The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  “It’s a bitch to heat, that’s for sure,” Salt Peter’s husband said to a small group who toured behind him. He was a shirtless man buffed to a shine. Marie, carrying a glass of wine procured from a full-service bar in the front room, followed the husband along with a couple she’d never met, both of them agelessly shining with plastic-surgery. The house boomed with music that sometimes lowered to breathy voices.

  “Do you like this music?” their host said on the winding oak staircase.

  “Sure,” she said. It was some kind of electronica mixed with sound effects (moaning, whispers, a scream).

  He nodded, approving.

  “You produced this one?” said the man next to Marie.

  Their host nodded again.

  “If I’d known that an artistic career could buy all this,” Marie said, gazing at the many chandeliers she could only assume were tasteful. Around the corner were more people she recognized only vaguely draped on leather chaises and sofas, vaping fragrantly.

  “What do you do?” the woman inquired.

  “I own the art store,” she said.

  “The art store,” said the woman. “You mean the one with the gold star?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, but we don’t live here,” the woman said. The “oh” seemed to be a disavowal: don’t think we’re like you. Her lipstick was wine-dark, her eyes heavy with liner. “Salt P. is trying to convince us that this is the place to be.”

  “I used to live near here,” Marie said. “It’s a beautiful neighbourhood.”

  “Seems like you can get a big old Victorian for barely a nickel,” the man said.

  “Seems like it.”

  “Where do you live now?”

  “I have an apartment above my shop,” she said.

  Their host had by now left them standing alone in the cavernous upper room. Smoke wafted around them.

  “The city doesn’t seem to smell as badly as it once did,” the man said.

  “I guess because it’s not a steeltown anymore,” Marie said. “They shut one of the factories down. There were a lot of layoffs. And the other one got bought out by an American company. More layoffs.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it has hurt anybody,” the woman said. “Still a bit depressed downtown, from what I hear, but things are improving, right?”

  Marie stared at her. “I’m not sure about that,” she said, thinking of the teenage mothers and young fathers and the tweakers and otherwise bedraggled men and women she saw down there every day. “The bars are nicer now.”

  “You grew up here?” said the woman, whose name Marie would never know, because the man was tugging on her sleeve. “You’ll have to excuse us,” she said, then. “We want to do a few lines. You could join us…?”

  But Marie declined and headed back downstairs, where Salt Peter was pacing in a large room with paintings hung top to bottom of each wall, salon-style. Most of the paintings resembled Caravaggios, realism plus dark emotion, realism plus pain; they were unlike the paintings Salt Peter himself did, which roared with energetic paint strokes, which lacked all control. His hair was long and greasy, in the manner of the homeless, in the manner of grunge, the counterpoint to his beautiful husband, whose hair was neatly pompadoured.

  Salt Peter called everyone to join him in the living room, where he pronounced that the Internet age was over. His husband came around with a glass of wine, handed it to Salt Peter, and stood back as Salt Peter climbed, glass in hand, onto the back of the leather couch.

  “It’s time to enter a new era!” he said. “And one of you will come with me!”

  He climbed down, still balancing his own glass, a tightrope stuntman from a silent film, and took a woman Marie knew, Larissa, by the hand and did a little dance with her. She was dressed in skirt and corseted blouse, like a bar wench, and Salt Peter twirled and dipped her and kissed her hand.

  Marie stood with her arms over her chest, wineglass in hand, frowning. Behind the couch the port had been standing all this time. Though she’d heard Salt Peter owned one, she hadn’t really believed they existed—not until she saw it shimmering there. She had only ever seen them on screens.

  “A new era!” Salt Peter said, laughing loudly.

  The port was already open. Marie could perceive its tall slit hovering in space.

  Salt Peter turned Larissa around three times and then shoved her into the thing. He went in after her, pulling the flaps closed with a zipper so small it was like a knife’s slit through an amniotic sac. A roaring white noise she hadn’t registered was silenced.

  “How does it work?” Larissa’s shouting voice was muffled. She and Salt Peter were still wavering, visible as objects viewed through still water.

  “It knows your thoughts, sweetheart! It works Dorothy-style.”

  “Dorothy-style?”

  “You click your heels three times.”

  She must have tried to click her heels, for Salt Peter said, “Not literally!” and laughed, big and loud, and then: nothing. All was silent; they were gone.

  The husband lurched toward the port.

  Marie realized she had stopped breathing. She began unconsciously fanning herself with one hand.

  “This is getting out of control,” someone whispered.

  Then Marie began to choke, gurgling; she ran to a bathroom to throw up. She looked at her thin face in the mirror, ripped out her huge gold earrings and gulped water from the tap. She turned the light switch on and then off, on and off. Watched her face disappear in the mirror, then reappear, disappear, reappear.

  When she returned to the party, people stood around as if at a performance, waiting to know what their expected response was in order to deliver it. The port was, in its emptiness, a gleaming mirage. Salt Peter’s husband was standing next to an old record player, sobbing into his hands. Another man had come to stand with him, was rubbing his shoulders as he cried. “He said they can come back,” the husband said. “They can come back, right?”

  “Of course they can. He hasn’t left you. You just had too much to drink. Come on,” said the friend, leading the way toward the bar, toward the people there.

  The husband looked up and directly at Marie. “It doesn’t feel right, though. Does it feel right to you?”

  * * *

  —

  Economists and other experts appeared on TV and radio shows to predict enormous shifts in population. “Chances are, if you don’t have a port, you know someone who does,” said a prominent techno-statistician, before she became unavailable to be interviewed, as did her replacements, one by one. The airwaves teemed with reruns, the news channels recycled the same information again and again. The New York Times filled the Sunday paper with investigative reports, photos of abandoned buildings and stories of lost employees, charts predicting collapse. The numbers were reminiscent of predictions about climate change; if we go over this threshold, flooding and refugees. If we go over this threshold, catastrophe. So, said the Times, here’s what will happen if we lose 5 percent of our population…here’s what will happen if we lose 10 percent, and so on. By the time this report came out, the worldwide loss was estimated at 10.8 percent.

  “Why isn’t anyone coming back?” a reporter asked Albrecht Doors.

  Doors smiled into the camera. “Because they don’t want to come back.”

  “Why would anyone believe the CEO of a company about their own product?” Marie asked Leroy, a sculptor who came into the shop every day. He’d been at Salt Peter’s party, too, had seen Salt Peter and Larissa disappear.

  “People are easily fooled,” Leroy said. “That’s, like, the deepest truth about human beings. Plus, they never know it. You can invent a religion and wave your arms and say, ‘Hi, I’m creating this religion to make enormous sums of money,’ and you end up with thousands of devotees. You can tell your people to murder people and also that they won’t have to be murderers, and they’ll go around with machine guns, doing as they’re told.”

  “Yeah,” Marie said absentm
indedly, hitting the keys on her 1980s vintage register, which whirred and dinged like a child’s toy. “Only $8.50 today,” she said. “You still working on the miniatures?”

  “But imagine,” Leroy said, looking past her and into the street framed in the window. “What if you could go to a place and time where, say, things hadn’t been monetized yet. Meaning, like, pre-money. A place where your wealth was measured out in goats.”

  “Tempting,” Marie said, thinking Leroy must be making a joke about the heavy bag of change he was handing her.

  But that was the last time she saw Leroy, who could never have afforded his own port. Maybe he had gone into Salt Peter’s house to use his, which is what Marie had already decided she would do if the catastrophic conditions predicted by the Times—starvation, violence, random explosions from unattended chemical plants, some other country invading—should come to pass.

  Another month passed; still she had not heard from Jason. Finally she drove around the lake to Jason’s new home. Stood knocking and ringing at his door, then sat for an hour on the front porch of the Edwardian he shared with his Maria. How old was his boy? The child must be five already—proof that Marie’s life with Jason, like Jason himself, had disappeared. The family he had now was so intact and beautiful, it was like he’d found them clamshelled in plastic at a store. She sat for hours on the porch that might have been hers, until the sun began to set and she saw with creeping awareness that the streets were too still. When a person did pass by, they were distracted, lost in thought. People who weren’t leaving were holing up. Those who remained on the streets were madmen, muttering to themselves.

  That day she had gone to Jason’s house, Marie had wrestled a window open in the back and pulled her body through its crack. He had left no message for her. A stack of mail sat in a tidy pile on the kitchen table, and the dishes in the rack were long dry. A pile of apples was rotting in a basket on the counter, smelling of vinegar, so thick with fruit flies that they were like rising ash. An inert PINAphone sat on the counter, a dead PINA laptop on the table. A barely humming sound came from the port—inconspicuous in the living room behind a leather armchair. Fucking bourgeoisie. She resisted the urge to put knife wounds into the thick hides of canvas paintings of bird’s-eye Venice, and Rome and the Toronto skyline. She thought of Salt Peter, of his sobbing husband. They can come back, right?

  She left a note for Jason on the table and another on each door. I’m at the store. Come say hello.

  She could not bear to write the word please.

  Chapter

  4

  THE NEIGHBOURS

  Marie cornered Rosa outside while everyone except the few strict vegetarians ate the juicy, amazingly fresh meat. Even the few aging hippies and longtime vegans ate some celebratory softened apples from their stash.

  People came up to Marie with tears in their eyes—as though by killing the deer, she’d healed their firstborns. “I guess I need to go hunting more often,” she said to Rosa.

  “If it’s admiration you’re after,” Rosa said, a slight edge in her voice. Mo was standing next to her.

  “Excuse me?” Marie said. “I think we could all stand to learn how to hunt.”

  Rosa squeezed her lips together impatiently.

  “What the hell, Rosa?” Perhaps, thought Marie, it was that not everyone had the cool nerves and steady shot to kill animals. Any accomplishment in this group invited envy. Any trait, even. Marie envied Rosa her youth, the six years between them a chasm of loss; she envied her black hair, her full, arched eyebrows.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rosa said.

  “This is pretty fucking aces,” Mo said to Marie.

  “Thanks, Mo.”

  Smoke escaped the garage through seams and gaps, stinging their eyes and throats. Philip was seated in a nearby folding chair, a blanket around his shoulders. Bonita stood behind him, rubbing his neck.

  Marie tried to keep her voice down. “Phil was so strange about the sport sign thing. Don’t you think?”

  “Not really,” Rosa said. “I think you’re being strange about it.”

  “Hey, hey,” Mo said. “What are you arguing about? The billboard?”

  “First, we’ll figure out if it was one of us,” Rosa said. She crossed her arms over her body, and spoke with such evenness it was clear she was fighting to sound calm. “And after we do that, we can think about more wild theories.”

  “Why is it a wild theory, Rosa? Nothing is normal here, right?”

  “When you are grieving you don’t think straight, and added to that, none of us are grieving properly. You’re like a mother whose child disappeared, but clings to hope while everyone else can see that the child is dead.”

  Mo squeezed Rosa’s shoulder affectionately.

  “And now we’re all kind of coping with the fact that no one is coming back. Everybody has left, and not one single person has come back.”

  “Not yet,” Marie said, trying weakly to be funny.

  “Oh my God, Marie. That’s like saying that we should still hold out for a unicorn sighting, when no one has ever seen a unicorn.”

  Around them, people were eating and eavesdropping on each other. How could you trust anybody, thought Marie, any of these strangers? Not one of them had been untouched by what had happened. So not one of them was thinking straight.

  “You can cling to the past or you can face what you see,” Rosa said.

  “I don’t know why you’re yelling at me,” Marie said.

  “Nobody wants to leave without you,” Mo said. “That’s why she’s upset.”

  Rosa made a sound and hit him gently.

  Marie’s mother had paid for a few therapy sessions after the divorce from Jason. There she had been told that she needed to have boundaries, was permitted to make her own decisions just as others were permitted to make their own. Now she thought: Maybe the framework for such things had changed? Perhaps the truisms of therapy were useless now, had been developed for psychological survival in a heavily-populated super-mobile world, not for a circle of forty-two who needed each other in ways more literal than not.

  “That makes me wonder, actually,” Mo said, looking around at the others. His large hand touched Rosa’s for a lingering moment. “It makes me wonder if the red S was intended to keep us here. Keep us wondering and paranoid instead of moving on.”

  Marie knew, but did not say, that she’d never move on. Never.

  “Why don’t you come to the fire tonight?” Rosa said, though to Marie’s ears the invitation sounded half-hearted.

  The group in its small cliques was already beginning to disperse. They had wood to chop while there was still a little light. Philip might go to fiddle with the inert solar equipment, like the young boy he’d once been would have taken apart a radio. The rest would start passing around bottles of hard liquor and wine.

  Rosa’s hip was now resting against Mo’s leg as though by accident. Marie’s stomach lurched. But she said casually, “Maybe for a bit.”

  * * *

  —

  “Probably it’s just unintended consequences,” Bonita said to Marie. They were having their usual, ongoing conversation about what had happened and why it had happened so quickly. She heaved an axe down through a hunk of wood so that it stuck into the surface of a tree stump. Bonita contended that PINA could not have counted on everybody wanting to buy a port; they could not have known that the desperation to get out would be so strong. The ports were chinks to break open dams. People were like water, in a hurry to rush.

  Not being much on the Internet in those early days, Bonita had heard everything a little late, either through the newspapers or from Rosa over the phone in her kitchen. Rosa was like her other children, Marcos and Camila, buying up new phones and new computers and paying for PINApps and tossing out their carcinogenic-ridden old electronics to be picked over by desperate children in developing nations. Bonita, who had been a poor child, understood the abjection of poverty better than the others, who were me
rely economically depressed. She thought the ports might be benevolent, even if such benevolence were an accident. Families in the developing world could go through some unguarded port to a space-time before capitalism had destroyed the possibility for their self-reliance, before their self-reliance was sacrificed to enable the self-reliance of the wealthy. A poor child would climb into one as he might have climbed into a dumped refrigerator, or, better, the poor would take over the abandoned homes of the too-rich and novelty-seeking, just as they were.

  In her insistence that some of what port had accomplished had been good, Bonita was the most optimistic of the group, and she had quickly learned not to say such things to the many who did not know where their loved ones were. Even her own Marcos and Camila had jumped off a cliff with the other sheep. Rosa was the only stone of familial loyalty. “I won’t leave without you,” Rosa had said to her mother. Bonita felt that now, at least, you knew who people were and what they were made of.

  Bonita threw the axe down into another hunk of oak, which splintered and split. She split each half into half, and Marie would carry these piled quarters of fresh, slightly piss-smelling wood to the tarp-covered shelter near the woods, while Bonita readied to split another.

  “Hey, take a break,” Philip called from several feet away, where he sat at the fire. “You’re almost out of light, anyway.”

  The kerchief over Bonita’s short mess of grey hair captured her sweat, and she pulled it off, wiping her dewed upper lip, her forehead, before folding it away in the back pocket of her jeans and heading over.

  Marie and Bonita sat in matching Adirondack chairs, and Bonita moved straight into her list of reasons for Marie to move in here, to the Robenstein-Williams house, where she and Rosa lived, since there was plenty of room for Marie and Gus, and even for all of the art supplies, if Marie wanted. They’d set up the sunroom with lines on which to hang Marie’s photos. They’d turn one of the bathrooms into a darkroom. All but Marie had claimed these homes and backyards of the city’s formerly wealthy. They’d connected the lawns by pulling down fencing, which they’d used to cordon off a large vegetable garden near a retiree’s hobby greenhouse.