‘Hi,’ said Alex.
‘Yeah. Okay.’ She walked into the waiting room and sat down.
There were any number of ways this could have ended that might have seemed simple and sad and final, satisfying in an elegiac way. But our lives are great shambling stupid things, the flawed nerve paths of memory and randomly built excuses for the body, and we are mostly still trying to make them come out right when we die. He followed her into the room.
‘How are you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I need to find his psychiatrist, I think. They aren’t sure about meds and stuff.’
‘Can I help?’
‘I can’t see how.’ She crumpled the candy’s foil wrapping. ‘I told you to go home.’
‘Yes. I decided not to.’
She shrugged. ‘Not my problem.’
‘All right.’
‘I fell asleep for a bit,’ she said. ‘I had this dream where I had a sort of a baby, this little wet white rag doll thing, but it just sort of fell out of me and I forgot about it, and it fell in a corner with its face against the wall and it couldn’t breathe and it died before I found it. It was like, how do you do CPR on a rag doll? I hate it when my dreams are so fucking obvious.’ She broke off a corner of the chocolate and put it in her mouth.
‘How is Derek?’
‘I don’t know. How is he ever?’ She set down the chocolate bar and wrapped her arms around herself. ‘I never meant to lose him,’ she said softly. ‘I tried, you know, I really did.’
‘You saved his life.’
‘No. Not in the way that counts. I let him go. I let him go away.’
‘Susie, there was nothing you could have done.’
‘But there should have been, don’t you see? There should have been.’
He heard a soft shimmer sound at the window, and looked up to see that it had started to rain, a filmy veil spread over the glass.
‘You haven’t taken your antibiotic,’ he said.
‘I will. In a bit.’
‘Well, when?’
‘I don’t know. Soon. When I feel like it.’
Alex watched her as she pulled her fingers through a tangled bit of hair, and he remembered something else about that day at the clinic, Susie hanging in the air and refusing to speak, knowing the policeman had his nightstick out, knowing he would hit her. The strength of her refusal. Derek’s tremendous negative power, under his bridge renouncing the world, the extreme and appalling force of doing nothing.
‘Take it now.’
‘Drop it, okay? I told you I’ll do it soon.’
‘No,’ said Alex. ‘Not soon. Now. I want to see you take it.’
‘Is there something wrong with you?’
‘I swear to God, Suzanne, if I have to pour it down your throat myself, I will do it.’ He felt like a fool, he was probably making himself ridiculous. Susie stared at him for a long time, and he looked back at her, and he didn’t know which one of them would break first.
‘You don’t own me,’ she said at last.
What he was going to say next terrified him, but he said it anyway.
‘Yes, I do,’ he said.
She stood up abruptly, the plastic bottle in her hands. ‘Jesus, Alex. You’ve got some fucking nerve.’
‘It’s probably not even a good thing, but there it is.’
He knew that he was saying something outrageous, that you were never, ever allowed to say this, but suddenly he couldn’t understand why, when no one could go on for a single day without this, all the passionate and harmful and endless ways that people owned each other. He had no right to this, none at all, it was just there, like Canadian weather; because sometime long ago she had been falling, and he had been the one nearby.
The edges of her hair were dark with sweat, but her skin was pale, and she had that look on her face again, like someone very young who wanted something badly, and believed that asking for it would doom her.
‘You make it so bloody hard,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. You scare me to death.’
He stood up and put his arms around her, and she leaned into his chest and hung on to his shirt with her hands, the medicine bottle pressed between them. He was a contingent person, his time artificially purchased, but this was his life, the rest of his life was contained in this, and it didn’t make him happy exactly any more than breath or insulin made him happy; it was simply necessary.
‘Take the antibiotic, okay?’ he murmured.
Susie pulled slowly away from him and sat down at the table. ‘I was always going to,’ she said, breaking the security seal on the bottle and pouring the thick suspension into the cup. ‘Honest to God, I was. You just make up stories about me. You’ve got to stop that.’
‘That’s a problem,’ said Alex. ‘I’m not sure I can.’
Susie sighed, swallowed the dose and grimaced. ‘Yeah. You and my brother. And the rest of the world, it seems like.’
‘It’s what people do, I think. But I really am sorry.’ He reached out and combed a strand of her hair between his fingers, and she sighed, inclining her head in his direction.
There would be a time, some years later, when he would be sitting in a dim room drinking coffee and talking to Evelyn, of all people, trying to explain what this moment meant, and the only thing he would be able to say was that it was not by then a choice but more like a gravitational process, and all you could do about gravity was to love its force.
II
On the surface of the city, above the tunnels and sunken gardens, the temperature has risen just enough for a cold rain to begin falling. Inside a little brick church, the rain is a muffled sound through an opened door, as a woman in a violet robe raises her arms in consecration, the elements transformed. She turns to place a wafer in her daughter’s hands. In the basement, someone is painting NO WAR on an old bedsheet, aware that the war will happen regardless. Out on the street, a man covers his mouth, and watches for signs of poison gas.
A teenage girl sits in front of the laptop in her bedroom. She is no longer pointed out as the first girl who fell. Now she is waiting to see who she will become.
She looks out the window at the letters on the wooden fence, at the ravine beyond, and imagines walking out there, what she might find. She believes there will be a change, someday, not now, but someday soon.
This girl wears pink glitter lipstick and silver bangles, and rolls up her skirt when she leaves her school. She sits in class folding the corners of pages, aware of an absence.
This girl knows a few things. This girl knows more than she thinks she knows.
Fear will find its own directions. Girls will keep falling, at least for a time; the subway will stutter and stop, and the hazmat teams will come. Men will stare at blisters on their hands and think about anthrax and death. But no particular contagion lasts forever. Troops will move at borders, and other shapes will form.
It is raining outside Derek’s window, winter rain, sudden and thick, that will melt down the drifts and fill the gutters with dark streams, leaving mounds of impacted snow on the city’s lawns and the slopes of the ravines. Small ribbons of ice crack from windowsills, and reach the ground as water.
Later, the water will freeze back into ice, treacherous slicks on the pavement and shimmering film on the branches of trees. These are only the early days of winter, still. It will last a long time.