Fearful Symmetries (34 page)

I was.

No one came to the house that day. Nobody phoned. The mail driver didn’t honk going by. I spent the morning worrying at Josie’s last jigsaw, and as the pieces fell into place, the pieces fell into place.

I don’t know how long I stood staring at the me in the coffin, at the perfect skin and lashes, and the expression more peaceful than any I’d ever seen in the mirror. Neither of us breathed. Finally I had to.

I lifted all the lids. The light through the stained glass cast a yellow glow across Micah and his parents. Josie had all her fingers. I made myself touch her. There was no pulse. In any good horror novel that would have been when they all opened their eyes and sat up, but they didn’t. Their skin was smooth and warm. I thought about cutting it to see if they bled, but even my curiosity has limits. I brushed my fingers over Micah’s face as he’d once run his over mine, and closed the cover.

I knew they’d burned in the car wreck; the constable had been only too willing to give me the details. Nobody had spared me those. But no one had told me any secrets. No one had warned me about the attic people.

There was a faint
crunch
in the back of my mind as I caught a glimpse of the big picture. It wasn’t anything I recognized. Sudden panic grabbed me, making me turn away too quickly. I yelped as I banged my face into a ceiling beam.

Downstairs, I locked the door behind me, sure there would be nails clawing the other side at any moment. When there weren’t, I caught my breath.

Josie’s jigsaw was one of the few things I understood that day. I was sure she’d made the me in the attic—making a life is a woman’s work, after all—but couldn’t imagine how.
Why
made a disturbing amount of sense, though. I thought of her frightening devotion to her family. Of Pastor Vance’s obsession with The Book of Corinthians. Of the too-small number of stones in the graveyard.

I thought of Grayman’s blood price.

Finally, when it was dark, I went upstairs and packed my knapsack again—a change of clothes, an obscene amount of cash, and my tool case. And Micah’s hair-stick, which I’ll never wear again. The radio said the night would be cloudy, with light snow toward morning.

As I ate another sandwich, fuelling, it occurred to me the neighbours might be expecting me to run. I wanted a cup of coffee, but skipped it—not a good idea when they might set the dogs after me. I put Grayman’s gun in one coat pocket, spare gloves and more money in the other.

I didn’t even think of using the door.

Shimmying out a narrow cellar window, keeping low, I made the short sprint into the woods, needing to be long-gone by sunrise. If I could just get to Ace’s, I thought, I could hitch a ride.

I did.

Another hundred miles north, another takeout coffee. It’s not as good as Josie’s.

“You’re awfully quiet over there,” the driver says. “Sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. Just thinking.”

About Elton Carlyle’s bad-enough accident. How he was up and walking three days later, his wife missing her thumb. About Mary Studevan’s heart attack, and how, when I saw her again, she had all her fingers and her husband didn’t.

About families making sacrifices for each other.

That maybe Pastor Vance’s platitudes weren’t. In all the sermons I heard him give, he never read the Psalms. He never once talked about the valley of the shadow.

That instead of going to the funeral, I was expected to be home with my family, waiting for them to draw breath. That by the time I got to Emery, at dawn of the third day since the accident, the neighbours would have been arriving at the house to make sure I brought my family back.

Beyond that, there are too many things I don’t know, and more I don’t want to. Like how much flesh and blood I’d have to lose to raise three people from the dead, and if they can rise without it. If anything happened to me now, would I end up back in Josie’s attic, and would Micah still love me enough to sacrifice me back to life?

Would my resurrection finally erase my alien status?

Would I still have the right to wear my hair up?

I think of the things no one said out loud, that you were just supposed to understand, like knowing that people only had to stay dead if they died of very old age. Like the cost of an extraordinary privilege being part of a greater mystery, and how there are some things even I can’t unlock.

I wonder if I’m being selfish, not giving of myself as Micah expected. But I didn’t marry him in The Church of the Risen. When I promised
till death do us part
I didn’t specify how many times.

Part of me thinks that if I loved him enough I’d go back. But part of me has had enough of that kind of love.

It’s a relief when the driver interrupts my thoughts again. “Hey, I never asked. Where are you headed?”

I can’t very well say, “Someplace where the houses don’t have attics.”

So I lie, because my answer is something I’ve been wrong about before.

I tell him, “I’ll know when I get there.”

Lately I’ve been thinking about eating my children.

When Olivia tugs at her glossy curls, I think about her hair in my mouth. Paper-dry, tasting of smoke and strawberry shampoo. The strands would break between my teeth. The sound they’d make—a tiny crunch, like a foot falling through snow—that sound would fill me. I would not be so hungry after that.

I allow myself the hair. It is better than the other things I imagine eating.

Macleay says, “I’m going to try again this afternoon. I think today’s the day.” We nod as though we believe him.

I study Macleay’s hands. They’re large and dirt-streaked. I imagine crunching through his knuckles and rolling the tattered joint on my tongue like a marble.

“What about you, Hui?” Sanderson’s tone is a bit too casual. “Any news on that canister?”

I shrug. I don’t want to open my mouth. I’m afraid of what might happen.

The arctic wind howls through our silence. It’s blizzarding outside the research station, -36 Celsius by the thermometer, god-knows-what once you factor in wind chill. The kind of weather even the locals complain about.

“They’ll send a plane as soon as the weather clears,” Bannerjee mutters. She’s been saying the same thing for a week now.

“Yeah.” Macleay doesn’t look at her. “I’ll try again this afternoon.”

“You okay, Hui?” I can feel Sanderson’s eyes on me. He knows something’s off.

Carefully, very carefully, I part my lips. Not much. Just enough to reply. And I know this is my chance—maybe my last chance—to warn them.

Olivia giggles in the corner. The thought darts into my head:
If not Macleay, then her.

“Fine,” I mutter. “I’m fine.”

After a moment, Sanderson nods.

That was on day eleven.

They say people who’ve received a terminal diagnosis brood over history. They go looking for mistakes: theirs or someone else’s. They try to identify the moment things started to go wrong.

I can think of two possibilities. In my mind, I flip them like a coin.

The first possibility: eleven days ago.

Bannerjee set something dull and gray on my work bench. “Check this out.” She looked flushed, proud as an angler who’s caught his first salmon. “It was in the ice, about a meter down.”

I picked it up. A gray canister, about the size of a paint can, weighing about two kilos. It was made out of a clouded, dull metal, striated with rings.

“What is it?” I wasn’t interested, just being polite. Nothing about the canister suggested danger.

“No idea.” Bannerjee leaned forward. “But I saw another can down there. And clothing.” She was practically squirming with excitement.

“Clothing?”

“A wool coat.” She grinned. “I stopped drilling. Shifted the borehole. We need to call this in.” Seeing my confusion, she added: “Could be old.”

Now something connected. “How old?”

“Dunno. But . . . it could be old.”

I turned the canister over. Once, maybe, we’d have shrugged our shoulders over a frozen coat. But not these days. The scramble for the melting Arctic is on, and governments look to history to strengthen their territorial claims. Canada has resumed the nineteenth century’s search for Franklin. Hell, a few years ago, Russia planted a flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole. A
flag
. Like in the Eddie Izzard skit. Everything old is new again.

“Franklin et al.,” I said. “They wore wool coats, didn’t they?” Like me, Bannerjee wore Canada Goose, the unofficial uniform of the frigid zone. Her coat was blazing red; a slot for the Arctic Rescue tag gaped emptily on her back.

“Yeah.” Bannerjee’s eyes glittered with what I assumed was excitement.

Now, looking back, I wonder if I was wrong about the look in Bannerjee’s eyes. If, like the slow crack of lake-ice underfoot, things were already getting out of hand.

“We need to talk about Bannerjee,” Sanderson says in a low voice.

I grunt. So far I have managed to get through the morning without opening my mouth. I am thirsty, but the hunger is much, much worse. It claws at my insides like a wild animal stuffed in a cage. If I open my mouth, I fear it will get out.

“I can’t find her anywhere,” says Macleay of the edible fingers. “I thought . . . I thought she might have tried for the mine. But when I checked the snowmobiles I found this.” He opens his dirty hands to reveal a tangle of black wires.

“She butchered the machines.” Sanderson’s voice sounds wet and heavy, like warm-weather snow.

It takes me a moment to register what they’re saying. I raise my eyebrows at Macleay.

“I can’t repair this,” Macleay says in disgust. His eyes are frightened. “We’re stuck here until the plane comes. Or until the satellite phone starts working again.” He makes no mention of trying the phone again this afternoon.

The blizzard moans through our walls. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Ethan and Olivia watching us.
Dohng
,
Suug Yee
, I would say, were I to call them by their Cantonese names. Unlucky names. I try to smile at the children reassuringly, but my heart is sinking.

We are in more trouble than I can bear to think about. Some facts I can face head-on: the damaged snowmobiles, the missing plane. Others I can only sneak glances at.

Fact:
I was the first person to touch the canister after Bannerjee.

Fact:
Something is wrong.

Fact:
I do not have, and never have had, any children.

“Well,” Sanderson says eventually. “Keep an eye out for her.” He looks deflated, as though he has finally realized what I have suspected for eleven days now.

Escape is no longer an option.

The second possibility: five years ago.

My then-girlfriend, Anna, wanted to see the Anthropology museum. One of her college friends was in Vancouver for a conference. So I drove her and the other folklorists to the weird borderland-city of UBC.

I circled the Bill Reid sculpture while Anna and Joel reminisced about grad school. I’ve always loved wood, and the honey-glow of the giant raven appealed to me. Not so the rest of the museum. A bunch of masks with distorted faces and stringy grass hair.

“The last murder was in the 1960s,” Joel said.

That jerked my attention back to their conversation. “What?”

“Creepy,” Anna agreed. Her skin was almost the same colour as the yellow cedar. Ethereal.

She turned to me. “They left the uncle to babysit their kids.” Her words were aimed in my general direction, but her eyes drifted past mine. Another one of the disconnections that had become common between us. “When they came back, he’d built a fire on the lawn. He was roasting his nephew’s body. And crying about it.”

The mask that reared up behind them was ugly. Lips peeled back from red-lined teeth. Black eyes staring nowhere.

“Did you hear about that bus murder in Winnipeg?” Joel said, out of nowhere.

Anna grimaced. The news was full of the Greyhound murder, which fascinated and repelled us. It was the sort of thing our Vancouver friends avoided talking about.

But Joel was from New York. “Beheading and cannibalism,” he continued, staring at the mask. “I’m just saying. Maybe wendigo psychosis is still with us.”

“Wendigo?” I could feel the conversation rushing past me, the way they usually did when Anna and her grad-school comrades got together.

“Yeah.” Joel’s face got the bright, careful look I imagined he must wear when teaching. “You’ve heard of the wendigo?”

And that was it. The moment of infection.

I am finding it difficult to keep track of time.

This is a common complaint in the Arctic. The land of the midnight sun. It disorders everything.

Still. Time is becoming difficult. I watch the old plastic clock on the wall to make sure the seconds are still advancing.

I hear sounds from the kitchenette. But I will not get up. I will not investigate.

Things must be kept in order. Or else.

My children are playing with leftover office paper. Olivia is showing Ethan how to fold the green-and-white sheets into dolls. They decorate their creations with pencil: people don’t bring pens to our latitude.

Ethan batters the dolls against each other, making them fight. It disturbs me, but I don’t know why.

Outside the wind is raging. I try not to think about Anna’s description of a deranged uncle roasting kids on the lawn. I don’t even know the whole story. The gaps in my knowledge make it worse, somehow.

“Hui.”

I hear Ethan drop his pencil. Olivia’s eyes widen and I follow her gaze to where Bannerjee stands, dripping and wide-eyed. Dried blood cakes the side of her head.

The sudden, frozen silence of my children’s fear gives me the strength to take Bannerjee gently by the arm. I steer her out of the small dorm room.

“
What are you doing?
” I spit through clenched teeth. I want to rip her throat out. “
What have you done?
”

Bannerjee shakes her head. She’s always been a small, anxious woman. Now she’s trembling like someone’s running a current through her.

“Macleay,” Bannerjee manages. There’s something wrong with her eyes. “I found him by the snowmobiles. He . . . was tearing them apart. He tried to
kill
me, Hui.”

I feel the same way I did in the museum all those years ago. Things are rushing past me faster than I can handle.

“Macleay?”

Bannerjee nods. She’s crying now, big, fat tears that track mascara and blood down her face. “You have to help me. He’s looking for me.”

I feel dizzy. I can’t remember the last time I ate. I feel my mouth move—“How can I help?”—although I’m not sure I trust Bannerjee. I’m not sure I trust Macleay either. Something about the way he held those wires.

Here’s a question I never thought about when I flew up here:
If the world goes haywire, is there anyone in this station you can trust?

“It’s the canister,” Bannerjee says hoarsely. That look in her eyes. “We need to get it out of here. We need to give it back.”

I nod as though this makes sense. Part of me—a part I can barely keep track of right now—agrees, but wants to warn her. Because here’s the thing about extracting resources. It’s always easier to take something out of the land than it is to put it back.

But suddenly I am too tired to say anything.

“Sure,” my mouth says. And I watch myself follow Bannerjee down the hallway. She keeps glancing back at the way we came. She’s dragging her left leg a little.

As we enter the field lab, Bannerjee whispers something that gives me pause. “We’ve angered the
vetala
.”

“The what?” I hear myself say. An echo of a museum long ago.

Bannerjee looks at me strangely. “The air is full of ghosts.” She delivers this information as though it were an ozone reading: a fact, visible to us all.

Later I wish that Bannerjee had explained herself. If I could have heard her version of the last twelve days—maybe I could have altered something.

But maybe not. “Come on,” Bannerjee says and pushes the door open.

I don’t like to think about what happens next.

“Is that it?”

Sanderson is framed by the doorway, a big, burly man who likes to wear his beard long and curly. He’s typical of a certain kind of Arctic visitor: the geologist who thinks of himself as a frontier throwback. And like a lot of geologists, he’s a bit odd.

Automatically I’ve thrown a cloth over the canister. For some reason I don’t want people to see it. Now, reluctantly, I remove the cloth.

Sanderson snorts. “Doesn’t look like much. Thought it might be the Holy Grail the way Bannerjee’s been carrying on.”

My stomach grumbles, and I am suddenly, painfully hungry. But I’ve already eaten three meals today. It isn’t even noon yet.

“Has she got through?”

Sanderson shakes his head. “Coms are down. Murphy’s law. Bannerjee makes a find and she can’t tell anyone. It’s driving her nuts.” His shoulders shake as he laughs. Sanderson prides himself on being laid-back. He finds the high-strung Bannerjee amusing.

“Do you think the plane will come through?”

Our station gets a bi-monthly supply drop. The pond-hopper that visits us and the southern Inuit villages is a tough little bird. It might be able to get through in this weather. But I’m not surprised to see Sanderson shrug.

“Maybe.” He sounds bored. “Wind’s bad. Don’t blame them if they postpone the drop. It’ll drive Bannerjee extra nuts though.” He chuckles.

I wonder now if Sanderson remembers this moment. I wonder if he appreciates the irony.

The pond-hopper never arrives. Normally I mark a missed drop with a minus symbol in my diary: -1 day of supplies. But that evening, I write “Day One” at the top of the page. Because that is what it feels like. Like something has begun.

The day she left, Anna and I argued in the parking lot. She said I was incapable of love. Worse, she said it sadly, as though it was something we both knew and had just been too polite to mention until now.

I protested, but words have never been my strong point.

If I could talk to Anna right now—if we could get a line out, if I could feel confident about baring my teeth to the air—I’d tell her that she was wrong. That what I find difficult isn’t love, but expressing it.

If she could see me now—the way I’m trying to shelter the children from danger, the way I’m trying to protect them from myself—I think she’d think differently.

At least, I hope she would.

“Tell us a story,” Olivia begs. I look away from her dark curls and Ethan’s bright, plump cheeks. The only stories in my head are awful ones. Franklin and his men staggering in the dark. Starving men cutting up their comrades for cooking pots. And the story Joel told me all those years ago.

“No,” I mumble. “No story tonight.” Olivia wails. Ethan bounces up and down.

“Fine,” I say. “Once upon a time there was . . .”

“A canithter,” Ethan lisps.