‘Did you hear about the guy who found the biggest prime number in the world?’ he asked the girl sitting next to him.
‘Did he go insane or what?’
‘No, he did not go insane, Sharon, why would he go insane? He just discovered the biggest prime number. It was, like, huge.’
‘I just thought. Like the guy in the movie.’
‘He was not like the guy in the movie, okay?’
‘Yeah, okay, so he found the biggest prime number, what did he do with it?’
‘Oh, like he had to do anything.’
‘Well, you’d just think. What good is it if you don’t do anything with it? And are you going to carry that box with you all afternoon?’
‘I’m gonna carry it forever. You can’t let evil run around unguarded.’
‘You’re such a freak.’
‘Yeah. I try.’ He moved the box so that the sign could be more easily read by people passing the table, and took another bite of hamburger.
Alex left the OR at lunchtime, and paused to check his blood sugar and inject his afternoon insulin before he went into his studio, checking the list of ambulatory patients he’d been assigned. A few hours later a girl came in, a last-minute addition to the list – a pale teenager, strawberry blonde, in tight jeans and a powder-blue T-shirt, carrying her coat and sweater and flanked by a nurse and a woman in business clothes, presumably her mother. He could see that her face and arms were splattered with bright red hives, but he didn’t make the connection right away.
‘Hi,’ he said, smiling, reaching his hand out to the girl and then to the mother. ‘My name’s Alex, I’m the photographer.’ He took the file from the nurse and glanced at it. ‘Okay. Looks like they just want some pictures of that rash there. Could you put your coat down here, and take a seat in that chair? Thanks.’ He checked the lights and adjusted his lens. ‘I’ll take some pictures of your arms first. Could you lift up your right arm?’ He adjusted the lens, focused and clicked off a few shots. ‘You’re Christine, right?’
‘Yeah,’ muttered the girl.
‘How are you feeling today, Christine? Bit under the weather?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Left arm now? Great, thank you. What happened? Allergies?’
‘I was poisoned,’ said the girl in a sudden rush of emotion. ‘Somebody poisoned me.’
‘It was on the subway,’ said the mother, controlled anger in her voice. ‘It was just like those girls on the news. Someone’s got to do something about this.’
‘Huh.’ Alex took a step back and looked at the girl, her limp hair and red-rimmed eyes. ‘Well, let’s just get these photos for the record, and we’ll see what the doctors have to say. I’m going to do a couple of profiles and then some pictures facing me, okay? So first I need you to turn your head to the right. Perfect.’
The sleet was coming down again. Alex wrapped his scarf around his face and bent his head, walking into the wind as the frozen rain rattled on shop windows, the tiny ice pellets not melting but clustering on the sidewalk, bright and slick. The wind rose and tugged at his coat, stinging the tips of his ears, as he crossed the broad intersection towards the subway and descended into the damp cold of the tunnels. The subway car was crowded, thick heat issuing from the radiators and from the bodies that pressed against him as he stood, grasping a metal ring, drowsing standing up.
In the faint elastic time of half-sleep, he thought of the falling girls, and though he didn’t for a moment believe it, he began shaping in his mind a story, a man who stepped onto the train with a package. Let him be a tall man, and good-looking, and educated. He must be a man with some scientific training. He could be a chemist, say; but in this story he would be a doctor. The doctor steps onto the train with a package wrapped in newspaper. He carries it as tenderly as if it were a damaged child, resting it gently on his knee as he sits.
Motive was not a question that Alex in his waking dream considered in detail, but he did not think the man was acting out of anger. The man believes, at any rate, that he is acting out of something like love.
At a particular stop, the man places his package unobtrusively on the floor of the subway car, just beneath his seat. The movement is smooth and subtle. The package lies on the metal floor among shoes and dust.
At another particular stop, chosen long in advance, the man, the doctor, rises from his seat and picks up his folded umbrella. Quietly, swiftly, he stabs the package three times with the umbrella’s sharpened tip. The train comes to a halt, the doors open, and the doctor moves swiftly out the door. An invisible twine of gas curls upwards.
The doctor watches the train pull out, and contemplates the end of the world.
At College station, Alex shook himself awake and joined the flow upwards to the streetcar stop. The car that arrived from the east emptied itself onto the street, and he found a seat by the window, rubbed his face with his hands and watched the lines of stores and office buildings gliding past.
When he was climbing down from the car near his apartment, he realized that the floaters were gone. It meant nothing, really, it signified no long-term hope, but he felt some of his fatigue lifting, his body not quite so heavy. He blinked, and breathed deeply in the metallic air, and crossed the street, the end of the world held off for now.
Queen Jane dropped off the couch in a slow jump, forelegs and then back legs in separate movements, as he walked in the door; he took his boots off and picked her up, shifting her heavy purring weight against his chest as he sat on the couch and sorted his mail with one hand, smoothing her thick fur with the other. She was clearly disinclined to move again, so he stayed on the couch for a while, wondering what to make for dinner and where he should go tonight, what he would do about the increasingly nasty weather. ‘Fat old cat,’ he muttered affectionately. ‘Dumb old thing.’
He could go to Parkdale tonight maybe, ragged transitional Parkdale. Ten years ago, the place you didn’t dare go after dark. Now the hookers and the junkies stood on the steps of boutique hotels, and there were articles in the newspapers about the neighbourhood’s character and charm. That phase in the process could be something to document, though of course anything could be something to document. Wherever you went there was light, there were bodies in space.
Once Jane seemed soundly asleep, he heaved her onto the couch and stood up, heading for the kitchen. On the way, he lifted the phone and heard the rapid beeps that signalled a voice-mail message, punched in his code and listened. The person on the voice mail cleared her throat. ‘Hi, Alex.’
Her voice was crazily, confusingly familiar, but at the same time he couldn’t put an identity to it, somehow thought for a second that it was someone he’d heard on the radio. ‘It’s been a long time,’ the voice went on, ‘but it’s Suzanne, Susie. Susie Rae.’
‘We were unable to find any significant abnormalities in the blood tests performed on the young women,’ said the public health officer.
‘What does that mean, significant abnormalities?’ asked the reporters at the press conference, the stand-ins for the worried city. ‘What is an insignificant abnormality?’
‘We found no abnormalities that would be associated with the release of a toxic substance,’ said the public health officer.
‘When you say you were unable to find them, does that mean they weren’t there?’
‘It means we were unable to find them with our most sensitive tests. In practical terms, it’s as good as saying they weren’t there.’
‘But it’s not the same thing.’
‘It’s