Alien Virus Love Disaster

by Abbey Mei Otis

  Trespass lurches up. His round face painted half white, half black. He pushes a beer into her hand. Cold. Condensation shocks her palm, makes her smile.

  “Thanks, T. Seen big sister?”

  His nose scrunches and paint flakes onto his shirt. “Not tonight. She’s in a dark phase, isn’t she?”

  Tesla lives her life too raw, thinks Colleen. It makes her easy to love and hard to protect. One time she sat on the beach for two straight days. Let the tide wash in and over her up to her neck, then out again, leaving her seaweed strewn and quaking. Then in. Then out.

  Ibiza has been crowned queen of a circle of sand. Boys hold her hands and she swoops and bobs between them. “Fuck this pull,” she crows. “I’ve got an appointment next week. Just wait. I’m gonna get my bones scraped straight. I’m gonna get this bulk shaved off.”

  Someone hoots. “Ye-ha. Like you got the credit for that.”

  Ibiza bends an ear to her shoulder so all her hair flows to one side. Her eyes are bladesharp. “I’ve got ways. Just wait. I’m gonna get jewels set into my kneecaps. I’m gonna get chimes in my ears so when you go bla all I hear is music.” Girl wrenches herself away from the boys and collars one of the kite dudes. “If this dude”—she jabs his chest—“if this dude can get body-modded for fucking surfing, why would I ever sit around looking like an ugly lump? Fuck that.”

  Kite dude looks bewitched. He is touching a moongirl and somehow it’s not disgusting. He traces a finger along Ibiza’s face and she smirks and snaps her teeth at him. “You know, on Luna, I was four inches taller? Now I’m squashed down.” She grabs kite dude’s hand and runs it along the lumpy flesh below her armpit. “All this? These are compressional folds.”

  Colleen looks on with weird feelings beating mothwings in her chest. She thinks she should calm Ibiza down. She thinks she should inform her, those body mods? They’re for moneybags. Not us. It doesn’t do any good calling people ugly. What does good is keeping your head down. Making it from one day to the next.

  But she can’t make herself step in. Watching a moongirl crow like that, some deep part of her grows honeywarm. It makes her think, maybe all these years she’s been aiming at the wrong target. Maybe there are other kinds of hope.

  When Ibiza lurches forward and grabs Colleen’s shoulders and hollers, “How about you, C? Be a movie star with me!” Colleen grins and blows kisses to pretend paparazzi.

  And then someone is yelling. “Here! She’s heeeeeere!” All heads turn waterward. It’s Tesla, bawling, pointing with both hands. Over the ocean a halfmoon is rising. Laughter simmers down. No one touches the volume but the music fades to a background lub-lub. Oh-oh, hey, Luna. Fancy seeing you here. What a small world.

  Colleen walks over and puts an arm around Tesla. “Hey, honey. Shh.” Tesla leans so that her tears fall on Colleen’s shirt.

  One of the kite dudes starts singing “Buffalo Gals” and Colleen hears Trespass growl. “Buffalo, motherfucker? You want buffalo? Buffalo fucking stampede.”

  She turns in time to see Trespass haul out and clock a dude in the face, and then the brawl is on, and of course Trespass will win, though he will end it wheezing and choking on the sand. Ibiza has disappeared. Colleen scans the shore and finally catches a mini figure hiking up into the dunes, long hair trailing behind her, back turned to the moon.

  “You must be disgusted with me.” Tesla flops her head into Colleen’s lap. Girls are on the futon couch in Colleen’s apartment. Just one room on the first floor, with an afterthought of a bathroom and a kitchen stowed away in one corner. But her front door slides open on to a sandy street, and across the street is sandy sidewalk, and past that is the roaring sucking spitting old man sea.

  Colleen pets Tesla’s hair. “I’m not disgusted with you.”

  “Then you’re a saint. I’d be disgusted with me.” The room smells like lemons and salt-stiff clothes.

  This afternoon Tesla spent locked in the Olde Tyme Quik Mart bathroom. Some brashmouth Earth lady tried to pick her up in the oral hygiene aisle, and fragile girl freaked.

  “She called me, lu-mi-nous be-ing.” Tesla rolls the words on the front of her tongue for disgusted emphasis. “She said something about devotion. She probably wanted me to go recharge her goddamn crystals.”

  Colleen does a belly laugh that makes Tesla’s head shake up and down. “You should have—you should have done her star charts. Blown her fritzy mind.”

  Tesla groans and reaches out to play with the rocks on the side table. Colleen likes rocks smooth, symmetrical, ovoid. She brings them home and finds that anyone who comes through the apartment likes to cradle them. Big as a finger, big as a fist. Earthbones in every color. Tesla lays a gray green pebble in each palm and rubs them with the hams of her thumbs. Holds them up to her ears like secret-listening. Brings them to her lips like a kiss.

  Colleen’s distracted by a phantom pressure on her upper arms. She worries at the memory until she can place it—Ibiza’s hands at the party shaking her shoulders, pulling her close. She twists her head and presses her mouth to her armflesh. Why? Dunno. Seeking a taste. Like how the ocean’s touch leaves behind fingerprints of salt.

  Suzo has a bunch of people over at his pieced together house. Ibiza shows up with legs like strange long twigs. Bulk still on her belly and ass but her hips all carved away. She walks like a newborn fawn. Cackles like a raven.

  “Told you. I told you I’d do it. Ugly mugs thought I was full of shit, but I told you. Doctor had a big laser, it was over in ten minutes.”

  They ask how she paid for it and she says, “Fill out the right forms. Smile at the right people. It was state of the fucking art, I’ll tell you that. I’m doing this shit right.” She flings her arms out, shakes her hips. “Next stop, torso! Next stop, shoulders! Next stop, face!”

  Colleen stays out of the fray though all night she can feel Ibiza raking her with her eyes. Finally Colleen slips out the sliding door and stands on the sidewalk, leaning against the vinyl siding of the apartment building. Tesla’s funk is making her anxious. She thinks about how it’s like some people have a broken vase inside them. The pieces never quite fit back together.

  She turns and finds Ibiza right up in her face.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Sorry.” Ibiza looks the opposite of sorry. She nudges Colleen. “Hey. Uh. I wanted to ask you a question. I heard a thing about you.”

  Oh, yeah. At some point or another everyone hears a thing about Colleen. She tries to look like she doesn’t know what Ibiza means and doesn’t want to. Like that’ll make the girl go away.

  “What I heard,” Ibiza grinds the gristle of her question, “is that you didn’t take the exams.”

  Yep, that’s what they hear. Colleen stands perfectly still and stares out across the parking lot. Then really slow she brings her head up and down.

  It’s the first time she’s seen Ibiza struck silent. Girl doesn’t ask why not, but it’s in the cant of her head and the tap of her fingers, so finally Colleen answers.

  “I didn’t want to do research. Didn’t want to be a scientist. Had some dumbass idea about art.” She laughs at herself, bitter sealbark.

  Yeah, Colleen, you thought you were pretty freaking cool, didn’t you? Sitting in the exam room with your hundred classmates, typing dirty limericks into the answer screens. Hitting the submit button and sending in fifty-six pages of blank, blank, blank. You were going to stick it to the man, you were going to shuck off your parents and your friends and your whole little sanitized, climate-controlled life, all in the name of that skanky pagan god called art. You lovely fucking revolutionary.

  But there were those first months when she arrived on Earth and found it so full of artists its eyes were turning tie-dye. When she tried to enroll in a narrative school and got laughed out of the admissions room. Because the truth is, Colleen, in this post-consumer post-information fever dream of a w
orld, creativity is a vital fluid. The inhabitants of these cities swim in virtual galaxies. They sculpt their bodies into fairytale shapes. They lick the lines between reality and fantasy, body and mind, until everything melts together like ice cream.

  All because of Luna. Gleaming white sacrificial lamb. It took three years for Colleen to get this. Research happens on Luna, so pleasure can happen on Earth. The beautiful Earth people, they don’t have time to concern themselves with the twitching blinking nerdmen from the moon. They for sure don’t have time for some flabby beach bum kids who wobble when they walk.

  So Colleen falls back on what she knows. She soothes Tesla and she rolls her eyes at Trespass. She’s good at giving people a place to crash. She’s good at serving fried food. When she dreams of the moon her visions are colored amethyst and silver and midnight. The desolate gaping plains of home wake her up with tears streaming down her cheeks. She’d like to dig her nails into random people on the street. Moonkids know pain, she’d shriek to them. Moonkids could make beauty. But she doesn’t. Oh Colleen, no one wants to hear about that.

  Ibiza grabs her wrist. “I knew there was something. Something. You don’t go around moping like everyone else.” Her fingers palpate up Colleen’s forearm. “You’re so tense.”

  Colleen tries to pull away. She wants to say, Tesla doesn’t mope, but that’s such a lie. And it’s true about the rest of them too, how they shiver, how they cling. Sometimes it builds like sludge on her brain until she wants to fling them all into the ocean.

  “I told myself I’d be different.” Ibiza scrutinizes Colleen’s wrist. “I knew I’d fail. I was never any good at that shit. I figured, might as well embrace it.”

  She doesn’t say anything else because Colleen leans in and kisses her.

  Somehow they are down the street and in Colleen’s apartment and on the futon. Ibiza’s hands are up her shirt, tracing orbits around her breasts. The moon is hidden behind clouds tonight, a milky haze that leaches through the window. Colleen reaches for Ibiza’s hips and peels her shorts down. The scar from her bone shave runs down the outside of her leg from hip to knee. The skin is sunken and gray. A line of pale pus oozes between the stitches and catches the moonlight.

  “It doesn’t hurt.” Ibiza puts a hand on Colleen’s cheek and forces her eyes away from the wound. “Leave it.”

  Her words rasp in a language Colleen doesn’t understand. Her long hair hangs in her face, brushes over her stomach. She must have been growing it for years on Luna, Colleen realizes. She must have planned to let it down. The clouds shift and for a moment the moon gets an eyeful of them, then is obscured.

  Colleen clamps one of Ibiza’s legs between her own knees, shoves her other thigh up with her hand. Leans down, breathing hard, sticks her tongue into the dark. New girl tastes like clam juice. Which is to say salt water, and body. Ibiza makes a noise like a gull. Something shakes in her thigh. Then she sits up and pushes Colleen back. Her eyes are dark and liquid and Colleen thinks she sees something broken open. Ibiza licks her lips.

  “You,” she says, “you could be Lunarian.” Her voice is thick with longing.

  Colleen has thought about this every day for three years. She imagines filling in the exam blanks with serious answers. She imagines filling them in with her whole brain and whole heart. She can picture the congratulations, the celebrations, the cool close embrace of her family and the tunnels of Luna.

  She shrugs at Ibiza. “No, I couldn’t. I’ve been here long enough to figure that out.”

  Ibiza shakes her head stubbornly. “But you don’t know for sure.”

  Suddenly the three years that separate them feel like ages. Three years of earthpull, of fighting, of just barely making it. They stretch miles wider than Colleen’s whole childhood on Luna. “If I had passed, there are other things I would never have known. I made a choice. I’m not really any different.”

  And you aren’t either, she thinks. I didn’t see that at first. She reaches out to pet Ibiza’s shoulder. The other girl’s questions drive sadness into her like a wedge. Her mouth is dry.

  Ibiza pulls away. “You are different,” she insists. The door that had cracked open in her eyes now so fast clangs shut. “We’re different.” There it is, back in her eyes, the tinge of distaste that makes her look more like an Earth girl than any body mod ever will. She is retreating and retreating like the tide. They sit in silence for a moment. Then Ibiza stirs. “I think I should go.”

  She pulls her shorts on, inhaling as the fabric skates over her scars. Colleen doesn’t turn and watch her go out the door.

  So. Sandpoint. Crappy little gum wrapper town. Undeserving of so many stories. So much love. But this not quite ground and not quite water, they own it. This sliver of country with its everchanging dunes and sinuous shoreline, it’s theirs. Knowing is a kind of possession, and they know where the tidepools form, where the weed is sold, which beachfront property owners don’t mind if you cut through their yards. Inconstant, of course, but remember they’re moonkids. They’re used to not owning things for real.

  They were raised in homepods doled out by the government. The moon knows sleeping space and study space. The moon knows regulated recreation zones and one vacation day per month. The moon knows you are part of the machine, and it presses that knowledge in on you, it gives you disposable clothes and flavorless food and raises you with the knowledge that you too are only worth the research you produce, sweet little cogs of mine.

  Funny, then, sick and sad, how souls find something to latch on to even in the bleakest environs. How hungry bodies are to belong. Little Lunarian kids, their brains know nothing is guaranteed, but their hearts cling like hermit crabs on driftwood as the tide comes in. December after they turn sixteen, the exams come. The wind whips up the water. January, the scores get mailed out. CRASH. Big waves slam down, froth and churn, and when the water recedes again, some of those crabs, those cogs, those bright-eyed girls and boys are swept clean away.

  In the night Colleen flees down to the beach, kneels by the water. Sand collapsing all swirly around her legs. She puts her mouth into the sea and inhales and the salt water barrels down her throat like a bullet train. Burns tracks into her tongue. Girl falls backward, coughing. Her hair goes smack in the wet sand.

  Turn her head one way, down the beach there is an old petrol car parked on the sand, people dancing like paper cut-outs in the headlight glow. They kick up shells and gallop down to the wateredge to scream and spit. Turn her head the other way, up the beach is a dark slick shape of something. Big jelly or rotten tire or selkie skin. Salt and body, the ocean is nothing but salt and body. Colleen drinks sea water til her eyes ache, thinking with each suck, go ahead, put the flame to us. Just see if we melt and flow away. Gulps until her stomach revolts and then she pukes it up and walks the long way into town. By the time she reaches her apartment the sand has dried on her. She brushes it off like dust and climbs into bed sweet and clean.

  On the phone with her mother in the pink hour between lunch and dinner rushes. Colleen leans against the sliding glass door and jams the minidisk to her ear. The connection is finicky, it balks and shuffles its hooves.

  “Do you”—her mother’s voice flickers in and out—“a job?”

  Her concern seeps down the phone line. No other question a moon mom could ask, really. No other way to tell: Are you okay? Are you functioning? Lucky Colleen lives in a pleasure park town where things like jobs still exist. Or else how would she explain to the mama, jobs mean goose egg here. We’ve moved on.

  “I’m a waitress, Mom.” Like I tell you every time. “I bring people food.”

  That faint noise might be her mother ohhing or might be the sound of two hundred thousand miles. Colleen waits for more news without expecting any. Machines don’t rearrange their parts too often.

  “Oh!” Her mother’s thin exclamation. “The Sacaros!” Mr. and Mrs. Sacaro live in a neighboring
pod. “They’re having a baby.”

  Sharp pain as big chunks of Colleen’s chest erode into her stomach, until she takes a quick tight breath. Why does this news smart so bad? Why does she wrench open the door and fling the minidisk into the flowerbed?

  Later she’ll apologize to the moon mom, explain how the connection fritzed out. And she’ll think of how Lunarians see her today. Wonder, if she saw Ma and Pa again, would things be different. Probably no, course not, how could you—but, maybe. Maybe there’d be a little hitch-pause between the moment of recognition and the moment of hugging. Maybe that hitch would grow wider.

  It would be easy to call the dark breathless void between them space, but Colleen knows it’s way older than that, and still no one’s built a rocket that can cross it.

  One evening Colleen runs into Ibiza on the boardwalk. Not like she’s been avoiding her or anything. Not exactly. When she thinks of Ibiza there’s an odd sensation in her stomach. Not embarrassment. That she’s sure of. More like disappointment. A little like grief. You talked so big, new girl, she wants to say. I thought you had answers. I though you could fix us like that hack doctor straightened your legs.

  They stare at each other. Ibiza licks her lips. Colleen makes a motion with one hand and then stops, not sure where she’s going. She shifts her eyes to the people passing them, ogling them in the neardark.

  Then she hears her name getting yelled. “Colleeeeeeen!”

  Trespass, white faced under his white paint, hurtling up the beach like a cannonball. “Colleen! It’s big sister. Get her. Gotta help me get her.”

  The two of them rush across the beach. No, not two of them. Three. Ibiza runs too. Colleen can feel her joints grind, her muscles fray. Times like this she hates her body the most. This earthpull, this aching flesh. How light we were on the moon. How we could have bounded over miles.