by Jill Smith
“Is that what you think, too? That I shouldn’t have dragged you here?”
“It was my choice.”
“No, it wasn’t. What were you gonna say to us? To me? What fucking choice did you have? You didn’t have a clue what you were getting into.”
Imms stares at the floor. He can barely count the loops in the carpet. His brain feels unanchored, like his heart. Drifting around his skull.
B paces. “Whatever we were, whatever we had when we were on your planet, it’s gone here, isn’t it? And now you want to leave.”
“Fuck you,” Imms says. Not faking anger—feeling it. His body wants to move farther and more quickly than he can in this house, and maybe if he lights a fire in B they’ll both go somewhere. Somewhere no one else can touch them.
“Then where is it? What is it?”
Imms shakes his head. If he opens his mouth, he will throw up or cry. “You stopped wanting me,” he shouts finally.
“I stopped wa—I gave up everything for you! What kind of a life do you think this is for me, feeding you, exercising you, training you like a goddamn dog?”
Lady barks at the raised voice.
“Worrying about you when I have to work late, wondering if NRCSE’s gonna snatch you away, feeling like I can’t go anywhere without—”
“I never asked you to do any of that.”
“There’s not a saint in history who could deal with all you need.”
“I don’t need anything! You’re the one who won’t let me take care of myself. It’s humans who need and need. I was okay. I was fine until you got there.”
“You’re right. We do need. I needed some kind of connection on that godforsaken planet. I needed something to remind me I was alive. But now…we’re holding something up that wants to sink. Let’s let it sink.” His voice softens. He sounds urgent now, pleading. “You can still live here, with me. We just won’t be—”
“Stop,” Imms shouts. He shouts it again and again, and the word acts as a barrier, keeping B from approaching him, touching him. Finally B retreats.
Hours later, Imms is alone in the house. B has gone somewhere; he didn’t say where. Imms flips the pages of Tin Star and Thunder Sam. He has given up trying to concentrate on the words. It’s is not the same story when it’s not in Grena’s voice.
He wants to see Grena sitting on the bright earth with the black sky all around her, wants to see her lips move, wants to hear the words for the first time and not know what they mean. He wants to feel light slipping through the dark shell around his mind, touching raw, ready space, making him aware of just how much he doesn’t know.
He thinks a part of him has always understood Earth, anger, humans, space, pain, and love. He just needed the right pieces to touch one another.
He closes the book. He can only think of one way to stop B’s guilt, to unfold his darkness and expose it to light. One way to stop being a criminal and a liar. To make people understand that Vir was a good person, not a murderer.
Imms has to tell the truth.
He has to tell Earth that the fire was his fault. Not Vir’s. Not B’s. Not even Joele’s.
If he does this, he might go to jail. Or to NRCSE for good. He certainly won’t be allowed to stay with B.
It’s very important to tell the truth, Imms, Sandy said. Do you understand that? If you don’t, bad things can happen.
Bad things have happened to Imms because he is a liar. Because he pretended to be human.
He knows now what he is and knows he doesn’t deserve B, or Mary, or Brid. Even if B claims he wants to keep Imms safe by lying about the fire, Imms knows B would be relieved if the world knew the truth.
This is his chance to rescue B. Rescuing someone doesn’t just mean pulling them off a burning ship or busting them out of an outlaw prison. B hurts, and Imms can stop it.
“You need to tell the truth, even if you didn’t tell it before. Even if you think it will get you or someone else in trouble.”
“Okay,” he whispers.
It’s not easy, though. Every time he thinks about what he has to do, he seems to break apart. Tears come. He feels more human than ever.
But finally Imms goes to the bedroom and opens B’s laptop.
Chapter Thirty-Five
NRCSE is going to burn Vir’s journals. Maybe not burn them. B doesn’t know exactly what they’ll do. But Vir’s words will disappear, and her reputation will stay intact. The Byzantine fire will be catalogued as an accident. B and Grena will keep their medals. Imms will remain a hero.
B is more than ready to move on. To snap the past in half and toss it aside. But it leaps back at him, inexhaustible.
The pages he copied from Vir’s journals were from her early months on the Silver Planet. The months she spent happy. He puts the copies in an envelope and drives to a small yellow house in a neighborhood on the edge of town. He double checks the house number, is relieved the garage is closed, the lights off. He wouldn’t actually be able to have a conversation with Vir’s parents. But he was curious enough about where they lived to deliver the envelope in person rather than mailing it. He wonders if this is the house where Vir grew up. If she played in this small, patchy yard. If she pretended her sandbox was another planet.
He wonders how her parents grieved for her. If they still do. B has never really grieved for anyone. Grief is not the raw, tender mess people think it is. Grief happens when the wound is already scabbed over. You can point to someone’s grief like a tattoo on their ankle and ask, “Did it hurt?” They say, for a little bit. It is the cicada shell of the real feeling—which is not a feeling at all, but an absence of feeling so great that no matter how you reach, you’re always touching nothing. Grief is not the true, dripping heartmeat of what it means to lose.
He walks up to the front porch and puts the envelope in Vir’s parents’ mailbox. Then he drives. He thinks he might be going home to apologize to Imms, but he ends up at his mother’s house. She lets him in and doesn’t ask how he is. She leads him into the kitchen, sits him at the table, and gives him a glass of water.
She hugs him, and it’s too hard, almost painful, but also too short. She asks him to tell her everything, and he does—or most of it. From the moment he met Imms to the moment he shut the door this morning.
“And the world’s still turning,” Mary says when he’s done.
His mother’s brisk, easy confidence is still there. It drove him crazy as a kid, but it made him brave even when he was sure he couldn’t be.
“I’ve lied to everyone.”
Mary taps his shoulder and goes for the cheap wine on top of the fridge. She pours them each a glass. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.”
“What do I do?”
“First,” Mary says, “call Imms.”
“I can’t talk to him.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t help him.”
His mother doesn’t ask what he means. “Tell him what matters.”
“What’s that?”
“That you love him.”
“How do I know I do?”
“Of course you do. Love is all of it. The moments you can’t stand him. The moments you think you’d be better off alone.”
B rubs his temples. “Why are you alone? If you know so much about it.”
Mary doesn’t flinch. “You can love him even if you’re not always together. But say the words, because he needs to hear them. Because that’s a starting point.”
“And after that?”
Mary stands. “I’m going to make lunch. You get him over here, and we’ll have a meal. We’re not going one step farther on empty stomachs.”
B takes out his phone and calls the house. It rings and rings.
Mary hums in the kitchen. And B waits.
*
Imms sits on the bus with his hat pulled down and his scarf up over his nose. He remembers the building is near the Rose Sanctuary, because Brid pointed it out on their first drive to Rose. When he sees the familiar lo
go, he pulls the cord to request a stop. He realizes when he steps off the bus that he probably could have waited, gotten closer to the building. But he doesn’t mind walking.
The lights are bright inside. The floor is reflective tile. His eyes try to find dark space, but there is none. He goes to the desk.
“Can I help you?” the young man asks. His smile falls as he looks at Imms.
“I need to see Elise Fischer.”
“Elise. Um, do you have an appointment?”
A woman in heels clacks over, mouth hanging open. “Is that…?” she asks the man, as though Imms is not there.
“He wants to see Elise.”
“Well I’ll go get her,” the woman says as though she can’t believe the man is stupid enough to still be sitting there. She glances at Imms, flashes him a quick smile.
She clacks back about ten minutes later, followed by a short, pretty blonde woman Imms immediately recognizes, though she looks smaller in person. Imms wonders why that is when TV is just a tiny, flat box, and the real world is enormous. She walks up to Imms and offers her hand. “Elise Fischer.”
“I’m Imms.”
“Imms. A pleasure. It’s quite a surprise to see you here. Where’s your handler?”
“He’s not here.”
“You’re alone?” Elise seems curious but not frightened.
“Yes.”
“Well, come on back to my dressing room and sit down.”
Elise’s dressing room has a plant. Imms likes plants, and this one wants water. He tells Elise this, and she laughs. “I’m afraid I don’t have a green thumb, Imms.” She sits at her table. Imms tries not to look at the large mirror in front of them. “So. I’m dying to know why you’re here.”
B used that phrase once: “I’m dying to know…” All Imms heard was “I’m dying,” and the rush of fear was so great that it took several minutes for his heart to move again, to stop hiding.
“I want to go on the news,” he says, “and talk about being on Earth.”
For the first time, Elise looks a little nervous. “Does anybody know about this?”
He shakes his head. “It’s my choice.”
She nods. “It absolutely is.” Elise reaches for the phone on the table and presses a button. “Jonathan? Tell Meryl we’re scrapping the goat lawn-mowing thing. I’m going to interview the Silver at one.”
“Got it,” voice from the phone says.
“You look tired,” Elise says to Imms. “Can I get you coffee? Tea?”
“Water?” Imms asks.
She pulls a bottle from a small refrigerator under the table and hands it to him. He drinks half, gives the rest to the plant. “Will the captain be worried?” she asks. “Does he know you’re here?”
“He’s at work.”
Jonathan brings in some papers. He and Elise whisper for a minute. Jonathan leaves, and Elise slides the papers toward Imms. “If we’re going to do this, I have to make sure I have your consent to be interviewed and recorded. Read these over… Can you read?”
Imms nods.
“Okay. Read, then sign. If you have any questions, just ask.”
Imms barely glances at the forms. It doesn’t matter what they say. He signs.
“I have to know before we start if any topics are off-limits,” Elise says. “Things you don’t want me to ask you about.”
“No,” Imms says. “You can ask me about fucking if you want. Bridique does.”
Elise gets a strange look on her face. Then she laughs. “I won’t ask you about that,” she says. “We’re network.”
Imms doesn’t know what that means, but he laughs, too.
At twelve-thirty, Jonathan takes Imms to another room to pick out a suit. Imms dresses, then someone guides him to a mirror and puts powder on his face. It makes him look like paste. Like mashed potatoes.
Soon he is sitting in a chair across from Elise, bright lights shining all around. He has a microphone clipped to his suit jacket. Somebody says, “Rolling.”
Elise speaks to one of the cameras. “Good afternoon, I’m Elise Fischer with Channel 5 News. I’m in the studio today with a visitor from another planet.” When she says the word planet, Imms thinks suddenly of the whole universe, bits of everything floating in nothing. How strange it is that when this interview is on TV, millions of humans will see it, but right now Elise is talking to nobody.
“You’ve all heard about Imms, a member of an alien race called the Silvers,” Elise continues. “Imms was brought to Earth by the two surviving members of last year’s Silver Planet mission, and has been living under strict government supervision for the last nine months. Now he’s come to us with the request that he be allowed to tell his story. So Imms, let’s start at the beginning.” She sits back a little. “Tell us how you first encountered humans.”
The first few questions are easy, and as Imms answers them, he feels the ache in his scars fade. He feels more like himself. Not the self he’s been lately, but the self he was when he first arrived on Earth. He forgets about the cameras, about Elise. He remembers Grena, and learning English, and Tin Star and Thunder Sam. He leaves out Joele, but he says that he was hurt and B found him. He likes remembering this, even though it means remembering pain and losing blood. He likes to imagine B digging him out of the ground, even though he wasn’t awake for it.
He slowly forgets the B who stormed out of the house this morning and remembers only the B who loved him.
“You said Silvers can’t feel anger,” Elise says. “But you can?”
“I think so,” Imms says. “I learned to. I was angry when I came here today.”
“And why was that?”
“B doesn’t want to be in love with me anymore.”
Elise blinks twice. Her lips are parted. “I think a lot of our viewers are probably surprised to learn that your relationship with the captain is, or was, romantic in nature. We were given the impression that he is your—your caretaker.”
Imms nods. “I tried to take care of him, too.”
Elise’s expression is soft, wondering. She is not performing for the camera anymore. “This may be a difficult question for you to answer, but do you think your motivation in coming here today was revenge?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because the captain told you he didn’t want to be with you anymore?”
“I was mad,” Imms says. “I’m not anymore.” Imms suddenly feels cold, despite the heat from the lights. “Don’t tell him. Don’t tell him I was mad.”
Elise hands him a glass of water, and he drinks. “Let‘s go back to the issue of emotion, Imms, because I’m curious. When did you begin to experience anger? Do you remember?”
“The fire.” He pauses. “I didn’t rescue B.” The words aren’t as hard to say as he’d imagined. He’s wanted to say them for a long time. “He rescued me. The fire was my fault.”
Lines appear between Elise Fischer’s eyebrows and across her forehead. “What do you mean?”
Imms undoes the first few buttons of his shirt. Elise looks nervous again. He shows her his scars. “I was in the lab. On the table. And she was burning me.”
“Who was?”
“Joele. I wasn’t supposed to go near the ship. But I did and she found me, and she made a small fire. She burned me, and I knocked the fire to the floor. It got on her clothes. I escaped from the table, but I couldn’t help her. I tried. Then I slept—I mean, passed out. And B saved me.”
“Okay.” Elise says it like she’s reassuring him. Or herself. “That’s not the story we’ve been told.”
Imms shakes his head. “B said I’d be safe here if humans thought I was a hero. But now B feels guilty all the time because we lied. I went to the lab when I wasn’t supposed to. I made the fire grow. I killed Joele, and Vir, and Gumm.”
Imms doesn’t remember if he answered her original question or not, so he adds: “I think the burning is what made me angry. At first.”
*
Elise gives him another bott
le of water for the road. She thanks him and shakes his hand again. She says, quietly so that no one else can hear, “I’m truly sorry.”
He doesn’t want to wait for the bus, so he walks past the building, keeps going until he reaches the Rose Sanctuary.
The guard at the entrance is the same one who was there when Imms first visited. Josh. “Hey,” he says, grinning. “Silver man.”
“Is Bridique here?” Imms asks.
Chapter Thirty-Six
They lie on Bridique’s bed. The room smells grown-up, elegant.
“You’re a caveman,” Bridique says. “Swinging your club at rival cavemen. Painting stick deer on the wall. Creating fire.”
“You’re an angel,” Imms says. “Soaring around heaven. Playing a—what’s it called?”
“Trumpet?”
“With strings.”
“A harp.”
“Harp. And you play the best of all the angels. But you want to play rock n’ roll, and all they want to play is Heaven music.”
Brid laughs. “That would be me.”
“How do you win this game?” Imms asks.
“You don’t. It’s wishful thinking. No winners.”
Imms looks at the rough plaster of the ceiling. “How about I’m a superhero? And when B tries to kill me, I turn invisible, or run through walls.”
“He’s not going to kill you.”
“I shouldn’t’ve told the news we were in love.”
“I’m glad you did,” Brid says.
Imms isn’t sure what she means. “Now people know the fire was my fault. Will I have to live at NRCSE, do you think? Or just jail?”
Brid shakes her head. “The fire was Joele’s fault. Plain and simple.”
“But I—”
“Can it. Whether Channel 5 airs it or not, you did a brave thing. And you won’t go to jail.”
“But I lied.”
“B lied.”
“He did it to protect me.”
“Partly. And partly to protect himself. I love my brother, but he is selfish, selfish.”
“He’s a good captain.”
“And sometimes he’s an idiot dickwad who tries to swing across Shit Creek and ends up neck deep.”