The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade

by Aimee Bender

  I sweep up the bat guano until noon then climb the stairs to the roof.

  Danger Bob is waiting for me. I cry into my hands, think maybe the whole world can see me up there.

  “It’s okay,” Danger Bob says from behind his three-inch exhaust pipe, and to show, he scurries furiously across the white gravel, invisible until the last moment when his small body is about to silhouette itself against the low, brick-red retaining wall.

  I see whiskers, the shadow of an ear, then look away.

  In my pocket now is all of Ronald’s mother’s mother’s silverware. I don’t know what to do with it.

  Two days later I find the first draft of the article Ronald’s writing for the neuromags. In it, Zipper Boy is Scuba Mouse, and I’ve been betrayed.

  Beside me, too, I can feel Zipper Boy watching me.

  It’s something Ronald’s tracked in his article— how his Scuba Mouse is now discovering his body, learning to use it, look through it. In a footnote, Ronald sketches out the helmet he’s going to build his Scuba Mouse. It’s filled with water, a failed diving bell. There will be no leash, either, no air hose, no tether. Just a mouse, teetering out into the world, wholly unaware what love is, even.

  Already all the other caged rodents in the lab are dead, overflowing from the red biohazard container.

  Ronald says Zipper Boy tells him it’s not murder, because they were never really alive.

  He’s the one talking to a mouse now. I don’t tell that to him, just shrug, look away, at a bat crawling nose first down the wall, stalking a cricket.

  Ronald throws the dolphin head at it, misses.

  My hand is shaking from something— from this.

  When Ronald collects his precious dolphin head he finds the cricket lodged in the basal ganglia and stares at it for an unhealthy period of time. Embarrassed, I look away. Zipper Boy’s water is 92 degrees Fahrenheit. The phone rings fourteen times, and fourteen times, we don’t answer it.

  When the human race ends, this is the way it will happen, I know.

  That night I kidnap Mandy a little bit then sit with her— bound hand and foot in the trunk of my car— and watch the city bats coalesce above the three-inch exhaust pipe of the lab. Insects are swirling up out of it, clockwise, and I smile, rename the insects manna bug, moses beetle, and realize I can’t take Mandy into this place. That I either love her too much or I could love her too much, which, really, is the same thing.

  I inject her with a non-lethal dose of sodium pentathol and lead her into her building, careful not to ask her any questions, even in a disguised voice. Her doorman takes her without question, nods to me once, and I fade back into the night.

  The green butterfly from the girl in high school was the one I found on her windshield one day at lunch, when I’d finally got my nerve up to wait for her, say something.

  From across town Zipper Boy says into my head, in her voice, Hungry there? and I sulk away, my hands in my pockets.

  Love isn’t a spoon, I say back to him from the parking lot, the next morning, and this time when I walk in Ronald has the dolphin head on a long, metal stick.

  “Scarecrow,” he says, about it, then explains in his most offhand voice how bats are really just mice with wings, meaning the mouse part of their brains must still remember the long winters spent under the snow, walking lightly, because the coyotes were up there somewhere, listening, listening, finally slinking off to the water’s edge, for clam, then fish, then they keep going out deeper and deeper, testing their lungs, until they’re dolphins. “Look at the teeth,” he says, running his finger along the dolphin’s jaw line.

  I close my eyes to think.

  “They— they weren’t coyotes then, though,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ronald says. “They didn’t know they were mice then either, right?”

  He stares at me until I nod, hook my chin to the tank.

  “You fed him already?”

  He shrugs— maybe, maybe not. This is kindergarten. The new title of his article on Zipper Boy is “Tidings from the Tidal Pool.” Even I know it won’t translate well— that, being a scientific article, it needs to— but before I can tell him, something pops above our heads.

  Ronald doesn’t look up from his paper. I have to.

  “Security,” he says.

  It’s a row of cameras, motion activated. Bat-activated.

  “What?” I ask.

  Ronald shrugs. “Scuby here says their REM patterns are— unusual for rodents. Like how when a dog dreams about chasing a car, its leg will kick?”

  “Maybe it’s having a karate dream.”

  “Whatever. It’s a luxury bats don’t have, right? One kick, they’re falling . . .” He shrugs again, already bored with this. “ . . . think it has something to do with circulation to their brain. Probably need to get an opossum in here to see, though— upside down, all that. It’s a marsupial, though, I don’t know . . .”

  “I’m not doing it,” I tell him.

  “What?”

  “Sleeping upside down.”

  “I’m not asking.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well.”

  “Yeah.”

  I work at my table counting salmon eggs into vials, careful to keep my back to the leering dolphin.

  Love isn’t a spoon, I know. It’s got to be something, though

  That night while I’m gone, Ronald somehow manages to spray the dolphin head with liquid nitrogen, to keep it from rotting.

  Over lunch, from his office, I call Mandy’s work number to report a crime but she doesn’t answer. I hang up, hold the phone there for what I know is too long.

  Through the plate glass of Ronald’s open-air cubicle, Zipper Boy watches me, manages to rewind my memory to the movie about the submarine family then play it again, without the zero-g amniotic fluid. This time, the birth is achieved through a primitive but functional teleportation device: one moment, the baby isn’t there, and the next it is, the mother’s stomach already deflating, the father guiding it back down like deflating a raft.

  I shake my head no, don’t want to see anymore, but Zipper Boy forces it on me, in me, and I have to watch this infant grow into an adolescent who appears normal until we follow him into his cabin. There, he reads books on what appropriate emotional reactions are to certain social stimuli, then, as a young man, standing over the father he’s just slain, we understand that the reason he is the way he is is that he was denied the essential violence of birth. That his whole life he’s been searching for that.

  It’s Zipper Boy’s story. He’s never been born either.

  I’m sorry, I think to him, but it’s too late, he’s dreaming with the bats again, flitting with them through their night made of sound, his small, atrophied feet perfectly still.

  I envy him, a little. But the rest of me knows what’s happening.

  The mechanism I’m reduced to is ridiculously simple, as most are: I simply take Ronald’s mother’s mother’s silverware down to the pawn shop, get a ticket for it, then leave it on the bulletin board.

  Ronald sees it first thing after lunch, stares at it, and walks away, then comes back again and again, until he looks across the room to me.

  “You do this?” he says.

  “We needed supplies,” I tell him.

  Zipper Boy’s water gurgles. Ronald looks from it to me.

  “Supplies?” he says.

  “Guess the lab fairy skipped us this month,” I say back.

  Ronald smiles; it’s what he told me my first week here, when I forgot to pick up everything he’d ordered—that the lab fairy wasn’t going to bring it, was she?

  I have no idea what Zipper Boy is telling him.

  Ronald shrugs, stands, looking in the direction of the pawn shop already.

  “It wasn’t really as great as you thought it was,” he says, in parting. “Number four’s trick.”

  Danger Bob, on his whee
l.

  My right hand wraps itself into a fist and I have to look away, swallow hard. Science isn’t cold. Not even close.

  Ronald laughs on his way out, trailing his fingers over his shoulder.

  “Stay off the roof, too,” he calls back. “I think it’s shaking the cameras.”

  I stare at him until he’s gone then track up to the cameras. Because there’s no way in a world of brick and stone that my footsteps could come through the ceiling. But Ronald was just saying that, I see now; what he wanted me to see was that each camera is on one of the old, radio-controlled servos. That he still has the trigger out in the parking lot. That the guidewires their board is hanging from are the perfect antenna. That he’s going to be documenting whatever I wanted him out of the lab for.

  Zipper Boy smiles, with his real mouth. His teeth dull from disuse. From never-use.

  But his mind.

  I take a step towards his tank and the room fills with pale green butterflies, the dust on their wings graphite-fine, and I have to breathe it, can hear the cameras snapping me in sequence, one after another, down the board, and the butterflies start to fill me. Light-headed.

  But no.

  Like the girl from high school said, meant, I take the first one I can catch, take it between my teeth, and swallow, and then the next, and the next, until they’re all gone, and I say it to Zipper Boy. That every experiment needs a control. Someone to exercise it. That I understand that now.

  He’s just staring at me now.

  Love, he says in my head.

  You understand, I say back. That’s why I’m doing this. Please.

  In his water, for me, Zipper Boy tries to do Danger Bob’s trick with the wheel, to save himself, but he’s not a mouse anymore, and there’s no wheel anyway, and it’s too late in the game for gymnastics to save us from what we’re doing here.

  The tears he cries for himself are bubbles of carbon dioxide— spent breath, his infant lungs still new, uncoordinated. The bubbles seep from the corner of his eye, collect on the surface of his water, and he nods, looks away to make this easy on me, but it’s not.

  Through the cameras, in what will be time-capture, Ronald is watching me, a future Ronald, an hour-from-now Ronald, and I’m sitting by him, trying to explain, to keep my job.

  Listen, Zipper Boy says. It’s a kindness and I do, and the-me-from-then knows, has it right: what I have to do now is what I can feel myself already doing—move my arms from the wrist, my legs from the foot, my head from the chin, so that, on film, when I take the salt shaker, empty it into the tank, it will look like suicide. Like Zipper Boy had made me his puppet. Chose me instead of Ronald because I was weaker.

  It’s a thing Ronald could buy. That he would buy.

  But then, without meaning too— scientific curiosity, the reason I responded to Ronald’s ad in the first place, maybe—I look too long, another hour into the future, past him accepting my explanation for homicide, to the way he stands up from his chair smiling, holding one of the early bat-dream negatives up to the light, so that the colors are reversed. This is one of the images from the camera on the end of the board, which was aimed wrong. Instead of the bats, it had been snapping pictures of the dolphin head, only—looking along his arm I can see it in the modified television set— the dolphin’s teeth in the reverse-color image are silver, silver nitrate, metal, and from the angle the camera was at the dolphin isn’t even a dolphin anymore, but a predator that can never die, not if Ronald builds it right, this time. Not if it keeps moving.

  THE PLANTING

  BENTLEY LITTLE

  I planted her panties by moonlight.

  I watered them with piss.

  The desire came over me suddenly, although where it came from or how I got the knowledge, I could not say. One day she was my neighbor, the nice mom next door, and the next I was climbing over our shared fence into her backyard while she went to pick up her youngest from preschool. The family’s laundry was hanging from the line, children’s clothes mostly, but her underwear was pinned behind a row of small jeans, and I carefully inspected each of them before picking a pair of pink bikini briefs. I folded them carefully, crotch-up, then put them in my pocket and climbed back over the fence.

  I was in my front yard setting up the sprinkler when she came home, and I waved to her and the little boy as they walked into their house for lunch.

  That night, I went into the woods, dug a hole at the foot of an old oak and planted the panties.

  It was a drought year, and the bears were coming down. Mike Heffernon saw one over on Alta Vista, and the police had to take one out who sat in the center of Arbor Circle and refused to budge. People in town were warned to stay away from uninhabited areas, and the Forest Service not only put fire restrictions on the campgrounds but closed them entirely, along with the hiking trails.

  But I still went into the woods on each night that the moon was out and pissed on the spot where I’d buried her panties, waiting to see what would grow.

  Her name was Anna. Anna Howell. And despite the fact that she was in her late-thirties/early-forties, at least ten years older than me, and a mother of three, she was still the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Mine was an objective appreciation, however. I didn’t covet her, had no plans to try and seduce her, no fantasies about having an affair with her, neither her face nor body entered my thoughts when I masturbated alone at night.

  But I was still compelled to steal her panties and plant them, and the impulse to water them when the moon was out was always with me, a vague urge that was almost—but not quite—sexual.

  Sometimes I thought of her panties when I masturbated, lying crumpled in a ball in the wet dank ground, deteriorating.

  And it made me come much faster.

  There was a circle of old cabins out past Dripping Springs in one of those pockets of private land in the middle of the national forest. I’d heard that it had once been a resort—or that the onetime owner had tried to make it into a resort—but it had failed and been abandoned long before my time, and now was the type of place that local kids said was haunted. I didn’t know if it really was haunted, but it was certainly a spot that bums might make their own or that drug dealers might find desirable: remote, isolated, far from civilization and the prying eyes of others.

  Because it was technically on private land, when a late-summer lightning fire started and word came down that the cabins were burning, they called out the volunteer fire department rather than have the Forest Service put it out—which would have been the most logical thing to do. But, as usual, jurisdictional concerns trumped common sense, and shortly after midnight the ten of us were speeding down the control road through mile after mile of oak and juniper and ponderosa pine, between rugged bluffs and rolling hills, in and out of hidden gorges and seasonal stream-carved canyons, until we reached the flat land on the other side of Dripping Springs.

  The cabins were gone when we got there, little more than charred piles of ash hemmed in by black and still-burning sections of frame. Luckily, a dirt road circling the perimeter of the old resort had acted as a break and contained the fire somewhat, keeping it from setting the entire forest ablaze. A lone finger stretch of brush on the north end was burning brightly and had created the only real problem we had to face, but we had ten men, two trucks and full pumpers—and even if we ran out of water, we had snake hoses long enough to tap any nearby creek, spring or pond we could find.

  We set to work.

  It was nearly morning before we finished, the sky in the east brightening enough to turn the trees into silhouettes by the time the last of the flames were extinguished. Blue-white smoke rose from the ashes around us, dimming the sun as the day dawned and we finished repacking the trucks. Through the haze, I saw a building behind the burned brush, a cabin of rough hewn wood that looked more ancient than the old growth trees surrounding it, although I did not understand how that could be possible. Either the cabin had not been there before or else the fire had cleared out the b
rush that hid it from view because none of us had seen it previously. I stepped closer to get a better look, then immediately stepped back. The façade of the windowless structure bespoke great age, and there was about it an air of dread and unsettled malevolence that shook me more than I was willing to admit.

  “God lives there,” Andre said, sidling next to me.

  I looked at him askance. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “That’s always been the rumor. That God lives out here. That’s why there’s no graffiti, no beer bottles or syringes or cigarette butts or McDonald’s bags. Everyone’s always been afraid to come out this way because God is here. And watching.”

  “You knew about this cabin?”

  “Not this cabin exactly. But I knew God’s home was in these woods, somewhere near the resort, and when I saw this place, I knew this was it.”

  “Yeah,” Rossi said. “And the Easter Bunny’s vacation house is right behind it.”

  The rest of us laughed, but Andre remained resolute in his conviction, and I had to admit that his somber certitude freaked me out a little. If it had only been the two of us, I would have acceded to his wishes, left the cabin alone and we would have returned to town. But there were others here, and they were curious, so I had to be curious, and I joined the group as we made our way over the still smoldering ashes across the charred dirt to the ancient shack.

  It was small, I saw as we approached. Not small as in limited square footage —although it was that, too—but small as in short, as though it had been made for people not as tall as we were. The top of the front door was just about eye level. I reached up and was able to place my hand on the roof.

  The door was stuck but unlocked, and after several shoulder shoves, it opened, scraping the dirty wooden floor. I’d been expecting a one-room cabin based on the exterior of the structure, but instead we found ourselves in a narrow hallway that ran the width of the structure. We filed in one by one, Mick and Garcia and Big Bill and Ed Barr flipping on their flashlights, all of us ducking, and it occurred to me that this would be a perfect place for an ambush, that some psycho could be lying in wait just around the corner and take us out one-by-one as we stepped into the next room. There were no cries of shock or pain, however, only the ordinary speech of continued conversation as my stooping fellow firefighters rounded the end of the hallway.