Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(35)

She’d tried to wiggle out of storage duty but the prime minister had been firm: no special favours for family.

“You must’ve done something.”

Lindy wondered, briefly, why most of her fellow Jitterbugs were such *s. Then she tuned him out; the glass was charged. She upgraded it to a touchscreen, growing a long, heavy pane, then loading up text from her latest interview as she lowered it to the floor.

Terese Bianchi’s story:

Last Year was the spring I turned nine, the spring Mama brought my Nonna home to die. It was intense, and weirdly private. We kept to ourselves; we weren’t watching the news.

I heard at school about the airplane full of people with persistent sleep syndrome; heard about the beer garden in Frankfurt. When our music teacher became a Winkle it was still so rare that someone went to his house, to check.

The Tuesday when the American president went down, they closed school early. I went home thinking today, for this, I’d find the news on. But our house was dead. Lights out, the air steamy from the dishwasher and the clothes dryer.

Mama was zonked in the rocker chair, holding Nonna’s hand. They’re in Storage now, together. Neither looks a day older.

By the time the tech gave up on trying to make her care about her trio of living tchotchkes, Lindy had loaded photographs of Terese onto the window with her testimony. This was one of two lancet panes slated to go outside the Prince of Wales Heritage Centre. It had to be perfect.

Her modem was running hot.

She lowered her bit rate, cooling the modem before making final tweaks to the pane’s historiated initial. Big “T” for Terese, with a faux-medieval image of a uniformed schoolgirl. Last, she set the glass to fossilize, permafixing the images and text.

“Something burning?”

A middle-aged Sikh man was hovering in Lindy’s doorway. Her afternoon appointment.

“It’s my modem.” She raised her left hand, showing the burned palm, ring of red where skin met the umbilicus of her modem. Coiling the umbilicus around her wrist, she made a bracelet of it, fib-op loops that hid a multitude of sins. “Are you Abrik Singh?”

“Nice to meet you.” He helped Lindy lift the new pane, examining the images of Terese, girl and woman, and the status bar flickering below them. Eighty percent finished.

They set it on the table near the kids. Once the crystals were set, Lindy would polish the pane and seal it in several layers of weatherproof varnish.

“You burn like that every time?” He reached for her.

Lindy skipped back out of reach. “Don’t.”

“Oh, that’s right—” He raised his hands, embarrassed.

Missy had made points a few elections back off being “close” to a rape survivor, before Last Year. Everyone knew she had a half-crazy sister who didn’t like to be touched. She might as well have branded VICTIM onto Lindy’s forehead.

But the public exposure was what bought her the modem she was, even now, burning to a crisp.

“You just surprised me,” Lindy said, offering him one of the portable mics she kept lying around. The whole studio was wired for sound, but her subjects didn’t know that.

Singh smoothed his moustache, left side first, in what looked like a habitual gesture. “What happened with the guy? He go to jail?”

“Yeah, but not for assaulting me. He went down in prison.”

Leaving Abrik to fit her past into his personal theory of Why me, why not her? , Lindy took up another mic: “People say the Naptime phenomenon began in Frankfurt, on Groundhog Day. Four weeks earlier, though, a passenger jet from Vancouver arrived at Lester B. Pearson Airport in Toronto with everyone aboard, but for the captain and co-pilot, deep in something like a coma.

“Abrik Singh was a marketing manager for Molson Breweries. He was aboard flight WS700. Abrik, what’s your story?”

He toyed with the mic: “I was online during take-off.”

Lindy offered an encouraging smile. “Online… working?”

“Reports, spreadsheets. The usual bull. I was concentrating hard because of the girl sleeping next to me. Woman, I mean. It was supposedly hot in Toronto. Remember what it was like, being hot?”

Lindy nodded. She missed summer heat almost as much as she missed antianxiety meds.

“She was in a skimpy white sundress, and slumped… whenever I glanced right, I was staring down her neckline.”

“You try to wake her?”

“Nudged her. Even said ‘hey.’ She had that look, like a three-year-old after a bender.” Abrik gestured at Lindy’s three charges – boy, girl, polyester-skinned Lucifer.

“I decided if I kept working, it’d be okay. She wouldn’t come around and find me checking out her boobs.”

“Sounds like a polite thing to do.”

“Three hours into the flight, we hit turbulence. I snapped out of it. The pilot was saying, ‘Sit down, strap in.’ I looked around. Nobody’d brought our pretzels. I was the only person awake on the whole plane.”

“Were you frightened?”

“No, not really.” He frowned. “I didn’t think ‘Oh my God, we’ve been gassed.’”

“Or ‘Holy shit, I better do something?’”

“I thought: ‘I’ve been at this for hours.’”