Free Swarm by Lauren Carter Page A

he said, as if that was something normal, a usual occurrence, like saying he’d run off with another woman. I wanted the whole story, all the details. It seemed like something far off, long ago, barely real. Like a legend, an epic novel.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œThe paramilitary took him a few years after she was born. He ‘disappeared,’” he said, forming quotation marks with his fingers around the word.
    â€œOh.”
    â€œA couple years later the army came in. There was a standoff. People hid in a church.” Marvin nudged the fire with a piece of wood that looked like a painted chair leg. The words from the book vanished into black carbon.
    â€œPhoenix was there with her mother. A paramilitary group went in and when the guns went off, she was buried in all the bodies.”
    Marvin waited for me to say something, to react in some way, but I didn’t know what words to use so I stayed silent, listening.
    â€œThomson was away in Mexico City, at the embassy, he said. Phoenix lay there until help came and then crawled out and Thomson brought her home as soon as he could arrange it.”
    â€œHome?”
    â€œHere,” Marvin said. I nodded and he continued. “They supported the Zapatistas. Indigenous rebels who wanted equity, control over local resources.” His voice grew louder, as if he was speaking to an audience. “The state was rich, but the people were poor. Our battles are similar, although that was a long time ago and a long way away.”
    He swallowed the last of his coffee and the mug hit the floor with a crack.
    What are our battles? I could have asked, but I didn’t. I thought I already knew. Survival, putting food on the table. “They’ve been through a lot,” I said, but Marvin talked over me: “I’m not that into making soup.” He stood and walked over and pointed at a green square in the centre of the circle of stars. “I want to take you here.”
    Half an hour later, we left through the back door of the row house. I used the outhouse and then we walked through a clearing, past a huge billboard that showed a man and woman, faces corroded by weather, under the words THE LUXURY YOU DESERVE . Marvin tossed his apple core aside and I followed its trajectory to a red brick building whose window frames had weathered into silver wood. “The lamp factory,” he said. “It was supposed to be turned into lofts.” Outside the building’s front door, a woman stirred a smouldering fire, her hair dirty and tangled, her face burned red by the wind. I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t have wanted to know, that would be me in fifteen years. As we walked toward the edge of the dark zone, I kept eating my apple, its flesh grainy, overly dry from the many months it had been off the tree.
    â€œHere” was a botanical garden north of the travel agency Marvin had vandalized the night before. It was in the middle of a park where an encampment was set up. Several tents stood between a grove of birch trees and the street, by a sign that read, ABSOLUTELY NO LOITERING . A bike lay on its side near a firepit scratched out of the lawn. Marvin waved at a guy in a lumberjack jacket who was tying a line to a tree branch to lift the peak of his collapsed tent. The smell of food drifted out of the doorway of a round yurt. On its side, a large sign read, HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT . A woman ate out of a plastic bowl, sitting on the edge of a large marble fountain that was empty of water. Marvin told me it had been drained when people started using it to wash themselves, their dishes and clothes. At one end of the park, the garden buildings gleamed like a palace. They were made entirely of glass—a huge central dome with two smaller ones on either side and rectangular greenhouses jutting out the back. Marvin pointed at a bright sign over the front door that blared the name of one of the big banks. “Privatized