“Zero out your sleep debt,” Lindy said, remembering advertisements. “Your stupid app gave me migraines.”
“Jitterbugs,” he said. “We can’t relax.”
Was it as simple as that?
“But now – what? She wakes up for no good reason—”
“I was done,” Zazu repeated.
“Yeah, done,” Matt snorted. “They achieve some crazy state of enlightenment, who knows what the fuck. Performing miracles cobbled out of bits and pieces of myths and Bible stories. For fun, as far as I can tell. Just to make themselves friggin’ happy.”
He sounded offended by the mere idea.
“Do they explain what’s going on? No chance.” He snaked the truck through a narrow lane, banging through a stack of tractor tires. It was a fake, a curtain made of hanging rubber pieces. They thudded on the truck roof, like fists.
Beyond the curtain were trailers: temporary school classrooms, a water recycler, a generator.
“Home sweet home,” Matt said.
Lindy checked the rearview. Zazu was eating saltines out of her battered red box.
Can you get out of there, kid?
Zazu shook her head. “Did you make the peanut butter?”
Do as you’re told, she thought, trying to flavour the thought with her sister’s bossiest voice. Get that door open right now, young lady, and run to town.
“I want peanut butter!”
No miraculous escape, no fucking peanut butter!
Matt yanked Lindy out of the truck. The cop car came with cuffs – he locked her hands behind her back.
“Go,” he said, nudging her toward the trailers.
She went, slow as she dared, and then froze beside an old iron bathtub. It was filled with ice: entombed within was a 10-year-old boy, blue of skin, with a carved willow flute.
“Hoof it,” Matt said. “This ain’t the zoo.”
She stumbled into the classroom. It was laid out like an ambulance, or hospital room, with a cot on either side. A Winkle was laid out on the left, a teenaged boy in a Vancouver Canucks jersey. His eyes were pinned open and his teeth were digging into a bit. His upper skull was shaved and open; a laptop umbilicus vanished into his brain.
He had ice skates on, black skates with black wings growing from the ankles.
Lindy retched, and Matt turned her away, so she couldn’t heave colourful cereal onto the boy’s open cranium.
“He’s perfectly okay,” he said.
“Okay? It’s not sterile in here,” she managed, when she could breathe again.
“Yet he’s alive,” he said. “You could still take the modem, Lindy, and walk back into town.”
“I’ll fuck you,” Lindy said breathlessly.
“What?”
“Let Zazu go.”
He made a dismissive noise. “Way too late to go pretending you give a shit.”
“I—” Part of her agreed; what was she doing?
“I miraculous scaped.” Zazu stood at the trailer entrance, with her little hood pulled off her head – her hair was a shaggy black mane – and snow on her feet. She had a cracker in one hand and her faded plastic pitchfork in the other. “Whajja do to Jason?”
I told you to run, Lindy thought. She tried to boot Matt in the crotch.
It didn’t work: he’d probably felt her getting ready before she’d formed the thought. Dodging her knee, he grabbed her throat. “No horsing around near the equipment, girls.”
Lindy went wireless.
Configuring her glass umbilicus into slivers, Lindy arrowed a thin, snaking line into Matt’s wrist, digging into his skin.
The grip on her throat eased, enough to yell. “Run, kid!”
Zazu had her hand in her mouth, sucking and watching.
She pushed through the wrist, a bright narrow icicle of glass, and arced it toward his face.
Matt shoved Lindy away. She dropped to the trailer floor, near the door, near the kid. A sticky tendril of hot smartglass stretched like a loose clothesline between her palm and his wrist.
“Loafs and fishes,” Zazu said. “You got all you need.”
It was true: Lindy could feel the trailer windows bending inward, disassembling. Outside, the SUV’s windshield and mirrors were coming too. She drew all the smartglass in the automorgue toward her. The strings of glass thickened, forming a web between her and Matt.
He put his head down, charging, an enraged-bull bellow.
Zazu patted her, consolingly, on the back. The throbbing in Lindy’s face subsided.
She jacked up her bit rate, crying out as the modem began to melt against the edge of the handcuffs, spreading the burn through her much-abused wrist. The glass fused, melting together in a wall, safety glass, half an inch, one, two.
Behind her, Zazu was moving, climbing up onto the cot.
“We gotta know,” Matt bellowed. “Why are they waking? How fast will it happen?”
Lindy lumped up window glass around him, trying to block out the sound.
Zazu had, by now, pulled the other kid’s monitors off, dropping them on the floor carelessly, along with little chunks of wire and brain. She pulled on the hinge of skull, mushing it down like someone forcing a suitcase shut.
“Arise, Jason.”
Matt laughed, a brittle noise, muffled by increasingly thick glass. He snatched up a wrench and began pounding it against the makeshift wall.
“We should go,” Lindy said. “He’ll break out eventually.”
“Can we take Jason?”
And do what? Feed him Berry Loops?
“Cereal’s for breakfast.”
“Stupid me.” Lindy shook her head. “I can’t get Jason into Matt’s truck, not like this.”
Zazu shook her head. Then she went outside.
“You have to stop walking around barefoot in the snow!” Lindy yelled.
“You’re not the boss of me!”
Follow? Or stay? She was afraid to take her eyes off Matt. His lips moved, soundless threat. She could make out the words “… gonna suffer…”
Zazu came back a second later with the peanuts and canola. “Make the peanut butter.”
“I’m a little tied up here,” Lindy said.
Zazu climbed into her lap, peering into her eyes. After a second, the right handcuff slipped off.
“Kid,” she said, “I ain’t fit to be your mother.”
Zazu dug her little fingers into Lindy’s palm, drawing out the umbilicus and scorched pieces of the modem, tracing the line where the overheated cuffs had scorched her wrist, examining the old self-inflicted scars and the tattoo: LET ME SLEEP, GODDAMMIT. She kissed the wrist, and the ache from the burns faded. “Just make the peanut butter.”
“Okay,” Lindy said. There was a bowl on the counter that smelled clean; pouring the peanuts inside, she took a small Pyrex flask and began crushing them to powder.
“Here’s the oil.”
Lindy mixed, a drop at a time, into the peanut powder, until the texture seemed right. Solemnly, Zazu flecked the salt off one of her crackers into the mix.
They dipped a finger each.
“See?” Zazu said.
“Just right,” Lindy agreed.
“Hey, Jason’s up.”
The hockey player’s skull had knitted itself together. He sat, giving Lindy a beatific smile.
He probably has a wicked yen for Pizza Pops, Lindy thought.
“Yuck,” Jason said. Then, to Matt, who was still pounding on the safety glass, he said: “You must be so tired.”
Matt let out a belch of laughter. He sat on the floor. His eyes rolled up in his head and he began to snore.
“Huh,” Lindy said. “I have no capacity for happiness, but he can go down, just like that?”
“Leopold understood less than he thought.” The boy fluffed the black wings on his skates. They stretched, flexed.
Owl wings, Lindy thought.
He reclaimed his toque and rolled it over the incision on his skull. Wings sprouted from the wool. His
stick, she saw, was a caduceus.
He leaned down to consider Zazu, then tugged on her sad, wet footies. They tore away above the knee, leaving little black-hooved feet. He tousled her hair, revealing horns.
“I’m going to go cut that Krishna kid out of the bathtub.” He took up his stick, and clomped out. A second later she heard wood chopping at ice.
Zazu was looking, regretfully, at Matt. “He said Wonderbread.”
“We need to refine your palate, kid. Bannock’s actually better. Some things are.”
“So we go home now?”
“I don’t think taking a devil baby back into Yellowknife is necessarily a good idea. And my sister…”
She hesitated. If the Winkles were coming around, everything was going to change. Getting a new modem, coasting on – it wouldn’t work out any longer.
“Missy never helps,” Zazu said. “Let me.”
“Do what?”
“Everything.”
“You’re awfully small to be taking on my problems.”
Zazu raised a sticky, peanut-butter hand. There was a pink antidepressant in the middle of her palm. “Look. From the truck.”
Lindy bit her lips.
“Are you…”
“What?”
Are you evil? Lindy thought, before she could help herself.
“Grrr,” Zazu said, play-acting the Halloween devil. “I’m scary.”
“You’re four.”
“Goin’ on five.”
If she was evil, did it matter? Nobody else was stepping up to offer.
“Okay,” she said, and felt bone-deep relief.
“Okay, your Majesty. ”
“Don’t push your luck.”
Zazu smiled, showing off her food-crusted teeth, and pressed her plastic pitchfork against Lindy’s chest. “Let’s find bannock.”
Lindy nodded. “Hide the horns.”
Zazu rolled the hood over her head and clasped the dangling handcuff on Lindy’s left wrist, tugging. After a second, Lindy followed her out into the snow.
“Ready or not, here we come,” Zazu said, and they began the trudge through the automorgue, trusting the tire tracks to lead them through the maze of cars, past the wolves to the capital.
KEEPER OF THE OASIS
Steve Stanton
The sand sifts between his stubby fingers as Riza digs, and the harder he pushes it aside, the faster it drifts back to void his work. His life has been like this from the first days of record: on his knees cursing the dusty ground and praying for relief from famine. He has been the official keeper of the oasis since his grandfather planted a palm tree on the day of his birth and consecrated the ground to him, the male heir of a proud tradition stretching back to the early days of restoration. The dry lakebed of the Algonquin Basin stretches around him in all directions, a desert left behind when the trees were razed by solar flares from Sungod and the Great Lakes boiled away. In the days of civilization, this hallowed spot contained one-fifth of the world’s fresh water in the largest group of lakes on Earth, but now the oasis has dwindled to a toxic trickle along with the fate of mankind.
The gritty dust sparkles metallic in the blazing sunlight, forged in furnaces of stellar fire billions of years ago, spread across the galaxy and blown by prevailing wind to collect in Riza’s quiet, terrestrial garden. The sand seems alive as it swirls around his busy hands, each molecule a miracle of complexity, each atom indestructible and eternal, destined to be carried by the breeze forever. Riza is nothing in comparison, a pilgrim on a sad sojourn to nowhere, his body but a fragile pattern of electromagnetism in a hostile universe, his consciousness a transient aberration. Why had he expected more? Why had he expected life and posterity?
The stench of dung assails Riza anew from a paper bag beside him filled with chicken bones and human excrement. He needs a hole deep enough to keep the desert jackals from digging up his garbage and spreading it round the ancestral tenement, but shallow enough for tree roots to find sustenance when the drought ends and seeds can flourish.
“Hurry up, Riza,” his wife yells from a grated window in the house. “Emil’s caravan has passed the outer gate.” Inside the bleached mud-block walls, candles burn at midday to freshen the air and the dry toilet is clean for company. His wife is bustling with nervous anxiety, hiding fresh anguish behind a coarse burqa of activity, holding to tremulous faith in the aftermath of horror. The house has been swept clean of sin, and their souls whitewashed with sacred observance.
Riza squints under glaring sun at a sad trio of approaching camels stooped with weariness and thirst. The oasis has been sour with precipitate minerals for years, and shallow wells barren throughout the Algonquin Basin. Denuded palm trees stand like paintbrushes against the cloudless sky, their hoary trunks tapered to scant tufts of green hope against a cruel azure sky. He recognizes Emil from a distance, a man of haughty stance and regal stature, his white turban an unearned crown. Emil wears an ornate cassock in public show of dignity as he searches for his errant wife who disgraced the marital nest in blasphemy to Sungod.
Emil dismounts his camel and ties it to a post at the centre of the oasis where the mud has been baked to a fissured mosaic. He tethers the other two camels and slides bulky packs onto the ground – a tent in one and all his worldly belongings in the other, probably little more than a sleeping mat and change of clothes, perhaps a flask of water and tin of dried jackal meat. He works with slow and deliberate care in the searing heat, inspecting the camels for problems or parasites, patting their heads and combing their shaggy coats with his fingers. The dromedaries are the last of the domesticated mammals on Earth, saved from extinction by syrupy urine, dry feces and water traps in their nostrils, able to travel for weeks without drinking yet provide daily milk rich in fat, protein, vitamins and iron – more than enough to keep a nomad alive in the desert. Methodically, Emil raises each camel hoof in turn, looking for damage or defect, then drapes a feedbag around the neck of each animal. His murmuring voice drifts across the compound like a soothing melody – a man with great respect for life and the creatures in his care, a survivor and custodian of a sacred future.
Working against time now and harsh circumstance, Riza renews his effort to carve a trench in the dust, scooping with both palms between his knees and holding back sand behind gnarly legs. He pushes his bag of dung into the ditch, and the ground drifts in to cover his offering like a lady closing her loins. A funeral dirge echoes in his mind, a sad song of surrender to silence, and a scent of smoke stings his eyes from a distant fire. Veins of coal continue to blaze in the hellish wastelands to the south where perpetual underground fires smoulder and burn. No plant or animal survives in the devastation beyond the oasis, and only a vestige of life hangs on in northern pockets. Even the ants and roaches have died off – creatures that once made up the majority of terrestrial animal biomass. Riza scans the distant horizon for any sign of movement, a rare bird or scrub of tumbleweed, but the Algonquin Basin is dead and forlorn. Perhaps there are fish deep below the boiling surface of the oceans, hiding in cool caverns of darkness. Perhaps there is hope.
A vision of loveliness appears to Riza as he rises painfully to his feet – a ghost in a red bridal sari embroidered with gold and decorated with prayer coins, his only child on her wedding day. Riza sobs with agony at the sight of her veiled face, but vivid eyes smile at him with a remembrance of youth. “Why do you weep over this arid dust?”
Riza ducks wet cheeks away from the ghost, but her presence lingers in majesty, a pleasant shadow from incessant heat. He had welcomed the young bride home just days ago, distraught but alive, crushed in spirit and trembling with distress. Her husband had beaten her in holy ordinance for refusing to conceive, for shutting her womb to any future in this terrible place. Riza had cringed with misery as he inspected the caning wounds on her back, righteous punishments from Sungod, angry purple bruises festooned with crimson welts, scars that would never heal in this world or the next. Emil should never have taken her to the
northern coast for their honeymoon, squandering her dowry for a few days at a remnant outpost on the salt beaches beside caustic waters. He should never have given her the taste of sweetmeats and pastries, nor graced her with fragrant oils and scented pillows. How could she come back to the desert and live without longing in a land without rainbows? How could she raise babies to return them to waterless ground?
Riza remembers her skin glowing with promise on that glorious wedding day, her nubile breasts pushing upward with the promise of fertility, and a red umbrella held ceremoniously over her head in blessing. Consolation shone from a golden sky as she performed the traditional wedding dance to tambourine and mandolin and shrill birdlike cries from a clapping crowd of attendants. The bone trumpet heralded her consecration at sunset, a sound reserved for royalty in the olden days, and the stars that evening glowed like jewels in an infinite expanse of heaven. Her betrothed Emil was Anishinabek by tribal right from the territory of the first fossils, a man austere of wit but a capable worker who feared Sungod and enjoyed the privilege of obedience. What better place for a virgin to find home and refuge?
Riza looks past the ghost to see her husband finally turn his attention from the care and feeding of his camels to hoist a packsack and begin walking toward the house. He does not hate Emil even now. The man easily could have resorted to bondage and rape in the absence of moral civility, he could have taken what he needed without conscience like the hoodlum vagabonds of yore who died out in vileness and misery. Emil is a handsome breeder and will find a healthy suitor to share his spawn. Riza dreads to see the man’s righteous face crumple into a mask of grief, his innocence forever sullied. Emil will wail and rip his cassock in grand spectacle at the terrible news. He will suffer for weeks in exile in his desert tent, walking to ground for a word of prophecy from Sungod, plumbing the depths of doom and ruin. But with the gathering curative of time and reflection he will shrug off his weight of guilt to the wisdom of holy law while the fallow ground cries out unheard.
All men hold a crystal core in the centre of their being, invincible and invisible, a private asylum packed solid with sorrow and sheltered from probing eyes of introspection. Emil will hide his wife away in a frozen catacomb of pain and force a balm of forgetfulness upon his mind. Riza knows the place and has packed his crystal core with untold tales of dismay, year after decade, heartbreak upon tragedy. The horror of life has condensed into a hard and brilliant diamond in his soul, for he has seen too much for one man to comprehend: children ravaged by starvation and women maimed by violence and disease. He awaits his final settlement with Sungod, a goddess of consuming fire who barbecued all flesh on Earth in a moment of cosmic indifference two centuries ago – snakes and frogs, sheep and goats, all the children of men. Riza steels his gaze now and hardens his strong shoulder for the benefit of others, but he cherishes his right to die and holds it tight for the day of reconciliation. Death is his only heritage, and who will speak of his legacy?
Fractured Page 14