Maria, Aaron, Laurence, Cathy, PI Pirelli… Crystal Doer…
Crystal Doer?
He hadn’t known any of these people two weeks ago; now they crowded his thoughts.
Victor closed his eyes, relaxed.
“Crystal Doer?”
She drew closer, a shadow taking shape within his darkened room. He half expected her to materialize in the midair between him and the billowing curtains, or to hear her voice threaded into the night sounds of the city. Could she be alive? Out there, after all these years? Her parents still hoped. She’s run away, they kept telling themselves. Someday she would come to terms with her demons, then she’ll come home.
She’ll phone from a town at the end of a long dirt road where the nightly entertainment is watching the Northern Lights. “Mom!” she’ll say. “Dad! Can you forgive me?” And they won’t even say a word. They’ll just cry, longing to hold their babe in their arms, to splice together the severed ligaments of their crippled lives.
Yeah, and now for the sappy music and credits, Victor objected…
You cannot have a name!
“What?”
The voice had no locus. It simply materialized inside and outside him and one and the same instant.
He says you can’t. So I’m going to call you Emanon – noname in reverse – because if you say something backward it makes no sense, yet it exists. I’ll still be obeying, but I will have a sound that means you and ‘not you’ at the same time. Do you understand?
If I even thought of a name like Billy, or Jake he’d know it. Even thinking about thinking it is dangerous. He senses disobedience the same way a hyena sniffs out molecules of sweat. You must never reveal your secret no-name to him. He’ll beat me and you within an inch of our lives if he ever finds out.
“Who is he?”
She didn’t answer. Her spirit faded, a weak signal obscured by the shifting electromagnetism of the city.
“Who is he?” Victor shouted after her, but she was gone.
He stared into the misshapen gloom of his bedroom. Am I going crazy? Had he become a medium for the long-lost spirit of Crystal Doer? Was he infatuated with a decades old photo of a dead girl?
Victor kicked the sheets away, freeing himself from their tangles and rolling out of bed. The room had become a locus of insanity, a place where reason wobbled, flew apart, the shrapnel of what had been tearing into the gauzy fabric of reality. He wrapped himself in his housecoat and padded down the hall. The inky well of False Creek, its shores encrusted with the garish phosphorescence of the city, came into view through his patio window. He stared down at his chosen world. At first nothing seemed out of place. Granville Island, the Granville Street Bridge, Burrard Bridge, all the meaningful structures that triangulated his sense of who and where he was remained in place. But…
You’re out there, aren’t you?
Crystal didn’t respond. Quiescent now, she’d become a presence perfectly merged into the dark interstices of his universe. When you speak, you become a point of absolute being; but your silence is everywhere.
He’d never thought such a thing, this connection to a certainty beyond belief. Crystal Doer’s spirit had broken free from the black holes of time and space, and he was the only human being in the universe equipped to pick up the irregular pulse of her background signal. She cried out for…
“Justice,” he pronounced, aware of the sliding door’s glass vibrating in harmony to the word. The world as he knew it was imploding, everything bending and buckling under the influence of an irrational new gravity.
“This is fucking crazy.”