Path of Smoke

by Bailey Cunningham

  The moon invited them to take the long way home. They walked back down Broad Street and dropped off Carl at his apartment. Love Selection was humming with activity. There was always a sale going on. Ingrid was bemused by the fact that they played classical music. There was something oddly inviting about the well-lit store, where you could browse for silicone toys while listening to a Naxos sampler. It reminded her of that woodcut image of women shopping for dildos in the seventeenth century.

  “We should meet first thing tomorrow morning,” Shelby said. “We don’t have much time to go over this plan.”

  “I thought we didn’t have a plan,” Carl said.

  “I’m calling it a proto-plan.”

  “How about Frodo-plan? Those always end with volcanoes.”

  “Go to bed.”

  He hugged both of them good night and then made his way upstairs. Shelby waited until she saw the light in his apartment turn on. Then she looked at Ingrid.

  “So.”

  Ingrid smiled. “Should I problematize your so?”

  “I’m not sure that it has an argument.”

  “I think the Dodger might still be open,” Ingrid said. “Want to grab a tea?”

  “They sell tea?”

  “Not happily. But it’s on the menu. We could get it to go.”

  They walked down Osler Street. The old fire station cast a peeling shadow over them. People were crowded onto the Dodger’s small patio, smoking and drinking martinis. A band was playing inside, but nobody seemed to be paying attention. They were all huddled around tables, yelling into each other’s ears. Ingrid made her way past the crush of people. The bartender actually seemed relieved by her request. All she had to do was add hot water. Shelby watched Ingrid making small talk. She couldn’t hear anything, but she could read their expressions. The bartender smiled. They weren’t flirting, exactly. It was more like two frayed wires, connecting momentarily. A small flash of kindness in a place where most people were intent on self-fashioning.

  Ingrid handed her the tea. “I hope peppermint is okay. It’s all they had.”

  Shelby hated peppermint. “It’s great,” she said. “Thank you.”

  They crossed the street. There was a small park on the other side. You couldn’t even really call it a park. The city had built it to memorialize a fire, but now it was overgrown, surrendering to its own wildness. Grass and weeds poked through a strange metal structure, and purple flowers made a kind of margin around the dust and gravel.

  Shelby sat on a chunk of stone. She held her cup in both hands, absorbing the warmth. Ingrid sat down next to her. Grasshoppers leapt like popcorn at their feet. The sounds of the bar were fuzzy across the street. She couldn’t quite look at Ingrid, so she looked at the moon, instead. Pollution had turned it amber. The sky had no limits, and she felt as if she could see forever, along the whole length of starless black prairie. Somewhere, there might be a galaxy in which she had the courage to take what she wanted.

  “How do you think it works?” Shelby asked finally.

  “How does what work?”

  “Magic.”

  Ingrid shrugged. “I’ve never known for sure. When I first discovered the park, it felt like some wild spell that had been building inside me, ever since I was a little girl. Then I had Neil, and that was a different kind of magic. But I have no idea how it all functions.”

  Shelby gestured to the micropark around them. “Do you think Anfractus is here? I mean, is it like a transparency, laid over this world?”

  “Maybe Regina is Anfractus. Or it used to be, or will be.”

  “Oliver seems to think it’s some kind of conspiracy. That Wascana Park was built to hide the bridge between worlds. But maybe he’s just a shell-shocked librarian.”

  “He’s a lot of things.”

  “How do you two really know each other?”

  Something softened in her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

  Ingrid leaned forward and kissed her. The grasshoppers danced. The weeds continued their impassive crusade. Shelby heard a low white humming in her ears. It was the sound of every word she’d ever known breaking free. Ingrid’s hand slid down her back. Night dropped a curtain across the stage, which had already begun to spin. They pulled back for a moment. Then Shelby rallied and stopped caring about anything. She ran her hands through Ingrid’s hair, which was soft from her conditioner and smelled of apples. For a moment, she thought they might strip off their clothes in the poor excuse for a park. But suddenly Ingrid stopped moving.

  “Shelby,” she murmured. “Look.”

  She turned, still holding on to Ingrid. Two figures were standing by the wall of a nearby building. At first, she didn’t recognize them. But then one of them gestured slightly, in the middle of a sentence, and the movement jogged her memory.

  It was Andrew.

  Shelby squinted, trying to make out the other figure. He had an arm on Andrew’s shoulder. She listened closely but couldn’t make out anything that he was saying. He turned slightly, and the moonlight yellowed his face.

  It was Oliver.

  “What’s he doing here?” Shelby whispered.

  Ingrid’s expression had darkened. “I have no idea.”

  That was when she remembered Carl’s offhand comment, back at the club.

  I hope he goes home with someone.

  Her mind was racing. Had Oliver been there the whole time? Had he simply been waiting for them to leave Andrew alone? This was her fault. She should have called him. She should have stayed with Narses. Why did she think that she could lead this company? Her anger had brought her to this moment, wasting time in a false park, trying to get up on a single mother while her friend was possibly being grifted by a librarian. Could they really trust Oliver? What did they know about him, in the end?

  The librarian took him by the hand. They walked into the undergrowth, beyond the sodium flicker of the streetlamps.

  Shelby felt a kind of tug. It was sickeningly familiar. The weedy lacuna seemed suddenly more real than it had ever been. Visible darkness fired every blade of grass, every dandelion about to give itself to the passing breeze.

  “Andrew!” She broke free and ran toward the deepest shadows.

  But he was already gone.

  PART FOUR

  OCULUS

  1

  YELLOW MOSS FLUTTERED ABOVE him. At first, he thought it was feathers. He could hear a distant clanging, iron against iron, and the smell of fish was thick in the air. He blinked. The moss clung to a brick wall, shimmering slightly beneath the heat. The ground bit into his shoulder and other soft parts. He looked down and realized that he was naked. He sat up, wrapping his thin arms around his knees. His instinct was to cover himself, but there was nobody around. This was an alley. Cries and hammering and other vague noises floated down its mouth, but he couldn’t quite put them together. They sailed past him on warm currents. The sun seemed too large, a sinister apple that glared at him. The sky was the same color as the brick.

  He tried to remember his name, but there was only white space. The word had been scraped clean. He stared at his hands, which were streaked with grime. They might have belonged to anyone. He wiggled his fingers experimentally, as if to prove that they were actually under his control. Little flares of pain coursed along his muscles. He tried to stand up. Everything tilted, and then he was on his knees, retching. He wiped the strands of bile from his mouth and tried to stand again, this time more slowly. He used the wall for support.

  Had he been here before? Something about the bricks, the maleficent sun, the plump black flies buzzing overhead—it seemed familiar. But the memory was wreathed in smoke. Like pain that you’d felt as a child, so immediate at the time, but now impossible to conjure up in detail. Had the hurt belonged to him, or someone else? Perhaps it was just a story that he’d heard, a bright fishhook dipping in, th
en vanishing just as quickly. He laid his hand against the dazed bricks.

  These are mine.

  He wasn’t sure where this thought came from, but he trusted it. The bricks, the alley, this little cell that sheltered him. It felt like an extension of his body, a rib that he’d given up. Something had reached into him, unlocked the bone chamber while he was dreaming. He touched his side, but there was no mark.

  Sweat beaded on the bridge of his nose, and he wiped it away. The alley may have been a part of him, but it wasn’t offering anything. He needed clothes. He looked down at his bare feet. They wouldn’t survive the hungry cobblestones. He would have to steal something, but that meant leaving the embrace of the alley. Should he cover himself and hobble along, or try to move quickly with his soft parts exposed? His third option was to stay here, until the heat and the hammer-song lulled him to sleep. He knew, however, that this would be no quick death. Better to risk the city than die of thirst and nightmares in his open cell.

  He should be panicking. He was naked and alone in a strange place. He had no name. But something about the blank tablet was oddly comforting. He was nobody.

  He said the word aloud.

  Nobody.

  Only, it sounded different when he said it.

  Nemo.

  The syllables were familiar. They meant “nobody.” As he spoke them, he could hear different words uncoiling in the back of his mind. They didn’t quite make sense but hovered just on the edge of his understanding. They were the motions of a dance that his body remembered. He said the word again. Maybe that was his name. Nobody.

  He heard something. Leaves crunching, but there were no trees. A delicate shadow moved along the wall. He drew closer to the corner of the alley. There was nothing there. Not at first. Then, as he continued to stare, the light shifted.

  At first, he thought that he was seeing a mirage. But the image slowly resolved itself, and he realized it was a lizard. Its scales were the color of fired clay, speckled with gold. All the heat in the alley seemed to gather around its compact form, which was roughly the size of his hand. A shy pink tongue tasted the air. Its eyes were perfect forges, ready to smelt a world of iron. He could feel the animal’s heat. As he drew closer, it singed the hairs on his arm.

  It didn’t seem dangerous, precisely. But neither was it harmless. Those eyes held possibilities, and none of them were entirely without risk.

  He dropped to one knee, a mixture of caution and fealty. Then he slowly extended his right hand, palm up. Maybe lizards were like cats. He lacked a ball of string (where would he have put it?), but at least he could appear friendly. He wasn’t sure if you were supposed to look a lizard in the eyes. It seemed the polite thing to do.

  The lizard’s eyes grew. He felt that he could step into them. The pupils were shaped like hourglasses. Then it drew closer. Its tongue flicked the tips of his fingers. The pink underside was rough and had the texture of a comb. Startled, he watched as a perfect drop of blood coalesced on his index finger. He looked at it for a long moment, then carefully put the finger in his mouth. The lizard watched him. Its tail moved in slow circles against the ground.

  “I’d tell you my name,” he said, “but I’ve lost it.”

  The hourglasses turned. He watched the smoke as it pooled inside them. The lizard opened its mouth, revealing a row of needle-sharp teeth. For a moment, he thought it might leap at him. But it didn’t move. Something about its eyes told him that it was smiling.

  Then it turned and made its way toward the mouth of the alley. He watched it go. When it was halfway to the entrance, it stopped and craned its neck to look back at him. That was when he realized that it wanted him to follow.

  A naked man with a lizard would probably attract the wrong kind of attention. But he didn’t have a lot of options. Maybe it would lead him to some clothing, or a nest—did lizards have nests? At any rate, it was better than baking in the alley.

  He paused at the mouth of the alley. He could hear the city now, a cloud of murmuring. Light settled in sharp planes along his body. The lizard gave him another indecipherable look and then kept walking. He followed. There was no other choice.

  The street was busy. Wagons made their way along deep ruts, while people of every shape and color hurried past. They waited at white stones for the traffic to clear, then stormed forward in a decisive cloud, kicking up dust. Most of them wore plain clothing, weathered from constant use. Some were dressed in brighter colors, and a few wore masks of silver, gold, and polished ivory. He noticed that smaller, less-human things were following them, skittering along at their own odd pace. A closer investigation revealed that they were automata. He saw mechanical spiders; birds that hopped along, their gears chirping; and little dolls that sighed as they made their way across the broad street. They looked at him with dark, unfeeling eyes, and he couldn’t tell if they were thinking or simply moving on instinct.

  He followed the lizard. It seemed to know where it was going, and nobody paid it the slightest bit of attention. It kept to the long shadows beneath the buildings. A few people glanced at him, but for the most part, his nudity wasn’t an issue. They saw him briefly, then looked away. He might have been a window, or a pebble on the ground, for all they cared. After the first few moments, the cut of shame was gone, and he stopped trying to cover himself. The lizard gave him what might have been an approving glance.

  They walked through some kind of market. He saw bizarre items for sale. Mechanical fruit with blades for leaves. Books with purple-pumiced covers whose pages expanded like giant accordions. A stylus that could write on any surface (the vendor was demonstrating on a piece of hardened leather). Clockwork dragonflies that circled a pond of geared frogs, all croaking in unison. There was a pile of cloaks with rampant tigers stitched into their linings, discarded on a table, as if tigers were too generic. Flies buzzed around them, drawn by the pyramid of oranges and star-shaped fruit in a bin next to the cloaks. He wanted to grab one of the oranges, but a vendor was watching him. In fact, the vendors, in their stained tunics, were the only ones who seemed to see him. Their sharp eyes followed him, issuing a subtle challenge. Obviously, he wasn’t the first nude exile who’d had the idea of stealing fruit.

  “I hope you know where you’re going,” he said to the lizard. “I’m getting a pretty thorough sunburn following you around.”

  He looked up and saw the stone skyways for the first time. They were artfully crafted bridges that connected the taller buildings. People made their way along them, not even bothering to look down, as if treading air were a perfectly ordinary part of their daily commute. What struck him were the colors of the stone. Pink, sea-green, slate, and spotted white that reminded him of a chess board. Only, when he thought of chess, his mind supplied a different word. Acedrex. He said it beneath his breath. It had more angles. Like everything, it felt oddly familiar.

  The lizard had outpaced him while he was transfixed by the many-colored paths. He had to hurry to close the distance between them. He couldn’t run—even if nobody was really paying attention, the thought of what he might look like was enough. It was also harder to avoid the sharper stones. The soles of his feet were already burning, and he could feel small cuts, leaving faint prints of blood in the dust. The lizard glanced at him once more, then made its way between two tall buildings. Insulae. They had balconies and gabled windows. Close to the ground, they were whitewashed and well tended, sporting small gardens. But as he looked upward, he saw that the higher levels were crumbling. Pigeons nested in the windows, and smoke settled in a heavy cloud at the apex of the buildings. The rich people must be living on the ground floors.

  There were stores on the street level, as well as a restaurant of some kind. It had an L-shaped counter, with clay jugs stacked behind it. He smelled burning chickpeas. His mouth watered, but the woman behind the counter gave him a knowing look. She wouldn’t stand for any kind of thievery. Feeling more than slightl
y defeated, he followed the lizard into the narrow space between the soaring insulae. There was something on the ground—it looked like a collapsed wooden umbrella and smelled slightly acrid. The lizard paused in front of it.

  “What’s that? Can I eat it?”

  He looked closer and realized that there were clothes drying inside the funny umbrella. Quickly, he reached in and grabbed a blue tunic. The dye stuck to his fingers. They must have been absorbing their new colors—the “umbrella” was a drying rack. He sniffed the fabric. It smelled faintly of piss. He had no idea why, but neither was he in a position to be choosy. After all, it was fairly subtle. Nobody would notice, unless they drew close to him. And it was far better than the sunburned alternative. He slipped on the tunic. It felt strange not to be wearing anything underneath, but the breeze was also nice. It helped to dry some of the sweat that was building in uncomfortable places. He worried about chafing, but in the broad scheme of things, it was probably the least of his problems.

  “Thanks,” he said to the lizard. “It was very thoughtful of you to lead me—”

  “Hey!” a voice shouted from a second-story window. “Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing, nemo? Those don’t belong to you!”

  He looked up. A woman leaned out the window, holding a blade and glaring at him.

  “I’m sorry,” he called. “Do you mind if I borrow them? I’m kind of in a bad situation right now, and I promise that I’ll return them.”

  “Get out of here, before I carve you a new hole.”

  The lizard was already scampering away. He gave a quick wave to the woman, but she had disappeared from the window. Fearing that she might be on her way down, he hurried after his guide, who was heading back onto the street. He was still barefoot, but at least he had something to cover himself. It was best not to think too closely about the smell.

  He walked downhill, keeping the lizard’s tail in sight. Luckily, the slope was gradual. He really needed to find some sandals. He kept staring at the feet of passersby and thinking sullenly that they didn’t deserve to be protected from sharp stones. The sun was making him tired and queasy, but as the buildings grew more densely packed, the shadows lengthened. He was grateful to walk beneath the edifices, until a pile of something awful landed next to his feet, and he realized that people were regularly tossing things out of windows. After that, he made sure to look up periodically, in order to avoid an unpleasant rain.