The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Steve stood, his breadth and height like the expanding wingspan of a predatory bird. “What we need to know now—” he said. “Everything else can wait! I’m so tired of this disorganized mess! What we need to know is how you got back.”

  “How did I get back?”

  Steve moved closer to the couch, looming, nearly lunging. “Tell us how you got back.”

  “I begged for it. I begged for her to let me come back.”

  “The apparition?”

  “The next thing I knew, I was on my back in my living room. Everything the same except it had a vinegar smell, rot, and all the neighbours were gone, and the light was grey. I still can’t be sure I’m not dreaming.”

  “We have a friend,” Bonita said. “Philip. I was telling you about him? He had a theory kind of like your theory.”

  “Bonita, do you really believe a word this guy is saying?” Steve’s fist hammered the air as he spoke.

  * * *

  —

  The footsteps came soft as a child padding down the stairs. Each small weight seemed to fall inside Jason’s body, all the fluid there pooling with dread. It was a woman, someone he did not recognize, with stony smooth skin cast bluish in the darkness. White clothing draped over white skin, so that she was like a bone floating in a pool of black oil. She walked in step with him. Her feet, too, under the long flowing dress, were bare.

  “I’m asleep,” he said.

  “You are not asleep.”

  “I am being punished,” he said.

  “You are not being punished.”

  “Where am I?” Without sunlight or an end to the dock, he feared going mad.

  “We thought that you so loved infinity. We thought you were interested in limits and the lack of limits.”

  “I can only assume that you are a projection from my deep unconscious,” he said. “Ghost of Christmas present? Ghost of Christmas future? The world is good and full of lessons?”

  “You were always too clever for your own good.” Her voice had a plurality, as though many similar voices had been recorded and overlaid one another.

  “I’m clever, but I’m kind. I’m still kind.”

  “You don’t need to cry,” she said, a chorus.

  He felt seen through, nakedly visible. “Real and supernatural or hallucination?”

  “First establish the possibilities, then narrow down.”

  “Please don’t make fun of me. I’ve been running for hours. I need to find my family. I’m alone here.”

  “You are alone here.” She began walking past him so that he had to struggle against a heaviness to keep up with her. “A sliver of a sliver of the population comes to a place like this. The crust. You always believed you were special.”

  His throat was raw as a newly opened scar. “I struggled not to want that, not to believe it.”

  “You chose women who would worship you. You didn’t mean to.”

  “But other people get sent to places like this.”

  “You didn’t mean to.” The repetition seemed a glitch. “Barely a sliver of the population. The proportion who sort into a place like this is infinitesimally small. In half, in half, in half, in half, in half, in half, in half, in half…”

  “Please don’t make fun of me.” Why did this woman hate him? “How do you know me?”

  “You are sick. Every system has a flaw. No fix is total. And you can’t stay here.”

  She waved a hand, and the purple starry sky was replaced by a brightly lit outdoor landscape. It was as though the backdrop had all this time been a theatre screen. He closed his eyes against the assault of light.

  “Open your eyes. Look.”

  An expanse of grass, bordered on both sides by large trees in full summer green. In the distance, he could make out a large building—an English estate. Figures on the grass appeared to be human. The scene zoomed closer so that he could count them. Two women, two children seated on a blanket. The women and one child wore white bonnets tied with ribbons at the chin and empire-waist dresses. The young boy was in a suit. They were nibbling daintily on strawberries. One of the women waved her hand at a fly. The building was far behind them, the only interruption of green trees and sky.

  “What is it?” he whispered, since they were so close he was sure he could be seen and heard.

  He could not hear what they were saying. One woman faced them, but the other’s face was not visible. He became fixated on the little gap between the girl-child’s arm and her torso, his heart sinking at the familiarity of its shape. Finally the other woman turned to address the boy, swanlike neck elegant and known. His skin went cold.

  “How can I get to them?”

  “You can’t.”

  “I thought she wanted to go to Italy. Italy in the sixties.”

  “People’s desires are ambiguous. It is our gift to interpret them.”

  “Why would you show me this?”

  “I want you to understand that they are gone. There are no seams in their escape. They have no memory of any other life. They have never met you.”

  He bent forward as though she’d knifed him in the gut and vomited into the grass.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “We have given them all fresh starts. We have made things better for everyone. We have given them all fresh starts, and also to the world you came from, which was suffocating, gasping for air. We have saved that world too.”

  “We,” he said. “Who’s we?”

  Her face, which had been as plastic and unmoving as a mask, now broke into a smile. “We,” she said. “The ports.”

  Chapter

  17

  THE PATHETICALLY WILLING

  Marie stayed by his side all day. Brandon went in once to see her and immediately regretted it. There was Marie at the end of the couch with Jason’s feet in her lap. There was the bare rasp of Jason’s breathing. The hope on Marie’s face gave him a pang, but he tried, in the return of his smile, to seem supportive.

  Mother-hen Bonita reported that she heard Marie say, “Why did you wait so long to come to me?”

  But Jason was often asleep.

  “Well, guys. What do you think?” Bonita looked at the rest of them standing around outside, as they had been all day, as though Jason’s return signified a kind of wedding day or a Sabbath. “It’s pretty far-fetched, but then—”

  “It’s pretty far-fetched!” Donnie said.

  “I was going to say, Donnie.” Bonita laughed. “I was going to say that it’s all been pretty far-fetched.”

  “Anything is equally far-fetched,” Mo said. “Even if there hadn’t been ports. With the ports, every explanation is a mind-fuck. All the people just went poof. Just as likely they end up on Jane Austen’s front lawn as on a boardwalk to nowhere.”

  “But according to him, no one should be able to return. Except for this small, special sliver.”

  “He’s pretty arrogant,” Steve said. “Marie used to be married to him?”

  “You can’t judge someone when they’ve just revealed their deepest shame,” Rosa said. “It’s bad form.”

  “Sure I can judge him,” Steve said. “I’ve never been arrogant like that. I don’t think I’m so special.”

  “Maybe not,” Bonita said. “But you haven’t really been endearing yourself to anybody with your attitude.”

  Brandon remained a polite distance away from these discussions, tossing a stick for Marie’s dog and patiently scooping up and redirecting his chickens away from fire, away from forest. He heard everything anyway.

  “And what about Brandon,” Andrea said. “You think he’ll go back to PINA?”

  “Andrea, honestly,” Bonita said. “He’s a keeper. First thing tomorrow we’re going to build him a chicken coop.”

  “Unless we decide to head south while we’ve still got the temperatures. Could snow as early as October,” Donnie said.

  “We can’t leave as long as Philip might come back. Now that we know it’s p
ossible to come back.”

  “But, Bonita! Fucking hell! We’ve been waiting for a year. Nobody else has come back.”

  “But if they come back, they might be disoriented, like Jason. They might be feverish and traumatized. We can’t just abandon them.”

  “Same fucking conversation!” Steve said. “Same fucking conversation! This is hell!” He stormed off, dodging even Regina’s touch, then loudly slammed the back door of their place.

  The light inched toward dusk, so they huddled more closely, sat on their logs and chairs, put their arms around each other.

  “Brandon Dreyer, come join us,” Bonita said. “We’ve got questions for you.”

  Brandon sat on a hard log. Its gnarls dug into his thighs. “I don’t have any new answers.”

  “But you worked side by side with Doors?”

  “I thought I knew what was going on, but now I don’t know. Maybe I was just a lackey.” By comparison to this, with its damp ash smell, its shitholes in the woods, Stable seemed a distant dream of excess. He’d been emperor, was now peasant. “Doors was—is—slippery. I thought I was the one who understood his vicissitudes, but I don’t know if even he knew what port was. He created it by accident and just capitalized. And I don’t think he even cared that much about making money.” Their smiles were friendly and neutral, their eyes eager and bright, but undeniably haggard. He was about to tell them that there was no Wizard of Oz. “Doors was a lot of things, but he was not methodical. So when he did all this, I don’t think he could have predicted what happened. I know he didn’t predict it.” Their faces were so thinned down that their cheeks were pits. “If we could get all of what we know about the ports together, maybe we could make sense of it. Or at least we could figure on some basic premises. Make a kind of flowchart.”

  “Now you’re talking,” said Donnie. “A flowchart.”

  “We needed Philip. That was a big loss.” Bonita’s eyes were wet. “We had started getting information together, theories, anyway, back when we spent a lot of time in the Church. We had maps and books on physics and ideas about the universe.”

  Mo thumped softly on the edge of his drum with his palms. Looked to Bonita like someone kneading dough, turning a circle of thin dough around and around. “Someone brought in a port, man. That’s when we found out what the ports were.”

  “Yeah,” Brandon said. “Marie told me about that.” Many of them looked like junkies, people who’d been ravaged in pursuit of a fix. “You guys can’t keep living like this. You’re exhausted.”

  “But what choice do we have?” It was Marie. Gus jumped up and bounded toward her. “We can’t stay, and we can’t leave either.”

  Marie sat next to Brandon. Warmth emanated from all points of contact with her, however slight. She was the only one who was still vibrant.

  “That’s always been the question. What’s the meaning of life?” Marie was smiling, as though she had a secret. “Why me?”

  “But now we know something new about the universe. We have the chance of a fresh start,” Brandon said.

  Steve, standing with his arms crossed over his chest, frowned. “Some fresh start. More like: we have the wonderful opportunity to hang onto the edge of a cliff by our fingertips.”

  “It’s not that dire, brah,” Mo said. Softly tapping: tip, tap, tip, raindrops plonking into a pool.

  “What does Mr. Dreyer think we should do? Go back to the west coast and confront Doors?” Steve said.

  Brandon looked at them glumly. Touched his hand to Marie’s knee. “I’m not sure either, to tell you the truth.”

  * * *

  —

  Later, while Brandon stood on Donnie’s back deck fiddling with his backpack straps, Marie went to him. He smiled, leaning against the wooden railing.

  “Hey.”

  “I feel like I haven’t seen you in awhile,” she said. “What do you think we should do? Do you think we should stay or go? Do you think something awful will happen to Jason?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She looked at his pack, to which he had clipped several stainless steel bottles. The chicks were in the shoebox near his feet, and Gertie kept jumped out over the cardboard edge. Brandon knelt down to pick her up and re-place her.

  “They’re getting big for that shoebox,” she said.

  “Are you glad he’s back?” he asked.

  She stared at him.

  “Stupid question. Of course you’re glad,” he said. “And, I mean, I’m glad I met you. The timing was terrible, but I’m glad I came here.”

  “What do you mean?” She blinked at him. “Are you leaving?”

  “Well, you’ve got your husband now. Your friends.” He sighed. “I’ll go west. The coast has plenty of resources, and I met some nice people in Portland.”

  “It’s not just me, here, though. We need you,” she said.

  “Who’s we?”

  “All of us.”

  “You were fine before I got here.”

  “I wasn’t fine,” she said. “I’m not fine.”

  She considered his face, the strangeness of him, the thrill of the worlds suggested by another’s mind, by the worlds of people a person could love.

  “Maybe we’ll end up in the same place again,” he said. “Despite the odds.”

  “Oh yeah, right,” she said, her mouth quavering. “I’ll just take a steamship and follow your bread crumb trail.”

  He was glad to make her cry. He moved toward her and put his hands on her cheeks, pulled her face, now wet with salty tears, toward his own. She closed her eyes and let him put his lips to hers, let him kiss her mouth, her jaw, her neck.

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, I mean, please don’t leave without us.”

  “Marie.”

  “Come on.”

  She took him by the hand, unembarrassed by this or the display of her tears, and led him to Donnie’s house and banged on the door, and then she marched over to the next house and banged on Joe and Yasmin’s back door. And then Andrea’s. She hollered for them all to come out.

  Donnie poked his head out. “What’s up?”

  “Marie wants everybody out there,” Brandon said, pointing.

  “All right.” He limped to the stairs.

  Marie stood by the fire and wiped her face with the sleeve of her thin sweatshirt and faced them, back to the trees. Mo had carried with him a bottle of whisky, which he poured into cups and passed around.

  “We need to go,” she said. “We’re going. Brandon is going to take us west.” She spoke loudly, kept her eyes on his eyes. “We go now, before it’s too late. Before the winter wears us out completely.”

  “And what if the others come back?” Bonita said.

  Rosa was writing in the blown ashes with a stick. “But Steve’s right, Ma. Nobody’s coming back.”

  “You still think so, even after you see Jason? Even after what Brandon said about this Kate?”

  “Now it’s even more clear that no one else is coming back,” Rosa said. “Jason’s an anomaly. But we could die waiting, that’s the point.”

  “That’s if we choose to believe his story,” Donnie said.

  “So here we are at our usual impasse,” Rosa said, standing suddenly. “Let’s just take a vote and be done with it. Take a vote and stick to it.”

  “Oh, so now Marie gets what she wants? Now we leave,” Steve growled. Still, he looked around at them. “All in favour of a migration,” Steve said, “hands up.” He counted the raised arms. “That’s twenty. So it’s settled. Let’s get some sleep tonight and get packed up as soon as possible.”

  * * *

  —

  Early the next morning, when it was still dark, while the cars were being packed full, bicycles tethered to trunks, and routes and stopping points being decided, Marie kissed sleeping Jason on the forehead and left with Gus and Bonita for the church. There they held hands and stood on the sidewalk looking up at the stone steps a
nd the splintered red doors above them. They would miss this building, the musty cold of it, its candle wax smell; they would miss coming out those red doors to be greeted by a smell of cooking meat.

  For Marie, it had not taken long to become accustomed to loneliness, and she perceived her life as a parabola hanging low on a graph. First she had everything—art, Jason, the possibility of children—and then she lost those things one by one. She had been pared down, thinned and thinner, until she had only herself, lonesome, in the apartment. You got used to things by degrees. Soon it was winter, and the people were leaving your town completely, and you came to know that you hadn’t been alone, not really, and it was possible for your hollow life to keep hollowing. There had been other lives, a million, a billion, seven billion other lives, burning flames of want and need, of anger and sorrow, of memories and futures. But then you found them on the streets, and you knew what they’d been through, and you went to the church together, because some guy you recognized from the fourth floor at the library, a guy who had only ever been rude to you, had decided that people needed, if not worship, someplace to feel the strange sanctity of their lives. The church was a place to know that things were mysterious, and weird, and that people might feel, if not significance, the ghost of that significance.

  “I’m going to miss it here,” Marie said. She and Bonita wanted the leisure of their tears, but they were both holding cans of red spray paint and had a task to do. She took a crowbar from Steve’s stash and pried the boards off the doors. “Let’s go in first. A funeral for one short chapter of our lives.”

  “It does feel,” Bonita said, “that life is long.”

  The space was hallowed, dusty, like an ancient library, and they picked up the books they wanted. Marie pulled down some of the maps and folded them wordlessly into her bag. Gus went to the front of the church, his stiff body directed at the port, his ears up. Beneath the maps, parables spoke. Jesus blue-eyed in his robe, holding out his hands to children. The icons of another age.