The alcohol seemed to be affecting Alex disproportionately; he felt nearly drunk already after a single beer, and so drained and tangled up in confusion and, God help him, a sick kind of jealousy, that he could hardly put words together. ‘Aren’t there social workers? Anybody?’
‘Well, what are they going to do with a guy under a bridge who won’t talk to them? I mean, in a bizarre sort of way he’s quite functional right now. Except for the not eating and the freezing to death.’ She picked at a maple-glazed doughnut, rolling bits of white pastry between her fingers. ‘I’ll call up social services, though. Maybe one of these days they’ll have a useful idea.’
Alex went to the counter and bought two more bottles of beer, thinking that she would kill him yet. Watched her pretty mouth on the brown glass, the slight movement of her throat when she swallowed. His mind full of serpents and severed heads, and the things that can happen to children.
‘I don’t know anything about you,’ he said.
She raised her eyebrows. ‘You know more than most.’
He took a long drink of beer and shook his head. ‘Nothing, really.’
‘Oh well.’ She broke a fragment of icing off the doughnut and licked it from the end of her finger. ‘It’s probably not worth knowing.’
Outside on Broadview, in the cold, he slid his arms clumsily beneath her unbuttoned coat and kissed the side of her mouth – he really was drunk somehow, it was ridiculous. She took one of his hands and pressed the knuckles to her lips, but he could see that this was already a movement away; he knew before she said it that she wouldn’t want him to come to her house that night.
‘But, you know, Sunday, if you want to do the photo thing.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’
‘Take me somewhere you know about,’ she said. ‘Some weird hidden place. Show me the city. I promise not to criticize.’
‘It’s okay if you do. It’s your job in a way.’
He walked down to the Danforth where the street signs were all in Greek, and he might as well have been in a foreign country, he knew so little, he was so far away.
Teenagers and old men wrapped scarves over their faces, picked up canvas bags and set out on newspaper routes with the early editions. One of the papers carried an article on the front page reporting, disapprovingly, the release on bail of the suspected terrorist, the man who had been parking his bicycle, now charged with assaulting a police officer.
On the next page, an article about the girl who had died of meningitis, the number to call if you had known her, the symptoms you should fear.
And at five in the morning Alex was walking around the west end, in the rising chill before dawn, his ears numb with cold and his blood sugar off, wondering why he couldn’t stop doing this, surfing these waves of self-destruction, wanting her with the sick pain of a physical lack, the skin-twitch of hunger as her hands withdrew. And his eyes went on bleeding.
Derek Rae beneath his bridge, writing on scraps of paper, trying to bring back the numbers he once knew.
Remember this.
A boy and a girl, dark-eyed and small. The grass of the lawn is cut short, a perfect chemical green.
Listen, says the boy. I will save you. I will always save you. He pokes branches into the earth, a pattern, a star or a helix. I will learn about the nature of time, he says. I will learn how to change the world.
The girl, even now, understands that he will fail. But she loves him. There is no one else. The girl knows too much, for a child this small, about having no choices.
Gusts of dirty smoke unrolled across a landscape of broken glass, in the bleached light of a winter dawn, and between the smoke, parting it like curtains, the white figures moved, flames at their feet. Raised arms to signal to the others, the masks over their faces smeared with black dust, their breathing harsh. The strange cracked sounds of fire.
The hoses stretched out, long paths of canvas, and the firefighters, masked as well, their uniforms coated with ash, directed the streams of water towards the windows of the warehouse, and the smoke turned heavy and dark, clotted clouds hanging low to the walls.
The white figures moved in the doorway, bloated and clumsy, turning in gradual motion. Within the doors of the warehouse, a livid blackness. They held up their ashen hands, their instruments, their mysterious process. Their slow-dance liturgical beauty.
The smoke divided, inside the warehouse, and revealed the signs on the walls, on the yellow barrels, the chemical hazard signals.
Bioterrorism, said someone, standing a street away. That’s what I heard.
I don’t think so
, said somebody else.
I’m just telling you. That’s what they say.
Coming back inside from hours of cold was more than a shock; it was an unpredictable series of pains as Alex hung up his coat and sat down on the sofa in his apartment, a swelling ache at the back of his sinuses, fingers and ears burning, lightning darts of pain through clenched muscles, even the cuts on his scalp beginning to throb again as blood flooded the extremities of his body. Jane pulled herself heavily up into his lap as the shimmery waves of hurt subsided, and he shivered and held on to her gentle mammal warmth. Reached over to turn on the radio, the mildly eccentric music of the early morning, avoiding any stations where they might break in with news.
When he had stopped shivering, he checked his blood sugar, worked out the dosage he’d need to balance it this time, and decided to make himself a bowl of porridge and a pot of tea with cream, invalid food, soft and soothing. He sat on the couch watching the golden swirls of melting butter through the oatmeal, the thick caramel lumps of brown sugar, and then slept for a little while, Queen Jane on the bed draped over his legs. When he woke up, he drank a cup of black coffee and thought that, after all, this might be a good time to visit Adrian.
He was uncertain what went on in churches on Saturday afternoons, and was afraid he might interrupt something or walk in on a service, but when he opened the side door to the hall, all he found was a small group of people sitting on the floor in sweatshirts and tights, reading from bound scripts.
‘But in what other way can we exist, in this consumer society?’ recited one of them.
‘No!’ cried someone else. ‘I don’t accept this solution to our crisis!’ A man with a thin red ponytail looked up at Alex. ‘Excuse me? We’re rehearsing here?’
‘I was looking for Adrian Pereira,’ said Alex. The man nodded his head towards the back of the room.
‘Through that way,’ he said. Alex stepped carefully past the circle of performers and down a narrow hallway. There were doors leading in several directions, but he could hear the faint sound of a guitar coming from one of them, so he opened it and found himself in the church proper. It was dark; the first thing he made out was a wooden altar at the front, with a stained-glass window, the spiky outlines of figures he couldn’t recognize. A circle of empty chairs, and in a far corner, by himself, Adrian playing a guitar and singing very quietly.
His voice had lost a bit of its upper register maybe, but it was still clear and oddly weightless. A voice that it was never really possible to sell, not a successful voice. He wasn’t singing one of his own songs, and he wasn’t singing a hymn either, though Alex briefly thought he was, and was made nervous by that; it was just one of those old odd floating songs about cryptic love.
Build me a castle
Forty feet high,