The Sea Beast Takes a Lover

by Michael Andreasen

  I could be his mother. I could take care of him. Bathe him and feed him. I could teach him to talk and read and tell him stories and I wouldn’t get in his way when he did his work. When he called his followers and took up his cross and began the long, hard work of judging everyone, I wouldn’t be a burden. I’d know him, like how Mary knew Jesus better than anyone else. I’d know that his laughter didn’t always mean that everything was fine, that his smile didn’t always mean he was happy. It’s a kind of hiding I know about, and he and I would have that in common and would understand each other in that way. I’d take care of him when I knew he needed to be taken care of, and when it came time for him to judge me, he would say, This one, though meek, has served me well, and will sit beside me in paradise.

  “No! No, because,” Aunt Connie cries and throws Fab’s arms off her, “because he’s right. He’ll just keep finding us . . .” She breaks free of the love seat and runs out of the room, and Fab goes after her, and Paul giggles.

  “Connie!” Fab shouts, but Connie is already out the front door and into the yard, and soon Fab is, too, and I’m alone again with Paul. His thin lips are stretched tight like a rubber band across his face, and I think to him, I know what you really want. What you’re really after.

  I think to him, You’re hungry, aren’t you.

  I roll my shirt up to my neck. Carefully, like a mother wolf, I kneel over him and lower my nipple to his lips. His smile cracks open, and I see the slick, gummy insides of his mouth. I feel his lips reach out for me, and I lower my chest a little more, and he locks on.

  Paul has me. His lips and his little tongue are on me and they’re filling me with a kind of lightness, a feeling that moves through me like a wave of goose bumps, and suddenly I’m warm all over and I know he’s changing me. I begin to feel things. People. I can feel Aunt Connie kneeling down in the front lawn, and Fab hissing at her under the dim porch light. I can feel the families in the houses on either side of ours. In one, our neighbor Rachel is talking to her grown-up son, but he’s not listening. He’s watching TV and turning the volume up louder the louder she talks. In the other, a husband and wife are standing at their window watching Fab and Aunt Connie argue on the lawn, whispering to each other even though they’re alone.

  I can feel more.

  I can feel the people on the streets that cross ours, and the streets that run the same way as ours, all the people in their homes and in their cars and walking on the street. It’s more than just feeling them. I can reach out to them. Make them feel me, notice me, even come to me, I think, if I concentrate. Paul’s lips pump and suck and the feeling gets stronger, until suddenly there’s a heat in my chest that starts to burn, and my elbows buckle and my body jolts and I have to fight to pull myself away from Paul’s mouth to keep from crushing him.

  Paul is piping with joy and beating his arms against the carpet. There’s a swollen, throbbing red ring over my heart where he bit me. All of the feelings I had before are gone, and he’s laughing. Paul calls out to everyone else because everyone else is good enough. Valerie and Clayton were good enough to make it to our door. Connie, who isn’t good at anything, is good enough to be his mother. But not me.

  If Paul won’t have me, I don’t think God will either. And if Paul can’t stand to be with me, then he should be with God.

  * * *

  —

  Fab is shaking me too hard by the shoulders. She and Connie are both saying my name and I don’t know which one of them to look at, until Fab takes over, speaking to me in a very stern, very controlled way.

  “Dizzy,” she says. “Diz, where’s Paul? Where’s Paul, Diz?” I must look like I’m asleep, because she keeps snapping her fingers in front of my face. “Dizzy!” She snaps. “Dizzy!” She snaps again.

  I don’t want to tell, but it’s hard not to, so I pretend that it’s something I’ve forgotten.

  “Check upstairs!” Fab shouts back at Aunt Connie, who is red and wet with so many tears. Her hands and knees are dirty. She runs out of the living room and Fab turns back to me. She asks me over and over where Paul is, and over and over I tell her I don’t know.

  Fab says that I was just with him, so I should know where he is. Someone has spilled macaroni all over the carpet. Upstairs we can hear Aunt Connie still crying as she knocks over laundry baskets and chairs. I hear the doors of the big wardrobe in Fab’s room slamming shut, then the whole wardrobe crashing to the floor. Fab tells me to try and think about what could have happened to Paul. Had he crawled away when I wasn’t looking? Had we been playing a game? Had I taken him somewhere? She’s still shaking me, her fingernails carving little red crescents into my skin.

  There’s another loud noise above us. This time it sounds like Aunt Connie crashing to the floor. We can hear her sobbing and yelling and biting the carpet, and Fab turns to me and says that it’s very, very important that I tell her anything I know about what happened to Paul. Did a man come into the house? The man from earlier today? Was there a man in here while she and Aunt Connie were outside?

  “Maybe he’s with God,” I say, and for a moment Fab’s grip on me relaxes.

  And she says, “What?”

  And I tell her that maybe God reached down and took Paul up to heaven, body and all, the way he did with the Virgin Mary. Maybe Paul isn’t here because he’s in heaven with God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Virgin and all the saints, and maybe that’s where he’s supposed to be. Where he should have been all along.

  Fab doesn’t say anything. She goes into the kitchen and stares at the phone, like she’s trying to decide whether to make a call, then she runs upstairs.

  They’re both worried about Paul, but I’m not. The Lord says vengeance is His, so we’re wrong to even try it. I left him in the most on-high place I know, as close to God as I’ll ever get, but I know eventually Fab will find him, or a neighbor, or a policeman. Someone with a kind face and a heart like a dried, thirsty pool will hear him coo from the flower box outside my window. They’ll see him lying shirtless just beyond the glass in a bed of white flowers and their heart will sigh and begin to drink him in, and for them he will be heaven on earth, a miracle child in a manger of daisies, and for the rest of their lives they’ll want nothing except to know him, and serve him, and be at his side when his judgment falls like rain upon us all. The world will never hide him, and the truly kind will be powerless against him. Paul will call out to them, and they will come.

  Rockabye, Rocketboy

  10

  The Rocketboy will never truly love her. How could he?

  For starters, he has never, as far as we know, touched the ground. We cannot even be sure, as he gooses through the cityscape hundreds of feet above us with his shoulders strapped to those massive turbines, that he is even aware of us. Does the Rocketboy ever look to the earth? Granted, we are built so high now that we can hardly see it ourselves, but at least we, in our tall glassed-in neighborhoods and elegantly domed towers, are aware of its existence. At one time or another, on a school field trip or arboreal holiday, or during a bout of youthful rebellion against the high places we come from, we have each endured the long, pressure-shifting elevator ride to feel the soft soil beneath us, to hold the cold shake of it in our hands, to press our faces in deep and breathe deeply. Most of us can recall a teenage summer spent wearing grass-stained pants and soiled T-shirts like a badge of honor, our sight and smell meant to offend. I’m not like you, was the unsubtle statement to a parent or teacher. I’m a child of the earth. Do you even remember the earth, old man?

  The Rocketboy, we must assume, has done none of these things. It is impossible to guess what he must think of us. He can see us through the windows of our apartments, can watch us walking the gardens and parks we’ve built on our rooftops to take advantage of sun-wet days. He might even spy us waving from our cockpits as we zip alongside him in airplanes and helicopters and paragliders and solar sailers and recre
ational foot-powered autogiros. But does he understand that our legs are for more than just pedaling flying machines and pacing balconies? Does he know that before we learned to build and soar, our species cut its teeth on long days of walking, sometimes even running, through buildingless fields and across broad, undeveloped meadows? Can he possibly know the difference between the multitiered floors of our towers and the one true floor of the world? And if he is unable to distinguish the foundation from the firmament, how could the Rocketboy possibly locate within himself a concept as terrestrial as love?

  Another problem: They (meaning she, the woman, twenty-four, cinnamon-skinned star of erotic films, and he, the Rocketboy) have never met. She is a fan, of course. An admirer from afar, as are so many. Men and women both. Anyone with eyes to tilt skyward and a heart quick to wonder. On a clear day, we can all follow a serpentine trail of dark exhaust to its source: a subsonic sixteen-year-old, his canvas skirts and goggle straps flagging in the jet stream, his chest bare and slick with that gunmetal grease intended, we presume, to promote aerodynamism and protect his skin from the furnacial heat of the turbines, those huge, roaring powder kegs of thrust that tow him through layers of atmosphere by the armpits.

  How does he command them? There are no visible wrist controls, no hip-mounted joysticks that we can see. The more fanciful among us have suggested a sympathetic mental link between the Rocketboy and the engines themselves, allowing for split-second adjustments in pitch and yaw, darting maneuvers, and daring escapes from the clutches of whatever might have cause to give him chase. Another somewhat more unsettling possibility is that he does not control them at all, that the Rocketboy is, in fact, at the mercy of his own rockets, an unwilling thrall to their whim, helpless as they lazy-eight and barrel-roll him through the air, a prisoner of speed and smoke.

  Most of us hate this idea. It is better for those who love him, as she does, to believe that he is in control of his own destiny, that the calligraphic threads of exhaust are woven by his design, that his course through our sky, as capricious and carefree as it might seem, is in every way deliberate, and safe, and good.

  9

  Not long after she realizes that she loves him in a manner that will likely never be requited, but at the same time can’t be ignored, she applies to be an official Friend of the Rocketboy. She sends us a check for forty-five dollars and a self-addressed stamped manila envelope, and in return we send her a copy of our quarterly newsletter, a membership pin, a logbook for recording the date, time, and location of her sightings, and a pair of official club sighting binoculars with an easy-to-handle zoom toggle and adjustable nylon strap. We include a temporary username and password that will allow her to log in to our website, through which she can submit her sightings to the community log, enter online forums to discuss the Rocketboy with other members, and receive information regarding Rocketboy-themed events in her area.

  At first she looks for him only when all other attentions are met, no script reading or rehearsing to be done, no outstanding chores or errands. Only then does she straddle the radiator in front of the small window in her bedroom and scan the sky for clues: a smudged line of charcoal across an otherwise unblemished panel of blue, a patch of oddly disturbed cloud. Sometimes a flock of agitated geese will announce him, or, if he is very close, the gut-stirring reverberation of the turbines sounding out between the towers. Had she been willing to venture up to the apartment tower’s rooftop garden, she might have attuned herself to his flight patterns more quickly, the 360-degree visibility allowing her to more easily note the times and altitudes of his regular appearance, but she refuses to suffer the loss of privacy. She doesn’t attend any of the Rocketboy-themed events in her area, not even on Rocketboy Day, celebrated on February 17 by Friends of the Rocketboy chapters citywide. She doesn’t want community. She’s not interested in sharing her tracking notes on the sighting boards. It frustrates her to know that others are watching. If Adrian walks into the bedroom while she’s at the window, she becomes nervous, distracted. She pretends to watch for turbines and smoke tails, but secretly hopes he won’t appear. If it were up to her, she would not share the Rocketboy with anyone.

  8

  She has always found air travel romantic. She had initially wanted to be a flight attendant, and had applied for a position aboard one of the city’s few remaining nonautomated crosstown airships, but was turned down because of her height. She has none. She has width and depth where it counts, not to mention a more than mentionworthy face that has taken her far. But the simple fact is that she is short, and dirigible stewards and stewardesses have all kinds of height-related duties, most notably the stowing and unstowing of luggage.

  Her audition at SkinDescribable Productions included the measuring of nearly every part of her: her waist, hips, bust, the distance from one ear to the other, the alignment of her eyes, the circumference of her mouth. After more than an hour of recording her dimensions—save for a straight up-and-down head-to-toe, which appeared not to matter in the slightest—she was hired to play the title character in a new series of soft-core erotic concept films called The Plug Detective.

  The Plug Detective films describe the exploits of the titular character, a naïve, nubile junior officer of the law. Despite constant admonishment from her sexually frustrated police chief and innuendo-stuffed chiding from her bi-curious female lieutenant, she is known for an eagerness and pluck that reliably delivers her, with each installment, into increasingly steamy scenarios.

  Adrian is the on-site technician for Spanner, the Plug Detective’s robot partner, and operates his controls during the plugging scenes. This is how he enters her life. They meet. They date. They share an apartment.

  The serial adventures of the Plug Detective become an underground sensation almost overnight. Again: She has the face, and sometimes—often, even—that is enough. Also, the films are not without some quality. The plugging is strong and sensual, the concept fertile, the writing clever enough to calm the nerves of those few stragglers still embarrassed by pornography. She develops a following of shy but ardent fans who demand in quiet corners to see more of her. Soon, SkinDescribable has her filming three to four times a week, pumping out new episodes of The Plug Detective almost faster than the writers can write them.

  Admittedly, a few of us are fans. Unadmittedly, even more are. A subgroup of us have founded the Friends of the Plug Detective. We admire her willingness to welcome new intimacies without suspicion or fear, and are more than a little jealous of how easily sex seems to happen to her. Like the Friends of the Rocketboy, we, too, have logbooks and binoculars. Sometimes we will spy her from our windows crossing a suspension bridge or a pressurized suborbital walkway. Our sighting logs tell us that she likes to do her shopping on cloudy days, and prefers the sour crunch of unripe mangoes to ripe ones. We know she always has her binoculars on her person, though she never takes them out in public. We keep a telescoped eye on her, studying her habits and movements as we might study a map of a place we know well, but have never been.

  7

  She dreams up a date with the Rocketboy. She knows it’s foolish to imagine that something so wild and mercurial would linger anywhere long enough to be entertained, but she does.

  She imagines the two of them candlelit at her window, she on the inside, hunched over the radiator, he on the out, bobbing in the twilight like a buoy. Up close he is unmistakably human, and yet she can’t imagine him ever being born to human parents. It is impossible to picture him cooped up in a womb. For some reason, it is easier to believe that the turbines birthed him. At the window, they grumble behind him like nervous chaperones. Their hum rattles the candleholders she has set up on the sill. Their exhaust worries the flames. They do not power down, but hover in their idle. The Rocketboy rests his elbows on the improvised table between them, his feet dangling in the open air.

  Even with the drone of the engines, the scene is not unromantic. The Rocketboy’s blue grease is glas
sy and slick in the moonlight. He looks like a chrome hood ornament. His hair is stiff sable, windblown and singed at its edges, curling puckishly around his ears and neck. His goggles, which he never removes except in her dreams, reveal cloudy, unblinking eyes that stare confidently at her, until she’s forced to look down at the single wineglass between them. She doesn’t offer him any of the Chablis. He is, after all, a minor.

  There is also this to think about: He’s not long for this world, and that fact, sleeping in a deep-down place she can hardly admit to, is part of the attraction. The Friends of the Rocketboy all share the same morbid certainty, one we don’t speak about on the forums. Secretly we know that, in the end, the Rocketboy is a child playing in traffic, a damsel tied to the elevated train tracks. He is too beautiful and delicate for our metal-heavy sky, which is already an obstacle course of planes, air cars, zeppelins, and so many jutting buildings, all of which he may or may not even be aware. Who knows what shapes penetrate the smoked glass of his goggles? Perhaps, to the Rocketboy, all is sky, or else not sky. Perhaps that is all the distinction he needs. Still, the grim consensus is that his manic flitting, his love of speed, his reckless disregard for the carefully plotted order of our airways will one day catch up with him, and in the most perverse and heartless depths of our hearts, we want him squarely within the reticles of our scopes when that terrible whatever aims him earthward and forces him down.