Path of Smoke (4 page)

Only after his stomach was terribly empty, after he'd opened his eyes and wiped a string of bile from his lips, did he realize that it was daylight, and he was no longer in the park. He was in the city of Anfractus, the city of infinite alleys, with the sun beating down on him. Smoke stung his eyes. The heat was suffocating. For some reason, he was naked, and all of his memories felt as if they'd been scattered about. He couldn't think of where he'd come from. All he knew for certain was his name.

Babieca.

The campus was a warren of demihysterical students, clutching their phones and their oversized textbooks as they ran from lineup to lineup. Academics wandered among them, trying to prepare for lectures as they walked. They mechanically sipped coffee, their eyes glued to books with titles like
Powers of Horror
and
Of Grammatology
. Some were dressed fashionably, while others wore rumpled clothing and looked as if they'd just woken up. Carl recalled his favorite philosophy teacher, who'd worn the same outfit to every class: a pair of gray sweatpants and a
Looney Tunes
T-shirt with a hole in the middle of Bugs Bunny's face. He'd never met anyone more brilliant or fascinating than this man, bleary and unshaven, too busy thinking about Immanuel Kant and the sweet sting of causality to wash his clothes. He'd observed over the years that male academics could get away with a lot. As long as they were interesting, they could show up to class in a pair of overalls, sporting a facial tattoo, and nobody would comment.

They went to the bookstore to cash in their TA vouchers, which would allow them to afford the pile of books they'd soon have to interpret. There was no such voucher for their graduate seminars, each of which boasted a long reading list. Sometimes you could cobble together the readings on your own—if you got to the library quick enough—but often, there was an overpriced custom courseware package to buy. It amounted to a binder full of photocopies, most of them askew, whose very presence seemed to offend the corporation known as CanCopy. A steaming envelope of freshly pressed articles, chosen for their difficulty. He wasn't sure he had any room left in his brain to memorize those dizzying arguments, produced by academics who had once lined up at a bookstore counter, just like him, clutching the same voucher and wondering how they were going to pay the power bill.

Andrew headed off to find his books. Carl started to follow him past the shelves of branded merchandise, but Shelby grabbed him by the arm. He almost yelped but managed to bite down on the exclamation. She dragged him into a corner filled with Plains University socks, sweaters, and bunnyhugs.

“What's the plan for tonight?”

“No parking,” he said automatically. That was the phrase uttered whenever one of them spoke about “park business” on the wrong side of Wascana. Companies were supposed to remain discreet. Not that they were a real company. Not anymore. But if one of Mardian's people happened to hear them—or worse, one of the basilissa's—their lives would take an unpleasant turn. After what they'd done, it was important to stay off the radar.

She sighed. “Things must have gone well and truly pear-shaped if you're the one advising me about parking.”

“Hey. I can be discreet. I've done a pretty good job this summer.”

“With a few slips.”

“What do you expect? We're with him all the time, and he likes to ask questions. In case you've forgotten, that's sort of his thing.”

“It might help if you didn't look so shifty.”

“I keep telling you—that's just my face.”

Shelby peered over the racks full of clothing. Andrew had vanished into the crowd of students who were trying to find their textbooks.

“Maybe we could fit him with a silent alarm,” he suggested. “Something that makes our phones buzz whenever he gets within ten feet.”

“Don't be a dick.”

“I'm halfway serious. We're running out of options. Do you think he really believes that story we told him about the battle in the library?”

A few months ago, they'd fought for their lives next to the circulation desk. Carl could still remember the sweat running between his hockey pads—their poor excuse for garniture. A salamander had nearly set fire to the stacks. And they'd told Andrew that it was a live-action role-playing game that had gotten out of hand. The smoke alarm, the shattered glass, they'd managed to explain all of it somehow. They'd blamed it on his medication, on stress, on a prank involving the sprinklers. But nobody knew if he actually believed them.

“He hasn't exactly mentioned it,” she said.

“He's in therapy. Some hack is forcing him to draw how he feels about life, and all we give him in return are terrible excuses.”

“They're not so bad. I really could be attending an art class.”

“Every other night?”

“I told him it was a compressed summer class.”

“And summer's gone. What's your next excuse?”

“At least mine's plausible.”

He frowned. “I could really be playing in a rec league.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I used to play hockey all the time.”

“Pee-wee? Or Atom?”

“Shut it.” He absently picked up a pair of socks. They were branded with a coyote, of all things. “Fine. What should we tell him?”

“That's the thing. I don't know.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I thought you'd be the one to crack first. Are we supposed to lie to him forever?”

“Maybe not forever.” He felt something heavy in the pit of his stomach. “Maybe—I mean—he could find his way back.”

“We don't even know if that's possible.”

“If we tell him, it's all over. That much we do know.”

“It's stupid,” Shelby muttered. “Stupid and cruel.”

“Pottery.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You can tell him that you've moved on to pottery class.”

Shelby laughed helplessly. “Right. Instead of studying and preparing for my tutorials, I've decided to make a vase.”

“Tell him it's an amphora. That sounds more interesting, at least.”

“And what about you? What if he wants to see one of your hockey games?”

Carl shuddered at the thought. “I guess I really could join a rec league. Something a bit cheaper, like roller hockey.”

“I think miniature golf is closer to your speed.”

“What about the bas—”

Andrew materialized, clutching a pile of books. He must have used his elbows. Maybe he was the one more suited to playing hockey. The thought made Carl grin.

“What bass?”

“Pardon?” Shelby was stalling.

“What bass?” Andrew repeated. “I interrupted Carl. He was saying something about—”

“Bass fishing.” Carl tried to make it sound perfectly logical. “My cousin wants to take me bass fishing. Mom was telling me the other night. Isn't that weird?”

“It really is,” Shelby murmured.

“Which cousin?”

“Mauri.”

“Isn't he a vegetarian?”

Fuck
. He could see Mauri in his mind's eye, skinny and smiling, as he ordered a lentil burger with extra chard. Suddenly, Carl hated him for being so healthy.

“We're not going to eat the bass,” he said haltingly. “It's a catch-and-release thing. Probably, we'll just drink a lot of beer and ignore the fish.”

“When is this happening?”

Shelby knocked over a rack full of bunnyhugs. “Oh
crap
. Why did I do that?”

Andrew helped her replace the rack. She gave special attention to each hanger, ensuring that the clothes were arranged by size.

“Can I see your books?” Carl asked. The key to distracting Andrew was to relentlessly change the subject. If you kept it up long enough, he'd usually abandon whatever question he'd been about to ask. Books were like catnip.

As he rattled off details about the publishers and individual editions, Carl smiled. His insides felt like a car crash. Soon the lies would feel true. On that day, he'd be able to look Andrew in the eyes, to smile at him, without a quiver of regret. Like an advisor, he'd be able to say—without blinking—that the job market was looking up, that a bachelor of arts had never been so valuable, that you couldn't put a price on critical thinking. He'd sweeten the knife before plunging it in. They'd both believe in a tremendous future, unscrolling across the sky.

A memory came to him, jagged around the edges, as if someone had abruptly tuned his mind to a halfway point between stations. He felt stone beneath his back. He saw a decaying tapestry. Fortuna was a ruined face. Her eyes had faded, but they still saw him, sweating, full of fire. Kissing the shadow. The rhythm that drove them, older than anything. The shadow moved, and Babieca felt something rising within him, a sweet, scalding incandescence that would burn everything to ashes if he let it loose. And he did. The mouth closed over his own. Ashes covered his body, a dream of collapsing staircases and blind alleys. The spark moved through him, leaving nothing behind, as the tongue sifted through his remains. He was shuddering and crying, but his body had flattened out to silk. There was only the cry, the beautiful breakdown.

But they hadn't kissed. Not in this world. Babieca—his other—had shared a furtive, happy moment with Roldan. The auditor, gone. The shadow. But why did Carl remember? Who had been the real shadow? Was Babieca just a character in a dream, or was he an extension of Carl, some nested memory that would never leave him? Babieca's particular skill set would have been useful in grad school. He'd never have to pay for another book, and being a musician had a certain mystique. It was a lot sexier than collecting Lego and back issues of the
Byzantine Historical Annual
. All those buttons and forgotten fibulae. Perhaps they really would save him, as he'd believed when he was young. Their lovely endurance. If a fine silver toothpick could survive the collapse of an empire, then—maybe—he could survive this.

Andrew was distracted by the color inset of his Broadview anthology and nearly walked into a group of students as they were leaving the bookstore. Shelby steered him, gently, around the four girls, who were trying to puzzle out their letters of admission. The acceptance letters were so stylized that it was often difficult to figure out where you'd been admitted, or what courses you were required to take. Carl had showed up to the Department of Kinesiology on his first day, a little bewildered by the fact that everyone was wearing jogging shorts and gleaming with a sense of healthy purpose that was completely unfamiliar to him. At first he'd thought they were on some kind of party drug, but they were simply conscious and in a good mood.

They were about to split up. The Department of History was in another building (for now, at least—the offices were always being shuffled around). Andrew and Shelby were both heading for the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, with its life-size posters of theorists and famous authors blown up to unnerving proportions. He was concerned that they hadn't decided anything in their sotto voce conversation about fake art classes and hockey practices. Would Andrew continue to believe their lies? They seemed like something delicate and confectionary, a gingerbread castle without a drawbridge. There'd be no escape for them once the towers began to crumble. So far, he'd gamely put up with their behavior. He hadn't asked why Carl and Shelby were spending more time together, or why they often stopped talking in midsentence when he approached them. Andrew could be oblivious to certain things—hipster irony, forced smiles, the fact that not everyone wanted to talk about intrusion versus portal fantasies in literature—but he'd surely realized that something peculiar was going on.

They crossed the science building, which was floored in polished granite. It had six levels, all encased in a smooth web of concrete and dazzling glass. The elevator intoned each floor, and a bank of large-screen televisions played a loop of experiments. Many of them involved sparks, fizzing beakers, and balloons. At the end of the loop, the screen would black out, displaying a single word:
Science!
Curiously, the sound was turned off, so you couldn't actually learn how the experiments were being performed. Carl was certain that he'd blow himself up, were he to attempt any of them.

Shelby paused in front of the lab café, which sold pastries and trough-sized noodle bowls. You could feel the collective anger in the lineup as everyone attempted to pay for small coffees with their debit card. This was where they had to part ways.

“I've got lecture until ten fifteen,” she said. “Then I'm done with my tutorial at eleven forty-five. Shall we meet back here around noon?”

That was a lie. She'd shown Carl her schedule, and her Monday tutorial was finished at eleven fifteen. If they met back here shortly after, they'd have some precious time to work on their excuses before Andrew showed up at noon. Carl glanced at Andrew. He wasn't looking at either of them. His concentration seemed to be wandering.

“Sounds good,” Andrew said, after a moment. “Happy teaching, Carl.”

This time he was looking at Carl. Looking directly at him, which was unusual. He didn't blink. His face was placid, but the look had a kind of challenge to it. Carl shifted nervously. Then he smiled, and nodded.

“You too, buddy. See you soon.”

Shelby also gave him a look.
Do not crack,
she was saying.

They parted.

Carl cut across campus, enjoying the morning chill. The weather was playing with them. For the moment, he could enjoy it, the way you'd flirt with something kind of beautiful that might kill you later. He unzipped his jacket and let the wind have its way. Students were smoking and searching through their bags, while cars endlessly circled the parking lot. Pigeons were nesting in the International Languages building, and they crooned at him as he walked by. As the cold light suffused him, he felt, for a moment, that he might be a functional adult. He had a bank account, a long-distance plan, even an RRSP (which he tried not to burglarize at the end of each month, when he could barely afford rent). His wallet was full of discount cards, whose punched holes and delicious icons—muffins, burgers, steaming cups—reminded him that he had options, that he only had to spend twenty more dollars to receive a free artisanal cupcake.