Falling Ice

The grown ups lied. They all swore they’d once been kids. No way. I was convinced when I was young they were either androids or, maybe, cyborgs -- so superficially human you’d be forgiven for mistaking them for the real thing – at least at first. Possibly they were extra-terrestrials. I eventually favoured that hypothesis and decided they’d all flown in from some remote square planet orbiting a remote square sun to conquer earth by assimilating the kids. They created an elaborate past, fabricated by their advanced technology and superior intellect, and made us think they lived it before we came on the scene. By the time we blew their cover, it was too late; we were one of them and resistance was futile. Like them, our veins ran silicone. Like them, only vestigial traces of human remained.

Okay, there were problems with this theory but this is what it felt like growing up. Were it not for my mother, I’d still think this way a couple of decades later. However, she was always recognizably a warm blooded, fully mortal, member of the same species as myself. Although, technically, adult – middle-aged, paid bills, bought groceries, watched the news -- she lived in a world that’s home to every kid and foreign to most adults. She lived in a personal universe. My mom was on a first name basis with everybody and everything – the neighbours, trees, the cashier at our local thrift store, rocks, flowers, the mailman – it was always a man when I was growing up -- birds, bugs, wind, snow, rain, sun, moon, the ground. God. She talked to the furniture as well. Not when anyone was around, mind you. She didn’t want to get locked up. But you can’t live with someone all your life and not know the things they don’t want you to know.

Most importantly, she read, and re-read, fairy tales. When not reading her woman’s magazines she could be found neck deep in the Brother’s Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffman, or stories written by that world famous, literary genius called Anonymous. His friends call him Anon. He wrote for the people – the folk – the ones who want fairy tales. He wrote for my mom.

My favourite story growing up was a fairy tale she read to me about an elderly, childless couple who, in a moment of either boredom or zany, senile whimsy, make a little girl out of snow. While surveying the perfect figure they’d completed, the wife suddenly sobs, “I wish, oh how I wish, she was a real, flesh and blood, little girl”.

A kind fairy happened to be passing, overheard her crie-de-coeur, and blew colour into the lifeless snow, rose into cheeks, burgundy into hair, cerulean blue into wide, thickly lashed eyes. She became, to their astonished delight, a beautiful, living girl pirouetting around them as snow fell in tiny, sparkling galaxies. While she danced, she sang, “sorrow for your longing brought me -- my veins run with crystal water; I am the Snow Girl, Ice King’s daughter.”

The Snow Girl lived down the street from me. Her name was Simone. Like the Ice King’s daughter, she seemed more a creature of desire than of bodily fluids, as though her parents, one an engineer and the other a famous architect, both ‘from away’ as we put it in St. Croix, had manufactured her out of the purist space-age alloys. I pictured her at night, especially in winter, never sleeping, never cold, slipping through her bedroom window, twirling on the shimmering snow, the white accumulation of millions of fallen stars, while the milky-way glimmered like fairy lights overhead.

“If you do not love me well, I shall bid you both farewell. You will find you have not caught me. North I’ll fly beyond the water; I am the Snow Girl, Ice King’s daughter.”

Her house too seemed to hover above the earth’s surface. Custom designed by her father, built by her mother, sheets of glass, slabs of concrete and chrome formed, I was told, a miracle of contemporary energy efficient engineering. When I first saw the completed house, I thought it had landed from Away and was ready to return at a moment’s notice. A huge double garage abutted one side and the whole structure was surrounded by a wide moat of concrete, like a launching pad. When I was young, it was Superman’s fortress of solitude. As I grew, and the stars, like scales, fell from my eyes, the house became a spa for snobby cars with servant quarters attached, you know, for the mortals who attended them.

The first few times I was permitted inside, I tiptoed, whispering, scared of being caught; a computerised security system kept the compound safe from earthlings. Simone, however, to the manor born adorned its glass breast like a matching accessory. She had everything, was everything, I wanted. I figured when we died justice would be served. I saw myself as Lazarus sitting beside Father Abraham his arm snug around me. Simone was Dives. “Send me back,” she cried, “to warn the living while there’s still time.” No one listened, mostly because nowadays we don’t really believe in death. Indeed, I now know I didn’t believe her even when she was alive.

Because, like everyone, I was, growing up, blinded by the screens. The screens were how the aliens controlled you. They even injected concentrated, liquid screen into pregnant women so watching began before birth. Some of us quickly become alarmed, not by the screens per se, but by the story and its endless variations they portrayed. I knew that I saw the lives of an elite few whose requirements I could never hope to meet. If I was anybody in the story, I was an extra who was routinely dispensed with. Extras never got the man or the girl or the prize or the life we all yearned for. They got the bullet or the axe or the drop or left -- alone. It was – unsettling -- seeing oneself repeatedly and casually disposed of on screen while still alive in the real world -- wherever that was.

But even an extra was often too important a role for us superfluous types. I was the laughter or applause that on cue announced something’d been said or done that required laughter or applause. My brother, Joe, once told me that studios usually re-used the same audience track since it’s cheaper. The sound we hear, Joe told me, is from people who are, and often have been for decades, dead. I was one of the not-yet-dead members of a clapping, laughing, corpse-filled audience.

Thus, early on, I developed a close relationship with the middle distance. It was my private screen where I could watch a limitless series of episodes featuring – me. By the end of grade eleven, I was in the two thousand-and-fourteenth season of My Dazzling Future. The problem with having my own screen, however, was that I rarely looked where I was told to look and during my school years, my first name was changed to Pay, my surname to Attention.

The events of the fall near the end of the second millennium and in my last year of high school, extorted attention from me with interest. I call that fall – The Fall. Someone – or something – shut down my private show and I was forced to see that school, the screens – the world – prepared us kids for entrance into a realm where the Ice-King ruled. They prepared us for a life where if you didn’t measure up, if you didn’t have the right stuff, the future waited -- with a baseball bat. I escaped in the nick of time.

Simone did not.

In some ways, she and I were almost siblings, growing up together as closely as we did. But then, that was true of almost all the kids in the town of St. Croix where we lived. My mom ran a day home for a few years when I was little and Simone was, as she called them, one of her kids. Looking at us together, though, it was immediately obvious we shared no genetic material. Hers were the brand name genes – mine, the generic variety. I could’ve been anybody’s kid, indistinguishable from hordes of others. Blah brown hair, blah brown eyes, blah big nose. I plodded through each grade – mostly unnoticed by the other masses of blah, boring, plodding kids with problem skin and big noses. Simone, however, flew from pointy, glittering A to pointy, glittering A, their tips iced with snow and glistening in the sun.

Our high school allowed us to pick courses for whatever we planned to do after. I wanted to be a nurse – a calling I’d heard since childhood and shared with my best friend, Laurel Bloest, so I’d been focusing on sciences and needed to take an extra L.A. credit to graduate. As it happened, Simone, although only sixteen, was taking the same class taught, it was rumoured, by a new teacher. She’d been accelerated. They did that in those days. Because she was so brilliant. She phoned the evening of the Monday before the first day of school.

“Since they’re calling for rain -- I thought maybe you’d be driving?”

“You’re not?” Simone had gotten her license about five minutes after she turned sixteen and lost it approximately twenty minutes later, but that was last spring. I assumed she’d batted her lashes at some officer and gotten it back.

“Um no -- I still have another week to go. So -- you know -- I’m wondering -- could you pick me up? Since it’ll be raining and you’ll be driving anyway?”

I hadn’t intended to drive anyway. I had intended to take an umbrella and the bus. Mom might need the car, although I knew all I had to do was ask and she’d make alternative arrangements which was code for she’d take an umbrella and the bus. But it was hard for her, with her arthritis and I knew Simone knew this.

“You could stay with Janine? I mean your dad isn’t home is he?” I hadn’t seen a fancy car in the driveway, which was the usual way to know he was there. Once she turned sixteen, Simone’s father occasionally left her overnight when he went on his short business trips. At such times, she often stayed with Janine Wilcox, a woman, that is, she’d been an adult since birth, we’d both known since kindergarten. Simone and Janine ran in the crowd that was, in reality, a secret society, requiring IQ testing to enter. It was a sort of rookie Illuminati where Reason was worshiped with all the requisite time-honoured rites. Much later, I was given to understand, these included, in spirit if not in fact, the ancient practise of human sacrifice to the demon, Moloch.

Janine was the tacit leader of this group and while she wasn’t as beautiful as Simone, she was more brilliant. Even in high school she was basically in college, taking courses offered to those who met the requirements. It was, therefore, according to the gods of natural selection, fitting she be showcased by the gracious splendor of her parent’s mansion less than two blocks from the college where they both taught. She also had a car – as in – her own.

“Dad is here – his car’s in the garage since it’s like – hello – gonna rain – but his plane leaves super early. I hardly ever get to see him for long so I was really hoping you’d let me stay here tonight and drive us in tomorrow since it’ll be raining and we’re in the same class – it’s first period -- and you’ll most likely have the car anyway -- but -- I’ll – um -- walk – I – suppose.”

Why she thought I’d be taking the car was a mystery. I rarely took our only vehicle – a battle scarred – I had three older brothers -- asthmatic ford caravan that wheezed up the hill where the school sprawled. I could suggest she walk. We weren’t that far, but well, snow girls flew, skipped, danced, but walk? Or she could take the bus? But this was even more ridiculous. “No, no, I’ll pick you up – I’ll tell Dad we have lots of stuff and with the rain an’ all -- we need the car -- maybe quarter to eight?” She made a strangled sound. “Parking’ll be bad.”

“Okay – fine,” and then, faintly, tagged on, “thanks.”

I was momentarily reassured. Part of me lived in terror of the day when I’d get written out of the script. If I wanted my own sub plot I had to stay close to one of the stars.