‘Sasha, come back!’ called the boy, as the girl leapt from the bottom of the escalator into the mass of commuters on the platform, colliding with a man in a duffel coat and then springing away, dodging into the crowd, head down. The man’s briefcase crashed to the tiled floor and he made a grab for the girl’s arm but she was long gone, her swift feet skating over the fake marble, people pulling away from her on either side. As the boy reached the bottom of the escalator the transit guard overtook him.
She was weaving now, through the mass of bodies, putting them between herself and the guard, her rainbow legs and flying hair darting in and out of sight. The guard moved fast and heavy in a long-legged run, reaching for her as she sped along the edge of the platform. ‘Leave her alone!’ shouted someone, while someone else tried to take hold of her arm, and she jumped sideways, away from his hands.
The lights of a train swept through the tunnel in the distance as it swung in towards the station. And the girl was going the wrong way, one long leaping step threw her onto the yellow line, and her own momentum was moving her forward.
‘Jesus, stop, stop!’ yelled the transit guard, throwing his hands out towards her. Her lead foot crossed the edge of the platform.
‘Shit, oh shit, oh shit!’ cried the guard. She tried to turn but the turn itself threw her off balance, and she was rocking on the edge, her arms spiralling, her green hair fanning out in the wind of the approaching train, and the lights of the train were washing her out in a haze of white, her mouth wide open and soundless. And now people were running towards her, a dozen people had realized what was happening and broken into action, converging on the girl from every side. A man in a knitted Rasta cap reached her first, jumped out of the crowd, grabbed at her wrist, and pulled.
A man in a dark coat pushed past Alex, holding a package wrapped in brown paper. He looks like the doctor, Alex noted, a quick twitch of fear, but the doctor was imaginary, of course. Like most of his problems. His own imagination and his own damn fault.
That man’s going to drop the package and poison us all, he thought. He was thinking this on purpose, wasn’t he? A weird variant on punishing himself, and he reached the top of the escalator and walked onto the platform.
The PA system was explaining that delays on the Yonge line had now been cleared but that normal service might take some time to resume. Passengers might experience longer than usual waits between trains. All right. He put his head back against the wall, retreating again into something near a dream, only his commuter reflexes still awake, attending for the sound of a train arriving.
Then everything fell apart.
He heard a shout, somebody screaming, and his head jerked up. The mass of people on the platform had fragmented, beginning to run in different directions, and an alarm going off. Emergency.
The man with the package. For one terrible moment, only half awake, Alex believed that he had done this, somehow he had done this, he had thought it and it had come to be.
A wave of people parting at the edge of the platform. Uniforms at the edge, on the stairway. He held the camera bag against his chest, and as he tried to step forward the glare hit his eyes and obscured the space ahead of him. He blinked again, dizzy, shook his head, and he saw a series of frozen pictures, like screen captures flashing in front of him. The man with the package opening his hands and letting it fall. An old man with a baseball cap, his eyes wide with terror. And then he saw her, the green-haired girl flying forward towards the edge of the platform, and this much he understood, that whatever else was happening this girl was in danger, and someone at his shoulder began to run an instant before he moved forward himself.
At the edge of the crowd, a woman sprinted to the wall. She was a woman who worried, her brain wired for anxiety, a woman who watched for pay phones and emergency buzzers wherever she went, and she knew the location of the subway’s red button, she knew how to cut the power. This was the moment she had waited for all her life. She slammed her fist into the button, once, twice, finally useful, finally justified.
The girl’s hair a wild swathe of brilliant lime as she pitched forward, lifted off her feet by the force of the man’s arm, her muscular body colliding with his at the edge of the platform, both of them hitting the ground.
The situation at the edge was a blur of colour and light, and Alex was still running and someone beside him running, when he lost his footing, and staggered for a moment, and a heavy man pushed past him and knocked him backwards and he felt the impact of metal on his skull, reached out for a wall, there was suddenly a wall in front of him, but it banked at an angle and then sped towards him, and the tiles struck him in the face as he fell.
Bodies in Time
I
Somewhere, people are talking.
An alarm goes off for an indefinite period of time. Somewhere there is the gentle continuous action of gravity, and the hard push of tile on the body’s weight.
‘He’s got a medic-alert bracelet,’ said a man’s voice.
After what seemed like some time, Alex realized that the man must be talking about him, that there was a hand on his wrist and another on his forehead. He should really open his eyes.
‘It says he’s diabetic. Do you think it could be insulin shock?’
Alex cleared his throat and looked up, an unfamiliar face leaning in towards him anxiously. ‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘Not insulin shock.’ He lifted a hand and wiped his eyes, and he could see that the girl was sitting on the platform, quite near him. If he had blacked out at all, it could only have been a matter of seconds. ‘I think I just, ah, just sort of lost it. I’m all right.’
‘He hit his head,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘On the pillar there. He could have a concussion.’
‘Should we call an ambulance?’
The girl was holding her forehead, dazed, and the boy with the goatee had pushed his way towards her now. Another group had formed around the man in the Rasta cap, who was waving them away, laughing, his hands trembling. The train was sitting still, frozen halfway into the station, the conductor leaning out the window.
The transit guard took a step towards the girl, his face stern, but a shiver of energy suddenly went through the people around her. Alex heard someone shouting, Ain’t you scared her enough for one day, man? The guard tried to speak, but he was cut off by someone else. Leave her alone. Jesus Christ.
And Alex saw what was happening now. It could have gone in any direction, she could have been their enemy, their terrorist threat. But the crowd, that strange volatile creature, had decided on protection, a soft animal embrace. For no reason, for this moment only, it had adopted the girl, the two fallen men; they were its wounded young.
He felt a man’s arm behind him, supporting him as he sat up. A curly-haired woman was at his shoulder. ‘I do think we should get you an ambulance.’
‘No, honestly. I’m fine now.’
‘At least a cup of tea.’
‘I have a glucometer in my bag. I need to check my blood sugar. But I really think I’m okay.’
Someone pulled the bag over to him and began lifting items out, a light meter and several lenses, before finally locating the insulin kit.
‘Can I help?’ asked the woman.
‘Thank you. But not really.’ They had found a thermos of tea, somehow, somewhere, and were carrying the plastic cup to each of the casualties in turn, the girl, the man in the cap, and then Alex. He sipped the tea, a man holding the cup to his lips; it was hot and sweet, and he was aware of an extraordinary feeling of comfort, which confused him, because he hated being looked after, he had hated it all his life.
The man with the Rasta cap was the first to stand, exchanging handshakes with some of the people around him and heading towards the stairway for the east-west line. The train had pulled fully into the station now, and people were coming off, a bit bewildered, moving in a slow arc around Alex and the girl and those who were still surrounding them, checking them for injuries, offering them mobile phones to call hom
e, one elderly woman pulling a thick brown herbal remedy out of her purse. Eucalyptus, thought Alex, eucalyptus and something else, the smell dark and weedy and medicinal, weirdly pleasant. It was not clear if he was supposed to drink it or rub it on his skin; he settled for inhaling deeply above the bottle, and this seemed to be satisfactory.
The boy had found the felt marker – the girl must have dropped it at some point in her dash down the platform – and he handed it over to the security guard, eyes lowered, then sat by the girl and muttered, Fucking fascist’s mad at the world because he couldn’t even be a proper cop.
Somehow Alex, on his feet now, was being led past a line of transit staff and up to the street, still accompanied, wrapped in the foolish kind concern of the crowd, and he hated this sort of thing, he really did, but this was so purely impersonal, so nearly abstract, as they hailed a taxi for him and helped him into the back, that he could almost accept it as a kind of joy.
You could stand on the upper level of the subway and look at the letters FE scrawled on the tile poster glass, and not have any idea what had gone on below. You would assume that it was someone’s initials, probably.
Above, in the shopping mall, exchanges of goods and currency continued unbroken, the inhabitants of the city purchasing candied pineapple and disposable razors and stocks and bonds and geranium-scented shower gels. A woman at a corner of the street hummed under her breath, sipping from a small paper cup of espresso. A driver climbed down from his streetcar to switch the tracks. White birds fell from the cold air towards the rooftops, and men and women crossed at the flashing lights, their selves a silent accidental balance, norepinephrine and serotonin, infinite tiny adjustments. These are the actions of the world, the small repetitions by which it runs.
And there is always this respite in the morning, misplaced and temporary, but a breathing space at least. Alex sat back in the taxi’s soft seat, conveyed without effort towards his destination.
The cloud cover had thickened while he was underground; the streets had gone shadowed and dim, as if the sun had barely risen, and the sky was a low churn of black and dark slate grey, the under-sides of the cloud drifts edged with brilliance. The taxi pulled into the parking lot of the hospital.
People were crossing the tiles of the lobby, the lights fully on now, a wide fluorescent space. Near the information desk, a woman with thick hair like yarn was sitting on a bench, turning her hands in her lap. She stared at Alex as he passed.
‘There’s going to be a wind,’ she said loudly. ‘There’s going to be a great wind tomorrow.’
‘Yes,’ said Alex. ‘You’re probably right.’
She turned away from him then, and he walked on into the hallway.
He went to the pharmacy on the ground floor, handed over his prescription slip and got back a plastic bottle of antibiotics, then took the elevator up to his office.
The Rifampin was chalky and foul-tasting, and Alex drank some fruit juice and ate a stale muffin that had been sitting in his desk drawer, then called Fiona to find out if he was working or not. No, she said, he had taken two sick days for the laser surgery, and what was he doing in his office at all?
‘I’ve been having trouble keeping track,’ he said.
Susie wasn’t in the ICU waiting room, but her gloves were sitting on the table, beside an unopened bottle of Rifampin. He waited in the doorway until he saw her coming, walking slowly down the corridor from the ward, each footstep deliberate as if she were balanced on a string. She was still wearing her coat, though the rooms were warm; her hair matted on one side, her face blotchy and raw. She pushed through the double glass doors, but she didn’t notice him right away – she went to the vending machine outside the waiting room and pushed the buttons with delicate disoriented precision, knelt down to remove a chocolate bar.
‘Hi,’ said Alex.
‘Yeah. Okay.’ She walked into the waiting room and sat down.
There were any number of ways this could have ended that might have seemed simple and sad and final, satisfying in an elegiac way. But our lives are great shambling stupid things, the flawed nerve paths of memory and randomly built excuses for the body, and we are mostly still trying to make them come out right when we die. He followed her into the room.
‘How are you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I need to find his psychiatrist, I think. They aren’t sure about meds and stuff.’
‘Can I help?’
‘I can’t see how.’ She crumpled the candy’s foil wrapping. ‘I told you to go home.’
‘Yes. I decided not to.’
She shrugged. ‘Not my problem.’
‘All right.’
‘I fell asleep for a bit,’ she said. ‘I had this dream where I had a sort of a baby, this little wet white rag doll thing, but it just sort of fell out of me and I forgot about it, and it fell in a corner with its face against the wall and it couldn’t breathe and it died before I found it. It was like, how do you do CPR on a rag doll? I hate it when my dreams are so fucking obvious.’ She broke off a corner of the chocolate and put it in her mouth.
‘How is Derek?’
‘I don’t know. How is he ever?’ She set down the chocolate bar and wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I never meant to lose him,’ she said softly. ‘I tried, you know, I really did.’
‘You saved his life.’
‘No. Not in the way that counts. I let him go. I let him go away.’
‘Susie, there was nothing you could have done.’
‘But there should have been, don’t you see? There should have been.’
He heard a soft shimmer sound at the window, and looked up to see that it had started to rain, a filmy veil spread over the glass.
‘You haven’t taken your antibiotic,’ he said.
‘I will. In a bit.’
‘Well, when?’
‘I don’t know. Soon. When I feel like it.’
Alex watched her as she pulled her fingers through a tangled bit of hair, and he remembered something else about that day at the clinic, Susie hanging in the air and refusing to speak, knowing the policeman had his nightstick out, knowing he would hit her. The strength of her refusal. Derek’s tremendous negative power, under his bridge renouncing the world, the extreme and appalling force of doing nothing.
‘Take it now.’
‘Drop it, okay? I told you I’ll do it soon.’
‘No,’ said Alex. ‘Not soon. Now. I want to see you take it.’
‘Is there something wrong with you?’
‘I swear to God, Suzanne, if I have to pour it down your throat myself, I will do it.’ He felt like a fool, he was probably making himself ridiculous. Susie stared at him for a long time, and he looked back at her, and he didn’t know which one of them would break first.
‘You don’t own me,’ she said at last.
What he was going to say next terrified him, but he said it anyway.
‘Yes, I do,’ he said.
She stood up abruptly, the plastic bottle in her hands. ‘Jesus, Alex. You’ve got some fucking nerve.’
‘It’s probably not even a good thing, but there it is.’
He knew that he was saying something outrageous, that you were never, ever allowed to say this, but suddenly he couldn’t understand why, when no one could go on for a single day without this, all the passionate and harmful and endless ways that people owned each other. He had no right to this, none at all, it was just there, like Canadian weather; because sometime long ago she had been falling, and he had been the one nearby.
The edges of her hair were dark with sweat, but her skin was pale, and she had that look on her face again, like someone very young who wanted something badly, and believed that asking for it would doom her.
‘You make it so bloody hard,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. You scare me to death.’
He stood up and put his arms around her, and she leaned into his chest and hung on to his shirt with her han
ds, the medicine bottle pressed between them. He was a contingent person, his time artificially purchased, but this was his life, the rest of his life was contained in this, and it didn’t make him happy exactly any more than breath or insulin made him happy; it was simply necessary.
‘Take the antibiotic, okay?’ he murmured.
Susie pulled slowly away from him and sat down at the table. ‘I was always going to,’ she said, breaking the security seal on the bottle and pouring the thick suspension into the cup. ‘Honest to God, I was. You just make up stories about me. You’ve got to stop that.’
‘That’s a problem,’ said Alex. ‘I’m not sure I can.’
Susie sighed, swallowed the dose and grimaced. ‘Yeah. You and my brother. And the rest of the world, it seems like.’
‘It’s what people do, I think. But I really am sorry.’ He reached out and combed a strand of her hair between his fingers, and she sighed, inclining her head in his direction.
There would be a time, some years later, when he would be sitting in a dim room drinking coffee and talking to Evelyn, of all people, trying to explain what this moment meant, and the only thing he would be able to say was that it was not by then a choice but more like a gravitational process, and all you could do about gravity was to love its force.
II
On the surface of the city, above the tunnels and sunken gardens, the temperature has risen just enough for a cold rain to begin falling. Inside a little brick church, the rain is a muffled sound through an opened door, as a woman in a violet robe raises her arms in consecration, the elements transformed. She turns to place a wafer in her daughter’s hands. In the basement, someone is painting NO WAR on an old bedsheet, aware that the war will happen regardless. Out on the street, a man covers his mouth, and watches for signs of poison gas.
Girls Fall Down Page 27
