Monday, May 31, 2010

Going Home - A Possible SciFi Story

Going Home
by Nancy Ellen McLennan

I had an awake dream two nights ago. I could not return to sleep after awakening at 3 a.m. Ultimately, I rose at 5:45 and at the time I thought I'd been faced with a revelation. A secret revelation. A shameful one. Well, one that would take courage to declare.

I arose as a new woman, resolved and calm in my new understanding of our world, but unsure how to handle the change, unsure what responsibility to take.

I laid there annoyed by my neighbours who in their understanding of the world had decided that the glaring porch light on the back of their house, the one that had lit my kitchen for the past five years, since I arrived in this town, was not sufficient to keep the bad guys away.

I wondered if the crux had been the sudden and unexpected death of our mutual neighbour, Harvey. Word of his death came days after his passing in a casual remark from a fellow neighbour.

“By the way, did you hear that Harvey died?”
“What!”
“Harvey. You know. The native guy in the little house?”
“What! You're kidding? What happened?”
“I dunno. He wasn't feeling well and he went to the doctor and they sent him home. Then a couple of days later he died. They took him away. They were checking-out the house.”
“Oh shit. He was a pretty good guy.”

Harvey Guiboche spoke with an accent: OjiCree. He lived long enough to see his native language officially recognized by the Manitoba government. Folks thought he was drunk, even when he wasn't. He kept his hair long and was happy and chatty all the time.

We were neighbours and both had small dogs. Baby, his little dachshund type mutt would bark territorially at Gia, my small poodle, when we passed their house, along the lane, after our long walks. Harvey would laugh and talk about how vicious Baby was and to be careful. The dogs liked each other and Harvey and I had a good respect too.

Since his death, his son moved into the house with his wife and son. Baby stayed and they brought another dog, a tied-up small rottie. The diamond willow carvings in the yard are to “pass the time”, says Harvey's son. And the grandson is cheerful and chatty, like his Grandpa.

I cannot be sure, but I think the arrival of new neighbours, being more active and a younger family, is what marked the need to move the motion light off the porch and onto the garage.

Nobody would call it racism and maybe it wasn't. Who knows what kinds of fear ring in the hearts of an elderly couple in a small central Manitoba town? Who knows what conversations pass between husband and wife for sixty years? Did it start in the home, after watching the horrors of TV news, or while discussing the reality behind a story of local mayhem in the weekly newspaper? Did it start among the men at the 10 a.m. coffee clatch down the street?

“The cops were at the house across form Jack's again last night.”
“Yah, I heard it's a crack house.”
“Those goddam natives.” or
“They got that guy they were looking for. They found him over at the house down from Brad and Shelley’s. Did you see the cop cars?” or
“Jeezus. I wish the cops would come down on those assholes beside the school. Who needs that shit?”

None of it had anything to do with Harvey. Not really. But racism is a nasty disease. It generalizes and sneezes into peoples' minds and comes out their mouths and it spreads into ears and out of other mouths across kitchen tables and from pillow to pillow. It lays dormant and silent and festers and manifests itself in action, if not force.

Just like greed, the second worst disease. Together they create an irrational fear and compulsion for an old couple to protect their property.


So they moved the single, motion light across the yard and attached it to their garage so it would flood the yard and their back porch. But as luck would have it, the westerly spot light shone straight into my upstairs bedroom window.
As a kid, living in the city, I used to listen to the city transit buses pass the front of our wartime house on Manitoba Avenue. But there was more. I would feel the gentle rumble of the house, a small, but unmistakable vibration of the Red River gumbo as the heavy vehicle passed. And of course, I could smell it every time, during the hot summer nights. Most of all I remember the lights. I could never figure out the math. I would hear the bus first and know it would pass us in a few seconds, so I would watch.

The street light on the corner cast a distinct series of shadows across the slanted ceilings of my bedroom. I tried to memorize them. I tried really hard as I anticipated the bus. And then it would begin. It was a transformation of probably fewer than five seconds. The shadows would move. The light would change. It was all very geometric. It wasn't smooth and gradual because the lines of the ceiling would cause the shadows to suddenly drop, or lift. Light would flash on one spot and move across, or up, or simply pop out of existence. It was a pattern. I knew it was, but I could never remember how it went. East to west, top to bottom, with the bus, but that's all I could truthfully discern. It was a fond memory.

Now, in a different bedroom with a slanted ceiling, I was laying awake at 3 a.m. looking at geometric patterns of light and shadow on my walls and ceilings. This time they did not move. It was on and off. On and off. On and off. And again I began to seek the math but instead of shape, I measured duration. The longest dark respite I received from the brilliant spot was ninety seconds, of the intervals I counted. I was struggling to find sleep so I did not count them all. Fifteen seconds. Thirty-one. Seventy-one. I woke a time or two with my hand over my eyes. I pondered moving my end table and learning to sleep on my left side instead of my right so the light would be on my back. I mourned not seeing the gradually dawning morning light every morning as indeed, I mistook it for another flash from the spot.

I contemplated what had been triggering the light. Cats no doubt, or maybe skunks. I must remember to keep my trash behind closed doors.

I didn't sleep as the light penetrated my sleeping quarters. I needed thicker eyelids. Maybe I could find that night mask from La Senza somewhere. It was frustrating and on this precipice between deep sleep and wakefulness, with my mind playing its usual rituals of figuring and pondering and yes, wakeful dreaming, that is when, thanks to my fearful neighbours, my gut began to churn as the revelation reached my consciousness.

For several weeks I had been grieving. On April 20, oil began bleeding from the earth's skin, into the Gulf of Mexico. Skin, protected by a layer of salty seawater had been probed and punctured and now it bled. Preserves, hidden within the crust of the earth for millennia, offering gravitational balance to the globe as it drifts through space, were being pulled through a hole, forced into the sea, and the flow was finding its way to the surface of the water and ultimately to sea shores, where alien to the touch of air, it would agglomerate and mingle and separate and smear itself. It was not malicious. It could feel the imbalance and the chaos of its new configurations, but unfortunately, it had no choice! Gravity was pulling it up. It knew that somewhere else on the globe, some land was sinking to fill the gap it had vacated. It really did not like the light and preferred the pressure and solid security of its cave-like origin, but an accident of existence, a species of existence, had a curiosity beyond logic and a persistence beyond rationality, an unnatural disease of greed that had driven it to find a way to set it, the oil, free from its silent balanced bastion beneath those tropical waters.

And I continued to grieve. I felt helpless though I told my friends to have hope.
That day, I had read a post on my facebook site that spoke to some hope and some grief. The next day, I spoke to a woman who concluded that we were powerless. The post was from Toronto. The woman was from Korea. And I am here, in Manitoba. The grief is global. There is a global connection. A global thought.

“We are all suffering from the disease of greed,” thought I.

It is like the racism. It spreads. It affects the innocent and it affects the perpetrators. It is insidious. It masks itself so folk think it is good and aspirational. It divides and separates to station for conquer.

But why? What is the ultimate goal? To puncture the earth's tender skin and cause its blood to pour and build an irreparably imbalance on the planet? To make life worse for sand and grass and song birds? To make the fishes run away?

There was no reason. It could only be explained as an infection. A disease. Or possibly an infestation.

And that was the revelation. Humanity is indeed an infestation.

A few weeks ago I read about Stephen Hawkings sending out a dire warning that “we” need to be cautious about alien onslaught. That it could be really horrible. Immediately, Paul Hillier retorted.

“Phshaw”. They have been here already. They are among us. “There is no doubt,” said he. He cited evidence that much of our technology, from the pyramids to the computer chips could not have been, were not to be credited to humanity.

I thought of the passage that Doris Lessing wrote about Martha, stumbling through the filthy populated streets of 1960's London, looking at the creatures with air holes and talking slits on their faces. With hair poking out hither and thither with eyes that wonder independently of the rest of the creature, of the stink and filth among them.

Then I realized. It made clear and honest sense. Humanity is indeed an infestation. Planted on this planet possibly to eradicate it from elsewhere where it was simply doing too much harm.

Unlike the bees or the ants, these creatures were quite large. The question was how long would it take for them to send their drones and their workers and build their hives and manufacture their nectar. How long would it take before the factions and the hives were formed and the renegades hid and the synapses became broken and lost in quests for power and supremacy?

Humanity had destroyed before and would do so again.

I thought of James Cameron's movie, Avatar, and the story stolen, or invented, or borrowed – or that we all knew, that there is really only one mind among us.

The grief is evidence of that. As implants, vain curious unusual beings, and continually regarding all stones and plants and clouds and creatures as “others” it became clear that, we are implants, striving to fit and belong.

The quest for power, the greed disease, the separation disease. These true diseases of humanity that have nothing to do with bodily functions have become paramount now. It took about six thousand years. The universal experiment is coming to a close. The pessimists’ thesis will fail to be rejected.


Finally, after two and a half hours enduring the punctuation of dark with fear, the light in my window turned midnight blue and then charcoal blue and the motion light stopped detecting the cat and I rose to greet another day.

No wonder they have never found the missing link. I wonder where home is. I wonder what it used to be like.

May 15, 2010