Once More Into The Abyss: A Tor.Com Original

by Dennis Danvers

  “Holy shit.”

  “There’s more.”

  So I tell him the whole story right up to the last message from Simon Deetermeyer himself.

  “So y’all are just uprooting and going to New Mexico? To that place of all places? Jeez, Stan, this is the loopiest thing you’ve ever done.”

  “I thought that was marrying Katyana. That’s turned out so horrible I can hardly begin to describe my suffering to you.”

  “You don’t have to get snippy. I’m happy for you. How’s Dylan?”

  I tell him about our anniversary breakfast. He doesn’t snicker once during the whole thing, and tells me what a sweet kid I have.

  So I’m not exactly surprised when he says, “Can I come with you? I don’t know how I’d get out there otherwise. I mean, if Deetermeyer’s right, I don’t want to miss it. I’d drive myself, but they took my license away.”

  “Of course, Ollie. The more the merrier.”

  He doesn’t even tell me not to call him Ollie.

  * * *

  When Ollie and I were little, we used to ride along with Dad summers, in the back seat of the company car. He was a traveling salesman with a five-state territory and was away a lot. According to Simon Deetermeyer’s research, traveling salesman was a favorite job among the original aliens. They were ideally suited—restless chameleons with tons of empathy and a ready wit. In Dad’s case—a pharmaceutical representative, aka prescription drug peddler, aka detail man—his work may also have been research on humans. You can learn a lot about a species by what ails them, what they choose to treat, the medicines they’ll take and the ones they won’t.

  In Dad’s day, ulcers were big. Now, I suppose it’s failing hearts, failing minds. Then, as now, the gatekeeper to many a medical professional was a woman. Dad had a way with women, as most alien men do—maybe one of the reasons Mom traveled with him in the summers, so all his girlfriends on the road could have a look at his happy family. There was a waitress in a Mexican restaurant in San Angelo who knew Dad by name, knew what he ordered, and was pretty nervous the whole time, Dad too, but that was one time out of thousands of restaurants, and Mom seemed to find the whole thing amusing. We were often a happy family, and we were happiest, seems to me, those summers on the road. We loved it. Me more than Ollie maybe, since it began to compete with his interest in girls. When he hit sixteen I mostly had Mom and Dad to myself, crisscrossing his territory. Ollie missed a lot.

  We stopped often, which Dad didn’t usually do when he was working. He would take note of anything that looked interesting to him, or might be interesting to me or Mom, during the year and wait till we were along to take it in. It might be an enormous model train layout or an impressionist painting or a snake farm or a hot blues band or a cemetery. Mom and Dad had a thing about cemeteries. All of us would wander around like they were sculpture gardens. I was always on the lookout for angels. Ollie bellyached about it, and we all ignored him, but I didn’t miss him when he quit coming along. Sometimes when it was just the three of us wandering among the dead at sunset, Dad would say, I wonder what Ollie’s up to now, all wistful, like he wished he was with us. Mom would answer his question with the name of some girl Ollie was screwing, half of whom I never met. He was five years older, in a different universe where people actually fucked. There was plenty of drama—angry girls on the phone who would even talk to me to relay a pleading message to Ollie—so I kind of believed him when he’d say he wished he’d been there to see the Monet, the 76 Deadly Rattlers in a Pit, or the Plains Indian Museum.

  Now here we are two old geezers in the back seat of Katyana’s Outback, rocketing through Texas, Katyana at the wheel, singing along with the music Dylan (riding shotgun) has selected from his phone, some band I don’t know the name of but I like. Alien men like to keep up with what’s current, hate oldies stations with a passion.

  Katyana has a beautiful voice. Alien women often possess beautiful singing voices. Dad once bragged to me and Ollie that our Mom sang Madame Butterfly to a standing ovation in her youth, and she told him to shush and soon left the room, tears welling in her eyes. Aliens are often tortured by unfulfilled artistic ambitions. Mom had several—painting, singing, poetry. Dad was a failed mystery writer and standup comedian. He loved to tell jokes. He was a master at it.

  They were a talented pair. But they knew they weren’t ordinary humans, and when their mission was completed, they would have to return home and turn their backs on all things human, starting with the human form all the art was about in one way or another. Who knows why an alien would love opera? Did Mom love it because it was alien, or because it was not? Maybe she was weeping because she knew when she shed her human body she would sing no more and live in a world without arias.

  I know I sound crazy. I’ve honed the skill over the years, along with a near total disinterest in what others may think of me. It’s one of the major perks to being an old fart, and don’t underestimate its value. Wish I’d learned the skill years ago.

  Avatar and Myrna sprawl across our laps, twitching and dreaming, making little yippy noises like they could still chase anything. Ollie’s goofy Dane, Horatio, crammed in the back with the luggage, can’t seem to sleep either. He’s not half-grown, already bigger than Avatar, but he’s all legs he can’t get to work together. He’s a clumsy, excitable boy. But once we hit the road something magical happened. I suspect this is his first highway drive with the windows down. Ollie always wants them up. Horatio stares into the wind, transfixed, his ears aflutter. His gyrating nose sucks down the smells until he’s numb with the smell of Everything! Bliss!

  With Katyana at the wheel, the windows are cracked so we can all smell the night air, hear the screeching rush of our passage! Be where we are! That was Dad, when the weather was nice, or we were driving through something he wanted to smell—flowers, horses, the dawn—crack would go the windows. As a kid, I used to close my eyes and imagine I was on a rocket ship bound for Heinlein’s Mars. What a swell place that was. Ollie used to complain he couldn’t hear himself think and Dad would reply in the shout necessary to make himself heard over the roar, like a voice out of a whirlwind— Don’t you get enough of your own thoughts already? Maybe you should listen to the wind instead of your busy little brain.

  I know Ollie didn’t like having his brain called little, because it certainly wasn’t, but the point Dad was trying to make went right by him. It was often like that with those two. Dad would try to pass on some wisdom to Ollie who could give a shit, while I hung on his every word. Those were great times. But this is better. Everything is perfect.

  Here and now. You can’t beat it.

  I look out across the desert landscape of west Texas and think about death. I know the eighty-year morbidity statistic isn’t like a law or anything. I don’t have to die then. Or I could die sooner. I could die right now.

  So what else is new? Death and I have met. He doesn’t scare me anymore. In fact, I often ask myself, If I were to die right now, how would that be? It’s made me a better and happier man. Seconds are precious.

  Ollie’s asleep, which is what I should be doing—we’re due to reach the abyss at dawn—but I can’t sleep—not usually a problem for me this time of night. The dogs and I typically rise early and doze off early. We’ve crossed a time zone, but the dawn’s chasing us. Pretty soon the dogs and I will need to stretch our legs. They’re slow these days but seem to enjoy their long, snuffling walks. They haven’t lost their sense of smell.

  As a kid, one of my first realizations of how weird and unusual my parents were was their attitude toward pets. If we brought it home, and it didn’t belong to somebody else and wasn’t dangerous—no scorpions or poisonous serpents—we could keep it and take care of it, get to know it. But not too many of any one kind. A new species was a shoo-in. Mom ended up doing a lot of the caretaking, of course, but what we weren’t allowed to do was neglect them. If you weren’t willing to hang out with a pet once in a while, maybe they might have something better
to do with their lives than live it in a cage.

  We had a fair number of dogs and cats, but never more than two of each, except for the occasional litter we fostered. Mom was crazy for kittens. Same with turtles, lizards, gerbils, rats. There were fish tanks until Mom rebelled on that one. I can’t blame her. How many ecosystems can you watch collapse, leaving a sea of fetid corpses? I’m guessing there weren’t fish on Mom’s home planet. She couldn’t connect with fish, though she certainly tried.

  With every other pet, however, Mom and Dad were full of information about what they were thinking, feeling, hoping for. To them, all species were sentient creatures. Not like Disney animals but weird and goofy and fun. Complicated.

  Because of the cats, we never did birds—though Mom always chatted up crows wherever they turned up. The one brief exception was a terrified cage-bound parakeet named Luigi who Mom soon drove down to somewhere in Florida to release when she saw how miserable he was.

  He was grateful, Mom reported when she returned, delighted to be outside. Outside doesn’t amount to much if you’re always on the inside looking out at it, but once you’re there? It’s everything! Remember that, boys, she added, another nugget from Mom. Ollie doesn’t even remember it, but it stuck with me. Dad and Ollie used to wound each other, but Ollie mostly ignored Mom, which wounded her, perhaps, most of all. I adored my mom and dad, and then they just left when I’d barely gotten to know them.

  If what Simon says is true, I may soon see them again after almost two billion seconds, most of my life, in other words. If that doesn’t make you lose sleep, I suppose nothing will.

  * * *

  There’s a fence around the perimeter of the abyss, quite a substantial fence, cameras, the whole rigmarole. Yet Simon Deetermeyer climbed over it. Fortunately for me and the dogs, we don’t have to. We’re housed on the abyss side of the fence. On the other is miles and miles of National Forest. Everything’s forest either side of the fence, except for the anomaly, the star of the show, the very deep, very strange hole in the middle of everything. It’s our first morning walk in our new neighborhood on the lip of an enigma, the dogs and I. We’re all a bit nervous, darting our eyes, twitching our noses, leery of shadows.

  You don’t just stumble upon the abyss. You have to navigate a maze of forest roads, each one shittier than the last and certainly bouncier. And even then it seems to come out of nowhere, this emptiness—the abyss.

  Just inside the fence sits a recently constructed three-bedroom house, nothing fancy but sound, the archeologist’s family residence, one of the perks of Katyana’s new job. We are the archeologist’s family, her most cherished artifacts. It’s completely furnished. Everything is beige or worse. We’ll have to make our mark by shedding prodigiously and hanging shit all over the walls. There’s a big eat-in kitchen. We’ll like this place just fine.

  On this first morning in our new home, I slipped out of bed quietly and the dogs followed. Horatio started whining, so I decided to take him with us and let my aged brother sleep. He claims never to get any, but he practically hibernated all the way here, prompting Dylan to ask if Uncle Oliver was all right. He’s eighty-four, I explained. How he manages to walk Horatio, I can’t imagine.

  For me, walking with dogs early in the morning is one of the great pleasures of human life. Horatio is challenging that notion. I want to walk through these magnificent woods and see the sun rise over the abyss. He wants to go berserk in the Forest! He’s never experienced one before. Gone is the Zen dog in the car window. He smells deer and dead things and who knows what all as he races this way and that. We proceed in fits and starts as I stop to reel him back in.

  Avatar puts up with his puppy antics for a few of these episodes, until finally he lets out a fearsome snarl worthy of a satanically possessed werewolf and shows some snaggletooth fang, and damn if huge Horatio doesn’t sink into the dirt and the pine needles in a puddle of submission, while Myrna looks on like that beauty who watched George slay the dragon—if she were a half-daffy collie in her last days. We haven’t got time for this nonsense, she seems to say. Myrna, even now, always acts like she’s got someplace to go, and the herd better stick with her.

  Avatar, as usual, falls in behind her, and Horatio stumbles behind him. Now that Myrna’s lead dog, I can relax. Her navigation skills are still far superior to mine. Around the house the woods are sparse, but they soon grow deep and dark.

  It goes without saying that the dogs believe in the presence of aliens. All dogs do. One sniff, and they know. I’ve never seen it fail. Has your dog ever veered off from his walk, quite out of character, to meet some oncoming stranger in a wagging frenzy? Alien.

  I counted four cameras in the trees aimed at the house, one for each side. Who knows how many are inside? Who knows what might show up out of the abyss?

  When we got here, Katyana and I did a quick dash through the visitor’s center with a tiny museum of the site. There was one car in the parking lot, one guy inside who said he was a volunteer. He volunteered his ignorance of the site, so we wouldn’t make the mistake of asking him any questions. Prominent among the displays was a case full of artifacts from the abyss with the caption Do you know what any of these objects are? What they might have been used for? Damn near anything by the looks of them, as intricate as the complex doodles I draw when I’m on hold listening to oldies, trying to maintain my serenity.

  The artifacts look like things that used to show up in Mom’s weird paintings and mosaics. I asked one time what something was in one of her paintings. She was going through a still life phase. She’d put something like a pile of fruit, a jug of laundry detergent, and a claw hammer on the kitchen table and spend the day painting it, only the jug didn’t look like a jug, and the hammer didn’t look like a hammer, and the fruit looked like fruit from another planet. She was letting me watch. I asked her what the hammer thing was, and she told me it was a thraxle.

  “You bend time with it,” she said, “so you can see what’s around the corner.”

  “You can’t bend time,” I said.

  “Not without a thraxle,” she said.

  I’ve always wanted a thraxle, but as Mom used to say, getting what you want is seriously overrated. She sounded like she spoke from firsthand experience, so I always wondered what had disappointed her, what did she regret? Did she want me and Ollie? I believe she did. What she didn’t want anymore was to leave us and go home. So maybe she will come to see us like Simon said if only just to say good-bye.

  And suddenly the dogs and I are out of the woods, standing at the lip of the abyss, a circular berm that for all the world looks like a pucker. All attempts to measure the depths of the abyss have failed, but the various instruments sent down to plumb it are hauled up encrusted with the artifacts Katyana has come to investigate and understand. What’s not to understand? They’re alien. Inscrutable. Everything is scrutable, Katyana corrects me, even if you don’t know what the fuck it means.

  It’s hard to look dead on at the abyss. There’s no point of reference. You’ve never seen anything like it before. The emptiness seems to draw you in, summon you perhaps, into its inky depths. It’s hard not to feel like no matter what you do, you will fall in.

  But we don’t look into it, the dogs and I, lined up in a row as the sun breaks through the massive pines and warms our faces with delicious light. Even Horatio closes his eyes and tilts back his drooling snout and lets the sun wash over him. We’re only here a few glorious moments in the sun’s embrace. To get here, Myrna led us through deep woods where the sun rarely reaches the forest floor, as if time itself is hiding under the litter of needles and cones. To bring us to dawn.

  Now Myrna unerringly leads us back. There’s not much of a trail to speak of, and everything looks different the other way about. Smells the same, apparently. Myrna never skips a beat. It’s chill and damp, but I can still feel the warmth on my cheeks, note the spring in even Avatar’s step as Myrna takes us home. Horatio ambles behind almost gracefully, as if the years t
he two old dogs seem to have shed have been gifted to him. A walk to remember.

  * * *

  When we step inside we find a household in chaos. In honor of our possible reunion with our folks, Ollie’s decided to make a Big Breakfast Like Dad Used to Cook. Indeed. There are pancakes. There are potatoes. A mountain of scrambled eggs. There is what looks like a pound of bacon frying in the skillet. Katyana and I are both vegans. Whoever thoughtfully stocked the fridge obviously wasn’t informed of this fact.

  The dogs are dazed with passionate longing for whatever shit that is simmering in the pan. It’s been some intense moments for Horatio—Car Window, Forest, Dawn, and now Bacon! But even Myrna isn’t blasé about the aroma of fatty, salty bacon in the air. She’s chattering like she used to do in her youth, and I have to smile. This is my brother. He’s just like Dad. We both are.

  “Tell your wife,” Ollie says, “that you will have some of this perfectly fried bacon in Dad’s honor.” Ollie’s been talking about Dad a lot, like he really might see him again, get a second chance to get things right. Maybe alien parents should stay dead like normal parents do. Ollie’s spent decades getting over a few things about them and finally seems at peace with them. I’m afraid if they show up, they’ll only piss him off again, and all that counseling will have been for naught. Horatio is about eye level with the pan. His drool streams to the kitchen floor. Ollie looks down at him. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Might as well think about it, Horatio,” I say. “I’m not having any.”

  “Stan, nobody lives forever.”

  “How about longer? Is that okay with you? I’m not having any.”

  “What about you?” he asks Katyana.

  “I love you, Ollie, but no thanks, and please don’t ever cook bacon in our shared kitchen again.”

  He likes the “Ollie” from her, who wouldn’t, the way she purrs it? But he’s standing there with a platter of bacon fried to perfection just like Dad taught us, dying to serve it to somebody, but there’s no one to serve.