by Nick Gevers
Callum texted Abby. Where are you? He couldn’t tell if it went through. A tall zombie in a green coat staggered toward them, chomping his teeth. He broke character to clap Callum on the back. Juarez.
“Z’up, Callum?” Juarez said, “Mrs. Fitzpatrick.”
“Hey,” Callum said. “Don’t eat me.” He offered him the jerky and Juarez gnawed off a chunk of venison.
“Dude. I met your girlfriend. She’s tasty.” Juarez waved over a too pretty, blue- haired zombie, who staggered a bit, then dropped the act.
“Mrs. F. What happened to you?” Abby asked.
Lily said, “Struck by lightning.”
“Oh my god! Really?”
“Sort of,” Callum said, but she didn’t press, and he was glad, because he didn’t want to explain.
“The aliens are inside the city limits.” Abby said, wide-eyed.
“We know,” Callum said.
“We saw some at the Festival Village.”
“Kristian Foden-Vencil just interviewed some sciencetard on the radio,” Juarez cut in. “About how the aliens are zapping our asses. They eat rare earth and create magnetic energy fields.” Juarez smirked. “Magnetricity. They eat dirt, man, and they shit magnets. They are, like, totally alien.”
Abby said, “Rare earths are minerals—not dirt—and they’re using the rare earths to make magnetic mono-poles. Magnets with only one pole. Not north and south. Just north. Yin with no yang.”
“Or Yang with no yin,” Callum said. He liked how she wasn’t afraid to be smart.
“Dudes. This is cutting-edge crap,” Juarez said. “It’s not even in our physics text.”
“Our physics texts are thirty years old.” Callum said.
“This just doesn’t seem real,” Abby said.
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Callum said, watching a girl walk by on her hands.
“Any more jerky?” Lily said.
“I thought your mom didn’t eat meat,” Juarez whispered.
Callum shrugged and handed the bag to his mother. “We gotta get home and rescue Grandma Vera.”
“Oh,” said Juarez. He looked guilty. “I forgot to tell you something important.”
“What?”
“We saw your grandma down at the Village, playing Our Lady of the Alien Spheres. She looks like she’s wearing an electric Lady GaGa bubble dress. The aliens are all over her. But here’s the weird thing—she remembered me. She never remembers me. Wacktacular.”
Callum heard his voice getting high and tight, like Lily’s voice when she chewed him out. “That’s what’s weird? My grandmother is swimming in lightning-spitting aliens, and you’re all, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you’?”
Abby looked pale under her hastily applied green. “That old lady was Callum’s grandma?”
“You saw her, too?”
“I didn’t know you were related,” Abby said. “Sorry.”
“At least you don’t have to walk across the bridge,” Juarez said.
This is your brain on drugs, Callum thought, but he craved a smoke himself.
A guy at the back of the zombie flashmob chanted “Braaaaains” and on cue the zombies surged toward the river.
“Let’s find Grandma,” Callum said, swept up in the march of the undead.
Everything and everyone converged on the waterfront. A constellation of blue spheres spilled out from Stark Street. More unearthly glow, deep orange, on the Morrison Bridge. If you weren’t drunk or stoned you were scared. People were drinking and dancing out onto Naito Parkway. Most of the Rose Festival Village tents were knocked down, vendor stalls abandoned. The city was lit up with blue and red and gold.
Abby put her hand on Callum’s elbow. “How often does your grandma run away?”
“Not usually,” he said, distracted by her touch.
A male police officer stood guard while his lady partner cuffed a skeezy guy wearing only a glow-in-the-dark orange life jacket and unlaced Doc Martens boots. It was gross. Not something you wanted your mother or your girlfriend to see. Girlfriend. Hardly. Good thing she couldn’t read his thoughts.
“Callum,” Abby said. “Look.” She pointed to a bunch of men marching toward the main stage. They hoisted a woman on their shoulders with green spheres orbiting around her head.
Grandma Vera. She did look like Lady GaGa. Well, Lady GaGa’s grandma. Her legs were crossed demurely at the ankles and she was fingering her moon agate choker.
“Whoa,” Juarez said. “It’s like some mosh Aztec ritual. Like the Mother Goddess Coatlicue with her necklace made from human hearts.”
Grandma Vera’s handlers deposited her on a bed of plywood. One of the men presented her with a pickle jar before backing away. She rose slowly to her feet.
“Callum,” Lily said, her voice heavy somehow. “Help Mom.”
He didn’t want to let go of the wheelchair handles.
“I’ll stay,” Abby said.
Lily nodded her approval.
Juarez said, “Dude, I’m coming with you,” and the two boys pushed through the crowd, body-chucking anyone who looked too drunk to shove back. Sirens blared in the distance. You could smell beer and popcorn and dread. Usually the Festival night sky blazed with carnival rides and the streaking circle of the Ferris wheel, but tonight the sky bloomed with alien light. The rain had faded to a drizzle. Faces tipped from shadow to a warm green light.
Juarez aimed his phone to snap a picture. Onstage Grandma Vera pulled a moon agate from her pickle jar and held it up to the crowd. Her greenies surged upward, mimicking the motion of her hand. They wanted that moon agate.
The pickle jar was full of moon agates.
Callum did the math. Holy shit. Grandma Vera was screwed.
Juarez saw it, too. “Rare earth, dude. Maybe you can distract the aliens with my cell,” Juarez said, and slipped his phone into Callum’s pocket.
He had two cell phones. No way to know how many aliens that would feed. “Help me up,” Callum said, and Juarez laced his fingers together so Callum could climb to the stage. “Hey, Grandma,” he called. “It’s me.”
Grandma Vera ignored him.
Callum offered up the phones, but Grandma’s green spheres showed no interest. Maybe the aliens were finished with feeding and had moved on to another phase. Grandma Vera leaned over like she wanted to throw her moon agate into the audience. Seemed like a really bad idea. Callum reached out by instinct and stopped her by closing his hand over hers. The alien spheres widened their orbit until they were circling them both. Welcome to Grandma’s world, Callum thought. Great.
“Grandma,” he said. “It’s Callum. I need you to give me that moon agate thingy.”
“Oh, honey,” she said. “These look like agates but they’re much more special.” She relaxed her veiny hand in his, and his fingers closed around the not-agate. “Your grandfather and I bought out every rock hound in the Gorge. We didn’t know what they were, but I liked them.” She dipped her free hand into the jar and came out with four more not-agates, five.
Blue aliens streamed across the broken tents and the sparse police line, into the crowd. They floated over the outstretched hands of zombies, steampunks and children, drunks, hipsters and fools. More poured out of the streets of downtown, a patchwork of red spheres and white and violet, all floating toward Vera. The aliens looked the same, just different colors. Like cousins coming together for a family reunion.
Blue aliens joined the green in their widening circuit around Vera, and now there were twelve orbs whizzing around her. More heading her way.
Callum closed his fingers around the wide glass mouth of the jar. This wasn’t in the manual. “You have to give me all the special rocks, Grandma.” He bent to kiss her on the forehead, and she let go of the heavy jar with a sigh. She was still so strong, carrying this all the way from the Hawthorne district. Or maybe magnetricity had fueled her strength. “Gimme your necklace, too.”
Vera made a sweeping gesture that brought her hand dangerously close to one of
the spheres, and he tensed up and felt like puking at the thought of her getting fried. But the circle she made with her arm stopped inches short of the closest alien. “Okay, dear. We’re family. Whatever I have is yours.” She unfastened the hook, and Callum let her drop it into the pickle jar. He held the jar close to his chest. The aliens’ focus changed and their orbit closed around him. They were his aliens now. His shoulder blades tried to touch across his back. This was what he’d wanted, right?
“Stay here, Grandma. Stay here,” he said. He scrambled off the stage with the pickle jar. Magnetricity lined up his red blood cells like a stack of coins. His eyebrows and lashes popped up and his scalp tingled. “Get away,” he said to a wide- eyed woman trying to bow down to him in the mud. He stepped over a passed-out hippie and crammed his hand in the top of the jar to keep any rocks from falling out, the way you’d cram your hand into a French horn bell to bend the pitch.
He stumbled onto the bike path, his boots falling loud against the cement. Few people ventured near the water, afraid, maybe, of falling into the darkness. The river smelled muddy, wild after the day’s rains. The aliens were dazzling and bright, beautiful, just as Grandma Vera had said. But who had asked them to come here and mess up his life? Oh, yeah. Probably Grandma.
Blue and green aliens followed him. This was like that game of hot potato. You did not want to be left holding the pickle jar. Grandma Vera had found the McNugget rocks in the river basin years ago. He didn’t know why the aliens had come back to this river now. He didn’t want to know. He just wanted them to go back into hiding.
Good music worked because it created a melody that dissolved into unbearable tension as patterns were repeated, unexpected dissonances introduced. You threw in harmony that pulled you toward a resolution. The air felt like those tense moments before the music became pleasurable again. He held the jar by the lip and spun around once, twice, three times, like an Olympic hammer thrower. He let go and the jar soared over the Willamette. Green and blue aliens swooped along the parabola of the jar’s path until it dropped into the river. The aliens hovered just above the surface. Water splashed up and crackled like breaking ice as it met the flame-bright edges of the spheres.
“Callum! Callum!” Abby called. She and Juarez battled the mud to move the wheelchair forward. Vera stomped along behind them. When they reached Callum, Lily held out her good hand to hold his.
They watched the spheres form a circle over the water. White, red, gold, joined blue and green. The perimeter expanded as more arrived. Maybe a hundred aliens in all. A psychedelic light show reflected up from the water. He forgot to remember to be afraid.
The circle divided like a class breaking into small groups, with formations of three aliens here, five aliens there. A red with a green and a yellow and a purple, a blue with orange and dirty gold. In the small groups the aliens lost their spherishness. The colors ran and the shapes rushed together. A sound rose, a feverish, buzzing, deafening cosmic amp.
“Dude,” Juarez said. “They’re like, doing it.”
Once he spoke it was obvious Juarez was right. Each mating group thrummed like a drum roll. Light strobed. Sparks flew. Callum felt embarrassed watching something so private.
“Not in front of the children,” Abby said with a laugh.
They came with sonic-boom blasts so loud even Grandma Vera covered her ears. After the thundercrack climax each mating cluster smoorged into one big ovoid about three feet wide. Instead of angsty and colormashed, the alien’s glow was serene and white. Another thundercrack. Another ovoid formed. And on and on. They were witnessing the fucking miracle of life, like seeing a blimp coming out of a chrysalis. One alien blimpoid curveted in mid- river and one drifted to the Hawthorne Bridge to slowly spiral up a support.
One blimpoid floated toward the bank, toward Callum. He was too tired or enchanted to be scared. The alien stopped a yard away, shadowing him. The axes of the thing rhythmically swelled and contracted like it couldn’t decide whether to be wide or tall.
“Can you see me?” he asked.
He strained to hear an answer. This alien was definitely digging him, aware of him in the same way he was conscious of it. Its frequency slowed to match his heart rate. He remembered the snack in his pocket, let go of Lily’s hand and plucked Grandma’s moon rock out of the bag of old peanuts and raisins. He offered it to the alien. Is this what you want? he asked. Or maybe he only thought he said it.
The alien kept doing its alien- oscillation thing. It didn’t want the McNugget any more than Callum did.
“Where did you come from?” he asked.
“That’s pretty obvious,” said Juarez. “Somewhere with rare earths.”
“That could be, like, anywhere in the universe,” Abby said.
Across the river, a white ovoid rose above the crowd like a lost balloon. Thirty yards up, it burst into shards. Light spewed out like cinders seeding the clouds. Callum watched the creature near him to see if it would do something. Friends don’t let friends explode. No response. The cycle of dimming and flashing remained unchanged. Another blimpoid rose to the level of the low-hanging clouds and exploded closer. This time he heard something plunk into the water.
This couldn’t be good. “Uh, maybe we should move,” Callum said. But they stood, transfixed.
“Bon voyage,” said Grandma Vera, as their blimpoid floated up, like the others. Its light flashed brighter, then dimmed.
Poof. Crack.
No more alien.
Alien dust glittered in the clouds. Something hard struck the ground next to Callum’s boot. Another McNugget. He let it cool for a moment and picked it up from the mud.
“Dude. You’re touching alien jism.” Juarez was all right, but there were things he didn’t understand. He didn’t know how lucky he was his dad was still alive.
“Respect, man,” Callum said. The rocks weren’t jism. They weren’t even rocks. “They came back to bury their corpses,” he said. “Along the river.”
“Like salmon spawning,” Lily said. Her voice broke. She opened her hand and Callum set a rock corpse in her palm and they were all quiet for a moment. He was thinking about the funeral, about the finality of first rocks hitting the casket. The funeral was sad because it marked an end to one time, but the end made a new beginning possible. How Lao Tzu.
“I don’t get it. Why didn’t we know about them?” Abby said.
“I think they were buried, and people dug them up, and thought they were something normal like thunder eggs.”
“I dunno, I’m starting to wonder about thunder eggs.” She had the cutest smirk.
“So they ate rare earths and then it took thousands of years to digest their dinner?” Juarez said. “Gross.”
“Something like that,” Callum said. “They woke up when it was time to reproduce.”
“I’d wake up if it was time to reproduce,” Juarez said.
Most of the aliens had gone up now, the next generation carried away on the winds to gather strength and await their time.
Lily handed her rock corpse back to Callum. “Let them rest with the others,” she said, but she was asking him, not telling him what to do.
Callum carried both rock corpses to the bank and skipped them past the shallows and into deep water. He stared across the river, toward East Portland and a soft glow at the base of the clouds.
“Well, I’ll have something to tell my grandchildren someday,” Grandma Vera said.
Lily looked ready to argue. “One of your grandchildren already knows,” she said. “Sometimes he knows more than the rest of us.” She rested her hand on her belly. “But you should definitely tell this little one about it. He’ll want to know.”
“He?” said Callum.
“He,” said Lily, and Callum opened his notebook to start writing down names.
(Special thanks to Loren Bruns.)
The Vampires of Paradox
James Morrow
Imagine a walled city rising against a cerulean sky in a faraway des
ert. Before the massive gates stands a guard who possesses an infallible ability to know when a person is lying. The guard’s duty is to ask everyone who seeks admittance to state his business. If the petitioner replies with a true account, the guard will permit him to enter freely and leave in peace. If the petitioner states his business falsely, the guard will take him to the gallows and hand him over to the executioner. One day a traveler comes out of the desert, approaches the city, and, offering the guard a sardonic smile, says, “I have come to be hanged.”
Although I have no hard data on the matter, I believe I know more about paradoxes than any assistant professor north of Battery Park and south of Herald Square. For the past twenty years I’ve sought the holy grail of absurdity in every nook and cranny of Western civilization. Thus far no dragons have crossed my path, no ogres, trolls, or griffins, and yet my quest has often proved perilous. Over the past decade three initially auspicious marriages have crumbled before my eyes, largely because the corresponding wives couldn’t be bothered to understand my burning passion to definitively deconstruct Zeno’s disproof of common sense before some upstart Columbia grad student beat me to it. My department head, the reprehensible Dr. Virginia Sayles, has likewise regarded my specialty with scorn. From the instant I got on the tenure track she began playing political games with my pet project, the Bertrand Russell Institute of Paradox Studies, first moving it out of the philosophy building and then off the NYU campus entirely, so that today I pursue my research in a subterranean office in NoHo.
A paradox may be resolved in one of three ways. First, we can embrace the seemingly unacceptable conclusion. In the case of our suicidal traveler, we might argue that he is simultaneously hanged and sent away unharmed, but such a solution is beneath the dignity of rational minds. Second, we may find fault with the reasoning that led to the contradiction. Concerning our lie-detecting guard, we might insist that his quandary—do I deliver the traveler to the executioner or not?—only appears to be genuine, and an obvious course of action lies before him, but such a demonstration would be beyond my powers. Third, we may attack the paradox’s underlying premises. That is, we might attempt to establish that the notion of stating one’s business truly or falsely is incoherent on first principles, though I cannot imagine a sane person taking such a position.