Komodo

by Jeff VanderMeer

I couldn’t tell you.

  All I can tell you is that floating in the after-shock of being devoured is very much like being rescued from an airplane that’s about to explode, while everyone else burns to death. You feel it outside yourself as much as inside, and you wonder if it’s worth it.

  That’s how it happened, by the way. It’s not just a metaphor.

  My husband and I were on a plane from one city to another—let’s say Seattle to New York City—and sitting to our left, looking out the oval window, was a large, athletic man with shoulders so broad I felt cramped. He could have been carved from marble. He had a continual smile because his lips curled up that way, which when he nodded and said his name, “Gabriel,” became both beneficent and the kind of sinister that some women think they like. He smelled strangely of cardamom and lime. I didn’t know he was going to change everything. I thought I was going to live out my life in the usual, the ordinary ways.

  “Gabriel” was a joke, I would find out later. I’ve never learned his real name, if he has one. The angels don’t communicate in quite the same way as we do, child. He told me later he asked me “When the time comes, do you want to be saved?” and that I said yes. Was that a joke too? I don’t remember that.

  My husband didn’t like him, I could tell, because he leaned in to whisper in my ear, “Do you want to trade seats with me? You don’t have to sit next to him.” That was William being protective. That was William being useful, and I didn’t mind.

  No, I didn’t want to trade seats, even though I was scrunched in the middle. Maybe it was something about Gabriel’s eyes; perhaps he had already coerced me in some way. Then the plane filled with smoke and dropped with a lurch that sent anyone not buckled in flying down the aisle. I don’t even remember the screams.

  All I remember is that William’s hand was in mine on the right, and that in that moment Gabriel locked his hand around mine on the left, and as the roiling wave of fire that was the explosion rushed to us from the cockpit, Gabriel’s grip became so strong that he ripped me up out of my seat as he stood, and I lost William’s hand, and couldn’t find it again in the smoke, and I was crying out his name but I couldn’t see him, and then there was a sense of limitless space and of rushing air . . . and I looked down to see the airplane below us, fragmenting in glistening orange lines of torque, blackness pouring out of it as if it had been filled with something evil, a torn off wing quivering as it twirled ghastly small and inconsequential down and through the cloud cover. Soon there was only the smoke and a spray of particles that hovered in a glittering cloud.

  I realized that Gabriel had wings, and that they beat strongly, and that at that altitude I should have been dead. That William was dead. Or still dying.

  “Is this Heaven?” I asked Gabriel.

  Staring down at me, those features registering the question with a kind of bemusement, Gabriel opened his mouth wide and streams of light issued forth and a sound came like a thousand windows breaking. Gabriel was laughing.

  No, I was not in Heaven. No, Gabriel was not an angel as I thought of angels. I was a recruit. I was just another human they needed to do something. And William was gone, and I had crossed over in an instant into another way of thinking about the world.

  The feeling of floating after being devoured by a bear is almost exactly the same as the feeling of floating when plucked from an exploding airliner by an angel. Let life spare you such resonances, child. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But these are the kinds of things that you think about in that void between death and reconstitution. Except, if you are also suffering a wound caused by komodo, infected with their poisonous saliva, you also become aware of a quick-silver, huge, darting presence somewhere in there with you. It’s unlikely that a komodo could hurt you as you’re traveling, but they definitely feel the velocity of your passage.

  Even though I knew that this sensation could not harm me, I tried to will myself closer to my objective, prayed for the formless, endless dark to drop away. A stupid, too-human thing to do, but that was kind of the point.

  I woke, reconstituted, in an empty hotel suite in Mexico City just one floor up and one hour away from the start of the most important party in the history of . . . everything, really. To me, at least.

  The light coming through the windows had a dull yellow quality to it and rising up in the distance the pollution seemed to gather not just in the sky but at the top edge of the window itself, as if trying to get in. I could see the distant bulbous prows of the purifying dirigibles, too, but there was too much for them to eat and they were getting lost in the smog that was food.

  The hum of the air conditioner seemed a prosaic thing to hear after listening to the snap of my own bones, the rip of my own flesh.

  A stuffed bear stood in the corner, fur mangy, eyes glassy. Someone’s idea of a joke, to place it at this end point. An inexperienced traveler might even have thought it creepy, but you find so many objects put there by your predecessors, a way of saying “I was here once, I made it through.”

  I checked my left leg. That glancing chomp from the komodo hadn’t gone anywhere. The outline covered most of the calf in fiery green splendor and the poison still sent out its signal. Had I evaporated into merely a soul, it would still have been there, as if the jaws were still clamped onto me.

  It always takes a while to get used to coming back into your body, but I only had the hour, so I walked into the bathroom and shoved the back of my head under the cold water tap.

  I don’t know if it’s the devouring or the floating in the void, or the sense that you’ve come back as a doppelganger that’s the most unsettling. But first it’s the sudden, incomprehensible weight of you, sagging into the bed, and then and only then the sense of that weight being whole rather than the rummaging, shattering violation of having been torn apart, of that weight being so strangely re-distributed in so short a period of time . . .

  Because being eaten alive isn’t really what you might expect. The horror of the idea of it can be mitigated by the point of it: to effect such dramatic travel, across such a span. No, the real terror occurs because you are then so utterly known , down to the last scrap, with nowhere to hide. No part of you can be held back. That feeling has been known to drive more than one traveler insane.

  What kind of travel is worth that price?

  The kind no one but angels and komodos can do quickly: travel through both time and space.

  You’ve been patient, child, or maybe it’s because I keep giving you candy. I would have been proud to think of you as my daughter, under other circumstances. So patient. So lovely. But in any child of mine, I’d remember William, I just wouldn’t be able to help it . . . and that’s beyond me now anyway. The sawdust is still falling out of this stuffed doll, and there’s not much left.

  Perhaps we’re deep enough into my story that I should reveal how I came to possess that giant green alien head in the first place.

  It’s not a fairy tale, or even a pleasant tale. The head wasn’t actually made of plastic. In fact, I had killed the previous owner, to whom it had indeed served as a head of sorts. I had then performed a hurried scooping-out of the former contents so that I might use it to walk unobserved through the city’s streets and courtyards. That might seem blood-curdling, I know, except it wasn’t quite that bad. This particular type of creature’s head is insensate, with its brain stored in the equivalent of its stomach, so it can fully digest its thoughts. The relationship between head and nervous system is looser than that between, say, the shell and body of a horseshoe crab, but not as loose as the relationship between a hermit crab and its shell.

  I want to say I had successfully removed the head without death setting in, and then the shock took over and I couldn’t save him—that it was sort of accidental, like a killing that occurs in the middle of some other crime. But the fact is, I can’t tell you that at all. I can’t make any promises that you’ll see me in a good light by the end.

  This particular “person” had been performing
several experiments in a homemade lab in his basement, including one that fused komodo and angel blood. He’d been working for the angels without knowing it. The blood had been presented to him as something else entirely, something that would fit his understanding of science and the universe. The angels always had several of these side projects set up, usually running the logistics and admin through proxies like me so their imprint wouldn’t be as obvious. And, of course, the blood wasn’t blood in the sense we think of that rich red ichor.

  “He” was “retired”—which in this case meant both a creature multi-gendered and six hundred years old, and cranky as hell. The substances had been sold to him by me (in disguise) some years before, and I’d kept an eye on him for the angels ever since, throughout the slow progress of his research. I had always known that someday, depending on his findings, I might have to betray him. As it turned out, I was just going to have to destroy all of his work, murder him, and burn down his house as I left. But that didn’t mean I wanted to kill him, even though killing comes more easily to me than it did before Gabriel plucked me from the dying plane. Gabriel’s present to me.

  It also strikes me now, dear child, that I may have been vague about where all of what I’ve been describing takes place. But the answer to that is easy: It takes place everywhere . The green head and its owner lived on a distant planet in a totally different part of the galaxy, in an area that used to be where the not-angels devoted most of their time and resources. The “creature” I killed—an extra-terrestrial, just as you would be to him—was a scientist known across four planetary systems. In that time. In that reality. And I really needed his head so I could make it to Seether, so I took it. The greater good demanded his head, and sometimes, with so much at stake, I’ve had to make that assessment in ways that might seem cruel. But I’m paying for it, too, as should be clear.

  Child, you should turn away if you are able. You should leave me here.

  Gabriel didn’t bother to rescue my husband from the exploding airplane even though he could have. It just didn’t occur to him. But it occurred to me. As we rose higher and higher, I screamed those words to Gabriel, even though I thought I must be dying, and hallucinating as I died, somehow still attached to my seat, and flung up out of the plane, soon to fall.

  Of course, as I would find out, my husband still existed across other realities, especially the ones where he didn’t get on the plane with me or the plane didn’t explode. In plenty of other realities, I was doused in flames—plummeted blackened and burning, throat closed by smoke and lack of oxygen, face cracking.

  Gabriel showed me that, too, toward the beginning, when I was resistant to my recruitment. There’s only one reality in which I am plucked off a plane by Gabriel, because angels exist outside of the algorithms of possibility, and those of us they recruit. The rest of you are out of luck or lucky beyond belief.

  We hovered across realities, watching me die over and over again until I became inured to my own death. Until I said, take me back. Take me back and I’ll help you. And even then I couldn’t remember more. I couldn’t remember if Gabriel asked me if I wanted to be saved, and what I said back.

  William, if you ever see this, the Williams that remain, if you ever hear this . . . I did not abandon you. I was not allowed to go back. And how could I usurp the place of those other me’s by your side? What right did I have? None.

  Soon, I grew accustomed to the hotel room and I felt better, even gave the molding stuffed bear a friendly pat. There was not much to do before the party; the clothes I’d arranged for had arrived by porter just a few minutes before. I stood by the window looking out across Mexico City. Seether had deposited me just as I had intended: right time, right place. Your reality, child: a 2032 desperately trying to adapt to and stop global warming by transitioning to airships and green technology while outlawing most internal combustion engines. The Brazilian rainforest was a postage stamp on the map. The Gulf Stream had begun to shudder to a stop, clogged by plastics. Eventually, this version of Earth would right itself, but by that time the human population would be down to about two million world-wide. That was still better than the probability for about eighty percent of all Earths.

  My reality had been in the other twenty percent, but for my particular Earth surviving climate change had been a booby prize: we had lasted until approximately 3052, when a comet smashed into the side of the planet. Unfortunately, we still hadn’t made it to the stars by then, but other Earths had, so did it really matter? (Yes, child, it mattered.)

  The angels didn’t try to stop such die-offs, and the few times they did reveal themselves rather than working behind the scenes, it almost always resulted in confusion or misunderstanding. Once, they’d even killed a rogue angel who had set herself up as a god-like figure in an Earth reality. Angels were hard to kill, but you could do it. At least, other angels could.

  Above me, in suite 640, the drinks and appetizers had been set out and the waiters were being given their instructions, and perhaps a guest or two had showed up early. Thirty minutes until show time. The party was a political fund-raiser for a Mexican politician. Nothing all that important to the world, just money changing hands to help elect someone to a government seat. Nothing you’d cross time and space for, really.

  Except I had.

  I had turned my skin green to match my head while on the other world. But now, after having stared into the mirror long enough to visualize the change, my skin was light brown, and my hair black, my eyes a beguiling green. Female. About mid-twenties. I’d be wearing a spring-time skirt with a flower pattern, and silver bracelets. I’d have on a lapis lazuli necklace. No earrings—I had no patience for them.

  Did I look pretty? Not as pretty as you, child, but, yes, I did look pretty. And I had no patience for that, either. The wound in my calf had begun to throb violently, sending pain-waves through my body that I imagined looked like the old-fashioned depictions of sonar or radar on the television when I was growing up.

  I wonder what you’re thinking, there behind the camera. I know this is recorded surveillance, that you aren’t there now , but you will be there later . I can imagine you in some office somewhere, wondering whether to hit delete or pass it on to higher-ups. I can imagine you thinking that you’re listening to the ravings of a crazy person. I wouldn’t blame you. In some ways, I am a crazy person. When you’re taken off an exploding aircraft by an angel that is not an angel, you could be forgiven if you contracted derangement.

  You might see the world just a little strangely if you had been bitten by a transdimensional komodo and then been devoured by a dead bear. It’s a cruel universe out there. If I could give you any advice, child, it would be: don’t go out there. Just don’t.

  But what choice did I have, knowing what I knew, and with so little time left because I was careless, because I was stupid, because I let my guard down . . . and yet it must have worked, right, at least for a little while, because here I am, in this backwater tavern, talking to you (and them) in a language you don’t know that well, trying to get it all out. Every last little horrible bit.

  After my initial resistance, life with Gabriel and the angel was fun because I forced it to be fun. It was either that or wallow in the past. It was either that or let Gabriel continue his reconditioning efforts, which despite his attempts to be gentle felt like someone shoving their thumbs into my brain. The surveillance across alt-Earths, the missions (give someone an envelope, a suggestion, a nudge) we were never supposed to question, the time off gazing across landscapes beyond imagination . . . I loved it on some level, even as a thorn of guilt had also lodged itself within me. I thought the angels, despite their alien quality, their distance from those of us who worked for them, somehow worked for the greater good. This was mostly my cultural assumptions about angels coming into play, their greatest propaganda tool. They need to let your impression of them work to control you.

  Why? There aren’t as many of them as you might think. Millennia ago they had warred agai
nst one another, set entire solar systems ablaze with the fury of their rage . . . and after that there had been thousands of them, not hundreds of thousands or millions. The details of their reproduction were beyond me, but when a new member of their species came into being, it would float inert and cold in the vacuum of space for thousands of years until some miraculous combination of conditions brought it to life amongst its brethren. It was for this reason, I would discover, that they turned to special ops, to recruits, grew craftier and colder and more elusive. Lost the thread, didn’t realize. Went on anyway. Didn’t matter. Matter.

  Still, for a time, I thought it all meant something. I trusted them. The surveillance was even presented as something that was for the greater good: something far up the time-stream that would affect all of the alt-Earths. Then, after training, that reason fell away and others replaced them, only for those to fall away again.

  In some ways, too, those early days felt unreal. Standing on the lawn atop the living mountain that they used as a base, on a planet remote from Earth. Seeing in their laboratories and intel stations just how many alt-Earths there were, just how much life had duplicated itself across realities. The boy who died in poverty somewhere I had never been rose again on another monitor like some odd version of reverse time-lapse photography. The sheer volume of life. The sheer alternalities of it all.

  There were other distractions. Suddenly, with what the angels embedded in my DNA, I could change race and gender at will—in a matter of minutes if I concentrated. Not only was the universe mutable and endless, so too was my body. My body was just an avatar, even if there was only one of it. Being thrust back into the heat and weight of the world again, having created a different body for myself, I became an actor with an infinite number of masks. I enjoyed being a man in some instances, received pleasure from playing that role. I could make myself as invisible or visible as I liked, depending on the mission and the situation.