People Park

by Pasha Malla

  She sank into her chair. The theatre faded. She felt removed from everything. If time in Cinecity had become an abstraction now so was space. She had only a peripheral awareness of having a body. Her mind was a whitewalled room. And then into the emptiness stabbed a voice. And though it was hushed the words were clear: I don’t think I can take much more of this.

  Adine blinked. Up there onscreen was Faye Rowan-Morganson.

  It’s just too much, she said, twisting a lock of black hair around a finger. I know no one’s watching, she said, and paused.

  Adine sat up, moved to the edge of her seat.

  No one at all.

  Faye Rowan-Morganson was younger than she’d had imagined, the cheekbones a little more drastic, and darker, and she wore makeup. But that was not the biggest surprise — most startlingly, she was naked. Or at least appeared to be, visible only from the shoulders up, the camera in tight, the background blurred. Even so, Adine felt she was meeting a long-lost childhood friend, now an adult — not an exact equivalent of the version in her mind, but the essence matched: mournful, fatigued, unmistakably her.

  No one in the theatre spoke up, no one seemed to know Cinecity’s latest star. Or if they did, like Adine they didn’t say.

  Well, Faye Rowan-Morganson told the camera, tomorrow’s Thursday. Her tone was one of resignation. As I’ve been saying, that’ll be it for me, and by the time you see this —

  The channel flipped: a woman in a yellow bandana and a heavily bearded man, cross-legged, bongos in their laps, were providing heartfelt tips on how best to transmit the Essential Soul through percussion. Their eyes were intense. You have to be one with the drum, advised the woman. I snuggle mine, said her husband. Yes, she said, nodding sagely, it’s a very good idea to snuggle your drum.

  IV

  Y MIDDAY ALL that was left of the flats was a puddle of grease, and Magurk — still shirtless, distended belly resembling a lightly furred, bulbous gourd — had popped the top button of his khakis. Since her fall the Mayor had retreated into an almost barometric silence that loomed at the edge of the conversation in a grey solemn wall. She sat pushed away from the table with her arms crossed while Griggs outlined the NFLM’s plans and Noodles presided behind tented fingers — nodding, always nodding.

  We’ll open Island Amusements at six, Griggs explained, and channel all the traffic up the Throughline into the parking lot. He dispatched Bean to oversee the operation of rides and concessions. Silentium, Logica, Securitatem, Prudentia, advised Griggs.

  Good lookin out, said Bean, puffed his inhaler, and hurtled eagerly up the ramp.

  The next order of business was the ICTS. Power was out only in UOT, Blackacres, and Whitehall, but because no trains could turn around in the Barns the whole Yellowline was frozen. Walters and Reed and their moustaches were sent to figure this out.

  You see? said Griggs, sealing the portal from his control panel. We’re on it. This is how we do, Mrs. Mayor — we run the city so you don’t have to.

  Primly she brushed flat crumbs from her jacket.

  The final issue: communications. While the NFLM’s internal radios were working fine, both the phonelines and We-TV’s closed circuit were out. Which actually isn’t such a bad thing, explained Wagstaffe, since it likely means we’ll get better crowds at Cinecity. To, you know, distract people a bit. From what’s going on, I mean. And with that Wagstaffe excused himself to oversee the film’s final cut.

  Around the table only halfnaked Magurk, enigmatic Noodles, incontinent (probably) Favours, Griggs, the Mayor, and her mute and crippled aide, Diamond-Wood, remained. The adjoining room had gone silent since Magurk’s last visit.

  And the final order of business, said Griggs: Raven.

  The Mayor sighed. And?

  A trapped animal, murmured Magurk, is a dangerous animal.

  What? said the Mayor. What does that even mean?

  Special Professor, please.

  So? said the Mayor. What’s the plan?

  Noodles held up both index fingers.

  The Imperial Master has some thoughts, said Griggs.

  Oh, good old Noodles, said the Mayor. Cuddle me up to a whole forest of green.

  And yet Noodles’ thoughts are his own, explained Griggs.

  Oh, said the Mayor. Of course.

  Noodles nodded, twice. And sat back, having said nothing. The room felt like the inside of a steadily deflating balloon.

  Anything else? said Griggs.

  The Mayor shifted into a stern, authoritarian pose, leaning forward — but before she could speak an alarm went squawking throughout the Temple.

  Code 42! said Magurk, jumping to his feet.

  Favours whipped to attention, eyes full of fire. Code 42! he cried in a phlegmy warble.

  Code 42? said the Mayor.

  A breach, muttered Griggs. From the main floor came thumps and shouts, a crash. Footsteps pounded back and forth. The alarm howled, the stomping thickened into rumbling, a mob of dozens, crashes and whoops.

  In the corner of the room, Favours had never seemed so alert, eyes darting around the room, a smirk playing at the corners of his lips. They’ve come, he chortled. Code 42, Code 42! They’ve come!

  The Mayor looked from Favours to Diamond-Wood to Griggs to Magurk to Noodles, who returned her bewilderment with a curt, officious nod.

  Magurk rose, knuckling up. Those fuggin animals, he sneered.

  They’ve come, sung Favours. Oh my yes Code 42 they’ve come!

  Who’s come, old man? demanded the Mayor.

  Kicking his feet in their stirrups and cackling, Favours threw back his head to reveal a rubbery yellow neck laced with purple veins.

  For fug’s sake, growled the Mayor, what kind of loony clubhouse is this?

  Application forms are upstairs, said Griggs coolly. He pressed a button on the console. The alarm died, the lights in the basement extinguished. After a moment of total darkness, a generator stirred to life somewhere within the Chambers, and the lights returned, though duller, tinting everyone beige.

  The noises above weakened into a faint scuffling.

  Griggs lifted the phone to his ear. His face sagged. He tapped the console, once, twice — then hung up, sat back, and rapped his fingers on the table.

  Did they cut the line? screamed Magurk, and then he stamped off to the adjoining room yelling, Is someone here for you, you fat sack of squatter trash? Who the fug is it?

  If there was a reply to this, it was drowned out by a gentle explosion from the Great Hall. The conference chamber shuddered. From upstairs came another rush of footsteps.

  There must be a hundred of them, said Griggs.

  Favours howled.

  Who’s them? hollered the Mayor. Who are they?

  A smoky odour began seeping into the basement, acrid and sharp.

  Magurk reappeared drawing a sword, long and parabolic, with a slippery shink of metal. Slicing through the air, he shrieked a feral battle cry.

  Oh come now, please, said Griggs. With the portal closed there’s no way anyone can get down here. Sheathe your weapon, you’re embarrassing everyone.

  Griggs, said the Mayor, tell me right now: who’s attacking you?

  Oh, it could be anyone, said Griggs, almost sadly. There are just so many people, he sighed, so many people it could be.

  WHAT DO THEY EXPECT? said Starx. That we’ll get out and check every site?

  Maybe we should have told them we don’t even know what — Olpert checked their notes from Residents’ Control — Gip Bode looks like.

  And what? Also tell the HG’s we didn’t even watch the show? Terrific idea, Bailie. Crazy Magurk’d cut our fuggin eyelids off.

  Ha, said Olpert — though this time Starx didn’t seem to be joking.

  They drove at a crawl through fog-soaked Lakeview Campground. Around every bend the
Citywagon’s highbeams appeared as twin dabs of yellow paint on a blank canvas, illuminating nothing, while the wipers scrubbed lethargically back and forth, smearing the scant snowfall into wet streaks across the windscreen.

  Starx steered them into a Scenic Vista at the edge of the poplars. Though the vista was of fog. Above the treetops this bled into a grey cloudcover in parts tinged bluish. Around the Citywagon the fog churned, coiling and uncoiling, a thicket of pale snakes or the fingers, thought Olpert, of many many searching hands.

  Know what I think?

  Okay? said Olpert.

  I think this guy, Raven — know what he’s doing? He’s hanging out somewhere right now, maybe in his hotel room, having a laugh at all of us.

  You think?

  Starx tapped the walkie-talkie: just a dull drone, not even static. Weird, he said.

  So do we go to the Grand Saloon?

  No, it’s not our job to look for him. They’ll have dozens of guys doing that. We’re supposed to find the kid, right, but how can we? I’m not a fuggin detective. Are you?

  Starx put a hand over Olpert’s mouth. That was rhetorical, you scrotal pleat.

  He let go. A taste of soup lingered.

  Tell you what. Let’s get a cider.

  Starx! We haven’t had lunch yet!

  Fine, you get lunch, I’ll get a cider. Though if you don’t drink then you have to drive.

  Oh, said Olpert uneasily.

  The Golden Barrel it is, said Starx, firing up the ignition. On the dash dials spun into place, the Citywagon’s headlights splashed onto the fog. Starx pointed at the dashboard clock. See? It’s nine o’clock, Bailie. Perfect time for a drink.

  Starx, wait, said Olpert, pointing through the windshield. Look.

  Something was happening in the headlights, mist swirled into phantasmal forms.

  Pictures? said Starx.

  They’re moving, said Olpert.

  What is it? said Starx. Can you tell?

  A series of indistinguishable images played holographically out of the highbeams, skipping one to the next — a slideshow of strange shadows marbled with light, just figurative enough to suggest people maybe, or animals. The pace quickened, then the figures began to sputter into motion, invoking those halted jerky images from the advent of cinema. But quickly they sharpened, the animation smoothed, and a scene took shape . . .

  Is that? said Starx.

  I think so, whispered Olpert.

  And —

  It can’t be!

  But —

  Oh god, said Starx. Oh no, oh god.

  Olpert’s face had gone the colour of the fog.

  No, said Starx. Bailie, no.

  The two men watched, rapt. The film’s refracted light danced over the Citywagon’s hood. Neither spoke, neither blinked, neither budged a muscle. The film blazed into a final searing swath of white, and in an instant everything was gone. The highbeams left a yellow stain on the wall of fog.

  What was that? said Olpert. What did we just watch? Starx?

  Starx shook his head as if to dislodge something from it, slung an arm around the passengerside headrest, put the gearshift into reverse, and floored the gas. Olpert lurched forward, the seatbelt sliced into his neck, gravel shrapnelled up the sides of the Citywagon, and they went screeching out onto Lakeside Drive.

  At the roundabout a Helper lowered his traffic batons and leaned in the window.

  Nothing on my radio, he said. Your guys’s dead too?

  Starx nodded so slightly that Olpert felt the need to pipe up: Yes, ours too.

  Where you headed?

  Special mission, said Olpert.

  Special mission, repeated Starx, and fixed the Helper with a blazing, wild look. Going to let us through, brother? B-Squad’s got places to be!

  The Helper removed himself from the car, called, Good lookin out, and waved them through the barricade, around the traffic jam up the Throughline, and out of People Park.

  IN THIS MOVIE or is it a dream the bridge has been empty, that sort of huge and booming emptiness that could never have been anything but empty, who else could be out here and where would they come from. But there it is bobbing at the horizon, a fleck, what might be just a spot in Calum’s vision or a reflection or a trick of light. From this distance it could be anything small, a mote or mite or flea, maybe not a person at all, this little blip of matter exactly at the point where the bridge narrows and vanishes. Amid all that emptiness here is this thing, whatever it might be, a blot or a mistake, a puncture or a speck, now visible and now not, flickering. It seems less present than projected or imagined. It is a dot, a period, the end.

  Calum keeps walking and holds up his hand to gauge perspective: the shape has curled into a comma half the length of his thumbnail. Some indefinite amount of time later it has fractured into a top and bottom, a semicolon, twice as big. Calum seems to be closing the distance at a rate incommensurate with the speed he’s walking. He squints but doesn’t pause. The shape bobs on the horizon. It is moving. It is growing. It is, he realizes, approaching.

  He squints again. This thing seems to be human, or at least human-shaped, and coming at him very, very quickly, now the length of a knuckle. And though the shape of this thing is human there is something inhuman about it, about the way it moves and its spectral presence and the shimmer of air between it and Calum, a dream’s air that thickens into tendrils that slip and tighten around his neck.

  Also as this person approaches, the bridge behind it, in fact everything behind it, even the sky, seems to be disappearing. It isn’t going dark. What was there a second before vanishes. And for a sky that was already an absence to cease to be even that — it becomes nothing, there’s just nothing there. As this person moves the horizon recedes, closing in, a hand curling around a camera’s lens, shrinking the image, choking what can be seen until, eventually, it will be just Calum and this person, alone, and everything else a void.

  Calum backs away from the yellow line. His first step is deliberate, but then he staggers, legs twisting, and everything goes slow and soupy, this can’t be a movie, it has to be a dream. The encroaching figure nears, the emptiness swells behind it — and Calum stops walking. He steps off the yellow line. He backs up against the bridge’s railing. There is nowhere to go. He looks down into the mist and what is maybe a river’s shadow beneath and above at what remains of the colourless sky, swiftly vanishing.

  And the figure comes closer still, swallowing everything in its wake.

  AT BLACKACRES STATION train 2306 sat on the southbound tracks, doors open. The platform was empty, the movators motionless. Debbie boarded the lead car. Two passengers sat down at the far end: a kid, maybe eight years old, and his fatigued-looking mother with a handbag in her lap.

  Standing over her, the kid kicked his mom’s feet, she told him to sit down. He crawled up on the seat opposite and from his knees looked out the window and said, We aren’t going anywhere, we’ve been here forever, what are we doing. Sit down, Rupe, his mother said again, and he said, I am sitting down, and pulled himself up as tall as he could on his knees and stared at her stonefaced. She had nothing to say about that.

  Normally the neighbourhood’s tinny din would drift up from the streets into the station. Instead the car filled with a silence that came thudding into the ears, at once thick and hollow, everywhere and empty. Outside the mist swirled past the windows of the train and over the roofs of Blackacres, between watertanks resembling the hulls of fogged-in ships, grabbing and releasing the phonelines and electric cables that lolled between rooftops. They were dead: the power was out, of course the train wasn’t moving.

  Yet Debbie didn’t leave. Stray bits of mist nudged through the open doors. At the far end of the car the kid got down and went back to kicking his mother’s feet. I said stop it, she said, and he kicked her once more, and she said, I’m warning you, a
nd he kicked her again, giggling — and at this she sprung forward and smacked his face. The kid held his cheek. He looked stunned. She shrunk away, seemed to reconsider, grabbed him roughly by the arm, and shook him. Are we supposed to walk to find your brother? she screamed. All the way all across the city, are we supposed to walk? The boy started crying. Rupe, no, said the woman and hauled him into her arms. I’m sorry, she whispered, kissing his face, his mouth.

  Stiffly, Debbie watched. Sometimes at the Room she was privy to corporal parenting, almost always interrupted by a realization of witnesses. Then came excuses and embarrassment, the family slunk out the door in shame. But to this mother, now coddling her boy, Debbie seemed invisible, their world didn’t include her or her judgments. What was wrong with these people, didn’t they know they were in public? Had they no shame?

  But what bothered Debbie most was feeling excluded and ignored. With nothing to say and no way to help, she slipped back onto the platform and down to the street. A Citywagon idled in the depot opposite. Debbie approached, waved. The driver, bundled in furs, face taut as a canvas and primed with powder and rouge, rolled down her window. Yes?

  Hi, said Debbie. Sorry, could you help me?

  Help you what? I can’t drive you anywhere. I have to get home.

  In a rush Debbie explained her predicament, that her phone was out, that someone was missing and —

  And so?

  And she’s blind, said Debbie — which, really, might not have been untrue.

  Oh, said the woman. Blind?

  Yeah. All I need’s a ride to Canal Station, maybe the Redline’s running . . . Listen, I can pay you, she said, producing her wallet as proof — the woman snickered — and shamefully pocketed it again.

  Can’t you get your own car? said the woman.

  I don’t have a Citycard. I don’t know anyone in the um, men’s league.

  Yeah, see, my husband . . . The woman trailed off.

  The engine idled, chugging exhaust.

  Debbie felt cornered. She sighed, could hear the self-disgust in her voice as she said, Listen, I write for Isa Lanyess —