Swarm (8 page)

He built a thick tepee of sticks around the balls of paper. The fire caught quickly and we sat watching the flames. Gradually, as he added wood, my body began to grow warm and the strong, black coffee tasted like a long-ago treat from childhood: chocolate or sugary soda pop. Marvin lit a cigarette and I reached for a drag.

“Don't blame me when you get hooked.”

I smiled, sucking in the velvety smoke. I thought of asking him about the map again, but I didn't. Probably I didn't really want to know. “Where's Chiapas?” I asked instead.

Marvin reached for the side of a picture frame and snapped it over his knee. He fed it to the fire, one part at a time. When I handed him back his cigarette, he laid it on a mortared groove between the bricks of the hearth and broke up more kindling. “Why?”

“I'm curious.”

But he didn't tell me. He nodded toward the map. “Jump Ship. That's where they've hit.” My back was turned to the wall where it was posted. I cupped my hands around the warm mug. He shoved a sharp piece of wood into the flames. I didn't know what to say. I felt uneasy, a burn in my throat forming from the acidic drink. “You follow them?” I finally asked. My mind scrambled around the details I knew, their few targets: a gas station, a bank machine, a car dealership. They were small bombs, minimal damage, no victims, the reasons never given. At least not through the media.

Marvin's hand flicked toward my coffee. “More?”

“No, thank you.”

He scowled slightly and I again noticed the lines around his mouth. “There isn't much left,” he muttered. When he spoke again, his voice came out flat, without inflection. “Chiapas is a state in Mexico,” he said, his eyes following the motions of his hand: twirling the end of his cigarette against the brick, carving off the brittle edge of the ember. “Phoenix's mother was part of a non-violent revolutionary group called Las Abejas. Thomson went there as a human rights observer. He met Phoenix's mom. They got married.”

“How old was Phoenix?”

“Six, I think. Seven. I was also just a kid.”

“Were you there?”

Marvin shook his head.

“What about her dad?”

“He was a casualty,” he said, as if that was something normal, a usual occurrence, like saying he'd run off with another woman. I wanted the whole story, all the details. It seemed like something far off, long ago, barely real. Like a legend, an epic novel.

“What do you mean?”

“The paramilitary took him a few years after she was born. He ‘disappeared,'” he said, forming quotation marks with his fingers around the word.

“Oh.”

“A couple years later the army came in. There was a standoff. People hid in a church.” Marvin nudged the fire with a piece of wood that looked like a painted chair leg. The words from the book vanished into black carbon.

“Phoenix was there with her mother. A paramilitary group went in and when the guns went off, she was buried in all the bodies.”

Marvin waited for me to say something, to react in some way, but I didn't know what words to use so I stayed silent, listening.

“Thomson was away in Mexico City, at the embassy, he said. Phoenix lay there until help came and then crawled out and Thomson brought her home as soon as he could arrange it.”

“Home?”

“Here,” Marvin said. I nodded and he continued. “They supported the Zapatistas. Indigenous rebels who wanted equity, control over local resources.” His voice grew louder, as if he was speaking to an audience. “The state was rich, but the people were poor. Our battles are similar, although that was a long time ago and a long way away.”

He swallowed the last of his coffee and the mug hit the floor with a crack.

What are our battles?
I could have asked, but I didn't. I thought I already knew. Survival, putting food on the table. “They've been through a lot,” I said, but Marvin talked over me: “I'm not that into making soup.” He stood and walked over and pointed at a green square in the centre of the circle of stars. “I want to take you here.”

Half
an hour later, we left through the back door of the row house. I used the outhouse and then we walked through a clearing, past a huge billboard that showed a man and woman, faces corroded by weather, under the words
THE LUXURY YOU DESERVE
. Marvin tossed his apple core aside and I followed its trajectory to a red brick building whose window frames had weathered into silver wood. “The lamp factory,” he said. “It was supposed to be turned into lofts.” Outside the building's front door, a woman stirred a smouldering fire, her hair dirty and tangled, her face burned red by the wind. I didn't know then, and wouldn't have wanted to know, that would be me in fifteen years. As we walked toward the edge of the dark zone, I kept eating my apple, its flesh grainy, overly dry from the many months it had been off the tree.

“Here”
was a botanical garden north of the travel agency Marvin had vandalized the night before. It was in the middle of a park where an encampment was set up. Several tents stood between a grove of birch trees and the street, by a sign that read,
ABSOLUTELY NO LOITERING
. A bike lay on its side near a firepit scratched out of the lawn. Marvin waved at a guy in a lumberjack jacket who was tying a line to a tree branch to lift the peak of his collapsed tent. The smell of food drifted out of the doorway of a round yurt. On its side, a large sign read,
HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT
. A woman ate out of a plastic bowl, sitting on the edge of a large marble fountain that was empty of water. Marvin told me it had been drained when people started using it to wash themselves, their dishes and clothes. At one end of the park, the garden buildings gleamed like a palace. They were made entirely of glass—a huge central dome with two smaller ones on either side and rectangular greenhouses jutting out the back. Marvin pointed at a bright sign over the front door that blared the name of one of the big banks. “Privatized now,” he said. “The city used to own it. It was built by citizens in the 1800s.”

We had to pay to get in. Marvin pulled a fold of crumpled bills out of his pocket and handed one of them to the attendant. She took it and gave me a brochure, her smile disappearing as Marvin said, “It used to be free.” A security guard watched us as we went inside, his radio stuttering static.

Under the curved roof, my eyes crawled up a skinny grey trunk to green fronds sprouting from its top. A palm tree. Plants with wide, ruby leaves grew around its base. Angular orange blooms jabbed out of the foliage.
Birds of Paradise
, the brochure said. In the sudden humidity I uncoiled the wool scarf from around my neck and shrugged out of my winter coat. It was another season in there. Summer. In the deep, cold hollow of winter, I still think about those gardens. A flickering memory I turn away from as quick as I can.

“You like it?” Marvin asked.

“Love it,” I breathed.

He gestured toward a plant with a fat stem amid its wide, flat leaves. A deep purple bloom that looked shiny like it had been greased. “Banana tree.”

I stared at him, surprised. The tropical plants made a foreign wilderness, entirely unfamiliar. I fingered the edge of a huge waxy leaf, then a red one veined with lime green.

“It's beautiful.”

“Yeah. But it's fantasy.”

The smell of humus and floral perfume reminded me of the farm in early summer. It seemed very real to me. I let go of a white trumpet-shaped blossom and wandered past the poinsettias. In a room for desert plants, a woman was sketching a barrel cactus. With a charcoal pencil, she tapped out the dark thorns. When Marvin started to speak, she looked up. “The only jungle we ever had was white pine,” he said to me. I turned down a trail crowded with yellow hibiscus, pink Allamanda, smoothly barked branches draped with Spanish moss. Fleshy leaves dangled from a hanging succulent, and I squeezed one like an earlobe. Marvin followed closely, whispering, his voice a hiss as his lecture continued. I felt overwhelmed, attached to him, as if every time I moved away whatever was tied between us tugged him along behind me. “Old-growth forests demolished by settlers to make fields for wheat farms that are now suburbs and housing developments like Parthenon's. We've lost hundreds of farms by now, but long before that we had all these huge white pines.” He stretched his arms out to illustrate their girth, but I doubted him. The part of the world that I was from had farm fields all the way to the horizon.

The outer walls were monochrome, dimmed by winter on the other side. A woman in a red coat stood like a large flower against the grey glass. Gold gleamed around her wrist and her slacks were neatly pressed. She looked up as we went past, Marvin's voice crackling, and I felt self-conscious, wearing wrinkled, grimy clothes, smelling of sex, sweat, and wood smoke. I looked away, my eyes moving up to the curved panes of the glass dome held together with iron spokes, and I thought about Margo, wondering if I'd see her when I got home, if I'd be able to talk to her about my strange night or if she'd already gone off to work.

Marvin kept talking, but I wasn't listening anymore. Irritated, I interrupted him. “I'm hungry,” I said.

He stopped mid-sentence and stared at me, his mouth slightly open. His arm swung forward, pointing. “There's another wing.” I hesitated. He stepped closer. “You don't like it,” he said, reaching for my hand.

“No, I do,” I said as his thumb slid over my palm and the memory of that morning resurfaced. I let him lead me through the next doorway into a room full of humid jungle.

“Imagine this place back then,” I said. “You're living in this inescapable season and suddenly somebody makes this place and you can come here, be warm, be around all these plants from places you can't ever hope to see. The desert, the Amazon jungle. I mean, even for me . . . I've never been anywhere.”

My mother had travelled. Using the inheritance from her grandmother, she went to Latin America, Europe, even Japan. I wanted to tell him about that, about her, but his voice grew sharp-edged in exasperation, like I'd done something wrong. “That isn't the point,” he said at the same moment as a security guard rounded the corner, and as if he was changing costumes, Marvin softened and quickly turned to a glassed-in case of orchids and started telling me about them. The guard brushed by us, moving slowly, like a stalking cat. Marvin twisted his face away, like he was hiding.

“They live on air,” I repeated, to show that I'd been paying attention, although I hadn't. I'd been wondering what he was originally going to say, where I'd gone wrong.

“The water in the air,” Marvin corrected. The security guard hovered at the entrance to the far room. I looked in at one of the orchids, its white petals like a bird's lifted wing. Thick roots dangled out of the pot, absorbing invisible nourishment. Marvin moved closer to me, his breath warm against my neck. I wanted him to take my hand, slide his fingers up the back of my sweater. Seduce me again. Instead, he only whispered in my ear: “Back then our horizons were expanding. Now they're narrowing.”

“I still like it.”

“Of course,” he said, as if that was never in question. I didn't know what he wanted. My head felt foggy from lack of sleep and food as we walked onto a humped wooden bridge. Orange carp swam under the reflection of the rounded glass and the weak, watery sun far above.

“But it's a bubble,” he said as we stared down at the copper pennies on the bottom of the pond. “And bubbles have to burst.”

By
then, Melissa, I wanted to go home. So much had happened in such a short time and I needed to process it all. Outside, a cold wind stabbed through the thin fabric of my jeans, which were smeared with soot. I was about to ask Marvin when I would see him again, but his pager buzzed. He tipped the small screen to his face and said, “It isn't personal, Sandy. I mean, don't get too attached.” His gaze slid across the shiny glass buildings of the gardens before he kissed me, his lips pressing warmly against mine. His hand lingered on my waist before he pulled back and walked away, headed for one of few pay phones in the city, the location of which he had mapped out in his head. I was left alone. I followed the rutted pathway through the park to the road. Perplexed, slightly humiliated.

Right then what I wanted was to go back to my old life, to the things I knew and was used to. My apartment, work, laundry on the weekends. Promising my mother I'd get home for a visit and never going. But I couldn't do that, and panic bubbled up inside me as I walked quickly west. When I was small, I'd been accustomed to the idea that there were many choices open to me, that I could do or be anything I wanted. There had been so many options. All the brands lined up, their hundred advantages stamped on brightly coloured packaging. But that wasn't the way things were anymore. In truth, it hadn't been like that for a long time. Maybe it was a trick, the notion that they ever were, that a fantasy like that was sustainable. Perhaps Marvin was right—nothing lasts, not even the Coliseum, that grand stone structure that could hold fifty thousand spectators where cows were grazing a few hundred years later. I wondered what it all meant, that long strange night, so out of character for me. A smile pushed at my lips as I thought of telling Margo what I'd been up to, how surprised she'd be, perhaps even jealous. A streetcar rumbled by but I watched it go, not wanting to spend the last bit of change rattling in my coat pocket.

There
was hardly anything to eat at home. The refrigerator was empty. I opened the cupboard, but there weren't any canned beans or macaroni and cheese left from the last time Margo's mom had come to visit. She always brought us food, pilfered from the dollar store where she worked. I lifted one of the last two eggs out of a bowl on the counter. When I turned the burner on, Margo appeared in the doorway. She watched without speaking as I cracked the egg into a frying pan and stared down at the unmoving yellow yolk.