Susie handed him the bottle, and he took hold of Derek’s shoulder, thinking of fleas and mites, and pulled him over. He would have to hold on to him. He put one arm around the other man – realizing for the first time he was a fairly small man, of course he was, he was Susie’s brother – and lifted him partway up. Bodies in space. Derek muttered, and his legs flexed up spasmodically; then his whole body moved, and a thin stream of stringy vomit ran from his lips down the side of his face. Alex put down the water bottle, reached for a rag and wiped the vomit away, then picked the bottle up again and tried to pour the liquid into Derek’s mouth.
He should have noticed it earlier, but maybe he hadn’t been at the right angle. Derek’s shirt was partly unbuttoned and hung open over his skinny chest, ribs like sticks, and Alex saw the rash, the dark purple explosive spots scattered across the skin. He froze where he was.
‘Do you have your cellphone?’ he asked, trying to control his voice. Susie nodded. ‘Call an ambulance now. Right now,’ said Alex. ‘This is meningitis.’
She took the small phone from her pocket, but she couldn’t get a good signal under the tracks, had to crawl outside the tent and stand on the hillside in the open air, leaving Alex alone counting how many days it had been since he’d shaken Derek’s mucusy wet hand, trying to remember whether he had touched his own mouth or nose afterwards. How many days it had been since, oh God, Derek had kissed his sister.
Susie crept back into the tent. ‘They’re on their way. You should take the lantern up to the top of the hill so they can see you. I’ll stay with Derek.’ She was unnaturally calm, her face stiff. Alex was still holding Derek, the heat of the fever close against him. ‘Susie, honey, he’s very contagious. I’ve had more exposure than you up to this point, maybe I should… ’
‘Don’t be an idiot. Leave me with him.’
She was right. Of course she was right. He lay Derek gently down on the floor of the tent and moved out, his eyes on Susie as she knelt beside her brother, and as he backed out of the entrance he saw her bend down, and put her lips once more to Derek’s.
He pulled himself up the slope of the hill in the circle of light from the lantern, hearing her voice behind him, a soft continuous sound. He couldn’t make out the words. He passed over the tracks and stood at the highest point of the hill, holding the lantern up, level with his head.
Outside its pale circle there was nothing but blackness, a chaotic punctuation of lights moving in meaningless patterns. Dry seed-heads broke through the snow at his feet, and the invisible city stretched out on every side. In front of him, the Don River, the slope upwards to the east side, the plane trees and small brick houses, and behind him the wetlands, and the landscaped sloping enclaves of Rosedale. To the south and west somewhere was most of his life, his apartment at College and Grace, the osprey on the wall in Kensington Market, the little brick church, the woman in the rooming house on Bathurst and the man being held hostage by terrorists, the new Sneaky Dee’s on College that would always be the new Sneaky Dee’s although it had been there for more than a decade; to the north, his office in the hospital, the operating rooms where he moved quietly among the surgical teams, the burned man in the isolation ward. The girls falling down in the subway, the Don River running past him and away into landfill, where the shore of the lake used to be. All dark. He closed his eyes and listened to the traffic on Bayview, the hum of the engines, the wires connecting in networks above his head, like the hiss and thud of his defective blood.
And here, on the edge of this valley, half-blind and tainted with disease, he felt the city inside him with a kind of completeness, all the tangled systems. Money and death, knowledge and care, moving constantly from hand to hand; our absolute dependence on the actions of bodies around us, smog and light and electric charge.
There was a sound like music at the bottom of the city’s noise, far distant. And it grew louder, and closer, and he knew it now, the wail of the siren, the ambulance come to them in this strange retreat, this place at the heart of everything.
IV
At the corner of College and Spadina, a man with a torn bit of blanket around his shoulders and a bottle of Chinese cooking wine in his hand stood in the radiance of a neon sign and watched the show. A streetcar stalled in the middle of the intersection, the sound of car horns surging around it at all four corners, as the traffic lights spread smears of green and red on the wet asphalt, and a woman lay in the road, flat on her back, her arms and legs spread, her hair fanned out, eyes open and white, the pupils rolled up. A fire engine pulling out from the station a block away. The streetcar driver climbed down onto the tracks and knelt by the woman, and the lights of the vehicles seized them there, etching them in high relief, a frozen sculpture on a city street.
Further south, the hazmat teams in their white gowns descended to the PATH, to a dim corridor where a man crouched and trembled half-conscious against a wall, and the friends around him spoke of roses and incense. The white figures raised their instruments again into the air.
And the hill on Bayview was public and crowded now, filled with noise. Alex had been partly mistaken – it was not the ambulance but the fire engine that arrived first, the firemen clambering up with flash-lights and a first-aid kit, as if they attended to people under railway bridges every day of their lives, and for all he knew perhaps they did. He led them down and into the tent, where Susie was sitting with Derek’s head in her lap, and they moved him away from her to check his airways, do whatever other preliminary things could be done. Susie, irrelevant suddenly, crept out of the tent to stand with Alex on the hillside.
The paramedics came, and Alex was needed to help them pull the stretcher up the hill. A fireman carried Derek out from under the bridge, cradling him in his arms like a child, and lay him down on the padded surface, strapping him in for safety before they brought him, slowly, dangerously, down the steep slope to the emergency vehicles, Alex holding on to the metal side of the stretcher with his gloved hands, pushing his feet into the earth and leaning against the weight. Susie followed them, empty-handed, the tent abandoned.
They were down beside the road, standing in the blue light of the ambulance, a police car pulling up, too many things being said that he couldn’t quite grasp. Derek’s cracked lips were bleeding, or perhaps the blood was inside his mouth, it was hard to tell.
‘When blood comes out of the ears, there’s no possibility to survive,’ whispered Alex.
‘You walked here?’ asked one of the paramedics, incredulous.
Somehow it ended up being agreed that Susie and Alex would ride behind the ambulance in a police car, and he was aware that this was a deeply unusual arrangement, that they must look like a pair of orphans on the roadside, grimy and confused.
The policeman talking through his radio to the ambulance ahead of them. Crackle of static. ‘They can’t all be on emergency redirect,’ said the policeman. ‘You’re shitting me, right? All of them?’ The radio chattered again. ‘Oh, sure, that’s great. We’ll take him to Sick Kids, give ’em a laugh, eh?’
The ambulance wound up and down the streets, south and west. More static from the radio, and then they turned north again.
They pulled into the parking lot of one of the central hospitals, and Alex saw four other ambulances sitting in the bay, their lights revolving. One attendant was standing on the pavement, smoking; he threw the butt angrily to the ground and stomped on it, went to the glass door of the emergency entrance and shouted something.