by Kate Cayley
Dear Sister, I am sorry to write with such melancholy, but I trust you of all people will grant me your pardon, for like our dear Mother you are disposed to see the greatest and most good in all, and possessed of a patience and understanding your wretched brother could never hope to find within himself.
I enclose a letter Lucy wrote only a week ago to her friend Mrs. Anson, and ask that you would deliver it in person along with the tidings of her passing, as I fear the dear lady will be most grieved. Perhaps you would also be so kind as to call upon Lucy’s brother Charles and his family. Though I will write to him myself, I would wish you to convey my respects with the kindness and sympathy only you could.
Your devoted brother,
J.M.B.
12.04.2070 station 1 / I’ve been practising.
I count to ten, take a deep breath, open the door, and run. So far I’ve only been able to get about two-thirds of the way to our wheel before I can’t help myself and let the air out. I blame it on the suit. Awkward and clunky as it is, it slows me down. Naked, I think I could get there in time, but I need to be sure.
As if this whole plan weren’t already complicated enough, I thought of yet another problem after my practice run this morning. Most of the surface is fine dust and quite soft, but there are pebbles and larger rocks, some of them with razor-like edges. The smaller ones are what I worry about, because they’re harder to see and shift from place to place with the wind.
My conclusion: I don’t think I can pull off complete nudity. I might need my boots. I picture myself almost making it, then puncturing the ball of my foot on a sharp stone, crying out—and you can imagine the rest. The researchers would find the mandala with its one empty wedge and nineteen peaceful bodies almost god-like in their serenity. Nearby would be the corpse of a naked old woman, awkwardly clutching her foot and her face contorted with some mixture of pain, surprise, and profound disappointment.
No, I don’t want to be that woman. I still have some sense of dignity. So in my breath-holding practice I must factor in a few extra seconds to take off my boots and toss them away before I get into position.
I am well aware the odds are close to nil that I will have the just-right notice of my impending death, which will allow me to even attempt carrying out this sequence. But if it happens, I intend to be ready.
—
After my practice, I repeated all the routine checks. I have been experimenting with changing the order of tasks to get through them more quickly and was pleased I set a record today: four minutes and fifty-three seconds less than the previous one. It’s not an obsession with efficiency, only that at seventy-something years of age, I would like to conserve my energy where I can. In any case, no structural damage or systems malfunctions to report. I will say now, conclusively, the transmitter batteries are completely gone. I held out some hope they would recharge at least a little after my last message, but after several days they fail to show the faintest sign of life.
—
Why am I still writing? One could say I went ahead and sent my last message, even after what you did, out of shock, with my internal processing of what had just happened incomplete. But I’m beyond that stage now.
Perhaps a sense of duty. We were, after all, sent here at considerable expense with the expectation we would notice things and report them, making our contribution to the collective knowledge of humankind. They screened us for qualities like diligence and responsibility. No social loafers on this mission. Given the slightest possibility someone survived total destruction of the planet and, even more improbably, was still picking up the signal, simple duty demanded I send that message.
But now? Now I no longer even have the means to transmit, yet I continue to write. Could I really still be clinging to some fine thread of hope? If someone survived the explosion of the blue-green planet. And if that someone received my final transmission. And if that someone had a way to travel here. And if, when that someone arrived, I was still around to let them in the door or they had the wherewithal to figure out how to open it themselves. And if they found this room and the systems were still functioning, so my words were still on this screen. Then…what?
I tug a little on that fine thread and it stubbornly refuses to break. Am I deceiving myself into improbable hope, not wanting to admit I am only clinging to a habit, some vestige of normalcy in the face of a really fucked-up situation? Could it be these words are just a pathetic attempt at sorting out my thoughts, at maintaining sanity with some reasonable measure of comfort? That in the end I write only for myself?
I have no answers to these questions.
—
I have been lying in my little wedge in the mandala. It may seem morbid to you that I spend so much time with corpses. I, too, might have thought so once. When I left the blue-green planet, in my country it was customary to dispatch the dead to morgues, funeral homes, crematoria, and to leave the handling of the remains to professionals. Perhaps an afternoon or two might be spent in the company of an open coffin with the loved one’s embalmed shell inside. Cosmetics artfully applied to give a semblance of peaceful sleep. More often a closed casket, or not even a whole body, only a small urn of ground bones and ash.
It was not always so. Once, in the not-so-distant past, bodies were laid out on kitchen tables, where they were washed, groomed, dressed, cried over by family members. Homes were small, and all the daily activities of cooking, bathing, nursing infants, mending clothes, conversing must have gone on all around. The men of the family, or perhaps a kind neighbour, would have built the coffin from whatever lumber was available, and loved ones would have laid the body inside and nailed it shut. There might have been an undertaker to dig the grave and cover it over, but even that task was often left to the mourners.
I was forty-one when I boarded the ship that brought us here. My parents had died in a plane crash when I was still in grad school, I was ten years divorced, had no children, no siblings, and had lost touch with any remaining aunts, uncles, cousins. Lack of ties to the blue-green planet.
Headquarters deserves some credit. They did at least put substantial thought and effort into selecting the right combination of people. Not only complementary skill sets, but a balance of gender, personality traits, values, interests. For the most part they succeeded. We were a remarkably harmonious group. A real community. Of course there were some limits. Most importantly, they screened us for fertility—a test I passed with flying colours, thanks to a hysterectomy two years earlier. As cold and indifferent as Headquarters could be, even they understood the absolute horror it would be to allow a baby into this living experiment.
So you see, this is my family. When I lie in my little wedge I feel no horror or revulsion toward my dead companions. Rather, I take comfort in their presence, the feelings and memories that resurface, the smiles and tears they bring. I have tapped into that ease and understanding of life and death all my ancestors must have had until a mere century or so before I left our planet. Here, in my part of the mandala, I feel only a sense of belonging, of being in my rightful place. Of being home.
—
There is one more observation I need to record. When I was looking up today, toward the dusk horizon where the blue-green planet should have been, I saw something. A handful of faint twinkles. I noticed them yesterday evening too, but today they are slightly bigger and I am certain I did not imagine them. They are approaching. Perhaps some of the debris field, a few molten rocks that will collide with this ball of red dust and complete your destruction. Or, dare I hope, perhaps a handful of ships carrying survivors. And bamboo.
Either way, I will be ready. / cmb
Red Jacket, Assiniboia East. October 24, 1889
Dear Sister,
I received your letter some weeks ago, and regret I have not been able to reply sooner. The harvest demanded every ounce of my physical strength so that, hungry as I was, for weeks I often fell asleep mid-supper and had to be nudged awake by one of the boys to stumble off to bed wit
h my belly only half-full. The wheat was plentiful this year and the prices fair. I am relieved the children will all have new sets of clothing, those of the youngest having become quite threadbare with use. It pains me my dear wife is not here to partake with us in this long-hoped-for bounty. She might at last have allowed herself a few small luxuries, and perhaps her hopes might have been rekindled and her spirits lifted by the sights of the full pantry and all her brood in tidy little trousers and dresses trundling off to the Sunday service.
Your words as always brought me great comfort. It eased my soul to read that Lucy, though with some trepidation, also approached our journey with a measure of excitement and anticipation, and not merely in obedience to her husband’s stubborn will. I am grateful she so confided in you, and that you have seen fit to now share those confidences with me.
You asked, most delicately, if I might in the next year or two remarry. I think not. Lucy’s memory is yet too dear, and I should hold myself content to dwell with it alone to the end of my own days, though I suppose this causes you some concern for me. You wrote of our father remarrying in less than a year, I think, in your kindness, to assure me it would be no disrespect to Lucille were I to do the same. He was younger than I, and ourselves much littler, when he and Maggie were wed. Even were I of a mind to take another wife, there are but a few unmarried ladies dwelling nearby, only a widow or two who I should not think suitable due to age or temperament. The children are mostly old enough to see to the running of the household, and where there might yet be want of a mother’s hand, Amelia has supplied that of eldest sister with such grace and gentleness as would have much pleased Lucille. You should not think even me helpless in these matters, Dear Sister. When Mother was ailing, was it not I who let you suck my little finger while I rocked you to sleep, cooked porridge for the rest of us, read stories aloud, and yes, even combed and braided my little sister’s hair! Of course you would not remember yourself, but I assure you it is the truth, and our siblings will bear me up should you doubt me.
You also asked if I might now return to England. The answer, Dear Sister, is no. As I have written, the land is at last yielding us some profit, and I have hopes our continued industry and determination will see us to greater, though still modest, prosperity in the coming harvests. In any event, it must be some years before I should have the means for us all to cross the Atlantic again, even were I to wish it so, and I do not. Rather, it pleases my heart the children have set down little roots of their own here, like the tenderest of carrots in early summer, and I would not now pull them from this earth.
I confess I, too, in spite of all the losses and hardships we have endured, have grown to love this soil. When we first alighted from the ship in Montreal, the thought came to me I should never set foot on such a vessel again, nor suffer the reeking ports and grey seas I had so come to despise. The fiercest of prairie blizzards could not change my heart. Those dark waters that took our Father and Mother to their early deaths and lured my beloved Henry to the farthest reaches of the globe only to drown him, I should never again take their salty stench into my nostrils, nor bear their fetid touch on my skin.
I have instead discovered a new ocean, one of blue skies and swaying gold and green. I have discovered my home. Of course you should always be welcomed with joy and warmth in any home of mine, Dear Sister, should you and yours ever be moved by some calling in your hearts to join us. On many a dark eve I have placed a candle in my window with a thought to you, perhaps at that very moment climbing from your bed to glimpse the same stars disappearing below your horizon that now rise over ours. Often now I recall the years when you and I and our siblings shared table and bed. I think on the small rooms that once contained the whole of our family, and how strange it seems to me that our children are separated by a vast ocean and hardly acquainted, and our grandchildren never likely to meet. I suppose it must be that they too will venture forth someday, to search out their own homes under these boundless heavens.
Your most affectionate and devoted brother,
J.M.B.
ANDREW MACDONALD
PROGRESS ON A GENETIC LEVEL
My brother and I tried to divvy up the depressing tasks ahead of us. He told me I should fetch our mother, who had all but given up the English language for Ukrainian. My brother thought that because I worked with more Ukrainians at the security agency than he did at his bank, I spoke it more frequently and could better articulate the reasons why she should come to our father’s funeral. In exchange, he would tell our uncle he wasn’t allowed to attend the service.
“He mostly speaks Ukrainian too,” I said, balancing the phone between my chin and shoulder. In the mirror, my reflection tried to figure out the best way to tie a Windsor knot.
“He’ll be angry, and I’m bigger than you. He’ll break your skull.”
Our uncle Joseph had been a boxer once. My brother wrestled in college, at his peak placing third in the Pac-10 conference’s one-hundred-and-seventy-four-pound category. The idea was that they could cancel each other out.
Joseph wasn’t welcome because our mother claimed he’d done terrible things to her when she was little, before they emigrated from Ukraine. Nobody in the family knew what to think, whether he did or didn’t. Our mother’s mental illness made it difficult to judge. For our father, there was no ambiguity. A year before he died, he drove me to a steak house and, after we ate, showed me a gun he bought, which he intended to use on Joseph.
“I’m going to go to his house and blow his fucking brains out.”
One can see why my father’s heart exploded. Though technically the product of calcium and protein and fat forming a brick of plaque in his aorta, his end represented the metastasizing of years of suffering, the day his body could no longer host his sadness.
—
In addition to not speaking English, our mother hardly ever left the house. Her apartment was in a dreary part of Toronto, in the neighbourhood we all used to live in. Her entire floor was filled with Ukrainians. One storey down, mostly Sudanese. Upstairs, Mexicans. The property managers liked to rent whole floors to families who knew each other, so that if one tenant couldn’t pay rent, the others would chip in. It was communism on a microscopic scale.
I knew she wouldn’t let anyone in, so I used the key I found on Dad’s keychain. I had the black mourning dress my brother bought for her draped over my shoulder, encased in a skin of crinkly plastic.
“Hello?” I said, opening the door just wide enough to slip in.
The apartment smelled the way my mother smelled: like smoke and some sort of vinegar. Eucalyptus plants, steroid creams for an imagined skin condition, the bleach she used on the linoleum of the kitchen to keep it chemical-white.
“I’m not leaving,” my mother said in Ukrainian. I traced her voice to the dining room, where she was drinking coffee and having a cigarette, crocheting a complicated pattern into a doily.
“You need to get ready.”
“Are you dead?”
Instead of answering, I took the dress and set it on the chair next to her.
“Nicolas bought this for you. I think it’s your size. Try it on.”
She shook her head.
“Your father and I hadn’t spoken in months. The last thing he said to me was that he was selling our Encyclopoedia Britannica.” The doily had the look of a jellyfish in her hands. “There’s coffee over there. Some left for you.”
Pouring myself a cup, I marvelled at the artifacts of my childhood that still hung on the walls. It was like being in a museum with a wing dedicated to myself. Pictures of my brother in his wrestling singlet, performing an arm-drag takedown on a weaker opponent. Peacock feathers we collected during a family trip to the zoo, arranged in a petrified fan shape. And there we were in a sepia-toned photo, a family. My brother, me, our parents, circa mid-eighties; tan lines, Dad’s glacially receding hairline, surrounded by a frame made of cherry-coloured mahogany, the gilding a brassy yellow.
“You need to go,�
�� I told her. “He was your husband. You never got a divorce.”
“A technicality.”
“Your wedding ring is still on.”
She looked down. “I’ve gotten too fat to take it off.”
Sighing, I went to the bathroom and called my brother. Without much thought, I rifled through the medications behind the mirror, silently noting unfamiliar names. My brother answered.
“How are things on your end?”
“She’s not coming.”
“Why not? Did you show her the dress?”
I asked if he wanted to talk to her. “You can try to convince her.”
For the next ten minutes, I listened to her switch from English to Ukrainian, shouting sometimes, turning away from me so I couldn’t hear what she was saying to my brother. I went to the living room, turned on the television, and watched some soap opera without the sound on. The plastic cover of the dress I’d brought crinkled, and I turned to see she was holding it up.
“It’s dowdy,” she said.
She sighed, pulling the zipper of the dress down. She held it to her chest, the bottom half falling past her kneecaps.
—
In the car, she asked me if I was still dating Maria Teodorowycz, the daughter of someone on Mom’s floor in the apartment building. Maria was a geologist who measured the levels of chemicals in soil that corporations sent her. She and I had gone on three dates, had sex on the last one, and then…I don’t know.