by Jerry
*
Those heat spirits and dust devils that had been with us a long time shivered up and down the cinderblocks. The cheap, slap-together walls and corrugated tin roof called them in from across the sand; driving them down the asphalt lines of what used to be old 66. North American ley lines. The standing stones of Shell gas stations.
“What’s that?” Nelson pointed.
I took the cold Cokes and walked back to the car. Nelson was stretching his legs, had on Weylin’s old boots. I followed him to the road shrine. A flat cairn of stones holding up a wooden man-on-a-cross. A black man, face stern and beatific; a bleeding bullet hole in his side and a thorny crown of computer chips.
“It’s a King on a cross,” I said, putting a bottle in Nelson’s hand. “Sometimes they say it’s Malcolm X.”
The shrivelled black man hit the gasoline nozzle back into the pump. “Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior,” he growled out.
Nelson didn’t seem to notice. “Saw the same thing in the war, in Jamaica, with the Zion cults. Was Marley then.”
I could see the black man’s wife eyeing Nelson from the porch. His gun in the back of his jeans, the Raven tattoo, the sockets on the side of his head. She crossed herself and muttered in Spanglish, “Proud Mary, Mother of God, rolling on the river.”
This is the wrong place for us. The best we could find here would have been old Navajos doing peyote and putting Coyote spells on their PCs and satellite dishes to pull down illegal signals from orbit. Ghost cattle on the ranges driven by cowboys on Suzuki bikes. Meat farms of bison reconstituted from DNA seeds and selling hot in Japan. Nelson sat down on the fender of the Thunderbird and took a long drink. “Twenty years is too long to sleep,” he said.
*
I bit down and cracked the betel nut in half, sucked a cheekful of saliva past the back of my mouth and bent over the half of the controls that still worked. Sliders and switches shown in masking tape and black marker. The red submarine light blacked and replaced with the blue-green sky of summer eve. A brass and mahogany globe squealed on its tilted axis when Nelson spun it. A map made before the coastlines had gone under; continents that seemed too big against the oceans went by, night, day, night, day. I turned another slider and the sky darkened until stars came out.
Nelson’s mouth opened and made a wonderful smile, bending his head back to watch the great bowl of the ceiling. Faraway trees and hills circled the bottom edge of the sky on the horizon of vision. He walked in drunken circles, head craned back. Boots made damp echoes on the marble tiles those crazy Freemasons had left in place of seats. Finally he tripped over a four-foot brass telescope and hit the floor.
I finished with the board and walked back to him. The betel warm in my chest and going through my veins like silvery snakes. The giant insect of lenses began to spin in the middle of the room and the sky went into a slide and dropped and moved away from us; the stars in the dark moved like the whole world was disappearing away below and everything was a merry-go-round in freefalI. The center of the world was inside your ribs and it all rotated on strings from there.
And Nelson had crawled to the rugs and fat pillows, knocking over an iron candle stand that, whump, landed on a dusty Persian pillow shooting sparkle clouds of dust. As he went, he left coat and shirt and big silver buckle belt and jeans. And me gaining on him, leaving shoes frozen in two footsteps and losing clothes in a trail behind me. Nut slivers ground between molars. The taste at the back of my tongue, and it’s slick all through me.
Remembering what Nelson taught us, what I tried to tell Sander and he used it the wrong way; that male energies have no direction and can be moulded to different paths, but that always—you have to know this—always there are magics that can only be done through women. That we have part of the earth working inside us, a cycle that is both moon and earth because a woman bleeds and blood is iron and iron and magic are like gunpowder and fire, and blood makes magic. But Sander used it the wrong way to suck the life out of his women and I had my own spells to bring Weylin back if no one else did.
Up to Nelson and—shush of clothes—on him. Kissing. And goosebumps spread from my breasts to my belly, down my arms and legs. My skin warms, pressed to the heat of his stomach, tongue past lips in passionate ummm, kiss. Pressed flat and him kissing chest and belly down to fine lines of hairs until I can’t keep my legs from shake—Ohh—shaking. And moving back to kiss and oh salt and sweat and sweet warmth and nmmmoh in between my legs and inside and so full and around my waist strong hands and ohhh his fingers. Squeeze, it can’t escape and fingers still touching and back arching and ahh, getting closer and ummm, uhuh, yes and goddess don’t sfopgaspingandrollingand meltinglogether Lelhimtf), ka-thump thump of heart inside, and slower until arms and legs are curled together and still. And only his heart: ka-thump, ka-lhump, thump.
*
Down below was too clean to be dead. Even the crews of night janitors had left when we came down the steps to it. Every surface polished, signs bright and day-glo and new. Bulbs and phosphorescent panels clear of dust to shine a blue-red pale imitation of daylight. All clear, just the broad traffic ways of closed-up storefronts and autotellers, swept and ready until a 5 a.m. rush. It was Nelson’s home and Sander knew it, just like he had tried to know everything about Nelson. Sander was more like him than Nelson was.
We went deep, past the arcades to where tunnels felt like tunnels and trains in the garage let rumbles and squeals go through the concrete when they moved around. Down where the unconditionables had burrows and warrens marked off with competing spray paint tags. A language as much art as print, indecipherable to anyone but the kids. I walked behind Nelson and listened. Him with his hand on the revolver but neither of us expecting anything. I tried to read through the faded collage of paint as we went, looking for a Nelson ‘17, but I didn’t find one.
And just like he said, stepping out of the wall shadow, Sander was there. Like Nelson’s own shade, come looking for him. Sander like death in black trenchcoat and boots and black leather jeans and gloves. And I watched the two of them move together like I never got the chance to with Weylin because he always tried to look so different. Nelson with this weird look of recognition and maybe sad too. Nelson, who by all rights should be over fifty and was only thirty, holding hands with Sander, who he last saw as a newborn. And my eight-year-old self remembering those green eyes and red-brown hair just like me and big brother Weylin.
“Here he is, Sander,” I motioned. “This is Nelson.”
Sander touched Nelson like he might break, leaned closer. Nelson only smiled and kissed him. Time passed, 1, 2, 3, all the way to 11 while their lips stayed together, eyes open, and watched each other. Nelson stepped away and lightly pressed a finger to the corner of his mouth.
“Sander. Did you pick that name?” he asked.
“It was the closest I could get.” Sander turned his head to the side.
Late that night, with Sander asleep on one side and me curled up at his back, I whispered into Nelson’s ear, “We have to go west.
I want to visit the sea.”
*
“Dead?” Nelson wondered out loud. “I thought they’d need silver bullets to kill him.”
I remembered the wreck of the place where they found his body. The white-on-white tile and porcelain filled with so much blood he just bled and bled and bled. Splashed so high to hit the ceiling.
“It was at Stratford.” Sander kept talking. “Bastards waited until act four, he was playing Macbeth. They musta been good, put a glamour on half the cast and they hacked him to pieces. Hell, even so he pulled down half the stage; bodies all over, in the audience, everywhere.”
“Who else? Who did it?”
Sander took another long breath. “Too good for CSIS, maybe the CIA freak squad. We found him after the Wheelkids had gone over it all. They put a stake through his heart and his head on a pike.”
We’re all grim on that. To Nelson, Weylin was all his and I know it’s bad inside. Bad to wake
up to. Maybe I’d been better off to have that black leather witch he slept with to tell him. Maybe but no, best from one of us. Sander’s fingers are white on the knives hooked inside his jacket. Big tears went drip splash off Nelson’s cheeks. We all feel it, like something plasticine wrapped around our hearts. But poor Nelson; flesh of my flesh.
*
They went out drinking tequila and bodysurfing. We ate Morrocan oranges and handfuls of shrimp and seafood. I got Nelson and Sander to come down from the house and we went nude sunbathing on the beach to forget about the ghosts of Montreal. Omni and Ferris played in the water and laughed. My hair got sunbleached and my nose peeled.
There was a bonfire cookout that night on the beach. Nelson and I held hands in cutoffs and T-shirts. Watching the fire; a hundred different colours of fall leaves rushed in the wind at once. A black sky and wash of moon’s tide pulling in the waves. I relaxed, warm and sleepy, like the girl on rainy days I used to be.
Sander sat down beside me, skin dark from the sun. Salt stains creased his clothing and red hair was spiked wet with ocean water. “Nelson, where did we come from, why did you make us?” he asked, because I never told him that story. Nelson closed his eyes. Tumbled waves and white bodies called behind us.
“I had good veteran’s benefits; guaranteed replacement parts due to physical injury, radiation damage or cellular breakdown due to chemical toxins. Pretty much had to be able to replace all of me. There were the fates to pay, Sander, the throe fates had said I couldn’t die that way.”
“Do we all have the same soul?” Sander asked.
“A part of it.” Nelson smiled.
And I knew why Nelson’s grief had gone away. Knew it better than him because I could feel Weylin inside me. None of us could die so easily while the others weren’t because he was still three-quarters alive. Blood pumping, thump drump in my belly and a dozen cells splitting and reforming and the fire was too hot and sand burrowing around my toes. “When I found out, I took you away,” Nelson was saying, but I left them at the fire. Staggered by Jessa and Weylin’s old pack until my soles left wet imprints in the sand and the surf tickled my ankles and foamed around my knees and cold saltwater at the crotch of my shorts.
On my back, hair swam around my shoulders, a touch like nibbling fish. Eyes open to the moon winking through the dented grey ceiling of clouds. The sea all around me, arms and legs wide to float. Cold water seeding up inside between my legs, because what Nelson couldn’t know was that some magics take a woman and iron and blood and the sea. That even though he knew sometime Weylin would come back, he didn’t know how, or that I could do it. Fate had left his soul inside us but engineering had left us genetic brothers and sister of one Lieutenant Alexander Weylin Nelson; and both those meddlers were alive inside me. Coming home.
FULL CIRCLE
John Alfred Taylor
At Edwards Air Force Base streets are named for test pilots who buy the farm. But none is named after Ted Kinzer.
Kinzer isn’t mentioned in any history of the X-15 program. Flight numbers and dates have been changed to make him a nonperson, with other pilots on record for his flights. Everyone involved had to sign documents with terrible penalties for breaking security. Nobody still alive has gone public, because who’d listen except The National Enquirer or Geraldo?
And who noticed the X-15 test program then, with the Mercury and Gemini astronauts hogging the headlines?
The Air Force paid Kinzer’s wife $50,000 to keep quiet, which was good money for the time. But Marge Kinzer waited two years before she went out with another man, and waited a third before she married again, waited just to be sure, just in case.
That was the end.
It began with Jim Roberts orbiting Chase-4 northeast of Edwards, waiting for visual acquisition after Kinzer’s altitude flight. From what he’d heard so far everything was fine: Kinzer had had ignition right after launch without having to sweat and try again, his angle of ascent while the LR99 rocket engine kicked him in the ass was nominal, and when he cut the engine off the plane was still rising toward 280,000 feet, where the sky was black and he had to use reaction controls instead of rudders and stabilizers. Now Kinzer had come through reentry, descended past 70,000 feet, and was using the speed brakes to kill his velocity.
“Acquisition yet?” said NASA-1.
“Not yet,” Jim said, peering toward the northeast as he banked again. The X-15 was dark and hard to see.
Then the propellant dump contrail made a chalkline on the sky.
“I see you, Ted.”
“Good to have a friend. How do I look?”
“Can’t tell till we’re closer.” Roberts made a tight bank as the rocket plane went by. “I’m coming up on your right, Ted.”
They went around the high key together, then turned back to come around for the approach.
“How do I look now?”
“Real good.”
Kinzer did his landing flare and set the plane down. The X-15 bounced on its rear skids, slammed the nose gear down, bounced up and down again, and started its dust-plumed slideout along Runway 18-36.
Halfway down the runway they picked up Kinzer’s last words:
“This is squirrely!”
By the time Roberts landed it was all over. The fire chiefs red pickup, the ambulance, the mobile control van, the fire engine, and the other trucks and vehicles had closed on the X-15 as it slid to a stop, while the rescue helicopter hovered overhead. By the time Jim was able to catch a ride down the runway, the recovery crew had the canopy up and were almost finished shutting down the plane.
Kinzer was on a litter forty feet away, still in his pressure suit.
“What’s happened to Ted?” Roberts asked as he pushed through the crowd.
“That’s what we’d like to know,” said a fireman, eyes wide and strange.
Then Roberts noticed how flat Kinzer’s pressure suit was.
One of the recovery crew was kneeling beside the litter, his face greenish-white. “Kinzer’s gone. There’s nobody inside the suit. We opened his faceplate, and he wasn’t there. Kinzer wasn’t there.”
Ted always looked forward to the moment they opened his helmet at the end of a flight, and he could finally breathe fresh air. But this time there was no smell of heat or dust when the faceplate popped up, no whiff of residual peroxide or anhydrous ammonia. The air was more like perfume, except it had a hint of hospital in it too.
And there was something about Peterson’s face—
“Is anything wrong?” Peterson asked.
“No,” lied Ted, squinting so he wouldn’t seem to stare. It was Peterson, but his face was too smooth, overpoweringly three-dimensional, like a portrait painted in an exaggeratedly photo-realistic style. To change the subject Kinzer begged “Get me out of here.”
Ted looked over the shoulders of his helpers on the way to the suit van: the dry lake looked wrong too, but how he couldn’t quite tell.
After he took off his gloves and boots and silver nylon coverall, they helped him with the rubber body suit. When that slid off his long johns much too easily, without struggle or sweat, he began to doubt his senses. “Is any of this real?” he asked the man who looked like Peterson. “Nothing seems quite right. Did I actually land at Edwards, or am I crazy?”
“Yes. And no and no,” said the Peterson person. “I’m real, and you’re not crazy. But you haven’t landed at Edwards, and we don’t look like this. The illusion of the familiar is meant to protect you from the shock of transition— Admirable how quickly you saw through it.”
“So just where am I, in a flying saucer? On Mars or Venus?”
Peterson and the other two people in the van spoke as if they shared the same mind: “Much farther away. You are in a habitat in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and nearly a million years into what you call the future.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Watch,” said the Peterson. The side of the van disappeared. Fifty yards beyond the X-15 melted like wax, s
himmered, and merged with the sunlit runway. Then the sky turned black over the bed of Rogers Dry Lake.
There were stars pressing in everywhere overhead, terrifyingly closer and brighter than Kinzer had ever seen, many more than on the clearest desert night. During the brief flight he had endured G-forces followed by vertigo as he rose into space and fell back, even heavier G-forces during reentry, but this was too much. Ted fainted.
Ted regained consciousness with Peterson’s hand—if it was a hand—palm down on his solar plexus, as if charging him with vitality through his long johns.
Long johns—what a costume to wear into the future! And then he wondered. If everything else was unreal—Ted scratched surreptitiously. It hurt and no fabric caught his fingernail: naked was even worse than long johns. Or did it matter so much, if these three things talking to him weren’t human?
“Feel better?” said the Peterson lookalike.
“Yeah,” said Kinzer, sitting up, “better. So I’m really that far in the future?”
“Most certainly.”
“And where did you say this was?”
“A habitat in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.”
“Just where’s that?”
“It’s a companion galaxy to what you call the Milky Way roughly 800,000 light years from your home planet.”
Kinzer almost fainted again. “Jesus. That’s pretty far to snatch a person. But why me?”
“You were the nearest target.”
“At 800,000 light years?”
“Nearest to our aiming point I mean. And we desperately needed an ancestral human specimen from Old Earth.”
“Ancestral? You mean you’re really human?”
Peterson’s teeth were too perfect when he smiled. “Oh yes. I should have made that clear from the beginning, rather than leading you astray. But much changed, and still changing ourselves, which is why you are a specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens, while we are Homo sapiens proteus.”
“I don’t enjoy being called a specimen,” Kinzer snapped. “Sounds too much like you’ll be dissecting me next.”