by Larry Doyle
On the wall was The Head of Christ, Warner Sallman’s dreamy Jesus, which came with the house. Miw took the print from the wall and turned it over.
The Polaroid attached to the back was old, actual, with a patina that could not be adjusted.
They are posed by a body of water. She’s younger, fluffier, in a polka dot kerchief and the thick-rimmed glasses she popularized but never saw a penny from. The bikini is white and fetching but overwhelmed by her belly, buoyant, pinkish and ridiculous. He’s wearing those dreadful Bermuda shorts he loved and towers over her, his argentine carapace sparkling in the sun, the glare mercifully obscuring his unfortunate face. His long silver fingers rest on her stomach, the closest he ever came to touching his son.
She did not know why she kept this secret, from J!m, or anyone. It was not illegal, exactly. But when she heard a sound in the hallway, she slammed the head of Christ against the wall so hard He almost judged her.
The sound she heard, a papery creep, was J!m’s ex-skin, making for the door. How many times she had told her son not to leave his sheddings lying around, where they could get into trouble, knocking over garbage cans and smothering dogs. Two years ago one of them had made it into Mrs. Porter’s house next door and slipped itself on her while she slept. Mrs. Porter awoke thinking that her latest whole body tuck had unravelled and gone to rot. Sheriff Ford was alerted, and Mrs. Porter pressed charges, assault by proxy and more sordid accusations the facts did not support, and fifteen-year-old J!m was required to spend two evenings a month at the Manhattan Juvenile Education Center, where he learned how to steal cars.
Miw grabbed the molt by the nape. It batted at her weakly as she stripped off the underwear, perfectly good, and fed it into the disinkerator.
It went down kicking, and silently screaming.
Chapter 2
Stalks the Earth
their house was imitation cod, built near the end of the last epoch and not upgraded since, save the required PLEX receptor. It was slate blue with white shutters and red door, a color scheme favored by the recently arrived.
J!m stepped outside, squinting, lightly grimacing, getting into character.
From his jeans he extracted a metallic white marble. He slid the alumina sphere apart into two hemis and stuck them on his temples. The right dome flashed once.
“Hey, creatures,” K-BOM’s morning host prattled around inside J!m’s skull, “your favorite Martian will be invading Manhattan High tomorrow moontime to kick off your rhythmic mating ritual. Human females, prepare to be,” basso, con roboto, “PROBED.”
J!m yanked up the collar of his new jacket.
“Now here’s Bobby and the Zimms!”
Anguished guitar over searing theremin, “Little Red Rebel” was J!m’s theme song, though he wasn’t little or red and his rebellion had been almost entirely apparel so far. But the music sounded like him, and it was what he wanted people to hear when they saw him coming, though only he could hear it.
Bobby Zee rasped,
Little Red Rebel,
You’re on your own
Little Red Rebel
Got no direction home
Head down, hands pocketed, J!m crossed his lawn and stepped on the walkway, a futile ritual that made him feel unwanted, which made him feel better. This time the autoped responded, but went backward. He applied forward pressure with the toe of his boot. The walk sped up in reverse.
Fully invalidated, he hopped onto the grass. It warned him to get off, but wouldn’t do anything about it.
the leaves were dying spectacularly, their autumnal remains swirling in variously ochered arcs around his boots. J!m crunched them without satisfaction. Tucked into his jacket as far as his big, fat encephalon would permit, he trudged down Maple Street.
He passed another Cape Cod like his, only nicer, a split-level ranch, a cod with a porch, a ranch split the other way, a cod, a ranch, a cod, a cod, each distinguished by quirky mailboxes, of which there were six basic models, four of them chrome and all superfluous, since there hadn’t been mail for two years.
The last of the cods had a billboard mounted on the roof, an ebullient housewife dousing her teal living room furniture with a fire hose.
she enthused,
Homeboards had originated in old Los Angeles, stoking outrage at the cheap commodification of everyday life, which accelerated their spread across the country. Miw looked into one, over J!m’s glowerings, and found that they paid a pittance, and that her property was not what they were looking for right now.
Across the street was Gort, the once mighty android, the preserver of intergalactic peace, raking leaves for the widow Benson. J!m gave a low wave, but Gort, who sees everything, didn’t see it. The eight-foot metal man trained his visor on the leaf pile, which proved no match for his heat beam. It wasn’t an Army tank, but it was something.
Mr. King flew overhead, jetpacking to work, a waste of hydrogen peroxide and an imminent danger to himself and others, the inconsiderate dolt.
J!m hated this town.
Which was a pity, since he had nowhere else to go.
And it wasn’t so horrible, not really, lately.
a typical American town, Manhattan boasted:
well-kept lawns and clean-nosed citizens;
a brick and neon Main Street;
a beach cove pocked with bottomless caves;
a deep dark forest preserve from which screams could not escape;
a Dairy Queen;
forbidden hills up by the old deserted Promethium mine;
and an evergreen lagoon next to the PLEX plant, a spot favored by young lovers because of the breathtaking sunset always on view, and that unintended pregnancies never seemed to take.
Like any picturesque community located near a heavily guarded military facility, Manhattan had had its share of the unpleasantness, but that was before, and this was after that. They had won, as far as they knew, and the streets were clean.
Most folks liked it here.
J!m, not among them, was unable to articulate why he hated it so much, only that he did. He could not state the paradigm that encompassed all he hated, what rules or measures he used to calculate his hate, why there were things he did not hate, or where this hate had come from, gripping him suddenly and furiously a few years ago. He had been such a happy child, according to his mother.
Three girls were skipping rope in the street. They chanted:
He had a big brain
It left a big stain
That looked like chow mein
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Big Brain didn’t go to heaven
7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
He went to hell and left a son
That might have had something to do with it.
j!m turned from maple street to Rose Avenue, which was another thing: this rustic matrix he was imprisoned in, trees crossed with flowers, because nobody wanted to be reminded that not too long ago this was an Army proving ground, built on a hallowed Indian burial site, which had once been an even more sacred sacrificial temple, for different Indians. The less desirable east end had been tar pits, stocked with the bones of Segnosaurs, a slow and unpopular dinosaur.
This subdivision was Arbor Gardens, since they couldn’t be bothered to buy a proper thesaurus, and everything about it was unremittingly bucolic.
The lawns were Verigrass, a hybrid of Kentucky Blue and Cytherean Yellow, the only shade of green not found in nature. It resisted weeds, drought, insects, stains and sulfuric acid, and ate chipmunks and the occasional baby.
The trees were cybernetic in no useful way. They grew naturally but could communicate with the house, which must have seemed a fine idea. Instead, Oak Drive residents were warned of every approaching squirrel, and over on Elm, owners were awakened at all hours by trees fretting that they felt fungal. Last spring, a boy on Whispering Willows Lane reprogrammed all the trees to whisper smutty overtures to passing women. It went unreported for months.
The PLEX transponders were m
ade to look antique, a quality humans associated with nature for unsound reasons. The brass poles, fashioned after nineteenth-century gaslights, were topped with a copper ellipsoid, which, when nightsparking, did not suggest the pastoral so much as the diabolical.
J!m liked those. They reminded him of James Whale’s Frankenstein, which he loved, as he did most movies that were made before they were all terrible. He called them movies, though they no longer worked that way, while everybody else called them viz regardless of what they were projected onto or plexed from. He watched movies constantly, carefully, desperately. He dreamt in movies, and one day he was going to make them, provided he could get into film school without paying for it. The movies he would make would be savage art, masterworks of light and shadow, vessels of unbearable truth and better than life, which was no better than a B movie in J!m’s experience. His movies would be admired and despised, money losers every one, but the people who saw them would be changed, would no longer be able to live among people who hadn’t seen them, and after he won his first Oscar, he would marry Marie.
j!m was giving his acceptance speech, ending with, “I Love You, Marie Rand,” and had just rejected that as hackneyed pablum when he arrived at her house. It was five blocks out of his way, his standard route.
J!m tapped the left Bone Dome and the music stopped.
Marie’s house was, through no fault of hers, a serious mess, an other-way ranch trashed with fussy contraptions, such as the overprogrammed lawn gnomes that had become sentient and were planning something, or, out back, the twenty-foot above ground pool converted into a Cassegrain reflector, able to pick up broadcasts from Metaluna, chiefly warfarmercials. A holographic picket fence went in and out.
J!m saw only the door.
It opened.
He ducked behind a tree, his back pressed against it.
Dr. Rand appeared, chin up, posture and deportment suggesting a person of greater social stature than a high school science teacher. The pipe was implied.
His eye was drawn to the jacaranda, which had grown two cerebral lobes, clearly visible on either side of its trunk.
“Jim,” Dr. Rand said in calm admonishment, “I hope you haven’t forgotten our exam this morning?”
J!m remained behind the tree. “No, sir.”
Howard Rand, friendly and firm: “No, Doctor.”
“No, Dr. Rand.” J!m upturned his hand and unfurled the middle digit, telescoping it for emphasis.
Dr. Rand climbed into his Rand OmniDynamic MaxiPod Vehicle, a structurally faultless teardrop design that also resembled a slime green turd on wheels, something Reptilicus might deposit after eating a busful of disagreeable schoolchildren. Only three were ever built; the other two were in the backyard.
Once Dr. Rand had backed out, stalled, rolled down the driveway, ground the gears and pooted down the street, J!m turned to peek around—
“Jim!”
She was the girl of his dream, and not that girl at all. Her hair was unflipped, her face unpainted. Her twin set and skirt were plain and pleated, not taffeta and laced. She wore saddle shoes instead of heels, and no tiara. He much preferred this Marie, not least because this one was running toward him, not away.
No screaming homecoming queen, Marie ran like the tomboy she once was, more the boy than J!m, always her idea to climb trees and build forts and eat bugs and stick things up rectums, or cloacae. She could take him in a tussle, and often did, when they were children.
Now she had gone woman, and was coming on fast.
He surrendered to her hug with fear and longing. He was affected the instant she touched him, her hands on his back, over his posterior heart. The curse, a gift from his mother, flooded him with her feelings, the brightness in her uncurdling his brain, spraining it in the process. She blinded him with joy. He was a crude instrument, unlike Miw, and so could only absorb the broad emotional strokes; he could not feel her love, if it was there.
She smelled like soap and strawberries.
J!m didn’t know what to do with his hands. He was welcome to touch her, he knew, but afraid what that might unleash. His pants were tight but not secure. He kept his arms out, palms open, in the frisking position. She went on hugging him.
She stretched on tiptoes and rubbed her cheek against his neck. The convulsion along his leg warned that he was seconds from letting his cat out of the bag.
“I love when you have new skin,” she said. “It’s so soft and cool.”
He might have to shove her to the ground.
“Oooo,” Marie inhaled. “New car smell!”
That fixed that.
She backed away from him, hooked her arm through his, a maneuver fraught with chastity, and escorted him off her lawn.
The gnomes watched them leave, biding their time.
“so,” she chatted, “what’s showing at the Skies tonight?”
“Entertainment product.”
Her first eyeroll. “People like entertainment, Jim! It’s not the worst thing.”
J!m stopped short of the autoped. Marie stepped on it, and was efficiently transported away from him. He trotted to catch up.
Marie frowned at the walk. “It must think you’re a cat or something.”
“It knows what I am.”
“Well, they should fix it,” Marie said. “We’ve had guest species for more than twenty years; there’s no excuse.” Her agenda uncovered: “And apropos of that, I’m handing my petition into City Hall today. So, last chance, Mr. I-don’t-sign-things.”
“My name can’t be written in three dimensions.”
It wasn’t that his wit eluded her.
“Don’t you want our town to be accessible to everyone? You, of all people.”
“I’m not people.”
“Exactly. When I become president—when you vote for me, Monday, do not forget—my first act will be to sit down with Principal Brooks and see what we can do at school, at least. I mean, why shouldn’t Kuiper kids be able to take classes with everybody else?”
“They’re a gas at room temperature.”
Marie pursed her lips. “I don’t mind a little gas.”
“It melts human flesh.”
J!m always thought he was one remark away from a playful slap, a light wrestle, and the inescapable kiss.
Marie, frosted: “We’ll have to be creative, then, Jim, won’t we? Maybe apply some of our advanced intelligence to the problem?”
She started walking on the autoped, leaving J!m behind. He was going to let her go, too, and would have, if he hadn’t sprinted after her instead. Marie slowed as he approached and stopped altogether when he rejoined her, but she was still not talking, which was hard for her.
asked the Mannings’ homeboard, over a caricature of a human male, ice bag on his head and tiny atomic symbols orbitting his addled brain. The board’s slats flipped, showing the same man, alert and ready for work, toasting with a glass of blue liquid.
he beamed through stained teeth.
This was the worst possible moment, and J!m seized it.
“Marie,” he said, his voice flutier than usual.
She was formal. “Yes, Jim?”
The pose was gone. It was only the boy.
“Going to the . . . event tomorrow night?”
She dropped her snit. “The dance?”
it was a magnificent scream.
Marie toed the walk, startled. J!m might have jumped out of his skin, if he hadn’t just done so, and if it wasn’t the umpteenth time he had heard that particular scream.
“Do I have your attention?” Sandra Jane Douglas flipped her blond ponytail, her big teeth in gleaming rictus. She bounced toward them.
“Hope I wasn’t interrupting,” with perky aspersion, “invasion plans or whatever.” She raised her palm to J!m in the traditional alien salute. “I come in grease.”
J!m looked for shade to step into.
Sandra Jane grabbed Marie, restarting the autoped. “You get that plex about Carol Webster? In-cu-bating!”
A noise, the sound of distaff thunder:
“SANDRA JANE”
Marie stopped; Sandra Jane nudged her to “keep moving.”
The front door opened and Sandra Jane’s mother, or rather her arm, came out. Allison Douglas had once been a showroom model, for the short-lived Chevy Fissionaire, and so it was an elegant arm, with a delicate wrist and long tapered fingers about the size and shape of a dancer’s legs.
Sandra Jane radiated high levels of odium as her mother’s arm crossed the yard to her.
Mrs. Douglas’s three-foot fingers unfolded. In her palm was an amazingly small man holding a capsule in both hands.
“You forgot your pill, sweetheart.”
Without a word, Sandra Jane plucked the pill from her father and turned to escape.
“Hey, how about a kiss from my little girl?”
Sandra Jane huffed, and ducked down furtively, pecking her miniature parent hard on the eyes and knocking him down.
J!m marveled at how much hatred Sandra Jane could muster for a father who adored her, who was alive, who hadn’t—
“What are you looking at, Butt-Skull?” Sandra Jane goggled her eyes and did fish lips at him, then dragged Marie away. Hearing her front door close, she flicked the pill into the street.
The two girls receded down the avenue, Sandra Jane a good riddance but Marie going, and soon to be altogether gone.
J!m’s buttock-shaped cranium sparked, creating a whole new universe. In this one he would not make movies, he would not marry Marie, and he would soon be sucked into this black hole in his chest. He had created hundreds of such dark cosmos over the years, all culminating in his death in multifarious but inaccurate ways. Each of those alternate universes coexisted in his head, along with the many orthogonally bright realities he had constructed, in which he was a pirate, or an alien overlord, or married to Marie, who was president of the United States. He had the neurons to create and store thousands of additional worlds, and the capacity to have more than one active at the same time. For example, even as his last atom tripped over the event horizon in his forebrain, in a posterior section he wore a silver tuxedo and walked down the red carpet with Marie, president of the United States and top lingerie model.