Pasha Malla - People Park

God, Bailie, don’t tell him that.

No, this is good, said Raven. This I can use. You see, as the one making these illustrations, the emotions they might evoke are alien, almost unimaginable, to me. Precisely because I am at their centre, I remain at an experiential remove — the eye of the storm, so to speak. So your neuroses interest me. Come, let’s sit down.

Olpert and Starx followed him inside the suite. The illustrationist seemed to glide across the marble floor.

Sweet digs, said Starx, collapsing onto a plush white settee. Olpert joined him.

Raven moved to the window that overlooked People Park. Yet when he spoke his voice seemed somehow inside Olpert’s head: Now, Mr. Bailie, what else fills you with fear?

What? Else?

I ask because I wonder what it was about this morning that struck fear into you. Perhaps it is at the heart of something. As I’ve said, as the generator of the experience, all this is beyond me. I want simply to understand. To achieve some. . clarity.

Raven’s voice seemed come from somewhere out the window.

Perhaps we are on the wrong track, said Raven. At the risk of sounding forward, could you tell me your dreams, Mr. Bailie. Your most secret dreams. Are there motifs.

Sorry?

Motifs, Bailie, said Starx. Patterns, themes. Stuff on repeat.

In the scary ones? There are snakes sometimes.

Snakes, said Raven.

Though that might be because of Jessica.

Starx perked up: Who’s Jessica?

What else appears in your dreams, said the illustrationist — he sounded now high above, hovering against the ceiling.

Other than snakes?

Yes. Tell me.

Something heavy and hot clamped upon his shoulders — Raven’s hands. Olpert tensed, but from the illustrationist’s fingers a soothing, sedative warmth spread into his body. When Olpert spoke the words came slow and didn’t seem his own: Motifs in my dreams are less things in my dreams than things not in my dreams. Absence as a motif. And by that I mean total absence. I’m all alone and there’s nothing else there.

Raven let go. What else, Mr. Bailie?

Well I have this one dream. . Olpert had no idea what he might say. But the words just kept coming, tumbling more quickly now one to the next: I’m on this big ship, as big as a building, one of those ships that’s so big it feels like a mall or something.

An aircraft carrier? said Starx.

Mr. Starx, please, said Raven. Then, to Olpert: Go on.

Okay, the ship’s so full of people I can’t move. You can’t imagine how many people. Millions. And everyone’s lined up for something, but I’m for some reason smaller than everyone else so I can’t see what it is. I can’t see over their heads. I’m a kid. Or feel like a kid, clarified Olpert, though none of this was true, he’d never had this dream, it spilled out of him from nowhere. Anyway, he continued, everyone’s looking at this. . thing , whatever it is, at the front of the ship — starboard? aft?

The bow, said Starx.

The bow, indeed. Thank you, seaman Starx, said Raven. Continue, Mr. Bailie.

So I want to see it, Olpert said, or at least find out what it is, but when I go to talk no words come out. I can’t ask anyone, and getting to the front is impossible too because the crowd is packed so tightly in. And it’s then I get this feeling, this wash of a feeling, that I’m alone. All these people are united by this thing and I don’t even know what it is. And that’s when the crowd starts spreading out from me. Like we’re on an iceberg breaking apart. Nobody’s actually moving but the space around me just gets bigger and bigger, and it’s not even that I don’t want to move, I don’t know where to go. There’s no one in the crowd I know, no one to go to, but the feeling of being alone like that — I can’t even describe it to you. I can’t. And the deck of this ship is expanding all around me, and the crowd is fading farther and farther away. I stand there and stand there and let it happen, until the crowd is eventually gone — they’ve disappeared. They’ve vanished.

Vanished, whispered Starx.

Oh, Mr. Bailie, said Raven, without even pressing you, we learn so much about your heart! Now, continue, please.

Well then I’m just alone, on this big open grey deck of something that used to be a ship, but now it’s just. . everything. It’s the whole world, as far as I can see, and I’m there, and it’s the same everywhere I look, just the greyness, and the sky is sort of colourless too, and I’m totally, completely alone. I’d walk somewhere but I don’t know which way to walk. And who would I walk to?

And this makes you afraid.

It’s the most terrifying feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life, said Olpert Bailie.

Starx’s eyes were wide, astonished. The room felt spellbound.

And then what, Mr. Bailie.

And then?

Olpert straightened. Starx blinked. The trance was broken.

And then? And then I guess I wake up.

AFTER RETRIEVING her papers from the Galleria’s security office Pearl wandered back to the foodcourt, where Kellogg and Gip and Elsie-Anne queued for nonresident processing. Go on, Pearly, said Kellogg, be a while here yet, we’ll meet you at the campground, and flashed a big thumbs-up. But Pearl couldn’t take her eyes off her son, who gazed at his mother with an uncomprehending, anaesthetized look.

She’d never seen Gip like this, almost catatonic, and though Dr. Castel claimed that a double dose of meds wouldn’t be harmful as a one-off emergency, she wondered. He’ll be fine, he’s a tough little guy, Kellogg had assured her, crushing four pills into a can of apple juice. Usually her husband’s brightness bolstered her, now it wearied her into surrender — hadn’t Gip himself looked frightened, swallowing the potion down?

One of the Helpers took her by the elbow, steered her away. The line shifted, her family disappeared. From within the crowd came Kellogg’s desperate, warbling cheer: See you soon, Pearly!

She was taken out of the foodcourt, past the shops, to the Galleria’s southern exit, where the Helper said, Welcome home, gave her a little shove onto Paper Street, and locked the doors behind her.

And there it was: the city.

All that concrete and glass and steel seemed ushered up from underground. Pearl imagined the buildings folding in at their rooftops and blocking out the sun, she had to lean against the Galleria’s wall to steady the ensuing vertigo. Though down below was no less disorienting — people, so many people, barrelling around and past and between each other, a choreography of chaos, a percussion of footsteps pattering this way and that. How did each one remember who they were, or where to go —

Pearl laughed. She was being ridiculous. Though she’d been away a few years, the city had been home for most of her life. She stepped away from the wall and levelled her thoughts and tried to look at things rationally, anthropologically. What had changed? She knew the buildings along Paper by name: Municipal Works, the caustic Podesta Tower, We-TV’s HQ on the corner at Entertainment Drive. The few new businesses bore merely cosmetic changes in signage, the architecture original and unchanged.

Even so, everything had the slightly skewed look of some dreamworld rendering, nothing matched her memories, not precisely. Though she’d never felt comfortable downtown, its joyless parade of suits and high heels, so she took Paper east to Parkside West, crossed over and stood at the hilltop looking down. And with the park spreading out before her, she tried to summon how it felt to be home.

Nothing surfaced.

A breeze got the bare trees creaking.

A few blocks south, a Citywagon pulled into the City Centre lot.