Trickster Drift

by Eden Robinson

  “Hey,” Jared said, stepping into the hallway. “Hey!”

  The guy stopped, and frowned at him. “Mind your own business.”

  Jared held up his phone. Gave it a waggle. The guy came down the hallway, suddenly smiling, jovial. Jared hit the Record button. “Let’s make you Internet famous!”

  “You think you’re smart?” The man’s face was shiny with sweat and his eyes were narrowed, but he was still smiling. “Stop filming me, you freak.”

  “I’m Jared Martin,” Jared narrated. “I live in apartment 202. This dude doesn’t live here and he’s, like, banging on my neighbour’s door super loud.” Jared said to the guy, “What’s your name, dude?”

  “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “Catchy. Is that your DJ name?”

  “Are you a pedo? Are you sniffing around my girl, baby fucker?”

  “Dude, so nasty.”

  “Answer me.”

  Jared kept filming as the guy towered over him. They were both breathing hard, not moving. The dude grabbed for Jared’s phone, but he was slow and telegraphed his move. Jared stomped his ankle and ducked back into his apartment, quickly locking the door.

  “Too slow!” Jared shouted through the door.

  The guy punched the door. Shu zapped inside, flitting up and down the hallway. She wanted him cursed. She wanted Jared to help her. She wanted it now. Mave stood in her bedroom door in her nightshirt. Eventually, Jared heard receding footsteps and cracked the door open. Other people were also peering out. He sent the video to Olive’s cellphone.

  Mave said, “Jesus, Jared. You don’t antagonize Aiden when he’s high.”

  “Maybe he shouldn’t antagonize me,” Jared said.

  She shook her head. “So cute. And so clueless.”

  “I’ve handled worse,” Jared said.

  The amusement fell from her face, and she flinched, suddenly finding something terribly interesting beyond his left shoulder. He wasn’t sure how to read that. Was it pity or sadness?

  She forced a smile. “Coffee?”

  “The answer is always yes,” Jared said.

  Dent, who had been trying to help Jared with his studying, popped away when Hank arrived. Jared picked up his phone and crept Sophia’s wall. She was spending her second anniversary near Lisbon, posting many arty food pictures to mark the occasion. She’d posed at a restaurant with a patio on a white sand beach, looking windswept and happy beside her sunburnt husband.

  Hank ignored Mave in the kitchen and came to stand by the table as Jared shut his phone off.

  “You did good, Jared,” Hank said. “You gave us good evidence.”

  “But…?” Jared said. “With you, I always wait for the ‘but.’ ”

  “Just film next time. Don’t engage.”

  Jared said, “He was trying to break down her door.”

  Hank was instantly pissed. “I said don’t engage.”

  Jared wished he’d just accepted the half-assed compliment. He stood to go to his bedroom. “Later.”

  “Did you hear me?” Hank said, grabbing him just above the elbow.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Jared yanked, but Hank had a solid grip on him.

  “Jesus, Jared. He’s unstable! You don’t have your kind of weird-ass chats with rabid dogs. You call security. You call 911. You come get me. Is that clear?”

  “Geez, you’re extra shout-y today,” Jared said.

  Hank gave Jared a shake. “Don’t engage with Aiden.”

  “You’re dislocating my arm, dude.”

  “Henry-kins,” Mave said in a warning tone.

  “This is serious,” Hank said. “I want you to take this seriously.”

  “I know. Okay? Got it. No more chit-chat with the ’roidy ex.”

  Hank released his elbow. “You don’t handle this on your own.”

  “He’s a giant asshole,” Jared said. “But he’s slow.”

  “He’s a starving bear,” Hank said. “And you are a squirrel.”

  Jared let the burn settle in. “Does that make you the moose? You know, moose and squirrel? The cartoon?”

  Hank slammed the door behind him as he left.

  “Yup,” Mave said, handing him coffee and a hard-boiled egg. “Making friends and influencing people. That’s you.”

  Olive and Eliza came to visit. Olive shyly thanked him, shoulders hunched, obviously embarrassed. Shu popped into the room, sizzling sparks. She stuck close to Eliza. Jared heard a hum, like power lines on a hot day, but no one else seemed to hear it, so he said nothing. Eliza handed him a quarter and asked him to get as many marshmallows as it would buy.

  “For Shu,” she explained.

  After they left, Shu stayed behind, staring unblinkingly at Jared. She held out her hand to him. She still wanted him to curse Aiden. She wanted him dead. She wanted Jared’s help. Jared got a picture in his mind of Aiden convulsing on the ground.

  No, Jared thought at her. Shu, no.

  His mom would do it, had done it. And he’d been tempted with David. But he couldn’t. That was a step beyond. He wasn’t ready to curse anyone. He might never be ready for that. Shu slapped his hand with a spark that was like touching an electric fence. Jared yipped and yanked his hand back.

  “Are you all right?” Mave said from the couch.

  Shu glared at him, radiating disappointment, before she popped away.

  “Yeah,” Jared said. “Muscle cramp.”

  Mave shut the TV off and came to the table, wrapping him in a hug from behind. “I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered.

  He checked the mail on the way out to buy some eggs. He recognized Granny Nita’s carefully sloped cursive immediately.

  Dear Jared,

  I’m happy you are safe. I’m so proud of you. Here is some coffee money. I’ll write you again if you like.

  Love,

  Granny Anita

  She’d included a twenty-dollar bill. He tucked the letter in his backpack.

  He felt a little unhinged, and decided to hit a meeting before he grabbed the eggs. He googled the closest one and took a shortcut down an alley. His phone pinged. Sarah was waiting for her grandfather at the airport and feeling ambivalent about it all.

  Danger, his nerves told him, as he heard heavy footsteps behind him.

  Before he could turn, his skull lit up on the inside, pain opening like a gunpowder flower sparking against a dark sky. He felt his face thump the slick concrete. His nose burst, a red splatter and the telltale taste of copper. A part of Jared’s brain hoped he wouldn’t have a bent nose like Richie’s, a crooked reminder of a brawl. He flailed, trying to stand, the ground tipped like a Tilt-a-Whirl ride, and he stumbled, coming to rest against a brick wall, barely standing.

  David wore a baseball cap and sweats. He raised his length of pipe again and swung it like a bat. Jared couldn’t move fast enough. The pipe connected with a thunk. Jared slid to the ground. David kicked him, and kicked him, and kicked him again. Jared stared up the alley, at the traffic zipping up and down the street. He managed to shout, but then David dragged him a few feet and straddled his head. David’s knees clenched on Jared’s ears and the world became muffled. David paused.

  He can’t kill me, Jared thought. He can’t. It’s daylight.

  David produced a forty-sixer of vodka from his backpack. Not a great vodka, but a vodka Jared remembered, with a raw, medicinal bite. He held it up so Jared could see it. He cracked it open, then put it down beside them. He produced a red plastic funnel. Jared kicked, realizing what David was going to do and thinking, No, no, I have a year.

  David shoved the funnel through Jared’s clenched teeth. He could taste the plastic, felt the tip of the funnel hitting the back of his throat, triggering his gag reflex. The vodka burned. He held his breath as he struggled, he held it as the vodka splashed everywhere. He choked, couldn’t catch his breath, couldn’t breathe. He gurgled.

  When David finally let him go, Jared rolled onto his side and vomited, his guts clenching while his lungs trie
d to suck in as much air as they could. David pulled out another bottle. While Jared retched, David splashed him, sprinkling him from head to toe with more vodka.

  Sauce for the goose, a part of Jared’s brain told him, and he crawled away, heaving. David kicked him until Jared was stuck on his back like a turtle, too dizzy and drunk to figure out which way was up. The sky, the grey sky, a bird, a pigeon cooing on a fire escape, the sounds of traffic, a girl laughing. The snap of a match being lit. David paused, looking down at Jared, his pupils wide and dark.

  The match burned in David’s fingers. The smell of sulphur. Jared’s soaked clothes clinging to him. His backpack a lump beneath him. His phone was going to burn. His first good phone, the closest thing he’d ever had to new.

  The slow arc of the match. David danced back, eyes meeting Jared’s, and he would plead for his life, he would beg for it, but the match was already flying and he was soaked with alcohol.

  Stop, drop and roll. Stop, drop and roll. Jared’s brain suggested things that weren’t going to work, panicked problem-solving, still confident that he could wiggle out of this. Scrambling, he jumped back enough so the match missed, but it hit the puddle of booze that Jared had left behind. The sudden flare of heat and the whoosh of combustibles realizing their potential.

  I don’t want to burn, Jared thought.

  The fire trailed him like a wedding train as he hopped back. He heard his own panicked scream.

  I want to live, he thought.

  And he leapt, losing his clothes in an instant. He shed the ground. He startled the pigeon into flight when he landed on the fire escape beside it, his vision suddenly strange with colours he didn’t recognize, the world acid-high intense. His arms were unwieldy, weighted with blue-black feathers. He flapped, confused, and realized his feet were claws and he needed to grip the iron grating, but he couldn’t figure out how and he tumbled, croaking and flapping.

  By the time he hit the alley floor, he was human again. David stared at him with wonder, even as he reached into the box of safety matches and pulled out another one, moving close.

  I’m human, Jared thought. That didn’t happen. Because I’m human.

  He stumbled as he tried to rise, and he was naked, like an anxiety dream come true. David lit another match and Jared bolted skywards, his wings knowing what to do with the lazy breeze even as his brain scrambled to deny that he was flying. David ran below him, a shrinking, furious figure.

  When he caught an updraft, he swooped. The ground was still there, but the air embraced him and he was overwhelmed by the kaleidoscope sky, its swirling shades of blue like the waves of an ocean, greenish where the air chilled and orange-tinged near the buildings where it was warmer. The sky above him was wide, beautiful and free.

  36

  The continent of North America rides on a giant shell called a tectonic plate, one of the great slabs of mantle and crust separating all living things from the earth’s molten core. The speed at which the North American plate crawls across the planet makes glaciers seem like rabbits on Red Bull. It is placid, taking millions of years to move negligible distances. But there are tectonic plates moving in different directions. Occasionally, at the edges, older, stiffer rocks gum up the gears of Earth’s geological clock. The plates keep moving, but they bulge, like flood water piling up against a dam, ready to burst. Where the tectonic plates brush against each other as they travel in opposing directions, the world shakes itself free. At the places where one plate slides under another plate, the world shakes until it rips itself apart.

  The San Andreas Fault is famous for causing quakes, but it has a quieter, more lethal cousin. The Cascadia Subduction Zone runs from the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to Cape Mendocino, California. The smallest of the tectonic plates, the Juan de Fuca plate in the Pacific Ocean, slips under the North American tectonic plate. Every four hundred to six hundred years, North America catches and gets stuck. The tension builds until the plates burst apart, releasing all the pent-up energy instantaneously. During the rupture, these interplate earthquakes are the planet’s most powerful. A magnitude 9.0 earthquake releases the same amount of energy as 500 megatons of TNT. For comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 released 16 kilotons or 0.016 megatons of energy.

  On a winter’s evening on the twenty-sixth of January in the year 1700, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake shook the northern Pacific coast of North America for five minutes and released a tsunami so powerful that when it reached Japan, the 600-mile-long wave churned the waters around the island of Honshu for eighteen hours.

  Eyewitness accounts tell us that late on a dark winter’s night, many years ago, Thunderbird fought a whale that had become a monster, killing other whales. As Thunderbird pulled the whale out of the ocean, the water receded, and then, when he dropped the whale, the water came flooding back, flinging canoes into the trees. When they fought on land, it shook with the epic battle.

  The earth snapped, popped and rippled as the shaking moved from west to east. Sand became so loose, people walking on the beach sank into it. Trees whipped, making a strange rattling noise. Longhouses up and down the coast collapsed. Landslides buried villages. The elders warned the people to run into the mountains. Those who heeded them were chased by a wall of waves. After a few days, the salt water sank back into the ocean. The survivors returned to their villages to find them scrubbed from existence.

  The shore had dropped six feet in an instant, long stretches of coast vanishing into the ocean. Stands of cedars and firs near the shore died as salt water drowned their roots. The resulting ghost forests can still be seen on beaches in Washington and Oregon, dead stumps and grey skeletons emerging from the sand.

  The ghost forests witness this new age and these new people who don’t understand what a thunderbird can do.

  37

  He couldn’t quite navigate the curve required to descend and swoop through the open patio door, so he hit the frame and squawked, tumbling into the apartment, naked and still smelling like a distillery. Jared sat up and cricked his shoulder and the pain went away. Then he was afraid of what that meant and the pain hit him again. He touched his nose, but his hand came away with no blood. His lips weren’t split or sore from the funnel. The fiery slice of skull where the pipe had struck was gone or had never existed, as if he’d been dreaming about falling but woke before he hit the ground. He touched his sides. He reeked and he still felt hosed, and he wondered if he could change that, and then he became afraid that he could and of everything that meant. He picked up a throw blanket and wrapped it around his waist.

  It meant nothing. He wasn’t…he couldn’t…

  Crap, he thought. My backpack. My wallet.

  Jared went to the kitchen to make himself a coffee. He laughed, because the grinder wouldn’t grind. He had to plug it in. He knew he should phone the bank and declare his debit card missing—his loan, the money from work. He should phone his cell provider and declare his phone stolen. He mourned the phone, but he didn’t see himself getting it back any time soon, or his ID, his bus pass and his ten dollars and change. Then he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the microwave door and saw that he still had half a head of feathers. He wanted his stubble back, and with that wish the feathers shrank back into his head.

  He took a shower. Scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, but the crazy stuck to him, fed him sensations of reading the wind with his feathers, seeing the city from its rooftops. The ecstatic freedom of it. The tumbling pleasure of flight.

  Feathers sprouted from his arms. His heart trip-hammered and he felt nauseous. He shut off the water and heaved, still dizzy and half-drunk. He vomited again, vomited and clutched the toilet like it was dear friend.

  I forgot how this felt, Jared thought. Drunk and rolled.

  He wrapped himself in a towel and peeked out the bathroom door. Mave was still working in her bedroom. He heard something screaming and went to check. The murals in the hallway popped to life as he came near them, the little
figures dancing and eating, swimming and screaming. Terrible red smoke rose from the painted longhouse on the shore as the painted bear with a seal’s tail started snacking on little chiefs in the war canoe. When he walked into his room, the floating heads blinked and yawned. Sarah’s fireflies shot through the ceiling, forming a tiny figure eight of cold fire above his head.

  Crap, Jared thought.

  There aren’t enough of us to go home, they told him. We need your help.

  No, he thought at them. No, no, I can’t.

  His bedroom filled with ghosts he’d never seen before and an assortment of new spirits. He didn’t know what they were, much less what to call them. They were piled up to the ceiling where Sarah’s fireflies spun. The ghostly murmur reverberated through the apartment. The ghosts and spirits stared at him. The fireflies sparked and disappeared, then reappeared.

  He steeled himself and walked through them to sit on his bed, his skin prickling, chilling. He felt himself getting shaky, anxious.

  Go, he told them. Get. Now.

  The ghosts and spirits all went silent. In the dark corner of the room, something darker tapped the wall. The fingers came through first, pale arms and a pale, bald head. Its black eyes scanned the room and it sniffed as it crawled out. All the other spirits puffed out of existence and the only sound was the television and the thing from the wall crawling towards him. Jared lifted his feet off the floor.

  It curled up like a dog and waited just out of reach, still except for its chest rising and falling, eyes fully black and hopeful.

  Jared could hear other spirits and ghosts surrounding the apartment, flashes of faces in the window, sounds above and below. Scratches. Scurrying. Children’s giggles.

  The faces painted on the wall were still as they watched the thing on the floor, suspicion etched in all their expressions.

  “It’s just me,” Jared said. “Lil plastered, but still me.”