Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  When I woke I found she had disentangled herself. A note on the pillow said, “Read before burning.” When I opened it, however, there was just a single word. “Bathroom.”

  One of Lazaro’s video cameras was pointed at the bathtub. Taped to it was a note that read, “View before burning. Full explanation!”

  The tub was full. Next to it was the freezer’s icemaker bucket, emptied, and a box of Instant Ocean, which is what I used to salinate the jelly tank water. It was empty too.

  In the tub, its blue-white glow refracting through the ice, filling and emptying like a lung, was a fully mature aphotic ghost.

  Mountain

  I climbed Everest. More honest: Roger and the Sherpas climbed Everest and hoisted me behind them. They might as well have carried me up on a palanquin for all the effort I expended.

  The search began the day after we arrived at the South Col. The weather was cooperating for now, and forecasts were good. If we were lucky we might get two days.

  The cold had sunk an inch down into my body, anesthetizing me, preventing both hope and despair. It was the only reason I could function, this close to knowing. If I failed to find Lazaro, I could try again someday. But if I succeeded, he would be alive or dead. The wave would collapse. I would either eject him from his superposition and bring him back to life, or reify his death.

  We searched half a day. I saw many bodies, none of them Lazaro. I wondered briefly if I shouldn’t make it the work of the rest of my life to bring the dead down and present them back to their families. But let’s see if I could succeed on my own mission first.

  Roger, with a Rumpelstilskin-like prescience, knew not to pry, but the Sherpas couldn’t comprehend that I couldn’t care less about the stark and ominous wonders Everest offered. So, thinking I was like every other tourist, they kept trying to show me the sights. Two of them were dying to show me the most curious ice formation they’d ever seen.

  I perked up. Ice formation? I followed.

  It had appeared out of the ground last season, they said. They exhumed it out of the recent snow for me to see. It was the size of a sleeping dog and looked something like hand-blown Italian glass, impossibly whorling and curling into itself, a hyaline nautilus relentlessly tearing sunlight into rainbows. Deep in its center there seemed to be a dark nucleus, and strange, ciliated phalanges circuited throughout its interior. Climbing gear radiated from it like an explosion.

  “Roger!” I yelled.

  Roger came. “We need the cooler,” I said.

  He spoke to the Sherpas and they brought the coffin-sized cooler I had had specially made. It borrowed from ice-cream maker technology, had a nitrogen core lining the metal interior. After I delicately placed the ice formation inside of it, I found I could just close the lid. “Tell them to help me pack it with snow,” I said. Soon every Sherpa who could fit around the cooler was dumping snow and ice into it. When it was full I padlocked the lid.

  I was weeping, but no one could tell because everyone’s eyes cry this high up, and anyway tears freeze before they fall. I took several hits from my oxygen tank, then said, “Roger, this is futile. I’ll have to reconcile myself to the fact that Everest will be my son’s final resting place. We’ll have to abandon the search. Gather the men.”

  I could see he knew there was more to the story. But all he said to me was “Right.” Then he told the Sherpas what I said. A few of them looked at me incredulously—the search had hardly begun, and now I was content to leave with just an ice-souvenir?—but the more experienced among them simply started packing up. Americans were generally regarded as the best tippers in the world, even when an Everest ascent failed. Tolerating their strange ways was a small price to pay.

  Sea Level

  It was my fourth date with Imelda. She was a year older than me. She didn’t dye her hair and was a retired librarian and said if I ever caught her playing Bingo I had her permission to kill her on the spot.

  We had met through Back from Heaven, the nonprofit I founded to recover the bodies of those who died on Everest. She had joined me on our latest mission, our most successful to date: three deceased climbers retrieved, identified, and returned to their loved ones. One ascent and she was hooked; she joined the team as a full-time volunteer researcher.

  And now we were seeing each other. And things were moving fast. Just four dates in and we were going back to my place.

  I unlocked the door, reached around to flip the lights, then gestured gallantly for her to enter. She curtsied and strolled in.

  And saw the tanks. I still had the smaller Kreisel with my original smack of jellyfish eternally smacking into each other, but what stopped her midstep was the new tank. It took up the wall, a tremendous bubbling cauldron of cornerless glass. In it, the two most enormous jellyfish she’d ever seen pulsed with slow signity through the water, their blue-white auras commingling. A third one, still just a polyp, trailed behind them.

  “Jesus!” she said. “Wow. Just wow.”

  “Do you like it?” I asked, moving behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist.

  She leaned against me. “They’re so beautiful.” And then, searching for a more precise description, “So unearthly.”

  “My son’s an underwater filmmaker. He discovered this species of jellyfish.”

  She turned to face me, rested her hands on my shoulders. “No!”

  “Really. You’ll meet him someday. And I’ll have to show you his masterwork: The Aphotic Ghost. He won an Oscar for it.” I directed her attention to the mantle.

  She looked, then turned back to me and smiled. “You are just endlessly surprising, Enrique.” Then, turning herself back to the tank, but belting my arms to her body, she said, “So when do I get to meet the Academy-Award-winning filmmaker?”

  “It’s going to be awhile, I’m afraid. He’s spending time with his mother right now.”

  “Ah. I see. Let me guess. You and she can’t be in the same room together?”

  “Not at all. We’re in the same room all the time. And she’ll always have a special place in my heart. It’s just that … well, let’s just say we come from two different worlds.”

  “Say no more,” she said, squeezing my arm. She turned back to the larger tank and, after a moment’s contemplation, she pointed at the polyp and said, “The tiny one’s cute. Does it have a name?”

  “She does,” I said, pulling Imelda a little closer. “Brumhilda.”

  The Pillar

  Farnoosh Moshiri

  For Turaj

  Like a voice from childhood, far away and inaccessible, he calls something in the language of dreams, painful and alien. A dry sob, a tearless cry. He is the one sitting on the cement, the foundation of this human tower, he is the bearer of the burden, the one below.

  But even he can sleep and dream.

  I’m the one on the top tonight, the privileged, the head of the tower, the one close to the eye-window of the ceiling, the one who can trace the clouds at twilight, measuring the turquoise against the sapphire. I’m the one who can think.

  Sitting on each other’s shoulders, we take turns being the one at the top, the one who has no burden, who can sleep.

  The cell is square, three by four meters, good for five prisoners to sleep side by side. We were ten once. We slept horizontally, sardines in a can. They added ten more. Now the only way to get sleep is to make human towers.

  It’s my turn tonight. I sit on someone’s shoulder, he is on someone else’s, the third is on the fourth, and the fifth one is the foundation, sitting on the cement, a mountain balancing on his back. Last night I was at the bottom, now it’s my turn to rest. But the position is shaky. If I sneeze or scratch my head the whole tower wobbles, the four people under me may lose their balance. We are sitting against the wall; I try to lean back and close my eyes. But sleep does not come.

  Up here I’m the king. We call the one on top the king. I’ve divided my reign into three periods. I don’t need to sleep the whole six hours. For the first two
hours I watch the sky. It’s summer and the blackout happens when the sky is still bright. I sit here, witnessing the moment-to-moment change of the colors. Sometimes a tinge of orange lingers, melting into lavender. Sometimes a lost bird flies in confusion. Once I saw a rainbow.

  For an hour I count sheep. I envision a stream, the sheep—woolly, white, and fat, their loose tails hanging over their buttocks—jump clumsily over the stream. One sheep … two sheep … three … four … until I reach three-digit numbers. Now I’m confused; I lose count and open my eyes. For the next two hours I fight with anger, anger at myself for wasting my sleeping time. Then I give up and sit alert, waiting for the red glow of the dawn. My eyes are wide open, sand dry, tearless, awake. I descend.

  During the day, when the guards take us out for interrogation, we remain in a perpetual sitting position, knees pressed to chests. We leave a small circle in the middle of the cell for movement. In groups of five, we trudge around the circle. To the right, then to the left. If someone looks at this view from above, he’ll see a wheel turning, going nowhere. We stop three times: for lunch, dinner, and toilet before sleep. We barely talk.

  We don’t like each other. We’re all here as the result of pursuing a common goal, but since our routes were different, we are not comrades. Our pursuit is as absurd as trying to reach the city of X, one walking on foot, one riding on a horse, one traveling with a group, one carrying a weapon, one praying while traveling, one holding a flag and a banner, all seeking the same city but hating each other for using different means to get there. All arrested for moving toward X, but now despising each other.

  So we sit in silence or walk around a circle, to the right and to the left. As the days pass in a constant but immobile struggle for our necessities, we forget the cause, the reasons for it, and the logic to all this.

  Up here I can think sometimes. If it is possible in this cell to think at all, it’s every four days, sitting up here on the pillar of four other sets of shoulders, next to the eye-window. I think while watching the sky changing colors; I think while counting the fat sheep; I think in anger, when I get close to the end of my reign; I think at dawn.

  There is seldom any disturbance throughout the night, but now this voice, this childhood voice, his or mine, remote and inaccessible, calls out in a dream language. Now this dry sob disturbs my thoughts. I’m not sure who is under us tonight, bearing the burden of four men on his shoulders. I do not know his name. I listen to him all night, pulling in my belly muscles to weigh less. Maybe his back is breaking under the burden.

  But I envy him and his nightmares. He is sleeping; I’m not.

  Woe to me, the listener of my cellmates’ cries: a king not, a priest rather, hearing confessions in a dream language from below. The bearer of my cellmates’ fears, the owl, the owner of images of a million fat sheep, an ex-traveler to the city of X, weaponless, on foot, blindly following the trail of leaders in dense fog. Woe to me, sleepless at the bottom, in the middle, and on top. A useless burden on human shoulders, shortly a bearer of human weight.

  Angels + Cannibals Unite

  Greg Tate

  Re the body of Chris: We had not all yet finished having our fill when they swooped in to snatch our bliss away. A few doomed souls were still eating from the angeloid we called Chris when his own kind came to retrieve him. Fortunately they did not annihilate all of us during the extraction. Just those two unfortunate gluttons, Mojo Raj Ralph and Mojo Raj Elton, who refused to stop feasting while the walls melted and the ceiling collapsed in our privy below Yankee Stadium.

  Chris had become our self-medicating mood salvation and our darkling angel child.

  We had all feasted heavily upon the angeloid during that day’s feedings— none more heartily than I. But some of us intuitively knew when it was time to let a good thing go. As in when three angry members of his species show up out of nowhere to incinerate the room.

  How much would we be missing Chris?

  When we survivors finally made it to Mojo Raj De Niro’s apartment in Harlem none of us looked a bit traumatized by the horrible death and destruction we had just witnessed.

  We were all instead beaming with light, full of grace and bliss.

  Dining off our hallucinogenic savior and prodigal son Chris had always made it so.

  The body of Chris regenerated mightily after every one of our group feastings upon his body. He never seemed any worse for our collective wearing and tearing of his darkling angel-flesh. Chris was our angeloid godsend, our muse, our most poetic inspiration. He gave us his all and we, in turn, made sure that he wanted for naught—except for maybe a hasty return to his angeloid homeworld.

  His starship had crashed on the Bronx side of the Harlem River during a brittle and unseasonably mid-spring blizzard. My boss, Mojo Raj Raj, had seen this vessel come down and flash bright just before smacking the water with a bang.

  This event occurred on a day when it was Raj’s scheduled turn to open our concession at Yankee Stadium. He’d gone in particularly early that morning because one of our food trucks’ refrigeration coils had been on the fritz. He described the angeloid’s ship as a kind of lozenge, one glittering with black, red, and violet lines and dots—the same patterning as that we all later found coated Chris’ prone body and vestigial burst of sooty wings. Mojo Raj said after Chris’ starship sank into the river you could still see its glow rising to the surface through the muck and murk of Harlem’s only estuary.

  Just as suddenly as it had appeared, though, the ship’s radiance faded and then disappeared, as if its pilot light had gone out. And then, right when the ship’s last ember winked into oblivion, the body of angeloid Chris shot up out of the water and floated before Mojo Raj, who recounted being more shocked and shaken by that phenomenon than by anything that had preceded it. After Chris fell by the shore, he began licking and sucking on parts of his own sheathed arm. He then swallowed the covered limb up to the elbow and began biting it off its hinges. The severing of the arm sounded as savage and soul-rattling as anything Mojo Raj had ever heard, even counting anything seen in Mojo Raj’s vast archive of horror films or the nightmares and worse imaginings they provoked.

  Raj also realized, as he watched in abject terror, that the mouth of Chris had no teeth. Or at least none that he could see. Like a lamprey’s, the mouth of Chris seemed only to have a maw made for sucking, so it stood to reason that some energy or corrosive fluid or hidden mandible of a thing down his throat was what had sliced off the arm and cauterized the wound. The arm had disappeared into—and perhaps dissolved in—his mouth. The mouth of Chris was therefore both self-cannibalizing and self-repairing. After feasting on himself Chris curled into a posture we would call fetal, stumpy arm and all. He looked pathetically at Raj, as if in need of love and tenderness. Mojo Raj said he felt safe and secure in carrying the thing into the stadium and down to the locker room we shared with the guys from Nathan’s. Raj went into our operation below the stadium, grabbed some blankets and tarps and lay Chris on them. As soon as he did another red and black energy capsule with multicolored designs appeared around Chris and mummified him. He must have seemed doubly protected from all harm, wrapped in Raj’s industrial-strength rags and his own second skin’s scarlet and obsidian covering.

  Why did we begin eating him? We didn’t. Not really, not at first, did we all go whole hog, eating away upon Chris as a group dining experience. Mojo Raj was the first among us, of course. He claimed that one day, for all his kindness, Chris offered him a finger to lick then mimed an action with a grin that invited and encouraged Raj to rip into that digit like he was some feral creature gone chomping into a leg of raw deer meat.

  Raj thought he’d feel mightily disgusted but instead immediately felt just the opposite.

  Boss said as soon as he began to chew on Chris he felt more loved and more beloved than he ever had in his life. After that first bite he found that he could not stop himself from wanting to devour the body of Chris whole. This task he set about with gusto for a
couple of hours, not stopping until the energy capsule reappeared and made him cease and desist.

  The texture of Chris’ skin was not exactly like that of a human, though he appeared humanoid, or technically angeloid, to us. After that initial feasting, Raj decided the taste Chris’ epidermis reminded him most of was njeri—that yeasty, spongy bread served as a sopping carb with all Ethiopian meals.

  Raj claimed he went into some kind of feverish coma a few minutes after his first swallow. Certainly he couldn’t remember anything between that morning and the next day. Or rather he couldn’t remember doing anything of merit in the real world. What he did remember were things of a dreamlike nature that had happened between himself and one Mrs. Poindexter in his youth. The vixen in question was a venerable, trusted, and very generous friend of Raj’s mother’s who’d deflowered him when he was twelve years of age back in Mount Vernon, New York. During this vision Mrs. Poindexter—after emerging from a scar on her living room wall that looked partly like jungle overgrowth and partly like the toothless, sucking yap of Chris—appeared to have reverted to a nineteen-year-old version of herself. Soon as Lady Poindexter hit the floor she began dancing in a serpentine manner Raj remembered so well from the teasing hour preceding his Wonder Years de-virgination.

  When we stumbled on Mojo Raj and Chris in our locker room two weeks later, Raj was clearly in some kind of dream state—writhing, moaning, and, as we later learned, miming the movements of this lustful cougar who danced like a thing possessed.

  Mojo Estragon was the one who declared the inevitable: ‘‘I’ll have some of whatever he’s having.’’

  When we all learned Raj’s altered state had come from gnawing on Chris, we all agreed to sample the source of this high ourselves. “Well, at least just once,” went the faint promise we all mumbled in the beginning. And so it began.