Path of Smoke (8 page)

“Oh—yeah, I thought it was heavier than usual.”

It seemed like a thin excuse. And it wasn't like Andrew to simply show up without texting first. He liked to plan things in advance.

“Normally I wouldn't need it,” Andrew continued, “but I made some notes—”

“Not a problem. The knapsack's in my room. You can fish it out, if you're willing to brave the mess.”

“It's nothing I haven't seen before.”

Andrew disappeared into his bedroom. Carl walked into the kitchen and opened the humidor that was sitting on the table. He rolled a joint. The resin stuck to his fingers, but he liked the tacky feeling that it left behind. Just a trace of skunk. He slipped the joint into his pocket, along with a lighter, and closed the fragrant box.

“Who's Julia?”

Andrew was standing in the entrance to the kitchen. For a moment, Carl had forgotten that he was even there. The question made no sense at first. Then his stomach did a flip as he realized what Andrew had just said.

“Who?” He tried to keep his tone neutral.

“Julia.” He was holding his copy of
Beowulf
. “There was a letter from SaskTel in your bag. It was still sealed, but you'd written
find Julia
on the envelope.”

“Oh. Right.” Shit. He must have been doodling on the envelope. The lecture had stalled a bit, and Darby was talking about the religious wars. His mind had wandered.
Find Julia.
Was his subconscious trying to completely screw him over?

“Who's Julia?” Andrew repeated.

An engineering student named Sam, who moonlights as an artifex.

The truth had a peculiar simplicity. If only it didn't sound crazy.

“She's—a student. I have to find her e-mail, so I can give her the syllabus.”

“It's not available online?”

“No . . . Darby's a weird traditionalist. He hates posting course materials on WebCT. If it were up to him, we'd be mimeographing all of the assignments by hand.”

“That seems really inconvenient.”

“Just one of the many joys of working for an aging hipster.”

“Soon we'll be the aging hipsters.”

“I'd prefer not to think that far ahead.” He filled a Nalgene flask with water. “Ready? We should probably get there early, before they start playing dubstep.”

“When did every café become a performance venue?”

“We live in the age of multitasking. I think it all happened while we were in college. The world suddenly accrued this new layer of irony.”

“Don't say that in front of your students. They'll eat you alive.”

“It already belongs to them.” Carl shook his head. “Isn't that odd? It was ours, but we missed it. Like a flash.”

“You really do need coffee. You're starting to sound like Jennifer Egan.”

Andrew seemed to have forgotten about the Julia thing. Carl was relieved. That was a rookie mistake, and if Andrew had pressed, he wasn't sure how far he could take the lie. The truth sounded impossible. Julia was a character, a shadow, whose life and memories belonged to an engineering grad student named Sam. Julia was an artifex who specialized in bees and frogs. Her mother, Naucrate, had maintained the fountains and the great cloaca of Anfractus. In this world, she was a glimmer in the mirror, a spot on the corner of Sam's vision. But on the other side of the park, she was a person with her own guarded intentions, her own patchwork of nagging fears and anxieties. Possibly, she had inherited the spark of life from her mother, the ability to forge a true machina with a soul—if that was what the spark was.

Carl paused in the act of locking the door. For a moment, he stood in the hallway, which smelled like old wood and cigarettes. He could hear music coming from the sex shop below. For some reason that he couldn't fathom, Love Selection insisted on providing a soundtrack. You'd expect them to play cheesy movies, but instead, the radio was tuned to soft jazz or classical music.

“Did you forget something?” Andrew asked.

He nearly replied in the affirmative.
Yes. I forgot to tell you that we're heroes, or maybe the next closest thing. I forgot to tell you that Wascana Park is some kind of spell that leads us to another world. Maybe it's all just a dream, but the memories are real. I forgot to say that we kissed once, even if it feels like years ago. We were naked with each other, and I don't know if that will ever happen again, but I still think about it. The way you grinned before climbing on top of me, the same grin that flashed out of you just before midnight, when the park turned. I forgot to tell you that we were lashed together by a lover's belt, and that I held your cooling hand as we rode away from the harbor. Behind us, I knew that the undinae whispered our doom, even if I couldn't hear them. He forgot to tell you so much, Roldan. That he loved to fix your sleeves. That he was writing a song for you. That someday, when you were both older, he really would tell you the story of the cracked lute.

“No,” Carl said. “Just lost my train of thought, for a second. Let's go.”

They walked down the narrow flight of stairs, avoiding the mildewed step that would always try to steal your shoe. Broad Street was brilliant and humming with traffic noise. A Greyhound bus thundered toward the depot. Orange rings of construction had appeared on every corner, and parts of the street were laid bare. He could smell braised pork from the nearby Vietnamese restaurant. Broad and Albert streets were the main arteries of Regina. Broad felt more exposed, and many of its façades were crumbling. Albert eventually became a series of strip malls, before giving itself up to the Ring Road, which encircled the city. Living on Broad meant sharing space with galleries, community centers, and parking lots that stretched like bald spots over the urban landscape. There was a constant cycle of demolition and construction, which reminded him of a body shedding its cells.

A woman walked by, wearing a sundress and yelling into her phone. Carl didn't recognize the language, but there was something beautiful and liquid about it. Even though she was clearly agitated, the syllables felt strangely calm, as if they knew better. He realized that her dress was covered in pineapples and toucans. He couldn't imagine being angry while wearing fruit.

They walked down Eleventh Street, where the construction had raised a cloud of yellow dust and grit. Carl saw an exhausted construction worker smoking in a trailer. His curly hair was matted with sweat, and his eyes were distant as he inhaled. He was skinny, and his steel-toed boots looked almost clownish.
Muster Point
, the sign next to him read. It sounded almost fun, like the rumpus in
Where the Wild Things Are
. Men mustering in a hot, smoke-filled trailer, carefully avoiding eye contact as they allowed themselves to unravel in the sunlight. He'd never learned how to muster, not properly. He couldn't fake that affability, that ease with which some men related to each other, as if they'd always been friends. He felt more at home with the slightly damaged. Men whose neuroses burned brightly, who could be as fragile as dandelions, their emotional flotsam always close to the surface.

Maybe the young guy was exactly like that. Maybe he was lost in thought, trying to figure out if he should apply to art school or wondering if someone would eventually recognize his talents as a DJ. When Carl had worked at a grocery store, arranging produce and throwing rancid cardboard flats into the compactor, nobody had asked him about grad school. Customers had assumed that he was a burnout, or that he lacked the evolutionary skills to become something useful, like a certified accountant. Wreathed by smoke, caught unawares, the kid in the trailer might have easily been him. Another wild thing under the sun. The traffic noise died down as they continued a few blocks away from Broad. The streetlights in this neighborhood were painted red, and the signs were in Mandarin as well as English. They walked past the old firehouse, with its peeling orange roof and clock tower. Now it was a heritage museum, but Carl could imagine it as was it nearly a century ago, klaxons ringing, on perpetual alert. Fires and tornadoes had always been a part of Regina's history. They crossed at Osler Street and made their way to the Artful Dodger. It was quiet at this time of day. A few burned-out hipsters sat on the couches near the front door, listening to oversized headphones. Posters for Funk Friday and the Cubanéate Latin Dance Party decorated the walls. The parquet floors had recently been sanded, and there was a faint tickle of sawdust in the air. The raised seating in the performance area was empty and covered by a scattering of pillows. It reminded Carl of an empty Hippodrome, although he couldn't say this aloud.

Two staff members leaned against the counter, enthusiastically debating the merits of different game consoles. “No,” one of them was saying, “what makes it totally superior is that you can play Alex Kidd in Miracle World. And normally, you can't even
get
that title, but I found a copy when I was in Toronto.”

“Here.” Andrew gave him some cash. “I trust you to order my sandwich.”

“I'm honored.”

“I'm going to look at the art.”

Carl ordered their lunch, along with two coffees. When the sandwiches came, he saw that Andrew's had a thick slice of tomato. Quickly he unwrapped the sandwich and popped the tomato into his mouth. Better to dispose of it than to watch Andrew make a face while he tried to remove the tomato without touching it, like a kid playing Operation. He swallowed it whole and then took a long pull of coffee, which made him nauseated. Andrew emerged from the gallery just as Carl was uncapping the Nalgene, trying to add another liquid to the mix.

“Let's go to the park,” Carl said. “I feel like they're about to play Vampire Weekend.”

“You're all about the diss today,” Andrew observed. “I really don't see what separates us from them.”

“For one thing, I'm no longer twenty. I don't hang out in raw spaces.”

“You sound like a PSA for getting older.”

“Fine. We share a spoke. Have it your way.”

“You share a what?”

Carl blinked. The words had come so easily.
We share a spoke on Fortuna's wheel.
If Shelby were here, she'd yell, “Parking!” But he was on his own, and apparently he couldn't keep his worlds separate from each other.

“Never mind,” he said. “The sawdust is getting to me. Let's go.”

They crossed to the micropark on the other side of the street. Decades ago, a building had burned to the ground on this spot, and the green corner was a kind of memorial. There was a mysterious sculpture involving rocks in a metal grid, and tiled benches, surrounded by blooming purple echinacea. The park had fallen into disrepair, but there was something appropriate about the encroaching weeds. The whole area had been left to its own devices, and parts were allowed to decay while others thrived. The chokecherry trees cast their shadows against a nearby wall whose white paint was falling away, revealing a layer of metallic blue. Carl leaned against the crumbling brick. Sunlight filtered through the bowed trees, moving across the sculpture whose significance was a mystery. Something to do with caged nature, or maybe it was about nature taking control. To him, it resembled a necropolis, with its orderly plots in the shape of dice.

He set the coffees and sandwiches on the ground. Then he lit the joint, shielding it from the light wind. The weeds nodded in silent agreement. Carl took a long drag. He held it in his lungs until it was a sweet, persistent burn, filling him up. Then he exhaled a current of smoke and slid down the wall. His muscles relaxed. He sat on the ground and listened to the generous silence of the little park. Andrew took the joint from him. Carl watched him inhale, then cough. He had virgin lungs. Unlike Carl or Shelby, he'd never picked up smoking. There was something miraculous about it, as if he'd grown up in a convent.

Andrew coughed again. Carl rubbed his back. It was an unconscious gesture. Andrew said nothing and handed the joint back. Carl took another drag. Then he stubbed it out and put the roach in his pocket.

“This is a strange park,” Andrew said.

“The Romans had parks like this,” he replied. “Little green spaces, in the middle of Rome's dirty sprawl. You can really only have a park in a city. Otherwise, it would just be a clearing. The two are symbiotic.”

“The park needs the city.”

“It's a love affair.”

“I think someone broke up with this park. It's seen better days.”

“I like the breakdown. It's comforting.”

“Spider.”

“What?”

“Giant spider. Right behind you.”

Carl turned around. A four-foot spider reared up, its legs flashing in the sun. Its mouth was an enormous black hole. He shouted. Andrew stared to laugh.

“It's only a garbage can,” he said. “Look.”

Carl approached the creature. His heart was still in his throat. Upon closer examination, he realized that it was a stylized garbage can. Its eyes were colored glass.

Andrew continued to laugh. “Your face was amazing.”

A flash of memory returned to him. They were at the insula in Vici Arces. They hadn't yet met Felix. He'd been about to steal some grapes when he'd heard Roldan scream. He was standing before a painted dog, baring its teeth.
Beware of dog
, read the caption below the painting. A primitive security measure. Roldan was pale but laughing. How quickly fear could effervesce, when you were in the right company.

“Fuck,” Carl murmured. “I thought it was a spider demon.”

“It's just art.” He unwrapped his sandwich and tossed the plastic into the spider's mouth. “See. It wants our garbage, and our compassion.”

“You didn't see it bearing down on you.”

Andrew took his hand. “Don't worry. I'll protect you from Shelob's daughter. Or granddaughter. As spider-demons go, it's a bit of a runt.”