Girls Fall Down (20 page)

‘Go
away
, go
away
, go
away
!' screamed Derek.

‘He isn't going to hurt me.'

‘I'm not afraid of him hurting you. Honey, come with me.' Alex pulled her up and away from the tent, out from beneath the
underpass, crawling with her, up the last steep slope to a level field, Derek howling, ‘Go
away
, go
away
!' below them. They came out at the edge of the railway track, and she staggered and fell against him on the narrow outcrop before the rail. They stood in the snow, staring at each other, out of breath, Susie hanging on to his arms, Derek still shouting below them.

‘I have to go back,' she said.

‘What the hell do you think you're going to do? Drag him out?'

‘Not like this. I can't leave like this.' She had barely taken half a step onto the plunging slope before she slipped, skidding down on her side and grabbing at a thorny branch, landing on her knees, Alex thought. But he couldn't really tell, she was in darkness now, hardly visible.

‘Derek,' she called, and Derek screamed, wordless, a long keening wail. ‘I'm going now,' Susie yelled above the noise. ‘Derek, I will come back. We will work this out.' Alex was standing uncertainly on the tiny strip of snow between the track and the downslope, listening for trains. ‘Goodbye, Derek,' shouted Susie, and he tried to make out the shape of her as she fought her way up the hill one more time. As soon as he could see her clearly, he grabbed her arm and hurried her across the tracks into the field beyond, then stopped, uncertain what to do next.

‘Where are we?' she panted.

‘Oh God, I don't know.' Car lights were moving below them, an arc of highway surrounding the dark wedge of the hill, a few bright windows in the apartment towers across the valley. ‘Bayview. That must be Bayview.' He moved towards the lights, reaching the verge of another steep hill where brush and thistles as tall as Susie's head rose out of the snow, and he held her tight to his chest and slid downwards, a controlled fall through dry branches towards the gravel shoulder. The world mostly visible again, he stared at the passing cars, trying to orient himself, to understand where he was.

‘Okay,' he said at last. ‘I think I know how to get out of here.'

There was a traffic light about twenty feet up the shoulder, and it took them across Bayview onto Pottery Road. And on the bend of Pottery Road, at three in the morning, there was a man selling roses
from plastic buckets, a thick luminescent green necklace wound around his forehead, glowing pink and yellow bracelets lining his arms, his piles of roses interspersed with flashing red artificial flowers. He looked at Alex and Susie hopefully as they came in his direction. ROSES $5 written on the buckets in black marker.

The thin sidewalk was intermittent; they had to walk on the shoulder most of the way, past the glowing man and up the road, across the Don River and beneath another underpass, to the foot of a hill. On their left side Alex saw a dreamlike array of wooden ponies, floodlit beneath a yellow billboard declaring the place to be Fantasy Farm. Smaller signs admonished
Fantasy Farm Is Private Property
, and
Please Do Not Climb On The Antique Carriage
. The ponies reared and pranced between pools of darkness.

On the right side was a proper sidewalk, protected from the road by a concrete divider, on which someone had sprayed the word FEAR in black paint. He stepped onto the pavement, weak with relief. ‘We can follow this street up to Broadview,' he said. ‘When we get to Broadview we'll be back in the real world.'

‘I'm so tired, Alex,' said Susie, who hadn't spoken since the traffic light.

‘I know.' He put his arm around her again. ‘It isn't far. You'll be okay.' But it was up another hill, and he was tired as well, too tired. He couldn't stop and get out his glucometer here, but climbing hills in the middle of the night would be driving his sugar down badly; he needed carbohydrates before a hypo set in.

They made it to the top of the hill, and it was Broadview and Mortimer. There were perfectly normal small houses, and a dental clinic, and rows of little strip malls on either side of the street, the stores locked for the night. There had to be someplace that was open, he thought, seriously worried now about his blood sugar. Anyplace. And yes, there was a lit building about a block away.

‘Let's go that way,' he said, and got close enough to see that it was something called the Donut Wheel Diner – perfect, he would be all right.

It was a small place, doughnuts in racks behind the counter, plastic-wrapped sandwiches, and a big handwritten sign over the cash
that said WE NOW SELL BEER!! It was long after last call, but the one other patron had clearly taken full advantage of this opportunity before going to sleep at his table.

He asked for an orange juice and a cream-cheese bagel, which would very possibly send his sugar too high. But he was beyond calculation, had been unprepared for any of this, had let Susie lead him to the brink of disaster yet again.

Susie rubbed her head, squinting against the light. ‘Oh God,' she muttered. ‘I think I'm starting to sober up. Oh God.'

‘I'm pretty sure I could get you a beer,' said Alex. ‘I think it's like a doughnut speakeasy.'

‘When I want you to be funny I'll tell you,' said Susie.

‘Black coffee?'

‘Please.'

They sat down at a little round table, and Susie sipped her coffee and rubbed her head again. She was covered with mud, and her stockings were torn, a rip down one sleeve of her jacket, a thin scratch on her cheek. There was mascara all over her face and she was not nearly sober yet. Alex reached across the table and took her hand; the palm was scraped and bloody.

‘Are you all right?' he asked.

‘That's a strange question.'

‘I'm sorry. I didn't know.'

She lifted her free hand and began to chew on a dirty thumbnail, and this seemed to Alex like a gesture from a distant past. ‘He's my brother, Alex. In our own sick way, we've always looked after each other. I can't just leave him there and let him freeze to death.'

‘He seems pretty determined.'

‘Well, he's insane, isn't he? That helps.'

He ate his bagel with one hand. ‘Let me take you home,' he said again. ‘I can get you a taxi.'

Susie shook her head. ‘We're near my house. It's a ten-minute walk.'

‘I'll come with you, then.'

‘I think I can get home safely.'

‘I know. But I'll come with you.'

And it was a plain, human place again as they walked. Small brick houses with snowy lawns and strings of red Christmas lights over the eaves, the windows dark, residential streets as quiet as sleep. She stopped at a house on Carlaw, just north of the Danforth.

‘I rent the second floor here,' she said.

They sat down on the top step of the porch. ‘I just need to catch my breath a minute,' said Alex, looking at her dark hair lying against the pale line of her cheek.

‘Sure.' She rested her chin on her knees. ‘He never got to have an adult life, you know,' she said quietly. ‘Not really. He was … he was just so young. When he … There were so many things he never got to have.' She ran her thumbnail back and forth across her lips. ‘Sometimes I think I'll forget how it was. It'd be easier if I did.'

‘Tell me.'

‘I don't know. What can you say? He was never ordinary. He had this – there was this magic thing about him. Something … so bright and … strange – he had these giant diagrams he'd drawn, hung up on his walls – and I never understood hard science, but they were really beautiful. The structure of things. He understood that. And – I wasn't alone. That was the thing. Derek was there. I was never – there was someone who cared about me. Always. That's all, that's … He was going to be a chemist. That's pretty fucked, isn't it, if you think about it?'

‘The difference between chemicals and emotions?' Susie lifted her hand, palm up.

‘Neurotransmitters,' she said. ‘The dopamine hypothesis. Serotonin. I know all about these things, Alex. The neuroendocrine system, I get that. But what does that mean? This is my brother. This is who he is. There is no real Derek somewhere else. That brain is real. And it suffers.'

‘I know.' He could hear traffic in the distance, but the street was still and empty.

‘We're all the same as Derek, you know. In the end, we are. We're all just trying to hammer together some kind of self around the chemical reactions.' She ran a hand across her eyes. ‘Look at us. You get angry for no reason when you're going hypo. I stole a flashlight
tonight because I got drunk. Is that real? Is that chemical? What's the difference? You fell in love with me back at
Dissonance
because you were smoking too much pot.'

‘No,' said Alex. ‘No. That wasn't why.'

But the truth was that he had, back then, never known why, and never wondered; his emotions had been instant and opaque and he had expected nothing else. He had known so little about her.

‘Why didn't you ever call me?' he asked, his voice very low.

‘It was too hard,' murmured Susie, staring out at the street. ‘It was just too hard.'

He raised his arm, and the motion had the weird dreamy slowness of an inevitable act. With the mingled hunger and sickness of someone going back to a familiar drug, he stroked her hair away from her face. He kissed her neck and tasted salt. She turned towards him and reached up, her mouth soft against his.

‘Oh no,' he whispered, after a while. ‘No, this is a very bad idea.'

‘Yes,' said Susie, running her hands down his chest.

He bent and touched his lips to her hair. ‘This is a train wreck,' he said. And then he was kissing her again, she was sucking his tongue, pulling him further into her mouth, and it went on forever, and he thought that he could dissolve in this, in this sweetness, the joints of his body coming undone. Wrecked, addicted, gone.

In her bedroom they stood apart from each other for a moment, still fully clothed, hesitant, and he was much more afraid now than he had been in his twenties, older than he should be and far too aware of all the things that could go wrong. Then she moved towards him, and he lifted her small burning hand and licked the drying blood from her palm.

Derek Rae's life in the ravine is, after its manner, a life well-organized. His time is measured by the regular catastrophe of the trains passing over his head, thunderous and dirty, an assault of noise. The days and weeks are shaped by weather, the poison sun and debilitating humidity of late summer shading slowly into the long cold nights and the sheltering snow.

He doesn't know that the girls are falling down. It is a shame, perhaps, that no one has told him, because Derek is closer to the heart of the problem than anyone thinks. But this is how it is, he doesn't take the subway, he doesn't read the newspapers.

Though Derek is radically isolated, he is not in fact quite without human contact. He is known to the street nurses, for instance, who bring him the bottles of water and tins of Ensure that now constitute his entire diet; the nurses have not passed this information on to his sister because Derek does not speak to them, so they are unable to determine whether they have his consent.

Sometimes he comes out of his tent and sits in Chorley Park, but he does not think he will do that again after what happened the last time.

When it becomes most urgently necessary – no longer very often – he will cross over to Broadview and ask for change until he can afford to visit one of the city's more desperate and undiscriminating sex workers. His library is made up mostly of books and magazines he has found lying in bus shelters or coffee shops, though in a few cases he has stolen them from the public library, because books are a singularly pressing requirement, the one thing left that resembles his vanished life. Sometimes he finds mittens and hats discarded on the hiking path, and these sustain him in the coldest weather.

None of this represents the truth of Derek's existence, his passions and his miseries, the battles he wages all alone against pains and fears and the forces of universal gravitation. The raw courage that is required of him every day. His hard-won choice to continue living, when so many possibilities to stop are offered at every hand, the cars on the highway, the trains on the tracks, an end to the
daily loss. None of this represents Derek's soul, scraped bloody, howling, fighting always to hang on, a solitary superhuman ordeal, unacknowledged by the world, unrewarded.

These things are known. Somewhere, they are known. But they are not to be spoken of.

And up and down the city, people pursued their lives, their own small braveries and defeats; they walked dogs and drilled holes in the street, wiped the noses of other people's children. At the corner of Bloor and Spadina, just before dawn, a shirtless man pulled out a knife and began to cut his arms and chest, spilling gouts of raspberry blood on the sidewalk, and as the police took him away he spoke of crimes against order, of the subway cars falling apart in rot and atomic disintegration, entropy calling them home.

Later, at this same corner, a woman would stagger and fall, and hives would break out on her face. The panhandlers who sat on the newspaper boxes, blind drunk at ten in the morning, laughed at first, and then watched her twisting on the street, biting her own lip until she drew blood, and one of them ran and pounded his fist on the window of the bagel shop until he saw the waitress pick up the phone to call
911
. Then he ran, staggering and falling with his friends, to the park down the block. They lay on the dead grass of the park and laughed again and wept.

In the hospital, the burned man dreamed of paper snowflakes, clean-edged and white and cool, falling to cover his bed. His body a field, extending through space. He lay beneath the blue light of the dream, the taste of dirt and honey in his mouth, and the paper snow filled the concave vault of space, this man his own world in his opiate sleep, the fire on the far horizon.