Swarm (5 page)

I didn't know history. My father was the scholar in our family, but my mother always waved away his commentary, accusing him of ranting. Probably I could have learned something, if I'd listened instead of seeing only his dark side.

“The Renaissance.”

Quickly he twisted and grabbed a bottle out of his bag and before I knew what was happening he pulled back and whipped it against the travel agency window. The bottle smashed, the glass cracked across the name: Phantasy Travel. In the sudden silence, we stared at each other.

“Marvin,” I said, the first time I'd ever spoken his name, and then the men cheered, and he grabbed my hand and we ran.

South,
near the edge of the lake, Marvin led me into an empty lot.

“Hold on,” I said, panting. I leaned over, hands on my knees, trying to draw enough air into my burning lungs. When I stood, his back was to me, his head swivelling right and left like he was on patrol. I turned to look at the road behind us, all the streetlights off or broken open, and thought about walking away, but I knew that it would be a long, scary journey back to my place. I likely wouldn't make it without being hassled or mugged or worse. There was no transportation. The subway and streetcars had already stopped for the night and the only cabs left doing business would be trawling through the wealthier neighbourhoods up north. “Shit,” I murmured. I felt stupid, trapped, like I'd been tricked. I wondered why he'd invited me along.

“You ready?” Marvin said from behind me, and I turned around to face him.

“What the hell was that?”

“Humanity is renewed through violence.”

I gestured back, to the building a couple blocks away, to the moment that had passed. “How is that renewing anything?”

“It evens out the playing field. You don't think it's violent: some motherfucker using up the last of our resources so he can go to Maui for a week?”

“So it's revenge?”

“You've never wanted to do something like that?”

“No!” I shouted, but I remembered my mother picking up the shards of Grandma's cup, saving a piece with half a red rose's bloom. My own rage.

“Come on, Sandy,” he said and stepped toward me. The way he held himself, shoulders squared, chin lifted, made my anger waver. Maybe it wasn't such a big deal. His green eyes gazed at me, and when he turned, I simply followed, moving carefully because the ground was frozen in bumps and ruts and I didn't want to twist an ankle. Marvin stopped at a chain-link fence with barbed wire spiralled on top. He pulled out a penlight and illuminated a large sign.
ECOGRID
, it read.
NO TRESPASSING
. Orange graffiti was scrawled over top:
ILLEGAL SEIZURE
. I smelled smoke and saw it rising, a fat grey plume, imprinted against the night, on the other side of the fence. Voices shouted; there was the regular beat of a hammer. More and more, I worried about where we were going, what his intentions were, but I see now, Melissa, that the life I had before that night, before I was laid off, the easy one, the one that seemed safe, was actually a more strange reality.

Farther
along we came across two men, one sitting on an overturned kitchen sink and another wearing a parka with a gash in its dirt-smeared sleeve. The chain-link rattled when he pushed away from the fence. Tiny feathers drifted out of a tear in his puffy coat. Marvin handed out cigarettes, and they both lit them on a fire burning in a rusty barrel. I crossed my arms, wanting to step closer to the heat, but uneasy. One of the men kicked his foot against the barrel and I heard the shattering sound of charred wood shifting. Marvin held his hands above the dull orange glow.

“Cops come by?”

The man who'd been sitting on the sink pointed the ember of his cigarette toward the road. “Drive by, no stopping.”

Marvin nodded.

“You get something to eat? Soup's on,” the other man told him.

“Good,” said Marvin. I was standing so close to him that his body was sheltering me, and when he stepped back, I felt the cold wind off the lake. The feathers from the parka glowed bright white on the earth. Marvin nudged me in the back, pushing me toward the men. I held my ground. I didn't know what he wanted, but then the two of them stepped aside and revealed a gap in the chain-link. There was nowhere to go but forward. Hunched down, knees lifted, I slipped through the hole.

They
called it the dark zone. I'd read some articles and heard people talk about how the city had claimed the area for a solar farm and relocated the residents. EcoGrid had been granted the contract, but then a protestor lost her eye from a rubber bullet and the company went bankrupt. I didn't know the whole story, just enough to know I shouldn't be there.

We walked past brick row houses with their doors smashed in. Spindles and bits of gingerbread trim hung like loose teeth. By now everyone knows about how quickly things can fall apart, but that was my first real glimpse of the unravelling. I waited for Marvin to lead me into one of the houses, but we kept walking, turning left and then right onto a wide street lined with empty storefronts. I heard a noise and looked behind us. The road was marked with hollow doorways, like burrows where any kind of creature could hide. They were back there, watching us. Squatters and homeless people: a population that made its own rules. Marvin didn't seem to mind. He walked with confidence and I stayed close to him. We passed a green-and-white awning torn in half, one side collapsed against the storefront. Two wooden chairs lay in the middle of the street, blackened by fire. The upper torso of a mannequin leaned out of a shattered window, naked, one arm reaching out as if to flag down a passerby for help.

“This is Alice,” said Marvin, brushing its fake fingers with his own. I said nothing. The place was an image of apocalypse and I didn't feel like joking. I wanted to ask him if this was what he'd meant before he broke the window at the travel agency, about how things were caving in and there was no way back, but before I could speak he pointed to a glowing window half covered with plywood.

“Brass Tacks Bar and Grill,” he announced. A lineup snaked to the doorway. A woman sorted through a boy's blond locks, examining his scalp with a penlight, looking for lice. The men ignored me or stared with indifference. We moved through to the front door and I smelled a strange mixture of sweat and beef. My empty stomach rumbled. A fat man stood at the door, his pale face bracketed in greasy black locks of hair. He lifted two fingers in a salute to Marvin and pulled the door open for us.

Bells jingled as we walked in, but no one looked our way. It was too loud, with everyone talking at once and dishes clanging and the occasional outburst of rattling laughter from deep in the back. Like an animal call, I thought. Those people were close to the earth, as close as we are now, with their faces and hands dirty with soot from homemade fires. Hair matted or twisted into dreadlocks, worn-out clothing stained or too large. I didn't know her name yet, but Phoenix stood out right away, in position behind the counter, wearing a puffy down jacket, unzipped, her head wrapped in a red scarf printed with black skulls and cobwebs. Black stubble showed at the scarf's edge. She ladled soup into a dull grey aluminum bowl held by a man with dirt pressed into the creases around his eyes.

“One,” she said sharply. He pulled his hand out of a large plastic bowl, his fingers clutching several round pieces of bread.

“Fuck you,” he said and pocketed it all.

She leaned forward. Pressing the ladle against his arm, she snarled at him: “Do you ever want to come back?” Her black eyes hard as she held his gaze. I flinched, afraid of what his reaction would be, of how the tension would break, but the man gave in, his hand returning to the bread bowl to drop the small pieces of hard crust.
Who would fight for that?
I wondered, but I know now, anybody would who was hungry enough. In winter I remember that hard bread and drool.

When I shifted my eyes, I found Phoenix looking at me and something moved between us. Like seals passing underwater, aware of each other's forms.

“This way,” Marvin said, and my gaze broke away from hers as he pulled me farther into the restaurant.

Thomson was at the back, although he was still a stranger to me then. His hair was grey, pushed back off his bald spot, and his hands looked old. He sat in a booth, cutting slices of bread off a long French roll. Mouldy scraps made a pile where the salt and pepper and chrome napkin holder once would have stood. As we approached, he looked up at Marvin and said, “Where've you been?”

Marvin tossed his backpack onto the seat. “Calm down.”

“Don't talk to me like that. I'm not an old fool.”

“I know.”

“These times call for smart people, but they don't seem to exist anymore. They've all lost their brains. It's like the Roman fucking Empire.” He looked up at me, his eyes angled as if he was peering over invisible glasses. “Are you smarter than him?”

I thought of the wild swing of Marvin's arm, the window shattering. “I just met him,” I said, as if that were an answer.

Marvin waved his hand at me. “Sandy, meet Thomson.”

But Thomson went back to cutting bread. He was using a hacksaw. The hard crust shattered as he dug the serrated blade in to start a new slice. Marvin slid into the booth and opened his backpack. He pulled out a fat envelope and laid it on the table. The saw stopped. Thomson sat there, staring at the bricklike bulk, an address scratched out in pencil.

Marvin jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, toward the front of the restaurant, and said, “Why don't you see if you can help.” It wasn't a question. I did as he said. Turned and walked away from them, back into the crowd of dirty bodies, demanding in their hunger, their need for food.

Phoenix
didn't speak to me when I joined her at the counter. Another woman faced the back wall, cutting carrots on the counter­top. Phoenix continued ladling soup as the line moved, as the mugs were held out to her. “Marvin told me to help,” I said, glancing around to see what I could do. There was a tea towel tossed over a cutting board and I picked it up, twisted it in my hands.

“Marvin did?”

“Yeah.”

A woman on the other side of the counter pulled back her steaming mug. “Thanks, Phoenix,” she said as she shuffled closer to me. A single tooth stuck out crookedly under her top lip and I suppressed a shudder. She was wearing a sweater that gaped open, revealing a tattoo of a purple dragonfly, criss-crossed with wrinkles that ran into her cleavage. “Bread,” Phoenix said loudly, jolting me out of my thoughts. She pointed at the bowl on the counter, pulled out of reach after the man had tried to take more than his share. I handed the woman a slice, noticing delicate seams of dirt under her fingernails. It was shameful how I judged her, not realizing how hard it can be to get clean, how much effort it takes to get water, warm it, undress in the cold. When she thanked me, I nodded at her, and she was replaced by a teenager with brown frizzy hair, a vacant look in his eyes. He sucked on his spoon.

We worked like that for a while and I saw all kinds of people—some as dirty as that woman, with greasy hair and weltlike scars on their skin, others dressed well, with teeth that were still white. But they were all needy, and even though I heard the noisy protests of my own stomach and kept wondering if I could ever end up like that, if my mother already had, I remember feeling like I was somehow better than them. My voice came out high-pitched and patronizing, as if I was talking to children. I moved through that night strangely, thinking I knew where my feet were landing although in retrospect I really didn't know at all.

“You work hard,” Phoenix said when we were finished. It had been more than an hour, one person after another until we'd nearly run out of soup. The other volunteers—a woman and the fat man who let people in, Zane—carried bowls of soup over to a booth as Phoenix turned the deadbolt on the front door.

“I guess so,” I said, shy from the praise. I finished wiping off the counter, brushing crumbs into the palm of my hand. As I threw them into a bin, I looked over and caught Marvin watching me from where he was sitting with Thomson, his lips leaking smoke. I prickled, anticipating the rest of the evening, where we might end up, if he lived there, if we'd go to his room.

“No guessing. You do.” Behind her the door rattled and she pulled aside the blind. “Closed,” she shouted. Something hard slammed against the door frame, the flat of a hand or a fist, and she jumped back. From her seat in a booth, the other woman twisted to look. Marvin stood up, stared the length of the diner. Phoenix walked back as if nothing had happened. “Desperation,” she said. “That's all.”

“And you think you can keep feeding that?” Marvin asked.

“Somebody has to,” Phoenix snapped as she moved behind the counter. She poured a bit of water into the soup pot, stirred it, and let it warm. When it frothed, nearly boiled, she ladled out four mugs, setting each one down in front of me, on the counter between us. “Are you Marvin's new recruit?”

I didn't know what she meant. I was about to disagree, to tell her I hardly knew him, when he appeared behind me.

“It's time to go.”

“Speak of the devil,” said Phoenix. “The rebel without a cause.”

“I have a cause,” said Marvin, and his hand slid onto the small of my back, surprising me. His fingers pressed against my vertebrae, following them downward, and I sucked in my breath. When I glanced back, I saw he was still staring at Phoenix.

Phoenix unplugged the hot plate from its battery pack. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law?” I recognized the quote scrawled in black marker on his backpack.

“You remember,” Marvin said.

“That works if people aren't motivated by their lowest desires.”

“You don't have much faith in people.”