Blackfish City(48)

Maybe they’re not great. You can’t tell. You are gone from here, from this subsurface dive bar, from this floating city, from this fallen world. Strains of Celtic folk songs tease your ears; American soul; post-reunification Korean gugak-yangak.

Archaeology. The most distinct and vibrant of Qaanaaq’s newborn musical traditions. Digging deep into the hundreds of musical heritages that people brought to this city. No singing, no lyrics. They don’t even speak between songs, and you understand this, you appreciate it, because you know as soon as they opened their mouths they would cease to belong to everyone. The language they used, their accents, would place them definitively in a box, mark them off as coming from one continent or another, one city, possibly this one, and a cheer would go up, from the people who belong to that same box, and everyone else would feel the slightest bit less included in the tight warm embrace of the song. Music is the common property of all humanity, but people come from particular groups. For as long as the song lasts, for as long as they say nothing, you can pretend you are part of the same group.

They don’t play songs so much as expeditions. Digging from one song into another, one century to the next. Late-1980s video game tunes become High Church Slavonic liturgical chants. The ruins of Troy, you remember reading, before the sea swallowed them back up, were actually seven cities, each one built around the bowels of its predecessor, and you imagine that this is a similar slow stroll from one epoch into another.

Word is, they’ve spent weeks at a time with different refugee communities, all over Qaanaaq. Learning, listening. Sucking up every song and scrap of indigenous style they can find. The Khmer surf revival. Nahuatl ballads dating to before Columbus. Bachata, where the notes run fast as raindrops. At every show they bring them up onstage to play a song or two, these inadvertent cultural treasures, these people who are all that remains of entire vanished musical genres. You see them now, sitting alongside the stage, smiling with pride and sadness.

You are alone, here. Your family was supposed to follow you, but it’s been five years, and the Water Wars became civil wars and then the whole eastern half of your country went silent. Every week you visit the registries, scroll through the lists of new arrivals, petitions for registration. You scan every sad face, every trembling lip, every stony resigned stare. You know there are many more who do not consent to be included in the registries, people wanted by rogue governments and warlords and syndicates, and you wonder if something like that has happened, if whatever desperate compromises they had to make to get out might have put them in mortal danger, if they’re in hiding, if they’re already dead.

You were sick. You went to the hospital. You hid your symptoms, because you feared it was the breaks, and you knew what they would do to you if it was. You didn’t tell them about the strange memories crowding your head, how they threatened to break you open. You told them it was overwork, exhaustion, dehydration, a history of violent abuse manifesting itself. They put you in the Cabinet.

You know this song, this scrap of melody. A Somali dhaanto, pentatonic perfection, the synthesizer effortlessly approximating the sounds of the oud lute.

A cellmate used to sing this song. An immigrant laborer back home, a fellow political prisoner.

The Cabinet is where you met me. Sitting in the corner of the rec room, eyes shut, the same corner I’ve been sitting in every afternoon for far longer than you’ve lived in this city. I saw you; knew what you were really dealing with. I cut my forearm, cut yours, pressed our forearms together. Made us blood siblings.

Since then, you do not fear the memories of strangers.

The beer, for all its seeming weakness, packs an unexpected punch. When you finish it you feel strangely blissfully happy. When you shut your eyes—

Memories fade in, fade out. Stirred by the songs. It doesn’t matter that they’re not your own. You belong to Qaanaaq now. Its people are your people. Their pain is yours, and so are their songs.





Fill


Fill should have been miserable. He should have felt ashamed, guilty; he should have been taking concrete action to ameliorate the consequences of his irresponsible actions.

But he didn’t. He wasn’t.

When had he become such a monster? Knowing he had a fatal sexually transmitted disease, he’d had unprotected sex with someone. He hadn’t warned them. He hadn’t even told them after. And instead of being eaten up with remorse—instead of feeling bad about what he’d done, here he stood, leaning against the guardrail, watching the sunset, admiring the fractal rainbow arcing slowly down the side of the windscreen.

What was he becoming?

Part of it was, he didn’t truly blame himself. The circumstances had been so strange. While he’d been incredibly turned on by the danger of it, a part of him had also been offended. Angry, even, with this criminal. An intruder, after all. In his grandfather’s secret apartment. A gorgeous, prickly, impoverished creature who turned his whole idea of gender on its head. It had felt like pornography, like a dream, like a horror story.

But still. They were real; it had really happened. The breaks were probably already manifesting themselves in Soq.

So, what? Why did he feel so strangely fine?

Tomorrow night I’ll have my answer, he told himself. My grandfather will say yes or no to the absurd amount of money I’m asking him for.

He’d wanted to just message Grandfather the request, but Barron said that seemed unceremonious. Too easy, unworthy of the momentous event those funds would facilitate. So instead he’d asked Fill to arrange a meeting, for himself and his grandfather and Barron, so they could make their pitch together.