by Isaac Marion
‘What does that mean?’
‘All this time I’ve been talking to you, are you just… leftovers from your brain? Or are you really actually you?’
He chuckles. ‘Does it really actually matter?’
‘Are you Perry’s soul?’
‘Maybe. Kind of. Whatever you want to call it.’
‘Are you… in Heaven?’
He laughs and tugs his blood-soaked shirt. ‘Yeah, not exactly. Whatever I am, “R”, I’m in you.’ He laughs again at the look on my face. ‘Fucked up, isn’t it? But Older-Wiser went out of this life pretty darkly. Maybe this is our chance to catch up with him and work some things out before… you know. Whatever’s next.’
I look out the window. No glimpse of land or sea, just the silky mountains of Cloud World spread out below us and piled high above. ‘Where are we headed?’
‘Towards whatever’s next.’ He lifts his eyes to the heavens with sarcastic solemnity, then grins. ‘You’re going to help me get there, and I’m going to help you.’
I feel my guts twist as the plane surges and drops on erratic air currents. ‘Why would you help me? I’m the reason you’re dead.’
‘Come on, R, don’t you get this yet?’ He seems upset by my question. He locks eyes on me and there’s a feverish intensity in them. ‘You and I are victims of the same disease. We’re fighting the same war, just different battles in different theatres, and it’s way too late for me to hate you for anything, because we’re the same damn thing. My soul, your conscience, whatever’s left of me woven into whatever’s left of you, all tangled up and conjoined.’ He gives me a hearty clap on the shoulder that almost hurts. ‘We’re in this together, corpse.’
A low tremor rumbles through the plane. The control stick wobbles in front of Perry, but he ignores it. I don’t know what to say, so I just say, ‘Okay.’
He nods. ‘Okay.’
Another faint vibration in the floor, like the concussions of distant bombs.
‘So,’ he says. ‘God has made us study partners. We need to talk about our project.’ He takes a deep breath and looks at me, tapping his chin. ‘I’ve been hearing a lot of inspirational thoughts prancing around in our head lately. But I’m not sure you really understand the storm we’re flying into.’
A few red lights blink on in the cabin. There is a scraping noise somewhere outside the plane.
‘What am I missing?’ I ask.
‘How about a strategy? We’re wandering around this city like a kitten in a dog kennel. You keep talking about changing the world, but you’re sitting here licking your paws while all the pit bulls circle in on us. What’s the plan, pussycat?’
Outside, the cotton clouds darken to steel wool. The lights flicker, and my souvenir stacks rattle.
‘I don’t… have one yet.’
‘So when? You know things are moving. You’re changing, your fellow Dead are changing, the world is ready for something miraculous. What are we waiting for?’
The plane shudders and begins to dive. I stumble into the co-pilot chair, feeling my stomach rise into my throat. ‘I’m not waiting. I’m doing it right now.’
‘Doing what? What are you doing?’
‘I’m trying.’ I hold Perry’s gaze and grip the sides of my seat as the plane shakes and groans. ‘I’m wanting it. I’m making myself care.’
Perry’s eyes narrow and his lips tighten, but he doesn’t say anything.
‘That’s step one, isn’t it?’ I yell over the noise of wind and roaring engines. ‘That’s where it has to start.’
The plane lurches and my souvenir stacks collapse, scattering paintings, movies, dishes, dolls and love notes all over the cabin. More lights flare in the cockpit, and a voice crackles on the radio.
R? Helloooo? Are you okay?
Perry’s face has gone cold, all playfulness gone. ‘Bad stuff is coming, R. Some of it’s waiting for you right outside this graveyard. You’re right, wanting change is step one, but step two is taking it. When the flood comes, I don’t want to see you dreaming your way through it. You’ve got my little girl with you now.’
Okay, you’re creeping me out. Wake up!
‘I know I didn’t deserve her,’ Perry says, his quiet murmur somehow rising above the noise. ‘She offered me everything and I pissed on it. So now it’s your turn, R. Go keep her safe. She’s a lot softer than she seems.’
God damn it, you asshole! Wake up or I’ll fucking shoot you!
I nod. Perry nods. Then he turns to face the window and folds his arms across his chest while the controls shake wildly. The storm clouds peel apart and we are diving to Earth, hurtling directly towards the Stadium, and there they are, the infamous R and J, sitting on a blanket on the rain-soaked roof. R looks up and sees us, his eyes open wide just as we—
My eyes open wide and I blink reality into focus. I am standing in front of a small grave in an amateur cemetery. Julie’s hand is on my shoulder.
‘Are you back?’ she asks. ‘What the hell was that about?’
I clear my throat and look around. ‘Sorry. Daydreaming.’
‘God, you’re weird. Come on, I don’t want to be here any more.’ She strides briskly towards the exit.
Nora and I follow her. Nora keeps pace with me, eyeing me sideways. ‘Daydreaming?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘You were talking to yourself a little.’
I look at her.
‘Some pretty big words, too. I think I heard “miraculous”.’
I shrug.
The waterfall noise of the city rushes into our ears as the guards open the doors and we step back into the Stadium proper. The doors have barely slammed shut behind us when I feel that baby kick in my stomach again. A voice whispers, Here it comes, R. Are you ready?
‘Oh, this is lovely,’ Julie says under her breath.
There he is, marching around the street corner in front of us: Julie’s dad, General Grigio. He strides directly towards us, flanked on each side by an officer of some kind, although none of them wear traditional military attire. Their uniforms are light grey shirts and work pants, no decorations or rank insignias, just pockets and tool loops and laminated ID badges. High-calibre side arms gleam softly in their belt holsters.
‘Be cool, R,’ Julie whispers. ‘Don’t say anything, just, um… pretend you’re shy.’
‘Julie!’ the general calls out from an awkward distance.
‘Hi, Dad,’ Julie says.
He and his retinue stop in front of us. He gives Julie’s shoulder a quick squeeze. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine. Just went to see Mom.’
His jaw muscle twitches, but he doesn’t respond. He looks at Nora, gives her a nod, then looks at me. He looks at me very hard. He pulls out a walkie-talkie. ‘Ted. The individual who slipped past you yesterday. You said it was a young man in a red tie? Tall, thin, poorly complected?’
‘Dad,’ Julie says.
The walkie squawks. The general puts it away and pulls a pair of thumb cuffs from his belt. ‘You are detained for unauthorised entry,’ he recites. ‘You will be held in—’
‘Jesus Christ, Dad.’ Julie steps forward to push his hands away. ‘What is wrong with you? He’s not an intruder, he’s visiting from Goldman Dome. And he almost died on the way here so cut him some slack on the legalities, will you?’
‘Who is he?’ the general demands.
Julie edges in front of me as if to block me from responding. ‘His name is… Archie — it was Archie, right?’ She glances at me and I nod. ‘He’s Nora’s new boyfriend. I just met him today.’
Nora grins and squeezes my arm. ‘Can you believe what a nice dresser he is? I didn’t think guys knew how to wear a tie any more.’
The general hesitates, then puts the cuffs away and forces a thin smile. ‘Pleased to meet you, Archie. You’re aware of course that if you want to stay any longer than three days you’ll need to register with our immigration officer.’
I nod and try to avoid eye contact, but
I can’t seem to look away from his face. Although that tense dinner I witnessed in my visions couldn’t have been more than a few years ago, he looks a decade older. His skin is thin and papery. His cheek-bones protrude. His veins are green in his forehead.
One of the officers with him clears his throat. ‘So sorry to hear about Perry, Miss Cabernet. We’ll miss him very much.’ Colonel Rosso is older than Grigio but has aged more gracefully. He is short and thick, with strong arms and a muscular chest above the inevitable old-man paunch. His thin hair is wispy and white, blue eyes big and watery behind thick glasses. Julie gives him a smile that seems genuine.
‘Thanks, Rosy. So will I.’
Their exchange sounds proper but rings false, as if paddling above deep undercurrents. I suspect they have already shared a less professional moment of grief somewhere away from Grigio’s officious gaze. ‘We appreciate your condolences, Colonel Rosso,’ he says. ‘However, I’ll thank you not replace our surname when addressing my daughter, whatever such “revisions” she may have embraced.’
The older man straightens. ‘Apologies, sir. I meant nothing by it.’
‘It’s just a nickname,’ Nora says. ‘Me and Perry thought she was more of a Cab than a…’
She trails off under Grigio’s stare. He pans slowly over to me. I avoid eye contact until he dismisses me. ‘We have to be going,’ he says to no one in particular. ‘Good to meet you, Archie. Julie, I’ll be in meetings all night tonight and then heading over to Goldman in the morning to discuss the merger. I expect to be back at the house in a few days.’
Julie nods. Without another word, the general and his men depart. Julie examines the ground, seeming far away. After a moment, Nora breaks the silence. ‘Well, that was scary.’
‘Let’s go to the Orchard,’ Julie mutters. ‘I need a drink.’
I’m still looking down the street, watching her father shrink into the distance. Just before rounding a corner he glances back at me, and my skin prickles. Will Perry’s flood be of water, gentle and cleansing, or will it be a flood of a different kind? I feel movement under my feet. A faint vibration, as if the bones of every man and woman ever buried are rattling deep in the earth. Cracking the bedrock. Stirring the magma.
The Orchard, as it turns out, is not part of the Stadium’s farming system. It’s their one and only pub, or at least the closest thing they have to a pub in this new bastion of prohibition. Reaching its entrance requires an arduous vertical journey through the Stadium’s Escheresque cityscape. First, we climb four flights of stairs in a ramshackle housing tower while the residents glare at us through their cracked apartment doors. This is followed by a vertiginous crossing to a neighbouring building — boys on the ground try to look up Nora’s skirt as we wobble over a wire-mesh catwalk strung between the towers’ support cables. Once inside the other building, we plod up three more flights of stairs before finally emerging onto a breezy patio high above the streets. The noise of crowds rumbles through the door at the other end: a wide slab of oak painted with a yellow tree.
The place is packed, but the mood is eerily subdued. No shouting, no high-fiving, no woozy requests for phone numbers. Despite the speakeasy secrecy of its obscure location, the Orchard doesn’t serve alcohol.
‘I ask you,’ Julie says as we push our way through the well-behaved crowds, ‘is there anything sillier than a bunch of ex-Marines and construction workers drowning their sorrows at a fucking juice bar? At least it’s flask-friendly.’
The Orchard is the first building I’ve seen in this city with some trace of character. All the usual drinking accoutrements are here: dart boards, pool tables, flatscreen TVs with football games. At first I’m amazed to see these broadcasts — does entertainment still exist? Are there still people out there engaging in frivolity despite the times? But then, ten minutes into the third quarter, the images warp like VHS tape and switch to a different game, the teams and scores changing in the middle of a tackle. Five minutes later they switch again, with just a quick stutter to mark the splice. None of the sports fans seem to notice. They watch these abbreviated, eternally looping contests with blank eyes and sip their drinks like players in an historical reenactment.
A few of the patrons notice me staring at them and I look away. But then I look back. Something about this scene is burrowing into my mind. A thought is developing like a ghost on a Polaroid.
‘Three grapefruits,’ Julie tells the bartender, who looks vaguely embarrassed as he prepares the drinks. We settle in on bar stools and the two girls start talking. The music of their voices replaces the jangling classic rock on the jukebox, but then even this fades to a muffled drone. I’m staring at the TVs. I’m staring at the people. I can see the outline of their bones under their muscles. The edges of joints poking up under tight skin. I see their skeletons, and the idea taking shape in my head is something I hadn’t expected: a blueprint of the Boneys. A glimpse into the their twisted, dried-up minds.
The universe is compressing. All memory and all possibility squeezing down to the smallest of points as the last of their flesh falls away. To exist in that singularity, trapped in one static state for eternity — this is the Boneys’ world. They are dead-eyed ID photos, frozen at the precise moment they gave up their humanity. That hopeless instant when they snipped the last thread and dropped into the abyss. Now there’s nothing left. No thought, no feeling, no past, no future. Nothing exists but the desperate need to keep things as they are, as they always have been. They must stay on the rails of their loop or be overwhelmed, set ablaze and consumed by the colours, the sounds, the wide-open sky.
And so the thought hums in my head, whispering through my nerves like voices through phone lines: what if we could derail them? We’ve already disrupted their structure enough to incite a blind rage. What if we could create a change so deep, so new and astonishing, they would simply break? Surrender? Crumble into dust and ride out of town on the wind?
‘R,’ Julie says, poking me in the arm. ‘Where are you? Daydreaming again?’
I smile and shrug. Once again my vocabulary fails me. I’m going to need to find a way to let her into my head soon. Whatever this thing is I’m trying to do, I know it can’t be done alone.
The bartender returns with our drinks. Julie grins at me and Nora as we appraise the three tumblers of pale yellow nectar. ‘Remember how when we were kids, pure grapefruit juice was the tough-guy drink? Like the whiskey of kiddie beverages?’
‘Right,’ Nora laughs. ‘Apple juice, Capri Sun, that stuff was for bitches.’
Julie raises her glass. ‘To our new friend Archie.’
I lift my glass an inch off the bar and the girls clang theirs down against it. We drink. I don’t exactly taste it, but the juice stings my mouth, finding its way into old cuts in my cheeks, bites I don’t remember biting.
Julie orders another round, and when it arrives she hefts her messenger bag onto her shoulder and picks up all three glasses. She leans in close and gives me and Nora a wink. ‘Be right back.’ With the drinks in hand, she disappears into the bathroom.
‘What’s… she doing?’ I ask Nora.
‘Dunno. Stealing our drinks?’
We sit there in awkward silence, third-party friends lacking the connective tissue of Julie’s presence. After a few minutes, Nora leans in and lowers her voice. ‘You know why she said you were my boyfriend, right?’
I shrug one shoulder. ‘Sure.’
‘It didn’t mean anything, she was just trying to deflect attention away from you. If she said you were her boyfriend, or her friend, or anything to do with her, Grigio would’ve grilled the fuck out of you. And obviously if he really looks at you… the make-up’s not perfect.’
‘I under… stand.’
‘And by the way, just so you know? That was a pretty big deal that she took you to see her mom today.’
I raise my eyebrows.
‘She doesn’t tell people that stuff, ever. She didn’t even tell Perry the whole story for like three years. I
can’t say exactly what that means for her, but… it’s new.’
I study the bar top, embarrassed. A strangely fond smile spreads across Nora’s face. ‘You know you remind me a little of Perry?’
I tense. I begin to feel the hot remorse boiling up in my throat again.
‘I don’t know what it is, I mean, you’re sure not the blowhard he was, but you have some of that same… sparkle he had when he was younger.’
I should stitch my mouth shut. Honesty is a compulsion that’s damned me more than once. But I just can’t hold it in any more. The words build and explode out of me like an uncontainable sneeze. ‘I killed him. Ate… his brain.’
Nora purses her lips and nods slowly. ‘Yeah… I thought you might have.’
My face goes blank. ‘What?’
‘I didn’t see it happen but I’ve been putting two and two together. It makes sense.’
I look at her, stunned. ‘Julie… knows?’
‘I don’t think so. But if she did, I’m pretty sure she’d be okay.’ She touches my hand where it rests on the bar. ‘You could tell her, R. I think she’d forgive you.’
‘Why?’
‘Same reason I forgive you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it wasn’t you. It was the plague.’
I wait for more. She watches the TV above the bar, pale green light flickering over her dark face. ‘Did Julie ever tell you about when Perry cheated on her with that orphan girl?’
I hesitate, then nod.
‘Yeah, well… that was me.’
My eyes dart towards the bathroom, but Nora doesn’t seem to be hiding anything. ‘I’d only been here a week,’ she says. ‘Didn’t know Julie yet. That’s how I met her, actually. I fucked her boyfriend, and she hated me, and then time passed and a lot happened, and somehow we came out the other side as friends. Crazy, right?’ She upends her glass over her tongue to catch the last drops, then pushes it aside. ‘What I’m trying to say is, it’s a shitty world and shit happens, but we don’t have to bathe in shit. Sixteen years old, R — my meth-head parents dumped me in the middle of a Dead-infested slum because they couldn’t feed me any more. I wandered on my own for years before I found Citi Stadium, and I don’t have enough fingers to count all the times I almost died.’ She holds up her left hand and wiggles the half-gone finger like a bride-to-be showing off her diamond. ‘What I’m saying is, when you have weight like that in your life, you have to start looking for the bigger picture or you are gonna sink.’