasty dog, the one that bit people. I don’t know what ever happened to him.’

‘I’m kind of hoping he got arrested,’ said Susie. ‘The Spits, though, they were the best buskers ever.’ She took her hat out of her pocket and pushed it onto her chestnut hair. ‘You remember the Spits?’

‘Of course. Of course I do.’

‘I was just thinking about them is all.’ She looked around at the dark windows, the warehouse doors of the small empty street. ‘So. Do you want to get a coffee someplace?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Let’s do that.’

They came out onto Queen Street, filled with light and crowds, and ended up at the Black Bull because it was later than he had thought, and the coffee shops were closing. He took the glucometer out of his camera bag to check his blood sugar, and decided that he could order a drink and a grilled cheese sandwich. The bar was loud and dark, the air thick with smoke and the wet smell of beer.

‘Whatever happened to the all-night doughnut stores? Do kids not stay up all night anymore?’ asked Susie, as she looked around at the crowd.

‘They must,’ said Alex, lifting his glass, the beer malty and pleasantly bitter. ‘I’m hoping they just go to places we don’t know about.’

He leaned back in his chair, feeling the warmth of the alcohol running through his limbs, and then noticed the TV above the bar, figures in white hazmat suits moving behind police tape at the Spadina subway station. ‘Christ, what now?’ he muttered, and stood up and walked over to where he could hear the newsreader explaining that the station had been shut down when someone found traces of white powder on the floor. That there were rumours of irregularities in the blood tests. The chair of the transit commission was dragged onto the camera, blinking and irritable, and then they moved on to the next item, a French diplomat saying something at the UN Security Council, the news crawl under the picture rolling out fragmentary stories of weapons and spies.

‘That’s so not true,’ said Alex, thinking he was talking to himself.

‘What isn’t?’ said Susie beside him.

‘Oh. I thought you were still at the table. I mean the blood tests.

The blood tests were fine. People are just making shit up.’

‘This is the poisoned girls?’

‘So-called. Yeah.’

‘It always starts with girls. They’re like a highly reactive compound.’

Alex walked back towards the table with her. ‘I’m very interested in teenage girls, actually,’ she went on. ‘Oh my God, that sounded bad. I hope no one was listening.’

‘Don’t worry. Sex panic is over. It’s totally nineties.’

‘You’re sure they weren’t really poisoned?’

‘I was there. Like I keep telling everyone, I was there. I’m not poisoned, so you tell me what’s going on.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe there was poison in the air and you just got lucky and missed it. Or maybe not. Like you said, what’s the difference between emotions and chemicals? Something knocked them down. Who am I to tell them what it was?’

‘But you don’t believe it was some kind of actual chemical, do you?’

‘I believe that belief in poisoning is moving through population groups. I believe there are actual chemical changes involved in belief.’

He took a bite of his sandwich. ‘Honestly, I’m tired of the whole thing.’

‘Okay by me.’ Susie shrugged, sipping her beer. ‘So, this project of yours.’

‘Yes?’

‘You go out and do this every night?’

‘One or two nights I stay home developing. Weekends I go out in the day, it’s not that I’m doing night shots on principle.’

‘And the idea is what? A book of some kind? A show?’

‘There isn’t an idea as such.’ He swirled what was left of the beer in his glass. He didn’t have to say any more. He shouldn’t. ‘I just want to get as much of the city on film as I can.’ He paused, glanced up at her. ‘As many parts of it as I have time for.’

‘Time?’

He had gotten too close to stop. ‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to work,’ he said, and finished the glass quickly.

She was waiting for him to go on, but he couldn’t, not on his own.

‘That doesn’t make sense to me,’ she said at last. ‘Alex, is something wrong?’

He looked down at the table, folding his hands into fists. He was at the verge of it now, the worst thing in the world, worse than anything she or anyone else had ever done to him, and he had never said this aloud to a human being before.

‘It’s called diabetic retinopathy,’ he began slowly. ‘It’s … it’s an eye condition that varies a lot in severity. The capillaries in the eye, well, they overgrow, and the excess ones, they’re very fragile, they, ah, they can break or, or hemorrhage pretty easily. Most people have some background retinopathy when they’ve had diabetes as long as I have. It doesn’t – if it’s just minor, it doesn’t do anything really. But in my case it’s started progressing. Apparently fairly quickly.’ She was watching him, her face still. He couldn’t lift his head.

‘I, ah, I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s not affecting my vision very much yet, but when it does, it can be fast. I mean, it’s always different but, well, this is potentially the bad kind. The kind people go blind with.’ He stared at his hands, knuckles pale and knotted. ‘There are, ah, laser treatments that can slow it down quite a bit. You can’t stop it, but you can slow it down. But, see, there’s a cost, you’re, well, basically buying some central vision by losing peripheral. Maybe some colour perception too, maybe some night vision – well, I’ve lost some of that already from the condition itself. Maybe after the treatment somebody can’t see in very bright light either, or maybe sight’s just generally less acute. And you, you don’t do the lasers once, see. You stop the deterioration for a bit, and then it comes back and you start, ah, bleeding inside your eyes again, and you have to do the lasers again, and you lose more peripheral, more acuity … What they tell you is, they can keep you from going blind now, and it’s true, they mostly can, but … I mean, they’re trying to preserve enough vision that you can read a bit and basically walk around. Not enough that you can, that you can drive a car, say. Or, say, be a photographer. That’s the bottom line here.’ He realized that he was breathing heavily, his voice sounding choked and strange. ‘I’ve started seeing floaters,’ he said, resting his forehead on his hands. ‘The little black spots, you know? They’re blood spots, actually. It means there’s bleeding inside the retina. Not a lot. It hasn’t got in the way of anything yet. But it’s … you know, there’s no way out here. There’s just not a way out of this.’

‘Alex.’

Don’t try to touch me, he thought. But she put her hand on his arm, and he flinched away.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered.

‘I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to be running around when I was ninety. I always knew that. Diabetes … it’s a chronic condition with a reduced life expectancy. Prospects are getting better, but that’s what it is, and you know my blood sugar control was a problem for a long time. Partly my own fault. Whether you have complications … glucose control counts for a lot, and then some of it’s just luck. And I’m not very lucky. It happens to be my eyes.’

He watched her hands, on the table near his own, and noticed for the first time that she bit her nails; they were short and uneven and ragged. There was a scar across the back of her right hand, a soft puckering of the skin, and he thought he remembered it from the days at Dissonance, her fingers resting on the keyboard of the old type-setting machine. She wanted to take his hand right now, he knew that, wanted to hold his hand in hers or put her arms around him, because that was what people did. People who had known each other, a long time ago.

‘I can’t talk about it, Susie. I’m sorry, but I just can’t talk about it.’

‘No. It’s all right.’

Tell me a story, he thought.

‘So this thing about teenage girls. You know, when I was a teenage girl I wanted to be a prophet,’ she said slowly, almost as if she’d heard him. ‘Which is pretty funny, because I wasn’t any more religious then than I am now. But I really wanted to, I wanted to be seeing lights on the road to Damascus and getting the word straight from God.’

‘What was God going to say to you?’

‘Well, I don’t know, do I? I never did get the word. Basically I just wanted everybody to stand around and marvel at me.’

‘Oh, they probably did anyway.’

‘Sure. Whatever.’ She shifted in her chair. ‘You want another beer?’

He paused and then nodded. Susie came back into his life, and instantly he started taking chances with his blood sugar. He couldn’t let this go much further. But one more beer was not a big risk.

‘Evelyn’s got the word from God, you know,’ said Susie, when she came back to the table with the glasses.

‘This we always knew.’

‘Did Adrian tell you what she’s doing? She’s a priest now, isn’t that something?’

‘Can women do that?’

‘With the Anglicans they can.’

‘And do the people marvel at her?’

‘Honestly? I don’t see how they couldn’t.’

These are some things that girls do.

In this city and in other cities, there are girls who cut their arms with the blades of razors. In the moment before they strike, all the anger and confusion in the world crumples up into their hands, sweat beading on their foreheads, and the blade slides into the skin with a sharp and accurate pain. The thick line of blood pours out like peace.

There are girls who starve, their hearts thin and pure, dreaming of the day when they can walk invisibly through the leaves in a trance of harmlessness. To do no damage, to touch no thing.

In Kosovo, girls fall down in their classrooms with headaches and dizziness and problems drawing breath, gasping words like gas and poison. Lines of cars stream towards the hospitals, filled with half-conscious girls with racing hearts, driven in by their terrified families, and doctors hand them sedatives and vitamins because they can think of nothing else to do. On the west coast of Jordan, Palestinian girls fall down in dozens with spasms and blindness and cyanosis of the limbs, stricken by some illness that can’t be rationally diagnosed, and they are given oxygen in the hospital until they somehow get better. On assembly lines in factories in Asia, girls collapse in convulsions, one after another, moving along the lines like a chemical reaction.

Then there are girls, sometimes, who gather in groups and choose one of their own to cast out, a girl like them but faintly different. Perhaps they surround her underneath a bridge by a river and begin to hit her, and her blood falls on their clothes, and in the nicotine air there is somehow no way to stop, and perhaps when she runs away they drag her back, and when she falls in the water for the final time they do not pull her out.

In little ingrown villages around Europe, girls walk into the fields and see the Virgin Mary, who has ditched her son and gone out to travel the world, whispering secrets to them that they must tell everyone, that they must conceal forever. The Virgin Mary wears blue, and hints at revolution.

‘Tell me about your dissertation.’ He was drinking his second beer very slowly, knowing that ordering another one was out of the question.

She opened a bag of potato chips she’d brought from the bar. ‘You’ll only make comments about academics.’

‘I won’t. I promise.’ He reached over and took a chip, then made a face when he realized it was barbecue-flavoured. ‘God, how can you eat these? Sorry. I am listening.’

‘Network analysis as such is nothing new.’ She ate around the edge of a chip as she talked, then broke the centre between her teeth. ‘But it hasn’t been applied so much to these really marginal populations. People think, I guess people assume they don’t have relationships as we understand them, that they’re not … they’re somehow outside the social world. Like they don’t – you know, that there’s no one they know or care about? But they do, they have a world that’s as complex as anyone’s. Hierarchies. Networks of acquaintance. I don’t know, people they love.’ He looked at her torn nails again as her hand moved on the table. ‘I don’t know what more to tell you. I go around and interview people. Fill out questionnaires with them. I doubt that this is going to lead to anything useful at all, but at least I’m providing them with a few hours of cheap entertainment.’

‘But do you like it? Is it what you want to be doing?’

‘It is, I think. Yes.’ She ran her finger around the inside of the bag to capture the last of the salty dust, then licked it off, delicately, with the tip of her tongue. ‘To me, it seems like a good thing. I don’t know why. But I’m surprisingly happy as an academic.’

‘That’s good. It really is.’

There was something she wasn’t saying. How did he know her well enough to know that? He shouldn’t be able to tell these things, but he could.

‘Maybe it’s not so different, what we’re doing,’ she said. ‘Putting together pieces of the city.’

‘Mmmm. I don’t know if I put them together, though. I think I just … watch them.’

‘Well, that’s all right. That’s all right too.’

An hour or more after midnight, the rhythms of the city change, the last subway trains running almost empty, the night buses beginning their schematic crossings of the major corners; the streets still crowded where there are clubs and bars, and elsewhere quiet, single figures walking alone, the streetlights detailing their clothes and hair.

Before the final train set out for its run to Kipling, a man walked by the McDonald’s inside Dundas West station, his pockets filled with sweet crumbling cookies flavoured with rosewater, and stood on the platform, his face shadowed with thought. In Kensington Market, a white limousine crept silently along the narrow street like a dog tracking a scent, gliding up to a house with darkened windows, a world of illegal need.

At Spadina, the police rolled up their yellow tape, the white powder pronounced harmless though of uncertain identity, icing sugar from a spilled box of doughnuts according to one report, though this could not be confirmed. The city’s sadness left untreated.

Alex couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to leave a bar because it was closing. It had started snowing again while they were inside, and the clusters of young people coming out of the clubs up and down the street were obscured by the white blur.

‘So where are you living, anyway?’

‘Danforth and Pape,’ said Susie, pulling her red hat down over her ears.

‘Yikes. That’s a long way to go this time of night. You should’ve told me, I wouldn’t have kept you out so late.’

‘It’s okay. There’s buses.’

‘You don’t want to get a taxi?’

‘I’ll walk up to College with you. I’m fine with the College streetcar.’

The snow surrounded them, sealing them in a soft enclosure, so that anyone more than an arm’s length away was part of a separate world, the traffic hushed and smooth.

‘It’s not that I didn’t think about you, Alex,’ Susie said, her voice low. ‘All this time. I did. I hope you believe that.’

They stopped at College and Spadina, where he had to turn west, and stood on the concrete island where the streetcar would arrive, shifting from foot to foot. There was an edge of danger in the air, as if anything, absolutely anything, could happen next. He bent down so their faces were close together, his hand hovering near her shoulder – she was a tiny woman, really, though most of the time she made you think that she was taller somehow. He felt a rush of heat in his chest, a memory of desire nearly as strong as desire itself, the girl with candy-coloured hair who stood on a stool and wrote on the walls of his darkroom with a black marker, Watch Out, The World’s Behind You.

‘Call me,’ he said.

‘I will.’ She pushed back a bit of her hair, this new glossy mahogany, almost natural. ‘I’ll call tomorrow.’

‘Goodnight, Susie-Sue.’

She smiled. ‘I always used to know you were really wasted, when you called me that.’

‘I’m fairly sober right now.’

‘I know.’

There was no good way to leave, but he saw the light turn green and moved quickly, walking almost backwards and waving. ‘I’ll talk to you.’

‘Yes. Goodnight, Alex.’ Then he reached the sidewalk at the south side of College and the lights of the streetcar were arriving from the west, and he turned away, his hands in his coat pockets.

He had reached his house and was putting his key in the door when the red-haired man scuffled up the sidewalk towards him. ‘Excuse me? I hate to trouble you, sir, but I’m being held hostage by terrorists, would you happen to have any spare change, sir?’

‘Yeah, I must have something.’ He rummaged in his pockets for change and found a two-dollar coin.

‘Thank you very much, sir. I wouldn’t ask, only I’m being … ’

‘Yes. It’s all right. How are you doing?’

‘Oh, I’m doing okay, sir. I could be much worse. But I think maybe there was a breakdown in the system a while ago. Like a malfunction, if you know what I mean.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, because it was a while ago, I know that, but normally the cleaning systems should prevent that kind of thing. I think the government’s working on it, though.’

‘I expect they are, in their way.’ ‘Because you don’t want that kind of malfunction if you can avoid it.’

‘No.’

‘But I’ll tell you what confused me, sir. What really confused me was when the pretty people were falling from the sky. We need to think about that in an analytical way.’

‘Yes,’ said Alex, suddenly so tired he could hardly stand, supporting himself with one hand on the brick wall of the building. ‘I’m sure we do.’

‘Anyway, thank you very much for the help, sir. Because you’ve got to add it up, you know? And when you get five dollars and seventy-six cents, that’s a very good one, because when you’ve got that you can get a breakfast. I’ll let you go now, sir.’ And he turned and walked away, his ankles collapsing in his ludicrous women’s boots, under the veil of the snow.