BERNICE FRIESEN

Writer     Editor    Visual Artist

"It's said of some novels that they beg to be filmed. The pictures Friesen makes are a cinematographer's dream..."    Jim Bartley, Toronto Globe and Mail

News

Watch and listen to the Launch of Universal Disorder at the Fat Oyster Reading Series: Bernice Friesen reads the beginning, introduced by Judy Leblanc.

Universal Disorder at Fat Oyster

Universal Disorder

Prologue

ℚ

324-7749.

What a thing to appear on his call display: a ghost calling.

"Nine," he says, as if he's able to stand behind her in the street and whisper her names: Seraphina--little angel--Jae. As if he could reach out and smooth his thumb up through her hair, the soft crewcut revealing the blue fleur-de-lys tattooed on the back of her scalp.

Imagine the system that gave it to her without knowing how exquisite it was; the first three digits add up to 9; the last four to 27, and two plus seven is 9, so the whole number is divisible by 9.

Nine is so beautiful, so neatly three 3s, the first truly odd number, the first oddity other than one... I... me, myself, that self-obsessed simpleton.

But it can't be. She must have given up that number shortly after he measured the space-time between his skin and hers, and found the distance unbearable.

Ten years ago calling. Really?

How old is he?

He walks to the bathroom, and lifts his heavy gaze to the mirror as if he's moving through water. Only the eyes are familiar, a blue of too much depth, staring through a nebulous tangle of hair. The stranger in the mirror lifts his hands; it's terrifying to feel those hands on his face.

He is the ghost--the shattered one--these eyes, these hands, these feet that managed to stumble out of the psyche ward.

Ten years ago, when he lost her, he lost himself.

∞