Alien Virus Love Disaster

by Abbey Mei Otis

  Colin woke them up by hammering. Colin was definitively a boy. You could tell by how many things he broke and how many things he fixed. None of his siblings had ever put much time into getting to know him, yet they all assumed that when it came to the killing he would take the lead.

  Mama had a list of tasks she hadn’t gotten around to. It comforted her to watch Colin complete them, even at this late hour. The thermostat was stuck in Celsius. The spice racks had been stained but never hung. The dead bolt on the back door was bent from where an adjustor tried to kick it in last month.

  “That’s the kind of thing that won’t happen once you kill me,” Mama reassured Colin. “They’ll know they can’t touch it.”

  Colin was impressed by the rigor in her voice but did not know how to tell her. When he set down the hammer and turned to look at her, he found her staring out the window with her mouth cruelly tight. He thought maybe she had seen a car drive by that he had missed, that had angered her.

  It was a point of pride in the neighborhood that so far only three houses had become trading posts. That happened if you didn’t kill your mother soon enough, or at all. One of the trading posts gave face massages and sold luxury lotions and herbal bath infusions. One of the trading posts was all local. One was a Waffle House.

  There came a trickle of weekend shoppers seeking suitable gifts for vague acquaintances. They bought whipped-mud masks and wildflower honey and hash browns diced, chunked, and smothered. Some people you would only see inside the trading posts, never walking through the neighborhood. The servers at the Waffle House wore black balaclavas and took orders without speaking.

  Look, I know it was the Thorntons’ place, but my skin gets incredibly flaky this time of year, the neighbors justified to themselves. Can’t really argue with convenience. Plus, they made their choice didn’t they? It’s not everything we need, sure, but you make do with what you have. No sense impeding forward motion. Get on with things.

  It’s not like they didn’t feel grief. As they spoke about Mama, sometimes they caught themselves referring to her in the past tense already. An accident, it was an accident. “Practicing!” Lorcom joked drily, without needing anyone to laugh.

  She was old but not that old. Sixty-six they thought and then tried not to. Her life was a drab gray thread when viewed from any significant distance, but up close it was variegated and lively and meant a great deal to her.

  Sometimes she smoked weed on the weekends. Even when they were little. They could picture her standing on the porch with a joint in her left hand, clutching her terry robe closed with her right, yelling at them to watch out for dog shit in the leaf pile.

  Casey, Stacy, and Colin had made it to college. Three out of five, nothing to be ashamed of. Lorcom was taken care of in a different way; one didn’t ask. Slug checked a lot of political philosophy out from the library.

  Colin left dinner early to do some final sharpening. Casey and Stacy cleared the dishes. Slug stayed sitting, leaned across the table to Mama.

  “Don’t you hate us?” said Slug. “Where is that inside you?”

  Mama uncrossed her arms. “Look, honey, can you hate the sun for going down?” (Her tone like maybe if Slug weren’t so, you know, maybe this explanation wouldn’t be necessary.) She went on in her usual vein, what a miracle motherhood was, to willingly bring a creature into the world, to weep at its perfection, knowing one day it would end you.

  In the kitchen, Casey, with suds on his wrists, brought up how Slug wasn’t even biologically related to them anyway. They all remembered the circumstances under which Slug had come into their lives. Stacy shushed him. No need for that now. Besides, it wasn’t biology that mattered, you know that. It was the manifestation of nurturance, which could look numerous ways.

  Slug said nothing else for forty years.

  It’s not as though they were secretly brutes. It’s not as though they took pleasure in carrying out hard but necessary tasks. It’s not that their experience of pain was fundamentally different from ours. It’s not that they were somehow more at peace with their instincts. It’s not that it felt unreal, nor purely metaphorical. It’s not that they did not know how to ask questions. It’s not like this changed things irrevocably. It’s not like nothing felt different. It’s not that they were more monstrous than you. Nor were they more brave.

  Stacy finished in the kitchen and creaked down the stairs to join her family. The sounds of the dishwasher gushed through the floor. They had inadvertently arranged themselves in a circle. Mama was no farther away from any of them than they were from each other, still she felt untouchably distant.

  Let’s say there’s no shame in this world. Nothing holding you back, nothing at all. And still things did not come out how they wanted. No matter how well adjusted they imagined themselves to be—Casey liked to assure clients he could “tackle whatever those sons of bitches threw” at him—still they discovered seams in themselves that could be worked loose. They came undone.

  They had lost ritual from their bones many generations ago, and they were all too averse to looking foolish to try and re-create it. There was a lot of patting each other on the shoulders, saying well, well now, here we are. If you think you will say exactly what you mean, in the moment when you must, you will be disappointed.

  It’s just how it was. Imagine you had to kill your mother. It was like that.

  How to begin? They did not know, and then they already had.

  In the end she did fight back. Everybody does. She stopped being their mother at all; instead she was a red-hot wire of life, embedded within the flesh of a violent animal. You can’t really comprehend this change until it happens. They loved her more then, not as their family but as a magnificent creature whose end they got to witness. They grew angrier and more determined to be worthy. It was more difficult than they had expected, because of the strength with which human tissues bind to each other, the myriad ways they can twist and dodge. They used every tool they had amassed. They even used the chain.

  Let’s say there’s no heartbreak in this world. Let’s say instead people just do a firm handshake and get on with things. Or if getting on feels impossible, you have the option of slicing off one of your formerly beloved’s nipples and taking it with you as a souvenir. They are glad to let you do it. What a trinket to give up that the rest of their life might remain intact. Stacy wore four dried-out nipples threaded on a string around her neck. Over the course of the evening the four nipples were spattered with flecks of red becoming brown. Though when you looked more closely you saw they were only beads shaped out of pink clay, like a child might make. A friend’s daughter. Perhaps this wasn’t real either.

  When it was over they could not look at each other.

  They dropped back into their bodies each alone. Their rationalizations had been inadequate, they realized. There was absolutely nothing that stood between them and the horror they had committed. They had held her heart in their hands, passed it around.

  They sat on the floor and pinched at bits of dust. They reminded themselves of places they had heard of where things were very different, where you did not have to kill any of your own relations but instead lived with the knowledge in the back of your mind that a stranger, or several, in an unknown place had killed another stranger, or several, in order for you to live as you did. This seemed altogether more dishonest, and imprecise. They shivered at the thought and congratulated themselves for being so decent and so square.

  Then they washed the thick blood and yellow streaks of bile from their hands. They bundled their clothes and set them in the incinerator, which had been replaced the previous fall with a quiet and efficient model.

  They got up early the next morning and went for walks, alone or in pairs. The air was clear and frigid and felt the way it feels on vacation, untethered from the expectations of ordinary life.

  They were struck by the realization that most of the
other households in the neighborhood had completed the same task long before them. Lorcom watched a family jogging by—grandfather, two adult daughters, twin girls in a stroller—with astonishment. All this time you knew, and I did not. I moved through the world in ignorance. Now I know how it feels, and your composure that seemed so ordinary now seems miraculous. How can you—how can you not—

  The family noticed Lorcom staring. But maybe they understood where his mind was (you had to, the screaming had carried all down the block), because they nodded politely and turned a corner.

  In this way they came to understand that it was not impossible to go on. They would learn to bear it. Their skin was thicker and more elastic than they had suspected; it could conceal beneath itself unimaginable transformations. They felt cleansed by this awareness, propelled forward by unexpected energy. They returned to the house preceded by their long shadows cast by the rising sun. Each motion they made felt new, and newly precise.

  They were in the kitchen, there was just enough chicken left for five sandwiches, a knock came on the door.

  “Here to complete the adjustment,” said the little man to Colin, whose knuckles whitened around the doorknob. Stacy froze the mayonnaise knife above a slice of bread.

  Finally Lorcom managed, “We’ve secured the place. You can’t.”

  The adjustor was having difficulty with his clipboard and tablet and stylus and phone all in two hands. His nose a little fruit in front of his softened face. At their words the fruit ripened. “Not possible.”

  Colin, grayly, recollected his language. “Of course not”—his shrug had a tinge of retch—“but there it is.”

  “I won’t meet my quota.”

  The adjustor had not meant to say this, they could tell. It was the involuntary reaction to a moment of unexpected distress. How trivial his distress, how mean and opportunistic compared to their own sonorous loss. They grew desperate to get rid of him; he polluted their meditations on grief.

  Get out, their hisses implied. They could basically move as one organism now. Get out. Now the blue embers of their hearts were cased in glass. As was the house. “Get out! ” Picture five resplendent snakes hissing from one hole.

  “Of course—I’m sorry! I’m sorry.” And his hands held up, palms out, demonstrated that he was.

  Their faceted eyes watched him as he retreated from the door.

  He kept his hands up until he was back out on the sidewalk, out of the shadow of the house. He scanned the street, afraid that someone had seen. The sound of the deadbolt sliding shut made him jump. He glanced back at the front window and saw a corner of a curtain twitch, then fall into place. He brought his arms down slowly to his sides, conscious of every joint articulated in the process. The street was empty. The brightness of the day repercolated into his awareness. Birds resumed singing.

  His name was Merclaire and he did not relish the hunt. A counselor in the GED program had recommended the adjustor profession as a “ladder straight to the top,” though in retrospect Merclaire realized, as he often did, that he had misunderstood.

  He stood for another moment outside the Erasmo house until the sting of their eyes subsided, then he relocated to the end of the block. His heart was not racing but he breathed heavily. A high cold sun left the air bright and heatless. The breeze chilled his bald spot.

  His key jammed in the bike lock and he nearly sobbed. He would not meet his quota. The event so long flickering on his horizon had finally come to pass. This really is your final chance, Merclaire. He was hopeless at repossessing houses but adroit at convincing himself he could make it work out. Now the true ramifications tumbled into his awareness. Somehow the adjustment gods would be placated. If all the roster houses had been secured, his own home became eligible for sacrifice. Imagining his house as a trading post made a ruthless physical impulse rise up in him. Though he understood he was embedded in a scheme designed for him to fail, still he could not eradicate the feeling of personal incompetence. Shame sat in his gut like a Lego block.

  His wife had recently been promoted from driver to clerk at the transportation bureau. She took night classes on administration. His daughter Havana had been born on the kitchen floor, Havarti in the bathtub. Such a relief to watch them roll around. Finally, people who would never fully grasp how far he had traveled to meet them.

  Unable to bear acceleration, he walked his bike toward home.

  Look up at the sky. Had there ever been such a saturated blue, so harmed by contrails? Merclaire could only concentrate on his own fear. His own mother had died a decade ago and her heart, though generous while alive, had not been of use to anyone. Maybe he could kill another relative who provided equivalent nourishment. Maybe he could locate the part of his body that cared for himself and cut it off. Watch that a setback in one area does not trigger catastrophic thinking everywhere, his therapist had said, but the court didn’t pay for therapy anymore.

  Without noticing the journey, he had pushed the bike to the top of the hill dividing the Erasmos’ neighborhood from his own. His body was coldly layered in sweat. Here there was no sidewalk, only the crumbling edge of the asphalt, demarcated from the driving lane by a white line. He could feel the crushing weight of the cars in the breeze they made as they passed.

  Behind him, neat though worn houses. Frost-damaged azaleas. Cars on concrete pads. Ahead of him, a tire yard, a parking lot for a moving company. Blocks of gray apartment buildings. His house shared a wall with a nail salon. So far the daughters seemed unbothered by the fumes.

  To the left he could see all the way down to the business district of the city. He paused here, from dread or admiration. He liked to stand with the girls on this hill and invent conversations for the city people. What’s your favorite animal? How about your favorite color? Did you draw that? What did you have for snack today? At this distance the buildings appeared innocuous, finely wrought miniatures. The malevolence that hung over them like smog dissipated before it could reach his nostrils. They emitted a great threat in their twinkling but from here he could imagine his family unscathed.

  Trash flipped in the alley to his right. A noise like a raccoon stuck in a can. The incongruity of vision and reality was unsustainable. He swung a leg over the bike and descended in a rush, cold peeling his knuckles.

  His wife sat on the porch of their duplex with two men. Merclaire had not realized her brothers would get out of prison so soon. They looked smaller than he expected men returning from prison to look, dapper in white T-shirts and elastic-waisted pants. They had spent their time bettering themselves.

  The men faced the house; his wife surveyed the street from her chair and so saw him first. He noted in her shoulders the moment she realized he bore bad news. Perhaps he lost focus or maybe he willed it; the bike’s front tire slipped from the sidewalk into the grass and could not regain its tread. The handlebars hit concrete with a clatter that made the brothers turn around. Under his pants his scraped leg smarted.

  A rattle of paper—a Burger King bag stuck to his shoe. He shook it off and told them what had happened.

  “I can’t make quota now. I needed that one.”

  His wife’s face did not collapse. Her voice carried only the exhaustion it usually did. “They’ll—” and that was all she said. Come for the house, was the rest of her statement. He heard anyway, the words coalescing in the air in puffs of icy mist.

  They’ll come for the house.

  There was nothing between security and precarity. You lived in one and then you lived in the other. The wet soft body of a newly molted cicada takes only a moment to dry in the sun. He watched her harden toward their new future at the same time he felt it in himself. What will I do, what will I do, he had wondered, pedaling home. Now he thought, there is no depth to which I would not plunge the knife.

  “Terrible, the multiple emotional valences occupied by the idea of home,” said one of the brothers. They had ju
st passed through the portal from prison back into the world; some strange ideas were bound to slip in with them. They all turned their heads at the same moment to look at the walls of the duplex. He loved it the way you must love a home, without volition, as a proxy for all the larger secret structures in which you were housed. It kept them dry, it withstood tornadoes. In the salon next door a disco ball whirled.

  His wife glanced down at her own breasts, contemplating herself as an object. No, it was out of the question. The daughters could not yet cut their own hotdogs, much less overpower an adult woman.

  His wife’s name was Lousi. Merclaire felt frequently on the verge of becoming irrelevant to her. Nightly her mind went off on trajectories whose endpoints remained undisclosed. She liked him to tuck in the girls while she cleaned the kitchen. Then she’d stand with her hands submerged in soapy water. After two stories and a lullaby he would join her, reach from behind her to slip a spoon into the sink and pull his hand back with a hiss. The water on his fingertips was so hot it felt like his skin had melted and slid off. Like the suds sloshed against raw nerve. Lousi turned her head a little toward him, hands still submerged, face tranquil—“Sorry, did you say something?”

  The brothers conferred. The taller brother detached himself from the porch railing. Flecks of white paint stuck to his forearm.

  “We have a proposal. If you are willing.”

  He looked delicately concerned. Lousi’s eyes narrowed.

  The brother continued, “We have a personal connection. An enterprising young lady. She works as a surrogate.”

  Lousi had a particular noise of exasperation reserved for her relations. “Not another—”

  “I have the utmost faith in her practices.”