“If only there was some way we could go on running this place on our own,” I moaned under my breath, trying to concentrate on repairing the pressure gauge on a pneumatic evacuator that we’d taken in for mending.
Monty shot me a look. He had taken the Sister’s coming very hard. “I don’t think I have it in me to kill the next one, too. Anyway, they’re bound to notice if we keep on assassinating our guardians.”
I snickered despite myself. Then my gloomy pall descended again. It had all been so good, how could we possibly return to the old way? But there was no way the sisters would let a bunch of crippled children govern themselves.
“What a waste,” I said. “What a waste of all this potential.”
“At least I’ll be shut of it in two years,” Monty said. “How long have you got till your eighteenth?”
My brow furrowed. I looked out the grimy workshop window at the iron grey February sky. “It’s February tenth today?”
“Eleventh,” he said.
I laughed, an ugly sound. “Why, Monty, my friend, today is my eighteenth birthday. I believe I have survived St. Aggie’s to graduate to bigger and better things. I have attained my majority, old son.”
He held a hand out and shook my hook with it, solemnly. “Happy birthday and congratulations, then, Sian. May the world treat you with all the care you deserve.”
I stood, the scrape of my chair very loud and sudden. I realized I had no idea what I would do next. I had managed to completely forget that my graduation from St. Aggie’s was looming, that I would be a free man. In my mind, I’d imagined myself dwelling at St. Aggie’s forever.
Forever.
“You look like you just got hit in the head with a shovel,” Monty said. “What on earth is going through that mind of yours?”
I didn’t answer. I was already on my way to find Sister Immaculata. I found her in the kitchen, helping legless Dora make the toast for tea over the fire’s grate.
“Sister,” I said, “a word please?”
As she turned and followed me into the pantry off the kitchen, some of that fear I’d felt on the bridge bubbled up in me. I tamped it back down again firmly, like a piston compressing some superheated gas.
She was really just as I remembered her, and she had remembered me, too—she remembered all of us, the children she’d held in the night and then consigned to this Hell upon Earth, all unknowing.
“Sister Mary Immaculata, I attained my eighteenth birthday today.”
She opened her mouth to congratulate me, but I held up my stump.
“I turned eighteen today, sister. I am a man, I have attained my majority. I am at liberty, and must seek my fortune in the world. I have a proposal for you, accordingly.” I put everything I had into this, every dram of confidence and maturity that I’d learned since we inmates had taken over the asylum. “I was Mr. Grindersworth’s lieutenant and assistant in every matter relating to the daily operation of this place. Many’s the day I did every bit of work that there was to do, whilst Mr. Grindersworth attended to family matters. I know every inch of this place, ever soul in it, and I have had the benefit of the excellent training and education that there is to have here.
“I had always thought to seek my fortune in the world as a mechanic of some kind, if any shop would have a half-made thing like me, but seeing as you find yourself at loose ends in the superintendent department, I thought I might perhaps put my plans ‘on hold’ for the time being, until such time as a full search could be conducted.”
“Sian,” she said, her face wrinkling into a gap-toothed smile. “Are you proposing that you might run St. Agatha’s?”
It took everything I could not to wilt under the pity and amusement in that smile. “I am, sister. I am. I have all but run it for months now, and have every confidence in my capacity to go on doing so for so long as need be.” I kept my gaze and my voice even. “I believe that the noble mission of St. Aggie’s is a truly attainable one: that it can rehabilitate such damaged things as we and prepare us for the wider world.”
She shook her head. “Sian,” she said, softly, “Sian. I wish it could be. But there’s no hope that such an appointment would be approved by the Board of Governors.”
I nodded. “Yes, I thought so. But do the Governors need to approve a temporary appointment? A stopgap, until a suitable person can be found?”
Her smile changed, got wider. “You have certainly come into your own shrewdness here, haven’t you?”
“I was taught well,” I said, and smiled back.
The temporary has a way of becoming permanent. That was my bolt of inspiration, my galvanic realization. Once the sisters had something that worked, that did not call attention to itself, that took in crippled children and released whole persons some years later, they didn’t need to muck about with it. As the mechanics say, “If it isn’t broken, it doesn’t want fixing.”
I’m no mechanic, not anymore. The daily running of St. Aggie’s occupied a larger and larger slice of my time, until I found that I knew more about tending to a child’s fever or soothing away a nightmare than I did about hijacking the vast computers to do our bidding.
But that’s no matter, as we have any number of apprentice computermen and computerwomen turning up on our doorsteps. So long as the machineries of industry grind on, the supply will be inexhaustible.
Monty visits me from time to time, mostly to scout for talent. His shop, Goldfarb and Associates, has a roaring trade in computational novelties and service, and if anyone is bothered by the appearance of a factory filled with the halt, the lame, the blind and the crippled, they are thankfully outnumbered by those who are delighted by the quality of the work and the good value in his schedule of pricing.
But it was indeed a golden time, that time when I was but a boy at St. Aggie’s among the boys and girls, a cog in a machine that Monty built of us, part of a great uplifting, a transformation from a hell to something like a heaven. That I am sentenced to serve in this heaven I helped to make is no great burden, I suppose.
Still, I do yearn to screw a jeweller’s loupe into my eye, pick up a fine tool and bend the sodium lamp to shine upon some cunning mechanism that wants fixing. For machines may be balky and they may destroy us with their terrible appetite for oil, blood and flesh, but they behave according to fixed rules and can be understood by anyone with the cunning to look upon them and winkle out their secrets. Children are ever so much more complicated.
Though I believe I may be learning a little about them, too.
selected haiku
GEORGE SWEDE
long past
its perihelion
this life
overgrown
with dreams
glued
by gravity to
4.54 billion years
coal-dark tombstone—
its eight numbers erased
by what they measured
pure
RIO YOUERS
Imagine a shadow, but vague, only slightly darker than the surface onto which it is cast. The light is obscured. The shadow suffers. It is a cataract.
You can’t see me. I am less than a shadow.
I am nothing.
But I am coming.
The cariocas paid him no attention.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. October 18th 2064.
Desperation had brought him here, and the final strand of what could be called animal instinct. These streets, as crowded as a child’s imagination, once filled with colour and vibrancy, but now made grey by clouds of fear; thunderhead of disease. The locals—the cariocas—pressed to get out of the rain, heads down, bodies wet. They did not look at him. They did not question his obvious weakness or the mask he wore. The storm blistered along Delfim Moreira. The palm trees twisted, fronds swaying. He was pushed aside and knocked to the floor. Again and again. The rain rattled off his mask. The cariocas paid him no attention. He picked himself up and followed the meager thread of instinct.
How long had
he been running?
“Where are you, Avô Vinícius?”
Every minute was fear. Every second.
Fernando gazed along Ipanema Beach, a deserted belt of cocoa sand, bullied by the relentless angst of the Atlantic. To the west, Morro Dois Irmãos loomed through bellies of cloud. Its split peaks made it resemble a giant, infected tooth. He felt a pull in that direction. The unguarded aspect of his soul registered hope. It was like oxygen. His pulse quickened and he staggered on.
He was close.
His mask was butterfly-shaped.
It was stained glass, as fragile as his life. The wings covered his eyes and cheeks. He viewed the world through tinted shards. The left eye was green. The colour of everything he had known and still hoped for. The colour of beginnings. The right eye was smoky-brown. The colour of destruction.
The mask covered his stigma. The word INFECÇÃO (infection) tattooed the left side of his face. His number, 339099, branded the right. A signature of ignominy. All of the infected were marked in this way, and would be until they faded from existence. They were no longer strong. They had been gathered like cattle and quarantined . . . broken down and weakened over several generations . . . reduced to little more than substance. His kind was crushed and dying. Flies in the cold.
If the mask were to slip, or break, if his sickness were to be unveiled, he would be captured within moments. The mask was his saviour, as important to him as the blood running through his body. Its colours represented the events of his species, from inception to decay. Its shape represented metamorphosis; flight; beautiful hope.
Cure.
Avô Vinícius.
“Close,” he whispered.
A scathing gust slammed him as he crossed Rua João Lira. A dramatic pirouette, jacket billowing. He was thrown against the side of a parked truck and fell to his knees, one hand instinctively protecting the mask. The locals hurried past him—almost stepping over him in their haste. He longed for wings to lift him above the storm.
Fernando got to his feet. Warm rain dripped from his hair. He continued across the street, buffeted by the storm. Sustained thunder damaged the sky. The creature kept his head down. His pale eyes flashed behind the mask.
They even chased him in dreams.
The only vivid things were his tattoos. He was diluted . . . watery. His body was a wan rack of bone and sinew. His hair was dead ragweed.
Heart like cirrus cloud, scattered across the sky of his body.
All he could feel was the weak beat of his instinct.
Lightning saturated the afternoon gloom, turning all things to ghosts. The sidewalk shimmered and he saw, in one brilliant frame of time, his reflection: a hunkered thing, as dark as any bad dream. He forced himself to stand straight, and in so doing saw the men walking toward him. His failing instinct, which had brought him this far, warned him that they were not cariocas. They were impervious to the storm. Bound by purpose.
They were a Polícia do Vírus (the Virus Police), enlisted by the Brazilian government to eradicate infection beyond the quarantines’ barricades. Officially, they were supposed to subdue carriers and return them to the nearest quarantine city, but they were more inclined to blood and torture. They were known throughout South America as Psycho Cowboys.
Fernando wanted to surrender—fall at their feet and let them tie him up and bleed him dry (infamous cruelty; they laughed while they tortured; they donned multicoloured garments and smeared their faces with wild paints). He was too weak to run, but salvation was within reach. He would not give up. He would not surrender.
He cut across the empty parking lot of what had once been a glimmering beachfront hotel, but was now a concrete ghost. Moving as swiftly as he was able, he climbed through one of the shattered windows and into a dark lobby. The walls were smeared with neglect. The front desk had been stripped for firewood. Vagrants huddled amongst the cockroaches and trash.
He turned, his butterfly mask sparkling, and saw that the Psycho Cowboys were following. They came fast, flowing through the rain. He staggered across the lobby, into a seemingly endless corridor. Doors hung in tatters and mosaics rippled on the walls, depicting the dead colour of the city: the Rio of yesteryear. His heart made rain and thunder and he pressed forward. He took a stairway, swollen steps that he struggled to ascend, both hands clinging to the rail.
He could hear them in the lobby: commotion, raised voices, cries of pain as they checked the vagrants for tattoos. They knew they were close; they could feel him, too.
Fernando burst into the first floor corridor and reeled toward the elevators. His mind was a battlefield. Everything was green or brown. His single thought was to keep moving.
The Psycho Cowboys were relentless. They even chased him in dreams, where his imagination gave them clown faces and legs like rainbows. In reality they were grave, almost normal, until they caught you . . . then the grey suits came off and their true colours were revealed.
He stumbled . . . picked himself up. The elevators, directly ahead, yawned open. He heard voices on the stairway and scrambled toward one of the empty shafts, throwing himself inside.
Falling . . . spinning. He reached out and grasped the thick cable, the skin ripping from his palm as he broke his fall and halted his descent. The cable whipped and bounced. The counterweight struck a single dull chord and then everything was silent.
He curled his legs around the cable, placed one hand on the mask to keep it from slipping, and hung upside down. He held his breath and waited, his heart cannonading, his wet jacket falling around his shoulders like wings.
He imagined them with rainbow legs.
Voices in the corridor above. Footsteps. Fernando closed his eyes and willed his frail body to become absorbed by the darkness. He heard them approach, bullish steps and coarse breathing. They carried guns and batons, but in his mind they wielded blunt torture implements and walked on rainbow legs. He was sure they would hear his heartbeat. The cable creaked and his jacket dripped water to the floor below.
Long moments passed. He did not move. He barely breathed. The Cowboys thumped and grunted. Six or seven of them, kicking open doors, cursing. He could feel their impatience vibrate through the walls of the shaft.
His hand covered the mask. He could feel the cable biting into the tender flesh at the backs of his knees.
“Coming for you.” The voice was keen and cold and too close. He imagined a white face and a deformed, painted smile. “We’ll find you.”
Less than a shadow.
The light bleeding through the elevator doors flickered.
“Coming . . .”
He sensed the Psycho Cowboy peering into the shaft, eyes gleaming, his clown-grin impossibly long.
You can’t see me.
His heart sent small vibrations through the cable. He could hear the Cowboy sucking in greedy breaths. The seconds passed too slowly, and he became convinced that he had been seen—would be caught, tortured and killed—and a part of him welcomed the end of it all. No more running. Nothing, indeed. A single tear dripped from his eye and ran across the inside of the mask, changing colour, from green to brown, like a leaf. A strident bell of regret sounded in his mind, and for a moment she was there, suspended in the darkness ahead of him, shimmering. They’ll find you, Fernando. They’ll kill you. He came close to reaching out for her, revealing his pale hand, or his mask. Stay with me. I know how to love you.
He opened his mouth to respond. Even his words were shadows: But we’re dying. More tears splashed against the inside of the mask.
She disappeared. His heart found hectic life and pounded furious fists against his chest. The cable creaked. He revolved, slowly, like a voiceless chime.
The light flickered again and he heard the Cowboy retreat, bouncing on his rainbow legs. Relief swarmed Fernando’s ailing body, but he did not move. The Psycho Cowboys continued their search—tearing through all floors, all rooms—for a loud, interminable passage of time. Fernando clutched the cable and waited. His body ached
. His shadow/soul withered. When he was sure that the Psycho Cowboys were gone, he adjusted his position. The cable rippled and the counterweight played several sad notes. He waited a little longer before emerging from the shaft. He crawled, and then collapsed. Painful breaths sagged from his lungs. He lay in the corridor, unnoticed by the world, like a charred piece of paper; broken furniture; a curled, damp strip of carpet.
Rain fell through the shattered windows.
The reason you look away.
It was a cold pain, as if a January wind were blowing through all the joints and tendons of his body. He staggered into the lobby and looked at the shapes of the vagrants huddled against the walls. They were rags. Breathing, bleeding rags. Specimens of a ruined city. The reason you look away. Fernando moved toward a lowly shape, embraced by shadow: a man, swaddled in mouldering newspaper, whose beard made the top half of his face appear too thin. Veins ticked beneath the membranous skin of his eyelids. His temples could have been hollowed out with spoons.
Fernando crouched next to the man. He removed his mask. The butterfly appeared, for a moment, to be suspended in the dimness, captured in flight. The vagrant opened his eyes: preternatural instinct; the core of survival. He saw the tattoo—INFECÇÃO—and the minutia of his face responded: the dry skin of his upper lip stretching and cracking; his pupils contracting; the creases around his eyes thinning; the hairs in his nostrils quivering. He managed only a fraction of his final breath before Fernando’s hand was pressed to his mouth, forcing his head back, exposing the vulnerable meat of his throat. A discerning eye may have detected a hint of resignation in the half-second before Fernando went for his jugular. A softening in the pupil, perhaps, or the fine crease appearing at the bridge of his nose. Then he was dying. Blood sprayed into Fernando’s mouth. The vagrant’s body was rigid for slow seconds, and then slumped all at once, as if some central support cable had snapped. His left leg twitched. His shoe came off and was buried in a drift of trash.
Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing Page 19