by Kat Cameron
Her grandma never ate any of the baking. She was short but weighed only ninety-eight pounds. Her thick knuckles were twisted by arthritis, the fingernails stained yellow by cigarettes. She had several irregular dark moles on her cheeks and forehead. When she was young, her hair had been strawberry blonde, like Kalla’s, but she suffered a bout of scarlet fever in her early twenties and her hair fell out. It grew back a grizzled dark brown.
One day while Kalla was combing her hair, her grandma came into the bathroom and stood beside her. They were the same height, had the same colouring, except Kalla’s eyes were pale blue rather than hazel.
“Look at my skin,” her grandma said. Kalla looked at the triangle of black moles on her grandmother’s left cheek, the deep lines stretching from the corner of the nose to the mouth, the grey pouches beneath her grandmother’s hazel eyes. Then she looked at her own peachy complexion, with a smatter of freckles across the nose.
“Look after your skin,” her grandma said. “I had skin like you once. Don’t go out in the sun. Wear a hat. Use sunscreen. You don’t want to end up looking like me.” It sounded like a curse.
Kalla was in a new school, one of those low single-story elementary schools built for the influx of children who came to Alberta for the oil boom. In her sixth-grade class, Kalla was surrounded by a Karen, a Callee, a Kendra. She made the mistake of telling these girls that her mother had named her for a flower, a Calla lily.
“You don’t look like a flower,” Callee said. She was the head of the popular clique, a tall skinny girl with dark hair. Sometimes when the teachers called Kalla’s name, Callee would answer. Her name wasn’t pronounced Caylee, like an Irish party, but Call-ee, like California. She said, “Unless it’s a stinkweed. Who gives their kid a stupid name like stinkweed?”
After that moment, the girls in the clique — Callee, Kendra, Lori, and Karen — called Kalla “stinkweed,” along with the other names: fat, stupid, ugly.
Kalla spent her teen years in a dark basement, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, FireFly, and reruns of Star Trek on the Space channel, and reading comics: X-Men, Watchmen, Elfquest. Comics about people who were different, but special. Nightcrawler, who could transport from one place to another. Storm, who could harness the elements. She read about superheroes punishing evil and protecting the innocent, and she imagined all the vengeance she would inflict on the girls in the popular clique, Callee and Lori and Karen, who had migrated with her to Scona High School.
She also spent most of her teen years on diets, trying to lose those fifteen pounds she’d gained. She cut out bread, sugar, cookies, white rice. She cut out nearly all the foods she liked and lived on lean protein, brown rice, vegetables, and fruit for four years.
When she was seventeen, Kalla shortened her name to Kal, an androgynous name. She dyed her hair copper red and wore black jeans and black T-shirts with skull motifs. She told friends in university that she had been named for Kali, the Hindu goddess of death, the black goddess with her necklace of skulls.
Her grandmother remained missing. Kalla stopped asking her parents if her grandmother would return. As far as she could tell, her father made no effort to find his mother. Like Spock in Star Trek, her father kept his emotions hidden. Spock: half Vulcan, half human, controlled by logic. In Spock, Kal felt her own split personality: logic and emotion.
When Kalla graduated with an MA in English, the recession was gutting education in Alberta, and she worked for a year as a substitute teacher. Now she had a one-year contract at Mount Royal College, teaching two first-year English classes. She could teach The Chrysalids, Ender’s Game, Animal Farm, The Hobbit, even graphic novels like Sandman and The Watchmen. Heroes and villains.
In February, she had assigned her students a creative short story. “Make it real,” she told them. For many of them that meant writing about their own lives. Stories about bullying. Stories about breakups. Stories about death. Her students pared back the flesh to reveal the heart.
Serena, a tiny black-haired girl, who wore bright red lipstick and equally bright fuchsia tops, had written an explicit account of bullying.
Serena’s classmates called her a skank and a loser. They spread rumours about her, snapped her bra strap during gym class, called her ugly. Serena couldn’t take the bullying anymore. She pulled out a steak knife and slashed her wrist.
In class, Serena was overly vivacious, her hand shooting up to answer questions. But now, early April, she had been absent for a month. She’d failed every grammar quiz. Her 800-word essay on Animal Farm was a month late.
As a teacher, Kal vowed she would never embarrass or single out a student. Her own ethical code. She recalled a class in her second year of university, when the English 356 professor sneered, “You seem to be in the wrong class,” as he handed back her paper. Looking at the front page, she realized she’d transposed two numbers: the class number read English 365, a simple typo. On the back page was a scrawled C-. No comments. The clues that he was a jerk had been there the first day, when he said “That’s a bullet dodged” after an Asian student peeked in the door, asked if this was the room for History 101, and then left.
Of course, she had singled out students this year. When they pulled out forbidden cell phones, when they spent the entire class whispering and giggling, when they quickly pulled down laptop screens so she wouldn’t see that they were playing Call of Duty, she put on her teacher face to maintain discipline. Students had their own world with clear social hierarchies. Teachers were outsiders.
Sometimes, like her grandmother, she wanted to run away. Faced with a desk piled high with student papers, a sink full of dishes, and a dwindling bank account, she imagined dropping everything and walking out of her life. But she didn’t know where she would go.
She went to Comic Con at the Calgary Agricom. The line of costumed adults stretched from the door of the main hall to the stairs of the C-train platform. For twenty minutes, the line didn’t move. A chilly April breeze blew. Kal shivered in her fleece pullover.
A girl with jet-black asymmetrical hair, like a twenties flapper, complained, “This is bullshit. I bought my ticket months ago. Why isn’t the line moving?” Below a bright yellow miniskirt, her bare legs pimpled with goose bumps.
Nightcrawler turned around. “They’re oversold. There’s no room in the main hall.” His long blue tail, wired to stand in a half-U, swished through the flap of a long black coat.
“I’ve never been to one of these before,” Kal said. “I read that Spock is here.”
“He must be in his seventies. Hard to believe.”
“Forty years since the original Star Trek.” She’d grown up watching reruns of the original series on Space. She needed to establish her nerd cred since she wasn’t in costume. She had on jeans and a black T-shirt printed with a Day of the Dead sugar skull, blue flowers decorating the eye sockets. Her own version of a uniform.
Spock was the draw. Leonard Nimoy, coming from a conference in Vulcan, Alberta, had just announced his retirement. Last chance to see Spock.
The line surged forward as the doors opened into a concrete warehouse crammed with aliens, vampires, middle-aged men in Star Trek uniforms, busty girls in medieval dresses with flowers in their hair. All the freaks, geeks, Goths, nerds, Trekkies, cosplayers, all the kids who never fit in, all together.
Pushing through the clot by the front doors, Kal moved through the masses. Her grandma, a British citizen raised in India, had taught her a trick for dealing with crowds. “Think of the people as statues,” she’d say. Kal slid past Batman posing for pictures, zigged past Queen Amidala in harem pants and a bikini top, and zagged to avoid a clump of teens with anime haircuts.
Now she was in the far corner of the warehouse, near the food stands selling perogies, mini-donuts, and hot dogs. She bought a large latte to fortify herself for the line for Spock’s autograph. An autograph alone cost $20. If she wanted a picture with him, it would be $100.
The lineup to see Spock already stretched the
length of the main hall, curving past closed doors to workshops with lesser celebrities (writers, illustrators, directors), reaching into the warehouse divided into aisles crowded with comic book stalls and T-shirt vendors. Kal joined the line behind a large woman with a prominent bald spot in her thinning black hair. Sipping her latte, she settled in for a long wait.
A weedy kid wandered by in thick platform boots, a brocade tan waistcoat and jeans, an eighteenth-century lord. He was holding the hand of a steampunk girl in a tightly laced crimson bustier, black tulle and lace foaming over a short black skirt, ribbed tights worn with thigh-high black boots. Where did they get their costumes? Geek had never looked so chic when Kal was in university.
After reading Serena’s story of slashing her wrists, she had called Serena in during office hours for a talk. “I’m concerned about your story. The cutting seems quite serious.”
“Please don’t report me. Please.” Serena started crying. “It was in high school. I’m okay now. Please don’t report me.”
Kal handed her a tissue, waited for her to stop weeping.
“I’m not going to report you.” Kal promised. “I just wanted you to know about the counselling services the school has. I was worried about you.”
Serena kept repeating, “Please don’t report me.”
Serena’s reaction seemed extreme. She hadn’t been back to class since the talk. Maybe she felt she couldn’t slip back into the herd now.
Would she report a fantasy about bringing a gun to school? Yes. But a story about bullying and cutting was less clear. The department guidelines were not helpful: Remember that communication is the key! Trust your intuition and report your concerns. She didn’t report the story until Serena had missed a month of class.
“So why are you reporting the story now?” the head of her department asked. Kal felt the floor slip beneath her. A sudden sinking in her stomach. This was how her students felt, sitting on the other side of a desk, across from someone who held all the power. The department head was a tall woman in a bright red tunic dress and dark-framed glasses. She was saying, Why are you getting me involved? And even worse: Why can’t you handle this on your own?
The department head told her to contact Student Services. “The number is in the Instructor Guidelines,” she said, making the process seem obvious. Kal left the office feeling that she had screwed any chances of another job. Her contract was renewable, but only if the college was satisfied with her work.
Kal had been waiting in line for an hour and fifteen minutes when the latte kicked in. She needed to pee. Right now. The line snaked past the washrooms. Kal looked ahead. There were at least 100 people in front of her.
“Excuse me,” she said to the woman in front of her in line. “I just need to duck out of the line for a moment and use the washroom. Would you mind holding my spot?”
“Actually, I would.”
“I’m sorry?” Was this woman, this Trekkie, refusing such a simple request? Like Kal, the woman was in ordinary clothes, black leggings and a green smock top covering wide hips.
“You can go to the back of the line if you need to leave.”
“That would mean another hour in line. I’ve already waited over an hour.”
“If you’re not willing to wait, I guess you’re not a real fan.”
Kal left the line. When had the world become so angry? If a person who claimed to be a Star Trek fan, a Spock fan, could be such a bitch, was there any hope for understanding?
Her last chance to see Spock was gone. He would never return to Canada.
Kal waited until she was in a washroom stall before she started crying. She knew about bullies. Her family had moved from Vancouver to Edmonton when Kal was in grade six. The first month she was walking home from school, past a small park rimmed with dark spruce trees in the centre of a cul-de-sac of bungalows. Three boys about her age were kicking around a soccer ball in a grassy area by the sidewalk.
As Kal walked by, one of them picked up a stone and threw it, just missing her head. Kal turned around, shocked, and the next stone grazed her, gashing a line down her forearm. She ran, stones pelting around her, hitting her back and calves. After that she walked along the main road to school, avoiding the shortcut.
She had no friends that year. During recess, Callee and the group of popular girls would chant, “Kalla lily, Kalla lily, she is fat and ugly.” And there were other names. Her mother told her, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” The stones hurt where they grazed her arm and legs. The words hurt more.
After splashing water on her face to reduce the puffiness around her eyes and remove the smeared mascara, she walked down the long hallway, past the booths selling comic books, signed anime posters, and movie memorabilia, and pushed open the double doors. Outside, snow swirled around the Agricom.
In March, a social worker at a care home had called her parents. Her grandma had had a small stroke and had been in hospital overnight, but she was back in the room she’d lived in for ten years. The social worker said she’d asked what relatives to contact, and Mrs. Martin had given her the phone number.
Kal’s father refused to go the first time. Kal’s mother drove down and picked up Kal in Calgary and then drove them both to Lethbridge, but she too refused to go into the care home. Maybe she was afraid that her mother-in-law would slam the door in her face. The force of will in that tiny person — fourteen years of silence and absence to make a point about betrayal.
At the door of the room, Kal hesitated and then knocked. She’d wondered if she would recognize her grandma, but she looked just the same, a tiny woman with frizzled grey hair, her wrinkled skin a darker shade than ivory. An orange sweater dwarfed her tiny frame.
“Grandma,” Kal said.
“Kalla. You finally came,” her grandma said, as if she had left clues and Kal had been negligent in finding them or she had just left a few days ago. She pulled Kal into the single room, which had a sofa piled high with balls of wool, a single bed, a table and two chairs tucked into a corner by the tiny kitchen.
“I walked out on that man,” her grandma whispered to her, as if she had been waiting all those years to tell someone. “He wasn’t a nice person. He left me for another woman.” Years of grievances spilled out.
Kal’s favourite Spock scene was at the end of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. The Enterprise is badly damaged, the hyper-drive non-functioning. Shields are failing. Spock goes down to the engine room, disables Dr. McCoy with a Vulcan nerve pinch, enters the engine room filled with radiation and repairs the engine. Dying, Spock says to Kirk, The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one. His Kobayashi Maru, an unwinnable scenario
She had failed her own Kobayashi Maru. She had betrayed a student, broken her word.
She hadn’t heard anything back from Serena or Student Services since contacting them. A long silence. Silence has its own power.
The Apostles
AFTER THEIR DEATHS, I WANTED to run to the end of the earth. I wanted to step off the edge of the world, to descend into black waters. I went to a place where the centre is rock, red as blood, and the ocean surrounds you on all sides.
Paul stood on the shore of the lake, looking over its luminous black ripples. He had not been back in two years. Walking down the stretch of sand, he discarded his clothing at the water’s edge. The ground fell away beneath his feet.
He swam into the lake, ten lengths, twenty. He swam away from the past, but it followed him, music rising off the surface of the water like evening mist. Simon and Garfunkel, their voices twining together in the ballad “Cecilia.”
He knew before he saw her that she was in the water. Her hair, slicked down by the water, was as glossy as a seal’s pelt.
“They’re here,” she said. “I can feel them, hovering above your head. Aren’t you afraid to come back? Peter was.”
Peter, who in this spot he could hear clearly, whose voice called out of the broken past.
When my visa expired, I stayed on in Australia. There are guys there, American ‘Nam vets, with no visas. A colony lives up in the mountains outside Cairns. I took a train, snaking over canyons, passing over an abyss of time. The sixties are still happening there. They’re up in the mountains, selling tarnished silver and tie-dyed dreams.
The moon rose, a glowing crescent in the eastern sky. Light fell in sheets, reflected from the darkness of Cecilia’s eyes.
They had come to the cabin that Peter’s parents owned but never used. Left unlocked, the cabin remained untouched by vandals or time: four small rooms, the walls permeated by the smoky haze of memories.
Sitting before the fire, they tried to bridge the gap between past and present time. She would say, Do you remember when? and he would match the pieces of her puzzle. But it remained as broken as the beer bottles they had thrown against stop signs. Time blurred into broken shards and he was alone with Cecilia, sitting in faded armchairs before the stone fireplace. Two old friends, reminiscing, while voices and visions swirled around the room.
Sitting in darkness, with only the red flicker of flames to cast an aureole around Cecilia’s cap of dark hair, Paul saw the ghosts rising from the walls and taking shape before him. Peter, with flames shining through him and turning the bottle of rye in his hands to gold. Even in the flesh, Peter had seemed insubstantial, subject to moments of disappearance. Cecilia once said, “Peter is a shadow; he needs to stand behind someone.” And so, after the accident, Peter began to fade, like a photograph left too long in the acid bath. Behind Peter’s skeletal form, Paul could see the wall of fire and jagged rock. Peter raised the bottle of rye to his lips and drank. A golden line trailed down the inside of his throat, then bubbled up again in words, harsh as a crow’s caw.
