She finishes her sandwich and takes a deep gulp of tea, even though it’s still hot enough to scald my tongue.
“No one told me that my fountain idea was stupid,” she says. “Not outright. But I knew it was a pointless project compared to what they wanted to do. I was just a plumber with a dumb dream. I had a responsibility to represent all those other victims, they said. So I became their face. The sterile Melting Queen, even if Birch never wanted me. He thought that I’d make it so spring never came. But it did. We won the case. I got 700k—350 for each ovary, I joked, no one laughed—and an official apology. And that was that.”
The room falls silent. Clodagh takes another gulp of tea. Magpie twirls her stone-cage in her hand.
“Iris Zambezi came to the Melting Queen’s Picnic and told me I had a duty to march in the Pride Parade,” I say.
“People love telling other people what to do,” says Clodagh. “And it’s always easier to let other people make your choices for you.”
She picks up her plate and goes over to the sink and rinses it off.
“Wait, so I get the rest of the story, but why a fountain?” asks Magpie.
“When I was little, in my first foster home, I saw this one movie I really liked. Roman Holiday. I was obsessed with it. I even got a poster from it—well, a magazine cover that I stuck up on the wall—and I learned all about Audrey Hepburn. I wanted to cut my hair like she did but they wouldn’t let me, so I did it myself and got in trouble. Anyways, I always thought Rome would be the best city in the world to live in. That’s why I used my ovary money to start a travel agency. But then, I never got around to going.”
I study this husky old woman, whose skin I’ve been in. She’s so strong, but so tired. She could probably lift a car over her head, but it takes just as much effort for her to get up in the morning. She used to want things.
“What were you doing at the masquerade?” I ask.
Clodagh turns off the water but doesn’t turn to face us.
“When I saw you on the news, I thought it was a sign or something.” She comes over to the table and sits back down. “I’ve wanted to go for years. To make my own petition. I even made up a name for myself, a dumb acronym like everyone uses. FLOE. The Fountain Lovers of Edmonton. Although that’s just me, as far as I know. Anyways, I didn’t get in to see you. Not that I was surprised.”
“You still want to build a fountain.”
Clodagh sighs.
“You should get some sleep,” she says. “It’s past two.”
“I’m not sleepy, I have chronic insomnia,” says Magpie proudly. “And I want to watch Roman Holiday.”
“Well, I suppose we could,” says Clodagh. “I have it around here somewhere.”
We go into the family room and Clodagh opens up a cupboard full of VHS tapes. She can’t find Roman Holiday so we settle for La Dolce Vita instead. Magpie laughs and claps as Marcello traipses around Rome. She doesn’t touch her stone once. Clodagh watches her with satisfaction.
I keep almost drifting off to sleep, but then thunder rumbles in the sky.
“There’s going to be a storm,” says Clodagh.
On screen, Sylvia shouts for Marcello and splashes through the Trevi Fountain. The thunder builds.
“Listen,” says Sylvia as the roar of the Trevi Fountain fades away and Rome is frozen in the light of dawn. They wade out of the fountain and the TV snaps to black. The power is out.
Magpie stands up and takes both of our hands.
“Come on,” she says.
She leads us out into Clodagh’s back yard and stands in the rushing wind, waiting for the storm to arrive. Soon, the sky splits open and water pours down onto the city. I smile up into the night sky, feeling the cold raindrops strike my cheeks. The first true spring rain, come to wash away the lingering shadows of winter.
{11}
Resurrected by the rains
The storm continues all night and all day and all night. The rain washes away all the salt and dirt and grit and grime and grey hues of winter. The earth opens, drinking up the water with greedy thirst. And then, at last, the summer sun comes out.
The next day, budding greenery blooms everywhere. Flowers burst open. Grass spears up out of damp soil. Leaves hang thick and succulent on groaning branches. The sun blares down on everything, soaking into the dirt. And I start to feel alive again, at last.
I’m going to build a fountain. Not for Edmonton. Not for a million ungrateful citizens. Not for me or my legacy or the glory of the Melting Queen. I’m going to build a fountain for Clodagh Paskwamostos. I don’t care about embodying the spirit of the city or changing Edmonton forever. I’m just going to make one person happy.
It’s hard to put exactly what I feel about Clodagh into words. I’ve never had such a strong, instantaneous connection with another person before. When I’m around her, despite all her gruff and awkward aloofness, I feel happy. I feel safe. I feel like I’m at home. And I also feel what she feels, still, after all these years. I feel aching, chronic pain. I feel world-weary cynicism. I feel a tiny flame of hope that a lifetime of winters hasn’t been able to snuff out. She needs me. She deserves this. And I’m going to do everything I can to fan that flame into a roaring fire, and bring Clodagh Paskwamostos back to life.
The day that Edmonton begins to bloom, I introduce Clodagh to my little team. We tell Kaseema and Sander and Odessa about our project, the long-overdue fountain that will make one tiny piece of Edmonton as beautiful as Rome.
Kaseema instantly starts drawing up timelines and plans, budgets and charts, reaching out to landscape design companies, researching everything she can learn about fountains. In one afternoon I see that Kaseema Noor is the Office of the Melting Queen. ECHO and Kastevoros Birch and all the glitz and grandeur of the Stalk are just the fancy packaging. She’s a one-woman organization, doing the work of a dozen people. She’s how a Melting Queen can demand a bridge be built in May and have it finished by April. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her with grout and trowel, building the fountain brick by brick if she had to.
Once he works up the courage to talk to Clodagh, Sander starts getting as excited by the fountain as she is. At first I cringe as I watch him ply her with questions about Intrusions and her famous court case. Her answers are sharp monosyllabic bullets, when she bothers to answer at all. But then he asks her about fountains, and Clodagh’s stony silence crumbles. She can talk for hours about her peculiar obsession, and Sander is an enthusiastic listener. He asks intelligent questions, and she instantly takes a liking to him.
Odessa is another story. Shortly after Clodagh and I announce our plan, she says she has to go for a walk and leaves her house in a huff. Everyone is so engaged, either in planning or in conversation, that they don’t seem to notice that something’s wrong. But I follow her outside, onto the back patio where I helped her smash bottles only a few weeks ago.
“What’s wrong?”
She turns to face me. I’m surprised to see so much anger in her grey eyes.
“Is this really what you want to do?” she asks. “Yet another spirit-boosting project?”
“I don’t care about boosting Edmonton’s spirits. I’m doing this for Clodagh.”
“You’re going to be just like all the others, then. Think of what you said at your coronation! You aren’t going to be a cardboard cut-out Melting Queen. You need to tackle issues that matter. You need to make real, challenging changes. Push people! Resist! Make them uncomfortable. Turn over the table.”
“I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t think that any Melting Queen could do that. All I know is that I’m excited by this idea, more than I’ve been about anything in years. I feel like I’m finally coming back to life. Please don’t be mad at me. I wish I could be the radical queen that you imagine. But I’m not you.”
Odessa’s face hardens. She pulls out her car keys.
“No,” she says. “You’re not me. I thought you were going to be different. I thought you were going to be be
tter than this.”
“You don’t understand,” I say. “I felt what she felt. I was her. I need to do this. She needs this.”
“Whatever,” she says, walking past me towards her giant copper Chrysler. “I’m going for a drive. Have fun with your new friend. I hope she’s worth it.”
I watch her drive away and listen to the roar of her engine down the block. I stand on the back patio for a few minutes, waiting for Odessa to come back, like she always does whenever we have an argument and her dramatic sensibilities take over. But she’s gone for real this time, and all I can do is go back inside to the others. Nobody seems to notice that anything is different.
I settle down with the three of them and start laying out plans for the next steps of our project. We need to choose a site for the fountain, come up with a design, work with the city planning department to stay within the bylaws. We need to find the money to build it and promote it across the city, at the countless events I’m supposed to attend. And even though I’m reluctant to admit it, Kaseema eventually brings up the inevitable: I need to go out and meet the people. Talk to them one on one. Hear their stories. Try my best to turn enemies into allies, or we’ll never build this fountain.
So I force myself to face my fears and walk through the city in endless circles, having conversations. I live through the same scene a thousand times. A person recognizes me, sneers at me, comes up to spit at my feet or shout in my face. Then, before they know what’s happening, they’re spilling their deepest secrets out—their doubts and their woes and their desires and their sins.
“I’m sorry,” they sob into my shoulder.
“I forgive you,” I say, feeling my warmth reanimate their cold bones. Feeling their coldness seep into me.
It feels like everyone hates me until they talk to me. All they can see is a man in a dress. ‘Genderfluid’ and ‘nonbinary’ mean nothing to them, especially when I’m not demonstrating perfect gender equilibrium every day. They see my painted lips and my dark stubble, my free-flowing hair and my sharply cut tie, my lace-up skirt and my button-down shirt and they shrink away. Then they feel the inexorable pull, like the force of gravity, drawing them in to clutch at my skirts and whisper in my ear.
A big muscular guy in an oil-stained jean jacket comes up to me, and I think he’s going to bash my head in. Instead he just sits beside me on a bus bench, sweating and not meeting my eyes, and tells me about his breasts. It’s a condition called gynecomastia that he’s had since puberty. He binds them down with a stretchy tube of fabric. He’s afraid to go to the gym or to a swimming pool or anywhere with a locker room. He’s afraid of bringing a woman home. He’s afraid of going to the doctor to get surgery to cut them off. He says he thinks I have bigger balls than he does, and he wishes he could be as brave as me.
A four-year-old runs over and asks me, “Are you a boy or a girl?”
“No,” I say. “I’m not. I used to be a boy but I grew out of it.”
“Oh, okay,” he says. Then he tells me his favourite colour is pink even though he’s a boy, because he likes the watermelon scent of the pink marker. I agree that the artificial watermelon smell is awesome and the boys and girls who tease him about it are small-minded bumheads with no imagination. His mother comes over and pulls him away from me. She slaps his hand down when he waves goodbye.
An old man has a stroke at the grocery store, and I hold his hand as we wait for the ambulance. He keeps trying to talk, whispering slurred words that I can’t understand. I keep telling him that I won’t leave, I’ll stay right here, he’s going to be okay. He dies before the ambulance arrives.
Sometimes they come to me with great news—I just got in to vet school! I just got an STI test and I’m all clear! I just released my first album!—and they search my eyes for a mother’s approval. But these interactions are rare. Mostly they tell me stories of anxiety or insecurity or persecution or shame. I had no idea there were this many people with this many problems in Edmonton. I had no idea that the misery I felt all winter ran so deep, was so widespread across the population. Everyone is miserable all the time. Everyone is pretending they’re fine, hiding their pain, ashamed of what they feel. All I can do is listen to their stories and try to comfort them. I don’t know if I’m really helping them. But still they come.
It’s draining, listening to story after story. I want to lock myself away from them and never hear another sad story in my life. I look at myself in the mirror and see the weight of their collected gloom etched into my face, the burden I’ve absorbed to lighten their loads. Odessa is barely around anymore, so I have to learn my own makeup tricks and cover up my haggard features by myself. I have a few tantrums, grumbling to Clodagh and Kaseema about how unfair it is that I have to listen to all these secrets and miseries, take on all these troubles and worries. They both humour me, telling me to take breaks if I get too worn out, treating me with far more patience than I deserve.
But even if I stay in my room, the powers of the Melting Queen won’t let me be. I’m having more and more Intrusions. Sometimes I’m being crowned Melting Queen or leading a grand celebration. Sometimes I’m doing something mundane like painting a wall or mowing my lawn. Sometimes I get to experience the joys of having a female body, like the time I was stuck having menstrual cramps for six horrible hours. On rare and glorious occasions, I even jump back into a Melting Queen who’s asleep, and when I come back to myself I feel incredibly refreshed and rested.
There’s only one memory that I’ve experienced more than once: running through the woods in the middle of the night, fleeing in terror. Whenever it comes I grit my teeth and close my eyes and pray for it to end. I trip over a stray branch, I go flying through the air, and I’m thrown into another Intrusion—safer, blander, where my heart can stop hammering and my blind panic can fade away. But no matter how much I try to avoid it, this dark memory keeps coming back. I have no idea what it is or when it is or whose it is. I don’t want to know. All I know is that I have to stay away from it.
I complain. I whine. But in the end, I have a job to do. These are my duties. This is what I signed up for when I decided not to run away to Phoenix with Odessa. I keep walking. And meeting people. And listening.
But eventually it’s time for the people of Edmonton to listen to us. Over the past few weeks, Kaseema has drawn up a plan of action, but we still have a lot of decisions to make. Where should we build our fountain? What materials will it be made of? How will we fund its construction and upkeep? What should we do with any money people throw into it?
We decided that we should get regular Edmontonians to help us answer these questions. We want everyone to contribute to this project—dreaming it up, having their say, donating as much as they can. So Kaseema organizes a public forum, a meeting in Sundial Park, one of Edmonton’s greatest Melting Queen projects.
In 2006, Ananke Cosmopoulos (Melting Queen 103) successfully campaigned to turn the derelict site of an old meatpacking plant into a unique and spectacular park. For years after the plant was torn down, its giant brick smokestack stood at the centre of a barren dirt landscape beside Fort Road on the city’s northeast side. Ananke persuaded the city to repurpose the land, maintaining the smokestack and using it as the central needle in a giant sundial.
Hundreds of people turn up and spread out their picnic blankets on the lush green lawn of the circular park. The media shows up too, and a handful of protestors, who’ve lost a bit of steam now that the inevitability of my reign has set in. The smokestack’s long shadow falls across picnickers gathered around the Hour of the Rooster statue. Clodagh stands in front of the smokestack, facing out on the crowd, brimming over with passion. After so many weeks of interacting with the public, I’m very happy to cede the spotlight to my friend.
“Fountains,” she says, “have been the beating hearts of cities for millennia. They used to provide clean drinking water to the people, maintaining the health of the body. But they also bring beauty to public spaces, nourishing a city’s so
ul.”
Her eyes shimmer like coins under rippling water. She’s been reinvigorated by our joint project. She’s a different person than the one I met in that travel agency all those aeons ago on the last day of winter.
“Fountains are places where people give voice to their deepest desires,” says Clodagh. “What do we all do at a fountain? We toss in a penny and pray for a blessing. A fountain holds the memory of a thousand whispered wishes. In its waters, the pooled secrets of an entire city circulate.”
Clodagh draws the eyes of every person present. She has them completely in her grasp. She takes a sip of water from a glass bottle and holds it up for all to see.
“The waters of our fountains are the waters of the river. Our river is in our blood. We suck up its water and pump it through a huge network of pipes, buried deep beneath our feet, insulated against the cold. You probably don’t think about it when you turn on a tap, flush a toilet, draw a bath, or take a drink. But this water is river water. It’s been carved up into your own personal tributaries and distributaries. There are vertical rivers channelled up and down skyscrapers, and horizontal ones running back and forth across bridges. The river runs through this city in a million little rivulets. In the winter it runs on beneath the ice, just like it runs beneath the surface of our own skins, circulating through us.”
Clodagh shares a radiant smile with the picnickers.
“A grand, cascading, monumental fountain may not seem like the most urgent of projects. There are always people to feed. Children to save. Potholes to fill. But it’s something Edmonton needs. Something that will make our city better. An oasis of peace in these times of constant stress.”
I look out at the crowd and see hundreds of individual faces. Crowds can never be singular entities for me anymore. There’s a white woman with a shaved head and a dozen piercings. A group of Sikh men in green turbans. A young family with kids lying on the grass, looking at the clouds. Protestors, as always, gathered at the edge of the park.
The Melting Queen Page 14
