Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100

by Aliette de Bodard

  The feeling is at once sickening and familiar.

  On a social media site I frequent, I click the top news article, “Citizens gather at city hall to protest hobbyist fishermen’s inhumane treatment of earthworms.” A video window pops out: a gaggle of young people in garish shirts, beers in their left hands and crooked signs in their right, standing in the city square. The signs read “Say NO To Earthworm Abuse,” “Your Bait Is My Neighbor,” “Earthworms Feel Pain Just Like Your Dog.”

  Did they have nothing else to do? If they really wanted to march and protest, couldn’t they have found an issue actually worth fighting for? My headache is returning in force, so I turn off the monitor. I flop onto the worn brown couch and tiredly shut my eyes.

  2.

  In the scheme of an enormous aggregation of resources like this city, a low-income, forty-five-year-old bachelor is utterly insignificant. I work three days a week, four hours a day, and my main duty is to read welfare petitions that meet basic requirements and pick the ones I empathize with most. In an age where computers have squeezed people out of most employment opportunities, using my “emotional intuition” to approve or reject government welfare requests is practically the perfect job, no training or background knowledge required. The Department of Social Welfare thought some measure of empathy was needed beyond the rigid rules and regulations to select the few lucky welfare recipients (from petitions that had already passed the automated preliminary checks, of course), and therefore invited individuals from all strata of society—including failures like me—to participate in the process. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I take the subway from my rented apartment to the little office I share with three coworkers in the Social Welfare Building. I sit in front of the computer and stamp my e-seal on petitions I take a liking to. The quota varies day to day, but my work typically ends after thirty stamps. I use the remainder of the time to chat, drink coffee, and eat bagels until the end-of-shift bell rings.

  Today’s a Monday like any other. I finish my four hours of work and swipe my card to leave. I walk toward the subway station, not far away, the gray granite edifice of the Social Welfare Building behind me. The performer is there at the subway entrance as usual, a one-man band whose repertoire consists of ear-splitting trumpeting accompanied by a monotonous drumbeat. As always, he glares at me balefully as I approach, perhaps because I haven’t given him a cent these few years. It makes me uncomfortable. The trumpet begins, the sound of a cat scratching at a glass pane. My lingering headache from yesterday begins to stir. I decide to turn away and catch the subway one station up.

  The ground is still wet from the drizzle earlier this morning. Ponytailed youths whiz by me on skateboards. Two pigeons perch on a coffee shop sign, cooing. The storefront windows reflect me: a thin, balding middle-aged man in a yellow windbreaker that used to be fashionable, with a brandy nose just like my father’s. I rub my nose and can’t help but think of the father I haven’t seen in so long. More precisely, I haven’t seen him since the banquet when I was twenty-two. My mother sometimes mentions him in her calls: I know that he still lives at the farm, that he’s raising cows, that he’s kept a few apple trees to brew hard cider, even though alcohol had destroyed his liver, and the doctors say that he’ll never drink again till science can cure his liver cancer.

  To be honest, I don’t feel a bit of sorrow for him. Although my red nose and big-framed body are all inherited from him, I’ve spent my adult years trying to escape his shadow, trying to prevent myself from turning into a fat, selfish, bigoted old drunkard like him. Today, however, I find that the only thing I’ve successfully avoided is the fat. The greatest achievement of his life was marrying my mother. I don’t even have anything close to that.

  “Stop right there!” A shout cuts short my self-pity. Several figures in black hoodies are sprinting my way, dodging and weaving through traffic. Two cops waving police batons stumble past braking cars in hot pursuit. One blows his whistle; the other is shouting.

  The drivers’ curses and the blaring of horns fill the air. I press myself against the coffee shop window. Keep out of trouble. In my mind’s eye, I see my father’s cigar-yellowed teeth flash amidst his whiskers.

  The people in black hoodies knock over the trash bin by the street. They run past me—one, two . . . a total of four people. I pretend I don’t see them, but I notice that they’re all wearing canvas shoes. They’re all young. Who hasn’t worn dirty canvas shoes in their youth? I look down at my own feet, encased in dull brown leather lace-ups. The surface of my shoes is covered in creases from long wear, like the wrinkles on my forehead I try valiantly to ignore when I look in the mirror.

  Suddenly, someone’s hand blocks my view of my feet. He’s reaching into the pocket of my windbreaker, pulling out my right hand. I feel strange tickling sensations—he’s drawing something on my palm with his finger. Surprised, I raise my head. In front of me is the fourth person in black, small and thin, his eyes covered by his hoodie. He rapidly sketches something out on my palm, then pats my hand. “Do you understand?”

  “Hurry!” the other three people in hoodies are hollering. The fourth person tosses a glance back at the steadily nearing police and leaves me to run after his friends. The cops are right behind, puffing and panting. “Stop right there!” one of them shouts hoarsely. The other has his whistle in his mouth, blowing raggedly. I’m certain they turn and look at me as they pass by, but they don’t say anything, only run into the distance, waving their batons.

  The pursuers and the pursued turn the corner at the flower shop and leave my sight. On the damp street, the cars begin to move again, the pedestrians weaving among them as if nothing has happened. But the warmth of a stranger’s fingertip still lingers on my right hand.

  3.

  “The usual?” the waitress in the diner below my apartment asks me. Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes.

  “Yeah—” I say automatically—“wait, add smoked salmon to the order.” The waitress, who already turned and started walking, makes an OK sign over her shoulder.

  “Did something happen? You changed your order.” Slim is a coworker at the Social Welfare Building, and my only acquaintance close enough to call a friend. He has the ability to sniff out the pheromones other people give off without fail. In the five minutes since he’s sat down, he’s identified a middle-age virgin, a pair of gay paramours, an aging housewife desperate enough to bed the pizza boy, a debauched teenager buying beer with his big brother’s ID card, and a sexually fulfilled paraplegic.

  “For real, though, how would someone in a wheelchair have a fulfilling sex life?” I pick up my beer glass and take a sip.

  “The higher the paralysis goes, the more likely he’s impotent.” Slim gestures at his own spine with a long, crooked arm. “Anyway, what about you? You’ve met the one, haven’t you? She’s a blonde, right?” His grayish eyes gleam with the pleasure of prodding at my privacy.

  “Stop kidding. I ran into some demonstrators this afternoon. You know, the sort of hooligans you see crying out on the news for earthworms’ rights.” I shake my head. “Thanks,” I say, taking the plate from the waitress. A meatball sandwich with pickles on the side—my dinner, forever and always.

  “Kids with too much time.” Slim shakes his head. “Speaking of which, did you know . . . the word ‘potato’ comes from the Arawa language of Jamaica.”

  Dimly, I think his voice sounded strange just then, when he was saying the second half of his sentence, as if something got stuck in his throat or the cold beer caused a relapse of my tinnitus. “No, I didn’t know. Not that I’m interested in some language no one speaks anymore.” I stick a slice of pickle in my mouth.

  Slim widens his eyes in surprise. “You don’t care about this?”

  His voice is back to normal. It was tinnitus, then. I should go see a doctor, if I haven’t reached my health insurance coverage limit this year. “I don’t give a damn,” I say with my mouth full.

  “Fine, then.” He lowers h
is head and toys with his beer glass. The waitress brings his dinner to the table, and passes me my smoked salmon as well.

  “Seriously, you two should go out and have some fun. Go to the strip club or something.” The waitress looks at our expressions, frowns, and leaves.

  Slim and I wordlessly turn our heads toward the gaudy club front across the street. I take two fries from his plate and stuff them into my mouth, then push my smoked salmon toward him. “Have you felt that we haven’t had any interesting topics to talk about lately?” I say.

  “You’re feeling it too?” Slim exclaims. “Beyond the sex lives I’ve sniffed out, I can barely find anything to talk about. I’ve found conversations so boring these last few years.”

  “Maybe we’re just getting old?” I unhappily retrieve my right hand from the plate of fries. There’s a noticeable age spot on the back of my hand. It appeared just recently, awkward like the stain on my trousers the year I was twenty-two.

  “I’m only forty-two! Jimenez was forty-one when he won the Welsh Open!” Slim cried, waving a French fry wildly. “The drudgery of work is making us this way. It’ll all be different once we retire. Don’t you agree, old buddy?”

  “I sure hope so,” I answer distractedly.

  4.

  I drink two more bottles of cold beer tonight. Waves of dizziness assault me once I’m through my apartment door. I make for my bedroom and collapse on the bed without bothering to shower.

  The sheets smell strangely earthy. I don’t know if it’s because I haven’t changed them in so long, but on the bright side, the smell makes me think of the farm when I was little—not the farm that reeked of my father’s animal stench, but from before he started drinking, before he started abusing my mother. I’m thinking of the tranquil, peaceful farm where my mother, my sister, and I lived.

  I remember my older sister and me playing in the newly built granary, airy and filled with the clean fragrance of earth and fresh-cut wood. Sunlight spilled in through the little loft window, accompanying the smell of the cookies my mother baked.

  When we got tired from running, we sat down with our backs against the wall. My sister pulled my right hand over. “Close your eyes,” she told me. I obediently shut my eyes, the sunlight glowing dusky red on the inside of my eyelids. My palm tickled. I giggled and tried to pull my hand back. “Guess what word I’m writing.” My sister was laughing too, her finger scritching around on my palm.

  I thought a bit. “I don’t know. Write slower!” I complained. My sister wrote the word again, more slowly.

  “ ‘Horse?’ ” I slowly answered, looking at her.

  “That’s right!” My sister laughed and ruffled my hair. “Let’s play again! If you can get five words right, I’ll let you ride my pony for two days.”

  “Really?” I excitedly closed my eyes.

  My palm started to tickle again. I barely held back my giggles. “It’s . . . ‘crow’ this time?”

  “That was ‘road,’ dumb-butt!” My sister flicked my nose, laughing, and jumped to her feet. “First one there gets the biggest frosted cookie!”

  “Wait for me—”

  I stretch out an arm. I open my eyes to fluorescent lighting and the ceiling, one corner stained with water. The family living above me forgot to turn off their bath tap again. I’ll get the apartment managers to teach them a lesson this time, I think, realizing that I’d woken up from my dream of childhood. My shirt smells sour from alcohol after a day of wear. My neck and back ache from my awkward sleeping position. It takes me five minutes to sit up, look at the alarm clock, and see that it’s only one in the morning.

  I feel better after a shower and a few glasses of water, but I don’t feel like sleeping anymore. I put on pajamas and sit on the living room couch. I flick on the TV; as usual, there’s nothing interesting at all on the late night shows. As I flip through the channels, I notice the ugly blotch on my right hand again. I scrub at it with my left hand, even though I know something like that can never be rubbed off.

  The sudden faint itching on my palm makes me shiver. Wait, what’s this feeling? I—I recognize it from the dream, my sister scrawling childish character on my hand . . .

  Today at noon, the stranger in the black hoodie wasn’t tracing some mysterious symbols or gang signs on my palm.

  He was writing. No, she was writing. The stranger was a woman. The black hoodie had hidden her other features, but that slender finger couldn’t have belonged to a man. What had she written?

  I frantically dig out pencil and paper and set them on the coffee table. I try with all my might to recall what I felt. The last word had been written by my sister before . . . yes, it’s “ROAD.”

  I write “ROAD” on the sheet of paper.

  There was another word in front of it. She had written it quickly, very quickly. From my long years approving petitions, I’ve found that people will write words with pleasant associations that way, fast and fluid, words like “smile,” “forever,” “hope,” “fulfillment.” She’d written a short word, standing for something good, with two vowels . . . aha! “EDEN.” That’s right, the garden of paradise.

  I write “EDEN” before “ROAD.”

  Even before those words had come a string of numbers, Arabic numerals. She wrote them twice over for emphasis. I wrinkle my brow, carefully recalling every movement of her fingertip. 7, 2, 9, 5? No, the first number traced the outside edge of my palm, so there should have been another bend at the end. It was 2, then. 2, 8, 9, 5. I check my recollections again. That’s it.

  I write “2895” on the left.

  The paper reads “2895 Eden Road”

  I flop down in front of the computer, open up a map site, and enter “2895 Eden Road.” The page shows Eden Road to be on the other side of the city from me, far from the downtown area and the slums near the financial center. But Eden Road doesn’t have a 2895. The building numbers end at 500.

  I rub my temple, translating each number back to a sensation on my skin, a tingling line traced on my palm. I stare at my hand. 2, 8, 9, that was right. 5 . . . oh, of course, it could have been an “S.” I type in “289S Eden Road,” and the map site shows me a four-story apartment building halfway down Eden Road. It’s at the outskirts of the city, forty-five kilometers from here. “Got it!” I triumphantly smack my keyboard and leap to my feet, only to fall back on my ass, dizzied by the blood rushing into my head.

  What would I find there? I haven’t a clue. But I do know that in the forty-five years I’ve lived by the book, I’ve never had an adventure where a woman in a black hoodie left me a contact address in a cloak-and-dagger manner —well, my path never seemed to cross with the ladies at all, loser that I am. Something interesting has finally appeared in my dull and listless life. Whether driven by the urging of my hormones, as sharp-nosed Slim would say, or my aroused curiosity, I decide to put on a windbreaker and go to 289S Eden Drive to find something new.

  Don’t make trouble, kid. As I prepare to leave, I see my father in the mirror opposite the door, his belly bulging, a bottle of gin in hand.

  Oh, fuck you. I stride out the door like I did twenty-three years ago.

  5.

  I own a motorcycle, long unused. In college, I’d been as captivated by the latest high-tech toys as all the other young people were: the newest phone, tablet, plasma TV, electricity-generating sneakers, high-horsepower motorbike. Who doesn’t love Harley-Davidson and Ducati? But I couldn’t afford such expensive brand-name motorcycles. When I was twenty-six, I found a Japanese exchange student about to return home because his visa was expiring, and at last managed to buy this black Kawasaki ZXR400R with only 8000 miles from him. She was in excellent condition, her brake disks gleaming like new, the roar of her exhaust pipes mesmerizing. I couldn’t wait to ride over to my friends and show her off, but they’d long since grown bored of motorcycles. They came to the bars and talked about women with their brand-new Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs parked outside.

  From then on, I didn’t really ha
ve friends anymore. When I put on my tie and rode my Kawasaki to work, everyone would look askance at me and my ride, smacking of youthful rebellion. In the end, I gave up and locked my beloved motorbike away in storage. There she stayed as I grew older and met one failure after another in my career. In the blink of an eye, I’d turned into a forty-five-year-old single alcoholic. Sometimes, on a sunny day, I’d ask my beloved Kawasaki as I cleaned her: Old buddy, when do you want to go out for a ride again? She never answered me. Every time I thought I could work up the courage to take her out for a ride, the grotesque mental picture of a balding middle-aged man hunched over the sleek motorcycle turned my stomach. It reminded me of the sickening way my drunken father would self-assuredly hit on every woman he saw.

  I make my way down the battered apartment stairwell and unlock the dusty doors to the public storage room. I find my motorbike half buried in empty beer cans and pull the tarp aside. The Kawasaki 400R’s jet-black paintwork is covered with dust, but the tires are still full of air, and all the gears still gleam with oil. I uncap a small spare gas can and pour the contents into the tank, then turn the key, testing the ignition. The four-cylinder four-stroke engine howls to life without hesitation. My old buddy hasn’t let me down.

  “Asshole, do you know what time it is?” When I walk my motorbike out of the storage room, a beer bottle smashes to pieces at my feet. I look up and see the landlady yelling from the second story window, a nightcap on her head. I don’t apologize like I would have usually done. I just get on my motorcycle and rev the engine, the roar reverberating up and down the street. I loose the clutch at her shouts of “Are you crazy?” Amidst the squeal of tires and the smell of burning rubber, I whoop with excitement, and my apartment and the strip club retreat from me at breakneck speed.

  The wind howls. I’m not wearing a helmet; I feel the air resistance mold the flabby flesh of my face into comical shapes, and the hair I grow long for my comb-over whips behind me. But I don’t care how many people might be around at one in the morning to see an ugly middle-aged man racing by on a motorcycle. At this moment, the endless monotony of my life has at least been broken by thirst for the pursuit of happiness.