The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  Marie kept her eyes on Rosa. Her friend’s pretty round face on the other side of the fire beamed up at Mo. Marie knew that radiance like this was a matter of hormones. It was also the play of firelight: eyes were bigger, blemishes did not show. Mo put his hand on Rosa’s knee. Mo, the other optimist, respectful and kind. His djembe stood behind him on the grass. On the other side of Bonita, Philip and Donnie were arguing. Andrea was picking inexpertly at one of Rosa’s guitars.

  The few young families had gone back to their homes. The group needed to keep small families, especially, in the fold. A community needed builders, and builders were people who had a stake. People left through port for the same reason they stayed in their hometowns: for the sake of nostalgia. So you had to manage nostalgia most of all: The past looks better but it is only the longing that makes it so. Do not trust your desires, nor your memories.

  Every night, the group kept this fire blazing, big enough to be visible from the air if anyone were watching. Sometimes they danced. Once the children had gone yawning off to bed, carried limply in their parents’ arms, flip-flops dangling from small toes, the smell of marijuana would punctuate the heavier smell of burning wood.

  Through the winter, they had burned what they could find. Chairs and small tables they attacked with axes; wicker items were easily broken by hand; baskets and hampers and paper were thrown on the flames. After the thaw, though, Bonita and Philip became concerned about the chemicals that might be in the smoke, so now they burned only trees.

  “I still think it would be a better use of resources if we burned all the extra stuff here,” Donnie said. He was sitting next to Philip in one of the Adirondack chairs with his bad leg lifted onto a tree stump. Donnie was one of the ones who thought no one was coming back; he was also a loner who had lost no one close to him—mostly because no one had been close to him.

  “And when we all get cancer from inhaling fumes,” Bonita said, “who’s going to cut out our tumours?”

  “But think of all the other fumes we aren’t inhaling anymore,” Philip said.

  “True. But we have no idea how much radiation the ports give off,” she returned.

  “Bonita, you are a cancer conspiracy theorist,” Donnie said. “You think everything causes cancer.”

  “Everything does cause cancer. But you’re one to talk,” Bonita said, swatting at his good knee, “since you’re a government-agency conspiracy theorist and a PINA truther.”

  “You only apply words like that to diminish the possibility of their being true,” Donnie said. “People just say ‘conspiracy’ when they want to make you seem paranoid.”

  “But you’re the one who said ‘conspiracy,’” Andrea said. She was always listening in, poor lonesome frightened one, thought Marie. Andrea continued plucking shyly at the guitar. “About Bonita!”

  “Well, we are a bunch of potheads,” said Bonita. “That much is for sure. And anyway,” she said, pointing to the wilted left side of her chest, “cancer is not theoretical.”

  “And we can’t deny the former existence of government agencies, whose actions may or may not have caused human near-extinction,” Donnie grunted. “I know you all don’t remember what PINA was up to just before port launched, but there were a lot of secret meetings with Albrecht Doors. Doors was buying up the rights. To all the tech.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Bonita said. “But we need to focus on immediate concerns. At this rate, we’re burning through trees too quickly.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible,” Philip said, putting his hands palm out toward the large fire.

  “That’s what everyone says. Famous last words.”

  “We should make a tally of famous last words. We could, like, find all the notes people left,” Andrea said, looking up from the guitar and into the fire.

  “Next on the agenda: an endless and meaningless project,” Donnie said.

  “Endless, maybe. Meaningless, no. Is poetry meaningless?”

  Donnie let out a scoffing laugh, a cough. “Yes! It is!”

  A bottle of rum came around, then a joint. Marie let them pass. Rosa and Mo were kissing, counting on the privacy of the ignored.

  “What about that one about the road less travelled by. ‘I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference,’” Andrea said. “That poem isn’t meaningless.”

  “You would quote Robert Frost,” Donnie said.

  “Collecting famous last words would be something to do, anyway,” Andrea said, glowering at him. “We’re not animals.”

  “We are animals,” Philip said. “That is precisely what we are.” He got up and moved to a seat closer to Marie.

  “You know what she means,” said Bonita. “But most people didn’t really leave notes, right?”

  “There’s a T. S. Eliot poem on the tip of my tongue, here,” Donnie said.

  “Anyway,” Bonita said, “the point is, everybody thinks they won’t run out of resources. That’s what the pilgrims thought, and look what happened.”

  “Wouldn’t have happened to the First Nations. They were here for a thousand years, not destroying the Earth.”

  “Maybe. What do you think, Donnie?”

  Donnie was one-quarter Ojibwe.

  “How should I know? For sure at least I know that they never had all this mass-produced junk lying around. Goddamn industrial revolution.”

  “Well we’re pre-industrial again, I guess,” Bonita said. “And that is not so romantic. People were dropping dead from the plague all the time. There were many, many ways to die.”

  Through the tall licking flames, Marie saw Mo’s hands on Rosa’s face; he was pulling her toward his mouth like she was something delicious he would eat.

  “We probably do need to start getting smarter,” Marie said. “We have enough time on our hands.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Philip said, slurring a little, listing toward her. She gently pushed him back to sitting. “If things get bad,” he said. “We just leave.”

  But Marie shook her head. She wasn’t going anywhere. And she knew that Bonita wouldn’t leave either. This place, maybe, if necessary, but not these people. Bonita had always held on to hope for a community like this. This was what she would have called heaven. Or if not heaven, some blessed place. To Bonita, this was, in all the important ways, the hereafter.

  * * *

  —

  Shortly after Mo and Rosa had gone, leaving the drum on its side like a discarded toy, Marie got up to go home. Her loneliness was sharpened by Bonita being high and by Philip being drunk, as though they were two negligent parents.

  Philip had leaned close to her before she left and said, “I think I went through.”

  “What? You mean the port?”

  He made a moaning sound of assent.

  “But you didn’t. You didn’t disappear even for a second. You didn’t go through.” She felt a chill then. “Probably wasn’t a great idea to bring one into the church, though. Without consulting anybody.”

  Philip lazily nodded. “I felt a tugging. Do you think part of me went through?” His eyes had closed. “The pressure was incredible. Like jumping from a plane.”

  “Okay, bud. But I need to get home before it’s completely dark,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Home,” he said. “Homeward bound.”

  “Yup.”

  She snapped her fingers for Gus.

  “Wait,” Bonita said. She ran to her house and returned a moment later with a heavy flashlight that she forced into Marie’s hand.

  Calculating that she still had half an hour until sundown, Marie made a detour west to her favourite place: the bridge over the highway. She wanted to feel the full force of its emptiness, the overwhelming expanse of asphalt, lanes winding through the landscape like fine charcoal ribbons. In the distance, if she waited long enough, she’d see packs of deer, the consoling beauty of muscled bodies on thin legs. The dappled fawns were like a negative image of herself, white spots on tan hide. But it was
getting too dark to see much now, and coughing into her hand to break the eerie quiet, she nudged Gus, and they walked back down toward her apartment.

  She flicked the light on and off to notice how dark it was getting. So many of the things she owned had lenses now: binoculars, flashlights, cameras. The barrel of a gun, too, that was a kind of eye, and she swung the flashlight as she walked, contemplating what paintings she might make of these repetitious circles. Or prints, maybe, silkscreens. The streetscape in its hollow silence was like a Chirico painting Marie had loved as a teenager. Long shadows, black on grey, empty space. His paintings evoked a creeping awareness that something was coming, something was right around the next corner. Her past love of Dadaism and Surrealism had gone along with a teenage obsession with the bon mots of Dorothy Parker and the habit of wearing cloche hats she bought secondhand. Now a Dali made her remember her naïveté, made her mouth dry up with shame.

  Far away, there was a clanking sound, a rattling: raccoons hoisting their quivering fat bodies into Dumpsters, knocking over long-emptied cans. She could feel the presence of dogs, too, other animals, prowling and slow, nervous and careful as they led their bodies down alleyways. Once in a while the quick thin movements of a cat. Rarely was there barking. Silence was what she’d always wanted. For there to be fewer people and less to do. Jason had wanted company. It was the central conflict of their marriage. In those days, she had felt in her body how the world was bloated with beings.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” she told Gus, scratching him aggressively behind the flop of his black ears, as they walked down James Street. Power used to force its way through wires into bulbs and lamps, swelling them with light, controlled distention. Now twilight deepened quickly, the sun blushing behind bluish clouds. Moonlight made a quilt-like geometry of the shadowy shapes of buildings against the starry panorama. She hurried, knowing darkness lured out things she feared. Cockroaches would spill out of sewage drains like pennies overfilling a jar. Armies of rats would stare at her, eyes aglow.

  She had to strain to see the corner of the store emerge in the darkness, the watery moonlit sheen of the windows on all sides. Gus raised his head, lifted and dropped the feathery end of his tail. She didn’t know how old he was, would never know. Could you discover such things, if you had the right training and equipment? Perhaps mammalian age was recorded in the liver or the joints, evident only after death. Could you discover age by examining DNA?

  She shone the flashlight up at the billboard where Sport now seemed to be an urgent, encoded message just for her. Meaning: Be a good sport? Or: This is all just a game? She moved the light up and down the street, searching for shapes, movement, the flash of eyes, raccoon or cat, caught and frozen. But the darkness swallowed up the weak stream of light.

  Three hundred and fifty-some days ago, electricity had ceased flowing, and water no longer rushed through the pipes when you commanded it. There was no longer any way to do most things she had known how to do, so every small habit of life required more energy output: to shower under waterfalls or bathe in murky lakewater, to cook and to keep warm, to keep away the many smells that were everywhere. Musks of various kinds, body odours, the shit stink of death. In the spring, when everything had begun to thaw, the garbage-rot smell grew.

  The winter, while awful, had temporarily neutralized certain smells outside, though indoors, smells were trapped along with whatever heat peoples’ bodies and burning wood could make. Everyone had lived in the few rooms they could insulate with heavy drapes. Someone had come up with the one bright idea to raid the sports equipment stores for sleeping bags and down-filled jackets and weatherproof materials. Marie had sealed up her shop and apartment, taped windows with thermoplastic to keep air out, and stayed there on all but the worst nights, huddled under layers, beside Gus. During the day, the group had travelled the route between houses and church on stolen skis and snowshoes through a blinding, sparkling cityscape that seemed enchanted because it was unrecognizable. Most of the group had not known snow to be so white, to so obliterate and soften the shapes of things, though Mo had spent a winter in Yellowknife, and Marie had been to northern Quebec, and Jack had lived for two years in a commune in Vermont. They could agree at least that they had never seen snow this white here, downtown. Real snow like this had a function, which had been lost by all those years of salting and plowing: it would soak into the ground and melt down into the lake. They were convinced that in these ways the ecosystem would eventually reboot, maybe even in a few years. The worms and maggots and increasingly apparent legions of mice would no longer seem disgusting but merely elemental to the processes that had always kept the world clean.

  The day it all went dark, Marie was at the small Chinese grocery across the street from the store. She and the others had known this was coming. News no longer arrived via paper or TV. Each day the holdout shopkeepers and artists came into the street to find out: Had anyone seen Charlene? Bob? No one had seen Evan, who owned the Cranberry Café, for a week. People didn’t give word that they were leaving. They were just gone, as though sheepish, as though they knew their departure was shameful. “If you won’t dignify your leaving with goodbyes,” Marie had said to Min, whose elderly grandparents owned the grocery, “then you have proven that you are wrong in leaving.”

  Min was distracted that day, or perhaps she disagreed. Their orders weren’t coming in; they couldn’t contact their distributors; the customers were gone. Min’s grandparents acted as though this were a crisis they would weather and then defeat. They’d sell food even if they couldn’t sell citrus, even if they could no longer sell fresh fish. They’d sell whatever was bottled or canned. They’d always opened the store, and they always would open the store. But then Min and her grandparents, too—poof—were gone. Marie found a note on the unlocked front door: Help yourselves. It was meant kindly, an invitation, but the phrase haunted her.

  Help yourselves.

  People were behaving as though drugged, she thought. This was her first theory, that the idea of port was like opium to an opium-eater: what if, without dying, you could just go. A different form of curiosity had kept her here. At first she had wanted to see how bad it could get, how few people there could be, whether she could be the one to outlast. She had wanted a test of her endurance, a way of discovering for herself what the marathoner wants to know. And then one day she had looked down into the solemn street, and it was so beautiful. Reality had become the dream, and she was awake for it.

  That March, they’d all worn masks over their mouths and noses. The big grocery stores were the worst, bacteria of decay making the air a swamp. They took what they could, cans and more cans piled into grocery carts. The bottled water most of them had once considered an unnecessary evil of capitalism was now a godsend. Donnie had jokingly put an empty bottle on a stick like a totem.

  How had they survived that first winter? Canadians had always felt this way in spring, but that first year was something else. We’re still here, they said to one another. The worst is over. Help yourselves.

  Marie and the others had gone through houses and apartments in a fever of inventorying, carrying the stiffened carcasses of pets to backyard graves, or, finally, because there were so many, to pickup trucks that could transport them to bonfires on the beach. This way at least some of the streets would be clear and clean. Even if she hadn’t seen this happen, Marie would have known how alone she was now. It wasn’t only the darkness and the silence, the way echoes returned sounds to you, everywhere, the lack of movement in the channels and tubes behind walls and underground—it was even in the taste and feel of the air, the buzz of it. You could sense that there were fewer people sharing oxygen.

  And yet, most days she still went home alone. It was at one of their fires in the spring that she’d got drunk and kissed Philip, letting him inch his meaty hand with its fat fingertips up her shirt, and it was at one of these fires that she’d told everybody about Jason. Several months later, the thought of these revelations still
made her cringe. She had sat on one of the log benches, leaning in (it was awful to picture her own intensity), and recounted everything. Rosa teased her later that she’d talked for forty minutes straight.

  And after nights like that, she only felt lonelier, or lonely in a different way, and realized she preferred the dignity and decorum of life above the art shop. Through her bedroom window she could see the uppermost tip of the gold star on the sign, its backing of unpainted wood with a few gold brushstrokes feathering over the edges. She could see the windows of stores and apartments, now empty, that used to punctuate her life here: the grocery with its bins packed with fruit and nuts, the homes of neighbours who were also her customers, who sometimes walked naked past translucent or ill-fitting curtains. The printmaker’s studio space, the specialty shoe store, the Italian café and the independent coffee shop. Normalcy, she had come to believe, is sanity. Marie knew this was a conservative view, but she could now also see that the time of upheaval and transition in her own life had been the most tragic for her. Abandoning one’s marriage was not an artistic gesture. Whether or not one should reject the status quo depended a great deal, it turned out, on the content of that status quo.

  Gradually, through minor shifts and adjustments, she had found a new routine. The pleasures of before were replaced by new pleasures: the discovery of guns, the companionship of a dog, the ability to walk up a street without fear of traffic. At first she missed things like buttery croissants that melted wafer-like on her tongue, and dark-roasted coffees, and the feel of possibility, as she unfurled the store’s awning every morning, of conflict or intrigue or even love among the people she knew.

  Last November, when she’d been shivering alone in the apartment, chewing on jarred olives and pickles until a layer of skin peeled from the roof of her mouth, she realized that she’d been, all these years, enacting other people’s lives. Hollywood lives—televised lives. When she had thought she was dreaming of being an artist, she had really been dreaming of the approval of an audience. When she’d wrapped her hands around a full a cup of coffee, it had felt large and full of import because of all the crime dramas she’d watched in which beautiful women held such cups along with their promise, their whip-smarts. So she, like everybody else, has been a victim of advertising. She had been curating herself, in the same way she curated the store. Once she realized this, she was okay. But she also knew that the only way forward was to commit to living her life among the church-haunters. It wasn’t only the roof of her mouth becoming raw and raggedy.