Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  He grinned at Likner and bent to scoop a little rock. Knowing Bouki’s games, Likner ducked as it sailed toward him, grabbed a bigger one and rushed forward for a revenge throw at Bouki. The woman grabbed his wrist as he went hurtling by. Bouki smacked him hard and skipped away. The woman held Likner until his struggling ceased, then set him down and waited. He turned and stared.

  Likner never really expected much. Half the time he didn’t even ask for money. He never pushed the blans like the other boys. He didn’t dream someone would take him home, to Canada or the States or France, give him money to go to school or buy a house for his mama. But even he couldn’t escape a little skipping in his heart, a little difficulty with his breath when she looked at him and smiled. Because you never know, do you? You never really know.

  Yesterday he’d thought that she was white-blonde, with gem-blue eyes and skin like shaved ice. Today he saw her hair was a light brown, and the blue eyes were tinged with green. She looked at him for a long time, steadily. He decided to try.

  “Ba m senk goud,” he told her. She cocked her head. “Give me one dolla,” he said in English. She understood.

  Bouki and Benji were gone. She reached into her pocket, one she had turned inside out earlier, and pulled out a large, dull coin. She put it in his hand, closed his fingers around it, and looked into his eyes. She pointed to the coin, pointed to his pocket, closed her fist. “Don’t lose it,” she was telling him. Then she stood up, gave him a little pinch on the nose, and walked away.

  He stared at the coin, empty of feeling. It wasn’t Haitian. Or American. He squinted. He couldn’t read, but he knew them all. It wasn’t Canadian or Belgian or French. He could barely make out the shape of a woman — an American, he thought, by her face and hair — and on the other side … perhaps a fish.

  He heard a shout and looked in the direction she had gone. Ezo and Bouki and Ti Patrik, sparring and yelling as they wandered up the street. The blan was nowhere to be seen.

  The coin was a disappointment. He looked at it numbly. He surprised himself with what he did next, without even thinking. He tossed it over the wall and into the muttering sea. The water swallowed it and it left his thoughts. Bending, he scooped up a nicely weighted stone. Straightened and aimed at Bouki’s shaved head.

  Likner sat on the darkened stoop across from the Merci Jesu Bar and Grill. People stood lined up waiting for manyòk juice and white bread with spicy peanut butter. A couple of the boys stood by the doorway, available for handouts. Likner felt a presence at his elbow and turned. It was the blan. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face in a tight bun. How could he not have noticed before that she was a grimèl? Though her skin was not dark, the Haitian features were unmistakeable. She smiled at him, as if he had been very naughty. She held out the coin.

  “Pa perdi li,” she said in Creole. Don’t lose it. She nodded sharply and he stuffed it in his pocket without a word. One of the boys noticed her there and came over to talk. She winked at Likner, smiled at him, and walked away listening to the other boy.

  That night, when Likner was alone, he looked at the coin again. The woman’s features were a little clearer. She had her eyes raised and her hands as well, her head twisted a little to one side, as if she was dancing. He turned it over. The fish was very long. It arced as though diving into the sea.

  He walked along the boulevard, considering. What could he buy with this? Nothing. What could he trade it for? Not much. His business sense said to trade it. His gut said to hell with it. To hell with the big shot blans and their money. To hell with their promises. He took it out again, glanced up the long, dark street. Three men laughed and talked loudly a few steps away from him. One lone man leaned against the seawall a half a block in front of him. The man filled up his lungs and sang horridly into the gentle breeze that came in off the sea. Likner thought of offering him the coin. But no. Instead, he turned to the sea again. He aimed it far out in the water, where it was deep, where the woman would not see it and fetch it back. And he threw it in.

  Likner woke to the sound of gentle breathing. He lay on the sidewalk in a little cluster of boys. Jean Denis’ long arm was resting on his face. The moon had left the sky. He sat up, let his legs dangle over the wall that faced the water, and stuffed his hands into his pockets. Something hard was in there. He pulled it out. The coin. Only now the woman was changed. He stiffened. She was the mambo dancing before they poisoned the owners and burned the plantations and started the revolution. He knew that it was her. He turned it over and there was La Sirene, rising in all her scaled majesty from her element, the sea.

  Don’t lose it, she had said. It wasn’t a visa. It wasn’t a schoolbag. It wasn’t even a hunk of bread. But anyone would know it was a wanga, though whose or why he had it or what it was meant to do he didn’t know. He leapt up and hurled it as far as it would go and turned to race away from the sea.

  He stopped. For a second he thought the moon had fallen from the sky and hovered in front of his face. He blinked. It was her, holding the coin up in her dark brown hand, a little smile playing on her face. Her black hair stood stiffly out on every side.

  “It was an orphanage,” she said in perfect Creole. Where was she getting these words? “With a school and uniforms and a library that actually has books.” He stepped to one side, hoping to get around her. “It was a boat. Forty people and high seas and nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Do you think they’ll reach America? Do you think they’ll let them land? Do you think that they’ll be welcome if they manage to sneak ashore?” He made a break. She nabbed him easily and held him while he wriggled.

  “Good,” she said. She pinned him down. Some of the other boys were starting to rouse. The ocean slapped the wall and spattered them with spray. “It was a marine. He strafed the fighters in the hills and made their families build the roads. He killed their pigs.” Her teeth clicked together as she sank against the curb, her black fingers tight around him still. “It was a houngan. What do you think a houngan can do? Draw vevers and dance for the spirits all night? Anything else? Can he do anything? Is he worshipping devils like the missionaries say? Is he always drunk?” Her legs twined around each other and fused into a long, scaled tail. She released his arm and bellied over the waking boys, paused for a second on the wall and blinked great green eyes at him. “It was a poet. He sketched his words in Creole, dipped his pen in his blood, wrote with the loops of his intestines. Did you hear him scream? Did you hear him laugh with joy?

  “It was a wish, Likner. Would you like to learn to see with eyes like mine? Would you like to find your own?” She blinked her great green eyes at him. So green, they were nearly coal. “It was a dream. Do you dream, Likner? Would you like to give that up?”

  She dove over the side and disappeared in the inky water with a hearty splash. “Come on,” he heard in his mind. “Follow and see. See if your arm can bend this wave.”

  One by one, the boys sat up stiffly, looking confusedly around them. Likner watched the water shifting where she had disappeared, heard it tapping at the wall. Tentatively, he put his hand back in his pocket. Met something small, round, hard. Just for now, he decided not to look.

  Jimmy Away to Me

  by Sarah Totton

  I couldn’t picture Jimmy Aldebaran’s face. In my mind he stood on the riverbank, left hand plunged past the wrist in his coat pocket, right hand pinning the sketchbook to his chest like a shield. I remembered him not by his face, but by that hand, wrapped in blue silk, dressed with golden rings — the hand that had drawn the landscape of Bron y mor as though I could reach through the glass and touch it. That was how I remembered him.

  I wondered if Mark remembered him like this — Mark who’d known Jimmy in high school, who’d driven from Sudbury with Jimmy’s mother, who stopped me in the funeral home parking lot to ask me how this could have happened to Jimmy — this Mark who had the strength to ask that question, to say
that name, when even the trees should not be standing that day.

  That was how it was for me — no fight left, eyes dissolving, fist clutched tight around the marble in my mitten, reciting in my head the only magic I’d ever known: Come by, Jimmy. Come by, come by…

  That magic my uncle Paul had taught me, years ago. When my hands grew large enough to grip a wooden rod eight inches long between my thumb and smallest finger, he taught me to play a piece on the piano called ‘‘Rustle of Spring’’. I knew how it was supposed to sound because I had heard him play it, but I recognized none of that magical sound in what I played, chipping and hacking at the notes, hands stretched taut over the keys.

  And then one day in the dead of winter, my splaying hands had sunk through the fog that had covered the keyboard and I touched something alive. My left hand, rippling over the white keys, became sunlight sparkling on cliffs. Above them, the black keys bobbed like the shadows of leaves in a summer breeze. And the song was a shivering swell of water dragging sound through a thousand rattling stones. When it ended, I touched my cheek and felt the heat of a summer sun burning on the back of my hand.

  Uncle Paul had called that place Bron y mor. It was the place he touched every time he played ‘‘Rustle of Spring’’. It was the place everyone went, he told me, when he did the one thing he did better than anything else. And it was where Jimmy went when he crouched over his sketchbook with a pencil laced through his fingers.

  I never played ‘Rustle of Spring’ again, not like I had that day. I came to master the notes, but its music never returned to me. Even the memory of it, so vivid at first, gradually faded, leaving me with a sense of the seasons and of the colours, blue, green, and grey.

  Then, long after I’d given up looking for Bron y mor in that piece of music, I found it again in a completely different way. Through a marble. I called it glass dreaming. I used clear glass marbles, the ones with petals and twists of dye inside — ‘plainsies’ people called them. When a plainsy spun, it breathed, it undulated, it took you in. The green glass went smoky and when I looked into its centre, sometimes I’d glimpse that place again. It was only a fleeting look, but it was all I’d had. Until I’d met Jimmy Aldebaran.

  Mark was waiting for me to speak. He seemed older than I was, a lot bigger than Jimmy, mirrored sunglasses, head and hands bare in this bitter cold. I looked away from him and tried to stop shivering.

  “You were his friend, Emma?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Can I talk to you?” he said. He looked at me through those silver disks.

  “About what?”

  “I want to see where it happened. Can you take me there?”

  I looked at him, appalled.

  “Please?” he said.

  I heard the catch in his voice, and, for a moment Jimmy lived in that sound. And I thought, I can’t help Jimmy now, but I can help someone who cared about him. That was why I took Mark to Riverside Park.

  It was a long walk across town, soundless except for the scratching of our boots on the salty pavement. Jimmy hung like a living thing in the air between us. So many memories, and the sweetest one, the day I’d shown Jimmy glass dreaming.

  Jimmy had backed into my room without knocking, a paper plate balanced on his left hand, the sketchbook clutched to himself with the right. He flicked off his shoes, lay down on my bed putting his feet up on the spread, and flipped open the sketchbook. I watched him from my desk. He produced a thick pencil, threaded it through his silk-wrapped hand, and proceeded to sketch something in his book. He noticed me watching him.

  “Garlic bread?” he said. He lifted a piece off the plate beside him, took a bite out of it and then proffered the bitten end to me.

  “No thanks.” I went back to studying. I could hear him chewing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a few seconds. “Are you busy?”

  “I’ve got an exam tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” He lay back on my bed and idly flipped through his sketchbook. He was quiet for a few moments. “Everyone thinks I’m weird,” he said.

  “So? Everybody’s weird.”

  “No, everyone’s normal. Like you,” he said.

  “What?” I put my pen down. “I am not.”

  “You are,” he said. “I can tell. People who’re weird know they’re weird.”

  “Then I’m definitely weird,” I said, “and I know why.”

  “Why?”

  I’d seen Jimmy’s drawings before, and I’d sensed an inkling of something in them, even then. Maybe that was why I showed him. Or maybe because I believed I’d kept the secret of Bron y mor to myself for long enough.

  As I upended the mock leather bag, spilling marbles over my desk, I told him what to look for. “You want one with tints, like the iris of an eye: green for the grass, blue for the sea, and grey for the stones. When they come together, you’ll know you’ve arrived. Don’t worry about the pattern.”

  Jimmy couldn’t grasp this. He was an artist; pattern was important to him. In the end, I chose one for him, one with petals of blue and grey dye in the green glass. I dragged my arm across the desk, sending the rest of the marbles clattering into the open drawer.

  “Now,” I said, “you pick a direction and spin it. If you spin left, it’s come by. If you spin right, it’s away to me.”

  “You what?” said Jimmy.

  I’d spent years developing a technique on my own. It felt odd having to explain it to someone. “It’s a shepherd’s code. When they’re bringing in the sheep, they give their dogs commands. Come by means ‘Approach me, circling left’. Away to me means ‘Approach me, circling right’.”

  Jimmy took off his glasses and stared through the marble. “All right. So what happens after I call the dog? Do I see sheep or what?”

  “Forget about sheep. It’s what’s in the marble that you’re calling to you. Just spin it. And don’t blink until it stops turning or it won’t work.”

  He couldn’t spin the marble with his right hand — the scarf stopped him gripping it properly — so he had to spin it with his left. Over the burr of glass on wood, he murmured, “Come by, come by.”

  The green glass spun milky, buzzing like a chorus of cicadas and the blue and the grey merged in an undulating funnel inside the glass. For a moment I thought he wouldn’t see anything, that maybe Bron y mor was something only Uncle Paul and I could see. Through the glass, I’d only had the briefest glimpse of it. Would he know, would he understand what it was if it appeared to him this way?

  But when the pattern chopped out and the marble stilled, I looked up to see Jimmy’s eyes shining like beacons.

  “What did you see?” I said, beginning to hope.

  He was staring still, into the marble, unblinking. “I think…”

  “You think what?”

  “I can smell … nutmeg.”

  That night, he drew a bird in coloured chalk, blue, green and grey, with teeth like mother-of-pearl.

  Riverside Park was darker than I remembered. I felt the trees hanging over us before we’d even crossed the field. Mark and I walked single file, taking turns breaking a trail through the snow.

  It had happened above the dam. I heard the water before I saw it. The sound was like a summer wind rattling leaves, or a thousand marbles spinning. But these trees were bare and the only marble here was in my hand. Halfway across the clearing, we stopped. Ice opened in a fan-shaped pattern around the foot of the dam where the water flickered, like ghosts in green froth, over the concrete embankment.

  “Here?” said Mark.

  “At the top of the dam. Under the bridge.”

  I led him up. Above the roaring dam, the quiet was almost deafening, peaceful. The water was completely frozen, crossed by a footbridge. On the opposite shore, an orange board that read: “Danger: Thin ice” had been naile
d to a weeping willow hanging over the water. There had been only one witness, the newspapers had said. She had been walking her dog by the dam and had seen Jimmy step out onto the ice and break through.

  “I know this place,” said Mark. “Why?”

  Cold wind and tears silvered the air. We stood for a while in silence. I squeezed the cold glass in my mitten.

  “I’m going to take a look,” said Mark.

  “Why?”

  “I want to see. They never found his body, did they? Maybe it was a mistake.”

  I watched him as he walked toward the bridge. It made me shiver, the way he moved, so eerily intent, as though he expected to find Jimmy there. He left the path and stepped down the slope toward the water’s edge where the new snow was marked with footprints. Then he disappeared into the shadows under the bridge and I was alone. I clutched the marble in my mitten. Come by, come by…

  “Jimmy?” I whispered.

  His name fractured in the air. On the opposite shore, shadows spread like thin arms from the dead stalks of cat-tails poking through the snow. A gust of wind dusted powder from the roof of the covered bridge, stirring the pendulous yellow tendrils of the weeping willow. I let my eyes drift out of focus and for a moment, a brief flicker, the colour of the tree seemed to deepen just slightly, to pale green, and the tips of the branchlets dropped in coloured strands to long tubes, gilded and painted. The fragrance of wild spices and a sound like wind chimes filtered through the air. Hardness and coldness and light spun inside me.

  “Careful, Emma!”

  The collar of my coat tightened and jerked against my throat.

  “Step back. Slowly,” said Mark.

  That was when I felt the slickness under my boots, and I realized that I was standing on cracking ice with the river rustling below me. As Mark pulled me back onto the shore, my knees dropped. He held me up as the music, and the memory of it, faded. The ground under my feet trembled with the force of the water as it roared over the dam. That, and the cold air, settled me.