SAM SLID BACK the cover from the peephole. The armoire was empty.
If you’re there say something okay, he said, and moved his ear to the door.
Silence. Sam touched his face. The scab was dry.
I know you’re in there okay, said Sam. I know you can make it look like you’re not. But you can’t go anywhere Raven. Sam tried the handles: the boards and chains and locks held fast. There’s no way out.
Sam placed an apple on the tray he’d affixed through a slot halfway up the door. You can have an apple for breakfast. If you want more I can get more.
He pushed it through, heard the dull thud of the apple falling, put his eye to the peephole. From the bare overhead bulb fanned a cone of yellow light that dwindled in the dark corners. Upon the armoire’s newspapered floor sat the apple, gleaming. There was no hint of movement from the shadows, darkness there and nothing more.
If the apple’s bruised I can bring you another one okay, said Sam. Or if you don’t like apples tell me what you like. I have juice. Or water. Or I could nuke you a meal.
Sam waited, eye at the peephole. Nothing.
The phone rang, the sudden burst of it a small explosion in the still room. Sam stood over the console. It alternated ringing and not — a tinny jangle, then silence, and the silence felt expectant, and Sam synchronized his breathing to it: inhale as the phone rang, and exhale between rings, not picking up because it would be the same voice, a deadened echo as though the call were coming from the bottom of the lake. Like speaking to his own drowned ghost.
The phone stopped ringing. The room waited. Then, from the armoire: scraping. Sam held his breath. A thump. And then something scrabbly and wet-sounding — the watery snap and crunch of a mouth biting hard with its teeth into an apple.
AT THE SOUND of fluttering Calum raises his head. Swooping down from above is a grey bird. A pigeon it seems at first but as it stills itself in the air with a slow backward beating of wings it might be a dove, though dirty or dusted with newsprint or ash, he thinks.
The bird, whatever it is, lights upon the railing of the pedestrian walkway, its claws curl around the metal bar, and tilting its head regards Calum with something evaluative or curious. He stares back. He feels cold. He laces his arms around his shins and pulls them close and wedges his chin between his knees. In the bird’s pinkish eyes glitters something suspicious, he thinks. It doesn’t trust him. It can’t be trusted.
Calum says, Go away. And the words again are eaten.
The bird lifts one foot, then the other, puffs, shudders, but doesn’t go anywhere.
So Calum lunges at it — though halfheartedly, if he caught it what would he do. The bird maybe knows this, it makes no effort to fly away. It only regards Calum steadily with those eyes like two droplets of something’s pale and mucosal blood. Calum feints again to smack it but the bird holds its ground undaunted, so he lowers his hand and for a moment the bird looks familiar, he thinks, though his memory feels emptied and what he can’t think is from where or when, or where where might even be or when, when.
He takes another swipe. Deftly the bird swerves out of reach, resettles on the railing, nods, caws, squawks, chirps, what does a bird think or mean to say, is it taunting him or only making noise for itself. Watching the bird gloat Calum feels repelled and repulsed.
Go on, he says, get out of here.
But his voice sounds like a tape played in reverse, each syllable sucks back into itself.
He looks up and down the bridge which narrows identically in both directions to little pinprick endpoints, tunnelling into a sky that has forgotten how to be a sky. Which way to go, does it matter. All that matters maybe is movement, away from this bird.
Calum picks a direction, he doesn’t know which one, and begins to walk.
II
EBBIE AWOKE ALONE. The covers on Adine’s side of the bed were undisturbed.
Adine? she called, sitting up. Adine?
No reply. She got up.
In the den Pop’s bedding remained heaped in the middle of the floor. The bathroom door was open, no one was inside, nor was anyone in the kitchen. Other than Jeremiah, blinking at her from the couch, the apartment was empty — Debbie did not count herself.
Normally the fridge hummed, the mixing bowls atop it jingled. But with no power everything was silent, the air brittle. From the couch Jeremiah, tail alert and coiled at its tip into a fiddlehead, watched her. Debbie shivered, scooped the blanket off the floor and took it to the window nook, swaddled herself, and curled up looking out over the street: but there was nothing to see, UOT was smothered in fog.
Across the room the blank screen of the TV glowed a greenish eggshell hue, it had a light of its own even when it wasn’t on. Where was Adine? Out there stumbling through the city in her sweatsuit and goggles — Adine out in the city, how absurd.
Though there’d been a time when she’d loved the city and in a way the city had brought them together. When they’d met, Debbie had been still new enough to it, having spent her undergrad years mostly on the Institute’s campus and in the adjacent student neighbourhood spoken of myopically as the ghetto. Everything west of the park seemed impossibly vast and intimidating and arcane.
Adine had spent her whole life on the island, she navigated it effortlessly, she knew things and places and secrets. Debbie’s exuberance and naivety invigorated her and so the city came alive for them both. Though it wasn’t just living in the city, it was talking about it: so much happened every day, hilarious and thrilling and sad. So they opened themselves to its people, its streets, its clichés and mysteries, and everywhere they found stories to recount to each other.
Once, during an early-morning Blueline commute, an elderly woman’s newspaper-wrapped fish came alive between her feet, and the woman — so old she was made of dust, Debbie would later poeticize her — calmly took the flopping creature by the tail, beat it to death against the train’s dirty floor, and reclined with a nonchalance meant to suggest the blood and scales at her feet had always been there. Witnessing all this from across the aisle Debbie was already skipping forward to that evening, when she’d tell it to Adine, and they’d cackle together in horror and delight.
Back then despite living on the opposite side of the city she spent most nights at Adine’s, and every minute apart provided stories for their next meeting. But they never had enough time: there was always too much to tell, their voices bubbled overtop of each other’s, everything frantic and urgent — and then! and then! and then! At night they had to start setting two alarms: one to wake them in the morning, the other to indicate a time they absolutely had to shut up and sleep, and after which they weren’t allowed another word.
After a year of this Debbie moved in. Technically she and Adine began to share everything, though quickly there seemed less to share. Something happened: the city lost its drama, fewer were the moments of the sublime, the absurd, the ridiculous. In stitching their lives together Debbie began to fear they’d sealed the space, that chasm of mystery and possibility between them, where what was most alive about their relationship had crackled and zipped.
But if the real city no longer held any magic for them, Debbie had wondered, perhaps Adine’s tiny replica version might. The first time Debbie suggested visiting her Sand City — just to see! — Adine had scowled and scoffed. But after some persuading, up there alone in the Museum’s upper gallery they’d gone quiet before it, almost reverential. Adine ran her hand over the glass. There it is, she’d said simply, and Debbie had scooted up behind her and laid her head on Adine’s shoulder so she could see what Adine saw and told her, It’s beautiful. And then: I’m sorry.