People Park (27 page)

ABOVE IT ALL SPUN
the Mayor in her tower, around and around and around.

IX

HAT IS WAKING,
waking is being born. The sky is pale, not the sky of day or night or dusk or
dawn, not clouds, but more a lack of sky. A sky that isn’t there. Or
maybe this is what exists behind the sky, now Calum sees what has been there all along. Staggering to his feet he looks up and down the bridge, the road narrows to twin vanishing points in each direction, these distances feel infinite, the horizons look unattainable, as though they’d keep peeling back and away and on forever.

Calum goes to the railing, looks down. Below shrouded in
mist might lie a river, if it is a river it disappears into thicker fog
beneath the bridge. If it is a river then the river mirrors the sky, which is to say, colourless. If it is a river its surface is still. There is no current. Were Calum to fling his body off the bridge it would fall in silence and hitting the water not make a splash, if there is water, if not it would fall forever, tumbling end over end, a satellite dislodged from orbit in space.

So Calum steps back into the middle of the bridge.

And sits cross-legged on the yellow dividing line, and breathes short hollow breaths. And lays his hands on the knees of his jeans and looks at the palms of his hands, ridged with lines that mean, somehow, fate and love and health and life. He runs the fingers of one hand along the lines of the other. Squeezes the top knuckle of his right thumb. The flesh engorged with what should be blood does not swell purple, and when released no blood retreats, a rosy hue does not return.

Hello, Calum calls. The word disappears: no echo, no trace, it is as if another mouth has pressed to his mouth and eaten the word, swallowed the word.

Was there never a word?

Calum looks at the sky that isn’t quite sky, along the bridge that stretches forever, down at his hands, into the fog that hides what might not be a river.

Hello? says Calum or does he. Does he say then, Hello?

Does he say hello does he not say hello has he not then ever said: hello.

What’s a city without its ghosts?
Unknown.
Unknown.
Unknown.

—
Guy Maddin,
My Winnipeg

I

ERE WAS THE MORNING barely.
Sometime in the waning hours of Friday night, those uncertain
moments before dawn, the cloudcover sealed fontanelle-like over
the island and snow began to fall. The temperature dropped
and when the sun rose it did so with effort, struggling through fog
thick as a pelt. Clouds drooped over the island, the sky nuzzled the ground, everything the same dirty white: the air, the thin crust
of
snow. Where did earth meet atmosphere, there was no telling.

It was this faint, hazy morning that greeted Kellogg. Waking felt akin to surfacing from the murky depths of a cave into an even murkier swamp. Outside hung that miasmic mist, and for a moment Kellogg had no idea where he was — and who were these people? and who was
he
? It took a moment before he recognized the children in the backseat as his own. The woman asleep in the passenger seat was Pearl, his wife, and he was her husband, Kellogg. They were a family, the Pooles, together, on vacation.

From the huge and vexing and open, Kellogg nestled into the sanctuary of the familiar. He looked from one dreaming Poole to the next, peaceful and perfect. But something nagged at him, watching them sleep. Elsie-Anne, Gip, Pearl, their faces were masks. Who might he be in their dreams, what sort of figure, a hero or villain, triumphant or shamed?

Though Pearl claimed she didn’t dream, never had. But everyone dreams, Kellogg told her once, they’d had friends over for dinner, he looked wildly around the table for support. Not me, she’d said, and poured herself more wine. She could be lying: maybe her dreams were too weird to share. Or maybe she was oblivious to her own dreams, which was sad. Sadder: what sort of person had no dreams?

Watching Pearl sleep Kellogg wished for a device with which he could witness his wife’s dreams — and then he could tell her about them. But such a device did not exist. Kellogg looked past her, out the window, where snowflakes like little flames tumbled through the campsite’s lamplight, and replayed the final hours of the previous evening.

When the khaki-shirted men had escorted Gip back to his parents there’d been something almost apologetic in the way they handed him over — Sir, Ma’am. From that point things petered out: the last firework popped and splattered, the videoscreens
shut down, an
NFLM
rep came onstage and offered a tepid, un-mic’d,
Thanks for coming, have a great night, and ducked behind the curtains. The crowd lingered with collective, discomfited confusion — there was a sense of unfinished business. Kellogg, though, remained ecstatic. With deep booming pride he hugged his son. You were amazing, champ, he gushed. Wasn’t he, Pearly? Everyone was watching you. Everyone saw! But the boy seemed distant. He felt oddly limp in Kellogg’s arms. He’s tired, said Pearl, prying Gip away, petting his face. We’ve had a long day, let’s get everyone to bed.

The crowd scattered, the air grew cold. Kellogg shivered as he hustled the family up the path out of the common. Along the way Gip kept silent as he was recognized and accosted: You were the boy onstage, how’d he do it? Pearl got snippy with one family who suggested Gip had been in on the trick and was now responsible for explanations. Leave my son alone, Pearl snapped, sweeping him under her arm while Kellogg shrugged and chuckled in a diplomatic way, he hoped.

At their campsite Pearl said, It’s too cold for camping, my kids are not freezing to death in a tent tonight, and herded them onto Harry’s backseats. Car sleepover, yelled Kellogg, fun! and grinned into the minivan. Gip gazed back blankly, his face emptied of life. What an amazing night! Kellogg roared, and Pearl said, Hush now, get the sleeping bags, you’re letting the cold in.

He headed to the tent feeling unsettled. The night had been amazing — hadn’t it? To think Gip had been centrestage alongside his idol for the whole miraculous thing, a dream fulfilled, before thousands of witnesses. Though why did the boy now seem so numb? The night struck Kellogg as a jewel — sparkling, perfect, yet flawed when tilted to the light. Worse: with some ghastly embryo fossilized inside.

Outside the tent Kellogg shivered, bedding heaped in his arms. Across the site, inside Harry, was his family, they couldn’t see anything beyond the lit-up interior of the minivan. He watched Pearl blow her nose, excavate her nostrils, inspect what she found, and ball the tissue in her fist. The campground was quiet, everyone was going to sleep. The air felt wintry and thin.

And now, the next morning, winter had arrived. Kellogg turned the keys in the ignition, the engine growled and the fans came on with a blast of cold air. And yet still no one woke: cocooned within sleeping bags Elsie-Anne and Gip slept soundly, Pearl leaned against the frosted window, a little ellipsis of clear glass where her breath melted the ice.

Kellogg had to pee. He slid out of the minivan quietly, eased the door shut. A half-inch of snow covered the ground. In the fog floated dark forms that might have been trees, he aimed in their general direction, shivering, and as he zipped back up from the neighbouring site an engine came coughing to life. The red squares of taillights appeared. Holy, said a voice, can’t see anything out here.

Another voice responded — quieter, murmuring, followed by the pneumatic wheeze of an opening car trunk. Kellogg moved toward the lights and voices, the squeak and crunch of snow and gravel under his feet. The trunk closed with a whump.

At the neighbouring campsite forms materialized from the mist: a young man, a green hatchback, a camping stove, blue flames wobbled around a tin pot. The car idled and chugged exhaust, the door hung open, and in the passenger seat a young woman flipped through a mess of static on the radio.

Morning, said Kellogg. Some fog.

The man — more of a boy, a fist-shaped medallion dangled from his neck — nodded down at the burner. I’m trying to make coffee.

Not going so hot? Heh.

Kellogg’s joke went unheralded. The girl joined them. The radio’s like, dead, she said.

The boy pulled the lid of the pot, revealing water as flat as glass.

My family’s sleeping a few spots over, said Kellogg. We were camping, but —

Weird, said the girl. Look at the snow! Yesterday was so nice, then, bang, winter, just like that. You ever seen snow
and
fog at the same time? And this shet with the bridge —

What’s the um, shet with the bridge? said Kellogg.

They’re still blocking off the
PPT
and Topside, said the boy. I went for a walk up there this morning and a Helper-guy told me — the bridge is just
gone.

What, still?

Yeah. I mean, it can’t be
gone
, said the girl. How are we supposed
to get out? We had camping plans this weekend, we aren’t even supposed to be here.

Our stupid dorm’s being fumigated, so.

And now there’s no way off the island.

Could be worse places to be though? said Kellogg.

You’re not from here?

My wife is. Originally. We’re here on vacation. That was my son onstage last night!

We didn’t watch the show, said the boy with pride.

And the magician? Maybe when he turns back up he’ll fix —

The girl said, Do you know how much money they spent to bring that guy here?

No, said Kellogg. How much?

She looked blankly at her boyfriend, who offered nothing. Lots, she said. Money they could have used for more important things.

Such as?

Housing programs.

For?

People.

Gotcha, said Kellogg.

This water, said the boy, it’s just not boiling.

What I’m saying is, said Kellogg, maybe the trick’s not over.

I mean, they’ve got to do something, said the girl. She looked forcefully and with disappointment at Kellogg, implicating him in this
they
.

They will, he said.

From the fog a voice called, Kell?

He excused himself, discovered Pearl on her knees in Harry’s backseat rooting through a mess of wrappers and juiceboxes and snot-wadded facial tissues. The kids were awake, blanketed to their chins and shivering.

Pearl stepped out, took Kellogg by the elbow. I can’t find them, she whispered.

Can’t find what?

His meds, she said. I can’t find Gip’s meds.

THE FOG FIT
snug as a lid over the island, dying at its edges in raggedy wisps. As the view from Podesta Tower rotated east the Mayor, torso still estranged from the lower half of her body, was faced with People Park: the common was a bowl of milk overflowing into the city. Fog scudded along the streets and up the sides of buildings, thick all the way to the water in every direction.

The deck rotated: Fort Stone, Li’l Browntown, Bebrog, Greenwood Gardens, the Institute’s campus knuckled into the island’s southeastern corner — all of it hidden under a melancholy lather. To the south, Perint’s Cove was also lost in fog, the Islet didn’t exist.

To the west the fog spilled through downtown, connected in ropy sinews to the low-slung clouds concealing the office towers’ tops, lapped up Mount Mustela right to the Necropolis, in
LOT
ignored and bounded over and through the gates of the Mews, engulfed Knock Street, threaded into
UOT
and Blackacres, the tenements swathed, the power still out, in the northwest corner of the island Whitehall was invisible too. And on the westside, as with the east, the fog stopped at the water. As if, thought the Mayor, a wall had gone up around the island.

Now she looked north: where Guardian Bridge had been was only absence. Across the Narrows, the mainland, was fogless and clear, not a wisp reached its shores.
NFLM
patrols clustered at either end of Topside Drive and at the opening of the People Park Throughline, into which snaked a trail of cars. That morning a queue had begun forming of commuters waiting for the bridge to reopen — or reappear.

Though this she couldn’t see, and only knew from the memo Griggs had faxed over at dawn. The gist: At four a.m. some hysteric had broken through the barricade screaming, Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors! and tried to sprint out over the Narrows. There’d been no cartoonish moment of the guy suspended in space, he’d just plummeted straight into the river. The current had been particularly swift and
Luckily
, reported the
NFLM
,
there were no witnesses
, and the story had been swept away with him.

Phone, said the Mayor, and Diamond-Wood passed her the handset, retreated, the cord connected them umbilically. The Mayor coiled it around her finger, let it sproing back and dangle slackly, listened to the steady bleat of the dialtone. She liked when expecting a call to ambush the person phoning, to pick up before it rang and disorient them, to always have the upperhand.

People who weren’t quick and sharp infuriated her, inefficiency was the bane of any city. This was the reason she’d whittled her council in half her first term, why she’d cut the city districts to four, and now met only quarterly with representatives from each quadrant. The Mayor was methodical, which wasn’t the same as slow: methodical meant developing a methodology and then operating, swiftly. If life were a minefield, the Mayor reasoned, you informed yourself and blazed into it, never tiptoeing along in meek, weak terror. If your leg got blown off you hopped. And now with a shudder the Mayor thought of her own legs: if you lost both, apparently, you found someone else to push.

Connect me to the Temple, she said.

Diamond-Wood dialled, the handset purred, the Mayor imagined the
NFLM
line jangling unheeded on some desk, the men asleep in bunkbeds — kids playing firemen but with hairier feet.

The view swung around to People Park. On its north side, the Thunder Wheel looked like a rusty sawblade lodged halfway into a robustly frosted cake. Beneath it, damp with fog, the rides would be shrouded in tarpaulin. Island Amusements was scheduled to open that evening, yet how could it possibly in this?