He lowered his camera and stared at her, as she kicked fretfully at the bridge with her leather boots. ‘That’s not fair,’ he said.
‘It damn well is,’ said Susie. ‘You’ve always been… you block yourself off. You always did. At least you’re not permanently stoned anymore, but there’s still always something in between you and the world, this weird obsessive project of yours or whatever. And you try to tell me about what’s human? I don’t get you sometimes.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ He ran a hand over his hair. ‘I’m as much in the world as anyone. I’ve got a job, I’ve got people I know. Hell, I had a girlfriend until a couple of months ago.’
‘Had would be the key word there.’
‘Well, so what? It wasn’t working out, I broke it off. It happens.’ He could have said more hurtful things, and he thought of them – you’re going to lecture me about busted relationships? – but he didn’t want this to go so bad, so fast, he didn’t want that.
‘Yeah, because why exactly? You needed more time to wander around taking pictures of metal structures?’
He turned away from her. ‘How about because I may be going blind, Susie? How about because it’s not so easy to say to somebody, by the way, I may be blind soon, is that a problem for you?’
‘So you’re going to deal with that by cutting yourself off even more? Alex, you live with a cat.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ He slammed his fist on the railing of the fence, hard enough to hurt. ‘You, you of all people are talking to me about being isolated? You never even told me you were back. You never told me for eleven fucking years, so fuck you!’ He ran down one short flight of steps, but then he stopped, breathing hard, unable to sustain anger.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Distantly, he heard water tossing in the stone channel.
‘I care about you, Alex,’ said Susie quietly. ‘I really do. But you’re already mixing me up.’
‘I need to take these pictures.’ He turned to look at her, standing on the bridge. Her face was half obscured by shadows. ‘I need this. I know I can’t do what I want to. I want to take pictures that will change people’s lives, and I know I won’t be able to, I know I’m not that good. But I can’t help wanting it.’ He walked up the steps towards her. ‘This isn’t about theory. This is about me. This is about me haemorrhaging inside my eyes. This about me losing the one thing I’ve ever had. This is about how I’m supposed to survive.’
He reached up and put his hand on her arm.
‘Susie-Paul,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re angry at me. I’m not even sure why, but I know there are reasons. But just – try to understand this.’
She looked down and shook her head, and didn’t speak for a while. ‘I guess I should go,’ she said at last. ‘I have to go and eat hors d’oeuvres with the big shots.’
‘I’m sorry, Susie. Don’t go yet.’
She sat down on the step. ‘I think I should.’
He was leaning on the railing, drained, waiting for her to move. She would walk away this time, he thought, and that would be the end, and he wasn’t even sure how that made him feel. But she was still on the step when he became aware of a noise, and then realized, to his astonishment, that his beeper was sounding.
‘Good Lord.’ He reached into his pocket. ‘That’s got to be the first time in two years this thing has gone off.’
‘You have a beeper?’
‘I do shifts on call sometimes. But it never actually goes off. I mean, how often do they need an emergency photo session?’ He pushed a button on the beeper, turning the noise off, and breathed out heavily. ‘Well, it means they’re expecting criminal charges. It’s got to be. God. I hate forensic.’
‘Charges?’
‘Maybe it’s a car accident,’ he said, thinking, Assault. Rape. ‘I need to find a pay phone.’
‘You can use my cell.’ She reached into her jacket and took out a small phone, and he punched in the hospital number, spoke quickly to the dispatcher at the other end.
‘I have to go,’ he said, handing the phone back to her. ‘I’m really sorry. They want me as soon as I can get there.’
‘It’s okay. I need to be at this party.’
‘We have to talk, Susie.’
She shook her head, noncommittal. ‘Sometime. Some other time.’
‘I mean it.’
‘Yeah.’ She stood up and walked down the stairs. ‘Whenever.’
But they couldn’t say goodbye then, they had to ride the subway north together, awkward, edgy, until she got off at Rosedale, making uncertain promises to call.
Two people on the train were wearing surgical masks, and someone else had a scarf wrapped over his mouth. Alex stayed on until Davisville, and walked out of the station into a cold night wind. He stopped at a little restaurant, bought a falafel and ate it on the way to the hospital, tahini sauce leaking out over his fingers. Maybe he wouldn’t see her again. He thought that at least, out of all of this, he knew where to find Adrian now, and that was something. It was definitely a good thing. Arriving at the hospital, he washed his hands with antibacterial soap and then called an internal number, was told to pick up his equipment and go to the burn ward.
It was going to be even worse than he had expected.
Outside the burn ward he found Janice Carriere, in her green scrubs, mask hanging down over her chest. ‘What am I going to be seeing?’ he asked.
She sighed. ‘It looks like assault. What we’ve been told, he was beaten up first, then someone took a lighter to his clothes. Maybe they didn’t intend to do this much damage.’
‘Oh, shit. Is he… ’
‘I think he’ll make it, but it’s not pretty.’
‘Is it a gang thing? Do you know?’
‘Well, a group thing anyway. Gangs or not – I haven’t got a lot of details. The police are over that way,’ she waved vaguely, ‘I had to send them out of the ward. He can’t talk right now.’
‘Is it a good time for me to go in?’
‘Good as any. There’s no procedures underway at the moment.’
He went into the scrub area, put on the gown, the mask, the gloves. You had to be especially careful in the burn ward; these were the most vulnerable of patients, their whole flesh exposed to the infective air. He adjusted his camera lens and took a breath. Bodies in space, he told himself, and entered the room. He smelled meat and scorched hair.
Fire flays the skin, stripping it back off the muscle in brittle charring. And this was not something he could do quickly, however much he wanted to. He had to move slowly around the bed, the nurse stepping aside for him, making sure that it was all on film, the exact degree of harm. The arms, the legs, the hands, the torso. Black, scorched red, the parched white of dead tissue.
You could look worse. You could look worse and live, and be basically all right, after a while. You could look much better than this and still die. The man would need intravenous fluids, antibiotics, skin grafts, he would be mapped with scars like a lunar surface, but he might well live.
There would be pain. It was too soon now, the man was in shock, and drugged unconscious, but he would wake to pain, and the knowledge that his skin had been peeled back by fire.
Alex left the room, and put his hands over his eyes in the scrub area. The grilled-meat smell clung round him. He took off the sterile gown and went back to the hallway. Janice was talking to a police-woman, down past a line of empty stretchers. He signalled to her that he was finished, and she broke off her conversation and came back towards him.