Alien Virus Love Disaster

by Abbey Mei Otis

  But the impossibility of that word brings me up short and grief bells inside me. I want to stave off that truth as long as possible. I lean forward and kiss him, clutch him to me. Suddenly it doesn’t matter whether the desire is in my flesh or in my mind, whether our words are adequate or not, whether everyone on the street is staring at us. Stay with me.

  He pushes me off. “Fuck’s sake. Sell yourself to the devil, sure. At least stand by your own position. This is pathetic.”

  Words calculated to smart. Words to reach where blows cannot. Where bodies refuse to go. They dig a honed edge into my chest and all the reasons why I can’t lose him spill out like organs. I clutch my stomach—the points of anchor will be severed—and turn, and flee.

  I plow through my house, upstairs into my room, punch the wall. Hot tears bully their way out from under my eyelids. Stupid girl. Typical girl. Crying because I would lose a boy I loved. Because my body was something people looked at as an artifact, and I was trapped inside it.

  My mother comes into my room holding the computer. She sees me slumped on the rug and kneels down next to me. “So you’ve heard.”

  I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  “You got a letter. From the regional exchange office.” She hands me the screen.

  In light of recent terrorist attacks, the alien bureau regrets to announce that all scholarship exchange programs will be put indefinitely on hold. We regret the inconvenience and hope that amicable relations can be restored with all possible speed.

  Postscript—Damia, I’m really very sorry about this. —Lute

  Behind their words I can feel it, really feel it, for the first time. The bafflement. The seeds that will blossom into disgust. The aliens rustle and murmur, After all we gave you. After all we sang your praises. How did we deserve that? How could you?

  “Honey, I’m so sorry.” Mom pats my hand. “I know how hard it is to feel you have nowhere to go.”

  But I drop the computer and ease out from under her palm. My eyes are dry. My nose isn’t running anymore. I stand up and step into the doorway.

  “Actually, I think I’m going outside.”

  I jog into the center of town and stand outside the Stray Cat. Aliens spill out of it, following the end of the lunch rush. Aliens everywhere, following shoppers, watching toddlers drop ice cream.

  “You want to fucking understand?” I scream at them. “Come here.” The humans who are around look up too and cover their babies’ ears. Fuck that. “Put this in your fucking guidebook.”

  The aliens follow me. They call to each other in their incomprehensible music and more come pouring out of shops and houses and Starbucks. They flock behind me until I’m wearing a shimmering cloak of air that billows across the whole street.

  I don’t need to look more than one place. George. I know where you are.

  I hope he gets my message, through my eyes and my set chin and my clenched fists. There are no more words between us. I will lay my thoughts down on his body, and he will give them meaning.

  I round the corner of the library just as he’s stubbing out his cigarette. He sees the aliens behind me, the flock, the exaltation, the avalanche. His eyes grow huge. I don’t pause, just bring my fists up and heave myself into his chest. He catches me around the waist, eyes still wide. Yeah, this dance. Remember, George?

  But he just pushes me back, barely any force, his lips parted in a silent question.

  I slam my fist into the side of his face.

  He staggers sideways, recovers. Bounces once on the balls of his feet and then lunges. Some restraint has been severed. Blows rain down on both sides of my head. He’s stronger, he’s always been stronger. He’s a he, not an it. My head rings like a hundred aliens are screaming. A hundred aliens are screaming. There’s something warm running through my hair. Lights in my skull explode. Light reflects off the sweat on his nose. I drop down, jut my shoulder into his stomach and feel his guts rearrange. He flips over my back, legs flailing, hits the asphalt with a noise of meat and wetness. I’ve always been faster. I’m a she, not an it.

  The bar of his shin knocks my ankles out from under me and I drop. My head bounces on—softness. George’s outstretched arm. My whole body peals with pain. Heartbeats flood my brain, drowning out the bray of alien projections. I can feel George’s pulse through my scalp. His forearm is slickening with my blood. My body fills with the crashing of my breath, in and out and in. Dark arterial colors are leaching into my vision. I fight the encroaching haze, wrench my eyes into focus. Above us the sky is dazzling blue, and empty.

  Sex Dungeons

  for Sad People

  It’s not that much of a mystery. It’s a translucent, human-size latex bag. I take off my clothes and climb inside. They seal up the top. There’s a rubber gasket that fits over my mouth so I can breathe. My lips are the only part of me that are exposed, which is why I have to wear lipstick but eye shadow is optional. Then they fit a hose onto a valve at the bottom and vacuum the air out of the bag. My arms get clamped to my sides. My legs get clamped together. They fasten the reinforced straps at the top of the bag to a hook in the ceiling and haul me up two feet, three feet above the floor. It’s like I’m being hung from my skin but there’s no pain. It’s like my brain is sinking in a pool of cream.

  I’m in the most exclusive room of Skin Tight; only Triple Deluxe Golden Venus members get this far. Sometimes it’s executives on a spree but tonight it’s a politician and some of his college brothers. That’s all I know. On a table covered by a white cloth are laid out all the tools they can choose from, the vibrators and safety blades, the spark wands and the ice and the clamps. The rules are: no damage to the bag, no damage to the performer. There’s always a watcher, somewhere, a window up high.

  The latex quadruples every sensation. A tap on my shoulder blade radiates out through my whole back. Clients love it when I moan. They reach up to brush my lips. Sometimes they swing me back and forth like the meekest game of tether ball. Sometimes they rub their bodies against me. This politician loves the colored ice. He holds the cubes with silver tongs and slides them down my thighs. The cubes are made of something thicker and darker than water, and as they melt they leave trails of red and purple and green. The brothers paint me like a canvas and I cry out at the cold.

  You would think I’d panic occasionally and writhe and claw at the bag. You’d think that but I don’t. Even the first time I didn’t. I’m good at not acting on every thought that goes through my brain. When the clients leave and they lower the bag and unseal it, I climb out with nothing to show but a thin film of sweat on my back. They dust the bag with baby powder to make sure I don’t stick. It makes me smell dry and floral. When I get home Kevin cuddles me on the couch and strokes the insides of my arms. “This job, babe.” He shakes his head like it’s the darndest thing. “It makes your skin so soft. You’re even softer than Flower.”

  On the floor Flower is busy with a pig ear but she thumps her tail when she hears her name.

  I met Kevin because he was an aide on Mom’s ward in the assisted-living home. He was always the best at explaining things, what the new machine was for or why they had changed her dosages. He would text me at the end of his shift to let me know she was sleeping alright. I told myself it was kindness; he was a kind person, which was fine. But at some point I started to hear from him when he wasn’t even at work, and eventually I was sending him the tiniest details of my life. I got a paper cut under my thumbnail and it hurts. Or, I thought there was a bug in my hair but there’s not. Things I hadn’t known I needed to tell someone. You go around for a long time carrying the minutiae of yourself in your own two hands, and it’s not so bad, not even that heavy. It’s just a thing you have to do. And then every so often a person shows up and opens their arms like the clean empty surface of a table, and suddenly your hands feel unbearably full, and you know that what was true isn’t true anymore, you coul
dn’t for another instant continue bearing so many small stories on your own.

  One weekend night at Skin Tight gets me six hundred on an average evening, but that’s not going to cover us plus Mom plus Kevin wants to do nursing school at night, so during the week I work in the seventh grade Alternative Learning Styles class of Stars & Stripes Collegiate Liberty Prep Academy. The school is an old strip mall in what I think used to be a bank building. Sometimes the kids have bake sales out of the drive-through teller window. Stars & Stripes hired me without explaining exactly what an Alternative Learning Style was, and I’m still trying to figure it out. For example, as far as I can tell, Champagne’s learning style is mimicking the sounds of technology at earsplitting volume. Or Brooklyn’s learning style is furtive, relentless masturbation. Or Jolie’s learning style is whales.

  Today in the classroom they’re supposed to be reviewing the origins of supply-side economics, but Champagne keeps twisting around so her head is under her seat and her butt sticks up in the air. “It hurts,” she says. Mr. K tells her to sit up and she does but then she puts her hands in the air, signing bathroom and clicking the phlegm around in her throat so it sounds like typing keys.

  Eventually Mr. K lets her go, and she does a funny twitching hop across the room and into the bathroom. The class is focused again and Mr. K tries to get them to identify a man’s picture on the Smartboard. They’re guessing Hawkeye or John Cena or maybe Rainbow Dash so Mr. K has to do three claps for silence before he says, “Actually, this is John Maynard Keynes!”

  There’s a crash from the bathroom. The kids jump and Prius says “Cleanup in aisle five!” in a perfect loudspeaker imitation. When I get into the bathroom I find Champagne on the floor with her uniform pants around her ankles, flailing like a beached mermaid. She makes a high insistent noise like a carbon monoxide alarm and claws at her hips. Her Minnie Mouse underpants are probably four sizes too small. The elastic is stretched as tight as wire. It digs so deeply into the flesh of her legs there are bright raw welts in her skin, and her thighs are blotching purple. She stops the alarm noise long enough to look at me with deep-welling eyes. “It hurts.”

  I go back into the classroom. “She’s stuck in her underpants,” I tell Mr. K.

  He trails off from an explanation of the Laffer curve. “What?”

  “Someone made her put on underpants that are too small. She’s stuck.”

  He glances back and forth from me to the Smartboard diagram. “Jesus.”

  “They’re hurting her. We have to cut them off.”

  “Oh no.” He puts both hands on his jaw like something suddenly throbs. “No. We can’t cut off a student’s underpants.”

  “Well. She’s not going to be able to pay attention.”

  Brooklyn raises his hand: “I have underpants.”

  Mr. K waves weakly at the Smartboard. He massages his eyelids. “Jesus.” He looks up at me. “You have to do it. I can’t go in there with her. They do not pay me enough for this.”

  Prius says, “Now available for three easy payments of nineteen ninety-five!”

  Champagne is still trembling on the floor when I go back in. I lay her head in my lap. She makes a soft computer trill. I slide the blade of the scissors along her hip, between her skin and the underpants. Her trill grows a degree more urgent. I try not to prick her but just touching the welts makes her flinch. Champagne is big for twelve. Her flesh as it is freed from the taut elastic exhales with relief, rises into smoothness. I slice through the cotton on each of her hips and for a moment let her lie naked in my lap, trilling, her face buried in my skirt. I wash the welts with only water because she gets frantic at the sight of soap. I bandage them with gauze and tape because we have no Band-Aids big enough. I button her uniform pants. I buckle her belt. I pull her up off the bathroom floor and make her look at me. “Commando today, Cha-cha. It’s no big deal.”

  She gives one forlorn beep but when I open the bathroom door she walks out first.

  Marcus has booked my whole Friday evening at Skin Tight. Marcus comes in about once a month. He has one of those jobs that seems important if you don’t really think about it. He wears rings but he never hurts me with them. Tonight he sits for a long time, cross-legged on the bamboo floor in his cashmere socks with his cheek against my calf. He clutches my toes as though I am some helium-filled woman who might at any moment fly away.

  He tells me about his children, how his daughter cries and won’t go to school. His wife wants to talk to specialists. He is afraid. I don’t want her to feel like a failure, he says of his daughter. I don’t want her to think that the way she is isn’t okay. Does it mean I am a failure? Does it mean I am not okay? He and his wife have fought every night this week. He told her she was too ready to admit defeat. She told him he was willfully blind, too weak to ask for help, pathetic in his brute insistence of fine-ness.

  I breathe loudly so he knows I’m listening. I don’t speak for Marcus. Eventually he goes to the table and picks up the spark wand. He carries it to me, hovers its slender tip—like a candle flame shaped out of glass—a millimeter away from my stomach. I’m still, not like a dead thing: but like a thing absolutely in control. The spark wand whirs. For a moment we stay poised together on this pinnacle of need. Nothing so mysterious here, just a person who wants to not hurt anybody for a little while. He presses a button on the wand. A single thread of pink light leaps from it to me and I buckle like a fish on a line. There is nothing left in my head, not the sound of electricity popping across my stomach, down my thighs, only the pain like metal screws into the soft mesh of my nerves.

  I wail and he jerks the wand away. Drops it on the table and presses to my body. His head between my breasts, his lips pressing through the latex against my sternum. “I’m not a failure.”

  It takes a moment for my nerves to unscrew. My tongue unlocks. I move it around inside my mouth and push saliva out to the tissue-papered skin of my lips. “No,” I say to him. “No, you’re not.”

  He nuzzles his nose against my chest. This is how I speak to Marcus. “No, you’re not a failure. You work so hard. You’re so smart. So smart. Such a smart boy. What a good, smart boy.” With each sentence he mews and rolls his face across my torso. Presses his eye socket against the cushion of my upper arm. Presses his mouth against my ribs. “My good boy. I’m so proud of you. So proud of you.”

  He touches his temple to my clavicle but doesn’t try to work his way any higher. Skin Tight has very carefully measured the height at which I hang. I am just high enough that even a taller-than-average man cannot reach my lips with his. So Marcus just stands with his head nestled into me, his arms wrapped around my body as though otherwise he might collapse. The latex by now has warmed, stretched between us like a second skin, though whether it is his or mine is no longer clear.

  You’d think my body would be crowded with memories of pain. You’d think that but it’s not. At night I lie in bed with Kevin and feel only the cool of the sheet and the warmth of his skin. When we were first together we slept clutching each other like two lovers in a barrel going over Niagara, but in order for things to last they have to loosen. Now I sleep on my back with one arm stretched toward him, and Kevin sleeps on his stomach with his arm reaching over my chest. His fingertips just brush my breast.

  The first thing I ever saw him do was count out pills for Mom. I couldn’t take my eyes off the gentleness in his hands. Now there are times when I hate him so much that pale spots crowd my vision. I think of all the tiny things I know about him that no one else knows. I think of how benevolent I am, not to speak them out loud. Petty things, unfairnesses, low and spiteful snares. I want him to be grateful to me for not saying what I could say. I want him to walk to me on his knees and clutch my legs and lick the honey that leaches through my skin.

  For example I could tell him that sometimes I let him help me with things and then I go back and fix them later. Or I could say, you ar
e not as good at public speaking as you think you are. And also, I know your new haircut is supposed to be professional, but really you look a little like a Nazi.

  I’m sure there are things he could say to me also, things I would not expect but that would wreck me. Open his mouth and there they are, my smallest fears laid naked on the table. All the things I imagine he doesn’t even notice but of course he knows, of course nothing is hidden between us, we two goosebumped patches of shadow with the dog sprawled vigorously over our feet. My heart swells inside me. There is only myself, protecting him from those hideous wounds. Only my frail and treacherous mouth. There should be a password, there should be a safety lock. Who would trust me with a job like that?

  I assume that’s what love is. To be bursting full of the most hurtful things you could say to a person, and not say them. And they lie inches away from you, not saying the things that could hurt you most. You hold that unbearable knowledge and you feel the heat radiating from each other’s skin. Hello, hello, let me buy you breakfast. Let me rest my lips against your neck as though I were placing my head inside the mouth of a bear. You are the only missile, you are the only shield.

  It’s morning math in Mr. K’s class and we’re learning about compound interest. We make a big graph on the wall and use different colored markers to draw the difference between compounding continuously and compounding yearly. “Remember,” says Mr. K. “When you’re calculating payments, you need to specify both the frequency of compounding and the interest rate!”

  Champagne today sits upright in her desk. She keeps sneaking looks at me, wiggling her eyebrows and mouthing the word Commando. I gesture at her to turn back toward her graph. Next to me Brooklyn tears up his worksheet and folds it into hard little needles and pokes them at my arm. He tells me about how Needle Man could kill me by throwing one of these into my neck at the speed of sound. Seychelles has just remembered a time two years ago when a fire engine drove by and scared her, so now she’s started to cry. The assistant principal pokes his head in and tells Mr. K that during the night Jolie choked on her own mucus and died.