by Pasha Malla
Gip said, What’s that.
Jessica.
Is she dead?
Olpert pocketed the hat. Twenty steps down, Sam had gone foetal.
Hey, Olpert yelled, the lake’s coming up, you can’t just lie there. Sam?
Sam didn’t move.
Gip tugged his sleeve. Should we help him?
No, said Olpert, turning. We have to go.
At the top step, Olpert looked back a final time: no sign of anyone. The water sliced the stairs in half, steadily rising.
TRAIN 2306 had the look of something discarded or forgotten, sitting there inertly in 72 Steps Station. Below in Mount Mustela things were bustling, the NFLM ensured order and joy, while other Helpers performed random citizenship checks and marched those without papers off to the park. Along with placards (RAVEN, RETURN! and WE NEED CLOSURE and THIS ISN’T MY TRUTH, I WORK AT THE AIRPORT, etc.) people lofted glowsticks and sparklers, a jaunty music played.
Debbie searched the crowd for familiar faces — Pop maybe, safe and sound and back to his old tricks. Instead, climbing atop a Citywagon appeared Loopy, instantly recognizable in her beret and caftan. With rhythm, perhaps trying to provoke a corresponding chant, she pumped a sign demanding, WHERE’S MY ART? But she was ignored, the parade headed up Mustela Boulevard, steered by Helpers across Paper Street toward People Park.
There they go, Debbie said, and sat down again across from the mother and son.
The woman nodded — not quite an affirmation, her chin dipped robotically. There was nothing agreeable in her eyes, nor even camaraderie, just resignation. She seemed accustomed to being abandoned: at the mercy of forces beyond her, as always she waited patiently for the world to have its way.
Debbie wanted to say something to either breach or access this, such faith seemed both admirable and sad. She said, Maybe we’re being held here for a reason?
Maybe.
Sorry, said Debbie, leaning in, I don’t even know your name.
The woman blinked.
I’m Debbie. This is Rupe, so I’ve heard. Hi there, Rupe. And you’re?
Me? Cora.
Cora. Hi. I’m Debbie.
Yes.
Hi. And you’re looking for —
Look, said Rupe, someone’s coming up the bluffs.
Debbie joined him at the window. Directly beneath the station two people, a man and a boy, both barefoot, were summiting the 72 Steps. The man took the boy’s hand and led him up Mustela, behind the last few stragglers trailing the parade.
Where’d they come from, said Debbie. A boat?
No boats, said Rupe. But look.
Perint’s Cove extended emptily to the horizon. It took Debbie a moment to realize what was missing.
The Islet, said Debbie, did it flood? It just seems . . . gone.
Maybe it sank, said Rupe.
I have a friend who lives there, said Debbie.
Maybe they sank too, said Rupe, and grinned.
But those people, said Debbie, they would have been taken to safety, right?
You’d hope, Cora said.
A chirp, the vents whooshed, the lights came on. The train hummed and shuddered and began to move.
There, said Cora, patting Rupe’s knee, see? We’re off.
The PA announced: Next stop, Bay Junction. Bay Junction Station, next stop.
And Debbie, rocked gently down into a seat, watched the swollen lake slide by, with no place to go but wherever the train was taking her.
THE PEOPLE EMERGING from the poplars were a shabby, shaggy crew that didn’t seem cityfolkish to Kellogg, nor the sort of countryfolk he was used to back home. They seemed wild, the children had a feral affect, the sight of them felt anthropological somehow, ten of them standing atop the park’s southern hillock with the look of captured prisoners of war. Last to appear were a bearded man and a headscarfed woman dragging a rowboat jacked up on axles that bumbled over the roots and rocks. At the slope’s edge they halted, but the boat kept coming, the mooring lines tautened and dragged them a few steps before they let go and the boat crested the hill — down it came, ropes flailing like tentacles.
Safely on the far side of the pond, Kellogg and Elsie-Anne watched: the crowd on the common’s southside scattered, the wheels hit an exposed gnarl of treeroots, the boat lurched free, out spilled cardboard boxes, a TV, which smashed, a suitcase that split and gushed clothes, a pair of chairs, a tricycle, machines, boots, sheaves of paper, food in tins and boxes and jars. The axles bounced off in opposite directions, the boat kept coming, sliding down the hill on its keel and across the mud-slicked common, hit the concrete banks of Crocker Pond with a ripping sound, pitched on end, cartwheeled twice, and came crashing into the water, where, remarkably, it righted itself and glided out over the surface with almost defiant serenity.
A miracle — or something like it. Everyone save the hilltoppers broke into applause. Wowee, yipped Kellogg, Annie, did you see that? A handful of Helpers dispatched to the poplars ordered the boat people into a tidy line to be counted or ID’d — but the man who’d been hauling the boat refused to line up. He shook his head, indicated all their ruined things strewn down the slope. His partner took off her yellow bandana and wagged it in the Helper’s face.
Let’s not worry about that, Annie, said Kellogg, and he lowered his daughter and pointed at the boat, sailing calmly into the middle of the pond. Hey, he said, wasn’t that amazing? And turning to confirm this with the student couple Kellogg discovered that he and his daughter had lost their spot in line.
In front of them was a huge man in a too-tight T-shirt (Back-2-Back Champs, it bragged) and coveralls meant for labour but, flopping from his waist, possibly misworn for style. Where’d he come from? And how could the NFLM ignore such recklessness? This sort of behaviour might ignite chaos, this was all it took: one instance of defiance and another person saw it and thought it was okay, and then another, and that was how order became anarchy, how a peaceful gathering degenerated into a frenzied mob.
Kellogg stared at the back of this interloper’s neckless head: the man feigned an ornithologically nonchalant gaze toward the treeline, where sparrows twittered and chirped. Did this bullish renegade assume he could do as he pleased unpunished? Was he brainless or bold? His presence was like a massive flaming boil bloomed suddenly upon clear smooth skin. He was immense and strange, smelled of mildew and sawdust. He had, Kellogg noticed, for his size, alarmingly tiny hands — and this was emboldening.
Clearing his throat, Kellogg tapped the man’s mountainous shoulder and said, in a voice of authority, Hey. The guy didn’t even turn. And the young couple offered no solidarity: their position hadn’t been compromised, they watched Helpers wrestle the bearded man and bandana’d woman to the ground and kneel upon their backs.
And so Kellogg was alone — but no, he had Elsie-Anne! He set her down in an illustrative way, as per the humanity-eliciting properties of small girls, or as though she were a bomb. Hey there, excuse me, Kellogg said, my daughter and I —
The big guy muttered something about it being no fuggin cataclysm, though he addressed Kellogg over his shoulder, as one might a drunk begging for change. How wrong! What about the protocol of women and children first, and if not women then certainly children, and alongside them their guardians? Such as Elsie-Anne and Kellogg, for example. But wait, was the big guy singing now? He was, gently, under his breath: Drag you down, drag you down, drag you something-something down . . .
Rage simmered through Kellogg’s body. And yet it was a trapped rage, a rage without outlet, an impotent rage that festered and fed upon itself, and now Kellogg was shaking. The line advanced. Kellogg rolled their luggage forward and enthused, Here we go, Annie! Though it came out choked. He stared at the point where the interloper’s weirdly bullet-shaped cranium sloped down into his shirt, imagined striking the top vertebrae, the spine snapping, the
man crumpling, dead . . . But he couldn’t. This was how life went: in exchange for his dignity Kellogg was so often handed something putrid and fecal, he grinned and offered thanks while the mess of it oozed over his fist. I’m a good dad and husband, I’m taking my daughter home, he wanted to scream — to whom? Who would listen or care? No one was even looking.
And then with a nod to a nearby Helper — acknowledged, Mr. Summoner, good lookin out — the big man insinuated himself between an elderly couple stooped over matching walkers. Who, aside from a brief flutter of disconcertion, said nothing, did nothing. What could they do?
A gust of wind scuffled the Jubilee banners hanging from a nearby lamppost. The birds sang, the sun shone down, the weather was a mildewed blanket draped over People Park. Overhead, a helicopter made a pass, the air thrummed. Kellogg looked up: with his feet dangling from the cabin, a cameraman filmed the scene.
OUTFITTED IN A knee-length fur coat and shearling chaps and mohair slippers, wet clothes discarded in the alley out back of the Mount Mustela Fur Concern, Olpert Bailie told Gip, Wait here, and edged back out to survey the street. He slid behind the rack from which he’d stolen the furs, and flinched at a sudden burst of gunfire — no, only an ineffectual dappling of fireworks shot into the daylight. The tailend of the parade at last moved off along Tangent 10, vacuuming sound with it.
Two Helpers lingered in the Citywagon Depot, packing up pyrotechnics. Otherwise Mustela Boulevard, from its bottom end, where the lake was beginning to spill over the bluffs, all the way up to the iron gates of the Necropolis, was desolate. A light wind stirred the parade’s detritus of cardboard platters and softdrink cups, paper streamers, Redapple butts, dead sparklers and confetti, then settled, and everything was still.
Olpert ducked back into the alley. Gip wore his knapsack overtop a stole and fleece bodysuit. For headwear he’d insisted on a pillbox hat, cocked jauntily.
Warmer? said Olpert.
What about that other man?
He’s off on his own now. He’ll be okay. We’ve got to get you to your parents.
But —
No buts. There are bad people looking for you, and two of them are out there. I can drive us, but I need to get a pass first and it’s a bit of a walk from here. Can you make it?
And then? You’ll take me to the bridge so I can finish the illustration?
I’ll take you to your parents, said Olpert, and they’ll take you home.
Oh, said Gip. I’m hot.
Keep the furs on until you warm up.
But I’m already hot!
From the sidewalk came footsteps. Olpert whisked Gip down the alley, out into the Courts and Paths and Crescents and Ways of Mount Mustela, west toward the Temple, abandoned save the Hand and the twins, loading tools into a great canvas sack, and, locked in his basement cell, Pop Street, who moaned, I can hear you, please help me, I’m subterrained below. Please help me. Please.
V
RS. MAYOR, perhaps I too have failed at the task of living.
You . . . too? Are you suggesting I’ve failed? I haven’t failed. You cut me in half, that’s not failure — other than failing to stop you. No, I’ve not failed. What are you talking about.
If I put you back together it’s just so predictable.
But it’s the right thing to do!
The right thing. Who decides what is right and wrong? It’s just tradition, that’s all.
Tradition — what are you talking about. It’s my body.
It’s my body too.
No. No it is absolutely not.
No?
You can’t come here and perform these tricks —
Tricks? I beg your pardon? What a rude suggestion. My illustrations are the honey of adventure with which I sweeten life’s bitterness! Whomever they do not please doesn’t deserve the status of human being. People —
People? You don’t care about people. All you want is to be looked at, to be watched, to hear them chant your name.
But Mrs. Mayor, up there onstage, I was actually watching them.
Why?
To observe, to . . . see. To witness their wonder. For my goal, as ever, was not merely exhibiting wonder, as some hawker or showman, but the revelation of a truth that, when one turns away, provokes more profound wonder. Did I do that, Mrs. Mayor?
I don’t know. I didn’t watch.
She who believes the world’s secrets should remain hidden, Mrs. Mayor, lives in mystery and fear.
But you said this was about fear. You said you wanted people to feel afraid!
Well perhaps I was misguided.
I would say so.
I almost feel bad about it now.
You should.
I said almost.
WHAT WAS THIS place, thought Pearl, moving west through downtown, and where might her son be in it? After so many years away, the city’s connective tissue — every corner that meant nothing to her, every neighbourhood in which she’d never known anyone — dissolved to nothing. In her mind the island had shrunk into a few neighbourhoods enjambed one to the next, condensed and imaginary, a shrunk-down dreamscape inhabited by a distant past version of herself. And Pearl ruled every inch of it.
That was not the case as she pushed along Trappe against the crowds flooding toward the park. A parade, she realized, but solemn, almost funereal. There were no floats. Just bodies trudging through the tropical heat. As they passed she searched for someone she knew, someone to help her find her son. But the faces were faceless. The crowd treated Pearl as a stream treats a stone, oblivious and flowing resolutely on its way.
There’d been a time when Pearl’s picture regularly graced the front page of The Island Word, she was interviewed or discussed on IBCTV, kids felt bigger having met her — adults, a little small. Now she was no one, ignored and irrelevant, foreign and strange . . .
The skyscrapers less scraped than hung from the sky. The city made her long for home, her real home, what kind of way to live was this, everything cement/steel/glass. The spindly trees wavering out of the sidewalk were cruel jokes on nature, leafless and bare, summer’s sad ghosts. And all these people! How could humanity exist in a place where a person was just another piece of the scenery?
Where was Gip, where had he gone, had he been taken. He could be behind her now, swept along on that tide of bodies, Pearl couldn’t look everywhere at once, only drift and hope that chance would carry her son into her arms. But the city was too huge. Faith in a place like this was stupid and vain. She needed a strategy, something firm and real. If he thought Raven had chosen him for something, what would he do? Where would he go?
Into Mount Mustela the crowd thinned. From a sidestreet a couple about Pearl’s age appeared rolling a wagon loaded with bags and boxes — and kids. She watched them, pressed together in a tight little bundle — father, mother, offspring — as they crossed the street and hustled past. Pearl headed north up the Boulevard, past Inkerman’s, a tailor, a rug merchant, a travel agent. And then, just before the fur concerns began, here was Bookland: a squat hovel, ramshackle and ancient.
In the front window, atop a velvety black cloth and eponymously topping a pyramid of copies was Raven’s Illustrations: A Grammar. Pearl tried the door — locked. The lights were off, the shelves cast in a dusty grey pallor. Yet deep within the store was movement. A woman poked her head out between the stacks, and disappeared.
Please, said Pearl, knocking again. Please, I know you’re in there, I’ll just be a minute. The woman moved in a cautious hunch out of the shadows, fiftyish, in a cardigan, skirt, and slippers. She stood behind the window display assessing Pearl, a hand at her neck, possibly taking her own pulse.
I’ll be quick, said Pearl. This was met with a stony look. She took a different tack: My son’s missing, she said, loud enough to be heard through the glass, yet with softened eyes, hands clasped in an imploring
gesture.
The door cracked. I’m only open by appointment, she said through the gap.
I just need that book, Pearl said gently, gesturing at the window.
Oh?
Please, Pearl said, producing her wallet, peeling off bills. I’ll buy it. I can pay. See?
And the door opened a little more.
WITH THEIR GLORIOUS hearts blazing in their eyes Gregory Eternity and Isabella lead the bloodthirstily heroic and still somewhat aroused mob through the streets of the city toward Budai Beach. Under all those thousands of stampeding feet the earth shakes like a weeping child who stops crying for a moment when offered candy but then has the candy whisked away and eaten, right in front of his/her face, and so erupts into a fit of such violent, wracking sobs that his/her body shudders like an earthquake. Or else is just shaken for being obnoxious.
Halt, cries Isabella, and takes up the binoculars she has procured from Gregory Eternity and through which now she peers.
They’re closer, she imparts. The invaders, she clarifies.
Gregory Eternity nods sagely, armed with the knife of this knowledge. Send in the airstrike! he screams with the authority of a man without a drop of fear in his 100 percent brave and fearless blood. Then he pulls out his actual knife, which he knows how to hold properly so as to punch and cut, and does so, examplarily. (This fugger’s ready for anything.)
Overhead some helicopters lope chopping along and hover above the gathered mob like hovercrafts except in the sky. The lead pilot leans out the window and jabs a thumb-is-up gesture to the crowd, which (crowd) cheers with the mania of a hundred thousand people who are really, really excited about something: vengeance.
Go get ’em, screams Gregory Eternity, stroking his moustaches pensively.
The helicopters sweep out over the Lake like a flock of bees through a hole in a window screen that someone has punched there in blind rage, probably because her daughter is journalling about her, and here now the bees come, hungry for the succulently spoiling contents of the fruitbowl. Only this time the fruit is going to be blown to smithereens.
