Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  I felt him relax suddenly. “I remember now,” he said. He sounded calmer, steady. “There was a ribbon tied to a branch. Blue and gold. I reached out and caught it. Gold threading around and around that branch, and gold, around and around my hand. It’s still there. I can feel the sun on it now… Did you hear that?” He let go of me.

  “Hear what?” The only sound was the wind in the tops of the bare trees.

  “The bird,” he said.

  “It’s night time. It’s winter, Jimmy.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

  He stepped away from me.

  “Jimmy, are you all right?”

  “I will be,” he said. “I know what I have to do.”

  He’d given me the sketchbook as we’d gone upstairs. “I don’t need pictures anymore,” he’d said. “I can see it now.”

  I looked at Mark, standing with his arms crossed, the sketchbook pinched between his finger and thumb.

  “What I want to know is, why you? Why did he give it to you?”

  “I knew what the pictures meant.”

  “Would you care to explain that?” he said.

  “…It’s private.”

  “Don’t think you’re sparing my feelings,” he said. “Spit it out. Was it about me?”

  “No. You wouldn’t understand,” I told him.

  Mark tossed the book onto my bed. “I want to understand,” he said. “Jimmy was my friend — more than my friend — and yet he picked you to give this to. Why? Were you sleeping with him?”

  “—What?”

  “Were you fucking him?” Blunt, it hit like a fist.

  “No!”

  I saw a glint of satisfaction in Mark’s eyes as I said that. I knew then that he didn’t understand — was incapable of understanding — what I’d actually done with Jimmy and how much more intimate it had been.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t fuck him. I would never have done that to him.”

  Mark looked nonplussed for a moment, but I was shaking. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I had to know.”

  “Can I have my marble back please?”

  Guilt opened his hand and I took it from him, looked him in the eyes.

  “You hurt him, didn’t you?” I said. “You bastard.”

  He looked away from me to the scarf on the desk and gathered it in his hand.

  “What are you going to do with that?” I said.

  “It has to be turned over to the police, as evidence. The sketchbook too.”

  I reached behind me and picked it up, but I didn’t give it to him. “Evidence of what? He didn’t kill himself.”

  “How would you know?” said Mark. “He didn’t tell you everything. He didn’t tell you about me.”

  I didn’t know what expression was on my face when he said that, but Mark’s went from resignation to pity.

  “Look, I’d better go and see how his mom’s doing.” He stood up. “Do you want to come with me?”

  Jimmy’s room was full of boxes. Walls bare, posters gone. A woman bending over the desk, straightened to face me. She was old, grey hair poking out from under a bright green head scarf. I could imagine it rasping against the material as she’d wrapped it around her head. It made me think of Jimmy’s hand and his blue silk scarf. There was nothing else about her like Jimmy. I believed for a moment, that he had never been a part of her. And then I pictured her alone in her kitchen drawing smiles on the faces of gingerbread men. I thought for a second I would break like the arm of that gingerbread man. And then, on an impulse, I held out the sketchbook to her.

  “This was Jimmy’s,” I said.

  She took it from me. When she spoke, she had a faint accent. “Is your name Emma?”

  “Yes— How did you know?”

  “Then these are your books?” she said. She lifted a box from the desk and held it out to me.

  “Yes.” I took it without looking inside. I stood there for a moment. There was something I had to know. “Mrs. Aldebaran?”

  “Yes, Emma?”

  “What happened to Jimmy’s hand?”

  Maybe I imagined the pause after I said it, a wave of dread, like when you go in for a booster shot and you wince as soon as you feel the cool dab of the alcohol swab and you wait forever before the needle goes in.

  “He was only three,” she said. “He climbed the fence at the end of the yard. One minute he was there, the next…. He fell into the river behind the house. A neighbour rescued him. The neighbour thought he must have caught his hand on something in the riverbed — he’d had to pull him quite hard to get him free, and when he was brought up, his finger was gone. He was too young to remember — he asked me about it once and I told him that God had taken it and was keeping it safe for him in heaven. For a long time afterward, I was afraid my little boy would be taken away from me again,” she said. “And now—”

  “I have to go,” I said abruptly. “I’m sorry.” I couldn’t stand to hear any more. I backed to the door, sidestepped into the hallway and bolted up the stairs. I slammed the door to my room and threw the books on the bed. I looked around. The sketchbook. I’d given away the only thing of Jimmy’s I’d had. I had nothing left. Only the books that he’d borrowed from me.

  I took a book out of the box. He’d touched them, read them, painted from them…. I shivered, picturing his hand — I had never looked at it closely; it would have seemed an invasion of his privacy somehow.

  Now he was gone, and if Mark was right … then Jimmy would have left me something to explain why. If he had left something behind for me, where would he have put it? Somewhere he’d known I would see it. Not in the sketchbook; I’d already looked. Not in his room; the police had searched it and found nothing. So, nowhere obvious. I sat down on the bed, held the book by its spine and shook it out. Nothing. Unless it was pinched tight between the pages. Hands shaking, I leafed page by page through it. Half of me wanted desperately to find something. But I also knew that if I did find something, then Mark would have been right, and that terrified me.

  When I came to the last book, I stopped. It was a King James bible. I shook it, but nothing fell out. I carefully leafed through it. The pages were tissue paper thin and clung maddeningly. After a while, I decided it was fruitless. He hadn’t left me a message.

  I set the bible down on my lap. My gaze blurred and froze and without the marble, I drifted into a glass dream. The specks on the page scattered and shifted and when my focus came back I saw what had been right in front of me: the caption at the top of the page. 1 Kings 11, 12— The numbers and the word in Jimmy’s last picture: First Kings, Chapter 11, verse 12:

  Yet for the sake of your father

  David I will not do it in your lifetime; I

  will tear it out of the hand of your son.

  The last line had been underlined. I set the book aside, still open, and stacked the rest of the books on my shelf. I shivered, as though the words had been Jimmy’s own. But what did it mean? Did it mean anything? Or was Mark right?

  The year went on. Jimmy’s body was never found. There was speculation that it had passed through the grating at the dam and gone down the river to the lake. But it was concluded that he must have died shortly after falling through the ice. And then in April, near the end of the inquest, I found out what the devil was.

  One of Jimmy’s neighbours remembered seeing him near the medical centre just four days before he disappeared. The police got access to his medical records. Jimmy had been diagnosed with cancer in November. The tumour was in one of the bones in his right hand. He’d been told that surgery to amputate part or all of his hand might be necessary, otherwise the cancer could spread through his body and kill him.

  Mark spoke to me after the inquest. “It makes sense now,” he told me. “That was the reason he did i
t. His art was so important to him, he couldn’t live without it.” He seemed almost euphoric with relief.

  I looked at him and thought, How dare you call yourself his friend and be happy about this? How dare you smile?

  Mark misread my silence. “We don’t have to feel guilty now,” he said. “We didn’t know. He didn’t tell anyone — not even his mother.”

  But in his way, Jimmy had told me: the splintered river people in his sketchbook, ice and water. Cracking the arm off the gingerbread man…. His bible: I will tear it out of the hand of your son.

  But that wasn’t the only thing Mark had been wrong about. It wasn’t his art that Jimmy had loved; it was Bron y mor. The choice he had faced — to lose his hand, to lose that place, to live and never touch it again. Or to die, and never touch or see anything again.

  Or…. Was there another way? Had he found another way?

  Residence felt empty without Jimmy. I doubted I would come back after the holidays. As I was packing to go home, the phone rang in my room.

  “Hello, is this Emma?”

  I didn’t recognize the voice. “Yes?”

  “This is the framing and art studio calling. We have a package here for you to pick up.”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

  “It was dropped off for you by a J. Aldebaran four months ago. It’s already been paid for.”

  The package was three feet by two and quite heavy. I carried it back to residence where I placed it on the bed still in its brown paper. Now that I had it inside, I could smell a strange, sweet scent emanating from it. I tore it open. Inside a black frame was a painting.

  It was Bron y mor. Not as Jimmy had sketched it, nor as I’d seen it in my marble. Not in pieces, not in glimpses. This was Bron y mor entire, as Jimmy must have seen it the day he’d died. A vast green mound sloping to a beach of grey stones on the shore of a sea at the mouth of a river. In the middle of that river, in the foreground of the painting, huge in its detail, lay an island. Here, the threads hanging from the tree on that island were coloured ribbons, each tied to a small painted bone. Bones of the hands of the dead. I knew that the blue and gold one which hung closest to the water, drifting in the breeze, was his. Though I couldn’t hear it, I knew the music that the bones made as they clicked together in the summer wind. And I knew that there was a bird in that tree that sang to all the souls that would come here, if they could. To the sea, to the stones, to the vast green mound of a coastal hill. I thought of a fourth explanation for Jimmy’s disappearance. One that Mark had never guessed.

  I went to the porter’s desk and signed out the key to the music room. Inside the doorway, I stared at the piano, the pale strips, like skin, where the wood had peeled off, the white keys shining like bones. I looked at it to mark its place in the room. Then I hit the switch and crossed in darkness to the bench. I didn’t have the sheet music, but it didn’t matter. I’d memorized the music long since. I had to count notes down from the ends of the keyboard to find where to place my hands, but once there, I knew where to go.

  I played ‘Rustle of Spring’ and the marble spun inside me, cicadas buzzing like the end of summer, green twists flowing apart like an explosion, showering around me in flashing leaves. The wind rattled them and without turning my head I knew that I was standing in long grass on a high hill. I felt the shivering of leaves inside me, as though the wind blew through my body. Far below lay an island where the river met the sea. And on the shore of that island under a great tree, in the high and clear autumn sun, stood a boy with one foot in the water and one on the land. He turned, raised his right hand to me — a white and whole and perfect hand — and beckoned: Away to me, away to me, away to me….

  Before The Altar on the Feast for all Souls

  by Marg Gilks

  Doña Pascuala Ek sat in the doorway of her house and waited for a butterfly.

  She knew Teodoro would return to her in the form of a butterfly rather than the quicker hummingbird, because that was how Teodoro had been in life: tranquil; a dreamer, his every movement easy and fluid. He’d performed even the most rigorous chore as though his mind was elsewhere, in an easier place.

  Pascuala missed Teodoro. He had passed a year ago May, crossed over to that easier place and left her alone in the small thatched hut they had shared for almost fifty years. The five sons he had given her lived with their families in the other huts of pole stakes and white lime marl that made up their compound so she was never truly alone, until now.

  Today was Hanal Pixan — her people’s name for the Feast for All Souls. Her five strong boys and their wives and the tumbling flock of their children were off at the village churchyard, honouring and remembering those who had crossed to the other side, but Pascuala had insisted on staying at the compound, near the altar lovingly constructed and provisioned for those souls who would find their way home to their loved ones. To Pascuala.

  Teodoro had not come last year at Hanal Pixan. She had waited in the doorway until her son Isidro woke her in the first thin rays of dawn the next day. But Teodoro had been new to the other side; perhaps he couldn’t find his way back to her then.

  Teodoro would come this year. She had seen to it. She had strewn yellow cempazuchitl petals in a confetti line from the jungle that crouched behind her son Juan’s house, across the hard-packed earth of the compound, to her door. Pascuala could smell the copalli candles that the family had lit upon the altar within. She could smell the strong resin odor of copal incense and, like an undercurrent, the sharp bite of spice mingled with the cooler, sweeter odor of fruit from the food offerings in the gourd hung beside the door. The smaller portions in the gourd were for the lost souls, those who roamed in search of families they would never find, but the aroma would guide her Teodoro in to the bounty on the altar. And to her.

  The last long, honeyed glow from the sun gave way to the silver-tinged gloom of dusk. The white lower walls of the huts circling the compound glowed, as if releasing the last wan vestiges of light collected during the day into the dark embrace of the jungle. This had been her and Teodoro’s favorite time of day, between the end of chores and the oblivion of sleep. In the twilight, Teodoro would talk in his soft, dreaming voice, and Pascuala would rest her head on his chest and feel his words thrum beneath her cheek.

  But he was not here yet. Pascuala must do one last thing to ensure that Teodoro found his way back to her.

  Spaced at regular intervals beside the path of bright marigold petals were thirteen small paper bags, weighted with sand and scissor-cut with lacy patterns to let the light of the candles within shine through. Pascuala rose and collected an ember from the hearth in the floor of her dwelling, then moved stiffly down the line of paper bags, stooping to light the candles.

  It was nearly dark by the time she finished. She turned back at the jungle behind Juan’s hut and returned to the stool beside her door to wait for Teodoro.

  Pascuala saw the couple standing by the fringe of jungle at the end of the path of marigold petals when she turned to lower herself onto the stool. They were a young white couple, turistas in bright crisp clothes that screamed “intrusion” against the worn lines and dusty, faded tones of the compound. The woman’s hair was pale, bleached-blonde, as bright and brassy as the glint of gold at neck and earlobes and wrist; the man wore an apologetic smile and a camera around his neck.

  Pascuala reeled as though their sudden appearance were a physical blow. The narrow road that ran through the village and past the Ek compound had been widened and paved by the Mexican government two years ago, and now taxis stuffed full of turistas from Playa del Carmen and tour buses from Cancun plied the route between the coast and Cobá. The whites had taken the great city of Pascuala’s ancestors and made it their own, and now the peace and privacy of her own family’s compound was being taken from her by the ix-tz’ul and their invasive cameras and handfuls of heavy mil-pes
os pieces that made beggars of her grandchildren.

  She had stayed behind at the compound while her family went to the church in the village so she would not miss her Teodoro when he came. Now these estúpídos gringos had blundered in, disturbing the special moment she’d worked so hard to conjure on this one night that her lost husband’s spirit might return. Destroying the one chance she had to see him, be with him, just once more.

  I cannot wait again to see him. Not another year.

  Anger lent Pascuala a moment of agility as she rose from her stool and stalked several paces down the yellow-petal pathway. “Go away, stupid turistas!” she called to them. She lifted both arms and waved them at the couple, trying to brush them back into the jungle like the dust she pushed out the door of her hut every morning with a stiff corn broom. “You should not be here; go back to the road and your fancy resorts, where you belong!”

  Instead of obeying, the garish woman took a step forward. She would crush the delicate marigold petals strewn for Teodoro and the Ek ancestors. Pascuala watched her approach in dismay.

  “Please, can you help us?” the woman asked. “Our car left the road—”

  “I cannot help you!” Pascuala exclaimed. “I am an old woman, alone. Go back to the road and walk to the village. There are men there who can help you push your car back onto the road.”

  The man stepped forward and put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. His smile was sheepish. “I’m afraid it’s somewhat worse than that,” he said to Pascuala. “The car rolled a couple of times and it’s resting on its roof, about a mile up the road to Cobá. We’ll need more than a push.”

  He spoke Mayan. The woman had, too, Pascuala realized. White people did not speak Mayan. She frowned, then sucked in a surprised breath. “I don’t know how I can help you,” she said slowly. “Come forward. Let me see you. Tell me what you need.”

  The man took the woman’s hand and the couple came forward, following the trail of strewn marigold petals to Pascuala. The scattered petals fluttered gently, shifted in small swirls as though something winged flew low above them.