Read Girls Fall Down Online

Authors: Maggie Helwig

Tags: #General, #Literary, #Toronto (Ont.), #Airborne Infection, #FIC000000, #Political, #Fiction, #Romance, #Photographers, #Suspense Fiction

Girls Fall Down (3 page)

BOOK: Girls Fall Down
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Looking out of the frame, he thought. As if there were someone beyond the picture who had a claim on her attention, more than any of the people around her. It had always been that way.

And far over to the other side was Alex, the rarely photographed photographer, a slender young man in black jeans and a black cotton
shirt, staring down at the floor, long sand-coloured hair falling over his face like a screen. Adrian probably assumed that Alex and Susie-Paul had been sleeping together when the photo was taken; a number of people believed this, it was one of the generally accepted reasons for Chris and Susie's rather noisy and public breakup and the subsequent failure of the paper. Alex couldn't remember now who had taken that picture – it didn't look like a professional shot – but whoever it was, they or the camera had been more perceptive, had understood that Alex's real position was then, as ever, at the margin, a half-observed watcher of the greater dramas.

I don't know, said the girl, lying on a cot in the hospital, her legs covered with a sheet. I don't know. I can't tell you. I don't know.

They had been doing nothing, her friends said, talking to the doctors in the hallway. They went to Starbucks. They walked in the park. They got on the subway and then she said she was sick, and they thought maybe there was a funny smell, and she said yes, there was this rose kind of smell, but she was too sick to tell them much, and then the other one fell down as well, and they could all smell it now, and somebody ought to do something because it totally wasn't right.

The white figures bent to the floor of the subway car, their heads lowered, their eyes intent behind the masks. They searched for traces of liquid or powder, greasy smears; they collected old newspapers and food wrappers and sealed them into plastic containers. The instruments registered no danger. The tests they could perform in the small metal space of the car told them of nothing, of absence. They would take their sealed containers to a secure lab for further testing. The girls in the hospital watched their blood flow into tubes that would be carried to another specialized facility, but the blood would say the same thing, it would say that it could tell them nothing.

The rain was turning into a light icy snowfall now – not too bad, not impossible weather to work in. For a minute Alex leaned back
against the wall, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness before he walked to the streetcar stop.

He did not admit to urgency. He did not admit to himself that missing even a single night bothered him, that this was becoming compulsive. He had always worked on his own projects in his free time, legitimate creative projects that were exhibited and published here and there, and he would not grant that he was behaving differently now.

He took his Nikon with him, and a shoulder bag with lenses and rolls of film. The digital technology was getting very good, he could see why a lot of people had made the shift, but he still preferred film for his own work, still liked the darkroom process, the smell of chemicals and craftwork on his hands. The Nikon was his standard personal camera. There was also the old Leica, but that was special – it was quirky, felt somehow intimate and tactile. There was a particular kind of photography that needed the Leica; he didn't use it very often.

He had always done this. Maybe not every night. It was true that he spent more time on it now. He'd broken up a while ago with Kim, a graphic designer he'd been seeing in a rather desultory fashion anyway. Sometimes the people in the imaging and computer departments of the hospital went out together, but missing these occasions seemed like no great loss.

Instead he wandered – down to the junkies and evangelists of Regent Park, or up the silent undulating hills of Rosedale, taking pictures by the pale light laid down from the windows of the mansions. Through dangerous highway underpasses to the lake, slick shimmering water rasping on the shores by deserted factories. To the bus station, the railway station, the suburban malls where his footsteps echoed by shuttered stores in the evening.

Tonight, perhaps because he'd been thinking about Susie-Paul and the paper, he went only as far as the university, got off the streetcar at St. George and started walking north. It seemed surprisingly quiet, the broad pavements almost empty. Maybe the students left the campus in the evenings. Or maybe students these days didn't go out, maybe they stayed in their rooms and read books about management techniques – but he was showing his age, one of those
old people who no longer complained that students were too wild, but that they were too good, they ate right and married young.

Susie had been his grand passion, he supposed. The phrase amused him. A grand passion. Everybody needed one. Not the most serious relationship necessarily, or the most real – that was surely Amy, who had lived with him, who he might almost have married – but the one that burned you out, broke you to pieces for a while. At some point in your life before you were thirty, you needed to be able to listen to ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' and cry real tears.

Outside the Robarts Library, he took a picture of a nervous girl buying french fries from a cart, then stepped back and shot a series of faint human figures, hurrying under the brutalist concrete shoulders of the massive building, blurred by the tall lights and the faint haze of snow. The wind whipped his scarf across his face as he walked up the broad curve of the stairway. He pushed open the glass door and went into the library's forced-air warmth. He was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to take pictures here, but he usually managed a few, inconspicuously. A row of students awkwardly curled up asleep in the chairs; an elderly man in rubber boots, puddles around his feet, reading one magazine after another.

He left the library and kept walking, east past the darkness in Queen's Park, statues and whispering men among the trees, then the cheap bright flare of Yonge Street, ADULT DANCERS and VIdEOS HAfL-PRiC, the neon signs reflecting in nearby windows like flame.

The white figures rose up from the station, the air judged innocent, uncontaminated, to the extent that the instruments could detect.

This is the nature of safety in the measured world – you can be certain of the presence of danger, but you can never guarantee its absence. No measurement quite trusts itself down to zero, down to absolute lack. All that the dials and lights and delicate reactions can tell you is that the instruments recognize no peril. You can be reassured by this, or not, as you choose.

It was later on that night, and Alex had come home, packed away his film and lenses. He was in the kitchen reaching for a jar of peanut butter, not thinking about anything in particular, when he caught himself blinking.

There was something in his field of vision.

He blinked again, and it didn't go away. He shook his head quickly, knowing this was useless. No change. Tiny black spots, just two or three. Up a bit and to the right. He closed his right eye, leaning against the counter. Standing in the empty kitchen, listening to the sound of his heart.

II

In the hour before dawn, the city is private and surprisingly cheerful, optimistic; hopeful, in the dark, of the coming day, the sunrise a slow dilution of shadow, a grey wash over the sky, tinged gently with pink.

On the Danforth, a handful of people sat in a coffee shop drinking espresso. A man and a woman, who met here every morning before work; he was bearded and aging, she was younger, black-haired, round-faced. Another woman in a second-hand army parka, reading a newspaper. A policeman buying muffins to take away. These were the ones who rose early and ventured out with the wind, at the coldest time on the clock.

Across the river, among the towers of St. Jamestown, a Somali girl tightened her head scarf, zipped up her red jacket and set out on her bike to deliver newspapers, and on the street an Iranian man who had once been a doctor cleaned vomit from the back seat of his taxi. A woman put a pan of milk on the burner of her stove, and stared at the creamy ripples on the surface.

The subway began to run, the first train on each line half-empty, the second and third filling up as the rush hour gathered mass and density. Underground bakeries drew fresh pastries out of metal ovens, the sweet hot smell of dough and yeast touching the platforms.

Alex left for work early. He had barely slept anyway. The floaters in his right eye were a shock, maybe more of a shock than they should have been, and he was far too anxious, too wound up to sleep, only skimming and plunging for a few hours through tangled twilight dreams. It was a relief to be outside, to drink hot tea with milk and sugar from his plastic travel mug as he rode the College streetcar, the world solidifying around him. On the northbound subway, a tall and muscular Buddhist monk, with orange robes and a shining round head, was fingering a circlet of wooden beads, a tiny secret smile playing over his lips, as he listened to three girls across the aisle from him
having a nearly unintelligible giggling conversation on the general theme of chocolate cake.

Alex arrived at the hospital during the hollow quiet of the morning shift change, his footsteps audible in the lobby, and went up to his office, unlocking the door and booting up the computer. When he checked his voice mail, he found a message already waiting for him – an unexpected work call from the cardiac
OR
, scheduled to start within an hour. He downloaded his mail, looked it over quickly, then collected his equipment and took the elevator up to the surgical floor.

In the prep room, he reached into the rack for a green gown, tied on a mask and slid disposable gloves over his hands. Despite the gear, he would not be sterile, not fully scrubbed in; that was the normal procedure, the photographer only ambiguously part of the team, outside the sterile field. Thus the first and most unbreakable rule, that he and his camera must under no circumstances touch anyone or anything.

He could hear the music through the door, so he knew that Walter Yee was doing the surgery today; Walter, usually over the objections of the team, played
REM
relentlessly, and insisted on singing along with his favourites. He did not sing well. They were in the early stages of the operation when Alex arrived, the chest already opened. Walter was humming ‘Losing My Religion,' his gloved hands moving delicately among the veins and arteries.

‘Hi. I'm Alex Deveney, I'm the photographer,' he said for the benefit of anyone there he didn't know, and moved towards the table. Walter gestured with his head to indicate where he wanted Alex to stand.

‘Can we get a picture of this before I start working?'

Alex nodded, framed a shot of the chest cavity, the heart's red throbbing muscle and glistening fat, then kept shooting as Walter placed a clamp on the largest artery and gestured for the infused medication that would paralyze the tissue.

‘So who got caught in the traffic jam last night?' asked the anaesthetist.

‘That was the subway thing, wasn't it?' said one of the nurses. ‘I saw something about it in the paper this morning. Somebody smelled a funny smell or something, and the security guys went crazy.'

‘Girls fainting, I heard,' said a resident.

‘Oh yeah, I was there,' said Alex. ‘It was very strange, private-school girls just crashing.'

‘Probably dieting themselves to death, poor kids.'

‘No, they were having rashes and stuff. Thought they'd been poisoned. It looked like some kind of hysterical thing.'

‘I've never liked the word hysteria,' said Walter thoughtfully, as he cut into the heart and began to open it, exposing the cavities. ‘I don't find it helpful. And it has a bit of a gender bias, don't you think?'

‘Yeah, the wandering uterus.'

‘Oh my God, my uterus has escaped!'

‘It's taken off down Yonge Street!'

‘Can I move over there, Walter?' asked Alex. ‘I'd like to get some shots from the other side.'

‘Hang on a second … yeah, okay. Linda, squeeze over for Alex there? Thanks.'

‘Anyway,' said Alex, ‘you can call it somatization if you want. I spent half an hour convincing myself I didn't have a rash. Like instant cutaneous anthrax or something.'

‘And we're letting you into the
OR
? Standards are really slipping.'

‘But if we don't, the terrorists have already won, right?'

Walter was singing again as he probed the mitral valve, professing along with Michael Stipe that he was Superman and that he knew what was happening. Alex took some longer shots of the gowned figures clustered around the table, then moved in closer and focused on the thick meat of the heart.

‘Tell you what I saw on the subway this morning,' said the resident. ‘I saw the kid who owns evil.'

‘Oh yeah?'

‘Really. I got on and there was this kid, this teenage boy, holding this big old box, like a computer box or something, and he'd written on it in pink marker: CAUTION, DO NOT OPEN. CONTAINS EVIL. The pink marker was what I liked.'

‘Do you suppose it was true?'

‘My thinking is, why would someone lie about a thing like that?'

Alex zoomed the lens onto Walter's careful hands, coated with the patient's blood. ‘David, could you come over here?' the surgeon was saying. ‘I think you'll be interested to see this.' The resident shifted around the table, and Alex moved back, wondering what it was that was interesting and hoping he'd gotten a good picture of it.

Where he was standing now he could see the man's face, slack and still, his mouth distorted by the breathing tube. He thought of this man getting up and walking away, damaged and healed. The heart cut open and motionless, this man as dead right now as anyone would ever be, short of the final death. He stepped back and photographed Walter leaning over the man, touching his heart with a knife.

The boy with the box of evil sat in the cafeteria of his high school, the box on the table beside him, eating a hamburger and feeling unusually cheerful. He hadn't heard about the problems on the subway the day before, and didn't know that a security guard had phoned in an alert while he was on the train, though it would have made him happy to know this.

BOOK: Girls Fall Down
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ads

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