Steal the Stars

by Mac Rogers

  We waited for someone to call it all off and no one did.

  “Backup personnel are in their suits and ready if you need them. Handing it over to you, Chief,” Patty radioed. I’d be calling the shots from here on out. “Good luck.”

  You stood back up and held the Harp steady with your uninsulated gloves. Two hands on. It might weigh a ton. It might crush me when I pulled the first pin. We just didn’t know. But you promised not to let it fall. You promised to keep me safe.

  I pulled the first pin.

  Nothing happened.

  I pulled the second pin.

  There was no tilting, no rocking, and no sense of its weight. You held it steady.

  I stood up to join you. You grabbed one side, I got the other. I looked at you—into those eyes—and together we took one more breath before lifting. We would lift on three.

  You nodded at me: ready?

  I nodded back.

  You were smiling—a tiny, impish grin. I felt the edges of my lips curl up in kind.

  And without further ado, we counted

  to

  THREE.

  * * *

  IT HAD to have been a dream. All of it.

  Hours and hours and hours afterward in my car, driving through the dead of night, I thought: There’s no way that could have happened. And there’s no way I’m doing what I’m about to do.

  The night outside was too dark to be real. The headlights showed nothing but the same stretch of road running like a treadmill underneath my wheels. A magician’s trick.

  It had all just been a dream—from the moment we got onto that elevator your first day and I sensed my life was over, to what we had just done, what we had just gone through. My life had ended, after all, and everything from that moment on had been some fantastic creation conjured up by desiccating brain tissue; one final, beautiful gift before saying goodbye to all that was. It had seemed to go on for days and days, but what is time to the deceased?

  The thing nobody tells you about the end of your life is sometimes you have so much damn longer to live afterward.

  And now here I was, on this dark, impossibly dark road, on the way to some sort of afterlife.

  None of what just happened could have happened. None of what was about to happen could be allowed to happen. All of this was unreal. Illusory.

  I drove into that too-black night and replayed what had (hadn’t?) happened over again in my head. Because dreams are slippery things and can be lost before you know it.

  * * *

  HERE’S HOW it should have happened:

  You and I pull on the Harp. It’s heavy and awkward, like lifting a large air-conditioning unit, but we manage to get it out of its base and lug it over to the insulated duffel without too much unseemly grunting and puffing. The hardest part is when one of us has to take the weight entirely on their own (the floor is coated in N5, as Lloyd reminded us), while the other grabs the bag and holds it open as wide as possible. Of course, I insist on being the one who holds the Harp, and I bend backward just a bit to accommodate its bulk while you retrieve the duffel. It’s a bit harrowing, easing the Harp in—it reminds me of that game as a kid where we had to extract items from some prostrate clown without touching the sides of his open wounds (is he too young to know what that game is?)—but we manage. And we carry our booty out of Object E and into the Hangar. The duffel strains at the weight of the object inside—perhaps one of the straps starts to give—and we breathe an immense sigh of relief when we’re able to set it down on its designated spot.

  Here’s what happens instead:

  The Harp sails up with our arms like it was made of balsa wood. We both gasp audibly and Patty comes over the comm, demanding to know what’s happened. We tell her, laughing.

  “It’s so light! Patty, it weighs like two pounds, tops!”

  We practiced so seriously for this and now it appears either one of us could’ve carried this thing out one-handed. But we have a plan and we are trained to stick to plans, no matter how silly they feel. We go through the motions of bringing this cheap community theater prop over to the staggeringly expensive duffel bag.

  We get about five steps when a small, low hum starts to churn inside the Harp. We stop in our tracks.

  Lloyd comes on the comm and tells us something is definitely happening—though nothing big yet. Is it something to panic about? He doesn’t know. Patty renews her desire to abort. Harrison renews his dismissal of her desire. It all happens over the radio in that dispassionate, eerily calm way you hear sometimes when calamity strikes: a police scanner reporting a shooting, an airplane pilot reporting the plane is going down. Just reportage. The bag is only four feet away. We can do this. You mirror my steps like it’s the only way you ever knew how to move.

  A light, not altogether unpleasant tingling spreads its way through my body, like I’ve just taken a shot of liquor on an empty stomach. Only, there’s no enjoyable buzz that follows, just the feeling of encroaching anesthesia. I realize: it’s like my blood sugar has started to drop.

  We’re almost to the bag. We’re right on top of it. You start to reach down to grab it and we adjust to get ourselves in a good position to lower it

  on

  three

  SHIT

  SHIT

  What’s happening? The voices on the radio are no longer so dispassionate.

  The humming gets louder. Is the Harp enacting some sort of countermeasure against being moved? Is it having a bad dream?

  We try to report to Bird’s Eye but the strain makes it hard to talk while also holding on to this leaden weight, this Buick, this dense collapsing star. It’s suddenly so fucking heavy. Except it hasn’t taken on any real weight—we’re just losing all our strength. It’s pouring out through our hands as quickly as if we’ve slashed our wrists.

  We’re both of us losing our grips on it, we, it, weighs, can’t, FUCK

  This is when the dream becomes a nightmare.

  We drop it. We miss our target. It lands next to the bag, then pitches forward and leans against the bag. The bag coated in N5.

  Meanwhile, we’re being blasted with (what?) (space?) (this is just a dream)

  It’s not a full blast yet—the hum isn’t as loud as I know it can get. And also I can still imagine tomorrow. I can still remember omelets and coffee and the smell of trees. But it’s getting close. It’s not just one shot on an empty stomach, it’s an entire bottle being poured down my throat. My eyes are losing focus, my bones are losing solidity. That lack of taste in my mouth I’d experienced when Andy got blasted is back—it is the flavor of absolute nothingness.

  Patty’s tiny, tinny voice is demanding an update, hurry, we might lose power soon. But the hum is getting louder and the connection with Patty is already starting to get crackly, unintelligible. We’re in a car listening to the radio, about to drive through a tunnel. And the tunnel is dark, too dark, and getting darker.

  You say my name.

  It actually takes a second to realize that’s what that sound means—that paltry bark of a noise is my name (nothing), my identity (meaningless)—but the Harp’s effects are still not fully realized yet and eventually I understand why you’re calling my name. You’re pointing to the bag, to the obvious truth.

  The Harp is still doing its thing even though it’s in contact with the N5.

  Only in a dream, I think.

  But oh well. My will. My life-force. I’m too drunk on misery, on disinterest, to take advantage of this game-changing observation. I can barely swallow the saliva pooling in my gaping mouth. I realize the engine-room door is still open and I think of what might happen to the base when the Harp reaches full power. We’ve never experienced that before; the blast very well could hit everyone up in Bird’s Eye. I don’t care. I’m alone enough in my minimizing world to not—

  But, no. I’m not alone. I see you. You. You’re trying to crawl toward me.

  There’s still time.

  It’s all I need. It takes impossible effort bu
t I get to you—

  curl up c’mon nothing matters this is all nothing but NO I pull myself toward you. The humming gets even louder but I pull myself toward you.

  Our ligaments are coated in lead my eyes are glazed and heavy but we do it just like we practiced. Just like your idea.

  I unseal your gloves.

  Whoosh. Buzz.

  You unseal mine.

  Whoosh. Buzz.

  And the bullshit gloves come off. (Bullshit … gloves … off.)

  I want to stop, to rest, just for a little bit just for—NO

  The real gloves go on. (Real gloves … on.)

  As soon as I activate the seals on your insulated gloves it’s like you’ve been injected with life. Your entire demeanor changes behind your helmet: more alert, more responsive. Everything about you becomes stronger. As for me, I’m fading fast. The end of the dream. An icy curtain is descending down over me and on three I’ll be gone

  one

  two

  You finish sealing my gloves. I don’t get to three. I get to stay asleep a little while longer and dream this dream with you.

  The instant the insulated gloves are on our hands we feel better. Not 100 percent, but suddenly alive again. We exchange looks of disbelief. We even laugh.

  We get our bodies back under our control and manage to maneuver the still-humming, really shrieking Harp into the bag. Once it’s in, we activate the seals on the bag, just in time for the hummingshrieking to culmINATE AND BURST through to its other sound dimension. We’re left in the eerie silence of that spreading tone of a full spin-up. It’s completely off schedule, there’s no telling how long it lasts. It could be days.

  But we’ve come this far. So we pick up the bag.

  I squeeze my way out of the ship, then you hand me the bag (is there anything in this thing? it’s so light again) and when you get out yourself, you try to take it from me but I keep it to myself. My papoose. I’ve been looking after it for years.

  The dream shifts locations like dreams often do. We’re on the other side of the Tent, and in the pitch black, fully offline Hangar beyond. We can’t see a thing. It’s completely silent and utterly dark.

  There was supposed to be some glow tape laid down somewhere—but where? How do we find it? There’s just so much ground to cover and not even a horizon on which to orient ourselves. For all we know we could be falling. Floating. It’s like that other dream, the one we all have after the first time we meet Moss (which I still haven’t learned if you had as well): of rushing through incredible nothingness … or standing still in wait.

  But then I remember. This is my home. This is me. I know where the tape marks are. Social Outcast Dak makes a joke about this being as easy as finding her own asshole in the dark—a piece of cake—and I cringe. I hate her. But she’s a part of me, too, and she’s in this with us, decomposing, and you don’t even seem to mind her at all.

  We find the glow-taped X and we set the Harp down, still churning its power-pausing churn. Our job’s not done, however. Now it’s time to deactivate the seals and remove our baby. The suits want to see “the Harp,” not “the Bag,” and Lloyd prepared us one more containment apparatus for this moment. One for which we have to wait until the power comes back on, hanging over our heads right now in the darkness.

  We pull the Harp out with our insulated, white gloves. I hate that it doesn’t glow. It’s humming and active, but just as dark as everything else. It feels wrong somehow. But don’t question it, none of this is real, it’s allowed its own rules. I cradle the Harp in my arms and you’re behind me, your arms around me in support, and it’s just you and me in the dark again, like we’re practicing something (what?). We talk to the Harp, we chastise it for trying to kill us and failing, we make nervous jokes, but mostly we just sit and wait together until

  the

  Harp

  finally

  starts

  to

  fall

  asleep. The humming recedes in intensity. Lower … lower. All of Hangar Eleven starts coming back online all around us: lights, sounds, refreshed from a siesta and ready to rock. Even Patty’s voice, screaming into our comms—she was screaming at us that whole time and we just couldn’t hear her. Because we were in space together. Because we were at the bottom of the ocean together.

  We tell her to drop it—not just the subject but also Lloyd’s final apparatus. She’s still screaming at us. This is the first time you and I are seeing each other since we almost died and I pray—I actually pray—that I look as perfect to you as you’re looking to me.

  I hear your voice now. They say in dreams that you can’t actually read things, like newspapers or letters. They say that your brain just provides you with the knowledge of the text you’re dream-reading, and that if you’re aware enough to pay some attention you’d notice that there are no legible written words before you. Your voice feels like that to me at this moment. I feel like I haven’t actually heard it until right now. It hits my ears like a distant alarm and I know this dream is about to end. And because we’re not inside the ship, it echoes, it rolls, it reverberates within me.

  Like thunder.

  “It’s coming,” you tell me. “We better crawl out of range.”

  You hold out your hand and I don’t even need to think about taking it. It’s mine to take. We link up and crawl away as a twelve-by-twelve N5-treated fiberglass cube descends from a winch over the Harp, softly humming its way back to contented sleep.

  * * *

  RUNNING IT all through my head just then, I was impressed I could still remember every moment. That was rare for a dream, wasn’t it? Usually they start to discorporate upon any sort of reflection. I could even remember things that happened afterward. I could remember coming back to consciousness several hours later, late Sunday, on a cot by the locker bay. I could remember medics over me, telling me you had already been cleared to go home and now it was my turn. I could remember Harrison even cracking a joke:

  “You deserve a year off,” he said. “I can give you six hours.”

  He told me to get some sleep. Tomorrow was Monday. It was going to be the biggest day we’ve ever had, after all. Even more stressful and insane than Saturday had been.

  So why was I in my car, on some road fully and unmitigatedly submerged in nothingness?

  The darkness out here was like the darkness inside Object E—light didn’t spread, it just punched holes in it. And even though I had my car headlights to help, I also knew this road the way I knew Hangar Eleven. This road was my sickbed, after all. Or perhaps my funeral bier. There was only one way I could go.

  There was a cell phone in my hand. A burner phone I’d picked up from a gas station. You wouldn’t recognize the number, but I was gambling that you’d understand what it meant.

  “Hello?” I heard your voice in my ear. I didn’t respond. I just breathed.

  “Get here,” you said, and for the second time tonight I was reminded of the dream we all seem to have after our first day working at Quill Marine. For years I wondered: are we imagining what it must have been like for Moss, traveling here? Are we imagining ourselves, rushing toward some previously inconceivable truth? Now I had a different understanding. Maybe we’re the nothingness. Things might pass through us, but ultimately nothing can change our nature, our hunger—we can’t even find the outer edges.

  Tonight I intended to ask you about it.

  I parked a fifteen-minute walk away from your motel. Part of me was screaming, “You’re giving him so much time to change his mind!” By the time I was on the second-level walkway of your motel it was like I’d been walking all night.

  Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. There’s an easy way to fix this. There’s such an easy way to stop everything that’s coming. Just … don’t … knock. Wake up wake up wake up

  That was Practical Dak, screaming. The way Patty had screamed. I shut that comm link off forever and knocked on your motel room door.

  It opened and your hand reached out to grab me a
nd pull me in. I let it, and within seconds you were on me. I was on you. My flesh, my bones, losing all structure and form until they were dust to be inhaled by you. But I refused to let myself worry.

  Everything that would happen next would happen fast and relentless. So I deserved this moment. An end to my dream. One last feverish spasm of a dead brain for me to hold on to as consolation as my body dissolved away.

  Tomorrow I would wake up and a new life would begin.

  PART TWO

  AFTERDEATH

  INTERLUDE

  OKAY, SO. A ten-year-old girl stands next to her father on a pier. It’s early, just a couple hours after daybreak, and I guess you could say the same thing about the relationship. They don’t know each other very well … but they’re giving it a try.

  They both have lines in the slate-gray water. The father is ambling his way through a monologue about the ins and outs of fishing—why they’re here so early, what kind of reels they’re using, what sort of fish they might find in these parts. He’s talking this way because—even the girl understands this—once he runs out of things to talk about on this subject, he’ll have to find something else to talk about with his daughter and he has absolutely no idea how to do that. The two of them have known each other for maybe seven months at this point, and the relationship between them is as mysterious and intimidating as the water into which their lines are sunk.

  She’s doing her best to listen. She’s never gone fishing before.

  He’s nearing that point, that dreaded point, where he runs out of things to say, when his line jerks and goes taut. They both gasp and he works on reeling in whatever is on the other end. It emerges shortly thereafter: a fat, slick brown fish, twitching and spasming in desperate dialogue for its life. This is not just an expedition for fun, though—this is for food, and so the father is pitiless.

  However, the fish is remarkably swollen. Unusually so. Once it has been stilled, he lays the fish down on the pier, slices open the fish’s belly and the girl is (amazed? horrified?) to see at least half a dozen smaller fish spill out, flopping, onto the ground. They’re not small, either, each one seems about the size of her father’s pinky finger.