The cops were blocking my view of what they were doing around the guy. And the girl with the steel mohawk was sticking my shoulder with one of its points. “Ow!”
“Sorry. Woke up with it like this this morning. Not used to it yet.”
The ring of cops suddenly tightened. They all seemed to be flailing away with their clubs.
“What’s happening?” asked the man who’d thought Punum was a guy. “Are they beating up that poor man?”
“He must have done something to ask for it,” said another voice.
Someone else replied, “Come to think of it, I thought he looked suspicious when he was in here just now.”
“Like hell you did!” yelled Punum.
“What? Who’s saying that? I’m just saying I know what I saw.”
“Maybe he’s turning into some kind of monster!” said an eager child’s voice. “Maybe a dinosaur!”
“Hush, Ashok.”
“I’d like to be a dinosaur,” said Ashok.
The knot of police thinned, and we could see the man again. He wasn’t in his wheelchair anymore. He was on his stomach with his hands behind him, handcuffed. His face was turned towards us. He looked terrified. He was screaming something; I couldn’t hear what through the heavy glass window. He had cuts on his face; I could see the blood. One of the cops had a foot on the man’s head, holding him down.
“Oh, my god,” said someone. “I wonder what he did.”
“Maybe nothing. But they have to be sure. They have to find out.”
“These are horrible times. Just horrible.”
Punum had tears in her eyes. “Fuckers.” I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about the cops or about the other people in the doughnut shop.
Two policemen picked the man up. His legs flopped out of the grip of the cop at his feet. The other cop almost dropped him. He didn’t, but he started yelling at the disabled man. He dragged him into the back of a cop car. He tried to sit him up, but the man fell over. Punum made an outraged noise. The cop’s buddy came over and the two of them kind of stuffed the man into the back seat, lying down. They got into the car and drove away. The wheelchair stayed there for a second, in the middle of the road. Then a car hit it and knocked it up against the sidewalk. It landed on its side. One wheel fell off. Punum said, “Christ.” She yanked her chair closer to her and pulled herself into it.
“What’re you going to do?” I asked her.
“I’m going to try very hard to not go postal. Come and open the door for me.”
She wheeled her chair about and bellowed, “Coming through!” Bit by bit people cleared the way. As I opened the door, she said to me, “Stay here.”
“Are you sure?” I asked her, relieved.
“I’m sure.” Just before the door closed, I heard her yell, “Hey!” in the direction of the remaining policemen. They turned toward her. Was she insane?
People in the doughnut shop wandered away from the window. A woman asked me, “Is your friend okay on her own like that?”
“She told me not to go with her.”
The woman looked concerned. “But can she be on her own? I mean, does she understand what she’s doing?”
A cold anger bubbled up through me and out my mouth. “You know what?” I said. “I understand what you’re saying, and you need to check yourself.”
“Oh!” she said, all offended. “Young lady, I was just—”
“You were just making assumptions, and now you’re going to just mind your own business. Right?”
Her face went red. She turned her back on me. “So rude,” she muttered as she walked away.
The serving people went back behind the counter and started working again. The lights flickered. People gasped. The lights became steady again. I sat there, tense, as Punum talked to two more of the cops. She was gesturing at the guy’s wheelchair.
Oh. She was coming back. Behind her, one of the cops righted the guy’s wheelchair and started clumsily trying to fold it.
I let her back in. She was fuming. She gestured for her coffee. I handed it to her. She stared at the writing on her cup as though she were trying to memorize it. “Bastards.” She fussed and shifted around for a second. Then she handed her cup back to me and turned her chair around again.
“What’re you doing?” I asked her.
“I can’t stay here, feeling useless. Some of my friends are down at the Convention Centre, helping to put out cots and stuff for people rescued from Toronto Island. You wanna come?”
Jeez, I couldn’t look after her and try to get my life back in order. “Uh, well, Ben might be meeting me here, and I still haven’t found Rich, or Tafari . . .”
“I get that, but while you’re calling around to try to find them, you could be helping some people who’ve lost everything.”
She saw the look on my face. “Fine. Suit yourself. It’s been real. Well, no, it hasn’t. Nothing’s real today. But you know what I mean. Put my guitar on the back of my chair.”
“But you can’t just . . . Don’t you want me to come with you? How’re you going to get there?”
Teeth gritted, she said, “Yes, I can just, and no I don’t bloody want you to come with me.” Her smile was all edges. “And as for how I’m going to get there, it’s all downhill from here. Like the whole world is going. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
I picked her guitar up. “You don’t have to be so mean,” I said. Where did she get off, being so high-and-mighty? I’d just defended her to some lady! She should have been grateful I even wanted to give her a hand getting around. I slung the strap of the guitar case over the two push handles at the back of her wheelchair. The broken guitar made a jangling noise as it swung against the back of her chair. Then I sat back down, scowling. No way I was going to open the door for her now.
She didn’t even ask. She just said, “See you, Li’l Miss Mississauga.”
“North Toronto, I told you. What are you, deaf?”
“No, I’m a different kind of crip.”
“Hey, I didn’t mean it like that.” Now I felt like an idiot. “I mean, it’s just an expression. Here, let me get the door for you.”
“Stay the fuck away from me.”
Stung, I stepped back. Punum wheeled over to the exit. An old guy opened the door for her. I watched her go down the street. She looked determined. Like she knew where to go, what to do. Like a grown-up.
My cell rang. My ring tone was the theme from the latest Bratz movie. At the time, it’d seemed like this cool, ironic joke. I mean, it’s not like I even went to see it; imagine me and a cinema full of nine-year-olds and their parents? But now, the tinny tune coming from my phone just made me feel childish. “Hello?”
“I was frightened all the time . . .”
The voice was whispery, almost familiar. Behind it I could hear the awful screaming I’d heard the last time, but muted. “Who is this?” Maybe my phone was haunted.
“I’m running out of space. I was frightened all the time. I was frightened all the time. I’m running out—”
The phone went dead. But I’d recognized the voice, remembered who’d said some of those words to me. My brother, just before we left for the bar last night. Frantically, I hit redial, but the phone hadn’t picked up the number where the call had come from. I called Rich’s number.
“The customer you are calling is out of range.”
My hands were shaking as I flipped the phone shut. I grabbed up my jacket and got out of there.
CHAPTER NINE
I wandered around the city for I don’t know how long. Harbord Street seemed to have turned into a loop. It used to be a straight line, I swear. I walked around and around it about three times before I figured out what must have happened to it. I took an alleyway. At the end of it was a small side street, the usual Toronto street with tall trees on either side, and those old houses with the big front porches. It looked normal, if you ignored the downed power lines and the occasional broken window.
A little boy was on h
is tippy toes on the sidewalk outside his house. He was about five years old. He was reaching into the mailbox. He was probably Japanese, wearing a striped navy and white baseball cap with jeans and a green T-shirt. He pulled out a wad of mail and yelled, “Ba-chan!” He held the mail out to show it to an old lady who was sitting on the front porch of the house. Her hair was pulled up into a bun. She and the little boy looked alike; same shape to the head, same mouth. Maybe she was his grandma.
The little boy thumped up the short set of stairs to the house. She smiled at him as she took the mail from him and gave him a hug. She put her knitting down and opened a big plastic cooler that was on the table beside the green Muskoka chair in which she was reclining. She pulled out an ice cream bar and gave it to him. She said something to him I couldn’t understand, straightening his cap as she did. She beamed at him so full of love I could almost feel the glow from it. He went and sat on the stairs to watch the spectacle going by out on the main road. He pointed and called something out to her in his piping boy’s voice.
He’d dropped a letter on the sidewalk. I picked it up. It was addressed to a Yachiyo Momono.
I took it to the old lady. “Thank you,” she said. She looked at the envelope and smiled. “For me. From my grandson Joey.” She jerked her chin in the general direction of the outside world. “Better than the TV today, right?” I chuckled. She picked her knitting up again. “You be careful, okay?”
“I will!” Wow. Was there some kind of grandma gene that every old lady had? For a second, thinking of it like that made me feel safe and comforted. The feeling only lasted until I got onto a main street. It was a zoo. People were mobbing the banks, groceries, and corner stores, clamoring to get in although they were already full inside. I went to buy a bottled water from a drugstore, and my bank card wouldn’t work.
“Most people’s cards aren’t working today,” said the girl behind the counter. Buying the water used up a third of the cash I had on me. What would I do when I ran out of the rest? It wasn’t even enough to buy a sandwich in most places. Electricity kept going on and off. I heard someone say that Garrison Creek had resurfaced and was flooding the whole area that had been the riverbed before they’d paved it and made it into a sewer.
I called a couple of hospitals to see whether Rich was in any of them, but they all put me on hold for so long that I gave up. I hadn’t brought my phone charger with me. I still couldn’t get through to my folks, and they hadn’t tried to call me. People were stocking up on water, groceries. I saw a handwritten sign in a convenience store window; NO MORE WATER.
A tendril of smog from the volcano snaked its way through the air, about head height. A man walked right through it. When he came out the other side, his brown hair had gone white, and he had no mouth. Like, nothing there, as though he’d never had a mouth. His eyes got humongous. I could hear him trying to scream. He looked across the street to where I was, but I was so creeped out that I kept walking. I mean, he could breathe, right? So he’d be okay until he got to where someone could help him? Right? Funny thing is, that volcano smog was everywhere, and I saw all kinds of people walk through it, and nothing happened to them. After that I avoided the stuff, though.
Rich hadn’t called back.
I found a public library and waited for a free computer. The wait was taking longer than usual because the terminals kept turning into traffic lights while people were using them, so then they had to get extra time because the minutes during which their computer was a traffic light didn’t count. I finally got to one. I poked about online for a bit, but everything I saw just made me feel worse. Horrible stuff was happening all over the world. Well, that’s not true. Some of it was good stuff; like every homeless person in San Fernando, Trinidad waking up inside a brand-new house. But some guy had blown up an LGBT bookstore because he said God was displeased with gays, like Reverend Whatsisface said, and they needed to be purged from the earth if we were going to be free of this scourge. Twenty people inside the bookstore had died, and six more had been injured. Two weren’t expected to recover. One of the dead was a lady’s two-month-old baby. Some town in I think Indiana was having a plague of lemon-and-green-striped plastic frogs that were swarming everywhere, yelling everyone’s secrets out loud. The people in the town were killing frogs as quickly as they could, but more kept coming. How did you kill a plastic frog, anyway? And this guy over in Petawawa? He went wandering around down by the train tracks. Only there was something haunting over there. On LJ, people were saying that it made a noise like the rattle of meat locker chains, and if you were getting close to it, you would know by the taste of rotting mint leaves in the back of your throat. It sounded to me like those fright spam posts that people will make on ViewTube. You know, “Post this message to twelve thousand of your friends in the next hour, otherwise you’ll lose both your hands”? Only it was for real. The guy ran into the thing haunting the railway tracks. Nobody knew what really happened to him, and he couldn’t say, because now when he spoke, his words came out in a high-pitched, warbly banshee wail that broke windows and spooked dogs. There was a clip on ViewTube of him on the news this morning. They wouldn’t let him talk, though, because he would have broken all their cameras. His hair had gone white. He was seventeen years old. He’d been a redhead yesterday when he went down by the tracks.
I wrote Mom an e-mail. Dad had an e-mail address, but only because I’d gotten him one. He never used it. He didn’t really like using computers. He was happier deciphering a roll of blueprints. In the e-mail to Mom, I said, Mom, I’m okay. I haven’t seen Rich yet. I’m trying to find him. It’s scary here. Please come home soon. I hope you and Dad are all right. Love, Sojourner. I remembered the name of the conference my mom had been going to. I found a website for it, but there wasn’t anything useful on it. I did find the schedule. My mom was supposed to deliver her paper tomorrow. It was called, “Violent Ideation in Prepubescent Girls.” It sounded so normal, so Mom. She was writing about the shit that had happened to me in my last school, telling other psychologists about it, hoping they could find a way to make sure it never happened to another girl ever again. And she hadn’t even told me. I could feel the tears rolling down my face. I didn’t care. I wasn’t the only one crying while they sat at a computer, trying to find the people they loved.
My computer flashed a bright red stoplight in my eye. “Fine,” I told it. I let the next person have it, even though my time wasn’t up yet. Oh, and the blemish had worked all the way up one leg, and there was another one starting on the other leg. Our family doctor wasn’t answering her phone. I didn’t even bother trying a hospital emergency room. People who had been hurt really badly were having to wait for treatment, so why would the hospital pay me any attention? Nothing was broken and I wasn’t dying.
Oh, God, I hoped I wasn’t dying. What would happen if that black stuff grew all the way up to my face? I didn’t know what to do about anything. I just kept walking. Then I realized that someone was walking along beside me. “Tafari!” That was his favorite trick; sneaking up on you quietly like that and waiting until you noticed. He was smiling that warm, gentle smile he smiled when he knew someone would be glad to see him. I leapt at him and gave him a big hug. It felt so good to be holding him again. “I have never been so glad to see anyone in my life! Where’ve you been? Were you stuck in the subway?”
He laughed. “Yeah, I suppose. But I’m here now.”
He was, and he looked so good! I could have just eaten him up with my eyes alone. “Where’s Rich? Is he with you?”
He frowned. “No.”
“Taf, I’m so scared. Things are all creepy everywhere, and people are even dying, and I can’t find Mom and Dad or Rich. Are your folks okay?”
“They’re okay. Don’t worry, they’re just fine.”
“And I have this, like, skin disease, and I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you about it before, when we were dating, but I was afraid you’d think I was gross.”
He took me into his arms again. �
�I could never think that!”
“Well, I hope not.” I was blubbering now. “Because it’s spreading, and pretty soon it’ll probably be all over me, and everything’s just a mess!”
He held me, kissing the top of my head every so often. Not a lot of boys could do that. Not when we were standing up, at least. “Don’t be scared,” he said. “It makes me feel so bad to see you like this.”
After a while I calmed down a little. Tafari said, “I gotta go.”
“What? Why? Can I come with you?”
He shook his head. “Something I gotta do, right now. I’ll come back.”
“Promise? You’ll call me and tell me where to meet you?”
He nodded. “I’ll call you.”
I’d just turned onto University Avenue at Queen when an enormous, clawed foot crashed onto the sidewalk, a few feet from where I was standing. It looked like I imagined a dinosaur’s foot would. I yelped. A second foot crashed down on the other side of me. People were scattering, cars and bicycles swerving out of the way. The feet were attached to ginormous drumsticks, which were attached to ginormouser thighs, all covered in big red and black feathers. With my eyes, I followed them upward, maybe twenty feet above, to where they disappeared into the volcano smog.
At first I thought a house was falling on me. I flinched. But it turned out it was just the body attached to the legs, leaning down and peering between those legs to get a good look below. And the body was a house. I mean a for-real house, with four walls and a door and windows and a roof and everything. I could see all that from underneath it because it had tilted down at a steep angle so it could see me better. I mean, I think it was looking. The house part cocked itself sideways so that one of its windows was facing me. I swear, the window blinked, its pane slamming open and shut like a big, square, startled eye. I was standing underneath a house that walked on two humongous, feathered dinosaur legs. Then the house gave a startled squawk. And in case I’d had any doubts about the walking part, it lifted one of its legs and stomped.
The Chaos Page 11
