by Joseph Fink
“This is good,” Tamara would tell them. “This is incredible.”
But they didn’t need it just to be good. They needed it to change everything.
48
A carpool lot off the parkway in Paramus, New Jersey, a half hour before dawn. Alice and Keisha pulled the truck across several spots. Already there were commuters on their way to Manhattan, yawning from their four a.m. coffees, but the lot was still mostly empty, and the two didn’t plan to be there for long.
Word of the place had come through the network of whispers that Sylvia had disappeared into. Safe houses and shelters for runaways. Good people doing good and getting nothing in return. Strangers but at least slightly more trustworthy strangers than most. And besides, the two of them had survived Wisconsin. At least this was in public, near a major highway. The information seemed good anyway. There in the corner of the lot, a figure in a folding chair, wearing a hoodie and watching the predawn horizon; a radio by their side played an old song by Rihanna.
“Thought you might be coming by,” the figure called as the two walked toward them.
“Guess you see the future,” Alice called back. Keisha whacked her.
“Sorry about her. She’s not good on manners. My name’s Keisha.”
“I know who you are. Your friend was joking. And she’s not wrong. Not entirely right either.”
“You don’t see the future, you just maintain it, we know,” said Keisha.
The oracle nodded and waved to a stack of unfolded chairs next to them. “Grab a seat.”
“Do I sit down though?” said Alice. “I don’t want to disrupt the flow of time if I’m supposed to do anything else.”
“Alice, stop being an asshole,” said Keisha.
The oracle laughed, a sound like a silverware drawer tossed down a flight of stairs.
“If it helps,” they said, “yes, you do sit down.”
And Alice did. The chairs were old but comfortable, with a lived-in bow to the bottom of them. There was a history of asses that had passed through this seat, each leaving a few millimeters of depth to it. A harried woman in a business suit pulled in a few spots down, glanced at them as she rushed off to whatever destination she was heading toward, somewhere well outside of this story. Alice gave her a friendly nod. Keisha kept her eyes on the oracle.
“So you aren’t the same oracle as we met in Wisconsin?” she said.
“No,” said the oracle. “There are many of us. Not as many as we need, however.”
“Lot of bad shit in the world,” said Alice.
“Indeed.”
“That’s what we came to you to talk about,” said Keisha.
The radio ran through its top-of-the-hour traffic report. Thousands of people using up the hours of their lives doing the stop and start on a highway somewhere. The announcer mentioned a big headline that was stirring up controversy. The music started up again, something aggressive that Keisha figured she was too old to recognize.
“We were told once that we don’t even understand the basic shape of this war,” she said. “And we want to. We want to learn so that we can help.”
“It’s an admirable impulse,” agreed the oracle. It was difficult to read emotion in their floating voice.
“Thistle,” said Alice.
“Yes,” said Keisha. “Thistle. We need to understand what they are. Where did monsters like that come from? Are they aliens? Created by the government? I can’t find an explanation that doesn’t sound like a joke, but I’ve seen those things, and they aren’t human.”
The oracle spread their hands wide. They wore baby blue wool gloves that still had Kmart tags on them.
“They are evil and hatred. They are a point of view felt so deeply that it becomes an identity.”
“Is there a reason you oracles can’t just say what you mean, ever?” said Alice.
“Yes, actually,” said the oracle, laughing again. Keisha wished they wouldn’t. “Everything about the human language is tied into time. It is a language by and for people experiencing time in linear order, each moment separated from the one before. When time is experienced all at once, it becomes difficult to express oneself the way that one might like.” The oracle shrugged. It was an oddly human gesture. “We do our best. There is a reason prophecy must always be interpreted before it can be parsed within linear time.”
“So the Thistle Men,” said Keisha.
“Not monsters in the way that you mean. Monsters, yes, but not created in laboratories or flown in by flying saucer from the old seabeds of Mars.”
The sun broke over the horizon and with it, as though they had waited for their cue, commuter cars started streaming into the lot. What had felt moments before like a rather isolated spot now, in the direct sunlight and with the cars, felt an awkward and silly place to be sitting. The oracle turned their head toward the approaching vehicles. Even in the light, Keisha could not see their face. They gestured toward a man who hopped out of his car, walked a few feet, then swore and turned back for his phone.
“Him, perhaps,” said the oracle. “Or him,” they said, pointing to another man in construction gear who was rummaging through his trunk. “Any of them could be, at some point. If a point of view becomes one’s entire identity, what was monstrous on the inside can become monstrous on the outside.”
Keisha took a moment to process this.
“You are saying . . .” she said.
“Yes,” said the oracle.
“That the Thistle Men are human.”
“Most monsters are.”
The construction worker found what he was looking for in his trunk and walked whistling toward a pickup truck across the lot. Alice and Keisha watched him go. They thought of the stooped, boneless fleshmen with their sharp teeth.
Alice’s phone pinged. She pulled it out and put her hand over her mouth.
“Keisha,” she said, her voice trying to find equilibrium. “The story. Our story. It’s out. The whole story is out there.”
“I would have mentioned,” said the oracle, “but I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.”
Keisha didn’t even remember leaving the lot, what the oracle said as they left, didn’t remember weaving the truck out among the morning commuters. She only remembered those words. The whole story is out there.
49
It was all there, plus more than they had known. Tamara and her team had found connections, proof of government sponsorship that Keisha and Alice would have had no way of stumbling on themselves. Not only was it there, it was undeniable. There was documentation of every step. They felt a visceral thrill to see their photos and videos, attributed to sources within the organization.
“Holy shit,” said Alice.
“Oh my god,” Keisha said.
They screamed and held each other. Keisha tried to parse through what she was feeling, like picking out the flavor of individual spices in a meal. She had been shaken by the oracle’s claim that the Thistle Men were human. She hadn’t had time to let it sink in, hadn’t felt any of it yet; it was just a piece of information she had and didn’t know what to do with. And then there was this. This story probably made everything else irrelevant. Because now they weren’t alone. That was it; she had pinpointed the thought that burned the brightest in her. Before it had only been them who knew how wrong it all was, how things really were, and now everyone would. They wouldn’t have to be alone with the knowledge and the struggle. She threw her body against her wife’s, forgetting her anger and pain for a moment and feeling the embrace as though it were the first one they had ever had.
“This has got to be everywhere now,” she said.
“How do people even process what is being laid out here?” said Alice. She reached for the radio, spun it around until she found a news station. There was talk of a budget showdown in Congress. The nominations for the Tonys had been announced. There was nothing.
“Try another,” said Alice. Keisha did. Station after station of news and chat and nothing about the ar
ticles.
It felt like an understatement, but all Keisha could manage was a quiet “What is going on?” because a silence this total didn’t feel real.
They went to a diner nearby that had several TVs on. Multiple news channels. Nothing.
“Can I get you two a table?” said the woman at the front.
“Tell me,” said Keisha. “Did you see an article about this Thistle mess?”
The woman frowned. “Let me know if I can get you a table.” She hurried off.
“What about you?” Alice said, accosting a man who was eating pumpkin pie at breakfast.
“Huh?” he said, through a mouthful of à la mode.
“The big story?” Alice said. “Bay and Creek. Members of the government involved?”
“Oh, I don’t really go for politics, sorry.” He muttered this into his pie, turning away from her.
“What in the fuck is going on here?” Alice inquired at a shout to the restaurant as a whole.
“Children are eating here,” a mother shouted back.
“Your children are going to be eaten by government monsters, didn’t you read?” Alice yelled, and Keisha pulled her out of the restaurant before they could be kicked out.
Keisha called Tamara from the parking lot.
“I know,” Tamara said before Keisha could say anything at all.
“No one is talking about it.”
“I’m getting the same reaction,” Tamara said. “Even my editors don’t want to talk about it, and they worked it.”
“This is the biggest story of the century.” Keisha felt her skin getting hot. She felt dizzy. She was not going to throw up. “How could no one be talking about it?”
“I’ve thought a lot about that.” Tamara sounded exhausted, her voice was hoarse. “I think people already knew.”
“I don’t understand. How could they have known?”
“It’s not that they knew exactly. They didn’t know the details. But they knew, you know? Somewhere inside of them they already knew, and they made a choice not to think about it. So even though we spelled it all out for them, they still are making that same choice.”
“So what do we do? We have to make them care somehow.”
“Keisha, you’re not hearing me. They know. And they have made the choice not to think about it.”
“Tamara, that’s not—”
“I’m sorry, Keisha.” The call ended. Alice paced around, swinging her fists at the air, fuming.
Inside, Keisha had been preparing for this to be the end. After this she would be free, and she could go home. It wasn’t that simple, of course, because she didn’t know if it was even possible for her to go home with Alice as things were now, but she hadn’t needed to think through that. Compared with all the rest of it, the hedge maze of their relationship had seemed relatively simple, a maze that could be hacked through in a straight line once they got tired of the twists and turns of it. But she hadn’t reckoned on the article not changing anything. That hadn’t entered her consciousness. She felt like she was somewhere quite far from herself. But of course she wasn’t that either. She was right there, in this horrible moment.
Alice started to cry, and that slammed Keisha back into her body, because she couldn’t remember when she had last seen Alice cry. It made Keisha feel like there was no center to it all, and that what had seemed to be the world was only a temporary arrangement of light. Keisha held Alice. Keisha did not cry.
50
Hank Thompson wasn’t taught to hate. He came to it naturally. As a teenager, most of his classmates looked like him, and this seemed right to him. At the time, he wouldn’t have been able to explain why it felt right, although later in life he would develop his own logic to explain it, one based on a patchwork of bad science and bad theology. He only knew that the few classmates who weren’t like him made him furious. He did everything he could to make their lives miserable. Others in his class weren’t as directly cruel, although they tolerated what he did, and this was its own cruelty.
After school, Hank would sometimes follow the classmates home, shouting insults and tossing rocks. He wanted them afraid. Not only in the school or on the streets, but to generally feel that there was nowhere safe. He wanted them to live with a tremble, because he hated them. Once he connected with a thrown rock, aimed at a child, named Theodore, two grades below him. Theodore crumbled instantly, and an accusatory finger of blood spread out toward Hank. Hank walked away, leaving Theodore in the street. Hank never heard what happened, never cared to ask, but he never saw Theodore in school again. This made him proud.
When Hank was sixteen years old, he was shaving in an old mirror out in the yard, and he noticed something on his cheek. A looseness to one side of the face. As though the skin there had grown bigger than the skeleton. The extra pocket of skin hung down slightly. He poked at it, but there was no pain. Just some extra skin. He ignored it and hoped it would go away on its own.
Hank was two months shy of eighteen when he joined the Klan. It made him feel powerful, the masks, the violence, the threats. When he saw fear in others, it made him feel like he could never be afraid. What he felt, late at night, when it was dark and he worried that he wasn’t good at anything and would die unremembered and unloved, none of that fear could be real, because when others saw him in his robes and hood, they trembled. They didn’t see a human, but a dangerous and powerful creature. He loved that feeling.
Around two years later, when he was working at a local general store, a woman named Harriet bought some flour and some eggs from his counter, and he found that talking to her was easier than he had expected. Their conversation turned into an agreement to take a walk the next day, and that walk turned into other walks and conversations, turned into discreet kissing in the woods or in quiet parts of the park. They would be married, he decided. But Harriet seemed anxious at the prospect.
“I have something I haven’t told you,” she told him, on one of their walks, when she was certain there was no one else around.
“Me too,” he said. He hadn’t told her about his role in the Klan, or the power it made him feel. He wasn’t ashamed of it, was in fact proud of it, but he also felt that women had no right to his internal life.
“I’m Jewish,” said Harriet. “I don’t make it public. As of this moment, you’re the only one I’ve told in town, in fact. Before we went any further, I wanted you to know.”
Hank felt sick. She had tricked him. Jews, he knew, weren’t even human. They were low creatures. He knew what must be done with low creatures.
She was bending over to look at an interesting beetle, and also so she wouldn’t have to see his face when he reacted to the news, and Hank stood behind her holding his hunting knife, which he had taken to always carrying with him because, like the Klan, it made him feel too powerful to worry about his many fears. He knew what had to be done. But he also felt love for her, and this disgusted him. He thought about killing her and then himself, but he couldn’t make the move. Instead he walked away. She called after him and he ignored her. He didn’t see her again, made no attempt for the rest of his life to find love. He knew what was at the end of that road. It was merely a trick to dilute his pure hatred, and his hatred was what made him powerful. He became isolated, only socializing with fellow Klan members, and then only sometimes.
As the years went on, other strange pockets of skin joined the one on his cheek. The area around his eyes grew dark and baggy, and then started to droop, exposing the pink around the bottom. The whites of his eyes were slowly tinging yellow. He didn’t go to a doctor about this. He didn’t trust doctors, because he thought that most of them were secretly Jews. He thought a lot of people must secretly be Jewish, and it made him boil. One side of his face started to travel toward the ground, and the other drifted upward. Looking in the mirror, he didn’t recognize the creature looking back. He tried to say his name at this strange reflection. “Snarf,” he said. “Phlffm.” He carefully set his tongue and his teeth and enunciated hi
s own name. “Marm,” he said. He didn’t look in a mirror again for a long time.
Decades arrived and went. Hank did not age, although his face and his body became stranger and stranger to him. The Klan had been temporarily put down and so he found other groups that had scattered after the humiliating defeat and joined those. He devoted himself to the feeling of hatred, and to the power of being feared. One night, he went one step further and murdered a man out back of a supermarket. The killing felt natural, and it made him hungry. He started tearing into the man with his teeth, and, surprised and horrified at this, he fled home.
He looked again in the mirror, a different mirror from the last time he had looked, in a different home. It was many years later. He wasn’t even sure he was human anymore. He looked so different from himself. Blood stained his teeth, but under the scarlet the enamel was a dull, sickly yellow. He howled at his reflection, and his voice didn’t sound like the voice he had once had. It sounded powerful and big. He felt feared. “Ha,” he said. “Pop.” He no longer tried to turn these sounds into words. They meant what they said. Hank walked out of his house, leaving the front door open. He never returned. It took weeks for his disappearance to be noticed.
The creature he had become walked with his now boneless legs along the highways. When he felt his energy fade, he would murder someone, anyone, it didn’t matter who, and this would give him the energy for another week or two’s walk. He did not question for a moment what he was doing, or what he had become.