‘How can you be sure of that?’
‘Because we found no significant abnormalities.’
‘So what kind of abnormalities did you find?’
We are not at home in the measured world. We would prefer our safety to be an unmeasurable absolute. Not an approximation. Not the mere knowledge that on this particular day we, unlike others, did not die, and that, if we are lucky, there is no specific reason to assume we will die tomorrow.
Finally Alex was undone by simple curiosity, as he had known he would be. But he put it off for a while, going to work on Thursday and almost forgetting her call, coming home and spending the evening in the darkroom he had rigged up in his apartment, printing a stack of contact sheets. On Friday morning he knew that he would phone her, but he didn’t know what her schedule was. Calling her during the day seemed safer; if she had left only one number, it must be her home, and she probably wouldn’t be there in the middle of the day.
Late in the morning he dialled up his personal voice-mail box from the phone in his office and copied down her number. Then he went out into the hallway and got a cup of coffee and drank it, came back and looked at a few more files on his computer. The number was nondescript and revealed little about her location. Probably somewhere in the east end.
At lunchtime he went down to the cafeteria in the lobby and bought a sandwich and a bottle of juice, and then, as if it had only just occurred to him, went across to one of the pay phones. Her number rang three times without an answer, and he thought that he would get her voice mail, and he could just hang up. At the beginning of the fourth ring he began to relax, and then the ring stopped and there was a live voice saying hello on the other end.
‘Susie-Paul?’ he said quietly.
‘Alex,’ she said. ‘I was starting to think I’d called the wrong number.’
‘No. No, that was me, I’ve been busy. Sorry.’
‘Adrian said he’d run into you. It made me think I should … ’ her voice trailed off.
‘Yes. Well.’ He tried to think of something to say aside from it’s been a long time, which was self-evident, or it’s good to hear from you, which wasn’t entirely true.
‘Are you … you know, I’d like to see you. Could we meet for coffee sometime, or … ’
He thought, let’s get it over with. ‘I’m free for a little while tonight.’
‘Oh. Okay, let me … okay. Tonight’s fine.’
‘We could have dinner. But there’s things I need to do later.’
‘Sure. Is, is seven good for you?’
‘Yeah, I’m, I live around Little Italy, so … ’
‘We could go to Sneaky Dee’s,’ said Susie.
‘Aw, no,’ he said, smiling despite himself. ‘I’m too old to go in there. The young people would laugh at me. Really, I’m, like, I’m really old these days.’
‘Well, don’t say this to me, Alex. What about that place, the Thai place at Bloor and Bathurst?’
‘That’s not a useful description.’
‘You know the one. The place that used to be the place that had the Caesar salad?’
‘Oh yeah. The Royal Whatever.’
They had been to the place with the Caesar salad, he remembered now. Remembered riding his bicycle home in the middle of the night, his eyes stinging, shaky and confused. One night like all the others.
‘They have this Buddha that lights up.’
‘Well, you know. The Buddha’s like that. Can you win little plastic prizes from him?’
‘I’m afraid not. Sorry to disappoint you.’
‘Well, I guess you can’t have everything.’
‘I’ll see you there?’
‘Yeah. I’ll see you. Cool.’
He hung up the phone and turned around to face the lobby, shaking his head. ‘Alex, man,’ he said to the air, ‘do you have a clue what you’re doing here?’
I
After one girl has fallen, the rest are explicable; they have a template, a precedent. But before that, it is harder to understand. At the beginning of this problem, then, is a single girl, the first girl to fall.
She shouldn’t have been a mystery, not even a question, this shining privileged girl with glossy hair, bright enough, well-meaning; this girl surrounded all her life with the expectation of clarity and goodness, who had collected tins of soup for the food bank, had given a talk in the school assembly about looking for the best in everyone, who had signed up to tutor an underprivileged child in math.
She had fears, of course she did, the normal kinds of fears. They read newspapers for their current affairs class, and she knew something about what went on in the world. She had dreamed for a while of the towers in New York. She hadn’t seen, on the television coverage, the people who fell or leapt from the windows, but it was all they had talked about at school, a literal incarnation of that childhood game, sitting around a flashlight at a sleepover trying to imagine whether you would rather die from burning or jumping. She knew that one war was already happening, and there might be another coming, wars in distant countries but somehow close. She drew peace signs on her notebooks, picked up flyers from leafletters by the Eaton Centre, and worried vaguely, the details unclear.
But she would not say that she fell because of this. Her account was simple – she smelled a smell like roses, then she started to feel dizzy and sick, as if she had been poisoned, and began to vomit, and didn’t feel better until she was carried into the open air on the street. She hadn’t been ill before that, she didn’t have a cold or an upset stomach, she was a healthy girl. She didn’t know about the panics on the London Underground, the rumours of cyanide. She hadn’t read the stories about what happened in Tokyo in 1995, when a group of elite sons and disaffected mathematicians decided to kick-start the apocalypse; never saw the pictures of people staggering out of the subway exits, clawing at their eyes.
So why would she imagine such a thing? Why would anyone?
The first girl who fell, on the day it began.
She had come out of school with her friends, in her kilt and tie and red wool jacket, her thigh still feeling intangibly damp where the geography teacher had put his hand on it after class.
‘Sid the Squid,’ snorted Lauren as they walked down the steps.
‘God, he’s so gross. He’s just made of gross. And his wife is a hog and a half, seriously, I mean, she weighs like a thousand pounds.’
‘She totally could sink the Titanic with her ass. I’m not kidding,’ said Tasha.
The strangeness of adults, their clenched little needs.
‘Yeah, can you imagine them in bed?’ said Lauren. ‘Oh, oh, darling, argh, I can’t breathe!’
She hated her thighs anyway, they were rounded and fat, swelling against the hard chair.
‘He’s repellent,’ said Lauren. ‘Hey, you know what, you know the Starbucks at Yonge and St. Clair is giving away free mochaccinos?’
‘No way,’ said the girl, taking a tube of pink glitter lipstick from her backpack and opening her mouth slightly to apply it. She wouldn’t stay after class anymore, not without Lauren, not without somebody. ‘No way they are.’
‘Yeah, because they had a sign in the window. But only till four.’
‘I