Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle (11 page)

Sam had always thought of himself as a pretty decent guy, and who was to say he wasn’t? While he was doing his MBA at the University of Toronto he’d been a volunteer on the Samaritans’ phone line. These days he couldn’t spare the time, but he made regular tax-free contributions to schemes for eradicating river blindness in sub-Saharan Africa and improving children’s sports facilities in the Yukon. He always wore a condom (well, not always, just when he was having sex), and he never pushed past old ladies to get on a streetcar.

The day it happened, he was coming down with a head cold. Funny how such a petty thing could make such a difference. Not that it felt petty at the time; it was a January cold, one of those brutes that makes you screw up your eyes all week and cough wetly for the rest of the month. So Sam – sensibly enough – had left the office before rush hour in order to get home and take care of himself. He had his Windsmoor coat buttoned up to the throat as he hurried towards the subway station. His friends seemed to live in down jackets all winter, but Sam refused to abandon his dress sense so he could look like a walking duvet. Today he did keep his cashmere scarf looped over his nose and mouth, to take the ice out of the air. With a hot whiskey and something mindless like
Nip/Tuck
and an early night, he thought he could probably head this cold off at the pass.

He walked right by the first time, like everyone else. It was a common sight, these last few winters, street persons in sleeping bags lying on the hot-air vents. The first time you saw it you thought:
My god, there’s a guy lying in the middle of the sidewalk, and everyone’s walking round him like he’s invisible. How bizarre. What a sign of the times.
But you got used to it – and, to be fair, it was probably much warmer for the homeless, lying on the air vents, than if they had to tuck themselves away against the wall of a bank or a travel agency.

This particular guy near the intersection of Bloor and Bay seemed pretty much like all his peers: a crumpled bundle with eyes half closed and a not-entirely-unsatisfied expression.
Probably Native,
thought Sam,
but you should never assume.
It was only when Sam had got as far as the crossing, blowing his nose on his handkerchief with awkward leather-gloved hands, that his brain registered what his eyes must have seen. Just as sometimes by the time you ask someone to repeat themselves, you’ve realized what they’ve said. Anyway, that’s when Sam saw it in his mind’s eye, the little trickle of blood. He thought he must have imagined it.
Classic white middle-class guilt hallucinations,
he said to himself. Then he thought:
So the guy’s bleeding a little from the lip, not necessarily a big deal, I sometimes chew my lips to shreds when I’m working on a big presentation.

The lights changed but something wouldn’t let Sam cross. Instead, he clenched his jaw and waded back against the tide of commuters. He picked a place to stand, near enough to the street person to get a good look at him, but not so near that anyone would notice. Besides, if he stood too close, the guy might wake up and take offence and bite him or something. A significant percentage of them were mentally ill, Sam had read in the
Street Times,
and no wonder, considering. But there was no sign of this particular guy waking up anytime soon. The blood from his mouth had trickled all the way round and under his chin, now, like some kind of Frankenstein party makeup. He had a dirty white beard.

Sam had no idea what to do, and frankly, all he felt was irritation. Where were human feelings when you wanted them? The timing was so inappropriate. Why couldn’t this have happened on another winter afternoon, when Sam wouldn’t have had a cold and so would have been able to respond like the person he truly was?

His eyes were dripping; he thought they might freeze shut. He unfolded his handkerchief and mopped at his face. An unworthy thought occurred to him:
Why did I look round at all when I should have kept my head down and run for the subway?

There was a foul reek of spirits coming off the guy when Sam bent nearer. It occurred to him to touch the guy, but he didn’t know where. Or why, now Sam came to think of it. On a theoretical level, he knew that the rigours of life on the street would drive just about anyone to alcoholism, but he still couldn’t help finding it gross.

‘Excuse me?’ he said, sniffing loudly so his nose wouldn’t drip on the guy. ‘Sir?’ How ludicrously genteel. ‘Mister? Are you OK?’

No answer. Sam’s breath puffed out like white smoke. He made up a reply:
Sure I’m OK, mister; I love to spend my Friday nights lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from the mouth.

Sam was crouched beside the guy now. Commuters kept streaming past; nothing interrupted the flow on Bloor and Bay. They probably assumed Sam was some kind of weirdo friend of the guy on the ground, despite the Windsmoor coat – which was trailing in the gutter’s mound of dirty old snow, he noticed, snatching up the hem. Now he wasn’t upright and moving at speed, like the commuters, it was as if he’d left the world of the respectable and squatted in the mud. They’d probably think the coat was stolen. Damn them for a bunch of cold salaried bastards. It wouldn’t occur to one of them to take the time to stop and—

And what, exactly? What was Sam going to do?

His nose was streaming now, and his legs were starting to freeze into place. He almost lost his balance as he rooted for his handkerchief. He ripped one leather glove off, reared up, and blew his nose. It made the sound of a lost elephant.

Quick, quick, think. What about first aid? Shit, he should have volunteered to go on that in-house course last year. Shreds of traditional advice swam giddily through Sam’s mind. Hot sweet tea was his mother’s remedy for everything, but it would be tough to come by; the nearest stall said ESPRESSO EXPRESS. Whiskey? Hardly the thing if the guy was full of alcohol already. Put his feet higher than his head? What the fuck was that about? Sam wondered.

The guy on the ground hadn’t moved. The blood didn’t seem to be flowing at speed, exactly. It hadn’t dripped onto the pavement yet. In films, bleeding from the mouth always meant you were a goner; the trickle only took a few seconds to grow into a terrible red river.

Sam shifted from foot to foot to keep his circulation going, like a hesitant dancer at an eighties disco night. Maybe, it occurred to him with an enormous wave of relief, maybe the blood on this guy’s face was an old mark he hadn’t washed off. If you didn’t have a mirror you probably wouldn’t even know you had blood on your chin. Maybe a bit of bleeding was the natural result of drinking methanol or whatever the cocktail of choice was these days. Well, not choice; Sam didn’t mean choice, exactly.

But the thing was, how could he be sure? How was a personnel officer with no medical experience to tell if there was something seriously wrong going on here? He shouldn’t call 911 on a whim. If they sent an ambulance, it might be kept from some other part of the city where it was really needed. They got these false alarms all the time; hadn’t he seen something on City TV about it? And the homeless guy probably wouldn’t thank him for getting him dragged into the emergency room, either …

And then Sam looked at the guy on the ground, really looked for the first time; he felt a wave of nausea roll from the toes he could no longer feel, all the way to his tightening scalp. The man lay utterly still, not even shivering in the hard air that seemed liable to crystallize round them both any minute now. Sam was not repelled by the guy, exactly; what turned his stomach was the sudden thought that he himself, by some terrible knot of circumstances such as came down on successful people all the time, might someday end up lying on an air vent with people stepping round him and an overeducated ignorant prick in a Windsmoor coat standing round inventing excuses for not making the call that could save his life.

Sam reached for his cell phone, but the pocket of his coat was empty. At first he couldn’t believe it; thought he’d been robbed. Then he remembered laying it down beside his computer after lunch. Today of all days! His head was made of mucus.

He dialed 911 from the phone box at the corner. He was afraid they wouldn’t believe that it was an emergency – that they would hang up on him – so he sounded inappropriately angry, even when he was giving the address. ‘The guy looks seriously ill,’ he barked.

It hadn’t occurred to Sam to wonder what he would do once he had made the call. He hovered outside the phone box, as if waiting for another turn. In a sense, there was nothing else to do now; the proper authorities had been called in, and Sam was just a passerby again, with every right to head home to his condo and nurse his cold. But in another sense, he thought with self-righteous gloom, he was the only connection. What if the ambulance never turned up? What if the medics couldn’t see the guy on the ground because the human traffic was too thick?

A sneeze shook him like a blow from a stranger. With grudging steps he walked back to the guy on the ground, who hadn’t stirred. It occurred to Sam for the first time that the guy might be dead. How odd that would be, for such a dramatic thing not to show on a human face, except by this discreet ribbon of blood and a certain blueness about the lips. He thought maybe he should see if there was any sign of life in the guy, but he couldn’t decide which bit of dirty raincoat to lay his hand on. If he wasn’t dead, Sam should keep him warm; yes, that was definitely to be recommended. Sam stared around to see if there was a department store on the block. He could buy a blanket, or one of those rugged tartan picnic rugs. He would be willing to pay up to, say, $100, considering the seriousness of the occasion; $125, maybe, if that was what it took. But the only stores in view sold lingerie, shoes, and smoked meats. He blew his nose again.

Take off your coat,
Sam told himself grimly. He did it, wincing as the cold air slid into his armpits. He was wearing a wool-blend suit, but it wasn’t enough. This was probably a crazy idea, considering his own state of health.

He laid the Windsmoor over the man; it was stagey, like a gesture from some Shakespearean drama. No response yet. What if the warmth made the guy wake up, and Sam had to make conversation? No sign of life, nor death, either. The coat lay too far up the guy’s body, so it almost covered his head; it looked like the scene after a murder, Sam thought with a horrified inner giggle. He stooped again, took the coat by its deep hem and dragged it delicately backwards until it revealed the dirty white beard. Sam’s keys slid out of a pocket and caught in a grating; he swooped to retrieve them. Jesus, imagine if he’d lost his keys on top of everything! Then he remembered his wallet and had to walk around the guy to reach the other pocket. Passersby might think he was picking the pockets of a dead man, like a scavenger on a battlefield.

He let out a spluttering cough. He could just feel his immune system failing. This cold would probably turn into something serious, like post-viral fatigue or something. He should sit down and try some deep breathing. But where? The heating vent in front of him would be the warmest, but it would look so weird, a guy in an $800 suit squatting on the sidewalk beside a bum. But then, who did he think would be looking at him? he asked himself in miserable exasperation. And why should he care?

Sam let himself down on the curb at last. It was so cold on his buttocks, through the thin wool, it felt like he had wet himself. He stood up and kept moving, jigging on the spot. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been out in January without a winter coat. Like one of those squeegee punks who lived in layers of ragged sweaters. Was that snow, that speck in his eye, or just a cold speck of dust? He rubbed his leather-gloved hands against his cheeks. His sinuses were beginning to pulse.

Twice he heard a siren and began preparing his story – which in his head sounded like a lie – and twice it turned out to be police, zooming by. After a quarter of an hour he no longer believed in the ambulance. His shoulders were going into tremors. For a moment he envied the guy on the vent, who looked almost cozy under the Windsmoor coat. He considered borrowing it back for a few minutes, just to get his core temperature up, but he was afraid of how it would look to passersby and afraid to touch the guy again, besides.
The bum probably brought this on himself,
he thought very fast.
What goes around comes around. These people get what they deserve.

Sam knew this was madness; he must be running a fever. He blew his nose again, though his handkerchief was a wet rag.

He felt a moment of pure temptation, melting sugar in his veins. All he had to do was pick up his coat, shake it off, put it on, and walk away.

He very nearly cried.

Thirty-two minutes by his Rolex by the time the ambulance showed up. He wanted to be gruff with the paramedics, but his voice came out craven with gratitude, especially when they said no, the guy wasn’t dead. He begged them to let him climb into the ambulance after the stretcher. They seemed to think this was a sign of his concern and reluctantly agreed, but the truth of the matter was that Sam was too cold to walk. He would have got into any heated vehicle, even with a psychopathic truck driver. Also there was the matter of his coat.

At the hospital the staff didn’t tell him anything. The doors of the ward flapped shut. The last thing Sam saw was his coat, draped over the end of the trolley. It occurred to him to ask for it back, but he couldn’t think how to phrase it.

It turned out they really did call people John Doe, like in the movies. The forms were mostly blank, even after Sam and the receptionist had done their best. Sam was staggered by all the things he didn’t know about the guy and couldn’t begin to guess:
age, nationality, allergies.
He left his own name and address, as well as a little note about his coat, and set off walking to the subway. He was streaming from the eyes, the nose, the mouth, even. The dark night wrapped round him.

He knew he should feel better now. He had been a civic-minded citizen; committed what his Scout Leader had called a Good Deed for the Day; displayed what editorials termed ‘core Canadian values’. So why did he feel like shit?