Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction

by Claude Lalumiere

  When the alarm went off, though, Ruth was still dead, and Wren went silently to school and Nadia to work with nothing between them but that.

  Wren didn’t come home that night, or the next night, or the next. Discreet inquiries eventually revealed that she was staying with Dave’s drummer, which Nadia was vastly relieved to hear; she knew Wren was capable of staggering impulsiveness, and Nadia’s first night alone — her first in months — was filled with dreams in which Wren merged with the jumper in the metro from so many years ago. Sometimes Wren was crying, sometimes angry; other times Nadia was too far away to see her face. She woke with her heart hammering behind her eyelids and was terrified to open them and see Wren still gone.

  Nadia called her boss at the electrical supply company and told him she was taking the last six years’ accumulated vacation time all at once. He agreed with ill grace, but she didn’t care; they could fire her if they wanted to. She stayed inside as much as she could. It was the middle of May, and below the apartment window the city trees and flowerbeds were a cacophony of colour. Nadia took to sleeping rolled up in quilts on the sofa; the bed was too large, though it never had been before. A week went by, and then another.

  Then Wren was home one morning, suddenly, pretending she had never been gone, but nothing was better — it was worse. They didn’t talk about it. Wren had quit her cashier job and was working as a bicycle courier, and she was out early and home late. Their conversations were filled with trivia about the groceries, the laundry, the repairs the landlord was doing on the roof, but they both steered clear of anything important. Sometimes people telephoned for Wren, and Nadia passed the phone to her without comment. She was used to not receiving calls herself.

  She wanted to talk, wanted to find the words to start the conversation that they both knew they had to have, but she couldn’t manage it. There was a gaping hole between the two of them, and she couldn’t cross over, not now. Nothing could be said until she knew if Wren could forgive her, and she didn’t think she deserved to ask.

  “Do you, um—” Nadia looked up from the book she was pretending to read. Wren stood there, twisting a towel in her hands. “Could you give me a hand with the dishes?”

  “Sure.” Nadia got up, and they moved to the kitchen together, falling into their familiar routine.

  “I had a weird one today,” Wren said as the sink started to fill. “This guy in the post office accidentally stapled his hand to the desk, and when the paramedics—”

  “I don’t want to hear about it, okay?” Nadia said sharply, and then realized too late that this would have been a good opening, only she hadn’t seen it. Wren only nodded, seeming unperturbed.

  “Fine. No problem. Small talk it is. How’s work?”

  “I haven’t been going,” Nadia admitted.

  Wren paused, dishtowel in hand. “You’ve been staying here? Every day?”

  “You didn’t notice,” Nadia said. Even though she knew she couldn’t blame Wren, that hurt.

  “No. I’m sorry. Are you — I mean, why — oh, fuck.” Wren grimaced, plainly frustrated by her lack of words. “It scares me when you do this,” she said at last. “I know how you used to live. I thought — you know — I thought you’d gotten over it.”

  “Well, I haven’t,” Nadia said. “I just don’t want to go out, that’s all. I’ve got good reason.”

  “Because you’re afraid!” Wren shouted. The suddenness of her fury startled Nadia, even used to her girlfriend’s mercurial moods as she was. “That’s all it is. All you ever do is shut yourself off. You don’t go out, you don’t have friends, you don’t do anything—”

  “If I go out I hurt people!” Nadia snapped back. “So do you! The more time you spend out in the city, the more strangers you see, the more—”

  “So instead you run into them in the grocery store, and in the metro, and at the pharmacy — how is that better?” Wren threw the dishtowel aside in disgust. “Answer me this. How many have you done this month?”

  Nadia had to think, and that took the edge off her anger. “Fourteen.”

  “Fourteen, sitting at home like you do. Want to know what I’m at? Twelve. And I’ve been going to parties, and gone hiking, and seen Dave and the Analemmas play at his brother’s club, and gone to Ruth’s—” She stopped.

  “Ruth’s funeral,” Nadia said quietly.

  “I don’t blame you,” Wren said.

  “Of course you do. Why wouldn’t you? I do.”

  “I should have been careful,” Wren said. “I should have thought to introduce you. I knew it only happened with strangers, I just — I didn’t think. Nadia, please. It’s as much my fault as yours.”

  “I’m the one who killed her,” Nadia said, and there it was.

  She turned away from the sink, her hands still wet to the elbows and dripping on the floor, and crossed to the window.

  “I didn’t love her,” Wren said. “I don’t know if it makes a difference, but I didn’t. She’s not really any different than any of the others, she just — it was just a shock, that’s all. Just because I knew her.”

  “That’s the worst of it,” Nadia said softly. “The others don’t matter. We don’t care anymore. We don’t — Wren, we’re monsters, and that’s bad enough, but what right do we have to — to profit from it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We met because we — you know, we made it happen. I’ve been thinking about this a lot the last few weeks. I can accept what we do if I think of it as, as a force of nature or something, as something that’s just going to happen, because I can’t make myself stop, not for long, but—”

  “But, if you’re actually happy, that makes it different,” Wren finished. “Nadia, didn’t you notice? Nobody died for us!”

  “As far as we know. How do we know? They never see the deaths. Maybe there was someone, and we just didn’t—”

  “I can live with maybe,” Wren said. “Why are you going out of your way to make yourself miserable? Everything’s fine.” Nadia started to speak, but Wren touched her lips. “No, it really is. I love you. That’s what counts.”

  “It isn’t enough,” Nadia said. “No, let me finish. Wren, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. I’ve tried, and I just—” Words failed her. “You have to leave,” she said.

  “So that’s it?” Wren demanded. “Just disappear out of your life, all neat and tidy and no loose ends? Well, it’s not going to be that simple. You don’t get to have it that simple.”

  “And I don’t get to be happy, either!” Nadia shouted back. “That doesn’t happen to people like us!”

  “I love you,” Wren said again, hopelessly. Nadia heard the words, felt them drop like small stones into her, and realized with horror that they felt grotesque, outsized, like sharks in a child’s wading pool, like a submarine in a bathtub. There was no longer room in her to contain them.

  “If we … break up,” Wren said in a small voice, clearly having to make an effort to get the words out, “are we … are we going to be strangers?”

  Nadia knew what she was asking. “No, no, of course not!” The enormity of the situation hit her suddenly, viscerally, as it hadn’t in all the dark hours she’d spent by herself contemplating it. “No, we’ll be friends, of course we will, Wren, I need you—” She was babbling and knew it, but she couldn’t stop.

  “I don’t need you,” Wren said. “I just love you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nadia said. “I’m sorry.”

  Wren nodded and took a deep breath, as though reaching a decision. “There’s something I need you to see.”

  Wren’s belongings were strewn about the living room in their usual disarray of battered cardboard boxes and teetering piles, and there was what Nadia felt was an awkward silence as Wren rummaged among them. A few times Nadia made as if to speak, but then stopped: t
here was no way to continue the previous conversation from where it had ended, and she didn’t really have anything else to say.

  At last Wren emerged triumphantly with a voluminous scrapbook, the cheap kind with thick yellow paper, and handed it to Nadia without speaking. Its cover was blank. Nadia looked at her questioningly and opened it.

  At first glance there was nothing to connect the various pieces of paper glued or stapled or folded into the pages: an origami crane; a ticket stub for a band called Stochastic Interference; a September bus transfer; a program for a play; a fragment of napkin on which someone had drawn a stick-figure dinosaur; several letters, and envelopes without letters; other pieces of paper that looked like they’d been fished out of the trash at random. There were photos, many of them, regular ones and Polaroids and tiny ones from photo booths, posed portraits that looked professionally done and pictures from a cellphone camera in dubious lighting that were little more than blurred shadows. Some of the people shown were friends of Wren’s whom Nadia recognized from parties and protests and shows; others she had never seen before.

  She flipped pages. It was all the same: a cartoon torn from the newspaper; an ad for powdered detergent; “John Halle and Christine Stettin invite you to the celebration of their marriage”; a train ticket stub from Ottawa to Belleville…

  Nadia looked up. “I don’t get it.”

  Wren took the book from her hands and turned back to the first page. “This I found in the trash,” she said, touching the crane. “Andrew Lane — you’ve met him — made it at the Japanese culture festival a few years ago, where he met his girlfriend Aya selling food. Stochastic Interference was Dave’s band, back when; that was where we first met, actually, at one of their shows. That was one that didn’t work out in the long run — they were together for about four months. Then Gina’s mom got cancer and she had to go back to BC, and Dave doesn’t do the long-distance thing.” She tapped the bus transfer. “I was never able to find out who these guys were, so I kept my transfer to remind me of them. There’s a picture, too.”

  “You do this with everyone?” Nadia asked incredulously. It shouldn’t have been shocking, but somehow it was. “I mean, you follow them?”

  “Most of the time. I haven’t actually been doing it as much lately; I was sort of worried you’d think it was weird. Like stalking, you know?” Wren gave a sort of sheepish smile. “I mean, when I told you about following those two to the hospital that time, you seemed kind of creeped out. And it is a bit weird, I guess. I just—”

  “It’s not,” Nadia told her.

  “And they’re interesting, you know?” Wren went on, as though she hadn’t heard. “And sometimes I get to know them, I make friends — that’s how I met Dave, like I said, and Brian, and half the other people I know. I get involved, and then I just — they’re interesting, and I want to meet them.”

  “But you can’t ever tell them why,” Nadia protested. “Doesn’t that make you feel like — like you’re playing God, or something? Changing their lives and not telling them about it?”

  “A little,” Wren said, and then grinned. “But once we’re friends, they end up changing mine, too.”

  She sighed. “Look,” she said. “We can’t stop using this power. You’ve tried, I’ve tried — sooner or later it’s too much, it breaks through. So it’s going to happen. But that doesn’t make it necessarily a bad thing. These,” she closed the scrapbook and handed it back to Nadia, “remind me of the good side, when I need to be reminded.”

  “And that keeps you from feeling guilty about it?” Nadia asked wonderingly.

  Wren snorted. “You know it doesn’t. But it makes it bearable. I’ve learned to live with this, Nadia, and you’ve got to do the same. Maybe you can do it the same way as me, maybe you need something different, but you’ve got to find something.”

  “And you want to stay and help me?” Nadia asked.

  “No.” Wren smiled wryly, shook her head. “I actually don’t. No, you need to work your shit out, and I need to let you go and do that. It’s best if I leave for awhile.” She smiled hesitantly. “I’ll be in touch, though. If you want me to, I mean.”

  “Not strangers?” Nadia asked in a small voice that sounded totally unlike her.

  “Never strangers,” Wren promised, and abruptly stumbled forward to enfold Nadia in a hug, nearly crumpling the precious book between them. “How could I ever lose you?” She stepped back, straightening her braids. “When you get things figured out,” she said, “call.”

  The sun beat down on the sidewalk and shimmered up from the pavement, absurdly warm for early June. The bus was late, and a dozen or so people waited below the sign with varying degrees of patience. Nadia sat on the bench, having arrived early, and tried to lose herself in a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. With Wren’s belongings out of the apartment, and the floor space no longer cluttered with comics and clothes and strange handmade art objects, she’d been able to find her own things much easier, and this had turned up while she was cleaning, one of her old favourites.

  She felt the longing radiating toward her and looked around for Wren before she could stop herself. She’s not gone forever, Nadia reminded herself. Just for a while. She closed her eyes and pushed.

  “Screw this,” the man next to her said. “I’m not waiting around anymore.” He jammed his bus pass back into his pocket and stood up.

  “Yeah, no kidding,” the woman beside him agreed, doing likewise. “I can probably walk downtown faster than this bus is going to get here. Should’ve just taken my bike.” Nadia watched the backs of their heads as they began to walk north, the way they leaned in toward each other as they spoke. Not strangers, she thought. They could be what she and Wren were. Every one of them could.

  “I thought you were a cyclist,” the man commented. “That tan from the bicycling gloves is as good as a badge.”

  The woman laughed. “Do you ever ride on the South Shore? There are some great trails there if you—” Her voice was fading; the two of them were nearly at the crosswalk by then.

  For a moment Nadia thought of getting up and following them, observing how things would begin to work out — if they did. That’s what I’d do, she could almost hear Wren saying, and Nadia thought swiftly in response, I am not you.

  The light turned, and the couple crossed the street, disappearing out of sight over the slight rise of the road. Nadia stayed seated on the bench, calm as a cat in the warm June sun. Any moment now, she thought, and, sure enough, there it was, the sound of an explosion behind her and, as she turned, a sudden gout of flame from a first-floor window. The kitchen of a restaurant, it looked like, and already the fire was spreading. The others who had been at the bus stop were fleeing, panicked; one ran into the street and nearly into the path of a car. Tires squealed. Someone inside the restaurant was shouting in Greek. Nadia stood and walked quickly to a payphone on the corner, calmly gave the address to the fire department, and came back. No-one else seemed to be doing anything useful yet.

  It felt strange to still be there, to be watching the aftermath for once. Ghoulish, Wren might call it. I am not you, Nadia thought again. Wren denied death by focusing on the lovers only; that was one way to cope, but not the only one. Someone inside the restaurant was dead, she knew it without having to see. She could do nothing for him or her, but that didn’t mean there was nothing she could do.

  People were pouring out of the restaurant onto the sidewalk now, patrons and waitstaff and kitchen workers with soapy hands, many of them stumbling, eyes glazed with fear or looking lost. A first-aid course, Nadia thought, that would be a good idea. And carrying a cellphone. She would have to sit down at home and make a list. Maybe she couldn’t stop the deaths, but she could mitigate the damage, and maybe do more than that — at least some of the time.

  Even being the one person on the scene who always stayed calm would be useful,
she thought, as her gaze fell on a little boy in the crowd, about six, apparently alone. His face was streaked with white ash, and he had wet himself. He had the odd pinched expression of a child who has been told over and over not to cry but hasn’t quite learned how to stop himself.

  Nadia walked over and knelt on the sidewalk in front of him. The boy stared at her, bewildered. Maybe his mother or father was the one dead, or maybe he had simply gotten lost in the confusion. Either way, this was as good a place as any to begin.

  “Let me help,” she said.

  The Story of the Woman and Her Dog

  E.L. Chen

  He slept in the bathtub that night.

  Natasha did not know anything about dogs. She feared that he would attack her, or eat the goldfish, or piss on the bedroom carpet, or all three. When he appeared, she panicked and shooed him into the closest room, waving a towel in front of her like a toreador’s cape. The towel was pale blue, the colour of his eyes. She dropped it on the bathroom floor once he was inside and shut the door.

  She sprawled across the unmade bed, listening for his whine, the scrape of toenails against the bathroom door. She wondered what she would tell the neighbours if he released a torrent of desperate barking. The walls of the condo were thin; her neighbours’ patience, thinner. She listened and waited because she did not know what else to do.

  She heard nothing.

  She had to pee but decided to hold it.

  Eventually she tired of the vigil and went to bed without brushing her teeth. In the morning, it was still quiet. She wondered if she had imagined him, that he was not really a dog. She opened the bathroom door, slowly, cautiously, as if she hoped to catch him in an altered state.

  She flicked on the light. The dog was still a dog. He stirred. Blinked. Yawned a doggy yawn, unrolling a long doggy tongue from between long doggy teeth. He still had not made a sound.