Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

  “Kind of a gender reversed Orpheus. Kind of like Isis and Osiris. Is your prince going to come and wake you up?”

  “Maybe. Maybe when we’ve finished making our show. I’m the star.” Louise makes a face, not entirely pleased about it. Some star; her foundation clumsily covers zits around her mouth.

  “I think maybe it’s Martin’s place across the hall. D’you know him? D’you live in this building?”

  She opens her eyes, the bluest blue, very wide as if she can’t believe how stupid I am. Truth is, neither can I. “Martin with the big purple eyes, the sharp nose, so handsome?”

  “That’s my man,” I say, glad she jogged my memory.

  “He’s your boyfriend? Really? What kind?”

  “How many kinds are there?”

  “I mean on this side or the other side?”

  “All sides,” I say, my head splitting, figuring it’s a trick question. She nods, accepting my answer, although it seems to worry her. “Where is he?” I ask. “We said we’d do Carnival together like we do every year, and here it is not even started and I’ve already lost him and myself. They should call Carnival the Season of Memory Loss.”

  Louise rolls her eyes, says curtly, “He was in here just before you. But he left.”

  I want to fill in some more gaps, ask questions, but she’s gone, her chunky heels clattering. They’re too big for her, like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s shoes.

  “Hey, Louise, wait up,” I yell.

  She runs down the hall, turns a corner and vanishes. I hear a steel door slam; hear her feet clattering on stairs that lead downwards. Slinging my day-pack over my shoulder I follow her, slowly, down long shadowy tiers of stair wells, to the street door. Look both ways, no sign of L.

  I walk, don’t recognize any street names. The few other people out walking too are so poor they seem invisible even to themselves. I pass old dry goods stores with locked doors and yellow plastic in the windows. There’s not a sign of Carnival, as if the city’s biggest party doesn’t exist. I buy Tylenol at a drug store, swallow several. Finally I come to a coffee shop called the Dew Drop Inn. I’m starving so I go in. The prices are ridiculously low: thirty-five cents for a cup of coffee, eighty-five for a fried egg sandwich; that’s what I order.

  The place is empty, huge, and dim. The booths are upholstered in shiny red stuff with flecks of gold in it, just like the flecks in the dolls’ eyes, the rips held together with wrinkled silver duct tape; they wouldn’t call it gaffer’s tape here. A taupe Formica counter with red swivel stools and a green Hamilton Beach milkshake machine behind it. God, how I always loved that name. It’s always been like a picture to me, of a perfect place, where you could leave all your troubles behind, where everything would be okay and you’d be happy.

  The waitress is in her fifties with bleached blonde hair and pencil thin plucked eyebrows. She sighs, bringing me my coffee. It’s terrible, from last week’s pot reheated eleven times. I stir in a whole bunch of sugar to mask the taste. I bite into Miracle Whip, not Hellman’s, stare a little.

  “Are you lost, dear?” she calls from across the room, where she’s busy polishing spotless tables, filling full sugar containers, sighing.

  “I’m looking for my friend. I thought he might’ve come in here.” Little does she know the half of it.

  She carries my sandwich from the kitchen, walking painfully, wrapped in support bandages that go halfway to her knees.

  “You must be ready for your break, Denise,” I say, now that she’s close enough I can read her name tag. Denise or Vera, I’d figured. A fifties name to match the place, her look.

  “Well, yes,” she says, laughing a little. “It’s these damn legs, you know?”

  “Sit down?”

  “Okay, but I’ll get my drink first.” She comes back with a can of Tab. Her yellow polyester uniform hisses on the shiny flecked vinyl.

  “What is it about me?” I ask, too blunt by half, as always. “People are always asking me if I’m lost.”

  She reaches out, pats my hand. “The truth is, I think we’re all lost. It’s just some people try to hide it more than others.” She blows smoke rings. “I think the trick is to stay amused, don’t you?”

  A woman after my own heart. And she can’t be a machine-head. They never touch living flesh.

  sss

  Three years ago during Carnival I went to this warehouse party alone. Martin was gone again. Thing is, I was really drunk, soooo, on my way out I got off the elevator on the wrong floor and walked into this big eerie room full of machine-heads and their gear. I started turning so I could run, but this one guy asked me if I didn’t want to try.

  I said I’d do anything once.

  He gave me a VR headset and controllers; I put on the headset and entered the space they were sharing, thinking I’d get to do a handsome stranger. But the people in there, our sex partners, had arms and legs made of machines, genital organs that didn’t look human at all, but were still sexy in this creepy way: valves expanding and contracting, each black rubber exhalation a sigh. I heard the rasping cries of grinding gears, saw furtive graspings of skeletal robotic hands, all the bones showing. Beneath dirty flesh-coloured vinyl I saw chrome tendons, frayed wiring. Sucking and popping and moaning, the sounds of machines in orgasm. Then as I stayed in, it started to happen to me too; I got replaced, starting with my sex where I was the most connected. Genius embedded in this craftsman’s hand. A sad, wicked, broken-faced genius, but all the same: the sound, the texture were so detailed, so rich. The furniture was clipped, the detail in shadows, in excrescences of old pink vinyl, raised and knobby like a keloid scar, in palest conflagrations of mauve in the velvet bodysuit I wore. Sighing, sighing: only velvet sighs like that. Someone was a genius, for sure.

  It could’ve been funny, I suppose, and in some twisted way it even was but it scared the hell out of me. I signed off and jacked out, left to walk city streets, shards of broken ice glinting like starlight. I knew it wasn’t real, so what was the matter? The technology’s still so new; maybe it’s like early horror movies. “The Thing” used to terrify people and now we just laugh.

  I walked, turning over in my mind sensations that had more to do with pain than pleasure; the missing parts of myself, the parts I’d allowed to be replaced by robotics had all been screaming faintly, phantom limbs. But it’s still a visual medium—how can you remember sensations in VR? I had to have supplied the sensations myself, a shadow of a shadow.

  Footsteps running behind me, male footsteps. I turned. One of the machine-heads, Matt, the one who’d invited me. I wasn’t afraid. Machine-heads are terrified of raping real women. They’d have to touch.

  He reached for my hand, like something long forgotten, and pulled it back, his mouth twitching. It was the first sign he might yet know what he’d lost.

  “You don’t like it?” he asked sadly. We walked side by side in the frozen night, the Don River snaking below us, full of moonlight. The east end has always been this sad.

  “It was okay,” I lied.

  “Then you’ll come back? Not many women come. Give me your number.”

  “I know where to find you,” I lied again. “I’ll drop in some time, ’kay?” I smiled up at him, his shaved head.

  He said, as if he was quoting: “And all because real people seemed too frightening and the machines promised to take the pain away.”

  “That’s exactly right,” I said, amazed, sober. “Who said that?”

  “I did,” he said, and turned to go. “I know you won’t come back. You don’t want to come that far in with us again. And I can’t come back out anymore to be with you, even if I wanted.”

  “Touch my hand,” I said. “Take your mitt off, touch my hand.”

  “In the virtual worlds people think they can do anything, darken as much as they want, and it doesn’t matter, doesn’t have any
effect in the real world. Strikes me they might be wrong. A shadow cast from that side to this, staining us,” he said, still sounding so lost and poetic and smart. Handsome too, in a rough-hewn way.

  “I thought that was just propaganda really, hype, that whole no-touch thing,” I said, half meaning it. An outlaw culture’s romance, I’d always figured. For it to be true would be too frightening by half.

  He waved his wet woolly mitten at me, walked away. His footsteps sounded cold and lonely.

  “And where is the one old story now that will tell us the way out of this?” I called after him, but then, I’m always saying that; it’s my thing. He stopped, turned towards me, took his mitten off. And touched the icy metal bridge rail instead. It stuck. He pulled it away, leaving behind tiny bits of skin.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, “so sorry,” the snot freezing in my nose.

  “I guess they lied,” I thought I heard him say, walking away again. We were already too far apart, couldn’t hear each other anymore.

  Broken mirrors. We are all holding pieces of a broken mirror, trying stubbornly to glue them back together. Maybe we should leave it shattered.

  It’s too bad I couldn’t tell him that, he would’ve liked it. That’s the thing; he seemed so nice, much nicer than Martin really, in spite of his preferences. I think about him a lot, of how our hands froze on the railing, looking down at the river. Your tongue would get stuck there forever if you let it. Something so stupid only an ignorant kid would do it.

  Denise’s cigarette package is red. Du Maurier King Size. She lights her smoke with a real lighter, a fake gold one and not a Bic click flick dick or whatever. She inhales as if nicotine were prana itself.

  “Maybe I went to another city last night and just don’t remember,” I say, thinking what harm can utter frankness do after everything’s already gone so wrong?

  She looks at me levelly. She’s been around the block a few times, this one. Knows the score. “But,” she says, blowing smoke rings, “you’d have to do an awful beer and pills cocktail to forget that much, down it with even more tequila.” Denise speaks so slowly, as though she has more time than the rest of us, only it isn’t very pleasant time.

  “Problem is I don’t remember if I did that or not. Mind if I have one of your smokes?” I ask.

  “Oh, please do. Please do. But finish your breakfast first. It’ll help.”

  But I push my half-eaten egg away, light my butt, don’t inhale. I don’t really smoke but it seems like the right thing to do; keep my molecules moving so I don’t get petrified in the fifties like Denise. And I entertain a thin hope it might make Martin show up, like he used to do to make the streetcar come. He wouldn’t have kept doing it if it hadn’t worked so often. That’s what we were like together: two lost lambs making up our own mythology, taking solace in an urban sympathetic magic, at once invented and uncovered.

  “Say, Denise?”

  “Yes, dear?” She’s staring out the window at the dead buildings, the grey afternoon light.

  “Do you know where anybody celebrates Carnival around here? Maybe if I could find Carnival I could find my friend.”

  “Carnival? They started it up here a few years ago, right? Kind of like down in New Orleans. I’ve never paid much attention; it’s not something for us old folks. But there’s a dance at a place called The Aquarium, a week from Tuesday. Somebody left me a poster for it, but I haven’t put it up yet.” She gets up and walks ever so slowly to the counter, retrieves the poster lying there. Watching her is like watching time itself. A bad time. “Maybe if you go to this dance…”

  She shows me the little map at the bottom of the poster. The Aquarium is a club just four blocks away from where we are. My life is like a video game this morning. If I follow the clues I’ll find Martin, remember where I am, how I got to be here. “Well, I guess I better get going. It was really nice to meet you, Denise. You’ve helped me out a lot.”

  “Okay, dear. Hope you feel better. Do drop in again.”

  I walk till night falls. I’ve slept in parks before and would do it again if I had to, but still. The street door is open: relief. The stairs as I walk up are still, so still. I don’t hear anything except my own feet, one at a time, although once I hear footsteps running along on an upper floor, but maybe it’s just a trick of memory, of desire, like knowing he’ll be there. But he isn’t, and neither is the red shirt. A stack of boxes is gone, but everything else is the same. I lock the heavy steel door and go to sleep.

  sss

  I make myself at home (haha) and wait for more clues.

  I look in the mirror; hold a mask to my face. Still, I can’t see: eyes in the way. I cut them out with an X-Acto blade but leave the eyelids, so they open and shut, eerily mechanical, over mine. For hours then, I sit at the workbench, cutting the eyes out of a few stacks of dolls. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel good. Cut out all those fake eyes, all that sacrilege.

  There’s a landline and someone calls it while I’m working, orders masks. I have to find x number of a certain type, box them, courier them to her Carnival store. “Make sure all the eye holes are cut out,” she says sharply. “They weren’t last time.”

  I tell her I’m strapped, ask if she could pick them up herself, bring cash. She agrees, somewhat surly. If I’m going to be staying here, I’m going to have to have money to eat.

  Wherever this is.

  She shows two hours later, just as I’m finishing up. Harried and businesslike, she takes the box I’ve packed for her and gives me fifty bucks. Doesn’t bat an eye at my masked face, like she sees weirder every day.

  I go to the Dew Drop for dinner, remembering at the last moment to go maskless, order a hot beef sandwich. Thick powdered gravy poured on white bread, a slab of beef and pale peas floating on the surface tension of melted marg. The fifties isn’t even my mother’s childhood; how come this place got stuck so far back?

  I’m the only person there again, and Denise joins me, can of Tab and red cigarettes in hand. I tell everything I know, there’s bits that come back just in the telling. “Once Martin and I had this dream we’d get a studio together. In the east end where rent was cheap. We’d work our butts off; he’d be an artist and I’d do the production and management, and then after we got rich we could move somewhere else, like to Hamilton Beach maybe,” I explain.

  “It didn’t work, did it?” she asks, and I have to nod. I ask her where we are and she laughs. I guess she thought I was kidding and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth.

  sss

  The next morning I take an old motorcycle helmet out of a cardboard box full of junk and trade it for my mask. I look in the mirror. Darth Vader. Could be. Just a little modification on the shape. Dig under all the workbenches; find a box of stuff for working with Plexiglas resin. I learned how to use it in art school, a million years ago, before I met Martin, back when I still had dreams of being an artist myself. What a fool.

  sss

  Memory returns very slowly. I haven’t had such bad amnesia since I first learned to abuse alcohol when I was thirteen. Where am I? Only the east end could be this sad. It’s just a part I never really knew; east of the Don River there are still pockets where the fifties and sixties and seventies live on, bordered now, so locked in misery they’ll never be able to catch up to the rest of time. In the store windows there are aspidistras with leaves that need wiping, and the ubiquitous layers of yellow plastic. I don’t know what all that yellow plastic is for, unless it’s to protect the plants from UV, not that they need much protecting, what with the dank grey skies. Why don’t I just get on the streetcar, go back to the west side, our old apartment, our friends, our bars, our jobs?

  I can’t. We gave all that up, late summer. Came here. It’s the in-between part I’ve forgotten, and I still don’t know where Martin is. I go to the Dew Drop for dinner again, order ham with canned pineapple ri
ngs. As always, the place is empty except for me, as though only I know the way in. Denise waves distantly, sighing, but doesn’t join me this time.

  When I get back I see someone’s been there while I’ve been gone, made the bed, worked on the masks. It’s happened before. Who?

  sss

  I take a westbound red rocket, what they call the streetcars here. I’m full of trepidation, and when the route passes through my old Spadina neighbourhood I don’t even get off, my limbs suddenly leaden. Who would I visit? Who even knows me anymore? I feel out of place again, only in a different way. Where do I really belong, or when? It seems like when people or neighbourhoods get stuck, they create little pockets of frozen time around themselves. Denise got stuck in the fifties, even though she’s too young for it. At the Dew Drop Inn, I guess the fifties never stopped. I wonder when I’m stuck in. A bad time with Martin, most likely.

  I get off the streetcar and stand on the other side of the road, a faint feeling of panic rising in me. The west side looks wrong, gives me a vertiginous feeling as though I’ve stepped through a mirror and the world’s reversed; everything has different meanings. I can barely wait for the streetcar to take me back to the other side, to run upstairs, coat tails flying, sit at my bench and cut doll eyes out.

  On the way back from the streetcar stop I see Louise. “Hey, Louise,” I say, grabbing her arm.

  She shakes me off, glares.

  “Where’s Martin?” I demand. “I still can’t find him. You know him, have you seen him? And how come he never mentioned you? What’s going on?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t like you anymore,” she spits. “Maybe you’re too messed up for him. Maybe he’s got someone new.”

  “Messed up? That’s a joke. He’s a way worse abuser than me.”

  “You don’t really have the same name as me.”

  “Course not. I’m Petra. That was a joke.”

  “I thought you were her. Where’s your lost five months, Petra?”