Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig

on the machine, his chest felt suddenly light, something like fear lifting away. On Sunday he took a pile of clothes to the laundromat, and then went so far as to phone Kim, who told him to fuck off, a response he found oddly cheering.
    He turned back to his computer, to the pictures of a rose-coloured circle of exposed brain tissue framed by green sheets, silver instruments smeared with blood, and he thought about the intricacy of the vessels, the exchange of fluid and the electric life of nerves.
    The person he really had to call was his ophthalmologist. He had to tell her about the floaters, he’d put it off too long already.
    He thought of Susie at the bar in the Cameron House, wearing black tights and an emerald-green sweater that came down to her knees, the sleeves falling loosely over her hands, turning away from him in the swirl of noise and music to smile at someone else; and went back to the photos, clicking ahead in the sequence, a walnutsized tumour in a metal bowl.
    Later, as he walked through Davisville Station on his way home, he saw a woman in a tailored coat wearing a surgical mask over her mouth, and on the train, which was not as full as usual, another mask on the face of a man holding a newspaper. But otherwise the journey was normal, someone eating french fries from a cardboard container, someone reading
Shopaholic Takes Manhattan
, everyone pretending not to notice the man in the mask.
    He played with his idea of the imaginary doctor, imaginary terrorist, leaving the cherished packet of chemicals under the seat. The man would wear an expensive coat. The umbrella, too, would be expensive. Had he already begun to talk to his patients, in some veiled strange form, about the attractions of death? Written for them prescriptions more powerful than they needed, or simply given them mad unworldly advice, to drink glasses of vinegar, to consume silver foil? But the man is not just mad, he does not act alone, he is part of something large. He loves this thing that he is a part of, and he believes that he loves people too, specific individual people, maybe his parents, a wife, a mistress. He desires for all of them the end that will come.
    This was a fairy tale, of sorts, Alex thought. The bad wizard. It happened to be a fairy tale that sounded true to him – or not so much true, he didn’t think it was something that was really happening in this city, but somehow credible, appropriate. The man in the mask must have a narrative of his own that he believed, other people on the subway told themselves other particular stories. The man on his street told a story about cleaning systems, and it might be a useful story, in its way.
    He got off the train at College, moving in the swaying stutter of the crowd, past tables where people in Cancer Society T-shirts were selling pizza slices. And he was thinking of her again. The ridiculous ease with which she could have moved back into the centre of his life and tossed it all up into the air like paper, the quiet safe place he had so strenuously constructed for himself.
    On College the pigeons wheeled in the upper air, seeking shelter for the night, as the streetcar pulled up to the curb, and the slanting red light of sunset caught their wings, a shimmer of brightness and shadow, and Alex felt suddenly stabbed through the heart.
    He came home and fed his cat, put on a scarf and gloves and a black wool cap and walked east, past Yonge and into Allan Gardens, where a few men were lying curled on benches under the walls of the conservatory, broken glass and torn paper around them. In the doorway of a blank concrete building, a young girl with round cheeks and a short blue skirt, orange highlights in her teased dark hair, was standing with her legs in that angled posture that meant invitation, that meant commerce; Alex lifted his camera, and then lowered it again. The girl scratched the back of her arm and shivered. But she might be older than she looked, her youth an