was in junior high and Johnny was arguably more famous than Vanilla Ice, Lifetime made a straight-to-TV movie about it, based on a novelization we hadn’t known about called ‘As Angels Sing.’ Looking back, the title was the only thing that didn’t make me physically cringe to think about. John’s parents sued—unsuccessfully, I think. Mine didn’t care; my character in the movie was only onscreen for a minute, and he was played by a black kid instead of brown, as if any colour would do.
When I found out about the movie, Johnny was away as usual, working at her maize lab in Georgia. I called main reception and patiently waited out five or six transfers till someone found her and I broke the news.
“Oh my God,” she wailed. “A Lifetime movie; please, God, no. I can’t come home now.”
“You have to,” I said sadly, “we have to watch the Canada Day fireworks with the kids.”
“I’m flying back out on the weekend. Do not bring up that movie.”
Even now there’s no indication that it happened, not even a plaque commemorating the deaths, because City Hall was renovated around the time the movie came out, swapping the bullet-pocked brick for tile and adding a glass pyramid. I was pleased—I wanted it changed, unrecognizable, something entirely new, something where no darkness could live. Johnny was upset. She wanted the city to knock it down and make a park.
At the opening ceremony, we sat between our moms so we could talk. “Treehugger,” I whispered, looking straight ahead.
“I’m an aesthete, not a treehugger,” she said. “Look it up.”
“I like how you think I wouldn’t know what it means.”
“I like how you’re pretending you’re not going to go home and look it up.”
“I’m not.”
Now, salt was crusted solid across the bridge of her nose, a wet channel running through the middle of the crystals, her upsprung hair shorter than mine. It had been years since she’d had long hair; I remembered it blowing in the wind once as we said goodbye on a summer evening, the silkiness and loft of it with the sun coming through, seeming blonder in its length, a shining scarf afloat on her shoulders, weightless.
A younger her, a younger me. We could never go back. And I was the only one who wanted to, anyway. Because I was the only one who loved or even knew how.
the teeth in the night, approaching
red the sky
stars turn and dance
the cathedral of black stone has shattered
the cathedral has been buried
water seethes at the foot of the cliff
in the snow we come, in the sand we come, from the waves we come
a curl
a curling plume of burning flesh
dance to the
stars
I woke up slowly, not the way she always did, snapping awake, and became aware of the airplane’s hum, my dry, sticky mouth, the blanket sliding off my shoulders, looking automatically for Johnny. Bad dreams, I thought. Proximity effects. I thought about telling her I’d had another one, letting her do some dream interpretation or whatever, but there was something strange about her. She was awake, alert, hilariously so, like a cartoon of herself—still wrapped in the blanket, only her nose and her wide, alarmed eyes showing. I followed her gaze to two pretty flight attendants chatting near the cockpit door, not in English.
“What is it?” I whispered.
She glanced quickly at me, then back to them. But it wasn’t till they eventually wandered off that she turned and whispered “Go get your bag out of the overhead storage bin. When we land, put the strap across your body.”
“...Why?”
“Because we’re going to be held in custody at the airport and I want you to have it on you in a way that they can’t easily grab it off.”
“What? We’re going to be arrested? For what?”
“Not arrested. Held in custody. For our own safety.”
And I looked at her grey face over the blanket, stony with not just anticipation but rage, and thought: Oh shit. Rutger. We asked him not to tell, she made him promise not to tell, but we both saw his face as we left, and he told. She was gone all the time without comment, but now we had been reported as missing.
I thought: We’re going to be put right on a plane back home as soon as we land. If we’re lucky. If we’re not...
I pictured a tiny room crawling with earwigs and cockroaches and scorpions. Dusty, terracotta light, unchanged for hundreds of years. Like the scenes in Robin Hood or The Mummy. Screams from