Dead Astronauts

by Jeff VanderMeer

  You don’t know where to look now, after the encounter with the salamander. You don’t know what to do. The eye of the salamander confronts you. Challenges you. The words it spoke to you in the language you’ll never understand. You can never ask it what it wants or what it needs. All you can do is try to understand what exists in the body. Try to feel what it’s like to live in water. What it means for a body to communicate with the world so intensely, so directly, for the world to be so up against you that you and it are the same thing.

  If you’re born to it, if you’re like the salamander, it must be like heaven, as if heaven were on Earth. The hell must be that no one will leave you alone here in heaven. That people hunt you and people kill you and people just cannot be still in their own bodies and listen and watch and hear but must somehow escape the beat of their own hearts by ever being in motion, even when they come to rest.

  As you have come to rest, frozen, pinned by the intent in the salamander’s gaze. There is prophecy there. What it means. How it means. Why it means. When it is meant.

  As you write in the journal, the pain is less. Your headache is gone. Your rash is gone.

  * * *

  <
  Even then, she’d known there was something in the house, something under the house, just could not put a name to it. Depending on her mood it was benign or horrible. But it was always the thing under the house that caused the arguments between her parents. It was the thing under the house that made her real father leave.

  After a while, she became convinced the thing under the house had come up through a tunnel and into her brain. When she told her mother, before the idea infected her mother, the man at the hospital with the glittering water-faucet smile told her that wasn’t true. She didn’t believe him. Why else would her mother keep arguing even after her stepfather had left? Why else would there be another voice in the girl’s head?

  The girl’s real father had left at birth, all that remained a few toys bought at a dollar store near the honky-tonk a few miles down the road. Where he’d met her mother before she got fired and went to work in fast food. She didn’t want to like any of those toys, but she was fond of a plastic boat her mom called “the ark,” but she just called Boat.

  When the girl’s stepfather saw Boat, he told her that he had owned a boat once and lived on the coast. When he wasn’t drunk, he’d told her stories about the tidal pools and wandering at sunset between them, and the treasures found there. He’d shown her photographs and pictures in books. Like he wanted his past to become her future.

  The girl would never see the ocean. It was too far away from town. Too far away from the tunnel that became her home. But she did remember playing with Boat in the bathtub, and taking her toys and plastic jewelry and creating tidal pools to explore. She had an active imagination. Her mother always said. Sometimes spat the words. Sometimes punished her for it. Which was when it was important to focus on the sea and the day when she might live in a little cottage on the shore.

  Her stepfather’s stories weren’t much, but they meant almost too much to the girl. She knew it, but couldn’t help it.

  Once, in a rare bout of kindness, the day after her stepfather left them, her mother had made star-and-moon mobiles to hang off the showerhead, and the girl had piloted Boat across the sea of the tub by the light of those stars.

  That was when the dark began to take form, shape in her mind, and she began to call what lived in the house and lurked in the town what they really were: demons.>>

  – 2 –

  That night. Which night. That one. Or that one. You’re losing track. Of time. Of symptoms. Of the world. But, that night, the dark came down and killed a pale man—and then another. Drags them off toward the factory smokestacks. Sound of their bodies through underbrush silky, smooth, disturbing, as if they move like molting snakes down a soft carpet. But the thing that drags them is rough, harsh, cracked branches and the night does not matter to it. Forces in the world that seem so mysterious are at odds. That it is not dark against light but dark against dark against dark against dark.

  Charting the English words through the journal, stitching them together into sense or a kind of sense. Thinking it gives you an anchor, even as each sets you more adrift.

  “What if the world were alive, the entire world, every thing in it. What if I could make that world, and each being connected in such intimate ways.”

  So dark, too, in the tunnel you venture from, the way its voices are so silent. Realize at some point that the others were as scared of you as the thing that drags the corpses of pale men through the forest.

  “What men make of the future must be better than the past. If the world is to live, we must make better things.”

  There, in the twilight, too, you imagine the salamander, hidden away against tree roots at the riverbank. The salamander, safe in subterranean hollows, in murky water, in among the river grasses, the algae and smooth rocks. While, above, the last pale man runs for safety, across the meadow and the fields and the forest. The dark bird following swift, close on the scent, and you realize the sound of it dragging its murdered burden comes to you from the past.

  “I cannot see the destination sometimes. But I know the work must continue. 10, 7, 3, 0.”

  The sound of the bird and the blood-red eyes and a sulfur smell and a scream and one will must win out. Another pale man has died. You imagine talons ripping through translucent skin, toward the visible heart beating its last. Delicate as a tree frog. Not up to the challenge.

  “I search for it in entrails and in skulls. I must believe that it lives there.”

  You find the damp part of the forest, where the moss is joined by the ferns and the ground curves down and water trickles continual. Where black iridescent damselflies glide and flit, still, then in the air again. Like something that could be torn apart in an instant, crumpled and thrown aside as if it had never existed. Find the places where the rotted wood of fallen trees gives shelter. Burrow deep like a fox. Hide your pack. Place the journal in a used plastic baggie, bury it in loam far from your hiding place. Until the next time.

  The writing has come slower and slower, as you feel compelled to use blood for more and more of the words. But still you keep at it. A vague sense of needing a record. Something the salamander said to you. About commitment. About escape or no escape and there might come a time when it could not protect you. Or you think it said this. There have been too many demons to concentrate, to know for sure.

  You love the soil against your skin. You love the water against your skin, the forest a kind of bliss. Or perhaps it is only that the salamander loves these things. Does it matter? The places covered in comforting dead leaves. The loam and the lichen, the earthworms and the snails, the mushrooms and the mold. Fungi like lampposts or markers illuminating the world. When you write in the journal, it feels like your skin is open to the messages it sends out, the messages you embed there. How these places, too, are tidal pools, the forest an island amid devastation.

  The glow, at night, of fireflies and, overhead, the canopy and the moon and, even, you imagine, a fox staring down at you, framed by leaves and dark branches. The face of a fox impassive, remote, centuries away. So far away. As far away as the moon.

  * * *

  Later. You fell asleep or fell awake. In the night, deep into it, so little difference, so little defense. But the forest now is full of light. Waves of red flickering light in a rough line, and a figure, distant, at the center of the line. Coming closer and closer across the shadows of tree trunks. No difference between flame and figure, as if the figure is made of light and holding out infinite arms of fire. But there is no smell of burning. But there is no crackling or hissing sound. Just the muffled sound of someone walking over damp leave
s and branches.

  Your mother. From your shelter, peering over a fallen log, you see that the figure is your mother. A burning flame, setting fire to the forest with the fury and derangement of her passage. Reaching out with blackened hands, the flame now wings to her sides. Beseeching. Imploring. You can hear her now, above the silence of the flames. Calling out your name. Asking you to help, to stop the pain. To stop hiding.

  What’s the present but a version of the past. You piss yourself with fear. Your heartbeat pulses strong in your ears as if the pressure has dropped. Pass out. Recover. Come to your senses, lurching onto your stomach, still hidden. But not for long. She is near. She is so close.

  The fine-etched features of your mother’s face, so locked in. As if set on a course for too many years, and even though the destination never appeared, still she must continue toward it, through a field of flame. Must find her daughter. To explain? To inflict? But that is only your fear rising again.

  The fire is hypnotic. The fire calls your name, too. Fire and mother both. You cannot run. You cannot reveal yourself.

  Until your mother stands on the lip of your shelter and stares down at you, her green velvet nightgown on fire and her eyes like raging candles.

  The hand she extends toward you is the edge of a dark, dark wing amid the burning loose fabric of her sleeve. Her face has turned reptilian and alien and talons clamp onto your shoulder and you’re lost. Lost, never to be found. Lost and no saving you should you burrow among the grubs and the moles and the other creatures hidden beneath the forest floor.

  Frantic, you push away, try to rise, trip, fall back against the opposite side of the hollow, tree roots holding you up. Knives slice into your shoulder, how blood trickles out and the talons come in for another strike. The dark wing stands there, red eyes hungry. It will flay you alive, take your soul. Use you up as demons do.

  That’s when the salamander barrels out of the dark, so much larger than before, smashes thrashing into the dark wing, and they fall, struggling, silent, terrible monsters, back into the darkness.

  The moment you can move again. Find the journal. Pick up your pack. Run.

  * * *

  <
  Once her mother explained that he was mostly a ghost because “He doesn’t want to do harm.” But she knew that wasn’t true. Maybe it just made everything easier for him. Did ghosts have shouting matches with her mother in the bedroom with the door closed? And when he was gone, all that remained were tidal pools in the girl’s head and the portraits to show that, once, he had hung something on the wall.

  His absence opened up a hole in her life she hadn’t known was there. As if he’d been an eclipse and the first abandonment now shone forth in all its heat and glory. The father she’d never known, who had never been in her life and about whom her mother said only vague things, like, “He was a good man,” or “He did like his sports,” as if any of it couldn’t describe a thousand men. Had he really been so ordinary?

  Worse, alone with her mother … her mother was still the same—the woman with the pinched cheeks and mussed-up blond hair who tried hard most of the time, but would just as easily fill her cereal bowl with orange juice as milk, and when she complained would find a way to blame her.

  Mother said she had no photos of the girl’s real dad. But once the girl went through some drawers looking to borrow a pair of her mother’s socks and found an envelope of old black-and-white photos of stern-looking people with narrow, pinched features and severe, sharp black clothes. She knew they weren’t their family or her stepdad’s family. They looked like no one she would ever have wanted to meet. They looked, upon reflection, in their reflections, like demons. As stiff and pale as the demons she watched become the town.

  Not long after, her mother slammed open the girl’s door, breathless, shouting: “You did it! You did. You’re the demon. He left because you’re a demon. I wish you’d never been born!”

  In the morning, her mother becoming Other had forgotten bursting in, forgotten that her daughter was a demon. But the girl remembered.>>

  – 1 –

  The dark bird cries out in pain, lost in the forest, wing useless from the salamander’s attack. Cries of alarm distant from the factory, as if the dark wing is a beacon. From your place by the river, beside the salamander, who is changing again. Not from wounding but from choice, from life cycle. That much you understand.

  The huge body beside you, engulfed by a river grown urgent, tugs at the creature. Tugs away at the strings, the knots of its body. As you watch, the salamander begins to disintegrate, the tail becoming a slow miracle of thousands of tiny writhing salamanders where one had been.

  The limbs and torso fall like living red sand into the river, taken by the swirls. Until there is only the head and the eyes that stare at you, until the erosion of self takes them too, and it all crumbles into the water and the river is awash with motes of life.

  Such joy in the sight. So much joy you feel that the pain leaves you for a time. To see a river that is full of wriggling red bodies. Tiny eyes so bright, staring as one at you, and then swept downriver. Changing the river, changing this world. A river aflame. Dispersed and disbanded and yet ever stronger in that fragmented state.

  And the thing you didn’t know at first: The dark bird is coming closer. You’ve lost a lot of blood, the wound too deep, too poisoned for the salamander to repair. Not and save itself. But it has a plan, a plan it whispered to you. A plan you’re willing to accept.

  Nothing left to do. Nothing you can do. For what could you do. This has all already happened.

  * * *

  <
  There was no warning. There seemed to be no motive. Perhaps it was a poison skimming the mind, present in the blood. Perhaps it was some pent-up rage that fell upon her Other for little reason. Perhaps perhaps perhaps.

  “The demons are in the shed,” her Other told her. “The demons are trapped in the shed. I trapped them. Pour the gasoline. Pour it. Make a bonfire. Kill the demons. Kill them!” Red reptilian eyes, but the girl only saw that it would get worse if she didn’t.

  So the girl took the cans of gasoline down to the shed, poured them on the wood. It was a little shed with nothing in it except the demons. Dirt all around. What harm could it do to burn it down, the girl reasoned. If it would calm her Other. If maybe she could have an evening of peace or something like it.

  The smell was harsh as her Other’s voice, so she hurried for the match, to smell something different. The shed lit up brilliant, with a gasp, gush, and shallow scream. The flames traveled up to the roof in seconds. It was always brittle and dry and rotted. Diseased.

  The scream of fire became a human scream, but by then it was too late. While her Other laughed and danced beside the girl and shrieked out, “He came back! He came back! But he was a demon! But he was a demon! So I gagged him! So I tied him up!”

  The shed on fire. The shed extinguished, blackened, strewn with ash.

  The girl’s stepfather is inside. The girl’s stepfather is not inside. Her Other put him there. Her Other did not put him there. If the girl doesn’t look inside, she can make the reality she wants to live in, the one that won’t make her scream. The one that won’t mean she spends time in a juvenile detention center. Becomes an old, old high-school dropout. Never stable. Even her Other and the demons become dull, predictable, fuzzy, lost behind a veil, and even that is a sort of loss.

  Never able to recover because how could she recover from that?

  Thinking: Perhaps the hot spring day, harbinger, had deranged both of them. If the world was a demon t
hat wanted to kill everyone, what did it matter? Did her Other know something true, in her body? Did she burn him in the shed because she knew what was coming and she wasn’t the equal of it? To survive the death of the world? If she wanted to die, she could have chosen some other way.

  Nocturnalia. Nocturnalia. Nocturnalia. The giant fish diving, diving deep, lingering in the depths beneath her. Waiting to devour her. Or had devoured her. Or would have.

  In prison terrible things happened to her and she didn’t care. For a long time, she didn’t care. For a long time, she thought the demons died with her Other, short months later.

  At least she hadn’t lived to see her daughter huddled in a tunnel under a bridge, poring madly over a journal that could not possibly, it was not possible, carry meaning. Could mean nothing to no one.

  A shed and a fire but no one really in there or that the body they did find had been someone else.

  She knew only the marker of territory who, like a fox, didn’t want to be seen, but only to be.>>

  - 0 -

  Things that can be said. Things that can’t be said. You know them both. Still the smokestacks belch smoke. Still you tunnel under the bridge, you will never be quit of the place. You will never be quit. You will live always, even when you don’t. You will never have the right to decide or to understand. You will only have the right to help or not help. Through all the versions. Yourself. Not yourself.

  Darkness encroaches from across the river and the salamander is truly gone and the river is calm once more.

  Darkness behind and above the tunnel, on the bridge, there stands the shadow of a fox. At the end of the tunnel, a vision you know must be false, but is still better than darkness: A shining City surrounded by gardens and streams. Surrounded by a swirl of snow that forms a portal, a window, almost a globe of light. Nothing else to do but to come closer, the dark bird in pursuit. The City ahead, the City you recognize.