by Andy Cox
Finally, our largest balloon was ready: a nine-foot tall monster that had taken me two weekends to assemble. We waited for the breezes to calm as they frequently did near sunset, filled the balloon, and then let it go. It wafted noiselessly upward, out of our back yard, over the house, and continued to rise. We’d never done a balloon this large! A wind current we couldn’t feel carried it away, and it occurred to us that a balloon this large might be a hazard. What if it came down on someone’s windshield!
We rushed to the car, but the wind carried the balloon across blocks. By the time we backed out of the driveway, it was already several streets away, and it was difficult to see from the car. We lost it, and all we could hope for is that it came down harmlessly somewhere, or was stuck in a tree. We joked that we had discovered a new way to toilet-paper someone’s house.
The next day, though, the local paper reported a series of UFO sightings. Numerous people reported a large object hovering over the town at sunset. We looked for where the witnesses lived, and they were all east of us. They’d seen our balloon, lit by the setting sun behind it, glowing in an orange light, numinous and stately, and, evidently, otherworldly.
•••
“We don’t believe he’s a flight risk,” said Shelly, the care center’s director, “but we have found him wandering at night a couple of times.”
My sisters and I look at each other around the round table tucked in the corner of Shelly’s office. We’re having a status check meeting. The care center takes notes about the resident’s needs and behaviors, and the family brings any concerns they have. It’s humane and gentle, but it’s hard to think about making decisions for Dad because he can’t make them for himself.
I smiled at the phrase ‘flight risk’. At the pace he walked now, I could spot him thirty minutes and he wouldn’t be out of sight.
I’d talked to him before the meeting. It had been a good morning for him. More connected, although ‘connected’ now meant that he would stay on script longer.
“How are you doing?” he’d say. He rested one hand on top the other, his skin so frail I thought I should be able to see the nerves and veins beneath.
“Just fine, Dad.”
“And your boys?”
“Fine too.”
“Pretty good weather we’ve been having.”
“Yes, I think so too.”
But if I wandered off the script, like asking him about the food, or if he’d made friends at the center, he’d say, “I don’t know. Guess I haven’t thought about it.”
Shelly said, “Last night, he made it to the doors to the Memory Support Center. They’re locked, of course, so he couldn’t have gone in, but he had to pass several people to get there. None of them saw him.” She laughed. Shelly’s a slender woman, dark hair, dressed in a brown pant suit. When we’d met, she’d told me that before she took the job in the center, she’d been a middle school English teacher. We talked shop for a little bit, but like all English teachers, we ended up discussing how time consuming grading was. “I don’t miss that,” she’d said. “The residents don’t write papers.”
“What about the outside doors?” I said. I had a vision of him pushing through them, into the night, wandering down the street.
“Locked and alarmed. A receptionist mans the front desk by the doors twenty-four hours a day. We are very conscious of resident safety.”
I think it’s interesting that none of the employees in the care center call their wards ‘patients’, which is how I think of them. The first day I’d visited the center, I passed a very old woman tucked in a couch. She was almost on her back, her chin pressed to her chest. She said so silently I nearly missed it, “Help me.”
I told an intern, and within seconds three of them were bending over her.
I wondered what was wrong. How long had she been like that, unable to speak loud enough for anyone to hear?
Near the front doors of the center is a beautifully burnished maple dresser. Fresh flowers in a vase grace the top. On either side of the flowers stand a framed photograph of a care center resident. Old, very old, but well-dressed and smiling for the camera. I’d been to the center several times before I realized each was a photograph of the latest person to die. ‘With fondest thoughts, we celebrate Elizabeth Donner’, read the brass plaque on the frame’s bottom. ‘1928–2014’.
I can’t remember seeing the same photograph twice, and there are only ever two portraits. I suppose on a bad day, someone’s memorial might be on the dresser for an hour or two before the next one replaces it.
The care center is a way station, a train platform with nice bedrooms and compassionate attendants. I know the whole circle of life narrative. I’m not denying death, but underneath the friendly wallpaper and shiny dining area furniture and spotless glass I feel the cold fingers waiting to reach out. My dad is here.
“Many of our Alzheimer’s patients are nomadic,” said Shelly. “Sometimes they’ll sleep twenty hours a day, but we don’t know which twenty.”
“Dad never slept through the night,” said one of my sisters.
I thought about Dad at the telescope. Naturally, he wouldn’t sleep at night. There were stars to see.
Someone said, I don’t know who, “Maybe he’s looking for Mom.”
A breath caught in my throat, and I realized I was almost crying.
We talked for another half hour. Since I was in town, I could be more helpful. I would take Dad to his doctor’s appointment the next day instead of one of my sisters.
•••
Dad needed help into the car. I’d been maneuvering him from his room in the care center to the passenger pick up and drop off area for twenty minutes. He paused for a long time at the front doors, as if he didn’t know what to make of the sunlight. I hadn’t been able to get him to use the walker, so I’d gripped his pipe-stem thin arm the whole way.
He fastened the seat belt on the third try. “’39 Ford,” he said. “Great car but it didn’t have a rumble seat.”
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. My mind was on other matters, though. I would take Dad to and from his appointment, then I’d drive home, but I’d forgotten the box with the telescope my sisters left for me. Dad’s house was not on my way home. We’d have time to swing by the house before the appointment, but it would be the first time he’s been home since before Mom died. Most of the furniture was gone. Bookshelves were empty. Would he recognize it?
Fifteen minutes later, we pulled into the old driveway of the house my Mom and Dad spent sixty years of their marriage in. I’d grown up in this house. In a month or two, if our plans went well, it would be sold, and another family would be living there.
I tried not to think of that.
“I need to grab something, Dad. Will you be okay?”
He unbuckled his belt. I had assumed he would stay in the car. That would be easier, but he already opened the door. I rushed around the front of the car to help him.
Inside, he sat on a folding chair that was the only furniture left on the living room’s hardwood floor. The drapes were closed, shrouding the room in twilight. At the care center, when he wasn’t sleeping, he sat. He’d never fallen while sitting, so I knew he would be okay to leave alone.
I went downstairs to get the box.
It didn’t weigh much. Before I turned off the lights in the basement, I looked around. My bedroom had been down here. It looked different without my parents’ photographs on the wall, without the interruption of couch and table. It was unlikely I’d ever see the basement again. Maybe some other little boy or girl would use the bedroom. Maybe they too would stay up late, reading by the closet light. For a second, I thought about leaving the old science fiction magazine. What would someone else’s child think of part three of ‘Glory Road’?
In the background, something buzzed. At first I thought it might be the furnace, but it came from upstairs. It wasn’t the door bell or a telephone, but it was incessant and familiar. I cocked my head to the side to he
ar better as I walked up the stairs.
The sound came from the back of the house upstairs, from the bedrooms. Dad wasn’t in the chair by the door, though. I almost dropped the box as I put it on the floor.
“Dad?”
I went down the hall, glanced in his empty office, checked the bathroom and the guest bedroom. Nothing.
His bedroom was empty too. The buzzing came from the closet and filled the room.
It was Dad’s UFO detector, still in working order after all these years. I moved the magnet off the contacts, cutting off the sound.
Where was Dad?
I double checked the rooms on the way out.
“Dad?”
Out the front door. He wasn’t in the car. I rushed to the street. Looked both ways. The sidewalks were empty.
In the next hour, I called the police. I called my sisters. I drove the blocks, slowly, windows down, looking at porch chairs and front yard swings. How could he get so far? Where could he be?
It’s dusk now. He’s been gone for four hours. I’ve answered a thousand questions. I’ve cried. I’ve been wracked with guilt. Now, though, for the moment, the house is quiet again. Everyone is outside, somewhere, searching.
I’m looking at Dad’s UFO detector, thinking about Martian moon maids and their queen. Dad introduced me to science fiction and telescopes and the stars.
It seemed fantastic, but his UFO detector had gone off.
For just a second, a tiny instant, I wanted to believe that maybe there was an alternate explanation. He wasn’t just a wandering Alzheimer’s patient.
He wasn’t.
•••••
James Van Pelt’s father introduced him to science fiction movies at a young age, starting with The Day the Earth Stood Still and the Godzilla films, and the rest of the best of the 50s. James sold his first short story in 1989, and since then has produced four collections and one novel. Besides Interzone – most recently issue #248 – his work has appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, and numerous other venues. He has been a finalist for the Nebula and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He occasionally blogs at jimvanpelt.livejournal.com and can be found on Facebook.
FLYTRAP
ANDREW HOOK
ILLUSTRATED BY DANIEL BRISTOW-BAILEY
When Adamson was a boy he imagined a planet. Days were dreamt in visual soliloquies, quiet monologues. He pieced together a harsh, barren, dangerous world from what he knew of the extremities of conditions on Earth. Volcanoes pepper-potted the surface, craters pock-marked its face. The atmosphere suffocated.
The night sky yielded the products of his imaginings. With head tilted back he gazed through his open casement window, each star a possible creation, each pinprick an aspiration. Adamson scorned the astrological books that his parents bought on special occasions, he didn’t want to understand the universe through second-hand knowledge: he wanted to experience it directly.
What made the human race different from the other species was that it sought not only to live within its surroundings, but to adapt them, to expand knowledge beyond necessity, to live outside its means.
Adamson had a special fondness for the brightest light in the night sky. He imagined darkness fell infrequently, that its radiance came from silver-suited occupants who braved the surface and were reflected back into the blackness as a message. He wanted this to be a truism. Adamson was lonely on Earth. He felt there were few people like him. If only he had known he was just a typical teenager who would live an average life and see all his dreams shattered, then maybe his perspective would have shifted.
•••
Gareth pinched the fly between his thumb and forefinger. Movement was felt rather than seen, a tremulous vibration resonated within the grooves of his fingerprints and made him want to rub those digits together, to erase the beating of that eloquent heart. Yet instead he maintained the grip, dropped the insect into the jaws of his Venus flytrap.
It bounced once against the plant’s interior, then unfolded its squashed wings like an escapologist freeing itself from a sticky straightjacket before rising and buzzing vehemently against the windowpane, catching a breeze and drifting to freedom.
Gareth sighed. He pressed the point of his pencil hard against the paper where he recorded his experiments and made a mark. The fly had been too fast. The trap would only spring when prey had contact with one of the three hair-like trichomes on the upper surface of the terminal lobes. Even then the hair had to be touched twice in quick succession – or two trigger hairs touched within twenty seconds of each other – for it to work. It was a delicate mechanism; but it was also deadly. The trap would shut within a tenth of a second under the right circumstances.
He found the entire process fascinating.
The Venus part of the plant’s name was a misnomer. It didn’t come from Venus. Gareth did, although he didn’t know it. Both the planet and the plant had been named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. The flytrap had been historically known as a tipitiwitchet, a possibly oblique reference to its resemblance to female genitalia.
Gareth didn’t know enough about female genitalia to make that comparison.
•••
Beth put down her copy of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers and shuddered. She had seen all four movie versions, the black and white classic directed by Don Siegel, the much-lauded remake featuring Donald Sutherland, the passable 1993 version directed by Abel Ferrara, and the execrable The Invasion made in 2007; yet it was the book which got under her skin.
There was something about the simplicity: of the idea, of the telling, of the plot, of the invasion. It resonated tiny triggers inside her body; goosebumped the skin like hairs stood to attention. It felt familiar, somehow. As though it had already happened and Finney was only setting out the facts for future generations to discover and find truth in it.
She arced herself back on the bed, looked upside-down out the window. The stars were in a reverse hemisphere, but not the opposing hemisphere of the Australasian states. She could still identify the three stars of Orion’s belt, the distinctive shape of the Plough, and the bright ‘star’ that was Venus. She looked for a long time at the planet, until closing her eye she found the afterimage remained on her retina, as though behind her eyelid was a pinhole camera.
She imagined Finney’s pods blowing through space and landing on Venus many millions of years ago, sucking the life out of the occupants there, and then leaving it desolate before heading to Earth.
She picked up her phone. It was only just past ten. Laura would be awake. With one push, eleven digits were dialled.
“Hello?”
“It’s Beth.”
“I know. What do you want?”
“Just tell me something.”
“Tell you something…?”
It was a game they had. The recipient of the question would make something up; often nonsense. Beth didn’t listen to Laura’s words, but she listened to Laura. She wondered if she would detect if Laura had been replaced by an emotionless being. If everything that made Laura human remained, or whether it had been subverted. She listened especially to Laura’s vowels, because she considered they would be the first to go. Not the staccato consonants, but the resonant vowels.
But Laura’s vowels were just as they should be.
•••
Adamson grew older and realised that all planets already existed before he imagined them.
He was only at the centre of his personal solar system.
The sense of isolation remained. It carried through his high school years and into adulthood, where, despite on the surface he hit each of the expected social landmarks at the right time, he found at the age of forty-seven that he could look at his wife and three children and not recognise anything of himself in them.
On nights where the rota dictated that he walk the dog, he took to the hills. Above him, the evening sky fought light pollution revealing its majesty. Unleashing the Labrador he looked upwards, basked in the
glow. Unlike the constellations which beckoned with promise he knew many of these were dead stars. Their brilliance long extinguished, with the light itself no greater than a memory of it. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket, having taken it from the packet before he left the house. The slender stem had buckled and needed gentle pressure from his fingers to restore its shape.
He saw himself as the bent cigarette.
Venus might be the brightest star in the sky, but he now understood that it wasn’t populated by those silver-suited beings of his youth. Atmospheric pressure ninety-two times that of Earth, a temperature that made it the hottest planet in the solar system and air that was 96% carbon dioxide put paid to that. He lit the tip of his cigarette, sucked the smoke into his lungs. For a moment they felt like the hottest part of his body, his chest tightened, he blew out carbon like a world-builder.
What he had looked for in the stars and planets wasn’t reflected on the ground. He had barely discovered Earth. So it was that dreams were more than snatched, they were stolen.
The dog barked. Adamson paid it no attention.
Then it yelped.
He drew the cigarette down by half, threw the butt to the ground, and pressed the remainder into the wet soil with the toe of his shoe.
Then he wandered off into the darkness to find his pet.
•••
Gareth found spiders more suitable than flies. Their longer legs triggered the flytrap’s mechanism much quicker than something airborne. Beetles also provided sustenance. He would watch as the trap closed, the interlocking lobes becoming prison bars. From experiments he knew smaller insects could escape through the gap, possibly the plant’s intention. He imagined the cost of capturing small prey exceeded the benefits of digesting it. But for the larger insects, those that struggled, the trap tightened. Digestion took ten days, after which the trap reopened and Gareth removed the husk of chitin and placed it in a box.