There are girls who starve, their hearts thin and pure, dreaming of the day when they can walk invisibly through the leaves in a trance of harmlessness. To do no damage, to touch no thing.
In Kosovo, girls fall down in their classrooms with headaches and dizziness and problems drawing breath, gasping words like gas and poison. Lines of cars stream towards the hospitals, filled with half-conscious girls with racing hearts, driven in by their terrified families, and doctors hand them sedatives and vitamins because they can think of nothing else to do. On the west coast of Jordan, Palestinian girls fall down in dozens with spasms and blindness and cyanosis of the limbs, stricken by some illness that can’t be rationally diagnosed, and they are given oxygen in the hospital until they somehow get better. On assembly lines in factories in Asia, girls collapse in convulsions, one after another, moving along the lines like a chemical reaction.
Then there are girls, sometimes, who gather in groups and choose one of their own to cast out, a girl like them but faintly different. Perhaps they surround her underneath a bridge by a river and begin to hit her, and her blood falls on their clothes, and in the nicotine air there is somehow no way to stop, and perhaps when she runs away they drag her back, and when she falls in the water for the final time they do not pull her out.
In little ingrown villages around Europe, girls walk into the fields and see the Virgin Mary, who has ditched her son and gone out to travel the world, whispering secrets to them that they must tell everyone, that they must conceal forever. The Virgin Mary wears blue, and hints at revolution.
‘Tell me about your dissertation.’ He was drinking his second beer very slowly, knowing that ordering another one was out of the question.
She opened a bag of potato chips she’d brought from the bar. ‘You’ll only make comments about academics.’
‘I won’t. I promise.’ He reached over and took a chip, then made a face when he realized it was barbecue-flavoured. ‘God, how can you eat these? Sorry. I am listening.’
‘Network analysis as such is nothing new.’ She ate around the edge of a chip as she talked, then broke the centre between her teeth. ‘But it hasn’t been applied so much to these really marginal populations. People think, I guess people assume they don’t have relationships as we understand them, that they’re not … they’re somehow outside the social world. Like they don’t – you know, that there’s no one they know or care about? But they do, they have a world that’s as complex as anyone’s. Hierarchies. Networks of acquaintance. I don’t know, people they love.’ He looked at her torn nails again as her hand moved on the table. ‘I don’t know what more to tell you. I go around and interview people. Fill out questionnaires with them. I doubt that this is going to lead to anything useful at all, but at least I’m providing them with a few hours of cheap entertainment.’
‘But do you like it? Is it what you want to be doing?’
‘It is, I think. Yes.’ She ran her finger around the inside of the bag to capture the last of the salty dust, then licked it off, delicately, with the tip of her tongue. ‘To me, it seems like a good thing. I don’t know why. But I’m surprisingly happy as an academic.’
‘That’s good. It really is.’
There was something she wasn’t saying. How did he know her well enough to know that? He shouldn’t be able to tell these things, but he could.
‘Maybe it’s not so different, what we’re doing,’ she said. ‘Putting together pieces of the city.’
‘Mmmm. I don’t know if I put them together, though. I think I just … watch them.’
‘Well, that’s all right. That’s all right too.’
An hour or more after midnight, the rhythms of the city change, the last subway trains running almost empty, the night buses beginning their schematic crossings of the major corners; the streets still crowded where there are clubs and bars, and elsewhere quiet, single figures walking alone, the streetlights detailing their clothes and hair.
Before the final train set out for its run to Kipling, a man walked by the McDonald’s inside Dundas West station, his pockets filled with sweet crumbling cookies flavoured with rosewater, and stood on the platform, his face shadowed with thought. In Kensington Market, a white limousine crept silently along the narrow street like a dog tracking a scent, gliding up to a house with darkened windows, a world of illegal need.
At Spadina, the police rolled up their yellow tape, the white powder pronounced harmless though of uncertain identity, icing sugar from a spilled box of doughnuts according to one report, though this could not be confirmed. The city’s sadness left untreated.
Alex couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to leave a bar because it was closing. It had started snowing again while they were inside, and the clusters of young people coming out of the clubs up and down the street were obscured by the white blur.
‘So where are you living, anyway?’
‘Danforth and Pape,’ said Susie, pulling her red hat down over her ears.
‘Yikes. That’s a long way to go this time of night. You should’ve told me, I wouldn’t have kept you out so late.’
‘It’s okay. There’s buses.’
‘You don’t want to get a taxi?’
‘I’ll walk up to College with you. I’m fine with the College streetcar.’
The snow surrounded them, sealing them in a soft enclosure, so that anyone more than an arm’s length away was part of a separate world, the traffic hushed and smooth.
‘It’s not that I didn’t think about you, Alex,’ Susie said, her voice low. ‘All this time. I did. I hope you believe that.’
They stopped at College and Spadina, where he had to turn west, and stood on the concrete island where the streetcar would arrive, shifting from foot to foot. There was an edge of danger in the air, as if anything, absolutely anything, could happen next. He bent down so their faces were close together, his hand hovering near her shoulder – she was a tiny woman, really, though most of the time she made you think that she was taller somehow. He felt a rush of heat in his chest, a memory of desire nearly as strong as desire itself, the girl with candy-coloured hair who stood on a stool and wrote on the walls of his darkroom with a black marker, Watch Out, The World’s Behind You.
‘Call me,’ he said.
‘I will.’ She pushed back a bit of her hair, this new glossy mahogany, almost natural. ‘I’ll call tomorrow.’
‘Goodnight, Susie-Sue.’
She smiled. ‘I always used to know you were really wasted, when you called me that.’
‘I’m fairly sober right now.’
‘I know.’
There was no good way to leave, but he saw the light turn green and moved quickly, walking almost backwards and waving. ‘I’ll talk to you.’
‘Yes. Goodnight, Alex.’ Then he reached the sidewalk at the south side of College and the lights of the streetcar were arriving from the west, and he turned away, his hands in his coat pockets.
He had reached his house and was putting his key in the door when the red-haired man scuffled up the sidewalk towards him. ‘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?’
‘Yeah, I must have something.’ He rummaged in his pockets for change and found a two-dollar coin.
‘Thank you very much, sir. I wouldn’t ask, only I’m being … ’
‘Yes.