Return of the Trickster

by Eden Robinson

  “What’s your name?!” you shouted. “Come and tell me your name!”

  No one is ever going to find you. No one is ever going to resurrect you. You are going to stay on your little plot of land until the sun bloats up like a corpse in water, scorching the surface of the earth before swallowing it. This is your life from now until the last red dwarfs blink into nothingness and the black holes dominating the universe fizzle into oblivion. You will be unremembered, maligned, marooned. Bored.

  Pop.

  You are in Anita’s kitchen. Oh, this is not good. This is not good at all. You would rather be bored in the forest than here. But you are here and if Anita, your ever-loving ex, wants you here, it is not for anything good. She made herself clear and her psychotic daughter used her shotgun to drive home the point that you are not to come around here no more, no more.

  The baby in the high chair wears a blue onesie and a blue bib and blue socks. Chewing on his hands, eyes fixed on yours. He has a spray of Cheerios around his tray along with a half-full bottle of apple juice, but he’s alone in the kitchen. A tiny sparkling thread connects you to him, tiny diamonds glittering, a dewy spiderweb on a summer morning.

  Anita sits in the living room, rocking lightly, head turned away from the baby. You can see her curls.

  Oh, you are in hell. Maggie had your baby. You are a daddy. And Anita thinks the baby is you, doesn’t she? Anita thinks you’re going another round through childhood, replaying your greatest hits. You’re kind of insulted the woman you were practically married to thinks you’re that much of a moron. She had dumped you and immediately married Albert, even though everyone knew what an arsehole he was. You just meant to hang around long enough to make sure she was safe. So you hung out as her baby boy. Things went awry. Let’s leave it at that. So your baby is not only stuck with the psycho as a mother but an unforgiving Anita as a grandmother. He’s scared and alone and he holds out his arms to you because he wants you to pick him up.

  But you are done with these women. You are done. They can bulldoze their way through life and you will run for the exits if you see them. They have brought you nothing but grief.

  Your baby boy realizes you aren’t going to pick him up and turns his head to Anita but doesn’t make a sound. Kicks his legs and shoves his hand back in his mouth.

  Guilt is a useless emotion. What does it do, really? Makes you feel bad and that makes you feel virtuous because you feel bad.

  Big eyes. He’s giving you big, hopeful eyes. He can see you. He has power, but it’s quiet, nothing obvious or flashy. You move in carefully, cautiously, but Anita is not looking, steadfastly not looking, not watching TV or listening to music, but not participating in this little scene. It wasn’t Anita who called you. You are here because your son wants you here. He wants someone, anyone, and he has no idea who you are. Anita or Psycho Maggie will banish you back to the woods any minute.

  Baby Boy Trickster reaches out and grabs for your hand.

  Oh, that is impossible. There is no way that you can feel his warm, chubby fingers locked on your pointer, but here we are. Your baby can touch the incorporeal.

  This is all he wants from you. He wants you to let him hold your finger as he gnaws on his other fist, his cheeks chapped and shiny with drool. You’re not the fatherly type. This is well-established. No one is going to argue with that statement. You don’t see the point of kids. But you’re curious about what else your boy can do. You feel an unusual flutter that is…pride? Excitement? What the hell is this?

  The world shifts. Not your heart, or you, or anything in particular, but you feel the futures you were going to move through die and here is your new future, taking his drooly fist out of his mouth to offer you a damp Cheerio.

  The very basics of magic: everything you meet, you’ll meet again.

  Magic is a gravitational-like force, surprisingly weak unless you have a decent mass of material, of powers. Then magic becomes the great attractor. The stronger the magic, the harder the pull. Baby Boy Trickster here blasted through all the considerable warding his mother and grandmother put up and yanked you from your grave so that you would be standing here now to keep him company, and the kid didn’t even break a sweat.

  Pop.

  Blue’s Clues you could deal with, but the Teletubbies were relentlessly creepy. Bob the Builder was okay, but someone needed to send a Terminator back in time to kill the guy that thought up Thomas the Tank Engine. Jared the baby Trickster developed a fixation on Percy and he wanted you to be Thomas so you could go on adventures together. They’re all whingy nerds, you thought. But Jared was more interesting than the woods around your grave, even when he was rolling the toy Percy obsessively over the wooden tracks of the very expensive train set Sophia had given her “grandson” for Christmas. Now there was a nuclear explosion ready to happen. You were very much looking forward to watching Sophia nuke Maggie. Jared hugged Percy to his chest and slept with Percy beside him, resting on his very own Percy-sized pillow made from a rolled-up feminine hygiene product with a Percy-sized blanket made from a dishcloth.

  Toy Percy went missing at school. Jared hid under the bed and stuffed his jacket into his mouth and cried. He wanted you and you popped into his room and he told you how Percy was in his backpack on his hook but then he wasn’t and the teacher asked if Jared played with him at recess and he said no but she didn’t believe him and she let him cry at the back of the class. Maggie knocked on the bedroom door and you zipped back to your grave. Whatever transpired while you were gone you never knew. A few days later, you were in the corner looking out the window when Phil came home saying they had found Percy and Jared gripped his toy and took him back to his bedroom and left him on the tracks and crawled under the bed again.

  This is the kind of thing you aren’t good with. You didn’t really care about the whole Percy drama. But if Jared was going to mope, maybe you could speed things up.

  “What’s up?” you said, sliding under the bed. “Percy’s back. I thought you’d be happy.”

  “It’s Percy,” Jared said. “But it’s not my Percy.”

  “He’s a replacement Percy, huh?”

  Jared nodded. “But if I say anything, Mom and Dad will be sad that I’m sad.”

  “And that makes you sadder?”

  “It hurts.”

  “Ah.”

  Kids. Little weirdos with lax bladder control. Slightly better than monkeys, but more prone to bite.

  “Story,” Jared said.

  You told him about your grandfather, who took your finger and traced the carved symbols on a one-ton granite rock down the beach that makes a calendar with the light from the setting sun and the shadows from the peaks of the mountains. The sun set on this mountain on December 21 and walked across six mountains to here on June 21 and then it walked back and that was one year. When the sun hit a specific spot on the mountain marked by the calendar rock, it was time to leave the winter camps and go to where the herring spawn. And when it reached here, you had to go to the rivers where the oolichan spawn. And here the first growth of seaweed would be ripe and you had to go out to the rocks the seaweed liked to grow on, where the ocean heaved as though it was a giant breathing.

  Your grandfather loved the stars, knew the Dog Star, the Star with Ears, the phases of the moon tugging the tides. If he was alive now, you would buy him the biggest telescope you could afford and a cabin on the shore of a dark lake.

  Jared watching you with serious eyes.

  The memories you did not explore with Jared: The bully boys that tipped you off the raft you had helped them build and used their paddles to take turns dunking your head underwater. How they chased you with sea urchins on sticks and the winner was the one who stuck an urchin to your back first. How you had only been safe when your grandfather was alive. Your mother was so low in the ranks you and she were practically slaves. Common. She was a braggart, someone few people like
d, and the ill will trickled down to you and your sister. Your sister was beautiful. You were fair game. She was fair. Who knew the world of gods would be much like home? You had expected godlike power to come with godlike status, but here you were again, weak amongst powerful bullies. It was not the world you expected when you ascended to semi-immortality.

  You hadn’t expected to lose your memories when you took the form of an infant to watch over Anita. You expected to maintain your faculties in a baby’s body so you could make sure Albert behaved, that Anita was safe. But you really became Anita’s baby, her child, her kid. It’s embarrassing now how much you loved her house, being home, being the centre of her world. When the Trickster memories broke like a rotten egg, you tried to pretend you hadn’t remembered who you were, but it was all spoiled and she knew almost as soon as you did.

  Jared will turn on you. People are selfish and ultimately self-involved. You knew that even as you were telling him stories in his bedroom, even before your sister, once so fair but now more deformed than the last time you’d met, found you in your grave in the lonely woods.

  “Brother!” Jwasins had said. “Who killed you now?”

  “You know damn well,” you replied.

  “You and your angry witches.”

  Her grinning old-woman skin hid the twisted thing she’d become. You knew she was ambitious. She’d used the Great Dying to marry her way up, taking names and status. But you never thought she’d cross the line between useful magic and harmful. It marks her: her lengthened jaw, her gnashing teeth, her odd gait. Ogress. While you were cooling your heels in the woods, she’d been eating her way through smaller beings to become something much less human, radiating rotting, ill-begotten power, a flesh-and-blood Chernobyl.

  “I’d love to resurrect you,” she said.

  “But…”

  “I want us to be a family again. You’re all I have, brother.”

  The wolves surrounding her were bred with coyotes and probably dogs. Mutts with attitude. Alert. Ready to pounce. The familiar giggling buildup to cruelty. Your sister used an English name now, something generic and simple, but you couldn’t remember it at that moment, alarmed that she’d taken the next step in the villainy handbook and gotten herself some henchmen. Their teeth and growls were distracting.

  “I want to know your children,” Jwasins said. “I want to be a part of their lives.”

  Uh-huh. Yup. The vainest woman on Earth, who only started using magic when her looks faded, trying to stay young and beautiful. When that failed, she ate everything magical that moved to stay alive long past her best-before date, refusing her destiny as a lowly mortal. That Jwasins was suddenly feeling the love for him? She was plotting again, obviously. But you could work with that to get yourself free.

  “Sure!” And you told her the names of all the children you knew of, except for Jared and two other random kids to cover up the fact that you were trying to hide him. You genuinely might have missed a few others. You can’t really remember the seventies.

  Pop.

  But your sister found him anyway. When Jared disappeared, you felt him leave the earth and assumed he’d died. You felt the universe without him. Jared, seriously, was no Einstein. He wasn’t going to revolutionize the world. He wanted to work as an ultrasound technician in a mid-sized hospital and buy a new car every ten years. That’s as big as his dreams got. The world didn’t lose a shining humanitarian, great thinker or renowned artist. He earnestly blundered into trouble like Mr. Magoo.

  Your grandfather, the Trickster before you, sat down the beach as the masks burned, as the frontlets burned, as the button blankets burned. The fresh converts prayed as they watched their treasures destroyed. When the ashes from the missionary purge were cold, he walked into the forest.

  You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to live.

  Then your son returned. Here it was again, the distinctive Jared-shaped tangle of empathy, self-loathing and power. The irritating klaxon horn of his panic split your skull as his organs frolicked on the hospital floor. You regretted your one-sided bond. You’ve offered to teach him, but he has issues with you. Mule-headed like his mother and his grandmother. The kind of stubbornness that gets you dead.

  Baby Jared, kid Jared. How much he cared about his stupid train. How much he loved dancing around his bedroom to “The Ketchup Song,” even though it made his mom pull her hair and threaten to throw his boom box down the beach. How, when Jared went to sleep, he reached for your pointer finger.

  Are your own dreams much bigger than his? Your small house in Kitsilano, filled with your treasures. A life that doesn’t include constant terror and harassment. A full fridge and the sky to fly through.

  You like your life. You can hear your son, frightened, a tsunami siren blaring his location to the world. You want to tell him to shut up before he attracts the attention of any more severely crappy beings, but instead you pull up an article on the web. “The Comet Siding Spring will make a close flyby of Mars on October 19.” Ah, you’d forgotten about the total lunar eclipse on Wednesday. Maybe a quick trip to Vegas to gamble and then camp out in the desert to watch the show.

  Jared’s made it very clear what he thinks of you. If he wants any more of your help, he can damn well ask for it.

  5

  THE ROCHE LIMIT OF LOVE

  The moments during the long car ride when Jared managed to drift into sleep kept sending him to the airless world where the coy wolves thrashed and moaned and died. Georgina simply watched him and he could feel her attention across the universes. He woke from the last brief nap struggling for breath, then touched his temple where a headache bloomed. Lack of sleep. Flop-sweat smell of fear. Stomach roiling with guilt and self-loathing he couldn’t seem to shake.

  “I wish I could scrub my brain,” Jared said.

  When Kota didn’t react, Jared wondered if he’d said it out loud or if he’d just thought it. His cousin kept staring forward, the lights of oncoming traffic highlighting the bones in his face.

  “You need a pit stop?” Kota said.

  “No,” Jared said. “Just something to take the edge off.”

  “Like I need your mom, Aunt Mave and Hank blaming me for another relapse.”

  “I was joking. Mostly. Ha ha.”

  “Not fucking funny.”

  Kota pulled off at an exit and scowled at his phone until he found an early morning Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the burbs of Vancouver and he took Jared there without asking if he wanted to go. They plunked themselves in folding chairs. Afterwards, Jared shoved his third white chip in the back pocket of his dad’s slacks. He might do his ninety in ninety. He might not. Given how weird his world was now, what was the point of sobriety? He didn’t want to argue with Kota, though, until he wasn’t depending on him for a ride to Mave’s. They helped stack the chairs back into a closet and then sat outside on a peeling wooden bench in the drizzly rain while Kota chain-smoked and jiggled his leg.

  Kota exhaled upwards. “I should have told your mom David was following you.”

  “Don’t ‘should’ on yourself.”

  “I’m not blaming myself, you goof.”

  Normally, at a time like this, Jared would check his phone, but he had nothing to pretend to be busy studying. The windbreaker his dad had given him was not waterproof and the rain leaked through the shoulders.

  Kota stood and crushed out his cigarette butt. He strode towards the Canuck bug without looking back to see if Jared was following.

  Jared felt muddled and uneasy as he got off the bench and went to the car. Kota glared into the middle distance while Jared opened the door and slid quietly into the passenger’s seat. Maybe Kota was tired from driving all night. And Kota, for all his pissy moods, was the easiest member of his family to deal with. God, this was going to be messy. Just get through it minute by minute. No overthinking things.

  “Did I do
something?” Jared finally said.

  Kota glanced at him. “I’m angry. You’re part of why I’m angry, but it’s not about you. It’s my own shit.”

  I don’t think I deserve to live, Jared wanted to say to his cousin, but couldn’t. I’m afraid of what I’ve become.

  * * *

  —

  They pulled onto Graveley Street, where Mave’s building was. All the parking spots on the street were taken, so they drove around to the rear through the alley and down into the underground parking garage. Kota shut off the car and grabbed his phone, scrolling through his messages and then hunting and pecking furiously.

  “Ready?” Kota said, putting his phone away.

  “Nope,” Jared said. “But let’s get this over with.”

  He felt as if he’d been away forever, as if he was returning to his childhood home after being gone for years. The micro parking stalls, the slow elevator, the greying colour of the carpet as they stepped into the hallway all brought him back to what was only a week earlier. Had he changed so much? How much did it matter that he wasn’t the same kind of human as everyone else in this apartment building? This country? This world?

  At the other end of the hallway, Jared noticed a bunch of people. But when he turned to see if he knew any of them, he realized some were faint and some were shredding the way ghosts did when they were older and couldn’t hold themselves together anymore. They crowded against one particular door like shoppers anxiously awaiting Black Friday. It was the door to Eliza’s apartment, his little cousin who, like him, could see the supernatural.

  “Is Eliza okay?” Jared said.

  “Her dad died while you were gone,” Kota said. “They took him off life support.”

  “Oh,” Jared said. He hesitated, not wanting to involve Eliza and her mother, Olive, in his insane life, but also wanting to see that they were okay.

  “Come on,” Kota said, holding Mave’s apartment door open for him.

  When he stepped inside, Jared could tell it was empty of all ghostly visitors. For a moment he could feel the familiar presences—Sophia was a deep thrum like the lowest note of an electric guitar—but his mother drowned everyone else out. When he entered the living room, her power growled like thunder. The hair on his arms rose, his hackles stood up, and he was dizzy. Other people were in the room. He could hear them. But he could only see his mother, could only feel her fierce joy as she ran to him. They crashed together as if they were in danger of being pulled apart for good, and Jared couldn’t tell if he was screaming or she was. They rested their foreheads together. His mind was filled with her terror, her worry, her focus fuzzy from the drugs Mave had given her. He had always loved her, always, always, in ways that embarrassed him to admit, like a baby, like a shrieking toddler, the need not something normal adults should feel.