Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

‘Pretty much, yeah.’ She ate a forkful of rice. ‘Okay. I’m actually a sociologist. Or nearly. I’m working on my doctorate.’

‘You’re an academic ? Jesus.’

‘Come on. It could be worse.’

‘I guess. It’s not organized crime.’

‘It’s not international finance. It’s not the arms trade. Or retail sales. It’s really quite harmless, I get my doctorate and then I go and teach other people till they get their doctorates and go teach other people. It’s a little self-contained closed system, like a terrarium or something.’

‘An academic. Man. What a thought.’

‘You know, usually people just ask why I don’t have a real job at my age.’

‘I’m hardly one to be asking that,’ said Alex, and then realized that he did have a real job, had done for quite some time, though it had somehow never managed to penetrate his self-image.

He could have asked her what she’d been doing in the meantime, but it was exactly that meantime that he didn’t want to touch, how she went away and came back, the old scars. Behind his back he heard the sheer whistle of rising wind, outside the glass wall.

‘So you’re writing a thesis or something?’

‘Dissertation. Analysis of relationship networks among the homeless and underhoused.’

‘Okay, I can see that. That’s really interesting.’

‘Not so much. Not to anyone but me. Anyway, I had to kind of change the topic because my supervisor – well, never mind, it’s just one of those dissertation things.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

She bent over her plate, pushing at the remains of the rice with her fork. ‘So. Well. So there you go,’ she said, and then she looked up again and her face was cracked and vulnerable, a question in it he recognized, sore to the touch. Do I know you? Do I know you anymore? He felt something that he couldn’t name slip loose inside his chest.

‘I was worried about you, a bit,’ he said. The window rattled behind him.

She nodded slowly. ‘I was… I’m all right. It was just… ’

‘I thought probably. Probably you were okay. But I wasn’t sure.’

‘I know. I mean… What about you?’

‘I… I’m fine now.’ He looked down at his own hands, fidgeting with the cutlery, and couldn’t think for a while what should come next.

‘You know, hands are very interesting things,’ he said finally.

‘You’re still a pothead, aren’t you?’ said Susie. And this at last was something he could laugh at, unforced.

‘Really not. I’m just like this all by myself, as it turns out.’

‘That’s gotta save some money.’

‘I spend it all on tofu.’ But while he had been looking at his hands he’d also looked at his watch, and time was pressing in on him again, the handful of hours left in the evening. ‘Listen, Susie, Suzanne, I’m sorry about this, but I should go. Let me get the check?’

‘Oh. All right.’ Her face tensed slightly, a small nod as if she were accepting the blame for this. Understanding that it had been her fault.

‘I’m sorry, it’s not… I just have this thing… ’

‘You’re meeting someone?’

He wished he could say he was, it was the right excuse, free of hurt or judgement. ‘Not exactly. It’s… I need to take some photos. I mean, it’s a regular thing I do, after work I go out and… it’s a sort of project. I don’t like to – I know this sounds compulsive, but I don’t like to miss a night.’

‘In this?’ She gestured towards the window, and he turned and saw that winter had abruptly fallen, as shockingly as it did each year, the first sudden storm. Against the darkness, the wind was driving sheets of snow in a slanting diagonal blur, pedestrians slipping in their inappropriate shoes.

‘Oh, fuck,’ muttered Alex, brought up against the inevitable wall of Canadian weather.

‘Are you on a deadline?’ asked Susie.

‘No. No, it’s not an assignment, it’s a personal thing.’ He folded his arms and frowned. ‘I could do the PATH system. I’m going to have to think about the weather long-term, but right now I could do the PATH system.’

‘You really think you have to do this?’

‘I really do.’

She caught the waiter’s eye and gestured for the check. ‘I could come with you.’

‘What? You think I’m going to die underground in the blizzard?’

‘I’d just like to come. See what you’re doing. If it’s all right.’

He took the check from the waiter and reached for his wallet. No one ever came with him. It wasn’t the way he did this.

‘I guess so. If you really want to.’

They stood up on the subway, their hair beaded with snow after the short walk up Bathurst, neither of them able to accept the tight physical proximity of the narrow seats, appropriate only for close friends or complete strangers. Discarded newspapers lay scattered around the car, under the feet of dripping passengers, repeatedly and monotonously predicting millions of influenza deaths. Alex thought of telling Susie about his encounter with the girls and their poison gas, but decided against it; he was tired of the story already.

There was a wet draft of wind on the subway platform, crowds wandering up and down the stairs, but they pushed through the turn-stiles and opened the glass doors into a warm corridor with ivory-white walls that was nearly deserted, one man in a dark suit crossing a corner in the distance. The stores to the left were closed, metal grilles pulled down.

‘Isn’t this a funny time to be coming down here? I mean, there’s nothing going on here at night, is there?’ Susie unbuttoned her coat and tucked her soft red hat into her pocket.

‘Well, that’s the trick, I guess,’ said Alex, opening his camera bag. ‘I make decisions and I stick with them, it’s one of the rules. But this could work.’

‘I can see it during the day. When things are open. It’s not exactly picturesque, but retail’s part of the urban experience, I get that. But retail that’s closed for the night?’

‘Just let me see what I can do.’ They passed from one corridor into the next, walking by a man with an industrial bucket mop talking in animated French to a woman with cornrowed blonde hair and hoop earrings, and came out into a shuttered food court. ‘I like this.

The bones of the food court. Infrastructure,’ muttered Alex, moving around the kiosks, kneeling, adjusting the lens. The light was dim, but it wasn’t too dark, not so dark that he couldn’t adapt.

‘It’s interesting, the shape of things down here,’ he went on, a kind of half-conscious patter, not exactly meant to be listened to. ‘I mean, up on the surface the city’s so rectilinear, but down here it’s like this wild kind of maze. And they put up these signs…’ he stepped back to take a picture of one of the glyphic, colour-coded signs that hung from the ceiling ‘… that make no damn sense at all, these weird triangles. I wonder about it.’

‘They disorient people so they’ll feel insecure and purchase more. Try to locate themselves through merchandise.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

In the next hallway there was music from a PA system, a woman in the uniform of one of the food court restaurants talking on her cellphone. A man walking by with a red balloon on a string.

‘Let’s go up this way,’ said Alex, gesturing towards a steep elevator, and as they rode up he tipped his head back in astonishment.

‘Oh, look,’ he said. ‘Oh, this is lovely.’

They were in a long hallway, with a high ceiling of white ribs, arching in a luminous cathedral curve above the darkened space, and set into the floor were panels of light, glowing in the dim surround. Alex knelt on the floor and leaned back, holding the camera upwards, almost lying down on the tile, then moved in a quick shuffle to the side, trying to hold the glowing panels and the arch in a single shot. ‘Isn’t this lovely?’