Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

by James Van Pelt

  I put my notebook down and shut my eyes. If I ignored the glassy clink behind the bar, shut out the alien cooking smells and odd gravity; if I concentrated on the river’s swishy passage under the boat and the dim red light through my eyelids, I could almost imagine faraway Lasarént. What season was it there? Would the rivers be running high now on their winding flow to the shallow seas? Would the hills be oozy and wet under the reddish sun? I licked my lips, tasted the river’s moisture on my tongue. Rested my head on the chair’s back to feel the moving water better.

  I stayed that way for a long time.

  Footsteps thudded on the floor. I felt them, and I scrinched my eyes tighter, trying not to break the feeling, but a chair scraped back, and someone joined me at my table. The problem with the vacant chair is it invites company. I thought about sending the person away. Another specimen for the database didn’t seem that important right now. What would be the use of one more tagged woman, moving through her life, tracked by invisible Lasarént field scientists? What would be the good of me committing one more act of human fakery?

  It was Trudy.

  “I expected to find you here,” she said.

  I touched her hand. “That’s good work.”

  She held it up to herself, fingers straight. “They hurt all the time, you know.”

  I didn’t, but I said I did.

  The bartender asked her if she wanted something, and she ordered a beer. When he turned away, she said, “Enzyme treatments make it palatable—even my digestive system was changed—but they drink it too cold.”

  “Mine too. When I started, all the food was shunted to a storage stomach. I emptied it after meals, but they decided that was too cumbersome—shipping food to me twice a month—so I have earth-analog bacteria implants and a processor that converts it for me.”

  “Ouch,” she said. “All that biologically?”

  “Most. I’d attract a lot of attention in an Earth hospital if they X-rayed my insides, though.”

  She laughed. I admired the perfection of her guise. No evidence of vestigial scales. The missing limbs. The loss of height. The loss of eye stalks. Trosfrilla biotechs must be true artists.

  The door opened and a dozen men and women poured into the bar. A coed softball team, wearing black and yellow T-shirts, talking excitedly.

  I didn’t want her to go again. The players settled around two tables, calling for beer and pretzels. One of them plugged money into a juke box, and the Sleepy Jean suddenly became noisy and too crowded.

  “Can we go someplace quiet?” I asked.

  She nodded. What thoughts were going through her Trosfrilla brain? We were no longer enemies, technically, but she could learn nothing about Earth people from me. I could learn nothing from her. Our conversation made no scientific sense. We’d gain nothing from it. She was not a human woman. I could take no readings or plant a tag. Still, I wanted to stay with her.

  She followed me in her car to my apartment. I turned the equipment off before she entered. No point in letting my superiors know I’d entertained a Trofrillan operative.

  I said, “Can I get you something to drink?”

  Trudy moved into my apartment unlike anyone who’d entered before. She dropped the human role; her feet slid across the carpet, more like her own gait, and her hands went to her jaw line that she rubbed hard. She said, “Water is fine, if it’s warm.” The heels of her hands ground into the side of her face. “It hurts all the time, here. I’ll be glad to go home.”

  I poured the water and one for myself. Through the door I could see her examining my things. She pushed aside an art print to study the thin plate of scanning equipment behind.

  “What’s your range?” she called.

  “About fifty feet.”

  She grunted and let the print swing back into place.

  “Do you have any music?” she said. “Real music?”

  I had several CD’s of recordings I’d made from Lasarént. The stereo couldn’t do the full tonal range justice, but it captured the mutating harmonics and asynchronous rhythms well. We sat beside each other on the couch. Through my picture window the sun set, a red sunset, and I smiled at that. Trudy stayed motionless, her fingers curled on her thighs, her wrists bent slightly, like a Preying Mantis. I smelled nothing Trosfrillan on her, only shampoo and perfume.

  Around us the human city teemed with its activities. In the building, doors slammed—I felt their distant echoes—feet pattered down the hallways. Outside, traffic pushed past, all individually guided, most cars holding only one person. Busy. Horns and engine noise beat against the glass. A siren whining. But in my apartment, the red sun bathed everything warmly, and the music currents swept by, gentle and chaotic, like the river beneath the Sleepy Jean, like the far Hydrash. My scanning equipment was off. My position was no longer clinical. I wasn’t collecting.

  Trudy rubbed her face again. Underneath the mock skin (Beautifully engineered! Only a well equipped lab that knew what to look for would be able to detect its extraterrestrial origin), I guessed her reshaped skull ached along its alien lines. She grimaced, a very human gesture of pain.

  “Here, let me,” I said. In the kitchen, I filled a pan with warm water and found a washcloth. She watched me soak the cloth, then press out the excess moisture.

  “I don’t think we should,” she said. Her hand rested on my forearm. “Thank you for the thought, though.”

  Still, she didn’t resist when I placed the cloth against her cheek, let the warmth rest there for a moment, and then pushed my thumbs gently into the muscles. Her dark eyes locked on my own. When I went back to the bowl to reheat the cloth, she sighed and shut her eyes. I straddled her on the couch so I could massage both sides of her face equally. She moved her head against the pressure, so I could tell where she wanted it. Gradually, the apartment darkened, and the red sunset behind me went from vermillion to purple to sable. My thumbs kneaded her cheek bones, pushed into the ridge of her jawbone, circled under her ears—the skin caressed the covered bones, a whole tiny landscape of knobs and valleys and smooth plains, over and over.

  She said, “Do you miss winter on Lasarént?”

  My back ached with memory’s loss. The den filled and dark and close. The hormonal changes engendered in the moist soil and shared air, and the timeless eruption of tendrils in my back, burrowing through the mud, finding other tendrils, growing and intertwining until we joined, all of us, in one organism; one birthing, breathing, thinking organism that waited out the winter in warmth and communion and unity. The integration.

  I couldn’t say anything, but swallowed the human sob in my throat while my thumbs orbited endlessly on her face.

  Her hands went to my shirt, unbuttoning. In the darkness I saw her eyes glinting, staring again at me. I massaged the skull above the ears; her hair tickled my wrists. She held my ribs and pulled me closer, her breath hot on my chest, then she reached around and put her hands on my back.

  “Here?” she said, her voice mellow against the music.

  “Higher,” I said, and moved down so she could reach.

  The Trosfrilla know our anatomy; they know us. One can’t go to war for generations without learning of the enemy, and she knew. She knew. Her fingers traveled up and down beside my back bone, digging until she found the buried tendril-pods, chemically suppressed, but still there, sensitive to stimulation, and she rubbed them gently.

  When the music ended, I fell away, exhausted.

  We breathed deeply in the now silent room, city lights glittering beyond the window, the traffic slowed to its night time murmur.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Does it hurt as bad?” I touched the side of her face.

  She didn’t look at me. “Not as bad. And you?”

  Of course there had been incomplete satisfaction in what she’d done, not like a full nesting, but she knew the tendril-pods were there. She’d touched them and reminded them they were alive.

  “That felt good,” I said. “Thanks.”<
br />
  Trudy rose from the couch, and I knew she was leaving.

  She got to the door before I said, “Will I see you again?”

  By the dim city light, she paused, her back to me—things remained that way for many heart beats—then she shrugged.

  “Why?” she said.

  I tried not to weep, my alien form overwhelming me with reflexive emotion, and I suddenly understood something human.

  “Don’t mind me,” I said. “It’s all blather.”

  CLASSROOM OF THE LIVING DEAD

  They came for me on a Monday morning when I was too exhausted to hear the back door caving in. Only when their hands were on me did I realize that all was lost, but the dead didn’t consume me. They dragged me out of the house, shambled the three blocks to the school, holding me tight in their rotted hands, shuffling in that loose-limbed, broken way that they had, until they’d pulled me up the stairs, through the front doors with their glass knocked out, down the hall strewn with books and abandoned backpacks, until we came to my room.

  Here, too, windows were broken, and the Venetian blinds hung askew. Morning sun slanted through the uneven slats. They pushed me toward my podium. I clung to the top, sick with fear. When would they kill me? Would I become like them?

  They stumbled against the desks, former students, all of them: Daniel, who used to play his guitar at lunch; Lisa, with her pierced lip and blue-dyed hair; Landon, who read manga and drew big-breasted girls in the back of his notebooks, all my students. They bumped into the chairs, moaning low in their throats, until they were sitting, a terrible parody of the class they once had been.

  What did they want, with their white-washed eyes and bruised faces? They looked at me, blank-faced, but ravenous, expectant, somehow. Hands gripped the sides of their desks. A breeze stirred a loose paper on the windowsill.

  Finally, Joselyn, a girl who used to look like she ran a brush through her long, brunette hair a thousand strokes before she came to class, raised her hand, her hair a knotted mess, now, her blouse, torn and stained. She raised her hand and waited.

  “Yes, Joselyn,” I squeaked.

  She opened her mouth, and for a while nothing came except a strangled gasping, until she forced the word: “Braaaiiins.” Her hand dropped with a thud. “Braaaiiins.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  She nodded. They all nodded.

  Was this what remained, after they died, after they reanimated? A desire to continue, to be a little bit of what they once were? Was it all habit? Would the athletes head to the gym after school to make layups? Would the marching band tramp across the field, their tuneless instruments dead in their grips?

  Joselyn said, “Braaaiiins,” a third time.

  I found a marker in the desk. What could be more surreal, but who was I after all? The world had ended. The apocalypse had arrived. Still, I was who I was. They were what they had become.

  I turned to the board. “Today, I will show you how to diagram sentences.” I wrote on the white surface. I drew lines and made connections and spoke the arcane language of grammar. When I faced the class again, they were silent and attentive.

  “Braaaiiins,” someone in the back groaned.

  By the time the sun had traveled to the horizon, I’d filled the board and erased it a dozen times. It didn’t matter what I talked about. They didn’t answer questions. They didn’t move.

  But they let me live.

  Tomorrow I think I’ll teach literature. Some Dickenson, some Poe. Tomorrow I’ll teach to the dead and for the moment pretend that the world will go on.

  Tomorrow they won’t have to drag me to school.

  SAVANAH IS SIX

  For as long as Poul could remember, he’d spent the summer at the lake where his brother drowned.

  This year, as they climbed in the van, Leesa said cryptically, “Savannah is six.”

  Poul held his hand on the ignition key but didn’t turn it. “I know.”

  Each year since Savannah was born, it got harder to come out. The nightmares started earlier, grew more vivid, woke him with a scream choked down, a huge hurting lump he swallowed without voicing. Poul took longer to pack the van; he delayed the day he left, and when he finally started, he drove below the speed limit.

  They pulled into the long, sloping driveway down to the cottage just after noon. Leesa had slept the last hour, and Savannah colored in the back seat, surrounded by baggage and groceries. Her head was down, very serious, turning a white sky into a blue one. She always struck Poul as a somber child, for six, as if there was something sad in her life that returned to her occasionally. Not that she didn’t smile or didn’t act silly at times, but he’d catch her staring out the window in her bedroom before she’d go to bed, or her hand would rest on a favorite toy without picking it up, and she seemed lost. She was quick to tears if either parent scolded her, which happened seldom, but even a spilled drink at dinner filled her eyes, the tears brimming at the edge, ready to slip away.

  Their cottage sat isolated by a spur of nature conservancy land on one side and on the other by a long, houseless, rocky stretch. He bought the place fourteen years earlier, the year after he married, from Dad, who didn’t use it anymore.

  Only a couple of hours from Terre Haute, Tribay Lake attracted a slower paced population; county covenants kept the skiers off, so the surface remained calm when the wind was low. From the air it looked like a three-leafed clover, with several miles of shoreline. An angler in a boat with a trolling motor could find plenty of isolated inlets covered with lily pads where the lunkers hung out.

  By mid-June the water warmed to swimming temperature—inner tubes were stacked next to the boat house for a convenient float—and the nights cooled off for sleeping. Poul and Leesa took the front room overlooking the lake. In the first years they’d opened the big windows wide at night to listen to crickets. Lately, though, he went to bed alone while she worked crossword puzzles, or she retired early and was asleep by the time he got there.

  Poul knew the lake by its smell and sounds—wet wood and fish and old barbeques, and waves lapping against the tires his dad had mounted on the pier to protect the boat, the late night birds trilling in the hills above the lake, and an echo of his mother’s voice, still ringing, when Neal didn’t come back. “Where’s your brother?” She’d asked, her eyes already wild. “Weren’t you watching Neal?” She called his name as she walked down the rocky shore looking for the younger son.

  Savannah closed her book and said, “I’m going to catch a big fish this year. I’m going to see him in my raft first, then I’ll hook him. But I want to visit Johnny Jacobs and his kittens first.” Over Poul’s objection, Leesa had bought Savannah a clear bottomed raft, just big enough to hold a child, and it was all she’d talked about for weeks.

  Poul said, “They won’t be kittens anymore, Speedy. That was last fall. They’ll be cats by now.” Gravel crunched under the wheels. Leesa didn’t move, her sweater still bunched between her head and the window.

  Poul wondered if she only pretended to be asleep. It was a good way to not converse, and the lean against the window kept her as far away from him as possible. “We’re here, Leesa,” he said, touching her hand. She didn’t flinch, so maybe she actually had been sleeping.

  Leesa rubbed her eyes, then pushed her short, black hair behind her ears. She’d started dying it last year even though Poul hadn’t noticed any gray. His hair had a couple of streaks now, but his barber told him it made him distinguished. At thirty-five, he thought “distinguished” was a good look.

  “I’m going to walk down to Kettle Jack’s to see if he has fresh corn for the grill. I like grilled corn my first night at the lake,” Leesa said. Poul wondered if she was talking to him. She’d turned her face to the side, where the oak slipped past.

  Poul pulled the car under the beat-up carport next to the cottage. Scrubby brush scraped against the bumper. Leesa opened the door and was gone before he could stop the engine. Savannah said, “I don’t like c
orn on the cob. Can we have hot dogs?”

  “Sure, Speedy.” On an elm next to the cottage, a frayed rope dangled, its end fifteen feet from the ground. Summers and summers ago, there’d been a knot in the end and Neal hung on while Poul pushed him. “Harder, Poul!” he’d yell, and Poul gave another shove, sending the younger boy spinning. Poul looked at the rope. He didn’t remember when it had broken; it seemed like this was the first time he’d seen it in years. With the door open now, forest smells filled the car: the peculiar lakeside forest essence that was all moss and ferns and rotted logs half buried in loam, damp with Indiana summer dew. He and Neal had explored the woods from the cottage to the highway, a half-mile of deadfall and mysterious paths only the deer used. They hunted for walking sticks and giant beetles, or, with peanut butter jars in hand, trapped bulbous spiders for later examination.

  Someone yelled in the distance, a child, and Poul jumped. He stood, his hands resting on the car’s roof. Between the cottage and the elms beside it, a slice of lake glimmered, and a hundred feet from shore, a group of children played on a permanently anchored oil drum and wood decked diving platform, whooping in delight.

  “I’d like mustard on mine, and then I’ll go see the kittens,” said Savannah. She had her duffel bag over her shoulder—it dragged on the ground—and was already moving toward the back door.

  “Sure, Speedy,” Poul said, although Savannah was already out of earshot. Poul arched, pushing his hands into his back. Sunlight cut through the leaves above in a million diamonds. He left the baggage in the car to walk to the shore. To his left, a mile away, partly around the lake’s curve, Kettle Jack’s long pier poked into the water. A dozen sailboats lay at anchor, their empty masts standing rock still in the windless day. Part way there, Leesa walked determinedly on the dirt path toward the lodge. Slender as the day they married. Long-legged. Satiny skin that bronzed after two days of sun. He remembered warm nights marvelling at the boundaries where the dark skin became white, how she murmured encouragement, laughing deep in her throat at shared joys.