by Kris Bertin
I watched them take her into the night like that, and my first thought was that I have to do something. My second was that I couldn’t, not without losing my job, or having them come at me in the same way. The third thought was big and sticky, and picked up all the other thoughts as it rolled by. The thought was:
Something in this place makes you crazy.
A moment later, the voice that brought it to me added you probably have it too.
I opened up the cafeteria, but after ten minutes I decided that I had to go back. That I’d done the wrong thing by ignoring them. I went and got a scraper to take with me, the only weapon I could find, a little razor to take stickers and paint off glass. It was small, the size of a playing card, but having it on me, in my pocket, got me past my fear and down the stairs. When I got there, all the kids were on the other side of the glass, standing together—four boys and a girl—and smiling. Smiling at me. Smoking and passing a pint of something between them, their teeth and eyes white but the rest of them gone grey under the shadow of the building.
I decided to leave then, left that whole part of the building unfinished, and locked up two hours earlier than I was supposed to. The next day I had my doubts that it even happened, but the condom was still in my uniform pocket, and the next week, I found one still in its package up in that missing brick. To me, it looked like a pattern, but when I was feeling like that, everything did.
The next week, one of the walls attacked someone. I was the last person to be told, and so I just came across a whole mess of caution tape and scaffolding and tarps and dust where I was supposed to be cleaning. When I called Charles, he apologized and told me to just leave that part and move on.
He told me there was gonna be a hell of a lawsuit:
“The fucking front wall’s been spitting rocks the size of grapefruits, one every ten years, but no one would listen to me about it. This time a kid happened through the door at the right exact moment and took one to the noodle.”
Avoiding the mess fucked with my hours, because it took a solid 2.5 off of them, but I didn’t say anything. Instead I put my hand in a locker and give it five good slams. I knew at the time that it wasn’t productive but it made a kind of sense. It was about my hours, but for that poor kid too, like if I felt bad pain it could somehow straighten things out for him and me.
When I look back I know I was acting that way because I refused to take the pills they said I needed after my hospital stay. I thought refusing them would make me stronger, that if I could get through on my own, it would be for the better. And so in that state, thinking about what the bricks and the kids and the wall meant kind of made me decide things I shouldn’t have. Like that the building was alive. That it made you a part of itself or else punished you if you didn’t go along.
It gave me something to do for the rest of my nights, on my smoke breaks, in the toilet bowls. Gave me something to look for when I was doing the floors, gave me cracks to see in the ceiling and little differences to notice. I was sure the school was moving. Maybe it was all marshland underneath, or a slow sinkhole or something, but there were signs of growing and shrinking, no doubt about it. The more I thought about it, the more I remembered stuff that had been one way and was now another, like a whole door that used to be under the stairwell, and the giant mirror that was right next to the south double doors that was just gone.
“What happened to that stuff?” I would ask out loud. I wanted to ask Charles but then I wasn’t really sure if he was on our side or Edmund Burke’s. I wanted to go look for the girl in the silver shirt from all those weeks ago, but I was both scared I wouldn’t be able to find her, and that I would, that I’d lose my job up there on a hot, sticky night.
One night I walked into a beam of moonlight coming down from a little round window and got trapped. I couldn’t move my body or call out for help and so instead I was stuck looking at the little crossbar in the circle and kept thinking I’m in its sights. I only got out of it by holding my breath and closing my eyes and imagining myself down at the other end of the lobby, doing my job. I focused on the idea long and hard until, when I opened my eyes again, that’s where I was, and what I was doing.
I mostly didn’t think about the building during my daytime. I’d just watch TV and smoke and take walks, but more than a few times I’d catch the tail end of an idea or a memory I’d once had that could help with my theory. Memories were hard to hold onto without booze, which had the ability to open my mind like a flower, so I even thought about buying some Russian Prince. Just so I could make my brain work right—not even to get drunk—just a few ounces to grease the wheels and get things going.
I didn’t give in, though, not then. I’d get into bed and sleep when I felt like that, and eventually my missing memory came to me. Spider-man dealt with this shit once. A living building. It was a museum and it tried to kill him. And a brown or a yellow guy was in it. Like a mummy or a zombie, all rotten and shit, and he controlled the museum. He made chandeliers fly around and wax cavemen chase Spider-man. In the end, a suit of armour cut Spider-man’s head off. Or no—Spider-man cut the rotting guy’s head off—but it grew back.
I tried to explain it to the guy at the comic shop and he said he wasn’t sure which issues I meant. He said it sounded more like a Twilight Zone episode but I said no, it’s definitely a comic. I read it as a kid, and then again at the library in the can back in ‘01. It was a pretty dull day so him and me went digging through the oldies and I realized it wasn’t a zombie, it was Spider-man’s enemy, the Lizard. We found four Spider-man comics with museums in them, but only one of them had the lizard. It wasn’t the right comic, but it was close enough that I bought it. Read it at the MacDonald’s nearby, and even though it wasn’t the one I remember, it seemed so familiar that it made me feel better, even if it didn’t tell me how to solve my problem.
I lost the comic book before I could read it twice, but I had a dream about it. About the story I thought I remembered. In it, there was a Lizard, but not the one from the comic book. This one was my Lizard—brown and sweating and covered in bandages—there just for me. I saw him in the hall at the school, upstairs near the toilets, and he had a mean hard-on sticking out of his wrappings. Was hissing and laughing and playing with himself, trying to keep it going so he could give it to me. He didn’t look exactly right, or real—he looked like a guy in a costume—but I got the idea that maybe the costume was alive, growing on the guy in patches, like moss. I knew, somehow, in the story of my mind, that he was a person who had died and come back this way, in a new body that was hell to be inside. And that he hated me and everything.
“Don’t come forward,” I said, but of course he did.
As he came at me, I got a jolt of pain in my guts like I’d been knifed and I fell backwards over my bucket, tipped the thing over and within seconds I was soaked in mopwater.
The monster’s rubber feet squeaked after me and it was then that I realized I wasn’t quite dreaming, I was seeing shit. I heard the echo of my own voice spiralling down the halls and bouncing off the floors and then it was quiet. Then I saw just how dark it was outside. That it was just another night and the hall was empty.
The doctor warned me I was probably gonna see shit. He said I’d feel good for a bit and then it would be like detox all over again. And it would be bad. I thought it had come and gone but there it was after all. At first I thought about the building, and imagined that it was using my own bad thoughts like a magnifying glass on an ant, narrowing them and making them come down on me hotter and stronger than they were in my head. But after that, when I had a drink from the fountain and a cigarette and sat down outside, I knew I would have to get those pills he talked about.
I barely finished my cleaning that night because I was so fucked up over my lizard. I kept looking over my shoulder and even fell down the stairs because of it. Ended up scraping my hands and bashing my knees and it took everything, everything in
me not to walk to Ron’s or whatever bar would let me in at eight a.m. to drink my face off.
It hurt to go to the doctor. To say that I fucked up and I couldn’t straighten myself out on my own. But he was nice about it. He said what he said before, that it’s not an option to go without the pills. That a guy as young as me can still make it if we get on top of it. He prescribed the stuff, which is usually for old people, but said it would help me keep my head sorted. He also gave me a chart of stuff to eat, vitamins to take. Said that people who have alcohol dementia need nutrition more than anything else. It’s important to eat three meals, make them healthy, and never miss them.
I realized too, that I hadn’t been drinking enough water, just a few cups of coffee and a can of coke to stay up. The doctor straightened all that up though, and after a while, I actually felt good. I started getting that high all the time and for a while the job got better. With something as easy as the right food the right amount of times, the right pill at the right hour, things made more sense. Three weeks is all it took for me to feel like a teenager again. At night, the school was quiet, like a church, and when I was cleaning, it was like a whole new place to me. It was like I’d just come back from another planet. One that looked just like this one if it didn’t have straight lines and right angles. I stopped seeing shit, hearing shit, thinking insane thoughts, and more than once I had a hard time remembering what it was even like before the pills.
It stayed away from me, and I didn’t even think about the building growing or moving, or controlling people’s minds. I just about forgot all about it until I found that comic book in a bag with a bunch of porno magazines and old burger wrappers. I laughed out loud, and remembered how crazy I was being, like it was so far away from where I was. But then, I looked inside, looked a little too close at one of the pages. That lizard was smiling too hard, his mouth too wide. And I felt it, like it was fresh. I closed the book. Threw it out.
Then one night the professors get me in their office.
I’m going by with the dust mop and one of them shouts hey and I stop. I don’t know why I stop. One of the professors has a sixty-ouncer, is drinking right out of the neck with one hand like the kids would do, except it’s a fancy Scotch I’ve never heard of. I get the sense from looking at them that maybe something had gone wrong for one of them, and maybe the other was the kind of person who’d go along with anything.
I resist the urge to step inside, so I just stay at the doorway and they ask me questions. Nothing important. Where I grew up (In town). How long I’ve been a cleaner (Just for a bit). If I want a drink (No, I can’t).
But they pass it back and forth to each other, and at some point, start passing it to me to give to the other guy. After a couple of passes, I watch my hand bring it to my mouth. Feel my mouth open, my throat take it and send it down to my belly, and feel everything get dull. Even though I stand there and joke with them and listen to their shit, it takes everything to keep it together. I feel like I’m falling backwards into something like a bed, but warmer. Something like water, but softer. I realize that I believe the building is moving again. I believed it with my first sip. And what’s more, I’ve always believed it.
I want to say something like no sorry I have to keep working, say it now and launch it back ten minutes ago, when I was still safe outside their door frame, but I can’t. I realize that going to meetings and all that probably would have trained me to say it from the get-go. I would have said it when I met them, would have shaken their hands and told them about my disorder or disease or whatever they would have instructed me to call it.
Then we’re outside, and I’m on my hands and knees, showing them the slope in the ground made by the building as it moves forward.
“That’s amazing,” one of them says.
“This place is fucking haunted to shit anyway,” the one with the beard says. “All I hear is people saying they wish the department was somewhere else. Jane saw a ghost here once.”
“Fuck Jane,” the other one says, then the bottle goes around again and we’re leaving to get more and I don’t even think about my dust mop up against the wall on the third floor. Don’t think about the unlocked maintenance room, the extension cord running down an entire hallway into a stairwell. The six dirty washrooms that need to be cleaned.
We’re at a bar after that, and they get us each a pitcher and we’re in a place that doesn’t even care if we drink right out of the jug. Then I realize we’re at Ron’s, and I brought us here. Nick’s behind the bar, watching me, and I get the sense that maybe I’m dreaming, maybe I’ve floated here in a dream and really I’m in bed, groaning and rolling around and kicking the shit out of the sheets. Maybe I’m still good, and I haven’t drank a drop, haven’t done what I’ve done, and everything’s okay.
“I need to put together a resume,” I tell the professors. “I need to get a new job.”
“Take out an ad,” the younger one says, “I’m sure you can do a lot of jobs.”
“I’m alive,” I tell them, “got two legs. I can work.”
“Is Alive and Can Move,” the other one says, moving his hands like he’s creating a headline before our eyes.
Then there’s a long, black piece in my memory like a blindfold and then I’m on a beach with my shirt off.
“Look at that,” one of the girls says. There are girls.
We look out across the harbour at the city and, even though it’s late, the lights and the fog and the sky all around it are this deep purple, green, and brown at the edges like a bruise. There are clouds over top of it that aren’t over us, and you can see the little flashes of lightning way in the air as things get ready to open up.
“The school’s moving,” I tell the professors. “In the past two months, it’s moved two feet. That’s why the wall almost collapsed.”
“Of course it is,” one of them says. “According to my research, the whole city’s on the move. It wants to get into the Atlantic.”
“Really?”
“It’s a living thing, the city. I know that sounds like a joke, but it grows and changes and learns. Does stuff. Just like us. Except it runs on people.”
“That’s bullshit,” I say, but I can feel myself getting scared. “Gonna need a new job.”
“He’s a professor,” one of the girls says in a voice I don’t like. Everyone looks at me like they’re serious, though. Like I’m not being fucked with.
“Your body runs on a bunch of smaller things going around and doing shit. Your blood, your cells, antibodies, bacteria, all that stuff. A city’s the same thing, except we’re those little guys making it work, keeping it alive. You see?”
“Yeah,” I tell them. And I do. I can actually see it in my mind, all of us climbing over scaffolding and driving our cars and walking up and down the streets like water through a pipe. I want to ask them if they know somewhere I can get a job, but then someone passes me a drink and I realize I don’t know anyone’s name, don’t even know who or what they are.
“The city’s gonna dump us all into the ocean,” the bitchy girl says. “You think two feet is impressive? Try a kilometre a year. That’s how fast the city is trying to kill us.”
“It’s true,” the professor says, but this time I can hear something in his voice. Then his friend speaks up and I realize they’ve been bullshitting me, going around in circles making shit up.
Smoke pours out of the other professor’s bearded mouth as thick as taffy, and he says, “Oh yeah, the world’s coming to an end. This is fucking it.”
Then there was thunder, and that feeling you get inside, that rumble that wants you to run away like an animal on a nature documentary, and I could almost see it. That bruise colour spreading through the sky. Everything shook—and I felt it, right in the middle of me—and the city actually moved, moved a whole block over. Like ka-chunk, and there it was, settling in, nestling into place like a cat. And the thun
der got louder and louder and the sky lit up again and when it was over, when the noise from the sky got quiet, almost everyone was laughing like crazy. I could feel something coming, something coming right up from inside of me, so I make a point to try and drift off to that place where everything gets dark and I can sink into myself like a stone down to the bottom of my thoughts.
Three years later I go back to that school and eyeball it from the corner of the steps to the big oak tree out front, and I count out the paces and put my hands flat on the earth and I swear it’s taking a goddamned walk up the city. I’m completely dry, and I’m on my medicine, and I’ve been stone-cold sober since I was back on the street, but I swear it’s moved. It’s a cold fall day and I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s all there, undeniable. And I can still see that same dark shit in all the kids, staring at me as they go by. They look at me like I’m some kind of monster dragging my belly but I know that, down low, from this angle, I can see something that they never will.
CRATER ARMS
There are two kinds of emptiness. The one I had, and the one I needed.
The first kind is empty because it had once been filled; because something had been there and was now absent. This emptiness has a kind of pressure, which I came to see was the expectation of something that used to come around and came no longer. The disappointment of it, which was considerable.
The other kind of empty was of the not-yet-occupied, and that was the kind I wanted. So I went looking for it in the apartment listings in the newspaper and online until I got something. Anything would do, and that’s what I found. I meet with a landlord. He’s an enormous person, the fat on his body parcelled into segments like an insect. He has huge, pointed tits.
It’s three hundred dollars a month, which is the cheapest one-bedroom I’ve ever heard of in this city. The cash is on me, in my shoes, and I tell the landlord I need to use the bathroom so I can get it. I close the door, take out the money, and flush the toilet before I head back out. Everything smells like boiled eggs and it’s cold. I put the wad in the landlord’s hand.