You, Human

by John Skipp

  “How did you get in here?” Steve asked, trembling.

  “I know the code.”

  “How did you survive out there?”

  The man laughed.

  Lights, Steve thought. But no, not yet.

  “There’s nothing to it,” the man said. “They tell you you can’t survive out there so that you don’t try it.”

  Lightning flashed close to the apartment and Steve saw him, the man, not sitting at the table, but crouched upon it.

  Darkness again. Complete.

  “Wanna get over the anxiety, Stevie? The guilt? Wanna … be free?”

  Steve looked down again. Saw that flicker die in a swirl of black sludge.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Mom said something, far away.

  Something about being mistaken.

  “Go on, then. Step outside the apartment.”

  “The door is locked from the inside. So that nobody jumps out, so that nobody―”

  White lightning again and Steve saw the man was now crouched upon the bed and beyond him the door was open, a crack, just enough for Steve to imagine his own fingers gripping the edge, opening it wider, allowing himself to step outside.

  Steve slid along the glass wall, toward the corner of the apartment, away from the bed.

  But the man was moving, too.

  Motion. In the dark.

  Shoes on a glass floor.

  Mom talking about no life.

  The steps closer.

  Mom talking about mistakes.

  No life.

  Shoes.

  Taps on glass.

  Shoes.

  Mom.

  Life.

  “LIGHTS!!”

  The lights came on inside and outside the apartment and Steve saw no man coming, no man upon the bed, the table, or anywhere.

  Wide-eyed, getting up, Steve looked everywhere. Under the bed. Behind the shower curtain. In the cupboards. Outside.

  “MOM!”

  “Yes, dear?”

  The door was still open. Just enough that he could pull it open wider. Could step outside if he wanted to.

  He looked down. He thought of Amy and the kids. How Amy must have taught the kids how Dad was a nervous man, a wreck, a shell, ever since nicking Dennis Coleman on Miller Street, ever since Dennis Coleman nicked the tree.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “What do you know about … getting over things?”

  Steve was crossing the apartment, stepping toward the unlocked glass door.

  “Getting over things? Well, for starters I’d guess a person needs to face their fears head on. But that’s what everybody says, and yet, most people don’t get over things, do they. So then that’s not the answer, is it?”

  Steve was halfway across the apartment. The glass floor was cool against his bare feet and Steve realized, distantly, that he’d spent most of his time in the dark without wearing socks or shoes.

  “So I’d think it’d have to be something more like …” Mom was thinking. “Experiencing the thing for yourself, the thing to get over.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you trying to get over, dear?”

  “The top of it. The all of it.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. But yes, I imagine the only way to get over something is to go straight through it.”

  “Yes.”

  Steve was at the door. His lips curled into an imitation of the smile Dennis Coleman wore, the expression Steve saw through the windshield, as Coleman fell back toward the tree.

  He felt for the edge of the open door. A flash of red lightning helped him find it.

  “Now, dear. We’ll be landing in less than an hour and I know you’ll be happy about that. You’ll be on the shuttle and headed back to your daily life in no time.”

  “My daily life,” Steve thought.

  THERE IS NO LIFE ON JUPITER. IF YOU THINK YOU SEE LIFE ON JUPITER, YOU ARE MISTAKEN!

  Steve opened the door.

  “Dear?”

  But Steve was already stepping outside. As Mom started to tell him to look down, that the lights of New Jupiter Station 2 were visible at last, Steve was already too far away to hear her, her voice sucked up and swallowed by the storms, unseen waves, and the astonishing volume of a planet with no indomitable apartment to hush it.

  Free fall.

  Steve was falling. Steve was breathing. Steve was seeing, too.

  Below him, the propulsion jets on the top of the apartment glowed like distant cigars in the dark, four men playing cards perhaps, gambling, someone’s life on the table.

  The apartment was far below him, moving faster than him, and beyond it was (yes) the catch pad, an enormous pentagon of elastic material (Glasgow, just like the walls of the apartment, all the unbreakable stuff was Glasgow), and standing upon the catwalks and solid bridges were men and women in white, Downey agents, ready to escort Steve

  (Steve’s not home anymore, Steve stepped outside)

  to the Disney shuttle that would take him back home.

  Home.

  It was impossible not to hold your arms out as far as they could go, to spread your fingers, your legs, to keep your eyes open, wide, as you fell. It wasn’t just wind in your hair, Christ no, it was the storms of Jupiter against your clothes, your face, your teeth. Steve felt rains he’d never felt before. Snow? Who knows. At times the current was so thick it felt like arms and legs against his own, at other times so thin as to be mere fingertips, tickling, and Steve smiled and laughed, an honest laughter that felt as free as advertised. The laughter of a man who wisely, calmly knows it’s okay to laugh, no matter what comes next in life.

  Life.

  Below him, at what appeared to be the bottom of Jupiter, the planet’s very edge, nestled into the impossible, gaseous surface, was something that looked like …

  “Amy’s hair.”

  Steve laughed again, but it was clipped now. Not because he was saddened by the correlation, but because the object (objects?) was so out of place as to be shocking, astonishing; a tangle of dark roots, unmoving, still despite the raging winds that shook the glass apartment below.

  Life.

  Steve, still alive, still falling, free falling, recognized the tangle as roots indeed, as though he were coming up from under the ground, as if her were digging rather than falling, rising, up up up, to the surface, and just below that surface were, yes, the roots that nourished Life, that supported the whole song and dance to begin with.

  Roots.

  Life.

  “A tree,” Steve said, and blue winds toyed with the syllables, keeping them near, before they were sucked up into the cosmic tempest above.

  THERE IS NO LIFE ON JUPITER.

  Yes, a tree.

  The apartment’s jets sputtered, slowed as the glass box came level with the tree and in the apartment’s lights Steve saw the bark in great detail, the branches like petrified lightning, the knots and the nicks …

  “The nicks …”

  Above the tree (Steve could see a crown now upon the tree, the green head in full bloom) New Jupiter Station 2 sat like a second sun, all man-made lights aflame, the pentagon catch pad ready for the coming apartment. Steve understood, then and only then, that gravity ought to be working against him, that there is no top and no bottom of Jupiter, no more than there is to planet Earth.

  And yet … falling … still …

  (Wanna get over the anxiety, Stevie? The guilt? Wanna be free? )

  … free falling.

  The empty apartment reached the catch pad, the Downey agents waved hello, hello Steve Ringwald, you’ve been gone two months, you did it, you didn’t lose your marbles in isolation, didn’t go nuts and try to drown yourself in the sink, try to chop your fingers off with the bagel slicer, no blood, no mess, didn’t try to open the door, didn’t open the―

  The door swung loose. Open.

  Steve saw clearly their expressions as the apartment landed, as nobody waved back to them from within, as the glass box wa
s empty, easily seen, all the way through.

  A magic trick. The vanishing man.

  But the agents knew where to look. The agents looked up. The leviathan ball storming above them, the Dropper Steve Ringwald dropping dangerously close to a tree.

  (up? down? There is no top or bottom to Jupiter …)

  Steve heard Mom, then. Heard her voice as though she were still beside him, as he fell, so close to the tree, no longer using one of the speakers, her tone clear and full, her syllables emerging and slipping back into the thick then thin winds, the blues, the oranges, the browns, the blacks, the―

  “The tree,” Steve said, as he reached it, as his body careened hard against the roots, as he tumbled up the body of the bark.

  Mom spoke.

  “THERE IS NO LIFE ON JUPITER. IF YOU THINK YOU SEE LIFE ON JUPITER, YOU ARE MISTAKEN!”

  Below, the agents were searching under the bed, in the shower, in the cupboards, too.

  Steve crashed hard against a thick branch, fell up to another, to another, thought:

  That wasn’t Dennis Coleman.

  But it didn’t matter who it was, who had advised him to step outside, to leave the safety of the apartment, to free fall through the center of a thing he couldn’t get over.

  “They’re looking for you, dear,” Mom said, her voice Jupiter’s thunder, the sound a lifecycle might make. “But they can’t find you.”

  Steve crashed into another branch. Another.

  “Where are you, dear? Steve? Where did you go? Are you hiding under the bed? Are you hiding in the shower?”

  Steve connected with another branch.

  His head this time.

  “Are you hiding in the dark, Steve?” Mom’s voice echoed through Jupiter. “Are you still there … hiding … in the dark?”

  THE UNIVERSE

  IS DYING

  PAUL MICHAEL ANDERSON

  The world is ending, but you don't know that yet.

  You are James McIntyre, 31, and the instant before the smartphone on your nightstand rings is the calm before the storm.

  You hear Deanna in the other room on the phone with her agent. You take a final moment to adjust the ends of your tie. You smell the cool saltiness of the Pacific wafting in through the bedroom windows. You think of nothing but what notes the producers gave Marty about the latest draft of the screenplay. This is your life, and it, as far as you can gauge, is perfect. This is your life and it is all calm.

  The calm passes when you pick up the phone and hit ACCEPT, when you bring it to your ear, when you say “Hello?”

  The storm arrives when the boy’s voice at the other end asks, “Where the hell have you been, Jimmy?”

  The boy’s voice wakes up your brain in a big-bad way, like the biggest hit of coke, but you’ve done coke a few times and coke is not like this. Great Klieg lights flash on in the center of your head, banishing mental shadows you didn’t know existed, showing the shapes of things too big and too numerous to take in at once, showing how little had actually been visible, how little you’d been working with. You can’t even be confused yet.

  “You need to come home, Jimmy,” the boy says and your head is nodding and the Klieg lights begin to fade, and darkness flows in, and you make a strangled noise in your throat. The darkness takes your few memories—coming out to La-La Land, getting the coveted Universal writing internship, signing with Marty, meeting Deanna—with it, but not before you see how flimsy they are, hurried sketches to a storyboard of a film trapped in pre-production hell. You did not live these times. They are not yours and, as such, you lose them.

  Deanna calls your name, but you don’t hear her. A hum fills your head, rising quickly, becoming a ringing and beginning to swallow you.

  And you say, as the ringing reaches a deafening level, as the darkness descends over one final glimpse of the Pacific and Deanna’s strained face, “I have to go home now.”

  Deanna opens her mouth, but the darkness falls.

  The ringing, like the aftermath of a gun going off next to someone’s ear, dragged McIntyre back to consciousness slowly, receding as he became more aware. He looked without seeing through the windshield, at the intersection made surreal by the moving curtain of water on the glass.

  And then the intersection flickered like a television with bad reception.

  “Gah!” he yelled, dropping his smartphone and jamming the heels of his hands into his eyes. He pressed until neon colors flashed, then warily removed them.

  The intersection—the puddles of rain in the street depressions, the drooping, dying trees along the corners, the low one-storey YMCA across the street—did not flicker. He took it all in and a name bubbled up from the back of his mind: Traumen, Ohio.

  He was home and his mouth dried. “What the hell?”

  He looked around the car—no key in the ignition, a tape-deck in the dash. The interior constricted around him. Heart thudding, he got out, grabbing the smartphone in his lap out of habit. The rain soaked him as he backed away from the car, a nondescript 1990s-era four-door he’d never seen before. It sat in the center of the intersection, paused in the middle of turning left

  (off of petroleum street and onto west front street)

  He shook his head. It felt crammed full of newspaper

  (like we used to put into our snowboots when they were too big)

  He turned the way he presumably had come and faced a girder bridge

  (the petroleum street bridge)

  with a raging gray river beneath.

  He looked back at the intersection, but saw nothing there. No other cars in sight, not even parked along the curbs. No other people. The only movement the rain plunking into the street puddles. It was all so still, a movie set waiting for cast and crew to arrive.

  A rising panic filled his head with static, closed his airways to a straw, pressed weight against his chest. Never mind Traumen, how he’d gotten here. Figure it out later. Just get away. Get away now.

  McIntyre did, running from the car, running for the bridge. He’d run right down the center, run right out of town, run—

  —right into what looked like nothing else, but what felt solid.

  McIntyre bounced back hard onto his ass. He looked up unbelievingly, the panic momentarily pushed aside. The bridge was there, the grey sludgy water beneath, but this close, it was obviously a matte-painting landscape, something Alfred Whitlock would’ve done in The Birds or the 1982 remake of The Thing. This close, McIntyre could see the brush strokes.

  “The fuck?” he muttered, approaching. He couldn’t see the end of the painting and—Jesus, that was all an effect, anyway, something superimposed over a green-screen shot during post-production. The paintings, in reality, were small; they only looked large when the effect was complete.

  “Like I’m in a movie,” he said.

  The rain went through what his mind insisted was a matte-painting and it made his eyes cross. He raised his hand, hesitated, then put his fingertips to it. A jolt like static electricity snapped at his hand and a nauseating sense of vertigo swirled through the center of his head, followed by a ping of pain, like a sharp jab to a pressure point. For the briefest moment, the sting of hospital cleaner—bleach insufficiently masked with perfume—slapped his nose, the chocolate-y-sweet taste of HoHos flooded his mouth, and he heard the opening piano chords to a song that sounded distressingly familiar.

  McIntyre stumbled away, hugging his stomach, holding onto his balance through sheer will alone. The saturated tails of his ties slapped his chest as he retched. Nothing came up but thick spit.

  (of course not when was the last time I ate)

  He straightened, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand like a kid, and turned back to the town.

  “How the hell did I get here?” he asked. He realized he still held his smartphone and a brief burst of hope rose—only to deflate when he turned the screen towards him to see it covered by a thin green-plastic stick-on coating, something the effects crews would put on electronics
during shots so they could insert the CG

  (like a matte-painting)

  later.

  McIntyre peeled the sheet off and tried to turn on the phone.

  The screen remained black.

  With a sinking feeling, he peeled off the rubber case and opened the battery-housing. Empty, of course.

  (a prop)

  (like in a movie)

  (this isn’t some fucking movie)

  He threw the phone down and it bounced with a crack off the asphalt. He touched his pockets, but they were empty.

  “How the fuck did I get here ? ” he yelled.

  (i’d been getting ready the phone rang and)

  And nothing.

  (where the hell have you been jimmy)

  And he was back in Traumen, Ohio.

  (you have to come home jimmy)

  But, looking through the intersection where

  (petroleum street)

  began its uphill climb, the roofs of post-World War II houses like a giant’s shaky staircase, nothing came to him. Just names. Barely factoids. Things he might’ve pulled off Google Maps and a read-through of his IMDB profile: James McIntyre, screenwriter to the adaptations of Paper Towns and 13 Reasons Why was born in Traumen, Ohio, and—

  —but there was no “and.”

  “Oh shit, I don’t remember any of this.” He squeezed his fists to his aching temples, as if pressure could force the memories out. There was just this moment, this instant. Before now was La-La Land and Deanna and Marty, but even they lacked any depth in his mind. More names. Like half-assed amnesia.

  (hurried storyboards for a film trapped in pre-production hell)

  (you did not live these times)

  And before that? Just black. More complete amnesia. He might’ve been created this moment, whole and breathing at the age of 31 with only the roughest sketch of backstory.

  “Fuck.” McIntyre dropped his hands. The odd certainty stole over him that every end of the intersection was a matte-painting, that he was trapped here. It was ridiculous, but then so was the matte-painting over the Petroleum Street Bridge.