You, Human

by John Skipp

  I wonder what he thought, that wretched, unnamed boy with his sieve under his arm and his pockets bulging with an odd conglomerate of sandy tourist coins, what he thought when he saw me lurching at him like a blind conductor stretching out his hands over a lunatic orchestra, what he thought as the last of the light fell across my hands, red and split and shining with their burden of eyes, what he thought when the hands made that sudden, flailing gesture in the air, just before his head burst.

  I know what I thought.

  I thought I had peeked over the rim of the universe and into the fires of hell itself.

  The wind pulled at the bandages and made them into tiny, whipping streamers as I unwrapped them. The clouds had blottered the red remnants of the sunset, and the dunes were dark and shadow-cast. The clouds raced and boiled above us.

  “You must promise me one thing, Richard,” I said over the rising wind. “You must run if it seems I might try … to hurt you. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.” He open-throated shirt whipped and rippled with the wind. His face was set, his own eyes little more than sockets in early dark.

  The last of the bandages fell away.

  I looked at Richard and they looked at Richard. I saw a face I had known for five years and come to love. They saw a distorted, living monolith.

  “You see them,” I said. hoarsely. “Now you see them.”

  He took an involuntary step backwards. His face became stained with a sudden unbelieving terror. Lightning slashed out of the sky. Thunder walked in the clouds and the water had gone black as the river Styx.

  “Arthur—”

  How hideous he was! How could I have lived near him, spoken with him? He was not a creature, but mute pestilence. He was—”Run! Run, Richard!” And he did run. He ran in huge, bounding leaps. He became a scaffold against the looming sky. My hands flew up, flew over my head in a screaming, orlesque gesture, the fingers reaching to the only familiar thing in this nightmare world—reaching to the clouds.

  And the clouds answered. There was a huge, blue-white streak of lightning that seemed like the end of the world. It struck Richard, it enveloped him. The last thing I remember is the electric stench of ozone and burnt flesh.

  When I awoke I was sitting calmly on my porch, looking out towards the Big Dune. The storm had passed and the air was pleasantly cool. There was a tiny sliver of moon. The sand was virginal—no sign of Richard or of the dune buggy.

  I looked down at my hands. The eyes were open but glazed. They had exhausted themselves. They dozed.

  I knew well enough what had to be done. Before the door could be wedged open any further, it had to be locked. Forever. Already I could notice the first signs of structural change in the hands themselves. The fingers were beginning to shorten … and to change.

  There was a small hearth in the living room, and in season I had been in the habit of lighting a fire against the damp Florida cold. I lit one now, moving with haste. I had no idea when they might wake up to what I was doing.

  When it was burning well I went out back to the kerosene drum and soaked both hands. They came awake immediately, screaming with agony. I almost didn’t make it back to the living room, and to the fire.

  But I did make it.

  That was all seven years ago. I’m still here, still watching the rockets take off. There have been more of them lately. This is a space-minded administration. There has even been talk of another series of manned Venus probes.

  I found out the boy’s name, not that it matters. He was from the village, just as I thought. But his mother had expected him to stay with a friend on the mainland that night, and the alarm was not raised until the following Monday. Richard—well, everyone thought Richard was an odd duck, anyway. They suspect he may have gone back to Maryland or taken up with some woman.

  As for me, I’m tolerated, although I have quite a reputation for eccentricity myself. After all, how many ex-astronauts regularly write their elected Washington officials with the idea that space-exploration money could be better spent elsewhere?

  I get along just fine with these hooks. There was terrible pain for the first year or so, but the human body can adjust to almost anything. I shave with them and even tie my own shoelaces. And as you can see, my typing is nice and even. I don’t expect to have any trouble putting the shotgun into my mouth or pulling the trigger. It started again three weeks ago, you see.

  There is a perfect circle of twelve golden eyes on my chest.

  THE IMMIGRANTS

  ERIK T. JOHNSON

  It’s almost four o’clock in the morning when my guard-bones bark me awake (That’s the best way I can describe this oddest of sensations. Old folks get lots of strange twinges and pains but this is new). I head for the bathroom. I glimpse myself in the medicine cabinet, just before it breaks along with the other mirrors in my place. Simultaneous. That’s weird but not the real puzzle here. Look, shit breaks, weird happens, right?

  What surpasses weird is the way they’ve broken. I go room to room, turning on lights (At least it’s not a blackout). I try all eight mirrors. There’s always a first time for all things to go wrong in unprecedented ways: I’ve never seen a mirror malfunction before.

  Each time I look at the glass, there’s no me, there’s disparate person-like non-people there, watching for something a ways behind my back. Giving off a lost, worried vibe, waiting for a monumental appearance on the distant horizon … Nothing there but the cramped walls of my tenement apartment, far as I can tell. And the black smudge of a squashed moth.

  I return to seeking my seeking reflection.

  Nope.

  Two of them in my largest mirror. Can’t tell if they’re male, female, clay-mation automaton, nuclear vegetable, or what. But I was a door-to-door salesman my whole working life—which ended decades ago—and between the great variety of doors opening and closing in your face, the invites for a cuppa joe and the accusations of trespassing, you get good at reading people. Who woulda thunkd’it: Turns out you also catch the knack for reading aliens.

  I see expressions above their necks that put me in mind of when a fish is taken out of water a few moments—not long enough to kill it—how in that time before it’s thrown back into the lake—how that experience must be the closest that fish ever came to dreaming. This pair’s giving a related impression. Or is it me feeling that way?.

  Stop it already.

  Know what I bet? Corporations run everything—and that’s no crazy old-timer conspiracy ranting. I bet some business who secretly charges each American in limbs has blown a grid-load of fuses. Whatever clandestine company that provides you with this power: The power to pretend your face belongs to someone else—so you can look him in the eye and fix his hair—Well, that shadow conglomerate’s had a damn awful outage I bet.

  I’ve even lost the ability to objectively confirm I’m a fossil of a man who can’t remember how long he’s been living by himself. Or living (Can’t be but a few years’ difference between the two). A man who looks in the mirror to see an exile from an icy planet of pensioners … Is that a biped? I don’t recognize this creature of moley wrinkle and twitch, this “me” …

  A man who, a lifetime ago, misplaced a list of important things to do. Such as: stop travelling the road like Rosie asked you to; kick the booze; prove I’m man enough to take care of her; marry Rosie; get a steady job, a career with upward mobility; some kids to run round a sprinkler in a big, green yard in Long Island. Such as: don’t let sixty years go by and wind up here with the dead moth-spotted walls. Don’t misplace that list. Such as: stop fucking up, and die already. I’m late for being late.

  Joy is careless. Misery couldn’t care less. My reflections, be they in mirrors or brain, never helped me understand this World much.

  There in the mirror I’m not reflected.

  I’d have a hard time selling this crap back in the day.

  Where my image should be, some-almost-one looks beyond me, not so much like I’m invisible as blocking a
view, the guy in a 10-gallon hat who just sat down directly in front of you at the movies.

  A nameless “X” is happening. What I mean is if the World’s truly spinning—if that’s the correct word—then no kid, drunk, dreidel, top or ballerina ever spins—They lack motive, have no Sun. We need another verb.

  Better: Another verb is here.

  The mirrors are X-ing.

  How will I shave?

  Here’s a relief (I guess)—I’m not just losing it:

  The radio is frantic with reports on this malfunctioning-mirror deal. It’s a scourge. My reception is eroded, like the signals are wrestling with a mighty angel, yanking them back to Transmitter Desert before they can get close enough to gimme the skinny. Eventually, I can make out the most frequently iterated words and phrases:

  Invasion … Electromagnetic Attack … Noted String-Theorist … Unknown Quantum … Tom Cruise issued this statement … Visitors … Dimensional Portal … Terrorist … So-called Bashing Parties … Alien … Impossible … Reality as We Know It … Bad Luck … Knows No Borders … Obama’s Fault … Apocalypse … Calm … Panic … Trump calls for mass executions by guillotine … Don’t … Do … Stay Put … Flee! Far Away! … Tom Cruise has retracted … Extraterrestrial Phenomenon … Go-Bag Essentials … Tesla’s Revenge … Is Obama an evil alien entity … Global … Guns … Ghosts …

  (They can rule that one out. This “X” happening with the mirrors is nothing supernatural, there’s no spirit world. When you’re dead you’re dead. I know because I died once. On an operating table. I was dead three minutes, and when the surgeons reeled me back, I remembered nothing of the experience, and I didn’t forget a single detail, either. You get me? Because there is nothing. Even that word alone is too much to describe it.)

  Detritus of interviews, mumbling heads, doctors with no degrees, comedians … Obnoxious jokes about vampires and bad luck beyond reckoning. They laugh, ha-ha. But laughter is like mist on a river—it might distract you from the water, but it cannot change its course, and the course is all a river is.

  Were people always this stupid?

  I shut that radio the fuck up, go through the rooms, visiting each of the formerly-known-as-mirrors. No, they certainly aren’t humans, no discernible gender or ages, even. Who’da thunkdit: My Eisenhower-Era door-to-door toaster salesman skills could be today’s cutting-edge forensic competencies. I register a new emotion on the “faces.” It’s difficult to explain. Let’s call it a lost-coin look:

  Whereas a coin toss has two possible outcomes, losing a coin is at least three kinds of loss. You lose a circular, metal object about the size of a 1947 pox-vaccination scar; you lose a bit of money; and you lose control (as with any loss). But these aliens, with their lost-coin looks haven’t lost any coins … What gives?

  I’m ashamed!

  What arrogance. How do I know what they’ve lost? What wicked cosmos they fled? Do they keep their to-do lists on them at all times? Are they waiting for salvation? Have they suffered? Then again, they could be coming to destroy humanity, to ruin civilization itself, steal our oxygen—who knows?

  They are looking forward, that’s for sure. Which means when I see them, I’m looking backward.

  At what, a new past?

  This question brings an antique photograph to mind. It belonged to my mother. A picture of my great-grandparents on Ellis Island, having just arrived from Ruthenia. He was a laborer and she a laundress. They’d come here with great hopes, like many millions. They’d work their stinking birthplace skin off, grow a vibrant new American layer. Live well and start a family, the biggest, the most beautiful. The old story. The one you have to believe is true, if only for an hour or two each year. Or else you will go mad.

  But now they’ve disembarked onto this land of no-turning-back-now. It’s plain to see in the photograph: Whatever ordeals they endured to reach New York has drained any emotion from their eyes, leaving dark sepia spots.

  It’s obvious: All they want’s to be left alone in the two-dimensional peace of that photograph. Because they quickly picked up how obscenely expensive cheerful eyes are over here. They’ll never save enough. The question of housing. If only they could stay in that photograph! They swear they’ll even wear those empty eyes forever, if that’s the cost of settling down in that photo. On the back someone with a firm hand, my mother didn’t know who, had written Much luck!

  I’m tired of those peering mirrorific things and the memories they stir. If I try hard enough I can imagine they’re eight weird, tacky posters not suited to my tastes. I like only Gauguin. And L.A. Spooner, I think. The one with the nudes.

  I must sleep, it’s late, dark.

  I’m not sleeping for long. People outside, crude, loud city-racket. My eyes open but I don’t feel like getting out of bed.

  A mob gathering in the street. Shouting. Mad as hell, not going to take it anymore, sort of black-and-white-TV race-riot stuff, fascist acting-out … The World outside my window counts down in remarkable solidarity: “Three … Two … One—Smash!” Sounds like the genocide of a million glass gypsies. Lynched with pissed-off collective WHACK!, baseball bats, crowbars, curtain-rods. After the shattering, lots of people screaming in burning-alive pain (I recognize the timbre of that particular dying-crying from the war). Must be one of those mirror-bashing parties that I think the radio’s spluttering about. I remember when they burned books. That was bad. But much quieter. Thankfully the screaming stops all at once, as if at the push of a button. The death of a laugh-track.

  I try the bedside lamp but it’s kaput. I get up, fumble to the wall-switch: Nope, no light.

  I open my window: Nope, no street. No people, nothing broken or burned. No stars. Which anyway are less loving than snakes, less than indifferent. Maybe they were just an omen of twinkling glass shards, extinguished now that of which they warned is come. It’s always one thing after another and when it rains it pours and Murphy’s Law. In other words, another grid has hit the fan. It’s the classic New York City blackout I was so glad wasn’t happening earlier. Lots of trouble tonight.

  My frozen pirogues will stink like corpse farts.

  Damn, I can’t remember if I did my weekly shopping …

  What will happen to those creatures in the mirrors? Looking expectant, lost-coin sad. These aliens who need their own verbs. These People of the Verbs. Will they find the right action words in time—There’s urgent yearning on their side.

  My God, am I worried about them? Remember, dumbass, you don’t know their true intentions.

  Don’t lose your head. It’s just a blackout. I can cope. The hell with Go-Bags. It is what it is and what’re you gonna do? and it’s a serious pain in the ass but whatever you do, stay calm. No problem.

  In my calm I suddenly feel the need to talk to another person. Why? I don’t know. It’s harder to explain than it oughta be. It’s not like me. I got to the telephone—a glorious landline, impervious to blackouts. Old ways aren’t always outdated.

  I have nobody to call.

  But wait, there’s always someone. There’s billions of wrong numbers.

  I sit on the edge of my bed. I find the fat candle on my night-table. I hate candles. It smells like marzipan and I like marzipan. I open the drawer and take out the big box of safety matches.

  I try lighting the candle, pick up the phone and wait for the dial-tone.

  I want to hear another person say “hello.” This isn’t like me at all. At the same time, my heart is stirring as though obedient to a thread, yes, it hangs from a loose thread, which in its turn is submissive to a sort of inner wind now passing through, uneasing it from firm uprightness. What opening in me permits such an impossible breeze entrance? Oh, that’s right. I can’t believe I can remember how it feels: heartache …

  I am obedient to the dizzy whims of the thinnest thread.

  The safety matches are definitely not wet, so the whole box must be defective. Probably made in New Jersey. Not a single match works, do you believe it. There’s no
marzipan smoke from a flame in this room. I can’t see a thing. My window is open and the street is awful mute. Silent as three minutes of operation-table, flatline nothing.

  There’s no dial-tone, either. I’ll hang on … The dial-tone’s probably just tired, taking its sweet time to reach me … It will arrive soon. Lame joke, old man. Please, stop lying. Something’s very wrong tonight. I highly doubt there’s a prowler running around cutting telephone wires, and barring that, I’m clueless as to why there’s no dial-tone. There isn’t even the possibility of hearing a person say “Hello, how can I help you?” or “I’m afraid you have the wrong number” or even “Don’t you ever call here again, do you hear me asshole … DO YOU?” No chance for me to apologize to someone, say “I’m so sorry to trouble you, truly sorry …”

  The crackling of mirrors begins throughout my apartment, a pizzicato crescendo. The eight mirrors are X-ing and other verbs, too, say, ZX-ing and XZ-ing … It sounds traumatic as birth but what do I know, it could be joy, the immigrants are disembarking. Oh, I see. Shit in my pants. My old salesman senses are tingling … I’m pretty sure they aren’t friendly, I’ve got that whatever-you’re-selling we-don’t-want-it-get-off-my-land vibe. I hang up the phone, pick it up again. Is that a dial-tone? It’s definitely something. Hope can impersonate anything from a dial-tone to the vision of future generations flourishing in a land of liberty … Still not a dial-tone.

  A slight ringing? Nope, not that, either. It’s a buzzing, an echo. No. You’re imagining things. It’s not the sound of a Coney Island conch in my ear. It’s not Rosie saying Can’t you stay just a few more days … love? But it’s definitely something, that’s for sure. It’s not that I’m afraid to die alone, right now, what at my age and all. It’s that I don’t want to go extinct like this, here in my voiceless dark, and it’s much luck to the immigrants, may at least a couple of their dreams come true.