The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion

by Chris McCoy

  Both options seemed terrible, so instead of picking either, I ran away from the mob sideways and pressed myself up against the lining of the Foloptopus’s stomach, which smelled like a slab of meat that had been left out in a powerful sunbeam, rancid and old and foul.

  There was a series of pops from the dam, and I watched it split. A flood of bile poured through the break, dissolving concession booths and fans as it filled the Foloptopus’s stomach cavity.

  I had bought myself a few extra seconds of life by getting away from the path of the bile, but it would soon reach me too. I attempted to climb the walls of the Foloptopus’s belly, but there were no handholds on the slick surface, and the creature was thrashing too violently for me to keep my footing.

  I saw the Interstellar Libertine rotate in the air, heading in the opposite direction from where I was standing, searching for the exit.

  Nobody on the bus had spotted me.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  The bus drifted away.

  I watched as a tidal wave of stomach acid consumed the metal lighting fixtures at the front of the stage and the merchandise stands hawking bootleg Perfectly Reasonable T-shirts and beer koozies. In the parking lot, it gobbled up the vehicles that had been unable to get off the ground before traffic snarled, and it gobbled up the vans that had crashed together in the rush to escape. The wave devoured Thighbone, who appeared to be in the middle of an argument with his ex-girlfriend, which seemed like a silly way to spend one’s final moments.

  The bile pooled near me in the dents and craters of the Foloptopus’s stomach, steadily getting closer.

  It was all deeply unfair. I had always considered high school a purgatory that I had to endure while waiting for real life to begin, but if I was to perish here, it would turn out high school had been my life. That was it. I had gotten so far, found my way into space, figured out where Sophie was being held, and made contact with her. Part of me was beginning to believe that I was going to be a hero, but if this was the way things ended, I would exit outer space the same way that I went into it—thinking about a girl.

  The bile lapped against the toes of my shoes, melting the soles. The smell reminded me of Gordo High seniors peeling through the parking lot in their cars trying to run over frosh—and occasionally me, if they were in the mood.

  Then the bile dissolved the rest of me. There’s no other way to put it. Perhaps I was in too much shock to feel any pain, but it was actually a warm feeling, like going to sleep from my toes on up.

  I died. It’s not a pleasant memory.

  —

  If the first kiss of my life had been something like a dream comprised of pure, pharmaceutical-grade joy, my second kiss made me never want to do it again. My eyes were closed when I was overcome with the smell of stale makeup and the sensation of having two alcohol-lubricated slugs pressing against my face.

  I heard Skark’s voice, which sounded very far away, like he was speaking to me through a long tin tunnel.

  “Just to make it clear,” he said. “I didn’t want to do that, but I’ve often been told my kiss is magic, so get up. You’ve cost this band almost all the money it has left, so the least you can do is awaken. And my God, put on some ChapStick once in a while. Not for my benefit, but for yours.”

  I opened my eyes, whereupon I saw Skark’s painted eyes a few centimeters from my own, his long, pointed face filling my field of vision like an out-of-focus head shot.

  “And…he’s back,” said Skark, waving a bottle of Spine Wine above his head. “I told you my lips have life-restoring powers. My father was a mortician. When I was bored when I was young, I used to kill time by bringing corpses back to life.”

  “That explains a little bit,” said Cad.

  “All art has to come from somewhere,” said Skark.

  “…How long have you been doing that?” I said groggily. I still wasn’t sure where I was or what was going on.

  “A minute or so,” said Skark.

  “A full minute?”

  “Barely a heartbeat compared to my normal Tantric indulgences,” said Skark. “Don’t act like this is something I found pleasurable. I have always preferred ladies, but when a little pro bono medical attention is required, I don’t mind stepping up to do my part. Plus, you were dead, so a little thanks would be appreciated, particularly because you’re uninsured, as we’ve discovered.”

  “I’m on my parents’ insurance,” I said.

  “Do you really think they take Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Mexico up here?” said Cad.

  I looked around and saw I was in some sort of hospital room—there were squiggly charts hanging on the wall, and a variety of ominous, pointy metal instruments on a side table next to my “bed,” which was less a bed than it was a receptacle coated in the dregs of a gooey pineapple-colored liquid. A pair of thin broadcloth scrubs covered my otherwise naked body. Skark, Cad, and Driver were standing under a lamp that was emitting a bright lime-green light, making everyone in the room look vaguely puppetlike.

  “What…happened?” I said.

  “It was Ferguson who sabotaged us,” said Skark, sounding even more unstable and emphatic than usual. His eyes were dilated, and it seemed like he was on something stronger than just Spine Wine.

  “Ferguson had nothing to do with it,” said Driver. “We know you went searching the hospital for pills during Bennett’s operation. Whatever you took is increasing your paranoia.”

  “I heard explosions before that dam came down,” said Skark. “Ferguson’s letters used to describe fantasies about him watching me perish in the stomach of a giant beast while he played his triangle, dinging it slowly as he enjoyed the sight of my body being eaten away. I swear I heard those dings today.”

  A doctor poked what I assumed was his head into the room. He was round-bodied and unclothed except for bands of fabric around his chest and waist. It looked a bit like he was wearing a woman’s bathing suit, but perhaps that was just what surgeons wore up here. His head was a set of jaws opening and snapping shut, like the snout of an alligator, but missing the rest of the skull. I couldn’t figure out where his eyes were located, and the only reason I knew that he was male was that Cad said hey, man when he entered the room.

  “How are you doing in here?” said the doctor.

  “A little rattled, but fine, I think,” I said.

  “Good boy,” said the doctor. “I kept thinking that I was getting your proportions wrong during the rebuilding process, but your genes were saying that’s actually the way you’re supposed to look. Amazing.”

  The doctor’s jaws opened and closed rapidly as he cackled to himself, and he ducked out of the room.

  “What happened to me?” I said.

  “You were dissolved inside the Dark Matter Foloptopus, and we brought you back,” said Cad.

  “What do you mean, brought me back?”

  “We were coming to get you in the bus when all of a sudden we saw you get swallowed up by the bile,” said Cad.

  “If you had stayed alive another few seconds, it would have saved us a lot of money,” said Driver.

  “We used this really high-end Tupperware we keep around for some of Driver’s more disgusting meals to scoop up a little of the stomach acid from where you disappeared, and we brought it here,” said Cad. “It was pretty foul. The doctors had to reconstruct you from your DNA.”

  “Personally, I think they did a great job,” said Driver. “The new cells really cleared up your complexion.”

  “Wait…this isn’t even my real body?”

  “Oh, like you would have been able to tell the difference if we hadn’t told you,” said Skark, rolling his eyes. “The doctors said it was actually a fairly simple reconstruction—none of your thoughts or memories were particularly profound, so they were easy to recover from what was left of your cells.”

  I spotted another chart tacked up on the wall. It appeared to be a page that had been ripped from an extraterrestrial anatomy textbook, with an illustrated figure
of a human male in the middle of the sheet, surrounded by arrows pointing to sensitive parts of the body and cryptic symbols that I couldn’t understand. The aliens had clearly learned something from all the people they had abducted, though I saw that the figure had no nipples, which concerned me. I put my hand on my chest to confirm mine were there.

  “Yeah, I made sure the doctors gave you your nipples back,” said Cad. “They weren’t going to do it because it wasn’t in their chart, but I showed them mine, and they figured it out.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Speaking of which—the doctors said there’s a chance that some other DNA got mixed up with yours,” said Driver. “There were a lot of fans getting dissolved, a lot of acid sloshing around—you were there, you understand.”

  “If you start feeling strange or develop any abnormal powers, that’s probably why,” said Skark. “Just ride it out and try not to get too angry about things—that’s normally when odd conditions flare up.”

  I pulled my body to a sitting position. It seemed great—all my parts felt new, like I’d received a head-to-toe tune-up. Dying wasn’t so bad if this was what you got to come back to.

  Skark produced another bottle of Spine Wine from somewhere, and with a series of glugs emptied its entire contents down his throat. It was the most that I’d seen him consume at one time. His movements were frantic one moment, lethargic the next.

  “Another,” said Skark. “There must be alcohol somewhere in this hospital. Somebody find me another bottle. I hate hospitals. And I hate it even more when I have to be in one because of Ferguson. Thank God I found those pills in a drawwwerrrrr….”

  He started slurring. I watched him use the edge of my tub to keep himself upright.

  “You shouldn’t have taken those pills,” said Driver. “You don’t even know what they were.”

  “I’m fiiiiine…,” said Skark. “By the waaaaay, did the rooaadieeees make it oouut?”

  Driver frowned. “They made it out, but they quit their jobs, citing dangerous working conditions. And they took our gear as payment for lost wages.”

  “So we don’t have our instruments?” said Cad.

  “That’s correct,” said Driver. “We have nothing, except Skark’s wardrobe, which none of the roadies wanted.”

  “At least there’s thaaaaat. This is all Ferguson’s faaauuult,” said Skark, and with that, he passed out and fell to the ground, mouth stained red.

  “Good Lord, he’s got a drinking problem,” I said.

  “Not even Skark’s body can handle Spine Wine combined with whatever pills he took,” said Cad. “This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. He’ll be out for hours.”

  “Hours?”

  “Most likely,” said Cad.

  “As in, many hours? Enough time to make a side trip?”

  I looked at Cad and Driver. They could see what I was thinking.

  “Any pit stops, and we’ll be cutting it close getting to Dondoozle, if we make it in time at all,” said Driver.

  “This is his prom date we’re talking about,” said Cad.

  “It’ll really piss off Skark,” said Driver.

  “Reason enough for me,” said Cad.

  “All right, everybody grab a limb—we’re going to have to get Skark out of here,” said Driver. “Bennett, you need to wear those scrubs until we find you another outfit. We couldn’t track down any underwear for you, but you’ll have to deal with it for now.”

  It was then that it occurred to me that I’d just been totally remade, and therefore all my appendages were new.

  I peeked under the scrubs to make sure everything was fully intact down there.

  “How does it look?” said Cad.

  “Honestly, maybe better than before,” I said.

  “Good,” said Cad. “When the doctor was doing the reconstruction, I told him to give you a little extra pop. Glad he listened.”

  “I am forever grateful,” I said. “Truly.”

  Driver grabbed Skark’s arm.

  “Help me lift him,” he said. “It’s time to get your girl.”

  Before we got to Jyfon, home of the Ecological Center for the Preservation of Lesser Species, Driver gave me the background on Certified Receipts, which were important in space due to widespread smuggling between planets. Because a lesser creature on one planet might be considered a pet or food on a world with larger, more aggressive organisms, the Certified Receipt was the only way to prove you weren’t somebody else’s property.

  Apparently in the rest of the universe all creatures were issued a Certified Receipt when they were born, and every creature was supposed to carry it around for his or her or its entire life, or until he or she or it gave it to somebody else. Because of the disparity of economic conditions in different galaxies, it was common for aliens to rent themselves out as indentured servants on other worlds, which meant handing over their Certified Receipts. If somebody had your Certified Receipt, they had you.

  When I pointed out that nobody issues Certified Receipts on Earth, Driver explained that backwater planets like Earth weren’t part of the standardized Certified Receipt program because they had no affiliation with any larger governing body, so everybody tended to look the other way. However, not adhering to the Certified Receipt system didn’t exempt humans from having to show proof of self-ownership. In most situations, showing a legal birth certificate would suffice—I guess a birth certificate is just a receipt, in a way—though it might take some time to check with the proper authorities back on Earth and verify that such a document was authentic.

  “Are you telling me I’m supposed to be carrying around my birth certificate to prove that I own myself?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” said Driver. “All of us have to.”

  “Do you have yours, Cad?”

  “Wouldn’t be caught dead without it,” said Cad. “Shore Memorial Hospital in Somers Point, New Jersey. We picked it up before I came on tour. Have to be careful—you know how much some aliens would pay for a handsome human blessed with the gift of music?”

  “What about you, Driver?”

  Driver showed me his Certified Receipt—it was a laminated rectangle of green paper, resembling a bookmark, with a bunch of words and numbers I couldn’t read.

  “It’s a pain to carry around, but not as much of a pain as trucking across the galaxy to the Office of Documentation and Proof of Ownership if you lose it.”

  “The system seems broken,” I said.

  “What system doesn’t?”

  The Interstellar Libertine vibrated and popped out of its latest space rift, and Driver took his foot off the accelerator to make sure we didn’t overshoot our destination. As we drifted toward Jyfon, we began seeing what appeared to be three-dimensional billboards promoting the Ecological Center for the Preservation of Lesser Species.

  The boards—if I can call them that, because they weren’t made of any solid material—were free-floating, high-resolution, mile-long pixelated images that changed form every few seconds, their atoms artfully arranging themselves into mirages of odd creatures sitting in open fields or underground caves. All of the animals had looks on their faces like they were being forced to sit still and smile for the camera. I even thought I saw the tip of a weapon at the edge of one photo, but it might have just been somebody’s finger on the camera lens.

  An image of a greasy ball of nervous lemon-lime fur melted into a shot of a silver-skinned brick of an alien wearing a head-dress made of strawberry-colored animal skins. The picture liquefied again, and I knew the subject of the next shot even before all the particles snapped into place.

  It was an image of Sophie, wide-eyed and looking over her shoulder as she ran past the front door of an Olive Garden.

  Apparently the Jyfos hadn’t been able to coerce her into the same kind of fake-casual photo as easily as they had the other residents of the Ecological Center.

  “Looks like Sophie’s become a tourist attraction in her short time
here,” said Cad. “Which won’t make it any easier to get her out.”

  “Thanks for making that point,” I said.

  “I’m just saying, it would be hard to roll into the San Diego Zoo and ask them to hand over a penguin,” said Cad.

  “Maybe the rules are different for research centers,” I said.

  “It would be just as difficult to show up at Princeton and ask for one of their study monkeys,” said Cad.

  “Is that some kind of passive-aggressive Princeton comment?” I said.

  Cad and Driver stared at me.

  “What are you talking about?” said Driver.

  “I got wait-listed at Princeton,” I said. “I thought I already told you guys about that.”

  Cad and Driver shook their heads.

  “As long as you get into other places, being on the wait list isn’t such a big deal,” said Cad.

  I didn’t say anything. Cad and Driver looked at me.

  “You didn’t get in anywhere else?” said Driver.

  “I didn’t apply.”

  “You didn’t apply anywhere else?” said Driver, incredulous.

  Cad and Driver were stunned. As far as I knew, neither of them had even been to college, and they couldn’t believe I had only applied to one place. I didn’t even know how Driver knew about Princeton. Maybe Cad had mentioned it to him before because of the New Jersey connection. I felt humiliated.

  Our final descent toward Jyfon was what I imagine approaching Vegas would be like—rows of lights hanging in the sky guiding the way, more boards featuring strange creatures interspersed with the occasional unflattering candid shot of Sophie, and finally the distant panorama of a city rising up out of the blackness of absolutely nothing. It was easy to discern the location of the Ecological Center—80 percent of the planet was gray skyscrapers and grids of electricity, in the middle of which was an egg-shaped wilderness of magenta and malachite fields. At the bottom of the reservation was a building shaped like an X.