The whine of hydraulics from out on the deck, the woomph of the trawl’s steel doors shifting, then the clattering of bobbins and floats against the mantra drone of the great spools winding out their kilometres of cable—the machine-music prelude to the slaughter I’d heard so many times before. Until one day soon, when it would all be over. There’d be nothing left to catch in this heaving, ancestral ocean.
There were a couple of hours to kill before the haul came in. The air of my cabin hung sour with last night’s sick, the sheets on my bunk all sweat-sodden and twisted. A half-empty Schweppes bottle sloshed like ancient urine amid the torn-open blister packs on the bedside table. On the floor lay my Wilby’s (1961) edition of Fishes of the Pacific Coast of Canada. I’d found it when I was a small boy back in Victoria, out behind a Goodwill store in a box of broken hairdryers. With its gold embossing and olive linen cover, it had seemed impossibly old to me even then. By the time I’d first opened it, the species it described were already mostly extinct. Climate change and rogue drift nets had pretty much taken care of that. I used to like stroking the frontispiece, a glossy, full-colour plate of a breeding male coho; an amazing, vermilion thing, turgid with testosterone, all hooked jaws and flared fins. It might as well have been a triceratops. Gone forever, before I was even born. Now, I couldn’t stand to look at it. I nudged the book under my bunk with my foot.
I settled into the orange fibreglass chair at my bureau, my thighs already aching from keeping me upright for more than a few minutes. Firing up my tablet, the C-Corp building throbbing menacingly on the log-in screen, I entered my password and dropped into the command line, down, down, descending through the file system, opening directories like so many nested Russian dolls until I was deep inside the server core. And there, hidden in a heavily encrypted backwater, was my little jewel: 3369devotchka.tar. The only thing left that could still make me smile. I unzipped it into my home directory and a row of little vidcons tiled themselves neatly across the screen. I slid on my headset and clicked on the first one; my favourite vid of all: Yamanote Crush.
A gawky, antelope-like woman, wearing nothing but a pair of vintage Manolo Blahniks and a Japan Rail conductor’s cap stands in the middle of a vast model railway landscape that replicates in obsessive miniature the vicinity of Shibuya Station. Her bony legs tower over a dense skyline of Lilliputian buildings, painstakingly outfitted with even minuscule transceiver masts and microwave repeating arrays, all modelled exactly to scale. The trains, streets, traffic signals and swarms of tiny pedestrians have all been perfectly and laboriously crafted. She bends over a section of the train track and picks up a green-and-silver E231-series engine from the Yamanote Line, gently, as if it were a cute little animal. Cuddling and kissing it, she begins playfully to lick the fuselage with her pointed, liver-coloured tongue, then rubs it across her tiny breasts and mouse-like pubic mound, glancing up at the camera occasionally as if receiving direction. She carefully places the engine back on its rail then rears up and crushes it beneath her stilettoed heel, slowly and precisely, an odd, sad look of affection on her face, her soft cooing punctuated by sounds of fracturing styrene and the skittering of tiny metal wheels.
She picks up another piece of rolling stock, this time a 205-series six-door passenger car, which she proceeds to fellate in an exaggerated manner before similarly treading it into toy-train oblivion. After a few more train cars, she turns to the buildings, demolishing them in an apoplectic frenzy, shrieking and stabbing at the shoebox-sized department stores and office blocks, her lustrous scimitar heels stomping the ruins into puffs of electric-blue smoke and plastic smithereens that fly in all directions. Sated, she strides across the flattened vista; she licks her lips, cheeks flushed, a sheen of fresh sweat on her pale Asian 310 CRUSH skin. From off-camera, we hear hoots of male encouragement followed by polite applause from an unseen studio audience. She bows modestly and exits the right side of the screen.
I had watched Yamanote Crush so many times that I knew every second of it by heart. And so did Zee. “Comfort television,” we used to call it. Everyone clings to some sort of ritual, I guess, and Yamanote Crush was part of ours. Back when we were together. Well, not really together. But now the shrieking and the crushing and the shattering didn’t seem so funny anymore. Not without Zee. I saw a deadness in the eyes of the model I hadn’t noticed before. I took off the headset and let the vid restart its infinite loop, letting my heavy eyes wander down to the bureau drawer beneath me. Sliding it open, I took out a few of the sample vials I had stored in there, each bundle tied neatly with red elastic bands. I barely recognized the wax-pencilled depth readings and accession numbers, so carefully marked on the white plastic lids. It was as if they had been written by a different person. Orderly. Precise. A self I no longer recognized. Each one held a precious sample of Foraminiferous ooze; the microscopic exoskeletons of dead plankton that had been raining down to the bottom of the ocean since the beginning of time. This used to be my research, my passion. Back when it was still possible to have passions. The ooze told the story. It told what happened; how everything in the sea had changed over so few years. One of the vials wasn’t labelled. I pulled it from its bundle and held it up against the tablet screen, still pullulating through the last few moments of Yamanote Crush.
It wasn’t ooze in there, but a tiny, white lump.
Old friend.
I slipped the crack pipe from my shirt pocket and packed it with the contents of the vial. My fingers scrabbled through the drawer for a lighter among the pens and sticky notes and then, tilting my head back, a flick of flame, the first taste of numbing smoke:
Oh, yes.
Bzzz-Bzzz-Bzzz-Bzzz. Better. Sharper. Everything gleaming, metallic, electrical, hissing, a warm, blue glow soaking into every cell of my being. My neural nets entwined in the great mito-chondrial mother, humming in the sea of her energy, her vistas of eternal pleasure—unicorns, thousands of them, copulating on waves of purple grass; the arteries in my head rushing; shining alpine streams of synaptic lubrication; ozone-electric fire burning away despair like autumn leaves. But then. Too soon. Fading. Vanishing. Into the rearview mirror of my mind. My mirror ball of pleasure. My mind’s eye. The third eye. Closing.
“Wil-l-e-e!”
“Willee Boy!”
The blind, the bird, the blind man, the bird-man. Rodger. What the fuck? Dull pain billowing in from all directions, gravity snapping at my limbs. A word coagulating in my throat, bitter syrup; choking me, gasping, back into the world of streaming tears and the little bird-man standing at the door, wanting something, waiting, wanting and waiting for me just to say:
“What?”
“They need you, Willee Boy, They need you out on deck.”
They needed me? Nobody needed me. Not ever. What was this? Old Rodge. Suspended there in the doorway, the fever aura of Cool-Whites flickering nastily above his bobbing, birdman head. Standing right there in the cold, hard inevitability of now. Everything played out, wound out, bagged, tagged, and slagged. Back into the tar pit, I am the tin man. Oil me. I am the slug man. Boil me.
“Willee. Come on now. Now!! They need you!”
Urgency. I was needed. How nice. But maybe he had something else in store? A plank perhaps, for me to walk? No. Not old Rodge. He wouldn’t be party to something like that. Or would he? But getting out of the chair wasn’t possible. Not close to possible. Not just now. The world was still too viscous, too strewn with impediments, unstoppable forces over which I had no control. I closed my eyes and let myself sink back inside, drifting back into that warm, internal ocean of smooth, dark oil. Infinite, infinite warmth.
Then Rodger at the back of my chair, shaking it. Shaking me. Shaking my shoulders. Oh, for God’s sake, why? Why now? Me, a different person, watching my non-self get handed its yellow rubber overalls by a wizened little bird-man; a blind man who could see everything. Next, he was helping me into my faded red float-coat. I myself looking out from inside someone else’s eyes, a former shell of me, fol
lowing the bird-man hovering down the corridor, feeling his way past the steel bulkheads and their drippy palimpsests of paint. Schumpf—the door opened onto the cargo deck.
Rodger’s hand on my back, pushing me out. “Go!” he said, standing in the threshold, shivering in his greasy blue coveralls. They were blue like something long extinct. An indigo bunting, perhaps. Poor little bird-man. Wind-spattered veils of rain, heaving sea. Writhing mounds of silver and black, dying all over the deck. Little crimson freeways of blood braiding across the rusted expanses of diamond-patterned steel. The Viet deckhands gaffing and stunning and shovelling squirming product onto the conveyor belts of the processing chutes. Winches squealing, hydraulics moaning. The universe of killing unfolding as it should.
Toward the starboard bow, I could see Zee, now in her orange immersion suit and visored black-knit cap, standing over something, looking down. I made my way over, halting and starting, the rain lashing across the shifting deck in sepulchral blasts, my legs buckling and dragging like half-empty sacs of iron filings. At least I was getting more in my own head, my thoughts congealing as the hyper-chilled rain slapped against my temples. As I got closer I could see Zee was crying, tilting up her Ray-Bans and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, the wind blowing her tears and the rain across the mahogany moons of her cheeks.
“Jesus Fuck Willy, what da hell we DO wi dem?”
Behind her, the Viets had stopped what they were doing and seemed to be waiting for me to say something, do something. Zee broke into a deep guttural sob, collapsing into my arms. I’d never seen her like this. I hugged her, stiffly, ambivalently, my hand patting her substantial shoulder with the mechanical efficiency of a sewing machine.
There were three of them lying out there on the deck; the first rigid on his back, the dark blood seeping like old wine from the gaff-puncture in his neck. The other two, clearly female, were convulsing—maybe from decompression sickness—I don’t know—wheezing grotesquely, grasping at their throats with tiny, delicate hands. They were the size of babies, really, perfect little people, not of this Earth. Not the one I knew, anyway. I pulled off the first one’s helmet. Such a wise little face; his skin grey, his mouth a frozen funnel of pain. We waited a while, Zee and I, neither of us saying anything, both alone with our thoughts, looking out across the vast dullness of the empty Pacific. In the end, when we were sure that they were dead, we threw them back into the sea. One by one. It seemed the kindest thing to do. The simplest too. Maybe they had relatives down there, someone who could grieve for them. We tried to put it out of our minds. And never spoke of it again.
WARRIORS
LAURA TRUNKEY
FIRE FROM HEAVEN
A Dystopian Suite
IN 1939, RUSSIAN electronic technician Semyon Kirlian witnessed flashes of light between electrodes and the skin of a patient receiving electrotherapy. Determined to capture the interaction, Kirlian re-enacted the procedure, but this time placed a photographic plate on the electrode and rested his hand on the film while he administered a shock. This was the beginning of Kirlian photography—a process Semyon and his wife, Valentina, claimed was able to record the energy force emanating from animate and inanimate objects, including coins, leaves, and the pads of fingertips.
In 1944, the C-squadron of the South Alberta Regiment made a reconnaissance into Bergen-op-Zoom. German forces had recently abandoned the town and the Canadians were welcomed as liberators. During celebrations in the Grote Markt—the Main Square—a young boy crawled across the hood of a Sherman tank, jarring the Browning bow-gun. The gun fired into the crowd, killing two teenage girls. Gunner Gerald Morris ran towards the girls and bent to lift them from the ground; as he did he felt a burning sensation in his right foot that soon spread to his calf. His leg would be amputated less than a week later. He was twenty-five years old.
In 1970, Gerald’s wife, Sally Morris, gave birth to a daughter, Daphne, in Saint Michael’s Hospital in Lethbridge, Alberta. During her labour, Gerald felt severe cramping in his right calf. He sat in the waiting room with his prosthetic in his lap, massaging his empty pant leg. There were only twelve minutes between his daughter’s arrival and his young wife’s death.
In 1997, Daphne Morris’s novel, The Galaxy of Harvey Monk, was published. The book followed an elderly space traveller on his mission to find the shadow-self he had lost on a distant planet during his youth. It was dedicated to her father, who had died from lymphoma the previous year.
In 2015, in Bam, Iran, four important men stood among ruins that had been a mud fortress, an earthquake zone, a modern city, and—most recently—a battlefield, and raised their pens to ratify a ceasefire that none of them expected would hold. As they signed, blue flame overtook their bodies, emanating first from their backs and then from their legs, and within minutes (though water was thrown and efforts were made to beat back the flames) they had been consumed entirely, but for a wrist and hand of one, feet from two others, and a head—shrunken— of the fourth.
Because Gerald Morris, inspired by the Kirlians’ phantom-leaf photographs, had duplicated their machine in an attempt to document the energy double of his right leg; and because his theories on phantom selves became the stuff of Daphne’s bedtime stories and stayed with her after her father’s death; and because as an elegy to her father she had made Harvey Monk’s shadow-self—once located—malfunction, enveloping him in flames; and because Daphne’s book—published in a limited run of five hundred copies by a small speculative fiction press, now defunct—was carried in the butt pocket of one Marcus Spark all through his awkward teens, the pages tattered and smudged; and because Marcus Spark in his adult years (book now toted in various briefcases) served as a member of the entourage of an important man from a powerful country who had become a pile of ashes (and one foot); and because as the event played out before his eyes he did not think to run for bottled water or an extinguisher, did not think to roll, or drop, but only stopped and recalled Harvey Monk, who had been enveloped in much the same way, and turned into much the same thing: because of all this, at six that morning, the telephone rang in Victoria, Canada, in the home of Daphne Morris and her daughter, Helen.
From the Kirlians to Gerald Morris, from him to Daphne and Harvey Monk, and then to Marcus Spark, who was so impressed by how right D.F. Morris had gotten the whole event—from the colours of the flames, to the smoke (thick and yellow, almost liquid), to the greasy ashes and extremities left behind—that he became convinced that The Galaxy of Harvey Monk was not fiction, but a depiction: an accurate account of something D.F. Morris had witnessed, or, at the very least, had heard of second-hand and thereafter researched thoroughly. And so, while the other members of the various entourages of the four departed-yet-still-important men were contacting scientists and physicians and swarms of the typically significant, Marcus Spark tracked down the phone number of a one-time sci-fi writer and present-time mother of one, Daphne Fern Morris.
HELEN—SEPTEMBER 2014
It’s just a blur at the edge of things: blades of grass, the wings of seagulls swooping the garbage bins, Mom’s head turned towards the remaining treetops of Beacon Hill Park. Like whoever’s in charge up there was doing some kind of kindergarten art project and outlined the world with scraps of blue wool. But I just see it with my bad eye, and even then only when I focus hard, which I try to avoid doing when Mom’s around because the second she sees me staring it’s either a) the end of the world because the surgery didn’t work, or b) the end of the world because now I’ve got glaucoma. “One in four cataract patients.” She’s been reduced to one of those motion-sensor alarm systems and all I have to do is walk near her to set her off.
“Helen, should I make an appointment with Dr. Frey?” she’s asking now. And this time I’ve brought it on myself because I have my hand in front of my face and I’m waving like a retard. But there are sparks leaping between my fingertips—light blue, cobweb-thin, and tingly as static.
At least with her eyes on me they’re off t
he crew stringing cable from the Douglas firs, building scrap-metal watchtowers among the top branches. Or, more precisely, off their ringleader: the bare-chested man with the scar on his neck. Mr. Clarke from across the hall says the tree platforms only protect the fir termites, allow them to multiply, mutate, and decimate the rest of the island’s trees. That the real problem is these bleeding-heart sympathizers. But Mom claims he’s wrong, that the Herons are the only ones doing good for the parks. It’s obvious by the way she stares at them, though, that it’s not the trees she’s mooning over, but the biceps of the Heron honcho. Even now her gaze is shifting slowly towards the group.
“The doctor? I’d rather vomit.” Dr. Frey has these thick lips that collect spit when he talks, so that by the time he’s finished one of his spiels it’s all beaded up and ready to drip on you. And besides that, minus the blue, my eye is fine. And if it weren’t for the pirate patch over my good eye and the fact that my mother is escorting me to the first day of seventh grade I might even resemble a normal human being.
“I’d just like to meet your new teacher.” The supposed reason she’s with me, but it’s a lie. Mom knows Mr. Perry well enough to chase him from the Safeway meat section to the bakery just so she can press her hand on his arm and spew off about windstorms and water levels and the price of produce as he gazes at her all wide-eyed amazed. But she’s not coming in to flirt either, which might even be preferable. She’s coming to deliver the one-in-four-glaucoma-risk lecture and to impress upon him the importance of me looking like a pirate until the doctor gives me some reprieve (presumably after I have suffered irreparable damage to my social life).
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