People Park

by Pasha Malla

  Olpert’s bowels slackened, but didn’t release.

  Gentlemen, said Raven.

  Starx took an elongated stride backward and stooped — more of a lunge than a bow.

  Raven said, You are my escorts to this dinner, I understand. This celebratory homage.

  We are, said Starx.

  Good. Your names?

  Starx.

  Olpert. I mean, Bailie.

  You attended my arrival this morning.

  We sure did, said Starx. Really amazing stuff, sir —

  Fine, yes. But may I ask how the morning’s events made you feel.

  Sorry, said Starx. Made us feel?

  Yes. What emotions did you experience. When I touched down, or made the illustration involving the birds, or when I trunked away. How you — Raven’s hand twirled in an evocative gesture — felt. Please explain.

  His accent could be described only as foreign, something bad actors might adopt to suggest somewhere else, all rolling r’s and hacking k’s, but even then nothing was consistent — a sentence later the vowels might drawl and twang.

  Olpert said, I felt a bit nervous.

  I don’t think that’s what he was after, said Starx. He’s always a bit nervous, this guy.

  No, no, said the illustrationist. Nervous is good. What else.

  Um, scared.

  Scared, good.

  I was sort of hungry, said Starx.

  Raven’s eyes flicked briefly to Starx, back to Olpert. His gaze was vertiginous — like an undertow, that helpless sensation of being tugged under.

  Mr. Bailie, how else did you feel.

  Anxious. And frightened. And worried, uneasy.

  Starx elbowed him. Those are the same as nervous and scared.

  Perhaps they are, said Raven. But continue. Why, what made you feel this way.

  Something felt . . . wrong.

  God, Bailie, don’t tell him that.

  No, this is good, said Raven. This I can use. You see, as the one making these illustrations, the emotions they might evoke are alien, almost unimaginable, to me. Precisely because I am at their centre, I remain at an experiential remove — the eye of the storm, so to speak. So your neuroses interest me. Come, let’s sit down.

  Olpert and Starx followed him inside the suite. The illustrationist seemed to glide across the marble floor.

  Sweet digs, said Starx, collapsing onto a plush white settee. Olpert joined him.

  Raven moved to the window that overlooked People Park. Yet when he spoke his voice seemed somehow inside Olpert’s head: Now, Mr. Bailie, what else fills you with fear?

  What? Else?

  I ask because I wonder what it was about this morning that struck fear into you. Perhaps it is at the heart of something. As I’ve said, as the generator of the experience, all this is beyond me. I want simply to understand. To achieve some . . . clarity.

  Raven’s voice seemed come from somewhere out the window.

  Perhaps we are on the wrong track, said Raven. At the risk of sounding forward, could you tell me your dreams, Mr. Bailie. Your most secret dreams. Are there motifs.

  Sorry?

  Motifs, Bailie, said Starx. Patterns, themes. Stuff on repeat.

  In the scary ones? There are snakes sometimes.

  Snakes, said Raven.

  Though that might be because of Jessica.

  Starx perked up: Who’s Jessica?

  What else appears in your dreams, said the illustrationist — he sounded now high above, hovering against the ceiling.

  Other than snakes?

  Yes. Tell me.

  Something heavy and hot clamped upon his shoulders — Raven’s hands. Olpert tensed, but from the illustrationist’s fingers a soothing, sedative warmth spread into his body. When Olpert spoke the words came slow and didn’t seem his own: Motifs in my dreams are less things in my dreams than things not in my dreams. Absence as a motif. And by that I mean total absence. I’m all alone and there’s nothing else there.

  Raven let go. What else, Mr. Bailie?

  Well I have this one dream . . . Olpert had no idea what he might say. But the words just kept coming, tumbling more quickly now one to the next: I’m on this big ship, as big as a building, one of those ships that’s so big it feels like a mall or something.

  An aircraft carrier? said Starx.

  Mr. Starx, please, said Raven. Then, to Olpert: Go on.

  Okay, the ship’s so full of people I can’t move. You can’t imagine how many people. Millions. And everyone’s lined up for something, but I’m for some reason smaller than everyone else so I can’t see what it is. I can’t see over their heads. I’m a kid. Or feel like a kid, clarified Olpert, though none of this was true, he’d never had this dream, it spilled out of him from nowhere. Anyway, he continued, everyone’s looking at this . . . thing, whatever it is, at the front of the ship — starboard? aft?

  The bow, said Starx.

  The bow, indeed. Thank you, seaman Starx, said Raven. Continue, Mr. Bailie.

  So I want to see it, Olpert said, or at least find out what it is, but when I go to talk no words come out. I can’t ask anyone, and getting to the front is impossible too because the crowd is packed so tightly in. And it’s then I get this feeling, this wash of a feeling, that I’m alone. All these people are united by this thing and I don’t even know what it is. And that’s when the crowd starts spreading out from me. Like we’re on an iceberg breaking apart. Nobody’s actually moving but the space around me just gets bigger and bigger, and it’s not even that I don’t want to move, I don’t know where to go. There’s no one in the crowd I know, no one to go to, but the feeling of being alone like that — I can’t even describe it to you. I can’t. And the deck of this ship is expanding all around me, and the crowd is fading farther and farther away. I stand there and stand there and let it happen, until the crowd is eventually gone — they’ve disappeared. They’ve vanished.

  Vanished, whispered Starx.

  Oh, Mr. Bailie, said Raven, without even pressing you, we learn so much about your heart! Now, continue, please.

  Well then I’m just alone, on this big open grey deck of something that used to be a ship, but now it’s just . . . everything. It’s the whole world, as far as I can see, and I’m there, and it’s the same everywhere I look, just the greyness, and the sky is sort of colourless too, and I’m totally, completely alone. I’d walk somewhere but I don’t know which way to walk. And who would I walk to?

  And this makes you afraid.

  It’s the most terrifying feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life, said Olpert Bailie.

  Starx’s eyes were wide, astonished. The room felt spellbound.

  And then what, Mr. Bailie.

  And then?

  Olpert straightened. Starx blinked. The trance was broken.

  And then? And then I guess I wake up.

  AFTER RETRIEVING her papers from the Galleria’s security office Pearl wandered back to the foodcourt, where Kellogg and Gip and Elsie-Anne queued for nonresident processing. Go on, Pearly, said Kellogg, be a while here yet, we’ll meet you at the campground, and flashed a big thumbs-up. But Pearl couldn’t take her eyes off her son, who gazed at his mother with an uncomprehending, anaesthetized look.

  She’d never seen Gip like this, almost catatonic, and though Dr. Castel claimed that a double dose of meds wouldn’t be harmful as a one-off emergency, she wondered. He’ll be fine, he’s a tough little guy, Kellogg had assured her, crushing four pills into a can of apple juice. Usually her husband’s brightness bolstered her, now it wearied her into surrender — hadn’t Gip himself looked frightened, swallowing the potion down?

  One of the Helpers took her by the elbow, steered her away. The line shifted, her family disappeared. From within the crowd came Kellogg’s desperate, warbling cheer: See you soon, Pearly!r />
  She was taken out of the foodcourt, past the shops, to the Galleria’s southern exit, where the Helper said, Welcome home, gave her a little shove onto Paper Street, and locked the doors behind her.

  And there it was: the city.

  All that concrete and glass and steel seemed ushered up from underground. Pearl imagined the buildings folding in at their rooftops and blocking out the sun, she had to lean against the Galleria’s wall to steady the ensuing vertigo. Though down below was no less disorienting — people, so many people, barrelling around and past and between each other, a choreography of chaos, a percussion of footsteps pattering this way and that. How did each one remember who they were, or where to go —

  Pearl laughed. She was being ridiculous. Though she’d been away a few years, the city had been home for most of her life. She stepped away from the wall and levelled her thoughts and tried to look at things rationally, anthropologically. What had changed? She knew the buildings along Paper by name: Municipal Works, the caustic Podesta Tower, We-TV’s HQ on the corner at Entertainment Drive. The few new businesses bore merely cosmetic changes in signage, the architecture original and unchanged.

  Even so, everything had the slightly skewed look of some dreamworld rendering, nothing matched her memories, not precisely. Though she’d never felt comfortable downtown, its joyless parade of suits and high heels, so she took Paper east to Parkside West, crossed over and stood at the hilltop looking down. And with the park spreading out before her, she tried to summon how it felt to be home.

  Nothing surfaced.

  A breeze got the bare trees creaking.

  A few blocks south, a Citywagon pulled into the City Centre lot.

  A train came gliding into Parkside West Station, high above, traded passengers, then went north. Pearl followed on foot beneath the tracks, caught up at Bridge Station, the Yellowline reversed and headed back toward Bay Junction. Traffic still choked Guardian Bridge all the way to the mainland, where, wedged into the cliffside, was the Scenic Vista upon which the Pooles had collected the night prior.

  Pearl headed east. Passing Street’s Milk (& Things — newly amended) she was first surprised, then relieved, to see an OPEN sign in the window. The place hadn’t changed, though had it ever been new? Pop’s store had always seemed in need of upkeep, the paint faded and flaking and the windows forever smudged with an orange, oily type of dirt.

  A half-mile along the park’s northend she came upon the grounds of Island Amusements, rollercoasters twisting like scoliotic spines, the ice-blue slides of Rocket Falls, the Thunder Wheel’s all-seeing eye glowering down upon everything. (OPEN JUBILEE SATURDAY! boasted a sign pasted to the fence.) But it was the Stadium that Pearl wanted to see, so she pushed farther east.

  Ten minutes later she stood at the players’ entrance. The new sponsorship and ubiquitous Island Flat Company signage provoked a slight proprietary jilt, but just seeing the place felt good: a bulbous island amid a sea of stark concrete, banners in Y’s maroon hung from the roof at each of the six gates.

  The players’ entrance was locked, so Pearl had to go around to general admissions. On gamedays, when Pearl arrived for warm­ups she was always greeted by fans clambering and begging for autographs. Though the lack now of fans, of other players — of anyone — felt ceremonial and right.

  A notice in the box office window seemed apologetic: Thanks for another great season, get next year’s season passes now, call YS-TICKT (978-4258). From here Pearl walked the perimeter of the stadium, stopping at each gate, cupping her hands to the glass, scanning the mezzanine for custodial workers or administrative staff or maybe even a keen rookie, out here alone to train.

  But there was no one, and no way in. By the time she made her way back to the box office Pearl was huffing and felt a slight twinge in her knee. Leaning forward, catching her breath with her hands on her thighs, she allowed herself a cruel little laugh: returning to the place she’d once been a star, she’d worn herself out trying to get in.

  IN THE GRAND SALOON’S banquet hall waiters hustled about to a tinkle of silverware and the burble of fifty conversations, the pepper-and-steel odour of roast meat wafted smokily from the kitchen, schnapps-based aperitifs had given way to cider, the bubbles lifted emberlike in each crystal flute. Distributed among the two dozen tables in blacktie and ballgowns were local dignitaries: various reps of cultural associations, several pink-drunk pillars of the business community, stars of the Lady Y’s tautly muscled and stuffed into too-tight eveningwear, nervous academics from the Institute and their embarrassing spouses, the beautiful and rich, the vapid and canny. A cameraman crept between the tables, dropping to one knee every so often to shoot scenes he’d edit later for In the Know’s weekly Party Town featurette.

  Upon the stage worked the island’s artist laureate, Loopy, a squat woman in a paisley caftan and matching beret. Loopy’s assistant, mousy and morose behind a curtain of bangs, handed over chisels and picks with which Loopy hacked a potentially avian shape from a block of ice.

  Two tables were stationed at the front of the room: one for the NFLM’s High Gregories, where a ducktaped Recruit struggled to napkin wheelchair-bound Favours, Griggs flipped idly through channels on his walkie-talkie, Noodles sipped a glass of water, and Magurk quizzed Wagstaffe: How’d you come at me with a blade? With a shy giggle, Wagstaffe wagged his butterknife. Wrong, said Magurk. Like this — see? Punch and cut, punch and cut. Good lookin out, said Wagstaffe.

  At the other head table, with the central positioning of newlyweds at their nuptial feast, sat the Mayor and Raven. She’d doffed her mayoral sash in favour of a powersuit, though a nick in her stockings had run from ankle to knee. He’d clipped a bowtie to his tracksuit, his head seemed especially polished, all discoball sparkle and gleam.

  Here were the appetizers: atop an IFC flat, fish bladders in a buttery broth, an antenna of sparrowgrass sprouted from their midst. Laughter stabbed into the air, glasses clinked, waitstaff in IFC uniforms cranked limb-sized peppermills and in the kitchen refilled empty cider carafes from a rubber tub by the compost bin.

  The Mayor watched Raven stir his fish bladders. The whole menu tonight comprises gourmet selections from the Island Flat Company, one of our local businesses, she said. Everything’s local, the cider’s from the orchard on the eastside of People Park . . .

  Raven wasn’t listening: he plucked a bladder from the bowl, examined it with a dubious squint, and tentatively slid it into his mouth. Face contorting into instant horror, he gulped cider, replicated the horror face, signalled a waiter, made sure the milk wasn’t local (it wasn’t), commanded the largest glass possible. Then, to the Mayor: You were saying?

  There was more to her little treatise, once upon a time she could dovetail any subject with civic pride. But she’d lost the thread. Gazing around the room she tried to feel something for her constituents beyond mild loathing. In the last half-decade of her incumbency she’d begun to feel first distant from these people, then estranged. Life on the island had become too easy, everyone took her reforms for granted, no one considered how things used to be. Look at them, she thought: these people owe their comfort to me and they don’t even realize it.

  Well I should probably say something, said the Mayor, pushed back from the table, closed her eyes for a quick personal affirmation — touch green! — before addressing the guests. But when she opened her eyes Raven was standing on his chair, arms extended in victory. Yes, he cooed. Yes, yes!

  Around the room people struck glassware with forks. Every head in the room swivelled toward the illustrationist, faces alight, what would he do.

  Yes, yes! he cried, conducting his audience like a maestro. Put down your forks, please. Friends — welcome. Yet here I am welcoming you when it is I who should thank you for being welcomed. For you have welcomed me here — graciously. And so it is with grace I thank you for this welcome.

  He bowed. Everyone tinged their gl
asses again, they couldn’t resist, the banquet hall was a cauldron of delight. Ignoring this, the Mayor carved into her fish bladder. Out hissed a little gasp, a nautical aroma.

  Please, no more tinging, said Raven, please. I’ve been all around the world, and this city — I’ve rarely had so keen a welcome. Don’t applaud. Seriously, stop it. Listen.

  He climbed down from his chair and began to walk around the room. The Mayor slipped the fish bladder into her mouth, the moist withered cyst of it.

  Passing the NFLM table Raven nodded, the High Gregories nodded back.

  Tomorrow night, he continued, though I have yet to discern the specifics, I will be illustrating something truly, I think, spectacular. As always it will be a magic that of course already exists, but remains unseen. My job as ever is just to reveal this magic to you, to illustrate what in your hearts you already know, what you already believe. My work is only to remove the fog that obscures the truth.

  The air had gone tense and glassy. The Mayor chewed, mouth flooding with a sour, silty mucous.

  Raven paused beside Loopy and her sculpture. A raven? he asked. She curtsied. He patted her beret in approval, then was on the move again: Friends, tomorrow night all I can offer is an uncovering. Each of my illustrations is only that, merely scratching at a frosted window to reveal the hidden wonders on the other side. But with a shift in light, every window can become what? A mirror. He smiled, snatched a napkin off a nearby table — its owner, the Institute’s oft-cuckolded provost, yelped — and held it up. Madam — sorry, sir, if you’ll allow me. Please, all of you, follow along with your own serviettes.

  Everyone in the ballroom folded their napkins as they were shown: once in half, once diagonally, doubled over, pinched in, and tucked. Choking down the fish bladder, the Mayor swept up her napkin and endeavoured to catch up. Nearby, Griggs, Wagstaffe, Magurk, Noodles, and Favours’ Recruit were doing a bangup job, while with each step the Mayor’s creation looked less like Raven’s, like theirs, like anyone’s or anything.

  The illustrationist said, Now we have envelopes. And what do you think might be inside this envelope? Perhaps we should open it to see.