The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  A few nodded, sheepish as though wishing they could confess to it. Steve scanned their faces, trying to detect a liar.

  “And then this morning one of our least likely to jump guys jumped and is gone.”

  “Maybe he’ll be right about the business cards?” Rosa said.

  “Those cards look like they were made by a child in a cartoon.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Marie said.

  “What do you think it means, Marie, that we have somehow lost our de facto leader whom none of us elected, by the way, who decides things unilaterally, as fucking usual—”

  “Steve,” Regina said.

  “Sorry. But Philip brought the port into the church. Who knows what he was thinking. And he probably knew a lot more than he told us. You can tell a guy like that—likes to hold the cards tight to his chest even if it’s a matter of life or death for everybody around him.”

  Bonita frowned. “That’s not fair, Steven. Philip wasn’t hiding anything.”

  “We all trusted him, that’s for sure. Because we’re sheep,” Steve said. His energy seemed as large as his six-foot-three body, its broad chest and shoulders. “And now we need to assume a few things so that we can start making some decisions. We don’t know. We’ll never know. We need to make some assumptions, so we can make a goddamn—sorry—a decision. Do you people understand this?”

  “Us people,” Mo laughed. “All right, brah, let’s have it.”

  “Screw you, Mo. Why don’t you go bang on your drum, and let a man make some decisions.”

  “Why are you being such a dick,” Rosa said.

  “Steve.” Regina pulled on his hand like a small child. “He’s just stressed out.” She turned to the rest of them. “He’s tired.”

  “I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do,” Steve said. “We’re going to first of all make sure we know where the ports are in any part of the city where we want to go, and stay the hell out of the rest of the city. And then we’re going to…”

  While he was speaking, Donnie, who sat two steps down from Marie, back against the railing, leg outstretched, turned to her and whispered, “Wish I had popcorn for this show,” causing her to laugh.

  “Wish I had any popcorn at all,” she said.

  “Corn we could grow. That we could. Easy.”

  Regina scowled at them. “Glad this is so amusing for you all.”

  Marie stifled her shocked laugh at this, but Donnie did not, and she nudged his shoulder with her foot. “Go on, Steve,” she said.

  “Well, do you want to live or not?” Steve said.

  She nodded. “Yeah, I do.” The other faces turned to her. “We do. Of course we do. We want to live.”

  Chapter

  11

  THE HOMECOMER

  The city wasn’t exactly as Brandon had left it. Of course not. In those days, the place had been mainly blue-collar, a steeltown dominated by lowbrow coffee shops like Tim Hortons and sulphurous smokestacks lining the bridge whose highways led to the capital. The lake that stretched the entire north end was unswimmable when Brandon was a child. “You can dip your toes in,” Mom had said. “But do not let your head go under the water.”

  Those empty coffee shops were on every other corner, cursive signage sullenly maroon instead of brightly lit red. The streets where sex workers or addicts had walked, and which he had therefore once avoided, now showed proof of what his mother had been telling him for years. The city is in a recovery, a renaissance. The city is filling up with artists and entrepreneurs. This city was a true cross-section of their times: they had professors and doctors and artists and weirdos, more than their fair share of the poor and nutty, environmentalists, you name it. People aren’t in a rush here like they are in the capital, she told him. Her speeches with their frantic quality were a way to beg him to return. This city, our city, she said, is like nowhere else on Earth.

  But this was only dismal proof of her lack of worldliness. He was fully Americanized by then and laughed at her a little. He was green-carded and employed by the wealthiest company on Earth. “You should come to California, Ma.”

  “I’d be free-floating there,” she told him.

  Sometimes on the phone or even in an e-mail, there was something slurry, something he could sense as strongly as a whiff of alcohol on the breath. “I need my tethers.” And it was true that as a reaction to her years of disordered mood swings, she had come to believe in weighing herself down, the way a house does with objects.

  During the two weeks it took him to get back, he did his risk assessment. The reasons she would go mounted against the odds of his finding her.

  1. She was desperate to see Dad again.

  2. She was weak-willed and prone to addiction, easily lured.

  3. Port picked off the least resistant first.

  This theory of the least-resistant belonged to the crew of his fellow Stable-escapees. DOS said in his comforting drawl that they believed the waves could be tracked this way: first the sick or lonely or desperate found their way out. They didn’t have the analytics, but this was the suspicion.

  “But the cost was extreme!” said Brandon. “It had to be the wealthy going first, on what they thought were leisure tours. We had those numbers, anyway.”

  His desire to argue against each of their theories was as strong as his hunger. Despite the spears and guns, none of them had yet successfully hunted anything, and so far, they were afraid to go into stores and houses for canned goods. Finally, day two, they were able to trap some squirrels, to gnaw meat from those tiny bodies like each one was a single chicken drumstick.

  “The first wave can be parsed into two categories: super-rich thrill-seekers and the super-desperate,” said Samuel, the youngest of the three. “Super-rich thrill-seekers disappear, leaving behind ports. Super-desperate break in and are through the ports before the police get there. We know that the port-maps got hacked twice in those days. Leakers thought ports should be publicly owned and studied, too, and we know that Doors wouldn’t want to admit that he had lost control almost immediately.”

  “So you guys were pirating?” Brandon said. He was already tired of their grandiosity.

  “Well, I wouldn’t call it pirating,” Samuel said. “It wasn’t for profit. Some of us just thought that this should have been controlled better, and I think it’s clear now that we were right.”

  “You’re as guilty as Doors,” Brandon said. “Guiltier.”

  Over every product that had preceded port, PINA had control. They’d known everything about their customers. One night Doors had called him to the office, where he sat on the yoga mat in lotus, fingers folded over thumbs. “The sea waves pass over us,” Doors said. His transformation was beginning. “The tech is so advanced, we don’t have eyes on it. Slippery.” Brandon’s next step—what seemed his only step—was to follow the newsfeeds and Wikipages; port was like every mad invention in every story since Frankenstein. It had all been obvious, but Brandon had been unable to see it. “You give a thing breath, and it runs wild ahead of you,” Doors said. “Off into the woods.” His eyes went from calm to blazing, spark of the previous version of himself.

  For over a year, Doors put Brandon in a scramble, following rumours like a man running over spinning logs. Doors talked about the multiverse and the so-called singularity because he’d really started to go mad, his mind destroying itself over his unutterable responsibility. As though possessed. Unless—unless Brandon was misremembering, had been sleepwalking, and with no access now to the archive, his confusion was only getting worse.

  “Hey, hey.” DOS, the peacemaker, put his hands up beside his head. “Hey, now.”

  “We didn’t know!” Samuel yelled. “Doors knew!”

  “All right, all right,” Brandon said, walking off. What had Doors known, when? Did it matter? He’d left his notebook in the drawer in the archive. He missed the old surveillance, days when the stories they had to stay on top of were accusations of data-mining. Ports them
selves had somehow evaded surveillance. He missed his espresso machine. In the car he had a can of old instant coffee procured at a gas station. The grounds resembled soil and indeed the coffee was like mud.

  That night they were camping in a dried-out, abandoned vineyard, the long rows of desiccated plants pitted with tough and mouldy little raisins, which, starving, they ate. He’d wanted to drive along the coast, for beauty’s sake, for nostalgia’s, but he’d been outvoted on this as on everything. By day four, they’d agreed to disagree, which meant they’d agreed that Brandon would soon go his own way.

  The group from Stable included quite a few women, who had the nervous appearance of hostages. None of them would speak to Brandon. They peered at him, big-eyed, a look so naked it made him look away. Had these women once been employees of PINA? Accomplished, the most accomplished in the world? Maybe they were only relatives of former PINA people, were outsiders. Doors would have known nothing about them.

  DOS was the only one here Brandon could talk to. He took him aside. Fire flickered behind them, the large and unprotected fire of amateurs.

  “These women are freaking me out,” Brandon said. “What’s going on here?”

  “These women are sweet and harmless,” DOS said.

  But they did things like pour twice-used soapy water into buckets and twist their clothes through tense hands and fingers, joints pushing at flesh. They did things like quietly mop up the men’s faces with this same water, though always avoiding Brandon. None of them had so much as grazed his body accidentally. They mushed their dehydrated noodles with boiled water and fed them to the children with their dwindling supply of plastic spoons. There were only three children, two boys and a girl, all of them old enough to feed themselves, old enough, Brandon thought, to cook for themselves too.

  For awhile Brandon was worried that they’d run into the scouts who’d been sent on their recon/retrieval mission. Or it would be Benji and Dawn coming over the next hill, around the next bend, two friends to talk sense and to save him from himself. They’d be angry that he’d left without them. It didn’t occur to him until four days later that no one—not Doors, certainly—was in pursuit of him. It didn’t matter to PINA if they lost a few skeptics. Doors didn’t care about him much at all, and this hurt more than the fact that his mother had never come to find him. So much for loyalty.

  They drove each morning, then stopped each afternoon to recharge the solar packs, certain that vehicular breakdown was inevitable. “Where the cars break down,” DOS said, “that’s where we’ll settle.” The cars were a tarot deck. The group attempted to hunt by day and then listened to Samuel’s theories until it grew dark and a fire was required. They were in no rush to get anywhere, and Brandon’s desire to be on the road and as far from PINA as they could get was met with irritated shoulder hunches and flared nostrils.

  The women had started covering their hair with scarves and kerchiefs.

  They were heading north, seeking rain. Awaiting fate to deposit them where it would. Maybe Tacoma. Maybe Vancouver. Maybe the rainforests of British Colombia. These freeways had already seemed post-apocalyptic two years ago, when the farmland began burning out. Hand-painted signs were posted all down the road beside brown fields: “Congress Created Dust Bowl” and “Drought Costs Farmers, Costs Everyone.”

  DOS had agreed to be Brandon’s passenger, and they drove past these relics silently.

  “Here’s what happens when you abandon reality,” Brandon said finally. “You can’t blame these farmers for leaving. Can’t make a profit, water costs a fortune, and crops are turning to dust. So they leave. Food prices go up. Then the number of the desperate increases.” At PINA they’d lived like emperors, living with complete unawareness of the lives of others. “No one knows what to do. PINA’s lost control. And here’s a handy way out. Go back to before we fucked it all up.”

  “Ah. It’s been fucked up for a long time,” DOS said.

  “But you could tell yourself that you’d go back and fix things for some other timeline, anyway. Make sure Reagan doesn’t get elected or something.”

  DOS was withering. “Yeah, I’m sure that will do it.” He looked away from him and out the window. “Listen,” he said. “You know I like you, man. We appreciate your…insights. But we’re trying to start something here. And—”

  “What are you trying to start?”

  “Look. The twelve of us had a plan. Enough—with the women and children—to get something going. We had a plan, and I don’t think you’re really on board.”

  “What’s the plan? Keep women in their place? Submissive women, domineering men? You want to go back to that?”

  DOS sighed. “Listen.”

  “Listen. Look.”

  “Hey. Don’t be like that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t think there’s a place for you in this culture. We’ve taken a vote. I voted for you, don’t worry about that. I’ve got your back. I’m not interested in a regression, but I like these guys. And I think we could start something.”

  “So you’re saying?”

  “At our next stop, it’s time we go our separate ways.”

  * * *

  —

  He drove as far as Portland, a route he knew, where he stopped for supplies. Thought he might even run into one of the few people he knew who’d moved there after college, even though he hadn’t run into anyone in days, and Portland was bigger than he remembered. At a convenience store, he got several much-needed cases of water, and he found a few maps, from which he realized that Portland was farther north than he wanted to be. He would have to backtrack to get northeast.

  “Where you headed?” a man said, while Brandon was standing unprotected in the street, scouring the map.

  He was surprised to find next to him a middle-aged couple with a rusty cart of looted goods. He showed them his route east, the destination by the Great Lakes, and they stood there talking calmly. The couple didn’t seem at all perturbed by the pretense that he was just a tourist looking for directions.

  “Or you could go up through Vancouver first. Such a pretty town,” the woman, Clementine, said. “Been meaning to go back. First you ought to get some rest. We’ve got a couch.”

  Portland was apparently still full of people. From the living room window of their small craftsman home, where Brandon put down his pack, people could be seen walking in pairs and threesomes down streets, as though it were merely a quiet holiday weekend and not the end of the world. Ducks would sometimes waddle behind them, and goats.

  “We like it this way,” Clementine said over dinner. “All the important people are still here. And real estate’s cheap now, ha.”

  Everyone had moved to within a few blocks of each other, and ports had been quarantined. “The ports of Portland,” Denis said ruefully. This new Portland maintained a bar, though Denis and Clementine told him they were rapidly running out of liquor.

  “We had a moonshine department,” Brandon said, “in the last place I stayed.”

  Clementine laughed heartily. “Really?”

  Denis took out a small notebook. “We need details.”

  “Denis doesn’t want to go outside the quarantine, so we are in dire need of information.”

  “I seen people leave that didn’t want to leave.” Denis grunted. “I don’t trust the ports.”

  “But you never know,” Brandon said. “How could you know they didn’t want to leave?”

  “I’m a scientist,” Denis said. “And I can make hypotheses. Some hypotheses you don’t test, though, right? The appropriate amount of suspicion has kept us safe here. Do not trust the ports.”

  “Denis has been instrumental in keeping this community together,” Clementine said, patting her husband’s knee. “What about you, Brandon? Do you think they’re coming back? All the people, I mean.”

  Brandon had not told them he had a connection to PINA, though he suspected they knew who he was. He played along. “I have no idea.”

 
The décor was abundantly floral, and throughout the night a grandfather clock sighed and chimed. In the morning he heard them talking in the kitchen. Smell of coffee was rich in the air. At the farmer’s table, Clementine was kneading dough, claimed it was her favourite thing to do, to shape dough into smooth round buns and apply heat. “Brandon is living proof that a person can survive out there!” She dusted her tray with flour. “We’ll run out of flour eventually,” she said. “Might as well enjoy bread while we can. In fact, I’ve gotten fatter since it all happened.”

  Denis gravely nodded at Brandon.

  “And we’re living proof that the urban farming movement was the wisest possible investment.” Out back, beyond the kitchen window, a dozen hens and a rooster head-bobbed and scuffed the packed earth.

  She handed Brandon a hunk of raw dough and waited for him to put it in his mouth.

  “Though, we could certainly live with fewer feral dogs,” she said. “Even the Pomeranians have gone bat-shit crazy! Were Pomeranians always a little crazy? But really, Vancouver is an incredible place. You only live once, and you’ve got all the time in the world.” Her energy as she talked and shaped the dough had both the men in thrall. “What’s your plan, going so far out? You got a woman there?”

  “It’s my hometown.”

  “Well if you changed your mind, there’s lots of women around here, and we could use a young man like you around,” Clementine said. “Is all I’m saying.”

  In his mouth the dough had turned slimy.

  “What are you going to do all winter?” he asked.

  “Animal skins and furs,” said Denis. “We’ve been super-insulating some of the old buildings downtown, and on the worst nights, everyone camps out there. Main issue, really, is the rain. Channelling runoff, holding and sanitizing as much as we can. Plus it gets so grey, so damp. That’s hard, psychologically. But people here were kind of always outdoorsy.”

  “Lots of women in Portland,” Clementine said again, smiling. She went out through the screen door to the porch festooned with bamboo and tinkling metal wind chimes, and out to the yard. She returned with a little shoebox. “Well, why don’t you take these. If you decide not to stay.”