by Liz Harmer
The billboard’s face would never again be slicked over, never again hold a new message. Marie had taken her first photo of it on the day, not quite a year ago, that she’d realized this, the first day her WiFi icon had searched frantically, spinning around and around like a dog chasing its tail, seeking a connection.
She reached for the camera and lifted the lens, then stopped short.
“Rosa!” she hissed.
But Rosa couldn’t hear her over the angry blare, the mosh-pitting, head-banging song they both loved. Gus went up to the car and nosed at Rosa through the open window.
“Oh shit. Holy shit.” Marie’s vision blurred as she stared through the tiny window of the camera, as she focused the scene by clarifying gradations, as she clicked, rewound, clicked, rewound, clicked.
She had to stop to wipe her face.
Rosa finally noticed something was wrong. She got out of the car and ran to Marie. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
Through the fluttering camera’s eye, Marie stared at the billboard, daring it to change again. “What does it mean?” Someone had painted an enormous red S in front of the word port. Sport.
Marie’s mind cast around for explanations. Click, crank, click. Someone had climbed up. Merely out of poetic impulse? Merely for fun? Someone who, like her, relished the wet slap of paint or its sizzle coming out of a can. A prankster. Or—click, crank—it was a message to her. It was a message from someone who knew she took the picture every day. The hairs lifted on the back of her neck.
She came to the end of the roll.
“We should get to the church,” Rosa said, gesturing back with her thumb to where the deer weighed down the trunk. They would begin to attract hungry animals or, maybe, lose the meat to decay.
“But what does it mean? Who did it?”
Both Rosa and Gus looked at Marie as one would at a beloved but delusional family member.
Marie allowed herself to be led back to the car. A thought was slowly taking form. What if there were other people in the world? Maybe there were others.
She tried not to think his name, but then it was the only thing in her mind: Jason, Jason, Jason.
Chapter
2
THE SUPPORT GROUP
Forty-two people were left. Philip, their self-appointed leader, had a ledger and took daily attendance. There were always absentees: groups taking hikes or canoe trips, couples newly in love. Once they’d nearly lost Donnie, who’d fallen down a flight of stairs at the library and lay unconscious with a broken leg and then conscious with a broken leg for the three days it took the rest of them to find him. The attendance ledger was their salvation. The attendance ledger and its law: after twenty-four hours without checking in, you were considered missing. The most recent losses had happened during the hard months of winter, and who could blame those who had disappeared? One couple had driven south with their four children; five others had gone out through port to nobody knew where. Before that, they would lose dozens at a time. These last surges of travellers (or quitters, as some zealots preferred to say) were like those final kernels in a bag of microwave popcorn. The kernels drew heat and popped, leaving only a handful of their remaining kin at the bottom of the bag.
It had been nearly a year since those who had stayed found their way to the church. Philip lived there still, at least officially, though lately he had been sleeping on Bonita’s couch. Marie had been a late joiner, arriving for the first time last fall, in mid-October. “I’m just here for the soup,” she’d joked, the sort of joke that nine months ago could still separate people into opposing camps: those sympathetic to cynicism on the left, zealots on the right. She’d been uncomfortable with the religiosity of recruitment. For months people would spot each other on the street and come towards each other with arms lifted and hands open.
“Hey, there’s this place—have you been?” one person would say to the other. “I’ve never seen you at one of the meetings. You should come.”
Marie was wary of this sort of shy, shrugging coaxing, which she felt masked a deeper manipulation, the reverse psychology of a cult. Eventually she realized that this group of people was unthreatening precisely because of their disunity. Overwhelmingly, they were secular humanist and slipshod; they included several children, a handful of seniors, one girl in a wheelchair, Donnie with his crutches—each of them more needy than conniving. The only person among them who seemed to have any religious belief was Mo, whose ritual of pressing head to ground several times a day was cross-fertilized by the Rastafari anti-materialism he’d picked up from his bygone friends. Philip and Bonita had once been parishioners in the church, but assured everybody—as apologetic as any anti-gun super-tolerant lefties—that they had not been fundamentalists, that this church had been as liberal as they came.
The group’s attempts at organization were ongoing and, Philip claimed, crucial to their survival. He with his ledger. They had inventoried the hospital, and went on frequent trips to the library, sorting through whatever might prove useful. Their lifted collection now contained books on edible plant identification, urban gardening, solar power and quantum physics. Bandages and antibiotics were accessible to everyone, while pain meds were locked away with the batteries. They took turns poring over old newspapers, clipping anything they could find that mentioned Albrecht Doors, his company PINA, or port.
Rosa screeched to a stop in front of the church, jumped out, ran up the stone steps and disappeared inside the building. Marie and Gus lagged behind. The heat was sapping Marie of energy. Her face was slippery, arms and shoulders sticky. Gus, trotting beside her, licked her hand.
The big church doors flapped open, ejecting Philip and Rosa alongside Steve, a big Dutch guy, formerly a greenhouse worker, whose wife and three kids were part of the group, too.
“Should be all right, still,” Philip said. The hooves of the dead deer were hanging out of the trunk, the slender and demurely crossed ankles of a beautiful woman.
“Even with the heat?” Rosa said. “We really came as quickly as we could.” She shot a look at Marie. In the car, Marie and Rosa had discussed the red S, briefly, Rosa insisting that the likeliest culprit was one of their own. They had agreed to keep its presence to themselves for now.
Marie loosened the bungee cords and opened up the trunk. “What do you think, Steve?”
“Nice shot, ladies,” he said.
Steve, Rosa and Philip worked to inch the doe out, and Marie took a fourth corner of the blanket. Blood had soaked through the wool, was warm and sticky in her hands. They carried the bundle to their makeshift slaughterhouse, a garage in the backyard of the house next to the church, and laid it on the cold cement floor.
Inside the church, the rest of the group was eating loose greens and a soup made mostly from boiled and mashed beets. They were calling it borscht. Several wood-burning stoves had been carted into the church foyer and duct-taped with complicated tubes for ventilation, and here meals were served as though by do-gooders at a soup kitchen. People wore hats and aprons, sneakers and smiles. The two women who had put themselves in charge of food prep actually had been just those sorts of do-gooders, so they knew some tricks. For example, if you mix up a variety of canned soups into the same pot—chicken noodle with cream of mushroom even—it all tastes fine in the end. And if you’ve got hot sauce and garlic and salt, you can make anything palatable.
“This is not the best place for us to be,” one of these cooks was saying to Donnie, as Marie ladled herself a cup full of soup. The group used paper coffee cups for everything, as these could be repurposed as seed pots, and they had no running water for washing. “The summer’s too hot, and the winter’s too cold.”
Such admissions always came out warily. Most of the group had grown up in this city. Some of them had seen the city change from booming steeltown to a place abandoned by the steel industry. Some of them had seen it go from depressed to slightly less depressed to renewed. Some of them were still annoyed about the gentrification
of Locke Street, of James Street. One of them had grown up on an orchard in an eastern township that became a strip mall that was itself then abandoned and boarded up. They felt, some of them, like underappreciated spouses who hung around even after affairs with flashy new mistresses had been exposed. The one thing they all had in common was attachment to place.
Donnie sat with his crutches leaning against the column next to his pew at the back. He turned toward the serving table, and grunted his assent.
In the pews, with legs drawn up or crossed, with faces held in hands or heads bowed; or not sitting in the pews at all, but milling around the aisles and in the front and back of the church, were most of the people in the world that Marie now knew. The stone ceiling soared above them, collecting their separate conversations so that one voice could not be made out from another. Whispers echoed harshly. Gus trotted away to sniff the backside of a yellowing Yorkie. A cat meowed violently and jumped off a high windowsill onto the red carpeting at Marie’s feet before bounding away, and several children ran shrieking down the aisle after it. Candles fat and thin, tall and short, scented, unscented, beeswax and aroma-therapeutic, burned along the steps and sills, the tables and altars. The effect was somewhere between a séance and a bad date.
Philip had washed his hands, as Marie had, beside one of the rain barrels outside, sudsing up with organic dish soap and pumping water over his blood-rusty palms.
“Nice work,” he said now, sidling over with his own cup of soup. A drop of it was caught in the thicket of his beard. “You were made for summer.”
“Thanks,” she said, eyeing him.
“You always seem like you’re sizing me up,” he said.
“That’s because I am.”
One night around Easter, Marie had too much to drink and let Philip kiss her. His beard had been so full that his mouth had seemed to hide, his wet warm tongue and lips as shocking as the whiteness of his teeth when he smiled.
“I like skepticism in a woman,” he said now.
“I know,” she said, resting her hand on Gus’s head.
“And I like a woman who can hold her own in a shootout,” he said.
“I’m sure you do.”
He laughed, grabbing at his beard, and then dropped the smile. “Well, I guess you know what I think about you,” he said.
She smiled. “I do,” she said, but as he walked away, she wished she’d waited to hear a litany of her traits, herself as refracted through the affections of another. It had been a very long time since anyone had stayed up late with her, had told her what she was like.
“Enjoy summer,” she heard him saying to someone else now, and the words gave her a brief chill of worry. She found an empty pew to sit in. Sometimes the church was like a party filled with people you knew only superficially. She supposed eventually they would become more like family. True rifts would form, and factions.
Vocabulary of war.
Mo had come in; Marie heard him laughing. Many of the men had chosen to grow beards, but Mo still shaved his face clean. His dreads were tied into a huge knot on the top of his head. Marie watched him talking to Rosa and two other women, one of whom took off her hairnet to shake out a greying brown bob. Mo’s magnetism, his princely aura, was such that despite the fact that he’d been a busking pothead in a previous life, they all wanted to impress him, to be seen by him. It was because of a kindness in his eyes and smile that could not be faked, and it was his good looks, the youth and health connoted by his broad shoulders and neatly muscled arms.
She sipped her soup. It was a little too sweet. A lone kernel of yellow corn floated to the magenta surface.
“All right, everybody!” Philip’s shout signalled that they were about to get started. “Steve is still in our underused slaughterhouse dressing some venison kindly foraged by our very own Marie Desroches, and”—he was interrupted by whoops and clapping—“yes, that’s right, and we are fortunate enough to have everybody present and accounted for.”
Mo picked up his djembe and came to sit beside Marie. “Hey,” he said, nodding.
She was embarrassed by how special this made her feel. She gave a slight nod in return and then took what she hoped was a casual sip from the cup of soup.
As she looked at Philip, she became aware that on the raised portion of the chancel behind him, something was different from usual. There was something new sitting there: a thick phallic dome-shaped thing covered over by one of the old dropcloths she had contributed to the group when they were winterizing every wall with layers of draperies. Paint-gooed and splattered as if it were an imitation of a Pollock, the covered dome stood a few feet taller than six-foot Philip.
“You think?” Mo said, glancing at her.
“I don’t know what else it could be. But I don’t know why he’d risk bringing one in here,” she said. “Or how he’d manage it.”
Mo shrugged. “But we’re talking about Philip.”
“Still.”
Rosa sat down on the other side of Mo, and their whispers melded with those of everyone else. Marie listened, eyes on the stage, pressing down her irritation by cultivating the same remove she once would have felt watching any television show.
“Enjoy summer,” Philip said to the group with foreboding. He pulled at his beard. He was gearing up for a speech.
Marie clenched her jaw.
Now Philip was standing behind the pulpit, now walking up the aisle. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and they slipped back down. Marie, Mo and Rosa were in the pew second from the front. Rosa’s mother, Bonita, in the pew ahead, turned around and gave Marie and Rosa a reassuring smile. Bonita was only ever approving and never mean. Her body, despite the whippling of age, revealed surprising rounds of muscle. Like Marie, she was sinewy and hard.
“Enjoy summer, but—” Here Philip walked to one set of maps taped on the wall between two tall windows.
The stained-glass windows glowed blue, yellow, green, and told stories Marie didn’t know or couldn’t remember. Black glass arranged into medieval calligraphy gave them titles: The Good Shepherd. Suffer the Children Unto Me. Her mother had been a lapsed-Catholic and then anti-Catholic, but Marie as a young woman had considered converting; she had been, and still was, attracted to the idea of cathedrals. Now, in the windows of the smaller-scale majesty of this church, she saw through the depictions of Jesus and his disciples to the cuts of stained glass in which they were wrought. The faces of the men in the scenes were finely detailed, with eyes and hair. The sheep had black noses. She had done some research, and discovered that this church, though old, had replaced these windows in the last few decades, that the black joints holding the jewelled glass together were almost certainly not lead.
Layered over and beside these windows were maps of all kinds, road maps, historical maps, maps of the constellations, novelty maps. A few days ago some people in the group had argued over whether the maps of the universe had been incorrect all along—if what was needed was a paradigm shift—or whether this universe remained intact, and port was somehow interacting with alternate versions. Marie, ever agnostic, preferred the idea that all maps were destined to be incorrect, but there was no convincing Donnie or Philip, both of whom thought understanding the multiverse would make a difference, would have some effect on their predicament.
Marie struggled to pay attention as Philip continued. “But I think it’s time we think about migration. Somewhere we might go for winter. I’m thinking southern U.S. No need to go much farther than Virginia. Maybe North Carolina.” He pressed his index finger to a map of the world. The word migration was heavy with meaning.
“We’ve got it good here, Philip!” Bonita said. “We’re setting things up. Numbers have settled.”
He nodded, seeming to consider. “For some of us, it’s hard to envision, though, just how good the future could be. As you know, I think we should all consider a fresh start.” These arguments had been ongoing for months. During the winter they’d all agreed: once spring came they
’d make their plans for relocation. But then spring had been busy, and summer had arrived and obliterated their previous commitments. Philip wanted badly to leave—we can always come back, he said—while others, like Marie, believed they should stay, that they were stewards of this place and time. The unspoken question for many others, Marie knew, was whether or not leaving through port was a viable option; the fantasy of doing so had been the only way some had made it through the bone-deep frigidity of winter. This rift had allowed smaller arguments to arise. Steve and his wife Regina thought Philip didn’t have it in him to lead, and were questioning his self-appointment to that role. The argument had opened a wound, still raw, so that Marie remembered it well:
–Why should this guy be in charge?
–But he’s not in charge.
–If I were calling the shots we’d have left by now. He’s not a strong leader.
–No one’s calling the shots. It’s a democracy.
Steve and Regina made it clear they thought that Philip’s attachment to Marie, and his fear that she would be left behind, was keeping him from thinking straight. Philip had frequently discussed with Marie his dismay over her habit of opening the store every day as though expecting customers, but she was tired of Philip’s obsessive care over what he deemed to be an unhealthy habit. Go ahead and leave, see if I care, she thought. Even now, from his pulpit, he was looking at her meaningfully. He finally broke her gaze when she took a loud slurp of the lukewarm, overly sweet soup-goo.
“We all agreed that this past winter was miserable. If we end up with another harsh one this year, we’ll be sorry we stayed. Winter can be a matter of life and death, which some of us may have forgotten.”
“I don’t think any of us could forget that. Sometimes I have nightmares where my teeth are chattering,” Bonita said. “But by winter this year we’ll have some generators up and running. We’ll have the solar panels sorted out.”
