Alien Virus Love Disaster

by Abbey Mei Otis

  I’m across the room learning about Needle Man but I see Mr. K cross his arms very high on his chest. The assistant principal sees Seychelles crying and nods. “Oh, you’ve heard already.”

  I’m still not sure what they’re talking about but I know it’s something from how tightly Mr. K shakes his head. Brooklyn spears me again with his paper. “Invisible to the naked eye, but a single touch will DESTROY YOU.”

  Champagne leans out of her chair to drum on the empty desk next to hers. “Mr. K, look, Mr. K? Jolie is absent today.” Absent is a word they learned last Friday when we went over the school’s new zero-tolerance attendance policy.

  Finally Mr. K comes over and explains it to me and then we explain it to the kids. We let them leave their seats and wander around the room. They make doorbell noises and tap dance and eat their hair. They roll their faces against my body and mew. None of them ask me why. I’m glad because I don’t know, but in the same way I don’t know why Brooklyn’s dad is in New Mexico, or why all the other students get fifteen minutes in the parking lot after lunch and they do not. When you get down to it really I think no one mystery is bigger than any other.

  The funeral is at the big square church under the light-rail line. It didn’t start out under a light-rail line but the church is old and the train is new. There are only enough pews to fill the front half of the church; the back half is filled with of folding chairs with metal seats sculpted in the imprint of a butt. The inside of the church is painted a peeling salmon pink that has faded to orange in the places where the window light hits it. I go to the bathroom and the toilets are low to the ground like they were meant for a kindergarten classroom. You don’t have to say anything, believe me, I know there are places in the world that put beauty into their buildings and this isn’t one of them.

  Kevin is studying for an anatomy exam this week so I’m here alone. I go all the way to the back with Ms. Madison from Counseling and Ms. Astrid from the Creative Entrepreneurship Center. We sit on folding chairs, our knees in our polyester church pants lined up in a row. Up in the front the family files in, quiet people, their mourning clothes still creased from sitting so long in the back of the closet. This isn’t a place of beauty, I know, but even in this church the salmon walls stretch up two or three stories high. You walk into even this church and you can feel the space between you and the roof opening and opening. You can sit with the great expanse of the air.

  The minister up on stage looks like Kevin’s baby cousin. He keeps his hands in the air most of the time like he hopes it will make him seem bigger. He has a lot to say about the things Jolie was spared from. She was spared from crack, she was spared from crank, she was spared from liquor, she was spared from ice. With each affliction spit out, his arms rise higher, his hands shake like he’s trying to fling thick liquid off his fingers. She was spared from the clap, spared from the other clap, spared from the unspeakable scourge.

  He tells us it isn’t God’s job to wake us up every morning. His eyes dart around above our heads like maybe he’s looking into the spirit world, but I know what men’s eyes look like when they rest on a miracle and that’s not it. He’s trying to tell us about how Jolie was spared the sins of teenagerhood, except he keeps calling her Julie and finally one of her uncles in the front yells out, “Jo-lee. Come on, man.”

  My eyes find Jolie’s mother. From where I sit I can see only the perfectly arranged back of her head and a bare sliver of her cheek. When she came in for parent-teacher conferences last year she wasn’t nearly so still. Going all over the room, picking up toys and putting them down. Had we seen her baby lately? Had we even seen the kind of progress she was making?

  You’d think she’d be the kind of woman to howl and tear her hair, but she doesn’t. The minister is spouting praise for being spared the foul lust of men, and Jolie’s mother doesn’t weep or shake or even look away. She only sits with her head tilted a little, like she’s working to make sense of what she sees. The room is full of heavy salmon-colored air and I can’t take my eyes off her. I realize hers is the truest sadness I have ever seen, and all the rest of us have only been pretending. My mouth wells with saliva. She is a state of matter different from everything else here, a vapor, a jet of steam. How can no one else be shaking in her presence? I want to crawl to her feet. I want to climb inside the cloud of her—withdraw all of my limbs into her concealing fog. I can’t hear the minister’s voice anymore. Every fluid in me is on the move. Come on, mama, I would say to her, get your harpoon gun, we can go hunting for God by ourselves, out on the wide open blue, we won’t miss a thing.

  I know, I know it’s not any of my business. I’m good at not acting on every thought I have. I don’t have reflexes; I have choices. They teach us that at Skin Tight.

  So I choose to climb onto Astrid and Melanie’s shoulders. They don’t feel me; I am so light. I glide forward over the pews, stepping from one person’s head to another like they’re lily pads in still water. No one looks up, no one notices, all the way to the front of the church. I find Jolie’s mama and lift her fingers with my fingers, both of us touching the other so lightly, just like we weren’t even two bodies. She raises her eyes to me and then she dips her head.

  I lead her out of the church and no one says a word. I lead her all the way to Skin Tight, through the dark doors, to the very back room. I face her, I touch her face, I so gently lift the blouse off her shoulders. We undress each other without ever brushing the other’s skin. Together we step into the latex bag, and she wraps her arms around me as they pull it over our heads. I can feel her breathing; our lungs expanding and contracting in turn.

  They seal the bag around us and remove all the extra air. From the outside the latex clouds our shapes so you can’t tell where I end and she begins. My arms blur into her waist. Her nose merges with my neck. Inside the bag is sweet and warm, the fog of her breath on my skin, our breasts crowded between us. They raise us into the air so that we hang with only each other to hold. Two organs inside one skin.

  Then the men come in. All the most valued clients of Skin Tight. Clean-shaven men with slicked-back hair. Men rolling up their shirt sleeves, loosening their collars. Men gently rubbing the tight muscles of their jaws. The men come in and as they enter they pass the table covered with a crisp white cloth. On the cloth there are crystal bowls, bowls filled with hundreds of cubes of red-dyed ice.

  The men come in and they take up the red ice cubes and they walk toward us, me and mama, they walk toward us as though they are coming into church. More and more men crowd into the room, all with red ice melting on their fingers. They stretch their arms to our hanging bodies. They touch us with their ice. They slide the cubes along our backs, thighs, calves. They stripe us crimson. There are too many men to all reach us at once and so they have to take turns. Like boys turning their crayons to the walls they scribble on us, they draw graceful loops, they scrawl their initials and blot them out. They stroke us until every inch of our translucent skin drips red.

  I don’t twitch anymore at this kind of thing, but mama wails when the first touch of cold sears her through the bag. She wails purely, with an open mouth. I feel her hot gasps against my shoulder, her muscles spasming against mine. Even though outside they are so careful. These men who only want to not hurt anything for a little while. It’s okay, I whisper. This is it. It doesn’t really touch you. It feels like it does, but it doesn’t. Even when the pain is so great you think it must leave you marked, or maybe you’ll never emerge. Don’t worry. You are whole. You keep on living. You arch your neck like this.

  Her head collapses back.

  You dig your nails in like this.

  Her fingers gouge into my sides.

  You breathe—like this—

  You breathe, and you breathe.

  Not an Alien Story

  Creigh is sort of a moron and Marko doesn’t give a shit so usually I’m the one in charge around here. We bunk in the sam
e room of a temp house. Used to be a big box store, like a Kmart or something, but when those got shut down someone with entrepreneurial verve decided to rearrange the shelves like room partitions and charge a hundred bucks a month.

  They make plenty of money off coastal people who get flooded out. The sea rise keeps on coming. Slides its big troll hands under town after town and squeezes.

  After it squeezed Norfolk I left my dad and my little sister in Blacksburg where we had some relatives. The sister still had two years of high school left. I hadn’t graduated but I turned eighteen so they wouldn’t let me back in. I told everyone I wanted to look for a job because it sounded better than saying I wanted to get the fuck away.

  I ended up in Akron, sitting in the cavernous dark of a warehouse, pretending I like these people.

  Marko’s cooking tonight. Pasta boiled on a Bunsen burner with American cheese melted in. Creigh sucks half-brewed beer straight out of the carboy. Creigh. You couldn’t wait?

  He burps. “Shit, man. What’s the point of waiting?”

  “We’ve got nothing to do but wait.”

  “Well I got nothing to do but drink wort.”

  Talking to Creigh makes you think he stole something from you. His head droops like one of those souvenir turtles with its neck hung from a string inside its shell. He’s got bony arms and watery eyes and three older brothers, all of them dead.

  Afterwards we sit around picking dinner out of our teeth. There’s only windows in the front of the warehouse so stuff gets dark pretty fast. The ceiling is so distant you can hear wind blowing.

  The evening sticks its nose under its tail. In a far corner of the store people are chanting. Someone shoots up a little bouquet of fireworks, popopop. Applause scatters through the warehouse like the wind rattling seed pods. I used to think you could get evicted for things like fireworks but now I can’t imagine who would do the evicting. This whole place is going to burn down any day.

  “Hey, Marko,” I say, “why don’t you tell us some stories?”

  He turns his big boulder head toward me real slowly. I think his eyebrows would be knitting together but the unibrow’s already got that covered. “Now why would you be asking me that, precisely, huh?”

  Marko’s from some island that got drowned under the sea rise. He moves like it’s a waste of time. We’re the same height but I always feel smaller, like my bones are bone and his are rock. I don’t want him pissed at me but I really want to hear a story so I stay quiet.

  Marko goes, “Is it because, maybe, I grew up on an island? And I sat around in my loincloth listening to the wise aunties tell fables about the seagull that shat out the world, is that it?”

  Creigh drops his pointy body down between us and unfolds a secretary. Its light spills onto our faces. I don’t know where Creigh got a secretary. He tries to jump on network and it murmurs, no signal, no signal.

  Marko snorts. “Yeah right, man. They don’t want driftwood jumping on.”

  Instead Creigh uses the secretary like a flashlight, spotlights my taped-up hand.

  “Dammit, man. Brutal.” He glances at my face to check if I appreciate the sympathy.

  I pick the bandage and try to look indifferent. “Yeah.”

  “Teach people to talk to Cheyenne, huh?”

  Cheyenne is my ex-girlfriend. She lives in the front of the store. Creigh wants me to say Damn straight and high-five him, which irritates me.

  “No. Look. The guy just looked like he was bugging her. So I steeled him. No story.”

  Creigh crumples a corner of the secretary screen between his fingers like a dog-eared book page. “It is a story.”

  “It’s not.”

  Marko makes a like hell sound in his throat.

  “That was really good macaroni you made tonight,” I tell him.

  “Fuck you, Asa.”

  The next morning I go outside. The sky is a milky gray and the parking lot spreads out in front of the warehouse like a lake. Some kids have tied a bucket to one of the light posts and now they’re playing a dumb version of basketball. Two girls and a boy. They leap and shoot and crash into each other with silent intensity. They play like people who put all their energy into their bodies because it’s got nowhere else to go.

  Some days something happens and it means the same thing your whole life is going to mean. It’s weird how all the shit of a lifetime can get narrowed into a slice of hours. It’s weird how the earth your home was built on can turn to silt, and one day you step on your carpet and it squishes.

  Creigh stands in the service alley around the side of the warehouse. At first I think he’s pissing but then I realize he’s just staring at something, hands clasped in front of him.

  “Whoa, man,” he says. His Adam’s apple bobs. “Whoa.”

  I look. It’s a thing. It’s about the size of a big watermelon, smooth and glistening. Fat at one end and then tapering down to a stubby flag that’s maybe a tail. The body pulses gently. It’s light pink, or else translucent, or else, I don’t know, the color of clouds at dawn. Looking at it makes me confused.

  “Creigh,” I say, “are you afraid?”

  “What?” he says.

  “Are you hungover?”

  “Oh.” He flickers his mouth into a smile shape. “Ohmyfuggengod, yeah.”

  I bend down. On its fat end, the thing has a human face. Or at least a kid’s drawing of a human face. Bulbous drooping nose and a grimacing mouth and flat gray dots that look like eyes but stare at nothing. I wave a hand at it. Hello? The face doesn’t twitch.

  It lies over a drainage grate in the service alley. Its sides flutter. I want to say it’s breathing but it could easily be masturbating or dying or preparing to attack.

  Marko walks up to us, thumbing the bristles on the back of his neck. “Jesus, Creigh. What did you hork up.”

  “No.” Creigh shakes his head. He stares at the thing and bites his lip so hard his skin goes white. “It looks like a deep-sea creature.”

  “Deep-sea creature?” Marko steps back. “If it’s a deep-sea creature we oughta pour gasoline on it and set it on fire. We oughta stake it down and pull its guts out and slice them into ribbons and fill its cavities with acid.”

  Creigh shifts his stare to Marko. “What do you have against deep sea creatures?”

  “What do I have against deep-sea creatures?” Marko thumbs Creigh and turns to me. “What do I—Jesus. Can you believe this guy?”

  “What would a deep-sea creature be doing in Akron?” I ask Creigh.

  “What are we doing in Akron?”

  I can’t decide if this is idiotic or brilliant so I don’t respond.

  “What do we know?” Marko scuffs the gravel. “Maybe it’s part of the native Ohioan fauna.”

  A fine net of red lines overlays the thing’s pale body. Dancing red, brighter than blood. Around its bulging face they fade to a haze of rose, blackberry.

  “Marko.” I look at him. “That is. The stupidest thing. I’ve ever heard.”

  “Oh right, I forgot you’re such an expert on Midwestern animals. I forgot about those nature walks you go on. Harry fucking Thoreau.”

  “It’s Henry, and go suck a dick.”

  Creigh punches my arm. “Asa. I think it’s hurt.”

  Now that he says it, there’s definitely an urgency to the way the thing trembles. It makes me feel a pull like I’m horny or I’ve just been betrayed. Creigh squats down next to me. His knees stick out like a frog. He puts his face two inches from the thing. “I think we should take it inside.” He doesn’t touch it. He waits for me to move. There’s a vapor of concern in his voice, the same pull, and it makes my caution fall away.

  I scoop the thing into my arms. It’s heavy but not dense, like holding an armful of cloud. A cloud made of pudding. Something beats inside it. Clear mucus soaks through my shirt. Its face remains imm
obile, glum. I kind of think it’s not a face at all. Why does a face have to be a face? Could be its side, or its ass, or a mask.

  We find a blue wading pool leaned up against the back wall of the warehouse. There’s a lot of stock that got left here when the store shut down. Creigh dumps in three buckets of water.

  “What? We didn’t find it in water.”

  He shrugs.

  I add a plastic pillow from a lawn chair and cover it with a towel. Like a dog bed.

  Creigh sets in two cans of Natty Ice.

  Marko stands back and watches us, his eyes and mouth small like lines scratched in a mountain. Then he jumps forward and drops in a Trudy Keane thriller.

  “What’re you on?” Creigh does his huh-huh caveman laugh, the one that makes me not want to be seen with him. “Thing can’t read.”

  Marko stares at him. “You just gave it beer.”

  I say, “Even if it could read, Caliban, why would it know English? And why would it pick some splatterpunk pulp like Trudy Keane?”

  Marko jabs a finger at the paperback. “Those books, they put me to sleep at night. Nothing else does.”

  I ease the thing into the wading pool. It lies in the shallow water, still trembling. Its expression hasn’t changed. It looks nauseated. Creigh knocks the pool with his foot and the water sloshes and the thing’s blubber sloshes with it.

  We sit around the pool. Our eyes are stuck on the thing, its iridescent scum, the boundaries where its cloudlike body fades into the water.

  “Maybe it’s the mutant baby of a mad scientist.”

  “Maybe it’s an alien from a planet where everything is made out of snot.”

  “Maybe it’s a person who went through a time vortex and got turned inside out.”

  “Maybe it’s Jesus Christ come back through a time vortex as a mutant alien baby made out of snot.”