Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

Further south, the hazmat teams in their white gowns descended to the PATH, to a dim corridor where a man crouched and trembled half-conscious against a wall, and the friends around him spoke of roses and incense. The white figures raised their instruments again into the air.

And the hill on Bayview was public and crowded now, filled with noise. Alex had been partly mistaken – it was not the ambulance but the fire engine that arrived first, the firemen clambering up with flash-lights and a first-aid kit, as if they attended to people under railway bridges every day of their lives, and for all he knew perhaps they did. He led them down and into the tent, where Susie was sitting with Derek’s head in her lap, and they moved him away from her to check his airways, do whatever other preliminary things could be done. Susie, irrelevant suddenly, crept out of the tent to stand with Alex on the hillside.

The paramedics came, and Alex was needed to help them pull the stretcher up the hill. A fireman carried Derek out from under the bridge, cradling him in his arms like a child, and lay him down on the padded surface, strapping him in for safety before they brought him, slowly, dangerously, down the steep slope to the emergency vehicles, Alex holding on to the metal side of the stretcher with his gloved hands, pushing his feet into the earth and leaning against the weight. Susie followed them, empty-handed, the tent abandoned.

They were down beside the road, standing in the blue light of the ambulance, a police car pulling up, too many things being said that he couldn’t quite grasp. Derek’s cracked lips were bleeding, or perhaps the blood was inside his mouth, it was hard to tell.

‘When blood comes out of the ears, there’s no possibility to survive,’ whispered Alex.

‘You walked here?’ asked one of the paramedics, incredulous.

Somehow it ended up being agreed that Susie and Alex would ride behind the ambulance in a police car, and he was aware that this was a deeply unusual arrangement, that they must look like a pair of orphans on the roadside, grimy and confused.

The policeman talking through his radio to the ambulance ahead of them. Crackle of static. ‘They can’t all be on emergency redirect,’ said the policeman. ‘You’re shitting me, right? All of them?’ The radio chattered again. ‘Oh, sure, that’s great. We’ll take him to Sick Kids, give ’em a laugh, eh?’

The ambulance wound up and down the streets, south and west. More static from the radio, and then they turned north again.

They pulled into the parking lot of one of the central hospitals, and Alex saw four other ambulances sitting in the bay, their lights revolving. One attendant was standing on the pavement, smoking; he threw the butt angrily to the ground and stomped on it, went to the glass door of the emergency entrance and shouted something.

The police radio crackled, and they pulled out again, heading further north.

‘Fuck this,’ said the policeman. ‘Somebody’s bound to die soon, eh? That’ll open up a space.’

Susie was looking silently out the window, biting her nails. He wanted to tell her not to put her fingers in her mouth. He searched in his bag for an alcohol swab and handed it to her. ‘You can wipe your hands with that,’ he said softly. ‘It’s kind of small, but it’s better than nothing.’ She held it in her lap and stared at it for a while before she opened the wrapping and rubbed it across her palms.

The car stopped suddenly, pulled over to the side of the road. He saw the word FEAR again, spray-painted on the wall of an alley nearby. They were somewhere above Yonge – on Avenue Road? He wasn’t quite sure. His hand was shaking a little, though he guessed that this was probably just the stress. ‘Excuse me?’ he said to the policemen in the front seat. ‘I’m about to check my blood sugar. I just wanted you to know that’s what I’m doing.’

‘Sure. Knock yourself out.’

It was okay, a little bit low, not dangerous. He would need to eat something in the next little while, but not immediately.

The radio crackled, and the car pulled out and continued north. At a red light, he saw a tall man with long greasy hair, his skin like old leather, holding cramped arthritic hands in the air and screaming, ‘Fuck OFF! Fuck OFF!’ over and over, in an ascending scale of agony. At another corner they passed two police officers bending over a woman, down on all fours on the pavement, her blonde hair covering her face, drunk or desperate or poisoned by terrorists, it all seemed much the same.

If he were going to imagine a terrorist, Alex thought, his murderous doctor or whoever, he would have to decide who this person had failed, where they had betrayed or misjudged; something terrible and public or very small, but there had to be that failure, a loss, a crack-up, a falling down. He could see how releasing poison gas on the subway might seem like a valid choice.

Not that he himself was the kind of person who released poison gas, more the kind who sat politely inhaling it, not wanting to cause a fuss.

His eyes were still sore, stinging, and after a while he closed them, and for a moment, in the darkness and the motion of the car, he thought he might sleep. The car kept travelling through the streets, then paused somewhere else, but he didn’t open his eyes.

The impossible thought that in a different world he would have a nearly teenage child, a girl falling down on the subway for all he knew. Or maybe not, maybe Chris would, maybe nothing in his life was any different than it had been the day before.

And it wouldn’t have been like that anyway, there was no reason to think that he would have been a father in anything except the most crude genetic sense. All that he could ever have given it was his weakness, his own sickness, nothing better.

They stopped finally, inevitably, at the emergency entrance of his own hospital, so close to where they had started that they might as well have sat in place for half an hour and avoided the whole journey, and he stepped from the car in a circling tide of light and darkness, Susie rushing past him towards the ambulance they had followed. But the stretcher was disappearing through the doors and down a dim corridor at the end of emergency admitting, and Alex and Susie pressed into the crowd – the moulded plastic chairs in the waiting area already full, a crying girl in one corner, people standing with styrofoam cups in their hands and bits of tissue clutched to their mouths and noses. A nurse with a clipboard led Susie towards a desk and began writing down information.

‘He had a health card,’ Alex heard Susie saying. ‘He did have a health card. But I don’t know the number.’

‘You can’t find it? We’re going to need that to admit him.’

‘It’s very complicated,’ said Susie, and put her head down on the desk.

‘Oh, now, stop that,’ said the nurse sharply. ‘We can get this sorted out. You just have to be sensible.’

A family pushed between them at the triage desk, parents supporting a wheezing girl who clutched her chest and wept, and Alex was separated from Susie and the nurse. He threaded his way across the room and stood by the wall, reaching into his bag for a granola bar, watching them assemble Derek’s story in bits and pieces, in questionnaire form. There were Christmas decorations hanging above him, cardboard Santas and holly-wreathed bells. A small boy was sitting on his mother’s lap, throwing up into a plastic bowl. Two middle-aged men in different corners of the room were clutching plastic oxygen masks to their faces. The nurse went away and looked something up on a computer, and then came back.

‘… risperidone last year,’ he heard Susie’s voice briefly, breaking out of the general clamour. ‘But he’s been off it… no, no allergies that I’m aware…’ Another man arrived, breathing hard, and then a girl with red welts on her face, hanging on to the arm of an ambulance attendant. A woman with a baby in her arms and pale clumps of sick-up clinging to her coat. Susie was standing with her elbows on the counter, her hands on her forehead.