Pasha Malla - People Park

The Mayor looked into the dark, squinted. Nothing. She spoke carefully: And what is this then? Where are we now?

Why, under the heavens! Under everything.

I thought it was everyone else who was going under?

Yes, he said, I do think that’s the truth, Mrs. Mayor. Though there is some joy to be found in where we are. Perhaps this is the kindness I offer. Speaking with you here and now, at least does, I believe, feel a truer truth. So you ask me where we are, yet you’ve answered your own question. You know the truth yourself. Hell, stated Raven simply. Truthfully, we are in hell — with glimpses of the other side.

ONE OF THE helicopters explodes terrifically. It just pops in the air like a piece of popcorn with a very, very small stick of dynamite inside. Gregory Eternity rises to his feet, erectly. Isabella pulls her legs from behind her head, climbs down from the tree around which’s low-lying branches she’d been coiled, and, smoothing her bulletbelts, assumes her rightful place beside him. Slowly everyone else withdraws or untucks, as flaming debris hurtles down to the Lake like bits of chopper-shaped meteor.

Another helicopter explodes, then another. Mayday, utters the lead pilot as his flying, propellered steed bursts into a ball of flames and he’s flung down insolently to a watery grave, in the water. One by one all the helicopters explode, until there is none left, not even a single one. The pinballs of hope bouncing around everyone’s stomachs vaporize and through the principles of evaporation become gasps of disaster that go wheezing up their cardboard-lined, dry throats, and out into the world between parted lips in brown, thin clouds of sadness.

With nothing stopping them now, the boats sweep fast toward the island. But how utterly weird, they aren’t coming to Budai Beach at all! They’re turning left!

They’re aiming to half-circumnavigate the island, as though it’s a halved apple lying facedown on a plate in the fridge and some bees, right before they die of frostbite, are climbing over its peel. Except upside down. They’re heading to the north shore!

They’re going to try to destroy the bridge! screams Isabella.

Oh shet, responds Gregory Eternity, though his moustaches turn upward at each corner, revealing impeccably bleached teeth, into a smile. Truth is, he’s impressed with Isabella’s prescience, though beneath that smile, or entering his smile and tunnelling down inside Gregory Eternity’s pulsing innards to someplace that we can only call his soul, we might find a dark, viscous blob of something called jealousy. We’ve got to get over there first to defend it, he manages to spew forth from his mouth.

Isabella steps in front of him. The crowd goes quiet. She holds her arms up in a V that could stand for Victory or Vengeance, take your pick. Are we all in together now? she bellows in the voice of a thousand war trumpets played by a cyclone massively. And the crowd bellows back just as loud times however many they are (thousands).

Now the citizen’s army (because that’s what they’re calling it) has to run all the way back across the island. There’s no time to dress! Will the naked army get there in time to meet the invaders’ boats/bees half-circumnavigating the island’s upside-down apple peel? Only time will tell. But how much time? (Same answer.) These are the questions asking themselves of each person as they run north with the hunched-over trot of old people with bowel obstructions, inside each of their own, private minds.

Let’s save the city! screams Isabella. It’s as clear as a freshly unclogged drain that, between the two of them, she’s the one in charge now.

Running along beside her, Gregory Eternity’s moustaches droop shamefully. But he’s not ashamed. It’s hard accepting his position in the reformed hierarchy of authority between him and Isabella, which now posits him beneath her, and her on top. But Gregory Eternity is a modern, accepting man. It will just take time.

The sound of the boats churning their way up the western shore of the island fills the air. Though it might sound improbable, this is how the crowd intuits that whoever is invading them represents an especially despicable breed of evil, one they’ve not encountered here before, even when rival fans come to town for Y’s games and do appleheaded things like litter all over Cathedral Circus, the fuggin dooshes.

At the northern shore the mob arrives just as the boats are coming around the corner by the Whitehall Piers. Their engines rape the air.

Everyone in position, screams Isabella. (She’s explained everyone’s positions along the way through a system of pass-it-along. Simple.)

Maybe a third of the people march out to the clifftops and stand there in a nude line with their guns trained on the Narrows to the west and the approaching invasion, another third scamper up behind them as reinforcements, and a third contingent gambol onto the bridge like a train of ants wandering out onto an island flat that has been folded and laid over a small stream in the manner of a bridge.

Isabella and Gregory Eternity climb to the top of the Thunder Wheel. She starts screaming at everyone through a megaphone. He abides at her side, trying to look proud.

Out on the bridge the people are ready. Yet one weird woman is apart from everyone else. She climbs down under the bridge. She walks out on a trestle. She has no gun. She just stands there, facing west, pale and naked, and the wind tussles her hair like a drunk uncle’s hand, though benign, into a mess of black scraggles.

The boats are fast approaching. The air fills with the clacking clamour of a bunch of guns cocked fast. But the woman apart from everyone doesn’t move. She seems oblivious to everything: to the invaders, to Gregory Eternity trying to get a U- nique! chant going, clapping his hands like someone’s too-keen, embarrassing dad, oblivious to her fellow citizens poised to kill, to the world and all that is in it.

GOOD LOOKIN OUT, Bean, said Griggs, and clicked his radio off.

From the top of the Thunder Wheel the view was astounding. The lake nibbled its way inland. The streets in the eastend’s farthest reaches had become a grid of black water from which houses and trees struggled, and upon these impromptu canals residents of Fort Stone and Bebrog and Li’l Browntown and Greenwood Gardens boated and swam and waded inland toward People Park.

The westend too was a swamp. From Lowell Canal ribbons of green sludge threaded into LOT and UOT. Residents who hadn’t joined the exodus surveyed this warily from upper-storey windows and roofs and the top of the Dredge Niteclub. Only the Mews, swelling bubblelike from the island’s southeast corner, remained, for now, dry.

As from the east so from the west, people were escaping to People Park — great convoys of them on foot, grimly splashing through the water, in and upon various watercraft (rowboats, surfboards, planks) they fled the Zone. Meanwhile, the protest/parade had reached Topside Drive, discovered it flooded, and disbanded — some people had relocated to the common, others milled aimlessly around downtown.

Yikes, said Wagstaffe, lowering his camera.

Too late to sandbag it, said Griggs. Once people are downtown it should be fine but —

Wait, said Magurk, what do you mean should ?

Look at the water, said Wagstaffe. It’s still coming up. Look!

I’ll take your word for it. . Lucal.

Whoa, who are you calling Lucal ? I’m sorry, things go a little wonky and suddenly we forget protocol? What is this, How We DON’T Do ? What if — he swung the camera at Magurk — we were actually broadcasting?