People Park (14 page)

And when he had called them together, he spake as follows —

— Plato,
Critias

I

HEY WOULD ALWAYS
remember the day their mama stopped believing in God, a hot August Sunday when Sam and Adine were seven. With the tower bells ringing the entire congregation was set free into the Cathedral parking lot, Sam and Adine held their mama’s hands, her grip went tight when they reached their parking spot: no car, just a sprinkling of what appeared to be beach glass. In her nice blue dress their mama sank down onto the curb, face in her hands. All around the bells chimed joy and past them flowed people in their Sunday best, smiling and saved. No one stopped to say anything or help.

Once everyone disappeared and the bells went quiet their mama stood and without a word started walking west, into the ruins of Lakeview Homes. Sam and Adine trailed behind her exchanging looks: What was happening, where was their car? They followed their mama in silence through the wreckage of buildings half-destroyed by diggers abandoned for the weekend, sitting there like the shells of larval bugs, and the spindly stalks of apple-tree saplings lined up along the fence that penned in the wrecking site.

The sun burned above and the asphalt of South Throughline
burned below and the churned-up earth burned from somewhere
deeper. The heat was brackish, stifling, they could taste the tarry smoke of it in their mouths. Their mama stopped at the fence: beyond it was the dug-out pit where A-Block 100 had once stood. All the A-Block residents had already been packed up and bussed across town, trucks had taken their things. As the demolition swept north into B- and C-Blocks, more and more people would be shifted to what people were calling the Zone, the westend neighbourhoods north of Lower Olde Towne. And when the bulldozers reached H-Block Sam and Adine and their mama would have to move too.

A Park Project diagram mounted on the fence showed how what had been A-Block would become a forest of poplar trees that stretched all the way to a campground at the lakeshore, where there would be a beach. Centre Throughline would be moved underground, tunnelled beneath the park all the way from the southside to the island’s northern shore, overtop of which would be a field and a pond. It was impossible to imagine what was pictured ever becoming real: Lakeview Homes looked as though a meteor had struck and incinerated its entire southern half, how could anything grow here, it was just a dead empty hole or a giant mouth gaping wider and wider until it swallowed the whole complex down.

Their mama took off her pumps and with one in each hand wiped her forehead with her sleeve and threw her shoes over the fence, one then the next plunging birdlike down into the shadows. The back of her blue dress was dark with sweat. Okay, she said, and barefoot continued home along what had once been sidewalks and now was just dirt. Sam and Adine followed her up Centre Throughline, north through B-Block and C- and D-, west along North Throughline into the 50s, then north again to their unit, H-54, wedged amid a row of identical units, where the screendoor smacked closed behind her.

If you had your car stolen you were supposed to call the
police, yet their mama did not. She sat in the living room smoking
cigarettes
with the front curtains drawn until the matching ashtrays Sam and Adine had made her at school overflowed. After church their mama always fixed lunch but today there was no lunch. She got up only to take down the cross that lived above the kitchen sink and dump it in the trash.

From that day on their mama became a pinched-in version of herself: smaller, and taut, and when she talked her mouth barely opened. It seemed something was hiding inside her that she couldn’t let escape. Though sometimes whatever it was would claw to the surface and come stabbing out in screams and slaps. When she found Sam inside the living room armoire dismantling her hairdryer he cried not because it hurt to be hit, but because of the surprise.

By the time school started in September the demolition had swept into C-Block and everything changed. Their mama switched to nightshifts at the factory, so there was no longer time in the evenings, she said, to cook or say Grace. Instead she heated
TV
dinners from the freezer, slid the trays onto the kitchen table at her kids. Eat, she said, putting on her coat as they peeled off the tinfoil covers and folded the warm edges into the still-frozen centres. While Connie was at work Sam and Adine would watch
TV
until they couldn’t keep their eyes open, and in the mornings she’d often come home to them still sprawled head-to-toe on the couch. Go to school, she said then, and she would go to bed, and they would go to school.

In October Sam and Adine came home one afternoon and a bicycle was leaning against their front steps. Inside a hardhat sat on the kitchen counter and mud had been tracked down the hall to their mama’s bedroom, the door was closed. At dinnertime she came out with a man she told Sam and Adine to call Uncle Bruno, but he was no uncle of theirs, they called him nothing. Bruno never said much to anyone, and around him their mama spoke in a whisper like she was embarrassed or sorry for something. He drove the crane, they learned, that swung a big ball on the end of a chain into their neighbours’ units and turned the walls to dust.

As the weeks went on and the Park Project crept north Bruno moved in, frying bacon every morning that he never shared with anyone, at night he took over the
TV
with his workboots up on the couch. With their mama at work and nothing else to do Sam and Adine hid inside the armoire and told each other the stories of
TV
shows they’d watched, including the one with the terrorist who made a bomb from batteries he was going to use to blow up an airplane — before, of course, he was stopped. They were always stopped.

The day of the first snowfall of the year, Sam and Adine came home from school to their mama crying in the dark in the living room, two bits of bloody paper towel stuffed up her nostrils. The matching ashtrays were smashed on the living room floor and there were cigarette butts everywhere. Bruno was gone. Adine swept up and then she and Sam sat with their mama, one on either side of her on the couch, each holding a hand. That night in the armoire they made up a new story, and it was about bad strange people coming from the outside and ruining everything, and it ended with revenge.

The next morning, a Saturday, Sam and Adine woke up and their mama was still sleeping. As quietly as they could, they rounded up all the batteries in the house, emptying flashlights and smoke detectors and other various small electronics — and put them all in the tin can of bacon grease that Bruno had left on the ledge above the stove, and last of all dug a pack of matches out of one of the drawers. We need more batteries, said Sam, so they stole one small bill from their mama’s purse and went to Street’s Milk and from the Polyp behind the counter bought the biggest battery they could afford.

This was November, the Park Project was demolishing C-Block. Then work would break until the spring, when Sam and Adine and their mama were supposed to move to some new big building across the city. The workers took weekends off too, though their equipment — backhoes and diggers and tractors and bulldozers — remained onsite. So this is where Sam and Adine headed: through the fence, their makeshift bomb ready, toward the big tall crane and its wrecking ball, inside the shadows way down in the pit.

IN THE TRAUMA
ward of City Centre Hospital, Sam stood beside his mama as the doctor explained what had happened to Adine’s eyes and when his mama said, So she might be blind, it seemed she was almost wishing it. There was a cold, white sharpness to her voice. The doctor said something about surgery, and recovery, and that it was good she was young — but Sam’s mama just said again, She’s blind, and rocked a little on her feet like she might fall. Sam put his hand on her lower back to steady her and at his touch she stiffened and wriggled away. Thank you, she said to the
doctor, and sat down on the other side of the waiting room. The doctor
looked at Sam and smiling in a soft kind way asked if he wanted to see his sister. Sam did not but he had nowhere else to go.

They went through two sets of doors and down a hallway and stopped outside a room. In a bed underneath a window slept a person that was almost Adine. Beside the bed was a chair. The doctor gestured at the chair and left. Sam didn’t move. Bandages hid his sister’s eyes. Across her cheeks were dark ridges and speckles of dried blood where gravel and battery acid had sprayed up from the ground. A big cut on her chin had been stitched with crude blue knots. Tubes ran from her arms to machines that beeped and hissed. Another tube ran to a box on the floor. Under the blankets Adine’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell. Sam leaned over the bed, watching his sister breathe.

What the fug are you doing, said his mama’s voice from the doorway, and Sam stepped away from the bed.

He didn’t know where to look or what to say. His insides felt hollow, scooped out.

You aren’t even going to cry, his mama said. You haven’t even cried.

She leaned against the wall in a small hunched way.

You did this to her and you can’t even fuggin cry?

Sam looked out the window: a pretty sunset over the city, big fat bands of gold and pink that darkened into mauve, indigo, all the way to black.

The last thing he’d seen before the explosion was Adine squatting over the coffee can, igniting the fuse, the fast sizzle of it, the thunder of the bomb blowing, a cruel ripping sound as the can sheared in half, and so much light.

It left a tone in his ears like when the
TV
went to coloured bars at midnight. He sat up, discovered Adine sprawled with her limbs at weird angles, the coffee can split and blackened between her feet. Sam went over. Through the thrashered mess of her face she seemed to be looking up at him for an answer. The gore was black in places, wet and raw in others. You couldn’t see her eyes.

On the taxi ride to the hospital his mama screamed Fug fug fug in the backseat with Adine’s head in her lap, his sister’s face not so much bleeding as just opened up, as if the top layer of skin had been wiped away. Sam noticed that he’d torn the knees of his jeans — and for a moment thought that
this
would be why he’d get in trouble.

A nurse appeared and whispered something to Sam’s mama. Outside the sky had gone purple. Okay, said his mama, Sam, we’re going home. There’s nothing for us to do here now. There’s nothing we can do.

At home Sam sat inside the armoire thinking about blindness, that his sister could be blind. He closed his eyes to see what a blind person saw: black. But still he could perceive a thread of light between the armoire’s doors, facing it the darkness behind his eyelids brightened.

He heard his mother shuffling down the hallway and called to her.

What do you want, said her voice. Why are you in that thing.

Mama, said Sam.

There was a pause and three short barks that was his mama coughing. And Sam looked and there she was, through the crack between the doors, her cigarette sparking orange in the dark and the light from the hall flooding in behind her. Don’t call me that, she said. Mama, don’t say that to me.

Sam scrunched his eyes so tightly they ached. Is being blind like this.

His mama’s voice was tight: You call me Connie, hear me. No more Mama.

Like this, said Sam, when it’s all dark. When I close my eyes it’s dark and —

Your sister can’t see nothing, his mama, Connie, said.

Nothing?

Nothing. You did it to her, and now she can’t see nothing at fuggin all, said Connie, and then she went down the hallway and shut herself in her room.

Sam sat there thinking about nothing. Nothing was a cold black space, an empty coffin. But then a coffin had walls so it was something. And a clump of smoke scudding over a field was
something. And the deepest darkest depths of the ocean were something.
And the farthest outlying nowhere of the universe was something. Even the air was something if it kept you alive, and even if not. The idea of nothing was impossible, it couldn’t exist because for it to exist it had to be something, which it wasn’t.

And Sam thought about what Adine’s world would be with eyes that saw nothing and it seemed too big to think of or too small. There were no words for what it was because every word was a thing and nothing meant no
things. What was nothing if even the dark was something — if even black and empty had to be seen?

Sam tried to make his brain go blank so it was nothing but even the blank was something because he was thinking about the blank and it was a wide white disc. He scrunched his eyes as tight as he could and when he opened them they ached and the air sparkled the way the
TV
did when everything dissolved into static.

Maybe death was the only way there was nothing. Heaven was a place to go when you were dead but if you did not believe in heaven, if you’d stopped going to church, there was nothing. Then your life slipped from you like ash caught in a draft: it went swirling away and your body was left a hollow husk. Then instead of burying you your family pushed that body into a fire where it burned to ash and ash was something that could get caught in a draft and go swirling away and be gone.