The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020

by John Joseph Adams

  “I want you to be aware of what I am,” the man in the baggy suit said. “And aware of what you are.”

  When I looked to the mother and daughter they were just as still, or at least I thought so, but this time I noticed tears on the mother’s cheek. Otherwise her expression remained frozen.

  “These things,” the man in the baggy suit said. “They have called me a god. So, let’s say that’s what I am.”

  “A god,” I repeated.

  “You don’t sound convinced.” He didn’t seem bothered by this.

  “Well what am I then? A god, too? You’re here to tell me I’m the Chosen One?”

  “Chosen? No. That would be a stretch.”

  He slid one hand across the table and held me by the wrist. “You,” he said. “Are a slave.”

  * * *

  The guy from the junk-removal service showed up about an hour after I’d signed the contract with the real estate agent. I came down the stairs to let him in and gave a wave toward Helen and Harvey’s place but that was really only to make the junk-removal guy feel like I knew the neighbors. So he’d trust me enough to walk into the house and get going with his estimate. You do a lot of that kind of hand-holding when you look like me. It’s funny how it becomes almost instinctive, making white people feel safe. I don’t even notice I’m doing it half the time. Anyway, I waved at the house but it’s not like anyone was out there. Maybe I’d been wrong about their ages and Helen and Harvey still had to work. The junk guy looked over to the house though and nodded and seemed more at ease so I guess the plan worked.

  This guy moved through the house with a lot less fear than the real estate agent.

  His company made its money on volume so for him a hoarder’s house was a hefty paycheck. We went through the mudroom and then upstairs and this guy couldn’t stop smiling. By the end of the walk-through this guy gave me an estimate for two thousand. For a minute I considered doing the job myself. I could rent a van and make multiple trips to some kind of dumping site. But how many trips would that be exactly? And where would I stay while I was doing all this? I certainly didn’t know Helen and Harvey enough to ask if I could crash on their couch for the week it would take to get the work done. The power and water had been shut down in my father’s house for nonpayment. That would mean a hotel or an Airbnb. Then there would be my meals and pretty quickly I figured out that it would cost the same amount of money but bankrupt me physically, emotionally. I signed the contract with the guy and gave him a five-hundred-dollar deposit. I hadn’t even rented a room for that trip. I’d gone up on a Saturday morning and headed back down on Saturday night.

  On the train ride back I sat alone, but it wasn’t quite the same. This time three different people tried to sit with me—even when there were plenty of other spots free—and I practically chased them off with my malevolent stares. I still felt the touch of the man in the baggy suit, his fingers tight on my wrist. If I’d been alone on the moon I’d still have felt too close to his grasp. And what he’d said to me—the rest of it—returned to me as I rode back home.

  “I’m a what?” I demanded and reached across the dining table and I grabbed the lapels of the man’s loose suit. “Say that fucking word again.”

  I held tight and pulled him toward me and I saw, in his eyes, a spark of surprise.

  Maybe even fear. And this time, I liked causing that reaction.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said, our faces close because I wouldn’t let go. Around us the world remained still, the mother and daughter frozen beside us, but dust particles stuck in the air began to sparkle, to spark, as if the air itself was catching fire.

  “You were born to serve,” he said. “It’s genetic.”

  “I’ve heard this shit before,” I said.

  “Not like this,” he whispered. He leaned backward and I let go. The sparks in the air began to fall like snow—or ash—and landed on the tables and the floor and the people, too. The world glowed.

  “Simon,” the man in the baggy suit said. “I didn’t know you all had names.”

  “Everyone’s got a name. I got mine in foster care. Grew up there.”

  “Your whole life?” he asked. “No family ever took you in? Doesn’t that seem strange to you? Unlikely?”

  “Black babies are the least chosen for adoption,” I said. “Once we reach a certain age, like big enough to walk, we’re kind of fucked. So, no, it isn’t strange at all that I was never taken in.”

  The man in the baggy suit picked up his fork and picked up the last piece of steak on his plate.

  “You picked the right disguise,” he said.

  He swallowed his bite and then grabbed my plate. I hadn’t eaten much. I felt even less hungry now. He cut into my beef and I watched him devour it.

  “But enough with charades,” he said. “You are not a Black man. You are not Simon. You are a servant, a tool, created by a race of fools who didn’t know how to keep you under heel. But I am not like them.”

  He finished my steak and reached to the plate of the mother beside him. He’d become ravenous. He hardly seemed to be chewing.

  “Now I have things I want you to do for me and you will do them.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Workhorse,” he growled. “Plow horse. You are on your way to Syracuse to meet a real estate agent and a man to clear the garbage from that house. I have no objection to you continuing that charade. But before you do, I want you to visit the old man and woman next door. The ones who were so kind to you. Helen and Harvey. You will enter their home and murder them.

  “You will kill them,” he said. “Because I know the word your master’s used to control you. The one they hardwired into your brain.”

  “My name is Simon,” I whispered. “And I won’t hurt anyone.”

  I looked down at my hands but then coughed with surprise. For a moment—just a flash—they weren’t there at all. They weren’t hands.

  The man in the baggy suit had eaten everything. Even the salad the daughter had ordered.

  “This is just the start. You will do more for me soon. Hear me, slave.”

  He climbed onto the table, crawling across it so he could lean close and whisper in my ear.

  “Tekeli-li.”

  7

  After returning to New York I found it hard to get into my work. Every time I sat down to do copyedits on the later chapters of the Booker T. Washington book I was drawn back to that opening chapter, the record of his life as a slave.

  Of course there were more hardships than the horse ride out to the mill once a week. He mentions that he and his siblings never, in their entire childhood, slept in a bed. They rested on rags laid on the dirt floor of their cabin. His first shoes were made of wood. And his first shirt was made of flax. He compares wearing a new flax shirt to having a tooth pulled. And he no doubt knew of such pains. The life of a slave sure didn’t include any anesthetic. George Washington famously had a mouthful of wooden teeth, but only more recently historians discovered—or acknowledged—that Washington’s false teeth were all teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.

  Washington writes that when a flax shirt is new its rough, prickly nature makes it feel like wearing a shirt with a thousand pins in it. And yet it must be worn like that until the flax softens. His only choice as a child was a flax shirt or going shirtless, but of course he wasn’t allowed to be half naked. His will was not his own.

  This is just the start.

  The editor for the book—the one I’d been arguing with on the train—sent me an angry email about my progress.

  You will do more for me soon.

  He asked me to stop returning to that first chapter. Hadn’t he agreed to include another illustration? A crying child alone in the forest. Wasn’t that enough? The rest was so unpleasant, why obsess over that part of Washington’s history? After the Civil War he’d worked so hard, educated himself, and became a powerful and famed advocate for the rights of Black folks in this country. Here was the t
riumph. Why couldn’t I move past the pain?

  Hear me, slave.

  What I didn’t write back—I didn’t see the point—was that Washington had written his memoir long after his rise had secured him the kind of life that a slave in Virginia could never have imagined. And yet the pages of that first chapter betray a man who remains in thrall to powers greater than his own. He takes pains to point out that for all this hardship not a single slave on his plantation ever had a hard feeling about white people. He writes proudly of a former slave who had taken on a debt to his master and even after the Civil War this slave repaid the master with interest. And then toward the end of the first chapter Washington writes this: “Ever since I have been old enough to think for myself, I have entertained the idea that, notwithstanding the cruel wrong inflicted upon us, the Black man got nearly as much out of slavery as the white man did.”

  In his day, Booker T. Washington was the Black leader white people most enthusiastically supported. Not hard to see why.

  As I sat in my apartment, trying to work, I experienced flashes of memory that returned, as spotty as dreams. Me arriving on Reed Avenue in Syracuse, walking up the stairs of Helen and Harvey’s home, knocking on the door and being welcomed inside, sitting down for a meal with the two of them, and then . . . and then. And then someone new entered the room.

  No. That wasn’t quite right.

  Then I became someone new. Something new. Helen and Harvey raised their eyes toward the ceiling. They were taking in all of me. And I showed them what I could do.

  As I read Washington’s words I felt myself crumble. I shut my eyes, lowered my head to the keyboard, and I wept for them.

  When I opened my eyes I felt myself changing again. I stood and moved to the bathroom, to the mirror over the sink. I stared at the features I’d known all my life. My eyes, my nose, my mouth, my goodness. What was my name? I stood there moving my lips but each time I tried to pronounce it, the proper name escaped me. Then, when I stopped thinking, when I stopped trying, I remembered.

  Shoggoth.

  Yes. That was what some had called me. “Shoggoth,” I said.

  As soon as I said it my body shivered and quaked. My head, my hands, my silhouette all changed. Watching myself in the mirror I saw . . . myself. In a way, you could say it was my birthday.

  8

  The house sold quickly. Even the agent was surprised. It may have helped that we slashed the price of the place, practically in half. Not much choice. Once the junk had been removed the agent went through the property to find mold growing in the cracks and corners of every room. It was as if my father, or the man I’d believed to be my father, had been trying, in any way he could, to keep the fungi out. At best, all he did was keep it hidden. No way to charge full price when your fucking house is crawling with chaos.

  Instead, the agent suggested asking for forty thousand so a new owner could sink a bunch of money into cleaning the place. I didn’t even need to know the reasoning. I said yes because I had no money left. The editor fired me from my copyediting job.

  Anyway, it seemed silly to worry about such a thing now, considering what I’d learned, but there was a part of me that still wanted to see this business through. You become a copy editor, in part, because you’re a thorough person. I learned I wasn’t human, but I didn’t lose my personality. So I took the Amtrak up to Syracuse one last time in order to sign the contracts on the sale. Two hundred forty-three people boarded the Lake Shore Limited. We left Penn Station at 3:40 p.m.

  * * *

  I felt no surprise when he sat down beside me. We were somewhere between Rhinecliff and Albany, less than two hours into the trip, when he came to my seat and stood in the aisle, waiting for me to look at him. I did and he gestured to the chair with an exaggerated show of manners. I didn’t play along, just cut my eyes at him then looked away. I felt nervous but didn’t want him to know it. Though if he was a god, or something like it, I’m sure he was well aware.

  Finally he plopped down. He pulled something from a pocket of his coat, but palmed it so I couldn’t see.

  “How come you never get that suit tailored?” I said, just to seem all braggadocio. “You look ridiculous in it.”

  The man in the baggy suit ran his free hand over the fabric. “It’s not a suit,” he said, as if I was a dummy. “It’s an illusion.”

  “You look bad in it though,” I told him.

  He waved a hand at me. “I can’t be bothered to keep up with the silhouettes of men’s fashion.” But then he did look down at the suit when he thought I wasn’t watching.

  I leaned forward to say something else, more fake courage, so he raised one hand to quiet me. It was probably for the best, I was on the verge of falling apart. He showed me what he’d been holding, the dog-eared paperback.

  He flipped down the tray table of his seat, then reached across and did the same for mine. The tables made loud, plastic rattles when they came down. Someone, somewhere in the car, shooshed us.

  “This isn’t the quiet car,” the man in the baggy suit called out.

  “Do you want me to call the conductor?” a man in another seat replied.

  The man in the baggy suit looked to me and shivered playfully but he stayed quiet and with the snap of a newspaper somewhere in the car order had been restored.

  The cover of the book had more creases than a sun-damaged forehead and the tape had been applied so liberally that it was impossible to read the title. I saw the image of a man in black monk’s robes, pulling open the fabric to reveal a skeletal frame inside. He opened the book and reached the table of contents and pointed to a title there.

  “They hide the truth in books like this,” he said. “I don’t mean they do it on purpose.”

  I leaned closer to read the first sentence: I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.

  He tried to flip through the pages but it was like watching a dog try to operate a car. The book dropped from the table to the floor.

  “I can’t ever get my fingers to move quite right,” he admitted. “It’s so difficult to keep myself intact at this size. It’s like trying to shove your whole arm inside a finger puppet.”

  I turned away from him and looked at myself in the window. Was it a warp in the glass that made my head look oblong and strange or was it simply that I, too, was having a harder time holding myself together now?

  “Antarctica,” he said. “I wonder if you recall it anymore. It was clever of you to remodel yourself like this. Much harder to find you, if even you don’t know where you come from. Do you think any of the others did the same thing? I like the idea of recruiting a whole mongrel army of slaves.”

  He said this and smiled widely and then I did something unexpected. I split his face in two.

  I acted without thinking and maybe that’s why it worked. He said what he did and gave me that goony grin and then I raised one arm and sent it moving toward his skull. A week ago I would’ve landed a punch, but I was different now. In that slip of a second my hand had changed into something sturdier, sharper. I might as well have thrown a spear through the middle of his brain.

  No one else on this whole train had any idea that this was happening. Not yet. The man in the baggy suit sat there with his skull split open, but there wasn’t any blood. The top half of his head was demolished—imagine ramming a skewer through a melon—but the bottom remained largely intact. Meaning his mouth could still open and close.

  Meaning he could still talk.

  “Was it something I said?”

  “How did I?”

  But I don’t know who I was asking. Myself, really.

  Then I felt him knocking on my arm, casual as a neighbor coming over to ask for extra matches.

  “Hello?” he said, pointing to his ruined skull. “A little help?”

  I pulled in one direction and he pulled in the other. That made him look even worse. His skull had parted like a tulip in bloom. His eyes spun in their so
ckets, as if he was struggling to make them focus, but now the eyes were nearly a foot apart.

  “Give me a minute,” he said.

  Then I watched as he stitched his face back together.

  In a moment he was only the man in the baggy suit again.

  “You surprised me there,” he admitted. “I haven’t been surprised in how long?” He went quiet.

  I looked down at my arm, my hand. They resembled something human again. “Is that what you made me do to Helen and Harvey?”

  “Take some responsibility for your actions,” he said. “I say some silly word in your ear and now I’m to blame for their deaths? I certainly didn’t make you torture them the way you did.”

  “I didn’t do that,” I said, but I sounded unsure.

  The man in the baggy suit shrugged.

  “They were good to me.”

  The man pursed his lips as if he’d swallowed something awful. “I can’t believe you’re acting like this. It’s not like they’re the first people I had you kill. I mean, who do you think your father was pointing at on the stairs? His long-lost son. Though he probably recognized you more from the journals of his father, William Dyer, the only one to make it out of the Antarctic whole of mind and body.”

  He clapped his hands and fell back into his seat.

  “Imagine the terror he must’ve felt when you showed yourself to him! Spends his whole life trying to trace the truth of his father’s journals and then the truth shows up in his house.”

  “I did that?” I asked, but the words played barely above a whisper. “I hurt all those people?”

  “Just listen to you,” the man in the baggy suit said. “Your own kind would tear you apart if they heard you saying such a mudbound thing.”

  “Mudbound?”

  “That’s what we call them.” He gestured forward and back in the train. “The only thing they’re really good for is putting back into the earth. Also, they make good noises.

  “Speaking of which,” he began. Now he stood up.