The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  Lots of people died from that flu. Famous actors and former presidents and seven teachers at my school. Two kids on my soccer team. A girl named Corinne with white-blond hair who used to say, “Hey, Dorn” to me whenever I saw her in the hall at school. She came to all my games.

  Our first meal in the hangar, served from a series of the largest pots I’d ever seen: reconstituted eggs and fried potatoes and lots and lots of beans. That was our second meal, too, and every meal after that, as long as we were in the hangar. Be glad that you’ve never had to live in a hangar with eighty-four people eating beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For variety, there were little fat yellow-green bananas and industrial-size jars of these rubbery, slippery cylinders that Naomi said were hearts of palm.

  My father said a couple of things to me. I ignored him. So he started talking to Naomi instead, about aliens and Costa Rica.

  After breakfast I went back and lay down on my cot and thought about how I was going to get home. I had made it as far as some weird place where everyone was running around, setting fire to these inflatable germ-proof houses, when I woke up, face and arms and legs stuck to the plastic mattress with sweat, confused and overheated and pissed off. I didn’t know where I was or why and then, when I did, it didn’t make me any happier. The girl Naomi was sitting on the floor beside her cot. She was reading a beat-up old paperback. I figured I knew who she’d borrowed it from.

  “You missed the excitement,” she said. “Some executive type got all worked up and tried to pick a fight with the guards. He said something about how they couldn’t do this to him because he’s a U.S. citizen and he has rights. I thought we gave up those years ago. Zuleta-Arango and some of the others held him down while your father stuck him with a muscle relaxant.

  “Have you read this?” she said. “I haven’t seen one of these in years. Me, reading a book. I feel so very historical. We got our luggage back, so that’s one good thing, although they’ve taken our passports away. I’ve never even heard of Olaf Stapleton. He’s pretty good. Your dad doesn’t exactly travel light. He’s got like a hundred more actual books in his luggage. And you snore.”

  “I do not. Where is he?”

  “Over there. In the office he set up. Taking temperatures and talking to hypochondriacs.”

  “Look,” I said. “Before he comes back, we need to get something straight. You’re not my babysitter, okay?”

  “Of course I’m not,” she said. “Aren’t you a little old for a babysitter? How old are you? Sixteen?”

  “Fourteen,” I said. “Okay, good. That’s settled. The other thing we need to straighten out is Hans Bliss. I’m with you. He’s a loser, and I don’t want to be here. As soon as they lift quarantine, I’m calling my soccer coach back in Philadelphia so he can buy me a ticket and get me out of here.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Good luck with that. It would be terrible if a global flu epidemic meant the end of your soccer career.”

  “Pandemic,” I said. “If it’s global, it’s a pandemic. And they’re working on a vaccine right now. Couple of days and a couple of jabs and things will go back to normal, more or less, and I’ll go home.”

  “This is home,” Naomi said. “For me.”

  While she read Stapleton, I went through the luggage to see what my father had packed. The things he hadn’t: my trophies, my soccer magazines, the braided leather bracelet that a girl named Tanya gave me last year, when we were sort of going out. I liked that bracelet.

  What he had packed bothered me even more than what he hadn’t, because you could tell how much time he’d spent planning this. He’d brought maybe a third of his collection of paperback SF. And in my duffel bag were my World Cup T-shirts, my palmtop, my sleeping bag, my toothbrush, two more soccer balls. An envelope of photos of my mother and of my brother, Stephen. The little glass bottle with nothing inside it that my mother gave me the last time I saw her. I wonder what my father thought when he found that glass bottle in my dresser drawer. It was the first thing he ever gave my mother. She liked to tell me that story. It didn’t work out between them, but they didn’t hate each other after the divorce, the way some parents do. Whenever they talked on the phone they laughed and gossiped about people as if they were still friends. And she never threw away that bottle of nothing. So I couldn’t, either.

  My father collects books, mostly sci-fi, mostly paperbacks. Most people keep their books on a googly or a flex, but my father likes paper. I read one of his books every once in a while when I got bored. Sometimes my father had written in the margins and on the blank pages, making notes about whether these were hopeful portraits of the future, or realistic, or other stories he was reminded of. Sometimes he doodled pictures of blobby or feathery aliens or spaceships or women whose faces looked kind of like my mother’s face, except with tentacles coming out of their heads or with insect eyes, standing on pointy rocks with their arms akimbo, or sitting and holding hands with men in space suits. My father read his paperbacks over and over again, and so sometimes I left my own comments for him to find. He’d packed two suitcases for himself, and one was mostly books. I pulled out Ray Bradbury’s R Is for Rocket and wrote on the first page of the first story, down in the bottom margin, “I HATE YOU.” Then I dated it and put it back in the suitcase.

  One of the two small offices in the hangar became my father’s clinic. He spent most of the day there—among the passengers on our flight there were seven diabetics, one weak heart, two pregnancies (eight months, and five months), a dozen asthmatics, a migraine sufferer, three methadone users, one prostate cancer, one guy on antipsychotic medication, and two children with dry coughs. My father set up cots in the second office for the children and their parents, reassuring them that this was only a precaution. In fact, they ought to think of it as a privilege. Everyone else was going to be camping out in the hangar.

  He came back smelling of hand sanitizer and B.O. “Feeling better?” he said to me.

  I’d changed T-shirts and put on some jeans, but I probably smelled just as bad. I said, “Better than what, exactly?”

  “Dinner’s at seven,” Naomi said. “They divided us into meal groups while you were asleep, Dorn. Meal groups with cute names. The Two-toed Sloths—Perezosos de dos Dedos—and the Mono Congos, howler monkeys to you, and the Tucancillos. That’s us. Us Tucancillos get dinner first tonight. We’re rotating dinner slots and chores. We do the dishes tonight, too. The Mono Congos are on latrine duty. I am really not looking forward to that.”

  It was beans and rice and eggs again, along with some kind of pungent, fibrous sausage. Chorizo. I loaded so much food on my plate that Naomi called me a pig. But there was plenty of food for everybody. After dinner, Naomi and I went out to wash dishes in the area that had been rigged for bathing. After I’d rinsed several stacks of smeary plates and sprayed them with disinfectant, I poured a dipper of water over my own head.

  I was washing dishes at a barrel next to the girl that I’d showed off for earlier. Not an accident, of course. Even with her mask on, she was better than pretty this close up. “American?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “From Philadelphia. Liberty Bell, Declaration of Independence, AOL Cable Access Riots of 2012. Are you Costa Rican?”

  “Tica,” she said. “I’m a Tica. That’s what you say here.” She had long, shiny hair and these enormous baby-animal eyes, like a heroine in an anime. She was taller than me, but I was used to girls who were taller than me. I liked her accent, too. “Me llamo Lara.”

  “I’m Dorn,” I told her. “This is Naomi. We met on the bus.”

  “Hola,” Naomi said. “I’m at UCR. Dorn is here with his father because of Hans Bliss and the aliens. Because, you know, Hans Bliss said that the aliens are going to show up again real soon and this time he knows what he’s talking about. Not like all those other times when he said the aliens were coming back.”

  Several Tucancillos stopped washing dishes.

  “Hans Bliss is a big deal here,” Lara said.
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  I glared at Naomi. “I’m not really interested in this guy Bliss. I’m just here because my father kidnapped me.”

  My father had got out of dish duty when Zuleta-Arango announced some kind of committee meeting. Figures. First he kidnapped me, and now I was stuck doing his dishes.

  “Hans Bliss can kiss my fat ass,” Naomi said. Now some of our fellow Tucancillos were beginning to seem really irritated. I recognized the woman from the bus, Paula, the one that Naomi had already gotten riled up. The younger guy who had grabbed Paula’s arm, back on the bus, was—I saw now—wearing a SHARE THE BLISS, HANS BLISS FOR WORLD PRESIDENT T-shirt. He gave Naomi a meaningful look, the kind of look that said he felt sorry for her.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “Cool,” Naomi said. “Porta a mi. Wait a minute, look over there. Is that an alien? Does it want to say something to us?”

  Everyone looked, of course, but it was just a huge, disgusting bug. “Whoops,” Naomi said. “Just a roach. But I hear our friends the roaches love Hans Bliss, too. Just like everyone else.”

  The woman Paula said, “I’m going to punch her right in that smug little mouth! If she says one more word!”

  “Paula,” the big-nosed guy said. “She isn’t worth it. Okay?”

  Naomi turned around and said, loudly, “I am too worth it. You have no idea how worth it I am.”

  The guy just smiled. Naomi gave him the finger. Then we were out of there.

  While we were walking back, Lara said, “Tengala adentro. Naomi, I am not saying that I am a big fan of Bliss, but do you think that he was lying about his encounter with these aliens? Because I have seen the footage and read the eyewitness accounts, and my mother knows a man who was there. I don’t believe it can all be a hoax.”

  Naomi shrugged. Back in the hangar, people were sorting through their suitcases, talking on cell phones, tapping away furiously at their peeties and googlies. We ended up back at the wall where our cots were, and Lara and I sat on the floor. Naomi hunkered down on her tires.

  “I believe there were aliens,” she said. “I just resent the fact that the first credible recorded contact with an extraterrestrial species was made by an idiot like Bliss. People who decide to go surfing in a Category 3 hurricane ought to be up for the Darwin Award, not considered representative of the human race. Well, not considered representative of the best the human race has to offer. And we only have Bliss’s story about what the aliens said to him. I just don’t buy that an intelligent race, the first we’ve ever come into contact with, would casually drop by to tell us to be happy and naked and polyam-orous and vegetarian and oh yeah, destroy all nuclear stockpiles. All of those are good things, don’t get me wrong. But they’re exactly the kind of things you expect a retro-hippie surfer like Bliss to say. And the result? What’s left of the United States, not to mention Greater Korea, Indonesia, and most of the Stans are all stockpiling weapons faster than ever, because they’ve decided it’s suspicious that aliens apparently want us to destroy all nuclear weapons. Which kind of puts this whole flu thing into perspective, you know? If Bliss’s aliens come back, there are going to be a lot of missiles pointed right at them, a lot of fingers hovering on those special fingerprint-sensitive keypads.”

  “And a lot of naked people lined up on beaches everywhere, singing ‘Kumbaya’ and throwing flowers,” I said.

  “Including you?” Naomi asked. Lara giggled.

  “No way,” I said. “I’ve got better things to do.”

  “Like what?” Lara said. I started to think she was flirting with me. “What kind of things are you into, Dorn?”

  “I’m a soccer player,” I said. “A pretty good one. I’m not bragging or anything. I really am good. You saw me, right? I’m a goalie. And I’m kind of feeling like an idiot right now. I mean, if I’d known my father was planning to kidnap me and bring me down here, I would have at least learned to say some stuff in Spanish. Like, This man is kidnapping me. How do you say that? I don’t know anything about Costa Rica except the usual stuff. Like there are a lot of beaches down here, right? And software. And iguana farms? I know a kid down the street whose father lost his job, and his father keeps saying he’s going to raise iguanas in the basement under special lights and sell the meat online. Or else raise llamas in his backyard. He hasn’t made up his mind. His kid said iguana tastes like chicken. More or less.”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” Lara said. “It’s okay that you don’t know Spanish. You’ll learn.”

  “I hope we’re out of here soon,” Naomi said, “because I have exams coming up. Is your phone working, Lara? My googlie keeps crashing when I try to get on. I just want to know if they’ve shut the university down.”

  Lara thumbed her phone. “My battery is almost dead,” she said at last. “But I know the situation of the schools. They’re closed for the indefinite future. My mother spoke to her cousin a few hours ago. Still no outbreak of this flu in San Jose or any other place in Costa Rica, but the government is asking people to stay at home except in situations of emergency. Just for a few days. All of the cruise ships are anchored offshore. My cousin runs a cruise-supply company, which is how she knows. The army is dropping food and supplies onto the decks of the boats. I’ve never been on a cruise. I wish I were on a boat instead of in here. On the talk shows, they are talking about the flu. How perhaps it was manufactured and then released accidentally or even on purpose.”

  “They say that every time,” I said. “My father says sure, it’s possible, but you’d have to be really stupid to do something like that. And anyway, all we have to do is sit here and wait. Wait and see if anyone here is sick. Wait and see if anyone out there comes up with a vaccine. Once they get a vaccine cultured, they get it distributed pretty quickly. The question is, what do we do for fun in the meantime?”

  “No point in studying if we’re doomed,” Naomi said, sounding nonchalant. “Maybe I should wait and see how bad this flu really is.”

  “We’re safer in here than almost anywhere else,” I said. At dinner, my father had made some announcements. He’d said clinic hours would run every day from eight A.M. until four P.M., and that if anyone began to feel achy or as if they had an elevated temperature, they should come talk to him at once. He said the odds that someone in the hangar would have the flu were minimal. He’d already talked with everyone who’d been on the flight and there was no one coming from Calexico or from anywhere farther west than Cincinnati. Our plane had started out the previous morning in Costa Rica and there hadn’t been any changes of crew, except a flight attendant who got on in Miami after spending her day off at home, with her daughter. He explained that if we got sick at all, it would probably be some kind of stomach bug or mild cold, the kind of stuff you usually got when you traveled. Anya Miike had stood next to him, translating everything he said into Spanish and then into Japanese for these two guys from Osaka.

  People had set up card games in the hangar. They’d brought out duty-free gins or tequilas or marijuana or those little bottles of Bailey’s. Kids were drawing with smart crayons right on the concrete floor of the hangar, or watching the anime Brave Hortense, which someone had loaded onto a googly with a fancy bubble screen. Big, fat tears were plopping out of Brave Hortense’s eyes, faster and faster, and the evil kitten who had made her cry began to build a raft, looking worried. A few feet away from us, a man was streaming a Spanish-language news program. The newsfeed became a Spanish-language song set to a languid beat. Elsewhere you could still hear news coming from tinny or expensive little speakers. There was good news and there was bad news. Mostly flu news. Flu in North America, and also in London and Rome.

  None in Costa Rica. The music made a nice change.

  “I love this song,” Naomi said. “It’s on all the time, but I don’t care. I could listen to it all day long.”

  “Lola Rollercoaster,” Lara said. “She always sings about love.”

  “jQue tuanis! What else is there to sing about?” Naomi said.


  I rolled my eyes.

  People sprawled on their tires and talked in Spanish and English and Japanese and German and watched the guards who were watching them. A man and woman began dancing to the Lola Roller-coaster song; others joined them. Mostly older people. They danced close to each other without quite touching. I didn’t see the point in that. If someone in here came down with the flu, dancing two inches apart wasn’t going to be much of a prophylactic. Lara looked like she wanted to say something, and I wondered if she’d ask me to dance. But it turned out that her mother, a not-bad-looking woman in a pair of expensive cornsilk jeans, was waving her back over to where they’d set up cots.

  “I’ll see you later,” Lara said. “Buenas noches, Naomi, Dorn.”

  “Buenas noches.” And then, “I think she likes me,” I said, when she got out of earshot. “Girls usually like me. I’m not bragging or anything. It’s just a fact.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s probably why her mother’s calling her back over,” Naomi said. “An American boy like you is no catch, even if you do have a wicked nice smile and nice green eyes.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Everybody knows that American boyfriends and girlfriends only want one thing. Costa Rican citizenship. Look over there. See that macha, that blond girl? The one flirting with the cute Tico?”

  I looked where Naomi was pointing. “Yeah,” I said.

  “She probably came down here on a tourist visa, hoping to meet guys just like him,” Naomi said. “This is a real stroke of luck for her. We’re going to be in here for at least five or six days. Lots of time for flirting. If I looked like her, I’d be trying to pull off the same thing while I’m at UCR. I’d rather cut off my legs than have to go back and live in the States. At least here they can grow you a new pair.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I said.

  “Really?” Naomi said. “If girls seem to like you, Dorn, realize that it’s probably not for your brains or your keen grasp of sociopolitical-economic issues. Tell me what you like best about our country. Is it the blatantly rigged elections, the lack of access to abortion, the shitty educational system? Is it the fact that most of the states where anyone would ever actually want to live would secede like Calexico and Potlatch, if they had someone like Canada or Mexico to back them up? Is it the health care, the most expensive and least effective health-care system in the world, the national debt so impressive it takes almost two whole pages of little tiny zeros to write it out? Tell me about your job prospects, Dorn. Who would you just kill to work for? Wal-Mart, McDisneyUniverse, or some prison franchise? Or were you going to join the army and go off to one of the Stans or Bads because you’ve always wanted to get gassed or shot at or dissolved into goo when your experimental weapon malfunctions?”