by Ryan Gebhart
“Today is a beautiful day,” he says, unsurprised by my presence, like he was expecting me to be here. Kinda like how I expected him to be here. He pulls out a J from his jacket. It takes him a few tries to spark up because of his thick, awkward gloves. He hits it, and there are flecks of green and blue sparking up in the center of the cherry.
I really want to try it, even though it might make me sick. Something grown on Pud 5 was not meant to be inhaled by someone from Earth.
He hands it to me. “It’s strong, but you’ll be okay.”
I take a hit and hold it in. My head wrenches forward, and a massive plume of smoke explodes from my mouth. I inhale a deep breath of fresh air, and there’s this tingling feeling in my throat, then in my lungs. Then in my legs and, whoa, my toes are like little stars floating off into the wind and everything, man. Everything is stars. But it’s not just stars.
I cough. “Whoa. This is like smoking the universe.”
Karo smiles. “Jovas grows it in his backyard.”
There are so many colors on his skin, on the frozen water, and I know there’s a squirrel up in that tree even though my eyes can’t see it. Everything is exploding like little fireworks. Holy shit. It’s like . . . man, I’ve never taken anything that had visuals this detailed. This makes those amazing shrooms that Shugar got last year for Bonnaroo look dull, like that weed we smoked before the I Will Dissect Your Lungs concert in Columbus.
It’s because these aren’t visuals. In some way that I can’t explain, I’m looking at actual things.
“I’m not going to get sick off of this, am I?”
“No, no, no.” He’s shaking his head a lot. “No.”
“Someone told me that we’re not immune to the germs and viruses inside of you, and that they will make us sick and maybe even kill us.”
“We’ve been tested,” Karo says, then makes his keh-keh laugh. It’s surprising that he’s got a sense of humor, because how do you make jokes when your people don’t even have words?
I’m so happy and it’s not because I’m high on Pud 5 weed. It’s because I’m just hanging out with a friend.
I say, “Your English is really good. Like, you’re totally fluent.”
“Jovas sometimes will practice with me.”
“So you’re gay, right?” There I go again, thinking like an asshole. It’s not my place to ask him about his personal life.
His face turns more serious, but there’s still an amused kink at the end of his lips. “Sexuality is a meaningless human construct. There are no rules when it comes to attraction, with love, or with anything. It may not seem like it, but there is plenty that you and I have in common.”
“Doubt it. Did you just get your heart broken too?” I pause to reevaluate my statement. “I guess that’s not accurate because Jenny didn’t technically dump me. It’s not a broken heart. It’s . . . this isn’t how I thought relationships would be.”
“You defined the relationship, and that’s why your heart hurts. A definition puts this girl you like into a box, but she won’t fit in that box.”
I watch the wind push snow across the frozen water, and I can see an image of her now, the glittery snow assembling into the shape of her face, then vanishing in the wind.
I blink. That was weird.
Karo says, “You call us aliens. That’s implying we’re entities from a different planet.”
“You aren’t?”
He sighs, seemingly upset by my answer. “Everything — you and me, the girl you like, these trees, the stars in the sky — it all comes from nothing, constantly changing and rearranging. Like sparks. Don’t you see them when you close your eyes? The little flecks of light and dark?”
I remember lying next to Jenny the night after we watched Wreck-It Ralph with her parents. She was sleeping next to me, and I was admiring the light show behind my eyelids. But I wasn’t watching the creation of stars and galaxies — it was just my eyes adjusting to the darkness.
Karo says softly, “Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.” He emotes this with his hands. “All around you, all the time, things are being created. Your sun, your planets, your galaxies and atoms — they’re popping out of nothing . . . but there is no such thing as nothing. Do you see it?”
“I think so.” But I probably don’t. “So how do you do it? You come here at ease, whenever you want. Do y’all have ships that fly through outer space, traveling from star to star?”
“No, no, no. We tried that once, but that was over a thousand generations ago.”
“What happened?”
Karo looks at me, and I get that warm, liquidy feeling behind my eyes again. “Is that why you’re here, to understand interstellar travel?”
I’m not afraid of him and his teeth or the things I came to ask of him. Even though I probably should be.
I say, “You know why I’m here. You just want me to say it.”
“I like practicing my languages.”
“Jenny promised me that if there was a day when no one on Earth would be fighting each other, then she would be my girlfriend. Something like that.”
“She’s not right for you,” Karo says, and a spark of anger at him rises in my gut. How could he jump to a conclusion so quickly? He hasn’t even met her.
Unfazed, I say, “If there were flying saucers hovering over all the major cities across the world, we’d stop fighting each other. We’d unite together to try to stop you.”
“I want to be friends with you.” He cocks his head at me, a look of part amusement, part confusion. “And we don’t have flying saucers.”
“When I first saw you, I also saw your ship. It was right above this island.”
“That wasn’t a ship. Those were stars.”
“What do you mean? Like, actual stars?”
“Sometimes I like to play with them. I used to be able to move only one at a time, now I’m up to twenty. My grandmother, however, she’s the best at it. She can make whole galaxies move.”
“You can’t move stars. That doesn’t make any sense.”
He shrugs. “Are you hungry? I know I am.”
I’m actually really hungry — it just hadn’t occurred to me until he mentioned it. I haven’t eaten since last night with Jenny’s mom.
He says, “You said you’d be willing to try our food, and today my family is having the biggest feast of the year.”
“Hey, how ’bout that. That’s kinda like our Thanksgiving, and we’re having that tomorrow.”
“I haven’t eaten so I can be really hungry for it. It’s the best food in the Milky Way, and I’d be honored to have you as my guest.”
“Will your family be okay with me?”
He looks at the river, blank-faced and contemplative. “I don’t know.”
And here I thought aliens knew everything. “I’ll go. But how are we gonna get there if you don’t have a ship?”
“We’re already there.”
“Huh?” I turn to my left and my right and back again, expecting to suddenly be transported to some futuristic city or anyplace other than Blue Grass Island. But the frozen river is still in front of us. The arctic chill still surrounds us. We’re still sitting on the fallen tree.
But the air is different somehow, like it’s aware of me.
Karo snubs the joint out in the snow and offers his hand.
I follow him into the thicket of trees on the island where I can’t see the bridge or the river. Some bird on a really high branch is chirping out all these random hooks, like it’s playing three-second clips from its own Greatest Hits collection. The sounds feel cold and delicate on my face like snowflakes and I giggle. Everything is suddenly as it was when I was just a child — bright and brand-new and full of magic and endless with possibilities.
He guides me through the trees, but what if there’s so much more to trees than what’s taught in science books? Maybe they’re not just carbon and water and other molecules sculpted into wood and leaves. Maybe they’re made of everything in this universe and eve
ry other universe. It would kind of look like clusters of galaxies webbed together.
My eyes get wide. Holy shit, that’s what trees are! Everywhere I look there are galaxies. Thousands upon thousands of them. No, way more than that. All I can see are these brilliant little hurricanes made of stars instead of clouds, and they’re strung together like an endless bundle of nerves. If I squint or move my eyes the right way, they revert back to trees. It’s not that I’m high; it’s that the curtains have been pulled back. Trees aren’t made of wood and leaves — they’re made of galaxies.
I say, “This is so beautiful. This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever . . . experienced. Your boyfriend ought to sell this weed.”
There’s a groan coming from Karo, then an echo of a groan. I shouldn’t have said that. That was the wrong thing to say. It wasn’t even the thing I wanted to say.
I actually didn’t want to say anything.
More galaxies — countless and luminous — are lazily suspended in the air. They’re incredibly small, but I can see them in breathtaking detail. I inhale and they get sucked down into my lungs. My body fills with warmth. My body is overwhelmed. I exhale and they go flying out of me, all mangled up.
I say, “Am I destroying these galaxies?”
“Yes.”
What the hell? He says this like it’s no big —
— holy shit, look at my arm! There are galaxies on me. It’s like I’m made of galaxies, and this isn’t fair to those galaxies. That’s a big responsibility, having to be a part of something that has living creatures that are probably way more intelligent than me and there are so many of them and I’m sorry. I’m so, so, so sorry.
I fall on the earth, I crush a trillion galaxies with my knees and my gloves. I’m crying out galaxies filled with stars and black holes and planetary systems and intelligent species and it’s everywhere and I can’t escape this.
Karo’s arm is around my shoulder. His galaxy-filled breath reminds me of Princess’s farts from that one time she got into my KFC Famous Bowl. He’s shushing me.
“This is only the beginning,” he says, and now I know how he traveled here. It’s because he’s always been here. He’s always been everywhere.
So have I.
I can’t stop breathing. I can’t stop destroying galaxies. Every second of every day, a trillion billion quadrillion love stories are coming to an end because of me. Everything’s dead because of me.
“Everything is alive because of you, too,” Karo says, and he’s not reading my mind. That’s not what this is. It just . . . is.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and my hands are digging into the galaxies in the earth. “I’m sorry I’m made of all the galaxies. I shouldn’t exist. I’m not worthy of any of this.”
Karo’s forehead is against mine, and he knows how much this is hurting me. He says, “You are worthy. You always have been.”
“I’m in love with Jennifer Novak.” This feels like the biggest, yet most pathetic confession anyone has ever given. I’m so insignificant and I have this stupid infatuation with the cute girl with dyed auburn hair and slightly crossed eyes and the most amazing fucking heart from Spanish class.
I say, “If only I could show her all this. If only she could see all the galaxies in her skin.” My God, I’m talking like the biggest hippie, and I’m not sad because I’m high on . . . no, I’m not sad. This is . . .
There are no words for this.
The Centaurians don’t speak to each other. It’s because all they have to do is look and they’ll know. They’ll just know.
I say, “I love Jenny so much, and I’d destroy a trillion galaxies to spend one more moment with her. And not even a good moment. I’d settle for a boring one where we’re watching a movie in her basement and she’s got her head on my shoulder and I know she’s fallen asleep because her breathing has gotten slower.
“I can’t stand this. We’re about to send two hundred thousand troops into war, and we don’t want to. None of us wants to, but we’re doing it anyway. We’re getting our guns and filling them with bullets and our aircraft carriers and filling them with . . . aircrafts.”
I feel blood pulsing in my head, in my lungs. There’s a funny feeling behind my eyes, and it’s dripping into my sinuses. It has this taste, a memory from my childhood of getting pool water stuck in my nose.
I’m not seeing much of anything now. The trees and the galaxies and the sound and the everything is blanking out, disintegrating into TV static.
I say, “I need your help. Humanity needs your help. So what if some people died when you shared your music? People die all the time. How many more will get killed when the war starts?” But it all comes out as hissing static.
I look at my hand. Everything beneath my skin is glowing red. There are my bones and there’s my blood coursing through my veins. The static is everywhere now. Deafening. I’m not just seeing it and hearing it, but I also smell it. It’s like the air after a thunderstorm. I can feel it. Every cell inside of me is vibrating, coming undone. All this gray foamy stuff is racing past me.
I’m vanishing.
I’m gone.
My brain must’ve blown a fuse.
I smell manure.
Wait. What happened to the island?
The static and foam and the swirl of an infinite amount of galaxies recedes from my periphery, and I’m standing in a cornfield, the stalks rising up to my chin. They sway together in a very mild breeze, but there are still pockets of cold Maumee air trapped around the collar of my jacket and the snow on my boots is melting.
Wait, this isn’t corn. The stalks are thicker, and the leaves are broader and tropical-looking with a waxy sheen. And rising from the crops like ancient giants are trees with smooth and shiny trunks. The only time I’ve seen these plants was when me and Mom watched the video of Karo’s home.
I’m not in Maumee anymore.
No, don’t think like that. I’m just totally tripping my dick off.
Okay, I can talk myself down from this. Remember this summer when Shugar slipped a hit of acid into my rum and Coke without telling me? We were camping down in Hocking Hills, and I was sitting across the fire from him and Andy. They were cooking hot dogs on sticks, and they couldn’t stop laughing, even though no one had said anything for five minutes. I asked them what was so funny — do I have something on my face?— and they busted up again.
I got up to take a leak, and as I walked down the hill next to our campsite, I had never realized how much this place reminded me of the wolfswood in Game of Thrones. I was in mid-stream when I noticed the tree I was pissing on had a face that was weeping tears of blood. My knees buckled. I couldn’t feel my legs anymore. I screamed for someone to help me, and I panicked when Hodor came trouncing down the hill.
I laugh. It’s funny thinking about it now, how it was actually Andy slinging my arm around his shoulder. He told me what they did, that I was tripping from the acid, but I was crying harder than ever because “Hodor” is the only word Hodor is supposed to say.
That day my mind had felt like a shattered mirror. There were all these different voices talking in my head, none of my thoughts made sense, and my emotions changed by the minute. But once I focused, once Hodor told me to pace my breathing, I actually enjoyed my trip to Westeros, and after a few hours I returned to Earth.
Think rationally here. You didn’t cross a frozen river to smoke with an alien. You were probably in your garage the whole time with Shugar and Andy, and they laced the weed.
You’re probably still in the garage. So open your eyes.
The most messed-up thing isn’t the fact that there’s a fucking one-story-tall dinosaur/turkey-looking beast grazing on the crops fifty feet in front of me — it’s the fact that my mind isn’t a shattered mirror right now. I am thinking rationally.
The beast cranes his thick neck so his head is facing me and I freeze. But he’s not going to eat me. His eyes are tired and uninterested. He squats on his hind legs, lifts his tail, then sque
ezes out a whole bunch of basketball-size pieces of shit that plop to the ground.
“Mark?” I say out loud, hoping that he will hear me. What if in real life I’m standing naked in the street, gawking at a UPS truck and thinking it’s a giant turkey?
“Mom?”
Hopefully I’m someplace safe, and Mom, Dad, Avery, and my friends are surrounding me, taking care of me as I convulse and shiver my way through the most intense trip ever. Yeah, relax. Right now Dad’s giving me water and Mom’s stroking my hair while I’m rambling on about who the hell knows.
I say to them, “I hope you can hear me. I want to tell you that as soon as I come down, I’m going to voluntarily commit myself or get the medication I need, because you don’t deserve to have to put up with me the way that I am.”
The beast opens his mouth and yanks a plant from the ground with dull, humanlike teeth, the wattle on his neck swaying. He lazily chews on the stalk, like a cow masticating on hay.
Just breathe. It only becomes a bad trip if I believe it will. Think about stupid things that make me smile, like the ThunderShirt and sagging breastcicles in Costa Rica. Summon the willpower and make this trip good. But even if it does end up bad, it will eventually be over, okay? Soon enough I’ll be back in my shopping cart chair putting the hurt on Andy in Baby Park.
No. I need to quit breathing because this isn’t Earth air. I’m on another fucking planet. Somehow I traveled four and a half light-years, and for all I know this air could kill me.
I’m getting dizzy and my hands are tingling, but what other air can I breathe?
Calm down. No need to panic. Just think back and retrace your steps. How did I get here?
Karo’s weed. It opened my eyes somehow. They felt bigger — maybe it even made them bigger. It showed me that everything is everywhere. I could go back home as easily as I traveled here. All I have to do is look hard enough, and I’ll see the Maumee that’s been here this whole time.
I squint. It just makes everything blurry.
