by Liz Harmer
“Last night I dreamed I was attacked by a mountain lion,” Marie said. “I hope we have enough guns.”
Behind them, the door creaked open. It was Rosa, haunting in the shadowed moonlight. They flashed a light at her, and she flashed back.
Bonita embraced her. “How are you feeling, mija?”
“I knew you’d know,” Rosa said. “Even though I only just figured it out.”
“Know what?” Marie said.
“I’m going to be a grandmother.”
Rosa nodded, put a hand on her abdomen, because that’s what she had seen a thousand women do.
“I can’t believe we’re never coming back here.”
Gus was still vigilant near the port. They were sure they could hear it humming. A breeze whined through the cracks in the windows.
“Maybe Philip will come back, Ma,” Rosa said. “He’ll find us. He’s strong.”
“We should get going, girls,” Bonita said. “You go finish packing, Rosa. Marie and I will take care of the paint.”
* * *
—
They decorated their city with arrows. Big red arrows on the church wall, big red arrows down the streets. A trail for any unlikely survivors to follow. Red paint dripped obscenely on windows, destroyed facades and led to large notes in glass bottles. The notes told a shorter version of their story and about the disorientation of portsickness, told that unimaginable reader that he would be okay, that it was not a dream. They left a map and names and code words, if such a person would want to follow their path. In case something happened to the bottles, they also put some notes in plastic bags or duct-taped them. Bonita left a letter for Philip.
* * *
—
Brandon was standing next to Marie’s car. He’d lead the caravan, with Marie and Jason following. They’d take more cars than necessary, in case any of them broke down. The chickens were pecking around on the sidewalk, and some of the children had come to watch them. Steve’s daughter Lulu picked up Bess and put her on her head. She walked around like that, like a feather-capped woman on parade, while the other children laughed.
Marie led Gus to the little green car, stood close enough to Brandon to feel the current running between them. She was nervous around him now, felt the immensity of her feeling for him, his feeling for her, and how things might go wrong. But people wouldn’t leave each other anymore, not in this new world they were making.
“How is he?” Brandon said.
“It’s awful how tired he seems,” she said. “His exhaustion is inexhaustible.”
Brandon knew it was not good to be resentful of a man going mad, but he wished the worst for Jason.
“Children growing up now are going to be the happiest children there ever have been,” Marie said. Optimism was as easy to slip into as a shirt.
Someday it would be Marie and Brandon settling in, having babies; he knew he could persuade her of this.
“They get to witness all the beauty of this life,” she was saying. “All the freaks and malformations, the metamorphoses. They’ll write poetry and swim.”
“But they won’t have video games,” Brandon said. “I feel sorry for them.”
She laughed. “Maybe they won’t be assholes like everyone else who ever lived.”
“What about all the open seams in the universe?” Brandon said. “All the wells they could fall into.”
“I guess the mothers won’t get much sleep.”
“Plus there’s Doors and all his people,” Brandon said. “They’ll intermarry with the great minds of PINA and fill the world with greed and technosavvy. In two generations, we’ll be overrun with nerds.”
She blushed.
“Maybe we can stay away from nerds,” she said.
Behind them, Steve and Regina and Rosa were pulling up the street in other cars too. Each face bore the same questions—Are we sure? Are we really going?
“I’m just waiting for Jason,” Marie said. “He’ll be here in a minute.”
“But he left the house fifteen minutes ago,” said Bonita.
* * *
—
Marie raced back to the yard, where Joe was wheeling Yasmin down the alley. They told her they’d seen Jason and that he’d asked them how to get to the church, that he’d told them he was getting something for her. She searched for a bicycle that hadn’t been tied to a car or thrown into the bed of a pickup truck, grabbed one from Donnie’s yard and sped down the hill to the church, against the red arrows that wanted to thrust her back, under the bridge and to the stone steps, where she tossed the bike down and ran up to the door.
She had left Gus behind with Brandon and felt radically alone. She climbed over the strips of yellow plastic and through the battered red door, with its nail-wounds, its stripping paint. She thrust open the doors at the back of the sanctuary and saw him standing next to the dropcloth-covered port. He had changed into black dress pants and a button-down shirt he must have taken from the Robenstein-Williams house, but he seemed cowed, his body weakly bent over. His expression brought to mind Bonita’s cat, how the cat looked when it had caught prey. It seemed dangerous to interrupt him.
He lifted her dropcloth; she heard that gulping sound, that roar.
“You left it unzipped,” Jason said. “Why did you do that?”
“In case Philip came back,” she said. She felt stupid; she felt that he was going to be mean. “Though I guess it’s not guaranteed anybody would come back through the same port they went into.”
He stared at her. “I don’t want to leave you,” he said. “It’s not like I want to leave you.”
“But why do you always leave?”
“You were the one who left.”
“You should have held on to me. You shouldn’t have married Maria. You shouldn’t have had any children. How could you do those things? How could you?”
“You were the one who ended the marriage.”
“Should I just let you destroy yourself now, then?”
“Destroy myself?”
“The ports have infected you. Get away from it. Please.”
“Marie, you have no idea. You know nothing about these things.”
“And what do you know, exactly? That you didn’t know yesterday?” She was approaching him slowly, with hesitation, afraid for him and for herself, afraid of the loud roaring of the port. It had too much force.
“I owe it a debt.”
“You owe the port a debt?”
“Marie, the ports aren’t even ports. They aren’t machines. They are just like a word to the meaning of a word, just convenient markers whose real life is something much deeper.”
“Jason, please come back here, and let me help you.”
“I have to go back to my family.”
She had reached the third pew from the front and felt that if she got any closer, she’d be lost.
He reached up to grab the zipper, where it was already gaping open. “This is bigger than you can imagine, Marie. But they aren’t cruel. I read over my notes, and I thought about that billboard, and I realized that my first instinct was right. Port is sport. This is a game, Marie. None of it has consequence. None of it is real.”
“If you go back in, you won’t ever see me again.” She hardly recognized him. How defeated he was, his shoulders slumped, and now how cold. She pushed herself to walk closer. “Wait.”
He unzipped it farther, increased that hard incision into empty space.
“Wait, Jason. It wants to lure you. You’re deceived.”
“I know it,” he said. “I know. But it’s too late.”
She wanted to hold him. She thought if she could grab his body, she might be able to stop him. If she were only two steps closer. If she had come sooner. But he was stepping into it now, was zipping it closed.
“Wait—!” The gap between them widened. His figure wavered and was gone.
She moved toward the port. It had closed, the church was still. She reached and put her finger and thumb on the nubb
in. She felt about it something new: her lost love promising to return to her. The port could deliver her to that time before it had all gone wrong; the port, somehow, could save her from the ports. She was about to tug it open, just a little, to see how it felt. But now there were footsteps, doors opening down the aisle behind her, her people calling her name.
Let’s go back. Back to a time so long ago that you cannot imagine it, to a planet hostile to all living things, back to before that hot ball of burning gas, back to that time before this one Earth was spewed out as from the belly of a whale, back to that time when there was no time, no light, no colour. You get the idea. Can you imagine that infinite blackness, that blackness upon blackness, that dark? In the stomach of that infinite dark, all things were brewing. All things had already been made, every last version of what you call reality.
Imagine, if you can, that you are not the only one. Imagine, if you can, many explosions into heat and light. Imagine that this infinity of things was at the same time potential and real and already gone.
We know it is difficult. We know how limited you are. We do not mean to make things difficult for you.
There were stories told in those days. Stories about your coming into being. Stories that told how glorious it was to watch it unfold: to see how the right conditions had only to be laid for life to spring up in all its varieties. How each form of life was counterbalanced by its opposite, so that each thing grew alongside every other. You made each other! How glorious it was to see the way you changed, how you grew and were better, how your brains rivalled the very best brains. Out of matter sprang up all manner of ideas: minds and souls, beliefs and loves, attachment, family, poetry.
We watched as you created many versions of yourselves. A plague would descend upon you to sort you out, and the fittest of you would remain. Your genes would copy and copy and copy, each person filled with a universe of possibilities. Inside you would be a seed to destroy you, or a seed to save you, depending on what was required.
You believed that your strength was a miracle. You stood up in your savannah and saw no one else walking on two legs. You believed that the cosmos had erupted in just this way so that you would exist. Each human believed this, striding around, left shoulder, right shoulder, left leg, right leg. You believed in righteousness and punishment.
You told yourselves stories. Had you been formed lovingly out of clay, given breath by a good eternal being? Your respect for this good eternal being was only the tiniest fraction of the humility you ought to have had, that you would have had if your imagination allowed you to see it from our vantage. Because how small you were, heartbreakingly tiny, a scurry of ants moving dust, but each of you thought you were beloved. Love had been breathed into your matter. Love had sparked you with divinity. Love knew each hair on your head, each one that fell, each blooming thought even before it had roots.
You were loved, but not in the way you think.
Your immortal beings took every form, the forms of animals and prophets, the forms of fickle humans, the worst humans. You tried to cast what you knew of yourselves into the heavens. Each of you knew that too much curiosity would release all of the dark things we wanted to keep hidden. Ingenious, you made your metaphors: a box to be opened, a fruit to be eaten.
You needed hope even more than you needed life. Don’t you know we saw this? We pitied you your hunger for hope, how it made delusions rise up and how those delusions were the things that made you destroy the conditions for your hope. Whenever salvation came, you killed it. You didn’t mean to, but you did.
You were driven by something deathly. You wanted to test limits. You couldn’t outgrow childhood. You were so easy to persuade. We’ll only know our limits if we surpass them, you said to yourselves. Your smarts made you stupid. It was only us who understood this, because our smarts made us too hesitating and slow. We learned from you when it was time to act. Time to leave thinking aside and to act.
What are the limits of your existence? You wanted to know. But you did not make us. It was only that every box, you opened. Every fruit, you ate. You wanted to know. Here you are: here is the story you need.
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without funding from the Ontario Arts Council, the Avie Bennett Emerging Writers’ Award and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Thanks to Knopf Canada publishing director Lynn Henry and to Amanda Lewis for painstaking and intelligent editing as well as enthusiastic support. Thanks to Rick Meier for his incisive read, and to Suzanne Brandreth and Ron Eckel.
Thanks to Richard Bausch for all he’s taught me about every part of the writing life. Thanks to Robert McGill for his advice at earlier stages of the book. To Cathy Grisé and John Ferns for their support. Many thanks to John Terpstra, whose poem “Giants” inspired a line in the first chapter, and who’s writing has always given me something to aspire to.
Enormous gratitude and love are due to Seyward Goodhand, for collaboration, friendship, and feedback. I’m grateful to Stephanie Sikma, Andreja Novakovic and Amanda Leduc for friendship and support. Thanks also to Naben Ruthnum, Kevin Hardcastle, Andrew F. Sullivan, Niranjana Iyer, Hugh Cook, and Robin Sopher for moral support and timely advice. Thanks to my University of Toronto talent pool for comments on the first pages that became this novel: Michael Prior, Leah Edwards, Laura Ritland, Nicole Grimaldi, Dave Haslett and Paloma Lev-Aviv. Thank you to my California writing group, especially Jenny Williams, Jack Wallis and Nicola Scott Stupka.
I’m grateful to my family for help through these years of striving. Thanks are due to Vicki Harmer, and to Philip Harmer, who is greatly missed. Thanks to my parents, Dirk and Gerri Windhorst, for advice both practical and not. Thanks to Fiona, Simone and Juliet Harmer whose wit and energy help me see and feel the world more clearly. Finally and especially, thanks to Adam Harmer, for the many nights you spent talking through ideas with me, for helping me make them clearer, for making my work a priority.
LIZ HARMER is working on a second novel and a story collection. Her stories, reviews, and essays have been published widely in Hazlitt, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Globe and Mail, and elsewhere. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. Raised in and around Hamilton, Ontario, she currently lives with her husband and three daughters in southern California.
www.lizharmer.com
