Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  The fight begins. The ex-husband finds them sitting in the car, chatting. He is furious. He tries to drag his ex-wife out of the car. Fist crushes bone. Ramon intervenes.

  “Stop!”

  Five .38 shots in the night.

  Later I will walk up to Arturo de Córdova as he sits at the table of a popular nightclub. I will tell him Ramon has died.

  I return with a fresh copy of a newspaper rolled under my arm. The headline reads: “No clue of the killer’s whereabouts.” It will make a lovely addition to my collection.

  Passing the fourth floor on the way up the stairs to my apartment, I see that the neighbour’s door is open and they’re dragging out his furniture. The super doesn’t think he’ll be back. She confiscates his TV.

  It’s a city of vultures in an age of carrion. I turn my head and pretend not to see.

  Instead I steal a peek at the screen of my camera. The face of Arturo de Córdova stares back at me, caught in the moment I delivered the news. Grief in amber. Precious.

  Next year I’ll collect another luminary. Another May death. Agustín de Anda. He looked amazing in Las manzanas de Dorotea.

  I hear cats meowing but I’m far away, lost in halftone smiles of long-dead stars.

  Bio-Anger

  Kiini Ibura Salaam

  rattling. rattling snaking around in my ears. echoes of rattling erupting in my temples. i hear a pop like the little explosions of air that punctuate my ear canals when i’m nearing the ocean floor. reflex. by reflex, i try to turn toward the sound, but my head is tethered in position. the rattling dies out with a slithering hiss. sharp parallel bands of light cut across the room. my head jerks back when light hits my eyes. behind me, somebody lets loose a low, raspy laugh.

  “A little jittery, ain’t you,” the laugher mumbles. doesn’t bother with volume, doesn’t separate his words; just lets them tumble out any which way, leaving me to pick meaning out of a jumbled mass of sound.

  “So it was a bio-anger, then?” another voice asks. clipped and precise tones dart around my head. a man slides across my view. i see the darkness of his pants leg skim the floor. i can’t make out a chair. looks as if he is gliding on air. been Under so long, everything on the Surface strikes me as strange.

  man stops in front of me—face so close to mine, i can see blueness of veins, redness of vessels just under his skin. fold my lips together; try to speak. try bringing up the “b” in “bio-anger,” but my jaw is so tired. my lips fall slack before i can get any sound to part them.

  “Won’t speak, huh?” those clipped tones don’t reach my ear until after the man’s lips stop moving.

  i set my jaw, try to squeeze out a “c.” CAN’T SPEAK, i yell in my mind. can’t even get a sound to whisper out of my mouth.

  “Nothing wrong with her vocal cords.” so says the mumbler. “Had ’em checked. Only part of her in good shape.” chuckles, but stays out of view.

  metal grate of an old machine lays dead in the corner. at first, the blank wall behind the clipped-tone man has nothing to tell me. then the banner blinks on. top fourth of wall glows red. bold white letters scroll across the red: 0.74 millimeters of coastal loss since 10 a.m., 22.6 million square miles of land remaining.

  “Knew it was broken,” mumbler says.

  “Your banner broken?” clipped tones asks.

  “Yeah, this morning when I left, said we had 24.2 million square miles. Knew something had changed. What about dead zones?”

  “Don’t know … don’t fuss over any of it. Nothing but a bother. Can’t fix Earth. Wish I could turn mine off.”

  “Wish I had yours. Can’t sleep without the latest. Look, no Earth Strikes for 24 hours! Thought for sure the night shift would have gotten one.”

  “Why do you think we’re working this one over? Word came from upstairs. Can’t let another 24 hours pass without a report. Have to deliver one tonight.”

  silence falls. the feel of the mumbler eyeing me trips across the back of my neck. feel a nervous tingle in my eyebrow. my knee jerks up. surprised my feet aren’t tied.

  “Won’t work, sweetheart,” clipped-tones says. twirling a small square mirror in his hands.

  a burning ache starts biting at the bottoms of my feet. fingers twitching now. thin, sticky fabric stretched across my thighs catch on my peeling fingertips. clipped-tones notices.

  “Had to dress you. Your clothes were in bloody shreds. What did this to you?”

  i tune out. let the words fall around me undeciphered. wonder: can water slide over these thin, sticky tights. if i escape, could i wear this to get back Under?

  when i don’t speak, clipped-tones slides the mirror between my face and his. i draw away from the face in the mirror.

  “No sense hiding from it. Hurt’s been done.” so says the mumbler.

  i steel myself and turn back to the mirror. the face i see is not my face. purple-black bruises flowering around the eyes—no big surprise. headache splitting my skull can’t be from a bug bite. slowly turn my head. ragged smear of tiny punctures—neatly gridded—crawls up my left cheek. a thin bloody shadow blankets the wounds. other side of my face, no better. a wide gash—dry, but glistening—cuts across my right cheek. puffed and pimply skin bloating around my mouth. salty water rises, clawing its way to my eyes. i will it back down—ain’t the place to shed a tear, even if it’s for my own flesh.

  “So, coordinates. Where did it happen? People need to know.”

  shake my head. from what i hear, a bio-anger is nothing like they make it seem on the Net. just because an Earth Strike breaks a few bones doesn’t mean Earth is angry. once you been Under, you stop thinking Earth even notices you. we can’t make Earth angry. we’re about as important as globs of spit.

  “What’s this then?” clipped-tones ask. i hear the mumbler clicking away on his hand-unit just behind my head. taking notes? sending messages? preparing a profile to send to the NewsNet? the mirror shifts from my face to flash on my neck and shoulders. first real mirror i’ve seen in a long time. clipped-tones tilts it, showing me a deep groove splitting the flesh above my breasts. thick and hard in some spots, too dry to be new. don’t need a mirror to see it cut across my chest, arc over my shoulders, rip across my upper back.

  wet my lips. try to push out “Und—” but my mouth is useless. lift my hand. try pointing down. ragged fingernails scratch at the sticky fabric on my legs.

  “What’s she trying to say?” mumbler asks from behind me.

  clipped-tone man shrugs.

  bang my feet on the floor. UNDER, yelling in my head. thought everyone on the Surface knew about us. Under. i’m damn near a lifer down there. been wearing the tank so long, the edges of the headgear grew into my flesh, got a little more comfortable—you could say. never mattered to me. better fit means less accidents. less accidents means more runs. more runs means more money i can send up to this damn air-breathing place. don’t expect no enviro-cop to ever understand that. us who live Under were born with hard choices to make, that’s all. some people end eighteen years of hard labor tied to a chair with a busted up face, others get to slide by them waving a mirror around. just the way it goes on the Surface.

  new sound behind my ear. shrill, metallic. sounds like the arms or legs of a machine clicking into sharp-angled positions. something cold and rigid presses on either side my neck: the metal was clicking for me.

  “You sure you have nothing to tell us?” man with the mirror asks. nervous edges flutter in his voice. sounds scared of what’s about to happen. “Look,” he says, drops his voice down to a whisper, slides closer. “We don’t have to link you up. You just cooperate, and we won’t have to extract the information. It’s easier if you talk. Can’t run your story without full details.”

  something heavy and round pushes against the base of my skull. panic wells up in my chest. gulp wildly. try to suck up enough air to force sound out of my mouth. CAN’T SPEAK! CAN’T SPEAK! CAN’T SPEAK! strain so hard my body jerks against the restraints. veins and voca
l cords bulge in my throat. feet pound the floor.

  “I know, I know,” clipped-tones says spreading his hands out. “Just stop. I know you can’t speak. We just … We’re going to have to ….”

  “Enough with the warnings. Just get on with it already,” mumbler says. “You know the drill. Let’s move.”

  “She can’t speak,” man with the mirror says. looks over my head at his partner.

  “Don’t matter,” says mumbler. “They want the story by 8, it’s going to run at 10. They’re already advertising.”

  a few drops of water fall out of my eyes. “extract information.” they’ll dig through my memories like starving squatters clawing through a garbage dump. grab my emotions, download them, dress them up, and beam a tearjerker to the NewsNet. who cares if there really was a bio-anger. there will be one now.

  flash of light—blinding—rips across my vision. inhale deeply. “Pain,” i think. “That was pain.” was pain? hear a tortured yell. behind me, the mumbler is losing it. wet, feral screams splattering against my back. clipped-tone man jumps out of his chair. his mouth moves but i hear no words.

  something is wrong.

  no more pain. splitting headache, gone. heat rests weighty between my legs. arms and hands don’t feel like mine—they feel thick and heavy. the room, the clipped-tone man, and the NewsNet banner all melt away. i am sitting in nothingness. nothing around me but a table laden with piles of ghostly flesh. not meat, not food—human bodies. curves of elbow and knee jut out from a sea of skin. here and there an ear, a chin, a pair of lips poke up from the jumble. my mouth moves easily. i lick my lips. no pain in my jaw.

  i am aroused.

  when my mouth moves, a voice trickles out. the voice is disembodied and tangled—and it is not mine. it is the same voice that has been muttering behind me since i woke tied to this chair. the mumbler’s voice pouring from me, stream of broken diction rambling about women and the marks of saliva he’s left behind on their skin. this is the mumbler’s voice; this must also be his tongue. his tongue resting in my mouth. his tongue moistening at the thought of ghostly flesh made real.

  odd memories begin to rain through my body. i am seeing and remembering parts of the female body that I’ve never touched. salivating for the crease of a breast resting on a fleshy torso, longing to push apart meaty female thighs. i fall back into my body for a split second. the room is just as i left it—stark, bright, unadorned. i am still tethered to a chair, and the mumbler is still yowling like an animal. clipped-tone man is behind me now, speaking to the mumbler in a voice that pulses with both worry and soothing. then i understand:

  that cold metal circle. the pressure at the base of my skull. the wrong source— it’s tapping into the wrong source.

  hunger whips through me like an electric shock, bringing me back to the mumbler’s table. i am the mumbler. predatory. needy. hoarder of fleshy victories. this is my table now, i own these body parts. i need what he needs: bodies, flesh; have no use for feelings. crave the tabled flesh. lift my bound hands, reach for it. hunger erases my boundaries. the room, my bruised body, it all slides away. the mumbler’s memories gush into me, become mine.

  something funky and toxic pulses deep in the viscera of my body. a multitude of tiny dried pellets, brittle-shelled capsules are lodged deep in my bowels. that’s what’s left of these women after i have lain with them; fed of them, then condemned them to this ghostly pile, this monument of memory.

  i sift through limbs, searching for flesh that hasn’t soured or been sucked dry. searching for a ghost that will yield her heart. not the heart that beats blood, the heart between her legs; the heart that speaks to her in feverish rushing whispers. the heart she works hard to ignore.

  i finger ghostly bodies, reenact his methods to shut down thought, pluck away restraint, create a frenzy of need until the heart lodged in the chest is silenced by the cacophony of blood rushing between thighs.

  i conquer.

  i am aroused.

  my arousal agitates; the fleshy pile begins to writhe. emotions spray my face. shake my head, fling off sentiment, drown out tears. the mumbler whimpers. i feel his fear. suddenly i am back in the room. clipped-tone man speaks quickly and forcefully. a sharp beeping rings out; relief floods his voice.

  “They’re coming, someone’s coming now.”

  “Get …” the mumbler speaks raggedly. “Get the story.”

  pain clings to the mumbler’s voice. pain that will soon be mine. close my eyes. force myself to pretend to go Under. imagine i feel water slipping over my suit. remember the loud hush of air trapped in my headgear. solitude.

  the metal circle taps into me. sharp, icy sparks shoot down my spine. it takes the peace from the water and suffocates me with it. my throat fills with water. then as i’m gagging, the memories come, flying at me like the tail of a stingray. whap! the wiry, steel brush slams into my cheek. when it pulls away, it’s red with my blood. hiss of blade nears me, then cuts a path across my other cheek. a pounding on my back. i go down to the sound of cracking bones—my bones.

  in the nightmare again. my tormenters watch me crumble. i can feel a waiting in them, a waiting that tells me they don’t want my pain. beating me is the prelude to something else.

  inside the memory and seeing the memory at the same time. glittering crumbs of glass halo my body. wiry brush, wet with my blood, rests on the ground next to my head. acrid odor wafts from the brush. have i been poisoned? for a brief second, my consciousness splits. begs to move on from this memory to the next. there is no bio-anger here. brush’s odor grows stronger, bitterness against the NewsNet solidifies. hate what this memory has given them: raw fear, brutality, a violent attack, all the emotional material they need to send a report. what is real—what really happened—doesn’t matter. pummeling fists will become murderous seeds or heavy, violent fruit. muscular arms will become thick green vines. they record every detail: the tremble of my body, the fluid burning my eyes and leaking onto my cheeks.

  the memory does not stop. while i lay inert, burly hands flutter over my face. the hands—disembodied against the backdrop of dark grubby clothes—hold small lumps of metal nested in palms. the metal glints as the hands dip closer. the men blot out light with their bodies. fingers, quick as fever, attach metal to my mouth. the metal lumps, spider-like, begin a many-legged prancing around my lips. spindly legs prick me rapidly, piercing the skin, pulling the saliva out of my mouth.

  skin around my mouth, blistered, stinging. the men paw through their pockets. their hands cradle round, foil-covered balls. my face feels as if it wants to split open. they pull away the foil, uncover powdery white globes. break the globes in half. lodge broken globes between teeth and cheek. slower, prancing metal legs move slower, and slower. stiff with terror, lie there. afraid to touch my mouth, afraid to move my arms.

  the hands dance over me, floating in unison. pull translucent tubes from filthy folds of clothing. i don’t exist. they see only the metal on my mouth. not a person, i am just a stretch of earth. a patch of living material, a vessel that spouts something they need. metal legs, stilled. breath, shallow; body, lifeless. hands attach tubes to metal lumps. don’t close my eyes. watch. they suckle the tubes, suck my saliva. i don’t close my eyes.

  my saliva rises through the tubes, flows into mouths of my brutalizers. cheeks shudder, they clench their mouths closed. my saliva erupts, sparking a riot in their mouths. eyes roll back. they slump, slack, onto the sidewalk. lay, close as lovers, next to my body—this body, the body they have claimed. a heavy limb falls across my lower legs. finally, i try. strain to lift my arms. can’t. try to shake the metal spiders from my mouth. can’t. no strength. not even to drag myself away. exhaustion engulfs me, wolfs down my consciousness. i tumble into a deep dark sleep.

  shivering.

  something in hands. hold tight. bundle against chest.

  “Equi!”

  my name. blank. in my mind is blank. know “Equi.” my name. up. up i see dark, gray sky. som
ething grab my shoulder. shake me. flinch. shaking stops.

  “Equi.” voice say my name. gentle voice. scared voice.

  “Are you sure she will be safe with you?”

  clipped tones. snap head left. see man, see man. down. look down. legs standing, not sitting. my legs standing too. man has brown shoes. i have slippers. shoes from Under. look up at man. don’t see eyes. i look where he looks. steps. hard stone steps. tall gray steps. steps.

  “I have to get back. Are you quite sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  voice. i know voice. man squeezes arm. looks sad in eyes. runs away. runs up steps.

  “Equi.”

  look down. woman. small woman, strong woman. dark eyes. wet eyes.

  “Equi,” says soft, sad voice. touches my face.

  throat hurts. brain hurts.

  “ma …” whisper. sound! i talk.

  “mama.” i talk again. mama nods. smiles. my voice ugly.

  wetness grows in her eyes. “I couldn’t get to you,” she says, hand in my hair. “I couldn’t get to you before they did. I shouldn’t have let you come back.”

  wetness grows in my eyes. water. water spill out. wet cheeks. voice louder. voice stronger. yelling now. howling. howl because the wiry brush. howl because the metal spiders. howl because they stole my spit. yell at steps. yell at man. yell all the way up to NewsNet.

  mama hand moving in my hair. sad. scared. looks like she wants to “shhhhh” me, but scared. scared to break me more. no more breaking. mama hands pull my bundle, i don’t let go. mama hands wrap around me. my arms lock across my chest, my yells shoot up to the sky.

  “Equi,” says, soft. mama hands pull me, soft. down. down the stairs to flat wide ground. “Equi, we must go,” says a little more strong. mama hands slip around my arm. mama hands pull me.

  “Give me that.” grabs my bundle.

  grunt. grab bundle back. no more taking. no more taking hands. look down in my arms. bundle: dirty cloths; my clothes, dirty with blood and something glittery. mama pulls clothes. catch the small flat thing that falls. box. shiny box. fancy green letters. hold box to face. read, “Your Bio-Anger.” more letters. serious black letters, say, “Thank you for sharing your story.”