Girls Fall Down (4 page)

He was a medium-sized boy with brown hair and thick glasses, and he had carried the box with him into every one of his classes that morning and sat it on the desk. When anyone asked him what it was, he said it was a prop for a play, which was almost sort of true.

The box had previously contained a computer game that wasn't much fun, just your basic maze game when you stripped away the effects, and the effects weren't so great themselves. There was nothing inside it, because he hadn't been able to think of what evil should look like, aside from maybe a lot of bugs, and you couldn't just fill up a box with bugs that easily. Or maybe if you lived in some really bad neighbourhood you could.

‘Did you hear about the guy who found the biggest prime number in the world?' he asked the girl sitting next to him.

‘Did he go insane or what?'

‘No, he did not go
insane
, Sharon, why would he go insane? He just discovered the biggest prime number. It was, like, huge.'

‘I just thought. Like the guy in the movie.'

‘He was not like the guy in the movie, okay?'

‘Yeah, okay, so he found the biggest prime number, what did he do with it?'

‘Oh, like he had to
do
anything.'

‘Well, you'd just think. What good is it if you don't do anything with it? And are you going to carry that box with you all afternoon?'

‘I'm gonna carry it forever. You can't let evil run around unguarded.'

‘You're such a freak.'

‘Yeah. I try.' He moved the box so that the sign could be more easily read by people passing the table, and took another bite of hamburger.

Alex left the
OR
at lunchtime, and paused to check his blood sugar and inject his afternoon insulin before he went into his studio, checking the list of ambulatory patients he'd been assigned. A few hours later a girl came in, a last-minute addition to the list – a pale teenager, strawberry blonde, in tight jeans and a powder-blue T-shirt, carrying her coat and sweater and flanked by a nurse and a woman in business clothes, presumably her mother. He could see that her face and arms were splattered with bright red hives, but he didn't make the connection right away.

‘Hi,' he said, smiling, reaching his hand out to the girl and then to the mother. ‘My name's Alex, I'm the photographer.' He took the file from the nurse and glanced at it. ‘Okay. Looks like they just want some pictures of that rash there. Could you put your coat down here, and take a seat in that chair? Thanks.' He checked the lights and adjusted his lens. ‘I'll take some pictures of your arms first. Could you lift up your right arm?' He adjusted the lens, focused and clicked off a few shots. ‘You're Christine, right?'

‘Yeah,' muttered the girl.

‘How are you feeling today, Christine? Bit under the weather?'

‘Kind of.'

‘Left arm now? Great, thank you. What happened? Allergies?'

‘I was
poisoned
,' said the girl in a sudden rush of emotion. ‘Somebody
poisoned
me.'

‘It was on the subway,' said the mother, controlled anger in her voice. ‘It was just like those girls on the news. Someone's got to do something about this.'

‘Huh.' Alex took a step back and looked at the girl, her limp hair and red-rimmed eyes. ‘Well, let's just get these photos for the record, and we'll see what the doctors have to say. I'm going to do a couple of profiles and then some pictures facing me, okay? So first I need you to turn your head to the right. Perfect.'

The sleet was coming down again. Alex wrapped his scarf around his face and bent his head, walking into the wind as the frozen rain rattled on shop windows, the tiny ice pellets not melting but clustering on the sidewalk, bright and slick. The wind rose and tugged at his coat, stinging the tips of his ears, as he crossed the broad intersection towards the subway and descended into the damp cold of the tunnels. The subway car was crowded, thick heat issuing from the radiators and from the bodies that pressed against him as he stood, grasping a metal ring, drowsing standing up.

In the faint elastic time of half-sleep, he thought of the falling girls, and though he didn't for a moment believe it, he began shaping in his mind a story, a man who stepped onto the train with a package. Let him be a tall man, and good-looking, and educated. He must be a man with some scientific training. He could be a chemist, say; but in this story he would be a doctor. The doctor steps onto the train with a package wrapped in newspaper. He carries it as tenderly as if it were a damaged child, resting it gently on his knee as he sits.

Motive was not a question that Alex in his waking dream considered in detail, but he did not think the man was acting out of anger. The man believes, at any rate, that he is acting out of something like love.

At a particular stop, the man places his package unobtrusively on the floor of the subway car, just beneath his seat. The movement is
smooth and subtle. The package lies on the metal floor among shoes and dust.

At another particular stop, chosen long in advance, the man, the doctor, rises from his seat and picks up his folded umbrella. Quietly, swiftly, he stabs the package three times with the umbrella's sharpened tip. The train comes to a halt, the doors open, and the doctor moves swiftly out the door. An invisible twine of gas curls upwards.

The doctor watches the train pull out, and contemplates the end of the world.

At College station, Alex shook himself awake and joined the flow upwards to the streetcar stop. The car that arrived from the east emptied itself onto the street, and he found a seat by the window, rubbed his face with his hands and watched the lines of stores and office buildings gliding past.

When he was climbing down from the car near his apartment, he realized that the floaters were gone. It meant nothing, really, it signified no long-term hope, but he felt some of his fatigue lifting, his body not quite so heavy. He blinked, and breathed deeply in the metallic air, and crossed the street, the end of the world held off for now.

Queen Jane dropped off the couch in a slow jump, forelegs and then back legs in separate movements, as he walked in the door; he took his boots off and picked her up, shifting her heavy purring weight against his chest as he sat on the couch and sorted his mail with one hand, smoothing her thick fur with the other. She was clearly disinclined to move again, so he stayed on the couch for a while, wondering what to make for dinner and where he should go tonight, what he would do about the increasingly nasty weather. ‘Fat old cat,' he muttered affectionately. ‘Dumb old thing.'

He could go to Parkdale tonight maybe, ragged transitional Parkdale. Ten years ago, the place you didn't dare go after dark. Now the hookers and the junkies stood on the steps of boutique hotels, and there were articles in the newspapers about the neighbourhood's character and charm. That phase in the process could be
something to document, though of course anything could be something to document. Wherever you went there was light, there were bodies in space.

Once Jane seemed soundly asleep, he heaved her onto the couch and stood up, heading for the kitchen. On the way, he lifted the phone and heard the rapid beeps that signalled a voice-mail message, punched in his code and listened. The person on the voice mail cleared her throat. ‘Hi, Alex.'

Her voice was crazily, confusingly familiar, but at the same time he couldn't put an identity to it, somehow thought for a second that it was someone he'd heard on the radio. ‘It's been a long time,' the voice went on, ‘but it's Suzanne, Susie. Susie Rae.'

‘We were unable to find any significant abnormalities in the blood tests performed on the young women,' said the public health officer.

‘What does that mean, significant abnormalities?' asked the reporters at the press conference, the stand-ins for the worried city. ‘What is an insignificant abnormality?'

‘We found no abnormalities that would be associated with the release of a toxic substance,' said the public health officer.

‘When you say you were unable to find them, does that mean they weren't there?'

‘It means we were unable to find them with our most sensitive tests. In practical terms, it's as good as saying they weren't there.'

‘But it's not the same thing.'

‘It's effectively the same thing. We don't make absolute statements.'

‘So you can't be sure they weren't there.'

‘We can be sure that there is no cause for the public to be concerned.'

‘How can you be sure of that?'

‘Because we found no significant abnormalities.'

‘So what kind of abnormalities did you find?'

We are not at home in the measured world. We would prefer our safety to be an unmeasurable absolute. Not an approximation. Not
the mere knowledge that on this particular day we, unlike others, did not die, and that, if we are lucky, there is no specific reason to assume we will die tomorrow.

Finally Alex was undone by simple curiosity, as he had known he would be. But he put it off for a while, going to work on Thursday and almost forgetting her call, coming home and spending the evening in the darkroom he had rigged up in his apartment, printing a stack of contact sheets. On Friday morning he knew that he would phone her, but he didn't know what her schedule was. Calling her during the day seemed safer; if she had left only one number, it must be her home, and she probably wouldn't be there in the middle of the day.

Late in the morning he dialled up his personal voice-mail box from the phone in his office and copied down her number. Then he went out into the hallway and got a cup of coffee and drank it, came back and looked at a few more files on his computer. The number was nondescript and revealed little about her location. Probably somewhere in the east end.

At lunchtime he went down to the cafeteria in the lobby and bought a sandwich and a bottle of juice, and then, as if it had only just occurred to him, went across to one of the pay phones. Her number rang three times without an answer, and he thought that he would get her voice mail, and he could just hang up. At the beginning of the fourth ring he began to relax, and then the ring stopped and there was a live voice saying hello on the other end.

‘Susie-Paul?' he said quietly.

‘Alex,' she said. ‘I was starting to think I'd called the wrong number.'

‘No. No, that was me, I've been busy. Sorry.'

‘Adrian said he'd run into you. It made me think I should … ' her voice trailed off.

‘Yes. Well.' He tried to think of something to say aside from
it's been a long time
, which was self-evident, or
it's good to hear from you
, which wasn't entirely true.

‘Are you … you know, I'd like to see you. Could we meet for coffee sometime, or … '

He thought,
let's get it over with
. ‘I'm free for a little while tonight.'

‘Oh. Okay, let me … okay. Tonight's fine.'

‘We could have dinner. But there's things I need to do later.'

‘Sure. Is, is seven good for you?'

‘Yeah, I'm, I live around Little Italy, so … '

‘We could go to Sneaky Dee's,' said Susie.

‘Aw, no,' he said, smiling despite himself. ‘I'm too old to go in there. The young people would laugh at me. Really, I'm, like, I'm really old these days.'

‘Well, don't say this to
me
, Alex. What about that place, the Thai place at Bloor and Bathurst?'

‘That's not a useful description.'

‘You know the one. The place that used to be the place that had the Caesar salad?'

‘Oh yeah. The Royal Whatever.'

They had been to the place with the Caesar salad, he remembered now. Remembered riding his bicycle home in the middle of the night, his eyes stinging, shaky and confused. One night like all the others.

‘They have this Buddha that lights up.'

‘Well, you know. The Buddha's like that. Can you win little plastic prizes from him?'

‘I'm afraid not. Sorry to disappoint you.'

‘Well, I guess you can't have everything.'

‘I'll see you there?'

‘Yeah. I'll see you. Cool.'

He hung up the phone and turned around to face the lobby, shaking his head. ‘Alex, man,' he said to the air, ‘do you have a clue what you're doing here?'

After one girl has fallen, the rest are explicable; they have a template, a precedent. But before that, it is harder to understand. At the beginning of this problem, then, is a single girl, the first girl to fall.

She shouldn't have been a mystery, not even a question, this shining privileged girl with glossy hair, bright enough, well-meaning; this girl surrounded all her life with the expectation of clarity and goodness, who had collected tins of soup for the food bank, had given a talk in the school assembly about looking for the best in everyone, who had signed up to tutor an underprivileged child in math.

She had fears, of course she did, the normal kinds of fears. They read newspapers for their current affairs class, and she knew something about what went on in the world. She had dreamed for a while of the towers in New York. She hadn't seen, on the television coverage, the people who fell or leapt from the windows, but it was all they had talked about at school, a literal incarnation of that childhood game, sitting around a flashlight at a sleepover trying to imagine whether you would rather die from burning or jumping. She knew that one war was already happening, and there might be another coming, wars in distant countries but somehow close. She drew peace signs on her notebooks, picked up flyers from leafletters by the Eaton Centre, and worried vaguely, the details unclear.

But she would not say that she fell because of this. Her account was simple – she smelled a smell like roses, then she started to feel dizzy and sick, as if she had been poisoned, and began to vomit, and didn't feel better until she was carried into the open air on the street. She hadn't been ill before that, she didn't have a cold or an upset stomach, she was a healthy girl. She didn't know about the panics on the London Underground, the rumours of cyanide. She hadn't read the stories about what happened in Tokyo in
1995
, when a group of elite sons and disaffected mathematicians decided to kick-start the apocalypse; never saw the pictures of people staggering out of the subway exits, clawing at their eyes.