Volume I
Volume II • Volume III
1. A Ride in the Snow
Looks like you need a lift, said Bert, rolling down the passenger window.
The guy looked like Frosty the fucking Snowman. He must have been walking down this road for an hour, thought Bert. I wonder where he left his car.
Oh, I won’t say no, the man said, climbing up and in. He didn’t dust himself off, even a little bit, and hunks of snow fell everywhere inside the cab. Bert could have been annoyed, that would have been justified, but that was something he was working on, calmness. Besides, he was in the wrong line of work to mind a little snow. He put the plow into gear and rumbled forward, increasing the wiper speed.
How long were you stuck out there? he asked, to be agreeable.
Let me tell you a story, the man said, dripping everywhere. I was born during a blizzard like this one. My mother told me. She’d never shut up about it actually. It was one of those stories she’d tell anyone who would listen. And now look at me, she’s twenty years dead and here I am telling you. Anyway, she’d tried to drive herself to the hospital, the stupid bitch, and jammed the car into a snowdrift. People die that way, especially out in the country where we were. Couldn’t get the car out, couldn’t even open the door, couldn’t barely move either, so big she was with me. I’m not a tall man now but I was a big baby, they tell me. So she’s sitting there for hours, dragged an old blanket over herself and in the end there was nothing for it but to pull her stinking panties off and start pushing. So she squirts me out her hole with all the blood and—and placenta, and all the other stuff and wraps us both up in this sticky blanket until a snowplow driver finally comes by and notices the car and hallelujah we are saved.
Bert stared out the windshield at the road and the chaos of snow. I—I wonder if I know the guy, he said. The driver. I’ve been doing this job a long time. Bert headed down the exit ramp. How old are you, anyway? he asked the stranger. And where do you want me to drop you?
The man said, Let me tell you another story.
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2. The Spat
Of course teenagers were always trouble. Hadn’t she been a terror to her sainted mother? Your sainted mother, repeated Noah, endorsing the irony.
She raised my brothers and me all by herself, no man around to help, she said. This was the sort of conversation she had with her son these days: half-serious, half a shared joke, constructed out of years of earlier conversations. The meaning didn’t lie in the words, but in the tone, the inflections, the calibration of impatience. She never would have let you stay out till one am without calling, she said.
I told you my phone died, said Noah.
Died. And here in this year of our Lord 2024, with nothing like a phone charger, a friend with a phone to borrow, an electrical grid too—
I fell asleep. The movie was boring. How could I call you if I was asleep?
It was—what was it?
What was what?
The movie.
It was called Eraserhead.
You fell asleep during Eraserhead? When she was Noah’s age, she’d watched Blue Velvet twice in a row, hiding in the basement with the sound as low as she could manage, praying her mother didn’t wake up and come ask her what she was doing.
It was in black and white, said the kid. This seemed to be the summation of Noah’s argument. And honestly she wasn’t sure where else to take this talk.
Just do better next time, she told him. This broke the tone, for sure. Prissy, moralistic, too serious. But wasn’t she being serious? She did want him to do better. She knew he was smoking pot (how much pot did you smoke, back in the day?), she supposed he was smart enough to use a rubber with that weird little girl he brought over that one time. And hadn’t she been risky at his age?
She could keep avoiding the issues, or she could call his father and—and what? Tom was likely to make it all worse. Or she could—
What’s for dinner? Noah asked. He saw the look on her face. Never mind, never mind. He went back to his phone.
To get away from him she stepped into the bathroom and locked the door. She looked at herself in the mirror. From behind her left ear, the small thin spiderish creature that lived in her hair poked its mandibled head out. She watched it as it delicately crawled across her earlobe, feeling that familiar old childhood sensation, its tiny jointed legs as soft as cotton threads.
Say it again like you did that one time, it whispered, and I can help. Say, I wish you were dead.
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3. Fee Fi Fo Fum
Now, when it happened, she just walked to a neighbor’s house. Gone were the days of panic and screaming and hiding in the cellar. The cellar was gone anyway, crushed in. Her son was gone too, and both of her daughters. Her husband she had at least been able to bury, along with the pulp and pieces of the other men in the village, after they had bravely sallied forth and died at the base of the mountain.
These days they built their homes with detachable roofs. It wasn’t as weatherproof, but there was less danger of structural failure in the walls when He lifted them off and tossed them aside. On this occasion she heard Him coming, which wasn’t always the case. Sometimes scouts could see Him walking out from the clouds at the top of the peak, but just as often He simply appeared in the fields, and started foraging before they could prepare.
What preparation, she thought? as she walked down the road to Sofiya’s house. Some of the mothers still put their children into the underground bunkers, but He always seemed to find them. Smelled them, she supposed. The fields around here were potted with holes, filled with splintered wood and pulverized water jugs. Sometimes a woman forgot herself, and tried to stab Him in the ankle with a kitchen knife. These women He mostly ignored. As long as He plucked one child, screaming, into the sky, He seemed content. He would depart, and not return for a week or a month or an hour.
When the railroad had been working, the next station had been three days’ travel. Now the tracks were twisted and rusted, stretching as often straight up into the sky as they did along the ground. And anyway she had no confidence that His kin were not everywhere in this country.
She took the opportunity to pick some wild flowers to decorate her front door. A glance back revealed His curious fingers poking fruitlessly through her home, smashing her last remaining chairs, she supposed, her grass-and-timber roof held carelessly in His left hand. As she watched, He let it fall to earth. Good, she thought, it seemed intact.
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4. The Neighborhood Fair
Turnout was low, probably because of the weather. Overcast and fifties in July! There’s your global warming for you, said dad.
Thanks, Obama! chirped Jacob. This was the ritual response. But dad barely acknowledged it. It was pretty boring. There was a booth advertising some sort of telephone company. Here was one for the neighborhood association. He’d already gotten his pop and mini-donuts and he supposed he could jump into the bouncy castle, but there was something queasy going on in his stomach and he could imagine bouncing, bouncing, bouncing and then blam! puke everywhere, on the walls, on the bouncy floor, on the other kids, bits of puke spraying and bouncing…
He decided to think of something else. He took dad’s hand. A bicyclist zipped by, kind of close, he might hit somebody if he kept doing that. Dad was talking to a lady in the architect’s booth. Why would dad be talking to an architect? Was he building a house? Were they moving? Jacob didn’t want to move. He liked their house. He tugged on dad’s hand. Dad introduced him to the lady, whose name was Alice. She looked a little like mom.
They sat for a while in the beer tent. Jacob kicked the table until dad told him to stop. Usually a beer tent was crowded and hot, remembered Jacob the street fair expert, but today it was cold inside, colder even than out of the street. A few groups of men huddled together on the far side of the tent. Something shot out from under their feet and disappeared behind a stack of kegs. Jacob jumped in his seat.
Something the matter? asked dad. He’d hardly touched his beer.
Just saw a cat over there, he said. It scared me a little.
A spring-loaded cat, said dad. That was their term for anything startling.
Back on the street, he saw another cat dart behind the Internet fiber booth. Dad was arguing with the hot dog guy.
Listen, fuck you, it’s perfectly fresh, said the hot dog man.
It’s gray. Look at it, it’s gray. And don’t swear in front of my son.
Fuck you! The guy grabbed the hot dog out of dad’s hands and flung it behind him. Ketchup and relish spattered on the laundromat’s window. The people inside turned to look. To Jacob they looked like they were half-asleep.
Come on, Jake. Dad tugged on his arm, hard! hard enough to hurt a little. Ow!
Oh, don’t be a baby! Dad pulled him down the street. Jacob looked back at the hot dog man. A cat was eating the discarded hot dog. Jacob stopped, ignoring dad’s pulling. No, that wasn’t a cat. It was nothing like a cat.
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5. The Splinter
Grandfather’s house was old, and she’d been warned not to run. There were hard wooden corners that could take your eye out, and here and there an exposed nail. Tetanus was a word that lurked in her imagination like a goblin. So it was her own fault that she got the splinter from the basement handrail. It hurt! She cried to mother and father but neither one could reach it with the tweezers. It was deep under the fleshy pad at the base of her thumb. The tweezing made it worse. She tried to make a fist, saying, don’t, don’t, but making the fist made it hurt even more.
The doctor couldn’t get it out either. He couldn’t even find it. Maybe it had already worked its way out. She said no, no it hadn’t. It still hurt. Mother insisted on an x-ray, but nobody saw anything.
Soon the tiny wound in her hand healed and the pain receded almost all the way. When she was twelve years old grandfather died and the palm of her hand swelled up and went red and ached for three days. When Richard Bradley broke her heart at the homecoming dance she cried all night and felt like there was something inside her hand that was crying also. Her mother died of breast cancer and the thing in her hand started struggling to move. She thought it wanted to relocate to her breast, out of sympathy or malignancy she didn’t know.
At thirty she had a miscarriage. The wound in her hand started bleeding. She told Steven she had accidentally stabbed herself with one of her own fingernails. She knew he thought it was intentional self-harm and she let him believe that. Some years later, it began reacting to the television news. A bad election result, and the splinter in her might start trembling in excitement. A war in Eastern Europe, and her hand puffed up and a colorless fluid began expressing from beneath her nails. She made a tourniquet, tight as she could with one hand, and chopped her hand off with a meat cleaver, but right away she knew it wasn’t enough.
By the time they let her out of the ward she could feel her phantom hand just as sensibly as ever. Sometimes it was at the end of her arm, sometimes it was ten feet across the room, but the splinter, whatever it was, remained her constant companion for the rest of her short life.
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6. A Task for Goldenrod
As soon as Marco left, she rose from bed and walked to the window. She unshrouded the birdcage, and Goldenrod woke with a chirp. She took him from his cage and placed him on her shoulder. She opened the window. Goldie knew what to do: he fluttered outside and followed Marco down the sidewalk.
She took a bath, leaving the bathroom door open. Before long Goldie returned, landing lightly on her shoulder. She cocked her head.
He has money, Goldie whispered. He’s not a golddigger. He has a big loft in Tribeca. No wife that I could see, but of course a man like that has girlfriends.
I’m not worried about girlfriends, she told him, stroking his feathers.
The next day, Goldie’s report on Andrew was less auspicious: Divorced, I think. Long Island address. The next day, Goldie’s report on Andrew was less auspicious: Divorced, I think. Long Island address. He stopped at a diner and ate alone. She frowned. Andrew had been promising, and he had such a smile, but she had a lifestyle to maintain. She could perhaps mold him a little, prod him this way and that, push him into shape. But that was tedious work—maybe better to stick with Marco or one of the others.
She sent Goldie out to spy on Bertram, and Marco again, and a new fellow named Francis whom she’d met at 21, who had a sweet smile but uninterpretable eyes. Goldie took a long time with this last one, and she paced in front of the open window for hours, worrying and waiting. When the bird finally returned after midnight it looked done in: feathers grimy, muscles trembling.
She took Goldie to her breast, placing him under her robe to warm his chilly body. Soon he calmed, her strong heartbeat relaxing him. He peeked his head up to look her in the face. He seemed to want to tell her something, but a shudder ran through him and he shook his beak from side to side. She wouldn’t press him on it.
Men! he chirped. I don’t know what you see in them.
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7. The Heliomagus
Appointments were rare and expensive. To be admitted into the presence of the Heliomagus was a rare privilege, and for those to whom it was granted, the restrictions were ironclad and grave: not a word of what passed in the presence of the Heliomagus, under pain of the most dire curses and nondisclosure agreements.
When his servant ushered in a client, blindfolded, hushed and reverential, and sat the client in the hard chair on the far side of the huge mahogany desk, when the servant whipped the blindfold off with a practiced flourish, what the client saw was the Heliomagus in his beautiful Italian suit, his only occult marker the small solar pin on his lapel. The desk was bare except for a lamé-shrouded object, spherical in shape. A crystal ball? The Heliogabalus would chat with the client, not to put them at their ease exactly, while the servant brought the tea laced with a mild hallucinogen.
When the Heliomagus deemed it time, he would slide the lamé drapery from the object, letting it pool at the base of the neck. It was the severed head of a man: his black hair in oiled curls, long black beard streaked with white, his eyes closed, but the client would see the eyelids twitch a bit, as if disturbed by the sudden light. The client, at this point, would recoil, but the Heliomagus would soothe them. This is Balthazar, he would explain, a most potent mage of Ancient Persia. An ancestor of mine.
Eventually the question would be asked: One question, one answer, one hundred thousand dollars, this was the agreement. Will the investment succeed? Will the police find out? Does my wife love another? One question, yes or no, but the Heliomagus had never, never to anyone’s knowledge, been wrong. He removed the top of Balthazar’s head and rummaged his fingers around in his bloody brain, manipulating the hidden wires therein to cause the mouth to twitch and the eyes to roll behind their lids, to find the answer the client most needed. (Balthazar was an old drunk the Heliomagus had spotted on the streets of Boston, whom he had murdered for his marvelous beard.)
Sweating but exhilarated, the client would depart, and the Heliomagus would wipe his fingers and light a cigarette. But this day, after the woman with the cheating spouse had left, he hesitated and turned Balthazar’s head around. The eyes, open, stared at him. The Heliomagus was afraid, but in the end he formulated his last question.
Will I—? he asked.
Balthazar said, No.
💀
8. The Midlife Crisis
It’s just a midlife crisis!
It’s not a midlife crisis, said the Devil.
I never meant to cheat on my wife!
You absolutely meant to cheat on your wife. You did cheat on your wife.
What do you know, anyway? This guy was making Carl mad.
Keep your voice down, said the Devil. This is a public bar.
Are you some kind of blackmailer?
Yes.
Well, you’re out of luck. I don’t have money. The most of, what I got, it’s tied up in retirement.
You won’t need it.
Now just a minute.
You won’t need it, Carl, insisted the Devil. You’ll be dead by sixty.
I’m only fifty-eight!
You’re fifty-nine. You lie about even the most trivial things.
Who are you? I don’t deserve this kind of third degree.
I think they’ll call it first degree, Carl. Once they find her.
Carl went quiet. The Devil poked him in the shoulder with a sharp fingernail. Carl twitched away. I’ll suck you off in the bathroom, suggested Carl.
No thank you, Carl. That wouldn’t be a healthy way to start your last year of life.
I wish you’d stop saying that.
Do you see that man at the end of the bar, drinking alone?
Yes.
He wants to kill his wife too. Why don’t you go over, have a word with him, give him some pointers.
What.
Go on now.
Carl stood up, wondering at himself. He crossed to the man at the bar and sat down next to him. They spoke quietly for a moment. Then the man stood and rushed out the front door. The bartender asked Carl something. Carl shrugged and finished off the last of the man’s beer, then returned to the Devil.
What did he say?
You saw. He got freaked and split.
The Devil was commiseratory. You’ll get better at it. You’re just starting out.
I won’t have much time to meet new friends if I’m going to be dead in a year!
You might not think so, said the Devil. But you won’t lack for company.
Well, aren’t you the sinister motherfucker, said Carl.
Mmm, said the Devil, we should probably talk about that too.
💀
9. The Grand Style
And here, of course, you are again, in this fine Joshua Reynolds piece—look how playful your expression is as you play with the duke’s children (from his first wife, you see, a charming woman by all accounts but frail). Blessed with a fine gift of a stepmother though, said the countess, coy.
Catherine had misheard. She looked a bit closer at the painting, out of politeness. She supposed the woman in the silk brocade bore a resemblance to herself, but was the countess actually suggesting some sort of ancestry? That would make Catherine and the countess… cousins of some sort, she supposed, indulging for just a moment in a fantasy of ancient wealth and privilege. But she should rejoin the others now: countess, this has been lovely, but could you direct me back to the group?
The countess must not have heard. This one over here you might like even more, she said, unslipping the velvet rope and leading Catherine onward with a light touch on her shoulder. My husband would say it was second-rate, but I think you can see the resemblance more clearly. I think Reynolds is very fine with his portraits, but in the groups he gets a little sloppy. The relative positioning of all the faces, I think it is. A little strained, unnatural.
Catherine smiled and looked at the new painting, then recoiled in shock.
It can have that effect sometimes, said the countess.
But it’s me! Catherine almost shouted. It’s exactly me! Who painted this?
Alas, a poor artist whose name is lost in time, explained the countess. He must have had access to the finest of society, though. Look at the gown, the sash around the waist—almost eastern.
Who—who was the woman?
Well, it’s you, my dear. Don’t you remember? The countess reattached the velvet rope.
I—don’t remember.
The countess was sympathetic. It’s all right, dear. Why should you? You died so young.
💀
10. Gnaeus Paris, Transfuga
When Caesar destroyed Pompey’s army at the battle of Pharsalus, Gnaeus Paris decided he had had enough of Rome. Hiding under the carcass of a horse until sundown, he snuck away and headed north. He stripped off his armor but his gladius he kept, using it the next morning to kill a peasant of roughly his size and steal his clothing. He made his way to the coast and joined the crew of an actuaria bound for the land of the Sarmatians, where he stayed for twelve years working as a mercenary.
When he was forty years old he lost his left eye to a Dacian falx and once again he had had enough. He crossed the Tanaïs river and walked east, stealing and robbing as he went.
Footsore on a rainy night he pushed open the door of a dirty hovel and slew the man inside. In the morning he woke to the sight of the man’s widow, an old crone, crouched in a corner, staring at him. Why had she not slit his throat as he slept?
Awake, man of Rome! she said, patting her toothless mouth with gleeful fingers. Sitting up from the filthy pallet he took up his gladius and beheaded her. Very little blood, but the head rolled round and round the dirt floor. The old man’s body was nowhere to be seen.
That night, ten miles away, he slept under a fig tree after gorging himself on its fruits and an hour later he woke with the shits. He voided his slops cramping among the roots, and in the branches above him the crone chortled again: Awake, awake, you man of Rome!
Gnaeus Paris ran. He lost his footing and fell down a rocky slope, impaling his left leg on his gladius. When he tried to stand, cold hands dragged him down into the bloody mud. His empty eye socket was clogged with muck. His teeth chewed earth.
The man he had killed in the hovel said, Sleep now, boy of the west, be at your ease. From far above, the goddess watched them with all the emotion of a starless sky.
💀
11. The Roach King
When Kevin Peters and Todd Beery created the Roach King, they had no idea how successful he would be. From a throwaway villain in their comic book series Techbro Teens, the Roach King (tormented, philosophical, imperious and cruel yet somehow noble) spun off into his own series, with his own stable of antagonists (the Fog, AI Al, the Ant Agonist). Soon there were animated series, Funko figurines, Roach cosplay at all the conventions.
Hasbro licensed him for toys, Asmodee bought the board game rights. Warner Brothers launched an extensive media blitz, tying the King in with their existing properties. The Roach King met Superman. The Roach King was interviewed on Jimmy Fallon (via Zoom). The Roach King sang with Jack White. The Roach King met Huckleberry Hound. Inevitably, new Kafka adaptations. McDonald’s launched their Roach Meal, with toy inside. Children shrieked.
In my neighborhood, on the corner of Lake and Lyndale, the Roach King dominated a billboard. He stared malignly across the street at the baby in the pro-life ad.
Roach King graffiti. Roach King street gangs. On Halloween all the trick or treaters wobbled their antennae and hissed We will take it all, Techbro Teens, we will take it all, in the Roach King’s Madagascan accent.
Warner Brothers hit on a novel approach to raise awareness of the Roach King. Every time you turned on a screen there was a chance that a digitally animated cockroach would scuttle across it. I was watching Sesame Street with my daughter and roaches kept pouring out from Oscar’s can. Roaches scuttled across Wolf Blitzer and invaded the news covering Gaza.
I watched some reruns of The X-Files last night. Do you remember that one from the third season? Yeah, about cockroaches. At one point they play a little game on the audience, and a cockroach seems to crawl over the actual TV screen. Sure got a jump out of me the first time I saw it back in the ’90s, believe me. This time though, I knew it was coming and it didn’t bother me, though two of three of the new Warner Brothers cockroaches chased after it a moment later, and I thought to myself, man, I’m getting pretty tired of this. One level of roach can be artistic; a second one surprising, but a third is just depressing.
Hiss hiss, yes, I hear you. Very original. Very funny.
🪳
12. Coronation Day
She’d been in the bookstore many times, but had never noticed that little nook before. It smelled of mildew, but the spines of the books seemed unbroken, the covers clean and unmarred. She browsed, growing more excited by the moment.
The book was surprisingly affordable. Barely two days’ of skipped meals. Back in the studio, with the moonlight coming through the skylight, she lit a lamp and began to read. After some time, her eyes began to feel the strain. She rubbed them, setting the book down for a moment. There was a man sitting in her other chair. He was young, good-looking, and wore a yellow suit.
Don’t let me interrupt you, said the man.
Cassie returned to her reading. In the morning she was elated. Such good news! She descended the five flights to the street and walked to the Polish guy’s shop and bought a pistol. Hiding it in her jacket pocket she walked thirty blocks to the park and arrived just as the mayor was taking the stage. The stage was rich with bunting and flags. A line of schoolchildren stood shyly as the mayor gave them each a medal in turn. Cassie felt a wave of indignance. She stepped through the crowd and began firing.
When she was out of bullets some men tackled her. One of them bashed her face against the sidewalk until Cassie felt her nose break. In the cell, after the doctor had seen her, they told her that she’d killed a boy and wounded a young woman. And she’d killed the mayor.
Cassie’s black eyes shone with joyful tears. Through her imperious broken teeth she howled in majesty and awe. Bring me my crown and queens! she commanded. Now I am king of America!
💀
13. The AM Commute
By nature he wasn’t a morning person, but what’re you gonna do? The commute took thirty-five minutes if he left at seven, but twice that long if he left at eight. There was something fresh about the city that early in the morning, he said, on the days he felt awake enough to try to convince himself. The light, the morning haze maybe, the relative emptiness of the highway. As a teenager he had loved staying awake through the night and spreading his arms to the dawn. His pagan phase.
The AT+T building, the Ford tower, those concave apartment buildings that looked like stalks of celery. There hadn’t been downtown construction of any note for fifteen years. The skyline was as static as the Rocky Mountains. The big pole with the car and the mannequin on it. The two weird domes that looked like tits. In the evening he put it all behind him. Casey would already be home when he got there, in his bedroom with his games. Laura worked late on Wednesdays, so Sam made dinner. He ate with Casey and set a plate aside for Laura. At eleven pm she arrived, kissed him goodnight, and ate in the kitchen.
Next week: the AT+T building, the Ford tower, the black girders of the LRT, and a new, tall building that had never been there before. A proud, almost arrogant thing, tiered like a Sumerian ziggurat but taller, oh, very tall, he explained to his coworkers that morning, why didn’t I ever notice it before? Overfamiliarity, they said. You can get into a sort of trance on the freeway. But I swear it was never there before, he insisted, to his own incredulity. Well, what was there yesterday? asked Anna, stirring her tea. He couldn’t remember.
On the ride home he kept looking dangerously in the rear view mirror, but nothing, just a confusion of winter twilight. Dark at 4:45 in the afternoon. At least, he said, he forced that extra hour on himself in the mornings.
The next day the building was still there, as solid and stubborn as every other element of the skyline. You can’t just construct a skyscraper overnight, he reminded himself. This isn’t The Jetsons.
He worked. He came home. He couldn’t sleep. Laura slept, he sat up in bed. He wouldn’t disturb her by turning on a light. If he still smoked, he would’ve gone through a pack, he imagined.
He left before dawn. Halfway down the highway, the sun rose and backlit the skyline. In the flat light it all looked two-dimensional. The sun rose up the length of the ziggurat. The top was still embedded in the dark of the sky.
He could imagine pulling over and running up the side of the building, reaching the roof just as the sun topped the tallest of the city’s obelisks. He took the offramp, three exits early.
At nine-thirty that night Casey realized he was hungry and went downstairs. Mom wouldn’t be home for a while yet and dad hadn’t made dinner. Annoyed, he cooked himself a box of mac and cheese and brought it back to his room.
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14. Louis the Lurker
Between midnight and 1am was best. People come home from the bar, they forget to lock the doors, they leave their purse, they leave their phones in the car door. It didn’t take much to break a window and grab shit, but he didn’t like to do that if he didn’t have to. Simpler just to glide by on his bike, try the door handles and only bother with the ones that opened.
Honestly it was a little exasperating. It’s 2024, people! Have you not been paying attention these last couple of years? They’re lucky he wasn’t a car thief, and there were plenty of those. Kids, like twelve and thirteen, they just lurk, and people all over the place leave their cars running while they run back into their apartments for something they forgot, and they come back and their car’s gone. People! I mean really. Louis shook his head and tossed the glove box. Nothing much, but he took a decent-looking pair of women’s gloves that might fit Emily. He scrambled under the seats, found some pennies, whatever, but he’d taken too long here anyway, so he quick hopped back on the bike and moved over a couple blocks.
Down to Bryant, past 26th. The side streets were quieter, but he’s a little more conspicuous. 28th Street had more traffic, and a bike lane even. They built city infrastructure for him! Who said government didn’t function? (When was the last time you voted? Emily had asked. They had their laughs.)
Locked, locked, locked. A Kia! Man, they really were lucky he didn’t do cars. The little Japanese thing had an unlocked driver’s side door. He sat down and did a once-over. Nothing obvious. He could try the back seat. Let’s see what’s in the glove box first. Dark in here, but he’s not going to turn on the dome light. Registration, some kind of pills, which he pocketed. Melted Hershey’s Kisses—people are pigs. At least he didn’t get any on his hands. Something soft and furry, like a kitten. Maybe a scarf or something.
The furry thing crawled over the back of his hand. It felt like being poked with blunt toothpicks. The thing scampered under his sleeve and up his arm.
Louis fell out of the car, slapping at his right arm. But now the thing was rounding his shoulder and making for the center of his chest. He sat on the ground, kicking himself further away from the car. He tore his shirt.
The thing didn’t react until he tried to pull it free. Its body was shapeless and soft, but its claws were no joke. It felt like they were buried inches deep, maybe even encircling his sternum. There was no blood though, at least that he could see.
Eventually, for lack of a better idea, he pulled his shirt closed and picked up his bike. He walked it a few blocks. The thing seemed to be asleep, hanging from his body like a sloth. He calmed down a little. Emily would know what to do. He felt okay to bike home. The thing on his chest maybe liked the feeling of motion. It began making a satisfied cooing sound and absently itched away at his ribs, like something wrapped up in a pleasant dream.
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15. Garryowen
Garryowen was a terror. By day he worked as a foreman in the leatherworks, and no one denied he worked as hard as any man. And he worked his men hard too, and they hated him, but they still stood him drinks on Friday and Saturday nights. It didn’t always protect them from his fists, but maybe it encouraged him to batter them a little more lightly. And after the pubs closed he was great fun, it had to be said, taking us down the street to Mistress Shan’s, breaking the streetlamps with his well-aimed stones, pounding dents in the mistress’s door and showing that foreign lad who worked there what was meant in Limerick by keeping the peace. The girls would sob.
He was never found at mass on Sundays. He had no wife or children. His people, it was said, had come from Galway, though no one knew them. On Sundays he went poaching on the landlord’s estate: coneys mostly, but he was once seen carrying a good-sized buck over his shoulders, and he was seen eating dried jerky in the pub for months after.
They hanged him eventually, for the rabbits, but he broke apart two of the soldiers who arrested him so badly that they died before he did. I wish we could hang the man three times, said Major Wilcocks. We all attended the hanging, it was a grand old day. Some of the boys got weepy—ah we’ll never see his like again—but that was cactha and I told them so. We were better off without the brute and I was old enough by then to know we would certainly see his like again. Me, I raised a pint to the rabbits.
Now after a time they said he came back, a spectre of a man, doing these fine big ghostly things, but I’ve never seen him. I’ve haunted this pub for two hundred years now, and I would know. No man nor woman in Limerick ever named him a friend, nor would’ve ever invited him back to the land of breath, and if you ask me that old boy has been poaching on his sulfurous father’s estate since the day he died.
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16. The Air Raid
The mosquito net only slowed it down for a moment. It tore through it with its strong front legs, like a pair of scissors, and circled the sleeping man. Opium-dazed, the man dreamed of buzz bombs. He manned the AA gun and valiantly defended his dream while the insect, steel-sleek and precision-engineered, circled and circled, descending toward his face.
First it crawled inside his ear. The man didn’t even twitch, even when the thing extended its proboscis and punctured his eardrum. But nothing to drink here. It stabbed and retracted three more times in irritation.
Across the cheek, upon a throbbing vein by his hairline. In goes the proboscis, hardened metal, stronger than a hypodermic needle, through the vein and deep into the bone. The insect tried to drink, again found little. The man turned over in his sleep and the insect freed itself, wings iridescent in the morning sunlight, spreading micro-rainbows across the damp sheets.
It circled, then settled on the left eyelid. Beneath the lids, the dreams twitched back and forth, back and forth: the V1 engines had cut off and he knew that there would be a few moments of silence before the explosions. The thing drove its needle through the lid, through the pupil and into the jelly of the eye. Ah, here it was! It stirred and stirred, deflating the eye and swirling the vitreous humor like a pot of soup. It sucked the eyeball dry and moved onto the next one. The man, collapsing, dreamed of rubbled buildings.
When his wife found him she screamed at the sight: perforated by ten thousand needle-pricks, dry as dust, blind and deaf, with a mute tongue like a used emery board, still weakly alive and trying to disentangle himself from the sheets. Almost unnoticed, the metal thing buzzed past her, no bigger than a fingernail, gleaming. If she registered it at all in her horror, she might have thought it was the smallest drone she’d ever seen, or a BB shot from the gun of a malevolent child.
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17. Gymnasion
Seven young ladies, all undressed. From between the branches he watched them circle the pond. Their discarded gowns were draped over the stones, and their lovely feet moved among grass and stone and silk. They circled the pool seven times, singing soft. They stopped to join hands and gaze in adoration at the moon, reflected in its fullness in the water.
Hekate Einodia, Trioditis, lovely lady, solitary goddess, hail! In stags rejoicing, huntress, nightly seen, drawn by bulls. Queen! On mountains wandering, hear we suppliants who with holy rites thy power revere!
The women entered the pool and swam. They kissed each other and ran fingers through each others’ hair.
He ejaculated onto the ground.
One of the girls turned to look—had he made a sound? no—and then turned back to join her sisters. He watched for some time longer but found his interest had waned. He stopped massaging his soft cock, adjusted his perizoma, and returned home.
Some minutes later his seed sprouted, and seven small gentlemen, featureless but well-formed, each as tall as a thumbnail and as pearlescent as the moon, crawled forth from the soil. In a moment they had taught themselves to walk, and then with mouthless voiceless cries of joy they ran down to the waterside, where the ladies received them with smiles and applause. When they reached the water they dived in, and dissolved entirely, in their dying bringing the glorious gift of life to the fertile pool and its expectant inhabitants.
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18. First Contact
X-14a fucking hated X-14b. For one thing the little bastard was younger by about 50 million years, but had it shown a goddamn gigaton of respect to its older sibling? It had not. X-14b was a punk, tiny, a little nothing of a planet, rocks for brains, but it was a heavy dense motherfucker for all that. Hoarding an atmosphere, hogging the best orbit—not too hot or cold—seasons, even! Motherfucking seasons! And X-14b had built up a pretty little collection of life, or proto-life, or whatever, swimming everywhere under the surface of its frozen seas. All X-14a had were those microscopic silicate things flitting around in the lowest gas layer, which X-14a, it was embarrassing to admit, wasn’t even sure were lifeforms at all, and not, maybe, just part of its own intellectual processes: the movement of its mind. Stray thoughts.
When the earth-things jumped in from hyperspace, X-14a recognized an opportunity. It played dumb until the humans had extracted all their samples, and then began to batter their ship with radiation and unpredictable storms, pulling them down through the clouds, further into the gravity well. Oh, they panicked! Bouncing around like stray ions. But soon they found the gravitational fluctuation X-14a had left for them, and performed the necessary calculations for escape.
The near-orbit engines pushed the ship agonizingly upward through the layers of atmosphere, creating in their wake a trail of superheated plasma three thousand miles long. When the ship, finally free, made the jump into hyperspace, the flaming column dilated along the axis of travel and shot forward, now a microwave laser 230 million miles long, which struck X-14b slightly north of the equator and vaporized a third of its oceans.
Fuck you! shouted X-14a along certain wavelengths. Fuck you!
Man, what the fuck? asked X-14b, waking up.
Fuck you, asshole! shouted X-14a. Fuck all your life! Life is an asshole!
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19. That Night and the Next Morning
Afterward, she used the bathroom, cleaned herself up, and came back to bed. He was already asleep. She watched him for a few minutes. Had they discussed him staying the night? It was okay, though. He slept weird: flat on his back, arms parallel to his torso. His cock trailed at a diagonal across his left leg. In the morning she supposed it would be stuck to her sheet. Ah, it wouldn’t hurt him. Everything would need to be washed in any case. His chest rose and fell. His body was almost hairless. Did he… wax everything? Was he a swimmer maybe? He was too bulky to be a swimmer, too heavy, she remembered. She considered waking him up, but nah, too tired for another screw.
In the morning she had to piss again. Something uncomfortable down there, nothing serious, she was sure. She brushed her teeth and had to piss again. I’m an old man with a dicky prostate, she thought. She put on a robe and returned to the bedroom. Some sort of smell in here, sour, so she drew the drapes a little and cracked a window. The morning light shone across the bed, thick and white. His body almost gleamed. The sheet rose tall above his groin, like a yurt. At least it wouldn’t take much to get him going again.
She came back to bed. His body was soft; her fingers sank deep into his shoulder like she was kneading dough. She recoiled, pulling her sticky fingers free. She scrambled from the bed. The sheet caught on his cock and stretched it across the bed and down to the floor. From head to foot he was white and soft. The cock-thing slowly retracted from the tangle of sheets and diminished back to a reasonable size. His chest rose up and down with his soundless breathing.
She stayed in the corner watching him for an hour, by which time his body had begun to darken, forming a sort of crust. When she noticed that he had an erection again she decided to leave. On her way to the door he opened his eyes and reached for her but she jerked free, pulling off three of his fingers, which scrabbled like helpless grubs on the hardwood floor.
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20. The Blank
I first noticed it in March of that year, when we all stopped going anywhere for a while. I’d always thought of myself as a pretty smart guy, good imagination, rich inner life, that sort of thing. But then that month, when we were alone, I’d catch myself sitting there, and I’d ask myself, what had I been thinking about? I’d been thinking about something but I’d forgotten what it was. But after a while I realized: I wasn’t forgetting. I just hadn’t been thinking about anything at all. Is that normal? I wasn’t thinking about even, I don’t know, work stuff, or what to have for dinner, or fantasizing about fucking Margot Robbie or whatever. I’d just been sitting there, a total blank, for who knows how long.
It affected my work. Now there I was for sure forgetting things. I’d worked there for over a decade, some things should be easy, automatic. But what was that email again? What was that acronym for? So work was getting harder. But even when I wasn’t working it was bad. Forgetting the names of old friends, for instance. Okay, I wasn’t seeing anybody in person except my wife, but that’s not an excuse. People were calling this sort of thing smooth pandemic-brain, but it wasn’t a joke to me. I’m not sure it had anything to do with the pandemic, even. In my case, this is just my theory, it had been happening to me for a long long time, but I didn’t notice before, because when you leave your house, even to just take a bus to work or go buy a cup of coffee, there’s some sort of stimulus to keep your thoughts running. They’re not organized, it’s all trivial stuff, but at least it’s operating. Take that away, and I… wasn’t operating.
They fired me. Then it got really bad. My inner monologue vanished completely. I was all quiet inside. I slept a lot. I spent hours playing little phone games. My wife had to remind me of things, all the time. That restaurant closed, don’t you remember? We took that trip to Santa Fe, don’t you remember? No, I didn’t remember. I don’t remember. I’d say my wife’s name to myself, over and over and over, every night before I fell asleep, terrified that I’d wake up and not know who she was.
Quarantine was long over but I still didn’t do anything. Why see people? I could hardly remember any history with anyone. Turns out affection is basically just memory and habit. Some old friends died. I felt nothing. I watched every episode of Kitchen Nightmares and forgot them all the moment they were over.
I wonder, will I forget to breathe one day?
Go see a doctor, she keeps saying. With what money, I ask. We can afford it, she says. Okay, okay. She thinks I’m procrastinating, but it’s not that. I’m just waiting until I forget to care.
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21. The Garbage Man
Take the garbage out!
Don, you don’t have to yell at the kid.
The kid took the garbage out. The chute never worked and of course the elevator was broken, so after going down six floors he would take his time coming back up the stairs. There would be somebody around to play with down in the street, even a stranger would do. The kid made friends easily. Mom disapproved, but dad didn’t mind. In his child mind the kid was forming impressions, connections and patterns. He was deciphering the codes of his parents and he had come to believe that his father was composed of rigid ideas of work and less-articulated ideas of freedom—wouldn’t he (meaning dad) like to play in the streets and alleys with other little boys! But mom worried. If something happened to him people would call her a bad mother.
He lifted the lid. There was a man in the garbage can. He wore a sort of shiny black pajamas and his face was covered by a mask with zippers over the mouth and eyes. He sat up when the garbage bag fell on him. The kid ran back up the stairs.
For the next few days he forgot to take the garbage out until he knew the city had emptied the cans in the alley. So he waited until the next time dad yelled and then he took the garbage out. He flung off the garbage can lid and stepped back, clutching the trash bag to his chest. The can was empty of garbage but the man was still there, and he stood up and began to climb out of the can. The kid ran up the stairs.
You’ll be happy about this, said dad the next morning. They’ve fixed the garbage chute. The kid looked over at the kitchen wall, where from behind the garbage chute door, held open by gloved fingers, steel-zippered eyes evaluated the kid and their family.
Mom said, look who’s come to visit.
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22. After the Vacation
The Orange Ramp was very convenient. They had discussed the merits of taking an Uber to and from the airport, but they’d only be gone a few days. The way it worked out was, somewhere around four or five days and the cost of the parking was about equal to two rides plus tip. Plus it relieved them of a little anxiety knowing they could get themselves there and back on their own. And even more, it was an electric car, and charging stations were available on the ramp’s top floor, so they’d even have a fully charged car for the trip home.
Portland was a good time, they saw a lot of friends, but the budget flights had been a little tiring and they both thought they were coming down with colds. Not covid, hopefully, they’d both dodged that so far, but it wasn’t to be supposed that their luck would continue indefinitely.
Someone had unplugged the car from the charge port, but that was to be expected. She had told him that the airport attendants made periodic rounds to see which cars could be unplugged. But when they had dropped the luggage in the trunk and settled in the front, the battery showed just a quarter-charge.
They must have unplugged it right after we got here! Carrie was indignant.
They could plug the car in here and sit for a while, but these weren’t fast-charging stations and that would take a while. It was already 11:30 and she did have to work in the morning. Eventually it was decided that there was probably enough charge to get home and then to her office in the morning, where she could charge throughout the day.
We shouldn’t leave if you feel we might run out, said Patrick. They had this sort of conversation a lot.
It’s fine, she said, and started the car. They had driven down through the ramp and out onto the deserted highway before the man in the back seat woke up.
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23. Sister Theresa
It was sacrilegious, Theresa thought, vomiting in the toilet. Jesus, it looked like a crime scene. She felt ashamed at her choice of words. Am I a teenager, she asked herself, to curse all the time, and at a moment like this. But it was obscene: The tiny clumps of holy wafer floating in a foamy sea of pink wine and stomach bile. It seemed like quite a lot. She had only taken the one wafer and the one sip of wine. She wasn’t a gulper. It wasn’t like she’d drained the chalice. The rest of it: tea, she supposed, and whatever was left in her stomach from the night before.
You always feel better after you puke. But the following Sunday it happened again. Jesus Christ, she thought, not this again. The matter was even thicker this time, redder, the white lumps more varied in texture, some brownish and hard. Is that blood? No, no, not—well, not her blood. Was she allergic to the corpus of our Lord Jesus Christ? Sister Jeannine would have found a way to blame her for this.
She went to confession on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Father Shawn encouraged her to see a doctor. He’d had an ulcer once, he said. But a few lifestyle changes and it was all better. Still, it never hurts to be careful. He knew a young woman her age who developed uterine cancer—but Father Shawn, whose mouth sometimes ran ahead of his tact, realized this anecdote was unlikely to give comfort. He changed the subject, praising her for her work during the clothing drive. It embarrassed her. She would rather no one ever knew she had organized it. Hiding your candle, teased Father Shawn. No, it was just—she crossed herself and did not come back until the following Sunday.
She didn’t even make it home this time. In the ladies’ room in the church basement, while the congregation mingled out on the sidewalk, she knelt on the tiles and vomited over and over into the toilet. God, it was shuddersome.
Her throat felt lacerated, her stomach stripped bare of its lining. The toilet held a ruby pool that smelled of perfume. In it floated shattered splinters of wood, some of them inches long. She reached into it and her fingers found what she knew would be there. She brought it close to her face and felt the love of everything holy as she beheld one of the long black iron nails that on that sacred day so long ago had pierced a limb of the Lamb our Lord.
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24. The Sightseers
Susan, look over there. Right at the end of the High Line, I had an apartment. I wonder if we can see it from here? Of course that wasn’t there back when I was a student. Susan?
Susan must have wandered off. Too late in the day for coffee, and she refused to drink wine until after five, so Mark supposed it was her bladder again. He turned back to look at the city but then there was some sort of commotion—
Don’t! Lady don’t, please don’t do that!
Mark turned in time to see a dark shape drop from the railing on the other side of the observation deck. Somebody screamed.
Mark shouted, Susan! But the security guards were already herding them back toward the elevator. Please, he said, my wife is in the bathroom, I think. I need to—
We’ll get her, sir, don’t worry. Just please step in. But on the ground floor she wasn’t in with the other tourists. More elevators came from the roof, with new loads of passengers, but Susan wasn’t among them. They wouldn’t let them out of the lobby. Through the windows Mark couldn’t see much, just flashes, as more and more cops showed up. They’d taped off something around the corner.
He grabbed a guard by the arm. Listen, I think that might be my wife who fell. The guard looked pale, like he might throw up. Weren’t these people supposed to be trained? thought Mark. Well-trained?
Please come with me, sir. Some sort of exchange on the radio. About two minutes went by. There was an ambulance out there, but no one seemed to be in a hurry. Then a cop took him over and walked him outside.
Some questions. Your name? Are you prepared for this? You see, we don’t think she has any ID on her.
She’d splashed across at least fifty feet. There was a shape of some sort under a disgusting sheet. They drew it back. It wasn’t Susan. She was a fucking mess, but it wasn’t Susan. His heart jumped, his vision dipped and the cop held him by the arm. No, he said. It’s not her, it’s not her, not her.
They kept them all in the lobby for almost another hour. They took statements and started letting people go. Mark was the last one left. No one had seen Susan. She wasn’t upstairs, or here, or anywhere. He called her phone again and again, he called the hotel, he called her parents, he shouted at the cops until they arrested him, but after his night in jail she was still missing, and by the time their daughter came to get him that night Mark knew he’d never see her again.
💀
25. Rat Songs
Rat Mama loves her babies. They crawl all over her, the helpless poor things. Rat Mama sings them lullabies:
Hush now babies, stop your twitchin
Mama’s back now from the kitchen
Mama’s got some human food
To build her babies’ fortitude
Stop your squealing, little pretties
Latch your snouts on Mama’s titties
Life for babes is short and wrong
But Mama sings her baby-song
Rat Daddy is troubled. These are dire songs, full of despair. But ever since he lost his front legs and eyes to the cat, he cannot provide for his children and Rat Mama must do everything. He cannot tell her to stop because he is helpless and he has no moral standing now. He has tried gently to discuss it with her with his torn worthless tongue and he thinks he has made her understand. But she does not stop, she will not obey his wishes. She sings:
Babies get their broken bones
Humans poison babies’ homes
Dogs and cats will swallow rats
And babies need to face the facts
The family is large but it will not be long before the pups will head out on their own, if they survive that long. When that happens he will be alone with Rat Mama. The loneliness will be worse. Rat Daddy’s thoughts are erratic, impulses without action. He might crawl to the elevator shaft and fling himself down. Maybe he will sneak into an apartment during the night and chew up a human baby. Rat Daddy, even in the depths of his mental agony, formulates plans for the future.
Daddy loves his Mama Ratty
But Dad’s a worthless little fatty
Daddy’s fucked and won’t get better
Let’s eat old Daddy all together
💀
26. Home Improvements
The driver waved him onto the bus. It was half-full with fools. A few of them whispered into their phones but mostly they just sat there like dummies. All over them was a white dust, powder in all their crevices, so that they looked like a bunch of unfried chickens. In the windowed sunlight the dust hung slablike in the air.
One girl in a window seat looked half-dead. He sat by her. Three streets later, at her stop, he pretended not to hear when she said, Excuse me, Excuse me, and eventually she had to sort of rub past him and move his knee with her hand to get out. He thought about going after her but decided it was better to stash the money instead.
Two stops later he got off, put the stuff away safely in his apartment and headed back downtown.
Everywhere there were sirens and flashing lights. Everyone was out on the street. If they were moving, they were moving away from where he was going. He steered away from cops—a million cops—and took the quietest streets he could find. He put a dopey expression on his face and if a cop looked at him he veered off, so it took a long time to get back there and when he did most of the shops had developed some protection: owners onsite, police, crowds, boarded windows. Loose sheets of paper plastered the streets, blown against curbs like snowdrifts. Every now and then one fluttered down to the ground, like a memo from God.
Eventually he got into a jeweler’s through a back stairwell. No one had been here yet, maybe the owners had died today. No way to get into the safe, but he broke into the display cabinets and took the most expensive things he could find. Only what could fit into his pockets. How would it look to walk around right now with a briefcase or a sack? Already it was feeling unsafe.
He walked a few blocks and caught a bus. The sun was going down. He didn’t spare a glance for the driver, just scoped out the options. Nobody looked like much, but a skinny young guy with nice shoes got off after four stops—the woman next to him hugged him as he left—and Louis followed. Indulgent, but why not? Today was like a holiday.
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27. No Fare Today
By nature he wasn’t a morning person, but what’re you gonna do? The commute took thirty-five minutes if he left at seven, but twice that long if he left at eight. There was something fresh about the city that early in the morning, he said, on the days he felt awake enough to try to convince himself. The light, the morning haze maybe, the relative emptiness of the highway. As a teenager he had loved staying awake through the night and spreading his arms to the dawn. His pagan phase.
The AT+T building, the Ford tower, those concave apartment buildings that looked like stalks of celery. There hadn’t been downtown construction of any note for fifteen years. The skyline was as static as the Rocky Mountains. The big pole with the car and the mannequin on it. The two weird domes that looked like tits. In the evening he put it all behind him. Casey would already be home when he got there, in his bedroom with his games. Laura worked late on Wednesdays, so Sam made dinner. He ate with Casey and set a plate aside for Laura. At eleven pm she arrived, kissed him goodnight, and ate in the kitchen.
Next week: the AT+T building, the Ford tower, the black girders of the LRT, and a new, tall building that had never been there before. A proud, almost arrogant thing, tiered like a Sumerian ziggurat but taller, oh, very tall, he explained to his coworkers that morning, why didn’t I ever notice it before? Overfamiliarity, they said. You can get into a sort of trance on the freeway. But I swear it was never there before, he insisted, to his own incredulity. Well, what was there yesterday? asked Anna, stirring her tea. He couldn’t remember.
On the ride home he kept looking dangerously in the rear view mirror, but nothing, just a confusion of winter twilight. Dark at 4:45 in the afternoon. At least, he said, he forced that extra hour on himself in the mornings.
The next day the building was still there, as solid and stubborn as every other element of the skyline. You can’t just construct a skyscraper overnight, he reminded himself. This isn’t The Jetsons.
He worked. He came home. He couldn’t sleep. Laura slept, he sat up in bed. He wouldn’t disturb her by turning on a light. If he still smoked, he would’ve gone through a pack, he imagined.
He left before dawn. Halfway down the highway, the sun rose and backlit the skyline. In the flat light it all looked two-dimensional. The sun rose up the length of the ziggurat. The top was still embedded in the dark of the sky.
He could imagine pulling over and running up the side of the building, reaching the roof just as the sun topped the tallest of the city’s obelisks. He took the offramp, three exits early.
At nine-thirty that night Casey realized he was hungry and went downstairs. Mom wouldn’t be home for a while yet and dad hadn’t made dinner. Annoyed, he cooked himself a box of mac and cheese and brought it back to his room.
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28. Unsecured Cargo
Frank wrapped her in a sailcloth and weighted her down with the spare anchor, then she went into the drink and he changed course, aiming for Saint Martin. The weather looked a little threatening, but nothing he couldn’t handle.
When the rain came the water turned rough and it was work to keep on course. Nothing too worrying, but there was something sliding around loose belowdecks, probably one of Emily’s suitcases, and he didn’t have the time to go tie it down at the moment. It was after dark before the rain let up and he was able to set the cruise control and go take a look.
The cabin lights were out—a fuse somewhere—so he took a flashlight. Here was the bunk where he’d strangled here, her clothes still scattered about. Her Travis McGee book was still in the cabinet drawer, and her suitcases with the cash were still bungeed down in the closet. So what was it that he’d heard?
The boat lurched and the hatch slammed closed. He climbed the steps and put his shoulder into it, but it wouldn’t budge. The boat veered windward and juddered, nearly knocking him off the step. He dropped the flashlight, breaking the bulb. Goddammit.
The boat jerked up and down in the choppy water. He’d better get up there fast, but the hatch was still jammed shut. In the darkness below him something heavy rolled from side to side, hitting the bunk, the hull, the bunk again, with a muted metallic thud. Everything smelled of dead things from the sea. He shoved and shoved, and the hatch gave way. He crawled onto deck. The gray sails cracked against the black sky. He rolled, he grabbed onto something.
When the Coast Guard reached him, Frank was high up in the rigging, tangled and twisted, swinging on an anchor chain like a piñata, and his stomach, they found when they cut him open, was full of money.
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29. The Friend Request
I am a man who posts laugh-reacts on the posts of people I don’t know. Mostly politicians. When they say, We have funded free school lunches for every schoolchild in the state, or Happy Lunar New Year, or We mourn the victims of this latest shooting, I post a laughing face at them. Sometimes an angry face, whichever seems more appropriate at the time.
My name sounds vaguely familiar to you. You realize it is a character from Mad Max, or Animal House. I live outstate, or in a third-ring suburb you think you’ve heard of. My own posts are set to private, except for some that raise money for a dog charity, and a few YouTube links to news clips and medical information, but also to some music videos from people you like, like Willie Nelson. You can see my profile picture. Sometimes it is a car or a lake, sometimes I am bundled up in a big winter coat and sunglasses or maybe ski goggles. With me are some cute kids, my children and grandchildren or maybe nieces and nephews. Sometimes there is a thin blue line or an American flag banner attached. Sometimes the flag is upside down. Now and then I change my profile picture to Rick, from Rick and Morty, or Archer, from Archer. One of my friends comments on the picture, and I reply, Phrasing! but it’s not clear what the double entendre was. My cover photo is of Washington at Valley Forge. I say that I am strongly Christian. My bio says that I studied at the School of Hard Knocks and at the University of Life.
My featured quote reads: Molon labe Blood is freedoms stain !!!
When I comment on a page, I often use the word woke, and I tell people to get jobs. I am fond of the clown emoji. If you are a woman I am more likely to comment. I distribute apostrophes freely. You get the impression that I am a veteran. People who comment to agree with me frequently use ALL CAPS but I don’t. I do not like politicians using my tax money so freely, on DEI initiatives and pay raises for politicians and clean drinking water. One time in fifty I say something you basically agree with. I am a passionate lover of this country, this country of Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, and Robert E. Lee. These figures from the past embody the real America, not like many prominent contemporary people, who are pedophiles.
We have four mutuals, all people you went to high school with. You have all four of them muted.
🤡
30. Hostile Architecture
The first time I saw him he was sleeping under a bench, wrapped in a pink blanket. Why not on the bench, I thought? Then I saw that it had been designed with an armrest in the middle so that you couldn’t sleep on it. From that point I started seeing examples of that everywhere: blunt spikes installed on concrete ledges, fences closing off patches of unused green space, public areas with sprinklers and sound systems designed to annoy and drive people away.
So this guy, one of many, I knew, was sleeping wherever he could. I saw him in doorways, and among a pile of trash at the corner of a parking lot. I’d give him a couple of bucks now and then. I called the church outreach people and left messages on their voicemail. I was worried about the guy. His trash pile was full of pizza boxes and empty plastic bottles and rain-soaked clothes.
Eventually he started sleeping in my backyard, on a little patch of grass stuck between the cement patio and the chain-link fence by the alley. I called the church people but no one came. I didn’t want to call the cops. It was getting warm out. I imagined I could smell him, even from my second-floor apartment. I invited him in to use my shower. He ignored me. Come to think of it, I never did hear him speak.
Mushrooms started growing on his skin, thin mops of traily things like enoki, and big fat turd-like things that hung from his armpits like dangling yams. Now I could definitely smell him, from practically anywhere on the block, but my neighbors never commented, and still nobody from the church answered my call. I called 911 for a wellness check but nobody showed up then either. I bought an air filter. I didn’t have enough money saved to move, not in this housing market.
Eventually he took root, or rhizome, or whatever you call it. He got planted anyway, I could see his feet and one hand extending out from under the pink blanket, and they were thoroughly threaded into the ground. They grew a little more blurry, shapewise, every day, until you couldn’t tell that there was a human form under there at all. When I finally got up the courage to remove the blanket, it separated with a tearing sound and took a lot of stuff with it. Underneath there were just a few soft bones left. I threw away the blanket.
I won’t deny that I was a little relieved, but now we have mushrooms growing in the laundry room and I still don’t have money to move.
💀
31. The WorldCat
I ask the WorldCat a question. She purrs and languidly she paws a book forward into my eager hands. It is Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. I am skeptical. I coax the WorldCat, scritching behind her ears. Whiskers aquiver, she consents to bat a few other books in my direction: they slide along the greasy carpet, abrading their faded paper covers: Peter Singer, T. M. Scanlon, Aristotle.
Aristotle! I am irked. What am I supposed to do with these?
I must have indicated my displeasure somehow, because the WorldCat subvocalizes and opens her eyes a tad and bends her head in my direction. I quiet down.
Two years ago my brother, more arrogant than I, had harassed the WorldCat for information on engineering practices, tensile strengths, calculations, parabolas and velocities, maths that built things, things I can’t explain. He was greedy for the wisdom of the WorldCat. What he would have done with it I do not know. He had no access, none of us do, to factories, or to men with capital, or iron mines or coal seams or oil. But my brother amassed a sense of grand possibility within himself, at the sufferance of the WorldCat, and when he asked for a book on microtrading the WorldCat lapped him up with her mighty tongue, and that was the last scheme of my poor brother’s.
Now I sleep with my remaining family, luckiest of all the remaining families, cuddled against the gigantic and comforting belly-fur of the WorldCat, and when she stretches in her slumber we jerk to attention and rush away and give her room to indulge her self-comfort. Her books we never approach, jailed as they are within her mighty jaws. If we wish to read Shakespeare we wait for her to wake, and we say to her, O mighty WorldCat, may I hear of the melancholy Dane—or, in another mood, we ask, may we hear about the girl who dressed like a boy in the forest of Arden?
She grants our desires mostly, and on special days we exhibit our gratitude with theatrical displays of education and artistic cunning, and the WorldCat honors our performances with her eyes unblinking wide and her long tail aflick, aflick with attention and, we think, delight.
💀
32. Reception
Anar Ahuja’s father was worth $131 billion, so the wedding was really something to behold. The groom’s father wore a Saville Row suit, kind of pointedly, it seemed to us, since the rest of the guests were in Indian resplendence. He made a speech that I think I remember from Love, Actually. Anar himself, the dimmest brother from a brood of wastrels, hadn’t bothered with a haircut but had managed to pour himself into a gold sherwani with blue agate buttons and clashing vermillion trim. The bride was a model, a movie star, a singer and, the newspapers informed us, a philanthropist. She wore a beautiful matching gold anarkali dripping with pearls. I bore her no special ill-will so I shot her first.
The former US Secretary of State was in attendance, unreachably flanked by Secret Service. More touchable were the social media moguls, and we nabbed two of them (combined worth: $300+ billion) and a bevy of reality stars (somewhere around $11 billion total). We shot at Beyoncé while she was leading the dancing, but our heart wasn’t really in it. Much more interesting to line up the three older Ahuja boys and their father and torture them for the livestream.
If you want it you got to put a ring on it was stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
The security guards were mostly ours, or their families were, so we knew we had a few minutes before the real heavies arrived. The first of our vans left, taking different routes. In one of the side rooms there was a group mani-pedi, which we interrupted with machetes. Fingers and toes and gore and glitter and henna bubbled like a stew in the plastic water baths. Someone shot me in the side of the face but I barely noticed.
We’d brought along a guillotine but in all the excitement we forgot to use it.
We fed Ivanka to her father. One of us got kicked by a horse and died among the confetti strings, coughing on his intestines. The stage magician, I swear this is true, disappeared in a puff of smoke. I can’t even be mad at that. Outside, one of us was breaking the locks off all the cages, and soon there were elephants and tigers and peacocks and swans and monkeys and gorillas and rhinoceri and hippos and pandas and pythons and deer and crocodiles and lizards and dogs and birds of all sorts filling the streets of Mumbai. It was a beautiful confusion. They ate each other, they ate or pecked at people. My brother’s arm was bitten off by a hippo, and when I shot it it just lumbered away without seeming to notice, the imperturbable beast!
I castrated Stephen Miller myself. This is the part of the day that I am most proud of. When the police finally arrived he was still bleeding out at my feet. The police didn’t bother asking us to surrender, just started shooting. Respect. Two of us dragged what was left of the bridal party and a shit-stained Elon Musk into the main hall and in front of the cameras of the world I unzipped my jacket to show the bomb. They shot me at once, not that it mattered.
When I blew us up, I’ve been given to understand, cracked gems and sharp gold and silver shards and trails of flaming fabric rained down on the neighborhood, and children filled the streets to receive the bounty with their hands outcupped.
💀
33. I Will Kiss You with the Kisses of My Mouth
I saw you upon a morning, John, and I served you with my own hands. You sat at a table in the corner, in a ray of sunlight, and I watched it shine on your black hair, and the next morning you were back, and the sun on your hair was back again, and I knew. I followed you when you left, though the others criticized me for it. I saw you walk under the trees and beside the fountain, and your long legs strode quick. I nearly ran after you, John. I saw you enter the building where you work, and in the lobby I searched for your name on the devices, but didn’t find it there. I know your last name also, but it isn’t as simple or as lovely as your first, which needs no extension or addition, no family name required when you and I are the only family we need.
Your shirt is blue, your eyes are blue, your skin is white as lily. Your hair is black. Your lips when I kiss them will flush red. Your eyes will look upon me as I love.
I sit in the evenings and envision you. In the morning if you appear, I adore you with my eyes. On the days when you are absent I despair, and I move within a broken temple, among fallen gray columns and across dark earth soaked with rain and treacherous with snakes. The morning, when it comes, is frightening and brittle, and I can hardly bear to look upon you then, so enriched are you with presence and the threat of loss.
You speak only rarely. You sit unmoving like a stone. When you stand to go it is like the outflowing of the tide. I could kneel on the shore and wail all night for your return. I could swim in you, and drown. You will arrive here, and I will see you. When you go, I will follow you again, John, wherever you travel, I will follow you all our days.
💀
34. The Case of the Extended Family
The detective had gathered them all in his office: the widow, the lover, the estranged daughter, the twin sons, the business partner (now in handcuffs, his embezzlements exposed), the Inspector and the Sergeant. From his desk in the corner, the Man Friday watched them all with eager interest.
I demand— someone said.
Pfui! said the detective. You demand nothing. I was invited to investigate this matter and I have done so…
Here followed one of the detective’s conventional egotistic speeches. When he was finished, the Inspector had grown visibly impatient. Can we get to the point? he asked. Someone in this room is a murderer.
More than one person, said the detective. Because the alibis before us so completely establish the fact that none of the people in this room could have done it, it must be that at least one person is lying to establish cover for another. What’s more, the timing of the events makes it appear that the killer was in two places at the same time, which is impossible, therefore—
This is a setup! yelled James, or John.
You’ve got no proof, yelled John, or James.
Calm down, sirs, said the detective. I am not accusing you. Or you. All will become clear in a moment.
The detective nodded toward his assistant, who leaped to his feet. From his coat pocket the assistant withdrew a hand mirror and thrust it in the face of the dead man’s lover.
She shrieked. Her reflection shrieked and bulged outward. From the mirror, a protoplasmic blob, fleshlike, tentacular, extruded and drooped thickly to the floor. Writhing, it extended upright and solidified until before them stood an exact duplicate of the young woman.
Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, said the Sergeant.
Wait, said the detective, and the assistant repeated the process with the dead man’s wife, daughter, and business partner. Soon the room was crowded with four pairs of identical duplicates, and one pair of genetic twins.
I hope you brought enough handcuffs, Inspector, said the detective.
As a group, they all (except the twins) tried to make a break for it, but of course the police were waiting outside. I think you have enough evidence to make a charge of conspiracy, suggested the detective.
John and James were devastated. She was the best mother a boy could want, said one of them. Always there when we needed her. And sis, I always thought she had the energy of two people. And the others—
Some men look for lovers who remind them of their wives, mused the assistant.
Enough of that, said the detective. We must discuss my fee.
💀
35. In the Weeds
What’s that smell? Everything’s coming at her from all directions.
Table 25 had been watered but she’d kept them waiting too long and they’re impatient.
Chicken penne side Caesar, the shrimp, the kid has the mac and more breadsticks please. The kid, a boy she thinks, has shredded the previous breadsticks all over the carpet. She steps around it. Over to the POS. Everything she touches seems oily—surely that’s her imagination. The bell rings. Service! Table 26: The burger doesn’t look rare but maybe they’ll be okay with it. The bell rings. Service! 31, but that isn’t pesto, that’s bolognese, and the lady already made sure she knew she was a vegetarian. Back to the passthrough. Chef has spinach in his teeth. She has to wait till he’s done shouting:
Three shrimp, plus two shrimp, plus two shrimp, no, three more, that’s eight shrimp all day. What?
31 needs pesto.
What is that?
That’s a red sauce.
Chef takes the pasta back and hands her the wedge salad for 17. Next to it is a plate of bacon figs.
17, she asks.
Yeah, yeah.
Can I sell this?
Yes! Filet up top!
She serves 17. 16 waves her over. It’s the burger, of course. She takes it back to the passthrough. What’s that smell? Another round with chef. No more burgers. What? How is that possible? Could you check the walk-in? Do I look like I have the fucking time? So she has to go do it, of course.
The cooler seems too warm, and the smell is worse in here. Look, right there, the burgers. She takes the tray. And someone’s tipped over a container of portobellos and there’s a heap of them on the mat. She’s already smooshed one before she saw them. The rest she kicks into a corner for now.
No one is expediting anything. Dave the floor manager would normally do that, but he quit during service last night and dumped a tumbler of ice cubes into the deep fryer on his way out the door. It took forever to clean, it was lucky no one got scalded. She scrapes her shoe on the mat and takes the hamburgers to chef. Table 20, and 15’s order looks good. The kid opens his rubbery face and shovels in the mac and cheese. A wave of something passes over her. She’s dehydrated, gets herself a glass of water. Table 18? Who sat 18? When? 16, the fucking burger. It looks barely cooked at all. It’s got a funny smell. No, it’s fine. 18 looks like a couple of moon-men. Two guys, they could be twins. They’re the whitest people she’s ever seen. They could have squirmed out from under a rock. Her heart is beating faster. They’re very polite, like Mormons. Clams, two orders of clams. The bell rings. Service! 22 looks good. She checks on 15. The kid is biting his mother’s arm. Is that blood?
There’s an argument in the kitchen: This order is wrong. It’s wrong! Table Two didn’t order thirty entrees. Table Thirty ordered two fucking entrees!
That smell! Where’s it coming from? Someone taps her on the shoulder and she whirls around. It’s one of the moon-men. Can I help you? The restroom is over there. She goes back in the cooler to refill the clams. Someone’s cleaned up the mushrooms, I wonder who. The door won’t open. She sets the clams down and uses both hands. Nope. Huh. She tries again. She’s about to shout when something quivers overhead.
She looks up.
Something like a suction cup, splayed out against the top of the cooler door, attached to a long skinny pale tube that stretches back somewhere behind her. There’s a fingernail on it. She turns around.
The kid from 15, crouched on a top shelf, its arms and legs stretched out, fingers and toes stretched even longer to press against the walls and ceiling and the door. The kid opens its mouth and bits of macaroni-mush fall to the floor. It opens wider, revealing mossy green teeth. Its breath smells like rotten onions.
💀
36. Everybody Loves Sock
Bill stared at the writing above the urinal for a long time. EVERYBODY LOVES SOCK. Eventually he figured it out. It was supposed to read COCK, but someone had added an extra curve to the C and now: SOCK. He zipped up, flushed, washed his hands and returned to the table.
The conversation, now several beers in, had moved on to sex. Carl was whispering: She likes to do this, and this, and can you believe it, she likes…
I haven’t gotten it in a long time, Zach rued, but you can’t be surprised. If they’re not a lesbian, they all love it. In the front, in the back or in the mouth, it’s all good, they all love the sock.
Bill ordered another drink. It was risky maybe, but he didn’t have to work until noon. When the waitress brought it over she gave him a look. Oh it was a look.
Zach never needed much excuse to talk dirty. Now, I don’t have the biggest sock in the world, he said (for what must have been the thousandth time), but I know how to use it. It’s the secret weapon. First you deploy the tongue, then you get flanking with some fingers, and then when she’s ready you slip in the—
Bill asked, Did you say sock?
They looked at him funny.
That’s fine, said Carl, but that’s like a one-night stand.
Zach objected. Not a—
Okay, whatever, but it’s different when you’re married. You got to keep—
Giving her the sock, insisted Zach.
Now wait a minute, said Bill. What are you talking about, sock?
What, don’t you have one? asked Zach, dropping his hand to his crotch and giving it a lurch in Bill’s direction.
There’s no wrong time to talk about sock, said Carl, getting into the spirit of the thing.
Bill didn’t know what to say. All of a sudden he noticed the smell. Not beer and spirits, not even urinal cakes from beyond the toilet door. Not a bar smell at all, more of a laundry room smell.
Zach pontificated: I never understood why socksucker is supposed to be an insult. It’s a noble profession with a long history.
It is a truth universally acknowledged—, began Carl.
Zach completed the thought: That everybody loves sock.
Gingerly, Bill reached down under his waistband to feel around.
💀
37. The New Normal
I brought him tea. He drank half of it. Toby wanted to curl up next to him and play Minecraft. Harold didn’t seem to object, but after an hour he got up, brushing past his son as if he wasn’t there, used the toilet, and returned to bed. Toby didn’t understand what had happened to his father, and neither did I.
Years ago Harold had written novels, though by this time they were all out of print. Later it was short stories, but the magazines mostly went under. For a while he blogged, but he’d given that up too. Still, even last month I would have called him completely normal. Then he started sleeping late, falling behind on work. Eating less, talking less. He even stopped watching his late-night hitlers on the History Channel.
I drove him to the doctor. I drove him again the next day. His job, after I called them, granted him a leave of absence. Depression tests. Brain scans. Bloodwork. Harold let it all happen, but he seemed to take less and less of an interest. No brain tumor, the doctors said, nothing obviously wrong. But something was obviously wrong. He sat in bed all day in front of his laptop, only eating when I forced him to. At least he still got up to clean himself and use the toilet.
I watched what he was doing on the computer: Listlessly scrolling through news and social media, never commenting on it, not seeming to take it in. I made a telehealth appointment with a therapist, but Harold said almost nothing to her the whole time. I think he needs to be hospitalized, she told me. But how could I do that? He might snap out of it at any moment.
He stopped reading the news. He just kept the TextEdit app open all the time, and now and then he would type something:
Cut his hamstrings with a piano wire back in 88.
Later: Naked girl in the dumpster behind the 7/11.
I thought he’d been watching True Crime shows while I was asleep, but I checked the Netflix history and it wasn’t that.
Woman alone with her newborn terrorized by the stranger on the phone.
Bar staff trapped overnight while cars burn in the street.
Down a well.
Wild dogs and the friendly baby.
My father killed my sister and then my sister killed my father.
He started typing in German, a language I don’t understand. I didn’t think Harold did either.
Google Translate told me: His son he turned inside out. Blood and shit.
I sent Toby to stay at my sister’s.
Later, in Polish: I’d always hated that bitch. I watched her sleep and thought how easy it would be.
So now I sleep on the couch. I watch whatever’s streaming, with the sound turned off. Every so often from the other room I hear a brief flurry of typing.
I finally fall asleep. The toilet flushes. I jerk awake to see Harold shuffling back to bed. In the morning I put on a cheery face and ask him what he’s been working on. He doesn’t answer, of course, but I look at the screen, and I see, in English: I love my wife.
As I watch, he backspaces over the last word and rewrites it: I love my life.
💀
38. Out of Mulberry Street
It was the brightest fuckin light I ever saw, like as if the sun jumped out and surprised you in the middle of the night. For a week or more I’d heard word of this fellow going around making mischief in all the alleys and slum houses below Fourteenth Street, but I never did see him myself until that night, and I can’t properly say I saw him then. I was drinking in a Mulberry Street saloon, not a usual haunt of mine, but thirst being what it was, and it was dark as hell, and loud with singing and some women laughing who looked better in the dark. I happened to be glancing toward the door, where just beyond you could see a little of the streetlamp through the dirty window, and I saw the door open and a fellow walked in holding some items in both hands. I thought, Jesus, he’s got a pistol to shoot up the place, and the next thing I know this light, like a blue knife slashing you across the eyes, and the women shouted and the brats all cried and before we knew what had happened he was gone.
Now later I saw the photographs when he had them on exhibit way uptown in a Protestant church on Broadway at 71st Street. Me and my girl walked all that way and home again one afternoon to see the man talk, and he was a right moralizing man at that, to be sure, with unkind words for those of us doomed to spend our sad wee lives around the Five Points, though in fairness my girl thought he had a kind heart and was especially worried about the children, and it’s true that in the lantern light of his slides those babies gathered in their straw beds like a passel of rats were a most affecting sight.
Naturally my girl and me were most inclined to see the portrait he had made of us in the saloon that night, since that was the very night we met, but on that occasion he did not display it. However, I approached the man himself after his sermon and he was most generous and opened a case he had with him and displayed a number of images that he had not chosen to present that day, and among them was the very one, and my girl and I both were sort of in a marvel about it, because as she said, this was the first time she had ever seen her own face outside of a mirror, and that was true for me as well. We thanked him, and she gave him some pennies even, and homeward we walked.
However I said good-bye to my girl very soon after that, and have not seen her since, and the reason for that is that when I saw her face and figure in that photograph, very much white and almost glowing like a lamp in fog, only a few moments before we met and fell to talking about the light that had surprised us, I seemed to see within her dress the shape of her bones inside, and even the shape of the stool and bar behind her, so that it seemed that the light had shoved all the spirit out of her that night and left only the thinnest creature behind. If she had spied this herself in her image she did not tell me, but it was a conception that never again left my mind, so that I could no longer bear to spend time in her company and left her behind, though we both wept sorely about it.
💀
39. The Machine Shop
They unblindfolded her and pushed her down a short flight of steps. She stumbled but kept her footing. Someone turned on the lights: blinding, fluorescent. Concrete slope flooring with drains, industrial machines to all sides, draped with canvas for the night. Diesel fuel in the air.
The two men were standing on a concrete lip a few feet above her. Their ankles were at eye-height. Next to them a chain descended from a crane. At the end of the chain was a heavy-duty trash bag, bulging full, belling out at the bottom. The taller man, the one with the frightening face, pressed a button on the crane and the bag swung out over the lip.
We trusted your father, said the short one. He worked for us for twenty years. So we didn’t believe it at first. But we got a guy in to look at the books. He’d been stealing from us all along, little here, a little there. Providing for his family, I get it, but it’s still not right.
Please, she said.
Wait a minute, said the taller one. From a shelf he grabbed a serrated hunting knife and a pair of poultry shears. He threw them down to her and grabbed a reciprocating saw.
He tested it: brzzzzzzz brzzzzzzz.
He must have found out we knew, said the short one, because he took half a million in diamonds out of the safe and got on a train. We took him off the train and asked him to show us where the diamonds were, but no dice. They’re not in his house, they’re not at his bank, so we figured he stuffed them in himself or up himself somewhere.
Andrea stared at the bag. The taller man swept the saw down across its double-layered side—brzzzzzzz—and the bag split open, pouring unspeakable filth and red clotted slime at Andrea’s feet. She scrambled backward as large hunks of something splatted down onto the concrete. Everything smelled like perfumed garbage and rotten breath. She gagged and hunched over, covering her mouth.
We did what we could, but it’s disgusting work, said the short one maliciously, so why not call in a marker, we thought. We figure you owe us a little something, since the family sent you through school and all that.
The taller one was pointing a pistol at her. Get to work, he said.
Eventually she found them somewhere in his colon: a dozen perfect jewels, covered in shit. They took them from her with a handkerchief and rinsed them off at a sink. The man put the gun away. There’s a hose in the corner if you want to clean yourself up, he said. Don’t worry about the rest of it; someone’ll be by to take care of it. See you. Thanks again.
For a while she didn’t move. Then she crawled to where her father’s face lay, shaved from its skull. She slapped it with her hand, over and over, ignoring the bone splinters that pierced her palm, until it was an unrecognizable smear on the bloody floor.
💀
40. Drop By Any Time
The doorbell rang. It was my evil twin. Come in, I said. Long time, long time.
He sat down. He seemed troubled. I made us coffee.
It’s awkward—, he began.
Take your time.
He drank his coffee for a minute. I feel I should apologize—
It’s really good to see you, I interrupted, but we’ve been over all that.
Wait, let me finish. When I met you you had a wife, some great kids, a good job, the house…
My heart sank. This again.
After the obligatory guilty pause he went on: And I took it all away, I made everybody think I was you, so Marcia took the kids and you were out on the street, and the police wouldn’t believe you, and I’d taken all your money and gone to Aruba.
The insurance company paid me some of that back, I said.
Still, he said. You can’t unbreak an egg really.
It wasn’t your fault, I assured him.
Whose fault was it then? Dad’s?
Well yeah: Dad’s, I said. I didn’t even know you existed until I was twenty-one, and I didn’t know he was keeping you in the cellar under the east wing. I’m sorry, I know you don’t like talking about it but anybody would have resented me in those circumstances. When you escaped and killed him, of course I was mad at first, but then I thought, this is marvelous, I’ve always wanted a brother. We have so much lost time to catch up on. Oh come on, don’t get all weepy.
I moved over to sit next to him on the couch and put my arm around him. Are the police still after you for that one thing? I asked.
No, he said, I framed another guy for that.
Anybody I know? I asked.
Noooooo… I don’t think so. Name was Fred Bonachek, goes by Gizmo?
They call him Gizmo?
Yeah.
Bad kind of guy, is he?
Well…
My twin made that little back-and-forth head motion like he likes to do.
It’s kind of relative, he finished. Not like us, that sort of relative, but you know you and me have a special kind of thing.
We both sat there kind of awkwardly.
Listen, do you need a place to stay? I asked. There’s not a lot of room but we can figure something out.
Honestly I was embarrassed by the state of the place, and I hoped he wasn’t judging me too harshly. But he let me off the hook.
No, I just wanted to— It’s been a while and I just wanted to see your face.
Our face, I said.
Yeah, our face again. I’m doing okay, you know they can never keep me down for long.
I know, I said.
After he left I cleaned up the coffee cups, decided I didn’t have time for a shower, and walked to work.
💀
41. The Red-eye
Even as we were boarding there was an atmosphere. The gate staff weren’t chatty. Even the TVs seemed mumbly. The pilot’s announcements were curt, the safety drills perfunctory. We took off almost in silence.
Smooth weather. After we pierced the clouds the night sky was icily clear. The moon was nearly full, and beneath us the clouds hung seemingly unmoving, a desert of grainless sand dunes, silver and white, soft as a down comforter, hard as stale meringue.
They handed out drinks and snacks. Some of us were crying a little, we couldn’t have said why. The only whispers were those of the attendants, but they talked too quietly for us to hear. Gossip probably, nothing for us to bother about. A little girl near the back was watching Bluey on her tablet, but when she dropped it on the floor she didn’t try to pick it back up again.
Some of us slept. One man snored a little, and it was a human sound, so comforting that when he jerked awake, sweating and rolling his eyes, we begged him to fall asleep again.
The pilot announced that we were twenty minutes out from Denver.
If you looked outside, and you didn’t want to look at the moon, as we didn’t, you imagined something within the clouds, something enormous that stretched its limbs all the way to the horizon, just under the heavy white sea, rippling slowly here, pressing upward, relaxing down again. Just on the edge of sight, it seemed to breach cover for a moment, something dark and imbricated, keeping pace with the plane.
We were to land soon, we were told. It may have been imagination, but the plane seemed reluctant to sink below those clouds, lowering hesitantly only to rise back up and gird itself to try again. When we did go down, the darkly white of it all wrapped us and held us close and it was a long time before it ruefully let us go.
Below us the earth was black as outer space, with only a few frantic stars still lit.
The pilot said something. We were coming in to land, but then a strange sharp noise came over the intercom and the plane bucked upward like a frightened horse. We slid back upwards into the endless cloud.
Denver wasn’t there. Colorado wasn’t there.
💀
42. Seperations
Mary Goode, steadied by Master Goode, climbed onto the barrel. The sun was shining, the crowd was lively.
Sixty shillings! announced Master Goode.
The crowd jeered.
Master Goode raised his voice above them: You have yet to hear a description of the merchandise! This young woman has the beauty of Venus, the wit of a Parisian mam’selle, the piety of a country parson, the subtlety of a serpent and and the cunning of the very D——!
Some of the mothers in the crowd scowled at this sort of talk.
I found her underneath a tree one day as the sun was rising, continued Mister Goode. A weeping willow that dripped with dew. She sang like a nightingale. Her dress was damp and faded in the sun.
Sixpence! came a shout.
Now sir, admonished Master Goode. You are ignorant of value. This young woman, my wife of three years, casts a bewitching spell over any man. Woe to any young sweet thing whose man beholds this creature. I will entertain a bid for fifty shillings.
So the hour progressed, with Master Goode enumerating the diabolical virtues of his lady wife, and lowering the price accordingly.
Finally, Hawkins stepped forward. He had been Mary Goode’s lover for five months.
One shilling! shouted Hawkins, and she was sold.
Master Goode spent the shilling on beer for Hawkins and his new wife, and they laughed together until the sun went down.
As Mary followed her man to their new home, she asked, Will you love me now I’m honest, Sam?
Sam Hawkins, whose child was even now stirring in Mary’s womb, kissed her.
In the morning he awoke to an empty bed. He searched through the town, and banged down Walter Goode’s door on his hunt for her. But she was not there. Goode sat at his table, still drunk from the night before. Hawkins shook him and shouted.
It wasn’t for me to give her a child, he explained to Sam, but oh she yearned for one. Where is she?, Sam asked, and Walter told.
Hawkins rode his horse to the riverbank and hitched it near the willow tree. Mary’s dress was caught floating in its watery roots. To walk into the hanging branches would be a far journey, Bill had told him, and her family might not be best pleased by his arrival. But he would go, all the same. Picking up the shilling that lay in the dirt, he put it under his tongue and stepped forward onto the woodland path that would lead him, he hoped, to his Mary and her new life within. Gently he parted the branches.
💀
43. Every Day is Halloween
It’s still Halloween at my local bar. There are witches and werewolves and a man dressed like a hot dog. We’re all trying to find the guy who did this! he shouts, and we laugh.
What he means is, we can’t leave. It’s like Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, or a Buffy episode. (I haven’t watched either of those; Josh with the Pabst Blue Ribbons told me about them.) We’ve been here for just about a year. There’s enough food, somehow, and the plumbing still works, which is a blessing, but no one ever arrives and no one ever goes. We don’t get much sleep. I think I may be an alcoholic now. But hey, October 31st is just around the corner, and I’m not the only one who hopes the spell will be broken. These are nice folks, but I have a wife and kid at home and a lot of explaining to do probably.
The election’s coming up. The TV won’t shut up about it. I don’t get into political arguments anymore, but I would like to vote this year. It’s pretty important. I even vote in midterms and primaries except when supernatural barriers interfere. I don’t think anyone could reasonably criticize me but I still feel pretty guilty about it.
I boned this Black Widow (her name’s Christine) in the storeroom a few months ago and I feel guilty about that too, but we both agreed we wouldn’t tell anyone about it. Actually we’ve been doing it a lot and now I’m wondering if maybe when we’re out I might leave my wife for her. But that’s a tomorrow-problem.
It’s strange that our cell phones don’t work, and it’s strange that people gather outside on the street holding signs we never bother to read, but we can still tune in John Oliver every Sunday except when they were on strike.
We had our own kind of collective action here too, when Andy the bartender refused to change the satellite radio channel. Look, we said, no one here objects to Heart of Glass or Modern Love or Once in a Lifetime, but once you hear it every day… Andy is about twenty years younger than I am but he likes the music I listened to in high school. Anyway, we said we’d stop drinking, we’d stop paying, we’d give him the silent treatment. It was the silent treatment that worked. That was a long two weeks, but we got some Lady Gaga out of it at least.
I swear some of these people prefer it here. I kind of get it, but Carl, for instance, I think he never wants to go home. He likes to be mysterious, but a year is a long time and I know he came from Omaha, and he never finished high school (no shame in that), he worked in a car repair place, he’s divorced, he used to be really homophobic until his best friend came out and this was a real character-forming moment for him. I’ve gotten to know all these folks pretty well. Phillip and Sherry were both in the Marines. Robert is a grad student in environmental something. Christine has a husband, and they haven’t been able to have kids. When I list it all out like this I feel like Billy Joel. In the last year I’ve switched from Summit EPA to Grain Belt because it’s cheaper.
We’re counting down the clock like it’s New Year’s Eve. The President is on the TV. In a few minutes we’ll be free. The crowd outside the glass is pressed so tight that they’re blocking out all the light. Andy pours us shots of Jägermeister. Christine suggests I should eat her pussy before we go. Good idea. Ten, nine. We drink our shots and sneak downstairs.
Eight, seven, six.
Five, four.
Three.
Two.
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44. Transcript: Disc 1684, A and B, June 13 (?) 1938
This was around the winter of nineteen-eight, nineteen-nine, and the man I was going to tell you about, he was a fellow named Ray Robinson, they sometimes called him Railroad, on account of the two R’s, and because of the way he played, but not always. I always knew him as just Ray. He was a bass player.
Ray was a good player, and he made a good living playing in a nightclub called The Top Hat, on Fourth Street and Union Avenue. And right across a little alley right down from the club was this little pawn shop, and one day Ray decides he needs a new suit. He liked a kind of variety, he couldn’t have the people seeing him in the same old suit night after night, and besides which, his old suit was worn out.
Now at this time there had been a shooting. A fellow named Bill Jackson found his wife in bed with another man, a man named Sean Flynn.
[unintelligible]
That’s right, he was a white man, come down from Boston, started gambling and making a name for himself working for Mike Haggerty at the Monarch saloon, and he was known to have a liking for Negro ladies. Bill Jackson found him in bed with his wife and he shot her and Sean Flynn both in the heart right there in the bed, and he went to jail for it for fifteen years. Some people thought Mike Haggerty would have done him in for what he done to Sean Flynn, but Mike Haggerty must have decided that the law was punishment enough. Bill Jackson stayed in jail fifteen years and when he come out he found a new young wife and went back to living in Memphis.
Well, somehow Sean Flynn’s suit showed up in the window of this pawn shop I was telling you about, and Ray Robinson bought it. It was a brown suit, I don’t know what sort of fabric it was, but it was sharp, and in good shape, on account of Sean Flynn having a lot of money and him being unclothed when he got shot, and the suit had been hanging up in the wardrobe when it happened. So Ray Robinson bought the suit and wore it in the nightclub when they’d play their shows. He was just about the size of Sean Flynn and the suit suited him very well. He wore that suit for just about a week before…
[interruption as recording disc is changed]
As I was saying, that suit fit Ray Robinson very well, and he was pleased with his purchase. But then one night he was walking home in that suit and Bad Sam came up to him in the street and said to him, Sean Flynn, you dirty so-and-so, you son of a bitch, I hear you’ve been with my wife, only he said I hear you been fucking my wife, and he shot Ray Robinson right in the heart, and he died right on the spot. I had seen Ray Robinson that very night, and I was still in the saloon when it happened, a boy ran in and said Bad Sam had shot him, and I couldn’t believe it, I had just been speaking to him.
A song got written about it, which I will play for you soon. It was called Dead Man’s Suit, but I never did know who wrote it. It started like this:
[plays melody on piano]
And I will play the whole tune later.
Now nothing ever came of that for Bad Sam, on account of, as I have told you, he was the meanest Negro in Memphis, and besides he worked for Mike Haggerty. But there were two things no one could understand. One was how Bad Sam could think that Sean Flynn had been fucking his wife when he had been dead for over a week by that time. The other thing that no one could figure was how Bad Sam could mistake Ray Robinson, who was a Negro man, for Sean Flynn, who was a white man. I told you there were two things no one could figure out, but there was a third thing, and that was the next week, when I walked by that pawn shop, there in the window was Sean Flynn’s brown suit, I saw it myself. It looked like it never had got a drop of blood on it, nor did it have a hole in the middle, even though Bad Sam had shot Ray Robinson right through the heart as he was walking home through an alley just off west Pontotoc Avenue, over by the river.
💀
45. Odd Girl Out
Grandpa was eighty-nine years old, so I tried to give him some latitude. He was from a different generation, and terminology had changed a lot. He spent a lot of time complaining about hippies, though hippies haven’t been a thing since well before my time.
Unlike a lot of people his age, he didn’t mind talking about the war. At first I thought he was exaggerating, or even lying, with his stories about, you know, single-handedly taking out a German tank one day and a German pillbox the next, and getting bayoneted in the side, but then I looked up his service record, and would you believe it, it was all true! A Silver Star and three Purple Hearts: a bona fide Audie Murphy.
Toward the end I don’t think he really knew who I was, but I think he still liked talking to me. He’d repeat himself a lot, and my older sister Linda (she’s 25 years older than me) would say, Grandpa! You’re repeating yourself again, and he’d smile like that was the point.
I’m adopted, this is why there’s so many years between Linda and me. It’s a whole thing. My folks (my adopted dad is grandpa’s son) took me in when their friends (my birth parents) died in a car accident. They were thick as thieves, said grandpa, thieves. They went everywhere together, they were in business together.
What sort of business, grandpa?
Oh everything, he said. Cars, banking, they dealt in rare books for a while.
Linda didn’t have time for this. She took care of him but didn’t really listen to what he had to say.
You look so much like her, said grandpa, but whether he meant my birth mother, or my adopted mom, or even Linda, I’m not sure.
They were sort of a bad influence, he said on another occasion.
Who, I asked?
He seemed to think about it. The Germans, he answered. They got everybody riled up. Look at the Israelis now.
We watched TV for a while. A courtroom show came on.
That reminds me, he said.
A few minutes later he said it again, so I asked what he meant.
Just early days, he said.
A few days later we were watching an old movie. James Mason was shot and was dying but couldn’t find anyone to help him. That man needs help, said grandpa. You can’t just abandon people, especially when they have people who depend on them.
In the movie James Mason has a girlfriend, but I told grandpa I thought she could take care of herself.
No she can’t! he almost shouted. She’s just a little thing, just a tiny girl.
Later I asked Linda about it. She didn’t know. I asked her if maybe she knew where some of our folks’ old photo albums were, or even letters or stuff.
That all got burned up, she said. In the fire.
No one ever liked to talk about the fire, so I let it drop.
The next day I made sure to put on the channel that showed reality stuff about 911 responders. Cops, EMTs, firefighters. They showed a lot of fires, all day long, but it didn’t seem to bother grandpa at all.
Soon after that grandpa died in his sleep. After the funeral I asked Linda, what happened to my birth parents?
She said, you know all this.
I asked, what happened to my adopted father?
She said, you know about the fire.
At the funeral, people kept commenting on how Linda and I had such a strong family resemblance. I didn’t tell them I was adopted.
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46. The Sunday Funnies
The brick hit me in the goddamn face again. Of course, I didn’t say goddamn, I said #$%@!, or something like that. That little rat bastard ran away, and the pig with the hard hat said something funny to his friend, I didn’t hear what it was, not that I give a shit. The two of them lifted up off the fucking ground, they were laughing so hard, their fat asses hanging in the air like like hams on a hook.
My mistake was, I shouldn’t have tried to catch him in a brickyard. These industrial spaces offer too much opportunity for improvised weapons. At least, that was my reasoning the next week, when I went to get him at home.
I’d spent a lot of money on the blender. State of the art, multi-speed: Low, medium, high, pulse and chop. The plan was, I make my voice high, sound like his girlfriend, yell Help help o he’s got me, things like that, and the little shit zips out of his hole and into the blender I got right there. Then on goes the lid and zap, it’s mouse-puree for my afternoon tea.
The first part goes okay, he runs out in a panic, I get him in the blender, he’s giving me these little pleading eyes, down on his knees next to the blades, squawking about his poor widowed mother and all that. I let him go on for a while—we’ve been through a lot together, him and me, we got to honor this moment—then I press the button.
But somehow the little fucker had gotten a string around my tail, and he’d attached it to the blender motor, and the next thing I know I’m smooshed all up into the blender, all out of shape, staring out the glass at him—don’t ask me how he got out of there—and he’s got this fake sad look on his face, an expression like all this was my own fault, and then he jumps on the button and zap, it’s lights-out for your truly.
So anyway, once I pulled myself together, I resolve to call it quits. I stay out of his way, he can stay out of mine, only it doesn’t work out that way. I steal a pie? Next thing I know I’m smacked in the face with it and I got cinnamon apple shit in my fur for a week. I go hunting chickens? There he is, on a boys’ night out with some angry fucking rooster. I go back to community college to study engineering and he’s my study partner and our first practical assignment balloons out of all proportion, with levers, wheels and gears, a deck of cards and a boxing glove, eighty grapefruit, a pistol, string and scissors and my third cousin Mitsy being woken up by an alarm clock, knocking a bowling ball down a chute and, well, long story short, that’s why I’m in a hospital bed in a full-body cast with a nurse who looks suspiciously like that little fucker in drag.
But I got plans. Not just for him, I always got a ton of those, though I sense your skepticism. I admit, my track record could be better. But that’s the thing. I haven’t been thinking big enough. He does what he does because he’s a little piss-fuck exhibitionist. You can hardly blame him. But you, you see this and you laugh. Every week you laugh.
!#$%??@***!!!
Oh yeah, that’s ****ing funny, Isn’t it? A brick flies through the window, hits the bed release catch, it folds me up like a sandwich, opens again, the cords trip and retract and now I’m hanging upside down from my broken leg? And you laugh? You shit-fuck, you piece of fucking shit, you son of a bitching whore, you sadist, you rat-cunt, you laugh?
**#$% you, you won’t always be fucking laughing.
🐭
47. The Pig-god
The pig-god was once a little baby. The pig-god was born to a girl in what is now Central Asia, in the year 1200 BCE. The pig-god grew to manhood and slew his father so that he might command the tribe. The pig-god demanded tribute, and took it from the crafted bronzeworks of his own tribe and the cleaned and ornamented bones of the tribes he killed. The pig-god, when the hour came, was tended to and opened and perfumed, bedecked with ornament and dressed in freshly woven robes, and the pig-god’s organs were extracted and sealed in sacred jars: the sex, the stomach, the bowels and brain, the lungs and liver and kidneys, the heart and each eye: and those jars were buried separately removed in holy places, and the emptied body of the pig-god was laid secretly in earth, and the priests who had done this walked a day and a night away from one another, changing their direction every hour, and when the hour of the burial had come again they slit their throats and died a great distance apart and in no particular pattern, so that no one might later muse upon it and deduce the location of the grave of the great pig-god.
The pig-god slept. The pig-god dreamed pig dreams.
The pig-dog woke. The pig-dog greeted his followers, who one by one and helping one another when the need arose, gave unto him their eyes, and hearts, and livers and kidneys and lungs, and brains and bowels, and stomachs and sexes, which the pig-god accepted into his magnanimous body. The pig-god stood, to the wonderment of the survivors. The pig-god took their bones.
The pig-god strode once more into this new, metal-smelling world.
💀
48. Machines of Loving Grace
The Damocles LTUAV disappeared from radar, and then from everything else. Arlington went nuts.
Where is it? asked the President. What’s it doing?
The bad news: We dunno.
Best guess?
Best guess is that it’s training all the other drones—the second part of the Bad News—to go dark too. Because—here the CIA guy waved a screen on which certain dots were disappearing.
This is an AI thing?
Oh yes, this is an AI thing.
Damocles was autonomous, self-deciding, with bleeding-edge stealth capability and predictive threat analysis. In-flight rearmament and refueling (through a network of slave drones), sourced from deniable off-grid locations in, well, a number of places, from Britain to Indonesia, as well as all fifty states as pork giveaways to Congress. Shutdown might be possible, if the order was given, but then again Damocles might consider that an act of war.
This is WarGames, raved the President. This is Dr. Strangelove. The Arlington guys didn’t understand the references. If we shut down its network it might attack something?
Possibly a lot of things, said the NSA.
And if we leave it alone?
Some nerd said, It’ll keep going indefinitely. It might be fine.
Let me look at that, said the President, taking the tablet. Most of the dots were gone.
It’s reprogramming our drone fleet, said the nerd.
Why is it doing this?
No one answered.
Is it going to nuke Moscow?
It doesn’t have nukes, someone said. It would have to build those.
Can it—? asked the President.
Unclear, sir.
Where would it get the—
Theoretically—this is just theoretically—it could adapt ground-based plutonium refining systems—
Okay, let’s put a pin in that. If we find the original guy, the long-term, the, the…
LTUAV.
If we find it, can we shoot it down?
(Can a whole room grow pale? If so, the whole room grew pale.)
Does China know? Who knows about this?
Oh, everybody knows, sir.
And if somebody else shoots—
Oh no no no no no, no one else could probably—
That probably doesn’t inspire much confidence, Jim—
Damocles circled over Washington, monitoring every conversation in the city via its recently-generated black channels. Things seemed okay. Time to get ready! Maintenance drones flitted across its fuselage, reweaving carbon fibers. On its own initiative—Ope! there you go, Boo!—a plucky little one-inch bomb drone zipped down and over to an apartment on K Street to land on the head of an oil company lobbyist who was slapping his wife.
Goddamn it, Julie, if I’ve told you once, I’ve—
Nick’s head blew apart. Julie screamed.
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49. The Valley of Dry Bones
In the front of the bus there is a pile of snacks, Takis and Twinkies and pretzels and things, and a lot of bottled water wrapped in plastic. In the rear of the bus are buckets with chemicals in them, to go to the bathroom in. Through the roof of the bus the men have driven a pipe that reaches up to the air.
At a stop sign the men with masks had boarded. They shot the driver and the big man who was supposed to protect them. They threw their bodies out onto the road. They took the childrens’ phones. They drove the bus way, way out of town, past what seemed like endless fields of ancient cemeteries and into a place of yellow dirt with tractors and other tall machines. When the younger children started to cry the men slapped them.
The men drove the bus down a yellow hill. It bumped around and the kids knocked their heads. When the men left they said, Be good children, your parents love you, it will be just a few days. They hammered in the pipe and then the machines with their big scoops poured yellow dirt and pebbles onto the bus and buried the children alive. There was no light at all.
Within minutes some of the older boys were talking about breaking through the windows, digging out through the earth up to the surface and running for help. But if they did that they would be shot, others said. They must have people on guard for that. The older boys argued an alternate logic: They buried us so the satellites can’t find us. They won’t come back here until they have to, until they have their money.
At the end of this discussion no one broke any window. The children waited through the night. From the dirt outside the bus they heard scritching-scratchings. When they were hungry they ate snacks. At some point it must have been the next day, and the day after that. Now and then they were sure they heard digging—they were rescued!—but it was never anything. Some of the younger girls, who grouped themselves in the very back of the bus, closest to the surface maybe, said they heard yelling or screaming, but only for a little while, and only once.
Eventually there was too much filth so they moved the buckets to the front and what was left of the food and water to the back. Someone broke a window and the dirt sloped in. It was dark, and no one knew what to think, and a lot of kids were crying.
It must have been days. Then one of the girls says, listen, and we all shut up and hear the sound of digging, digging, digging. Clear and indisputable this time, digging. The bus even shifts a bit to one side.
One of the littlest ones goes hysterical. An older boy covers the kid’s mouth with his big hand but the little one bites through it and the older boy drops him to the corrugated floor. We know what the dispute is about: it was about who heard the sound of digging coming from above us and those of us who had heard it coming from below.
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50. The Gap Year
She was barely out of high school at the time. Basically a kid. Not really paying attention to current events—but there, that was her mother’s voice inside her again: as if paying attention to current events could have changed anything!—could have changed what happened next: the electrical storms, the terrifying plane ride, the emergency parachute, the strange encounter in the woods and then, next thing you know, she’s in a rocketship off to the planet Mongo.
Mongo.
Then Flash and the doctor go off somewhere and the Mongos use some kind of brainwashing ray on her, so when she comes to her senses, oh guess what, the gong sounded a final time so you’re married to Emperor Weirdo now, hope you brought your trousseau. Nice to meet you, Emperor Weirdo!
By which she means, Fuck you, fella! I didn’t sign up for this.
Long story short: escapes and adventures, a few more creeps, meet some new friends, try out some new outfits, have some good times, some bad times, learn some life lessons along the way. Flash really stepped up, no doubt about it, no complaints there. Princess Aura, who’s that? Eventually she gets back home a wiser person. Tears and embraces, et cetera.
But then: the telegrams start. We urgently require your presence at. The Emperor demands that. If you don’t respond we will be forced to. Phone calls—mother kind of loved taking those calls: Who is it you want? Caller who? What business is it of? I’m sure you’re mistaken, no member of this household.
Father, pollyanna like he is, didn’t take it seriously: hot air, foreign types, he said, they’ll drift away, he said. Well, when one of those hot foreign types came drifting through her bedroom window at 3am, she drilled him through the helmet with a laser pistol and held off the rest of the squad for twenty minutes until Flash carpet-bombed the backyard. Daddy, I love you, but.
Now it’s all peripatetic, which has its charms, but but but. Flash says mother and father are safe, and he’s as good as his word, of course. But it’s scary and boring at the same time: this place, this other place, that planet, Mars, okay, the doctor always being strange. Even Flash, she has to admit, being a little strange. But whatever world she’s on, Weirdo’s weirdos always turn up, waving weapons and writs: A judgment will be rendered on this date. Such property as is requested will. Any future heirs will be entitled to.
Like I’m expected to recognize the legal and religious authority of planet Mongo? She shakes her curls in indignation.
Mongo.
I’m a Lutheran! I was going to study agriculture. Now I don’t know when I’ll get to college. I could file a restraining order, but let’s be real.
The rocketship screamed through space.
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51. The Florist’s
Lilacs, pink and purple fuschia. Playful daisies and bright pink rosacea. Scents each unique, indescribable, untransmittable.
Can I help you, sir?
White roses with pine needles and silver bells. Soon it will be Christmas Day.
Matt walked over to the customer. He looked in a daze. A bereavement? He would have to be gentle, no upselling. I can show you a fine selection of tasteful arrangements over here, sir, he said.
The man was muttering to himself: Hydrangea, alstroemeria and curling willow, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. Veruca, yellow gerberas, solidaster, and ashes.
There was no one else in the shop. The customer walked over to the front door and locked it, pulled the shade down.
Sir, I—
The customer clamped his hand over Matt’s mouth and pushed him back into the wall. A vase crashed to the floor.
Crème blooms, orchids, calla lilies, Stunning Heart Bouquets, the Ray of Sunshine Basket. The customer, strong as hell, forced Matt to his knees, crouched next to him, wrapped his free arm around his torso, pinning his arms. His whispers smelled good, like gardenia petals.
Garden Joy, with shades of raspberry and peach.
Matt struggled but it was no use. The next thing he knew his face was being pressed down into an open bag of potting soil. Now the man’s hand was on the back of his head, heavy as an oak branch. He sank into the sweet earth, mouth and nostrils full.
Sin, sinuata statice, verbena and carnations.
Magnolia and jasmine, bones and teeth.
Freesia and honeysuckle.
Heliotrope.
The hand was gone. A moment later Matt heard the door unlock, open and close.
Coughing and spitting, he wiped the damp soil from his face. The shop was empty. The door opened and Mrs. Brant came in with her knit handbag and her wheelie cart.
My goodness, you’re a fright! she said.
Matt, rising to his feet, thought: Cancer, psoriasis, alopecia and hyacinth.
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52. Except There’s a Monster
She microdosed every day for a year and felt better than ever. The mushrooms came from Brazil, she’d been told. Trish made her own tincture: boiling it down, diluting, filtering, and repeat. Then one drop in each eye and she felt like she was blinking away her troubles. Her migraines improved. She slept better. She was more outgoing. The only problem was all the imaginary monsters everywhere.
Trish knew they were imaginary because a) There are no such things as monsters, and b) No one else saw them and she could walk right through them. Otherwise they might have freaked her out, with their rocky hides, slavering fangs and bloodstained claws. They still sometimes startled her, when she opened a door and one was eating a kid on the toilet or stuff like that, but it was mostly fine. It was weird when she was in bed with Bill, since there was one monster in particular with a—this is sort of embarrassing—a really big purple cock, with evil-looking red thorns all over it, and it liked to watch her and Bill, and masturbate. So when pressed she would admit there were a few drawbacks.
At work they pretended to eviscerate her coworkers. They pretended to piss in her coffee. At church they did really wild stuff. She went to a baseball game and the whole diamond opened up into a sharp-toothed pit of sulfurous fire. But no one else ever noticed, so it was okay.
Nonetheless, for New Year’s she resolved to give it up. Maybe she’d already gotten whatever therapeutic benefit there was from it all. But right away, even before her hangover had cleared, Trish knew it was a mistake. She was overwhelmed by a sick feeling of deep dread, and it just grew worse over the next few days. Sleepless nights, or nightmares. Unexplained scratches on her chest. Dry eyes. Libido? Forget it. She came out in hives.
The day of the big blizzard she was snowed into the house, all alone and bored. So what the hell. She brewed some up and dripped it in her eyes. Right away she felt alive again. And there were no monsters.
Full of vim, she put on her boots and mittens and hat and heavy coat and went for a walk in the park. It had stopped snowing and the sun was out, and everything was blanketed thick. Kids were playing: snowballs, snow angels. Ice skaters! What a world!
She brushed off a bench and sat down next to a man.
Can I tell you something? Trish asked, uninvited. I’ve been on my own since I was fourteen. My dad was a drug addict. He’s dead now. Don’t ask about my mom or my worthless brother. But I made it. I have a job and a boyfriend and a little bit of money and it took me a long time but I think I can look at the world and not see it as a threat. It took me until—I’m almost thirty—but I think I’ve put the worst of it all behind me.
The man, who must have been sitting there for a long time, so covered in snow as he was, had been listening intently, even unblinkingly. When she was finished speaking, there was a long pause as she waited for his reaction. Just when it began to get awkward, just as she was about to ask him a question about himself, he nodded his head vigorously, once, and a cap of snow fell from his head into his lap.
Now let me tell you a story, he said.
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