People Park (10 page)

AT FIRST WHEN THE
pickup and trailer pulled into Street’s Milk &
Things, Pop assumed he’d only have to disappoint hopeful patrons
of Mr. Ademus. In the doorway he held up his arms in a
gesture meant to convey:
Sold out, apologizations!
But out stepped
two men in the khaki uniforms of the
NFLM
, one carrying a briefcase, the other with a Citypass lanyard around his neck, both with terrific moustaches. At last the birds fly home to roast, said Pop.

He locked eyes with each of the men in turn, closed the door, turned the sign around so
NOT OPEN
faced out. The men looked at the
NOT OPEN
sign, at the proprietor posed defiantly behind it, one of them knocked, the other gestured at the pickup. Pop didn’t move. From the briefcase papers were produced and pressed to the glass. At last Pop addressed them as per their nametags: Bygone with yous, Misters Walters and Reed!

The Helpers exchanged words. Walters tore off a crinkly carbon copy, rolled it into a tube, and wedged it in the doorhandle. Then they got back in the pickup and pulled around behind the store. Pop’s breathing shallowed, a vein throbbed in his throat. Finally he threw the door open and in socked feet went waddling after the two men.

With Walters waving him along, Reed was reversing into the clearing. The trailer slid underneath the houseboat with a clang.

That’s my home!, screamed Pop. What is your strategization?

It’s condemned, said Walters. We’re just picking it up. You’ve got a problem, go through the proper channels. We gave you the paperwork.

Just doing our job, called Reed from the cab.

Pop wailed, Injust, degenerational, vandalistic, totalitary! Unsuppositionant, predominary, predilicted, no, reprehensitory, no, unfoundational, no, declensionive, no, anti-popularly, no, not fair, not fair, not fuggin fug fuggin fair.

Meanwhile Walters secured his houseboat on the trailer, strapped it down, locked everything into place. Listen, he said, smoothing his moustache with thumb and forefinger, just check the paperwork. There are processes for this sort of thing.

Processes?
roa
red Pop. I’ll tell you a processional thing or two. If it didn’t mean defiliating the hollowed ground of my establishment I’d process my foot through your cranial lobe right now, both of yous, evil ones!

Walters nodded at Pop’s stockinged feet. Would you now?

This is my home, Pop said. He fell to his knees. My
home
. A quartered century hencefrom. Whereupon am I supposed to sleep?

Reed honked the horn.

Read the paperwork, said Walters, and hopped into the cab.

Pop knelt in the gravel, watched the pickup pull onto Topside
Drive, houseboat swinging behind atop the trailer, slid into traffic
— and just like that his house was gone.

AS REED PILOTED
them west toward the dump, Walters opened his briefcase and took out a packet of Redapples. He offered one to his partner. No, sir, said Reed, quit those things years ago.

Smart, said Walters, unrolled his window, lit the cigarette, took a long, deep drag, and blew smoke into the oncoming traffic. On the shoulder, someone had painted over the Guardian Bridge turnoff sign with a solid black rectangle.

Look at that, said Walters. Those fuggers are getting bold, coming this far east.

Try blacking out the Temple though, said Reed, and they’ll see what’s coming.

Or, you know, they won’t.

Won’t?

See what’s coming, sighed Walters. Hence the surprise, Reed, of whatever
what
is.

In the sideview mirror Reed checked the trailer. It rolled along steadily behind the pickup, a boxy shadow back there in the purple evening. From the cupholder he took a walkie-talkie, confirmed the seizure and signed off: D-Squad, Good lookin out.

Poor guy, said Walters between drags. You got to feel sorry for him.

Reed merged onto Lowell Overpass. How do you mean?

Oh, he’s a total applehead. I mean, what’s he doing, living in a parking lot? It’s amazing it took this long to get him out of there. Still though, he said. Still
. . .

Enh, said Reed. You heard the
HG
’s: this weekend’s supposed to go smooth, no hiccups. Who knows what trouble that guy might have had planned. What did Magurk call him?
A genital wart on the dong of the city.

Walters ashed out the window, inhaled, blew smoke into traffic.

You think too much, Walters.

So what? We’re just doing our job?

Exactly. We’re just doing our job.

DURING THE DAY THE ZONE
was a storybook of wonders: why did that person have a parrot on her shoulder? What was happening down that alleyway with three men arguing around a dolly heaped with copper? This litter of thousands of orange paper dots — who, how, when, what? But in the cold, still night with the only life her own jammering heart and the cloudpuffs of her breath, Debbie’s curiosity shrivelled. You bundled against the cold. You were wary. Any shadow could morph into a thief slinking at you with a blade.

After sunset the Zone always felt a little chillier, the air a little thinner, than the rest of the city. It didn’t help that the breakwater subdued the tides, or the lack of lights in the old stockyards cast the western side of F Street in gloom, or that
UOT
and Blackacres emptied at dusk: the soup kitchen and shelters and Golden Barrel began to admit their nocturnal clienteles, the shops lowered their shutters, families withdrew into their houses for the night. The only people out would be patrols of Helpers, whistling cheerfully as they strolled the streets, clubs hidden in their pantlegs. At night anything could happen here, and often it did: instead of a place of stories, it became a place where stories happened to you.

Following Calum up F toward Whitehall, Debbie talked unceasingly,
if only to distract from their footfalls, calling out to be chased.

So you’re really in with these folks now, huh?

Sure.

They’re okay?

They’re okay.

You’re not worried about —

Calum clicked his tongue. There’s nothing to worry about. You have this idea that these people are like, not people. Maybe they just figured out something different than you. Maybe they look at what you think’s a normal life and are just like, that’s not for me. Maybe it’s too safe and boring and there’s nothing, there’s no
edge
to it. So they make something else. And maybe their something else isn’t for you.

Well why take me there then?

So you can see.

Does this mean you’ve been before? You’ve hung out with them lots? Calum?

He quickened his pace.

At F Street and Tangent 20 the Yellowline sloped downward and continued at streetlevel into the Whitehall Barns, and it was here that Calum veered inland. He led Debbie down a laneway between empty warehouses, through the hole in the chainlink, to the silos. In there? she said, and he told her, Yep — though he seemed to waver, and it was Debbie who went first.

Inside, the moon sliced through the shattered windows and played jagged patterns over the concrete floor. Flashlight, said Calum. Debbie turned it on: a dab of yellow quivered at their feet, down a flight of slatted metal stairs to the basement, where bunches of candles burned on either side of a door propped open with a chair.

Then they were in the service tunnels angling down beneath Whitehall, the temperature warmed, Debbie shed her coat and sweater, carried them heaped in her arms. An industrial noise came grinding up the tunnel. As they descended it intensified, a grating drone that set Debbie’s teeth on edge. On and on they went, deeper and deeper underground. Finally the tunnel released them into a sort of grotto, where the sound exploded: a terrible music that was huge and cruel and everywhere.

Debbie killed the flashlight. Motes of colour swam before her eyes, she plugged her ears and blinked at the sparkling dark. Gradually she was able to pick out industrial lamps strung along extension cords ringing the room. Beyond their alcoves of weak light the room was a fathomless smudge. Slowly the shadows took shape, they seemed to swell and pulse and writhe — people.

Were they dancing to this tuneless music that rattled Debbie’s bones inside her skin? There were people around the periphery too. In one of the nearby light nooks a hooded figure held out a forearm to someone else dragging a piece of glass across the skin: the blood swelled in black bubbles, wiped away with a rag. They noticed Debbie watching, turned toward her, faces just shadows inside their hoods.

Where was Calum, he was gone. Debbie squinted. How many people were there? Thirty, forty, hundreds, she couldn’t tell. And even with her ears plugged the music throbbed inside her head. Though this was hardly music, no instruments, no one was singing. It was noise, yet somehow immediate and intimate, even alive. It seemed, thought Debbie, to billow mistlike from the room itself and swirling to consume everyone within.

Tentatively she took her fingers out of her ears, let the sound come screaming in, tried to make sense of it. The whining through the middle range was reminiscent of the staticky screech of a distorted guitar, the pulse beneath it seemed percussive, but there was no sign of either guitars or drums. Just people, ringed by a dozen or so megalithic towers of speakers and amps, wires webbed overtop in a ropy ceiling. Inside these towers the crowd milled and shifted — slow, almost purposeful.

Calum stood at the edge of the cipher, backlit, talking to a girl wearing what appeared to be a glove for a hat.

Debbie caught his eye and waved. He ignored her, kept talking to the girl. But then he eyed Debbie again and finally came over and slouched in front of her like a child humouring a parent he wants to escape.

What is this music? she yelled. What do you call it?

Calum pulled away, looked around, leaned in again, didn’t speak.

Is there a band? Where are they?

Calum’s lips moved but Debbie heard nothing.

The band, Debbie screamed, and placed her ear to Calum’s lips.

There’s no band, he said. We’re the band. He gestured above, at the network of wires overtop the dancefloor. Those are sensors. The sound comes from us, moving around. However we move is whatever we hear. You hate it, don’t you?

He seemed almost gleeful. Cal, said Debbie, why did you bring me here?

Why? So you could see.

But there’s nothing to see!

A sour look Debbie couldn’t quite read passed over his face, frustration or regret. He muttered something and drifted away, back toward the girl in the odd hat — not a hat but hair, Debbie realized, palming her skull.

This girl spat, said something to Calum, who looked at Debbie, quickly, then away. The urge to calm whatever she had unsettled fluttered up, but the girl took Calum by the hand, moved out of the light and into the crowd.

And Debbie was left alone with the music. It was horrible — like a hand over her mouth, like hands on her throat, like hands tightening on her shoulders and stomach and thighs. It stabbed into her ears, filled her face, centipedelike went scuttling down her spine, spread pulsing back up into her chest, expanded, tingled all the way to her fingertips and out again, into the world, as shreds of exhausted light. She tried to find something in it, to trace some melody or beauty. But she couldn’t. She didn’t understand.

Calum and the girl had vanished. The two who’d been cutting each other were gone too, all that remained in the lamplight was a shard of bloodied glass. Everyone was inside the circle now. Except Debbie, who groped toward the tunnel, found its opening, entered, the walls rough as gravel. She remembered the flashlight: it strobed wildly ahead of her as she went splashing through puddles that hadn’t been there on the way in, the cavernous hall chased her with its screams.

After a time the music faded to a distant drone, farther along the only sounds in the tunnel were Debbie’s footsteps and the rasp of her breath. She leaned against one of the walls: moist, almost spongy, she recoiled from it shivering. Behind her and ahead, the flashlight shone into blackness. Hello? she called. Her voice didn’t even echo, just seemed swallowed by the dark.

She couldn’t go back, not to what was there. And so she continued on — the corridor sloped down, leading her even deeper beneath the city. She turned back and there was the music, faint but screeching. So down again she went. What was this lightless place, where would it take her, the smell was earthy, the floor became dirt and the flashlight wobbled over it, was it fading? A knot bobbed in Debbie’s throat, she blundered on.

And up ahead was a shaft of light.

Debbie raced to it: a grate, high above, and a ladder leading up. She pocketed the flashlight and climbed. The grate swung open — the street, and air, sweet and cool, and the night sky, the vast burnt skin of it bruised by citylights.