Pasha Malla - People Park

The bird lifts one foot, then the other, puffs, shudders, but doesn’t go anywhere.

So Calum lunges at it — though halfheartedly, if he caught it what would he do. The bird maybe knows this, it makes no effort to fly away. It only regards Calum steadily with those eyes like two droplets of something’s pale and mucosal blood. Calum feints again to smack it but the bird holds its ground undaunted, so he lowers his hand and for a moment the bird looks familiar, he thinks, though his memory feels emptied and what he can’t think is from where or when, or where where might even be or when, when.

He takes another swipe. Deftly the bird swerves out of reach, resettles on the railing, nods, caws, squawks, chirps, what does a bird think or mean to say, is it taunting him or only making noise for itself. Watching the bird gloat Calum feels repelled and repulsed.

Go on, he says, get out of here.

But his voice sounds like a tape played in reverse, each syllable sucks back into itself.

He looks up and down the bridge which narrows identically in both directions to little pinprick endpoints, tunnelling into a sky that has forgotten how to be a sky. Which way to go, does it matter. All that matters maybe is movement, away from this bird.

Calum picks a direction, he doesn’t know which one, and begins to walk.

EBBIE AWOKE ALONE. The covers on Adine’s side of the bed were undisturbed.

Adine? she called, sitting up. Adine?

No reply. She got up.

In the den Pop’s bedding remained heaped in the middle of the floor. The bathroom door was open, no one was inside, nor was anyone in the kitchen. Other than Jeremiah, blinking at her from the couch, the apartment was empty — Debbie did not count herself.

Normally the fridge hummed, the mixing bowls atop it jingled. But with no power everything was silent, the air brittle. From the couch Jeremiah, tail alert and coiled at its tip into a fiddlehead, watched her. Debbie shivered, scooped the blanket off the floor and took it to the window nook, swaddled herself, and curled up looking out over the street: but there was nothing to see, UOT was smothered in fog.

Across the room the blank screen of the TV glowed a greenish eggshell hue, it had a light of its own even when it wasn’t on. Where was Adine? Out there stumbling through the city in her sweatsuit and goggles — Adine out in the city, how absurd.

Though there’d been a time when she’d loved the city and in a way the city had brought them together. When they’d met, Debbie had been still new enough to it, having spent her undergrad years mostly on the Institute’s campus and in the adjacent student neighbourhood spoken of myopically as the ghetto . Everything west of the park seemed impossibly vast and intimidating and arcane.

Adine had spent her whole life on the island, she navigated it effortlessly, she knew things and places and secrets. Debbie’s exuberance and naivety invigorated her and so the city came alive for them both. Though it wasn’t just living in the city, it was talking about it: so much happened every day, hilarious and thrilling and sad. So they opened themselves to its people, its streets, its clichés and mysteries, and everywhere they found stories to recount to each other.

Once, during an early-morning Blueline commute, an elderly woman’s newspaper-wrapped fish came alive between her feet, and the woman — so old she was made of dust , Debbie would later poeticize her — calmly took the flopping creature by the tail, beat it to death against the train’s dirty floor, and reclined with a nonchalance meant to suggest the blood and scales at her feet had always been there. Witnessing all this from across the aisle Debbie was already skipping forward to that evening, when she’d tell it to Adine, and they’d cackle together in horror and delight.

Back then despite living on the opposite side of the city she spent most nights at Adine’s, and every minute apart provided stories for their next meeting. But they never had enough time: there was always too much to tell, their voices bubbled overtop of each other’s, everything frantic and urgent — and then! and then! and then! At night they had to start setting two alarms: one to wake them in the morning, the other to indicate a time they absolutely had to shut up and sleep, and after which they weren’t allowed another word.

After a year of this Debbie moved in. Technically she and Adine began to share everything, though quickly there seemed less to share. Something happened: the city lost its drama, fewer were the moments of the sublime, the absurd, the ridiculous. In stitching their lives together Debbie began to fear they’d sealed the space, that chasm of mystery and possibility between them, where what was most alive about their relationship had crackled and zipped.

But if the real city no longer held any magic for them, Debbie had wondered, perhaps Adine’s tiny replica version might. The first time Debbie suggested visiting her Sand City — just to see! — Adine had scowled and scoffed. But after some persuading, up there alone in the Museum’s upper gallery they’d gone quiet before it, almost reverential. Adine ran her hand over the glass. There it is, she’d said simply, and Debbie had scooted up behind her and laid her head on Adine’s shoulder so she could see what Adine saw and told her, It’s beautiful. And then: I’m sorry.

Jeremiah hopped up onto the window ledge, mewling, back arched, tail rippling at its tip. Good dog, said Debbie, running her hand over the cat’s spine. There was something in his fur, some dander or fluffy lint, Debbie plucked it free — a feather. For a moment she assumed he’d clawed open a pillow, something he used to do as a kitten, and then she remembered the bird. Oh no, bad dog, she scolded him, and went into the kitchen.

On the sill sat the newspaper-lined casserole dish into which she’d laid the dove. The window was open, mist hung thick and colourless over the street. In the dish were some feathers, a yolky smear of poop — but no bird. Oh, Jeremiah, sighed Debbie, taking his face in her hands. Did you eat that poor bird? The cat offered a slow, bemused blink, and flicked his tongue over his nose. Then he squirmed away.

Debbie looked under the table, behind the stove, anywhere the feeble creature might have been either dumped or gotten lost. From the kitchen window she struggled to make out the street below, let alone a carcass upon the sidewalk. The fog was solid as cement.

She removed the newsprint from the dish and unfolded it on the countertop as if it might reveal some clue. Maybe the dove had flown? The idea swelled from fantasy to probability. It had been simply stunned, Debbie told herself, and over the course of the night revived and, at some early morning hour, found the strength to push off out the window, caught an updraft that lifted it over the city, up through the clouds into the sky, where it wheeled and danced, maybe, once again free.

AT SOME POINT midmorning, time meant nothing in Cinecity, the images onscreen went live again: first-person footage of the downtown streets, fog whisking this way and that, a faint snowfall sprinkling down. The shot plodded along between office towers, everything silent save the rustle and squeak of popcorn breakfasts taken in the theatre.

These were the first live images Adine and the rest of the full house had seen since midnight, when she and her westend cavalcade had arrived just in time to watch a dishevelled Lucal Wagstaffe and a possibly drunk Isa Lanyess announce they were ending their broadcast. After the analgesic tone of an EBS test the colour bars were replaced with a title card in black and white: The Silver Jubilee, A Second Look .