She was an intelligent woman, she knew that this behaviour was somewhere within the range of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. She knew that there was no possible contaminant that would cling to her front steps or kill them all with a single molecule. She knew, as well, that the burning pain in her shoulder was the result of tension and cold, not a heart attack, not the effect of a neurotoxin. But this knowledge was useless. Her knuckles frozen white, the skin of her fingertips chafed away till they almost bled.
Inside the house, the sound system was playing, the music meant to convince her that this was less than torture, a bearable household chore. Leonard Cohen’s vampire voice singing ‘Ain’t No Cure for Love,’ over and over. She dipped the rag in the bucket again, shook the tin of cleanser over the steps, wondered what breathing it in was doing to her lungs, as the night gathered around her.
‘You don’t mind me coming along with you?’
It was Friday afternoon, and Alex was kneeling by a butcher’s stall in St. Lawrence Market, under the high ceiling of the old hall, when Susie arrived. He had been photographing a man packing up trays of meat as the market closed for the day, working on the contrast between the slick deep redness of the steaks and the thin and papery skin on the man’s gnarled hands.
‘It’s okay, it’s good you called,’ said Alex, putting the camera back into his bag. ‘Besides, I bet this is something you don’t even know about.’
‘What, raw meat?’ asked Susie, looking towards the butcher’s stand. ‘I know more about raw meat than you do.’
‘No, this was just me killing time. We’ll be going north from here.’
‘And this doesn’t bother you at all?’ asked Susie, with a gesture towards the heaps of ground pork, the glistening coils of sausage.
‘Bodies in space, Suzanne,’ said Alex, standing up. ‘It’s all bodies in space.’
They walked out of the hall and crossed the street. She was wearing a rather elegant black and white batik dress and a red quilted jacket, not quite warm enough for the weather. ‘I have to go to a party for some American hotshot later,’ she said, shrugging, aware that he’d noticed. ‘House of a major donor to the university, up in Rosedale. Filipina maids handing around wine and smoked salmon. And academic backbiting.’
‘The maids hand around the backbiting?’
‘They might as well. The upper classes can’t do a thing for themselves.’
‘Sounds fantastic. Don’t let me keep you from it.’
‘I wish you could. But I have some time before it starts.’
Outside St. James’ Cathedral, a Mennonite family was handing out pamphlets in the dusk – a man in a broad hat, three small girls in calico dresses and aprons, and a pregnant, tired woman wearing a bonnet. Alex took a pamphlet from one of the girls, and after a short negotiation with the father was permitted to take a picture of them, posed stiffly in a group, their papers clutched to their chests.
Alex studied the pamphlet as he picked up his camera bag. WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? it read on the front.
‘See, this is a question I ask,’ he said. They walked by the cathedral garden, brown now and shrivelled, the dried seedheads covered with the powdery snow that had fallen during the night. ‘What would Jesus do? Would he be a fireman? A circus acrobat? I mean, you hang out in churches, you tell me.’
‘Something weird, I think,’ said Susie. ‘This is what I’m starting to pick up, that he was a very odd guy. He’d be sitting on the church steps telling a story about mustard. He was always on about the mustard.’
‘You’re making that up.’
‘No, really. I definitely have heard about mustard.’
‘I’m going to check with Evelyn before I accept that.’
‘Feel free.’ Susie looked up and around at the office towers. ‘Damn, we’re in the business district again.’
‘We should turn this way,’ said Alex, pointing to a pillared corridor between two glass walls.
‘I got a letter from my ex-husband today.’
‘Oh?’
‘He says I was a bad wife. I mean, I know I was a bad wife, it’s his fault he married me in the first place. I just don’t see the point of bringing it up now.’
‘Well. Sorry.’ He had no idea what his response to this was supposed to be. He and Amy exchanged polite and impersonal Christmas cards every year, and he could hardly imagine her mentioning their relationship, much less critiquing it.
‘Forget it,’ said Susie. ‘It’s a crappy day all over.’
They went on through the back streets, under grey walls, and then across Yonge and into a gravelled lot, entering an empty glass walkway and crossing out the other side, onto the little stub of Temperance Street. ‘There,’ said Alex, pointing across the road. ‘That’s the Cloud Gardens.’
Behind a five-storey building, the cold waves of a waterfall poured down the wall, reflecting coloured lights from a theatre marquee across the street. The brilliant water dove into a stone channel, framed as it fell by stepped and ragged limestone terraces and a network of metal bridges. To the side of the cascading waves, a long red oxide steel grid held squares of etched glass and beaten copper and pale concrete, rippled aluminum, green and gold metals. In the square below, curving stone walkways ran between bare oak and ash, banks of snow-covered shrubs.
‘Who even knows this is here?’ said Alex, waving his arm as they walked onto the largest path. ‘No one even knows it’s here at all.’ Though this was clearly not quite true, as the bridges and terraces were dotted with clusters of teenagers, sheltered in pockets of darkness. The sharp smell of pot smoke was drifting down over the water.
‘I’m thinking that’s why they call it the Cloud Gardens,’ said Susie, nodding her head towards them.
‘Kind of takes you back, doesn’t it?’ said Alex, and then put down his camera bag and began moving through the paths, turning in a circle with his camera and causing some consternation among the pot-smoking teens. He had been taking pictures for a few minutes, and had climbed up onto one of the terraces, focusing down on the lights that flickered on the swift run of the water, when he saw that Susie was sitting on a rock, staring down and picking at her fingernails. ‘Hey,’ he called to her. ‘You could come up here.’ She shrugged and walked slowly towards him.
‘There’s something else I wanted to show you,’ he said. He led her up another terrace and over one of the metal bridges to a glass door. ‘It’s closed right now, but look.’
Inside the glass, barely visible, was a dense foam of broad, deep-green leaves, tree trunks hanging with vines, cut through by more bridges. ‘It’s the top of a rainforest,’ said Alex. ‘They built a rainforest under glass here, over a parking garage. Just because. Just so it would be there. And no one even knows.’ She had folded her arms and pursed her lips. ‘This is a human thing, Susie, and I love it. You can tell me it’s pointless if you want. You can tell me it’s built on exploitation and I partly believe that. But you can’t tell me it isn’t beautiful.’
‘Alex,’ said Susie sharply. ‘Would you quit with the lectures already?’
He stepped away from the glass. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m sorry, but you don’t know what I’m thinking, do you? You have no idea what I was was going to say about this rainforest. For some reason you’re trying to make it out like I’m all theory and no humanity, but you don’t know who the hell I am. And you’re hardly one to talk about what’s more human.’