The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  “I dreamed about it.” Philip had taken the cup from Bonita but had not taken a drink. His eyes were fixed, it seemed to Marie, on nothing.

  “It?”

  “It. Port. It was really strange. I dreamed about it the way you dream about a woman.”

  “The way you dream about a woman.”

  “Something happened to me in there.”

  “Okay.”

  The jerky came around, and Bonita took some for herself, plus Marie’s and Philip’s shares, and then passed it on, toward Andrea and Regina. The kids screamed and whooped. Donnie yelled. The wind changed and blew smoke into Bonita’s eyes.

  “Steve and Regina are taking a few families on a farm scouting mission. Apparently Lulu saw a chicken cross the road,” Bonita said.

  “Lulu saw a chicken cross the road?” Marie said.

  “I kid you not,” Bonita said. “Want to go with them?”

  “I have something I’ve got to do at the church,” Philip said.

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll go with you,” Marie said.

  “No.”

  “Geez, fine. But maybe at least try not to fall into the port again,” she said. The jerky was hard and difficult to chew, like plastic.

  “Well, maybe Marie and I will go do some target practice, then. Or I’ll work in the greenhouse. I’ve got plenty to do.” Bonita’s tone was defensive, and Marie looked at her and Philip quizzically.

  “Steve, control your children!” Donnie shouted.

  Steve smiled and waved at Donnie, pretending not to hear.

  Mo came walking out of the last house on the block. No Rosa. He nodded briskly at Marie, nodded more shyly at Bonita, grabbed a small bag of jerky and a handful of blackberries, purple juice dripping, balanced two sloshing cups of tea in one arm and then wandered back to the house. Bonita and Marie watched his body grow smaller.

  “Well, I guess they’ve finally gone and done that,” Bonita said.

  “Uh huh,” Marie, beside her, agreed, her mouth tight.

  * * *

  —

  After breakfast, half their number drove off in a fleet to a set of farms, hoping to find animals or people. Such outings were practically vacations; a rumored chicken sighting was only an excuse to break the usual routine. Marie instructed Steve on how to use his gun properly, which annoyed him, though he listened, but she stayed back with Bonita to work the garden and greenhouse.

  Then, finally, Mo and Rosa came out of Mo’s house. “We’re going foraging,” Rosa said cheerily. There was no invitation to Bonita or Marie. “And maybe fruit-picking too. Or is fruit-picking also foraging?”

  “I’m coming with you,” Marie said.

  “Oh,” Rosa said. “Okay. Ma? You wanna come too?”

  Bonita, had she been born to different parents or in a different age or in love with a less domineering man, might have held a managerial position, might have run a business. She was commanding, and she knew everything. She knew at all times where each of the eighteen women in the group were on their cycles, and who was pregnant, and who was no longer giving off the reek of fertility and lived in the same calm post-menopause that she did. She knew even before a couple did that they were about to break up. She’d been the one to tell Rosa, a week ago, that Marie was also interested in Mo.

  “First of all,” Rosa had said, “how do you know I’m interested in Mo?”

  “Oh, mija, I think you’re in love with him.”

  “What?”

  But you couldn’t fool this woman.

  “Don’t lose your friendships over men.”

  “Marie’s still in love with her ex,” Rosa had said. “She doesn’t get to own every man she likes the look of.”

  Now, Bonita eyed all three of the younger people. “Nah. I’m going to hang back. But you guys be good to each other,” she said, turning her gaze on her daughter.

  * * *

  —

  Marie found it calming to be with Rosa and Mo. And she found she wanted to set all three of them free of whatever tension existed amongst them. She wanted to say: Have sex, fall in love, leave me out of it. She felt ordinary, not being the object of Mo’s attention—but so what? All that told her was how much she relied on male attention. They walked down the hill together, under the tree canopy of Caroline, past the red-brick Home for the Friendless she’d lived in with Jason, past street after street of narrow two-and-a-half-storey houses with their pointed attic lids, like rows of sharpened pencils.

  “I guess all the astronauts are gone too.” Rosa sighed. Now she and Mo were holding hands. Grass, with slow determination, was overtaking the sidewalks, winding its long way out from under weights of concrete and asphalt. Ants piled their homes everywhere.

  “Yeah. I dunno,” Mo said. His ropey dreads hung loose, and sometimes one would drag across Rosa’s arm.

  “Astronauts would be the first to go, wouldn’t they? They’re not even committed to being on Earth in the first place,” Marie said.

  “I guess. But we don’t know how widespread this thing is,” Mo said. “That’s why Philip wants to head south. Think about, like, I dunno…Mississippi or wherever. These Bible belt states: you think these guys are just going to take off through something just because the government approves the technology? And what makes us so special? Nothing. It can’t be just us. I know this city is full of self-haters, but still.”

  “Do you ever think about where you’d go?” Rosa said.

  Marie felt that they talked about this too often. It wasn’t really a game, when there were no rules. Many consequences, no rules. People pretended to several fantasies. Of course, in theory they could go anywhere at all, so PINA said, anyplace real or imagined, past or future. But most people said predictable things. There was talk about ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, the Mayans, the Aztecs, though they knew that in such places they were likely to be enslaved. (“I wouldn’t mind a shorter lifespan,” Marie had said once, and Bonita told her she’d better sleep off that morbid exhaustion.) Marie always gave the obvious answers: the twenties in Paris was a favourite. Andrea liked the idea of living in Hollywood in the fifties, since she secretly believed herself to have a Marilyn Monroe quality. Steve and Regina refused to say where in front of the kids, but otherwise confessed they’d travel to 1993, the year they’d met. They’d go to Nirvana and Pearl Jam concerts, follow the bands around in an RV. But they would only go if they knew they could come back again, and so they wouldn’t go.

  Marie thought the game dangerous precisely because each of them did in fact have in mind a particular place and time. Each of them knew exactly where they’d go, down to the minute and hour, down to the precision of what one of Jason’s philosophers had called a time slice.

  At first Marie had thought she would go back to the apartment on Caroline, a year after she and Jason were married, exactly eleven years ago. But then she reasoned that she could enter only as an observer, watching her old life without inhabiting it. Instead, she knew, she’d really go to wherever Jason and his new Maria and their children had gone, though this was a crime in several ways, an intrusion on their portal fantasy, their portal dream lives, as well as an intrusion on their marriage. She was not yet ready to commit a crime against the fabric of reality, whether or not everyone else was doing it, even if she had been willing to commit other crimes.

  A stronger deterrent than her scruples was her doubt. The port was just supposed to know where to take you. People trusted PINA as if it was more reliable than God. They believed that wishes could come true, that they deserved this. They did not heed the old slogans, forgot about Be careful what you wish for.

  People had always been stupid and full of hope, thought Marie. Despite their cynicism, everyone believed in magic.

  * * *

  —

  The quiet of the downtown was a kind of bliss, at least during the day, full of warm shades of red brick and trees. The streets had been stripped of categories and priorities, and buildings that had once see
med awful for being untended or turned into halfway houses filled with bedbugs, now could be seen as they were, as sturdy, even kindly shelter, as gifts to those who might need them.

  “Remember all the poor people who used to live down here? All the beggars. Where’d they go?” Rosa said.

  “I was one of those poor people,” said Mo, pretending outrage.

  Marie laughed.

  “I used to busk on the corner of Hughson and King.”

  “You mean when you were a teenager. You weren’t really poor.”

  He didn’t answer this. “Decimation would cut the population to a tenth, right? That would leave us with fifty thousand, give or take, and here we are with, like, one ten-thousandth or something. So this is an extinction. We’re the mutants. We’re the ones selected out. We’re the ones who will survive and reproduce. The fittest for this.”

  “But we’re not the fittest for this,” Marie said.

  “Proof’s in the pudding.” Mo shrugged.

  “But none of us knows how to do anything,” Marie said. “We’re the least efficient possible group of people to be working together.” None of them could reconstruct anything with their makeshift archives, agree on anything or plan ahead.

  “And I don’t know if Darwin can really apply anymore,” Rosa said. “It’s like trying to use Newton to explain Einstein. Our lives are happening at some other level now. I’m not even sure that I believe in the genome anymore.” She stood with her face scrunched up, thinking, until Mo laughed and kissed her.

  They were standing outside the once-horrible basement-dark mall at the corner of King and James, only a few blocks away from Marie’s store. Marie followed Rosa’s gaze and stared up at the old bank tower. It was one of the only glass towers in the city, its skin a mirror reflecting the blueness of sky floating with clouds, no longer explosive with helicopters or planes, and below that the squat mall, and then just the three of them and Gus. Stick figures, barely visible. Mo and Rosa started walking again, but Marie didn’t move.

  “There’s something extra sad about a bus stop where the bus will never come,” Mo said. He turned around. “What’s the hold up?”

  “Where are we going?” asked Marie.

  “Down to your shop, first, to get the wagon. Or that’s what I assumed.”

  Marie told them about the noise in the night, about the broken glass. “I don’t know what I’m afraid of. I just—I looked into the grocery—and I checked it months ago, there is no port in there—but the whole thing felt both bleak and kind of alive. I feel surrounded by them.”

  “But there’s no port there?” Rosa said.

  “It’s not just the grocery. It’s—Philip’s been acting strange. He was talking about the port like it was alive, a person. And yesterday—I don’t know—I know there’s no port in the grocery but I felt, yeah, just surrounded.”

  “The ports aren’t alive. That’s just projection,” Mo said flatly.

  “How do we know they’re not alive, though? They don’t have engines. What makes them hum?”

  “I lived with a port for awhile, when Yasmin and Joe and a couple of my old pals were living here too. I mean, it was in our house with us for two months. One of my pals jumped through. Last summer. We still had electricity then, and my pal Jamesie knew a guy who was moving the ports on the black market. He’d figured out on his own how to take them apart. Maybe he’d watched a portician, I dunno. You know how it is. Opportunity is the mother of invention. Yasmin and Joe and I, and Jamesie, we were squatting in this place but some of the other neighbours were still around. They knew what we were up to, but nobody said anything. Bigger fish to fry by that point. So this guy came over to take the port out. We tipped him off to the other houses on the block that had one, and he did his pirate thing. But just before he could take it apart, Jamesie was gone.”

  “Why did Jamesie go then?” Rosa said.

  “No clue,” Mo said. “That’s the thing. You cannot predict who is going to go through, and people don’t really give you clues. It’s like with drugs. I don’t know if you’ve known any junkies. They’re kind of thinking about them all the time, though they don’t tell you that.”

  “That story doesn’t at all prove your point, Mo. It makes the ports sound more dangerous.”

  “I’m saying I lived with one for two months.”

  “I think we have to go back to the church,” Marie said. She felt close to panic. “We have to go check on Philip.”

  * * *

  —

  They hurried along the streets, Marie feeling more paranoid the closer they got to the church. She could tell Mo and Rosa thought she was unhinged, while she felt that they were two lovesick weights she had to drag along. She was urgently, now, afraid for Philip. Despite everything they’d witnessed, people were always full of doubt, always saying, How can you believe that? Marie could hear the disbelief in Rosa’s voice. “It’s not crazy to be afraid,” Marie said. “It would be crazy to say we’re safe and that nothing’s ever going to happen to us. There’s only so many of us and too many jobs to do. All it takes is someone getting an infection, a year from now, two years from now, when there aren’t any antibiotics left. Don’t they go bad? We don’t have a fucking doctor. Not one nurse. All we have is Philip and his fucking CPR training.”

  “Hey, man, don’t worry. I’m learning all I can from the MERCK Manual,” Mo said.

  Marie laughed weakly. “We shouldn’t have been smashing windows all the time. So wasteful. We need to pool info. We need to weapon up.”

  “But no one is living anywhere near the stores we smashed.”

  “Do we know that? Do we know?”

  “Maybe this is good,” Rosa said, putting a hand around Marie’s arm, trying to calm her. “If the ports are really as dangerous as you’re saying, then you can stay with us instead of returning to the shop. There’s power in numbers.”

  “If they are?” Marie found Rosa’s optimism wearying, a hard sun and no shade. It had begun to seem like stupidity. “Philip would have stopped that chicken expedition if he were okay.”

  “But you never know. Chickens could help eat the bugs in the garden and fertilize the soil.” Rosa looked helplessly, nervously, at Mo, seeking reassurance. “We have sunlight and water, but we need an ecosystem, right?”

  “How could any chickens have got through winter?” demanded Marie. “We’ve been really stupid. It’s a waste of a morning, chasing after a chicken. Delusional. There are no chickens without people to take care of them.”

  Mo nodded gravely. “No chickens where there’re wolves.”

  “Are there wolves?” Rosa said.

  “Probably. If there are coyotes and wild dogs, why not?”

  “And foxes,” Rosa said.

  The world was enormous, thought Marie, and here they had been, pretending it was small. The trees and buildings on all sides, as if through the magic of CGI, seemed to thicken, grow longer and larger and leafier.

  At last, they neared the church.

  “The ambitious have set out to sea,” said Marie, as she rushed towards the concrete stairs leading to the big red doors, Gus whining behind. “We need somebody with a little drive. We need to get properly organized. We need to sort out what we have and what we need and what we know, and figure out how to do stuff. We need to anticipate problems.”

  “Let’s get our five-point plans,” Mo said.

  But Marie knew Rosa had only ever wanted love and ukulele songs. And Mo just wanted to be high. Marie could feel them dragging their heels as she marched them up the church steps.

  “Everyone’s a coward! Us included! We’re the lotus-eaters! We are! We need to start acting like fucking human beings! Human beings should be resourceful. We should have our wits about us.” She held the doors open wide for the others, and Mo and Rosa sheepishly entered. Even Gus hung his head.

  “No one wants me to shout.”

  “Marie. You’ve been through—” Rosa tried.

  “Your reactions ar
e, let’s say, a little over the—” added Mo.

  “What Mo’s trying to say is just—”

  Marie turned away from them, her eyes alight, her muscles tense, the adrenaline from the long night driving her into a fury. “Philip! Philip!” A tabby jumped off a sill and meowed loudly, leaping past her and out the open door. Avoiding the sanctuary, but not quite aware she was doing so, Marie went down into the cold concrete basement where they stored anything perishable, where they kept baskets of squashes, and where Philip could often be found, counting and inventorying. She rattled on the locked doors of cabinets and closets, shouted his name. The other two followed quietly for a time, then broke away. Marie exhausted herself and slumped down in a corner, let her skin cool against the contact with the stone wall. Wiped sweat from her face onto her shoulder the way professional tennis players once had.

  She heard Rosa calling her name, and so she heaved herself up again. “What?”

  Her name rang out again. “Marie!”

  She found them at the front of the church. Hands held in a wedding pose, which they dropped when they saw her. They stared at her. She wanted to spit at them, Spare me your concern.

  “The candles are lit,” Rosa said.

  “So Philip’s here?”

  Mo shook his head.

  Behind the happy couple was the glimmering port. Uncovered and beating like a heart. She had the urge to hold it in her arms, the way one cradles a hurt kitten, a lost child. Big-eyed and alone. She wanted to reassure it. She stood, staring, and took a step.

  “We’ve been walking around in a stupor,” Marie said, unable to break what felt like a gaze. “We’re spending too much time taking stock.” She felt as though something was reaching toward her. With a great effort she continued, “We can’t afford to be so indecisive.” Mo took three big steps to the stage, jumped up, and with a surge of energy, threw a dropcloth over the port. On the carpet nearby were business cards, scattered. Each of them bore Philip’s thin cursive, the same message, telling its holder to remember and to come back.