‘This is kind of weird,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to, I don’t know, I’m not used to this.’
‘Yeah, I know. Photo sessions, they’re a funny thing, they’re…’ he ran out of words. She smiled, and pushed at her hair as it slid back over her ear.
‘I trust you, though,’ she said. Pale hand resting on her knee, the pattern of wear in the fabric of her jeans, the sun-filled hollows in the curves of her legs. He picked up the light meter and walked around the room, his eyes off her for a moment, half dizzy.
‘Could you stand over here?’
She stood up from the spool and crossed the room again, stood awkwardly against the unfinished wall.
‘It’s okay. Relax. Just stand normally.’ She bent one leg and put her hands behind her back, leaning her head against a spill of light, a good accident.
‘This isn’t really normal.’
‘It’ll do.’ He went down on one knee and held the camera upwards. She tipped her head slightly to the side, suggestion of tendon along her neck, a shadow on the opposite cheekbone.
‘I hope you’re not thinking of exhibiting these.’
‘They’re yours.’ He leaned back. ‘They’re completely yours. I’ll give you the negatives if you want.’
‘I was kind of kidding, actually.’
She swept her hair over her ears with both hands, letting it down in front of her shoulders. Folded her hands loosely in front of her, cupped low on her stomach, her wrists resting above the small protrusions of her hipbones. The inevitable upwards tension of her legs, the bowl of her hands.
‘The police are going to come and accuse you of making nerve gas in here,’ she said.
He adjusted focus, still kneeling in front of her, and moved the shot in tight to her face. The fine crinkling of the skin around her eyes, the maple-syrup fall of hair, indirect light on the golden strands within the soft brown. The small space of floor between them, the lens of the camera. The way the Leica felt, like a human response.
‘Okay.’ He put the camera down, staring at the floor and feeling the pulse of blood in his head. ‘I think that’s enough.’ He looked up at her, and tried to smile casually. ‘You’re free to go.’
This was the strangest moment for the person being photographed, he knew, suddenly released from the control of the lens and unsure how to move. There was always that second of forced informality, a small nervous laugh. He took a deep breath and wiped his forehead. Susie shook out her hands, more shy now than when he was photographing her, and then walked across the room for her coat, pulled her hat down over her ears, and sat down not far from him.
At that moment he was prepared to give in completely, to let her eat him alive if that was what she wanted. He blinked at the skittering hint of a floater in one eye, and swallowed.
They sat on the floor, across from each other, in the frozen half-built room.
‘I’m not really a terminal case,’ he said. ‘I’m not really going to end up blind tomorrow.’
‘Of course not.’
‘It’s a thing I have to do. It’s not anyone’s good scenario.’
Outside the window the sun broke through cloud, a broad slab of light suddenly detailing the flawed uneven plaster of the wall, the unsanded wood floor. She stood quickly and walked from the room, and it seemed to Alex as if her image in the doorway froze in a hanging moment of time, her head in profile. Susie leaving.
She must have expected that he would follow, shivering with the bright cold and the need of her; and in the dark hallway at the bottom of the spiral stair she reached out for him, the chill of her hands like needles on his skin, the rough grain of the brick wall scraping the fabric of his coat as his body rose to hers, her heat pouring into him. But the image was as fixed in his mind as any picture, the sequel to every photograph he had ever taken of her. Susie turning away.
A woman fell down at Glencairn, the long sweep of her coat spreading over the tiles of the floor. A few hours later, the police entered the back room of a pizza restaurant on Ossington and arrested a Nigerian man who had been seen near the warehouse before the fire, taking a picture with a disposable camera.
At the Healthcare Divisional Operations Centre, men and women sat around the table in an emergency meeting. Two paramedics who had attended at the College Street restaurant were off work, collapsing suddenly, their symptoms unclear. A flipchart by the table was scribbled with handwritten notes. Under the heading A) Unknown/fainting, written in blue ink, were the words Contact CUPE asap. Working quarantine possible?
Then a slash across the page, and a second heading, this time in red, a pointer to an urgent fax lying on the table: B) MENINGITIS.
In the crooks of the ravine, men and women reached out for survival, scooping water from the river, and at the shore of the lake someone walked through the small stone spirals of a garden, and saw the word FEAR on the side of a building across the road.
The girl who had fallen went back to the park bench, and the can of tuna and the money had been taken.
It could have been anyone.
She walked to the bushes at the edge of the hill, and she thought of going past the line of trees, but the thistles caught at her clothes, and she stepped back.
It was late when Alex left Susie’s house on Carlaw, late enough that the subway had stopped running. Late enough that he was expected at the eye clinic in a matter of hours, and he still had to develop the film in his camera bag. He walked down to Gerrard, turning off Carlaw to pass beneath the bridge, where snow and damp litter piled up at the edge of the wall, the smell of urine lingering on the concrete. He was tired, he hadn’t had enough sleep for days, maybe weeks.
He leaned his head against the glass of the window as the bus travelled along Gerrard, and almost wished that he was twenty-five again, able to live on devotion and drama. To promise her he would do anything, for nothing in return, and to believe it was true. Give up, give in, whatever the state of his blood, though she was always poised in a doorway on the verge of departure.
But he couldn’t; he couldn’t go on like this really, he would kick this, he would let it go.
The hopeful phantoms of the city’s night passed briefly under the streetlights as the car turned onto Carlton – a large bearded man in a white tutu, a fat little Franciscan monk eating a burger from a paper bag, a woman with a shopping cart full of newspapers. He rode further, onto College, past the university and the frayed margins of Spadina, into the small shops and cafés of his own neighbourhood, and he got off the streetcar and stood at College and Grace feeling once again that the city was just about to give up its secrets, that point in the depth of the night when everything was transparent and lucid, one impossible step from a final meaning. When he saw the man held hostage leaning against the wall, he greeted him like a kind of colleague, a fellow worker in the fields of madness.
‘Thank you so much, sir,’ said the man, taking the two-dollar coin. ‘You’re very kind. They’re assembling the forces to protect me, sir. There’s been a great improvement.’ He hid the coin away somewhere among his layers of sweaters. ‘And the man you were looking for, have you had good luck in finding him?’
‘Oh. We found him, yes. Thanks very much for your help.’
‘It’s no problem, sir, I’m happy to do what I can. It was approved by the government, you see. It’s all part of a larger plan. The terrorists want me dead, sir, because of the pretty people falling from the air, so I have to keep on top of an intelligent strategy.’