The Chaos (13 page)

The first diner we got to was closed. The second one was open, but Punum said, “Not this one.”

“How come?”

She pointed. You had to walk up three steps to get inside it.

“But can’t you use your crutches?”

“Yeah. But my friend Jeremy couldn’t, and my ex Sharmini
couldn’t. I just don’t go into places like this anymore if I don’t have to. Won’t give them my money.”

“Don’t you think that’s kinda harsh?”

“No, I don’t. Let’s go.”

There was a Tim Hortons doughnut shop a little farther on that looked open. There were a ton of customers inside. And it had a ramp. But the door was locked. We had to bang on the glass door a few times before one of the employees came out from behind the counter and opened it a crack. “You guys real?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I’m not bigfoot, and neither is she.”

“You’re not going to turn into a pile of jelly beans on me? Last guy did that. Well, his clothes did, anyway. And his little dog. And the jelly beans had teeth.” She looked us up and down. “Hell, who can tell? You look okay. Come on in.”

It was weird in there. People were quiet, all huddled over their coffees and doughnuts, staring up at the televisions mounted near the ceiling. A few people were crying. Punum and I tried to get sandwiches, but they only had doughnuts left. “Didn’t get our morning delivery,” explained the woman at the counter.

Punum got a cinnamon bun and a coffee. She bought me a grape pop and a couple of those vanilla glazed doughnuts with the little multicolored sprinkles on them. I put it all on a tray for us. I grabbed us a table, but Punum couldn’t pull her chair up to it; all the tables in there were the kind with the seats bolted down to the floor. Punum sighed, levered herself up out of her chair, and slid into one of the seats. I put our tray on the table and hung my jacket on the back of one of the seats.

“Gotta pee,” I told Punum. “I’ll be right back.” Not looking at me, she nodded. She had her cell phone out and was punching in numbers.

I found the women’s washroom and looked in the scratched
mirror there. Yup, I had a new blemish on my left ear. A tiny one, thank heaven. I could tell people it was a mole.

I went into the stall. I perched on the seat, took my boot and sock off, looked at my leg, and started to cry. The blemish covered my foot and ankle and went all the way up to just below my knee. It was like someone had dipped my right leg in some kind of dull, lumpy black rubber. And worse yet; as I watched, a small spot popped up out of the skin on my knee, about the size of a pinhead. Slowly, the skin all around it began to blacken and bubble. It didn’t hurt. It was the slightest tingle. If I hadn’t been looking right at it as it happened, I wouldn’t have known I’d grown another spot. “Out, spot,” I whispered, trying to make a joke of it. That only made me cry all the harder. Pretty soon, this stuff was going to be covering my whole body. My shoes wouldn’t fit, or most of my clothes. And now there was no way I could take part in Wednesday night’s battle; not looking like this! Which meant I wouldn’t have the money to give to Rich after all, and I’d be stuck living with my folks. Assuming Rich made it home alive sometime soon. Assuming my parents did. Assuming the world wasn’t coming to an end.

I got my ointment out of my purse. The nasty smell of it was the least of my problems right now. I rubbed ointment all over my foot and the lower part of my leg. It started to sting right away. I used up all the cream that was in the jar.

Someone knocked on the door. “Just a second!” I yelled. I sniffed the tears back as best as I could, jammed my sock and boot back on, stuffed the empty jar back into my purse. I left the stall so the next person could use it. She was wearing a scarf, but I caught a glimpse of vines peeking out from under it. I tried washing my hands, but the stuff coming out of the faucet looked weird. It was fizzy. I leaned in close and took a sniff of it. Then
I put a fingertip in and tasted it. Diet Sprite, not water. That was going to get old quickly.

When I got back to our table, Punum was talking on the phone, half in Tamil, half in English. In between the words I couldn’t understand, I caught, “No, Mom,” and “Why did you do that?” and “It’s okay.” Then she said, “I gotta go now, Mom. What? No. With a friend. No, not another girlfriend. I’ll come by later, okay? Okay.” She closed the phone. “Finally got through to my folks. They’ve been on the phone to Sri Lanka since last night, checking in on relatives and friends.”

“Are they in Toronto?”

“My folks? Yeah. Some stuff fell off the wall in their apartment and broke when the ground started shaking, but they had too many ceramic figurines of English shepherdesses, anyway.”

“Your folks know you date girls?”

“Yup. That’s why I don’t live there anymore. My dad kicked me out.”

Confused, I said, “But you’re going to visit them later?”

“They’re still my folks! Besides, my mom would kill my dad if he tried to stop me from visiting her.”

Her voice sounded funny; kind of far away. I looked closely at her. Her face was gray. “Someone’s bombing Sri Lanka and India. Direct hits to Colombo and Delhi,” she said.

I nearly choked on my doughnut. “How bad?”

“Bad. No one can reach my uncle and his family. They live in Colombo.”

“Oh, God, Punum. I’m so sorry.”

We watched the news. The chaos was all over the world; a combination of things that couldn’t exist and things that shouldn’t have happened. Sri Lanka had experienced heavy casualties. The country was accusing Pakistan of an act of war. Sri Lanka would have been retaliating, except that all their
soldiers’ uniforms seemed to have turned into flocks of green geese that roared like lions instead of honking. The geese appeared to be made of garbage bags. Meanwhile, Pakistan was asking for emergency aid; something was the matter with their food supply, but they weren’t saying what. They had no electricity at all, and even backup generators weren’t working reliably. A lot of people on life support in hospitals had died when the power had suddenly gone out.

“The same thing happened here!” wailed a man standing in front of one of the televisions. He turned to the people nearest him. “My brother died in the hospital this morning. He died!” He started sobbing; that racking, awful sobbing that comes from people who don’t let themselves cry often. It got me crying, too. An old lady took a tissue out of her purse and handed it to him.

Punum and I had one of those uncomfortable silences you get when two people don’t know each other well. Then she said, “Power’s gone out in the subway. News announcer just said a bunch of trains are stuck in between stations. There are people trapped in the trains! In the dark!”

An older man sitting near us said, “They’ll get them out of there, sonny. Don’t you worry.”

I guess he was talking to Punum. He smiled reassuringly. Punum just nodded. “Anyway,” she said to me, “unless you can afford a cab, you aren’t going home to North Yuck in a hurry.”

“I don’t live all the way up there, all right? Besides, me and my bro are moving into an apartment downtown on the first of the month.” I took another bite of my doughnut. “Hey; if the trains stay closed all day, I won’t have to go into work this evening!” It’d be nice to have one Saturday where I didn’t spend Saturday evening wearing a paper hat and scooping fries into paper cones.

“But then people would be stuck in the trains for hours,” Punum replied.

“Yeah. I didn’t think of that.” I took a sip of my pop. The shop that sold my skin ointment was open on Saturdays. But it was too far to walk, and I sure didn’t have money for a cab. I sent Ben a text. I was so relieved when he texted back almost right away. Stephen had sprained his ankle. Ben was okay. I asked, HEARD FR GLORIA?

YEAH BUT SHE GOT CUT OFF.

Oh, man. This was all making me sick with worry. WHERE R YOU?

COLL & YONGE.

College and Yonge. I texted him the cross streets where the Tim Hortons was. COME OVER IF U WANT. I hoped he would. It’d be nice to see at least one of the people I cared about, to see that he was okay with my very own eyes.

“He call you yet?” Punum asked. “Your brother?”

“No. And if he doesn’t report to his parole officer by ten a.m., they’re gonna put him in jail again. What’d they make this doughnut from, sand?” It tasted awful.

“Hey,” said Punum, “what about that other guy who was at your table? Heard from him?”

I sat upright. “Oh, crap. Tafari! How could I forget about Tafari?” I’d thought about everyone else before him, even my parents.

I called him. I was using up a lot of my minutes today. “He’s my ex,” I told Punum. Then I realized that now she was thinking I’d told her that so she would know I was single. Sure enough, she grinned her butter-melting grin at me. I pretended I hadn’t seen. Tafari didn’t answer his phone. I got the mechanical voice that said, “
The customer you are calling is out of range
.” Yikes. Was he trapped in the subway with those other people?

Punum was working her phone hard, checking in on friends, friends checking in on her by text and by voice. At one point I
heard her say, “Yeah. Snapped in half, right in the middle of the neck. Something fell on it, someone stepped on it, I guess. I dunno, man. No, I can’t afford to fix it!”

She talked a little longer, then got off the phone. She looked pretty glum. I asked her, “Why didn’t you tell me your guitar was broken?”

She shrugged. “You have your own problems.”

“Can I see it?”

She shrugged again, but there were tears in her golden-lashed eyes. She picked her guitar case up off the floor, and put it on the table. She unzipped it.

The body of the guitar was fine. The rest looked like an accident in a tackle box; wires in a tangle, splintered wood. “Holy,” I said.

She quickly closed the guitar bag back up. Her lips were pressed close together. “There goes my singing career for a while.”

“Can’t you just get it fixed?”

She shook her head, with that look someone gives you when they think you’re too dumb to live. “Kids,” she said. “I work three days a week, for minimum wage. Best job I could get. Took me six years just to save up for that axe.” She put it back beneath the table. I didn’t know what to tell her.

On the television, a news announcer was saying that in London, Big Ben was now blowing giant soap bubbles and chanting dirty seventeenth-century drinking songs. There appeared to be a new island off the coast of Jamaica, and it seemed to be made of gumdrops. Bet my dad would love to see that. One news channel had given a name to all the bizarre, scary stuff that was going on. They were calling it “the Chaos.” Some big preacher guy in the U.S. was saying that God hated homosexuality, and that was why he’d given every Pomeranian
in that country pink fur overnight. Punum grinned. “He thinks pink Pomeranians are because God
hates
homos? I know about a hundred fags who’d give their eyeteeth for a pink Pomeranian!”

The thought made me smile a little. “Seriously, though,” I said, “what do you think’s going on?”

A lady at a nearby table piped up, “It’s terrorists. You aren’t safe anywhere nowadays.”

A man reading a newspaper snapped it extra hard to stop the top half of it from flopping over. He kept his face hidden behind the paper, but I knew that gesture. I leaned over and whispered to Punum, “That was Torontonian for, ‘
Lady, you are so full of shit. Shut up and go away.
’
” Punum grinned. Her smile helped a little bit. Just knowing that I could make someone smile, even though everything was so messed up.

“Maybe this is the end,” said a young white girl with what looked like a steel mohawk. “We’ve poisoned the environment, and now Nature is getting back at us.”

Her hawk was real metal. Bet that was new. Newspaper guy rustled his paper, which was Torontonian for,
“Keep quiet, all of you. Can’t you see I’m reading?
”

Two policemen in bulletproof jackets ran by the window we were sitting by, then one more. One of them had a long, swishy tail poking out the back hem of her jacket, like a horse’s. She tripped over it and fell. She got up and kept going. Another came running out of a side street. They all pulled out their billy clubs and surrounded a man in a wheelchair who’d been trying to get across the street. People inside the doughnut shop exclaimed and crowded around us at the window. I heard the same lady ask, “What is it? Is it a terrorist?”

The cops were blocking my view of what they were doing around the guy. And the girl with the steel mohawk was sticking my shoulder with one of its points. “Ow!”

“Sorry. Woke up with it like this this morning. Not used to it yet.”

The ring of cops suddenly tightened. They all seemed to be flailing away with their clubs.

“What’s happening?” asked the man who’d thought Punum was a guy. “Are they beating up that poor man?”

“He must have done something to ask for it,” said another voice.

Someone else replied, “Come to think of it, I thought he looked suspicious when he was in here just now.”

“Like hell you did!” yelled Punum.

“What? Who’s saying that? I’m just saying I know what I saw.”

“Maybe he’s turning into some kind of monster!” said an eager child’s voice. “Maybe a dinosaur!”

“Hush, Ashok.”

“I’d like to be a dinosaur,” said Ashok.

The knot of police thinned, and we could see the man again. He wasn’t in his wheelchair anymore. He was on his stomach with his hands behind him, handcuffed. His face was turned towards us. He looked terrified. He was screaming something; I couldn’t hear what through the heavy glass window. He had cuts on his face; I could see the blood. One of the cops had a foot on the man’s head, holding him down.

“Oh, my god,” said someone. “I wonder what he did.”

“Maybe nothing. But they have to be sure. They have to find out.”

“These are horrible times. Just horrible.”

Punum had tears in her eyes. “Fuckers.” I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about the cops or about the other people in the doughnut shop.

Two policemen picked the man up. His legs flopped out of the grip of the cop at his feet. The other cop almost dropped
him. He didn’t, but he started yelling at the disabled man. He dragged him into the back of a cop car. He tried to sit him up, but the man fell over. Punum made an outraged noise. The cop’s buddy came over and the two of them kind of stuffed the man into the back seat, lying down. They got into the car and drove away. The wheelchair stayed there for a second, in the middle of the road. Then a car hit it and knocked it up against the sidewalk. It landed on its side. One wheel fell off. Punum said, “Christ.” She yanked her chair closer to her and pulled herself into it.