‘I’m glad you stayed.’
‘Of course I did.’
‘It would’ve been awful if you hadn’t stayed.’
Heat gathering between their two hands, a film of sweat.
‘I don’t want you to think…’ she went on.
‘Shhh. You don’t need to talk about it.’
The song ended, and Evelyn walked off the floor, self-contained, silent, and Adrian put his guitar back in its case and got up. She stood in front of him and they looked at each other, nothing else, and left the room together.
The bartender turned the tape off and began to collect empty bottles from the tables, the clatter of glass sending back a hollow echo. Alex sat very still, hardly breathing, his ears still humming in the absence of music.
‘They’re going to kick us out of here soon,’ said Susie.
‘We could go somewhere,’ he said softly. ‘If you want.’
She hesitated, putting her other hand over his and stroking his thumb with her own.
‘I think I should go home,’ she said at last.
‘Are you sure?’
‘No.’ She drew her hands back, their fingertips still touching. ‘But… I think I should go home. I need to go home.’
At the bus stop he put his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. ‘Susie-Sue,’ he whispered, as the Bathurst bus arrived, filled with the lost and desperate flotsam of the night city. She climbed on board and rode away. Alex found the pole where he’d chained his bike, fumbled with the lock until it came apart, and kicked off, weaving along the road. In a final grand gesture of self-destructiveness, he reached his house and passed it, kept riding into the blurred and shining night, further and further south until he reached the lake, passing empty buses and street-sweeping machines spraying water on the road, grinding their huge black brushes, spinning in darkness.
It was nearly dawn, and he was halfway sober again, when he rode back along King Street and saw that he was, without any conscious intention, riding by the house where Chris and Susie lived. The light was still on in their apartment. He stopped for only a minute, one foot on the sidewalk, looking up at the window and thinking of their lives, of a deep and complex privacy that was going on without him, that he would never be able to enter.
V
When the bright young men released sarin on the Tokyo subway, the gas soaked into the clothes of the passengers. Many of them pulled themselves out of the subway and went to work, their pupils contracted, their breathing restricted, sarin leaking from their jackets into the office air. Others were lifted into cars and ambulances and sent to the hospital, and the nurses and doctors who treated them found their own eyesight growing dark, their own muscles weakening. This is mentioned as a risk in the literature on chemical incidents.
The girl with the braided wool bracelet who had fallen on the steps at Jarvis Collegiate sat up in her hospital cot and watched a resident walking away from her stumble suddenly, grab for the wall to support herself, and slide to the ground.
The young resident’s pupils didn’t contract. Her blood tests didn’t show the low cholinesterase that would signal sarin, or the blood acidosis of cyanide. Her white cell count was perhaps slightly elevated. Some of the others who worked on the girl said later that they felt sort of ill, not exactly sick, but not quite well.
The resident had dyed blonde hair and long thin fingers and no known allergies or medical conditions. When she tried to describe the smell she spoke at first about exhaust fumes, and then about water and metal, but finally she could only say that it was not quite like that, that it was a smell like the absence of smell. The precise smell of nothing.
Susie was doing interviews at the drop-in at a church on College – not far from his house, she told him. He knew the place, of course, a little red-brick building with a low slanted roof, but he’d never been inside. All things considered, he shouldn’t really have been surprised to arrive and find Evelyn, who seemed scarcely to have aged at all and was looking not especially priestly in jeans and an old duffel coat, coming out the side door.
‘Alex? Suzanne told me she was meeting you here. How are you?’
‘Okay,’ he said nervously. ‘Yeah. Not bad. You?’
‘I have to go to a meeting right now, I’m sorry, but everybody’s inside.’ She swung a backpack over her shoulders and climbed onto a bicycle. ‘Call Adrian sometime,’ she said, kicking off the curb. ‘He needs a peer group, nobody knows how to talk to him.’ But she disappeared into the traffic before he could think of a response.
He opened the door that he’d seen her coming out of, and walked into a small hall filled with dishevelled men and a few women, lying or sitting on mattresses, a pile of folding tables stacked against one wall. There was a TV set in the corner playing Titanic, and some of the men were watching this and drinking from styrofoam cups, others reading crumpled copies of the Sun or Employment News. One man was sketching tiny painstaking patterns into an old notebook. Pinned on the wall was a bad drawing of Archbishop Romero, and pieces of cardboard with phrases written on them in capital letters. PLEASE SPEAK SLOWLY. I AM LEARNING ENGLISH. CAN YOU HELP ME FIND THIS ADDRESS? There was a strong smell of unwashed bodies in the air, cut through with overbrewed coffee.
Adrian was sitting cross-legged on one of the mattresses, talking gently to a man with a twisted, tearful face and unpredictably moving hands; in the kitchen, a woman who looked roughly a hundred years old was slowly cleaning a pile of roasting pans, and a frizzy-haired girl, probably the Pereira-Sinclair child, was sitting on a stool frowning over a copy of Harriet the Spy. There was something bizarrely domestic about the whole scene, Alex thought. Dinner with friends in Bedlam.
Susie was in a corner of the room, sitting on a folding chair with a clipboard and talking to an old man in a baseball cap. ‘So you’d say he’s a close friend?’ he heard her asking. The man shook his head.
‘Not close so much. But I’d say reliable, when he isn’t drinking.’
Susie nodded and wrote something on her clipboard. ‘And does he know that other guy you were telling me about, that Steve guy?’ Then she noticed Alex, and gestured him over with her pencil.
‘It’s okay,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll wait.’
‘I’m nearly finished.’
The man in the baseball cap was holding on to a clear plastic cane filled with dried roses, petals of faded red and yellow and cream, packed tightly together. Nearby, a grey-haired woman was pacing in tiny wired circles, strung out, shaking, oblivious to the world – crack or crystal meth, he thought. On the TV screen, the steerage passengers on the Titanic were singing and dancing and demonstrating their working-class virtues.
‘Filtered water,’ said the man in the baseball cap. ‘That’s what I told him. You drink filtered water, the skin problems clear right up. This lady gave me one of them filters for the tap in the rooming house, but the schizophrenic guy took it off because he thought somebody was watching him through it. Mr. Sandman, he tells me. Watching him through the water filter.’ He shook his head. ‘You could write a book, darling, I’m telling you.’
Susie made a note on her clipboard. ‘So, is the lady someone we’ve talked about before?’ she asked.
‘No – no, I guess not. So she’d be another one on the chart, eh?’
‘Yeah… you know what, are you going to be up at Bloor tomorrow? Somebody’s waiting for me right now.’