CVC

by Gloria Vanderbilt

  “I was.”

  She strips down and dives in naked. You stop time and swim around her body caught in the air. You can feel that things have changed between you. If you are a gay man or a straight woman, she is already inviting you into the intimacy of indulging in a complex fantasy. If you are a straight man or a lesbian, she is inviting you into a triste érotique with time. Something has changed, though, and you pause, floating beneath her body. You climb out of the pool and restart time.

  “Where are you?” she cries. “Fuck, I’m not going to get used to that.” You both laugh, and she starts talking about your power in environmental terms – moving a mountain, rerouting a river. She has always wanted a mountain, she says, right there. You haven’t quite decided what you want to do with it, so you humour her, indulge this play of landscapes.

  “How about a simple bouquet to start?” as you hand her the most gorgeous arrangement ever assembled. You can tell that she wants to join you between the plancks, she tells you as much, but you don’t know how. You offer to try, and pull her close.

  This time, when you stop time, she is there on the other side with you. Inside the moment. Free moving. You laugh to hide the fact that you aren’t sure how you feel, as she explores and experiments with the shocking freedom of living in the moment. The near weightlessness, the serene airiness of all the things in the world. You go to Wonderland for a while, then Disney, until the rides are no longer amusing.

  “I guess we can’t sail to Europe,” she says, thinking of Paris. You can tell she is still thinking of herself within time. You tell her various methods. She agrees that it would be useful to learn how to fly. You travel round the world, moving with indulgent leisure through the silent earth. You walk the African savannahs until you come across a den of lions curled in upon each other. The two of you lie down with them, and roll in their thick furs, the only living humans on the planet. You make love on a bed of sleeping lions, because it is the most appropriate thing to do. We have time to figure it out, you laugh. But you don’t.

  Things fall apart quickly. You’ve complicated your relationship. Your lack of ambition with your powers, your hesitation, is swamped by her incredible desire to intervene in world affairs. It annoys you that she is behaving as if this is her one opportunity to set things right, though you know it is true. You try to argue with her that you are above that now, you float above the ways of the world in a quiet and lonely freedom. We are the shadows beneath eternity’s veil, you decry with half-hearted conviction – you know that only you belong here, but her presence is a gift. A gift to you! She doesn’t understand that.

  “You would dare to live alone, isolated?” she asks.

  “Age cannot destroy me now. Here, at last.”

  But she is not yet drawn toward the calm endurance of the shadow realm. How could she be? She remains just a visitor. This moment between the plancks is proof of the fragility of governments, human affairs. She is imagining a divine intervention, set on earthly effects, and this desire gives you a chill. You echo the words of the Dalai Lama about self and will and volition, Zen without the work, the necessity of failure, but she has cast her imagination too deep into the waters of affect.

  “We can change things,” she says. “We can legislate change, move like unseen powers among the people of the entire world. Bring grace, bring peace. We can do this! We have a responsibility, like a debt to this moment. I couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t at least try to level the field some.”

  You gradually convince her to return to her house, on various pretenses. This welling ambition in her unsettles you, though you aren’t sure why. It seems to open up an enormous pit of darkness. A dream has the power to poison, and already her dreaming has poisoned your wild dissolving bliss.

  In her home, you pull her close and give her a long, lingering kiss. You can feel her ambition electric through her skin. She can feel your withdrawal. You break apart. Everything is revealed in a series of quick glances.

  “Don’t,” she says. “Don’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” you offer meekly. “We can’t fix the future.”

  You restart time with a sigh, but unexpectedly she simply disappears. Sinking inside, you realize that she did not make the leap. You were not holding her, she let go or you did; her imprint still remains impressed on your skin, your skin darkens from the white of her touch.

  You panic. You stop time again, but she is gone. The difference between one planck of time and the next one is infinity (in fact, all the stars in the universe multiplied by all the grains of sands on the planet earth; infinities). She remains trapped forever where you brought her. You sit down, feeling a hollowness that stops your breath. You marvel at your mistake, your foolishness, your forgetfulness. You let it all slip away. All the memories of your time in that planck, one voluminous (endless if you can’t end it) moment, cycles through your mind. You return to the thought of making love on the bed of lions. Was it worth it? It was, you decide, the tipping point in latent conflicts. It was the failed test of the limits of your power. You still don’t know how much you can do, but you know now one line you cannot cross. The past cannot be accessed. Some mistakes cannot be corrected.

  You start to come around to the burden of your guilt. It is done and cannot be undone. You vow to build her a mountain. You stand up and walk toward the windows at the back of the house, as if to begin the planning and imagining of that momentous task. On the table, though, you notice a finely gilded card that bears your name in finely wrought ink.

  “Hey you,” it reads intimately.

  “I left something for you in the fridge. Don’t drop it.

  With a forgiving love,

  Connie.”

  Your eyes well up as you follow the curl of her hand-writing, and picture the terrible isolation in which she wrote this note. You grip it tightly as you walk toward the fridge, which you find empty but for a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. There are two glasses. Wistfully, you pull them out, let one touch your lip. Don’t drop it, you think. You won’t.

  You fill your glass with the wine and turn around to face a spectacle beyond your ability to render. The entire wall has been replaced with a window of a type you can’t recognize. It is thin, porous almost, like the glass wall is itself alive and rendering what it displays. You half feel like you are already outside. The scene, the outside, is even more disturbing than this impossible glass. Your small if elegant swimming pool remains, but beyond and surrounding it, the land cuts away into the sheer cliffs of an enormous canyon that sweeps away beyond your sightlines. It drops into a seething darkness. Beyond this canyon is a mountain that makes Mount Fuji look subtle. You drop the bottle.

  Out in front of the house, the entire suburban street has been transformed into a glimmering boulevard built out of all your childhood fantasies. Can you imagine the spectacle of phantom lampposts, statuesque monoliths and a wide expanse of bejewelled walkway? It all leads in one direction, which route you passively follow. There is no trace of the suburb, and you start to feel that it would make no difference if you started time or not. This is an encapsulated jewel-encrusted space. At the end of the street is an architectural wonder of a style you cannot recognize. It isn’t futuristic or neo-primitive – it is merely…alien. You walk up the capacious steps, only gradually realizing the presence of an advanced technology that has been monitoring you all along.

  “I know you’re watching me,” you holler.

  A clean mechinic voice, with faint traces of Connie encoded into its digital signature, replies flatly, “Please. Come inside.”

  Inside the building is a grand welcoming chamber, pointing perfectly toward the moment of your arrival. It has been built for you, you flatter yourself (and it has indeed anticipated your need for flattery). As you step forward, a hologram of Connie appears. She explains that they are using this old technology to help you understand. That she lived for many generations until she experimented with birth technologies and had children. Many of
them. It is easier here, she says, lighter and far quicker. She says she used to joke with her granddaughters about the issues you people used to have with abortion. Of course, as this new kind of population spread across the globe, they were compelled to abort the frozen population. At first they called them “sleepers,” eventually calling them “stones,” eventually calling them something that doesn’t translate. Eventually, they stopped referring to them at all. Except for you, she says. You play a special role in all of this. She admitted aborting felt a bit like smashing fine sculpture. You had to feel for the sculptor, she says.

  She speaks of her brood in terms of generations, as in gen7 or gen12, and you are astonished to hear the range of numbers she discusses, and the geographies they claimed, even invented. “I don’t know where that is,” you say more than once. “You wouldn’t,” is all she offers. “What killed the sleepers?” the young would ask. “They were frozen” became the adopted metaphor. Eventually only small groups of the curious would ask at all. Humans have receded into our primitive past. It’s hard to explain, she says, that people once died of time. Even I sometimes forget what time meant or felt like, she says. The hologram of Connie starts to crackle and hardens into a real body. She is standing right in front of you as if herself.

  “Now that you’ve seen this much, you are ready for another dose of the truth. I was alone. Alone for a long, long time. I don’t know, thousands of years, more, I suppose. It is impossible to judge such things. All alone. I went through many changes. The young ones tell stories of the dynasties of my moods and my projects.”

  “It was only a moment for me,” you whisper.

  “Every moment is eternity when you dwell there. I learned enough to advance your technologies until I had no more use for your people’s knowledge, your people. I collected them all and terminated them when I realized what was at stake. I can live anywhere in the universe. I need nothing. Since I began breeding, we have learned enough to leave the planet. It doesn’t matter if I tell you where. You will never be able to return to our planck, though you might seek us out to discover what became of us. Me. We have created spectacles that you could not comprehend. And I mean that literally. We have expanded the number of our senses, expanded their range, expanded the capacity and speed of our brains. Our bodies achieved a sublime velocity when we replaced our functionless blood with light. It is hard to explain to you all that we have become.”

  “What are you?”

  “Some of the youngest speak of me as the daughter of the end. What you see before you, though, is simply printed matter. A printed version of what you remember. People were already printing toys and houses when you left me. We’ve learned a lot about matter since then, even though matter in motion, the idea of atoms moving, is a theory my young struggled hard and long to imagine. But this me, this printed me, will still be here when you start time again.”

  “Where are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’ve gone. We’ve decided to allow the planet to recreate itself. You are the last one here. Eventually, you will want to restart time. When that happens, the animals will flourish. We have come to value the diversity of animals on earth far more than human contributions. It is a far more barren universe than you might hope. In any event, our thinking, as it is, circles around the prospect of the restart of time. We call it the beginning and we have prepared the earth well for it. When you do it, of course, is entirely up to you. As you can imagine, you fulfill all the needs we have for a god. Not you, exactly, but your power.”

  “There’s nothing left.”

  “That’s not exactly true. You have the choice. You can start it up again and let yourself die, or you can set to find us. We have reached the point where it doesn’t matter to us whether time starts or not. We have solved that problem.”

  A horror creeps over you. You run from the chamber, run back home, through to the edge of the cliff before the endless canyon. It is a dark mass at the bottom. When you climb down, you realize the darkness is the broken remains of humanity. Cut down like abandoned husks. This is how the earth restarts itself, you think. This is the myth of the flood. The fertile ground will decompose and life will start again.

  You look up in the sky and see the pale day moon. She has carved into it a perfect likeness of your face. You realize that it will blur and fade by the time of the next civilization. They will grow up with ghostly legends of what lies beyond. You set to work.

  George McWhirter

  SISTERS IN SPADES

  Sister Felicitas scolds me. Usually, it is my bad calculus or lab book that gets it; this time, it’s taking a spade from where it leans against what was the gardener’s lodge, but which now serves as the school chemistry lab. The men who do the garden don’t live-in anymore.

  I can’t believe Sister Felicitas has taken the spade from me so daintily. Outdoors, the gym-and-chem teacher grabs everything like a bat, but inside she is otherwise. This is the inside Sister, who handles the spade as she does tetra-meters, beakers and slender vials to be stored in the lab fridges.

  After resting the spade back against the wall, Sister Felicitas brushes her grey cardigan and pleated grey skirt.

  “But why does he leave it here?” I ask.

  “Who’s he?”

  “The gardener.”

  “Have you been watching one of the labourers…have you some arrangement attached to this spade?”

  The wood on the grip has a leathery glaze from the hands that use it.

  “Sister Felicitas, would I ask you why the gardener leaves it here, if I had anything to do with him?”

  I pose the point, logically, like the nuns teach us to. I get no answer.

  “Should it not be in the tool shed – out of the weather?” I wallow in saying weather, the Irish way, meaning rain.

  “I caught sight of him,” I say, choosing my words. “He wears leggings made out of old sacks, tied round his shins.” Like a poor man’s puttees, I think, but don’t say.

  “You are…if I remember rightly…a Waterston?”

  All St. Ursa’s girls are addressed by surnames, but I’m stumped at once by her “a,” which puts me in my place through the Waterston collective.

  “You know fine well I am, Sister Felicitas.”

  “And sent back.”

  I think Sister Felicitas refers to placement, my being put back a year into Fifth Form when I came from Mississauga to St. Ursa’s in Ireland.

  “What’s your meaning, Sister?”

  “Sent back to your old home,” Sister Felicitas frowns. “The Waterstons are not supposed to touch anything to do with the property. Keep in touch, and your family has, but the property is to be left alone. Everything in the garden has its place, and it’s not for you to choose where they go any more. How did you happen to see this…gardener?”

  I point up to the window that looks down from our attic dorm.

  “From our room.”

  “Then, you must be moved. We can’t have our girls watching young men going about their work. Especially, a Waterston.”

  Once again, my curse of being a Waterston in the town of Waterston, in what was Waterston Hall. As bad as being the head teacher’s daughter. Extra severity seeps into the Sisters’ voices when they mention any deficit in my studies or appearance. Like some form of fat, I feel debilitated by Waterston money. My father did tell me to dig into my schoolwork, not our history. But said as if Dad insinuated I should.

  In bed I often do a rewind mind-run on the toboggan down the slope from the back of our Mississauga house to the Credit River. In Mississauga, Ontario, I fill the slope with school friends to crowd out whatever my father, grandmother and great-grandmother stare at there, on the slope from our house down to the Credit River.

  I have had this luxury of Waterston women to advise and the family business to prepare me. Rosheen Waterston, my great-grandmother, filed the first records and did searches for guests at the Toronto hub. The Waterstons have always run Lineage Hotel
s, which operate not unlike the Mormon Centre in Salt Lake City with its worldwide family information and data base. This feature keeps Waterston Hotels running as continuous conference and research centres. But my father still speaks to my grandmothers and my mother about me as if I’m not there – even before I’m not there.

  “Can she bear to be on her own with only memories of us to keep her company?”

  “Memories are a man’s distraction, but woman’s daily bread. In any case, it’s our trade,” my grandmother har-rumphs at him, and my mother won’t even look up at my father from the chair where she sits, reading Chatelaine.

  I quote her. “She abhors his absurd mix of sentimentality and trepidation at his decision to return his daughter to the fold, but then she only married into the Waterstons.”

  They gather in the kitchen, like it’s their debating chamber. Kessie, the cook, uses a wooden spoon, a pot or a pan like a gavel when discussion gets in the way of their eating or her cooking.

  They settle my switching schools over a seafood sauce and pasta-draining session. “The Grey Nuns will take care of her.”

  “The Grey Nuns?” I ask.

  “Charity begins at home, in our case, our old home,” I am informed.

  I learn Waterston Hall was a gift to the Grey Nuns in Ireland, and Waterston Hall is now St. Ursa’s School, where the nuns shall pass the benefit of their wisdom and instruction on to me. Amen.

  “Okay, I agree to a good Catholic education, and to live without a friend in the world.” Neither relieved nor pleased, they peer at me like I am one of Kessie’s pots and colanders she has struck with her wooden spoon.

  In Mississauga I would be going into Grade 12 after the summer break; at St. Ursa’s I’m in Fifth Form. Put back and prickly as a pincushion about it, I badger to Sister Felicitas in Chemistry over my top mark for my lab book. “Shows I should be in the Sixth Form,” I tell her.

  “Don’t feel that you are behind, Jean. The Irish are always ahead of themselves in their educational standards because of their reputation for being backward, but then, the Irish always see their way forward by looking back.”