into the flow of daily life – the way he had gone on with his routine the day the planes flew into the buildings in New York, the way he had gone from his errand at the bank to his office at the hospital, had spent most of the day at his computer, and forgotten for minutes at a time that anything was wrong. The way you could spend the afternoon in what might perfectly well have been a poison gas attack, check your skin casually for a rash, and not bother with the radio. As long as no one you knew was hurt or sick, you were at least as interested in hearing about a girl you thought you were in love with fifteen years ago.
He wondered if she still called herself Susie-Paul. Probably not. It sounded like she was using Suzanne now. Suzanne Paulina Rae.
He chewed on the bagel and the sharp crumbling cheddar, mopping up the insulin before his blood sugar dropped too low, the intricate dance of chemical balance that he could never ignore, never leave to run automatically as most people did.
There was a photograph he sometimes came across, loose among his files, not properly stored and catalogued like the others because it wasn’t one he’d taken himself. A loose colour print of a dozen people, arranged against the wall of the newspaper office, all of them in their twenties, clear-eyed, effortlessly beautiful. Susie-Paul and Chris were well into the final disintegration of their relationship by then, the paper nearly as far along the road to its own collapse, and the people in the photograph were each in their various ways tense, unhappy, embarrassed. Adrian, who was by no stretch of the imagination a member of staff, had been installed on the sagging couch between Susie and Chris as a kind of human Green Line; he was frowning and adjusting his glasses, one sneakered foot curled up on the cushion beside him. Chris, in a heavy sweater and corduroys, faced the camera down, his face hurt and determined under a forced smile. Susie was looking away, apparently speaking to someone. She was wearing a little flowered sundress over a pair of jeans, and a torn brown leather bomber jacket; her hair, in a feathery bob, was dyed a startling pink, the camera emphasizing her large dark eyes.
Looking out of the frame, he thought. As if there were someone beyond the picture who had a claim on her attention, more than any of the people around her. It had always been that way.
And far over to the other side was Alex, the rarely photographed photographer, a slender young man in black jeans and a black cotton shirt, staring down at the floor, long sand-coloured hair falling over his face like a screen. Adrian probably assumed that Alex and Susie-Paul had been sleeping together when the photo was taken; a number of people believed this, it was one of the generally accepted reasons for Chris and Susie’s rather noisy and public breakup and the subsequent failure of the paper. Alex couldn’t remember now who had taken that picture – it didn’t look like a professional shot – but whoever it was, they or the camera had been more perceptive, had understood that Alex’s real position was then, as ever, at the margin, a half-observed watcher of the greater dramas.
I don’t know, said the girl, lying on a cot in the hospital, her legs covered with a sheet. I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I don’t know.
They had been doing nothing, her friends said, talking to the doctors in the hallway. They went to Starbucks. They walked in the park. They got on the subway and then she said she was sick, and they thought maybe there was a funny smell, and she said yes, there was this rose kind of smell, but she was too sick to tell them much, and then the other one fell down as well, and they could all smell it now, and somebody ought to do something because it totally wasn’t right.
The white figures bent to the floor of the subway car, their heads lowered, their eyes intent behind the masks. They searched for traces of liquid or powder, greasy smears; they collected old newspapers and food wrappers and sealed them into plastic containers. The instruments registered no danger. The tests they could perform in the small metal space of the car told them of nothing, of absence. They would take their sealed containers to a secure lab for further testing. The girls in the hospital watched their blood flow into tubes that would be carried to another specialized facility, but the blood would say the same thing, it would say that it could tell them nothing.
The rain was turning into a light icy snowfall now – not too bad, not impossible weather to work in. For a minute Alex leaned back against the wall, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness before he walked to the streetcar stop.
He did not admit to urgency. He did not admit to himself that missing even a single night bothered him, that this was becoming compulsive. He had always worked on his own projects in his free time, legitimate creative projects that were exhibited and published here and there, and he would not grant that he was behaving differently now.
He took his Nikon with him, and a shoulder bag with lenses and rolls of film. The digital technology was getting very good, he could see why a lot of people had made the shift, but he still preferred film for his own work, still liked the darkroom process, the smell of chemicals and craftwork on his hands. The Nikon was his standard personal camera. There was also the old Leica, but that was special – it was quirky, felt somehow intimate and tactile. There was a particular kind of photography that needed the Leica; he didn’t use it very often.
He had always done this. Maybe not every night. It was true that he spent more time on it now. He’d broken up a while ago with Kim, a graphic designer he’d been seeing in a rather desultory fashion anyway. Sometimes the people in the imaging and computer departments of the hospital went out together, but missing these occasions seemed like no great loss.
Instead he wandered – down to the junkies and evangelists of Regent Park, or up the silent undulating hills of Rosedale, taking pictures by the pale light laid down from the windows of the mansions. Through dangerous highway underpasses to the lake, slick shimmering water rasping on the shores by deserted factories. To the bus station, the railway station, the suburban malls where his footsteps echoed by shuttered stores in the evening.
Tonight, perhaps because he’d been thinking about Susie-Paul and the paper, he went only as far as the university, got off the streetcar at St. George and started walking north. It seemed surprisingly quiet, the broad pavements almost empty. Maybe the students left the campus in the evenings. Or maybe students these days didn’t go out, maybe they stayed in their rooms and read books about management techniques – but he was showing his age, one of those old people who no longer complained that students were too wild, but that they were too good, they ate right and married young.
Susie had been his grand passion, he supposed. The phrase amused him. A grand passion. Everybody needed one. Not the most serious relationship necessarily, or the most real – that was surely Amy, who had lived with him, who he might almost have married – but the one that burned you out, broke you to pieces for a while. At some point in your life before you were thirty, you needed to be able to listen to ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ and cry real tears.
Outside the Robarts Library, he took a picture of a nervous girl buying french fries from a cart, then stepped back and shot a series of faint human figures, hurrying under the brutalist concrete shoulders of the massive building, blurred by the tall lights and the faint haze of snow. The wind whipped his scarf across his face as he walked up the broad curve of the stairway. He pushed open the glass door and went into the library’s forced-air warmth. He was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to take pictures here, but he usually managed a few, inconspicuously. A row of students awkwardly curled up asleep in the chairs; an elderly man in rubber boots, puddles around his feet, reading one magazine after another.
He left the library and kept walking, east past the darkness in Queen’s Park, statues and whispering men among the trees, then the cheap bright flare of Yonge Street, ADULT DANCERS and VIdEOS HAfL-PRiC, the neon signs reflecting in nearby windows like flame.
The white figures rose up from the station, the air judged innocent, uncontaminated, to the extent that the instruments could detect.
This is the nature of safety in the measured world – you can be certain of the presence of danger, but you can never guarantee its absence. No measurement quite trusts itself down to zero, down to absolute lack. All that the dials and lights and delicate reactions can tell you is that the instruments recognize no peril. You can be reassured by this, or not, as you choose.
It was later on