by Kelly Link
Poisonous rubbish creates hermaphroditic superheroes maybe? That’s an old one.
“These changes are obvious results of plastics, pesticides, industrial pollutants and other endocrine disruptors—hormone mimics—flooding our environment. Indicator species like amphibians—before they died out—exhibited feminization of males and females with occlusions, cancers and reproductive difficulties. Humans were similarly affected. The horrifying extinction of our marine mammals, seals, whales, dolphins—along with the entire class of Amphibia—was just the beginning of a massive loss of species diversity.”
I miss frogs. I can picture them in another memory, hopping, eating flies. Being used to poison arrows—or maybe that was a film.
“Now almost every species on our planet is in decline. What we don’t normally see are increases in reproductive possibilities in any species besides jellyfishes, some insects, and bacteria—yet here’s the possibility of an advantageous mutation.”
He sure is long-winded. I watch Joon. Charlie finally gets to the point, about how he believes some of the most messed up can still have kids, once they grow up.
(I never will. Never.)
Joon eats and maybe listens. When the food is gone, he pushes away the bowl, leans back, and says, “Ge. So what you hetchi pervs want is to—what? Fuck my freaky boy Jae and create a race of superherms?”
I can’t help giggling. I figure Joon’s gonna blow now. Why doesn’t he?
“What I’m offering,” Charlie says sharply, “is hard credits to Jack and you—for help researching. . . .”
“Charlie thinks the street-kids are humanity’s last hope.” Leo cuts in abruptly. “Despite the reality that even if a sub-species emerges that can breed; it will have nowhere to live, no plants or animals to share a very lonely existence.”
Charlie glares. “Unless we discover a regulating hormone or . . . gene . . . transferable to other species!” Why does this sound like a comic strip?
“A madman’s dream.” Leo smiles tenderly at his partner.
Joon’s mouth turns down. “So what am I, then?” he asks. “Some kinda control? Like, to compare my boy Jae to, neh?”
“No.” Charlie says. No one speaks. Joon stands, shoving back his chair, which clatters to the floor. He glares at me and stalks away.
“But I never said anything!” I wail. Jack is abandoned again. “I never said!”
Charlie’s eyes are hound-dog sad (no more dogs, dogs-gone). “You didn’t. There are visual indicators . . . sometimes. Slim build, no body hair . . . .”
I want to go—but where? Joon is beyond angry. I can’t go there.
“Jack,” Leo says. “Can you take us to others like you two?”
The words tip me into panic. With no destination in mind, I run. It’s what Jack does.
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack had better run like shit.
•••
Jack is cold. Jack is alone.
I’ve eaten too much and feel ill. Why didn’t I get the credit voucher?
Why did that Leo make me feel so . . . Freak! There’s an alley. I hide and consider what to do next, how I will survive for the next little while.
Jack is cold and alone . . . .
Snap.
Uni
The Market Guard don’t find me until after the other Warehouse kids do. The guards carry me to Charlie. I drift awake from a long, hot nightmare (dreams within dreams). Charlie is asleep nearby, long hair loose about his face.
“Mother?”
Charlie wakes with a start. Not Mother.
“How old are you, Jack?” He asks, soothing my bruises with a cool cloth.
I have no answer.
We don’t talk about Joon (or why I got beat up). I know Charlie wants to know how many others like Jack and Joon are out there (I need to know too—so badly. Is there any one of them like me?). But I can’t pull my multiple lives together into any kind of explanation. Charlie never once mentioned an overly long lifespan as a side-effect of toxic garbage. His research seems focused only on our immaturity and potential baby-making superpowers. (Eat your heart out Spiderman, plastic hormone mimics are the new radiation—now in pink!). And I never mention how very long I’ve been alone. I’m in Charlie’s world now—out of the wind—with daily walks through quiet halls, the bio lab with its acrid smells, and the psych lab with its carefully neutral colors.
I become familiar with the guards at the entrance, the few lab and hydroponic workers. No one questions my presence and I start to lose the feeling of being a bug on a pin. Charlie gives me (free!) access to the University’s online databases, to answer my questions (but what should I ask?). This after multiple warnings about cross-checking information. The warning is unnecessary. I’ve understood for a very long time that nothing is ever what it seems.
This is the first time I’ve had easy access to the University’s fragmented—and contradictory—collection of databases. In the market it’s referred to as the Idiot’s Encyclopedia, or NonK. NonK is my digital alter ego. We both have trouble remembering things. My head keeps just so much in it and no more. But then an image, a knowing, will pop out of nowhere. This can complicate day-to-day existence. But Charlie’s research and NonK’s databases, however flawed, are my hope for answers if I’m ever to understand what I am.
•••
NonK: From noncomp. (adj) idiot, moron, stupid (Eng.); ’baka (Japanese). Derived from the Latin ‘non compos mentis’. IE: “Dude, you’re such a noncomp.”
(Archived by NonK from The Urban dictionary.com, New Millennium circa 2010).
Time Surges
I see Joon several times during brief visits to the market. Joon keeps his distance, but I know he means for me to see. I’m left breathless and disoriented. On bad days—the Joon days—I dive into NonK’s virtual library. I choose histories and plunge back in time until my eyes weep —from the backlighting, so I tell myself. I avoid fiction. I could lose myself in story, become the tale told by firelight. My brain is already so full (so disorganized) it’s difficult to keep my memories separate from stories and dreams. Even with eyes wide and staring at the here and now, the wail of older winds haunts every empty room.
I eat well from the hydroponic tanks and greenhouses; I avoid jellyfish when possible. My body feels good. One hunger’s satisfied, at least. Jack thrives. Jae pines. What would make us both happy?
Then Charlie mentions that I’m growing taller. I stop eating. My hands are shaking when the researchers meet me in the lab to draw blood.
“What’s going on, Lad.” Leo’s resonant voice is out of place in a lab, filling the space as if it will shake apart the hand-blown glass vials and pipettes. “You’re sugar-crashing. If you get dehydrated, you’re fuck-all useless to us—and yourself. You in love or something?”
“Freak no.” I flinch. Lies don’t flow smoothly these days. Life is too easy. (Could this confusion be love?) “You want consistency for the tests, na? If I don’t eat, I don’t grow. So I stay the same, ne?”
Charlie frowns. “You’re at that post-pubescent stage when you’re supposed to have growth spurts, Jack. You’ve heard of anorexia?”
“Is he post?” Leo says thoughtfully.
I feel ill.
“Jack, you will not run away this time.” Leo’s voice is stern. “I won’t have you disrupting Charlie’s research. What’s so upsetting to you about the idea of growing-the-hell-up?”
“He’s pre-pubescent? Leo—that could explain so much.”
I do not want to have this conversation.
Charlie hands me a cup of sugar-beet water. “No blood today. But Jack, how old are you really?”
I wince. Wrong question/misdirection.
“You asked about the others.” I stop, ashamed.
“You’re safe here Jack.”
“There are lots of us,” I say finally, heart pounding (willing it true, willing them all like me). “Dunno how many. We come and go. But no one tells!” I feel like crying (like lying).
“Are there any girls?” Leo asks.
I stare. “Well, duh.” Leo grimaces in apology.
“He just means anyone who identifies as female.” Charlie says dismissively.
(There is. There are.)
“Look Jack, you have this hormone mimic in your system complicating things.” (Some comic book deus ex machina.) “When we understand, we can help. All of you.”
“I said I’d be in your study,” I say miserably, “because I need to know too. (What am I? Will I always be alone?) “But that’s why Joon and the others are angry. Why I can’t go back.”
Joon. My heart may crumble to dust.
“Would Joon come here?” Charlie asks eagerly.
Leo growls, “Was it Joon who hurt you?”
I shake my head. “Ah, no. Gomennasai . . . . Sorry.”
So we’re all surprised when Joon arrives the next morning, face dripping blood.
“Are you sleeping?
Are you dreaming, Jack?”
In the Hallowed Halls
I take Joon through the echoing halls of the University. Charlie fed him and bandaged his face. Now he wants to see everything. The way is empty and well lit. Abandoned treasures gather dust in empty rooms. At an intersection, glass cases display specimens of extinct species. We inspect colorful preserved frogs and stuffed seabirds white as ice. Joon stands for a long time in front of two small toothed whales, smiles curving painted mouths.
“There were some long as the hall,” I point upward to a giant skeleton hanging from the ceiling. A great bowed bone shows where the jaw must have been.
“Good that one’s dead, ne?”
“Baka. That one ate critters the size of millet grains. You never heard the old stories?” Sometimes I forget and talk as if I’ve seen these alive and in the world. Joon does not.
“And this one?” Joon’s fingers splay on the glass where the dolphin’s laughing eye is frozen in time.
“There’re stories of drowning sailors being saved by those.” I lower my voice, as we all do when speaking of the lost ones. “Charlie thinks they died out around the time these took over the oceans.” I point to three aquarium tanks set in one wall. Each swirls with a different kind of jellyfish rising and dropping in artificial currents like lovely little plastic bags. The first tank holds numerous tiny creatures. The next contains just two jellies, each the size of a church bell. Joon stares hungrily.
I point toward the first tank. “Charlie calls the tiny ones hydrozoans. They aren’t edible like the jellies the Fishers harvest, the scyphozoans.” I’m showing off. I like using the right names for things (except for me). “Charlie says hydrozoans are incredibly adaptive survivors. He says they remind him of . . . us.”
But Joon looks only at the giant jellies. “Do we eat these?”
“Dried, shredded, pickled, marinated. They’re the same kind we ate this morning, stir-fried with crickets and salt-kelp. They grow bigger. Charlie says more than 500 pounds!”
Joon presses against the glass, staring at the enormous animals.
I want Joon to notice the hydrozoans. They have high bells the size of my pinkie nail and opaque pulsating sides that expose bright red stomachs.
“I like these best.” That gets his attention.
“Charlie says most are short lived, but this one, Turritopsis, can stop being adult and return to its immature stage if it’s under stress. He says it’s pretty much immortal.” I watch Joon carefully. “Course, that only helps the individual creature, it doesn’t add diversity or anything to the gene pool.”
Joon says nothing.
“But Charlie says when it does mature it can choose its gender—choose to be a male or female and reproduce sexually—you know—make babies from several parents. It’s only when the pollution’s toxic or weather’s bad or there’s nothing to eat that it kinda turns inside-out and goes back to the beginning again. Then it roots in a new place and starts over.
“Like you and me . . . ?”
We contemplate the tiny parachutes, small survivalists rising and falling in the current. A disturbingly successful species—going nowhere.
“Maybe like you. Not me. You remember birds, ya freak,” Joon finally says. “And frogs.” He flashes a bright grin that doesn’t reach his eyes and stalks away down the corridor, dreads bouncing in mimicry of the thick, deadly tentacles of the sea wasps in the very last tank.
I lean my forehead against the glass. (Snap. I float with the tide, letting the currents take me . . . . Crack.) My skin shivers and I push off the aquarium glass. For a brief moment I imagine cracks spider-webbing through it. Then the glass is clear and whole again.
I turn and hurry after Joon—as I always must.
Jack & Jae
Jae has Joon in his bed for the first time in months. Joon is sleeping, a line of drool stringing down from sculpted lips. His dark face is so lovely in sleep—mouth relaxed, fierce eyes lidded. I’m worried about the others, and why Joon was hurt, but it’s peaceful watching his sleeping face. Joon rolls onto the bandage that covers a gash along one cheekbone. He hisses and the hazel eyes half-open. I stroke the smooth forehead and Joon’s eyes close again.
I want to know what the men are saying. As Jack, I often wander at night. I hear things. Jack is braver than Jae, has been around longer. It’s Jack who pads barefoot to the cistern for a drink. The moon is full, so when I enter the living space I can clearly see people outside on the balcony. My scalp prickles and I think intruders, but I know it’s really Charlie and Leo.
I slip closer—don’t want to consider whether I ought. I’ve been watching the two men at home, at work, testing my feelings when I see them touch. When Leo pushes Charlie’s hair back from his face, I feel pain. I tease the feeling like a loose tooth.
It makes Jack a lonely boy.
I creep across the room. Charlie’s breathless whispers alternate with Leo’s bass rumble. Two bodies tangle with the moonlight, shifting and sliding, bright skin and dark shadows. A hand, massive and square in the darkness, twists into silvery hair, a breathy voice gasps as the hand tightens and draws a shining, moonlit body down. A furred giant—a demigod or satyr—erupts from underneath, swinging the smooth tree-nymph body underneath; muscled chest and thighs heave in the dark. I’m unable to move. My heart thunders wildly with conflict: fear, loneliness—longing. I can’t look away. Then the great shaggy head turns and dark eyes seem to stare directly into mine, slitted with what looks like fury. Jack runs.
It’s Jae who curls next to Joon, watching him sleep (though Jack’s heart races). I remember Jae and Joon’s many nights tangled together, usually under a filthy tarp in an abandoned warehouse. We cuddled for warmth, for companionship. Joon would lay his head on my shoulder, legs layered. Never was there a hint of the . . . thing I’ve just witnessed. Surely I’d know if Joon felt that way. What’s wrong with me? With us all?
I love Joon. I believe Joon loves me. I run a fingertip along the side of his face. Joon murmurs in his sleep, the beautiful lips curl and fingers close around the hand I slip into his. I lay my head beside the darker one on the futon and drift into memories of dreams, chastely holding the hand of my lovely, dangerous Joon—while the world ocean shrinks to a rocking swell, soothing us to sleep. We drift and dream, flying out over dark waves.
“Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.”
—T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
Request for an Extension on the Clarity
Sofia Samatar
Dear X,
I am writing to request an extension on the Clarity. I would like my term extended for twenty years. I’ve received two other extensions—one for two years and one for ten—but I’ve never managed to get a twenty-year term.
I’ve decided to contact you directly instead of
going through my supervisor, in the hope that, once you’ve heard my reasons, you will grant my request.
Now you’re thinking: well, this is unconventional! Keep in mind that you have not hired me to do a conventional job. You have hired me to live almost alone and I live almost alone and my work is excellent. The Clarity has run for thirteen years without a pause. She is my boat and my cottage and my cocoon. Cocoon is not the right word. Coconut? Coffin? That was a joke.
Dear X, I wish I could see you. I wish I knew your name. But you are veiled in the obscurity of the highest rung of the Program. So I make do, despite my disadvantages, despite the fact that I know nothing about you while you know everything about me.
Tap the screen. Look at me. Here is what you will see:
One subject, female, black, 41 years of age.
Height 1.75 m, weight 62 kg.
Subject wears orange.
Subject stretches, eats, performs equipment check, plays with cats.
Subject feeds cats.
Subject reads, writes, eats, evacuates, showers, stretches, performs equipment check.
Subject waters terrarium.
Subject sleeps.
Earth outside the window, sweetly curved. The stratosphere like cream.
Do you really know everything about me? What do you read in these fingers tapping, the pause for a neck-rub, the clearing of the throat? What do you read in the stars? Did you know that God is a potter? Our moon is a pot encircled with white copper. God turns it one quarter at a time.
You might hear me whisper: “Potter, copper, quarter.” This is normal. Solitary people grow sensitive to the rhythms of language.
God’s name is Amma. As I perform the daily equipment check, you might hear me murmur: “Amma. Om. Home.”
I know, of course, that God did not make the Clarity. Humans made her to receive transmissions from our distant ships. The Clarity circles the earth like a small bright moon. Inside, I keep her healthy, monitor her functions, sometimes send out a request for parts. The parts are sent up in a pod with my food and supplies. A low chime sounds when it connects, and the cats prick up their ears and mew. My tabby cats, Crick and Crack. When I open the door and climb down to open the pod, they crowd against me, they want to jump down inside. “Get out, get back!” I say. They know there are treats in the pod: liver flavor, their favorite. I haul everything up. “Santa’s here!” I tell them. The cats spool around me, beside themselves. We open everything at once. There’s a mess on the floor, boxes everywhere. I am singing.