And then he leads me to his flying saucer, which is pretty big but not as big as I imagined, not as big as all of Wal-Mart, certainly, maybe just the pharmacy and housewares departments put together. It’s parked out in the empty field back of my trailer where they kept saying they’d put in a miniature golf course and they never did and you don’t even see the saucer till you’re right up against it, it blends in with the night, and you’d think if they can make this machine, they could get him a better suit. Then he says, “You are safe with me, Edna Bradshaw daughter of Joseph R. Bradshaw and granddaughter of William D. Bradshaw.”
It later turns out these family things are important where he’s from but I say to him, “William D. is dead, I only have his favorite fountain pen in a drawer somewhere, it’s very beautiful, it’s gold and it looks like that Chrysler Building in New York, and you should forget about Joseph R. for the time being because I’m afraid you and my daddy aren’t going to hit it off real well and I just as soon not think about that till I have to.”
Then Desi smiles at me and it’s because of all those words, and especially me talking so blunt about my daddy, and I guess also about my taking time to tell him about the beautiful fountain pen my granddaddy left for me, but there’s reasons I talk like this, I guess, and Desi says he came to like me from hearing me talk.
Listen to me even now. I’m trying to tell this story of Desi and me and I can’t help myself going on about every little thing. But the reasons are always the same, and it’s true I’m lonely again. And it’s true I’m scared again because I’ve been a fool.
Desi took me off in his spaceship and we went out past the moon and I barely had time to turn around and look back and I wanted to try to figure out where Bovary was but I hadn’t even found the U.S.A. when everything got blurry and before you know it we were way out in the middle of nowhere, out in space, and I couldn’t see the sun or the moon or anything close up, except all the stars were very bright, and I’m not sure whether we were moving or not because there was nothing close enough by to tell, but I think we were parked, like this was the spaceman’s version of the dead-end road to the rock quarry, where I kissed my first boy. I turned to Desi and he turned to me and I should’ve been scared but I wasn’t. Desi’s little suckers were kissing away at my hand and then we were kissing on the lips except he didn’t have any but it didn’t make any difference because his mouth was soft and warm and smelled sweet, like Binaca breath spray, and I wondered if he got that on Earth or if it was something just like Binaca that they have on his planet as well.
Then he took me back to his little room on the spaceship and we sat on things like beanbag chairs and we talked a long time about what life in Bovary is like and what life on his planet is like. Desi is a research scientist, you see. He thinks that the only way for our two peoples to learn about each other is to meet and to talk and so forth. There are others where he lives that think it’s best just to use their machines to listen in and do their research like that, on the sly. There are even a bunch of guys back there who say forget the whole thing, leave them the hell alone. Let everybody stick to their own place. And I told Desi that my daddy would certainly agree with the leave-them-the-hell-alone guys from his planet, but I agreed with him.
It was all very interesting and very nice, but I was starting to get a little sad. Finally I said to Desi, “So is this thing we’re doing here like research? You asked me out as part of a scientific study? I was called by the Gallup Poll people once and I don’t remember what it was about but I answered ‘none of the above’ and ‘other’ to every question.”
For all the honesty Desi said he admired in me, I sure know it wasn’t anything to do with my answers to a Gallup Poll that was bothering me, but there I was, bogged down talking about all of that, and that’s a land of dishonesty, it seems to me now.
But he knew what I was worried about. “No, Edna,” he says. “There are many on my planet who would be critical of me. They would say this is why we should have no contact at all with your world. Things like this might happen.”
He pauses right there and as far as I know he doesn’t have anything to translate and I swallow hard at the knot in my throat and I say, “Things like what?”
Then both his hands take both my hands and when you’ve got sixteen cute little suckers going at you, it’s hard to make any real tough self-denying kind of decisions and that’s when I end up with a bona fide spaceman lover. And enough said, as we like to end touchy conversations around the hairdressing parlor, except I will tell you that he was bald all over and it’s true what they say about bald men.
Then he takes me to the place where he picked the flower. A moon of some planet or other and there’s only these flowers growing as far as the eye can see in all directions and there are clouds in the sky and they are the color of Eddie’s turds after a can of Nine Lives Crab and Tuna, which just goes to show that even in some far place in another solar system you can’t have everything. But maybe Desi likes those clouds and maybe I’d see it that way too sometime, except I may not have that chance now, though I could’ve, it’s my own damn fault, and if I’ve been sounding a little bit hit-and-miss and here-and-there in the way I’ve been telling all this, it’s now you find out why.
Desi and I stand in that field of flowers for a long while, his little suckers going up and down my arm and all over my throat and chest, too, because I can tell you that a spaceman does too appreciate a woman who has some flesh on her, especially in the right places, but he also appreciates a woman who will speak her mind. And I was standing there wondering if I should tell him about those clouds or if I should just keep my eyes on the flowers and my mouth shut. Then he says, “Edna, it is time to go.”
So he takes my hand and we go back into his spaceship and he’s real quiet all of the sudden and so am I because I know the night is coming to an end. Then before you know it, there’s Earth right in front of me and it’s looking, even out there, pretty good, pretty much like where I should be, like my own flower box and my own propane tank and my own front Dutch door look when I drive home at night from work.
Then we are in the field behind the house and it seems awful early in the evening for as much as we’ve done, and later on I discover it’s like two weeks later and Desi had some other spaceman come and feed Eddie while we were gone, though he should have told me because I might’ve been in trouble at the hairdressing salon, except they believed me pretty quick when I said a spaceman had taken me off, because that’s what they’d sort of come around to thinking themselves after my being gone without a trace for two weeks and they wanted me to tell the newspaper about it because I might get some money for it, though I’m not into anything for the money, though my daddy says it’s only American to make money any way you can, but I m not that American, it seems to me, especially if my daddy is right about what American is, which I suspect he’s not.
What I’m trying to say is that Desi stopped in this other field with me, this planet-Earth field with plowed-up ground and witchgrass all around and the smell of early summer in Alabama, which is pretty nice, and the sound of cicadas sawing away in the trees and something like a kind of hum out on the horizon, a nighttime sound I listen to once in a while and it makes me feel like a train whistle in the distance makes me feel, which I also listen for, especially when I’m lying awake with my insomnia and Eddie is sleeping near me, and that hum out there in the distance is all the wide world going about its business and that’s good but it makes me glad I’m in my little trailer in Bovary, Alabama, and I’ll know every face I see on the street the next morning.
And in the middle of a field full of all that, what was I to say when Desi took my hand and asked me to go away with him? He said, “I have to return to my home planet now and after that go off to other worlds. I am being transferred and I will not be back here. But Edna, we feel love on my planet just like you do here. That is why I know it is right that we learn to speak to each other, your people and mine. And in conclu
sion, I love you, Edna Bradshaw. I want you to come away with me and be with me forever.”
How many chances do you have to be happy? I didn’t even want to go to Mobile, though I wasn’t asked, that’s true enough, and I wouldn’t have been happy there anyway. So that doesn’t count as a blown chance. But this one was different. How could I love a spaceman? How could I be happy in a distant galaxy? These were questions that I had to answer right away, out in the smell of an Alabama summer with my cat waiting for me, though I’m sure he could’ve gone with us, that wasn’t the issue, and with my daddy living just on the other side of town, though, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t miss him much, the good Lord forgive me for that sentiment, and I did love my spaceman, I knew that, and I still do, I love his wiggly hairless shy courteous smart-as-a-whip self. But there’s only so many new things a person can take in at once and I’d about reached my limit on that night.
So I heard myself say, “I love you too, Desi. But I can’t leave the planet Earth. I can’t even leave Bovary.”
That’s about all I could say. And Desi didn’t put up a fuss about it, didn’t try to talk me out of it, though now I wish to God he’d tried, at least tried, and maybe he could’ve done it, cause I could hear myself saying these words like it wasn’t me speaking, like I was standing off a ways just listening in. But my spaceman was shy from the first time I saw him. And I guess he just didn’t have it in him to argue with me, once he felt I’d rejected him.
That’s the way the girls at the hairdressing salon see it.
I guess they’re right. I guess they’re right, too, about telling the newspaper my story. Maybe some other spaceman would read it, somebody from Desi’s planet, and maybe Desi’s been talking about me and maybe he’ll hear about how miserable I am now and maybe I can find him or he can find me.
Because I am miserable. I haven’t even gone near my daddy for a few months now. I look around at the people in the streets of Bovary and I get real angry at them, for some reason. Still, I stay right where I am. I guess now it’s because it’s the only place he could ever find me, if he wanted to. I go out into the field back of my trailer at night and I walk all around it, over and over, each night, I walk around and around under the stars because a spaceship only comes in the night and you can’t even see it until you get right up next to it.
KATHERINE DUNN
Near-Flesh
Katherine Dunn is best known for her novel Geek Love, a National Book Award finalist, and the novels Attic and Truck. She is considered one of the best journalists on boxing in America today, and she received the Dorothea Lange– Paul Taylor Award for her work School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America’s Toughest Boxing Gyms. Dunn’s essays on boxing are collected in One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing. Her long-awaited fourth novel, The Cut Man, has yet to be released, but a part of it appears in the Paris Review under the title “Rhonda Discovers Art.” Dunn currently teaches creative writing at Pacific University in Oregon.
First published in the collection The Ultimate Frankenstein, “Near-Flesh” examines the alienation that may come with the advent of robots and cheap labor.
Early on the morning of her forty-second birthday, Thelma Vole stood naked in the closet where her four MALE robots hung, and debated which one to pack for her trip to the Bureau conference. Boss Vole, as she was known in the office, had a knot of dull anger in her jaw and it rippled with her thoughts. She hated business trips. She hated hotels. She hated the youngsters who were her peers in the Bureau ratings though they were many years her junior. She hated having to go to a meeting on the weekend of her birthday.
In her present mood it might be best to take the Wimp along. She reached into the folds of the robot’s deflated crotch and pinched the reinforced tubing that became an erect penis when the Wimp was switched on and operational. She picked up one of the dangling legs, stretched the calf across her lower teeth and bit down deliberately. The anger in her jaw clamped on the Near-Flesh. If the Wimp had been activated, the force of her bite would have produced red tooth marks and a convincing blue bruise that disappeared only after she shut him down.
Thelma had treated herself to the Wimp on an earlier birthday, her thirty-sixth, to be specific. The inflated Wimp was a thin, meek-faced, and very young man, the least impressive of Thelma’s MALEs to look at. But he was designed for Extreme Sadism, far beyond anything Thelma did, even in her worst whiskey tempers. She had saved the Wimp’s purchase price several times over in repair bills. And his Groveling program and Pleading tracks gave her unique pleasure.
Still, she didn’t want to celebrate her birthday in the frame of mind that required the Wimp. It was Thelma’s custom to save up her libidinous energy before a birthday and then engage in unusual indulgences with her robots. While these Bureau meetings happened twice and sometimes three times a year, it was the first time she could remember having to travel on her birthday.
She always took one of her MALES along on these trips, usually Lips or Bluto. She was too fastidious to rent one of the robots provided in hotels. Hygiene concerned her, but she also worried about what might happen with a robot that had not been programmed to her own specifications. There were terrible stories, rumors mostly, probably all lies, but still . . .
Thelma rearranged the Wimp on his hook, and reached up to rub her forearm across the mouth of the robot on the adjacent hook. Lips, her first robot. She had saved for two years to buy him seventeen years ago. He was old now, outmoded and sadly primitive compared to the newer models. He had no variety. His voice tracks were monotonous and repetitive. Even his body was relatively crude. The toes were merely drawn, and his non-powered penis was just a solid rod of plastic like an antique dildo. Lips’ attraction, of course, was his Vibrator mouth. His limbs moved stiffly, but his mouth was incredibly tender and voracious. She felt sentimental about Lips. She felt safe with him. She brought him out when she felt vulnerable and weepy.
Bluto was the Muscle MALE, a sophisticated instrument that could swoop her up and carry her to the shower or the bed or the kitchen table and make her feel (within carefully programmed limits) quite small and helpless. Thelma never dared to use the full range of his power.
Bluto was the frequently damaged and expensively repaired reason that Thelma had to purchase the Wimp. Something about the Muscle robot made her want to deactivate him and then stick sharp objects into his vital machinery. Bluto scared Thelma just enough to be fun. She always made sure she could reach his off switch. She even bought the remote control bulb to keep in her teeth while he was operational. His Tough-Talk software kept the fantasy alive. His rough voice muttering, “c’mere, slut,” could usually trigger some excitement even when she was tense and tired from work. Still there were times when she had to admit to herself that he was actually about as dangerous as a sofa.
She rubbed luxuriously against the smooth folds of Bluto’s deflated form where it hung against the wall. She didn’t look at the body on the fourth hook. She didn’t glance at the corner where the console sat on the floor with its charging cord plugged into the power outlet.
The console was the size and shape of a human head and shoulders. A green light glowed behind the mesh at the top. She knew the Brain was watching her, wanting her to flip his activation switch. She deliberately slid her broad rump up and down against the Bluto MALE. The corner of her eye registered a faint waver in the intensity of the green light. She looked directly at the Brain. The green light began to blink on and off rapidly.
Thelma turned her back on the Brain, sauntered out to the full-length mirror and stood looking at herself, seeing the green reflection of the Brain’s light from the open closet. She stretched her heavy body, stroking her breasts and flanks. The green light continued to blink.
“I think, just for once, I won’t take any of these on this trip.” The green light went out for the space of two heartbeats. Thelma nearly smiled at herself in the mirror. The green flashing resumed at a greater speed. “Yes,�
�� Thelma announced coyly to her mirror, “it’s time I tried something new. I haven’t shopped for new styles in ages. There have probably been all sorts of developments since I looked at a catalogue. I’ll just rent a couple of late models from the hotel and have a little novelty for my birthday.” The green light in the closet became very bright for an instant and then went out. It appeared again steady, dim, no longer flashing.
When Thelma finished encasing her bulges in the severe business clothes that buttressed her image as a hard-nosed Bureau manager, she strode into the closet and flipped a switch at the base of the Brain console. The screen glowed with varied colors, moving in rhythmic sheets. The male voice said, “Be sure to take some antiseptic lubricant along.” The tone was gently sarcastic.
Thelma chuckled, “I’ll take an antibiotic and I won’t sit on the toilets.”
“You know you’d rather have me with you.” The console’s voice was clear, unemotional. A thin band of red pulsed across the screen.
“Variety is good for me. I tend to get into ruts.” Coquetting felt odd in her business suit, grating. She was usually naked when she talked to the Brain. “It’s too bad,” she murmured spitefully, “that I have to leave you plugged in. It’s such a waste of power while I’m away. . . .” She watched the waves of color slow to a cautious blip on the screen. “Well, I’ll be back in three days. . . .” She reached for the switch.
“Happy Birthday,” said the console as its colors faded into the dim green.
Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Page 39