Happy Snak

by Nicole Kimberling

  Fitzpatrick walked back to assist Gaia out of the golf cart. As he steadied her, she noticed that she didn’t hate his cologne as much as she previously had.

  They rode the elevator down thirty-eight floors, and emerged in the old familiar residential food court Coke-38. Its blue chairs were in disarray. This section adhered to no particular style. The ceilings were not lofty. Treat Bonanza’s western-style sign and red cowboy-boot logo blinked on and off in the same way she’d always hated. At the far end of the food court, Happy Snak’s blue and yellow sign with its jaunty jester logo was dark.

  Gaia led Oziru across the deserted food court and down the narrow service hallway to the back door of Happy Snak. Fitzpatrick followed them.

  Gaia entered her voice ID. Crammed into the narrow service hallway behind her stood Oziru and Fitzpatrick. Blum, Seigata and their collective minions waited in the desolated food court.

  The back door slid open.

  Gaia turned to Oziru and gestured inside. “After you.”

  Oziru made its way through the small door, managing to look stately even though it was forced to stoop. The pearls comprising the fabric of Oziru’s robe clicked and scraped across the Happy Snak tiles. Gaia followed Oziru inside. Fitzpatrick remained, lurking in the hallway.

  Happy Snak smelled nasty. The rancid odor of old oil and stagnant air gave Gaia a chill. This was the perfume of a dead restaurant, mingled with the cutting acidic scent of a dead Kishocha. Gaia’s bandaged arms twitched.

  Inside, she could see the real damage. The motions formed deep ruts in the linoleum. They swept from the front gate in long calligraphic strokes only to terminate in a tangle of gouges and broken tile at the base of her sink.

  Oziru went to the front gate, crouched down and rubbed its palms slowly against the marks. The alien glanced up at Gaia.

  “This is where you began?”

  “Yes, I pulled Kenjan from the middle of the corridor to the sink.”

  “Why to the sink?” If the alien had an expression on its face, Gaia couldn’t read it.

  “Kenjan asked for water.”

  Oziru turned its face down toward the motions again, this time pushing its hands forward. As it crawled along the length of the store, it ran its hands through the motions with deep intent. It seemed predatory in a way that disconcerted Gaia. But there was also an unexpected shiver of pleasure in her own discomfort.

  During the four years she had run Happy Snak on A-Ki Station, she had seen the aliens but had never looked into one’s eyes or spoken directly with one. At first she’d harbored fantasies of selling them snack foods, but once she’d realized how xenophobic the Kishocha were, she let go of that idea. For Gaia, space had become an escape from banal tedium of life as a divorcee in Seattle.

  The Kishocha had been purely tangential to her existence. Happy Snak filled every crevice of her waking thought. She had no friends or even associates. Her only obligation was to her hamster. Her business covered her like a shell allowing her the impermeability of a closed oyster. If any thoughts of loneliness irritated her, she smoothed them over, rolling them within the folds of her mind until they, too, became enshrined in layers of defense.

  Watching Oziru crawl across the floor of her dead restaurant with inhuman grace, reading the last wishes of its deceased consort, she realized that she was witnessing something completely new—something that was not in any way derivative. The honor of being the first human to see this belonged to her—and maybe to Fitzpatrick, still observing from the hall.

  Oziru leaned forward and licked the furrow in front of it with its long purple and white striped tongue. Gaia watched in rapt fascination while Oziru slid back and forth, inspecting every inch of the markings, tasting them, feeling them.

  “This is a holy place.” There was a certain finality in Oziru’s voice, as if this pronouncement was something she should have been hoping for.

  “Well, I like it,” Gaia replied.

  “And for the last of the motions.” Oziru extended its hands toward Gaia’s stumps.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your hands. There are motions on them. I would like to read them.” The Kishocha gently indicated her stumps.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t take the bandages off.”

  “Are they locked?” Oziru cocked its head at the bandages quizzically. “I think that they unwind from this point.” Oziru indicated the taped end.

  “No, I mean I can take them off, I’m just not supposed to. Besides, my hands aren’t there anymore.”

  “Have they vanished?” Oziru looked alarmed.

  “No, they’ve just been amputated.” Behind her, Fitzpatrick began to whisper into his phone.

  “What is that?” Oziru asked.

  “They’ve been cut off.”

  “Do you still have them?”

  “No,” Gaia said. “I have some new ones growing in the lab, though.”

  “You didn’t keep the old hands?” Oziru’s expression seemed intense, but Gaia didn’t know in exactly what way.

  “I don’t think so… Wait, let me check.” Gaia looked to Fitzpatrick, who was still talking on the phone. He motioned her to wait. “Do you need them? I mean, they were really destroyed.”

  “My Kenjan touched them. I must see them.”

  Fitzpatrick pocketed his phone and strolled over to where Gaia and Oziru stood.

  “The hands are on their way over from the hospital. A courier will bring them on the next tube,” Fitzpatrick reassured Oziru, then, to Gaia, “We kept them to examine more closely.”

  “How long must I wait?” Oziru sighed.

  “About half an hour,” Fitzpatrick responded.

  “Then I will wait.” Oziru knelt down beside the motions again. One of its thicker tentacles fell into the furrow of a motion. Oziru rubbed its tentacle back and forth through the rough surface, entirely immersed in its own arcane thoughts. Gaia imagined that she understood its mournful language. She imagined it loved Kenjan in the way that she loved Happy Snak. The silence and the smell of grease grew pervasive.

  Gaia leaned against the wall. The humans in the food court got bored. They shifted from foot to foot and passed around sticks of cigarette gum. To them, this drama between her and Oziru had grown stale. They chatted about sports. The Kishocha guards stood apart from the humans, inert and motionless.

  Gaia’s energy flagged. The bandaged ends of her arms throbbed. Crabbiness welled up inside her. The Kishocha grew less fascinating and more annoying. The way that the guards in the hall failed to shift uncomfortably during their long wait irked her.

  Finally, the courier arrived with the Styrofoam box that contained her frozen hands.

  Oziru tore into the box like a child ripping into a Christmas present. It annihilated the carefully sealed biohazard bag and pulled Gaia’s dead hands out with unseemly urgency. Her old hands were white and swollen. Red, yellow and purple streaks spider-webbed through the hard flesh. Each hand ended in a stump just below the wrist. She could see a white bone sticking out of the bottom of one of them. Gaia swallowed a jolt of nausea. She felt disoriented by the sight of them. Her hands shouldn’t be across the room from her. It made her queasy, but she couldn’t make herself look away.

  As if they were holy relics, Oziru reverently turned each appendage over. Then, without warning or permission, pressed its purple and white striped tongue against the palm of her former left hand.

  Gaia was suddenly, violently ill.

  She lunged to the sink and managed to vomit in it, rather than on the floor. She hunched over the sink and supported herself on her elbows. Fitzpatrick slid up behind her and quietly turned the water on. Gaia watched her lunch swirl down the drain.

  “Is Gaia Jones healthy?” Oziru asked.

  “Not yet. Don’t worry though, Ms. Jones will be fine,” Fitzpatrick assured Oziru. “Please continue. Don’t mind us.”

  Gaia didn’t dare look back; she didn’t want to know what Oziru was doing with her old, dead body parts.
She also didn’t want to continue to watch Fitzpatrick spraying her puke down the drain. She closed her eyes and waited.

  It didn’t take long. Fitzpatrick tapped her on the shoulder and whispered, “Oziru wants a word with you.”

  Gaia’s old hands were nowhere in sight. Fitzpatrick withdrew to the hallway.

  Oziru sat on the floor next to the motions. “I have reached my conclusion. Kenjan shall be enshrined, and you shall be Kenjan’s holy guardian.”

  Gaia searched her mind for any good response. She found none. Far down the hall she heard Fitzpatrick talking to Blum. Diplomats were never around when you really needed them.

  “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.” Twinges of pain shot up her arms. Vomiting had drained Gaia of her remaining energy.

  “Kenjan was a prophet, and here is where that one died so it is only fitting that this place should be enshrined. You will leave your position to tend Kenjan’s ghost in my garden. You need never toil in Happy Snak again.”

  “I like to toil in Happy Snak.” Her arms throbbed distractingly. It was bad enough dealing with the embassy’s regulations and the health department. Now even the Kishocha thought they could tell her what to do.

  “That pleasure will soon be eclipsed by the joy of serving the Kishocha.”

  “Thank you very much, but I’d rather not.”

  “You will do as I bid you.” Oziru’s voice dropped lower. Gaia could feel it throbbing in her chest. Oziru’s cranial tendrils lashed sinuously around the Kishocha’s feet.

  “You are not my boss,” Gaia pointed out. “I am an entrepreneur.”

  A deep silence filled the air. Gaia stared at Oziru, who returned her unwavering gaze. She got the impression that Oziru was not used to being questioned or refused. She knew the Kishocha had a rigidly vertical hierarchy, but she also knew that Oziru must understand that the humans on the station didn’t.

  Gaia heard footsteps in the hallway, and a rising female voice that could only be Blum’s.

  Oziru lowered its eyes to the motions. There was something about the way it looked at the floor that made her feel guilty.

  “Look, Oziru,” she began. “I’m sorry about snapping at you. I feel sick and my painkillers are wearing off so my arms hurt a lot. I really do want to help you.”

  The Kishocha did not answer her.

  “The reason I don’t want to leave Happy Snak is that I need money, understand? Without an income I can’t stay on the station.”

  “As guardian of the shrine, we would never allow you to starve. There would be offerings of food every day,” Oziru said, quietly. “You would have my personal favor.”

  “Starvation isn’t my problem. I’m licensed here as a businessperson. If I have no business I’ll be sent home.”

  “I can force your embassy to make you stay. I can stop the air and water and gravity. I can have my way. I am master.”

  Gaia waited a long time before speaking again. She didn’t know if Oziru was telling the truth, but if it really could stop the air and water and gravity, then maybe she should call a diplomat or lawyer. But they seemed scared of Oziru.

  “I like running Happy Snak. It makes me feel good,” Gaia said. “Happy Snak is my creation. I don’t know what I’d do without it.”

  Oziru rubbed its hand along a furrow in the floor. “You would go on. As we all do when we lose our love and reason. That is our obligation.”

  Gaia carefully knelt down on the floor next to Oziru.

  “Do you miss Kenjan?”

  “Kenjan was my beloved consort. No other can ever match the beauty of that one, nor the sweet song,” Oziru replied.

  “And you want to keep a shrine to that one’s memory?”

  “I must. Kenjan’s ghost must have a shrine to inhabit, or it will wander, hungry. The ghost must be near the sacred waterways, within my hearing. The ghost cannot be here in the human sector away from us. And you must be there to protect Kenjan.”

  “I can come visit.”

  “You must be there always.”

  “Why?”

  “Because ghosts are always in danger.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gaia said, “but that’s okay for right now. Let me ask you this: Why does it have to be me?”

  “Because Kenjan has chosen you,” Oziru said. “Because only you were there.”

  “So you want me to guard Kenjan and stay with Kenjan in the shrine, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what I want is to have Happy Snak back,” Gaia went on.

  “That is what you have said.”

  Treat Bonanza started broadcasting its specials on the commons loudspeaker. She hated Treat Bonanza. She hated that they were right across the concourse, and the fact that they were too corporate to involve themselves in alien religious problems. No one in that store would have helped Kenjan. They probably had some kind of anti-involvement regulation prohibiting it. The next time she opened up a Happy Snak, she would make sure Treat Bonanza wasn’t within one hundred yards of the place.

  The really great place to open a new Happy Snak would be on the hangar deck, but vendors weren’t permitted there. It would be perfect positioning to set up a new store right in the Mutual Interaction Area. It was at the bottom of the Embassy Tower and had a big window in the floor that showed pinkish Kishocha waters running beneath. New arrivals from Earth rushed to it, expecting to see aliens. There were never any there. Wouldn’t it be good to have a little stand there so that people could have ice cream to soothe their disappointment?

  Gaia smiled and said, “I think I know how we can both be satisfied.”

  Chapter Four: 30% More

  After twelve weeks, both the new snack bar and the Kishocha shrine were finished. Crews worked round the clock to comply with the draconian deadline imposed by Oziru. The Mutual Interaction Area was a thirty-by-thirty-foot space with a Peace Corps office front, the new Happy Snak storefront and an oblong window in the center of the floor through which one could see murky pink water. The air was different, heavy, salty and humid. Dehumidifiers ran constantly, but the Kishocha air curled in through the vents and coated everything with a glaze of moisture.

  Tenacious new arrivals had been known to sit by that window for hours, looking down, hoping to catch sight of an alien. No one ever had. Then the construction began.

  Already Gaia had seen more Kishocha than even the embassy personnel saw in a year. While the human crew built Happy Snak (which was, to Gaia’s delight, thirty percent larger than before) the Kishocha built Kenjan’s shrine.

  The last room completed was her personal cabin, the area that linked the alien world with the human. Her cabin was not a seamless melding of galactic ideas. The two styles of architecture met in a clash of awkward juxtaposition. Three of Gaia’s walls were human-made. They were square and, except for two nondescript sliding doors, blank and white.

  One of Gaia’s sliding doors opened to reveal a small personal bathroom. She’d put the bathroom on her list of non-negotiables. The other led to the back kitchen of Happy Snak. She wasn’t overjoyed to still be living in the backroom of her restaurant, but felt resigned to it.

  Gaia’s fourth wall curved into her bedroom like an enormous bulging egg. This wall was pearly, smooth and hard. It was the outer shell of the Kishocha shrine. The door in the center of it was made of opaque gray flesh. When open, the Kishocha door was about six feet in diameter. It contracted and dilated like a huge pulsing sphincter. The door was at the end of her bed. She tried not to think about it too much.

  To feel settled in, she put up her hamster maze.

  Gaia fitted the fist-sized links of clear plastic tubing together and locked them into place. She slid an elbow joint into the three-foot length of tubing and added it to the vertical labyrinth of tubes and egg-shaped chambers. Then she opened a little door near the bottom and waited.

  Hot pain twanged up her left arm. Gaia sat back and tightened the straps of her wrist braces. Her new hands still felt soft and stra
nge. Blisters dotted her fingers and palms.

  After a few seconds, Microbe, her hamster, emerged from under a pile of curly wood shavings. He hesitated, sniffing nervously at the air around him. His fawn-colored ears twitched articulately around. Feeling a sense of sudden freedom, the hamster jumped into a tube and scampered up. He froze. Seconds ticked by before he continued his exploration. Each time Gaia moved his maze, he had to rediscover every corner.

  This time it took Microbe longer than usual. Gaia thought it would take her a while to adjust as well. She eyed the Kishocha door.

  The only time an alien had come through was when Gaia had tried to hammer a nail into her weird convex wall. The wall had bled thick pink liquid. Gaia suddenly realized the wall was alive. She’d slapped an elastic bandage over the wound, but a Kishocha worker had come through, given her an evil look and replaced her bandage with what looked like a limpet. Four days later the limpet fell off the wall, desiccated and dead. The wall remained marked with a puckery scar. Shamed, Gaia had found another place to hang her clock.

  The current volunteers at the Peace Corps Welcome Center jumped at the chance to help with Happy Snak’s construction. They were a husband and wife team named Roy and Cheryl. Roy was a barrel-shaped smiler with a master’s degree in anthropology. Cheryl’s degree was in post-alien humanities. Her hair was blonde and straight and perfectly matched her curveless body. They were supposed to teach English to aliens, but no aliens signed up for the class. Lacking any Kishocha to teach English to, the couple was deeply bored. Cheryl even offered to pack up the old Happy Snak, as well as Gaia’s personal room in the Coke Tower.

  As Gaia disgorged the boxes Cheryl had packed, she realized that Cheryl really enjoyed packing peanuts. She used them in every box. Gaia made a game of sifting through the opaque fluff. She ran her hands through it and tried to identify each item before she saw it.

  Microbe scuttled softly by in an eye-level tunnel. Gaia went deep. Her fingers brushed against a smooth hard cylinder.

  “Mug!” she cried, exhuming her King William ascension souvenir mug. She placed it on her tiny desk, next to her brand-new hand-held—the old, broken one had melted during her alien encounter.