by Neil Clarke
Nineteen
Eventually it comes to pass that those who tell the story insert themselves into its fabric. There is the green-skinned housekeeper who hands me a tangled knot of thread when I first enter the house and warns me of a monster at the center of the maze. I believe she is confused with other constructions, other stories which are being told and retold in other places, at other times and I (and we all who come after) are too embarrassed to tell her so.
I am the first who can see outside: the black hills and black sun, the blue-limbed trees which sway in winds too warm for brittle skin. I take the thread and tie it to the door anyway, shed my shoes and run as fast as I can in any direction. The air fills with a fine silt and it is hours before I realize I am not breathing it in.
I breathe nothing in.
I do not breathe.
When I wake, I am lying beneath the crystal chandelier in the entrance, the green-skinned housekeeper who speaks in clucking syllables and waves her many arms and legs in gestures of emphatic apology, hands me a ball of tangled thread. I believe she is confused; I am too embarrassed to tell her I am already dead.
Nineteen (after many more tellings)
Eventually it comes to pass that I learn to expand and contract my diaphragm. When I meet the housekeeper, I ask her for a mask, for cylinders, and boots made of thick rubber and hard soles. I clip lights and lines, learn to turn my regular on and off in the dark. I keep a journal with times and distance and SAC rates. If ever one of us is to escape, I feel it must be through me.
My husband and I spent every anniversary in Mexico. Once, as he carried my gear down the wooden steps, where the snorkelers were gathered, he asks the name of the place. Nahoch Nah Chich, I tell him.
Giant birdcage. He laughed. Why do we name such things, but out of fear, or longing.
I do not remember marrying him. I do not remember how we met, or where I was born, my mother’s face, the ten-page checklist of mission objectives.
Tying the thread to the door, I feel a familiarity in my fingers. I bend my legs at the knees, floating above the alien world and it is not alien at all: white fingers of limestone drip down and all is quiet save the sound of my own breathing. It is a different cave each time. Different jumps and line arrows; the thread never pulls me back, but eventually I fade.
Thirty
A woman made entirely of bees introduces me to my husband. She sits us both down and explains, in as few words as possible, that I am here to be murdered by him. The story says it must be so. There would be time to come to it naturally, a progression of intimacies and arguments, tests of will as we circled each other like dogs, but everything is running slower than expected. He must do it now. Quickly.
My husband argues with her. He says he does not wish to kill anyone. He has never wished to kill anyone and could he please simply go home. He laments the destruction of free will, the confines of destiny. Why is his role never examined, the contextual analysis of his decisions given more than cursory glances.
The woman of bees grows large and small before him. “The things that I could show you would make you piss yourself in fear.”
My husband is undeterred. “You brought us here. This is all on you.”
“We did not make you,” she says.
There are glimpses within her form, planets and stars I do not remember, and I reach out without thinking. If the universe had formed in an infinitesimally different way, had a molecule collapsed or grown larger, had a butterfly been squished beneath a hunter’s boot, my life would not exist.
I hold stardust in my palm, I think, as a few crushed bees twitch and tickle against my skin.
I do not think this one small act has the power to affect great change. We are not at the beginning after all and the universe is expanding too quickly to catch up with it now. How insurmountable the arrogance that a crushed insect could change a presidential election (I do not believe I have ever seen an election, besides).
Four Hundred Thirty-Seven
On our first date I tell the man who will one day be my husband how in 1994 Sheck Exley drowned at 925 feet in Zacatón cenote trying to see what the bottom was like. I linger on the ideal percentages in his gas mixture and tell him how the total pressure exerted by a mixture of gases is equal to the sum of the pressures that would be exerted by each of those gases if they alone were present and occupied the volume. I calculated the distance and ascent rate of an exhalation on a cocktail napkin to explain how when the last of his bubbles breached the surface, Sheck’s wife must have known he had died a full ten minutes before.
“But didn’t she jump in after him?” he asks.
“It would have been pointless,” I say.
Our relationship becomes a study of inverse calculations. Pressure and volume. My love for him is a steel cylinder, over pressurized. Quantifiable, divisible into clean fractions, calculable for the prevention of oxygen toxicity and nitrogen narcosis. I do not enter a cave unless I am sure I have enough to get out. But he is decompression: a slow release of frustration and longing. Mathematically imprecise.
“What is the most scared you’ve ever been,” he says and I tell him of the Blue Holes in the Bahamas, how a woman there likes to follow the cave divers inside, flips their line arrows around to discourage them from returning.
“There are places one may reach,” I say, “where all exits point back to the self.”
“So that happened to you?” he asks, and I shake my head.
“But all of us suffer the same fears. Even though I have never seen that place, I can still feel her eyes on me in the dark. Kindred spirits. Like the myth of twins who can feel when the other is in pain, or dies.”
“In this story, are you the lost diver? Or are you the one who traps them inside, so they will never return?”
“Can’t I be both?”
“Why are all the mad ones women,” he laughs. “Medusa, Lusca, evil queens and scorned ex-wives.” He smiles at me and I remember smiling. I remember agreeing. I remember being foolish in a great many ways.
Later, when I cannot clean the tell-tale blood from my hands he snaps my neck. The last thing I hear is the key hitting the floor. A small sound, less than leaves breaking, and I see there are two of him behind his eyes. One I will never understand, and the other who whispers It was a kindness.
The Husband’s Last Will and Testament Left on His Brother’s Answering Machine Before Lift-Off Which the First Wife Sometimes Whispers to Wife 1001 Like a Greeting, or a Prayer
Please take care of the dogs. Keep the house, or sell it—by the time we get back there won’t be a house left. If we get back. Tell your kids I’ll name whole galaxies after them.
I’ve left you all our books save one. It’s her favorite and I’m thinking of sneaking it up there by hiding it in my jumpsuit. We’re not supposed to take any unauthorized items, and they tell us the sum of human history is in the computer if we get bored. But just the two us, willing to float out there alone for centuries, how can they say no?
The Penultimate Wife
I enter the story knowing my husband’s plans for me. He weeps as he does it; he begs forgiveness. We can be so much better than the sum of what has come before.
He mistakes my disinterest for his guilt as evidence that I do not know what I am, what we are, where we have been and where we were headed. It know it was a moment’s sentiment when the knife glanced against my throat and failed. A miscalculation of time and distance, a desire to wait until the last possible second.
He believes it is my story he is telling, dividing me into ten thousand forms, variation after variation and in this way he can keep us both alive. My consciousness hangs like silt stirred by the breath of unknown women. He hopes the sum of us will equal the whole, but looking into my eyes he must know the tiniest parts of me have been discontinued.
I’m sorry, he says, I’m sorry. I promise not to do it again.
I Tell Thee All, I Can No More
Sunny Moraine
; Here’s what you’re going to do. It’s almost like a script you can follow. You don’t have to think too much about it.
Just let it in. Let it watch you at night. Tell it everything it wants to know. These are the things it wants, and you’ll let it have those things to keep it around. Hovering over your bed, all sleek chrome and black angles that defer the gaze of radar. It’s a cultural amalgamation of one hundred years of surveillance. There’s safety in its vagueness. It resists definition. This is a huge part of its power. This is a huge part of its appeal.
Fucking a drone isn’t like what you’d think. It’s warm. It probes, gently. It knows where to touch me. I can lie back and let it do its thing. It’s only been one date but a drone isn’t going to worry about whether I’m an easy lay. A drone isn’t tied to the conventions of gendered sexual norms. A drone has no gender and, if it comes down to it, no sex. Just because it can do it doesn’t mean it’s a thing that it has.
We made a kind of conversation, before, at dinner. I did most of the talking, which I expected.
The drone hums as it fucks me. We—the dronesexual, the recently defined, though we only call ourselves this name to ourselves and only ever with the deepest irony—we’re never sure whether the humming is pleasure or whether it’s a form of transmission, but we also don’t really care. We gave up caring what other people, people we probably won’t ever meet, think of us. We talk about this on message boards, in the comments sections of blogs, in all the other places we congregate, though we don’t usually meet face to face. There are no dronesexual support groups. We don’t have conferences. There is no established discourse around who we are and what we do. No one writes about us but us, not yet.
The drones probably don’t do any writing. But we know they talk.
Drones don’t come, not as far as we can tell, but they must get satisfaction out of it. They must get something. I have a couple of orgasms, in the laziest kind of fashion, and the vibration of the maybe-transmission humming tugs me through them. I rub my hands all over that smooth conceptual hardware and croon.
There was no singular point in time at which the drones started fucking us. We didn’t plan it, and maybe it wasn’t even a thing we consciously wanted until it started happening. Sometimes a supply creates a demand.
But when something is around that much, when it knows that much, it’s hard to keep your mind from wandering in that direction. I wonder what that would feel like inside me. One kind of intimacy bleeds into another. Maybe the drones made the first move. Maybe we did. Either way, we were certainly receptive. Receptive, because no one penetrates drones. They fuck men and women with equal willingness, and the split between men and women in our little collectivity is, as far as anyone has ever been able to tell, roughly fifty-fifty. Some trans people, some genderfluid, and all permutations of sexual preference represented by at least one or two members. The desire to fuck a drone seems to cross boundaries with wild abandon. Drones themselves are incredibly mobile and have never respected borders.
Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re not going to get too attached. This isn’t something you’ll have to work to keep from doing, because it’s hard to attach to a drone. But on some level there is a kind of attachment, because the kind of closeness you experience with a drone isn’t like anything else. It’s not like a person. They come into you; they know you. You couldn’t fight them off even if you wanted to. Which you never do. Not really.
We fight, not because we have anything in particular to fight over, but because it sort of seems like the thing to do.
No one has ever come out and admitted to trying to have a relationship with the drone that’s fucking them, but of course everyone knows it’s happened. There are no success stories, which should say something in itself, and people who aren’t in our circle will make faces and say things like you can’t have a relationship with a machine no matter how many times it makes you come, but a drone isn’t a dildo. It’s more than that.
So of course people have tried. How could you not?
This isn’t a relationship, but the drone stayed the night after fucking me, humming in the air right over my bed as I slept, and it was there when I woke up. I asked it what it wanted and it drifted toward the kitchen, so I made us some eggs which of course only I could eat.
It was something about the way it was looking at me. I just started yelling, throwing things.
Fighting with a drone is like fucking a drone in reverse. It’s all me. The drone just dodges, occasionally catches projectiles at an angle that bounces them back at me, and this might amount to throwing. All drones carry two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, neatly resized as needed, because all drones are collections of every assumption we’ve ever made about them, but a drone has never fired a missile at anyone they were fucking.
This is no-stakes fighting. I’m not even sure what I’m yelling about. After a while the drone drifts out the window. I cry and scream for it to call me. I order a pizza and spend the rest of the day in bed.
Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re not going to ask too many questions. You’re just going to let it happen. You’ll never know whose eyes are behind the blank no-eyes that see everything. There might not be any anymore; drones regularly display what we perceive as autonomy. In all our concepts of droneness there is hardly ever a human being on the other end. So there’s really no one to direct the questions to.
Anyway, what the hell would you ask? What are we doing, why are we this way? Since when have those ever been answers you could get about this kind of thing?
This is really sort of a problem. In that I’m focusing too much on a serial number and a specific heat signature that only my skin can know. In that I asked the thing to call me at all. I knew people tried things like this but it never occurred to me that it might happen without trying.
It does call me. I talk for a while. I say things I’ve never told anyone else. It’s hard to hang up. That night while I’m trying to sleep I stare up at the ceiling and the dark space between me and it feels so empty.
I pass them out on the street, humming through the air. They avoid me with characteristic deftness but after a while it occurs to me that I’m steering myself into them, hoping to make contact. They all look the same but I know they aren’t the same at all. I’m looking for that heat signature. I want to turn them over so I can find that serial number, nestled in between the twin missiles, over the drone dick that I’ve never actually seen.
Everyone around me might be a normal person who doesn’t fuck a drone and doesn’t want to and doesn’t talk to them on the phone and usually doesn’t take them to dinner. Or every one of them could be like that.
At some point we all stopped talking to each other.
Here’s what you’re going to do. Here’s what you’re not going to do. Here’s a list to make it easy for you.
You’re not going to spend the evening staring out the window. You’re not going to toy endlessly with your phone. You’re not going to masturbate furiously and not be able to come. You’re not going to throw the things you threw at nothing at all. You’re not going to stay up all night looking at images and video that you can only find on a few niche paysites. You’re not going to wonder if you need to go back into therapy because you don’t need therapy. You’re not going to wonder if maybe you and people like you might be the most natural people in the entire world, given the way the world is now. You’re not going to wonder if there was ever such a thing as natural.
Sometimes I wonder what it might be like to be a drone. This feels like a kind of blasphemy, and also pointless, but I do it anyway. So simple, so connected. So in tune. Needed instead of the one doing the needing. Possessing all the power. Subtly running more and more things until I run everything. The subjects of total organic surrender.
Bored, maybe, with all that everything. Playing some games.
It comes over. We fuck again and it’s amazing. I’m almost crying by the end. It nestles against me and hums softer a
nd I wonder how screwed I actually am in how many different ways.
Anyway, it stays the night again and we don’t fight in the morning.
A drone wedding. I want to punch myself in the mouth twenty or thirty times for even thinking that even for a second.
It starts coming every night. This is something I know I shouldn’t get used to but I know that I am. As I talk to it—before sex, during, after—I start to remember things that I’d totally forgotten. Things from my early childhood, things from high school that I didn’t want to remember. I tell with tears running down my face and at the end of it I feel cleaned out and raw.
I don’t want this to be over, I say. I have no idea what the drone wants and it doesn’t tell me, but I want to believe that the fact that it keeps coming back means something.
I read the message boards and I wish I could tell someone else about this because I feel like I’m losing every shred of perspective. I want to talk about how maybe we’ve been coming at this from all the wrong angles. Maybe we should all start coming out. Maybe we should form political action groups and start demanding recognition and rights. I know these would all be met with utterly blank-screen silence but I want to say them anyway. I write a bunch of things that I never actually post, but I don’t delete them either.
We’re all like this. I’m absolutely sure that we’re all like this and no one is talking about it but in all of our closets is a thing hovering, humming, sleek and black and chrome with its missiles aimed at nothing.
We have one more huge fight. Later I recognize this as a kind of self-defense. I’m screaming and beating at it with my fists, something about commitment that I’m not even sure that I believe, and it’s just taking it, except for the moments when it butts me in the head to push me back. I’m shrieking about its missiles, demanding that it go ahead and vaporize my entire fucking apartment, put me out of my misery, because I can’t take this anymore because I don’t know what to do. We have angry sex and it leaves. It doesn’t call me again. I stay in bed for two days and call a therapist.