Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  My mother reached out and hugged Auntie Lulu to her breast. I expected them to cry, but neither did. My mother scrunched her face in concern. Auntie Lulu allowed herself to be held, protected. Her shoulders slumped and relaxed.

  As if to impress the surreal scene into our memory, a tinker led his mule-drawn cart along the busy street below, advertising his knife-sharpening services on a bullhorn. All four of us craned our necks to see beneath the half-wall. In a time long past, before the renovation, before the end of the civil war, before malls and French supermarkets, tradesmen traversed our street. The women of the neighborhood would call to them from balconies and stairwells. But now we were silent, as if studying a rare relic, a momentary, ephemeral glimmer of what once was.

  About six months before Walid disappeared, I introduced him to Alex, a boy I was dating. Alex and I were at a coffee shop in the neighborhood when I saw Walid walking home and called to him. He was courteous, said his pleasure-to-meet-you-how-are-you, but when Alex extended his hand, Walid didn’t shake it. Alex ignored the insult, either because he didn’t consider it important or because he was dense. I couldn’t. That evening, after his fourth prayer, I cornered Walid in his room and let him have it. He was thin, all skin and bones and flaring acne, and I wanted to press my thumbs through the saddle-shaped hollows of his collarbones until he submitted. I didn’t allow him to stand up. He remained kneeling, the bed behind him, its sheets at low tide. How could he? I demanded. How could he be so inconsiderate to another person, to me, to someone I cared about? Was he now unable to touch a non-Muslim? Would shaking the hand of a Christian pollute his soul? He kept looking up at me with those embarrassed Arab eyes—desert, warm nights, vast and sorrowful. I wanted to pluck every single hair of that sad, inchoate peach fuzz on his chin. He would not repeat this performance, I swore. When he met Alex next, as I assured him he would, he was to shake his hand and not hurry home to wash, or I would never speak to him again. I accused him of always smelling of moisturizing lotion and disinfectant. His eyes didn’t leave me. He looked like a monk in a Zurbarán painting.

  The second time they met, two evenings later, Walid rushed to shake Alex’s hand. I felt guilty because Alex and I had been kissing in the car and his hand had ventured into virgin territory, returning with the faintest scent of meat and yeast and brine. When we got home, I told Walid he could wash his hands if he wanted. He said he could wait, his smile and eyes grasping for approval. He looked new to me.

  In 2001, a few days after the planes were used as suicide missiles, the fbi or the cia or some American agency released the names of nineteen men, one of whom was Lebanese, Ziad Jarrah. We were shocked, then horrified, then furious. He wasn’t a murderer. He was like us. He was Sunni, middle-class, well educated, good family, nice guy. His mother went on television, his father, his uncle. They were secular, they said, and so was their boy. Like Walid and me, Ziad attended a French Catholic school. He had a girlfriend, his father insisted on television, a German girlfriend. He held up pictures of the couple for the camera, dancing in a nightclub, happy and not sober. His mother said he’d called her two days before the attack to tell her he was coming home for his cousin’s wedding. He’d bought a new suit. He loved weddings. He was normal.

  “Just because he’s on the plane,” my mother said at the time, “they think he’s a terrorist.”

  His German girlfriend had talked to him three hours before the flight. He was pleasant and flirty. They were getting married. She had never met any of the other hijackers and had never heard her fiancé mention any of them. He’d never been to a mosque as far as she knew. He wasn’t that way.

  “Not just one of the hijackers,” Auntie Fadia said, “but a pilot, and of course he was supposed to have flown the one plane that didn’t reach its target. He crashed it. Incompetent terrorists, that’s how they see the Lebanese.”

  We were angry. Why wasn’t it possible for them to see the poor guy as a passenger? He was a victim as well. He was like us.

  His mother cried on camera. “They don’t know about us.”

  One of us, a grainy, somewhat pixilated picture, his school id or driver’s license, flickered in the top right corner of the television screen.

  Not too long after, though, Bin Laden released a statement about the events, and he made sure to praise the martyrs, as he called them. He spoke of them in general but mentioned two names specifically: the Egyptian and the Lebanese, Ziad Jarrah.

  I could only imagine what his mother must have felt when she heard her son’s name on Bin Laden’s lips.

  Later, when a tape of the pilot making an announcement to the passengers of flight ua93 was released to the media, her remaining time on earth must have been shortened by half.

  “This is your captain speaking,” her son’s voice said. “Would like you all to remain seated. There is a bomb on board …”

  I asked Walid what he thought of Ziad Jarrah.

  “I try hard not to think of him,” he said, “or his poor mother.” My Walid was normal.

  I could still hear the tinker’s bullhorn down the street, but I could no longer see him or his mule. As the coven drank their coffee, I lit my first cigarette of the morning. I was trying to cut down. I didn’t want to smoke as much as they did.

  “I’ll need to get my eyebrows done as well,” Auntie Fadia said. “This evening will be good.”

  “I know he wasn’t listening,” Auntie Lulu said, “but I told him I’m saving his Tintins just in case.” Her face remained expressionless as though it had been cast in wax.

  My mother raised her eyes above the half-wall, to the section of the sky that could be seen, and sighed. She looked as if she were waiting for the heavens to crack open, for Gabriel, the trumpet-tongued angel, to explain the way of the world to her—the way of this impermanent world.

  Like our family, the Itanis owned a small plot in a local graveyard, in which members of the family were supposed to be interred. Walid’s place would be unused, probably as long as Auntie Lulu remained. I couldn’t predict whether it would remain on hold after she left.

  My spot was reserved, my own special Golgotha. I hadn’t seen it, yet I knew where it was in principle, next to my parents and grandparents, to the left of my mother’s. Would I insist on using it if I married? Would I want to be buried next to my future husband? Would I keep my name?

  The gravestone, upon its body, should begin to consider where my name would be inscribed.

  Unathi Battles the Black Hairballs

  Lauren Beukes

  Unathi was singing karaoke when the creature attacked Tokyo. Or rather, she was about to sing karaoke. Was, in fact, about to be the very first person in Shibuya’s Big Echo to break in the newly uploaded Britney come-back hip-hop remix of the Spice Girls’ classic “Tell Me What You Want (What You Really Really Want).”

  It was, admittedly, early in the day to be breaking out the microphone, but Unathi was on shore leave, and the truth was that she and the rest of Saiko Squadron weren’t up early so much as they were still going from last night, lubricated on a slick of sake that ran from here to Tokohama.

  Unathi stepped up onto the table in their private booth, briefly giving her madoda a flash of white briefs under her pleated miniskirt. When she was on duty as Flight Sergeant of the squadron, she kept strictly to her maroon and gray flight suit or the casual comfort of her military-issue tracksuit.

  In her private life, however, Unathi tended to be outrageous. Back in Johannesburg, before she’d been recruited to the most elite mecha squadron on the planet, she hung out at 44 Stanley and Newtown, where she’d been amakipkip to the max. Named for the cheap multicolored popcorn, the neo-pantsula-gangster-punk aesthetic had her pairing purple skin-tight jeans with eye-bleeding oranges and greens, and a pair of leopard-print heels, together with her Mohawk, added five inches to her petite frame.

  In her newly adopted home, she tended toward Punk Lolita. And not some Gwen Stefani Harajuku-wannabe Lolipunk either. In civvies, she wo
re a schoolgirl skirt cut from an antique kimono that had survived the bombing of Hiroshima according to the garment dealer’s providence, and she’d grown her hair out into little twists that were more combat-friendly than her Mohawk. But the highlight of her look was a pair of knee-high white patent combat boots made from the penis leather of a whale she had slaughtered herself.

  Now, standing on the karaoke booth table, the light of the disco ball glittered behind her head like a halo. As she raised the mic to her perfect, pierced lips, time shifted into glorious slow-mo.

  Or maybe that was just the impression of First Lieutenant Ryu Nakamura—a street fighter in his spare time and in love with Flight Sergeant Unathi Mathabane like a plant is in love with photosynthesis.

  Around her, Ryu found that time went gooey at the edges, like unagi on a hot summer’s day. Unfortunately, so did his tongue, hanging limp and useless in his mouth in her proximity, unless he was responding to a direct order. He’d been planning to spill his guts about what was in his heart via a romantic duet already queued in the karaoke machine.

  But that was before a flailing phallic tentacle ripped through the wall of the Big Echo, sending glass and brick and people flying.

  The tentacle was monstrous, a thick and glossy tendril of black hair the diameter of a compact Japanese car. It was equipped with eviscerating spikes and, on the bulbous, eyeless head, a mouth full of spiny black teeth.

  The force of the initial attack flipped over the table Unathi was standing on, sending her crashing to the floor. She hit the ground head-first with a crack like a rupturing tectonic plate. A moment later the table smashed down onto her chest, driving the air out of her lungs. The black bubbles of a mild concussion popped across her vision. In the background, Britney rapped the Spice Girls classic over a thudding raunchy beat.

  While Unathi struggled to get up, the tentacle made sushi of Saiko squadron. It snapped Chief Engineer Sato’s spine so violently that his vertebrae erupted through his stomach. He twitched and flopped obscenely, only inches away from her on the carpet. A spike gutted Ensign Tanaka and another tore Corporal Suzuki in half. And then the tentacle bit off Ryu’s head in one neat snap of those spiny teeth.

  The karaoke jukebox clicked over to the duet. Looking in your eyes, there’s reflected paradise. And that might have been true if Ryu still had eyes, or, for that matter, a head. His body stood swaying for a moment, like an indecisive drunk. And then a bright, hot jet of blood fountained from the stump of his neck, spraying Unathi in the face like some vampire bukkake video. She managed to suck in enough air to scream. She’d had an inkling of his crush. It was in the way he showed all his teeth and scratched the back of his head whenever she gave him a direct order. The cheesy 80s duet cemented it. And now he was dead. The whole of Saiko Squadron was dead. And, worse, there was blood and spilt sake on her white patent whale penis leather boots.

  “Someone is going to fucking pay!” Unathi growled in the back of her throat.

  She shoved the table off her chest and yanked herself to her feet, drawing her sabre. But the tentacle was already withdrawing, slithering back through the carnage. She vaulted the upturned table (and the still-flopping Chief Engineer Sato) and leapt through the smashed remains of what had once been a wall. She landed in a crouch in her heeled boots and looked up to see the creature looming above the couture capital of Shibuya 109, a mall that made Sandton City look like a fong kong fleamarket.

  The creature resembled a Godzilla-sized hairball matted with blood. Inside the tangle of black hair, gaping mouths lined with rows of sharks’ teeth gnashed opened and closed. Tendrils of hair thrashed from the thing’s body like an epileptic cartoon octopus, leaving gashes ripped through high-rises, laying waste to historic pagodas and skyscrapers alike.

  Unathi got to her feet and started running, not toward the creature, but toward her mecha, stashed eight blocks away on Takeshita Street—the only place she could find parking.

  The giant robot—a Ghost VF-3—was painted in zebra stripes as a little homage to her hometown. It was sitting dormant, exactly as she’d left it, bar the parking ticket pasted onto the ergonomic claw of the mecha’s left foot. Unathi yanked it off, folded it into an origami unicorn and left it on the pavement as a little “fuck you” for the meter maid—no doubt, like all of Tokyo’s public servants, an android who could only dream of being human.

  She scrambled up the front of the robot using the multiple revolving turrets of the massive chest cannon as footholds, only to spend the next five minutes sitting on the mecha’s armored shoulder, searching through her oversized Louis Vuitton bag for her keys.

  They were right at the bottom, sandwiched between her Hello Kitty vibrator and a bento box containing yesterday’s uneaten lunch. She bleep-bleeped the immobilizer, and with a hydraulic hiss and an actuator hum the robot’s blank-faced head folded back on its shoulders, revealing the cockpit. Unathi pounced into the pilot’s seat and started flipping switches.

  Beneath her, the Ghost VF-3 started to thrum as the engines powered up. The decorative samurai armor spines on its back flipped down and fanned out to become interlocking fighter-jet wings. The whole street was vibrating now with the throbbing force of the engine. Windows in the neighboring skyscrapers were rattling. Unathi happily hummed the Top Gun theme to herself while she calculated the sudoko puzzle on the virtual display unit that would unlock the VF-3’s weapons systems.

  “Weapons activated,” a serene female voice said as Unathi plugged in the last digit. A four. Like the four men of Saiko Squadron lying in pools of their own blood and spinal fluid back in the Big Echo. With a grimace, she hit the thrusters and the Ghost VF-3 burst into the sky, leaving a crater behind it in the tarmac. On the pavement, the origami unicorn caught fire.

  The battle was a blur. Literally. Possibly because she was still drunk.

  There were sweeping colors and motion lines as the Ghost VF-3 launched toward the evil hairball. There was a shuddering frame-by-frame slow-mo as one of the tentacles smashed into the mecha. Another as the VF-3 doubled over from the blow and catapulted backwards—and straight through Shibuya 109. In the streets below, ducking the falling rubble and the flaming, tattered ruins of high couture, fashionable teen girls screamed in an agony of loss.

  Inside the cockpit, Unathi jabbed at the controls and broke out her nastiest tsotsitaal. “Come on! Come on! Msunu ka nyoko!” until the Ghost VF-3 wrenched itself free from Shibuya 109, leaving a mecha-shaped imprint in the rubble. One of her wings had snapped right off with the impact. “For the love of kawaii!” Unathi cursed, pulling up the systems diagnostics check. They sure didn’t make them like they used to. She had told her superiors at High Command they should buy Korean.

  Apart from the broken wing, which would throw her flight patterns for a loop, the damage wasn’t too serious. Some minor bruising to the VF-3’s sidian heat diffusers, an annoying fritz on the rear-facing starboard camera visual systems, but at least the Reaver cannon hadn’t taken a hit. Unathi yanked the joystick forward and the VF-3 bounded down the street toward the hairball, leaving a trail of cracked concrete under every armor-plated footfall (and at least one squished teen fashionista).

  Unathi awoke feeling as if the oni of hangovers had squatted in her mouth. She sat up, her vision still bleary, and immediately started hacking up blood. She wiped her hand across her mouth and looked around. The world oozed in and out of focus. A shadowy figure loomed toward her and resolved himself into a mild-looking middle-aged man, his hand extended to offer her a handkerchief. “Here,” he said, as she dabbed at the bloodstains round her mouth. From the carpet, a black cat with one white ear looked up at her curiously. There was jazz playing quietly in the background. Miles Davis, she guessed, but then her knowledge of jazz was pretty much limited to Miles Davis.

  “Where am I? What happened?” she said, handing back the gobby, bloodied handkerchief. The man folded it up and tucked it into a pocket.

  “Perhaps you should tell me?” the man said, til
ting his head at the smoking VF-3 wreck lying sprawled in the ruins of what was once a tidy little kitchen. Actually, it was only part of the mecha; the head, one shoulder and the ripped chassis of half the chest cavity partially melted to fuse with the shredded remnants of the Reaver cannon. Unathi felt a hitch in her throat at the sight. First her boots, now her VF-3. Was there no end to the horror?

  She closed her eyes. The memory of what happened came in Polaroid flashes of the action.

  The Ghost VF-3 crashing down into Shibuya station.

  The hairball swallowing up half a train, which disappeared into one of those gnashing mouths like it was a tunnel.

  The VF-3 seizing the nearest thing to hand, which just happened to be a panty-vending machine, and hurling it at the beast.

  Scorched panties drifting down through the sky.

  Launching into the sky, locked together like fighting hawks, her damaged wing sending them spiralling in crazy loops.

  And then, weirdest of all, in the moment just before two tentacles seized the legs and chest of the Ghost VF-3 and twisted, shearing through the metal with a horrible, mangled screech, she had plunged the mecha’s hands into the heart of the thing and yanked the hair apart like a curtain, revealing … a multicolored smiley-faced flower.

  “Would you like some spaghetti?” the man asked. He ducked under the sparking wiring of the VF-3’s amputated arm to the stove, miraculously still intact, where a pot was bubbling.

  “Hai, baba. I have to get back. I have to destroy that thing!” Unathi snapped, lurching to her feet.

  “You shouldn’t go into battle on an empty stomach,” he said mildly, dishing out a bowl of spaghetti for himself. He added fresh basil.

  Unathi narrowed her eyes. “You know, for someone who just had the flaming wreckage of a mecha crash through his kitchen, you’re being suspiciously calm about all this. Who the hell are you?”