So Long Been Dreaming (8 page)

“None of the griots wanted to leave this planet, but that always happens. You leave anyhow.” Perez/Axala coughed and spit something out of the frame. “But even I couldn’t do it, couldn’t separate us from the body of Earth, couldn’t send us on our endless journey. I just didn’t have the heart to blast millennia of living into nothing.”

I gasped at the words I had spoken to Jay.

“So. . . .” The sun made her eyes look white. She closed them slowly and gathered her last few breaths. “So I hired Jay and Renee to explode me and the tree griots, and release us all from life on Earth.”

The map, the lizards, the guards blown up. An inside job to kill yourself and get back to the mother ship.

“Renee surprised me. Blew up the van before I was ready . . . when Max and I got out to pee. Max didn’t like that. Chased her down.”

Renee probably thought the good doctor would double-cross her.

“Perez’s body is almost finished.” Perez/Axala opened her eyes and squinted at something off camera. “And from what I can see, Max is chewing up Renee, so. . . .” She looked right into my eyes. “I guess I’m talking to myself.” Axala had jumped into Renee.

“Each body changes us. We are the sum of all the bodies we have joined,” I said out loud. “I’m not the same Axala that you were.”

On a second row of video screens, the husky lunged at Renee’s throat. The metal worms with camera eyes captured their fatal encounter from every angle. I switched off the screens just as he would have ripped her throat out.

“One last blast and we body historians are free to download the burden of Earth and start again.” Perez/Axala chased after her words, hoping to get everything said before it was too late. “You can release the griots and get to the mother ship or. . . .” She looked away from me, at the ruin of her body.

“Or stay. . . . And what the hell will that be?” I argued out loud with the ghost on the screen, with the body I had been yesterday. “If we don’t blow up shit and run away to the stars. . . . What the hell do we do here?”

“A great mystery. It’s up to you.” Perez/Axala fell against a purple lizard and her image exploded on nineteen monitors, but one screen froze on a close-up, as Axala dropped out of Perez and into Renee. I had never seen myself abandon a body, never looked back at a finished life, always rushing to the next body. . . . I switched off the monitors.

Jay’s watch had run down to a row of zeroes. Rendezvous time. The mother ship was calling. I stumbled back into the chair at Perez’s workstation. Max put his head in my lap, his chest rumbled, his eyes searched mine. My left hand hovered over ESCAPE – one touch would blast us to the mother ship. Two right hand fingers rested on ENTER – one touch and we were Earthbound. Paralyzed, I flashed on the forest of ancestors holding Jay and me, on hot milk flowing, humming birds flying backwards, Jay inside of me, and miles of roots holding up a mountain. After twice ten thousand years I wanted to do something impossible, something noble. Instead of chasing down infinity, we could contribute our souls to Earth. A blessing on this future, not now or nothing. The voice and the body and the history.

Axala of Earth.

ENTER

Suzette Mayr
is the author of two novels,
Moon Honey
and
The Widows
, and a poetry chapbook entitled
Zebra Talk
.
The Widows
was shortlisted for the 1998 Commonwealth Prize Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean region and was translated into German. Her third novel is being published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2004. She lives and works in Calgary.

Toot Sweet Matricia
Suzette Mayr

The legend goes like this:

A lazy horny fisherman, classy as a goat and smelling as good, finds what he thinks is a seal skin. This fisherman is not very clever – no one on land would ever marry him.

These are the rules.

The selkie sunbathes naked on the rocks; her skin tucked away in what she thinks is a good hiding place. The fisherman hides the seal skin from her, and the selkie is forced to be his wife.

The selkie makes a wistful but loyal wife and no one in the neighbourhood asks questions. She dutifully suckles her babies, her husband, but her eye is always on the sea, or the lake, or the plastic swimming pool, or the goldfish bowl where Darth Vader, the 75-cent feeder goldfish, blows “I love you” over and over.

Her two-year-old’s fingerprinted glass of lemonade makes her so homesick she wants to puke. All her children and her children’s children have webbed fingers and toes.

But the day comes when the selkie decides to give all the clothes in the attic to the Salvation Army, or sweep up the mouse turds in the basement once and for all, or clean out the ancient dirt in the upstairs closet, and then she finds the trunk, or the canvas sack, or the plastic Safeway bag and inside, where her husband’s hidden it, her selkie’s skin. Suddenly she’s gone out to her yoga lesson and strangely enough forgotten her yoga mat.

The horror is, she never looks back.

Crueler men burn the skins. These wives are doomed. Prozac, scotch on the rocks, varicose vein strippings, house renovations, feigned and real illnesses can’t stop the mourning, the inner burning. These are the kinds of wives who one day set their houses on fire with themselves inside, or in a matter of hours turn into lesbians, or slash themselves with their husband’s razors just so they feel something.

I feel something.

Putting on the skin when it’s not really yours is like putting both arms into a bog and drawing up pieces of corpse. Ring fingers still wearing rings, arms, palms, and hands (these are harder to identify), legs severed at calf and mid-thigh. I have found no heads yet, not yet felt the horror of hair twine around my fingers, the yawn of a mouth, a thick flapping tongue. Body bits perfectly preserved.

I look in the mirror at the skin around my shoulders, draped over my head. I look like my grandmother.

Matricia said that with the chemical straightener, my hair felt like the strings on the bow of her violin. The afro roots of my hair winding and colliding from my scalp, the straightened ends down my shoulders, dry and crisp as winter twigs. She fingered and stroked my hair, buried her hands in its coils while I kissed her breasts. I tugged at her nipples with my teeth through the layers of her sweater, her blouse, her bra. Her armpits seaweed-fragrant.

Her body smells like perfume and sweat. Matricia is a very black woman, much blacker than me, her hair scraped back from her face and into an elaborate coil, and I picture the excruciating smoothness of her inner thighs. I dragged her up piece by piece from the bogs of memory and horror. The smell of her. The smell of her hair and my skin.

I try to lose myself to the river by filling my pockets with stones from my mother’s rock garden.

You’ll only rip the seams of the pockets, my sister says. It’ll never work.

Detergent foam, empty pop cans, floating cigarette butts swirl around my ankles. The denim of my jeans sucks at my thighs.

Don’t think you’re getting out of washing the dishes! my sister calls.

I smell tears; they smell the same as water-fear. That horrifying lurch when my head is pulled under and a long fluid gasp fills my lungs. My mother drags my sputtering body through unnaturally bright pool water, and when she lets go I sink and inhale the water like rose petals. For years we did this every Sunday, she teaching me how to swim, me foundering, flailing, my hair afroed from my head in all directions, dry even under water and strung-out from chlorine, my eyes bitter-red and bulging.

I have watched too many television documentaries about the
Titanic
. This is why I hate the water. The documentaries never show the body remains; pieces of bodies just outside the picture, inedible chunks of skull, the flat, silver eyes of fish ogling the newly sunk banquet, the flat, silver lips shredding and tearing away at the sad skin under the soaked fabric, the taut necks, the soft flesh of human bellies. The camera focuses instead on a well-preserved shoe. A barnacled chandelier. A brooch filled with hair in the shape of flowers.

The TV camera never shows the people who live where the
Titanic
sank. The ones who stare up through the water’s surface with the faces of the drowned, the ones who crunch through bones like sharks.

I look into a cup of tea and see my eyes flat, silvered with salt-water cataracts. Submersion, immersion, mouth an open, wavering cavity. There is even danger in dish-water. Drowned angry children hissing through the drains sing me to sleep.

The water licks and licks at my sister’s boots. Every step she takes swirls whirlpools. My body floats face-down in the river, stopped by the branches of trees caught on my clothes. The stones in my pockets don’t hold me down.

You can stop faking it, my sister says.

She watches my blue lips sputter awake when the paramedic with prematurely grey hairs in his nose gives me mouth-to-mouth.

He’s gay, you dummy, she says. He’s gayer than Paree.

A year later, I marry the paramedic. On our wedding night at the Royal Wayne Hotel, he pushes the skin away and says, Phew! That reeks!