Swarm (15 page)

“It felt like being one of a whole, an enormous body. But it took a long time to get there. The first time I went to protest, with my girlfriend, I was beaten. The police took us a long way out of town. Four hours it took to walk home. Many students, shuffling back to Prague like zombies. My mother didn't want me to go. When I arrived home she wouldn't feed me. She threw the food in the garbage—cabbage and liver slop, something like that. She was a small woman, but she was fat and had a crazy smile, full of teeth.” He touched the bottom of the bottle to his lips. “But none of that mattered. The whole damn thing was tipping and we were pushing it over.”

He sounded like Marvin.

I was excited to hear the rest of the story, but he pointed suddenly at the brick row houses beside us, the same as Marvin's squat. “Built for workers. You've seen the lamp factory?”

I nodded, remembering the huge building Marvin had pointed out, that first morning.

“Founded by Charles Cobden in the 1920s. Business booming up to the '90s.”

“What happened then?” I asked because I'd barely been born.

“Free trade,” he said, as if those words told the entire story.

“Where were you then?”

“In the '90s? Canada. Before that, Mexico.”

“Where you met Phoenix's mother?”

Thomson loudly banged the bottles together and I jumped. Two cats scattered away from the corpse of a small bird.

“Goddamn strays,” he said. “They're everywhere.” He was right: all over the city, animals that people couldn't afford were running loose. Dogs, cats, even exotic birds. Margo once brought home a dead parrot she'd found in a stairwell. She plucked beautiful feathers from it, as many as she could, and then laid it on our lawn. Soon the bird was a putrid rack of bones and we had cats and a few dogs milling around, waiting for the next handout.

“Do you feed them?” I asked. It seemed like something they'd do.

“Eat them, more likely.”

He saw the shock on my face and grinned. Years later, I asked him about that and he told me no, they hadn't yet sunk that low. On the island we did. Anything for a meal.

We were close to the water then, and Thomson stared ahead, eyes squinting into the light off the lake as if trying to pinpoint a small detail in the waves, dark and oil-coloured, a killer whale.

“It was different then,” he said. “We felt morally obligated to avoid violence. Violence would make us like them, like the regime. Now we've embodied our system. We all have to expunge it, shrug it off, even the dissenters. It's heavy and hard and causes self-hatred. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” I lied. We couldn't go any farther. We were at the end of the dock. Thomson stared at the fringe of ice around the wooden footings. A flush of red prickles had spread in his cheeks, accentuating the mud-coloured troughs under his eyes, the white circle around his lips, half hidden by the stubble of beard. I held out the bucket and he took it, but he wasn't finished.

“It's better not to push for the end with violence,” he said. “In the end are the seeds of the beginning and we want them to be strong and good.”

What end?
I wondered. I was young enough that I thought he meant me, my uncertainty at being down there, my new relationship with Marvin.

Thomson handed me the iodine pills. He went down on one knee and pushed the bucket into the lake. Both hands gripped the handle, but it was too heavy and I saw how it tugged on him, how he bent farther, fighting with it. I stepped quickly forward and helped, wrapping my fingers around the hard wire of the metal handle and pulling up on the weight until it slid onto the dock, the water slopping over, soaking our pants and sleeves. Thomson dropped an iodine tablet into each of the bottles and we watched the ochre unfurl.

“Jan Palach. You know him?”

I shook my head.

“Your age,” he said. “At the end of the Prague Spring . . . After the Soviets came in 1968, he set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square.”

“Why?” It astonished me that someone would do that.

“To oppose people's hopelessness, was what he said. But people were hopeless. More so, after that.” He laid one hand on his chest and vibrated it there like he trying to wake himself up, bring feeling back to a numb spot.

“Be cautious of strong feeling,” he told me. “Or of thinking you have no options because you don't like the ones that are there.”

I didn't answer because I didn't know what to say.

Pretty
quickly, back at the diner, Phoenix set me to work again. She had me scrub down the counter and all the tables, benches, and vinyl stools. She handed me a dish detergent container with
BLEACH
written in blue marker down the side. There were no plastic gloves so I used the scrunched-up corner of an old brown bath towel and dipped it carefully into the mixture of untreated lake water and bleach, but my hands ended up red and raw. They stung right through lunch—boiled eggs, sprouts, and raisins from the previous summer—and into the afternoon when I was on to the next thing: untangling the wires on a tarnished solar panel someone had donated. There were others there—the woman I'd seen in the morning, cutting rotten spots out of a pile of tiny hothouse peppers, and Zane, moving quickly despite the huge stone of his round belly. I watched Phoenix, waiting for her to stop or even pause, but she never did, that I saw. It was like she was stronger than everyone else, moving around with a force that compelled us to follow. When night came, and I fought to stay awake without any kind of caffeine, Zane opened the doors and people started coming in. Phoenix hovered at the end of the counter, ladling, while I did what I had done that first night: handed out bread. We launched the soup kitchen like a theatre production and I played my role, my arm moving automatically, but I was too exhausted to feel the kind of meaning or contentment I thought I'd feel. Past midnight, I was too tired to talk or think about anything, so when a pane in the front window was broken, my reaction was dulled.

We were in a booth, three or four of us, Phoenix making tea behind the counter. The doors were already locked. Thomson was talking about how salt was once used as a currency when the front window suddenly shattered and half a brick tore the brown curtain, pulled it off the nails that fastened it. From outside we heard whooping. Phoenix ran. One of the cups tipped over on the counter, the hot water dribbling down. She flung the door open and screamed after them. “Fuck off. You're wasting your fucking lives.”

It happened so fast that we sat there stunned, only Thomson still moving, acting normally, lifting a mug to his mouth. He coughed once or twice but then calmed and Phoenix came back in, her face flushed plum, pulling off her sweater.

“Bastard kids,” she said, and their sound still carried: raucous laughter, fading like animal noises in the woods.

That night I fell onto my thin mattress at the foot of their bed, exhausted, but for a long time I couldn't sleep, wondering if they'd come back. Afraid, until Phoenix asked me, out of the blue, so sudden I thought she must be blurting out words in her sleep:

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, and the springs creaked as she rolled over in the bed. Thomson already snoring.

The
next few days were similar. One task after another, usually arranged by Phoenix. Most mornings I fetched water. Smashed apart frozen beef bones. Dropped lye down the outhouse hole. By the third or fourth day, I felt ready to collapse. It was mid-afternoon and I was gathering the courage to tell Phoenix I needed a nap, even just a short one, when Thomson appeared and asked for my help. Phoenix set down the knife she was sharpening.

“Come on,” he said. “We aren't hosting a state dinner.” It felt like that, as if every day we were readying for an important occasion: a dinner with royalty, a political summit.

Already I'd been to fetch another round of water and it was now nearly gone. I didn't want to go again. I moved closer to Thomson, although I didn't even know what he wanted me for. She looked at me, studied my face.

“Fine,” she said, sounding annoyed, and examined the gleaming blade before setting it down to work on the next dull tool.

Outside, Thomson and I walked along the empty storefronts.

“I thought you could use a break,” he said.

Gently, I slid my hands into my pockets. They hurt from the bleach. I stared down the street at the park at its end, the city beyond.

“This is how she moves forward,” Thomson told me. “How she makes sense of things.” When I didn't respond, he said, “She must always be giving.”

I nodded, but I was thinking that it would be great to be on the receiving end. I felt like a slave. Even my paying job hadn't been so hard.

“Shouldn't people be allowed some freedom?” I said.

Thomson stopped. We stood beside a smashed-up Starbucks I hadn't noticed before.

“You came to us, remember? She isn't the enemy.”

Still, I felt afraid of her, her sternness, the stubbornness of her walls. I wondered if we could ever be friends. Thomson turned the corner and I followed. My eyes filled with tears—mostly because I was exhausted, my hands hurt, I didn't know how much more I could take. I hadn't even contacted Margo. Looking back I realize that was the beginning, Melissa: my initiation, my first understanding of what adult life would be like. Things that you grew up learning: how difficult it is to exist on this earth, to survive.

But Thomson didn't give me any sympathy. “It's only been a few days,” he said, and I pushed the heel of my hand against my cheekbone, wiping away the tears.

We were at the hives by then, down the laneway where I'd first knocked on their window, wanting in. Thomson pushed the last slivered ridge of snow off the white box. His knuckles were covered in scars and one fresh wound, red and scabbed over. Although the nights were warming up, it was still too cold to expose the bees, but I listened as he named each part: hive body or super. Frames, foundation, brood chamber. He laid one hand on the top of the hive and before he could speak, I said, “Home.”

We didn't have enough food to host the soup kitchen that night and the freedom felt like a snow day had when I was a kid. We did have bones, though, and Phoenix set a stock to bubbling in a huge pot, mixing in carrot shreds, broccoli stalks, and a clove of garlic. The hot plate stayed on low, using a trickle of energy from the solar-charged battery pack that had been sucking up the sunlight on the springlike days we were having. The smell made my stomach growl. I was always hungry because of how hard I was working. That day, after the hives, I'd helped clean the chimney and then had gone for more water after all.

Phoenix brought tea into the back room while Thomson stayed in the kitchen. I sat up to accept a cup, leaning my back against the closet door, which pushed inward from my weight. Phoenix's cup cooled on the coffee table as she worked on mending one of Thomson's shirts.

When I was tired of the silence, I asked, “What's the plan for tomorrow?”

“More of the same.”

I nodded. Tiny leaves bobbed on the tea's surface.

“Does Marvin ever come by?”

“You're still thinking about him,” she said, and I pushed my shoulders up in a shrug. It was true: he ate at me, partly because I felt forgotten.

“He's good-looking,” Phoenix said.

“Yeah.”

“And he knows it.”

“I guess you know him well,” I said. She didn't answer so I took a breath, about to dive. “He told me about you, in Mexico.” I nudged my head to one side. “Before.”

The shirt slumped on her lap. It was blue, the kind a businessman might once have worn: a pointed collar, wide cuffs. “He's quick to share everybody's stories but his own.”

“You don't like him, do you?”

She shifted. I saw the slight give in her face as she decided to answer.

“We have history.”

Sounds came from the kitchen: the splash of water, the ting of hard things—fingernails, Thomson's ring—against the aluminum bowl used as a washbasin. Her eyes lifted, met mine.

“Not like that. Not sexual.” She picked out a thread. “Thomson knew Marvin's mother from university. They'd been lovers, then friends. We moved in with them when we came from Mexico. We were children, like brother and sister.”

I hadn't seen any sibling closeness between them, only a kind of wrestling, arguments over principles.

“I understand him,” she said, “but I can't help him.”

Marvin seemed like the last person who needed help, who needed anything, actually. We were silent, breathing in the scent of mint. The night had settled. She sat against the black square of the doorway, like an actress on stage.

Finally I said, “Tell me where you come from.”

Candles cast drifting veils of light over her face. I watched the slow reveal of her wide forehead, cheeks, lips, as she told me about the hollow, breathy howl of jungle monkeys, her parents' stuccoed house where spiders crawled out of the cracks, how they'd run a stick around the rim of a log hive and pull out drooling honey. The story looped back, skipping over her mother's violent death, to the cold Canadian November, Marvin's mother's home, the tulip tree in the front yard with its huge pink blooms turned to frosted clumps. In the kitchen, Thomson sang in Czech. Phoenix's voice dropped so I had to lean forward to hear.

“We had to come here,” she said. “At his rooming house there were used needles on the floor and everyone smoked and his . . .” she swallowed hard, sat back, and I saw her start to stiffen. “It was in the news, all about this place; how could we not help?”

Her gaze fell away. Abruptly, she stood, took my cup, and it clattered against her own.

“It's history,” she said—meaning, I think,
and the rest is history
—but I didn't correct her. When she left the room, I pushed down inside my blankets and curled onto my side, a trembling vibration inside me, and brought Marvin into my mind, remembering how he'd kissed me, and more.