After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Completely understandable.

  •

  Eight painful days later, G443Ha’s cocoon trembled with life.

  Maddy helped with her probe and forceps as much as she could. The videocamera hummed on the counter beside the terrarium, recording these momentous events.

  What the camera caught on its grainy screen was—it was a lizard. Of sorts.

  Before Maddy could catch it, it scampered into the foliage.

  Maddy blinked, swallowed, tried to breathe.

  Had it gotten into the terrarium on its own, burrowed into the cocoon and slurped up the newborn?

  Maddy hoped not.

  •

  The next morning was carnage. Maddy walked into the lab to find Drs. Romin and Chang at her desk, flipping through the log.

  Her heart spiked, but then it was just the public log, not the diary she’d been keeping.

  “Doctors?” she said, her hand still to the doorknob.

  Dr. Corinth stood from the other side of the terrarium.

  “Looks like you’ve had a fox in the henhouse,” he said, and directed Maddy over.

  The rubber seal in the rear corner of the terrarium had been leaking—the misters ran at regular intervals—was cracked now, very finely.

  “Here’s where it got in,” Dr. Corinth said.

  “Twenty-eight generations,” Romin said, pooling his fingers out to show where those twenty-eight generations had gone.

  “Not her fault,” Chang said.

  He had been at the memorial, Maddy was pretty sure. Not because he knew her—he didn’t—but way in the back, as if fulfilling a personal debt. As if keeping a secret promise.

  “Faulty equipment,” Dr. Corinth finally agreed, though something about his tone suggested that this conclusion was a one-time compromise.

  “You can manage the maintenance form?” Romin asked.

  Maddy nodded, dazed.

  “And order more of the … the—”

  “Hemiargus isola,” Maddy filled in, her face flushing.

  “I am sorry,” Chang said, squeezing her upper arm on his way past, for the door.

  “We all are,” Romin added, and then they were gone.

  On the gravel bed of the terrarium were the savaged remains of the whole twenty-eighth generation.

  Maddy closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, the lizard was looking back at her through the glass.

  Its eyes were hazel, the irises striated, the pupils a deep well.

  •

  Protocol was to sterilize the terrarium in preparation for the next brood. To gas the lizard out. To defoliate, to run the gravel through the scrubber. To dip the glass walls, completely remove the contaminant.

  The new order of Hemiargus isola was still six weeks out, though.

  Maddy opted to monitor the lizard, the one with the heart of a butterfly.

  It was the twenty-ninth generation.

  •

  The next day, its belly full, the lizard burrowed into the decay, pulled the covers around itself again and again, tighter and tighter.

  It trusted Maddy.

  She casually locked the door, threaded the private log from the file cabinet. Cued up the videocassette she’d since replaced.

  The artificial sun went down, came up, and went down again.

  Four days later, a mouse pup nosed through the soil.

  Maddy cried.

  In the private log she wagered that every planet produces one animal that contains every form of life. A genetic chimera. For purposes of repopulation following some global calamity.

  This had probably happened before.

  Just, never in a lab.

  And, though Maddy knew what the calamity in this case had been—Chang could have guessed as well, she would wager—she didn’t write her son’s name in the log even once.

  •

  Three accelerated generations later—they ate the cocoon now, and whatever else she could smuggle into the lab—Maddy recorded the birth of what she strongly suspected would grow into a star-nosed mole, if given the chance. Something burrowing, anyway. Something born pregnant. With itself.

  Maddy’d taken to sleeping less, in order to document. And Dr. Corinth didn’t bother her about grieving anymore. She was the busiest body in the lab, helping out in each experiment, always checking the day’s mail for her shipment of Hemiargus isola.

  Soon enough, after gnawing down a pigeon Maddy had trapped under a cardboard box on the balcony of her apartment, the mole developed enough to gecko up the glass wall of the terrarium, spit a cocoon around itself in the high rear corner.

  Maddy camoflouged it as well as she could, all the while recording temperature and sound, and humming to it in case it needed to know her voice. Even on the bus, she noted, she was humming.

  It wasn’t a bad thing.

  Two mornings later, she found Dr. Corinth probing the flaky shell of the cocoon with a probe.

  Maddy’s coffee dropped, and she didn’t even register the splash on her shins.

  “Dr. Greenwald?” Dr. Corinth said to her, his pants legs spattered as well.

  “It’s, it’s—” Maddy said.

  “Amazing,” Dr. Corinth said.

  Drs. Romin and Chang agreed.

  Thermal readings were taken, and taken again. Evidently the reason the cocoon was flaky was due to the exothermic process happening within, that Maddy’s delicate thermometer hadn’t pushed deep enough to feel.

  The flakes from the cocoon were preserved, frozen, wondered at.

  Other lab personnel toured through. The way they held their eyes was the way photographers hold their cameras at important but fleeting social events. Because they knew this area was soon to be cordoned off, Maddy knew, and didn’t want to know.

  In an effort for her access not to be revoked, she produced the private log, the secret videorecordings.

  “I call him Gabe,” she said.

  Chang’s eyes flashed up to her about this, but he didn’t say anything.

  Nobody was thinking about the lipstick job anymore. Instead they were all composing their speeches, for the awards that had to be coming.

  Drs. Corinth and Romin and Chang and the other lab-coated rubberneckers retired to the break room at mid-afternoon. The big television was there. They wired Maddy’s camera to it, watched birth after birth, freezing the frame to argue. Each instar confirmed a suspicion. Each new life was the first of its kind, a new entry into the fossil record.

  The tree of life was branching into finer and finer filaments.

  For them, anyway.

  Maddy stood alone in what had been her lab.

  Meaning she was the only one there when the cocoon trembled again.

  Calmly, watching her hand more than controlling it, she disconnected the leads that would have drawn everyone in from the breakroom.

  The cocoon shuddered, cracked, and dripped, finally exhaled a moist breath of steam.

  Maddy helped it down to the floor of the terrarium.

  The cocoon weighed 1905.1 grams. Dr. Corinth had written it down already.

  X-rays were scheduled for this evening.

  Now they wouldn’t be necessary.

  Maddy dialed the light down, used forceps and a probe to separate the fibrous tissue.

  Two eyes looked through to her from another world.

  Two eyes with dark pupils swimming in hazel, striated irises.

  Then a hand pushed through, reaching for her.

  Maddy touched her own throat with her fingertips, realized she’d been humming again.

  Five fingers, she noted.

  Human.

  Maddy shook her head no, no, and parted the cocoon more, more, enough to see that this wasn’t Gabe at all, like she’d been insisting.

  This was Taylor.

  Again.

  Each letter of his name had cost seventy-five dollars, in granite.

  It was a price she hadn’t anticipated.

  Gabe was better, more economica
l.

  Or, no: Ty. Ty would be perfect.

  Maddy nodded to herself, her eyes crinkling in amusement at her folly, and then, just like last time—in science, you learn about repetition, about achieving the same results—she held her hand over Taylor’s small wet mouth, and counted him back to sleep.

  at the digital clock on the stove, and try to call up the way those greenish letters would shiver the instant before they changed, like they were about to hatch? Like they held the future in their vertical lines, their muted glow.

  And I’d always be waiting for them to change.

  It’s my fault, what happened to Kelly.

  You can ask why I’m still here, and that’s my only answer: that it’s my fault.

  She woke falling, the cool, unbreathed air of our new house rushing past her, all around her, her nightgown fluttering back from her upper arms, from her thighs. And it was a dream, she says, in her little girl voice. The air was cushioning her, was soft around her. She was safe. She knew because she’d been floating there for minutes, it felt like. For hours.

  Since then, I’ve read up on dreams. How they’re not what we think, aren’t grand and Freudian, aren’t these strange windows into those parts of our heads we’re not familiar with.

  Trick is, if our eyeballs don’t stay in some state of motion throughout the night, then they would dry to the backside of our eyelids. It’s that simple. So they twitch back and forth on their own schedule, and, because our mental defenses are down, each of those muscular twitches sparks up a knee-jerk association: what we saw the last time our eye was looking this way, and that way. Keeping our eyes wet so we can see in the morning, it kicks up random images all night.

  That’s not dreaming, though. All that is is you, lying in bed, all these mismatched flashcards floating in a jumble above you. But—you know how sometimes when your alarm rings, or you hear the garbage men on the curb talking before sunrise, how that can weave its way into your dream? And how, even though that alarm, those voices, they’re what’s waking you, can’t have lasted more than a few seconds, still, the narrative you cough up to contain them, it feels like the alarm’s been going off for hours. Like those garbage men have been telling their life stories out there.

  It’s not that dreams unfold at a different pace than waking life, it’s that, when you wake, all those flashcards floating above you, they fall onto the floor of your mind, and, because we’re human, always insisting on faces in wood grain and in bowls of soup, what we do is run a story thread through all those images. It’s why dreams don’t make sense, half the time: of course that apple doesn’t go with a talking carburetor. The apple just happened to fall by that engine you saw earlier, and that engine, the reason it can speak is because it happened to fall by this grey blazer a woman in line at the coffee shop was wearing, and—you can remember if you try—she wouldn’t stop talking on her phone, would she?

  Because we want our mental time to count, though, we assign meaning to those dreams. Or try to extract it. Try to make them these magical communiqués from our subconscious.

  And it can be meaningful, sure, but it’s the self-analysis that actually gets you somewhere. You’re just using the dreams as a springboard to dredge up whatever your real issues or concerns are. You’re using them as a trigger to look inside yourself, for whatever you’ve been denying. But they’re inherently empty, are always accidental.

  And I didn’t want to know any of that, understand.

  I wanted Kelly’s last memory, of floating, to be a gift the world had given her. An apology for what was coming.

  Instead, it was just physiological: she was asleep when she rolled out of the loft, off the edge of our bed, and she slipped away, her senses delivering those sensations to her all at once—air rushing past, weightlessness, no impact—and when she glimmered awake mid-air, she maybe grinned a little in the darkness.

  To be flying, to be floating.

  Those are always the best.

  Until the ground rises to meet you.

  •

  When I say it was my fault, what I mean is that I shouldn’t have smuggled her from her office that Friday, even going so far as to carry her giggling over the threshold of the elevator. I shouldn’t have already had a bottle of red wine in the backseat. We shouldn’t have stopped for the family meal of fried chicken to go, and then the Rolos from the gas station, an impulse buy because she never allowed herself those anymore.

  It had been a special day, though.

  We ate the Rolos at the first stoplight, the wine at the second, and only got to the chicken later, and didn’t have nearly enough napkins for what it did to our fingers, our chins.

  It didn’t matter.

  I killed the car maybe two hundred feet from what was going to be our driveway—what was already our driveway—but left the headlights on.

  We coasted in like thieves, the windows glinting at us, the plywood exterior still showing streaks of blue spray paint from its former life in the lumberyard, or on a truck.

  What we were doing was breaking in.

  Not the kind of breakin that would land us in jail—her father was building the house, the lot was ours—but still, we weren’t supposed to be there yet. Later Kelly would have to make decisions about fixtures and doorknobs, later I would have to say how high I wanted the mailbox, and together we might decide on a wind vane for the eave above the third floor study—this was the country, after all—but there weren’t supposed to be any midnight picnics, any sexual romps like we were teenagers, our fingers greasy with dead animal.

  But, sonograms: if you could, you would reach into that black sheet, wouldn’t you? Run the pad of your finger along the delicate curve of your unborn child’s forehead, anointing him into the family, into your care?

  That’s what we were doing. Christening this room with Mark and Kelly, then, when we could, the next room, until, by the time we retired to the third floor loft, all we could do was take turns blowing up the air mattress I’d had in the trunk. It was supposed to be for guests, for old college friends someday, but for now, it was for us.

  Later, her father would look away and ask me why way the hell up there?

  Because it was cool, Stan. And because we were hot. And because our love buoyed us up to the dizzy heights.

  What I told him was nothing, because there was no answer that would explain, really.

  I just shrugged.

  We were standing in the antiseptic hallway of the hospital, then. Were the only ones there for minutes and minutes, the only time I ever saw it like that, all the months I lived there.

  And, as for why I slept on the left side of the air mattress that night, not the right, it was because that was my assigned place. In our townhouse downtown, the left side of the bed was the side closest to the door that opened onto the hall, and it had never locked right. Or, the knob would lock, but the brass tongue would never catch in the strikeplate properly, so sometimes when the air conditioner sighed on, the door would just drift open.

  It freaked us both out a few times, but, because I was the new husband, was trying to be the protector, the brave one, I switched sides of the bed with Kelly, so that anything that rushed gibbering down the hall, through the door, it was going to get me first.

  We were kids, yeah.

  Nine years later, though, it was habit, it was custom: the left side of our marriage bed, that was my side.

  Which is no excuse, I know.

  Sometimes I think that my dream flashcards, they’ve all spilled in my lap. A bed in the clouds, a straw, a squirrel. And all I’m doing is threading myself through them, ducking into this one, stepping into the next one.

  She never screamed, either, Kelly. That night.

  And we’re not even for sure when it happened.

  Our best guess is that we finally nodded off close to midnight, our mouths sticky with wine, and each other. And, though I’d thought ahead enough for the air mattress, the wine, the chicken, and to ask off early for the afternoon,
I’d of course forgotten about any kind of flashlight.

  Kelly’d told me it wasn’t my fault, I was just being the typical male, worried only about certain developments, but still, before bedding down, to sleep, we’d had to go barefoot, hand in hand out to the car. The lighter was the closest thing to a flashlight we could think of, and we were each too jumpy to feel our way to the one working toilet in the dark. And, since there were no walls around it yet, and we’d always been bathroom shy, somewhat, the solution we came up with was that one of us would sit in the driver’s seat of the car, pass the lighter up when it popped, then the other would take it, scramble for the bathroom, and sing to him or herself the whole time so the other would know everything was cool.

  We were still kids, yeah.

  The world never lets you stay that young, though, does it?

  •

  So, sometime during the night, and in spite of the chicken bucket I’d set up as railing for us—it had the lighter from the car in it, which was supposed to rattle if we nudged the bucket—Kelly rolled over, rolled off into open space.

  I’m thinking it took her between three and four seconds to reach the concrete floor of what was going to be our foyer.

  When she landed, I imagine the sawdust kind of whoomphed up around her and hung in the air for long moments after, insulted. Or curious.

  The reason I can guess at the seconds is because our family meal, it had come with drinks, even though we had wine.

  Before bed, we’d laid bellydown across the mattress, our faces and arms hanging over the edge, and we’d sucked drops of lemonade and tea into our straws, held them there by sucking, then, on the silent count of three, opened our mouths, let them hurtle down to the floor below.

  There’d been just enough moon through the stained glass framing the front door for us to see the splashes we were making. Just enough moon for us to laugh at what her Dad was going to think when he saw it. How he was probably going to send the youngest kid on site up onto the roof, to check for leaks, even though there’d been no rain. And why were the ants so interested in these splashes?