“Show me,” the woman said, and Karen had only to point to the ceiling where a manta ray, three feet in circumference, hung from a chain.
“It’s six hundred dollars,” Karen said. “Which is half of what you’d pay uptown. And it’s his newest, so truthfully he wanted to keep it a bit longer, but…” She made an ingratiating gesture.
“I’ll have to think about it,” the woman said, “Not that it isn’t gorgeous.” She hesitated before asking, “Do you happen to know where I can get any Green?”
Karen just shook her head no, as Shadow had instructed. Green wasn’t scheduled, but it wasn’t exactly legal either. Shadow and Rick had both tried explaining the difference between selling and personal use, between synthetic and leaf, between last year and this year—a bristling confusion of facts that, just when it was about to cohere in Karen’s mind, always chose to disintegrate instead. Like a sea urchin she’d just stepped on, but not before it poked her sharply in the soft sole of her foot.
The woman gave her a disbelieving look. “But I heard.”
Karen just shrugged, returned to the desk, leaving the woman to browse. She opened the little metal box that served as cash register, sorted change into appropriate compartments. The box was dependable in times of power outage, which was often. Everyone was dumping their smart phones in favour of stacks of clipped together file cards, and email, no longer reliable, was out. Green Magic sported a meeting area consisting of a spotty Wi-Fi connection and more importantly, comfortable seating. There was no charge for use of the embroidered couch and the connection; people who met at the store sometimes ended up buying clothes or art.
Beside the couch, a metal stand housed fabric paints, mason jars of brushes, and a stack of white tees Shadow had liberated from the dumpster behind a Spadina jobber. Karen took the top shirt and stretched it over a painting board. She’d let an arty customer try her hand at painting a shirt to take home the week before, and now Shadow charged people for the pleasure. Karen figured it was the first thing she’d come up with that her boss had approved of.
Karen sighed, staring at the shirt. People who had never dived could hardly be better painters than her; they didn’t have a wealth of undersea imagery in their heads to draw upon.
The door chimes rang, startling her. The woman had finally left. Karen wouldn’t tell Shadow; he’d complain she could have closed the sale.
No sea here. Karen missed the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally she took the streetcar to Cherry Beach, just to sit there looking at water. Lake Ontario was so big you couldn’t see the other side, but there were no breakers and no jellyfish and it didn’t smell of salt. Of course, the Strait of Georgia didn’t have much in the way of breakers either. She’d grown up in Vancouver but she’d never spent much time on the island, outside of Victoria. Some friends of Rick’s had told her it wasn’t really the ocean till you’d built a bonfire on Long Beach, brought hand drums and tents or—if it was summer—just curled up in a sleeping bag. No one else around for miles. It wasn’t really Green till you’d done that. Back then, she still thought her life would change just by being with Rick. It had, too, but not quite in the way she’d hoped.
Still, they’d been in Toronto, now, for over two years, and some things were definitely better.
Back in Vancouver they’d mostly sat in their east side basement apartment heating little pots of green paste on their hot plate. Once it was warmed, they rubbed the paste gently into each other’s skin where it was thinnest: temples, neck, the insides of elbows and knees. Waiting for it to begin, staring into each other’s eyes, smiles of delight deepening and widening. And there it was: a popping sound, like squelching through soft clean river bottom mud. But it was more than that; it was a popping feeling, her skin transmogrifying. Karen would look then, just to make sure what she felt was also what she saw: Rick’s hand wasn’t just a hand anymore but also a whale’s flipper, the flipper brushing her own, that of a green sea turtle.
Shape shifting. It was electrifying.
Rick never disappeared entirely when Orca arrived. Karen still felt the warmth of primate skin, the hardness of the bones within, the slender bird feet tendons. She knew if she pressed just so, his tendons would move, just a little, and at the same time she’d be touching skin that was slick and rubbery and wet, so alien it left her breathless. Cetacean skin.
Sometimes the change arrived mere moments after dosing, sometimes it took hours to achieve. They chanted and drummed to bring it nearer. They closed their eyes and tuned into the process with every scrap of energy and will, and—something like love. Definitely something like passion. Wasn’t prayer in the end just that, an expression of passion for the divine?
Walking, they’d talk about everything that was wrong with the world. If it was up to Rick, he’d have been born as a pre-industrial revolution European peasant. Then, even if his land wasn’t his and most of the products of his work, whether it was a lamb or a vegetable or a loaf of bread, went to the owner, well, at least he and his woman could sit on the broken back step peeling apples and looking at the moon. They’d tell folk tales to the little ones, and someone would get out an instrument and someone else would sing, and the apples would be organic because no one had ever even heard of pesticides back then, let alone invented them.
Karen had shared Rick’s daydream about a feudal existence with a Green Magic customer once and he’d told her she was romanticizing a brutal existence. Which was probably true but you had to hope there was a better life somewhere. Maybe for some, the implausible fantasy lay in the future.
The present was no help at all.
Nowadays you had to work forty or more hours per week at a call centre, told how to dress and what to say. Everything mapped out bit by bit, piece by piece, all of it, until you got home and there was nothing left, no you anymore. Every part of you remodeled by them and for them, for the privilege of an evening can of soup or a box of take-out and a thriller on the DVD.
And there it was, her mother’s life. To prove it, Karen noticed she’d painted not a whale or a turtle on the T-shirt as she’d intended, but a flower sporting Thelma’s face.
Rick had always told her art was a kind of therapy.
Thelma stared at her reproachfully.
Why was her mother mad at her this time?
Why was she still so mad at her mother?
It wasn’t Thelma she ought to be mad at, anyway, but Thelma’s boyfriend Syd.
Rick’s manta ray sculpture swung just a little on its chain. She ought to wake him up but if she did he might just dive again. These days, Rick spent most of his time awake upstairs in the bedroom, diving. Not working on his art at all. It was worrisome. Green wasn’t addictive; many users said their physical and psychological health improved when they did a little Green now and again. But lately Rick returned to Green Lady over and over, withdrawing from real life.
Karen dabbed away at her mother’s face. It had been Shadow’s idea that she painted shirts. Green Magic didn’t do much business; the weekends were their big days, but it still made sense to open during the week—you just never knew. If she painted “Greenstyle” T-shirts while she clerked she might make a little money and create additional stock for the store.
She didn’t think the painting of the flower with her mother’s face was “Greenstyle”—she ought to be painting visionary fish, sharks, manta rays, even jellyfish. Still, the likeness was better than she had any right to expect. She’d actually taken more art lessons than Rick ever had, and only now did she remember her instructor telling her she had a talent for portraiture.