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SHE HAD THOUGHT that seeing other people would cheer her up, but the effects of the Great Depression were everywhere. Someone had jumped out a window the night before. The landlady was pouring a bucket of water over the dried bloodstain. The water turned red and rolled out onto the street. Rose leaped backward as the bloodied water spread out on the sidewalk and almost touched her shoes.
As she walked farther down the street a little girl ran by her with a jar with frogs. She released them into the sewers. “We’re being evicted,” the little girl told Rose. “And we can’t keep any of the pets.”
Rose wondered if the frogs would find a way to survive in the sewers. Perhaps they would multiply and be everywhere in the city in a year. You would go to your bathtub and find it filled with frogs that had climbed out of the drainpipe. Rose shuddered.
A group of boys passed her. They were wearing dirty clothes, and shoes that looked too big. One boy was barefoot. Their heads were shaved, surely because of lice. They must have slept in the same filthy bed, and the mites were contagious. Who knew what other vermin were in the houses. There were the remains of a burned mattress in the trash. The bedbugs had gotten to be too much. It seemed like everyone in the city was itchy.
A stray dog hurried by. It had once had a job protecting a family, no doubt. But now no one could feed it. It looked in the window of the butcher shop. They were selling all sorts of ghastly pieces of meat.
She passed the line for the soup kitchen. There were so many men, all in clothes that had become too big, making them look like circus clowns. A man in the line removed his hat, as though in deference to a pretty lady. His face was covered with boils.
A man came out of the soup kitchen, clanging a large pot with a big spoon. It made the sound of great thunder. He was announcing to the men that they could go inside now.
Rose saw a boy holding a newspaper. On the front page it described a horror story about the prairies. There were grasshoppers everywhere. They were eating all the crops. They were insatiable. They came in huge swarms.
She thought she would keep her eyes closed until she passed the street. As she cut through the park, she saw men sleeping under the trees and on the benches. She had wondered why there were so many men sleeping in the park. They wanted to nap through this part of history. If everyone just closed their eyes, did that make the world go dark?
Montrealers had spent the entire 1920s out partying, making money off the Americans who came up looking for legal liquor, and maybe the Great Depression was a punishment for that. All the women with short skirts had really enraged God.
Rose arrived at the doctor’s apartment building. The small lobby had red tiles. She rang his doorbell and then began the long climb up the spiraling stairs to the seventh floor. Rose knocked on the door. Dr. Bernstein answered. He was a middle-aged, sophisticated gentleman. He was wearing a suit, and his white pompadour looked like a wave about to crest. He gestured for Rose to enter. It was a small apartment, but it was quite amazing how much stuff was in there. Rose couldn’t help but gaze around the room as she stepped in.
There were framed ferns and flowers on the walls, and tiny butterflies pinned to corkboards. In addition, the shelves of his room were covered with all sorts of strange things. There were geraniums on all the windowsills. He had a shelf full of seashells that he had collected when he was young and full of adventure. What beautiful days those were when he had piled these things into a tiny blue tin bucket. He had thought he would figure out the world.
“You’ll notice I’m a bit of a naturalist.”
He had a tiny aquarium with a cocoon in it, as he liked to raise butterflies. They would flit and fly around the room. He would get stoned and watch them. The butterflies from warm places were truly magnificent. They had such beautiful wings.
“Ooooh my, you do have some exquisite bugs.”
“Thank you. I discovered my interest in insects at school while I was studying biology. I wrote a paper on the sex life of slugs that was widely read by students in universities.”
He sighed as he led Rose to his examination table.
“But my father encouraged me to enter medicine. He told me it was much nobler to worry about humans than about bugs. But you know, he was wrong. Because people are wicked. They are cheaters and liars and degenerates and drunks, and the science of medicine just keeps them alive so they can murder and commit even more sins. But I have yet to find anything about the workings of insects that has disappointed me.”
Rose sat down on the examination table. He pulled up a wooden chair that had once been painted pink and had once been painted blue and had once been painted white. The nature of its deterioration caused all the colors to show.