Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (21 page)

When the first wisps of vapor appeared, escaping the sea like departing spirits to join the triple moons above, she began her nightly trek down the 118 steps. At the bottom, she disrobed and walked into the steaming sea. The salinity was high, contributing to great buoyancy. By the time she was waist-deep, her bare feet could no longer stay in contact with the sandy bottom. She let her body recline until she was floating on her back, arms and legs splayed wide. Her sense-hairs spread themselves on the surface like a halo around her head— like they used to when she was mending. She lay like this for as long as she could, before the ocean became too hot to bear. Sometimes that was one hour, sometimes two. It depended on the ambient air temperature and the degree of thermal venting on any given night.

She lay like this in the hope that her sense-hairs would remember their shape and resume their function. She lay like this to drink in the milky energy of the triple moons. She lay like this to ground her bioenergetic core to an infinite pool of negative ions. She lay like this to absorb the restorative minerals of the sea. She lay like this.

* * *

It was easy to see why Dr. Aurelio’s first observation of Opul’s nightly practice had triggered his arrhythmia. When he discovered her nude and motionless body adrift in the ocean below, his heart jackhammered until she righted herself and walked ashore. It had been weeks since he had witnessed that (and only once— to repeat it would have been voyeuristic and an invasion of patient privacy). Now the image of Opul’s magnificent mane of sense-hairs, spread wide like a halo on the moonlit sea, was forever seared into his memory. How like the dendrites on a neuron. How like the roots of a mighty tree!

Dr. Aurelio’s dissertation had not only earned him his doctorate in Xenopsychology, it ultimately launched the entire discipline of psycho-reharmonization for superheroes. To this day, Dr. Aurelio is still considered the leading authority in the field. Tonight in his office, dwarfed by the dark expanse outside and the ethereal mysteries of a fractured sense-mind floating in the sea, he felt more humbled than exalted. It seemed he was powerless to help either Leap or Opul.

Opul was the only one who could reach and repair Leap. And she was certainly the only one who could repair herself. Did he have anything to offer these scarred souls? All he could do was listen.

Yes, Dr. Aurelio could do that. He could listen.

* * *

Kim Goldberg — the author of six books of poetry and nonfiction and a winner of the Rannu Fund Poetry Prize for Speculative Literature — lives and speculates in Nanaimo, BC.

Lost and Found

Luke Murphy

Days later, and I was still finding his things. I’d spot a razor blade under the bathroom sink or one of his books jumbled among mine, and I’d pick it up like it had thorns and put it in the box in the closet. He said he’d call when he was ready to coll
ect his stuff. I didn’t even know where he was. Had he moved in with that other girl? Were they coiled together on knotty sheets while I stared at the ceiling?

I tried not to do it. Three days I walked in circles around the apartment telling myself not to do it. I tried to distract myself: web surfing, cheap wine, bouts of self-pity. It didn’t work. I needed it. My skin fizzed like cheap pop. I scratched my arms and bit my lips.
My boss called. Why wasn’t I at the office processing forms? I told him I’d quit.

At four in the morning I watched a web video that promised me I Wouldn’t Believe What Happened Next (spoiler alert: I did, without much trouble) and realized I’d worn out the distraction capacity of the internet.

I walked to my bedroom. I lay down with my clothes on, shut my eyes, took a few deep breaths. My weight of flesh and bone and blood sank into the mattress.

I felt the shape and outline of my body, sensed its boundaries, and floated out of it.

I drifted up to the ceiling, turned and looked down at the fleshbody lying on the bed below me. Its eyes were closed, mouth slack. Greasy hair and grubby sweatshirt. When had I last showered? Physical me looked wretched.

But ethereal me felt glad to be weightless again. No pinched nerves or lower back pain. I held up the hands of my lightbody in front of my face, saw a vague form made of ghost-colored mist. Perfect. I floated to the wall and pressed myself into it. A chalky sensation in my lightflesh as I passed through it. I pushed deeper into sudden darkness, moved through sour-tasting concrete and rasping brick and burst into the night air. Streetlights glared seven stories below. I flitted above the luminous streets of Toronto and flew.

* * *

We’ve all got two bodies. Our other body’s where our consciousness lives, and it’s made of thinner stuff than the flesh. Quantum particles, maybe. Lots of people slip out of their skin at one time or another, mostly when they’re in shock or asleep or on th
e operating table. And everyone does it one final time. But I had the good or bad fortune to have learned how to control the process when I spent a week in hospital with appendicitis at the age of six. The incense-and-crystals crowd calls it astral projection, and I’ve been doing it for almost as long as I’ve known I shouldn’t talk about it.

* * *

I soared into a layer of thin clouds far above the city and rested in the air. Below, the sprawl glittered between the two blacknesses of lake and forest. I pictured his face— making a lopsided smile after he’d said something funny, the way I always thought of him.

“Where is he?” I asked. A light tug pulled me northeast.

Just like last time, a week ago.

For the third evening in a row he’d texted me to say he’d be working late at the ad agency; I thought,
let’s find out for sure so I can stop wondering.
I lay down and left the flesh behind, came outside and felt that pull to the northeast. His office wasn’t that way. I let the pull direct me over streets and parks to a row of townhouses. A window drew me toward it. The curtains were closed, but the light was on. I remembered the rule I’d made when I first learned the knack: no spying. Yes, but this was different, wasn’t it? I didn’t wait for an answer, just ghosted through the wall and into a bedroom and saw.

They couldn’t see me, of course — I’m invisible in this state — but her eyes were squeezed shut anyway. And he never looked up from what he was doing.

He came home later that night; I tried to keep it casual — “How was your day, hon?” “Oh, you know, the usual” — but it jumped out of my mouth. Then came the denials and the shouting and the weeping and he progressed quickly to
how did I know?
Was I following him around? No, of course I wasn’t. Well, how did I know then? I just suspected. Bullshit. What kind of woman stalks her own boyfriend? Make that
ex
-boyfriend.

Somewhere below, a helicopter clattered toward a hospital, a red light vanishing in the night. The northeast was tugging me again to where my answer lay. I could find out what I already knew: yes, he was with her. And then?

“You know my secret now,” he’d said while standing in the doorway. “You can keep yours, whatever it is. I don’t care.”

I stared northeast at the glowing grid of streets and pictured his face again. I felt hollow. I had no boyfriend, no job, no money. Above, the dark was a chasm my ghostbody could plummet into. I could float up and keep going. Feel the air become thin, see the horizon curve and the stars brighten in clear space. Could I survive up there? I didn’t know. I flitted up into the colder dark.

A gust of wind propelled a cloud of frozen ice crystals through me. Each one twinkled inside me like the taste of a wind chime. My ghost mouth tugged itself into the shape of a smile.

“I need a new life,” I said to the empty sky. “Where do I find that?”

No response, of course. Not a gentle tug nor a flash of insight. There was no new life. Upward was the chasm. How far could I go?

A lonely note sounded in the night; it held and faded and sounded again. Far below a freight train crept, its whistle calling to the world, wheels beating steadily on steel. Enough self-pity. The rest of the world was getting on with things, and I was alive, healthy, and doing something most people couldn’t.

I flitted down to skyscraper height and followed the train westward through downtown. A streetcar dinged on Spadina Avenue and clattered through an intersection. Something was drawing me. I sank lower, followed the streetcar north. It passed College Street; I broke away from it, dropped to rooftop level, and flew west above the silent street. I felt the tug more strongly now: it was like a child pulling at my sleeve, begging me to come and see, come and see.

A few blocks further and I was in Little Italy, passing over the dense rows of shuttered bars and restaurants and patios, and still the voice whispered,
come
. The pull on my sleeve grew to a gentle hand wrapping my wrist, taking me past a comics shop, a clothing store, a barber, and there I stopped. Not the barber. Above it. The second floor was offices, venetian blinds closed behind the stencilled name of an accounting firm. Up again. The windows on the third floor had shabbier blinds and no name on the glass. Something was stuck to the corner of one pane. I went closer. A postcard taped to the glass and two words handwritten on it: “Help Wanted.”

A sign where nobody could possibly see it.

Except me.

I flew home, plunged back into my skin and bones, and fell into the first proper sleep I’d had since, you know.

* * *

By nine I was awake. One load of laundry later I put on a clean shirt and skirt and biked over to Little Italy.

I found the barbershop but had to cross the street to verify that there really was a tiny patch of white on the third-floor window. The door to the up
stairs offices led into a stairwell where the lino predated the moon landings. Two scratched mailboxes hung at the foot of the stairs. One for the accountants on the second floor, the other unmarked. The stairs smelt of no cleaning. I stopped on the middle landing. My heart punched my ribs like a piston. Why was I so tense? What was I supposed to find here?

The door on the third floor was closed and had no name on it. I knocked on chipped cream paint, heard nothing, pushed the door open.

“Yeah, I know, I’ll be able to pay—” The old man behind the desk fluttered an anxious hand. The voice on the other end of his phone was a tinny squawk. He looked up, managed a warm smile, and gestured to a collapsing armchair. “I’ll have it by the end of the month.
Si. Grazie.
”

He put the phone down and turned to me. I was still standing. The seat of the armchair was covered in a Greenland-shaped stain, hopefully coffee. “Welcome,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

I said, “I’m here because…” Seconds of silence ticked by. Partly because I had nothing prepared, partly because I was occupied with looking at him. He was short, in his sixties or older, in an ancient brown shirt and with the haircut of a man who tells the barber to do whatever’s easiest. He could be one of the Mediterranean men watching soccer in the neighborhood’s pre-gentrification bars. Except his eyes, old and wise and gentle, didn’t belong: not in this office, not in this city, not in this century.

He gave me the kind of encouraging smile one uses to coax sense out of the addled.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m here because of the help wanted sign in the window.”

His face changed like the sun coming out. “Fantastic! Glad to meet you. I’m Tony.”

“My name’s Lilya.” His handshake was muscular for a small man. He’d worked hard in his life.

“Lilya?” He turned his head at an angle and looked me over. “You’re Zoroastrian? Parsi?”

“My family is. How did you know?”

“You’re of an ancient people,” he said. “I am Catholic, a newcomer. Coffee? Anything?”

On the carpet, a dusty jar of instant coffee rested next to an ancient steel kettle.

“No thanks. What does the job involve?”

“We find stuff. Things or people that go missing.”

“We?”

“Just me now.”

“So you’re like a detective?”

He made a waggling gesture. “Sometimes. I’ll give you an example.” From his back pocket he took a spiral notepad, pages fat with writing, and tore the top page off. “Now, you want to come in the back here? If you work for me, you can have this office.”

I followed him down the corridor. Two doors faced each other; he pushed open the one on the left and ushered me in.

Against one wall lay a single bed, covered only with a bottom sheet. No desk, no chair.

Sensible me wanted to flee. Instinctive me knew better. The room was full of dusty emptiness. Nobody had been in here for a long time. Tony had a hopeful but embarrassed air. He casually positioned himself between me and the water-damage stain on the wall.

“I had a co-worker, but he retired,” he said. “Been doing everything myself. Hard to find good help.”

“Tony,” I said, “how do you find stuff?”

He handed me the piece of paper. “Why don’t you show me how you’d do it?”

“Ana Costa,” it read in a curious hand, like a medieval manuscript written with a cheap ballpoint. “Benaulim, Goa, India. Lost purse.”

“Can you do it with me here?” he said.

“You mean…” My mouth was dry. I’d never talked to anyone about my knack, not since a crushing conversation with my parents after I’d recovered from appendicitis.

“Can you leave your body?” he said.

This was how Robinson Crusoe must have felt after he found that footprint. I wasn’t alone. Tony knew. Tony would understand.

I just had to trust him.

I took a deep breath. “Yes. But…” But I’m not ready to leave my unoccupied body in a room with a man I just met.

“You don’t know how to get to India? I’ll teach you to go anywhere, like” — a dramatic gesture — “that.”

I studied his face and the thousand years behind his eyes.

“And then?” I said. “I know how to find things, or people. But I can’t pick up this woman’s purse and leave it on the kitchen table.”

“You don’t touch anything. I’ll show you how to whisper to them. They can’t hear but they will know.”