There was nothing he could say – there was nothing he could do, short of kneeling and putting his head in her lap – so he said nothing. A flicker crossed the path of his sight, and he moved his head, and caught himself making a brushing motion at one of the floaters. She noticed the gesture, but she didn’t know what it meant, it had no implications for her. My eyes are bleeding.
‘Anyway. What’s the news in your life, aside from magic stars?’
‘Nothing much. Day-to-day stuff at the hospital.’
My eyes are bleeding because of you.
‘I don’t want to keep you if you’re busy.’
‘No. I’m not.’ He watched the shifting highlights in her hair and wondered how long he would be able to see them. That was the kind of detail he might lose. ‘I got a good run of photos at the church.’
They sat without speaking for a while, Susie eating her fries with her fingers.
‘I’d like to photograph you sometime,’ he said.
‘You already have. A bunch of times.’
‘Yeah, but ages ago.’
Slowly, Alex was becoming aware of noises behind them. Voices at another table growing louder and more agitated.
‘Come on. I know you were taking pictures of me last week.’ He shrugged; it was true, though he’d been only half aware of it at the time. Susie in the darkness of the Cloud Gardens, looking at the ground. ‘But I mean properly.’
‘Yeah, okay. Sometime.’
He saw movement, real movement, not black spots, from the corner of his eye, and heard a woman’s voice, high and scared, saying something about roses. ‘Oh man,’ he said, and turned his head in time to see her – in her thirties probably, in a furry green coat – crash heavily to the ground beside the door. Alex stood up from the table.
‘Shit,’ said Susie, and they both started to move towards the woman, but half a dozen other people had already reached her. As someone tried to lift her up, she vomited onto the floor, splashing her coat and a man’s shoes. Alex heard her saying the word poison, the word terrorist.
‘Let’s just go,’ he said. Another man was clinging to a table, his heavy shoulders hunched over as if he were barely supporting himself, red blotches appearing on his face. But Susie’s expression was lit up with professional fascination. ‘Oh no,’ she said, excited. ‘I have to stay, I have to watch this.’
An ambulance had already arrived, then a fire truck. Two more people were sitting on the floor holding their heads. The paramedics were wearing masks that covered their faces, blue gowns over their uniforms and green plastic gloves, and they lifted the woman carefully to her feet. She staggered and fell against one of them, and he turned his head to the side as he held her up. Strips of bacon, neglected on the grill, began to shrivel and blacken, harsh smoke curling into the air around the counter.
‘This is really, really interesting,’ said Susie, moving closer to the centre of activity.
The paramedics led the woman and the blotched man out of the restaurant, the firemen passing oxygen masks out among the crowd. The scorched bacon was spitting fat, and Alex felt a heave of nausea. A dark-haired waitress ran back behind the counter and scraped the strips of bacon off, tossing them into the sink. The deep fryer and the coffee maker were smoking as well, she turned them off, unplugged the coffee maker and threw it hastily into the sink. Susie moved back a step, took Alex’s arm and pulled him forward. He put one hand over his mouth, thinking he was about to be sick, a horribly familiar smell of burned meat in his nostrils.
‘Here’s what I want to know,’ she whispered. ‘Do the ERTS think this is a poison gas? What procedures are they employing for these incidents?’
‘I just don’t want to be taken in for decontamination or whatever.’
‘See, look at this, the medics have the masks but the firefighters don’t, and that doesn’t make rational sense. But it’s like… they have a kind of ambiguous response to this. Like it’s, hmm, liminal between real and imaginary, you know?’
A fireman stretched an oxygen mask towards them, but Alex waved it away. He was afraid that Susie was going to put on a choking fit in order to get into one of the ambulances – there were two outside now – but she was busy with her clipboard and pen. Police cars pulled up at the curb, and then everyone inside the restaurant was being led out, standing for one shocking moment outside without coats, pressing against the wall for shelter.
‘They’re not sure what they’re doing,’ said Susie. ‘A lot of this is improvised.’ Policemen began coming out with armloads of winter clothes, purses and bags, dumping them on the sidewalk. He pulled his coat on, and his scarf, but he couldn’t find his hat. Susie had brought her bag outside with her, but she still had no coat, was hunched over and windblown, scribbling notes. A heavy man leaning against the wall seemed to have a nosebleed; he was clutching a wad of bloody tissue to his face, his mouth wide open. A cyclist with dreadlocked hair rounded the corner, staring at the crowd as he passed, and shouted, ‘Valium! Take Valium!’ as he sped into the darkness along College.
‘Susie. Aren’t you freezing?’
‘Just a second.’ She wrote another sentence, then bent down to a pile of clothes on the sidewalk and tugged her coat out. The woman who had fallen was being lifted into the ambulance.
‘… set up a decontamination tent?’ he heard one of the firemen saying, and then another fire truck arrived, and a white-suited hazmat team climbed down. A woman stood with her mouth partly open, pinned down by the sight of these swollen figures moving clumsily towards the door of the restaurant. Alex grabbed the sleeve of Susie’s coat and pulled her along the street, out of the light from the windows.
‘Can we go now? Please?’ He stood behind a newspaper box, separated from the crowd, his hands in his pockets. Susie looked back almost regretfully, but Alex started walking quickly west on College, and she came with him, trotting to keep up.
‘I’m glad I saw that,’ she was saying. ‘It really is a thing that’s worth studying.’
‘I just don’t want it happening around me all the time, is what I want.’ He took a breath, and the exhaust-filled air seemed clean in comparison, his nausea subsiding.
‘You notice it’s always just one or two people? It’s like a mass phenomenon that’s at the same time highly atomized, I think that’s almost unique. I wonder what they were talking about just before she fell.’
‘It seemed to come out of nowhere, more or less.’
‘Nothing comes out of nowhere, believe me.’ She blew on her hands again, rubbing her knuckles.
‘And why does that sound like a pop lyric?’
He was walking more slowly now, safely away. As she drew level with him he reached out almost absently, and his fingers touched her shoulder and then moved back.
‘I’d like to talk to that first girl. She’s the real key to all this.’
‘She looked pretty ordinary, I have to tell you,’ said Alex, shrugging. ‘I don’t know, I think one of her friends had a pierced navel, if that’s any use.’
‘Gotta be useful to someone.’
‘I wouldn’t count on that.’
They had gone by Palmerston now. As they passed the streetcar stop Susie paused and made a small uncertain gesture.
‘Well,’ said Alex, ‘I live over by Grace. It’s just a few blocks.’
She nodded, and as they crossed the street his arm moved around her waist, his hand running up and down the soft curve of her hip as she leaned into him for warmth. He could have told her that it wasn’t a good time, that he needed to be at work in the morning. He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about going to bed with Susie knowing that her twin brother’s chronicles of anal rape were folded away inside her shoulder bag. But it was like this, it would be like this, he had never been truly alone with her.