by Pasha Malla
Hey, the Hand called, why you hiding, party’s in here.
So Calum, caught out, made the long dreadful walk up the driveway.
The threesome barely shifted to let him past, he had to squeeze between them, for a moment he was face to face with the Hand, she blasted smoke in his face. Don’t lock the door, she said. We’ll be right in.
In the living room Edie and a half-dozen of their friends sat in a stiff quiet circle, six ciders on the coffee table, six labels peeled to shreds, a boardgame unpacked and so far unplayed, everyone’s pieces loitered on START. Did you see who showed up, Edie whispered. Calum nodded, didn’t go over to kiss her.
And the door opened and in gusted the winter and here they were with their shoes on.
Great party, said the Hand, laughed, as sharp as a slap, the laugh hung fizzing in the air. Nobody moved, nobody said anything. Then there was a cry of, You’re on TV, and one of the goblins plucked a camera off a tripod in the corner and did a slow pan over everyone’s dazed faces, then said, Don’t worry, I’m not taping, and gave the camera to Edie, who held it to her chest like an infant.
Towing her sidekicks the Hand withdrew to the foyer. Footsteps headed downstairs.
Go see what she’s doing down there, whispered Edie.
Calum stared.
You know her better than any of us. Go!
The goblins sat at the top of the basement stairs, their whispers followed him down. The recroom’s open screendoor admitted an icy draft, the deck was dark, but the pool lights were on. Kneeling on the diving board was the Hand.
If you’re supposed to be checking up on me, she said, you’d better come out here.
He thought of Edie, of this house, of her parents. When he was over they talked to Edie as Calum’s interpreter or warden: And how does your friend do at school, etc., while a mute housekeeper served soup in bowls of bevelled glass. This was what he was now supposed to defend.
The Hand reclined on the diving board. Calum stood in the doorway: what might she do? Snow dusted the flagstones. The pool steamed. Deeper into the backyard was the tennis court, and beyond that, down the hill, Kidd’s Harbour, a fleet of pleasurecraft nudged about by waves.
Here’s a game, said the Hand. Find a star. Find one.
The sky was the broad back of something huge, turned away.
You can’t, can you? Because of all the lights. There’s too many lights here so there’s no stars. What’s the point of being up here if you can’t even see the night?
The Hand sat up and spat into the pool: a little raft of phlegm floated atop the water. This is your girlfriend’s house, right? The poor little rich girl? She sucks.
Careful, said Calum.
She snorted, moved to the edge of the board. Careful, she said. Careful’s nothing.
In a single, swift gesture she pulled her shirt over her head. Her shoes came off next, kicked onto the deck. And finally she stepped out of her jeans. The pool’s ghostly light shimmered over her body: parts were dark and then lit, parts were always light, parts were always dark. Calum looked over his shoulder, into the house. And back at the Hand.
Her mouth twitched at the corners. See? she said simply, and flopped into the pool with a splash. She surfaced, just a head, the water mangled the rest of her body into jagged indistinguishable shapes. This was tantalizing, if the waves settled it would all turn clear. Calum imagined diving in, swimming up, touching the smooth wet skin. He tensed, leaned forward on the balls of his feet, toward her —
Well, said the Hand, see you round.
Her legs kicked up and she dove. Calum waited, waited, the ripples stilled — and she didn’t come up. He moved poolside: the pool was empty. Giggling came from the house. The goblins rushed out cackling, scooped the Hand’s clothes off the deck, and tumbled in wild somersaults into the water. When the bubbles cleared they were gone too.
Later, when Edie and Calum went to bed they realized the brass doorknobs to the master bedroom were missing. I can’t believe you let that happen, she said, and rolled away. Overhead glowed the star-stickered ceiling of Edie’s room. He thought about the Hand’s body in the water, the slick shimmering gibberish of it, and tried to assemble the pieces into a naked whole.
Edie, he said, edging across the mattress, pressing against her. The replica galaxy shone down, dull and green. Hey, Calum murmured — nudging, grinding, stroking. Edie, hey. Edie? But she was either asleep or pretending.
LOOK, SAID CALUM, his voice coaxing, squeezing Edie’s hips. Look at these two appleheads, he said, and Edie sighed and looked: a couple, thirtyish, pushing a fancy stroller up the hill toward Orchard Parkway. Calum waited for Edie to ask what was so wrong with them. When she didn’t he said, I bet they don’t even do it. Edie let his words hang. He crossed his arms around her waist and pressed himself into her backside and said, Hey?
She wriggled away and left Calum holding air. Voices called from within the trees, their friends emerged, watches were tapped, they should go to school. School? said Calum. Come on, Edie. We could go back to my place, my ma’s at work all day. But Edie shook her head firmly. No way, Calum. You might not care about your future but I do. I want to graduate, thanks.
Their friends were moving up the path, behind the stroller couple, in pairs. Calum gazed across the common, at the stage where the famous magician had wowed everyone that morning, and he wondered how it felt to have so many people, together and all at once, say your name.
THE MONDAY after Edie’s party Calum awoke to his mother, Cora, leaning her head into his bedroom, eyes ringed with dark, voice a reedy crackle: Okay Cal, up you get, go to school. But he just lay there thinking. After a time his little brother Rupe appeared in the doorway. Ma said you have to take me to school. Take your fuggin self, said Calum, and went back to sleep.
That afternoon he walked up F Street, slushy and unplowed, through the Zone, past Blackacres Station, past the Room, into Whitehall, the factory district, and the ICTS Barns, where the trains went to sleep every night, unlaced sneakers flopping and soaked through to his socks. Past the Barns he entered the industrial district: abandoned warehouses, factories, plants, various Concerns no longer concerned with much, their gerundial purposes (Shipping, Receiving, etc.) painted onto pale splintering wood. At last he came to the massive concrete panpipes of the Favours Brothers silos, long decommissioned, where Calum ducked through a peeled-back section of chainlink. The loading dock was open. Inside was dark as a throat.
He peered into this blackness. There was no sign of the Hand or any of her people. But this was their way: invisible unless and until they wanted to be seen. Yet the gloom seemed to dance with firefly sparkles — dozens of eyes, catlike and glittering, watching him . . .
Calum ran. Back through the fence, out of the docklands to the Piers. Here he hopped out along the blunt-headed stumps of a drowned jetty to the breakwater, the most western point in the city, and sat, heart hammering and dangling shoes refracted in the lake. The air smelled of wet wool and sewage. To the north was the mainland: tan-coloured fields, chalky cliffs, a gravel beach prodded and coaxed with waves — close enough to swim to, but Calum had never been.
HE REACHED FOR EDIE, to hold her, to hold on to anything. But her back was to him. He tapped her shoulder. A half-swivel of her neck: an acknowledgment of what he’d done, but not him.
What?
Nothing, said Calum.
Well are you coming? There was exasperation in Edie’s voice. You can’t skip, you’ve already been suspended. Calum?
The only people left in the park were the NFLM, hollering, taking down barricades, rolling up the welcome rug, collecting garbage on spiked sticks, their voices resonated as the woofs and hoots of animals.
One of the men splintered off from the group. He was coming over, crossing the common in a delicate mincing way. Calum said, Look at this guy, but Edie was moving up the hill to jo
in the rest of their friends, waiting to go to school.
LOOK AT THOSE KIDS, said the one named Starx. Hey, partner — look.
Olpert Bailie stopped struggling with the guardrail. Teenagers loitered in the hillside orchard on the eastern edge of the common.
Go tell them to get the fug out of here.
Olpert blinked. Me?
Yeah you. You’re the security guard, right? Effortlessly Starx, a man-shaped monster, lifted a barricade into the back of the cube van, hopped up, hauled it alongside the others, and stuck his head out again into the daylight. Get going, he told Olpert. And quit being such a foreskin.
So Olpert went trembling across the swampy common, mud spattered his slacks. It was impossible to tell how many teenagers were gathered among the trees, they shifted in and out of the shadows, they made Olpert’s stomach jump and twist. The trains were always full of kids this age, they jostled him, they said things about him, it took such effort not to listen to what they were saying, if you met their eyes they had you.
Surely Starx would have been better at this sort of thing, the man was a giant, a menace, a coil of rage. Also he had on boots. Olpert wore loafers and anger was a language he’d never learned. In fight-or-flight moments he preferred to just stand, to stand and wait. To Olpert life was a negotiation of terror — at the world, but also at himself, as a part of it.
He’d only met Starx the week before, his first visit to the NFLM Temple in two decades. Prior to that he’d sat through the unveiling of his grandfather’s portrait alongside the other departed Original Gregories, afterward been granted conciliatory Full Status: Helper Level 1 (Probationary), funnelled the ceremonial pint of schnapps, sat while his legs were shaved by a hunting knife, sprinkled the clippings into the Hair Jar, thanked everyone profusely for the opportunity, and never returned.
Twenty annual newsletters arrived over twenty Decembers, each one junked. In that time Olpert took a job as overnight security at the city’s Department of Municipal Works, ten p.m. to six a.m. shifts paging of magazines in the building’s marble-pillared foyer. At dawn he was relieved by a woman named Betty and took the ferry from Bay Junction to the Islet, then walked home to a roominghouse where the four other lodgers existed only as crusty dishes piled in the shared kitchen sink and occasional thumps or groans from behind their bedroom walls. Also one of them was stealing Olpert’s apples.
So went Olpert’s life through his thirties, into his forties, punctuated with the sporadic glory of the Lady Y’s, his season tickets renewed devotedly each campaign. His body aged: the rusty mop atop his skull thinned and withdrew, his torso softened, the mightiness of his pee stream dwindled. As a kid he’d been an old soul, sombre and serious, taking nightly walks around the Islet with his hands clasped behind his back, and had always assumed in adulthood he’d at last find a home within his own body. Yet at forty-two he still felt apart from himself. Betty suggested a girlfriend might help, instead Olpert took to keeping moles: half his small room was taken up with a terrarium in which they burrowed and lived their delicate, private lives.
In March one of his housemates had taken a message: Olprt Balie call Griggs, and there was a number: 978-0887. A bland, almost robotic voice answered — NFLM Temple, Head Scientist speaking — and explained that all Helpers, even inactive ones, were required at a mandatory meeting that weekend. You work security, Bailie? asked Griggs, and Olpert told him sort of, yes. Well we can use you then, Griggs said, make your grandpappy proud. And at this Olpert felt something shrivel in his chest.
The following Thursday night he ferried to Bay Junction and switched to a Yellowline westbound to Lower Olde Towne. The Temple was two blocks up Knock Street, housed in what had at one point, before the Mayor’s sweeping reforms, been a police station. The building’s history was hinted at over the doorway: in rusted steel lettering, OLDE TOWNE POLICE SIA ION — one-and-a-half T’s had fallen, the half having maimed a postwoman, the lawsuit was ongoing.
Olpert paused on the doorstep, flooded with memories of that year spent trailing his grandfather into the bi-weekly meetings, less at the old man’s side than in his blindspot. As a Recruit, he’d have his mouth ducktaped and spent meetings wedged into a Little Boy Desk. Later everyone but the Recruits pounded schnapps and staggered into the neighbouring Citywagon Depot to unleash orange splashes of meaty man-vomit.
The door swung open and standing there was a six-foot-tall moustache. Bailie! Remember me? growled the moustache. He tapped his nametag — Reed — and hauled Olpert into a handshake that felt like losing an arm to a trash compactor.
I was L1 when you were a Recruit, said Reed. L2 now though.
Olpert recognized him: a manic character keen on workshopping masturbation techniques, his own involving slit fruit.
Reed rattled his bones with a clap on the back, screamed, Diamond-Wood, ready for your ducktape? and leapt away to wrestle a kid on crutches into a headlock.
At a sign-in desk inside the doors, between hauls on an inhaler a Helper named Bean handed Olpert a nametag — in a child’s scribble: Belly — and told him. You’re the only call-up, you know that? You start your own club or something?
Olpert faltered.
Just fuggin with you. Great to have you back. Now head on in, guys’re just getting their shine on.
Little about the Temple had changed. The walls were still panelled in a plastic approximation of wood, the floors the chipped tile of an elementary school gymnasium, track lighting flickered by the bathroom doors — one denoted with an M, the other with an upside-down W. Queues to both toilets choked the corridor, and whenever a man came out the next one went in fanning the air in reverent disgust.
Everywhere men performed manhood: punching, wrestling, grunting, roaring — there was so much roaring. All the Helpers wore nametags, official NFLM golfshirts, khakis, and the generic black sneakers of elementary school custodians. Olpert’s own uniform, resurrected from his leaner, lither Recruit days, spandexed his body, and his shoes — loafers, always loafers — seemed conspicuously unsporty and brown.
From the recroom came the burnt sour smell of too-strong coffee, pingpong ticktocked within a rumble of voices. Helpers sprawled on recliners, the bigscreen chopped between classic episodes of the incredibly popular Salami Talk and the NFLM’s own We-TV fixture (mostly pingpong). In the library things were more docile: a half-dozen men swirling snifters of schnapps debated the topic of Helping. Beyond this Olpert hovered as a child might outside his feuding parents’ bedroom.
Well people here just don’t seem to appreciate how we hold the city together, a man was proselytizing, to murmurs of agreement. Most people, he continued, most people wouldn’t know what to do if we stopped helping. It’d be chaos!
A different man jumped in, lisping: Juθt baθic θurvival, people have no idea how to θurvive if they have to. They’ve got it too fuggin eaθy.
Dack, come here, growled the first man, let’s see how you’d get out of a chokehold.
Some shuffling, a pause. The first man was flipped on his back.
See? he called from the rug. That’s how we do.
That’θ how we do, confirmed Dack.
Another man spoke up: My neighbour, you know what he’s got in his garage? Nothing. Honestly, it’s amazing, shelf after empty shelf — not even a hose.
Amid jeers and snide laughter, Olpert thought of his own garage: the roominghouse didn’t have a garage.
He drifted back through the foyer into the dimly lit, high-ceilinged, pew-lined Great Hall. The walls were the same fake wood as the rest of the Temple, but stained darker, suggesting the kitschy austerity of a stripmall funeral parlour. Ringing the room were portraits of late Original Gregories — and here, by the door, was Olpert’s own grandfather, face youthful and taut, gazing down along a pelican’s beak of a nose.
From the front of the Great Hall came a smashing sound — a gong, the Summons, the night
’s assembly would soon begin. One by one the High Gregories emerged from a semi-secret portal that led to the Chambers and took their seats upon the dais. In the shadows, wielding a felt-tipped mallet, stood a massive, bullet-shaped man with no discernable neck — the Summoner — beside whom the gong hissed into stillness. Had he always been there, Olpert wondered, lurking in the dark?
With a great crash the Summoner struck the gong again. Last up from the tunnel appeared Favours, pushed out in a wheelchair by a ducktaped Recruit. Favours, the final remaining OG, appeared to have been unearthed from the grave: a face made of dust, eyes that ambivalently surveyed the living world as though already glimpsing the other side. The Recruit positioned him upon the dais and retreated.
Affixed to the wall above Favours’ head was a six-foot version of the NFLM crest: atop an outline of the city, a naked woman and winged man entwined in coitus. Above this image was written New Fraternal League of Men: The Mighty Ones of Eternity, and below it the four pillars: Silentium. Logica. Securitatem. Prudentia.
The gong exploded again, again, again, and Olpert slid into the end of a pew as Helpers shuffled in, some twirling pingpong paddles. The High Gregories took their seats on the dais, flanking Favours. At the far end of the table was Wagstaffe, the NFLM’s current Silver Personality and host of We-TV’s Salami Talk, which featured interviews leavened with a barely euphemistic sausage-making theme. In person he was even more orange-skinned and drastically chinned than he seemed on TV.
Beside Wagstaffe was Magurk, the Special Professor, a ratlike and savagely hairy man. As an L1 he’d wrestled Olpert into a half nelson and demanded to be told which pressure points it was possible to kill a man by striking. Out of nowhere Olpert’s grandfather had come barrelling down the hall, dropkicked Magurk in the lower back, and, as he crumpled, suggested, That one?