by Nisi Shawl
In his room he paced, trying to calm himself, trying to remember his training, trying to remember that he had been picked out of a line-up of the best freight drivers in the galaxy, that he’d done a combat tour on a moon in the outer rim, that he’d eaten in a mess hall with a bunch of other, gnarly men, their shirts threadbare and covered in grease, telling stories about their gear, about riding with legendary captains across the stars, about being trapped in zanak mines for days with only the silk of otherwise poisonous alien mollusks as a nourishment.
“Computer, pull up the files for the last three human men to board this ship.”
ACCESS DENIED.
“Computer, override security wall with code Zyrn, I.D. 890239234”
ACCESS DENIED.
“Computer, why do these files remained sealed?”
CLASSIFIED.
Zyrn began to sweat. He sat down in his chair, almost trembling. He banged away at his computer’s keyboard, trying to manual override it’s encryption. ACCESS DENIED. He rose in a fury and came smashing down on the monitor with both fists. And again. He smashed at the monitor until it sparked and chunks of its insides shook loose. He breathed, panting; he felt like the air had been sucked out of the room, like he’d just opened an airlock and gone hurtling through space. Then the door to his room slid open with a sharp gust. Standing there was one of the clones, a tablet in hand. He opened his mouth, but his lips never moved and in a voice both tremulous and vacuous, he said, “I am. Sorry. You deserve. To be shown.”
“God, that is just fucking creepy when you guys do that.” Zyrn straightened himself up. “Shown what? Wait, how the fuck are you in here? How’d you get the code to open that door?”
“You were. In. Distress. There is an. Auto-release for your protection.”
“My protection,” Zyrn said in disbelief, near disgust.
“It is. Against my programming to be here. But I. Must. Shoooowww youuu.”
“Show me what, you fucking clone?”
“I have. Developed a. Contrarian position to my brothers.”
“Brothers? What the fuck are you talking about? Position, you have no position except the ones you were grown for. “
The clone just stared at Zyrn. His eyes were pooling up, curiously wet. Zyrn saw that his visage was unchanged, except for those eyes. There was only the slightest hint of a slouch in the clone’s posture.
“Man, you are weird.” Zyrn was snapping out of it. He put his hand on the clone’s forehead. “I’m going to have to run some tests on you, get you back in a pod, reboot your system.”
“I am. Functioning. Just. Fiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnne.”
“Wait here,” Zyrn said, and pushed past the stoic clone and into the hallway. The corridors were astir with activity. There was never this much clone movement during these hours; they should have been at sleep-state. The further he advance down the corridor, up towards the labs, the thicker the throng of clones gathered to greet him. He was lost in a sea of their blackened skin, his rough, ruddy, active body clashing wildly with their dark, fined-down rigid immobility. Their eyes were all wide—frightened? Excited? Some would brush an instrument over his arm, or scan him, others tapped furiously at tablets, others averted their eyes altogether. Zyrn reached the lab and began tearing it apart. What am I looking for? he thought. Something to override the computer? Something to unlock files of the last voyages of this ship? Anything to make sense of what was happening.
The lights shut off. The computers audibly powered down. He could hear shuffling across the darkness. And then no sound. Only the wet-warm breath entering and leaving his body in sporadic heaves. Then, with a mighty roar, the lights flashed on again and Zyrn screamed. A burst of a hologram sprayed over the walls. He tried to tear at them as if it would make the image of them untrue. Men who looked like the clones, in fact, yes, the clones! They were standing in front of a dozen veiny, mucus-filled leafy pods with mechanical tendrils pumping fluid into them. Then, when the pods filled and the tendrils released from them in a violent, milky spray, the pods opened; they birthed men who looked like, with every fiber of muscle, with every prickly red hair, with every inch of pearl-white skin, like Zyrn, writhing on the floor, covered in mucus and unfamiliar with how their arms or muscles or bones worked, twitching to a chorus of cheers from the black, ashy beings in long, flowing capes.
B.
6p.m. South Philadelphia was whispering. Henry stared at the bathroom mirror, picking at a sore. It was a purple, pus-filled sack draping from his neck. He touched it and it seemed to move, to squirm. What the fuck was it? He scratched at it one last time, splashed his face, and sighed. He moved out of the bathroom disgusted at himself, a state he was defaulting to more often than usual these days. He would lie on the bed as the television droned out another rerun of The Big Bang Theory, just picking at the sores that speckled his body. The bedroom of his apartment had begun to stink of raw flesh as scab after scab flaked onto the floor. Every once in a while he’d yell back at the TV some obscure point of the continuity of the comic books Sheldon and Leonard argued over, then, after the laugh track subsided, he’d breathe out a disdainful “Hmph,” turn toward the ceiling and hate himself all over again.
A fat geek. That’s all he’d ever been. In Mr. Bennett’s 7th grade science class he threw up on the dissecting frogs, causing the man to pull his chair into the middle of the classroom. Bennett barked at him, inches from his face. Henry watched the teacher’s old, crusty mouth move in gnarled, fragmented twists, watched the saliva spew in little droplets, some landing in Henry’s eyes. The boy was terrified, covered in chunks of his own puke, berated in front of the entire class. Jake Lawson laughed under his breath, shook his head coolly as the rest of the class erupted in hysterics. Henry saw Jake just sort of sit back in his chair, pointing his finger at him, cocking it back, moving his lips: “POW.” Henry then wet his pants.
As a sophomore, he’d been infatuated with Angela Morris, twin sister to Anthony, captain of the football team. He’d track her after class, following at least five, six lockers behind her, letting her get a bit farther down the hall. The sound of her laughing with her friends was like a homing signal; he could make out her laugh in the thick of that teenaged girl rabble. It had a lifting lilt to it, but it lacked something…innate? Intrinsic? She shot him a look and he turned away, quickly, smashing into a locker, his books and messy Trapper Keepers sprawling everywhere. She giggled at the sight, turning to her friends and pretending to laugh at their Saved by the Bell recaps to keep the real reason for her blushing away from them. Did she notice? Did she see me staring at her like an idiotfatpieceoffuckingshitassholeohmygodmyglassesbrokeagain? Then he heard her laugh a second time. It was louder, richer, this time, full. The lilt had evened out, it was still graced by bells, but this time there was a husk to the laugh that seemed to carry its way down the hall and into his abdomen. It was Anthony’s laugh. He was rounding the corner heading toward Henry, nodding at his sister’s friends, striding assuredly into the school hallway. “Huh?” Confused, Henry tore up the hallway and out of the back entrance of the school. He ran across the football field, barreling towards home, tears streaming down his face. That night he cursed God. That night he stared blankly at his dad’s porno mags. That night he pleasured himself bathed in dreams of Anthony Morris. He also had another dream. A man in a space suit, on an expanse of clouds bounded toward him. Siren-like voices rained down on them, snake-like tendrils wrapped themselves around their bodies until they ripped off the man’s helmet. Henry was staring at his doppleganger. The man withered inside that suit, turned to an ash that coated the clouds, surrounding Henry, naked in the darkness. “Hello. Hello, Henry. HENRY.”
Henry woke up to see Marcus standing at his bedroom door. He was trunked down with shopping bags from Barney’s and Zara and Sephora and Trader Joe’s. “Henry, baby? Are you ok?”
“Oh.” Henry said, sitting up. “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself, what’s—what’s going on, babe. You h
aven’t returned my calls.”
The television was the only light in the room. A blue glow washed over Henry’s pale, fat face. He tried to straighten his tangle of red hair, to wipe the crust out of his eyes, to look pretty for his man. Marcus put the bags down and turned on the light.
“Oh my god! What’s happened to you?”
They had had a fight a week ago. Marcus stood at the kitchen door, leaning over the jamb, hand on one hip. “Well?” he asked. “Did you finish it?” Henry looked up from his video game. They hadn’t spoken at all that day. “Finish what?” he asked.
“Jesus, Henry. Your fucking screenplay, man!”
“Oh. No.” Henry turned back to his game, oblivious.
“I don’t know what’s up with you these days. It’s like, a month ago, you wanted to move to Los Angeles, New York, find your old college buddies, start building game apps, start—I don’t know—writing screenplays! It’s like, all of this we’ve built up in the past year or so you’re just throwing away—”
“Ha. Listen to the Golden Boy, everything handed to him on a silver platter. Mr. Popular, straight A’s in high school, 1300 on the SATS.” He knew that Marcus hated that term. Golden Boy. Henry had started calling him that affectionately, except that it was always weighted with self-pity. As brilliant as Henry was, nothing came easy to him. Least of all, Marcus. After their first encounter at the porn theater, though, and after Henry had taken the two weeks to get up the courage to call him, they’d developed a relationship. Marcus wanted to be in love with a man whose flashes of brilliance were so sharp that they’d sometimes make him stop and cry. They were fleeting, these flashes—a text that was full of ideas and that seemed to beget a universe in just a few sentences. Or they were weird doodles on restaurant napkins during another brunch where Henry sat like a lump as Marcus rattled off work gossip or another sordid tale about Curtis. Once Henry drew a picture of a circle on the bottom of Marcus’s Starbucks cup. When they’d finished their lattes and another conversation about Henry’s surprising lack of self-esteem (surprising to Marcus anyway, a man so smart, so sporadically brilliant…), Marcus looked into his cup and saw the remnants of his drink moving in chromatic patterns, as if the last sips of that coffee were entranced, made alive by the circle Henry had drawn. At first he did not know what he was looking at, sure it was an illusion. Marcus rubbed his eyes and looked again and the vision had normalized, the synesthetic pattern had gone.
“Oh my god, really? This again?” They sat in silence, the only sound coming from Henry’s video game. Marcus crumbled a bit this time, silently walking toward the kitchen counter, picking up his back pack, and walking out of the door.
He returned two weeks later to find Henry alone in his pitch black apartment, no light except the television. He turned on the light and gasped, ran over to Henry who slumped off of the bed and into his arms.
“I’m sick,” Henry uttered, his body heaving as if he were going to throw up.
“Fuck fuck fuck!” Marcus grappled through his pockets for his cell phone. In one hand he held his estranged lover, with the other he dialed 911.
He pulled up Henry’s body, gently; he was heavy but something moved through Marcus that allowed him to place his man on the bed with angelic grace. Henry felt the room slow down. It seemed to take a full minute for his head to hit the pillow, and when it did it was like he was lying down on the cupped hands of God. Marcus tore out of the room, nearly screaming at the 911 operator. In Henry’s haze, Marcus’s frantic shouts sounded like a dirge, a low moan. Wait, was this right? A guy in the hallway in a space suit being led by four strange men, all with a weird resemblance to Marcus—he couldn’t tell, they were black skinned like him, but they sort of wafted in a mesh cloud of flowing cloth. “Marcus…I—” he could not speak. He could dream. The world was washing away. He could dream.
“Hello, caller, are you there? Caller? What is your location…caller?”Marcus had dropped his phone when he returned to the room. Henry wasn’t there.
3.
And when he comes out of the pod he is covered in a thick, milky slime. He lay there twitching and writhing. His vision is clear, his memory hazy but moving in the back of his mind like shadows. He is—where? A path, a dark corridor—no, a carpet, a red carpet. A man with a craggy face, in a sequined robe, sits at a long table. There are others sitting there, they are shrouded, their faces obscured. Men with numbers on their foreheads are dancing in the aisles. He can feel his muscles bursting to life around his bones. He can feel his bones stretching into his very skin. He can feel the hairs on his head spin into curls at the follicles.
He tears out of the immersion tub, attached to wires and tubes, splashing wildly, ripping at dials on his neck and back. He is roaring, kicking at the edges of the tub. There are men droning around him, checking instruments. They are unfazed by his tantrum. He stares wide-eyed at them, can feel his nostrils flaring, can feel his own hot, swampy breath reverberate on the hairs on his lips. There’s a man with ripe red hair walking into the lab. The man is peering at him in wonder; there’s a solitary tear on his cheek. He sits there in the tub, panting. He sees both of their reflections in a piece of metal; they are identical.
He is on a treadmill.
He is climbing a wall.
He is spinning in a wheel.
He is the Vitruvian man spinning in a wheel.
He is gathering light mites on a dust planet.
He is in a pressurized suit gathering buds that wilt to his touch.
He is in a room that is too hot, naked, and the men who drone around him, they are dying now, clinging to rails, lying at his very feet, gasping for air, starved, their once long and flowing capes now soiled and tattered and scrunched into balls.
He is in a small pod, closing the hatch, locking his seatbelt when a hologram blinks on from a dial in his arm.
“What are you doing? This is not how this ends. FINISH YOUR OBJECTIVE.”
He reaches into his arm, passing his hand through the flickering image of a craggy faced white man in a black robe. “FINISH YOUR OBJECTIVE.”
“I’ve got a new objective.” He rips the dial out of his arm; it is longer than he thought, about 10 inches, it is wet with blood and pus, it’s nervy, wiry endings alive like tentacles. He throws it across the pod, and—“Fiiiinn n n nisssssssssssssshhhh—” smashes it! With all of his might!
He is in space.
He is in outer space, drifting through the cosmos, appearing before the black hole that’s sucking the air out of the atmosphere of one hundred nearby planets, that’s eating one hundred nearby suns. He is a circle spinning on a Starbucks cup. He is a sore on man’s neck, a pulsing virus. He is traveling on a photon in the spray of the pale blue light from a 25-cent porno booth video monitor.
He is going home.
C.
Marcus sat in Curtis’s new car. It was a hybrid. It was weird.
“Don’t you love it?”
Marcus felt the dashboard; the leather was crisp. “Well, it’s new all right.”
“What? Aren’t you happy for me?”
“Happy that you’ve finally stopped trying to snort all of the coke in the world? Happy that you stopped trying to fuck every underaged circuit boy in Center City? Happy that your last temp job stuck and that you got promoted? Yes. Yes, I am happy.”
“Ooo, little Ms. Epilogue over here is ssshhaaaddddyy! Why I have to be all of that?”
“I’m sorry, Curtis…that was wrong of me. Yes, yes. I’m quite happy for you.”
They were crossing the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, listening to 90s club hits. When LaBouche’s “Be My Lover” came on, Marcus’s countenance changed. He slumped back, curling into the seatbelt. Curtis looked over and saw that his friend wasn’t laughing anymore.
“This was the song playing when I first saw him sitting there, watching me dance.”
There was a pause. Curtis hesitated, then, putting his hand very gently on Marcus’s thigh, said, “Hey, don’t be sad, ok?
I mean, I—I never knew what you saw in him anyway, he was so fucking—weird…”
“Curtis. Stop the car. Stop the car now.”
Marcus got out, despite Curtis’s huffing in protest. Leaning in to the car, Marcus said, “I saw in him…yes, he was weirdo. But he was my weirdo. And that’s all that really mattered.”
Marcus turned back up the bridge, flagging down a bus and riding into the thick of the city. He went to all the places that Henry had loved to go to. He stayed in that city center all night, letting the roar of a Phillies game in a leather bar wash over him. He paid the $10 to get into the hipster night at the club that used to be TRINITY, listened to the beat but just sat on the same barstool where he’d first caught a glimpse of the man he loved. Then, he went to the porn theater. In the years they’d fallen in and out of love, much had changed in the city. The gay neighborhoods had been slowly swallowed up by rich yuppies and their trendy Indian-Bulgarian fusion restaurants, toddler fashion boutiques, and stores that sold nothing but soap. Long ago, the authorities had rounded up all the vogueing kids and closed down the pizza joints and food trucks that sometimes sold marijuana to late-night partiers. But the porno shop was still there, buzzing and bright, smelling of Freon and chlorine, peopled with the usual junkies, lawyers, priests, and teenaged goths. He sat in the booth where he first kissed Henry. “IF YOU’RE GONNA SIT IN THE BOOTHS YOU GOTTA PAY,” the man watching yelled.
And so, when he put in his quarter, the ground shook. At first it was a slight tremor. A very light, barely-registering murmur of the earth. Then the screen got jittery, blacking in and out. The doorknob rattled and before Marcus could say “Occupied,” the entire store went black. A deafening roar ripped through it, doors to booths flew open. Air swirled and sucked itself up and out, blowing away the glass windows, shaking loose bricks. On the screen, there was a circle, painted black, spinning around, a rainbow wave peeking out of its edges. In the middle of floor, an object was growing, pushing its way into the planet, ablaze with a synesthetic fire. The other patrons seemed oblivious to it. They continued walking casually throughout the store. One of them asked Marcus if he was all right.
