Arkady

by Patrick Langley

  Then came the Dragon, the wheezing: red phlegm and blue pills.

  The brothers jump off the bus. The office is a short walk under the flyover, the shadows swirling with exhaust as cars roar by.

  ‘Can we do more climbing?’ Frank asks. He grips the gnawed corners of his jumper in his teeth, tugging more fibres loose. ‘We going somewhere new?’

  Jackson shakes his head. ‘We’re practising maps.’

  ‘Maps? I know all about maps.’ He kicks a crushed can and watches it skitter.

  ‘These are different,’ says Jackson. ‘You’ll draw them.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Frank, sounding sceptical, before his face brightens into a wicked smile. ‘Okay. I’m good at that.’

  Timing is crucial. You have to be sly. You can’t just smash a window or jump a fence in broad daylight, condemned in the glare of the public’s presumption. Jackson leads his brother down the road, but the pavements are busy. He ducks into a doorway and pretends to check his phone.

  Jackson gets physically sick of it sometimes: chesty cough, inexplicable nausea, aching bones. Broken windows bite his palms as he boosts the sills. He sprains his ankles on crooked stairs. There are pointless fights when he steps on someone’s turf, pointless fights if they step on his. Sometimes his nostrils recoil at a familiar, high-pitched, rotten-sour smell, which he hopes is rancid milk but is almost certainly something worse. The rooms are scattered with sadness and waste: fading photographs, blackened pipes.

  But pain is an education. Beneath, beside, between the city’s official boundaries – its maps of space, which are maps of ownership, maps of property, maps of power – other territories and signals appear: an infinity of codes that dictate how the city is moved through, immaterial borders that constantly rise and fall and flux, like tides. Sometimes he’ll be struck by a delirious dread that makes his fingers and forearms fizz. His heartbeat spikes and his throat feels strangled by invisible hands. He doesn’t think he might possibly be about to die – he knows he is: of a heart attack or aneurysm or some medically unprecedented eruption of guts and blood that will need washing clean with industrial hoses. Lights quiver and swim. His skin prickles with inexplicable pain.

  When it passes – it always eventually passes, leaving the promise of death unfulfilled – Jackson tells no one, not even Frank.

  The lessons take place in the evenings, at weekends, and in the adrenalized afternoons when the brothers bunk off. Jackson teaches Frank about his secret life, his rides to the city’s four corners, and passes down secret knowledge. The point of the lessons, Jackson says, is survival. Unlike ‘trigonometry’ or ‘extended metaphor’, the word makes immediate sense. Frank feels the word in his fingers, rolls it under his tongue. He slips survival into his pocket: a secret, a weapon, a hex.

  The alley – grubby and dark, nothing special – juts off a long main road lined with anonymous blocks and chain cafés. Bin bags, heaped in squishy mounds, leak tarry juice; the runoff dribbles through a grille and into the tubes and tunnels of the city’s swollen bowels.

  Frank pictures the Maths class he’s supposed to be in right now, students half asleep over pages of gridded paper. He beams.

  They scrabble over hoarding adorned with photos of couples smiling in fake rooms, and duck into the dusty hush beside the tall building. Pellets of fox droppings litter the ground, the only sign that anything else is alive. Frank glances at the entrance to one of the buildings, where he spray-painted their secret logo: two heads, in profile, beneath a radiant crown.

  The seventh floor of the office building is a clone of all the others, vacant, pale, and flooded with light from the strip of windows. The space is empty, derelict. Dark patches where desks, cupboards, printers, photocopiers, potted plants and water coolers once stood now pattern the sun-bleached carpet. Half-dismantled desks and chairs litter the floor. Wires hang tangled from vanished ceiling tiles. Frank sits on his office chair, shoes dangling an inch above the carpet. He folds his hands on the desk’s speckled plastic veneer and looks up at his brother. Jackson pulls the stuff from his rucksack, lays it neatly on the desk.

  ‘You ready?’ he asks.

  ‘Yep,’ says Frank. He taps the pencil on the desk and bites his lip, taps it, taps again.

  ‘Stop it,’ his brother says. ‘Drives me insane when you do that.’

  The squint with which Jackson pierces the window’s glare makes his forehead crease like an older man’s. For a while he stands there watching, momentarily transfixed by something outside.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘remember where we got to last week?’

  Frank nods.

  ‘Good,’ says Jackson. ‘I want you to try again. Where we finished last time. Same instructions. Just start again, like nothing’s happened in between.’

  ‘Okay. Got it. Fine.’

  Frank arranges four sheets of paper across the desk so they form a larger page. The graphite hovers over the bottom right corner. He draws a line across the middle, another one up the side. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. The pencil meanders around the page.

  Frank has arranged a handful of treasured objects on the desk: the glass turtle, the blue bottle, the mirror-shard, and the round, grey pebble. He stares at the latter for inspiration, willing it to give him ideas. Its pale grey surface, smoothed by water to a perfect ovoid resembling a gull’s egg, is speckled white. He found the stone on the street a few weeks ago, when the sun was setting fire to the dazzling windows, which flashed the light back red and gold. Something about the stone had struck Frank, in that moment, as significant. Its rounded smoothness. Its balanced weight. Mostly he loves the speckled pattern, the white dots flecked throughout the dark grey. He believed, at the time, that the stone was a map of the night sky, a constellation inscribed on a pebble, but now that he is here he sees the stone for what it is: a meaningless lump.

  These aren’t the only lessons Jackson gives, but they’re definitely the weirdest. Most of the lessons are practical, hands-on. How to crowbar open a fire escape, short-circuit certain alarms, or scavenge food. Combined with these are lessons of a more abstract, even philosophical nature. They are, Jackson grandly proclaims, an ‘antidote to official knowledge’. For months, he taught Frank a course called ‘How to Read the News’, the central tenet being ‘don’t trust a word’. The lessons left Frank’s brain feeling scrambled, numb with boredom.

  ‘Finished,’ says Frank, squinting at the page.

  Jackson wanders over and inspects the pencilled lines. They branch and veer in random directions, a tentacular node of squiggles and scrawls. Frank chews the end of a pencil and watches his brother. It’s not a good start. He could do better, has done better in the past.

  ‘This is bollocks,’ Jackson says, chucking the pages onto the floor. ‘What is this meant to say?’

  Frank frowns, shame pulsing through his body like heat.

  ‘It doesn’t say anything,’ he says. ‘It’s a picture.’

  ‘Do it again.’

  Four clean sheets, arranged in a square. The pencil hovers over the page.

  This time he thinks about a trip they took last summer, to the beach. The brothers cycled down the long, bleak coastal roads under mountainous, black-bottomed clouds. Reeds rustled at the tarmac’s fringe. Coast wind pounded the bikes so hard he’d had to lean all the way to one side. On the beach at night, they made a fire. Slivers of driftwood spat sparks.

  ‘Here,’ he says, pushing back from the desk.

  Jackson inspects Frank’s second attempt. The drawing is somehow tighter, its edges more distinct. They contain something. It’s hard to know what, exactly, but it’s there.

  ‘This is better,’ says Jackson. ‘Much better. I can imagine this place is real.’

  ‘It is real,’ says Frank.

  Jackson ignores his brother in favour of his phone. ‘Alright. One good, one shit. Let’s have a break.’

  Frank lies flat on his back. He whistles an aimless, meandering tune, inhaling the stewed-air smell of the
room. He slaps the carpet tile. A cloud of particles leap and wander weightlessly, catching the light.

  ‘Alright,’ Jackson says a moment later. ‘Get up.’

  ‘The ceiling looks so weird from here,’ says Frank, looking at the pockmarked white of the tiles. ‘Like the surface of the moon.’

  ‘Get up. We haven’t finished.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ says Frank.

  ‘Already?’ Silence. ‘You can eat when we’re done.’

  Frank sits back on the chair and glowers at Jackson.

  ‘I want you to do something different this time,’ Jackson says. ‘This one isn’t like the other lessons. I want you to draw a map of a place that doesn’t exist.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ says Frank.

  ‘Just imagine a place,’ says Jackson, ‘and draw it.’

  Frank is confused at first. He doesn’t know if Jackson is playing a joke, but his brother’s face, as usual, gives nothing away. Jackson stands at Frank’s shoulder and stares at the blank page, so close that he can hear the flutey sounds his brother’s nose makes when he breathes.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ says Jackson.

  The room is vast and stark, interrupted here and there by thick white columns supporting the ceiling. Dead spider plants are racked along the windowsill; they cast long, spindly shadows on the floor like witches’ spell-casting hands. Frank is overcome by the sense that someone else used to sit right here, at this empty desk in this corpse of a building, a person with a suit, a family, a name, a salary, a job, probably a mortgage, certainly a body – a body that pressed its weight into this faux-leather cushion, slathered it in sweat, grease, shed cells and dead hair.

  ‘I don’t know what to draw,’ he says.

  ‘Just make it up,’ says Jackson. ‘It’s the easiest thing in the world.’

  Frank leans over the desk, his eyes fixed on the space between the pencil and the page, a gap that seems impossible to cross when Jackson is standing right there beside him, observing his every move. Frank waits for an idea but nothing arrives. He thinks about cities, fields, forests and motorways, all the kinds of places he drew so easily as a kid. The shapes shift and dissolve at such high speed that all he can see inside his head is a flickering, fading blur.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ he says.

  Jackson is a silhouette. Arms folded, he tilts his head.

  ‘The sooner you do it, the sooner it’s over.’

  Frank rubs his itching eyes with the knuckles of both hands.

  A drawing is just a drawing, a mess of scribbles on a page: if Jackson wanted a pretty picture then he could search for one online. Frank lowers the tip of his pencil.

  ‘Remember what we said before,’ says Jackson, ‘about starting with somewhere you know, then moving outwards.’

  ‘I did that,’ says Frank, ‘just now. I used all the memory up.’

  ‘Try again,’ Jackson says.

  Frank shuts his eyes and makes an effort to remember. Soon the images come flickering past.

  He sees himself in an alley with Jackson, crouching, grit digging into their shoeless feet, gnawing a heel of bread. The bread is stale and has a rim of filth along its crust.

  The public library, Jackson beside him, reading him books.

  In Leonard’s bathroom after the boiler broke, their clothes in a bucket, forearms beetroot-red in the icy water. The water clouds with the dirt leeching out of their clothes.

  At the gates of the North District Institute, first day, feeling sick, surrounded by cackling crowds.

  That time Jackson dislocated a kid’s jaw after he pushed Frank; the way the kid’s tongue flapped loose in his screaming mouth.

  Running headlong from blackvests and laughing breathlessly when they escape.

  The tongue-numbing taste of too much salt on kebab-shop chips.

  Soon he is drawing quickly, fluently, sunk in his work. The feeling is specific but hard to define: he is anxious, excited, calm, all the moods mixed up together, swirling in his stomach and head. Instead of a place, he draws a home. It isn’t an island. It doesn’t have volcanoes, helipads or sprawling malls; there aren’t any lakes or caves. He draws a square, and, within it, a smaller square. The space is sealed. He divides the interior with three horizontal lines, adding stairs between the floors, then beds, a bath, and windows, and pictures on the walls. Something isn’t right. He erases the roof and adds more floors.

  ‘This is good,’ says Jackson – but Frank isn’t really listening.

  His pencil makes a shuffling sound. The tip becomes blunt as he works, soft lead fuzzing the lines. It feels like time is passing but it’s hard to be sure. Frank glances around the room; the long, low, panelled bench-like thing beneath the window, the wall’s hard corners and the packets of cement, or is it sand, stacked against a pillar.

  Jackson places a plastic cup of water beside Frank’s pages.

  ‘I hate it when you do that,’ says Frank.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come over before I’ve finished.’

  Jackson wanders back to the door. He leans against the jamb, head cocked, smiling.

  ‘Let me finish the balcony,’ Frank says. He sketches the last few railings, more rapidly than he’d like, and pulls back from the desk. The drawing isn’t finished. But Jackson is at his shoulder now, lifting the page to the light.

  ‘This is good,’ says Jackson. ‘This is the best one yet.’

  Frank stands up in his chair and spreads his arms wide: ‘I’m the fucking champion! Oof oof oof,’ he says, shadow-boxing the air. Jackson’s face is slack, unimpressed, almost disappointed. ‘Sorry,’ Frank mutters, jogging circles on the floor. Pins and needles in his thighs: he has been sitting down too long.

  ‘Did you do what I said,’ says Jackson, ‘and think about somewhere real?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Frank says. He picks a stray page off the floor: FTG recently exported some thirty per cent of its workforce to China to leverage. He crushes the paper into a ball.

  ‘Which place did you think about?’ says Jackson, still inspecting the page.

  ‘The house.’

  ‘Which house?’

  Frank kicks the paper ball against a column. It bounces off and comes to rest in a tangle of wires. ‘You know which one,’ he says.

  Frank liked to drag the sofa away from the wall in Leonard’s flat to form a private, protected cave. He taped sheets of paper to the wall and spent hours drawing over them, pencil-and-crayon vistas. As he grew older, he started working in collage, cutting out photos from magazines and gluing them to the pages. Jackson would tell him what to draw, show him pages from comic books for inspiration: draw a city, he’d say; draw a skyscraper, draw a fight breaking out on the street. Often he drew Arkady: the tall, faceless man who could fly through the air and travel through time. When Frank got bored, or the mural was finished, he would rip the drawings down and start again. He must have built and razed several cities, created and destroyed entire continents over the years.

  One afternoon the brothers sat together in the warm dark of the fabric cave with a packet of biscuits between them. Frank pointed at a drawing on the wall. It showed a lone house floating high above a city, held aloft by engines shooting flared petals of blue and yellow crayon.

  ‘I want to live here,’ said Frank. ‘That’s my best house.’

  Frank took Jackson on a tour of his imagined building: huge garden, penthouse cinema, games room, water slide.

  ‘It’s pretty great,’ said Jackson. Then he noticed a problem. ‘How would you get places?’ The door opened onto thin air: if you stepped out, you’d drop to your death. ‘And where would your shit go?’ Frank looked nonplussed. ‘The pipes in the bathroom need to go somewhere, don’t they?’ Jackson said. ‘Or do they just leak out the bottom of the house and fall on everyone?’ The idea made him smile. ‘And what about water, for taps and showers? I don’t see any pipes.’

  ‘You get water from the clouds. The poo just goes…’ Frank thought abou
t it for a moment. ‘Bang!’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think it works like that,’ said Jackson.

  ‘It does in my house,’ said Frank.

  Jackson packs the folded drawings away in his rucksack. The brothers jog down the windowless stairwell, footfall echoing off the bare walls, and slide into the reddening evening. Leonard’s flat is near the top of a tower that from a distance resembles a breezeblock, a thump of solid grey. Its wide windows overlook a scrubby, nubbled park and the smog-softened reach of the city beyond it. The yard below is hushed as the brothers approach, the balconies crowded with wardrobes, shipping barrels, pigeon-roosts, clothes lines, rusting bikes. Jackson squints at Leonard’s, a dim cave. His balcony is a miniature jungle, thronged with lush growths spilling out of their pots, several of which hang on chains from the ceiling, ivy trailing down like hair.