by Ryan Gebhart
I put my hand to my chest. My heart’s racing and I’m hyperventilating even though I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop. More and more of this poisonous air is leaching into my body. My knees are getting weak. I won’t be able to stand much longer.
“Please!” I cry out to anyone who can hear me. “Let me out of here!”
I fall. I curl into the fetal position. The poison air has begun its assault on my heart, and it’s pounding so hard it won’t be able to take much more.
I don’t want to die this young. I want a full life with a wife and beautiful kids, but Death has at least a dozen hands and he’s grasping at my ankles, my wrists, and his icy fingers are squeezing into my neck.
“Hey.” A different, more soothing hand touches my shoulder. I look up, gasping. The face is blurry and the sky is a shade of purple that I’ve never seen before.
Not taking his hand off me, he says, “You’re having a panic attack. If this air was poisonous, you’d be dead already.”
I lift my head and my heart begins to settle. My entire body is tingling the way my funny bone does when I jam it against something. Sweat is dripping down my face, and I lick the sweat from my lips with a parched tongue and I’m alive. Oh, thank God, I’m alive.
The Centaurian is wearing a plain orange trucker’s hat, cargo pants, and a white butcher’s smock over a gray T-shirt. He’s more muscular than Karo — kinda like an alien version of Shugar — and there’s a fresh spatter of blood across his expressionless face and exposed forearms. His smock has streaks of blood where he must’ve wiped his hands clean. It’s like he just finished killing someone.
I say, “Are you Jovas?”
“Karo calls me that, yes.”
I manage a smile and raise up my right hand. “Hey. I, uh . . . I come in peace.” I need to correct myself. “I come looking for peace. There’s a war about to happen on my planet, and we can’t stop it on our own. I came here to ask for your help.”
His lips purse, then he makes the widest of grins, like he’s stretching out his mouth muscles. He takes a deep, mucousy breath and says, “Karo was foolish to open a human’s eyes. You weren’t ready.” He wipes spittle from his chin with the back of his bony wrist. “We don’t have a name for our planet, for our oceans or continents, or even for ourselves. But these frightened, blind ants who live four and a half light-years away have already made words for everything.”
“Who’s that?”
“Humanity.” Jovas winces, putting his hand to his mouth. One of his teeth — which are just as sharp as Karo’s — has left a small cut in his upper lip.
“You okay?”
Cautiously, he continues, “The cosmos are not here for you to categorize and quantify. You can’t claim everything that you see as your own.” He licks the trickle of blood away with a tongue that looks human. “Are you feeling better?”
“No. No, man, I’m not. This is too much. I feel like my head’s going to explode.”
In a slow, unworried voice, he says, “A child first must crawl before he learns to walk. But Karo wants you here. He finds you entertaining.”
I breathe through my nose. The air smells intense, of manure and ozone and a sweetness I can’t place.
Jovas looks blankly at the crops surrounding us.
He says, “It’s the same air as yours, mostly. It has oxygen, carbon dioxide, some methane from our livestock.” He looks me up and down. “You’re not dressed for the weather.”
I pull the stocking cap from my head, and relief hits me. I unzip my winter coat, and it hits me again. Reddish mud is sticking to my palms. I get to my knees, and blood rushes out of my head. I fight through the little black specks trickling into my periphery and stand up.
Their sun is slightly larger and more orange than ours. The sky is more indigo than straight-up blue, but the clouds look about the same as Earth clouds. Thunder rumbles, and one cloud towers above the rest in the distance, drifting away. It must have rained not too long ago because water is dripping from the leaves, and quarter-size pieces of hail have littered the ground. The breeze is crisp and fresh like how it is after a massive Texas storm.
This isn’t schizophrenia or a drug-induced trip. I know this because my senses aren’t heightened or distorted, time doesn’t shift randomly like in a dream, and the colors aren’t all melty and psychedelic. The crops sway with the breeze the way one would expect them to. The large maraca-shaped grains sprouting from the plants rattle like a crowd of polite spectators at a golf tournament. There’s a stillness and an order to this place.
“I’m on Pud Five.” Saying this out loud, I look at my hand to confirm that I’m still me. My skin is the same color it’s always been — pasty-ass white. I look at Jovas, but he’s not an alien anymore. I’m the alien.
He says, “Only someone who thinks they’re madly in love would do something this stupid.”
“What did I do?”
His once-calm facade instantly disappears. He sneers, revealing the teeth of a pure carnivore glistening beneath a different sun. “You came here to start an interstellar war.”
I swallow. I have nothing to say. But I’m sure that even if I did, he would already know what it was.
He says, “We will never invade. Why would we go to war against ants? Because one of them thinks they understand love?”
I gather my things and walk behind him through the endlessly golf-clapping crops. I should be feeling guilty or sad that I came here for the wrong reasons according to a more intelligent species, but instead I’m numb. Maybe it’s from just having been disintegrated into nothing and then brought back, but my arms are getting scratched by the broad leaves of an extraterrestrial plant, and it feels like, I don’t know . . . any description would work. Amazing. Awful. Terrifying. Full of love or hate or whatever. My emotions are in pieces, still trying to assemble into something that I can reason out.
But what am I? Every way I described myself in the past — a Texan stuck in Ohio, a swimmer who drinks and smokes too much, a boy in love with a girl, a person who wants to stop a war, a person who wants to start a war — none of it seems to fit anymore. I just am.
Am I?
“Any help would do.” I know these words are leaving my mouth, but they feel disconnected from me, like someone else is thinking them.
I say, or somebody using my mouth says, “You don’t have to invade. I’m sure with your help there are plenty of things we could do to stop the war. Maybe we could get a million tons of your weed and smoke out planet Earth.”
“You came here for dinner and then you will leave. There won’t be anything else.”
He takes my hat and jacket and leads me to a mowed yard that’s mostly weeds, and in front of us is a salmon-colored house with paint chipping near the bottom. I recognize this home. It’s the same one from the video I watched with Mom.
There are no futuristic buildings that reach impossibly toward the sky. There are no flying cars. Just one neglected ranch house, an endless field of crops, and massive, prehistoric-looking trees randomly scattered throughout an otherwise normal rolling countryside.
“This kinda reminds me of my grandparents’ place outside San Angelo.” I don’t know why I’m telling him this — surely he could not care less — but the similarities are there and there’s a lot of them and it’s all blowing me away. I put my hands on my hips and soak it in. “They have a longhorn ranch, and they got some pretty big trees too. Not as big as these ones, though.”
A grinding, buzzing sound erupts from behind the house, startling me, but Jovas drapes my jacket over the wooden railing as if nothing happened. I’ve heard that noise before, I know I have. But where?
The front door opens and a Centaurian peeks his head out, looking at me with a furrowed and hairless brow.
I say, “Who’s that guy?”
“That’s the mother of my two sons.”
“Oh.” Whoops. “My bad.”
Two little kids — one an inch taller than the other and both in nothin
g but dirty, holey pants — squeeze past her and stand on the porch, gawking at me. Little Dude — who barely stands two feet tall — has his index finger dangling out the corner of his mouth, eyes wide with disbelief or amazement or fear, I can’t really tell.
I smile at him. “Hey there, Little Dude.”
He squeals with laughter and hops twice, waving at me frantically from behind the wooden railing. He scuttles to the steps, jumps over them, and splashes into a puddle. “Hey dere, Widdal Wuud,” he mimics back, his tiny voice raspy. He laughs again, amused by the sounds he’s making. He brings his arms back, squats, then lunges into the next puddle.
The older one steps forward and makes both hands into peace signs, like in all those old pictures of President Nixon. Well, I can’t say that Not-as-Little Dude is technically the older one, because what would they assume if they put me and Avery side by side?
Little Dude keeps hopping — puddle by puddle — closer to me. Jovas grabs him underneath his armpits as he’s in mid-jump and spins him around, the muddy water fanning off his bare feet. The kid is so happy. The kid is so surrounded by love.
Jovas takes him on a piggyback ride up the steps, crouching so Little Dude’s head doesn’t hit the canopy. The door swings wide as Jovas’s ex-girlfriend or ex-wife or whatever she is — who looks a lot like Karo sans his pigment condition — gestures both her boys back in the house. She’s wearing the same basic clothes as the rest of them, and the only thing that differentiates her is the distended belly poking out from the bottom of her white shirt.
I look at Jovas. “Is she pregnant?”
“That child’s not mine,” he says briskly, like he wants to change the subject. Which, yeah, I’d be the same way. That’s a heavy thing to hear, and I don’t know if I should console him or do anything. How devastated would I be if I were in his situation, if I found out Shugar had knocked up Jenny?
I’m trying to figure out how all these relationships are connected. Was Jovas married to this woman long enough to have two kids with her until she cheated on him? Maybe he got pissed off when he found out the child wasn’t his and he ended it, but they’re all coming together today for their version of Thanksgiving for the kids’ sake. Or did she end it with him when she discovered he had a secret boyfriend? I can’t ask him any of this potentially sensitive stuff, because, I mean, I just met the guy.
No matter what, there’s bound to be some drama tonight in this house.
The woman puts her hand on his shoulder, and Not-as-Little Dude shoots her a disapproving glare, his brows narrowed over his massive emerald eyes. He bares his teeth, whiter and smaller than the adults’. Unimpressed, she pushes him inside and the door closes.
The grinding, meaty sound explodes again. It goes kinda like —
clip-nah rrrip takakakaka
I say, “That sound. Isn’t that from one of the songs Karo sent to Earth?”
“He thought it would be fun to be the first of our kind to be heard by humanity.”
“It’s a really good song. Where is he?”
Jovas points to the distance, where the land slopes down toward a patch of forest. “There’s a creek that way. He’ll be hiding out until we start the feast because his grandmother and I are mad at him.”
“Why?”
Even though it’s hard for him to make words — having to make sure his teeth don’t cut his lips again — he has a lot he wants to say. “For generations our people have gone out of our way to avoid contact with Earth. I’ll never understand why, but Karo has been fond of humanity since I’ve known him — of your music, your sports, your sense of humor — and he didn’t want to stay hidden. He began emulating your songs the best he could. He picked a favorite football team. He learned your languages and begged me to practice them with him.”
“Are you the Ravens fan?”
“No one else here cares about football except for him. We don’t like anything about humanity.”
I probably should feel insulted that an entire planet despises us, but, I mean, I’m not too fond of us either.
He says, “This is what he wanted — you here with us. He’s spontaneous, unpredictable, reckless, and sometimes devastating.” After a pause, he adds, “I suppose that’s what attracted me to him in the first place.”
Jovas is taking me toward where the sound is coming from. We’re walking down a wide dirt path that leads to a large and featureless LEGO brick of a building that must be a quarter of a mile away. The ground beneath me is embedded with beastly footprints that are at least ten times the size of my own, and they all go in one direction: toward the building.
He says, “I would do anything for him.”
“What is that?” Even though the building is as white and glimmering as a pearl, every step closer makes my defenses go up. A pair of towering doors have been left open, like a gaping mouth insisting that I come in. Even from our distance, I can feel the warmth and wetness from the emanating air, which reeks of something metallic and god-awful.
“This is where I work with Karo’s grandmother. We package and ship our meat out of here to cities across the world. Working on a ranch, we get to select the freshest cuts for ourselves. As tonight’s guest, you will pick out our kill.”
“Okay. When do you want me to do that?”
“Now.”
Grazing in every direction are the turkey/dinosaur/whatever beasts. If they wanted to, they could take us out with a single lazy step over our faces. There are at least a hundred of them. Unlike the ranches I’m used to, there are no fences here, but the dispersed herd with their tired eyes clearly has no intention of taking off.
I’m not sure what physical features I’m supposed to be looking for, so I point to one of them at random. “That one, I guess.”
As if he could hear and understand me, the beast emerges from the crops and onto the dirt path, his head hung low, like he’s ashamed of what he’s doing or about to do. His head, then his fattened-up body, then finally his tail slips into the darkness of the building’s open doors.
He’s not being escorted by anyone.
“What’s he doing?” I turn to Jovas.
He reaches into the pocket of his butcher’s smock and hands me a set of earplugs. “Put these in.”
The path forks in two directions. The first goes straight to the barn doors. We take the second, more narrow path. It veers to the right and leads to a closed door smaller than I am on the side of the building.
I should have done what Avery suggested: forget about my plan, forget about Jenny, and play Mario Kart with him and maybe find a new girlfriend. Because right now, Jovas might very well be leading me into a place worse than death. He’ll tie my hands and feet to a cold, surgical table, and he’ll cut me open while I’m still alive.
My muscles tighten and the remnants of the panic attack are resurfacing. Jovas, the Centaurian with the bloody clothes and a butcher’s knife in a holster strapped to his waist, is guiding me into a slaughterhouse.
Jovas opens the door and walks right in, but I have to duck down and pinch my shoulders together. We’re in an office of sorts, and he hands me one of the fresh smocks that are hung up. It’s too small for me to tie it in the back, so I leave it undone. The tubular bulbs that graze the top of my head are reminiscent of fluorescent lights, though smoother and softer like LEDs. I barely have time to process anything else, because he opens a second door and we’re on a vast slaughterhouse floor. I’m terrified, but it’s like my legs are fascinated, because they keep moving forward even though I don’t want them to.
Beyond a chain-link fence that goes up to my chest and to the top of Jovas’s head, there’s a row of headless beasts hundreds of feet above. They’re hanging upside down from the ceiling by their Achilles tendons, their bodies flat and empty. A conveyor moves them down about twenty feet, causing their bodies to jostle and bump against each other, and an empty set of hooks appears.
The gentle beast that I picked out surveys his surroundings with the blank, uneas
y expression of a child who can’t find his parents at the grocery store. He huffs, then bobs his head forward and makes a birdlike and timid chirp that contradicts his massive size.
I rest my hands on the fence and lean forward. He’s standing on a round plastic tarp, cocking his head curiously at all the others who came before him, now dangling and headless. He’s standing in front of a gray telephone booth–shaped box as tall as he is. It’s entirely featureless, but I can’t stop staring at it.
I say, “How did he know to come in here?”
But Jovas can’t hear me. His two little ear holes are plugged.
A clamp shoots out from the top of the box and grabs the beast by the neck, then slices off his head like a cigar cutter in a clip, then a gasping nah sound. A squirt of hot blood shoots in my direction, landing on my neck and face. A long, curved blade appears from the bottom, rrripping his belly to the top of his rib cage, and all of his guts and organs plop onto the tarp with a sickening squish. Then a black bazooka-looking gun pounds away at the severed neck and gaping belly — TAKAKAKAKA. The jackhammer-like rattling is like two punches on either side of my face, resonating painfully in my jawbone. I wince and shield my ears, but all that’s left is an echo lingering in the slaughterhouse.
It all took less than three seconds.
My ears are ringing something so fierce, it’s making me nauseous.
The headless and gutless beast stumbles, then flops lifelessly to the left of the tarp, his hind legs stretched out behind him the way Princess’s do when she’s lying on her belly.
The sun is shining onto his tail through the double doors.
A mechanical arm swoops down from the ceiling and latches on to his rear lower legs, then quickly and silently raises him onto the empty hooks. A chill goes down my legs to the recessed spot between my Achilles and ankles where the hooks slipped effortlessly through the beast’s leathery skin. But I’m actually not horrified, which is weird. Now that I think about it, my panic attack has almost entirely retreated.
I wipe the blood off my face, clean my hands on my shirt, and fake a laugh. “That’s exactly how we butcher our turkeys.”
