by Neil Clarke
He looked dumbstruck. She pushed past him and out the door. She was striding away across the gravel parking lot when he called after her, “Avery! You can’t leave.”
She wheeled around. “Can’t I? Just watch me.”
He left the bus and followed her. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t care,” she said.
“I won’t do it again.”
“Who’s talking, you or him?”
A light went on in the RV next to them. She realized they were making a late-night scene like trailer-park trash, attracting attention. This wasn’t an argument they could have in public. And now that she was out here, she realized she had no place to go. So she shooed Lionel back toward the bus.
Once inside, she said, “This is the thing, Lionel. This whole situation is creeping me out. You can’t make any promises as long as he’s in charge. Maybe next time he’ll want to see what it feels like to kill me in my sleep, and you won’t be able to stop him.”
Lionel looked disturbed. “He won’t do that.”
“How do you know?”
“I just . . . do.”
“That’s not good enough. I need to see him.”
Avery wasn’t sure why she had blurted it out, except that living with an invisible, ever-present passenger had become intolerable. As long as she didn’t know what the door in the back of the bus concealed, she couldn’t be at ease.
He shook his head. “That won’t help.”
She crossed her arms and said, “I can’t stay unless I know what he is.”
Lionel’s face took on an introspective look, as if he were consulting his conscience. At last he said, “You’d have to promise not to tell anyone.”
Avery hadn’t really expected him to consent, and now felt a nervous tremor. She dropped her pack on the bed and gripped her hands into fists. “All right.”
He led the way to the back of the bus and eased the door open as if fearing to disturb the occupant within. She followed him in. The small room was dimly lit and there was an earthy smell. All the crates he had brought in must have been folded up and put away, because none were visible. There was an unmade bed, and beside it a clear box like an aquarium tank, holding something she could not quite make out. When Lionel turned on a light, she saw what the tank contained.
It looked most like a coral or sponge—a yellowish, rounded growth the size of half a beach ball, resting on a bed of wood chips and dead leaves. Lionel picked up a spray bottle and misted it tenderly. It responded by expanding as if breathing.
“That’s Mr. Burbage?” Avery whispered.
Lionel nodded. “Part of him. The most important part.”
The alien seemed insignificant, something she could destroy with a bottle of bleach. “Can he move?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” Lionel said. “Not the way we do.”
She waited for him to explain. At first he seemed reluctant, but he finally said, “They are colonies of cells with a complicated life cycle. This is the final stage of their development, when they become most complex and organized. After this, they dissolve into the earth. The cells don’t die; they go on to form other coalitions. But the individual is lost. Just like us, I suppose.”
What she was feeling, she realized, was disappointment. In spite of all Lionel had told her, she had hoped there would be some way of communicating. Before, she had not truly believed that the alien could be insentient. Now she did. In fact, she found it hard to believe that it could think at all.
“How do you know he’s intelligent?” she asked. “He could be just a heap of chemicals, like a loaf of bread rising.”
“How do you know I’m intelligent?” he said, staring at the tank. “Or anyone?”
“You react to me. You communicate. He can’t.”
“Yes, he can.”
“How? If I touched him—“
“No!” Lionel said quickly. “Don’t touch him. You’d see, he would react. It wouldn’t be malice, just a reflex.”
“Then how do you . . . ?”
Reluctantly, Lionel said, “He has to touch you. It’s the only way to exchange neurotransmitters.” He paused, as if debating something internally. She watched the conflict play across his face. At last, reluctantly, he said, “I think he would be willing to communicate with you.”
It was what she had wanted, some reassurance of the alien’s intentions. But now it was offered, her instincts were unwilling. “No thanks,” she said.
Lionel looked relieved. She realized he hadn’t wanted to give up his unique relationship with Mr. Burbage.
“Thanks anyway,” she said, for the generosity of the offer he hadn’t wanted to make.
And yet, it left her unsure. She had only Lionel’s word that the alien was friendly. After tonight, that wasn’t enough.
Neither of them could sleep, so as soon as day came they set out again. Heading west, Avery knew they were going deeper and deeper into isolationist territory, where even human strangers were unwelcome, never mind aliens. This was the land where she had grown up, and she knew it well. From here, the world outside looked like a violent, threatening place full of impoverished hordes who envied and hated the good life in America. Here, even the churches preached self-satisfaction, and discontent was the fault of those who hated freedom—like college professors, homosexuals, and immigrants.
Growing up, she had expected to spend her life in this country. She had done everything right—married just out of high school, worked as a waitress, gotten pregnant at 19. Her life had been mapped out in front of her.
She couldn’t even imagine it now.
This morning, Lionel seemed to want to talk. He sat beside her in the co-pilot seat, watching the road and answering her questions.
“What does it feel like, when he communicates with you?”
He reflected. “It feels like a mood, or a hunch. Or I act on impulse.”
“How do you know it’s him, and not your own subconscious?”
“I don’t. It doesn’t matter.”
Avery shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to go through life acting on hunches.”
“Why not?”
“Your unconscious . . . it’s unreliable. You can’t control it. It can lead you wrong.”
“That’s absurd,” he said. “It’s not some outside entity; it’s you. It’s your conscious mind that’s the slave master, always worrying about control. Your unconscious only wants to preserve you.”
“Not if there’s an alien messing around with it.”
“He’s not like that. This drive to dominate—that’s a conscious thing. He doesn’t have that slave master part of the brain.”
“Do you know that for a fact, or are you just guessing?”
“Guessing is what your unconscious tells you. Knowing is a conscious thing. They’re only in conflict if your mind is fighting itself.”
“Sounds like the human condition to me,” Avery said. This had to be the weirdest conversation in her life.
“Is he here now?” she asked.
“Of course he is.”
“Don’t you ever want to get away from him?”
Puzzled, he said, “Why should I?”
“Privacy. To be by yourself.”
“I don’t want to be by myself.”
Something in his voice told her he was thinking ahead, to the death of his lifelong companion. Abruptly, he rose and walked back into the bus.
Actually, she had lied to him. She had gone through life acting on hunches. Go with your gut had been her motto, because she had trusted her gut. But of course it had nothing to do with gut, or heart—it was her unconscious mind she had been following. Her unconscious was why she took this road rather than that, or preferred Raisin Bran to Corn Flakes. It was why she found certain tunes achingly beautiful, and why she was fond of this stra
nge young man, against all rational evidence.
As the road led them nearer to southern Illinois, Avery found memories surfacing. They came with a tug of regret, like a choking rope pulling her back toward the person she hadn’t become. She thought of the cascade of non-decisions that had led her to become the rootless, disconnected person she was, as much a stranger to the human race as Lionel was, in her way.
What good has consciousness ever done me? she thought. It only made her aware that she could never truly connect with another human being, deep down. And on that day when her cells would dissolve into the soil, there would be no trace her consciousness had ever existed.
That night they camped at a freeway rest stop a day’s drive from St. Louis. Lionel was moody and anxious. Avery’s attempt to interest him in a trashy novel was fruitless. At last she asked what was wrong. Fighting to find the words, he said, “He’s very ill. This trip was a bad idea. All the stimulation has made him worse.”
Tentatively, she said, “Should we head for one of the domes?”
Lionel shook his head. “They can’t cure this . . . this addiction to consciousness. If they could, I don’t think he’d take it.”
“Do the others—his own people—know what’s wrong with him?”
Lionel nodded wordlessly.
She didn’t know what comfort to offer. “Well,” she said at last, “it was his choice to come.”
“A selfish choice,” Lionel said angrily.
She couldn’t help noticing that he was speaking for himself, Lionel, as distinct from Mr. Burbage. Thoughtfully, she said, “Maybe they can’t love us as much as we can love them.”
He looked at her as if the word “love” had never entered his vocabulary. “Don’t say us,” he said. “I’m not one of you.”
She didn’t believe it for a second, but she just said, “Suit yourself,” and turned back to her novel. After a few moments, he went into the back of the bus and closed the door.
She lay there trying to read for a while, but the story couldn’t hold her attention. She kept listening for some sound from beyond the door, some indication of how they were doing. At last she got up quietly and went to listen. Hearing nothing, she tried the door and found it unlocked. Softly, she cracked it open to look inside.
Lionel was not asleep. He was lying on the bed, his head next to the alien’s tank. But the alien was no longer in the tank; it was on the pillow. It had extruded a mass of long, cordlike tentacles that gripped Lionel’s head in a medusa embrace, snaking into every opening. One had entered an ear, another a nostril. A third had nudged aside an eyeball in order to enter the eye socket. Fluid coursed along the translucent vessels connecting man and creature.
Avery wavered on the edge of horror. Her first instinct was to intervene, to defend Lionel from what looked like an attack. But the expression on his face was not of terror, but peace. All his vague references to exchanging neurotransmitters came back to her now: this was what he had meant. The alien communicated by drinking cerebrospinal fluid, its drug of choice, and injecting its own.
Shaken, she eased the door shut again. Unable to get the image out of her mind, she went outside to walk around the bus to calm her nerves. After three circuits she leaned back against the cold metal, wishing she had a cigarette for the first time in years. Above her, the stars were cold and bright. What was this relationship she had landed in the middle of—predator and prey? father and son? pusher and addict? master and slave? Or some strange combination of all? Had she just witnessed an alien learning about love?
She had been saving a bottle of bourbon for special occasions, so she went in to pour herself a shot.
To her surprise, Lionel emerged before she was quite drunk. She thought of offering him a glass, but wasn’t sure how it would mix with whatever was already in his brain.
He sat down across from her, but just stared silently at the floor for a long time. At last he stirred and said, “I think we ought to take him to a private place.”
“What sort of private place?” Avery asked.
“Somewhere dignified. Natural. Secluded.”
To die, she realized. The alien wanted to die in private. Or Lionel wanted him to. There was no telling where one left off and the other began.
“I know a place,” she said. “Will he make it another day?”
Lionel nodded silently.
Through the bourbon haze, Avery wondered what she ought to say to Henry. Was the country in danger? She didn’t think so. This seemed like a personal matter. To be sure, she said, “You’re certain his relatives won’t blame us if he dies?”
“Blame?” he said.
That was conscious-talk, she realized. “React when he doesn’t come back?”
“If they were going to react, they would have done it when he left. They aren’t expecting anything, not even his return. They don’t live in an imaginary future like you people do.”
“Wise of them,” she said.
“Yes.”
They rolled into St. Louis in late afternoon, across the Poplar Street Bridge next to the Arch and off onto I-70 toward the north part of town. Avery knew exactly where she was going. From the first moment Frank had told her the destination was St. Louis, she had known she would end up driving this way, toward the place where she had left the first part of her life.
Bellefontaine Cemetery lay on what had been the outskirts of the city in Victorian times, several hundred acres of greenery behind a stone wall and a wrought-iron gate. It was a relic from a time when cemeteries were landscaped, parklike sanctuaries from the city. Huge old oak and sweetgum trees lined the winding roadways, their branches now black against the sky. Avery drove slowly past the marble mausoleums and toward the hill at the back of the cemetery, which looked out over the valley toward the Missouri River. It was everything Lionel had wanted—peaceful, natural, secluded.
Some light rain misted down out of the overcast sky. Avery parked the bus and went out to check whether they were alone. She had seen no one but a single dog-walker near the entrance, and no vehicle had followed them in. The gates would close in half an hour, and the bus would have to be out. Henry and his friends were probably waiting outside the gate for them to appear again. She returned to the bus and knocked on Lionel’s door. He opened it right away. Inside, the large picnic cooler they had bought was standing open, ready.
“Help me lift him in,” Lionel said.
Avery maneuvered past the cooler to the tank. “Is it okay for me to touch him?”
“Hold your hand close to him for a few seconds.”
Avery did as instructed. A translucent tentacle extruded from the cauliflower folds of the alien’s body. It touched her palm, recoiled, then extended again. Gently, hesitantly, it explored her hand, tickling slightly as it probed her palm and curled around her pinkie. She held perfectly still.
“What is he thinking?” she whispered.
“He’s learning your chemical identity,” Lionel said.
“How can he learn without being aware? Can he even remember?”
“Of course he can remember. Your immune system learns and remembers just about every pathogen it ever met, and it’s not aware. Can you remember them all?”
She shook her head, stymied.
At last, apparently satisfied, the tendril retracted into the alien’s body.
“All right,” Lionel said, “now you can touch him.”
The alien was surprisingly heavy. Together, they lifted him onto the bed of dirt and wood chips Lionel had spread in the bottom of the cooler. Lionel fitted the lid on loosely, and each of them took a handle to carry their load out into the open air. Avery led the way around a mausoleum shaped like a Greek temple to an unmowed spot hidden from the path. Sycamore leaves and bark littered the ground, damp from the rain.
“Is this okay?” she asked.
For answer, Lionel
set down his end of the cooler and straightened, breathing in the forest smell. “This is okay.”
“I have to move the bus. Stay behind this building in case anyone comes by. I’ll be back.”
The gatekeeper waved as she pulled the bus out onto the street. By the time she had parked it on a nearby residential street and returned, the gate was closed. She walked around the cemetery perimeter to an unfrequented side, then scrambled up the wall and over the spiked fence.
Inside, the traffic noise of the city fell away. The trees arched overhead in churchlike silence. Not a squirrel stirred. Avery sat down on a tombstone to wait. Beyond the hill, Lionel was holding vigil at the side of his dying companion, and she wanted to give him privacy. The stillness felt good, but unfamiliar. Her life was made of motion. She had been driving for twenty years—driving away, driving beyond, always a new destination. Never back.
The daylight would soon be gone. She needed to do the other thing she had come here for. Raising the hood of her raincoat, she headed downhill, the grass caressing her sneakers wetly. It was years since she had visited the grave of her daughter Gabrielle, whose short life and death were like a chasm dividing her life into before and after. They had called it crib death then—an unexplained, random, purposeless death. “Nothing you could have done,” the doctor had said, thinking that was more comforting than knowing that the universe just didn’t give a damn.
Gabrielle’s grave lay in a grove of cedar trees—the plot a gift from a sympathetic patron at the café where Avery had worked. At first she had thought of turning it down because the little grave would be overshadowed by more ostentatious death; but the suburban cemeteries had looked so industrial, monuments stamped out by machine. She had come to love the age and seclusion of this spot. At first, she had visited over and over.
As she approached in the fading light, she saw that something was lying on the headstone. When she came close she saw that some stranger had placed on the grave a little terra-cotta angel with one wing broken. Avery stood staring at the bedraggled figurine, now soaked with rain, a gift to her daughter from someone she didn’t even know. Then, a sudden, unexpected wave of grief doubled her over. It had been twenty years since she had touched her daughter, but the memory was still vivid and tactile. She remembered the smell, the softness of her skin, the utter trust in her eyes. She felt again the aching hole of her absence.