“I thought if you had a brother in lockup with a hard rep, people would be too scared of him to rape you.”
I gave her another sticker. “At this point,” I said, “I don’t scream, because I know if I started screaming I would never stop.”
Devin’s tooth was getting worse. When he spoke, gray foamy sludge spilled over his lips. I told him to open his mouth so I could look at it. His mouth had become a huge eroding cavern. His teeth were icebergs collapsing into a dark sea. As I watched, more fell away and the abyss enlarged.
I recoiled and went back to teaching poetry. Because I was on probation I had to read from the preapproved curriculum script to make sure that I didn’t teach anything wrong. The Vice Principal checked on me every half hour.
“There are four types of poetry,” I read. “Haiku, quatrain, acrostic, and limerick.”
Thompson raised his hand and I called on him. He grinned. “I got a question, Ms. X. I’m sorry, but do you think Nacai smells like ass?”
The class howled.
“That’s not following the Golden Rule, Thompson.”
“My bad, my bad. But it’s true, right?”
“Fuck off, Thompson,” said Nacai. He was sitting in the back of the room and his voice was very small.
“Don’t talk to me,” said Thompson. “I don’t want nobody talking to me who shit their pants.”
“You are not showing respect to your peer,” I told Thompson. “I’m going to write you up.”
“Why don’t you write up the person who shit their pants, is what I’m wondering?”
Nacai stood up and flipped his desk over. The Vice Principal walked in. The class screeched like an aroused monster with many heads.
“This is highly unorthodox!” shouted the Vice Principal.
I said, “Haiku is composed of three lines. The first line consists of five syllables. The second line consists of seven syllables. The third line consists of five syllables. Now let us look at this example poem about the snow goose.”
I did not look at the Vice Principal. I only looked at the paper. If I looked up at the class they would become a sea and drown me.
The home test kit revealed two lines. I didn’t believe it. I was sure there was a testing error. Maybe there had been some sort of irregularity in the test-taking environment. Maybe the proctor had been incompetent. I took another and another and another.
In the classroom I shattered my SUPER TEACHER! mug on the floor and said, “I’m pregnant.”
“Oooh, bay-bee!” The class was thrilled.
“I call godmother!” yelled Lani.
Thompson yelled, “Don’t worry, Ms. X, I’ll teach your baby do the running man. S’gonna be tight.”
“You don’t understand, I can’t bring a child into this world.” They didn’t understand. Every day children flooded into the world around them. They were foam on a rising tide. “I need to get rid of it.”
That they understood.
“What my sister does is fall on her bicycle.”
“You gotta drink bleach, Ms. X.”
“You gotta shove some papaya up in your business.”
Alisha dragged a chair to the front of the classroom. “Jump off your desk, Ms. X. Fall on this chair. It’s the best way.”
The class clustered around me. I stood on my desk. I jumped and crashed down onto the chair. A tree of pain unfurled in my stomach and I sobbed as the class applauded.
I climbed onto the desk again. Blood ran down my legs. My head was buzzing. It sounded like a million people were running toward me from very far away. I looked down at the children and saw their faces flecked with my blood.
“If the world were as I dreamt it,” I told them, “I would be ten feet tall, waving a flaming sword.” The million people were getting closer. “I would lead a horde of righteous warriors howling down a green hill.” The world was growing translucent. “I would burn everything until you got what you deserved.”
Suddenly we heard a thump on the window. The million people had arrived. It was everyone who had ever died for no reason. They were flinging themselves against the outside of the school. Their bodies were decaying and falling apart.
There was clamor in the hallway. The dead people had gotten inside. I could hear the Vice Principal yelling. “Do you have a hall pass? Do you have a hall pass?”
His voice made the pain bloom again in my stomach. I couldn’t breathe. His shoes clicked closer to my door. I gasped, “There’s no way out.”
Alisha stepped forward. “You need to jump into Devin’s mouth,” she told me. Devin obligingly opened his mouth and I saw an endless black chasm.
Some of the class ran to the windows and flung them open. “Come in!” They beckoned to the dead people. “Hurry up!”
I looked from Alisha to them and back again. The Vice Principal was almost here.
Alisha said, “You need to jump like you would jump from a burning building into a fireman’s net. You need to jump into Devin’s mouth, otherwise this is the end and the stories will all be rewritten and there will be no sound left to speak our names.”
The Vice Principal flung open the classroom door. “I spent six weeks at the National Summer Academy for Vice Leaders!” he shouted. “And before that I was a very successful hedge-fund manager! And let me tell you—there does not appear to be a lot of learning occurring here! ”
His face shone with sweat. Dead people pressed close behind him. I jumped.
The gulf of Devin’s mouth yawned around me. I didn’t land. The class jumped behind me, one by one. Devin jumped last. “This way!” he called to the dead people. “Follow us!”
The light of the classroom shrank above us and vanished. The bottom was nowhere in sight. Black wind ribboned sweetly through our hair. The kids grabbed each other’s hands the way they had been taught in kindergarten. We flew through the darkness toward a new world, and the dead poured down all around us.
Blood, Blood
I’m sixteen when George and I figure out the aliens will pay to watch us fight. We’re leaning against milk crates in the alley behind the library and he’s giving me shit about losing my waitressing job. To shut him up I bring my fist back in slow motion and plow my knuckles into the side of his mouth. He does an exaggerated, drawn-out reaction, flapping his lips out and staggering into the cinder block. Then at the last moment he spins, catches me around my waist, and pulls me in to him. My foot snags the milk crates and the stack comes clattering down.
A group of aliens are leaving the library—a family, maybe, if families are something they have. They catch sight of us—smell us, sense us, whatever—and drift over to the mouth of the alley. I feel George tense as the aliens say, What are you doing? What does this mean?
His face is drawing tight with irritation when I reach back and tickle him. My fingers dig into the softness between his ribs hard enough—maybe—to leave bruises. We topple to the pavement. He lands on top of me. His elbow jams my boob. Or, as my mom would say, the place where my boob ought to be.
“Shit, ow.”
“So says the weaker sex.”
“I hate you.”
His whisper hums against my neck. “I know.”
I flip out of his grasp and my knee drags along pavement, leaving a stain of capillary blood on the faded asphalt and the tufts of grass that break through.
How thrilling, the aliens murmur. How visceral.
A moment later George lies on his stomach. His feet kick feebly, like a turtle. “Mercy, fair lady!”
Sitting on his back, I inspect my nails. Each capped with a rind of black grime. Sweat, his and mine, soaks through my Stray Cat Diner polo.
“Mercy!”
When I let him up, he picks his messenger cap off the pavement. Dusts it off. Drops his card in and waves it toward the cluster of aliens. “Donations? Donations! Show
your appreciation, whatever manner you feel is right.”
Giggling, the aliens reach in and touch his card. Credit rushes into his account.
Even after they’ve paid him, they linger. They are fascinated by the way he grips the brim of his cap, the way I press my finger into the scrape on my knee and hiss as the sting flares and fades. George and I stand very still. Usually aliens don’t leave unless you’ve really done nothing for a minute or two. They hate missing anything.
When they’ve gone, George flips them the bird. He checks the balance on his card and looks up at me, his mouth spreading into a grin. His eyes are hard and bright with opportunity. “We’re rich.”
I tell my parents that waitressing interfered with my schoolwork. The thought of this is so horrific that my mother drops the dust cloth and runs to smooth my hair. “Don’t worry, honey, you do whatever you need to do. Eyes on that scholarship, right?”
“Sure, Mom. Whatever.”
Really, Mr. Reade fired me for not being welcoming enough toward aliens. “I don’t give a damn how you feel, Damia,” he said. “We need them. They want to go behind the bar, you let them. They want to get right up next to people and watch them put fries in their mouths, you let them. Anything they want, you let them. Understand?”
I said I understood, but I couldn’t help it. When one of them got near me, I froze up. I could hear my heart lurching, big as a cantaloupe, filling my whole torso. I was sure they could hear it too.
Sometime before the aliens found us, they discovered a way of divorcing their bodies from their minds. In cartoons and commercials here, the alien bodies are portrayed floating in pods of translucent goo, humanoid forms with wires running into them, rows of thousands upon thousands. The reality, I’m sure, is something totally different, something totally beyond any portrayal we might attempt.
Earth is visited, then, only by alien consciousnesses. They move through air, through concrete, through steel and polycarbonate with equal ease. They speak, or rather do not speak, in streams of thought directed toward our minds. Look at one straight, it’s like the sunlight that plays on the hull of a boat in a lake. Only no boat, no lake, no sunlight.
Whatever splits them from themselves is not the only technology they have. They dole progress out to us in small doses. Cheap and infinite energy sources. Cures for genetic disorders. Earth governments turn into throngs of men clustered hungrily around the alien portals. Slowly now, the aliens say. You’ll ruin yourselves.
Recently, reluctantly, they have agreed to take a small number of people each year back to their ship (or wherever they come from). The people will study alien technology so that it can be more unobtrusively incorporated on Earth. They will get to leave their bodies behind and move as pure consciousness. An alien came to our school to discuss the opportunity with us. If I hadn’t been taking notes so frantically, I might have been unnerved at how silent the classroom was, the lecture delivered straight into our heads. But I was too busy panicking that I wouldn’t get every thought down.
Halfway through the talk something hit my hand and made me start. George’s copy of the brochure on alien exchange, folded into a paper football.
George doesn’t mention his new source of income to his family. His mother and his sisters, they take what they can get, no questions. George’s father split a long time ago, part of a NASA division to study alien tech. Or that’s what he said. He also said he’d send them funds every month, enough alien credit to take a bath in. All they get is the government checks.
We’ve been friends since we were seven. At the beginning of third grade, this asshole Ross Tate followed us around for a week, singing “George and Damia, sitting in a tree—”
Punching Ross Tate was how I began my long and tumultuous relationship with in-school suspension.
Two days into my first suspension, I heard from another kid in the slammer that Ross Tate’s desk had exploded. Firecrackers. He and three other kids ended up in the ER. The principal found a note in Ross’s cubby, saying he had a plan to blow up my desk. He spelled my name wrong—D-a-m-Y-a. Tate spent a week in the hospital, and then two weeks in out-of-school suspension, crying about how he had no idea what happened. George’s extralegal career was always more calculated than mine.
The aliens have no gender. When we asked them about it, they laughed and told us it was irrelevant. But it feels so strange to call a thinking being “it.” “It” is more general than one being. We use the word all the time: It was irrelevant. It feels so strange.
Just in front of the Bean in Chicago, a patch of shimmering air hangs at eye level. If you walk straight at it, you can’t miss the glint. If you come at it from the side it nearly disappears. Mostly people give it some space, though you could touch it, I guess. Every now and then, a bulge appears in the shimmer. It swells and grows and finally detaches, a scrap of light that floats away across Millennium Park. It’s an alien, just arrived through the portal from shipside.
They could drift from shipside all the way to the surface of Earth, but it would take a long time. Or something. We’re not totally clear where they come from, or how they perceive time. At some level, we assume, they value convenience.
They have no interest in the Grand Canyon or Everest or Victoria Falls. They put their portals in places where people gather. Parks, gas stations, fish markets. When we bump into each other or high-five or blow our noses, their delight is palpable. They’ve been here ten years and it’s still unsettling. Sometimes when aliens follow George and me as we walk down the street, he will spin around. Flail his arms. Shout, “What! What are we doing?”
Those times, he might as well be talking to air.
When I was in elementary school a fun thing to do was play alien. Little mirrors or LED screens glued all over our clothes, reflecting back our surroundings and scenes from music videos. We stood stiffly in corners, flitted down the halls. Asked everyone, Did you see me? Was it like I wasn’t there?
In high school it would be grotesque to be so overt. We still try to mimic them, though no one would admit it, and maybe no one could say exactly how it’s done. Starving yourself is not the answer. The boniness of an emaciated kid is completely different from the gossamer presence of an alien. It’s more a way of holding your body. A way of sliding your feet as you walk and knowing how the light falls on your face.
I wonder if the aliens can tell when we try to mimic them. If they coo over us in private. How flattering. How cute.
George sticks to coyer, anachronistic forms of rebellion. George grows his hair long. George wears all black. George pierces the protrusions of his flesh (“You have no idea how many aliens were in that tattoo shop”) and fills the holes with metal studs. George stands in the middle of the football field and kisses boys.
One day we’re sitting outside the library after a fight, holding matching ice packs to our faces. George leans back. “I don’t get it. Why would anyone want to leave their body? It’s part of you. It is you.” He flexes his fingers as he says this, clenches his fist. As though whatever anchoredness he feels from these gestures will pass to the rest of the world. He cannot mentally separate himself from his body. I’m jealous.
“It’s the stupid aliens making people think like this,” he says. “They’re making people go crazy.”
“No.” I press my lips together. “People thought this way before. We just never had an answer until the aliens came.”
“It’s a new thing to do. That doesn’t mean it’s an answer. That doesn’t mean we’ve got the problem right.”
A few days ago, George shaved himself a mohawk. He dyed it bright green and spiked it up with a glue stick. He has gold glitter on his face. His nails are painted bright red.
“How about this problem,” I say. “I can’t debate you when you look like a Christmas tree from Satan.”
He pushes his ice pack into my face and I bite it and condensation trickl
es down my throat.
My father is an insurance agent. At the same firm, his father before him. They sat behind the same cherrywood desk and took seriously the business of keeping people safe. On one side of his desk there’s a framed picture of my mother and me at the beach. Also a drawing I made when I was four, of a horse with human hands.
But the aliens have made health care cheap and technology safe and hardly anyone gets sick anymore, anyway. My father was never laid off—the aliens grow stern at the idea of people losing their livelihoods. But there are mornings when I leave for school and he is frozen at the sink, bathrobed, staring out the window. There are afternoons when I come home and wonder if he’s moved.
He buys cookbooks. He watches the Food Network. He says he will become a gourmet chef, which was always his dream. I come home from school and make us tomato and cheese sandwiches. I say, Daddy, how about we watch something different for a while? He nudges the remote over to my side of the couch.
My mother substitute-teaches and cleans. She pretends she cannot hear him when my father asks, could she turn off the vacuum for a while? She sets her body between him and the TV, vacuums around each of his feet in their slippers as though he were an ottoman she’d rather not touch.
At night I peel off my gym shorts and T-shirt and stand in front of the bathroom mirror. My lips, too big for my face. My breasts, too small. It puzzles my mother, who has said twice in the past year, I don’t understand it, Damia, all the other women in our family have gorgeous bods. I think she’s trying to comfort me. I guess it could be worse if she said, I do understand it, Damia. You got exactly what you deserve.
My hips are too wide compared to my waist. The pores on my nose are visible from several feet away. My hands are huge, like a man’s, like a giant’s. The curve of my shoulders—no, the hulk of my shoulders—is abhorrent. It’s weirdly satisfying, this rephrasing of my body into something grotesque. So when I finally peel off the whole thing, it will be deserved.
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