Zoe glanced at the page. ‘What? The whole letter B?’ she said teasingly. The teacher pointed at a line.
‘Beel… no way. You’re trying to make me look dumb.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said the teacher.
‘You read it.’
The teacher shrugged and picked up the dictionary. ‘Beelzebub,’ he said. ‘Definition 1: the prince of demons; the devil. Now you read the derivation.’ He passed the book to Lauren, who ran her finger down the page and found the line.
‘Hebrew – oh, wow! Hebrew for Lord of the Flies! Awesome!’
‘Oh my GOD!’ exclaimed Zoe, putting her hands up to her face. ‘How did you even know that? Were you just, like, reading through the dictionary one day and you found it?’
‘Um, it’s just more like – general knowledge,’ said the teacher, who was a very young man, though he didn’t seem so to the girls in his class. ‘It’s a thing people know.’
The girl drew a flower in the corner of a page, watching the rest of the class from the corner of her eye. Looked outside at the woods.
‘That is so awesome,’ said Lauren.
The girl played with her pen for a moment, and then closed her exercise book and carefully inked the word FEAR onto the cover, in tiny, precise, very dark letters.
‘You know, if William Golding had kids, his kids would be totally upset reading this book,’ said Tasha.
At the St. Patrick station, on the stairway leading to the street, a woman collapsed and fell down half a flight, breaking two bones in her hand. A dead smell, she said it had been, a dead, sweet smell that pulled her down.
How could she be expected to do proper blood tests, asked the doctor in the toxicology lab, when no one could tell her what to look for, when all they could tell her was what they supposed it was not, not sarin, not cyanide, probably not a virus? Was she meant to search down to infinite degrees of abnormality? There could never be an end to that.
In the storage rooms and passageways below the subway lines the hazmat workers moved, breathing through heavy masks, slowly searching each room, each corner, for traces of powder or chemical marks, for doors opened that should not have been, cigarette butts in forbidden areas, for any sign that someone had hidden here, waiting, contaminants in open hands.
Other things happened that were innocuous and fairly ordinary, the little troubles of winter. A common enterovirus infiltrated several playschools and caused a large number of toddlers to start vomiting. Many adults exhibited upper respiratory tract infections. Some of them, remembering the men who had lost their breath at the King station, understood their symptoms to mean that they had been poisoned. Hospital emergency departments began to overflow.
A man was admitted to one of the hospitals with a high fever, the transaction that had passed between himself and a dead girl breaking violently to the surface. This man got to a doctor in time; he was treated effectively with intravenous antibiotics. Public Health was notified, and began once again the process of tracing contacts, discovering those he had been close to, those he had lived with, those he had touched. Meningitis is fast, faster than organized plans, and the dead girl, the vector, with her weak immune system and her coded, hidden world, she was moving the authorities now in a way that her life could never have done.
Alex went out again in the early evening with his camera, and tried dismally, experimentally, to take some pictures. That everything felt wrong was surely a function of his mood as much as the state of his eyes.
Anyway, some of the photos might turn out all right. There was a quality of light and movement that he liked, outside the windows of the Diplomatico, a girl in the doorway of the Bar Italia, these might be okay after all. He had to believe that.
When he got back to his apartment, there was a message on his voice mail from Susie. Asking how he was. He didn’t want anyone asking how he was. Telling him that she was going to see Derek that night, that she’d be leaving around ten, he could come to her house anytime before that.
In theory, he could simply not turn up. She had left him that choice. She might even have been suggesting it.
He could do other things. He could phone his sister, his pleasantly normal, dissatisfied sister, and listen to her stories of the folly of her co-workers. He could call in a pledge to that poor campus radio station. He sat on his couch stroking Jane and thinking about the things he could do if he didn’t answer Susie’s message, and then it was quarter to ten. He stood up and got his coat, put the photographs of her in a new manila envelope, and packed his insulin kit in his camera bag. He was halfway out the door when he turned back, grabbed the string of the balloon and brought it along with him.
He would come when she called. Watch when she left. Lose her, lose his eyes. Lose the winter light, and end up with nothing.
Two of the smaller restaurants along College had posted handwritten signs in the windows, announcing themselves to be Closed on Account of Illness. Whether this was the illness of the proprietors, or whether they were entrenching against the illness of the city, he wasn’t sure.
He was late. She’d probably go ahead without him.
End up with nothing.
He rode the streetcar up Bathurst, noticing that the gold foil star was sagging a bit now as the helium leaked slowly away. He didn’t look out the window, not wanting to know how much he was unable to see. As he got off the car at the Bathurst station, he saw the word FEAR spray-painted in big black letters on the concrete wall. He entered the station and caught the subway going east.
As he arrived at the house he checked his watch – it was past ten-thirty. But when he went inside the front door, he saw that the door to her apartment, at the foot of the stairs, wasn’t actually closed. Slightly ajar, it swung open further at his knock.
‘Alex?’ she called down the stairs.
‘Yeah, it’s me.’
‘Are you okay? Come on up.’
She was sitting at her desk chair, lacing her boots, but she stood up when he came in.
‘How are you? I tried to phone.’
Alex moved away from her, slumping down on her futon couch, and fought back another irrational spasm of anger. He twitched his shoulders in a tight shrug. ‘They cauterized the blood vessels, I guess. I can’t really, you know, it’s too early to say if it’s affected my vision. It’s just the first round anyway. I have to go back.’
‘How are you feeling, though?’
‘It hurts. I’d rather not talk about it.’ He realized that he was still holding the balloon, and stretched his hand towards her. ‘Here. This is for you.’
Susie took hold of the string and wrapped it loosely around the back of her chair. ‘Wow. Mafia balloon,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘Thanks.’ The star didn’t pull the string taut anymore, but hovered softly a few feet below the ceiling.
‘I was just going to see Derek.’
‘Yeah. I know. I got your message.’
‘I don’t have to go right now necessarily.’ She played absently with the string of the balloon. ‘I talked to this guy, this psychiatric social worker, he’s going to come with me and see him next week, if he’s got my okay maybe Derek’ll talk to him.’
And suddenly he couldn’t bear any of it, the hunger and the damage, the constant covert search for signs of other men in her life, the moment when she would leave him this time. He shoved his hands into his pockets. ‘Good. Great. You won’t be needing me anymore, then.’
She pushed her hair back and looked at him, frowning. ‘What does that mean?’