Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories

by John Robert Colombo

  She could’ve moved by now, sat up, grunted even. Instead, she lay in her prone position. Part of me believed she wanted me to undo the hood. She said, “How long did you keep her?”

  “A few months, until the army deemed her gratuitous.”

  “Did you miss her?”

  “I barely remembered her until you asked.” My determination wouldn’t last much longer. I bit my lip, grabbed a string, and pulled.

  Her hands unfolded from beneath the cloak, the knife in her right. It moved in a slow, deliberate arc, and I braced myself for the pain of a thick hunk of metal sliding through skin, deep into my flesh.

  Instead, she cut the bindings holding my wrists.

  My arms flopped to my sides with an excruciating round of pain. I couldn’t will them to move. Control wouldn’t happen for a while yet. But I turned to face her and smiled.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She set down the knife like a line in the dirt between us. I stared at it then back at her. Without another word, she loosened the hood’s string and pulled it down, revealing her face.

  Nothing could have prepared me for the shock.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s real.”

  My thoughts tumbled, a flurry of questions, repercussions, and analyses until the room wouldn’t stop spinning. I swallowed down the bile rising up my throat. After years of war, endless offensives, and then the fall from the sky, I should’ve simply accepted the reality. But Thinkers analyze. They make sense of the senseless. And what this woman had revealed to me was so incongruous, so unlikely, that my mind and body would not allow the truth of it to sink in.

  “The airship,” I said.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time for the opportunity. The cost was worth the benefit.”

  “People died,” I said. “The survivors were probably tortured. If they confessed our plans, you might’ve changed the course of the war.”

  “I didn’t. There’s no word of it on the network. This was about you, Greg. Nothing more.”

  “Thinkers never make a decision based on one parameter. But I don’t need to explain that to you, do I?” My fingers graced her left cheek. Her tattoo had the family crest in the center, like mine. Her Thinker level swirled around it, with two more loops than I carried. The bare skin where her military designations should’ve been were so pristine, I had to touch them, again and again. Her level has higher than mine. How could she have hidden from recruiters her entire life?

  She closed her eyes and I could almost hear the data connecting and re-forming. At the far left, two outstretched lines, identical to mine save for the tapers, reached out into the world. Her tapers ended in v-shaped forks. If I could pull my tattoo from my face and place it next to hers, my tips would fit precisely into her forks.

  “I thought the marks were like snowflakes,” I said. “Never this similar.”

  “Destiny lives in the tattoo’s needle. No other pattern could ever find its way onto me.”

  “What do we do now?”

  She rubbed at my wrists, bringing pain, but also the relief of blood circulation. “I had to be sure you were ready.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “We run. North. I’ve spent years scouting safe stops and surveying trails. In five days, we can cross into the Northlands. Old Kanada. Neither side will look for us there.”

  She stood and picked up her bow which had been leaning against the wall near the tunnel. As she pulled back the string, testing the weight of her weapon, I saw her life as an operatic opus of choices: proximity to the border, high ground, along a logical flight path, the cave setup, the broken thermalater. All strategically placed like chess pieces, while she waited for the first white pawn to move.

  “By tomorrow, they’ll have finished with the airship,” she said. “We can scavenge what we need from the wreckage. Can you walk?”

  I shook my legs, one at a time, testing their workability. With a glance at her for permission, I staggered over to the sideboard, dug out a glass, and slowly downed some water.

  Another glassful.

  After gasping with relief, I said, “Got any stew left?”

  “In the kitchen. And clean clothes. The trip should loosen your muscles.”

  She reached out a hand and I took it. My thoughts felt fractured, disconnected. I’d gone from fugitive to prisoner to conspirator. “How long have I been down here?”

  “Forty-one and a half hours, give or take six minutes.”

  I nodded. We moved into the tunnel. She pulled a portable blue emitter from her cloak and lit the way. I’d always hated the feel of blue light, as though it shouldn’t count as light at all, more like an eerie glow that doesn’t belong in the world.

  She must’ve sensed my discomfort because she said, “They draw less power. Makes the batteries last.”

  I considered explaining to her that I understood the reason, and the feeling wasn’t rational. But she knew.

  “The facility had blue lights,” she said. “Where they tested us. I despise the color, too. It makes me feel vulnerable.”

  And with her revelation, a compartment door blew outward in my mind. Its contents seeped across every aspect of the knowledge that built Greg. I’d buried every moment with her, from the warm, wet womb of our mother to the final grip of our chubby hands as they yanked her away from me.

  “Alyssa?”

  She nodded.

  I closed my eyes and prayed for the strength to follow her north, to a place where we might find peace. My tattoo tingled at the tips. I opened my eyes to see her cheek lightly pressed against mine. I longed for a mirror, yet I knew the tapers had finally found each other.

  Just as she’d said, the crash site appeared deserted. Most of the wreckage had been picked over. Alyssa’s pack nestled on her back like an old lover. Mine simply made my shoulders ache.

  I swallowed another mouthful of sage grass and chased it with a quarter liter of milk to coat my throat and gut, slowing the autonomic gag reflex enough to force down the grass. Alyssa said its chemical composition blocked my frontal synapses. My data stores would randomize then reconnect into patterns that distorted my archives of the airship. Otherwise the sight of it would trigger embedded beacons and call the good guys to extract my still-alive ass before the Pacificers found it.

  Military my entire life — save for that first year — the instinct to regroup, to debrief, clung to me like dew on a leaf. Loyalty to the cause had never been negotiable, but the thought of a war-free zone with a cabin in the woods brought closure, and with it a level of comfort I’d never experienced before.

  My twin.

  I had blocked her existence for so long that acceptance fought against every neuron firing in my head.

  “Hurry,” she said. “We need to put some distance between us and the site.”

  I nodded. The gesture was easy, small, neutral. Hardly worth the attention of a mind overflowing with more important thoughts and decisions. But gestures can mean so much more, and this one, unbeknownst to me, would have been no exception, if not for the protection of her crop of vile weeds.

  To distract me from puking another mouthful of the stuff, Alyssa shared her history. At the age of three, she had outsmarted facility security protocols. Alone, she fled Boston, making her way from culverts to abandoned sheds, hiding from the world while building her own place in it. Living off the grid meant no formal education, no military training, no family, no friends. She had constructed a hole in the world and waited for me to join her.

  I spoke of my own life, my service, but it all seemed selfish and heinous compared to the purity of her choices. When I described my former platoon, giving life to the memories of my closest war mates, she said, “They’ll come for you.”

  “But the grass—”

  “It only block
s deliberate communication. They might have planted a deep initiative, just in case. To protect their investment.”

  “Is that all I am?”

  “Not after I’m through.”

  Three hours and seventeen minutes later, give or take twelve seconds, a squad of Atlanticers caught up to us. We hid at first, but they outnumbered us twenty to one. We had discussed this inevitability, and dreaded our only course of action.

  Alyssa buried herself and slowed her breathing to a near comatose state. I moved as far away from her as possible, and then snapped a twig so they’d find me.

  As they cuffed my hands, I embraced a flow of data. It did little to block out my fear and guilt, but its solace was all that I had. I held it close to my heart, a buffer of hope while I braced myself for the long ride back.

  I hadn’t seen or heard from her in two years. I had buried her so deeply within my mind that I often wondered if I had simply dreamed her existence.

  As the airship neared the front, we detoured north to avoid the enemy. The hit took us by surprise, so far from the main fighting. As the men and women around me prepared for the crash, I donned my gear and stepped out an emergency exit with an uneasy calm brought on by my constant diligence to check and recheck my gear.

  I dropped from the airship like a rock, praying Alyssa would be waiting for me.

  Nights in White Linen

  Daniel Sernine (Translated by Sheryl Curtis)

  It’s a vision of marble or limestone, white under the moon: palaces or marble tombs, limestone cliffs, sand dunes, as white as shrouds in the night. And so many stars in the sky — it must be a vision of the past, in the desert. Weren’t the greatest astronomers Egyptian and Arab?

  There are steles, possibly a colonnade; long, shallow, empty basins, which must have once surrounded a courtyard or garden with water.

  Far from the mosaics and arcades, an old dog wanders, gaunt, white with age. There’s a wall, surrounding a city, a necropolis — blending into one another like a memory we dream about. Or the memory of a dream.

  Then I wake, recalling only that it was night, but everything was white, ivory and bone powder.

  Sometimes I manage to fall asleep almost as soon as I lie down — waiting 30 minutes or an hour for sleep, no more. But I wake in the middle of the night and that’s when insomnia lies in wait for me. Too tired to read, too wide awake to settle back to sleep, a hollow in the pit of my stomach I don’t want to fill.

  Occasionally, insomnia has already settled in at the onset of the night. My desperation, then, is akin, I imagine, to that experienced by women when their husbands would slip between the sheets, men they didn’t love but with whom they’d never the less spend two-thirds of their lives.

  So I try to read as long as possible, magazines, newspapers, filled with the wars and massacres of the previous day. But my eyes weary and I have to turn out the lights. Yet, I still can’t fall asleep. The images fill my mind, along with the memories, the thoughts. The syncopated flashing of the roof-lights, blue and red, like a raid on a shooting gallery, the fluorescent numbers on the police car doors, the crackle of the radio and the brief injunctions in a shocked quasi-silence.

  And Xavier’s white face behind the door window, a red blotch beneath his mouth as if he had been struck.

  Once I thought I would come through this okay — the shock, the initial disbelief, a refusal all too quickly overcome by the evidence. For a while, I thought that was all there was, that it would pass.

  There was no delayed reaction, only the slow upwelling of thoughts, of feelings, deploying like an army that takes weeks to take up its positions, a few hours at a time, every night. The things we said, the things we did, without knowing what turn events would take.

  We’d known for some time that someone was dealing coke in the department. How long had we known? Impossible to say. Who had told us? Just as difficult to know. It would have been easy enough to ask, I suppose. And a short while later someone would have come up to me with what I needed. But I knew myself too well. I couldn’t use or I’d be lost. There was no merit in my decision. It was the caution of fear.

  We also knew about the pranks — there were more than in the previous years. I didn’t know the victims. I supposed they weren’t about to make a public complaint. Who found the scalp taken from a certain cadaver in their locker? Which professor found the index finger that had gone missing from another on his desk (apparently, at McGill, this was referred to as “giving him the finger”). The victims of these practical jokes didn’t boast about it. Or possibly the department had dealt harshly with these tricks which were in poorer taste than usual.

  I never thought that either Xavier or Geneviève was keeping company with pushers; I thought I knew them too well. Yet, I immediately suspected that Xavier was one of the pranksters — something in his tongue-in-cheek brand of humor, something in the tone of certain rejoinders, brought to mind a quartet of comedians from the 1960s (one of our profs had all their records).

  The coke problem must have reached a peak for the dean to get worried enough to admit it. There was so much pressure on us all the time that the students needed something to keep up. That was a known fact. And everyone turned a blind eye up to a certain point. Apparently, the point of no return had been reached that year, or possibly the year before.

  A conference was held on the problems of hard drugs. For third-year medical students! And on the resources available to health professionals who wanted to overcome their dependency. An anonymous, non-judicial program.

  And we felt … I felt … that some of the people around me were being targeted: looks, allusions, a certain tension in the silences. Yes, it was serious and it was probably much more than just cocaine.

  When did it all start? For Xavier and Geneviève, probably quite a long time ago. For me, I don’t know. In my insomnia, it doesn’t always start at the same time. It depends on the night. It didn’t start with when I met Xavier, or Geneviève. They had already been in the background for an unknown amount of time, without me being able to recall a precise moment when we “met”. No anecdote, no cute or touching story, like at the beginning of a movie. They were students, like I was, and they gradually stood out, taking on relief and depth, like other guys and chicks, as the weeks and then the months of the first year passed. It’s not as if they were anonymous within the group. Far from it. I recall having noticed both of them, separately, for different reasons. Geneviève, because she seemed to be older than the average. She must have worked for several years, maybe as a nurse, before going back to school. I figured she was close to forty, but I readjusted this downward and gave her thirty — in any case, she was clearly more “adult,” than the members of our group who were just out of Cégep.

  Xavier too, I know this now, was older than the group average. But what was noticeable in his case was his small stature, which no doubt made him look younger. He reminded me of Roman Polanski, but with a Latino touch in the expressiveness of his face and the mobility of his eyes, not to mention his heavy five o’clock shadow.

  So, when did it all start already?

  The dissection team next to mine was desperate: their cadaver was unusable. They lost marks identifying anatomical structures since very few things were still in their rightful place in the obese mass that continued to decompose despite embalming and refrigeration between sessions. My neighbors were out of luck: instead of some good chap who died from a heart attack after deciding to donate his body to science, they had inherited an unclaimed body, some stiff from the morgue. There were cigarette burns on his torso, barbed wire lacerations on his belly, and several of his fingers were broken out of shape — surely the result of hanging out with the wrong crowd.

  That day, we were supposed to open the skull. The teams at the other tables found their brains to be small pinkish masses, rubbery, too perfect to be real. But the head of that poo
r guy, which must have been used for batting practice, released a semi-liquid mass that overflowed onto the floor. One of the students uttered a string of swear words; another hurled her last meal.

  Xavier and Geneviève were part of the scene, at the next dissection table, smiling at our colleague’s colorful language.

  So when did it all start, already? Possibly when I would run across Xavier in the hallways at med school, either alone or with Geneviève, late at night. Or when they would be walking down the road from the tower instead of taking the bus as we did when we went to the Tabasco Bar. When it was night.

  Or maybe the whole thing started when I saw men talking with a worried looking dean in the reception area of his office, well after 5:00 p.m. then leaving, all looking like people who had failed to resolve a problem. Yet, judging by his face, it was the dean who shouldered the heaviest part of the burden. Maybe it all started then, when the problem had become so serious that the police sent in undercover investigators.

  Of course, at the time, I had no idea they were police officers.

  I recall one Friday, late afternoon. That week there had been no anatomy exam. The students were left to their own devices, without the usual pressure to keep them in line. The atmosphere was electric. It was hot in the old med school corridors; it smelled of formaldehyde. The most compulsive were thinking ahead to studying all weekend; the others focused on their usual Friday night drinking binge.

  That evening, there was a group of us. Xavier and Geneviève were there. They didn’t often mingle with the other students and occasionally seemed to have other cultural references, other memories, different tastes, like immigrants, like the elderly. We left the Tabasco Bar at about two in the morning; it was a typical autumn night — cool, yet not too cold. We crossed Decelles Avenue to walk up the long road to the tower. On our way, Charlebois took a small flashlight out of his car’s glove compartment. When we were level with the Bronfman Library, we slipped behind the grove, climbed over the wire mesh fence and crossed into the cemetery. Xavier, who had waited until then, got out his coke and we all enjoyed some. I still didn’t know if he was the supplier; but I did learn that night that he used.