Cooper isn’t sure where he stands on the issue. He isn’t sure a first-world country should be practicing third-world punishments.
He puts the gear stick in park and climbs out to close the garage door because the damn automatic opener broke about two months ago and the service agent is still waiting on parts that were supposed to arrive back then. He can feel the warmth from the ground through the soles of his shoes. He breaks into a sweat a few paces from the door. The breeze is light and feels hot enough to ignite. All week people have been walking around with short sleeves and shortened nerves. He can smell marijuana from the goddamn surfer across the road who likes to spend his mornings and evenings and the hours in between using his lotto money to get as high as a kite. His shirt dampens with each stride. He’s so distracted by the thumb and the heat that he suddenly realizes he’s picked his briefcase back up and is carrying it with him.
“Weird,” he says, and when he turns back to the car it gets even weirder. A man he’s never seen before is standing next to it.
“Excuse me,” the man says, and even though he’s in his midthirties there’s something about him that makes Cooper think of him as a kid, it could be the floppy hair hanging across his forehead, or it could be the corduroy pants twenty years out of date. “Have you got the time?”
“Sure,” Cooper says, and he looks down at his watch, and when he does a sharp cramp explodes in his chest. He jerks the briefcase into his body with enough force to pop it open. The contents spill onto the driveway and a moment later he collapses next to them, every muscle and limb well beyond his control. The pain extends to his stomach and legs and groin, but mostly it’s his chest that hurts. The man lowers the gun and crouches down next to him, brushing his hair out of his eyes.
“It’s going to be okay,” the kid says, at least that’s what Cooper thinks he says, he can’t really tell, because at the same time a chemical smell wafts over him and something is pushed into his face and he can’t do a thing to fight it. It’s at that moment the darkness rushes in and takes him from his collection.
chapter three
The sign says Lost puppys for sail-$5 each. It leans against the side of a brick wall held together by mortar and graffiti. The wall is two hundred meters closer to home than the police station. Leaning against that same brick wall in the shade it offers is a guy in a tattered blue shirt and tattered blue shorts and a hat made out of cardboard that came from a cereal packet. It doesn’t fit quite right but he doesn’t seem to mind. He hasn’t shaved in a while by the look of it and hasn’t eaten real food in about as long. I walk past him and he smiles and asks for loose change, only one side of his mouth moving when he talks, revealing teeth pointed and gray. All I have is the money Schroder gave me, and I give ten of it to him, hoping he’ll spend it on spelling lessons rather than beer. His smile widens and clean white lines appear around the corners of his eyes between all the grime, and I figure his last four months have been worse than mine.
“That gets you two lost puppies,” he says, arithmetic his strong point. “Take your pick.”
I don’t want a puppy, but I look anyway, turning left and right and not seeing any.
“They’re lost,” he reminds me, and tucks the money into his pocket.
I walk into the heart of the city, past office blocks with large glass doors and shops with large glass windows; banks and cafés scattered among them, even the occasional place of worship. Many of the buildings in the city are almost a hundred years old, some even older, the old English architecture looks fantastic when you’re in the mood for it, and it’s hard to be in any kind of mood other than a pissed-off one when the temperature is above a hundred. Most of the buildings are stained with exhaust fumes and soot from over the years, but the beauty of Christchurch isn’t in the architecture, but in the gardens. Christchurch isn’t known as the Garden City for nothing-there are trees almost on every street, the Botanical Gardens are only a few blocks away, and it breaks up the old look of the city more than the occasional modern hotel or office block being built. A couple of the shops still have Christmas decorations in the windows from a few months back, or they’re getting them up earlier this year. It’s creeping up to ten o’clock in the morning and the streets have never looked so empty. It’s as if in the time I was away the Ebola Circus came to town, but of course it’s nothing as scary as that; the heat is keeping people indoors. Those unlucky enough to be out and about are walking slowly to maintain energy, shirts and blouses damp with sweat, people carrying bottled water they’ve bought from the supermarket even though Christchurch has the best water in the world coming straight out of the tap. I cross the bridge going over the Avon River. The water level is lower than normal, and the trees lining the banks are drooping and look like they’re trying to dive in. There are a couple of ducks hidden in the shade of some flax bushes, and another duck floating along the water on his back, his head twisted backward, dark bloated flies swarming its body. I pass a four-wheel drive double-parked at a set of lights, forcing cars to swing out into the opposite lane to get past. The vehicle is coated in dirt, and somebody has written I wish my daughter was this dirty across the back window with their finger. I walk to the central bus terminal and get blasted by the air-conditioning. The terminal smells of cigarette smoke and the electronic board displaying the departure times has had a brick or something equivalent thrown through it. I wait with ten other people for the next ride, a few of them helping to give a pair of lost tourists directions. For the first time in about twenty years I catch a bus in my own city. At the back of the bus a couple of school kids are rolling cigarettes and talking about how wasted they got last weekend, how wasted they’re going to get this weekend, their drunken antics a badge of honor for them. They use fuck as a noun, a verb, an adjective, their conversation littered with the word.
The bus driver barely fits in behind the wheel and there is no obvious sign where his forearms end and his wrists start, and his head seems to come straight out of his shoulders, his neck engulfed by the fat of doughnuts past. We drive past a large group of teenagers with shaved heads all wearing black hoodies and jeans and looking like they’ve all just come from court and getting ready to do something that will send them back. I watch the city and see nothing dramatic has changed; a couple of new buildings and altered intersections, but for the most part it’s identical to how it was before; those who don’t look defeated by it are those doing the defeating. On the outset of my prison stay, four months seemed like a long time for me, and it seemed like time on the inside would come to a standstill while on the outside it would fly by. Now it looks like I haven’t missed a thing.
Clouds of smoke erupt from behind the bus and add to the smog stain that’s building on the back window. The bus pulls over every few minutes and the numbers on board shrink and grow. By the time we hit the suburbs there are only two other people onboard besides the driver. One of them is a nun, and the other is an Elvis impersonator decked out in full Elvis-Vegas-style sequins, and I feel like I’m in the middle of a setup to a joke. The folder Schroder gave me stays on my lap-unopened-the entire time. It has a green cover that is held closed by two rubber bands that I flick with my fingers every now and then. It takes a little under thirty minutes to reach the bus stop closest to home, and it’s a five-minute walk from there that takes me eight in this heat.