Sci-Fi-O-Rama is back with the tenth installment of “A Colour Like Orange: Stories from a Broken World“, our grand series of interlocking stories from Toronto writer CG Inglis, now moving into its concluding chapters.
In this month’s story, we follow a young woman into the crumbling tenements and thriving nightlife of “Northside“, an old miners’ district now famous as the source of the drug powder. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, the boundaries between the worlds are thin – with the right frame of mind, could there be a better place to party?
–
The bus shudders over the cracks and potholes in the road as it makes its way north. All the windows are rattling in their panes, the one next to her so badly she’s half afraid it might break. To ease the sound she presses her forehead to the glass; through the hollows of their own reflection, her eyes track the passage of streetlights and beyond them a shambling line of brick houses. She and a fat man in a skull cap seated in the front are the only passengers. Every second block or so, the man glances back at her with a confused look on his face, as if continually surprised to find her there. Like she’s some kind of ghost. She chose to meet his eyes once, but regrets it now. It only seems to have piqued his curiosity.
She does her best to ignore him; the window glass is cool on her head and the rice alcohol she drank earlier is sitting nicely. Her thoughts slip forward, following their own loose, internal current: Capreol is playing tonight, and Marmoset. Two totally different sounds, Capreol’s aggressive, pop-art anthems contrasted sharply by the dark and glitchy beats Marmoset is better known for. She’s not sure she would have put them on the same bill, but no one asked her, and there’s no question both DJs are talented. Besides, the venue alone is worth the trip, and it’s possible some of her friends might show up. Stella maybe, or Adam. More and more often she’s found herself going out on her own, and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t miss her people. She thinks back to the ritualized preparations at Stella’s place, music pounding on the battered sound system, the buzz of shared anticipation. But Stella’s current boyfriend doesn’t dance, and Adam is getting weird, muttering to himself when he thinks no one’s paying attention, laughing at his own bad jokes. Nothing lasts forever, no shared scene or moment. People change, or their priorities do. They fade in and out of each other’s lives, and anyway it’s not like she’ll be alone. Music conjures its own community, and with the right spark, the dance floor can become a cauldron.
Speaking of: she removes a plastic vial from her pocket and unscrews the lid. Tapping the end, what’s left of the orange powder slithers into the divot formed by the bones at the base of her thumb. She lowers her nose and inhales with a single, powerful snort, bringing her head back with it, releasing an explosive breath. At that, the fat man starts upright, his mouth gaping. Smiling, she wipes the orange grains that cling to her nostril and lower lip with the back of her hand.
“What’s the matter?” she asks, more forcefully than she meant to. “You wanted some?”
Her high voice rings out in the near-empty bus, but the man is looking away again, eyes on his mud-spattered boots. His face is soft, uncomprehending. He might not be all there, and she regrets her outburst now, being hard on him.
Sniffing, she rubs the back of her hand. The powder is tangy in her nose, sharp as the edge of a blade. She’s been doing too much of the stuff lately. It’s not supposed to be addictive, or at least she’s never heard of anyone with a powder habit, but it’s not like there’s a wealth of information on the subject. She knows what everyone else knows: powder was discovered right here in Northside, a rich, thick vein of the stuff buried almost two kilometers under the ground. No one has any idea what it is, not the company that owns the mines, or the specialists they called in from the Institute to study it; a drug cut out of the earth, it can be eaten, or snorted, inhaled in a cloud of smoke if laced in a joint. For all she knows, you can inject the stuff. She examines the few fine grains left on the side of her hand. Their colour is similar to the back of an eyelid, pointed at the sun. The urge seizes her to lick the skin clean, a dark and primal desire, like the sudden longing to jump when standing next to a ledge. All she knows is that nothing hits her the way that powder does. Nothing else is so honest.
There is no rush, bumping it. No spike of adrenaline. There is always the same tangy, citrusy smell. A scent like iron-rich blood, and an opening in the nasal cavities. It isn’t like cocaine. Not like ketamine either, no wild ego trip or disassociation, only a heightened sensitivity to place and time: she is aware of the bus, and the windows rattling, and the back of the ratty, threadbare headrest in front of her. There is her own body, her thin hands pressing down on the flesh of her thighs. The feel of the denim under her fingers, the breath entering her nose and passing into her lungs. Her heartbeat.
All of this, and also something else: an airy, psychic tingling on the back of her neck. A sense of being watched, as if a pair of eyes are hovering right behind her, staring into her thoughts, taking her in. That had been hard at first, but by now she’s used to it, the awareness of someone (or something) watching. She only hopes she’s making it worth their while; that was Adam’s joke – if someone was bothering to tune in, the least they could do was put on a show. Granted, a girl sitting on her own in a bus can’t be very entertaining, but she’ll turn up once the music starts. She always does, and the venue all but guarantees a trip; the best thing about powder is that the doors it throws open really exist.
As the bus grinds to a halt she lifts her head from the glass. Through her reflected profile she glimpses the people standing at the curb, waiting to board. Norfolk Street: the end of the line. The bus will make a U-turn here, heading back south. Past Norfolk you take a cab or you go by foot. There are no bus routes to the tenements.
Grabbing her bag, she edges out of the seat and pushes hard on the rear doors. The fat man doesn’t budge. It’s possible that he missed his stop awhile back, or maybe it’s just that he’s happy riding around all night. Definitely not all there; she shouldn’t have snapped at him like that, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. Stepping outside, she inhales a lungful of frigid air and swirling diesel fumes. The group at the curb has formed a line and together they press forward as the doors at the front of the bus swing open. She watches as the fat man smiles up at them in welcome, as if he’d been waiting for them. Like they were all old friends.
She crosses the road and walks north. At the end of the block is the Eft & Dragon – the first bar in Northside, or the last, depending on which way you’re headed. Three storeys of crumbling brick, the Eft is a miner’s pub recently overrun by college kids and tourists out for a taste of the district’s nightlife. Most weekends it bursts at the seams, a sprawling, dilapidated old house known for cheap drinks and fried food, and these days for playing host to a brisk secondary trade in powder.
In one of the big, bay windows on the ground floor is a circular neon sign, a blue dragon rounding on a pink, lizard-like thing. Someone once told her this was meant to be an eft, a juvenile newt; the coloured lights meet in a purplish haze along the layer of snow that lines the windowsill. The bouncer, a thick man in a bomber jacket, is perched on a stool by the door. He nods at her, but says nothing, breath streaming from his wide mouth. The synthetic fabric of his jacket creaks as he opens the door to let her in.
The humid air is laced with cigarette smoke. Instantly overheated, she shrugs free of her jacket and makes her way through the crowd to the bar. Some bass-heavy dub is playing on the room’s ancient speakers, and along with the hum of conversation and the occasional burst of drunken laughter, the aural soup is so thick she can hardly make out her own voice as she orders a glass of rice alcohol. The bartender, a tall man with a wiry neck and arms like cables, cocks one long, perfectly formed ear in her direction. She is transfixed; she can’t remember ever having seen an ear so beautiful. Another advantage of powder: everything is better defined, more truly itself. Her hands on the sticky surface of the bar look like sculpted clay. She gathers herself, and tries again.
“A glass of Takatan!” she says, using the brand name this time, and her ears must be getting used to it now because the words are suddenly clear to her and the bartender is nodding like he understands. She watches as he opens a bottle and fills a glass almost to its lip. They do not overcharge at the Eft, and they don’t skimp. She worries that will change once word leaks out far enough, but for now things are done just the way they were when the place catered exclusively to miners and retirees.
The bartender with the perfect ears sets the glass in front of her, some of the clear liquid slopping over the edge and onto the counter. She pays him, leaving a large tip, and gulps down a mouthful without tasting it. The noise in the room crashes all around her. The powder is working hard and she can feel the eyes boring into the back of her head. What are they seeing there? What can she show them? She attempts another drink, this time rolling the alcohol around on her tongue. It’s dry, and more than passable. Stepping away from the bar, she cradles the glass against her chest as she threads her way to the back stairwell. The carpet that lines the stairs has been worn through by generations of rough feet; the wallpaper is cream-coloured, with a stacked urn motif in powder blue; hanging overhead is a faux-crystal chandelier. Drinking at the Eft is like crashing a party at the home of some aging widow.
The second floor is just as crowded. A waitress carrying a tray of empty glasses picks her way through the narrow gaps between the tables. In the back, a few semi-circular booths are situated in the recesses formed behind a series of long, shallow arches in the wall. Occupying one of these are C and J, and with them is a man with a line cut out of his face.
An outsider, she thinks, but the realization arrives without shock. Of course he is – what else could he be? A thin man with a shaved head, and utterly unremarkable except for the line that runs like an incision through his right eye from forehead to cheek. One hand clasping a bottle of beer, he gazes at the table in front of him as if at a written message. She wonders what he’s seeing; they’re all supposedly psychic, more or less. She’s been using powder long enough to have met a few of them, most often in Northside. The district is crawling with powder users, and it’s only thanks to the drug that she can see the outsider. Without it, the man with the line cut out of his face wouldn’t exist, at least not to her, and that is still something she struggles to wrap her head around. She met an outsider at a party once, way back when she first started taking the drug, who admitted that it messed with them too.
“I mean we’re here, but we’re not, you know?” he said. “Invisible, sure, but it’s worse than that. We’re out of phase. No one has any sense of us at all. This conversation we’re having? Half the people here aren’t even aware of it. They can’t hear me, or touch me. And I couldn’t touch them. Not unless they’re taking powder. Kind of narrows the dating pool.”
She’d laughed, and so did he, but on reflection it sounded awful. When she asked why they came in the first place, he admitted it wasn’t by choice. He’d just fallen in. Apparently that was what they all said, that they’d fallen into the world through its cracks. It kind of went against the whole psychic theory, but she believed him. Powder reveals things as they are, and her world is full of holes. She’s known that for a long time. Even without the drug, it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. Things are falling apart. The government is useless, and the environment is on the brink of collapse. When she asked the outsider how much time they had left he told her not to worry, there were still a couple decades before shit really started to hit the fan, at least on her continent. So there’s that. The world might be ending, but only a little at a time. The outsiders are here, and so are the holes they fell through, even if they’re invisible, even if they are “out of phase.” Ignoring that fact, or trying to deny it, is useless; by definition, what’s real must be the truth. Parallel universes, psychic party guests – at the very least, the outsiders make the end times more interesting.
“Hey!”
A deep, booming voice, dragging her back to the bar. Above the crowd, J is waving at her; a young man with the massive frame of a third-string football player, he somehow manages to move with a delicacy she finds endearing. She smiles, and crosses the room to their table. C raises his eyes; a lot of the men in Northside go by their initials, and she has never learned his proper name, or J’s. Whereas J is all heavy muscle and rounded lines, C is half a foot shorter than his partner, and much leaner. A swirl of mismatching tattoos extends along his right arm from his wrist to the edge of his gray t-shirt. Both he and J are local products, born and raised in the tenements. She has been buying drugs from them for the better part of a year.
They make room at the table and she finds herself sitting next to the outsider. She shakes his hand; the skin of his palm is cool, and very dry. She stares at the narrow sliver the line has cut from his face. Behind it, she can just make out the curling drift of what might be purple-tinted smoke. She’s seen the lines up close before, cut in other faces, but there’s no getting used to something like that.
“I’m Ashley,” she tells him. “Ash.”
“Call me Auld,” says the outsider.
“Auld’s been helping us out lately,” C informs her.
“He’s kind of our guardian angel,” J adds.
“That right?” she asks. “Sounds like a full-time job. These two must need a lot of hand-holding.”
“You have no idea.”
There is a smile at play in the corner of the outsider’s mouth. His voice has an odd, hollow quality, as if it’s been pre-recorded and dubbed back into the conversation.
“So what is it?” Ash directs the question at C. “Problems with the cops?”
C shakes his head.
“No cops. They’ve ramped up security at the mines, but we can work around that. There’s always someone willing to shove a few bags of the stuff down their pants. It’s the Institute. They’re jealous of our business. Want to keep all the powder to themselves. Auld’s been helping us steer clear of any trouble.”
J has taken out a package of loose tobacco and is busy rolling a collection of cigarettes on the table. His big fingers move with quick assurance; he hands the first to Ash and lights it for her. Technically, she quit more than a year ago, but while in Northside she makes allowances. She leans back, luxuriating in the burn of the smoke in her lungs and a long, controlled exhalation of breath. The outsider is finishing off the last of his beer.
“So what’s in it for you?” she asks him. He turns to her. The space behind his line recedes into an empty darkness. It has a way of drawing the eyes, and it takes a strong effort of will to look away.
“I believe in the free market,” he says. “The thought of an Institute monopoly makes me anxious.”
“Another dedicated capitalist.”
“Actually,” says C. “We prefer to think of it as a public service.”
“Oh yeah? How do you figure that?”
“It’s bad out there right? I mean, we know that, but not everyone knows how fucked up things really are. There are actual holes in the world. We are literally sitting at a table with a guy from another universe. These seem like pertinent facts.”
“We’re pro-knowledge,” J chimes in.
“Can’t solve a problem if you don’t know it exists right?”
“You’re calling me a problem?” Auld asks, clearly enjoying himself.
“You? You’re a great guy,” C assures him. “I’m speaking in generalities. Besides, it’s for your benefit too.”
“That’s right.” J is nodding as he licks the edge of the rolling paper. “Even I would get bored talking to us all day.”
“Every vial sold expands your social horizons,” C says.
“Very kind.”
“We’re humanitarians,” J intones. He grins as he twists tight the end of the finished cigarette. “You’re human right?”
“Don’t I look human?”
“Other than the line cut out of your face?”
“A minor detail.”
“It’s disconcerting.”
“Disconcerting huh?”
“That’s the right word for it.”
“Just think of it like a tattoo.”
“A tattoo cut out of your face.”
He is laughing. As Ash sips her drink, their banter washes over her, two drug dealers and a man from a parallel world. She is less than five kilometers from her workplace, and only a few hours ago she’d been writing copy for a client. She can still hear the drone of the air conditioning system in her office, and the slick, plastic clacking of the keyboard in the cubicle opposite her own. The sliver of reality comprised by her 9 to 5 is too fine, and too confining. Some days she feels it like a noose around her neck, time ticking by in increments, each second bringing her closer to the end of her life, and to the end of everything else. She comes north to remind herself that she exists. Swallowing the last of the alcohol, she sets the empty glass down in front of her.
“I hate to interrupt,” she says. “But can we move on to the drug dealing now?”
J laughs. He tips his beer in her direction.
“Right,” C mutters. “Down to business.”
From the bag at his feet he retrieves a small vial and passes it to her across the table. She reciprocates with a loose wad of bills.
“You mind?” she asks.
“Be our guest,” C tells her.
She is already unscrewing the vial’s lid. Tilting her head back, she tips some of the powder into her mouth. The taste is as intense as it is familiar: the same rotten fruit and rusting razor. She has her eyes pressed shut, and when she opens them again the space around the outsider’s line is shimmering with refracted light. She takes one breath, and then another. At the back of her head, disembodied eyes press like a warming glow.
“Well,” she says, standing. “It’s been real.”
“You’re leaving us?” C asks.
“Stick around awhile,” J urges.
“As pleasant as that sounds, I want to get there while there’s still room on the dance floor. Need to express myself through movement.”
“Are you serious?”
“That was called sarcasm. But I do want to dance.”
C grunts.
“It was good to meet you,” Auld tells her.
“Likewise. And don’t let them get to you. They grew up in Northside. We can’t expect much.”
“Exactly,” J says. “We’re a product of our environment.”
“The schools here are a disgrace,” C adds.
“So that explains it,” Auld mutters.
“Right,” Ash interjects before they can really get going again. “I’ll be seeing you boys.”
She waves as she turns and makes her way across the room. There is a tingling sensation at the back of her neck that could be the powder or maybe just the three of them at the table, watching her leave. The stairs pass in a blur, and the faces crowded around the bar form a mosaic. She is pulling her arms through the sleeves of her coat as she forces the front door open with her shoulder. The bouncer is no longer on his stool, and the road is empty. The cold air feels very good against her skin.
Like powder, Northside is unrelentingly honest. The street in front of her might have been lifted from the set of a mediocre dystopia: cracking pavement, shuttered store-fronts. Slush the colour of car-exhaust piled in the gutters. It’s different down south, where the well-tended lawns and designer boutiques serve to paper over some of the decay, and people wear their smiles like masks. Sometimes when she is in the office cooking up new ways to track customer engagement and boost brand recognition she loses the thread of herself so badly she has to dig the ends of her nails into the meat of her palm just to remind herself to breathe. Being in Northside is equally bracing; C is probably right that people need to be made aware of the cracks and the outsiders, but to her they aren’t a problem to be solved. The broken bits are where things get interesting, and that is where she’s headed now, to a party in a basement, and a hole in the world.
The bar is called Lower Cavern, or maybe Lower Tavern, it’s impossible to tell – the lettering on the old wooden sign above the door is badly weathered, and maybe the name was always meant to be ambiguous. Like a lot of the bars in Northside, the Cavern was built inside a converted house with a sloping, shingled roof. A little bronze bell above the door jangles as she enters. The space is narrow, with a wooden counter along the left hand wall and a few tables in the back. The opposite wall is covered in picture frames. There are dozens of them, of varying sizes and styles, from ornate pieces with gilded edges to the generic plastic type that come packaged with stock photos of grinning families. But there are no photos, of families or anything else. All the frames stand empty, housing nothing except the wall’s crumbling brick.
The bartender, a short man named Mikey, glances up at her from a tablet on the counter. The screen’s blue glare paints the underside of his ragged beard. The place is empty, but the pulse and thrum of bass is shuddering so hard through the floorboards that the glasses and bottles rattle on their shelves.
“Capreol up already?” she asks. Mikey shakes his head.
“He canceled. It’s some new kid.”
“Any good?”
“Given what I can make out through the floor, I’d say she’s alright.”
Over the past year, the Cavern has become the go-to spot for diehards in the local electronic scene. All of the best acts out of Northside play here, and several from the capital. The lineups are not always stellar – if you make a point of showcasing young talent, you’ve got to expect a few duds, but every once in awhile the Cavern unearths a gem. Capreol is one of those, and Marmoset is well on his way. Ash isn’t surprised by the cancellation – the venue is small, and Capreol in particular might have outgrown it. She doesn’t mind the change. The music is only part of the reason she chooses to spend her nights here.
Passing the bar, she descends a cramped flight of stairs at the back of the room. The shadows in the basement are thick; a flickering light seeps from a few candles stuck in the wine bottles while an overhead projector shoots a beam of wavering colour onto the stage. A few dozen people are moving on the floor, with maybe the same number gathered by a second bar or seated on benches along the walls. She spots a few faces she knows, as well as the distinctive line of an outsider in the crowd. Up front, the girl working the decks is young, maybe 17, or 18, with a wide face and dark skin. Her eyes are ringed by dark makeup, and beneath a white, oversized t-shirt her thin frame bobs with in time with the beat.
From the foot of the stairs Ash takes it all in, the bar and the candles, the young DJ doing her thing. Through the concrete floor, strands of orange light are snaking like the cracks in a broken window. A thin mist hangs in the air, faint as the dying gleam of a fire. These details, like the outsider in the back, are only visible to her because of the powder she’s taken; among the town’s users, the Cavern is famous. The bar sits on a fissure, a crack in reality. The light bleeding through is from another world.
Ash folds her jacket into a bundle and sets it down on a bench in the corner. She pulls her hair back and stretches her arms above her head. She starts to dance.
The music pounding from the speakers is aggressive. Echoes of pop songs from twenty years ago are thread between the beats, and disjointed voices that might be cut from episodes of old TV shows or simply messages left on the girl’s phone. Commonplace things. Fragments of daily life. It has that distinctive Northside sound, dark, and a little lonely. It’s definitely raw, but give the girl a couple years and she’ll be there, right where Capreol and Marmoset are now. Ash smiles, her arms passing through the orange mist, the light of the projector cutting the ends of her fingers. From her back pocket she removes the vial of powder and tips a good quarter of it into her mouth. The fruit rots on the back of her tongue. The razor slices her gums. The dance floor is suddenly full.
Half-empty figures move through the darkness and candlelight. Backlit, illuminated from strange angles, at times a face will appear in the air, an eye or pale stretch of cheek, the edge of pink and parting lips, and then it will be gone. People are flickering in and out of her world and the cracks under her feet blaze like veins of molten lava. The space is full with bodies in cross-section, dancing with less than a full complement of limbs, or with far too many: a girl’s outstretched arms multiplied like the icon of a god, two heads flung forward from the same neck; a leg emerges from nowhere, followed by a lithe male body, as if from behind an invisible door. Parallel dancers in a parallel bar, moving over the cracks in an identical floor. Parties at the Cavern take place in two universes at once.
Like Ash, they have all come here to dance, but they are spectral figures, wavering. Ash releases a gasp as the heat of someone’s body passes through her, a second heart beating inside her chest. On the dance floor, over the cracks in their respective worlds, bodies run together like streams of spilled ink. Their energy merges, and their consciousness: can you feel me like I feel you? That’s why you came here, isn’t it? The thought arrives from outside, from the mind of a person in another universe. Ash raises her arms into the air. She keeps dancing.
On the stage, there are now two DJs, the girl and a man almost twice her size, their bodies intertwining, arms flowing into and between one another as they move across the decks. Someone, somewhere is laughing. The crowd seethes in a great wave. A woman passes through Ash, and then a man, and for a brief instant they are one. Sweat is running along her back. She can feel the press of eyes on her, watching. How’s this for a show? She can’t tell if the thought is her own; she knows that the world is broken. None of them have much time left. Still, the night is young, and the music is good, and what else is there, in the end?
–
Visit us again next month for “A Host“, the next installment in “A Colour Like Orange: Stories from a Broken World” by CG Inglis.
Follow CG Inglis on Twitter @viscereal