Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  His ears hurt, and all sounds were muted now. He felt nothing in his left arm; he risked a brief glance at it, saw a mangle of flesh that had been his hand and might yet be saved, if he could get medical attention. The blast had been directed outward, away from him; but the left side of his body was still badly burned.

  Leaning on his right hand, he raised himself to his knees. He saw Jeremiah’s body, nearly torn in two, lying on the ground. Next to the dead dog the metamorph lay writhing and screaming; her cries of pain seemed to come to him through thick cotton. Fragments of the suitcase and its contents had imbedded themselves into her. Kelly could see her burned flesh twist and flow like thick mud. It seemed to have lost all cohesion, to drape itself at random on her bones. The face, his face, was losing its definition, becoming a blank mask with two holes for the eyes and one for the screaming mouth.

  Doctor Jonas had been mostly spared by the blast; he stood staring at the scene. Kelly got to his feet, rushed tottering to him and slammed his right fist in the Doctor’s face. The Doctor reeled back; Kelly seized the gun in his hand and wrestled it free almost without effort. Doctor Jonas looked at him uncomprehending; Kelly raised the gun and shot him twice in the head.

  Kelly looked around, but there was no one else on the platform. He strode over to Lydia; her flesh was still heaving and boiling, oozing blood and lymph. He emptied the gun into her, trying to hit the heart; her body convulsed after each shot. The last bullet seemed to hit a vital organ: the body grew suddenly rigid, then went limp; the flesh sagged.

  Kelly strode down the platform; Sebastian Bloom’s huge, peeling face gazed at him from the poster on the wall. He heard a tinny screech all around him, saw the train pull into the station, finally come to a stop.

  A cloud of steam rose from the engine. Kelly hobbled toward the train, but now the pain had begun. His whole left side felt seared, and his arm, his arm, his hand! He faltered, almost fell, forced himself to go on. Surely the conductor must see him; there was no one on the platform, no one looking out of the empty train.

  He called out, weakly: “I am an envoy from Centrality. In service to Sebastian Bloom. My name is Kelly. Help me. I’m wanted in Centrality. The Bureau…”

  It seemed to him he had clawed his way into the train, was sitting in a compartment, tended by a worried steward who said: “We should call a doctor right now, Sir.” And Kelly was saying, “No. Not here. They want me dead here. The next stop. Or maybe wait to Centrality. Call ahead. You have wireless equipment? Call ahead. Call the Bureau of Intelligence…”

  And it seemed to him too that he was still at the station, kneeling on the platform, his life running out of him, his arm a spike of burning pain, and the train was leaving the station, ignoring him, pulling ahead, faster and faster, and now he did see the little man walking along the tracks, holding a chamois cloth in one hand, buffing the rails, buffing the rails, erasing every least speck of tarnish from the gleaming metal, while the train sped off into the distance. The little man raised his head to smile at Kelly, and his face was Kelly’s own.

  Mom and Mother Teresa

  by Candas Jane Dorsey

  Mother Teresa came to live with my mother in the fall of 2001. The famous nun had been touring around the war zones of the world, but she was much frailer since her nearly-fatal heart attack a few years before and perhaps she felt it was time to tackle problems of a different nature — no less serious difficulties of the human condition, but in a more peaceful milieu.

  My mother was a healthy eighty-two at the time, a healthy, fat, sedentary, angry widow who looked fifteen years younger than her age and charmed strangers with her clear thoughts, her delightful conversation, her grasp of world events, and her vigour. I found her less charming as I extracted her from her agoraphobic denial patterns and drove her to her doctor’s appointments, grocery shopping, and visits with friends, listening non-stop to her fears, her complaints about how difficult my mild father had been really, her catalogue of how little help she got from anyone or how alone she was. She often telephoned me to just run her out to — somewhere — in my lunch hour, and the resulting trip usually took three hours or more. My boss had had me in for two little talks already.

  My mother’s adult years of desultory attendance at the nearest United Church had not served to erase her Scots Presbyterian childhood with its message of duty, sacrifice, and unhappiness, but the reality these reflexes were based on was a long time ago. When she opened the door that day and found a little, spry, sari-clad Catholic nun on her doorstep with a suitcase, I must credit my mother for reacting according to the training of her parents and grandparents. She invited the little woman in and offered her tea and the second-most-comfortable bed in the house.

  “I don’t drink tea,” said Mother Teresa. “Thank you for your hospitality. Thank you, God, for providing this plenty. Nice house. Does anyone else live here?”

  “No,” said my mother. “My husband died a year ago. I miss him so much, though it was a terrible struggle taking care of him for the last few years. I just couldn’t do anything. It was a nightmare time…”

  “Plenty of room,” said Mother Teresa. “I think I’ll just sleep here in the front verandah. It’s cooler anyway, and I don’t like a lot of clutter around.”

  “Would you like some lunch?” said my mother. She had just been starting to make egg salad sandwiches.

  “Lovely,” said Mother Teresa. “How about if you make a lot more of those?” She was already on the telephone. Before the sandwiches were finished, there was a knock on the door, and two young nuns ushered in about two dozen orphans. You could tell they were orphans, my mother told me later, because they were all dressed alike and their last names were alphabetical by age: Anderson, Ben-Adhem, Carnegie, Daillard, Endicott, Feinberg, Griffon and so on, to Singh, Taillenen, Underwood, Versailles, Wooster, Xander, Yung … there was no Zed orphan.

  The orphans stayed for lunch. My mother opened several cans of Campbell’s cream of celery soup and used up the last of her milk making it wholesome. She thawed out another couple of loaves of white bread from the downstairs fridge and opened cans of sardines for sardine salad. The older orphans helped her chop onions very fine and one spooned in the mayonnaise, licking the spoon afterward with frightening eagerness. By adding water to the four litre jug of orange juice in the refrigerator my mother was able to give them all orange punch. Mother Teresa said grace, then doled the punch out in the Royal Doulton cups that the grandfather and grandmother that I never met had rescued from the forest fire by burying them (the cups, not the grandparents) in the North Ontario woods and digging them up after the fire had gone through.

  The orphans were all pretty careful, and the young nuns washed the dishes and put them back exactly where they came from. My mom appreciated that.

  “Now,” said Mother Teresa briskly, looking at the orphans, “where shall we put you all?”

  It was at that point that my mother left the first message on my voice mail.

  It was a hot, “Indian-summer” day, and Mother Teresa decided that the cool basement would make the best dormitory. She hobbled down the stairs step by step, my mother following her anxiously. “Be careful on those steep stairs,” my mother said. The young nuns followed unobtrusively, then all the twenty-five orphans in single file alphabetically.

  “This will do when we get these things out of here,” said Mother Teresa. She began to pull boxes of papers and family antiques out of the corners, and organised the orphans into a kind of bucket brigade carrying the useless stuff outside to the yard. After they discovered that one of the windows hinged up the work went a lot faster, with a few orphans in the yard to receive the boxes and stack them by the garage.

  Any box that held anything useable Mother Teresa waved aside and the nuns unpacked it. The old set of dishes my parents hadn’t used in the ten years since they moved into that house, the family silver plat
e, various linens and laces emerged from their newspaper or old-sheet wrappings and were stacked in corners or taken upstairs. After the basement floor was washed down and the soapy water swept into the drain, linens from my mother’s upstairs closet were carried down. The orphans, who had been joined by a couple of men in olive green outfits driving a three-ton cube van, started handing in through the window, in pieces, bunk-bed frames of a faintly military nature, and thin sturdy mattresses with striped ticking. Mother Teresa was deft at putting these together, and orphans and nuns followed her lead. Mother Teresa had to resort to her nitro pills at one point, but she didn’t make a big deal of it. Soon the basement was transformed into quite a capable dormitory, with bunks stacked three up and clean white sheets hung as curtains to separate the age groups and genders of children. Each orphan had a towel and washcloth and the first shift were taking their baths.

  At this point my mother, having left several increasingly frantic messages for me at home and at work, was out in the yard trying to cover the stack of trunks and boxes containing her family history and photographs with a large sheet of six mill plastic my father had used for a paint dropcloth in 1973 and which had been stored in and moved with the garage contents ever since. That’s why she was the one to see the bus draw up to the curb, and two other nuns, both older and a little wearier, more street-savvy looking than the two inside, start unloading the families and homeless single men and women.

  My mother went in and found Mother Teresa on the telephone. “Excuse me,” she said, “but I really think…”

  “Good, there you are,” said Mother Teresa. “I’m glad you are so capable, and have this many resources here. It makes my job much easier. Now that you’ve finished outside, perhaps you would help Sister Sophia and Sister Rosario settle the new families in? One family in the back bedroom, one in the middle bedroom. I’ve had them move your things into the study, because I’m sure you’ll want to keep on with your work in your spare time. Really, you have all you need in there — it’s a lovely little set-up. Very cozy. I’ve moved the little desk out to the porch for my office. Once we get everything going, we’ll need places to do the administrative work. Right now, though, we should put the men in the living room, don’t you think? They’re used to sleeping rough. The women — we’ll have to figure something else for the women. Especially the ones with children.”

  “I have to use the phone,” said my mother.

  “I’ll be done soon,” said Mother Teresa. “Oh, your doctor phoned. He said to tell you your EEG tracing was normal, all the tests were normal. Your blood pressure was upper normal but he said he thought that was white coat syndrome. He advised you to keep taking the Atavan, and to try to eat less cream and butter. Lose a little weight. The bone density scan was remarkably good, especially for a woman your age. Good. I recognised that you are a woman blessed by God. Is there a car here?”

  “Yes,” said my mother. “I haven’t been able to bear to sell my husband’s car yet. He put so much money into that damned old thing when we needed — I mean, he loved that car so much. I’m sure it’s a valuable antique, or at least a classic. I don’t know how on earth I can get what it’s worth. When they see your hair is white, they think they can take advantage of that. I just don’t know how I can — with my arthritis, and my vision — it’s a nightmare time…”

  “Yes, the vision is a problem,” said Mother Teresa, “I’m taking into account that you can’t drive, so I think it will work best if you give the keys to one of the soldiers. Sergeant Fortunato perhaps. He drove the half-track we used in Palestine to get the disabled children out of the hospital there. By the grace of God, he knows his way around old vehicles. Someone has to pick up the tents and arrange for delivery of groceries. Do you have one of those bank card things? Perhaps you’d better go with him.”

  It was at this point that my mother barricaded herself in the study and began to phone me on the speed dial, one number after another, until finally someone at the office told her I had gone to the Minister’s Office. She actually phoned me there again, despite the fact that after what happened last time I had begged her not to endanger my job that way. The message wasn’t clear, but the panic-stricken tone was both familiar and demanding. I had to explain to the Assistant Deputy Minister that if Mother called there after all that they had said last time, this must be an emergency. She said that the last four calls from my mother hadn’t been much of an emergency, and that working out this Action Request for the Minister was an emergency too, especially given his problems with bad publicity lately, but I told her that the Minister already had everything in his briefing book that the office needed to answer the letter, and I was sure it was serious. I wasn’t convinced myself, but I presented my case firmly, then left while they were still looking for the briefing book. That was actually the last I saw of my job, but by the time I heard that my boss had fired me, I had figured out that I wouldn’t starve if I — what do they say? — pursued other options. I learned a lot from Mother Teresa, even if I am more interested doctrinally in Buddhism.

  When I arrived at my mother’s house I almost didn’t recognise the place. The marquee was already up on the back lawn, joined to the porch of the house on one side and the garage on the other by striped awnings, and the tent city was being erected on the large, long front lawn. The ramshackle picket fence that the landlord wouldn’t fix was already half-dismantled so that the provisions could be unloaded into the marquee where a sort of summer kitchen had been set up with half-oil-drum barbecue stoves borrowed from the local Lions and Shriners Clubs. The pieces of the fence were going in on top of the briquettes to make a roaring fire in each stove, and people were wrapping potatoes in tinfoil, filling huge pots with water from the hose and putting them on to boil, and cutting up carrots and celery.

  A troupe of neat-as-a-pin orphans worked alongside a few soldiers, several young sari-clad nuns, and two homeless men. One of them, I found out later, had been bottle-collecting in the alley (it was the day before the recycling pickup) when Mother Teresa engaged him in conversation, and discovering that he had been in a residential school, suggested that his experience could help the orphans avoid pitfalls in the system and protect themselves from the unscrupulous among their caregivers. As he carried cases of canned goods and sacks of potatoes out of the truck, he was giving the orphans laconic advice: “Take a friend along when you go to confession,” was the one phrase I heard, and only heard the context later, so as I walked by I had the odd impression he was repeating some Martha Stewart homily he’d seen in a woman’s magazine at the supermarket from which the groceries had come.

  “Where shall I put all this day-old fruit we got for free?” one of the orphans said to a small woman standing at the top of the back-porch steps.

  “Take it inside; the girls are making fruit salad for everyone and then canning the rest,” she said, and I realised with shock that I was seeing the famous Mother Teresa.

  My shock had a guilty element. Okay, I can confess it now, but if you ever tell my mother, I’ll deny I said it: I actually was the one that told a friend of mine that if she needed to billet anyone for this ecumenical conference she was organising, I was sure my mom had space. After all, when my mother was a kid, her family housed the student ministers for the little rural church they’d helped build. Also, I thought it would bring her out of herself, and, I confess, distract her from her attempt to get the same level of service from me as she had had from my father. When my pal said “What about Mother Teresa?” I thought she was kidding, and I said, “Sure, that would be perfect!” I had no idea Mother Teresa really was coming to our little city and I certainly figured if she did she’d stay somewhere else, somewhere holy and Catholic and conventy. I have never told my mother about this, and I am really not kidding when I say I never want her to know. I figure having to work with her every day is karmic punishment enough.

  Anyway, it’s too late to change things. It was
already too late when I showed up on the lawn, though my mother has never let me forget that she called me for help and instead I immediately got drafted into helping make the fruit salad and Mother didn’t find out I was there until two hours later when she finally gave in and came out of her room to take a painkiller and an Atavan.

  “But, Mom,” I say to her over and over, every time she brings it up. “I knew where all the knives and stuff were. It made perfect sense. I just couldn’t say no to a greater need.”

  From under the folds of the sari covering her abundant white hair, my mother looks at me reproachfully. Luckily, usually, before we get any further, one of the younger nuns comes in and says, “Excuse me, ma’am, there are some new women here; do you have any more clothes?” or “Excuse me, missus, but I’m wondering if you would mind if we gave these talking books you’ve finished with to that blind woman who’s running the tent city?” and she has to bustle off and help with something. Anyway, by the time our day is over I’m ready to leave for my apartment with the other nuns I’ve got staying there with me, we’re both too tired to argue after a hard day’s work helping Mother Teresa.

  My mother doesn’t much like the sari, but since she’s become so much more active, she’s lost so much weight that none of her clothes fit anymore. Besides, the homeless women, the formerly homeless women I mean, are getting a lot more wear out of all those outfits than she ever did.

  Fin-de-siècle

  by E. L. Chen

  He slips into the room, a shadow creeping into shadow.

  — Nick? she says. Oh, Nick, I was so scared. I had the nightmare again.

  — It’s okay, he says. I’m here.

  — Don’t leave me again. It’s so lonely here without you.

  — I have to, he says. How else are we going to eat?