The Amateurs Read online

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2018 Elizabeth Harmer

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint from the following: Lyrics to “Goin’ Down South” written by R.L. Burnside. Published by Mockingbird Blues. Publishing, Ltd. (BMI). Administered by Wixen Music Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Harmer, Elizabeth, author

  The amateurs / Liz Harmer.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780345811240

  eBook ISBN 9780345811264

  I. Title.

  PS8615.A7433A82 2018 C813’.6 C2016-906009-8

  Book design by Kelly Hill

  Cover images: (pineapple) © Leontura / Getty Images; (clouds) © ZaZa Studio, (texture) © Dinga, both Shutterstock.com

  v5.2

  a

  To Adam

  Although necessary, it was absurd and cruel, reasonable in intent but botched in particulars, a task for professionals bungled by amateurs.

  — Paul Fussell,

  “The Romantic War, and the Other One”

  Nature is pathetically willing….The flowers growing in the desolation of Mount St. Helens testify to what in human beings we would call a lunatic hopefulness, the optimism of the amateur.

  — Frederick Turner,

  “Cultivating the American Garden”

  There is a world of created things, of living beings, of animals, of entelechies, of souls, in the minutest particle of matter….There is, therefore, nothing uncultivated, or sterile or dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion.

  — Gottfried Leibniz, La Monadologie

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  THE AMATEURS

  Chapter 1: THE COLLECTORS

  Chapter 2: THE SUPPORT GROUP

  Chapter 3: THE DREAMERS

  Chapter 4: THE NEIGHBOURS

  Chapter 5: THE LOTUS-EATERS

  PART TWO

  THE PROFESSIONALS

  Chapter 6: THE OPTIMISTS

  Chapter 7: THE INVENTORS

  Chapter 8: THE PERSUADERS

  Chapter 9: THE GUILTY PARTIES

  INTERLUDE: PORT

  PART THREE

  THE TRAVELLERS

  Chapter 10: THE FAITHFUL

  Chapter 11: THE HOMECOMER

  Chapter 12: THE PESSIMISTS

  Chapter 13: THE STRANGER

  Chapter 14: THE FAMILIAR

  Chapter 15: THE PHILOSOPHER

  Chapter 16: THE HOSTAGES

  Chapter 17: THE PATHETICALLY WILLING

  POSTLUDE: THE STORY

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter

  1

  THE COLLECTORS

  Looting was absolutely not frowned upon. One of the happier aspects of this new era was that everything was up for grabs. You would never again go without a pen. You would never come to the end of plastic sandwich containers. In a reversal worthy of a God with more humour than vengeance, the people who remained were outnumbered by every other thing. There had been a time, parents told wide-eyed children, when humans were a cancerous growth upon the land. Ten years from now, if you wished to shock a thirteen-year-old, you would tell her that people had once been so populous, so resourceful, so filled with greed they had begun to eliminate the other species. How was such a thing possible, the child would say, thinking of the raccoons and cats that moved in sea-waves, too numerous to count. The trick had been, it seemed, not proliferation but longevity. People didn’t reproduce like rabbits, or like spiders with their hundreds of eggs, but despite incredible odds, they’d managed millennia of dominance. And then it had all changed.

  The odds were against them, yet here they were, down to forty-two, not including pets. Here they were, gathering in an Anglican church in the city’s core. Marie refused to live with the others in the huge brick houses near the escarpment; instead, she stayed in her apartment above the art shop near the abandoned mall downtown. But even she came every day to the old stone church where they held meetings. Every afternoon a meal was prepared, and the remaining people gathered with an air of gentle gravity. They gathered on land the way now-abandoned satellites that had once choked the atmosphere with signals did in the sky. They gathered the way debris did in the unthinkable sea.

  Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that some of them, these orphans of the age, had become collectors, specializing their hoards. Rosa, twenty-nine and unable to leave the group because of her stubborn mother, had begun to accumulate stringed instruments. She took borrowed cars up to the music store on Upper James, or down to the one on King, searching through the basements and garages of former teenaged guitarists who had lived in wealthy townships. The group had some gasoline left over, kept in one of the garage-caches near the church, but there was always the worry that the gas gauges of these cars did not read true. So Rosa planned for the possibility that she’d have to walk or find a bicycle to get home, and was careful to remain inside an invisible perimeter. Even so, she had amassed enough cellos, violins, ukuleles, banjoes and guitars to fill two rooms of one of the houses where she and her mother were squatting.

  Sometimes, Rosa took Marie with her. Without traffic, and without other people, it was easy for them to traverse the city as though they were giants. They took their few large steps from the lake, which buttressed the city’s northerly side, and rode under overpasses and over bridges, past the smokestacks that had once fumed sulphurously and through the half-crumbling sights of a mid-sized city: parks, parking garages, a hundred small shops and homes, restaurants and cafés, all reduced to square footage, to the skeleton of their meaningless parts. The city was greener now, Marie thought, except for those streets atop the hill sacrificed to commerce and its billboards and lots. You could breathe easier now.

  Inside the car, Marie felt calmed by the fine lines of digital light, numbers arranged into bright slivers of neon green or red. She had become used to the emptiness of the streets, as though hollowed out by some terror. Happy in the cocoon of their small or midsized cars, windows rolled down, Marie and Rosa played music to match the heat and talked about the men. Rosa had taken a liking to Mo’s ass; Marie insisted that he hardly had one.

  “It’s not his ass so much as the way he walks with it,” Rosa would confess, black hair whipping in the summery air.

  “The way he walks with it!”

  “He’s very poised, you have to admit.”

  Marie would never say so to Rosa, but of course, Mo was the most eligible of the last men on Earth.

  Today, they had driven past parked cars and through unlit intersections to retrieve yet another piece for Rosa’s stash. One of the satisfactions of the new era could be had in the smashing of windows, so Marie was not shocked at the sight of Rosa in long wild hair and sunglasses stepping through a broken window with a baseball bat. And she knew that Rosa thought nothing of the Berretta peeping its black handle out of the waistband of Marie’s shorts.

  “We should bring Mo along next time,” Mari
e said. “How could he resist you?”

  “Shut up,” Rosa said, grinning.

  “He can take you back there,” Marie said, pointing to the hardwood stage where amps were still plugged into walls, their black wires like severed rat tails.

  “Stop.” Rosa was eyeing the space with head tilted, an interior designer trying to visualize.

  Both women were, despite their jokey bravado, scanning the empty store for a port-sized gap, craning their necks to listen. Ports were everywhere, an invisible multitude. Most stood in living rooms; almost all were privately owned. Sometimes it seemed that you could hear them humming, as refrigerators once had. No one knew where their source of power was, but when you found a port, at first mainly because of the space cleared around it, it would seem to shimmer in the light like a spider’s web.

  There was a rustling, a faint clinking, and in the time it took for the chills to register, Marie had whipped around with her handgun aimed, arms out straight. Facing her was the stupid beauty of a full-grown deer. Its ears flicked, and Marie’s chest heaved with adrenaline.

  “Holy crap,” she whispered.

  “People so jumpy shouldn’t carry guns,” Rosa said. She had put up her arms in surrender as soon as Marie yanked out the weapon.

  “You and your guilty conscience,” Marie said. “What I really need is a hunting rifle, clearly.”

  The deer stood still, staring.

  “This is why a person should always have a dog,” Marie said pointedly. Rosa had forbidden Marie to allow her German shepherd-cross to hop into the back seat of the car.

  “What good would Gus do at this point?”

  “He would have been keeping watch. First line of defence.”

  “That’s the vocabulary of war.”

  “That’s the vocabulary of Mo.”

  Rosa reddened and dropped her arms.

  Marie held hers rigid and pulled the trigger. Once, twice, the sound enough to deafen them for several ringing moments. Two tiny wounds opened in the deer’s chest, black and then spurting blood. It attempted to bolt, then fell, first to its knees, then to the ground.

  “Can you help me get it into the car?” All of Marie’s kills had thus far been theoretical or tiny: for months she had been perfecting her aim and had never hit anything larger than a raccoon. Only her dog knew that she’d been unable to eat the raccoon, that she had instead let Gus tear at it until all that was left was inedible, its prison-striped tail, its bandit face.

  Rosa followed Marie to the body, and the women knelt to hoist it.

  “We killed it,” Marie said.

  “Oh, but it was alive, and it was so pretty,” Rosa said, knowing that this would make Marie roll her eyes. She laughed when Marie did.

  “Stupid deer,” Marie said. “There’s a forest full of yummy bark and berries, and it comes strolling up to this wasteland on Upper James.” The street was mostly parking lots, billboards, five lanes of asphalt. A car dealership across the way still boasted a dancing wind figure, faded from black to grey. A wind machine would once have filled it with air, bending it at the waist, making its puppet arms perform a frantic dance. Now it whipped up once, lethargically, painted face grinning.

  “Creepy,” Rosa said.

  They lifted the deer’s body onto an old emergency blanket and then waddled sideways, each holding two corners. Proud as two hunters could be, they drove back down through the escarpment, bouncing on roads full of potholes.

  “This drive is getting sketchy,” Rosa said. “If the road gets much more cracked up, we won’t be able to use it. And who’s going to change the tires? Fix the engine?”

  “When we can’t drive, we’ll just walk. We’ll hike.” In a previous life, Marie would often climb the three hundred metal stairs built into the side of the cliff at various points in the city. When she did it now, she felt the ghost of that former self climbing ahead of her, felt the ghosts of all her fellow fitness freaks. Those who had left water bottles dug into the dirt, who had numbered the steps with permanent marker.

  Hot wind flew through the car’s open windows. Marie felt for the gun and reached into the back seat for her camera, which she hung around her neck. From this spot on top of the escarpment that locals had always called “the mountain,” they could see the city through the weave of trees. It spread silent and still below them, grey and brown buildings, puffs of green, emptied highway bridges over the blue of the bay beyond. The car bounced along that curve of road, and Rosa eased off the gas, pressed lightly on the brake.

  A Janis Joplin song was playing, a hoarsely sad “Summertime.” Marie’s favourite thing to find in a house was an old mix CD, preferably without labels; this song came from one of those.

  “When I was in high school, my best friend started dating this really weird guy. He used to pull his penis out, like, while he was driving,” Marie said.

  “What?” Rosa laughed. “Just for you guys to stare at it?”

  “Pretty much. It just sat there in his lap.” Had it really happened that way? Marie squinted out at the lush oaks and ash trees and maples on either side of the road.

  “Who does that?”

  Old habits were unbreakable. Rosa still signalled her turn. “He was crazy. My friend kept breaking up with him for the penis thing, and then he’d do it again when you weren’t expecting it. Must have been compulsive. Like a flasher. Anyway, we used to drive all over the place on the weekends in this van—I’d sit in the empty back of the van like a kidnapped child, no belt, no windows—and we’d drive through the city looking everywhere for Pez dispensers.”

  Rosa laughed in her throaty way. “That is not where I expected this story to go.”

  Marie went on. “There was this holy grail of Pez for him. But I hardly remember any of the details. Was it a Darth Vader Pez he wanted? Maybe Bugs Bunny? Something rare. And I have no mental picture at all of his penis.”

  “Sounds like your friend was dating Pee-wee Herman.”

  Marie leaned back and closed her eyes. Joplin’s voice was raspy and full of emotion. “Man. Remember Pee-wee Herman?”

  The cityscape reminded her of the heavy garbage days of yore, those days when people put bookcases and old lawn mowers and defunct computers on the lawn, and anybody who wanted their junk could take it home. Or maybe it was more like this: Marie as a child rooting through her grandmother’s attic, crawling into cupboards and behind the dummy doors at the back of closets, which she’d believed were secret passageways. Now the whole world had the complicated architecture of a crumbling mansion. This last year she had done the things she’d never dreamed of doing before: camping out on the Bruce Trail, sleeping on the ridge over the gorge they called the Devil’s Punch Bowl, smashing battery-powered alarm systems to spend full days in the art gallery surrounded by shadow-darkened Alex Colvilles. But unlike everybody else, she had not relocated to one of the huge houses south of Aberdeen. She still slept in her cheap IKEA bed in the apartment above her store, where she still dusted and maintained inventory. Even during the cold months of January and February, and even during that awful March when they’d all huddled together in shared rooms, Marie maintained the pretense of living elsewhere. The shop was only a fifteen-minute walk away, but both Rosa and her mother, Bonita, continued to insist that Marie was too far from the rest of their people. Marie knew what they were thinking: Far enough outside of their mass, Marie was liable to be sucked into a black hole.

  “How long before the deer starts rotting? It needs to be dressed, right?”

  Marie shrugged. “We’ll be at the church in ten minutes, so…”

  If she were melted down and remodelled in plastic, Marie would have the following accessories: tank top and skirt, heavy analog camera with lens and film rolls, handgun and bag of dog treats. Plus dog, Gus. She and Rosa stopped in front of her store. In the same fit of whimsy that had made her open an art supply shop ten years earlier, Marie had named it Frankincense & Myrrh. She had been in a lighting-incense-to-mask-the-reek-of-pot stage. Pl
us, she’d reasoned at the time, lonely and stoned, it was a place she wanted people drawn to from afar, a place they’d come to buy gifts. She’d painted the large gold star on the sign herself.

  Rosa stayed in the car, which was now blaring “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” When, outside the store, Marie looked back, Rosa waggled an ironic rock and roll hand sign at her. Gus was in a part of the alley Marie had sectioned off with fencing; he was panting and appearing to smile. He followed her out, and as they approached a view of the PINA billboard, Marie reflexively reached for the camera now sagging at her neck. Every day for 356 days, Marie had been taking photographs of this particular image, this billboard perched on its steel frame like a bird of prey on the edge of an apartment building across the way. Every day Marie unfurled her store’s awning with the hand crank and then went into the road to take the picture. Once a roll was filled, she’d develop it in a makeshift darkroom she’d set up in the vacant top apartment, which she’d been planning to rent out in the days before vacancies were everywhere. She’d made the light she needed for developing the photos by applying red film to a large flashlight.

  Sometimes an image would be over- or under-exposed, would be clouded or haunted. The images were not meant to be anything other than her record of decay, her monument to post-reality, each the same and with its minor variations, just as Monet had done with his lilies.

  In the store the photos hung by clothespins along a length of twine that had turned into two lengths, and now had so many turns that the photos were nearly covering the back wall. To Marie, the billboard itself was detestable now, omnipresent as an unloved spouse. In its centre was half of the world’s most notorious silhouette: the pineapple. In art school she’d read about this graphic: simple but cheeky. It did not take itself too seriously; sometimes it was sliced into yellow chunks, sometimes it was striped with rainbow colours. At Christmas, from its spikes a single ornament would appear to hang. Here, on the billboard, it was made to shimmer against a blue background. Beside the glassy halved pineapple, one word: port.