The Midnight Boat to Palermo and Other Stories

by Rosemary Aubert

Too bad they don’t teach English in college any more. “To the library,” Mrs. DiRosa lied, and Meenie, who was standing behind her, nodded.

  “Well, you all be careful now, you hear?”

  “Of course,” both the old women said sweetly and simultaneously.

  “Good, we fooled her,” Mrs. DiRosa told Meenie as she got herself down into the chair and arranged a blanket around her legs. “Now we’ve got to get going. The plan’s simple. We just wheel right on out the back door, over the parking lot, across the street—be sure to watch both ways—and onto the bridge. On the American side we’ve just got to pay the toll—no questions asked. Once we get over to Canada, I’ll tell them you don’t speak any English. That way I can do all the talking.”

  “What if they find out we’re missing from The Towers?” Meenie wasn’t nearly as sure of the plan as Mrs. DiRosa.

  “No problem. Today’s Tuesday—Trans-border Social day. It’s Canada’s turn. I signed us both up. That bus driver’s so lazy, he never checks how many there are. And if the Canadians have any questions, we just say we missed the Trans-border Social Club bus.”

  Meenie shook her head. “I don’t think…”

  “You don’t have to think,” Mrs. DiRosa said. “You just have to push.”

  ***

  It was cold going across the bridge even though it was the middle of June. The wind off the river smelled a certain way that Mrs. DiRosa remembered from long ago. It had been almost twenty years since she’d gone across the bridge in any way except by her daughter and son-in-law’s car. She remembered Mr. DiRosa and all the times they went to Canada together in the old days, bringing back good Canadian tea, jam, cheese and toffee that killed your teeth and—for the Fourth of July—nice Canadian firecrackers that you had to hide under your blouse to get across. The memory of it made tears come to her eyes and the tears gave her a good idea.

  “Don’t say a thing, Meenie,” Mrs. DiRosa reminded her friend as they came within a few yards of the Canadian customs booth. They could see the outline of a person behind the glass of the booth, but when the person stepped out with a little smile on her face, Mrs. DiRosa was surprised. She’d expected the Canadian customs officer to be a handsome young man just like the American one. Only it was a young woman instead. A smart-looking young woman.

  “Well now, ladies, what can I do for you?” the girl said. She looked friendly, but suspicious, too. Mrs. DiRosa was glad about the new angle to her plan.

  She sniffled and squeezed her eyes shut, and made a few of the tears that were still in her eyes run down her cheeks. “I have come home to die,” she said.

  She could feel the back of the wheelchair wiggle a little bit, but Meenie kept her mouth shut.

  The young woman looked shocked. “Come in here, ladies,” she said, her voice a little shaky, “just wait for a moment, please.”

  She opened the door to the customs office. Meenie wheeled Mrs. DiRosa in. The customs officer disappeared down a narrow hall.

  The minute she was out of sight, Meenie came around the front of the wheelchair. She was good and mad. “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded of Mrs. DiRosa. “Why you tell them such a crazy thing? You want to be like Mr. Winters? How that fix the smugglers?”

  “Calm down,” Mrs. DiRosa said. “Remember how they got all those officials to come to the bridge when old Winters went crazy? They’ll call the same ones now. The minute the bigwigs get here, we’ll spill the beans.”

  They heard footsteps coming down the hall, the light steps of the female officer and then heavier steps.

  “Here they come.”

  ***

  It was in all the papers: the Niagara Gazette, the Buffalo Evening News, even the papers up in Toronto and the Pennysaver. Mrs. DiRosa cut out the articles and taped them up on her wall. They showed her and Meenie talking to a reporter, and they said how they’d tipped off the bridge guards and broken up a ring of people smugglers.

  Mrs. DiRosa’s daughter was hopping mad at first. “I signed you up at The Towers so you would be safe, and look what you do—running off after smugglers.”

  “I didn’t run after them, I just turned them in,” Mrs. DiRosa said.

  “Well, I’m taking those binoculars away right now. I don’t want you to put yourself at risk like this ever again.”

  Mrs. DiRosa thought fast. “I’ll give them in to the penny sale,” she said. “Then somebody else can benefit by them.”

  Her daughter was about to answer that when the phone rang. It was a TV reporter from New York. She forgot about the binoculars when she found out Mrs. DiRosa was going to be on the news right across the country.

  “You’re hot now, Grandma,” her grandchildren said when they heard that.

  Smarty-pants.

  Mrs. DiRosa manoeuvred her walker so that it was flush against the windowsill. She lifted the binoculars to her eyes.

  “What you lookin’ at now? More trucks?”

  “’Course not,” she said to Meenie. “I’m just checking to make sure these are all right before I give them in for the penny sale. You know how mad that social worker gets when people donate things that don’t work.”

  Mrs. DiRosa leaned against the walker and freed her other hand to fiddle with the focus. She could see the Canadian flag clear as a bell across the river.

  Good thing they teach people to respect their elders in Canada.

  That’s what she was thinking when she saw it again. Just as she had seen it twice before: a van driven by a man pulled into one of the parking lots a little ways down the river from the entrance to the bridge. The man seemed to disappear into the back of the van. Then after a little while, the front door of the van opened and a woman walked out. No sign of the man anymore. Like he had up and disappeared altogether. The woman walked toward the bridge, paid the toll and began to walk over the bridge right toward America.

  “Lots of crooks in this world, Meenie,” Mrs. DiRosa said.

  “We gonna need that wheelchair again?” Meenie asked.

  Could be, Meenie, could be….

  THE PRIME SUSPECT

  This story is dedicated to Professor Eric Mendelsohn of Ryerson University to whom I owe the premise.

  A woman attempts to escape a plague and believes she has succeeded until she encounters the work of a trickster, showing, as in Day Eight of the Decameron, one of “those tricks which all people, men and women are playing upon each other all day long.”

  It spread like a plague. How else explain why it was everywhere?

  She’d worked in a library all the years before her retirement, before she’d had time to take the math courses that were now her single pleasure. But even the library had been infected in the final years of her working there. That had been only five years before. Things had gotten a lot worse since then.

  As she walked up St. George Street at the heart of the university, she felt the deadly enemy invade the very pores of her skin. Same as every day. Noise. The unavoidable, intrusive foe, like a virus or a bacteria. Like a cancer cell that multiplied with exponential efficiency. Cancer was considered an epidemic now, wasn’t it?

  Noise. She had no husband to wake up to anymore. Which was a tragedy. Because her Sam had been such a quiet man. She knew some women were cursed with husbands who snored. Thank heaven she had been spared that misery! When they had lived together in their beautiful house, she had awakened each day to the sound of exactly nothing. Not even the ticking of an annoying clock. Well, that was all changed now. That morning, like every morning, she had had to get up to the racket of the old-people’s residence where she was trapped. Everybody who lived there but her was half deaf, and everything had to be turned up to top volume in order for her fellow residents to be able to hear what she could hear through the walls. Alarm clocks. The rush of water and the squeal of pressure in the pipes. The clink and clank of the heating system. The woman in the next room skyping to her sister in Bangladesh.

  As she neared the Science Building, she gave wide b
erth to the vendors with their long lines of students waiting to buy the sort of things the kids liked to eat: French fries, shrimp rolls, hot dogs. She didn’t mind the smell of these things, even at nine in the morning. What she hated was the sound of it all.

  Their chatter seemed to comprise half the languages of the world, a sound like the buzz of a cloud of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. And the vendors themselves, calling out the orders for their foul-sounding wares: poutine, bratwurst, pho…

  Worst of all was the music, if you could call it that. She had heard that a couple of math students had, as a semester project, figured out a trick to assign a musical tone to each numeral from zero to nine. This meant that on their computers, their equations sounded like songs. Thankfully, not everyone in the math department had figured out how to do this, or the racket would have been even more unbearable than it was. Now: rap music; twanging squeaky female voices; young men engaging in an activity that they called singing, but which, to her, was nothing more than arrhythmic yelling. And then there was that Bieber kid and the guy from Korea that hopped around with his wrists crossed. And all of this leaking out of the little plastic gadgets called ear bugs—or something like that.

  Shaking her head in annoyance—not that anybody was paying any attention to her—she climbed the steps of the Science Building. The wide glass door groaned as she pulled it open. Didn’t anybody lubricate anything anymore? She made her way quickly through the groups of students gathered around the entrances to the classrooms and clustering on the stairs. Of course they couldn’t hear her when she asked them to respect the safety regulations of the university by leaving stairwells clear of obstruction. The human voice, especially the voice of a small woman past the age of sixty, was as useless as the flu vaccine in July.

  When she got to the fourth floor, she was relieved to realize that no one had got there before her, no one was going to give her a hard time about using the “Little Room”.

  Theoretically, continuing-ed students such as herself were not supposed to use the room, but she had gotten a special dispensation from her con-ed math professor, an intense, handsome, silver-haired man with dark eyes that sparkled whenever anybody asked him a question. Probably because it was rumoured that no one had ever asked him a math question that he couldn’t answer. Anyway, the reason she was allowed to use the room was that after taking a decryption course from him, she had—all on her own—figured out how to decrypt the security device that kept the room locked. She did that now, her fingers on the keys fast so that any unauthorized person seeing her, either in person or by means of the video camera mounted in the hall, wouldn’t have a chance of copying what she was doing.

  She had to be careful. Because she needed the computer in that room. Her own little laptop just wasn’t powerful enough for the equations she liked to play with. And more importantly—most importantly, she needed the quiet so that she could concentrate.

  Competition for the “Little Room” was so stiff that the story had gone around that a few years previously—before she’d entered the evening math program—a math student had been found murdered there, lying bloody on the floor between the computer and the door.

  Of course, that had probably been an urban myth, though it was true that a student had died of some sort of heart failure somewhere in the Science Building. Well, that wasn’t her problem. She set out her papers, signed in and got down to work.

  It was fine. In fact, it was great. It was like going to the country when the racket in the city was starting to make you sick. There was simply nobody else around. For almost an hour, she worked away. It was a good day. The numbers she was playing with were co-operating beautifully. If she could keep on like this, she had a good chance of solving the set of linked equations that formed this year’s math contest. The winner would receive a magnificent prize: A full year’s expenses, including tuition, room and board—that is, the opportunity to become a matriculated mathematics student.

  Fine at first. But after about an hour and a half, she thought she heard something. True, there was now the muffled buzz of students beginning to arrive for class, but that was one of the few sounds that didn’t bother her, because everybody respected the “no-talking in the corridor” rule. Nobody wanted to be responsible for saying something or making a noise that might distract a fellow mathematician at the critical instant of insight that might enable that student to solve a problem he or she had been working on during their entire time at the university.

  No. This was some other sound. Vaguely rhythmical. Not as insistent as rap or rock. Not as entwined and intriguing as classical. Musical, yes. But not any music she thought she’d ever heard before.

  She was annoyed. Of course she was. But she would have been less the mathematician than she was if she had not been curious. Curious enough to leave her papers, the computer station, eventually the room itself in order to investigate.

  When she opened the door, she could hear the sound much more clearly and now it had a dimensionality—that is, a direction.

  She glanced down the hall. To the right was a single door that she knew led to a class always in session at this time of day. Basic Considerations of the Calculus. She didn’t waste time going in that direction. There was no music there. At least not to her, though the professor of the course might disagree.

  No. This was a real sound. This was noise and she set off in search of the source with the determination of an epidemiologist searching for the source of a virus.

  Of course the more she moved in the direction of the strange tuneless, irregularly beating soundtrack, the louder it became.

  Until she found herself in front of the door to the Number Theory Lab. She seldom bothered coming down here. She wasn’t interested in number theory. In fact, it bored her, always looking at problems that she found too basic for consideration.

  The sound was throbbing now. It seemed to increase in intensity moment by moment. There was no window in the door, so she had no idea which of her fellow math students was responsible for this disgusting intrusion into the silence of the building.

  She knocked, but knew it could do no good. The sound coming from the room drowned out any other.

  She tried the door knob, but of course the room was locked and coded, just as the little room had been.

  It didn’t take her long to decrypt the lock, but the sound, the wavering, sometimes repetitive, sometimes wildly divergent tones kept growing in intensity. Somebody had to be in there and somebody had to be told to stop that deadly, sickening noise.

  After what seemed an eternity of seconds, the knob released and the door swung open.

  Nobody. That’s who she found in the room. Nobody.

  And it was dark. The only light came from the screen of one of the computers ranged in a bank against the back wall, only about eight feet away. A dazzling, dizzying light that seemed to change color and intensity with every note that came out of the computer’s speakers.

  She wasn’t entirely ignorant of number theory. She knew, for example, that there were classical searches. Infinite attempts to pin down some number that could never be found. The square root of two. The exact value of pi. And what this computer was looking for. The next prime number. The primes, the numbers divisible only by one and themselves. The numbers that stretched to infinity.

  Someone had set this computer to that search and someone, some clever trickster, had set the search to music.

  At first, she figured she could just turn it off. But the closer she got to the machine, the harder it became to move. Even a single step became too hard to manage. It was the number itself, as if it were some sort of animal that was defending itself against her. And its weapon was those dreadful sounds, those ringing notes that rang in a deafening cascade. There were thousands of primes, but so many had already been discovered that any new one might have thousands, even millions of digits. A million notes from a single numeral.

  It was so loud that she couldn’t think. Couldn’t hear anything but the s
ound of the number. She raised her hands to shield her ears. And she felt a liquid flowing out of them. When she looked at her hands, she saw blood.

  It was the last thing she ever saw.

  THE MIDNIGHT BOAT TO PALERMO

  What I loved most about meeting the midnight boat was not the motion of the waves, though I often thought the movement of the sea made it easier to sleep than the stillness of my bed. Nor was it the moonlight that I loved, for I was afraid of moonlight and am to this day. Many of the women in our self-help group speak of their fear of moonlight. Sometimes they connect it to abusive fathers or to their general terror of night. I loved my father and he never abused me in the way some of these women have been abused. But like them, talking now about my youth, I have stirred up a memory that I had buried long ago—forty years, in fact. I have suddenly understood that my father was murdered. I have suddenly remembered that I was there when he was killed. I have suddenly realized the name of his killer.

  What I loved most about the midnight boat to Palermo was the silence. For my world, both then and now, has been a very noisy one. When I first came to this country, though I could not speak the language, I knew already that I spoke too loudly. How else could it be? There were, after all, seven of us, and we lived in a tiny hut on the shore of the inlet. We didn’t call it an inlet, of course. That’s a word I learned much later—in a writing class sponsored by the government. But an inlet it was, a little indentation in the rocks of the shore of Sicily. And when you spoke, if you were to be heard at all, you had to shout not only above the sound of all the brothers and sisters, not only above the arguing of my parents, but above the sound of the sea. That’s what we called it. Not an inlet, the sea.

  Like most of the people of our village, we were not rich. But we had plenty to eat and good clothes to wear, even though the Second World War had been over for only a few years. Twice a year, my mother would go to Rome and buy me and my sisters dresses, blouses with lace, shoes to wear to church on Sunday. Looking back on it now, it amazes me that we never questioned such extravagance. Nor did I question my mother’s attitude about these trips. For weeks before, she’d be so sweet to us, so kind. Instead of her usual severity, she’d be almost gay. Though she said she hated to leave us, it was hard to ignore her happiness, just as when she returned, it was hard to ignore how angry she seemed to be for weeks. My mother, I thought then, was an unpredictable woman. But now I see, after all these years, she was far more predictable than I could have imagined.