‘Be cool, R,’ Julie whispers. ‘Don’t say anything, just, um… pretend you’re shy.’
‘Julie!’ the general calls out from an awkward distance.
‘Hi, Dad,’ Julie says.
He and his retinue stop in front of us. He gives Julie’s shoulder a quick squeeze. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine. Just went to see Mom.’
His jaw muscle twitches, but he doesn’t respond. He looks at Nora, gives her a nod, then looks at me. He looks at me very hard. He pulls out a walkie-talkie. ‘Ted. The individual who slipped past you yesterday. You said it was a young man in a red tie? Tall, thin, poorly complected?’
‘Dad,’ Julie says.
The walkie squawks. The general puts it away and pulls a pair of thumb cuffs from his belt. ‘You are detained for unauthorised entry,’ he recites. ‘You will be held in—’
‘Jesus Christ, Dad.’ Julie steps forward to push his hands away. ‘What is wrong with you? He’s not an intruder , he’s visiting from Goldman Dome. And he almost died on the way here so cut him some slack on the legalities, will you?’
‘Who is he?’ the general demands.
Julie edges in front of me as if to block me from responding. ‘His name is… Archie — it was Archie, right?’ She glances at me and I nod. ‘He’s Nora’s new boyfriend. I just met him today.’
Nora grins and squeezes my arm. ‘Can you believe what a nice dresser he is? I didn’t think guys knew how to wear a tie any more.’
The general hesitates, then puts the cuffs away and forces a thin smile. ‘Pleased to meet you, Archie. You’re aware of course that if you want to stay any longer than three days you’ll need to register with our immigration officer.’
I nod and try to avoid eye contact, but I can’t seem to look away from his face. Although that tense dinner I witnessed in my visions couldn’t have been more than a few years ago, he looks a decade older. His skin is thin and papery. His cheek-bones protrude. His veins are green in his forehead.
One of the officers with him clears his throat. ‘So sorry to hear about Perry, Miss Cabernet. We’ll miss him very much.’ Colonel Rosso is older than Grigio but has aged more gracefully. He is short and thick, with strong arms and a muscular chest above the inevitable old-man paunch. His thin hair is wispy and white, blue eyes big and watery behind thick glasses. Julie gives him a smile that seems genuine.
‘Thanks, Rosy. So will I.’
Their exchange sounds proper but rings false, as if paddling above deep undercurrents. I suspect they have already shared a less professional moment of grief somewhere away from Grigio’s officious gaze. ‘We appreciate your condolences, Colonel Rosso,’ he says. ‘However, I’ll thank you not replace our surname when addressing my daughter, whatever such “revisions” she may have embraced.’
The older man straightens. ‘Apologies, sir. I meant nothing by it.’
‘It’s just a nickname,’ Nora says. ‘Me and Perry thought she was more of a Cab than a…’
She trails off under Grigio’s stare. He pans slowly over to me. I avoid eye contact until he dismisses me. ‘We have to be going,’ he says to no one in particular. ‘Good to meet you, Archie. Julie, I’ll be in meetings all night tonight and then heading over to Goldman in the morning to discuss the merger. I expect to be back at the house in a few days.’
Julie nods. Without another word, the general and his men depart. Julie examines the ground, seeming far away. After a moment, Nora breaks the silence. ‘Well, that was scary.’
‘Let’s go to the Orchard,’ Julie mutters. ‘I need a drink.’
I’m still looking down the street, watching her father shrink into the distance. Just before rounding a corner he glances back at me, and my skin prickles. Will Perry’s flood be of water, gentle and cleansing, or will it be a flood of a different kind? I feel movement under my feet. A faint vibration, as if the bones of every man and woman ever buried are rattling deep in the earth. Cracking the bedrock. Stirring the magma.
The Orchard, as it turns out, is not part of the Stadium’s farming system. It’s their one and only pub, or at least the closest thing they have to a pub in this new bastion of prohibition. Reaching its entrance requires an arduous vertical journey through the Stadium’s Escheresque cityscape. First, we climb four flights of stairs in a ramshackle housing tower while the residents glare at us through their cracked apartment doors. This is followed by a vertiginous crossing to a neighbouring building — boys on the ground try to look up Nora’s skirt as we wobble over a wire-mesh catwalk strung between the towers’ support cables. Once inside the other building, we plod up three more flights of stairs before finally emerging onto a breezy patio high above the streets. The noise of crowds rumbles through the door at the other end: a wide slab of oak painted with a yellow tree.
The place is packed, but the mood is eerily subdued. No shouting, no high-fiving, no woozy requests for phone numbers. Despite the speakeasy secrecy of its obscure location, the Orchard doesn’t serve alcohol.
‘I ask you,’ Julie says as we push our way through the well-behaved crowds, ‘is there anything sillier than a bunch of ex-Marines and construction workers drowning their sorrows at a fucking juice bar? At least it’s flask-friendly.’
The Orchard is the first building I’ve seen in this city with some trace of character. All the usual drinking accoutrements are here: dart boards, pool tables, flatscreen TVs with football games. At first I’m amazed to see these broadcasts — does entertainment still exist? Are there still people out there engaging in frivolity despite the times? But then, ten minutes into the third quarter, the images warp like VHS tape and switch to a different game, the teams and scores changing in the middle of a tackle. Five minutes later they switch again, with just a quick stutter to mark the splice. None of the sports fans seem to notice. They watch these abbreviated, eternally looping contests with blank eyes and sip their drinks like players in an historical reenactment.
A few of the patrons notice me staring at them and I look away. But then I look back. Something about this scene is burrowing into my mind. A thought is developing like a ghost on a Polaroid.
‘Three grapefruits,’ Julie tells the bartender, who looks vaguely embarrassed as he prepares the drinks. We settle in on bar stools and the two girls start talking. The music of their voices replaces the jangling classic rock on the jukebox, but then even this fades to a muffled drone. I’m staring at the TVs. I’m staring at the people. I can see the outline of their bones under their muscles. The edges of joints poking up under tight skin. I see their skeletons, and the idea taking shape in my head is something I hadn’t expected: a blueprint of the Boneys. A glimpse into the their twisted, dried-up minds.
The universe is compressing. All memory and all possibility squeezing down to the smallest of points as the last of their flesh falls away. To exist in that singularity, trapped in one static state for eternity — this is the Boneys’ world. They are dead-eyed ID photos, frozen at the precise moment they gave up their humanity. That hopeless instant when they snipped the last thread and dropped into the abyss. Now there’s nothing left. No thought, no feeling, no past, no future. Nothing exists but the desperate need to keep things as they are , as they always have been . They must stay on the rails of their loop or be overwhelmed, set ablaze and consumed by the colours, the sounds, the wide-open sky.
And so the thought hums in my head, whispering through my nerves like voices through phone lines: what if we could derail them? We’ve already disrupted their structure enough to incite a blind rage. What if we could create a change so deep, so new and astonishing, they would simply break ? Surrender? Crumble into dust and ride out of town on the wind?