Hour of the Crab

by Patricia Robertson

  But Torin did not come that summer after all, because Babs got sick. It began with dizziness, and a ringing in her ears, and a strange taste in her throat like very salty seaweed. Miranda referred her to a neurotologist, who suspected Ménière’s disease. The dizziness, and the strange taste, got worse. A half-dozen tests proved inconclusive. The neurotologist prescribed betahistine and referred her to a colleague of his in West Vancouver. A highly puzzling constellation of symptoms, the colleague said. She hadn’t come across anything similar in the literature.

  The betahistine helped but made her nauseous and brought out a blistery rash behind her ears that wouldn’t go away. The three skin marks — there were, after all, only three — remained, though no one seemed interested or thought they had anything to do with her illness. Francine and her other friends, emissaries from the land of health, brought her meals, did her laundry, kept her company. Even Deirdre, now thirteen, came and read aloud to her in the evenings. Deirdre had acquired a boyfriend, though according to her mother they seemed quite uninterested in sex. They researched things online — planetary exploration, the origin of stars, the composition of sand. Why weren’t they practising French kissing instead, Francine wanted to know?

  Deirdre was going through a stage of dystopian fantasy novels, grim worlds where children were tortured or imprisoned or pursued by an increasingly inventive panoply of monsters, but nevertheless survived. They’re rehearsing, these children, Babs thought, and then reminded herself how she too had loved death and mystery and darkness at that age, a backdrop for her own blazing self.

  A week later the specialist in West Vancouver sent her an email. A very interesting article in the literature recently. Children in several Midwest American cities reporting symptoms like yours. Some of them have peculiar cravings — for dirt or soil, for example. The authors hypothesize either a mineral deficiency or some new autoimmune pathology.

  The specialist had included a link to the article. Babs, half-lying against her sofa cushions, clicked on it. The jargon was almost impenetrable, nearly as bad as her own profession’s, and she fell asleep with the glow of the laptop flooding her, as if she faced an altar.

  Deirdre arrived as usual that evening, bringing a basket of fresh peaches and her collection of shells. Babs had almost forgotten about them. As it turned out, so had Deirdre, who’d given up on the idea of messages and was instead learning how to repair bicycles with her new boyfriend.

  –How is he, your boyfriend? Babs asked, struggling to sit upright on the sofa. Bryn or Bryant or some such — she could never remember this generation’s unorthodox names.

  –Bevan, said Deirdre. –Bevan Eiric Alinsky. He’s fine, thanks. He’s spending a couple of weeks with his grandparents in Winnipeg.

  It was stinkingly hot, with unusually high humidity. Peculiar weather for the island; climate change, of course. –Should I turn the light on? Deirdre asked.

  –No, it’s cooler like this, in the dark. She’d had the shades drawn all day, the fan whirring beside her; the cabin had no air conditioning. Who had ever thought, here, it might be needed?

  –I brought you these to show you, Deirdre said, opening the paper bag she held and tipping the contents into Babs’ hand. She felt rather than saw the cool smoothness of the shells, their sharp little rims. –It’s hard to see in this light, Deirdre said, but they’ve changed colour.

  Babs examined them in the beam of Deirdre’s pen flashlight. They had darkened, each of them, to rich browns and ochres that were almost black. –Is this what they do over time, do you think? Deirdre asked. –Once you take them from the beach?

  They checked the shells against the two on Babs’ windowsill. These had darkened too, though not as much. –I looked online, Deirdre said, but I couldn’t find anything. She frowned, puzzling, touching them gently. –They must be telling us something again. I wish we could understand.

  The old knowledge, the stuff that had carried them from the Enlightenment, was drying out and blowing away. In its stead was a new kind of knowledge, thrusting itself in their faces, demanding to be deciphered and understood. What was needed now were seers, diviners, poets; the trouble was, Babs didn’t know any. She knew people like herself, who had parsed knowledge by dividing it into ever smaller pieces and had no idea, now, how to put it all back together.

  A certain Dr. Molly Threshwick at her old university was a folklorist with an international reputation. Babs knew her from interdepartmental committees. She found herself telling Molly Threshwick, by email, about the discovery of an Atlantic periwinkle species on a Pacific coast, and about Deirdre and her grandson, though she left out the part about the marks on her own body. After she’d hit send she had immediate regrets. She was a fool after all, a credulous old woman, evincing, despite her efforts, mental deterioration and decline.

  A week passed, ten days. When the reply came, she couldn’t at first bring herself to open it. Molly Threshwick, it turned out, had been away at a conference on new developments in the study of proto-writing systems, of all things. Babs would be aware, she said, of archetypal beliefs about marine shells, apparently universal, such as their association with birth images. Human embryos, like snails in the ocean, dwelt in the salty environment of amniotic fluid. Representations of gods or humans emerging from shells were widespread in ancient Mesoamerica as well as Peru, India, and possibly other places. In the Sacred Well at Chichén Itzá was a gold plaque showing an old man emerging from a snail shell, suggesting the arrival in the world of hidden knowledge.

  Did she know, Dr. Threshwick asked at the end of her email, what Erasmus Darwin — grandfather of the more famous Charles — had written? E conchis omnia. Everything from shells.

  The taste of seaweed lingered, but Babs got no worse. By September, when her energy had returned enough to take Boas for short walks, she asked if Torin might miss a week of school and come to stay with her. He arrived bearing gifts that must have been chosen by his stepmother — herbal tea from a specialty store, a lavender-infused pillow, a new book about Turkey, which she’d always wanted to visit. He was cheerful and insouciant. She listened to everything he said with great care and said little. On their first evening they went to Martina’s and took Deirdre with them. Talked about island news — Deirdre was hand-rearing an orphaned lamb, she and Bevan were just friends now — while Torin asked eager questions. Over dessert — Martina’s famous rhubarb crumble — Babs asked, tentatively, if any more of the marks had appeared on Torin’s friends.

  –They’re all fading, Torin said without interest.

  –I think you just didn’t figure them out in time, Deirdre said firmly. –It’s all so new. They’ll try something else instead.

  –What about the shells? Babs asked before she could stop herself.

  Deirdre stirred her mound of ice cream into the rhubarb. –They’re changing again. She paused, as if she wasn’t sure whether to continue. –They’re glowing. I take them out at night to watch.

  –Hey, cool! said Torin enthusiastically. –Can I come over later and see them?

  –They send out pulses. She stared at her spoon as if it was glowing too. –On and off. And then they stop.

  Babs had no doubt that the gods her generation had worshipped were dying. They were passing away, were emptying out into husks. The new ones, when the time came, would stride out onto land, perhaps on this very island, full of vigour, shining in their nakedness. She wondered if she’d live long enough to see it. They were readying themselves, the children, they were paying attention. They were doing what they had to do. They looked back at her from wherever they were, their faces radiant, but they couldn’t tell her where it was.

  BRING DOWN YOUR ANGELS AND SET ME FREE

  The man appeared on her lawn on a Wednesday in October. He emerged from the mist moving in from the lake, the shifting light, a bent figure with a pickaxe. Thirty-something probably, muscled arms in shirt sleeves, flat grey cap above a small square jaw. Charlotte went outside and walked through the ta
tters of mist toward him, or toward where she’d seen him, but he’d gone. Baffled, mildly irritated, she returned to the house. She was shivering in her T-shirt; the day had turned raw.

  The next time, a week or so later, she was backing out of the driveway, late for an appointment. He stood holding his pickaxe in the corner by the Japanese maple. Turned and looked at her as she drove past. What she noticed now were the thin ribs, the eyes narrowed, hunted. The eyes gave her pause. She phoned the city works department. No, they had no one working on William Street. That evening, over a dinner meeting, one of her colleagues said –A pickaxe? What would he be doing with a pickaxe nowadays?

  Charlotte could have imagined the pickaxe but not the man. He reminded her of her brother, her tall intense younger brother, a sculptor in Halifax. She was overtired, it was true; her last mission, to the Gambia, had taken a lot out of her. Her colleague said –I wish they’d take a pickaxe to my street! One pothole after another since the winter we had.

  The house was a two-storey limestone saltbox with a glossy red door and black-and-white trim, the ivy thick on the walls, and had once belonged to a British officer who’d fought in the War of 1812. Charlotte had grown up with the insubstantiality of wood; the house, built in 1815, looked as though it could withstand anything. The owner had inherited it from his great-aunt and wanted a quick sale. That red door, and the ivy — she’d bought it on impulse the day she’d seen it. Her share of the sale of her parents’ house on the west coast would more than cover the down payment.

  –That British officer probably helped dispatch some of my ancestors, she told Campbell when he came for a visit a week after the sale went through.

  –Don’t blame me when you start having nightmares. He lifted his scotch glass, the first of the night, to her. –Channelling your forebears and all that. Around them the bar hummed angrily, an agitated hive.

  –My nightmares, she said, are about totally other things. Like yours. When are you off to South Sudan? She didn’t tease, this time, about him being a war whore — his term — though it was true. He’d been a stringer for Agence France-Presse when they’d met in Cameroon; she’d been part of a UN child malnutrition campaign.

  –Next week. My editor thinks it’s a waste of time, no one’s interested in another failed-state story. Even if the details keep changing.

  –There’s an orphanage in Yei run by a group of French nuns, she said. Campbell was already signalling the bartender; she put her fingers over her own glass. –Amazing place, my friend Jeannette was with a team there a while back. You could do a story about them.

  –Another of your Charlottes living there? Campbell’s old conceit, that there were babies named after her all over Africa.

  She laughed. –I’ve never worked in South Sudan. There might be the odd Jeannette, though. Who knows, if you write a good piece they might name one after you, too.

  –Poor little sod. The Campbells were a ruthless bunch. He might not be pleased when he finds out.

  Who’d have thought, with her peripatetic life, that she’d ever own a house? She’d spent the last dozen years nursing in Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Botswana — countries most people she knew had barely heard of and certainly couldn’t have found on a map. When she went back to Canada she stood paralyzed in grocery aisles among fluorescent-green broccoli, waxen apples, unable to have a normal conversation. No Canadian doctor would understand the numbness, the anger, the inability to sleep. What did you talk about when you’d spent three months in acute hospitalization tents, setting up IV drips with rehydration salts for one cholera patient after another? When you’d seen a pregnant young mother — feverish, malnourished — who’d trekked fifty miles through rebel-held territory to give birth? Or helped treat a badly dehydrated three-year-old, her arm suppurating through to the bone from Buruli ulcer?

  It was Buruli ulcer — of all things — that had brought her to this city in the first place. A Nigerian colleague from her early days in the field was presenting his research on Mycobacterium ulcerans at the medical school. She’d driven him down from Toronto, and afterwards they’d walked along the lakeshore together. It was Emmanuel’s first visit to Canada, but when she saw the house with its For Sale sign he understood. He even wrote out a prescription, laughing, saying she’d have to frame it because no one would be able to fill it.

  –The house is what I prescribe for you, he said. –The house will be your medicine. Though a person must want to be healed. The mind and the body must collaborate, no?

  –And the soul, she said. –Don’t forget the soul.

  –The house, he said, the house will nourish that. The house will provide.

  She kept being sent on missions and the house stood empty, her boxes still unpacked. When she next took a break it was August, stifling, humid. She’d come from a week’s holiday with friends in South Africa, where the winter weather was cool and invigorating. Between boxes she sat drinking margaritas in the back garden, now overrun with daisies and delphiniums and unpruned raspberry canes. What had she been thinking, buying a house in this eastern city on the shores of a vast lake where the streets were named after dead British generals and forgotten royalty? Her own ancestors were refugees from potato famines and land clearances, not men and women who’d fled north from a revolution to a country where they could still be loyal to the Crown. Besides, with its four bedrooms, its vast dining room, its walk-in pantry, it was far too big for her. But there was nothing to send her back to the west coast — her parents dead, her sister in Australia, her sculptor brother busy carving out his own life along with his works of granite.

  What she needed was a roommate, someone to animate the place while she was away. Was that what Emmanuel had meant with his prescription? And a dog — she’d wanted a dog since childhood. With all her travelling it hadn’t seemed sensible, but if the roommate liked dogs… She’d get a stray from the shelter. Name him Crofton, after the British officer.

  When the doorbell rang the next morning, for a strange unstrung moment she saw the man on her lawn. What did he want? But a tall young woman stood there, a good six inches taller than Charlotte, lifting a rope of dark hair from her cheek. –I saw your sign. Is the room still available?

  –The sign? Charlotte stared at her, unmoored by the young woman’s poise, her obvious solidity.

  –I rang the bell last week but there was no one here. And now the sign’s gone. I’m Bethany, by the way.

  The house itself must have drawn her, just as Emmanuel had predicted it would. Bethany turned out, happily, to be a third-year economics student, too practical to be given to visions of men on lawns. Her father, she told Charlotte over tea, was a partner at an investment brokerage in Toronto. –Monnier Dettweil, perhaps you’ve heard of it? I’ll be joining him when I graduate. She laughed, a generous unstudied laugh. –Monnier, very funny, huh? Everyone says we must have made it up. It’s French, of course.

  Had Bethany Monnier’s ancestors raised their muskets against the British, perhaps on these very shores? Now she and Charlotte sat drinking tea as Bethany explained her need for quieter roommates. –You’ll want a deposit. She laid half an inch of crisp bills on the kitchen table. Taking charge, having determined that Charlotte did not know the ropes. –Will that be enough?

  She hadn’t even seen the room, but the house was perfect. She’d known the minute she saw it.

  –Do you like dogs? Charlotte said.

  She joined a new team in the DRC, in North Kivu, coping with the ever-present malaria, an epidemic of measles, a steady influx of rape victims. After her shifts she lay awake in the staff tent, smoking the cigarettes she had promised herself she’d give up. Not twenty miles away were boys of eleven and twelve, armed with AK-47s and M16s and rocket-propelled grenades, part of a rebel force high on amphetamines, on cane juice and gunpowder. Any day now the team would be ordered out for their own safety.

  Was it perverse that she liked having her brain numbed, razed as if by some scorched-earth tactic? That she felt more
alive here? In a matter of hours she could be in that cool limestone house on the shores of a peaceful lake where, in oblivious ease, she might drink tea with Bethany, pull weeds in her garden. Soldiers in Canadian army uniforms walked unarmed in the streets there, among the shoppers and traffic, ordinary men and women protecting other Canadians from the knowledge she and Campbell had acquired. A knowledge that war, that tiny word with its three letters, didn’t quite accommodate.

  Or perhaps war had always been some variant of this ecstatic embrace of death, this worship of erasure? I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

  One of the local health workers went back to her village to check on her family. When Nadège returned, face drawn, eyes glazed, Charlotte brought her a rice beer and rubbed her back while she sobbed.

  –They come up to me, they are holding their guns like big men. Nadège spat out the words in little bursts, as if their flavour sickened her. –And they are singing, singing about victory.

  She’d found nothing but piles of smoking embers, blackened bodies in the streets. Her sister’s family had fled. She didn’t know where her parents were. She’d treated two of the rebels, stragglers from the larger force, for shrapnel wounds, and so they spared her.

  Charlotte hadn’t been back from the DRC a week when she saw the man on her lawn again. Still with his pickaxe, his hunted eyes, though this time he stood among the fallen pods of a sycamore in the disorder of the back garden. She closed the curtain, afraid he’d turn and look directly at her with that expression of his. Went on with her stripping of the wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom where the plumber had been dismantling the old iron pipes.

  Under the wallpaper, yellowed against the lath, was part of a page torn from some long-ago newspaper, layout cramped, print tiny. Halfway down was a headline: Staff of Streatfeild House Join the Gallant War Effort. This house, her house, evidently, with its name — now disappeared — engraved on the lintel, just visible above the men ranged on the steps in the photo. A head gardener from a different age gazed out at her, along with two assistant gardeners, a chauffeur, a garden boy, who looked no older than fourteen. Under the cap of the boy she saw the immature face of the man on her lawn, a younger, sweeter face with an air of solemnity, perhaps at the gravity of having his photograph taken.