The Cracks in the Kingdom Read online

  Nearby party guests step over to him at the window and look down too.

  The couple squint up.

  “You can’t?”

  Maximillian shakes his head.

  The woman calls, “Thanks.”

  The man stares a moment, then turns away.

  That’s another thing he likes: the complicated reactions of strangers to his parking advice. Grateful, suspicious, resentful. They want to park here.

  The party guests are talking, making jokes about parking and English speakers, and he smiles and nods, and drinks from his whisky.

  He likes how the guys at the office call him Max instead of Maximillian. He laughs suddenly, and the people talking to him laugh too, thinking they’ve pleased him with their stories.

  But he’s laughing at the idea that he could squeeze lemon juice on his inner elbow and turn out to be somebody else.

  That his memories of his past could be invention. It does your head in, thinking like that. Because how can you know for sure? You can’t. His own memories, for example, are always getting tangled with dreams he’s had about people or places. So they slip around, his memories. Change shape.

  It’s like those toy dispensers where you put in a coin and twist the handle, then the handle springs back and a toy comes out. Each time he tries to lean into a memory, it springs back like that handle.

  But everybody has that, right?

  His phone buzzes in his pocket.

  He looks at it.

  It’s an email.

  He gets an odd, excited feeling. This email. It could be the answer.

  It’s from Air Canada. Discount Flights to Halifax.

  Nah, that’s not the answer. He doesn’t want to go to Halifax.

  He tips back his whisky, but it’s empty. He pours himself another.

  His phone buzzes again. The answer, he thinks again, but less enthusiastically.

  It’s a phone call this time. That tech guy from the office. What is he doing inside Maximillian’s phone? He should be at the party!

  Maybe he forgot to invite him. Who knows with memories these days?

  He shrugs, and answers.

  “Hey,” says the tech guy. “Remember that weird audio thing you gave me?”

  The kingdom-of-cello again. He’d forgotten he gave the tape to the tech guy.

  “Come to the party!” Maximillian says.

  “What party? Anyhow, it’s not a regular audiotape like you thought, but I figured out how to get sound off it anyway. It’s a woman singing. You want me to play it to you now? I’m only saying cause I’m not sure I’ll be able to get it to work again on Monday. The technology is super out-there weird.”

  Maximillian shrugs again.

  “Okay.”

  There’s a shuffling, some static, then the singing starts.

  Maximillian listens. He keeps listening, pressing the sound so close it hurts his ear.

  Then he disconnects the call. Puts the phone in his pocket.

  Puts the whisky on the window ledge. Pushes up his shirt sleeve. Calls to his party guests, “First person to get me a lemon can have this apartment.”

  At first, the Clay Brown was perfectly still, but then movements began to catch the corners of their eyes.

  It was shifting beneath them like a deep, slow ocean. There was something almost tender in its billowing.

  “I can’t think through this headache.” Agent Nettles gritted her teeth, hunched her shoulders. “Princess Ko, follow me. We’ll get you off this thing. Ramsay?”

  Agent Ramsay was bent forward, hands on his knees, eyes squeezed tight.

  “You can’t escape from a Clay Brown,” Keira said.

  “Follow me, Princess,” Agent Nettles repeated, but the Princess’s arms were wrapped around her head. She was rocking back and forth on the spot.

  Agent Nettles slipped and slithered until she reached the edge of the Clay Brown where it crawled up the side of the building.

  “Come on, Princess,” she called. “We’ll climb.” Using her knees, elbows, and fingernails, she clambered up until her hands were touching the brickwork of the building. At once, she slid back down. She tried again. The same thing happened. Each time, the edges would tilt slightly, tipping her gently back.

  “It plays with you, see,” Keira called, then she pressed her hands into her hair, moving them around her scalp, her face crumpling with the pain.

  Samuel lay flat on his stomach, now and then rolling from side to side and moaning.

  Sergio wandered about, his eyes wild, tripping and falling as the Clay Brown surged beneath him like a theme park ride.

  The edges rose higher. Agent Nettles continued clambering up the sides, and tipping back in. She screamed suddenly, and Keira laughed, then her laughter caught another flare of headache and turned into a wail.

  The Princess dropped her arms from her head.

  “The Magenta’s getting worse,” she said. She could hardly make out the others’ faces through the mist, but their mouths, eyes, and noses were outlined now in dark pink. It was underneath her own fingernails and spotting her knuckles like a row of scabs.

  She staggered along and nearly tripped over Samuel, who rolled over and saw her.

  “Princess,” he said. “I will always love you.”

  “We’re not dead yet,” she said, absentmindedly, but the Clay Brown was moving steadily. Its edges rising higher and tipping inward now. The billowing had increased too, like whales surfacing, or like a giant sleeping body moving underneath a blanket.

  Sergio appeared beside her, his face creased with headache.

  He took her hand.

  “We will take a run at the edge,” he said.

  “It’ll just tip us back in. Then it will start to crush us.”

  “I know.”

  He held her hand anyway, and started to move.

  “Wait, wait,” she said, pressing her fists to her eyes. “I can’t see through this headache. I can’t —”

  Sergio waited, then she held his hand again.

  She was crying openly.

  The Clay Brown was rising like cake mix folding beneath beaters, forming mounds that lay down and then reformed.

  They slipped toward the edge, passing Keira whose eyes were closed. She was deep inside her headache. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

  The ground tipped and slid them about, its sides rising, wrapping slowly around them. As if someone were gathering the edges of a picnic blanket, and they were all the plates and utensils, sliding toward the middle.

  Sergio had stopped. His face was twisted with pain.

  “Come on,” the Princess said.

  She pulled at his hand. Sergio staggered two more steps, and then his steps moved upward and into the air.

  He was just above her.

  He was leaning sideways, his legs at an awkward angle, as if one of his dance twirls had gone wrong. He was hovering. He looked down at himself, and saw the air between his feet and the ground.

  He frowned, scraped at the air with his free hand, scooping at it.

  He rose a little higher.

  He adjusted his grasp on Princess Ko’s hand, and gave an experimental tug. Her feet lifted off the ground.

  He scraped his way even higher, grinning, and Princess Ko followed.

  Agent Nettles looked up.

  “Holy crap,” she said. “He’s an Occasional Pilot.”

  Then she was stumbling toward them, grabbing Princess Ko’s hand for herself, and waving at the others: “Join hands — join hands —” which they did, one at a time, until they were all lifting, rising, slow and steady, like a chain of paper dolls being dragged into the air.

  They rose out of reach of the Clay Brown. They soared above the Magenta, breathing the sky, headaches blowing free, hands joined, Sergio riding the wind ahead, his eyes as bright as the buckles of a harness under sunlight.

  Maximillian Reisman approaches the intersection of St-Denis and St-Catherine in a taxi.

  He’s fiftee
n minutes late. There are better intersections in Montreal than this, he thinks. Those brown brick buildings, they might be part of the University of Quebec or Montreal or whatever it’s called, but they’re nondescript and hulking. The other corners are just shops. JACOB, he can see, and a little green sign that says VUE. Glimpses of Hotel St-Denis in one direction, and that’s a nice church. Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, he remembers. Otherwise, it’s just your regular lampposts, bare trees, trash cans, bike stands.

  NO PARKING signs, phone booths, and patches of unfinished roadwork: toppled barriers and witch’s hats.

  People walking. Cars driving.

  His wife’s voice sings in his mind. He’s still carrying his whisky. It sloshes over the edges of the glass as he pays the cab fare, and opens the door.

  He turns a slow circle. Which is the southwest corner? Does it matter? He’s looking for familiar faces in the crowd, somebody come to get him and take him home. Usually, directions make sense to him, but his wife’s voice is singing more and more persistently through the haze in his mind, so nothing else matters. The whisky sloshes again. He licks the spilled drops from his hand. He smiles at everybody.

  Then there’s a blink of blackness, a streak of something jagged, the glass falling, a smallish hand clutching his hand, fingernails cutting, and here he is, somewhere else.

  How about that.

  High ceilings. Carpet. Chairs. A crowd of strangers, mainly teenagers it seems, pressing in at him, their eyes wild, clothes disheveled.

  They’re a bit much.

  He looks away from them and around.

  It’s a conference room.

  The Sandringham Convention Center, he remembers.

  Ducale. Golden Coast.

  Memories shoot at him: ping, ping, ping. It’s a pleasant kind of pinging. He grins and lets them keep on shooting.

  “I’m the freakin’ King of Cello!” he says.

  “Indeed you are,” says a grim-looking woman in a uniform of some kind — she’s an agent. She’s a security agent. She’s talking fast to another agent beside her, a guy, also familiar: “The WSU have issued a press release,” she’s saying. “They give a list of places where major cracks have been reported. Local law enforcement are setting up barricades right now, the release says, and WSU officers are on their way. It’s all the crossover points. Someone’s leaked it to them. We won’t be able to get the others through.”

  He ignores all this. He’s waiting — it will come —

  “Agent Nettles!”

  She looks back at him.

  “That’s your name, right?”

  “It is. Welcome home, sir.”

  Now he looks down at the figure beside him, the one still clutching his hand, with the fingernails.

  It’s Ko. His daughter. She returns his gaze.

  She looks like hell. Dried blood and bandages streaking across her face, hair in knotted tatters, clothes torn and mud-splattered, eyes and face all lit up with that beautiful, self-important, self-conscious, knowing, cranky smile of hers. He lets go of her hand so he can lift her off the ground into a bear hug.

  By the time he walks into Cambridge, the soles of his feet feel like they’re pressing into lava.

  There’s no room in his mind to look around. There’s just that thin white line: I am Elliot Baranski. Bonfire. Cello. Madeleine.

  He has to follow that line.

  He gets glimpses in his peripheral vision. Bikes. Bells. Turrets. People eating cake. A clock eating time. A kid kicking a ball along the path. A man shouting at the kid: “Oy, this is not a park!” People glancing at Elliot as he passes them. He stinks, he realises vaguely. He’s filthy. He’s coated in stains.

  He turns back to the thin white line.

  Elliot Baranski. Cello. Madeleine.

  It’s getting thinner.

  He remembers a story Madeleine once told him, about an astronomer who lost his nose in a duel. He had a new nose made out of gold and silver, Madeleine had said, and affixed to his face with glue.

  Outside that thin white line it’s just a dark space now.

  He needs to glue new memories in, made of gold and silver.

  Only how did that astronomer breathe through the gold? How did he smell?

  Elliot. Madeleine.

  He stops and someone brushes against him. He can’t look up. He has to close his eyes and remember.

  He knows her address here in Cambridge. She’s told him.

  The street name comes to him. He says, “Excuse me,” to a passerby, and they ignore him. Do they speak a different language here? He tries again, twice more, until someone stops, and tells him how to get there.

  He follows the directions.

  He remembers the number of the house.

  He remembers that Madeleine lives on the top floor.

  There’s a line of buttons down the side of the door.

  4, 3, 2, 1.

  He guesses 4 might be the top floor, and presses the button. There’s a lightening at once. That’s all he has to do. Press that button.

  Now she’ll come to him.

  He waits.

  There’s a great, gaping silence.

  He presses it again, hears the shrill, and again the shrill, and nothing.

  She’s not home.

  He leans against the door, thunks his head gently on the wall.

  Elliot.

  He remembers she has a friend who lives downstairs. The computer guy downstairs.

  Denny. Her friend’s name is Denny. He’ll ask Denny where Madeleine is.

  Does downstairs mean one floor down, or all the way? Another memory comes to him: Denny hits his ceiling with a broom, Madeleine says, when he wants Holly and Madeleine to come down to him for a chat.

  He presses the buzzer for 3.

  He straightens. It occurs to him that the people in the street might have ignored him because he looks like a tramp. They probably thought he wanted money. This Denny guy might turn him away.

  Block him from seeing Madeleine.

  He runs his fingers through his hair.

  He can hear footsteps from inside. Thudding footsteps, and a smaller pattering, a panting sound. A dog. There’s a man and a dog coming downstairs.

  The door opens.

  A dog pours out, and just behind, a man with a wheeze, an unshaven chin, grey-specked hair.

  The man catches his breath, lets the wheeze fade, looks at Elliot.

  Elliot looks back.

  There is a long moment of looking.

  Then Elliot grins his crooked grin, his famous grin, his Elliot Baranski grin.

  “I knew you weren’t dead,” he says, and loses the grin because all those cracks are splitting open, and from the sound that his father is making as he reaches for Elliot, lunges at Elliot, the same thing is happening to him.

  They stayed in Norwich for three nights and then came home.

  On the train, Madeleine closed her eyes and fell into a daydream in which Belle’s parents were waiting to welcome Belle at the station.

  Belle’s mother would be carrying a bunch of wild freesias (Belle’s favourite flowers) and a golden mango (Belle’s favourite fruit) — no, she’d have a straw basket. She’d have a basket over her arm, laden with flowers and mangoes, which she would have tracked down somewhere, even though neither was in season.

  As the train pulled into the platform, Belle’s mother would throw out her arms (being careful not to spill the basket), joyful tears spilling down her cheeks as she showered Belle with promises: that she would unburden Belle of her sadness; that she would clear away the clutter from her own aura so that Belle could see the glow of her love for her daughter; that she would never again laugh unless something was genuinely funny.

  Then, Madeleine imagined, her own eyes would move farther along the platform, and there would be her father, her mother beside him, swinging a hat in one hand, holding his arm with her other. Both of them radiant to see each other and see her.

  And Belle would glance over fro
m her own tearful reunion and say, “Look at that. Your dad’s aura is totally clear! His substance-abuse issues have been washed out of him!” — while meanwhile, in another reality, Elliot Baranski would be sitting on his farmhouse porch with his parents, the rescue from the Hostiles having proceeded smoothly — and then, soon, she would reach out her hands and carry Elliot across the space between — out of the darkness — and into her world — where —

  The daydream faltered because someone was slapping her knee.

  She opened her eyes. They were pulling into Cambridge, and Belle was watching her shrewdly.

  “They won’t be there,” she said, and Madeleine turned to the window. The platform was empty except for a woman with a baby in a sling across her chest.

  Belle reached to grab her bag.

  “Some things you just have to take,” Belle said. “My parents. Your dad. They’ll keep on letting us down. Nothing we can do about it.”

  “There you go again,” complained Jack, and he and Belle argued their way out of the train, onto the platform, and out to the bike racks, where they switched to an argument about whether Jack would take Belle home.

  “Ya tosser,” Belle said. “I know the way.”

  Jack quoted a line from a Byron poem which seemed completely inapplicable, as Belle herself pointed out, and Madeleine left them arguing, standing close together in the afternoon light, the shapes of their shadows jittering, bickering, swaying.

  * * *

  She rode straight to the parking meter.

  There was a thin line of white but when she pulled it out, it seemed faded and worn, and it was not in Elliot’s handwriting.

  WEDNESDAY, 2 P.M.

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,

  IF YOU’RE THE PERSON IN THE WORLD WHO’S BEEN WRITING TO ELLIOT BARANSKI, THIS IS TO IMPRESS ON YOU THAT YOU’D BETTER STOP DOING THAT. YOU MAYBE DON’T KNOW THIS BUT IT’S A CAPITAL OFFENSE TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOU PEOPLE, AND IT SEEMS SOMEONE HAS REPORTED ELLIOT TO THE WSU. I CANNOT THINK WHO’D HAVE DONE THAT, AS HE’S A POPULAR BOY, AND TO BE HONEST, WHOEVER DID HAD BETTER HIGHTAIL IT OUT OF TOWN IF THEY DON’T WANT TO GET LYNCHED. ANYHOW, THAT ASIDE, THE WSU ARE RIGHT NOW, AS I WRITE, IN PURSUIT OF ELLIOT. SEVERAL CHOPPERS IN THE AIR ABOVE ME. I’M JUST HOPEFUL THAT ELLIOT WILL GET AWAY, AND IF HE DOES, WE CAN’T HAVE ANY INCRIMINATING LETTERS ABOUT. SO PLEASE DO NOT WRITE BACK TO THIS. IF YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST IN KEEPING ELLIOT ALIVE, FORGET ABOUT HIM. STARTING NOW.