After shutting the back door, you called my name. I tried to answer, but I still couldn’t manage to make any sound.
I heard you pick up the phone, no doubt checking for messages. The phone hadn’t rung all day. I was thankful for that bit of silence.
You swore and slammed the phone down. You turned on the TV and set the volume high. I braced myself for the pain, but I was adapting well – too well – to my condition. There was no discernible increase in my pain level.
I heard you wander through the apartment, shuffling papers, opening doors. You returned to the living room and plunked yourself down on the couch. Over the sounds of a car advertisement, I could hear you sniffle and sob. Already, I missed you so much.
* * *
You watched TV all evening, not bothering to eat. At 1:04 in the morning, you finally turned off the TV and walked into the bedroom. You looked miserable. You stared at me. In a tearful whine, you said, “Where are you?”
Desperate, I tried to channel all my strength, all my energy into screaming that I was right there, but I still failed. Couldn’t you see me? It’s not like I was dead. If I were, there’d be a corpse, a body.
And that’s when I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
I craned my neck to look down at myself, at where I felt my body squeezed into immobility by the blankets, and…and there was nothing there.
* * *
I stayed awake that whole night.
You fell asleep on your stomach, without taking your clothes off. You didn’t move all night, but you snored – of course, you snored. Your left arm fell across me and crushed my chest – the part of me that still felt like a chest – until you woke up at 10:42 the next morning.
It was only after your arm had been separating my upper self from my lower for several hours that I noticed that I was no longer breathing. When I thought about it, I was pretty sure that I hadn’t breathed since I’d woken up in this condition.
Whatever that was.
I listed the symptoms: I was invisible, even to myself; I didn’t get hungry; I didn’t need to pee or shit; I didn’t get tired, but I felt a constant, numbing weakness; my senses were too acute for comfort; I wasn’t breathing; blankets were too heavy for me to lift.
Like a list was going to explain everything, or anything.
And where was my body? How could I feel so much physical pain if I didn’t have a body?
* * *
You rolled on your back, away from me. I felt my rib cage pop back up. Did I still have a rib cage? I looked at where I felt my body to be, and there still wasn’t even the slightest hint of a shape. Was I even in there with you? Or was that sensation an illusion of some kind?
I told you, silently, that I was sorry for everything, for being so distant, for so often only pretending to listen to you, for so often having some stupid thing to do when all you wanted was to enjoy spending time with me – and in the middle of my futile apology George sat on my face.
* * *
You called in sick for the next two days. Minutes crawled by like weeks, sleepless days and nights like lifetimes.
You called my office and a few of my friends, but I could tell from your voice the emotional price you were paying for doing this. You gave that up quickly.
Couldn’t you see that all my clothes were still there? My keys by the bed? Couldn’t you feel that I was still there, longing for you?
Your orbit consisted of the bed, the fridge, the couch, and the toilet. The centre of your universe was the TV.
You stopped calling in sick. You just stayed home. When the phone rang, you ignored it.
* * *
A week later, your sister used her spare key to come in when you failed to respond to the doorbell. At first she was furious, yelling at you to snap out of it. Eventually, you broke down and started crying. That mollified her.
You told her that I’d vanished on you with no warning. She said she was surprised at that; she’d always thought of me as good for you.
You were an odd combination of fragile and tough, and I’d fallen in love with the intensity that accompanied that mix. You needed undivided attention to feel loved. You didn’t give your trust easily, but, once you did, you trusted without question. Being with you was a heady experience that left little time or energy for anything else. I indulged like an addict: your intensity was a powerful narcotic. You had tended to attract lovers who abused your fragility, who took pleasure in shattering someone so strong who could nevertheless be so easily broken. Your sister had liked that I made you laugh, had seen how it thrilled me to have you permeate my whole world.
Eventually, life outside our bubble intruded. Friends, work, whatever. And I drifted away. I let you suffer, even though I knew you were suffering; I let my growing indifference chip away at you. And, like a coward, instead of talking to you and trying to mend the rift, I just ignored it. I ignored you.
Sex with you was so beautiful, such a complete escape, sad and hard, silly and serious, in all the best ways. How could I let anything get in the way of that? Of being close to you?
I’ve never wanted to comfort you as much as when I heard you tell your sister how much you’d been hurt by my disappearance. But I’d started to disappear much earlier than you were telling her, and I hated myself for that. For betraying you. For betraying myself.
* * *
Do you remember when, the week before we moved in together, you stopped by my office and took me out to lunch? Warming your hands on my cup of tea, a fleck of something green stuck between your teeth, you asked me what I needed, and we bonded because of our common goal: your happiness. When did that stop being important?
* * *
Your sister couldn’t see me either. She cleaned the bathroom. After she put you in a hot bath, she turned off the TV and put on the radio instead. Classical. Worse: opera. Then, she attacked the embarrassing mess of our apartment. I’d like to say that most of it was due to your recent binge, but our place was always a disaster area.
And then she changed the bed.
The weakness disappeared when the weight of the blankets was lifted off me.
And, just like that, I was free. I was free! I danced and leapt and twirled and ran and –
And then I caught the words ‘missing’ and ‘disappeared’ on the radio news report.
There was, all around the world, an alarming increase in missing-person reports. The prime minister of Canada. The CEO of Toshiba. The US ambassador to the UN. The populations of whole villages in Africa. Hundreds of Afghan women. And so on. From the most disenfranchised to the most powerful, people everywhere were vanishing.
The news that I probably was not the only victim of this peculiar condition did not reassure me, but rather filled me with overwhelming dread. I walked into the bathroom, needing the security of your presence, and sat on the edge of the tub. You had no reaction when I reached out and stroked your face. Was I that insubstantial?
I could no longer take comfort in the slight plumpness of your cheek. To my touch, your flesh was as hard and unyielding as concrete.
* * *
When your sister left the apartment, I took advantage of the open door – all physical objects now being immovable, impassable obstacles – and left with her. I didn’t follow her. I had been cooped up inside for so long. I needed the open air. I wandered and mulled over what I had heard on the news. I was already so used to the pain from the sensory overload that it was no longer even a distracting irritant.
Were all the vanished in the same situation I was? If I met another vanished person, would we see each other?
Outside I discovered that rain, even the mildest precipitation, knocked the strange substance of my nearly insubstantial body to the ground, raindrops hammering into me like nails. Yet, for all that I had some, if almost negligible, physical presence, I cast no shadow. I was truly invisibl
e.
There were fewer and fewer people about every day. Obviously, we vanished could not perceive each other. What people were left acquired a haunted or persecuted look. They knew that their time would soon come.
Less than a week after I escaped from the apartment, civil order broke down. Vandalized and overturned police cars burned on street corners. All the stores I passed had their windows broken, their stock looted or destroyed.
The city grew quiet, as traffic dwindled away and industry stopped dead.
The silence was occasionally punctuated by bursts of gunshots and quickly silenced screams. Those sounds filled me with more dread than my inexplicable vanishing ever did. I was always careful to walk away from such noises and never discovered exactly what was happening.
Dogs wailed and wandered everywhere, searching for their vanished human companions, scavenging through garbage for food.
I saw stray cats hunt some of the smaller wildlife that was reclaiming the city. They gave the bears a wide berth, though. Often, I thought I saw George, but the cat was always gone before I could be sure.
During that time, I returned to the apartment only once. The door had been torn off. Everything had been trashed. A raccoon family was living in our bedroom. By then you must have vanished, like me. I wanted to find you, hold you. But you were beyond my reach.
* * *
I was following a bear around, excited by what would have been in normal circumstances suicidal behaviour, when a giant shadow fell over me. I looked up. Swift grey clouds covered the afternoon sky. Scraps of old newspapers were being blown every which way. There was so much wind – wild, chaotic wind. Before I could think to take cover, I was hit on all sides – by a ragged shirt, a torn magazine, a broken beer bottle, cigarette butts, gum wrappers. I was jabbed and crushed and flattened and stabbed and twisted. It hadn’t hurt this much since that first morning.
The storm erupted; the sharp, heavy rain felled me, knifed through my prone body.
* * *
The storm ended; the clouds parted and revealed the moonlit sky, glittering with stars. I lay on the ground, recovering from the storm, and gazed at the sky. There were more stars visible than before: when people had vanished, so had the city lights that had made the nighttime too bright for starlight.
I stayed like that until dawn, and then someone stepped on me.
I looked around; the streets were filled with people. Naked as newborns, they walked calmly but with a sense of purpose, murmuring softly to each other, casually touching each other, sharing complicit glances.
I recognized a few faces – no-one I knew well, but people I’d seen in shops or cafés.
Still wobbly, I stood up. Was this ordeal finally over? Was I back, too? A quick test – trying in vain to see my hands or any part of my body – told me I wasn’t. I tried to call out to the people around me, but I was still mute.
What about you? Could you have returned? I ran to our apartment.
* * *
When I neared home, I saw them. They were also heading there: hand in hand, smiling and laughing, so obviously deeply in love with each other.
It was you and me. More beautiful, more in love, more confident, more at peace than we’d ever been. Serene.
But it wasn’t you, was it? No more than it was me. You must still be vanished like me. Neither dead nor alive. And so it must be for everyone.
Do you, like me, spend your time watching our doppelgangers? Are you frustrated at being unable to understand their language? Are you jealous at how much better they are at being us – at loving each other – than we ever were? At how much even George seems happier with them? Are you envious that all these new people have made the world a better place?
I want to end my life, but I don’t think I can. I’ve tried jumping off roofs, but all I get out of it is more pain – never death.
Are you here with me, my love?
I long to die with you.
To be really dead. Together. Forever oblivious.
Water Scorpions
Rich Larson
“This is you,” Noel says to his new brother, holding up a writhing water scorpion by its tail. Spindly legs churn and its pincers clack, but the tail is stingerless. It is thin and stiff and hollow like a straw, so the water scorpion can breathe through it when it clings to the rusty iron bar around the inside of the pool.
Danny rocks forward on his haunches and watches through his cluster of gleaming black eyes. His body is all slippery spars and gray angles. Noel hopes he sees the resemblance to the creature dangling between his fingers.
“This is you,” Danny mimics, a warbling echo that doesn’t require movement from his needle-lined jaws, coming instead from the porous bulb underneath them.
Noel stands up from the pool’s blue-tiled lip, keeping the water scorpion pinched between thumb and finger. He doesn’t have to tell Danny to follow. Danny always follows, even when Noel stamps his feet and screams at him to go away.
He leads his brother along the concrete deck, slapping wet footprints. Danny’s feet clop instead of slapping, like when their mother wears high heels. Now she sits barefoot in a dilapidated beach chair, wearing the stretchy black one-piece that hides her scar. Her eyes are on a work screen full of lab notes, but she sets down her stylus and waves and smiles when Noel and Danny pass by.
Noel lowers the water scorpion into the pocket of his trunks to shield it from view, still gripping the tail. It squirms and rasps against the fabric.
Nobody else looks up from their loungers. Nobody stares at Danny here, not even the cooks anymore. The private pool on the edge of Faya-Largeau, only hours from the Saharan crash site, was bought out by the UN specifically for its team of scientists, translators, engineers – all of them now used to seeing aliens.
Noel and Danny pass under a stucco arch, and the concrete becomes the courtyard’s chipped mosaic tile, hot on Noel’s feet. He does not know if it is hot on Danny’s feet; Danny never jerks away from scalding sand or half-buried thorns. Not even when Noel has him walk over a spread of prickly goatheads.
Pungent eucalyptus overtakes the smell of chlorine and greasy samosas. The silvery-gray trees line a long open-air entryway. Noel leads Danny all the way to the end, into the red dust of the parking lot where the pool sounds of splashing and satellite radio and voices are muted. Danny’s neck pops and swivels toward the family car where it gleams hot white in the sunlight.
“Look at this, Danny,” Noel says, lifting the water scorpion from his pocket. “Watch this.”
“Watch this,” comes the wavery echo. He crouches obediently as Noel drops the creature into the warm sand. It makes a skittering circle, claws waving, then tries to dart away. Noel meets it with a wave of sand kicked up by the blade of his hand. The water scorpion flails and shies off, scuttles in the other direction. Noel tosses another fistful of sand.
Danny keeps watching, stone still, as Noel pours scoop after scoop of sand onto the panicking scorpion, sucking the moisture from the cracks in its keratin, battering down on its carapace, until the creature turns sluggish and can only slowly kick its legs in place.
“That’s like you, if Mom didn’t bring you to the pool all the time,” Noel says softly. “You’d cook. You’d get all dried up and die, and after a while she’d forget you ever existed. Just like she forgot Maya.”
Danny looks up at him with all of his black beetle eyes. Danny never blinks. He never smiles and never cries. He doesn’t understand, not a single thing.
Noel covers the water scorpion over, heaping a burial mound. With his eyes on his work, he whispers, “I hate you.”
“I hate you,” Danny trills softly back.
* * *
The stork ship came down on the day Noel’s sister died. He was sitting in the waiting room, watching red balloons in animated smartpaint drift across the peeling green walls, remindin
g him his tenth birthday wasn’t far away, when the news feed sliced onto every screen in the hospital. A crumbling castle of pitted alloy and crystalline spars, falling from the sky. When the ship crash landed in the Sahara, an ocean away, an orderly gasped and bit the skin between her thumb and finger.
Noel understood it was something his xenobiologist mother would need to know about, something as important as the baby in her belly, so when she came from the examination room with her shoulders shaking, he rushed to show her the screen. She watched the crash calmly, nodded to herself as if it made perfect sense. Her eyes were shot through with pink.
Later, on the metro, she explained in her doctor voice that Maya’s umbilical cord had shrunk too thin, and she’d starved, but they would still have to go back to the hospital the next day for induced labor.
“If she died, then how can you give birth to her?” Noel asked, feeling a wave of confusion, a panic aching his throat.
His mother wept then, a raw rusty sound that made other people watch her in the subway windows. Noel buried his face in the crook of her arm. The woman in front of them played the news feed at full volume on her tab, about the UN seeking to assemble a response party, to drown out the noise.
* * *
Back poolside, their mother has migrated back under the gazebo, rolling up her work screen. Noel and Danny join her in the straw shade for samosas. Iridescent green and purple swirls over Danny’s body, as it always does around their mother. Noel leans back against a rust-flaking pole of the gazebo while Danny hurries to her. She strokes his jaws, an approved contact from the stork instructional transmissions, but can’t resist giving a human squeeze at the end. When she motions the same for Noel he digs back against the pole, feeling it on the nodes of his spine.
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