Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature

by Jacob Weisman

  Kefirovsky checks the mixture. “Five minutes more should it. The only thing I’m not sure of is the forty years. I don’t know if the time out has to be that long or if it can be shortened. Do you think you could eat this for forty years?”

  “Exclusively?”

  “Exclusively.”

  “I don’t think so, Professor, at least I wouldn’t want to try.”

  “I am seventy-seven years old. In order for me to try it forty years I would have to live to be one hundred and sixteen. This is possible, but unlikely. There will perhaps be no other scientist to follow in my footsteps. Science will produce more Corfam and SST engines. The keys to natural history lay shrouded for thousands of years, now we refuse to see the one true gift of the gods. Easy, abundant, tasty, and wrapped in a time out. If the clergymen would wake up, they would see it. What is the promised land? Milk and honey and time. What is yogurt? Milk and bacteria and time. Why did the people who lived on manna for forty years want a land of milk and honey? Why not a land of pomegranates? Why not a land of barley and sesame seed and olive oil? Why not wine and cheese? Where else do you read about milk and honey? Nowhere. I’ve looked. And what sort of honey would you find in a semiarid climate where the annual rainfall could hardly support a large bee population. If Hans Fricht was alive, he would be an immense help now. He knew bees from A to Z. He would have seen immediately. He used to say, ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I,’ and Eidler and Van Strung would laugh at him saying that while he hit the croquet ball and jumped up and down when he had a clean blocking shot. He knew the bee signal language before anybody wrote about it. Hans could have understood birds too if he would have tried. We all worshiped that man. Einstein brought him page after page of dull formulas by the thousands until one day Hans said to him, ‘This is it, you glücklichkraut. You’ve finally got something worthwhile here.’ And that’s the only time he ever praised Einstein. But it’s once more than he praised me. He used to say to me, ‘Vasi, lay off, they’re not ready for you. Try a hobby.’ When I left optometry college, he thought I should be a pharmacist. But I was lucky, I got a job at the Institute. Hans himself was unemployed for twenty-two years. They made him leave the optometry faculty when they found out he was not an optometrist. After that he was a sponge, a hanger-on, a misfit. Imagine such a misfit. He wouldn’t take a penny from anyone. He was an expert sewer and knitter. One of the great minds of the twentieth century making his own suits and sweaters. He raised his own vegetables. The man lived on a few hundred dollars a year. His friends made sure he had plenty to eat and that was our mistake. We tried to be generous and our butterball turkeys, our triscuits, our dark beer, and our wurst, all this killed him.”

  Kefirovsky is almost breathless. He leans on his pointer and his body shakes with sobs.

  “Vasi loved Hans Fricht,” Emily says. “You would have too. There was a scientist and a human being. Godfather to all the boys.”

  “It’s a shame that he had such a hard life,” the reporter says. “I’ve actually never heard of him.”

  “That is science,” says Kefirovsky.

  “If Hans was alive,” Emily adds, “he wouldn’t let you starve yourself like this. That’s why you’re so weak that you can hardly talk for a few minutes. You’re the thinker, let someone else starve to prove you’re right. Thousands of college students are looking for jobs like this. They swallow goldfish and squeeze into telephone booths and now they kiss for two weeks at a time. These people could prove you’re right and you could live to see it. Ask the reporter.”

  “She has a point, Professor. Lots of students do paid experiments. But I don’t want to get into the midst of a family squabble about this.”

  “Look at him,” Emily screams, “look at him. How can you say you don’t want to mix in? You’ve listened to a brilliant scientist talk, don’t you want to save his life?”

  Kefirovsky remains calm. He smiles at the reporter and raising his pointer directs the rubber tip at his wife. “She means well, but in spite of my many explanations Emily does not see that it is the yogurt that keeps me alive and well. At my age the average man has been dead for seven years.”

  “From two hundred and twenty pounds to one forty-five, that’s how it’s keeping you alive.” She addresses the reporter. “Write this in Time magazine, that he can’t walk stairs, that I have to tie his shoes. He’s dizzy from air conditioning, and he chokes on the heat. He sits at his desk and starves himself. For two years I’ve watched. Enough is enough.”

  Still smiling, Kefirovsky says, “The revolution that is coming will make you forget Marx. Eating three meals will be like having three wives. Ordinary people by the millions will have their teeth pulled and drink happily ever after. Science and scarcity change the world. The yogurt will end scarcity, another time out is coming. You’ll see. Marx and Malthus will be as forgotten as Paracelsus and Agrippa. Do you know what they worried about? Thousands of years ago Heraclitus, a smart man, thought the earth was packed tight as a suitcase. Everyone is wrong. Someday I’ll be wrong too. That is science. In the meantime, it’s time out. The Babylonians were a thin people but the Philistines gorged themselves. Huns were thinner than Romans. It’s the law of history. Look at the Ethiopians. Look at the black Africans who weigh eighty pounds and can chase a giraffe for three days without food or water.”

  “It’s terrible to watch.” From her seat on the kitchen stool, Emily sobs and watches the kitchen clock. “The five minutes are up, Vasi.” Emily wipes her eyes and once more raises the funnel. The Professor takes up his mittens and approaches the calm yogurt in the midst of bubbling waters. “This time it’s good and ready.” He holds the heavy glass jar steadily, the blue veins in his forearms stretch and tremble with the exercise, but Kefirovsky’s pouring hand is still and even. Expertly, Emily moves the funnel from one pint bottle to the next, spilling only droplets on the stainless-steel counter. As coordinated as a ballet, their hands move the thick milky liquid over and into its bottles in a silent rhythmical pattern. As the big jar becomes lighter, the Professor does not quicken the pace of his pouring nor does Emily speed the funnel. The yogurt drops like long thick tongues into the bottles and it stops at the very tip of each one without overflowing. It bubbles for a second and then expires. With thick corks Emily seals ten bottles while Kefirovsky and the reporter watch her strong fingers. She leaves two unsealed. Kefirovsky pours his yogurt into a yellow glass decorated with the figures of parrots. “Do you want to drink yours or eat with a spoon?” he asks the reporter.

  “I’ll drink,” Williams says.

  “Isn’t Mrs. Kefirovsky having any?”

  “No,” she says, “I have a steak in the broiler. I usually drink one at night while Vasi is reading.”

  The Professor raises his glass. A slight steam rises from the yogurt. With the gesture of a toast he extends his glass toward Emily, who stands in front of the ten corked bottles. Her eyes are vaguely red, and in the silent kitchen the noise of a broiling steak begins to be heard. Emily nods and smiles at Kefirovsky, who then makes the same gesture to the reporter. “To science,” Emily says as the two men slowly raise to their lips the white flakelike liquid, thick as dew and fine as the hoarfrost on ground.

  JUNOT DÍAZ

  Monstro

  Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Junot Díaz is the author of Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her , a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and PEN/O. Henry Award. The fiction editor at Boston Review, Díaz is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  “Monstro” was written for the New Yorker’s special science fiction–themed issue and is the basis for an eponymous novel to be published by Riverhead Books. “Monstro” is the story of a man caught in a world of love, disaster, friendship, and possibly zomb
ies.

  At first, Negroes thought it funny. A disease that could make a Haitian blacker? It was the joke of the year. Everybody in our sector accusing everybody else of having it. You couldn’t display a blemish or catch some sun on the street without the jokes starting. Someone would point to a spot on

  your arm and say, Diablo, haitiano, que te pasó?

  La Negrura they called it.

  The Darkness.

  These days everybody wants to know what you were doing when the world came to an end. Fools make up all sorts of vainglorious self-serving plep—but me, I tell the truth.

  I was chasing a girl.

  I was one of the idiots who didn’t heed any of the initial reports, who got caught way out there. What can I tell you? My head just wasn’t into any mysterious disease—not with my mom sick and all. Not with Mysty.

  Motherfuckers used to say culo would be the end of us. Well, for me it really was.

  In the beginning the doctor types couldn’t wrap their brains around it, either.

  The infection showed up on a small boy in the relocation camps outside Port-au-Prince, in the hottest March in recorded history. The index case was only four years old, and by the time his uncle brought him in his arm looked like an enormous black pustule, so huge it had turned the boy into an appendage of the arm. In the glypts he looked terrified.

  Within a month, a couple of thousand more infectons were reported. Didn’t rip through the pobla like the dengues or the poxes. More of a slow leprous spread. A black mold-fungus-blast that came on like a splotch and then gradually started taking you over, tunneling right through you—though as it turned out it wasn’t a mold-fungus-blast at all. It was something else. Something new.

  Everybody blamed the heat. Blamed the Calientazo. Shit, a hundred straight days over 105 degrees F. in our region alone, the planet cooking like a chimi and down to its last five trees—something berserk was bound to happen. All sorts of bizarre outbreaks already in play: diseases no one had names for, zoonotics by the pound. This one didn’t cause too much panic because it seemed to hit only the sickest of the sick, viktims who had nine kinds of ill already in them. You literally had to be falling to pieces for it to grab you.

  It almost always started epidermically and then worked its way up and in. Most of the infected were immobile within a few months, the worst comatose by six. Strangest thing, though: once infected, few viktims died outright; they just seemed to linger on and on. Coral reefs might have been adios on the ocean floor, but they were alive and well on the arms and backs and heads of the infected. Black rotting rugose masses fruiting out of bodies. The medicos formed a ninety-nation consortium, flooded one another with papers and hypotheses, ran every test they could afford, but not even the military enhancers could crack it.

  In the early months, there was a big make do, because it was so strange and because no one could identify the route of transmission—that got the bigheads more worked up than the disease itself. There seemed to be no logic to it—spouses in constant contact didn’t catch the Negrura, but some unconnected fool on the other side of the camp did. A huge rah-rah, but when the experts determined that it wasn’t communicable in the standard ways, and that normal immune systems appeared to be at no kind of risk, the renminbi and the attention and the savvy went elsewhere. And since it was just poor Haitian types getting fucked up—no real margin in that. Once the initial bulla died down, only a couple of underfunded teams stayed on. As for the infected, all the medicos could do was try to keep them nourished and hydrated—and, more important, prevent them from growing together.

  That was a serious issue. The blast seemed to have a boner for fusion, respected no kind of boundaries. I remember the first time I saw it on the Whorl. Alex was, like, Mira esta vaina. Almost delighted. A shaky glypt of a pair of naked trembling Haitian brothers sharing a single stained cot, knotted together by horrible mold, their heads slurred into one. About the nastiest thing you ever saw. Mysty saw it and looked away and eventually I did, too.

  My tíos were, like, Someone needs to drop a bomb on those people, and even though I was one of the pro-Haitian domos, at the time I was thinking it might have been a mercy.

  I was actually on the Island when it happened. Front-row fucking seat. How lucky was that?

  They call those of us who made it through “time witnesses.” I can think of a couple of better terms.

  I’d come down to the D.R. because my mother had got super sick. The year before, she’d been bitten by a rupture virus that tore through half her organs before the doctors got savvy to it. No chance she was going to be taken care of back North. Not with what the cheapest nurses charged. So she rented out the Brooklyn house to a bunch of Mexos, took that loot, and came home.

  Better that way. Say what you want, but family on the Island was still more reliable for heavy shit, like, say, dying, than family in the North. Medicine was cheaper, too, with the flying territory in Haina, its Chinese factories pumping out pharma like it was romo, growing organ sheets by the mile, and, for somebody as sick as my mother, with only rental income to live off, being there was what made sense.

  I was supposed to be helping out, but really I didn’t do na for her. My tía Livia had it all under control and if you want the truth I didn’t feel comfortable hanging around the house with Mom all sick. The vieja could barely get up to piss, looked like a stick version of herself. Hard to see that. If I stayed an hour with her it was a lot.

  What an asshole, right? What a shallow motherfucker.

  But I was nineteen—and what is nineteen, if not for shallow? In any case my mother didn’t want me around, either. It made her sad to see me so uncomfortable. And what could I do for her besides wring my hands? She had Livia, she had her nurse, she had the muchacha who cooked and cleaned. I was only in the way.

  Maybe I’m just saying this to cover my failings as a son.

  Maybe I’m saying this because of what happened.

  Maybe.

  Go, have fun with your friends, she said behind her breathing mask.

  Didn’t have to tell me twice.

  Fact is, I wouldn’t have come to the Island that summer if I’d been able to nab a job or an internship, but the droughts that year and the General Economic Collapse meant that nobody was nabbing shit. Even the Sovereign kids were ending up home with their parents. So with the house being rented out from under me and nowhere else to go, not even a girlfriend to mooch off, I figured, Fuck it: might as well spend the hots on the Island. Take in some of that ole-time climate change. Get to know the patria again.

  For six, seven months it was just a horrible Haitian disease—who fucking cared, right? A couple of hundred new infections each month in the camps and around Port-au-Prince, pocket change, really, nowhere near what KRIMEA was doing to the Russian hinterlands. For a while it was nothing, nothing at all . . . and then some real eerie plep started happening.

  Doctors began reporting a curious change in the behavior of infected patients: they wanted to be together, in close proximity, all the time. They no longer tolerated being separated from other infected, started coming together in the main quarantine zone, just outside Champ de Mars, the largest of the relocation camps. All the viktims seemed to succumb to this ingathering compulsion. Some went because they claimed they felt “safer” in the quarantine zone; others just picked up and left without a word to anyone, trekked halfway across the country as though following a homing beacon. Once viktims got it in their heads to go, no dissuading them. Left family, friends, children behind. Walked out on wedding days, on swell business. Once they were in the zone, nothing could get them to leave. When authorities tried to distribute the infected viktims across a number of centers, they either wouldn’t go or made their way quickly back to the main zone.

  One doctor from Martinique, his curiosity piqued, isolated an elderly viktim from the other infected and took her to a holding bay some distance outside the main quarantine zone. Within twenty-four hours, this frail septuagenarian had t
orn off her heavy restraints, broken through a mesh security window, and crawled halfway back to the quarantine zone before she was recovered.

  Same doctor performed a second experiment: helicoptered two infected men to a hospital ship offshore. As soon as they were removed from the quarantine zone they went batshit, trying everything they could to break free, to return. No sedative or entreaty proved effective, and after four days of battering themselves relentlessly against the doors of their holding cells the men loosed a last high-pitched shriek and died within minutes of each other.

  Stranger shit was in the offing: eight months into the epidemic, all infected viktims, even the healthiest, abruptly stopped communicating. Just went silent. Nothing abnormal in their bloodwork or in their scans. They just stopped talking—friends, family, doctors, it didn’t matter. No stimuli of any form could get them to speak. Watched everything and everyone, clearly understood commands and information—but refused to say anything.

  Anything human, that is.

  Shortly after the Silence, the phenomenon that became known as the Chorus began. The entire infected population simultaneously let out a bizarre shriek—two, three times a day. Starting together, ending together.

  Talk about unnerving. Even patients who’d had their faces chewed off by the blast joined in—the vibrations rising out of the excrescence itself. Even the patients who were comatose. Never lasted more than twenty, thirty seconds—eerie siren shit. No uninfected could stand to hear it, but uninfected kids seemed to be the most unsettled. After a week of that wailing, the majority of kids had fled the areas around the quarantine zone, moved to other camps. That should have alerted someone, but who paid attention to camp kids?