Swarm Page 11

  I wiped my hands on my pants. Marvin threw the bike and it crashed against a dented filing cabinet. As the sound faded away, we stood there, staring at each other, surrounded by debris. His eyes searched my face, waiting for me to realize he was right, as I had in the past. I stared back at him, wanting to remind him of the times he’d failed, the terrible outcomes. His voice when he spoke was gentle: “I’m just trying to show you that this idea you have of some happy family—” I lifted up the backpack and threw it at him, hard, but he jumped to the side and it slammed against a mangled plastic garden bench, splattering orange. “Sandy,” he shouted as I turned and ran, my feet pounding against a skin of crushed juice boxes and disposable diapers and half-buried black bags. “It’s the truth,” he called after me.

  His truth.

  In the trees, a fish aquarium with one intact glass wall stuck out of the debris. I knew I shouldn’t. I knew that the glass could be used for many things and that because of my choice the world would be a more dangerous place, but I did it anyway: swung my leg back and slammed my boot right into the centre of the pane. It shattered. Before the noise fell away, a movement flickered in the corner of my eye. I turned fast but saw only the forest, the leaves shifting in a slight breeze. A crow called and flew across my line of sight: a glossy black gap within the world.

  I sank onto the corner of an old mattress, folded in half, the springs frozen with rust. Garbage all around, like the aftermath of an explosion.

  I put my head in my hands and pulled them away when I realized how dirty they were: the lines on my palms darkened in orange. Marvin wouldn’t look for me and that was what I wanted. To get away from him; to be free. I thought of my mother. Her stories of flying to foreign countries before she married my dad, stepping off the plane into different seasons and smells. Ecuador. India. Spain before the European Union collapsed. A round purse made of woven grass, embroidered with red and black beans, hung in the dining room. I remembered a photograph of her with a monkey on her shoulder. There were other photos too. One my father brought out to show me how I looked like my great-grandmother, same fair skin, hair the colour of spelt bread. In it, she stood on the wooden veranda, one hand around the railing, a pane of the front window broken. My baseball went through it, my father told me most times we hunched over the black pages of that album, the silver corners coming loose. That’s how I remembered them—my father a series of interactions, his rough fingers fastened around my bare toes on the couch while we watched television and his voice sank into my ears, one prediction of doom after another. My mother a machinery of tasks: slicing a roast, cleaning mouldy soup from the fridge, flicking the broom over the tiny apartment floor. In motion, always, as if to deflect his words, draw them into her gears and grind them into powder so she could look up and say, What’s that, dear?, and he’d turn again to me, speak to my still face. I missed them. Nearly two decades since we’d spoken or seen each other. But that was ancient history. Ruins under the dust of my grief.

  It must be true that when people have children they start thinking differently about their own childhood because that’s been happening to me. I think about you, Melissa, out there in the woods, and I realize that my parents did the best they could. If my mother felt for me as I feel for you—this agonizing pull, like our skin is attached—letting me go must have been the hardest thing she ever did. Not that she had a choice. One day, late winter, sleet streaming out of a pewter sky, I vanished, never to be seen again. As if I’d joined a cult.

  Tears came. Afterwards, I rubbed the rough vines on the gold heart that I wear around my neck and wondered what my mother would have thought of you. No matter what, I had to find you. You had to be real.

  Dead leaves from the previous autumn covered the forest floor. I picked one up and tore it in half, dropped it, and found another. “Demolition helps me think,” Phoenix once said when we were breaking open walls to scavenge insulation. Back then we’d had a lot to think about. Now life is about survival, making it through each day, with no time to consider whether or not I’m happy. Every little break in routine means less time to put up my beets, harvest zucchini, clear away the weeds from the pumpkin patch, watch over the hens so the animals don’t steal our eggs. All while Marvin is out in the boat. There is no way I could ever leave him. He is my lifeline and I am his.

  It’s been that way for a long time—since we got to the island and spent those first few years looking over our shoulders. Hiding. A beard disguising his face. My hair cut as short as we could with dull scissors. All three of us shell-shocked, grieving, numb. Pushing down a past that was now bubbling up. Ghosts rising to the surface, bones coming into the light, like the skulls and femurs found in the caves on the island’s south shore that Mr. Bobiwash told us about. Holes in the limestone cliffs where the Ouendat found shelter from the Iroquois. They were trapped. At the turn of the last millennium, skeletons were still being found.

  I stood up.

  I grabbed my backpack and pushed through the woods, to the road, the scrap of fabric breaking apart in my worrying fingers. Had it come from your dress? Or another little girl’s, long since taken to the mainland or dead from starvation or flu? Were you dressed in rags, your hair dirty, shorn from your scalp like the children I’d seen in the dark zone, lined up with their parents for soup. If I could see you, I’d know what you need. I’d talk to you. Understand you. Help you.

  I moved quickly over the broken asphalt, down the shattered yellow line. A row of rocks lined the field, piled by a farmer who had cleared his land by hand more than a century ago. The thick cedar forest on my left seemed impenetrable. Toward the shoreline, turkey vultures circled in graceful, dipping arcs, their heads a dim, distant red, like Mars. I ran.

  10 City

  I hadn’t been asleep very long when the springs on the sofa bed screamed from the release of Phoenix’s weight. A grey light sifted through the glass door as she kneeled in front of the stove and I felt relieved. All night, I’d lain on my side, tightly curled, trying to keep warm on the thin, narrow mattress on the floor. Phoenix’s olive skin turned the colour of toffee as she added a slim length of wood to the fire. I sat up, hugging myself against the air’s sudden cold.

  “Good morning,” I whispered, and my breath steamed in front of my face. Phoenix glanced at me.

  “This will take a while to get going,” she said before she shut the door and stepped back to the bed. Thomson groaned a few unintelligible words before Phoenix shushed him. I lay back down, felt the heat gather slowly at the soles of my feet, and didn’t wake again until the room was so hot I had to shove off the sleeping bag for relief.

  It was like that down there—a constant swing to extremes. Plenty of vegetables or beans and meat for soup or none at all. When in my normal life I’d often been entertained by shows and movies stored on the Internet, we had the evening’s deep silence, followed by the chaos of the soup kitchen. On those nights, about three a week, up to a hundred people could show up. Zane, whose belly hung over his suspendered pants, who lived up the road and kept to himself, let twenty in at a time through the single door while Phoenix dished out soup or assigned duties. It was hers and Thomson’s project, but Phoenix oversaw it all. That became apparent pretty quickly.

  That first morning, Phoenix made tea out of peppermint from their summer garden.

  “I miss coffee,” Thomson said as I curled my hands around the warmth of the mug. In the kitchen, Phoenix dished chunks of potatoes onto three plates and then carried them over with a jar of sprouts. As she set the food on the table, I wondered if I should have offered to help. Something bit at me, and I reached down and scratched my knee. Thomson stabbed at a potato hunk, set it down, and sliced off a rotten spot.

  “These already turning bad?”

  Phoenix glanced up from her food. “It’s damp down here. Cold.”

  “We should keep them in the back room.”

  “Too warm and they’ll sprout.”

  Thomson shook salt on his potatoes.
“Sometimes I wish we’d stayed there. The coffee, fresh fruit, honey, heat.”

  “Hurricanes,” Phoenix said, but Thomson didn’t seem to hear her.

  “Much easier to live off the land.”

  “We’re not living off the land,” said Phoenix. “Barely.”

  Thomson pushed the rest of the potato chunk into his mouth.

  “We couldn’t have known,” she said.

  “Known what?” I asked, lifting a pinch of sprouts to my mouth. The water in them was icy, sent shivers through my jaw. They both looked at me. Thomson’s blue eyes and Phoenix’s black, considering how to answer. Finally Thomson spoke.

  “Everything,” he said and laughed.

  While we ate, Phoenix outlined the day’s chores. Put on bones for broth, pick up the vegetable donations, collect wood from wherever we could find it. Thomson said he’d take me to get the day’s water and Phoenix nodded like he needed her permission. Before we left, a few people came in—one of the men I’d seen at the gate and a woman with a green scarf on her head tied turban-style, like Phoenix wore hers. They hugged and I turned away, swallowing the last gulp of my tea while I wondered where Marvin was, when he would stop by, if we would be together again—but really, Melissa, what I wanted wasn’t so base. It was that: those two women, standing with their hands on each other’s elbows, speaking about the next steps to take. Phoenix smiled and I saw how all the complicated lines on her face relaxed.

  Outside, a grey haze of smoke hung over the rooftops. Thomson cleared his throat several times and spat on the ground, barely missing my shoe. He carried two green pop bottles and I swung a blue bucket, a small jar of iodine pills rattling inside. He must have noticed me looking around.

  “It’s an adjustment. Think of it as waking from a dream.”

  I thought of Marvin’s speech about the bubble bursting. “That’s what Marvin says.”

  “Yes? What else does he say?”

  “A lot.”

  We laughed, stepped into the road to walk around a puddle.

  “I hope you’re being careful with him?”

  I blushed.

  “He’s passionate,” Thomson said, and my cheeks burned hotter but Thomson didn’t notice. “When I was his age I was at student demonstrations. A hundred thousand people in Wenceslas Square. Havel and his group stayed away because it was our turn.” His voice was adamant, almost angry. “You know Vaclav Havel?” he asked, and I nodded, because I did, at least what Marvin had told me.

  “It felt like being one of a whole, an enormous body. But it took a long time to get there. The first time I went to protest, with my girlfriend, I was beaten. The police took us a long way out of town. Four hours it took to walk home. Many students, shuffling back to Prague like zombies. My mother didn’t want me to go. When I arrived home she wouldn’t feed me. She threw the food in the garbage—cabbage and liver slop, something like that. She was a small woman, but she was fat and had a crazy smile, full of teeth.” He touched the bottom of the bottle to his lips. “But none of that mattered. The whole damn thing was tipping and we were pushing it over.”

  He sounded like Marvin.

  I was excited to hear the rest of the story, but he pointed suddenly at the brick row houses beside us, the same as Marvin’s squat. “Built for workers. You’ve seen the lamp factory?”

  I nodded, remembering the huge building Marvin had pointed out, that first morning.

  “Founded by Charles Cobden in the 1920s. Business booming up to the ’90s.”

  “What happened then?” I asked because I’d barely been born.

  “Free trade,” he said, as if those words told the entire story.

  “Where were you then?”

  “In the ’90s? Canada. Before that, Mexico.”

  “Where you met Phoenix’s mother?”

  Thomson loudly banged the bottles together and I jumped. Two cats scattered away from the corpse of a small bird.

  “Goddamn strays,” he said. “They’re everywhere.” He was right: all over the city, animals that people couldn’t afford were running loose. Dogs, cats, even exotic birds. Margo once brought home a dead parrot she’d found in a stairwell. She plucked beautiful feathers from it, as many as she could, and then laid it on our lawn. Soon the bird was a putrid rack of bones and we had cats and a few dogs milling around, waiting for the next handout.

  “Do you feed them?” I asked. It seemed like something they’d do.

  “Eat them, more likely.”

  He saw the shock on my face and grinned. Years later, I asked him about that and he told me no, they hadn’t yet sunk that low. On the island we did. Anything for a meal.

  We were close to the water then, and Thomson stared ahead, eyes squinting into the light off the lake as if trying to pinpoint a small detail in the waves, dark and oil-coloured, a killer whale.

  “It was different then,” he said. “We felt morally obligated to avoid violence. Violence would make us like them, like the regime. Now we’ve embodied our system. We all have to expunge it, shrug it off, even the dissenters. It’s heavy and hard and causes self-hatred. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” I lied. We couldn’t go any farther. We were at the end of the dock. Thomson stared at the fringe of ice around the wooden footings. A flush of red prickles had spread in his cheeks, accentuating the mud-coloured troughs under his eyes, the white circle around his lips, half hidden by the stubble of beard. I held out the bucket and he took it, but he wasn’t finished.

  “It’s better not to push for the end with violence,” he said. “In the end are the seeds of the beginning and we want them to be strong and good.”

  What end? I wondered. I was young enough that I thought he meant me, my uncertainty at being down there, my new relationship with Marvin.

  Thomson handed me the iodine pills. He went down on one knee and pushed the bucket into the lake. Both hands gripped the handle, but it was too heavy and I saw how it tugged on him, how he bent farther, fighting with it. I stepped quickly forward and helped, wrapping my fingers around the hard wire of the metal handle and pulling up on the weight until it slid onto the dock, the water slopping over, soaking our pants and sleeves. Thomson dropped an iodine tablet into each of the bottles and we watched the ochre unfurl.

  “Jan Palach. You know him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Your age,” he said. “At the end of the Prague Spring . . . After the Soviets came in 1968, he set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square.”

  “Why?” It astonished me that someone would do that.

  “To oppose people’s hopelessness, was what he said. But people were hopeless. More so, after that.” He laid one hand on his chest and vibrated it there like he trying to wake himself up, bring feeling back to a numb spot.

  “Be cautious of strong feeling,” he told me. “Or of thinking you have no options because you don’t like the ones that are there.”

  I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what to say.

  Pretty quickly, back at the diner, Phoenix set me to work again. She had me scrub down the counter and all the tables, benches, and vinyl stools. She handed me a dish detergent container with BLEACH written in blue marker down the side. There were no plastic gloves so I used the scrunched-up corner of an old brown bath towel and dipped it carefully into the mixture of untreated lake water and bleach, but my hands ended up red and raw. They stung right through lunch—boiled eggs, sprouts, and raisins from the previous summer—and into the afternoon when I was on to the next thing: untangling the wires on a tarnished solar panel someone had donated. There were others there—the woman I’d seen in the morning, cutting rotten spots out of a pile of tiny hothouse peppers, and Zane, moving quickly despite the huge stone of his round belly. I watched Phoenix, waiting for her to stop or even pause, but she never did, that I saw. It was like she was stronger than everyone else, moving around with a force that compelled us to follow. When night came, and I fought to stay awake without any kind of caffeine, Zane op
ened the doors and people started coming in. Phoenix hovered at the end of the counter, ladling, while I did what I had done that first night: handed out bread. We launched the soup kitchen like a theatre production and I played my role, my arm moving automatically, but I was too exhausted to feel the kind of meaning or contentment I thought I’d feel. Past midnight, I was too tired to talk or think about anything, so when a pane in the front window was broken, my reaction was dulled.

  We were in a booth, three or four of us, Phoenix making tea behind the counter. The doors were already locked. Thomson was talking about how salt was once used as a currency when the front window suddenly shattered and half a brick tore the brown curtain, pulled it off the nails that fastened it. From outside we heard whooping. Phoenix ran. One of the cups tipped over on the counter, the hot water dribbling down. She flung the door open and screamed after them. “Fuck off. You’re wasting your fucking lives.”

  It happened so fast that we sat there stunned, only Thomson still moving, acting normally, lifting a mug to his mouth. He coughed once or twice but then calmed and Phoenix came back in, her face flushed plum, pulling off her sweater.

  “Bastard kids,” she said, and their sound still carried: raucous laughter, fading like animal noises in the woods.

  That night I fell onto my thin mattress at the foot of their bed, exhausted, but for a long time I couldn’t sleep, wondering if they’d come back. Afraid, until Phoenix asked me, out of the blue, so sudden I thought she must be blurting out words in her sleep:

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and the springs creaked as she rolled over in the bed. Thomson already snoring.

  The next few days were similar. One task after another, usually arranged by Phoenix. Most mornings I fetched water. Smashed apart frozen beef bones. Dropped lye down the outhouse hole. By the third or fourth day, I felt ready to collapse. It was mid-afternoon and I was gathering the courage to tell Phoenix I needed a nap, even just a short one, when Thomson appeared and asked for my help. Phoenix set down the knife she was sharpening.