by Larry Doyle
“He was captured, tried and convicted, on nearly thirty million counts of murder.”
Tubesteak shouted, “Electrofry him!” which sounded like slang but was just Tubesteak.
Little noticed by most: in the first row of the courtroom gallery, the creature’s wife wept, holding the hand of their small bewildered son.
J!m’s inner eyelid fluttered.
“Days before his execution, the cowardly creature made a run for it.”
An incandescent ball burst through the atrium of the National Air and Space Museum, showering molten glass onto the Mall. The sphere sprouted its ring and rose into the sky over war-ravaged Washington, D.C.
“But not for long.”
Schoolchildren, spotting the enemy craft, cocked fingers and fired, and were jubilant when the saucer took a direct hit, most likely from the atomic tank nearby.
The spaceship flipped end over end, crashing onto the Washington Monument. The energy ring sputtered out, the underlying globe impaled on the obelisk.
“The creature was dead. And peace had come again to our small planet.”
Isolated storms raged throughout J!m’s brain, in areas associated with anger, denial, depression and, buried there in the back, grief.
In front of him, color had arrived in America, sunny music playing over contemporary scenes of cheery folks walking bright streets.
“Today, we live in a world of atomic wonders . . .”
J!m rose.
“He had a name!”
He jarred desks as he ran from the room. Marie started after him, pausing for permission from Mr. Gray.
On the viz, a businessman ordered from a city street cart.
“. . . a world where everyone, even well-behaved aliens and mutants . . .”
The man took a meat-on-a-stick from the Umani vendor, who bore an uncanny resemblance to his bill of fare.
“. . . can live in peace and prosperity.”
The businessman grinned juicily as he chewed the meat. The Umani grinned back, dryly.
Chapter 9
Millions are Asking - What is it?
j!m sat high in the stands, under the VISITORS sign, his usual brood.
He gazed dully across the field at the old announcer’s booth, wood and weathered, HOME OF THE MUTANTS peeling green and gold, Manny the Mutant in happy caricature, big overbite and bigger brain. Obsolesced by vizbug coverage and unused for years, the booth remained there because it had been there before.
J!m took a pack of Red Balls from his jacket, tapped one out and flipped it into his mouth.
“What,” snatching it away, “are you, goony?”
“I’m not that flammable.”
Marie sat down next to him. “I don’t care what the Surgeon General says. Smoking is bad for you.”
“I don’t have any lungs.”
“You have six.”
“Yeah?” J!m said. “Was I on the test?”
“I wish.”
J!m was out of small talk. But it was agreeable, sitting there, being quiet, with Marie.
Marie disagreed.
“I’m sorry about your dad.”
“Being evil? Me too.”
“You know he couldn’t have done half the stuff they said he did.”
“Phew.”
Marie touched his forearm. He felt that she felt bad for him, and a bit peeved.
“Andee-ee-ra.” She enunciated the life out of it. “That was his name, right?”
“Something like that.”
“Do you miss him?”
J!m thought.
“I never had him.”
“I’m really sorry,” and she really was.
And yet:
“So,” J!m said, “Russell Ford.”
“Yikes. No secrets around here.” Marie puffed her cheeks, exhaled. “Sandra Jane just wouldn’t . . .” her hands moving faster, “and it’s not a—it’s just a bunch of people going together. Anyway, here.”
It was a small package, wrapped in exotic brown paper, hard to find. She placed it in his lap, where it stayed, him looking down at it.
“You have to open it to find out what it is,” Marie teased. “Unless you’ve developed X-ray vision or something.”
She pulled her sweater closed.
J!m tore back the paper. There was more paper underneath, a painting on it, a boy in a backward red cap, long black coat, carrying a suitcase, it appeared, into a house of burlesque. An inconveniently placed block of type over the entrance read:
This unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart — but you will never forget it.
J!m didn’t understand the title. He thought it might be about baseball.
“A book?”
“You can still get them,” Marie said. “I mean, they’re not against the law. That one’s not in the PLEX, though. I think you’ll like it.”
J!m was unsure of what to say, touched by the trouble Marie must have gone through to get him this terrible present, but also devastated that she would so blithely betray him by cohorting with Russ, and self-recriminatory that he hadn’t asked her this morning, or Wednesday, or last week, when Marie repeatedly brought up the dance walking to school and he responded with a trenchant critique of adolescent social rituals, the ridiculous inequity of them and vacuity of anyone who partook in them, which may have led Marie to believe he did not want to go with her.
And so he said a thing that meant nothing, he thought.
“Coming to the Skies tonight?”
“Yeah. . . .” Marie became fascinated with some air in the middle distance. “Me . . . and a bunch of people.”
The school bell tolled the end of day. Students swarmed out of the building, in frenzied escape from the dusty maw of learning, and ran screaming into the weekend.
Marie pushed her hands into her lap.
“I gotta go, Jim. I have a . . . ride.”
“Sure,” his face obtuse.
Marie circled around and met his eyes directly. She frowned.
“Happy birthday.”
She kissed him, for slightly longer than civil, engulfing him in such pain and pleasure he could not tell which was which and whether it was his or hers.
Marie ran down the bleachers.
He ran after her, caught her in his arms, whispered something perfect and spun her around, kissing her and her kissing him, the camera flying around them in the scene he was directing in his head, from a movie set in another universe.
In this one, he put on his domes.
Like a fool, I fell in love with you,
Eric Clapton sang, riffing on a Persian myth, a boy who went mad when the girl he’d loved all his life was married to another, parallelling the singer’s own romantic entanglement, with a moon princess promised to a volcano back home.
Layla, they got you on your knees,
Layla, I’m begging, darling, please,
Layla, darling, don’t appease your fire gods
the world was changing. New, freshly beachfront communities were debuting weekly in Florida, collateral opportunity from the repeated nuking of the North Pole to destroy a Thing that, it turned out, ate radiation. Brazil got less prehistoric by the day. In Eurasia, the Ming and the Russians, if they even were still Russians, obliterated one another on an hourly basis, and here in Manhattan, in the stands of a high school football field, childhood ended.
J!m did not like the way things were, but liked even less the ways in which they were changing: his body was going haywire, his girlfriend was dating his archenemy, and his father was an officially sanctioned supervillain. Most frighteningly, he had lost the ability to not care. His hard-earned psychic shell had shattered, his long cool persona stripped away, leaving a dithering fool prancing down hallways and shrieking his feelings on school property.
If he could only make everything stop, and be still, and shut up, for just a few years, it would give him time to think, to make sense of what was happening to him and draft a plan to reverse it,
or find a hiding spot. The world never stopped spinning, though, except that one time. Night would follow this day, worse awaiting him in the dark, he knew, because worse always awaited him, like they were chums.
But first, he had detention.
“no sleeping on my time, Mr. Anderson.”
J!m was not sleeping, had only closed his eyes so he did not have to watch her watching him. Principal Brooks was a handsome woman, meaning if she were a man she’d be attractive, but she was not, probably, a man.
They were the only ones in her office. J!m had served so many detentions alone he was beginning to think he was the only person besides Johnny who ever did anything wrong. Gloria Castillo used to join them, always paying for something her kooky boyfriend did, but over the summer Ed Byrnes had squashed a family of Ocularians with his car, and now Gloria was in reform school. So it was J!m and Miss Brooks, again.
“I’m resting my eyes.”
“No resting those baby blues. I want them looking right at me, mister.”
The story on Eve Brooks was that she had been engaged to a soldier before the unpleasantness, and when her fiancé was devoured by a tree that ate women but was bi-curean, she went to work for the CIA, using the nom de guerre Ida Day, where she seduced and tortured hundreds of alien combatants, often at the same time, which led to her career in higher education.
When J!m opened his eyes, Principal Brooks smiled, startling him.
“What are we going to do with you, Jim?”
“Execute me.” A half shrug. “Eventually.”
The principal got up from her desk and moved to the window in an aberrant way, leading with her lower torso and swinging it arrhythmically from side to side. J!m speculated that her hips were pneumatic, and misfiring.
She ran her finger down the glass and it went dark.
“Do you like being bad, Jim? Being a bad boy?”
She was talking fast and low, a noir patois J!m ordinarily loved, when the femme in question was on screen and about to mess up some other fellow’s life.
“Does it make you feel like a man?”
There was no alcohol in the room that J!m could detect, except the residue of four drops of Jean Naté, two behind her ears, one on her sternum, and one somewhere else. J!m also considered an aneurism and menopause.
She sat down on the couch next to him.
“Girls like bad boys, don’t they, Jim?” the former fatale husked. “Well, do you want to know what I think about bad boys?”
She reached for J!m’s right thigh.
This was the most celebrated thigh at Manhattan High, in the entire township, notorious but unmentioned among the female population, tightly denimed with something thick and mesmerizing running down its inner length almost to the knee, something that presently retracted violently and hid between J!m’s legs.
She rapped his knee with a fingernail, and turned back into Principal Brooks.
“I think bad boys don’t get good girls. Girls like Marie Rand. And they don’t get into film school.”
She returned to her desk, busying herself with urgent requisitions.
“I don’t want to see you in here again, Mr. Anderson.”
In agreement, J!m made for the door.
“And, Jim?”
He stopped, knowing it couldn’t be that easy.
“Happy birthday.”
Chapter 10
Youth on the Loose!
the ballistic kept accelerating until it reached Marie’s driveway, coming to an abrupt 140-decibel stop, almost dislodging Sandra Jane from Tubesteak’s face. Russ bent over to kiss Marie but she moved smoothly out of the car, leaving him with blue lips.
“Eight o’clock,” Russ called after her. “Bring that boom.”
Marie stilled her hips and walked stiffly to her door, a half wave over her shoulder.
The robognomes let her pass, for it was not yet time for her to become their Courtesan Queen.
As she stepped inside:
“Marie!”
“Hey, Mom,” smiling gamely as she entered the kitchen, “guess what—”
“I’m dry,” snapped her mother’s head, rattling in the pan devised to keep it alive. Dr. Rand did not like it referred to as a pan, or a pie tin, although it was both, untidily constructed with more tubes, wires and lights than could possibly be required.
Marie went to the counter and checked the gauges on the Rand Dynabolic Biopreserver; they were flashing in the normal random pattern.
“Don’t just gape at me like a cow.”
Marie squeezed the bags of glucose and biopreserver fluid suspended above the contraption.
“Everything seems okay.”
Her mother gave her an ugly look, one of the uglier ones. Like most of Manhattan’s matrons, Susan Rand had been a great beauty in her youth, but time and decapitation had taken their toll. Years of meanness were gouged into her face, which no amount of cosmetic troweling could ameliorate.
The dutiful daughter lifted a jug of Angry Red and poured affordable burgundy into a glass burette suspended on the opposite side, allowing herself the small indulgence of an almost inaudible sigh.
“Don’t you judge me!” her mother said. “Walking around all day on your two legs with your pretty little torso . . .” Mrs. Rand’s eyes meandered down her daughter’s body, so like her own, as anyone willing to venture into the basement freezer could attest. There was no point trying to reattach it, after seventeen years and several power outages, but Dr. Rand liked to keep it around, for reference.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Marie said, turning the stopcock and releasing a dark red spiral down the tube, roiling into the clear syrup in the pan like a slow rolling storm cloud.
Mrs. Rand smacked her lips.
sandra jane lay on crimson sateen among heart pillows in her fluffy pink room, her upper lip thick with Estroglam depilatory cream, reading the latest node of Normal Teen, with interesting articles on “Fitting In Without Sticking Out” and “50 Ways to Keep a Boy,” including one involving her index finger that sounded very doable. On the orb, David Cassidy sang:
How can I be sure
In a world that’s constantly changing?
Sandra Jane held up her right index finger and mimicked the twisting motion in the aniviz, and was noticing what big hands she had, and deciding that was okay, Tubesteak could take it, when a spritely terrier mix leapt onto her bed, yipping.
“Whoa, Barker!” Mr. Douglas shouted, pulling on the dog’s harness, steadying himself atop her. He was almost eleven inches tall, high for him, and a tad much for the dog.
“Something wrong with your finger, sweetie?” Sandra Jane’s father asked.
“No,” she said, taking cover behind the vizzine.
“We should get going,” her father suggested. “Our reservation is in fifteen minutes.”
Sandra Jane forced out a baby cough.
“I don’t feel so good, Daddy.”
A skeptical face loomed up in the missing wall of Sandra Jane’s room, which opened out into the underground hangar her mother lived in. Sandra Jane threw frequent fits about this dollhouse arrangement, but it was the only way her mother could get any housekeeping done, and Allison Douglas was as headstrong as her daughter, and ten times larger.
“You don’t look sick,” Mrs. Douglas said, placing her fingertip on Sandra Jane’s forehead and pinning her to the bed. “You feel normal.”
“I am normal!” Sandra Jane yelled, squirming from under her mother’s touch. “I don’t want to go with you, okay? I’m going out with my friends!”
“We’re going to Tony’s . . .” Mr. Douglas hoped to tempt his little girl out from deep inside the blond monstrosity she’d become, but gave away his game by shrinking an inch, squeaking, “Basghetti and meatbells . . .”
“Don’t you get it?” Sandra Jane shouted back. “I can’t be seen with freaks! I’m in high school!”
“I understand, sweetheart,” her father said, disappearing into his suit. “Don’t stay ou
t too late, okay?” Half the man he just was, Grant Douglas yanked Barker’s reins, turning away.
Mrs. Douglas slowly sank out of view.
four roasted chickens, ten pounds of baked potatoes, a bushel of corn on the cob, a basket of buttermilk biscuits and a five-gallon honey pot were at Larry Sweeney’s end of the table.
His mother and father were having soup. They weren’t hungry, they always said, and being thin was best at their age, less weight to carry up and down those steps, and when the time came, they could share a coffin if need be. And they did so love to watch their boy absorb.
Larry picked up a chicken, dipped it in the honey pot, and stuck it in his neck. Competing ameboid factions tore the bird apart with brio, but the boy made no outward sign of gratification.
“Are you all right, Larry?” asked his mother. “You’re hardly eating.”
“And you haven’t hit your mouth once,” his father said.
Larry cleared the bones from his throat, and looked to his parents with anxious love.
“Mom, Pop,” he bibbled softly, “was I adopted?”
Ma Sweeney bit her lip. Pa Sweeney reached across the table and took her paper-thin hand in his.
the red sun fell behind a Martian saucer, remodelled into a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath split-level with a panoramic view of Manhattan from high in the hills, where it had crashed. The à la mode spoil of war was owned, in the sense that nobody would dare remind him that the government officially owned it, by U.S. Army General Walter Ford, on active duty at seventy-one, and was occupied by the former Supreme Commander of Earth Forces, his son the sheriff and his twin grandchildren.
Dinner was served at 1700 sharp.
“You two have your fun tonight,” the general was saying, “but Russ, make sure you preserve your precious bodilies for the game.”
Russ nodded soberly.
“Let’s limit the fluid talk at the table, Dad,” Nick Ford said.