Because of Mitch’s video posts, the ice room meme went viral within minutes and thousands of people requested guides on how to build one.
Mitch provided information without revealing our location.
But people found us anyway. The kind in uniform, enviro cops, checking this and that with vague non-orders.
“They’ve noticed the energy spike,” I said. Electricity, exclusively solar powered, was strictly monitored. I wish we’d had the materials to set up our own off-grid energy, but solar panels were no longer being produced.
“Turn off your grow lights for a few hours a night. That will confuse them. Sun’s freaking hot enough,” Kent said.
But the same two guys, a rookie and one my age, came back. They sampled the weed. (Mitch, Kent, and I never did, but I kept a stash for when any of us faced the end; I’d bought it for Mom to relieve her pain, which generated the decision to grow it). The cops hung out for hours, watching me work, getting in the way.
To ignore them, I pictured May, her pale hair and skin, but strong limbs from an inside exercise gym created by Kent, a skylight, and the baby veggies I cultivated in pockets between the marijuana. The first time we took her down to the rink, how her eyes had twinkled! Her hands clapped the faded mittens knitted by Mom for Kent, lifting up scrapings from the shovel Kent used to smooth the surface of the ice. I so wanted to let her lick them, but gently redirected her handful of ice to her cheek instead to feel the coolness, the wet. The rising colour in her face, the same hue as the mittens. A mitten fell off and the crystals melted into droplets in her little hot hand. She pushed a chair across the length of the ice, then pulled off her kiddie skates and her socks and shoes and squealed at bare feet on ice before Kent scooped her up and pretended to nibble her chilly toes. I kept May’s giggling in my ear now to keep me calm, fight fear.
In prison, there were no fans. They were legal in your home, as long as you kept under your kilowatt max. In prison, part of the punishment was roasting like a meat on a stick (totally illegal now, a carbon crime, but no wieners or processed food remained). The penal code had narrowed exclusively to environmental infractions. People could do whatever they liked to each other, and some did, but most were occupied by subsistence. There were no schools or hospitals anymore, but most folks helped each other because that was the only way to survive. Our refrigeration unit counted as an earth crime, bad as the retro chest freezers some oldsters kept plugged in during the heat of the day and climbed into at night for a few hours of cool rest. There was zero tolerance for the ultimate form of greed, staying cool from energy-sucking air conditioning or possessing carbon-emitting refrigeration. The penalty was prison, fed only from waste trucks and work without rest on the power stations until death.
“What’s this?” One of the officers fingered Kent’s red plaid jacket, once our Dad’s, hanging from the hook on the wall, not properly hidden by my silicon apron. About twenty-two, the curious one kept a carefully trimmed beard. (Shaving was no longer permitted, along with baths, showers, diuretics including coffee, tea, and alcohol of all kinds. And children.)
“My brother’s. A relic. He wants me to make a pillow out of it,” I said. Reuse of any kind was not only promoted but essential because manufacturing, innovation, industry—all of it—halted.
The cop sniffed the jacket. “It’s been worn recently.” He handed it to his partner. This one, bald with a Santa beard, was old enough to recognize the smell of wet wool.
Kent had recently left after putting down another layer of rink water. The plaid sleeve must have come undone at the cuff and dipped in the hose.
“Yup.” The old guy took another whiff and was gone, remembering. His eyes fluttered closed. His stern mouth relaxed into a grin.
“I’m sorry. I must have spilled,” I sputtered.
But it was no use. The hoses gurgled, dripping plant liquid from a computerized tank. The system was ultra-efficient, designed not to waste a drop.
“Her juice,” Mitch said. Fruit juice was legal, if you could find a bearing tree. Most people drank the hydration concentrate supplied by the government. No one knew what was in it, but a chemist on another website, Black Hole, had done a test and found six hundred substances, many unrecognized
by her.
“What kind of juice?” the younger one asked, salivating.
“Apple,” Mitch continued, showing the heritage tree we’d moved inside the greenhut to prevent it from scorching. The healthy specimen graced a huge pot that covered the trap door. Mitch pointed out seven apples, almost ripe.
“Want one?” I asked.
The young one wrote that down and ignored me, but the older one flinched, reaching his hand out involuntarily, tempted.
“What do you do about bees?” he said, feeling the apple, its weight, its gloss. Fondling it, but careful to leave it on the branch. Old enough to remember the magic of bees. I showed my pollinating brush. It used to be for makeup. That became an off-list manufacturing item rather late; women didn’t want to let go of cosmetics, but I had, long before the change in my own body (a heartbreak after many miscarriages), never mind the parching of the world. The old guy moved uncomfortably close to me.
“She’s got ketones.” He was smelling my breath; everyone smelled of ketones because of universal dehydration. “Not apple juice.” He was salivating.
“Let’s look around some more,” said his partner.
Mitch and I stood as far away from the apple tree as possible, trying not to cling to each other. I mourned those seven apples. They’d be stolen before we were strapped in the barred police van. They were meant for May.
The officers searched the floor. It was made of scrap wood. The younger one, on his hands and knees, felt for drips, which led him to the trap door, not entirely covered with the tree pot as I’d instructed Kent, over and over.
Oh no. Kent. I had mentioned my brother, and he had an illegal child, which is why his wife never went out and had never seen or heard of the ice room. If Kent was caught, he and Maggie would be shipped to hard labour. May, not a chosen child permitted to the wealthiest, healthiest, and smartest people alive, would be executed.
The officers reached the bottom of the ladder.
Mitch motioned to lock them down there.
I shook my head. We couldn’t have another charge against us. And they had zapguns, which stunned through doors, walls; they had camera optics to call the street police unit in milliseconds even if they were killed.
So we went down the ladder, too, to feel the cold for the last time.
“Saw this on Winter,” said the young guy, impressed.
“Me, too,” the old guy said. Most of the world’s population had access to Internet, but only thirty percent had water. “It’s beautiful. You’ve done a remarkable thing.”
“Too bad it’s going to cost you. Never been on a case like this before—could be fatal.”
Mitch and I had calculated our risk as twenty-five years each—more than we expected to live, so we had accepted it for the sake of our niece. But Kent was only forty-five, his wife thirty, May two.
Mitch said, “You want to shoot a few while you’re here?” He pointed to the hockey sticks, taped and retaped, the puck, hockey gloves, the restrung net.
“Oh, yeah,” said the old one.
“This could be like an interactive hyperexperience. VR isn’t the same at all.” The young guy swung for a slap shot, and it hit the boards.
“The sound. It’s the same sound!” The older officer laughed. He threw off his police hat, as if he’d scored a goal, dropped his gloves, pumped the air with his fist.
Kent’s skates fit one, and Mitch’s fit the other, but both stumbled numerous times and had to hold on to us. They were both working so hard that they didn’t cool down right away in the subzero air. Euphoria glazed their eyes; glee pitched their calls and echoes. The officers’ exubera
nt, spread-eagle hilarity pitted the ice, and I made a mental note for Kent to repair it. Then I remembered our fate. When the winter police emerged from their skating party, Mitch and I would lose this tiny world. We’d lose each other.
The bald one leaned on his stick as if listening to the pre-game national anthem and studied the artifacts on the walls: snowshoes, ice auger, toboggan, figure skates. “You know, Jake,” he said, “this is a living museum.”
“People would pay to come here,” said Mitch. “They’d come from long distances.” Mitch still tried. I loved that he tried to save the underground rink.
The cops stood tall in the skates.
Especially Jake. He had gained enough balance to look us up on his phone. An NHL referee now, wide stance, checking facts via his screen. “They have 80,000 followers. This could be your retirement project, Buddy.”
I said, “How did you find us?”
Without looking up from his phone, Jake said, “Your brother. Wet shirtsleeve.”
I wished Kent was on Hell’s Subway by now (a last-ditch effort to save families, connected by cyberthwarts and safety phishnets). Maybe he got a message to Maggie to run
with May.
“We stungunned him,” said Jake.
Buddy, with new energy of a person half his age, paused from lacing his boots. “So I protect us from the high-up heat, you two and your brother work on water, machinery, and ice maintenance, and whiz kid here brings in the customers.” He pointed to Jake. They locked eyes like two men jumping off a cliff.
Mitch clasped my hand. “People need this,” he said.
A shiver, a really good one, went up my spine. This one cooled me right to my scalp. I focussed on May’s red mittens, strung together, hung around a framed photo of Wayne Gretzky, Mom’s favourite hockey player.
But the ice room was for everyone. I should have known that from the beginning. I squeezed Mitch’s hand with all the passion I had for him and our worn world.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get Kent.”
We didn’t argue about the money. People threw it around like dead leaves now. The winter police shook freezing hands with us, then led the way back up the ladder.
Love, Janis
It was because of Love that I survived. I wouldn’t have made it without her. It’s going to be the same for you, you’ll see. I don’t know if you can hear me, but I sense that you feel me here. And I’m staying all night. Your first night here, the nuns say, someone has to keep vigil. I’m going to call you Gloria. I can see the beauty you are, even with your face all beat up and your body bruised. After they found me, knee-deep in cast-off clothes and junk food packages and dirty points poking out of the carpet, I would have been left for dead except that the nuns heard tiny heartbeats.
The nuns took over from there. First they told the world that I was gone and then they slowly resurrected me out of my overdose so I could give birth. When I started to talk again, they whispered back at me about mother Mary and Jesus and the blessings showered upon me. My body was a wreck, as you know. They fed it and babied it and healed it; they took turns holding my body tight for six months, forcing the last atom of toxins out of me. They called me Sleeping Beauty. As if, huh? I never was no beauty. Not like you.
But I had guts. Tough guts, to come back from the beyond to deliver, fully awake, without pharmaceutical help, two perfect baby girls. I named them Peace and Love. We lost Peace hours after she was born, but I got to hold her close and sing to her and she heard me, that itty bitty thing. Her three hours of life was a gift, a blessing. When we lost her, the nuns and I, we sang our voices raw. Well, my voice was already raw. Always was.
Love slept through all that. And when she woke up, the nuns taught me how to breastfeed her. They assured me there was nothing bad left in me to pass on. By now, I believed everything they said. For a long time, I thought I was in heaven. I was in awe. I was stupefied. I didn’t really understand what was real until Love slept through the night. It took me weeks to get that I was alive, that my one baby was alive, and we had lives to live. Then I woke up and started to cry. The nuns got me singing if I felt like crying, and that helped. Music was my drug, they said. They said my voice had power. I ate, fed Love, I sang.
The nuns pray all the time, seriously. While they work, while they eat, while they walk. That’s what they’re doing now, in the chapel. Can you hear them? They’re praying for you, for me, for all of us. I started singing their prayers, rock style. They loved it. They even have me sing at Mass now. On a seawind chilled night, they found me a guitar in a back alley trashcan, and they gave it to me, with a package of new strings. They are garbage-pickers, these women. Angels who pick up debris. They only take in the weakest, most pathetic pregnancies, girls so crazy spaced out that their babies are not expected to—but yours will, Gloria. I can feel her in there, listening to me. I began to help by singing to the girls and their babies. I’m going to sing to you, if you want, when you open your eyes or even if you don’t. I give them hope, some of them, I think, maybe the younger ones. The ones who’d never heard my voice before. They call me Hope, anyway. I’m not a nun. I am Hope.
My voice has mellowed a bit, but not much. It’s full of scars. So. The nuns never asked me to leave and I never asked to go. I knew if I went back to my old life, even with Love, I could not survive. I am permanently wasted on the inside, but I would never, ever, risk the life of Love. I needed her and the sanctified ground of the nuns under me. I learned how to be a gardener and bit by bit I took over the flowers first, then the vegetables and grains.
And Love, she was my flower-fairy child. I took good care of her, but also gave her lots of freedom—within our nunnery walls, that is. Whenever I felt like jumping those walls, I did my own brand of meditative hallucination. The nuns taught me. They do it with prayer, but I stare at my flowers for a while and my brain takes over. It remembers the rush. The imprint, the pathway, is still there. I can actually relive the whole freaking feeling of being high! Without the stuff. Well, I only use grass, now. I’ve got my own stash planted so the nuns won’t find it. It’s enough. Just enough to get me there. And I use it on the girls. To calm them. Medicinal purposes. Hope. I’ll teach you. After your baby comes.
Now that Love’s away, travelling, I’ve been a bit lost. Thank God for girls like you, Gloria; you’re all my babies now. The nuns educated Love, then encouraged her to go out and see the world. Besides, there are no guys here. Love, naturally, wanted to find out about men. The only man here is, uh, God, and well, you know, we all have to share Him. I let Love go, but I didn’t tell her about Janis. Sooner or later she’s going to get messed up in all that crap: hey, I know that hellish voice, she’s alive, she’s my mother! She’ll want to know. I hope it brings her back, but the world is an intoxicating place.
If Love comes back for me, I’ll go with her if she asks. In a heartbeat. But she hasn’t. If I go out there to look for her, I’ll have to sell my story to survive. That would mean the end of Hope, for me.
Yet even with my natural organic highs, I miss the joy. I never counted on having that joy, and it just blew my mind, every single day she was growing up. I miss Love so much, I’m either singing or tripping all the time now. I sing for Peace, too. I think about her all the time. I’ll never forget her as long as I live. That tiny kitten body, alive, and then asleep forever.
I was the one who was supposed to die.
M & M
When Maurice and I met, through friends at the curling rink, we were both past looking for someone special. We’d both had lovers, never a partner, but soon found home in each other’s arms. Before we set out in the car later that winter, we walked in the river valley. We found lace in frosted trees, longing in strings of waxwings, and eloquence in cracking ice. At the top of the trail, perched on a manhole cover, the only space free of snow, Maurice and I pledged togetherness with a ring that dazzled in the winter sun.
&n
bsp; Snug in my small red Mazda, humming down Highway 16 from Edmonton to Jasper Park Lodge, Maurice’s hand strayed from the wheel and warmed mine. Our families understood that we wanted to be alone for our first Christmas together. And that for my birthday on December 22, I wanted only Maurice.
“The age we fall in love, Marissa, is the one we are together, forever.”
In his eyes I would never turn thirty-nine. He was forty-one. Maurice wiggled my diamond ring.
I dug in my bag. “Want some M&M’s?” Friends kept giving them to us as gifts.
“Let’s save the M&M’s for the tables, as favours for the guests.”
We agreed that everyone would know about the engagement and the wedding, as soon and as simple as possible, when we returned. For now, the news would be savoured by us alone.
I patted the family-sized package of M&M’s on my lap.
For his first gift of the season, I had packed Napoleon wineglasses in honour of his French heritage. I anticipated filling the glasses—Maurice hid champagne, but I spied it—and the chime as our glasses touched. I stashed eleven other presents, one for each of the twelve days of Christmas, but the wineglasses were for that night.
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