Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  “Daphne,” Mr Perry says, somewhat breathlessly. He combs his fingers through his hair and dumps the stack of math books off the chair beside his desk. “And Helen.” An afterthought.

  I stand at the aquarium and try to tune it out: “Of every four. . .” When I do look I see this thick blue around Mom, like the edge of her is puffed up and leaning into Mr. Perry and sort of licking at him—which is pretty disgusting if you stop and think about it. And so I watch the fish instead—the tetras Mr. Perry claims he bought when it was legal to import wildlife from overseas. Their fins glimmer, and I’m still standing there watching them when Morgan and Emily arrive, dressed head to toe in red, including so-long-it-must-have-taken-all-summer-to-grow-them crimson fingernails that they flutter at Mom when Mr. Perry finally walks her to the door. I keep my eyes on the tank, even as Mom blows kisses at my head and sweeps a blue sparking wave towards me.

  “Hey,” I say, when Morgan and Emily wander over. Like I don’t give a shit that our trio is now a pair and neither of them has returned a phone call since the middle of July. Like I haven’t noticed that they’re dressed like mini versions of the Beacon’s spaced-out followers. Emily smiles, but Morgan just smirks.

  “What the fuck, Helen.” She yanks off the eye patch and slingshots it at the aquarium, but Mr. Perry is erasing pencilled pornography from math-book margins and doesn’t look up. I grab the thing and shove it in my pocket, but all of a sudden Mr. Perry is attentive.

  “Helen,” he says, pointing at his right eye. “Remember.”

  At recess Morgan and Emily are out the door before I’ve even made it to the cloakroom for the pride-and-joy bruised apple Mom bought as a first-day treat. They’re on the side steps, but when I sit down Morgan says, “We’re trying to have a private conversation here.” Which is what she used to say last year—to the other girls. The Freak Squad and the Ordinary Nobodies.

  “Fine.” I stand up and walk past the portables to the chain-link fence at the edge of the field. Grass-green and aquamarine, and puffs of turquoise through the petals of the daisies. The arrow on the terrorist alert sign at the edge of the field is halfway between amber and red, and someone has spray-painted Burn in Hell Raghead on the boarded window of the house that belonged to Mr. Abdul, last year’s pock-faced custodian. Then Morgan and Emily are by the goalpost and Morgan is whispering something in Emily’s ear, and rolling her eyes, and laughing, and looking away. Emily’s blue is so faint it’s like there was no wool left and all she got were some strands of thread, and Morgan’s is puffed up like Mom’s except that near her head there’s this streak of spitting orange.

  “Morgan, your head is on fire!” Which I honestly believe it is before my brain catches up with my stupid big mouth. I flip up the patch for an instant and see just her thick black curls.

  Half the kids on the field are turned towards me, the pirate loner. Morgan turns too, whipping her head from side to side, a shower of sparks, red whirls licking at her ears and down her neck.

  “Fuck, Helen,” she says. And louder, to make certain I can hear her. “Freak.”

  DAPHNE—MARCH 2015

  The doorstep of “The Emily Carr,” Daphne and Helen’s apartment building at the corner of Simcoe and Douglas, looks onto the cluster of lodgepole pines that fringe the Beacon Hill soccer pitch and the rusted football tackling-sled tipped sideways behind the bleachers. Beyond this, to the south, a pale strip of horizon divides sea and sky at Dallas Road, and the Olympic mountain range rises in a wash of greys. These are the things that have always been.

  But other things have changed. The Herons, a rotating roster of men and women from the Elk Lake commune, now live on platforms among the branches of the park’s last standing Douglas firs. In the north of the province, entire forests have been destroyed because of fir-termite infestations. Daphne sides with the Herons. She has little sympathy for the city’s cover-of-darkness tree-felling campaign—especially now, with reports that the demand for silver-streaked termite wood has skyrocketed in the Asian market. She has memories of those trees; when Helen was a toddler they used to collect eggshells from beneath them, dropped from the nests of the real herons. The park road is lined by rows of stumps, and though it is said that the chopped trees were burned, she has seen new fir desks and coffee tables in the offices at the legislature. In fact, she once sat in a silvery fir armchair while waiting to deliver a stack of proofed correspondence to the Minister of Forests—temperate responses to outraged environmental advocacy groups about the city park clear-cuts across the province. Her co-workers and neighbours would be appalled if they knew, but sometimes she bakes batches of shortbread cookies with jam-filled thumbprints— birds’ nests—and at night ties bags of them to the lower branches of the firs for the Herons’ breakfasts.

  Beneath the closest of these tree platforms is the strip of cement that was a water park before the restrictions, and before seventeen Canadian geese fell from the sky (paralyzed, but still in V-formation) during a lightning storm that saw the city lose its power for eleven days. The birds did not recover, and Daphne was hardly surprised when Helen came home from school a week later with theories about the Muslim community adding poisoned breadcrumbs to the piles of offerings left for the birds, targeting them because of their patriotic name. Though Daphne tried to talk some sense into her daughter, Helen said she refused to be part of a conversation in which her mother sided with terrorists.

  Children these days seem to Daphne to be more impressionable than before. And this is what worries her. Helen and her classmates turn their televisions on each morning to see whether the terror alert is amber or crimson, hide beneath their school desks once weekly during simulated terrorist attacks, and have gas masks stuffed inside their lockers. It’s not surprising that the Beacon, with his alarmist preaching, has found an army of supporters. She wishes he had set up camp elsewhere, but his green-plastic pre-fab garden shed is less than three blocks from their home, beside the bronze Terry Fox monument at Mile Zero. Although she isn’t certain if it will make a difference, she has forbidden Helen to go near the man. She is worried about her daughter joining the Beacon’s throng of crimson-clad teenage followers who pace the strip beside the cliffs like zombies, droning about the apocalypse to all who will listen. In fact she is worried about Helen going near Dallas Road at all. The tides are rising and the cliffs have been paved along the top with cement, but she knows that when storms come the ramparts will crumble and those nearby will be swept out to sea.

  As Daphne waits on the doorstep of her apartment building listening to Helen’s frothing about being dragged to a fucking war zone to be killed by fucking terrorists she thinks of these new things: the Herons, the Beacon, the lightning storms, the rising tides. These are what make her believe that anything is possible. That a man named Marcus Spark is coming to fly her and Helen to Iran. That Daphne is being sought for her expertise regarding classified matters. That she, a woman who has spent the last two decades typing letters in defence of programs and policies she doesn’t believe in, is finally being asked her opinion.

  POVED—OCTOBER 1944

  Today the Moscow doctor and my husband discussed my treatments. Beside them I sat in my blue dress—a fox, a wolf, and me a sheep already slaughtered. On the desk: thick volumes, water glass half-empty, yellow handkerchief, and at the edge a photograph— an imprint of a hand, thick smudge of prints with gauzy luminescence spreading outwards. I touched the fingers with my own before the doctor moved it from my view.

  “What is that?” My husband took the paper into his hands; this the doctor allowed.

  “From Semyon, the electronic technician. Just a photograph he exposed with an electrode. His hand.” The doctor traced the shape in the air.

  “The Blue.” I had my husband’s wrist, pulling it towards me, asking him to share. But he did not.

  “Poved and her colours.” He patted my thigh, his fingers bristling. “Everything a colour.” But he is wrong. Nothing is coloured now.

  DAP
HNE—FEBRUARY 1995

  The elderly woman in 11-D offered Daphne a stick of Juicy Fruit before takeoff. She unwrapped it first, her fingernails pressing moon-shaped grooves in the centre. Then, before the plane had even levelled, the woman fell asleep with her head tipped back and jolting towards Daphne’s shoulder, her smell a mix of disinfectant and bad perm. It was a reprieve—no one talking at her. Even the stewardesses scuttled quickly past, eyes averted from the tears.

  Across the aisle was a kid who reminded Daphne of Ben Adelman from third grade (the boy who had instigated a fistfight when he declared Your dad’s so old he’ll be dead before you finish high school. Daphne had given him a jab to the stomach for the cruelty of the statement, a broken nose for making her realize it could be true—Gerald already just months from sixty then, with more hair showing through the neckline of his undershirts than on his head). This Adelman doppelgänger was equally chinless and beady-eyed—Game Boy clutched in fat fists, a smirk as his feet stabbed into the back of his father’s seat. Daphne wanted to lean over and smack his face: Appreciate what you have, you little punk. Because someday you’ll be alone on an airplane wanting to buy back seconds from a God you don’t believe in.

  She should have gone home when Gerald first told her: “Harvey Monk is on his way out. Dying of cancer.” “Are you still telling those Harvey Monk stories?” she’d asked, but in the beat of silence that followed she’d realized what he meant. “What did the doctor say?” Her roommate’s mother had breast cancer, and Daphne knew about things. She knew about chemo and radiation. She knew about juice diets. She knew about visualization and meditation and the power of crystals. But there had been no doctor. Gerald had diagnosed himself.

  Daphne had called Mrs. Neang, who she hoped still spied on Gerald over the fence. And Mrs. Neang had assured her that each morning Gerald filled the birdfeeders and just the day before he had delivered grocery bags of tomatoes to the neighbours. She claimed he still unhooked his leg from time to time to the delight of her grandchildren. Don’t worry, Daff-a-nee. And she had stopped worrying. Besides, the next time she called, “cancer” seemed to have been abandoned.

  There had been nothing malignant until Christmas, when Daphne arrived for a visit to find the house furnished with little else than stacks of labelled boxes. Gerald had even dismantled his machine and filed away the photographs that had always papered the basement walls. And there he was, sitting in his gutted study, watching the Discovery Channel and eating dry-roasted peanuts from the Melmac camping bowl because the Corningware was ready for Daphne to take with her when she left. And he hadn’t looked sick at all.

  “Cancer of what?” she had demanded.

  And she had written down his answer and slipped it in her wallet so as to read it to the doctor, to illustrate the extent of her dad’s instability. “Bones, blood, marrow. I don’t know where it started, but it’s everywhere by now.”

  Somewhere in the back of the plane a baby was crying, and the Adelman double twisted towards the noise, his eyes daggers and his fingers in his ears. Her dad had always said: before you board, count the babies. Like he could cure her fear of flying through his faith in the kind of God who spared infants from tragedy, a God who was rational. He’d eye the strollers in the security line, pointing them out as he clutched his empty pant leg and hopped through the metal detector.

  Only a month earlier, they’d waited together in the snow for Daphne’s cab to the airport. He had grabbed her shivering arm and insisted she count the babies. Standing there on the doorstep in front of the Neang kids’ snow angels, there was so much Daphne could have said. But a week with Gerald was draining and she had just wanted to press fast-forward. She had been thinking past the flight home. She had been thinking about what she’d tell the doctor when she called his office, begged him to drag her father in for some tests, to prove him wrong.

  Two weeks later, after an exam on medieval devotional prose, she had come home to a message from Gerald on the answering machine: his diagnosis. And she had tried to be calm and efficient. She phoned her landlord and her professors. She culled her possessions into a single suitcase. It was when she realized she had no clean socks that she lost it. Lost it in a way that made her throat ache, made the man downstairs throw shoes at his ceiling. But Gerald had said: you’re not going anywhere, young lady. He’d said: we’ll see each other soon enough. And he’d sounded so good she let herself believe him.

  On the plane she realized she couldn’t remember her father the way she wanted to. All she saw was a shrunken moon-coloured person on a hospital bed bleeding from his ears. Her dad in his final moments. Her dad as the matter-of-fact nurse at the Regional described him.

  And then the plane hit turbulence and Daphne did the thing she always did: her legs hugged to her chest, knees pressed into her eye sockets, humming. Any particular tune you’re after? Gerald had asked, but still his hand would be there on her arm. As she was thinking about that hand, its absence, she felt a weight below her elbow. And when she opened her eyes, there he was, floating past the airplane window. No moon-person and no old man either, but Harvey Monk himself, ready to fight the forces of evil on distant planets. He had a fishbowl over his head and a jumpsuit like a bag of Jiffy Pop—puffed up and silver. His hand was raised and he might have been waving or he might have been doing the countdown to liftoff.

  The only goodbye she ever got.

  MARCUS—MARCH 2015

  “Harvey Monk felt a searing pain below his knee, like the sting of a nest of hornets, and looked down to see a flame—thin and blue, the width of a wisp of candle smoke—shooting from his leg. And yet his pants were not on fire.”

  Marcus read this passage from The Galaxy of Harvey Monk repeatedly on the plane to Victoria, and reads it again when Daphne and Helen are in the car—a 2012 Chevrolet Levatio, the only biodiesel vehicle manufactured in Canada before GM closed the Oshawa Car Assembly for good. Marcus keeps his voice low so that the men in the front seat can’t hear. He glances at Helen.

  “What do you think of that?”

  Still turned sideways glaring at her mother, she shrugs her shoulders.

  Daphne, her body a fruit basket of all things swollen and ripe, is so unlike the D.F. Morris Marcus imagined that he feels awkward around her. He is directing most of his attention towards her sullen and mostly mute kid who he has sat between them as a barrier.

  Outside the car window, past the conference centre, the Empress Hotel slumps sideways—propped against a row of metal girders. The place is deserted now, the view nothing more than the wall that holds the ocean at bay, and besides, who comes to this city anymore? Only the transients escaping Prairie drought and Eastern ice storms, their tarps and shoes spilling from the once boarded, broken windows of the Crystal Gardens. Even with the car windows rolled up, Blanshard Street smells of human shit. Further on, members of restless flocks stand waiting their turn in the line-ups outside St. Andrew’s Cathedral and the Temple Emanuel.

  Marcus remembers taking the Port Angeles ferry to Victoria on a high school band trip. He had marched down Douglas with his clarinet in the Victoria Day parade, and afterwards he and his friends had followed a group of local girls along the Inner Harbour, talking loudly about the quality of their asses. They meant to snare the girls with these compliments, but the redhead called them Yankee pricks and wanted to know why all Americans wore tube socks pulled halfway up their calves. Before his group left the next morning he bought a six-inch wooden totem pole in a gift shop, and didn’t notice the Made in China label until his mother thanked him for the gift and peeled it not-so-discreetly off.

  He wants to ask Daphne about Harvey Monk’s spontaneous combustion. But he’ll wait until the jet, when he can send the aides to the back, out of earshot. There are two of them, the skinny one driving, the other seated in the passenger seat—trying to look busy with stacks of paper but holding on to every word. And what if she did invent the entire thing? What good would his expert be among the scientists then?
r />   “Science fiction writer?” they repeated when he pulled the book from the side pocket of his suitcase.

  “A witness,” he clarified.

  They drive past the soggy garbage dump that was once Swan Lake and continue up the highway to Elk Lake, which the younger aide informed him has been taken over by a group of back-to-the-wild environmentalists. A tarp city with communal meals of steamed skunk cabbage and twig tea. Clothing is optional, by most accounts, and instead of attending school the kids learn from their elders how to construct water-filtration systems and start fires with sticks. Marcus has read about similar groups across this country and his own, and tries not to speculate on what they are preparing for.

  “So what was this classified thing that happened?” Daphne asks.

  But instead of answering, Marcus flips to another section of Galaxy.

  “‘Everybody has a self made of matter, and a self made of energy.’ Did you research this? Was this something you determined on your own?”

  “It’s fiction,” he hears Helen muttering. “Like as in, not true.”

  “My father discovered it through the use of Kirlian photography.” But she says it with a little smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Why? Because it’s something that’s obvious? Or is Helen right, did she really make all this up?

  Marcus skims the paragraphs as field after defended field flips by through the windows, a row of soldiers standing at the edge of the highway guarding carrots and sheep.

  GERALD—AUGUST 1994

  In London, before they shipped me home, I woke one night with a cramp in my leg so goddamned unbearable that I grabbed the closest thing to the bed—a crutch—and pounded at the mattress until the Scotsman wrestled the thing away. The nurse with the mole above her lip got the job of changing the bandages but the stump wasn’t the problem and I told her so in no uncertain terms.