Imaginarium 3

by Sandra Kasturi, Helen Marshall (ed) (v5. 0) (epub)

  “We intend to discuss Teddy’s infractions with him as soon as possible,” one read. “We understand that his hacking the school lunch system to obtain chicken fingers every day for a month is very serious, as well as nutritionally unwise.”

  Teddy had indeed hacked the school lunch system to order an excess of chicken fingers delivered to the school kitchen by supply truck. He did this by entering the kitchen while pretending to go on a bathroom break, and carefully frying all the smart tags on all the boxes of frozen chicken fingers and fries with an acne zapper. With all the tags dead, the supplier instantly re-upped the entire order. The only truly dangerous part of the “hack” was the fact that he’d been in the walk-in freezer for a whole five minutes. Surveillance footage showed him ducking in with his coat zipped up all the way. The coat itself said that his body temperature had never dipped.

  “I don’t get any junk food at home,” the boy said, during his inevitable talk with the principal. “They don’t deliver any.”

  The gate to Jackson Hills was still functional, despite the absence of its residents. It slid open for Lena’s car. As it did, a dervish of dead leaves whirled out and scattered away toward freedom. It felt like some sort of prisoner transfer. The exchange made, Lena drove past the gate.

  The car drove her through the maze of empty houses as the dash lit up with advertisements for businesses that would probably never open. Burger joints. Day spas. Custom fabbers. In-house genome sequencing. All part of “town and country living at its finest.” Some of the houses looked new; there were even stickers on the windows. As she rolled past, projections fluttered to life and showed laughing children running through sprinklers across the bare sod lawns, and men flipping steaks on grills, and women serving lemonade. It was the same family each time.

  “WELCOME HOME,” her dashboard read.

  The house stood at the top of the topmost hill in Jackson Hills. Lena recognized it because the map said they were drawing closer, and because it was the only house on the cul-de-sac with any lights on. It was a big place, but not so different from the others, with fake Tudor styling and a sloping lawn whose sharpest incline was broken by terraced rock. Forget-me-nots grew between the stones. Moss sprang up through the seams in the tiled drive. There was no car, so Lena’s slid in easily and shut itself off with a little sigh, like a child instantly falling to sleep.

  At the door, Lena took the time to remove her gloves (when had she put those on?) and adjust her hair. She rang the bell and waited. The lion in the doorknocker twinkled his eyes at her, and the door opened.

  Teddy stood there, wearing a flannel pyjama and bathrobe set one size too small for his frame. “Hello, Lena,” he said.

  She blinked. “Hello, Teddy.”

  “It’s nice to meet you. Please come in.”

  Inside, the house was dusty. Not dirty or even untidy, but dusty. Dust clung to the ceiling fans. Cobwebs stretched across the top of every shelf, and under the span of every pendant light. The corners of each room had become hiding places for dust bunnies. But at Teddy’s height, everything was clean.

  “Where are your parents, Teddy?”

  “Would you like some tea?” Teddy asked. “Earl Grey is your favourite, right?”

  Earl Grey was her favourite. As she watched, Teddy padded over to the coffee table in the front room, and poured tea from a real china service. It had little pink roses on it, and there was a sugar bowl with a lid and a creamer full of cream and even a tiny dish with whisper-thin slices of lemon. When he was finished pouring, Teddy added two sugars and a dash of cream to the cup. Then he handed her the cup on a saucer with both hands, and then pressed something on his watch.

  “It tells when it’s done steeping,” he said. “Would you like to sit down?”

  Lena sat. The sofa shifted beneath her, almost as though she’d sat on a very large cat. A moment later it had moulded itself to her shape. “It’s smart foam,” Teddy said. “Please try some of your tea. I made it myself.”

  Lena sipped. “You’ve certainly done your homework, Teddy,” she said. “You’re not the only person to research me before my arrival, but you’re the only one who’s ever been this thorough.”

  “I wanted to make it nice for you.”

  It was an odd statement, but Lena let it pass. She took another sip. “This is a very lovely house, Teddy. Do you help your parents with the housework?”

  He nodded emphatically. “Yes. Yes I do.”

  “And are you happy, living here?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “There don’t seem to be many other kids to play with,” Lena said. “Doesn’t it get lonely?”

  “I don’t really get lonely,” he said. “I have friends I play with online.”

  “But it can’t be very safe, to live here all alone.”

  His mouth twitched, a little, as though he had just heard the distant sound of a small animal that he very much wanted to hunt. “I’m not alone,” he said.

  “Well, I meant, the neighbours. Or rather, the lack of any.”

  His shoulders went back to their relaxed position. “I like it here,” he said. “I like not having any neighbours. My parents didn’t like it very much, at first, but I liked it a lot.”

  Since he had left the door open, Lena decided to go through it. “So, when are your parents coming?”

  “They’re here,” he said. “They just can’t come upstairs, right now.”

  Lena frowned. “Are they not well?”

  Teddy smiled. For a moment, he actually looked like a real eleven-year-old, and not like a man who had shrunk down to size.

  “They’re busy,” he said. “Besides, you’re here to talk to me, right?”

  “Well . . . Yes, that’s true, but. . . .” She blinked again, hard. It was tough to string words together, for some reason. Maybe Mrs. Dudley was right. Maybe she did need her brain scanned. She felt as though the long drive in had somehow hypnotized her, and Teddy now seemed very far away.

  “I hope that we can be friends, Lena,” Teddy said. “I liked you, the last time they sent you here.”

  Her mouth struggled to shape the words. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You wore those gloves, last time,” he said. “In February. You’d had a really lonely Valentine’s Day, the day before, and you were very sad. So I made you happy for a little while. I had some pills left over.”

  It was very hot in the room, suddenly. “You’ve drugged me,” Lena said.

  Teddy beamed. “Gotcha!”

  Lena tried to stand up. Her knees gave out and her forehead struck one corner of the coffee table. For a moment she thought the warmth trickling down her face was actually sweat. But it wasn’t.

  “Uh oh,” Teddy said. “I’ll get some wipes.”

  He bounded off for the kitchen. Lena focused on her knees. She could stand up, if she just tried. She had her pendant knife. She could . . . what? Slash him? Threaten him? Threaten a child? She grasped the pendant in her hand. Pulled it off its cord. Unflipped the blade.

  When Teddy came back with a cylinder of lemon-scented disinfectant wipes, she pounced. She was awkward and dizzy, but she was bigger than him, and she knocked him over easily. He saw the knife in her hand, gave a little shriek of delight, and bit her arm, hard. Then he shook his little head, like a dog with a chew toy. It hurt enough to make her lose her grip, and he recovered the knife. He held it facing downward, like scissors. He wiped his mouth with the back of his other hand.

  “I knew I liked you, Lena,” he said. “You’re not like the others. You don’t really like kids at all, do you? This is just your job. You’d rather be doing something else.”

  “That’s. . . .” Her vision wavered. “That’s not true. . . .”

  “Yes, it is. And it’s okay, because I don’t like other kids, either. They’re awful. They’re mean and stupid and ugly and poor, and I don’t want to see them, ever ag
ain. I just want to stay home, forever.”

  Lena heard herself laughing. It was a low, slow laugh. She couldn’t remember the last time she had heard it.

  “Why are you laughing?” Teddy asked.

  “Because you’re all the same,” she said. “None of you want to go to school!” She laughed again. It was higher this time, and she felt the laugh itself begin to scrape the dusty expanse of the vaulted ceiling, and the glittering chandelier that hung from it. She could feel the crystals trembling in response to her laughter. She had a pang for Jude, who would have absolutely loved whatever shit Teddy had dosed her with.

  “I just need someone to create data,” Teddy was saying. “I’ve tried to keep up the streams by myself, but I can’t. There are too many sensors. I have to keep sleeping in their bed. I have to keep riding their bikes. Both of them. Do you even know how hard that is?”

  Lena couldn’t stop laughing. She lay on the floor now, watching her blood seep down into the fibres of the carpet. It was white, and it would stain badly. Maybe Teddy would want her to clean it up. That seemed to be her lot in life—cleaning up other people’s messes. But as she watched, Teddy got down on his knees and began to scrub.

  “It won’t be that bad,” he said. “I’ll make it nice, for you. All I need is someone to pretend to be my mom, so I can do homeschool. I have all her chips, still. I took them while she was still warm, and I kept them in agar jelly from my chemistry set.” He winced. “I would have gotten Dad’s, too, but he was too fat.”

  Teddy reached out his hand. “Do you think you can make it to the dining table?”

  She let him help her up. “Social Services. . . .”

  “You can quit, tomorrow,” Teddy said. “Just tell them you can’t do it, any more.”

  “But . . . My mirror. . . .” Why was she entertaining any of this? Why was she helping him?

  “I have a mirror,” he said. “Your face is the login, right? You talked to my mirror, the last time you were here. You just don’t remember, because you blacked out later.”

  She turned to him. “This is real?”

  He smiled, and squeezed her cold hand in his much warmer and smaller one. “Yes, Lena. It’s all real. This is a real house with real deliveries and real media and a real live boy in it. It’s not like a haunted house. It was, until you came. But it’s your home, now. Your own place, just for you and me.”

  “For. . . .”

  “Forever. For ever and ever and ever.”

  HOW GODS GO ON THE ROAD

  Robin Richardson

  She keeps a crystal ball on the coffee table

  at a Super 8 somewhere between Harrodsburg,

  Kentucky, and the cornfields she’s afraid to enter.

  She’s thirty again. Spends her birthday burning

  sage, rearranges history with the lifting

  of a little toe, composes wars while singing

  in the shower—“Viper’s Drag,” “Honey Dipper.”

  She’s the “Lady with the Fan.” Tan as deep

  as tamarind. Whatever secrets she’s received,

  what talents, doors as wide as steak knives open

  on a nebula she knows she’ll one day enter.

  Weather will not touch her, nor the sounds

  of schoolboys in their march to physics. They

  won’t fix this hole. Alive too many lifetimes

  to believe in cures, she passes decades with the gait

  of Tolstoy heroines. However deep she cuts,

  it is the blade that bleeds. Her skin like water

  holds no form, but folds, and folds, and follows

  numbly through the hours of a day.

  OUBLIETTE

  Gemma Files

  Therapy Blog of Thordis Hendricks, July 2, 2012 (4:17 PM):

  Back when I was in hospital, recuperating, I thought a lot about what my life had become over those months—that entire year, almost—before my second suicide attempt finally led to formal diagnosis, a plan of treatment, a potential way out of this ever-narrowing flesh trap. The way my perceptions kept on altering, as though filter were laid on top of filter on top of filter, yet so softly, so irretrievably . . . until finally, it was as though I woke up one morning to discover the way I saw things had always been inaccurate, horrifyingly so, and the systemic shock alone was enough to make me reach for something sharp.

  Like I’d been born and almost died inside a prison cell, thinking that tiny bit of sky I could see through the window was the wide world, and me outside in it, walking, talking, laughing, living. Until that sky itself became a horror too, blue just a thin lid over black, gravity always in danger of failing before the upwards rush and airless fall into deep space—and it was that fear, that awful lurch, which wrenched me back in and reframed my understanding. Showed me the grave I’d all this time been trapped by, and began to push its walls in on top of me.

  I feel better these days, of course, though not by much. But this, what we’re doing right now . . . this is supposed to help.

  Therapy Blog of Thordis Hendricks, July 2, 2012 (7:02 PM):

  All right, Take Two. Start over.

  I moved into Shumate House almost immediately after my last consultation with Dr. Corbray, as an alternative to further hospitalization, which had been almost impossible for me to stand once the initial numbness wore off; constant panic attacks, five different drug combos tried and discarded, all clusters of side-effects equally disgusting. Like I’d been dropped head-first into a gluey swamp and left to thrash, studiously observed, but unaided otherwise.

  But being rich counts for a lot, no matter how crazy you may be otherwise. And after Aunt Isa died, the portion of the Hendricks fortune that fell to me—administered, in trust, through my family’s firm—served to buy me into Shumate and pay for the almost-undivided attentions of Dr. Corbray. Which brings us here.

  This therapy blog is predicated on the assumption—not completely inaccurate—that because my phobia means I can’t physically leave Apartment Five but my privacy-linked anxiety issues argue against around-the-clock live-in care, I should be required to provide my assigned worker (Yelena) with a between-sessions look at my thought-processes, so she can make sure my psychological baseline isn’t fluctuating wildly: No toxic thought-patterns, no repetition or obsessional looping.

  Of course, it’s a model of exchange which presumes quite a lot, right from the get-go; that I’m not simply lying in session, for example, let alone out of session. That I really will write down a representative sample of whatever comes into my head between this time-signal and the next, if asked to, as opposed to simply . . . making stuff up out of whole cloth, because it amuses me, or because it gives me just the tiniest shred of control over what happens in a life otherwise dictated by other people. That I understand how directly I’m threatening my own welfare, if I do. That I can be trusted to recognize what is and isn’t appropriate behaviour, even for myself.

  This last part isn’t completely up to me, though, thankfully. Since that’s supposedly what Yelena is for.

  So: Today’s entry. Set the timer. Mark.

  Saw Yelena yesterday, at 12:22 PM. She claimed to be late (was late, no reason to distrust her words by labeling them claims) because of traffic and construction. We took the usual roster of tests, blood, spit and urine, then talked about self-harm triggers for roughly the rest of the hour: how to qualify and quantify, make sure things didn’t progress beyond a certain level. Yelena says up to twenty-five per cent is allowable, but once you catch yourself imprinting, you need to move on. Sounds legit.

  Talked about Internet access, settled on a protocol. The plan is still to use a family-friendly timer app to restrict potential surfing, allowing just enough time in a row to compose and post. The app in question adds up all your seconds, concurrent or not, and cuts out after a set limit is reached. I still can’t believe I agreed to this, but have the distinct
feeling I must have been fairly high when I signed those papers. Impossible to tell, one way or the other.

  So no looking things up randomly, or not randomly. No visiting the same sites over and over. No time-sinks. Team-mindedness is key. Just RL, baby, moment after dragging-ass moment of it. We already turned off the cable, and there’s nothing in my DVD queue but nature films. The books are all self-help. It’s daily meditation and morning pages and yoga from here on out, if and when the side-effects of the latest cocktail let me do a Downwards-Facing Dog without feeling like I’m going to puke. Hell, I can’t even sleep in too long, or the concierge comes knocking.

  It’s a great system, really, and I’m honoured to have had so much “input” into its design. At the end of the day, though, I guess I’m just still not sure why there has to be so much care taken that my life, mine, my particular life, isn’t destroyed. I’m not sure why I should matter so much, to anyone, aside from basic monetary considerations. And I don’t know if any of this qualifies as allowable thought or not—if it’s sick, or simply logical. Something anybody else might wonder, given the circumstances.

  Okay, that’s time. See you tomorr

  Entry posted automatically. See attached IM exchange:

  rostovy@monitoru.net What’s this stuff about “team-mindedness”?

  hendricksnox@shumatehouse.com what stuff

  rostovy@monitoru.net In Tuesday’s last entry. “Team-mindedness is key.”

  hendricksnox@shumatehouse.com dont understand what youre saying. im tired.

  rostovy@monitoru.net No, I understand that, I just need you to look at it again. It might be important.

  hendricksnox@shumatehouse.com cant, tired, im done. took my pills. Bed.

  Initial MonitorU Intake Report on Thordis Charlotte Hendricks, June 15, 2012

  Prepared by Dr. Maurice L. Corbray, consulting psychiatrist

  CC’d to Yelena Rostov, attending worker

  Registered diagnosis of severe agoraphobia, mid-range obsessive-compulsive disorder and clinical depression with suicidal ideation. Subject is twenty-seven years old. Currently recovering from two suicide attempts, one by intentional overdose of prescription meds, one by radial/ulnar arterial self-exsanguination. Highest education a Master’s Degree in Comparative Religious Studies (incomplete). Formerly a T.A. at University of Toronto, now unemployed.