Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  Madeleine’s bedroom is in the basement; the window is level with the ground. The girl from the street is there, looking concerned. Madeleine blinks, sits up, rises, opens the window.

  “What’s your name?” asks the girl at the window.

  “Madeleine.” She tilts her head, surprised to find herself answering in English. “What’s yours?”

  “Zeinab.” She grins. Madeleine notices she’s wearing pajamas, too, turquoise ones with Princess Jasmine on them. “Can I come in? We could have a sleepover!”

  “Shh,” says Madeleine, pushing her window all the way open to let her in, whispering, “I can’t have sleepovers without my parents knowing!”

  Zeinab covers her mouth, eyes wide, and nods, then mouths sorry before clambering inside. Madeleine motions for her to come sit on the bed, then looks at her curiously.

  “How do I know you?” she murmurs, half to herself. “We don’t go to school together, do we?”

  Zeinab shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know this place at all. But I keep seeing you! Sometimes you’re older, and sometimes you’re younger. Sometimes you’re with your parents, and sometimes you’re not. I just thought I should say hello because I keep seeing you, but you don’t always see me, and it feels a little like spying, and I don’t want to do that. I mean,” she grins again, a wide dimpled thing that makes Madeline feel warm and happy, “I wouldn’t mind being a spy but that’s different, that’s cool, that’s like James Bond or Neil Burnside or Agent Carter—”

  —and Madeleine snaps back, fingers gone numb around a mug of cold milk that falls to the ground and shatters as Madeleine jumps away, presses her back to a wall, and tries to stop shaking.

  She cancels her appointment with Clarice that week. She looks through old year books, class photos, and there is no one who looks like Zeinab, no Zeinabs to be found anywhere in her past. She googles “Zeinab” in various spellings and discovers it’s the name of a journalist, a Syrian mosque, and the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter. Perhaps she’ll ask Zeinab for her surname, she thinks, a little wildly, dazed and frightened and exhilarated.

  Over the course of the last several years Madeleine has grown very, very familiar with the inside of her head. The discovery of someone as new and inexplicable as Zeinab in it is thrilling in a way she can hardly begin explain.

  She finds she especially does not want to explain to Clarice.

  Madeleine takes the bus—she has become wary of driving—to the town she grew up in, an hour’s journey over a provincial border. She walks through her old neighbourhood hunting triggers but finds more changed than familiar; old houses with new additions, facades, front lawns gone to seed or kept far too tidy.

  She walks up the steep cul-de-sac of her old street to the rocky hill beyond, where a freight line used to run. It’s there, picking up a lump of pink granite from where the tracks used to be, that she flashes—

  —back to the first time she saw a hummingbird standing in her driveway by an ornamental pink granite boulder. She feels again her heart in her throat, flooded with the beauty of it, the certainty and immensity of the fact that she is seeing a fairy, that fairies are real, that here is a tiny mermaid moving her shining tail backwards and forwards in the air before realizing the truth of what she’s looking at and feeling that it is somehow more precious still for being a bird that sounds like a bee and looks like an impossible jewel.

  “Ohh,” she hears from behind her, and there is Zeinab, transfixed, looking at the hummingbird alongside Madeleine, and as it hovers before them for the eternity that Madeleine remembers, suspended in the air with a keen jet eye and a needle for a mouth, Madeleine reaches out and takes Zeinab’s hand. She feels Zeinab squeeze hers in reply, and they stand together until the hummingbird zooms away.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” murmurs Zeinab, who is a young teen again, in torn jeans and an oversized sweater with Paula Abdul’s face on it, “but I really like it.”

  Madeleine leads Zeinab through her memories as best she can, one sip, smell, sound, taste at a time. Stepping out of the shower one morning tips her back into a school trip to the Montreal Botanical Garden, where she slips away from the group to walk around the grounds with Zeinab and talk. Doing this is, in some ways, like maintaining the image in a Magic Eye puzzle, remaining focused on each other with the awareness that they can’t mention the world outside the memory, or it will end too soon, before they’ve had their fill of talk, of marvelling at the strangeness of their meeting, of enjoying each other’s company.

  Their conversations are careful and buoyant as if they’re sculpting something together, chipping away at a mystery shape trapped in marble. It’s easy, so easy to talk to Zeinab, to listen to her—they talk about the books they read as children, the music they listened to, the cartoons they watched. Madeleine wonders why Zeinab’s mere existence doesn’t corrupt or end the memories the way her sentences do, why she’s able to walk around inside those memories more freely in Zeinab’s company, but doesn’t dare ask. She suspects she knows why, after all; she doesn’t need Clarice to tell her how lonely, how isolated, how miserable she is, miserable enough to invent a friend who is bubbly where she is quiet, kind and friendly where she is mistrustful and reserved, even dark-skinned where she’s white.

  She can hear Clarice explaining in her reasonable voice that Madeleine—bereaved twice over, made vulnerable by an experimental drug—has invented a shadow-self to love, and perhaps they should unpack the racism of its manifestation, and didn’t Madeleine have any black friends in real life?

  “I wish we could see each other all the time,” says Madeleine, sixteen, on her back in the sunny field, long hair spread like so many corn snakes through the grass. “Whenever we wanted.”

  “Yeah,” murmurs Zeinab, looking up at the sky. “Too bad I made you up inside my head.”

  Madeleine steels herself against the careening tug of Sylvia Plath before remembering that she started reading her in high school. Instead, she turns to Zeinab, blinks.

  “What? No. You’re inside my head.”

  Zeinab raises an eyebrow—pierced, now—and when she smiles, her teeth look all the brighter against her black lipstick. “I guess that’s one possibility, but if I made you up inside my head and did a really good job of it, I’d probably want you to say something like that. To make you be more real.”

  “But—so could—”

  “Although I guess it is weird that we’re always doing stuff you remember. Maybe you should come over to my place sometime!”

  Madeleine feels her stomach seizing up.

  “Or maybe it’s time travel,” says Zeinab, thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s one of those weird things where I’m actually from your future and am meeting you in your past, and then when you meet me in your future I haven’t met you yet, but you know all about me—”

  “Zeinab—I don’t think—”

  Madeline feels wakefulness press a knife’s edge against the memory’s skin, and she backs away from that, shakes her head, clings to the smell of crushed grass and coming summer with its long days of reading and swimming and cycling and her father talking to her about math and her mother teaching her to knit and the imminent prospect of seeing R-rated films in the cinema—

  —but she can’t, quite, and she is shivering naked in her bathroom with the last of the shower’s steam vanishing off the mirror as she starts to cry.

  “I must say,” says Clarice, rather quietly, “that this is distressing news.”

  It’s been a month since Madeleine last saw Clarice, and where before she felt resistant to her probing, wanting only to solve a very specific problem, she now feels like a mess, a bowl’s worth of overcooked spaghetti. If before Clarice made her feel like a stubborn child, now Madeleine feels like a child who knows she’s about to be punished.

  “I had hoped,” says Clarice, adjusting her glasses, “that encouraging you to talk to this avatar would help you understand the mechanisms of your grief, b
ut from what you’ve told me, it sounds more like you’ve been indulging in a damaging fantasy world.”

  “It’s not a fantasy world,” says Madeleine with less snap than she’d like—she sounds to her own ears sullen, defensive. “It’s my memory.”

  “The experience of which puts you at risk and makes you lose time. And Zeinab isn’t part of your memories.”

  “No, but—” she bites her lip.

  “But what?”

  “But—couldn’t Zeinab be real? I mean,” hastily, before Clarice’s look sharpens too hard, “couldn’t she be a repressed memory, like you said?”

  “A repressed memory with whom you talk about recent television and who suddenly features in all your memories?” Clarice shakes her head.

  “But—talking to her helps, it makes it so much easier to control—”

  “Madeleine, tell me if I’m missing anything here. You’re seeking triggers in order to relive your memories for their own sake—not as exposure therapy, not to dismantle those triggers, not to understand Zeinab’s origins—but to have a … companion? Dalliance?”

  Clarice is so kind and sympathetic that Madeleine wants simultaneously to cry and to punch her in the face.

  She wants to say, what you’re missing is that I’ve been happy. What you’re missing is that for the first time in years I don’t feel like a disease waiting to happen or a problem to be solved until I’m back in the now, until she and I are apart.

  But there is sand in her throat, and it hurts too much to speak.

  “I think,” says Clarice, with a gentleness that beggars Madeleine’s belief, “that it’s time we discussed admitting you into more comprehensive care.”

  She sees Zeinab again when, on the cusp of sleep in a hospital bed, she experiences the sensation of falling from a great height, and plunges into—

  —the week after her mother’s death, when Madeleine couldn’t sleep without waking in a panic, convinced her mother had walked out of the house and into the street or fallen down the stairs or taken the wrong pills at the wrong time, only to recall she’d already died and there was nothing left for her to remember.

  She is in bed, and Zeinab is there next to her, and Zeinab is a woman in her thirties, staring at her strangely as if she is only now seeing her for the first time, and Madeleine starts to cry and Zeinab holds her tightly while Madeleine buries her face in Zeinab’s shoulder and says she loves her and doesn’t want to lose her but she has to go, they won’t let her stay, she’s insane and she can’t keep living in the past but there is no one left here for her, no one.

  “I love you, too,” says Zeinab, and there is something fierce in it, and wondering, and desperate. “I love you, too. I’m here. I promise you, I’m here.”

  Madeleine is not sure she’s awake when she hears people arguing outside her door.

  She hears “serious bodily harm” and “what evidence” and “rights adviser,” then “very irregular” and “I assure you,” traded back and forth in low voices. She drifts in and out of wakefulness, wonders muzzily if she consented to being drugged or if she only dreamt that she did, turns over, falls back asleep.

  When she wakes again, Zeinab is sitting at the foot of her bed.

  Madeleine stares at her.

  “I figured out how we know each other,” says Zeinab, whose hair is waist-length now, straightened, who is wearing a white silk blouse and a sharp black jacket, high heels, and looks like she belongs in an action film. “How I know you, I guess. I mean,” she smiles, looks down, shy—Zeinab has never been shy, but there is the dimple where Madeleine expects it—“where I know you from. The clinical trial, for the Alzheimer’s drug—we were in the same group. I didn’t recognize you until I saw you as an adult. I remembered because of all the people there, I thought—you looked—” her voice drops a bit, as if remembering suddenly that she isn’t talking to herself, “lost. I wanted to talk to you, but it felt weird, like, hi, I guess we have family histories in common, want to get coffee?”

  She runs her hand through her hair, exhales, not quite able to look at Madeleine while Madeleine stares at her as if she’s a fairy turning into a hummingbird that could, any second, fly away.

  “So not long after the trial, I start having these hallucinations, and there’s always this girl in them, and it freaks me out. But I keep it to myself, because—I don’t know, because I want to see what happens. Because it’s not more debilitating than a day dream, really, and I start to get the hang of it—feeling it come on, walking myself to a seat, letting it happen. Sometimes I can stop it, too, though that’s harder. I take time off work, I read about, I don’t know, mystic visions, shit like that, the kind of things I used to wish were real in high school. I figure even if you’re not real—”

  Zeinab looks at her now, and there are tears streaking Madeleine’s cheeks, and Zeinab’s smile is small and sad and hopeful, too, “—even if you’re not real, well, I’ll take an imaginary friend who’s pretty great over work friends who are mostly acquaintances, you know? Because you were always real to me.”

  Zeinab reaches out to take Madeleine’s hand. Madeleine squeezes it, swallows, shakes her head.

  “I—even if I’m not—if this isn’t a dream,” Madeleine half-chuckles through tears, wipes at her cheek, “I think I probably have to stay here for a while.”

  Zeinab grins now, a twist of mischief in it. “Not at all. You’re being discharged today. Your rights adviser was very persuasive.”

  Madeleine blinks. Zeinab leans in closer, conspiratorial.

  “That’s me. I’m your rights adviser. Just don’t tell anyone I’m doing pro bono stuff: I’ll never hear the end of it at the office.”

  Madeleine feels something in her unclench and melt, and she hugs Zeinab to her and holds her and is held by her.

  “Whatever’s happening to us,” Zeinab says, quietly, “we’ll figure it out together, okay?”

  “Okay,” says Madeleine, and as she does, Zeinab pulls back to kiss her forehead, and the scent of her is clear and clean like grapefruit and salt, and as Zeinab’s lips brush her skin she—

  —is in precisely the same place, but someone’s with her in her head, remembering Zeinab’s kiss and her smell and for the first time in a very long time, Madeleine feels—knows, with irrevocable certainty—that she has a future.

  Notes from Liminal Spaces

  Hiromi Goto

  I am a first generation Japanese Canadian immigrant. I gratefully reside on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples: the Musqueam, the Skwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil Waututh Nations.

  It was an unusually warm night for mid-March, and I had left the glass patio door open to let in the fresh air. I’d already heard the person from across the back alley release their pet—the dog’s gleeful nails rapid-clicking as it pelted up the paved laneway. From the distance a set of jangling keys drew closer. An urban seagull, buoyed by city lights, screeched even though it was almost midnight. I glanced outside.

  A brightly lit object fell across the sky. A steady white light as bright as three Venuses, it arced downward for several seconds until it flared brighter, a green surge, an emerald flare before it extinguished.

  It was stunning.

  Had anyone else seen it? The digital clock on the stove said 12:01 a.m. I did a cursory search online, but I couldn’t find anything on Twitter or Facebook or local news sources. I stayed up for a while, reading articles and watching a few YouTubes. My daughter hadn’t returned from her late shift at the restaurant. Tired, I went to bed.

  Representational narratives have us experience stories in many different ways. Some stories rely heavily upon expository prose, and the primary engagement is intellectual. In contrast, a highly subjective narrative can have us virtually assuming the visceral, psychological, and emotional life of a fictional character, feeling their “reality” with an empathetic intensity we may not even have for our loved ones. A kind of temporary intimacy can be constructed in the bubble world where
the writer’s words and the reader’s engagement distill an imagined reality. Much can happen in this fabricated space. The writer brings her culture of imagination with her. The reader brings their culture of imagining with them. Story content is imbued by values and beliefs held by the author. Stories are ideologically saturated sites. Not just the content—but also in its making. In the lattices of the structure. The architecture. It’s not just what we write but how it is written and in what form.

  A fuzzy sleep coalesced into waking. Something smelled tinny and slightly sweet—a strong chemical burning was in the air. I glanced at my bedside clock: 9:17. I swung my legs off the bed and rushed to the kitchen in my T-shirt and underpants.

  There was nothing burning on the stove. I looked up at the smoke alarm in the ceiling. The green eye glowed—presumably it was still working. Kanami! Maybe some electrical cords had caught fire in her room!

  I ran to my daughter’s closed bedroom door. The sweet metallic tang in the air caught in my throat, and I began to cough. My eyes burned. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  After a few seconds Kanami mumbled.

  I opened the door to peek inside. The blankets were pulled over her head. There was no smoke in the air. I sniffed. It didn’t smell any stronger than what I’d smelled in my room and the rest of the apartment. She sounded sleepy and crabby, her usual morning self, so I closed her door and went to inspect the outer hallway of the apartment building. No visible smoke, no increase in odour. I went back inside and slid open the glass door to the patio.