Mighty Unclean

by Cody Goodfellow

  Inside the female, a relentless array of defenses purges unfit sperm. In many species, such as domestic hens, a uterine gatekeeper detains the suitor’s seed for several days until a competitor may weigh in, at which time the inferior seed is summarily ejected. In external fertilizers such as fish, selection pressure is even more intense, shaping males into a carnal display of color and fantastic fins to close the deal.

  In such an arms race, escalated by eons of rape and rejection, no organism can maintain a foothold for more than a paltry hundred generations, before some breakthrough mutation in the enemy gender’s camp shatters the advantage.

  I freely admit that a rape did occur, but it was the rape of her egg by my sperm, which is the universal method whereby all the animal kingdom crowns its queens. I did not physically rape her. I did not need to. Seduced by my grief, she accepted me, and all the love I had to give her.

  ««—»»

  The true criteria that drive reproductive fitness are not the superficial courting displays that win trysting rights. The fitness of a suitor’s gametes has no correlation to the organism’s fitness or desirability – an ugly duckling’s sperm have as much chance of penetrating the egg as the seed of its handsome rival, so the arms race of sexual selection occurs on two, almost mutually exclusive fronts.

  Mayflies, of the order Ephemeroptera, mature, mate, spawn and die in a single day. The fierce and absolute urgency of their mating is a good model for understanding what goes on inside us, in the throes of the act we call love.

  In most “lower” orders of life, production of offspring is the culmination and the end of the organism; in the most ruthlessly efficient insect species, the next generation hatches and feasts on its superfluous parents, wasting nothing. Only in advanced or social animals can any individual earn its keep after birthing, as parent, caregiver or queen. We take such a system for granted, because the alternatives have been lost to us for so long. This is why I do not feel that I am anything new; rather, what I am is very, very old…

  ««—»»

  I returned in a month for a new battery of tests. My liver and kidney function were still steadily declining, and I had a year at the outside. My uncommon blood type made the possibility of an organ donor match almost impossible. That day, I did not cry.

  On the way out, I chanced to overhear Cynthia talking to a secretary. She and her husband had tried for years, but no joy, his count low and motility a joke. They were looking to adopt, when out of the blue, she came up pregnant.

  The secretary who took my co-pay and forms, a college-age blonde, big-boned, acne-scarred and achingly wholesome, clucking her tongue in a stage whisper that she’d missed her period, and hadn’t told her boyfriend, but wasn’t that a weird coincidence? I thought about pregnancy and coincidence and natural selection, and how much love I still had to give. By then, I had fallen in love with and pined for a hundred or more brief glimpses of women, and if it were within me to force myself upon one, I know I would have. I had begun to suspect that I had some effect on them, as well. The smile of every waitress and supermarket cashier was a little wider, their hands brushed mine and lingered a moment as they gave me my change. I did not kid myself that they fell in love with me, but it was the light in their eyes that first gave me an inkling of what I was giving them.

  I thought about Mom and Dad with their Lucy & Ricky beds, and about how Dad took Mom’s hand, and the rest—

  ««—»»

  Around the same time my organs started to fail, my skin cells were transforming. Newly activated glands in my epidermis began to produce sperm – or, to be more exact, viral RNA in capsules that mimicked, but vastly improved upon, human spermatozoa. When I got nervous around women and began to sweat, I was a teeming ocean of lusty, never-say-die gametes, and any fleeting contact was enough to deliver several million onto the object of my desire without arousing anything but a fleeting blush at my timid touch. Difficult to wash off, capable of surviving on the skin for a week, my sperm stood an excellent chance of being delivered into the host’s eyes or mouth, and from there they swam, like determined salmon, to spawn.

  I knew where I came from, and I knew I had even less time than the doctor predicted. Dad lived for twelve years after he took my mother’s hand. I’m burning brighter, using myself up faster than my father, and won’t last even the few weeks they say I have left. My father never touched the bare skin of any woman, not even my mother, after I was born. And I have touched so many…

  ««—»»

  Fewer than six hundred specimens of the giant squid, genus Architeuthis, have been discovered in the last four centuries, and not a single one has been captured alive. Its mating rituals are an enigma, a primordial sex crime reconstructed from autopsies. The male adult giant squid may grow to six meters in length, and its penis is longer than its body, but down in the lonely dark of the ocean deeps, its quest to slake its burning lust and perpetuate the species is a suicide mission.

  The solitary female giant squid is a third larger than its suitors, and viciously repels any amorous approaches with its sucker-studded feeding tentacles and razor beak. The male Architeuthis organ is a high-pressure hose, which injects its packet of sperm from a distance, hopefully into the thrashing tentacles of the female, where it will migrate to the sex organs internally and fertilize the target. These submarine mating battles often result in the male, badly damaged and often dying, haplessly inseminating itself or a hapless rival, wasting its fleeting chance at some sliver of immortality.

  What would drive such a magnificent creature to sacrifice life and limb for such a cold exchange of passion with a deadly enemy? What empty mote of hopeless pleasure must it take from such a bitterly hostile transaction? I, alone, can truly say that I know.

  ««—»»

  Determined to make the most of my remaining time, I went out on the road. I went courting.

  Just a few for-examples: I was a greeter at a Wal-Mart in Oklahoma City for a week. I was a towel boy at a country club in Albuquerque for two weeks. I have been a masseuse, a door-to-door salesman and a bartender’s assistant, all over the eastern states.

  My most fruitful jaunt was as an ordained minister at a quickie wedding chapel in Branson, Missouri. I was there just long enough that the place got a reputation. I touched at least a thousand fertile women before I moved on to Reno, and then Las Vegas.

  On the strength of that social custom whereby an extended hand must be shaken, I have seduced multitudes. Bony, pale, birdlike hands with immaculately manicured nails; robust, mauling, mannish hands the color and texture of pot roast; palms soft and supple as the belly of a newborn hare, or horny with calluses from hard labor; the tattooed hands of biker chicks, prostitutes and circus freaks, and the meek, plain hands of nuns and veiled Moslem women whose faces I will never see.

  Obviously, I try to sow my investments among Catholic and conservative Christian communities, and I’ve found that warm climates work best for conducting my genetic material. I suspect that my viral sperm aerosolizes and travels under hot, humid conditions, for I have had to leave more than a few jobs and apartments, after discovering that I had impregnated multiple women I never once touched or shared facilities with. An elderly spinster landlady whom I avoided for multiple reasons made the news when she died in childbirth, but every one of her octuplets survived.

  You look at me like I’m a lunatic, a liar or a freak, but in a handful of generations, they’ll teach that my reproductive system gave me a competitive edge, so my appearance was predestined, my conquest inevitable. Schoolchildren will wonder, as they snicker and fondle repulsive museum exhibits of internal fertilization with antiseptic mittens, how humankind ever endured the dark ages of sexual reproduction.

  It’s one of the things I wonder about as I lie alone in bed, when I’m not wondering how many more nights I’ll be alive to wonder: how many of them know? And if they knew, would they tell? Or would they just kick the dirt over it and walk away? Or would they steal into the cribs of
twenty or thirty thousand helpless babies, and snuff them out? And how could they know if the babies in those twenty or thirty thousand homes – or fifty or a hundred thousand, for all you know – are even half of my children?

  I only regret that I’ll never to get to see them all grow up, to tell them what they are; but I know it’s best that they will find out as I did, and make the most of their daylight.

  I sincerely hope you will make the most of yours.

  About Gemma Files

  Born in England and raised in Toronto, Canada, Gemma Files has been a film critic, teacher and screenwriter, and is currently a wife and mother. She won the 1999 International Horror Guild Best Short Fiction award for her story “The Emperor’s Old Bones,” and the 2006 ChiZine/Leisure Books Short Story Contest for her story “Spectral Evidence.”

  Her fiction has been published in two collections (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both from Prime Books), and five of her stories were adapted into episodes of The Hunger, an anthology TV show produced by Ridley and Tony Scott’s Scot Free Productions. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry. In 2009, her short story “Marya Nox” will appear in Lovecraft Unbound, a new Lovecraft-themed anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, while her story “each thing I show you is a piece of my death” will appear in Clockwork Phoenix 2, from Norilana Books.

  Ring Of Fire

  By Gemma Files

  Late June, 1857:

  “The sepoys themselves, strangely enough, have a phrase which describes my current state of mind to perfection: ‘Sub lal hogea hai’ – ’Everything has become red.’”

  ««—»»

  nlike most madmen, Desbarrats Grammar was debatably lucky enough to be gifted with an enduring understanding of the exact instant when his sanity had collapsed. The moment in question had occurred shortly after the retaking of Calcutta, during what his commanding officer had then referred to as “the mopping up”, post-Indian Mutiny – a process of justice which, in keeping with the usual British reinterpretation of Biblical tradition, required considerably more for the price of an eye than payment in kind. Correspondingly, a method of retribution had to be improvised which would be both impressive and educative.

  And this was how Grammar, then a mere twenty-two years of age, soon came to be standing next to a cannon across the mouth of which a lucklessly uprisen native soldier of the British Army had been strapped, briskly dropping his sword in one neat arc in order to visually indicate that the order to fire had been given – upon which the cannon bucked, swinging a bit to one side on the recoil, and enveloped him in a halo of molten blood before his attentive native second-in-command even had a chance to get him out of the way.

  Grammar stood a moment, suitably frozen, only his eyebrows – still lightly sketched in gold – indicating that he had not been born with red hair.

  His second-in-command asked him something, presumably in Hindi, which Grammar spoke quite well; his service in India had soon revealed an unpredictable facility for languages. But the man’s voice, usually so clear and strong, had apparently dulled to a scanty murmur in the brief space between order and result. Grammar narrowed his eyes at him, straining to read his lips.

  “Repeat that,” he said.

  The second-in-command did. No enlightenment ensued – until frustration brought him around the other side of Grammar’s blood-soaked head.

  “…thee, art thou hurt? Sahib, I have asked thee—”

  Grammar nodded, slowly. He was beginning to form a theory, but knew it would have to wait some while yet to be confirmed.

  “Keep by that shoulder, I pray thee,” he replied, “that I might have the benefit of thy protection a little closer to hand, in the future. And bring on the next one.”

  Hours later, when the work was done, a physician reported that, yes, the cannon’s concussion had blown out one of Grammar’s eardrums, causing him to consequently lose all hearing on his right side. Grammar nodded again, thanked him, and left the tent – refusing, gracefully, the doctor’s offer of a pan and cloth to wash himself with before he saw his commanding officer to ask that his duty be extended to finding and executing those remaining sepoys who had fled beyond Calcutta’s limits.

  Grammar wore his mask of sepoy’s blood until it flaked and ran, until his own sweat washed the worst of it away. Only then did he accept a handful of rice from his second-in-command, with which to rub away the flies which had gorged themselves and died in his sanguine crown. Because he could not shave, he avoided mirrors; occasionally, however, the unexpected sight of his own stained face would waver momentarily in streams and puddles, or grin at him from the broad surface of a rain-soaked leaf. And he would pause, obscurely flattered to recognize – once again – how well this red dust suited him, redefining all those subtle undercurrents which had once swum invisible beneath his honest British skin. Reminding him of who – and what – he had always been, in truth as well as unvoiced dream.

  This was the beginning of it.

  The two mental games he had kept to for most of his life, Home-face and Acting-as-though-one-were-Away, had suddenly been discarded in favor of a third, less well- remembered play: Don’t-Care Island. For madness had always lain dormant in him, the hidden loot in his genetic plum-pudding – generations of half-lies and after-the-fact explanations for inexplicable behavior, as when his grandfather had suddenly thrust his Aunt Myrtle’s forehead down against a lamp during the playing of a game of cards, causing her hair to blaze up like a torch. Or unknown facts, like the layers of mutilated bird- and mouse-corpses which had, for so long, fertilized Strait Gate Hall’s incomparable gardens. Now, due to a combination of circumstances no Grammar had ever faced before or ever would again, that madness had been given whip-hand.

  And thus it remained.

  It was perfectly easy to be mad in India, Grammar soon found, as long as one were British, with some rank, some breeding and – most importantly – some money to prop one up. After all, his madness made no particular outward show (at least, not in civilized circles); he did not rave, or make insane gestures. He did not shirk his duty – on the contrary, he embraced it whole-heartedly, always tasting the wind for any trace of slaughter. And this was because the smell of incipient tragedy whipped his madness into a fire that made his pulse pound like a singing, liquid drum. It made him grind against himself in a frenzy of excitement. And once, when the battle was safely done and his group had all had their way with a certain woman of the sepoys, it made him smile at her in such a warm and reassuring manner that she wept to see him, thinking him an angel – before cutting open her belly with his bayonet, and thrusting his penis inside the slippery bag of her bladder until both their groins were stiff with urine, blood and semen.

  To you who listen, meanwhile: I do not tell you these things to make you hate Lieutenant Desbarrats Grammar, o my beloved, and neither do I tell you them to make you fear or pity him. I tell you only what is true.

  ««—»»

  July, 1857:

  “Another body burning on the ghat this evening; as I stood to watch, there came a sudden flood of bats, as big as crows, flying over our heads. Beyond, the river was covered with odd-looking boats, and a copper-colored sky bent over all, vivid and still as some frieze from the Arabian Nights. (Memo: Romesh Singh reminds me that I have a riding engagement with the Misses Mill tomorrow.)”

  Romesh Singh was Grammar’s second-in-command; they had exchanged full names long before, at the outset of Grammar’s posting, though Romesh Singh had never since been forward enough to ever suggest Grammar actually USE his when addressing him. The Misses Mill, meanwhile, were called Ottilie and Sufferance: One tall, one not, both equally dishwater-plain and more than financially equipped to compete for the hand of Calcutta’s most eligible potential bridegroom. Their coordinated flirtation, polished and hollow as an acrobatic troupe’s routine, stirred nothing in Grammar beyond a dim contempt – as was, perhaps, only to be expected. But he was between atrocities at the moment, and in need o
f diversion.

  “Were one to report today’s weather accurately in one’s correspondence,” said the Miss Mill at Grammar’s left hand (tall, therefore Ottilie) – her head swathed with soaked gauze under a big straw hat, hooped skirts well-spotted at the hem with mould – ”no person at Home would ever believe one did not exaggerate.”

  “Especially since it is so very hot, one would not know how to spell the word large enough,” the other – Sufferance, presumably – murmured.

  Grammar made some slight noise in reply, vague enough to let either Miss consider it confirmation of her acuity.

  It was mid-July, and the rains had just begun. Large stains rose like veins from the bases of pillars, while green ones spread darkly down from wherever water cascaded off the roofs of British-owned Calcutta’s fine, white lime-coated buildings. The rooms grew high with blistered drawings, damp-cracked books, mildewed daguerrotypes. Silverfish were everywhere, and the cream of the Raj were already eating off of white marble tables covered to some depths by a frail, crackling layer of wings discarded by flying ants. The aforementioned heat, meanwhile – undiminished, even in the teeth of such humidity – had split the ivory frame of Grammar’s only miniature of his mother, allowing white maggots to eat up the paint.

  (I was there as well, of course, as an unseen extra darkness in the blur of their horses’ shadow. It was my face that made the beasts shy an hour or so later, throwing both Misses to their respective injury and death.)

  Down by the riverside, an age-bent man lay fetally curled in a palanquin sprawled almost directly across their chosen path – blanched and sallow beneath his tan, half-lidded eyes too full of blood to close, his friends and family hovering in patient attendance as death grew palpably nearer with every shallow gasp.