Alias space and other st.., p.30
Alias Space and Other Stories, page 30
An ordinary man. Hoodie. Cap.
Jessica, breathe.
Her head whipped around, eyes wild, hands scrambling reflexively for a weapon. Nobody was at the pumps, nobody parked at the air pump. He could come back any moment. Bring his knife and finish the job.
Please breathe. There’s no apparent danger.
She fell to her knees and crawled out from behind the counter. Nobody would stop him, nobody would save her. Just like they hadn’t saved all those dead and missing girls whose posters had been staring at her all summer from up on the cigarette cabinet.
When she’d started the job they’d creeped her out, those posters. For a few weeks she’d thought twice about walking after dark. But then those dead and missing girls disappeared into the landscape. Forgotten.
You must calm down.
Now she was one of them.
We may not be able to bring you back again.
She scrambled to the bathroom on all fours, threw herself against the door, twisted the lock. Her hands were shuddering, teeth chattering like it was forty below. Her chest squeezed and bucked, throwing acid behind her teeth.
There was a frosted window high on the wall. He could get in, if he wanted. She could almost see the knife tick-tick-ticking on the glass.
No escape. Jessica plowed herself into the narrow gap between the wall and toilet, wedging herself there, fists clutching at her burning chest as she retched bile onto the floor. The light winked and flickered. A scream flushed out of her and she died.
A fist banged on the door.
“Jessica, what the hell!” Her boss’s voice.
A key scraped in the lock. Jessica gripped the toilet and wrenched herself off the floor to face him. His face was flushed with anger and though he was a big guy, he couldn’t scare her now. She felt bigger, taller, stronger, too. And she’d always been smarter than him.
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing, I’m fine.” Better than fine. She was butterfly-light, like if she opened her wings she could fly away.
“The station’s wide open. Anybody could have waltzed in here and walked off with the till.”
“Did they?”
His mouth hung open for a second. “Did they what?”
“Walk off with the fucking till?”
“Are you on drugs?”
She smiled. She didn’t need him. She could do anything.
“That’s it,” he said. “You’re gone. Don’t come back.”
A taxi was gassing up at pump number one. She got in the back and waited, watching her boss pace and yell into his phone. The invincible feeling faded before the tank was full. By the time she got home Jessica’s joints had locked stiff and her thoughts had turned fuzzy.
All the lights were on. Gran was halfway into her second bottle of u-brew red so she was pretty out of it, too. Jessica sat with her at the kitchen table for a few minutes and was just thinking about crawling to bed when the phone rang.
It was Mom.
“Did you send someone to pick me up on the highway?” Jessica stole a glance at Gran. She was staring at her reflection in the kitchen window, maybe listening, maybe not.
“No, why would I do that?”
“I left you messages. On Saturday.”
“I’m sorry, baby. This phone is so bad, you know that.”
“Listen, I need to talk to you.” Jessica kept her voice low.
“Is it your grandma?” Mom asked.
“Yeah. It’s bad. She’s not talking.”
“She does this every time the residential school thing hits the news. Gets super excited, wants to go up north and see if any of her family are still alive. But she gives up after a couple of days. Shuts down. It’s too much for her. She was only six when they took her away, you know.”
“Yeah. When are you coming home?”
“I got a line on a great job, cooking for an oil rig crew. One month on, one month off.”
Jessica didn’t have the strength to argue. All she wanted to do was sleep.
“Don’t worry about your Gran,” Mom said. “She’ll be okay in a week or two. Listen, I got to go.”
“I know.”
“Night night, baby,” Mom said, and hung up.
September 11, 2001
Jessica waited alone for the school bus. The street was deserted. When the bus pulled up the driver was chattering before she’d even climbed in.
“Can you believe it? Isn’t it horrible?” The driver’s eyes were puffy, mascara swiped to a gray stain under her eyes.
“Yeah,” Jessica agreed automatically.
“When I saw the news I thought it was so early, nobody would be at work. But it was nine in the morning in New York. Those towers were full of people.” The driver wiped her nose.
The bus was nearly empty. Two little kids sat behind the driver, hugging their backpacks. The radio blared. Horror in New York. Attack on Washington. Jessica dropped into the shotgun seat and let the noise wash over her for a few minutes as they twisted slowly through the empty streets. Then she moved to the back of the bus.
When she’d gotten dressed that morning her jeans had nearly slipped off her hips. Something about that was important. She tried to concentrate, but the thoughts flitted from her grasp, darting away before she could pin them down.
She focused on the sensation within her, the buck and heave under her ribs and in front of her spine.
“What are you fixing right now?” she asked.
An ongoing challenge is the sequestration of the fecal and digestive matter that leaked into your abdominal cavity.
“What about the stuff you mentioned yesterday? The intestine and the…whatever it was.”
Once we have repaired your digestive tract and restored gut motility we will begin reconstructive efforts on your reproductive organs.
“You like big words, don’t you?”
We assure you the terminology is accurate.
There it was. That was the thing that had been bothering her, niggling at the back of her mind, trying to break through the fog.
“How do you know those words? How can you even speak English?”
We aren’t communicating in language. The meaning is conveyed by socio-linguistic impulses interpreted by the brain’s speech processing loci. Because of the specifics of our biology, verbal communication is an irrelevant medium.
“You’re not talking, you’re just making me hallucinate,” Jessica said.
That is essentially correct.
How could the terminology be accurate, then? She didn’t know those words—cervix and whatever—so how could she hallucinate them?
“Were you watching the news when the towers collapsed?” the driver asked as she pulled into the high school parking lot. Jessica ignored her and slowly stepped off the bus.
The aliens were trying to baffle her with big words and science talk. For three days she’d had them inside her, their voice behind her eyes, their fingers deep in her guts, and she’d trusted them. Hadn’t even thought twice. She had no choice.
If they could make her hallucinate, what else were they doing to her?
The hallways were quiet, the classrooms deserted except for one room at the end of the hall with 40 kids packed in. The teacher had wheeled in an AV cart. Some of the kids hadn’t even taken off their coats.
Jessica stood in the doorway. The news flashed clips of smoking towers collapsing into ash clouds. The bottom third of the screen was overlaid with scrolling, flashing text, the sound layered with frantic voiceovers. People were jumping from the towers, hanging in the air like dancers. The clips replayed over and over again. The teacher passed around a box of Kleenex.
Jessica turned her back on the class and climbed upstairs, joints creaking, jeans threatening to slide off with every step. She hitched them up. The biology lab was empty. She leaned on the cork board and scanned the parasite diagrams. Ring worm. Tape worm. Liver fluke. Black wasp.
Some parasites can change their host’s biology, the poster said, or even change their host’s behavior.
Jessica took a push pin from the board and shoved it into her thumb. It didn’t hurt. When she ripped it out a thin stream of blood trickled from the skin, followed by an ooze of clear amber from deep within the gash.
What are you doing?
None of your business, she thought.
Everything is going to be okay.
No it won’t, she thought. She squeezed the amber ooze from her thumb, let it drip on the floor. The aliens were wrenching her around like a puppet, but without them she would be dead. Three times dead. Maybe she should feel grateful, but she didn’t.
“Why didn’t you want me to go to the hospital?” she asked as she slowly hinged down the stairs.
They couldn’t have helped you, Jessica. You would have died.
Again, Jessica thought. Died again. And again.
“You said that if I die, you die too.”
When your respiration stops, we can only survive for a limited time.
The mirror in the girls’ bathroom wasn’t real glass, just a sheet of polished aluminum, its shine pitted and worn. She leaned on the counter, rested her forehead on the cool metal. Her reflection warped and stretched.
“If I’d gone to the hospital, it would have been bad for you. Wouldn’t it?”
That is likely.
“So you kept me from going. You kept me from doing a lot of things.”
We assure you that is untrue. You may exercise your choices as you see fit. We will not interfere.
“You haven’t left me any choices.”
Jessica left the bathroom and walked down the hall. The news blared from the teacher’s lounge. She looked in. At least a dozen teachers crowded in front of an AV cart, backs turned. Jessica slipped behind them and ducked into the teachers’ washroom. She locked the door.
It was like a real bathroom. Air freshener, moisturizing lotion, floral soap. Real mirror on the wall and a makeup mirror propped on the toilet tank. Jessica put it on the floor.
“Since when do bacteria have spaceships?” She pulled her sweater over her head and dropped it over the mirror.
Jessica, you’re not making sense. You’re confused.
She put her heel on the sweater and stepped down hard. The mirror cracked.
Go to the hospital now, if you want.
“If I take you to the hospital, what will you do? Infect other people? How many?”
Jessica, please. Haven’t we helped you?
“You’ve helped yourself.”
The room pitched and flipped. Jessica fell to her knees. She reached for the broken mirror but it swam out of reach. Her vision telescoped and she batted at the glass with clumsy hands. A scream built behind her teeth, swelled and choked her. She swallowed it whole, gulped it, forced it down her throat like she was starving.
You don’t have to do this. We aren’t a threat.
She caught a mirror shard in one fist and swam along the floor as the room tilted and whirled. With one hand she pinned it to the yawning floor like a spike, windmilled her free arm and slammed her wrist down. The walls folded in, collapsing on her like the whole weight of the world, crushing in.
She felt another scream building. She forced her tongue between clenched teeth and bit down. Amber fluid oozed down her chin and pooled on the floor.
Please. We only want to help.
“Night night, baby,” she said, and raked the mirror up her arm.
The fluorescent light flashed overhead. The room plunged into darkness as a world of pain dove into her for one hanging moment. Then it lifted. Jessica convulsed on the floor, watching the bars of light overhead stutter and compress to two tiny glimmers inside the thin parched shell of her skull. And she died, finally, at last.
When I was sixteen, my classmate Shelly Ann Bacsu disappeared. She was certainly murdered; the RCMP found her clothes but not her body. We imagine she was abducted from alongside the highway while walking home in the evening, targeted by an unknown man. Maybe he was known to her, maybe not. What she went through in the hours before she died is unimaginable. I’m pretty sure none of my female classmates have ever gotten over it. I know I haven’t. Her murder has never been solved.
Over the years, I’ve tried to encompass this horror in various ways. In “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill,” I’ve applied September 11 as a framework, drawing an equivalent between those acts of terrorism and the long-term, still ongoing, and barely investigated epidemic of murdered and missing Indigenous women.
This was my first published story. I took some flack for portraying a rape (though nobody ever complained about the murder). Rape is not here for prurience or effect. Horrible violence appears in this story because it happens all the time. Sexual violence is the air women breathe. It haunts me.
If we can’t tell stories about the things that haunt us, then we can’t tell stories at all.
Ricci slipped in and out of consciousness as we carried her to the anterior sinus and strapped her into her hammock. Her eyelids drooped but she kept forcing them wide. After we finished tucking her in, she pulled a handheld media appliance out of her pocket and called her friend Jane.
“You’re late,” Jane said. The speakers flattened her voice slightly. “Are you okay?”
Ricci was too groggy to speak. She poked her hand through the hammock’s electrostatic membrane and panned the appliance around the sinus. Eddy and Chara both waved as the lens passed over them, but Jane was only interested in one thing.
“Show me your face, Ricci. Talk to me. What’s it like in there?”
Ricci coughed, clearing her throat. “I dunno. It’s weird. I can’t really think.” Her voice slurred from the anesthetic.
I could have answered Jane, if she’d asked me. The first thing newbies notice is how strange it smells. Human olfaction is primal; scents color our perceptions even when they’re too faint to describe. Down belowground, the population crush makes it impossible to get away from human funk. Out here, it’s the opposite, with no scents our brains recognize. That’s why most of us fill our habs with stinky things—pheromone misters, scented fabrics, ablative aromatic gels.
Eventually, Ricci would get around to customizing the scentscape in her big new hab, but right then she was too busy trying to stay awake. Apparently she’d promised Jane she’d check in as soon as she arrived, and not just a quick ping. She was definitely hurting but the call was duty.
“There’s people. They’re taking care of me.” Ricci gazed blearily at our orang. “I was carried in by a porter bot. It’s orange and furry. Long arms.”
“I don’t care about the bot. Tell me about you.”
“I’m fine, but my ears aren’t working right. It’s too noisy.”
We live with a constant circulatory thrum, gassy gurgles and fizzes, whumps, snaps, pops, and booms. Sound waves pulse through every surface, a deep hum you feel in your bones.
Jane took a deep breath, let it out with a whoosh. “Okay. Go to sleep. Call me when you wake up, okay?”
Ricci’s head lolled back, then she jerked herself awake.
“You should have come with me.”
Jane laughed. “I can’t leave my clients. And anyway, I’d be bored.”
Ricci squeezed her eyes shut, blinked a few times, then forced them wide.
“No you wouldn’t. There’s seven other people here, and they’re all nuts. You’d already be trying to fix them.”
Vula snorted and stalked out of the sinus, her long black braids slapping her back. The rest of us just smiled and shook our heads. You can’t hold people responsible for what they say when they’re half-unconscious. And anyway, it’s true—we’re not your standard moles. We don’t want to be.
Only a mole would think we’d be bored out here. We have to take care of every necessity of life personally—nobody’s going to do it for us. Tapping water is one example. Equipment testing and maintenance is another. Someone has to manage the hygiene and maintenance bots. And we all share responsibility for health and safety. Making sure we can breathe is high on everyone’s our priority list, so we don’t leave it up to chance. Finally, there’s atmospheric and geographical data gathering. Mama’s got to pay the bills. We’re a sovereign sociopolitical entity, population: eight, and we negotiate our own service contracts for everything.
But other than that, sure, we have all the free time in the world. Otherwise what’s the point? We came out here to get some breathing room—mental and physical. Unlike the moles, we’ve got plenty of both.
Have you ever seen a tulip? It’s a flowering plant. No nutritional value, short bloom. Down below ground, they’re grown in decorative troughs for special occasions—ambassadorial visits, arts festivals, sporting events, that sort of thing.
Anyway. Take a tulip flower and stick an ovoid bladder where the stem was and you’ve got the idea. Except big. Really big. And the petals move. Some of us call it Mama. I just call it home.
The outer skin is a transparent, flexible organic membrane. You can see right through to the central organ systems. The surrounding bladders and sinuses provide structure and protection. Balloons inside a bigger balloon, filled with helium and hydrogen. The whole organism ripples with iridescence.
We live in the helium-filled sinuses. If you get close enough, you can see us moving around inside. We’re the dark spots.
While Ricci slept, I called everyone to the rumpus room for a quick status check. All seven of us lounged in the netting, enjoying the free flowing oxygen/hydrogen mix, goggles and breathers dangling around our necks.
I led the discussion, as usual. Nobody else can ever be bothered.
“Thoughts?” I asked.
“Ricci seems okay,” said Eddy. “And I like what’s-her-name. The mole on the comm.”
“Jane. Yeah, pretty smile,” said Bouche. “Ricci’s fine. Right Vula?”
Vula frowned and crossed her arms. She’d hooked into the netting right next to the hatch and looked about ready to stomp out.
“I guess,” she said. “Rude, though.”
“She was just trying to be funny,” said Treasure. “I can never predict who’ll stick and who’ll bounce. I thought Chara would claw her way back down belowground. Right through the skin and nosedive home.”
