How curious that it should begin on a day of dazzlingly flawless blue.
LL WE UNDERSTOOD: at nine o’clock that morning, the illustrationist would be arriving by helicopter.
In the pre-dawn gloom Helpers from the New Fraternal League of Men, mostly middle-aged guys in matching khakis and windbreakers, busied themselves with preparations. The streets surrounding People Park were closed to traffic and down on the common a landing area was marked off with pylons. From these a red carpet cut woundlike across the muddy lawn, up the steps of the gazebo, to a pressboard podium. Affixed to lampposts banners proclaiming the park’s Silver Jubilee hung limp as dead sails in the cold still air. At just after six a.m., with everything readied, the NFLM assumed their positions, walkie-talkies crackling, breath puffing in clouds, and waited for the crowds to come.
The towerclock of the old cathedral, now the Grand Saloon Hotel, had barely marked six-thirty when the first people began to appear: families and lovers hand in hand, businessfolk swinging briefcases, Institute undergrads with their knapsacks and hangovers, teens walking bikes, the elderly in pastels, the tall, the short, the fat, the thin, the hirsute and bald, citizens of every shape and creed and trouser, many in Islandwear jackets — Unique! silkscreened into a skyline silhouette.
In a splendid show of diversity and solidarity, with the same look of curiosity and expectation, they came. As night lifted they came, the bruise-coloured sky leaking light while citizens from all corners of the island arrived stamping and squelching onto the wet brown grass, the mud suckled their shoes, their boots, a few thousand strong by the time the lamps and streetlights flicked off at seven-fifteen, everyone wrangled into order by the NFLM.
Atop the bannered poles, on the roofs of the boathouse and the Museum of Prosperity, amid the solar panels of the Podesta Tower, from all around, cameras trained on the crowd, panned over the crowd, zoomed into and out of the crowd, while We-TV commentators readied microphones and ran spit-slicked fingers through their hair. Camcorders pointed at the stage and sky and one another: when two faced it was akin to a pair of young pups nuzzling snout to snout, awaiting the instinct to maul or mate.
Though there were no dogs.
The tower bells sounded eight, and with room scarce on the common, new arrivals were forced up the surrounding hillocks. To the west in the windows of the downtown towers faces appeared framed in steel and glass. Some intrepid souls climbed into the leafless apple trees to the east, or the bare-limbed poplars on the park’s south side. In a hilltop clearing to the north a handful of demonstrators wagged placards — ignored and estranged until one young woman was hit with a gritty snowball. Hey! her boyfriend cried. Hundreds of people poured blithely past, the culprit secreted among them.
At twenty to nine by the towerclock the Mayor arrived alone and waving to perfunctory applause, attempted to stride up the gazebo steps — and found herself marshalled sidestage behind a handwritten sign: VIP. Then a signal was given and a faction of Helpers formed a line before the crowd, arms yoked in the manner of paper dolls. They spoke into walkie-talkies, responses sputtered back.
Ra-ven, Ra-ven, Ra-ven, the crowd began chanting and clapping in time.
This was April 16, a bright cold morning warmed by the sun nosing out of the lake. Springtime was coming: stray patches of snow had gone crystalline and grey in their dying days, the asphodels would soon bloom, the trees beckoned leaves with their spindly arms, the crinkle of ice upon Crocker Pond fractured like an eczemic skin. Everything smelled of decay and worms, rich with thawing dirt. High above, a single cloud, a thin little wisp, trailed along — a baby bird lost from the flock. The Ra-ven chant faded. Everyone watched the sky because he would come from the sky.
Someone said, It’s nearly nine!
Someone said, Shut up howbout, okay?
Someone said, Listen!
There it was: the growl of an engine, faraway. Everyone craned their necks and looked, but in the sky was just the cloud. He couldn’t travel inside a cloud. But watching it drift along up there people began to wonder. In locales around the globe the illustrationist had defied many laws of physics and gravity and, more roguishly, the judiciary arms of governments.
There, yelled another someone.
A little piece of cloud seemed to be breaking away. But it was not, the crowd realized, a cloudlet that was now swooping toward the common, graceful and white as a gull against the deepening blue. It was a helicopter. As it approached the air began to thrum, applause splattered through the crowd, there were shouts and yelps and murmurs and with fingers pointed skyward hollerings of: There he is — He’s coming — Yeah!
As though lowered on a rope the helicopter descended: one hundred feet from the ground, eighty, sixty, engines snarling. The crowd watched, faces slanted skyward. Those wearing hats were holding their hats. Some people plugged their ears. Puddles rippled and Silver Jubilee banners fluttered and tree branches trembled and all those cameras captured everything, everything. From her pocket the Mayor produced a stack of cue cards she patted into a neat little pile.
Pausing only inches from the ground the helicopter’s twin tinted windows were the eyesockets in a polished white skull that tilted this way and that, regarding the crowd curiously. For a moment it seemed it might lift back up and away. Everyone watched, hands clutched hands and squeezed, hearts hoped. And at last as though satisfied the helicopter straightened and nestled between the pylons, and was still.
Two NFLM higherups scuttled out under the chopper’s thupping main rotor. The engines settled, the blades slowed from a single whirring disc into four separate propellers, and stopped. The Mayor smoothed her sash and stepped forward, cue cards poised, only to be impeded by a windbreakered arm, a freckled hand. Sorry ma’am, offered the arm’s owner, eyes downcast, lashes the colour of lard.
The helicopter sat there on the lawn, gleaming and still — was the crowd watching it, or was it watching the crowd? The feeling was of that cork-wriggling moment before the champagne pops: anticipatory and dreadful. And then the door to the cockpit flapped open and out swung the illustrationist, Raven, a brownskinned man in a white velour tracksuit, baldhead glossy in the sun.
A roar went up. The crowd hollered and thronged and the NFLM held them back. A teenager ululated ironically. Hopping down the illustrationist shook hands with each of the men on the landing pad and whispered into the ear of one, a guy in sport sandals and thick woolly socks, who signalled to his vigorously nodding, goateed colleague, and together they pulled from the helicopter a white, glassy-metallic trunk. With loping strides Raven glided along the red carpet, up the steps of the gazebo, out to the podium. The NFLM hoisted his trunk onstage and retreated.
Raven gazed over the crowd. But as he opened his mouth to speak, from the Grand Saloon clanged the old towerbells. His head sank to his chest, he tapped his fingers on the podium. The hours rang out golden: the first, bong, the second, two more, then three, and in a show of impatience Raven thrust his hand to his forehead, closed it in a fist, and the strikes stopped at eight. Instead of the usual echo and ebb, absolute silence — a tongue cleaved from a singing throat, leaving only breath and flapping lips.
Cameras lowered, everyone looked around at one another, eyebrows arching. But Raven was clutching the edges of the podium now, leaning forward, what would he do next. His fingernails were either all cuticle or painted white. His gaze dragged over the crowd as a net trawling the ocean floor. Beyond People Park there was no indication of the city: its usual hum, its growls and gurgles and honks and whispers — all absent. The island had never been so quiet. Then, with sudden violence, here was the illustrationist: eyes widening, thrusting his arms into wings.
I am Raven, he hollered.
The crowd roared in a single voice and the illustrationist bowed to them and bowed to the cameras and bowed in the general direction of the Mayor, waving her cue cards like a winner.
Ra-ven, Ra-ven, Ra-ven, chanted the crowd again, almost pleading. But he looked past them to some place beyond their expectation. He snapped, thrice and crisply. The white trunk heaved open with a groan.
Hush fell. The trunk’s insides were as dark as a coffin’s. What was hidden within?
The sun continued its slow swing upward. The lone cloud had scattered into droplets — had the illustrationist made it do so, some people wondered. Raven stared out from the podium, the brown of his face and hands, the white of his nails, the white of his tracksuit, china-white teeth bared between parted dark lips, the black of the shadows behind him, the white trunk vesselling night into the daytime. The people waited. The NFLM stood fast — ever-khaki, ever-vigilant. The cameras rolled. The Mayor coughed.
Then the illustrationist sucked in a deep breath and hurled his arms above his head: six doves erupted from the trunk. The crowd applauded, cameras followed the doves upward. Raven pointed a single finger, thumb extended, at the birds as they climbed. A gunshot cracked and the doves plummeted and thudded dully into the sodden field. But they were no longer doves: half a dozen pigeons lay there in the muck.
The crowd whispered, fell silent again.
The illustrationist looked deep into the rolling cameras, and crouching inches from his TV screen Sam watched through a fizz of static and shivered. In the illustrationist’s eyes was — what? Nothing.
His eyes are like tunnels, Sam described into the telephone. They’re just black eyes.
Contacts probably, said Adine, on the other end of the line. What a doosh.
Summoned by the illustrationist’s trembling fingertips the pigeons wobbled to life, tottered about with the wary steps of a litter just born. The crowd gasped and clapped and the cameras zoomed out and the illustrationist bowed. He snapped his fingers — once, twice, three times, the clack of bones.
He’s snapping his fingers Adine, explained Sam to his sister.
I’ve got the volume up, she said, I can hear.
You can hear.
Just tell me what you see, she said. You’re my closed captions, okay?
I’m okay Adine. I’m doing the work Adine. I’m doing good communication.
You sure are, buddy. And I appreciate it.
The crowd had gone quiet once more. It was as if a blanket were being ruffled over them, up and releasing their hoots and hollers, down and stifling them silent. A pause. Then the illustrationist flung his arms skyward, the pigeons lifted into the sky, they were white again: doves.
Sam explained to his sister what he saw.
He’s done this before, she said.
He’s done this before.
It was on TV, at some square in some city, said Adine. One of those places all covered with pigeons. He walked into the square and waved his hand and all the pigeons fell down and everyone thought they were dead and then he did something else stupid and they went flying away, all at once.
They went flying away.
Right. And then he cried a single tear off the main bridge and the rivers started flowing again after like a hundred years or something. God, I just can’t understand how anyone buys this guy. The illustrationist Raven — it’s just so affected and phony.
People like that sort of thing Adine. They like that sort of thing I guess.
People? said Adine, as though the word were a disease. People fuggin suck.
On the TV the doves vanished, the applause faded. The illustrationist peered down upon the crowd and grinned two rows of perfect white teeth from his brown face, arms still extended in the same vast V from which he had released the birds. His eyes were two wet black stones and what Sam didn’t tell Adine was that, looking into them, in his gut churned a sick, sour feeling of vinegar and rot.
Slowly, with drama, the illustrationist lowered his arms, returned his hands to the podium, curled his fingers around its edge. He leaned forward. He closed his eyes. He licked his lips.
He’s opening his eyes, said Sam.
Look out, buddy, said Adine, here we go.
I am Raven, screamed the illustrationist, and everything exploded in thunder.
HE MINIVAN was trapped in a snarl of traffic along Topside Drive, bumper to bumper back over Guardian Bridge all the way to the mainland, cars and trucks and utility vehicles for sport and vans and other minivans too, though none as spanking fancy as this one, with its sidepanels of woodgrain appliqué. The licence plate was vain, HARRY, and into Harry’s roofrack were strapped matching black wheelie suitcases in checked and carry-on sizes, and a hot pink duffel depicting witches and fairies upon a background of castles. Inside Harry were the Pooles: Pearl and Kellogg and their kids, Elsie-Anne, five, and Gip, ten years old and, with each new roar from People Park, more dismayed and defeated to be missing it all.
The Pooles’ trip had begun Wednesday morning, post-meds: two pills on a swallow of grape juice, a daily cocktail Gip required for function and focus. Without it, for example, amid teasing on a fieldtrip to a classmate’s farm he’d kicked out a schoolbus window and climbed onto the roof, knelt up there screaming and punching himself in the face until the taunts of the other kids had alerted his teacher. Afterward Gip wept. I hate them, he sobbed, chewing the brim of his cap, I’m not a little piglet, I’m a boy — I hate them.
Those were what Kellogg and Pearl called Episodes. Meds curtailed Episodes. So did generally just keeping Gip happy. He had problems, sure, but what kid was perfect, no kid was perfect — medicated he was as perfect a kid as anyone’s. And while his classmates delighted in the unfortunate coincidence of Gip’s physique and his name’s written inverse, Kellogg preferred to think of his son as healthy — what Kellogg’s own father, who had starved in the old country, liked to tweak the boy’s small breasts and call him.
At dawn Kellogg piloted Harry along the main street of their sleepy and still-sleeping town. Passing Dr. Castel’s office Gip hollered, We’re going to see my idol Raven, Dr. Castel — finally! and Pearl took Kellogg’s hand atop the cassette holder. The Pooles hit the coastal highway and the sky swelled into a great blue expanse mottled with puffy darling clouds. To the west the land rippled dunly, all rolling farms and hillocks and cherry trees just blossoming, while the water glittered indigo to the horizon in the east. Pearl let her other hand loll out the window, the wind buffeted it dreamily. You couldn’t worry about a thing, doing a thing like that.
The Pooles arrived too late to check in at Lakeview Campground so they stayed on the mainland at the airport motel, which Kellogg’s guidebook commended for its satellite dish and prime rib, though the pool was closed. From there, said the CityGuide, it would be a just a quick zip over Guardian Bridge in the morning — Back to Mummy’s hometown, enthused Kellogg, which Gip corrected, Do you mean to see Raven? and Kellogg said, You betcha, and Pearl smiled, though her smile seemed pinched and in her eyes flickered something wary.
After ten grey-pink slabs of prime rib between them the Pooles descended a boardwalk to the Scenic Vista, a platform wedged into the cliffside. Across the Narrows the city was a dome of light plunked down into the night. Guardian Bridge twinkled in parallel undulating lines to the chalky bluffs on the island’s northern shore.
There it is, said Kellogg, the big city. Where Mummy was a star. How does it feel, Pearly? Is it everything you remembered?
Well I didn’t often look at it from this side, Kellogg.
Right. He rubbed a small circle on her lower back, the hand hovered in space, found a home capping Gip’s skull, Gip squirmed away and adjusted his hat. But wow, coming back after so long! Guess Mummy was something else for the — what was it?
Lady Y’s.
Lady Y’s. And there’s the arena there! Beside that big round thing! What’s that then?
The Thunder Wheel. God, I remember one time I went on it, on a date — what was that silly boy’s name? A hairy little guy. .
Kellogg shrugged, looked away.
Anyway he barfed when we got to the top. Sprayed all the way down on everyone.
Ew, said Kellogg.
He barfed! roared Gip. On a ride? Someone barfed actual barf?
He did indeed. Poor kid, he was scared of heights, what was his name. .
More like the Chunder Wheel, yucked Kellogg. Anyway I bet my guidebook’s got coupons. See it, Gibbles? To the left — other left! Maybe we’ll get to take a ride!
The Thunder Wheel was a huge black disc, unlit and unmoving, which rose from the grounds of Island Amusements over the northern fringe of People Park. To its east the orange hump of IFC Stadium glowed like a dinner roll under a heatlamp.
I have to pee, said Elsie-Anne.
Pee in your purse, said Gip, Dorkus. You retard.
I left it inside Harry, Stuppa, retard.
Hey now, said Kellogg, let’s not call each other names, huh? But hey, anything you guys want to ask your mum? She was famous when she lived here, a real celebrity. Annie, one sec, okay — but think! That arena’s where thousands of people came to see Mummy play. Imagine if she hadn’t done her knee in? You guys might never have even been born!
Dad? said Gip, looking worried.
Anyway it’s been a long time! How does it feel, Pearly? To be back?
Well we’re not back yet, are we. We’re over here.
Yeah but sure, you know what I mean. And you’ve got plans to see your old pals too, right? I wonder if any fans will recognize you? It must feel —
It doesn’t feel like anything, okay?
The air stiffened. Across the river, the city shimmered and hummed.
Pearl patted her daughter on the cheek. Else, you need the toilet?
Hand in hand mother and daughter headed back to the motel. Pearl’s knee must have been acting up: she favoured her left side as she walked, stiff-legged and lurching. But as always there was a publicity and performance to her limp, a showy sort of pain. Down the highway a plane was taking off from the airport. Kellogg watched it rise, roaring and blinking, into the night. Look at that, he said, to one in particular.
Dad? Gip was pulling his father’s hand hair. We should go to bed because we have to get there early. Tomorrow, I mean. Dad? Raven’s choppering in at nine a.m. in the morning and he’s always precisely on time, so we have to get there at eight o’clock at the latest just to make sure, Dad, Gip huffed. To make sure we get a good seat, so we can see everything. Dad?
Got it, said Kellogg. We’ll be up first thing. Don’t worry, pal.
Later, back in the motel room, while Gip, who wouldn’t share a bed with dead-to-the-world Dorkus, snored in his cot, and Pearl ground her teeth with the sound of marbles pestled to dust, Kellogg flipped through the satellite’s endless TV channels. In the high 400s he paused: a large man in a red fez was being robed by a sexy assistant. Kellogg thought for a moment to wake his son, but Gip had no interest in magicians other than Raven. The assistant disappeared offstage — and, to a burst of delight from the audience, the performer collapsed, pitched backward, and went still. The screen cut to black. Kellogg shivered. Somehow it was one-thirty.
AT THE FIRST SHUDDER of light through the curtains Gip was up, shaking his parents awake and whipping the covers off his sister. Come on, come on, we have to get across to the island, Raven arrives today! As his family showered he danced around the room — Hurry Dorkus, hurry Dad, hurry Mummy, hurry!
Kellogg waited for Pearl to dress, then while she administered Gip’s meds coordinated his outfit with hers: pale bluejeans, grey crewneck, ballcap. Emerging from the bathroom he announced, Matchy matchy! and Pearl covered her face in her hands. Come on, Kellogg laughed, we’re on vacation, it’s fun.
At breakfast Kellogg was loudly good with his kids, everyone’s plates heavy with sausages tonged in pairs from the buffet — except Pearl’s, she had yoghurt and fruit. All the other diners would surely look over at their table and think, What a nice normal family on a nice normal family vacation, holy.
How healthy his marriage had become again, Kellogg thought, like an amputee striding about on fresh prosthetics. He and Pearl talked things out, they were communicative and open, infidelity was inconceivable, Dr. Castel would be proud. And here they were, taking a holiday. They’d see some magic and camp and visit all Pearl’s old haunts. On the south shore of the island was a beautiful beach, said the CityGuide, Elsie-Anne loved swimming so much, the little fish. And Kellogg would just be happy to make it happen, to make his family happy.
After breakfast, packed up and ready to go, in the parking lot Kellogg took Pearl’s hands and said, Hey, we okay? Just kidding around, I can put on a different shirt if you want. Pearl said, Kellogg, hey, no, I know. Just feeling a little stressed, a little weird is all. Coming back is weird. With Harry’s door ajar and dinging, Kellogg corralled his wife into his arms. I love you, he whispered into her neck. I know, said Pearl. I know.
Come on, screamed Gip from inside the minivan, it’s past seven o’clock!
Elsie-Anne had wandered off down the boardwalk. Kellogg found her leaning over the railing at the Scenic Vista. A drainpipe jutted from the cliffs twenty feet down, she claimed an eel lived in its depths, she’d named him Familiar. Gently Kellogg pried her away, and as he folded her into Harry’s backseat she whimpered, But I loved Familiar and he loved me.
Kellogg followed the ISLAND signs down to the water, where they hit a jumble of cars queued at the Guardian Bridge onramp. Pearl’s allergies were acting up, she blew her nose, discarded the tissue on the dashboard, punched an antihistamine tablet from a blisterpack, swallowed it dry.
Just a little traffic, folks, no big deal, said Kellogg, grinning into the backseat.
Dorkus is talking to her purse, said Gip. It’s weird.
Gip, why not try a trick from your book? suggested Pearl. Else, hey, wouldn’t you like to see your brother do some magic?
While Pearl readied their documents Gip leafed through Raven’s Illustrations: A Grammar. Tapping a page, he announced, Situation Thirteen, in which Dorkus picks a card, any card. Cunningly he fanned a deck on the backseat. Kellogg smiled at Pearl: how sweetly their kids played together, what lucky parents they were, and he reached over and squeezed his wife’s arm as though testing a fruit. She regarded him with confusion — a look that suggested she didn’t, for a moment, know who he was.
Hi, it’s me, Kellogg — is that who I am, according to those things?
You’re fine. It’s the kids: Gib Bode, and his lovely sister L.C.N. Goode.
But you have proof you’re from here, which gets us in — right?
Let’s hope, said Pearl.
After a rambling, theatrical process that required Gip to consult Raven’s Grammar four times, Elsie-Anne refused to admit, with a shake of her braids, that she’d chosen the nine of clubs. What? Gip said, brandishing it at her. This is your card, Dorkus. No it isn’t, Stuppa, said Elsie-Anne, mine was jack. Impossible! her brother screamed, and swept the rest of the deck onto the floormats.
Gip, barked Pearl — but Gip only gazed out the window, while the minivan crawled onto the lip of the bridge.
Why are we going so slow, he said. We’ve barely moved at all.
Just a little backup, said Kellogg. Got lots of people heading over probably just as excited as you, pal. We’ll get there, don’t you fret.
Gip leaned into the frontseat. But gosh, it’s nearly seven-forty a.m. in the morning, Raven’s arriving at nine o’clock sharp, and what if we don’t make it for eight, which is when I said we needed to get there, if you remember. Don’t you even listen to me?
Oh hush up, said Pearl. We’ve got plenty of time.
We’ll get there, said Kellogg. Everyone’s going the same place, traffic’s got to go somewhere. Just likely making sure everyone’s got their tickets and permits in order, and Mummy’s from here so we’ll just whip on through. Okay?
No response.
One spot ahead of Harry was a maroon pickup truck with a bashed-in taillight. Its driver, a wild-looking man in a dirty blond ponytail and prospector’s beard, leaned out the window to spit. The spit, even from this distance, was goopy and brown.
Disgusting, said Pearl, and sneezed.
Ten minutes passed, traffic barely budged, the pickup driver spat four more times. Gip ignored his dad’s suggestion to try the trick again. Instead he began humming, a sound somewhere between the whine of a cicada and the bleating of a distant car alarm. Kellogg and Pearl exchanged a look. The driver of the pickup hawked out the window again, pulled forward eight inches. Harry followed, stopped, and Gip kept humming.
You guys excited about, Kellogg began, couldn’t think what to say, turned on the radio: static. No signal out here I guess, he said. Weird.
Pearl turned the radio off.
Gip is humming, Elsie-Anne said. Mummy, Stuppa’s humming.
Stop it, said Pearl.
The humming continued. Pearl cracked her window.
Little cold out for that yet, said Kellogg. And what about your allergies?
Pearl looked at him. He winked. She rolled up the window.
And Gip hummed.
Elsie-Anne covered her ears with both hands. The traffic jam stretched ahead, a steel-scaled python slumped over the bridge. The guy in the pickup truck stuck his head out the window, made eye contact with Kellogg, spat, and retreated back inside the cab. Nothing moved. Pearl pointed at the vacant opposite lane. Just go there.
I can’t — sheesh, Pearly, here’s a lane just for the Pooles I guess? He checked Gip in the rearview, who hummed back. When Kellogg spoke again his voice was oddly boisterous, infused with the forced mirth of a waiter singing Happy Birthday to a table of businessmen. Hear that, buddy? Get us arrested why don’t you! We’ll get there, guys. Look, see, cars are starting to come the other way. And hey-ho! We’re off now too.
But something was wrong: traffic was being routed back to the mainland.
A car swished past, the faces of the driver and passengers resigned. Gip’s humming stopped. The clock on the dash ticked over to 8:00. Gip unleashed a scream like a bottle hurled against a wall. No no no no no no no no no, he sobbed, kicking the back of his mother’s chair.
Kellogg cried, Wait! — but Pearl was already diving into the backseat to tackle her son. Kellogg’s technique would have been soothing, soft words and a gentle hand on his knee. Discipline was useless, he thought, watching Gip jolt and squirm in Pearl’s arms. Episodes weren’t his fault, you had to be patient — you subdued him with kindness, not force. Why didn’t the boy’s own mother understand that?
The pickup wheeled into a three-point turn and the shaggy guy absconded, spitting. In the rearview Kellogg watched Pearl cuff her son’s wrists in one hand and clamp his mouth with the other while Gip thrashed and moaned. Hesitantly Kellogg put the minivan in gear, pulled forward, said, Look, champ, here we go.
Gip went still. Blinked. Inhaled a trail of snot.
That’s it, coaxed Kellogg, we’re at the checkpoint, we’ll see Raven soon, don’t worry.
In the middle lane sat a man in khaki at a child’s schooldesk. Kellogg was summoned from the minivan with curling fingers.
Take Elsie-Anne, Pearl told him, still restraining Gip. Show him our permits.
Kellogg wanted to see something beyond resignation on his wife’s face — love! Instead in her eyes was the beleaguered look of someone suffering a chore. Go, she said.
Annie, come with Dad, said Kellogg, and together they approached the guy at the desk — Bean, said his nametag.
Bean nodded at Harry’s plates. You have a resident in the car?
Former resident, my wife. She used to star for the Y’s?
Leafing through the papers, Bean eyed Elsie-Annie. Who’s this?
That’s Elsie-Anne — L.C.N., see? Someone must have —
Bean held up a hand. And Gib?
With my wife. He’s. . sick.
Sir, you realize no one in your quote-unquote family has the same last name?
That’s maybe not our fault though?
You’re suggesting it’s ours.
No! Just a miscommunication maybe? It happens. .
Bean swivelled, spoke into a walkie-talkie. Took a puff from an inhaler. Eyed Kellogg with the ambivalence of a bored shopper sizing up a lettuce.
Kellogg gazed down the bridge. Along the island’s shore was more gridlock, a call-and-response of horns, long blasts echoed by long blasts, all of it useless, nothing moving.
Mr. Poole, we’re going to need you to get processed once you’re islandside. Your wife is fine — Bean stamped her permit forcefully, handed the others over — but the rest of you need special permission before you can join the Jubilee celebrations.
But! No, we can’t do that — my son, he’s. . We’ll miss Raven’s arrival!
Bean checked his watch. Not much chance of you making that anyway. NFLM on Topside Drive are expecting you, they’ll direct you to Residents’ Control — that’s the Galleria foodcourt, five minutes from the bridge. Good lookin out!
Thanks, said Kellogg, and headed back to the minivan wondering what he’d thanked him for.
Elsie-Anne raced ahead to the bridge’s railing, hopped up, leaned over. And went rigid. Dad, she called, pointing below. Look.
A naked woman was walking — precariously, slowly — out onto one of the iron trestles that extended from the structure’s underside. Two hundred feet below lay the river, a ruffle of black silk spangled silver, and as the woman stepped, one foot then the next, the wind tousled her hair like the hand of some benignly drunk uncle. Pigeons burbled somewhere, but Kellogg couldn’t see any pigeons.
The woman seemed oblivious to everything: to the traffic, to Bean and his flares, to Kellogg and Elsie-Anne, to the world and all that was in it. Her back was hunched, her buttocks alabaster. At the end of the trestle she stopped, arms extended for balance. If she were to jump it seemed she would be leaping not down, but outward, into open space.
Oh my god, said Kellogg. Elsie-Anne, get in the car.
Dad?
Kellogg snatched her by the chin. You listen, if that person jumps and we’re the only witnesses, it will ruin our vacation. You won’t get to swim, Gip won’t get to see his magician — we’ll be at the morgue, answering questions. They might even blame us! So forget you saw anything. Get in the car. Say nothing to your mother. Hear me? Nothing.
Elsie-Anne nodded.
Good girl, said Kellogg, knuckled her cheek, slid open Harry’s door, ushered her inside, slammed it closed — and looked over the railing. The woman hadn’t moved: a porcelain, otherworldly figure who seemed to float in the brisk morning air.
Kellogg opened his mouth to call to her, to tell her — what? But it was too late: a great tumble of hair, and the trestle was empty.
Trembling, Kellogg rushed to catch the body’s splash or see it swept away in the current. But Bean was calling him: Sir, sir, in your car, please, sir. So Kellogg stopped, apologized, returned to the minivan. In the backseat Pearl, sniffling, stroked Gip’s hair. Elsie-Anne stared vacantly into her purse. Okay, said Kellogg, moving his foot from brake to gas. The engine vroomed, he pressed harder, Harry went nowhere.
You’re in Park, said Pearl.
Oh, said Kellogg, shifted to Drive, and lurched another ten feet closer to the island.
Y TEN-THIRTY it was all over. Raven stepped into his trunk, waved a brochure from the Grand Saloon, said, I believe this is where I’m staying, and closed the lid on himself. A moment later the helicopter seemed to come alive of its own accord, lifted up from the common, looped over Crocker Pond, and landed atop the hotel. The doors to the penthouse suite opened and Raven stepped onto the balcony, blew six kisses at the crowd, bowed, and ducked away.
The trunk sat innocuously in the middle of the stage.
There was nothing else to look at.
And so with a collective sigh people began to shuffle back to their lives.
From the top of the northern hillock the protestors withdrew, trashed their placards out back of Street’s Milk & Things. Today Debbie, Pop and the two Island Institute students whose names Debbie kept failing to learn were joined by the most militant members of the Lakeview Homes Restribution Movement: a man called Tragedy — walleyed, squat, and gnomish, smelling of salsa — and his lean, lisping, wispily bearded friend, Havoc. They’d shown up to their first meeting only two weeks prior and pulsed with something weird and feral that might euphemistically be described as energy.
Debbie watched the crowd thin and scatter, far below. You wonder if anyone even knows we’re here, she said.
The one who hit me with a snowball did.
Here were the students, clasping hands.
That sucked, said Debbie. People just don’t think sometimes. You okay?
The girl nodded shyly, the boy shook his head. A patchwork of cause-oriented pins covered her knapsack. Over his woolly jumper hung a pendant in the shape of a fist.
Down the path to the common Tragedy was trying to tear a Silver Jubilee banner from a lamppost. He was too short though, and couldn’t get decent purchase: he jumped, clutched, flailed, swore, sulked. Havoc lisped, Let it go, man, it’θ only a θymbol. Be real.
Meanwhile Pop was heaving himself up the steps of his houseboat, which presided on the lip of the clearing over People Park. He was in his sixties, and large, flabby even, somehow yellowing, every breath was a gasp.
The houseboat was a boxcar on blocks, scabbed with rust and flaking paint. Maybe she’d help fix it up sometime, often thought Debbie, and felt guilty now having only ever thought this thought. Pop unfolded a lawnchair and plopped into it. One minute, he said, wheezing. Yet in his eyes, as always, was that manic glimmer. When three years prior Debbie had come to interview him for In the Know he’d stormed out of Street’s Milk & Things ranting about restribution, every few sentences screaming, Get this word for words, reporter! After a four-minute diatribe he’d announced, I have to work, and disappeared into the store. Debbie, assigned to write about Mr. Ademus’s mysterious and hugely popular sculptures — the Things he sold, the Things of Milk & Things — had written nothing.
Lark, called Pop from his lawnchair, arms raised, poncho spread (RESTRIBUTION! markered across the chest). Gather!
Debbie pushed close with her notebook and beamed at him with what she hoped passed for reverence.
In the baritone of a preacher Pop began: Thank you all for attendenating here with me today. The city’s going to hear us! — Tragedy responded, Fug yeah! — We may be small, but we’re big. This Mayor, this NFLM, this Jubilee, they envision our spirits as flattened as they flattened Lakeview Homes? That a quartered century hencefrom we’ve forgotten this so-and-so-called park was once impersonated by people? Say it with me: No!
No fuggin way, said Tragedy.
Feverishly, Debbie took notes.
No! Not this time. Not any time. Not this time!
Shame, warbled one of the students — the girl. Shame, echoed her boyfriend.
Shame! Pop pointed at them, eyes narrowed. You’ve said the magical word. It is a shame. What transposed here, a quartered century hencefrom — a bloodied shame.
Bloody fuggin cogθuggerθ! screamed Havoc.
And they think they can just erect a memorial to make it okay-dokay? A statue?! Well I’ve got a statue of limitations for that sort of thing!
Pop’s eyes gleamed.
The memorial unveiling’s tomorrow, added Debbie. Hope everyone can come?
Pop saluted, hoisted himself to his feet, howled, Restribution! and waddled off, puffing, to open Street’s Milk & Things for the day.
A pigeon wheeled overhead, perched on the roof of the houseboat, eyed the gathering, scratched itself under a wing with its beak. Tragedy threw a rock, which went sailing into the bushes. The bird shat a greenish dribble onto the roof and glared defiantly back.
Guess that’s it for us then, said Tragedy, lighting a wilted Redapple.
Some halfhearted goodbyes were offered (Θolidarity, proposed Havoc unconvincingly, and passed around a fist-bump) and he and Tragedy, swapping the cigarette between drags, took the path down into the common, past an elderly man caning his way up the Crocker Pond Slipway to Parkside West Station.
The students hung around. Debbie wished she’d been more like them in her twenties: all secondhand alpaca and shy, dreamy ideals. Instead she’d been an athlete.
Thanks for coming, guys, she said.
We saw the posters on campus, said the girl, at the Institute.
We didn’t know anything, said her boyfriend, about this. Before.
But we’re glad we could come.
The boy shuffled, his girlfriend nudged him. He spoke: We wanted to tell you, though, we’re leaving town. Tomorrow. We won’t be around for the rest of the weekend.
It’s just, we’re going camping. Back home.
Can you tell Mr. Street we’re sorry?
Oh, that’s okay, said Debbie, feeling flattered. Just nice you came out today, right? And have a nice time camping, that’ll be fun for you guys.
Yeah, we feel bad is all. There aren’t a lot of people out.
Most kids we’re in school with are happy to just party at the Dredge till they’re sick.
And watch themselves after on TV.
We’ll totally be up for whatever when we’re back. With the um, Movement.
We’re just a little worried.
What about? said Debbie.
The boy and girl exchanged looks. We’ve heard Mr. Street tends to —
Kick people out. Of the Movement. For disappointing him?
Like almost everyone?
Yeah, sighed Debbie, that happens. We’re currently in a rebuilding phase.
A second pigeon joined the first: an elderly couple, grey and waiting.
Hey, said the girl. We heard you’re writing a book about him?
Debbie laughed — a sharp, awkward bark. Well it started as a script but my boss didn’t want it. I mean, you can’t really capture Pop Street in a four-minute segment.
That was for Isa Lanyess? You write for In the Know, right?
Not that we watch it, clarified the boy.
Yeah, said Debbie, though I only do occasional stuff now, got to pay the bills, right? Mostly I run a program in Blackacres, for neighbourhood kids. Out of the Room?
The students stared back. Were they judging her? What was their judgment?
She plunged ahead: But yeah, I have all these notes about Pop and the Homes and everything, and someone should write about this stuff, it’s just so hard making it all come together, right? We should get a cider. I could tell you more about it, about the book.
We’ve got class.
We would though, totally. Otherwise.
Oh I didn’t mean now, ha. A bit early for drinks! Just sometime, anytime — whenever! You guys should give me your number. So we can stay in touch. About Movement stuff.
The girl said, Not sure I’ve got a pen, and dug around in her knapsack: no pen.
From the houseboat, the birds cooed in chorus, ruffled their wings. Their poop was an eggy froth baking in the sunlight.
Debbie said, Okay, off with you then, get to school. She tried to sound light, but it came out hurried, dismissive. And when they left, Debbie felt abandoned — and embarrassed, she still hadn’t gotten their names. The students were heading the same direction as her, toward Parkside West Station, but she hung back, didn’t want to sidle up alongside them after saying goodbye. It’d seem too desperate, even pathetic, and too much like pursuit.
YELLOWLINING WESTBOUND on a packed train Debbie got out her notebook. On the first page were a few attempts at a prologue: For twenty-five years Pop Street has been camped out behind his old store in a stoic steadfast protest against People Park, living out of the houseboat he used to keep at the Bay Junction piers, the ceiling so low the man has developed a permanent hunch. . Or: For most islanders, People Park is a place we only associate with joy: it’s where our kids go to daycamp, where we go on dates for picnics, enjoy the Summer Concert Series at the gazebo — but for one widely misunderstood former resident of Lakeview Homes, it’s a monument to forgetting, and a place that embodies everything that is wrong about this city. . Or: What is justice?
Though like many of her teammates she’d majored in Communications at the Institute, Debbie had never considered a career in journalism, the accountability made her nervous. But when Isa Lanyess, a star from the pre-Y’s era of the Island Maroons, saw her We-TV fixture, In the Know, become the island’s preeminent news source, she hired a few ballers who weren’t turning pro to write her scripts. I’m the Face of this thing, Lanyess told them, so think of yourselves as my makeup artists. And what’s a makeup artist’s job? To make the face look good. And also? To make their own work invisible. All anyone should see is my face.
It was a job. For a year Debbie churned out reports on local goings-on with the mechanical proficiency of a windup clock, yet failed to find satisfaction hearing her words spoken on TV by someone else. But the meeting with Pop left her feeling forced to the edge of her own life: she stood there peering down into it, blank and bottomless. When she’d returned to Isa Lanyess’s downtown office, Debbie suggested a piece about the Homes might be more interesting than one on Pop’s Things.
Lanyess gave Debbie a withering look. People don’t care about that guy, she said. Unless he’s Mr. Ademus. Is he? No, right? Mr. Ademus and the Things are hot. So how the fug did Pop Street, who’s never been lukewarm by anyone’s measure, become the guy’s dealer? That’s what people want to know. So that’s, are you listening, what you, who I hired, write about. Not some fat loser living in a trailer who can’t forget the past.
I just thought there was a bigger story here, said Debbie. Right?
Wrong, said Lanyess. I brought you on here because you struck me as a hard worker, someone who knew how to be part of a team. Was I mistaken?
Debbie had stood there, fists clenched, heart pounding. Lanyess had a way of speaking to her that made her feel not only indebted, but small and young. Like a scolded child, in hateful silence you could only wait until it was over, she told Adine that night, drinking ciders on their couch.
Fug Lanyess, said Adine. Fug that show. I mean, props to Pop Street for making bank selling it, but trash nailed together into funny shapes? That’s art now? I guess, according to the superdooshes of this dumb town who buy it up like it’s gold.
Debbie tipped back her cider. He can’t be making much, she said. The guy’s the closest thing this town’s got to an ascetic.
Is he? Whatever he is, he’s just like, off. Even when me and Sam were kids our mum didn’t let us go to his store alone. The Human Polyp, we called him. That’s what he’s holding on to? He needs to let go of Lakeview Homes, everyone else has.
But, started Debbie — and stopped herself.
What does he even want?
Restribution, Debbie said automatically, and Adine rolled her eyes, wrangled Jeremiah into her lap, and buried her nose in his fur.
Now, on the train, Debbie leafed through her notebook, and felt she was closer to a real reason — and the person himself, the two were linked. In her notebook were dozens of Pop’s attempts at aphorisms: If you’ve an advantage, do it, e.g., and People come in a multitudany of kinds, but we’ve all got the same heart.
In a way Pop had thrown Debbie’s life into relief. To live as he did, a living protest, one had to forgo everything else — social mores, relationships, basic hygiene. His dedication made Debbie feel flaky and capricious. So she’d begun attending his rallies, not as a journalist but as a participant, committed to the Movement, even fancied herself his second-in-command. Though there always lurked the danger of being banished, often for random, arbitrary, and baffling reasons. Most recently Pop had expelled three of Debbie’s friends for Insufficient restritubutive doctrination. Requests for clarification had been ignored.
So around him Debbie took notes, listened, deferred, and always, always agreed. But what really kept her on his good side was the prospect of being written about: Impart this in your book, he would say, and then enunciate, syllable by syllable, so Debbie didn’t miss a word. Being around someone so firm in his vision of the world, and of his purpose upon it, was comforting. And by writing about him Debbie was getting closer to clarity about her own life as well. Because her own life, thought Debbie, as the train slowed into Mustela Station, felt so vague and shifting, a precarious trudge through churning sand: no matter how firmly she stepped, it always felt to be swirling off course, or backward. She wasn’t even lost: how could you be lost when you didn’t know where you were heading? And so she reeled people in, she surrounded herself with people, she felt all she could do was try to be good, to try in her floundering way to be useful, to help.
A SATELLITE INITIATIVE of the Isa Lanyess Centre for Westend Betterment, the Room occupied an old crabshack at F Street and Tangent 15, right on the water, a building on stilts scummed with algae and around which rippled the lake. But because Upper Olde Towne Station was under renovation and had been for months, Debbie preempted her ride at Knock Street and took the escalator to streetlevel while the train slipped north into the Zone.
On foot she passed Lower Olde Towne’s B&B’s and Islandwear outlets and expensive artisanal concerns, horse-drawn buggies clopped by depositing great steaming dung knolls upon the cobblestones. At the top end of Knock was the Dredge Niteclub, a block-long, three-storey partyhouse that had once been a functioning dredge meant to scour Lowell Canal. Past it was the canal, a gutter of sludge the colour of dead TV screens. Crossing the footbridge Debbie held her breath, the canal’s off-gases shimmered like noxious aurorae, its lustreless surface reflected nothing.
Released into Upper Olde Towne, Debbie gulped cleanish air and headed up F Street. The east — west Tangents ascended, the neighbourhood bustled: greengrocers hawked produce, two girls in throwback Y’s jerseys lobbed a ball back and forth in a concrete parkette, a young couple on a bench smoked Redapples and took turns ashing into a cup. In shadows under the Yellowline’s tracks, the westside of the street was edged with razorwire that fenced in disused lots and docks. Debbie stayed on the sunlit eastside, where rejuvenated properties alternated with boarded-up vacants, the latter supervising the neighbourhood with the staid melancholy of blind widowers.
At the corner of F and 10 was the Golden Barrel Taverne. Already drunks milled about on the sidewalk, taciturn and twitchy, jingling pockets of coins. Debbie smiled, was ignored, kept going north. This had once comprised her jogging route, abandoned when concerned locals kept flagging her down to ask if she was being chased. The Zone wasn’t pretty or quaint but it boasted a certain authenticity, Debbie thought, and though way out on the island’s western fringe it struck her as the city’s heart, vibrant and essential — or maybe its guts.
At Tangent 15 Debbie waved to Crupper, sweeping the front step of the newsstand opposite the Room. He gestured across the street. Seems they got you last night, he said.
Debbie looked: the Room’s front windows had been painted black.
Are you serious? she said.
Crupper shook his head sadly. Animals, he said.
Debbie went up to the window, scratched. The paint came off in a jammy curl under her fingernail, tarlike and still wet.
As always the Room smelled of the faint salmony tang of children and their half-eaten lunches. Debbie hung her coat in the office, checked the messages — none — filled a bucket with soap and water in the bathroom. But before she washed off the blackup she had to attend to the business of her daily We-TV address, which she loathed.
Debbie turned on the camera, readied her spiel: two minutes of tape to satisfy the Island Arts Division trustees and the schoolboard people, who claimed these updates were meaningful to the parents, but what parents would watch it? There were better things on TV than their kids building papier mâché piñatas and Debbie breaking up fights over pastels.
Adine had tuned in to her bit exactly once and that night she’d mimicked, in a perfectly fake-bright voice: Hi, Debbie here! This is the Room’s um, channel! Today’s Tuesday and we’re making time capsules! Debbie had shut herself in the bathroom and moaned, Why’d you watch it, you know I hate doing it, why have you forsaken me? while Adine cackled on the other side of the door.
Eyes shifting around the room, never quite settling on the lens, Debbie covered the date, the day’s crafts (gluesticks, shoeboxes, glitter), and explained the Room would be closed for the long weekend — though, with a three-day tape-to-broadcast delay, she was unsure why this information mattered. When all this was done Debbie shut the camera off and, as its recording light dimmed, felt oddly lonely, unnerved less by the prospect of being watched than by the thought that people, given the choice, might opt not to.
ITHIN THE ORCHARD on People Park’s eastern fringe, teenagers, some with cameras, watched the last few stragglers filtering back into the city. While Edie videoed, Calum clutched her from behind at the hips, nuzzled her ear, the whisk and swish of her hair against his cheek, his cock throbbed dully in his jeans. But when he winnowed a thumb into the waistband of her skirt Edie squirmed, lowered the camera, and said, We should go to school, and Calum grinded into her and said, Sure? and Edie said, What’s wrong with you, and pulled away, and Calum was left with what might be wrong with him, a bit.
IN THE FINAL DAYS of winter he’d gone to a party at Edie’s, her parents were away somewhere tropical on their yacht. From his family’s apartment in Laing Towers Calum walked south, over the Canal, down Knock Street, and up the cobblestone hill to the Mews, the gated harbourside community that lofted over Lower Olde Towne, where, after a call to Edie, the security guard buzzed him through.
Calum passed mansions festooned with pillars and arches and ornately trellised decks, to the Lanyesses’ landscaped yard. On the front porch, smoking, was a girl with her hair shorn into a hand shape, the nape and sides shaved right to the skin. The Hand. Calum ducked behind a bush. Why was she here, how did she get past security? With her were two kids, hoods up, a pair of goblins. Calum shifted, snow tumbled from the top of the bush in a little avalanche. Laughter, cruel and shrill — they’d seen him.
Hey, the Hand called, why you hiding, party’s in here.
So Calum, caught out, made the long dreadful walk up the driveway.
The threesome barely shifted to let him past, he had to squeeze between them, for a moment he was face to face with the Hand, she blasted smoke in his face. Don’t lock the door, she said. We’ll be right in.
In the living room Edie and a half-dozen of their friends sat in a stiff quiet circle, six ciders on the coffee table, six labels peeled to shreds, a boardgame unpacked and so far unplayed, everyone’s pieces loitered on START. Did you see who showed up, Edie whispered. Calum nodded, didn’t go over to kiss her.
And the door opened and in gusted the winter and here they were with their shoes on.
Great party, said the Hand, laughed, as sharp as a slap, the laugh hung fizzing in the air. Nobody moved, nobody said anything. Then there was a cry of, You’re on TV, and one of the goblins plucked a camera off a tripod in the corner and did a slow pan over everyone’s dazed faces, then said, Don’t worry, I’m not taping, and gave the camera to Edie, who held it to her chest like an infant.
Towing her sidekicks the Hand withdrew to the foyer. Footsteps headed downstairs.
Go see what she’s doing down there, whispered Edie.
Calum stared.
You know her better than any of us. Go!
The goblins sat at the top of the basement stairs, their whispers followed him down. The recroom’s open screendoor admitted an icy draft, the deck was dark, but the pool lights were on. Kneeling on the diving board was the Hand.
If you’re supposed to be checking up on me, she said, you’d better come out here.
He thought of Edie, of this house, of her parents. When he was over they talked to Edie as Calum’s interpreter or warden: And how does your friend do at school, etc., while a mute housekeeper served soup in bowls of bevelled glass. This was what he was now supposed to defend.
The Hand reclined on the diving board. Calum stood in the doorway: what might she do? Snow dusted the flagstones. The pool steamed. Deeper into the backyard was the tennis court, and beyond that, down the hill, Kidd’s Harbour, a fleet of pleasurecraft nudged about by waves.
Here’s a game, said the Hand. Find a star. Find one.
The sky was the broad back of something huge, turned away.
You can’t, can you? Because of all the lights. There’s too many lights here so there’s no stars. What’s the point of being up here if you can’t even see the night?
The Hand sat up and spat into the pool: a little raft of phlegm floated atop the water. This is your girlfriend’s house, right? The poor little rich girl? She sucks.
Careful, said Calum.
She snorted, moved to the edge of the board. Careful, she said. Careful’s nothing.
In a single, swift gesture she pulled her shirt over her head. Her shoes came off next, kicked onto the deck. And finally she stepped out of her jeans. The pool’s ghostly light shimmered over her body: parts were dark and then lit, parts were always light, parts were always dark. Calum looked over his shoulder, into the house. And back at the Hand.
Her mouth twitched at the corners. See? she said simply, and flopped into the pool with a splash. She surfaced, just a head, the water mangled the rest of her body into jagged indistinguishable shapes. This was tantalizing, if the waves settled it would all turn clear. Calum imagined diving in, swimming up, touching the smooth wet skin. He tensed, leaned forward on the balls of his feet, toward her —
Well, said the Hand, see you round.
Her legs kicked up and she dove. Calum waited, waited, the ripples stilled — and she didn’t come up. He moved poolside: the pool was empty. Giggling came from the house. The goblins rushed out cackling, scooped the Hand’s clothes off the deck, and tumbled in wild somersaults into the water. When the bubbles cleared they were gone too.
Later, when Edie and Calum went to bed they realized the brass doorknobs to the master bedroom were missing. I can’t believe you let that happen, she said, and rolled away. Overhead glowed the star-stickered ceiling of Edie’s room. He thought about the Hand’s body in the water, the slick shimmering gibberish of it, and tried to assemble the pieces into a naked whole.
Edie, he said, edging across the mattress, pressing against her. The replica galaxy shone down, dull and green. Hey, Calum murmured — nudging, grinding, stroking. Edie, hey. Edie? But she was either asleep or pretending.
LOOK, SAID CALUM, his voice coaxing, squeezing Edie’s hips. Look at these two appleheads, he said, and Edie sighed and looked: a couple, thirtyish, pushing a fancy stroller up the hill toward Orchard Parkway. Calum waited for Edie to ask what was so wrong with them. When she didn’t he said, I bet they don’t even do it. Edie let his words hang. He crossed his arms around her waist and pressed himself into her backside and said, Hey?
She wriggled away and left Calum holding air. Voices called from within the trees, their friends emerged, watches were tapped, they should go to school. School? said Calum. Come on, Edie. We could go back to my place, my ma’s at work all day. But Edie shook her head firmly. No way, Calum. You might not care about your future but I do. I want to graduate, thanks.
Their friends were moving up the path, behind the stroller couple, in pairs. Calum gazed across the common, at the stage where the famous magician had wowed everyone that morning, and he wondered how it felt to have so many people, together and all at once, say your name.
THE MONDAY after Edie’s party Calum awoke to his mother, Cora, leaning her head into his bedroom, eyes ringed with dark, voice a reedy crackle: Okay Cal, up you get, go to school. But he just lay there thinking. After a time his little brother Rupe appeared in the doorway. Ma said you have to take me to school. Take your fuggin self, said Calum, and went back to sleep.
That afternoon he walked up F Street, slushy and unplowed, through the Zone, past Blackacres Station, past the Room, into Whitehall, the factory district, and the ICTS Barns, where the trains went to sleep every night, unlaced sneakers flopping and soaked through to his socks. Past the Barns he entered the industrial district: abandoned warehouses, factories, plants, various Concerns no longer concerned with much, their gerundial purposes (Shipping, Receiving, etc.) painted onto pale splintering wood. At last he came to the massive concrete panpipes of the Favours Brothers silos, long decommissioned, where Calum ducked through a peeled-back section of chainlink. The loading dock was open. Inside was dark as a throat.
He peered into this blackness. There was no sign of the Hand or any of her people. But this was their way: invisible unless and until they wanted to be seen. Yet the gloom seemed to dance with firefly sparkles — dozens of eyes, catlike and glittering, watching him. .
Calum ran. Back through the fence, out of the docklands to the Piers. Here he hopped out along the blunt-headed stumps of a drowned jetty to the breakwater, the most western point in the city, and sat, heart hammering and dangling shoes refracted in the lake. The air smelled of wet wool and sewage. To the north was the mainland: tan-coloured fields, chalky cliffs, a gravel beach prodded and coaxed with waves — close enough to swim to, but Calum had never been.
HE REACHED FOR EDIE, to hold her, to hold on to anything. But her back was to him. He tapped her shoulder. A half-swivel of her neck: an acknowledgment of what he’d done, but not him.
What?
Nothing, said Calum.
Well are you coming? There was exasperation in Edie’s voice. You can’t skip, you’ve already been suspended. Calum?
The only people left in the park were the NFLM, hollering, taking down barricades, rolling up the welcome rug, collecting garbage on spiked sticks, their voices resonated as the woofs and hoots of animals.
One of the men splintered off from the group. He was coming over, crossing the common in a delicate mincing way. Calum said, Look at this guy, but Edie was moving up the hill to join the rest of their friends, waiting to go to school.
LOOK AT THOSE KIDS, said the one named Starx. Hey, partner — look.
Olpert Bailie stopped struggling with the guardrail. Teenagers loitered in the hillside orchard on the eastern edge of the common.
Go tell them to get the fug out of here.
Olpert blinked. Me?
Yeah you. You’re the security guard, right? Effortlessly Starx, a man-shaped monster, lifted a barricade into the back of the cube van, hopped up, hauled it alongside the others, and stuck his head out again into the daylight. Get going, he told Olpert. And quit being such a foreskin.
So Olpert went trembling across the swampy common, mud spattered his slacks. It was impossible to tell how many teenagers were gathered among the trees, they shifted in and out of the shadows, they made Olpert’s stomach jump and twist. The trains were always full of kids this age, they jostled him, they said things about him, it took such effort not to listen to what they were saying, if you met their eyes they had you.
Surely Starx would have been better at this sort of thing, the man was a giant, a menace, a coil of rage. Also he had on boots. Olpert wore loafers and anger was a language he’d never learned. In fight-or-flight moments he preferred to just stand, to stand and wait. To Olpert life was a negotiation of terror — at the world, but also at himself, as a part of it.
He’d only met Starx the week before, his first visit to the NFLM Temple in two decades. Prior to that he’d sat through the unveiling of his grandfather’s portrait alongside the other departed Original Gregories, afterward been granted conciliatory Full Status: Helper Level 1 (Probationary), funnelled the ceremonial pint of schnapps, sat while his legs were shaved by a hunting knife, sprinkled the clippings into the Hair Jar, thanked everyone profusely for the opportunity, and never returned.
Twenty annual newsletters arrived over twenty Decembers, each one junked. In that time Olpert took a job as overnight security at the city’s Department of Municipal Works, ten p.m. to six a.m. shifts paging of magazines in the building’s marble-pillared foyer. At dawn he was relieved by a woman named Betty and took the ferry from Bay Junction to the Islet, then walked home to a roominghouse where the four other lodgers existed only as crusty dishes piled in the shared kitchen sink and occasional thumps or groans from behind their bedroom walls. Also one of them was stealing Olpert’s apples.
So went Olpert’s life through his thirties, into his forties, punctuated with the sporadic glory of the Lady Y’s, his season tickets renewed devotedly each campaign. His body aged: the rusty mop atop his skull thinned and withdrew, his torso softened, the mightiness of his pee stream dwindled. As a kid he’d been an old soul, sombre and serious, taking nightly walks around the Islet with his hands clasped behind his back, and had always assumed in adulthood he’d at last find a home within his own body. Yet at forty-two he still felt apart from himself. Betty suggested a girlfriend might help, instead Olpert took to keeping moles: half his small room was taken up with a terrarium in which they burrowed and lived their delicate, private lives.
In March one of his housemates had taken a message: Olprt Balie call Griggs, and there was a number: 978-0887. A bland, almost robotic voice answered — NFLM Temple, Head Scientist speaking — and explained that all Helpers, even inactive ones, were required at a mandatory meeting that weekend. You work security, Bailie? asked Griggs, and Olpert told him sort of, yes. Well we can use you then, Griggs said, make your grandpappy proud. And at this Olpert felt something shrivel in his chest.
The following Thursday night he ferried to Bay Junction and switched to a Yellowline westbound to Lower Olde Towne. The Temple was two blocks up Knock Street, housed in what had at one point, before the Mayor’s sweeping reforms, been a police station. The building’s history was hinted at over the doorway: in rusted steel lettering, OLDE TOWNE POLICE SIA ION — one-and-a-half T’s had fallen, the half having maimed a postwoman, the lawsuit was ongoing.
Olpert paused on the doorstep, flooded with memories of that year spent trailing his grandfather into the bi-weekly meetings, less at the old man’s side than in his blindspot. As a Recruit, he’d have his mouth ducktaped and spent meetings wedged into a Little Boy Desk. Later everyone but the Recruits pounded schnapps and staggered into the neighbouring Citywagon Depot to unleash orange splashes of meaty man-vomit.
The door swung open and standing there was a six-foot-tall moustache. Bailie! Remember me? growled the moustache. He tapped his nametag — Reed — and hauled Olpert into a handshake that felt like losing an arm to a trash compactor.
I was L1 when you were a Recruit, said Reed. L2 now though.
Olpert recognized him: a manic character keen on workshopping masturbation techniques, his own involving slit fruit.
Reed rattled his bones with a clap on the back, screamed, Diamond-Wood, ready for your ducktape? and leapt away to wrestle a kid on crutches into a headlock.
At a sign-in desk inside the doors, between hauls on an inhaler a Helper named Bean handed Olpert a nametag — in a child’s scribble: Belly — and told him. You’re the only call-up, you know that? You start your own club or something?
Olpert faltered.
Just fuggin with you. Great to have you back. Now head on in, guys’re just getting their shine on.
Little about the Temple had changed. The walls were still panelled in a plastic approximation of wood, the floors the chipped tile of an elementary school gymnasium, track lighting flickered by the bathroom doors — one denoted with an M, the other with an upside-down W. Queues to both toilets choked the corridor, and whenever a man came out the next one went in fanning the air in reverent disgust.
Everywhere men performed manhood: punching, wrestling, grunting, roaring — there was so much roaring. All the Helpers wore nametags, official NFLM golfshirts, khakis, and the generic black sneakers of elementary school custodians. Olpert’s own uniform, resurrected from his leaner, lither Recruit days, spandexed his body, and his shoes — loafers, always loafers — seemed conspicuously unsporty and brown.
From the recroom came the burnt sour smell of too-strong coffee, pingpong ticktocked within a rumble of voices. Helpers sprawled on recliners, the bigscreen chopped between classic episodes of the incredibly popular Salami Talk and the NFLM’s own We-TV fixture (mostly pingpong). In the library things were more docile: a half-dozen men swirling snifters of schnapps debated the topic of Helping. Beyond this Olpert hovered as a child might outside his feuding parents’ bedroom.
Well people here just don’t seem to appreciate how we hold the city together, a man was proselytizing, to murmurs of agreement. Most people, he continued, most people wouldn’t know what to do if we stopped helping. It’d be chaos!
A different man jumped in, lisping: Juθt baθic θurvival, people have no idea how to θurvive if they have to. They’ve got it too fuggin eaθy.
Dack, come here, growled the first man, let’s see how you’d get out of a chokehold.
Some shuffling, a pause. The first man was flipped on his back.
See? he called from the rug. That’s how we do.
That’θ how we do, confirmed Dack.
Another man spoke up: My neighbour, you know what he’s got in his garage? Nothing. Honestly, it’s amazing, shelf after empty shelf — not even a hose.
Amid jeers and snide laughter, Olpert thought of his own garage: the roominghouse didn’t have a garage.
He drifted back through the foyer into the dimly lit, high-ceilinged, pew-lined Great Hall. The walls were the same fake wood as the rest of the Temple, but stained darker, suggesting the kitschy austerity of a stripmall funeral parlour. Ringing the room were portraits of late Original Gregories — and here, by the door, was Olpert’s own grandfather, face youthful and taut, gazing down along a pelican’s beak of a nose.
From the front of the Great Hall came a smashing sound — a gong, the Summons, the night’s assembly would soon begin. One by one the High Gregories emerged from a semi-secret portal that led to the Chambers and took their seats upon the dais. In the shadows, wielding a felt-tipped mallet, stood a massive, bullet-shaped man with no discernable neck — the Summoner — beside whom the gong hissed into stillness. Had he always been there, Olpert wondered, lurking in the dark?
With a great crash the Summoner struck the gong again. Last up from the tunnel appeared Favours, pushed out in a wheelchair by a ducktaped Recruit. Favours, the final remaining OG, appeared to have been unearthed from the grave: a face made of dust, eyes that ambivalently surveyed the living world as though already glimpsing the other side. The Recruit positioned him upon the dais and retreated.
Affixed to the wall above Favours’ head was a six-foot version of the NFLM crest: atop an outline of the city, a naked woman and winged man entwined in coitus. Above this image was written New Fraternal League of Men: The Mighty Ones of Eternity, and below it the four pillars: Silentium. Logica. Securitatem. Prudentia.
The gong exploded again, again, again, and Olpert slid into the end of a pew as Helpers shuffled in, some twirling pingpong paddles. The High Gregories took their seats on the dais, flanking Favours. At the far end of the table was Wagstaffe, the NFLM’s current Silver Personality and host of We-TV’s Salami Talk, which featured interviews leavened with a barely euphemistic sausage-making theme. In person he was even more orange-skinned and drastically chinned than he seemed on TV.
Beside Wagstaffe was Magurk, the Special Professor, a ratlike and savagely hairy man. As an L1 he’d wrestled Olpert into a half nelson and demanded to be told which pressure points it was possible to kill a man by striking. Out of nowhere Olpert’s grandfather had come barrelling down the hall, dropkicked Magurk in the lower back, and, as he crumpled, suggested, That one?
To Favours’ right, in the Imperial Master’s chair, sat a tense, taciturn man Olpert remembered as Noodles — older than the rest, in his sixties, golfshirt tailored into a turtleneck. Framing a stoic, pink face were a white brushcut and matching goatee. Noodles rarely spoke, just icily observed, yet was always nodding, as if his head were physically affirming its own secret thoughts. He worried Olpert even more than Magurk.
Griggs, the Head Scientist, took the podium. His hair was puttied into twin crisp halves, beneath which his face remained expressionless and waxen, almost animatronic in its movements, the way the forehead crinkled and flattened, the nose dipped obediently when he opened his mouth to speak. Quiet now, he said, in a voice like wind over water.
Pivoting on his hindquarters the bullish Summoner wound up and bashed the gong a final time. The murmuring around the room faded. Everyone stood for the Opening Oath, led by Griggs in a droning monotone from the pages of How We Do, the ongoing codex of NFLM ideology and activities. Olpert joined where he could remember: Let us all swear an oath. . A new year is dawning. . Stay awake to the ways of the world. . sworn and bound. . in eternal execration. . the last days and times… from generation to generation and forever. . the mighty ones of eternity. . all men.
The gong sounded again, the NFLM lowered into the pews, and the Summoner, perspiration ringing his armpits, squeezed into the empty seat beside Olpert. He nodded, a downward bob of his neckless head, his shoulders were foothills that sloped into the mountainside of his face. With a glance at Olpert’s nametag (his own read: Starx), the man took Olpert’s hand and whispered, Good lookin out, Belly.
Starx’s hand was weirdly tiny for such a huge man. The handshake felt to Olpert like having his fingertips gummed by a small, toothless lizard.
Hi, said Olpert. Good looking out.
The meeting got underway: Griggs conceded the mic to Magurk, who took it in his furry fist and began strolling the aisles. Terrified he’d be recognized, singled out, perhaps even attacked, Olpert slouched and averted his eyes. From the back of the Hall four Recruits crammed into Little Boy Desks, ducktape over their mouths, videotaped the proceedings — that was new, the cameras. One was the cripple, Diamond-Wood.
The rest of the men were the same as ever, broad and tense, with a primordial intensity in their eyes that goaded: Try and test me, just try. All of them, save Griggs in his socks and sandals, wore those same black sneakers. Olpert covered his left loafer with the right, then the right with the left. For some reason he found himself trying to estimate how many individual testicles were in the building — and had to shake his head to rattle the dangly jungle this conjured from his brain.
Magurk’s speech, whatever it had been, was over. My people, he said, you ready to show this city the best weekend of their lives? Are you with me? Are you fuggin with me?
Yeah! roared the men.
Starx punched the air, grinned at Olpert, whispered, Gotta love this stuff.
Magurk passed the microphone to Wagstaffe, reassumed his seat at the edge of the dais, rabies frothed at the corners of his lips. Positioning himself in the Great Hall’s most photogenic light, Wagstaffe spoke rousingly of courage, the four pillars, the NFLM’s responsibilities, history, order, the cameras rolled. The speech seemed a little too performed, infused with a mannered nonchalance meant to deny the presence of a viewership beyond the Temple. But people would be watching. They always were.
Was it less of a lonely life to be watched like that? To know you were seen? Olpert thought of his own life, the furtive hush of it. As a child he had more than anything wished to be invisible, to just drift through the world without being heard or judged. Two pews back was Reed, stroking his moustache. Did Reed have a wife? A family? Or was the NFLM his only family, and was that enough? The New Fraternal League of Men, thought Olpert: like a religion, except all they had to believe in was one another.
Wagstaffe handed the mic to Noodles, who pressed it to his lips, nodded, nodded, the room was silent, expectant — and with a final nod tendered it to Griggs.
Applause.
Helpers, Griggs began, though Olpert lost focus — Starx had shifted, his arm pressed against Olpert’s. It was a hot, heavy arm. He was very close, he smelled of boiled cabbage and wet towels clumped on the floor for a week, his nostrils flared and whistled. There was something almost soporific about his breathing, the steady in-out rhythm of it, it lulled Olpert, he listened and lost himself a little —
And now Starx was elbowing him, standing. Everyone was standing.
Olpert flushed and jumped to his feet.
Starx moved gongside. What had Olpert missed? He checked his watch, an hour had passed, how? Everyone rose for the Final Oath, which Olpert lip-synched as best he could. Starx banged the gong a final time and came at Olpert, seized him by the upper arms. Olpert tensed to create muscles there (biceps, triceps, whatever).
What do you know, Belly, said Starx, me and you: partners. B-Squad.
Me and you?
Yeah. Pretty big honour. Us as the magician’s official escorts or whatever.
Starx still held him, Olpert was growing exhausted from clenching his fists. Around the room like a prisonyard dance men had partnered off muttering in low tones. Starx’s eyes scanned Olpert’s face — and at last he was released.
Me and you, Belly, said Starx, smacking a small fist into his palm. Big time. You work security? Good. Here’s our lanyard. You take it, it won’t fit me — Starx gestured sadly at his colossal head. Nice to get a Citypass though. Ever drive one of those wagons?
No. I don’t drive much really. I get a little nervous on the roads —
Great. Seriously though, Belly, this kinda makes me think they’re grooming me for a bump, if you know what I mean. Maybe even to HG. I mean, because you’re still, what? Technically only Probe or something, right? Because you quit or whatever.
It’s Bailie.
So you’d think they paired you with me because I’m like, senior or whatever. Bigups have gotta be due soon. I know Noodles has his eye on the top spot — I mean, Favours isn’t going to be around forever.
Across the room the old man, deserted on the dais, had spun himself around. He bumped against the wall, a disoriented animal trying to tunnel its escape.
Poor guy, said Starx.
My name, I mean, Olpert tried again. They spelled it —
Belly! Heads up, here comes the We-TV crew.
A Recruit sidled up with a camera. Starx hauled Olpert under his arm, displayed him with paternal pride, and beamed into the lens. Me and my man Belly here, Raven, if you end up watching this, we’re gonna make this the best weekend you ever had. Welcome to our fair city! He squeezed Olpert roughly. Anything to add, Belly?
Olpert Bailie looked at his hands. His fingernails dug ridges into his palms. Bailie, he whispered. My name’s Olpert Bailie.
Best weekend you ever had, Raven, repeated Starx, through a teeth-gritted smile.
The Recruit moved off to shoot a pair of Helpers by the Citypass cache playing tug-of-war with a lanyard. Starx fixed Olpert with a stare. Hey, dingledink, I know you’ve been away awhile but we use patronyms in this here outfit. Everyone’s first name Gregory, last name whatever — in your case, Belly. Got it?
Olpert tried to meet Starx’s eyes. But they were hard eyes to meet, twitching over everything but settling nowhere. What did they see?
CALUM WATCHED the gingery man highstepping his way through the mud to the bottom of the hill, where he did a salute sort of thing over his eyes, squinted, and, in a voice like a feebly blown flugelhorn, told them they needed to leave the park. School time! he said.
From the top of the hill one of Calum’s friends said, We’ve got the morning off.
Well the morning’s over, right? said the man. He wore a nametag: Belly.
Grumblings, mild protest, but there had already been talk of going to school. Calum felt apart from them, from everything, standing there alone at the edge of the orchard.
He looked past Belly, into the sun, high above the treetops now. When he’d been little, Cora had told him never to look at it directly, it could blind you. So now he stared not just at but into the sun. He wouldn’t go blind. Nothing would happen to him. But after a few seconds Calum looked away, blinking and queasy.
THE NIGHT AFTER being suspended for skipping class Calum lay awake in bed until his mother’s gentle snores came wisping down the hallway. He tiptoed out the door, slid his shoes on in the stairwell, and, ducking in and out of shadows to evade Helper patrols, ran all the way to Whitehall, where he waited by the loading dock. Past one a.m., past two, to that nothing hour when the moon sagged and dimmed and the night became infinite. It was only then they appeared from underground, a faceless hoodied mob toting cans of paint and rollers.
From behind someone grabbed his shoulders and Calum tensed — but the Hand was leaning in, the soft warmth of her cheek upon his cheek. So you’re with us? she whispered in his ear, and Calum told her, Yes.
He’d been delirious with it, the silent stealthy rigour of the herd slipping through the streets, so many of them, he stayed at the Hand’s side. It was random yet purposeful: someone picked a window and someone else unfolded a stepladder and up Calum went, taping the top of the frame and around its upper corners while someone else did the bottom. Then the painters stepped forward with their rollers and the quiet filled with the zipping sound of acrylic pasted over glass, and when they were done Calum tore off the tape and there it was: a blackup. And on to the next window, wherever it might be.
Time disappeared. Calum lost count of the blackups. He felt giddy. At some point the night began fading, he’d just finished taping the vitrines that fronted a pretentious hardware store. When he came down the Hand told him, This’ll be the last one, and pressed close and her breast was against his arm and she said, Fun, right? and he said, Yes, and she laughed and went off to gather the troops.
Calum admired their final piece, the big bright window negated into a dead black thing. He patted the wet paint and transferred a handprint to the wall. Stepping back he saw himself in the five-fingered outline on the bricks and thought how being a person was at once such a big incomprehensible thing and so, so small.
But the Hand had returned to curse him: What are you doing, that’s not how we do it. She spat. You think you’re special? You don’t get it, we’re all part of this, no one’s above anyone else.
She turned her back on him. Everything withered. The group tramped away and so did the Hand and Calum stood there deserted in the middle of D Street while the sky lightened into morning, his handprint growing more stark and black and stupid as the bricks around it blanched, and knew he was a fool.
YOU TOO, OKAY? said the man, Belly, to Calum. Time to go to school.
At the top of the hill Edie and everyone else were waiting for him. Above them, rising out of Orchard Parkway towered the Redline Station. But why go? Being suspended had been liberating, all that time alone with his thoughts.
Hey? said Belly.
He was about Calum’s mother’s age. He was struggling to be brave, something he wasn’t. He couldn’t meet Calum’s eyes. You could tell he was no one.
Calum moved out of the shade. Belly wavered. From up the hill Edie called, Cal, hey, we’re going, let’s go.
Belly still wouldn’t look at him, he cast a sidelong glance over the common, muttered, Okay now, thanks a lot.
Calum took another step downhill, turned his head, hawked from deep in his throat, then spat a jiggling gob that landed at the man’s feet.
Hey, said Belly. But his voice was weak.
One of his classmates said, Did Calum just spit at that guy? and Edie called: Calum, hey! Calum, what are you doing?
Belly watched the spit foaming on the grass, the little bubbles popped one by one. For some reason, he closed his eyes. He swayed.
Calum hawked again and spat. Belly flinched as it struck him in the cheek, but his eyes stayed shut. Edie screamed. Yet she didn’t come running down the slope. In fact there was a sudden emptiness to the air that suggested she and the rest of their friends had fled. How did Calum feel? He couldn’t feel anything.
His spit wiggled down Belly’s face.
And then from somewhere came a sudden rush of something swift and huge. A second figure in the same beige shirt was steaming up the slope, and Calum barely had time to cringe before a fist caught him in the face. A sparkle of lights, his legs gave way, the earth swam up to catch him, cool and damp. An enormous pair of legs stood over him — black sneakers and khaki trousers — and from high above a deep godlike voice boomed: You fug with my man Belly? You’re nothing, you hear me? You’re nothing, nothing, nothing, you’re fuggin nothing.
ITH JEREMIAH nuzzling her feet, Adine channel-upped past people showing off their musical skills, giving hotplate cooking lessons and walking tours of their neighbourhoods, hawking used electronics, performing standup routines, etc., all those endless lonely voices, each one calling into We-TV’s echoless ether, all the way to 73, where the woman, Faye Rowan-Morganson, drained and draining and tragically fascinating, the lure of a stranger’s tragedy, was just beginning her daily introduction.
Well it’s Monday, she sighed, welcome to The Fate of Faye Rowan-Morganson. Though if anyone’s even watching, for you it’s Thursday by now. I hope you’re having a better Thursday than my Monday anyway. I’m having a hard day.
A pause, which Adine, seeing nothing, had to fill with her imagination. Maybe Faye Rowan-Morganson was just staring into the camera, at herself reflected in the lens. Maybe she had stepped out of frame for a moment, maybe she was getting a drink. Adine raised the volume a couple clicks and listened for the knock of a mug or glass placed back on the kitchen table.
Of course, since Adine saw nothing, this table was just one detail in a world she imagined for this stranger every noonhour, the rest of the kitchen sparse and dimly lit, more scullery than culinary suite, just a sink, bare countertops, with this pale and drawn woman hunched at a plastic table with her arms outstretched, thin arms, reaching toward the camera and toward anyone who might be watching. Or not watching: listening.
THAT NIGHT, back in February, when Debbie came home to Adine painting the goggles black she joked, Is this so you don’t have to clean out the mousetraps? Later, in a more delicate tone, she asked, Is this about your accident when you were a kid? Adine pulled the goggles over her eyes and stared into the emptiness concocting some acid response.
Finally she said, No. It’s about trying to be alone.
The air went taut.
Adine sensed Debbie hovering, wounded. Then the bedroom door closed and from behind it came whimpering. Adine turned on the television: two Helpers were elucidating the merits of a backhand serve. After a few minutes she called Sam. Tell me what’s happening, she said. And happily he did.
Watching TV without seeing: this became her work. Not investigating blindness as phenomenology, not a (sub)liminal exploration of nonvisual space, not an inquiry or critique of any sort. Not lost in words. She just wore the goggles day and night, flipping channels, seeing nothing beyond the pictures her imagination painted inside her mind. Maybe one day her hands would paint them. Maybe not.
At 1:00 and 5:00 and 9:00 Sam would call and narrate the action in two-hour chunks. Her brother felt so faraway out there on the Islet, it was good to connect again. Before We- TV’s closed-circuit democratized the airwaves, they’d grown up together with television: cartoons and gameshows and the overwrought daytime dramas in which soft focus signified both memories and dreams.
Meanwhile Debbie was out saving the world with her endless friends and colleagues and contacts and networks and indomitable faith in the city and its citizens. Adine found it all exhausting: pleasing so many people fractured Debbie into many different people herself. From the moment they’d met she’d struck Adine this way, trying to please her even as Adine ranted and raved and shoved her against a wall.
This had been at an IAD gala, a semi-formal banquet celebrating the new arts-dedicated floors at the Museum of Prosperity. The exhibits included a retrospective of Loopy’s work, four sculptures by the mysterious Mr. Ademus, and, thanks to Isa Lanyess’s on-air lament, Adine’s Sand City, which technicians had unearthed from Budai Beach and shellacked and preserved under glass. Though she’d been invited, Adine played event-crasher, ninety-five pounds of rage storming past security, her hair a brushfire, right up to the host of In the Know.
I’m just the show’s Face, explained Isa Lanyess. She pointed across the room at Debbie skulking by the punchbowl. She’s the one whose idea it was, she’s the one who wrote the script, she’s who’s responsible for your sculpture getting saved. Talk to her.
You? Adine railed, driving a finger into Debbie’s chest. You’re responsible for this? You want to save Sand City? Do you understand anything? Who even are you?
I just thought it was a waste to have such beautiful work washed away, Debbie whispered, steering Adine into the coatroom. She begged her to go for a coffee or a cider or a meal or something, please, she’d only loved the exhibit and —
Exhibit? You and your fuggin exhibit. Adine produced a notebook from her pocket and in a voice of mockery recited:. . that infinitesimally detailed replica of the city, heartbreakingly rendered, building by building, in sand-sculpted miniature. What a travesty to have such a magical creation just erode into the lake. You doosh, she sighed, destroying it was the fuggin point! But her rage seemed to be waning.
They should talk more, this wasn’t the best time or place, Debbie told her, she just wanted to support what was good. Please, she said, I’m sorry.
Fine, ciders. But you have to come to my neighbourhood.
Ciders became dinner (wings) and more ciders, a soft and nervous goodbye, another round of ciders the following week, a midnight walk down to Budai Beach, a kiss on the sand, and a few nights later, back at Adine’s apartment, the two of them collapsing sweat-slicked on either side of the mattress. Debbie whispered, Let me hold you, and Adine cracked up, a snort that exploded into goosy hoots while Debbie disappeared under the duvet. I was just trying to be nice, came her voice, muffled by the covers. Adine cackled: Let me hold you — what a precious swan you are, it’s adorable.
JUST AS FAYE ROWAN-MORGANSON was signing off — Well if there’s anyone even watching thanks for listening, hope it wasn’t too depressing — the phone rang.
It was Debbie: You sound out of breath, she said.
No, said Adine, just working.
Oh? Oh good. Me too. Except guess what? I got blackedup. Can you believe that?
Sam’s going to be calling soon.
It’s just you’d think they’d respect, I don’t know, that this is a place for kids. No?
At one. What time is it?
Nearly Lunchtime Arts. But listen, that old friend of mine? Pearl? She’s in town tonight. And I’d told her I was planning this big reunion —
Pearl. . Your former colleague.
Teammate.
Teammate, whatever.
Ha, well she was a million times the player I ever was. I mean, she went pro, for one thing. But I haven’t heard back from anyone from the old team. Do you think you could join us? So it’s not just me and her?
Ew, Jeremiah’s doing that bum-licking thing. I can hear it. Ew, ew. He’s really going for it. Get in there, buddy!
Adine, hey, it’d be nice if you came. I mean, you don’t have to decide now or anything. If it’s last minute, that’s fine. Just, you know, keep it mind. She’d love to see you.
She would? Or you feel bad you couldn’t raise a crowd?
Please?
Are you coming home first?
Didn’t I tell you about this thing out in Whitehall? With one of the older kids? Calum?
He’s — ew. Should we put one of those cones on him? Listen, I’ll hold the phone up.
Adine?
Did you hear that? It’s like, slurping. Do you think he has worms?
Anyway I might write it up for In the Know, this thing, it’s some sort of concert or something. And before you say anything, I know, slaving myself to Lanyess again, but we need the money. Or I do anyway. And then meeting Pearl, so. See you after? If not before?
What about dinner? Picture me, alone at the kitchen table eating corn from the can.
Meet us! We’re just going to the Barrel for wing night, it’s two minutes from the apartment. And if not to eat you could at least come by to say hi?
Silence on Adine’s end of the line.
The door jangled and slammed: the first kids arriving for Lunchtime Arts, three of them smacking one another with their knapsacks. Debbie held a finger to her lips, the kids hushed. Adine, she said, you there? I have to go.
Love me.
I do. I do!
Of course you do. You love everyone.
AT THE STROKE OF ONE, Sam called his sister.
It’s one o’clock Adine, he said. Time to do the work. Time’s a machine right Adine?
It sure is, Sammy. Thanks for calling. What’s on?
Salami Talk Adine, said Sam, and switched the phone to his other ear, clamped it against his shoulder. On 12 a tearful Knock Street florist was raving to Lucal Wagstaffe about being blackedup. When she finished, he leaned in with half-lidded eyes and murmured, How terrible, madam — but what are your feelings on spicy meat?
I can’t do this, said Adine. Anything else, please.
Flipping the dial Sam said, Are you ready for Monday Adine?
What’s Monday, buddy?
We’re thirty-six on Monday Adine. The end of the third hand.
Ha. Right.
And then it’s the end of the work right Adine? The end of time’s third hand when the machine stops and goes backward. All the way back to the beginning right?
Buddy, I get a little lost when you —
Then time’s machine will take us to thirty-six years ago okay, when we were zero and together okay Adine. Right Adine?
You want to get together for our birthday? You want to come out here? Sure. .
Sam smeared his thumb into the worn arrow on his remote, the TV chunked from one channel to the next, through the hissing blizzard of channel 0, at 99 pictures appeared again. He paused on an infotainment program where neon graphics splashed across the screen to the zipping sounds of lasers. Sam watched.
What are you watching? What channel are you on?
He’s doing his trick tomorrow night at nine Adine, said Sam.
What? What channel?
Raven. This is what Isa Lanyess, In the Know, is saying now okay. Channel 83. She’s not saying what he’s doing yet — Raven.
Raven, ugh. Just the name.
It’s going to be in the park Adine. But it’ll be on TV too. Not even tape-delayed. Live.
Hey, buddy, the talking stuff — I’m good, okay? You don’t have to tell me that stuff. I can hear fine. It’s just seeing. So if there’s something to see, jump in there.
Sam said, Yes.
He watched and listened while Adine listened. Isa Lanyess, In the Know, was talking about the downtown movie theatre, Cinecity, where people could come if they wanted to watch what was happening everywhere else, all at once, on the bigscreen.
With all the We-TV Faces’ feeds, plus all the public cameras, there’ll be coverage of every neighbourhood in the city, Isa Lanyess said. So anything that Raven does will be projected live to anyone who wants to see it!
That’s kinda crazy, said Adine.
Who knows what he’ll do? said Isa Lanyess. We’re all really excited.
The woman doesn’t so much talk as bray. Don’t you think, Sammy?
It’s kinda crazy, said Sam. Why’s it kinda crazy Adine?
Buddy, that they can even do that sort of thing. Turn the city into a movie set, I mean.
And then don’t forget, said Isa Lanyess, starting on Saturday, Cinecity’s going to be broadcasting the Jubilee Spectacular, all weekend. And don’t forget All in Together Now, the movie for the people, by the people, that you all helped write and create!
Oh, wait, said Adine. This is the worst ever.
Ever Adine?
Ever.
The report ended. An ad for Salami Talk came on, a feline slink of bass guitars and saxophone beneath the sultry voice of its host: Tomorrow on Salami Talk we’ll —
Adine hit MUTE. This fuggin show, she growled. This fuggin guy.
They’re having Raven on tomorrow. As a guest.
Right.
Lucal Wagstaffe’s chin, said Sam, is a very big orange chin.
Hey, Sammy? How’s that thing on your face? Are you taking care of that?
Can we watch this interview Adine?
Don’t pick at it. Remember what the doctor said. And you got that ointment, make sure you’re putting that on. And food? Today’s grocery day, right? Make sure you go.
Yes. Adine? Raven’s on at one o’clock. That’s perfect, that’s when we do the work.
It is.
Adine?
Sammy?
I’m sorry.
You’re sorry.
Yes.
For?
Because you can’t see okay.
Oh. Ha. Right. Well thanks.
But we’re doing the work right Adine? We’re doing good communication. And it’s only Monday when it’s our birthday and we’re thirty-six and time’s machine —
Indeed, buddy. I appreciate it.
Adine hung up and Sam sat for a moment with the phone pressed to his ear, waiting for the dialtone to be replaced by the machinations grinding away beneath the city’s surface. When it emerged, the sound was faint. Did that mean the machine was slowing? Sam wasn’t sure. He checked his three watches. The first two had stopped, their six hands aligned at midnight, the final watch’s three still wheeled. He put the receiver back in its cradle, looked around his room at the various parts and elements, trying to decide if a last-minute cog or gear required adding before the end.
Sam touched the scabby crust along his jawline, felt a loose flake, and pulled. The pain as it peeled from his cheek was lemony and sour, his eyes watered. The air was cold on the raw spot. He brushed his finger over the sore, paused, then stabbed inside. The hurt was sudden and sharp. Sam closed his eyes and said, This is time’s machine and not a dream, and gouged, and finally, gasping, pain blazing in his face, examined his fingertip: capped in a thimble of blood.
ON THE FERRY to Bay Junction Sam stood on the deck with his hands on the railing, the boat’s engines growled, the water frothed and sloshed, the day dimmed. An Islet-bound ferry passed transporting workers home from their downtown jobs, their own work. Citybound it was only Sam and an elderly man with his cane on his lap, whom Sam avoided. It was important workers were unseen, and good communication with Adine was important too, though Sam’s own work had many elements: good communication, proper attire, dream checks, systems maintenance — all of it, all the way to time’s reversal, and then they’d be at the beginning again, before everything went wrong and changed.
When the ferry arrived at the mainland Sam did not head down into Bay Junction Station as the old man did. He could walk to Street’s Milk & Things, though it was much farther than it had once been. When he and Adine were kids they’d lived so close that if his mother Connie needed milk for her coffee he could run over and get it before the water even boiled, though they had to go together, the Polyp’s products were often expired: you had to know the calendar, you had to check the dates.
Normally Sam walked, head down, up the path from Lakeview Campground into the woods, past the Friendly Farm Automatic Zoo and out beside the People Park Throughline, then down into the common and up through more woods, finally entering the clearing and past the houseboat to the glowing white sign of Street’s Milk & Things. But today Sam stopped at the edge of the poplars on the southern ridge of the common and stood for a moment, looking.
The common was empty, the muddy ground golden in the late-afternoon light. On television that morning the whole park had been teeming with bodies, all those bodies that existed within time’s machine, each body held a brain that made it a person, and each person had a mother and maybe a sister, or a brother, and friends, or at least other people they knew, and those people had brains and families, and more people attached to them, and it was endless, a great sprawling lattice of people and their brains upon people with more brains that grew and looped back upon itself and grew again, forever, yet everyone was so separate. Though soon time’s machine would bring them all together.
Deep underground (and monitored on Sam’s wrist) turned the three final hands, most people were oblivious, they just lived their lives. Which was fine. Only a select few could be responsible for the work, though Sam had to remind himself that anyone among the city’s bodies could be a worker — you didn’t know, you were only permitted to connect with two other workers. And his connects were Adine and the Polyp.
Atop the Grand Saloon Hotel the towerclock’s hands were locked at nine. Sam recalled Raven putting his fist to his forehead and his eyes opening and the nothing within them, they were just holes, and the clock had stopped. It had only two hands, was not official, its rotations were marked by minutes. So Sam stared at the clock and counted to sixty. The hands did not move. He counted again: nothing. Yet upon his own wrist his third watch still chipped away, seconds to minutes to hours. .
Sam listened: birds chirruped and the leafless branches of the poplars creaked in a tired wind and on Parkside West cars went by with an airy, breathy sound — but there was no grinding of gears, no clank of levers, no steady drone of engines or tick of meters or hiss of valves from underground. The earth didn’t vibrate and hum. The towerclock was still. Sam touched his scab and felt pain. This was real. He looked out over the common and said, Hello? But to whom. The park was empty. There was nobody there.
STREET’S MILK & THINGS hadn’t changed since Sam was a kid: the sad clinking of the bells over the door as you entered, its owner the Polyp affixed to his stool behind the counter, everything furred with dust, you came out feeling grimy and damp. Near the door was a rack that held one yellowing dirty magazine and a poorly folded map, the scantily stocked shelves were organized by container type: boxes of cereal and detergent and nails, canned goods huddled together below — corn-in-a-can, catfood, motor oil, a labelless can, in black marker it asked: BEANS?
In the back of the store was a sign that heralded: MR. ADEMUS’S THINGS. Upon these shelves Sam filed the parts to be collected by another worker who passed them along to another worker to maintain time’s machine. Now though the shelves were empty. Everything was in place. The work was done. There was nothing to do now but wait for Monday, the end. But what about the towerclock, locked, and the silence —
Mr. Street the Polyp came waddling out from behind the counter. Hello, Mr. Ademus, once again. Old friend! As you can envisage for yourself, you’re a sellout. Success!
A hand came at him: a bulge of meat that slumped into a wrist, an arm, up to a humped shoulder, a neck lost under a sludge of chins. Grinning lips, yellow teeth, from the mouth a bad smell. But first the hand.
Grudgingly Sam took it: now Street had him, he squeezed. The fat man started ranting, nothing Sam wanted to hear — restribution this and historiographically that — all the while pumping Sam’s hand with his fat, hot hand. At last he pulled away grinning. Mr. Ademus!
Hi, said Sam, Mr. Street, but what about time’s machine? It’s stopped or I can’t hear it okay. And it’s supposed to be Monday that the machine reverses and time turns back, the third hands I mean. And do you think it’s Raven Mr. Street? Who might stop the work?
Pop shook his head sadly. Almost without refutation, he sighed. This charlating they’ve plotted upon our fair island, how could he not be balsamic of all your whoas?
And so? Should we do something Mr. Street?
Mr. Ademus, prehaps more work? More things, prehaps?
But should we try to stop him Mr. Street?
Unrefutably! He must — Pop looped an arm over Sam’s shoulders, placed his mouth to Sam’s ear, dropped his voice to a whisper — be stopped.
Okay.
Now, said Pop, clapping, Mr. Ademus, about you endowning me with new works.
Sam told him no.
Ah. So today you endown me only with shopping?
Sam told him yes.
Then beplease yourself and shop till you’ve dropped!
From the freezer Sam took a stack of nuclear meals, put them on the counter, and waited for Pop to ring them in.
Once again, Mr. Ademus, please consider these on my house. As grace for your things.
Sam took his groceries, turned to leave.
Until tomorrow, Mr. Ademus?
If there even is a tomorrow okay, said Sam, and headed out the jingling door, home.
HE GRAND SALOON’S penthouse was in the cathedral’s former belfry. On either side of the suite’s door stood the watchmen of B-Squad: the Summoner — Starx — and Olpert Bailie.
Inside the room napped Raven, he needed his sleep, though who knew what he got up to in private, thought Olpert. There was something strange in his eyes — or, more, it seemed they weren’t there at all. The illustrationist had requested the A/C cranked, so the air was icy and brittle. While Starx fiddled with the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, Olpert shivered, blew into his hands, hugged himself.
Starx looked him over from head to toe and said, You haven’t thanked me yet, Belly.
Bailie, said Olpert. My name is Olpert Bailie.
Sure, sure.
You want me to thank you.
I knocked that kid the fug out!
A kid. You punched a kid.
He spat on you. And you were just standing there. What’s wrong with you?
Olpert had no idea what to do with this question.
You got a lady, Bailie?
A girlfriend.
Starx nodded.
Not currently.
You go out a lot?
Out?
To meet ladies.
Olpert thought about the last date he’d been on, nearly a year ago. His colleague Betty had set him up with her sister, Barbara, of the recent divorce and red leather pants. Things had been going fine, considering, until the nosebleed.
He shrugged. Sometimes, I guess.
Starx’s walkie-talkie crackled — Griggs, with instructions: at six p.m. they were to escort the illustrationist to the hotel’s banquet hall. The NFLM had taken the liberty of booking Olpert off work until Tuesday. So he’s all ours, said Griggs, all weekend. Then he recited the four pillars, traded Good lookin outs with Starx, and the radio went dead.
Listen, let me buy you a cider, said Starx, turning to Olpert, when we’re done tonight.
A cider.
Or two. Or nine. You ever been to the Golden Barrel?
In Upper Olde Towne?
You sound nervous.
Nervous?
You’ll be fine with me. That’s my hood, been out there since — a while. Tell you what, we’ll do our business, bust outta here say eightish, and be over there to make wing night. The Barrel’s got a killer wing special till nine.
Wings.
Holy shet, yes.
Somewhere, the A/C came on with a whoosh. Olpert closed his eyes, shivered. Opened them.
And standing there was the illustrationist.
Olpert’s bowels slackened, but didn’t release.
Gentlemen, said Raven.
Starx took an elongated stride backward and stooped — more of a lunge than a bow.
Raven said, You are my escorts to this dinner, I understand. This celebratory homage.
We are, said Starx.
Good. Your names?
Starx.
Olpert. I mean, Bailie.
You attended my arrival this morning.
We sure did, said Starx. Really amazing stuff, sir —
Fine, yes. But may I ask how the morning’s events made you feel.
Sorry, said Starx. Made us feel?
Yes. What emotions did you experience. When I touched down, or made the illustration involving the birds, or when I trunked away. How you — Raven’s hand twirled in an evocative gesture — felt. Please explain.
His accent could be described only as foreign, something bad actors might adopt to suggest somewhere else, all rolling r’s and hacking k’s, but even then nothing was consistent — a sentence later the vowels might drawl and twang.
Olpert said, I felt a bit nervous.
I don’t think that’s what he was after, said Starx. He’s always a bit nervous, this guy.
No, no, said the illustrationist. Nervous is good. What else.
Um, scared.
Scared, good.
I was sort of hungry, said Starx.
Raven’s eyes flicked briefly to Starx, back to Olpert. His gaze was vertiginous — like an undertow, that helpless sensation of being tugged under.
Mr. Bailie, how else did you feel.
Anxious. And frightened. And worried, uneasy.
Starx elbowed him. Those are the same as nervous and scared.
Perhaps they are, said Raven. But continue. Why, what made you feel this way.
Something felt. . wrong.
God, Bailie, don’t tell him that.
No, this is good, said Raven. This I can use. You see, as the one making these illustrations, the emotions they might evoke are alien, almost unimaginable, to me. Precisely because I am at their centre, I remain at an experiential remove — the eye of the storm, so to speak. So your neuroses interest me. Come, let’s sit down.
Olpert and Starx followed him inside the suite. The illustrationist seemed to glide across the marble floor.
Sweet digs, said Starx, collapsing onto a plush white settee. Olpert joined him.
Raven moved to the window that overlooked People Park. Yet when he spoke his voice seemed somehow inside Olpert’s head: Now, Mr. Bailie, what else fills you with fear?
What? Else?
I ask because I wonder what it was about this morning that struck fear into you. Perhaps it is at the heart of something. As I’ve said, as the generator of the experience, all this is beyond me. I want simply to understand. To achieve some. . clarity.
Raven’s voice seemed come from somewhere out the window.
Perhaps we are on the wrong track, said Raven. At the risk of sounding forward, could you tell me your dreams, Mr. Bailie. Your most secret dreams. Are there motifs.
Sorry?
Motifs, Bailie, said Starx. Patterns, themes. Stuff on repeat.
In the scary ones? There are snakes sometimes.
Snakes, said Raven.
Though that might be because of Jessica.
Starx perked up: Who’s Jessica?
What else appears in your dreams, said the illustrationist — he sounded now high above, hovering against the ceiling.
Other than snakes?
Yes. Tell me.
Something heavy and hot clamped upon his shoulders — Raven’s hands. Olpert tensed, but from the illustrationist’s fingers a soothing, sedative warmth spread into his body. When Olpert spoke the words came slow and didn’t seem his own: Motifs in my dreams are less things in my dreams than things not in my dreams. Absence as a motif. And by that I mean total absence. I’m all alone and there’s nothing else there.
Raven let go. What else, Mr. Bailie?
Well I have this one dream. . Olpert had no idea what he might say. But the words just kept coming, tumbling more quickly now one to the next: I’m on this big ship, as big as a building, one of those ships that’s so big it feels like a mall or something.
An aircraft carrier? said Starx.
Mr. Starx, please, said Raven. Then, to Olpert: Go on.
Okay, the ship’s so full of people I can’t move. You can’t imagine how many people. Millions. And everyone’s lined up for something, but I’m for some reason smaller than everyone else so I can’t see what it is. I can’t see over their heads. I’m a kid. Or feel like a kid, clarified Olpert, though none of this was true, he’d never had this dream, it spilled out of him from nowhere. Anyway, he continued, everyone’s looking at this. . thing, whatever it is, at the front of the ship — starboard? aft?
The bow, said Starx.
The bow, indeed. Thank you, seaman Starx, said Raven. Continue, Mr. Bailie.
So I want to see it, Olpert said, or at least find out what it is, but when I go to talk no words come out. I can’t ask anyone, and getting to the front is impossible too because the crowd is packed so tightly in. And it’s then I get this feeling, this wash of a feeling, that I’m alone. All these people are united by this thing and I don’t even know what it is. And that’s when the crowd starts spreading out from me. Like we’re on an iceberg breaking apart. Nobody’s actually moving but the space around me just gets bigger and bigger, and it’s not even that I don’t want to move, I don’t know where to go. There’s no one in the crowd I know, no one to go to, but the feeling of being alone like that — I can’t even describe it to you. I can’t. And the deck of this ship is expanding all around me, and the crowd is fading farther and farther away. I stand there and stand there and let it happen, until the crowd is eventually gone — they’ve disappeared. They’ve vanished.
Vanished, whispered Starx.
Oh, Mr. Bailie, said Raven, without even pressing you, we learn so much about your heart! Now, continue, please.
Well then I’m just alone, on this big open grey deck of something that used to be a ship, but now it’s just. . everything. It’s the whole world, as far as I can see, and I’m there, and it’s the same everywhere I look, just the greyness, and the sky is sort of colourless too, and I’m totally, completely alone. I’d walk somewhere but I don’t know which way to walk. And who would I walk to?
And this makes you afraid.
It’s the most terrifying feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life, said Olpert Bailie.
Starx’s eyes were wide, astonished. The room felt spellbound.
And then what, Mr. Bailie.
And then?
Olpert straightened. Starx blinked. The trance was broken.
And then? And then I guess I wake up.
AFTER RETRIEVING her papers from the Galleria’s security office Pearl wandered back to the foodcourt, where Kellogg and Gip and Elsie-Anne queued for nonresident processing. Go on, Pearly, said Kellogg, be a while here yet, we’ll meet you at the campground, and flashed a big thumbs-up. But Pearl couldn’t take her eyes off her son, who gazed at his mother with an uncomprehending, anaesthetized look.
She’d never seen Gip like this, almost catatonic, and though Dr. Castel claimed that a double dose of meds wouldn’t be harmful as a one-off emergency, she wondered. He’ll be fine, he’s a tough little guy, Kellogg had assured her, crushing four pills into a can of apple juice. Usually her husband’s brightness bolstered her, now it wearied her into surrender — hadn’t Gip himself looked frightened, swallowing the potion down?
One of the Helpers took her by the elbow, steered her away. The line shifted, her family disappeared. From within the crowd came Kellogg’s desperate, warbling cheer: See you soon, Pearly!
She was taken out of the foodcourt, past the shops, to the Galleria’s southern exit, where the Helper said, Welcome home, gave her a little shove onto Paper Street, and locked the doors behind her.
And there it was: the city.
All that concrete and glass and steel seemed ushered up from underground. Pearl imagined the buildings folding in at their rooftops and blocking out the sun, she had to lean against the Galleria’s wall to steady the ensuing vertigo. Though down below was no less disorienting — people, so many people, barrelling around and past and between each other, a choreography of chaos, a percussion of footsteps pattering this way and that. How did each one remember who they were, or where to go —
Pearl laughed. She was being ridiculous. Though she’d been away a few years, the city had been home for most of her life. She stepped away from the wall and levelled her thoughts and tried to look at things rationally, anthropologically. What had changed? She knew the buildings along Paper by name: Municipal Works, the caustic Podesta Tower, We-TV’s HQ on the corner at Entertainment Drive. The few new businesses bore merely cosmetic changes in signage, the architecture original and unchanged.
Even so, everything had the slightly skewed look of some dreamworld rendering, nothing matched her memories, not precisely. Though she’d never felt comfortable downtown, its joyless parade of suits and high heels, so she took Paper east to Parkside West, crossed over and stood at the hilltop looking down. And with the park spreading out before her, she tried to summon how it felt to be home.
Nothing surfaced.
A breeze got the bare trees creaking.
A few blocks south, a Citywagon pulled into the City Centre lot.
A train came gliding into Parkside West Station, high above, traded passengers, then went north. Pearl followed on foot beneath the tracks, caught up at Bridge Station, the Yellowline reversed and headed back toward Bay Junction. Traffic still choked Guardian Bridge all the way to the mainland, where, wedged into the cliffside, was the Scenic Vista upon which the Pooles had collected the night prior.
Pearl headed east. Passing Street’s Milk (& Things — newly amended) she was first surprised, then relieved, to see an OPEN sign in the window. The place hadn’t changed, though had it ever been new? Pop’s store had always seemed in need of upkeep, the paint faded and flaking and the windows forever smudged with an orange, oily type of dirt.
A half-mile along the park’s northend she came upon the grounds of Island Amusements, rollercoasters twisting like scoliotic spines, the ice-blue slides of Rocket Falls, the Thunder Wheel’s all-seeing eye glowering down upon everything. (OPEN JUBILEE SATURDAY! boasted a sign pasted to the fence.) But it was the Stadium that Pearl wanted to see, so she pushed farther east.
Ten minutes later she stood at the players’ entrance. The new sponsorship and ubiquitous Island Flat Company signage provoked a slight proprietary jilt, but just seeing the place felt good: a bulbous island amid a sea of stark concrete, banners in Y’s maroon hung from the roof at each of the six gates.
The players’ entrance was locked, so Pearl had to go around to general admissions. On gamedays, when Pearl arrived for warmups she was always greeted by fans clambering and begging for autographs. Though the lack now of fans, of other players — of anyone — felt ceremonial and right.
A notice in the box office window seemed apologetic: Thanks for another great season, get next year’s season passes now, call YS-TICKT (978-4258). From here Pearl walked the perimeter of the stadium, stopping at each gate, cupping her hands to the glass, scanning the mezzanine for custodial workers or administrative staff or maybe even a keen rookie, out here alone to train.
But there was no one, and no way in. By the time she made her way back to the box office Pearl was huffing and felt a slight twinge in her knee. Leaning forward, catching her breath with her hands on her thighs, she allowed herself a cruel little laugh: returning to the place she’d once been a star, she’d worn herself out trying to get in.
IN THE GRAND SALOON’S banquet hall waiters hustled about to a tinkle of silverware and the burble of fifty conversations, the pepper-and-steel odour of roast meat wafted smokily from the kitchen, schnapps-based aperitifs had given way to cider, the bubbles lifted emberlike in each crystal flute. Distributed among the two dozen tables in blacktie and ballgowns were local dignitaries: various reps of cultural associations, several pink-drunk pillars of the business community, stars of the Lady Y’s tautly muscled and stuffed into too-tight eveningwear, nervous academics from the Institute and their embarrassing spouses, the beautiful and rich, the vapid and canny. A cameraman crept between the tables, dropping to one knee every so often to shoot scenes he’d edit later for In the Know’s weekly Party Town featurette.
Upon the stage worked the island’s artist laureate, Loopy, a squat woman in a paisley caftan and matching beret. Loopy’s assistant, mousy and morose behind a curtain of bangs, handed over chisels and picks with which Loopy hacked a potentially avian shape from a block of ice.
Two tables were stationed at the front of the room: one for the NFLM’s High Gregories, where a ducktaped Recruit struggled to napkin wheelchair-bound Favours, Griggs flipped idly through channels on his walkie-talkie, Noodles sipped a glass of water, and Magurk quizzed Wagstaffe: How’d you come at me with a blade? With a shy giggle, Wagstaffe wagged his butterknife. Wrong, said Magurk. Like this — see? Punch and cut, punch and cut. Good lookin out, said Wagstaffe.
At the other head table, with the central positioning of newlyweds at their nuptial feast, sat the Mayor and Raven. She’d doffed her mayoral sash in favour of a powersuit, though a nick in her stockings had run from ankle to knee. He’d clipped a bowtie to his tracksuit, his head seemed especially polished, all discoball sparkle and gleam.
Here were the appetizers: atop an IFC flat, fish bladders in a buttery broth, an antenna of sparrowgrass sprouted from their midst. Laughter stabbed into the air, glasses clinked, waitstaff in IFC uniforms cranked limb-sized peppermills and in the kitchen refilled empty cider carafes from a rubber tub by the compost bin.
The Mayor watched Raven stir his fish bladders. The whole menu tonight comprises gourmet selections from the Island Flat Company, one of our local businesses, she said. Everything’s local, the cider’s from the orchard on the eastside of People Park. .
Raven wasn’t listening: he plucked a bladder from the bowl, examined it with a dubious squint, and tentatively slid it into his mouth. Face contorting into instant horror, he gulped cider, replicated the horror face, signalled a waiter, made sure the milk wasn’t local (it wasn’t), commanded the largest glass possible. Then, to the Mayor: You were saying?
There was more to her little treatise, once upon a time she could dovetail any subject with civic pride. But she’d lost the thread. Gazing around the room she tried to feel something for her constituents beyond mild loathing. In the last half-decade of her incumbency she’d begun to feel first distant from these people, then estranged. Life on the island had become too easy, everyone took her reforms for granted, no one considered how things used to be. Look at them, she thought: these people owe their comfort to me and they don’t even realize it.
Well I should probably say something, said the Mayor, pushed back from the table, closed her eyes for a quick personal affirmation — touch green! — before addressing the guests. But when she opened her eyes Raven was standing on his chair, arms extended in victory. Yes, he cooed. Yes, yes!
Around the room people struck glassware with forks. Every head in the room swivelled toward the illustrationist, faces alight, what would he do.
Yes, yes! he cried, conducting his audience like a maestro. Put down your forks, please. Friends — welcome. Yet here I am welcoming you when it is I who should thank you for being welcomed. For you have welcomed me here — graciously. And so it is with grace I thank you for this welcome.
He bowed. Everyone tinged their glasses again, they couldn’t resist, the banquet hall was a cauldron of delight. Ignoring this, the Mayor carved into her fish bladder. Out hissed a little gasp, a nautical aroma.
Please, no more tinging, said Raven, please. I’ve been all around the world, and this city — I’ve rarely had so keen a welcome. Don’t applaud. Seriously, stop it. Listen.
He climbed down from his chair and began to walk around the room. The Mayor slipped the fish bladder into her mouth, the moist withered cyst of it.
Passing the NFLM table Raven nodded, the High Gregories nodded back.
Tomorrow night, he continued, though I have yet to discern the specifics, I will be illustrating something truly, I think, spectacular. As always it will be a magic that of course already exists, but remains unseen. My job as ever is just to reveal this magic to you, to illustrate what in your hearts you already know, what you already believe. My work is only to remove the fog that obscures the truth.
The air had gone tense and glassy. The Mayor chewed, mouth flooding with a sour, silty mucous.
Raven paused beside Loopy and her sculpture. A raven? he asked. She curtsied. He patted her beret in approval, then was on the move again: Friends, tomorrow night all I can offer is an uncovering. Each of my illustrations is only that, merely scratching at a frosted window to reveal the hidden wonders on the other side. But with a shift in light, every window can become what? A mirror. He smiled, snatched a napkin off a nearby table — its owner, the Institute’s oft-cuckolded provost, yelped — and held it up. Madam — sorry, sir, if you’ll allow me. Please, all of you, follow along with your own serviettes.
Everyone in the ballroom folded their napkins as they were shown: once in half, once diagonally, doubled over, pinched in, and tucked. Choking down the fish bladder, the Mayor swept up her napkin and endeavoured to catch up. Nearby, Griggs, Wagstaffe, Magurk, Noodles, and Favours’ Recruit were doing a bangup job, while with each step the Mayor’s creation looked less like Raven’s, like theirs, like anyone’s or anything.
The illustrationist said, Now we have envelopes. And what do you think might be inside this envelope? Perhaps we should open it to see.
Around the dining hall, the packages were unfolded — the Mayor’s collapsed — and murmurs rippled around the room. At the neighbouring table, Wagstaffe displayed his creation: seared into the fabric was the Silver Personality’s self portrait. And so it was with everyone, hundreds of effigies of the attendees’ own faces, rendered in striking realism. The Mayor’s own napkin bore only a brown smear — hideous, possibly fecal.
See? the illustrationist laughed. Now you see. Just a simple illustration.
The Mayor launched to her feet, clapping. Wonderful, wonderful. On behalf of us all, thanks a bundle for the trick. But now let’s eat, you’re our guest, not our entertainer. And we’re here to celebrate the park, after all, twenty-five years of People Park, let’s not forget. It’s the Silver Jubilee — she sensed hysteria mounting in her voice, paused, breathed. Please, sir, relax, enjoy the IFC’s fine cuisine. A round of applause for our guest!
Hands tapped.
The main course arrived: squab with toasted almonds atop the requisite IFC flat, steamed sparrowgrass on the side. Raven slouched in his chair, draped his napkin over his face, appeared to nap. Though the Mayor’s meal tasted weirdly bilious, she ate every bite, sawing the sour grey meat into little cubes that she chewed to oblivion and swallowed, until all that remained were bones, a rubbery dimpled flap of skin.
The dessert carts began to circle the room. Raven peeked out, snatched the napkin from his face, leapt to his feet, snapped three times, and screamed, Who wants to see, before we retire, one final illustration?
Hooting. Feet stamped, laps were drummed. An apple flat was held aloft in salute.
Raven slid behind the Mayor, took her napkin, and placed his hands, as heavy and hot as fire-baked stones, on her shoulders. She squirmed, he squeezed. From his fingers heat entered and spread through her body, along her arms into her fingertips, through her torso down to her feet. Her face tingled, relaxed. Raven released her, turned to a passing dessert cart, said, May I? to the young woman wheeling it, swept all the flats into the white cloth, shook the bundle, and opened it: empty.
Wild applause.
Please, Mrs. Mayor. Please, if you could just lie upon this cart.
The crowd cheered: Mayor, Mayor, Mayor!
Summoned with a curling brown finger, as a patient called to a surgeon’s table the Mayor lay down on the dessert cart, her legs hung off at the knee. She felt nothing beyond distant, dreamy worry, almost a memory of the emotion even as it occurred. The illustrationist draped the sheet over her midsection. In his hand materialized a whip with a grip of two knotted snakes.
Cutting a woman in half, intoned the illustrationist, is delicate business. It is most important to ensure that she remains — Raven fingered the whip — alive at both ends.
He tossed her napkin up and snapped the whip: the fabric fluttered in two halves to the floor. The brown stain had vanished. Wagstaffe yelled, Huzzah!
All this seemed vague, the room shimmered, the Mayor felt herself not quite falling asleep — but fading. She was only hazily aware of the illustrationist looming over her, grinning, eyes like two black slots.
I hope you can forgive me, he whispered, for what I am about to do.
The crowd waited.
The illustrationist stroked her midsection with the whip, lazy and serpentine. He closed his eyes. Once, twice, three times he stroked the Mayor’s body with the whip. Then, with drama, he cocked it behind his head. It has been said by one of my predecessors, said Raven, that one receives just desserts in accordance with one’s beliefs. His eyes opened — in them the Mayor saw herself, reflected — and he screamed, So be it! and the whip swooshed through the air.
There was a moment of silence and stillness, as if everyone in the dining hall had inhaled at once. This was broken by a clumsy, clumping noise, like a piece of furniture knocked over. A gasp resounded around the room.
And then silence.
The Mayor felt a surge of satisfaction: the trick had failed!
But they were applauding now, a few scant claps that swelled quickly into a standing ovation. People roared and shrieked. Someone smashed a glass. Favours cackled. Noodles nodded. Magurk whispered, Holy fug, look at that. Wagstaffe fell to his knees, tears in his eyes. Even Griggs’ waxen face seemed to have come alive with delight.
You see? laughed Raven, nudging the cart forward.
The Mayor looked down.
By its wheels, her legs lay in a heap on the floor.
ROM WITHIN THE HOOD of his sweatshirt Calum watched his mother’s back, or the bones of it beneath her dress, the coathanger of her shoulderblades over which the dress draped, through its thin fabric her ribs and spine. Eyes on the little TV propped on the kitchen counter, Cora stirred the pot of corn-in-a-can with a mix of tenderness and fatigue, slowly, round and round.
Calum turned his attention to the empty plate before him, pressed down on the tines of his fork and angled the handle upward. Across the table, in a matching sweatshirt, his little brother Rupe began to do the same thing.
Calum snatched Rupe’s fork, a flare of pain shot down his cheek. He touched the tender, puffy skin around his left eye, wondered if something was broken, if you could break your face.
Rupe watched him carefully.
Be nice to each other, said their mother. It’s so rare we’re together, be nice, please.
Yeah, Calum, said Rupe.
In a careful voice Cora said, How’s Edie?
Calum folded the fork around his wrist, admired his new jewellery.
Cal? I said: How’s Edie?
No idea.
His mother stirred the sauce. On the TV, Isa Lanyess, so classically, equinely handsome, with her cheekbony grin and thick batting lashes, counted down the week’s most popular Faces. At number three, she said, what do you know? It’s me, Isa Lanyess, In the Know. And then she threw to a clip of herself that morning, hair whipping around her face as Raven’s helicopter descended into the common.
She’s up two spots from last week, said Cora.
Calum imagined a punch landed between his mother’s kidneys, the wet paper crumple of that pitiful body around his fist.
So, Cal, are you going to the Room after dinner?
Her voice was the faint whimper of mice in the wall.
Cal?
Yeah, he said. But talking hurt, his eyes watered, he blinked away the tears.
It’s so nice you do that, Cal, with those kids. You’re so talented — and generous too! Cora gave him a proud look. The sauce sputtered. Calum hid inside his hood.
Isa Lanyess was back: At number two, holding strong from last week, Lady Y’s Lingerie Pillowfight Extravaganza. It’s the quarterfinals —
Well we don’t need to see that, said Cora with a nervous laugh, snapped the set off, and announced, Dinnertime!
Onto the table she slid Calum’s and Rupe’s dinners, a splat of corn over an XL flat apportioned half to each of her sons. None remained for herself. She put in some toast.
You boys eat, she said. You’re young, you’ve got appetites. I’m just an old biddy thing, what do I need all that food for. Then she rocketed to her feet moaning, Cheese, and rushed to the fridge. She returned with a plastic tub. There you are, sorry.
He shook some on, ate a forkful. Chewing was agony. Good, he said.
Is it, oh I’m glad! You’ve always liked my flats, Cal, since you were a little boy.
Rupe said, It’s really good, Ma, thanks.
The rest of the meal passed in silence save the chime and scrape of cutlery. Calum longed even for the TV’s inane chatter. Despite the pain, he shovelled food mechanically, rapidly, into his mouth. Meanwhile Cora sheared corners from her toast and chewed each one pensively, watching her boys eat until they were done.
Thanks, said Calum, and rose with his plate.
Don’t clear up, his mum shrieked, standing. I’ll do it, you go, you’ve got places to be, and then seeing his face she startled. Cal, honey, what happened to your eye?
He shook off her hand, slid his plate into the sink, pushed past. As he put on his shoes at the door Rupe appeared. Cora wants to know when you’re coming home.
Late. Tell her, late.
Then he was bounding down the stairwell past blocks of black painted on the walls, the tang of urine, to the street. He leapt over the final, broken stair, landing upon the flagstones of Laing Towers’ courtyard, the impact split his lip, he tasted pennies, a sour ache radiated through his face. Calum tightened his hood and headed up F Street, where the streetlights were just coming on, one then the next, in gradual consensus admitting the night.
KELLOGG JIGGLED THE POLES, buckled down the final clasp. The tent flapped a bit in the wind up from the lake but seemed secure.
What say you, fair wife of mine? A shipshape castle for the lady in her manor?
Pearl took two ciders from the cooler, knocked the tops off on the picnic table, handed one to Kellogg. Ahoy, she said, and drank, and giggled, and said, Ahoy-hoy.
You think Gip needs another round of meds? said Kellogg.
Across the campground their son sat reading Illustrations: A Grammar in Harry’s backseat. At sixish Kellogg had pulled into the site to find Pearl sitting on the picnic table with a warming sixpack, two empties at her side. She’d sprung up and climbed into the van before anyone had a chance to get out.
I missed you guys, she said, lavishing boozy kisses upon each of the Pooles in turn.
Gosh, Pearly, said Kellogg. We missed you too. But we’re all together now, right?
Gip had ignored his parents’ requests for help setting up camp and refused to get out of the van. The day’s already ruined, what’s the point, he’d sulked, arms folded over his chest. Now, with dusk settling, he still hadn’t moved, nose buried in his book.
Let me see how’s he doing, said Pearl.
Kellogg was left at the picnic table with Elsie-Anne, whispering into her purse. An errant braid hung in front of her face, Kellogg tucked it behind her ear. She permitted this stiffly, as she might an inoculation.
Annie, hey, who you chatting to?
Familiar. He’s telling me about Viperville.
What’s that then?
She cocked an ear, leaned down, nodded, smiled.
Oh, is that your friend from this morning? The snake?
Eel, she said. In Viperville Familiar says babies don’t come from mums and dads. They come from themselves.
Do they now.
Shhh, she said, and bent to listen.
Kellogg tipped back his cider.
The van door opened. Pearl swung her legs out, sat there rubbing her face.
Everything okay in there? said Kellogg.
Gip’s hungry, she said. I am too. All this cider on an empty stomach —
I’m starving, Dad! screamed Gip.
Well sheesh, champ, then why don’t we get a move on and find something to eat?
WELL, SAID DEBBIE, that’s it for today, I’m Debbie, thanks for checking in, we’re off for the Jubilee Weekend but we’ll be back Monday, hope to see you then.
She turned the camera off. Calum, sprawled on a workbench, was shaking his hooded head.
What?
Nothing.
I don’t like doing it! Come on, Cal. You know this isn’t my thing.
Right.
Just let me finish up here and we can go, okay?
Sure.
Debbie tacked a drawing on the gallery wall — a spring theme, a lot of green and great lurid bushels of flowers, with clear skies topping the pages in blue stripes or rain dashing down from grey washes of cloud. The newest addition was a picture of the Zone: the twin rectangles of Laing Towers anchoring one end, the ramparts of F Street rowhouses, above everything the traintracks ran like a headline. No people. A cat sniffed a fire hydrant and over a fat pale spider of a sun flapped two m-shaped birds. Most striking was an alley in the picture’s centre, markered so black the page puckered. In the bottom right corner, the artist had signed his work: — P.
Pierre’s latest masterpiece, said Debbie. See how he’s using what you taught him about perspective? And that alley! Look how dark he’s done it. Very mysterious.
Yeah.
Hey. Debbie sat down beside him. Everything all right?
He pulled his hood away.
Your face!
One eye was swollen shut, the skin puffed and glossy, black crust scabbed his lips.
What happened?
Calum moved to the back of the Room. By the bay window stood an easel draped in a sheet. Past it the lake was purple in the dusk. Twenty yards out waves met the breakwater, a ridge of cement that resembled the petrified spine of some beached aquatic beast.
Debbie said, You going to work on your painting?
Calum shook his head.
If you want to talk about it, I’m here. Right? Calum?
Yeah.
Was it an initiation or something?
The Room’s timbers groaned, waves glipped and swished against its stilts. Calum watched the lake.
Well should we get going? said Debbie. When does this thing start?
Dark. When it’s dark.
And what is it exactly? I know you explained sort of but. .
I saw you got blackedup. There’s still paint on the front windows.
Yeah. I mean, a little frustrating because we have kids here and, I don’t know. .
You don’t think you deserve it.
I don’t know. Do you think I deserve it?
Calum pulled his hood up again. It’s getting dark, he said.
Sure, let’s go then, said Debbie. Put the benches up for me?
In the bathroom she washed sparkles and marker from her hands, locked her office. When she came back Calum was still standing at the window, staring at the lake.
You’re not going to write about this for TV, right?
Calum, no. I told you. You don’t trust me?
This is just to see. You want to know what’s going on out there, what we’re doing, well you can come see. But it’s not for anyone else, right?
Sure. Wait, what do you mean?
You can come but it’s not. . He trailed off. It’s just, it’s for us.
Oh.
He flipped his hood up and moved past Debbie, toward the door. Grab a flashlight, we should go, he said.
And Debbie went after him, trying to feel trusted, trying to feel good.
AT FIRST WHEN THE pickup and trailer pulled into Street’s Milk & Things, Pop assumed he’d only have to disappoint hopeful patrons of Mr. Ademus. In the doorway he held up his arms in a gesture meant to convey: Sold out, apologizations! But out stepped two men in the khaki uniforms of the NFLM, one carrying a briefcase, the other with a Citypass lanyard around his neck, both with terrific moustaches. At last the birds fly home to roast, said Pop.
He locked eyes with each of the men in turn, closed the door, turned the sign around so NOT OPEN faced out. The men looked at the NOT OPEN sign, at the proprietor posed defiantly behind it, one of them knocked, the other gestured at the pickup. Pop didn’t move. From the briefcase papers were produced and pressed to the glass. At last Pop addressed them as per their nametags: Bygone with yous, Misters Walters and Reed!
The Helpers exchanged words. Walters tore off a crinkly carbon copy, rolled it into a tube, and wedged it in the doorhandle. Then they got back in the pickup and pulled around behind the store. Pop’s breathing shallowed, a vein throbbed in his throat. Finally he threw the door open and in socked feet went waddling after the two men.
With Walters waving him along, Reed was reversing into the clearing. The trailer slid underneath the houseboat with a clang.
That’s my home! screamed Pop. What is your strategization?
It’s condemned, said Walters. We’re just picking it up. You’ve got a problem, go through the proper channels. We gave you the paperwork.
Just doing our job, called Reed from the cab.
Pop wailed, Injust, degenerational, vandalistic, totalitary! Unsuppositionant, predominary, predilicted, no, reprehensitory, no, unfoundational, no, declensionive, no, anti-popularly, no, not fair, not fair, not fuggin fug fuggin fair.
Meanwhile Walters secured his houseboat on the trailer, strapped it down, locked everything into place. Listen, he said, smoothing his moustache with thumb and forefinger, just check the paperwork. There are processes for this sort of thing.
Processes? roared Pop. I’ll tell you a processional thing or two. If it didn’t mean defiliating the hollowed ground of my establishment I’d process my foot through your cranial lobe right now, both of yous, evil ones!
Walters nodded at Pop’s stockinged feet. Would you now?
This is my home, Pop said. He fell to his knees. My home. A quartered century hencefrom. Whereupon am I supposed to sleep?
Reed honked the horn.
Read the paperwork, said Walters, and hopped into the cab.
Pop knelt in the gravel, watched the pickup pull onto Topside Drive, houseboat swinging behind atop the trailer, slid into traffic — and just like that his house was gone.
AS REED PILOTED them west toward the dump, Walters opened his briefcase and took out a packet of Redapples. He offered one to his partner. No, sir, said Reed, quit those things years ago.
Smart, said Walters, unrolled his window, lit the cigarette, took a long, deep drag, and blew smoke into the oncoming traffic. On the shoulder, someone had painted over the Guardian Bridge turnoff sign with a solid black rectangle.
Look at that, said Walters. Those fuggers are getting bold, coming this far east.
Try blacking out the Temple though, said Reed, and they’ll see what’s coming.
Or, you know, they won’t.
Won’t?
See what’s coming, sighed Walters. Hence the surprise, Reed, of whatever what is.
In the sideview mirror Reed checked the trailer. It rolled along steadily behind the pickup, a boxy shadow back there in the purple evening. From the cupholder he took a walkie-talkie, confirmed the seizure and signed off: D-Squad, Good lookin out.
Poor guy, said Walters between drags. You got to feel sorry for him.
Reed merged onto Lowell Overpass. How do you mean?
Oh, he’s a total applehead. I mean, what’s he doing, living in a parking lot? It’s amazing it took this long to get him out of there. Still though, he said. Still. .
Enh, said Reed. You heard the HG’s: this weekend’s supposed to go smooth, no hiccups. Who knows what trouble that guy might have had planned. What did Magurk call him? A genital wart on the dong of the city.
Walters ashed out the window, inhaled, blew smoke into traffic.
You think too much, Walters.
So what? We’re just doing our job?
Exactly. We’re just doing our job.
DURING THE DAY THE ZONE was a storybook of wonders: why did that person have a parrot on her shoulder? What was happening down that alleyway with three men arguing around a dolly heaped with copper? This litter of thousands of orange paper dots — who, how, when, what? But in the cold, still night with the only life her own jammering heart and the cloudpuffs of her breath, Debbie’s curiosity shrivelled. You bundled against the cold. You were wary. Any shadow could morph into a thief slinking at you with a blade.
After sunset the Zone always felt a little chillier, the air a little thinner, than the rest of the city. It didn’t help that the breakwater subdued the tides, or the lack of lights in the old stockyards cast the western side of F Street in gloom, or that UOT and Blackacres emptied at dusk: the soup kitchen and shelters and Golden Barrel began to admit their nocturnal clienteles, the shops lowered their shutters, families withdrew into their houses for the night. The only people out would be patrols of Helpers, whistling cheerfully as they strolled the streets, clubs hidden in their pantlegs. At night anything could happen here, and often it did: instead of a place of stories, it became a place where stories happened to you.
Following Calum up F toward Whitehall, Debbie talked unceasingly, if only to distract from their footfalls, calling out to be chased.
So you’re really in with these folks now, huh?
Sure.
They’re okay?
They’re okay.
You’re not worried about —
Calum clicked his tongue. There’s nothing to worry about. You have this idea that these people are like, not people. Maybe they just figured out something different than you. Maybe they look at what you think’s a normal life and are just like, that’s not for me. Maybe it’s too safe and boring and there’s nothing, there’s no edge to it. So they make something else. And maybe their something else isn’t for you.
Well why take me there then?
So you can see.
Does this mean you’ve been before? You’ve hung out with them lots? Calum?
He quickened his pace.
At F Street and Tangent 20 the Yellowline sloped downward and continued at streetlevel into the Whitehall Barns, and it was here that Calum veered inland. He led Debbie down a laneway between empty warehouses, through the hole in the chainlink, to the silos. In there? she said, and he told her, Yep — though he seemed to waver, and it was Debbie who went first.
Inside, the moon sliced through the shattered windows and played jagged patterns over the concrete floor. Flashlight, said Calum. Debbie turned it on: a dab of yellow quivered at their feet, down a flight of slatted metal stairs to the basement, where bunches of candles burned on either side of a door propped open with a chair.
Then they were in the service tunnels angling down beneath Whitehall, the temperature warmed, Debbie shed her coat and sweater, carried them heaped in her arms. An industrial noise came grinding up the tunnel. As they descended it intensified, a grating drone that set Debbie’s teeth on edge. On and on they went, deeper and deeper underground. Finally the tunnel released them into a sort of grotto, where the sound exploded: a terrible music that was huge and cruel and everywhere.
Debbie killed the flashlight. Motes of colour swam before her eyes, she plugged her ears and blinked at the sparkling dark. Gradually she was able to pick out industrial lamps strung along extension cords ringing the room. Beyond their alcoves of weak light the room was a fathomless smudge. Slowly the shadows took shape, they seemed to swell and pulse and writhe — people.
Were they dancing to this tuneless music that rattled Debbie’s bones inside her skin? There were people around the periphery too. In one of the nearby light nooks a hooded figure held out a forearm to someone else dragging a piece of glass across the skin: the blood swelled in black bubbles, wiped away with a rag. They noticed Debbie watching, turned toward her, faces just shadows inside their hoods.
Where was Calum, he was gone. Debbie squinted. How many people were there? Thirty, forty, hundreds, she couldn’t tell. And even with her ears plugged the music throbbed inside her head. Though this was hardly music, no instruments, no one was singing. It was noise, yet somehow immediate and intimate, even alive. It seemed, thought Debbie, to billow mistlike from the room itself and swirling to consume everyone within.
Tentatively she took her fingers out of her ears, let the sound come screaming in, tried to make sense of it. The whining through the middle range was reminiscent of the staticky screech of a distorted guitar, the pulse beneath it seemed percussive, but there was no sign of either guitars or drums. Just people, ringed by a dozen or so megalithic towers of speakers and amps, wires webbed overtop in a ropy ceiling. Inside these towers the crowd milled and shifted — slow, almost purposeful.
Calum stood at the edge of the cipher, backlit, talking to a girl wearing what appeared to be a glove for a hat.
Debbie caught his eye and waved. He ignored her, kept talking to the girl. But then he eyed Debbie again and finally came over and slouched in front of her like a child humouring a parent he wants to escape.
What is this music? she yelled. What do you call it?
Calum pulled away, looked around, leaned in again, didn’t speak.
Is there a band? Where are they?
Calum’s lips moved but Debbie heard nothing.
The band, Debbie screamed, and placed her ear to Calum’s lips.
There’s no band, he said. We’re the band. He gestured above, at the network of wires overtop the dancefloor. Those are sensors. The sound comes from us, moving around. However we move is whatever we hear. You hate it, don’t you?
He seemed almost gleeful. Cal, said Debbie, why did you bring me here?
Why? So you could see.
But there’s nothing to see!
A sour look Debbie couldn’t quite read passed over his face, frustration or regret. He muttered something and drifted away, back toward the girl in the odd hat — not a hat but hair, Debbie realized, palming her skull.
This girl spat, said something to Calum, who looked at Debbie, quickly, then away. The urge to calm whatever she had unsettled fluttered up, but the girl took Calum by the hand, moved out of the light and into the crowd.
And Debbie was left alone with the music. It was horrible — like a hand over her mouth, like hands on her throat, like hands tightening on her shoulders and stomach and thighs. It stabbed into her ears, filled her face, centipedelike went scuttling down her spine, spread pulsing back up into her chest, expanded, tingled all the way to her fingertips and out again, into the world, as shreds of exhausted light. She tried to find something in it, to trace some melody or beauty. But she couldn’t. She didn’t understand.
Calum and the girl had vanished. The two who’d been cutting each other were gone too, all that remained in the lamplight was a shard of bloodied glass. Everyone was inside the circle now. Except Debbie, who groped toward the tunnel, found its opening, entered, the walls rough as gravel. She remembered the flashlight: it strobed wildly ahead of her as she went splashing through puddles that hadn’t been there on the way in, the cavernous hall chased her with its screams.
After a time the music faded to a distant drone, farther along the only sounds in the tunnel were Debbie’s footsteps and the rasp of her breath. She leaned against one of the walls: moist, almost spongy, she recoiled from it shivering. Behind her and ahead, the flashlight shone into blackness. Hello? she called. Her voice didn’t even echo, just seemed swallowed by the dark.
She couldn’t go back, not to what was there. And so she continued on — the corridor sloped down, leading her even deeper beneath the city. She turned back and there was the music, faint but screeching. So down again she went. What was this lightless place, where would it take her, the smell was earthy, the floor became dirt and the flashlight wobbled over it, was it fading? A knot bobbed in Debbie’s throat, she blundered on.
And up ahead was a shaft of light.
Debbie raced to it: a grate, high above, and a ladder leading up. She pocketed the flashlight and climbed. The grate swung open — the street, and air, sweet and cool, and the night sky, the vast burnt skin of it bruised by citylights.
And people: a crowd of students lined up along the street, an ordered line behind a velvet rope of girls in too-tiny skirts and boys in too-tight tops, and beneath everything thumped a dull and steady bassbeat.
The Dredge Niteclub. She’d come out in its gutters.
T EIGHT-THIRTY a Yellowline train dumped the Pooles into Mount Mustela, a neighbourhood known for okay restaurants and furshops and Bookland, the city’s oldest bookshop, said Kellogg’s CityGuide. From the platform the escalator lowered him and Pearl and Gip and Elsie-Anne, conversing with her purse, while Kellogg enthused, How about that train, eh, guys? Can you believe there’s no one driving those things, pretty amazing. You want to talk magic? And those moving sidewalks — just whoop, all aboard! And off you go.
They were spit out where Mustela Boulevard deadended at Tangent 1, a turnaround from which the 72 Steps switchbacked down the bluffs to Budai Beach. From here the alleged mountain (more modestly, a hill) lifted to the Mount Mustela Necropolis at its top end. On either side were residential neighbourhoods, fractals of courts and crescents, each house and duplex and walkup glowing golden with the lives lived inside. Surf rumbled, the night held the island in its fist, the air smelled of deepfry and the fishy lake, and Kellogg took it all in, beaming.
We’re here, he said. The Pooles have arrived.
I’m hungry, said Gip.
Well how about some island flats? The local specialty, isn’t that right, Pearly?
You bet, she said. Inkerman’s at Mustela and Tangent 4. Best flats in town.
Best in town? Is that what my guidebook says? I thought —
It’s what I say, said Pearl.
Gotcha. Kellogg pointed to a streetlight: a buttery flame danced inside a wrought iron cage. Check it out, guys — fire!
Gas lamps, said Pearl. That’s new.
Why does no one care about me? said Gip. I’m hungry, I said, a million times.
The Pooles swept north, Kellogg in the lead brandishing his CityGuide, Gip next in his knapsack, then Pearl holding hands with Elsie-Anne, who whispered into her purse. At Inkerman’s they were greeted with a HOLIDAY HOURS SORRY notice over padlocked metal shutters.
Great, said Gip thinly, just great. What now? Are we going to starve to death?
Did you take your meds? said Kellogg, then to Pearl: You gave him his meds, right?
The gas lamps seemed to slow and gutter. At the fur concern next door a man wheeled display racks off the sidewalk, shaggy pelts jostling as if still alive, and closed up for the night. A few doors up a woman was folding up a sandwich board — BOOKLAND: NEW AND USED BOOKS. Kellogg sprinted toward her yelling, Hey, hey you there!
The proprietor slipped into her shop, studied him through a little window in the door.
Hi? said Kellogg. Sorry, we just want directions.
I’m closed, she said, voice muffled. Open by appointment only.
We’re just looking for island flats, he said. Or anything really. Food.
Pearl came up, holding Gip’s and Elsie-Anne’s hands. Raven! screamed Gip, and pointed at the storefront display, a tower of Illustrations: A Grammar.
My family, said Kellogg, gesturing grandly.
The woman spoke to Pearl: It’s food you’re after? Flats?
Or anything. Anywhere to eat.
Only stuff that’s open now this far north is in UOT. But you don’t want to go there. Not this late. You’d do better down on Knock Street. Lots of restaurants there.
For tourists, said Pearl.
The woman stared.
My wife’s from here, Kellogg explained.
Oh, said the woman.
We’re here for the Jubilee!
Well good luck, said the woman, and trotted off into her store.
Pearl snorted, shook her head. What a charmer. See why I left?
Oh come on now, said Kellogg. Probably gave her a shock is all! But how bad is OUT?
UOT, Upper Olde Towne. I guess there are patrols and stuff now, they’ve cleaned it up a bunch. My friend Debbie lives out there. It’s where we’re meeting later.
So then, really, said Kellogg, how bad can it be?
THE BANQUET HALL was in darkness. From Loopy’s bird sculpture, packed away in the hotel’s meatlocker between two gory sides of beef, one of the catering staff chiselled a few feathers into his end-of-shift schnapps, chugged it, then locked everything up and went home for the night. All but one head table had been cleared and folded up and stacked in a backroom. At this table, swirling a goblet of milk, sat the illustrationist. Beside him was the Mayor, or the two halves of the Mayor: her torso erect on the top shelf of the dessert cart, and below, heaped on the lower tier, her legs. She had the defeated look of a child promised a pony and whose parents instead have divorced.
The illustrationist spoke: This is not what I intended. I had thought to fill these folk with trembling and awe. With desire.
He sighed, swirled his milk, took a sip, swallowed.
The Mayor stared into the shadows of the banquet hall, saying nothing.
Something, anything. I wanted to make them feel. But they long only to be entertained. If that! One wonders if they know what they truly want. . I’m a showman to them, nothing else. One would assume a show then is a means to attract their attention, to ignite some flicker in their spirits that gives way to —
Please fix me, said the Mayor.
Raven shook his head, continued: That gives way not to empty sentiment, Mrs. Mayor, but true, desirous feeling.
I feel something, if that counts. I feel annoyed. I feel you should fix me.
Oh, my sweet queen. That’s not at all what I mean.
PEARL LED THE WAY OUT of Mount Mustela, around a bend, down an alley painted black from road to roof, and out onto a different sort of street: one side all crumbling rowhouses, the other pawnshops and cheque-cashers, windows barred. Trash clotted the gutters, many streetlights were burnt out, the air was sickly and foul with sewage and rot. At the first corner huddled men who went silent as the Pooles approached. Pearl held Gip’s hand, Kellogg hoisted Elsie-Anne onto his shoulders, her purse atop his head, her legs yoked his neck. They hurried past the quiet men with a rigidity Kellogg hoped conveyed purpose, rather than fear.
No problems here, he whispered, in his pocket lacing keys between his fingers.
The Pooles went west along Tangent 7, the rowhouses of A Street gave way to the squat shapes of warehouses and storage facilities between C and D, many of the windows punched out in spiky dark shapes. At F Street they headed north. Beyond the empty stockyards to the west shone the oily glint of the lake.
The only sounds were footsteps: Kellogg’s, with Pearl’s and Gip’s echoing half a block behind. The air was still and cold.
Pearl called, The Golden Barrel’s just ahead.
A motion sensor light flicked on as Kellogg passed what he mistook for another painted square, but a breeze wafted from it — an alley. He gripped his keys, ready should a drunk stumble out of the dark, to shred the man’s face with a razory punch.
Around the corner on Tangent 10 the Taverne’s blinking sign lit the sidewalk in orange flashes. Upon its roof was a movie-screen — sized billboard: the obelisk of the Island Flat Company’s logo and Food at the edge of forever scrawled beneath.
Suddenly Kellogg’s footsteps were without echo. He stopped, looked back: no Pearl, no Gip. The corner sat in darkness, they’d somehow not tripped the motion sensor.
Pearl? Kellogg called. Gip?
Nothing.
He lowered Elsie-Anne into his arms. Guys?
No reply.
Clutching his daughter he jogged back down F. The motion sensor triggered. Kellogg stopped. The light went off. He called his wife’s and son’s names again, with Elsie-Anne held close his heart thudded through both their bodies. He faced the alley: a murk too dark to be shadows, a void that existed beyond light.
Kellogg moved to the alley’s edge. He squinted. Nothing became clearer, nothing took form or shape. Pearl, Gip, he said, his voice weak. The blackness seemed wet. His pulse filled his ears, surged through his hands.
He hitched Elsie-Anne onto his hip and stepped forward. The shadows closed in. Another step, the ground sloped down. He pushed in a little farther and thought he saw movement. Then, faint and faraway, came a rushing, airy sound, and the breath of something huge whisked hot and cobwebby over his face.
Kellogg wheeled, stumbled, whispered, We’re okay, we’re okay, into his daughter’s hair, ran and nearly fell inside the Golden Barrel.
The bar’s half-dozen patrons swivelled to inspect him, and in disinterest or disappointment returned to their drinks.
Kell!
Pearl and Gip were in a booth by the bathrooms. Kellogg took the seat opposite, moved Elsie-Anne off his lap, gaped across the table at his wife and son.
What’s going on? said Pearl. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.
Yeah, Dad, said Gip. Your hands are shivering. Dorkus, what’d you do to Dad?
Elsie-Anne spoke into her purse.
I don’t, began Kellogg. You were. . behind us. What happened?
Kell, sorry, I’m confused. What are you so shaken up about?
Sensing the whole bar watching, Kellogg hid behind the menu. So, he said, what’s good?
Mummy already ordered, said Gip. Wings.
Hope that’s okay, they don’t have flats. Pearl touched his arm. Kellogg?
Wings! he shouted — too bright, too loud, with a maniac’s grin. Hear that, Annie? Mummy’s ordered wings, who needs flats. . He trailed off. On the floor was Gip’s knapsack. Be right back, he said, scooped it up, and tumbled out of the booth.
In the bathroom he dug past Raven’s Illustrations: A Grammar, his CityGuide, the extra sweaters he’d packed (just in case), their permits, apple juice, a first-aid kit, until his fingers closed around the cold smooth container of Gip’s meds. He tapped two of the white tablets onto his palm, looked from them to his reflection in the mirror — wide-eyed and weak — shook out two more, opened the tap, filled his mouth with water, and choked all four pills down.
PUT MY LEGS BACK.
Back? Mrs. Mayor, who is to say they were ever otherwise?
Who? Me! I do!
Bah, said Raven, waving his hand as if to waft away an unpleasant odour. It’s all perception and perspective. You say tomato, I say thaumato.
Listen here, I’ve been very patient. I’m all about keeping my constituents happy. And they seemed to very much enjoy this. . trick. But, now, come on. It’s been hours.
The illustrationist drained his milk.
Please.
No.
You have to.
With a forlorn expression he contemplated the creamy residue inside the glass. You try, is the thing. You try and try and try. And people will just make of whatever you do whatever they want. Or, more — whatever they think they want.
He stood. The Mayor wriggled toward him, lost her balance, toppled onto her chest. The view was of her own legs on the lower tier: the skirt hitched to reveal a glimpse of silky slip. She grasped for it — hopeless — and let her arm hang, hand dangling.
Well, said the illustrationist, if people want a show, a show is what they will get.
He placed the empty goblet upon the dessert cart and drifted off into the shadows. The Mayor started to tell him to wait, but was preempted by a ruffle, a flapping, a whoosh. And then silence. The air felt sucked from the room.
Hello? she called.
The word echoed. Hello, replied the shadows.
Hello, hello, hello.
CALUM FLOATED WITHIN the screaming darkness. Everywhere were people: hands ran down his chest, someone’s lips fastened onto his neck, who was anyone, he patted the tops of heads for the distinctive frizz of the Hand’s buzzcut. But instead his palm met fabric — hats, hoods, stockings, masks — or greasy nests of hair, flat and damp, and he recoiled as though he’d fondled a corpse.
None of these people was her, where was she, he saw nothing. Someone caressed him from behind, looped their arms around his waist, pulled him close. Calum broke free, was hauled instantly into the arms of another stranger. Who? Nothing was discernible in the dark. Sound scorched his ears, jangled his nerves. He slipped into the arms of someone else and felt their head: a woolly cap.
The Hand was here somewhere, she had to be. Or had she left — had she abandoned him? Calum floundered into the naked flesh of someone else, he was held, though cruelly, aggressively, and the rusty music grated and shrieked, and now this person was lifting Calum’s shirt to press their hot wet skin against his — and were they now fumbling at his belt? He squirmed but was held fast, the arms were strong — and even in the dark there was something faceless about this person, something phantasmal or maybe masked. . Calum wriggled, pushed, was released with a giggle.
From the periphery glowed those feeble pockets of light: in this one figures writhed on the floor, faintly illumined in the next a shadow pinned another shadow to the wall, in the next a tangle of limbs unravelled and four, five, six people stumbled back into the central darkness. The screaming shifted, sharpened. Where was the Hand? Calum pictured that shirtless character finding her, cornering her, her body trapped and rubbed and licked. And her licking back. .
Fingers laced through his and squeezed. The touch felt familiar, safe. A cheek pressed to his, nuzzled, at the temples the smooth skin gave way to stubble, the head was crowned with a bristly patch. Come on, the Hand said in his ear, and he was taken out of the circle, beyond the music, past the ring of lights, to a tunnel, and down through the darkness, and down where it was quiet, and down and farther down.
THERE YOU GO, said Starx. Her husband’s leaving.
Olpert swivelled on his barstool. In a corner booth, a man and two children were abandoning a woman with a half-drunk pitcher and a basket of bones.
Starx punched him in the thigh. Shet, Bailie. Don’t look.
Sorry. I just might know that woman. If she’s who I think she is, she used to play for the Y’s, blew her knee in her second season and —
Pints appeared. Drink, commanded Starx. You want hot or mild wings?
Mild, said Olpert, drinking, and Starx said, Wrong.
The Taverne smelled of stale popcorn and cigarettes and pee. It had the mood lighting of a supermarket, there was no music, the sounds were the clop and chime of glassware, subdued conversations like rain upon soil, all of it supervised by the bartender, Pete, an abundantly sideburned older guy in big square glasses and a tuxedo.
Okay, said Starx. You like that ballplayer?
Olpert rubbed his thigh. That’ll bruise, he said, I hope you know.
Starx motioned to the mirror behind the bar. You want to check her out use that.
Olpert was bad at mirrors: what was reflected there never made much sense to him. He couldn’t use a rearview to park a car, and, shaving, he often floundered with the razor on the wrong side of his face.
I don’t like her, Starx. She was just on the team for a bit, I recognize her. Gosh, I probably have her card!
Card?
Y’s cards, they come with season tickets. I’ve got every set way back to when I first started going to games with my grandpa.
One of the OG’s was a Y’s fan?
Well back then they were the Maroons, Starx. . This received only a blank stare, Olpert drank. Had he said something wrong? From behind his glass he looked along the bar at the three men down the other end, each one steeping in the boozy puddle of his world, and then up to the mirror: there was the booth, and the women — it was her, the former star, Pearl, and she was staring back at him, hard.
HER EARS STILL RINGING, Debbie entered the Golden Barrel gently, almost apologetically. The usual pallid faces ringed the bar, a foursome of recent Institute grads nibbled wings. The only other patron sat by the bathrooms, some sad grey woman alone with a jug of cider. How tired and defeated this person looked — and then she was standing and waving and Debbie realized it was Pearl.
You haven’t changed a bit, Pearl told her, they hugged long and hard, and pulling away Debbie wished she’d worn a shirt that showed off her tattoo.
Kell and the kids just left.
Whoa, you brought them here?
One sec, said Pearl, and slid out of the booth wagging the empty jug at the bartender.
Order me wings, said Debbie, please, studying Pearl as she limped away. Did she know what life had done to her? This scared Debbie, the thought that life might happen beyond one’s understanding, with its truths manifest in a hunched and heavy walk or the lines on one’s face, those cicatrices of every trial and sadness.
Pearl returned, set down the refill. Those two at the bar are checking you out, she said. The big guy and his little friend in matching shirts.
Not you too? So I get both?
Nobody checks me out anymore.
Aw, Debbie said — how condescending this sounded. But what else to say?
Pearl poured two pints. Behind the bar, the phone started ringing. Pete stared it down until it stopped, then went back to twisting a towel inside a spotty glass.
Cheers, said Pearl. They clinked drinks. And then came the question Debbie was dreading: So who all’s coming?
BAILIE, here’s the thing about you: there’s no life in your life.
There’s life!
Example?
I have moles.
Freckles.
No, no. As pets, Starx. I keep moles. In a terrarium. But they’d call it a larder.
Starx shook his head, drank. The phone started ringing again. The bartender scowled at it, held up his hands to deny responsibility, disappeared into the kitchen. Ha, said Starx. You gotta love Pete.
Starx, hello? Moles don’t count? Those aren’t lives?
Fug, Bailie, that’s not what I meant. There’s no life in your life outside your life. Look, I’ve only known you for, what?
Cumulative? Less than twenty-four hours. But we met two weeks ago.
Whatever. Listen to me. You’ve built this little life and you live inside it, and anything outside it is — there’s nothing outside it. You don’t let anything in.
Wait, I’m sorry, moles don’t have lives? Whatever! Do you even know anything about moles? Keeping a mole is really hard. The thing with moles is that they have to feel at home in their world. They have to be able to burrow, they like to feel safe, they feel safe by burrowing. They need to be surrounded in their homes. And they’re delicate. I only keep one at a time. If you put two together they’ll mate, and you don’t want all those babies. That’s if you’re lucky. Usually they’ll just kill each other.
Are you going to talk to that woman over there or what?
The little gal I’ve got now is called Jessica. I just got her. Poor Kathy passed on the eighth, just over a week ago now. Before her was Alfredo, I just realized it would have been his sixth birthday last week! Moles are sensitive, is the thing. You have to keep them dry, and the temperature has to be regulated. They don’t like loud noises either — loud noises can kill them. Just from shock. That’s how Henry died, I think. One of my housemates —
Gal. You call your mole a gal.
What? Do you even know how much moles eat? Often half their weight in bugs a day! I get a lot of slugs from under stones around the Islet, and since I live with slobs we’ve got roaches, and I have a worm bin too, under my bed. They like variety in their diets, moles.
Starx tipped back the end of his cider.
What I’m saying is that you want to talk about alive? Well moles are very much alive, Starx. Are you listening? Are you even listening? They’re very, very alive.
BUT THINK, said Debbie, if you moved back home you’d get to see everyone, whenever!
Home? You mean here? No thanks.
Never?
What’s there for me here? For my family?
I don’t know, this is a great city. I mean, there’s problems, but there’s a lot of good people here. You should have seen this thing I went to earlier tonight, it was amazing —
Yeah, obviously I’d have a real community to come back to.
Well people get busy, right? And to be fair it was kind of short notice —
Pearl waved it away. She drank.
So, said Debbie, you playing any ball at all ever?
With my knee?
Yeah, me either. It’s less of a shame for me than you though. I mean, you were a for-real star! But anyway, I’ve just got so many other commitments.
Adine.
That commitment, yeah.
How’s she?
Good! Really good. She says hi. She’d love to meet you but she’s — you know how artists are. She’s working hard on a new project, it’s really cool, it’s about all sorts of really smart stuff. She’s so smart. But we’re good, yeah.
So everything’s good.
So good! What about Kellogg? Things okay? I mean, last time I talked to you —
Things are fine.
And your kids! They must be like little people now. What’s the younger one?
Elsie-Anne. Else.
And Gip was like two or something when I visited — that was fun, remember that? Who’d have guessed you’d end up living on a farm?
Deb, wow, you’re such a big-city girl. It’s not a farm! People grow things on farms.
Ha, yeah. I guess even the idea of grass is like, so rural-seeming to me.
What about the park?
Debbie waved her hand. Don’t get me started on the park.
No?
No. Debbie looked at Pearl carefully, felt the gulf of this conversation opening up before them — it was better sidestepped. Debbie conjured light to her eyes and grabbed her old friend’s hands across the table. It’s just so good to see you!
THE OTHER WOMAN’S laugh was like fireworks, it came tinkling down in silver lights: head thrown back, neck exposed, such a clean perfect neck to put your lips to — once, again, again, forever for the rest of your life, every night. But then in the mirror Olpert’s eyes met Pearl’s, suspicious and mean.
He stared into his cider.
Quite a mating call on the other bird, said Starx. Eh?
I know.
Whoa, wait a minute! Look at you, all fawny and — you’re smitten, aren’t you, Bailie.
Starx.
You are. Well go get her.
Ha, yeah right. Her friend already thinks I’m probably a rapist.
Starx stiffened. Don’t say that, he said.
Oh. Okay. Sorry.
Their wings arrived. Olpert ate one, a sweat moustache came, he wiped it away, another appeared in its place — why was his body so relentlessly humiliating?
Starx licked sauce from his fingers. Good lord but that’s the stuff, he said.
This is embarrassing, said Olpert.
What?
What, what? Everything.
Stop talking to me. Go over there.
Just go over there, just like that. Hey sugar, hey babe, or something, nice hotwings, great legs, do you want to give me your phone number? Right. That’ll happen.
Are you scared?
What, right now?
When else?
I don’t know.
What are you scared of?
Olpert drained his glass. The bartender dove upon it, filled him up.
Good man, Petey, said Starx. My man here’s nearly living.
I’m getting drunk, said Olpert. I don’t do this. It’s not normal.
Well it’s normal in bars, said Starx. That’s what guys who are living do: get drunk in bars. Speaking of fuggin which, let’s gun some schnapps. Pete! Shots!
Shots appeared. Starx cheersed the guys at the end of the bar, who ignored him, and then faced Olpert. Look me in the eye, he ordered. Olpert did, and noticed his partner’s face had softened. Starx said, To you, getting laid, and slammed his schnapps. Olpert followed suit and came away gasping. Starx thumped the bar.
Mutherfugger, he howled, that’ll put hair on your shaft!
JESUS, listen to those guys.
Aw, they’re just having fun.
Pearl spat cider back into her glass. Deb? Wow, that’s not like you.
Like me? What do you mean?
You used to chew up guys like that. No smartass comments? Look at them — wait, don’t look at them, they’ll think you’re interested.
I just figure everyone’s got a right to a good time. They’re not hurting anyone. I mean, not in this instant. Outside of here, of course, they’re the enemy.
Huh. You used to be so funny.
I’m still funny.
Are you?
I don’t know. Adine’s funny, in her way. Maybe she’s funny for both of us.
Pete arrived with Debbie’s wings, held up their empty jug with a questioning look.
One more, said Pearl.
You don’t have to be back? For your kids? What time is it?
But Pearl was watching the bartender return to his post. Is he going to get that phone?
Pete dispenses drinks and wisdom, said Debbie. Don’t expect much else.
Pete. How long have you been living here?
Let’s see, I’m thirty-one, I came to the Institute when I was eighteen, so —
No, in UOT.
Years, now. Since I moved in with Adine.
Right.
Debbie smacked the table. I forgot to tell you! Though, wait, now I forget. .
What?
Someone from the team’s coaching now. Coaching the Y’s, not at the Institute. .
Who?
I can’t remember! Isn’t that terrible? It’s just, I haven’t really been up with ball-related stuff. I’m trying to think, though, who it might have been. .
Pearl waited.
Anyway. Neat, right?
Whoever it was.
Debbie took a wing, eyed Pearl. I feel bad, she said, nibbling, that no one else came.
It’s fine.
No, it’s not. Wouldn’t it have been great to get everyone out? Could have been a perfect excuse for a little reunion. And short notice, I know I said that, but it’s no excuse, right? Blame me. As I said, I’ve been a little AWOL from that whole scene.
Doing what?
I’ve been doing more like, activism-type work, with a different crowd. Stuff around the park. So I’ve met some new friends through that. And Adine, of course — I see her. Though lately she doesn’t see me, ha. Anyway you barely ever come home. I feel bad.
Stop saying that, home. My home is very, very far from here. This isn’t a homecoming, Deb. It’s a vacation. And we only came here because of my son.
I just mean —
I’m not home. Do you understand?
But your parents —
No plans to see those two appleheads this weekend either.
WE MAKE A GOOD squad, Bailie — even if you’re a fuggin asphodel. Maybe because you’re such a fuggin asphodel. And I’m weedkiller! So we’re balanced or whatever.
Um. Thank you.
Though you still need to lighten up.
I’m lightened! I’m wasted. I feel like I could float home.
Starx ordered more schnapps. Olpert was still chasing the first one’s burn with cider, it fizzed in his nose, he pulled away snorting.
Easy there Bailie.
Olpert wiped his face with a napkin, looked at Starx. I’ve been meaning to say: you shouldn’t have socked that boy. Even if he spat on me. That wasn’t right.
Socked. Bailie, the words you use. I hardly socked him. Just a little love-tap.
Love-tap? You could have killed him.
Killed? With a little knock like that? You don’t ever dust it up, as a security guard?
At Municipal Works? Who would I dust it up with?
What do they got you carrying? A nightstick? Spray?
Sometimes staff come in to work latenights and I have to check their ID badges. I’ve got a scanner for that. Starx was searching his face for something. What?
Bailie, listen. You have no idea about anything — you don’t understand people, what people can do. You probably think those blackups are the reason we started Zone patrols.
Does this reason also explain why you go around socking children?
Someday, Bailie — someday I’ll tell you a story.
Not now?
No.
Pete brought two more shots and another round of ciders. As he turned away the phone started ringing again. He swept it from its cradle and banged it down, hard.
Starx?
Go talk to that woman.
Starx sipped his drink in silence. Olpert shredded his coaster onto the bartop. The phone was ringing. Scowling, Pete disappeared into the kitchen. Starx burped. The phone silenced. And started ringing again.
I HAVE TO ADMIT I was a little wary about meeting out here. Never mind bringing the kids, though Kellogg had some sort of freak-out.
Oh yeah?
Well you know. UOT. This used to be one of the neighbourhoods you just didn’t go. After Lakeview Homes closed.
Right.
Though I guess people are really starting to move out here?
Her glass halfway to her mouth, Debbie paused. I’m sorry — people?
Pearl blinked.
What people?
You know. People.
Debbie put her drink down.
People like us, whatever.
And what are we like, Pearl?
Forget it.
No, come on, I’m not being confrontational, honestly. You said people are moving here — people like us. I just want to know what people you’re talking about.
Forget it, okay? I’m very proud of you for living here. You’re very brave —
No, no. That’s not what I mean. I’m just interested is all.
Pearl opened her mouth, closed it, pushed back from the table, looked at her watch. The air over the table had turned jagged and static.
What? Are we done?
It’s past eleven.
Right, well at this hour the trains only run every fifteen minutes. The next eastbound Yellowline is —
Now you’re telling me how to get back? I grew up here, Deb. You’re not even from here. I love people like you, who move —
People like me? I’m sorry, are those different from people like you? Because a minute ago we were the same. We were people like us, remember.
This conversation is stupid. This is not a conversation. I don’t know what this is. Pearl stood. I have to go to the bathroom, she said, and moved with care, one step after the next, toward the toilets.
Debbie gazed mournfully at the empty seat across from her, tried to pinpoint the moment things had swung so drastically in the wrong direction. If only she could rewind the night somehow, and reset it on a different, more affable path. She looked around, avoiding eye contact with the guys at the bar. The Institute kids had cleared out. The place was quiet. She realized the ringing in her ears was gone. Two hours earlier she’d fled that awful sound — and come here, to this: drunk and alone, with a basket of bones.
LOOK, she’s solo, said Starx. Make your move.
From Olpert came a panicked bleat, like a vexed sheep.
What was that? Is that your alert siren?
I’m too drunk.
You’re not. You’re the perfect amount of drunk.
Olpert lay his head on the bar. Her name was Debbie, the other woman had said it. She was a full person now: Debbie.
Don’t do that, with your face. It’s disgusting. Who knows where that bar has been.
Olpert didn’t move. Time passed, the phone began ringing again, the room pitched and reeled. He concocted scenarios with this Debbie: a phone number, a date, a kiss, a whole life together, and every night ended with their heads on the same pillow and Olpert whispering, Goodnight, Debbie, I love you. And her saying it back.
From the real world came a clatter. The phone had stopped ringing — Pete had it to his ear screaming, What the fug? What!
Olpert blinked. Okay, he said.
Who’s that on the phone then, Pete, said Starx.
Okay, I said, said Olpert. I’ll do it.
His cheek was stuck to the bar, he had to peel himself off. Eyes bleary and bloodshot, Olpert wavered on his stool, buffeted by a secret wind.
That’s it, Bailie. Starx lifted his cider in salute. Live, it’s time for you to live.
Olpert searched his partner’s big face for mockery. But Starx, though flushed a ripe-cherry purple, looked stoic, even sincere.
Easy, Bailie. You look like you’re about to kiss me. It’s only our first date.
Sorry, sorry. .
No, that’s the spirit. Just, you know, direct it over there.
Olpert swung off the stool, stepped down. The room carouselled around him. Starx gave him a push that sent him staggering toward the corner booth. He reached for something, a chair maybe, to steady himself, it toppled. He came closer, his mouth began to form the words he was meant to say — simple words spoken all the time: Can I have your phone number. Because that was all you needed, a number, to begin.
Debbie was a person-shaped blur, Olpert’s stomach churned, then heaved with a more troubling sort of violence. Oh no, he said, and felt Debbie watching him as he stumbled past to the men’s, her eyes full of revulsion — or, worse, pity. Hands pressed to either wall he shimmied down the hallway as a miner down a mineshaft, face tightening as vomit threatened at the back of his throat.
He swung through the door: the toilet was occupied. Olpert rattled the handle and a woman said, Take it easy. He staggered and fell against the sink, slid to a sitting position on the tiles. The stall door opened and he had a view of jeans and sneakers and from somewhere above them a female voice was demanding angry questions Olpert didn’t understand and couldn’t answer because here it came, surging and gurgly and sour, a hot spray down his uniform, all over the women’s bathroom floor.
TS FINAL S FLICKERING, the STREET’S MILK & THINGS sign lit the parking lot in a milky pallor. The store’s lights were off. Debbie tried the door, found it locked, cupped her hands to the glass, and looked inside. Pop sat behind the counter, the great mound of him motionless in the dark. His hands were not madly gesticulating, no invectives poured from his mouth, no perspiration darkened his poncho. He seemed sad and hunched, a shadow of himself. She’d never seen him like this.
Debbie knocked. He looked up. Fear flashed in his eyes. She waved. The look faded, he nodded and came around to let her in.
Mr. Street, hi, sorry, said Debbie, trying to steel the boozy slur from her voice. I rushed here as quick as I could.
I dilated your phone number, I spoke to someone —
Adine.
— whom told me of your presence at this drinking bar. After localizing the number I called recurrently, and called. Ultimately upon the midnight hour a man responds, and thence you are. Should I have slept in my store, what of the Movement then?
Mr. Street, sorry. I would’ve come quicker if I’d known —
They took my house. After a quartered century hencefrom, they took my house.
I know. I know.
The men who took it — I lend you insurance, was I younger. . With his hand Pop made the chopping motion of a cheese slicer.
We should try to catch the last train. Do you have stuff?
He held up a plastic bag. It seemed to be filled with candy.
Pop locked up and led Debbie around back. Where the houseboat had been a handpainted LAKEVIEW HOMES RESTRIBUTION MOVEMENT placard lay in the gravel, which Pop collected and stroked as a sad dad might a photo of his lost child. My domicidal return can be petitioned on Monday, he said. After this Jubilee has transposed.
This is so unacceptable. I’ve got a friend who’s a lawyer —
They are desirous for my eradification. Sincerely! For I am the lone recalcitrant of history, of what presupposed what is. I’m the sole one who cares anymore.
Debbie, following Pop down the path into People Park, said, Well.
Lark! I’m the sole one.
Are we supposed to be in the park after midnight? I thought there were Helpers —
They can’t tell me whence to be or not be, said Pop.
Okay, said Debbie, swaying down the path behind him, still drunk.
They bulldoze my home and then sagefully proclaim this park better? Bah. To whom did they consult among us, the populace, the impersonatory people? This Mayor cares about people as the eagle of malignancy cares about the earth from which it plucks the worm of hope — the earth this worm has toiled, stay mindful.
I will, said Debbie.
The night sky had clouded over, the moon glowed dully behind a smoky scrim. Debbie followed Pop into the lightless common — a vast pool of spilled ink.
This here, he said, was the beginning of the alley behind F-Block, I impersonated unit F-802. All the way aghast this hill were backyards. Of course it was planified then also, there was no hill. Perhaps difficult to visualize from here.
I think Adine’s family was in Block H, said Debbie. That was near your shop, right?
But Pop was on the move again, heading around Crocker Pond to the Slipway, which they’d climb to Parkside West Station. At the boathouse he stopped to catch his breath. The clouds parted: a perfect full moon splashed little crags of silver upon the pond.
You okay?
He nodded, produced a blowholish grunt. Atop the hill the train station glowed like a spaceship. See, you see? He gestured vaguely with his bag of candy, gasping. Thence was my place. You see?
Do you mean when you had your boat in Crocker Pond or —
They made me move from the pond! Claiming that upon my own property would be an endurable arraignment! And now the squab has come home to roast.
I know, but was your house near here too? Sorry, I’m just confused.
The hawk, he whispered, and grinned. I’d forgotten about him, what was his name, what did we call him? The walls were so thin that if you heard mice you couldn’t be sure if they were from next door or your own unit. And if you had mice there was a hawk, someone had tamed a hawk. This man brought his hawk to your house and you would go out and come back and the mice would be gone, all of them. But what was his name?
The man’s?
No, said Pop. The hawk’s.
He had grown so lucid. He even breathed more easily — but he snorted and wheeled. Lark, why am I pontificating this story? About a hawk! Not exactly utilitary.
It’s a great story. Our cat Jeremiah’s useless with mice. He —
Cats, bah.
Clouds slid over the moon.
Climbing the slipway, between gasps Pop muttered, Stories are just stories.
I thought it was nice. Crazy maybe, a hawk let loose indoors —
Nice and crazy maybe is not utilitary.
Well it’s just nice to hear a story that’s not about how dangerous it was here. In the Homes, I mean. You hear about the violence —
Pop grunted. You entreat me of violence? Of course there was violence. Whence is there not? But is it not just as violent to force citizens from their homes? To uproot us like so many roots from the soil, with the spade of unjustice?
I wasn’t —
Violence. Bah.
Debbie and Pop cut through a final thicket of shrubs onto the sidewalk. Ahead loomed the monorail station, up on stilts and halogenically lit, tracks extending north and south, and into which an escalator rose, whirring.
With his hands on his knees Pop rested, candy bag hanging. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose and splattered the sidewalk. Across the street, the Cinecity marquee read: JUBILEE LIVE FRIDAY/ALL IN TOGETHER NOW STARTS SATURDAY! Beyond it, the Podesta Tower lofted high above everything, twirling twin searchlights into the night sky.
Debbie never came downtown at this hour, the abandoned streets reminded her of afterhours at the Bebrog bar where she’d worked before signing on to In the Know. At the end of each night, with everything hosed down and the stools stacked and the place vaultlike and the morning lurking outside, it never seemed that the night’s revelry, or anything resembling life, could ever happen there again. And now, with the streets empty and the office towers vacant and the escalator winding up and down, untrafficked, the absence of people in this world they’d built filled her with that same melancholy.
Something moved under the Cinecity marquee. A strange shape jerked through the shadows with a scraping, rattling sound. At first Debbie thought it might be a person in a wheelchair, but the figure seemed too tall — a homeless person piloting a shopping cart maybe. But there were no homeless people downtown, not anymore.
Pop toed the escalator, retreated. How does one make an ascension?
What do you mean? said Debbie.
You think, with all I do, that I have time to gallivate around the city? Pollycock!
Wait — you’ve never taken the train?
Across the street the figure had heard them: it melted inside the entryway to the theatre. There’s someone there, Debbie whispered, but Pop was edging onto the escalator.
No problem, he said, swept upward, here I go.
With a glance over her shoulder — the person across the street cowered, motionless — Debbie followed Pop, the escalator lifted them to the turnstiles. Up the tracks a train eased south from Guardian Bridge Station. Good timing, said Debbie, and Pop nodded, eyes fixed upon it in terror, as if what approached were a shuttle to his own grave.
THE MAYOR WAITED until the train pulled out before moving. With a dust shovel scavenged from the banquet hall fireplace she land-paddled out from under the marquee and wheeled right onto Paper Street. From atop the dessert cart she punted along, legs heaped on the lower tier. One foot had lost its pump and dragged on the pavement, the tights split, big toe flaking skin like sparks.
At Municipal Works’ executive entrance the Mayor keyed in her code. The doors opened, she paddled down a long, empty hallway, out into a marble-pillared rotunda, surveillance cameras blinked red lights, past the security guard, Betty, to the elevator at the base of the Podesta Tower. And then she was lifted into the sky: the island swelled glittering to its edges, where it ceded abruptly to the lake.
Released one hundred storeys up, the Mayor flicked on the lights and rolled out onto the viewing deck, a bubble enclosed by glass on all sides that turned, languidly, clockwise. And though the viewing deck boasted the best and most comprehensive panoramas of the city, at this hour, with the lights on inside, the Mayor saw none of it: not the sleeping city, not the night sky, not the polished coin of the moon, not, as the viewing deck rotated south, the vast emptiness of the water, a second sky hollowed out beneath the sky. Everything was lost in the room’s reflection.
And at the heart of this reflection the Mayor saw herself, spectral and translucent, floating out there in space, a thousand feet above downtown. The dark shapes of her eyes hovered in a gaunt face, every wrinkle a gulley, her hair a tussled silver nest. She stared into the eyes out there, on the other side of the glass, her eyes, but couldn’t see her own eyes: they were just absence, two holes punched into the night.
Had she left the lights off, as the deck swivelled north, then east, she would have been treated to a straight shot over People Park, and across it, the tower of the Grand Saloon Hotel, the clockface a sort of second moon, the hands at right angles where the illustrationist had frozen them that morning. On the roof’s edge sat his helicopter, nosing out over the brightly lit penthouse suite. The balcony doors had been cast open, the curtains billowed in the A/C’s steady draft. And with each ruffle they revealed the illustrationist atop the sheets in his tracksuit, fast asleep.
He needed cold air to sleep and light, lots of light. The penthouse was all marble and polished dark wood and brass, everything gleamed in the brilliance sprinkled down from a row of crystal chandeliers. Atop the nightstand was the CityGuide that lived in every guest’s bedside drawer, bookmarked with a feather four pages from the end.
Raven’s position atop the bed’s black silk sheets was perfect symmetry: on his back, arms at his sides, legs a fist apart, face to the ceiling. His baldhead gleamed. His tracksuit was velvety. His eyes were open, yet he was sleeping, this was how he slept, and his eyes seemed to have no irises but just pupils swollen into pits, and his body produced no movement or sound, his chest did not rise and fall, there was not even a hiss of breath, and anyone happening upon this person would have assumed him dead.
The illustrationist seemed to stare upward, but his brain registered nothing of the outside world, only his dreams — if he had dreams. But Raven did not dream.