People Park (28 page)

She let the line ring a couple more times, hung up, ordered, Hit
PAUSE
.

The deck stopped turning. Everything was still.

Look, she said, pointing to the Thunder Wheel. What a beautiful thing. Do you love this city? I love this city. I was born at Old Mustela Hospital fifty-seven years ago and I’ve lived here all my life. You know how many times I’ve left in those fifty-seven years?
None. Why would I leave? I’ve never been on an airplane. On a boat exactly once — the fireworks barge during the centenary celebrations. You don’t
need
to leave this place. So why get bent out of shape about being
trapped
here — where else would you rather be?

Silence from Diamond-Wood. The Mayor checked the phone again — nothing — handed the receiver to him, he deposited it into its console. Take off that tape, will you? she said. It’s like talking to a coma patient.

He did.

Better?

Yes, he said. Thanks.

Anyway where was I? Oh yes —
trapped
, bah. The idea of being
trapped here, it’s like a child being trapped in a
. . .
in a
. . .
wherever
children like to be. A store for children’s things. Games or what have you!

The Mayor could hear the anxiety rising in her voice. Like a child in an adultless land, she decided, and continued with rekindled vigour: And while these aren’t ideal circumstances, doesn’t it offer the potential to bring the city together? Maybe it’s
exactly
what we need to make us realize how lucky we are! So the bridge is gone, so what! Right?

Well, said Diamond-Wood, the power’s still out in the Zone —

Those people are used to struggling! If
anyone
can deal with a little hardship it’s them. Few people are aware of this, but I come from poverty.

Oh?

The Mayor peered over her shoulder at her aide: hunched upon his crutches, patchy stubble darkened his cheeks and chin, his uniform had the appearance of a rumpled paper
bag. She looked away, continued: Touch green! Grew up in a trailerpark in what was then called South Bay. This was before the Lakeview projects. I was born in a house on wheels. Not literally, I was born at Old Mustela, but a trailer was where I spent the first few months of my life. So I think I know a little something about
struggle
. I
understand
people — rich, poor, young, old, fat, stupid — and that’s what makes for an effective leader in times of crisis: empathy.

The phone burbled to life.

Give it to me! she screamed, nearly falling off the dessert cart.

The High Gregories sat around the speakerphone in their underground conference chamber — Griggs, Wagstaffe, Magurk, Noodles. Bean stood at the portal that led up into the Temple, hands behind his back in the pose of niteclub bouncers. In an adjacent chamber, Favours was having his morning treatments administered by two Recruits in latex gloves and surgical masks. From another came whimpering — tears?

Bad news first? said Griggs, his voice as inert as the basement air.

Fine, said the Mayor.

No sign of him, said Wagstaffe.

None? said the Mayor. What is wrong with you people? What did you —

It’s nothing we can’t sort out, said Griggs.

And Island Amusements? said the Mayor. It’s expected to open —

Don’t get your gitch in a gotch, said Magurk. That’s the fuggin good news.

Everything’s all set, said Wagstaffe.

Everything? said the Mayor. I wouldn’t say —

Let’s meet here for a face-to-face, said Griggs. There’s a car waiting for you outside.

Now?

Now.

See you soon! said Wagstaffe cheerily, and the line went dead.

Griggs looked around the table. Anyone hungry?

Noodles nodded.

Bean, said Griggs, fetch us some flats. And wake B-Squad up. I’m sure the Mayor will want some answers from the dynamic duo meant to be keeping tabs on Raven.

SAM SLID BACK
the cover from the peephole. The armoire was empty.

If you’re there say something okay, he said, and moved his ear to the door.

Silence. Sam touched his face. The scab was dry.

I know you’re in there okay, said Sam. I know you can make it look like you’re not. But you can’t go anywhere Raven. Sam tried the handles: the boards and chains and locks held fast. There’s no way out.

Sam placed an apple on the tray he’d affixed through a slot halfway up the door. You can have an apple for breakfast. If you want more I can get more.

He pushed it through, heard the dull thud of the apple falling, put his eye to the peephole. From the bare overhead bulb fanned a cone of yellow light that dwindled in the dark corners. Upon the armoire’s newspapered floor sat the apple, gleaming. There was no hint of movement from the shadows, darkness there and nothing more.

If the apple’s bruised I can bring you another one okay, said Sam. Or if you don’t like apples tell me what you like. I have juice. Or water. Or I could nuke you a meal.

Sam waited, eye at the peephole. Nothing.

The phone rang, the sudden burst of it a small explosion in the still room. Sam stood over the console. It alternated ringing and not — a tinny jangle, then silence, and the silence felt expectant, and Sam synchronized his breathing to it: inhale as the phone rang, and exhale between rings, not picking up because it would be the same voice, a deadened echo as though the call were coming from the bottom of the lake. Like speaking to his own drowned ghost.

The phone stopped ringing. The room waited. Then, from the armoire: scraping. Sam held his breath. A thump. And then something scrabbly and wet-sounding — the watery snap and crunch of a mouth biting hard with its teeth into an apple.

AT THE SOUND
of fluttering Calum raises his head. Swooping down from above is a grey bird. A pigeon it seems at first but as it stills itself in the air with a slow backward beating of wings it might be a dove, though dirty or dusted with newsprint or ash, he thinks.

The bird, whatever it is, lights upon the railing of the pedestrian walkway, its claws curl around the metal bar, and tilting its head regards Calum with something evaluative or curious. He stares back. He feels cold. He laces his arms around his shins and pulls them close and wedges his chin between his knees. In the bird’s pinkish eyes glitters something suspicious, he thinks. It doesn’t trust him. It can’t be trusted.

Calum says, Go away. And the words again are eaten.

The bird lifts one foot, then the other, puffs, shudders, but doesn’t go anywhere.

So Calum lunges at it — though halfheartedly, if he caught it
what would he do. The bird maybe knows this, it makes no effort
to fly away. It only regards Calum steadily with those eyes like two droplets of something’s pale and mucosal blood. Calum feints again to smack it but the bird holds its ground undaunted, so he lowers his hand and for a moment the bird looks familiar, he thinks, though his memory feels emptied and what he can’t think is from where or when, or where where might even be or when, when.

He takes another swipe. Deftly the bird swerves out of reach, resettles on the railing, nods, caws, squawks, chirps, what does a bird think or mean to say, is it taunting him or only making noise for itself. Watching the bird gloat Calum feels repelled and repulsed.

Go on, he says, get out of here.

But his voice sounds like a tape played in reverse, each syllable sucks back into itself.

He looks up and down the bridge which narrows identically in both directions to little pinprick endpoints, tunnelling into a sky that has forgotten how to be a sky. Which way to go, does it matter. All that matters maybe is movement, away from this bird.

Calum picks a direction, he doesn’t know which one, and begins to walk.

II

EBBIE AWOKE ALONE.
The covers on Adine’s side of the bed were undisturbed.

Adine? she called, sitting up. Adine?

No reply. She got up.

In the den Pop’s bedding remained heaped in the middle of the floor. The bathroom door was open, no one was inside, nor was anyone in the kitchen. Other than Jeremiah, blinking at her from the couch, the apartment was empty — Debbie did not count herself.

Normally the fridge hummed, the mixing bowls atop it jingled. But with no power everything was silent, the air brittle. From the couch Jeremiah, tail alert and coiled at its tip into a fiddlehead, watched her. Debbie shivered, scooped the blanket off the floor and took it to the window nook, swaddled herself, and curled up looking out over the street: but there was nothing to see,
UOT
was smothered in fog.

Across the room the blank screen of the
TV
glowed a greenish eggshell hue, it had a light of its own even when it wasn’t on. Where was Adine? Out there stumbling through the city in her sweatsuit and goggles — Adine out in the city, how absurd.

Though there’d been a time when she’d loved the city and in a
way the city had brought them together. When they’d met, Debbie
had been still new enough to it, having spent her undergrad years mostly on the Institute’s campus and in the adjacent student neighbourhood spoken of myopically as
the ghetto
. Everything west of the park seemed impossibly vast and intimidating and arcane.

Adine had spent her whole life on the island, she navigated it effortlessly, she knew things and places and secrets. Debbie’s exuberance and naivety invigorated her and so the city came alive for them both. Though it wasn’t just living in the city, it was talking about it: so much happened every day, hilarious and thrilling and sad. So they opened themselves to its people, its streets, its clichés and mysteries, and everywhere they found stories to recount to each other.

Once, during an early-morning Blueline commute, an elderly woman’s newspaper-wrapped fish came alive between her feet, and the woman —
so old she was made of dust
, Debbie would later poeticize her — calmly took the flopping creature by the tail, beat it to death against the train’s dirty floor, and reclined
with a nonchalance meant to suggest the blood and scales at her feet had always been there. Witnessing all this from across the aisle Debbie was already skipping forward to that evening, when she’d tell it to Adine, and they’d cackle together in horror and delight.

Back then despite living on the opposite side of the city she spent most nights at Adine’s, and every minute apart provided stories for their next meeting. But they never had enough time: there was always too much to tell, their voices bubbled overtop of each other’s, everything frantic and urgent —
and then! and then! and then!
At night they had to start setting two alarms: one to wake them in the morning, the other to indicate a time they absolutely had to shut up and sleep, and after which they weren’t allowed another word.

After a year of this Debbie moved in. Technically she and Adine began to share everything, though quickly there seemed less to share. Something happened: the city lost its drama, fewer were the moments of the sublime, the absurd, the ridiculous. In stitching their lives together Debbie began to fear they’d sealed the space, that chasm of mystery and possibility between them, where what was most alive about their relationship had crackled and zipped.

But if the real city no longer held any magic for them, Debbie
had wondered, perhaps Adine’s tiny replica version might. The first time Debbie suggested visiting her Sand City —
just to see!
— Adine had scowled and scoffed. But after some persuading, up there alone in the Museum’s upper gallery they’d gone quiet before it, almost reverential. Adine ran her hand over the glass. There it is, she’d said simply, and Debbie had scooted up behind her and laid her head on Adine’s shoulder so she could see what Adine saw and told her, It’s beautiful. And then: I’m sorry.

Jeremiah hopped up onto the window ledge, mewling, back arched, tail rippling at its tip. Good dog, said Debbie, running her hand over the cat’s spine. There was something in his fur, some dander or fluffy lint, Debbie plucked it free — a feather. For a moment she assumed he’d clawed open a pillow, something he used to do as a kitten, and then she remembered the bird. Oh no, bad dog, she scolded him, and went into the kitchen.

On the sill sat the newspaper-lined casserole dish into which she’d laid the dove. The window was open, mist hung thick and colourless over the street. In the dish were some feathers, a yolky smear of poop — but no bird. Oh, Jeremiah, sighed Debbie, taking his face in her hands. Did you eat that poor bird? The cat offered a slow, bemused blink, and flicked his tongue over his nose. Then he squirmed away.

Debbie looked under the table, behind the stove, anywhere the feeble creature might have been either dumped or gotten lost. From the kitchen window she struggled to make out the street below, let alone a carcass upon the sidewalk. The fog was solid as cement.

She removed the newsprint from the dish and unfolded it on the countertop as if it might reveal some clue. Maybe the dove had flown? The idea swelled from fantasy to probability. It had been simply stunned, Debbie told herself, and over the course of the night revived and, at some early morning hour, found the strength to push off out the window, caught an updraft that lifted it over the city, up through the clouds into the sky, where it wheeled and danced, maybe, once again free.

AT SOME POINT
midmorning, time meant nothing in Cinecity, the images onscreen went live again: first-person footage of the downtown streets, fog whisking this way and that, a faint snowfall sprinkling down. The shot plodded along between office towers, everything silent save the rustle and squeak of popcorn breakfasts taken in the theatre.

These were the first live images Adine and the rest of the full house had seen since midnight, when she and her westend cavalcade had arrived just in time to watch a dishevelled Lucal Wagstaffe and a possibly drunk Isa Lanyess announce they were ending their broadcast. After the analgesic tone of an
EBS
test the colour bars were replaced with a title card in black and white:
The Silver Jubilee, A Second Look
.

This comprised hastily spliced-together We-
TV
footage of the previous night’s festivities, and began with monologues performed in garages and bedrooms around the island, from the Mews to Fort Stone, the popular acumen of the masses, all those predictions and insights edited into one rambling overture that echoed and contradicted and befuddled itself before things cut to a happy Li’l Browntown family painting wings on one another’s faces and chanting Ra-
ven
on their driveway.

Cut to a disembodied voice narrating tremulous handheld footage of the crowds descending into the park, hundreds of napes of necks and backs of knees with the view sometimes flashing skyward where sunspots seared the lens. A new voice took over, someone else shooting the opposite end of the park. All of this was set to a jaunty carnivalesque score, the time flashing at oddly progressing intervals:
13:40
,
14:10
, etc.

The daylight began to deepen. An extended segment featured a surprisingly well-researched and thorough tour of the Museum of Prosperity, right up to the top floor, and here was Adine’s Sand City, and seeing it she felt a slight pang of — what? Something proprietary, violation, shame, yet beneath it an ember of pride. With the camera zooming in on her model it seemed unreal, or too real, the miniature buildings expanded to the size of actual buildings. Feeling overwhelmed, Adine’s thoughts retreated into memories — of Debbie. Debbie who had once cranked a song on the radio, claiming it was
theirs
, and Adine had run to the bathroom and pretended to barf. But if anything was theirs it was the Sand City. Visiting the Museum’s top floor had become the thing to do when there was nothing to do, they’d Yellowline over and Redline up and wave at the girls working ticketsales and climb the tower and there it was, under glass.

They’d tell each other stories then. When they ran out of stories they’d make some up: What if Isa Lanyess was actually sent here from some other planet to jellify our minds so she could plant her eggs into them and then all our heads would hatch millions of little space-alien babies? Adine suggested once. What if Lucal Wagstaffe’s a secret vegetarian? countered Debbie. Adine had a key that locked the door, if she needed to. And sometimes Debbie would fix her with a sidelong lingering look, and she did.

Though these thoughts sparked irritation. The model wasn’t Debbie’s, it wasn’t
theirs —
it was hers, Adine’s, only Adine’s. Debbie was an interloper. She had so much else, all her friends and causes, her stupid cumin-drenched dinners and
community
. She shouldn’t get to possess or even share the thing Adine had created before they’d met.

Debbie was the one responsible for its display now on the bigscreen — this violation, this corruption. Of course the public could visit the Sand City whenever they wanted, and that was bad enough, but simultaneously seen by so many people like this, with its creator reduced to another set of ogling eyes, felt cheap and humiliating.

But then the image dissolved: from the roof of the boathouse someone made wide sweeping pans of the mobbed park, which
became a montage, one image flashed to the next, until the moment
the Zone’s power had cut out. All the westenders who’d missed the illustration edged forward in their seats. The tubby little superfan, Gip Poole, was brought onstage. The crowd went wild, the trunk opened, Raven got inside, the boy locked him in. Cut to one of those massive screens that flanked the gazebo, footage of the footage of Guardian Bridge, and the lights went out and came back on and the bridge was gone, and everyone in Cinecity gasped, even those not seeing it for the first time.

Cue fireworks.

Fade to black.

Credits.

The End.

And now this preamble to the main event,
All in Together Now
, the movie for the people by the people: a camera trolling the streets of downtown. South on Paper Street, out of downtown to Lakeside Drive, down to the shoreline, nosing out of the mist with the curiosity of a stage manager scoping the crowd between parted curtains. If this made the water an auditorium, there was no audience. The view was clear: no fog, no people, just the crimped steel of the lake all the way to the horizon.

Little flashes pocked the water where waves flared into whitecaps. Otherwise it and sky were the same brooding grey, clouds too sullen to storm. No one was out boating or swimming. There was something soothing about the quiet chaos of the lake, undisturbed by human beings, wave after wave slicing up and frothing and dying. Adine watched. Everything was quiet. A pall had fallen over the theatre, silent and serene.