Girls Fall Down (29 page)

‘And phone in those pledges right now, people,' the announcer on the campus radio station was saying, ‘because we are
$15,000
behind on our rent, and if you don't get on those phones, we're going off the air at midnight!'

He would have to remember to check the station tomorrow and find out whether they were still around.

This is what it would be like, he thought, an aimless little life of walks and radios and pointless diversions. Because he couldn't really believe that it would work out well, that they would arrest the
disease with a few treatments and cause no major damage to his sight. His ophthalmologist, he suspected, didn't really believe it either. It happened that way for some people, but it wouldn't happen for him.

The girl watched the late afternoon light move across her desk, deep yellow, the sun glowing orange behind the dark mass of trees beyond the window. Her notebook was open in front of her, a purple pen with gold sparkles lying across it. The English teacher reached for a dictionary and set it down on Zoe's desk. ‘Okay. Definition and derivation,' he said. ‘Read that part?'

Zoe glanced at the page. ‘What? The whole letter B?' she said teasingly. The teacher pointed at a line.

‘Beel … no way. You're trying to make me look dumb.'

‘Oh, come on,' said the teacher.

‘You read it.'

The teacher shrugged and picked up the dictionary. ‘Beelzebub,' he said. ‘Definition
1
: the prince of demons; the devil. Now you read the derivation.' He passed the book to Lauren, who ran her finger down the page and found the line.

‘Hebrew – oh, wow! Hebrew for Lord of the Flies! Awesome!'

‘Oh my GOD!' exclaimed Zoe, putting her hands up to her face. ‘How did you even
know
that? Were you just, like, reading through the dictionary one day and you found it?'

‘Um, it's just more like – general knowledge,' said the teacher, who was a very young man, though he didn't seem so to the girls in his class. ‘It's a thing people know.'

The girl drew a flower in the corner of a page, watching the rest of the class from the corner of her eye. Looked outside at the woods.

‘That is so
awesome
,' said Lauren.

The girl played with her pen for a moment, and then closed her exercise book and carefully inked the word FEAR onto the cover, in tiny, precise, very dark letters.

‘You know, if William Golding had kids, his kids would be
totally
upset reading this book,' said Tasha.

At the St. Patrick station, on the stairway leading to the street, a woman collapsed and fell down half a flight, breaking two bones in her hand. A dead smell, she said it had been, a dead, sweet smell that pulled her down.

How could she be expected to do proper blood tests, asked the doctor in the toxicology lab, when no one could tell her what to look for, when all they could tell her was what they supposed it was not, not sarin, not cyanide, probably not a virus? Was she meant to search down to infinite degrees of abnormality? There could never be an end to that.

In the storage rooms and passageways below the subway lines the hazmat workers moved, breathing through heavy masks, slowly searching each room, each corner, for traces of powder or chemical marks, for doors opened that should not have been, cigarette butts in forbidden areas, for any sign that someone had hidden here, waiting, contaminants in open hands.

Other things happened that were innocuous and fairly ordinary, the little troubles of winter. A common enterovirus infiltrated several playschools and caused a large number of toddlers to start vomiting. Many adults exhibited upper respiratory tract infections. Some of them, remembering the men who had lost their breath at the King station, understood their symptoms to mean that they had been poisoned. Hospital emergency departments began to overflow.

A man was admitted to one of the hospitals with a high fever, the transaction that had passed between himself and a dead girl breaking violently to the surface. This man got to a doctor in time; he was treated effectively with intravenous antibiotics. Public Health was notified, and began once again the process of tracing contacts, discovering those he had been close to, those he had lived with, those he had touched. Meningitis is fast, faster than organized plans, and the dead girl, the vector, with her weak immune system and her coded, hidden world, she was moving the authorities now in a way that her life could never have done.

Alex went out again in the early evening with his camera, and tried dismally, experimentally, to take some pictures. That everything felt wrong was surely a function of his mood as much as the state of his eyes.

Anyway, some of the photos might turn out all right. There was a quality of light and movement that he liked, outside the windows of the Diplomatico, a girl in the doorway of the Bar Italia, these might be okay after all. He had to believe that.

When he got back to his apartment, there was a message on his voice mail from Susie. Asking how he was. He didn't want anyone asking how he was. Telling him that she was going to see Derek that night, that she'd be leaving around ten, he could come to her house anytime before that.

In theory, he could simply not turn up. She had left him that choice. She might even have been suggesting it.

He could do other things. He could phone his sister, his pleasantly normal, dissatisfied sister, and listen to her stories of the folly of her co-workers. He could call in a pledge to that poor campus radio station. He sat on his couch stroking Jane and thinking about the things he could do if he didn't answer Susie's message, and then it was quarter to ten. He stood up and got his coat, put the photographs of her in a new manila envelope, and packed his insulin kit in his camera bag. He was halfway out the door when he turned back, grabbed the string of the balloon and brought it along with him.

He would come when she called. Watch when she left. Lose her, lose his eyes. Lose the winter light, and end up with nothing.

Two of the smaller restaurants along College had posted handwritten signs in the windows, announcing themselves to be Closed on Account of Illness. Whether this was the illness of the proprietors, or whether they were entrenching against the illness of the city, he wasn't sure.

He was late. She'd probably go ahead without him.

End up with nothing.

He rode the streetcar up Bathurst, noticing that the gold foil star was sagging a bit now as the helium leaked slowly away. He didn't
look out the window, not wanting to know how much he was unable to see. As he got off the car at the Bathurst station, he saw the word FEAR spray-painted in big black letters on the concrete wall. He entered the station and caught the subway going east.

As he arrived at the house he checked his watch – it was past ten-thirty. But when he went inside the front door, he saw that the door to her apartment, at the foot of the stairs, wasn't actually closed. Slightly ajar, it swung open further at his knock.

‘Alex?' she called down the stairs.

‘Yeah, it's me.'

‘Are you okay? Come on up.'

She was sitting at her desk chair, lacing her boots, but she stood up when he came in.

‘How are you? I tried to phone.'

Alex moved away from her, slumping down on her futon couch, and fought back another irrational spasm of anger. He twitched his shoulders in a tight shrug. ‘They cauterized the blood vessels, I guess. I can't really, you know, it's too early to say if it's affected my vision. It's just the first round anyway. I have to go back.'

‘How are you feeling, though?'

‘It hurts. I'd rather not talk about it.' He realized that he was still holding the balloon, and stretched his hand towards her. ‘Here. This is for you.'

Susie took hold of the string and wrapped it loosely around the back of her chair. ‘Wow. Mafia balloon,' she said with a faint smile. ‘Thanks.' The star didn't pull the string taut anymore, but hovered softly a few feet below the ceiling.

‘I was just going to see Derek.'

‘Yeah. I know. I got your message.'

‘I don't have to go right now necessarily.' She played absently with the string of the balloon. ‘I talked to this guy, this psychiatric social worker, he's going to come with me and see him next week, if he's got my okay maybe Derek'll talk to him.'

And suddenly he couldn't bear any of it, the hunger and the damage, the constant covert search for signs of other men in her life, the moment when she would leave him this time. He shoved
his hands into his pockets. ‘Good. Great. You won't be needing me anymore, then.'

She pushed her hair back and looked at him, frowning. ‘What does that mean?'

‘Oh, nothing. Never mind. It's probably just as well.'

‘Alex.' She sat down on the couch beside him, and he edged away.

‘I said it's okay. Look, I was convenient. I'm aware of that, and if you've got some other guy to take over, that's fine. I can't really do this any longer anyway.'

Susie lifted one hand to her mouth and began to chew on the edge of her thumb. ‘Okay, I don't get this. Where is this coming from all of a sudden?'

‘Oh, come on.' He stretched out his legs and crossed one ankle over the other. ‘We both know where I stand. I mean, you never bothered to call me for thirteen years, did you? You called Adrian and not me, for God's sake.'

‘This is bullshit.' She twisted her thumb between her teeth. ‘In case your memory doesn't extend back a full three weeks, I
did
call you, how the hell else would you even be here?'

‘Yeah. Eventually. You did.' He didn't know why he didn't stop, but he couldn't, the rush of it, high and reckless. ‘Your brother was missing and you wanted somebody to be your, your good luck charm or whatever. And apparently you didn't happen to have any other admirers around at that point, or, or your husband, whoever the hell he was – '

‘His name's Nick McCawley,' said Susie fiercely, biting off a strip of nail. ‘He works at Legal Aid. Why don't you give him a call, collect a few more stories you can throw in my face?'

‘That's not my fucking point!' He didn't mean to shout, but it happened, a stab of pain in his head. ‘I'm trying to tell you, I can't do it again, Susie-Paul, I can't go through this again.' He put his hands up to his eyes and rubbed them. ‘For God's sake. Of course I want you. You're smart, you're beautiful, probably everybody wants you. But it costs me too much. It costs me too fucking much to hold your hand until you feel like going away. I can't give up everything else just to be a marginal player in the dramatic life of Suzanne Rae.'

She stood up then, without saying a word, picked up her coat and walked past him to the stairs and left, closing the door hard behind her, and suddenly he was alone in her apartment, half-panicked by what he had just accomplished. He couldn't stay here without her, that was ridiculous, he had to – oh Christ, he had to follow her again. He ran down the stairs and out into the street.

She was far ahead of him, a distant little figure under the street-lights. He had to keep running, his camera bag thudding awkwardly against his hip, to catch up with her, and for a minute he thought that he wouldn't, that he'd have to stop and lose sight of her. In the darkness she kept receding, a small shadow in the shadows, and by the time he reached her he felt such relief that he almost didn't expect her to be angry.

‘Get lost,' she snapped. He tried to touch her shoulder, but she shook him off, still walking.

‘Susie, cut it out,' said Alex, struggling for breath. ‘I wasn't making fun of your life. I've seen what you go through with Derek, I know it's real, and I know the breakup with Chris must have hurt you in its own way, but Jesus, it nearly killed me, and you never even noticed.'

‘That is not true.'

‘Okay. You did. You noticed that I was someone who would just hang around and be in love with you forever and never ask too much of you. But I,' he tried to catch his breath; she was so much smaller than him but she was moving fast, ‘I have a chronic illness, okay? I don't like to say that, but it's true. The first night we went down into the ravine, I nearly had a hypo episode, and then my sugar went up way too high, and I had something close to a hemorrhage from the stress, I had serious damage to the blood vessels in my eyes, I'm, I'm, I'm losing my sight for fuck's sake, you can't do this to me!'

She didn't stop walking, but she slowed down a bit. ‘You didn't tell me.'

‘Well, what was I going to say?'

‘I'm sorry, then. About that, I'm sorry. But about everything else, you're just wrong.'

‘I am not.'

‘Do you really believe – God, Alex, do you think I could ever …' she moved her hands in the air as if she were trying to shape a sentence. ‘Alex, I'm sorry about what happened back then. I fucked up. I treated you badly, I know I did. But you have no idea. You have no idea what it took to call you, what it – Alex,
you
, you are not, you have never been marginal. You can't believe that. You can't really believe that.'

‘It's actually not very hard, all things considered.'

‘No. No, you just want to think that.'

‘Fuck that, Susie-Paul.'

‘You do. You don't want to think that I was confused too. You don't want to think that you mattered. That's too hard. You just want to live in this pretend world where you aren't responsible for anything.'

‘
I'm
not responsible? You left. You just
left
. You never even sent me a fucking postcard.'

‘Go home, Alex,' she said quietly. They were nearing the intersection with Broadview now. ‘I don't need you.'

‘No kidding,' said Alex sourly.

‘God, you like that idea, don't you? Poor Alex, out in the cold, all fragile and powerless. As if you … as if it never hurt, knowing you were always there – wanting things I couldn't give you or, or anyone … ' She turned her head sharply, scanning the road for a break in the traffic. ‘As if you never hurt me. Jesus.'