by Anne Stone
She imagines how it must feel to walk, heart fluttering in your ribs like a butterfly trapped in a drinking glass. What it’s like to have no control over it, not when the button is pushed, not when the world flies to pieces, taking you and those you love with it.
Over the last week, her pupils have become huge black pools. And the little of the iris that remains has changed colour. A brilliant green.
She’s read case studies.
She’s knows how organs can become viral reservoirs.
She can guess what’s happened to her. Figures that the only reason she’s still alive is because – whether it’s all the antivirals they pumped into her veins or that she was already infected with the old virus – somehow, the new strain has been confined to the orbs of her eyes.
What’s more interesting though, is how the virus has changed her eyes. How it has lengthened her vision, while turning everything close to her into a soft, forgiving blur.
Maybe bright lights hurt her now, but the dark has changed too. Because the dark, like her past, is no longer a thing to fear, because it is no longer absolute.
| Chapter 0 = X + 67
Dany finds a decent pair of sunglasses in the pocket of one of the bodies in the lobby. But even with them on, the sun is sharp, painfully so. So, yes, it hurts a little, to step out into the sun, to feel it on her face.
But over the last days, Dany has become accustomed to pain.
The streets of the city around her have been transformed into the hospice grounds.
The air is thick with the muttering of those who have forgotten the old world. She sees them, dotting the car-strewn roads and grassy places, everywhere. Here and there, sprawled on the ground, are the ones who didn’t survive the change. Dany surveys all of it, but most of all, she feels the sun on her face and the sun, which she never thought she’d see again, is good.
It’s brighter than she remembers, this sun, and it sets things in greater relief.
Dany looks down at her socks. One of the first things they did – after blinding her with an evac hood and shooting her full of barbiturates – was take her boots.
Still, she hasn’t missed her shit-kickers, not half so much as sunshine.
The sun is warm on her face, so warm and alive.
She looks up at the sky and sees the sun, a full and brilliant yellow. So bright, that even shaded by her glasses, the sun is galvanic, current-filled, dazzling. She looks at the luminous green of leaves on a tree – sees the electric blue sky – so bright and deep she feels like she is swimming in it.
All around her, the whole world trembles with light.
| Chapter 0 = X + 68
Dany is so happy to be alive, so graced by the sun, that an hour passes before she thinks to look at the intersection. From a city block away, she can read the street names painted on the sign, can see the least flaw in the lines of paint.
She’s never been here before, can’t say what city she’s in.
Still, glancing at the names on the street signs, she feels that familiar tickle of recollection – and yes, she knows she’s seen those street names before – but instead of pulling up an image from the archive, a map, there is a long whirring moment that should be followed by a click, but isn’t. In place of razor-sharp memory, there is déjà vu.
And then it’s déjà done. The memory gone. Zeroed out.
It’s as if a door has begun to close – on the vault of memory, taking who she is with it – and for the life of her, she can’t remember if there is a key.
| Chapter X = 0
For the first time in her life, the girl isn’t remembering. She’s not remembering what she is. She’s not remembering who she is. She’s lost. She’s standing there, lost, staring at lines on a street sign. And that’s when she hears it.
The sound is distant at first, but grows louder.
The rickety wheels of a grocery cart on asphalt, a familiar rough rattle.
She’s heard the cart over and over this last year. Soon, she knows, a woman with a familiar face will wheel her way around a blind corner. Maybe there will be a doll propped up in the child’s seat of woman’s cart – one with hair as wild as a little girl she once knew. And in the woman’s cart, maybe there’ll be photographs, little keepsakes, half-remembered from a lifetime ago, from childhood.
She’ll see the cart, and in it, she’ll see the history of two little girls, told in whatnots and bric-a-brac. A bauble-eyed bear won at a fair. A tiny house made out of Popsicle sticks. A tiny silver case that holds two locks of baby hair, and a handful of Tic Tac–sized teeth.
The woman will walk towards her, and to a stranger, it might look like the woman’s spine is a fossil, as if she is a clockwork doll, like she’s the Tin Woodman, joints weathered and rusted up. But the girl knows that isn’t true.
The girl knows something else too.
When she sees the woman – this time, she won’t run.
She looks up, and the sun on her face is good. The rattling draws close, and she tilts her head, listens. Then, all at once, she’s crying. But these tears are different than any she has ever known. These are tears of a different kind, made of entirely different stuff. They even taste different. These tears are clean and wet and as warm on her face as the sun. She pictures an old bottle of pills, but she can’t make out the letters, and she turns to face the woman with the shopping cart and –
“Hello,” the girl says. “Hello.”
Acknowledgements
Thank you to everyone at Buckrider Books: to Paul Vermeersch for really getting the book, for helping me see it through to its final form and creating the awesome space of possibility that is Buckrider Books; to Noelle Allen for being so incredibly supportive of Wolsak & Wynn authors and doing the hard work that allows books to be made and read. Thank you to Ashley Hisson for copy edits and all else; Michel Vrana for cover design; Jennifer Rawlinson for interior design; sales & marketing; and everyone at Wolsak & Wynn.
My immense gratitude to the Canada Council for the Arts and to the BC Arts Council – whose support of early drafts of this novel gave me the gift of time. Thank you to Banff, for offering me a self-directed residency (and a space in which I could really focus) and the Capilano University PD committee (for supporting that residency).
Threefold gratitude: to Wayde Compton (who read many drafts and parented as I wrote); to Senna Compton (for her huge heart and her inimitable art practice); and to Hiromi Goto (for the kind of brilliant editorial feedback that has made me a better writer). Gratitude to my families for love and stories. For child care, too, thank you to Ruth & Ross Stone, Alisha Hyrb, Pat & Levi Compton.
My heartfelt gratitude to Erin Soros, who did a sensitivity read of the book, and whose deep and thoughtful response helped me see the work anew (all flaws my own). Gratitude to Harry Karlinsky, whose advice and feedback on early drafts were not only empathetic and deeply informed, but so very generous. His insights made me ask the kinds of questions I could not have otherwise. Gratitude, too, to Harry’s colleagues at the Lucid Book Club – members of UBC’s psychiatric department – who spent their time and intelligence on an early draft, and Robin Evans, who shaped this session with great intelligence and care (once more, all flaws my own).
Many people have been generous over the years. Thank you to everyone who has read drafts, speculated on the world-building alongside me, loaned this novel an empathic eye, asked hard questions, shared knowledge with me about everything from brain chemistry to apocalyptic tropes to epidemiology to French idiom and grammar; who supported my writing, made space in the community, thought through titles with me; and of course, thank you to those who have been willing to get thoroughly drenched in cold rain while touring me around a real-life version of a book setting. Gratitude for the above and more to David Chariandy, Kevin Chong, Michelle Siobhan Cyca, Charles Demers, Daniel Demers, Ryan Knighton, Leanna
McLennan, Mike O’Connor, Emily Pohl-Weary, Caroline Purchase, Melanie Fahlman Reid, Renee Rodin, my many colleagues at Capilano University and the larger writing community whose conversations about writing are a gift.
Books are born of reading, and I owe necessary debts to more books and writers than could ever be listed. In particular, I’d like to acknowledge the following borrowed words & phrases: Vincent Racaniello’s virology blog describes viruses as “completely at the mercy of their environment” – a phrase I’ve loaned to Jasper Okello in this novel; the phrase “Character is destiny” appears in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and, as Alberto Moreiras points out, is likely derived from Heraclitus; Frank Baum authored the lines borrowed from The Wizard of Oz; Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, wrote, “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe”; Kara Roanhorse’s ongoing work on the concept of the “Indigenous multiverse,” gleaned only via a conference program, is the source of a too small to be legible quote on a T-shirt worn by a student at Dany’s school; and finally, Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses is the book Dany’s mom must have read to know about crickets. There are other nodes of intertextuality, of course, peppered throughout – tiny gestures to some of the books I love most.
Anne Stone is the author of three previous novels, Delible (2007), Hush (1999) and jacks: a gothic gospel (1998). She is currently at work on a collection of short fiction. She spent her childhood in Toronto, lived in Montreal and now makes her home in Vancouver, where she teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Capilano University.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, places and events portrayed are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead; events or locales is entirely coincidental.
© Anne Stone, 2020
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Buckrider Books is an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers.
Cover design: Michel Vrana
Interior design: Jennifer Rawlinson
Cover image: Tocarciuc Dumitru / istockphoto.com
Author photograph: Hiromi Goto
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the BC Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of Canada.
Buckrider Books
280 James Street North
Hamilton, ON
Canada L8R 2L3
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada.
ISBN 978-1-989496-11-4 (print)
ISBN 978-1-989496-24-4 (ebook)