Path of Smoke

by Bailey Cunningham

  She stepped into the eunuch’s office. Carl was sucking down a rum and Coke, while Ingrid stood with her arms crossed. Shelby tried to catch her eye, but she was staring at the overhead light, which flickered imperceptibly. What could she divine within its decay? She was so still, except for one curl of hair, which trembled beneath the air-conditioning. Neil was probably fast asleep, dreaming of their next adventure. A real adventure, involving dogs and comets and sunlight.

  “Where’s Sam?”

  “Paul drove her home,” Carl said.

  “Andrew?”

  Carl drained the last of his drink. For a moment, the office was filled with the sucking sound of his straw. Then he pushed the glass away.

  “Gone.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Does it even matter? I hope he goes home with someone. A hookup will distract him from the fact that we’re all just messing with his head.” He turned to the club owner. “So, you must get a lot of trim. And free drinks. Why did you ever leave? Was it ennui, or do you just have a fetish for sandals?”

  “You might as well pretend that you’re in a comedy,” Narses said. “It’s a good instinct. If your logic follows, we’ll all be married by the end of this.”

  Carl nodded. “You’ve got to admit—all this story lacks is fairy juice.”

  “Hush.” Shelby sat down next to him. “I need to think.”

  “I need to drink.”

  “Stop it! You need to help. You can’t just sit there like a useless harlequin, and then puke on the floor as soon as things get dangerous.”

  She hadn’t intended the words to be quite so acrid. Carl just stared at her. Then he pushed the glass farther away.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s fine. I get it.”

  Shelby didn’t know what to say. She turned to Ingrid. “Is Paul okay?”

  Ingrid didn’t answer at first. Then she blinked and looked at Shelby, as if seeing her for the first time. “I told him—” She laughed, suddenly. “I don’t even remember. Isn’t that great? I just spun the wheel of lies, and who knows where it landed? Sam helped. My sweet brother. He never sees it coming.”

  “Deception drives the engine of this game,” Narses said.

  Shelby stared at him. “You sound like a character from a cheesy RPG. I am the Dark Savant, and I get to be cryptic, because of my giant bubble helmet. Is this really all you have to offer us? Because your clichés stink—”

  “Like an evil fart,” Carl added.

  “Right. No. Ignore him. What are you even doing here?”

  “I used to live here,” Narses replied. “A lifetime ago. The only way to outdistance Latona was to come back.”

  “Is it parking when he does it?” Carl asked.

  Ingrid stepped forward. “Are we in danger? Here, in this world?”

  “The worlds are running into each other, like paint,” Narses said. “That’s what she wants. If you stand in her way, she’ll devour you.”

  “That’s not an answer. Why do you people insist on talking this way?”

  “It’s strange,” Narses observed. “You’ve been on the other side of the park longer than they have. But you still think of us as different species.”

  “We’re nothing alike. I have a life here. A family.”

  “So did I.”

  Shelby couldn’t stand it anymore. She was so tired of feeling stupid. It was like being part of an infernal pyramid scheme. You could never quite see the apex, so you kept trying to pull your own weight, hoping that you’d rise. But they always wanted more, and nobody could ever explain what it was all for. How did the park even work? Was it magic? Was it a curse? She’d grown up reading C. S. Lewis and wanted so badly to be Lucy. She’d scoured every shitty duplex and subsidized apartment for a magical wardrobe. But she could never find the room with the dead bluebottle on the windowsill.

  And, like most people, she’d given up on deeper magic from before the dawn of time. Until the night that she’d vanished into the park. Then she’d discovered that real magic was dangerous and volatile, a match hovering over celluloid, a look in the dark that might be the death of you. She hadn’t even hesitated. But what was it turning into? Bleeding and running and riddles in the club, the one place where she’d felt safe.

  She stood up. “Let’s go.”

  Carl stared at her. “This is the exposition scene.”

  “He doesn’t really know anything. He’s in the dark—just like us.”

  “Trust me,” Narses said. “You need my help. When she begins—”

  “We’ll call you,” Shelby replied. “It’s late, and I’m tired of being played with.”

  Narses leaned forward. “You have to be careful. They have your scent.”

  “She can send as many monsters as she likes. This is Saskatchewan. We’ll just get a bigger truck.”

  Shelby walked out of the club with Carl and Ingrid trailing behind. Broad Street was humming with late-night activity. Students on bar crawls were headed toward O’Hanlon’s downtown, or Bushwakker on the strip. Their nights had just begun. A few exhausted souls were carrying home TV dinners and pet food. The moon kept a yellow eye on them. A group of kids were smoking in the alley. Their braying laughter carried across the street.

  “So—” Carl was half smiling, as if to reassure her. “We just walked out on the one person who might have been able to tell us what was going on. Any thoughts on that?”

  “We already know what’s happening. It was all in the letter that Eumachia stole. Her batshit-crazy mom is meeting with the chieftain of the silenoi to give him some kind of relic. Of course, relics are always safe and never cause destruction, so we have no reason to worry.”

  “Shel, are you coming undone?”

  They both looked at her kindly. She jammed her hands in her pockets, as if that might keep her from throttling someone.

  “I’m just so tired of gambling,” Shelby said. “That’s all we do. We rattle around like dice in a cup, waiting for someone to tell us something. But we still don’t know a thing about what the park is, or how it works, or if it’s going to eventually kill us. Narses helped us—I’ll admit that—but right now, he just seems like one more cryptic asshole.” She shook her head. “This was our night, Carl. Our night to be normal. And we came so close. Andrew was here, and Paul, and everyone was dancing, and having fun. It was the first time that I didn’t want the magic anymore. I just wanted everything to be like this, always.”

  But even as she said it, Shelby knew that it was a lie. Fantasy novels had taught her that it was useless to complain about wonder. She didn’t want to be one of those vampires who whined about their immortality, or the child of prophecy who just wanted to be normal. Superheroes, wizards, monsters—they all just want to be us.

  Nobody chose normal, if they could help it. The park was a bloody gift that tore her every night in its jaws, and she loved it, she welcomed it, because the pain meant that she was alive. She’d wept over Gandalf’s death, over the Red Wedding, over the pile of bones that fantasy left behind. For years, she’d tried to explain it to everyone, but so few understood what it was like to ride a luck dragon, to lose yourself in the sacrifice of a brave white hole, to chase Tenar through the dust-choked halls of Atuan, searching for your name.

  The park was real magic, and that was about pain. It left marks. It wasn’t all in her head, because these people understood. That was what made it so seductive. It made more sense than all of her favorite authors, more sense than grad school, more sense than the desire that she’d felt in fits and starts for one person, then another. Those midnight collisions, fueled by alcohol and the sting of hope that so quickly dissolved beneath the sunlight. Those diurnal mistakes that you were supposed to make, over and over, not because you’d one day get it right, but because life was all digressions and apostrophes. You ventured out
onto the edge of the dash, staring at that blank space beneath you, not knowing if you were going to make it. Everything you’d learned was supposed to guide you, but it only left you with a knapsack full of bullshit transitions and sadly glimmering footnotes. There was no forward. Only sideways.

  She looked at Carl. He used to burn with confidence, but lately he’d been more like a long-suffering bulb that needed changing. There were dark circles under his eyes, and if she squinted, she could almost see a single white hair in his beard. What had the park shown him? Why did he keep coming back? She was beginning to doubt that she really knew anything about her friends, these stations of grace, who followed her around with their thin arms outstretched.

  Ingrid was watching her. Tell us what to do, she thought. You’re the only real adult among us. But her mortgage and the toys that littered her house, like baroque pearls, didn’t make her any wiser. She was equally disoriented.

  But there was also something curious in her expression. That shock of amity that drew you to someone, reaching across the gap to pull you in, so unexpectedly. It might be as simple as a shared sin, or as complicated as a fear that you both honored, when you were alone and the veil dropped. That moment when someone undressed before you. It wasn’t just about the primeval thrill of attraction, which made a cuckold of your brain and all its plans. It was the voice that cut through the fog, the ordinary little way in which you realized that you were sharing the world. You weren’t the only confused one, dragging your groceries and loves and dark thoughts behind you.

  Maybe this digression would lead her somewhere. All she had to do was stay alive long enough, and avoid the black page.

  “We should call Sam,” she said. “Maybe she wants to meet us.”

  “Not if she’s smart,” Carl replied. “This night has gone postal. I wouldn’t blame her if she finally bailed on us.”

  She dialed Sam’s number. It rang, but there was no answer. Maybe she’d turned the ringer off. Maybe she and Paul were hooking up. Either way, it seemed as if their strategy night was over. Sam was the only member of their company who didn’t seem entirely bound up in the world of the park. In spite of her mother’s position as a known artifex, she treated it as a kind of part-time job. What was her secret? How did she keep herself from thinking about it, day and night, like they did? It was like going to a party and meeting that group of students who were unnaturally well adjusted. They talked about their families, their dream vacations, the renovations to their bathrooms. They didn’t pass out in the library after eating nothing but a bag of Wheat Thins for six hours.

  The park ran in her family, but what did that mean? Perhaps its closeness was what made it possible to avoid, like a surreal Thanksgiving dinner. It wasn’t like heroin to her, because she’d grown up with it. Was that common? Had Naucrate always been a citizen, or did she find a way to smuggle her daughter in? Thinking about it made Shelby realize that they knew almost nothing about Sam, or her shadow. Andrew had been a tablet under lamplight, his script easy to read, but Sam’s life had a pumiced cover.

  Shelby realized that she’d been standing with her phone in her hand, saying nothing, for what must have been a full minute. Carl was frowning at her, while Ingrid looked away, as you did when you wanted to avoid an uncomfortable reality.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Shelby admitted. “Tomorrow, Latona is going to make some kind of sketchy pact with the silenoi. Who knows—maybe my supervisor will be there. We’ve got no real plan, aside from running in and yelling, Hey, feel like killing us? Even with the help of Felix and Drauca, we don’t stand much of a chance. And we don’t even know if Sam’s with us or just humoring us.”

  Carl nodded. “Good summary.”

  “Don’t you have anything useful to add?”

  “Not really. However—” He patted his bag. “I do have three cans of pilsner left in here. It used to be a six-pack, but things got real back at the club.”

  “You’ve been carrying those around the whole time?”

  “I always have contingency beverages.”

  Ingrid put an arm around her. “This night—like my car—is officially a write-off. Let’s take a walk and then go to bed.”

  Together?

  The word very nearly escaped her lips. But she managed to just grin and nod, without embarrassing herself. Real heroes probably wouldn’t have ended the night with three cans of pilsner, but they weren’t real heroes, after all. They were students following their most basic instinct: to ramble while drinking.

  Carl distributed the beer, and they walked down Broad Street. All the brightly colored stores and restaurants were asleep for the night. A few lights gleamed in the second-story apartments, but most people were dreaming, or absent. The shawarma restaurant by the bus depot was still open. Carl couldn’t resist the spinning tower of meat, so they waited outside while he ordered them food. Shelby realized that beer and falafel weren’t a charming couple, but she had a weakness for the pickled radish. Carl observed that if hobbits had embraced nightclub culture, they would have called this meal “second supper.” Ingrid chortled at that. Shelby liked the rough texture of her laugh. She was beginning to see what Ingrid shared with Fel—the slender thread that linked their shadows. A laugh, a wink, a flash of temper. They weren’t the same, of course, but they might have shared a family tree.

  They walked through the ghostly downtown core. The bank buildings were glass mausoleums, their sharp angles chipping the moonlight. The windows of the SGI tower burned like gold damascene: something risen from an age-old hoard. Night buses made their pilgrimage toward the loop on Twelfth Street. A man played the saxophone on the corner of Scarth, and his sweet notes followed them as they crossed at the light. A few people were smoking by the flowerpots, and farther down the street, they could hear laughter and shouting from the patio at O’Hanlon’s. The Canada Life building soared above it all, casting its neon glow over the length of Victoria Park. They strolled past the light sabers, watching them shift from green to electric purple, until they’d cycled through every Jedi possibility.

  There was a stage across from the park where intrepid couples took salsa lessons. On alternate days, a collective yoga group met to practice stretching on the green. It all seemed terribly active. Shelby figured that climbing the stairs in the library was enough to get her blood moving. Any type of yoga made her feel as if she were revisiting the Canada Fitness Test, which had taught her that she had the flexibility of a bronze statue. Take the participation card and run. That had always been her motto.

  Carl climbed onto the stage and lit a roach. It took a few tries, because he kept swearing and burning his fingers. Ingrid had to lend him a bobby pin, but finally he got it going. They passed it around, a pug-nosed little joint that threatened to go out at any moment. Ingrid took a discreet puff and then gave it to Shelby.

  She coughed. “This smells like the inside of your bag.”

  “It’s all I’ve got.”

  They sat with their legs dangling off the stage. Red, blue, green. The light sabers flickered through the spectrum, until they suddenly flashed bone-white. A metallic sculpture loomed above them, but nobody could figure out what it was supposed to be. Shelby thought it might be the giant fart living under the bed in Good Families Don’t. Carl said it looked more like an imperial star destroyer. Ingrid declared it abstract, which prompted a long sigh from the others.

  “That’s like calling it a text,” Carl said. “You lose.”

  “Isn’t everything a text?” Shelby asked. “At least that’s what Derrida says. Every text has an edge, and we’re supposed to, like—I don’t know—live on it, or something?”

  “How do we fit?”

  “We make ourselves really small, like The Borrowers.”

  He cackled. “What if it’s an e-book? Where’s the edge?”

  “Up your ass.”

  Carl spread his arms. “Quick. What’s
everyone’s favorite bullshit, made-up academic word that doesn’t mean anything?”

  They all considered the question for a moment. Then they answered in one voice:

  “Problematize!”

  “Criticality!”

  “Chronotrigger!”

  Shelby laughed. “That’s a video game.”

  “Shit,” Carl said. “I meant chronotope.”

  “I think I may have used problematize when I was at the bank,” Shelby replied. “So I’m not blameless in this scenario.”

  “Do you think other people make fun of their calling?” Ingrid asked.

  Carl made a face. “You’re such an education student.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I hate it when people describe teaching as a calling, like someone handed them a stone tablet or Excalibur or something. It’s a profession, sure, and it’s not for everyone—but the fact that you can put a syllabus together isn’t some kind of miracle. We’re all just hanging on by the skin of our teeth.”

  “That’s deeply motivating,” Ingrid said.

  “You’re welcome.” Carl stood up. “Besides. We need more dancing. There are studies, you know, about teaching and movement. Something called a kinesphere. I don’t know what the fuck that is, but it sounds like something wicked from Dune.”

  He turned the volume up on his phone and set it on the stage. A moment later, they were waltzing to Leonard Cohen. Carl swayed on his own, while Shelby and Ingrid danced together, skirting the edge of the platform. When the song changed to “Everybody Knows,” they all sang in unison, crying out that the dice were loaded. The basilissa wins all. Fate moves as it must. Even Beowulf was right about that. It didn’t matter what world you were in. There was what you wanted, and then there was the din of the wheel.

  They changed partners. Ingrid laughed in surprise as Carl spun her around. Then he fell off the stage, and everyone knew that it was time to go.