Hour of the Crab

by Patricia Robertson

  At five p.m. she lifted herself out of the maze of linguistic symbols and made tea. And then it was evening — time to heat up soup, to take a last walk with Boas before bed, to study the stars. At night, outside, she imagined star languages in their billions, their sound waves travelling through the cosmos. She kept up, as much as she could, with quantum physics, knew about the many-worlds theory and was certain that, after her death, universes would unfold from one another like origami, suddenly visible in earthly dimensions. What a fascinating job that would be — first interpreter to some distant star-circling planet!

  The stars, tonight, were hidden by cloud. She studied the dark shapes of the trees instead, the rough wood fence that separated her property from her neighbour’s. For a moment, in the sideways V of a branch, she saw the fifth letter of the Arabic alphabet as written at the beginning of a word. A hanging leaf provided the dot underneath.

  Too long in her head again. She was seeing symbols in everything.

  That evening, washing herself before bed, she discovered the imprint, unfaded, still there on her wrist. No amount of soap would remove it.

  In the morning, showering, she noticed the second. Not like a bar code, this time, but a series of greyish squiggles on the back of her left knee. She’d never have seen it if she hadn’t bent sideways to retrieve the soap. Examined in a mirror, it resembled a cursive script in an alphabet she didn’t recognize. It, too, resisted repeated scrubbing. Perhaps it was an allergic reaction. Or was there some disease that manifested as grey letters on the skin?

  She could ask her doctor, but that meant the tedium of appointments and explanations and tests. A nuisance, when she had so little time. Go away, she told the marks. Stop being a bother. Don’t make demands.

  With Torin’s help she was learning how to write simple computer code, another hedge against senescence. He was her son Gregor’s oldest child, dispatched to the west coast at every opportunity since his mother’s death, six years before, from a rare heart defect. Some days, staring at the strings of symbols, she wondered, despairingly, if a binary language was the future. Some days her brain shut down and refused to respond at all. An hour of computer coding was always followed by an hour’s walk with Boas, ending in town at the bakery, where Torin got to choose a treat and she got to watch him eat it.

  In early October she picked him up at the airport in Vancouver. The rain so drenching it seemed a monsoon, the windshield liquefying on the drive back to the ferry. Unperturbed, Torin told her about learning to play the trumpet, the aquarium they’d set up at home, his new friend Firdaus, who came from Iran. As usual they didn’t speak of his stepmother, or of the new half-sister, now almost two.

  They were eating dinner in the ferry café when he noticed the mark on her wrist.

  –That’s so cool, Babs, he told her, and rolled up his sleeve. (Babs, always — Barbara was for her academic papers — because she refused to be Grandma or Nanny or Gran.) The inside of his elbow bore a similar string of symbols, darker and less complex than her own. –Firdaus has one too, he said matter-of-factly. –Inside his mouth.

  –His mouth? she heard herself say weakly.

  –I think they’re messages. Torin reached for another of the little paper tubs of ketchup. –About saving the world. He looked sombrely at his grandmother. –Everyone knows the planet’s dying.

  Was this what eleven-year-olds talked about these days between their texting and their computer games? Perhaps the use of binary code was altering the brain. Perhaps each day’s news was driving them crazy with anxiety.

  –Eat your broccoli, she said firmly, as if the rules of the old world still applied. They didn’t, of course. She just didn’t know what the new ones were.

  Caught up in explorations of soggy trails, in Thanksgiving dinner with friends and children and assorted others, they didn’t speak about it again until the third day of Torin’s visit. She’d been debating whether to show him the mark behind her knee, but when she did he was unsurprised.

  –Of course you get more of them. You’re older. And you know all those languages. They’ve probably decided you’ll figure them out eventually.

  –Who, she said, not sure she wanted to ask, are they?

  –Firdaus thinks they’re from another galaxy. Trying to help us out. Torin was scrolling through messages on his cellphone. –And Olivia thinks they’re whales.

  –Whales? She felt as if she were falling into a crevasse in some peculiar landscape, so deep she’d never be able to climb out. Perhaps another dimension was opening up after all, and this was how it felt?

  –Olivia has one under her arm. Torin lifted his own arm, pointing at a place near the armpit. –Just a short one, though. She got it one night, it woke her up. It was itching.

  Babs had read about cases of mass hysteria, groups of people spontaneously manifesting the same physical symptoms — vomiting, for example, or dizziness, or seizures. There’d been those dancing plagues in the Middle Ages, in Germany and Switzerland and France, when people danced uncontrollably for days or weeks. During the first Gulf War there’d been episodes of nausea and fainting in several elementary schools in the States. Was that what this was — contagious psychogenic illness? But Torin’s last visit had been in July, and the marks on her wrist hadn’t appeared till fall.

  –Olivia, she found herself saying, has a very vivid imagination. That disapproving tone — she hadn’t meant to sound like that at all. –Have you told your parents?

  –Of course not. Her stupidity had offended him; he was frowning. –They wouldn’t believe us. They’re the wrong age, anyway.

  –For what?

  –For getting the messages.

  It was a neighbour’s daughter who found the second periwinkle. Torin had gone home the day before, and she’d dropped round at Francine’s to pick up her weekly egg supply. (Francine kept free-range Buff Orpingtons.)

  –Look what Deirdre found, at Roxmere Point, Francine said, and held out a tiny whorled shell, yellow and orange. –Odd, isn’t it? I’ve never seen these here before.

  It was a deeper shade this time, with its characteristic flattened spire, the shell curling round itself. Someone must have dumped them on the beaches as a practical joke. Or to get rid of some old collection.

  –Yes, I found one, too, on the beach near my place, she said casually. –They must have washed up from somewhere.

  Deirdre found a third periwinkle and then a fourth, and brought them over to show Babs. At twelve she was turning leggy and exuberant, with hair the pale creamy colour of the fourth shell. Babs told her about the nineteenth-century sailing ships, and how they must be from someone’s eastern collection. –I’m writing down where I found them, and in what position, Deirdre said. –They mean something. I don’t know what yet, but they do.

  –That’s preposterous, she said sharply, regretting it the minute Deirdre flinched. –What I mean is… What did she mean? –You can find meaning in anything if you want to.

  –But you know lots of different languages, Deirdre said quietly. –And they all have meaning, don’t they?

  –Yes, but… She was floundering, back in that crevasse. –They’re languages. These are just — shells.

  The Tlingit had a word, yalooleit, that meant coffin or womb as well as bivalve shell. The Haida believed that the first men sprang from a cockle shell when the trickster, Raven, opened it. The Navajo held that Changing Woman, the source of life and fertility, was washed ashore and emerged from a seashell. Perhaps the old gods were stirring, unable to sleep. Tilting the world so that shells turned up in unexplained places, creating confusion everywhere, a kind of cosmic joke.

  Though that didn’t explain the skin symbols. Perhaps that, too, was one of Raven’s tricks.

  On his next visit — it was spring break — Torin didn’t speak about the messages. In the unseasonably warm March weather they skipped stones across the bay, ate battered halibut at the diner, and had Torin’s friends over to play an old-fashioned game of Monop
oly (at her insistence; it would limit their exposure to the screen). Afterwards, expertly manipulating strands of pizza cheese, they talked, knowledgeably, about sea monsters, pet lizards, how birds had evolved from dinosaurs.

  Deirdre and Torin were sitting on the beach the next morning, heads together, whispering, oblivious, when she arrived with Boas. Torin was never up this early — he always slept in. She approached uneasily, pretending to be absorbed in Boas’s fetch game.

  –It’s only Babs, Torin said.

  Deirdre held out a palm. –Another shell, look! Torin found this one.

  It was large and lemon-yellow, a golden sea jewel. –We were trying to figure out, me and Deirdre, how many languages there are, Torin explained. –I mean, there’s the skin codes and the shells, and there must be others.

  An uncontrollable shiver seized her, a vertiginous terror about what these children were up to. She squatted down beside them. Boas shoved his nose between legs, eager not to be left out. –What, she said, is going on? Is this some sort of — I don’t know, some stunt?

  Torin looked genuinely puzzled. –I told you. They’re messages.

  Beside him Deirdre, staring at the shell in her palm, nodded slowly.

  –But how do you know that? I mean, what evidence do you have? She couldn’t help it, that training of hers, the primacy of empirical fact. It was what she knew how to do.

  –We just… Torin and Deirdre glanced at each other. Torin shrugged, and Deirdre looked away. –We just know, that’s all, Torin said.

  It was some credulous cult, on a par with religious fundamentalism or right-wing ideologies. A nationwide childish conspiracy. She stood up. You couldn’t reason with such beliefs. –Boas is getting restless, she said, which wasn’t true. –I’d better keep going. What would you like for breakfast, Torin?

  That evening, taking off her bra, she discovered a third outbreak of the skin symbols, a ragged line that looked almost like a sentence and travelled right round her left breast.

  Perhaps it was some unexplained dermopathy, Miranda said in her melting-butter voice. Babs was grateful for the lack of judgement in this generation of doctors. A variant of Morgellons disease, possibly, though that was believed to be a delusional parasitosis.

  –But certain metals can produce this effect too, Miranda said. The flowered headband that held back her spiralling hair made her look even younger. –Do you wear gold regularly?

  On some people, apparently, friction with gold alloys could result in what looked like black lines. But the only gold Babs had worn for the last fifty-two years was her wedding ring, without problems.

  –It’s definitely odd. Miranda wrote something on her doctor’s pad. –You don’t seem like a candidate for hysteria. I’m going to refer you to a specialist.

  At home Babs wrote down all the symbols as clearly as she could, using a mirror where she had to and then reversing them. She would treat this like a linguist, as though it were a language. Defeat the children at their own game. Establish that it was, after all, some nonsense eruption, some peculiar virus that mimicked meaning. The marks weren’t all equally readable, though she was quite sure they hadn’t faded. Some resembled Cyrillic and Hebrew characters, but others she couldn’t identify at all — bars and circles and what looked like tiny ideograms. A hodgepodge, with no rhyme or reason she could see.

  She phoned a former colleague, someone she thought she could trust, and sent him the transcription. He couldn’t make any sense of it, either.

  –I suspect it’s some sort of allergy or pathogen that mimics writing, Babs. His voice held a faint tinge of alarm, or was that her imagination? –It doesn’t look like any sort of coherent system. I mean, ideograms and an alphabet?

  The next morning she found a periwinkle shell — was this the fifth? — on her doorstep. Boas tasted it and promptly spat it out. She carried it inside and laid it next to the first one on her windowsill. That evening she searched for the spirals of shells among the glyphs she’d transcribed from her skin, but found none.

  There were many writings that couldn’t be deciphered, of course. The Vinča script, for example, found on artifacts excavated near the Yugoslavian city. It was thought to be between 6,500 and 8,000 years old, but no one knew what the language was. Or the Harappa script, which had been used in the valley of the Indus River between 3500 and 2000 BC, though whether the symbols represented a language or something else was unknown. There was even a script that might be a practical joke. The Voynich Manuscript, according to different researchers, was the record of early discoveries by the thirteenth-century friar Roger Bacon, written in a peculiarly complicated code; a rare prayer book from the Cathars, written in a pidgin version of a Germanic/Romance creole; or meaningless strings of characters, a joke played on the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg, who had supposedly acquired the manuscript for six hundred ducats.

  Torin, she remembered, had a book about code-breaking given to him on his last birthday. When she asked him, though, he looked at her with amused condescension. –You think that’s what we’re doing? Inventing codes?

  They were sitting together on a bench overlooking the ocean after one of Boas’s outings. She pleated and unpleated Boas’s leash. –I thought it was a possibility.

  Though that didn’t, of course, explain the eruptions on her own body. Fortunately Torin didn’t point out the contradiction.

  –Why is Boas named Boas? He was bored, slouching, almost adolescent; she didn’t have much time left to have real conversations with him. –Dad says he’s named after a linguist.

  –Franz Boas. A remarkable man. A nineteenth-century German Jew who studied the Kwakwaka’wakw language here on the coast, and believed you could only formulate theories and conclusions after rigorous examination of the evidence. You haven’t answered my question.

  –We told you already. His body tightened, a shield against discovery. –You haven’t said anything to Dad, have you?

  –No, of course not. She made a face at him. –But you must admit it’s all a bit — a bit —

  –I think it’s amazing. His eyes glowed like a fanatic’s. –That we’re getting help.

  Boas was nose-greeting an acquaintance, a ringleted English sheepdog who lowered a noble head. Babs had argued with friends over the use of who or that in talking about Boas. –They’re beings, she’d said hotly. –Animals, just as we are. That is for things. Boas is most certainly not a thing.

  –But it’s not much help if you can’t read these — these messages, is it?

  Torin was staring out to sea, his eyes narrowed. –Deirdre says I ought to ask you. I mean, you’re getting them too, not just kids.

  –As a matter of fact… She described her colleague’s response, her doctor’s.

  He gave a theatrical sigh. –It’s something completely new, Babs. They don’t know. How could they?

  It was starting to rain. The owner of the sheepdog flicked up her hood and waved goodbye. Boas nudged Babs’ leg with his nose in his own language, one she’d learned slowly and stupidly.

  –Can we go to Martina’s? Torin was hungry again despite the thick soup and four slices of bread she’d fed him at lunch. At Martina’s they made fat vegetarian burgers slathered with their own special mayonnaise.

  She stood up slowly, her joints squeaking in their own code. –Only, she said, if you tell me all about these marks on your friends.

  Francine was standing on a ladder painting a wall of her kitchen when Babs dropped by. She’d left Torin at the airport security gate the day before, none the wiser, though he’d given her detailed descriptions of the marks.

  –Deirdre’s found nine of those shells, did you know? Francine said, pouring coffee into a paint-smeared mug. –Counting your two, that is. She keeps rearranging them. Trying to figure out what they say.

  Babs sipped her coffee cautiously. –Don’t you think it’s a little — peculiar?

  –Obsessive, yes. But that’s their age, don’t you think?

  Apparently
Deirdre had told her mother she wouldn’t find any more periwinkles; there would only be nine. The number nine, according to a cousin of Francine’s ex — an astrobiologist at Yale — represented the ability to see clearly and the integration of the three worlds: physical, intellectual, spiritual. It was also the last symbol before the return to unity, represented by zero.

  –Deirdre says that’s the job of this generation. Making the planet whole again. I’m impressed, I must say. Sounds like a major task to me.

  Francine had also consulted professionals — the school counsellor, in her case. Children had changed alarmingly over the last decade or so, he told her; his colleagues had noticed too. How quick they were to grow up, how fascinated by interspecies communication and other worlds. How they had skills like telepathy and precognition.

  –And the weirdest thing, Francine said. –I’ve noticed this with Deirdre and her friend Stella: they can make a streetlamp go out when they walk by. She got up to feed the cat as if they were merely talking about the weather and not a shift on the world’s axis. –Especially the amber sodium vapour type. Because of the make-up of their body’s bioelectromagnetic field, so I’m told.

  It was a great relief to Babs, on Torin’s next visit, that no streetlights faltered when they took Boas for his evening walk.

  Fresh air, she decided. Fresh air and excursions and physical exercise. When Torin came for his summer holidays they’d get outside as much as possible. For his twelfth birthday in June she sent him a subscription to Scientific American and a lavishly illustrated book called Our Physical World. She would hold him down with her on solid earth as long as possible. Geoffrey, his late grandfather, dead these twenty years — an unfashionably non-hyphenated geologist — had exhibited the same disconnectedness, the same dreamy absences. Torin had also inherited his grandfather’s thin pinched nose, though his sharply angled jaw came from his mother. His half-mocking, half-confiding look was hers too, as though at some shared and absurd conviction.