This seemed to be his place in the life of the city, and in Susie’s life too, somehow, a devoted observer at the margins of the crack-ups, the big stories. Susie and Chris, Susie and Derek. At least he had managed to miss the episode of her marriage, whatever that had been about. Someone else had presumably held her hand for that one.
… which could indicate the presence of a viral infection, said a side-bar to the story. The possibility of a large number of casualties, it said, in the hypothetical case of the deliberate release of H5N1 influenza, or bird flu. But the chances of such a release being successful are far from clear.
He imagined his murderous doctor striding through the snow with an oily package, thinking of love and killing, elegant, serious, sometimes uncertain. How many people in the street were carrying their own terrorists in their heads, and what shape did they take? Foreigners and police, dark men and angry children.
On College, a block from his house, the window of the little grocery was broken, chunks of safety glass swept into a pile on the sidewalk. It could have been a child playing ball, but everything now seemed to assimilate to the city’s larger narrative, and he assumed it was a crime of fear. The owners of the grocery Lebanese maybe, or Iranian, or mistaken for whatever.
Maybe it was just an accident.
For a little while he studied some contact sheets that he had left out on his desk, but the floaters were bothering him. And he was very tired, that alone was putting his eye off. He took a cassette out of the cupboard and slid it into the machine. One of Adrian’s old tapes – how long had it been since he’d listened to Adrian sing? It was another regression to the past, maybe, but one that at least wasn’t confusing or dangerous, just Adrian’s odd propulsive wandering songs, his inscrutable lyrics.
Queen Jane crawled up onto his chest, the weight of her pulling him down towards sleep. He shouldn’t really sleep on the couch, he’d just end up with a stiff neck, but he was disinclined to move. The tape clicked and began to replay. He should go by the church and see Adrian sometime, he thought, as he slid into a disordered space of dreaming.
The snow stopped that night, but the temperature kept dropping for days, the wind howling in white swirls up and down the streets. The floaters were persisting. Alex told no one at work, but it was a constant low-key struggle not to raise his hand to brush them away, not to blink and shake his head every few minutes; they were in the way of his focus, distracting him. And reminding him, reminding him as long as his eyes were open, of that bleak space breathing in from the future.
But they would recede, maybe they were already receding a bit, it was hard to tell. This time, next time, they would still go away. Probably damage to the retina would be minimal, for now.
On Monday night he was walking west on College, towards his apartment, with his hat pulled down to his eyebrows and his scarf over his nose, and then sirens were coming from all directions at once, and the street became a sea of red light, fire engines and ambulances and police cars all meeting at a point on the north side, a restaurant with a broken window. He didn’t want to know what it was about. In between the emergency vehicles were little groups of people, hugging each other and crying, and broken glass on the road. A man was holding up his hand, thin streams of blood running down his arm.
Alex didn’t want to know what it was about but he was reaching into his camera bag nevertheless, he’d need a long exposure for this, the light would be tricky to handle. He took a picture of the bleeding man, of the police entering the restaurant.
And he was packing his camera away when something came towards him out of the dark, shining and unpredictable, a fluttering thing, and before he knew what he was doing he had put out his hand and caught the string of a gold foil balloon in the shape of a star.
Then the whole cluster of balloons tied to the restaurant’s patio fence broke free and were swept up in the wind, into the bare branches of the overhanging trees, into the awnings along the street, a flock of golden stars reaching out of the damage. Alex stood in the street and held on to a string.
Sometime before the day that Susie had fallen from the stairs of the clinic, that Alex had caught her – though his memory was inevitably coloured now by what had come after – he had been sitting outside his house in the market, trying to fix the advancing mechanism on one of his old cameras, when she came down the street with a bag of potatoes in her arms.
‘Hi,’ she said as she passed the steps. ‘It’s Alex, right?’ He nodded, glancing up at her and then looking back at the camera. ‘Aren’t you cold out here?’
He shrugged. ‘One of the kids in my house dropped some acid last night. He’s been playing the same chord on his guitar over and over for, like, the last twelve hours. I needed a break.’ He lifted the camera up to the light so he could get a better look at the insides. ‘My definition of responsible drug use is if you’re going to play the same chord for twelve hours, you don’t inflict it on anyone else.’
‘Okay.’ She shifted the bag of potatoes on her hip. ‘I wanted to tell you I liked your photos in the last issue.’
He didn’t know what to say, so he shrugged again.
‘Sorry, you’re busy. I should get home anyway.’
‘No, it’s all right.’ He didn’t want her to leave for some reason. ‘You can sit down if you like.’
She put the potatoes on the steps beside her. ‘You fixing that?’
‘Trying. Not actually doing it.’
‘You could always go over to the Last Temptation, it’s warm in there.’
‘I don’t mind. This is cheaper.’
He spent a few more minutes prodding the gears of the camera, Susie sitting beside him without speaking, her breath a white cloud in the air. He was slightly stoned himself, and not really able to focus on the task that well.
‘The thing is,’ he said, and was surprised to find himself speaking, ‘the thing is, maybe if I just sit here long enough, then…’ The sentence ran out on him and he stopped.
‘Then what?’
‘I don’t know.’ He put the camera in his lap and tucked his hands into his sleeves, thinking about wanting things that could never be named.
‘Well, if you sit here long enough, your toes could turn black and fall off. That’d be something.’
‘Yeah, I guess it would.’
They sat in silence for another minute. ‘Where does your family live?’ asked Susie.
Alex snorted. ‘What? You’re gonna call my mother and tell her I’m sitting outside without a hat?’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Susie, but she smiled. ‘I’m just asking.’
‘Kitchener. If you must know.’
‘Do you see them much?’
‘Not so much, but we get along okay. They’re all right.’
‘My family’s in Scarborough.’
‘Oh. Hey. I’m very sorry.’
Susie laughed. ‘Yeah, no kidding.’ Taking off her mittens, she pushed back her hair with one hand. ‘I was wondering,’ she said quietly.
‘Yeah?’
She studied her nail polish, the same pink as her hair. ‘If people – if anyone ever escapes from things. Gets away. I mean, do you think it’s possible?’
The size of this question confused him entirely. ‘I, ah, I don’t know. I mean, um, is this a person and their family?’
‘I suppose so. Yeah.’
‘So what… what’s the family doing, you know? I mean, is there a problem?’
‘Never mind. That was a stupid thing to say.’ She put her mittens back on and stood up, lifting her bag of potatoes. ‘I better get home.’