Rebecca Campbell

by Such Thoughts Are Unproductive (html)

  “You heard from Mom?”

  “Yes. And I realized how much I’ve missed of your life these last years. Remember when I lived on Elm Street and you guys used to come over and we’d go to that one park with the splash pad, and then we’d get ice cream on the drive?”

  I found myself nodding. It’s what you do. Lie.

  “Anyway.” My new aunt said. “I thought I’d come over and I had your mom’s key so. I brought you dinner, too. Are you still vegan?”

  “Yes,” I said. “For five years now.”

  “Good. You know, while I was waiting I remembered how much you hated cooking when you were a teenager—remember how your mom tried to teach you to make, I don’t know, spaghetti sauce, and the fights. Oh God. I heard about the fights.”

  I had not remembered those fights in years. “The Bolognese,” I said. “I still can’t make it. On principle.”

  “I brought pakoras. They’re off the fucking hook—I ate like two of them waiting for you. Let’s go eat the rest.”

  The pakoras were excellent. The rice she also brought was fragrant and nutty underneath the curry. The beer delicious, bubbling out of our glasses and over the rough table on my back deck, which just had room for four people. Sophie talked about grad school and Mom, about parties they threw together, about staying up late crying over deadlines and supervisors, about graduation, and how Mom had blown hers off for the government job, but been there the next year for Sophie’s, already pregnant with me.

  “So you were at my graduation. Good luck charm.”

  I slid into this the way we slid into so many things: the loss of cities to the encroaching waters and deserts, the swamps and the Zika virus creeping north along the Mississippi, as the days grew hotter and the mosquitoes adapted. A kind of compliant quiet—pleasant, safe—overtook me as I thought yes, of course I had an aunt named Sophie. Of course.

  She slept that night on the couch. It was the obvious thing to do. Curfew.

  That night I lay in bed and recited the facts of my life: I do not have an aunt named Sophie; my mother did not have antibiotic-resistant TB and was not in a sanatorium on one of the quarantine islands. My mother is in an internment camp with yellow cinder block walls, somewhere in the mountains, far enough north that she’s surrounded by tamarack, maybe by black spruce. At the end of the road with no exit. Britney is gone. The dam on the Peace River was bombed last year. Gasoline shortages are worse.

  In the dark I texted Mom, or the Mom-function of some bot, or the person assigned to be my mom that shift, while my real mom—the internal enemy—underwent her daily reeducation, which wasn’t happening but was happening all the time. Maybe, I thought, as I typed, these words are shuttling right out to the living room, where my aunt Sophie was not sleeping, but surveilling the various fictions of my family relationships. I wondered how many nieces and nephews she had.

  Sophie is here.

  Who? The answer came too quickly. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping. She had trouble sleeping, she said, despite all the fresh air and exercise. Maybe she wasn’t Mom, maybe she was—

  Sophie. My aunt.

  Awesome. How is she? I haven’t seen her for ages. She asked about you, though. Not surprised she turned up. She just finished that contract in Halifax.

  She’s great. She brought pakoras from the place on Main.

  Oh man. I miss those.

  They’re really good. We have leftovers. I wish we could send them.

  I want pot stickers from Hon’s. And honeymoon rice. Then we should go for gelato.

  Triple scoop. Then back for another three.

  You should ask your dad if he’ll come into town and have gelato with you.

  He’s so busy.

  I didn’t write he hates the city now or he hates people now or neither of us can afford the gas if we want to eat. I wrote, he’s so busy and somewhere, the mom-function, or the behemoth, took note.

  Have you heard from Britney?

  And then I had to stop, because the question hurt so much it didn’t matter whether the woman on the other side was my mother, or a fiction, or some synthesis of true and false too complicated to understand.

  * * *

  You ask yourself as you read my record: why is she so compliant? Why doesn’t she tell the woman who keeps visiting daily, bringing food and asking questions about work and dating and Mom and Dad, why doesn’t she just say, you aren’t my aunt, I don’t have an aunt.

  I answer: because this is what we all do. Because I don’t want to end up removed to a complex somewhere in the northern mountains, where if I escaped the hundreds of km between me and a highway would kill me before any of the guards had to. Because things can always get worse for everyone involved. Because they need someone on the outside.

  But also. Also. Because she knows that I love honeymoon rice, and that I would like nothing better than to gorge on pakoras and gelato with Mom and Dad, and talk about inconsequential things, without reference to—or—or—but rather what we watched on TV and whether it was a Mac’s convenience or a 7-11 that we used to stop at on our way out of town for holiday road trips (it was definitely a 7-11). Whether the aphids are back on the nasturtiums. I talk this way with the entity who is/isn’t my mother, who may be my mother, who may be human. The entity behaves so exactly like my mother, and I like that, because then I don’t think about how she’s dead, or in solitary, somewhere, with the volume on prog rock or economic propaganda at 79 decibels for weeks on—

  —But this is not productive.

  My face betrays itself to the camera that is watching me, that also hears the catch in my voice when I thank the barista for my coffee. I use the drive-through because it offers marginally more privacy, since it can’t read your whole body, and because if you order with the app the drink is there and you don’t have to say anything and you have the pleasure of silence, though your face—the breathing, roughened by repressed tears—is still visible to it.

  The girl who gives me her drink is impassive, but I think—a flicker of sympathy in her eyes? She can’t tell that I’m contaminated by my association with my mother, that I have an Aunt Sophie. But maybe she’s contaminated, too, and has an Aunt Sophie. Who knows? You don’t wait long enough to find out.

  Sophie and I watch movies and go for walks, and sometimes I think how much I would like it if Sophie was my aunt. She clucks over me when I cough and asks whether I’ve tried turmeric and makes me tea of mint and ginger. It would be very easy to accept the gentleness of this state-sponsored intervention, ignoring the deviations I hear in conversation, and the fact that she is also someone else’s aunt. I like Sophie. That’s what I keep thinking. I like her. It’s such a relief to have someone like a mom around that I cry, sometimes, when she checks in to see if I ate lunch.

  We walk past my neighbors who say, who’s that, Mar? And I say, this is my Aunt Sophie, and they all smile, and I don’t know—not really—if they believe me, or if Aunt has become code for them as it has for me, for something you can’t talk about, a person who is close to you like a missing lover, like family, but who is—

  * * *

  Dad called. Unusual, therefore treacherous. “It’s confirmed,” he said.

  Sophie was on the porch. She’d waved yes yes when I got the call, take it, and she kept eating. I’d made us cold noodles with mint and basil from the pot I kept in the corner of the little deck.

  “When?”

  “This morning. I’m going to head out tomorrow morning.”

  “I could be there—”

  “—No, you can’t. It’s contagious. You’ll have to get checked out. They’ll be in touch. Probably soon.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Nothing. Just to hear your voice.”

  In the silence my throat shut and on the other side of the line, his throat shut too. I tried to think of safe things I could say, but what would that even be? All conversations are recorded. All expression is evidence.

  “What is it?”

  �
��TB.” He paused. “You know the one.”

  We all knew what that meant. There’s nothing for us to say, because probably all the feelings, all the fear and anger, were exhausted that first year when we didn’t hear from Mom, and he went with me to the offices with the hard blue chairs. Now, though, it was just the familiar and inexorable creep of the end, as all us imperfect citizens were taken up, one by one.

  Sophie started as soon as I hung up the phone, “What happened?”

  I said nothing.

  “Talk to me, honey.”

  Mom used to call me honey. She still did sometimes, in text. Sometimes she didn’t.

  “It’s your dad, isn’t it? I know how hard this is.”

  I threw things into my pack. T-Shirts. Socks. Solar charger. Filter bottle. Fleece.

  “You can’t go silent on me. Mar. Mar. Do you think this is what your mother wants? Seriously? You have to talk.”

  Documents, hidden from her view by the closed door, on which she banged her fists, tucked into my waistband.

  “It’s not good to bottle everything up inside. You need to learn to trust people.”

  My backpack—the giant frame one that Dad got me for my first real solo expedition the summer I was twenty. It cost twice what I wanted, but he insisted, and he’d been right because here it still was. I checked my balance with Humanitas, the telecom provider for all the camps. Sanatoriums. Whatever. Ten minutes banked against next week’s call, and enough for a handful of texts, so I hit dial.

  She didn’t answer. I rang again, just swallowing the five dollars. Then the woman appeared, her back to the windows.

  “Hey, I didn’t expect—”

  The image of my mother-not-mother hung, and reflexively I studied the margins of her face for the suture between reality and fiction, the faint betraying lines of an AI’s interference.

  “You cut out.”

  “I didn’t expect to hear from you. I heard from your dad yesterday, though, so both of you are off schedule. What’s up?”

  “Dad’s sick.”

  The image hung. I picked up the jiffy I had ready in case, and began writing on the white wall of my bedroom. DAD IS SICK IM GOING TO VISIT HIM.

  Her face—hanging in the moment when she understood what I wrote—was animated only by the shimmer of pixels across my screen. She might have dropped, but I kept my phone fixed on the wall so she had a chance to see it again. One way or another, they already knew, and if it was Mom. If it was. If. Then she had to know.

  “Are you talking to her? Is that her?” Sophie shouted. “You can’t disturb her recovery, Mar. That’s just fucking selfish.”

  She said other things in quick succession, about my being a bad daughter, about how I was a bitch, about how I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, careening from insult to affection in a split second in order to stop me from doing—something. I wondered if she’d try to hit me.

  I locked up the apartment with Sophie still following me, talking about opening up, saying are you a fucking rock? Tell me what’s wrong with Bastien, he’s my friend too, you can’t shut me out. A thousand other platitudes about sharing the burden of pain.

  I got into the car. She stood in front of it.

  “Why don’t you just put a tracker on me,” I said, “and let me go. It’ll all be over soon anyway.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I inched forward. She leaned onto the hood and I thought, this may be the single stupidest moment of my entire life.

  “We’re family, Mar.”

  Maybe she told the truth, though not in the way she thought. We were family in the sense that we were bound to the same omnivorous machine.

  “Please,” she said. “Please.”

  I could hear her saying those words to someone else, someone standing behind me, someone looking out of my eyes, and I wanted to ask, who is it? Who are you talking to?

  I unlocked the door. She got in, face full of rage-tears.

  “You can’t rescue him,” she said. “You need to just trust that things happen for a reason.”

  * * *

  I thought about killing her. I thought about killing myself. I thought about driving into the roadblock at the exit for Needle Park, which was now manned by American uniforms, hazmat suits, trucks with Chinese plates. But while I often have those thoughts, I have never pursued them. It’s how I have survived as long as I have, why I haven’t been scooped with my parents, with Brit—

  —But thinking of Britney would make things even worse than they were. So instead I thought about the roadblocks, and how the exits for Kingsvale and Brookmere and Coldwater were bulldozed, so you couldn’t leave the car to feel the air change as you climb into the mountains. I thought about what might now be on the other side of the torn up concrete and rock.

  She talked. She laughed. She told the same stories about my mother in grad school, what a mess she was during her comps, cleaning the bathroom at midnight, smoking until dawn on their tiny, rotten front porch. Ha ha ha.

  I thought of all the times we started our summer road trips on the Coquihalla, headed to the cabin, or farther north and east. Other years due south along the American coast, watching the beaches change from shingle to sand, to Manzanita and Tillamook, then farther south until we found our way to California. I thought of camping, and the dogs with me in the back seat.

  Her throat raw with talk, she kept going, “Your parents love you so much,” she said, “they want what’s best for you, and what’s best is to let them get better.”

  “We’re going to need gas,” I said. “Stop at Merritt.”

  “Are you even listening? I’m here because I love you, Mar, and because I’m trying to convince you to move on with your life, and let them go. You can’t change this.”

  Once, a year ago, when I still hadn’t heard from Mom, and Dad had just moved to the interior but was off the grid because of the fires, and the Coquihalla was still roadblocked because of the attack on the dam, and I had no idea about anything anymore, and Britney was—

  —I had the opportunity to find an aunt, or a niece, or a cousin. This happened when you appeared to be as compliant as I did. Ashley—my direct manager—called me into a meeting with someone I’d never seen before, a woman in a sleek gray suit who talked about how I could help Britney and my mother and anyone else I cared to help, by telling them about my extended family, about those cousins I met sometimes on the hard blue chairs. I told them I didn’t have any cousins like that, but that I’d think about it. I wondered, later, if my hesitation was enough. Maybe we were all damned because I thought instead of saying, yes yes whatever you like I’ll find a cousin and tell you anything you need to know.

  The lineup at the gas station was better than Vancouver. Thirty minutes. I thought of killing her again, my Aunt Sophie, who had grown so familiar to me, messenger from a childhood I had not had, a life I did not lead in a country that no longer existed, full of loving familiar bonds, and gentle teasing, and a father not slowly dying of TB, a mother not being tortured by—

  —I said, “There has to be someone you’re protecting, right?”

  “You, Mar. You’re my goddaughter,” she said it mechanically, and I could imagine the dialogue somewhere in the dossier that archived me, identified my vulnerabilities, cataloged my failures. I have no godmother, no aunt, no mother, no wife. “I swore at your christening that I would uphold the ethical and social bond of our relationship. That I would love you. I promised—”

  —We moved a car length forward. You could smell the wildfires, and see last year’s burnout, overgrown with fireweed.

  “Daughter?” I asked. “Your sister? Granddaughter?”

  It was like a moonscape out there, Dad said when he drove through after the fires. On the other side of the mountain, the cabin was safe, but probably not for many more seasons. I had always thought that I could escape there, if I needed to, get the camping gear and walk out to some place no one will ever set foot. A mountain. A valley
where I could wait until this was over.

  “You should probably go see them,” I said. “Whoever they are. They’d rather see you than get whatever help you think they’ll get. Because you’re not helping. Not really.”

  When we got to the pump I filled up, then we went in to pay and get some water, and whatever candy was available because that’s what you do in Merritt, you get snacks for the last two hours on the road, even if they were sparse and overpriced gummy worms.

  She said, “You know I don’t have a choice.”

  I nodded.

  “She’s not your mother, probably, the one you talk to. You know where your mother is. You know what they do.”

  I nodded.

  “I did actually know your parents in grad school. I did. You were in utero at my graduation. That’s why they thought—and I was already doing. It. This. For her. I was doing it because if I don’t—”

  —And I will grant her a little privacy here. It only takes a few words when it’s people like us, the imperfect citizens of this perfectly known world. She told me things I do not wish to know, because they hurt to know, then we both looked instinctively for cameras and drones and microphones.

  She said, “I have to. I’ll just be. I have—” and she walked away.

  I went back to the car and drank from the water bottle, then started the engine. A full tank of gas, the sunlight brilliant, and I pulled out of the lot. I had, I figured, a couple of hours before they got to me, and by then, I would be at Dad’s, and maybe we could talk for a few minutes before they came. I saw the signs for Peachland and Kelowna, and the sun was going down, and eating the gummy worms I could almost be on one of those other road trips, out from the city to the cabin for a week, or maybe past the mountains and somewhere else, north maybe. This time I’d make Britney come with us, even if I had to beg her to take time away from work. And—the image came to me, though I did not want it—Sophie with us, sitting up late to talk with Mom. I could imagine another lifetime in which she was my aunt, when she and her daughter might have joined us for a week on the lake, drinking beer by the water, and swatting at the mosquitoes together.