He remembered that he’d been late getting to work, the morning it had happened; he’d been standing in line at the bank, and had gradually realized that the line was moving so slowly because the tellers kept leaving their posts to cluster around a small radio. As he got closer to the desk he’d been able hear bits of the broadcast, stories of airplanes and skyscrapers. ‘Ah geez,’ one of the tellers had muttered, a huge man with a shiny bald head. ‘I just hope they don’t start a war over this, you know?’
So it was like that now, catastrophe inevitable at the most empty moments. Everyone waiting, almost wanting it, a secret, guilty desire for meaning. Their time in history made significant for once by that distant wall of black cloud.
But there was no such news this morning, Susie gone before dawn and Alex sitting by the radio with a cup of coffee, trying to pay attention; it was all about UN weapons inspectors and fluctuating currencies, an outbreak of Marburg virus in a tiny distant country, and a confusing story about an arrest in connection with incidents not precisely named. The subway, he guessed, and wondered who they’d found and what they were thinking.
The small explosion of order in his own life happened later that day, ephemeral and unexpected, when a bird somehow entered the hospital, in a way that no one was ever able, later on, to understand. When Alex arrived, unsummoned but pulled away from his lunch break by rumours of excitement, it had been contained in an empty room where it huddled in a corner, grey feathers fluffed angrily out, a disoriented disease vector, potential reservoir of avian flu, West Nile, any number of other infections.
‘Just let me kill the fucker!’ an orderly in a mask and industrial gloves was shouting, grabbing for the pigeon as it leapt from his hands, its wings slicing upwards.
Alex slipped unnoticed into the room, and knelt with his camera as the pigeon exploded towards the ceiling in a scatter of fluff and droppings, crashed into an IV stand, and started to make a break for the door before someone slammed it shut. The orderly ran at the bird with a canvas bag and it veered up again, greeny-white shit falling into another orderly’s long hair. ‘Jesus!’ she screamed, her hands flying up.
The pigeon began to spiral, high out of reach, and the orderly dropped the bag and picked up a mop, began stabbing the wooden handle at the bird. ‘Open a window!’ someone else called. ‘Open a window, let it out!’
‘They don’t open that way!’ yelled the first orderly, and a male nurse, seeming now in a state of pure panic, picked up a chair and bashed at the window, trying to break it.
‘Kill it, kill it, we have immuno-compromised patients in here!’
‘How in God’s name did it get in?’
‘Alex, Jesus Christ!’ The long-haired orderly backed into him. ‘Don’t take pictures of this.’
‘Personal use only,’ said Alex, as the pigeon wheeled in lunatic circles, wings beating into the walls. Then it sank downwards, bright amethyst slivers of light splintering from its chest, and dug its festering claws into Alex’s hair.
‘Fucking hell!’ he shouted, stumbling forward, the thin talons piercing his scalp.
‘It’s gone on the attack!’ cried an orderly.
Alex fell onto his knees, his teeth sinking into his lip, his hands beating uselessly at his head as the window gave way.
‘Oh, good going, Stuart,’ snapped another nurse. ‘I hope you know you’re paying for that.’
An orderly swung a pillow at the bird and it lifted off from Alex’s head, leaving him bent on the floor, tears of pain in his eyes. The pillow still waving, a white flag, and the bird was herded towards the window and out, suddenly hesitating in the air and almost returning, before Stuart began cramming bedclothes into the gap.
‘You’re probably going to get head lice,’ said the other nurse to Alex.
‘What the hell was up with that bird?’ asked the orderly with the pillow. ‘I mean, have we got a big hole in the wall somewhere or what?’
‘There’s going to be an inquiry over this one.’
‘Just don’t sue us about the lice, okay, Alex?’
His scalp was throbbing when he got home, his head smelling of disinfectant and Polysporin. He felt shaky still, but unable to sit down. He didn’t think he wanted to cook himself anything for dinner. Didn’t want to stay home at all, really. He’d spoken to his ophthalmologist that morning and it hadn’t been very encouraging.
He could have phoned Susie. He thought about phoning Susie, but he found himself instead with his camera on Bloor Street. He’d tell her about the bird sometime. She would like to hear about it. But not now, not quite so soon, not so he looked like he needed her.
He did have to eat something before he started working, so he went into the tiny falafel shop by the movie theatre. An older woman, heavy-set, was sitting in one of the plastic chairs, wearing a deep green velvet head scarf and peeling a mandarin orange, and as he came in she looked up and smiled at him, soft, familiar, as if he were a loved relative, or as if the pigeon had marked him, in some way recognizable only to a few. He smiled back, nervously, and she stretched out half the orange towards him; he shook his head, but she pressed it into his hand, the orange and gold-washed flesh of it shining under the fluorescent light. He broke off a segment and lifted it to his mouth, the juice sharp and sweet, a wordless agreement between strangers in the city.
There was one night when Dissonance was in production that a phone call had come in, and Chris had waved Susie into the office to take it. Alex was at one of the tables studying a page layout, and he watched her, resting her head on one hand as she talked, biting her lip anxiously, twirling her hair around one finger. Chris seemed to get impatient as the call went on and started gesturing for her to hang up, but she shook her head. He spoke again, more sharply – Alex could hear his voice through the glass, though not the words – and she put her hand over the receiver and whispered something back at him, her face pale and tight. It was too long for Alex to keep sitting there; he had to go back into the darkroom.
He had just finished shooting a stat on the process camera when she knocked tentatively on the inner door.
‘It’s okay,’ he called, switching on the light. ‘You can come in.’ She sat down on the stool, her feet pulled up, tucking her knees under her chin.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
She was wearing an oversized white shirt and torn jeans, a jagged metal necklace, army boots. She put her head to one side, her cheek against her knee.
‘Do you think it would be easy to lose your mind?’ she said, picking at a flake of nail polish at the corner of her index finger.
He lifted out a sheet of photographic paper and ran it into the developing machine. The room smelled of chemicals and stale marijuana smoke.
‘It could be,’ he said.
‘Does it scare you?’
The stat came out of the developer, a little darker than he’d wanted. Maybe he should shoot it again.
He had never thought about losing his mind, not really; he had enough to think about when a small needle of insulin was the only barrier between him and rapid death. ‘Not so much as some things,’ he said – and then pre-empting her, because she would have asked, ‘I just mean things in general.’
She nodded. ‘Okay.’ He had one of his mixed tapes on in the background, a song from Big Star’s last album playing, ragged and needy. ‘If somebody loves you,’ she said, and Alex was glad that he was facing away from her because he could feel the rush of heat in his face, ‘what kind of rights does that give them?’