So Long Been Dreaming (31 page)

I don’t get far. The doctor lashes out with his rib-arms, and though I struggle and beat at his arms and try to pry loose from his suction with my soft fingers, he is too strong, and he pulls me in and lifts me and sets me on the table. And once on the table, I cannot move.

“How do you feel?” the doctor says.

“I feel nothing.”

He moves his hands, and the silver arms overhead descend.

“Good,” says the doctor. “We can begin now.”

He begins by severing my rib-arms.

When I scream out – not in pain, but in something else, something worse – he adjusts the table and I am silent.

“Yes,” he says. “That is good. Your life has been good and comfortable, and it will be so in continuance. You have no cause to cry.”

1969

It occurred to me some time ago that my backyard is a re-creation. The chicken coop, with the half dozen Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds, is a plywood attempt at something Papa might have built. Only, he was a carpenter, and I just began playing with wood and nails seven years ago, when we came to California. My work is a mess of crooked surfaces and ill-fitted joints, but it keeps the chickens inside, and that’s what’s important. I fear once the pigeon hutch is done, only the fattest and stupidest cats will fail to find a way in.

But this is my backyard. In Holland, we shared a courtyard. Here, we have something: A rambling, cluttered, wild backyard that I can think of as home.

To have a home of your own – something that can’t be taken away – this is no small thing. We rent now, but someday, perhaps, it will be ours.

Of course, anything can be taken away. Even here, in this country, anything can be taken away from any person.

It’s important to keep that in mind.

I turn satay kambing on my barbeque grill while across the fence, the neighbour flips hamburgers on his. Between the pickets, I see the neighbour’s boy watching me. He wrinkles his nose as if he smells something foul, and I say, loud enough for him to hear, “Mmmm. Good dog. Good, delicious dog.” Even louder: “Say, I wonder where Ranger is?”

Ranger is the boy’s sweet-faced mutt.

The boy runs to complain to his father, and the neighbour scowls at me.

I smile and wave.

2371

To be Terran is to walk without water. Earth is a wet world, but our home is a dry building. There is water in the walls – sometimes I can hear it course through pipes – but it comes out only in faucets, and it can be collected only in small vessels. There is a tub in the bathroom, roughly the size of a coffin, but it is dead water and I will not stay in it.

My family is fortunate. We have been located near the sea, only twenty minutes by rail, and I have a job on the shore. I sell tourist items to those who visit the water. They like to buy clothing and sensations that remind them of their travels. I sell these items well, and someday, perhaps, I will have a business of my own. I often wonder if people who come to the sea might like to have sensations that don’t remind them of where they’ve been, but instead show them where they cannot go.

In the shop’s changing room is a mirror, and I always volunteer to clean it. It is not pleasant to examine myself, but doing so is like the kind of meditation we did back home in the bulb-temples.

My body is made for work. My two arms are stronger than my rib-arms ever were, which were made for sculling. My lungs don’t take in as much air as they used to, but I get enough oxygen by inhaling often. Sometimes I stand and look at myself as I am now, and then I try to imagine myself as I was. Neither body seems quite right. My new body is alien to me, and my old body is alien to this world. When I clean the mirror, I see a puzzle that cannot be solved, or an out-of-place object that has no place.

In times that are not busy, I can look outside the shop, out over the ocean. The surf can be violent here, and the waves boom against the sand, fingers of white foam reaching out and grasping, as if the ocean were trying to pull itself up on the land. Twice a day, the ocean gets as far as it can go, but then it recedes. Despite its strength, the ocean must always return to itself.

1969

Last night, we went to the Moon. Three men were packed like the last pairs of socks into an overstuffed suitcase and then they went to the Moon. I didn’t stay up to watch, but Anthony did. From down the hall, I could dimly hear the voices from the television, and the sound of Anthony clapping and bouncing in the squeaky-springed chair.

He’s a dreamer, my son. He believes in better places.

He comes out of the house and I hand him an unseasoned lamb skewer. Satay kambing should be made with goat, but nobody eats goat here.

“How are your spacemen?”

“Astronauts,” he corrects. “I don’t know. Mama made me turn off the TV. She thinks I need more sunlight.”

“The spacemen can get by without you watching them.”

“The most important moment in the history of humanity, and Mama’s worried about my Vitamin D.”

I bite my lip to keep from laughing. He’s a funny kid, my son. And smart. Much smarter than I was at twelve. Or smart in other ways, I suppose. By the age of twelve, I’d lost two brothers. I’d seen Japanese Zeroes fly over my house. I’d seen my father taken away by our neighbours to die. Not much time for jokes when I was his age.

“So, first we walk on the Moon,” I say. “And then what? We come back home? We use what we learned to build better adding machines? New and improved vacuum cleaners?”

He gives me a look that, had I ever given to my Papa, would have earned me a slap across the face. And I let it pass. I have learned to let so much pass. It is a better way of getting through life, I think.

“It’s not about . . .
things
,” Anthony says. “It’s about going places. There’s so much out there, Dad.” About a year ago, he stopped calling me Papa and started calling me Dad. I understand why – it’s what American boys call their fathers – but I have yet to get used to it. I will, in time, but not yet. “We can’t stay here forever. First, the Moon. Then, by the time I graduate college, Mars. Then the asteroid belt, maybe. And the moons of Jupiter. By the time I have kids, the stars. There’ll be other planets. Other worlds. Maybe with intelligent life. We have to go there.”

“We can barely live on the Moon,” I argue. “Billions of dollars and space suits and thousands of people to make it happen. And the Moon is just next door, isn’t it? It’s just a few thousand miles away.”

He gives me that look, and I chide myself for baiting him. The Moon is 240,000 miles away. I’ve been following everything too.

Anthony clamps down his molars on a chunk of lamb and tears it from the skewer. “Things’ll be different by the time we get to the stars,” he says. “We’ll be different. I read a story about it. If we find life out there, we’ll change ourselves to be more like what we find. We’ll make our bodies and brains different. We won’t even have to come back home. We’ll be so well adapted that we can survive wherever we land as efficiently as the native aliens.”

Native aliens.

I let the paradox pass.

Removing the satay from the grill, I lay the skewers down in neat rows on a plate. “But, what if the life we find out there doesn’t want us? What if they see us as a threat? People come to a new land, and they want to change it. They want to make it like the place they came from, and they want to be top dog. Visitors who refuse to go home aren’t really visitors.”

“We’ll be welcome,” he says, with so much confidence that I feel my heart fissure, “because we’ll come with peaceful intentions.”

This is a moment, now. This is a moment in which I could press the issue. I could bring to bear my thirty-five years of life experience, of scratches and bruises and scars and calluses. I could strip away every one of my son’s naive sentiments and make him see the world as it is. I have seen blood in the dirt. I bet I could make my son see it too.

I hand him the plate of satay. “Bring this to the kitchen. And then watch your spacemen walk on their rock.”

“Astronauts,” he says, taking the plate. “And it’s not just some rock. It’s a world.”

I pierce more lamb chunks onto skewers. “Okay. Have it your way. A world. Tell me if the astronauts find something good on their new world.”

He gives me his look and takes the satay kambing into the house.

I stay in my backyard and look to the sky.

There’s nothing to see there, but I look on my son’s behalf, praying that he’ll never have to see what I see.

Celu Amberstone
was one of the only young people in her family to take an interest in learning Traditional Native North American crafts and medicine ways. This made several of the older members of her family very happy, while annoying others. Though legally blind since birth, she has spent much of her adult life avoiding cities. She has lived in the rain forests of the west coast, a tepee in the desert, and a small village in Canada’s arctic. Along the way she also managed to acquire a BA in cultural anthropology and an MA in health education. A teacher of cross-cultural workshops and traditional Native ways, Celu loves telling stories and reading. She now lives in Victoria, British Columbia near her grown children and two grandchildren.

Refugees
Celu Amberstone

Awakening Moon, sun-turning 1

This morning I arose early and climbed to the Mother Stone on the knoll above the village. The sun was just rising above the blue mists on the lake. The path smelled of tree resin and flowering moss. I took in a deep breath and sang to the life around me. I was shivering by the time I reached the Mother Stone and made the first of my seasonal offerings to Tallav’Wahir, our foster planet.

I cut open my arm with the ceremonial obsidian knife I carried with me, and watched my blood drip into the channel carved into the stone for that purpose. Blood. The old people say it is the carrier of ancestral memories, and our future’s promise. I am a child from the stars – a refugee, driven from my true home. My blood is red, an alien colour on this world. But I am lucky because this planet knows my name.