Image 1 of 6
Image 2 of 6
Image 3 of 6
Image 4 of 6
Image 5 of 6
Image 6 of 6
Want to sample before you buy? Read on:
Caught a hundred feet downstream of the Bloor Viaduct, Lixue’s corpse is battered from buttressing up against jagged rock and river bottom. Yuehua can just make out the hollows around her eyes, her former lover’s face framed by tendrils of dark hair submerged in sluggish current. Yuehua’s breath frosts in the air as she kneels outside the circle of light, features backlit gas-lamp pale by lanterns laced along the base of Toronto’s Luminous Veil.
In the weak light from streetlamps atop the bridge, the Bloor Viaduct’s suicide barrier is a string of false crosses canted out over the valley floor. The towering barrier an answer to bodies falling swift and frequent, in numbers superseded before its construction only by the Golden Gate Bridge and Aokigahara, the Suicide Forest. The Viaduct’s gleaming, too-solid barrier casts its shadows long, phantom jumpers held fast by lines of wire and caging mesh.
But Lixue is no suicide, no jumper.
Thick snow, stark in the competing artificial light, coats Yuehua’s shoulders. Weighs her down and soaks through her flimsy clothes. She’s the only officer on the scene not in uniform. The only officer from 52 Division.
She’s not supposed to be here.
Officers from 51 mill around the two women – take photographs, make sketches, erect caution tape along the edges of the scene. Already their heavy jackets are slicked wet, black-furred collars speckled white, hat brims frosted. Their fingers ache in the whistling cold.
They barely register for her – ghosts whispering in the air. Her gaze fixed on closed eyes, a narrow face with features so mirrored that at a remove the two women might be sisters.
She doesn’t move as Lixue rolls her limp head to the side and opens her eyes to whisper: “Yuehua?”
“—Yuehua?” repeats Dagmar, those ever-cold fingers on her shoulder. Yuehua blinks; exhales a cloud of vapour. The woman in the water has not moved. Yuehua can’t recall when Dagmar arrived, but the presence of another officer from 52 – her presence – is welcome. “Who called you?”
“No one,” says Yuehua, unable to tear her eyes from how the river’s flow pulls at the tangled shroud in which Lixue is wrapped. The fingermarks on her throat gone black in the monochrome light. Yuehua’s gaze travels back upriver, following slow bends and tree-lined paths north of the Viaduct, to branches burdened by thick falls of winter white. “Heard on the scanner.”
Dagmar’s hand tightens on her shoulder. Then it’s gone, leaving only the memory of warmth. “You can’t be here. Even if it weren’t her. Go home.”
She rises from her crouch. Brushes settled snow off the creased knees of her jeans; denim already soaked through, legs pinprick-frozen beneath. Uncomfortable stares from uniformed officers roll off her back like water; they all know what she did. Word seeping like rot between departments, between divisions. Whispers in her wake wherever she walks among their number. Seething stares blistering beneath brims, fingers twitching at her presence.
She wonders that none of them have tried to remove her yet. A courtesy of shared histories, perhaps. Or an understanding that they’re all a hair’s breadth from being like her. From falling as hard and as fast as she did. As she’s still falling. But eventually that courtesy will go, and they’ll turn like foxes on a straggling rabbit. It’s inevitable as the course of the river. The course of this river. Always this river…
Yuehua’s exhaustion crashes over her like a wave. She has known grief, raw and biting, too long: it is the topography that shapes her world, broken by valleys of lust and hunger. The river, at least, does not discriminate: it devours all equally.
Dagmar waits on her, blows warm air into her hands as Yuehua considers the Don’s conspiratorial flow. Considers where along that winding course a body might quietly slide from bank to gurgling slick. Where a car or truck might park near enough to drag a body – even one as slight as Lixue’s – to the edge. Where best to roll a tangle of limbs and dead weight down the shallow inclines.
This a mirror, too. Questions fifteen years gone, from when they pulled Yuehua’s mother, Daiyu, limbs mangled among the same rocky shallows, corpse already gone to bloat, from these chattering waters.
The Luminous Veil already showing its damage then, worn and warped from the weight of too many attempted breaches. Standing again in its lee, it is as though the years that followed have been erased. As though she stands once more over Daiyu’s body, still sixteen, surrounded by officers who can offer no comfort.
Now she’s one of them.
And still she is alone.
The flow of the river in her head slows, stops, as Dagmar waits for her to finish her silent goodbyes. Until a different flow begins, unbidden: “What do I tell her family?”
“You don’t,” says Dagmar.
Yuehua turns, half expecting more, to find the tall woman shaking her head at the state of Yuehua’s half-dress and her flimsy clothes soaked through with snowmelt. She sees only skin and shell, gaze not boring down to hurts and wounds marrow-deep. Those days gone. Yuehua would still tear her skin from its mooring, bare everything for her, if she asked.
But there’s too long between them. Too many lovers, long-dead or lost, in this place.
“Do you want someone to drive you?”
She shakes her head. Regrets, in that moment, the distance they have fashioned between them, etched in cartographies of flesh; regrets, in that moment, that she chose to stay with Lixue. Lixue who now lies swallowed by the river. Regrets that Dagmar chose her wife over her; that they could not… And here words fail, because she still cannot articulate what she wanted – wants – from her. She maps anew the lines of Dagmar’s face; sees the country of her filtered through the storm slinging quiet haze and blur around them; the stark white of her as pale as the drifts in which they stand, as washed out as the pinprick stars barely visible through squall and smog in the wine-dark sky under which they linger.
“I’m fine.” The words slam down between them in yet another wall, both knowing it for a lie.
“You sure?”
She rubs at her eyes with river-wet hands. “Let me stay.”
“No.”
“Lixue makes four since he’s come back. Let me help you.”
Now it’s Dagmar’s turn to shake her head. Yuehua opens her mouth to protest, but Dagmar cuts her off, barely audible over the snowfall: “Please go. They’ll make the suspension indefinite if you stay.”
She clenches her jaw and swallows her response. Comes to attention, foregoes the tentative hand Dagmar raises between them, and salutes harshly.
Yuehua ignores the glares from the assembled officers as she stalks back to her car.
#
