The Melting Queen

by Bruce Cinnamon

  “We should go somewhere and talk about this,” says Odessa.

  “No. No, I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to hear you explain everything to me about how you know better about everything. I was wrong before. I shouldn’t have come today. I should’ve just left right away, right after I broke the river. So that’s what I’ll do.”

  I push through the crowd and head for the stairs before Odessa can grab me again. Whatever. I need to go and they aren’t going to help me go. Melting Day is almost done and what have I done with my day? I need to get home and pack, start making a plan to go. I don’t have much money left or a passport so that’ll be a problem but maybe I can borrow a car from someone, hitchhike even. But first I’ve got to go. Just get going, like I should’ve done last night. I can’t believe I’ve wasted the day like this.

  I shove past a bunch of people who are all wearing a stupid Scooby-Doo group costume. I hurtle down the stairs, to the ground floor, crash out a side door into the Legislature’s statue park. And then I begin to run.

  {4}

  As sundown claims the melting city

  My postcard dress is disintegrating, scattering Parthenons and Pantheons across the dead grass. I race through the statue park, toward the river. I run out onto the High Level Bridge. Its black girders are studded with lights which glow pink and green for Melting Day. I sprint along this tunnel of light, only stopping when I’m in the exact centre of the bridge.

  I look down. It’s too dark to see the water, but the white icebergs are lit up by the bridge’s pink and green emanations. Every so often a huge piece of ice will slam into one of the pillars and shake the whole structure. Good. I hope it shudders apart and all comes tumbling down.

  The light changes and I look up. I might be imagining it, but I think I see a faint blue light on the horizon.

  Soon the sun will come up.

  Soon it will be spring.

  And then summer.

  And then fall.

  And then winter again.

  And I’ll still be here. With people like Brock and Sander and Odessa remembering my old self. With the ghost of Adam Truman haunting me wherever I look.

  I notice with detached curiosity that I’m on the other side of the railing, looking down at the dark waters. They seem at the same time far away and too close. How easy would it be to take a little step, and fall, and vanish into thin air—to finish what I should’ve done yesterday, the easiest way to leave.

  “NO!”

  A voice cracks out into the cold night air, dry and hard and sarcastic.

  “STOP!”

  I twist my head around, but there’s nobody on the bridge deck behind me.

  “Don’t do it!”

  The voice is loud, clear, right next to me. I must be going crazy.

  “You have sooooo much to live for!”

  I cling to the railing, feel the wind slapping at me and making my postcards dance.

  “Who’s there?

  I hear a tinkling sound, glass on glass, and then the voice drawls out again, mocking me.

  “If you’re really going to jump at least cut off your hair first and give it to me. It would make a fantastic wig.”

  I hear a rustle of movement and then I see her as she stands up. She’s not on the pedestrian path behind me—she’s on the bridge’s upper level, on the train tracks where the streetcar runs in the summer. Up close I can see that her green leaf dress isn’t fresh or living like in the story, but made of scratchy green synthetic leaves like an office fern. She’s got a bottle of sparkling wine in one hand and a champagne flute in the other. Her black hair is streaked through with shocks of phosphorus white and iridescent blue. Her eyes are dark, leering down at me. Magpie. The Melting Day storyteller.

  “You! What are you doing here?”

  The drag queen adjusts her dress and takes a swig of champagne.

  “I came to watch the sunrise,” she says. “I’d ask what you’re doing, but somehow I think I know.”

  I look down at the river again and suddenly feel very self-conscious.

  “So what’s really your plan here?” she says. “You’re not actually going to jump.”

  “You don’t know that! Maybe I will jump! Maybe I’ll land on an ice floe and sail away to a more exciting place than Deadmonton.”

  “Well you’d flow east, so you’d go to Saskatchewan,” says Magpie.

  “Oh god, never mind. I’ll aim for the water.”

  The drag queen cackles and plops back down on the train tracks. She dangles her legs over the edge and kicks her feet back and forth, high heels swinging wildly from her toes.

  “It’s a long way down. Look.”

  She drains her champagne bottle and then heaves it over the edge. It arcs through the air and smacks dead centre into an ice floe, shattering it into a dozen pieces. The shards bob up and down in the water, spiralling off and crashing into other floes. I imagine what it would be like to hit the water, from this height. I probably wouldn’t even feel it.

  “So you’re really depressed, aren’t you?”

  The drag queen’s voice breaks into my thoughts.

  “What? No I’m not.”

  I snap back this automatic answer, despite the fact that I’m hanging off the edge of a bridge.

  “It’s okay,” says Magpie. “I can tell.”

  “Oh really? How is that?”

  “I’m really perceptive,” she says. “It’s my superpower.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “Wow. You can tell that someone is depressed when you find them hanging off the edge of a bridge? What a gift.”

  “You don’t have to be ashamed of your depression,” she says. “At least not in front of me. The real reason I can tell is because I’m depressed too. And there’s no way you’re as bad as me. I’m catastrophically depressed.”

  She says this with such obvious self-satisfaction that I can’t help but groan.

  “So what? Everyone has depression in the winter. You’re not special. You’re just not taking enough vitamin D supplements.”

  Magpie drains her champagne glass and tosses it after the empty bottle. She flips down off the railway tracks with a surprising lack of grace and lands in a heap on the bridge deck. She clambers to her feet and skitters over to where I’m hanging off the railing.

  “Can I show you something really personal?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. “But I have a feeling you’re going to show me anyway.”

  Up close I’m amazed at how feminine her face is. If I hadn’t seen her with her two other drag queens before I might’ve thought she was just a historical performer. Her eyes catch mine picking her face apart and I turn away and look back down at the ice lily pads flowing away.

  “I know I saw you before, at Churchill Square,” she says.

  “Oh yeah,” I say, not looking up. “Quite a performance.”

  “It’s all bullshit, isn’t it? The people of Edmonton all coming together in peace and harmony and brotherly love. Please. But still, my girls and I have gotta eat. The city pays us well.”

  “I should hope so.”

  “I trust you for some reason,” she says. “Have you ever had that before—people just naturally trusting you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I watch two icebergs converge, producing a dozen smaller floes.

  “It makes me suspicious but I can’t seem to help it,” says Magpie sharply, clearly irritated that I’m not looking at her.

  “Is that so?” I respond, for some reason very satisfied by her frustration.

  “So here it is,” she declares.

  Magpie holds her hand out beside me and I see that she’s holding a black, kidney-shaped stone. Blacker than anything I’ve ever seen. Black like a black hole, so black that not even light can escape its pull. It looks like it ought to be burning through her hand, falling to the riverbed, eating its way down to the earth’s core. Its weight warps everything around it. The girders above our heads buck
le in and shred themselves apart. The revellers on the Legislature Lawns are ripped to pieces as the world is sacrificed to the stone’s evil hunger. It feels like the stone is looking into me, plotting how it will erase me from existence along with everything I’ve ever loved. I tear my eyes away and look up at Magpie’s face. She’s staring at me with a neutral expression.

  “What the hell is that!?” I ask, dry-mouthed.

  I clutch the edge of the bridge, gripped with wind-whipped terror. Magpie rubs her thumb across the surface of the stone and looks down at it affectionately.

  “I’ve only ever shown this to one other person,” she says.

  My heart begins to slow down, and my sense of reality returns. The buzz of activity resumes from the party at the Legislature. I don’t want to look at the stone directly.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I made it,” she says. She flips the stone over. I can’t shake the sense that it’s watching me—that it’s the pupil of the world, and everything I’ve ever seen has just been the vast, colourful iris around it.

  “This stone was white when I pulled it out of the river,” says Magpie. “I used it to absorb all my negative thoughts and feelings. It’s not a special stone at all. I chose it at random. I thought, if I can have one small point to concentrate all these dark feelings, maybe I can purge them out of me and get rid of them forever.”

  She hefts the stone in her hand. It smacks her palm with audible weight. It seems heavier than anything its size has any right to be.

  “It was a good receptacle, for a while. I felt a bit better. But now it’s full. Overflowing. I guess I could go find another one. But then I’d be pulling stones out of the river for the rest of my life. And what do I do with the ones I’ve used up? Throw them back? Is there anything more toxic than this?”

  She holds the stone out to me and I tense up. She laughs.

  “Calm down, it won’t hurt you.”

  “You don’t know that,” I say. My shock has abated, and now I find myself surprisingly angry. “You have no idea what you’ve made, do you? You can’t even feel it anymore, can you? That thing is wrong. And you say that it’s only an echo of your own negativity. How can one person be that horribly negative?”

  Her heavily made-up face twists into a grimace. She bites her lip, looks away.

  “I’m dying,” she says. “I have cancer.”

  I feel like an asshole.

  “Shit. I’m sorry.”

  Magpie shrugs.

  “How could you have known?”

  She drapes herself across the railing, looking out at the river valley.

  “This is my disease,” she sighs, lifting the stone to her lips. “My externalized tumour. This is what grows in me, eating me from the inside.”

  “Wait, what? So you don’t have actual cancer?”

  “I have depression, like I said,” mewls Magpie. “It’s an emotional cancer.”

  “Wow, are you kidding? That’s horrible. You can’t just pretend to have cancer.”

  “It’s just as serious as a physical cancer. Or no, actually you’re right. Cancer is easier. At least there are effective treatments for cancer.”

  “People can treat depression. There are solutions.”

  “Says the man hanging over the edge of a bridge. You’re just oozing stability.”

  “Well you have bad breath.”

  “I have diabetes, I can’t help it.”

  “Just like you have cancer? Is it emotional diabetes?”

  “No, this time it’s real diabetes.”

  I snort and look away from her flushed face.

  “Yeah right. Emotional cancer. That’s minimizing the suffering of—”

  “Yeah well what about my suffering?” she says loudly.

  “What do you have to suffer about?”

  She stares at me for a long time. The silence is unnerving but I’m determined not to speak first. I shift my weight on the railing. My muscles are sore from being in the same position for too long.

  “You’re not going to throw yourself off this bridge,” she says at last. “I know you’re not. We both know you’re not.”

  We stare each other down for a few moments, then she holds out her hand. After a moment’s hesitation, I take it. She helps me climb over the railing and I plop to the bridge deck with no more grace than she did before.

  “Did you make this dress?” she asks, tapping the Golden Gate Bridge with her toe as I climb to my feet.

  “Yeah, this morning.”

  “I like it.”

  “Thank you.”

  We stand there, face to face finally, me towering over her.

  “What’s your name?” she asks.

  I feel the words come automatically to my tongue, like they’ve done for twenty-two years. But I stop myself.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay. That’s not a weird answer at all.”

  “I mean, I had a name. But my friend said I should pick a new one. And I think that makes sense to me now.”

  She turns away and leans against the railing. I lean next to her and look out at the river. The old metal feels sturdy, strong, powerful from this side.

  “Is your friend a drag queen?”

  “No. Well, I guess she sort of is. But not really.”

  “I’ve had lots of drag names. Right now I’m Magpie, because I’m obnoxious but also very beautiful. For a while my drag name was Tara Nullius, because I’m Métis and also very clever. Not as clever as my friend Andrés—you saw him earlier, he’s Mary Cone now, but he used to be Panama Canal, and before that he was Marianas Trench. He’s really obsessed with his fictional vagina. But anyway, my name is René Royaume.”

  “René?”

  “It’s French. Je suis francoalbertain.”

  René Royaume offers his hand again, and I shake it. A second later, there’s a pop and a whistle and huge green and pink fireworks start exploding above the Legislature. The soundwaves bounce off the bridge, booming across the valley. We watch the fireworks display grow larger and larger until it’s one huge stuttering explosion. Then smoky silence. A chorus of cheerful screams rises up from the Legislature Lawns.

  “I’ve had an idea,” says René when the voices have died down and the smoke has drifted away.

  “What?”

  “Do you have your CIRCLE? Give it to me.”

  I have to rip apart one of my postcards (sorry, Ponte Vecchio) to get at the pocket of the pants I’m wearing under my gown. But the dress is in tatters anyways at this point, so I don’t mind. I pull out the ID card and hold it out to René.

  Citizen Identity Registration Cards for Living in Edmonton were established two years ago, an initiative of that year’s Melting Queen. Everything—the transit system, the library, fitness centres, homeless shelters, the art gallery and museum and conservatory, complimentary city-wide Wi-Fi—is available if you’re in the CIRCLE.

  “You keep it,” says the drag queen. “I have two suggestions. One, you could throw it over the edge. A symbolic suicide. Much less permanent than your last idea.”

  René looks down at the ice floes.

  “Or two,” he says, “you use this.”

  He rummages around in his cleavage for a moment then pulls out a permanent marker.

  “Why do you have a permanent marker?”

  “Vandalism. My enemies aren’t going to write their own names in gas station bathroom stalls.”

  “Okay.”

  “I should’ve kept my champagne bottle,” says René. “We could’ve smashed it over your head and rechristened you. But this’ll do.”

  He hands me the pen.

  “I’m René Royaume,” he says. “What’s your name?”

  I look down into the little square photo where the sharp-angled face of twenty-year-old Adam Truman is imprisoned. I twirl the card through my freezing fingers, out in the empty air above the abyss. I look down on Edmonton’s river valley, the grey salted city. Far on the horizon I see the true
colours of dawn emerging—a lick of pink and orange swooping up from the land to join the light blue and deep navy sky.

  “Is it lighter or is it just me?”

  “It’s almost dawn,” says René. “Sunrise. Spring.”

  Spring. New life.

  If I don’t leave now I’ll never leave. If I stay in Edmonton any longer I’ll get stuck here like so many people have gotten stuck in lives they hate. Melting Day is over now.

  I put a thick black line through that old name. Adam Truman, redacted. I look down at the icy waters, and I write a new name for this new self. It flows right into my mind. It’s obvious. The name you choose is a promise you make to yourself.

  René tilts his head toward me, reads my CIRCLE.

  “I like it,” he says.

  So do I. My name is River Runson.

  {5}

  The Melting Queen shall Name a successor

  Dawn drapes itself over the city, lighting up the shattered river, the snow-free streets, the wreckage of the carnival. I walk through the barren cityscape and watch the remnants of Melting Day being cleared away. Cleaning crews repair the damaged property, sweep up the shattered glass, pick up the soggy streamers and the hundreds of people passed out in the street. Opportunistic magpies feast on the discarded confections of the revellers. People peel off their bright costumes, fold them up carefully, and hide them away for next year.

  Every year, on the morning after Melting Day, the city gathers at City Hall for the Melting Queen’s Pardon and the Naming ceremony, where the Melting Queen speaks the name of her successor. I’m hungover, dead on my feet, but Churchill Square is on my walk home to Chinatown. I might as well go see this one final ritual before I start packing my bags.