by John Gould
“Of course.” She smiles, steps forward. It never hurts to be pleasant to people. “I’m Val. I was … we were all so sorry to hear.”
“Val,” he says. “Thank you. It’s a long time ago now.”
“It is.”
A brief silence. He opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. “I actually … it’s odd remembering this. I actually came along on that date.”
“Date?”
“You and Ricky. His plan was to take you swimming, just the two of you, but he lost his nerve and wanted me along.” Ronny shrugs. “I was the outgoing one, as you may recall.”
“No.”
“Anyway, it was a big deal for him. He almost never spoke to girls, but he was crazy about you.”
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”
“No, you wouldn’t have known, he wouldn’t have made much out of it. But he was smitten.”
“I’m saying you’re mistaken about the date. Ricky asked me out, but I didn’t go.”
“Didn’t go?”
“I was seeing Ken Grant. Remember, from rugby?” She finds herself making an absurd huggish sort of gesture, as though to lock Ronny in a scrum.
“But —”
“I wish I’d gone, believe me.”
“Ah.”
“Stupid girl.”
“No. I mean, I certainly didn’t mean …” Ronny looks about, apparently in search of a clue as to where he’d been headed.
She says, “I really do wish that.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Listen, you take care now, okay? And give my best to Helen, will you? I had a big crush on her.” He chuckles in a self-deprecating way, turns and strides off.
She turns too, back to the shop window. A clerk is just climbing into the display to fetch a teddy bear, or actually a fuzzy baboon. The little red tent — fifty dollars, can that be right? Far too much for a make-believe tent. Imagine crawling in there, though, you and a brother or sister. How safe that would feel.
Earthlings
Apogee is different, since we lost Perigee. She yowls even more, and she keeps trying to throw up, to empty her empty stomach. She sleeps at Perigee’s end of the padded cage, which I’ve moved into the crew capsule so she can be closer to me. She’ll startle for no reason, and swim weightlessly around in tight little circles, a decaying orbit with the pull of a black hole at its centre. Is this what grief looks like, for a cat? Growing up, my sister and I were only ever allowed guinea pigs. We’d have a funeral each time one “joined the choir celestial,” as Mum would say, and I’d marvel at what seemed even to me like the disproportionate depth of my despair. I failed to be curious about how its buddies felt. Incredible, how much of my life I’ve spent not noticing, or noticing only what was already evident to me.
It was Gabi, it was my colleague Dr. Gabisile Nkosi, who renamed the cats just before our launch. Apogee, the point in a terrestrial orbit that’s furthest from the earth. Perigee, the point that’s closest. Nerdy names, but also kind of perfect. “O-Apogee, O-Apogee,” I sing, like “Awimbawe,” the chanty background bit of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” If Gabi were here she could do the other bit. She probably had a better singing voice than I do. It couldn’t have been much worse.
Perigee died this morning (granted, time of day doesn’t mean much when you circle the earth every ninety minutes), Gabi last night. Gabi was out trying to see where we’d been struck, what systems might be restored. We did rock paper scissors. I lost. Our mission had already been aborted, it was a matter of mustering enough control for a re-entry. The chances of Gabi being hit too were minuscule. We must have passed through a cloud of debris, a busted up old satellite or some such. At seventeen thousand miles an hour, a fleck of metal will barely slow as it drills through you.
Our whole lives we’re bullied by gravity. We obey, we knuckle under. The longing to get free, isn’t that just gravity talking too? This is the kind of thought I’d share with Petra, if I had one more chance.
Apogee paddles her way over to nuzzle my fingers when I poke them through the bars of her cage. She doesn’t seem to have any desire to get buckled back into what Gabi called her “blastoff box,” and I’m not going to insist. I’ve unplugged her from the hard drive that was capturing her data — the hookup on her head looks like a tiny little top hat. She’s lucky we missed our rendezvous, or at least this is the story I’m telling her. She’s better off to orbit with me for a few more hours and then die (I’ll have to devise a way to kill her when the time comes, when our life support begins to shut down for good) than to be gradually dismantled on the space station. With no weight to bear she’d have declined like a little old lady, muscles atrophying, bones growing porous, and the team would have done whatever it took to extract information that might one day be useful to us. Like every other thing, animate or inanimate, she’d have been transformed into a text for us to read, a reservoir of data for us to drain. I keep apologizing to her for that, and for everything else. This, where we are right now — whistling pointlessly around the planet, a couple of carbon-based creatures wedged into a boy’s toy — this is where we’ve been headed all along. I knew it, but she did not.
I say a couple of carbon-based creatures, but in fact there are a whole lot of us. A veritable Noah’s ark, this ship, though heavy on “lower” life forms — the folks in back are all insects and amphibians. Of what suffering might they be capable? Is it possible that they’re grieving too, as their kin perish? How would I know? I gaze godlike down from space, taking note of how clueless I am about myself and my fellow earthlings.
As a kid, I loved cheetahs, for their speed. My sister Soph loved lions, for their strength. Oh God, my sister Soph. They’ll have brought her in by now, on the chance that we might regain communication. And Petra, though our relationship is almost too new to count. And of course Gabi’s people, her husband and two daughters, since as far as they know she’s still in here with me, not mummified and towed behind us on her tether. Horizon, this is Mission Control Houston. Do you read?
Sometime out in the middle of our last night together — we were soaking in the bathtub, thoroughly soused on one another — Petra got serious. She asked me if I ever have doubts about the way I’ve chosen to spend my time, if I ever regret letting myself be “seduced by velocity” — she meant my flying career, I think, but also the way I’ve confessed to careening through my private life. Could I imagine another route to transcendence, another way out of whatever it is we’re all stuck in? Her voice was wistful, and so soft she might have meant it as more pillow talk. Looking back, I realize she was trying to tell me something about herself, about the grim frenzy of her own past. I should have asked her, but instead I answered. I hope she’s forgotten whatever I said by way of evasion.
Both of us have been lost a long time. Do we not deserve a little found time together? Then again, getting what you deserve, is that the point of this particular universe?
Apogee’s on the move again, bunting herself about the cage like a calico balloon. I’ve explained to her that it’s an illusion, this experience of weightlessness. I’ve explained that we aren’t actually drifting but dropping, in free fall around the earth. For now, the pull of the planet is perfectly offset by our forward momentum. It’s like jumping out a too-high window, I tell her. Until you land, it’s liberty.
She isn’t much interested in this kind of talk. She likes it better when I sing.
Skywalker
Amongst the papers my mother left behind when she died — files from old court cases, mostly, the failed prosecutions by which she was most vividly haunted — was the draft of a mystery novel. Under its title, Song of the Skull, she’d supplied a couple of highbrow epigraphs, pulled, presumably, from the fat volumes of philosophy she kept on her bookshelf. I’d never seen her open one, but then again I seem to have missed a lot. Spinoza: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” And Heraclitus: “Everything flows, nothing remains.” What we want is to
keep being what we are, or imagine ourselves to be. What we want is exactly what we can’t have.
Mother had concocted a challenging pair of murders. First to die was a young Indigenous activist seeking to have certain human remains repatriated to the people of the land from which they’d been stolen a century earlier. Suspicion for the murder was directed at the curator of the museum, who was disturbingly zealous in his efforts to prevent those remains being released. He acknowledged that it was wrong to exhibit the bones of First Nations people, but couldn’t grasp the necessity of returning them. His shaky rationale in this particular case was that Luke (as he’d taken to calling the collection of bones labeled L640) had been dead seven thousand years, and might not be related to anybody who now lived in the area. The only way to confirm this, or refute it, would be to perform further DNA and other tests on Luke’s skeleton, precisely the kind of desecration from which the band was seeking to spare him.
But then the curator was killed too. He had his throat slit with a Neolithic flint blade, of the sort Luke himself would have wielded, filched from the museum’s collection. This was the same fate that had befallen the activist. Same M.O., so same attacker? Who would want both of them dead? Who stood to gain from silencing both sides?
There were other twists too. Most of the books on Mother’s shelves were mysteries, and she knew her stuff, knew what it took to entice and befuddle a reader. Might the whole thing have been a hoax, the bones planted by somebody out to make mischief? Might the first murder have been a hate crime (there’d been a rash of such killings in the community a couple of years earlier), the second an attempt to cover it up? And so on, a whole host of obfuscating prejudices and desires.
Mother’s taste was for hardboiled American mysteries, but she looked more the part of an Agatha Christie character — the slightly addled aunt, say, who notices things she oughtn’t. Her style on the page was a curious hybrid of the two, the gritty and the effete. She’d had a go at adding colour to her story through evocations of Indigenous life, about which she knew nothing. This was painfully obvious, even to another outsider like me, but the earnest generosity of her imaginings went some way to make up for it. She’d risked a few fancy moves, for instance granting the activist a vision in which she fought and found herself bayoneted by a white man on the field of an old battle. She remained conscious, indeed serene, as her skull was measured and found to be “primitive,” supposed proof that she and her people were inferior to the invaders who were engineering their extinction. The vision ended — I’ve never admired Mother more — with a glimpse of the white man, older now, a raving syphilitic, face caved in like a rotten gourd, baying at a lantern he’d mistaken for the moon.
Mother’s mystery worked, in the sense that it made me crave a solution. Fortunately I’d skipped ahead (I’ve never been able to bear suspense) to find that there wasn’t one. Mother had left her book unfinished. I’ve searched her records, rummaged through her files, digital and otherwise, and found no evidence that she knew who to hold responsible for the two deaths. Her weakness as a lawyer — a weakness I’ve inherited, along with the profession — was a tendency to be overwhelmed by conflicting narratives. Perhaps this flaw stymied her as an author as well, made it impossible for her to home in on one culprit. Or perhaps she simply ran out of time. Her death was sudden, as sudden as an assault she might have visited upon one of her characters.
It’s the other mystery that most matters to me, of course. Why did Mother keep her mystery novel to herself? In a way, it’s no mystery at all. She and I were never intimate, not since I was a boy. When Mother and I talked, we talked about work, about nuances of the law that seemed to escape our colleagues. Intimacy of a sort, but we steered clear of the more personal confidences that tend to signify a family bond. Mother would once in a while hint that it was time I put down roots, found somebody special, but she did so in a way that made the notion sound even more farfetched than I already believed it to be. The most confessional she’d get on her own account would be to muse, now and then, about trying a whodunit for herself. It disheartened her that she hadn’t any ideas. Despite a career spent prosecuting criminals, she was stumped when it came to devising a crime of her own. What ultimately clicked for her? And what made her feel the need to conceal her inspiration from me?
It was a matter of delicacy, as best I can piece it together. Respect for the dead. To explain the Indigenous theme to me, Mother would have had to reveal that she herself was Indigenous, or partly so. To explain that, she would have had to reveal that her father wasn’t her father, that her mother went AWOL for a few months at the start of their marriage, fleeing her new husband for the charms of a guy named Randy Rice. All of this, or most of it, was discovered by a distant cousin of Mother’s who’d retired and taken to puttering at genealogy. Mother learned of her complicated parentage a couple of years before she died, but kept the knowledge to herself. She clearly used it to try to make sense of the disturbances in her own upbringing, and thus in mine. She took to brooding in private about the ongoing injustices visited upon a people with whom she now felt so connected. Since she didn’t have it in her to rant, she sought to encode her outrage in a mystery story. That story, the process of crafting it, seems to have intensified her feelings to the point that they couldn’t be expressed.
Randy Rice was Mohawk. He would have said that he was of the Kanien’kehá:ka, the People of the Flint Nation. Or at least I believe that’s what he’d have said — my ignorance is, to be truthful, largely intact. He appears to have been a “sky-walker” (thus the cute “Luke” clue from Mother, a nod to my childhood obsession with Star Wars), one of the many men of his people who worked the high steel. I haven’t been able to determine if he was ever in New York City, but it’s on the Empire State Building that I imagine him, guiding a girder into place a thousand feet above the teeming city. Ladies in cloche hats, men in fedoras.
I picture him, my grandfather, or I try to. Envision him. My grandfather, his father, his father’s father, and so on. I turn around and go the other way, forward in time but by a different route — I picture me if my settler forebears hadn’t fled their own lives, if they’d never overrun this land and leached into my bloodstream. I picture me at home here. I picture me at home anywhere, a stranger to nothing.
Savasana
Ed drives, Mel fiddles with the radio. Her parents’ place is far enough out of town that they lose the public radio station and have to find it again on a different frequency, which they can never remember one visit to the next. Ed had been half listening as another aria was introduced. Something from Rigoletto, which he’s pretty sure he hates, though hating is something on which he’s been trying to cut back. “Gilda,” said the guy on the radio, “is happy to die for her lover, the cad. Better perhaps to say she dies for love …”
“If my father offers you a second glass,” says Melanie, “you say no.”
“I do, do I?”
“You do. Please.”
“Even though he’ll go ahead and have a second glass himself. And a third, and a fourth, and start explaining to me how he saw the whole thing coming.”
“What whole thing?”
“Exactly.”
Mel continues to poke at buttons, getting blurts of news, weather, wimpy rock ’n’ roll. “Besides, with your pills.”
Ed lowers his window, lets the evening air lash at his face. “You know that thing where if you die in a dream you die for real?”
“If he pours a fourth, we leave,” says Melanie. “That’s a myth.”
“You think so? Have you ever died in one?”
“I’m not sure. Yes, once, definitely.” She gets Rigoletto, cranks it up to cover the roar of the wind, but it’s too stat-icky. She shuts it off. “Guess we’re in between.”
“Because actually, how could you dream you’re dead? Who’d dream it?”
“I drowned, and I washed up on the rocks, and the sun dried me and then I was okay. I was alive.” She shrugs, bewil
dered, and then worried. “Why, have you been having bad sleeps again? I heard you up last night.”
“Mm, odd sleeps.” The road curves closer to the shore, Ed accelerating to intensify the tug on his body. Bits of sunset bounce off the waves at them through a thin fence of fir trees.
“Maybe I should drive,” she says. “Want me to drive?”
“I keep waking up. I go to touch Galia, and before I can reach her, I’m awake.”
“Galia.”
This isn’t fair, sharing this. But would it be fair to shut it up inside? What he’s supposed to be doing is getting things out in the open, releasing the pressure.
She says, “Like, Galia?”
“Yeah. She’s in the camel pose. Or sometimes the cobra. Bhujangasana.”
“I know the names, Ed.”
His favourite is the corpse pose, savasana. You lie there, is what you do. Give up your body, murmurs Galia. Give up your mind. He’s come close, a time or two. The peace, the permeable sense of self Mel and the others seem to experience — he’s almost made contact. And then, maddeningly, felt himself recoil.
“Why are you trying to touch her?” says Mel. “And I mean, where are you trying to touch her?”
“Just … anywhere.” It was Mel’s idea, him signing up. Beginners’ class, a new way to work on his troubles. Purer, more positive. “That’s not the point.”
“Okay. What’s the point?” She turns his way. “It’s weird, right? We barely touch for months, and then you dream about touching another woman and —”
“Trying to touch another woman. I reach out, but then I wake up, every time.”
“Every time? Like, how many times?”
“I don’t know, Mel. Does that matter? The point is, it’s like falling, and then just before you hit … boom. You’re awake.”
“So …?”
“So maybe you didn’t drown. You were under water, but still breathing.”
