The Quarantined City

by James Everington

  Seller’s instructions, a voice sneers in his memory.

  ~

  As Fellows approaches The Echo Bookshop, he hears that voice from the open door, raised in exasperation. He is unsure if in the pause afterwards another, quieter voice replies or if it just the sound of the wind shaking the gutters. Fellows stands indecisive in the alley, wondering whether he should just walk away. Every time he has become more entangled in Boursier and his stories it has never gone to plan. Whatever power Boursier’s stories have is fickle and can’t be relied upon, and the man himself seems to pass through the quarantined city without any impact whatsoever. He has had a lucky escape: the fifth story doesn’t seem to have changed anything. And what sort of crap title was The Panda Principle anyway? Fellows has heard the term but would never have used it for a title beyond the first draft. It referenced an evolutionary postulate, that once a given ecological niche was filled by a species it was hard for another to replace it even if the original species was not as well adapted to it as the second. Pandas were not very good at digesting bamboo; QWERTY keyboards were not the quickest to type on; vinegar was not the best way to sterilise. Sometimes what you have has to be enough, Fellows thinks.

  So he should just walk away from here. He would get his things from his house, hopefully avoiding the damn ghost, and go and stay at Georgia’s. She would forgive him, surely? He could stay with her while he tried to sort alternative lodgings. After all it was houses that were haunted, wasn’t it? He’s been ignoring the obvious solution with all his pointless walks across the city.

  But what had Boursier meant when he said the boy wasn’t dead?

  Fellows looks up to the sky, seeking a world where he isn’t about to go into The Echo Bookshop. The gulls above are turning in rigid circles, as if attached to the poles of a carousel. “Stop staring off into space!” he remembers Lana saying, with exasperated affection. Affection then, when his inattention had been to trifles. Later on, furious, she’d accused him of looking away from her, from their relationship. From the road.

  “What game are you playing?” he hears the bookseller yell, in the tone of voice of a man who feels an argument should have ended in his favour many minutes ago. “You’ve had your money!” Fellows smiles—whatever else, the thought of seeing the cocksure and aggravating bookseller so annoyed appeals to him.

  He walks up the alley towards the sound of voices; the bookseller’s cries are as raucous as the city gulls, but as he gets nearer he can hear a milder voice attempting to reply. He had been right then; Boursier has come to collect his money.

  Fellows steps into the shop, remembering with a smile his previous resolution never to return to the Echo. If anything it is even more unwelcoming and dilapidated than he remembers. The windows are grimier and let in less light; one of the shelves (Fictions G) has collapsed under the weight of old paperbacks, spilling its titles onto the volumes below. The layer of dust on every surface is thicker, so thick on the stone floor he thinks he can see the faint imprint of footprints heading down the aisle towards the hidden front-desk. I’m on your trail Boursier, he thinks, and there is no peeling boundary for me to cross here... Thinking of that makes him think of the Boundary Stone from The Panda Principle and how its description matched that of the stone he’d seen at the entrance to the house full of protestors in the Enclave. But how could that be, when he’d seen the stone before reading the story, before it could have changed anything?

  As disquieting as that thought is, it is driven completely from Fellows’s mind when he steps out from the aisles of bookshelves and sees Boursier and the bookseller in front of him.

  Boursier is sitting placidly in the incongruous office-chair in front of the desk; the bookseller is on his feet, arms flung out in angry gesticulation. His face is pale and there is a cloud of dust faintly visible around him, as if the movements and pacings of his anger have stirred it up. For a brief second Fellows thinks that while one of the boy’s misaligned eyes is glaring at Boursier the other is already focussed on him. But then the bookseller turns to look at Fellows directly; so does Boursier. The bookseller’s face does something complicated as if trying to process contradictory inputs, before it finally settles into a wry smile.

  “Well this explains a lot,” he says, but Fellows is not looking at the bookseller but at the man who he feels he has never properly looked at before, never seen straight on.

  Boursier has changed, or been changed, and now he looks exactly like Fellows.

  Although not exactly, Fellows realises, looking closer despite his shock. Boursier’s face is still unnaturally placid and settled; his eyes still lack any spark as if he were a poor copy, or a first draft. An illusion of being younger—Boursier looks like Fellows not as if the last ten years hadn’t happened, but as if nothing had happened in them.

  Fellows stares at Boursier, who doesn’t get up out of his chair; doesn’t even look surprised. Fellows is aware that the appropriate emotional reactions inside aren’t occurring; aware that in their space he is filling up with an irrational anger. Why had Boursier written The Panda Principle? Why had he written any of it, chipping away at the foundations of his life here in the quarantined city...

  “Well?” Fellows says to Boursier, flinging his arms wide. “Happy now?” He is aware the bookseller is speaking but he ignores him.

  “Happy?” Boursier repeats placidly, as if he doesn’t understand the question or what he has done.

  “You fucking twat,” Fellows says, and steps forward and punches Boursier in the face. The other man doesn’t even try to avoid being hit and he feels Boursier’s nose give under the blow; the chair Boursier had been sitting on rolls away on its wheels for a few feet before Boursier falls off in an ungainly sprawl.

  The bookseller bursts into laughter at the sight, so suddenly and violently that Fellows finally turns to look at him. The boy looks like he is about to have a fit; his misaligned eye has rolled up into the socket while his other bulges. There’s something repulsive about him and Fellows is still furious; he takes a step towards the boy and if it wasn’t for the fact that the bookseller backed away in fear until he was against one of the bookshelves he would have punched him too.

  “And what did you mean, that this explains a lot?” he yells at the boy.

  “What did I... This, this explains a lot,” the bookseller says, gesturing at Fellows and Boursier, who is struggling up off the dusty floor. “Are you twins? But then how come you didn’t know who wrote those weird stories? Is it a pen-name, Boursier, does it mean anything?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well I thought you were the same person didn’t I? Each time one of you came in.”

  “But you can’t have!” Fellows slams his fist into the rickety bookshelf behind the boy, causing it to shudder and some of its stories fall. “It’s only just happened! He’s only just been changed!” The boy looks at him google-eyed, as if he is mad.

  Boursier stands up, brushes dust from his linen jacket.

  “That’s not strictly speaking true,” he says.

  Fellows rounds on him, his body tensed as if he had been insulted, as if this were nothing more than a brawl in one of the bars near the harbour. Maybe that is what he would prefer, for when his anger fades Fellows does not know where he will be stranded. Boursier does not react to the threat in Fellows’s pose, which infuriates him the more. If Boursier were to fade from his vision like the ghost Fellows wouldn’t be surprised, the writer seems so little a part of the world around him.

  “What you’re seeing,” Boursier says, “aren’t changes as such. They seem like changes to you, but they’ve always been there. A different waveform. The quantum city.” He gives a brief laugh, a teacher laughing at a joke his class doesn’t understand.

  “What,” Fellows says, “the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Before, what you were seeing was good enough, it made sense to you so nothing could dislodge it. But now...”

  “Now, because of your
fucking stories?”

  “If you like. You always thought the stories changed things didn’t you? Typical writer; so arrogant! Stories can’t change things. Stories can only change how you see things.”

  If this were some bar brawl, Fellows feels as though he has just taken a punch to the gut, for he is sick and breathless at Boursier’s words, and can’t instantly respond.

  “But some people, like our friend here,” Boursier says, nodding at the bookseller, “are able to see the other side, especially if they have imagination. Imagination is just seeing what the world would look like if it were different, after all.”

  “I’m with him,” the bookseller says, “what the fuck are you talking about? What is this hippie shit?”

  “But why,” Fellows says, “why do you want me to see the world differently? Why write the stories; isn’t what I could see good enough? Why am I now seeing you looking like me?”

  “What makes you think it’s me you’re seeing differently?”

  Fellows’s head rings as if struck. He feels weary and wonders why he ever came here. He should have gone to find Georgia, apologised... His thoughts crumble before he can even finish building them in his head. Would Georgia even recognise him? Or want to talk to him if she did?

  He imagines bending down to offer his hand for Mogwai to sniff, and the cat reacting by arching its back and snarling, as if his very odour was wrong.

  “If you want to know why...” Boursier begins.

  “Oh I know, I know,” Fellows cuts him off. For once Boursier looks surprised, and Fellows feels a weary satisfaction as he goes to the chair, rights it, and sits gratefully down.

  “I mean it’s a bit bloody obvious isn’t it?” he says. “I’m sure you think you’ve been clever, with your little games behind the scenes, but you’ve given too much away now.”

  “Yep, obvious,” the bookseller says. Fellows glances at him, shrugs. A truce then. He gestures at the bookseller to speak.

  “I assume this idiot has read all but one of the stories he bought,” the bookseller says snidely, causing Fellows to dislike him all over again. “And he’s going to ask more gormless questions and you’re going to answer with your bloody Buddha-on-the-mountain act that fools no one. And eventually you’re going to tell him to read the final story, whatever that one is called...”

  “The Quarantine,” Fellows says, glaring at the bookseller, who just laughs.

  “Too bloody predictable,” he says. “But yeah, you’ll do your ‘all will be revealed’ spiel to get Mister Gullible here to read it and...”

  “I don’t want him to read it,” Boursier says.

  “You don’t?” Fellows says. He had agreed with everything the bookseller had said, despite the bastard’s goading.

  “No,” Boursier says, with a shrug. “I want you to finish writing it.”

  There is a silence, broken only by the sudden panic of gulls taking off from the roof above their heads, as if reacting to a loud and monstrous noise only they can hear. Outside, the city seems to darken perceptibly, like time-lapsed photographs of the night falling.

  “Wait,” the bookseller says, “you’ve tricked me into selling stories that aren’t even bloody finished?”

  Fellows isn’t listening; his head feels muffled, and the gloom outside is replaced by a bright light pouring in from the windows, a flash as if of great violence. He takes the bag of stories he has been carrying around and puts it on the bookseller’s dusty desk. He finds the story headed The Quarantine and flicks through it; sure enough it is full of crossed-out words, false starts, marginalia. A first draft, Fellows thinks. The bookseller sits on the opposite side of the desk and attempts to read the story upside down. Fellows finds the act oddly intrusive; he rolls up the story and places it in the inner pocket of his jacket.

  As he does so he glances at his hands; they are stained with ink.

  He remembers, ten years ago, on days when he’d been struggling to write with a cheap biro as fast as the inspiration came to him, how he’d used to stain his fingers ink-black and how Lana had never let him touch her until he’d scrubbed his hands. Remembers it as if it were yesterday.

  He stands up; he feels a strange kind of calm, as if his feelings were being held at bay, or being felt by another. He wonders if this is how Boursier feels, and in doing so he looks over at the writer: he sees Boursier’s pale hands, familiar and equally as ink-stained as his own. Because of course they are the same.

  So much so that...

  He is looking at his own hands.

  When he looks up Boursier is gone.

  He is sitting at the desk in front of the bookseller, who is looking at him uninterestedly, as if they have never met before. He has just placed a bag with five stories on the desk between them. He feels different to just a minute before, but also as if more than a minute has passed; he feels good. For a moment it is like a whole other set of memories is about to break over him, overwhelm him, but some instinct guides him. When he speaks, it is just as if he is following a script written in ink on his palms.

  “Morning,” he says to the bookseller. “I was wondering if you’d be interested in selling these stories for me? On commission.”

  The bookseller peers at the first story suspiciously; it is in a literary journal called Other Rooms, Other Cities and is entitled The Smell Of Paprika.

  The light of a summer heat-wave that has lasted three months is streaming through the Echo’s windows; the quarantined city outside has the quiet air that has lasted ever since the unity government imposed petrol rationing.

  He can still remember the events leading up to this point, even if the bookseller can’t: his purchase of the Boursier stories, the strange changes to the city, the house in the Enclave and that idiot Jaques, his argument with Georgia and his time in the Guardia’s offices. And he knows these things are still not without effect. But he also knows what he must say next. Like he has said it before.

  “Fifty percent,” he says and sees the bookseller’s interest although the boy tries to hide it. “Although there are some special instructions I’d want you to follow...”

  The bookseller sneers. “How many stories?”

  Maybe this time round, Boursier’s voice says in his head, and Fellows changes his mind about what to say next. Ad libs.

  “Five.”

  When Fellows leaves The Echo Bookshop after the inevitable fractious conversation with the bookseller, the pages of the first draft of The Quarantine make a rustling sound in his jacket.

  I want you to finish writing it, he thinks.

  PART SIX

  THE QUARANTINE

  Fellows steps out the alleyway that leads to The Echo Bookshop, and into the marketplace. The scene in front of him seems static for a second, a photo taken in the soft light of sunset, before it blurs with movement. The market is busy, noisy with the sound of people chattering and gossiping over the scarlet peppers, stuffed olives, and bunches of radishes bigger than Fellows’s fist. In the other direction he can see flat fish laid out on ice, alongside slowly struggling crabs, trussed up and out of their element.

  Fellows lifts his face, closes his eyes, and feels the sun’s heat on his face.

  There is a sudden commotion; from a stall selling bootleg spirits and cassis he sees a small jerky figure dart away into the dappled sunlight and shadow beneath the canvas. For a moment it seems like... but no, it is not the crippled child impossibly loose from his house, but a flesh and blood thief, trying to run with a bottle clutched to his pigeon-chest. The stall-holder’s cries have alerted the Guardia, and a pair of them come pushing through the crowd after the kid. The thief runs with a limp, there is no way they won’t catch him.

  “Look,” he remembers Lana saying, on a holiday together before things had gone bad between them, “that Guardia is well pissed off with her colleague.” They had just emerged from a Cathedral Lana had lit a candle in, and in the sunlight he saw two figures striding across the square bickering; as a foreigner Fellows ha
d been uncomfortably aware of the firearms strapped to their hips.

  “Is that right?” he had said. “Is ‘Guardia’ singular or plural?”

  “Fuck it,” Lana said with a grin, “one Guardia, two Guardia, three Guardia, four—hopefully we won’t need to know, we’re only here a week.” It had been their private joke for the rest of the holiday: ‘the Guardia’.

  Fellows blinks and comes back to the quarantined city. The lame boy is more agile than he looks, and he eludes the clutches of the Guardia by changing direction in the last second; Fellows finds himself rooting for the kid. As if reading his thoughts, the boy dodges again and starts running directly towards Fellows.

  As he passes, Fellows takes the boy by surprise and grabs him, lifting his kicking legs from the ground.

  “I can help you,” he says as the boy yells and curses; the Guardia approach, the male one visibly out of breath.

  “You want to check out that bookshop down the alley,” he says before either of them can speak. “Trading with pre-quarantine money. Subversive literature.”

  The male Guardia isn’t listening and starts to reach for the still struggling boy, before his colleague puts a hand on his shoulder. Although he has never seen these two before, Fellows feels the doubling sensation of deja-vu when he looks at them.

  “Subversive literature?” the female Guardia says suspiciously; Fellows meets her gaze so she doesn’t look down and see his ink-stained fingers.

  “Definitely,” he says. “Have a look at a story called The Smell Of Paprika he’s selling. It’s not on the shelves, he keeps them behind the desk.”

  “Paprika?” the male says. “That doesn’t sound very...”

  “Shut up,” the other says wearily.

  “And I’ll make sure this criminal mastermind returns what he stole,” Fellows says. There is a cry and the boy kicks him in the shins.

  After checking both their papers to prove their residency in the city when the quarantine began, the two Guardia leave them be. Fellows watches them disappear into the gloom of the alleyway towards The Echo Bookshop. This time I really can’t go back, he thinks. He escorts the boy back to the stall (the bootleg nature of it seemingly hadn’t concerned the Guardia; kickbacks he assumes) where he pays for the bottle of red wine the boy had pilfered.