call me ‘darling’ or ‘honey’ or something normal? Why does everything have to be one of your stupid geeky references?’
I didn’t reply, and after a silent while we gathered ourselves together and got going. Crawling out of our hiding place, a jammed together nest of chairs in an empty conference room, we entered the echo-straining silence of an aftermath.
We made for the loading bays, away from the splatted facts of the halls up front. Maybe my ribs weren’t broken after all; this morning I could limp a little better, could almost fake a sleep-depraved shamble. Following Tanya down the hallway, I saw a large dark patch on the back of her jeans; during the night, she’d pissed herself. I sniffed myself and winced. Hair and nails growing, skin slowly shedding. We were ridiculous factories, producing smells and oils and shit and piss. Better things went into us than ever came out.
‘There were footsteps all night. People kept running past. Guns. God, all sorts of horrible sounds. I can’t believe you slept through it,’ she added spitefully, as angry at the word ‘slept’ as she was at me.
I didn’t reply, didn’t feel fully tethered to Tanya’s ragged world. Rather, I felt like a slowly-inflating balloon, tugged at by clean winds. But what would come of it? Would I eventually bulk up to God-size, or would Death creep in, pin in hand, and burst my bubble?
* * *
We emerged into chill light, shading our eyes, and saw how, overnight, new structures had risen alongside Vancouver’s green glass towers. We wouldn’t have been able to see this new architecture with our old eyes, mind you: we saw them with our new ones. Sharp white spires of thought, thin as needles, pierced the sky, pierced everything on the ground. All my precious orphan Nod-words were crawling closer, each with their own particular, pressing agenda: chokepear, chatterpie. Yesterday’s Blemmye had only been the herald of this new world, a Silver Surfer to the slowly-advancing Galactus whose gargantuan form was drawing nearer and nearer to our blue sky.
‘Tanya, I…’
But that’s all I said. In the time it took those two words to leave my mouth, I grew sick of my voice, physically ill from intent.
A billion miles over to my right, Tanya didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d spoken at all. In the sunlight, the skin around her eyes was cracked and dry as a riverbed. She scowled at me, then quickly turned away. I pictured middle-aged couples with nothing left to say to one another but with years and years of life left to live out, sitting in shamed and furious silence beside one another. In restaurants, in cars, on holiday beaches.
* * *
When we were about halfway back to our apartment, we came upon a crowd surrounding a woman standing atop a concrete bench in the middle of one of those tiny roundabouts the city installed back in the 1980s to slow traffic and dissuade johns from cruising for hookers.
‘I know how to sleep!’ the woman cried. ‘I know!’
She was in her forties, with the look of someone grown thin and old waiting for something that she’d known all along was never really going to come her way. Even if nothing was coming, you still had to wait: those were the rules. And if you were waiting anyway, you inevitably ended up pretending that your vigil wasn’t really in vain. To salvage a little dignity. And besides, maybe if you faked it long enough, you’d get lucky and hope would pop up like a morning mushroom on a dewy morning, suddenly whole and instantly there. No one could really say it was impossible, not really. No one knew for sure.
Anyway, this woman had grown tired long before the world ended: I could see it in her anonymous hair colour, in the way her jeans fit, in the list of her shoulders.
Her audience pressed close, trampling the ranks of city tulips festooning the roundabout.
‘I know how!’
No one believed she knew anything. Her eyes were too red and raw for her to be in possession of some
I didn’t reply, and after a silent while we gathered ourselves together and got going. Crawling out of our hiding place, a jammed together nest of chairs in an empty conference room, we entered the echo-straining silence of an aftermath.
We made for the loading bays, away from the splatted facts of the halls up front. Maybe my ribs weren’t broken after all; this morning I could limp a little better, could almost fake a sleep-depraved shamble. Following Tanya down the hallway, I saw a large dark patch on the back of her jeans; during the night, she’d pissed herself. I sniffed myself and winced. Hair and nails growing, skin slowly shedding. We were ridiculous factories, producing smells and oils and shit and piss. Better things went into us than ever came out.
‘There were footsteps all night. People kept running past. Guns. God, all sorts of horrible sounds. I can’t believe you slept through it,’ she added spitefully, as angry at the word ‘slept’ as she was at me.
I didn’t reply, didn’t feel fully tethered to Tanya’s ragged world. Rather, I felt like a slowly-inflating balloon, tugged at by clean winds. But what would come of it? Would I eventually bulk up to God-size, or would Death creep in, pin in hand, and burst my bubble?
* * *
We emerged into chill light, shading our eyes, and saw how, overnight, new structures had risen alongside Vancouver’s green glass towers. We wouldn’t have been able to see this new architecture with our old eyes, mind you: we saw them with our new ones. Sharp white spires of thought, thin as needles, pierced the sky, pierced everything on the ground. All my precious orphan Nod-words were crawling closer, each with their own particular, pressing agenda: chokepear, chatterpie. Yesterday’s Blemmye had only been the herald of this new world, a Silver Surfer to the slowly-advancing Galactus whose gargantuan form was drawing nearer and nearer to our blue sky.
‘Tanya, I…’
But that’s all I said. In the time it took those two words to leave my mouth, I grew sick of my voice, physically ill from intent.
A billion miles over to my right, Tanya didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d spoken at all. In the sunlight, the skin around her eyes was cracked and dry as a riverbed. She scowled at me, then quickly turned away. I pictured middle-aged couples with nothing left to say to one another but with years and years of life left to live out, sitting in shamed and furious silence beside one another. In restaurants, in cars, on holiday beaches.
* * *
When we were about halfway back to our apartment, we came upon a crowd surrounding a woman standing atop a concrete bench in the middle of one of those tiny roundabouts the city installed back in the 1980s to slow traffic and dissuade johns from cruising for hookers.
‘I know how to sleep!’ the woman cried. ‘I know!’
She was in her forties, with the look of someone grown thin and old waiting for something that she’d known all along was never really going to come her way. Even if nothing was coming, you still had to wait: those were the rules. And if you were waiting anyway, you inevitably ended up pretending that your vigil wasn’t really in vain. To salvage a little dignity. And besides, maybe if you faked it long enough, you’d get lucky and hope would pop up like a morning mushroom on a dewy morning, suddenly whole and instantly there. No one could really say it was impossible, not really. No one knew for sure.
Anyway, this woman had grown tired long before the world ended: I could see it in her anonymous hair colour, in the way her jeans fit, in the list of her shoulders.
Her audience pressed close, trampling the ranks of city tulips festooning the roundabout.
‘I know how!’
No one believed she knew anything. Her eyes were too red and raw for her to be in possession of some
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