I glanced in at Thomson, asleep on the couch, slipped on my shoes, and left.
16 City
I had nowhere to go. I hoped Marvin would bring me home, like a lost puppy, so when he said he knew a place I could stay I didn’t really question him or make a decision. I just followed, like the other times, the times to come.
Outside the Pantomime, I took his hand. He stiffened at first, still annoyed, I think, at Walter’s outburst, but his fingers pushed through the gaps between mine. Margo and Walter left, saying they’d see me later. They were heading to our old apartment to talk to the landlord about my things—a promise I’d managed to pull out of Margo.
The oak trees were reddening with early buds on the street where Marvin took me. It was lined with three-storey brick houses with peaked roofs and bars on the lower windows. We turned up a narrow cement pathway leading to a wooden gate painted a scuffed, glossy black. The hinges shrieked and Marvin stopped, waited for the sound to fall away, and then pushed it open quickly like pulling a bandage off. We went through a door and then down a steep flight of concrete stairs. Marvin snapped a light on and led me into a narrow room. The walls were the rock of the building’s foundation. The ceiling was so low he had to stoop. A long velvet couch stood across from wooden stairs that led to another level, and I heard feet moving across the floor over our heads. I sneezed three times, and Marvin watched me from an opening in the wall at the other end of the couch. His arm swung into its dark hole.
“Bedroom, unless you want to sleep on the couch.” He walked past me and I turned, realizing there was a kitchen. Marvin opened the fridge and I saw a can of apple juice and a couple potatoes.
“Food,” he said. “No reason to go out.” He pointed past the counter. “Bathroom’s there. If you need anything, slide a note under the door at the top of the stairs.”
“Who’s up there?”
Marvin smiled, a small motion of his closed lips. “Trust me,” he said.
“I can’t go out?”
“It’s better if you lay low.”
“I’m just supposed to stay here?”
“Start with a couple days. Who knows, maybe you’ll love it.” He pushed off the counter. “I have to go.”
“Now? You can’t stay?” I knew I sounded needy, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted more of him, had already imagined the two of us there, forgetting time in the room without windows.
“Entertain yourself,” he said, walking toward the door. “Do some studying.” Above the couch, a shelf bowed from the weight of books. I saw titles: Wretched of the Earth, Our Ancient Future, Life After Debt, and a pile of Archie comics, their spines whitened, wording barely legible.
“Wait,” I said and scrambled up the rough-edged stairs to press my mouth against his. It was a hard kiss but I felt him soften, and we stumbled against the wall, my elbow grazing an edge of granite so it would bleed.
That first night I slept in the tiny bedroom. It was hardly bigger than one of the booths at the diner and on the wall was a rusted iron hatch, bolted shut. The old coal chute, I knew, because we’d had one at the farm that I used to send my dolls down, entertaining myself, dirtying their long blond hair.
At some point that night, I woke, feeling restless, my lungs constricted. Overwhelmed with anxiety, I lay in the blackness. There was no clock. The only window in the place was in the shower stall, in the bathroom on the apartment’s other end, and it looked into a hollow of dirt. Deep breathing calmed me. Marvin would be back, I told myself. I’d figure it out. Everything would be all right. Despite the dank mustiness of the place and the terrible feeling of being underground, it was a refuge, a break from constantly thinking about what came next, what to say, how to impress Thomson and Phoenix. I gave in, let myself be there, decided to trust him.
When I woke again, I heard the door to the upper floor closing. I located the switch to the room’s single light. A teal plate sat on the top stair, three boiled eggs wobbling in place.
That happened every morning and in the afternoon, other food showed up: a bowl of watery chicken soup, half a bottle of homemade wine, hard cookies that were barely sweet.
The people upstairs were noisy. I heard the low rumble of their voices, feet confidently crossing floors, the strumming of a guitar. They came and went from the house without a rhythm.
It was like that for days. Days he left me down there and I stayed, stupidly waiting. I had no clock so I figured out the time of day by climbing out into the backyard. Often it was night and I breathed in the cold, fresh air as I looked up at the stars. The third time that happened, after I’d read all of the Archies and skimmed through some of the heavier books just so I could tell Marvin I’d read them, I decided to go for a walk. I wanted to go to the Empire. I wanted to talk to Margo and find out what had happened with my stuff. I wanted to find Marvin and find out why he had abandoned me.
The neighbourhood had fallen into a deep hush so I knew it was likely only a few hours till dawn. But halfway down the street, I started thinking about Marvin, how he’d said that it was better if I hid, how he’d asked me to trust him. I stopped walking. I stood there, staring down the street to the nearest intersection, and then I turned around.
When I got back to my basement, I snapped on the room’s single light and the bulb popped, glass shattering in a miniature explosion.
I know you understand darkness. That cave. Night in the forest when the moon isn’t full. But I had never been in such complete, sudden blackness before. I lifted my hand in front of my face and saw nothing no matter how hard I pushed my eyes. It was like I didn’t exist.
It gave me something to do. A mission. I slept for a few hours and when I woke I felt my way to the stairs. At the top, my toes hit the plate and it crashed down, boiled eggs and ceramic shattering. I knocked, but no one came. No sound. The door wasn’t locked. Daylight poured through two large windows on the far side of the kitchen. I paused, blinking, and when my eyes adjusted, I saw dishes drying on a towel beside the sink. Bright yellow flowers on the old-fashioned wallpaper.
I didn’t want them to find me. I didn’t know who they were. I moved quickly, searching under the sink for a lightbulb but found nothing but chemical glass cleaner, a container of dishwasher detergent, a plastic compost bucket with coffee grounds on top. More coffee. I stood and looked around. An old-fashioned phone was fastened to one end of the cupboards. I stared at it for a minute and then went to it, lifted it, and quickly punched in my parents’ number. As it rang and rang, my fingers clutched the spiralling cord, working it around my palm and loose again. When voicemail picked up, I left a quick message: Everything’s fine, I’ll try you soon, I love you. Almost all lies.
After I hung up, I swallowed the sting in my throat and kept looking for lightbulbs.
There was a pantry. The walk-in kind, like a closet. The shelves were full of canned food, giant brown bags full of rice and red lentils. Four huge jugs of water on the floor. And baking supplies: brown and white flour, jars of yeast, baking soda, and a plastic bag of powdered sugar, already opened and wrapped in red elastics. My hand closed around it. It was rock hard, but I lifted it anyway, knocked it softly on the edge of the shelf, and felt the contents shift and loosen. I didn’t know how I would get it to Thomson, but I took it; it felt like it was mine. When I turned to leave, something glittered through a curtain of aprons on the back of the door. I parted the draped fabric and saw it: red, gold, and silver stars shining on a map of the city. My finger hovered over each.
I left the house that day. There was nothing I needed from the basement so I didn’t even bother going back down although as I walked I regretted not grabbing the toothbrush that had been left for me when I moved in. I didn’t think I’d be going back. At first I wasn’t quite sure where I was, but it didn’t take me long to get my bearings and I walked by the New Covenant Church where the sisters handed out warm lemon tea during power outages and turned west at a corner with an empty newspaper box covered in faded stickers advertis
ing their website. I was headed for the Empire. I wanted to talk to Marvin if he was there, Margo and Walter if he wasn’t, and try to get some answers. At the Pantomime they’d made it seem like it was only them, a small operation, not the storm of stars I’d seen on the map on the back of the pantry door. I held the hard bag of sugar against my chest like a child. Part of me wished I could simply return to the diner, but I cringed with shame at those last days. Naked in the room with Phoenix, back-handing the bowl of grasshoppers in her face. Not to mention her hard cruelty and what had happened afterwards at Marvin’s. Who was I? Somehow I’d get the sugar delivered to Thomson for his hives, but that was all I could do. Instead, I needed to find Marvin and get answers: how big was Jump Ship and which part of the boat was I on?
Upstairs at the Empire, the reek of mildew from the burgundy carpet made me dizzy. When I knocked on Walter’s door no one answered. I tried again and then pushed open the unlocked door. Twisted sheets on an unmade bed. Empty beer bottles clustered on the bedside table. One-quarter of the wall was taken up by a life-sized poster of a woman in a stars-and-stripes bikini, straddling a motorcycle. A fringe of black mould ran along the loose wallpaper at the edge of the windows. A stack of books with broken spines on the sill. You’re living here? I asked Margo in my head, but then thought of my own circumstances. I turned to leave, unsure where to go—back to the basement, down to Marvin’s place in the dark zone, or just downstairs to the bar to wait without any money to even buy a beer—and found Margo standing in the doorway. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said and pushed me back into the room.
“Because Marvin says?”
“Yeah. Partly.”
“Well, I am.”
She studied me. “What’s that?” she asked, touching the bag of sugar. I shook my head. It would take too long to explain. She walked past me to pull three home-brewed beers out of a box in the corner.
“Shit,” she said. “Come on.”
We went down a back stairway at the end of the hall, one I supposed the servants had used when the run-down building was a home for a single wealthy family. The steps were covered in linoleum that was so dirty I couldn’t make out the pattern. In the basement, we walked along a narrow hallway with walls of stacked stone, cemented in. I thought of the catacombs in Paris, another place my mother had been—that time with my father, on their honeymoon. A postcard pasted into the back of their wedding scrapbook. As a kid I’d looked at that picture a lot, flipping past the bright photos of my parents as young people grinning in the yard at the farm.
Margo pushed open a wooden door and the first thing we saw was Walter, his face squinting in surprise. His steel hand shone violently under an exposed bulb. “Knock,” he shouted.
“Who else would it be?”
“Let’s see,” said Walter, lifting a finger to his chin. “The cops?”
Marvin looked at me. “What’s she doing here?”
“Ask her,” Margo said as she handed out the beers and sat next to Walter on a futon shoved against the wall. Marvin waited.
“They’re Jump Ship?” I asked, and told them about the map in the pantry, stars shining all the way to the suburbs. Walter and Margo were listening but Marvin cut me off. “What were you doing upstairs?”
“I needed a lightbulb.”
“I told you to put a note under the door.”
“It was pitch-black! Nobody was home.”
“What’s that?” Marvin asked, jabbing his chin toward the sugar.
“Can’t I ask any questions?”
“No. You can’t.” I stared at him. “That was the point. I was keeping you out of things so you don’t know more than you need to.”
“I want to know.”
“Why?”
Why? I wanted in, wanted a home, a family. Like I wanted to know about Thomson’s illness, about you. That’s me: burrowing until everything caves in. But what I said was: “Because I’m part of this.”
He took a slug of beer and leaned against a work table that held a pair of rusty pliers, a Styrofoam cup half full of mouldy coffee, a book with its insides cut out. “You’re here now. Sit down.”
“I’m fine.” I’d been sitting for days.
Marvin rustled through a plastic bag and pulled out an old-fashioned cellphone, silver, with a flip-top. “Untraceable,” he said and tossed it to Walter, who caught it with his good hand. “Our next target—” Marvin said.
“Drum roll, please,” said Walter, his hand pinging against the metal futon frame.
Marvin counted off the reasons on his fingers, starting with his nicotine-stained pointer finger. “They have no security. They sell to the same airlines as wealthy agencies. It’s an easier neighbourhood to negotiate. Dark. No cameras.”
“What is it?” asked Margo.
“Phantasy Travel.”
The place where Marvin had broken the window, the night we’d first slept together. Like a clue. I looked down at the dirty floor, covered in snips of coloured wire.
“They specialize in last-chance tourism. Trips to doomed places. Create tonnes more carbon so you can see the last little bit of the Great Barrier Reef that’s being destroyed by carbon. That sort of thing.”
Walter set his empty bottle down and lit a cigarette. “When?” Margo asked.
“Sunday. 9:00 PM.”
“They’ll be closed,” said Walter.
“Yeah.”
“That’s bullshit.”
I wondered if Marvin was placating me, planning something less dangerous. But it was how Jump Ship had always operated: no one hurt, only properties destroyed. Walter pressed his wrist against the centre of his chest. “Let me do it. I’ll walk in there in the middle of the fucking day.”
“Like a suicide thing?” said Margo, her voice too loud.
“I’ll fucking do it.” Margo moved abruptly forward, planted her feet on the floor. She lit a cigarette. The room was already full of smoke. I switched the sugar to my other arm, wishing I could take it down to Thomson, help him scatter it over the bees to knock the small, tarry mites off their sweetened bodies.
“That’s what I’ve decided,” Marvin said.
“And we don’t get a say?”
“You were in the army,” Marvin said. “You know how it works.” Walter glared at him, twisting the cigarette in his steel pincer. Marvin’s fingers pinched the edge of the work table. He seemed still and powerful while Walter sank, slouching on the couch, dropping ash onto the knee of his filthy jeans. “What about the gardens?”
I lifted my head. Palms. Banana trees. Orchids that lived on air.
Marvin and Walter stared at each other until Walter finally spoke. “Shithead,” he said, his voice a kind of hiss, and he settled his gaze on a patch of crumbling mortar as he smoked, one puff after the other, like something mechanical, a train pushing hard down the track.
“Sunday,” Marvin repeated, and when Walter opened his mouth again, Marvin held up his hand, palm out, silencing him. “It’s decided.”
We left then. I followed Marvin out to the street, where a light snow was falling like ash. Marvin slid along the sidewalk on the gripless soles of his combat boots and shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket. We headed north. “Can’t we just go to your place?” I asked.
“That’s not the plan.”
“I don’t get what the big deal is. I hate that place.”
“It’s only a few days.”
He meant until the bombing.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
He smirked. “You want to slow down?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “It’s only property.”
“It’s their business.”
“I’m sure they have insurance.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
“It isn’t personal. It’s a tactic.”
“How is it not personal?”
“We’re not attacking them, we’re attacking what they represent.”
He threw his half-burned cigarette to the ground. There was alr
eady enough fire in him—a heat that was contagious. I found myself nodding, knowing my father would have agreed with him, even added his own support. At the house, Marvin came into the basement. Inside the door, he pulled me against him and I dug through his clothes like some sort of tick, trying to attach myself to him irrevocably. That night was the best sex I ever had, like the lovemaking in a movie about apocalypse where the lone survivors find respite under the rubble of a collapsed overpass. I tingled. I felt the rush, the force of something I mistook for meaning. Afterwards, I told him I loved him. The words erupted out of me. Elemental, a current of water or flame. He didn’t speak, and I lay there for a while hoping he hadn’t heard me, that he’d fallen asleep.
“What’s with the sugar?” he said into the dark.
“It’s for Thomson. His hives.” I didn’t tell him that I’d stolen it.
“You’re planning on going back there?”
“No,” I said, hoping he’d offer to take it for me but he didn’t. When we woke, the eggs at the top of the stairs were cold. We ate and then Marvin left, swallowed by the mouth of light that was the doorway to the outer world.
He disappeared after that. I couldn’t help thinking it was because I’d confessed my feelings to him, feelings I wasn’t even sure about once his powerful presence had dissipated.
I felt uncomfortable that we’d left it at that, but I somehow settled into a routine in the tiny basement. Three or four days passed and then a knock sounded on the door. I looked up from my ham sandwich, a book bent open in my greasy fingers. It was Margo, her arms wrapped around a cardboard box.
“This is all I could get.”
Inside, I dug out my things—an old orange coat that was warmer than the one I had, a pair of jeans, socks and underwear, a few books. Margo wandered through the apartment, sticking her head in the dark coal bin, glancing up the flight of stairs that led to my keepers.
“What about the rest?” I asked as I pulled out a change of clothes.
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