Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (623 page)

(1960– )

Although she’d had a few stories published previously, Nalo Hopkinson burst onto the SF scene when her first novel,
Brown Girl in the Ring
(1998), won a contest sponsored by editor Betsy Mitchell, then at Warner Books (now at Del Rey). Since then Hopkinson’s Caribbean-edged fiction, which tends to skirt the intersection of folklore, fantasy, and SF has won her a Campbell Award for Best New Writer, a Locus Award for best first novel, a World Fantasy Award (for her 2001 short story collection,
Skin Folk
), the Canadian Arurora and Sunburst Awards, and the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for GLBT SF (for
The Salt Roads
, 2003).

Born in Kingston Jamaica, Hopkinson grew up in Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad (along with a brief stint in the U.S.) before her family moved to Canada when she was sixteen. With an actor father and a librarian mother, she was encouraged toward literary pursuits: She earned a BA (with honors) in Russian and French from York University and a Masters in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania. From 1992–1996, she was a freelance journalist for various papers in Toronto while working in a SF bookstore, Bakka Books. After attending the Clarion Writer’s Workshop in 1995 she sold her first two stories, “A Habit of Waste” and “Riding the Red,” a fairy tale retelling.

She still lives in Toronto, which has a thriving community of SF writers and fans.

First published in
Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly of Writing, Politics, Art & Culture
, Late Spring 1996

These are the latitudes of ex-colonised,

of degradation still unmodified,

imported managers, styles in art,

second-hand subsistence of the spirit,

the habit of waste,

mayhem committed on the personality,

and everywhere the wrecked or scuttled mind.

Scholars, more brilliant than I could hope to be,

advised that if I valued poetry,

1 should eschew all sociology.

—Slade Hopkinson, from “The Madwoman of Papine: Two Cartoons with Captions”

*

I was nodding off on the streetcar home from work when I saw the woman getting on. She was wearing the body I used to have! The shock woke me right up: It was my original, the body I had replaced two years before, same full, tarty-looking lips; same fat thighs, rubbing together with every step; same outsize ass; same narrow torso that seemed grafted onto a lower body a good three sizes bigger, as though God had glued leftover parts together.

On my pay, I’d had to save for five years before I could afford the switch. When I ordered the catalogue from MediPerfiction, I pored over it for a month,
drooling at the different options: Arrow’slim “Cindies” had long, long legs
(“supermodel quality”).
“Indiras” came with creamy brown skin, falls of straight, dark hair, and curvaceous bodies
(“exotic grace”).
I finally chose one of the “Dianas,” with their lithe muscles and small, firm breasts (“boyish
beauty”).
They downloaded me into her as soon as I could get the time off work. I was back on the job in four days, although my fine muscle control was still a little shaky.

And now, here was someone wearing my old castoff. She must have been in a bad accident: too bad for the body to be salvaged. If she couldn’t afford cloning, the doctors would have just downloaded her brain into any donated discard. Mine, for instance. Poor thing, I thought. I wonder how she’s handling that chafing problem. It used to drive me mad in the summer.

I watched her put her ticket in the box. The driver gave her a melting smile. What did he see to grin at?

I studied my former body carefully as it made its way down the centre of the streetcar. I hated what she’d done to the hair—let it go natural, for Christ’s sake, sectioned it off, and coiled black thread tightly around each section, with a puff of hair on the end of every stalk. Man, I hated that back-to-Africa nostalgia shit. She looked like a Doctor Seuss character. There’s no excuse for that nappy-headed nonsense. She had a lot of nerve, too, wrapping that behind in a flower-print sarong miniskirt. Sort of like making your ass into a billboard. When it was my body, I always covered its butt in long skirts or loose pants. Her skirt was so short that I could see the edges of the bike shorts peeking out below it. Well, it’s one way to deal with the chafing.

Strange, though; on her, the little peek of black shorts looked stylish and sexy all at once. Far from
looking graceless, her high, round bottom twitched confidently with each step, giving her a proud sexiness that I had never had. Her upper body was sheathed in a white sleeveless T-shirt. White! Such a plain colour. To tell the truth, though, the clingy material emphasized her tiny waist, and the white looked really good against her dark skin. Had my old skin always had that glow to it? Such firm, strong arms…

All the seats on the streetcar were taken. Good. Let the bitch stand. I hoped my fallen arches were giving her hell.

* * * *

Home at last, I stripped off and headed straight for the mirror. The boyish body was still slim, thighs still thin, tiny-perfect apple breasts still perky. I presented my behind to the mirror. A little flabby, perhaps? I wasn’t sure. I turned around again, got up close to the mirror so that I could inspect my face. Did my skin have that glow that my old body’s had? And weren’t those the beginning of crow’s-feet around my eyes? Shit. White people aged so quickly. I spent the evening sprawled on the sofa, watching reruns and eating pork and beans straight from the can.

* * * *

That Friday afternoon at work, Old Man Morris came in for the usual. I stacked his order on the counter between us and keyed the contents into the computer. It bleeped at me: “This selection does not meet the customer’s dietary requirements.” As if I didn’t know that. I tried to talk him into beefing up the carbs and beta-carotene. “All right, then,” I said heartily, “what else will you have today? Some of that creamed corn? We just got a big batch of tins in. I bet you’d like some of that, eh?” I always sounded so artificial, but I couldn’t help it. The food bank customers made me uncomfortable. Eleanor didn’t react that way, though. She was so at ease in the job, cheerful, dispensing cans of tuna with an easy goodwill. She always chattered away to the clients, knew them all by name.

“No thanks, dear,” Mr. Morris replied with his polite smile. “I never could stomach the tinned vegetables. When I can, I eat them fresh, you know?”

“Yeah, Cynthia,” Eleanor teased, “you know that Mr. Morris hates canned veggies. Too much like baby food, eh, Mr. Morris?”

Always the same cute banter between those two. He’d flattened out his Caribbean accent for the benefit of us two white girls. I couldn’t place which island he was from. I sighed and overrode the computer’s objections. Eleanor and old man Morris grinned at each other while I packed up his weekend ration. Fresh, right. When could a poor old man ever afford the fresh stuff? I couldn’t imagine what his diet was like. He always asked us for the same things: soup mix, powdered milk, and cans of beans. We tried to give him his nutritional quota, but he politely refused offers of creamed corn or canned tuna. I was sure he was always constipated. His problem, though.

I bet my parents could tell me where in the Caribbean he was from. Give them any inkling that someone’s from “back home,” and they’d be on him like a dirty shirt, badgering him with questions:
Which island you from? How long you been here in Canada? You have family here? When last you go back home?

Old Man Morris signed for his order and left. One of the volunteers would deliver it later that evening. I watched him walk away. He looked to be in his sixties, but he was probably younger; hard life wears a person down. Tallish, with a brown, wrinkled face and tightly curled salt-and-pepper hair, he had a strong, upright walk for someone in his circumstances. Even in summer, I had never seen him without that old tweed jacket, its pockets stuffed to bursting with God knew what type of scavenge; half-smoked cigarette butts that people had dropped on the street, I supposed, and pop cans he would return for the deposit money. At least he seemed clean.

I went down to shipping to check on a big donation of food we’d received from a nearby supermarket. Someone was sure to have made a mistake sorting the cans. Someone always did.

* * * *

My parents had been beside themselves when they found out I’d switched bodies. I guess it wasn’t very diplomatic of me, showing up without warning on their suburban doorstep, this white woman with her flippy blond hair, claiming to be their daughter. I’d made sure my new body would have the same vocal range as the old one, so when Mom and Dad heard my voice coming out of a stranger’s body, they flipped. Didn’t even want to let me in the door, at first. Made me pass my new I.D. and the doctor’s certificate through the letter slot.

“Mom, give me a break,” I yelled. “I told you last year that I was thinking about doing this!”

“But Cyn-Cyn, that ain’t even look like you!” My mother’s voice was close to a shriek. Her next words were for my dad:

“What the child want to go and do this kind of stupidness for? Nothing ain’t wrong with the way she look!”

A giggled response from my father, “True, she behind had a way to remain in a room long after she leave, but she get that from you, sweetheart, and you know how much I love that behind!”

He’d aimed that dig for my ears, I just knew it. I’d had enough. “So, are the two of you going to let me in, or what?” I hated it when they carried on the way they were doing. All that drama. And I really wished they’d drop the Banana Boat accents. They’d come to Canada five years before I was even born, for Christ’s sake, and I was now twenty-eight.

They did finally open the door, and after that they just had to get used to the new me.

1 wondered if I should start saving for another switch. It’s really a rich people’s thing. I couldn’t afford to keep doing it every few years, like some kind of vid queen. Shit.

* * * *

“What’s griping you?” Eleanor asked after I’d chewed out one of the volunteers for some little mistake. “You’ve been cranky for days now.”

Damn. “Sorry. I know I’ve been bitchy. I’ve been really down, you know? No real reason. I just don’t feel like myself.”

“Yeah. Well.” Eleanor was used to my moodiness, “I guess it is Thanksgiving weekend. People always get a little edgy around the holidays. Maybe you need a
change. Tell you what; why don’t you deliver Old Man Morris’s ration, make sure he’s okay for the weekend?”

“Morris? You want me to go to where he lives?” I couldn’t imagine anything less appealing. “Where is that, anyway? In a park or something?”

Eleanor frowned at that. “So, even if he does, so what? You need to get over yourself, girl.”

I didn’t say anything, just thought my peevishness at her. She strode over to the terminal at her desk, punched in Mr. Morris’s name, handed me the printout. “Just go over to this address, and take him his ration. Chat with him a little bit. This might be a lonely weekend for him. And keep the car till Tuesday. We won’t be needing it.”

Mr. Morris lived on the creepy side of Sherbourne. I had to slow the car down to dodge the first wave of drunken suits lurching out of the strip club, on their boozy way home after the usual Friday afternoon three-hour liquid lunch. I stared at the storey-high poster that covered one outside wall of the strip club. I hoped to God they’d used a fisheye lens to make that babe’s boobs look like that. Those couldn’t be natural.

Shit. Shouldn’t have slowed down. One of the prostitutes on the corner began to twitch her way over to the car, bending low so she could see inside, giving me a flash of her tits into the bargain: “Hey, darlin’, you wanna go out? I can swing lezzie.” I floored it out of there.

Searching for the street helped to keep my mind off some of the more theatrical sights of Cabbagetown West on a Friday evening. I didn’t know that the police
could
conduct a full strip search over the hood of a car, right out in the open.

The next street was Old Man Morris’s. Tenement row houses slumped along one side of the short street, marked by sagging roofs and knocked-out steps. There were rotting piles of garbage in front of many of the houses. I thought I could hear the flies buzzing from where I was. The smell was like clotted carrion. A few people hung out on dilapidated porches, just staring. Two guys hunched into denim jackets stopped talking as I drove by. A dirty, greasy-haired kid was riding a bicycle up and down the sidewalk, dodging the garbage. The bike was too small for him and it had no seat. He stood on the pedals and pumped them furiously.

Mr. Morris lived in an ancient apartment building on the other side of the street. I had to double-park in front. I hauled the dolly out of the trunk and loaded Mr. Morris’s boxes onto it. I activated the car’s screamer alarm and headed into the building, praying that no weirdness would go down on the street before I could make it inside.

Thank God, he answered the buzzer right away. “Mr. Morris? It’s Cynthia; from the food bank?”

The party going on in the lobby was only a few gropes away from becoming an orgy. The threesome writhing and sighing on the couch ignored me. Two men, one woman. I stepped over a pungent yellow liquid that was beetling its way down one leg of the bench, creeping through the cracks in the tile floor. I hoped it was just booze. I took the elevator up to the sixth floor.

The dingy, musty corridor walls were dark grey, peeling in places to reveal a bilious pink underneath. It was probably a blessing that there was so much dirt ground into the balding carpet. What I could glimpse of the original design made me queasy. Someone was
frying Spam for dinner (“canned horse’s cock,” my dad called it). I found Mr. Morris’s door and knocked. Inside, I could hear the sound of locks turning, and the curt “quack” of an alarm being deactivated. Mr. Morris opened the door to let me in.

“Come in quick, child,” he said, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel. “I can’t let the pot boil over. Don’t Jake does deliver my goods?” He bustled back into a room I guessed was the kitchen. I wheeled the dolly inside. “Eleanor sent Jake home early today, Mr. Morris. Holiday treat.”