Guardian Angels and Other Monsters

by Daniel H. Wilson

  I move closer to her sleeping body, press myself against her.

  * * *

  —

  This morning—morning, is there such a thing anymore—I walk to the front door of the dormitory and I look out and I see that the sky is missing. A postbox is on its side in the street, half-buried in the pavement. The red metal skin of it is juddering on and off. Between the blinks I can see mail inside.

  Before I go back upstairs, I put my hand on the glass of the door and it doesn’t feel cool. It doesn’t feel warm, either. It doesn’t feel like anything.

  Sarah is curled on her bed. Shaking. She is shaking and moaning.

  I hold her, feel her hair slithering over my arms.

  The world outside is getting smaller.

  Sarah shakes. The forgetting grows.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t remember waking up. I am floating in gray. My body is falling through the walls and it’s so familiar.

  * * *

  —

  I am holding Sarah in my arms and I can feel the cool sand of the beach under my hip. I am stroking her sea-smelling hair and murmuring into the soft dampness. “It will be okay,” I’m saying. “You’re the dreamer, Sarah.”

  “We can find each other in your dreams,” I say to her.

  * * *

  —

  And then the smell of her hair is gone, along with the feel of the sand. I open my eyes to look down at my body and I am tumbling, spinning in space because I have no eyes. There is no body. All of it has finally gone away.

  Things unseen are not rendered.

  And yet I am still here.

  I am thinking. My thoughts are somewhere. Churning in the gray.

  Sarah slipped through my fingers.

  Was she my dream, then?

  Am I the dreamer?

  * * *

  —

  Even now, there is this one constant thing.

  A pressure where my hand should be.

  Fingers, laced into mine. Squeezing.

  I can remember if I try very hard.

  * * *

  —

  “Final stage.” I hear the whisper.

  * * *

  —

  Something beats at my eyes. A flutter of reality. A line of hard light appears and shatters my vision into a briar’s patch of eyelashes.

  I am opening my eyes.

  * * *

  —

  And I find myself lying in a flower-smelling bed under a clean white ceiling that is chopped into neat squares. There is a gray video screen hanging on the wall.

  “Final stage,” says that unfamiliar voice. “Neural calibration and transmission complete.”

  * * *

  —

  Sarah?

  Eyes swiveling down, I see that my right hand is a leathery claw, laced with blue-black veins, knuckles twisted and humped.

  A small moan comes from my dry, cracked throat.

  I am old. I am ancient. I am twenty how am I twenty?

  And my Sarah.

  She is lying next to me on the bed—it’s a hospital bed this isn’t right where is our dorm? Her lips are peeled back into a sweet worried smile and I can see a hint of that beauty I remember in her youthful angular face—a dimple still lodged stubbornly in her sagging cheek.

  We are…old. Melted like wax.

  I was saving my wax. I blew out my candle. I was twenty.

  Years have draped themselves over us. Did we fall asleep?

  “I lost you,” I say.

  “No,” she whispers. “We’re together now. Forever.”

  * * *

  —

  The screen on the wall flickers, shows me something painful.

  Sarah and I are standing together on the screen.

  Versions of us. In the computer.

  We are holding hands and smiling.

  It makes me cry to see us so young.

  * * *

  —

  “Neural upload complete,” says the voice in the gray. “Both computational entities are viable. It’s a success, people.”

  * * *

  —

  I think the world is running away between my blinks. The screen and the ceiling and the walls are splitting off and falling into the great forgetting.

  Only she is vibrant.

  “Hosts are losing mental cohesion,” says a gray whisper.

  Sarah.

  She is lying next to me on her back with tears tracing down her temple. Our fingers have found their old familiar places. Her face is so bright that it hurts my eyes. Her lips are red again. Her hair is a sun-kissed brown.

  We are both trying so hard to hold on.

  “Sarah?” I ask.

  “I’m not scared anymore,” she says and her teeth are so white. “It will be okay. We’ll find each other in our dreams.”

  Her hand in mine. It’s all that matters.

  In all of this forgetting, there is this one constant thing.

  Her name is Sarah. I will always remember that.

  GARDEN OF LIFE

  The garden of life is complex, way beyond the ken of humankind. Textbooks say science has only stumbled upon around 10 percent of all existing species of plants and animals. There could be from 10 to 100 million more. Critters, big and small (mostly small), are living and reproducing and dying as they have for eternity…without a human being ever so much as laying eyes on them.

  It’s a wide old world out there for a taxonomist.

  There are more living things hidden in the wilds than we’ll ever know. Life likes to break free and spread. And what you can find will surprise you.

  I’m on what I call one of my long jaunts. A jaunt is supposed to be short by definition, but I enjoy the paradox. In fact, I enjoy it just about every weekend and holiday. Come Saturday morning, I pull on my hiking boots, tuck my pant legs into them, and lace them up tight. Out here in the mountains, there’s a particular area that’s all mine to explore. Miles of government land surrounding some kind of research center. Scrubby deer trails meandering through scalp-prickling heat. Tick-infested pine trees and plenty of poison ivy. But every now and then, you’ll find a cool hollow. Caves gouged out of sweating granite. Plenty of microclimates are hiding there in the rough country, off the horse trails and way aways from where idiot four-wheelers scream and churn mud.

  Worse it is out here, the better I like it.

  Some people get a thrill jumping from a plane. Out on the lake, kids’ll get those wakeboards going faster than I’m comfortable driving my Chevy half-ton on the highway. That’s not for me. I get my jollies in the wild, hunting for brand-new insect species. I send my specimens to an old buddy at the university’s entomology department, then play the waiting game. Sometimes, I hit pay dirt…and then comes the best part: I get to name them.

  Gryllus oklahomas was my last find. A field cricket under a piece of rotten bark. Named that little dude in honor of my state and kept on looking for more.

  I find the fist-sized knot in the base of a dead pine tree. Sort of a cubbyhole in the shape of a stop sign. The little hexagon has too many straight lines to be from nature, so I stoop down on creaking knees and take a look.

  The smell of burning wood wafts from the hole. Peering into the thing, I see that it holds what looks like a plastic cube with an ember in it. And around the lip of the hexagonal hole, I see a brownish leg that is moving in precise jerks. It has a claw tip and it’s busy scratching…building something. Staring at it for a second, I realize it’s making another little arm, a perfect copy of itself.

  “What in the…,” I ask the empty woods.

  When I was a kid, I used to find fairy nests near the creek that ran behind my parents’ place. Little shacks made of sticks and moss and l
eaves, placed around a shade tree or in a sun-dappled clearing. In those days, kids roamed free, and I spent a whole summer hunting those fairy nests with a kind of magic in my heart. One night at dinner, I finally told my mama about what I’d found. I will always remember the little smile she gave me. All of a sudden I knew exactly where those fairy houses came from.

  I knew, but I never stopped searching.

  Something tickles my hand and I give a yelp. In the dirt, I see a handful of marbles. Only they’re moving on lots of legs, like pill bugs, or roly-polies, as we once called them. The insects are trundling and falling over a piece of bark, peeling splinters from the wood. The size of thimbles, each one has a raspy spot on its belly. They drag themselves over the wood and shred little pieces off. I watch one pick up a splinter with tiny mandibles and climb right into the hexagonal hole.

  He’s tending the fire in there. Keeping energy going to his factory.

  This is a whole new deal. I climb onto my knees and rifle through my field bag. Pick up one of the little crawlers with tweezers and drop it into a glass specimen jar. I screw the lid on tight and wonder if it really needs airholes. Can’t say whether this little dude breathes or not. For the life of me, it looks like the bug is made of some kind of metal.

  Government land, you know? Hard to say what the scientists are doing in those fenced-off buildings. Only thing I know is that life likes to break free.

  Life likes to spread.

  Getting to my feet, I shade my eyes and look deeper into the woods. Now, I notice a lot of the trees are dead. More than usual. And it may just be my old eyes, but I feel like there’s a haze over everything. A thin smear of smoke from more of those miniature power plants…more smoldering factories out there in the sunbaked woods.

  I stand still, and the movement of the crawlers seeps into view. Thousands of them, the color of dirt and leaves, dragging themselves like a living carpet over the ground. The hair goes up on the backs of my arms. Somewhere out there, far off, I hear a tree splinter and crack. A shadow sweeps and I hear a hollow thump.

  The captured crawler clinks against its jar and I flinch a little bit. Time to get back to the truck. I shrug my pack on tighter and turn around. And even though I start out walking at a reasonable pace…before long I’m running.

  In the truck, I don’t take it easy on the accelerator. I’m on a dirt road for a few miles, meandering alongside razor-wire fences. My tires chew the rocks loudly, and I can’t see anything but my dust trail in the rearview, which is fine with me. When I finally stop at the sign to get onto paved road, it gets quiet except for my ragged breathing. I’m gripping the steering wheel, knuckles like mountain ridges.

  Then I hear the scratching sound from next to me.

  Fingers shaking, I swipe all the trash off the passenger seat. A curled yellow newspaper, a pair of work gloves, and an Auto Trader magazine waterfall onto the floorboard. Underneath, I find more of my friends-with-no-names. Guess I must have left my window open while I was exploring the woods. The crawlers are busy making themselves right at home, pulling strips of fabric out of the seat back.

  They’re carving out a neat hexagon shape.

  I take a deep breath and put my foot on the gas. A shaky smile has got onto my face. The garden of life, see…she’s way beyond the ken of humankind. The textbooks say we’ve barely scratched the surface. At the first exit, I head off toward the university. I’m pretty sure these bugs are made of metal, and I’m pretty sure they were built and not born. But if nature doesn’t care, then neither do I.

  I’m already thinking of names.

  ALL KINDS OF PROOF

  Joe is a misanthrope and a drunk.

  I never did take to cigarettes, you know. Or any of the ones after them. Vaping. E-cigs. Charged burners. There’s always an electronic version of everything these days. A sparkling paint job plastered over the same old shit. The suits have gotta move merchandise somehow, I guess. But I never took to any of it.

  What happens with me is whenever somebody tries to convince me of something, my gut reaction is a big old “fuck you, buddy.”

  Head down and I’m moving on, you understand. Keep the change.

  If there’s some kind of an organization to whatever-it-is, then just forget about it. And that goes for everything. Religion. Sports. A job.

  Hell, especially the job side of things.

  You learn a little bit about yourself after five or six decades. And I know I’m mostly built to be solitary, in that I can handle about one other human being. Two at most and then only when I was young. And despite every goddamn Hollywood movie, I don’t think a person can help the way they’re built. You can’t change what’s in your heart or grow a pair of balls all of a sudden. For chrissake, just be honest with yourself and get on with living your life. Maybe try and do the best you can for the ones you do care about.

  I tend to think about this kind of garbage while I’m sitting outside the Goose, not smoking cigarettes, staring down my first whiskey and beer back of the day. Something to get my eyes open in the early afternoon, is all.

  And if you’re judging me, you should see the other regulars.

  My spot is on the front sidewalk of the Goose Hill Bar & Grill, alone at a rickety table next to a dented dog bowl that the bartender, Mallory, sometimes remembers to fill with water. I’m about a foot from the curb and usually on the verge of getting my neck snapped by a side-view mirror. Through an open window, I can see the barflies who sit inside. At the moment Sherry, the back of her neck tattooed with spiderwebs, is lighting up the place with her cackle. Adrian, an aging busker in a purple beret, is hee-hawing right along with her. She really is the queen of the bar, holding court to that fawning group of well-lubricated drunks.

  Mallory pours them strong, God bless her, and that’s why we’re all here.

  I can smell the stale cigarette smoke wafting around the corner of the building. The bums who sit over there in the smoking section—I can’t see them, can only hear their occasional shouting matches—are coughing down butts plucked from the sidewalk after a long day scrounging and begging. They’re literally bums over there, you know? It’s not just a turn of phrase or petty name-calling on my part.

  Good for the bums, though. Any one of us could end up around that corner, quicker than we might suspect. At least they’re enjoying themselves.

  Up the other way are a bunch of metal pigs.

  They’ve got a name that I forget. But the three sculptures are fat and silver and bolted to the sidewalk, just the right size for kids to climb around on until they fall off and get hurt. Which they nearly always do. The pigs are wearing chains around their necks with their names on them. And at their feet is a homemade lockbox, welded together out of solid steel with a rolling tube for dropping money inside. A shitty piece of half-laminated, half-soaked paper is taped to it: “Donations.”

  It seems like such an obvious scam I can’t believe how many people jam coins and bills inside the thing, you know?

  Every few days, the dude we call Hemingway comes shuffling out of the Goose with a few leaves of curled-up newspaper in his gnarled fingers. He wears a navy blue flat cap and a beard as white as sea spray. He must be in his late seventies, but the old reprobate still has twinkling blue eyes and the swagger of a twenty-year-old.

  Hemingway.

  It takes him a few minutes, but he’ll toss down his papers, crouch to unlock the box, and then dump and scrape the money out onto the newspaper. He rolls it up, takes it inside, and my guess is he gives it straight to Mallory to pay his tab. It happens quiet and on a regular schedule and nobody says a thing about it.

  Those shining pigs are dumb and mute and they’re a lifeline for the old bastard.

  I see it all from my perch. The folks here mostly give me space to myself and that’s fine. I’m not clubby. In case you hadn’t guessed, my preferen
ce is to observe.

  So, yeah, that means I enjoy watching the angular girls in clunky glasses that come clip-clopping past. The kind with soft eyes and sharp hips—who send a snap of endorphins thrashing through a man’s brain at the speed of a grunt.

  But that’s not what I mean by observe.

  What I’m trying to talk about is all those things we see and yet we don’t see. Like the kid wearing a sagging backpack and his straightlaced customer, walking side by side, making their exchange in a subtle clasp of hands; or the elderly guy reaching into an open car window and snatching a jacket off the seat; or maybe it’s something more altruistic, like a shopkeep dropping a pair of old boots next to some sorry lump in a sleeping bag.

  It’s those little times. Those fleeting moments when people don’t expect a reward or a punishment. I enjoy bearing witness to them.

  Because things are happening, you know? And what I really mean to say by that is things are going down. And, more clearly, shit is going down, all around us, all the time, on any street.

  Even on these wet Portland streets.

  So that’s my thing. I sit in the flow for a couple days or months, years or decades. Watch the shadows creep over the pavement and the shoes traipse back and forth. And after a while, I’m grown into a place like a tree through a chain-link fence.

  The world is pretty goddamn interesting, if you look at it long enough. Have a little patience and imagination. You wait for something to happen, and if it doesn’t, why then you wait some more.

  My problem with it is—a guy can only go it alone for so long. I don’t need much, but I’m sure as hell no island. I get lonely, like anybody. And in life I think most of us need a confidant. Nothing magical, just somebody to swap conversation and arguments and complaints with, pulling the words out of each other like snake-poisoned blood.