Free So Long Been Dreaming by Nalo Hopkinson Page B

dynamics. My mother told people I played beautifully at home. I don’t remember that, but that’s how memory works, isn’t it? Selectively.
    I liked to dress up. I remember once making an elaborate Indian Princess costume which I wore for the Halloween dress-up contest at school. I brushed my long black hair straight and darkened my skin with cocoa powder mixed with water. I expected to win, since all the other kids wore costumes that were obviously store-bought. I was devastated when the boy in the Darth Vader mask won. It seemed the teachers placed no value whatsoever on creativity and imagination.

    “You are reading a magazine and you come across a picture of a naked woman. You show it to your husband and he likes it so much he wants to hang it in your bedroom.”
    “Is this testing whether I’m a replicant or a lesbian, sir?” The question annoys me. I am now sure that I don’t like the policeman. Or his test. There is a subtext to it I don’t understand. Is he coming on to me, or does he know something about me that I don’t? I want to look at my father but I don’t dare.
    When the test is over, I am inexplicably angry. At my father or at the policeman, I’m not sure. What I want more than anything is to see my mother, but she died shortly after my skating accident. I remember little about her death. My father says I’ve repressed it because it was so traumatic. He says when I’m older, I can have hypnosis therapy to try and retrieve the memories. Right now all I know is that I miss her. I get up from the long table and leave the room quickly, rudely. I don’t care. I just want to get to the music room where there is a large portrait of my mother over the piano.
    But I am still within earshot when I hear the policeman say, “How can it not know what it is?”

    How can it not know what it is? I barely heard the words, but now I can’t stop them from echoing in my head. I have failed. My father has been lying to me. But how much? I run to the music room and sit down at the piano. It is the one place where I feel most comfortable. Or should I say it is the one place where I feel closest to my mother. I try playing the most famous of Schumann’s Songs from Childhood , the sweet, sad Traumerei . It uses four octaves at once and requires large hands, but mine are small. It was my mother’s favourite piece. I love it too, but she always complained that my rendition was too mechanical.
    Playing comforts me. I don’t know if I’m playing well, but I play the piece over and over until my fingers ache.
    My father had first seen my mother in a catalogue of women in China who wanted to marry Western men. He said he liked her sad eyes. They began a correspondence and fell in love. After six months she agreed to marry him. He went to Shanghai and paid for her to fly down from her small northern Chinese village. They were married a week after they first met. Sepia photographs of the wedding, framed in elaborate pewter, adorn the music room. They could easily have taken colour photographs, or holographic ones for that matter, but my mother was the nostalgic, sentimental sort, and sepia was all the rage in fashionable Shanghai at the time of their marriage. There are also sepia photographs of me and my brother on the walls and the sideboards: playing in the yard at our New England house, running on the beach during a holiday in Southern California, screaming during the sudden drop of a rollercoaster at Disneyland.
    My brother died at the same time as my mother. I think it’s strange that I don’t remember what happened. My father says that the memories will return in time, and that I should tell him when they do so he can help me through the process of mourning. But it’s been five years and I still don’t remember a thing.
    It comforts me to be surrounded by these photographs, these certain memories. How can it not know what it is? Whose memories are these?
    I can’t think of myself as one of them. Replicants