The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  Was it better to be safe? Were safe or sorry the only options? Now to get into the church they had to duck under or step over the bright warnings: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE and climb through a window.

  “You’re overreacting. It isn’t instantaneous. It doesn’t suck you up,” Marie had told him as he pulled the streams of tape around the posts and railings surrounding the church. Beside him stood Regina with her large and frightened eyes. Steve no longer seemed the strapping Dutchman who so loved to prepare meat and plant seeds, who always smelled like the damp earth inside the greenhouse; both of them were thinner, now, slack in the cheekbones, hanging with clothes. They had been sapped of energy they’d had only a month ago, with their peach-picking and canning, with their plans for solar panelling and greenhouse-equipping.

  “It sucked Philip up,” Steve said.

  “It didn’t. Philip was already on the verge. Bonita told me he was talking about leaving all the time.”

  “He talked about staying a lot too.”

  “We all talk about leaving all the time,” Regina said, scanning the street for her children. One, two, three, running up ramps and down porch steps, jumping into weedy gardens and pulling up snails. “How is this my life? How is this their childhood?” She put a hand to her mouth.

  “Everybody else just accepted this. You just accepted this,” Steve said.

  “You know that isn’t true,” Marie said. “But you can’t live for too long in a state of paranoia.”

  “How did everyone else just sign up to leave? I don’t get it,” Regina said.

  “We just need to hold on a little longer.”

  “For how long?” Steve said.

  * * *

  —

  They knew they’d just missed Philip that day, and they were fairly sure he had a few business cards, that small, unlikely-to-work antidote to amnesia. Assuming that port actually took you somewhere, when you arrived would you still have all your old clothes on? Still have pockets in which to hold such cards? None but Marie, Mo, Bonita and Rosa would go near the church anymore, where Marie’s paint-splattered dropcloth was the only membrane between them and the sweetly humming trap beneath. They wouldn’t sleep at the church as they had sometimes done, and no one would go alone, but the four of them were there almost every day, the way a person visits and revisits the gravesite of a beloved. Marie grasped a leash and apologized to Gus for the shackling, afraid that he’d get too close to it. They would not go farther up than the third row of pews from the front.

  Marie thought sometimes that it would be all right if the rest of them got out and left only these four. Together they were a force, even if Mo and Rosa were sharing their own umbrella and oblivious in their lovesick state to the loneliness of others. Marie knew that the moment she went in alone, she’d be up there, unwrapping, unzipping, as though each small exposure to its seductive force had been a taste of a potent, perfect drug. It seemed to promise the world. It did promise the world. She could still taste how it had felt: like the future, like a lover to know you as no one else did, like the perfect new baby, your baby in your arms. Every itch she’d been trying not to scratch.

  Together that first day, they’d cut a tiny hole at the top of the dropcloth, kept a few inches unzipped, so that Philip, if he returned, could get out again. They did these things with tongs so as not to touch it. Mo developed a mark like a burn, a puckering discolouration on the back of his hand where he’d touched the inside of it for too long.

  * * *

  —

  Almost as soon as the sun was up, the back of Marie’s neck burned hot, curls of hair slick against her skin. She had left Bonita to the vegetables and was on her way to some of the yards they knew where people kept peach trees. After that, she would scavenge more paper cups. She bicycled through the streets, towing the sporty double stroller filled with empty bottles, fingertips tingling with readiness to grab the gun, Gus scrambling to keep up. She went first to the stream at the top of the Charlton golf course while it was still relatively cool and filled the bottles. Though people would sometimes bathe in the lake on the other side of the city, most preferred the apparent cleanliness of waterfalls coming down the escarpment’s stacked rocks. If they had a scientist, they could test for E. coli or for any of the other bacteria they couldn’t afford to ingest without a doctor around for diagnoses; as it was, all their hopes lay in the looted plastic bottles and their several water filtration kits. She filled the bottles and dipped her head under, soaking hair and face. Gus dunked his snout in and drank. Was she becoming more canine? She, like Gus, was happy for a job. Sometimes it seemed that she was made for this—for tasks deeply important, for high stakes, for—not courage exactly—but fortitude. This was why she would outlast almost everyone else. Her peculiar combination of genes, her Marie-ness, was like a genetic immunity against a plague.

  Jason was just a convenient location into which she could place her anxieties. Her talisman, her rosary, the thoughts like a line of beads: what would she say to him if he ever returned, his face, his hands on her body, his mouth, his mind? It was good to be good at this—to have a job to do—but like any loyal mutt, she wished for someone’s recognition. She wished for Jason to say: I should have stayed. No matter what it took, I should have stayed. You were right, Marie.

  Back on the bicycle, she raced down the hill and back towards James Street. She parked outside her abandoned storefront, took one of the photos that were amassing on roll after roll, perhaps never to be developed. Rosa joked about keeping a record. The era of the daily photo is over, she said. Day 356 marked the day that everything changed.

  Every day marked a day on which everything changed. The familiar jagged shape of her fading yellow star was up there in front of the place where she used to sleep. She picked the camera out of the wagon and stood back in the middle of James Street, right on the yellow dividing line, to take it. So maybe she should begin painting again. Why not? Set up an easel in the street. Better than a photographic record would be splashes of colour, and how those colours felt. She’d make them brighter than they were.

  She pivoted and took the photo of the billboard. She had not missed a day. The red S was still there. As she and Gus continued on to find more boxes and coffee cups, to find more clay or plastic pots that could be cleansed of dead matter and replanted, she turned the word sport over in her mind. She was certain now that it had not been painted by any of them. It seemed to mean, Isn’t this a laugh? What fun! She could only picture Willy Wonka, somebody with odd—nearly insane—affect. Tap dancing, crying hysterically, “Everybody’s gone! Ha ha ha!”

  Children would one day put on plays and musicals, would make puppets and design travelling shows. Rosa and Mo’s children, maybe. She was supposed to be happy for them and for the gift of their pheromone-shaded compatibility because of the future it pointed to. These would be their legends. Future puppeteers would make up a mask with exaggerated features. This character, writer of the red S, a Zorro, a person who had to exist, because a letter of the alphabet didn’t just appear in red paint out of nowhere—a character who, once found, would explain everything to them.

  Rosa was supposed to meet her here, and she waited in the shade against the old Eaton Centre shopping mall, which had long been a deserted husk, long before the slow desertion of the planet, and now would never be reclaimed and revitalized by civic boosters, by artists or filmmakers or whatever movers and shakers did such things.

  She and Rosa had spent every morning of the past two weeks combing through the apartments and storefronts within a two-block radius of the billboard. They drew police tape over doors holding ports inside, because Steve had asked them to, and because they still loved him. They would have settled for anything to prove that someone was living in any of these places, but all were dusty and cobwebbed, and any old food scraps they found were long rubberized or dried completely.

  Today Marie stood in the shade of the Eaton Centre, waiting for Ros
a. They’d finally climb to the top of the building, where the answer, if there was an answer, had to be.

  Waiting for Rosa, sweat beading on her neck, her chest, soaking through her shirt, she put the camera to her face. Took a photo of the plaza kitty-corner from her, the red awning of the diner where she’d bought cheap, terrible coffee before the fair-trade place cropped up. Then a snap of the specialty shoe store. She stepped into the street to catch the gallery just north of the plaza and then turned and flicked through several shots of the brick apartment building they’d not yet entered, the one hosting the billboard. She was staring up at it, a knight before castle walls, when Rosa startled her.

  “Hey!” she said, coming up behind her and pulling her into a hug.

  “Ugh,” Marie said, swinging around. “I’m drenched.” She scanned Rosa for red marks where Mo had put his mouth, but this only made Marie miserable. “What an ugly time in history to be stuck in,” she said. “Money poured into eyesores.”

  “But you’ve made it into art,” Rosa said. “Your photos are haunting.”

  She sounded like a sycophant at a gallery opening. Marie tried not to frown. “I wonder how long it will take for it to fade completely. If thousands of years from now it will be a mystery for the fossil record.”

  There were many things too solid to be melted down. Many things that would outlast them and their children and their children’s children. Perhaps the building would turn to rubble and still the metal scaffolding would endure.

  “So we’re doing this, right?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Yup.”

  Marie no longer entirely trusted that Rosa’s heart was in anything, felt that Rosa must be thinking always of Mo. I get it, Marie wanted to say. I’ve been in love before. Everyone in the world has been in love. It’s commonplace, and you guys aren’t heroic for being led around by pheromones and hormones and whatever.

  Probably they could have climbed up to the roof through the building, by jimmying open or breaking down doors, by way of stairwells, but instead, they pulled themselves up the metal fire escape, their arms and abs strong from their daily work and no longer sore. They climbed up iron beams plugged into the wall at the top and hoisted themselves over the top lip of brick.

  In front of them was a ratty folding lawn chair, woven from plastic. Beside it was a fleece beige blanket, black-spotted with mildew, a pile of candy wrappers somewhat disturbed by wind and an empty paint can without its lid. Marie walked over, lifted the blanket to her nose as though it could smell like anything other than that dry rot smell.

  “Mildew will take over the world,” she said.

  “Pays to be small,” Rosa said. Under the blanket was a pair of binoculars, apparently high grade, and she picked these up and put them to her face. “These are heavy.”

  There was also on the ground a paperback novel, cover torn off. She picked it up and saw the title. “I know this book,” she said. “It was one of Jason’s favourite’s.”

  “Vonnegut?” Rosa said idly, reading through the binoculars, her face made owlish and odd.

  “Yeah,” Marie said, turning the brittle, water-damaged pages. “It’s pretty famous, though. Doesn’t mean anything.”

  Rosa was scanning the cityscape. She could see right into Marie’s old apartment, could even make out the unicorn’s thin embroidered horn on her quilt.

  “Can I have those for a sec?” Marie said.

  Rosa hesitated and then passed them over. Marie did not direct her lens-gaze to the apartment but instead pointed her head down into the street below, where Gus was seated in front of the fire escape.

  “He’s a good dog,” Rosa said.

  Marie laughed. “I say we take the binoculars.”

  “Doesn’t this worry you?” Rosa said. “This doesn’t seem like it could be one of ours. This is like a stakeout. It’s a set-up for a sniper.”

  But Marie didn’t feel afraid. “It’s just binoculars and paint.”

  “But what if this is the same guy who broke that window? He’s been hanging around a long time,” Rosa said.

  “Could be. Probably,” Marie said. “He or she.”

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  Marie put the binoculars to her eyes and stared into her own apartment. Her hands were shaking. Rosa tried to take them from her, but Marie yanked her hands away. “Don’t.” She wanted to be alone with the information cooking inside her, a dough rising. “Say the person who painted the S broke the window. Say this person means no harm. Say he—or she—say he or she is disoriented, trying to make sense of this.”

  “Say they’re deranged.”

  Marie sighed.

  “I want to help you, Marie. You know we love you.”

  She bristled at this we. “I’m okay. I’m always okay.”

  “But what if you’re being watched. What if we’re all being watched,” Rosa said.

  “I miss the days when someone was watching me. Surveilling me, omnipresent, interested. I miss the eyes of men on me in the street even.”

  “Gross,” Rosa laughed. “Mo thinks the ports have brains. Like, ESP or something.”

  “To have ESP you first have to have senses.”

  “He thinks they have senses,” Rosa said.

  “But they don’t have sense organs!”

  “Think about it, Marie. PINA had access to all of our data. E-mails, banking, social media, names of pets. Everything. These ports might know, well—”

  “Oh God. Another theory.”

  “Why are you angry with me?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. Obviously. Because of Mo.”

  “Ugh. Don’t start getting such a big ego that you think I’m jealous or something.”

  “Marie. I’m your best friend.”

  “Yeah right.” She knew she shouldn’t, but she said it anyway: “Best friend by default.”

  “Why don’t you go into the fucking woods with your fucking gun,” Rosa said. “Screw you.” And then she was gone, hooking her feet back onto the metal steps and climbing down to the street. The binoculars knocked against Marie’s chest, clattered against the camera as she climbed down a few minutes later.

  This is what fear did, and uncertainty and hunger. They were beginning to project the intent to surveil on things without eyes or intentions. Not only ports or the stars, but the billboard, too, which Marie couldn’t help feeling was to blame for everything, that on its high overlook it was watching her.

  Rosa sped off, her braided hair a thick black whip. Marie greeted Gus absently. She put the camera into the wagon next to the lukewarm water bottles and walked over to the store. Gus’s nails clicked slightly against the hardwood, and she shushed him. He whimpered, whined, pulled toward the corner armchair surrounded by books. She let him lead her to small round droppings in the corner. “Just rabbits, Gus. Maybe a squirrel. Poor hungry thing.” She left him to root around in the back of the store, while she went up the stairs to her apartment.

  The most tempting conclusion beat like a bloody heart in the centre of every thought she’d had since seeing that changed billboard. She did not believe in good luck. Jason had believed that pessimism was a self-fulfilling prophecy. As though her mind had caused the miscarriages, her mind had caused her to fail to become an artist. “It’s not pessimism, it’s realism,” she’d told him.

  “Spoken like a true pessimist,” he teased.

  She missed being teased. There was no one here to know her or to tease her.

  There’s probably nothing, she thought, or tried to think, as her head filled with white noise. The clinking of Gus’s collar was faint and far away, as though under water.

  The door to her apartment at the top of the stairs was still hanging open. Everything as she’d left it. This seemed to be an answer: no. She wandered through the apartment, where her paintings still hung and her sculptures and figurines were still seated untouched on small gallery-style shelves. The embroidery on her bed had not come unstitched
. There were no footprints except those she was making in the thin layer of dirt that had breezed in from the windows she’d left cracked. Nothing had been touched. To be sure she went through the kitchen cupboards, which still housed her bags of jerky and dried fruit, her line of cans. She pulled it all out and arrayed it on the counter to see if anything was missing. But if someone had been squatting or looting, surely by now it would all be gone.

  She took the blanket from the bed and laid it on the kitchen floor. On it were the medieval-style unicorns standing next to two-dimensional menfolk, fenced in by white and golden threads, each with its head turned toward the viewer, toward her. Nothing was amiss, but she wanted reinforcements. “Gus!” She could no longer hear his collar rattling.

  Onto the blanket she put clay roosters, wooden painted horses, her miniature bust of an ear-bandaged van Gogh, her framed Elvis rodeo photo, some jewellery, her food. A dollar-store photo album with pictures from their honeymoon in Montreal. It was the only trip they’d taken. Almost all the photos were of Jason or Marie against full panoramas of strange sky and river. There was one of the two of them before a stone wall, under a bronze umbrella, bodies turned toward each other. She knew it well and did not need to open the album to feel, even, how damp had been the ankles of her blue jeans.

  That’s where she’d go if she could go anywhere. “Gus!” She had to sit. She curled up against the wall, chin on knees. They’d been too young to marry. Their faces in the photo were round with youth. No hard edges, no resentment, no regrets no matter how deep they might go inside themselves. Each was a beautiful mollusk to open carefully, known only to the other.