Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  “Rutger,” I finally called up front. “Ru! Can we put on a movie?” It was the only thing I could think of, and for a minute, while the screens slid out of their recesses in the ceiling and the opening strains of The Lion King filtered through the van, it seemed like everything was okay. I was panting, drily wheezing as if my throat had been lined with dryer fluff.

  “Johnny, what happened?” Carla said. The boys looked up.

  “Yellowjacket nest,” Johnny said. “A big one, and they were so mad I couldn’t yell to warn you about it. I’m so sorry about the picnic, guys! Tell you what, let’s go into town and get burgers and shakes, okay?”

  She was shaking, despite the cheerful, Mary-Poppins voice that lulled the kids almost visibly as they settled in to watch the movie. I caught her eye in the rear-view mirror, her green irises dull, almost the colour of the sockets around them. We are going to talk about this later, I told the eyes with my eyes.

  She nodded.

  “WELL, TODAY WAS a goddamn disaster,” I said. “Also. Why are we meeting here?”

  “No connection to either of us,” she said. “Harder to find.”

  I had to run that through my head a couple of times, rubbing my chest, where the heel of her hand had left a bean-shaped bruise. Wouldn’t have thought she had it in her. Were we harder to find now? By whom?

  Rutger had dropped me off at home, but I’d barely managed to get the kids in bed before Johnny had called me demanding, in whispers, that we meet again. And at her insistence we had walked to this park instead of driving, a long way from both our houses. It was almost midnight, no traffic, nothing open, far from cameras and sirens. I hadn’t left a note for Mom, and hoped she wouldn’t freak out at me being out so late. She worried so much now.

  I had arrived to find a swing moving apparently on its own, a black smear in the darkness, for a moment something unknown—a form without identity, without shape, black hackles and claws like a cat. But the flash of her pale palm had been enough to reassure me. It was cool and still, just starlight and the reflections of the streetlights, and the familiar, beloved glow in the horizon.

  “Hey. Look—northern lights.”

  She glanced up, in the wrong direction, then kicked her feet in the sand, setting her swing going. I clenched my fists.

  “Joanna Meredith Chambers, you better tell me what the fuck happened today, and don’t tell me yellowjackets,” I said. “What was that in the trees? I thought it was a bear for a second.”

  “No.”

  “Well no, I figured that out, because we wouldn’t have run like that if it was,” I said. It still felt like there was something in my throat, not a hand now but a lump, a blood clot, through which voice and breath could barely emerge. “Do you know what it was?”

  “Not for sure. But it wasn’t human.”

  “All right. Not a person. Not a bear. But dangerous. Now we’re getting somewhere.” I didn’t dare sit in the swing next to her; it was made for kids and the chains might snap under my weight. I leaned my forehead on the support pole, cold metal thrumming with all the earth’s invisible vibrations, a train ten kilometers away, electricity in the streetlights, footsteps of people in their houses, distant traffic. I wanted to tell her about the shooting star I’d seen yesterday and the wish I hadn’t made.

  After a moment, she said, “I think we dodged a bullet. Maybe we didn’t. It might be a while before I know.”

  “You wanted me to come out here to talk about it. So I came. Are you just yanking my chain or what?”

  She sighed hugely. From anyone else it would have sounded melodramatic. Or maybe on any other day. “I thought I could, but now I’m just worried you’ll think I’m nuts. Or sleep-deprived. Or have caffeine poisoning.”

  “I think all of those things all the time.”

  That squeezed a real laugh out of her, if flimsy. Her eyesockets were dark pools on her face, like a skull, untouched by the scanty light. I shuddered, hoping she didn’t see. Then she swung forward into the streetlight and was just Johnny again, the small, fey, familiar face, ninety pounds of blonde bullshit in a raccoon-print t-shirt. “Well, only two of them are usually true.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Listen...” she said, the chains squeaking minutely as she swung. “Listen, did we both pass out yesterday because I had changed the world? Because the whole world changed and no one else knew?”

  I looked at her for a moment, trying to tell whether she was joking or whether she’d just unintentionally put her ego on display again. The way her mind works, I have always understood that it is very different from mine, and we had to overcome that to be friends; but sometimes I needed to remind myself that it works differently from everybody else’s too. The things that interest her are not above but aside from the things other scientists are interested in, behind and underneath, so that she didn’t progress linearly on her preferred problems but zigzagged around, failing quickly and discarding things at lightning speed. That’s the way she wants it, as many problems as possible, as if she were the only one put in charge of the world’s collective future. There’s always been an added layer to the world she inhabits, one I can’t live in, one in which she asks questions meant only for herself. I couldn’t tell where she was going with this, but she really did seem to be waiting for my answer. I said, “Maybe. I thought it was the heat, though.”

  “Well, what we saw at the Creek is, I think... a thing that... is called when that happens. That has been set in place to watch for it, its face... pressed to the membrane separating the places where things like that never happen and where they can and do. Which, I will now admit, sounds stupid.”

  I stared at her for a moment, trying to figure out a polite way to agree. “It doesn’t sound stupid, it just doesn’t sound...” I groped for a word. “Real.”

  “Well. What’s real, anyway.” She laughed. “How do we know what’s real?”

  “I don’t know, but that thing was real enough to see, I guess, since we both saw it.”

  “What did you see?”

  “A thing, a black... tall... thing...” I hesitated. Now I knew what she meant about it sounding stupid. Anything sounds reasonable until you have to explain it to someone. I wondered if this was why she got so famously short-tempered on her lecture tours. “With something white or yellow on top, but not a face or a hat. I thought maybe it was a skull, later. Why? What did you see?”

  “‘Bout the same.”

  I sat on the ground, looking at her feet instead of her face to spare my neck. Her scuffed black-and-white off-brand Nikes half-full of playground sand next to my equally scuffed off-brand Converse.

  She kicked ferociously at the sand. “I’m an idiot. Should have stayed in the house. Wasn’t thinking at all.”

  “Good one,” I said. “Some prodigy.”

  “If I had a nickel for every time you’ve said ‘some prodigy,’ I could literally afford to send another spaceship to Mars.”

  “Yes, but I’m always justified. You sound scared,” I said.

  “You too.”

  “I don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I said, more sharply than I meant. “And I don’t think you really do either. That’s what scares me. You being scared.”

  She fell silent, swinging, not looking at me. I thought again, unable to help it, about the day we’d met. Which I couldn’t even remember.

  We were eight and nine when I learned the whole story. We had been dancing to Thriller, hopping and twisting through the sprinkler in her parents’ backyard, trying to moonwalk on the wet grass. The hose we had unwisely left exposed on the dark patio stones produced a blood-heat shower stinking of metal, evaporating in seconds off our sunburned skin.

  “Joanna!” her mother called from the house, or maybe it was the au pair. “Snack!”

  “Coming!” Johnny yelled. We turned off the record player—a beautiful, vintage machine in a real wood cabinet—and were stopped at the glass doors by another shout, this one actively hostile. Johnn
y rattled the handle.

  “Change before you come in! And don’t track in any dirt!”

  “But we’re clean! We were in the sprinkler!”

  No one came to unlock the door. Johnny sighed.

  I stripped like a snake behind a topiary and whipped into my dry clothes, then trotted across the hissing flagstones to see Johnny wrestling with her wet t-shirt; for the first time I saw the scar on her back, a shining coin stuck to her golden skin. Then it was gone, covered with the silkscreened face of Optimus Prime.

  Inside, we speared grapes and cheese with toothpicks, like grownups.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  “Feta.”

  “And what’s this?”

  “Smoked gouda, I think.”

  I gulped my strawberry milk and said, “And what’s that thing on your back?”

  Said like that, I expected her to get mad, or go quiet, or just cry. Instead, to my surprise, she answered me.

  “It’s from the same thing as the scar on your shoulder,” she said.

  I blushed. I always had a shirt on when we played, even when we were swimming. I thought no one outside my family knew of it. “Mom said I was born with that.”

  “You weren’t,” she said. “I wasn’t born with mine either. We were shot.”

  “We were what?”

  She finished her Snapple in lingering sips as she looked out the window, telling the story to the backyard instead of me, exhaling fake peach as she spoke.

  ONCE UPON A time, she said, spinning the Snapple lid like a top, there was a charity choir performance at City Hall, and lots of inner city kids—such as myself—had attended because it was free, and a few kids whose parents had donated lavishly to the charity—such as herself—had also attended, and it so happened that a group of domestic terrorists selected the event for participation in negotiations with the federal government. They segregated the children into a store closet as hostages, ejected the adults, and installed men at exits and entrances, which they welded shut.

  Their wish, they said, was no loss of life.

  News helicopters hovered, sparring with the police ’copter till threatened with obstruction of justice; for days the government negotiators asked our captors to let us go, then begged, cajoled, threatened. One child from the choir died early on—diabetic, they said. Then another: unknown causes. Then another and another: dehydration. And when eight of us had died the Army sent in men with guns and it all went wrong.

  We were the only survivors.

  And even so, it was a very near thing: a round went through the door, then through Johnny, then attempted to go through me, where it stuck against my shoulderblade. They operated on her first because she had lost so much blood; me next, because they had to phone some people, as no one knew who had fired it, and whether what had lodged inside me was explosive and might have maimed the surgeon.

  Recovery was in the same hospital room, infrequently separated by the blood-smelling curtain. We shared our nightmares for weeks, staring in mute pain at each other when we woke, brown eyes meeting green. Our mothers bonded, superficially but tightly. The round, as it turned out, had not been explosive.

  “The end,” she said.

  I stared at her. She told good stories, and I was old enough to know that that sometimes meant she could recap a movie she’d seen or a book she’d read, and sometimes it was an original work for our month-long games of pretend in Braeside Ravine. But which was it this time?

  I thought as hard as I could about that dim, violet scene. Had that really been her, that glimpse of blonde hair, clear mask? Or had it been a dream? “That didn’t really happen,” I said.

  “It did,” she said.

  I hesitated. There was something... the sickly, lemony smell of the hospital, the rusty smell of soaked bandages. My kindergarten teacher sending a card with an animal on the front... a hedgehog or porcupine, its leg in a cast. And there had been a little girl who talked like a grownup. Hadn’t there? “Mom said I had to have surgery...”

  “That’s true.”

  “You were there,” I said. “I mean, were you there? Are you sure? How come I don’t remember that?”

  “Because many anaesthetic drugs cause retrograde amnesia, so you might not remember the period in City Hall at all, and because most people have incomplete memories before the age of approximately seven,” she said. “I’m mostly eidetic, which means I don’t have that problem. I remember everything. You’re not just dumb.”

  “I already knew that.”

  But of course, when your best friend was the world’s most famous child prodigy, it bore repeating. I felt dumb for even needing her to explain it. “It just means early,” she insisted. “Not better.” I knew she was lying, though. She hadn’t even spoken till she was three years old—that wasn’t early. Her parents hadn’t taken her to the specialists to see if she was gifted; they were worried she was the opposite.

  But when she decided—and not before—there came the torrent of words, the books, the tours, the newscasts, the patents. All her parents could do was get out of the way, shading their eyes against her light, as the labs and observatories began to go up, till her very name became shorthand for young genius—a piano Chambers, a math Chambers. Nothing that applied to me, to the ordinaries, the anti-Chamberses.

  Now, sitting on the swing and still avoiding my gaze, she said, “I don’t even know if I would tell you if I did know. It might be dangerous for you to know.”

  “Dangerous how? Should you be out here without security? Do you even have security right now?”

  “I hate security.”

  “Well I don’t care what you hate, if we’re in danger.”

  She fell silent.

  I stood up, dusted myself off. “Is that what you wanted me to come here for?”

  “I’m sorry.” She looked up at me; her lips were chewed red and raw and I felt my anger waver for a second, replaced with the old love, or maybe just pity. I thought about that dark time at City Hall, and the dark times afterwards, unable to help it. For a long time I’d thought it was a darkness that we carried inside us, whole and complete, like a stone; but it was more like a coat, something we wore and couldn’t take off, always visible in how we moved through the world. Our fear of small things, large things, made-up things. The way it took forever to trust someone. The way we clocked exits now when we went to an unfamiliar place, glancing at each other, knowing we were doing it. We’d never be able to train ourselves out of any of it.

  I pointed again, and she finally looked up at the right place on the horizon, then started back, nearly toppling out of her swing. The northern lights danced, surging like waves, punctured by stars so bright and hot they barely twinkled. There was another faraway roar, the scream of a big plane passing.

  “See? Told you they were out tonight,” I said, pleased by her surprise. “They were out yesterday, too. Nice: more blue and purple than usual. I even saw a shooting star.”

  “Did you,” she said softly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I INSISTED ON walking her home, despite her protests that it was safer if we were separated; I couldn’t quite get over how she had dismissed me at the picnic, and gone after the boys herself. She wouldn’t tell me safer from what, either, and so we walked down the silent streets, dodging between pools of streetlight, with the obvious question hanging over our heads like a cloud. I was not quite at ‘How did you know what that thing is?’ but I could consider ‘Where did you get the idea that it could be a real thing?’

  I couldn’t think of a single answer on my own. It was one thing for her to be intelligent, which no one doubted; it was another thing to be the holder of knowledge that no-one else had. Was it an alien? Some kind of secret government project? A genetically modified animal? Who would make such a thing, and from what? A... a black bear, and a vulture, and a snake, and a bat?

  But there was something about her caginess, her disavowal of all certainty. Her refusal to speak now, as if it would a
ppear again upon hearing her voice. I shivered, thinking about it, looking behind me.

  Johnny lived in a quiet neighbourhood—rich folks don’t like traffic noise or screaming kids—but it was absolutely without sound tonight, only the wind, so quiet I could hear my heart beat. I kept glancing into the black, shivering trees between the houses, wondering if something hid behind the slender trunks. Watching us, as it had watched earlier.

  Things seemed to move in the corner of my eye as Johnny unlocked the door. And she could see them too—she kept jumping, fumbling the numbers, peering nervously around us. Well, at least one of us got home safe. “Goodnight,” I said. “Listen, if you see that thing again, call me and I’ll—”

  She jerked away from me, hitting her back against the door; I instinctively looked behind me. Nothing. Darkness. All the shades of darkness, and streetlight soft and orange on the shadowed lawn, patchy beneath swaying leaves. What had she seen?

  Before I could ask, she beckoned me inside, and slammed the door. We stood panting for a moment in the oval of light from outside, as if we had been running.

  Probably a squirrel or a rabbit or somebody’s outdoor cat, for Christ’s sake, not the... thing. Alien-thing. Probably shrubbery.

  I slumped against the wall and laughed. How obvious was it that it was a stalker, someone in a cheap black Grim Reaper costume left over from Halloween, with a skull mask on top? It was probably glow-in-the-dark, too. For fuck’s sake, me thinking it was an alien or a yeti or some weirdo genetic splice. Our government couldn’t even get running water on reservations, there was no way it could clone a bear with a snake. If anything, aliens were more likely than some garbage animal cooked up in a government lab. And less likely than another pedophile stalker, like the ones that came creeping out from under their rocks after that Time cover.