‘Thank you.’ Evelyn looked into the bag, sorting through the contents. ‘That looks like the main things he’d want. This was good of you.’
‘I don’t know.’ He wasn’t sure if this made Susie less alone or more so, that she had shared Derek’s pain all along with someone else, with a friend who had never told her. Whether he himself would tell her after all. Or even have the chance. ‘I just, it was just an idea.’ He rubbed his eyes again. ‘I had some free time, I guess.’
She reached out and put a gloved hand on his arm, and his nerves startled at the muffled contact.
‘This is where we live, Alex,’ she said.
‘I… what?’
Evelyn shrugged, her hand still on his sleeve. ‘This is where we are. Right here. It’s a fallen world, or whatever you want to call it. Derek’s not exactly wrong. There’s dangerous chemicals all over the place. We just… follow it down. Make it what we can. That’s all we do.’
She turned away, the plastic bag hooked over one wrist, and slid down the hillside.
In the snow by Holy Trinity Church a man fell to his knees, the Eaton Centre like a cliff of glass behind him, a red flush spreading across his hands. He cried out, an inarticulate noise, stretching his arms towards the men who lived in the square, blankets wrapped over their heads, and one of them stood, staggering towards him. A woman by the icebound fountain saw the falling man, saw him jackknife now and retch on the pavement, and she picked up her briefcase and ran.
A man sat on the steps at Summerhill subway station and wept, not even sure what he was crying about. Because there could be no end to this, not a proper end with catharsis and resolution. Because there would be neither a single evildoer to cast out of the community nor a moment of realization to draw us together, because there would be no shape or sense but only the ongoing confusion of our lives.
Because our bodies are permeable to the world, and ash and poison are moving in the air, and we have to persist like this, in anxiety and longing, on high alert.
Alex hadn’t considered how he was going to get home. He felt too awkward to follow Evelyn on the Bayview slope, so he went back to Derek’s tent, then skidded down the long valley wall that he and Susie had climbed the first night they came here, towards the brickworks, his camera bag over his shoulder, his trousers covered with snow up to the knees. Pulling himself out of a tangle of dried thistles, he made his way along the path to the side of the abandoned building, where a network of footbridges spanned the frozen wetlands.
He was more tired than he could have imagined possible, his head floating, unable to form coherent plans. His eyes were starting to hurt again. Morning sunlight splitting through heavy cloud to shatter on the snow, drowning him in a milky blur. He thought longingly about the restfulness of the taxi’s back seat, the smell of fake leather, and it seemed to him now like the softest, the most comforting place he had ever been.
He’d never find another taxi here. The road was thick with rush-hour traffic, but any taxis passing this way would have fares on board already, no one would cruise around the highway turnoffs looking to pick up stray photographers and flower sellers. He’d have to walk to Castle Frank station.
He went into the old factory hall and sat down for a minute, holding the bag against his chest. He was still feeling somehow deprived of Derek’s remnants. Lonely without them, though he had been their custodian for only a few minutes. But he still had the photograph with him, he remembered. That was reassuring but not proper, he would need to return it somehow, and this gave him a small residual duty, a thing to hang on to. There were the pictures he had taken of Susie as well, the ones he had promised were hers. He was accumulating quite an archive in his bag, and none of it should stay with him. He was terribly tired. But he could do this, he could get to the top of the hill, and it would be easier after that.
He wasn’t sure what he would do with the photographs. Maybe he would give them to Adrian; one more small thread of knowledge and silence, but Adrian could handle it, he could take them back to Susie and it would be a straightforward thing, not the random complicated mess that it was bound to be if Alex tried.
He stood and came out of the hall, wet and chilled, blinking hard, onto the shoulder, and began to trudge alongside the road, dishevelled and unshaven, clutching his camera bag. West on the first turnoff, and then up the long slope of highway ramp, under the bare trees, orienting himself towards the great viaduct that spanned the Don Valley, its massive black arches, the delicate suicide veil bending harp-like above, shining silver in the breaks of sunlight.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that when he reached the top of the hill there would be someone there waiting for him – Adrian or the imaginary doctor, or possibly the police, he didn’t know which of these it might be but he felt crazily sure that he was awaited. A wave of vertigo hit him, and he stopped, an acid burn in his throat as if he might need to throw up on the gravel, but it wasn’t that bad, the moment passed.
He heard the sound of a motor behind him and moved further over on the shoulder. Somewhere behind the trees a car alarm was going off, a mechanized voice barking commands at no one. Please step away from the car. Please step away from the car. He was out of breath, but close to the top of the hill now, and there had to be something conclusive in this. Some expected moment.
He let himself think that it would be Susie who was waiting for him, though he could not imagine a circumstance which would cause that to happen; and it was not a particularly good thought, a fragmentary swirl of shining brown hair and anger and failure, but it pulled him forward with a quick deceptive longing. He came around the last bend, where the ramp curved through the last edge of the woods and opened up to Castle Frank subway station.
Of course there was no one there. Please step away from the car, the alarm repeated. It was parked near the subway station, he could see now; someone must have brushed against it on the way in. A woman with a sky-blue helmet rode a bicycle onto the viaduct and spun quickly out of sight. Beyond the traffic island, someone pulled open the door of the station and entered.
He had never really thought there would be anyone there. He had never really supposed there was anyone waiting, but he stood at the edge of the sidewalk for a while, looking across at the subway entrance, and no one came.
He wouldn’t see her again, he thought. That was what it meant, that he had looked for her at the top of the hill and she wasn’t there. He needed sleep so badly. He would have a bowl of soup, he would lie down and rest, his cat curled up against his legs, and Evelyn would guard the secrets of the world, and that would be enough.
He walked across the traffic island, kicking at the snow, crossed the street and entered the station. Inside, a skinny old man stood in the corner leaning on a cane, wearing a bright red coat and a baseball cap with a large Molson Canadian sticker on the front. At his feet, a mechanical clown doll was jerking and gesticulating frantically, reaching out from a paper bag. Someone had scribbled the word FEAR on the glass wall in black marker.
Maybe she was right that he had chosen to live his life so much alone, though it wasn’t a choice he remembered making. But it hadn’t saved him anyway from the network of debts and payments. It hadn’t saved him at all.
The doll stretched out its palsied arms to Alex as he passed, as if it were begging him for rescue.
He was waiting on the platform at Castle Frank, leaning against the wall, when he saw a young man, mid-twenties maybe, with wire-rimmed glasses and a small goatee, sliding an oversized black marker into the pocket of his army jacket and exchanging a covert glance with the woman beside him. She was tall and athletic-looking, dressed in a short black skirt and rainbow tights, her long hair a bright lime green. She was carrying a canvas backpack, and as she turned to look into the tunnel for the lights of the train, Alex could see the top of a can of spray paint. He smiled to himself. So these were the city’s editorialists, then. He was relieved to discover that they were not people he knew, that the FEAR graffiti was in no way connected with him, that there were still a few people around with whom he did not have complicated emotional ties.