Girls Fall Down (2 page)

‘Hey,' he said, lowering the camera.

‘Alex Deveney?'

‘Yeah. Adrian.' He was still standing with one foot in the road, the traffic motionless now. He stepped back up onto the sidewalk. Adrian Pereira, observant and amused, older, his curly black hair thinner, but unmistakably himself. ‘Man, it's been about a million years.'

‘Give or take.' Adrian pushed a small pair of wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose. ‘So I hear we've had an airborne toxic event.'

‘That's from a book, right?'

‘Also latterly from
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
. It's multivalent.'

‘I was there, actually. I mean, I think I was. I was right by these girls who were fainting, anyway, if that's what started all this.'

‘Oh yeah? So you're, like, laden with anthrax spores?'

‘That's what I figure.' He wondered if he was handling this properly. If he should say more, or less, shake hands perhaps, or apologize for something. Or say something about those times, when they were young and anxious and the world was wide open. A quick sense memory of smoke and music flickered over him.

‘Seriously, though,' Adrian looked around, ‘I heard there was a gas on the train. A chemical leak, maybe?'

Alex pushed the disposable camera into his pocket. ‘Honestly, I don't think so. It just, it didn't look like that to me. It was a weird set of symptoms, it didn't look like anything that made sense. And I was right there, it's not like I'm dropping on the pavement.' He looked at his wrists. ‘I keep thinking I'm getting a rash, but it's just a nervous twitch.'

‘You should talk to one of those guys,' said Adrian, waving his arm at the three ambulances which had now stationed themselves at the corner.

‘I'm not attached to spending a whole night in the hospital so they can tell me I'm fine. I figure I'm being a good citizen by saving them the trouble.'

‘If you say so.'

They wove through the seething stationary traffic, crossing from the northeast corner to the northwest. Alex supposed that he was deciding to walk home; where Adrian was going, he didn't know.

Adrian pulled his jacket around himself. ‘Do you still see anyone from the paper?'

‘Me? No.' Alex bent forward under a gust of wind, the sky fully dark now. ‘I'm right out of touch with the world. Are you still playing?'

‘Oh, you know.' Adrian shrugged. ‘Now and then. Here and there. Mostly teaching guitar to little kiddies, actually. I feel they should have the opportunity to waste their lives in turn.'

‘Hmm.' Alex saw a mass of people at the next corner, pouring out from the Bay station, waving at the bus as it rocked perilously through the stream of stalled cars. Behind them, the imploring wail of the ambulances.

‘Perhaps you've been infected with smallpox,' suggested Adrian.

‘Yes, very likely. Or maybe the plague. Plague would be good.'

‘I'd take some Tylenol if I were you.'

One of the ambulances had forced itself through the traffic, its blue light splashing against the glass walls of the Gap.

‘I see Suzanne now and then,' said Adrian.

‘Suzanne.' No one called her that, back then. Except maybe Alex.

‘Susie-Paul.'

He kept his voice casual, he thought. ‘She's back in Toronto?'

‘Did she leave?' Alex stopped walking and stared at Adrian, who put a hand to his forehead. ‘I'm sorry, Alex. Of course she did, I forgot. But yeah, she's been back a long time. She was wondering if you were still around, actually.'

‘Well, obviously I'm still around. I mean, people can look in the phone book if they're so damn curious.'

‘I guess that's true. Nobody thinks of the phone book nowadays, do they? It's like, that's a land-based life form, we've moved on.'

‘Well. I'm in the phone book, as it happens. Lumbering towards Armageddon.'

‘Yeah, okay, 'cause she might want to know that.'

‘It's not a question of knowing, is it, it's like, you open up the book and see it or not. I mean, if you want to know, it's not like it's an actual difficulty.'

‘Yeah, okay.' He nodded towards the corner. ‘I have to go north here.'

‘Oh, well, okay.' Alex shifted from foot to foot, wondering if he should ask for a phone number, if that would seem too demanding.

‘Good to see you and all.'

‘You too, Alex. Who knows, maybe I'll see you the next time they poison the subway.'

Adrian turned and started to walk up the street. ‘Hey,' Alex called suddenly. ‘Hang on a sec?'

‘Yeah?' He turned again to face Alex.

‘What's she doing now?'

‘Oh. I don't know exactly.' He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. ‘Something intelligent. You know.' And then he was gone, into the laneways and expensive boutiques of Yorkville, the crowd swelling on the street behind him.

At Yonge and Bloor, bloated figures in papery white suits crept down the stairs, breathing through masks, holding up instruments with lights and dials. The security guard who remained in the station held a towel across his face as he led the white figures towards the train. Behind smoky glass, another guard sat with his head down, trying to breathe, his hands damp.

Decontamination
, said a white figure, its voice obscured by the air filter.

The guard nodded.

What about the girls?
said a figure.

Telephone the hospital
, said another.

Just precautionary. That's all. Can't be too careful.

After the Bloor/Yonge station was cleared at both levels, the trains stopped running north up as far as Eglinton, and south to Union; the eastbound line halted at St. George and the westbound at Broadview. And at every stop along the route the people of the city spilled out, onto subway platforms, into underground walkways and shopping malls, onto the sidewalks and roads, driven upwards into the air. At Queen, as the train pulled into the station, a forty-year-old bass player with thinning red hair, dressed entirely in black leather, was saying to his companion, ‘Drummers. They're like a different breed, man, eh? Seriously, drummers are a whole different breed.'

‘Yeah,' said the other man, staring out the window. ‘They're totally.'

The metallic voice of the
PA
system interrupted to tell them that the train was terminating, and that they should go to Queen Street to catch a bus northbound. They joined the flow from the train and
up the escalator, pausing on the next level. A group of people were gathered at the wall with the map of the
PATH
system, that complex underground skeleton of corridors and courtyards that could lead them into the malls or the banks, the bus terminal or City Hall, outlining the shape of the downtown core in concrete and tile.

‘It's like they're not even the same breed as us, you know?' said the bass player, as they stepped onto another elevator.

‘Fuckin' A,' said his friend.

‘Somebody must of jumped on the tracks, eh? 'Cause it happens like every day, but they don't admit it. It's like a public policy they don't admit it.'

‘Fuckers.'

‘Or it could be one of those, you know, Middle East things, you know, about the war with Iran or whatever.'

‘Iraq,' said the other man. ‘They're gonna have a war with Iraq is where.'

‘No,' said the bass player. ‘No, I gotta tell you, man, I'm pretty sure it's Iran.'

They stepped out into the chilly evening, the corners of the wide streets filled, the tall glass windows of
HMV
reflecting the arms of people waving at the buses, pushing for space.

‘You know what, man?' said the bass player. ‘Screw this, is what. I'm seriously going home.'

Between Broadview and Castle Frank, one train waited, poised on the bridge over the ravine. A man with a briefcase took out a tiny silver phone and sighed impatiently. ‘Yeah, the train's stuck again … I don't know … I don't know … ' Beside him, a pasty-faced boy in enormous pants stared solemnly at a piece of paper on which he had written the heading RAP SONG, and carefully printed
I get more head than King Kong/My style is grim and
… He studied the page for a few minutes, changed
grim
to
grem
, looked at it for a while longer, and changed it back again. In the seat at right angles to the boy was a couple, probably in their sixties, their faces pouchy and collapsed. The man was very drunk, a smear of alcohol fumes in the air around him, his eyes closed in half-sleep, his head on the woman's shoulder. She was staring ahead, not smiling, not frowning, blank and still.

Another woman looked out the window, down into the ravine, seeing a red tent half-hidden among the trees at the edge of the twisting river. She spread one hand against the window and watched the rain begin to fall, leaving tiny flaws in the water's surface, thrumming against the sides of the tent.

Even past Spadina, the traffic seemed locked in a permanent snarl, but when Alex got onto the Bathurst streetcar it was no more crowded than usual. There were no visible effects of the subway incident, but he thought that people did know somehow, fragments and rumours; he was not even sure why he thought this, except for a slight modulation in the atmosphere, a measure of silence, glances of quiet complicity between the Portuguese housewives and the Asian teenagers. He got off the streetcar at College and walked west in the darkness, the rain stinging his face, the fabric of his pants clinging to his knees and calves.

Just past Euclid, a shape moved out of a doorway and into the pool of a streetlight. A man, a big shambling man, with matted red hair and a heavy beard, three layers of ravelling sweaters, his hands shaking, his feet crammed into a pair of women's fur-lined boots that had split along the seams of the fake leather. ‘Excuse me, sir?' he said, his voice soft and interrogative, surprisingly high-pitched. ‘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?'

Alex reached into his pocket and found a two-dollar coin, dropped it into the extended hand, a pale mass of flesh, blue veins standing out. ‘Thank you so much, sir,' said the man, retreating back into the alley. ‘I wouldn't ask, sir, only I'm being held hostage by terrorists.'

‘Don't worry about it,' said Alex.

‘But I'm on cleaning systems now. It's a lot better since I got on cleaning systems.'

‘That's good, that's great. Keep it up.'

One day last month he had been walking in front of the Scott Mission, and two men were standing outside, men with bashed-up swollen faces and rheumy eyes, shouting, ‘No war! No war! Peace
for the Middle East!' He'd wanted to film them, send it to the news, grassroots political initiatives, but what happened at the Scott Mission was in a different dimension, he knew that, a borderline zone whose intersections with the world of agreed reality were tenuous at best.

His apartment was just short of Grace Street, on the third floor, up a narrow flight of stairs; when he moved in, it had been above a cluttered little store selling saucepans and floral-print dresses to middle-aged Italian women, but now the store had been replaced by a café with pine tables and rag-painted walls, and his rent had risen precipitously. It seemed odd to him that he could still afford to live here, but in fact he could – he had a good job, he was a proper adult, there shouldn't be anything so surprising about that.

He unlocked his door and went in, shouldering off his wet coat. Queen Jane shifted vaguely on the couch and batted her tail a few times, then went back to sleep. He sat down beside her, absently stroking her grey fur and inspecting his feet for any blisters that might be forming.

He took a small fabric case from his coat pocket, opened up his glucometer, unwrapped a sterile needle and looked at his fingers to see if any of them were developing calluses; the right index looked best today, so he pierced it with the needle and squeezed a dark bubble of blood onto the test strip. The sugar count was well within his target range. He slid out a syringe and a little glass bottle of insulin and carefully drew the clear liquid into the barrel, inspecting it for air bubbles, then pulled up his shirt and pressed the needle into the skin of his abdomen. He capped and broke the syringe and went into the kitchen, dropping it into the plastic bucket that he used as a sharps container, opened a tin of lentil soup, sliced a bagel and put it into the toaster.

You would expect yourself to be more curious, he thought, when a thing like this happened. You could speculate, now and then, on just how you'd react to a genuinely important incident, but really what you did, it seemed, was to incorporate it almost instantly into the flow of daily life – the way he had gone on with his routine the day the planes flew into the buildings in New York, the way he had gone from his errand at the bank to his office at the hospital, had
spent most of the day at his computer, and forgotten for minutes at a time that anything was wrong. The way you could spend the afternoon in what might perfectly well have been a poison gas attack, check your skin casually for a rash, and not bother with the radio. As long as no one you knew was hurt or sick, you were at least as interested in hearing about a girl you thought you were in love with fifteen years ago.

He wondered if she still called herself Susie-Paul. Probably not. It sounded like she was using Suzanne now. Suzanne Paulina Rae.

He chewed on the bagel and the sharp crumbling cheddar, mopping up the insulin before his blood sugar dropped too low, the intricate dance of chemical balance that he could never ignore, never leave to run automatically as most people did.

There was a photograph he sometimes came across, loose among his files, not properly stored and catalogued like the others because it wasn't one he'd taken himself. A loose colour print of a dozen people, arranged against the wall of the newspaper office, all of them in their twenties, clear-eyed, effortlessly beautiful. Susie-Paul and Chris were well into the final disintegration of their relationship by then, the paper nearly as far along the road to its own collapse, and the people in the photograph were each in their various ways tense, unhappy, embarrassed. Adrian, who was by no stretch of the imagination a member of staff, had been installed on the sagging couch between Susie and Chris as a kind of human Green Line; he was frowning and adjusting his glasses, one sneakered foot curled up on the cushion beside him. Chris, in a heavy sweater and corduroys, faced the camera down, his face hurt and determined under a forced smile. Susie was looking away, apparently speaking to someone. She was wearing a little flowered sundress over a pair of jeans, and a torn brown leather bomber jacket; her hair, in a feathery bob, was dyed a startling pink, the camera emphasizing her large dark eyes.