The Long List Anthology 2

by Aliette de Bodard

  As her mother’s life fell away from her, so did Madeleine’s. She took a leave of absence from her job, and kept extending it; she stopped seeing her friends; her friends stopped seeing her. Madeleine is certain her friends expected her to be relieved when her mother died, and were surprised by the depth of her mourning. She didn’t know how to address that. She didn’t know how to say to those friends, you are relieved to no longer feel embarrassed around the subject, and expect me to sympathise with your relief, and to be normal again for your sake. So she said nothing.

  Madeleine’s friends were not bad people; they had their own lives, their own concerns, their own comfort to nourish and nurture and keep safe, and dealing with a woman who was dealing with her mother who was dealing with early-onset Alzheimer’s proved a little too much, especially when Madeleine’s father had died of bowel cancer only a year earlier, especially when she had no other family. It was indecent, so much pain at once, it was unreasonable, and her friends were reasonable people. They had children, families, jobs, and Madeleine had none; she understood. She did not make demands.

  She joined the clinical trial the way some people join fund-raising walks, and thinks now that that was her first mistake. People walk, run, bicycle to raise money for cures—that’s the way she ought to have done it, surely, not actually volunteered to be experimented on. No one sponsors people to stand still.

  • • • •

  The episodes happen like this.

  A song on the radio like an itch in her skull, a pebble rattling around inside until it finds the groove in which it fits, perfectly, and suddenly she’s—

  —in California, dislocated, confused, a passenger herself now in her own head’s seat, watching the traffic crawl past in the opposite direction, the sun blazing above. On I-5, en route to Anaheim: she is listening, for the first time, to the album that song is from, and feels the beautiful self-sufficiency of having wanted a thing and purchased it, the bewildering freedom of going somewhere utterly new. And she remembers this moment of mellow thrill shrinking into abject terror at the sight of five lanes between her and the exit, and will she make it, won’t she, she doesn’t want to get lost on such enormous highways—

  —and then she’s back, in a wholly different car, her body nine years older, the mountain, the farmland all where they should be, slamming hard on the brakes at an unexpected stop sign, breathing hard and counting all the ways in which she could have been killed.

  Or she is walking in a world perched on the lip of spring, the Ottawa snow melting to release the sidewalks in fits and starts, peninsulas of gritty concrete wet and crunching beneath her boots, and that solidity of snowless ground meets the smell of water and the warmth of the sun and the sound of dripping and the world tilts—

  —and she’s ten years old on the playground of her second primary school, kicking aside the pebbly grit to make a space for shooting marbles, kneeling to use her hands to smooth the surface, then wiping her palms on her corduroy trousers, then reaching into her bag of marbles for the speckled dinosaur-egg that is her lucky one, her favourite—

  —and then she’s back, and someone’s asking if she’s okay, because she looked like she might be about to walk into traffic, was she drunk, was she high?

  She has read about flashbacks, about PTSD, about reliving events, and has wondered if this is the same. It is not as she imagined those things. She has tried explaining this to Clarice, who very sensibly pointed out that she couldn’t both claim to have never experienced trauma-induced flashbacks and say with certainty that her episodes are categorically different. Clarice is certain, Madeleine realizes, that trauma is at the root of these episodes, that there’s something Madeleine isn’t telling her, that her mother, perhaps, abused her, that she had a terrible childhood.

  None of these things are true.

  Now: she is home, leaning her head against her living room window at twilight, and something in the thrill of that blue and the cold glass against her scalp sends her tumbling—

  —into her body at fourteen, looking into the blue deepening above the tree line near her home as if into another country, longing for it, aware of the picture she makes as a young girl leaning her wondering head against a window while hungry for the future, for the distance, for the person she will grow to be—and starts to reach for a phrase only her future/present self knows, to untangle herself from her past head. She has just about settled on Kristeva—abjection is above all ambiguity—when she feels, strangely, a tug on her field of vision, something at its periphery demanding attention. She looks away from the sky, looks down, at the street she grew up on, the street she knows like the inside of her mouth.

  She sees a girl about her own age, brown-skinned and dark-haired, grinning at her and waving.

  She has never seen her before in her life.

  • • • •

  Clarice, for once, looks excited—which is to say, slightly more intent than usual—which makes Madeleine uncomfortable. “Describe her as accurately as you can,” says Clarice.

  “She looked about fourteen, had dark skin—”

  Clarice blinks. Madeleine continues.

  “—and dark, thick hair, that was pulled up in two ponytails, and she was wearing a red dress and sandals.”

  “And you’re certain you’d never seen her before?” Clarice adjusts her glasses.

  “Positive.” Madeleine hesitates, doubting. “I mean, she looked sort of familiar, but not in a way I could place? But I grew up in a really white small town in Quebec. There were maybe five non-white kids in my whole school, and she wasn’t any of them. Also—” she hesitates, again, because, still, this feels so private, “—no part of an episode has ever felt unfamiliar.”

  “She could be a repressed memory,” Clarice muses, “someone you’ve forgotten—or an avatar you’re making up. Perhaps you should try speaking to her.”

  • • • •

  Clarice had suggested that Madeline could manage the episodes by corrupting the memory with something incompatible, something of-the-moment. Madeleine had settled on phrases from her recent reading: they were new enough to not be associated with other memories, and incongruous enough to remind her of her bereavement even in her mother’s presence. It seemed to work; she had never yet experienced the same memory twice after deploying her critics and philosophers.

  It is very strange, now, to go in search of a memory instead.

  She tries, again, with the window: waits until twilight, leans her head against the same place, but the temperature is wrong somehow, it doesn’t come together. She tries making chicken soup; nothing. Finally, feeling her way towards it, she heats a mug of milk in the microwave, stirs it to even out the heat, takes a sip—

  —while holding the mug with both hands, sitting at the kitchen table, her legs dangling far above the ground. Her parents are in the kitchen, chatting—she knows she’ll have to go to bed soon, as soon as she finishes her milk—but she can see the darkness outside the living room windows, and she wants to know what’s out there. Carefully, trying not to draw her parents’ attention, she slips down from the chair and pads—her feet are bare, she is in her pajamas already—towards the window.

  The girl isn’t there.

  “Madeleine,” comes her mother’s voice, cheerful, “as-tu fini ton lait?”

  Before she can quite grasp what she is doing, Madeleine turns, smiles, nods vigorously up to her mother, and finishes the warm milk in a gulp. Then she lets herself be led downstairs to bed, tucked in, and kissed goodnight by both her parents, and if a still small part of herself struggles to remember something important to say or do, she is too comfortably nestled to pay any attention as the lights go out and the door to her room shuts. She wonders what happens if you fell asleep in a dream, would you dream and then be able to fall asleep in that dream, and dream again, and—someone knocks, gently, at her bedroom window.

  Madeleine’s bedroom is in the basement; the window is level with the ground. The girl from the
street kneels 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 sleep-over!”

  “Shh,” says Madeleine, pushing her window all the way open to let her in, whispering. “I can’t have sleep-overs 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 she 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 finds no one who looks like Zeinab, no Zeinabs 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 grand-daughter. 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 there is thrilling in a way she can hardly begin to explain.

  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 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. There, picking up a lump of pink granite from where the tracks used to be, 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 and feeling that it is somehow more precious still to find a bird that sounds like a bee and looks like an impossible jewel.

  “Ohh,” she hears behind her, and there is Zeinab, transfixed by the hummingbird, and as it hovers before them for the eternity Madeleine remembers, with its keen jet eye and a needle for a mouth, Madeleine reaches out and takes Zeinab’s hand. Zeinab squeezes 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 like it.”

  • • • •

  Madeleine leads Zeinab through her memories, 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. 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 so easy to talk to Zeinab, to listen to her—about the books they read as children, the music they loved, the cartoons they watched. Madeleine wonders why Zeinab’s presence doesn’t break the memories like her philosophers do, why she’s more free inside her memories 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, watching the sky. “Too bad I made you up inside my head.”

  Madeleine steels herself against the careening tug of Sylvia Plath, but then remembers 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.

  “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 looking forward to seeing the R-rated films in the cinema—

  —but she can’t, and she shivers, naked, in her bathroom, and the last of the shower’s steam vanishes from the mirror as she starts to cry.

  • • • •

  “I must say,” says Clarice, quietly, “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 a mess, a bowl’s worth of overcooked spaghetti. If before Clarice made her feel like a stubborn child, now Madeleine is a child who knows she’s about to be punished.

  “I had hoped,” says Clarice, adjusting her glasses, “talking to this avatar would help you understand the mechanisms of your grief, but 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, “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.