After the sighting, he rushed to his parents, who gathered some of the leaders who’d emerged, and they held a meeting.
Clive Waltham, who was in charge and resisting democracy “just until all this mess blows over,” now stood behind the podium in the theater to address the entire community. “We’ve heard that we’re not alone. We have intelligence that there are others among us, possibly those who are responsible for our destruction, in order to take over.”
He then introduced Elliot Pegg and the boy walked quickly to the podium, pulling the mic down close to his mouth. He wore braces and I wondered, absurdly, if there was an orthodontist among us. Would the boy spend the rest of his life in braces?
“I was watching the monitors,” the boy said, “because I like to, in case you were wondering. And I saw a strange creature on the monitor located near 35.169 latitude and 136.906 longitude.”
The crowd was silent. Did this kid see the world in latitude and longitude? He read our bewildered expressions and added, “At Sunshine Sakae in Japan. A mall,” he added. “With a Ferris wheel.”
This made a little more sense—a boy, sunshine, a mall, a Ferris wheel. The room was relieved but still all were still silent.
“I’m going to show the footage now, but I think that they’re here to see what the place looks like—without us. You know, like a head of hair without the lice.”
Elliot didn’t seem to realize that he’d called us lice. He just started fiddling with the remote to start up the tape. Clive, however, walked up quickly and covered the microphone. He thanked Elliot, though it was a bit muffled, and excused him.
Elliot headed offstage, but not without looking back over his shoulder first and waving to his parents, as if he’d just successfully recited JFK’s “Don’t ask what your country can do for you…” speech.
Then he disappeared behind the curtain.
The video footage was crisp and clear. The person who’d blown it up had enhanced the film enough that it wasn’t grainy.
They looked human, at first. They loped down the aisles of the Sunshine Sakae, a mix of races and ethnicities; their arms swung at their sides and their very human eyes darted and drifted and lingered.
But when they stopped, their bodies shivered. When they reached for something from a shelf—food items in cans that I didn’t recognize—their arms reached out as fast as frog tongues catching flies. In fact, the gestures seemed over before they began.
And then I felt alone, more alone than I ever had in my life. The room was filled with people, all those respirators purring along, and Oliver was beside me, standing so close that I could feel the pressure of his suit against mine, bubble to bubble.
But the thought had crossed my mind that this would happen again—this moment of me watching this foreign species at the Sunshine Sakae—and it would keep happening. However, this one singular moment was the only one I knew of. I was trapped to have only it, to be conscious of only it.
And this was my life, rising up—net-empty.
I was the sole person having this thought in this room.
And when I died, as I knew I would—the final bit of lice eradicated, maybe, while the one last nit was roiling in the pregnant woman’s belly inside her maternity contamination suit—I would be within a memory and I would be aware of the present. And existing in the combined center of that Venn diagram, I would be absolutely alone.
* * *
Elliot Pegg’s work was no longer so solitary and desperate. A whole team of people kept constant watch now and they couldn’t look at any livestream without eventually seeing one of the foreign species, if they had even a bit of whale-watching patience. They were sometimes solitary, more often in groups. They seemed to know each other and be able to read each other’s actions, moving quietly and yet constantly around each other. They were tireless and seemingly efficient, though we didn’t know their overall goal.
We had decisions to make.
Some believed we should venture out to greet them.
Others said we should prepare our riot gear and tap our armory.
There were rumors of secret groups forming different coalitions.
* * *
One night, I couldn’t sleep. I sat on the edge of the bed. Oliver was curled away from me. We’d started sleeping in our suits again, like when we’d first arrived.
I said, “There was this woman in college, Elli Truth Bartok—and we assumed the middle name was one she’d made up. She tried to start a humane treatment of insects movement to make sure all the insects we used in the lab were euthanized painlessly, like cricket dissections in introductory bio classes. She wanted us to use inhaled anesthetics. Basically, fog in a terrarium.”
This was the kind of weird extremism that Oliver would usually enjoy making fun of, but he didn’t chime in.
“Like the DDT trucks that kids used to run after in the 1950s before people figured out it was all pretty deadly.” I’d seen pictures in magazines and old newsreels. It struck me as odd that these things were lodged in my mind—probably Oliver’s, too—but how did they get there?
Oliver didn’t say anything. I assumed he was asleep but I liked hearing my voice, the company of it, so I kept talking. “What if the species euthanized as many of us as they could? As sweetly as possible because something awful and painful is coming?” I kept going, “What if they’re like kids with nets collecting butterflies…”
In my mind’s eye, I saw the species as children now—and realized there were never children in the groups we spotted on film. I imagined them running through beautiful wheat-swaying fields. “Why have they been so gentle? Why did they allow the dying their eternal returns?”
I felt my mind wandering toward a rocky cliff, but I kept going. “What if the butterflies aren’t our bodies, but our minds? Our consciousness?”
I envisioned a corkboard. Instead of butterflies pinned to it, there were small wisps—gray, diaphanous, and fluttering lightly; it was a child’s bedroom and a nearby window was open. “What if they don’t care about our bodies but are keeping our souls?”
“Did Elli Truth Bartok believe that insects had souls?” His voice startled me, not only because I thought he’d been asleep but because he seemed earnest. He seemed to want to know that someone—even a stranger who was most likely dead—had once believed in the souls of insects.
I lay down next to him, my face mask pressed against the back of his suit. “I never asked her.”
* * *
At dinner one night, we heard that three people were missing. They’d gone out in order to make contact. They’d been gone for a while and others had covered for them. (This was an enormous breach. There would be repercussions for those who’d covered for them.)
But what was important was that they’d been sending messages back and the messages had stopped.
* * *
I found myself stripping off my suit. I got in the shower. I wanted the water to needle my skin. I wanted to know that every inch of my body was alive.
Oliver didn’t come in to watch or join me. I assumed he was just trying to process the new information. I certainly was.
But when I stepped out of the bathroom, I found him sitting on the edge of the bed. His contamination suit was baggier than ever. His helmet was still locked into place.
And I recognized the look on his face—beautiful, distracted, wide-eyed contentedness.
I touched his mask with my fingers.
His head snapped up. “What?” he asked, as if nothing were wrong. But his voice was just a little too loud, his eyes just a bit pinched, as if he were concentrating very hard to remain here with me in this room.
“How long has it been going on?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Just a few hours. Those fuckers broke the seal on their way out. I’m sure of it. The virus is probably just riding on the wind now and it made its way in. All the way in.”
My fingers tingled. My neck felt flush with blood. But I wasn’t afraid. “What’s your
eternal return?” I asked.
He smiled. “I’m in the yard with my dog, Chipper. I can hear my older brother practicing the trumpet through the open windows. He was really good.” He looked at me through the three-layer face shield. “Did I ever tell you that he toured in Europe with a jazz band when he was only nineteen? He gave it up to go into finance.” His brother had died of the virus very early on. I could see that Oliver was crying, his face contorted with a mix of joy and loss. “He was so fucking good. Jesus.”
I reached up and put my hand under the double storm flap that protected the gas-tight zipper closure that ran down his back. He turned quickly and grabbed my naked wrist with his gloved hand. “No.”
“Who knew how tender the apocalypse would be?” I said.
“Please don’t.”
“I’m condemned to my freedom,” I said. “And this is a moment I’d like to return to eternally.”
And—hello, you, reader, other—what did I do?
I undressed him.
About the Author
Julianna Baggott is the author of over twenty books, under her own name and pen names, most notably New York Times Notable Books of the Year Pure, from the Pure Trilogy, and Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column and Book Review section, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Best American Poetry, and NPR’s Here and Now, All Things Considered, and Talk of the Nation. She teaches screenwriting at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts and holds the Jenks Chair of Contemporary American Letters at The College of the Holy Cross. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Julianna Baggott
Art copyright © 2017 by Ashley Mackenzie
Mental Diplopia Page 2