Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  35.

  Lola, will you marry me? Please stop, she replies. I’ve already buried my wedding dress.

  34.

  Babies have very strange customs. They wiggle their toes and leapfrog to the moon. That’s why so many go missing.

  33.

  I forced it out of mother today. I kicked so hard she lied and told me I brought her joy.

  32.

  I ask Lola if she thinks about me. I’m a like a plant, she says. I water you because you are there, but if you wither I do not hold myself responsible.

  31.

  If I wither, it is due to the soil I grow on. Look at mother. Each time she turns in her sleep, her eyes open a little and she curses me. Her dreams could curdle breast milk.

  30.

  My Lola dreams too. When she is asleep, an angel covers her eyes with duct tape to prepare her for the blind days to come.

  29.

  I could talk about Lola for as long as I live. She makes my heart bounce across walls that divide countries.

  28.

  Lola says that if I went to school nobody would be my friend. The teacher would take one look at me and hang me from a ceiling fan. Lola says she will be there to switch the fan on.

  27.

  But how will Lola and I find each other? Will we cry in the same frequency when we are born, will we not stop until we are inches from each other, and when our tiny little fingers touch, will we drown in our own sorrow?

  26.

  Listen, I hear Lola say. Let’s play a game. You count to ten and die. She loves to joke around, my Lola.

  25.

  Lola and I just felt a surge of electricity. It’s Einstein taking rebirth. He’s split his soul into nine and entered several wombs at once. At least one of us will have straight hair, he says.

  24.

  Lola, when we meet I will give you a shoebox. I will put my eyes in it, my first gift to you. You fool, says Lola. Who wants to the see the world through your eyes?

  23.

  Do you even have a heart, Lola? Call Lola whenever there is a water shortage, she says. Lola’s eyes will pump tears to the houses of the poor.

  22.

  How old am I, Lola? You are six months old and you have six wrinkles, she says. Lola has none at all. She is timeless. If Lola were to wear a watch, its hands would disappear. Speaking of hands, Mother Teresa wants to come back. But this time, with a hundred hands so she can simultaneously soothe the foreheads of a hundred children.

  21.

  I have a feeling I’m special. God was not paying attention when he created me. He was tending to his garden of angels. He was worried about them because they were growing from the soil with their heads bashed-in and holes in their bellies.

  20.

  I will form a gang of babies. We will smother mothers with diapers.

  19.

  Lola and I can still be saved. I want you to know that.

  18.

  How many trees can you climb, asks Lola. As many as you want, I say. Good, says Lola, I like servants.

  17.

  I can’t live without you, Lola. I take my mother’s cord and wind it around my neck. Lola yawns.

  16.

  To live, says Lola, you need to be in constant pain.

  15.

  I am a tiny animal begging for air.

  14.

  What colour are your eyes, Lola? They change colour, she says. They are both black and blue from beating.

  13.

  And your nails? Oh, my nails are red, she says. I dig out my own flesh from my thighs and face. I don’t want to be beautiful. But I will be born a healthy seven pounds. My body will weigh only five. Two I will carry in my hand.

  12.

  Let’s talk about something else, I say. What makes you happy?

  11.

  Birds, she says. Birds with big black beaks and tiny wings. So that they go nose down into the earth and their beaks get stuck in the mud and they get asphyxiated.

  10.

  She makes me laugh. When we are seven we will hold hands for twenty-four hours and laugh in the face of the orphanage nuns. Ha ha, we will say, we have no parents.

  9.

  Here’s something else that will make you laugh, says Lola. I will travel to war zones and collect the sweat of soldiers in a glass bottle. Then I will create a perfume from it, born from nightmares and bomb explosions and severed limbs. I will call it the Scent of Fear, and feed it intravenously to all government officials.

  8.

  I love you, Lola. Your words are like snake spit.

  7.

  You are my only friend. I have no one else to call my own. Jump with me, Lola. Let’s jump off that building together.

  6.

  No, she says. I will die at one hundred. I will sip my coffee, and swallow my last tooth with it. I will choke on it. Then my grandchildren will slit my throat and fight for that last tooth. The winner will put it under her pillow.

  5.

  Lola, it’s almost time now. In a few days we will exit the womb. I buy time like it is auctioned at half price, she says. Ticks, chimes, bells that make grown-ups fearful.

  4.

  I am now nine months old. I have no recollection of the months that have passed. I think I died but nobody noticed.

  3.

  I want to be young again. A small warm ball of misery.

  2.

  I love you, Lola.

  1.

  See you on the outside, she says.

  OUTLIERS

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  DOUGAL DISCARNATE

  I MET DOUGAL in Kits, in the early eighties, when I was first starting to try to write fiction. I was thirty-three. He was nineteen.

  He’s still nineteen. He’s been nineteen since Halloween night, 1972.

  He went to a party that night in an attic apartment on Stephens Street, and took acid. He’d done this plenty of times before. In fact was a serious stoner, a 4th Avenue veteran. This time, though, during a particularly intense rush brought on by a guitar solo on a Quicksilver Messenger Service album, something happened. Actinic, the colour of mercury under a flashbulb.

  He’d become discorporate. Discarnate. Had left his body.

  He didn’t know it, at first. He was seeing the room from some very odd angles, but he took that to be the working of the blue tab.

  Then he noticed that the sad-looking guy across the room, in jeans and a jean jacket and a lumpy red-and-blue plaid Chinese lumberjack shirt, was him.

  No doubts, no mere doppelgänger suspicions; it was him. But it was him without himself, or rather he, Dougal, was without himself, or. . .

  And then he started yelling. And that was when he realized that nobody there could hear him. Except maybe himself, across the room, his body and whatever was left in it, and that started to cry, long, wracking, shoulder-heaving, bereft sobs, face buried in its hands, seriously bumming the party out.

  His body, Dougal told me, when I first got to know him, enrolled in Langara a week later and eventually became an accountant.

  He spent the rest of Halloween night, and most of the next day, trying to get someone’s attention, anyone’s. He went back to the place where he’d been crashing, and tried to get his body’s attention, but that proved too sad to bear. His body seemed near catatonic (a word he hadn’t known at the time). Sunk in some unutterable depression.

  The people at the house were getting worried that Dou-gal had messed up his head, and these were people it took a lot, in that particular way, to worry. They were wondering if they shouldn’t take him to a hospital, or anyway the Free Clinic, but in the end they just left Dougal’s body alone. It crawled onto the mattress on the floor and pulled his spare pair of jeans over its head and eventually fell asleep.

  He went out walking, then, away from the sadness in that room, and he’d more or less been walking ever since, for about ten years, when I met him.

  We went to a lot of movies together, once we got to know one anoth
er, and that meant the Hollywood, because he couldn’t leave the neighbourhood. Couldn’t leave Kitsilano at all.

  I brought up psychogeography, when we were trying to figure out why he couldn’t leave Kits, but to someone in his position it probably just seemed like some postmodern conceit (which it basically was). For his part, he had some fuzzy ideas about ley lines, from a book he’d read part of, in 1971, when he’d still been carnate. I told him I didn’t think there were any. Maybe underground water, he suggested. The buried salmon streams, like the lost rivers of Kits. But I know where some of those are, and he crossed them without any problem. And anyway, he wasn’t a ghost, just part of the reason why people have always believed in ghosts.

  He didn’t think people ordinarily discarnated when they died. If they did, he said, he’d have been able to see them, and you’d figure there’d be quite a few around, even if they were just all the people who’d ever died in Kits.

  There were three other discarnates in Kits. A First Nations guy in a semi-rigid outfit woven out of cedar bark; a Japanese man with a derby, an old-fashioned black suit, and pointy little black dress-boots that laced to his ankles; and a mean crazy white girl named Mary. Dougal figured the First Nations guy was from a long time ago. He had a big polished plug of jade stuck through his lower lip, and two smaller ones through his earlobes. Dougal thought the Japanese man was from the 1920s, by his clothes, but I guessed ten years earlier, from the description. Mary just wore a white cotton slip. Hard to date. Long straight dark hair. She’d talk, sometimes, but not particularly to him, and she didn’t make much sense.

  He asked me why I thought discarnates had clothes at all, or, for that matter, bodies. I pointed out that naked ghosts aren’t much a part of our folklore, but that in England, for instance, people see ghosts walking around in suits of armour and nobody thinks twice about it, at least as far as ghosts go. Nobody knows, I told him, and he shrugged, a skinny young man with centre-parted shoulder-length hair, with a jean jacket over his plaid shirt, the kind they used to call a rounder shirt. He’d never figured out how to take any of his discarnation outfit off, he told me. He’d been wearing it all that time. It just seemed like part of the deal.

  Like the time-mirages.

  I don’t know why I couldn’t see the First Nations guy, or the Japanese man, or Mary. I couldn’t always see Dougal that well, either. Sometimes I thought I saw him best with a hangover; other times scarcely at all, just a Cheshire-cat grin, in the rain that didn’t touch him.

  But I really wanted to see those time-mirages.

  Once, he said, he’d been down at Kits Beach at dawn, in a fog, and heard voices, a language that sounded like birds, and out of the fog had glided this war canoe, dark, almost black, with men bent down rowing, and two men up in the prow, standing, with spears, talking. They weren’t First Nations, he said.

  He thought they were Hawaiian. He said that there had been Hawaiian settlements over on the west coast of Vancouver Island, once, and I doubted him, but later I read somewhere that there are people who believe that. But this was a time-mirage, he said, not a war canoe full of discarnate people. Not just because they were out in the water, where he couldn’t go, the same way he couldn’t go much farther south than 16th, but just because it was different. Not like seeing other discarnates. There was a shiver to it, he said.

  And on 16th once, standing in the middle of Arbutus with cars driving through him, he’d looked up into a Shaughnessy and a Kerrisdale that were nothing but the tallest evergreens he’d ever seen, little wisps of mist hanging, a couple of small waterfalls, and this elk, its antlers as tall as a bus, taller, and nearly as wide, looking back at him.

  Another time, a sunny spring day at the top of 4th, the sunlight changed in a long smooth blink, and he saw deep snow, filthy with the soot of coal-burning furnaces and fireplaces. A mostly residential avenue, lawns where the stores are now, the white frame houses darkened with that same smoke, and an electric tram ascending the hill, like something out of some shabbier, more realistic version of Disneyland.

  Then blink again, everything reversing.

  You’ve seen Dougal, if you’ve ever spent much time in Kits.

  If I could show you a photograph, you’d recognize him. There was a very bad Identi-Kit portrait of him up on some lampposts, once, though that isn’t what I mean when I say you’ve seen him. The victim of an attempted rape had mistaken him for her assailant. Which really got him down, he said, seeing as how he’d been the one who’d saved her, back in that alley, getting repeatedly up in the rapist’s face and screaming at him, in sheer disgust and frustrated disembodied fury. He’d been praying he’d give this asshole an embolism or something, whip some harsh discarnate voodoo on him, but it doesn’t work that way. Though the guy had started batting at his own face as though there were insects there or something, then just stalked off, struggling with his fly.

  Dougal figures the girl must have seen him then, and described him to the police. That was a good five years before I met him, but when he told me about it, I remembered the posters.

  But if you spent any time in Kits, back then, you’d have seen him. He was always around. No choice in it.

  He’d attended a lot of night classes, at Kits High, whatever they were offering, and had watched a lot of television, mostly in people’s apartments. He could get in anywhere, but never really knew how. The world seemed solid enough; he could sit on a sofa, climb stairs, but if he wanted in, somewhere, he found himself in. He’d discovered a couple of places where people left the television on, when they went out, and if they left it tuned to something educational, they were on his list. He gave himself an education, that way. When the Discovery Channel started, he was an immediate fan. Books were harder. Impossible, really. He’d have had to read over someone’s shoulder.

  He went to bars fairly regularly, which was where I met him, and also to AA meetings. Said the new people in AA always saw him, figured he was there for the meeting, but the people who’d been going for a while usually couldn’t see him. People would see him, nod, then not offer him their hand when they said the prayer at the end. Just the way some people in bars would talk to him at length, hit on him, even, then seem to forget him. Turn and walk away.

  I don’t know if he had any other friends, when we knew each other. If he did, he never mentioned them. He was always glad to see me, even if he was down, and he often was, though never much prone to self-pity.

  His three fellow discarnates weren’t much help, as far as company went. The First Nations guy was in his own space, totally, and the Japanese man seemed perpetually terrified of everything, including Dougal, and just ran away. Mary, the girl in the slip, he confessed to having had a thing for, initially, but she was just too crazy. Hung out in Tatlow Park around dawn, first light, scaring the shit out of the odd drunk who happened through there. He’d had to chase a profoundly inebriated UBC student out of the little creek there once, because the guy had seen Mary from the bridge and tumbled off, over the timber railing, landing on his face in cattails and frog-water. Which would’ve been, Dougal said, like drowning in a bowl of cold old spaghetti. Much harder to motivate this one than to freak that rapist, but somehow he managed it. But he’d seen a look in Mary’s eyes, then, that he didn’t like, not at all, and after that he wondered if anyone had ever drowned there before, in Tatlow Park, just around dawn.

  We bonded, in large part, around cheesy science fiction movies. I explained my theory that the best cinematic SF is almost always to be found in very bad films, but only in tiny, brilliant, fractal bursts. We both loved Blade Runner, Alien, the first couple of Terminators. Hated Star Trek, hated Star Wars. Loved Mad Max. But really what we both wanted was Mick Jagger driving around some half-assed dystopian L.A. in a six-wheeled armoured car, painted red.

  I worked out a deal, with a friend who lived on Cornwall, that allowed Dougal and me to more fully explore this genre. The friend would go out while Dougal and I watched videos I’d rent. That way we cou
ld talk without my having to worry anyone would think I was crazy. Except my friend, whatever he thought I was up to.

  I rented Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Dougal swore it had put both of us to sleep, but he was joking. He never slept. When he wasn’t watching movies with me, and he wasn’t that often, he watched everything else. Did the disembodied witness thing. He’d seen it all, he said. Said that if there was anything he’d ever heard of that he hadn’t seen someone in Kits do at least once, he couldn’t think of it.

  The dystopian movie thing, I figured, for both of us, was actually about Kits.

  A mirror. Inversion. Utopias are by definition unreal. Dystopias are merely relatively unpleasant. One person’s raging dystopia is another’s hot immigration opportunity. But there’s something about living in such a thoroughly, however relatively, non-dystopian place. A place whose time-mirages, if you could see them, might mostly be quite pleasant. (Though if you were Dougal’s First Nations discarnate, maybe not. More of that relativity.)

  After I’d sold one or two stories, and not long after I’d met Dougal, I went to New York. Stayed in Alphabet City with someone I knew from Portland. New York before what my friend Jack calls “the regooding.” If you were ready to put up with some relatively serious dystopia, you could live there, then. It wasn’t about having enough money. It was about wanting something else badly enough, the secret semi-utopian flipside, the freedom of a splendidly broken metropolis. The sirens all night. Buildings torched for the insurance. A lawlessness, and the absolute need to abide by the real, the unwritten rules. Somehow I carried some of that home with me, as in a Dixie Cup. I’d never seen anything like it, and haven’t since. And dipped into it as needed. In Kits. Building what I was always somewhat annoyed, later, to see described as dystopian fictions.

  I saw Dougal last in 1998, across Arbutus from the Ridge Theatre, where the Vancouver Film Festival had just screened Abel Ferrara’s adaptation of a story of mine, “New Rose Hotel.” He’d liked it.

  We’d gone across the street, afterward, so we could discuss it without people seeing me talking to myself, though I’m sure a few did. He was a huge Walken fan, Dougal. I am myself.