The Arms of the Sun
-1-
“Just do it!” Valerie screamed. “Don’t stop now, you idiot!” She sprayed spittle in his face. Her blood was on his fingers. Her juices were dried on his withered organ, from when they had made love this morning on the mattress on the basement’s damp floor. During the night, they were too tense to make love.
George held the exacto knife as if it were a pen he was using to write on a leg cast, or a tattooist’s buzzing needle. A hesitant tattoo artist, who had quickly withdrawn when he saw his customer grip the arms of her chair and arch her back in pain. It was not a tattoo he had begun, however, but an incision he had lightly parted open down the front of her chest. She had no blouse on. She smelled of musky, acidic sweat, since neither of them had dared venture upstairs to shower for days. A band of thick blood began inching down her skin, between her rapidly rising/falling breasts. Her wrists were tied to the arms of the old chair with the sleeves torn off one of his old dress shirts.
Her chest, where he had begun to carve it, was flushed red with her sunburn. Though she’d received the burn two weeks ago, it hadn’t turned brown or to freckles or peeled. It was as vivid and hot to the touch as it had been the day after the Fourth of July barbecue at their co-worker Dawn’s house. She had worn a halter top and shorts that day. They’d fought about that before they even left their apartment. Why was she dressing like that if she knew Dawn wasn’t going to be opening the pool because of all the little kids running around? Because it’s fucking scorching out today, she had replied sharply. George had persisted, telling her the shorts were too tight (I can see your camel toe!) and too short (I can practically see the bottom of your cheeks!), finally bringing up his main concern – that their co-worker Raphael would be there, and she knew how much Raphael liked her, and Raphael knew she liked to flirt with him in turn, and she had snapped that he shouldn’t be so immature and jealous, and he had brought up her halter too and that a girl with breasts as big as hers shouldn’t wear a halter and she had said fuck you and what difference does that make and she had stormed out of the apartment without him, leaving him to drink beer in front of the TV all day with the merciful air conditioner blowing on him (let her sweat and swelter, let the Latin lover ogle her) and he hadn’t ventured outside all day except once to pull the mail out of the mail box, which was almost sizzling to the touch, and he had quickly ducked back in out of the crushing heat, though he had lingered just long enough to squint up at the sun with his palm like a visor, seeing how silvery the sun looked, and how spiky its rays as if those spikes were solid protrusions instead of projections of light. There was a thin greenish halo around the sun, besides. Pollution in the air, or just heat haze, distorting its radiance.
The only other time he had gone outdoors was to watch Eastborough’s annual fireworks, launched from the high school football field, as they splashed in crystalline colors across the now black sky, accompanied by crackling/sputtering like automatic fire and bomb-like booms whose delay made him tense up slightly each time in anticipation. It seemed as though stars were going nova in a chain reaction, galaxies being born in one big bang after another only to grow cold and extinct, eons condensed to seconds. Valerie pulled up into the driveway halfway through the show, and stood beside him on the little rickety porch of the two-family home to watch. They didn’t speak. They heard the massed voices of people far away, at the high school, crying out – as if they were being mowed down by the machine guns his imagination conjured. As if a distant war were going on. When they’d spent their colors, the fireworks sizzled, wilting, and as they turned to embers, drifted on the hot air in their direction, drooping like willow branches of ash and fire...resembling dimly phosphorescent, immense jellyfish floating across the sky in purposeful migration.
“Do it, do it, do it!” Valerie shrieked, jolting in her chair as if an electric current passed through her.
His hand shaking, George leaned in again to make a second cut, this one horizontal and meeting the end of the first. He swallowed hard, held his breath, gripped his wrist with his other hand, and – putting pressure on the edge of the blade – drew the scalpel-like knife to the right in one motion. The sound of the slice was barely audible, a half-imagined whisper.
“Fuck!” Valerie sobbed, stomping her feet on the stony floor. “Oh God, oh fuck!”
Valerie was most severely burned on her upper chest. Her shoulders were reddened, shiny balls, her face uniformly pink. There were white strips of skin where the halter straps had been, and her fleshy breasts were pale, soft, vulnerable animals that seemed to quiver – but her upper chest was almost lurid in its color. There was a round pale spot in the very center of the burn, however. One might easily have concluded that Valerie had worn a medallion that day which had shielded, stenciled, the shape. Once she had told George that after a spring break in Florida, having worn a small crucifix throughout her adventures, she had come home with the outline of a cross burned onto her like some kind of stigmata (punishing her for her sins, George had told her, not entirely joking, jealous even if he hadn’t known her at the time). The medallion outline she sported now seemed to be surrounded with wavy spikes, like the arms of one of those starfish with more limbs than just the standard five. But, of course, Valerie hadn’t been wearing a medallion that day. Neither had the other thousands (millions? wondered voices on the radio, faces on TV) of other people – in this country and others – who had been burned so badly on July Fourth...who had woken up on July Fifth to find that same spiky circle emblazoned on their chests.
“Faster! Keep going, damn it! Stop being such a fucking wimp or I’ll have to do it myself!”
Before they’d begun, George had suggested she dull the pain with a few of their last beers. She’d replied a tattoo artist had once told her (she had a thorny, tribal-style black tattoo in the small of her back which her low-slung jeans and midriff-baring t-shirts often showed off, to the delight of Raphael no doubt) that people often made the mistake of downing alcohol prior to an inking, only to end up regurgitating their medicinal elixirs as a result.
He made a third incision: from right corner downward. This time, riding his wave of adrenalin, before he ended up hesitating to the point where he simply couldn’t bring himself to resume at all, he carved a fourth line horizontally – connecting the bottom corners of the two vertical slices. Now, the pale medallion that had appeared overnight on Valerie’s breastbone was outlined in a picture frame of streaming blood. Glittering beads were snaking down her skin, one of these even entering into the space of the medallion shape. For some reason, it alarmed George to see that drop of blood enter within the mysterious stencil, and he quickly smeared the blood away as best he could with the balled remnants of his ripped dress shirt.
“Now dig it out,” Valerie wailed, throwing back her head, tears streaming like her blood. One of those tears had plopped on his knee a moment ago, to join the spittle on him, the blood, her lubrication of mucus. He was being anointed in some way. It was like a religious ritual. A baptism/exorcism, perhaps.
George rose from his stool so as to better pose himself a little above her, above the wound. He adjusted the lamp he had set close to her, the heat of its bare bulb burning his shoulder as if to redden him like her. His skin was, however, as pallid as it always was.
The point of the angled razor blade was slipped under the lip of the upper, horizontal slice. He then drew it sideways, separating the outer layer of skin from the dark wet redness that was somehow contained within all skin, within his own, like the gulfs of space kept outside merely by a thin blue vapor of atmosphere.
“Ohhh God, oh my fucking God...”
It sounded as though Valerie were having an orgasm. Or delivering a baby. And he, the untrained surgeon, pulled down the edge of her wound so that he could drag the blade along once again, shaving more of the square flap of skin away. Blood ran more freely. It trickled over his hand, wound around his wrist. In grabbing up his already blotted and smudged shi
rt to swab at her some more, he accidentally dropped the knife. When he retrieved it, he saw that the delicate tip had broken off. And the blade, sterilized only with little isopropyl alcohol, had touched the gritty floor. He grabbed up the plastic bottle, splashed some more alcohol over the knife, and leaned in again to complete the operation, abbreviated tip or no.
“This will save me...” Valerie was chanting, almost hyperventilating, her frantic state making George ache even though this had been her idea “...they won’t get me now...” she panted, sweat running down her throat, sweat now added to her fluids on him, her straight brunette hair matted with it, plastered to her cheeks in long dark lines like bloodless gashes “...they won’t get me...”
He had opened the flap so much now that it began to curl over itself, like a page being turned. For an abrupt moment he had to spin away, and he hacked, gagged, bent over to vomit but only a long stream of spittle and bile dangled free, so he wiped his arm across his mouth and straightened up again. He tried to get in closer to his flaying. If he saw only the wound – as a surgeon covers the rest of his patient up until it’s an anonymous blob – and not the body it was a part of, not the face of his girlfriend contorted with agony, it might be easier to finish.
The flap of flesh hung almost entirely off, raw crimson underside glistening, a door open entirely on its hinges. Blood flowed down Valerie’s spasming belly, pooled in her navel, soaked the rim of her blue jeans. He had a pair of tweezers. He used them to grip the flap and pull it out taut so that, with his right hand, he could make the last decisive stroke. At the same time, with the tweezers, he pulled harder at the flap...until it came away from her body at last and hung limply, dribbling, and he whirled to fling the flap with the medallion on it into a waiting rusty trash can he had found down here in which he intended to burn that square of skin, skin he might have kissed once, burn it to ash with cleansing fire, purifying flame, but first he had to fall to his knees and this time he was able to vomit, really vomit, while above him Valerie stamped the ground and even gave him a stomping kick on the hip that almost knocked him over as she sobbed, “Ow, you fucker, ow-ow-ow-oh God, oh God, oh-ho-ho God!”
-2-
In the day, they could maybe chance a trip upstairs into their apartment – even outside, if they didn’t stray far – to furtively collect more supplies. At night, however, the Changelings (as they had been dubbed by the media, for lack of a more clinical classification) became much more active...
One time – the last time George had dared remove the bolts and latches he had hastily mounted on the inside of the cellar door, and go upstairs into their apartment during the hours of night – he had peeked around a shade in the darkened living room and seen the road in front of his house seething with black movement, as if filled with huge maggots swarming on a bed of rotting flesh. These had probably once been his neighbors, among them the elderly woman who had rented the apartment above their own in this little house on this little side street just off the center of this town of Eastborough. Their massed voices, if voices they could still be considered, had been deafening. The voices they used at night were like men strangling while they bellowed rhythmic chants, ghosts moaning loudly underwater (the ghosts of the people they had once been). There were almost garbled worlds. Their combined booming voices had made the walls rumble, and had made him want to sob. He had tried not to make noise to alert them as he clawed his way through the murk back to the cellar door in the kitchen.
He didn’t know where they hid or nested during the hours of angry daylight – if this punishing, persisting sunlight harmed them or if they were simply nocturnal – but more than once during the day he had heard loud thumps, a dinner plate or window smashing, strange high chitterings and deep bass croakings, all coming from the second floor. Sounds he could even hear from down in the basement. He thought that must be his former fellow tenant, Mrs. Parker, sheltering during the day, moving about a little in her somnambulant rest. The chitters/croaks were apparently the daytime voices of the Changelings (mumbling in their sleep?). He and Valerie had been careful not to make too much sound down here even during the day – but he was certain the thing upstairs must have heard her screams today. He hoped the Changeling had been too disoriented in its slumber, or that the thing was simply too unintelligent, to direct an attack on their makeshift bomb shelter when night came.
Should he wait and take that risk? Or should he try to avoid it? Act upon it, in advance?
He diverted his thoughts to the issue of food. There was still electricity on this block, though he didn’t know for how long others like himself could maintain it. But he wanted to go upstairs to the fridge as little as possible, so it was better to have canned and packaged food, and though they were okay for the time being this could only last so long. He and Valerie had made one previous trip to the Serves U Rite convenience store around the corner from the end of their street (on foot, so as to be more stealthy), coming back with bags full of groceries and he with a throat raw from puking; there was a body in the store, no doubt someone like himself who had not been burned by the changeling sun but who had been cornered in the nighttime by some of those who had. The body had been charred and half consumed. The Changelings seemed to cook their food in the process of eating it.
During that excursion, he and Valerie had worn hoods made from pillow cases with eye holes, shirts with long sleeves, buttoned to their throats, and winter gloves despite the suffocating heat. Under their hoods they wore sunglasses, and briefly noted that the jagged buzz saw of the sun was still a metallic silver, that it still wore its thin green corona. In Valerie’s case, however, it had seemed all these precautions were a wasted effort. She had already been burned...
He came back to the thought he was trying to sidestep. It reared up to block his path. His former tenant. The second floor. She had to have heard Valerie screaming a few hours ago. Night would fall in a few hours more. What then?
Glancing over to Valerie, he saw she was still passed out on their mattress, which together they had dragged down here; still without a shirt on, big patches of gauze taped over her chest. The gauze was stained, sodden. A small electric fan, resting on the chair she had been lashed to, directed a cool breeze on her like a child blowing kisses; a good-intentioned but insufficient comfort. After the operation she had finally decided that self-medicating with alcohol wasn’t so bad an idea after all, and had drank their last three beers though they were only moderately cool from having been stored in a basement corner.
He began looking around him for weapons. He had done this before, occasionally near panic, on nights when the sounds the Changelings made were close at hand, rattling the small cellar windows behind the boards he’d nailed up, but also on nights when their sounds were far away or absent altogether, which in a way made him more tense sometimes. He’d never spotted much that could be used to defend their caveman’s lair. He had no guns but for an old BB gun, without even a BB to load into it. No axes, no chainsaws (just an old hedge trimmer he wasn’t even sure worked anymore). There was a garden spade with a long handle and a good heavy blade, but other than that his weapons would put him distressingly close to an enemy. Several butcher knives...a hammer...assorted screwdrivers...a tire iron...
He gazed up at the low ceiling of insulation tucked between plumbing, all of it thinly veiled in webs old and new. Spider carcasses, gnarled and brittle, hung from them; the live ones lurked cleverly out of sight. He looked at the ceiling as if he would eventually see through it, through the intervening first floor, into the second floor. Was it even Mrs. Parker up there? Why shouldn’t it be another of the things instead? Why, if they were so thoroughly altered, would they feel an instinct or a desire to rest in the places they had dwelt in while still human?
It didn’t matter if it were Mrs. Parker or not. What mattered was that the creature, the being, the entity or however he might think of it, lived in the same nest he did. But what if he could catch it resting, vulnerable? Assuming he killed it, a
ssuming it could be killed at all, would the others miss it tonight if it didn’t slither down the front staircase, nudge open the door to the porch, squirm out into the blackness to seek its fellows? Would they come looking for it if it didn’t show up?
If it should wake while he was attacking it, might it call out in its alien language to alert the others? Would they come that night, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, all those in Eastborough who had been out in the sun two weeks ago on July Fourth? All those who had already changed, that was to say. People changed at different rates. Some had changed in a mere two or three days. Others still hadn’t changed. And hopefully, never would...especially now that they had skinned away the strange pale brand the sun had marked on Valerie’s breast.
He had to try. If everyone were afraid to try, then they all might as well step out into the night with their arms spread open, like martyrs without a cause, sacrifices. They might just as well give up, right? No...no...people had to try. Surely others were doing so. Fighting. He didn’t have a gun, but he’d heard gunfire; one night there had been numerous thundering shotgun blasts from just two streets over, down by Eastborough Swamp, convincing him that more than one person had joined forces to protect their nest. Whether they had succeeded or not, however...
Should he rid his nest of the creature that shared it? Would it make more sense, instead, to take their car and drive, drive, drive as far away from other people – and hence, concentrations of Changelings – as he could? But he and Valerie knew their street, their town. Its resources. Out in the woods somewhere, up in Maine maybe, they could isolate themselves fairly well. But what about food, then? Electricity, running water? For now, they had these things.
Why not take the chance of killing the thing upstairs? It might just help him understand how intelligent, or unintelligent, the Changelings were, by their reaction or lack of reaction to it. Mrs. Parker’s horrible doppleganger might not be missed at all. Even if they did note her absence, she had been elderly; might her Changeling, then, also be old and ailing? Might they take her disappearance to mean she had passed away naturally? Would they investigate?
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