Swarm (2 page)

My name is
Cassandra Burch-Bailey. I'm thirty-seven years old. The winter I met Marvin, I had just turned twenty-one, not much more than a child. That isn't an excuse for what we did, but it is part of the reason why I went along with it.

For Marvin, those long-ago events are lodged in the past like a memory you sometimes think is a dream, but I know that they are real. For years I've been carrying the weight, with no one to talk to, no way to set it down and let the earth absorb the shock.

We did things, Melissa. Things that I can't bury.

Melissa
means honeybee, Thomson has told me, reciting the story of the nymph who cared for Zeus. If he could have chosen my name, if I had been his daughter, that's what he would have called me. Melissa and Phoenix. Sisters. So that's what I'm calling you.

The
morning I was laid off, the lights were flickering on the twenty-seventh floor. In the downtown offices of Parthenon Developers, nobody knew whether we'd have a blackout or not. An old song seeped through the ceiling speakers, dripping like water from a fractured pipe, and my co-worker Nadja sang along—
I want to be a billionaire, so freakin' bad
 . . . She stopped when the company president began talking, telling us about the bankruptcy, about the end of all our jobs. A panicked rustle went through the crowd. There must have been fifty of us, and I swear I could smell fear, the sour odour of sweat as strong as it would have been on the over-packed, sticky subway in the middle of July. A man shouted from the back and Sissy shushed him, told him to listen. The president, whose name I can't recall—something like Jennifer or Jessica but different—crossed her arms and continued speaking, flanked on either side by security guards. She gave a deadpan speech about new opportunities, silver linings. It was late in the afternoon, a week into February, and a light snow tumbled into the cavern between the buildings. I remember looking out, south to the shimmering plate of the silver lake, not yet realizing I would never again see from such a height.

I
know this is an old story. For my whole life I'd been hearing it: people talking about the coming crisis, the present crisis, the inevitable collapse. Some lucky people still had money, shopped at expensive clothing stores like the one where my roommate, Margo, worked or bought coffee at boutique food shops. But most people, people like us, lived hand to mouth, squabbling for the last boxes of tea on the shelves, cheap trays of animal organs, counting out our change at the till. There were rotating blackouts at least once a week, mob robberies, gas prices through the roof. Families couldn't afford to bury their dead so the morgues and funeral homes filled up with bodies. On the Internet I'd seen mountain lions lounging beside an algae-filled pool in an abandoned suburb down south. The loss of my parents' farm wasn't even unusual; it had happened to millions of people. I was used to that world and navigating through it, but I had still been raised to think that something special was in store for me. In the city, I thought my life was starting, that things were getting better, and I think that day was the first time I really realized that a happy ending wasn't guaranteed for me. My job might not have been the most lucrative, but it gave me enough money to buy cans of beans, bacon wrapped in butcher's paper, even the odd vodka martini out in a bar. It meant my own room in the small, second-floor apartment I had shared with Margo for nearly ten months. Without it, I would be one of them: the ranks my parents had already joined, lining up at the food bank for softening cellared apples and lone sleeves of saltine crackers.

After
I lost my job, I thrashed. I didn't know what to do with myself. I slept in and didn't take showers and avoided the ping of Margo's computer when the power was on. I knew it was my mother, wanting to chat. My father had stayed in bed for days when we first lost the farm, my mother bringing him meals, the broth slopping over the side of the bowl, bleeding orange into the edge of the paper napkin. His face was pale from the drawn curtains, stubble on his cheeks like ash. I was afraid of being like him, of sinking, so I pushed myself to hit the pavement. Quickly I discovered that any store with a
HELP WANTED
sign already had fifty applicants. It was pretty much hopeless. I skim-read the forms, filled in what information I could, left only a few squares blank. In the evenings, Margo watched me. I felt her eyes on me as we sat in the living room, the windows wide open, wrapped in striped and patterned afghan blankets her aunt incessantly knit.

“What?” I'd ask her, but usually she'd change her mind about whatever she was going to say. It was a relief when she didn't speak because she was paying for everything—our food, the hydro bill—and I didn't want to field questions about what my plans were. Even the rent, due in a few weeks, would come entirely from her. She'd never lose her job. Her father had fought in the army with the man whose family owned the store where she worked. An upscale boutique. Limited clientele. Layoffs moved through, but Margo was always left standing, even though she occasionally stumbled into work acting weird after having been out all night. Once, when she got in around dawn, I found her clothes in the bathtub, soaking in soot-black water. When I asked her about it, all she said was, “I fell in the mud.” Scratches over her knuckles, criss-crossed like a kind of script. Looking back I wonder why I didn't see it sooner, but those are the sorts of things you don't want to know, the hints you turn away from, hoping there's a harmless explanation.

It was Margo who took me to the bar.

Margo who introduced me to Marvin.

Margo who started it all.

That night, the fifth of my unemployment, when I was beginning to wonder if I could brave my parents and actually move back home, she took me to the Empire Tavern. It was housed in a shabby Victorian: huge, with rot like the shapes of continents spreading under the windows. War vets lived in the rooms on the second storey, Margo told me, before we went inside. The place smelled of damp ash and chemical aftershave, and I followed Margo as she marched forward with her arms at her sides and her chin tipped up. When we rounded the second corner of the square bar, I saw him. Sitting at a small round table, a backpack by his boots like a dog. The last spindle of a hand-rolled cigarette set in a glass ashtray, unwinding its smoke. A map was spread out in his hands like a quilt. When he looked up, his eyes were full of fragments of jade from the Christmas lights strung on the fake wood panelling.

Something moved in me right then, Melissa. Like a deadbolt worried in the dark, it fell into place with a clunk. I don't know why or if it was right or if, in hindsight, it wasn't just because of Marvin's good looks and the way he shook his black hair out of his face because when we got to the table, I realized pretty fast I wasn't welcome.

“You brought a guest,” he said to Margo, frown lines dug into his cheeks like bits of flint. She slid into a wooden chair, the legs rocking against the floor tile's broken grout.

“I knew you wouldn't mind.” She glanced around. “Where's Walter?”

Without answering, Marvin roughly folded his map and I heard the sharp tear of a seam giving way.

“Sit,” Margo told me, but I stayed where I was. The men at a nearby table looked over, one wearing a parka with its hood half torn off, the other hunched forward, tugging a blue hoodie tight to his chest. He winked at me and I pulled my jacket zipper close to my throat. When I turned to go to the bar, I could tell Marvin was watching me. My ass in the tight jeans with glittering pockets that Margo had bought me back before my body was so scrawny. I strained to listen to them talking—their words a messy collage of hissing whispers—as I ordered us a pitcher of beer that Margo would pay for.

When I got back, Marvin was friendlier, or at least accepting of my presence. He finished rolling a cigarette, licking the edge of the paper to seal it shut. He offered it to me, but I shook my head. There was a weird silence between us, as if none of us knew what to say, and I tried to break it by asking Marvin what he did, if he'd grown up in the city, but he didn't seem to want to talk. The woman behind the bar turned on the television and a rumble started up, the picture sliding in and out of static. A litany of bad news—China banging war drums, forest fires out west, the crude bomb detonated a few months earlier at a gas station by a group called Jump Ship, the investigation ongoing. They hit randomly, that group. I remembered their first couple strikes, half a decade earlier, at a debit machine and a car dealership. How excited my father got when we watched the news coverage together, as if they were helping him take revenge. But then they seemed to go silent. Until a couple years ago, when they started up again—hitting the lobby of an oil company and then the gas station.

We all watched. No sound in the bar but the rattle of the
TV
until a voice—raspy, nearly a growl—sounded behind my back. “Nobody hurt,” it said. “That's all they fucking care about.” I turned and saw a man with the beginnings of a bald spot, hard blue eyes in a wide, pale face. His lips were chapped, a spot of blood on the bottom one. He reached his right hand out to greet me, the skin on his arm mottled pink and red, shiny and scarred.

“Walter,” Margo said, and his palm was bone dry against mine. When he sat down, I watched as he reached for Marvin's tobacco pouch with his other hand, a metal claw that caught the colourful lights. Margo pulled out her own cigarettes, store-bought, and slid them over to him. I tried not to stare as he pulled one out, popped it between his lips, and snapped a match. The tip ignited, crumpled into orange. When his eyes met mine, I quickly looked away, settling on the nearly empty pitcher of beer. He smiled, his two front teeth speckled with bright white spots.

“More?” Marvin asked, standing, his body beside my face. That was before he wasted away, went skeletal, when he was lean and tall and good-looking and knew it. Blushing, I turned to Margo and her lips stretched into a narrow, mischievous smile. Something brewed in her—I could sense the simmer before full boil. “Why not?” she said. Margo's way was to plunge ahead, leap into frothy water; mine was to look for rocks.

“I don't know,” I said.

“Come on. It's on me.” She turned to Walter. “This girl got laid off.”

“Shots,” he bellowed, so loud I jumped in my seat.

“Got it,” Marvin said and walked over to the bar.

“Margo,” I said and turned to call out to Marvin to just get me some water. I hated spending her money. But she laid her hand on my arm, misunderstanding. “You're going to be fine. Everything happens for a reason.”

Marvin carried back a clutch of treacly brown shots. He sat them down, and tiny rivulets ran down the sides, making the glasses sticky. We each reached for one, held them chest level, ready to drink, until Marvin said, “What will you do now?”

I shifted in my seat. “Find more work,” I said and set the shot down, sucked the liquid off my finger. Sweet and sharp.

“A lot of people are in the same boat. What's unemployment at now?” The question hung there. It was weird because we were all waiting to drink. I looked at Walter, then Margo, but neither of them answered, both waiting for Marvin to finish. Walter pushed the moment forward, lifted his shot glass into the silence, and said, “Viva.”

Margo and Walter drank. Marvin was still watching me, the tiny glass of alcohol ignored. He leaned forward, bent his head almost horizontal with the table. “It couldn't have been a surprise.”

It's stupid, but I hadn't been expecting it. I thought the company might tremble around me but ultimately remain standing, my job intact. The early tremors had been there: phone calls from banks, meetings cancelled, our hours reduced. I'd told all that to my mother and she'd convinced me to give up my cellphone to save money. “Not at all,” I told Marvin and threw the liquid into my mouth.

After that, we ordered more beer, and Marvin kept offering me cigarettes. Finally I took one and felt the brush of his fingers against mine. When he scratched a match to light it, the flame leapt between our faces and I felt a shiver of expectation move through me. But Walter wanted attention. With his claw he held out a tiny mechanical beetle, a delicate thing with legs of soldered steel and a carapace of hammered tin clipped from a soda can. Wires connected to a battery made up its innards. When he hit its “on” switch, it climbed over Marvin's tobacco pouch, Margo's wallet, even tried to mount my extended finger.

“Walter built that,” Margo said, her voice firm with pride. He didn't look up. I felt sorry for him, for his disfigurement. But what did I know? A few weeks later, I would be several hours north in a stolen car fuelled by gasoline bought by Marvin, looking back through a blur of tears, Walter dead, my heart irreparably broken.

It
wasn't very late when Margo and Walter stood up from the table. The lights were dim in the bar by then so I didn't see the look on Walter's face when his chair fell over and crashed against the hard floor. He grabbed at Margo, shoving his intact hand through the loop that her elbow made. Margo had her fingers over her mouth, suppressing a laugh, and she stumbled against him as he pulled on her. I thought they were going to dance, but Walter breathed some words in Margo's ear and pulled her toward a flight of stairs on one side of the room. They were together, I realized, and felt stupid that I hadn't seen it before. It didn't surprise me. Margo marched to a different drummer, as my mother used to say. She glanced over her shoulder at me and wiggled her fingers in the air to say goodbye and I knew I'd have to find my own way home.

Marvin
split the foamy dregs of the beer between our glasses. We finished it quietly, beginning to build the silence that still lives between us. I was a bit drunk, my tongue thick in my mouth, so I didn't speak, afraid of how my words would slur. When his glass was empty, he packed his rolling papers and matches into a battered silver tin and slid that and his tobacco pouch into the top of his canvas backpack. He stood, so I did too.