Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  During the drive, I popped the CD into my player and listened to the velvet voice of a woman pronouncing the vowels and consonants of my father’s language. I couldn’t even spit the first half of the alphabet between my clumsy lips. Rolling an r was like tying a cherry stem in a bow. My tongue was a big oaf. I broke every crisp, delicate sound the woman offered me. I pulled into the hospital parking lot with a pile of splintered words in my lap.

  The hospital was so high into the foothills that the patients probably didn’t even have to worry about cockroaches. The parking lot brimmed full of cars with sunroofs and paint jobs and clean windows and two working headlights. It was real classy. I edged my truck into a space among them and took a walk to the main building. The wind had calmed, and the sun baked the earth with happy springtime beams.

  I walked past the front desk without making eye contact with anyone. I thought maybe they wouldn’t notice me. I figured I’d just sidle by. It worked, in that no one questioned me. They were too busy cradling their jaws, busted from dropping so fast. I got on the elevator with a gurney presided over by a muscular orderly. A woman lay swaddled inside. Only her wide blue eyes and an oxygen mask protruded from the blankets. We acted out the mummy meets Frankenstein’s monster. I dodged a few nurses in the halls of the third floor. The acrid stench of chemical cleaner and medicine hung over an undertone of suffering and disease.

  A nurse or two stumbled up to me, but I waved them away and found the room without a catastrophic fuss. The door stood open. I poked my head in and found a woman sitting up in a hospital bed. Her body lay long and willowy beneath the blanket, and slender brown arms lay beside her with hands folded on top of her stomach. Between narrow shoulders, her clavicles stood out above the line of her hospital gown. Auburn highlights shot through her dark brown curly hair. She had wide-set chestnut eyes, high cheekbones, and slender lips. Clean white bandages traced her left jawline. A dark and muscular man with thick hair and a firm jaw sat on the bed next to her. He looked like he made his money modeling hospital scrubs.

  The woman bloomed with happiness when she spotted me. “You found me!” Her voice could have belonged to any bubbly person on the face of the earth.

  I knew her despite the symmetrical face and the voice that spoke without a slur. The pitch rung sonorous and clear, the vowels hitting all the right notes, the consonants breaking crisp between her lips. Nothing was right about her. I said her name, and didn’t believe it even when her face lit up. A beautiful, happy Melodía spoke through a new face.

  “Come in!” She flapped the hand not attached to an IV. The guy turned his head and zapped me with some twinkling eye beams. He had the facial structure of a Greek statue. “I can’t believe you’re here!” Melodía said.

  I entered. “You―” She looked like a typical beautiful woman whose face happened to be swaddled in a few bandages. I didn’t know what to do with this new woman wearing half the face of my old friend. I opened my mouth to talk and left it like that for a while. I finally got out a few words. “You’re different.” I tried to feel happy about it.

  She beamed. “I look in the mirror, and I see the person I’ve always known I was.”

  “You look great.” I’d heard people on TV say such words to each other. If you memorized enough of TV, you didn’t ever have to say what you meant.

  “Thank you,” she cooed. “I feel so good. It’s so good to hear you say that.”

  “She’s ravishing, isn’t she?” The man said. He had a voice like oiled leather. His forearms were made of grade A beef, and the left one rested next to Melodía’s knee.

  Melodía blushed. “This is my physical therapist, Bruce.”

  I didn’t like Bruce. His five-o’clock shadow and straight white teeth made me angry.

  “Bruce.” She touched the hand connected to the forearm. “This is John Stick, my best friend.”

  “Great to meet you,” he said, barely looking at me. He got up. He had excellent posture. He’d obviously never had to slouch around under the burden of a lifetime of self-doubt and evil eyes. He touched Melodía on the shoulder. “I’ll leave you two alone.” His cologne hung in the air after he left. It made me want to wash out my nostrils with roach spray.

  “So,” I said, “you’ve experienced a miracle.”

  Melodía spoke. I could barely follow the words. It was like knowing someone your whole life and then meeting their identical twin. She was familiar but utterly strange. “A week ago. It was a complicated procedure. Bruce has been monitoring the muscles in my face to make sure they’re functioning properly. He’s a miracle worker. I’ll have some small scars around my jawline. Besides that, I’ll be normal!”

  “Your surgeon’s the miracle worker,” I said.

  “My surgeon!” She spun sentences out of her face with all the enthusiasm of a teenage cheerleader who’d learned nothing about the miseries of life. “Dr. Hudson. He’s English. They flew him in from the Mayo Clinic.”

  I already knew ‘them.’ The orange dust on her shoes had told me everything I needed to know. John White had systemically dismantled my life with the intention of replacing it with blood sucking Greek monsters. He’d soon send my father back to his happy homeland, and now he’d cured my best friend. If he made enough of the people close to me happy, I’d have no one left. I’d been too miserable too long to change. The world was a compost bin. Life lived and died, new life sprouted from the dead, and each living being’s rotten core stunk more than the last.

  I vomited up a smile from my stinking rotten guts. It made it through my teeth, but barely. “Are you going to tell me how this miracle occurred? I thought your tumors were inoperable.”

  “Apparently, a lot has happened over the past two decades.” She looked exactly like a normal―no, she looked better. She was prettier than a normal. “Plastic surgery has made progress.”

  “Imagine that. Progress.”

  “Yeah.” A little of the bitter, sardonic woman I knew sliced through. “I always thought progress was for normals.”

  I wanted to tell her that she wasn’t allowed to use that word anymore. It was reserved for those us of still held in the thrall of abnormality. Instead, I apologized for not bringing her flowers.

  “Don’t worry. My benefactor sends me flowers every morning. I’m so lucky.”

  “Yes. You are lucky.” I added some nods to convince everybody that I meant it. Half of me did. The other half pitied her for feeling so lucky with what every other human was born with. There’s nothing more pathetic than a dog that gives you doe eyes simply for not kicking it.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to ask me who my benefactor is?”

  “I don’t want to pry,” I lied.

  “His name is John White.”

  My guts rotted a little more.

  “He’s the president of Typhon Industries, and he set up the surgery in exchange for some information sharing.” Her face sobered a touch. “He’s studying the birds, Stick. I was at a dead end. I couldn’t figure it out. I gave Typhon Industries my data and they gave me this.” She framed her face in her hands as if she were showing off a particularly resplendent piece of jewelry.

  “Sounds like a great deal,” I said.

  Her smile went stale. “You don’t look happy for me.”

  “I’m happy for you,” I murmured. “I’m also exhausted.”

  “Tell me about it. Long hours at the zoo?”

  I could have told her everything. But we had nothing in common anymore. I couldn’t talk to her about anything that mattered. I could barely look her in the eye. “Yeah, and a little worried about my best friend, who disappeared without telling me.”

  “That’s sweet.” She reached toward me with her free arm, as if to tenderly touch her fingertips to my cheek. I stood near the door of the room and impersonated an oak. When I didn’t move toward her, she let her hand fall atop the blanket. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t. It was something I needed to do
alone.”

  “I get it,” I said. I knew what it felt like to do things alone.

  We chatted a little bit more. She reviewed the nuts and bolts of the procedure with me, the hours of work her team of surgeons had logged in the OR to remove the tumors and restructure the system of arteries, muscles, and underlying tissue. How they’d peeled her face from the jaw line so that the incision would hide in the shadows beneath her jaw. How it had gone flawlessly and after only a week, the swelling was down, blood flowed, feeling was sharp, and the incision site was healing like magic.

  “And now”―she smiled in a way I’d never seen before―“I can have a good life.”

  I said some more words about how happy I was for her, and as soon as I could, ducked back into the hallway, making my escape among the nurses padding back and forth on rubber soles and the moans of dying invalids and the cloying hospital stink. I took a lungful of that stink with me into the parking lot and released it. With that double fistful of breath, I saw a friendship vanish into the bright desert day.

  I twisted the key into my truck’s ignition. The Spanish-speaking woman poured her velvet voice into the cab. The sounds she made were beautiful. Every feature of every syllable adhered to a perfect form. I’d never make those sounds. I’d never live up to the templates that the normals crammed themselves into. I punched the eject button, rolled down my window, and hurled the gleaming silver disc at the sun.

  went home and haunted my cave. No one called. No one came by. I kept company with my spider, and the rest of society forsook me. I lay on my long sectional couch, the only piece of furniture that fit me. It was freakish and modular, a Frankenstein. I lay on it for an absurd span, unable to sleep. The sun stretched the shadows of the pines across my patio. They looked like dark doppelgängers of trees, but really, they marked an absence of light. The shadows morphed as day grew thin. They prickled with spikes. They grew taller, thinner, and more monstrous until the sun set, and then they vanished into universal darkness. I lay there as the stars irradiated the patio with feeble light and as the life of night awoke, skittering amidst the desiccated bramble of late winter, chirping in the corners of my escape-proof room. I stayed up all night tracking the movements of the tiny lives of nocturnal creatures. Even they thought their lives had purpose, and they went about fulfilling it without question or self-consciousness.

  The three humans in my life were like the shadows of the trees. They could transform. Melodía had vanquished the part of herself that had made her my kin. She could flit among the normals now without any hint that she’d once been shunned by them. My father had chosen to give up our life together and metamorphose into the man he’d once been. He could fold himself back into the family and language he’d never shared with me. And Rex. He’d found compassion and joined a movement, where he’d become just another ranch hand. I lay on my couch laughing about it. I was a tree. I’d always be a tree. No miracle could transform me. No country or movement would accept me.

  When the sun rose, I still lay awake. I decided to stay that way across the span of the day, into the next night, to eventually witness another sunrise without shutting my eyes. It would be the same sun, and I’d be the same man watching it. By the time that second dawn arrived, I vowed never to sleep again. I vowed to sit and watch the sun fly through the air like a celestial yoyo until I was immortal.

  I stood during the day after that second dawn. My legs worked by remote control. I hit my head on the doorframe of my bedroom. I switched on my bathroom light and found a man in that cramped cabin. Yellow stained the armpits of his undershirt beneath his stooped shoulders. His limbs, like the long and spare limbs of winter trees, clumped with muscle and bone at the joints. Thick brown hairs stippled his oaken skin. His eyes, like black stones thrown in a sandpit, gleamed from their deep places nestled in the harsh geology of bone. His teeth were big and crooked and his lips sloughed skin like a snake having trouble molting. I let myself look at this monster and hate him. I let myself be honest and thorough about it. I’d hated John Stick for a long time.

  I went to the kitchen and removed a can of black paint from beneath the sink. Taking a brush, screwdriver, and stir stick, I returned to the bathroom. After setting the paint can on the toilet and prying the lid off, I dipped the brush in the can and painted the mirror in broad, careful strokes. The paint beaded and ran at first, but I smoothed and thickened it until no light gleamed through. The full-length mirror that had come mounted to the closet door held the paint a little better, as did the faces of the microwave and the oven. I saw faint specters of a giant hanging in the windows overlooking my patio and painted them. It was tough going and I nearly ran out of paint. It lasted just long enough to cover up the same phantom giant in the television screen.

  After cleaning the brush with turpentine and placing it on a paper towel on the windowsill to dry, I retrieved the shoebox of photographs from beneath my bed and set it on my bar. Outside, I gathered twigs and pine needles from the litter layer under the skirts of the trees and fluffed them in a small pile in my kitchen sink. A wooden match set them ablaze. Once I’d removed the battery from my smoke detector and activated the extractor fan above my stove, I stood over the fire and added clusters of photos like I was folding hands of cards in a poker game, one after the other. Greasy smoke trailed up like the agonized appendages of a tortured creature. I breathed in the poison fumes of my life. Little Johnny Stick in a rusted red wagon with ragged bangs in his eyes. Little Johnny Stick standing in a dirt yard looking at a gray cat. Stick in his third grade photo as tall as his teacher. Stick cramped behind the wheel of his father’s green Datsun in the snow, the trees in the background, spindly, brown, and as knobby as the boy’s hands gripping the wheel. Stick’s crooked mother holding his fingers in her twisted, broken hands just weeks before she died. Stick’s father smoking a cigarette in the yard with thirteen-year-old Stick towering over him. Stick at his high school graduation, the robe sweeping at his knees, looking past the camera at something out of view, a frown on his long, brown face.

  I fed the pictures in until they were black husks, like the skin shed by a snake made of despair. The ceiling above the sink rippled with the black stains of memories burned away. The fire slowly died. Through my black windows, I couldn’t tell what time of day it was. My apartment had sunken into permanent night, and I’d transformed into a nocturnal monster that would never sleep again.

  Someone came for me a few hours after the fifth dawn. I’d spent the past dozen or two hours pacing my carpet. The someone knocked on the door. Without thinking, I opened it. All the blood drained out of Tony’s face. I must have looked even worse than I imagined, which meant that my gaze probably stopped just shy of turning him to stone on the spot.

  “God man… What happened to you?”

  “I’ve evolved,” I said. “I no longer need food or water.”

  He surveyed me as if I were a shattered vase that he were somehow responsible for piecing back together into a functional whole. It would take a miracle. “We need to get a cup of coffee into you.”

  “Very sound. I’ll get to growing the beans.”

  He herded me backwards into the apartment with some flapping of his hands and gestured at the barstool. “Sit. Don’t move.”

  I obeyed. I wasn’t sure whether this was the real Tony or whether he was a new and more advanced chupacabra, but I determined that it was best to listen to him―or it―until I had more information. What I could tell was that he had colors coming out of his ears. Or maybe my eyes just needed rest.

  He gave me a glass of water. I waited until his back was turned before I poured it into one of my shoes. He started some coffee brewing. The water filtered through the shoe and spread across the floor in a dark gray octopus. The sputtering and steaming of the coffee machine made me tear up. My coffee maker sounded like it was in so much pain. I wanted to liberate my coffee machine. I wanted to find a nice marshy bend of the Rio Grande, and set it beneath the shade of some cottonwoods whe
re it could be free to live out its natural life.

  “Wow.” Tony was looking at my empty glass. “You were thirsty.”

  I smiled at him. Real big.

  He rolled back on his heels. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. It’s quite an experience.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m only now feeling happiness for the first time. It’s a very special emotion. No wonder everyone’s talking about it.”

  “You on something?” he asked. “Head-shrink dope?”

  “I’m on life. It’s what’s hot right now.”

  Tony stuck his pointer finger in my face. “I need to tell you something. I want you to listen and not say anything batty.”

  I listened.

  “Are you listening?”

  I nodded and titled my ears toward him. I had the feeling I was about to hear the most important news of my life.

  Tony hung his pointer there for a few more moments. Then he slapped me. His hand left a bright streak in the air. I blinked. The whole room flared red and then faded slowly back to the color of newspaper.

  I blinked my eyes a few times. “Thanks. I needed that.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  I felt like he’d jerked all my gears together. “How about that coffee?”

  “That’s my boy,” he said and loaded up a mug with sugar.

  “Black.”

  “Today you’re taking it the way I say you are.”

  I couldn’t argue. I sipped the concoction. My body lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “You’re a good man.”

  “We’re both good men, John Stick. That’s all we can ever try to be.”

  This was the deepest day of my life. “You’re right. All we can do is try to be good.”