The City

Laurel grows up talking to the sidewalk. It tells her where her brother is hiding during hide and seek and it whispers about the bad men who come to take her little brother away. Mom doesn’t believe her when she says she knows where they took Glen. Mom looks at her like she’s a monster, tells her to stop playing make believe, and cracks a hand across her face on national TV.

The city surges when Laurel’s cheek stays flushed with heat for hours after the blow. It whispers terrible, threatening things to her, things it will do to punish Mom for laying a hand on her. Laurel doesn’t know how to stop it, she doesn’t know what to even look for, she doesn’t know. In important things, the knowing always comes too little too late.

The city kills Glen the next night, rolls his body out from under the freeway overpass and onto the dirt underbelly. A homeless man finds him and screams, screams, screams, because in Afghanistan there was another little boy who once laid dead at his feet. He cradles Glen in his arms and staggers into town. He doesn’t feel the way the city laughs as it pulls at his feet, slips beer bottles under his shoes, changes street signs so that it takes him a quarter of an hour to reach the police station.

Laurel jerks upright in her room, eyes sightless, wide, and wet. There’s a bell ringing in her head. Glen is dead. She wails, she cries, she curses the city. She tells it that this isn’t justice, you don’t hurt another to punish someone, you don’t because now Laurel can’t feel the heat in her cheek through the pain in her heart.

And confused, beaten, like a puppy, the city gives Glen back his life. He sucks in a painful breath on the threshold of the police station in the arms of a forgotten war hero.

This is not a happy ending.

When the forest of cameras thins, the endless stars of flashing lights dims, the roar of their national audience fades, they are left in their small lives. Glen is not her sweet, little brother anymore.

He acts like Glen, cries in the night about the bad men, comes to her to wipe his tears away, trusts her to get him ready like she used to. But… sometimes when she turns around just a little faster than he thinks she will, she sees the tail ends of an odd, ghoulish smile sprinting across his face.

She sees the city in that smile.

She doesn’t tell the city that she knows. The city wouldn’t like that, she thinks, and she doesn’t ever want to make the city mad. For whatever reason it likes her, listens to her, and she doesn’t want it to open up and swallow her whole. She knows if it does she won’t roll out from under a freeway overpass. She’ll never be found.

***

The first time she sees others that have the city in their smile, she’s being mugged in what her mother calls a no-business-alley. She calls it no-business because Laurel has no business being there, tucked between a brick wall and green, metal garbage bin. 

What her mother doesn’t understand is that it is her business, just as any part of the city is. She’s listening to the sounds of life there, in the corner, and she can smell both the rot consuming the food in the bin and the decadent scent it once carried on its way to the dining table. She knows that the woman who took two bites of beef wellington wore a purple dress and she knows that the man wore foundation to hide the violent scratch marks ripping down his cheek. In this way, Laurel has learned that nurturer and protector are just roles people pretend to hold while they claw each other open.

The thin, gaunt hand on her shoulder is lined with engine grease and human excrement. It’s strong as it draws her back, throws her to the ground, pins her in place. She doesn’t feel fear like she used to, consumed by the stories the city tells her, and her eyes are level as she looks into the face of the man who wants to claim her wallet. 

“Your name is Ben Carruthers,” she tells the emaciated cheekbones. There’s a mess of scar tissue churning the skin of his cheek and she reaches up to drag the pads of her fingers over the hills and valleys. “The sidewalk on Third holds your blood in trust, the bridge over the river knows the scent of your sweat, and, yesterday, you killed three rats. They tasted bitter and you haven’t been able to keep anything down since.”

Ben Carruthers can’t hear her. There’s a nest of syringes in his coat’s pocket and the ringing in his ears never quite leaves him. His other hand, feces and oil, slips along the thin column of her neck. Long nails anchor themselves in her skin and she feels the choke point blossom, feels the air stop in her lungs until she feels like her lungs are like balloons; no air to expand and contract around.

Then--then Laurel is afraid.

She has never been hurt, she realizes, until this moment. Her mother’s slap so many years ago had been a singular occurrence, an explosive reaction. There hadn’t been the intention to hurt her, only to stop her. She knows Ben Carruthers because the city saw his family move to town when he was eleven and too small to stop the violation, too young to know that there are some things in the world that shouldn’t be. She knows him, his scars, his hopes, his despair, and he doesn’t know her. He doesn’t want her to stop; he wants her to bleed like he has bled.

Across the city, every public clock tower begins to ring in the hour ahead of schedule. Street lights flicker to red and burn brighter and brighter until they--pop!--go out. Cars screech on Fullerton as a water main bursts, ripping at the street until chunks of asphalt curl and twist away from the ground.  A construction crane stops working halfway through lifting six tons of steel; the steel plummets; the foreman is crushed beneath clean edges.

Then she is alone in her head, alone in her body, alone. Silence rings through the hallways of her mind and she can feel the warmth of Ben Carruther’s hand on her neck. There is pressure and heat, terrible heat, inching its way across her body, so hot it feels cold. She is the sudden star of her own narrative and it is silent. The city is not with her now and she is not with the city at all.

In the quiet, the isolation, she thinks, Oh, this is what it’s like to be free.

A man in a three piece suit rips Ben Carruthers away from her, scrabbles at his hand until his fingernails ease out of her neck. It’s instinctive to gasp in air, to let the sandpaper particles rush down her swelling throat, and she twists onto her side to ease the traumatic reopening of her trachea.

You are alright, he says when he finishes beating in Ben Carruthers skull. He is handsome and successful, the watch on his wrist is not one of the fakes the old woman on Diversey sells to unsuspecting businessmen.

“I am,” she says without realizing that his lips didn’t move, his throat did not vibrate, he did not say the words aloud. “Thank you.” She realizes and stands, entire body aching. She presses herself to the brick wall and tries not to show fear.

Always, the man says. Laurel cries out as the knowing comes back to her, fills her head like a cup and spills over. She presses her back to the alley wall, stealing the coolness from the brick and knows that this too is something the city has decided to give her.

The man doesn’t smile. His eyes are blank, sightless, wet.

The city smiles through him.