Alien Virus Love Disaster

by Abbey Mei Otis

  “Different like putting a fry in your nose?”

  “What?” But he’s too distracted and I get one in each of his nostrils before he can duck, and then it’s just like when he was six and I was twelve and he’s yelling “Fry monster, fry monster!” and chasing me all the way home.

  I lose him going up the hill, he’s still faster even with fourteen lumps, and so I’m walking and huffing toward home when I see a car parked on the corner of James Row and Marion Street. Little hatchback, shiny red like a toy, no exhaust pipe—nobody around here owns one of those cars. I stare at it for a moment but then Dean is yelling for me to come unlock the door, so I go on.

  For a while Trini had this guy friend but now he says he’s not going to come around anymore. Just to be safe, he says.

  “What a useless coward, you know?” Trini holds both her eyes open with her fingers. “No way am I going to cry over him.”

  I pull her hands away from her eyes. I get out my little soak tub and set her fingers in hot water. “Honestly I think you’re kind of lucky. Like if I was betting on which of you was going to be giving out diseases, I would not put my money on you. Just saying.”

  “What is that, supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know what Noma? You are pretty cold sometimes.” She’s tipped way forward on the couch because by now the lumps are all over her back like little mountains. “That coward said it was his ‘survival instinct,’” she goes on. “Said I couldn’t blame him for just following his survival instinct.”

  The baby sits on the floor in front of her. He’s got just this one lump between his shoulder blades. It makes it look like maybe he’s about to sprout wings. I lift Trini’s hands from the soak and start to massage her wrists. I work my way over the tendons in the back of her hand, feel them shift over her bones. I’m standing up because the lumps make it hard for me to bend in the middle. Our skin is stretched shiny in the places where the domes grow. Sometimes I think I can feel them rasping against each other inside me.

  “They’re kinda like elegant, you know?” Trini says. “Like better than some tattoo or something. And, I’m serious, way better than being pregnant. No offense baby.” She tickles the baby who breathes funny now that his lump is basically as wide as his whole back. I rub moisturizer into Trini’s knuckles, knead each of her fingers, our hands are fragrant with cucumber-melon. Then without really thinking I reach up and stroke the lump below her shoulder. Her skin slides just a little bit over the hardness. I imagine them all hidden in the darkness of her, baseball-sized diamonds buried in black earth. White hot lumps of star stuff buried in black space.

  Now that I’ve seen it once I see it every day, that little red car parked on Marion Street. This time it’s right by the taped-up Magic Factory gate, and through the back windshield I notice a silhouette in the driver’s seat, upright and still.

  I walk up along the sidewalk and tap on the passenger window. “What you still doing here?”

  Inside there’s a man looking like a lawn gone to seed. Wrinkled dress shirt done up wrong and stubble patching his jaw. His head jerks when I knock. “Huh?”

  “Yeah, huh. What are you still doing here?”

  His eyes are big and dark as holes and his mouth works soundlessly.

  “What, you can’t hear me? How about you open the window?”

  Long hesitation and then, without taking his eyes off me, he raises his hand and toggles the window down.

  “That’s better. Look I was just curious, I guess. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m sorry.” He brings a thumb to his mouth and gnaws on the nail. He still hasn’t blinked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You worked in there.” I jerk a thumb at the Magic Factory. “I used to see your car go in. Plus my girl Trini was first-shift security guard, that little booth right there. But you know, it’s closed now. So why are you still here?”

  He so slowly raises his hands, turns them palm up like he’s about to receive a present from the steering wheel. Then he methodically, mechanically lowers his face into those palms.

  I hold on to the door rim and use one big toenail to scratch an itch on my other ankle. I wait.

  He slides his hands down an inch. “I don’t know. I ask myself. I can’t—I can’t seem to let it go.”

  “What’s it?”

  “I was a researcher. I was helping to—” Then his eyes change like he’s remembering other things about me, “But you know already. You must have seen.”

  “We saw the magic shows, yeah.” I put my elbows down on the door rim and lean through the window into his car. “Tell me.”

  He starts to laugh. “It’s all gone! Poof! I never worked here. Your memory must be tricking you. Check the records, there was never even a lab.”

  He’s not really getting it. “Research-man I don’t have a lot of time.” I lean farther into his car and smell the unwashed smell. “You didn’t call it magic show, I bet.”

  “We had longer words. We thought that meant we understood it better.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t know shit.”

  He reaches for my face, stops his hand halfway across the distance between us. “Look at you. It glows inside you. Even I can see that.”

  His dark hole eyes widen like he wants to take in every inch of me. I try to imagine him in lab coat, ironed, clean-shaven. Probably at one point he was the kind of person I’d be scared to talk to, which almost makes me laugh. Like imagine you spend your whole life afraid to look on the face of God, and then you finally do and it turns out he’s just one more eyes-nose-mouth combo, just another blur to be learned in a minute, remembered or forgotten without much work.

  Instead I hiss, “If I dragged you out the car right now and stomped your head into the curb, would you fight me?”

  He shakes his head and I can hear small dry things rattling in his hollow body. “No.”

  “Would it change anything?”

  His eyes meet mine and between us we hold the answer unspoken.

  “Why don’t you leave us alone, then? You didn’t before. You could now.”

  He flinches. “I—I wanted you to know. I had to tell someone. For whatever it’s worth. I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I’m so sorry.”

  I don’t really sleep anymore. Kind of I just lie in bed and sweat and imagine shapes in the dark. Once in the deepest part of the night I hear a weird noise coming from the front of the house. A shivery kind of croon. I coax the orbs of my body into a standing position and feel my way to the living room. Dean sits up on the sofabed, shaking. I turn the lamp on and see his face shiny with tears.

  “Little brother? You okay?”

  He can barely get out words between sobs. “It was—just a dream.”

  I haven’t seen him cry so hard since he was three. “Aw, shh. That’s right. Just a nightmare. It’s gone now.”

  He’s still crying but he manages to shake his head. “It—it wasn’t—wasn’t a nightmare.”

  “Oh yeah? What was it?”

  “It was—so beautiful.”

  “Oh. Well, like, that’s not so bad then, huh? What was beautiful?”

  He snorks a big load of snot back into his head. Wipes his face on the edge of my T-shirt. “The things—the things that are growing in us. That are getting ready to come out.”

  And it’s like all my insides have vanished, which is good because otherwise I might throw up. “But I didn’t—but I never said—”

  His sobs have stopped and now he’s just laughing really quiet. “Noma I wish you’d quit acting like I’m in diapers. It won’t do you any good. Everybody can feel it. We’re the Magic Factories now.”

  Next morning Dean is gone. He spends most of his time now by the dumpster outside the Amor
cito Apartments, passing roaches around with high-rise delinquents. I always thought those kids were kind of dead in the eyes but whatever, I guess so are we. I walk down there and find him laying into this pale kid with more lumps than anyone I’ve seen.

  “What are you, sad? You think this is some kind of therapy session?” Dean kicks the dumpster to punctuate his sentences. “There isn’t a thing to be sad about. There’s never been anything like us. We’re the next stage. The whole world is going to pay attention.”

  The wispy kid has a hard time stringing together a response. “I know. It’s just. It’s scary. Sometimes. When you think about it.”

  “Scary?” Dean’s voice goes all smooth. “I know. But you can’t be scared either. You have to welcome it. Think how pretty a butterfly is.” I get shivers listening to him talking like an adult while his voice still seesaws between high and low. His voice that used to beg me to go to the splash park or call me over to look at some weird bug he’d found. He’s almost six feet tall now though he doesn’t look it. Just a jumble of elbows and shins and Adam’s apple and hair that hasn’t been washed in too long. It makes his lumps stand out even more. Now he reaches out and strokes the kid’s bumpy head. “When you see the butterfly, you understand why the cocoon rejoices as it breaks.”

  Rejoices as it breaks, rejoices as it breaks, I start walking and the words churn around my brain, faster and faster as my steps speed up. I see the little red car parked by the lab gate and I head straight for it, blood rough in my ears. The passenger-side door is unlocked, of course it’s unlocked, and I get in and slam it behind me. I stare straight ahead. Outside the sun is going down and the sky is a smooth creamsicle field.

  After a moment he says, “Is something happening? Do you feel different?”

  Yeah I knew he’d ask this, and I wanted him to, except now it only pisses me off. Out the corner of my eye his hands are folded in his lap; he scrapes the cuticle of one thumb with the nail of the other.

  “Can you describe the sensations in your torso right now?”

  Now I look at him. “You’re serious?”

  “If you can tell me what you’re experiencing, I might be able to get some sense of the progression of—”

  “Jesus, mister scientist man, I don’t fuckin know.” I kick my sandals off and arrange my feet on his dashboard. “How about you drive already?”

  He is still and silent for a moment, then he pushes the ignition. The car hums to life quieter than an electric razor. In the side mirror the Magic Factory slides away behind us. I don’t say anything until we’re coming down the ramp onto the highway. “You want to know how I’m feeling? I’m feeling like I want to see someplace pretty. You know anywhere like that? Take me someplace really fuckin pretty.”

  We stand on the edge of a river. The water is cloudy and clogged with floating islands of sticks and muck and lost flip-flops. On the far bank the sunset licks the trees with copper. I exhale and feel something more than air flow out of me.

  The scientist grazes my wrist with his bitten-up fingernails. “They found it near here, you know. In a field. Not far away. Not out in space. It fell right here. And we thought we were so lucky—we got to name it. We got to do something wonderful for humanity. We weren’t bad people.” He twists toward me. “If you had the chance to touch something utterly unknown, something not of this world—wouldn’t you take it?”

  I keep my eyes on those far bright trees. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  Like he was struck, “Right.”

  We stand next to each other for a long time. He keeps opening and closing his mouth. Finally he goes, “I wish you could have seen how beautiful it was.”

  There’s something in his voice I recognize. His hunger chimes with mine. Like maybe if we devoured each other, deep inside the other’s gut, we’d both find peace.

  He puts a hand on my waist, doesn’t flinch when he feels the lumps. He lays two fingers on my face. “You’re so beautiful.”

  I start to shake. “You should get me home.” I’m feeling full of fire, I’m feeling untouchable, I’m thinking no, no, he couldn’t kiss me any more than he could kiss the hot edge of a knife.

  Our lips meet.

  One of his hands slides between my legs. We both gasp. He kisses my neck.

  “You don’t deserve pain,” he says to my skin, “you don’t deserve any of this. Let me—please?”

  There’s some sad little part of me that thinks he’s offering to undo it all. The rest of me knows this is a stupid weak hope, not God nor Jesus and certainly no scientist has power like that. But still. The huge sweetness of this thought, I lean into it.

  He peels off my clothes there by the river. I pull or he pushes us back against a tree. The bark scrapes my back and I shiver like way back on that cold morning in August. My heart is exploding blood through me. Every beat hurls the globes against my skin. He stares at me for a minute and I think he’s forgotten how to breathe. Then he pulls me to him, wet kisses down the center of my chest and each rib and my belly. His knees press into the mud.

  “So beautiful, so beautiful.” His breath tickles my stomach. “I’m so sorry, so sorry.”

  He kisses the lumps, lips brushing the crest of each dome. His kisses make them churn. “Who ever deserved to see beauty like this?” He lays his cheek against them, nuzzles them with his nose. “I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve this.”

  I stare across the river at the trees though the sun is almost down now, their fire smoldering out. The river under its sluggish skin runs fast and cold. They brought me here when I was little, once, they taught us about the water cycle. The scientist enters me like a plea, like somewhere at my core lies the promise of his own absolution. He seeks it again and again.

  What happens the next week is pale blue slips show up tacked to our doors. Properties in the indicated area have been designated unfit for habitation. Domain is hereby transferred to a redevelopment firm. Current residents have two weeks from notification date to complete relocation.

  I know there was a time when I would have gotten mad about this. When I would have looked around at the apartment—the view through our window and the spot where Dean rollerbladed into the door and the Eiffel Tower picture I taped to the wall—and gone wild at the thought of leaving. But now it’s like someone’s yelling at me from very far away, almost too far for me to hear, and I just can’t see how it could be that important.

  “They’re tearing down our houses?” Trini says from the couch. Trini doesn’t get off the couch anymore. Then she just starts laughing and laughing except her laugh sounds basically like a grunt.

  Dean and I start to pack our stuff. At least I think we’re packing but I can’t tell if we’re really getting anything done. I keep putting things in boxes and taking them out and refolding them. Dean finds Mom’s clothes crammed onto a high shelf and pulls them all down, fluttering avalanche of rayon and polyester over his head. He presses his face into her dresses, gasps in like he wants to pull the fabric into his lungs.

  Out in the street we show each other the blue notices, we ask where are people headed, we shake our heads. One thing that’s changed is we touch each other more. Even people I barely know, instead of saying hi we just brush our palms over the hills in each other’s skin. We move like people who are sleepwalking, we move like people who are about to wake up.

  The only person who doesn’t act like they’re dreaming is Dean. He stands on the bleachers in Paige Clifton field wearing one of Mom’s old nightgowns. The dead-eye kids crowd the grass in front of him, reach up to touch his hem.

  He howls, “We are the mothers of new creation! Do you feel the power growing inside you? Why do you think they want to drive us out?”

  His face is unspeakable. More people pause at the edge of the field, listening.

  “They fear us. They fear our children.” His voice climbs up to a shriek. “They may
cast us out of here, but we will spread across the country! We will spread across the planet! When it comes it will come to all of us, and it will not be denied, and every place on Earth will know our glory!”

  Everyone listening starts to whoop and sway. A breeze picks up and Mom’s nightgown billows around him and fills with light and his bony lumpy body is silhouetted through the white fabric. Really I have no idea anymore, who can even say, he could be my little brother or he could be a goddess born in the center of the sun, come to walk with us through the fire of these last days.

  On our final night in the fourplex I go out into the backyard. It really wasn’t that long ago that we stood here and whooped for the Magic Factory to get going already. There’s no glitter or glow anymore. Only the plain sky, filthy with regular stars. For every one I count, there’s one more. For every world that lets you down there’s another, and another, promising redemption. It’s strange looking up at them. They flicker and pulse and from inside me come answering pulses and I know without knowing that what’s inside me is the same as what’s up there. I’m flayed down to nothing but a thin boundary of skin between two fields of stars.

  You know when I think about my life there’s not really a lot I got to choose. Mostly what I did was because we’d be evicted otherwise or because there was a coupon for it and I never spent too much time freaking out about that. But now I have this new feeling like something has loosened I didn’t even know was tight. Like the gentlest stream ever is carrying me away. Like I don’t have to worry anymore about anything, no regrets or what-ifs, because before I go, I’m going to make something beautiful.

  Maybe I’ll be the sound, the music that was never music. People all over will hear me and freeze and just start crying where they stand. Or I’ll be the stars that gush up into the sky and rain down over the highway. All the cars will come screeching to a halt and everybody will reach out their windows for the lights falling around them and laugh and know that there is love everywhere in the world even where you don’t imagine it could survive. Or I’ll pour into a spring of clear shining liquid, I’ll flood the streets and wash away the sticks and trash and broken glass and you can come out and dip your Dixie cup in and gather me up. One drop on your tongue and your scrapes will heal, your teeth will straighten, your feet will soothe. One sip and your daddy will come home. A cupful and, come close now, no one will ever lie to you again. The world will be set on fire with justice. All the things you hunger for will fly close like tame hummingbirds. Just reach out—oh God—just take it.