So Long Been Dreaming (10 page)

Toot sweet Matricia. I stretch my lips and blow.

Larissa Lai
was born in La Jolla, California, grew up in Newfoundland, and lived and worked in Vancouver. Her first novel,
When Fox Is a Thousand
(Press Gang, 1995), was shortlisted for the Chapters/
Books in Canada
First Novel Award. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and is working on a PhD at the University of Calgary. Her second novel,
Salt Fish Girl
(Thomas Allen Publishers, 2002) was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, the Tiptree Award, and the W. O. Mitchell Award. In 2003, TVO’s Imprint named her one the Top Ten Writers to Watch Under 40. Arsenal Pulp Press will release a new edition of
When Fox Is A Thousand
in 2004.

Rachel
Larissa Lai

When the policeman says I’m cold, my father tells him about the figure skating accident. “She was a beautiful skater. She could execute a perfect quadruple lutz by the time she was thirteen. But the previous skater had really worked over the ice. It was perilously uneven before Rachel ever set foot on it. Or should I say blade.”

“In short, I fell,” I tell him. I eye the officer nervously. My father doesn’t trust policemen and neither do I.

“And you hit your head,” the policeman says, evenly. I can’t tell whether or not he is being sarcastic. His speech is steady and uninflected.

“Yes, officer,” I say. “On the ice. It knocked me out cold.”

“She was an extraordinarily emotive child before that,” my father says. “Her mother is Chinese, and very circumspect. And I’m a man of science myself. I don’t know where her passion came from. Or where it went. But doctors say this happens sometimes.”

“I don’t know where it went myself,” I say, somewhat earnestly. “But it’s gone. That’s for sure.”

I don’t want to take the test, but my father and I had agreed beforehand that I should. That I would. And that I should volunteer before the policeman asked, so there would be no question of coercion. I hadn’t expected to feel nervous. There is nothing to be nervous about. My father is here. I know who I am. There is no question of failing.

I sit down opposite the policeman at the long table and let him shine his nasty light into my eye. I can feel him scrutinizing me. There is something about him that stirs me in a way I can’t describe. It’s not exactly pleasant.

“You’re given a calf skin wallet for your birthday,” he says. The test has begun.

“I’d return it,” I say. Since 2017 it’s been illegal to slaughter any living thing on Earth. “Also, I’d report the person who gave it to me.”

My childhood memories are extraordinarily vivid. I remember my mother giving me an empty egg box one day when I was playing in the sand. I filled the box with sand and packed it down tight. When I turned it over there were two neat rows of six identical little houses with round tops. I imagined that if I were really small, I could stroll the alleyways between them.

I remember piano lessons. I was never very good at music, but it was something my mother valued a great deal, so I made the effort. Recitals made me terribly nervous. When I had to get up to play, I’d be shaking so badly I could barely hit the keys. I played at a tremendous speed with no attention at all to feeling or dynamics. My mother told people I played beautifully at home. I don’t remember that, but that’s how memory works, isn’t it? Selectively.

I liked to dress up. I remember once making an elaborate Indian Princess costume which I wore for the Halloween dress-up contest at school. I brushed my long black hair straight and darkened my skin with cocoa powder mixed with water. I expected to win, since all the other kids wore costumes that were obviously store-bought. I was devastated when the boy in the Darth Vader mask won. It seemed the teachers placed no value whatsoever on creativity and imagination.

“You are reading a magazine and you come across a picture of a naked woman. You show it to your husband and he likes it so much he wants to hang it in your bedroom.”

“Is this testing whether I’m a replicant or a lesbian, sir?” The question annoys me. I am now sure that I don’t like the policeman. Or his test. There is a subtext to it I don’t understand. Is he coming on to me, or does he know something about me that I don’t? I want to look at my father but I don’t dare.

When the test is over, I am inexplicably angry. At my father or at the policeman, I’m not sure. What I want more than anything is to see my mother, but she died shortly after my skating accident. I remember little about her death. My father says I’ve repressed it because it was so traumatic. He says when I’m older, I can have hypnosis therapy to try and retrieve the memories. Right now all I know is that I miss her. I get up from the long table and leave the room quickly, rudely. I don’t care. I just want to get to the music room where there is a large portrait of my mother over the piano.

But I am still within earshot when I hear the policeman say, “How can it not know what it is?”

How can it not know what it is?
I barely heard the words, but now I can’t stop them from echoing in my head. I have failed. My father has been lying to me. But how much? I run to the music room and sit down at the piano. It is the one place where I feel most comfortable. Or should I say it is the one place where I feel closest to my mother. I try playing the most famous of Schumann’s
Songs from Childhood
, the sweet, sad
Traumerei
. It uses four octaves at once and requires large hands, but mine are small. It was my mother’s favourite piece. I love it too, but she always complained that my rendition was too mechanical.

Playing comforts me. I don’t know if I’m playing well, but I play the piece over and over until my fingers ache.

My father had first seen my mother in a catalogue of women in China who wanted to marry Western men. He said he liked her sad eyes. They began a correspondence and fell in love. After six months she agreed to marry him. He went to Shanghai and paid for her to fly down from her small northern Chinese village. They were married a week after they first met. Sepia photographs of the wedding, framed in elaborate pewter, adorn the music room. They could easily have taken colour photographs, or holographic ones for that matter, but my mother was the nostalgic, sentimental sort, and sepia was all the rage in fashionable Shanghai at the time of their marriage. There are also sepia photographs of me and my brother on the walls and the sideboards: playing in the yard at our New England house, running on the beach during a holiday in Southern California, screaming during the sudden drop of a rollercoaster at Disneyland.

My brother died at the same time as my mother. I think it’s strange that I don’t remember what happened. My father says that the memories will return in time, and that I should tell him when they do so he can help me through the process of mourning. But it’s been five years and I still don’t remember a thing.

It comforts me to be surrounded by these photographs, these certain memories.
How can it not know what it is?
Whose memories are these?

I can’t think of myself as one of them.
Replicants like photographs,
the policeman had said. Did my mother put these photographs here, or did I?

I must have fallen asleep while playing because I don’t hear my father enter the room. He is not a sentimental man, and he says nothing to comfort me, though he does put his hand on my shoulder.

“Rachel,” he says. “I want you to offer the policeman your help. I think you can be of service to him.”

“No,” I say. “Don’t you know what you’re asking of me?”

“Please do as I ask, child,” he says. “One of the escaped androids is the same model as you. You could really make a difference.” He gives me a set of photographs, not nostalgic, sepia-stained images, but holographic cards identifying the escaped replicants. He turns abruptly and leaves the room.

My cheeks are wet. It is the first time I’ve cried since my mother and brother died.

The policeman calls me from a sleazy bar near Chinatown. He looks a little drunk on the vidphone screen, and I detect self-loathing behind his impenetrable eyes.

“I’m at Taffy Lewis’s,” he says. “Why don’t you come down and join me for a drink?” There is a lot of movement in the background behind him.

“That’s not my kind of place,” I say. Right now I hate him more than anyone. I turn off the vidphone without saying goodbye, and go upstairs to bed.