After that first day at the pit Mink and I met Lynx back at the research fields. They were perched low in the grass just past the chainlink fence. They had a little coil notebook and were reviewing their notes. Mink asked if we could see the Baird’s nest but Lynx hadn’t yet found it and didn’t want to risk disturbing it. The three of us sat in a row against the fence and they talked and I listened all about the collective and life as a buzzkill, about all the awful secret shit our university was getting away with and how all that awful secret shit fit into the broader picture of all the awful secret shit happening in the world. It felt like the gas in my gut was suddenly catching flame.

  Our outrage was more than the foundation of our friendship, it was the foundation of our identities. It became impossible to believe that the world might not be shit, that there might be hope. Outrage is a drug, both giving us life and sucking us dry. We’ve been beat down our whole lives with the notion that the world is ending and after a while you just become numb to the violence of that idea. That bubbling rage in the pit of my stomach, our shared drive to punch back—

  I’ve been chasing that high since then.

  3

  trauma

  The weekend after Mink’s demonstration, Lynx, Badger, and I gathered outside Abbott College. It was dark and warm. The spring evening had coaxed us out of hiding to survey the damage. Mink had planted bombs in the sewers beneath the college just a week before the end of the term. When they went off, shit and spring runoff came bubbling up to the surface, erupting out of the toilets and sinks inside the college, erupting out of the manholes outside the college, flooding half the campus in its own waste.

  Abbott College and its greenway, up to the river’s edge, was now blocked by orange construction netting. Through the netting the college looked almost the same as it did before the demonstration. They hadn’t yet ripped off the East wing of the building, or torn out the trees along the river. Maintenance staff had hosed off the waste. The college was dark and quiet. I had never before seen it with all of its lights off, but it looked almost the same. A bulldozer sat next to the college with its shovel full of debris and mud. There were no workers on the site and the bright construction floodlights made the building and the discarded machinery look lonely.

  What did you tell them? Badger said. Our fingers were entwined in the orange construction fence, our gazes fixed on the lonely college. Badger didn’t need to ask more directly than that.

  The truth, Lynx said, that I don’t know anything. That Mink was sick but we didn’t know how bad. They had a warrant and took a bunch of my stuff: my laptop, notebooks, and old copies of the zine. My phone too. They were aggressive. It was especially scary because it’s CSIS. But they only detained me for a few hours. They detained Heron overnight.

  Is that even legal?

  Heron’s dad sent a lawyer and that’s probably when he got out. Knowing Heron, it was probably a long night of grumbling and silence.

  They took my phone too, Badger said, and searched my room and computer but didn’t take anything else. What about you? Badger and Lynx turned to me but I looked to the ground. The sidewalk was torn up to repair the sewers. The soles of our sneakers were balanced on the edges of jagged concrete, our hands still gripping the sagging construction fence for balance. Lynx grumbled in their throat and Badger changed the subject. What’s that smell?

  Uh. Shit? Lynx said.

  No, the smoke.

  Lynx waved their hand casually through the haze, their face soft in the strange sepia hue of floodlights passing through smoke. It’s prescribed burns in the agriculture fields, they said.

  Prescribed burns?

  They burn off natural spring growth in the field to clear it and fertilize for their crops. “Prescribed” like medicine. Isn’t that kind of funny?

  Mhmm…

  We sat in the dirt. The haze had grown so thick that we couldn’t see beyond the construction site. Badger pulled out a block and knife and started carving. The smell of aspen wood shavings mingled with the shit and smoke.

  What’s really funny, though, is how the boreal pushes back, Lynx said.

  What do you mean?

  There are forest seeds buried deep in the dirt that are activated by fire, Lynx said. They hide in pinecones and can be dormant for decades. Sometimes even longer. When exposed to intense heat, Lynx pressed their palms together, the cones peel open, Lynx pulled open their palms, wrists still connected, fingers gently wiggling outward, they spread their seeds.

  Very cool, Badger said, eyes on his knife.

  The seeds that wake up may have been waiting generations, or they might be blown in from surrounding forest.

  What happens next?

  Trees shoot up. Like, SHOOT up. Fast. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you how fast. The university can barely keep up with it. In the middle of growing season crop growth is disrupted by huge jackpines dropping these massive, resilient cones to the earth, crushing crops, blocking the sun. Half of the ag students’ practicum is spent clearing out these monstrous, awesome trees.

  Wow.

  Wow.

  Yeah. They come back every year though.

  Cute, Badger said. The forest resists the university too. But it’s bullshit, right?

  It’s as true as any other make-believe, Lynx said.

  Oh my god.

  Your faithlessness isn’t radical. It’s just boring, I said in that deep, inflected tone we employ when we’re making fun of other activists. We laughed and Badger put down his carving.

  Of course. I’m sorry. Our Student Experience is make-believe, Badger said. Saluting at nothing with his knife still in hand.

  Our Student Experience is arm wrestling the boreal for a chunk of stolen land, Lynx said, saluting back.

  Around us, pinpricks of darkness, like ink, appeared in the glowing yellow haze. The spots grew bigger and began to take shape as they approached us, spiraling vines of darkness. They surrounded us, crawling through the dirt as thick, hearty roots, towering above us as boughs of trees, wrapping us up in strong arms, gripping our hands with strong fingers. The jagged cement was churning in the mud, the orange fence disappearing behind tangles of dark. The bulldozer was picked up off its massive wheels and flipped upside down in the air, muck and debris pouring from its shovel and crashing to the earth.

  Lynx, Badger and I were laughing and holding hands, being lifted in the air. We were kissing each other’s cheeks and tussling each other’s hair, laughing and crying as the dark tossed us up and caught us like a parent tosses a toddler overhead. We could see nothing but each other and the swirls of dark like tangles of wet hair.

  Every inch of my skinclothinghair is soaked in blood and shit.

  A silver safety blanket is wrapped around my shoulders,

  crinkling in my ears at each slight

  movement. The wind, my shivering, people touching me,

  touching my arms, shaking me,

  grabbing.

  Everything before me is distant, more distant if I try to focus.

  I am floating. Or numb?

  I can’t feel the ground,

  either way.

  My ears are humming but the rattling in my brain has—

  a man is talking to me.

  I should focus on the man.

  His mouth is moving slowly. Patronizing. Or maybe time

  has stopped.

  His lips are so dry that

  flakes of cracked skin gather

  in his blonde beard.

  Behind him the college is bathed in flashing red / blue / red.

  There are sirens between the humming. Where is—the man

  grabs my arm.

  His face. Beard. Flakes of cracked skin. Snow on dry grass.

  Sidewalk salt from the spring melt

  caked to the dusty boulevard.

  Wipe your fucking—

  How do you know the suspect?

  Oh. Uh.

  We once ran through the prairie pretending to be bison,

  separated from our herd.

  We howled and ran. Searching. Found no kin.

  We collapsed in the dry, dusty embrace of autumn grass.

  We awoke to the screams of a V of geese.

  We rose and flapped our arms.

  We ran, ran after them, after our kin, we screamed like

  they screamed.

  We couldn’t catch up. They melted into the horizon and we fell

  to our knees again.

  Did you know they mate for life? Geese? But if their partner

  dies they—

  How do you know the suspect?

  We were the kind of doomsday preppers without bunkers

  and guns, but with a lifetime’s worth

  of that almost contented resignation to imminent extinction

  that makes you lose all concern for

  hygiene and nutrition.

  Like your teeth

  coffee stained / cigarette stained / beer stained.

  Your teeth are the colour of piss.

  Spring run-off. Shit, of course, everything is—Oh, they’re very

  pragmatic, geese. If their

  partner dies they find another.

  How do you know the suspect?

  Well, it’s her blood in my hair. Her blood crusting to my scalp.

  Cracking. Flaking

  Dusting my shoulders. A dandruff of her viscousness drying.

  Clinging this starchy linen to my skin. I am sticky with shit,

  piss, the

  buzzing fluorescents of this interrogation room

  hum, crinkle,

  whose shirt is this

  by the way?

  How do you know the suspect?

  How? Through obfuscation and distance.

  Concealing and revealing.

  Always on her schedule too.

  How? I was desperate. Pathetic.

  She was calculating, manipulative—no—shut up youfuckingliar—

  it was pursuit.

  You pursued her.

  You saw her and wanted her.

  You poisoned her with your desire.

  It was you—and she lost her mind—you let her—it was easy—

  she was yours when she was—

  How do you know the suspect?

  I’m sorry. I won’t be much help. I knew her only through the

  abscess of

  her body’s rejection, the translucent shield of

  puss built around me to

  excrete me

  easily.

  Know her?

  You’re confused.

  I don’t know her.

  I don’t know shit.

  Don’t know shit about her.

  Who the fuck is she?

  Suspect of what, you fuckers?

  Who the fuck are you talking about?

  Who the fuck are you, even?

  What the fuck kind of system is this?

  Whose clothes are these and why am I—

  How do you know the suspect?

  How is not the right question.

  How is a misnomer, a red herring, a red flag, red blood how

  is blood so impenetrably red and

  bone—is that bone—can I see her fucking bone through

  —bloodshitandscreaming—

  sirens and the earthshattering—

  it’s why you want—

  why you should be asking—

  why do I know the suspect—why

  am I here—why

  was I on the scene—and why can I see her bone through the

  gashes she

  made in her own arms—she made them herself it was

  her so leave me out of it.

  Sometimes, when I am too still, I am struck with the sea sickness that my nagymama felt when she was six months pregnant, immigrating from Soviet-occupied Hungary on an overcrowded steamer. I feel the rolling in the head and gut that precedes vomit. I feel the railing against my ribs and the weight of my head dangling overboard. I feel the cold mist off the wake of the ship on my face and arms, inviting me to drown in the Atlantic. My tiptoes urge me over the edge. Sometimes, when I am too still, I can feel her tears on my cheeks as her father is taken, the rattling of bombs in our bones, the cry of hunger in our gut.

  Sometimes, when I am too still, I can feel my nagypapa’s fists striking against my mother’s sternum, the vulnerable bones of a child. I feel the grass between her toes, the whispers of joy gently carved in fragile stone. Sometimes, when I am too still, I can feel our hymen ripping.

  Sometimes, when I am too still, I can feel my brother’s fist crack through drywall, rope burn on my father’s palms, my grandfather’s hand crushed to dust between the gears of a hammer mill. Sometimes, when I am too still, I hear the sirens in our blood.

  Sometimes, when I am too still, I can smell the smoke of burning fields, the salt of the cold ocean, the steam off melting flesh, yeast off pan bread, gunpowder and dust, my blood, your blood, sap and honey, cedar and mud, the sweat of labour, the sweat of flight, the sweat of fear, the sweat of starting over, the sweat of taking over, the sweat of being taken over, shit and piss, twenty years of shit and piss, generations of shit and piss, lost centuries of shit and piss, the shit and piss of every ancestor I’ve had long past our thin recorded history and into the ancestry of apes and birds and reptiles and fish and whatever shit and piss amoebas shit and piss all the way down to the first shit, the shit that each and every one of us took together, that lives deep in the bodily memory of every living thing, the crux of our relationality, the beginning and the end of it all, the original shit.

  4

  the pit

  Heron leads the collective—what’s left of us anyway—back in the room beside the pit, our faces aglow in the dull buzz of the lantern. It is only when he speaks that I notice he’s sitting at the head of the centre desk. His voice is a low-dragging monotone, a lull much deeper than his usual rumbling pitch and his eyes scan ours. He is playing Mink.

  Mink didn’t always facilitate the collective meetings, not formally anyway, but she was always accommodating them. She kept the floor clean. When conversation got hot or mean or collapsed inward, Mink would eye her wrist watch, keep track. Every few syllables uttered she would glance down, calculate, map the argument and then, in a low voice, make a patiently paced suggestion or comment that cleared space for voices that had been backed into corners of the room.

  “As a gesture of good faith, I’d like us to conduct this meeting with our palms on the table,” Heron says.

  All of us—me, Badger, Lynx, Raven, and Heron—roll up both sleeves and lay our forearms on the table. Together our arms are a fragmented map, scabs and scratches forming a cross-body network of rivers and lakes. With hands on the table we can keep an eye on each other’s picking. This sort of accountability request has been commonplace since cutting ourselves up became our cultural pastime.

  “Lynx called this meeting today, though I think we’ve all been eager to see each other. We had a rough summer and we’ve been avoiding meeting since classes started up again,” Heron says.

  Lynx nods “mhm.”

  “We need to talk about what happened at the college, to the college. As a group, I think, we also need to discuss how we’re going to deal with Mink personally. I know we’ve all gone to see her, but we should strategize that care. And the police have spoken to us all separately; we should get those stories straight.”

  My throat is in knots and I eye the convex heave of the waterlogged ceiling tiles.

  “We also should be figuring out, you know, what we’ll say if there’s a trial.”

  I don’t know how many more of these meetings I can take. The ego-driven circle running out the clock like:

  1.The self-appointed leadership fortifies dominance through a gentle voice and even pace, setting the parameters of the conversation by pretending their ideas are naturalized from the floor;

  2.Almost automatic resistance to that leadership develops based on perception of the character or assumed position of the leadership on the central topic, triggering the ad-hoc formation of an opposition party;

  3.The quiet-rumbling fearofunworthiness is subdued by the pulsing of our heels on our shins, fingernail to cuticle, fist to temple;

  4.Aggressive, accusatory, political posturing ensues in which we each try to demonstrate our own political savvy and moral purity, disguising the theatre as debate;

  5.A conclusion is made in which no one has changed their minds but some have fatigued and submitted, this is called consensus;

  6.The self-appointed leadership reinforces dominance through a gentle voice and even pace, setting up action items and determining the next meeting’s agenda but pretending these ideas are naturalized from the floor.

  Raven, hands on the table, fingers flexing tightly, sighs, “I think Mink did it, I just do. That’s the only thing that makes sense. I mean, we basically know that she did it. I’m not going to lie under oath.”

  Badger nods. Heron sits with his eyes loosely averted to the grey-green walls. Our collective silence is punctured only by the shudder, twitch, and scratch of fifty fingers against the table’s frayed laminate.

  “We know that she had access to the labs and the basement,” Raven says. “We know that she knew how to make explosives.” Looking around with frustration at our averted gazes, Raven pushes herself up off the table to stand over us. “She was obsessed with the Anarchist Cookbook in first year.”

  “You think Mink cooked up nitroglycerine bombs from a recipe some high-schooler wrote fifty years ago?” Heron asks with raised eyebrows. “Where would she even find the chemicals or equipment for that?”

  Raven crosses her arms fiercely and turns her back to us. Heron’s legs twitch in agitation.

  “No one is asking you to lie,” Lynx says. “It’s really better if you don’t. She’ll be convicted if this makes it to trial regardless of what we say. We just need to be protecting each other.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8