Girls Fall Down (28 page)

‘This is kind of weird,' she said. ‘I'm not used to, I don't know, I'm not used to this.'

‘Yeah, I know. Photo sessions, they're a funny thing, they're … ' he ran out of words. She smiled, and pushed at her hair as it slid back over her ear.

‘I trust you, though,' she said. Pale hand resting on her knee, the pattern of wear in the fabric of her jeans, the sun-filled hollows in the curves of her legs. He picked up the light meter and walked around the room, his eyes off her for a moment, half dizzy.

‘Could you stand over here?'

She stood up from the spool and crossed the room again, stood awkwardly against the unfinished wall.

‘It's okay. Relax. Just stand normally.' She bent one leg and put her hands behind her back, leaning her head against a spill of light, a good accident.

‘This isn't really normal.'

‘It'll do.' He went down on one knee and held the camera upwards. She tipped her head slightly to the side, suggestion of tendon along her neck, a shadow on the opposite cheekbone.

‘I hope you're not thinking of exhibiting these.'

‘They're yours.' He leaned back. ‘They're completely yours. I'll give you the negatives if you want.'

‘I was kind of kidding, actually.'

She swept her hair over her ears with both hands, letting it down in front of her shoulders. Folded her hands loosely in front of her, cupped low on her stomach, her wrists resting above the small protrusions of her hipbones. The inevitable upwards tension of her legs, the bowl of her hands.

‘The police are going to come and accuse you of making nerve gas in here,' she said.

He adjusted focus, still kneeling in front of her, and moved the shot in tight to her face. The fine crinkling of the skin around her
eyes, the maple-syrup fall of hair, indirect light on the golden strands within the soft brown. The small space of floor between them, the lens of the camera. The way the Leica felt, like a human response.

‘Okay.' He put the camera down, staring at the floor and feeling the pulse of blood in his head. ‘I think that's enough.' He looked up at her, and tried to smile casually. ‘You're free to go.'

This was the strangest moment for the person being photographed, he knew, suddenly released from the control of the lens and unsure how to move. There was always that second of forced informality, a small nervous laugh. He took a deep breath and wiped his forehead. Susie shook out her hands, more shy now than when he was photographing her, and then walked across the room for her coat, pulled her hat down over her ears, and sat down not far from him.

At that moment he was prepared to give in completely, to let her eat him alive if that was what she wanted. He blinked at the skittering hint of a floater in one eye, and swallowed.

They sat on the floor, across from each other, in the frozen half-built room.

‘I'm not really a terminal case,' he said. ‘I'm not really going to end up blind tomorrow.'

‘Of course not.'

‘It's a thing I have to do. It's not anyone's good scenario.'

Outside the window the sun broke through cloud, a broad slab of light suddenly detailing the flawed uneven plaster of the wall, the unsanded wood floor. She stood quickly and walked from the room, and it seemed to Alex as if her image in the doorway froze in a hanging moment of time, her head in profile. Susie leaving.

She must have expected that he would follow, shivering with the bright cold and the need of her; and in the dark hallway at the bottom of the spiral stair she reached out for him, the chill of her hands like needles on his skin, the rough grain of the brick wall scraping the fabric of his coat as his body rose to hers, her heat pouring into him. But the image was as fixed in his mind as any picture, the sequel to every photograph he had ever taken of her. Susie turning away.

A woman fell down at Glencairn, the long sweep of her coat spreading over the tiles of the floor. A few hours later, the police entered the back room of a pizza restaurant on Ossington and arrested a Nigerian man who had been seen near the warehouse before the fire, taking a picture with a disposable camera.

At the Healthcare Divisional Operations Centre, men and women sat around the table in an emergency meeting. Two paramedics who had attended at the College Street restaurant were off work, collapsing suddenly, their symptoms unclear. A flipchart by the table was scribbled with handwritten notes. Under the heading
A) Unknown/fainting
, written in blue ink, were the words
Contact CUPE asap. Working quarantine possible?

Then a slash across the page, and a second heading, this time in red, a pointer to an urgent fax lying on the table:
B) MENINGITIS
.

In the crooks of the ravine, men and women reached out for survival, scooping water from the river, and at the shore of the lake someone walked through the small stone spirals of a garden, and saw the word FEAR on the side of a building across the road.

The girl who had fallen went back to the park bench, and the can of tuna and the money had been taken.

It could have been anyone.

She walked to the bushes at the edge of the hill, and she thought of going past the line of trees, but the thistles caught at her clothes, and she stepped back.

It was late when Alex left Susie's house on Carlaw, late enough that the subway had stopped running. Late enough that he was expected at the eye clinic in a matter of hours, and he still had to develop the film in his camera bag. He walked down to Gerrard, turning off Carlaw to pass beneath the bridge, where snow and damp litter piled up at the edge of the wall, the smell of urine lingering on
the concrete. He was tired, he hadn't had enough sleep for days, maybe weeks.

He leaned his head against the glass of the window as the bus travelled along Gerrard, and almost wished that he was twenty-five again, able to live on devotion and drama. To promise her he would do anything, for nothing in return, and to believe it was true. Give up, give in, whatever the state of his blood, though she was always poised in a doorway on the verge of departure.

But he couldn't; he couldn't go on like this really, he would kick this, he would let it go.

The hopeful phantoms of the city's night passed briefly under the streetlights as the car turned onto Carlton – a large bearded man in a white tutu, a fat little Franciscan monk eating a burger from a paper bag, a woman with a shopping cart full of newspapers. He rode further, onto College, past the university and the frayed margins of Spadina, into the small shops and cafés of his own neighbourhood, and he got off the streetcar and stood at College and Grace feeling once again that the city was just about to give up its secrets, that point in the depth of the night when everything was transparent and lucid, one impossible step from a final meaning. When he saw the man held hostage leaning against the wall, he greeted him like a kind of colleague, a fellow worker in the fields of madness.

‘Thank you so much, sir,' said the man, taking the two-dollar coin. ‘You're very kind. They're assembling the forces to protect me, sir. There's been a great improvement.' He hid the coin away somewhere among his layers of sweaters. ‘And the man you were looking for, have you had good luck in finding him?'

‘Oh. We found him, yes. Thanks very much for your help.'

‘It's no problem, sir, I'm happy to do what I can. It was approved by the government, you see. It's all part of a larger plan. The terrorists want me dead, sir, because of the pretty people falling from the air, so I have to keep on top of an intelligent strategy.'

‘It's not easy,' said Alex. ‘I don't find it easy myself.'

‘But you've always been kind to me, and they're sure to give consideration to that.' He scratched at the hair around his ears. ‘There are different ways that a person could come to die, I guess. Like when
blood comes out of the ears. But you could also die if you happen to walk on the subway tracks and a train arrives. Do you ever think about that, sir?'

‘I try not to.'

The man nodded. ‘The terrorists try to put me in front of the trains. It's pretty bad, sir. But I have the support of the military now. They're getting the forces in position. So thank you for the help, and things are getting better all the time.'

‘No trouble. Really. And I hope … ' he shrugged, unsure what he could hope for this man.

‘They're mobilizing the forces on the border, sir!' the man called after him as he reached for his key and opened the door of his building.

This is what happened. Alex Deveney sat with his head in a box – though it was not actually a box, it was in fact a medical device of some sophistication, but he experienced it as a box, a metal box. And in the darkness of this device they fired lasers at his eyes, burning the overgrown blood vessels, and burning, as well, the tissue around them. This was unavoidable, the risk could be reduced but never eliminated; there would be some spontaneous repair, but also some permanent scarring. The lasers were a specialized type known as Argon Green, used in many similar procedures. More than one eye condition is treated with Argon Green lasers, but for proliferative retinopathy the burns are harsher, the number of burns is many times greater. It is an intractable illness, difficult to treat.

Alex sat with his head in a box, repeating the words
Argon Green
in his head with each painful flash, about a thousand burns on each side, green knives of light from the dark ground. He lost, for a while, chronology and proprioception, existence distilled to the world of Argon Green and the small fluid arc of the eye.

And the rest of the world went on, planes fell out of the air and diseases were quarantined, amazing rescues were performed from burning buildings, people married and died and played air guitar.

In a biohazard lab, instruments scanned the single sheet of paper that had arrived from nowhere saying that it contained no anthrax, and again and again the machines proved the claim to be true. It made no sense, the only reason to deny such a thing was its ultimate truth, but the instruments ran the results again and returned the same answer. Nothing.

On a late-morning street in the centre of the city, Alex Deveney leaned against the wall of an office tower, his hands over his face.

He hailed a taxi and rode home trembling. He couldn't see, he couldn't properly see, everything was obscured by glare and blur, and his eyes were throbbing with pain. And he knew it wasn't really so bad. He was blowing this out of proportion, he had to be.

The blur would go away, the blur was not permanent damage.

The permanent damage he couldn't be sure of right now.

The glare was probably lasting. He would have trouble with bright sunlight forever, he'd have to wear dark glasses or some stupid baseball cap. This intense lovely light of winter, the crystal drifts.

He couldn't really tell if his field of vision had narrowed. It felt constricted. He could be wrong. It was easy to imagine, hard to be sure.

He turned out the lights in his apartment and lay down on the couch. It would get better. Of course it would get better. And he would go on taking pictures. He would go on as long as he could distinguish light from darkness and maybe after that. Perhaps he could make a living as a kind of inspirational novelty. Hallmark would put his photos on their cards, beside poems about how you truly see with your heart. But he wasn't going blind right now, that was absurd, self-dramatizing.

He had a vague memory of reading somewhere that if you drank a lot of water it would wash anxiety-causing chemicals out of your system, which seemed like probably spurious science, but he went to the sink and drank two glasses of water anyway.

He remembered the tulips he had seen lying in one of the city's concrete planters the past summer. Squirrels had got at the bulbs, dug them up and eaten them, and left the stalks, with the flowers still in the bud, lying scattered across the planter's soil. But they had gone on growing, they had gone on turning red, the buds opening into distorted and burned-looking flowers, even bending upwards on the torn stems towards the sun, a futile and terrifying pantomime of vitality. He had wished that they would just give up and die, or that someone would throw them away, but he had never done anything himself, just gone on staring at them every day, at their horrible stupid post-mortem life.

In the hospital, the specialists held their vigil over the burned man. They supervised the debridement of the dead meat from his body, watched the progress of the skin grafts. The man woke and slept again, and saw always the fire as it came towards him.

He knew that he had not been a good man, not really, that he had failed in work and in love and talked to himself sometimes out loud.
Speak to the bones
, he would say to himself, thinking of her disappointed face and the carton of expired milk. Things happened badly. But no one could tell him why – how it was he had been burned like this, why he was the person that young men had chosen to hurt.

The burned man could not remember their faces, those angry young men equipped with fire. When he saw them in dreams, coming towards him, he could not picture them clearly. These things he knew, that they had lighters in their pockets, alcohol on their breath, that they had tense, implacable muscle. That they were full of lack and desire, and they hated him because he was weak. Because he was no one.

They were angry before these troubles started, these young men, and they would be angry afterwards, formlessly angry, and only rarely would they cross the path of the public world. They were not the city's only threat, and not the worst, but in the burned man's dreams they came to him, and he woke to pain and purple infection and the constant drip of liquid in his arm.

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death
, he whispered.

Alex went down the winding slope of Grace Street and walked for a while in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, kicking at snow, throwing a badly formed snowball at a tree. Then the pain got to be too much for him and he went home and took a Tylenol and sat with his eyes closed, listening to the radio.