Girls Fall Down (7 page)

‘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.'