Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Thought hopped up and down on the dresser cackling.

  “It’s up to us now,” said the upside down Memory. “To intervene in the mortal plane on our own.”

  “In our own way.”

  “Thank you, but I’m not looking for divine intervention,” said Jo.

  Thought chuffed up at her choice of words and opened her beak but Memory spoke first: “Selfish beings need to remember that there are other lives in the world, other problems that need resolving.”

  “If you’re trying to tell me that it makes a difference whether I sit on the couch or not, save your breath. I’ve never been swayed by delusions of grandeur.”

  “This one’s lost the threads of her narrative,” said Memory to Thought. “She’s not going to be any help to us until she’s found them again.”

  “More like she’s abandoned them,” said Thought, staring at Jo with one eye. “Well, hurry up and find them and make her pick up the right ones. There are lives at stake.”

  “You know as well as I that I can’t do that. There are rules to be observed.”

  Thought’s hackles began to rise. “Well, if you hadn’t wasted time using her memories for your own vicarious pleasure, by now she might be closer to remembering who she is.”

  Jo left the birds to their argument and went in search of water.

  She took a glass out of a kitchen cupboard and filled it from the sink. The cool liquid slid down her throat in one long gulp. She heard a thump from the living room, then some scrabbling. Hoping that the ravens had left, she filled her glass again and went out to see.

  Lying in the middle of the floor was a painting of an anthropomorphised crow sitting at a computer terminal in a messy cubicle.

  “What does it say on the back?” Thought asked Jo.

  She didn’t need to turn it over to know. “It says ‘Birdbrained’.”

  This sent Thought into hysterics again. She cackled so hard that she fell onto her back, her feet kicking the air spasmodically.

  It was the only portrait Eileen had ever painted of Jo.

  “And whose fault is that?” asked Thought, lapsing into another fit of barks.

  “Hush,” said Memory, glaring at her.

  Their last summer in Toronto had been a grisly one. Jo had spent days on end in the grad lab of the ornithology department at U of T tallying up crow deaths in different counties of Southern Ontario and analysing tissue samples.

  While public health departments scrambled to protect people from West Nile, Jo’s fears went with the crows. A few years ago when the virus first hit New York City, the crow population there had plummeted to ten percent of its original size. Jo was worried that pesticides in agricultural areas were attacking crow immune systems, making them even more susceptible to disease. The results could be catastrophic. Unfortunately, most of the farmers she talked to seemed to think the loss of crows would be a good thing and Eileen wasn’t very supportive either.

  “I never see you anymore,” Eileen complained one night over the curry and naan bread that she’d brought to the lab from their favourite Indian take-out. “I think you love your birds more than me.”

  It was an unfair statement, but sometimes Eileen said things like that just to get attention. Besides, Jo missed Eileen as well. It was August and the other students were off doing fieldwork or just slacking, so Jo suggested that Eileen bring her paints in and they could work side by side. Eileen agreed on the condition that Jo let her paint her portrait as she worked.

  Eileen’s eyes sparkled when she finally showed Jo the finished picture of “Birdbrained,” like she expected Jo to find it funny. But she didn’t. Jo had hoped her portrait would reveal some hidden depths, some inner beauty that she was not aware of herself. Instead, Eileen had produced a passive-aggressive joke. What did that say about Eileen and Jo and their relationship?

  The only way for Jo to avoid choking on her disappointment was to start yelling. She shouted that Eileen had no respect for her research, and accused artists of being parasites that thrived on human experience but did nothing to improve the quality of life on the planet. Eileen fled with tears in her eyes.

  Jo camped out at the university the next couple of days, eating at the cafeteria and sleeping on the battered orange couch in the corner of the lab. Her fear and anger slowly melted into guilt, then sorrow. She bought a voluptuous orchid that they couldn’t really afford and went home.

  Lying in bed after making up, Eileen proposed that they put Jo’s beliefs into practice and buy some land, somewhere far from the distractions of the city, and start up an organic farm. Jo suspected that getting into farming was not that easy, but Eileen was adamant and the idea of having Eileen all to herself in the bush somewhere definitely had its appeal.

  “Oh, the irony,” said Thought, arcing her wings out and bobbing up and down. “She named you, and here we are, and here you are, and you think it’s a joke. And it’s all so very funny.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why Odin stopped listening to you,” said Jo, glaring at the bird.

  She picked up the painting and placed it on the mantelpiece. Despite her initial reaction, she had to admit that there was beauty in it: in the way her hair metamorphosed into feathers and in the hint of arms in the curve of wings. Eileen had even included the little photo of herself that Jo kept next to the computer, only the painted version was leaning out of the frame blowing a kiss to the viewer. Jo wondered why she had never noticed that before.

  A rustling came from the kitchen. Jo followed the sound and found Memory perched on the toaster tearing a hole in a bag of stale bread.

  “Do you have peanut butter?” he asked hopefully. “Or cheese?”

  “Peanut butter and cheese,” said Thought, swooping into the room.

  Jo retrieved a jar of chunky peanut butter and a hunk of old cheddar — mouldy around the edges — from the fridge and made the ravens a sandwich. Then, since the stuff was out anyway, she made herself one too, sat down at the melamine table and watched the birds make a sticky mess of their food. At least the peanut butter clogged up their beaks for a while.

  Jo hadn’t realised how hungry she was until she took a bite of her own sandwich. She wolfed it down, but all it did was whet her appetite, so while her guests were occupied preening daubs of peanut butter out of their sleek feathers she thawed some ratatouille from the freezer and sat down to a proper meal.

  A gun went off in the distance. Thought fluttered up from the counter, squawking in panic. Memory began to pace rapidly up and down the counter between the sink and stove.

  “You’re wasting time,” said Thought, settling on the back of a kitchen chair across the table from Jo. “Why won’t you remember what we need you to remember?” she stabbed her beak towards Jo.

  Jo thrust the half-eaten bowl of ratatouille away. “Why won’t you go away and leave me to my forgetting?”

  Thought leaned forward and hissed, a low menacing sound. Memory flew over, pecked at Thought and then began pushing the ratatouille back across the table with his beak.

  “You’ll have to excuse my mate, she’s a little overwrought,” he said, turning to glower at Thought. He returned his attention to Jo. “While you’ve been hiding away in here these last five days, events in the world outside have continued to unfold. It is these events that are causing her some distress.”

  Five days only? It seemed like a lifetime.

  “What events?” asked Jo. “Why won’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

  “Can’t,” said Memory. “You have to remember.”

  “And think!” squawked Thought, ruffling her feathers and glaring at Jo with her beady eyes.

  “May I have a word with you, in the living room, please?” Memory said to Thought.

  Thought looked the other way.

  “Now,” said
Memory.

  Thought hopped down off her perch and waddled, beak raised high, into the living room. Memory flew after her.

  Jo polished off the ratatouille and began to open cupboards at random. She craved something else but she wasn’t sure what, until she found a half-empty bag of chocolate chips. Exactly what she needed.

  Croaking, squawking, thumping and thudding continued in the living room. Doing her best to ignore the sounds, Jo shook some chips out onto the palm of her hand and returned to the table. The last time she’d baked chocolate chip cookies was on the summer solstice when Shelley still worked for them.

  Thought and Memory swooped into the room and dropped a small picture onto the table: the little 10” by 10” portrait of Shelley sitting in a patch of strawberries.

  “You needn’t have bothered,” Jo said. “I was going there anyway.”

  Jo had completed her thesis with a little grant money to spare. Combined with the small inheritance Eileen had from her grandfather’s death a few years back, they had enough to make a down payment on a 30-acre property two hours west of Sudbury. The land had been farmed, though never profitably, and had eventually been abandoned.

  Eileen loved the farmstead on sight, staking out a small ramshackle shed as her painting studio. She made forays into the bush, coming back with treasures of dried fungi, flowers and antlers, which she used to transform the one-storey farmhouse into a home.

  The prospects for farming were not so good. The “vegetable patch” in the real-estate ad turned out to be nothing but weeds and hard-packed soil. Still, somehow they managed to get the hardpan rototilled and the vegetables planted before the April showers arrived.

  At first they rejoiced as the rain coaxed their seeds into sprouting, but as it continued day after day, weeds began to outstrip their vegetables. When the sun finally came out, their neat rows had vanished under a tangle of ragweed and crab-grass. It took an entire week to remove the unwanted plants and by the time they’d worked through the last row, the weeds at the far end were two inches high again.

  Eileen put together a flyer advertising a part-time job for a student, decorating it with a smiling sun in the corner and a row of tulips along the bottom. The only applicants were a couple of girls. The first candidate showed up in a Marilyn Manson t-shirt with an attitude to match. The second needed a job because she was saving up to go to vet school, and it had to be part-time because she already volunteered at the local animal hospital. The choice was easy.

  Her first day on the job Shelley uncovered an old strawberry patch next to the compost pile, which neither Jo nor Eileen had noticed, and began to nurse it back to health. She then made them enclose the rows of vegetables in chicken wire, to protect them from the local rabbits. She had wanted to put up a scarecrow too, but Jo wouldn’t agree to it. She explained her research to the girl, who seemed interested. Afterwards, whenever a crow landed in the garden, Shelley would come fetch Jo and the two of them would sit in the sun and discuss corvid behaviour.

  Things were looking up at the beginning of June when they harvested their first produce: lettuce, chives and mixed spring greens. High on optimism, Jo talked the minister at a big church on the highway into letting them set up a stand in the parking lot on Saturdays.

  But as June progressed, morale plunged. Business was slow and the work backbreaking. Jo’s worries that they’d made a huge mistake investing all their money in a farm they didn’t know how to run, kept her from sleeping. Eileen grew cranky as days without painting turned into weeks and Jo added a fear that Eileen would abandon both her and the farm to her nightly litany of anxieties. To make matters worse, Shelley was working more hours than they could afford to pay her for and without her assistance their chances of making it through the summer without missing a mortgage payment were even bleaker.

  One sleepless night in mid-June as worries chased each other through Jo’s head, an idea began to take form. The next morning she proposed to the other two that Eileen paint Shelley’s portrait as partial payment for all her overtime. Happily, they both agreed. Eileen was more than willing to take some time off from her gardening chores and Shelley was charmed by the prospect of seeing herself on canvas. Disaster was staved off for a while longer.

  Eileen finished the portrait in time for summer solstice. It was one of the most beautiful pieces she’d ever done, filled with all the life and vitality that Shelley brought to their farm. She even included a small crow in the corner to represent the kinship that had grown between Jo and Shelley as they studied the birds.

  The three of them took that afternoon off, ate chocolate chip cookies, toasted the longest day of the year with cheap champagne and admired Eileen’s work.

  When Jo and Eileen arrived at the church the next Saturday, the minister was waiting for them in the parking lot, clutching the portrait of Shelley. Jo’s stomach sank as they pulled up.

  “Mrs. Murray has come to me with disturbing information,” he said as they got out of the car. “She overheard her daughter tell a friend that there is only one bedroom in your house, and only one bed in that room.”

  Jo could feel Eileen bristling beside her. She had to step in before Eileen said something foolish. “We never pretended to be anything other than what we are,” she said.

  “What you do in your own house is between you and God,” said the minister. “But to subject a minor to your depraved lifestyle—”

  “Oh, for the goddess’ sake,” exclaimed Eileen. Jo lay a warning hand on her arm but she wouldn’t be stopped. “How backwards are you? There’s nothing immoral about the way Jo and I live. We love each other, we’re not ashamed of that. Our personal life is none of your business.”

  “It became my business when you sought to influence a minor. Mrs. Murray smelled alcohol on her daughter’s breath when she returned from your place carrying this,” the minister held up the portrait. “She suspects that there’s more than gardening going on at your farm,” he said. “And, I must agree that the evidence is damning.” He read from the back of the portrait: “Happy Summer Solstice Shelley, love Eileen and Jo.”

  “Are you for real?” asked Eileen, shaking free of Jo’s grip. “I painted her portrait, and suddenly you want to burn us at the stake?”

  “If it is an innocent picture, why is there a black bird menacing her from above?” asked the Minister, growing red in the face. “And why have you painted her suggestively in a flimsy tank top and cut-off jeans with strawberry juice running down her arms?”

  “It’s strawberry season, I painted her while she picked strawberries on our farm. The crow is there because there are crows on the farm. Besides, if I painted it for nefarious purposes why would I give it to Shelley?”

  “Maybe you have other paintings of the poor child.”

  “The picture was to thank Shelley for all her hard work, nothing more,” said Jo. “I admit that Shelley had a small glass of champagne to celebrate the summer harvest. It was wrong of us to give alcohol to a minor. We apologise for that, and promise it won’t happen again.” Jo turned her back on the minister and unlocked the trunk. “Now if you’ll excuse us, we need to get the lettuce out of the car before it wilts in this heat.”

  “Oh no you won’t,” said the minister. “I’ll not have the likes of you using church land to reap a profit.”

  “Alright then,” Jo said, slamming the trunk closed. “We’ll not waste anymore of your time. Let’s go, Eileen.”

  “Not until he gives the painting back,” Eileen said.

  “I think I’ll hang onto this, just in case,” replied the minister.

  “I painted it for Shelley, not so some lech can feast his eyes on a young girl whenever he gets the urge.”

  “Eileen!” said Jo. “Get in the car now, we’re leaving.”

  Eileen lunged towards the minister. He flinched and she yanked the picture out of his hands. Jo ope
ned the passenger door of the car and pulled her in.

  “You’ll regret this!” shouted the minister as they drove away.

  Eileen leaned out the window and gave him the finger. She turned back to Jo, laughing.

  “That was a stupid thing to do,” said Jo.

  “Oh, lighten up.”

  “We’re barely breaking even as it is. How are we going to sell our produce now? Pretty much everyone in town goes to that church.”

  Eileen shrugged. “We can always do farm gate sales. It’s mostly the cottagers who buy from us anyhow. The locals go to Loblaws.”

  “People purchase our produce because they see us as they go by on the highway. Our farm’s at the end of two kilometres of dirt road; how will anyone find us there?”

  “We could sell it in Sudbury. They have a farmer’s market.”

  “I didn’t move to the country so that I could spend two hours driving to Sudbury and back every weekend.”

  “Well I didn’t move up north so that some ignorant man-of-the-cloth could insinuate that I’m a pervert. I would be more than happy to drive to Sudbury, it would give me a chance to get out of these claustrophobic backwoods.”

  Shelley’s portrait had the same sensuousness to it that all of Eileen’s work had. It depicted a girl on the brink of becoming a woman, surrounded by a verdant abundance of vines and heavy ripe strawberries. But the minister had it all wrong. It was a tribute to life, not soft pornography.

  The word “Hope” had been written on the back of the canvas. It hadn’t been there when Eileen gave the portrait to Shelley. She must have added it later. Hope for what, Jo wondered. If Eileen had been hoping Shelley would come back to work, that hadn’t come to be.

  “This is all very interesting but I don’t see what any of this has to do with why we’re here,” said Thought. The two ravens were perched on the chair across the table from Jo.

  “Shelley was another thread she needed to pick up,” said Memory.

  “But we don’t have time,” said Thought, hopping onto the table and pacing in front of Jo. “Lives are being lost.”