The rest we killed.
Except the chef, who raged at me that he had so much work to do that day. That he must be allowed to prepare the kitchen. The rows of kitchens. The rows of larders full of stinking maggoty meat. For all of the dead guests. What was wasted was no less or no more than what was wasted before the fall.
The concierge cowered next to him, begging forgiveness for the words of the chef.
But the words meant nothing to me. Kitchen meant nothing to me. All the sunken, skewed tables and beds and chairs and sofas and slanted paintings, stinking of the poisons they released. All the useless chandeliers broken across the pointless marbled floors. Nothing. What a nothing you made out of the world you were given.
I let them go. Watched them running across the devastated landscape. Where were they going? The whole world was like this.
The cook and his concierge, the concierge and his cook. Dancing into oblivion. And as they receded into the landscape, the words cook and concierge fled with them, became tiny. Were no more.
With all the murder and the killing and the chaos of warfare, there was little time to talk to my prey. But I talked to some.
There was the artist who believed we were all sacred as he begged me for a ham hock or any scrap of meat and clung to the tattered remnants of his fur coat, shivering against the cold. Who thought us holy, but perhaps not holy enough not to kill. I bit his head off. It took quite a while. He would not stop talking.
There was the woodsman who thought we ate his chickens. He was stiff, like something out of a fairy tale. He could see us only out of the pages of old ideas. Nothing we could have said would convince him different.
We ate him instead and set his chickens free to show that we could be fair and just. Cooked or uncooked, what’s the difference? Do you care?
There was the old biologist in his hovel of a house, eating stew made of whatever animals he wasn’t banding. Setting up his fine-mesh nets full of holes because his brain told him that what the old biologist in his hovel of a house, eating stew made of whatever animals he wasn’t banding, did was set up fine-mesh nets full of holes because his brain told him that what the old biologist in his hovel of a house, eating stew made of whatever animals he wasn’t banding, set up fine-mesh nets. Full of holes.
We sat down to dinner at the bench, all around him. He had not banded us. He could not eat us. But we had seen the ones he’d crushed underfoot by mistake in his fine-mesh nets. We had seen the ones who when they flew off after banding were too disoriented to evade the predator leaping from above or swooping from below. All the instrumentation of trauma in the old shed. The one that might someday burn down, but that was not our concern.
Our concern was the old biologist, sitting there on the bench eating his weak stew, his tender soup.
“Is it good?” I asked. “Is it fine?”
“It’s hearty,” he replied, his face a map of his own weakness more than he knew.
In the basement were his attempts at art. Masterpieces some thought, but to us merely the evidence of kidnap victims. Posed normal, noble, not struggled entangled. Not in the shed, splayed out and shoved down. Alien abductions. Blood taken. Probed. Vast and choking light smashed into the huge eyes. Talons held tender yet still held unwilling.
Rates of trauma in re-banded birds. Rates of trauma in old biologists whose research was suspect. Rates of trauma in drone harassment. Crunch of birds underfoot. But it’s a species, not an individual.
The loneliness of the musk ox released back into the herd, forever marked and alone. Taking shelter in the snow, alone. The seal with the glue-affixed beacon on the forehead. Maybe it will come off. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Here’s a kingfisher. I had to kill it so I could save it. The bighorn sheep that, the last of its herd, looked at the reflection in car metal to know of another of its kind.
“We need data from you,” I explained to the old biologist.
He, the object, objected, but we pushed past that point, until the binocular necklace was pressed tight against his throat. We took his blood. We weighed him. We shined bright lights upon his lined face. He didn’t understand. How could he? We barely understood ourselves. These rituals, how do they evade scrutiny. How they evade scrutiny. What we tell ourselves is important.
He pissed himself and we took that sample too. Dehydrated, despite the stew. There was too much of the wrong kind of bird in that stew, his nets too poked through with holes, for us to mistake the results of that.
There were monsters in the night. Things that would never be studied. We let the biologist go, out into that darkness, holding his binoculars like a weapon. Swinging them against whatever lay in wait. Watched as he, shrieking, was pulled up into the night, flung and quartered, soon scraps for predators. It wasn’t our fault. We needed our data. We had our data. Still, no excuses. We had no control or controls.
“You don’t mind if we band you, do you?” I asked. “It’s what we do. We band things. It’s nothing personal. It’s about the species.”
We burned down the nets, burned down the house. Spared the shed. I could not take the echo that I knew was coming to me from somewhere in the future or the past—it wasn’t clear.
Our data told us to discontinue that particular experiment, so we did. Instead, we traveled north, our breath fierce in our throats and our eyes encrusted with the white rust of ice.
The furriers who kept our arctic brothers and sisters in tiny pens and then skinned them alive for their fur … these furriers we herded off a cliff into an abandoned quarry. A fox can be a sheepdog. A fox can be whatever he wants to be, contrary to legend. Careening crazed around the edges as the furriers pleaded and stumbled even as they ran. Teetered there on the cliff’s edge. As long as they could. Toppled and fell in ragged lines of flailing human, falling out of the sky to Earth. The screams ripped from them, battering the rock, reaching not our ears. The last one of them wheeling arms, red-faced, shouting for mercy. If only he had not been clad head to toe in fox, perhaps we could have forgiven a single, a solitary soul. Perhaps, then, seeing the error of his ways, he would have released his prisoners. But we had already done that. And a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.
Broken-limbed at the bottom, split and riven, so the red could leak into the exhausted gravel and turn weeds sodden. Brains dashed out as fast as they’d dashed to the edge. Not puppets expressed there. No, not puppets. No one could ever use their skins for anything in that condition. But who but a barbarian would wear the skin of his enemy?
I suppose I was, for a time, deranged. The rest are a blur and a burr and a rankle, even now. A tug-tug of direction or misdirection. I cannot rest thinking about them. How the effort was a waste. How not a one could see me. How I could smell and hear them all too clearly. That I knew more about them from their scent than they knew about themselves. That this one was dying of cancer. That that one suffered from a brain tumor. That the rasp of breath wasted on pleading was close to the rasp of death anyway. What did they know about me? Only that I was a demon come to murder them all.
And what was ease but boredom? The tromping clod so quick to track the way they stank like any dead thing as their victims’ path took them quick and sure leaping over their bodies into the wilderness beyond. Because our arctic kin distrusted us as much as they distrusted humans; they had seen what we could do.
The way they stank so hard and long it was as if they trailed spirals of fire through the night. The way not one of those liberated would join us, could understand our mission.
A fox is just a prisoner who hasn’t escaped yet.
A fox seen in the daytime must have something wrong with it.
A fox is a question that must be answered.
A fox is vermin. Ought to be shot. Quite right. Loose the hounds, my good man. Train them first on the kits, or the hounds will never learn to kill a full-grown fox. Tally. Tallyho.
A fox is not just a fox is not just a fo
x.
How tiresome it became, too, for other reasons. Oh, how these dead people who lived in houses on lots where they had cut down most of the trees loved trees. How they loved to be out in the trees. The tales they told about the trees and how they loved them. Perhaps because trees did not resist. Trees fell over of their own accord, sometimes, as if to prove their love of the ax. The chain saw that felled most of them just completed a tree’s own inevitable thought.
The proof—that trees never turned chain saws against the ones that wielded them. The chain saws, which were even named, as if they were as alive as a tree, had a personality. Greta. Berta. Charlie. Frank. Sarah. So some we killed with chain saws, to remind them of what it really meant to be a tree. A messy business. Difficult for them and for us.
Absurd of foxes to do all of this. We had no hands. We did not walk upright. We were not made to use human tools. Yet still we did it, and did it well and with vigor.
Do you doubt me? Do you not see the corpses strewn there in my mind’s eye? Can you not distinguish truth from fiction? Or were you never taught the difference?
I’m not laughing at you; I’m laughing with you. Except: Foxes don’t laugh, they grin. Do you know what a grin from a fox means?
But I was not content to wage such a ragged war upon the enemy. I raised a great liberation army and stood one dusk looking out upon the glittering plain where the humans had camped. They did not know we were their enemy. They had come to that desolate place to battle another army of humans. That was the way of them—to fight each other even as they waged war on us as well. War against us was a casual affair, as quick as thought but without thought.
I stood above that glittering valley, the dusty plain, and watched the legions arrayed there. An army that didn’t think of itself as an army. Even as they killed us quick and casual, slow and calculated. Poisoned the darkness with an everlasting and cruel light. They did not smell our blood, heard nothing that we shrieked out or moaned.
We set upon you in the night. And you, bewildered that your quarry should be full of so much rage, as if killing us had been a gift you’d given us. Confused that we fought to the death. That we could overcome the animal instinct to flee, to survive, to subsist.
We stormed the gates. We died in droves. We laid siege. We were destroyed from within and from without. Still, we surged. Still, there were enough of us … for a time.
So much I could sense what they could not, even in the middle of battle. The electromagnetic fields were already in my head. The trails left by voles crisscrossed the night ground, luminous green. I could never be lost, held tight that way by the world. There was no darkness for me, no light.
Yet still I lost, because I was being human.
Killing is easy. I think that’s why people do it so much.
But soon I realized the error. I was just doing what had been done to me and mine. Revenge was not sweet. Revenge deformed. I saw my mistake and I atoned because I had been bad, revolutionary turned terrorist. Soon I was on the march with my army again—this time rebuilding what we had destroyed, helping humans repair their cities, restore their lights, their shops, their vehicles. And they were thankful. They thanked us as they always had, for we had misunderstood, thought that they did not love us. But of course they loved us, because they said they did.
No, that’s not it. That’s not what happened. Who could in their hearts forgive mass murderers? It’s that it still wasn’t enough. There were too many of you and too few of us. I could kill you from sunrise to sunset and it would never be enough.
Still, I tried. I attended social events. I observed and thought about what I saw. At a masquerade, a cocktail party. On another Earth, where still you humans congregated at public institutions and people’s houses to drink and talk because there were institutions because there still were houses. If I could kill humans, I could disguise myself as one to mingle. Mingling was a big thing for humans. To show off houses. To show off wealth. Like marking things was for us.
This house had a slow death of useless objects on its walls. This house stank of toxic house cleaners and the food stank of pesticides and the people stank of pesticides, too, but didn’t know it. I didn’t have to kill any of them; most were dying of cancer, slowly, and didn’t know it. Most had bellies full of plastic. The plastic would grow and grow in their bellies until, years from now, as they mingled, as they drank expensive wine, their bellies would burst and out would come all the plastic, dribbling onto the floor. Pressing cool and bloody against some synthetic floor. Plastic in love with synthetic. Pressing there cool and bloody. Finally home.
Businessmen mingled at this party. They mingled with artists who made them amazing sculptures of abstract animals and cute animals. The owner of the house loved the ironic taxidermy of roadkill. “If it’s roadkill, it’s pure. I just make them beautiful again.” The taxidermist was there.
I wondered if I ran over the taxidermist and preserved her in resin if she would feel beautiful. If she would feel pure. Exploded first into a jagged eruption and pulling apart of flesh and tissue and bone and sinew. Left with a hole where the chest had been. A face half sawed off. Or perhaps a broken back, still alive and gasping, but crushed to asphalt in the middle, hoping now for another car to finish the carnage.
But, to mingle. I must mingle. I must hover and flit and pirouette and make my excuses to the next conversation and engage in small talk.
“What about the weather?” But you could not talk about the weather on this Earth. The weather had turned bad. The weather was a traitor.
“What about sports?” But you could not talk about sports because the weather had “fucked up” the sports.
What could we talk about? I complimented the owners on their house. My voice had a rasp to it, then. I wasn’t yet comfortable talking human. My voice had a rasp, and I gazed upon the bison head on the wall and my voice became raspier still. I gazed upon the mossy rock imported from another country, the water feature in the house, and wanted only to return to all fours and to drink from the pond. To gaze at my reflection and remember who I was, not what I had become.
“Did you find that here or did you have to go online?”
“That tablecloth created by forced labor looks amazing on that table manufactured with formaldehyde in a sweatshop.”
“Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”
It was bracing to hear such honest talk, even if only in my head.
“And what do you do?” Directed at me.
The rasp: “I’m in private equality.”
“Equity?”
“Equality.”
“Wolves all in equity.”
“Some of them are foxes,” I said.
Then I revealed myself and my emissaries came smashing through the special nonreflective glass that had stopped birds from flying into it even as the owners’ vehicles and leaf blowers and pesticides had poisoned all the birds into extinction.
There is a question I should ask, but I feel you’ve forgotten the answer. I feel there’s no point in asking now.
What do you run in? Do you run in? Do you ever run in circles chasing your own tail? Is your tail ever on fire yet you chase it still? Circles. Reentry. Burning up like a space capsule. Fever run hot. Why lunge for a jugular when you could rip out tendons, watch the timber fall, and then, at your leisure, circle back in the dark.
Sometimes it wasn’t about the hunt or the kill. Sometimes it was about meting out in equal measure a never-ending bile. A never-endingness. A never-ending moment of never having rest. Let them never rest as they have not allowed us to rest, to just be. May they always be on the run, looking over their shoulder, that we may have peace.
It wasn’t a cabin. It was a burrow. We knew they’d come for us. But we could see what they couldn’t. We knew, and by the time they arrived, we weren’t
there. Or we were underfoot, underneath—under the pine needles, the bramble, the dirt, even the limestone. We could hear them above, clumsy, loud. But we had dissipated. We had dissolved like rainwater into the substrate.
To hide, I came back to my own. Through all the hidden doorways. I spread myself thin to do so. I made many versions of myself. We multiplied through the burrows. We came out the other end … different. In different places.
I watched—
I watched a Grayson on an empty moon base. Frozen there. Unable to decide. For that Grayson, I became the noise around the corner that made her blanch, made her decision for her. In another it was the hatching sound of a thousand Company invertebrates, which had swept the base clean. Maybe in a third, Grayson left for simple loneliness and the Company never reached that moon.
I watched—
I watched—
I came back to my own. I bled through mud. I fell in sand and dirt. I ate lichen off old stone and dead tree trunk. I snapped up mice again. Rolled in yellow grass and offal. Still they did not know me as kin. I smelled wretched, like you, not like fox. I could not shed it. I was an alien, come down from the stars to them. I wished it wasn’t so. I wished I could run with them. Remember nothing. Be erased under the moon. Disappear into Nocturnalia.
But still I came back to them. I came back to their minds through their scent. They sniffed me and danced around me and I was still not like me. Not like them.
Yet they stayed and followed me.
You say why save an empty Earth? I can smell it on you, hear it in your voice. The way you can’t remember because how could you live. But it’s only empty to your eyes. It’s only empty because you helped make it so, and thought nothing of it.
There is no end to us. Only to you. You’ll never understand that. You’ll never understand that without us, you don’t exist. You wink out of existence. You become something else. Forever. And when I’m gone, what will remain? Everything.
Dead Astronauts Page 18