The Humanity of Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  “Kid,” she said, “I got a little job lined up for you today.”

  I felt myself go cold. “What kind of job, Ellis?” I asked, faintly—though I already had a fairly good idea. Quietly, she replied: “The grown-up kind.”

  “Who?”

  “French guy, up from Saigon, with enough jade and rifles to buy us over the border. He’s rich, educated; not bad company, either. For a fruit.”

  “That’s reassuring,” I muttered, and turned on my side, studying the wall. Behind me, I heard her lighter click open, then catch and spark—felt the faint lick of her breath as she exhaled, transmuting nicotine into smoke and ash. The steady pressure of her attention itched like an insect crawling on my skin: Fiercely concentrated, alien almost to the point of vague disgust, infinitely patient.

  “War’s on its last legs,” she told me. “That’s what I keep hearing. You got the Communists comin’ up on one side, with maybe the Russians slipping in behind ’em, and the good old U.S. of A. everywhere else. Philippines are already down for the count, now Tokyo’s in bombing range. Pretty soon, our little outfit is gonna be so long gone, we won’t even remember what it looked like. My educated opinion? It’s sink or swim, and we need all the life-jackets that money can buy.” She paused. “You listening to me? Kid?”

  I shut my eyes again, marshalling my heart-rate.

  “Kid?” Ellis repeated.

  Still without answering—or opening my eyes—I pulled the mosquito net aside, and let gravity roll me free of the hammock’s sweaty clasp. I was fourteen years old now, white-blonde and deeply tanned from the river-reflected sun; almost her height, even in my permanently bare feet. Looking up, I found I could finally meet her grey gaze head-on.

  “‘Us,’” I said. “‘We.’ As in you and I?”

  “Yeah, sure. You and me.”

  I nodded at Brian, who lay nearby, deep asleep and snoring. “And what about him?”

  Ellis shrugged.

  “I don’t know, Tim,” she said. “What about him?”

  I looked back down at Brian, who hadn’t shifted position, not even when my shadow fell over his face. Idly, I inquired—

  “You’ll still be there when I get back, won’t you, Ellis?”

  Outside, through the porthole, I could see that the rising sun had just cracked the horizon; she turned, haloed against it. Blew some more smoke. Asking:

  “Why the hell wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know. But you wouldn’t use my being away on this job as a good excuse to leave me behind, though—would you?”

  She looked at me. Exhaled again. And said, evenly: “You know, Tim, I’m getting’ pretty goddamn sick of you asking me that question. So gimme one good reason not to, or let it lie.”

  Lightly, quickly—too quickly even for my own well-honed sense of self-preservation to prevent me—I laid my hands on either side of her face and pulled her to me, hard. Our breath met, mingled, in sudden intimacy; hers tasted of equal parts tobacco and surprise. My daring had brought me just close enough to smell her own personal scent, under the shell of everyday decay we all stank of: A cool, intoxicating rush of non-fragrance, firm and acrid as an unearthed tuber. It burned my nose.

  “We should always stay together,” I said, “because I love you, Ellis.”

  I crushed my mouth down on hers, forcing it open. I stuck my tongue inside her mouth as far as it would go and ran it around, just like the mayor of that first tiny port village had once done with me. I fastened my teeth deep into the inner flesh of her lower lip, and bit down until I felt her knees give way with the shock of it. Felt myself rear up, hard and jerking, against her soft underbelly. Felt her feel it.

  It was the first and only time I ever saw her eyes widen in anything but anger.

  With barely a moment’s pause, she punched me right in the face, so hard I felt jaw crack. I fell at her feet, coughing blood.

  “Eh—!” I began, amazed. But her eyes froze me in mid-syllable—so grey, so cold.

  “Get it straight, tai pan,” she said, “’cause I’m only gonna say it once. I don’t buy. I sell.”

  Then she kicked me in the stomach with one steel-toed army boot, and leant over me as I lay there, gasping and hugging myself tight—my chest contracting, eyes dimming. Her eyes pouring over me like liquid ice. Like sleet. Swelling her voice like some great Arctic river, as she spoke the last words I ever heard her say—

  “So don’t you even try to play me like a trick, and think I’ll let you get away with it.”

  Was Ellis evil? Am I? I’ve never thought so, though earlier this week I did give one of those legendary American Welfare mothers $25,000 in cash to sell me her least-loved child. He’s in the next room right now, playing Nintendo. Huang is watching him. I think he likes Huang. He probably likes me, for that matter. We are the first English people he has ever met, and our accents fascinate him. Last night, we ordered in pizza; he ate until he was sick, then ate more, and fell asleep in front of an HBO basketball game. If I let him stay with me another week, he might become sated enough to convince himself he loves me.

  The master chef at the Precious Dragon Shrine tells me that the Emperor’s Old Bones bestows upon its consumer as much life-force as the consumed would have eventually gone through, had he or she been permitted to live out the rest of their days unchecked—and since the child I bought claims to be roughly ten years old (a highly significant age, in retrospect), this translates to perhaps an additional sixty years of life for every person who participates, whether the dish is eaten alone or shared. Which only makes sense, really: It’s magic, after all.

  And this is good news for me, since the relative experiential gap between a man in his upper twenties and a woman in her upper thirties—especially compared to that between a boy of fourteen and a woman of twenty-eight—is almost insignificant.

  Looking back, I don’t know if I’ve ever loved anyone but Ellis—if I’m even capable of loving anyone else. But finally, after all these wasted years, I do know what I want. And who.

  And how to get them both.

  It’s a terrible thing I’m doing, and an even worse thing I’m going to do. But when it’s done, I’ll have what I want, and everything else—all doubts, all fears, all piddling, queasy little notions of goodness, and decency, and basic human kinship—all that useless lot can just go hang, and twist and rot in the wind while they’re at it. I’ve lived much too long with my own unsatisfied desire to simply hold my aching parts—whatever best applies, be it stomach or otherwise—and congratulate myself on my forbearance anymore. I’m not mad, or sick, or even yearning after a long-lost love that I can never regain, and never really had in the first place. I’m just hungry, and I want to eat.

  And morality . . . has nothing to do with it.

  Because if there’s one single thing you taught me, Ellis—one lesson I’ve retained throughout every twist and turn of this snaky thing I call my life—it’s that hunger has no moral structure.

  Huang came back late this morning, limping and cursing, after a brief detour to the office of an understanding doctor who his father keeps on international retainer. I am obscurely pleased to discover that Ellis can still defend herself; even after Huang’s first roundhouse put her on the pavement, she still somehow managed to slip her razor open without him noticing, then slide it shallowly across the back of his Achilles tendon. More painful than debilitating, but rather well done nevertheless, for a woman who can no longer wear shoes which require her to tie her own laces.

  I am almost as pleased, however, to hear that nothing Ellis may have done actually succeeded in preventing Huang from completing his mission—and beating her, with methodical skill, to within an inch of her corrupt and dreadful old life.

  I have already told my publicist that I witnessed the whole awful scene, and asked her to find out which hospital poor Mrs. Munro has been taken to. I mysel
f, meanwhile, will drive the boy to the kitchen of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant, where I am sure the master chef and his staff will do their best to keep him entertained until later tonight. Huang has lent him his pocket Gameboy, which should help.

  Ah. That must be the phone now, ringing.

  The woman in bed 37 of the Morleigh Memorial Hospital’s charity wing, one of the few left operating in St. Louis—in America, possibly—opens her swollen left eye a crack, just far enough to reveal a slit of red-tinged white and a wandering, dilated pupil, barely rimmed in grey.

  “Hello, Ellis,” I say.

  I sit by her bedside, as I have done for the last six hours. The screens enshrouding us from the rest of the ward, with its rustlings and moans, reduce all movement outside this tiny area to a play of flickering shadows—much like the visions one might glimpse in passing through a double haze of fever and mosquito net, after suffering a violent shock to one’s fragile sense of physical and moral integrity.

  . . . and oh, how the ghost of you clings . . .

  She clears her throat, wetly. Tells me, without even a flicker of hesitation:

  “Nuh . . . Ellis. Muh num iss . . . Munro.”

  But: She peers up at me, straining to lift her bruise-stung lids. I wait, patiently.

  “Tuh—”

  “That’s a good start.”

  I see her bare broken teeth at my patronizing tone, perhaps reflexively. Pause. And then, after a long moment: “Tim.”

  “Good show, Ellis. Got it in one.”

  Movement at the bottom of the bed: Huang, stepping through the gap between the screens. Ellis sees him, and stiffens. I nod in his direction, without turning.

  “I believe you and Huang have already met,” I say. “Mr. Wao Huang, that is; you’ll remember his father, the former warlord Wao Ruyen. He certainly remembers you—and with some gratitude, or so he told me.”

  Huang takes his customary place at my elbow. Ellis’s eyes move with him, helplessly—and I recall how my own eyes used to follow her about in a similarly fascinated manner, breathless and attentive on her briefest word, her smallest motion.

  “I see you can still take quite a beating, Ellis,” I observe, lightly. “Unfortunately for you, however, it’s not going to be quite so easy to recover from this particular melee as it once was, is it? Old age, and all that.” To Hunag: “Have the doctors reached any conclusion yet? Regarding Mrs. Munro’s long-term prognosis?”

  “Wouldn’t say as ’ow there was one, tai pan.”

  “Well, yes. Quite.”

  I glance back, only to find that Ellis’s eyes have turned to me at last. And I can read them so clearly, now—like clean, black text through grey rice-paper, lit from behind by a cold and colorless flame. No distance. No mystery at all.

  When her mouth opens again, I know exactly what word she’s struggling to shape.

  “Duh . . . deal?”

  Oh, yes.

  I rise, slowly, as Huang pulls the chair back for me. Some statements, I find, need room in which to be delivered properly—or perhaps I’m simply being facetious. My writer’s over-developed sense of the dramatic, working double-time.

  I wrote this speech out last night, and rehearsed it several times in front of the bathroom mirror. I wonder if it sounds rehearsed. Does calculated artifice fall into the same general category as outright deception? If so, Ellis ought to be able to hear it in my voice. But I don’t suppose she’s really apt to be listening for such fine distinctions, given the stress of this mutually culminative moment.

  “I won’t say you’ve nothing I want, Ellis, even now. But what I really want—what I’ve always wanted—is to be the seller, for once, and not the sold. To be the only one who has what you want desperately, and to set my price wherever I think it fair.”

  Adding, with the arch of a significant brow: “—or know it to be unfair.”

  I study her battered face. The bruises form a new mask, impenetrable as any of the others she’s worn. The irony is palpable: Just as Ellis’s nature abhors emotional accessibility, so nature—seemingly—reshapes itself at will to keep her motivations securely hidden.

  “I’ve arranged for a meal,” I tell her. “The menu consists of a single dish, one with which I believe we’re both equally familiar. The name of that dish is the Emperor’s Old Bones, and my staff will begin to cook it whenever I give the word. Now, you and I may share this meal, or we may not. We may regain our youth, and double our lives, and be together for at least as long as we’ve been apart—or we may not. But I promise you this, Ellis: No matter what I eventually end up doing, the extent of your participation in the matter will be exactly defined by how much you are willing to pay me for the privilege.”

  I gesture to Huang, who slips a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. I tap one out. I light it, take a drag. Savor the sensation.

  Ellis just watches.

  “So here’s the deal, then: If you promise to be very, very nice to me—and never, ever leave me again—for the rest of our extremely long partnership—”

  I pause. Blow out the smoke. Wait. And conclude, finally:

  “—then you can eat first.”

  I offer Ellis the cigarette, slowly. Slowly, she takes it from me, holding it delicately between two splinted fingers. She raises it to her torn and grimacing mouth. Inhales. Exhales those familiar twin plumes of smoke, expertly, through her crushed and broken nose. Is that a tear at the corner of her eye, or just an upwelling of rheum? Or neither?

  “Juss like . . . ahways,” she says.

  And gives me an awful parody of my own smile. Which I—return.

  With interest.

  Later, as Huang helps Ellis out of bed and into the hospital’s service elevator, I sit in the car, waiting. I take out my cellular phone. The master chef of the Precious Dragon Shrine restaurant answers on the first ring.

  “How is . . . the boy?” I ask him.

  “Fine, tai pan.”

  There is a pause, during which I once more hear music filtering in from the other end of the line—the tinny little song of a video game in progress, intermittently punctuated by the clatter of kitchen implements. Laughter, both adult and child.

  “Do you wish to cancel your order, tai pan Darbersmere?” the master chef asks me, delicately.

  Through the hospital’s back doors, I can see the service elevator’s lights crawling steadily downward—the floors reeling themselves off, numeral by numeral. Fifth. Fourth. Third.

  “Tai pan?”

  Second. First.

  “No. I do not.”

  The elevator doors are opening. I can see Huang guiding Ellis out, puppeting her deftly along with her own crutches. Those miraculously-trained hands of his, able to open or salve wounds with equal expertise.

  “Then I may begin cooking,” the master chef says. Not really meaning it as a question.

  Huang holds the door open. Ellis steps through. I listen to the Gameboy’s idiot song, and know that I have spent every minute of every day of my life preparing to make this decision, ever since that last morning on the Yangtze. That I have made it so many times already, in fact, that nothing I do or say now can ever stop it from being made. Any more than I can bring back the child Brian Thompson-Greenaway was, before he went up the hill to Wao Ruyen’s fortress, hand in stupidly trusting hand with Ellis—or the child I was, before Ellis broke into my parents’ house and saved me from one particular fate worse than death, only to show me how many, many others there were to choose from.

  Or the child that Ellis must have been, once upon a very distant time, before whatever happened to make her as she now is—then set her loose to move at will through an unsuspecting world, preying on other lost children.

  . . . these foolish things . . . remind me of you.

  “Yes,” I say. “You may.”

  the things

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nbsp; peter watts

  I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

  I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

  I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

  The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

  I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

  The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.

  There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.

  I will go into the storm, and never come back.

  I was so much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.

  So much wisdom I had. So much experience. Now I cannot remember all the things I knew. I can only remember that I once knew them.

  I remember the crash, though. It killed most of this offshoot outright, but a little crawled from the wreckage: a few trillion cells, a soul too weak to keep them in check. Mutinous biomass sloughed off despite my most desperate attempts to hold myself together: panic-stricken little clots of meat, instinctively growing whatever limbs they could remember and fleeing across the burning ice. By the time I’d regained control of what was left the fires had died and the cold was closing back in. I barely managed to grow enough antifreeze to keep my cells from bursting before the ice took me.