by S. T. Joshi
“A more intrepid will than yours would have bypassed the chrome gate and deduced from tableaux and inscriptions on geometrically indecent monuments the glory of those who flourished before our stars, our sun, occupied the sky. You’d have understood that our predecessors can only reclaim bodily existence when the stars are right, those stars that were their stars, which decomposed into dust, into atoms of elements that became our sun, our planets, ourselves.”
With a clinical detachment in itself probably symptomatic of mental breakdown, Ira noted a readiness to take Ari at his word, as if he were professing nothing deranged, just as Ira’s reaction to blood from the ceiling was limited to a desire to sidestep the widening pool. No dice! His vexing bouquet had vanished, he was no longer a pillar of naphtha, but his feet were stuck fast.
“In other words, we are the stars, and now we are right, and in a position to restore the primeval majesty of one who has bided inert and diminished, a relic of his former omnipotence. This is our destiny, to revivify a lord of previous creation, to commune with what we were ten billion years ago.”
Initially Ira blamed bleak lantern glow for Ari’s greenish complexion, but it overtaxed coincidence that at the same instant he perceived Ari had gone mute, flapping his lips like a stranded fish, or else Ira had gone deaf, for he couldn’t hear the orgiastic din either. His nose, meanwhile, still functioned, and in lieu of naphtha was the burgeoning stench from a barrel of rotten shrimp. It didn’t bother him, though, any more than the blood on his shoes did, and really, it was something to savor.
And now sea-green Ari was calmly, languidly sloughing off human outline and melting out of his clothes, and Ira yearned to liquefy more quickly and coalesce with Ari and flow from the elevator toward the others, and it didn’t hurt, without pain receptors it couldn’t, those must have been among the first mortal attributes to go. Instead, his disembodiment felt liberating, empowering, and especially natural.
Best of all about becoming one drop in this rising sea, one piece in this global puzzle, he could envision the totality, as if a jigsaw piece could see the finished picture. His interactions with Ari, everybody’s interactions the world over, had always been jigsaw pieces too, building up to this moment, and as history ended and eternal now began, he saw with another’s eyes, and with dwindling selfhood, that he would be augmenting the girth of a mountain, a mountain he brought more fully to life by melding with it, a mountain that would live forever and tread among the stars and among the stars that would succeed them. The sound of his true name no longer posed a mystery, except no human mouth could properly pronounce it, and he had no mouth whatsoever.
Trophy
MELANIE TEM
Melanie Tem’s work has received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards and a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award. She published numerous short stories, eleven solo novels, two collaborative novels with Nancy Holder, and two with her husband Steve Rasnic Tem. She was also a published poet, an oral storyteller, and a playwright. In Concert, a collaborative short story collection with Steve Rasnic Tem, was published in August 2010, and solo stories have recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Crimewave, and Interzone, and in anthologies such as The Devil’s Coattails and the Black Wings series. Her novels Yellow Wood and Proxy were published by ChiZine in 2014 and 2015. Melanie was a social worker and non-profit executive director. She died on February 9, 2015. She is survived by her husband, four children, and four granddaughters.
LEG AND STUMP AKIMBO, BARE KNEE WEDGED against the side of the dry bathtub, neck at an uncomfortable angle, limp mutilated penis as ready as he knew how to make it for the unimaginable event that possessed his imagination, Nolan waited. He’d been pregnant a long time. Tonight was the night.
Last Thursday had been going to be the night, too, and a particular Fourth of July, and more than one anniversary of his accident. But he’d been wrong all those times, screwed up the calculations, or just been dumb or crazy. Or they’d tricked him. They liked to trick him, for reasons of their own, like sending him full-on down the slope into that tree with his legs wide apart. Once he’d realized that had been their doing, it had made more sense.
He didn’t think he was wrong this time, though. They were still tricking him, but not about this—or, if they were, the trickiest part of the trick was that he had no way of knowing. Waiting in the flimsy shower stall of his flimsy apartment, he watched YouTube videos and played games and sang love songs. The songs were prayers. The games and videos—hands and legs and heads blown off, eyes gouged out, hearts run through—helped him pass the time while the alien child grew inside him. Grew and grew.
Nolan had no idea how long the gestation period would be. He didn’t really know when or how they’d knocked him up; his best guess was that it had happened on that last long beautiful run, but he couldn’t quite figure out the mechanics. All he could do was wait, be ready. If you could ever be ready for something like this. If you could ever be ready for anything.
Usually he liked to start out with the animal ones and move up from there. Trying to obey orders not to change his position in the tub, Nolan pressed the Start button for the app. On the screen, close to his own face, so close he felt the breath, tasted the blood and snot and what was probably brain, the cute head of a rabbit exploded. Then a beautiful long-winged bird in flight, feathers flying, belly dropping gore. Then a spectacular eight-point buck, bloody hole opening in its chest, trophy head left intact. Then an elephant with knowing eyes.
Holding the phone made his fingers spasm. The back of his cut-off knee itched. Cramps flared in the foot that had been gone since the crash. The flesh of the missing thigh and hip was tingling and sweating. In the crater left when the doctors had dug out his smashed scrotum, pain and pleasure swelled the balls that weren’t there.
Sometimes Nolan enjoyed the discomfort of using his hand to work the controls. Tonight he thought he’d prefer the strain of using the mouthstick. He pursed his lips and wiggled his tongue, as if for the kiss he used to waste time wishing for. If his body still worked the way it had been made to, life would be a lot easier, but maybe not as sexy.
As he moved on to the human videos, something moved in his belly. He caught his breath, still afraid to think about where the baby would emerge from his body, afraid because it would be so good and it would hurt so much and it would probably kill him. That’s what they’d promised, if he’d understood right. It was hard to understand aliens. Nolan didn’t dare let himself think he might have misunderstood.
In the too-narrow bathtub, he cocked his knee up next to his shoulder like an insect leg that could be pulled off with a quick flick. He cupped his penis and stroked it with just the tips of his thumb and forefinger while the villagers were shot, bayoneted, raped, hacked. Blood sprayed and gusted. Nolan didn’t come, of course, but the not-coming felt good in a miserable sort of way. Zooms showed off the terror in a young woman’s eyes, the sorrow in the body of a really old man. Nolan could name “terror,” “sorrow,” “despair,” “anguish,” and he’d taught himself which worked best for his pleasure, but he couldn’t be expected to know what would please aliens. A little boy’s round tear-streaked face hung on the screen for a nice long moment before it was blown apart.
The child inside him kicked, or did some alien thing that resembled kicking. Nolan arched his back as much as he could. He couldn’t picture what part of the baby alien’s body was beating up on him from the inside, and he couldn’t translate the rhythm. Was it a message? Did it mean something about the alien’s birth and his own death? Eventually it just stopped.
The face on the screen now was so close-up he couldn’t tell age or gender or race or condition or expression. There were no visible wounds. Nolan bulged his eyes, chilled when they almost touched the other bulging eyes. He kissed the gaping mouth with his own. Bombs and people screamed. Nice.
The stick wasn’t totally under his control, so the thrill when it con
nected with the NEXT button was always about both skill and luck. This time severed appendages flew toward him, trailing strings and chunks. The phantom effect in his excised body parts was excellent. So was the buzz of knowing that somebody had spent all that time and energy creating this great video and that other people might be watching it at this same exact second. Not all of them were waiting to give birth to an alien child, though; in fact, Nolan might be the only one in this world. A hand flung itself at him and he could have sworn stroked his cheek on its way down into the battlefield mire. Gory flames filled the screen.
Good one. But over too fast. Nolan was nowhere near finished, and nothing was happening with the pregnancy except that his belly seemed a little fuller, tauter. A pleasantly unpleasant ache spread all across his lower abdomen, between his leg and stump, through his squashed dick. Or all in his mind. Whatever.
That desperate night when the first video had appeared on his screen, gaudy logo and garish trumpets and drums, personalized “Nolan” and with his log-in already set up, he’d assumed he’d screwed up somehow, uploaded it by accident. Precision was not his strong point. Then he’d thought some goon or goonette must have been messing with his phone, even though he almost always had it with him and his sleep was never what you’d call sound, even with all the drugs. Only later did the realization come to him that the devilish aliens had set all this up for him—or, more likely, for their own sick fun.
The Start button had been easy to find and responded right away to his unsteady touch. His own image had popped up, full-screen and nude, up close and displayed in amazing high resolution. When could that have been taken? They must have been in the apartment somehow without him knowing it. The very blue eyes of onscreen Nolan had met and locked with the very blue eyes of Nolan who watched. The scars on his chest and belly, throat and forehead, had throbbed as those on the screen glistened. The leg stump and the destroyed and sort of rebuilt crotch had rushed forward to slap him in the face. The two Nolans had kissed.
And the rest, he thought, is history. But it’s not over yet.
He was poking around for the Enhanced Interrogations button when Goon came in and stood over him, probably looking at the screen. Probably getting off on it himself. Most of them didn’t admit to that; sometimes Nolan was aware of their wetness or hard-ons. Most of them barely spoke to him. The only thing they had in common with him was their job, which they hated and needed and wouldn’t have if it wasn’t for him being the way he was, meaning they also hated and needed him and his unnatural, ruined body. And they didn’t even know that it was also temporarily inhabited by another life form.
This Goon liked to chat about how disgusting Nolan’s various porn was, why would you fill your head with something like that when you could fill it with thoughts of God? War porn was the work of the Devil. Car crash and dead-baby scenarios were the work of the Devil. Hunting animals was one thing, especially if you ate the meat, but getting off on the kill was the work of the Devil. Nolan’s accident had been the work of the Devil, claiming him because he’d strayed. “God doesn’t intend for us to live in this world the way you do,” he explained again now, dripping kindness and reasonableness while he ogled the screen. “God didn’t make you like this, buddy. The devil made you.”
Nolan spat out the stick and the word “Cool,” just to mess with him. Goon knuckled him on the back of the head. He heard it through his skull. Goon told him that Satan had taken over his mouth and soul and he had to cast Him out. Nolan laughed at how close to being right Goon was, and how completely wrong. Goon rapped him again and left the room.
Nolan didn’t always know if he believed in anything other than the alien inside him and the onscreen images and the vivid physical sensations his distorted body couldn’t possibly be feeling. But if he did, and if he cast out his Maker and Ally, what would that leave him with? He’d understood that he’d never have anything else since the moment he’d spread his legs for the mirror and stared full-frontal at what the jet skis and the surgeons had done, that tree the last thing he would ever embrace.
Tonguing the mouthstick to scroll through his Mutilated Corpse favorites list, he settled on “Whores” and, within that, “Lulu.” The first slash, to cut off the left boob, went a little too fast and Lulu’s begging was sort of blurry, but after that the rhythm was good, the visuals awesome.
“You are one sick puppy,” Goon declared from behind and above him. So he hadn’t left the room after all, or he’d sneaked back in to spy. He was tall, loud. “Get out of the damn tub. This is totally stupid.”
“No! I can’t! I have to—” But it didn’t matter what he said. Goon pulled him up and out of the place where he was supposed to wait and jerked clothes onto him and crammed him into the chair and stuck him in the bedroom. He didn’t take the phone away this time, though, and Nolan managed to get another video up, a young soldier burning alive, then burning dead. The screams were outstanding, shrill and then hoarse and then guttural and then silenced. The odor was a nice touch; good thing the aliens were advanced, and good thing they had sort of the same tastes he did. It occurred to him now for the first time that, in addition to having chosen him for the birth, they might be using him to let them feel human eroticism. He smiled. When it was over—not before—Goon gagged and left the room shouting his own kind of prayers.
Then Nolan worked on the game he would invent if he had the technical knowledge and the physical skills. And the time; he didn’t think he’d have time before the birth, but he didn’t know for sure. All in his head, it was as real as anything.
This Goon had been working for him long enough now that Nolan knew what his avatar would be like: broad shoulders, rough hands, bulldog voice. Piercing him with dozens of poison arrows might be fun, or putting a bomb in his underwear. Nolan stopped to think for a while. Maybe the aliens would send him a message about that.
Even the best scenarios started to get stale after only a few times through. Wistfully, restlessly, Nolan moved on to another of his favorites, the Pillaged Village, which had the nice feature of letting you pick either the viewpoint of the gang of rapists or of somebody getting gang-raped. For a while he was stuck in a delicious mental paralysis because either choice might pleasure and relieve him and either might fall flat.
This evening neither identity did much for him. He watched again and again, adjusting the effects—bigger cock, sharper or blunter broken bottle, longer iron rod; younger/older perps and victim; different values on a drop-down scale amusingly labeled “degrees of virginity.” Nothing.
Not enough build-up would make him feel cheated for days afterward. Too much was so frustrating he often couldn’t get there at all, as if his body got tired of waiting and gave up, as if everything was just too much effort.
Everything was too much effort. But that was his life. This was the body he’d been dealt—by his own adolescent stupidity, by the macho recklessness of his buddy who’d come to see him once in rehab and spent the whole time chatting about how that run had been the best ever. By Whomever had set the whole thing up, whose identity Nolan was now pretty sure of.
Sometimes after all these years—talk about the work of the Devil—he was visited by dreams of being touched by somebody who loved him, at least got that he was a person, not just by the paid, hurried hands and eyes of Goons and Goonettes that he couldn’t always tell were straying into places in his body or in his apartment where they hadn’t been invited. A lot of the time it was hard to tell whether these dreams were sleeping or waking, and the distinction was meaningless anyway. He might welcome or dread them; there wasn’t a lot of difference.
It would be stupid to say he couldn’t stand it. You could stand just about anything. He had, after all, been able to stand that first look in the mirror at the mess of his crotch: prepared for, built up to piece-by-piece with examinations of the other damage, staged behind the closed door of his childhood bedroom he’d returned to because there was nowhere else to go. Unable on his own to spread what was
left of his legs, he’d made his father do it, and Dad had been shaking and choked up before Nolan had glimpsed and then stared at the raw new stitched-up hole.
“Look what they did!” The words had been almost incomprehensible, even to him, but the wail had been clear. “Look what they did to me!” hating the doctors, hating the buddy, hating the sound of his mother’s moans and retches in the bathroom and how the next thing his father did was cover him up. Hating what back then he’d thought of as God, Whose Plan this was for him. But standing it all, coming to some kind of terms. And then getting the message that he was carrying an alien child and would someday, somehow, bring it into this world, meaning he was chosen and doomed.
The frustration was bad tonight. Everything he could feel about his body, and a lot he couldn’t really feel, was pulsing, shuddering, and shattering, afire. He knew that was a trick, an effect. His body, already shattered years and years earlier, couldn’t move enough to shudder or pulse. The burning was phantom. Only the images on the tiny screen were real. And the sudden particular cramping in his belly, and the entities behind it all.
Nolan held his breath and waited. Another cramp bent him over. His heart was pounding and he was wet with sweat. This could be the first pangs of the birth. Or not, but he couldn’t risk missing it.
He called and pushed the buzzer and banged on his chair for Goon to come and get his clothes off and put him back in the tub where he was supposed to be. Goon was probably busy jerking off, or stealing Nolan’s food, or snoring on Nolan’s couch. Or he wasn’t here at all. Whenever this happened, Nolan was attacked by terror that he’d been left alone. They did it on purpose just to devil him. It gave him some sort of weird comfort to remind himself that he was in fact alone, even when one of the Goons or Goonettes was here, alone and waiting for the one real experience left to him.
