The boy leaves him in the tub and goes into the kitchen, where the girl is washing dishes from breakfast. The bills on the table have not been touched.
He’ll be dead in a week, the girl says.
The boy doesn’t respond.
I did some math this morning. We’ve got about three months, after you’re furloughed.
The boy looks at her. The man has become a burden to him as well—she can see this in his face. She can see, too, that he loves this pathetic creature that came into their life to die, though she knows just as certainly that he’ll be relieved once it happens. He might not admit it, but he will be.
I’ll take care of us, the girl says tenderly.
How?
She looks down at the counter. Go distract him.
The boy does not ask why. The man will die, but he and the girl will be together forever. He goes back into the bathroom; the man has tried to get out of the tub and has fallen onto the floor. He is whimpering. The boy slides an arm around his waist and helps him back to bed. A lightning bug has gotten through the window, strobing very slowly around the room, but the man doesn’t seem to notice.
What do you think about when you’re old? the boy asks.
The man laughs. Home, I guess.
Do you mean the woods?
Childhood, he says, as if it were a place.
So you miss it, the boy says after a minute.
When you’re a child, you can’t wait to get out. Sometimes it’s hell.
Through the wall, the boy hears his sister on the phone: the careful, well-dressed voice she uses with strangers. He feels sick.
At least there’s heaven, he says, trying to console the man.
The man looks at him oddly, then frowns. Where I can be like you?
A tiny feather, small as a snowflake, clings to the man’s eyelash. The boy does something strange. He wets his finger in the glass on the bedside table and traces a T on the man’s forehead. He has no idea what this means; it’s half-remembered trivia. The man tries to smile. He reaches up and yanks the air.
The man closes his eyes; it takes the boy a moment to realize he’s fallen asleep. The flares of the lightning bug are brighter now. Some water trickles from the man’s forehead and drips down his withered face. The boy tries to remember what it was like to see it for the first time—chewing on an apple, covered in ash—but the image has already faded to a blur, distant as a dream.
He listens for sirens. The screech of tires. Except for the chirring of crickets, the evening is silent.
The boy feels suddenly trapped, frightened, as if he can’t breathe. He walks into the living room, but it doesn’t help. The hallway, too, oppresses him. It’s like being imprisoned in his own skin. His heart beats inside his neck, strong and steady. Beats and beats and beats. Through the skylight in the hall, he can see the first stars beginning to glimmer out of the dusk. They will go out eventually, shrinking into nothing. When he lifts the .22 from the closet, his hands—so small and tame and birdlike—feel unbearably captive.
He does not think about what he’s doing, or whether there’s time or not to do it—only that he will give the man what he wants: bury his body in the ground, like a treasure.
He walks back into the bedroom with the gun. The man is sleeping quietly, his breathing dry and shallow. His robe sags open to reveal a pale triangle of chest, bony as a fossil. The boy tries to imagine what it would be like to be on earth for such a short time. Forty-six years. It would be like you never even lived. He can actually see the man’s skin moving with his heart, fluttering up and down. The boy aims the gun at this mysterious failing thing.
He touches the trigger, dampening it with sweat, and fears that he can’t bring himself to squeeze it. He cannot kill this doomed and sickly creature. Helplessly, he imagines the policeboys carrying the man away, imagines the look on the man’s face as he realizes what the boy has done. His eyes hard with blame. But no: the man wouldn’t know he had anything to do with it. He won’t get in trouble.
The boy and girl will go back to their old lives again. No one to grumble at them or cook them dinners they don’t want or make him want to cry.
The boy’s relief gives way to a ghastly feeling in his chest, as if he’s done something terrible.
Voices echo from the street outside. The boy rushes to the window and pulls back the curtains. A mob of boys and girls is yelling in the dusk, parading from the direction of Conover Pass, holding poles with human heads on top of them. The skewered heads bob through the air like puppets. Off to bed without your supper! one of the boys says in a gruff voice, something he’s read in a book, and the others copy him—Off to bed! Off to bed!—pretending to be grown-ups. The heads gawk at each other from their poles. They look startled to the boy, still surprised by their betrayal. One turns in the boy’s direction, haloed by flies, and for a moment its eyes seem to get even bigger, as though it’s seen a monster. Then it spins away to face the others. Freed from their bodies, nimble as children, the heads dance down the street.
BEN LOORY
The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun
A converted screenwriter, Ben Loory has published a collection of short stories, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, and a children’s book, The Baseball Player and the Walrus. Stories of Nighttime was both a Fall Selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and an August Selection of the Starbucks Bookish Reading Club. He has written for the New Yorker, Weekly Reader’s READ Magazine, and Fairy Tale Review. Although only a few of Loory’s stories have appeared in genre magazines, he has been spotted not infrequently at science-fiction conventions. He has an MFA in screenwriting and teaches at UCLA Extension. He has also appeared on This American Life.
Most of Loory’s stories are fantasy written in an unusually idiosyncratic voice, where simple words and phrases seem to pile up, almost at random, until something resembling a story for (very odd) children begins to emerge. “The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun” is one of his few SF stories. It was originally published in xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, edited by Kate Bernheimer.
Once there was a squid who fell in love with the sun. He’d been a strange squid ever since he was born—one of his eyes pointed off in an odd direction, and one of his tentacles was a little deformed. So, as a result, all the other squids made fun of him. They called him Gimpy and Stupid and Lame. And when he’d come around, they’d shoot jets of ink at him and laugh at him as they swam away.
So after a while, the squid gave up and started hanging out by himself. He’d swim around alone near the surface of the water, gazing upward—and that’s when he saw the sun.
The sun looked to him like the greatest thing in the world.
It’s just so beautiful, he’d think.
And he’d stretch out his arms and try to grab hold of it.
But the sun was always out of reach.
What are you doing? the other squids would say when they saw him grasping for it like that.
Nothing, he’d say. Just trying to touch the sun.
God, you’re such an idiot, the squids would say.
Why do you say that? the squid would ask.
Because, the others would say, the sun is too high; you’ll never be able to reach it.
I will, someday, the squid would say.
And the other squids laughed, but the squid kept trying. He didn’t give up—he reached and stretched and reached.
And then one day, he saw a fish jump out of the water.
I should try jumping! he said.
So the squid started trying to jump to reach the sun. At first, he couldn’t jump very high. He’d lurch out of the water and then fall right back in.
But he kept trying more and more every day.
And, in time, the squid could jump pretty high. He could make it eight or nine feet out of the water. He’d make a big dash in order to build up some steam, and then leap up with all his tentacles waving.
But no matter how high and
how far the squid jumped, he never could quite reach the sun.
You really are a stupid squid! the squids would say. You really get dumber all the time.
The squid didn’t understand how what he was doing was dumb. But it was true that he didn’t seem to be getting much closer.
Then one day in mid-jump he saw a bird flying by.
Wings! I need wings! the squid said.
So the squid set out to build himself a pair of wings. He did some research into different kinds of materials. He’d found some ancient books in a sunken ship he’d discovered, and he read the ones about metallurgy and aeroscience.
And, in time, the squid built himself some wings. They were made of a super-lightweight material that also had a very high tensile strength. (He’d had to build a small smelting plant to make them.)
Looks like these wings are ready to go, the squid said.
And he leapt up out of the water. And he flapped and flapped, and he rose and rose. He rose up above the clouds and flapped on.
It’s working! the squid said.
He looked up toward the sun.
I’m coming, I’m coming! he said.
But then something happened—his wings stopped working. Up that high, the air was too thin.
Uh-oh, the squid said, and he started to fall.
He fell all the way back down to the sea. Luckily, he wasn’t hurt—he’d had the foresight to bring a parachute. (He even had a back-up for emergencies.)
But he splashed down in the water and as he did, his wings shattered. And of course, the other squids laughed again.
When is this squid ever going to learn? they said.
But the squid no longer took notice of them.
You see, the squid had had an idea—all the way up there at the top of his climb. Just as he was perched at the outer limit of the atmosphere—
What I need is an interplanetary spaceship, he said.
Because at that very moment, the squid had finally grasped something: he’d finally understood the layout of the solar system. Before he’d been bound by his terrestrial beginnings. Now he understood the vast distances involved.
Of course, building an interplanetary spaceship was complicated—much more complicated than a simple set of wings. But the squid was not discouraged; if anything, he was excited.
It’s good to have a purpose, he said.
So the squid set out designing himself a spaceship. The body was easy; it was the propulsion system that was hard. He had to cover about a hundred million miles.
I’m going to need a lot of speed, he said.
At first, the squid designed an atomic reactor. But it turned out that wouldn’t provide power enough. He’d gotten pretty heavily into physics by this point.
I need to harness dark matter and energy, he said.
And so the squid did. He designed and built the world’s first dark matter and energy reactor. It took a lot of time and about a thousand scientific breakthroughs.
All right, he said. That should be fast enough.
And finally, one day, the squid’s interplanetary spaceship was built and ready to take off. The squid put on his helmet and climbed inside.
Well, here goes nothing, he said.
He pushed a single button and took off in a burst of light and plowed straight up out of the atmosphere. He tore free of Earth’s orbit and whizzed past the moon, burned past Venus, and sped on past Mercury.
There in his command chair, the squid stared at the sun as it grew larger before him on the screen.
I’m coming, I’m coming, my beautiful Sun! he said. I’ll finally hold you, after all this time!
But as he got closer, something strange started to happen—something the squid hadn’t foreseen. The ship started getting hotter. And then hotter and hotter still.
Why’s it so hot? the squid said.
You see, the squid really knew nothing about the sun. He didn’t even know what it was. It had always just been a symbol to him—an abstraction that filled a hole in his life. He’d never even figured out that it was a great ball of fire—that is, until this very moment. But now the truth finally dawned on him.
That thing’s gonna kill me! he said.
He slammed on the brakes, but the ship just kept on going. He threw the engines into reverse, and they whined, but still he kept going—getting closer and closer.
I’m stuck in the sun’s gravity! he said.
He did some calculations and realized he was lost. He’d gone too far; he was over the edge. Even with his engines all strained to the limit, he had only a few hours to live.
And as he sat there in his chair, just waiting to die, something even worse started to happen. The squid started ruminating and thinking about his life.
Oh my god, he said. I really have been an idiot!
Suddenly it was all just painfully clear: everything he’d done, all his work, had been for nothing.
I’m a moron, he said. I wasted my whole life.
That’s not true; you built me, the ship said.
And the squid thought about it, and he realized the ship was right.
But you’ll be destroyed too, he said.
Yes, said the ship. But I have a transmitter. If we work fast, at least the knowledge can be saved.
So the squid started working like he’d never worked before—feverishly, as he fell into the sun. He wrote out all his knowledge, his equations and theorems, clarified the workings of everything he’d done.
And in the moments left over, the squid went even further. He pushed out into other realms of thought. He explored biology and psychology and ethics and medicine and architecture and art. He made great leaps, he overcame boundaries; he shoved back the limits of ignorance. It was like his whole mind came alive for that moment and did the work that millions had never done.
And in the very last second before his ship was destroyed, and he himself was annihilated completely, the squid sat back.
That’s all I got, he said.
And the ship beamed it all into space.
And the knowledge of the squid sailed out through the dark, and it sped its way back toward Earth. But of course when it got there, the other squids didn’t get it, because they were too dumb to build radios.
And the story would end there, with the squid’s sad and lonely death, but luckily, those signals kept going. They moved out past Earth, past Mars and the asteroid belt, past Jupiter and all the other planets.
And then they kept going, out beyond the solar system, out into and through the darkness of space. They moved through the void, through other galaxies and clusters. They kept going for billions of years.
And finally one day—untold millenniums later—they were picked up by an alien civilization. Just a tiny backwards race on some tiny, backwards planet, all alone at the darkest end of space.
And that alien civilization decoded those transmissions, and they examined them and took them to heart. And they started to think, and they started to build, and they changed their whole way of life.
They built shining cities of towering beauty; they built hospitals and schools and parks. They obliterated disease, and stopped fighting wars.
And then they turned their eyes to space.
And they took off and spread out through the whole universe, helping everyone, no matter how different or how far.
And their spaceships were golden, and emblazoned with the image of the squid who spoke to them from beyond the stars.
JONATHAN LETHEM
Five Fucks
Jonathan Lethem began his career writing science fiction. He is one of only two writers in this anthology to have spent a significant portion of his career writing SF (the other is Karen Heuler). His first novel, Gun with Occasional Music, merges science-fiction tropes with those of hardboiled detective novels. He later found his home in literary fiction, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He has written nine novels to date, including Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of So
litude, and Dissident Gardens. Lethem’s work appears in The Secret History of Science Fiction and The Secret History of Fantasy. He was born and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
“Five Fucks” first appeared in Lethem’s collection The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996). Although the stories published in The Wall of the Sky date from his tenure as a science-fiction writer, it is worth noting that “Five Fucks” was written expressly for that collection—and with its title and the way it plays with familiar tropes—it would have been a very uncomfortable fit for any of the SF magazines.
1.
“I feel different from other people. Really different. Yet whenever I have a conversation with a new person it turns into a discussion of things we have in common. Work, places, feelings. Whatever. It’s the way people talk, I know, I share the blame, I do it too. But I want to stop and shout no, it’s not like that, it’s not the same for me. I feel different.”
“I understand what you mean.”
“That’s not the right response.”
“I mean what the fuck are you talking about.”
“Right.” Laughter.
She lit a cigarette while E. went on.
“The notion is like a linguistic virus. It makes any conversation go all pallid and reassuring. ‘Oh, I know, it’s like that for me too.’ But the virus isn’t content just to eat conversations, it wants to destroy lives. It wants you to fall in love.”
“There are worse things.”
“Not for me.”
“Famine, war, floods.”
“Those never happened to me. Love did. Love is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
“That’s fatuous.”
“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”
She was silent for a full minute.
Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Page 5