Love and Hydrogen

by Jim Shepard

  #47: Earth Bombs Mars

  The bombardier’s fingers bring back a photo of a family vacation in Montauk. Who took the picture? My mother slung in a low sand chair, squinting grimly out to sea. My father demonstrating how to add a tower to a rambling sand castle. Behind him, my brother and I squatting over something on our scratchy old army blanket: cards, two new packages each, that my father bought us at the drugstore near the beach.

  #48: Earthmen Land on Mars

  Another purple sky. Parachutists coming down, a huge Earth behind them. The horizon curves sharply. The ground is arid and broken by palisades. Martians are running toward us. One who’s being shot in the head from behind is tilting delicately toward the shot. He’s wearing a close-fitting shirt with pointed padded shoulders and bikini briefs. Another, about to run out of the frame, is all brain and bulging eyes. Don’t the Martians have radar? Is this all a trap?

  #49: The Earthmen Charge

  Soldiers with red standard-issue helmets under glass mill around a tank porcelain-white like a Frigidaire. Otherwise they wear regular khakis. Why aren’t they cold? Or hot? How does the glass form a seal? On their backs, the same red scuba tanks the Martians wore, but no regulators, and no air hoses. In the distance, a domed city out of the Jetsons, with air taxis and floating platforms. A monorail toots out toward them. Are the Martian commuters puzzled as to what’s going on? The leader of the troop gave his orders and the soldiers continued toward the dome, with revenge in their hearts.

  #50: Smashing the Enemy

  A soldier whose helmet reads US on the front drives the butt of his rifle into a charging Martian’s brain. A buddy at his side sporting a Norwegian flag drives his bayonet into another Martian’s eye. All of this takes place on an immense flight of stairs. One Martian attacks with what appears to be a vegetable peeler. Where are the heat rays? Where are the forces in reserve? Where is the Martian National Guard?

  #51: Crushing the Martians

  A Martian in the foreground losing all his dentition. Another dead in the middle ground and leaking a winding stream of blood. A small boy’s notion of the ultimate tank, bristling with cannons pointed in all directions, breaks through the aquarium wall of the dome and fires. At my brother’s confirmation I sat in the car after the ceremony and traded for this card, with a cousin I rarely saw. My brother was wildly unhappy. The scrutiny was excruciating to him. Waiting in line for the bishop’s blessing, he pawed at his suit, his haircut, his eyes. He spent the ceremony crying and enraged at himself for doing so. My parents were frozen with mortification.

  Afterward they dispensed with the photos in front of the church. They couldn’t get my brother to come back to the car. My mother found me in the backseat and told me she didn’t know what they were going to do. My cousin was embarrassed for us. My mother wanted me to help however I could, and I knew it. I could see my brother yank his arm away from my father across the parking lot. I had no idea what I could or couldn’t accomplish. I was too frightened to find out. Meanwhile, here was my cousin: he lived nowhere near me, so I knew he’d have different cards.

  #52: Giant Robot

  Silly. Buttons for eyes, transformers for antennae, wrench-grip pliers for hands. No one’s even wearing helmets or oxygen tanks anymore. An Army bazooka hit its mark, and the robot crumbled disabled to the ground.

  #53: Martian City in Ruins

  Martian victims were sprawled across the desert sands, many badly wounded and others beyond repair. The advanced civilization had been beaten into the dust under the force of Earth’s violent counterattack. The dangerous atomic pressures were rapidly building to the climactic point and it was now only hours before the explosion which would destroy Mars. See Card #54: Mars Explodes.

  #54: Mars Explodes

  The end of the series. Collecting took a year. What was the first card? Death in the Shelter. I pored over it at night under the covers, cupped it in my hands at Mass, laid it on my thigh, school days, in the boys’ bathroom. What did it connect to? What was the rest of the story? I had no synopsis and had seen no other cards. Everything lay ahead of me. I was hooked when I saw the first one. A giant bug, eating a guy: that was for me. My parents did what they could. They were attentive; they were flexible. Who knows if they trace their disappointment with me back that far?

  What was the last card? Watching from Mars. Months of searching, and it was my brother who finally found it. A few weeks after the doctors let him come home, he left it on my desk, with a note: For your collection. In the meantime, I’d lost The Monster Reaches In. When he calls now, and tells me what the set’s going for, I tell him I don’t have the set; I lost one. And he says, Yeah, you have the set. Remember? I found the last one. Watching from Mars.

  And it kills me that he remembers the title. It kills me that I can’t bring myself to keep talking to him, to tell him, No, I don’t have the whole set.

  Now I’m trying to remember: Did I ever have them all or not? Did they further separate me from my family, or allow me a place within it? Did I know then how much they affected what I could imagine? Do I know now? But that was how I learned to see, and that was what I saw.

  GLUT YOUR SOUL ON MY ACCURSED UGLINESS

  Anson started signing his seventh grade worksheets The Fist because of his ugliness. Mrs. Ackley asked him what was up. She recognized his handwriting.

  “Is this a joke?” she asked from her desk. She graded the math worksheets while the class worked on social studies.

  “The joke’s my face,” Anson answered.

  It got a laugh. Still, his classmates were wary.

  “Who’s ‘The Fist’?” she asked them. She was always complaining about never recognizing the newest trend. “A superhero?”

  The class looked at her.

  The kids who owned recess misunderstood. They thought she’d caught him bragging. One kid kicked him in the tailbone. “Hey, I’m ‘The Foot,’” the kid said.

  Anson walked around crying and holding his butt. The nicer kids seemed to think that what was going on was sad. A girl he liked looked mystified. Games went on around him.

  After recess Ackley announced that he was getting all zeros on his assignments. She said she was getting perfectly good assignments from someone named “The Fist,” but Anson had apparently stopped doing his work.

  The class looked to see how he was taking the news.

  “I suck,” Anson said. He meant it. There was a week’s detention, right there.

  On the way to the first detention, after school, he went to the nurse about his tailbone. She was sympathetic.

  She gave him a pillow for his chair. The pillow turned out to be a bad move, in terms of the other kids in detention.

  The next day Mrs. Ackley lost her patience. “Anson,” she said when she got to his worksheet.

  His butt was killing him. The hair on the side of his head over his ears looked like somebody’s armpit. His nose felt like the bill of a cap. “Feast your eyes,” he said, to whoever was looking. “Glut your soul on my accursed ugliness.”

  He’d seen Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera on video fourteen times.

  “Beware: the Strangler’s noose is quick,” he reminded Ackley. The class hooted.

  “What is your damage?” Ackley asked. She seemed to really want to know.

  Part of his damage was that his dad was moving out. His dad was head over heels for one of the veterinarians at the animal hospital. The veterinarian’s name was Jeanne and she looked like a shorter Christina Ricci. He’d seen them making out at the movies. He’d lost his gloves and they’d had to go back and help him look. They never found them.

  His mom spent her time trying to figure out how to hook the DVD, the laser disc player, and the VCR into the back of the same monitor. The monitor had only two inputs. She sat at the kitchen table with the manuals spread out around her after dinner. “Nobody talk to me,” she said.

  His dad when he was home after dinner listened to gospel albums. He liked to fake a German
accent and say things like, “Listen to zem. Zey are animals. But zey sing zo beautifully . . .”

  They kept on him about his homework. The afternoon after the first detention he watched his man Lon on the old suitcase-sized VCR in the finished basement. That night he wandered around the house wanting to get out, nowhere to go. He toured the upstairs and ended up in the living room with his dad, in front of whatever movie was on. It was always something like a spoiled teenager having an affair with her plastic surgeon. Sometimes it wasn’t so clear because his dad liked to play with the mute.

  “I’m gonna throw this monitor right out the window,” his mother said. She was cross-checking the Sony manual with the JVC. “I’m gonna pitch it out the window and watch it smash.”

  His father had the mute going so he could listen to the Golden Gate Quartet. “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground.” “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’.”

  A torn woofer in one speaker fuzzed the deeper tones. They had the right glue to fix it somewhere. His father was not the You want something done right, do it yourself type. He was more the The only way this’ll be done right is if I do it, but I’m still not gonna do it type.

  His father paused the Golden Gate Quartet to take the call from Mrs. Ackley.

  “Well, I heard of The Chin,” he said when he got off. “But not The Fist. I’m surprised it wasn’t The Nose.”

  “Very nice,” Anson’s mother said.

  “Shut up,” Anson said, not to her. His dad unpaused the music.

  They sat around listening. His mom looked at him, thoughtfully.

  “I was thinking about plastic surgery,” he said.

  “That’s a good idea,” his dad said. “You being twelve years old and all.”

  His dog, Shitface, was at the deck door in the snow, scratching to be let in. His real name was Johnny, after Johnny Depp, but his father called him Shitface because he was always eating his own poop. The dog lowered his head and threw up a greenish mess. You couldn’t hear it through the glass.

  “Why not?” Anson said. “Why can’t I?”

  “The Fist,” his dad said. He filled his cheeks with air and swallowed it. “You’re not The Fist anymore,” he said. “You got it? You’re not The Torso, The Bicep, or The Tower of Power.”

  “You don’t have to go to school like this,” Anson told him.

  “Join the circus,” his dad said. “Exploit your deformity.”

  “You look fine,” his mother said. “Your face is still growing.”

  “I look like a ferret,” Anson said.

  “You’re not The Ferret, either,” his dad said.

  HIS MOM went to bed around nine. At eleven, he heard his dad turn in. He got up and pushed open the door to their room.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “I don’t think your face calls for radical intervention,” his dad said from under the covers.

  “You think I’m good-looking?” Anson said.

  “I’m really attracted to a whole different look,” his father said.

  “You’re a pig,” his mother said from the other side of the bed.

  “Sorry,” his father said.

  He went back to his bed. He watched car headlights on the ceiling. It was supposed to go below zero tonight but he couldn’t hear the wind. He got up and walked back down the hall to his parents’ room.

  “Ah, morning already,” his father said.

  “I’m not going to school like this,” Anson told them.

  “What way you gonna go?” his father asked.

  He stood there for a while. He didn’t have anything else to say. His head was a balloon that filled the house and had nothing inside it.

  Shitface came up to see what the discussion was about. Anson led him back to his room. The dog curled up at the foot of the bed. An hour later, his mom started crying. His parents talked. He couldn’t hear what they said.

  He gave it as long as he could and then he trooped back down the hall again, hating himself. They were still lying in the dark, but they were each up on one elbow. “You think I’m bringing this up because of what’s going on with you guys, but I’m not,” he said.

  They looked at him together. “We’re kind of in the middle of something here,” his father said.

  “Sorry,” Anson said.

  “Your father’s explaining why he’s better off without us,” his mother said.

  “That’s productive,” his father said. “That should help.”

  “Would you go back to your room?” his mother asked. “I’ll come tuck you in in a minute.”

  On his way back down the hall he stopped in the bathroom. He stood over the toilet in the dark but couldn’t pee. “Go to bed,” his father said.

  In bed his covers came off the foot of the mattress, and his toes stuck out. He tried to kickbox the sheets back into place.

  There was a sound on the floor like a stick in gravel. “The dog threw up again,” he called.

  He heard his mother padding down the hall. “Oh, jeez,” she said, from the doorway.

  She turned on the light, and he had to roll his face into the pillow. “Oh, Geoff,” she called.

  His father came quickly down the hall. Anson tried to rush getting his eyes used to the light so he could look. He hung over the bed. Shitface was on his side. Ropy saliva and blood looped over his nose and whiskers. More was soaking the rug under his chin.

  His father moved his mother’s hands away from the dog’s mouth and put his hand on the rib cage, feeling for something. “Get me a blanket,” he said. She got up off her knees and went down the stairs.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Anson asked.

  “He’s not doin’ too good,” his father said. “You’re not doin’ too good, are you, pal?” he said to the dog.

  The dog sounded like he was clearing his throat, and gave a little shake. Anson’s mother came back upstairs with an old wool blanket, and his father took it and laid it on the rug behind the dog. Then he got ahold of the skin of the dog’s neck and butt and slid him over onto the blanket. The dog barely seemed to notice. His father flapped the two ends of the blanket over, dug his arms underneath, and lifted.

  “Comin’ through,” he said, and carried him downstairs.

  They heard him open the back door with one hand and shut it behind him with his foot. They heard the car doors open and close, and the car start up and drive away.

  His mother stood where she was. She rubbed her eyes.

  “I wasn’t happy with the way I looked in school,” she said.

  He started to get teary. He was the biggest pussy who ever lived.

  “What do you think Grandma would’ve said if I’d said I wasn’t going because I didn’t like the way I looked?” she asked.

  He looked at his hands. If he didn’t stop crying at the count of three, he was going to punch himself so hard he’d cave his face in. “Grandma told me looks aren’t everything,” he finally said.

  His mother turned out his light and stood at the top of the stairs. “So isn’t that true?” she said.

  “We hadn’t been talking about looks,” Anson said. “She just brought it up out of nowhere.”

  His mother laughed. She came back to his bed and gave him a kiss. She kissed him again on the mouth. “I think you’re the beautiful one,” she whispered.

  He snorted, so happy she’d said that.

  “Good night,” she said. At the bottom of the stairs, she turned off the light in the stairway.

  He listened. The furnace kicked on. Someday his cheeks and chin would catch up, he thought. Maybe his nose and bug eyes were just adult-sized, and the rest of his face would catch up.

  He went downstairs without making noise, though he wasn’t trying to be quiet. His mother was on the sofa in the dark, facing the TV. The TV was off.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey hey,” his mother answered.

  His pajama bottoms didn’t have any pockets. He put his hands on his thighs. “I cleaned the rug,” he sai
d. “Good as I could.”

  She nodded.

  He turned on the lamp near the TV table so he could look through the videos. The babysitter had messed them all up.

  “You worried about Shitface?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” his mother said.

  “Put on your movie,” she said. “Put on Lon Chaney.”

  “You wanna see it?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  Here she was worrying about him. He hunted around, throwing things aside, and found it. He slid it out of its box and into the VCR. He hit Fast Forward.

  “She may not be the one there,” he said. “She may not be the one who comes in.”

  “On call,” his mother said.

  “On call,” he said. “She may not be the one on call tonight.”

  “No, she may not,” his mother said. She sounded okay.

  He stopped the tape and hit Play at the forty-five-minute mark. But it wasn’t The Phantom of the Opera. The babysitter had put things in the wrong boxes. Instead it was something he didn’t recognize: guys were trying to rope black horses in a corral and the horses were bucking and rearing. It was in black-and-white and the horses’ eyes were huge.

  His mother made a noise. He went to hit Stop, but she said, “Leave it on.”

  “What is this?” he said, but she didn’t hear.

  Even at this point, he wasn’t trying to help as much as show off how sad he was. He spent all his free time striking poses, whining and complaining.

  “What happens when you really hate who you are?” he asked.

  “It’s a problem,” his mother said.

  His father had left the mute on. In the movie, a little truck was driving along a desert road.

  Sunday afternoons Anson and his father went to the movies. Jeanne had started showing up. His dad had asked him not to tell. Now whenever he was with his mother he imagined LIAR painted across his face. A week ago, she’d said something about the movies and he’d thought: She already knows. She knows all about me.

  The cellular rang. His mother picked it off the arm of the sofa, hit the Talk button with her thumb, and held it to her ear. She listened.

  “Should we come down?” she said. Anson stopped the movie and ejected it. He looked around for the Phantom and found it without its box in the back of the cabinet.