by Melanie Tem
Outside, the wind was picking up. The seams of the metal building whined, and weeds scraped across the walls. Mary huddled closer to herself, recognizing the tendency toward introspection that sometimes interfered with her work, the preference for her own thoughts and her own company to which she sometimes succumbed. The stranger sat quietly beside her, neither looking at her nor looking away. His posture on the stool, the way he held his hands, the tilt of his head all made her feel slightly disoriented.
She often felt disoriented, here and elsewhere. Nights on Wheat suggested to her travel through subspace. In training, Mary had secretly found it hard to imagine subspace as a real phenomenon; science notwithstanding, she’d been able to accept it only as metaphor. But now she understood it as the in-between, the country which is neither here nor there, the terrain where dreams take place once the props and backdrops and references to the waking world have dissolved. The land where the dark Domoviye live forever behind the stove no matter what you do, and the exquisite Ruselky dance the night and the dawn and the dusk away in whatever wheat fields there are. The place where Mary might at last feel at home.
If she were to step out of this bar alone, she would find herself in thick gray darkness without features— no trees, rivers, mountains. Although the wind was constant and she always felt the grit and force of it, she could never see anything blowing. To find another building on Wheat at night, she looked for lighted windows, like other ships, alien sparks of life. But by this time, when everything but this bar was closed and everyone but patrons of this bar was asleep, she wouldn’t have the lights; if she went outside alone, she’d have to travel from one building to another by dreamlike memory, as though sleepwalking or making her way through someone else’s imagination.
She glanced at the stranger again. He was leaning back on his stool at an impossible angle, hands peaked and still in midair in front of him. Usually by now she knew whether a man was interested and didn’t waste her time on somebody who, for whatever reason, didn’t respond; she had learned early not to take personally either interest or the lack of it. But with this man she couldn’t tell.
Deliberately, she raised a hand and put it over one of his, so that their two hands hovered in the air between them. His skin was cool, and of an odd texture. She noticed how long his nails were, and shaped in asymmetrical triangles. He didn’t move his hand or make any other response to her, but Mary was somehow aware that something had altered in the relationship, the exchange, the space between them.
Then she and the stranger were walking together toward the door. Together, but not touching or even speaking. There was none of the businesslike haste she often experienced with a customer, both of them eager to get on with it, to get it over. Mary felt as if she were floating free.
The wind was directionless, blowing from all sides at once. She shielded her eyes and threw her head back, trying to glimpse the expression on the stranger’s face even if it wouldn’t tell her anything about what he was thinking. But he was too tall, the night was too dark, and his face was shadowed by the high collar he’d pushed up around his neck—some kind of soft fabric, or maybe, she thought, skin. They matched stride for stride, as though both of them knew exactly where they were going.
Between the bar and the place where she lived—between almost any two objects on the surface of Wheat—was an expanse of weeds, knee-high and tough, bulging with sap that made your skin itch. Mary thought this was probably the source of both the locally-brewed ale and the acrid liquid that passed for coffee, although she’d never heard a specific name for the plants other than “sap weed” and never seen any indication of either cultivation or harvest. As she and the stranger pushed among them, the stalks snapped against her shins and, she imagined, wrapped themselves around his thin ankles. Although it was impossible to distinguish one patch of weeds from another, Mary had the curious sense that, in the dense darkness or the daytime glare, they were landmarks to guide her home.
Her body was moving in ways she was sure it had never moved before, although it was a profoundly familiar sensation. The stranger was with her, around her, matching every motion she made, leading and following. They were dancing, she realized, and the plants were dancing with them. The plants were growing to their rhythm and to the silent music that sustained it.
He was singing. His mouth moved very slightly as he sang sounds that she didn’t think were words. His hands were at the small of her back, the long feathery fingers reaching almost all the way around her.
She lived in a single room in a distant, narrow two-story barracks. It was as much “home” as anywhere else she’d ever lived, certainly as much as the Kansas farm. This time she’d remembered to leave the red light on (the color satisfied her occasional need to make fun of what she did); a few nights sleeping under a windblown bush or at the home of the somewhat horrified customer had finally taught her to make sure she could find her way home.
The main door had come open in the wind, as it often did, and was banging back against the corrugated wall. She held it open for him, tried to capture a sense of him as he slipped past, then pulled the door tight. But it swung open again and the wind swept in.
He had already started up the stairs, and she studied him as she followed. His torso was very long in proportion to his legs, too long according to any conventional aesthetic but enormously pleasing to her. Scanning the hallway, he turned his head too far from one side to the other, as though his neck was more loosely jointed than hers. When he reached to open her door, and before she could intervene, his forearm and elbow stayed stationary while his wrist pivoted so far that it should have snapped. Mary was sure that she had locked her door.
He preceded her into her room. She saw how broad his shoulders were, but sharply angular. Under his thick coat, his shoulder blades created more movement than she’d have expected. As though he had extra ones there. Or maybe, she thought on the verge of a nervous laugh, wings.
She had a sensation of flying, of falling into the subspace. He turned and looked down at her, a glance that didn’t hold and that could have meant anything or nothing. Mary reached up, fitted her hands to the unlikely contours of his face, and brought his lips to hers.
He resisted a little, as if he didn’t know what she was doing. The possibility that she might teach him something, too, added to her excitement. Drunk, aroused, she could barely stand, and his arms came around her in ways no one had ever held her before.
She was falling. She had no thought to catch herself. His arms opened for her and closed around her, again and again. Some part of him—his tongue, maybe, if he had a tongue, or the tips of his long thin fingers—flickered in her throat until she thought she must have wandered off the path and fallen asleep in the field, and now for punishment would choke on her own carelessness.
His skin opened for her. Almost effortlessly she tried on the dark veil of him, slipped him on and stood before a mirror she knew from memory was there although she couldn’t see it in this alien night. She saw her own reflection, and the reflection of the place where he had taken her, and it was home.
With altered eyes, she stared through him into a vast field of thick black plants that glistened from hidden sources of light; they grew and shrank and grew again, and her height shifted accordingly. Hearing acutely and in a different way, she listened to the wind’s directionless moan, which had become the voices of everyone she’d left behind on earth, everyone she’d never found.
Suddenly she was terrified that she would fly the in-between forever, that she’d lose herself altogether in the spreading country of this man’s imagination. She tried to stop, to say no and push him away, but it was too late and she’d gone too far. He entered her from underneath her own skin, from among the folds of her brain. It hurt, and she cried out. But it was what she’d been waiting for all her life. Other things happened then, but she forgot them even as they occurred. She slept, but without sleeping.
And then, in the morning, he was gone. As usual,
Mary woke up alone in Wheat’s harsh early daylight, and knew before she was fully conscious that she was more profoundly alone than she’d ever been, that the alien had made her more alien. She lay on her bed for a long time, but the heat in the little room soon became unbearable and the glare through the high uncurtained window cast sharp shadows.
“So,” said the bartender by way of greeting, bringing her, unasked, a mug of coffee as bitter as last night’s ale, “how was your night? I didn’t see you leave.”
“I went home alone.”
He looked at her guardedly. “Mary, do you remember thinking there was a tall, dark, handsome man in here last night? And you were determined to pick him up?”
“I was drunk,” she said. Already her head was spinning and her hands shaking unpleasantly from the coffee, and her words had an edge to them. She drained the mug and pushed it across the counter for more.
Refilling it, the bartender said, “I told you this last night, Mary, but maybe you don’t remember. You need to get yourself some help.”
“What I need,” she told him, “is to get off this damn planet. When does the next ship come through? Headed anywhere?”
“They were talking in here last night that most of the subs coming through here anymore are automateds.” He shook his head. “Bad for business. The Outliner II is due in a few months, but they already have a full crew. You got any passenger credits?”
“I can’t wait a few months.” She rested her forehead on her fists. Even as she gave in to the panic, she knew it was pointless. She was almost sure the stranger would be anywhere she went, would make her dance among the stalks of any alien grain, would live behind any stove and, when she was sufficiently unhappy, would destroy any house. Still, she muttered, “I have to get out of here right away. Tonight.”
“You know that’s impossible.” He put his hands on her hunched shoulders. “Mary, what are you so afraid of? What happened last night?”
She pulled away from him and stumbled out into the reddish glare of broad daylight. In her path rose the suggestion of the alien; she saw him only out of the corner of her eye. He made no move toward her and didn’t say his sweet version of her name, but shreds of him clung to her as she ran and finally she stopped trying to shake them off, stopped running altogether and waited for him.
Where are you? he whispered. Come back to me.
Leave me alone, she sang. Wherever she looked in the sun’s glare she saw red circles with white edges and dark centers, like fairy rings.
All day she stayed out in the sun, and she neither found the alien nor escaped him. The heat made her dizzy. The glare hurt her eyes and, she knew, was probably damaging them, but she would never wear the protective lenses again.
People stared at her. Some said hello. Some of them she’d had sex with, slept with, spent a night or more with. She didn’t know which ones.
As the short day ended and the short night came on, Mary slipped between buildings, between weed stalks, into the border between light and shadow. She searched between things for the lover who had so frightened her, who had claimed her from all others. He wasn’t there, and yet he was.
In the darkness then there were lights all around, but none of them hers. She didn’t know whether she’d left the light on in her barracks room; that wasn’t the way she’d ever find her way home again.
Instead, she wandered off the path and fell asleep in the fields. The shadows separated then, as though choosing sides, and she was neither asleep nor awake but in between, and his hands were around her neck, his fingertips in her mouth.
Mary heard the song he sang, felt it in her own throat, and sang it back. Her body moved as his did. In his empty eyes she saw her own eyes, her own perspective. She thought of him entering her, but of course he was already there.
They travelled together, between the stars. Between the places where everyone else lived. Into the country of his dreams and hers, the in-between. Into the Kansas of memories of a life she’d never lived, into a future on a planet among life forms she would never discover.
Ground moved in waves, separated to reveal another sky beneath it. Great pools of sunlight changed their borders slowly, eventually becoming the size and shape of her eyes. Fallen animals, which were parts of her body, buzzed with decay and turned her into something else that was neither alive nor dead. Tall plants of every color, bursting with poisonous hallucinogenic sap, rose so high and so quickly that she couldn’t imagine the scope of either their branches or their roots; high above her head and deep under her feet, they spoke of things she’d never dared speak of before.
He reached for her. His hands were not hands. He would embrace her, make love to her, devour her. “Leave me alone!” she cried. “I don’t belong with you, either!” But she knew it was not true.
She heard them calling her name, a search party made up of all those others she’d slept with, all those others she’d never known. She heard the bartender calling her name, telling her they’d come to help. She could see their hands reaching toward her through the burnt haze of her damaged eyes.
But his hands, which were not hands, reached her first.
My love, he said, and his face was so close to hers that she thought the sheer vision of him would consume her, this is not me, his voice pulsing with her breath and her heartbeat, this is you.
SAFE AT HOME
“Mindy.
“Touch me. Here. Like this.
“You like to touch me, don’t you?
“That’s a good girl. Oh, that’s right.”
Charlie was incredulous. “You want me to take you to another horror movie? But you hate that stuff.”
“The monster in this one has long sticky tentacles that come up out of a dark pool.” Melinda squinted at the newspaper ad and gave a short, brittle laugh.
“Let me guess. It has a particular affinity for pretty young women.” Charlie’s laugh was easier, fuller than hers.
“Don’t they all,” she said.
Charlie took her to the movie because she wanted to go, and also because he knew there was a good possibility of sex afterwards. She didn’t begrudge him that. Charlie was a good guy, and Melinda felt bad about using his baser instincts to get what she wanted. But it worked. It had always worked.
She didn’t love Charlie, not yet. And he didn’t love her. She hoped he didn’t love her.
“I love you, Mindy. You’re my favorite niece, did you know that?
“You want to make your Uncle Pat happy, don’t you? Let me show you how to make me happy.
“Oh, you are such a good girl.”
Charlie was a tender, considerate lover. He went slow. He never hurt her. She knew he thought what they did together in bed was beautiful.
It made her want to throw up.
Monsters made it possible for her to throw up. Monsters in horror movies especially, with sticky appendages or gaping maws or formless bodies that oozed from everywhere and never went away.
At some point during every show she’d get up and hurry to the ladies’ room, hoping there wouldn’t be a line. She’d crouch over a toilet and vomit for a long time. If she’d been able to force herself to eat any popcorn or candy, it would come out of her in recognizable chunks, but everything else being expelled from her body was whitish and viscous, like semen. For a while then—sometimes minutes, sometimes the rest of the night—she wouldn’t be sick to her stomach.
“Oh, no, Mindy, this isn’t wrong. We love each other, so how could anything we do together be wrong?
“Show me that you love me, Mindy.
“That’s right. That’s my girl.”
She hated having to chew and swallow in front of people. Sometimes she caught herself imagining that if she opened her mouth too wide a sticky, sinewy monster would slide out and wriggle into the darkness under the house, under the streets, under the world.
She watched Charlie eat. She wanted to see what his teeth did to the food, how his tongue rolled and humped to get the food down. So
metimes in the middle of a meal she’d reach over and very lightly rest her fingertips on the hinge of his jaw, where she could feel the bones and muscles, sinews and tendons all working together in one building rhythm.
“You’re weird,” Charlie said the first time she was brave enough to do that. Mouth full of spaghetti, he leaned across the table and kissed her.
Melinda had thought he was going to say he loved her. He’d had that tender, passionate, self-absorbed look on his face that had nothing to do with her. Relieved that he’d said something else, she didn’t pull away.
She tried hard not to imagine the spaghetti in his mouth. For some reason it scared her.
Then she gave up and set herself to imagining it as vividly as she could. Whitish sticky tendrils, viscous sauce. Charlie’s mouth caressing it, taking everything from it, the inside of a kiss.
“Sweet,” Charlie said, still looking at her more intently than she liked. “And very beautiful. But definitely weird.”
“Your mommy and daddy didn’t mean me. I’m your daddy’s brother.
“They asked me to babysit this weekend, remember? They asked me to take care of you while they were gone. Don’t you think they must trust me a lot to let me take care of their precious little girl?
“So you can trust me, too.
“Come here, Mindy. Come to Uncle Pat.”
After the movie they often rode the bus across town to Charlie’s house. When she rode the bus alone, Melinda watched all the men waiting for her, in the other seats, at stops, on street corners, on billboards and movie posters. During heavy rains there were so many people in doorways that she couldn’t tell which ones were waiting for just her, and in the wet shadows she usually couldn’t see their hands. There ought to be a law requiring men to keep their hands exposed at all times in the presence of females. Especially girls. Especially little girls.
