Pasha Malla - People Park

An overhead light came on. She was in an elevator. The doors closed, the cables cranked into motion, and up it took her. There was no gauge of floors, but the little tin box accelerated, faster and faster, lifting her higher. The lights flicked off, then on again: the elevator, now glass, rose out of Municipal Works and climbed the Podesta Tower with views of the city all around, most of it submerged under black lacquer.

They’re all going under save me and you .

To the west, yachts and various pleasurecraft had formed a leisurely armada, abandoning Kidd’s Harbour on strips of white wake. Upon the roof of Old Mustela Hospital patients and staff waved vainly at the media helicopters making passes above, but they just swooped away, onlookers only, not here to intervene. Farther north, at Upper Olde Towne Station something had gone wrong, the Yellowline had collapsed, a train was upended into the swamped street.

There was movement out there too, a cluster of multicoloured dots, people spilling from the train. Some climbed up to tracklevel, others dropped into the flood. And as she reached the viewing deck, with a shudder the Mayor thought of the bottomless alleyway at F Street and Tangent 10: underwater now, while chaos raged on the surface.

She walked out onto the deck, still hesitant, stockings torn. Though she felt hungry. Or not hungry, but hollow. She touched her midsection. Nothing there. She patted, passed a hand through: just space — no torso at all. She was two arms, two legs, and a head, her jacket drooped emptily.

The deck turned. Gloomily the Mayor surveyed the eastend. The incoming water had almost reached Orchard Parkway, chasing residents inland. Cars, their roofs loaded with suitcases and boxes, had been abandoned amid thousands of pedestrians, some pushed shopping carts or pulled wagons loaded with parcels and bags and boxes, others floated rafts buoyed with dumped-out bleach bottles, all of them converged on People Park.

IFC Stadium’s parking lot resembled a beach at high tide. The rides at Island Amusements seemed to struggle out of the water, gasping for air. The deck rotated west, toward the setting sun: the Necropolis evoked a kneecap jutting from a filling tub. Nothing looked like itself, everything looked like something else. Though maybe it was just easier to make sense of things that way.

Some of the Mews escapees doubled back to help with the UOT Station rescue. One lavish pleasurecraft stopped to collect folks stranded on the Dredge’s roof. But instead of bringing them to People Park, it shuttled them off to the mainland. Rats, thought the Mayor, abandoning a sinking ship.

The elevator whirred to life, zipped down to the lobby, collected someone, brought them back up. The Mayor tensed. The doors opened. Standing there was Diamond-Wood, heaped over his crutches. He grinned sheepishly. Draped over his shoulders was her mayoral sash. You’re okay, he said. Good.

IN SINGLE FILE Gip and Olpert followed Pop from Mustela Boulevard through the gates of the Necropolis, Olpert had shed his chaps, they’d gone sodden and heavy, he traipsed along shyly in his skivvies and the shaggy coat. Pop lectured as to why, historiographically speaking, the squabs were flying home to roast.

Speaking of aviants, you are savvy to the birds that used to impersonate these here tombs? An urbane legend, prehaps, though valid.

I don’t, said Olpert.

Not you . It was the boy upon whom I requisitioned.

Gip blinked.

Young man, said Pop. Bend me your ear! And you too, evil one, whom might learn a thing or two things.

But Olpert’s thoughts were elsewhere: his grandfather’s grave was nearby — where? He looked around, felt disoriented, it’d been so long since he’d last visited. .

Well these birds, said Pop, they had gotten lost on their way enmigrating somewhere else, or had been someone’s pet, or came over on a ship, a stow-in. But on any rate, it was very colourful, a parrot of some sort, to actualize there were in fact two: a male and a female. Now the male only had one wing, on the right side, and the female only one wing, on the left, and where the missing wings should have been, you see, the male had a bit of bone in the shape of a key. And the female, do you see whence I’m getting toward, young man? The female of course had the enmatching lock .

Gip’s eyes filled with light. Wow.

Shall I continue, said Pop.

Yes!

Well, said Pop, how do you think they flew?

They locked together, said Gip.

And then?

And then the one with the right wing —

The man.

He did the flying for them on the right side.

And the woman?

She did the flying on the left.

And thus way they flew. Betrothal’d.

Gip nodded.

Should we go? said Olpert, with a glance at the darkening sky. Night’s coming, he said.

Pop glared at him. I say when we sully firth — he paused — and hence? It is now.

But wait, said Gip, what happened if one of the birds died?

Well, said Pop, that’s exactly what transposed. One of them died, and so the other couldn’t fly, and so he was, I believe the anecdote finalizes, forewhence the ban on such animals in our fair city, plucked from his nest and eaten by a dog.

ARMS AND LEGS thrashing, Kellogg scanned the water for Elsie-Anne. All around him people scaled fences and lampposts, others grasped at anything floating by — planks, water jugs, other people. Across the street, a woman atop a schoolbus stared with astonishment at the jagged bone poking through a hole in her forearm. Beside her five people in a huddle formation were either scheming or praying.

The names of missing loved ones rang out, Kellogg joined the chorus: Elsie-Anne! Annie! But there were too many people, he couldn’t see anything, the water roiled, the world reeled, the reek of the flood so thick in his mouth it seemed a dead and festering thing had been laid on his tongue to rot.

Though maybe she’d never jumped. At tracklevel two cars remained railbound, from which the other four hung. Up top people gazed dazedly across the chasm that separated the severed section and where the tracks resumed on the far side of UOT Station, there was no way to Whitehall except by water. Helpers began pulling them away, steering an exodus back downtown. Might Elsie-Anne be among them somehow?

An aristocratic-looking couple breaststroked past as if out for a leisurely dip at the beach. In Kellogg’s periphery someone floundered in the water, a gargly voice choked, Help me, help me, was sucked under, came up sputtering —

Kellogg swept his arms over his head and dove, saw nothing but murk, veered in another direction. The water had the odour and consistency of that foul brown juice that collects in the bottom of trashbins. It tingled on his skin, stung his eyes. It was too much. He surfaced, gasping, Annie, Annie!

An eerie hush closed around his voice. All around people slopped and splashed through the water, calls for help, yelps and shrieks and sobs, but nothing lingered, the air seemed incapable of sustaining sound.

Annie! he cried again, but the word was vacuumed up and lost.

Then: Dad.

There she was, on the balcony of a Laing Towers apartment. Kellogg swam toward her, climbed up, took his daughter’s face in his hands, and kissed her, long and hard.

Annie, I’m sorry, he blubbered, hugging her. I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry.

Familiar saved me, she said. He carried me on his back.

You’re such a good swimmer. I forgot. I’m sorry I forgot, Annie.

Kellogg let her go — she was bone-dry. The sweatshirt was slightly askew, her left nipple winked at him, he adjusted it for modesty. But otherwise Elsie-Anne appeared unscathed, in fact she seemed to have never entered the water at all.