Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “Why did you do that?” said Mark. He sounded shaken.

  “What did you see under the bridge?”

  “I saw the hole. It doesn’t look big enough for…”

  “You didn’t … hear anything?” I said. “Under there?”

  “No.”

  I pressed my mitten to my face and breathed winter air filtered through the wool. “Nutmeg.”

  “Emma?” he said.

  I felt him shake me. “Maybe you should sit down.”

  I shook my head.

  “You and Jimmy were pretty close, weren’t you?” he said.

  “What do you think happens to people, after they die?” I said.

  “I think the more relevant question is what happens to them before they die.”

  I felt a peculiar and disturbing clarity at those words. “That was why you wanted to come here.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I thought if I saw it, I’d understand. But I don’t. Tell me, Emma, did he ever mention me to you?”

  “No.”

  I wanted to go back to my room and stare at the walls until the pain went away, until the world stopped ending. I pulled away from Mark and crossed the footbridge. I heard him scrambling to catch up to me. Maybe that’s why he didn’t see it. But I did. The flash of blue on the willow tree was like a needlehook in my heart. I stepped off the path and went toward it, ignoring Mark’s sudden shout. I stood numbly and stared at it, bright blue and flickering, caught on the bark: Jimmy’s scarf, fluttering there like a dying moth. Mark did what I didn’t dare do; he plucked it off the tree.

  “It might have caught on the bark,” he said quietly. “It’s probably … oh my God.”

  He was staring at the back of the orange sign. And then I saw what he saw, on the ledge of wood making up the frame: a pair of glasses, the lenses shining like living eyes in the last light of the day. They’d been set there with care so that they wouldn’t fall. Jimmy had always taken them off before doing his sketches, but without them, he could barely see to walk around.

  “Emma?”

  “No, be quiet.”

  “Emma, did Jimmy say anything to you before he came here?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t see him that day.”

  “Did he leave you a note? Did he give you anything beforehand? A letter? Anything?”

  “—Yes. Not a letter.”

  “Can I see it?” he said.

  “I don’t have it,” I said. “It’s in my room.”

  “Then I’ll take you back to residence. I’ve got to meet his mom there anyway. She’s collecting Jimmy’s things.”

  On the way back to residence, I asked Mark to let me hold Jimmy’s scarf. I tried to imagine the warmth of Jimmy’s hand as I twisted folds of it around each finger of my right hand.

  The day after Jimmy disappeared, the police had interviewed me for nearly an hour. They’d asked the same kinds of questions Mark asked me as we walked. Had he seemed unhappy when I’d known him? I turned my thoughts away from that last week, back to the early days of the semester. He’d seen Bron y mor, just as I had, only clearer. There were hints of it in the things he’d drawn before I’d even shown him. He must have known it a long time; he was connected to that place more intimately than I would ever be. To see Bron y mor the way he had…. He had been a visionary. Unhappy, never, but…

  One week after I’d shown glass dreaming to Jimmy, he’d burst into my room.

  “I know where it is,” he told me. “Come outside.”

  I didn’t have to ask him what it was; he told me as we descended the stairwell. “I saw it in the marble, in the glass, but then I realized it really was in the glass.”

  He led me away from the university into the heart of the city. In the main square he hesitated, casting around the buildings.

  “It’s changed,” he said.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “It’s near the church — there!” He strode off with hard deliberate steps, crossing a parking lot to a road between a row of older buildings. The street was actually cobbled here. The further along Jimmy went, the quicker he walked until he broke into a run. Then suddenly he checked in mid-stride opposite a doorway set into the stone. He looked right at it, and for a second, he seemed almost scared. Then he pushed open the door and went inside.

  It was a pub. Not a bar, but a quiet, dim little room. Net curtains on big copper rings were pulled across a bay window in the back wall. Light filtered through the rippled glass in the panes of that window. Some of the panes were coloured and when Jimmy pulled back the curtain, I saw a bird in the window done in stained glass and mother of pearl — not exactly like the one in his sketchbook, but similar. Jimmy pressed his right hand in its silk wrapping against the glass. A half-smile crossed his face.

  Jimmy had only rarely mentioned his past to me. I knew that he’d lived in this city until he was nine years old. That was why he’d applied to university here, though there were many others in the province with a better Fine Arts program. He’d wanted to come home again. His childhood had been haunting him, hovering on the edges of dreams, clinging to the bricks and stones of his hometown, but the memories hadn’t returned — until I’d spun him a glass dream.

  “My father made that bird,” said Jimmy. “He was an artist too. A glass artist, but he taught me to draw. He showed me how to get it down, from here,” he touched his head. “where it’s bright and amazing to — bam!” He slapped the sketchbook. “Here on the paper. He taught me that your hand wicks visions out of your head onto the paper. That’s why it’s called ‘drawing’. And it works the other way too. The brush sucks up the colours, makes your hand tingle. Green, like that colour in the window, freezes you right to your fingertips.

  “He used to take me to this pub every Saturday when he was alive, and we’d walk home along the river, past the dam. He died when I was nine. Cancer. But I remember him. He taught me to see inside things, past things. You see that way too, don’t you?”

  “I can’t do what you can do,” I said. “I can’t bring it out and put it on paper. That’s a gift.”

  He closed his sketchbook and meandered around the bar with a kind of furtive happiness, stroking the velvet cushions in the bench along the wall, crouching under the tables, peering behind the curtains. Finally, he sat down at a table in the corner and took the marble I’d given him out of his pocket.

  “Show me again,” he said.

  I spoke to him about Bron y mor as the marble spun. He stopped it with his palm before it even slowed.

  “I know that place,” he said. He had a strained look about him, as though he were trying to remember something. “I’ve been there before.”

  The sketchbook was under my pillow where I’d left it. I hesitated, holding it while Mark stood in the doorway of my room. He took the book out of my hand and opened it to the first page. I sat down on my bed, pulled the marble out of my mitten and tapped it lightly on my desk. I could hear footsteps in the hallway outside and I pretended it was Jimmy coming down to talk to me.

  “The covered bridge,” said Mark suddenly. “That’s why I recognized it. There was a painting he did when we were in high school. It won the art award that year. It was the same bridge.”

  He was silent for a bit, turning the pages. I’d only had the sketchbook a few days, but I’d gone through it a hundred times. Most of the pages were covered in chip and cookie crumbs and white powdered sugar from the donuts Jimmy had loved. He’d eaten constantly while he worked, but he’d never gotten fat.

  Pages one to thirty were landscapes from around town, some in coloured chalk, some in pencil. There was a magic in them, but it was the muted kind, like a beautiful song played so softly you could barely hear it.

  The next pictures were the ones he’d drawn after I’d shown him glass dreaming, pl
aces he’d given names to: “Cold Keep”, “Black Tor”, and others. These were followed by pictures I could hardly believe were his. Wooden twig-men with twisted limbs, ice-men cracked in pieces, like glass falling from a window. There were no crumbs on these pages.

  “Death imagery,” said Mark.

  I used the tick-tick-tick of his thumbnail as he flipped through the pages to time the marble as I spun it.

  “Did he seem depressed the last few weeks, Emma?”

  Two, three, four…. “Not really.”

  The marble buzzed, Away to me, away to me…. After a time, it spun out, stilled, and the ticking stopped. I knew the picture Mark had come to.

  It was a pond filled with clear water. Deep in the bottom lay a circular pit made of stone, like a well. Its walls were crumbling and ancient. In its centre lay a tumble of splintered bones, green with algae. One of the bones, a small one, was gripped in the long, narrow jaws of a skull — not human. The teeth in the skull were conical and opalescent. The ring of stone forming the wall of the well was broken in one place. Across this gap fell a thin shadow that crossed the bones, melting into them. The shadow was cast by a cat-tail at the surface which hung above the water like the bowed head of someone at prayer.

  I picked up the marble and spun it again, timing it as it slowed.

  “What’s with all the blank pages?” said Mark. “This book’s half empty.”

  “Yeah,” I said. One, two, three…

  The surface of the marble shimmered like melted sugar. I could almost feel heat pouring from it. It became harder and harder to keep my eyes open…

  “When did he give it to you?”

  …five, six, seven… “The eighth.”

  “Of December?”

  “Mmmm…”

  “Look at this picture; it’s dated. Shit! That can’t be right. Did you write this, Emma?”

  …nine, ten, eleven… The marble wobbled and the blur unravelled into three separate colours.

  “Huh? No, I didn’t write in his book.”

  “Did he borrow it back after he gave it to you?”

  I set the marble between my fingers. “No.” And spun again.

  “When was the last time you saw him? Emma? Why am I talking to myself? Emma!” The whirl of the marble caught me up. I felt rather than saw Mark’s hand bang down and pin it still.

  “Why do you do that?” he said.

  “It’s something to do.” I could almost feel the echo of Bron y mor. As long as I didn’t blink, I could keep it there.

  “This is important. When was the last time you saw Jimmy? Emma!” He waved his hand in front of my eyes.

  Bron y mor dissolved like chalk in the rain. I sighed and allowed it to recede.

  “It must have been after the eighth,” said Mark. “Look at this.”

  He showed me the last page in the book: an outline of a hand with the fingers outstretched. The page was torn, the rough edge truncating the index finger of the hand. Just below the thumb was a complex insignia. I couldn’t decipher it. I’d figured it was a stylized signature.

  “So?” I asked him.

  “So look at that.” He pointed to the insignia. “They’re numbers: 1 1 1 2. It’s the date: Eleventh day, twelfth month. December 11th. The day he died.”

  “What’s that word then, by the numbers?”

  “Looks like ‘Kins’, or ‘King’. But it’s the date that matters. He must have given this book to you on that day.”

  “Why does that matter?” I said. “What difference does it make now?”

  “It’s evidence,” he said. “Don’t you see? Don’t you realize how important this is? It was the day he died.”

  He looked at me expectantly. But there was nothing to say.

  Mark took hold of my hand and unravelled Jimmy’s scarf from between my fingers. “Look. There are three possibilities: One, foul play. I think we can rule that out — the witness claims he was alone. Two, misadventure. He didn’t realize the ice wasn’t thick enough to bear his weight. Possible, but why take his glasses off first?”

  “Maybe he went there to sketch something,” I said.

  “…He’d already given his sketchbook to you,” said Mark “Which leaves suicide.”

  “No.”

  “What I want to know is, why did he give his sketchbook to you? Or did you just take it?”

  “No!”

  “Then tell me what happened when he gave this to you. What did he say?”

  I hadn’t seen Jimmy in eight days. I’d known there was something wrong and I suspected the reason. Visiting Bron y mor had a price; glass dreaming had often left me lethargic and displaced. Sometimes even when I came out of it, part of me never left and it would drag me down like an anchor. Days would pass and I wouldn’t speak to another person; they were around me, but they didn’t seem real. They’d put my marbles away when I’d started failing school. And it was strange, but at the time I was almost relieved. Though the feeling of Bron y mor was often one of euphoria and I missed it terribly, it had begun to haunt me, and to frighten me. I felt its sweet promise as a sort of menacing call, one that caused me to lose myself so that I would spend days afterwards as though in search of my own soul.

  I hadn’t told Jimmy this. I suspected he knew now. And then one evening, on the 10th of December, I saw him in the hallway coming back from the porter’s desk with a big box under his arm.

  “Hey, Jimmy. Long time no see. Who’s the package from?”

  “My mum.”

  “Bit early for Christmas, isn’t it?”

  “I dunno.”

  We got back to his room. It was more of a mess than usual. He opened the box with an X-ACTO knife and pulled out a few plastic-wrapped packages and a painted cookie tin. Inside the tin were homemade gingerbread men with happy faces on them.

  “Hey, treasure trove!” I said.

  While I worked the tape off one of the plastic bags, he sat on the edge of his bed. He picked up one of the gingerbread men, abruptly snapped off its arm and dropped it into the garbage can. He picked up another one and did the same thing.

  “What are you doing?!”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Then give them to me,” I said. “What’s the matter with you? Your mom made these for you.”

  “Who cares?” said Jimmy quietly.

  “Jimmy,” I said. “What’s up?”

  He was sitting hunched over in his chair, staring at the floor. I could hear him breathing loudly and slowly, as though it took great effort.

  “Do you know what the devil is?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The devil.”

  “Some red guy with horns?”

  “It’s not a guy,” said Jimmy. “It’s a thing. It’s the shadow under a cloud. And the cloud is in your backyard. And it’s going to rain and the dog is outside and you want to call him in, you want to save him, but you’re afraid to open the door because if you do, you’ll never close it in time.”

  I laughed to break the tension, and failed. “Jimmy, let’s go down to the caf’ and get some coffee, okay?”

  His sketchbook was on the desk. I took it with me. I didn’t know why — I suppose I didn’t think it should be left behind. He didn’t want coffee so I got him a glass of water. We sat at a table by the boxes of Christmas stock that the cafe was selling off before the holidays.

  “Can I do anything, Jimmy?”

  “That smell,” he said. He held his hand under his nose. There were still cookie crumbs on it. “Nutmeg.”

  He grabbed the sketchbook and opened it to the picture of the pond. With his finger, he traced the white slope of the hill, down the fall of land to the edge of the shore.

  “Water…” he murmured.

 
He reached for his glass, nearly tipping it over before picking it up. He sipped from it, running his hand along the cat-tails, smudging the chalk across the surface of the water and then down.

  “Sinking,” said Jimmy. He spoke like someone half asleep. His finger dropped toward the centre of the well.

  “Salt,” he said suddenly.

  On downward, his finger drifted to the pile of bones until it touched the gaping skull. And then he screamed. It was more of an exclamation, short, violent, but the sound was sucked back into his mouth almost immediately. The cashier by the counter looked over in alarm, but Jimmy had stopped screaming almost as soon as he’d started, as though jolted awake.

  He looked at the cup in front of him, considering it intently. He reached for the salt shaker on the table and sprinkled some of it into the water. Then he sipped it.

  “Saltwater,” he said.

  He unscrewed the top of the shaker and tipped it upside down over the glass. Salt drifted to the bottom. He swirled it around.

  “Jimmy, what are you doing?”

  Without acknowledging me, Jimmy tipped the glass back and drained it to the slush at the bottom. He flinched as he set it down. Then he retched and spat some of it out. The glass hit the floor and exploded as he stumbled for the door.

  I found him throwing up in the bushes by the door. He paused, still looking at the snow, and said, “Don’t watch me.”

  The snow was falling thick, and far off I heard the muffled sounds of the late night traffic. I counted snowflakes until he moved again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally.

  “Come back inside, Jimmy.” I turned him towards me.

  “The dog’s barking,” he said suddenly. “It wants to come to me and I want to go to it. Sometimes. I want to go on here, but there’s a cloud in my backyard, and I’ve left the door open. I can feel it right up my arm.”

  “Jimmy, I don’t understand. What can I do?”

  He shook his head and then he seemed to be falling so that I had to hold him up. I realized with a shock how thin he was, the ridge of each vertebra palpable under his shirt.