So Long Been Dreaming Read online

  But I am still within earshot when I hear the policeman say, “How can it not know what it is?”

  How can it not know what it is? I barely heard the words, but now I can’t stop them from echoing in my head. I have failed. My father has been lying to me. But how much? I run to the music room and sit down at the piano. It is the one place where I feel most comfortable. Or should I say it is the one place where I feel closest to my mother. I try playing the most famous of Schumann’s Songs from Childhood, the sweet, sad Traumerei. It uses four octaves at once and requires large hands, but mine are small. It was my mother’s favourite piece. I love it too, but she always complained that my rendition was too mechanical.

  Playing comforts me. I don’t know if I’m playing well, but I play the piece over and over until my fingers ache.

  My father had first seen my mother in a catalogue of women in China who wanted to marry Western men. He said he liked her sad eyes. They began a correspondence and fell in love. After six months she agreed to marry him. He went to Shanghai and paid for her to fly down from her small northern Chinese village. They were married a week after they first met. Sepia photographs of the wedding, framed in elaborate pewter, adorn the music room. They could easily have taken colour photographs, or holographic ones for that matter, but my mother was the nostalgic, sentimental sort, and sepia was all the rage in fashionable Shanghai at the time of their marriage. There are also sepia photographs of me and my brother on the walls and the sideboards: playing in the yard at our New England house, running on the beach during a holiday in Southern California, screaming during the sudden drop of a rollercoaster at Disneyland.

  My brother died at the same time as my mother. I think it’s strange that I don’t remember what happened. My father says that the memories will return in time, and that I should tell him when they do so he can help me through the process of mourning. But it’s been five years and I still don’t remember a thing.

  It comforts me to be surrounded by these photographs, these certain memories. How can it not know what it is? Whose memories are these?

  I can’t think of myself as one of them. Replicants like photographs, the policeman had said. Did my mother put these photographs here, or did I?

  I must have fallen asleep while playing because I don’t hear my father enter the room. He is not a sentimental man, and he says nothing to comfort me, though he does put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Rachel,” he says. “I want you to offer the policeman your help. I think you can be of service to him.”

  “No,” I say. “Don’t you know what you’re asking of me?”

  “Please do as I ask, child,” he says. “One of the escaped androids is the same model as you. You could really make a difference.” He gives me a set of photographs, not nostalgic, sepia-stained images, but holographic cards identifying the escaped replicants. He turns abruptly and leaves the room.

  My cheeks are wet. It is the first time I’ve cried since my mother and brother died.

  The policeman calls me from a sleazy bar near Chinatown. He looks a little drunk on the vidphone screen, and I detect self-loathing behind his impenetrable eyes.

  “I’m at Taffy Lewis’s,” he says. “Why don’t you come down and join me for a drink?” There is a lot of movement in the background behind him.

  “That’s not my kind of place,” I say. Right now I hate him more than anyone. I turn off the vidphone without saying goodbye, and go upstairs to bed.

  I can’t sleep. As the night progresses, the object of my fury slowly moves from the policeman to my father. At around three, our artificial owl flies past my window. I see its dark shape and hear the rapid pulse of air and feathers. I don’t know what my father is playing at. I have to know what the policeman knows. I go downstairs and dial the police station on the vidphone. I tell them I am his estranged sister and that our parents have been in a terrible accident. They give me his home address. I take a skycab to his building and give the doorman the same story. He lets me into the elevator. But the policeman isn’t home. It’s cold, so I pull my collar up and wait.

  It must be close to daybreak when he finally steps out of the elevator, though these days the rain and smog are so constant that the presence or absence of the sun makes little difference. He isn’t just a little drunk anymore. He’s tanked. His eyes are dark and there is blood on his coat. By the looks of things, he’s been working. I wonder if he’s just retired one of the androids. I wonder if it was the one that looks like me.

  “I need to talk to you,” I say, stepping out of the shadows. If he’s startled, he recovers quickly. In his line of work, I guess he has to. But he doesn’t seem worried to see me.

  “Talk to your father,” he says.

  He punches in a code and presses his thumb into the printreader. His door clicks open. I follow him in.

  “I want to talk to you,” I say. From inside my coat I pull out a photograph I carry with me everywhere. “Look. It’s me and my mother.” I show it to him.

  “Do you remember when you were ten?” he says. “You and your brother were going to play doctor. You broke into an abandoned building and went down to the basement. Your brother showed you his, but when your turn came, you chickened and ran. You ever tell anyone that?”

  “Yes,” I say, though to be honest, I’m not sure.

  “You’re lying,” he says. “You remember the orange and green spider that spun a web outside your window one spring?”

  I nod slowly.

  “She laid a huge egg and nursed it all summer. In the fall. . . .”

  “Hundreds of little baby spiders came crawling out. And they ate her,” I finish. I’ve never told anyone that. So it’s true. “I’m a replicant,” I say. For the second time in years I feel tears well up.

  He looks at me. I hate that I can’t read him, can’t tell what he’s thinking. Is it pity in his eyes?

  “Implants,” he says. “The manufacturer’s niece. . . .”

  He continues to stare. I’m uncomfortable. Finally he says, “Look, I’m sorry. Your father told me . . . that he had you hypnotized. . . .” He puts his hand on mine. I don’t like it and pull away. “What about a drink?” he asks. “I’ll get you a drink. I could use a drink.”

  When he turns to reach for a glass, I bolt out the still open door.

  Until this morning, my father was my best and only friend. The only one who understood. The only one who accepted the strangeness that came over me after my mother’s death. The only one who could see that I’m not cold, only sad.

  I don’t know what to think. The feelings have become stranger, uglier. The only one who understands now is this policeman, this murderer.

  I wander the streets, drift through the banality of another grey Los Angeles day with my collar around my ears and my hands in my pockets. Hours pass before I see a man who looks like one of the escaped replicants. I check the holographic cards my father gave me. I follow him, half out of curiousity to know what replicants on the street are like and half out of some emotion I can’t name. It has something to do with the policeman, and the uncomfortable sensation of his hand on mine, which lingers, though I don’t will it.

  The android walks up and down the residential streets in a neighbourhood that used to house garbage collectors and rat catchers. The buildings were all five and six-storey walk-ups, mildewed, dilapidated, and identical. Occasionally, he breaks into one. He emerges moments later looking frustrated and worried. He’s looking for something.

  I realise we’re in the policeman’s neighbourhood. The replicant slips into an alley and I slip into one just behind him. The policeman, wearing a coat identical to the one he was wearing last night but without the bloodstain, walks toward us. From the alley, the replicant steps out behind the policeman and grabs him in a headlock. The policeman thrashes, but isn’t strong enough. The replicant puts a gun to his temple. My heart is beating fast. I don’t fully understand why, but I don’t want my policeman to die. I reach for my own gun and empty
a round into the back of the replicant’s head.

  The policeman picks himself up and looks at me. He’s been roughed up. He has a black eye and a bleeding lip. He offers me his arm. I take it.

  When the policeman tells me what he wants, I can only reflect his desire back to him. Is that because I am eighteen and inexperienced or because I am nothing more than a wind-up doll? He treats me like a wind-up doll. He pushes me against the wall. It hurts but I don’t say anything. I don’t struggle. “Say kiss me,” he says.

  “Kiss me,” I say. I like his mouth and the taste of alcohol on his breath.

  Lying in the policeman’s bed, contemplating what it means to be a machine, I begin to remember the day of my mother’s death. I was thirteen. There was a skating competition. I’d been practicing a sweet, melancholic choreography to music from Swan Lake. I had a white dress, covered in feathers.

  On the drive to the skating rink, my mother and father fell into a bitter argument about the identity of a young woman in one of their wedding photographs. I knew exactly which picture they were talking about. It was a side profile of a young, dark-haired girl, who, on the day of the wedding must have been about my age. It was one of those strange photographs where you can’t tell what race the person is. My father insisted it was his niece – his older brother’s only daughter, and, in fact, the only child in the family until the arrival of my brother and me some years later. My mother said that it was obvious the girl was Chinese, and that she was, in fact, the daughter of her friend who had left the village to marry a Shanghainese businessman some years before. They fought bitterly and angrily. I was sure that there was something important about that young girl, though I didn’t know what. Either that, or there was a subtext to the argument I didn’t understand. My brother and I sat quietly in the back of the car, frightened and worried. My mother said that my father didn’t know her and that she should never have married him. My father said that maybe she shouldn’t have. After that, there was a dreadful silence in the car. It lasted all the way to the rink.

  I remember skating to the dramatic strains of Swan Lake. I remember falling. But I didn’t hit my head. I threw my arm out in time and managed to land on my hip and elbow. They were badly bruised but I had no concussion. The trauma came later.

  When the competition was over and first prize had been awarded to a pale gold girl in a green tutu, only my father came to comfort me. “You’ll always be number one in my eyes,” he said, and I believed him. We went to the bleachers to collect my mother and brother, but they weren’t there. A security guard said he had seen them leaving halfway through the show. I wondered whether or not they had seen me skate.

  The police had taken photographs of the crash site and the mangled bodies. My father said I shouldn’t look at them, but I opened the folder when my father was led to the morgue to confirm their identity. That was when I blacked out and hit my head.

  My policeman stirs in his sleep. I nudge him and his eyes blink open. “I dreamt I heard music,” he says. He looks like a child.

  “I dreamt about my parents,” I say.

  He nods, as though he’s understood something. He reaches for his gun.

  “I heard them say there’s a man and a woman left.”

  “That’s right.” His face settles into a killer’s mask.

  “I heard the woman looks like me.”

  He nods.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I say. I touch his cheek.

  “You don’t have to remember,” he says.

  “All I want is for someone to know me,” I say. “Do you think that will ever be possible?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I do think it’s possible.”

  Then he and his gun are gone. I move to the piano to see if I can really play, or if those music lessons were just the product of a stranger’s love for another stranger. I’m not sure which way I’d have it, if I had a choice.

  SECTION II

  FUTURE EARTH

  The next four stories give us extrapolations from the present that take our human histories of colonization into account; given our belligerent past, what kind of futures might we create? Eden Robinson’s “Terminal Avenue” explores a future Canada where First Nations peoples face an increasingly apartheid life. “When Scarabs Multiply” by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu follows a young African girl as she puzzles through the bonds of love and hate in a reborn society that quickly degenerates into patriarchal stagnation. The protagonist of Vandana Singh’s “Delhi” searches for meaning now that he wanders between a past and future Delhi. And in “Panopte’s Eye,” by Tamai Kobayashi, the world’s ecological survival is set against an apocalyptic landscape of warlords and slave gangs.

  Eden Robinson wrote “Terminal Avenue” in Vancouver, Canada on the number 9 Broadway bus between Commercial and the University of British Columbia over a period of two months. It was the third anniversary of the Oka Uprising, the salmon wars had just heated up, and the B.C. television helicopters were scanning the Fraser River looking to catch native fishermen “illegally” fishing. She is the author of a novel, Monkey Beach, and a collection of short stories, Traplines. She is currently working on another novel, Blood Sports, and the screenplay adaptation of Monkey Beach.

  Terminal Avenue

  Eden Robinson

  His brother once held a peeled orange slice up against the sun. When the light shone through it, the slice became a brilliant amber: the setting sun is this colour, ripe orange.

  The uniforms of the five advancing Peace Officers are robin’s egg blue, but the slanting light catches their visors and sets their faces aflame.

  In his memory, the water of the Douglas Channel is a hard blue, baked to a glassy translucence by the August sun. The mountains in the distance form a crown; Gabiswa, the mountain in the centre, is the same shade of blue as his lover’s veins.

  She raises her arms to sweep her hair from her face. Her breasts lift. In the cool morning air, her nipples harden to knobby raspberries. Her eyes are widening in indignation: he once saw that shade of blue in a dragonfly’s wing, but this is another thing he will keep secret.

  Say nothing, his mother said, without moving her lips, careful not to attract attention. They waited in their car in silence after that. His father and mother were in the front seat, stiff.

  Blood plastered his father’s hair to his skull; blood leaked down his father’s blank face. In the flashing lights of the patrol car, the blood looked black and moved like honey.

  A rocket has entered the event horizon of a black hole. To an observer who is watching this from a safe distance, the rocket trapped here, in the black hole’s inescapable halo of gravity, will appear to stop.

  To an astronaut in the rocket, however, gravity is a rack that stretches his body like taffy, thinner and thinner, until there is nothing left but X-rays.

  In full body-armour, the five Peace Officers are sexless and anonymous. With their visors down, they look like old-fashioned astronauts. The landscape they move across is the rapid transit line, the Surreycentral Skytrain station, but if they remove their body-armour, it may as well be the moon.

  The Peace Officers begin to match strides until they move like a machine. This is an intimidation tactic that works, is working on him even though he knows what it is. He finds himself frozen. He can’t move, even as they roll towards him, a train on invisible tracks.

  Once, when his brother dared him, he jumped off the high diving tower. He wasn’t really scared until he stepped away from the platform. In that moment, he realized he couldn’t change his mind.

  You stupid shit, his brother said when he surfaced.

  In his dreams, everything is the same, except there is no water in the swimming pool and he crashes into the concrete like a dropped pumpkin.

  He thinks of his brother, who is so perfect he wasn’t born, but chiselled from stone. There is nothing he can do against that brown Apollo’s face, nothing he can say that will justify his inaction. Kevin would know what to do, with doom
coming towards him in formation.

  But Kevin is dead. He walked through their mother’s door one day, wearing the robin’s egg blue uniform of the great enemy, and his mother struck him down. She summoned the ghost of their father and put him in the room, sat him beside her, bloody and stunned. Against this Kevin said, I can stop it, Mom. I have the power to change things now.

  She turned away, then the family turned away. Kevin looked at him, pleading, before he left her house and never came back, disappeared. Wil closed his eyes, a dark, secret joy welling in him, to watch his brother fall: Kevin never made the little mistakes in his life, never so much as sprouted a pimple. He made up for it though by doing the unforgivable.

  Wil wonders if his brother knows what is happening. If, in fact, he isn’t one of the Peace Officers, filled himself with secret joy.

  His lover will wait for him tonight. Ironically, she will be wearing a complete Peace Officer’s uniform, bought at great expense on the black market, and very, very illegal. She will wait at the door of her club, Terminal Avenue, and she will frisk clients that she knows will enjoy it. She will have the playroom ready, with its great wooden beams stuck through with hooks and cages, with its expensive equipment built for the exclusive purpose of causing pain. On a steel cart, her toys will be spread out as neatly as surgical instruments.

  When he walks through the door, she likes to have her bouncers, also dressed as Peace Officers, hurl him against the wall. They let him struggle before they handcuff him. Their uniforms are slippery as rubber. He can’t get a grip on them. The uniforms are padded with the latest in wonderfabric so no matter how hard he punches them, he can’t hurt them. They will drag him into the back and strip-search him in front of clients who pay for the privilege of watching. He stands under a spotlight that shines an impersonal cone of light from the ceiling. The rest of the room is darkened. He can see reflections of glasses, red-eyed cigarettes, the glint of ice clinking against glass, shadows shifting. He can hear zippers coming undone, low moans; he can smell the cum when he’s beaten into passivity.