Mr. Chum’s strange statement got my mind off my other worries. What did he mean? And why did he — just that once — speak without any accent? His simple sentence seemed familiar somehow, yet I could not tell why. I puzzled over it in school and in the coffee shop. I started to ask him once, but I changed my mind when I heard him once more speaking with his Chinese accent to some customer. Then, one day in the library, I recalled the opening of a television series I used to watch with Dad in Napanee: The Outer Limits. As it opened, a man with a thin voice would say, “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling...” Each episode showed creatures that could change their shapes, or robots wanting to be humans, or aliens pretending to be ordinary families. While I mopped and cleaned the coffee shop, I would glance at Mr. Chum, thinking about his remark. A couple of times, he caught me looking at him, and he returned to his newspaper without smiling or anything.
