“Well, I kinda doubt you’re going to figure it out between now and tomorrow morning.”
“Not for me,” he said. “For you. I could find a surgery and if you wanted to do it, I could be your host.”
“My what? No,” I said. “What would be the point? Nobody likes this, Lou, but you have to man up.”
I could see that he wanted to get angry, but he held himself back. “You just think about it,” he said.
We drank the rest of our beers in silence, and then Lou let himself out.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I clicked on the TV. The only thing that wasn’t an infomercial or an old game show was a documentary about President Bolagno, who, as far as I was concerned, had been a total asshole. Everyone would have remembered him that way, too, if he hadn’t died in office; being the final U.S. president had done wonders for his approval ratings.
As much as I hated him, I couldn’t stop watching once they started the footage of the first official meeting with the Masters. My thumb twitched against the channel button a few times, but didn’t quite exert enough force to accomplish anything before morbid fascination won out. It was all completely familiar—the flags flapping, the confetti, Kinshasa O’Brian belting out the national anthem—but I couldn’t help getting a little choked up. When Bolagno stepped onto the dais and approached the Master who’d been sent to meet him, when the Master formed a little portion of its glutinous body into an appendage and Bolagno reached out to shake it, I started talking to the TV. It was like watching a horror movie that way, or a rerun of an old football game—I was saying, “No, no,” to someone who couldn’t hear me, who’d been dead for years and wouldn’t have listened to me even if I had been there. Bolagno let go of the Master’s appendage, and I knew that already fungus from the Master’s body was working its way into his bloodstream, reproducing at an insane rate, that in five minutes I’d be able to see the first black tinge in his skin, and fifteen minutes after that he’d be dead. And yet there he was, smiling like a rock star, hogging up as much time as he could while the All-Father of China and the German chancellor and the Indian prime minister all stood there looking pissed, waiting for their turn to die. I hadn’t had any particular love for any of them, either, but I wanted to thank them for throwing themselves on that grenade; it gave the rest of us fair warning.
Eventually the documentary moved on to Bolagno’s childhood, and at some point after that I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew it was morning and I was waking up with a stale mouth and a sore back. Half an hour later, I watched through the window as an Exchange Center van pulled into Lou’s driveway. Two Masters got out of the van and mushed along up his front walk like two huge balls of slimy Play-Doh. One of them rang the doorbell, and then they started whistling back and forth at each other, carrying on a conversation in their own ridiculous language. For a minute I thought Lou’d decided to make a run for it, but a few seconds later he came to the door, dressed in a suit and tie, and got in the back of the van. The Masters whistled some more, and then they got into the van, too, and drove away.
Lou wasn’t back yet when I got home from work, and neither was Yvette, but she showed up at eight with a bottle of good Scotch. Within an hour we were doing shots and making out in the dark when Lou’s living room suddenly lit up—his bay window faced mine, and was only about twenty feet away. Lou was still wearing his suit, and he sat down on his couch and rested his elbows on his knees and held up what would have been his hands the night before. He touched the tip of each new metal finger to the metal thumb, and I could just imagine the sound: click, click, click, click, repeat.
“Oh, Jesus,” Yvette said.
I closed the curtains and we started kissing again, but I could tell she was rattled. Eventually she just stood up and went into the bedroom. I carried the dishes to the kitchen, and before I went after her, took one more peek out the window. Lou was still at it.
* * *
—
The next day was chilly but bright, and Beatrice and I ate lunch outside, at the Chinese restaurant across the street from our office, to try to get a little sunshine before we spent another five hours staring at computer screens.
“Hasn’t anyone ever taught you how to use chopsticks?” Bea said. “You look like you’re spearfishing.” She used her tines to twirl one of her chopsticks like a miniature baton.
Bea had been rehanded at the very beginning of the Exchange, about three years ago, and I couldn’t remember anymore whether she had always been this snarky or whether it was something the forking did to her. I was trying to think of a good comeback when I heard someone shouting, and we both looked up.
A van was parked across the square and people were jumping out of it, all wearing rubber suits and gas masks. Another van pulled up behind the first. I grabbed Bea’s purse and my jacket, and we ran for the door of our building.
We could hear the gunfire start as soon as we got inside, which meant that the rebels had guns, which meant they were probably not very smart. We took the elevator upstairs to our office and went to the window.
“Those scuba suits were a good idea,” Bea said. “And the gas masks. Those cover their whole heads. It looks like they have oxygen tanks, too.” She was tapping her forks against the glass with a little tink tink tink sound.
“Let’s just sit down, Bea,” I said. “Please.”
“I’m just saying, they look pretty good.”
There were maybe two hundred resistance fighters now, more than I’d seen gathered in years. In addition to the guns, they had grenades, which would buy them a little time. They were shooting at the buildings, chipping off bits of stone and breaking the first-floor windows with their bullets. Bea looked at her watch.
Masters started to emerge from the buildings facing the square, sliding through doorways by the dozens, moving the way they always did during these occurrences: slowly, apparently bored. One took several bullets as it slithered to the head of the pack, the ammunition disappearing into its mucous body without ever slowing it. One of the masked fighters threw a grenade, which splattered the closest Master and momentarily flattened the rest of them like squashed caterpillars, while the rebels hunkered down. But a few seconds later, the exploded Master collected its mass back into a single ball and started moving again, and so did the others.
The rebels had grouped themselves around some sort of apparatus in the center of the square, and now they took out what looked like cattle prods, long rods crackling with electricity. They plunged them into the Masters’ bodies and someone threw a switch, and for a few seconds you could feel the rebels’ anticipation, their hope, even from five stories up. Then each Master belched a little cloud of smoke, and they all surged forward again. This time they engulfed the rebels. For about thirty seconds there was a heaving mass of people and Masters, and then slowly the Masters reversed direction and began to depart, being shot at and pelted with bricks the whole time, ignoring it. It was the most successful riot I had ever personally witnessed. Bea looked at her watch again.
“Did they break ten minutes?” I asked.
“Eight and a half.”
The rebels were still running after the Masters, hacking at them with machetes and gun butts, but they were crying, too, because they knew what we knew: If the Masters had turned around, it was already over. The Masters had torn or punched or somehow found minuscule holes in all those bodysuits. They had momentarily pressed tendrils of their slimy bulk against the skin of the protestors, enough to let the fungus take hold. And now they would just let the rotting progress, the way it always did, while they returned to the comfort of their offices.
“Come on, Bea,” I said.
“No,” she said. “When I die I hope someone has the decency to watch.”
The Masters disappeared back into the buildings, and the rebels stood in the square, hugging one another and sobbing, looking up at all of
us watching in the offices. I went back to my desk, and twenty minutes later Bea turned away from the window and walked back to her own cubicle, bright-eyed and grim. Only then did I notice that a Master had entered the room at some point and pressed itself against a far window, taking in the scene below. “Buncha loons,” it said.
* * *
—
The rebels’ bodies were blocking the entrance to the garage where I had parked for work, so I caught a bus home. I took a hot shower and put on jeans and a sweatshirt, heated up a tray of meatloaf, and settled onto the couch. I tried not to think about the protestors, but I must have been thinking about something, because I didn’t remember until the doorbell rang that Yvette was coming over. When I opened the door she plucked at my sweatshirt with her fingernails, which she’d had manicured since the day before. Now they were long and blue, with little rhinestone stars on them.
“You wear this just for me?” she said. “Wow.” I gave her a hug, and she said, “Sorry. I need a drink.”
“How about pot instead?”
“I don’t really smoke anymore.”
“Neither do I, usually. But it’ll be like the good old days.”
“These are so clearly not the good old days,” she said, but she followed me inside and took the baggie of marijuana I handed her, then sat down to pack a bowl while I heated up a second tray of food.
We ate on my couch, passing the pipe back and forth between bites. As I watched her cut her meatloaf into fastidious cubes and then gobble them like a rabid animal, I wondered whether I hadn’t been a little more in love with her than I’d ever been willing to admit to myself, back in our younger days. Yvette sparked up the lighter again and stopped to look at it. “Am I even going to be able to do this?”
“You will. I’ve seen lots of people do it.”
She took a hit and handed the pipe to me, leaned back against the opposite end of the couch, kicked off her shoes and curled and uncurled her toes. “My feet stink,” she said.
I laughed, coughing on the lungful of smoke I’d been trying to hold in.
“You stink,” she said. “Stop laughing at me,” but she started laughing, too. Soon she was leaning against me, her forehead touching mine. She pressed one finger to my lips, pushed it into my mouth and wriggled it there like a worm, around my tongue, across my teeth.
“Wait a minute,” I said, and I moved out from under her and went to the window to close the curtains. Lou was sitting across the way in his living room, staring at his TV with an intensity that confirmed my suspicion that he’d been watching us.
I went back to Yvette and kissed her lips and neck, her wrists, her fingers, all those pulse points, all those tens of thousands of nerve endings. She laced her fingers against the back of my neck and kissed me on the mouth.
“Did you know,” she said, “that the Romans used to send prostitutes to prisoners who were about to be executed? I always thought it would be a really sad job, to be one of those girls. Do you feel sad?” She started running her fingers along the waistband of my pants, then unzipped my fly and slipped her hand inside. “Well?”
“What? No, no, of course not. Could you just…yes, thank you, that,” I said. “Just watch your nails.”
“You should be glad I still have nails. One day the sight of someone with fingernails is going to be enough to make you stop dead in the street.”
“Mmmhmm,” I said. “You’re so right about that.”
“Of course I’m right,” she said.
* * *
—
I woke up in the middle of the night still on the couch, Yvette’s body wedged between my legs with her head against my chest. I thought she was asleep, but as soon as I tried to shift a little to get more comfortable, she opened her eyes and looked at me.
“Help me,” she said. “Please. Let me hide here. Don’t make me go home.”
“You know they always catch people who try to run. They’ll find you eventually whether you go home or not.”
“But please don’t make me,” she said.
When I met Yvette she’d been cussing out some complete stranger she’d caught dumping his used motor oil into the sewer system—“poisoning the rest of us,” as she’d repeatedly shrieked. The guy was probably twice her size and was looking pretty pissed off when I stepped in to help her, only to find out that she didn’t need my help. After five minutes of her lecturing him about the importance of public waterways, the guy mumbled an apology and fled. That kind of indomitability was what had drawn me to Yvette, and what drove us apart in the end. She could never just let things be—she had to control them, fix them, whether that was a casual polluter or the world or me. But now, for a moment, that was gone, and she was all bare sweetness and trust, looking at me as if I was the one who could fix everything.
“Poor honey,” I said, and kissed her forehead.
She pressed her cheek tighter against my chest, but a minute later she pulled herself up and got off the couch.
“Did I do something?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing.” She went to the window seat, pulled open the curtains, and sat looking out. I knew that in the darkness she was invisible even if anyone happened to be watching, but the ease with which she sat there naked still surprised me. I remembered, now, that she had always been like that, effortlessly nude; in art school she’d painted most of her canvases naked, mixing colors on the skin of her forearm or her hand, and once we’d started having sex she stopped closing the door when she used the bathroom. “You don’t mind fucking me but you think it’s weird to see me pee?” she’d said, when I mentioned it. “Boy, you are twisted.”
Now she reached out and flipped the latches that locked the windows, turned the little crank that set them reeling open, leaned out into the cool night air.
“You know all those rumors you hear?” she said. “That they want to replace our hands so they can program the forks to turn against us, or so we can’t use weapons, or because hands remind them of something scary from their home planet? That’s all bullshit. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just something they do to show us they can. And it won’t stop with hands.”
“What do you think is next, then?”
“Your dick, probably.”
I laughed, but she said, “I’m not kidding. If they control reproduction, they control the whole population. Not to mention what it’ll do to morale. You know what a hand job goes for on Birmingham Avenue these days?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Do you?”
“More than sex, I know that much.”
“Come back over here. It’s getting cold.”
She reached her hands out the window and waved them slowly back and forth. “I’m leaving,” she said, “just give me a minute.”
“I don’t want you to leave.”
She shrugged, as if to say that what I wanted didn’t matter much. I walked over and stood behind her with my hands on her shoulders, and she kissed my thumb and got up to start collecting her clothes.
“Why don’t you just spend the day here tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll call off work. We can go to a movie or something.”
She finished dressing and stood in front of me, her high heels clutched in one hand. The top of her head came up only to my chin. She took hold of my hair, not all that gently, and pulled my face toward hers for another kiss. “You’re exactly the same as you ever were,” she said, when we separated again.
“Thank God for small favors, huh?”
She looked at me very seriously for a moment, but all she said was, “Good night, Aaron.” I wrapped myself in a blanket, walked her to her car, and watched her taillights until she turned onto Parkvale and disappeared.
The next day I kept checking my phone, hoping she’d text me and say she wanted to spend the night. Around eight o’clock I gave her a call, but she didn’t ans
wer, and she didn’t show. I knew she was due at the Exchange Center the following day and wouldn’t come to see me after she’d been forked. And I didn’t really want her to. More than anyone else I could think of, Yvette would be diminished by the forking, subdued in a way that was antithetical to her nature, and that I didn’t want to witness.
* * *
—
The week that followed brought the first really warm days of the year. I got home from work on Wednesday and found Lou in his backyard loading his grill with charcoal. He winced a little every time his metal fingers scraped on the metal of the grill. That was one way you could tell people who had just gotten their forks—that sound still bothered them. From what I heard, you got used to it soon enough. He disappeared inside, and came back a while later with a plate of hamburgers. He made great burgers, with diced onions and garlic mixed right into the meat. They smelled incredible while they were cooking, and I knew all I had in the house was a bag of frozen corn and some ramen; I couldn’t help glancing over now and then. When the burgers were half-cooked, Lou flipped a few of them with a spatula. But then he reached out and grabbed one with the tips of his metal fingers and turned it over just like that. He did the rest of them that way, and when they were finished he picked them up and put them on a clean plate, and wiped the grease off his tines with a paper towel. Then he knocked on his window, and a minute later, a woman came out carrying a plate of buns, with a bottle of ketchup pinned under one arm. She looked way too hot to be hanging out with Lou, and I realized that she was the neighbor I had seen consoling him on the day he got his draft card.
She went back into the house for a blanket, and they both settled down on the grass to eat.
“Like a burger?” Lou called to me.
“Sure would.” I hauled my chair over to his side of the lawn.
Lou put his fork gently on the woman’s shoulder. “This is Mary Ellen. She’s our neighbor.”
All the Names They Used for God Page 17