Alien Virus Love Disaster

by Abbey Mei Otis

  I slap water onto my face and tell myself to quit wallowing. I’m lucky. Other girls born at other times didn’t get my choice. Write three essays, get two teacher recommendations, take a test, drop into the goo (if we choose to believe the cartoons). You’re wrong, George. We’ve all always wanted this. To have the doubts fall away. Everything and nothing. Reborn. Glory-blinding.

  I tell George I have to make up a comp-sci quiz, and I linger after school. There’s an alien in the guidance counselor’s office. Is it the one who told us about the exchange program?

  I am, it says. You are interested?

  “Uh, yeah. Yeah, I am.”

  Please, sit down. Or, actually— In the fluorescent light of the office, the alien is almost invisible. A dime of dull air rather than a plate-sized shimmer. —would you like to go outside?

  Under a tree in the school courtyard, the alien says, First, let me try to dissuade you.

  “Dissuade me?”

  Yes. This program—I’m not sure it’s entirely a good thing. We don’t fully know what the effects will be. And your way of life has been in balance for so long. It’s a terrible thing to disrupt.

  “You don’t think you’ve already disrupted a lot?”

  Its response is not quite words this time, only shades of discomfort, regret, defensiveness. I have to backtrack. “I’m sorry. I get it, definitely. But I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’ve made up my mind.”

  The alien’s projection morphs into acceptance. Well. If you’re sure. I’ve always said what independent minds you have. You’d be doing a great service for your planet, certainly. What’s your address? I’ll send you the application file.

  George is smoking outside the old gas station and when I get there he says, “Jesus, that took a long time.”

  “Don’t tell me. I’m shit at writing code.” I focus on his shoes, the scar on his elbow, the cobwebby gas pumps. Not his eyes.

  He knocks on my door when I’m working on my application, and I let my mother answer. I can’t see her but I can picture her with her arms crossed, filling up the doorway, lips bunched in a disapproving rose. “You two seem to get hurt a lot, don’t you?”

  “The fuck, Damia?” George yells through her like she’s a screen door.

  His voice makes the bruise on my thigh, the scrape on my knee, the split on my cheek throb angrily. My fingers hang frozen over the keyboard until he’s gone.

  It’s the afternoon after I submitted the application, and the aliens are asking for another fight. George sits on the curb, scuffing gravel into a pile and not looking up.

  “Oh, come on, guys. You’re good for business. Wouldn’t believe how good.” Mr. Reade, my former employer. He likes us to beat each other up in the parking lot beside the Stray Cat. “They come from shipside talking about you,” he tells us. “One of them called it—wait, wait, I got it—something like, ‘an authentic celebration of human physicality.’ That great or what?”

  George snorts. “As long as they keep putting money in the hat.”

  “Hat? They’re putting you in a guidebook.”

  There’s a sucking shrinking feeling in my chest. I edge toward George to sit down beside him, but without warning he kicks one leg out and swipes my shins. My palms smash into the grainy asphalt. The shrinking feeling is knocked out of me, replaced by something clean and pissed off. I take a deep breath and sweep gravel at George.

  “Bitch!” He clutches his eye. “Rocks? Seriously?” Then he stands, brings his hands up, bounces on the balls of his feet. “Okay, cheater. Let’s do this.”

  “What I’m talking about,” says Mr. Reade.

  The alien running the exchange program tells me its name is Lute. Or at least, it puts something in my head, and out of the jumble I get that word. Pretty, melodious name. Genderless as always. Lute says it came here to get away from responsibilities at home. Sometimes, when they talk about back home, the idea that fills me is “another dimension.” Other times I only get “shipside.” I put the two ideas to Lute. Were they different places? No, no. I feel Lute’s patient smile. They are two slightly different ways of referring to the same place. Epithets. The distinction grows wider in translation.

  I wonder what it’s really saying. I suppose there’s no way to know. “Understanding” is predicated on having the same apparatus translate things in the same way. One mouth must translate thoughts to sounds in the same way that other ears translate sounds to thoughts.

  But Lute! Lute is sunlight falling on dust. Our apparatuses might not even lie in the same dimension. I am so lucky that it can move through things as it does, bypass organs altogether. It lays down its intentions on my brain, and I give them meaning. The right meaning, I hope, though probably not. Inside the gnarled clod of my brain, something is always lost.

  George shows up at my house one evening, looking like he’s going to puke.

  “My mother. Overdrew her card. Needed cash. Told the aliens they could come and watch her pay bills. Watch her boil pasta.” Something jumps in the soft skin under his left eye. “Those morons would tip to watch me shit.”

  “Maybe she deserves a break.” I put my hands around his forearm. Whatever anchoredness I feel, let it pass to you. “Really. How’s it different from what we do?”

  “That’s a performance,” he gasps out. “We can shuck that off. This is who she is.”

  “Right. She’s a broke lady.”

  “She’s a whore.” He clutches my hand. Squeezes my knuckles white.

  “And you’re a terrible person.” I go to flick him on the forehead, and somehow my hand doesn’t fall away. Two of my fingers rest on the line of his jaw. His hands have moved up my arm now. His thumb brushes the inside of my elbow. He has been staring out at nothing but now his eyes move to me. And I fall in.

  “You know, I don’t think you’re gay.” I’m trying to make a joke. “At best you’re an asshole.” Then I kiss him.

  His lips are dry and his hands move across my shoulders, down my back, over all the places where he has opened cuts on me and seen them heal and opened them again. All the places I wish different, that I do not like, gouged or no. His hands never break away.

  Somehow my sports bra is over my head and his jeans are coming off. Oh, I think, it’s so simple. Simple as throwing that first punch. These barriers between people, these gulfs, how easily everything collapses.

  There’s a moment, later, when I revise: Really, that was not like fighting at all.

  A cross section of how we are, George and I. My blood, my skin, some air, his skin, his blood. Sometimes: blood, skin, air, wall, air, skin, blood. During sex: blood, skin, skin, blood. As close as we can get and seeking closer. But that final, perfect closeness? Blood, blood? That’s not a place we can get, no matter how deep we pull. We strain against the boundaries of skin.

  Except sometimes, when we fight. My knuckle into his lip, just the right way. The gouge in his elbow knocking the scab off my ear. Blood, blood.

  We get there.

  There is the night we lie against each other, naked, when George freezes, breath trembling in his throat. “Do you think—this—would they pay to see—”

  I kiss him hard, but the thought is already out. It hangs like a marble on a string between us and grows foggy with our breath. Yes.

  Is the answer. We both know and the marble grows bigger and presses a red welt into my chest. Yes.

  Not only would they, but they will and they have and they probably are. Just because this thing is newly discovered to us doesn’t mean it isn’t old and tarnished to plenty. And plenty who wanted to eat or wanted to please could so easily say: You want human bodies? You want flesh? Come this way.

  Not prostitution, exactly. No give and take of pleasure. Just watching. They would take the same kind of joy in it that they take in watching cashiers scan groceries, girls play clapping games, m
en fix a roof. Could sex still have beauty if it took place under such bland, curious eyes? Could it still have cruelty if that horror was supplanted by the blunt horror of being observed? Meanings warp, meanings dissolve. But still we let them in. Into the most Eleusinian mysteries, even when it breaks our hearts. The marble, giant now, weighs on my lungs and makes it difficult to breathe. Why is it never us, I wonder. Why are we never the ones who get to smile, to say—No, this is not for you. It’s complicated. In a million years, you could not hope to understand.

  One night, my father asleep in front of the television, I hear the newscaster say, “With us tonight, Johanna DeWitt, first human to return from shipside. If you think the studio looks emptier than it should, don’t worry! Johanna has undergone the splitting process. On the street you’d be hard-pressed to tell her from your average alien. Tell us, Johanna, how are you feeling?”

  Johanna’s responses scroll as text along the bottom of the screen. They angle the studio lights so that we can see her shimmering a foot above the couch. Another woman sits next to Johanna. The caption on the screen informs us that this is Helene, Johanna’s wife. She is small, with a round face. Her eyes look straight ahead but down, maybe at the cameraman’s shoes.

  The Johanna scroll informs us that she and Helene met in graduate school, that they devoted their lives to alien tech, that they were both so overjoyed when Johanna was selected as an ambassador. My body is safe, Johanna assures us. And I feel so indescribably free.

  Helene hunches her elbows in, as though trying not to occupy the space that Johanna’s body would need, if Johanna were there. She twists her wedding ring.

  George comes up to me after school, squinting, hands jammed in his pockets.

  “So, do you . . . should we go on a date, or something?”

  I burst out laughing almost too hard to gasp out, “No.”

  “Thank god.” Tension relinquishes his shoulders.

  “But—want to swing by the library?”

  That means, want to punch me until my skull rattles, but we never say that. The fights exist in a new vicious language, modulated by the color and spread of our bruises. Since we both speak it there’s no point in translating.

  If you could lay your thoughts down on my brain, George. What would I understand?

  When either of us lands a solid hit on the other there is a ripple of excitement among the aliens. My elbow goes into George’s stomach and I can almost hear the chimes of their thoughts. Like starving men watching someone eat, I think. George hears it too. He clutches his stomach, his mouth frozen in the shape of pain. After a moment he catches my eye and grins, hard and grim.

  I lean into his blows. Each punch he lands unmoors me a little more. If I can turn every inch of my body to bruise. Convert the entirety of my flesh to pain. Then by default the mysterious points of anchor will sever. I will rise into the air.

  When I sit down to dinner with blood crusted around my nose, my eye puddled purple and yellow, my mother stares. My father saws at his chicken without putting any pressure on the knife. My mother swallows. “We could buy you some new foundation,” she says.

  Protestors grow more active in the wake of Johanna’s appearance. Will we let them disembody a generation of our children? No, we will not! Protect our human heritage! There are rallies around alien portals. A protestor grows wild, shoves his arm with his middle finger extended through the rippling air. His body convulses in a shudder—delight or anguish?—and he falls to the ground. They revive him with Gatorade and Cheetos.

  I want to tell George how funny it is, the protestor slurping down Blue Ice, with dangerously cheesy dust around his mouth. Protect our human heritage! But George is not in school. He’s not slouching behind the library or riding the kid swings at the park and drawing dark looks from the nannies. Four days go by.

  I wake up feeling the imprint of his head against my chest. Every glimpse of dyed hair or glitter makes my heart lunge. I even try his mother’s house and she says, “I’m sorry, who are you?”

  The Chicago portal is destroyed. An organized act of terrorism, say the newscasters. No simple firecrackers either; they used alien technology. Set fire to the air inside a tightly controlled ring and devoured that unfathomable field. There’s nothing there in the morning when the cameras arrive. A crowd gathers in the shadow of the Bean, unwilling or unable to believe that it is gone. For the first time in a long time they are actually staring at empty air.

  The camera sweeps across the flock of faces and my heart flips so hard I can hear the deafening clap in my ears. There in the crowd, a green mohawk. His arms are crossed over his chest as he stares at the spot where the portal used to hang. His smile is hard and grim.

  I knew something would happen, says Lute. It and I are in the park. I sit with my back against a beech, a knot digging into my spine. We should not have given so much so quickly. You could not deal with it.

  “No,” I say. “It’s not that. Not exactly.”

  Lute is puzzled but I keep silent. They get our actions. Our angers, even. But not our reasons. Not this time.

  Finally Lute says, In any case we should hurry things along. I know officials shipside. They could bump you to the front of the list.

  Its presence is pale, diffuse. In my mind I catch fragments of distaste, anger that softens to grief. The sun is a low yolk in the sky. There is an ant crawling up my calf. Across the park two kids are trying to ride their Big Wheel bikes down the grassy hill. At the bottom they catch, go flying off, and for a moment their long shadows leap away from their feet.

  Lute says, Could I—do you think—can I touch you?

  I know Lute doesn’t truly mean “touch,” but I know it does mean “front of the list.” And the front of the list means escape. Certain definitions can be made hazy. Some lines can be blurred. The change in density that marks the boundary between my skin and the air can be bridged. Touched.

  My heart races. I pick at the gummy lines of my cuticles. My wide hands with their bulging knuckles. The loaves of fat lying under the skin of my thighs. I could never have to look at this body again. I could never have to breathe.

  So I say, “Yeah, sure.” Lute is a patch of air in front of me, and then is not. Lute is now the length of my forearm. My flesh glows if I watch from the corner of my eye but fades if I look straight on. Lute moves up my arm and through my torso. Lute is a gentle orb of heat, or else a chill that ripples through me. Lute is saying, Wow, wow, wow.

  Deep inside my head I picture my consciousness as a hot-air balloon, harlequin red and blue and gold. It strains against a hundred ropes. One by one they are struck through with an axe. The balloon trembles. Its basket tips back and forth.

  Vessel. The word jumps into my mind, so derisive it scorches my hair. Vessel. Now I am open to the mockery of late-night talk-show hosts, politicians, mothers who gossip at luncheons. They don’t know it, but when they say it, vessel, they are talking about me. Imagine it, being probed by the unknown. Being . . . occupied. Their disgust tinged with the heat of fear.

  Vessels hand over not just actions but the medium of flesh. It’s what the aliens most want. It gives them bragging rights shipside. They tell horror stories of their close encounters with bodies. Their friends listen raptly, the ones who would never be brave enough to come down here. They think, shuddering, of their own bodies, wherever they have left them. When they sleep (or whatever) they have dreams (or something different) of being trapped.

  I tell myself that this new kind of revulsion is just a temporary burden. I tell myself guilt is just another trapping of flesh. My body senses that its time is almost up and so it casts out wild nets of feeling, trying to trap me and haul me back in. When I wake up retching at three a.m., sure that the gentle orb of heat has returned, that it has come through my neighborhood and my walls and my sheets to slide again up and down through my body, that’s just muscle memory. Not a part of me. />
  And when I have no container? When I am no container? I will be nothing but myself.

  I get out of bed and stand in front of the mirror. I cup a hand between my legs, cover everything up. I lay my other forearm over my breasts. More acts of self-censorship. Neuter. Neutral. It. It feels so strange. This is it.

  George shows up at school the next Monday. He sits in the back of class with his head on the desk and the teachers don’t bother calling on him. He ignores me at lunch. I stake out his locker after school but he doesn’t pass by and by the time I’ve figured that out and sprinted from the building he’s halfway down the street. He freezes when I shout his name.

  I catch up to him and spin him around by the shoulders. It’s disconcerting how much he looks the same. What did I expect, some disfiguring scar? A brand on his forehead? Whatever words I had desert me.

  He speaks instead. “You applied for exchange.” It’s not a question. And now his face is falling apart. “All those times—you said you hated them. You said how stupid they were.”

  Oh, George. You are not the only betrayer here. How can I explain that yes, I said that. But more than those things, I want to fly and I want speak in the music they speak and I want to touch and be touched the way they are. He would say they had tricked me. He would look at me with pity, and when pity didn’t change my mind it would change in him to disgust. But it’s my right to want those things. It’s a want that is in myself, not my flesh.

  He’s not done. His voice cracks. “How can you hate yourself that much? How—you would go somewhere you’re not even sure exists. You would leave your own body. And me.”

  You’ve already left me, I want to say. Not in the same way that I would leave, but it’s your way and it’s as real to you as my way is to me. You know it is.

  “Day. There are other ways to escape. We’re fighting them. You should join us.”

  Join. The word could mean so much more. The meaning he intends for it is sad, inadequate.