Hummingbird

  The bathroom hadn’t changed: the pedestal sink, the blue tub. I made sure the water was working, then sat on the edge of the tub. I wouldn’t have any furniture for a couple of days. I’d arranged to have Dad’s old things delivered to the house later in the week. In the meantime, I would have to sleep on the floor. I took out my smartphone and checked my email. No one had written to me in months. I googled locksmiths and called the first one on the list.

  “A1 Security and Locks,” a man answered.

  “Yes, hello,” I said, using the same intonations Dad had always used when conducting business over the phone. “I’m just wondering how soon you can come out to change the locks on my house.”

  Within days, I’d restored the house to its previous condition, the furniture back where I remembered it, the pictures remounted on the walls, the closets and dressers filled with Dad’s old clothes—slightly large, but wearable. When the security company came out, I had them install a state-of-the-art security system with a glowing panel by the front door and discreet video cameras around the perimeter of the house. The following week, I had a landscaping company tear up the front and back lawns, replacing them with no-maintenance rock. I determined exactly what groceries I was going to need and arranged for them to be delivered by the neighbourhood grocer on a weekly basis, the winter shovelling subcontracted out to the grocer’s son-in-law. By the time the snow hit the ground, I’d settled in. I paid my last smartphone bill and disconnected my account. All my transactions from that point forward would happen in writing, through the mail.

  My plan was to write twelve hours a day. I had a computer, a printer, and a large store of ink and paper. When not at my computer, I read or paced through the house, making a circuit of every level—up and down the stairs, speaking the voices of my characters. The leaps in time stopped, but my sharpened senses gradually began to detect something new: echoes from the past, lingering in the house. The first time I caught a glimpse of Dad walking down the hall with wet hair and a towel around his waist, I’d been terrified, thinking his ghost had come back to haunt me, but when it happened again a few days later, I realized that his movements had been identical, that I was watching a specific moment in time replayed. The following week, I spotted a much younger version of my sister playing on the living room floor with a toddler that it took me a moment to recognize as myself. Before long I was seeing ghosts every day. Eileen and me wrestling on the couch. Dad writing angry letters to the government. Mathilda standing guard at the window. My mother—a shimmering suggestion of a woman—sweeping up and down the stairs. Once I’d grown used to them, these echoes were more consoling than frightening, as I knew that similar echoes must have resonated through Meredith’s house; that in spite of everything, I was and always would be back there, lying beside Christine’s crib, listening to her soft, regular breaths. But mainly, I tried not to think about the family I’d left behind, focused instead on a new project, a children’s book about an orphaned girl named Penelope, who lived under the protection of creatures from another dimension. By the spring, I’d completed the book and immediately began work on a second, with the same protagonist. After some searching, I found a publisher who agreed to print the series, while accepting my two main conditions: that I would write under a pseudonym, and that I would make no public appearances of any kind.

  My body fell into its natural rhythm: dropping into unconsciousness when most people woke, waking when most people were coming home from work. I hardly ever looked outside, sliding ever deeper into the worlds I was building for Penelope to explore. Once the books began to appear in print, I had no interest in how well they were doing. The only reader I cared about was Christine. I had my publisher send copies to Meredith in the hopes that she would read them to her out loud, and I personally mailed her as much of the profits as I could spare. I never told Meredith where I’d gone, but she’d clearly found out, as regular letters began to appear in my mailbox: weekly at first, then monthly, and eventually, once a year, around Christmastime. Unable to bring myself to read them, I stuffed the envelopes, unopened, into a shoebox on the fridge.

  Time blurred past. An ungodly amount of time. Sometimes I could still feel Christine’s sturdy little body against mine, still smell the baby shampoo in her hair. But for the most part, the house did its job and distracted me. I wasn’t just seeing the ghosts now, I was hearing them too. Some nights, I could hardly think for the noise: shrieking laughter, monotonous barking, Dad yelling up the stairs, Mother’s soft, uncertain voice somewhere at my shoulder. They might not have been aware of me, but I took a voyeuristic, almost godlike pleasure in observing them when they thought they were alone: Dad straining on the toilet, Eileen lip-synching in the mirror, my teenaged self, masturbating furiously in bed.

  When the letters from Meredith stopped coming, I assumed the worst, that the end I’d foreseen for Christine had arrived. She was gone. I made an instant chocolate cake on her birthday, covered it with candles, and waited for her ghost to appear. Eventually, seeing nothing but Dad’s old kitchen table and three empty chairs, I blew out the candles and threw the cake in the garbage. From that moment on, I stopped keeping track of time, cancelling my newspaper subscription, deliberately averting my gaze from the dates on my written correspondence. But time hadn’t forgotten me. Grey threaded its way through my hair and beard, my flesh slackening on the bone, my joints tightening with arthritis. A dozen books into the Penelope series, I couldn’t have said just how old I was with any degree of certainty. I was dying, that was all that mattered. I could be patient for this last part. As long as I had royalties, my solitude would be preserved. And for the longest time it was. Then one day, a letter from the postal service informed me of an imminent change. They were, I was told, phasing out the old door-to-door postal system in favour of a more efficient network of community mailboxes, for which I would soon be given a key. My box would be at the end of the block, on the north-east corner of Poplar and Rose (the exact intersection where I’d been struck down as a boy). I had to collect my mail somehow. I was going to have to leave the house.

  I started by stepping out onto the porch, a thin note of terror ringing through my head as I gripped the railing. A few days later, I took one step down the stairs. By the end of the week, I’d made it all the way to the yard, discovering years of accumulated trash and a few resourceful weeds among the rocks. On my next outing, I moved beyond the perimeter of the fence, lurching down the block to snatch a handful of flyers from my assigned cubby. Once a week, I forced myself to make that terrible journey, the peace of mind I’d worked so hard to achieve shattered as I dwelled on small moments from the walk—a child observing me from the passenger window of a slow-moving car, a beautiful young woman saying hello, my disastrous reply. Gradually, the weather began to cool. The leaves changed colour and spiralled to the ground.

  One afternoon, I was standing at the kitchen window by the coffee machine, when a flock of geese passed over the house. My skin tingled as the scene around me grew eerily familiar. I’d eaten breakfast by that same window for years. I’d seen dozens, if not hundreds of geese pass over the house. But there was something about that breakfast, those geese, the precise quality of light in the window, the way I was holding my cup, that left me feeling I’d experienced the moment before. Only when I burned my mouth and slammed down my cup did my very first trip to the future return to me: the long walk to the bank of mailboxes down the road, the unexpected letter from Meredith.

  I leafed through several half-finished books (just as I’d done in my vision), before putting on my shoes. Outside, all the familiar details were there. The wind around my naked ankles. Dad’s ghost working on the fence. A boy on a bike. A speeding car. I moved down the sidewalk on a rigid track to the mailbox, not at all surprised to find Meredith’s letter in my cubby. I carried it home, spotting Dad’s ghost on the roof. My neighbour appeared and I awkwardly saluted her, hauling myself up the front porch, as hail began to fall from the overcast sky.


  That was the point where my vision had ended and Christine had jumped into my arms, but now I could follow the story further, into the house. Rather than tearing the letter open immediately, I took down the shoebox with all of Meredith’s unopened letters. Judging from the postmarks, she hadn’t written in five years. I hadn’t seen her in nearly ten. If Christine had still been alive, she would have been twelve years old. Unable to think of anything that Meredith could say that might lessen the pain of that fact, I added her latest letter to the shoebox and went back to the window. The storm had passed. More geese flew over the house, plaintively calling. Next door, the neighbour’s lawnmower roared to life. A fist-sized shadow drifted over the rocks in the yard, though I could see nothing to cast it. I went back to the fridge and grabbed the shoebox of letters. Before I could change my mind, I carried the box over to the old woodstove in the living room and shoved it in, lighting a match and setting the whole thing on fire.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A half-dozen empty yellow vehicles sat in a row outside the airport terminal. I stood on the curb with my bag for a long time before an airport employee finally noticed me and came over to explain how the autocabs worked in a loud, patronizing voice, as if I were ninety years old.

  “Do you have a device?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “A phone? A wristlet?

  “I have a credit card.”

  He nodded at this quaint, but apparently still functional, technology and pushed a button on the rear hatch, exposing a luggage compartment. I stowed my bag and climbed into the vehicle where, following the man’s instructions, I swiped my credit card and told the car where I wanted to go. The autocab signalled and rolled into traffic. At first, I was unnerved by the absence of a driver, but the vehicle inspired confidence, moving more smoothly than any human driver I’d ever encountered. I sat back and looked out the window. Other than this one futuristic change, the city was much as I remembered it. A few new housing developments had sprung up, and most of the larger franchises had been refaced, but the people on the streets were familiar: wealthy retirees and students, tourists and the homeless, all drawn to the coast by the temperate climate. Halfway through the ride, I felt like I’d been using an autocab my whole life, nearly drifting off in the quiet, climate-controlled cab.

  At the hotel, I reluctantly stepped back into the world, feeling a bite in the air as I dodged a panhandler and carried my bag into the building. The autocab carried on without me. The lobby was empty. I followed the prominent self-check-in instructions at the front desk, taking my keycard from a slot and pausing at a kiosk beside the elevator to purchase the most basic-looking smartphone on display. It seemed important to have a device in this new world. I toyed with the phone in the elevator, well on my way to making it functional by the time I’d reached my room on the twenty-second floor. I let myself in and flopped onto one of the room’s two beds, waking the huge wall-embedded screen before spotting the mini-bar across the room. All the rules I’d been living by for the past decade were tumbling away. Soon a row of small empty bottles stood on the nightstand beside me and I’d immersed myself in a frenetic news cycle dominated by proxy wars and mass killings. Noting a mysterious steel box beside the mini-bar, I pivoted off the bed and pushed to my feet, swaying a little as I opened the box with the help of my new smartphone. Inside, I found a handful of sex toys available for purchase, notably a flashlight-shaped object with a rubberized vagina on one end. Attached to the device were clear instructions for how to synchronize it with the hotel television. With six ounces of hard alcohol in my system, it seemed like the thing to do. Ten minutes later, I was lying on the bed with two pillows under my head, staring at the huge screen in front of me. The device made a low humming noise as it stimulated me in time with the action. It didn’t take much imagination to erase the borders around the screen and immerse myself in the experience, with myself as the protagonist and a limber co-ed as my eager partner, but just when my pleasure began to intensify, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror across the room—old and exhausted, my cock (which felt slightly bruised) encased in a hard plastic shell. I quickly removed the device and threw it into the garbage, then, reconsidering, wrapped it in a towel and tucked it into my bag. After a long sobering shower, I turned out the lights and went over to the window in my cheap hotel robe. Large, distinct flakes drifted down from the overcast sky. Snow never stayed long on the coast, but on the rare occasions that it came, it fell thick and heavy. I doubted that I would be able to see Meredith’s house from there, but looked for it anyway, peering out at the sprawl of the city, isolating one small quadrant, one narrow band, one individual speck of light, which—I became increasingly certain—had been left on just for me. A lantern in a window.

  The next morning, I found myself in an idling cab, staring out the window at Meredith’s house, her roof covered in two inches of new snow. The driver, a real person who’d briefly tried to make conversation before retreating into offended silence, twisted around to look at me with his elbow on the seat. “Thirty-two fifty,” he said flatly.

  If I’d been in the autocab, I might have changed my mind and gone straight back to the hotel, but with him staring at me, I felt that I had no choice but to pay and get out of the car. Once he’d gone, I stood in the empty street, looking at the newish SUV in Meredith’s driveway. I approached the house slowly, making distinct footsteps in the snow. A pigeon nesting under the gable of a neighbour’s roof took to the air with a jackhammer beating of wings, and I came to a brief stop, waiting for someone to shout at me, to demand that I explain my presence. I grabbed the porch railing and climbed, my footfalls on the steps deafening. I touched the doorbell and heard a familiar chime inside. After a few seconds, the deadbolt clunked, and a dangerous swell of emotion rose up in me as the door swung open.

  “Oh,” Meredith said, in a soft breathless voice.

  She was wearing a style of shirt I’d never seen on her before, with a wide collar that flared in the opposite direction that you’d expect. This, more than any physical change, made me aware of the amount of time that had passed since I’d last seen her. “Hello, Meredith,” I said, barely holding back the tears. The surprise in her face gave way to concern.

  “What are you doing here, Felix?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted.

  She looked up and down the street. “Well, you’d better come in. It’s freezing.”

  I followed her into the house, carefully wiping my shoes on the front mat and standing in the entry with my arms at my sides.

  “You should have worn a coat,” she scolded. Her hands looked different, smaller somehow. She’d repainted in my absence and the furniture was mostly new, but I recognized my old easy chair against the far wall, piled high with papers. I brought my eyes back around in her direction, unable to keep them on her face for long. “Just make yourself at home,” she said, a hint of a tremor in her voice. “I’ll get some coffee. Do you still drink coffee?”

  I nodded.

  “Black?”

  I nodded again, pleased that she remembered. She disappeared into the kitchen and I walked gingerly through the living room, as if the floor were on fire. An abstract painting hung on the wall opposite the couch—violent sweeps of colour slashing the canvas, like hard-angled rain. I glanced around for Christine’s ghost. A low rumble sounded in the kitchen and Meredith stepped back into the living room with two steaming cups. She handed one to me.

  “This is quite the surprise,” she said, appearing calmer.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. It’s just … unexpected. You’ve been getting my letters, then?”

  “No,” I said. “Well, yes, but I haven’t read them.”

  “I see.”

  “It was … I just couldn’t.”

  She waved a dismissive hand and sat on a chair a short distance from the couch. A silence fell between us.

  “You look good,” I finally offered.

  She
received the compliment with a neutral smile. “How have you been, Felix?”

  I couldn’t answer, bursting into a half-laugh, half-sob. She waited for me to compose myself, sympathetic but distant.

  “Are you on medication?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you mind if I ask why not?”

  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “As long as I’m alone, I find I can manage.”

  “So, you live alone.”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded, seeming to approve. “I married a few years ago.”

  “I see,” I said weakly.

  “I mentioned him in my letters. He’s a good man. Not a deep thinker. But he has a big heart.”

  “Is he …” I said, my voice rising in pitch, “here now?”

  “Actually, he’s out of town on business. He’ll be back tonight.”

  My eyes drifted around the room, finding no signs of a male presence. “What does he do? Your husband.”

  “He’s a pharmaceutical rep,” she said after a slight pause. “He loves Christine very much.”

  I looked at her sharply, noting her use of the present tense. Loves. Beating wings grazed my right ear. The room dimmed and brightened.

  “Does he?” I said.

  “Yes, he does. He’s become like a father to her. I’m sorry, I know that might be hard for you to hear.”

  “No, no. It’s fine. So, Christine …” It hurt just to say her name. “She’s …”—I looked at the closed door down the hall—“in her room then?”

  “Actually, she slept over at a friend’s last night. If I’d have known you were coming …”

  I looked around, seeing no more evidence of a twelve-year-old girl in the house than I’d seen of a husband. “What’s her name?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Christine’s friend. What’s her name?”

  “Charlotte,” Meredith said, her voice tight.