Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  ‘Dissertation. Analysis of relationship networks among the homeless and underhoused.’

  ‘Okay, I can see that. That’s really interesting.’

  ‘Not so much. Not to anyone but me. Anyway, I had to kind of change the topic because my supervisor – well, never mind, it’s just one of those dissertation things.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  She bent over her plate, pushing at the remains of the rice with her fork. ‘So. Well. So there you go,’ she said, and then she looked up again and her face was cracked and vulnerable, a question in it he recognized, sore to the touch. Do I know you? Do I know you anymore? He felt something that he couldn’t name slip loose inside his chest.

  ‘I was worried about you, a bit,’ he said. The window rattled behind him.

  She nodded slowly. ‘I was… I’m all right. It was just… ’

  ‘I thought probably. Probably you were okay. But I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘I know. I mean… What about you?’

  ‘I… I’m fine now.’ He looked down at his own hands, fidgeting with the cutlery, and couldn’t think for a while what should come next.

  ‘You know, hands are very interesting things,’ he said finally.

  ‘You’re still a pothead, aren’t you?’ said Susie. And this at last was something he could laugh at, unforced.

  ‘Really not. I’m just like this all by myself, as it turns out.’

  ‘That’s gotta save some money.’

  ‘I spend it all on tofu.’ But while he had been looking at his hands he’d also looked at his watch, and time was pressing in on him again, the handful of hours left in the evening. ‘Listen, Susie, Suzanne, I’m sorry about this, but I should go. Let me get the check?’

  ‘Oh. All right.’ Her face tensed slightly, a small nod as if she were accepting the blame for this. Understanding that it had been her fault.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s not… I just have this thing… ’

  ‘You’re meeting someone?’

  He wished he could say he was, it was the right excuse, free of hurt or judgement. ‘Not exactly. It’s… I need to take some photos. I mean, it’s a regular thing I do, after work I go out and… it’s a sort of project. I don’t like to – I know this sounds compulsive, but I don’t like to miss a night.’

  ‘In this?’ She gestured towards the window, and he turned and saw that winter had abruptly fallen, as shockingly as it did each year, the first sudden storm. Against the darkness, the wind was driving sheets of snow in a slanting diagonal blur, pedestrians slipping in their inappropriate shoes.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ muttered Alex, brought up against the inevitable wall of Canadian weather.

  ‘Are you on a deadline?’ asked Susie.

  ‘No. No, it’s not an assignment, it’s a personal thing.’ He folded his arms and frowned. ‘I could do the PATH system. I’m going to have to think about the weather long-term, but right now I could do the PATH system.’

  ‘You really think you have to do this?’

  ‘I really do.’

  She caught the waiter’s eye and gestured for the check. ‘I could come with you.’

  ‘What? You think I’m going to die underground in the blizzard?’

  ‘I’d just like to come. See what you’re doing. If it’s all right.’

  He took the check from the waiter and reached for his wallet. No one ever came with him. It wasn’t the way he did this.

  ‘I guess so. If you really want to.’

  They stood up on the subway, their hair beaded with snow after the short walk up Bathurst, neither of them able to accept the tight physical proximity of the narrow seats, appropriate only for close friends or complete strangers. Discarded newspapers lay scattered around the car, under the feet of dripping passengers, repeatedly and monotonously predicting millions of influenza deaths. Alex thought of telling Susie about his encounter with the girls and their poison gas, but decided against it; he was tired of the story already.

  There was a wet draft of wind on the subway platform, crowds wandering up and down the stairs, but they pushed through the turn-stiles and opened the glass doors into a warm corridor with ivory-white walls that was nearly deserted, one man in a dark suit crossing a corner in the distance. The stores to the left were closed, metal grilles pulled down.

  ‘Isn’t this a funny time to be coming down here? I mean, there’s nothing going on here at night, is there?’ Susie unbuttoned her coat and tucked her soft red hat into her pocket.

  ‘Well, that’s the trick, I guess,’ said Alex, opening his camera bag. ‘I make decisions and I stick with them, it’s one of the rules. But this could work.’

  ‘I can see it during the day. When things are open. It’s not exactly picturesque, but retail’s part of the urban experience, I get that. But retail that’s closed for the night?’

  ‘Just let me see what I can do.’ They passed from one corridor into the next, walking by a man with an industrial bucket mop talking in animated French to a woman with cornrowed blonde hair and hoop earrings, and came out into a shuttered food court. ‘I like this.

  The bones of the food court. Infrastructure,’ muttered Alex, moving around the kiosks, kneeling, adjusting the lens. The light was dim, but it wasn’t too dark, not so dark that he couldn’t adapt.

  ‘It’s interesting, the shape of things down here,’ he went on, a kind of half-conscious patter, not exactly meant to be listened to. ‘I mean, up on the surface the city’s so rectilinear, but down here it’s like this wild kind of maze. And they put up these signs…’ he stepped back to take a picture of one of the glyphic, colour-coded signs that hung from the ceiling ‘… that make no damn sense at all, these weird triangles. I wonder about it.’

  ‘They disorient people so they’ll feel insecure and purchase more. Try to locate themselves through merchandise.’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

  In the next hallway there was music from a PA system, a woman in the uniform of one of the food court restaurants talking on her cellphone. A man walking by with a red balloon on a string.

  ‘Let’s go up this way,’ said Alex, gesturing towards a steep elevator, and as they rode up he tipped his head back in astonishment.

  ‘Oh, look,’ he said. ‘Oh, this is lovely.’

  They were in a long hallway, with a high ceiling of white ribs, arching in a luminous cathedral curve above the darkened space, and set into the floor were panels of light, glowing in the dim surround. Alex knelt on the floor and leaned back, holding the camera upwards, almost lying down on the tile, then moved in a quick shuffle to the side, trying to hold the glowing panels and the arch in a single shot. ‘Isn’t this lovely?’

  Susie was standing with her arms folded, half smiling. ‘It’s a bank, Alex,’ she said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So? So it’s a bank. So this is just money trying to look good.’

  Alex walked to the glass wall at the end of the hallway, seeing that they had returned to street level, and squinting out towards the street. He could barely make out a sheer black cone, slick with wet snow, and the angular glass edges of the facing building, and he took a series of shots, working on intuition, hoping that the tangle of reflections would come out the way he wanted it to. ‘I say again – so? People made this. They thought it would be beautiful, so they made it.’

  ‘You’re very easy to impress.’

  ‘Maybe so. But that’s a choice too.’

  A small child ran onto one of the light panels, screaming in delight as his father ran after him, dodging and chasing in the scattered darkness, and Alex stopped thinking in concepts as he raised the camera, his fingers moving as he shifted the pictures around, framing, needing, taking in the shapes of their play, before they went down again to the underground passageways.

  Some of the corridors were suddenly full of people, walking north from Union Station and branching off to the east or west at different points along the route. They passed Yogen Früz stands, candy stores with
piles of maple fudge in the windows, shops that sold bottles of vitamins, or silk scarves and mittens, shuttered and dark. Into another underground courtyard, white marble, with banks of ferns and violets and tiny willow trees, a small waterfall at one end with the twisted copper shapes of salmon leaping in front of it. His feet were starting to ache; he sat down on the small stairway between the ferns, thinking that if he were by himself he could take his shoes off.

  ‘Where else have you done this?’ asked Susie, sitting beside him.

  ‘Oh, everywhere.’ He wiggled his toes and rotated his ankles, keeping the circulation going. ‘I mostly concentrate on the downtown, but everywhere I can get to, really. People think urban photography is all big-eyed kids in housing projects. Which, I mean, yeah, housing projects are part of it too. And police stations and stuff. But so is this…’ he waved his arm around, ‘… this whatever. Is this a hotel?’

  ‘I can’t even tell. It’s all much the same down here.’

  They sat on the steps in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘How long were you in Vancouver?’ asked Alex.

  Susie took a breath before she answered, and looked down. ‘A year? A year and a half, I think.’

  ‘Ah.’ He held his camera on his lap, fidgeting with the lens. And he knew that she was aware of the same thing, that she had been back in Toronto for over ten years, and she hadn’t talked to him. She talked to Adrian. Not to him.

  He reached over and rubbed the leaf of the violet beside him, thinking he would find that it was plastic, but it wasn’t, it was real.

  ‘Adrian and Evvy got married, you know,’ Susie said at last.

  It took him a minute to place the name – yes, Evelyn Sinclair, the very quiet and faintly mysterious theology student that Adrian had been with, in some uncertain way, all those years ago. ‘Huh.’ He hadn’t expected that. ‘Well, I’m glad things work out for some people. They have any kids?’

  ‘One.’ She looked over at Alex. ‘How about you? You married or anything?’

  ‘Nah.’ He rotated his ankles again. ‘Came close to it once, I guess. But it didn’t happen. Basically I stick with my cat.’

  ‘Not the same cat, surely.’

  ‘Oh yeah. She’s very old now, but she’s still around. She’s like my life partner. What about you? Married?’

  ‘Was for a bit. Not anymore. It wasn’t a good idea.’

  ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Alex stood up. ‘Okay. We’ve been in retail long enough. Let’s check out Metro Hall and call it done.’

  This meant another series of corridors, and a brief emergence into the damp clatter of the St. Andrew subway station, before they reached an orange hallway where the air was indefinably different, where there were no shops on either side. In the corner two figures lay rolled up in dirty sleeping bags on the tile floor, food wrappers scattered around them.

  ‘See, this I understand,’ said Susie. ‘We’ve moved from retail space to civic space now. It’s a less censored environment. Inclusive.’

  Alex lifted his camera. He shouldn’t do this, shouldn’t photograph homeless people who were asleep, helpless to give permission, but his cannibal eye demanded the picture, and he didn’t really try to resist. They walked into another hallway, a glass wall down the left side; he knew there was a sunken pool outside, surrounded by granite boulders and pine trees, a tiny replica of the Canadian Shield down below ground level, but at night there was nothing visible, only thick black beyond the glass. Up a spiral stairway, and another man in a small foyer just a few feet from the cold, asleep sitting up, a grey blanket draped over his shoulders. Susie shrugged on her coat and pushed the door open, and then they were out in the wind.

  The snow had stopped, leaving a sugared dust drifting and whirling across the pavement as they stepped outside. Alex squeezed his eyes closed and opened them again, not quite able to move forward until he had grown used to the dark, hoping that Susie wouldn’t notice this.

  ‘So you’re finished?’

  ‘I guess so. Yeah.’

  ‘Did you get what you wanted?’

  ‘I’ll have to wait and see. I never know till the pictures are developed if they’re going to come out or not.’

  They stood on King Street, awkward, putting off the moment of leaving, not so much because they wanted to be together exactly, but because they didn’t know how leaving was supposed to go. A few yards away, a man in a blue suit with a paper bag over his head was playing a guitar and singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ a light frosting of snow on the top of the bag and the shoulders of his jacket.

  ‘He’s actually not too bad,’ said Alex.

  ‘What do you suppose the paper bag is about?’

  ‘Gotta have a trademark of some kind.’

  Susie started walking north, for no clear reason, into the featureless side streets, and Alex followed.

  ‘There was that guy who used to play the accordion down by the church on Bloor. And he had that nasty dog, the one that bit people. I don’t know what ever happened to him.’

  ‘I’m kind of hoping he got arrested,’ said Susie. ‘The Spits, though, they were the best buskers ever.’ She took her hat out of her pocket and pushed it onto her chestnut hair. ‘You remember the Spits?’

  ‘Of course. Of course I do.’

  ‘I was just thinking about them is all.’ She looked around at the dark windows, the warehouse doors of the small empty street. ‘So. Do you want to get a coffee someplace?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Let’s do that.’

  They came out onto Queen Street, filled with light and crowds, and ended up at the Black Bull because it was later than he had thought, and the coffee shops were closing. He took the glucometer out of his camera bag to check his blood sugar, and decided that he could order a drink and a grilled cheese sandwich. The bar was loud and dark, the air thick with smoke and the wet smell of beer.

  ‘Whatever happened to the all-night doughnut stores? Do kids not stay up all night anymore?’ asked Susie, as she looked around at the crowd.

  ‘They must,’ said Alex, lifting his glass, the beer malty and pleasantly bitter. ‘I’m hoping they just go to places we don’t know about.’

  He leaned back in his chair, feeling the warmth of the alcohol running through his limbs, and then noticed the TV above the bar, figures in white hazmat suits moving behind police tape at the Spadina subway station. ‘Christ, what now?’ he muttered, and stood up and walked over to where he could hear the newsreader explaining that the station had been shut down when someone found traces of white powder on the floor. That there were rumours of irregularities in the blood tests. The chair of the transit commission was dragged onto the camera, blinking and irritable, and then they moved on to the next item, a French diplomat saying something at the UN Security Council, the news crawl under the picture rolling out fragmentary stories of weapons and spies.

  ‘That’s so not true,’ said Alex, thinking he was talking to himself.

  ‘What isn’t?’ said Susie beside him.

  ‘Oh. I thought you were still at the table. I mean the blood tests.

  The blood tests were fine. People are just making shit up.’

  ‘This is the poisoned girls?’

  ‘So-called. Yeah.’

  ‘It always starts with girls. They’re like a highly reactive compound.’

  Alex walked back towards the table with her. ‘I’m very interested in teenage girls, actually,’ she went on. ‘Oh my God, that sounded bad. I hope no one was listening.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Sex panic is over. It’s totally nineties.’

  ‘You’re sure they weren’t really poisoned?’

  ‘I was there. Like I keep telling everyone, I was there. I’m not poisoned, so you tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe there was poison in the air and you just got lucky and missed it. Or maybe not. Like you said, what’s the difference between emotions and chemicals? Something knocked t
hem down. Who am I to tell them what it was?’

  ‘But you don’t believe it was some kind of actual chemical, do you?’

  ‘I believe that belief in poisoning is moving through population groups. I believe there are actual chemical changes involved in belief.’

  He took a bite of his sandwich. ‘Honestly, I’m tired of the whole thing.’

  ‘Okay by me.’ Susie shrugged, sipping her beer. ‘So, this project of yours.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You go out and do this every night?’

  ‘One or two nights I stay home developing. Weekends I go out in the day, it’s not that I’m doing night shots on principle.’

  ‘And the idea is what? A book of some kind? A show?’

  ‘There isn’t an idea as such.’ He swirled what was left of the beer in his glass. He didn’t have to say any more. He shouldn’t. ‘I just want to get as much of the city on film as I can.’ He paused, glanced up at her. ‘As many parts of it as I have time for.’

  ‘Time?’

  He had gotten too close to stop. ‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to work,’ he said, and finished the glass quickly.

  She was waiting for him to go on, but he couldn’t, not on his own.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense to me,’ she said at last. ‘Alex, is something wrong?’

  He looked down at the table, folding his hands into fists. He was at the verge of it now, the worst thing in the world, worse than anything she or anyone else had ever done to him, and he had never said this aloud to a human being before.

  ‘It’s called diabetic retinopathy,’ he began slowly. ‘It’s… it’s an eye condition that varies a lot in severity. The capillaries in the eye, well, they overgrow, and the excess ones, they’re very fragile, they, ah, they can break or, or hemorrhage pretty easily. Most people have some background retinopathy when they’ve had diabetes as long as I have. It doesn’t – if it’s just minor, it doesn’t do anything really. But in my case it’s started progressing. Apparently fairly quickly.’ She was watching him, her face still. He couldn’t lift his head.

  ‘I, ah, I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s not affecting my vision very much yet, but when it does, it can be fast. I mean, it’s always different but, well, this is potentially the bad kind. The kind people go blind with.’ He stared at his hands, knuckles pale and knotted. ‘There are, ah, laser treatments that can slow it down quite a bit. You can’t stop it, but you can slow it down. But, see, there’s a cost, you’re, well, basically buying some central vision by losing peripheral. Maybe some colour perception too, maybe some night vision – well, I’ve lost some of that already from the condition itself. Maybe after the treatment somebody can’t see in very bright light either, or maybe sight’s just generally less acute. And you, you don’t do the lasers once, see. You stop the deterioration for a bit, and then it comes back and you start, ah, bleeding inside your eyes again, and you have to do the lasers again, and you lose more peripheral, more acuity… What they tell you is, they can keep you from going blind now, and it’s true, they mostly can, but… I mean, they’re trying to preserve enough vision that you can read a bit and basically walk around. Not enough that you can, that you can drive a car, say. Or, say, be a photographer. That’s the bottom line here.’ He realized that he was breathing heavily, his voice sounding choked and strange. ‘I’ve started seeing floaters,’ he said, resting his forehead on his hands. ‘The little black spots, you know? They’re blood spots, actually. It means there’s bleeding inside the retina. Not a lot. It hasn’t got in the way of anything yet. But it’s… you know, there’s no way out here. There’s just not a way out of this.’