What’s strange is that quasars don’t belong in the beginning. They should be signs of an old universe, one winding down. It takes vast amounts of time for a star to collapse into a black hole, then an even more immensely long time for the black hole to congregate whole galaxies into a mass dense enough to look like a single star. That’s where the word comes from—it’s short for quasi-star. So why is it when we capture the light from the young universe, they’re already there? Every schema has to strain, if not backflip, to account for it. One theory is that everything happened faster back then. Another is that quasars are, somehow, just born old.
So I stop shaving in the shower. The scar is getting a little tender, and I’m going to the mirror first thing anyway. Eun-Ha comes off her shift at the clinic with a handful of the tiny free samples they give to physicians, little tubes of something called Dermex. I let her rub one in.
“It looks angry today,” she says. “That’s the term, right? An angry scar. I don’t know why they call it that.”
People are staring outright now. People I know do it pointedly. I’m expected to explain, like a guy hobbling into work on a fresh cast. “I was looking into a coffee can,” I say.
I start coming in at night, ostensibly to oversee the new Utah captures but really to stay clear of that look I’m getting. Just until it passes. Harlan and I still eat together most days, but it’s my breakfast and his dinner. Eun-Ha doesn’t complain. Standard procedure for an astronomer’s wife, and the residency and the LifeWing flights play enough havoc with her own schedule. The building has a good quiet late at night. It’s never entirely empty—at least three or four people rattling around—so you don’t get that creeped-out, alone-and-therefore-victim kind of quiet. I caught up on my work. I thought happy, pleasant, healing thoughts. I did not examine my scar, strange, sourceless and spreading, more than a dozen times a night.
Look, I’m really sorry that I had to stick you with that needle. But it didn’t hurt a bit, did it? Shake your head, yes or no. What did I tell you? Not a bit.
I went to a specialist. I had a theory it was an allergic reaction or something environmental, some spin on Toxic Building Syndrome. But the dermatologist was adamant. “It’s just an old scar,” she said.
“But it’s getting worse,” I said.
“It’s inflamed, not infected. My guess is it’s getting worse because you don’t stop touching it. Use the Dermex. Try not to scratch or rub.”
“I’m not touching it, and it’s not an old scar. It appeared out of nowhere. It’s getting worse.”
She was silent for a moment. She wore glasses with clear plastic frames, as if that would somehow make them disappear. When she spoke again, it was slower, with a quiet earnestness and lots of eye contact. “It’s like the little pits in your car windshield,” she said. “They’re there all along, but you only see them when you get the idea to look for them. This is . . . maybe taking a little too firm a hold on your awareness. Are you familiar with the term obsessive-compulsive disorder? I have some pamphlets.”
She was right: it’s amazing what you notice only when you’re keyed into seeing it. As we traded passing nods in the corridors, I saw for the first time that Tim Callien had an unmistakable jag across his throat, and Amy Holzer had a half dozen ragged-looking slivers on the undersides of both forearms. At some point, something had happened to Guresh Subrahamian’s right ear.
Those weren’t the only small things I was beginning to notice. At my next breakfast-slash-dinner with Harlan, I noticed how he shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and how he could hardly look me in the face. I noticed that when he was paying the bill at the register he reached into his pocket and pulled out not just change, but a little tube of Dermex. The physician-only sample size.
I’m not a jealous man. I’m not a paranoid man. But I was all caught up on my work, and time on your hands late at night turns your head into an echo chamber. By now the crescent on my face had bloomed to the thickness and pinkness of a pencil’s eraser tip, with darkening scarlet-tinged edges. I thought of how repellent it made me, how even my best friend won’t look at me straight. I thought of Eun-Ha’s hands, gently rubbing in the medicine. I thought of the tube in Harlan’s pocket.
I was getting back at dawn, and I’d do my best to not wake Eun-Ha. I’d walk slowly into our bedroom, spend some time looking at her asleep, assess her sprawl so I could enter the bed without disturbing her. One morning she was on her side, one arm flung out, the other pushing down the sheet. She usually wears an old T-shirt of mine but it must have been a warm night. She was just in panties.
Sunlight from the break of the drapes was shafting on the rise of her breast, and for the first time I could see her own faint white-thread scars. Six vertical lines, exactly parallel, about half an inch apart.
I crawled in beside her. I never mentioned what I saw. I reached out to stroke them, but in her sleep she turned away. When I awoke I started wearing a bandage on my face.
Obsessive-compulsive. Kind of an awkward term, isn’t it? Two big words handcuffed together, one meaning can’t stop thinking, the other can’t stop doing. I did some reading, especially about a subset called dermatitis artefacta, “self-induced or self-aggravated bizarre lesions without an obvious cause.” Clearly, I wasn’t going to get the help I needed until I disproved this ridiculous, this specious diagnosis. I wasn’t touching, couldn’t bear to touch, during my waking hours, but who knew what happened while I slept? The bandage kept rubbing off against my pillow.
I wore gloves to bed, wrapped my face in gauze, even asked Eun-Ha once to bind my wrists, a request that brought only a stare and her quick exit from the room. By then it was moot, because I was hardly sleeping at all. I started coming home later and later, until I was getting back long after she’d already left for the clinic. That made it easier, some nights, to not come back at all. I stopped showing up for breakfast-slash-dinner as well, and it was telling that Harlan didn’t press the matter beyond a thirty-second phone call.
In the gaping hours of solitude I turned to make-work tasks. Correlated infrareds and radios by spectrum spikes, just to see what might pop out. Toyed with the math on every approach to the quasar-creation mystery. Thought a lot about old light in new time.
You’re trembling. Are you cold, or trying to cry? It’s okay. It’ll all be over soon. I promise.
Amy Holzer’s arms became my revelation. She was pushing a floor button when I noticed how her little shrapnel-like marks had changed. At first I thought it was just the low fluorescents of the elevator, but I stepped in and saw clearly the red coruscations, felt the hard ridge of scabbing. She yelped and jumped back, and before I could apologize for my abruptness the doors had opened and there was Tim Gallien, his throat-jag glaring like a second smile. Also gone to scab. He gave a confused shout but I was already pushing past him, heading for one office in particular.
Guresh Subrahamian opened his door wearing a bandage on his ear.
It was pointless to explain. They were the wrong specialty, them and everyone else in the building. Only another primordialist might understand, and there was only one I truly wanted to understand. I was halfway to Harlan’s when I pulled to the curb, took a deep breath and let the long-suppressed thoughts come flooding in: You know he’s not there. You know where he is.
I headed back here, to our apartment building. In the car I tore off my own bandage, and reached up to touch where I had been forbidden to touch. I could only catch quick glimpses of my face in the rearview mirror, in the flashes of streetlight, but they were enough to serve as a final confirmation. By the time I parked in my slot alongside Eun-Ha’s I was crying, breath-gasping voiceless sobs.
I found the spare key she’d given me and opened up the trunk of her car. Air transport doctors need to be ready at a moment’s notice, so Eun-Ha drives around with a dedicated bag just for LifeWing calls. I shouldered it, and as I walked I shuffled through its depths to find the K-Sticks. I couldn’t find a scalpel, so some trauma shea
rs would have to do.
I’ve gotten used to entering my bedroom quietly, to navigating the almost-darkness. They were sleeping. Side by side and skin to skin, flat on their backs, his hand resting on the juncture of her hip and thigh. I tugged the drapes a little ways apart, just enough for a strong spill of moonlight across their bodies. Enough to reveal the thin rubying of their scar lines. There was a whir and hum as the air-conditioning kicked in; it was another warm night. I looked straight up and saw the familiar grille of the ceiling air vent, right above our bed.
Dropsticks are single-use syringes of Droperidol. They’re used when a patient starts thrashing around on a LifeWing flight, and needs to be immediately immobilized for everyone’s safety. That much Droperidol is not a tranquilizer; it’s a paralytic. You’re awake, able to look around and understand what’s happening to you, just temporarily disconnected from voluntary control of your body. Eun-Ha calls it “cutting the strings,” because the patient collapses like a marionette. It was, she said, an unsettling thing to do to someone. She didn’t like their eyes while it was happening to them.
If administered patiently, through the desensitized pads of the foot, a Dropstick does not awaken a full-grown man deep in postcoital sleep. It is almost a pinprick, a stingless bite of some nocturnal insect.
After a while I knelt, and gently prodded Harlan with the trauma shears. His lids fluttered and opened, and I understood what Eun-Ha meant about the eyes of the suddenly paralyzed. Before he could try to speak I put a hand on his lips, leaned in close and whispered, “Please don’t wake her up. I don’t know if I can be strong if she wakes up, and I don’t want her to suffer.”
Like I say, he’s Mutt to my Jeff. It was no trouble to carry him into the tiled quiet of the bathroom. I sat him on the floor of the shower, propped him up as best I could.
“Look, I’m really, really sorry about this. But I knew that if I came barging in you’d think it was about your sleeping with my wife, and it would be unpleasant. What I need is for you to listen, okay?”
His eyes were getting to me. You’re looking at me the same way. Can you possibly stop, or even just turn away? No, of course not.
“Thought experiment, Harlan. Let’s say the independent-causality theories are roughly correct. Quasars aren’t part of the Big Bang; they’re little bangs, bullets from a different gun firing through time in a different direction. They’re born backward, born old, at least that’s how it reads to us. It’s like languages—some read from left to right, some from right to left.”
He shivered a bit, still staring. The shower stall was damp and cold, and he was naked.
“So. With that as a given, let’s assume that a new quasar was coming into existence. How would it manifest itself? No, don’t try to speak just yet. You’ll just exhaust yourself. Let me run with it. How would such a quasar makes its debut?”
I splayed and cupped my fingers, mimed an expanding ball. Kaboom .
“Explosively, yes? Of course. But there’s more to be considered, because now we’re not just talking matter hitting antimatter, but timelines colliding. One arrow hitting another arrow in mid-flight. Okay. Now, how would that impact manifest itself? I’ll give you one hint. I’ll give you two.”
I pointed to the scars on his bare chest. Angry scars, as Eun-Ha would describe them. Then I ran my finger along the counterclockwise half circle on my face. It was no longer a scar but a fullfledged wound.
“Collisions send out shock waves. There would be damage, maybe even annihilation, but it would creep up on us. Remember, we’re reading backward. The injury that kills you would show up as an unhealing scar, one that goes on unhealing until it’s a fresh trauma, until the moment when it’s actually inflicted. I don’t remember getting this, because I haven’t yet. But I will. Soon.”
He could only speak by exhaling in the shape of words, and only with great effort. I took his face in my hands and turned it closer to my ear.
we were/just getting/it out of/our system
“Of course. That was my assumption.”
please/you need help/please/delusional
Goddamn it. I was crying again. “It’s going to hurt, Harlan. I just want to be with Eun-Ha when it happens. I was hoping you would understand.”
But he was unconscious now. I found a towel to wrap him in, and laid him on the floor in what I hoped was a comfortable position. I looked at his prone form and thought, I’m sorry, I really am. But one of us has to die alone.
I was getting ready to flick out the light when the towel rustled and twitched, and Harlan lurched his torso upright. His eyes were still closed. His head lolled slack on his shoulders, as if the neck were just a sheaf of skin. In a roil of blind motion, betraying no awareness whatsoever, he simply propelled his body toward the door. His hand was on the knob before I flung him down.
His head hit the tiles with an audible crack, but it was just a moment before he was moving again. Eyes still shut, thankfully, still utterly limp but with a strange momentum just the same. A marionette struggling to draw himself forward despite the cut strings.
Half in panic, half in rage, I emptied another Dropstick into him, then another. It slowed him down some, but still he moved. I bear-hugged into a collapse, throwing my weight on him until I heard the snap of bones.
Still he moved.
I grabbed syringes randomly from Eun-Ha’s bag, stabbed and plungered them in without bothering to read what drugs they were. The fourth needle broke off in his chest. He got the door open anyway.
I couldn’t tackle him again without waking Eun-Ha. I could only watch as he made his nerveless disarticulated way back to my bed, to my wife’s side. He climbed back in, assuming the same easy position I’d found him in, draping his hand over her exactly as before. She wriggled slightly, moving into his touch. With the opened bathroom door spilling soft light down the hallway, I could see them both more clearly. I could see how their scars fit together.
On her, in the pale expanse below her breast: six vertical lines, exactly parallel. On him, bisecting the sternum and pectorals: five more. I didn’t place the pattern until another whir and hum led my eyes upward. The ceiling air vent grille.
I loved them both, but I couldn’t let it happen. I was not going to be the one to die alone. I waited until he was absolutely still, then summoned all my strength and plucked him straight up, right off of her and the bed. I slung him over one shoulder, held tight to the LifeWing bag and kept closing doors behind me until we were here. Outside the apartment, in the seventh-floor common corridor, just shy of the elevator landing.
Trauma shears are designed to cut the clothing off an accident victim’s body. They’re nicknamed pennycutters, because they’re strong enough and sharp enough to do exactly that. Jeans, leather jackets—they just slice right through. The skin above an artery hardly taxes them at all.
I don’t know why I went to the trouble. If he could quietly, ceaselessly clamber his way back on broken ankles and half a pharmacy in his veins, I don’t know why I thought a slit throat was going to stop him. It didn’t. I rummaged around the bag, and found what I was looking for still packaged in its sterile plastic, never used. An amputation saw.
That’s when you heard the commotion, isn’t it? My neighbor of how many months? Anonymous until now. I suppose it was the muffled thumps outside your door. You were curious. You investigated. I suppose I must have looked a fright.
Boy, I’m full of apologies tonight! But I’ll say it again: I’m sorry. I had just finished up with Harlan and there you were, with your face inflamed with a scar of your own. I took one look at the door behind you and I knew that it was meant to be. This is where it’ll happen. It took a Dropstick and some explanation to convince you. But you’re convinced, right?
You’re giving me that look again. That trying-to-wake-up look.
I tried to do my own waking up. I tried to convince myself that Harlan was right, that I was sick, a seriously deluded man spinning jealousy into fantasies of a starburs
t apocalypse. I would rather be blithely insulated by insanity. That would be a better thing to bear than this.
But there he goes. Harlan—I’d rather just call it Harlan’s body by now—collecting himself. Piling and sliding the pieces into a semblance of a man. There: he’s found both hands. Now no doors can keep him, not from the fate that draws him like a sideways gravity. The ceiling vent will kill them. Nothing else can.
It’s my last profound hope that Eun-Ha doesn’t wake up beforehand, doesn’t discover the approximation lying by her side.
We don’t die alone, either. That’s some consolation. See the door numbers, the numbers for apartment 7C? See how the pointed slash on your face exactly matches the 7, and how my curve-cut, my half-circle, will be created by the C? It won’t be long now. Our wounds will tell us when.
Oh, good. We’re finally starting to bleed.
THE MINIATURIST
by HEIDI JULAVITS
For Lois Duncan
AS THE TIRE CHAINS CONTINUED their maddening irregular clinking and the steeply pitched road disappeared for a third time beneath a snowdrift, Jennifer reminded herself: it was Helen’s idea to spend the weekend in the creepy Cascades in mid-February, mere miles from the cabin where, just last year, a man had killed his entire family in a fit of winter melancholy.
“What’s the odometer say?” Maureen asked. She held Helen’s handwritten directions to the window to catch what little light eked between the frantic white particles, zooming this way and that like a flock of crazed, speck-sized pigeons.
McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories Page 13