Corridor Nine

by Sophie Stocking

  “Come on, let’s go,” she says to Angus. They walk out the kitchen door again. She locks it with the blue key, puts the key back in the plastic rock, and wedges the plastic rock into her childhood rock collection. They drive away, but part way up the highway the contorted knot of her stomach refuses to hold her breakfast any longer. She pulls over, crawls across the passenger seat and vomits out the door.

  “Will we have to do this in punishing chronological order?” asks Fabian. Bune sits entranced by the flickering images.

  “This part is so heartbreaking. The Christmas Harold didn’t come home, left for a walk after breakfast and didn’t get back until eleven o’clock that night. They had the turkey alone, Bernadette’s mother and father (your great-grandma and -grandpa Elizabeth and Herbert), Bernadette, and eight-year-old Evelyn. A Christmas to remember, don’t you think, so embarrassing. You can see how that coloured . . . ” Bune looks sideways at Fabian who spins on his bottom, rolls his eyes and looks off into the dark. “How that coloured her feelings about men? This is too methodical? What would you prefer?”

  “I’ve heard that story a hundred times. I thought you were going to give me an overview of the ‘Big Picture’ first. You said you’d tell me after our walk.”

  Bune stretches his wings behind him, flexing them spasmodically at their furthest extension. They brush in a muscular way against Fabian, toppling him sideways; they feel stronger, more softly napped, than feathers should. Looking closely, Fabian sees they are constructed like leaves, lacking the delicate inter-hooking barbules of an avian feather.

  “Hey!” says Fabian. Bune pretends not to notice, flexing his wings back some more and out to the sides, pushing and nudging at the homunculus boy like a dog would a pup. Fabian refuses to relent, rolls away and gets to his feet. “You promised! You said I could see an overview.” Hands on hips, he stretches as tall as he is able.

  Bune gets up and shakes out his legs, the cloud gown crackles and gives off soft echoes of thunder. “All right, there’s no harm in getting a lay of the land. Here, I will put up a diagram of how we are going to proceed over the next while, the course outline, and then a diagram of, how can I express this? I guess you said it best, ‘The Big Picture’.”

  “Yes, a map. Can’t we start with the map?”

  Bune looks down at him; his rocky face shifts to amusement.

  “If you like. Now watch.” He gestures towards the Membrane and Fabian’s eyes search, frantic and hungry, but then grow puzzled.

  “Well it just looks like a bull’s eye. You’re telling me the Master Plan is some sort of dart board?”

  “Let me orient you,” says Bune. “The very outermost layer, the darkest stripe is Corridor Ten, the realm of reorganization, this is where the basic building blocks for beings come from. If you fail in your next assignment this is where you’ll end up. Like I said before, the bonds of self dissolve, and a mulching process occurs, kind of like composting. Beyond all the time and effort, you’ve put in I suppose it isn’t such a waste because your essence will be reconfigured for some other being.” “Does that hurt?” Bune looks away.

  “It’s not something you can remember, but definitely Corridor Ten echoes with groaning and gnashing sounds, very noisy. Luckily, I’ve never been employed there. But let’s move on. Here we are thankfully in Corridor Nine.” Fabian stares at the second ring, which glows a dark burgundy. A band of light separates it from the third ring, of a less clotted red, and so on. The rings progress towards the centre of the donut. The smallest innermost ring shines a clear pale gold. At the very centre, inky black and spinning, Fabian sees an exquisite planet. It radiates a quivering light so that he can only indistinctly make out the geography. All the rings are separated by an outline of radiating light.

  “What are those lines of light,” asks Fabian, “between the Corridors? I’m surprised really, this map seems so reductionist, I thought the universe was about expansion.”

  “Oh, you can find your universe, tucked into the layers of light roughly between Corridors Nine through Six.” Bune points toward the Membrane, his craggy finger tracing each of the radiant borders, making them glow more brightly. “Within these bands you see, are housed your assignments or lifetimes. You enter them; I’ll have to zoom in, via the Sponsor Ring. Here, do you see?” A circular cut out of Corridor Nine projects forward in greater and greater detail until Fabian can see an outer tracing of pink around the ring of light. “The pink band, the Gateway, gives you entrance into your next assignment.”

  “What would motivate me to keep moving towards the centre of this bull’s eye? It seems like a lot of effort, my last assignment was so horrific, punishing really. Do they get better as they progress? I feel so constricted.” Bune reaches out to lay a consoling hand on Fabian’s shoulder, but Fabian moves away, hunkering on his heels and gripping his head in his hands.

  “Each layer is less and less constricting, with greater freedoms, greater joys, until you reach the centre and that truly is, how do you say it? ‘Mind blowing,’” chuckles Bune.

  “That’s where they’ve hidden it then?” says Fabian, standing up. He begins to vibrate with excitement, “that’s where they’ve hidden Valhalla!”

  “Val who?”

  “Valhalla! Paradise! Heaven! The Promised Land!” Fabian hops from foot to foot. Bune clasps his hands behind his back and waits, staring into the middle distance. In a minute Fabian whirls towards him.

  “There’s got to be a Fast Track plan, shortcuts, points for good behaviour. Something!”

  “Tadpole,” says Bune, “we must start with patience, step by step, endurance, stoicism. One of your three lessons. Although any corridor can be accessed from any gateway, skipping a level is almost unheard of. It would depend on your intent and the evolutionary level of your Sponsor, none the less very unlikely. You’d need to be a quick study and made of pure material.”

  “Like skipping a grade in school!” exults Fabian. “My mother had the principal move me ahead in Grade Two . . . Okay, now where is the entrance to this ‘Gateway’? What did you call it, the Sponsor Ring? Bune smiles and gestures magnanimously towards the Membrane. A dotted moving light can be seen extending at a right angle from the burgundy band of Corridor Nine into the pink Sponsor Ring.

  “Just like the strip of emergency lighting in an airplane,” says Fabian. “But where does the entrance lie relative to me, I mean to our position?” Bune zooms the diagram out again.

  “I believe this is what you are looking for . . . ” a red X appears at the three o’clock position on the burgundy ring, “and the exit is anywhere along the furthest external edge of Corridor Nine, you see the little light?” Fabian stares at a capricious sparkle that skips and zips, reappearing unpredictably around the perimeter.

  “If it won’t stay still, how can we enter through it?” “You need me. I must take you,” says Bune.

  Bernie wakes tangled in the blanket on her bed. The alarm blares. What planet was she on? She flails until she makes contact with the alarm clock and turns it off. Two-thirty, but what those numbers signify she doesn’t know. She lies there for five minutes staring at the moving branches outside her window before it dawns on her that two-thirty means time to pick the kids up from school; she has to go in ten minutes to be there by three-fifteen. Bernie gets up and splashes water on her face. She brushes her teeth and wishes she had time to wash her hair. Tonight, she must fit in a shower. She clamps a cap onto her head and finds a clean sweater.

  Waiting in the playground she makes small talk with other parents. Yes, the weather has been amazing, can’t complain. Are you volunteering for the Science Centre field trip? Ilene tries to motivate her to spearhead the next bottle drive. Bernadette wonders how she looks from the outside, how they possibly couldn’t know. All these people and their normal healthy lives. How was your summer, I never got the chance to ask? Just dandy. She couldn’t tell them anything, couldn’t ask casually, “Does anybody know of a reliable post-death-cleanup service?
”

  Finally, the bell rings and the kids start streaming out of the blue door. Lola comes out first, talking intently to her friend Gretchen, no doubt about their hedgehogs. They had been planning on getting their pets together for a social visit on the weekend. Bernie hopes they are right about both owning females. Now the twins. They pick her out of the crowd and run at her, nearly knocking her over with the impact of their daddy-long-leg bodies. Mommy! With the offer of ice cream, they forego the playground and head for the minivan. She follows them, bright globules of light in Bernie’s dark world.

  “Mom, can we stop at the pet store and get some more meal worms? Cynthia hasn’t had a chance to hunt all week.”

  “Really, do we have to get live ones? It’s just the way they squirm, Lola. Couldn’t we buy the freeze-dried ones, then I wouldn’t have to keep them in the cheese drawer.”

  “It keeps her sharp, Mom, I think actually she’s a little depressed. Insectivores need to stalk their prey, it’s an instinct, like migrating.”

  Bernie laughs, “Okay, the pet store then ice cream.”

  “Oh, and Mom, please please please, can we stop at Staples? I’ve run out of elastic bands,” begs Louie.

  “Your elastic band ball is huge Louie. Will an elastic even fit now? Last time we measured it was ten inches across.”

  “I’m taking it to school next week for show and tell, please mom.”

  “Okay, pet store, Staples, ice cream.” Feeling wildly benevolent, “anything for Moira?” looking into the rear-view mirror where her skinny girl sits, her head partially out the open window singing one of her stream-of-consciousness ditties. The slipstream partially fills and flaps her cheeks. “Moira, do you need anything on the way home? What’s she singing, Louie?”

  “Something about ‘I don’t care, you can’t make me, you guys can all go climb a tree, usual stuff,” says Louie.

  “Ah yes,” says Bernie. She lets everything in the van warm her up. Her three-hour nap has restored her to a level of sleep deprivation that felt like the buzz after two glasses of wine. The sun pours over them. Stepping into Staples, she breathes in the wonderful stationary store smell, reams and reams of paper, erasers by the box-full, paper clips, Duo tangs, those sticky circular hole reinforcers. She loves all of it with a sudden ferocity, so normal, so grounding, the staff people who smile at her and wish her a good night, despite their day marinated in top forty tunes and fluorescent lighting. The girl at the drive-through ice cream window, a tattoo in her cleavage and a stud in her tongue, winks when Bernie thanks her for the lavish doling out of ice cream. She probably lives in a basement suite with her abusive boyfriend and yet she was so kind.

  When all the errands are done, they drive home. Walking into the front hall, she sees Eben’s shoes and backpack splayed across the floor, proof of his existence and return home on the school bus.

  “Eben!” she shouts up the stairs. “Eben, how was your day?” No reply. I yell too much, she thinks, and starts climbing. Forgetting he lives here is becoming too easy. Upstairs she walks noisily to warn him of her coming and then knocks on his door.

  “Eben?” he lays on his bed with the duvet pulled over his head, his back towards her.

  “What?” he pulls the blanket back and rotates to look at her, pained boredom on his pale and acne-tortured face. He pulls his earbuds out by their wires.

  “I just wanted to see you. How was your day? Is there anything on tonight? I was thinking . . . ”

  “Mom, it was all normal, just a normal day.”

  “The kids and I saw this cool bike repair place on the way home from school, down by Totem. I guess they help you fix your bike, and it’s a great place to go get volunteer experience. Why don’t . . . ”

  “Mom, please, just go away. I’m tired.” He rolls over and pulls up the quilt. Bernie stands there staring at the long burial mound of her child. She wants to wrestle with him, make him laugh like when he was twelve, wants to give him a back rub, as she always had. The last time happened about a year ago when he’d slept through his alarm. “Don’t touch me!” he’d snapped. For awhile she’d asked permission and sometimes, he’d say yes, but at this point it wasn’t respectful to even attempt. Bernie turns around and leaves the room.

  The twins are outside jumping on the trampoline, shouting and laughing. Bernie walks to Lola’s room where a sign is posted on her door, “Hedgehog at Large”. She slips in quickly and closes it. They have to be careful in light of Angus’s questionable loyalty to Cynthia. Lola lies on the floor on her belly. Beside her, arranged in a labyrinth of wrinkles, her fleece baby blanket twitches and vibrates.

  “Watch this Mom! Watch! I’ve hidden five mealworms; let’s see how long it takes her to find them. She’s so fast with her nose . . . ”

  At least she has Lola for another couple years, and a long, long time with the twins she thinks, as she walks into the kitchen to start supper. Tonight, she will actually cook and not just heat up pizzas or order Vietnamese. She must start functioning again, but digging through the fridge and freezer she realizes the scarcity of anything verging on edible. She manages to find two bags of frozen beef raviolis, a large onion that has started to rot at the crown but is otherwise sound, four slightly wrinkled tomatoes, some shrivelled but not decomposing garlic.

  Bernie heads to the garden with a knife. She pauses before her studio, the large shed Peter had renovated. He’d insulated it, installed a Franklin stove, and a north facing many-paned window, rescued from some old house. At the peak of the roof perches the sundial her father made from her drawing when she was ten. She’d drawn a long arrow that blossomed at the tail with a sun and a crescent moon. It rotates with a squawk, and she imagines the marble inside the pipe, the pivot point, shattered long ago.

  She walks on, climbs the cast-concrete stairs that meander through the modernist garden of tiered beds that Peter designed for her. She had worked on this garden all summer, and the raised beds spill over now with an explosion of growth. First, she pulls carrots, then digs a few leeks, silky and as thick as her thumb, cuts some oregano and flat-leaf parsley, and finds a small zucchini that hasn’t exploded to whale-like proportions like the others. She shouts to the twins on the trampoline.

  “Lou and Mo come see your zucchini. They’ve gone crazy!”

  In the bed against the retaining wall, cherry tomatoes grow, their laden branches propped up in wire cages. Bernie gathers handfuls of round red and yellow pear-shaped ones, carrying them to the house using the front of her t-shirt like an apron. In the kitchen she washes the dirt off the leeks, chops garlic and zucchini, throws in the tomatoes, and gets it all sautéing in olive oil. She fills the big pot with water and adds a handful of salt. She tastes it. Pasta water should be as salty as the Dead Sea. When the vegetables are soft she mashes them with her potato masher, and seasons them. The ravioli are al dente. Peter and his team are working late on the development permit for his airport project. Terminal D, hopefully ready to proceed to construction in the spring. He won’t be home until late. She calls the kids to the table feeling victorious, the clock says six thirty, and the meal actually contains both protein and fresh vegetables. They all sit around the table, except for Eben who deigns to sit on the couch.

  “Eben, before you vanish, you have to unload the dishwasher. Then Lola, you load, and Lou and Mo,” she looks around, but they are in their room. She hears the rustling, tinkling sound of their hands searching and pushing through piles of Lego. Ah, never mind, she’ll scrub out the two pots herself. Eben without any complaint or resistance goes to the dishwasher and gets to work, and when he finishes Lola steps in and fills it with unaccustomed efficiency. Their goodness puzzles her.

  Sitting on Lola’s bed, Bernie reads Harriet the Spy to the three younger ones. Bernie finishes the cliff-hanging chapter, where Harriet’s friends find her perfidious notebook, and she must face them for the first time at school.

  Bernie looks up and Lola, Louis, and Moira are staring at her transfixed, like do
gs waiting to be thrown a steak. Now comes the begging and wrestling match she thinks, as she shuts the book, “Please just one more chapter!” but Lola makes an odd clicking noise with her tongue on the roof of her mouth.

  “Remember, guys?” she says to the twins, and then all three of them get up and shuffle off to brush their teeth.

  What’s up with that, wonders Bernie.

  Later she walks around the house switching off lights and turning down thermostat. She checks on the twins. They sleep together in the bottom bunk, Mo’s arm thrown over Louis, whose head lolls close to the edge of the bed. Bernie shifts Moira further in towards the wall and then moves Lou. No danger of waking them, they sleep like the dead. The horrible morning and trip to the old house seem a week ago, so different from the calm at the end of the day. Perhaps finally going into the house was the trigger, no more procrastination and worry about the unknown. Maybe that will be enough to keep her asleep tonight. Bernie gets out of her clothes and puts on her bathrobe. She brushes her teeth and, taking her laptop, crawls into bed.

  What would the appropriate term be? Bernie types in “after-death disposal” and a list of coroner’s offices and funeral homes comes up. No, she had no actual body to worry about. “Cleaning services”, but she couldn’t ask some lady from Molly Maid to rip out a shit-encrusted carpet. Finally, she tries “suicide clean up” and finds page after page about “biohazard remediation”. There are pictures of large friendly men in protective hazmat suits, fabric booties, and respirators. On an American website for a company called Biocare she reads: “Suicide clean up attempts are best handled by our trained professionals. It is recommended that friends and family members, do not try to clean the scene of a suicide for safety and emotional well-being. Contact us!” How wonderful is that, thinks Bernie. She types in “suicide clean up Calgary”. Two listings come up on YellowPages.ca.