by Jack Ketchum
One evening, you walk through a playground, now deserted. Glass from a shattered bottle slides into the sole of your foot. A condom filled with dried semen affixes to your heal to join the refuse accumulating in your clay, and you wonder on the purpose of each new ornament, though you understand they are meaningless to you. These are items cast away by man, and you are not a man. You only wear one's shape. You've seen men and women eat and drink and sleep and breed just like all of the other species you've encountered on your journey: all except you. You require none of these things, and though you recognize your difference, only now does the extent of that difference work into you like another jagged piece of broken glass.
Drops of rain begin to fall. The first lands on your shoulder and you feel an insignificant part of yourself wash away with the water. A vivid fear emerges. You imagine that each drop of rain will take a little more of you until nothing is left, and this possibility terrifies you, so you seek shelter.
Beneath a child's fort constructed of thick redwood beams, you lean against a tree and make a decision. Though you are not a man, you will live like one. Perhaps your kind has different customs, different norms, but you have found no other like you to provide example or tutelage, so you use the patterns to which you have become familiar. And with the decision made, you feel less vulnerable to the rain, though you still do not dare to continue your journey until it stops.
One day you are wandering through a field and find a shack. It is hardly taller than you and constructed of weathered boards, uneven at the seams. Like you, the wood is gray. A window of filthy glass looks out on a mountain range in the distance. Tall grasses surround the building, running over sweeping hills to the forest at your back. The shack is infested with mice and insects; several of them join the accumulation on the soles of your feet as you absently stomp around the shelter's dirt floor, testing the way you fit in the space.
Satisfied that you have found a home, you sit in a corner and begin the process of memory. Months of experience play back to you. Some of these memories are more pleasant than others, and these are the ones you want to recall, want to see with the most frequency, but foul recollections are given equal if not greater weight than the agreeable ones.
Days go by while you sit motionless in the shack, engulfed in reminiscence. Rain and sunshine and night and day pass hardly noticed. Finally you are satisfied with the memories, certain you remember each moment of your brief existence. Only then do you leave the shack to explore the peaceful environment you have discovered.
At a riverbank you watch the current race from north to south. You wonder what lies beyond the river, but you fear straying too far from your shelter. Each afternoon has brought rain, and there is no reason to believe this one would be different. Instead of pursuing an expedition you sit on the bank and scrape lines in the mud, a substance not unlike your own material. Deborah fills your thoughts, and you wish she were with you to share your home.
But Deborah is gone. You have found no other like her. No other like yourself.
Rising to a crouch, you push your hand into the mud. It tingles as if infused with energy. And you begin to dig.
You scrape the mud together, leaving long troughs on either side of an oblong mound, which is as long as the distance between your feet and shoulders. The form's edges are ragged and you look at your hands, understanding their inadequacy for the finer work ahead. From the field, you take a twig and force it through the flat edge of your hand. With the wood you score the oblong, starting at the middle and drawing a line to one of the tapered ends. At the other end, you round the boxy mass and create divots to designate the contours of a delicate neck. You want this form to resemble Deborah, but it never will. The level of artistry necessary to achieve that miracle is far beyond your meager skills. As you stab the twig into the rounded lump of mud crafting the first eye, you tell yourself that creating the general form will suffice, so you gouge two holes. With the eyes complete, you move on to the mouth. Gently, you dig a narrow hollow and the mud pushes back and away, forming a rough ridge of lips. An hour passes as you draw and pause, trepidation often stilling your hand as you trace a strand of hair or separate toes with the edge of wood. What you began in desperation, its completion so utterly imperative, now fills you with uncertainty.
You drop the stick and walk into the field, determined not to look back, resolute in your decision to abort this ridiculous activity. But ahead of you is the shack, hardly a crate in the distance, and the emptiness of your days strikes your chest like stones.
When you return to the shape in the mud, you look down at the face and find it beautiful. Already you've forgotten your recent hesitation. Unable to resist, you kneel and press your lips to hers.
Gravity takes hold of the scroll in your mouth, and it falls, rolling over your lips to rest against the mud at the back of your creation's throat. You die in that moment, the life-giving document no longer touching the clay of your form.
But she lives and returns the kiss, rising to you. Her material and yours meld and in this moment you are resurrected, the power of the document passing through mud and clay. Consciousness surges, and you experience a frisson of joy, fueled by the sensation of touch.
You think of her as Deborah, and for a time, you are happy—the scroll passing from you to her in the moments of embrace. Sometimes the world goes away and you live no longer until she returns to again pass the document from her mouth to yours. You share this intimacy and a single life. You and this new Deborah have no language. When you are alive she is not, but some days you wake to find scratches in the dirt. You interpret a wavy line with an arrow as the river and understand that Deborah visited its banks that day. A jumble of lines erupting in wings suggests your companion has come across a nest of birds, and Deborah has drawn a clumsy map so that you might find it too. You adopt the practice, leaving symbols in the dirt for her. These are oblique communications but they are the only means you have to interact beyond the physical.
Initially this is satisfying, but as the months pass you wonder if you've added to your existence or diminished it. And there is always the transient death.
You begin to dread those moments of darkness, imagining that one day Deborah might wander from the shack and never return—gone like the first Deborah—leaving you to erode in the wind gusting through the cracked boards or to suffer at the hands of some passing strangers, incapable of defending yourself because you are nothing but an unconscious shape.
When the fear becomes too great you stay to your side of the shack, forsaking the intimacy that could pass the life between you. No touch. No kiss. No comfort. Only the certainty of continued existence, and that is enough.
One day, you leave the shack with the sculpted mud that once served as your companion propped against a wall and you walk through the field and to the riverbank, and instead of turning back you follow the river to a bridge, then cross, heading toward a horizon serrated by mountain peaks.
This time you travel during the day, allowing the sun to warm you, and at night you recount the sights and the sensations. You encounter no men, only simpler creatures—the rodents, the birds, the insects, the scavenging coyotes—concerned with the fundamental needs of existence. You envy the ease of their thoughtless pursuits: gathering food and finding shelter and rutting. They exist by instinct. Regret is impossible for such beasts.
Days pass before you reach the base of the mountain ridge. You imagine that if you climb this incline you might see the entirety of the earth spread out before you, but you resist the urge to scale this peak, and you look back at the way you have come.
Instead of beginning up the mountain, you sit on a rock. You think of Deborah, but not Deborah the woman. Instead, the name recalls the figure of dirt with which you shared the scroll. You think about the pictures she scratched in the ground to greet you when both the document and life were returned. You want to go back to her and draw the mountain ridge before waking her and holding her tightly to you so that
your kiss provides enough life for you both.
But there will be darkness. There will be death.
The day ends as you sit on the rock. Through the night, memory eludes you. In its place are silence and a mental twilight against which no images play.
Before the dawn, you rise from the rock and begin the trek home. The earth is too large and there will always be something new to see, something new to experience, but if such discovery requires casting off equal measures of acquisition, then what is gained? It is merely a trade, for which novelty is the only means of differentiation. And novelty is little more than moisture, glistening and smooth but soon evaporated and forgotten.
As you approach the shack, you are startled to see a man there, standing in the open doorway. He is old and bent at the middle. You pause in the field with the green grasses waving against your legs, watching intently as the old man scratches his head. Finally, he shrugs and closes the door and walks away. In moments the blades of grass obscure him completely.
You run forward, imagining the terrible things this man might have done to Deborah. The guilt for having left her crashes down with palpable weight, causing you to stumble. When you reach the door your awkward hand has trouble opening it, but you manage to work it free and throw it wide.
With relief you see Deborah propped against the wall as you'd left her all of those days ago. In your eagerness to touch her, you don't even bother drawing the mountain ridge on the ground for her. Instead, you kneel down and lower your mouth to hers, your hands simultaneously reaching out to hold her close.
Before your lips can touch hers, she crumbles. Her seemingly solid constitution comes apart into a multitude of specks, at first a cloud, then merely soil on top of soil, indiscernible from the earthen floor of the shack.
Her loss confuses you, and you grow angry. You imagine the old man did this, performed some murdering rite on your companion, and your primary urge is to find this man, to shatter his skull and crush his chest, reducing him to dirt the way Deborah has been reduced, but already you understand the blame cannot be reassigned. You took too long to return, and Deborah died because of your neglect.
Running your hand through the precious dirt, mixing it with the common earth, your anger continues to blossom, growing hard and sharp-edged in your chest. You stand and punch the rickety wall. The entire shack cants and creaks with the impact. With another blow, you punch through the dried gray boards, and you continue this destruction until the shack is reduced to ragged slats and shards of broken window.
And still Deborah is gone, and still your guilt enrages you. You stomp away from the shack and into the field toward the river. The banks there are deep with mud. You'll make another companion—another Deborah. You'll make a hundred of them so that when one crumbles others will remain to assuage your grief.
On the river's edge you watch the current rush. Above you, the afternoon rain clouds have gathered. They are black and cover the sky like tumors. You dare the rain to come now. It can't hurt you, could never truly hurt you so long as the document rested in your mouth. To prove this you wade into the river to let the coursing water caress and tug at you, and as you suspected, you are unharmed. When you walk out, your legs and feet glisten but they have not been weakened.
Yet in those few moments, wetted by the river, your resolve to fashion new companions waned. You look at the rich mud on the bank and think it is only mud. There is no Deborah to be found in that substance, just dirt and minerals and moisture, not unlike yourself.
It returns to you then, this lost realization: though you dreamed of life as a man, you are not a man. You are merely a collection of silica and ore with aspirations of humanity, given consciousness and mobility by a scrap of rolled paper. You can't know what a man thinks or what he feels or how to walk the paths he's carved. You can merely observe and mimic his behaviors in an awkward pantomime of life.
The first drops of rain fall, but you hardly notice them. They will come and go forever as long as there is moisture and a sky, and your thoughts are too thick to be bothered by such a mundane occurrence.
Strangely, you have found the knowledge of your dissimilarity amusing, even comforting. If man is one thing and you are another, why should you measure yourself against this dissonant calibration?
As the rain beats down, you sit in the wet field and wave your arms like blunt scythes bending the damp grasses. You entertain memories of the first Deborah, who gave you life, and the second, who gave you her touch and sketches in the dirt. Between them are a hundred memories of sights and sounds, none yet lost, none traded for fresh experience and evanescent novelty. Your clay shimmers and the rubbish clinging to its surface washes away, though so much remains embedded in the material of you—strands of Deborah's hair, a few bones, and the toy, metal car secure at the back of your head.
—Benjamin Kane Ethridge
Benjamin Kane Ethridge is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novel Black & Orange (Bad Moon Books 2010). He has several new novels slated for 2012 and beyond. Benjamin lives in Southern California with his wife and two creatures who possess stunning resemblances to human children. When he isn't writing, reading, videogaming, Benjamin's defending California's waterways and sewers from pollution.
—Solution
By Benjamin Kane Ethridge
A tremor passed through the ship and glass beakers jiggled in their holding racks. Some solutions had been deep red once (Py remembered) and now were dull pink. Other solutions had been vital and blue once—Py remembered—and now were spotted gray lesions on the glass. All solutions had dried up, but discolored memories still remained.
Py didn't like the lab, yet he felt he belonged there. It was a confusing little room, both enlightening and deterring. The lab was a womb; the lab was a tomb. He couldn't change that.
He uncrossed his legs and got on his knees. The freezing floor eventually chilled him. Something in that cold streak through his nervous system brought his senses back. He understood few things and only in simple terms, but connections were suddenly easier to make again.
Something on this ship was broken and he was the only one to fix it.
He tossed through the starchy pages of the ship's blueprints, passing plumbing sheets and sewage disposal schematics, passing air and water conveyance, and passing a guidance manual for the pressure line control system, which had somehow been mixed in with the rest.
Py set down the manual carefully and shook his head. He was about to run his fingers through his hair when a stabbing instinct caught him. It was a black road-sign stuck at the side of his subconscious highway: No touching the body. He wouldn't think about why he obeyed either. Asking that particular question was dangerous for some reason and he had enough problems. Didn't he?
His thoughts eventually bobbed away; attention deficit disorder kept the terror from stacking too great. He breathed deep into his lungs but felt only a snakelike twinge in his chest. Am I a ghost?
He stood up—surely ghosts had no need for legs or feet. His eyes tilted down and sprung back up quickly. Py wouldn't look. He'd seen himself once in a mirror in the lavatory. What had been in the reflection? He couldn't remember. But he knew that looking once had been too much.
Where were the other passengers? They had gone into their Displacement Chambers during the prep for light speed. He had seen them go in from his own D-Chamber. He'd seen a couple smiling faces and a few complacent stares behind the transparent shields. Then their bodies had turned over, went out, slipped away, vanished to vapor, just as the airlock to Py's chamber had hissed opened and spilled him out.
He stole a glance out the lab window. No stars, only black-black nothingness, no reference to elucidate whether they'd made light speed. Py wagered the bridge display would be able to answer that easily enough. But if light speed had been reached, wouldn't the artificial gravity have powered down? And how could his body withstand the force? Maybe he wasn't withstanding anything; maybe he was a ghost after all. He didn't want to
sit in the lab forever and think negatively like that though. After all, he might be able to help the others stuck in limbo. Could a ghost do such a thing?
He had to find the bridge on foot. The blueprints hadn't given any ideas. They were too disorienting. Finding himself in the main hallway, Py glanced east and west. The light panels in the ceiling dripped down and the shadows from dead rooms etched the spreading maze of dusty aluminum floor tiles.
Where was he going again?
Since light speed initiation, thoughts had become more slippery to hold, even for Py. Right before his D-Chamber popped open, he had felt some displacement occur, as though he'd begun to fall into limbo with the others, only to return from that temporary death.
The others—did he remember them? There had been only one woman, a geobiologist, and the rest had been men: two navigators, a network specialist, and a medical doctor. Py remembered occupations, not names. He remembered his own occupation as well and wondered whether his male shipmates would appreciate a lowly operations mechanic rescuing them. Py had no expectations of being branded a hero though. Perhaps it wouldn't matter. The others could have loved him or ridiculed him or ignored him, but he did not know. Thinking back to anything, even to five minutes ago, was like looking through layers of gauze; there were shapes and colors, but definition had taken leave.
