“Professional soccer,” I said. “Preferably in Japan or Italy. Whoever offers the best money.”
Naomi blinked, opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She pulled out a bar of chocolate and broke off a piece still in the wrapper and gave it to me. We pushed our masks up and chewed. “This is good,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Even the chocolate is, like, ten times better down here. Oh boy. Look over there.”
I turned around. It was that woman again. Paula. She was standing in a row of about two dozen other women and men and she was taking off all her clothes. Then she was standing there naked. They were all taking off their clothes. The homely guy who’d been wearing the HANS BLISS FOR WORLD PRESIDENT T-shirt turned out to have a full-color portrait of Hans Bliss—on his surfboard, on a towering wave, about to be lifted up by the aliens—tattooed across his chest. It was pretty well done. Lots of detail. But I didn’t spend too much time looking at him. There were more interesting things to look at.
“These are the people that my dad wants to go hang out with?” I said. I thought about getting out my camera. There were other people with the same idea, holding out their cell phones, clicking pics.
“Look, a priest,” Naomi said. “Of course there would be a priest. A Church-of-the-Second-Reformation priest, too, by the look of him. Try not to drool. Surely you’ve seen naked women before.”
“Only on the Internet,” I said. “This is better.”
A guy in a black suit and a priest’s collar was striding over toward the protestors, yelling some things in Spanish. A naked man, so hairy that he was hardly naked at all, really, stepped out of the line with his arms out wide. Hans Bliss’s Star Friends believed in embracing all of mankind. Preferably in the nude. (Or as nude as you can get when you’re still wearing your stupid little face mask.)
The priest had apparently had run-ins with Star Friends before. He picked up a tennis racket beside someone’s suitcase and commenced swinging it ferociously.
“What’s he saying?” I asked Naomi.
“Lots of stuff. Put on your clothes. Have you no shame. There are decent people here. Do you call that nothing a penis. I’ve seen bigger equipment on a housecat.”
“Did he really say that?”
“No,” Naomi said. “Just the stuff about decency. Et cetera. Now he’s saying that he’s going to beat the shit out of this guy if he doesn’t put his clothes back on. We’ll see who’s tougher. God or the aliens. My money’s on God. Does your father really buy into all this? The nudity? The peace, love, and Bliss uber alles?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He just really wants to get a chance to see aliens. Up close.”
“Not me,” Naomi said. “Maybe I’ve just seen too many animes where the aliens turn out to be, you know, alien. Not like us. I am really, really tired of these Bliss people. Can I borrow another sci-fi book? Do women ever write this stuff? A story with some romance in it would be nice. Something with fewer annotations.”
“Connie Willis is fun,” I said. “Or there’s this book Snow Crash. Or you could read some Tiptree or Joanna Russ or Octavia Butler. Something nice and grim.”
The priest continued to shout at the naked Star Friends and make menacing, swatting motions with the tennis racket. Other passengers got involved, like this was a spectator sport, yelling things, or whistling, or shouting. My father and Zuleta-Arango and the rest of the committee were walking over. The guards watched from their station by the hangar entrance. Clearly they had no plan to get involved.
It was twilight. The sky through the windows was lilac and gold, like a special effect. There were strings of lights looped along the walls, and a few worklights that people had found in one of the offices and set up strategically around the hangar, which made it look even more like a movie set. You could see the blue-white glow of googly screens everywhere. And then there were the bats. I don’t know who noticed the bats first, but they were hard to miss, once the yelling started.
The bats seemed almost as surprised as we were. They poured into the hangar, looking like blackish, dried-up, flappy leaves, making long, erratic passes back and forth, skimming low and then winking up and away. People ducked down, covered their heads with their hands. The Hans Bliss people put their clothes back on— score one for the bats—and yet the priest was swinging his tennis racket at the bats now, just as viciously as he had the nudists. A bat dipped down and I ducked. “Go away!”
It went.
“They have vampire bats down here,” Naomi said. She didn’t seem bothered at all. “In case you’re wondering. They come into people’s houses and make little incisions in the legs or toes and then drink your blood. Hence the name. But I don’t think these are vampire bats. These look more like fruit bats. They probably live up in the roof where those folds in the steel are. Relax, Dorn. Bats are a good thing. They eat mosquitoes. They’ve never been a vector for flu. Rabies, maybe, but not flu. We love bats.”
“Except for the ones who drink blood,” I said. “Those are big bats. They look thirsty to me.”
“Calm down,” Naomi said. “They’re fruit bats. Or something.”
I don’t know how many bats there were. It’s hard to count bats when they’re agitated. At least two hundred, probably a lot more than that. But as the people in the hangar got more and more upset, the bats seemed to get calmer. They really weren’t that interested in us. One or two still went scissoring through the air every now and then, but the others were somewhere up in the roof now, hanging down above us, glaring down at us with their malevolent, fiery little eyes. I imagined them licking their pointy little fangs. The man with the music turned it off. No more sad love songs. No more dancing. The card parties and conversations broke up.
My father and Zuleta-Arango walked up and down the makeshift aisles of the hangar, talking to the other passengers. Probably explaining about bats. People turned off the worklights, lay down on their cots, pulling silver foil emergency blankets and makeshift covers over themselves: jackets, dresses, beach towels. Some began to make up beds under the cots, where they would be safe from bats if not the spiders, lizards, and cockroaches that were, of course, also sharing our temporary quarters.
Half a soccer field away, Lara sat on a cot leaning back against her mother as her mother brushed her hair. She’d taken off her mask. She was even better looking than I’d thought she’d be. Possibly even out of my league.
Naomi was looking, too. She said, “Your parents are divorced, right? That’s why your father kidnapped you? Have you called your mom? Does she know where you are now?”
“She’s dead,” I said. “She and my brother lived out on a dude ranch in Colorado. They caught that flu three years ago when it jumped from horses.”
“Oh,” Naomi said. “Sorry.”
“Why be sorry? You didn’t know,” I said. “I’m fine now.” My father was headed our way. I took off my mask and lay down on my cot and pulled the foil blanket over my head. I didn’t take off my clothes, not even my shoes. Just in case the bats turned out not to be fruit bats.
All night long, people talked, listened to newsfeeds, got up to go to the bathroom, dreamed the kind of dreams that woke them up and other people, too. Children woke up crying. Naomi snored. I don’t think that my father ever went to sleep at all. Whenever I looked over, he was lying on his cot, thumbing through a paperback. An Alfred Bester collection, I think.
We settled into certain routines quickly. Zuleta-Arango’s committee set up a schedule for recharging googlies and palmtops and cell phones from the limited number of outlets in the hangar. After some discussion, the Hans Bliss people rigged up a kind of symbolic wall out of foil blankets and extra cot frames. That was the area where you went if you wanted to hang out in the nude and talk about aliens. Of course you could just wander by and get an eyeful and an earful, but after a while nude people just don’t seem that interesting. Really.
My dad spent some of the day in the clinic and some of his time with Zule
ta-Arango. He hung out with the Hans Bliss people, and he and Naomi sat around and argued about Hans Bliss and aliens. Somebody started an English/Spanish-language discussion group, and he got involved in that. He set up a lending library, passing out his sci-fi books, taking down the names of people who’d borrowed them. There were plenty of movies and digests that people were swapping around on their googlies, but the paperbacks had novelty appeal. Science fiction is always good for taking your mind off how bad things are.
I still wasn’t speaking to my father, of course, unless it was absolutely necessary. He didn’t really notice. He was too excited about having made it this far, impatient to get on with the next stage of his journey. He was afraid that while we were quarantined, the thing he’d been waiting for would arrive, and he’d be stuck in a hangar less than a hundred miles away. So close, and yet he couldn’t get any closer until the quarantine period was over.
I figured it served him right.
Most of the passengers in quarantine were returning to Costa Rica. The foreign passengers were almost all in Costa Rica because of tech industry stuff or the aliens. Mostly aliens. Because of Hans Bliss. Some of them had waited years to get a visa. There were close to a thousand Star Friends in Costa Rica, citizens of almost every nation, true believers, currently living down along the Pacific coastline, right next to Manuel Antonio National Park; Lara had been to Manuel Antonio a few times on camping trips with friends. She said it was a lot nicer than camping in a hangar.
The first day, the Star Friends quarantined in the hangar got through, on their cell phones and on e-mail, to friends already out with Hans Bliss. My father even managed to speak to Hans Bliss himself for a few minutes, to explain that he had made it as far as San Jose. The Star Friends community was under quarantine as well, of course, and Hans Bliss was somewhat put out that his doctor was stuck at the airport. Preparations for the imminent return of the aliens were being hampered by the quarantine.
Like I said, I saw Hans Bliss speak in Philadelphia once. He was this tall, good-looking blond guy with a German accent. He was painfully sincere. So sincere he hardly ever blinked, which was kind of hypnotic. When he stood on the stage and described the feeling of understanding and joy and compassion that had descended upon him and lifted him up as he stood out on that beach, in the middle of that ferocious storm, I sat there gripping the sides of my chair, because I was afraid that otherwise I might get up and run toward the stage, toward the thing that he was promising. Other people in the audience did exactly that. When he talked about finding himself back on that beach again, abandoned and forsaken and confused and utterly alone, the man sitting next to me started to cry. Everyone was crying. I couldn’t stand it. I looked up at my father and he was looking down at me, like what I thought mattered to him.
“What are we doing here?” I whispered. “Why are we here?”
He said, “I don’t like this any better than you do, Dorn. But I have to believe. I have to believe at least some of what he’s saying. I have to believe that they’ll come back.”
Then he stood up and asked the crying man to excuse us. “What were they like?” someone yelled at Bliss. “What did the aliens look like?”
Everybody knew what the aliens looked like. We’d all seen the footage hundreds of times. We’d heard Bliss describe the aliens on news shows and in documentaries and on online interviews and casts. But my father stopped in the aisle and turned back to the stage and so did I. You would have, too.
Hans Bliss held out his arms as if he was going to embrace the audience, all of us, all at once. As if he was going to heal us of a sickness we didn’t even know that we had, as if rays of energy and light and power and love were suddenly going to shoot out of his chest. The usual agents and government types and media who followed Hans Bliss everywhere he went looked bored. They’d seen this show a hundred times before. “They were beautiful,” Hans Bliss said. People said it along with him. It was the punch line to one of the most famous stories ever. There had even been a movie in which Hans Bliss played himself.
Beautiful.
My father started up the aisle again. We walked out and I thought that was that. He never said anything else about Hans Bliss or Costa Rica or the aliens until he picked me up at soccer practice.
I put on my running shoes. I stretched out on the concrete floor and ran laps around and around the hangar. There were other people doing the same thing. After breakfast, I went over to an area where no one had set up a bed and started messing around, kicking the ball and catching it on the rebound. Nice and high. Some people came over and we played keep-away. When there were enough players, we took two cots and made them goals. We picked teams. Little kids came and sat and watched and chased down the ball when it went out-of-bounds. Even Naomi came to watch. When I asked her if she was going to play, she just looked at me like I was an idiot. “I’m not into being athletic,” she said. “I’m too competitive. The last time I played organized sports, I broke someone’s nose. It was only kind of an accident.”
Lara came up behind me and tapped me on the back of the head.
“¿Cómo está ci arroz? What’s up?”
“You ever play soccer?” I said.
She ended up on my team. I was pretty excited about that, even before I saw her play. She was super fast. She put up her hair in a ponytail, took off her mask, and zipped up and down the floor. Our team won the first match, 3—0. We swapped some players around, and my team won again, 7—0, this time.
At lunch, people came by the table where I was sitting and nodded to me. They said things in Spanish, gave me the thumbs-up. Lara translated. Apparently they could tell how good I was, even though I was being careful on the concrete. I didn’t want to strain or smash anything. This was just for fun.
After dinner there was some excitement when the bats woke up. Apparently nobody had really been paying attention that first night, but this time we saw them go. They bled out into the twilight in a thin, black slick, off to do bat things. Eat bugs. Sharpen their fangs. Nobody was happy to see them come back, either, except some of the little kids, and Naomi, of course. This whole one corner of the hangar floor was totally covered in bat guano. My dad said it wasn’t a health risk, but as a matter of fact, one of the joggers slipped on it the next day and sprained an ankle.
The next day: more of the same. Wake up, run, play soccer. Listen to Naomi rant about stuff. Listen to people talk about the flu. Flirt with Lara. Ignore my father. I still wasn’t ready to check in with Sorken, or to check e-mail. I didn’t want to know.
That afternoon we had our second invasion. Land crabs, this time, the size of silver-dollar pancakes, the color of old scabs, and they smelled like rotting garbage. There were hundreds of them, thousands of hairy, armored legs, all dragging and scratching and clicking. They went sideways, their pincers held up and forward. Everybody stood on their cots or tires and took pictures. When the crabs got to the far wall, they spread out until they found the little cracks and gaps where they could squeeze through. A boy used his shirt to catch three or four crabs; some of the kids had started a petting zoo.
“What was that about?” I said to Naomi.
“Land migration,” she said. “They do that when they’re mating. Or is it molting? That’s why they’re so stinky right now.”
“How do you know so much about all this?” I said. “Bats and crabs and stuff?”
“I don’t date much,” she said. “I stay home and watch the nature feeds online.”
By lunch that second day we knew about outbreaks of flu in New New York, Copenhagen, Houston, Berlin, plenty of other places. The World Health Organization had issued the report my father had been predicting, saying that this was a full-on pandemic, killing the young and the healthy, not just the very young and the very elderly. We knew there were hopeful indications in India and in Taiwan with a couple of modified vaccines. The mood in the hangar was pretty unhappy. People were getting calls and e-mails about family members or friends back in the Sta
tes. Not good news. On the other hand, we appeared to be in good shape here. My father said that in another two or three days, Costa Rican health officials would probably send a doctor out to sign off that we were officially flu-free. The two children with the dry coughs turned out just to have allergies. Besides that, the most pressing health issues in the hangar were some cases of cabin fever, diarrhea, and the fact that we were going through our supply of toilet paper too fast.
On the third day in the hangar we built better goals. Not quite regulation, but you’d be surprised what you can do with some expensive fishing gear and the frames from a couple of cots. Then practice drills. I sat out the first quarter of the first game, and a Tico with muscle-y legs took the goal. We still won.
The hangar guards changed over every twelve hours or so. After a while they were kind of like the bats. You didn’t even notice them most of the time. But I liked watching them watch us when we played soccer. They were into soccer. They took turns coming over to watch, and whistled through their teeth whenever I blocked a goal. They placed bets. On the third day a guard came over to me during a time-out, and pushed up his N95 mask. “jQue cache!” He made enthusiastic hand gestures. “jPura vida!” I understood that. He was a young guy, athletic. He was talking fast, and Naomi and Lara weren’t around to translate, but I thought I had a pretty good idea what he was saying. He was trying to give me some advice about keeping goal. I just nodded, like I understood what he was saying and appreciated it. Finally he clapped me on the shoulders and went back over to his wall like he’d finally remembered that he was a guard.
The Starry Rift Page 8