So Long Been Dreaming (11 page)
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.
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.
