The Outer Harbour

by Wayde Compton

  The first woman nods, like she’s thinking. Then she goes through her purse. Okay, she says, handing him a pen. Write down “To the Republic of the Graeae” on the back and sign your name below it. And put your password at the bottom. We’ll take it to the Magister in the morning and divvy up your essence points. You’re out anyway, right?

  I’m out. He signs.

  Hop in.

  DONALD LOOKS THROUGH the half-mirror of the bus window at the landscape. It reels by. The country will become the suburbs, and the suburbs will become the city, and then he’ll be home. The exterior is dark. Subterranean walls of black.

  What they’d wanted was for him to turn May, to get her to join their group. It was transparent from the start, though they couched everything in the patois of their game. If he could convince May to come over to their crew, they would take him too, and let him in on all their arcane rules and protocols. But it wasn’t even really May they wanted. She had, according to them, a sacred object, the Jewel of Something-or-Other—a token of gameplay. It took them half an hour of jabbering there in the torch-lit clearing to get to that point. The Jewel would give them the power to counter the Kingdom of Somebody-or-Other. He stopped paying attention and interrupted. Asked to leave. The magic of the moment was broken and his interest in the concept melted into the night air.

  And here he is alone in the howl of the bus on the highway.

  The driver has shut off the interior lights. It’s just Donald in the back and the driver up front, no one else. He tries to get comfortable for the long ride, hugs his bag, and rests his head against his own reflection in the window. A cold echo. He closes his eyes and waits for the change.

  400 FT3 (11.33 M3)

  Troy slides the desk into the space beneath the window, wondering how he will get any work done with such a view in front of him: the North Shore mountains, the bridge, the park, the city. The water looks like the surface of a vast jewel. Only a ship here and there mars the image. He thinks about all the times he has gazed out at the harbour from the city. Now he is there, as if by magic, but really by credit and daring.

  There are boxes everywhere yet to be unpacked. But Troy wants the desk and computer available. They will pin him down here, make this space his. Jatinder is doing something similar in the living room, deep in the trance of arranging and re-arranging.

  When he gets down on his hands and knees to plug in a cord, he sees a corner of paper sticking out from the back of the drawer.

  The desk is new to him, though he grew up with it all his life. It was his father’s first, then his mother’s. Now it’s his. Troy remembers watching his father carefully doing his taxes at the desk when he was a child, and he remembers seeing all the things left untouched on the desktop for years, it seemed, after his father had gotten sick. His mother did not begin to use the desk herself until Troy moved out of the house and went to university in another city. The desk is scored and old. Dark heavy wood.

  The surface is a field of mourning. But the underside seems cheap.

  A corner of paper pointing down.

  He can’t work it free without ripping it, so he removes the drawer, and there it is, an envelope stapled to the back, crumpled, askew. He tears it away. It’s yellow and old. Inside is a single folded sheet of paper. Cursive in blue—

  Delman Kern (1833–1897) [3/4 black, 1/4 white] m. (mulatto woman)

  begat

  John Kern Sr (1867–1932) [5/8 black, 3/8 white] m. (Nootka woman)

  begat

  John Kern Jr (1889–1958) [5/16 black, 3/16 white, 1/2 Indian] m. (quadroon woman)

  begat

  William Kern (1923–1981) [9/32 black, 15/32 white, 1/4 Indian] m. (white woman)

  begat

  Daniel Kern (1952–) [9/64 black, 47/64 white, 1/8 Indian] m. (white woman)

  begat

  Troy Kern (1983–) [9/128 black, 111/128 white, 1/16 Indian]

  His father’s handwriting.

  He reads it.

  He reads it.

  He reads it very slowly.

  Jatinder enters the room, steps over the boxes to get to him. He hands the piece of paper to her.

  After a time she says, Did you—?

  No.

  So this is—?

  New to me. Yeah.

  Her brow is furrowed. What does this mean?

  I don’t know.

  She flips the paper over. Scans it. Then hands it to him.

  On the other side it says, HISTIAIOS. STEGANOGRAPHY. HOW?

  HE SEARCHES THROUGH three boxes before he finds it: A Boy’s Book of Codes, by Anthony Saxelford (London: Ark Press, 1960). The memory is in his fingertips. He flips to it automatically:

  Histiaios believed his only chance to escape Susa was for Aristagoras to start the rebellion in Miletos, which would draw attention away from his position. But the roads between Susa and Miletos were heavily patrolled by the enemy. Any messenger he sent would be searched. So Histiaios summoned his most trusted slave, shaved the hair from his head, and instructed his scribe to tattoo the plans for revolt on the slave’s scalp using a needle and ink. He waited until the slave’s hair grew in and then sent him on to Miletos. When the slave arrived he asked that Aristagoras shave his head, revealing Histiaios’s orders to rebel. In this way Histiaios ensured that his meticulous instructions would be received in his own wording, as he distrusted the commitment of such a critical message to the memory and care of a subordinate.

  There’s an asterisk scribbled by his father in the margin beside the passage.

  When his dad gave him this book, Troy was seven years old. By then his father had been sick for a year and a half, and would die seven months and eight days later.

  He lips to the title page and there it says: TO TROY, FROM DAD, FOR EVER.

  HIS BACK IS to the large mirror, the one in the freestanding frame. It was his mother’s, had always been hers. She stood in front of it every day; it was as tall as she was, made of magenta pine, she said.

  (No such thing.)

  Whatever she knew, she took it with her, too.

  He angles the handheld mirror over his shoulder, aiming it here and there at the back of his head.

  Nothing.

  There is a mess of his hair on the floor.

  Jatinder watches him from the edge of the bed.

  He steps backwards, toward himself, closer. He throws his head back to expose his crown, bends the tops of his ears over with his fingers, swivels this way and that.

  Nothing. Nowhere.

  Okay. What now?

  Troy lets his hand—the one holding the smaller mirror—drop to his side.

  This is crazy.

  Jatinder nods.

  He kneels beside her. He closes his eyes and rests his face against her thigh. His head feels too cool, as if it were wet.

  She touches his scalp. She’s never seen him bald before. Her fingers move lightly across his skin.

  What did they call that ridiculous thing they used to do, diagnosing people by feeling the bumps on their heads?

  They called it “science.”

  THE NAME OF the place is TERMINAL SELF STORAGE. It sounds to Troy like a joke or a judgment.

  He opens the latch on the old trunk.

  Toys he’s kept. Action figures, an old green army tank, countless interlocking plastic bricks. Tears. Immediately. The smell of these things, a mix of polymer, dust, cardboard. The sudden currents of memory—Christmas, birthdays. Then a black garbage bag, beneath it all, taped up. He rips it open. The musty plush animals, the familiar colours and shapes. The texture of his making. The scents of his house and the everyday of his childhood somehow stowed here, which is nowhere.

  And finally the one he is after. The one he called Harold Brown.

  Because his father had called it that.

  Troy tries to remember its origins. A birthday maybe.

  But the reason he is here is because of his father’s refrain, only now glaring out in relief, that he should never throw the do
ll away, even when he was grown. That he should pass it on to his own son someday.

  A woolly explosion of black hair. Harold Brown’s button eyes, his faded and tattered grey suit made of terrycloth.

  Troy lifts him up to the fluorescent light hanging from the corrugated ceiling of the ten-by-five locker. Parts the hair at the back of the doll’s head. The yarn is frayed and matted. No other way. He takes the scissors out of his jacket pocket and cuts a path.

  There on the scalp, stitched inexpertly, needle and thread in red on the doll’s cloth skin: a site, a street, a set of numbers, an inexorable accounting.

  The button-eyes look.

  That endless stare.

  WHY IS IT just boys? Sons?

  I don’t know. “Primogeniture”—is that the word?

  “Patriarchy” is what you’re looking for.

  THEY TAKE THE ferry from the island to the Aquatic Centre Dock, then walk over to the lot where they keep their car. It doesn’t take long to drive to the East Hastings address, which was the whole of the message stitched onto the doll’s scalp. When they get there, parking across from it, the whole block is the skeleton of a building. A crane sprouts out of it. Workers, cement trucks, rebar.

  They watch the revision of the city through the glass.

  The address is the same, but that Vancouver is gone.

  2BR + SPECTACULAR VIEW

  According to the directories they pick through at the library, the space had been home to many things over the years—all industrial usages, though it has now been rezoned: an auto parts shop; a pressure washer rental store; a seller of trolley wheels and castors. But in the last years of Troy’s father’s life the address is listed as “Lennox and Sons, book publishers.” The proprietor is down as “A. Lennox.”

  ALL MOD CONS

  A variety of searches. The footprints of the last century. And finally a used book, a slim thing, at a store in Oberlin, Ohio, via the computer. He puts it in his “cart”:

  The Elucidation Proclamation: 100th Anniversary Edition

  George S. Lennox (author)

  Paperback: 108 pages

  Publisher: Spectrum Continental Communications (Vancouver, BC, 1958)

  Language: English

  Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8 inches

  Average Customer Review: Be the first to review this item

  OPEN CONCEPT

  “We are as a prism reversed: our hues go into the glass and come out colorless and, like light, we retain the potential of our former state. We look back, and we act with fidelity. Our achievements will never be measured. We will never be comprehended as heroes. The Race will never celebrate our victories in story or song. Our offensives will be as subtle as pen strokes and our conquests as bland as handshakes. In plain sight we will fight a war that no one, not even the Enemy, will understand is being waged. And when we win, our Race will not know how or why they won; they will only know that they are victors. Our Enemy will not know that he has been defeated, but he will be outflanked. We will make an ever expanding net, a snare, of what are now clear battle lines. We will change the unchangeable from within.

  “Such are the principles of this, our long strategy to overwhelm the forces of complexional distinction that have cast a shadow on this continent since our arrival in chains. We hereby call these principles to which we adhere ‘Hannibalism’ after the great African who in similar style entered the Enemy’s house to defeat him from the inside. His were the Alps into Italy; ours are the sly routes of blood and reflection. We will win where his work was unfinished.

  “Yet Hannibal is merely one source of inspiration. The other is the figure of our current political governor, a man whom rumor without confirmation asserts has colored ancestry, though his looks are as those of a white man. With this secret tucked away in the feint of his visage, he rose to the highest rank in the region, and now cannot be touched by word from British Guyana and elsewhere that his mother was a plantation Mulatto, his father a Scottish exploiter. James Douglas, a builder of this fort and of these colonies, is the unsteady hand behind our immigration to these shores from those United States. But he is no friend to the Long Project, and his motives are personal only. Nevertheless, in his eyes and countenance I found the suggestion of a way out of this wilderness for us. One Douglas can do nothing. But a secret army of them could change all.

  “Hannibalism is, simply put, the deliberate tactic of marrying light and creating issue who are lighter skinned than oneself and passing this practice on to one’s eldest. This itself does nothing but make a singular kind of escape and is in form nothing new. But we add the crucial formula, an intergenerational strategy, to also pass on with this tradition the Secret Mission to use this skin, this guise, this lightened body, to enter the house of Oppression and loosen its hinges. As our descendants lighten, so will their status and power increase, and with the Secret Mission passed on, they will be whites in body but Negroes in mind, spirit, and action. Judges, doctors, politicians, lawyers, makers of doctrine and policy will emerge forth as white men to the outward world but men whose power will be used to elevate the status of our Race at each turn, and end our oppression. This is the future cabal that we will build.

  “Above all, the Mission must remain clothed in silence. These documents may be circulated freely, but your own allegiance to its principles must remain internal. Passing on the Mission to your sons must be done when they are just coming of age, and they must be carefully brought into this as into the most exclusively guarded guild. All must be kept from those closest to you. The line goes forward for ever. The silent victory is at hand. As it says in Second Corinthians: ‘We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.’ We go into the future bearing the Race in our hearts always.”

  JATINDER IS REALLY the handy one, but he has a go at putting the crib together. The instructions are in twelve languages, with dowels and a hex key. When he’s done, there are pieces left over. But it is as sturdy as anything.

  Troy has heard that there is a growing clear-cut the size of a small country in the middle of Siberia, where the manufacturer of the crib gets all its wood. The world, now the world of his coming child, a future world, is an island of growing but unseen debts and consequences. A mass of plastic flotsam in the Pacific. A patch of apocalyptic void in a foreign forest.

  Who assembled the pieces of this that he assembles in turn?

  He will pass on every single thing.

  And the years will come and go with the tides, taking what they take and leaving what they leave.

  The blocks are interlocking, and with them his girl will build a little house on the floor of her bedroom. For her “babies.”

  He will watch, transported by pure awe.

  FINAL REPORT

  ASSOCIATION FOR PETROSOMATOGLYPHIC INNOVATION

  Clandestine Placement Grant

  Funding is available through our Clandestine Placement program for the following categories of self-directed projects involving impressions of hands, feet, faces, or other body parts into rock, concrete, brick, or other like materials. Our two funding channels include:

  Site-specific: Creating and installing permanent, unaccredited, socially engaging petrosomatoglyphs, in urban or rural settings, for the purpose of inspiring new ways of thinking about familiar sites and/or for referring in innovative ways to pre-existing historical or cultural understandings of these sites.

  Peripatetic: Creating mobile, unaccredited, socially engaging petrosomatoglyphs, imprinted in a subject material that can be placed in a public space and subsequently found, moved, stolen, sold, stored, recovered, and otherwise passed from hand-to-hand by the general public. (These must be impressed into materials weighing no more than twenty kilograms.)

  The maximum amount of funding available per application is $5,000.

  Eligible Recipients: Canadian citizens; Canadian non-profit organizations; Ca
nadian municipalities and townships.

  Applicants must include a design sketch, a one-page project description, and a CV.

  Due date: January 31

  THE LOGATOMIC INSTITUTE

  The Angus Nanning Bursary for Studies in Comparative Non-Lexical Vocalism

  The Logatomic Institute is pleased to offer this bursary for the purposes of offsetting the burden of tuition. Members of the Alumni Association have dedicated this to the late Angus Nanning for his contributions to the field of comparative non-lexical vocalism.

  We are currently accepting applications from students who wish to receive this bursary and who are working on a project involving the translation of a significant extant sample of lilting, mouth music, scat singing, and/or other forms of non-lexical vocalism into a similarly non-lexical form including, but not specific to, lilting, mouth music, scat singing, and/or other forms of non-lexical vocalism.

  The bursary amount is $5,750. It will go to a single recipient.

  Applicants must answer the question below and send it to klactoveedsedstene@tli.moc. Please paste your answer into the body of your email; do not send attachments. Please also include your name, age, address, and phone number.

  Question:

  Without using words or images, explain why you think you should receive this bursary and how it would improve your ability to research the forms you are investigating.

  (Note: We also require two wordless/imageless letters of recommendation indicating why you are a worthy candidate for this bursary. It is not important that these arrive with your application, but it is required that they are drafted, and we recommend that applicants leave each letter in a location near, but not necessarily at, the Institute, such as unfolded upon a rock at Pigeon Bluff, near the stone plinth that overlooks Armleder’s farm, where the wind may or may not lift and carry it until it rests at a place where it may or may not be read by someone who may or may not influence, in conversation or through action, the life of one [or more] of the jury members, toward a positive or negative outcome in the selection process involving you or some other future candidate.)