Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

“Yeah, well, I have one more question,” Will said with a throb of mounting courage, turning his feet to bolt for the door. “If you were so busy helping Marcus, why did I find your fingerpri—” and it was then Will heard the dull scrape of metal behind him.

At the subway station, she canted the stroller and wheelied her son onto the escalator, holding him prone as they descended. He frowned and threw the worlds of his eyes wide, thoroughly baffled by her upside-downness.

They emerged onto the grimy, gum-spackled tile of the platform. Always tile! she mused playfully, must public transit take place in one enormous bathroom? As though all the tunnels were slated to someday be flushed?

She and Will awaited their train, the air close and thick, her son babbling fragments only she could piece together, most related to food and the construction scene they’d witnessed earlier that day: a section of pavement torn out, exposing the multifarious cables and pipes beneath, densely packed as a wrist. Workers had cut into the pavement with a tremendous saw, a blade the size of a café table, throwing a rooster tail of sparks into the tepid morning air. It was a spectacle of noise and destruction no boy could resist, so she’d held him up to watch over the fence. When the sawing ceased, leaving his eyes braziers of wonder, aflame with the knowledge that, like wood, pavement could be sawn, she resisted a gushy urge to crush him in her arms, to feel him squirm but hold him fast.

Now in the cool of the tunnel, she could feel the lick of perspiration at her neck’s nape. It had been a long day of walking, of submission to the pedestrian rapids, to the dueling scent of exhaust and hot dog cart — how long would these smells last if either were outlawed? A year? More? She’d once heard the street scene called a ballet, but she disagreed. The president of some arts foundation had once mailed Arthur tickets, but Diane fell dead asleep, only to be poked awake by the pin of her thrift store brooch. “No one ever falls in the ballet,” she’d said afterwards, one of her famous remarks.

But is there a greater, more sustaining joy than walking in a city? She could wring all that she needed from the sight of men shaking hands, the cooperative swerving of cars, the incredible garbage arrayed curbside for collection. What a thrill it was to move through it all, unharmed, like sipping tea in the splayed jaws of a lion, then stretching out and napping there, waking only to linger in the lion’s warm breath for another minute.

She’d imagined strangers as houseguests to introduce to her son, adoring the combination of indifference and tenderness commingling in their faces: a man with a thudding radio perched upon his shoulder like a parrot; phalanxes of businesswomen in imposing shoulder pads and high, fortified hair; a man in red leather pants and futuristic shades like the human version of a sports car; another man rummaging through the trash with a baseball mitt. Even the ugliness was important, the seediness, the homeless, the filth — it needed to be acknowledged, even to children, so they didn’t grow into princes. If she wasn’t with Will and she’d had her Bolex, there wasn’t a single part of it she wouldn’t have loved to capture.

A day of ticked-off errands: produce shopping in the thick compost funk of Kensington Market, the post office to forward Arthur’s mail to his latest PO box in Milan, and a visit to her lawyer. To avoid conflict of interest she’d found her own counsel, a woman that their lawyer (who Arthur kept — old U of T classmates) had suggested. She took the fact that she had toys in her waiting room as both a good sign and something terribly sad.

Had she really just signed those papers? Wasn’t this business the reason they’d remained common-law? Legally, however, it was the same mess. A “trial separation”—whether this meant a tryout or a formal ceremony of judgment and sentencing she was unsure. It was terrifically amiable, almost maddeningly so. She wondered if he was paying full attention. The house was hers. As was Will, whom Arthur adored, theoretically, but had always viewed more as a side dish to the main course of himself, as he had her, she supposed. In truth, she felt nothing: neither longing nor onrush of freedom, only an emotional beigeness, as though hydroplaning on the surface of her life, something close to those reckless months after Charlie died. But she expected life without Arthur would closely resemble life with Arthur, who was either at his drafting table or attending the architectural conferences and colloquia of the world.

Finally the train arrived, and she wheeled a now-napping Will into position. Bodies pushed to line the tracks. All these people, she thought, as the train stormed past their noses, so content to stand inches from their deaths. When the doors parted, casually, with no warning, like the tiniest snag on the otherwise flawless surface of her confidence, she realized that she might be somewhat afraid to step onto this particular car. With this thought a knuckle of fear slipped into her throat, unswallowable.

She chuckled. Afraid the doors might pinch her behind? Of going the wrong direction — as she and Arthur so often had, rapt in the conversation of their early days? Was this feeling even real? She’d ridden hundreds, thousands, of subway cars — though she’d never loved the black rushing of tunnels, she’d always endured them, cheerfully even.

Yet her heart insisted on racing, like an oil-doused bird flapping for its life in her chest. Other sensations, too, unmistakable as neon: a dull pain throughout, a soreness to her blood, a twisting in her gut, stardust in her fingertips. It would pass, a mere miscalculation of an errant brain that found danger where there was none, that saw a lion instead of the lamb before her.

People pushed past as she breathed hard and fought to reset herself. She needed only to regain the mental ground on which she’d stood a moment before, only one step back, a gathering of balance, but the fear — it was fear, she admitted now — would not abate.

She refocused her eyes, saw the car still split before her like an offering. A chime sounded. The doors jumped shut and the train dragged itself away. She laughed, more for those she imagined watching, then glanced around the empty platform. Everyone had done what she couldn’t. She must look lost, or more probably insane, as if she’d remembered her pressing appointment with God in the other direction.

She drew Will away from the tracks. Passengers arrived clueless of how narrowly they’d missed a train. She took a long breath and decided she would simply make herself, through sheer mental force, board the next train, and the inevitability of this comforted her. Soon her heart slowed. Tingling ceased.

She waited with a bullied, yet sturdy, calm. A warm breeze emitted from the tunnel, carrying with it the fragrant innards of the city. Wheel grease had affixed itself to everything down near the tracks, leaving all the mechanics and gadgets a flat black, like the backdrops of those experimental theaters Arthur loved. Only the tracks themselves were clean and silver-smooth, like the palms of hands.

She was composed now, solid even, and her foundation — all she’d done, the dangers she’d braved, places she’d traveled — had returned beneath her. Maybe it was the sight of the steel subway tracks, but suddenly she was a girl looking on the grain cars from the workhouse of the elevator in Thunder Bay, sitting like notes on a musical staff of steel far below. It was those same tracks that brought the cars that both her father and Charlie unloaded. Their weight that broke the cable that swept her twin brother from the world like crumbs from a table — oh, she wished a train would arrive this instant! If the doors opened before her now, she could surely step in and leave all this nonsense behind. This was but a tiny blockage in the flow of her day. The only mercy was that no one would ever know it happened.