Swarm (24 page)

Upstairs
at the Empire, the reek of mildew from the burgundy carpet made me dizzy. When I knocked on Walter's door no one answered. I tried again and then pushed open the unlocked door. Twisted sheets on an unmade bed. Empty beer bottles clustered on the bedside table. One-quarter of the wall was taken up by a life-sized poster of a woman in a stars-and-stripes bikini, straddling a motorcycle. A fringe of black mould ran along the loose wallpaper at the edge of the windows. A stack of books with broken spines on the sill.
You're living here?
I asked Margo in my head, but then thought of my own circumstances. I turned to leave, unsure where to go—back to the basement, down to Marvin's place in the dark zone, or just downstairs to the bar to wait without any money to even buy a beer—and found Margo standing in the doorway. “You shouldn't be here,” she said and pushed me back into the room.

“Because Marvin says?”

“Yeah. Partly.”

“Well, I am.”

She studied me. “What's that?” she asked, touching the bag of sugar. I shook my head. It would take too long to explain. She walked past me to pull three home-brewed beers out of a box in the corner.

“Shit,” she said. “Come on.”

We went down a back stairway at the end of the hall, one I supposed the servants had used when the run-down building was a home for a single wealthy family. The steps were covered in linoleum that was so dirty I couldn't make out the pattern. In the basement, we walked along a narrow hallway with walls of stacked stone, cemented in. I thought of the catacombs in Paris, another place my mother had been—that time with my father, on their honeymoon. A postcard pasted into the back of their wedding scrapbook. As a kid I'd looked at that picture a lot, flipping past the bright photos of my parents as young people grinning in the yard at the farm.

Margo pushed open a wooden door and the first thing we saw was Walter, his face squinting in surprise. His steel hand shone violently under an exposed bulb. “Knock,” he shouted.

“Who else would it be?”

“Let's see,” said Walter, lifting a finger to his chin. “The cops?”

Marvin looked at me. “What's she doing here?”

“Ask her,” Margo said as she handed out the beers and sat next to Walter on a futon shoved against the wall. Marvin waited.

“They're Jump Ship?” I asked, and told them about the map in the pantry, stars shining all the way to the suburbs. Walter and Margo were listening but Marvin cut me off. “What were you doing upstairs?”

“I needed a lightbulb.”

“I told you to put a note under the door.”

“It was pitch-black! Nobody was home.”

“What's that?” Marvin asked, jabbing his chin toward the sugar.

“Can't I ask any questions?”

“No. You can't.” I stared at him. “That was the point. I was keeping you out of things so you don't know more than you need to.”

“I want to know.”

“Why?”

Why? I wanted in, wanted a home, a family. Like I wanted to know about Thomson's illness, about you. That's me: burrowing until everything caves in. But what I said was: “Because I'm part of this.”

He took a slug of beer and leaned against a work table that held a pair of rusty pliers, a Styrofoam cup half full of mouldy coffee, a book with its insides cut out. “You're here now. Sit down.”

“I'm fine.” I'd been sitting for days.

Marvin rustled through a plastic bag and pulled out an old-fashioned cellphone, silver, with a flip-top. “Untraceable,” he said and tossed it to Walter, who caught it with his good hand. “Our next target—” Marvin said.

“Drum roll, please,” said Walter, his hand pinging against the metal futon frame.

Marvin counted off the reasons on his fingers, starting with his nicotine-stained pointer finger. “They have no security. They sell to the same airlines as wealthy agencies. It's an easier neighbourhood to negotiate. Dark. No cameras.”

“What is it?” asked Margo.

“Phantasy Travel.”

The place where Marvin had broken the window, the night we'd first slept together. Like a clue. I looked down at the dirty floor, covered in snips of coloured wire.

“They specialize in last-chance tourism. Trips to doomed places. Create tonnes more carbon so you can see the last little bit of the Great Barrier Reef that's being destroyed by carbon. That sort of thing.”

Walter set his empty bottle down and lit a cigarette. “When?” Margo asked.

“Sunday. 9:00
PM
.”

“They'll be closed,” said Walter.

“Yeah.”

“That's bullshit.”

I wondered if Marvin was placating me, planning something less dangerous. But it was how Jump Ship had always operated: no one hurt, only properties destroyed. Walter pressed his wrist against the centre of his chest. “Let me do it. I'll walk in there in the middle of the fucking day.”

“Like a suicide thing?” said Margo, her voice too loud.

“I'll fucking do it.” Margo moved abruptly forward, planted her feet on the floor. She lit a cigarette. The room was already full of smoke. I switched the sugar to my other arm, wishing I could take it down to Thomson, help him scatter it over the bees to knock the small, tarry mites off their sweetened bodies.

“That's what I've decided,” Marvin said.

“And we don't get a say?”

“You were in the army,” Marvin said. “You know how it works.” Walter glared at him, twisting the cigarette in his steel pincer. Marvin's fingers pinched the edge of the work table. He seemed still and powerful while Walter sank, slouching on the couch, dropping ash onto the knee of his filthy jeans. “What about the gardens?”

I lifted my head. Palms. Banana trees. Orchids that lived on air.

Marvin and Walter stared at each other until Walter finally spoke. “Shithead,” he said, his voice a kind of hiss, and he settled his gaze on a patch of crumbling mortar as he smoked, one puff after the other, like something mechanical, a train pushing hard down the track.

“Sunday,” Marvin repeated, and when Walter opened his mouth again, Marvin held up his hand, palm out, silencing him. “It's decided.”

We
left then. I followed Marvin out to the street, where a light snow was falling like ash. Marvin slid along the sidewalk on the gripless soles of his combat boots and shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket. We headed north. “Can't we just go to your place?” I asked.

“That's not the plan.”

“I don't get what the big deal is. I hate that place.”

“It's only a few days.”

He meant until the bombing.

“I'm not sure,” I said.

He smirked. “You want to slow down?” When I didn't answer, he said, “It's only property.”

“It's their business.”

“I'm sure they have insurance.”

I wasn't sure what to say.

“It isn't personal. It's a tactic.”

“How is it not personal?”

“We're not attacking them, we're attacking what they represent.”

He threw his half-burned cigarette to the ground. There was already enough fire in him—a heat that was contagious. I found myself nodding, knowing my father would have agreed with him, even added his own support. At the house, Marvin came into the basement. Inside the door, he pulled me against him and I dug through his clothes like some sort of tick, trying to attach myself to him irrevocably. That night was the best sex I ever had, like the lovemaking in a movie about apocalypse where the lone survivors find respite under the rubble of a collapsed overpass. I tingled. I felt the rush, the force of something I mistook for meaning. Afterwards, I told him I loved him. The words erupted out of me. Elemental, a current of water or flame. He didn't speak, and I lay there for a while hoping he hadn't heard me, that he'd fallen asleep.

“What's with the sugar?” he said into the dark.

“It's for Thomson. His hives.” I didn't tell him that I'd stolen it.

“You're planning on going back there?”

“No,” I said, hoping he'd offer to take it for me but he didn't. When we woke, the eggs at the top of the stairs were cold. We ate and then Marvin left, swallowed by the mouth of light that was the doorway to the outer world.

He
disappeared after that. I couldn't help thinking it was because I'd confessed my feelings to him, feelings I wasn't even sure about once his powerful presence had dissipated.

I felt uncomfortable that we'd left it at that, but I somehow settled into a routine in the tiny basement. Three or four days passed and then a knock sounded on the door. I looked up from my ham sandwich, a book bent open in my greasy fingers. It was Margo, her arms wrapped around a cardboard box.

“This is all I could get.”

Inside, I dug out my things—an old orange coat that was warmer than the one I had, a pair of jeans, socks and underwear, a few books. Margo wandered through the apartment, sticking her head in the dark coal bin, glancing up the flight of stairs that led to my keepers.

“What about the rest?” I asked as I pulled out a change of clothes.

She shrugged. Like the money from the salvage job, I'd never see my stuff again.

In the bathroom, I left the underwear I'd been wearing for days in the sink to wash out later. When I came back out, Margo was picking at the edge of my sandwich, putting bits of crust into her mouth.

“Marvin's coming tomorrow,” she told me. “He wants you to plant it.”

You would think that during those long, empty days I would have come to my senses. But until Margo passed on Marvin's command, I hadn't really been thinking about Jump Ship at all. Only in moments, in the middle of what I thought was the night but was sometimes midday, when I'd wake, worrying, waiting for the future to unfold. There were sleeping pills in the bathroom cabinet and I took them in fragments, breaking the tiny discs into dusty quarters that I pressed into the bowl of my tongue. Mostly I thought about Marvin, what he was doing: Where was he? When would he come back?

“Me?” I said to Margo.

“That's what he wants.”

“Where is he?”

She lifted the top slice of bread to look into my sandwich. A smear of yellow mustard over the fatty ham.

“Have it,” I said, annoyed.

Like a little kid, she picked it up with both hands. “Around,” she said, with her mouth full.

Arms crossed, I leaned against the counter.

“You don't want to do it?”

I looked at her.

“I already told him I'd be a better choice, but he says he wants it to be you.” I heard the tinge of jealousy in her voice. She turned away, walked to the couch. The doorway to the bedroom I never slept in was a solid black rectangle. I imagined Marvin in there, hiding, listening to my answers. Like this was a test.

“What's involved?”

Margo told me how it would play out, the acting I needed to do.

“I have to talk to the people?”

She sat on the couch. “You can't stay here all your life.”

I thought about Phoenix and Thomson. What they would have said. But I already knew. They had nothing to worry about, in their safe, snug home, only the grasshoppers scratching to get out. Margo curled her feet under her, her shoes still on. She wrinkled her nose. “Smells in here.”

“Would you do it?”

She raised her eyebrows. “What makes you think I haven't?”

We were all
out that night—me, Marvin, Mr. Bobiwash, even Shannon and the boys. The only person who stayed home, sunk under the cold surface of his illness, was Thomson, asleep on the couch. Just starting to wane, the moon spread an amber wash on the lake, so I made my way easily up the shoreline even though I'd left the wind-up flashlight at home. All afternoon the wind had pushed west so I could still smell the bodies and the acidic stench of the ashes they'd raked into the beach sand after the cremations. We hadn't stayed for that, only for the lottery of supplies, only until Mr. Bobiwash gestured us over to the wagon and we gathered without speaking or making eye contact. Shannon the last to arrive.

The waves slapped against the stone. Thick roots of cedars gripped the corners of the rock. I scrambled over boulders and jumped over puddles, thinking about what Albert had said in town: that the wind would blow in the rest of the boat's floating timbers and any buoyant trunks. We all knew that more than eight people were on the ship, so there was that too. More bodies, like in those strange seasons when the carp or the pickerel die off and the shore is cluttered with puffy rotting bodies, glossy as candle wax. I didn't want to see that. I couldn't take much more. I moved as fast as I could to find you, hoping you wouldn't run. That instead you'd call out:
Help me. I'm here.

I
didn't know where I was going. I wandered the shoreline, over limestone beaches, through forest, in fields. For a long time not really looking but only thinking: about my past, my parents, the story I've been slowly telling you.
There are no happy endings
, my mother often said to me shortly after I ran away from home to go to the city. And when we came to the island, I told that to Thomson, as if he needed to hear it from me. But he listened. He nodded and said, “Yes, that's true. Life goes on and on.”

At
the western end of the island, the cliffs are steep. I climbed up, inland, into the evergreens and pushed through prickly boughs of blue spruce. When I reached the thicker cedars I had to crouch, nearly crawling, sharp needles digging into my palms. In the clearing, water boomed into crevices carved in the limestone wall. Several feet from the edge stood the lighthouse. One window lit with a weak flicker. I pulled back, crouched in the cool, dark forest, and watched. The yellow light leapt and danced, reminding me of the movement of the bees. From far away, a coyote started howling and then the candle flashed its final light and sputtered out. It was dark, but the building glowed in the moonlight. I didn't know what to do. There were no noises except for the animals. Were you sleeping inside? For a long time I sat there, until the memory of the candle started to fade and lose its form and I wondered if I had imagined it. My eyes ached with exhaustion and I closed them for one second, let the weight of my muscles relax, and the next thing I knew I was waking up, the musty smell of last autumn's leaves in my nose, their dry prickle scratching my cheek. I sat up. Thomson, home alone. The moon had arced farther, casting the lighthouse into shadow. I walked carefully like Mr. Bobiwash had taught me, consciously lifting my feet. When I reached the road, I turned east, toward home.