By the time I was let back out in the world the streets were clear, the feathers had been swept from the schoolyard and that was it. Just no more birds. It was silence from the skies, and they were gone.
I arrive at the beach and lay my eyes on the ocean, but this is no time for relief, I am driven mad by this itching bite and the possibility the perpetrator is still in my pants. I have no choice but to whip them down, but the next thing I see Maxi is coming over the dunes. Keep your pants on, dude, she yells, and I try to explain, I had a bug! But too late; I am harshly judged. The twins are next. They appeal for a drink, but I insist we do the tent because Tilly, though a master of tent engineering, is sadly lightweight in the face of vodka.
After that’s done we swim. What a relief from the biting insects, and it feels like we’re here now, the trip’s really begun. The four of us ride the waves for a while and then float together on the ocean, our energy sapped and our eyes closed in relaxation until someone dives under to inflict fear and coughing with an unexpected yank on the ankle.
Michael, you cock, Maxi Pad screams, but Mick is as calm as anything. What? I’m nowhere near you, he says.
Tilly gives me a look so I know it was her, but I don’t say. This situation is about to deteriorate so I offer my peace pipe, so to speak. You guys, want to smoke some weed? There’s a whoop of elation then a splash of arms and legs, and it’s swimming, Markson-style. Did they never have lessons? No, they did, but some genetic defect makes them splash around like three separate seizures.
Back on the sand I receive the high-fives offered my way. Aren’t you full of surprises, Maxi Pad says, and I raise my eyebrows like, who even knows what other secrets, etc. We open our first packet of chips and then the vodka, then we layer up with insect spray and head off to the rocks.
The rocks is the place we think about going to when things get us down, where we feel alive and unjudged. So we find a spot with a view, up on top of the big round rock, and it’s like life on the moon here, if the moon had an ocean around it instead of space.
We lie back. Curled against rock and facing the sky, we feel so high above the world and important. But looking up at the stars we feel small, too.
We pass the joint around and get into reminiscing about fun times gone by, and it’s funny how much I’ve forgotten. If I live five or six times as long as this, how much more will I forget? It feels urgent that this moment, this right now, makes it into the memories I will keep.
What is it we are remembering? The seagull, Tilly is saying. That fucking seagull.
It comes back to us all at once. Mick’s robotic seagull, ordered in from France or whatever place for his tenth birthday.
Do you still have it, Maxi says. And he’s like, Do you not know? And me and Tilly are rolling over in laughter because we know, we were there. It’s off a cliff, I say. Which is so funny we can’t stop laughing, and Maxi Pad’s hand is over her mouth, she can’t believe he did it.
That cost them a fortune, she says. He rolls his eyes like he does not care and we know why, because Mick did not ever ask for a robotic seagull for his birthday; he asked for a bike or a Transformer or whatever normal thing, and they all went on about how lifelike it was. Look at its eyes, look at its eyes, they all went. And we were like, That is so creepy, thank God they’re all dead.
It’s who knows what time when we traipse back down to camp, and we’re lying on our sleeping bags when Maxi Pad drops a bomb.
So Sargie and Parsons are coming up tomorrow, she says. They’ll bring their own booze though, don’t worry.
And we are like, I’m sorry, what?
And Maxi Pad acts like it’s nothing at all. But really, she’s saying, I already told you this like way before?
Tilly is the most angry. You’re telling us this, now? she says, and takes a deep breath holding back tears, the poor thing. You are so fucking demented, she says. Then she storms off down the beach, and when I go after her and call out, Are you okay? she screams back, Can’t I even take a piss!
It’s quiet after that. We climb into bed and I tune my ears into the insect noise swelling around our tent. I wait until Tilly’s back, rustling into her sleeping bag, and only then do I close my eyes. I can’t believe Maxi’s done this to us. So this is why she’s here, not even for us, but for them. But as much as I fume away in the dark there’s also something else creeping up on me. Sargie and Parsons. I have never heard these names. Are they the new friends I have only recently glimpsed? It may be interesting and now I am flooded by curious thoughts. What insights into the secret life of Maxine Pad might tomorrow bring?
We wake early and it’s dead quiet. It’s already hot and it stinks in here, to be honest, so I slip from my sleeping bag and make my way out of the tent. There is one dead lump in the corner, that’s Mick; the others must be outside.
I unzip the flap and there’s Maxi giving me a look already, and I’m like, What?
Nothing, she says. Just Tilly, who is being a pain. I shrug because, seriously, it is too early and until I eat breakfast I will be maintaining a dignified silence on this matter.
I go about preparing my bowl of rice crisps, applying milk and sitting down to eat like I have not a care in the world. But, as if my silence is irrelevant, Maxi continues to talk on about Tilly—how ridiculous and selfish she is, etc. Then Tilly appears in a towel and all falls quiet around me.
Morning, she says. God, I’m so starving, anyone else need chocolate? Which she proceeds to share with us all, even Mick, who has been awake this whole time and only now sticks his head out of the tent. So it is fair to say that Tilly, sweet thing, has decided not to ruin the trip for herself or us by holding a grudge.
How was your swim? Maxi says, testing the waters.
Oh great, Tilly says, it’s so calm today. Maybe we should head to the wetland before lunch?
So we spray ourselves to death with sunscreen and insect spray, then we start on our walk over. It’s about an hour to the wetlands and so we stop and smoke a bit of a joint, then we keep on and Mick’s got this whistle started, this low breathy thing that Tilly can’t stand, like it’s on some twin frequency that sends shivers up her spine. But after a while even that wears off and we’re just walking in a rhythm of silence under the cover of trees where it’s green and cool and like another world.
We’re single file with Mick up the front, but then he stops.
What the fuck, he says.
We all look ahead to see what he means.
What the fuck, Mick says again, and then we see it.
Tilly’s like, Shh get down, so we crouch and watch, and although we’re stoned, we’re not that stoned, so we can’t explain what we are seeing.
Is that, like, an animal? Tilly says.
A round white body perched on stick legs, a long neck up to a black leather face? None of us want to say what, but as the oldest Maxi is the one who must remember them most clearly.
A beak, Maxi says. Like a bird?
The thing makes a deep sound from its throat and wades forwards. What we do not expect is the knees bending back as it walks.
How disgusting is it, Tilly says.
We wait a minute, just hearing our own hearts and thinking, What should be our
plan, we should call someone, right? A wildlife service, or police, and people will come with nets and cameras and syringes and they will take this one bird and turn it into millions more so the world will be so much better than it is now—it will be the way our parents remember, full of birdsong and feathers and whatever else; the impossible magic of flight.
It’s Tilly who does it: hurls a rock at the bird. She misses, but before it can go anywhere we have three more in the air. Do we mean it, what we’re doing? I see Tilly chuck another. It strikes deep in the bird’s body and it’s weird how that sounds, firm and full.
Nice shot, Maxi says, so we all go again.
The bird stumbles on its stick legs and red seeps onto its feathers. We reach for more rocks, but it goes to unfold its wings and it’s almost like, shit, we forgot, it can fly.
Quick, Mick says. We don’t have time.
So with one last effort we throw everything we have. We throw as hard as we can.
THE FOREMAN
Fresh from the shower, with his hair slicked down, Mr Wei checks his appearance in the small mirror on the wall behind his desk before he turns on the park’s PA. The speakers ring with feedback so he steps onto the balcony, where for some reason the sound is not so bad.
‘Good morning, workers.’
Three storeys below, and for kilometres around, his workers wake with wet faces and stinging eyes. Some are in tents, some in makeshift beds in storage areas; hundreds more have slept on the ground. They crawl from sleeping bags and pull on boots as Mr Wei’s voice comes to them, distorted, through the haze.
‘Of course I don’t need to remind you why this is such an important day.’
The mist will hold back the sun for an hour or two as the workers board buses destined for their allocated section of the park. They will ride them through the soupy morning and take up where they left off yesterday: painting the walls of the teacups, bonding fibreglass leaves to fibreglass palm trees, shuttling animals into their enclosures. But for once they will do all this with cautious optimism.
‘Today we will show the investors how this park lives up to every dream they have had,’ Mr Wei says. ‘And if we do well, then before you know it our work will be done, and you will all be home with your families.’
By now the park’s initial plans could have been fulfilled ten times over, but instead there is always another assignment: a new exhibit to build, a gravity-defying ride, another enclosure for a previously extinct species, extending the park further and further beyond its former boundaries.
Some workers have been here so long they barely remember their children’s faces.
‘But if you are not required for the investor’s presentation, please be out of the visitor areas by 1pm.’ Mr Wei continues. ‘I can’t stress this enough.’
The echoes of his words writhe in the smog and he waits for them to fade.
‘Thank you for your attention, have a good work day.’ Mr Wei closes the balcony door and turns off the PA. He takes his towel and rubs it across his forehead, pats the sweat from his ears. The extension of the shark tunnel is not complete. The dome housing the Ice Caps of Doom has failed to maintain a steady temperature and workers have been crawling over it for days searching for a leak—but Mr Wei has told the investors to come. Of course we are ready, he said. And now he can’t afford to let them down.
On the other side of the country, Mr Wei’s niece is wheeled into a small room to wait out the rest of her labour. Carla moves from the chair to the bed and back again, smiles for a photo and rests a hand on her belly just as everything within her heaves.
‘For Uncle Carl,’ her mother says.
Mr Wei’s phone buzzes and the message She is feeling good, not long to go seems to contradict the accompanying photo, in which his niece looks drained, almost frightened.
I am thinking of her every moment, he writes back. His day begins at the Walking Dead trek, where Amazonian creatures live among a fair estimation of lost jungles fleshed out with mood lighting and a looping soundtrack of animal noise. Spider monkeys and ocelots look on as the jungle team leads Mr Wei to the banks of the Amazon River. This is where visitors will climb aboard rafts and paddle the rapids while animatronic caimans and unrealistically large alligator heads rise up to snap at their oars. The combination of real animals and robotics makes the whole thing more convincing, but this complexity comes at a price. It’s at the slow point of the journey, where the rapids fall away and the rafts settle into the still lagoon, that the technicians are having a recurring issue with the (real) giant otters.
Mr Wei’s boots sink into the red soil on the riverbank and the jungle team don’t need to explain. He sees them: three more dead otters, one fully grown, the others under a metre in length, perhaps just a year or two old.
Mr Wei is always thrown by the sight of the bodies, their little faces with furry cheeks and eyebrow whiskers, but then how snake-like their tails are.
‘It’s the same, like last time,’ the head veterinarian says. She autopsied the first lot of otters but found no sign of disease, no sign of injury. Since then, the workers charged with their disposal have buried eight more otters in shallow graves now concreted beneath the visitors’ walkways.
Together they consider the options: new otters could undergo more tests, daily check-ups, be kept in isolation.
‘No more otters,’ Mr Wei says. ‘Call technical and have them reprogram the touch screens.’
‘Remove the otters altogether? All references to them?’
‘Change them to past tense.’
Mr Wei unsticks his boots from the riverbank. He knows it’s a poignant moment for the team, but he has not, in his request for this change, announced the death of a species. He is not a veterinarian, he is not a zoologist or an expert in genetics. He is a foreman and a builder and this is far beyond his area of expertise, so when he thinks of those snake-like tails, and of his workers waiting to return home, there’s no competition. Fast and firm decisions, that’s his job.
He looks over at the rolling river they’re so proud of, ignores the tears welling in the vet’s eyes, and wipes the soles of his boots on a rock.
‘Lead me back out?’ he says.
Mr Wei is not really the foreman. He clings to the title, the promotion he was awarded after the first foreman left without explanation or farewell, along with a host of administrative staff and the original architect. He does not know who the new architect is, or even if there is one. Plans come in with amendments in multiple versions and he takes them with a grain of salt, makes unsentimental decisions, and in this way he keeps things on track for the investors. From time to time, he hands out advice to young workers who are homesick or full of dreams about future wealth.
‘But where did money ever get us?’ Mr Wei says, gesturing at the park.
His workers are confused by this because they work twelve-hour days in a thick, damp mist and in other places there are people who do not.
Carla pushes her mother’s hand away.
‘No more photos,’ she says. After a sleepless night, it’s happening faster than she expected. Not just the pain, but her sense of self eroding, people poking and coaxing, exhaustion overwhelming her personality. She feels reduced to an average of human experience.
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Her mother types a message. Sends it.
Still here, progressing well. She’s being so brave.
Carla, far away and fearful.
The idea keeps Mr Wei, in a funny way, at a distance from those around him but also incredibly present. He is still shrouded by the low-set clouds that break up the stingy reality of the mud paths he and the workers use to navigate the park. The walkways are reserved for visitors.
He has six more hours before they arrive.
As he walks, Mr Wei phones to make sure the sea lions are in transit to their enclosure. He can hear their barks in the background of the call, sharp and finite. Once he hangs up he stands still, listening for these creatures in unknowable distress. They might be as far away as Carla for all he can do to reach them.
Tell her to be strong. Tell her I am proud.
The doors of Meltwater Station swing open as Mr Wei approaches.
‘Good,’ he says. They close behind him. ‘Good.’
He is met by the Arctic crew leader and led onto the train’s first carriage. The crew leader clicks the carriage door into place and the Glacier Ghost Train begins its cruise into darkness, jerking to the right before coming to a stop at the base of a wall of backlit ice. It’s remarkably real and affecting. Mr Wei turns to the crew leader and shares the start of a smile before the train jerks forward again, tracing the blue lines of the glacier up towards the sun.
The crew leader is Shen, a short man with a shaved head. It was Shen who discovered the problem with the official plans, the physical impossibility of the icebergs, and oversaw the redevelopment of the ride to its current state.
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