Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  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.

  II

  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.

  ‘You’re probably going to get head lice,’ said the other nurse to Alex.

  ‘What the hell was up with that bird?’ asked the orderly with the pillow. ‘I mean, have we got a big hole in the wall somewhere or what?’

  ‘There’s going to be an inquiry over this one.’

  ‘Just don’t sue us about the lice, okay, Alex?’

  His scalp was throbbing when he got home, his head smelling of disinfectant and Polysporin. He felt shaky still, but unable to sit down. He didn’t think he wanted to cook himself anything for dinner. Didn’t want to stay home at all, really. He’d spoken to his ophthalmologist that morning and it hadn’t been very encouraging.

  He could have phoned Susie. He thought about phoning Susie, but he found himself instead with his camera on Bloor Street. He’d tell her about the bird sometime. She would like to hear about it. But not now, not quite so soon, not so he looked like he needed her.

  He did have to eat something before he started working, so he went into the tiny falafel shop by the movie theatre. An older woman, heavy-set, was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, wearing a deep green velvet head scarf and peeling a mandarin orange, and as he came in she looked up and smiled at him, soft, familiar, as if he were a loved relative, or as if the pigeon had marked him, in some way recognizable only to a few. He smiled back, nervously, and she stretched out half the orange towards him; he shook his head, but she pressed it into his hand, the orange and gold-washed flesh of it shining under the fluorescent light. He broke off a segment and lifted it to his mouth, the juice sharp and sweet, a wordless agreement between strangers in the city.

  There was one night when Dissonance was in production that a phone call had come in, and Chris had waved Susie into the office to take it. Alex was at one of the tables studying a page layout, and he watched her, resting her head on one hand as she talked, biting her lip anxiously, twirling her hair around one finger. Chris seemed to get impatient as the call went on and started gesturing for her to hang up, but she shook her head. He spoke again, more sharply – Alex could hear his voice through the glass, though not the words – and she put her hand over the receiver and whispered something back at him, her face pale and tight. It was too long for Alex to keep sitting there; he had to go back into the darkroom.

  He had just finished shooting a stat on the process camera when she knocked tentatively on the inner door.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he called, switching on the light. ‘You can come in.’ She sat down on the stool, her feet pulled up, tucking her knees under her chin.

  ‘You all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

  She was wearing an oversized white shirt and torn jeans, a jagged metal necklace, army boots. She put her head to one side, her cheek against her knee.

  ‘Do you think it would be easy to lose your mind?’ she said, picking at a flake of nail polish at the corner of her index finger.

  He lifted out a sheet of photographic paper and ran it into the developing machine. The room smelled of chemicals and stale marijuana smoke.

  ‘It could be,’ he said.

  ‘Does it scare you?’

  The stat came out of the developer, a little darker than he’d wanted. Maybe he should shoot it again.

  He had never thought about losing his mind, not really; he had enough to think about when a small needle of insulin was the only barrier between him and rapid death. ‘Not so much as some things,’ he said – and then pre-empting her, because she would have asked, ‘I just mean things in general.’

  She nodded. ‘Okay.’ He had one of his mixed tapes on in the background, a song from Big Star’s last album playing, ragged and needy. ‘If somebody loves you,’ she said, and Alex was glad that he was facing away from her because he could feel the rush of heat in his face, ‘what kind of rights does that give them?’

  It took him a while to gather his breath to speak. ‘Probably none,’ he said quietly, turning a dial on the machine.

  ‘Yeah. Maybe that wasn’t what I meant.’

  ‘I have to turn the lights out,’ he said, and he pushed the switch, and they were in red-tinged darkness. The flash from the process camera blurred across them and flared out. He reached out a hand in the crimson dark and stroked her hair, and he knew that his fingers were wet with the developing fluid, that she would carry the smell of the darkroom with her for the rest of the night. Her face in red shadow. He thought her eyes were closed, though he couldn’t be sure.

  He stepped backwards and turned on the light. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, well. I have to run this through the developer now.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right,’ and slid down from the stool, turning towards the door.

  Laser photocoagulation is performed as an outpatient procedure. Each individual treatment should take less than one hour. Your ophthalmologist will tell you how many treatments your particular condition will require. If you have been diagnosed with proliferative retinopathy, you will probably require two or more treatments at two-week intervals.

  You may experience some discomfort during and after the treatment. You will be given anaesthetic drops before treatment, which should minimize the discomfort. If your eyes are still causing you discomfort one week after the treatment, inform your ophthalmologist.

  You may experience blurred vision immediately after the treatment. This should go away by itself. DO NOT attempt to drive home after the treatment. You should bring a friend to the clinic who can take you home. If your vision continues to be blurry for several days, inform your ophthalmologist.

  ‘I have an appointment for Monday morning,’ said Alex, putting the pamphlet back in his bag as they walked, after dark, towards Pottery Road. ‘That in itself is disturbing. I don’t like them treating it as an urgent case.’

  ‘Do you want me to come?’

  ‘No, I’ll be okay. I’ll just take a taxi back. But I did want to ask you – if you happen to be free. I wanted to take some photos of you this weekend.’ They passed by a man wearing a surgical mask, white gloves on his hands. ‘I know I’m being superstitious. It’s not going to make a big difference, not the first series of treatments, only if I have to, only if it comes back. So it’s not really that important but – I’d like to do it, if you have the time.’

  Susie nodded. ‘I was going to spend tomorrow in the library. But Sunday, if you want.’

  ‘Late morning? The light’s good in the late morning.’

  ‘Sure. Whenever.’

  Under snow-covered trees, they made their way down the hill, past the concrete divider with the black word FEAR on the side. High drifts surrounded the prancing wooden ponies of Fantasy Farms, and the glowing flower man was breathing out clouds of ice crystals, clutching a bouquet of plastic roses to his chest. Into the sketchy dreams of the city’s sunken veins, across the Don.

  They climbed the steep hill at Bayview, scrambling and sliding up the slope where the brush cover was most scattered, sinking into the snow. By the time they reached the top, snow had clumped in Alex’s gloves and the creases of his coat, his boots had filled with a cold layer of it, freezing his ankles. He ran quickly over the railway track, thinking how he hated crossing it, though it was small and narrow and there was clearly no train anywhere nearby; he felt sure, irrationally sure, that an engine would loom up from nowhere and flatten him.

  ‘Should I wait up here?’ he asked, as they reached the sharp downslope, just above Derek’s underpass. Across the valley, he could see an array of lights, and above them a soft red glow in the sky, the city’s permanent day.

  ‘Come down a bit further,’ said Susie. ‘We’ll see how it goes.’ She brus
hed snow from her arms. ‘I’d like to have you in sight, I guess,’ she added, almost apologetically.

  She went down the slope ahead of him, and stumbled, clinging to a branch, onto the level area; following her, he nearly fell himself, snow down his right side. As he found his footing on the bare ground, he heard the sound of a man crying. Susie stood still. Inside the tent, the sound went on, hiccuping, empty, desolate.

  She walked to the tent. ‘Derek,’ she said softly. ‘Derek. It’s Susie-Paul.’

  The crying sound stuttered and died away. Susie waited, squatting down, and slowly Derek crept out of the tent, his face still wet and crumpled. Under the emaciation and dirt and age he seemed somehow young, almost childlike.

  ‘I’m feeling very sad,’ he whispered.

  ‘I can tell,’ said Susie gently.

  ‘I was thinking about when we were small, and Mom and Dad killed our white horse.’

  Susie pinched her lips together. ‘We never had a horse, Derek.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Derek, nodding. ‘We did. It was a white horse, and it spoke to us. But they killed it. There was blood all over. You cried and cried. I tried to comfort you.’

  ‘Okay. Sure. Let’s just not get into this now.’

  ‘They cut its head off. The blood got into your hair. That’s why your hair keeps changing colour.’

  Susie put a hand to her hair automatically, then shook her head. ‘Derek. We need to talk about a place you can live.’

  ‘I’m doing very well here.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s getting really cold. It will get colder in January. I don’t want you living in a tent.’

  ‘You remember that horse. I know you remember. Mom held its mouth shut while Dad cut its head off with an axe. The blood went flying.’ Tears began to roll down his face again. ‘Oh. Oh. It used to talk to us. Baby sister. It would take us away to a place where we could be safe together.’ His voice broke up into little gasping sobs. ‘You cried and cried.’