Dr. Aurelio did not want that outcome for any of his patients, and recently, it had started looking like Leap might escape it. The once-explosive lagomorph had become subdued in recent weeks. Calming him was no longer the chore it had been in the beginning, and the soft chamber was no longer necessary. Dr. Aurelio would have liked to credit Leap’s turnaround to his own therapeutic skills and proven track record as the pioneer of superhero psycho-reharmonization therapy. But he was honest enough to admit that, in this case, the truth lay elsewhere. Specifically, it lay somewhere deep within the badly frayed sense-mind of Opul the Mender.
Opul was by far Dr. Aurelio’s toughest nut to crack. While her outward symptoms appeared to be psychological — despondency, abysmalism, alienation — her fundamental malady was in fact physiological and bioelectric. So deep was her wound that it touched her bioenergetic core and its architecture of neural webs. Opul needed more than group validation and gentle guidance from a trained professional. Much more. And the only one she could get it from was herself. At best, Dr. Aurelio was nothing more than a passive conduit for her powers of autonomous neural repair, if such repair was even possible in so extreme a case.
Normally, patients were barred from using their superpowers while at Bluefields. There was simply too much risk of them injuring themselves or others while in recovery. But in Opul’s case Dr. Aurelio had decided to make an exception. Once he had fully assessed the neurological basis of her condition and her special aptitude, he realized that the only likelihood of her ever regaining the full use of her sense-hairs and her mending power (really more of an energy-streaming ability) was if she actually began to do it again, to mend something or someone close at hand. It was indeed a “use it or lose it” situation. Neurons that fire together, wire together.
“The Mother must be saved! The Mother…” Leap erupted again but quickly trailed off once Opul’s gaze fell upon him.
Opul’s effects on Leap told Dr. Aurelio that she was already starting to regain her powers. Although, to see her immobile in her lounge chair, with her long sense-hairs limp against her head and shoulders, one would never guess she was engaged in mending.
Dr. Aurelio had reviewed vid images of Opul at work: in full-out mending mode, she stood erect while sweeping her elongate arms rapidly in front of her and bringing them back to her torso in broad gathering motions; her lustrous mane of sense-hairs lifting from her scalp, defying gravity, each strand twisting and turning every which way. But he had never observed her mend firsthand. It was rumored that she could even mend wounded planets ravaged by war, natural disaster, or cosmic accident, could stream and heal all of a planet’s broken or tangled geoenergy threads. Amazing! How he longed to see her in action.
On Earth, for as long as she’d lasted there, she mended from a concrete highway underpass in a small coastal town in Canada. Yet the primary geowound she was sent to heal was thousands of bounders inland, where a vast swath of forest had been sheared off and the land was now mired in an upwell of black tar that had lain buried for millennia. From all accounts, Opul would have completed her mission, even from that distance. But her sense-hairs and neural webs were severely damaged by the unanticipated levels of radio-frequency radiation on the planet. The concrete underpass provided the only shelter she could readily find from the toxic radiation. So she lived there during her sojourn on Earth. In order to do her mending each day, she’d had to stand at the mouth of the underpass. Anything that shielded her sense-hairs from the withering radiation also shielded them from the planetary energies she was there to reweave.
Now, Opul was beginning to mend Leap’s tangled energy threads. Perhaps not just because he was close at hand; all the patients were. But Leap was the only one who had been born on Earth. And come into his powers on Earth. And ultimately wreaked his great havoc on Earth before being captured by the Corps and sent for reharmonization. It was as though, at some subliminal level, Opul’s bioenergetic core knew that the key to her own autonomous repair would be found in reconnecting with the source of her damage: Earth. Perhaps the key also lay in Opul completing the mission she had been forced to abort. Namely, the healing of Earth. Or, in this case, a proxy for Earth in the form of Leap.
“…I knew they weren’t really gemstones,” KwaKwa sobbed. “The red was dripping off them and landing on my face. I knew they were the slaughtered jimbos from the ravine. And it was my own neck that was being circled until I couldn’t breathe!” KwaKwa broke off his tale and wept.
Ixcel the Ice Child (who was really three hundred years old but looked twelve) slipped her tiny pale hand into KwaKwa’s big mitt and gave it a squeeze.
“I have scary dreams too sometimes,” she said.
“Do you?” KwaKwa stopped bawling long enough to speak.
Ixcel nodded.
“Sure. We all do,” Dark Blade said.
Doonah the Maker patted KwaKwa’s shoulder. “We got yer back, buddy.”
“But what does it mean?” KwaKwa asked Dr. Aurelio.
“What do you think it means?” Dr. Aurelio replied.
“I think the blood that landed on my face was really my own tears. And the strangulation by that shuttle pod was my powerlessness against the offworlders. And the ravine of dead jimbos is the loss of our fertility. And…” KwaKwa dissolved into tears again.
“You’ve done significant work today, KwaKwa,” Dr. Aurelio said. “This is a lot of progress.”
Then he turned to Leap and braced himself for an incoherent litany of Mother worship.
* * *
That night, as Dr. Aurelio sat at his desk in the glass conservatory writing up his daily notes, his thoughts turned to the woolenwood forest to the rear of the compound. The patients at Bluefields were free to wander the trails, observe the wildlife, or simply meditate and restore themselves beneath the soft protective shield of the forest canopy.
The cornerstone of his doctoral thesis decades earlier involved cross-mapping the psychological profile of a superhero to the vital impulse of a tree. Each is driven by one need only: to fulfill itself according to its own laws, to represent itself in the world at large. Superheroes do not choose to be superheroes, do not choose to act when called upon to do so. They cannot not act. It is as hardwired into their genes as the tree’s impulse to build up its own form. When superheroes are unable to access their powers, unable to represent themselves, to fulfill their mandate, the damage to their psyche is profound and potentially irreversible. It is as mortally damaging as a tree’s inability to represent itself would be for the tree.
Opul visited the woolenwood forest more than any other patient in the current batch. But never at night. Nights were reserved for something else.
Dr. Aurelio glanced up from his desk and, as expected, saw Opul’s dark silhouette standing at the cliff edge, illuminated under the triple moons. The first night he had observed her there, he wondered if he needed to worry that she might jump. Indeed, what he saw floating on the ocean when he raced across the moss after her silhouette disappeared from the clifftop made his heart do several backflips. But after he understood her nightly ritual he determined he had no cause for concern.
* * *
Opul stood at the cliff edge along the east side of the compound. A wooden staircase led down to Lullo Cove. She was waiting for the steam to start rising from the sea. That was the best thing about this place. Thermal vents on the sea bottom opened at night, and the ocean warmed considerably.
When the first wisps of vapor appeared, escaping the sea like departing spirits to join the triple moons above, she began her nightly trek down the 118 steps. At the bottom, she disrobed and walked into the steaming sea. The salinity was high, contributing to great buoyancy. By the time she was waist-deep, her bare feet could no longer stay in contact with the sandy bottom. She let her body recline until she was floating on her back, arms and legs splayed wide. Her sense-hairs spread themselves on the surface like a halo around her head— like they used to when she was mending. She lay like this for as long as she co
uld, before the ocean became too hot to bear. Sometimes that was one hour, sometimes two. It depended on the ambient air temperature and the degree of thermal venting on any given night.
She lay like this in the hope that her sense-hairs would remember their shape and resume their function. She lay like this to drink in the milky energy of the triple moons. She lay like this to ground her bioenergetic core to an infinite pool of negative ions. She lay like this to absorb the restorative minerals of the sea. She lay like this.
* * *
It was easy to see why Dr. Aurelio’s first observation of Opul’s nightly practice had triggered his arrhythmia. When he discovered her nude and motionless body adrift in the ocean below, his heart jackhammered until she righted herself and walked ashore. It had been weeks since he had witnessed that (and only once— to repeat it would have been voyeuristic and an invasion of patient privacy). Now the image of Opul’s magnificent mane of sense-hairs, spread wide like a halo on the moonlit sea, was forever seared into his memory. How like the dendrites on a neuron. How like the roots of a mighty tree!
Dr. Aurelio’s dissertation had not only earned him his doctorate in Xenopsychology, it ultimately launched the entire discipline of psycho-reharmonization for superheroes. To this day, Dr. Aurelio is still considered the leading authority in the field. Tonight in his office, dwarfed by the dark expanse outside and the ethereal mysteries of a fractured sense-mind floating in the sea, he felt more humbled than exalted. It seemed he was powerless to help either Leap or Opul.
Opul was the only one who could reach and repair Leap. And she was certainly the only one who could repair herself. Did he have anything to offer these scarred souls? All he could do was listen.
Yes, Dr. Aurelio could do that. He could listen.
* * *
Kim Goldberg — the author of six books of poetry and nonfiction and a winner of the Rannu Fund Poetry Prize for Speculative Literature — lives and speculates in Nanaimo, BC.
Lost and Found
Luke Murphy
Days later, and I was still finding his things. I’d spot a razor blade under the bathroom sink or one of his books jumbled among mine, and I’d pick it up like it had thorns and put it in the box in the closet. He said he’d call when he was ready to collect his stuff. I didn’t even know where he was. Had he moved in with that other girl? Were they coiled together on knotty sheets while I stared at the ceiling?
I tried not to do it. Three days I walked in circles around the apartment telling myself not to do it. I tried to distract myself: web surfing, cheap wine, bouts of self-pity. It didn’t work. I needed it. My skin fizzed like cheap pop. I scratched my arms and bit my lips. My boss called. Why wasn’t I at the office processing forms? I told him I’d quit.
At four in the morning I watched a web video that promised me I Wouldn’t Believe What Happened Next (spoiler alert: I did, without much trouble) and realized I’d worn out the distraction capacity of the internet.
I walked to my bedroom. I lay down with my clothes on, shut my eyes, took a few deep breaths. My weight of flesh and bone and blood sank into the mattress.
I felt the shape and outline of my body, sensed its boundaries, and floated out of it.
I drifted up to the ceiling, turned and looked down at the fleshbody lying on the bed below me. Its eyes were closed, mouth slack. Greasy hair and grubby sweatshirt. When had I last showered? Physical me looked wretched.
But ethereal me felt glad to be weightless again. No pinched nerves or lower back pain. I held up the hands of my lightbody in front of my face, saw a vague form made of ghost-colored mist. Perfect. I floated to the wall and pressed myself into it. A chalky sensation in my lightflesh as I passed through it. I pushed deeper into sudden darkness, moved through sour-tasting concrete and rasping brick and burst into the night air. Streetlights glared seven stories below. I flitted above the luminous streets of Toronto and flew.
* * *
We’ve all got two bodies. Our other body’s where our consciousness lives, and it’s made of thinner stuff than the flesh. Quantum particles, maybe. Lots of people slip out of their skin at one time or another, mostly when they’re in shock or asleep or on the operating table. And everyone does it one final time. But I had the good or bad fortune to have learned how to control the process when I spent a week in hospital with appendicitis at the age of six. The incense-and-crystals crowd calls it astral projection, and I’ve been doing it for almost as long as I’ve known I shouldn’t talk about it.
* * *
I soared into a layer of thin clouds far above the city and rested in the air. Below, the sprawl glittered between the two blacknesses of lake and forest. I pictured his face— making a lopsided smile after he’d said something funny, the way I always thought of him.
“Where is he?” I asked. A light tug pulled me northeast.
Just like last time, a week ago.
For the third evening in a row he’d texted me to say he’d be working late at the ad agency; I thought, let’s find out for sure so I can stop wondering. I lay down and left the flesh behind, came outside and felt that pull to the northeast. His office wasn’t that way. I let the pull direct me over streets and parks to a row of townhouses. A window drew me toward it. The curtains were closed, but the light was on. I remembered the rule I’d made when I first learned the knack: no spying. Yes, but this was different, wasn’t it? I didn’t wait for an answer, just ghosted through the wall and into a bedroom and saw.
They couldn’t see me, of course — I’m invisible in this state — but her eyes were squeezed shut anyway. And he never looked up from what he was doing.
He came home later that night; I tried to keep it casual — “How was your day, hon?” “Oh, you know, the usual” — but it jumped out of my mouth. Then came the denials and the shouting and the weeping and he progressed quickly to how did I know? Was I following him around? No, of course I wasn’t. Well, how did I know then? I just suspected. Bullshit. What kind of woman stalks her own boyfriend? Make that ex-boyfriend.
Somewhere below, a helicopter clattered toward a hospital, a red light vanishing in the night. The northeast was tugging me again to where my answer lay. I could find out what I already knew: yes, he was with her. And then?
“You know my secret now,” he’d said while standing in the doorway. “You can keep yours, whatever it is. I don’t care.”
I stared northeast at the glowing grid of streets and pictured his face again. I felt hollow. I had no boyfriend, no job, no money. Above, the dark was a chasm my ghostbody could plummet into. I could float up and keep going. Feel the air become thin, see the horizon curve and the stars brighten in clear space. Could I survive up there? I didn’t know. I flitted up into the colder dark.
A gust of wind propelled a cloud of frozen ice crystals through me. Each one twinkled inside me like the taste of a wind chime. My ghost mouth tugged itself into the shape of a smile.
“I need a new life,” I said to the empty sky. “Where do I find that?”
No response, of course. Not a gentle tug nor a flash of insight. There was no new life. Upward was the chasm. How far could I go?
A lonely note sounded in the night; it held and faded and sounded again. Far below a freight train crept, its whistle calling to the world, wheels beating steadily on steel. Enough self-pity. The rest of the world was getting on with things, and I was alive, healthy, and doing something most people couldn’t.
I flitted down to skyscraper height and followed the train westward through downtown. A streetcar dinged on Spadina Avenue and clattered through an intersection. Something was drawing me. I sank lower, followed the streetcar north. It passed College Street; I broke away from it, dropped to rooftop level, and flew west above the silent street. I felt the tug more strongly now: it was like a child pulling at my sleeve, begging me to come and see, come and see.
A few blocks further and I was in Little Italy, passing over the dense rows of shuttered bars and restaurants and patios, and still
the voice whispered, come. The pull on my sleeve grew to a gentle hand wrapping my wrist, taking me past a comics shop, a clothing store, a barber, and there I stopped. Not the barber. Above it. The second floor was offices, venetian blinds closed behind the stencilled name of an accounting firm. Up again. The windows on the third floor had shabbier blinds and no name on the glass. Something was stuck to the corner of one pane. I went closer. A postcard taped to the glass and two words handwritten on it: “Help Wanted.”
A sign where nobody could possibly see it.
Except me.
I flew home, plunged back into my skin and bones, and fell into the first proper sleep I’d had since, you know.
* * *
By nine I was awake. One load of laundry later I put on a clean shirt and skirt and biked over to Little Italy.
I found the barbershop but had to cross the street to verify that there really was a tiny patch of white on the third-floor window. The door to the upstairs offices led into a stairwell where the lino predated the moon landings. Two scratched mailboxes hung at the foot of the stairs. One for the accountants on the second floor, the other unmarked. The stairs smelt of no cleaning. I stopped on the middle landing. My heart punched my ribs like a piston. Why was I so tense? What was I supposed to find here?
The door on the third floor was closed and had no name on it. I knocked on chipped cream paint, heard nothing, pushed the door open.
“Yeah, I know, I’ll be able to pay—” The old man behind the desk fluttered an anxious hand. The voice on the other end of his phone was a tinny squawk. He looked up, managed a warm smile, and gestured to a collapsing armchair. “I’ll have it by the end of the month. Si. Grazie.”
He put the phone down and turned to me. I was still standing. The seat of the armchair was covered in a Greenland-shaped stain, hopefully coffee. “Welcome,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
I said, “I’m here because…” Seconds of silence ticked by. Partly because I had nothing prepared, partly because I was occupied with looking at him. He was short, in his sixties or older, in an ancient brown shirt and with the haircut of a man who tells the barber to do whatever’s easiest. He could be one of the Mediterranean men watching soccer in the neighborhood’s pre-gentrification bars. Except his eyes, old and wise and gentle, didn’t belong: not in this office, not in this city, not in this century.
Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen Page 16
