Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  The fight leaves my body. Even if she’s lying to me, so that I won’t struggle with the paramedics, I can’t force her to listen to me. It’s all too late.

  “Eiko,” Lori says.

  I look up at her.

  Lori smiles. She places the orb inside her mouth. She can’t stop a grimace from forming on her face. She shudders. Closes her eyes and swallows.

  I smile. Tears stream down my face.

  From a great distance I can hear the coming roar of wings.

  Kanami and Lori’s eyes widen as they turn toward the patio door. They can hear it, too! A smile breaks across my face.

  The paramedics look at each other and then at my daughter and my lover, their eyebrows raised with skepticism. The gruff one rolls his eyes.

  The glass in the door bulges outward, as soft as a bubble of soap. The glass pops with a crash of a thousand shards.

  The air roars.

  I reach for Kanami’s and Lori’s hands. We squeeze tightly. With love. With certainty. We take to the skies.

  Speculative fiction can be a remarkably generative site from which we can deconstruct, agitate, investigate, and extrapolate. A queer place where dreams and visions can be actualized. Alongside speculative fiction’s potential for critical and transformative engagement, there remains at its core the possibility of engaging with a sense of wonder. Even as we need to be able to call attention, to dismantle and deconstruct, it is necessary for us as a species to be able to imagine. To imagine things that are not, or are yet to be, we need first to be able to imagine the impossible. When we imagine the impossible, it is only then that it becomes possible. To my mind, the best of speculative fiction takes us from a familiar place to the unfamiliar. Enter this other space, it invites us. Explore it. Imagine yourself and your world, better …

  Footnotes

  1 For further etymological reading on the possible origins/meanings of “queer”: “More Than Words: Queer, Part 1 (The Early Years).” Cara. Autostraddle. January 9, 2013.

  2 How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Joanna Russ. University of Texas Press. 1983.

  3 The limbs of the liminal

  body are fully detachable. Look

  what happened to Sedna. Every

  little bit counts. It wasn’t her mother

  who betrayed her. Not all of our stories

  are pretty. We’ll name our own

  violence. Take the venom

  that will cure your illness.

  Medusa

  Christopher Brown

  It’s best first thing in the morning. When you get up out of bed, while the remains of fresh dreams spark into warm ash across the trails of neurons. Especially in summer, when the sun comes on and pushes the gelatinous ozone ooze of the metropolis through the window of your flat on the 114th floor. In that moment when you can’t remember where you are or even who you are and know only the hunger of your appetites after a long night hunting in the dream worlds. Before the anthill starts humming, and Capital starts tapping you on the shoulder.

  Sometimes Medusa wakes you up, rattling in her crate at the foot of the bed. You wonder if she wants it more than you. When you let her out of her dark wet incubator and she envelops you before you can hold her, pushing you back onto the bed, opening up to you through new apertures of flesh and entering you through ones you didn’t know you had. Lately, she has taken to covering your eyes with her own grown film of red membrane. Having no eyes of her own, perhaps she wants to see what you see.

  Medusa plugs you in. To yourself and to her network, the cryptic bioelectrical pathways of empathic genius that she grows in her crate when you put her away after each session. When she grips you, she mirrors your flesh and makes contact with what seems like every nerve in your body, sending and receiving signals that transcend language. And as the cascades of spastic release hurtle through your body, all the feeling goes, too. Medusa sucks out the pain. She sucks out the very idea of the self and replaces it with flashes of lightning inside the void between your ears.

  And then you have to go to work.

  Catastrophe bonds are good business in a world of endless little wars and overpass-busting natural disasters. Crafting elaborate derivatives that algorithmically transform apocalypse into internal rates of return does not leave a lot of time for “relationships.” Living in the sprawl of K.L., where you don’t know the idiom or the correct time to kneel, makes it easier to embrace the alone.

  You moved here with another, but the tropical fungus scared her away, and the fezzes and the men in black with their invisible women. She went back to London, to the world of friends and technicolor dinners and the dream of family. You had a light ache and the abstract idea of the loss, but you mostly felt free. Free to be alone.

  That was before Medusa. Before you brought her home from the bio-atelier in Hong Kong where she was grown.

  You heard about Medusa and her brothers and sisters from some colleagues—men, of course—over a drunken dinner in Shanghai on a road show to pitch a new series of famine reinsurance derivatives to Chinese fund managers. Medusa was part of the newest generation of the first line of engineered biological entities that could last more than a couple of months without a live-in lab tech as its au pair. She had been developed as an accidental byproduct of the latest injectable male tissue enhancements, grown from a stem cell culture that would be spiked with your own genetic material to generate a custom lover.

  The purchase of Medusa was like a cross between applying to the astronaut corps and signing up for an online dating service, with two days of physical evaluations, fluid extractions, and psychological inventories. They even monitored your sleep one night, your brain wired to some sort of fMRI that color-coded your dreams and generated semiotic taxonomies of your ascendant yearnings and neuroses. In the end, of course, you knew that the true purpose was really just society’s structural imperative to set you up to maximize your productivity.

  For a while it looked like it would have the opposite effect. Like the third week after she came home, when you didn’t show up for work for several days and stopped checking your login accounts, locked with her in your apartment in a sustained orgasmic opium daze, a languorous exercise in the obliteration of ego. And then you remembered you needed to keep paying for her.

  The investors rely upon you to sustain the growth of Capital in a world where population has crossed the summit and is irrevocably declining. And as you postulate the socioeconomic sine curves propelled by off-season hurricanes and the shock waves of post-nuclear bunker busters, you wonder what kind of alpha is represented by the movement to mass masturbation.

  Sometimes in the evening you groom Medusa, plucking her random hairs, cleaning her box, massaging her extruded blood vessels, putting the balms on her different dermal surfaces. The ointments make her colors change, as do the shifting lights in the room.

  Sometimes you fall into a post-coital sleep without putting her back in her incubator. She escapes your bedroom. You find her on the bathroom floor, in the kitchen, against the floor-to-ceiling window. Your pink freckled snail, your pet slug the size of a very large dog, looking without eyes for things you cannot imagine. Once you found her squeezed behind the desk, devouring one of the network jacks.

  You are the sort of person who prefers numbers to words. Medusa has neither. And you wonder how it is that she communicates the way she does, turning your own feelings into a looped remix that she pumps back into your bloodstream.

  Afterwards, the apartment always seems to know what to do. Though when the radio comes on with music you haven’t heard before but instantly love, you wonder what Medusa is telling it.

  Salter is a lawyer you work with. She represents your investment house, helping contractually structure the derivatives. She’s based out of Melbourne but comes to K.L. every couple of months. You always have dinner and sometimes more. You share a rigorous, overeducated clinicality that allows you to sequester your emotions beneath layers of impenetrable logic. After a perfectly spice
d protein and an engineered Bordeaux, you like to let your feelings out to play with each other like underdeveloped, sheltered children. It feels good, or at least the idea of it does.

  When you and Salter roll off each other, though you both may be physically satiated, you feel like you know each other less than you did before. The nakedness and the inadequacy of language amplify the abyss between your personalities, a gap in perception that cannot be traversed except through primate grasping and thrusting and grunting.

  Which does not stop you from trying.

  How is it, you sometimes wonder, that this woman who is so like you in so many ways becomes more alien the objectively closer you get? While the essentially brainless masturbatory aid you keep by your bed makes you feel transported to some plane of metaphysical oneness?

  Your relationship with Salter is mediated by so many different forms of exchange. Language, money, pheromones, numbers, clothing, the narrative overlays of the idea of love. Medusa just lives. Part of you, in a very literal sense, her genomic key opening undiscovered compartments of your brain, revealing flashes of satori within.

  Salter sometimes wears a designer merkin of blue synthetic material to adorn her fashionably depilated body. When you take it off, she tells you the reason we have pubic hair is to remind us we are animals.

  You tell her you want to open your other eye, the one you got from your amphibian ancestors. You wonder if Medusa can help. You wonder if Medusa is a variation on the amphibian.

  One morning you wake to find Salter with Medusa, writhing in the pink fingers of dawn. The sounds Salter makes, sounds you have never heard her make before, are what wake you up. You do not know how Medusa got out of her crate. She is wrapped around Salter like a sleeping bag made of skin. A sleeping bag that goes inside you, too. Salter is shaking. Medusa moves through a range of color you haven’t seen.

  In time, you help coax Medusa off of Salter.

  Salter did not previously know of the existence of Medusa. She does now.

  You show her how to put Medusa back in her crate. You talk to her. You call her by her first name, the one her parents called her when she was an infant.

  Salter understands.

  Later, you and Salter try to invent new words to explain how you feel.

  Salter schedules time off the Network for a long weekend with you. And Medusa. You close the blinds this time, banish clothes to the other room, and turn out the lights. And the three of you find each other in the dark, swimming in space. Medusa comes between you and in doing so, brings you together. It feels like you are all three breathing the same epic breaths even though Medusa does not have lungs, so far as you can tell.

  You find each other at a level you did not imagine possible. Medusa is the bridge across which authentic feeling uncorrupted by language can cross. All the feelings you don’t believe in, like love, and the ones you do, like pain. You cry and forget the first words you learned and quiver together like a slab of mixed gelatin jolted by spasms of convulsive shock Medusa conducts through your nervous wet tissues.

  When Salter returns again three weeks later, something is wrong with Medusa. She becomes inert. She resists leaving her crate, and if you remove her, she refuses to move. You notice a lump that was not there before. You call the laboratory for support.

  The laboratory sends out one of their field techs, who cannot figure it out either.

  And so you all pack up and fly across the sea to Hong Kong and meet with the white-haired men with white coats and extra Ph.D.s.

  Dr. Wu explains that Medusa is pregnant, if that word can be applied to this singular and unprecedented circumstance, as he describes it. Pregnant with what, only extensive testing will tell. But they know at least this, that the growth inside Medusa has parts of each of the three of you.

  The doctors share their conclusion that Medusa must be destroyed. Salter confounds their engineer logic with insoluble legal puzzles of ownership of this thing within the Thing. You look at the red mass squirming on the imaging of Medusa and wonder what she would want. And understand that for all of you, the idea of choice is, and has always been, a masterful delusion.

  A Universal Elegy

  Tang Fei

  translated by John Chu

  I love you, stranger, but not because the world is hurting me. Before my love froze, it once flew.

  —The Elegy of Alia

  Alia Calendar 6th month, 87th year

  Brother, it’s not until my tongue stumbles over these two syllables that I realize how long it’s been since we last talked. Julian and I kept moving, kept living where even the heating system was a problem. A satellite communication system that could reach Mercury was beyond my wildest hopes. Sorry that I haven’t contacted you in so long.

  Actually, I could have run to a public communication kiosk. Sending you a written message would have cost only several sou, but Julian didn’t like it when I did that. He thought it was a waste of money. We both knew, though, that this was just one of the ways he punished me.

  Julian, my now former lover, had at some point suddenly become a nightmare. He tormented me, ridiculed me, in every way he could. He’s like all the others. His shifting gaze, the curl of his lips, the way his nose blushed, even the sound of his footsteps were filled with a meticulous indifference. He laughed at me, saying that I was mad. Gradually, I started to believe it. The world grew hazy. It lost its contours and weight. I sunk into thick, black, yet glistening agony. When I looked up at the stars, I saw a sky filled with flowing fire, dancing and spinning in a daze.

  I was always crying. Once, Julian said in front of me to his research institute colleagues that he wanted to conduct research in genetic ethology using me as a specimen. Of course, he was drunk when he said that. He was always drunk, just like I was always crying.

  I can say these things to you, not just because I’ve left the nightmare that was Julian—yes, we’ve broken up—but especially because you’re the only person in the universe who can understand me. We came from the same fertilized egg. We have the same DNA. Even though radiation from Cygnus A methylated some of your genes, you can still understand me, a sufferer of an inhibitory neuron blockage disorder.

  It’s done, brother. All of the suffering is done. I’m fine now. I’ve never been finer. In six hours I’m going to leave this planet together with Hull. He’s a good man. Although we’ve only known each other fifteen days, we already understand each other. How do I describe the merging of souls that happens between two strangers? Such a mysterious stirring of emotions. I can’t put it into words. It’s like how the sound waves from two different kinds of musical instruments resonate together harmoniously. Forgive me for such a clunky analogy, brother. All you need to know is that I’ve fallen in love with a stranger who happens to love me. More importantly, he completely understands me and accepts me.

  Six hours from now, fire will rush out of our rocket, and we’ll travel to the other side of the universe to Dieresis. That’s where he was born. Hull promised me that there I’ll get the respect that I deserved but never got on Earth. There, no one will think of me as being sick in the head. Like him, they’ll understand and respect me, even appreciate me.

  Brother, I love him. It’s absolutely not because the world keeps hurting me.

  Alia Calendar 6th month, 89th year

  Time flies by so fast. Sorry that I’ve gone so long without mailing you again. But, brother, in this vast universe, do people have to rely on such obsolete methods to reach out to each other? Hull told me that signals the brain sends travel farther than we think. During the countless years of an endless trek, a person’s train of thought will enter the mind of someone else on another planet. Isn’t that amazing?

  I want to tell you about Hull. Don’t worry, brother. I know my last letter made you think that I’ve committed yet another thoughtless mistake. Indeed, I have to admit that leaving Earth was definitely a somewhat hasty act. You know that’s why I sent you that last letter.

  Hull is a Di
eresian. He’s 1.8 meters tall, 72 kilograms, black hair, brown eyes. He looks like a handsome Caucasian and speaks Earth languages really well. Our conversations are fluent and joyful. He’s more like my kind than any Earth person.

  His every subtle detail, no matter how difficult to check, is perfect. His pupils dilate at the just-right times. His skin suffuses the air with a unique perfume. The rate his eyelashes quiver, the flaring of his nostrils, the unique path his fingertips glide over my skin steep me in the warm current of his love. I respond in the same detailed, satisfying way. We echo each other. The way we express our love is something that humans have never experienced and can never understand.

  Our love unfolded on an even more profound layer of spirituality. Cautious and reverent at first, it gradually transformed into something frenzied and wild until finally I realized that, all along, Hull had been guiding me, consciously training me. Through constant, ever deeper, ever more meticulous interactions, like how our ancestors sliced ever thinner slices of graphite until they finally sheared off a sheet of graphene, my already keen powers of perception and expression improved.

  Of course, coins aren’t just carried and spent. After all, Hull comes from outside the Milky Way. He has his quirks. For example, taking baths. For the first year of our flight, Hull never took a bath. One day, he suddenly announced he wanted to take one. By then I was already used to his body odor, and moreover, I believed he had never taken a bath in his entire life. He locked himself in the bathroom for three days. To reassure me, he had meaningful conversations with me through the door that separated us. Even so, I was still distracted whenever I did anything else. Unbearable fantasies of what must have been happening behind the door ran wild through my mind.

  Afterwards, he told me that everyone on his planet takes this long to clean their body and waits this long in between. I asked him if I had to do the same. As he laughed, he comforted me, saying that they respected everyone’s habits and customs. I don’t know whether all Dieresians are like him. He obstinately refuses to cut his hair or nails. However, even if they are, I can accept that.