Smoketown Read online

  Much had changed in the last twenty-five years.

  What was once the Heart was now only the Center. Though much of the city’s beauty had persevered, these days, pinpoints of light danced in the Leiodaran dark for other reasons.

  Flames from thousands of candles swayed with the collective breath of the city. Most of its inhabitants assembled on McClaren Street for the unfestive holiday, the marking of March twenty-seventh—the day that the last infected died, the last body burnt, a few months before the quarantine was lifted, and birds were declared illegal.

  Red candles covered the stoops of McClaren Street. They dotted the sidewalks and dominated the windowsills, the rooftops, and stairs. One candle burned for each person who had perished during the three months that Leiodare was shut away from the rest of the world. There were no candles for those left behind, or even for the friends who had had to sever ties when supplies ran low and monkeys were hunted like rabbits. And certainly not for the birds that had been exterminated. One in four humans died during the quarantine. Ninety percent of the bird population had perished, most at the hands of the people who had once taken no more notice of them than of the clouds overhead.

  These people and their descendants, the ones on the street in their light jackets and heavy thoughts, stood gazing into the candlelight, a spectacle as beautiful as the celebrations of the time before—simpler, quieter perhaps but just as memorable. They did their civic duty, took care of themselves—not so much each other—and quietly lived in fear. Such was Leiodaran culture, twenty-five years after the city had been abandoned by the outside and left to its own devices. Back then, the borders had only been closed for three months, but Leiodare had turned during its time alone.

  Fresh off her shift, Anna skirted the perimeter of the crowd. It stood between her and her building. Near her, a gaggle of others, mostly other non-natives she assumed, kept up running conversations. She watched the ceremony with disquiet as she thought of the birds upstairs. In the distance, she could still hear chants from the protestors cordoned a block away in Lumpur Park. Anna looked toward the distant corner where animal rights activists and Starling gang members had been thrown together by their mutual ire for the commemoration. The animal rights activists tried to create some space between themselves and the Starlings but to no avail. A few activists watched the Starlings nervously from the edges of the crowd. The Starlings didn’t frighten Anna. To her, the gangs seemed just another distraction for an anxious generation looking for a way to take their mind off the weather and how much habitat would be left as they aged—same as everywhere in North America and, she expected, everywhere else.

  Now the protestors were chanting, but earlier it had been nearly the whole city. Even inside the warehouse during work she had heard it. The sound of finger cymbals could be lost in the forklift’s engines and the whirr of the carts as she and a few other pickers rolled around the warehouse’s wide aisles. But the chanting had been inescapable. One couldn’t get away from the feeling of one hundred thousand people chanting in unison. The vibration had ran up her spine, rattled her.

  Leiodare’s holy days had always disturbed Anna: the chanting, the candles, the scarecrows, and the cleansing ceremonies. Because she wasn’t a native, most of Leiodaran culture intrigued her, but not these three days in the winter when all the city seemed in a fever. She had spent all day wanting only to go home and check on the cygnets, to make sure she hadn’t hallucinated the reintroduction of magic back into her life.

  Now the crowd stood between her and them. In her backpack, courtesy of a stop at the pet depot, thirty flies wrapped up in a plastic bag like goldfish lay in the bottom of the pack, and though this was no crime in itself, Anna thought it best that that she get inside.

  Given the size the crowd, she knew it would be a challenge. Amazing that she could forget how many people gathered on this single street. The spectacle had dumbfounded her during her first year here, but now thoughts of the cygnets kept her focused. She looked for pockets of space in the crowd, trying to chart a course through the swell of people who clogged the entrance to her building. Anna turned back to the center of the street. A flash of green fabric stood out in the crush of people. Seeing it, Anna decided to stay, and not because of the trudge through the crowd. By the look of the group of fans dressed in small green capes she wasn’t the only one focused on something other than the commemoration. They, and she, stayed for the calls, or more specifically, the caller.

  At the center of the street, on a raised platform alongside a griot from the historical society, stood Anna’s favorite morning caller. Anna found the woman’s voice remarkable. It hovered between suggestive and refined. Each morning she heard her song-like calls rise up over the din of traffic, bend around buildings and charm Anna into dreams.

  Anna momentarily rose up to her tiptoes, focusing on her. As always, the caller wore a jade green robe with a large hood and enormous bell sleeves. It completely obscured her body and most of her face, leaving just her jaw and mouth visible. The hood overhung, concealing the rest of her features. It revealed full lips though, plum against the rest of her face’s deep brown complexion. Her lips stood out against the green, drawing Anna’s eye. From what Anna could see, she looked to be a younger woman, not much older than Anna’s thirty years. The rest of the crowd, no doubt, noticed the robe’s shimmer more than anything else.

  The robe had been constructed of the rare peacock floss sold in The Shallows and reputed to be manufactured from the last remnants of the gossamer bushes that had once attracted butterflies and bolds to the center of the city. Anna had seen images of the immense white birds hovering over the bushes, butterflies lighting across the gossamer’s iridescent flowers. Now gossamer bushes were known by all and kept by none. Even this scant association with birds had been enough to have them removed. The list of taboo objects and activities in Leiodaran culture stretched as long as the memories of those who had lived through the quarantine.

  The caller opened her mouth to begin and the shimmer of the robe, the light of the candles, the memories of the tragedy the griot shared, all faded away in the power of her song.

  She sang the melody of her creation while the griot droned the lyrics.

  As the story went, when birds were outlawed and could no longer be heard at the city’s center, a kind of sickness crept up in Leiodarans. Not the sickness that had banished birds to legend and memory but a tangible disquiet, a certain silence between the train’s brakes, the rumble of the biplanes, of foot traffic, and the feverish music that had overtaken the sidewalk cafés. People knew what was missing; elements of background noise become more apparent when removed, and even more so when such absence means emptiness—as it did on those silent mornings that skewed the rest of the day. The conundrum of Leiodarans’ circumstance weighed on the streets. In the wake of this tide of uneasiness, the callers were created. Now their voices filled the streets in the morning; each of the callers walked their routes, bringing a semblance of peace with their song.

  Anna had known bird calls before she came to Leiodare, but they didn’t sound like this woman. Some callers had voices that mimicked birds so well that they could trick the mind. This one though, the green-robed woman who walked the path of Anna’s street each day, sounded nothing like a bird—not bio, mechanical, or virtual—but Leiodarans didn’t seem to care. They revered her. People lined the streets on her route, and Anna had even seen some people throw petals at her feet. This single tangible instance of agreement heartened Anna’s impression of her fellow city dwellers. It kept her from believing she’d come to a beautiful, exciting, and functionally insane place.

  What made the woman’s song so captivating was not the tenor of her voice, which was pure and pleasing, nor the inflections or absolute control she seemed to have over herself and even Anna’s impression of her. It was that the caller seemed to give the best of herself without using words. She communicated as clearly and as profoundly as if she were speaking to Anna from inside her own
head. That was why Anna stayed up each night after her shift to listen every morning, and why she stayed now.

  The caller’s song flowed out over the crowd, ostensibly a background to the story that the griot related, but overpowering it easily so that the history took a backseat to the particulars of this moment: the occasional ring of finger cymbals, the smell of burning wax, the heat of the bodies pressed together on the wide avenue.

  For a moment Anna closed her eyes, relaxing into the night. It was a brief peace.

  Shouts erupted from the crowd, first on the farthest edges north of where Anna stood, but soon closer and more fervently until even the caller quieted her song and turned towards the sound. Just visible in the crush of bodies, Anna could see the shadows of movement in between people’s arms and legs as the crowd parted along an invisible axis, creating a path that eventually led straight to her. Anna didn’t move. She’d learned in her short time in Leiodare that she rarely feared the same things as the people around her. So she held her ground, squinting through the near darkness as she tried to recognize the wet-looking shadow moving toward her.

  Small bodies scurried in the dark. Or rather, on closer inspection, a series of small masses flowed towards her, thousands of rolling beetles falling over each other, surging forward like a glistening wave of tiny legs and hard, clacking bodies. Since the beginning of the rainy season, rolling beetle colonies had infested blocks as far afield as The Shallows, pushing out even the large bee colonies that speckled her neighborhood and the armies of caterpillars in The Dire. From the faint sound of buzzing, Anna suspected that the beetles had lost a fight with one of the nearby colonies and now were pushing humans out of their way.

  Just then, a fat raindrop hit Anna square in the middle of her nose, followed by another and another. The hiss of extinguished candles floated across the crowd until it was overtaken by the sound of the rain striking metal, stone, and flesh, a sudden raucous roar. Blinking away the wet, people in the crowd shuffled in all directions, looking for cover. Anna removed her pack and held it low. As she watched the crowd of people start to loosen she quietly unzipped the front pocket and waited. In the instant before the crowd broke apart, Anna held her pack out and scooped off a thin layer of beetles from the rolling wave. Revulsion trickled up her arm. Still, it was surely a week’s worth of swan food in one deft swoop. Finally the edges of the crowd started to break away as more people retreated to the spaces between buildings, and towards the train station.

  “Please clear the streets!” the unmistakable digital voice of an automated pest sentry urged loudly. Anna turned to the sound and saw the armored sentry rolling slowly onto the street. Within minutes, it would be followed by a full battalion.

  “Retire to the comforts of home while the area is cleansed. More concerned citizens please join your brethren at the nearest giene station—.” The voice paused and Anna covered her ears. “At 555th and de la Sol.”

  Anna sighed and looked towards the now-empty platform as she discreetly wiped the straggling beetles from her bag. The caller had fled with the rest of them. Even without the cygnets to consider, she’d rather not endure any time with the “concerned citizens” known to frequent giene stations.

  She hoped Peru would answer soon.

  3

  The sound of metal scraping against stone echoed down McClaren Street. Dr. Eugenio Oliveira passed under the fluffy morning clouds, enjoying the feel of sun on his face. Though he spared a glance or two at the crews working to clear the last of the bright red candle wax from the stoops on the street, his mind and gaze were locked on the next block where the Municipal Rest building stood as stooped and decayed as the residents inside.

  Counterbalancing with his attaché case, Eugenio maneuvered to keep his cane from sticking in the gaps between the brick pavers that lined McClaren. As he walked, he dug his cane into the stamps of that founding family’s icon printed into the stone. The street had never needed a sign because the pavers were emblematic enough. Later McClaren became infamous for that same founding family’s demise when most of them fell victim to the Crumble during the winter of quarantine. As a child, Eugenio had felt sentimentally toward this wide alley of opulence that had once been Leiodare’s main thoroughfare; now, as a young man, he only wished it didn’t present such a gauntlet.

  Eugenio stepped up onto the curb in front of the building and tried to steady himself for the indignity of the moving sidewalk. He grabbed the thick rubber railing just in time to keep his legs from being snatched forward too quickly and sending him into the awkward jerk and tumble with which he’d first greeted the shitspitting thing. Years ago, before the building had been retrofitted for the elderly, chromed banisters had lined the building. The banisters had been just fine with Eugenio, but once the city decided to turn the old tenement into a rest center, the sidewalk went in. Eugenio, despite his knee, shouldn’t have to worry about such contraptions for many years to come—but his work required otherwise. Reasonably well balanced, he swatted at a passing bee and spared a glance back down McClaren as Municipal Rest’s front doors parted and deposited him inside.

  Frigid air conditioning rushed at Eugenio’s face as the sidewalk slowly made its way to the front desk junction. A long sparse desk split the lobby into a visitor’s waiting area and a resident lounge—there, the administrative manager stood, tapping on the inlaid screen, most likely entering the morning’s reports. Ready for the weekly check-in ritual, Eugenio hopped from sidewalk to marble floor.

  “Morning, Doctor,” the gray-coated man behind the desk said.

  “Morning,” he responded.

  Eugenio pulled up the sleeve of his shirt and scanned his clearance. The day’s business downloaded to the tablet in his briefcase while he made small talk with the manager. The tablet beeped completion. Turning for the elevator, Eugenio removed it from his case and prepared for the day’s work.

  His first interviewee, a short elderly woman with a youthful face and bright white hair, was waiting for him in the hallway when he stepped off the elevator. Interesting that she would get the treatments but let her hair go white, he thought to himself. Eugenio looked forward to getting started.

  “Passing your time spying on people, are you?” he asked jokingly.

  She harrumphed and stepped into the small apartment.

  “They alerted me to your disturbance,” she said.

  “It’s not as if I am an intruder. It’s hardly a disturbance for a man to come and visit a new friend,” Eugenio replied.

  She looked at him sideways, pursing her lips slightly.

  “There’s no need to humor me with the illusion of friendship. I’ve had countless confidants in this life and expect to have them in the next. I don’t require pity from ambitious young men.”

  She entered the apartment, leaving the door ajar. Eugenio took this as invitation enough and followed her into the surprisingly sun-washed, cheerful room. He watched her cross the small living room, its walls covered in plaques, and seat herself on the corner of a writing desk along a short wall.

  “I apologize for my—” Eugenio began.

  “Condescending remarks,” she finished for him.

  “Yes.” Eugenio met her steady gaze. “I meant no disrespect. I apologize.”

  “Perhaps you were simply overly familiar,” she allowed, waving her hand for him to sit. “How can I help you, Dr. Oliveira?”

  “Eugenio, please, Dr. Etive. If anyone should be addressed by a title, you are that one.” Eugenio reached into his pocket to pull out his pen-sized recorder.

  “Now, let’s not overcorrect.” She made a small noise of exasperation.

  Eugenio blinked and looked down at the floor. Absentmindedly, he pulled a small metal circle from his pocket and took a breath as he tried to find a new tack.

  “That object, can I see it?” Dr. Etive asked.

  He could refuse, of course, but perhaps this would work. He held the charm up at eye level, its concentric circles glinted in the sunlight pouring t
hrough the windows.

  “Are you Mendejano?” she asked.

  Eugenio smiled slightly, impressed by her sharp deductive skills.

  “How interesting.” Dr. Etive looked at him keenly, seemingly eager now to make his acquaintance. “So, why would a Mendejano become a medical anthropologist?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s passive. Mendejano fix things, not study them.”

  “But one must first understand a problem in order to fix it. Don’t you agree?” he asked.

  “I do. Then you came to be Mendejano later in life?”

  “Why do you assume this?” he asked.

  “Is it true?” she persisted.

  “Somewhat later in life, I am still a young man after all.” He chuckled good-naturedly.

  “Clearly,” she said.

  Eugenio stopped laughing. “I’m old enough, Dr. Etive. Old enough to know what the Crumble has done to my home, and yours. We’ve built not just a society, but a culture on fear.” He paused and met her gaze. “We no longer die of the Crumble, but it still steals our lives. Life expectancy in the city has decreased twenty percent since that winter.”

  “It’s just stress,” Dr. Etive said in a deadpan voice.

  “That’s what they say,” he answered, “because they have nothing better to say.”