by Pasha Malla
Let’s keep going, screams Isabella.
While the helicopters go out over the Lake to bomb the invaders, the mob moves down Parkside West toward the shores of the very same Lake. Their weapons are poised. Their readiness to fight for everything they believe in has not abated, nor been replaced with mutinous laziness, which in this particular case would amount to sedition.
Out over Perint’s Cove the helicopters’ machine guns start blazing a rat-a-tatting chorus. One of the invading boats explodes in a ball of orange, hot flames, then sinks. The crowd explodes in exultant eruptions that spray everywhere in a scorching lava of joy. But when that lava cools it becomes the hard and uncompromising bedrock of stick-to-itiveness. Eyes narrow. Fists clench. Resolve is up-plucked.
They’re at the beach now. As the helicopters dodge retaliatory fire from the evildoers, Isabella licks the barrel of her gun, as is so often her wont.
Gregory Eternity flexes his considerable pectoral muscles, one then the other, as though they’re in conversation. In fact he’s having an imaginary conversation in his brain between them: Let’s do this, says the left one. Okay, replies the right, let’s. And so forth. Then he twirls the ends of his moustaches into points sharp enough to impale cubed squab, kebab-style (squababs, his favourite food). Then he dons shades that match Isabella’s, and staring at her reflection in his lenses, she says, Do we have time? He knows exactly what she means. Do we have time not to? he replies, coolly unzipping.
While Isabella and Gregory Eternity are taking each other the rest of the crowd strip and follow their masters as guides. Yet no one can quite achieve the same range of positions or heights of ecstasy. If ecstasy is a ladder Isabella and Gregory Eternity are balanced way, way up on the top rung and whoever’s holding the bottom better not let go, because the lovers will come hurtling down and crack their skulls open and splatter their brains like cerebral cortical stew all over the pavement.
THE OVERALLED line-jumper had wheedled to the front of the line at the base of the Slipway, a few hundred spots ahead of Kellogg and Elsie-Anne on the far side of Crocker Pond. Kellogg’s wishes upon this man for a lonely death were interrupted with a honk from the NFLM megaphone. All right, people, shouted its operator, we’re ready for the first wave!
Helpers ushered a hundred-strong contingent up to Parkside West Station, the big guy leading the way, clapping his tiny hands, whistling and jolly as could be.
The queue shuffled forward. Four helicopters now circled the park, each bearing the insignias, Kellogg noted, of mainland TV networks. A train slid into the station, loaded, headed off south, another group was led up the slope. The sun beat down. Kellogg sweated through his shirt in abstract patterns, Elsie-Anne drooped at his side.
The boyfriend half of the student couple returned from some reconnaissance mission. The riots in the Zone are coming this way, he said. Gangs trashing the city as they go.
It’s those people who live in Whitehall, said the girl.
It’s finally happening, said the boy.
It is, she said.
It: the pronoun lodged in Kellogg’s brain. Whatever was happening was becoming an it, an it that history would later name more specifically. For now it was it, and the careful order of the people, their submission to the uniformed authorities, suggested that everyone recognized they were living an it, helpless and servile to it, whatever it might be.
Exciting, said Kellogg, and the students’ expressions wilted into disgust.
Another train arrived, collected passengers, the line moved forward.
We’re next, Annie, said Kellogg, and Elsie-Anne said, Yes, it’ll all be over soon.
They were relieved of their luggage — You’ll get it on the ferry, explained a Helper — and directed up the hill. The air felt tight, the heat stifling, their ordered march regimental.
At streetlevel the group collided with an incoming mob. The rioters, Kellogg assumed, and braced for confrontation. But no, this was a parade, subdued and behaved and NFLM-sanctioned. Still, there were suddenly people everywhere, and amid the confusion, as Helpers struggled to segregate the evacuees, the student couple slipped into the procession north to the Narrows without a word to Kellogg, who watched them go feeling abandoned, though he’d never gotten their names.
A Helper hollered, Nonresidents, keep going, take the escalators, and Kellogg and Elsie-Anne went where they were directed, rode the escalator in silence, waited at the turnstiles for further instructions.
As the movator began conveying people out to the platform, Kellogg thought enviously of the students. If this was an it, he reasoned, shouldn’t he be more of a participant in the drama? Like those young folks, stealing off to a new adventure. But what about Ruben Martinez, the photographer, whose defiance had only gotten him punished . . .
Maybe action was too dangerous. Instead Kellogg entertained fantasies:
Sir, he imagined a Helper saying, we’re not letting you leave.
But, Kellogg would scream, my wife’s from here!
Only people who have gone through the proper channels, sir, are getting priority clearance now. And if your wife, as you say, is a resident —
Former resident. She used to live here, and doesn’t now, because we live elsewhere, and her name like mine is Poole but you’ve got it as Pode!
Sir, if your papers aren’t in order there’s nothing I can do.
Our child disappears and no one will help us, and look at my little girl — Kellogg would gesture at Elsie-Anne, an ammonial scent sifting from beneath the Islandwear sweatshirt.
But the Helper would be heartless: You’re not boarding this train.
Pushed to the brink, Kellogg would grab the guy by the throat, Helpers would collapse upon him, he would shatter windpipes and sternums and storm off into the city with his daughter in his arms to find his missing son . . . What drama! That was more like it.
He felt a hand on his back. Θir, said a lean, whiskery Helper, let’θ go, move ahead.
Way down the tracks, a train was rounding the bend from Bay Junction. Kellogg apologized, took his daughter’s hand, did as he was told.
When Familiar comes back we’ll go to Viperville, she told him.
We will?
Not you. Just me and Familiar. Then we’ll be together forever, she said.
Kellogg stroked her cheek. Shush now, the train’s coming.
Forever, Dad. Forever and ever and ever.
VI
HE TEMPLE DOOR was open, Olpert stepped inside, called hello, sensed the word drift through the Chambers like a loopily thrown paperplane, skidding uncaught onto the dais of the Great Hall.
A flick of the lightswitch achieved nothing. Slowly the foyer came into view. Shards of the smashed Hair Jar gleamed within its furry contents, Olpert’s own orange leg hair would be somewhere among them. Solid black rectangles had been painted over the foyer’s twin windows — from inside. Cast in shadows, the place had that amplified stillness that prevails after destruction, phantasmal, absence so palpable it becomes present. Olpert ushered Gip in from the chortling floodwaters and closed the door.
The library was trashed. One of the recliners had been sliced open, foam frothed from the wound. The shelves had been emptied, strewn everywhere were dozens of defaced (pages torn out, covers ripped to strips) editions of How We Do. Olpert picked one up, flipped through. The pages were blank. He tried another. Empty. He’d seen men writing and reading feverishly in here, had they been faking? But then he shivered: the words might somehow, amid everything, have been erased.
Gip called, Someone made a mess in here.
Olpert discovered the boy in the kitchen. The cupboards had been dumped out, a split tin of corn-in-a-can dribbled mucous all over the counter. Various other foodstuffs littered the room: a confetti of cereal and rice, various energy-drink powders in neon trails and sprinklings, anthills of coffee grounds,
what Olpert hoped was chocolate pudding piled beside the upended trashbin.
In their furs Olpert and Gip moved into the Great Hall. The pews were upturned, the Original Gregories’ portraits hauled from the walls or spraypainted black, or both, and the faintly marine odour of urine hung stale and salty in the air. By the Citycard cache Olpert discovered his grandfather’s picture torn in two, the old man’s halved visage seemed to glare at him even now with disappointment: Where were you to save me, boy?
But of course he’d never been able to save him.
During its innocuous initial stages, his grandfather’s illness had been a relief. Instead of attending that week’s NFLM meeting, they’d watched a Y’s game on TV. The old man shivered under blankets and turned his head occasionally to hawk clots of black guck into a shopping bag. Something viral in the chest, a break from routine and nothing more. Two weeks later, Olpert was visiting Gregory in hospital, and then two months after that interring him in the Mustela Necropolis, the headstone emblazoned with the NFLM crest and the title GRANDMASTER AND CO-FOUNDER in a reverential-looking font. After the funeral, Favours had laid a claw of a hand on Olpert’s shoulder and wheezed, You’ve got a lot to live up to, carrothead.
From the recesses of the Temple came a weak voice: Is someone there? Please, aidance, please, I’m subterrained, please.
The portal was open, the ramp sloped down into shadows.
Olpert took a Citycard from one of the hooks. Listened.
Gip appeared. There’s someone downstairs, he said.
I know, said Olpert.
Well we can’t just leave him, how we did the other man, the one with the thing on his eyes.
No, said Olpert. You’re right. We can’t.
They descended into blackness. As the ramp levelled off the basement trembled with brownish light. The conference table was underwater, chairs afloat. Deeper in the Chambers the generator hummed faintly.
Hello? cried the voice. Is someone there?
Wait here, Olpert told Gip, rolled up his fur pants, and waded in. Around the corner, cell lit with a guttering yellow lamp, there he was. Pop surveyed Olpert with ambivalence.
So you’ve retailed for me, said Pop. Was it guilt? I envisaged as such.
I didn’t, said Olpert. I’m not really one of them.
A likewise story. And what now, evil one?
Now I’m going to let you out.
With the Citycard Olpert swiped the security box. The door slid open.
At last, justification, said Pop. Yet how estranged it feels to be rescued by an evil one! I’m aligned onto the side of the behooded revolutionaires. Still they left me. You all left me. And only now you enfeign restribution.
Olpert said nothing, led Pop to the ramp, collected Gip, and headed up into the Temple, past his grandfather’s halved portrait, and outside. Water, seeping in blackly from the west, hid the cobblestones of Knock Street.
We can’t drive in this, said Olpert.
Ah, but evil one, said Pop, if only you’d not abscondered my watercraft!
Your houseboat, said Olpert. They took it to the dump.
They? Pop eyed him. Are you, evil one, not one of them? Or not?
No. I’m not. It’s complicated but I’m not. It’s just me and the boy —
Not?
No.
How do you know?
That I’m not one of them?
Where I might find my boat.
Olpert gestured at Gip. I want to get this boy to his parents.
If we get to my boat, I can transpose him to safety.
You can.
I can, said Pop, puffing out his chest. With absolutesimal certainty, yes.
THE MORE I talk to you, Mrs. Mayor, the more convinced I am that you are very intelligent.
Oh, well gee. How kind.
I’ve made a decision, with your help: from this time on, I’ll . . . I’ll . . . what? What will I do? I’ll try to look at people differently. With more kindness. Maybe. But after all I still have my illustrations to do. So I’ll do them, but with a little more kindness.
What about my people.
Do you mean the people, Mrs. Mayor?
Yes, of course, the people. The people of this city.
I’d say they’re all going under save me and you.
What do you mean, going under.
What do I mean? What does one ever mean?
This is hell. I’m in hell.
Hell, Mrs. Mayor?
What was the point of all this? This — this show?
Oh, nothing, Mrs. Mayor, but to delight the mind. And to let everyone see what magic can perform. But you say you find yourself in hell? Where hell is, I’d suggest, is where you’ll ever be. Aren’t all places not heaven in some way hell? Doesn’t knowing there is some other paradise make this a hellish reality? But don’t little glimpses — illustrations — of that paradise give us hope?
What do you mean?
That question again! I mean perhaps, Mrs. Mayor, only when you cease to be will you find yourself anywhere else. And yet can you not find glimpses of heaven here on earth? What’s happening up there on your city’s streets, say. Is there any other truth than that?
The Mayor looked into the dark, squinted. Nothing. She spoke carefully: And what is this then? Where are we now?
Why, under the heavens! Under everything.
I thought it was everyone else who was going under?
Yes, he said, I do think that’s the truth, Mrs. Mayor. Though there is some joy to be found in where we are. Perhaps this is the kindness I offer. Speaking with you here and now, at least does, I believe, feel a truer truth. So you ask me where we are, yet you’ve answered your own question. You know the truth yourself. Hell, stated Raven simply. Truthfully, we are in hell — with glimpses of the other side.
ONE OF THE helicopters explodes terrifically. It just pops in the air like a piece of popcorn with a very, very small stick of dynamite inside. Gregory Eternity rises to his feet, erectly. Isabella pulls her legs from behind her head, climbs down from the tree around which’s low-lying branches she’d been coiled, and, smoothing her bulletbelts, assumes her rightful place beside him. Slowly everyone else withdraws or untucks, as flaming debris hurtles down to the Lake like bits of chopper-shaped meteor.
Another helicopter explodes, then another. Mayday, utters the lead pilot as his flying, propellered steed bursts into a ball of flames and he’s flung down insolently to a watery grave, in the water. One by one all the helicopters explode, until there is none left, not even a single one. The pinballs of hope bouncing around everyone’s stomachs vaporize and through the principles of evaporation become gasps of disaster that go wheezing up their cardboard-lined, dry throats, and out into the world between parted lips in brown, thin clouds of sadness.
With nothing stopping them now, the boats sweep fast toward the island. But how utterly weird, they aren’t coming to Budai Beach at all! They’re turning left!
They’re aiming to half-circumnavigate the island, as though it’s a halved apple lying facedown on a plate in the fridge and some bees, right before they die of frostbite, are climbing over its peel. Except upside down. They’re heading to the north shore!
They’re going to try to destroy the bridge! screams Isabella.
Oh shet, responds Gregory Eternity, though his moustaches turn upward at each corner, revealing impeccably bleached teeth, into a smile. Truth is, he’s impressed with Isabella’s prescience, though beneath that smile, or entering his smile and tunnelling down inside Gregory Eternity’s pulsing innards to someplace that we can only call his soul, we might find a dark, viscous blob of something called jealousy. We’ve got to get over there first to defend it, he manages to spew forth from his mouth.
Isabella steps in front of him. The crowd goes quiet. She holds her arms up in a V that
could stand for Victory or Vengeance, take your pick. Are we all in together now? she bellows in the voice of a thousand war trumpets played by a cyclone massively. And the crowd bellows back just as loud times however many they are (thousands).
Now the citizen’s army (because that’s what they’re calling it) has to run all the way back across the island. There’s no time to dress! Will the naked army get there in time to meet the invaders’ boats/bees half-circumnavigating the island’s upside-down apple peel? Only time will tell. But how much time? (Same answer.) These are the questions asking themselves of each person as they run north with the hunched-over trot of old people with bowel obstructions, inside each of their own, private minds.
Let’s save the city! screams Isabella. It’s as clear as a freshly unclogged drain that, between the two of them, she’s the one in charge now.
Running along beside her, Gregory Eternity’s moustaches droop shamefully. But he’s not ashamed. It’s hard accepting his position in the reformed hierarchy of authority between him and Isabella, which now posits him beneath her, and her on top. But Gregory Eternity is a modern, accepting man. It will just take time.
The sound of the boats churning their way up the western shore of the island fills the air. Though it might sound improbable, this is how the crowd intuits that whoever is invading them represents an especially despicable breed of evil, one they’ve not encountered here before, even when rival fans come to town for Y’s games and do appleheaded things like litter all over Cathedral Circus, the fuggin dooshes.
At the northern shore the mob arrives just as the boats are coming around the corner by the Whitehall Piers. Their engines rape the air.
Everyone in position, screams Isabella. (She’s explained everyone’s positions along the way through a system of pass-it-along. Simple.)
Maybe a third of the people march out to the clifftops and stand there in a nude line with their guns trained on the Narrows to the west and the approaching invasion, another third scamper up behind them as reinforcements, and a third contingent gambol onto the bridge like a train of ants wandering out onto an island flat that has been folded and laid over a small stream in the manner of a bridge.