Not Your Average Monster, Vol. 2: A Menagerie of Vile Beasts

by Pete Kahle

  A stall opened and I went in. When I came out she was leaving. I followed her. Around the edge of the dance floor. Away from it. To the entrance. Through it.

  A heavy mist was falling. Or a light rain. Typical Northwest weather. She had no coat. Not that either of us needed one—it was warm, late April. End of the semester. She stopped walking at the first corner, her face turned up to the damp, dark sky. Red traffic lights and neon blinked. Her neck and sleeveless arms were traced in blue and green again.

  I reached out and lifted a strand of wet hair curled against her collarbone. I couldn’t help it. Even soaked her hair was so pale, almost translucent. Sheer as glass.

  “Come to my place.” I wanted not to beg. “It’s close.”

  Like that was all that mattered. Her eyes widened. They seemed to deepen, too. I took her hand and she let me lead her home.

  We made love. Her clothes seemed to melt away. She was incredibly responsive, which was pretty much all I needed to make me come. I cried aloud, but she stayed oddly silent.

  Afterwards we lay on our sides on my fold-out futon, facing each other. “What’s your name?” A smile. “You’re—you can’t talk?” I didn’t know the civil way to ask. “A mute?” Her head tilted back, sank forward. She was nodding. Like a flower.

  “Oh. That’s—that’s not a problem. Really.”

  She couldn’t write either—at first I wasn’t even sure she could read. It didn’t matter. I showed her my gallery, the shots and stills of him, TJ, which I’d collected from fan sites and pulled off of my aunt’s footage of the concert he gave when he was ten.

  She never told me her name. I made one up that very first morning, and she answered to it.

  “Victoria.” She looked at me. “Here. This is yours.” I gave her my old laptop, a 2007 Dell Inspiron. Showed her where the power was and how to horn in on the downstairs coffee shop’s Wi-Fi and she went surfing.

  Not much social media. I left her alone with the net while I went to my classes and work, checked the cookies when I came home, after a shower. They were always links to images and articles. She was all over Wikipedia and sites like that.

  I came back from the library one day and found her deep in an article about TJ’s comeback concert series. I read over one soft white shoulder. Twenty-four dates had been added in August. This was June.

  “We can’t go.” The hall where the series would be held was in Japan, Tokyo, too many time zones away. She turned the anemone of her face up to me. Her mouth puckered, opened as if to say “Oh,” shut tight again. I had learned to interpret this as a sign of distress. Her fingertips petted the air lying against the laptop’s screen, tracing the latest surgical transformation of his face.

  “I know. But I’m only working part-time, for minimum wage; I don’t have—I can’t—”

  Hands lowering to the keyboard, she clicked on another tab and the sweet opening chords of “Ocean Song” rose from the laptop’s speakers. Framed by a montage of larger-than-life one-celled animals, he sang and wept and supplicated us to save the sea:

  “So much larger than the land;

  “So much deeper than we can understand;

  “So much wiser, so much more;

  “So much richer; without her we’re so poor.

  “Without her we’re nothing; let her live, let her live.

  “Without her we are dying; let us live, let us live.”

  Victoria’s tears trembled in the screen’s glow. That was the only time I’d ever seen her cry.

  “All right. All right.”

  I’d get the money for the flight and the tickets and somewhere to stay, borrow it or something. I knew better than to think Victoria might be able to chip in. She had no money. None. And forget about her finding a job. I understood. Victoria was not like other girls.

  Before the first time she disappeared I had figured that much out. Before the first full moon.

  # # #

  We were so tired of standing up. Terrible this weight. Our amphipods had no way to prepare us. Breathing, yes. For that we were prepared. But walking stabbed us like urchin spines.

  We sat on a bench by the water as it rose up, blue and wanting us. We stumbled to the end of the pier and stepped off.

  We were in before unshaping. We who worked as ears heard shouting when we sank: humans who feared that we would drown.

  We kicked away from the barnacle-covered pilings into our belovely current, loosening ourself from human form to the swirl of us as we are when natural. No feet, no arms, our tentacles drifting and bellyheads pulsing together, in rhythm, together, as the special amphipods of our mother had taught us.

  We swam out to the open. As wide as the ocean. As free. Out to where she awaited us. She had emerged from her immemorial trench to make us, and still she stayed up here, up high for her. Deep for us. We went down to find her. All of us in accord, beating our way through the water like hearts traveling through cold blood.

  As low.

  Oh, languor. Oh, sweet chill. The snow of algae and other foods falling, touching our skins, our skins pressed so tight against the water.

  Humans could say what her name was. We could say we touched her, tasted her, smelled her, heard her.

  What did she look like? Our amphipods have eyes, but saw only short brightnesses, the flash of her green light, her blue light, her green, her blue. She was our home. Where and who and what we came from. How did your mother look to you when you were a child? Rich as molasses the scent we bathed in; delicate as dreams her tendrils and tentacles, curling about our edges. And she asked us… and she told us… and we answered….

  With words the conversation would look like this:

  “Have you found the one up there killing us? The one sending down more plastic. More oil. The sicknesses spread fast—our reefs are rotting, our waters losing their oxygen. Have you found the one?” As if, like the oceans, the airs were all responsible to a single entity.

  “No.” We gave her this reply, in our way. “Not such a one as that. Our enemies are many, too many, and impossible to touch.” Those in charge, we had learned, were powerful abstractions: governments, corporations. “However, we have discovered a friend who can help us.”

  # # #

  She came back. My post about Victoria’s disappearance got lots of comments, most of them linked to reports of a suicide with no body found, but I had never believed she would have killed herself. Didn’t even go to the cops. Not a week afterwards, there she was on the weedy lawn.

  “Hey, where you been?” I had to ask the question, though I knew she’d never answer it out loud.

  We went upstairs. I took the cover off the lamp. Its living light glowed below the front room’s ceiling, fell yellow and orange over my futon. Which Victoria ignored, heading instead for the kitchen with its big table and both our computers. Booted hers up and logged on, sinking into the seat I shoved behind her.

  Had she even missed me? Yes. In a moment her dark glance sought mine. Her so-white fingers clutched my shirtsleeve, tugging me closer to the screen where TJ sang “Ocean Song” once again.

  “I got them. The tickets? I got two. One each.” For me, and for the hope of her return. “Want to see?” I started my computer and printed them out.

  The designer had done a good job, used thin curving lines layered under thinner ones, like shot silk. She brushed the air above the printouts with the same reverence she’d shown TJ’s face. I would have left them on the table, but she brought me my mat knife, insisted I cut them down and put them in my wallet for safekeeping, following me into the front room where my pack hung.

  I covered the lamp so it would sleep. I kissed her plump white hands. Her arms were covered in the finest hairs. I breathed against them, flattening them when I turned one way, raising them the other. Left. Right. Up. Down. Down. Further down.

  I’ve heard that lesbian couples eventually tire of sex with each other, fucking less and less frequently. Females have fewer sex hormones than males is how self-app
ointed experts explain this so-called “bed death.” Well it wasn’t happening here. Maybe because one of us wasn’t really a woman.

  Victoria slipped gracefully to the futon’s sheets. Her clothes vanished. I went from kneeling to all fours to lying on her full length, moving like a manta ray, rippling, fluttering, then, hell, grinding, humping, thrashing through the gasping deeps of orgasm. And after, the pair of us becalmed again, her touch on my skin still tingled, still thrilled me as much as ever.

  After. Ever. Ever after.

  Too happy to sleep, I got up. We’d left the kitchen lights on. My computer’s stand hummed, the fan a quiet promise of actions seamlessly edited together. Letters on the keyboard kicked back the screensaver’s flickering colors in some sort of sequence—a storyline? I sat. I brought my files up, text and stills and clips, opened them, logged on to Sketchit. Wished I’d had a helmet as I reached behind the chair for my earpads. Felt the smile on my face as I sank into my art.

  This was what I could do. This was what could do that would make a difference.

  I finished four films before she left the second time. I waited a whole month. She didn’t come back.

  It was August. I still had our tickets.

  # # #

  At night. Another pier—this one without any watchers. We went in. Unshaping fast as foam and finding her for whom humans have a name. Praya dubia. She whom we do not need to call.

  Her long curtains drew around us. She coiled us tighter and at her core we posed the problem with our plan. In words:

  “Our friend who could help doesn’t stay anywhere more than a little while. The land we’ve been living on is far from the place where we hoped to meet him, on the ocean’s other side. Our host has a way there, in the air. A hard way. We have learned it’s a way we cannot go.” Simpler than saying scanners, passports, proof of identity; simpler, and in effect the same. A hard way, Draya’s. A dry way. Impassable. Impossible.

  We thought for a long moment our mother had no answer. No solution. Then the cool of movement, the swirl of swimming forward. Carrying us, she opened and closed, opened and closed, swallowing and spitting out the water and letting it push her through itself, taking us safe across the salty-tasting sea.

  I went without her. I told myself she would have wanted that. I sold her plane ticket and got half what I had paid, so the trip was cheaper by a couple hundred.

  I arrived at Narita International eight hours before the hall even opened. The train from the airport to took hardly any time to cover thirty miles, and then I was in Tokyo for real and following my cheap shades’ glitchy tracking to Kitanomaru Park. They kept trying to get me on the subway, but if I went below street level I lost their link to the cloud. So I walked.

  In Seattle it was a few minutes after nine at night, but here the lunch crowds had barely begun to recede. My jean jacket held the heat too close to my body. If I took it off, though, I might lose it—and the mother-of-pearl brooch pinned to it that Victoria had made me buy. Instead I got rid of my shirt. My bra was bright red. It could be mistaken for a halter top. I hoped. Buttoning the jacket partway helped, and I stuck my fingertips in my pants pockets and let my elbows jut out to keep people away.

  I reached the park unmolested. Nothing spectacular there: bushes, trees. Foreign fans like me wasting time till we could get into Budokan and sit in our seats and wait some more. Couple of impersonators I watched for a minute, but they’d never be as good as him.

  What made me wander off the path and under the trees’ warm, limp leaves? Did I only want to escape the dull pounding of sunlight on my head?

  Or did I know I’d find her climbing out of the canal?

  Victoria. Fully dressed in white skirt and tank top, white scarves. Just as when I’d first met her—or, wait—no shoes. A ghost? If I touched her would she pop like a bubble? I put out one hand—I was suddenly close enough somehow—and touched her soft skin.

  She was dry.

  Fresh from the water. Not a drop on her. Clothes lifting gently in the breeze.

  But no breeze blew.

  I opened my mouth. Only air came out. I gripped her beautiful bare arm tight, too tight. It had to hurt but I couldn’t let it loose, I couldn’t let her go. No. She had not come back to me but I had found her and I would hold on to her always, have her, hold her, wherever she was, whoever. Whatever.

  Whatever else she was, Victoria was mine.

  She smiled, her lips opening and drawing in. A smile of expectancy. She held out her hand, pale palm up.

  I laughed. Her ticket. Of course I had brought it. To sell, I had told myself. I fished it out and gave it to her. She wrapped a couple of her scarves around it and let them toss behind her in the wind.

  There was no wind.

  We walked back to the path. Her hand settled over mine on her arm and gradually I relaxed. My grim clutch became a firm clasp, then a caress. Before I knew we were going anywhere we reached the Budokan. She led me around to an unguarded back door. It must have been locked, but the nonexistent wind wound Victoria’s scarves around the handle and she pulled. The locked door opened and we went inside.

  I found our seats. Main floor, unobstructed, as guaranteed. Hidden fans stirred the air. This breeze I felt. Cool at last, I wished I hadn’t thrown my shirt away. Wished I’d packed a change of clothes, luggage, something besides my camera, shades, and toothbrush. Wished I had rented a hotel room where Victoria and I could make love after the concert, before our plane.

  My plane.

  # # #

  Better for us than the emptiness of the land’s sky, this dark shell in the bottom of which we now rested beside our host. From the seat cushions we looked up into a space large enough our mother might have swum there. If this had been water, not air.

  Where was our friend? We knew he would come here to sing, to dance. Thousands would see him. How, though, we wondered, would he see us?

  Our host took one who was being a hand to soothe and caress. Above the well-known smell of her sweat we detected something more…the smallest whisper of him! His voice breathed out his scent with his words; he spoke as streaming as the thinnest of currents. As light…

  Ribbons of his essence spilled down from high above our head. In water we would rise to find him, separate to navigate whatever secrets barred our way. But we were here. We stood. Not that much nearer. Walked forward hoping this was the way.

  Draya, our host, came with us. We turned to her, pleading. Surely she would know what to do now.

  # # #

  I had an idea what Victoria was up to. Worth a try. I walked coolly, confidently, to where a tall man in a grey suit emerged out of what was obviously a door backstage. “You wanna let us in?”

  “Decided to start with filming pre-show after all?” He squinted. “You look way better than the picture. I guess you ain’t doin’ your own publicity shots.” We were expected? Not exactly, but somebody like one of us—like me.

  The grey suit leaned back against the door and it chunked open just a crack. “Where’s your camera?”

  Well, I had that. I unfastened my jacket and pulled my Samsung from the inside pocket, flashing more of my bare torso than was really necessary.

  But he leered at Victoria, not me. Whitney Houston lookalikes weren’t his cup of vodka, evidently—despite my bare midriff and sexy lingerie. “What you gonna be doin’ while your girlfriend gets her footage?” he asked her.

  “She can’t talk.”

  “Hunh. Bet we can find a way to communicate without it. Am I right, sweetie?” The door opened wider. Not wide enough for us to pass through without touching him. “My name’s Reggie. Like the comic books.”

  She turned to me. Her eyes, that’s what I miss most. The night we met they took me right inside themselves. A whole new world. That afternoon they were just as wide, and again I felt myself begin to fall.

  But then she turned away from me, towards the opening door. Her hair and scarves and hips slid against Reggie’s face and hands as she p
assed him. He nodded to me to join her. I shook my head. “You first,” I said, and caught the door as he let it swing to shut me out.

  The hallway was floored with old beige linoleum. We went down a flight of stairs, walked past brown doors in white walls. Victoria somehow knew where we were headed; she stayed in front till she stopped at a door like all the rest and we caught up.

  “Been here before, hunh?” Reggie knocked and an even taller man in a red and white jersey let us in.

  A long, low-ceilinged room, lined with mirrors—big, but only a fraction of the size of the actual concert hall upstairs. A tiny stage at the far end, and him on it.

  He wasn’t doing anything but giggling with a bearded man holding a keyboard on his lap, but he had everybody’s attention. He shone. His thin body was the wick and desire the flame. I wanted him as much as I wanted her, and there they were, in the same room. I wanted both of them, each more than the other.

  Reggie introduced us. Me, anyway. My name was supposed to be Pauline Wilson. Of course I’d heard of her work.

  I shook TJ’s hand. I touched his glove. I pulled Victoria forward and told him the name I’d made up for her. Her hand now felt damp, the way it should have been coming out of the canal—all her softness gleamed, wet and glinting oh so faintly blue and green. My dear, sweet monster.

  No one else seemed to notice. Maybe they thought the moisture was some sort of cosmetic? Reggie got her away from me for a minute by dragging her over to a refreshment table.

  “Your girlfriend’s very beautiful, Pauline,” TJ said, and suddenly I felt bad, lying to him like everyone else in his life.

  “Actually, my name is Draya. Draya Hudson. I’m a filmmaker, too—not the one you invited, but—”

  “Draya? Aren’t you—You posted a few shorts to my site, didn’t you?” He had seen them—my silly tributes, remixes of music videos and nature docs and his long-ago appearances on TV game shows. How many stars bothered visiting their fan sites? He smiled over the tops of his shades. “Girl, you got somethin’ good you doin’.”