Pasha Malla - People Park

I just need that book, Pearl said gently, gesturing at the window.

Oh?

Please, Pearl said, producing her wallet, peeling off bills. I’ll buy it. I can pay. See?

And the door opened a little more.

WITH THEIR GLORIOUS hearts blazing in their eyes Gregory Eternity and Isabella lead the bloodthirstily heroic and still somewhat aroused mob through the streets of the city toward Budai Beach. Under all those thousands of stampeding feet the earth shakes like a weeping child who stops crying for a moment when offered candy but then has the candy whisked away and eaten, right in front of his/her face, and so erupts into a fit of such violent, wracking sobs that his/her body shudders like an earthquake. Or else is just shaken for being obnoxious.

Halt, cries Isabella, and takes up the binoculars she has procured from Gregory Eternity and through which now she peers.

They’re closer, she imparts. The invaders, she clarifies.

Gregory Eternity nods sagely, armed with the knife of this knowledge. Send in the airstrike! he screams with the authority of a man without a drop of fear in his 100 percent brave and fearless blood. Then he pulls out his actual knife, which he knows how to hold properly so as to punch and cut, and does so, examplarily. (This fugger’s ready for anything .)

Overhead some helicopters lope chopping along and hover above the gathered mob like hovercrafts except in the sky. The lead pilot leans out the window and jabs a thumb-is-up gesture to the crowd, which (crowd) cheers with the mania of a hundred thousand people who are really, really excited about something: vengeance.

Go get ’em, screams Gregory Eternity, stroking his moustaches pensively.

The helicopters sweep out over the Lake like a flock of bees through a hole in a window screen that someone has punched there in blind rage, probably because her daughter is journalling about her, and here now the bees come, hungry for the succulently spoiling contents of the fruitbowl. Only this time the fruit is going to be blown to smithereens.

Let’s keep going, screams Isabella.

While the helicopters go out over the Lake to bomb the invaders, the mob moves down Parkside West toward the shores of the very same Lake. Their weapons are poised. Their readiness to fight for everything they believe in has not abated, nor been replaced with mutinous laziness, which in this particular case would amount to sedition.

Out over Perint’s Cove the helicopters’ machine guns start blazing a rat-a-tatting chorus. One of the invading boats explodes in a ball of orange, hot flames, then sinks. The crowd explodes in exultant eruptions that spray everywhere in a scorching lava of joy. But when that lava cools it becomes the hard and uncompromising bedrock of stick-to-itiveness. Eyes narrow. Fists clench. Resolve is up-plucked.

They’re at the beach now. As the helicopters dodge retaliatory fire from the evildoers, Isabella licks the barrel of her gun, as is so often her wont.

Gregory Eternity flexes his considerable pectoral muscles, one then the other, as though they’re in conversation. In fact he’s having an imaginary conversation in his brain between them: Let’s do this, says the left one. Okay, replies the right, let’s. And so forth. Then he twirls the ends of his moustaches into points sharp enough to impale cubed squab, kebab-style (squababs, his favourite food). Then he dons shades that match Isabella’s, and staring at her reflection in his lenses, she says, Do we have time? He knows exactly what she means. Do we have time not to? he replies, coolly unzipping.

While Isabella and Gregory Eternity are taking each other the rest of the crowd strip and follow their masters as guides. Yet no one can quite achieve the same range of positions or heights of ecstasy. If ecstasy is a ladder Isabella and Gregory Eternity are balanced way, way up on the top rung and whoever’s holding the bottom better not let go, because the lovers will come hurtling down and crack their skulls open and splatter their brains like cerebral cortical stew all over the pavement.

THE OVERALLED line-jumper had wheedled to the front of the line at the base of the Slipway, a few hundred spots ahead of Kellogg and Elsie-Anne on the far side of Crocker Pond. Kellogg’s wishes upon this man for a lonely death were interrupted with a honk from the NFLM megaphone. All right, people, shouted its operator, we’re ready for the first wave!

Helpers ushered a hundred-strong contingent up to Parkside West Station, the big guy leading the way, clapping his tiny hands, whistling and jolly as could be.

The queue shuffled forward. Four helicopters now circled the park, each bearing the insignias, Kellogg noted, of mainland TV networks. A train slid into the station, loaded, headed off south, another group was led up the slope. The sun beat down. Kellogg sweated through his shirt in abstract patterns, Elsie-Anne drooped at his side.

The boyfriend half of the student couple returned from some reconnaissance mission. The riots in the Zone are coming this way, he said. Gangs trashing the city as they go.

It’s those people who live in Whitehall, said the girl.

It’s finally happening, said the boy.

It is, she said.

It: the pronoun lodged in Kellogg’s brain. Whatever was happening was becoming an it , an it that history would later name more specifically. For now it was it , and the careful order of the people, their submission to the uniformed authorities, suggested that everyone recognized they were living an it , helpless and servile to it , whatever it might be.

Exciting, said Kellogg, and the students’ expressions wilted into disgust.

Another train arrived, collected passengers, the line moved forward.

We’re next, Annie, said Kellogg, and Elsie-Anne said, Yes, it’ll all be over soon.

They were relieved of their luggage — You’ll get it on the ferry, explained a Helper — and directed up the hill. The air felt tight, the heat stifling, their ordered march regimental.

At streetlevel the group collided with an incoming mob. The rioters, Kellogg assumed, and braced for confrontation. But no, this was a parade, subdued and behaved and NFLM-sanctioned. Still, there were suddenly people everywhere, and amid the confusion, as Helpers struggled to segregate the evacuees, the student couple slipped into the procession north to the Narrows without a word to Kellogg, who watched them go feeling abandoned, though he’d never gotten their names.

A Helper hollered, Nonresidents, keep going, take the escalators, and Kellogg and Elsie-Anne went where they were directed, rode the escalator in silence, waited at the turnstiles for further instructions.

As the movator began conveying people out to the platform, Kellogg thought enviously of the students. If this was an it , he reasoned, shouldn’t he be more of a participant in the drama? Like those young folks, stealing off to a new adventure. But what about Ruben Martinez, the photographer, whose defiance had only gotten him punished. .

Maybe action was too dangerous. Instead Kellogg entertained fantasies:

Sir, he imagined a Helper saying, we’re not letting you leave.

But, Kellogg would scream, my wife’s from here!

Only people who have gone through the proper channels, sir, are getting priority clearance now. And if your wife, as you say, is a resident —

Former resident. She used to live here, and doesn’t now, because we live elsewhere, and her name like mine is Poole but you’ve got it as Pode !