Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

Decontamination , said a white figure, its voice obscured by the air filter.

The guard nodded.

What about the girls? said a figure.

Telephone the hospital , said another.

Just precautionary. That’s all. Can’t be too careful.

After the Bloor/Yonge station was cleared at both levels, the trains stopped running north up as far as Eglinton, and south to Union; the eastbound line halted at St. George and the westbound at Broadview. And at every stop along the route the people of the city spilled out, onto subway platforms, into underground walkways and shopping malls, onto the sidewalks and roads, driven upwards into the air. At Queen, as the train pulled into the station, a forty-year-old bass player with thinning red hair, dressed entirely in black leather, was saying to his companion, ‘Drummers. They’re like a different breed, man, eh? Seriously, drummers are a whole different breed.’

‘Yeah,’ said the other man, staring out the window. ‘They’re totally.’

The metallic voice of the PA system interrupted to tell them that the train was terminating, and that they should go to Queen Street to catch a bus northbound. They joined the flow from the train and up the escalator, pausing on the next level. A group of people were gathered at the wall with the map of the PATH system, that complex underground skeleton of corridors and courtyards that could lead them into the malls or the banks, the bus terminal or City Hall, outlining the shape of the downtown core in concrete and tile.

‘It’s like they’re not even the same breed as us, you know?’ said the bass player, as they stepped onto another elevator.

‘Fuckin’ A,’ said his friend.

‘Somebody must of jumped on the tracks, eh? ’Cause it happens like every day, but they don’t admit it. It’s like a public policy they don’t admit it.’

‘Fuckers.’

‘Or it could be one of those, you know, Middle East things, you know, about the war with Iran or whatever.’

‘Iraq,’ said the other man. ‘They’re gonna have a war with Iraq is where.’

‘No,’ said the bass player. ‘No, I gotta tell you, man, I’m pretty sure it’s Iran.’

They stepped out into the chilly evening, the corners of the wide streets filled, the tall glass windows of HMV reflecting the arms of people waving at the buses, pushing for space.

‘You know what, man?’ said the bass player. ‘Screw this, is what. I’m seriously going home.’

Between Broadview and Castle Frank, one train waited, poised on the bridge over the ravine. A man with a briefcase took out a tiny silver phone and sighed impatiently. ‘Yeah, the train’s stuck again… I don’t know… I don’t know…’ Beside him, a pasty-faced boy in enormous pants stared solemnly at a piece of paper on which he had written the heading RAP SONG, and carefully printed I get more head than King Kong/My style is grim and … He studied the page for a few minutes, changed grim to grem , looked at it for a while longer, and changed it back again. In the seat at right angles to the boy was a couple, probably in their sixties, their faces pouchy and collapsed. The man was very drunk, a smear of alcohol fumes in the air around him, his eyes closed in half-sleep, his head on the woman’s shoulder. She was staring ahead, not smiling, not frowning, blank and still.

Another woman looked out the window, down into the ravine, seeing a red tent half-hidden among the trees at the edge of the twisting river. She spread one hand against the window and watched the rain begin to fall, leaving tiny flaws in the water’s surface, thrumming against the sides of the tent.

Even past Spadina, the traffic seemed locked in a permanent snarl, but when Alex got onto the Bathurst streetcar it was no more crowded than usual. There were no visible effects of the subway incident, but he thought that people did know somehow, fragments and rumours; he was not even sure why he thought this, except for a slight modulation in the atmosphere, a measure of silence, glances of quiet complicity between the Portuguese housewives and the Asian teenagers. He got off the streetcar at College and walked west in the darkness, the rain stinging his face, the fabric of his pants clinging to his knees and calves.

Just past Euclid, a shape moved out of a doorway and into the pool of a streetlight. A man, a big shambling man, with matted red hair and a heavy beard, three layers of ravelling sweaters, his hands shaking, his feet crammed into a pair of women’s fur-lined boots that had split along the seams of the fake leather. ‘Excuse me, sir?’ he said, his voice soft and interrogative, surprisingly high-pitched. ‘Excuse me? I hate to trouble you, sir, but I’m being held hostage by terrorists, would you happen to have any spare change, sir?’

Alex reached into his pocket and found a two-dollar coin, dropped it into the extended hand, a pale mass of flesh, blue veins standing out. ‘Thank you so much, sir,’ said the man, retreating back into the alley. ‘I wouldn’t ask, sir, only I’m being held hostage by terrorists.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Alex.

‘But I’m on cleaning systems now. It’s a lot better since I got on cleaning systems.’

‘That’s good, that’s great. Keep it up.’

One day last month he had been walking in front of the Scott Mission, and two men were standing outside, men with bashed-up swollen faces and rheumy eyes, shouting, ‘No war! No war! Peace for the Middle East!’ He’d wanted to film them, send it to the news, grassroots political initiatives, but what happened at the Scott Mission was in a different dimension, he knew that, a borderline zone whose intersections with the world of agreed reality were tenuous at best.

His apartment was just short of Grace Street, on the third floor, up a narrow flight of stairs; when he moved in, it had been above a cluttered little store selling saucepans and floral-print dresses to middle-aged Italian women, but now the store had been replaced by a café with pine tables and rag-painted walls, and his rent had risen precipitously. It seemed odd to him that he could still afford to live here, but in fact he could – he had a good job, he was a proper adult, there shouldn’t be anything so surprising about that.

He unlocked his door and went in, shouldering off his wet coat. Queen Jane shifted vaguely on the couch and batted her tail a few times, then went back to sleep. He sat down beside her, absently stroking her grey fur and inspecting his feet for any blisters that might be forming.

He took a small fabric case from his coat pocket, opened up his glucometer, unwrapped a sterile needle and looked at his fingers to see if any of them were developing calluses; the right index looked best today, so he pierced it with the needle and squeezed a dark bubble of blood onto the test strip. The sugar count was well within his target range. He slid out a syringe and a little glass bottle of insulin and carefully drew the clear liquid into the barrel, inspecting it for air bubbles, then pulled up his shirt and pressed the needle into the skin of his abdomen. He capped and broke the syringe and went into the kitchen, dropping it into the plastic bucket that he used as a sharps container, opened a tin of lentil soup, sliced a bagel and put it into the toaster.

You would expect yourself to be more curious, he thought, when a thing like this happened. You could speculate, now and then, on just how you’d react to a genuinely important incident, but really what you did, it seemed, was to incorporate it almost instantly into the flow of daily life – the way he had gone on with his routine the day the planes flew into the buildings in New York, the way he had gone from his errand at the bank to his office at the hospital, had spent most of the day at his computer, and forgotten for minutes at a time that anything was wrong. The way you could spend the afternoon in what might perfectly well have been a poison gas attack, check your skin casually for a rash, and not bother with the radio. As long as no one you knew was hurt or sick, you were at least as interested in hearing about a girl you thought you were in love with fifteen years ago.