The Inner City (8 page)

Patricia Sweetman saw a bowler hat on the ground, its rim just barely out of the ground, and she went to it, bent over and studied it. There was dirt in the crease on top, more dirt on the sides, but for all that it looked fresh and unharmed. She reached out and lightly brushed off the dirt, making it neat again, and considered taking it home, to give to someone or perhaps even wear it herself in a style inappropriate for her age.

She lifted it up and saw, underneath, on the ground, like a small hill rising, a man’s head of hair, parted on the side. The part was clean and white, the hair was dark brown. She froze. At first she thought she was mistaken, that she was suggestible, that no one’s head would be stuck in the ground, but then she thought, “Why not?” In this incredible world, why not? With all the weirdoes running around, uncaught and even undisclosed, why not someone who buried a man standing up, though—as she straightened up and looked around, noting the condition of the soil, the sprouting plants, the rooted bushes—though nothing looked at all disturbed. It all felt quite natural.

Of course she couldn’t get it out of her mind, so every day she returned, just to see, and every day the head of the man rose a little higher as if he were indeed another plant anxious to get going now that the earth was warm.

And then she noticed another hat, a cap really, come pushing up out of the soil, and then a beehive hairdo, a baldish head, a scarf tied around the slicked back hair on another head, until in all there were almost two dozen of them, now with their eyes above ground, looking serious and patient, until their chins tucked free and they moved their heads slightly, observing the world with faintly impatient airs.

Sometimes the head with the bowler nodded slightly when she showed up. One of the women winked at her once. Soon their shoulders were above ground and she saw they were all dressed in business attire—even the women wore suit jackets, clean shirts; the men wore ties, except for the one in casual business wear, who wore a sports jacket and polo shirt, but very crisp and pricey looking. By the time their waists were showing she herself wore her best clothes, or really, to be honest, her better clothes because she was retired and her best clothes were out of date. But she was determined to honour them by dressing as they did. And it was interesting, too, how wearing business clothes again made her feel a bit more efficient. Uselessly efficient.

By then, one man and two women had asked her how the land was doing around there, subject to breakage and contaminations, and Patricia wasn’t sure about the way the questions were asked so she said, “Pretty much the same as yesterday,” and they would put down their newspapers (they all had newspapers) and then look into the distance. She followed their eyes and saw a haze just down the road, where the city sat like a blister. Her heart gave a little lurch; she had worked there and missed the sense of importance and irritation the city gave her; if they went there, she would go with them. Why not? Whatever these people were, they weren’t ordinary and she herself had been reading more and more about the organic lifestyle anyhow, so she had the feeling they were topical. For a woman who had once been lower management, being topical felt almost lusty. And the fact that it was all so unusual made her happy. She felt less inconsequential; she felt part of the new order, and she imagined the new order would be fundamentally daring. She could be daring.

When the last one of them shook his feet free from the earth, she had her own briefcase and wore a suitable jacket and skirt. All of them were carrying briefcases and cellular phones and paper cups of coffee that had grown beside them in the last few days, steaming in the morning, the vapour rising from the neatly folded dib in the plastic cup.

They assembled gently on the road. Remarkably, the dirt didn’t cling to them; perhaps it was the peculiar texture of their business wear, which seemed wrinkle-resistant and smooth without being shiny. Their shoes were polished. Their white shirts were spotless. The women—there were six women in addition to over a dozen men—wore skirt suits and low-heeled shoes.

Patricia would have bet that the women carried chai lattes, and that the men were evenly split between coffee black and cappuccino with a double espresso shot. That had been the rule where she worked. But she’d retired five years ago; perhaps the caffeine fashions had changed.

Her own hand was empty. She felt faintly embarrassed and bent down to pluck a daisy from the side of the road. When she straightened up she saw that they were looking at her. She bent down slowly and put the daisy back on the ground.

The last of the large people—for they were well over seven feet in height and were proportionately thicker than normal people, too, giving them a substantial impression, a width that was almost tree-like—the last of them had reached the road. The man with the bowler asked, “Are we all here then?” and someone answered, “Yes, Roland, we’re all here.”

They strode off, in twos and threes, casually rippling together as if they had no weight, and they quickly passed fields, then houses, then strip malls. The city rose ahead of them like rows of mountains, its spires the peaks, the streets the valleys, and around them, shouldering their stride into the city, through the industrial suburbs, were the high-flowering ranks of
electrical towers, the granite squat of generators and transformers. Tufts of drying grasses sat disconsolately on broken macadam, with exhausted branches flung nearby. The sky was a pale blue almost white.

Patricia had to jog to keep up with them, their strides were so much longer. The road turned into a street and then an avenue. They walked sturdily and quickly up to the first glass and marble tower, its windows shaded gray like a building hidden behind sunglasses, and here the group divided, half moving forward along the avenue while the rest (including Patricia) went into the building. These marched without comment past the security guards and the main desk, up to the elevators, where they broke apart without a word, standing in front of different elevators—unwilling, she thought, to tax the weight limits. She had followed the bowler hat, who seemed to be in charge. When the doors opened, the elevator’s passengers took one startled glance and scurried out, peering at the massive forms from lowered heads.

The large people stepped into the elevator, allowing room for Patricia, and pressed the button for the 30
th
floor. She noticed that the man in the bowler hat was looking at her with raised eyebrows. “I’m Roland,” he said.

“Patricia,” she said.

“Ciceline,” the woman who stood next to him said. “Thank you for joining us.”

“Are we going to a meeting?” Patricia said hopefully; she missed the self-importance of meetings.

“We are going to take over,” Roland said evenly. “Things have come to a pass.”

The phrase itself said nothing, and rather than display what might be perceived as ignorance, she merely nodded. Taking over would change what had come to a pass and it would all become clearer. She had no objection to it; she was old enough to have seen what had been and what was; and she disliked, sometimes, the world as it was.

The doors pinged open—and all the other doors on the other elevators pinged open simultaneously—and a beautiful kind of orchestrated step forward happened as the large people put their right feet out at once and kept walking, striding, wonderfully moving together into the corridor. Patricia was proud to be part of this movement; and she felt a little smug, too, as if she’d been selected.

They swept past the receptionist and into a meeting room where a dozen men sat around a table with coffee and a tray of bagels in front of them. There was a Power Point presentation going on; the screen read: Projected Highway Miles. The lines on the chart went upwards, in thousands of miles, a figure that astonished Patricia. Thousands of miles per year?

The large people stepped through doorways the way anyone else would step through a hatchway: right foot, right arm, body. They bent down a little, to avoid hitting their heads.

One by one they assembled behind the men in their chairs, who turned, surprised at what was going on. The man at the Power Point looked around the room, trying to figure out whether this disruption was something he was supposed to handle. The men at the table were shifting, looking around, whispering to each other, but uneasily noncommittal. The man at the head of the table rose up and said, “I don’t know who you people are.” Everyone looked at him expectantly.

Roland nodded at another of the large men. “That’s the one,” he said. “Take him out, Anselm.” The large man with the brown hair and the brown suit stepped neatly forward, placed his enormous hand on the shoulder of what Patricia presumed was the president of the company, and took him outside, protesting intensely, his head bent back to look up into Anselm’s impassive face.

The room rustled with indecision. Roland turned off the projector and addressed them: “No more invasions,” he said. “For every mile you pave, a mile of land must be restored.”

“We have a
contract
,” one man said testily. “Restoring land is someone else’s job.” Immediately, two of the large men moved towards him and placed their fingers on his shoulders.

The man narrowed his eyes. “Get your hands off me,” he said. “I’m calling security.” He reached for his cell phone.

“Take him away,” Roland said. Two of the large men grabbed him and they disappeared to the hallway. “Take them all away,” Roland added, and the businessmen jumped up, some arguing but many feeling that it was better to give in than to protest. Patricia felt a small qualm. She had assumed the large people were benign: were they? She sat down quickly in a vacated seat, her hands in her lap.

“We’ll have lunch now,” Roland said, clearing the table of notepads and notebooks, of handouts and charts. The door opened and some of his cohorts entered with trays piled high with money of all denominations, as well as mayonnaise and salad dressings. Roland sat down with apparent pleasure, took a plate and fork and began to select bills and pile them on. “Help yourselves,” he said, and the other large people came in and sat down, leaning over for plates and food. “I prefer the twenties,” he said, glancing at Patricia. “Not as crisp as the fifties, not so soft as the singles.” His plate was now quite hefty with bills, and he poured Italian dressing on them, careful not to dribble over the sides. He sat back and began to eat, chewing vigorously and thoughtfully. “Eat up,” he said, motioning with his fork.

Patricia reached out and took some of the hundreds—she would have to take something to be polite and these seemed cleaner. She chose blue cheese dressing and decided to roll up a bill with a wad of dressing in it and eat it like an hors d’oeuvre. It wasn’t bad; the dressing made it all that much easier. Eating money! she thought. Eating money! She was inordinately pleased.

Roland and the large people ate quickly and quietly, their heads lowered, concentrating on the task at hand. When he was done, Roland put down his flatware, cleaned off his hands, and rose.

“What about the rest of it?” Patricia asked, looking at the leftover money.

“It will grow,” Roland said without interest. Ciceline came into the room, glanced around, and placed a small green ball on the platter of money, put her newspaper over it, then emptied a glass of water over the whole thing. Patricia followed them as they left. She glanced back; the stain from the green ball was spreading through the newspaper already. The fibers in the newspaper were starting to move.

“Roland,” Patricia said. “I know I should have asked earlier, but I need to be clear. Are you going to harm anyone?”

He stopped to look at her without emotion. “Yes,” he said. “This is a war.”

She bowed her head. “Am I on the right side?” she asked quietly. She had always believed in being forthright and honest whenever possible.

“How can there be a right side in war?” he asked reasonably. “It’s just that each side wants to live.”

She wanted to live, too, brazenly. For a moment she doubted that she was doing the right thing, but her feet continued after Roland. She had watched the large people grow, so she was naturally attached to them. And she had always had a complex reaction to working in the city: some days she loathed it, some days it felt more real than her own life. It seemed to her that she had been, most of the time, on the road between the self she was in the city and the self she was outside it, between structure and order. She had stopped moving back and forth when she retired, but from that point on she had felt dull and compromised, arrested. With Roland she felt strong and certain and ahead of everyone else. It was, no doubt, not the thing to base a decision on, but she hadn’t felt this empowered in years. She would go with Roland.

They met up with the others back on the street. The large people stood idly, not in rows, looking at a spot along the avenue. There, right on the corner, a small dry cleaner’s shop was absurdly lopsided, its back wall up in the air, its front wall tipping toward the street as a small crowd watched, quietly waiting behind yellow caution strips placed by the emergency squads.

The building gave a small but obvious lurch.

“That’s good,” Anselm said. “Almost there.” They began to walk slowly towards the store, and people moved out of their way if they saw them, with a look of surprise on their faces.

A cop watched them carefully, then came over and spoke to Roland. “Heard a report,” he said. “Of some big people—pardon me, not a judgement—disrupting a meeting.” He looked at Roland. “That’s what dispatch said. Disrupting a meeting. Would that be you?”

Roland nodded. “Shareholders,” he said. “Stock disagreement.”

“Thought so,” the officer said. “As far as I know, those stocks are outside the law anyway. Just checking.” He nodded and moved towards the shifting building, calling out, “Just get back now, behind the line. Never saw a building collapse before? What are you, from out of town?”

The dry cleaner’s, Patricia could now see, rested on a pale green slab of some kind. She craned her neck forward and Anselm, noticing her difficulty, pushed aside everyone in front of her so she could see it unobstructed. It was the colour of new spring growth, and it perfectly filled the lot the dry cleaner’s store stood on. There was a sound of breaking glass and a groan from the roof of the cleaner’s, echoed by a groan of excitement from the bystanders. “Move back! Move back!” the police cried, and it was just in time, for the building suddenly heaved up a few more inches and toppled bulkily into the street.