by Kage Baker
As if to prove it, the subway ran all the way to my stop for a change. Somewhere on the line, they must have had a couple guys like me, people who could still read a schematic and remember how to show up for work and not throw toilet paper around the control rooms. I wondered who they were. And then I wondered if they ever noticed how hard it was to get anything done.
When I got home, Maggie was already in bed. I gave her a kiss and she woke up a little. She pushed her hair away from her face. “I left out a hotpack burrito for you. The stove’s still broke.”
“Sorry. I forgot. I’ll fix it now.”
“No worry.” She turned away from me and pulled the sheets up around her neck. For a minute, I thought she’d dozed off, but then she said, “Trav?”
“Yeah?”
“I got my period.”
I sat down beside her and started massaging her back. “How you doing with that?”
“S’okay. Maybe next time.” She was already dropping back to sleep. “You just got to stay optimistic, right?”
“That’s right, baby.” I kept rubbing her back. “That’s right.”
When she was asleep, I went back to the kitchen. I found the hotpack burrito and shook it and tore it open, holding it with the tips of my fingers so I wouldn’t burn myself. I took a bite, and decided the burritos were still working just fine. I dumped all the books onto the kitchen table and stared at them, trying to decide where to start.
Through the open kitchen windows, from the direction of the park, I heard another crash of concrete rain. I looked out toward the candleflicker darkness. Not far away, deep underground, nine pumps were chugging away; their little flashers winking in and out with errors, their maintenance logs scrolling repair requests, and all of them running a little harder now that Pump Six was down. But they were still running. The people who’d built them had done a good job. With luck, they’d keep running for a long time yet.
I chose a book at random and started reading.
Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing has appeared in Wired Magazine, High Country News, Salon.com, OnEarth Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. His short fiction has been anthologized in various “Year’s Best” collections of short science fiction and fantasy, nominated for three Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best sf short story of the year. His short story collection Pump Six and Other Stories was a 2008 Locus Award winner for Best Collection and also named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. His debut novel The Windup Girl was named by Time Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards. His debut young adult novel, Ship Breaker, was a Micheal L. Printz Award Winner, and a National Book Award Finalist. His most recent novel, The Drowned Cities, was a 2012 Kirkus Reviews Best of YA Book, a 2012 VOYA Perfect Ten Book, and 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist. He currently lives in Western Colorado with his wife and son, where he is working on a new novel.
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Blake Butler’s story may or may not be surreal. Why should the End of an irrational world be particularly rational? Why should anyone experience it in easily explicable ways?
THE DISAPPEARED
Blake Butler
The year they tested us for scoliosis, I took my shirt off in front of the whole gym. Even the cheerleaders saw my bruises. I’d been scratching in my sleep. Insects were coming in through cracks we couldn’t find. There was something on the air. Noises from the attic. My skin was getting pale.
I was the first.
The several gym coaches, with their reflective scalps and high-cut shorts, crowded around me blowing whistles. They made me keep my shirt up over my head while they stood around and poked and pondered. Foul play was suspected. They sent directly for my father. They made him stand in the middle of the gym in front of everyone and shoot free throws to prove he was a man. I didn’t have to see to know. I heard the dribble and the inhale. He couldn’t even hit the rim.
The police showed up and bent him over and led him by his face out to their car. You could hear him screaming in the lobby. He sounded like a woman.
For weeks after, I was well known. Even bookworms threw me up against the lockers, eyes gleaming. The teachers turned their backs. I swallowed several teeth. The sores kept getting worse. I was sent home and dosed with medication. I massaged cream into my wounds. I was not allowed to sleep alone. My uncle came to stay around me in the evenings. He sat in my mother’s chair and watched TV. I told him not to sit there because no one did after Mother. Any day now Dad expected her return. He wanted to keep the smell of her worn inside the cracking leather until then. My uncle did not listen. He ordered porn on my father’s cable bill. He turned the volume up and sat watching in his briefs while I stood there knowing I’d be blamed.
Those women had the mark of something brimming in them. Something ruined and old and endless, something gone.
By the third night, I couldn’t stand. I slept in fever, soaked in vision. Skin cells showered from my soft scalp. My nostrils gushed with liquid. You could see patterns in my forehead—oblong clods of fat veins, knotted, dim. I crouped and cowed and cringed among the lack of moonlight. I felt my forehead coming off, the ooze of my blood becoming slower, full of glop. I felt surely soon I’d die and there’d be nothing left to dicker. I pulled a tapeworm from my ear.
My uncle sent for surgeons. They measured my neck and graphed my reason. Backed with their charts and smarts and tallies, they said there was nothing they could do. They retested my blood pressure and reflexes for good measure. They said say ah and stroked their chins. Then they went into the kitchen with my uncle and stood around drinking beer and cracking jokes.
The verdict on my father’s incarceration was changed from abuse to vast neglect, coupled with involuntary impending manslaughter. His sentence was increased. They showed him on the news. On screen he did not look like the man I’d spent my life in rooms nearby. He didn’t look like anyone I’d ever known.
The bugs continued to swarm my bedroom. Some had huge eyes. Some had teeth. From my sickbed I learned their patterns. They’d made tunnels through the floor. I watched them devour my winter coat. I watched them carry my drum kit off in pieces.
Another night I dreamed my mother. She had no hair. Her eyes were black. She came in through the window of my bedroom and hovered over. She kissed the crud out from my skin. Her cheeks filled with the throbbing. She filled me up with light.
The next morning my wounds had waned to splotches.
After a week, I was deemed well.
In the mirror my face looked smaller, somehow puckered, shrunken in. My eyes had changed from green to deep blue. The school required seven faxes of clearance before my readmission. Even then, no one came near me. I had to hand in my assignments laminated. I was reseated in far corners, my raised arm unacknowledged. Once I’d had the answers; now I spent the hours fingering the gum under my desk.
On weekends I went to visit Dad in prison. He was now serving twenty-five to life. They made him wear a plastic jumpsuit that enclosed his head to keep the felons’ breath from spreading their ideas. Through the visor, my father’s eyes were bloodshot, puffy. His teeth were turning brown. His small paunch from years of beer had flattened. He had a number on his arm. He refused to look at me directly. He either shook his head or nodded. This was my fault, I knew he thought. We spent our half-hour grunting, gumming, shrugged.
Each time before I left he asked one question, in sign language: HAS YOUR MOTHER FOUND HER WAY BACK YET?
Each time before I left he slipped me a ten and told me where to go.
At home we had a map of downtown that Dad kept on the kitchen table where we used to eat together. He’d marked with dated dots in fluorescent marker where he thought he’d seen her last. Mom was one of several who’d gone missing in recent weeks. Each night, between commercials, the news showed reams and reams of disappea
red—pigtailed teens and Air Force pilots, stockbrokers, grandpas, unwed mothers. Hundreds had gone unaccounted. The missing ads covered milk cartons on every side. The government whispered terrorism. On the news they used our nation’s other problems as distraction: the wilting trees; the mold-grown buildings, high-rise rooftops clung together; the color shift of oceans; the climaxed death rate of new babies.
The way the shores washed up with blood foam.
How at night you couldn’t see the moon.
Before prison, Dad had sat at night with his cell phone on his knee on vibrate, waiting to feel the pulse shoot up his leg and hear her on the other end, alive. His skin would flex at any tremor. The phone rang through the night. The loan folks wanted back their money. Taxes. Electricity. They would not accept Visa or good will. Dad developed a tic and cursed with no control. He believed my mother’s return in his heart. His list of sightings riddled the whole map. He thought he’d heard her once in the men’s room at the movies. Once he’d seen her standing on the edge of a tobacco billboard, pointing down. He wanted me to keep tabs on all these places. As well, he wanted farther acres combed. Mom had been appearing in his sleep. She would not be hard to find if he truly loved her, he said she whispered. You should already know by now. On his skin, while in his cell bed, he made lists of the places where he should have looked: that spot in the ocean where he’d first kissed her; the small plot where they’d meant one day to be buried side by side; behind the moon where they joked they’d live forever; in places no one else could name. He wanted a full handwritten report of each location.
After school, before the sun dunked, I carried the map around the nearer streets in search. Sometimes, as my dad had, I felt mother’s hair against my neck. I smelled her sweet sweat somehow pervading even in the heady rush of highway fumes. I heard her whistle no clear tune, the way she had with me inside her and when I was small enough to carry. I used the hours between school’s end and draining light. I trolled the grocery, hiked the turnpike, stalked the dressing rooms of several local department stores. I felt that if I focused my effort to the right degree I could bring an end to all this sinking. I’d find her somewhere, lost and listless, lead her home, reteach her name. Newly aligned, she’d argue dad’s innocence in court to vast amends, and then there’d be the three of us forever, fixed in the only home we’d ever known.
I did not find her at the creek bed where she’d taught me how to swim via immersion.
I spent several hopeful evenings outside the dry cleaner’s where she’d always taken all our clothes.
There were always small pools of buzzed air where I could feel her just behind me, or inside.
My uncle did not go home. He’d taken over my parents’ bed and wore Dad’s clothing. Through the night he snored so loud you could hear it throughout the house. You could hear as well the insects crawling: their tiny wings and writhing sensors. You could hear the wreathes of spore and fungus. The slither in the ground. It was all over, not just my house. Neighborhood trees hung thick with buzz. House roofs collapsed under heavy weight. Everyone had knives. They ran photo essays in the independent papers. The list of disappeared grew to include news anchors, journalists, and liberal pundits. I stayed awake and kept my hair combed. I tried not to walk in sludge.
I received an email from my father: SHE SAYS THERE’S NOT MUCH TIME.
I committed to further hours. I stayed up at night and blended in. I looked in smaller places, the ones no one else could name: through the sidewalk; in the glare of stoplights; in the mouths of tagless dogs. I avoided major roads for the police. Out-of-town travel had been restricted. They mentioned our best interests. They said recovery begins at home. I marched through the forest with a flashlight, not quite laughing, being careful not to die. Trees fell at random in the black air. Anthills smothered whole backyards. It hadn’t rained in half a year. You might start a mile-wide fire with one mislaid cigarette. The corporate news channel spent their hours showing pictures of dolphin babies and furry kittens cuddling in the breeze.
Meanwhile, at school, other people started getting sick. First, several players on the JV wrestling team shared a stage of ringworm—bright white mold growths on their muscles. The reigning captain collapsed in the hot lunch line. They had to cancel future matches. The infestation was blamed on high heat and tight quarters. Days later, Jenny Rise, the head cheerleader grew a massive boil on the left side of her head. It swelled the skin around her eyelids until she couldn’t see. She went to the hospital not for the boil itself, but for how she’d tried to stab it out.
The seething moved in small creation through the cramped halls of our school. Popular kids got it. Kids with glasses. Kids in special ed. Teachers called out absent, then their subs did. Sometimes we were left in rooms unmanned for hours. There were so many missing they quit sending people home. Fast rashes rushed from collars. Guys showed up with their eyes puckered in glop. My lab partner, Maria Sanchez, grew a strange mustache. They had to sweep the hallways several times a day.
Instead of our usual assignments, we read manuals on how to better keep our bodies clean. Diagrams were posted in our lockers. Baskets of dental floss and disinfectant were placed in the nurse’s office with the condoms. No one really laughed.
Then, one day during my math class, men in military gear barged in. They had batons and air masks with complex reflectors. They made us stand in line with our hands against the wall. We spread and coughed while they roughed us over. They pulled hair samples and drew blood. From certain people they took skin grafts. The screaming filled the halls. They confiscated our cell phones and our book bags. Our class fish, Tommy, was deposed. The walls were doused with yellow powder. Several people fainted or threw up. They put black bags over the windows. The school’s exit doors were sealed with putty. A voice that was not the cafeteria lady’s came over the loudspeaker and said what was being served. We’d eaten lunch already. We sat at our desks and said the pledge. We sat at our desks with no looking at each other. The sub for our sub was reprimanded for attempting exit. They laid her flat out on the ground.
We were contained this way without explanation. Because of the window bags, we couldn’t tell how many days. There was a lot of time and no way to pass it. We were not allowed to talk or use the restroom. We were given crossword puzzles and origami. The PA played Bach and Brahms over the rumble overhead. When the lunchroom ran out of leftovers, we were fed through tubes lowered from the ceiling.
After the first rash of fistfights and paranoia spasms, they locked our wrists with plastic. They turned the heat to high. The veins began to stand out on people’s heads. Their skin went red and dented, then bright purple. Their hair fell out. Their teeth and nails grew green and yellow. Their swollen limbs bejeweled with sores. Cysts blew big in new balloons.
I felt fine. I felt an aura, my mother’s breath encircling my head.
The costumed men carried the expired elsewhere. Those who weren’t sick were crazed. I watched a girl bang her face in on a blackboard. I watched a boy stick out his eyes. The rest of us sat with our hands flat on the desktops, not sure which way to turn.
Soon the power was extinguished. False neon panels were employed. Peals of static began to interrupt the PA’s symphonies. A sudden voice squawked through with contraband report. Look what we’ve done. Can you imagine? Half the nation under quarantine. The buildings crumpled. The oceans aboil. The President’s committed suicide. And now, just a bit too late, we’re getting rain. The men burst in and shot the speaker with a machine gun. They said to assume the duck and cover. One spotty redhead whose glasses had been confiscated refused to get down. She walked around in small circles reaching from desk to desk to guide her way. The men zapped her in the neck with a large prong. She ran straight into a wall. She fell on the floor and bumped her forehead, and it spilled open on the white tile. None of the men would let me help them help her. They carried her out and wrapped our heads in plastic and went into the hall and shut the door. I heard the tumblers
clicking in the lock. I saw the hall fill thick with smoke. There were sirens, screech and screaming. Something scraping on the roof. It wasn’t long yet until other . . . I didn’t try to think of what. Small Susie Wang huddled beside me, praying. She spoke in hyperventilated mumble. She put her hands over her mouth.
I sat on the floor in the neon light with stomach rumbling and sounds of flame and stink of rot. I saw things moving toward me and then gone. I couldn’t remember where or why I was. I couldn’t find my name writ on my tongue or brain-embedded. I felt a burning in my chest. I fumbled in my pockets for my father’s map. I stared and rubbed the paper between my fingers. I read the sightings’ dot’s dates with my wormed eyes, connecting them in order. There was the first point where my father felt sure he’d seen mother digging in the neighbor’s yard across the street. And the second, in the field of power wires where Dad swore he saw her running at full speed.
I connected dots until the first fifteen together formed a nostril.
Dots 16 through 34 became an eye.
Together the whole map made a perfect picture of my missing mother’s head.
If I stared into the face, then, and focused on one clear section and let my brain go loose, I saw my mother’s eyes come open. I saw her mouth begin to move. Her voice echoed deep inside me, clear and brimming, bright, alive.
She said, “Don’t worry, son. I’m fat and happy. They have cake here. My hair is clean.”
