People Park

by Pasha Malla

  And then she fell.

  The room went still. The Mayor, or her upper half, lay by Olpert’s feet, eyes closed. He gazed down at the greying half-woman discarded on the floor, struck by how drastically she resembled a seamstress’s dummy.

  I got this, said Starx, swept her into his arms and replaced her atop the dessert cart. From the table he took a roll of ducktape and adhered her torso and legs to their respective tiers. Everyone pretended not to watch, the air stiffened with feigned nonchalance, it was like a breastfeeding. Starx bowed, retreated, the Mayor coughed, smoothed the lapels of her jacket.

  Into the silence from the next room came whimpering.

  That fat sack of shet, roared Magurk, and stormed out.

  Mrs. Mayor, tell me what you need, said Griggs. We’re here. We can help.

  This is my city. My city. I will not see it spiral into chaos. There was a plan for this weekend, an agenda. You’ve got your Spectacular, sure, but what about families —

  Island Amusements is scheduled to open as planned, said Griggs. Why wouldn’t it?

  And the movie, said Wagstaffe. Don’t forget! Our movie for the people —

  By the people, chorused Bean and Walters and Reed. This time they were not scolded, instead Wagstaffe continued, beaming: All in Together Now! It’s going to be great.

  Griggs smiled thinly. Mrs. Mayor, while our men look for Raven — and we will find him — we’ll send these two men, Starx and Bailie, to find the boy. A chance to redeem yourselves, said Griggs, and Noodles nodded, nodded, nodded some more.

  Okay, said Starx, standing, hauling Olpert to his feet.

  Magurk appeared in the doorway — shirtless, his chest so shaggily haired it appeared a rodent clung to his nipples.

  Good luck, he said, sneering at Starx, finding anything in that fuggin fog.

  III

  HIS IS GOOD, finding my knapsack, Gip said, towed along by his mother as the Pooles marched in a tight grim formation through the foggy campground, the gently falling snow. So I can get the Grammar? And then I’ll be able to figure out where Raven’s gone? And maybe even how he vanished the bridge? And how he had me onstage? It was like he picked me because he knew. Like he knew, Mummy, are you even listening? Like he knew that I was his biggest fan so maybe do you think he wants me to put everything right? Like it was a sign? Like it’s up to me now?

  That’s a lot of responsibility, honey, for a boy your age, said Pearl, blew her nose, tucked the tissue into her sleeve. Stay close, we can barely see anything.

  We’ll get your knapsack, Gibbles, don’t worry, said Kellogg, with Elsie-Anne wobbling atop his shoulders.

  Gip kept talking, his voice trembling and delicate. Every sentence swung up into a wavering interrogative, questions that weren’t questions, questions that only demanded being heard. The boy had come to life a bit since breakfast, Kellogg thought, eyeing him warily, but still seemed less than himself.

  The Pooles came out of Lakeview Campground at the Ferryport, no boats were running. A sinew of fog linked Perint’s Cove to the Islet, where it collected in a cataractal haze. Otherwise the view south was promise-clear to the horizon.

  Beyond the roundabout where Lakeside Drive met Park Throughline lights stabbed through the mist in crimson spears.

  Did someone crash? Kellogg said, and slid Elsie-Anne down to a piggyback.

  The fog parted: one car sheared in half in the ditch, another upturned onto its roof. Around the accident gathered emergency vehicles, sirens flashed, pink flares sparkled, yet the scene was silent.

  Good thing we walked, said Kellogg.

  Except now my knee’s bugging me, said Pearl, reaching down to massage it.

  Is it, Kellogg said vacantly, watching two paramedics haul a stretcher out of the ditch and slide the body-shaped figure upon it into a waiting ambulance.

  Limping slightly, Pearl led the family up the Throughline. Traffic was stalled bumper to bumper in the northbound lanes. To every car and van and truck corresponded a family, some huddled for warmth inside, others had unloaded lawnchairs and gathered around little bonfires on the shoulder. Farther along there looked to have been an accident, a white coupe angled into the ditch. Engines idled, but no one was going anywhere. There was no way off the island.

  What’s everyone waiting for, said Gip.

  To go home, said Kellogg.

  To escape, said Pearl.

  But there’s no bridge, said Gip, and don’t you think I could save all these people, Mummy? We have to get my book, what if someone found it and they don’t know that I’m the one who’s supposed to finish the illustration?

  Gip, said Pearl. We’ll get your book. But this has to stop.

  Kellogg set Elsie-Anne down. Dad’s a bit tired, you mind walking?

  It’s okay, she said, hugging her purse. Familiar can help.

  At the edge of the poplars the Throughline ducked underground and ran beneath the common all the way to Topside Drive, where it surfaced again at the gates of Island Amusements. The Pooles skirted the line of cars disappearing into the tunnel, climbed up top, and looked down into the park. Nothing below, just a milky wash of fog, the closest poplars appeared as shipmasts in a misty harbour.

  Wow, said Kellogg. Think we can find anything in that?

  I’ll do it, said Pearl.

  How’s that, Pearly?

  I’ll go get his bag. If it’s not there I’ll find someone. Event staff or whoever. You take the kids to the Museum. We can meet back up later. Go to Island Amusements maybe.

  Not a bad idea, said Kellogg, and pulled the CityGuide out of his backpocket. How about it, guys, want to see some exhibits? They’ve got a model of the city there, Gibbles — and hey look at this! Kellogg tore out a coupon. Two-for-one entry for kids! One of you guys gets in free!

  Why does Mummy keep leaving us? said Elsie-Anne.

  Leaving us? Ha, Annie, she’s not leaving us. Just knows the city, she’ll be back.

  Will she? said Elsie-Anne. Familiar’s not sure.

  Kellogg frowned. I’m beginning to have it up to here with Familiar.

  Yeah, Dorkus, said Gip, Mummy’s our only hope of finding the Grammar.

  That’s the spirit, said Kellogg, wrapping his kids under his arms. This is Mummy’s town! If anyone’s going to find your knapsack, it’s Mummy. Right, Mummy?

  Let’s hope, said Pearl.

  A REAL WRITER, Isa Lanyess repeatedly told her staff, was meant to have a voice. Yet Debbie’s writer’s voice always felt distant, a vague echo toward which she’d only ever leant, squinting, like a deaf person with an ear trumpet. The voice was faint, or a hallucination, or there was too much clutter, too many other voices from outside and within, a cacophony of selves all clamouring for attention. All she could ever make out was its timbre: meek, timid and doubtful and meek.

  The night before, down in the belly of the city, she’d gotten the closest she’d ever been to this voice, or something like it, before the power had gone out. Now Debbie sat in the window nook in a square of limpid daylight, the streets clogged with fog, trying to summon it back. But worry muddied her thoughts: where was Adine, had Debbie driven her away, would she come back? Over and over she replayed their fight, felt stupid for fleeing it, she should have stayed, said something . . .

  Maybe things could still be fixed with words, thought Debbie, and she decided to write Adine a letter. She fetched her note­book and settled back into the window nook. But where to begin? What she wrote had to be genuine, from that essential part of herself she’d almost found in Whitehall, not as the cartoonish maudlin goof she’d come to play against Adine’s cold cynic. But with the pen hovering over the page as always she was a little lost. What to say? How to say it?

  All she could come up with were memories of happier times. Look, she wanted to tell Adine, see when we were happy, see how happy we can be? Th
ough what was wrong with happiness, she thought. Maybe what they needed was exactly that — a celebration and reminder. She settled on a story: their first kiss.

  They’d gone to Budai Beach so Adine could show Debbie how erosion would have swallowed her Sand City. The night was moonless. They slipped out of their shoes and sat where the waves swished up onto the shore and withdrew fizzing into the lake. Adine’s leg brushed Debbie’s, retreated, then she reached over with her toes and playfully pinched Debbie’s calf, and Debbie yelped and Adine leaned down to press her lips to Debbie’s leg. When she came up her face was close. Neither of them said anything. Everything felt a little lost in the dark. Trembling, Debbie leaned in and — miracle! — Adine was doing the same. They kissed and Debbie thought, This is the most perfect kiss in the history of kisses. And after an instant or forever Adine pulled away and said, Fuggin finally, holy shet.

  Debbie recalled a funny interpretation that had always batted mothlike around the fringes of this memory: When we first kissed, wrote Debbie, it was like two halves of the same strawberry pressed back together. Reading this over, her cheeks flushed. She could hear Adine’s laugh, a skewer that pricked and went sliding into her heart, pictured her puckering her lips and teasing, Don’t be shy, put my strawberry together. Don’t make fun of me! Debbie’d wail. You’re mean!

  She dropped her pen. Here she was once again, performing herself in caricature. Always Debbie gushed and swooned, safely mawkish and too much, and Adine played the cruel realist, cutting her down with jokes. Though it felt good to make her laugh, and eventually Debbie would be laughing too. This dynamic preserved the illusion that they were still having fun — and it was, actually, fun. But also exhausting: fearing them corny Debbie buried her most heartfelt thoughts somewhere inaccessible even to herself. And Adine? She wondered if their theatrics had numbed Adine to her own heart entirely.

  From the front door came a creaking sound.

  Debbie sprung from the ledge. Adine?

  It was only the apartment, its rickety walls spoke their own dialect of ticking and groans. Adine? echoed through the empty rooms. Debbie did this often, called her name, sometimes for no reason — it just came out, midsentence while reading or doing the dishes: Adine? And when Adine came harrumphing into the room, hands on hips, and Debbie would have to invent some excuse as to why she needed her. What was this instinct, akin to some nightmare-stricken child pawing for a parent in the dark: Adine, Adine, Adine?

  But now she didn’t come. The letter lay unfinished and abandoned somewhere between thoughts. Fog choked E Street. Adine was out there somewhere in it, thinking spitefully of Debbie. But where? To whom might she flee? At Sam’s maybe — but the phone was dead, there was no way to call. The island suddenly seemed too huge, its streets sprawling in vast and terrifying catacombs within the mist.

  Debbie tore out a page from her notebook, wrote a quick purposeful note: Not sure where you are. Worried. Heading out to find you. Sorry about last night. See you back here if you come home first. Love, Deb. This she taped to the TV, collected her jacket and keys, and with a glance over the apartment, taking everything in, realized that Adine might not be able to read it. But she’d left. She’d gone somewhere. She couldn’t have done it blind. So the note was a gesture of faith, thought Debbie, as she headed out into the city, making sure to leave the door unlocked.

  CALUM HAS NO idea how long he’s been walking. The scene keeps repeating: the bridge is identical with the same beams and girders and lampposts and the smooth roadway split with the yellow dividing line, the horizon never gets any closer, there is no way to gauge how much distance he’s travelled and no change in light to suggest the progression of hours. Also each step feels part of a steady fluid motion that his body performs outside of itself, churning along the bridge so along the bridge his body walks, toward — toward what, toward nothing.

  He remembers hearing a voice, the voice hasn’t returned. From which direction did it come and should he be seeking or escaping it, Calum doesn’t know, he doesn’t know which he is doing anyway. The silence out here is cottony, a river would make some watery whispering noise but whatever’s below doesn’t, it just hovers blackly beneath the mist and everything’s dampened and the only noise sometimes is the bird: and here is the bird, the fup-fup of its wings as it flies by and disappears, where does it go, Calum wonders. All he sees is the sky, and the bridge, so he walks.

  The air smells of water. Nothing is getting closer: there is no nearing shore, just the endless bridge which slopes gently to an apex beyond which it seems to slope down, though Calum is perennially on the upslope, the apex always just beyond reach, he feels himself chasing a wave as it rolls steadily away.

  It feels, Calum thinks, like being on some enormous treadmill. The girders and beams and lampposts he passes indicate momentum, yet they are the same, the same, the same. He seems to be a character, he thinks, in a piece of cheap amateur cinema with the scenery cranked around and around on an endlessly repeating scroll.

  And if this is a film then Calum’s body is just an illusion, he thinks, a mirage fidgeting in and out of existence, and if the projector breaks or stops Calum will shudder for a moment and then fade and cease to even be. Like something dreamed and destroyed upon waking. And so to exist he must keep moving, toward the bridge’s peak, toward nothing, just on along the bridge and forever and ever on.

  THE TRAY PUNCHED through the slot, a jeering tongue. Sam approached cautiously. Upon it was an applecore nibbled into an hourglass and already browning. He peered through the peephole. The armoire was empty.

  You ate the apple Raven, said Sam, so I know you’re in there Raven.

  He shifted his ear to the peephole, listened.

  Outside a sprinkler spat arcs of water over the roominghouse lawn.

  I can’t even let you out if I wanted to okay. I don’t even have the combination of this lock. There’s a way I guess of getting it open, a boy showed me how from your book. But I don’t know how. I don’t remember. I never knew.

  Sam removed the applecore, pushed the tray in square with the door. From underground there was no sign of time’s machine starting up again. The floor didn’t judder or vibrate, the silence down there felt booming and hollow. And his third watch was still stopped. Now the end would be like a train barrelling headlong to a precipice, the tracks running out, and the whole thing hurtling over the edge.

  You have to help us, said Sam. You have to okay. I’ve done all the work and —

  From inside the armoire came the sound of a book opened in a windstorm, pages flapping madly. Sam peeked in. Something ragged and panicked fretted through the dim light: a bird. It bumped against the ceiling, flung itself against the door, settled. A few feathers puffed through the crack, drifted to the carpet.

  I can’t let you out okay, said Sam, even if I wanted to.

  The armoire shuddered with another collision, the bird squawked, hit the door again, beak and claws ticking.

  Please stop.

  It seemed to listen. Stillness prevailed. From beyond the basement the sprinkler sputtered and hissed.

  Sam stepped hesitantly toward the armoire.

  The tray slid out of the door. Upon it was the bird — a dove — lying on its side, motionless and serene, eyes glazed, freshly dead, and served up as a dish.

  ON CINECITY’s bigscreen appeared another title card. It explained that before that afternoon’s premiere of All in Together Now the theatre would screen a Best of We-TV countdown. This began with Lakeside Drives, an utterly unwatched show that consisted of a single tracking shot of the eponymous thoroughfare’s centreline, inch by inch of yellow paint striping black bitumen, from one end of the island to the other, and back — meant, Adine guessed, to be experimental, but without explanation only boring and bad. Everyone booed.

  Next: the island’s community theatre troupe. Strange and solemn music played while shadowy figures in bl
ack undulated around a royal banquet, and just as the King opened his mouth to speak he was replaced with grainy film of a Y’s Classic, all that maroon and white thronging in the stands as time wound down toward a championship, and that became two matronly looking women poaching themselves in a hot tub and reciting highlights from their daughters’ diaries, and that in turn transformed into something else, and then something else, and so on.

  It was weird to be watching TV again, thought Adine. And while this was exactly how she’d always navigated channels at home — relentless flipping — experiencing it at Cinecity, on this scale, in a roomful of strangers, was much more disorienting. With the images so enormous and the sound stereophonic and everywhere, her senses were overcome. She felt trapped on some endless babbling stream, forced to leap from stone to stone before each one flooded: establishing a foothold then plunging ahead to the next, just hopping along without a purpose or destination.

  But more than that, the swift flicking through all those lives seemed deeply sinister. Each fleeting glimpse of existence suggested not only mortality but the expendability of people too. This was made even more tragic when shouts of recognition rang out in the theatre (Hey it’s me! — Hey it’s you! — I know that person, hey!). People delighted in seeing themselves or someone they knew up there, gigantic and famous, each a bit more popular than the last. But celebrations were brief before each station was supplanted with something better.

  Listening to voices exclaim and rejoice and awkwardly fade, Adine forced her mind to cloud over, to abstract the people and places onscreen into shapes, shadows, patterns of colour. Wasn’t that more honest? Those weren’t people up there but pictures, illusions of life. So she let them be that — just light — and let the sound also blur into formless noise. Every so often this reset, nonsense hiccupped into more nonsense, the rhythm soporific, lulling Adine into a dreamy stupor.