It was a small place, doughnuts in racks behind the counter, plastic-wrapped sandwiches, and a big handwritten sign over the cash that said WE NOW SELL BEER!! It was long after last call, but the one other patron had clearly taken full advantage of this opportunity before going to sleep at his table.
He asked for an orange juice and a cream-cheese bagel, which would very possibly send his sugar too high. But he was beyond calculation, had been unprepared for any of this, had let Susie lead him to the brink of disaster yet again.
Susie rubbed her head, squinting against the light. ‘Oh God,’ she muttered. ‘I think I’m starting to sober up. Oh God.’
‘I’m pretty sure I could get you a beer,’ said Alex. ‘I think it’s like a doughnut speakeasy.’
‘When I want you to be funny I’ll tell you,’ said Susie.
‘Black coffee?’
‘Please.’
They sat down at a little round table, and Susie sipped her coffee and rubbed her head again. She was covered with mud, and her stockings were torn, a rip down one sleeve of her jacket, a thin scratch on her cheek. There was mascara all over her face and she was not nearly sober yet. Alex reached across the table and took her hand; the palm was scraped and bloody.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘That’s a strange question.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’
She lifted her free hand and began to chew on a dirty thumbnail, and this seemed to Alex like a gesture from a distant past. ‘He’s my brother, Alex. In our own sick way, we’ve always looked after each other. I can’t just leave him there and let him freeze to death.’
‘He seems pretty determined.’
‘Well, he’s insane, isn’t he? That helps.’
He ate his bagel with one hand. ‘Let me take you home,’ he said again. ‘I can get you a taxi.’
Susie shook her head. ‘We’re near my house. It’s a ten-minute walk.’
‘I’ll come with you, then.’
‘I think I can get home safely.’
‘I know. But I’ll come with you.’
And it was a plain, human place again as they walked. Small brick houses with snowy lawns and strings of red Christmas lights over the eaves, the windows dark, residential streets as quiet as sleep. She stopped at a house on Carlaw, just north of the Danforth.
‘I rent the second floor here,’ she said.
They sat down on the top step of the porch. ‘I just need to catch my breath a minute,’ said Alex, looking at her dark hair lying against the pale line of her cheek.
‘Sure.’ She rested her chin on her knees. ‘He never got to have an adult life, you know,’ she said quietly. ‘Not really. He was… he was just so young. When he… There were so many things he never got to have.’ She ran her thumbnail back and forth across her lips. ‘Sometimes I think I’ll forget how it was. It’d be easier if I did.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I don’t know. What can you say? He was never ordinary. He had this – there was this magic thing about him. Something… so bright and… strange – he had these giant diagrams he’d drawn, hung up on his walls – and I never understood hard science, but they were really beautiful. The structure of things. He understood that. And – I wasn’t alone. That was the thing. Derek was there. I was never – there was someone who cared about me. Always. That’s all, that’s… He was going to be a chemist. That’s pretty fucked, isn’t it, if you think about it?’
‘The difference between chemicals and emotions?’ Susie lifted her hand, palm up.
‘Neurotransmitters,’ she said. ‘The dopamine hypothesis. Serotonin. I know all about these things, Alex. The neuroendocrine system, I get that. But what does that mean? This is my brother. This is who he is. There is no real Derek somewhere else. That brain is real. And it suffers.’
‘I know.’ He could hear traffic in the distance, but the street was still and empty.
‘We’re all the same as Derek, you know. In the end, we are. We’re all just trying to hammer together some kind of self around the chemical reactions.’ She ran a hand across her eyes. ‘Look at us. You get angry for no reason when you’re going hypo. I stole a flashlight tonight because I got drunk. Is that real? Is that chemical? What’s the difference? You fell in love with me back at Dissonance because you were smoking too much pot.’
‘No,’ said Alex. ‘No. That wasn’t why.’
But the truth was that he had, back then, never known why, and never wondered; his emotions had been instant and opaque and he had expected nothing else. He had known so little about her.
‘Why didn’t you ever call me?’ he asked, his voice very low.
‘It was too hard,’ murmured Susie, staring out at the street. ‘It was just too hard.’
He raised his arm, and the motion had the weird dreamy slowness of an inevitable act. With the mingled hunger and sickness of someone going back to a familiar drug, he stroked her hair away from her face. He kissed her neck and tasted salt. She turned towards him and reached up, her mouth soft against his.
‘Oh no,’ he whispered, after a while. ‘No, this is a very bad idea.’
‘Yes,’ said Susie, running her hands down his chest.
He bent and touched his lips to her hair. ‘This is a train wreck,’ he said. And then he was kissing her again, she was sucking his tongue, pulling him further into her mouth, and it went on forever, and he thought that he could dissolve in this, in this sweetness, the joints of his body coming undone. Wrecked, addicted, gone.
In her bedroom they stood apart from each other for a moment, still fully clothed, hesitant, and he was much more afraid now than he had been in his twenties, older than he should be and far too aware of all the things that could go wrong. Then she moved towards him, and he lifted her small burning hand and licked the drying blood from her palm.
Plague Days
I
Derek Rae’s life in the ravine is, after its manner, a life well-organized. His time is measured by the regular catastrophe of the trains passing over his head, thunderous and dirty, an assault of noise. The days and weeks are shaped by weather, the poison sun and debilitating humidity of late summer shading slowly into the long cold nights and the sheltering snow.
He doesn’t know that the girls are falling down. It is a shame, perhaps, that no one has told him, because Derek is closer to the heart of the problem than anyone thinks. But this is how it is, he doesn’t take the subway, he doesn’t read the newspapers.
Though Derek is radically isolated, he is not in fact quite without human contact. He is known to the street nurses, for instance, who bring him the bottles of water and tins of Ensure that now constitute his entire diet; the nurses have not passed this information on to his sister because Derek does not speak to them, so they are unable to determine whether they have his consent.
Sometimes he comes out of his tent and sits in Chorley Park, but he does not think he will do that again after what happened the last time.
When it becomes most urgently necessary – no longer very often – he will cross over to Broadview and ask for change until he can afford to visit one of the city’s more desperate and undiscriminating sex workers. His library is made up mostly of books and magazines he has found lying in bus shelters or coffee shops, though in a few cases he has stolen them from the public library, because books are a singularly pressing requirement, the one thing left that resembles his vanished life. Sometimes he finds mittens and hats discarded on the hiking path, and these sustain him in the coldest weather.
None of this represents the truth of Derek’s existence, his passions and his miseries, the battles he wages all alone against pains and fears and the forces of universal gravitation. The raw courage that is required of him every day. His hard-won choice to continue living, when so many possibilities to stop are offered at every hand, the cars on the highway, the trains on the tracks, an end to the daily loss. None of this represents Derek’s soul, scraped bloody, howling, fighting always to hang on, a solitary superhuman ordeal, unacknowledged by the world, unrewarded.