by Brett Savory
“I’d say I’m sorry, Mr. Jacobs, but I’m not. Your wife deserves to be on that shuttle.”
I look down at a crease in my suit pants, pick at some fluff there. The pants are so tight, I can’t pick at the fluff without pinching my skin.
“Do you want to know what she did?”
“No,” I say. The word is out of my mouth before I even realize I want to say it.
Lennon shrugs her shoulders, goes back to shuffling papers, barking orders to uniformed people in her vicinity.
Asudden wave of tiredness drops my shoulders. The only thing of relative importance I can think of to ask is:“Where are they going?”
“Up,” Lennon says. “But you already knew that, didn’t you.”
“Just into space?” I ask, look up at her. Her eyes are soft, caring. “You don’t seem the type to just launch people into space. If you don’t mind me saying.”
My chest feels like a stone weight, sinking me deeper into the chair. Something like tears wet my eyelids.
“I’m not just launching them into space, Mr. Jacobs. But I do appreciate your kind words about my character.” She leans against the desk, one arm across her chest, one fingering the handle of her coffee cup. No nail polish. I glance up to her face. No makeup, either.
Forgettable.
She tilts her head to one side. “Aren’t you going to ask how I did this? Don’t you want to know who I am?”
“I thought you were shadowy and cryptic.”
“I am. Very much so, but now that the operation’s underway, there’s no point in being so silly. I’m fairly certain I can’t be stopped.” She smirks, pleased with her cartoonish declaration.
“Ah,” I say, rapidly losing interest.
“What’s more invisible than a short, middle-aged, overweight woman, Mr. Jacobs?”
I shrug.
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” she says. There is pride and sadness in her voice at the same time.
I nod, glance at the monitor. My wife is squirming in her seat. I can’t be sure because the camera’s too far away for clarity, but I think she’s crying.
“And you’ve got a few bucks, too, I’d venture to say.”
“A few, yes. More than a lot of people. But most of the money came from investors.”
Another airplane lands outside. Passengers for the next couple of waves, I assume.
I look around me, watch everyone hurry about, seeing to their assigned tasks. They do not look mad. They do not look particularly concerned with their lack of sanity at all.
“I decided, with some input from my backers, who would go, and why. Which politicians, which leaders of religion, which terrorists, which greed-driven CEOs. The hate machines of the world. There was a period, early on in the project—this was probably a decade ago now—when I wasn’t sure I’d get enough support,” Lennon says, her confession sounding scripted. “Or that it would be impossible to pull off, that the timing would be too hard to coordinate, but you’d be surprised at how easy—”
“Can I go on the next wave?”
Lennon stops talking. Stares at me. “Pardon?”
“The next wave of shuttles. Can I be on one of them?”
On the monitor, more than just my wife is squirming in her seat now. There are eleven more monitors, but they’re turned off, so I can’t see the other shuttles full of people squirming, crying, begging for their lives. But it’s comforting enough to know that they’re there.
“They . . . ” she says, appears to be choosing her words carefully. “They won’t be coming back, Mr. Jacobs.”
I think about this for a moment. Of course I know this, but hearing the words said out loud makes it more real.
“I know,” I say. “I don’t want to come back.”
Lennon looks at Hatchet Face and Twiggy. I keep my gaze locked on hers.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Jacobs,” she says, clearly uncomfortable with having to go off-script, with being forced to stray from her well-thought-out confession. “You’re not on the list.”
The weight in my chest sinks me further into the chair. The wetness in my eyes that resembles tears comes a little harder now. I’m unsure what I’m doing, but if I’m crying, it’s a completely different experience than I thought it would be. For a moment, I allow myself the delusion that these tears are for my wife, that I actually loved her, and that she loved me, but that we’d just somehow forgotten.
Disappointed that I’d cut her off, Lennon turns away and appears to be sulking.
“Please?” I say, desperation creeping around the edges of my voice. My body feels hot, burning up from the inside. “My suits feel like a second skin, always too tight. My skin itself feels like a second skin. Never my own.”
I look at the monitor again, imagine that my wife has turned fully around in her seat and is mouthing my name, motioning with her hand for me to come aboard.
“Can’t you just put me—”
“Your name is not on the list, Mr. Jacobs.”
And just like that, I am as invisible to her as she is to the world.
She instructs Hatchet Face and Twiggy to take me home, then gathers some papers from the desk—knocking others off in her impatience, sending them fluttering to the floor—and briskly walks away.
I wipe a sleeve across my eyes, look at the wetness, touch it with a fingertip.
“Come on,” Hatchet Face says, wrenches me out of the chair, pushes me toward the tent flap.
Outside, handcuffed people get off airplanes, panic in their eyes, sweat dripping down their faces. They see the shuttles and they try to get away, scramble in the desert dirt. Their captors do not harm them, only pull them back up to their feet, march them forward.
The sun has just topped the horizon. I look as long as I can at the yellow-orange ball. Close my eyes and imagine sundogs to either side of its ghost-image. Something inviting, something beautiful to embrace these unwilling travellers.
When we get to the van, Twiggy ties my hands behind my back again with rope, opens the back doors. Hatchet Face moves to thrust me inside, but I tell him I can get in on my own. He backs up, clearly disappointed to have some of his ruffian duties pulled from him.
I wriggle inside with difficulty, gain my feet by propping my back against the shelves of electronics and pushing with my legs. Twiggy slams the doors shut. I kick my metal chair into position, plunk myself down on it.
Outside, rocket engines ignite.
We drive away. At one point, the van swings around so I get a decent view of one of the launches. Might be the shuttle my wife’s on. Might not be. Smoke billows under the fire of the rockets. Another one ignites. Even this far away, the sound is deafening.
I close my eyes. Sundogs dance behind my eyelids.
Back in the city, Hatchet Face and Twiggy drop me off at home. They do not say goodbye. They do not say anything at all. Twiggy cuts my rope and Hatchet Face shoves me in the back. They climb inside their van and drive off.
My socks are pooled around my ankles. My suit suffocates me. My own skin feels alien, more so than ever before. I want to cut it off my body, stretch it out on my lawn. Pin it down. Examine it. Determine how it came to be mine, who covered me in it. And why.
I look up. See tiny white ovals glittering against the light blue of the sky. Marching in single file.
Other people, curious about the noises coming from the desert, drift out onto their lawns in bathrobes, wiping sleep from their eyes.
Watching this cosmic funeral procession, my body burns inside. My chest crushed by millions of pounds of thrust. A feeling of weightlessness and lack of oxygen comes next. I look down but my feet are still planted firmly on the ground.
The shuttles move up in direct line of the sun. For a few moments, I can still make them out.
Then they disappear from sight.
I walk into my house, take a shower, and climb into my wife’s side of the bed.
In the morning, I ch
eck the newspapers, but Lennon was wrong. None of them mention last night’s march, nor the next night’s, nor any of the following ones that I watch from my bedroom window over the next three weeks.
But the people I saw at the party are gone. Never in the news. Never in the scandal sheets. When I look up their names online, I get no results. They do not now, nor have they ever, existed.
My socks do not pool around my ankles.
My suit fits me perfectly.
My skin feels natural on my body.
I have never been married.
The sun is the giver of life.
LANDSCAPE
The landscape shifts and we barely notice.
Breathe in.
Move your arm down to pick up your coffee mug, bring it to your lips. Shift. Something has changed. Pan back, take a snapshot. The scene is different than it was just one second ago.
Breathe out.
Replace the coffee mug on the desk. Now there’s coffee in your belly, some of it probably still sliding down your throat. The mug is no longer in the same place from which you picked it up. Shift. It’s different. You’ve impacted your surroundings; you’ve impacted yourself. The way you perceive things and, in turn, the way people perceive you from this point on has changed, and will never be exactly the same again.
This is all it takes to change the world.
Time doesn’t change the landscape, people do. The best indicator of this is not a clock, whose hands just go around and around, impacting nothing; the best indicator is your perception.
Take my wife, for example. She goes to work in the morning. Very, very early in the morning. Roughly 5 a.m. She works weekends, too, but doesn’t have to be up until 6 a.m. then. When she comes home each night, at about 5 p.m., her face tells the whole story. Written in every line of her skin, every shift of her body, every word from her mouth, I know exactly what she’s done all day. It’s always terribly boring, but I never tell her this. She enjoys her job, and is under the impression that it’s rather important.
These changes in her are not subtle; they are the furthest thing from subtle, but she perceives nothing. When she looks in the mirror, her landscape is unchanged. She might be in a different mood than yesterday, the last time she looked into the mirror, but otherwise, she thinks everything is the same. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that even her bone structure is changing. She no longer appears to be my wife at all. She’s almost an entirely new woman every day. But I don’t let on. I just smile, make us dinner, pour some wine, and stare across the table at a stranger.
Now, take my daughter. Recently, she began piercing every bit of flesh on her body that she could get a hold of. It started out how other teenagers’ piercings start out: ear, nose, belly button, maybe tongue. But it progressed from there, and now when she comes home from school, all I see is a tall strip of metal walking through the door, mechanically reaching into the cupboards, fishing out food. At about the same time I started getting a new wife each day, my daughter stopped going to the regular food cupboards. Hers is no longer human food, but is instead oil, grease, and any other kind of lubricant she can find in the garage. She dumps it into her head, rubs it all over her body, between cogs, along hydraulic rods. Anywhere and everywhere it can be used.
My daughter glistens.
She squeaks and pops while sitting at the kitchen table, headphones on, doing her homework, her pencil gripped between two chrome pincer-type claws. She scribbles endlessly, then finally packs up her work, floats by me on some sort of hover-suspension system, gives me a quick, cold-steel kiss and drifts up the stairs to bed.
I don’t know what she sees when she looks in the mirror. We’re unable to communicate now; I am not from her country, and she is no longer from mine.
Our pets have disappeared. What used to be our cat slithered on its belly out the front door one day when I’d left it open bringing groceries in. It left some kind of snail trail that I’ve not been able to clean from the floor tiles to this day. What used to be our dog crumpled up into a ball of thick, crinkled cardboard and rolled itself into a dark corner. It stayed that way for several days before I got the nerve to pick it up and toss it in the recycling bin.
I think we had a bird, too, but the last I saw of it, it had melted into a puddle of bright primary colors in its cage. I tipped its remains into a plastic bag and put it at the curb.
The garbage men wouldn’t touch it. It stayed out there for two weeks before a little boy picked it up and wandered away with it. He was smiling as he stroked the bag of goo in his hands, and though I’m pretty sure I miss the bird, I’m glad someone found something worth saving in it.
Perhaps something I was just no longer capable of seeing.
My chameleon wife and robot daughter went out together tonight. Bone structures shifting under various skins; whirligigs spinning, pincer-claws clacking. I think they went to see a movie.
My landscape seems to change faster when they’re out of the house.
They came home from the movie, beeped and shifted lazily past me, clucking and morphing—movements and sounds I cannot understand. When my wife lost the power of coherent speech, I don’t know. But all that emanates from her mouth now are clipped bursts of guttural barks.
Someone stole the refrigerator today. Don’t ask me how, but it’s gone. And don’t ask me when, because I’ve been home all day. There’re only dust bunnies and dead insects left to indicate where it once stood.
I tried to explain to my wife and daughter that the fridge had disappeared, but I couldn’t make either of them understand. I gave up, leaving them confused, babbling and squawking to one another in the hallway.
The job I used to go to sent me home the other day. Knitted eyebrows and lots of curious stares from my coworkers, so I guess I did something wrong. Maybe I was doing a different job from the one I was hired to do. Could be that the square I was trying to put into the circle wouldn’t fit. Another shift, blurring my perception. I’m usually quite good at recognizing when things change and can adapt pretty quickly, but it seems as though this one escaped my notice.
I packed up my things in a box, went outside and quietly waited for the bus. No one at the bus shelter looked in my direction.
One piece of furniture disappears every day now. The pictures on the walls stay, the carpet is still here, there’s no change in the ceiling—hanging plants, light fixtures, etc.—but the things that we all use on a daily basis, the things that support us when we sit down to speak to each other, are vanishing steadily.
From what I can make out when my family comes home, they blame me. There’s certainly plenty of harsh, quick sounds coming from them, and their respective limbs point to the places where the couch, the La-Z-Boy, and the kitchen table and chairs used to be. I try explaining that I don’t know what’s going on, either. I write it with pen and paper, shove it under their noses. I think they try to understand the words, but there’s no recognition in their eyes.
That’s when I wonder for the first time what I might look like to them.
The car my wife drives looks like some kind of demented metal pelican. I don’t know how on earth she controls it, or how she steels herself to even get in the hideous thing. When my wife pulls into the driveway and turns the pelican off, it shudders obscenely, flops to the concrete, deflated.
I sit on a milk crate in the middle of the near-empty living room. Indentations marking where the furniture used to be are like mirages to me, pockets of unreality that will reform and fill in if I just get something, maybe water, into my system. Good thing the tap still works.
I get up from the milk crate, walk into the kitchen, turn my head as the door opens and my wife comes in. Her face seems to be melting, the colors of her makeup shifting around on her face. She drops her purse on the ground, moves toward me. I freeze, drop the glass I’ve removed from the cupboard. It smashes on the floor, sending shards everywhere. My wife doesn’t notice, just comes closer,
her face a churning mash of mascara, rouge, lipstick, and cover-up. I glance down quickly at her body. Her clothes seem to be crawling all over her, different sections of her outfit migrating from her arms to her chest to her legs to her stomach and back over to her arms again. A Ferris wheel of fabric.
Her voice takes on some semblance of human speech as her everywoman’s face fills my vision. Just beneath the abstract cluckings and bursts of deep-throated belches, I hear something that sounds like the human word “love.” Then she falls into my arms and smears herself all over my body in one smooth, sudden motion.
My daughter comes through the door, but doesn’t even make it fully over the threshold before she completely comes apart, claws and whirligigs and steel rods and metal pins clattering to the floor. In pieces, she says nothing. The section of stainless, blackened metal that used to be her head does not say “love,” does not say anything at all, but just stares at the ceiling, silent.
I am unsure what to make of this, so believing very strongly that the landscape can be controlled, I get another glass from the cupboard, run the tap, fill it with water, turn the tap off, and make my way through the debris back to the living room.
I sit on my milk crate again. The last of the furniture—and even some of the pictures and light fixtures—disappeared while I was in the kitchen.
I close my eyes and drink the water in long, smooth gulps, leaving traces of my wife’s makeup around the edge of the glass.
Inside me, I feel a shift like an entire continent being cleaved down its middle, fault lines giving way, massive internal eruptions peppering my organs. I puff out, bulk up, feel my soul sharpened by clarity, infused with the purest sunlight. I glow. I am fucking supernova.
I open my eyes.
The room is almost the same as it was before, except that the indentations left by the missing furniture are fading, the carpet filling out again, erasing any trace that the couch and the La-Z-Boy were ever there at all.