Pasha Malla - People Park

Surely Starx would have been better at this sort of thing, the man was a giant, a menace, a coil of rage. Also he had on boots. Olpert wore loafers and anger was a language he’d never learned. In fight-or-flight moments he preferred to just stand, to stand and wait. To Olpert life was a negotiation of terror — at the world, but also at himself, as a part of it.

He’d only met Starx the week before, his first visit to the NFLM Temple in two decades. Prior to that he’d sat through the unveiling of his grandfather’s portrait alongside the other departed Original Gregories, afterward been granted conciliatory Full Status: Helper Level 1 (Probationary), funnelled the ceremonial pint of schnapps, sat while his legs were shaved by a hunting knife, sprinkled the clippings into the Hair Jar, thanked everyone profusely for the opportunity, and never returned.

Twenty annual newsletters arrived over twenty Decembers, each one junked. In that time Olpert took a job as overnight security at the city’s Department of Municipal Works, ten p.m. to six a.m. shifts paging of magazines in the building’s marble-pillared foyer. At dawn he was relieved by a woman named Betty and took the ferry from Bay Junction to the Islet, then walked home to a roominghouse where the four other lodgers existed only as crusty dishes piled in the shared kitchen sink and occasional thumps or groans from behind their bedroom walls. Also one of them was stealing Olpert’s apples.

So went Olpert’s life through his thirties, into his forties, punctuated with the sporadic glory of the Lady Y’s, his season tickets renewed devotedly each campaign. His body aged: the rusty mop atop his skull thinned and withdrew, his torso softened, the mightiness of his pee stream dwindled. As a kid he’d been an old soul, sombre and serious, taking nightly walks around the Islet with his hands clasped behind his back, and had always assumed in adulthood he’d at last find a home within his own body. Yet at forty-two he still felt apart from himself. Betty suggested a girlfriend might help, instead Olpert took to keeping moles: half his small room was taken up with a terrarium in which they burrowed and lived their delicate, private lives.

In March one of his housemates had taken a message: Olprt Balie call Griggs , and there was a number: 978-0887. A bland, almost robotic voice answered — NFLM Temple, Head Scientist speaking — and explained that all Helpers, even inactive ones, were required at a mandatory meeting that weekend. You work security, Bailie? asked Griggs, and Olpert told him sort of, yes. Well we can use you then, Griggs said, make your grandpappy proud. And at this Olpert felt something shrivel in his chest.

The following Thursday night he ferried to Bay Junction and switched to a Yellowline westbound to Lower Olde Towne. The Temple was two blocks up Knock Street, housed in what had at one point, before the Mayor’s sweeping reforms, been a police station. The building’s history was hinted at over the doorway: in rusted steel lettering, OLDE TOWNE POLICE SIA ION — one-and-a-half T’s had fallen, the half having maimed a postwoman, the lawsuit was ongoing.

Olpert paused on the doorstep, flooded with memories of that year spent trailing his grandfather into the bi-weekly meetings, less at the old man’s side than in his blindspot. As a Recruit, he’d have his mouth ducktaped and spent meetings wedged into a Little Boy Desk. Later everyone but the Recruits pounded schnapps and staggered into the neighbouring Citywagon Depot to unleash orange splashes of meaty man-vomit.

The door swung open and standing there was a six-foot-tall moustache. Bailie! Remember me? growled the moustache. He tapped his nametag — Reed — and hauled Olpert into a handshake that felt like losing an arm to a trash compactor.

I was L1 when you were a Recruit, said Reed. L2 now though.

Olpert recognized him: a manic character keen on workshopping masturbation techniques, his own involving slit fruit.

Reed rattled his bones with a clap on the back, screamed, Diamond-Wood, ready for your ducktape? and leapt away to wrestle a kid on crutches into a headlock.

At a sign-in desk inside the doors, between hauls on an inhaler a Helper named Bean handed Olpert a nametag — in a child’s scribble: Belly — and told him. You’re the only call-up, you know that? You start your own club or something?

Olpert faltered.

Just fuggin with you. Great to have you back. Now head on in, guys’re just getting their shine on.

Little about the Temple had changed. The walls were still panelled in a plastic approximation of wood, the floors the chipped tile of an elementary school gymnasium, track lighting flickered by the bathroom doors — one denoted with an M, the other with an upside-down W. Queues to both toilets choked the corridor, and whenever a man came out the next one went in fanning the air in reverent disgust.

Everywhere men performed manhood: punching, wrestling, grunting, roaring — there was so much roaring. All the Helpers wore nametags, official NFLM golfshirts, khakis, and the generic black sneakers of elementary school custodians. Olpert’s own uniform, resurrected from his leaner, lither Recruit days, spandexed his body, and his shoes — loafers, always loafers — seemed conspicuously unsporty and brown.

From the recroom came the burnt sour smell of too-strong coffee, pingpong ticktocked within a rumble of voices. Helpers sprawled on recliners, the bigscreen chopped between classic episodes of the incredibly popular Salami Talk and the NFLM’s own We-TV fixture (mostly pingpong). In the library things were more docile: a half-dozen men swirling snifters of schnapps debated the topic of Helping. Beyond this Olpert hovered as a child might outside his feuding parents’ bedroom.

Well people here just don’t seem to appreciate how we hold the city together, a man was proselytizing, to murmurs of agreement. Most people, he continued, most people wouldn’t know what to do if we stopped helping. It’d be chaos!

A different man jumped in, lisping: Juθt baθic θurvival, people have no idea how to θurvive if they have to. They’ve got it too fuggin eaθy.

Dack, come here, growled the first man, let’s see how you’d get out of a chokehold.

Some shuffling, a pause. The first man was flipped on his back.

See? he called from the rug. That’s how we do.

That’θ how we do, confirmed Dack.

Another man spoke up: My neighbour, you know what he’s got in his garage? Nothing. Honestly, it’s amazing, shelf after empty shelf — not even a hose .

Amid jeers and snide laughter, Olpert thought of his own garage: the roominghouse didn’t have a garage.

He drifted back through the foyer into the dimly lit, high-ceilinged, pew-lined Great Hall. The walls were the same fake wood as the rest of the Temple, but stained darker, suggesting the kitschy austerity of a stripmall funeral parlour. Ringing the room were portraits of late Original Gregories — and here, by the door, was Olpert’s own grandfather, face youthful and taut, gazing down along a pelican’s beak of a nose.

From the front of the Great Hall came a smashing sound — a gong, the Summons, the night’s assembly would soon begin. One by one the High Gregories emerged from a semi-secret portal that led to the Chambers and took their seats upon the dais. In the shadows, wielding a felt-tipped mallet, stood a massive, bullet-shaped man with no discernable neck — the Summoner — beside whom the gong hissed into stillness. Had he always been there, Olpert wondered, lurking in the dark?

With a great crash the Summoner struck the gong again. Last up from the tunnel appeared Favours, pushed out in a wheelchair by a ducktaped Recruit. Favours, the final remaining OG, appeared to have been unearthed from the grave: a face made of dust, eyes that ambivalently surveyed the living world as though already glimpsing the other side. The Recruit positioned him upon the dais and retreated.