Anarchy

by James Treadwell

The stairs didn’t clank like usual. She must have been going extra carefully. It occurred to her that she hadn’t put shoes on. The night seemed milder than recently. No wind; that made all the difference.

  On the linoleum at the bottom of the stairwell was a blob of nondarkness. She went all the way down. The door there had a square window of frosted glass crossed by a lattice that looked like chicken wire. The square shimmered, the eerie color of a harvest moon.

  Somewhere outside glass popped and tinkled. Agitated voices rose for a moment, as distant as seabirds.

  The power was gone, definitely, and communications were down. Everything had started to go wrong. She remembered the bank being out of money and having to suspend accounts because of the computer glitch: that was definite too, because she remembered it in lots of different ways (talking to her father, talking to Jonas, unspooling police tape outside the ATM, watching the news and seeing the pictures of people standing in long lines on the sidewalks in Toronto holding cups of takeaway coffee; they couldn’t all be part of the same dream or nightmare). And the autumnal glimmer in the door was surely fire.

  Was she on duty?

  She thought she ought to get to the station anyway. She couldn’t quite see where the door was. The crazy Brit woman must have come out ahead of her and left it open; by the glow of hidden firelight she found herself outside, on the uneven stones by the street. Sparks tumbled upward into sight over the silhouette of the building next door. The fire was toward town. Its light was all the light there was. The outage had blacked the whole place. A car screeched into hearing and then sight on the road below, going the other way, much too fast. She felt her way onto the street and down to the main road, where she noticed again that she’d forgotten shoes. The tarmac didn’t seem wet and wasn’t cold. Anyway, it was an emergency: best to hurry. She felt light, that slightly delirious convalescent feeling. Now she could look along the road and see the splintered outline of flames, strips of gossamer yellow tearing themselves off and vanishing into the dark. A house was burning. Another house.

  Down by the inlet people were shouting.

  As she jogged into town a set of headlights swung out from one of the side roads. They swept round and came head on, blinding her. She turned aside and got herself out of the way. As the vehicle accelerated past, she waved from the side of the road to stop the driver. She leaned into the head-high brilliance of the headlights as far as she dared. Tires squealed and skidded, the lights tipped away, there was a crack like a cannon. Goose cowered in shock. The truck had swerved into a pole and embedded the wood in its crumpled front. After the crunch of impact, silence: then something heavy thumped against the inside of the side window and stuck there, leaking darkness.

  Goose uncurled herself, dumbstruck.

  The headlights were still on, picking out long grass and the foot of the building on the corner. A window slid open somewhere above.

  “Hello?” Goose called. She approached the side window where the unmoving silhouette was sprawled. “Someone there?”

  “You okay?” a voice shouted down.

  “I think the driver’s injured. Can you call an ambulance?”

  “Anyone there?”

  “I’m the police.” Shielding her eyes from the glare in front, she pushed her face to the glass. The silhouette became another face, looking back at her, pressed flat against the window, unmoving, cracked open at the temple. No need for an ambulance after all.

  “Tabarnac.” She’d seen plenty of vehiculars but the impact of the empty-eyed faces never wore off. “Fatal accident,” she called to whoever was leaning out of the building above.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m a police officer. Sir, I need you to—” She was about to say call: then she remembered (was it remembering?—it didn’t feel quite like remembering, but there wasn’t time to think about it) that the phone lines were down. She’d have to get help herself. Get the accident scene cordoned off, get back here with some light. If there was light. If she had time. She`struggled to think of the proper procedure. The fire was more urgent, anyway; the accident was over. The blink of an eye, and another life snuffed out, another person’s whole history of fears and desires and things done and undone all gone as quick as pressing the off switch, wink. . . .

  She backed away from the car.

  “Anyone alive down there?”

  “No survivors,” she called back. “Please stay away from the incident scene, sir. We’ll be back as soon as we can.” Insects flittered silently out of the dark to bathe in the beam of the lights. She stepped among them, looking up to where the man at the window seemed to be. “I’m—” she began, and heard the window bang abruptly shut.

  “Sir?”

  A white-winged moth brushed by her face, too light for touch.

  “I need your name, sir,” she called. “For a statement later.” No one answered. “That’s an official police request.” Still no one answered. She glanced toward the fire again. She didn’t have time for this. “Small-town piece-of-crap losers,” she added. All she could see of the building above was the dim echo of firelight in panes of glass, as though the apartment block were thinking about smoldering too. She tried to get the truck’s tag number but the glow behind was too dim, though when she looked down the road toward the fire it seemed taller now, its heart a deeper red. The station, she thought. She could get herself back on top of things once she was properly at work. She could get Jonas to bring her up to speed. She didn’t like to leave the scene of an accident but there wasn’t anything more she could do on her own, and if there was a house burning in town she’d be needed there too, until the rescue squad came. She wondered how long it took them to get over from Hardy once they got the call—

  No call. The phones were down.

  She found herself jogging faster toward the firelight, imagining the volunteer firefighters in their beds in Hardy, on the other side of the island, thirty dark kilometers away. They couldn’t hear or see the burning house and yet they were supposed to know and come racing. What happened when they didn’t?

  As she passed she glimpsed a few people standing on the doorsteps of houses back from the road. She yelled at them to stay clear. The inevitable bystanders, drawn to the fire like those insects in the headlights, would only be putting themselves in danger. She didn’t wait to see whether they were listening. They probably couldn’t see her in the dark anyway. The flames were rising from a property down near the water, where the road dipped closest to the inlet, not far from the dock. As she came closer the stillness of the night dissolved into the white noise of burning, a dry roar as constant as a waterfall. The heat was less fierce than she’d expected, but the sound was overwhelming.

  In the surrounding darkness the fire was the uncontested center of the world. Trees and houses and trailers and the poles of dead streetlamps and empty electrical wires came into being around it, made of red light and shadows, and the surrounding streets shone like expiring lava, cooling into black as they flowed away. She saw a few silhouettes scurrying back and forth around the house, some carrying pails. Two kids on a motorbike came roaring past. The one riding shotgun tossed a bottle into the conflagration, whooping. A family ferrying possessions out of a nearby property and into the back of a camper van stopped what they were doing long enough to shout tepid insults after the kids. A weak chain of maybe six or seven people stretched between the street and the inlet, ferrying pails of water. The man at the top of the chain edged as close to the burning lot as he dared before chucking his load onto the house. Goose could see at once that his efforts were hopeless. The rising glow turned the surface of the inlet into a sheet of submerged copper, punctured by dark holes where a handful of boats were moored. Someone was shouting about wetting the bushes around the yard. Other townspeople were just standing around, hands in the pockets of their bathrobes. No one looked her way. The air hissed and crackled and hummed.

 
“Has someone gone over to Hardy?” An older guy was standing by himself, leaning on a stick. Goose ran up next to him. “Excuse me? Sir?” He didn’t seem to hear her. She touched his arm. “Sir?” He had the patiently bewildered expression common to most of the old guys. He turned it on her, or nearly on her; his eyes didn’t focus. Half blind, perhaps, or half drunk. His mouth fell open but he didn’t answer. She looked for someone who might have been in charge. The guy who’d been shouting about making a firebreak was trying to wrestle the pail away from someone else. Between the two of them they only managed to drop it. A tongue of spilled water licked across the road, reflecting the leaping brilliance as though the tarmac too had caught fire. She went over his way. “Sir? Sir?” But the noise of the burning was deafening here, either that or he was ignoring her too: he ran back toward the inlet with the pail. Someone behind her screamed. A white spot rose on the road behind and rushed closer: the motorbike again, making a return pass, both of the kids now howling with anarchic joy. Goose turned to see where the scream had come from. Her gaze was caught by a ripple of shadow on a roofline at the edge of visibility. For an instant she thought something huge and dark had moved there, spreading massive wings; then it was gone, if it had been there at all.

  “Get everyone out of these houses!” No one even stopped to listen. By the light of the flames their faces were all masklike, flattened and filled with shadow. She imagined herself the same, another eerie phantom in the crowd. She needed the authority of her full uniform, then maybe people would start recognizing her and she could get something done. She turned her back to the burning house and started uphill toward the station, wondering where Jonas was. She’d gone the first block when it occurred to her that it was the middle of the night (wasn’t it?) and she hadn’t picked up her keys. She wasn’t sure what she’d thought she was doing just running out of her apartment like that without even putting her shoes on, let alone grabbing anything else she might need; still, here she was. (Wasn’t she?) She slowed down. Already, just a block and a half up the hill, the road was almost utterly dark, two rows of houses with their yards fed by Pacific rainfall between her and the blaze. In one picture window she saw candlelight, which, now that she thought about it, was probably how the fire had started in the other house. She considered knocking on the door, waking them up, ticking them off for leaving their candles lit, but she couldn’t make herself do it. The little illumination would be all they had. Without it—snuff—

  Up another block and then two more along the slope. She thought she’d made the right turns but it was hard to be sure. She heard screams again, floating up like the short-lived cinders. In consort with the fistful of fire surrounded by absolute darkness and the memory of the gruesome dead face in the truck, the shouts turned the scene below her momentarily hellish. The kids, she guessed, doing their best to terrify already fearful people. She promised herself she’d have the two of them in cells in the morning. . . .

  She halted, dizzy: or not exactly dizzy, because in the darkness she didn’t feel stable on the earth anyway, but suddenly afflicted by a vertigo of uncertainty. She was remembering a girl in a cell one morning, a memory too concrete with consequences to be part of any nightmare. Jennifer Knox, The Girl Who Wouldn’t Speak—except that Goose could recall the sound of her voice precisely.

  It had just been the two of them, after all, with kilometers of nothing in every direction, the sea and the barren islands. She remembered Jennifer explained why it was okay to speak to Goose: Talking with you’s like talking with nobody.

  The cells were just here, if she was right. She tried to make some sense of the dark. Edging along the road, she saw a tall straight shadow suddenly come between her and the glow. The flagpole: she’d reached the station, then. But there wasn’t a hint of light inside. The power had left it, the same as everywhere else. No one was there.

  Jonas might be at home, though. She couldn’t see if the patrol car was out in front. It was hard to believe he wouldn’t be out on duty somewhere on a night like this, but then if you’d have backed anyone to sleep through the apocalypse Jonas would be the guy. Anyway, her options were either getting lucky and finding him in or footing it back to the apartment for all the stuff she needed; she ought at least to give it a go while she was here. Unfortunately the half of the station where Jonas lived had its entrance at the back, where it was utterly dark. She remembered there were shrubs by the path but she couldn’t see them at all, not even the suggestion of an outline. She went step by step, feeling for anything that might orient her. A few paces in off the road she thought she felt plants: something cool and living, at any rate. She prodded her way carefully past.

  The ambience of the darkness changed: tighter, closer. The air smelled of inside things. She thought she must be right by the back fence, but when she put her hands out they met nothing.

  “Goose?”

  “Jonas?”

  “Goose!”

  She must have gotten all the way inside without knowing it. So he’d left his door open too? Perhaps he’d been hoping for a trickle of light, though when she turned around there was nothing visible in that direction either.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to just walk in. I can’t see a thing. Where are you?”

  “I’m right here, man.”

  “Thanks, that helps. Don’t you have a flashlight or something? What are you doing?”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “You were asleep? Don’t you know what’s going on out there?”

  “Lotta things been going on, Goose. What happened to you? Where did you go?”

  “I—” She felt weightless again, as if her own history had fled from her, as invisible and intangible as the room as she was (wasn’t she?) standing in. “I was—” Was, the past tense. J’étais . . . It felt like a grammatical trapdoor opening onto a bottomless drop. She edged away from it. “Am I supposed to be on tonight? I guess I lost track. Sorry.”

  “Aw, Goose. None of that works anymore.”

  “None of what?”

  “Rotas and stuff. Normal service. Is that why you’re here? Worrying about work even in my dreams?”

  “You’re not dreaming, Jonas. Where are you?” She reached around her ankles, feeling for the clutter she remembered in his room, the TV and the man-cave chair.

  “Hey, you’re right. If this was my dream you’d be naked.” He chuckled his gentle amusement, a soft, slow belly laugh, at ease with itself. He sounded as if he were over . . . there, but when she tried to connect the direction with wherever she was facing it didn’t add up.

  “You fell asleep in your chair?”

  “I guess.”

  “Couldn’t even make it to the bedroom? Jeez.”

  “Nah. I gave the kid the bed.”

  “Kid?”

  “You remember. You saw him first. The Chinese kid.”

  Fog. She felt it vividly again—or rather didn’t feel it; she felt or recalled or reexperienced the absence of anything to feel, the (non)sensation of floating in the dense grey mist, not knowing up from down. She’d been with Jonas in his boat. . . .

  “I got him from the hospital.” Jonas sounded even dozier than usual. He hadn’t even tried to get up from wherever he was. “They couldn’t deal with extra bodies. Doctor stopped me in the street and said they were gonna put him out on the sidewalk. When the power went they tried to send everybody home. Man, nobody knew where to go. Crazy couple o’ days. I couldn’t just leave him on his own. Some of the guys were running pretty wild in the streets.”

  “The kid on the beach? The killer whale? He’s here?”

  “Yep. He’s been okay. Freaks out sometimes, but I think we’re starting to get along. Said his name a couple of times. It’s a start. Hey, you were right, maybe I was cut out to be a dad after all.”

  Goose felt around, still trying to get her bearings in the room. She remembered the gigantic TV and was amaze
d she hadn’t bumped into it yet. Her sweeping fingers tapped against something near knee level. “Jonas? That you?” No, it was an object, not a body; in fact, her hands identified it immediately, despite the darkness, as if its oval-eyed face had thrust out of the fog. The mask. Something about the rough solidity of the carved wood was unmistakable to the touch. “Where the hell are you?” Now she noticed a smell so powerful she wondered how she could have missed it before. He must have been fishing and forgotten to put his catch in the freezer. No. The freezer wouldn’t be working either, of course.

  “You sound kinda troubled, Goose. You got something you need to tell me?”

  “Can’t you just get your ass in gear? There’s a fire in town. Someone needs to get down there and keep some order.”

  “Order?” She thought she heard him stirring, getting up, but it was only a whispery exhalation, the quietest version of his half chuckle, half sigh. “Good luck with that. Order, heh. What, you want me to go wave my badge around, tell everyone to chill out, get back to work? Where’ve you been these last couple of days?”

  Drifting. Nowhere. “I—”

  She couldn’t answer that question. Not only because she didn’t know: when she tried to know, when she thought about it, the terrible ungrounded vertigo made her spin. She glimpsed a reflection of her old childhood nightmare, the incommunicable horror of a solitary spot of consciousness moving in an infinite void.

  “You not coming back, Goose? Here to say good-bye?”

  “I’m trying to get to work. We’re still Mounties. Sworn to serve, remember?”

  “Kalmykov left. Hoaglund too. Hoaglund was supposed to be watching the SavaMart. Know what he did? Filled the back of the car with ham and beer and bagels and took off. Dunno where they all think they’re going. Last we heard, things were getting pretty heavy down-island too. Before we stopped hearing anything. Me, I knew it was serious when they canceled the play-offs.”

  “Hoaglund’s a prick. You’re not, Jonas. Come on. Are you planning to sleep through it?”