Spirits in the Wires (2 page)

“I feel as if I should know you,”
Saskia Madding says as she approaches my chair.

She's been darting glances in my direction from across the cafe for about fifteen minutes now and I was wondering when she'd finally come over.

I saw her when I first came in, sitting to the right of the door at a window table, nursing a tall cup of chai tea. She'd been writing in a small, leather-bound book, fountain pen in one hand, the other holding back the spill of blonde hair that would otherwise fall into her eyes. She looked up when I came in and showed no sign of recognition, but since then she's been studying me whenever she thinks I'm not paying attention to her.

“You do know me,” I tell her. “I'm pieces of your boyfriend—the ones he didn't want when he was a kid.”

She gives me a puzzled look, though I can see a kind of understanding start up in the back of those pretty, sea-blue eyes of hers.

“You—are you the woman in his journals?” she asks. “The one he calls Mystery?”

I smile. “That's me. The shadow of himself.”

“I didn't…”

“Know I was real?” I finish for her when her voice trails off.

She shakes her head. “No. I just didn't expect to ever see you in a place like this.”

“I like coffee.”

“I meant someplace so mundane.”

“Ah. So you've made note of all those romantic flights of fancy he puts in those journals of his.” I close my eyes, shuffling through pages of memory until I find one of them. “ ‘I can see her standing among the brambles and thorns of some half-forgotten hedgerow in a green bridal dress, her red hair set aflame by the setting sun, her eyes dark with mysteries and stories, a wooden hare's mask dangling from one languid hand. This is how I always see her. In the hidden and secret places, her business there incomprehensible yet obviously perfectly suited to her curious, evasive nature.' “

I get a smile from Saskia, but I don't know if it's from the passage I've quoted, or because I'm mimicking Christy's voice as I repeat the words.

“That's a new one,” she says. “He hasn't read it to me yet.”

“You wait for him to read them to you?”

“Of course. I would never go prying …” She pauses and gives me a considering look. “When do you read them?”

I shrug. “Oh, you know. Whenever. I don't really sleep, so sometimes when I get bored late at night I come by and sit in his study for awhile to read what he's been thinking about lately.”

“You're as bad as the crow girls.”

“I'll take that as a compliment.”

“Mmm.” She studies me for a moment before adding, “You don't read my journals do you?”

I muster a properly offended look, though it's not that I wouldn't. I just haven't. Yet.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “Of course you wouldn't. We don't have the same connection as you and Christy do.”

“Does that connection bother you?”

She shakes her head. “That would be like being bothered by his having Geordie for a brother. You're more like family—albeit the twin sister who only comes creeping by to visit in the middle of the night when we're both asleep.”

I shrug, but I don't apologize.

“I'm only his shadow,” I say.

She studies me again, those sea-blue eyes of hers looking deep into mine.

“I don't think so,” she says. “You're real now.”

That makes me smile.

“As real as I am, anyway,” she adds.

My smile fades as I see the troubled look that comes over her. I forget that her own exotic origins are no more than a dream to her most of the time—a dream that makes her uncomfortable, uneasy in her skin. I wish I hadn't reminded her of it, but she puts it away and brings the conversation back to me.

“Why won't you tell Christy your name?” she asks.

“Because that would let him put me in a box labeled This is Christiana' and I don't want to be locked into who he thinks I am. The way he writes about me is bad enough. If he had a name to go with it he might be able to fix it so that I could never change and grow.”

“He does like his routines,” she says.

I nod. “His picture's in the dictionary, right beside the word.”

We share a moment's silence, then she cocks her a head, just a little.

“So your name's Christiana?” she asks.

“I call myself Christiana Tree.”

That brings back a genuine smile.

“So that would make you Miss Tree,” she says.

I'm impressed at how quickly she got it as I offer her my hand.

“In the flesh,” I tell her. “Pleased to meet you.”

“But that's only what you call yourself,” she says as she shakes my hand.

“We all have our secrets.”

“Or we wouldn't be mysteries.”

“That, too.”

She's been sitting on her haunches beside the easy chair I commandeered as soon as I'd picked up my coffee and sticky-bun from the counter, leaning her arms on one of the chair's fat arms. There's another chair nearby, occupied by a boy in his late teens with blue hair and razor-thin features. He's been listening to his Walkman loud enough for me to identify the music as rap, though I can't make out any words, and flipping through one of the cafe's freebie newspapers while he drinks his coffee. He gets up now and I give a vague wave to the vacant chair with my hand.

“Why don't you get more comfortable,” I say to Saskia.

She nods. “Just let me get my stuff.”

Some office drone in a tailored business suit, tie loose, top shirt button undone, approaches the chair while Saskia collects her things. I put my scuffed brown leather work boots up on its cushions and give him a sugar and icicle smile—you know, it looks sweet, but there's a chill in it. He's like a cat as he casually steers himself off through the tables and takes a hardback chair at one of the small counters that enclose the cafe's various rustic wooden support beams, making it look like that's what he was aiming for all along.

Saskia returns. She drops her jacket on the back of the chair, puts her knapsack on the floor, and settles down, tea in hand.

“So, what were you writing?” I ask.

She shrugs. “This and that. I just like playing with words. Sometimes they become something—a journal entry, a poem. Sometimes I'm just following words to see where they go.”

“And where do they go?”

“Anyplace and everyplace.”

She pauses for a moment and has a sip of her tea, sets the cup down on the low table between us. Later I realize she was just deciding whether to go on and tell me what she now does.

“You know, we're like words,” she says. “You and me. We're like ghost words.”

I have to smile. I'm beginning to understand why Christy cares about her the way he does. She's a sweet, pretty blonde, but she doesn't fit into any sort of a tidy descriptive package. Her thinking's all over the place, from serious to whimsical, or even some combination of the two. I think I just might have a poke through her journals the next time I'm in their apartment and they're both asleep. I'd like to know more about her—not just what she has to say, but what she thinks when there's nobody supposed to be listening.

“Okay,” I say. “I'll bite. What are ghost words?”

“They're words that don't really exist. They come about through the mistakes of editors and printers and bad proofreaders, and while they seem like they should mean something, they don't. Like ‘cablin' for ‘cabin,' say.”

I see what she means.

“I like that word,” I tell her. “Cablin. Maybe I should appropriate it and give it a meaning.”

Saskia gives a slow nod. “You see? That's how we're like ghost words. People can appropriate us and give us meanings, too.”

I know she's talking about our anomalous origins—how because of them, we could be victim to that sort of thing—but I don't agree.

“That happens to everybody,” I tell her. “It happens whenever someone decides what someone is like instead of finding out for real.”

“I suppose.”

“You're thinking about all of this too much.”

“I can't seem to stop thinking about it.”

I study her for a long moment. It's worrying her, this whole idea of what's real and what isn't, like how you came into this world is more important than what you do once you're here.

“What's the first thing you remember?” I ask.

Words are like a corridor;

put enough of them in a line

and who knows where

they will take you.

—S
ASKIA
M
ADDING,

“Corridor” (
Mirrors,
1995)

I remember opening my eyes and
—

You know how if you blow up an electronic image too much, you don't have a picture anymore? When you push the image that far, all you really have left is a pixelated fog, a screen full of tiny coloured squares that don't form a recognizable pattern, never mind an image.

That was the first thing I saw.

I opened my eyes and I couldn't focus on anything. A hundred thousand million dots of colour and light filled my vision. I stared hard, trying to make sense of them, and slowly they started to come together, forming recognizable objects. A dresser. A cedar chest. An armchair with clothes draped over the arms and back. A closed wooden door. A poster from the Newford Museum of Art advertising a retrospective of Vincent Rushkin's work. Close by my head on the night table was an unlit candle in a brass holder, and a leather-bound book with a pattern of pussywillows stamped into the leather, a fountain pen lying on top of it.

It was all familiar, but I knew I'd never seen it before. Just as I myself was familiar, but I didn't know who I really was. I knew my name. I knew there was a computer and paper trail tracing my background—where I was born, grew up, went to school—but I couldn't actually recall any of it. The details of the experiences, I mean. The sounds, the smells, the tactile impressions associated with them. All I knew were the bare bones of cold facts.

I studied the explosion of pigeons in the painting they'd used in the poster for the Rushkin show and tried to make sense of how I could be in my own bedroom, but have no sense of where it was or how I got here or anything that had happened to me before I opened my eyes at that moment.

And I was strangely calm.

I knew I shouldn't be. Somewhere a part of me was registering the fact that none of this was right—neither the where and how of where I'd found myself upon waking, nor my reaction to it.

I had the strongest sense of being temporary. A shadow cast by a light that was about to move or be turned off. An image in a film that the camera had lingered up on before moving on.

I held one of my hands up in front of my eyes, then the other. I sat up and looked at the reflection of the woman in the mirror on the back of the dresser.

Me.

A stranger.

But I knew every inch of that face—the blue eyes, the shape of the nose and lips, the way the blonde hair fell in a sleepy tangle on either side of it.

I swung my feet to the floor and stood up. I pulled the flannel nightie I was wearing over my head and faced the mirror again.

I knew this body as well.

Me.

Still a stranger.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. Plucking the nightie from the floor, I hugged it to my chest.

An odd notion came into my head. I had a sudden impression of some other place, a pixelated realm that lay somewhere in cyberspace—that mysterious borderland of electrons and data pulses that exists in between all the computers that make up the World Wide Web. I could almost see this deep forest of sentences and words secreted in a nexus of the Web, and as I did, I sensed some enormous entity swelling up out of it, a leviathan of impossible proportions that had no physical presence, but it did have a vast and incomprehensible soul.

The thought came to me that I was a piece of that entity. That I had been broken off from it, born there in that forest of words and sent away. That I was separate, but also still a part of that other. That it had made me up through some curious technopagan ritual, given me flesh and then set me free to make a life for myself in the world beyond the endless reaches of cyberspace.

I know. It sounds like science fiction. And maybe it was. But it was magic, too. How else can you explain a computer program that was self-aware? Some voodoo spirit, itself made of nothing but ones and zeros, that was able to create a living being out of neurons and electricity and air and send it off into the world to be its own being.

The island of calm I'd sensed before whispered to me through this whirlpool of disquiet and speculation.

In a normal person,
it said,
what you are experiencing would be considered madness.

But I already knew I wasn't normal. I wasn't even sure I was a person.

Finally, I lay back down on the bed and closed my eyes.

Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe when I woke up in the morning I'd remember my life. I'd be myself and just shake my head as I went about my morning, dimly recalling the very strange dream I'd had the night before.

But in the morning, nothing had really changed. Only the force of what I was feeling had.

I could see normally as soon as I opened my eyes. The sensations of dis-association and confusion I'd experienced in the middle of the night were still there, but they weren't as intense.

This time I was able to get up and get as far as the door of the bedroom. I looked down the hallway into familiar/unfamiliar territory. I/my body had to pee—but it was something I only knew from the pressure in my bladder. I knew the mechanics of how I would do it. I knew where to go, to lift the lid, and sit down. But I couldn't seem to call up one memory of the actual experience. The only real, tactile memories I had were of waking last night.

Panic came rolling up through my body, quickening my pulse, making me sweat, creating a worse confusion in me than I was already feeling.

Let it go,
that small calm place inside me said.
Stop thinking about it for the moment. Give your body control
—
it knows what to do.

What did I have to lose?

I took a deep, steadying breath. Another. I don't even know how I did it, but somehow I managed to step back from the panic and confusion and follow the voice's advice.

I was like a passenger as I made my way to the bathroom, peed and showered. Back in my bedroom, I looked in the closet and was momentarily overwhelmed by the choices. It's not that there were a lot of clothes— because there weren't. But there was still too much choice. I was still confounded by knowing exactly what all the various materials were, but not what it would be like to touch or wear them—their texture, their weight, the feel of how the fabric would hang.

I took another steadying breath and let the decision go. I watched as I chose a cotton T-shirt and a pair of jeans, enjoyed the sensation of the cloth as it covered me. Slipped on a pair of moccasins and wiggled my toes in them.

It wasn't until after I'd made toast and coffee and was still drinking the coffee at the kitchen table that the immensity of my disassociation began to ease. It came and went throughout the rest of the day, like the ebb and flow of some inexplicable tide, but the troughs and crests began to even out and calm.

The oddest thing was how whenever I had a question about something, that calm voice would speak up from the back of my mind in response. Like when I took the coffee from the fridge and I wondered about the beans as I spooned some into the grinder.

Coffee,
the voice in my head said.
It's a beverage consisting of a decoction or infusion of the roasted ground or crushed seeds (coffee beans) of the two-seeded fruit (coffee berry) of certain coffee trees. It can also be the seeds or fruit themselves, or any of various tropical trees of the madder family that yield coffee beans, such as
Coffea arabica
and
C. canefora.

It was like I had an encyclopedia sitting in the back of my head. One that knew everything.

I didn't leave the apartment all day. I didn't dare. I explored its four rooms—bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and the final all-purpose room that looked to be a combination of study, library, office, and living room. I opened the patio door that led out of that last room, but I didn't go onto the balcony. I simply stood in the doorway and studied the street below, the buildings on the other side.

Mostly I poked through the books and magazines I found, studied the contents of my purse and the wallet inside it, turned on the computer and explored its various document files.

It turned out I wrote poetry. A fair amount of it. I'd had three collections published, with enough in these files for at least a couple more, though some of the poems were obviously works-in-progress.

I also did freelance writing for various on-line magazines and wrote some op-ed pieces for
Street Times,
a little paper produced mostly by street people for street people—to give them something to sell in lieu of asking for spare change.

I found a financial program and saw that while I wasn't rich by any means, I had enough money banked to keep me solvent for a few months. When I thought about where that money had come from, my own work history popped up in my head. Dates, places of employment, job descriptions, salary and benefits. But I had no personal, hands-on memories of even one of these places where I was supposed to have worked.

I closed all the files and turned off the computer.

After a supper of asparagus, tomato, feta cheese and shredded basil on a small bed of pasta, I was finally able to go outside and sit on the wicker chair I found out on the balcony. The flavour of my meal still lay on my palate, the food itself a comforting pressure in my stomach. It was dark now, the city lit up with lights, but I was safe and unseen in a pool of shadow since I'd turned out the lights in the room behind me.

I watched the people passing below, each of them a story, each story part of somebody else's, all of it connected to the big story of the world. People weren't islands, so far as I was concerned. How could they be, when their stories kept getting tangled up in everybody else's?

But all the same, I understood loneliness right then. Not the idea of it, but the empty ache of it inside me. How one could live in a city of millions and realize that there was not one person who knew or cared if I lived or died. I searched my mind, but nowhere in amongst the neat and orderly lines of facts and work histories was there the memory of someone I could call a lover, a friend, or even an acquaintance.

That will change,
the calm voice in the back of my head assured me.

But I didn't know—not how my life could have come to this, or if it even should change. Either I was so unlikable that I'd been unable to make a single friend in the—I counted out the years from the facts in my head— four years since I had apparently moved here from New Mexico—or I was some kind of freak. Neither, it seemed to me, deserved friends.

I dreamed that night that I was flying, soaring, not over city streets, but over circuit boards, and rivers of electricity. …

The next morning—my second that I could truly recall—I felt a little better. I still had a lack of hands-on memories and a calm, quiet voice in the back of my head that was happy to play encyclopedia for me, but the weight of a full day's experience seemed to have steadied me. Even if all I'd done for the whole day was wander around in my apartment and then get terribly depressed as I sat out on the balcony in the evening, that one day still felt as though it had anchored me to the real world.

In the morning light, things didn't seem quite so bleak, so desperately black and white, it had to be this way or that. I was able to consider that I might be different and it didn't cripple me. Last night's loneliness and despair had no real hold on me this morning. I didn't know quite how or where, but I was sure I had to fit in someplace.

Today I meant to go outside.

I finished my coffee and washed my breakfast dishes, then put on a pair of running shoes. I found my purse. After checking it for apartment keys, I stepped out into the hall.

My neighbour across the way opened his door at the same time and smiled at me.

“So there is someone living in that apartment,” he said. “I'm Brad.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “In 3F, as you can see.”

“I'm Saskia,” I said and we shook hands.

He was nice looking guy, dark-haired and trim, dressed in casual clothes. I could tell he liked what he saw when he looked at me and that made me feel good. But as we stood there talking for awhile, I saw something change in his eyes. It wasn't like I had a bit of egg stuck between my teeth or something. I was just making him uncomfortable. By the time we'd walked down the two flights of stairs to the streets, I got the sense he couldn't get away from me quickly enough.