City in flames, p.9
City in Flames, page 9
On the message board, most people were cautiously defending the intention behind the attack. Others remained silent on the question while checking in to say they were OK. UpHill had asked about Sara, and she had responded with a quick “I’m okay” to avoid any further discussion and any thought about her previous posts. Later, she’d opened a bottle of wine. She only wrote to Kevin after pouring the end of it. Now she was trying to focus her eyes and catch her typos.
KVN_07: Right now you want to?
QueSaraSara: Yesssss
KVN_07: Haha OK, I guess
QueSaraSara: Amazing! OK I’ll call u
Sara looked in the mirror. Her hair had grown out in the last several months, far past her shoulders, longer than she’d had it since high school. It was getting hard to contain. She adjusted the lighting and lay down on the bed before calling. She checked herself one last time on the screen as the phone rang. Her face moved slowly from side to side. When Kevin picked up, there was a delay—real or imagined, Sara couldn’t tell anymore—and Kevin’s head seemed to morph out of hers.
“Hey,” Kevin said. His face scrambled as he connected. Then his video stabilized, and there he was. He smiled so gently and so naturally that Sara became immediately aware of all the wine it had taken for her to suggest the call. She tried to keep an eye on what she looked like, but it took all her attention just to focus on him. His face was chubbier than she remembered. His hair was short and freshly cut. There were three freckles on his left cheek that she had never seen. Sara leaned her face into the phone to examine more closely.
Kevin laughed. “You okay over there?”
His voice was coming through clearly now after cutting out slightly before. Sara heard it so infrequently that it still stunned her. It was always lower than she imagined it. Grave in a way that clashed with Kevin’s small frame and with the caring look he was giving her now. It seemed alien—like someone had implanted it into Kevin’s body.
“Oh yeah,” she said. Her own voice surprised her. “Just taking a good look at you.”
There was silence for a second, and Sara became conscious of the fact that one of them would have to fill it.
“You have a voice for radio, you know?” she said.
Kevin laughed. “Isn’t that what people say when someone isn’t very good looking?”
“No,” Sara said, dragging out the o a bit too much. “That’s a face for radio.”
“Right.” Kevin blushed a bit. “Obviously,” he said.
“Anyway,” Sara said, “what I mean is that anyone who only heard your voice would think you were, like, a really serious guy.” She dropped her voice several octaves at the end, then regretted it immediately. Ideas were moving from her head to her mouth a little too fast now.
“But you’re not serious,” she kept going. “I mean you are, but you’re not serious.” Her voice dropped again. Kevin’s eyebrows were raised, but he was grinning.
“You know what I mean,” Sara said.
Kevin laughed. “Yeah, don’t worry,” he said.
“You probably get that all the time, right?”
“No, not really, actually.”
“It’s just me?”
“Yeah,” Kevin said, then paused. “No one else has really noticed, I guess.”
Sara drew back. She couldn’t tell if her face went red or if the alcohol had hidden it. She moved the phone far away from herself so that her shirt and chest were visible. But she couldn’t keep the phone there for long before drawing her arm back. She flipped over on her bed trying to find a position she could stay in.
“This is why I hate this stuff, right?” Kevin said. “It’s so hard to get comfortable.”
Sara shifted and sat up to lean against the bed’s headboard. She could see herself falling in and out of the frame as she fidgeted into position. Meanwhile, Kevin sat patiently on his couch.
“Show me the room,” Sara blurted. She didn’t know what else to say.
Kevin smiled. “Okay.” He flipped the camera.
“I think I sent you pictures, right? This is the TV. Here’s the couch I was on. On the other side of that wall is the kitchen and then the bedroom. And here’s the view.”
Kevin opened the door to his balcony. There was a blast of street noise. Sara suddenly remembered the bombing.
“Oh my god, are you okay?”
“What?” Kevin flipped the camera back.
“The bombing. Are you doing okay?”
“Oh,” Kevin said. He sat back on the couch. “Yeah, I guess. It’s kind of freaky. Did you hear the sirens when I opened the door? There are police everywhere. And they’re just stopping people randomly, checking IDs, hassling people. But I’m okay. I mean, yeah, I guess it’s scary, but I’m okay.”
Sara waited a bit too long to respond. “I’m really glad you’re okay,” she said.
“Thanks,” Kevin said after a second, swallowing.
There was silence for several moments. Kevin adjusted his position and put his legs up on the couch.
“So—”
The two of them had started talking at once. They laughed.
“Go for it,” Kevin said.
“No, you,” Sara answered.
“No, no. Honestly, I don’t even know what I was going to say. It’s just—it’s good to see your face. I know I never want to do video calls. I find these things so awkward. But, also, you’re right there.”
Kevin looked down so Sara couldn’t see his eyes.
“What I mean is, you look really nice.”
Sara awkwardly sat up higher on her bed. Kevin’s eyes were back on the camera now, looking straight at her somehow, through the distance. He was okay, she thought. For the last day, she’d been overcome by the thought that he could’ve been killed in the bombing, but now, she told herself, she could see he was okay. She could let go of the fear.
At the same time, his face magnified the loss that could have been. Before the bombing, Sara had sometimes rationalized away her feelings for Kevin by viewing him as nothing but a useful repository: a place to vent, to make jokes, to waste time, to complain, to relax, to release her demons. But the prospect of Kevin being gone, of their conversation ending midstream, had made Sara realize that it wasn’t any person who could fill that space. She’d scrolled through a few profiles on Perfect Match, trying to picture herself writing to any of them. But it had felt empty. She only wanted to write to Kevin.
A desire to touch Kevin, to lie on the couch with him and rest her head on his chest, now filled Sara to the pit of her stomach. Not for the first time, she pictured herself at the Hillside airport, passing through the arrival gates, peering across the groups of people waiting for their partners and their families. She pictured Kevin, his face open and gentle like it was now. She thought of the moment she would catch his eye while looking across the crowd. She sensed what it would feel like for her face to brush up close to his as she went in for a hug. In regular times, Sara thought, she would have visited Hillside several times by now. She would have done it without thinking. It would have been the normal thing to do. But nothing felt normal now.
Sara came out of the vision. Kevin was still on the call, looking at her. There had been another silence. This time Sara cut in alone. “Let’s play a game.”
“Oh wow, in real life.”
“As close as we can get.”
“What’s the game?”
Sara paused. She hadn’t thought this through at all.
“Let’s pretend it’s New Year’s.”
“Uh, okay,” Kevin said. Then, after a second, “What does that mean?”
“Do you have champagne?”
“No.”
“Me neither,” Sara said, laughing.
Kevin laughed too.
“All right, so then what?” he asked.
“Well, I have this.” She picked up the fresh bottle of wine she had opened right before calling. “It’s close to midnight, right? That’s the game. So I’m obviously down to drinking from the bottle.”
Sara took a swig.
“You go get a beer,” she said.
“Okay, give me a second.”
The phone dropped, and the camera faced up toward Kevin’s chin as he walked to the fridge.
“Okay,” he said a few seconds later. “Done.”
Sara heard the crack of the can opening. She took two more gulps of wine.
“All right.” Sara was slurring every word now. “Well, it’s close to midnight now, so we have to count down.”
“From ten?”
“Yes!”
“Okay.”
“Ten,” Sara started, “nine, eight—you have to do it too—seven.”
Kevin reluctantly joined in.
“Six, five, four—”
Sara sped up. “Three, two, one, Happy New Year!”
Sara threw her head back and lost her balance. She dropped the phone to catch herself. A splash of wine jumped out of the bottle. She crawled down to the floor and pushed herself back onto her feet. She could hear Kevin’s voice coming from the phone. “You okay?”
Sara put the bottle down and fixed her hair. She picked up the phone.
“Yeah, all good here!”
Kevin’s brow was slightly furrowed, but he smiled when he saw Sara.
“So it’s the New Year now,” he said. “What next?”
“A New Year’s kiss obviously!”
Sara didn’t quite believe she had said it. The smile disappeared from Kevin’s face. He laughed awkwardly.
“How do we do that?”
“Right here, it’s simple.”
Sara switched her phone to her other hand and pushed the hair out of her eyes.
“Let’s count down again,” she said. “Three, two, one, Happy New Year!”
Sara brought her face forward and put her lips on the camera.
“Sara—” Kevin started.
“You just do the same,” Sara said.
“I—”
“Just do it!”
There was a pause. Sara couldn’t see what was happening.
“Okay,” Kevin said.
“Are you doing it?”
“Yes.”
Sara pulled back slightly, puckered her lips, and kissed the camera. She stumbled back and then fell on her bed. She started laughing. Kevin’s voice still came from her phone, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
12
Hillside, after
Kevin pushed his way back to Hillside, stopping to sleep for one night just off the highway in the woods. Once he reached the city, he moved through downtown, climbing over abandoned blockades. Lost shoes and bloody footprints still marked the way from city hall. A stillness hung in the air. It struck Kevin not as a sign of calm but as the residue of abandonment. On a bus shelter, a fresh piece of graffiti heralded that prospect with an ungracious farewell: Fuck you, Hillside.
Kevin stopped and sat on a bench at a park he visited almost weekly as a kid. It was surrounded on all sides by steel-and-glass towers. The futuristic jungle gym in the middle had been Kevin’s reward for having to promenade with his mom through the city beforehand.
Walking there from their house on the Hill was like stepping through the winding entrance to a nightclub. The thrum of activity intensified as the buildings got taller and more densely packed. Kevin’s mom would get increasingly excited the farther they went. She loved to stop and talk to people—families sitting on their porches, door attendants waiting by building entrances, store owners sweeping their sidewalks. She would ask them how long they had lived in the buildings, when they were built, how they had changed over the years, all while Kevin stood back, stepping from one foot to the other, waiting impatiently for her to get moving again.
For Kevin’s mom, buildings made a city—“Look up,” she would tell Kevin as they walked—but the people made the buildings. She claimed to hate the Hill for that reason. When P. got elected, she said it was no surprise that he was from there: “It’s the only place in the city where you can live for years and hardly talk to anyone but the people in your house.”
The true origin of her distaste for the Hill was different, though. While Kevin was in high school, his parents had grown apart—something his dad had failed or refused to notice. Kevin’s mom had wanted a divorce. She’d never said it, but Kevin had realized it, even at the time. Then his dad’s cancer was discovered, and once it became clear that he would be gone in just a few weeks, Kevin had watched his mom try to fall back in love. From outside the hospital room, he saw her stroke his hand, wet his lips, then look out the window. The anger and resentment were too strong.
After that, Kevin’s mom transferred her bitterness onto the neighbourhood that had housed it. She waited for Kevin to graduate from high school, then did what was necessary to never see the place again: she left Hillside entirely, encouraging Kevin to apply to schools out west so he could move with her, too.
Eventually Kevin came to understand his mom’s choice to leave. He realized that she’d had to do it to get closure. That she never would have fled the city otherwise. In the moment, though, he internalized her move as just one more abandonment—an extra insult after giving up on his dad. So, unlike his mom, he stayed in Hillside, sleepwalked through college, and made a life in the city without really living in it. For years he went to the same pub, sat at the same table, with the same friends from high school. Later he settled for his job, his computer, his apartment.
In that small life, it was easy to live with blinders on. Even after P.’s election, as Hillside wasted away in front of him, Kevin did his best to ignore the city. He changed his walk to work to avoid a school that had been identified online as a detention centre. He dodged the protest camps that popped up in new locations every few weeks before getting shut down by police. As the government’s tactics grew harsher, it became harder to turn away, but still Kevin felt a distance. The city’s degradation seemed imperceptible to him until it was long established.
Seeing Hillside fully deserted and ruined now, Kevin knew he should feel something. But it was hard to mourn when the buildings seemed to rest easier, as if they had been on the verge of crumbling from the weight, tension, and conflict. As if they were regaining their strength after years of burden.
Kevin’s mom had found a way to leave the country a few weeks before the fires. She’d gone to stay with a friend who had a winter home down south. Kevin hoped she’d never have to see Hillside like this. But he also couldn’t ignore his own growing sense of calm. In the woods, he hadn’t been able to shake the feeling of being surrounded, even though he knew there was probably no one else nearby. Now, skyscrapers loomed over him, and Kevin felt comfort in their hollow permanence. Next to him on the park bench, someone had drawn a wilted flower and, below it, in elegant cursive, a twist on the famous phrase from the protest: Peace out.
Kevin tightened the straps of his backpack and pushed uphill away from the lake. Walking through the silent city, he thought of his mom’s conversations, the whirr of traffic and construction, the buses snorting as they came to a stop at the corner, the formless rhythms created by people trying to make it to the end of the day. He imagined these sounds of the city slowly fading behind him, and bid them good riddance.
* * *
Once he reached the Hill, Kevin began searching for further traces of his childhood. He passed by where his old house used to be and started toward his elementary school on Mill Street. On the way, just a few blocks from the school, was Stanley Street, and at the head of Stanley, one block north of Mill, was a four-storey apartment building that faced south toward the water.
The building had always stood out among the houses in the neighbourhood. When Kevin was growing up, he imagined that a general lived in the top apartment, standing guard over the Hill and the city. Every day on the way to and from school, Kevin would slow down and look toward the building, hoping to catch sight of someone standing at a window or coming out the door. He never saw a soul. By the time he was nine, he had become convinced the building was empty, or filled with old, shrivelling people who never went outside. The building went from being the neighbourhood’s protector to its haunted house. Kevin would rush by it, eyes down and shoulders tense.
Now, the building had lost its ghostly force. It was just one more abandoned structure in a city littered with them. Kevin strode confidently up Stanley Street, past homes with spacious front yards and patios, to the building’s front door. A pile of old couches, wardrobes, storage boxes, chairs, and tables blocked the entrance and barely let him see the lobby. A horrible smell wafted from the parking lot behind.
Kevin moved cautiously to investigate. He turned the corner and jumped as a band of scraggly dogs ran off through a hole in the back fence. The concrete was stained with dried blood. Bits of bone and flesh lay around the lot. That and the torn fabric from a pair of old jeans and some hiking boots were the only signs of what had been there before.
He climbed up the drop ladder to the fire escape. Windows at each storey displayed the same picture of empty cabinets and dusty wooden floors. On the fourth and final storey, one bachelor unit still had all its furniture. The open fire-escape window led to the kitchen, where there were hundreds of cans of food and gallons of bottled water. At the front of the apartment, the door was barred shut with two-by-fours.
Kevin surprised himself with his instinct to plug his phone charger into the first outlet in sight. He circled the whole apartment, hoping against all science to find a few pulses of power remaining in the wiring. When the last outlet failed, he went back out on the fire escape and looked straight down at the stained concrete. How many months had this person prepared for? How long had they lasted before taking these final steps?
Kevin brought up the drop ladder. Back in the well-stocked apartment, he popped open a can of tuna, unscrewed the top off one of the jugs of water, and locked the window. The smell from the parking lot began to fade. Kevin paced slowly through his new environment. He rifled through the dresser drawers and changed out of his old clothes. From the bed he examined his surroundings. The paint on the walls was peeling, and there was chipped plaster on the ceiling. The thin wooden floorboards were discoloured and scratched. In the past, Kevin might have thought of the place as rundown. Now it felt lived in, to the very end.
