The police radio crackled, and they pulled out again, heading further north.
‘Fuck this,’ said the policeman. ‘Somebody’s bound to die soon, eh? That’ll open up a space.’
Susie was looking silently out the window, biting her nails. He wanted to tell her not to put her fingers in her mouth. He searched in his bag for an alcohol swab and handed it to her. ‘You can wipe your hands with that,’ he said softly. ‘It’s kind of small, but it’s better than nothing.’ She held it in her lap and stared at it for a while before she opened the wrapping and rubbed it across her palms.
The car stopped suddenly, pulled over to the side of the road. He saw the word FEAR again, spray-painted on the wall of an alley nearby. They were somewhere above Yonge – on Avenue Road? He wasn’t quite sure. His hand was shaking a little, though he guessed that this was probably just the stress. ‘Excuse me?’ he said to the policemen in the front seat. ‘I’m about to check my blood sugar. I just wanted you to know that’s what I’m doing.’
‘Sure. Knock yourself out.’
It was okay, a little bit low, not dangerous. He would need to eat something in the next little while, but not immediately.
The radio crackled, and the car pulled out and continued north. At a red light, he saw a tall man with long greasy hair, his skin like old leather, holding cramped arthritic hands in the air and screaming, ‘Fuck OFF! Fuck OFF!’ over and over, in an ascending scale of agony. At another corner they passed two police officers bending over a woman, down on all fours on the pavement, her blonde hair covering her face, drunk or desperate or poisoned by terrorists, it all seemed much the same.
If he were going to imagine a terrorist, Alex thought, his murderous doctor or whoever, he would have to decide who this person had failed, where they had betrayed or misjudged; something terrible and public or very small, but there had to be that failure, a loss, a crack-up, a falling down. He could see how releasing poison gas on the subway might seem like a valid choice.
Not that he himself was the kind of person who released poison gas, more the kind who sat politely inhaling it, not wanting to cause a fuss.
His eyes were still sore, stinging, and after a while he closed them, and for a moment, in the darkness and the motion of the car, he thought he might sleep. The car kept travelling through the streets, then paused somewhere else, but he didn’t open his eyes.
The impossible thought that in a different world he would have a nearly teenage child, a girl falling down on the subway for all he knew. Or maybe not, maybe Chris would, maybe nothing in his life was any different than it had been the day before.
And it wouldn’t have been like that anyway, there was no reason to think that he would have been a father in anything except the most crude genetic sense. All that he could ever have given it was his weakness, his own sickness, nothing better.
They stopped finally, inevitably, at the emergency entrance of his own hospital, so close to where they had started that they might as well have sat in place for half an hour and avoided the whole journey, and he stepped from the car in a circling tide of light and darkness, Susie rushing past him towards the ambulance they had followed. But the stretcher was disappearing through the doors and down a dim corridor at the end of emergency admitting, and Alex and Susie pressed into the crowd – the moulded plastic chairs in the waiting area already full, a crying girl in one corner, people standing with styrofoam cups in their hands and bits of tissue clutched to their mouths and noses. A nurse with a clipboard led Susie towards a desk and began writing down information.
‘He had a health card,’ Alex heard Susie saying. ‘He did have a health card. But I don’t know the number.’
‘You can’t find it? We’re going to need that to admit him.’
‘It’s very complicated,’ said Susie, and put her head down on the desk.
‘Oh, now, stop that,’ said the nurse sharply. ‘We can get this sorted out. You just have to be sensible.’
A family pushed between them at the triage desk, parents supporting a wheezing girl who clutched her chest and wept, and Alex was separated from Susie and the nurse. He threaded his way across the room and stood by the wall, reaching into his bag for a granola bar, watching them assemble Derek’s story in bits and pieces, in questionnaire form. There were Christmas decorations hanging above him, cardboard Santas and holly-wreathed bells. A small boy was sitting on his mother’s lap, throwing up into a plastic bowl. Two middle-aged men in different corners of the room were clutching plastic oxygen masks to their faces. The nurse went away and looked something up on a computer, and then came back.
‘… risperidone last year,’ he heard Susie’s voice briefly, breaking out of the general clamour. ‘But he’s been off it… no, no allergies that I’m aware…’ Another man arrived, breathing hard, and then a girl with red welts on her face, hanging on to the arm of an ambulance attendant. A woman with a baby in her arms and pale clumps of sick-up clinging to her coat. Susie was standing with her elbows on the counter, her hands on her forehead.
‘If we can’t determine his health coverage, we will have to ask you for payment. You may be able to get it refunded if he’s eligible.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Alex loudly. ‘I work here. Take it out of my damn paycheque.’ The nurse turned around and glared at him, snapped a file closed as loudly as she could. He stood by the wall, eating his granola bar, avoiding Susie’s eyes.
Outside the movie theatre at College and Yonge a woman knelt on the sidewalk, her arms wrapped around herself, cradling her body like an infant.
‘You shouldn’t touch her,’ shouted someone. ‘We don’t know what it is.’
‘She’s just sick to her stomach, it’s nothing,’ said someone else, as they stood in a circle around her, not quite near her, and she swayed back and forth and vomited onto the sidewalk.
It’s nothing.
Don’t touch her.
A man leaned against the glass window of a coffee shop with one hand in the air, holding a fluttering magazine, trying to summon a taxi before he fell, and an ambulance rounded the corner, the sound of its siren slowly flowing through the night.
They stood in emergency for a couple of hours, or it might have been longer, he hadn’t checked the time. One of the nurses had set up a preliminary triage station at the door, collecting the breathing problems in one area, the children with intestinal viruses in another. Alex could see the ambulances lined up in the parking lot, paramedics and orderlies waving their hands at each other in the pools of light on the asphalt. An intern dragged two more portable oxygen canisters into the waiting room, fastened the plastic masks on two more patients slumped in the chairs.
A man with a press card and a camera came in the door, and an orderly grabbed his shoulder and pushed him outside again. Someone turned up with his hand wrapped in a blood-soaked strip of canvas and was sent to the corner of the room, one of the lowest priorities, a trail of blood running slowly down his arm, a smear drying on his face; then the paramedics ran in with another stretcher, a body strapped down in restraints, foam curdling at the edges of the mouth. Solvents probably. Glue, or plastic bags of gas. The nurse at the door was handing around a bottle of antibacterial alcohol gel now, demanding that everyone wipe their hands as they entered. The man with the camera got inside again and was again expelled.
Alex wondered what was happening in the city outside the doors, as chaos arrived at the lobby in tiny pieces. He was very tired, and drained of almost every possible emotion, and his mind was wandering in half-connected ways, probably about as valuable as the insights you had when you were stoned. Wondering if it was possible to distinguish, really, between illness and fear, immune systems equally mobilized now against germs and dreams. Susie blew on her coffee, the fluorescent lights reflecting on its surface. Her eyes were redrimmed and damp.