“Officers of Adaptation to Climate Change”

Creators of Justice Award 2021 | First Prize: Short Story

Dean Gessie is a widely-acclaimed author and poet who has won or placed in more than 100 international competitions. Dean won the Angelo Natoli Short Story Award in Australia, the Half and One Literary Prize in India, the Eyelands Book Award in Greece, the short story prize at the Eden Mills Writers Festival in Canada, the Wordsmiths Literary Competition in England and - in Maryland - the Uncollected Press Prize for a short story collection. Dean also won the Enizagam Poetry Contest in California, the Ageless Authors Poetry Competition in Texas, the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize in Massachusetts and the Editors’ Prize Poetry Contest from the Spoon River Poetry Review in Illinois. He has also published three novellas with Anaphora Literary Press in Texas.

Laura called me in Mozambique to say that mom had died. Our two year vigil had ended. Anyway, could I be home in a week? We were all going to scatter her ashes at the cottage. In a subsequent text, she developed the plan. The ash scattering would coincide with the solar eclipse. We’ve got a cosmic window to honour mom’s memory. Soon, another text arrived: We’ll stream the ceremony on Facebook Live. Did I have a plane ticket, yet? Our younger sister, Becky, would also be there. Love yuh, bro’.

Laura was like that. Commemoration was a Christmas tree and a box of decorations. Life altering moments were hand-painted ornaments. Popular holidays were tinsel. And anniversaries were sepia strings of popcorn. Her industry was cheerful spin. In fact, she reminded me of an ice skater that has mastered perfectly closed circles. Anyway, I pushed back against Facebook Live. Minutes later, she sent a thumbs-up emoji.

Africa was only partially my idea. At the end of our last session, my psychiatrist suggested service to others as an antidote for loneliness. She probably meant the Daily Bread Food Bank or the Yonge Street Mission. I told her over the phone that I had chosen to volunteer for six weeks in Mozambique. I could tell she was surprised by the way she held her breath. “Travel far enough,” she said, “to meet yourself.”

I had been battling the beast of depression for twenty-five years. I had never married. I had no kids. I sometimes spent days in bed where my nearest companion was a urine collection container. Ironically, I was a successful headhunter for the arts and entertainment sector in Toronto. I could minister to the needs of any organization, but I couldn’t help myself. In a lighter moment, before leaving for Mozambique, I hoped the beast didn’t have a passport.

After one week of training, I earned my stripes as an officer of adaptation to climate change. I was working with young university grads who wore this new title easily, like an activity tracker. Anyway, it was our job to mentor people whose livelihoods had been destroyed by global warming. I saw what that looked like when we flew over the Larde district of Nampula province. A river with a thousand year history had vanished. All that remained was brown grass that looked like a parched earthworm.

A young woman named Carlina gave us the backstory: “There was too much sun. The river went away. The fish followed the river. Some tried to grow tobacco or cassava. Some collected bits of firewood to sell. The tobacco died. The cassava starved. The firewood followed the fish into memory.”

Carlina’s eyes and voice communicated a deep well of sadness. Instinctively, I drank and thirsted for more. She was a twenty-one year old divorcee (barren, I was told) who lived with her parents. Six years earlier, she had been a child bride given by her father to a man more than twice her age. The river left. The fish left. There were many mouths to feed. My thoughts about Carlina came immediately and fully formed. I wondered if her father might - yet again - bless her union with a man twice her age. My psychiatrist’s words were all the rationale I needed. I had travelled far enough to meet myself. Would I be able to love myself?

Courtship of Carlina reminded me of my very first courtship. I would go to dances in middle school and lean against a wall in the gymnasium. A girl I liked did exactly the same. Through the darkness, we would look at each other furtively, the first time and all other times. At evening’s end, we would embrace and move slowly to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”.

Carlina and I watched each other like that, secretly and through the darkness in our hearts, until she took my hand and said, “Come see.” I thought about Led Zeppelin, the zeppelin called the Hindenburg, the fire that destroyed it and the stairway to heaven. I was all in from the get-go.

The return trip to Canada gave me a glimpse of what life would be like. Carlina travelled in traditional dress, bold yellow and pink colours and a sweeping bolt of cloth around her body and over one shoulder. I was no longer a wallflower. I was the greying white guy travelling with a young and dazzling black woman. I imagined people’s thoughts like falling ticker at a parade: I was a predator or a colonizer or a marriage tourist of spent virtue.

Of course, I repurposed these thought bubbles into trial balloons that put me in the best possible light. I told myself that I was no more sexist or racist than those who might judge me. Was my new wife a victim simply because she was an African and a woman? That kind of thinking was automatic writing from an old culture. I shared these thoughts with Carlina, worried about my own posturing. She said, “You have seen my lupembe?” I had seen her lupembe. It was a wind instrument made of animal horn. “Each is handmade and unique. It can be no other way.” I wrapped my arm around hers. I felt unbelievably happy.

Everyone met us at the airport in Winnipeg. I had texted Laura about Carlina. I knew she would bring the others up to speed. Our plan was to drive straightway to the cottage. Becky gave me the kind of hug that comes with a deployed airbag. I knew she was there under duress. Laura said that the urn containing mom’s ashes was in a cup holder in the car, right next to the coffee from Starbucks. “If we’re not careful,” she said, “we’ll eulogize Blond Vanilla Latte.” Anyway, we had two hours of road before us and a cosmic window. She hugged me and whispered in my ear, “You could be her father.” It was easy cruelty, because it was true.

But it was dad that I had seen first. I looked at him through the window on the customs side of arrivals. He was coyote thin. His right arm rested on a portable oxygen machine. Of late, his speech was unfiltered and impulsive, bytes of memory, observation and occasional obscenity. Dementia was giving him a scrabble board and few vowels to play with. Anyway, it was a miracle that mom had lived into her eighties and that dad was still alive. Both had smoked cigarettes since their mid-teens, become fierce enablers of one another.

In fact, I’m still haunted by memories of their toxic routine. In the living room, they had easy chairs, ashtrays, books and a carton of cigarettes. They read, smoked and cleared their throats through days and years. I and Laura and Becky went our separate ways into the basement or into our rooms. We were environmental refugees and asylum seekers. Through time, we convinced ourselves that family was damage and isolation. My psychiatrist clarified one point for me, “If you and your sisters felt unloved, I’m guessing your parents didn’t need cigarettes to do that.”

In the car, Carlina was in the back seat next to Becky who was next to my dad. I was beside Laura up front. I had a pretty good idea what Becky was saying to Carlina. She was a wounded soul and a broken record. Anyway, it didn’t occur to me to ask about Laura’s husband until we were in the car.

“Where’s Mitch?”

Laura said, “I have no idea. We’re not married, anymore.”

I was stunned. I asked her what happened.

“Life happened.”

I had taken little or no interest in Laura and Mitch. She owed me nothing in the

way of explanation.

“What about the kids?”

“The kids are with me. We all celebrate holidays together.”

I noticed that Laura was checking her speed and her mirrors constantly. She wanted me to know that she was managing just fine. “Jesus,” I said, “I’m really sorry.”

Laura’s eyes stayed on the speedometer, the mirrors and the road. “Couples have been falling apart since forever. You know what mom used to say - Don’t cry in your pork chops.”

In spite of myself, I pushed forward in a small voice, “Why didn’t you tell me?” Laura stiffened and threw a fastball. “Mitch and I both make good money, Steve. You couldn’t have saved us.” It was easy cruelty, because it was true. Carlina had nothing. I had money and the unspoken belief that I could use it to trade for anything. I didn’t know how to think about my privilege or to what degree I had simply monetized my needs. I was the best and the worst of myself all at once.

Anyway, Laura, the ice skater, looked at me directly and produced another perfectly closed circle, “Hashtag failure, bro’. It’s over.” I knew we would never talk about this, again. It’s over was her one and only post. While we sat in silence, dad snored, Becky talked and Carlina listened.

Intermittently, I turned down the air conditioner. I was trying to hear what was going on in the back seat. Laura noticed my fiddling and said, “What’s up with you and the AC?” I answered truthfully and evasively, “I am an officer of adaptation to climate change.”

True to form, Becky was introducing herself by way of a familiar theme. She left home when she was still a teenager. She quit school and moved in with her girlfriend. After twenty years of conjugal bliss, Renée, her girlfriend, moved out and shacked up with some low-life guy. “I gave her the best years of my life and she shit on me.” Becky could be vulgar and completely unselfconscious. She described to Carlina examples of kinko sex demanded by her ex.

When I was a kid, I resented Becky. It had nothing to do with age or gender or property. I resented her because she had managed early release from our failed home. In adulthood, my attitude toward her was more conflicted. On the one hand, it couldn’t have been easy for her to live as an openly gay person. She was the first heroine I knew who didn’t come from the pages of books at school. On the other hand, after her split with Renée, she wore emotional pain like cosmetic scars. These were ugly and she chose ugly language to describe them. It was hard to testify to anything that might derail her own self-absorption.

Or so I thought. I heard Carlina say to Becky, “They cut my genitals when I was four. I cannot have children. My first husband took me sexually when I was still a girl. I sometimes pee where and when I shouldn’t. It was my job to get water from the well. Village boys knew this was my job. It was a long walk and they knew. You and I are sisters.”

I put on my sunglasses and started to cry. Carlina added something else I couldn’t hear and Becky fell silent for the remainder of the trip. When we got to the cottage, Laura said we had precious little time to get into the water. The solar eclipse would start in minutes. I helped dad out of the car and steered him toward the lake. Carlina walked beside me, too. She had her small travel bag in one hand.

At the dock, I sat dad down and removed his shoes and socks. I said to my dad, “We’re going to put mom’s ashes in the water. She loved it here. Do you remember?” My dad said, “Oh, yeah, sure.”

Of course, my own memories were less burnished. Mom and dad used to recline in chairs on the dock and smoke and read. As small children, I and my sisters would swim and compete for their attention until, of course, we stopped.

And then dad said something that horrified me. He had forgotten his introduction to Carlina. With her at my side, he said, “Is this your darkie?”

I hadn’t heard that awful word in decades and the idea of possession almost made me scream. Like others from their generation, mom and dad were casual racists. In this case, dreadful habits were a feedback loop. They would sometimes share offensive language and opinions while darkening their own lungs with tar. Anyway, I looked at this sick, old man and measured my response. And then I listened to Carlina’s answer. She repeated herself word for word from the airport lobby, “I am from Africa. I am your son’s wife. My name is Carlina. It is good to meet you.”

We were up to our knees in lake water, mostly hand in hand in a small circle. If I felt degrees of separation from my parents and my sisters, wearing solar eclipse glasses did not help. We looked like witnesses to a nuclear bomb test. Not far from the truth, really. Nor did it help that the sky was darkening and midday became twilight. Laura’s cosmic window was a funeral home with drawn curtains. Suddenly, I regretted my veto of Facebook Live. Performing for a camera might have given us our best chance for closure.

No one spoke. We were supposed to take turns honouring mom’s memory, but no one said a word. Becky had already refused to take anybody’s hand. Laura couldn’t find the strength to decorate the tree. And Dad did his part, too. A cigarette hung from his lips as he stared at the waning sun. As for me, I was filled with guilt and resistance, hope from an ocean away and despair up to my knees. We couldn’t manage a good life together and, it seemed, we couldn’t manage a good death, either. We were utterly and impossibly dysfunctional.

That’s when Carlina rested her travel bag in my arm and proceeded to extract her lupembe. I had never heard her play before. The sound was mellow and warm and heraldic. It gave dignity to my family that I didn’t believe possible. Laura moved to the last part of the ceremony and shook out mom’s ashes into the lake water. For the first time, God help me, I felt compassion for my father. He and my mom had always been the sum of one and one and less than more. How did he feel seeing her atomized remains returned to the DNA of the world? We all cried and I suspect for different reasons.

Anyway, after Carlina finished her song and while the sun hid behind the moon, she whispered in my ear, “I am become an officer of adaptation to climate change.” I wanted to give her my very best hug, but I had her own travel bag under one arm and dad’s oxygen machine under the other. I leaned forward to kiss her and say, “You won’t have to carry the water alone.”