Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

It was nearly dawn, and he was halfway sober again, when he rode back along King Street and saw that he was, without any conscious intention, riding by the house where Chris and Susie lived. The light was still on in their apartment. He stopped for only a minute, one foot on the sidewalk, looking up at the window and thinking of their lives, of a deep and complex privacy that was going on without him, that he would never be able to enter.

When the bright young men released sarin on the Tokyo subway, the gas soaked into the clothes of the passengers. Many of them pulled themselves out of the subway and went to work, their pupils contracted, their breathing restricted, sarin leaking from their jackets into the office air. Others were lifted into cars and ambulances and sent to the hospital, and the nurses and doctors who treated them found their own eyesight growing dark, their own muscles weakening. This is mentioned as a risk in the literature on chemical incidents.

The girl with the braided wool bracelet who had fallen on the steps at Jarvis Collegiate sat up in her hospital cot and watched a resident walking away from her stumble suddenly, grab for the wall to support herself, and slide to the ground.

The young resident’s pupils didn’t contract. Her blood tests didn’t show the low cholinesterase that would signal sarin, or the blood acidosis of cyanide. Her white cell count was perhaps slightly elevated. Some of the others who worked on the girl said later that they felt sort of ill, not exactly sick, but not quite well.

The resident had dyed blonde hair and long thin fingers and no known allergies or medical conditions. When she tried to describe the smell she spoke at first about exhaust fumes, and then about water and metal, but finally she could only say that it was not quite like that, that it was a smell like the absence of smell. The precise smell of nothing.

Susie was doing interviews at the drop-in at a church on College – not far from his house, she told him. He knew the place, of course, a little red-brick building with a low slanted roof, but he’d never been inside. All things considered, he shouldn’t really have been surprised to arrive and find Evelyn, who seemed scarcely to have aged at all and was looking not especially priestly in jeans and an old duffel coat, coming out the side door.

‘Alex? Suzanne told me she was meeting you here. How are you?’

‘Okay,’ he said nervously. ‘Yeah. Not bad. You?’

‘I have to go to a meeting right now, I’m sorry, but everybody’s inside.’ She swung a backpack over her shoulders and climbed onto a bicycle. ‘Call Adrian sometime,’ she said, kicking off the curb. ‘He needs a peer group, nobody knows how to talk to him.’ But she disappeared into the traffic before he could think of a response.

He opened the door that he’d seen her coming out of, and walked into a small hall filled with dishevelled men and a few women, lying or sitting on mattresses, a pile of folding tables stacked against one wall. There was a TV set in the corner playing Titanic , and some of the men were watching this and drinking from styrofoam cups, others reading crumpled copies of the Sun or Employment News. One man was sketching tiny painstaking patterns into an old notebook. Pinned on the wall was a bad drawing of Archbishop Romero, and pieces of cardboard with phrases written on them in capital letters. PLEASE SPEAK SLOWLY. I AM LEARNING ENGLISH. CAN YOU HELP ME FIND THIS ADDRESS? There was a strong smell of unwashed bodies in the air, cut through with overbrewed coffee.

Adrian was sitting cross-legged on one of the mattresses, talking gently to a man with a twisted, tearful face and unpredictably moving hands; in the kitchen, a woman who looked roughly a hundred years old was slowly cleaning a pile of roasting pans, and a frizzy-haired girl, probably the Pereira-Sinclair child, was sitting on a stool frowning over a copy of Harriet the Spy. There was something bizarrely domestic about the whole scene, Alex thought. Dinner with friends in Bedlam.

Susie was in a corner of the room, sitting on a folding chair with a clipboard and talking to an old man in a baseball cap. ‘So you’d say he’s a close friend?’ he heard her asking. The man shook his head.

‘Not close so much. But I’d say reliable, when he isn’t drinking.’

Susie nodded and wrote something on her clipboard. ‘And does he know that other guy you were telling me about, that Steve guy?’ Then she noticed Alex, and gestured him over with her pencil.

‘It’s okay,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll wait.’

‘I’m nearly finished.’

The man in the baseball cap was holding on to a clear plastic cane filled with dried roses, petals of faded red and yellow and cream, packed tightly together. Nearby, a grey-haired woman was pacing in tiny wired circles, strung out, shaking, oblivious to the world – crack or crystal meth, he thought. On the TV screen, the steerage passengers on the Titanic were singing and dancing and demonstrating their working-class virtues.

‘Filtered water,’ said the man in the baseball cap. ‘That’s what I told him. You drink filtered water, the skin problems clear right up. This lady gave me one of them filters for the tap in the rooming house, but the schizophrenic guy took it off because he thought somebody was watching him through it. Mr. Sandman, he tells me. Watching him through the water filter.’ He shook his head. ‘You could write a book, darling, I’m telling you.’

Susie made a note on her clipboard. ‘So, is the lady someone we’ve talked about before?’ she asked.

‘No – no, I guess not. So she’d be another one on the chart, eh?’

‘Yeah… you know what, are you going to be up at Bloor tomorrow? Somebody’s waiting for me right now.’

‘Okay, well, thank the people here very much for the delicious meal, and I’ll see you then.’ The man tipped his baseball cap, then stood up and left the hall, leaning on his flowering cane.

‘Joseph’s quite interested in the project,’ said Susie, coming over to Alex. ‘And he’s got a social network like you wouldn’t believe. I could spend a year just mapping his contacts.’

‘Ah,’ said Alex.

‘We can go if you want. I think Adrian’s busy talking to Luis.’ She pulled the door open and waved at Adrian, who glanced briefly away from the tearful man and nodded quickly.

‘Luis gets very angry at Thomas Aquinas,’ Susie explained as they went down the steps. ‘He’s an ex-seminarian or something. He’d really rather talk to Evvy, but Adrian can handle him. Me, I just wave my hands around.’

‘What did Thomas Aquinas do to make him angry, then?’

‘I told you, it’s all beyond me. He’s just like, fucking Aquinas, I hate the stupid fuck, and I’m like, sure. You bet.’

‘Maybe they had a fight about a girl.’

They stopped at the traffic light at Augusta, just north of Kensington Market. ‘Do you want to get something to eat?’ asked Susie.

‘No, I ate at home. Just a coffee shop’s fine.’

‘We could go someplace in the Market, if you wanted. I think the Last Temptation’s still there.’

‘Oh God. Please, let’s not.’

‘Your old house is a vintage clothing boutique now,’ said Susie, pressing the button for the light. ‘But you know what? They’ve still got that crazy painting you did in the basement.’

‘They must be ill,’ said Alex, though what he wanted to ask was why she had gone to his old house, how she had ended up in the basement there anyway.

‘How come you never did more paintings?’ They crossed College Street and went into the Second Cup.

‘Because I suck. Taking photos is the only thing I’m good at.’