Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

The smoke divided, inside the warehouse, and revealed the signs on the walls, on the yellow barrels, the chemical hazard signals.

Bioterrorism , said someone, standing a street away. That’s what I heard.

I don’t think so

, said somebody else.

I’m just telling you. That’s what they say.

Coming back inside from hours of cold was more than a shock; it was an unpredictable series of pains as Alex hung up his coat and sat down on the sofa in his apartment, a swelling ache at the back of his sinuses, fingers and ears burning, lightning darts of pain through clenched muscles, even the cuts on his scalp beginning to throb again as blood flooded the extremities of his body. Jane pulled herself heavily up into his lap as the shimmery waves of hurt subsided, and he shivered and held on to her gentle mammal warmth. Reached over to turn on the radio, the mildly eccentric music of the early morning, avoiding any stations where they might break in with news.

When he had stopped shivering, he checked his blood sugar, worked out the dosage he’d need to balance it this time, and decided to make himself a bowl of porridge and a pot of tea with cream, invalid food, soft and soothing. He sat on the couch watching the golden swirls of melting butter through the oatmeal, the thick caramel lumps of brown sugar, and then slept for a little while, Queen Jane on the bed draped over his legs. When he woke up, he drank a cup of black coffee and thought that, after all, this might be a good time to visit Adrian.

He was uncertain what went on in churches on Saturday afternoons, and was afraid he might interrupt something or walk in on a service, but when he opened the side door to the hall, all he found was a small group of people sitting on the floor in sweatshirts and tights, reading from bound scripts.

‘But in what other way can we exist, in this consumer society?’ recited one of them.

‘No!’ cried someone else. ‘I don’t accept this solution to our crisis!’ A man with a thin red ponytail looked up at Alex. ‘Excuse me? We’re rehearsing here?’

‘I was looking for Adrian Pereira,’ said Alex. The man nodded his head towards the back of the room.

‘Through that way,’ he said. Alex stepped carefully past the circle of performers and down a narrow hallway. There were doors leading in several directions, but he could hear the faint sound of a guitar coming from one of them, so he opened it and found himself in the church proper. It was dark; the first thing he made out was a wooden altar at the front, with a stained-glass window, the spiky outlines of figures he couldn’t recognize. A circle of empty chairs, and in a far corner, by himself, Adrian playing a guitar and singing very quietly.

His voice had lost a bit of its upper register maybe, but it was still clear and oddly weightless. A voice that it was never really possible to sell, not a successful voice. He wasn’t singing one of his own songs, and he wasn’t singing a hymn either, though Alex briefly thought he was, and was made nervous by that; it was just one of those old odd floating songs about cryptic love.

Build me a castle

Forty feet high,

So I can see him

As he rides by.

sang Adrian, who did sometimes sing songs meant for women’s voices without bothering to change the pronouns.

As he rides by, love,

As he rides by.

So I can see him

As he rides by.

Alex sat down in a chair, trying not to make any noise, but Adrian noticed him, of course, lifted his head from the guitar and stopped singing.

‘Well. Hi there.’

‘Hi,’ said Alex.

‘Waiting for someone?’

‘No. Just hanging out.’

Adrian nodded and put the guitar down into its case. ‘Okay.’ He snapped the case closed and seemed to be thinking for a moment.

‘You want to see our miraculous lightbulb?’ he said at last. ‘It’s been burning for more than eighty years without ever being replaced. The angry little old lady wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury about it.’

‘Did he come and see it?’

‘He never wrote back. I think she was pleased, it gave her something else to be mad at. “There’s no excuse for this! Doesn’t he open his mail ?”’ Adrian stood up and led Alex over to a niche in the wall that held a baptismal font and a small light with a red glass shade. ‘Now, you understand I can’t personally verify that it’s been burning for eighty years. All I know is that we haven’t replaced it in the two years we’ve been here. But I’m firmly told that it’s been the same lightbulb as far back as the oldest person in the parish can remember.’

‘Awesome,’ said Alex.

Adrian looked at his watch. ‘Well. I’ve got a kid coming in for a guitar lesson in a little while. But I could make some coffee if you want.’

They went into the little kitchen off the church hall, the actors throwing them suspicious looks. ‘It’s not just you, James,’ one of them was reading solemnly. ‘We men have to tackle our sexism as a group! And we’ll do it as a group!’

‘There’s an idea,’ said Adrian, pushing the kitchen door closed. ‘We could do that.’

‘Is two men enough of a group?’

‘I’ve never been part of a bigger one.’

‘I’m not sure I’m up to heavy-duty tackling, though.’

‘Oh well. Another great opportunity lost.’ Adrian reached up into the cupboard. ‘Is instant okay? ’Cause if not there’s, well, nothing actually. Maybe a teabag.’

‘Instant’s fine. By the way, your cupboards are full of herbal shampoo.’

‘I know. Crazy Larry’s been dumping his hot goods on us again.’

‘Is this a routine thing with churches? Receiving stolen goods?’

‘Pretty much, yeah. I mean, the general public would be surprised.’ Adrian set a kettle onto the burner. ‘So, there’s a fire burning at a warehouse out in Scarborough,’ he added. ‘They were talking on the radio about evacuating people. Chemical fumes. There’s a theory it was set on purpose.’

‘By who?’ asked Alex.

‘The Mad Poisoner, I guess. He’ll be dropping acid in the reservoirs next. Do we have reservoirs? I’m not sure.’

‘We have Lake Ontario.’

‘Yeah. That’d kind of dilute it, I suppose. When you were a kid, did you get those scenarios about the Russians putting LSD in the water supply?’

‘Not that I can remember,’ said Alex.

‘Okay. Maybe I just had weird parents. Anyway, the thing about the Scarborough fire, everyone in Scarborough is just sitting in their houses waiting to be told what to do. We don’t have much of a gift for chaos.’ A twist of steam rose up from the kettle, and he poured the water over coffee crystals in two white mugs. ‘I don’t think people are as scared of LSD these days,’ he went on. ‘So it’d have to be something else in the water. PCP, would that scare people?’

‘No,’ said Alex, taking one of the mugs. ‘Chemical warfare stuff. Or maybe disease. Ebola. Smallpox.’ The imaginary doctor, pouring a test tube of cloudy liquid into a vat at the R. C. Harris Filtration Plant. Putting a match to a pile of rags in a suburban warehouse. Thinking of love.

Adrian poured sugar into his coffee from a tall glass dispenser on the counter, and stirred it again, hiking himself up onto one of the counters. ‘That’s true. It’s an infection-based paradigm.’

‘You like the word paradigm, don’t you?’

‘I like that it’s gone out of fashion. Slightly obsolescent terminology is my deal.’ He blew on his coffee. ‘I could say they’re just worried about nothing, but maybe that’s the thing precisely. Nothing can be extremely disturbing.’