People Park

by Pasha Malla

  Debbie watched the crowd thin and scatter, far below. You wonder if anyone even knows we’re here, she said.

  The one who hit me with a snowball did.

  Here were the students, clasping hands.

  That sucked, said Debbie. People just don’t think sometimes. You okay?

  The girl nodded shyly, the boy shook his head. A patchwork of cause-oriented pins covered her knapsack. Over his woolly jumper hung a pendant in the shape of a fist.

  Down the path to the common Tragedy was trying to tear a Silver Jubilee banner from a lamppost. He was too short though, and couldn’t get decent purchase: he jumped, clutched, flailed, swore, sulked. Havoc lisped, Let it go, man, it’θ only a θymbol. Be real.

  Meanwhile Pop was heaving himself up the steps of his houseboat, which presided on the lip of the clearing over People Park. He was in his sixties, and large, flabby even, somehow yellowing, every breath was a gasp.

  The houseboat was a boxcar on blocks, scabbed with rust and flaking paint. Maybe she’d help fix it up sometime, often thought Debbie, and felt guilty now having only ever thought this thought. Pop unfolded a lawnchair and plopped into it. One minute, he said, wheezing. Yet in his eyes, as always, was that manic glimmer. When three years prior Debbie had come to interview him for In the Know he’d stormed out of Street’s Milk & Things ranting about restribution, every few sentences screaming, Get this word for words, reporter! After a four-minute diatribe he’d announced, I have to work, and disappeared into the store. Debbie, assigned to write about Mr. Ademus’s mysterious and hugely popular sculptures — the Things he sold, the Things of Milk & Things — had written nothing.

  Lark, called Pop from his lawnchair, arms raised, poncho spread (RESTRIBUTION! markered across the chest). Gather!

  Debbie pushed close with her notebook and beamed at him with what she hoped passed for reverence.

  In the baritone of a preacher Pop began: Thank you all for attendenating here with me today. The city’s going to hear us! — Tragedy responded, Fug yeah! — We may be small, but we’re big. This Mayor, this NFLM, this Jubilee, they envision our spirits as flattened as they flattened Lakeview Homes? That a quartered century hencefrom we’ve forgotten this so-and-so-called park was once impersonated by people? Say it with me: No!

  No fuggin way, said Tragedy.

  Feverishly, Debbie took notes.

  No! Not this time. Not any time. Not this time!

  Shame, warbled one of the students — the girl. Shame, echoed her boyfriend.

  Shame! Pop pointed at them, eyes narrowed. You’ve said the magical word. It is a shame. What transposed here, a quartered century hencefrom — a bloodied shame.

  Bloody fuggin cogθuggerθ! screamed Havoc.

  And they think they can just erect a memorial to make it okay-dokay? A statue?! Well I’ve got a statue of limitations for that sort of thing!

  Pop’s eyes gleamed.

  The memorial unveiling’s tomorrow, added Debbie. Hope everyone can come?

  Pop saluted, hoisted himself to his feet, howled, Restribution! and waddled off, puffing, to open Street’s Milk & Things for the day.

  A pigeon wheeled overhead, perched on the roof of the houseboat, eyed the gathering, scratched itself under a wing with its beak. Tragedy threw a rock, which went sailing into the bushes. The bird shat a greenish dribble onto the roof and glared defiantly back.

  Guess that’s it for us then, said Tragedy, lighting a wilted Redapple.

  Some halfhearted goodbyes were offered (Θolidarity, proposed Havoc unconvincingly, and passed around a fist-bump) and he and Tragedy, swapping the cigarette between drags, took the path down into the common, past an elderly man caning his way up the Crocker Pond Slipway to Parkside West Station.

  The students hung around. Debbie wished she’d been more like them in her twenties: all secondhand alpaca and shy, dreamy ideals. Instead she’d been an athlete.

  Thanks for coming, guys, she said.

  We saw the posters on campus, said the girl, at the Institute.

  We didn’t know anything, said her boyfriend, about this. Before.

  But we’re glad we could come.

  The boy shuffled, his girlfriend nudged him. He spoke: We wanted to tell you, though, we’re leaving town. Tomorrow. We won’t be around for the rest of the weekend.

  It’s just, we’re going camping. Back home.

  Can you tell Mr. Street we’re sorry?

  Oh, that’s okay, said Debbie, feeling flattered. Just nice you came out today, right? And have a nice time camping, that’ll be fun for you guys.

  Yeah, we feel bad is all. There aren’t a lot of people out.

  Most kids we’re in school with are happy to just party at the Dredge till they’re sick.

  And watch themselves after on TV.

  We’ll totally be up for whatever when we’re back. With the um, Movement.

  We’re just a little worried.

  What about? said Debbie.

  The boy and girl exchanged looks. We’ve heard Mr. Street tends to —

  Kick people out. Of the Movement. For disappointing him?

  Like almost everyone?

  Yeah, sighed Debbie, that happens. We’re currently in a rebuilding phase.

  A second pigeon joined the first: an elderly couple, grey and waiting.

  Hey, said the girl. We heard you’re writing a book about him?

  Debbie laughed — a sharp, awkward bark. Well it started as a script but my boss didn’t want it. I mean, you can’t really capture Pop Street in a four-minute segment.

  That was for Isa Lanyess? You write for In the Know, right?

  Not that we watch it, clarified the boy.

  Yeah, said Debbie, though I only do occasional stuff now, got to pay the bills, right? Mostly I run a program in Blackacres, for neighbourhood kids. Out of the Room?

  The students stared back. Were they judging her? What was their judgment?

  She plunged ahead: But yeah, I have all these notes about Pop and the Homes and everything, and someone should write about this stuff, it’s just so hard making it all come together, right? We should get a cider. I could tell you more about it, about the book.

  We’ve got class.

  We would though, totally. Otherwise.

  Oh I didn’t mean now, ha. A bit early for drinks! Just sometime, anytime — whenever! You guys should give me your number. So we can stay in touch. About Movement stuff.

  The girl said, Not sure I’ve got a pen, and dug around in her knapsack: no pen.

  From the houseboat, the birds cooed in chorus, ruffled their wings. Their poop was an eggy froth baking in the sunlight.

  Debbie said, Okay, off with you then, get to school. She tried to sound light, but it came out hurried, dismissive. And when they left, Debbie felt abandoned — and embarrassed, she still hadn’t gotten their names. The students were heading the same direction as her, toward Parkside West Station, but she hung back, didn’t want to sidle up alongside them after saying goodbye. It’d seem too desperate, even pathetic, and too much like pursuit.

  YELLOWLINING WESTBOUND on a packed train Debbie got out her notebook. On the first page were a few attempts at a prologue: For twenty-five years Pop Street has been camped out behind his old store in a stoic steadfast protest against People Park, living out of the houseboat he used to keep at the Bay Junction piers, the ceiling so low the man has developed a permanent hunch . . . Or: For most islanders, People Park is a place we only associate with joy: it’s where our kids go to daycamp, where we go on dates for picnics, enjoy the Summer Concert Series at the gazebo — but for one widely misunderstood former resident of Lakeview Homes, it’s a monument to forgetting, and a place that embodies everything that is wrong about this city . . . Or: What is justice?

  Though like many of her teammates she’d majored in Commun
ications at the Institute, Debbie had never considered a career in journalism, the accountability made her nervous. But when Isa Lanyess, a star from the pre-Y’s era of the Island Maroons, saw her We-TV fixture, In the Know, become the island’s preeminent news source, she hired a few ballers who weren’t turning pro to write her scripts. I’m the Face of this thing, Lanyess told them, so think of yourselves as my makeup artists. And what’s a makeup artist’s job? To make the face look good. And also? To make their own work invisible. All anyone should see is my face.

  It was a job. For a year Debbie churned out reports on local goings-on with the mechanical proficiency of a windup clock, yet failed to find satisfaction hearing her words spoken on TV by someone else. But the meeting with Pop left her feeling forced to the edge of her own life: she stood there peering down into it, blank and bottomless. When she’d returned to Isa Lanyess’s downtown office, Debbie suggested a piece about the Homes might be more interesting than one on Pop’s Things.

  Lanyess gave Debbie a withering look. People don’t care about that guy, she said. Unless he’s Mr. Ademus. Is he? No, right? Mr. Ademus and the Things are hot. So how the fug did Pop Street, who’s never been lukewarm by anyone’s measure, become the guy’s dealer? That’s what people want to know. So that’s, are you listening, what you, who I hired, write about. Not some fat loser living in a trailer who can’t forget the past.

  I just thought there was a bigger story here, said Debbie. Right?

  Wrong, said Lanyess. I brought you on here because you struck me as a hard worker, someone who knew how to be part of a team. Was I mistaken?

  Debbie had stood there, fists clenched, heart pounding. Lanyess had a way of speaking to her that made her feel not only indebted, but small and young. Like a scolded child, in hateful silence you could only wait until it was over, she told Adine that night, drinking ciders on their couch.

  Fug Lanyess, said Adine. Fug that show. I mean, props to Pop Street for making bank selling it, but trash nailed together into funny shapes? That’s art now? I guess, according to the superdooshes of this dumb town who buy it up like it’s gold.

  Debbie tipped back her cider. He can’t be making much, she said. The guy’s the closest thing this town’s got to an ascetic.

  Is he? Whatever he is, he’s just like, off. Even when me and Sam were kids our mum didn’t let us go to his store alone. The Human Polyp, we called him. That’s what he’s holding on to? He needs to let go of Lakeview Homes, everyone else has.

  But, started Debbie — and stopped herself.

  What does he even want?

  Restribution, Debbie said automatically, and Adine rolled her eyes, wrangled Jeremiah into her lap, and buried her nose in his fur.

  Now, on the train, Debbie leafed through her notebook, and felt she was closer to a real reason — and the person himself, the two were linked. In her notebook were dozens of Pop’s attempts at aphorisms: If you’ve an advantage, do it, e.g., and People come in a multitudany of kinds, but we’ve all got the same heart.

  In a way Pop had thrown Debbie’s life into relief. To live as he did, a living protest, one had to forgo everything else — social mores, relationships, basic hygiene. His dedication made Debbie feel flaky and capricious. So she’d begun attending his rallies, not as a journalist but as a participant, committed to the Movement, even fancied herself his second-in-command. Though there always lurked the danger of being banished, often for random, arbitrary, and baffling reasons. Most recently Pop had expelled three of Debbie’s friends for Insufficient restritubutive doctrination. Requests for clarification had been ignored.

  So around him Debbie took notes, listened, deferred, and always, always agreed. But what really kept her on his good side was the prospect of being written about: Impart this in your book, he would say, and then enunciate, syllable by syllable, so Debbie didn’t miss a word. Being around someone so firm in his vision of the world, and of his purpose upon it, was comforting. And by writing about him Debbie was getting closer to clarity about her own life as well. Because her own life, thought Debbie, as the train slowed into Mustela Station, felt so vague and shifting, a precarious trudge through churning sand: no matter how firmly she stepped, it always felt to be swirling off course, or backward. She wasn’t even lost: how could you be lost when you didn’t know where you were heading? And so she reeled people in, she surrounded herself with people, she felt all she could do was try to be good, to try in her floundering way to be useful, to help.

  A SATELLITE INITIATIVE of the Isa Lanyess Centre for Westend Betterment, the Room occupied an old crabshack at F Street and Tangent 15, right on the water, a building on stilts scummed with algae and around which rippled the lake. But because Upper Olde Towne Station was under renovation and had been for months, Debbie preempted her ride at Knock Street and took the escalator to streetlevel while the train slipped north into the Zone.

  On foot she passed Lower Olde Towne’s B&B’s and Islandwear outlets and expensive artisanal concerns, horse-drawn buggies clopped by depositing great steaming dung knolls upon the cobblestones. At the top end of Knock was the Dredge Niteclub, a block-long, three-storey partyhouse that had once been a functioning dredge meant to scour Lowell Canal. Past it was the canal, a gutter of sludge the colour of dead TV screens. Crossing the footbridge Debbie held her breath, the canal’s off-gases shimmered like noxious aurorae, its lustreless surface reflected nothing.

  Released into Upper Olde Towne, Debbie gulped cleanish air and headed up F Street. The east–west Tangents ascended, the neighbourhood bustled: greengrocers hawked produce, two girls in throwback Y’s jerseys lobbed a ball back and forth in a concrete parkette, a young couple on a bench smoked Redapples and took turns ashing into a cup. In shadows under the Yellowline’s tracks, the westside of the street was edged with razorwire that fenced in disused lots and docks. Debbie stayed on the sunlit eastside, where rejuvenated properties alternated with boarded-up vacants, the latter supervising the neighbourhood with the staid melancholy of blind widowers.

  At the corner of F and 10 was the Golden Barrel Taverne. Already drunks milled about on the sidewalk, taciturn and twitchy, jingling pockets of coins. Debbie smiled, was ignored, kept going north. This had once comprised her jogging route, abandoned when concerned locals kept flagging her down to ask if she was being chased. The Zone wasn’t pretty or quaint but it boasted a certain authenticity, Debbie thought, and though way out on the island’s western fringe it struck her as the city’s heart, vibrant and essential — or maybe its guts.

  At Tangent 15 Debbie waved to Crupper, sweeping the front step of the newsstand opposite the Room. He gestured across the street. Seems they got you last night, he said.

  Debbie looked: the Room’s front windows had been painted black.

  Are you serious? she said.

  Crupper shook his head sadly. Animals, he said.

  Debbie went up to the window, scratched. The paint came off in a jammy curl under her fingernail, tarlike and still wet.

  As always the Room smelled of the faint salmony tang of children and their half-eaten lunches. Debbie hung her coat in the office, checked the messages — none — filled a bucket with soap and water in the bathroom. But before she washed off the blackup she had to attend to the business of her daily We-TV address, which she loathed.

  Debbie turned on the camera, readied her spiel: two minutes of tape to satisfy the Island Arts Division trustees and the schoolboard people, who claimed these updates were meaningful to the parents, but what parents would watch it? There were better things on TV than their kids building papier mâché piñatas and Debbie breaking up fights over pastels.

  Adine had tuned in to her bit exactly once and that night she’d mimicked, in a perfectly fake-bright voice: Hi, Debbie here! This is the Room’s um, channel! Today’s Tuesday and we’re making time capsules! Debbie had shut herself in the bathroom and moaned, Why’d you watch it, you know I hate d
oing it, why have you forsaken me? while Adine cackled on the other side of the door.

  Eyes shifting around the room, never quite settling on the lens, Debbie covered the date, the day’s crafts (gluesticks, shoeboxes, glitter), and explained the Room would be closed for the long weekend — though, with a three-day tape-to-broadcast delay, she was unsure why this information mattered. When all this was done Debbie shut the camera off and, as its recording light dimmed, felt oddly lonely, unnerved less by the prospect of being watched than by the thought that people, given the choice, might opt not to.

  IV

  ITHIN THE ORCHARD on People Park’s eastern fringe, teenagers, some with cameras, watched the last few stragglers filtering back into the city. While Edie videoed, Calum clutched her from behind at the hips, nuzzled her ear, the whisk and swish of her hair against his cheek, his cock throbbed dully in his jeans. But when he winnowed a thumb into the waistband of her skirt Edie squirmed, lowered the camera, and said, We should go to school, and Calum grinded into her and said, Sure? and Edie said, What’s wrong with you, and pulled away, and Calum was left with what might be wrong with him, a bit.

  IN THE FINAL DAYS of winter he’d gone to a party at Edie’s, her parents were away somewhere tropical on their yacht. From his family’s apartment in Laing Towers Calum walked south, over the Canal, down Knock Street, and up the cobblestone hill to the Mews, the gated harbourside community that lofted over Lower Olde Towne, where, after a call to Edie, the security guard buzzed him through.

  Calum passed mansions festooned with pillars and arches and ornately trellised decks, to the Lanyesses’ landscaped yard. On the front porch, smoking, was a girl with her hair shorn into a hand shape, the nape and sides shaved right to the skin. The Hand. Calum ducked behind a bush. Why was she here, how did she get past security? With her were two kids, hoods up, a pair of goblins. Calum shifted, snow tumbled from the top of the bush in a little avalanche. Laughter, cruel and shrill — they’d seen him.