He was not the only person who had broken away from the crowd; in front of him, while he waited at the checkout with a disposable that doubled as a coupon for a Shrek hand puppet, were several people with their arms full of what seemed to be anxiety purchases, vitamin C and ginseng tablets, plastic gloves, antibacterial handwipes. Last year when the buildings fell in New York, in the midst of the aftershock a day or two later, he’d gone into the SuperSave on Bloor and watched people hoarding, all of them apparently unaware of what they were doing – smiling, chatting, walking calmly through the aisles, and at the same time piling their carts full of toilet paper and canned tuna and bags of pasta. Commenting cheerfully on the weather to the sales clerks while stacking up boxes of cheap candles at the cash register. Because you didn’t admit to fear, not up in this country; it would be disruptive and far too personal, and not very nice for everyone around you. He used to consider this an appalling attitude, but lately he thought he was coming to see some virtue in it; the gentle restraint of people who live close together in the cold, and know that they must be patient.
He stepped out onto the seething pavement, between the concrete buttresses of the mall. People were standing at the curb waving for taxis, the line stretching down the block; in front of him at the corner they crowded together, surrounding the hot-dog vendor, covering all of the broad sidewalk and spilling into the street. A city bus arrived, running west, and was surrounded, rushed by a frantic swarm, a few of them making it inside, cramming up against the entryway until the doors groaned closed, and the bus swayed with the weight and set out slowly into the gridlock of taxis on Bloor Street. Another bus was creeping southwards towards them on Yonge – both lines were shut down, then.
He scrambled up against a buttress, bracing one leg at an angle and getting his head above the crush. It was nearly dark. He knew this camera couldn’t really handle the complex light of the swiftly falling evening, but he turned west, tried to frame a shot of the buses, then eastwards, the spire of the Anglican church black against the ink-blue sky and a smoke of charcoal cloud, the line of raised arms hailing taxis down Bloor, an echo of upward movement. Dropping down again, frustrated by the shadows, he slid towards the curb and hopped delicately out into the road, firing shots off quickly in a flurry of car horns as the lights from the stores washed over the traffic, a choppy lake surface. Then, swinging one foot back onto the sidewalk, he realized that the viewfinder was framing the narrow clever face of Adrian Pereira.
‘Hey,’ he said, lowering the camera.
‘Alex Deveney?’
‘Yeah. Adrian.’ He was still standing with one foot in the road, the traffic motionless now. He stepped back up onto the sidewalk. Adrian Pereira, observant and amused, older, his curly black hair thinner, but unmistakably himself. ‘Man, it’s been about a million years.’
‘Give or take.’ Adrian pushed a small pair of wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose. ‘So I hear we’ve had an airborne toxic event.’
‘That’s from a book, right?’
‘Also latterly from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s multivalent.’
‘I was there, actually. I mean, I think I was. I was right by these girls who were fainting, anyway, if that’s what started all this.’
‘Oh yeah? So you’re, like, laden with anthrax spores?’
‘That’s what I figure.’ He wondered if he was handling this properly. If he should say more, or less, shake hands perhaps, or apologize for something. Or say something about those times, when they were young and anxious and the world was wide open. A quick sense memory of smoke and music flickered over him.
‘Seriously, though,’ Adrian looked around, ‘I heard there was a gas on the train. A chemical leak, maybe?’
Alex pushed the disposable camera into his pocket. ‘Honestly, I don’t think so. It just, it didn’t look like that to me. It was a weird set of symptoms, it didn’t look like anything that made sense. And I was right there, it’s not like I’m dropping on the pavement.’ He looked at his wrists. ‘I keep thinking I’m getting a rash, but it’s just a nervous twitch.’
‘You should talk to one of those guys,’ said Adrian, waving his arm at the three ambulances which had now stationed themselves at the corner.
‘I’m not attached to spending a whole night in the hospital so they can tell me I’m fine. I figure I’m being a good citizen by saving them the trouble.’
‘If you say so.’
They wove through the seething stationary traffic, crossing from the northeast corner to the northwest. Alex supposed that he was deciding to walk home; where Adrian was going, he didn’t know.
Adrian pulled his jacket around himself. ‘Do you still see anyone from the paper?’
‘Me? No.’ Alex bent forward under a gust of wind, the sky fully dark now. ‘I’m right out of touch with the world. Are you still playing?’
‘Oh, you know.’ Adrian shrugged. ‘Now and then. Here and there. Mostly teaching guitar to little kiddies, actually. I feel they should have the opportunity to waste their lives in turn.’
‘Hmm.’ Alex saw a mass of people at the next corner, pouring out from the Bay station, waving at the bus as it rocked perilously through the stream of stalled cars. Behind them, the imploring wail of the ambulances.
‘Perhaps you’ve been infected with smallpox,’ suggested Adrian.
‘Yes, very likely. Or maybe the plague. Plague would be good.’
‘I’d take some Tylenol if I were you.’
One of the ambulances had forced itself through the traffic, its blue light splashing against the glass walls of the Gap.
‘I see Suzanne now and then,’ said Adrian.
‘Suzanne.’ No one called her that, back then. Except maybe Alex.
‘Susie-Paul.’
He kept his voice casual, he thought. ‘She’s back in Toronto?’
‘Did she leave?’ Alex stopped walking and stared at Adrian, who put a hand to his forehead. ‘I’m sorry, Alex. Of course she did, I forgot. But yeah, she’s been back a long time. She was wondering if you were still around, actually.’
‘Well, obviously I’m still around. I mean, people can look in the phone book if they’re so damn curious.’
‘I guess that’s true. Nobody thinks of the phone book nowadays, do they? It’s like, that’s a land-based life form, we’ve moved on.’
‘Well. I’m in the phone book, as it happens. Lumbering towards Armageddon.’
‘Yeah, okay, ’cause she might want to know that.’
‘It’s not a question of knowing, is it, it’s like, you open up the book and see it or not. I mean, if you want to know, it’s not like it’s an actual difficulty.’
‘Yeah, okay.’ He nodded towards the corner. ‘I have to go north here.’
‘Oh, well, okay.’ Alex shifted from foot to foot, wondering if he should ask for a phone number, if that would seem too demanding.
‘Good to see you and all.’
‘You too, Alex. Who knows, maybe I’ll see you the next time they poison the subway.’
Adrian