PostApoc (7 page)

“Hold this,” she says without waiting for my answer, stubbing the filter of her cigarette between my fingers, telling me I can smoke some if I want. I do.

The girl goes face down into her bag, digging. Her fingers come out of the dark sack, tips covered in powder, soot. “Ready?” she asks, looks at me, and then she's at the side of my face. Her fingertips have the stickiness of a spider's legs. They spin out a spiral across my eyelid, stretch the webbing across my cheekbone.

“There,” she says. “Done.” She's smiling, proud, wants to show me, pulls a small compact from her pocket, holds it up. Except the mirror's at the wrong angle and has me out of the frame. I reach for the compact, try to pull it down but she stops my hand, holds it in hers mid-air.

She wants to know: “You like it?”

All I see is sky. “I love it,” I tell her.

It might be somewhere around what used to be
3AM
and the show is breaking up. There's still a small sputter of fire; a few people have stretched out around the fire pit, sleeping on their backs. Tara and I have lost the last of our time here, both blacking out after the singer went back inside and Aimee went off somewhere again. Shit Kitten said they were doing two sets but we can only remember seeing one.

You never know how long it'll take to walk across the Bloor Street bridge. Should only be a few minutes, five to eight depending how fast you are, but you never know what you might step into here. There are pockets of time, holes that'll slow you down, ghosts that'll pull you in.

Tonight the only measurement of time I have to go by is the fatigue I'm starting to feel in my lower thighs, muscles straining to get to the other side, slowed by the cold that always creeps in up here. I want to stay, lie down right where I am on the bridge, but Tara pushes into the small of my back, tells me to just move, move, move. I fall behind anyway.

Finally I crawl up the porch stairs, the last one in. Even Aimee has made it in before me, having come a different route with Trevor. No one waits to make sure I get in okay.

The legs of my jeans are damp from something wet but I don't know what. It's absorbed upwards, left a coating of black grime, tiny pebbles across the calves of my pants. I pull the jeans off and leave them in a far corner of the room, don't want anymore outside transmission on me than there already is. I throw my t-shirt there, too, wipe at my ankles. A few specks of dark sand fall onto the floor.

I find another t-shirt to wipe at my face. It's not clean but at least it's dry. The sun is starting to come up, bringing in enough light to get at my makeup. The swirl the singer painted earlier is gone, nothing left even in the crease of my eyelid.

- 13 -
EMPTY HUNGER

A
imee wakes me up and asks “Do you want to get drunk?” and I say, “Of course I do.” She says, “A friend I ran into last night told me about someone who can hook us up.”

I sit up. “Really? Who?”

“Well it's kind of weird,” she says. “Like, how we have to pay for it.”

“Okay,” I say. “So what do we have to do?”

Downstairs, the kitchen sink is backed up. Blowing chunks. Looks like stewing beef, meat cut at odd angles. Tough strands of white fat exposed. A circle of blood rims the drain.

Five of us stand around trying to figure out how to deal with it, what to do. After this I think I will probably never be hungry again.

From the right, a finger runs the length of darkness beneath my skirt, distracts me from the disgust of the sink. Cam, at the back of my knees.

“What the fuck?” I spit, spinning to catch him.

He laughs. “I'm kidding,” he says. “Besides, you better get used to it if you want to get drunk today.”

Close your eyes and they could all be the same, guys like Cam, grabbing at ankles in the dark, hands reaching higher.

Aimee says guys always like me because I'm one of the thin girls, because they think they can just flick me away. My raccoon eyes give me away, apparently, make it too obvious that I apply insomnia in place of eyeliner.

I kick at Cam, heel to collarbone, prove Aimee wrong.

We ride west, big empty bags over our shoulders. Aimee says no one needs money anymore, that dealers just want to hold you, have someone close.

“Girls and guys?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Why not? It's not sexual. They just want to not feel so lonely or something.”

A platonic exchange. No sex, just an hour in a man's arms.

“So is this different from what Trevor does?” I ask.

“Trevor does his own thing,” Aimee says. “There are a lot of people who don't want to get off, just want to be cradled. Oh, and my friend said they might want to talk or something, so pretend you're listening and don't fall asleep.”

Aimee pulls into a driveway in front of a line of row houses. I follow her around the back of number
133
and we knock three times, like her friend told her.

The door pulls back, opens onto a dark basement hallway. A man's moon-white face appears. The long black curls that fall around his cheeks add to the pallor. I'd guess him to be in his late thirties.

“You want something to drink?” he asks.

We smile, nod, stay silent. He steps aside and we go in.

“You girls want one bottle or two?” he asks, settling into a dirty rose-coloured couch.
The legs on it have collapsed so it sits flat on the floor, bringing the man's knees up to the middle of his chest.

I look at Aimee but she's already formed an answer: “Two.”

He nods. “Who's first?”

He brings me into a windowless room and tells me to get into bed. He closes the door, keeping the soft light from the hallway outside.

“I keep a knife on me at all times and guns hidden in every room,” he says. “So don't think you're going to rip me off because I'll have you dead in less than a minute.”

He gets in beside me and the mattress sinks to my left, rolls me against him. “Put your back to me so we can spoon,” he says. I turn around and my ass crack fits against his penis. My heart drops, but bounces back again when his softness doesn't change.

He puts his head in my hair and breathes deep, sighs.

“I had a girlfriend before,” he says. “I miss her.”

“Oh?” I say. “What was her name?”

“Natalie,” he says. “She had a body more like your friend: tall, curvy, strong.”

“Uh huh,” I say, and then, “sorry,” not sure what I'm even apologizing for.

“It's all right,” he says. “You're fine. I just like to feel someone next to me. I like skin on skin, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

“I'm losing my energy anyway,” he says. “I couldn't get it up if you paid me. I heard that's happening to other guys, too. Not that many of my friends are still around, but the ones who are . . .”

“Oh?” I say, thinking it's obviously not happening to Cam or Trevor.
“What's your name?” I add.

“Mike,” he says.

He's quiet for a second, doesn't ask my name. I remember Aimee's warning, about falling asleep, so I keep going. “Where'd you and Natalie meet?”

At a club, he tells me. Under the lights her mocha skin was red clay, and it cracked and flaked as she crawled across the floor. But when she looked up, smiled, she was whole again, her skin newly smooth, limbs fresh with movement. He was so high he probably didn't have access to all parts of his eyes, but could feel the warm tightness of a packed club, the guardedness stiffening in his shoulders, the small of his back. He and every other man in there had his eyes on the patch and swell of this girl's body. He remembers that he could smell the other men's crotches, the salt between the legs of the girls. Or maybe that was just the acid, heightening his senses.

He got a dance from her later, told her he loved her. Just another stoned creep at the strip club, but she went for it.

“I felt like I was the luckiest man ever that night,” he says. “That night, and every night.”

My jaw's tight, keeps a seal around a flood of spit behind my teeth.

Mike says his water's working today, if I want to use the bathroom. I see Aimee go into the room next as I lean into the sink, elbows propped on either side of the porcelain. Breathing deep I tell myself,
Don't puke don't puke don't puke
.

Thin tentacles of black hair zigzag out of the drain, hundreds of strands attempting to clog the flow. I run the tap and light a cigarette, wait for the water to cool down. I cup my hands and fill them, hold my breath. Pretend to drown.

The Bloor Street bridge was built above an altar, for sacrifices and worship. Below it is an eye that opens onto astral planes. The structure's belly is a skeletal system, subway tracks and frail ladders, bloated with ghost trains, rolling whispers of phantom vibrations.

My spine fits the width of the rail, the bump of each vertebrae bruising against the flat of the tracks. My shins are feathers, feet peppered with pins and needles. Beside me, Aimee dangles her legs over the edge, torso expertly balanced even with a bottle of vodka in hand. From all the way up here, you'd never believe that there's such an empty hunger running from the stretch of space between the bridge and the road below.

People used to come to this bridge to die. Jump, believing it would bring them to another world.
The Eye, it only looks back at those who can see it.

When the city was built, did they think they could pave it shut? Maybe they couldn't see it. Maybe it never woke up until the bridge was built over top, hundreds of feet above. Maybe that's when the Eye knew it could finally feed.

There were so many suicides here that the city put up a payphone at one end of the bridge, a big white sign above with the number for a crisis line. “
WE LISTEN 24 HOURS A DAY
,” the sign says, “
CALL IF YOU NEED TO TALK.
” But would the Eye wait? Or would it close in on you anyway?

The payphone couldn't have been enough because later the barriers went up, thick silver wires creating a cage, encouraging pacing and panic attacks. But still the bridge smells of anxiety, anticlimax.

I imagine, below me now, the Eye opening through a slow, lazy spin, its size prehistoric, gaze preternatural. When the subway still ran through here I'd close my eyes as it shot out of the tunnel and into the cold shadow-light of the bridge's underside, fifteen seconds of flying over a stream of cars. The train's brakes would flare up, squeals pinging against the bridge's metal legs, its stacked weight, and every time I'd think,
This is it—today this train will go over the edge
.

Pictured from the ground up, a clumsy figure making an awkward arc in the air, its joints thick with stiffness, my own body boneless in a corner seat. An imprint, a smear of shadow, all that would be left behind.

“Let's call that number on the payphone, see what happens,” Aimee says, taking another swig of vodka.
We decided to crack it now, before we got back to the house. We'll tell the others we only got one bottle. No, we won't tell them anything. These will be our bottles. The others can get their own.

The bones in my back turn to chattering teeth bracing against the deep vibrations coating the belly of the bridge in goose bumps as a ghost train runs through me, as something old and dark rotates in its sleep under the crust of silent road below. I try to go boneless now but my flesh has gone tough, malnourishment cutting away at softness and curves.

My hipbone is at its highest right now. The Eye, in its state of craving, has no sense of how little there is left of me to live. Aimee stands above me, foot between my legs and hand extended. “Come on,” she says.

There is a tang to the phone's mouthpiece, old words trapped in the holes of old plastic, misted spit turned sweat-sweet. The crisis line number is not toll-free: anyone without a quarter and the sense to call collect would have given up. The final confirmation that no one
really
wants to listen.

“Here,” Aimee says, pulling a quarter out of a zipped pocket in her boot. There is no dial tone, but there is static, as if something is already there, eavesdropping on the other end. The quarter slides in, plunks against other coins at the bottom. Maybe we haven't been the only ones here, in this spot. Maybe they just never bothered to collect the coins near the end, either not a priority or just forgotten.

Dialing stiff buttons. Numbers three and nine crunch into their frames. Each entry still beeps through the earpiece, programmed in, maybe, rather than electrical.

Aimee's head close to mine, her ear leaning in to hear what will happen. I expect, “Please hang up and try your call again” or “We're sorry, the number you have reached is not in service.” But there is only static, the chattering of more ghosts.

Below, the Eye rolls.