Content note: attempted suicide

 

The first time Kittu teleported was into the lavatory of a plane bound for London, fifteen seconds before it crashed in a field south of Gatwick. One moment she was brushing her teeth in front of the bathroom mirror in her apartment in Toronto, wishing she had the money to go on vacation, and the next moment she was thrown upward, hitting the ceiling of a tiny, smelly, enclosed space. Her mouth was screaming. So was her stomach. And so were other people, apparently. She vomited as the plane nose-dived to its doom, her brain skittering around possible scenarios in its base hunt for survival. Nightmare? Hallucination? Time slip? Alien attack?

The crash, when it came, was ear-splitting, soul-jarring. She fell on the toilet, groaning in pain, convinced she was dying. And in the most bewildering way, too.

After some confusion, she decided she wasn’t dying, although her body felt like it had been pummelled by a giant. There were voices outside, shouts and thuds and the sound of running footsteps. She hauled herself up and wrestled with the door, but it was jammed. She banged on it, calling for help.

It was a long time before help came. Kittu tried to breathe and meditate and ignore the complaints of her body. Nothing was permanent. The body was a shell. There was no undying self. All was unity and all was also plurality and if she could walk the middle path between those two extremes, what was so unnerving about her present situation?

At last, the door was wrenched open by rescuers. Kittu was taken to a hospital with the other survivors—thirty-two in all, out of a total of eighty-four on board. All who survived had been seated near the lavatory—near her. The rear cabin of the plane was the only part that stayed intact after the crash. A miracle, people called it. It was a while before they discovered the second miracle, namely Kittu.

She had been rescued from a plane lavatory, so she was clearly a passenger. But she wasn’t on the passenger manifest. In fact, there was no record of her leaving Toronto at all, and the flight had originated in Zurich. At first, airline staff thought she was lying or confused about her identity. But her identity was confirmed through a combination of biometrics and dental X-rays. She was interviewed on her hospital bed by a series of hatchet-faced men and women, to all of whom she gave the same, honest answers. No, she didn’t know how she got on the plane. No, she was not a terrorist, nor did she support any terrorist ideology. No, she hadn’t left Toronto in over a decade. She couldn’t afford to fly anywhere. Her only trip “abroad” in all her twenty-five years had been over the border to the American side of Niagara Falls, back when she was in college. Yes, she’d dropped out. Yes, she worked as a cashier in a grocery store in downtown Toronto. Pizza? No thanks, she was vegan. Not quite a Buddhist, but she had those leanings.

Family? None.

Never had Kittu been so keenly aware of her brown skin, her “ethnic” looks, the indeterminacy of her name. Kittu Warrier. It sounded so martial. So unlike her, and so unlike the stoic, hardworking immigrant parents who had died when a car crashed into their diner. Talking about them hurt. Still, she answered her interrogators’ questions, and at the end of each session, plucked up the courage to ask one of her own. Could she possibly leave the hospital and see a bit of London?

No, she could not. They seemed affronted that she would even ask. They kept her for another week, during which scientists were called in to conduct various tests on her, placing electrodes on her scalp to measure her brain waves and a helmet to detect magnetic fields. She was subject to an MRI, a CT scan, and a full body ultrasound, as if she might harbour sneaky alien tissue under her skin. At the end of it, she was deported back to Canada without ever having left the hospital, which she thought mean. It wouldn’t have hurt them to let her tour London, would it? After all she had been through! Her injuries may have been minor, but what about the mental trauma of displacement? They ought to have given her compensation instead of treating her like a criminal.

When she landed in Toronto, she was met with the flash of cameras and an excited gaggle of reporters. Despite the hatchet-faced people’s best efforts, her story had leaked to the press.

Kittu had never received so much attention in her life. It was disconcerting, but she made the best of it. She was paid ten thousand dollars to appear for an interview by the CBC—something they assured her they rarely did. On the panel with her were a representative from the Canadian Paranormal Society, a researcher on quantum teleportation, and a priest. After a heated discussion, the anchor dubbed her the Teleporting Woman and surmised that her inexplicable appearance was responsible for the miraculous survival of the passengers in the rear cabin of the plane.

The next day, the hate began. There were plenty of people who disagreed with the anchor and thought that Kittu was responsible for the crash. She broke the laws of physics, screamed the headline of a local rag. Now the laws of physics will break her. The writer was quite pleased with himself over that article. It referenced her veganism, her Buddhist leanings, her lack of friends and family, and hinted darkly of otherworldly forces in eastern religions.

Trolls found out where she worked. Kittu quit her job when someone came asking for an autograph and threw dog faeces at her instead. Ten thousand dollars didn’t go far in Toronto, so she accepted another interview—with Fox News this time. She had some misgivings about it, but they offered ten thousand US dollars. The exchange rates being what they were, this meant over thirteen thousand in Canadian currency. It was too good to pass up. It was better than being a test subject for the weapons companies that had reached out to her, at any rate. Kittu had had enough of being tested, and she had no desire to contribute to the global arms industry.

The Fox News anchor was less kind than the CBC anchor. He accused Kittu of being part of a government conspiracy to distract the public and hide the true cause of the crash. Kittu’s denial sounded weak to her own ears. A conspiracy was more plausible than the truth, after all. If she was a viewer, she wouldn’t have believed herself either.

After the Fox News interview, Kittu decided to lay low for a while. She holed up in her room, refuting the conspiracy theories about her online, fending off shady corporate inquiries, and researching possible causes for what had happened. There was no sensible way to explain it, but there was no sensible way to explain the universe either. Why is existence was a bigger and more unanswerable question than why did I teleport into the lavatory of a falling plane.

Was her physical displacement a mere extension of the mental and spiritual displacement she experienced after her parents’ death? Kittu had never been an extrovert, but while her parents were around, she was part of a community. Working at the diner after school, delivering food to customers, volunteering at the community kitchen, accompanying her parents to the local temple—these were not things she would have admitted to doing of her own free will. Yet, when they were gone, they left giant holes of nothing. Her life was a lacuna, defined by absence.

Until the plane. Clearly, the universe was trying to tell her something. All she had to do was listen and understand.

She only went out for groceries—fully masked—and avoided her neighbours. Happily, everyone else in her multiplex—a rambling old house converted into six studio apartments—had too many issues of their own to pay attention to hers. Apartment A was an alcoholic. B was a retired paramedic with PTSD. C had fled an abusive marriage. D was a penniless violinist who was currently wooing C. E had dissociative identity disorder with three distinct personalities, one of whom claimed telekinetic powers. F was Kittu. She fit right in. The rent was low, and she could have lived there for several years with her neighbours none the wiser.

Unfortunately, the second time she teleported was while walking down the stairs to the front door, right in front of C and D, who had been about to kiss for the first time and thus were staring at her with a mixture of annoyance and embarrassment.

Kittu arrived on the deck of a massive cruise ship in the middle of the sea. After the first few disorienting moments, she removed her mask and cast a covert glance around. People lounged on deck chairs in scanty swimwear, sunbathing. Waiters circulated with trays of colourful fruity drinks. A group of kids was playing with inflatables in a small swimming pool. No one seemed to have noticed her pop into existence. Kittu let out the breath she had been holding. The sun shone bright, the pale blue sky was dotted with cottony clouds, and the sea was a startling turquoise she had only seen in pictures before. Now this was a vacation. She grabbed a drink from a passing waiter, leaned on the railing and sipped, enjoying herself and trying to forget how she had, once again, broken the laws of physics.

Kittu had just finished the drink—a delicious mix of pineapple juice, coconut water, and cranberry juice—when there was a whoosh followed by a terrific bang in the rear of the ship. A missile? Kittu’s heart sank as fire bloomed into the sky and the ship erupted into screams. Was she destined to always teleport into disaster? Could she not have teleported to a white sandy beach on a coral island? Of course, if that happened, it would probably be just before a tsunami hit. As she boarded a lifeboat along with a hundred panicky passengers, she contemplated selling herself as a warning system. All people had to do was evacuate as soon as she appeared—or gather around her—to dramatically improve their odds of survival. Maybe this was what the universe intended for her.

She put forward her theory to the captain of the rescue ship, which arrived five hours later—hours filled with sobs and shrieks and much vomiting over the side of the boat on the part of her fellow passengers. The captain put her babbling down to PTSD and ordered her to be restrained until they docked in Corfu. He had over fifteen hundred survivors to deal with, all in various states of injury and distress, and had no time for the ravings of any one of them.

It took much longer for Kittu’s identity to be confirmed this time, even though she was carrying her wallet, things being more chaotic in Greece than they had been in the UK. On the plus side, she got to spend a few days in sunny Corfu before she was transported to the Canadian embassy in Athens. On the minus side, those days were spent in a holding facility. Why were people so stingy about their scenic spots? Would it reduce their touristy charm if she laid eyes on their churches, their beaches, their cliffs, their ruins, their waterfront taverns? Was she not worthy, simply because she did not have a passport?

In Athens, she explained what had happened to embassy staff, to universal disbelief. Disbelief changed to disapproval when she pulled up her CBC interview on one of their terminals and told them who she was.

This time, there were not only dental records and biometrics to prove her identity, but her health card, her credit card, and the near-hysterical accounts of C and D, who had witnessed her vanish before their eyes. That story had already broken days ago, with news anchors discussing where she might have ended up. When her location—and the link with the cruise ship disaster—was revealed, media outlets exploded. Kittu was a PSYOPs agent. Kittu was an alien. Kittu was a messiah. Kittu was a demonic manifestation of all the evil in the world.

Her return to Toronto this time was fraught. The reporters waiting in the arrival area were more aggressive, the crowds frenzied. Airport security helped her into a pre-paid taxi and washed their hands of her. But the scene at home was no better. Kittu took one look at the crowds milling before her multiplex and begged the driver to take her to the nearest Timmies instead.

At Timmies she donned a surgical mask she’d picked up at the airport and spent five of the twenty dollars embassy staff had given her on a cup of boiling hot steeped tea and a chocolate donut. She sat at a corner table, nibbling the donut beneath her mask, trying to cultivate detachment. The donut was sweet, but it would finish soon. The tea was hot, but it would cool down. She was as changeable, as temporary, as them. Why, then, should she hurt so much?

The theory was correct, but the practice was hard. She was a flawed human, not a bodhisattva. She managed not to cry. She managed to persuade herself that this, too, would pass. When Timmies closed at midnight, she snuck back home and was relieved to find the reporters gone. E let her in. It was the personality that claimed telekinetic powers, which made it easier.

C and D had inadvertently revealed her location, so there was no help for it but to move. But where to? Kittu was unemployed and now unemployable. Her savings were low and the waitlist for subsidized housing was several years long. Just when she thought she would have to pitch a tent in the local park, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service came to her rescue. Someone had belatedly decided she was a Person of Interest.

Kittu was taken to Ottawa, lodged in a budget hotel, and interrogated over the next few days by various CSIS agents. This was a vacation of sorts. The room and board were decent, and she didn’t have to do anything except answer the same questions repeatedly. The best part? No reporters of any kind. She could walk along the river, climb Parliament Hill, or wander around the Farmers’ Market unmolested. To be on the safe side, she carried her passport everywhere, even slipping it into her pajama pocket at night. She mastered the art of the thirty-second shower, lowering the risk of teleporting while nude. She washed her hair fully clothed, head bent over the bathroom sink. And that was how, the third time she teleported, it was with a head full of shampoo and a damp shirt, to the lip of a Level 2 volcano near Iwo Jima.

Kittu took a moment to congratulate herself on her foresight, another to admire the view, and a couple more to take in the signage and the stunned tour group. The sky was clear, the sun was shining, and the sea in the distance was an unruffled blue. There was only one possible disaster that could happen here. “Run!” she bellowed. “The volcano is about to erupt.” She turned and ran, trusting in the sheep-like nature of humans. If one cried wolf, the rest were sure to follow.

Sure enough, the panicked tourists ran after her, several overtaking her down the hill and toward the docks, where they leaped on the boats and shouted for evacuation.

Despite some confusion and delay on the part of the tour operators, the boats managed to pull away before the volcano erupted, launching ash and rock two miles into the air. Kittu coughed, her eyes watering as the boats attempted to outrace the toxic ash cloud.

This time, there were no fatalities, only minor burns. Kittu regarded the survivors with a benign air, in much the way a mother hen might regard her chicks after chasing a fox away. She had found her calling. And she was in Japan. With her passport! She even had a twenty-dollar bill. True, it wouldn’t go very far, but surely it was enough for a couple of snacks and a few turns at those famous claw machines. Tokyo, here I come, she thought gleefully.

Alas, it was not to be. The Japanese erred on the side of caution and deported her as soon as they confirmed her identity. They were polite and implacable. After all, it was unclear whether disasters caused her to appear, or if she caused disasters to appear.

Once was a mistake, twice was cosmic coincidence, three times made it a rule. Teleporting Disaster Fairy Strikes Again, screamed the headlines the next day, which Kittu thought misleading. She hadn’t struck anyone; she’d saved them.

Could she have saved her parents?

This question did not pop into her mind all at once. It slid in like a snake and once lodged, refused to leave, breeding chatty offspring. If she had been in the diner with them at the time, could the car crash have been avoided? If they were still alive, would she have continued being a disappointment to them? Would she still have dropped out of college? Would they still have fought like cats and dogs? Would her mother still be making coconut fish curry and appam every Saturday night? Would Kittu still be teleporting into disasters? Or was the car crash the beginning and end of it all?

Grief due to loss and impermanence was one of the three categories of suffering. Knowing this did not decrease Kittu’s suffering. She was trapped on a wheel, unable to get off, unable to understand what the universe was telling her. Or if it was telling her anything at all. Save everyone, maybe. Save everyone and you get one wish. That would be nice, if only it were true.

The fourth time she teleported was into a concert hall in Berlin fifteen minutes before a planned terrorist attack, which failed because she marched onto the stage, grabbed the mike from a bewildered singer, and ordered everyone to evacuate in an orderly way. Not that she knew what was going to happen, but it was sure to be terrible, going by experience. By the time security nabbed her, people were already rushing out. The gun-toting terrorists who were trying to get in were trampled in the stampede. After this, CSIS agents kept her in a holding cell in the vain hope that reinforced concrete walls would prevent her from causing international incidents.

They didn’t. A week later, Kittu teleported into a school in California just before a mass shooting. She hurried to the principal’s office and told him she’d overheard a student making a bomb threat. While factually incorrect, it did have the result of having the school evacuated. The would-be shooter was arrested outside the school and charged with possession of illegal firearms.

Unlike everyone else, the Americans tried to detain Kittu. She spent a miserable month in an ICE jail before teleporting to a Nepalese mountain village, where her arrival in the middle of a meeting caused considerable excitement and alarm. The elders deduced that conditions were ripe for an avalanche and led everyone down the mountain, minutes before the village was buried in snow.

The trickiest part was always predicting what sort of disaster would occur and how to get everyone out as quickly as possible. Fortunately, English was a global language, so Kittu didn’t have to worry about being understood in most countries. She spent her time back in her holding cell in Ottawa reading up on disaster management, which was more useful than wallowing in existential angst. Or trying to find a pattern to her jumps. Why didn’t she teleport to every major disaster? She scanned the news every day and made copious notes but couldn’t figure out if there was a method to the madness or if it was utterly random. CSIS agents gave her the books and newspapers she wanted and let her go for walks, having given up on the idea that they were confining her in any useful way.

The second last time Kittu teleported was into a Russian naval submarine. To her astonishment, no one recognized her. Or understood her. That was a first. She was arrested as a stowaway by the officer on duty and confined to the brig. She tried to stay calm. She tried to prepare herself for death.

But nothing could have prepared her for what happened next. Which was exactly nothing. The submarine surfaced after a few days, and she was sent to a Moscow jail for foreigners. It took six months for the Canadian embassy to negotiate her release—months that the Russians spent fruitlessly watching her for paranormal tendencies. Kittu practiced yoga and breath control and waited, in vain, to teleport out of jail. Finally, with much disappointment, she was deported back home.

Why did nothing happen on the submarine? Had her presence rendered an impending disaster invalid? A submarine explosion, for instance, had a vanishingly low survival rate, so this was not implausible. More importantly, why had she not teleported out of the Russian jail? Had she broken some sort of rule? Perhaps she would start teleporting again once she was back home. Kittu returned to her holding cell filled with anticipation.

But several months passed and nothing continued to happen. Kittu slipped out of the news and out of the minds of her CSIS handlers. She was an anomaly, best forgotten for the sake of general sanity. One evening, her cell door was left open, and she walked out. No one tried to stop her.

Kittu kept walking. Somewhere in her experience were clues to the secrets of the universe, but all she wanted was a clue to her own existence. Life bred desire and desire bred suffering, but had she not saved enough people by now to earn the merit of a single wish? If not, she might as well walk into Ottawa River.

You know how to swim, said a small, pesky voice in her brain. She brushed it aside. So what? Perhaps the drama of a small, individual disaster would break the deadlock. It wasn’t as if she had enjoyed teleporting, but averting disasters had given meaning to her life. She wouldn’t let it be taken away without a single act of defiance.

She arrived at the beach and took off her shoes, shivering in the autumnal cool. This late, the beach was deserted, the river mirroring the dark gray sky. She walked toward the water’s edge, wincing as pebbles dug into her feet, and stepped in.

The water was cold and heavy, soaking into her jeans. A small current grabbed her legs, making her stumble, but she kept going. Higher the water rose, and higher still, but she didn’t stop, not even when it reached her shoulders. Space had bent around her to save other people. She had to trust that it would bend to save her.

The water rose above her mouth, her nose, her head. Dark, it was so dark inside the water, and so very cold. The last breath escaped her lips. Am I not worth it, she thought. Her eyes and lungs burned. Her mouth opened, of its own accord, to take in air that wasn’t there, and…

The river vanished, replaced by a small, crowded diner. The aroma of rice and coconut curry assailed her nostrils. From a beat-up pair of speakers, an old Bollywood number struggled to be heard above the noisy customers.

“Kittu!” shouted her mother, sliding a tray on the counter. “Table four.”

Kittu swayed and blinked. Her mouth worked, but no words came out.

“I’ll take it.” Her father grabbed the tray. “Kittu, clean Table three.”

Kittu obeyed, her legs moving like an automaton. Ma, Pa, you’re alive. She should be asking what date it was. She should be evacuating the diner. She should be—

There was a tremendous crash outside. After a moment of stunned silence, they all rushed out. Kittu followed her parents, her heart beating like a drum.

A red Honda Civic had crashed into a utility pole. The same car that had, in a different timeline, crashed into her parents’ diner, setting it ablaze. A police car arrived, followed by an ambulance.

“That could have been much worse,” muttered her father. He turned to her. “What are you gawking for? There’s work to be done.”

The world fell into place. Kittu went back in, her heartbeat steadying. She put aside, for now, the burning questions of whether she was dead or alive, asleep or awake, singular or duplicate. As Pa said, there was work to be done.

 

(Editors’ Note: “The Teleporting Disaster Fairy” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 67B.)

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