It’s hard to say how long they were in space. The Man of the Future kept snapping in and out of consciousness, and whenever he was awake, Colette appeared not to be. Their new diodes and the persistent pulse of the Volvo’s hazards were the only light to be had in the emptiness through which the car slowly somersaulted. Outside there were no visible walls, no floor or ceiling, nothing to suggest that they were in a craft at all, save for the fresh supply of oxygen and the undeniable sense of grand motion all around them, like floating through the calm belly of a sailing oil tanker.
Then they were awake, together, still in the backseat of the Volvo and still naked, but heavy again and shivering on the side of the road. Colette fingered her implant, watched it blink for a minute against the imitation-leather seat cushions, and asked with a croak to be taken home.
The Man of the Future dressed quickly and exited the car to clear away the accumulated snow before realizing that there was no snow to clear, on the car or anywhere else. There was no sign that there had been a blizzard at all, only an empty ribbon of highway and a stiff, daggery wind.
At home, he learned from a stack of unopened mail how long he’d been absent, that what had seemed to him a few hours of cosmic voyaging had actually been almost two years to the turning world. His wife, it appeared, had been husbandless for all that time without a clue. Or rather, with just enough clues to assume the worst. He knew she had tracked him back to the Radisson through his work, and from there to the restaurant where he and another woman had dined for two. When word of Colette’s co-disappearance got out, his wife had done the math.
He has tried to imagine her furious in that moment, shaking with rage, shattering his collection of souvenir coffee mugs and setting fire to his clothes. But this fantasy never aligns with his memory of the woman who had once calmly disinfected the paw of their wounded cat as it clawed her arm, the woman who left his music playing in the car even when she was driving alone. This bottomless well of deference that had made her seem so small to him before the affair was now the perfect indictment of it. It was devastating to him that she had left their home so unmangled before departing, with only disappointment and heartache to be read in all that furniture and air.
* * *
—
Check it out: The Man of the Future is visited again in his bed by alien thoughts.
Hello, the thoughts say.
The Man of the Future tries not to think anything back.
Sorry to bother you, say the thoughts. Superquick: Are your satellites and space stations a good indication of your species’ current level of orbital technology, or do you have something more advanced that we’re missing?
The Man of the Future closes his eyes and rubs his forehead, forgetting for a moment about the light and accidentally grazing it with his hand. It does not budge, or produce pain, or do anything else to suggest it isn’t standard-issue human hardware. It blinks on.
I don’t know, he finally allows himself to think. I imagine they’re probably the best we’ve got.
Fantastic, say the thoughts. One more.
Why don’t you look all of this up on the Internet? the Man of the Future thinks.
Because we’re busy, the thoughts say, and interfacing directly with your thoughts is easier than learning your languages. Why do you have so many? But no, forget that. It’s not important. Honestly and truly, just one more question.
Fine.
How many times does a member of your species mate in his or her lifetime?
What do you mean? the Man of the Future wants to know.
Coupling, the thoughts say.
Be more specific.
Relations.
“What the hell do you mean?” the Man of the Future says out loud. “Do you mean sex? Or do you mean coupling like being a couple? When you say ‘relations,’ do you mean relationships, or are you just talking about fucking? I have to know what you’re asking if you want me to answer.”
Yes, say the thoughts, that’s what we mean.
“Which one?”
Fucking.
“Jesus, I don’t know,” the Man of the Future hollers in bed. “A hundred times. A thousand. Sometimes never. It’s different for everyone. No one knows. Nobody knows any of this crap. You can’t just ask and expect somebody to know.”
Okay, say the thoughts.
“All right?”
Yes, we understand.
“All right.”
Okay, say the thoughts. Sorry.
“Okay.”
Thanks.
* * *
—
“I heard something last night,” the Man of the Future half whispers to Colette in the lab the following day.
Look at the two of them, alone together in the waiting room, almost like a real couple. The techs have made off all squirrelly with swabs from their mouths and ears and anuses and have left them to their vitamin drips. Colette raises an eyebrow to indicate that she is listening without looking up from her laptop.
“Like something talking,” he says.
“Like voices?”
“Like voices,” he says, “but not like voices either. Like my own head talking to me.”
“I fucking knew it,” she says, finally yielding her full attention. “What’d they say?”
“Nothing,” the Man of the Future says. “Just questions.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Tell me about it. ‘How many hours do you sleep in a year, on average? How many different species of vegetation are there on your planet? Why have some parts of your planet been irradiated? Did you do it on purpose?’” She shoots herself in the skull with her thumb and forefinger.
“Like I’m Wiki-fucking-pedia,” she says.
“What do I do?” he asks. Not really to her, but she’s the only one in the room. The only one who answers.
“Tell them,” she says, turning her laptop around, pointing at the camera embedded next to the screen. “Tell everyone.”
He hesitates, but then it occurs to him: A message, broadcast wide enough, might reach his wife, wherever she is. Eventually he nods. Within seconds, Colette has set up a live feed on her site. Her audience is waiting.
But there, see how he hesitates again? He is unsure how to begin. The stakes are suddenly so high. Should he remind her, his faraway wife, why they decided to get married in the first place? All the reasons it had made sense? The way it felt right to stop messing around, to put down something that would hold, to finally make a statement about themselves, that they were people worth committing to? Was there any merit in trying to explain the dull, pitiful origins of his infidelity, or should he simply offer himself up to her judgment?
Should he be on his knees?
There are too many ways it can go, too many opportunities to screw it up for good.
So: He imagines her ear. The one she almost always hid under her hair and never wore jewelry in, the one he had massaged tenderly like a silk lapel on a red-eye back from her parents’ place in Connecticut. Luck had placed them in a row of three coach seats all to themselves, and so she had spread out, her head in the soft basket of his lap, her eyes closed, her mouth asking that he talk to her, just talk, just until she fell asleep, and in that moment, looking down on her, caressing her ear, he found himself awonder that something so small and perfect was capable of hearing anything at all.
He imagines that this is the ear he is speaking to now, somewhere on the other side of the laptop’s blinking camera light.
“I miss you” is what he says.
“Please,” he says. “I miss you and I love you. I was so wrong and I’m so, so sorry. I almost can’t remember what you look like, and it’s making me so sad and crazy and I feel terrible all the time. Please. Please come back.
“Come back,” he says. “I can be better.”
The camera records the message, an
d the long silence that follows. It waits for more. It keeps recording. The light keeps blinking.
Then, in the chat log: Yes, come back, and take me this time!
And me! says another to whatever is listening. I love you, too! I am worthy. Install into me your celestial gifts!
We love you, they cry out to powers unknown, powers only guessed at. The Earth loves all of her neighbors. Best wishes from planet Earth!
Because they believe the Man of the Future is talking to something else, something larger and less terrestrial than a wife, and that through him they might transmit their own prayers and desires. Because they can be so shortsighted. Because they get so lost. Because they want so badly.
Please take me, one writes. I don’t have long.
Take me, they plead. I love you. Over and over, I love you, I love you, the lines of text marching up the page like a single, desperate human hand reaching out toward a cold cosmos.
This, the Man of the Future knows, is as far as his message will go.
He sees the blinking light on his forehead reflected in the laptop screen. It strikes him as ridiculous now that he should have turned to Colette for a solution. In the end, her equipment is the same as his. Their lights blink in unison. Colette, the techs, his abductors, none of them have the answer he wants. Everything he wants to know, he can find out for himself. All he needs is right in front of him, glittering like a ruby waiting to be mined.
The Man of the Future takes his key ring out of his pocket. His car key is too thick, his house key too rounded. Only his mail key is sized for the task. He fixes its sharp tooth to the diode on his forehead, which blips against the serrated edge. He pulls the skin of his brow tight against his skull, slips the tip of the key under the hard metal ridge of the light, and twists.
Look away.
There is absolutely no pain. Even as the diode begins to make a sound of sticky separation, the Man of the Future doesn’t feel he’s doing anything that shouldn’t have been done long ago. With a flick of his wrist the light pops free from his forehead, swan diving on a thin black wire until it dangles against the bridge of his nose.
Does the Woman of the Future stop him? Does she shut down the feed?
Are you kidding?
She zooms the laptop’s camera in close. She is so thrilled she’s trembling. The chat log is losing its mind.
There is no blood, from the hole or on the wire, which is spaghetti-thin and dry as a hair. The light on the end is still blinking, but with less authority now that its tiny workings are finally exposed. When the Man of the Future pulls the wire, it gives. He draws it out like floss, until his arm is fully extended and he has to take hold with the other hand. It is an odd sensation, like drawing a suture that won’t go taut. The Man of the Future wonders why there’s no blood. After a few more pulls, a small beaded junction emerges. The wire splits into two wires, each as large as the first. He can feel the friction of the wires killing the skin cells surrounding the hole. Soon the two wires become four, the four become eight. The hole gags, then widens. Little nodes plink out like rosary beads. Eight become sixteen, and more, and more.
How much of this is in me? the Man of the Future wonders. How much of me is this?
Thoughts materialize in his mind, wherever that is.
A lot, they say.
The wires keep coming, doubling with every few pulls. The Man of the Future yanks them out hand over hand. He pulls hard. He has to.
The laptop camera gorges itself on the image. It cannot stop. It will not look away.
Look away, earthlings. Look away.
This won’t solve anything, the thoughts say. This won’t make anything better.
The Man of the Future doesn’t think of a reply. He doesn’t think anything. He keeps pulling out bundles of beaded wire, which lie in his lap now in licorice-colored bales. He empties himself for the camera. His fingers dig into the hole for more to pull, following every strand, searching for where each one connects to some other earthly thing, a patch of grass, or sand, or sky, or the moon, which tugs at them all invisibly, and constantly, and all the while falling, falling, always falling. And here, under his forefinger, this could be the wire that connects him to her, the line that knows where she is and how to bring her back. He will pull it and pull it until he’s pulled all of her out of him, heavy and whole on a bed of wire, where he’ll stroke her neck, kiss her hand, and tell her in her ear that she is home.
The Sea Beast Takes a Lover
The bosun threatens to shoot anyone who tries to join him in the crow’s nest. He does this every few hours, his flintlock pistol raised to the gauzy drape of heaven like he’s going to shoot the sun out of the sky.
We don’t need reminding. We’ve all watched him, at one time or another since we started sinking, play the coconut game, in which the bosun points to a coconut placed at the base of the man-of-war’s foremast by his mate Samson, calling it by the name of someone who is irritating him, or someone nearby, which is often the same thing. Then he aims his pistol at the coconut. Then he executes the coconut, spraying the quarterdeck with meat and milk in a way that would be unremarkable if man and object weren’t separated by more than a hundred feet of open air. Then the bosun proclaims: “Yes, [name], that is you. That is the ripe fruit of your brainpan. Or rather, it will be tomorrow if you remain on my bad side.”
But tomorrow it is not the nearby sailor. It is, if anything, another coconut, or a dolphin whose errant fluke has dared to enter the bosun’s crosshairs (“Yes, [name], that is your errant fluke”), or the unhappy head of a gull perched too close to the crow’s nest, where the bosun sits, cue-ball-eyed and prune-chinned, watching the water rise.
We are all watching it. Some of the men are still able to commit themselves to their crewmanly duties as if nothing has changed. Others spend their days hunting distraction and drink. But out of the corners of our eyes, we are all watching the steady creep of the waterline against the hull.
I stumble past a tentacle on my way to the ration barrel and am about to draw out my breakfast when the bosun issues his warning.
“That’s close enough, Ensign,” he shouts.
I am not close enough for anything. I am five feet to port and 114 straight down. High above the mainsail, the bosun wags the muzzle of his flintlock at me, as if to say, I could make a coconut of you from here.
I take my effigy from my coat pocket and show it to him. It has a salt-hardened coat like mine, a tricorn like mine, trousers with a torn left cuff like mine. Its left leg is corkscrewed like mine, and if it could walk, it would doubtlessly shuffle about the deck like a broken toy as I do. I wave the thing at him, as if to say, Be my guest. This ship is sinking and I’m drawing my breakfast from a barrel. You’ll be doing me a favor.
The bosun hates being sneered at, but shooting an officer, even an ensign, is risky. Tensions between the officers and the crew are high enough as it is. He lays a hand on his own effigy, which wears the same teal-striped shirt he does, and has the same weathered, bloodied bandage wrapped around its head. God knows how much food and ammunition lie at the bosun’s feet, hauled up in his teeth in the dead of night at the sight of the first tentacle. A bosun’s true skill lies not in marksmanship, but in foresight and preparation. Another ten feet above him, the admiral’s wind-tattered pennant cracks like a whip.
The Winsome Bride has been sinking for months. As far as we can tell, the beast has mistaken us for one of her kind and is, in her own fashion, pitching woo. She lowers us patiently, tenderly, as a mother might drown her child. Her love-struck tentacles have hamstrung our rudder, bent our keel, noosed up our figurehead. The ship is rife with suction-cupped infiltrators. We find them everywhere: in lockers and holds, in cupboards worming into the flour meal. They lie in coils on the deck pretending to be rope. They flirt under the seat of the head. Day by day they pull us deeper. It is a drowning of inches. We pump bilge fo
r hours with nothing to show for it. Wood dries and warps and is drowned again. A salt patina ices everything. When the monster’s prehensile affections finally drag us under a capital of foam, the bosun, perched on the Winsome Bride’s highest bough, intends to be the last man breathing.
Lambeaux, the master gunner, and his mate Sip sidestep napping deckhands and lolling tentacles, arriving at the ration barrel just behind me. Excess treble bleeds out of Sip’s headphones. He wears a leopard-print bandanna and shredded jeans, and the cheeks under his sunglasses are peppered with gunpowder. He draws breakfast for Lambeaux and himself while nodding his head along to muted hip-hop. Lambeaux takes a cup from his mate and squints up at the bosun, then offers me a commiserating headshake.
“I saw that, Master Lambeaux,” the bosun bays. “You’re lucky I don’t have you for twelve lashes!”
“And who would administer them?” Lambeaux calls to the crow’s nest. His shirt is tied at the navel with a gold Turkish gunner’s sash. “Would the bosun be so good as to come down and scourge the insolence out of me with his own instrument, or will he command God Himself to descend from on high and deliver His justice?”
At this, the bosun hollers across the quarterdeck to Samson for a coconut and brings his shooting arm to bear. The hammer cracks, and not far from where we’re standing the coconut swallows a full bore and paints the deck. Sip lifts his sunglasses to visually confirm the kill. The effigy tucked into his cartridge pouch also wears sunglasses, and miniature headphones, and has the same gelled quaff on its head, though no facsimile could re-create Sip’s perpetually detached expression, as if he were always just on the threshold of experiencing interest in the world around him.
The Sea Beast Takes a Lover Page 4