Path of Smoke

by Bailey Cunningham

  Now the real test would begin. It was easy to keep the lie going when they weren’t distracted. They’d had time to organize, to make plans. Today, that luxury was over. They’d have to lose sleep if they were going to keep this up. All it took was the tiniest slip. At first, he’d thought that Shelby would crack. She spent more time with him, and he knew her moods. But lately, Carl was beginning to fear that he’d be the one to say something. He could feel the words like a weight on his chest. Sometimes, he’d say them silently in front of the mirror.

  You died.

  He went downstairs. They were waiting for him on the street.

  “First day of term,” he said with a fake smile. “Who’s pumped?”

  Shelby handed him a coffee. “I’m not ready. My hair’s fucked, this sweater smells like fries, and I can’t remember what room I’m teaching in.”

  “RC 111,” Andrew said. “It’s in the Innovation Centre.”

  “Is it a smart room? I’m intimidated by them.”

  “Yes. It’s full of buttons and has very little seating.”

  “Perfect.”

  Carl gave him a granola bar. “Put this in your bag for later.”

  Andrew took it without quite looking at him. Lack of eye contact was nothing new with him, but this seemed different. Still, he smiled slightly as he took the bar.

  “Kashi Crisp. Thanks.”

  “They have the least amount of sugar,” Carl said. “And taste, I think. But on the plus side: ancient grains.”

  “Fitting that a historian would like his grains ancient.”

  “I prefer the ones loaded with sugar. But these are heart-smart.”

  “According to your mother?” Shelby asked.

  “She’s looking out for all of us.”

  “Does she still think that you’re dating Tammy?”

  “Hey.” Carl took a long pull of coffee. “Don’t knock imaginary Tammy. She’s gotten me out of many conversations that I’d rather not field.”

  “Why not just admit that you’re a complete rake? Your mom’s a poet. I don’t think she’s going to judge you.”

  “Poets can be surprisingly focused on grandchildren.”

  “I think you’d be a good father,” Andrew said.

  Carl blinked and looked at him. “Why?”

  “Well, you’re kind of obsessed with Lego. You like to barbecue, you call every dog ‘buddy,’ and in nearly every picture of you that I’ve seen, you’re holding a baby.”

  “I’ve got a lot of cousins.”

  “I don’t know. It seems like you’re halfway there.”

  “It took four alarms to get me out of bed. I don’t think I’m cut out for fatherhood at this point in my life.”

  “Let’s focus on not getting kicked out of the MA program,” Shelby said. “Then we can talk about crazy hypotheticals.”

  They walked from Broad up to Albert Street. The wind licked at their jackets. By the end of the month, they’d be wearing gloves and hats with earflaps. For now, the weather seemed to balance on a knife’s edge. Scraps of summer remained, but everyone could feel that winter was due to arrive. You could feel a collective sigh in the city of Regina, at the moment of the first snowfall. The time for shoes was over. The boots would have to come out, and with them, a pile of layers to fend off the cold.

  He’d squandered four months of buggy, dry heat, and now the snow was on its way. He wasn’t ready for anything—teaching, toques, an honest conversation with his mother. Carl wanted to run back home, but they were already crossing the park, and it was too late. In a few hours, he’d be in front of a classroom once again, explaining the finer points of a history syllabus. Five hundred years of blood, sex, and politics, condensed into a dark espresso. Most of them would be half asleep, distracted by their phones, or slowly coming to the realization that they were in the wrong class. But a few would be listening, and it was for their benefit that he made jokes, paced the room, and showed images of crumbling Roman via. Someday, they might be in his exact position, and he could think of no finer revenge.

  They crossed Wascana Park. Geese wandered along the pathways, hissing at joggers. The lake was clear, reflecting the parliament building in all of its rippling, neo-Victorian majesty. The original building had been destroyed by a cyclone. Papers and desks and people flew out the windows as the foundations cleaved apart. Now it was a copy, but a brilliant one. Carl loved the different kinds of marble inside. Once, he’d gotten so turned on by the architecture that it had made him light-headed. The brutalist design of Plains University didn’t have quite the same effect. The only space on campus that excited him was the room with fur on the walls. It had once been used for LSD experiments. He also liked the Pit, which resembled a dry, carpeted hot tub in the middle of the Administration-Humanities building. Students gathered there to study, and it always smelled faintly of Cheetos and ripe socks.

  The park didn’t talk during the day. It was mostly sedate. At night, it awoke, opened its mouth, and sang. You knew that you’d be swallowed if you listened to the song, but you couldn’t help it. You’d never heard anything so enchanting, so frightening. Carl looked at Andrew, now immune to the park’s pull. He looked fragile, in frayed jeans and an oversized Community T-shirt with Abed Nadir on it. Cool cool cool, the caption said. This was the outfit that he’d chosen for the first day of term.

  Carl remembered the first night that he’d discovered the real park. He’d been wandering back home from Athena’s, the campus pub, where he’d consumed entirely too much tequila. His tongue felt pickled, and as he walked past a rusted ventilation duct—placed inexplicably next to the pub—he thought briefly about prying off the grate and climbing down. As a kid, he’d dreamed of doing just this, in the hopes that he’d find the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Donatello would teach him how to build a siege engine, all MacGyver-like, and then Splinter could show him how to meditate and achieve satori. Which must have been harder for a rat, but he certainly made it look easy in the comics. Distracted by the thought, he’d nearly run into a weathered sculpture, which looked almost exactly like the ventilation duct. He’d stared at them both in confusion, trying to see the art, to figure out what made one of them an installation, while the other was merely a rusted-out conduit. Unable to figure it out, he’d kept walking.

  This was long before he’d met Shelby or Andrew. He was still an undergrad, writing forgettable essays on the Thirty Years’ War, glasnost, and Renaissance optics. He should have been gearing up for grad school, but already he felt himself growing disillusioned. He no longer had that roller-coaster feeling in his stomach when he read about buried artifacts. Only a few years ago, he would have wet himself at the chance to join an archaeological dig, to roam through haunted foundations in search of the past. Now he selected courses based on how many credits they offered, what time they’d been scheduled (morning classes interfered with his hangovers), and, sometimes, how close the room was to a vending machine. He seemed to receive the same mark on all of his papers, accompanied by the same comments. The handwriting was different, but the faint praise (thoughtful discussion; good use of outside sources) didn’t change. He didn’t feel as if he were being groomed for an illustrious career as an academic. Instead, he felt as if he were being managed, like an unexceptional child in a Montessori classroom.

  That night, wrapped in his tequila blanket, he’d stumbled through Wascana Park. The geese shadowed him, their glowing eyes winking in the dark. Faint shapes moved on the margins of his fuzzy awareness. He heard skitterings, the crunch of gravel, the curious presence of animals watching him like something on display. The moon was full and slightly jaundiced. Plenilunada, he thought. His mother used to whisper that in his ear when he was little, pointing to the full moon. He’d thought, at the time, that she could control it, make it wax and wane on command. His mother, who held his small hand while offering him names for everything, first in Spani
sh, then in English. While he was thinking about this, he’d walked between two trees. There was nothing distinctive about them. He’d felt suddenly light-headed. The world lurched violently. He fell to his knees, retching salt, lime, and undigested nachos.

  Only after his stomach was terribly empty, after he’d opened his eyes and wiped a string of bile from his lips, did he realize that it was daylight, and he was no longer in the park. He was in the city of Anfractus, the city of infinite alleys, with the sun beating down on him. Smoke stung his eyes. The heat was suffocating. For some reason, he was naked, and all of his memories felt as if they’d been scattered about. He couldn’t think of where he’d come from. All he knew for certain was his name.

  Babieca.

  The campus was a warren of demihysterical students, clutching their phones and their oversized textbooks as they ran from lineup to lineup. Academics wandered among them, trying to prepare for lectures as they walked. They mechanically sipped coffee, their eyes glued to books with titles like Powers of Horror and Of Grammatology. Some were dressed fashionably, while others wore rumpled clothing and looked as if they’d just woken up. Carl recalled his favorite philosophy teacher, who’d worn the same outfit to every class: a pair of gray sweatpants and a Looney Tunes T-shirt with a hole in the middle of Bugs Bunny’s face. He’d never met anyone more brilliant or fascinating than this man, bleary and unshaven, too busy thinking about Immanuel Kant and the sweet sting of causality to wash his clothes. He’d observed over the years that male academics could get away with a lot. As long as they were interesting, they could show up to class in a pair of overalls, sporting a facial tattoo, and nobody would comment.

  They went to the bookstore to cash in their TA vouchers, which would allow them to afford the pile of books they’d soon have to interpret. There was no such voucher for their graduate seminars, each of which boasted a long reading list. Sometimes you could cobble together the readings on your own—if you got to the library quick enough—but often, there was an overpriced custom courseware package to buy. It amounted to a binder full of photocopies, most of them askew, whose very presence seemed to offend the corporation known as CanCopy. A steaming envelope of freshly pressed articles, chosen for their difficulty. He wasn’t sure he had any room left in his brain to memorize those dizzying arguments, produced by academics who had once lined up at a bookstore counter, just like him, clutching the same voucher and wondering how they were going to pay the power bill.

  Andrew headed off to find his books. Carl started to follow him past the shelves of branded merchandise, but Shelby grabbed him by the arm. He almost yelped but managed to bite down on the exclamation. She dragged him into a corner filled with Plains University socks, sweaters, and bunnyhugs.

  “What’s the plan for tonight?”

  “No parking,” he said automatically. That was the phrase uttered whenever one of them spoke about “park business” on the wrong side of Wascana. Companies were supposed to remain discreet. Not that they were a real company. Not anymore. But if one of Mardian’s people happened to hear them—or worse, one of the basilissa’s—their lives would take an unpleasant turn. After what they’d done, it was important to stay off the radar.

  She sighed. “Things must have gone well and truly pear-shaped if you’re the one advising me about parking.”

  “Hey. I can be discreet. I’ve done a pretty good job this summer.”

  “With a few slips.”

  “What do you expect? We’re with him all the time, and he likes to ask questions. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s sort of his thing.”

  “It might help if you didn’t look so shifty.”

  “I keep telling you—that’s just my face.”

  Shelby peered over the racks full of clothing. Andrew had vanished into the crowd of students who were trying to find their textbooks.

  “Maybe we could fit him with a silent alarm,” he suggested. “Something that makes our phones buzz whenever he gets within ten feet.”

  “Don’t be a dick.”

  “I’m halfway serious. We’re running out of options. Do you think he really believes that story we told him about the battle in the library?”

  A few months ago, they’d fought for their lives next to the circulation desk. Carl could still remember the sweat running between his hockey pads—their poor excuse for garniture. A salamander had nearly set fire to the stacks. And they’d told Andrew that it was a live-action role-playing game that had gotten out of hand. The smoke alarm, the shattered glass, they’d managed to explain all of it somehow. They’d blamed it on his medication, on stress, on a prank involving the sprinklers. But nobody knew if he actually believed them.

  “He hasn’t exactly mentioned it,” she said.

  “He’s in therapy. Some hack is forcing him to draw how he feels about life, and all we give him in return are terrible excuses.”

  “They’re not so bad. I really could be attending an art class.”

  “Every other night?”

  “I told him it was a compressed summer class.”

  “And summer’s gone. What’s your next excuse?”

  “At least mine’s plausible.”

  He frowned. “I could really be playing in a rec league.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I used to play hockey all the time.”

  “Pee-wee? Or Atom?”

  “Shut it.” He absently picked up a pair of socks. They were branded with a coyote, of all things. “Fine. What should we tell him?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I thought you’d be the one to crack first. Are we supposed to lie to him forever?”

  “Maybe not forever.” He felt something heavy in the pit of his stomach. “Maybe—I mean—he could find his way back.”

  “We don’t even know if that’s possible.”

  “If we tell him, it’s all over. That much we do know.”

  “It’s stupid,” Shelby muttered. “Stupid and cruel.”

  “Pottery.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “You can tell him that you’ve moved on to pottery class.”

  Shelby laughed helplessly. “Right. Instead of studying and preparing for my tutorials, I’ve decided to make a vase.”

  “Tell him it’s an amphora. That sounds more interesting, at least.”

  “And what about you? What if he wants to see one of your hockey games?”

  Carl shuddered at the thought. “I guess I really could join a rec league. Something a bit cheaper, like roller hockey.”

  “I think miniature golf is closer to your speed.”

  “What about the bas—”

  Andrew materialized, clutching a pile of books. He must have used his elbows. Maybe he was the one more suited to playing hockey. The thought made Carl grin.

  “What bass?”

  “Pardon?” Shelby was stalling.

  “What bass?” Andrew repeated. “I interrupted Carl. He was saying something about—”

  “Bass fishing.” Carl tried to make it sound perfectly logical. “My cousin wants to take me bass fishing. Mom was telling me the other night. Isn’t that weird?”

  “It really is,” Shelby murmured.

  “Which cousin?”

  “Mauri.”

  “Isn’t he a vegetarian?”

  Fuck. He could see Mauri in his mind’s eye, skinny and smiling, as he ordered a lentil burger with extra chard. Suddenly, Carl hated him for being so healthy.

  “We’re not going to eat the bass,” he said haltingly. “It’s a catch-and-release thing. Probably, we’ll just drink a lot of beer and ignore the fish.”

  “When is this happening?”

  Shelby knocked over a rack full of bunnyhugs. “Oh crap. Why did I do that?”

  Andrew helped her replace the rack. She
gave special attention to each hanger, ensuring that the clothes were arranged by size.

  “Can I see your books?” Carl asked. The key to distracting Andrew was to relentlessly change the subject. If you kept it up long enough, he’d usually abandon whatever question he’d been about to ask. Books were like catnip.

  As he rattled off details about the publishers and individual editions, Carl smiled. His insides felt like a car crash. Soon the lies would feel true. On that day, he’d be able to look Andrew in the eyes, to smile at him, without a quiver of regret. Like an advisor, he’d be able to say—without blinking—that the job market was looking up, that a bachelor of arts had never been so valuable, that you couldn’t put a price on critical thinking. He’d sweeten the knife before plunging it in. They’d both believe in a tremendous future, unscrolling across the sky.

  A memory came to him, jagged around the edges, as if someone had abruptly tuned his mind to a halfway point between stations. He felt stone beneath his back. He saw a decaying tapestry. Fortuna was a ruined face. Her eyes had faded, but they still saw him, sweating, full of fire. Kissing the shadow. The rhythm that drove them, older than anything. The shadow moved, and Babieca felt something rising within him, a sweet, scalding incandescence that would burn everything to ashes if he let it loose. And he did. The mouth closed over his own. Ashes covered his body, a dream of collapsing staircases and blind alleys. The spark moved through him, leaving nothing behind, as the tongue sifted through his remains. He was shuddering and crying, but his body had flattened out to silk. There was only the cry, the beautiful breakdown.

  But they hadn’t kissed. Not in this world. Babieca—his other—had shared a furtive, happy moment with Roldan. The auditor, gone. The shadow. But why did Carl remember? Who had been the real shadow? Was Babieca just a character in a dream, or was he an extension of Carl, some nested memory that would never leave him? Babieca’s particular skill set would have been useful in grad school. He’d never have to pay for another book, and being a musician had a certain mystique. It was a lot sexier than collecting Lego and back issues of the Byzantine Historical Annual. All those buttons and forgotten fibulae. Perhaps they really would save him, as he’d believed when he was young. Their lovely endurance. If a fine silver toothpick could survive the collapse of an empire, then—maybe—he could survive this.