“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 wheel.
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.
ROCKET MAN
The dead aren’t exactly known for their baseball skills, but still, if you’re a player short some afternoon, just need a body to prop up out in left field—it all comes down to how bad you want to play, really. Or, in our case—where you can understand that by ‘our’ I mean ‘my,’ in that I promised off four of my dad’s cigarettes, one of my big brother’s magazines, and one sleepover lie—how bad you want to impress Amber Watson, on the walk back from the community pool, her lifeguard eyes already focused on everything at once.
Last week, I’d actually smacked the ball so hard that Rory at shortstop called time, to show how the cover’d rolled half back, the red stitching popped.
“You scalped it,” he said, kind of curling his lip in awe.
I should mention I’m Indian, except everybody’s always doing that for me.
The plan that day we pulled a zombie in (it had used to be Michael T from over on Oak Circle, but you’re not supposed to call zombies by their people names), my plan was to hit that same ball—I’d been saving it—even harder, so that there’d just be a cork center twirling up over our diamond, trailing leather and thread. Amber Watson would track back from that cracking sound to me, still holding my follow-through like I was posing for a trophy. And then of course I’d look through the chain link, kind of nod to her that this was me, yeah, this was who I really am, she’s just never seen it, and she’d smile and look away, and things in the halls at school would be different between us then. More awkward. She might even start tim
ing her walks to coincide with some guess at my spot in the batting order.
Anyway, it wasn’t like there was anything else I could ever possibly do that might have a chance of impressing her.
But first, of course, we needed that body to prop up out in left field. Which, I know you’re thinking ‘right, right field,’ these are sixth graders, they never wait, they always step out, slap the ball early, and, I mean, maybe the kids from Chesterton or Memphis City do, I don’t know. But around here, we’ve been taught to wait, to time it out, to let that ball kind of hover in the pocket before we launch it into orbit. Kids from Chesterton? None of them are ever going pro. Not like us.
It’s why we fail the spelling test each Friday, why we blow the math quiz if we’re not sitting by somebody smart. You don’t need to know how to spell ‘homerun’ to hit one. You don’t have to add up runners in your head, so long as you knock them all in. Easy as that.
As for Michael T, none of us had had much to do with him since he got bit, started playing for the other team. There were the lunges from behind the fence on the way to school, there was that shape kind of scuffling around when you took the trash out some nights, but that could have been any zombie. It didn’t have to be Michael T. And, pulling him in that day to just stand there, let the flies buzz in and out of his mouth—it’s not like that’s not what he did before he was dead. You only picked Michael T if he was the only one to pick, I’m saying. You wouldn’t think that either, him being a year older than us and all, but he’d always just been our size, too. Most kids like that, a grade up but not taller, they’d at least be fast, or be able to fling the ball home all the way from the center fence. Not Michael T. Michael T—the best way to explain him, I guess, it’s that his big brother used to pin him down to the ground at recess, drop a line of spit down almost to his face, the rest of us looking but not looking. Glad just not to be him.
That day, though, with Amber Watson approaching on my radar, barefoot the way she usually was, her shoes hooked over her shoulder like a rich lady’s purse, that day, it was either Michael T or nobody. Or, at first it was nobody, but then, just joking around, Theodore said he’d seen Michael T shuffling around down by the rocket park anyway.
“Michael T?” I asked.
“He still can’t catch,” Theodore said.
“That was all the way before lunch, though, yeah?” Rory said, socking the ball into his glove for punctuation.
It was nearly three, now.
“Can you track him?” Les said, falling in as we rounded the backstop.
“Your nose not work?” I asked him back.
Just another perfect summer afternoon.
We kicked a lopsided rock nearly all the way to where Michael T was supposed to have been, and then we turned to Theodore. He shrugged, was ready to fight any of us, even tried some of the words he’d learned from spying on his uncles in the garage. He wasn’t lying, though. Splatted all over the bench were the crab apples him and Jefferson Banks had been zinging Michael T with.
“Jefferson,” I said, “what about him?”
“Said he had to go home,” Theodore shrugged, half-embarrassed for Jefferson. “His mom.”
Figured. The one time I can impress Amber Watson and Jefferson’s cleaning out all the ashtrays in the house then reading romance novels to his mom while she tans in the backyard.
“Who then?” Les asked, shading his eyes from the sun, squinting across all the glinty metal of the old playground.
None of us came to this one anymore. It was for kids.
“He’s got to be around,” Theodore said. “My dad said they like beef jerky.”
I seconded this, had heard it as well.
You could lure a zombie anywhere if you had a twist of dried meat on a long string. It was supposed to be getting bad enough with the high schoolers that the stores in town had put a limit on beef jerky, two per customer.
I kicked at another rock that was there by the bench. It wasn’t our lopsided one, was probably one Jefferson and Theodore had tried on Michael T. There was still a little bit of blood on it. All the ants were loving the crab apple leftovers, but, for them, there was a force field around where that rock had been. Until the next rain, anyway.
“She’s never going to see me,” I said, just out loud.
“Who?” Theodore asked, studying the park like Amber Watson could possibly be walking through it.
I shook my head no, never mind, and, turning away, half-planning to set a mirror up in right field, let Gerald just stand kind of by it, so it would seem like we had a full team, I caught a flash of cloth all the way in the top of the rocket.
“It’s not over yet,” I said, pointing up there with my chin.
Somebody was up there, right at the top where the astronauts would sit if it were a real rocket. The capsule part. And they were moving.
“Jefferson?” Theodore asked, looking to us for support.
Like monkeys, Les and Rory crawled up the outside of the rocket, high enough that their moms had to be having heart attacks in their kitchens.
When they get there, Rory had to turn to the side to throw up. It took that loogey of puke forever to make it to the ground. We laughed because it was throw-up, then tracked back up to the top of the rocket.
“It’s Michael T!” Les called down, waving his hand like there was anywhere else in the whole world we might be looking.
“What’s he doing?” I asked, not really loud enough, my eyes kind of pre-squinted, because this might be going to mess our game up.
“It’s Jefferson,” Theodore filled in, standing right beside me, and he was right.
Instead of going home like his mom wanted, Jefferson had spiraled up into the top of the rocket, probably to check if his name was still there, and never guessed Michael T might still be lurking around. Even a first grader can outrun or outsmart a zombie, but, in a tight place like that, and especially if you’re in a panic, are freaking out, then it’s a different kind of game altogether.
“Shouldn’t have thrown those horse apples at him,” Gerald said, shaking his head.
“Shouldn’t have been stupid, more like,” I said, and slapped my glove into Gerald’s chest, for him to hold.
Ten minutes later, Les and Rory using cigarettes from the outside of the rocket to herd him away from his meal, Johnny T. lumbered down onto the playground, stood in that crooked, hurt way zombies do.
“Hunh,” Theodore said.
He was right.
In the year since Johnny T had been bitten, he hadn’t grown any. He was shorter than all us now. Rotted away, Jefferson’s gore all drooled down his frontside, some bones showing through the back of his hand, but still, that we’d outgrown him this past year. It felt like we’d cheated.
It was exhilarating.
One of us laughed and the rest fell in, and, using a piece of a sandwich Les finally volunteered to open his elbow scab on—we didn’t have any beef jerky—we were able to lure Michael T back to the baseball diamond.
After everybody’d crossed the road, I studied up and down it, to be sure Amber Watson hadn’t passed yet.
I didn’t think so.
Not on an afternoon this perfect.
So then it was the big vote: whose glove was Michael T going to wear, probably try to gnaw on? When I got tired of it all, I just threw mine into his chest, glared all around.
“Warpath, chief,” Les said, picking the glove up gingerly, watching Michael T the whole time.
“Scalp your dumb ass,” I said, and turned around, didn’t watch the complicated maneuver of getting the glove on Michael T’s left hand, and only casually kept track of the stupid way he kept breaking position. Finally Timmy found a dead squirrel in the weeds, stuffed it into the school backpack that had kind of become part of Michael T’s back. The smell kept him in place better than a spike through his foot. He kept kind of spinning around in his zombie way, tasting the air, but he wasn’t going anywhere.
And then—this because my who
le body was tuned into it, because the whole summer had been pointing at it—the adult swim whistle went off down at the community pool. Or maybe what I was tuned into was the groan from all the swimmers. Either way, this was always when the lifeguards would change chairs, was always when, if somebody was going off-shift, they would go.
“Amber,” I said to myself, tossing my ragged, lucky ball to Les then tapping my bat across home plate, waiting for him to wind up.
“Am-what?” Theodore asked from behind the catcher’s mask his mom insisted on.
I shook my head no, nothing, and, because I was looking down the street, down that tunnel of trees, Les slipped the first pitch by me.
“That one’s free,” I called out to him, tapping my bat again. Licking my lips.
Les wound up, leaned back, and I stepped up like I was already going to swing. He cued into it, that I was ahead of him here, and it threw him off enough that he flung the ball over Theodore’s mitt, rattled the backstop with it.
“That one’s free too,” he called out to me, and I smiled, took it.
Just wait, I was saying inside, sneaking a look up the road again, and, just like in the movies, the whole afternoon slowed almost to a stop right there.
It was her. I smiled, nodded, my own breath loud in my ears, and slit my eyes back to Les.
He drove one right into the pocket, and if I’d wanted I could have shoveled it over all of their heads, dropped it out past the fence, into no man’s land.
Except it was too early.
After it slapped home, I spun out of the box, spit into the dirt, hammered my bat into the fence two times.
And it was definitely her. Shoes over her shoulder, gum going in her mouth, nose still zinced, jean shorts over her one-piece, the whole deal.
I timed it perfect, getting back to the box, was wound up to launch this ball just at the point when she’d be closest to me.
So of course Les threw it high.
I could see it coming a mile away, how he’d tried to knuckle it, had lost it on the downsling like he always did, so there was maybe even a little arc to the ball’s path. Not that it mattered, it was too high to swing at, but still—now or never, right? This is what all my planning had come down to.
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