Art by Valerie Thornton
Prologue.
In the conspiratorially creamy centre of a dark chocolate and poppy seedy room was a truffle mousse table, garnished by the presence of three men in trace peanut suits. Clockwise from the front was Stem, the tallest, who was the group’s silent caretaker; Thorn, the surprisingly reliable assassin with a long scar across his throat like a slit red eye; and then Petal, the accountant.
‘Why am I surprisingly reliable?’ Thorn asked. Because it's generally assumed that assassins in fairy tales are completely incapable of poisoning properly. The others nodded in agreement.
‘Stem is lanky and Thorn is a killer,’ said Petal as he went over his companions. ‘Their names suit them to a tee. I have some homosexual tendencies. Is that derogatory, politically incorrect? I don’t think it matters. Anyway, I’m generally self-effacing. I can handle being the subject of a little bit of controversy.’
The group was called The Risen Roses on account of their coincidental monikers.
‘Only it’s an utter shame that Thomas is gone,’ Petal said wistfully as he gazed at the table’s empty spot. ‘Like the wind that takes the sweet scent of flowers to far off lands, Thomas has sailed his soul to a realm far more suiting of his noble spirit. Let us lower our heads in remembrance.’
The flowers temporarily wilted.
‘He only left to get some tea, though,’ Thorn said.
The door creaked open, allowing daggers of sharp light to cut into the room. Loud grumbling filled the air as The Risen Roses covered their eyes and pounded the table. When the door closed again, there was Thomas standing before them, holding a silvered tray of immaculate teacups.
‘I brought the tea!’ Thomas exclaimed.
‘What kind?’
‘Earl Grey.’
The loud grumbling and pounding of the table resumed. Thomas displayed marked insouciance as he set a cup before each of The Risen Roses, all of them balking at the grey flavour in turn. With exaggerated enjoyment Thomas sipped the acidic liquid, pinky up; his eyes lingered among each of the gentlemen as the heated stream ran down the tunnel of his slender throat. His eyes widened with a smile as he swallowed.
‘Excellent!’ he said, setting the cup back onto the table with a quiet tap. ‘They don’t make Earl Grey like this anymore. And I’ve been all over the world, from Austria to Zaire to Azerbaijan and back to Canada, so trust me when I say I’ve had it everywhere, every time – but in all the years of my life I’ve only had a decent cup twice, and this is the second time. Drink up, men.’
The Risen Roses all looked at one another uncertainly before taking up their cups and allowing a tiny, apprehensive sip. A silent, tense pause invaded the air before all three men spit out fountains of muddy water simultaneously. They grumbled and pounded the table more loudly and vigorously than before.
‘Lads! Gents! Men!’ Thomas called over the din. ‘Behave yourselves! This is supposed to be a meeting.’
The noise gradually and guiltily subsided into stray awkward coughs. Petal lit a long and thin cigarette, its orange glow burning vividly like an omnipresent and poisonous rat eye keeping watch over the room.
‘Thomas is right,’ Petal said as he released billowing black smoke from his mouth like a chimneystack. ‘I’ve received word from The Boss: “I have need of your particular brand of services once more,” he says; “There’s a man named Terence Darling who I’d like to see cancelled out.” By cancelled out I’m guessing he means killed. He’ll pay us half now and half when the job is done, and of course I’ll be allocating the funds to all of us on a conditional basis.’
‘How many bones?’ Thorn asked, his scar blinking.
‘The same amount found in the human body,’ Petal relayed. ‘Times one hundred.’
‘Terence Darling?’ spoke up Stem inquisitively, for the first time since the meeting began. ‘What reason were we given for “cancelling out” this Terence Darling?’
‘None,’ said Petal before absently sucking on his cigarette.
‘Because we’re getting paid for it,’ Thomas cheerily explained. ‘We’re going to cancel him out because that’s our job; that’s what we were put on this earth to do. How can you question your own purpose when it’s your purpose?’
Stem sank back in his chair as cigarette smoke reached out towards him. He folded his arms and looked away.
‘Just remember,’ he mumbled in a voice thicker than a chocolate milkshake, ‘I’m here to keep you guys on life support. If you die, I lose my job. These kinds of mysterious business ventures are risky by nature. I know that’s exactly why you lot would decide to take it up, and I’m not about to sway you away from it, but I’m just saying we need to be more careful. We’re human beings, just like this Terence Darling. He’ll want to stay alive to enjoy all the sweet sounds, smells and sexes of life just as much as we do. This can make pretty much anyone dangerous, given the circumstances. I guess what I’m saying is we need to know who this guy is before we go after him. I’m tired of faceless killings.’
Grim silence reaped the room of pleasantness.
‘Jesus, Stem,’ Petal said, resurrecting. ‘You’re supposed to be a quiet guy.’
‘We’re all supposed to be who we are, but that doesn’t mean we should be,’ Stem declared. ‘I’m Stem, he’s Thorn and you’re Petal. We all get it. But what about Thomas, eh? What part of the rose is the Thomas?’
‘Thomas is the soul of the flower,’ Petal explained through freshly exhaled black mist.
Thomas nodded in agreement with a huge grin smeared across his face. ‘I’m the Thomas! I’m Soul! Drink up, gents!’
The Risen Roses took up their teacups and clinked them together before filling their mouths with Earl Grey, and then they all sprayed it back out again with the gleeful exception of Thomas.
1.
‘Terence, darling! You forgot your lunch!’
Nara sat at the kitchen table, eating a chicken sandwich as she watched her mother’s shadow box with a floppy glove; a quarter of her father’s shadow appeared in the entranceway and took the bagged lunch from her, and then the shadows of her parents temporarily merged into a single black form. The door closed with a satisfying rush of wind and Nara’s mother reentered the kitchen with the bright, bright stars of love in her eyes.
‘You look transcendent, Mama,’ Nara said, holding the half-eaten sandwich in her hands like a report card safely laced with average marks. ‘Thanks again for making me breakfast.’
She took the glass of orange juice into both of her hands and gulped it down; Nara Darling was a sixteen-year-old girl with childlike qualities lingering about her like the dust of a fairy. She felt around beneath the table in quest of an unseen creature; her hands felt through the thick air like rival whaling ships searching for Moby Dick, and eventually they chanced upon the furry back of a great grey mammal. The table purred.
‘Haha! Fat cat!’
‘Don’t tease the cat, dear.’
A thin strawberry poked through Nara’s subtly curled lips. ‘You know he loves it.’ The purring grew so loud that the table nearly vibrated, the pacifying tone beginning to sound like a forceful meeting between wood and saw.
Then out strolled the cat nonchalantly, acting as though nothing had happened. Nara caught the cat staring directly at her and stomped her feet and clapped her hands all at the same time; it was just enough to widen the cat’s eyes into large yellow marbles and push his ears back like thin bushes caught in a heavy wind. As soon as Nara made the motion to stomp and clap again, the cat bolted out of the kitchen like lightning, towing its thundering fat after it. She covered her face to giggle and wiped a stray tear from her eye.
‘At least you’re giving it some exercise,’ said her mother as she took the dirty dishes from the table. ‘But what about you? What’s on the menu today, little cloud?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ said Nara, shyly bending her finger against the edge of the table.
‘“This and that”,’ her mother repeated mischievously. ‘Billie Angers, “this and that”. Yes, don’t worry, I know how much time you spend with that boy.’
‘Oh, Mama!’ cried out Nara, aghast. ‘You know Billie is more like a brother to me than anything. Gee whiz, I can only imagine how you get such ideas in your head. Too much sun, I bet.’
‘Now, now, Nara,’ said her mother, absently shaking a milky spoon in a disciplinary manner. ‘You shouldn’t talk to your mother that way. What would your father think, mm?’
‘He’d probably put it in his comic strip.’
The acknowledging expression on her mother’s face displayed agreement, but as a mother and wife she gave verbal disapproval by reflex. ‘Your father is very creative, Nara. But while his work may seem to make light of some incidents that are kind of familiar to us, that doesn’t make him any less serious a man. He works very hard to support us. You need to learn to respect him more.’ As a blithe, rotund figure capable of brandishing stinging words, she reminded Nara of a bumblebee.
‘You get so serious on the turn of a toonie,’ Nara noted as she removed herself from the kitchen table. ‘It’s kinda spooky.’
Her mother simply ignored her and turned on the kitchen counter radio; Pictures of Me by Elliott Smith played through the tinny white speakers, thumping along to the apocalyptic war drum of a one angel army. Nara was a sweet girl, but she was still a teenager and had a habit of making tiny cracks about her parents that tended to irritate her mother after a while. ‘This song is making me depressed,’ Nara said, kissing her mother’s cheek as she turned off the radio. ‘I’m heading out.’
‘Are you going to call on Billie Angers?’ her mother asked as a sprightly smile sprinkled across her face.
‘I’m going to the arcade,’ Nara divulged while putting on a particularly defensive air; she became slightly flustered whenever her mother pried into her personal life. ‘If Angers is there then I’ll probably hang out with him, sure. Billie does what Billie does, and I’m none too sure what Billie does; even if he is my brother. Well, he’s not, but you know what I mean.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t, my little cloud,’ said her mother, the subtle wrinkles of her forehead forming a most sincere attempt at understanding, ‘but I hope you have fun, regardless.’
‘Thanks, Mama,’ said Nara, instantly relaxed by her mother’s affection. ‘You’re sweeter than sunset.’
She exited the kitchen and pulled on her dainty summer boots in the ethereally decorated vestibule, giving an enthusiastic farewell (‘I’ll miss you!’) before sallying forth like a little ladylike Don Quixote.
Outside, the sun was pouring onto the earth like an incandescently golden, thickly sticky syrup, sweet without being saccharine and fiery without setting the world ablaze; Nara could feel a thin sheen of sweat already forming on her peachy white skin, just enough to cool her down without being itchy and annoying.
She managed to walk all the way down to the end of her driveway before noticing a remarkably tall man standing suspiciously on the sidewalk at the other side of the street, holding up a newspaper like an old tv spoof detective disguising himself in the most ludicrous way at hand. As Nara couldn’t resist such a deliciously odd sighting, she waited for a short parade of automobiles to pass by before strolling up to the aberrant man; he was visibly disconcerted by the confrontation as the newspaper was crinkling and crackling in his hands like an embarrassing manuscript tossed into a fire.
‘Hallo, sir,’ she greeted the man, a childlike grin on her face. ‘What’s the news?’
The tall man mumbled something inaudibly, folded the wrinkled newspaper, then slowly shifted weight from one foot to the other as though walking barefoot across hot coals in a dream. He made to walk away but Nara touched him lightly by the sleeve of his jacket, preventing him from making a clean escape.
‘Why were you standing here like that?’ she inquired, quite eager to learn more about him. ‘Were you spying on our house?’
The tall man sighed heavily. ‘I’m just a fan,’ he explained with a weak smile, his voice so deep it was weighed down with anvils. ‘Everything Shakes has been my favourite comic strip since it came out; I was just hopeful for an autograph, that’s all. I’m sorry if I invaded your family’s privacy in any way – it won’t happen again. I swear on it.’
‘Wow!’ exclaimed Nara, eyes brightening and her grin broadening like a Cheshire cat. ‘No one has ever tried to track Daddy down before, at least not that I know of. I think it’s actually pretty cool if you ask me.’
‘Oh, dear, darling Darling – it’s really not cool at all,’ said the tall man, tucking the newspaper into his armpit. He breathed a sigh heavier than a gust of wind blowing in from the very peak of Mount Everest. ‘You see, if I managed to find out where your father lives, then it goes without saying that a fair amount of information concerning him has come into my possession. I know that he’s still working his original factory position until the freelance work becomes more stable. That’s a good idea, I think – his comic strip is still in its infancy so there’s no way of knowing how successful it’ll be in the long run just yet. I know that the paper has had a lot of faith in it, to have let it take over Ape Fissure. That’s been a favourite of quite a few people for some time now. Everything Shakes is vying for the affection of many. Your father knows how dangerous this is, but I’m not sure if he realises the exact extent of it. Do you think he cares enough about his family to remove the danger completely? You should let him know that Ape Fissure deserves a second chance as much as Everything Shakes deserves an amber.’
Nara faltered. That didn’t sound at all like the dialogue of a fan to her; she felt incredibly intimidated. She took a few steps away from the strange man as though she were setting a comfortable distance between herself and a wild bear. ‘I’ll let him know that, sir,’ she managed to say, although she could barely hear herself over the beating of her own heart.
The tall man nodded slowly and puissantly, like the originating moment when snow slides from a slope to form an avalanche, and then he turned to walk away. Nara sprinted down the street in the opposite direction, using the side of her arm to wipe away a quick succession of tears. Once she reached the end of the block, she stopped to catch her breath, realising that she should start exercising more.
She held up the side of her arm before her and looked at the fine mixture of tears and sweat that had formed on her skin, though for no reason other than to take her mind off of the tall man. Why hadn’t she run back to her house to tell her mother? Or to call the police, for that matter? The event had been so odd that she was already starting to suspect that she had merely dreamt it. When she carefully turned her head to look back down the street she saw nary but a few passing cars. If she hadn’t dreamt it, then perhaps she had simply misunderstood the man; when she thought about it, she wasn’t entirely sure what he had been talking about in the first place. Perhaps it was just the man’s voice that had frightened her.
Whatever the case might be, Nara figured she would tell Billie Angers all about it at the arcade. Billie had been generally helpful of such matters in the past, as he was once caught stealing a chocolate bar at a store when he was a kid; it gave him a special insight into matters of crime and punishment in the same way that radiation gave some people super powers.
Running beneath the sun’s summery rays had caused Nara to feel even worse than she had at first thought. Her knees wobbled and her legs shook as she panted heavily, clutching the front of her shirt; stars entered into her vision like exceptionally bright snowflakes, and she pushed past them towards a small delicatessen on the corner across the street.
The bell above the door jingled like a stray reindeer when Nara entered the deli. The owner stood behind the counter with a bored, vacant expression on his face, and he watched on in silence as Nara crawled towards him. ‘Help,’ she panted in a mousey squeak, looking up at the half of his face that was peering over the side of the counter. ‘I need free water. Do you have free water?’
‘Free water?’ the man repeated in an accent so thick that Nara had to set her ears in what she called machete mode. ‘Yes, free water. Yes.’ The half of face disappeared and then just as quickly reappeared, the eyes revealing a glimmer of kind concern. ‘Ambulance?’ he asked.
‘No thanks,’ Nara said, pulling herself onto her feet and leaning against the counter. ‘I just need a drink.’
The owner handed her a paper cup filled with cold water and she swallowed all of the liquid in a single gulp. At that moment water was the same to her as the elixir of life – a cool sensation passed through her throat and chest, melting the stars away from her vision and rejuvenating her spirit. ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ she said with an appreciative smile. ‘I felt like I was about to die for a little bit.’
The owner took the paper cup from her hands and set it on the counter. ‘Take it easy,’ he said to her. ‘It’s a hot day. You know?’
‘Yes, sir. No more running for me.’
Having been repaired by the water, Nara left the deli in a slight red ribbon twirl of embarrassment and was greeted by a rush of warm wind. The nascent day had become so golden that she felt like a pleasant Liddell girl; buoyant thoughts of playing Billie at Street Fighter added a cheery blossom spring to her step, and before she knew it she was nearing the arcade. As always she brought a single quarter and not another cent more.
The arcade was housed in an old brick building about the size of four elephants, if you stacked two of the elephants on top of the others; painted in a faded yellow-orange on the yellowing yellow sign was Chase’s Arcade, though nobody named Chase had ever even glanced in its direction, let alone run it; and the cracks in the sidewalk leading up to the entrance were substantial evidence that an earthquake had hit, though the town had never once been treated to a tremor. Yes, the démodé arcade was the ultimate haunt of Nara and Billie, at least until the owners became bankrupt and the building was demolished to make way for a parking lot. Such was the fate of arcades in North America.
Standing in the entrance was a stocky bald man wearing a coin dispenser apron, holding an unlit cigarette and generally looking like an adult Charlie Brown who had failed at life. He stared vacantly into space and popped the cigarette between his lips like a large decorative toothpick, completely oblivious of Nara as she passed him by and entered into the dark, dirty and dank interior of Chase’s Arcade. She kept her eyes on the bald man until it pained her to do so, his utter disinterest being strangely hypnotic. No matter how many times she went into the arcade he never said hi.
But at least he was mysterious in a familiar, comfortable way, not like that giant who had been spying on her house. Maybe the tall man was a private detective working for the creator of Ape Fissure? She desperately tried to reason. Oh, well, there’s Billie anyway – I’ll try to think about it later.
Her best friend – or ‘brother’ – was leaning against a Virtual On white dual cabinet, watching the demo play on the first screen; he always watched with great interest when people played it but refused to pay the loonie it charged. Once the demo looped back to the title screen he looked up and saw Nara shuffling towards him like a zombie who had seen a ghost. ‘Jeez, Nara, what the walrus happened to you? Are you all right?’
Billie was a year older than Nara and about a head taller in the process; he had messy brown hair, wore a black leather jacket over a black Bach vs. Beethoven shirt, and wore jeans the colour of a polluted stream. Nara looked like a Sunday school student standing next to him.
‘I think I nearly suffered a sunstroke,’ she said, pressing her hands together in a swimming stroke position. ‘A guy at a deli saved me, though. I would probably have died if not for him.’
‘Thank god for delis,’ said Billie as he led Nara away from the Virtual On cabinets.
‘Every night in my prayers. So what have you been up to?’
‘Oh, this and that. Lately it’s been more of that than this. You know how it is with school – you keep telling yourself that you’re going to put off all of your homework, you try your hardest to find other things to do instead, but the next thing you know you’re sitting at your desk in your room and studying like somebody had misplaced tomorrow. So far the marks for my classes go like a sheep: B, A, A, A. How am I supposed to be an irresponsible teenager with stuff like this happening? Oh, I just don’t understand it!’
‘Gosh, Billie, don’t be such a drama king. Isn’t that the class you’re getting a B in?’
‘Shush. We’re not here to discuss school. School has no place in an arcade.’
‘Unless somebody schools you, eh?’
Billie cocked an eyebrow. ‘I sure hope that’s a challenge, Darling, because I’m rearing to go.’
‘Let’s toss down.’
‘You mean “let’s throw down”. But you shouldn’t mean that anyway. That kind of slang is generally silly by default, and when you say it it delves into a whole new level of silliness that tears down the very foundations of the universe.’
‘I was joking, Billie,’ she managed to say between giggles. ‘Stop being funny.’
Billie stopped at the Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike cabinet, where video gamey hip hop beats blared in the background as a man dressed in the dark blue colours of the deepest depths of the ocean went up against the CPU. The dark blue man played as Q in his red trench coat colour, and his playing style reinforced the violence that the colour implied; his game was largely ‘beat down’, which meant he never gave the opponent a moment to breathe, and whenever it seemed like the opponent had a chance to do so, he’d simply snatch that breath away with a barrage of hardhitting attacks. The screen lit up with seizure inducing colours upon perfect victory. His points netted him the highest rank in the game.
‘Man, aren’t you a little old to be playing games?’ Billie asked in a friendly manner.
They stepped back, aghast – and with full foot movements, not just subtle slides – when the dark blue man turned from the cabinet to face them. They had never seen a man with a huge scar across his throat before – it looked as though he had been recently reaped by the grim one himself. Billie immediately reached behind himself and grabbed a neon pink light gun, pulled it out as far as the cord would allow, and completely let loose on the man with the scar. Hollow clicking noises rang throughout the arcade like the call of a summer insect. ‘Die, monster!’ he shouted, clicking furiously. ‘You don’t belong in this world!’
He huffed and puffed theatrically before replacing the light gun in a manner that implied that nothing had happened; no, no, nothing at all. His behaviour was similar to that of a small child caught stealing cookies from a cookie jar (‘What’s this doing in my hand? Where am I?’).
Except for a subtle hint of smirk, the man with the scar was completely unaffected by Billie’s antics, as was the case with anyone over twenty-five.
‘It’s a bit of a hobby,’ the man said flatly, so flatly that you could set a row of onions over his words and chop them up as thinly as could please. ‘Eh? Just a hobby. “Aren’t you a little young to be all grown up?” I suppose I should be playing chess or darts or poker.’
‘I meant it all in good fun,’ Billie explained as he tried to wring his hands of any misunderstanding. He looked to Nara for support and she nodded agreement as though in a daze.
‘Your gun hadn’t any bullets in, not a tall, not a tall. Before you pull the trigger know who you’re shooting.’ And with that the man with the scar across his throat strode out of the arcade as august as Augustus, leaving a bitter afterthought hanging in the air around Billie and Nara. They stood stiffly still in the strangers’s wake, as bemused, bewildered and befuddled (that’s three times one) as they could possibly be.
‘This isn’t the first time this has happened today,’ Nara said to Billie in the tiniest, most worried voice of Tinker Bell after a deathly silent moment had passed. She seemed to have shrunk down to half her size right before Billie’s eyes. ‘I came out of my house this morning and saw a suspicious looking man standing across the street, so I thought it’d be funny to go right up to him and say hi. You know, just for a laugh. But the man – and he was a really, really tall man, like a redwood tree that had wandered away from a forest – the man came out with a kind of threat, though it was a bit vague. I think he threatened Mommy and Daddy and me because of Dad’s silly little comic strip; he came across as a kind of crazed fan of Ape Fissure. I don’t know if you remember, but Ape Fissure was the comic that ran before Dad’s, then had to be dropped to make room for Everything Shakes. I honestly can’t recall much of it, myself, but I don’t think I found it particularly good. Anyway, I was planning on telling you all of this later, but then again I wasn’t expecting this man here. You saw the scar too, right? I don’t know, Billie, I might be overreacting but I’m definitely a little scared right now. Should I go to the police? Is this just a harmless coincidence? My imagination can be a curse sometimes – I’m never quite sure just how much I’m making up in my own mind. I guess I get that from Dad. Gee, I don’t know, Billie. What should I do?’
Billie leaned back on the cabinet of some generic shooter with a thoughtful expression on his face, his elbows resting on the Bomb buttons of Player One and Player Two; the way his eyes shone intelligently showed that he was taking in all of the information that she had told him and was piecing it all together in his mind, like a detective working through preliminary evidence near the beginning of a tv show. At last he stood back up straight and snapped his fingers as though he had stumbled across a satisfying conclusion, then placed an enthusiastic hand on Nara’s shoulder and said, grinning:
‘Don’t you worry, Darling; if you see that man again then I’ll fight him for you.’
Even though what he said was barely more than a joke, Nara still found herself taking comfort in his words and relaxed a bit, like a cat that, after hearing a door slam in another room, soon decides it was nothing and settles back into its owner’s lap. ‘I just hope they don’t go after fat cat,’ she said in a melancholic fit of humour.
‘Your cat’s a savage beast,’ Billie told her factually. ‘If anyone tried to touch him they’d be torn from limb to limb; you know, like in the rabbit scene in the Holy Grail. “Look at all the bones!”’
Nara covered her face and shook ever so slightly, but instead of crying she was really trying to suppress laughter at how awful his impression was; Billie reached out to her timidly, thinking she was actually about to sob. As soon as his touch reached the fabric covering her shoulder she revealed her face, sparkling tears in her eyes like water splashed from a fresh spring creek; they went alarmingly well with the large smile that spanned the width of her face, making Nara appear unusually pretty and fragile. Billie knew then how Genji had felt when he first gazed upon the young Lady Murasaki all those years ago, though he would always keep this to himself.
‘Are you okay, Nara?’ he asked with startling sincerity.
Nara paused for only a second, staring directly ahead of her into a dark corner of nothingness as she gazed inwards at the light of her soul, and then nodded with a pleasant smile. ‘I have nothing to be worried about,’ she said in a self-reassuring manner. ‘I’ll probably never see that guy from this morning ever again and the guy who was here just now was probably just a random somebody. Why am I getting so worked up about it? This isn’t some dumb detective story or murder mystery. If only I had a proper vent for my imagination like my dad does, then it wouldn’t seep out into reality and I wouldn’t make a fool out of myself like this. I get so silly sometimes, I know. But I’m okay now – absolutely dandy canes. You cheered me up, Billie. Thanks.’
He patted her back; the first pat for reassurance, the second for support, and with the third pat he pushed her in the direction of the Street Fighter Alpha 3 cabinet. Once there, Nara reached into her pocket and pulled out her sole quarter, holding it up to her eye like a silvered eclipse. From Billie’s pocket came an audible crash of coins as though a treasure chest had just been kicked over, and from that crash Billie pulled out an antlered quarter and held it up to his eye as well. They popped their quarters into the greasy slots and the hungry machine emitted a metallic digesting sound in satisfaction. Nara’s quarter was regurgitated so she slid it back in; this time it registered so away they went.
Neither of them made any hesitation in picking their warriors. Nara went with her mainstay: the electric Blanka, a stocky green creature from Brazil with a shocking mane of orange hair; Billie went straight for Zangief, the homosexual (as his character biography in Japan reveals) Russian wrestler, picked solely on the basis that Billie was on a Russian literature kick, having recently read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and early Nabokov all in a row. The screen was then filled with large cartoon portraits of their selected champions as the announcer boisterously verified with the players that they were indeed ready, and Nara and Billie mashed their respective Start buttons in confirmation; the portrait screen then wiped away in the style of golden age Kurosawa, revealing a viridian battle scene of lush animated jungle.
As soon as they were able to control their fighters Nara had already got her first hit in with a Roll Attack, rocketing a somersaulting Blanka into Billie’s Zangief; she then immediately followed this up with an Electric Shock, electrocuting the Russian for an altogether satisfying opening combo. Billie managed to return the favour with a Siberian Bear Crusher, and no, none of them took the game particularly seriously. Billie managed to win the first round while Nara won the second; the third was played out as precisely as chess, each hit and movement painstakingly – and painfully – concise and exacted.
In the end Nara won with her hulking green monster – and with nearly no health remaining – by taking lightning strike advantage of a missed throw. After throwing up his hands and questioning the heavens in mock despair, Billie gave her a thumb up in approval and watched as she battled the CPU for a few rounds, already thinking over all of the mistakes that he had made and figuring out various ways of correcting them; once he was ready he popped in another quarter and proceeded to lose to her substantially worse than last time.
‘You know I gave you that win to cheer you up,’ Billie said to Nara all wink-wink like.
‘You’re just that good, eh?’ Nara said, ending a CPU battle with a special finish. ‘Anyway, I think you’re getting better with Zangief. Your only real fault is falling into the same predictable pattern every time you get trapped in a corner. But other than that – ’ she gave him a thumb up.
‘Well, well,’ Billie said in his most joking voice, ‘look who’s giving the thumb’s up now, eh? The student becomes the master.’
‘You only have yourself to blame for getting me into this stuff,’ she reminded him with a smile that he hadn’t seen since her arrival. ‘I think I’m good to go, though. I’m starting to feel claustrophobic in here.’
Billie nodded in agreement and led her out of the arcade, pushing past the large bald coin exchanger who had finally lit his cigarette and was staring into the blue sky ahead of him, a particularly pensive look on his face. What does a coin exchanger think about? Nara wondered, but she didn’t want to say anything within earshot of him.
‘Did you know that Zangief was modeled after Pushkin?’ said Billie with such conviction that Nara actually believed him for a split second and then hated herself for it. ‘Pushkin wrestled bears, you know. They all did back then. Tolstoy was the worst offender.’
‘I’d really, really like to know where you get all of your information from,’ Nara teased back with a friendly flash of ivory. ‘It must be a treasure store of ideas. Gee whiz.’
They strolled through an alleyway reminiscent of an old fighting game background; Nara expected Final Fight villains to spring out at any moment and retrograde them to death. Beyond the alleyway was a small abandoned parking lot, its warm pavement kissed by the unselective sun, summoning forth an almost unbearable feeling of nostalgia for Northbrae, Nara’s old public school. Stray pebbles were strewn everywhere, rolling beneath their feet like broken marbles; broken glass lined the bottom edge of the wire mesh fence, recalling a time when she had cut herself chasing and stumbling after a bumblebee; and the sing-along voices of children could be heard echoing past the alleyway behind them. Her world suddenly felt a whole lot smaller, so much so that it was nearly suffocating, and Nara sat down in order to breathe. She pressed her face into her knees, holding them close and closing her eyes, a fully clothed, grown-up foetus in the belly of the world.
‘Gee whiz,’ she said, though not to herself, Billie, or anyone else in the world; it was simply the most profound universal statement available, a summary of the history of mankind by the star child of two thousand six. She was too sick with worry to play detective – ‘gee whiz’ was the extent of her power, and she was hating herself for it.
‘Don’t hate yourself,’ Billie said, bending down beside her and holding her to his side. ‘Comedy can switch to drama at the most unexpected and awkward of times. This is life.’
‘That’s just your high school philosophy class talking,’ she said sulkily, her voice muffled through her knees. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. You’re good at cheering me up. Really, you’re always good at cheering me up, Billie. I just feel like I have as much control over my life as I do with my emotions: Zilch; nada. Gosh, what’s wrong with me?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Billie, staring at the shimmering pavement ahead of them. That was their lovely stream, the place where protagonists go in fiction when they need to say something important. ‘Something important,’ he said. ‘Think about something very important to you and then everything will be right again.’
‘My family and friends,’ she responded instantly with fragile delight. ‘Street Fighter.’
‘Which one?’ Billie asked.
‘Street Fighter II. It’s the purest example of the engine,’ she explained, and then she stood up again. ‘You know how to distract me.’
‘Everything’s a distraction,’ Billie said thoughtfully, though in his usual humorous tone. He stood up with her and stretched loudly. ‘Everything shakes.’
Together they trekked past the terrain that had welled up so many strange thoughts in Nara, exiting the mnemonic parking lot through a large hole in the wire mesh fence. They walked with a purpose, however leisurely: They were making their way to their high school, their morning classes having been cancelled for a conference. Without ever bothering to check the time, they followed as many unfamiliar routes as possible, enjoying all of the new sights that welcomed them. One sight of particularly gorgeous note was a street lined with trees on either side, forming an arched tunnel; it looked to Nara as though the trees were bowing to one another in preparation for an eternal dance, reminding her of the many soirées in War & Peace.
‘Tolstoy didn’t wrestle bears,’ she thought aloud, ‘he wrestled with the world. But the world is a kind of bear, isn’t it?’
‘Just remember,’ said Billie, ‘that Zangief was based on Pushkin.’
By sidestepping it completely, he vanished her question into thin air; a perfect victory sans the flashing screen.
They turned a corner and found their high school not too much further on, easy to spot with its elderly weeping willows shedding tears of grey ribbon. On the hike to the building they managed to bring the conversation to safely idle topics such as schoolwork, with some minor discussion of literature (‘Have you read this?’ ‘Yes, I’ve read this.’) thrown in. Such lines of thought sheared through the previous melodrama like a pair of conversational safety scissors. They walked along a wrought iron fence, curled like rusty eyelashes, with tall bushes lining the opposite side.
‘Nara! Watch out!’ Billie cried.
‘What?’ Nara asked, eyes as wide as saucers. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Behind you!’ he shouted, gently moving her aside. ‘Triffids. They’re everywhere.’
As if to add substance to the joke, they heard a distressed cry coming from between two buildings just up ahead. Billie raced into the passageway while Nara followed with a quickened pace, not wanting to overexert herself like she had done running from the tall man. When she rounded the corner she saw a boy of about fourteen years on the ground, holding the back of his hand to his bloodied nose, and beyond him was Billie holding up an older teen to the wall. The older teen had on a black jacket and his hair was cut like Vanilla Ice’s at the height of his popularity; this was one of the Final Fight villains that Nara had expected back by the arcade. She gasped when he spit square into Billie’s face like a cigarette-smoking camel, and Billie retaliated by throwing him to the ground, clutching the collar to his black jacket and walloping him between the eyes. A five-cornered yellow star fluttered away from the impact point like an imaginary butterfly. He clutched his head as he unsteadily stood up, then lumbered off into an area of dark shadow as though returning from whence he came.
Nara quickly went to the boy and put a comforting arm around him as she tried to get a good look at his bloodied face. He looked like a young Capote.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked with tender concern. The boy nodded. ‘It doesn’t look broken to me,’ she said to him, relieved. ‘Are you okay? Does it hurt? I think the bleeding stopped a few minutes ago; look, it’s caking.’
While helping him up she took the care to brush white dirt from his knees and tee shirt. Billie brought him his backpack, which had been torn open along the side like a huge mouth, displaying textbook teeth. The boy looked at his bag with an air of humiliation.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Nara told him. ‘I can take it to some friends in sewing class and they’ll fix it up right as rain for you. Don’t worry. You should get yourself cleaned up, though.’ She gave a quick seeking glance up the passage for anything else of the boy’s but, finding nothing, could only offer him her empathetic gaze. If anything she was surprised by how he managed not to cry. ‘All this blood. What grade are you in?’
‘Nine,’ he sputtered, then whispered a long string of unintelligible swear words.
Nara looked up to Billie, who held a vindictive mask over his usually passive face. She had very rarely seen him like this. ‘Let’s take him to the nurse,’ she said. Billie nodded and together they supported either side of him as they paced measuredly to the school, taking the side entrance so as not to be seen; an audience would only throw salt into the wound.
‘What’s your name?’ Nara asked the boy as they made their way through the doors.
‘William,’ the boy said as though suddenly remembering who he was. ‘That guy’s in one of my classes. He keeps picking on me because he thinks I’m gay. What an insecure idiot, eh? Why would he pick on me just because he thinks I’m gay? What an idiot!’ Then he finally started crying all of the tears that he had been saving throughout a lifetime of being teased, a never-ending river of pain, disgust and disappointment streaming down his face and mixing into his blackened blood.
They paused in the stairway so Nara could take the boy into her arms and hold him as he sobbed into her shoulder, rays of golden sunlight seeping through the window and cascading down their bodies. ‘You’re okay, William,’ she reassured him. Philip K. Dick once said that for every person there is a healing phrase, a few select words that completely restores them; that one phrase was William’s and upon hearing it he could only cry even harder. Nara pressed him closer to herself and kept him there until he finished; when he had done so, William pushed away, revealing scattered clusters of tiny red eyes opening on Nara’s shirt.
‘Thank you, both of you, for helping me,’ he said as rose petals blushed through his bruises. ‘Really, I truly, honestly mean it. But I can make it to the nurse by myself – I don’t want to keep you.’ He was quite obviously embarrassed, either from being beaten up or because of his cry, possibly both, and Nara understood that in order for his ego to begin healing she would have to let him be. He was behaving like a child being kissed by his mother in front of the school bus and Nara had to try her hardest to keep herself from finding it adorable. Poor little guy.
‘That’s fine, William,’ she said in a sweetly understanding tone. ‘Take care of yourself.’
William gave Billie a quick nod of gratitude before racing up the stairs. ‘Hey, be careful!’ Nara shouted after him. There was the sound of a door being slammed shut, followed by total silence; Nara looked to Billie and watched as a smile worked at his lips like a hook tugging at a fish’s mouth, and then his smile broke into laughter that filled the stairway. The effect was like that of a cymbal crash following a flute solo. Nara couldn’t help but laugh as well, though she hadn’t felt like it and wasn’t entirely sure why she was laughing or even why Billie was for that matter. Was it because his laughter was infectious? Then it’d be like catching the plague. Was he laughing simply as a means of releasing any tension? That would be a very Billie thing to do, Nara decided, and was satisfied with this answer. Together they laughed like children who had just played the ultimate prank on someone and got away with it; Nara laughed so hard that she was clutching her sides and wiping away tears.
‘I must be getting to my class now,’ Billie said once their fit of madness had ended. ‘My geography teacher is a fright whenever one of us is late. Like dealing with an utter ghoul.’
Nara accompanied him up the stairs to the third floor and bid him adieu at the doorway; Billie left her with a bit of a bow that came across as a gelatinous mix of pretentiousness and nobility, like a loyal lackey to the emperor who wore invisible new clothes. History would be starting soon but Nara wasn’t feeling at all up to it, so she decided to skip class for the second time in her life; anything she missed she could always catch up on by borrowing a friend’s notes.
Instead of racing back down to the second floor as she would normally have done, Nara continued to ascend the staircase with her hand firmly on the rail as though any slack in her grip would send her tumbling into the molten pit of the earth.
Part Two