Pasha Malla - People Park

A gust of wind scuffled the Jubilee banners hanging from a nearby lamppost. The birds sang, the sun shone down, the weather was a mildewed blanket draped over People Park. Overhead, a helicopter made a pass, the air thrummed. Kellogg looked up: with his feet dangling from the cabin, a cameraman filmed the scene.

OUTFITTED IN A knee-length fur coat and shearling chaps and mohair slippers, wet clothes discarded in the alley out back of the Mount Mustela Fur Concern, Olpert Bailie told Gip, Wait here, and edged back out to survey the street. He slid behind the rack from which he’d stolen the furs, and flinched at a sudden burst of gunfire — no, only an ineffectual dappling of fireworks shot into the daylight. The tailend of the parade at last moved off along Tangent 10, vacuuming sound with it.

Two Helpers lingered in the Citywagon Depot, packing up pyrotechnics. Otherwise Mustela Boulevard, from its bottom end, where the lake was beginning to spill over the bluffs, all the way up to the iron gates of the Necropolis, was desolate. A light wind stirred the parade’s detritus of cardboard platters and softdrink cups, paper streamers, Redapple butts, dead sparklers and confetti, then settled, and everything was still.

Olpert ducked back into the alley. Gip wore his knapsack overtop a stole and fleece bodysuit. For headwear he’d insisted on a pillbox hat, cocked jauntily.

Warmer? said Olpert.

What about that other man?

He’s off on his own now. He’ll be okay. We’ve got to get you to your parents.

But —

No buts. There are bad people looking for you, and two of them are out there. I can drive us, but I need to get a pass first and it’s a bit of a walk from here. Can you make it?

And then? You’ll take me to the bridge so I can finish the illustration?

I’ll take you to your parents, said Olpert, and they’ll take you home.

Oh, said Gip. I’m hot.

Keep the furs on until you warm up.

But I’m already hot!

From the sidewalk came footsteps. Olpert whisked Gip down the alley, out into the Courts and Paths and Crescents and Ways of Mount Mustela, west toward the Temple, abandoned save the Hand and the twins, loading tools into a great canvas sack, and, locked in his basement cell, Pop Street, who moaned, I can hear you, please help me, I’m subterrained below. Please help me. Please.

RS. MAYOR, perhaps I too have failed at the task of living.

You. . too ? Are you suggesting I’ve failed? I haven’t failed. You cut me in half, that’s not failure — other than failing to stop you. No, I’ve not failed. What are you talking about.

If I put you back together it’s just so predictable .

But it’s the right thing to do!

The right thing. Who decides what is right and wrong? It’s just tradition, that’s all.

Tradition — what are you talking about. It’s my body.

It’s my body too.

No. No it is absolutely not.

No?

You can’t come here and perform these tricks —

Tricks ? I beg your pardon? What a rude suggestion. My illustrations are the honey of adventure with which I sweeten life’s bitterness! Whomever they do not please doesn’t deserve the status of human being. People —

People? You don’t care about people. All you want is to be looked at, to be watched, to hear them chant your name.

But Mrs. Mayor, up there onstage, I was actually watching them .

Why?

To observe, to. . see. To witness their wonder. For my goal, as ever, was not merely exhibiting wonder, as some hawker or showman, but the revelation of a truth that, when one turns away, provokes more profound wonder. Did I do that, Mrs. Mayor?

I don’t know. I didn’t watch.

She who believes the world’s secrets should remain hidden, Mrs. Mayor, lives in mystery and fear.

But you said this was about fear. You said you wanted people to feel afraid!

Well perhaps I was misguided.

I would say so.

I almost feel bad about it now.

You should.

I said almost.

WHAT WAS THIS place, thought Pearl, moving west through downtown, and where might her son be in it? After so many years away, the city’s connective tissue — every corner that meant nothing to her, every neighbourhood in which she’d never known anyone — dissolved to nothing. In her mind the island had shrunk into a few neighbourhoods enjambed one to the next, condensed and imaginary, a shrunk-down dreamscape inhabited by a distant past version of herself. And Pearl ruled every inch of it.

That was not the case as she pushed along Trappe against the crowds flooding toward the park. A parade, she realized, but solemn, almost funereal. There were no floats. Just bodies trudging through the tropical heat. As they passed she searched for someone she knew, someone to help her find her son. But the faces were faceless. The crowd treated Pearl as a stream treats a stone, oblivious and flowing resolutely on its way.

There’d been a time when Pearl’s picture regularly graced the front page of The Island Word , she was interviewed or discussed on IBCTV, kids felt bigger having met her — adults, a little small. Now she was no one, ignored and irrelevant, foreign and strange. .

The skyscrapers less scraped than hung from the sky. The city made her long for home, her real home, what kind of way to live was this, everything cement/steel/glass. The spindly trees wavering out of the sidewalk were cruel jokes on nature, leafless and bare, summer’s sad ghosts. And all these people! How could humanity exist in a place where a person was just another piece of the scenery?

Where was Gip, where had he gone, had he been taken. He could be behind her now, swept along on that tide of bodies, Pearl couldn’t look everywhere at once, only drift and hope that chance would carry her son into her arms. But the city was too huge. Faith in a place like this was stupid and vain. She needed a strategy, something firm and real. If he thought Raven had chosen him for something, what would he do? Where would he go?

Into Mount Mustela the crowd thinned. From a sidestreet a couple about Pearl’s age appeared rolling a wagon loaded with bags and boxes — and kids. She watched them, pressed together in a tight little bundle — father, mother, offspring — as they crossed the street and hustled past. Pearl headed north up the Boulevard, past Inkerman’s, a tailor, a rug merchant, a travel agent. And then, just before the fur concerns began, here was Bookland: a squat hovel, ramshackle and ancient.

In the front window, atop a velvety black cloth and eponymously topping a pyramid of copies was Raven’s Illustrations: A Grammar . Pearl tried the door — locked. The lights were off, the shelves cast in a dusty grey pallor. Yet deep within the store was movement. A woman poked her head out between the stacks, and disappeared.

Please, said Pearl, knocking again. Please, I know you’re in there, I’ll just be a minute. The woman moved in a cautious hunch out of the shadows, fiftyish, in a cardigan, skirt, and slippers. She stood behind the window display assessing Pearl, a hand at her neck, possibly taking her own pulse.

I’ll be quick, said Pearl. This was met with a stony look. She took a different tack: My son’s missing, she said, loud enough to be heard through the glass, yet with softened eyes, hands clasped in an imploring gesture.

The door cracked. I’m only open by appointment, she said through the gap.