Swarm (6 page)

“I don't have faith in the system that produced them.”

Marvin took his hand off my back. He gripped the edge of the counter and leaned toward her. “We're so close. We're a rallying cry.”

“You're a dispersive force.”

“Children!” Thomson shouted from the last booth in the diner, and I was glad he stopped them because I didn't have a clue what they were talking about. Phoenix slid two mugs of soup over to Marvin and me. He was already carrying his backpack, wanting to leave, but I told him I was hungry.

“She's been working hard,” said Zane, standing with another volunteer, their soup finished, dirty aluminum bowls left on the counter. Phoenix handed them each a clutch of paper, a few floppy squares of newsprint, before they slipped out the front, headed for their squat down the street.

“What's that?” I asked as Marvin and I sat across from Thomson.

“Our currency,” Thomson said, pulling a bill out of his breast pocket, a torn strip of newspaper stamped with the complex design of a Celtic knot. “Dark dollars. We give soup in exchange for this and we give this in exchange for work.” I took it from him. It was flimsy, easily torn.

“What about counterfeit? Don't people cheat you?”

“People do what they need to in order to survive,” said Phoenix, walking back to us. She'd let the others out and locked the door again. “Wouldn't you?”

“Of course,” I said, remembering my mother talking about the food bank. How she'd had to fit into the crowd in the tiny waiting room that stank of cat litter and sour, old smoke and wait for her number to be called.

“The important thing is organization,” said Thomson. “You give me a promise to wash dishes or help with the hives and I'll give you these.” He wiggled the bill. “Marvin calls our activities stop-gap, but we do what we're able. We keep bees. We garden. We organize.”

Marvin smiled, lowering the mug from his mouth. He had guzzled it down.

“Why do you run it so late?” I asked, tasting the soup. It was delicious: salty, with flavours of licorice and cumin and carrot.

“People are hungrier at night,” said Thomson. He pushed his own soup aside, half eaten.

“At night, we're less bothered,” Phoenix said.

“By the police?”

“Among others.” Her eyes shifted warily to the front door. No one was there. The door shut and locked. A striped brown sheet turned into a curtain covered the few surviving panes of glass in the front window.

I asked them other things: where they got water, if there was ever violence, how long they planned to stay. It was mostly Phoenix who talked, telling me about the grocery store outside the dark zone that donated withered mushrooms and soft hothouse tomatoes and garlic sprouting green shoots. “The beef and fish bones come from Chinatown,” she said, her eyes on mine. They were the blackest I'd ever seen. I thought of the ocean—the deepest places where things get lost. Ships, skeletons. The broken steel bodies of oil rigs. I looked away. It was cold in the restaurant, a seeping chill that felt like liquid.

“And you keep bees,” I said to Thomson. He nodded. “Can I see them?”

“Nothing to see. They're snug in the hives, living off the fruits of their labour.” Thomson must have seen the disappointment on my face. “Another time,” he added.

“Do you know about bees?” Phoenix asked. I shook my head. I wondered how she wasn't cold. All she was wearing was a long-sleeved red T-shirt, the cuffs spotted pink from bleach. Her jacket tossed aside on a chair. “Each bee has a duty. Forager bees collect the nectar. Undertaker bees remove corpses from the hive. They work collectively for the sake of the colony.”

“Like communism,” Marvin said.

Thomson laughed, a dry snort. “Not quite. Nobody instructs them. No one suppresses their free will.”

“What would you call it?”

“Nature.”

“And what's happening now?”

“In the hive?” Thomson asked, confused.

“No,” said Marvin. “In the city. They claim private property for the supposed good of all and they continue, with whatever laws they can muster, with a police force they can barely fucking pay, to crack down harder and harder—”

“Yes,” Phoenix said, interrupting. “And you're making it worse.”

Marvin started to speak, but Thomson held a hand up, stopping him. “In 1989, our dissidents would have been entitled to plant bombs, blow things up, fight violently for what was ours, but we chose not to.” His finger jabbed the air. “Not one window was smashed.”

“That isn't what we're doing,” Marvin nearly shouted. Tentatively I touched his knee, trying to calm him, but he pulled away from me with a jerking motion. “The whole system is struggling to keep this fucking boat afloat with only the wealthiest still breathing. Everyone in steerage has already drowned.”

His last word echoed in the quiet night air of the diner. Thomson and Phoenix stared at him. I could feel my heart beating, the steady thump of it, driven harder by his anger. His hair had fallen into his eyes and he brushed it away with the palm of his hand. Abruptly he sat back and dug into his tobacco pouch and soon his fingers were busy, moving like wind in the underbrush, scattering tobacco, rolling cigarettes, folding tiny strips of cardboard into filters. Under the table, I pressed my fingers against his legs, but he didn't respond.

I would have left with Marvin right then, but Thomson started speaking. “When the people here lost their homes, it was state control.” Marvin looked up. “It reminded me of my grandparents' stories about the coup in 1948 when nothing they'd worked for mattered anymore.”

I ran my thumb along the chrome edge of the table. Rust spots showed around the tiny bolts. I was still living at my parents' apartment when the city cleared the way for EcoGrid to build their solar farm, triggering one protest after another. I remembered the news: how some of the evicted residents set up an encampment on the lawn of a community centre in a wealthy neighbourhood. The media reported plenty of complaints from the homeowners. The protestors crushed the tulips and cleaned themselves in public washrooms. A little girl was startled by a couple having sex under the swings. That's what the news reported. And one night, the police went in and arrested them all.

“After that, a lot of us started squatting down here,” Thomson told me, reaching for one of Marvin's cigarettes. “And the company gave up because they knew it was too late.”

“Too late for what?” I asked as Thomson leaned into the flame from Marvin's match. He inhaled, and when the smoke streamed out of his mouth, he coughed, bending forward, his fingers gripping the edge of the table. He was coughing too hard to answer. Phoenix took the cigarette and dropped it into her mug. I heard the hiss of the ember against the remaining dampness. She filled my empty cup with water from a jug on the counter.

Marvin nudged his shoulder against mine. “Solar,” he grunted.

“What?”

Thomson drank, finishing the water, handing the cup to Phoenix for more. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It's too late for solar,” he said, and when Phoenix set the mug down he ignored it. Instead, he returned to his soup, sloppily shoving the spoon into his mouth like he was all of a sudden starving. I heard the metal clang against his teeth. Drops of broth fell on his chest and I noticed the holes in the weave of his sweater. His grey hair hung down to his collar. There was a smudge of black dirt on his bald spot. Late fifties or early sixties, I thought.

Marvin slid his tin of cigarettes into the top of his pack. He was getting ready to leave. Suddenly I felt tired. All I really wanted was to go home, to sleep. I had no means of making money, feeding myself, paying the rent. I realized this as if the fact was only just coming true. I thought of telling them about my situation, but our conversation had taken a long time. It was after 1:00
AM
.

Thomson wiped his mouth with a towel Phoenix had brought over. The red broth smeared onto the fabric from his lips and facial hair. “What do you think of this?” he asked me. “Our project.”

“It's great,” I mumbled.

“We should go,” said Marvin, standing. I nodded and pressed my hand against the torn vinyl and slid to the edge of the bench, but Thomson persisted.

“What do you like about it?” I thought about it. My mother always used to say a change is as good as a rest and that's what I liked. Going down there was different, entirely new, a foreign landscape. It had helped me stop focusing on my own miseries. But I knew I couldn't say that. I dug around for another reason. And when I said it—“You're doing something meaningful, you're making a difference”—I realized I meant it.

“Marvin's found a nice girl,” Phoenix said. She sounded sarcastic. My face grew hot. It was like she could see through me, to my soft life, the frailness of my reasoning. When we said goodbye they hardly even looked at me. Phoenix had turned her back to finish the last of the dishes and Thomson was counting his dark dollars, licking his finger to move through the stack.

When we walked away I considered all the things I could have said to impress them. The things I knew how to do, the skills I had. How to force rhubarb. How to save the best of the crop for seeds. Canning. Even making butter.

Maybe I could help them.

But Marvin broke into my thoughts. “They think you're simple, but I know you're not.” And he took my hand. Not like a lover but like a brother. Fingers folded over mine as he led me deeper into the dark zone.

Along
the street, nearly every neon store sign had been smashed, their letters broken into brightly coloured pieces that crunched as we walked. Nobody else was out. Up the way, I saw a dog and then another, working their noses in gaps under separate doors before coming back together. I pressed closer to Marvin, wanting him to take my hand again, to slide his fingers between mine, but his hands were shoved into his pockets. In a quiet voice, he filled me in on the neighbourhood's history.

“After the city cut power to the neighbourhood, most of the stores and houses were looted. I came down a few months later.”

“How do you know them?” We'd moved into the middle of the street, crossing to head south. Frozen tufts of pink insulation skidded past.

“He's my uncle. In a way.”

Thomson had come from the Czech Republic, Marvin told me. “Czechoslovakia then. He was a dissident. He and his friends fought for the revolution. They rallied in the city squares with Vaclav Havel until communism fell.”

“Who's that? Havel.”

“Playwright, dissident, first president of the Czech Republic.”

“Oh,” I said, and he continued.

“They were happy. Thomson and his friends. Those who wanted the change, who wanted freedom. But then capitalism moved in and he saw Operation Desert Storm T-shirts fill the shop windows. McDonald's.
KFC
. Then he heard about his cousin Katja. Her husband had died in a labour camp before the revolution and she needed money so she did what women can do—she went to the German border wearing sexy clothes. Germans crossed over, probably still do, and picked them up and fucked them behind the border patrol buildings where the guards used to stand and shoot you if you tried to run across.”

He glanced at me. I didn't know what to say.

“People needed money,” Marvin said, as if defending her. “They need to eat.”

As if I didn't know that.

We turned the next corner. My eyes moved from one window to another, most of them empty pits, a few glowing with a dim internal light.

“So Thomson decided to travel,” Marvin continued. “He ended up here as a student. He met my mother at school and she sponsored him to stay.”

“Why was he so mad at you?”

Marvin shrugged. It was clear he wouldn't tell me.

“And Phoenix?”

Marvin stopped to straighten a bent cigarette. “She's just a bitch.”

“I didn't think so.”

“No?”

“No. Who is she?”

Marvin stuck the smoke in his mouth and mumbled around it. “His one and only. The apple of his eye.”

“His daughter?”

“Stepdaughter. Born in Chiapas. Her parents were activists. Well, everyone was, unless you were military or a landowner.”

I didn't know where Chiapas was, but Marvin didn't give me time to ask. “You know you don't have to prove anything to her,” he said, stopping at the last in a line of row houses. “You don't even have to see her again.” I followed him up the path and through the front door, already aware that was the opposite of what I wanted.

People
don't always have reasons for what they do, Melissa. I left the diner knowing I would sleep with Marvin that night. Partly because I liked the feeling of his hand on my back and the heat of his confidence but also because the evening demanded it. I had never slept with a guy so quickly before, but Margo did it all the time and constantly told me to loosen up, be more spontaneous. Maybe it was out of character for me but since everything else had changed, I thought that could too. The box that had been my life—job, home, regular routine—had caved in, and going back to Marvin's squat was just the breaking of one of the seams.

The house was freezing cold and smelled musty. Marvin dumped his backpack on the floor. I heard the snapping of a match as he lit a candle lantern and the flames stretched every shape into large shadows. I saw a table with five chairs. Three books piled next to a typewriter. A black sleeping bag coiled on a mattress on the floor. The walls were covered with newspaper, cardboard, a blue tarp, and strangely shaped patches of plywood. In the mix a map was pinned up. Shiny red, silver, and gold stars formed a circle on streets north of the dark zone and the empty spot that was the lake. They glittered in the jumping light. They caught my eye, and I started walking over to look but Marvin said, “Come over here.” When we met in the centre of the room, he put his cold hand on my neck and a tremor went through me. He leaned his face toward mine and when he kissed me, it was like the opening of a black hole, hot and magnetic, sucking me in.