by Mark Leidner
“They’ll kill you,” Rxgr-14 said. “We can lie all we want, but it won’t erase the memory.”
Tzara-9 and Lnzt-16 were silent. The marching got louder. Rxgr-14 stared into the empty divot where his reflection had shone in the unfertilized reproductive protein upon first coming in that evening, and where there was now only reflectionless dirt. He lowered his head into the hole, waiting for a moment, then turned up and looked at Lnzt-16 and told him what he wanted him to do without words.
Lnzt-16 shook his head.
“You have to,” Rxgr-14 said.
“No,” Lnzt-16 pleaded. “I can’t.”
Rxgr-14 said, “I’d rather it be you than them. And you’ll be a hero… for slaying the upstart. For containing the problem. For enforcing the will of the queen. For taking bold action to protect the colony from the menace.”
Lnzt-16 looked at Tzara-9, then at the tips of his own bladelike mandibles, then back at Rxgr-14. He took a step backward on shaky feelers. He finally shook his great head and said, “I can’t do it.”
Tzara-9 was watching Lnzt-16, her antennae curled back in fear and wonder.
“If you don’t,” Rxgr-14 said, “you’ll both suffer. I can see it. I understand what will happen. They’ll ask questions. They’ll find out where you were last night. Then you really will be killed. And they’ll blame her too.” He looked at Tzara-9. “Somebody has to be sacrificed, don’t you see? I’m gonna die either way. This way you get to be heroes.” A new vision suddenly exploded into his mind, and he groaned and closed his compound eyes.
When he finally reopened them, there was a tiny blue flame or sparkle of electricity that was not there before in each lens. He nodded at his friends. “With this,” he said slowly, “the two of you will buy yourselves enough time, or privilege, to make preparations to leave.”
“To leave? To leave what?” Tzara-9 asked. “What is he talking about?”
“Tell her,” Rxgr-14 said. “Tell her everything, and leave with her. You, Tzara-9, Szafair-2, and everyone else the princess is recruiting. It all makes sense. I felt it when I flew with her, her plan. She’s going to sneak you all out through the secret tunnel to the surface. She was testing your loyalty, showing you the way. You’ll need capable tunnelers, especially at first.” His voice dropped an octave and took on an echolike quality as if many voices were speaking: “Seek Emnf-4 in Avern-Z9. Her work is exceptional, and she’ll be sympathetic. She’s lonely, like we are.” He looked right through them, and the flames in his eyes flickered wildly. “We don’t belong here.”
The royal guard burst into Avern-Y6. One of the royals spread his wings, then whipped them rapidly, which lifted him off the floor just enough to float above the survivors as he cast a scowl across the gore-splattered chamber. Then he started pointing in four directions, each with a different feeler. Columns of soldiers poured into Avern-Y6, breaking off in the different directions, opening more room for new winged leader-led columns to file in behind. Every soldier who’d participated in the mayhem hung their heads in shame. Tzara-9 and Lnzt-16 hunched together instinctively. No one dared drink a drop or even move. The big-winged, needle-shaped male in charge went up to the nearest soldier and began hissing, demanding an explanation. The interrogated soldier looked over at Lnzt-16, Tzara-9, and Rxgr-14. Rxgr-14’s remaining antenna was slack down the side of his head. Lnzt-16 turned to Tzara-9. Her compound eyes flickered fearfully, but then she said, “He’s right.”
“I know,” Lnzt-16 said. “But I can’t.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Rxgr-14 said.
Lnzt-16 looked at him angrily, then forlornly.
“I am what I am,” he said.
“What’s that?” Rxgr-14 said sharply. “You choose who you are with each moment.” He looked at his friend. “Just like your mother.”
Lnzt-16 looked at him for a long time, then nodded unsteadily.
“And promise me you’ll leave,” Rxgr-14 added.
Lnzt-16 nodded again. Rxgr-14 looked at Tzara-9. She nodded.
Rxgr-14 was briefly overcome with a sense of peace.
“Now, do it. Hurry.”
The needle-shaped male’s wings flapped louder, floating their way. Lnzt-16 turned his head so that his mandibles were perpendicular to Rxgr-14’s neck, then he hesitated again, and said, his voice barely a whisper, “I’m sorry. I can’t kill my mon frère.”
Then Lnzt-16 was weeping. Tzara-9 watched with incredulousness, then with tenderness. Lnzt-16 turned to her and said raspily, “I love him.”
The words broke Rxgr-14’s heart at the same time that they repaired it. Then Tzara-9 looked at Rxgr-14, and she said, “Me too.” Her words did the same, and he found a meaning resounding in them that had neither floor nor ceiling. Tzara-9 then skittered around the edge of the divot, knelt on her forward feelers, and locked eyes with Rxgr-14 as her mandibles widened around his. When their chitin touched, saliva gushed out of Rxgr-14’s throat on reflex and coated Tzara-9’s much larger mandibles, just as saliva gushed out of her mouth and glazed his face. He was blinded, and a flowering numbness took the pain of his missing antennae away and then undid his broken feeler with a feeling of oneness that sank down his spine and spoke its strange, wordless language to every fiber of his body. He felt again like he was flying, only without moving, like flight without time, like movement without exertion, like he was still and it was the world that was flying through him. When Tzara-9 whipped her body and separated his head, he didn’t hear the suction and the snap. There was a second of surprise, then it cut to black.
GARBAGE
ON A DOG-ASS COLD SUNDAY MORNING IN FEBRUARY, after trudging twenty minutes through shin-deep snowdrifts, I arrived at my favorite café, flung open the door, and was rewarded by a warm wave of air redolent of freshly baked pastries and freshly ground, exotic coffees. I was certain I’d made the right decision in leaving the house. Uncoiling my scarf, looking around, however, I realized that everyone else in town had had the same idea, and there was only one remaining empty chair. It was at a table already crammed with four other people. I went for it on instinct, only to stop short when I got closer. What I hadn’t been able to discern from the café’s entrance was a mug and a copy of The New York Times Book Review spread out in front of the seat. The claimant must either have been in the bathroom, or was one of the several people standing in line to order, perhaps going back for a refill or a treat. There happened to be a woman studying a textbook to the left of the vacant seat, and I assumed she was the companion of the person who was missing. In fact, I remember thinking, she is precisely the kind of person I wished I could be, an intellectual who is the companion to another intellectual. Isn’t it just typical, I thought, that not only do I get to not have a seat, I get to be taunted by almost having one, and even further toyed with by having my attention drawn right to the person in this café I would most want to be like or become friends with, only to have that opportunity taken away the moment it dawns on me as a possibility. Then, as if confirming my status as a waste of space the world has no place for, someone got up from one of the low, slanted, uncomfortable, drafty-ass seats along the back window. You’d think it would be impossible for even the winter wind to blow clear through glass, but, somehow, as soon as you sit in one of these seats by the window, you feel it. Your toes go cold, and then your socks feel like they’re wet even though they’re not, and then you can’t enjoy your coffee. The perfect perch, I thought, for someone like me: lonely, irascible, unfriendly, combative, and deranged.
I navigated toward it, grinding my teeth. I dropped my scarf on the slanted seat and my hat on the window sill, then I rushed back to stand in line and wait to buy the coffee and maybe a treat that I knew I didn’t need but which I’d probably buy anyway. I’d recently read an article that had suggested one way to lose weight was to remember that all your unhealthy cravings weren’t the result of some evolutionary imperative to hoard sugar like most people thought, but were actually just the product of marketing and loneliness
. What we secretly craved, the article said, when we buy things we know we don’t need, is the social web it lets us take part in. The sense of purpose and version of justice we get to experience when we trade something we have that someone else wants for something we want that someone has, the article argued, was a need we would go to virtually any length to meet when it wasn’t met in our personal lives. The article suggested that if we interacted more with friends and family, we’d be less prone to filling that void with the inferior substitutes of capitalistic exchanges with anonymous entrepreneurs and their low-wage employees. Then we’d all be wealthier and thinner, but I guess the economy would collapse, or perhaps have to change.
I’d never seen this barista before. He looked barely fifteen. Because he was new and young, the line the rest of us waited in was long and slow. I’d reached the middle when I realized I’d left my phone wrapped in my scarf at the window. I looked at my scarf and hat from across the dining area. I didn’t want to lose my spot in line, and I also refused to suffer the indignity of having to walk all the way back through the maze of chairs and tables, asking people to scoot up, interrupting their conversations, in order to get it—just to have to do it all over again on my way to get back in line.
Without my phone, I was noticing things I’d normally not given a shit about. One was a lady with a stroller with a kid in it who I knew wouldn’t become a genius. She was rocking the stroller with one hand while studying the rows of colorful juices in the display case like she was trying to figure out what juice would make her baby a genius. Spoiler alert: even the green ones supposedly packed with antioxidants contain something like two-and-a-half servings of 26 grams of sugar each. Sugar’s all you’re loving when you crack it open and drink it and think, “Ahhhh, I’m finally healthy! I’m finally doing something smart!”
Fuck all these people, I thought: the two cute dudes who get everything they want just by flexing their dimples—they should be taxed; the bearded scholar crouched over a book I knew was poetry from how spare it was on the page, sipping his mug through that mask of hair between him and the world, broadcasting smug discernment before scribbling his own inane fragments in a notebook with one of those medium-fancy pens that’s like $5.99 for a two-pack—a clown without a circus; the teenage scarecrow bopping snowboots on her barstool footrest, leaking huge puddles of snow on the tile, intermittently glancing up from a novel whose thickness bespoke its genre—fantasy—to gaze through the fogged-up window, woefully unaware that her real life would never be the magic epic she was programming herself with such books to endlessly yearn for it to become more like—a mouse fashioning her own mousetrap; two cops, one fat and one skinny, the fat one cutting a bagel with a plastic knife, the skinny one chuckling, probably at something casually sexist or racist the fat one just said—with their big black guns on their uniformed hips and their big black belts hung with human-hunting tools practically screaming out for people to stare at and imagine them being used, inspiring in me unwanted fantasies of running up and grabbing the skinny one’s gun and firing two shots into the pressed copper ceiling and further shattering the complacency of the café by shouting something completely insane like, “Hitler’s back, baby!”
Not that I’m a Nazi—far from it, I hope. It would just be fun watch lucky people try to maintain their benign personas at the sudden advent in their midsts of something so obviously evil. Maybe somebody would be a hero and put me down. Or reason with me and surprise me with their reasoning and somehow save my soul. Besides, what if I did have to disarm a cop? What if this was the eve of the people’s coup and I was a key operative upon whom national liberation depended? What would I do, just jump on his back? Or charge like a bull? Would I be able to get that little snap thingy on the holster unsnapped before he threw me off, bowed me in the face, and then put me out of my misery? Would I even have the nerve to do it at all? Or would I just stand there petrified, perhaps even by the fear of success, while the only chance the revolution had slipped away forever into history. Like a match I let blow out when all I had to do was move it one inch closer to the bonfire whose light would let others, others I’d never even know of, know that courage is possible.
Then there was the conversation the two girls ahead of me in line were having. I had no idea who they were talking about, but whoever it was, they kept calling her ‘garbage’:
“She’s garbage.”
“I know,” said the other. “Fucking garbage.”
Then, the first one said it again, as if it were a new idea. “She’s a garbage human being.”
“Oh my God,” said the other, “garbage.”
“I mean, she’s just garbage.”
It was almost like they were in a contest to see who could speak the ugliest about this person, but they’d both agreed beforehand to only use one word, so they just kept saying it in slightly different ways, but then, after a few rounds, they’d return to old iterations as if they’d forgotten them or agreed to pretend to forget them. I desperately wanted one of them to say to the other, “You’ve already said it that way.” But neither did.
“I mean, it’s like, she’s just…” the one on the right squinted, seeking a new way to put it. She had amazing blue ombré waterfall hair that was dark on top and got lighter and bluer at the ends. She looked like a futuristic comet.
“She’s just garbage,” concluded the comet.
“I know,” said the other. She had helmet-like bangs and her otherwise long black hair shined and swished like a curtain.
“And I’m not even, like, angry, or even care really? Does that make sense?” the blue-headed one said. The one with bangs nodded. “It’s just that she’s garbage.”
“She’s fucking garbage,” agreed the one with bangs.
“She’s a garbage human being,” the blue-haired one said again, pulling out her phone and doing something that seemed unrelated.
“Ugh, she is garbage.”
“Garbage.”
“Ugh,” the one with bangs said, checking her phone, too. I waited for another garbage to drop, but the pair was perfectly silent, just doing stuff on their phones. Then the one with blue hair put her phone away. Then the other did. Then they looked around like I had just been doing. The one with bangs leaned out of the line and looked at the barista, whose skinny arms were struggling with the espresso machine. Then she said something to the one with blue hair I couldn’t hear.
They both had hair I wanted. My hair is unevenly curly and looks like a mullety bridal veil, curly on top and straightening out to my shoulders. The only thing that prevents it from looking completely gross is if I don’t wash it. It’s almost cool-looking, then, in its oiliness—like I might be some kind of avant-garde theorist who spurns norms of hair-related fashion, or rather, one who establishes such norms before they become the mainstream. But rarely am I able to achieve this delicate balance of intentionally uncool coolness because I always wash my hair. If I don’t wash it, my scalp itches like crazy and I can’t stand that feeling. I think it goes back to when I was little, when my mom, who was so beautiful, always made a big deal about washing my hair. She gently scrubbed the shampoo into my scalp with firm fingernails while humming show tunes and telling me I was an angel. I think it programmed me to where I have anxiety if my hair isn’t washed. I just wish I’d have inherited her sweet disposition instead of my father’s, but shit in one hand and wish in another and see which one fills up first, as my dad used to say. What’s truly heart-breaking is that I’m sure there’s even some fancy conditioner out there that would resolve all my hair drama forever, but if I suddenly got good hair now, it’d just make me regret the preceding thirty-seven years of hair-related angst even more. Few things leave as bitter a feeling in your soul as learning so late that something you’ve hated about yourself all along was easily within your power to alter.
There I was, envying their hair, mesmerized by how uncreatively nasty they were being to this unnamed person, growing more curious about who their enemy was and w
hat she must’ve done, when they started calling her garbage again completely out of the blue.
“I’m serious,” said the one with blue-hair. “She’s garbage.”
The other looked surprised, as if she, like me, had been certain they were through with the topic. She inclined her head in solidarity, but then didn’t actually say the word, perhaps indicating her desire to retire it.
“She is.”
“Like—total garbage.”
“And I hate that we even care. It’s like, she’s garbage. Why do we care?”
There was a pause, and the blue-haired one finally leveled her eyes at the one with bangs and said, “She’s a bitch.”
A different look spread across the face of the one with bangs, worry or perhaps even disagreement.
“I mean, isn’t she?” added the blue-haired one. “I mean, she is.”
“Well…”
“You know she is.”
The other one thought about it, then said in a clarifying tone, “She’s garbage.”
The blue-haired one shrugged and the line inched forward.
Maybe she was garbage, I thought. Maybe she was the worst person ever. But it just made me love her, whoever she was. I pictured her as a waif in rags crouched in a cobblestone alley in eighteenth-century Paris. She had dirty cheeks and fierce, innocent eyes, like Cosette on the cover of Les Misérables, hopelessly besmirched by a bleating and distant clique, friendless, penniless, and unable to make her own way. But then I looked at the clique in front of me more closely, and they seemed to be in their own purgatorial version of friendlessness. I remembered being in high school, and, insanely, feeling sorry for the people who were popular because of all the things that had probably made them so. I was a pariah who no one thought twice about terrorizing, but even when I looked at those I envied, I saw their meanness or indifference or willingness to be self-destructive or to flaunt their wealth as the likely consequences of various horrible parents. All the jocks I imagined had violent, alcoholic dads, all the cheerleader-types were the spawn of sniveling, materialistic moms, and all the people with dyed hair who did drugs and got laid had charismas tempered in the forges of blistering divorces of fools who should’ve never been married.