The Trouble with Women

Trojan Horses

MY NERVES ITCH with a dry, irritating static that's made its way under my skin; there's an old-fashioned record, forgotten, abandoned, left spinning in my brain, the needle crackling across the slick empty space, bumping up against the cardboard centre, jumping back. Shhhh, dk. Shhhh, dk. Shhhh, dk.

I wish someone would lift the needle.

The city news this morning is subsumed by the weather. The relentless rain has flooded the highway again.

It's not like a weather surge is novel territory. In the photos, drivers hardly seem surprised to find themselves caught out, having to wade waist-deep through the flash floodwaters of the Don Valley River. Scenes like this have been commonplace since the twenties, despite millions spent on water infrastructure — pumps, land grading, dam building. It occurs to me that the news is glad for a reason to look away from the trouble with women and turn back to more comfortable, understandable crises.

It irritates me that the public's attention can be so neatly, so inexplicably, so artificially turned from the social crisis of the moment. There is still a note of blame assigned to us under this mostly benign weather story: the ongoing climate crisis should have been turned around by the sacrifice of our fertility. Why isn't it working? Why are we behaving badly and calling the whole program into question. How dare we?

I am sick of being blamed for the world's evils. This sickness prickles under my skin. Shhhh dk.

That sense of injustice is what drives me to leave my apartment and walk all the way across Bloor to the pub to have a drink, alone. Becks can't meet me even though it's Thursday, our usual night. She says she has an appointment to interview Simon at his lab. If I finish early, maybe I can stop by and see how you're getting on, she offers weakly. She doesn't mean it. Becks isn't herself now that she's out of the hospital, which makes perfect sense, of course, because she left a piece of herself in there. She'll never be wholly herself again.

Another injustice that irritates my raw insides.

I try not to let it annoy me further that the ladies' bar upstairs — which I've been counting on for the quiet salve of consistency —  has been garishly decked out for Halloween. Plastic pumpkin lanterns sit atop the tables: future landfill destined to erode down into microbeads of plastic, suffocating the last of our oceanic food-supply. This is the very year they'd predicted the death of the world's oceans not so long ago. An unheeded warning. The only fish colonies that have survived the warming temperatures and bellies full of plastic have monstrous features and toxic flesh. Thank goodness for Fish-ish pies.

Worse than the pumpkins are the grotesque depictions of witches hanging from the walls. Pointed hats, green faces, hooked noses. They look greedy and untrustworthy, simple caricatures of what the world has always suspected of women. That they've hung them here, in the ladies' bar, is particularly offensive.

I consider calling this to the attention of the French barmaid, but she's not here. Her replacement is an English Bulldog of a woman; thick arms and brassy hair, inexpertly dyed to cover her grey.

"Where's..." I realize I don't know the french barmaid's name. "The usual person?"

The stout, dour server tilts her chin and looks me over. "Celia's not here, love. What can I get you?"

I glance at the specials board.

"Why isn't she here?" I persist. I need some semblance of regularity in all of this upset.

The woman sighs and glances at the other tables, deciding it's a safe enough place to share a little gossip. She wipes the clean table down and says, "Well, I don't know what I don't know, but I've been told she's got herself banged up."

"Hurt?"

"No, love. I mean, in prison." She widens her eyes and relishes my look of dismay.

"Was it her implant?"

"Hard to say. Sounds like she caught her fella putting it about and, from what I understand, well, Celia put a swift end to it. If you know what I mean. She claimed her Revolut made her do it, but the police think different. They think she just had a mind to get rid of the beggar and used the implant for an excuse. The strange thing though..." She pauses, tucking her damp rag into her black server's apron. "The detectives came around here asking what type of assistant Celia had."

"What do you mean, assistant?"

"You know, her MYA, the ear thing." She taps the side of her head. "I told them I hadn't a clue since I didn't want to do her wrong, but the boss downstairs told them he was sure it wasn't one of them new ones—under the skin, like—just a regular MYA. I'm guessing they think they can track her on it. But Celia's too canny for that. She'll have taken it out."

I feel like a child who's gotten lost on a school trip. Left behind and suddenly afraid I've missed the bus.

I order a vodka martini, and the woman leaves my table.

I cautiously pull MYA out of my ear and turn it over in my hand as though the shiny skin-like surface of it will give up its secrets. Rather than putting it back in, I slip it into my front pocket. Better safe than sorry.

This doesn't lessen the crackling static under my skin.

I STAY TOO long in the pub. I order another martini, then another. Becks doesn't come. Not that I thought she really would. After the third martini, I go to the toilets and stand, swaying, before my reflection.

Christ, you look a mess, Dolores, says a nasty voice in my head.

I wash my hands feverishly, my head tilted close to the mirror and steal another look up at myself. The whites of my eyes are spidered with angry little red veins. Underneath, dark smudges of blue attest to weeks of sleeplessness.

In the relative quiet of the washroom, I'm aware of a buzzing. Like the static, but centralized in my belly. I look down at my front, half expecting an error code to flash back up at me. Have I been taken over? Is this the feeling in the belly that woman spoke about, the one that drove her to drug and rape someone?

I press my hands over my stomach to stop the vibration, then realize it's just a message ringing through on the MYA I've stowed in my pocket.

I laugh at myself until I catch my own eye in the mirror again. A crazy person with bloodshot eyes laughs back at me. She's frightening.

I decide I can't risk putting the thing back in my ear. I leave it in my pocket and don't check the message.

Dolly? Pick up, Dolly. I've just left Simon's lab, and I... there was a list on his desk. The same names I gave you to look up. The same names. I asked him about it, and he said he's been following the trail, just like us. He thinks it's an inside job—someone at Janus Klien. When I asked him how it could be done, he told me about trojan horses — if you introduce a third point into the path of any signal, you can intercept and override the original. I thought he was showing off, but then... I'll call you back when I'm home. The message clicks off.

WISELY, I CONVINCE myself not to order another martini. I've had more than enough and am already slightly unsteady on my feet. There's nothing more lonely than being drunk on your own. I leave a large tip for the new barmaid and clutch the bannister carefully on my way out to the street.

Out here in the gloaming, I am light of foot. My head feels airy and threatens to float away without me. I have an idea that I'm going to walk all the way home. Not to Dolly's home, but Dolores' home — which another part of me knows is a ridiculous proposition given that it's far too far to walk there both in distance and in chronology.

That thought makes me laugh again.