The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  “Right,” Philip said. “That’s what I’m saying. They forget.”

  “It’s not just that they forget,” Marie said. “I think they must be unable to think straight. Even when they had the remotes, way back, those remotes that were supposed to work to bring people back, even then nobody did.”

  “How do you know so much?” Donnie said, then coughed viciously into his gardening glove.

  “I don’t know anything!” Marie’s shout boomeranged back to her, hard and cruel. Rosa put a hand on her shoulder, and she shrugged it off. “But just think about it. Anyway, it’s very risky. And so is leaving town. We don’t know what’s out there, and I think we have a really good thing here. There’s lots of us, and Bonita and Steve and Mo have done so much on the greenhouses, and we know our way around. I don’t see why we need to leave.”

  “Then we’re stuck at the same impasse. What is the point? There’s got to be something better out there!” Philip said. He paced, shaking his head. “So it’s up to me. I’ll go. It’s gotta be me.”

  It wasn’t clear to Marie whether he meant he’d go to Virginia or into the port. He stood there, his eyes big and panicked, like a trapped animal.

  “I don’t think anybody should go,” Marie said, lowering her voice. Sweat trailed slowly down her chest and back. “We need to just stay put. Wait awhile.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “At least we should find out who painted the S.”

  But what she really wanted was for every day to stay the same. To open the store, take her photo, drink her one instant coffee out of a tall white cup. Bicycle through the empty city. Congregate here at the church. She had to stay. Otherwise the world hadn’t meant anything. It had been nothing but a circus, now all folded up and gone.

  Philip stepped inside the port.

  Instantly, Steve and Mo raced up the aisle and onto the stage. They pulled Philip out with difficulty, as though the port had its own gravity. They heaved him out by his armpits and waist as they would a drowning man and zipped the thing back up. Mo tried to kick it over, but it was stronger and less pliable than it appeared and did not budge.

  Marie got out of her seat and made her way to the chancel. Philip had psyched himself up to jump off a cliff; now, pinned down, his breathing was huge and fast. “I don’t know if I can take it anymore. I want to go out there. I want to see if there’s anyone else. A scientist. Anyone.”

  “Why?” Mo was pushing moist hair back from Philip’s face.

  “I just need to know. I need to know.” Philip was crying now. “There’s no future anymore. I need to know this isn’t it. I need life to be more than this.”

  Mo was shushing him as a mother would a child. He pulled Philip closer so that his head was lying in Mo’s lap. “You don’t want to go out there, man.”

  “But—”

  “It’s okay. It’s all right.”

  The church filled with the smell of melting wax. Marie felt an itch like guilt, its source inaccessible. The others began making their way to Philip’s side, proceeding in lines up the aisles.

  “If this were a movie, some of the doctors and scientists would have stayed,” Philip said. “We’d have a proper cross-section. We need someone with some expertise.”

  “Let’s just get ourselves sorted out, Phil,” Bonita said. “It might be a good plan to go. Maybe it’s a good plan. We’re not saying don’t go. But I think we need to figure out our next move together.”

  “Let’s eat,” Steve said, turning away from Philip. He tried to lead the others outside. They shrugged, nodded, shook their heads, but slowly a consensus took hold of them. The smell of cooking meat had been wafting in for a few minutes now, and hunger was everything. Soon most of the others followed Steve down toward the garage where venison was being barbecued and smoked by Regina.

  Marie waited on the stage with Philip and Mo. Philip was sitting up now, leaning over his bent knees.

  The port loomed out of the space behind her, a giant pointed finger. Where the light caught it, it dazzled. Marie held her breath and tried to listen. The humming, the low electric buzz seemed to change gears. It, too, seemed to be catching its breath.

  “Maybe we broke it,” Marie said. She scanned the sanctuary out of long habit, searching for an on-off switch she might toggle. “How are these things still running,” she said.

  She was careful not to put her back to the port and its uneven buzzing. The sound was too much like human breathing. Her skin crawled. She picked up one of the business cards Philip had left piled on the pulpit.

  On each, he had written: You are not at home here. Remember port and the place you come from. Come back, come back.

  Chapter

  3

  THE DREAMERS

  Long before most of the world had drifted away in lifeboats, long before port was anything more than a theory of Albrecht Doors, Marie and Jason had been newly married and living in romantic squalor. Just downtown and near the church where Philip now held sway, their apartment on Caroline was partitioned within a larger building that had once been called Home for the Friendless. The ceilings were high, and next to their working refrigerator was an icebox that might have worked, too, if they’d known what to do with it. The claw-foot tub in the bathroom was stained grey where it wasn’t chipped to reveal charcoal-hued metal underneath. Its late-addition shower nozzle always pointed in a direction that invited mould into the crevices where no mop could reach. From outside, the red brick building was stately as a manor. For awhile Marie believed that her artistic fantasies of a place like this had been so strong, she had conjured it.

  Both Marie and Jason were still students, and most of the time when they were home they walked around half dressed. Marie kept her fingernails short, and always had blue and black stains on her finger pads. She had set up folding tables in the living room where she listened to singer-songwriters or riot grrrls as she made her prints and hung them along the many rows of twine stretched across every wall; these served as the apartment’s only decorations. Romance had confused her. She had believed in the saddest Leonard Cohen songs, that a song was enough, that art was enough. She would sing along, pulling a squeegee through a silkscreen frame. At regular intervals, Jason would poke his head out of the second bedroom—his office—to admire her in her paint-stained shorts, her thin bra. To make more coffee, he unplugged the refrigerator. Otherwise the fuse would blow.

  They’d had a registry at Sears for their wedding guests, at her mother’s insistence, but had no idea what stuff they needed to build a life together. “Building a life together” was the kind of phrase used by the sort of people who liked to have a set of good china. Marie and Jason had approached the registry at Sears with the same whimsy with which they treated the marriage itself, wandering around, scanning things at random. Jason held up an electric mixer: “I guess we need one of these?” Everything he said seduced her. So they had a workbench without tools in the living room, which they used as a counter for their appliances, because there was only one outlet in the kitchen.

  In his white T-shirt, thin enough to show his nipples, and his white boxers, Jason stood with two mugs of weak coffee and watched her work. “I like that one. What is it?”

  “It’s the view of Montreal from the room where we stayed,” she said, clipping it up and leaning against the couch. He handed her a coffee. “But it’s in negative,” she said. “All the shadows are inverted.”

  “Everywhere you turn there’s an inversion,” he said, pausing to drink. “I think I need to switch to Philosophy.”

  Marie was accustomed to his non sequitors. “Can you just switch to a different PhD?” she asked.

  If Marie could now go anywhere that she imagined, as PINA had promised, it would be to that apartment, to those thousand perfect days she and Jason had together. She would lie on the couch and bask in that time. He’d been very nearly a boy then, and if she ever met his new wife, the horribly named Maria—as though an imprecise doppelgänger of herself—
she would lord those days over her unrepentantly. I knew him when the world was going to be ours, I knew him when he was ageless and sweet, I knew him when everything was perfect.

  In the afternoons, no matter what the weather, they’d go for walks in the neighbourhood and fantasize about the future. The same walk under an umbrella, the same walk with flakes of snow catching on their hoods. A sign of the uniqueness of their love, a sign that it wouldn’t go ugly or stale the way everyone else’s did, was that they never tired of each other. Presence made the heart grow as fond as absence did. The rest of the world shimmered around the edges of the clam they’d shut themselves into. It was love, as though they’d invented it, and the fact that so many artists had felt this sort of thing before did not puncture Marie’s unlucky certainty.

  Jason had liked to walk toward the escarpment where the mansions were, where single houses were bigger than the twenty-apartment Home for the Friendless, and pointed at them like Satan to Jesus: All of this could be yours. He’d say to Marie, I’ll be the philosopher, and you’ll be the artist, and our babies will have picnics there, out on the lawn. On the way home, they would stop at the corner store, where they bought all their fuses, and for dinner they ate whatever was available: lunchmeats or pickles, ice cream cones or bowls of cereal. Some of those boxes of cereal had come infested with brown flour-moths, and these flew around their pantry, leaving grey dust on Marie’s fingers when she killed one.

  She’d thought he was a visionary; she didn’t know that he really did want wealth and fame, that he wanted children who’d play on an expansive lawn. Maybe she should have understood that he was driven, that he had the focus required of ambition, by the way he scooped up grants and scholarships, by the way his professors spoke about him, by the careful way he chose words, even by the way he took out library books only one at a time. He did a thing well, and then he did another thing well. He was so unlike her. His charisma was a line that ran up and down his body, holding it still and symmetric. She was the sort of person who took twenty books out of the library at a time and only got through a single one, who bounced between sentences and ideas the way she bounced between art projects.

  She’d fallen for him when he was a patron at the public library where she worked the desk part time, and he would take out a book from the 100s section, about aliens creating the world, or ancient reptile overlords, or interplanetary conspiracies. He was too handsome for such nerdy subject matter, with eyes beautiful because they seemed intelligent and calm, and when he got through all of the books in the 130s, he started reading Dostoevsky. She came to anticipate his arrival at the circulation desk, where he would return his book from the week before, and take out the next one. Week after week, she watched him, his face seemingly both unconscious of being watched and deeply controlled. Unlike most patrons, who wanted to engage her in long discussions, and told her random things that came into their minds, like why they named their children after Greek goddesses or the awful temperature of their apartments, like why the library should not stock this thing or this other thing, Jason didn’t speak to her at all. Their transaction did not require it. She longed for him to have an overdue charge or any kind of message she could use to speak to him. He’s beautiful, she told her friends—the very friends she stopped seeing later, in her obsession with him. And I think he might be even smarter than me. This was her schtick: ironic self-aggrandizement that had worked to attract men to her before, that always made her girlfriends laugh. But what could she say to Jason? She took his plastic card to scan the barcode, and after he left with the single book in his hand, no receipt necessary, symbol of a clean life, she read over his file and tapped his name into the PINA search bar. She knew his phone number and address near the university, where she then made a habit of walking more often to increase the odds of running into him. She knew that he was a star student, a scientist, and that he did not have a social media account at all.

  “Do you believe in all this stuff?” she said at last one day, her curiosity and her desire indistinguishable, two waves that refused to break.

  “What stuff?” he said. He was not in a hurry, and there was no one behind him in line.

  She looked down at the book he was returning. A paperback it was amazing that they hadn’t weeded, binding broken and taped and retaped, yellowing pages. Seventies-style font and a grainy photo with a white saucer in a black sky. The story of a Tennessee couple who had been victims of alien abduction. “In aliens?”

  “Don’t you?” he said.

  “In aliens?” she said. “In alien abductions?”

  He watched her with indifference bordering on impatience, or so it felt. It turned out later that he’d been as attracted to her as she was to him, an improbable ending, a fantastical conclusion to the story of her desperation.

  “Agnosticism is healthy,” he said. “I feel the same way. But the stories are interesting: either for what they tell us about psychology or about the universe.”

  A week later he wandered into fiction, his first foray. She left the desk and approached him in the stacks. He was contemplating a ratty copy of Notes from the Underground. Soon he would read War and Peace, and The Brothers Karamazov, and all of the Russians one week at a time, and she felt that she was going to ruin his life of clean, careful choices. “Jason,” she said to him, standing there in the stacks. She moved as close to him as she could, because he was too slow and she knew how to be fast. “I’m Marie.”

  “I know.”

  “Can I take you out for a drink some time?” she said.

  On their first date he talked about the evolution of flirtation, and about whether flirtation could be taught to a robot, and he argued that it could, precisely because humans were so responsive to flattery and interest. Marie understood that this was a method of flirting, too, and she told him about the world of art, she told him how she made an effort to go to new galleries without planning what she would think or see beforehand, to avoid placards or leaflets, to avoid all the famous paintings, and to stand in front of a painting to discover what she would feel. Sometimes a painting would disturb her—she had used the word disquiet, she remembered now, because this sort of attraction woke up your dormant language and gave you new words—and it would turn out to have been painted by a person who’d lived in a lunatic asylum in Nazi Germany, perhaps Poland. But, she told Jason, she also liked to see up close a glob of paint, a clear paint-stroke on a famous painting, the proof that Van Gogh had been as near to that same canvas she was now. She liked, too, what Rothko tried to do with colours, an obliteration of narrative and language and thought, the attempt to approach something deeper than feeling. Blabbering, drunk, she had smiled into his face and said, “I think you like robots and aliens, and I like humans, and…”

  And he touched her arm, her hand. She felt the calculus in his touch.

  “I like humans too,” he said.

  When she and Jason weren’t walking along the road with mansions, they were driving to the outskirts of the city, toward its orchards and greenhouse-dotted expanses. They would leave their dirty dishes in the sink, forget to plug the fridge back in, and climb into the old Nissan, with its broken speedometer, that his father had given them. Jason would already have packed the car with a thermos of hot chocolate and a flask of bourbon, and the binoculars would shudder lightly on the blanket in the trunk while he drove through the city, oblivious to his speed. On these drives, Marie would push a cassette into the car’s player. The library had been throwing away cassette tapes in heaps. They didn’t waste time trying to donate or sell them, and since Marie had been tasked with inking out the barcodes and deleting their records from the catalogue, she didn’t see the harm in sometimes tossing them into her purse instead. She had purloined Cat Stevens and the Beatles, but also George Michael and Michael Jackson. Christmas songs and books on tape—self-help and Agatha Christie and spiritual encouragement—were piled in their tiny reels in their little plastic cases on the back seat.

  Their rit
ual became a deep groove. She believed that he’d never done these drives with any other woman. She was the only one who wouldn’t laugh at him for hoping to see a UFO, to see something strange in the sky.

  Each night was like the others. They parked in a church lot. The dome of the world invisibly held them; the atmosphere was a window through which they could see all of the universe’s possibilities. She had felt as if she was a child under that dome—and this was what she’d lord over that wealthy Maria if she ever met the woman. (Bitterly, secretly, Marie called the new wife “Ave Maria,” rolled the r in Marr-rr-ea until it barely resembled Marie.) We lay on a blanket together, and we believed. Mostly it had been quiet. The occasional struggle of car tires against gravel, and once in awhile, the whooting of a train. Sometimes she was silent, and lay there having sensations, seeing on the inside of her eyelids constellations that mimicked the ones out there. Jason had told her he didn’t believe that silences were awkward, and even now she would not have added a single word, would not have wanted another person. In those days it had been true that anything was possible.

  “A thing in the future determines what happens in the past,” he told her, putting his hand on her navel, leaning in to kiss her. “And not the other way around.”

  “Is that right?” she said. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “We don’t know all that much about time’s direction, only that we perceive it to be linear,” he said.

  He had told her already, and so did not repeat, how the universe holds billions of stars, billions of star systems like their own, and so must house many other Earth-like planets with beings like themselves. He found this consoling. And she had believed, as she lay there, that she in turn wanted his clean lines and logic, his calm, his sparse belongings. She had believed she truly wanted there to be less of everything, and also that he wanted what he saw in her: more company, more words, more versions, more ideas. She had believed that he was starving and that he was lonely for more.