‘I’m sorry,’ said Alex, and he meant it though he wasn’t sure what it was attached to.
‘Thank you, Alex. Maybe I’ll see you around.’
On Tuesday morning a woman collapsed at Kennedy station, and later she would say that it was the smell of flowers without air, of flowers that took the air away. Another woman would say that she saw a man with a beard, and something on his head, it might have been a turban, and he was standing by a pillar and watching them, like he already knew what would happen.
The hazmat teams descended with swabs, collecting fragments of matter far below the threshold of vision, which would be taken to protected labs and cultured. Trace elements would grow in the petri dishes, but there would be nothing that could be blamed, nothing that could act as an explanation.
Loose pages of newspapers, crumpled words, blew along the platform in the wind of the trains, respiratory symptoms, H5N1, variants of anthrax.
Alex rode home through a depleted rush hour, barely recognizable as such, the traffic in the stations thinned out and moving nervously. It had been last Tuesday night he’d met Susie at the church, and he was fairly sure that churches coordinated their meal and shelter programs with each other, that they each took particular days of the week. For all he knew, Evelyn had people sleeping in the hall every night, but it was more likely that her church was responsible for Tuesdays.
He walked east on College to the little brick church. It was dark when he got there, but still early evening, and the first thing he saw was a line of men and women stretching out the doorway; inside, he made his way past rows of tables where people sat over plates of lasagna and mashed potatoes, to where Evelyn was standing in the kitchen, staring at something on the counter and raking her fingers through her hair.
‘Okay,’ she was saying as he came in. ‘So someone has given us a casserole made from permafrost. This is just something I have to come to terms with. It’s all just part of the rich incarnational parade.’
‘Hey, Alex.’ Adrian came in through a side door, and glanced down at the frozen casserole, which was leaking trails of water onto a cutting board. ‘You didn’t get bombed out of your house last night, did you?’
Alex blinked. ‘What’s this now?’
‘That restaurant where the bomb went off. Don’t you live over that way?’
‘It was a bomb?’
‘A very minuscule bomb, though,’ said Evelyn, poking at the casserole with a knife. ‘And of poor quality. Nobody was really hurt. They don’t have access to the good explosives down at the low end of organized crime.’
A large man in a ragged jacket got up from his table, coming to lean in the doorway of the kitchen. ‘There’s something I can do to help, maybe?’
‘I don’t think so, Vojcek, not right now. You can collect the plates in a few minutes, I guess.’
‘Aye-aye, captain,’ said Vojcek with a brisk salute.
‘You’re kidding me,’ said Alex. ‘A bomb? Was this connected to, I mean, was it some kind of hate crime or… ’
‘Nah.’ Adrian bent down to turn on the dishwasher. ‘These two guys have competing establishments. They despise each other. It’s, I don’t know, who does the better calamari in mango sauce with chipotle reduction or whatever. So one of them hired somebody. This is what I’m told, at any rate. But I suppose it’s part of the overall municipal malaise.’
‘Is the terminal stage of capitalism,’ said Vojcek. ‘Soon we are a communist dictatorship, and I will flee to New Zealand.’
‘Attaboy, Vojcek,’ said Adrian. ‘Keep looking on the bright side.’
Alex left the kitchen and went back to the hall, where servers, at a table against the far wall, were scraping food out of the bottoms of the pots. A young woman with shining dark hair and the tense brightness of insanity in her face took his arm with a terrified smile. She was wearing a long orange scarf over her head, a blue sweatshirt that was slightly too small, grey pants that were slightly too large.
‘Is this a safe place?’ she whispered, and then laughed. ‘Is this a safe place? I have to face my fears, you see – there are people trying to drive me crazy, there are people out there trying to drive me crazy, and you have to ask why? Don’t you? Don’t you have to ask why?’ She held on tighter to Alex’s arm. ‘Are they benefitting financially, are they benefitting spiritually? Is it a question of the war? Everyone here knows my obsession, you see, everyone knows my weakness… and it’s hard when there are people all over the streets trying to drive me crazy, do you know what I mean? Is it clear? Do you think this is a safe place?’
‘I think so,’ said Alex. ‘Sure. I think it is.’
‘I have to face my fears,’ she said, and then turned her head as if she had heard something, and pulled her scarf tighter around her hair and crept into a corner, nodding and moving her lips.
The frizzy-haired girl he had seen last week slammed suddenly into the hall, apparently in some temper, and stomped past the tables into the kitchen, kicking off her boots and whining in a high unintelligible voice, Evvy’s own voice soft at first and then sharpening, and the child stormed away into some other part of the building. Evvy leaned back against the counter and ran a hand over her face, and Alex wanted to do something but he knew that he couldn’t. Adrian moved closer to her and touched her arm.
‘Domestic crisis,’ announced Vojcek cheerfully, picking up plates from the table beside Alex. ‘Is difficult child. Has poor sense of responsibility.’
‘Mmm,’ said Alex vaguely.
He didn’t know how much he really expected Susie to be there. Not much, he thought, though he knew he was unnaturally aware of every person who opened the door.
Evelyn had come out of the kitchen now and was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the hall, sorting through a box of old mittens. A short woman in a red hat walked across the room, and for a moment things were suddenly vivid and sharp at the edges; but it wasn’t Susie after all, in fact she looked almost nothing like Susie. He went into the kitchen, where Adrian was turning an unlit cigarette in his fingers and staring at it with a vague suppressed longing.
Susie probably wouldn’t come. There was no real reason to suppose she would.
‘I was wondering about taking some pictures,’ he said. ‘I mean, I know I’d have to ask people. But would it be okay to try?’
Vojcek had no problem posing for a portrait, and neither did Joseph with the flowering cane; he spent a long time with Joseph, working on the textures of his skin, the fleetingly sweet expressions in his eyes, and trying to get the cane into the shots in the right way. Luis didn’t want to be photographed, and it was clearly a bad idea to ask the woman with the orange scarf. A girl named Mouse asked to be photographed with her ferret, which was living inside the sleeve of her coat.
‘Isn’t that a bit funny?’ asked Alex, slipping into the kind of easy patter he used with teenage patients. ‘A mouse with a pet ferret?’
Mouse grinned and chewed a loose bit of her hair. ‘I know a girl called Kat who has a hedgehog, what about that?’
‘A pet hedgehog?’
‘Yeah, but it kinda sucks as a pet. It can’t cuddle you or nothing. And it’s not very friendly. Actually it’s kinda mean. It really brings Kat down sometimes.’
‘Maybe she needs a better pet.’
‘Well, she don’t want to give up on this hedgehog. She thinks it can, you know, rehabilitate.’
He was focused now, working, and happy, and not even too bothered by the floaters, which were definitely diminishing, and then he heard the thud of the wooden door. Susie was partway into the hall, unwinding her scarf, when she saw him, and stood still for a second before she walked towards him.