Jan paused. When her voice resumed, it was with a hitch.
“I always wanted to see a black hole. Stupid thing for a scientist to say, right? Right before we fired up the collider I was convinced, absolutely convinced, we would find evidence of a miniature black hole, something stable enough for our instruments to detect. But no dice. I guess I’ll just have to be content with metaphors.”
A click, and the audio ended. Maggie unclenched her fingers from her neck. Hands shaking, she slotted the next tape into the machine.
“Then, there’s the sound.” Jan’s voice, picking up a thread in the middle of her one-woman conversation. A rustling as she shifted the recorder closer to the computer and played one of the audio files.
It was the same as listening to it in the video on Jan’s computer—an eerie doubling between two recordings. An echo of an echo. Maggie’s skin puckered. Her sister’s ghost, finally talking to her now that it was too late. But talking nonetheless. Trying to tell her something.
“I don’t understand.” Maggie spoke aloud. On the tape, Jan continued.
“There’s a theory—an object on the edge of a black hole, once it crosses the event horizon, is destroyed. Except a perfect copy is created. Or an imperfect one. Nothing can ever be created or destroyed, so the energy is spread across the surface of the black hole and stuck there, a copy made out of light, and the original is gone, burned up completely. A black hole is a factory for ghosts.”
Maggie’s hand skittered across the desk, an involuntary movement knocking the puzzle box to the floor. The remaining tapes scattered.
“So if we don’t understand everything about black holes, if we in fact understand very little, which is the case, who’s to say metaphor couldn’t be reality? Maybe light and sound and time all bend out there in the deepness of space, and something comes back to us, unrecognizably changed. The original copy is destroyed, but something survives, different, but the same.
“I’d like to think that when I cross the event horizon, that maybe, just maybe the rules are malleable, and maybe some piece of me—the same, but kinder, more patient—will survive.”
Maggie’s hand went to her mouth. The tape clicked to an end, but the echo of it remained, Jan’s voice, coming back to her from the other side of death. Jan’s ghost, in audio form, bent and changed into something kinder, more patient. The same, but different. And what about Jan’s other ghost? What if what Maggie had hoped—even knowing it was impossible—actually wasn’t impossible at all? Both things could be true, her sister’s ghost, both a hallucination and real. Light and time bending, and some fragment, some imperfect and kinder copy of Jan coming back to her years before she died.
There was so little sound in space, only the radio waves that came from the deepest parts in a cosmic roar. No one knew how sound might behave around a black hole. But if a black hole could bend gravity, light, then why not warp sound? Why not form a strange, imperfect copy as Jan had hypothesized and send her voice back to her—stretched, changed, completely unrecognizable?
Maggie shook her head, tears slipping free. The mythology, the metaphor of black holes—that was what mattered. Ghost science. It’s how she had always thought of what Jan did—studying things that couldn’t be seen except for the effect they had on what was around them. Even if Maggie never unraveled the sound Jan had been studying—and she would keep trying, even if it meant staying in this miserable climate for a while longer, and even working with Barston—she had this. Jan’s ghost, real in a way Maggie had never suspected. Her sister’s final gift to her: her words, kinder, gentler, coming back to her from beyond the event horizon. In a way, Jan had bridged the gap. If Maggie kept searching, it would be like they were finally working together after all.
February 7, 2011
“When we grow up, we’ll be scientists. We’ll discover something no one else has discovered before.” Maggie kept her voice to a whisper, glancing over her shoulder occasionally.
On the bed beside hers, Jan didn’t stir. Maggie turned back to the ghost. Her solemn eyes were just like real-Jan’s eyes, but kinder; she waited patiently for Maggie’s next words.
“Maybe we’ll find a new planet. Or a cure for cancer. I bet we could do it together.”
It was a struggle to keep her voice low. She wanted to shake the real Jan awake. Wouldn’t she be excited to know she had a ghost-twin? Three brains were even better than two, after all.
Maggie glanced back at real-Jan and bit her lip, changing her mind. Real-Jan wouldn’t listen. She would roll her eyes at Maggie, or call her names. Ghost-Jan was safer. Maybe one day, Maggie would figure out how to talk to her real sister. But for now, she turned back to ghost-Jan, who continued to wait patiently for Maggie’s words.
“We could even build our own rocket ship,” Maggie said. “Like that movie about the farmer who built a rocket in his backyard. We could explore the farthest stars and find out what’s on the other side of a black hole. What do you think?”
The ghost remained silent. Maggie glanced over her shoulder one last time. It was hard to tell in the dark, but as the real Jan rolled over in her sleep, it looked as if she smiled.
WASHING LADY’S HAIR
Ursula Pflug
“I heard you could get Rick Sutton’s sculptures here,” the woman said, “for half the Yorkville price.”
Coiffed and slender, she wore an equally slim black suit that smelled like money. Feeling shabby, Karen wished she’d gotten properly dressed, but maybe her vintage flowered dressing gown, smudged mascara and vaguely matted hair could actually help. Shadow always said people came to the gallery just to feel they were a part of something.
“You can,” Karen said. Maybe the woman thought if she had one of Rick’s animals, her life might change, just a little bit. She might be right too: Rick’s work was that amazing. Karen knew it wasn’t just because Rick was her boyfriend that she thought so—his work actually sold, and not for pennies. Well, sometimes anyway.
“Show me,” the woman said, and Karen had only to point to the ceiling where a manta ray, three feet in circumference, hung from a chain.
“It’s six hundred dollars,” Karen said. “Which is half of what you’d pay uptown. And it’s his newest, so truthfully he wanted to keep it a bit longer, but . . .” She made an ingratiating gesture.
“I’ll have to think about it,” the woman said, “Not that it isn’t gorgeous.” She hesitated before asking, “Do you happen to know where I can get any Green?”
Karen just shook her head no, as Shadow had instructed. Green wasn’t scheduled, but it wasn’t exactly legal either. Shadow and Rick had both tried explaining the difference between selling and personal use, between synthetic and leaf, between last year and this year: a bristling confusion of facts that, just when it was about to cohere in Karen’s mind, always chose to disintegrate instead. Like a sea urchin she’d just stepped on, but not before it poked her sharply in the soft sole of her foot.
The woman gave her a disbelieving look. “But I heard.”
Karen just shrugged, returned to the desk, leaving the woman to browse. She opened the little metal box that served as cash register, sorted change into appropriate compartments. The box was dependable in times of power outage, which was often. Everyone was dumping their smart phones in favour of stacks of clipped together file cards, and email, no longer reliable, was out. Green Magic sported a meeting area consisting of a spotty Wi-Fi connection and more importantly, comfortable seating. There was no charge for use of the embroidered couch and the connection; people who met at the store sometimes ended up buying clothes or art.
Beside the couch, a metal stand housed fabric paints, mason jars of brushes and a stack of white tees Shadow had liberated from the dumpster behind a Spadina jobber. Karen took the top shirt and stretched it over a painting board. She’d let an arty customer try her hand at painting a shirt to take home the week before, and now Shadow charged people for the pleasure. Karen figured it was the first thing she’d
come up with that her boss had approved of.
Karen sighed, staring at the shirt. People who had never dived could hardly be better painters than her; they didn’t have a wealth of undersea imagery in their heads to draw upon.
The door chimes rang, startling her. The woman had finally left. Karen wouldn’t tell Shadow; he’d complain she could have closed the sale.
No sea here. Karen missed the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally she took the streetcar to Cherry Beach, just to sit there looking at water. Lake Ontario was so big you couldn’t see the other side, but there were no breakers and no jellyfish and it didn’t smell of salt. Of course, the Strait of Georgia didn’t have much in the way of breakers either. She’d grown up in Vancouver but she’d never spent much time on the island, outside of Victoria. Some friends of Rick’s had told her it wasn’t really the ocean till you’d built a bonfire on Long Beach, brought hand drums and tents or—if it was summer—just curled in a sleeping bag. No one else around for miles. It wasn’t really Green till you’d done that. Back then, she still thought her life would change just by being with Rick. It had, too, but not quite in the way she’d hoped.
Still, they’d been in Toronto, now, for over two years, and some things were definitely better.
Back in Vancouver they’d mostly sat in their east side basement apartment heating little pots of green paste on their hot plate. Once it was warmed, they rubbed the paste gently into each other’s skin where it was thinnest: temples, neck, the insides of elbows and knees. Waiting for it to begin, staring into each other’s eyes, smiles of delight deepening and widening. And there it was: a popping sound, like squelching through soft clean river bottom mud. But it was more than that; it was a popping feeling, her skin transmogrifying. Karen would look then, just to make sure what she felt was also what she saw: Rick’s hand wasn’t just a hand anymore but also a whale’s flipper, the whale’s flipper brushing her own, that of a green sea turtle.
Shape shifting. It was electrifying.
Rick never disappeared entirely when Orca arrived. Karen still felt the warmth of primate skin, the hardness of the bones within, the slender bird feet tendons. She knew if she pressed just so, his tendons would move, just a little, and at the same time she’d be touching skin that was slick and rubbery and wet, so alien it left her breathless. Cetacean skin.
Sometimes the change arrived mere moments after dosing, sometimes it took hours to achieve. They chanted and drummed to bring it nearer. They closed their eyes and tuned into the process with every scrap of energy and will, and—something like love. Definitely something like passion. Wasn’t prayer in the end just that, an expression of passion for the divine?
Walking, they’d talk about everything that was wrong with the world. If it was up to Rick, he’d have been born as a pre-industrial revolution European peasant. Then, even if his land wasn’t his and most of the products of his work, whether it was a lamb or a vegetable or a loaf of bread, went to the owner, well, at least he and his woman could sit on the broken back step peeling apples and looking at the moon. They’d tell folk tales to the little ones, and someone would get out an instrument and someone else would sing, and the apples would be organic because no one had ever even heard of pesticides back then, let alone invented them.
Karen had shared Rick’s daydream about a feudal existence with a Green Magic customer once and he’d told her she was romanticizing a brutal existence. Which was probably true but you had to hope there was a better life somewhere; maybe for some, the implausible fantasy lay in the future.
The present was no help at all.
Nowadays you had to work forty or more hours per week at a call centre, told how to dress and what to say. Everything mapped out bit by bit, piece by piece, all of it, until you got home and there was nothing left, no you anymore. Every part of you remodelled by them and for them, for the privilege of an evening can of soup or a box of take-out and a thriller on the DVD.
And there it was, her mother’s life. To prove it, Karen noticed she’d painted not a whale or a turtle on the T-shirt as she’d intended, but a flower sporting Thelma’s face.
Rick had always told her art was a kind of therapy.
Thelma stared at her reproachfully.
Why was her mother mad at her this time?
Why was she still so mad at her mother?
It wasn’t Thelma she ought to be mad at, anyway, but Thelma’s boyfriend Syd.
Rick’s manta ray sculpture swung just a little on its chain. She ought to wake him up but if she did he might just dive again. These days, Rick spent most of his time awake upstairs in the bedroom, diving. Not working on his art at all. It was worrisome. Green wasn’t addictive; many users said their physical and psychological health improved when they did a little Green now and again. But lately Rick returned to Green Lady over and over, withdrawing from real life.
Karen dabbed away at her mother’s face. It had been Shadow’s idea that she painted shirts. Green Magic didn’t do much business; the weekends were their big days, but it still made sense to open during the week—you just never knew. If she painted “Greenstyle” T-shirts while she clerked she might make a little money and create additional stock for the store.
She didn’t think the painting of the flower with her mother’s face was “Greenstyle”—she ought to be painting visionary fish, sharks, manta rays, even jellyfish. Still, the likeness was better than she had any right to expect. She’d actually taken more art lessons than Rick ever had, and only now did she remember her instructor telling her she had a talent for portraiture.
She’d painted Thelma with a mournful cast to her face, and while Karen definitely hated Syd she couldn’t hate her mom. Even back in Van she hadn’t blamed Thelma—she’d just needed to get out of harm’s way. She understood why her mom would want to get tipsy on Friday nights, forget everything for a few sweet hours, even her daughter, who it was ostensibly all for. The supervisor with his creepy surveillance, the landlord who didn’t fix the washing machines in the basement, the spiralling costs of gas and food and rent and insurance and fear.
“Relax, Thelma, just relax, I’m here. Take off your shoes, I’ll rub your feet for you.”
Karen felt ill, hearing Syd say that. But why should she deny her poor overworked mother a pleasure that, after all, Karen indulged in with Rick as often as she could?
Well, they used to, anyway. Nowadays Rick dove so much it had affected his libido.
“Darling, Karen hasn’t eaten,” Thelma said. “I’ll just run down to the corner and pick us up a bucket of chicken. And then we can pick up where we left off.”
Karen hated the taste of KFC; never mind that the cost of the bucket would’ve paid for a sack of organic brown rice Thelma could’ve made with vegetables: better tasting food that might just help to keep her encroaching cancer at bay. But who had the time, or the energy? It was Rick who had taught Karen about natural foods, how to make kombucha tea and grow herbs on the windowsill and sprout grains.
“Of course,” Syd said, and grinned at Karen, meaningfully. She knew what was coming, and awful chicken was the least of it.
And just like the other times, she hadn’t told Syd to stop. She’d frozen. She couldn’t understand why; she hated herself for freezing. No, that was wrong: she actually had tried telling him to stop. He’d grinned at her, a grin with just the tiniest, shocking hint of menace in it.
There were footsteps outside in the hall. Syd stopped. Karen moved away from him and adjusted her clothes. He smiled: a weird mix of gratitude and again, menace.
Don’t tell. He didn’t have to say it out loud.
Thelma came in, looking happy to see them, but especially, it was unarguable, Syd. He got up and took the takeout bag from her and assembled food onto three plates. Thelma laughed and Syd kissed the top of her head. No, he buried his face in her hair and Karen watched in some horror as her mother melted, as if this was the one good thing that happened in her week. She’d never give it up. How could she?
“We’ll sit and eat, the three of us,” Thelma said happily, and Syd, serving the chicken, said, “I brought a movie over.”
The chicken smelled rotten.
Everything had smelled rotten for a long, long time.
The part that, oddly, creeped Karen out the most was that Syd didn’t even behave as if he were hiding anything. Maybe he thought it was normal, even fun, for the three of them to sit down together and watch the latest sex and violence thriller bordering on porn and eat chicken bred with no heads, right after he felt her up.
Did the chickens really have no heads? Karen wasn’t sure if it was true or Greenie apocrypha but it didn’t really matter. It could’ve been true; if it wasn’t true now, it would be soon.
It felt like it was true now.
She left without eating her chicken. She never told Thelma. She went to Rick’s. Her schoolbooks were all in her locker at the high school. She wore Rick’s clothes, and bought a few more at the St. Vincent de Paul, which was a lot cheaper than Value Village. She went on student assistance so she could help Rick pay his bills. He welcomed the windfall and spent a lot of it on art supplies. And Green.
Diving and phone calls were activities inimical to one another. And Karen wouldn’t have called her mother once they’d resurfaced; after diving, sleep always seemed of the utmost importance, leaving pesky to-dos like letting family know you’re safe to be left till morning. Anyway, Thelma wouldn’t have worried, not right away; she’d have known Karen was at Rick’s.
Problem was, she’d never called. And it was two years later.
Shit. No wonder Thelma was melancholic.
Karen picked up the store phone, looked at it.
Put it back. Shadow would hate it if she used long distance.
She left her painting to get up and re-arrange the crab in the window. It was slipping a little from its perch in a pink velvet Victorian armchair; if it fell forward to the floor it might break; papier mâché was hardly the most hardy of materials. Beautiful and rose-hued, the crab’s huge claws were painted with an eerie life-like verisimilitude. Light-shadows of waves floated across its back as though it were underwater, and prisms swirled in its eyes. Most visionary art was wall art painted on canvas and the fact that Rick’s was 3-D gained him an extra cachet. Even his early attempts back in Vancouver had been clearly better than average. It was why she’d crushed on him in the first place, more than his looks or his charm which were, truthfully, somewhat non-existent. Karen had still been living at her mom’s, going to high school and hating her mom’s creepster boyfriend. Dropping in at the café where Rick worked part-time and hung his sea creatures had been her one solace; the dreamy oceanic peace in his work implied another world was possible, in a way nothing else ever had.
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