Which is the exact point, not counting that first fish flopping up into the dirty sunlight, when humanity started to wink out of existence.
Billy Hanson’s fingers fell to the keyboard as they had a hundred other nights, to adjust the second lens, which needed regrinding, really, not just another gear pulling on it, and his gravity peephole focused down across the universe, tight enough that, for an instant, the skin or covering of his subject’s forelimb blurred, then snapped back in fine detail.
Billy nodded, backed off a hair—had anybody ever done this, even? was he, in addition to testing the limits of physics, pioneering exobiology as well?—and when the image finally settled again he nodded to himself, content, and only stopped when the alien cocked its head over the slightest bit, in a way that made Billy feel suddenly hollow inside.
This was the way the deer on the golf course he’d grown up by would stop, when they became aware of him and his sister, trying to sneak up.
“No,” he mouthed, as if even voicing the word would give his position away, but it was too late.
The alien was tilting his head around now, then focusing up, back along the gravity tunnel, using some sixth or forty-first sense that Billy Hanson couldn’t even conceive . . . had it felt the pressure of his stare? was this a species so hunted across both time and galaxies that it had developed a sensitivity to observation acute enough that it even kicked in across light years? Or—or could it even be knowledge-based, part of some maniacally epistemic religion, where knowing something about a fellow creature was tantamount to rape, or murder? It could even be that, sitting there, this alien was involved in the most dire offense known to its kind, so all its senses were already turned up, listening, feeling.
It didn’t matter.
What did was that it had turned its head up to Billy Hanson in direct response to Billy leaning closer to his monitor. Nevermind that Billy was holding his breath now, shaking his head no, insisting that this wasn’t in his research, that this shouldn’t even be possible, according to the laws of physics as he understood them.
But neither should looking across the universe.
“No,” he said again, instead of all the famous and enduring things he could have said. By then the alien was standing, looking back down the tunnel of stars, into Billy Hanson’s heart, and it was only when the alien smiled that Billy realized what he was thinking: that this was a bilateral species, yes.
The only reason he noticed this was that the smile spreading across the alien’s main face, it was lopsided, not really meant to indicate pleasure. The kind of smile Billy Hanson associated with an older cousin standing perfectly still in an empty hall during a game of hide and seek. Standing perfectly still and listening to the linen closet.
In that closet, Billy closed his eyes, tried to pretend he wasn’t really there, and so never saw the backlash of power boring now through the fabric of space for Earth, to implode it with such suddenness that the brief vacuum left by it would, for a few breaths, pull all the surface flame from the sun, allowing what had been his solar system a moment of darkness, followed by a cold millennium marked by a shroud of dust, that, because the implosion had been so thorough, no longer contained even the building blocks of life, much less any memory of man.
That was all still seconds away, though.
A lifetime, an eternity.
In it, Billy Hanson opened his eyes, smiled the way you smile when you’re caught, and, in the last and perhaps purest gesture humankind would be afforded, pulled the phone up to his ear and dialed the first six digits not of his girlfriend’s number—he had no girlfriend—but of a girl from his department who always touched her right eyebrow when she laughed, as if there were a button there to make her stop embarrassing herself.
What Billy was going to tell her, maybe, was not to worry about it, you’re beautiful and perfect and everything good, and I love you I love you I love you, please.
What he did instead was wait to call her for what turned out to be too long, and then, along with everybody else, wink out of existence with the phone to his ear, as if that mattered, what he meant to do.
LITTLE MONSTERS
We built the monster from leftover pieces of other monsters. A beak here, a tentacle there, claws all over. Gina kept pushing for bilateral symmetry, and I held my tongue for as long as I could—this wasn’t her idea, after all—but finally had to say it over ordered-in boxes of noodles: that this is a nightmare creature we’re foisting on the world, right? It’s not supposed to conform to biology as we know it. That’s specifically what’s terrifying. Gina chopsticked another mouthful in, showing off that she could—of the two of us, I’m the barbarian—then shrugged and explained that bilateralism is particular to two things (chew, chew): whether or not the monster walks upright, might need to balance in some ‘crazy, unmagical’ way, and what gravity field it developed in. And of course it had to walk upright. Chase scenes are completely unexciting when the creature’s just clumping and oozing and looming behind. Sometimes I hate her. But I wouldn’t be doing this with anybody else, either. So, again, I told her sure, sure, this monster was going to be terrestrial, definitely, homegrown, and it was also going to get around without leaving a slime trail. And then I forked another bite in, let it swell until I had to close my eyes to swallow. The creature I’d been dreaming of for so long now, I told myself, maybe I’d been hiding it half in the shadows of my mind on purpose, so I didn’t have to get into stupid details like gravity. I guess what I wanted was the effect—people in the streets falling to their knees, screaming, the whole city stopping what it’s doing, looking around to this new thing in its midst. Except, then, two days later, Gina stepped back, kind of rubbed her lips with the side of her hand, and said something was wrong. “What?” I asked, squinting in dread. “Peter,” she said, cranking the garage door up to let us breathe, “so it, you know, it eats random citizens, pets, the occasional shrub or mailbox.” I nodded. Hated it when she called me by my full name. It never tokened well for what was coming. This time was no exception: our monster needed some means of elimination. If not, then it would bulge, teeter, finally explode. And, if it was going to have that kind of apparatus, then we might as well assign it a sex, right? Unless of course we wanted to pioneer a third, fourth, or fifth gender—but we were already pushing it with the tentacles, wouldn’t I say? I closed my eyes, could feel things collapsing inside me. We had to go to the kitchen to hash this out, and it took days, sketch after sketch. Not just the bathroom habits of monsters, but the mating practices. The dimorphism between the sexes—we were unimaginative, finally stuck with just the two we knew—and which sex was likely to be the most fierce, the most terrifying. The most successful. So the beaks had to go, turned out to just be vestigial, movie-inspired ornamentation. Driving to get more noodles that night, I hammered the steering wheel with the heel of my hand and cried, called myself Peter over and over. The next morning, then—I’d like to say after a night of furious lovemaking, but, well: more like acrimonious sitcom watching—we walked into the garage, found we’d forgot to disconnect the fibers from the switchboard. We salvaged what we could, our hands working in a unison we thought gone forever, but still, at the end of that terrible day, our monster was maybe a sixteenth of its former mass. The tentacles were still disconcerting, sure, but the claws were outsized now, had to go. “I’m sorry,” Gina said into my chest, “it was me, it was me,” but it had been both of us. I’m adult enough to know that, at least. So we did what we could with what we had. Again. Gina pulled back-to-back eighteen hours days just getting the eyes right—if it wasn’t going to be fast, it at least needed to be able to spot its prey from a distance, have that kind of advantage—and I decided to save the tentacles (our last complete set) for next time around, and promised myself to harbor zero malice toward this monster, for not having been worthy of them. And then, finally, all of summer behind us now, it was done. Sure, we could tinker here, adjust that, shade this over a scratch, but the good artist knows
when to put the brush down. And we could pretend to be good artists, anyway. “Well?” Gina said, her arm around my side, my arm draped down across her far shoulder—you love whoever you climb the mountain with, right?—and I nodded, hit the button in my hand, and the garage door creaked up behind us, bathing the slick cement floor in early morning sunlight, and, just like the two times before, our little monster hitched its backpack into the right place and we unleashed it on the world, out into the river of children leading to the playground, to kindergarten, each of them perfectly designed to wreak its own particular brand of havoc on the world, to never ever ever stop until the helicopters made it. And, if the city’s breath caught in its throat a bit when our garage door came up, if it looked our way for maybe a moment longer than usual, then we never knew it. We were too busy watching her walk away ourselves.
THE HALF LIFE OF PARENTS
Zach had never given Muppets much thought, before meeting his in-laws.
All through his and Kayla’s courtship (two years, four months), she’d managed to only mention her parents in passing, and, as they’d had the justice of the peace marry them shortly after a certain pregnancy test, and he had a thing about large groups of people and the not-so-great outdoors anyway, meeting her parents at the wedding hadn’t been an issue.
Really, everything Zach knew about Kayla’s family could be boiled down to one school photo: her brother, forever six years old, never going to learn to swim.
The age he was when he died, he probably would have been into Muppets, Zach said to himself, standing in the bright doorway of his in-laws’ musty home.
Her dead little brother would probably think this was the best thing ever.
Not Zach. Not so much.
And Kayla could have prepared him better, he thought. There’d been a whole four-hour, last-minute road trip where she could have mentioned Kermit in passing. Just to soften this blow.
She was still holding his hand, though. That was something.
Maybe it was weird for her too, after all these years gone. All these years pretending her parents didn’t exist.
Thirty minutes from getting here, her voice reverting to a sixth-grade squeak, she’d called them, surprise. Hi, Dad. Guess who’s coming home? Guess who’s almost there already? The idea was to lead with her shiny new husband, sneak the baby news in with an excited shrug, a few nervous bats of the eye.
A lifetime too soon, now, here they were, Zach’s parent-meeting khakis wrinkled from the drive.
It probably didn’t matter.
On the other side of the wood-paneled breakfast bar dividing the kitchen from the living room, was who had to be Kayla’s mother, Marcy. She was poking her head over the bar. And her torso. Her crazy limp arms.
He could tell she was a she from the yarn hair, the overkill lipstick.
Kayla’s father—Zach was suddenly at a loss for his name—was caught partway up the hall, just on the other side of the brick planter with the fake plants, the planter that would come up to about Zach’s belt, were he over there.
But he wasn’t going to be. He could already tell.
Kayla’s father’s eyes rattled to a rest in their shallow plastic lenses, exactly as if they were settling on Zach, and on Kayla, the new couple.
Zach smiled an uncomfortable smile, made one hundred-percent sure he still had that deathgrip on Kayla’s hand.
“H-hello,” he said, not sure if he should be looking directly at these Muppet parents or not—was that rude?—and over the rest of that first and only visit, Zach found himself unable to stop studying the phone on the end table.
It was old, flesh-colored, had the spiral cord and thick buttons. A real antique. In his dorm freshman year, they’d all used these handsets as hammers, they were so strong, so heavy.
But that was the problem. That was the reason he couldn’t look away from this phone.
Over and over, he kept trying to picture Kayla’s dad darting out from behind the planter to catch the phone when she’d called, then somehow picking it up with his floppy arm. And directing it where? To which head?
“They never moved from their, their perches in the kitchen, and over in the hall, see,” Zach told his first and only daughter Mira four years later, when she asked about legs.
Mira widened her eyes in a way that he could tell she was there all over again, looking at her grandparents with wonder, with awe. Like humans had descended from dolls, maybe, and Muppets were the missing link.
The story made Kayla cry. It was either because of the way he told it, where her parents were wild and unpredictable, fun-loving and whimsical, or because she was always on the edge of crying anyway, lately.
As far as Zach could tell, it was because of the ghost of Kayla’s once-upon-a-time baby brother. She’d thought she was over him, until Mira started holding her eyes like his.
Instead of a splash pool in the back yard, Mira got washcloth baths.
Her food was all cut up into morsels so tiny that Mira had to use a spoon, never a fork. And still there was the chance of aspiration. But even Kayla could tell that, just as growing up with Muppets had left her with certain unshakable suspicions about the world, her following Mira around with an umbrella and disinfectant wipes wasn’t all that different.
So she backed off, step by step.
To Zach, it was like the world was exploding in slow motion. He and Mira were on one postage stamp of an asteroid, and Kayla was on another.
For a while they could still see each other, but then Kayla went to visit her parents for a long weekend, to figure herself out.
Except it must not have worked.
A week passed, then two. Alone with his daughter, Zach found himself taking over all the worries Kayla had left behind. He’d always had concerns about the outdoors, but what was the indoors, if not just a trapped little piece of the park, the street, the alley?
Because Mira’s little fingers could pry back the electric socket covers, he turned the power off at the fusebox.
Because anybody could knock on the door, he stopped answering it.
And every chance he got, he would fall to his knees and hug Mira, and tell her all the stories he knew, and paint Mommy as on a great adventure out in the scary world, fighting for him and for Mira.
It was his duty, he felt. And maybe it was even true.
Next to go were their shoes, because shoe laces can be a choking hazard.
They slid around in socks, and when Mira wasn’t looking, Zach’s breath would hitch in his chest at the weight of it all, and he would click the flashlight on, shine it at the ceiling like a beacon.
But that was a fire hazard. He had to be more careful.
Walking to just his voice in the hall a day or two later, Zach making sure his voice didn’t shake like it wanted to, Mira’s skating feet snagged a nail. It had pushed up through the aluminum strip separating the kitchen linoleum from the living room carpet.
She chirped surprise and fell forward, into Zach’s arms. They leaned back against the couch like falling into a trench in wartime. Zach smoothed her hair down, held her face against his chest, and only heard it when she did: the front door, jingling and jangling.
Zach’s heart splashed into his stomach.
It was a break-in. He’d refused to deliver Mira to the world, so the world was coming for her.
He shook his head no, no, and then the front door opened for the first time in three weeks, turned into a square sheet of sunlight. It threw a hazy shadow on the wall Zach and Mira were staring at.
Zach felt a beat of recognition in his chest, like he’d been here before.
“What?” Mira whispered to him, and he crossed her lips with his index finger, so he could remember.
When nothing came, he breathed in deep, held Mira tight with his left arm and used his right to peel one of his socks off.
He bit the elastic top of the red-striped sock and ran his hand down all the way to the toe, then periscoped up over the back of the couch, his new, toot
hless mouth open as wide as his hand would go, in surprise.
Insert seven seconds of absolutely dead silence, here.
Until Mira’s newly-socked hand (sparkly) came up beside his, looked around, opened its mouth in surprise as well.
“Mommy?” she said.
The shadow on the wall behind the couch took a step back, into the sunlight, her edges getting more definition.
“Kayla?” Zach said, the base of his jaw tingling.
The sharp intake of breath from the doorway told him everything.
“I brought, I brought—” she said, then said it better: “They want to meet their grand-daughter.”
Beside her, then, two yarn-headed shadows appeared at her hips, their heads moving unnaturally fast, casing this living room.
Because her face was right next to his, Zach could feel the wonder spread across Mira’s face.
“Close the door?” he said, over-enunciating so his hand could match up.
Or maybe the voice was actually coming from up there.
“Zach?” Kayla said, falling to her knees, “Mira?” and that was exactly when the phone on the shelf by the television rang once, long and perfect, the handset dancing in its cradle.
“I got it,” Zach said, and, somehow, he did.
OLD MEAT
Dear Abby—
I’ve resolved not to inform the authorities on her, my wife. But I write to you to ask whether I should inform her or not, my wife. And, in trying to come to a decision, I of course ask myself if I would want to know.
In the daylight, the answer is rational, and simple, and obvious: yes.
But in the night, lying in bed with her, I’m not so bold. Yet at the same time I have to suspect I have nothing to fear, really. Have we not been married already thirty-eight years? Surely if she meant me harm, it would have happened well before now, yes?
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth Page 3
