Three Moments of an Explosion

  “Will you calm down?” Stacey said when I finally got hold of her, when Tor didn’t come home. “I thought she was on her way to you. No, I don’t know where she is and if she doesn’t want to call you that’s her prerogative. Seriously I don’t know what went down between the two of you but don’t act like I’m the dick here, OK? It’s not like someone snatched her, she got in the car herself.”

  A car, a black car, waiting outside the house. Stacey doesn’t know from cars. Not a limo, something more casual. Two or three guys in it, she thinks, not in suits or anything like that, black polo-necks maybe. Just some guys. Guys Tor must have known, she thought as she watched from her front room, because after Tor saw the car waiting and leaned into the side window, so one of the men could show her a piece of paper, and scribble on it while she nodded and seemed to make her own suggestions, she turned and waved to Stacey and calmly got in with her bags.

  I got Stacey to tell me what clothes Tor was wearing when the car drove off and I recognized every item she described, all old standards, but it turns out that’s not enough any more, that I have to see Tor wearing clothes to get a sense of whose clothes they are. I don’t know who she was when she wore them, or from what condition she was suffering when she got in the car and they drove her away.

  I went to Stacey’s and we had a big row. We patched it up recently because Tor’s gone and Tor’s her sister and one of her favorite people and she wants her back and the cops have been no help at all.

  I’m registered at this conference under an invented name. We decided I’d probably sent the ASP too many letters, and letters that were too agitated, to attend under my own.

  We’ve had disease control up in Treemont. I steered clear of them. There’ve been more admissions for hardened skin.

  Five weeks after Tor disappeared I woke up sick as hell, and just made it to the bathroom. Even before I looked, I could taste that whatever I’d thrown up was nothing I’d eaten.

  It bobbed in the bowl. It looked like the remains of someone’s birthday cake. From a kid’s party.

  Yes I was scared but I didn’t go to the hospital because you don’t know where that’s going to end up. Who’s going to take you where.

  Brandon died.

  “We’re really sad,” Jonas said. “We’d got to like the dude. And we’d been trying all these things out and some of them seemed to be working. I swear to God we’re getting better at this. We have no idea what we’re doing but we’ve actually started curing some of these people now.”

  You don’t have to understand to have insight to fix things.

  People mess up correlation and causation all the time. Just because we noticed these diseases after Tor started performing them doesn’t mean she caused them. She might’ve done, yes. But honestly I don’t think that’s what she was a vector for.

  There’s a miserable game I play, wondering who Tor’s with—the government, the afflicted, the leaders of that secret ASP cabal, someone, no one. Whether or not she is, or was ever, sick. Whether she’s alive.

  Like he said, Jonas and his colleagues are getting better at dealing with these diseases. I think Tor is exactly what Tor always seemed to be. An incredibly talented performer, whose performances taught, and maybe still teach, healers to heal.

  I can’t make sense of these session write-ups, and that makes me nervous because I’m pretty good at glancing at stuff I don’t know about and getting to grips with it fast.

  I’m not a crazy person, I don’t expect to find out much at this conference, but who would I be not to try? So here I am with TODD BRYANSON, INDEPENDENT RESEARCHER, on my name tag, waiting to talk to a drunken psychologist-cum-stand-up-comic.

  SARS, prions, bird flu. What other barriers have illnesses been jumping? If you knew you were going to face new epidemics from other places, wouldn’t you set in motion programs to train doctors against them? That’s what would be terrible bund sensible.

  We should have put a proposal in. We should have presented. I’m not really joking. I’ve made a list of the speculative illnesses so far. I’m going to give it to Gower. She should add it to her routine, or replace her routine with it, because who knows what the stakes are? What we’re being prepped for?

  I’m healthy. I’m sad but I’m healthy. I’m telling you, though, somewhere soon, in Sacramento or Kuala Lumpur or Lagos or wherever, someone’s going to be admitted because their warm flesh arms end in twilit ghost hands.

  RULES

  For millennia no girl or boy made that now-familiar noise or that recognizable shape with their arms. They did not bank or weave, did not yaw with instinctive elegance and mimic a machine. There was a first time. There was one child who first pretended to be an airplane.

  She was an eight-year-old girl. The day before she inaugurated the era she had watched entranced from the edge of a close-cut meadow while a wobbling engine trundled fast forward and made it at last off the ground. She had stared up at its precarious progress with a new kind of delight.

  1) Consider beginnings and endings. Consider their relations.

  Player one draws a horizontal line and calls it “Time.”

  Player two cuts the chronology with vertical strokes in several colors.

  Player three numbers the divisions, according to whatever logic is appropriate.

  The sheet is placed in the center of the table and the digital hourglass (included) is started. Meditate on the schema while that random timer runs.

  The girl’s name was Emmeline, and she went by Nuthatch, according to a brother’s whim. It was she who, tired of making daisy chains with a friend from the valley, stood abruptly and ran up the hill to her mother’s cabin with her arms stiff and cruciform in an unprecedented configuration, mud on the hem of her skirt.

  “What are you doing?” the other girl shouted. “Slow down!” Not because she could not keep up but because she wanted to parse Nuthatch’s motion. She had not witnessed the previous day’s ascent but something in her immediately recognized the necessity of what she saw.

  2) Play commences when the buzzer sounds.

  Player four picks one card from the Integument stack and one from the Geist stack, and places them face up, visible to all. She has thirty seconds to decide on what First Thing the combination of these two cards portends. While the timer runs again, she performs a wordless mime of this inauguratory activity.

  The other players announce their guesses as to what is being mummed. A correct call ends the turn. If the timer runs down without the activity being guessed, no one wins.

  Lastness:

  Play can be interrupted at any time by any player who declares “Final Thing.”

  She must take a card from the Possible stack. She must never reveal her Possible Card to any other player. She must combine its value with those of the other two visible cards, and on that basis decide on an ending.

  All other players must remain silent.

  She must perform the Final Thing as long as she can.

  There will be a last child too. She will play when Earth is mostly cold and mostly dark, and under heaps of granular, grubby ice. The time will not be without joy and it will find its last pleasures in things other than color. Another girl will run to the edge of a cliff and back again, purring like a propeller. That will be anachronistic, but not much more than if she pretended to be a jet: no planes of any kind will have flown for centuries. She will be the last player of a game passed down. She will not know what it is she mimics.

  And after that final, offhand, chilly performance of this girl whose name we don’t yet know, even that trace will be gone and it’ll be the end of this brief epoch and time for other things. Afterwards, all the children will play differently, with their arms held up under heavy clothes into quite other shapes than those of metal wings.

  ESTATE

  Two nights running I woke up with my heart going crazy. The first time, as I lay there in the dark, I heard a group of guys outside. They were running, shouting, “Hurry!” and “We
’ll miss it!” I wondered if I should do something, but I couldn’t hear any fighting or smashing glass. I got up when they were all gone. I kept my light off and parted my blind to look down.

  There was rubbish under the streetlamps. There was a big rectangular bin, its lid open, and all around it was a rim of paper and plastic and leaves.

  It was August. The slats of the blind left black dust on my hand.

  The next night foxes woke me. I knew their swallowed barks but I’d never heard a racket like that before. One night when I was really young, before we moved to the estate, our cat was in heat—my mother explained it to me carefully—and as I was closing my bedroom curtains I saw that the tree at the bottom of our yard was full of cats. They were switching their tails as the light went down. They were all staring, it seemed to me, at me. They started up these boylike horny tom cries.

  I listened to the fox calls and wondered if it was the same sort of thing going on. If they were courting, under city trees, or on the roof of a corrugated shed.

  There’s a park near my flat with a little playground in it, populated by friendly plastic animals. One’s a fox, with bright red fur and a blue cap. I imagined a bunch of real foxes circling that cartoony figure in the dark.

  I went and stood outside. It was much colder than it should have been, like winter. The foxes shut up. Under a lamp was a notice board for the tenants’ association. A torn sign about a coffee morning. Recycling. A meeting called by a social capital group called OBYOSS, about regeneration. The name of one of their organizers was familiar.

  The playground wasn’t far. I went past closed shops and into unlit rows.

  There’s a robin next to the fox. It’s about the size of a three-year-old, and dressed like a pirate. There’s a badger and a pig. They’re the same size: they aren’t to scale.

  A few cars passed, streets away. There was no rain but the air felt wet. I heard muffled percussion. A faint thud-thud-thud. The rhythm of hooves.

  The sounds echoed between the damp walls. I thought I could smell pollen. Light was coming up from an unkempt side street. Something glowing. The beats got louder.

  The air was full of dust and little leaves. I had to squint to see.

  There was a guttering noise. The shadows of street trees jumped madly. Wavering light reflected in the windows of a shop, in the fronts of the machines that, for a few coins, would spit out toys and sweets.

  The light flared and rolled and went out. When I reached the side street I stood with the wind shoving at me. I smelled smoke but there was no fire anywhere. There was no sound.

  I went back the next day. A group of kids were circling a puddle on their bicycles. Two older men struggled with shopping. There were scorch marks high up on a lamppost. In front of one small house a young family giggled at their fussing baby. It grizzled but they seemed delighted.

  “Can you believe it?” its mother said. “You were so ill last night, you little terror! Now look at you!” The baby burped and everybody laughed.

  Their garden was thick with some flowering bush. I doubt it was ever healthy, but to me it looked freshly ripped, missing foliage. I tugged at one of the broken branches, as if my hand was something grazing as it passed.

  Back at the estate, people were clustered in little groups between the blocks. There was a woman there who lives close to me and likes me because I made faces for her toddler one time.

  “You were at my school, yeah?” she said. I hadn’t realized until that moment. “Did you know Dan Loch?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was startled. “I knew who he was anyway.”

  “He’s back.”

  “Right,” I said. “I think I saw his name on something.”

  “Don’t pretend like you don’t care.” She smiled as if we were conspirators.

  When Dan was expelled from our school he and his family had left the estate altogether. I was one of the kids who watched him go.

  The Lochs had lived in a stretch of flats by outbuildings full of maintenance stuff, where addicts would take drugs. We’d climbed up onto the roofs and lay on our stomachs to watch Dan’s family.

  His mum was hauling his younger sister over her shoulder, their crying faces close together. His dad shuffled behind them, a suitcase in each hand. In front of them all was Dan, sniffing the air as if that would decide him which way to go.

  We made no effort to hide. It was all a bit solemn. Dan looked up and acknowledged us with raised eyebrows. He looked at the sun, paused, beckoned, and turned into the city, his family behind him.

  “He was in Paris and South Africa,” the woman said. “Now he’s back.”

  “This the welcoming committee?” I said.

  There were police hovering at the edges of the square but there was no trouble.

  We stayed into the night. A lot of the people there I didn’t recognize. That’s surprising when you’ve been in the estate as long as I have. Some wore country clothes, and sounded like they came from posher areas than ours.

  When it got dark people got more raucous. They listened to music on their phones, and some were even dancing, joke-dancing to show they weren’t taking it seriously. It drizzled.

  A little after ten o’clock I heard a clacking. There was a brief cheer.

  People came from behind one of the towers. Eight or nine of them, in overalls, with sports bags over their shoulders. Each carried a pointed stick, speared litter they shoved into black rubbish bags. They knocked their sticks together rhythmically. There was a woman who couldn’t have been older than nineteen. A man in his sixties, waving like a celebrity. In front of them all was Dan. I wouldn’t have known him if my neighbor hadn’t put him in my mind.

  They conferred. They whispered, pointed in various directions, down passageways and under concrete. They slapped hands at last in a complicated salute and separated. We all picked one of them to go after.

  I followed Dan. I said his name. He glanced. It took him a moment but I could see he knew me.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You alright?” He touched his finger to his forehead and twirled his litter-stick. He was elegant.

  I said, “Dan,” again, but he was gone. A group of teenagers passed me. “Shut up,” one said. “Man’s focusing.”

  Dan fingered walls and bollards. He passed a knocked-over bin and knelt to examine it. We hung back. I felt like I was seeing him leave home again.

  By a concrete ramp and a commercial space that had never been let, the wall was blackened. Dan began to run.

  He was taking us down routes I’d never seen. Behind those blocks the only noises we made were those of our feet and bikes. The bases of the brown towers ran up to the surrounding streets, which were not deserted. Cars crossed the bridge over the canal.

  Dan stopped suddenly in the light of late-night shops and we all stopped with him and he stared into shadows and derelict bike sheds, their doors permanently open. He waved at us to stay still. Very slowly, he put his stick and sack down. He took the bag from his shoulders and opened it.

  Firelight flared. There was a roar of burning. A stag walked out of the dark.

  It shone. Its antlers were on fire.

  The stag was huge. It regarded us without fear. The antlers were like the branches of a great tree. They rushed with flame. They sent up oily smoke, lit the cars and the lots and the pedestrians. The antlers spat.

  The stag swung its brawny neck. It walked toward us with forest calm. It paused and lowered its head and lapped at a gutter.

  We didn’t move. It went on at last for the road. I heard screaming. Two men came out of a late-night shop, stared and ran. One fell backward and kept scooting along the pavement on his arse. The other yelled his name and came back for him.

  There was a horrible series of thuds as a car swerved and hit another, and then as a third hit them. Fire spread along the animal’s tines.

  Dan was clicking something together. A rifle. One of the boys on bikes whooped and Dan shouted, “E! Nuff!” without looking round and made t
he kid freeze.

  Clots of stuff fell from the stag’s head and made its pelt smolder. It crossed the road close to us. I smelled the burning hair. The animal was twitching now.

  Dan sighted. His quarry staggered. It hesitated, it swayed. The fire was accelerating, crawling down the antlers. The stag blinked.

  Dan fired.

  The stag spasmed and buckled and bowed.

  There were whoops. But Dan cursed and did something to his weapon. It wasn’t his bullet that had done this. The flames began to take the stag’s big head.

  Dan took aim again. Another car careered across the road. The deer was too lost, shaking too hard to look, if it even had eyes still and they weren’t burnt up. The car slammed into its kneeling body.

  Glass exploded. The burning animal flew so hard into the railing on the bridge I felt the impact in the air. Its antlers splintered, leaving stumps in the head-shaped fire.

  “Jesus Christ!” I shouted. A man fell out of the car holding a bloody wound.

  “Fuck,” Dan said.

  The deer was half off the bridge, fitting. You could see its teeth through the fire pulling back its lips. It lolled. Its weight shifted and it tipped and we shouted, “No!” as if that might stop it falling but it didn’t. It plummeted out of sight. We heard it hit the water.

  “What does that mean?” someone said at last. “Did it work?”

  “You can’t tell straight away.”

  “What do you think?”

  Dan was disassembling his rifle. He saw me looking and rolled his eyes at me in an Ah well way. Gave me a wave and swung the bag back over his shoulder. I think I was the only one who saw him walk quickly away, back into the estate, into the dark under the towers. Everyone else was by the railings, watching the smoking carcass bob rump-up in the canal.

  The council got it out with a crane. They used one from the building site on the other side of the water. They didn’t even have to reposition it. The operator just turned it round and dropped the hook and expertly fished the stag out.