Girls Fall Down (24 page)

‘ … set up a decontamination tent?' he heard one of the firemen saying, and then another fire truck arrived, and a white-suited hazmat team climbed down. A woman stood with her mouth partly open, pinned down by the sight of these swollen figures moving clumsily towards the door of the restaurant. Alex grabbed the sleeve of Susie's coat and pulled her along the street, out of the light from the windows.

‘Can we go now? Please?' He stood behind a newspaper box, separated from the crowd, his hands in his pockets. Susie looked back almost regretfully, but Alex started walking quickly west on College, and she came with him, trotting to keep up.

‘I'm glad I saw that,' she was saying. ‘It really is a thing that's worth studying.'

‘I just don't want it happening around me all the time, is what I want.' He took a breath, and the exhaust-filled air seemed clean in comparison, his nausea subsiding.

‘You notice it's always just one or two people? It's like a mass phenomenon that's at the same time highly atomized, I think that's almost unique. I wonder what they were talking about just before she fell.'

‘It seemed to come out of nowhere, more or less.'

‘Nothing comes out of nowhere, believe me.' She blew on her hands again, rubbing her knuckles.

‘And why does that sound like a pop lyric?'

He was walking more slowly now, safely away. As she drew level with him he reached out almost absently, and his fingers touched her shoulder and then moved back.

‘I'd like to talk to that first girl. She's the real key to all this.'

‘She looked pretty ordinary, I have to tell you,' said Alex, shrugging. ‘I don't know, I think one of her friends had a pierced navel, if that's any use.'

‘Gotta be useful to someone.'

‘I wouldn't count on that.'

They had gone by Palmerston now. As they passed the streetcar stop Susie paused and made a small uncertain gesture.

‘Well,' said Alex, ‘I live over by Grace. It's just a few blocks.'

She nodded, and as they crossed the street his arm moved around her waist, his hand running up and down the soft curve of her hip as she leaned into him for warmth. He could have told her that it wasn't a good time, that he needed to be at work in the morning. He wasn't entirely sure how he felt about going to bed with Susie knowing that her twin brother's chronicles of anal rape were folded away inside her shoulder bag. But it was like this, it would be like this, he had never been truly alone with her.

Inside the apartment she stretched up on her toes, trying to touch the gold balloon above her head, car alarms going off on College Street.

The fear had been always visible, the men with instruments appearing on television almost as soon as the first girl fell. But when real disease awoke in the city, it happened so quietly that hardly anyone noticed.

It woke, like the fear, in the body of a girl, though a very different girl, a strung-out child with a push-up bra and a chronic cough and track marks, two miniskirts and some fishnet stockings and undiagnosed fetal alcohol syndrome. This girl began to feel sick, as if she had the flu. For a while she kept working, and it wasn't so bad as long as she could get a line of coke from the guy who ran her, back in the parking lot behind the Salvation Army building, or even just some booze, but then he didn't like his girls to be that far out of it, he'd smack you around if you got too wasted, but it was hard to work otherwise when she felt this sick. And then it got worse, and then a lot worse than that.

She was lying in her bed and she couldn't even tell if she was cold or hot except that it hurt, whatever it was, it was hurting. And bad dreams. Choking in her sleep, down her throat, jamming it, couldn't breathe, and she couldn't get away from it, and she wanted to scream, but she was pinned down, too heavy, but it just hurt so much. Dirty girl. And some of the johns were freaks. The things they wanted her to do. The light scooping into her eyes like a jackknife, it was in her head now, it was all pain blowing up her head, and it was too heavy, she couldn't move her, her, it hurt too much. And what they wanted her to do. Perverts. But when you spread your legs. Dirty girl. And it hurt, in her, in, in, and in her body, and it was shredding into black, dark dark, and her neck snapped back, and her body turned to stone.

The guy who ran her came in, and then left. By the time her friend found her, hours later, and called an ambulance, she could no longer be woken. The ambulance came and took her away; and in the hospital she died.

As she was still dying, the procedures for a meningitis outbreak were set into motion.

The staff at Public Health acted quickly when the hospital phoned them. They placed a story in the local paper, they put up flyers in the neighbourhood where the girl had been working. But the desires of the street move so strangely, so covertly, and they follow no reliable pattern. The public health officers knew they would not reach everyone they needed to, and perhaps not anyone they needed to, but there was not much else they could do.

The other girl, the first girl who fell, walked quietly into the kitchen of her house and opened the cupboards, searching through the canned goods, turning the tins around in her hands as if she were considering something. Tomato soup, stuffed vine leaves. A jar of peanut butter. She wasn't sure how much she could take without an explanation, and she didn't think that she could explain why she needed to do this. A tin of coconut milk. Finally she took two cans of tuna, hesitated, and put one of them back on the shelf.

She picked up her coat, a rather expensive leather coat, and slid the can into her pocket.

Just going for a walk, she said, poking her head around the door to the sitting room. She'd be back by ten to finish her homework. Anyway, there was a
TV
show she wanted to watch. Her father nodded, and she checked for her keys, her cellphone, and went out into the wind.

She walked around to the back of the house and looked down into the ravine, but there was no one there. It would have been strange if those people had been there anyway, that green-haired girl and her friend. They had come, and performed their task, and vanished.

The fence had been painted over, but she could see the shadow of the word FEAR, a grey shape underneath the white paint.

A few streets over it was there again, FEAR, on the side of a little florist's shop. All the things she could never do, the places she couldn't go. The kind of person she could never be.

The girl stood in a park at the north end of Rosedale, her hands in the pockets of her coat, fingering the can of tuna, watching figures pass under the wide blurred halo of the lights. A woman with a fawn-coloured pug on a leash, the collar of her own coat pulled up around her face. A jogger with a scarf tied over his mouth, fingerless gloves on his bunched hands, his running shoes kicking up snow. The girl looked at an empty bench near the bushes, the damp mahogany-stained wood showing some decay at the edges. She turned her head to either side, as if checking for watchers, then moved reluctantly, uneasily, towards the bench. She took a five-dollar bill from her pocket and put it on the wooden seat, then pinned it down with the can, a strange coded offering. Walking away from the bench, she waited at the verge of the park for a while longer, looking as if she expected a great bird, perhaps, to arrive and carry her gifts away. But she couldn't stay out forever, she had homework to do, parents who kept her mostly to a curfew. The tuna and the money were still sitting on the bench when she left. She would never be able to know who would take them, or what meaning someone might see in the gesture.

On Dufferin near Lake Shore Boulevard, two police officers arrested a man in a turban who had left his bicycle leaning unattended against a wall, with plastic bags hanging from the handlebars.

If you were frightened enough, they could look like something else, those bags. Bulky packages, brown paper with grease stains. It could be groceries. It could be terror.

The policemen pushed the man onto his knees on the sidewalk as he came back to his bicycle, and bent his hands behind him, binding them with cuffs.

They drove along Lake Shore for a while, and then they stopped at a Tim Horton's, and one officer stayed in the car with the man while the other went inside to buy coffee and a box of maple-glazed Timbits. The officer in the car asked the man if he thought he was a smart guy. The man said no, he did not think that he was a smart guy at all.

As they went east, the sidewalk was lit up with a small flame, and on the steps of a small office building a circle of women were passing a burning coil of sweetgrass between them, wafting the smoke with their hands. The police car slowed to watch the ceremony, but didn't stop.

They drove further east, and then turned south, driving through blocks of boarded-up lots and a small sad diner with a neon canary above the door, down to the ports. The man realized now that they were taking him to Cherry Beach, and he knew what this meant, he had heard about what the police did at Cherry Beach. They drove on, past the green ice-edged water of the canals, the metal heft of container ships, bars that advertised themselves with drawings of martinis and dancing girls, and stopped by a stand of bare trees near the edge of the water. The officers pulled the man out of the car and he stumbled, his hands still cuffed behind his back, and they watched him as he struggled up and walked, at their orders, towards the lake. There was a small hut leaning over the water, its white paint cracking, and a half-submerged picnic table. At the shoreline the water was frozen, a lace of hard ice, shards and peaks, and it caught the distant
light and cast it back in a faint shimmer. The man went down on his knees by the pebbled shore, and lowered his head, and waited for the clubs to descend.

Towards morning, a girl fell down at Yonge and Eglinton, and the sun rose on the hazmat squad.

There were mornings when Alex turned on his radio with the thought, almost the assumption, that he would hear about a major terrorist attack in one of the central cities, London or Paris or Los Angeles. Somehow it was not a thought that brought any sense of fear with it, nothing much stronger than curiosity, and up to this point he had never actually been proved right. But it had been that way since what happened in New York; any daily routine, now, could contain this news.

He remembered that he'd been late getting to work, the morning it had happened; he'd been standing in line at the bank, and had gradually realized that the line was moving so slowly because the tellers kept leaving their posts to cluster around a small radio. As he got closer to the desk he'd been able hear bits of the broadcast, stories of airplanes and skyscrapers. ‘Ah geez,' one of the tellers had muttered, a huge man with a shiny bald head. ‘I just hope they don't start a war over this, you know?'

So it was like that now, catastrophe inevitable at the most empty moments. Everyone waiting, almost wanting it, a secret, guilty desire for meaning. Their time in history made significant for once by that distant wall of black cloud.

But there was no such news this morning, Susie gone before dawn and Alex sitting by the radio with a cup of coffee, trying to pay attention; it was all about
UN
weapons inspectors and fluctuating currencies, an outbreak of Marburg virus in a tiny distant country, and a confusing story about an arrest in connection with incidents not precisely named. The subway, he guessed, and wondered who they'd found and what they were thinking.

The small explosion of order in his own life happened later that day, ephemeral and unexpected, when a bird somehow entered the hospital, in a way that no one was ever able, later on, to understand. When Alex arrived, unsummoned but pulled away from his lunch break by rumours of excitement, it had been contained in an empty room where it huddled in a corner, grey feathers fluffed angrily out,
a disoriented disease vector, potential reservoir of avian flu, West Nile, any number of other infections.

‘Just let me kill the fucker!' an orderly in a mask and industrial gloves was shouting, grabbing for the pigeon as it leapt from his hands, its wings slicing upwards.

Alex slipped unnoticed into the room, and knelt with his camera as the pigeon exploded towards the ceiling in a scatter of fluff and droppings, crashed into an
IV
stand, and started to make a break for the door before someone slammed it shut. The orderly ran at the bird with a canvas bag and it veered up again, greeny-white shit falling into another orderly's long hair. ‘Jesus!' she screamed, her hands flying up.

The pigeon began to spiral, high out of reach, and the orderly dropped the bag and picked up a mop, began stabbing the wooden handle at the bird. ‘Open a window!' someone else called. ‘Open a window, let it out!'

‘They don't open that way!' yelled the first orderly, and a male nurse, seeming now in a state of pure panic, picked up a chair and bashed at the window, trying to break it.

‘Kill it, kill it, we have immuno-compromised patients in here!'

‘How in God's name did it get in?'

‘Alex, Jesus Christ!' The long-haired orderly backed into him. ‘Don't take
pictures
of this.'

‘Personal use only,' said Alex, as the pigeon wheeled in lunatic circles, wings beating into the walls. Then it sank downwards, bright amethyst slivers of light splintering from its chest, and dug its festering claws into Alex's hair.

‘Fucking hell!' he shouted, stumbling forward, the thin talons piercing his scalp.

‘It's gone on the attack!' cried an orderly.

Alex fell onto his knees, his teeth sinking into his lip, his hands beating uselessly at his head as the window gave way.

‘Oh, good going, Stuart,' snapped another nurse. ‘I hope you know you're paying for that.'

An orderly swung a pillow at the bird and it lifted off from Alex's head, leaving him bent on the floor, tears of pain in his eyes. The
pillow still waving, a white flag, and the bird was herded towards the window and out, suddenly hesitating in the air and almost returning, before Stuart began cramming bedclothes into the gap.