by Mark Leidner
I’d rather it had gone on longer, since it was effectively distracting, but it was otherwise ineffective enough that I wasn’t terribly disappointed when it ended. I’d forgotten how awkward it can be when you don’t know your partner and they don’t know you. Afterward, K-lo kept trying to kiss me, and I kept turning away. He asked me why I’d come on to him, and I said in a tone of attempted old-fashioned Hollywood glamour that I was going through a divorce and he was a kind, handsome stranger. Although I wanted to be free of his company at that point, I also didn’t want to leave the bed, another piece of furniture in the folds of which I could try to hide from time. K-Lo kept pouting, so I told him he’d been wonderful, by the way, my most memorable roll in the hay in ages, and other corny lines like that. He got up and sat on the edge of the bed and hunched over and lit a cigarette. I suddenly had the fantasy that if I said the right thing right then—if I made up the right lie and then said it with total conviction—I could change the course of his life. Because we were strangers and we had already slept together and obviously never would again, in his mind, I imagined, there would be no incentive for me to lie to him, and he therefore might believe anything I said. Plus, he seemed like a genuinely good person. What if I told him that I was a prophet and I’d slept with him because I believed that he would go on to save the world? Why wouldn’t he believe me? Why would I make something like that up? Would that make my life matter more, if he then went on to become, not even a messiah, but maybe just a better taxpayer? Or artist? Or father? Or inventor? Or teacher? Then he turned and puffed his cigarette and asked again if I wanted a ride home. I now understood that he wanted me gone. The shameful realization that I had been patronizing him the whole time, and he was tired of it, suddenly struck me. I checked my phone, again afraid I’d missed my husband’s call, but I hadn’t.
I covered my breasts with one hand and reached to him with the other, pointing at his cigarette pack. He got one out of the pack and put it in my mouth and then leaned over and lit it. I smoked it with my eyes closed and then blew the smoke at his head. It tasted good, better than sex or getting high. I had the thought that if I could do it all over again, upon leaving the clinic, I’d have simply gone to the nearest store and bought cigarettes and smoked a couple. When the cigarette was halfway finished, however, I felt nauseous and remembered why I hated them. I got to my feet and picked up my clothes. I took one more drag and dropped it in a can of soda on his dresser.
“You leaving?”
I just looked at him while I got dressed, as if this question was stupid. He asked if I was sure I didn’t want a ride. “I have a car,” I said.
“Where?”
“Across the street.”
With painful slowness, his confusion melted into recognition.
“You were at the clinic,” he said, almost a question.
I nodded.
He squinted at me, as if reconsidering all my antics.
“I didn’t want to drive home,” I said.
“You okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” I almost said. But then I didn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t want to lie to him.
“You’re a good guy, K-lo,” I said. “I hope all your dreams come true.”
It was cheesy, but I meant it, and I think he could tell.
IT HAD BEEN SO DARK and cold inside that leaving his apartment felt a bit like rebirth, moving from the netherworld into a world of too vivid color. Humidity immediately beaded all over me, and I was grateful for every droplet.
I was halfway across the speckled parking lot when my phone rang, startling me.
“What’s up?” blurted my husband before I’d even said hello. “I was taking a power nap.”
I said where I was.
“Oh, right,” he said. “I thought you drove.”
I told him I had.
“You cool to drive back?”
I told him to come get me.
“Is everything okay?”
“Just come,” I said.
“What happened?”
I didn’t say anything. Then I heard rustling and movement and footsteps.
“I’m on my way.”
A JEEP PULLED UP IN front of the bar. A middle-aged man in sandals and dreadlocks got out, unlocked the bar, went inside, and a moment later the neon signs came on. I looked up at K-lo’s bedroom window, still dark. I could tell it was his because I could see the back of the air conditioner wheezing in his window, dripping water, sucking air out of the world. Above the building, several intersecting power lines gave the impression of a big empty sail. From my angle, it made the building look like a kind of ghost ship, with K-lo in the captain’s quarters and the dreadlocked sailor belowdecks in the galley. Even the wooden stairs I’d staggered up and then drifted back down evoked a kind of mildewed rigging. I turned away from the ship to face the comparatively shinier complex of medical offices across the street, floating forward more than walking.
Everything felt like it was still underwater, but no longer was I the stunned witness to the sad ruins of some other planet’s or time’s civilization. I was a monster who belonged here among such wreckage, invisible tentacles billowing all around me, touching and connecting everything, wondering nothing, unseen and all-seeing, marked for extinction like everything, and finding there a forbidden comfort uneasily bordering grace.
AVERN-Y6
RXGR-14 ENTERED AVERN-Y6 TOO EXHAUSTED TO think, aching from abdomen to antennae. Avern-Y6 was packed. The sucking sound of soldiers slurping athletically from generous puddles echoed around Rxgr-14 like white noise. As he negotiated the bodies and feelers of the other patrons, his own feelers felt like they were still digging, still pushing dirt forward, still pulling it back, still tamping it down, smoothing it out, and digging it out of the wall in front of his compound eyes. When he wasn’t depressed, he called it tunneling. When he was, he called it moving dirt. Today was a moving dirt day.
There was always more to move, for one, and whether he moved it quickly or slowly, well or poorly, no one took notice. There were too many others just like him. Rxgr-14 wasn’t sure how many workers there were, but he was certain it was more than he could imagine. He’d always been able to count pretty high, but somewhere up around a hundred his brain turned into fog. It was part of why he liked coming to Avern-Y6, a soldier’s watering hole, despite the fact that those soldiers sometimes gave him shit. As a lowly worker, he felt unique among them.
Rxgr-14 chose an unoccupied divot in the far, uncrowded corner of Avern-Y6. His reflection shimmered in the puddle of golden liquid. He looked old. He wondered how long it would be before he died. In the mirrors of the lenses of his eyes, he observed tiny versions of himself, each looking up into him with the same grim curiosity.
Rxgr-14 looked around at the soldiers. How did they not go crazy worrying about dying while rushing into danger? Rxgr-14 reassured himself that they were probably as afraid as he was, they just knew how to conceal their fear from others, or from themselves. That’s the real trick, Rxgr-14 thought. Maybe courage was a kind of camouflage behind which you hide the fearful part of you from the part that’s brave. But how can the mind hide something from the mind? Dirt can’t move itself.
Rxgr-14 appraised his reflection again. His exoskeleton was scuffed and matte. He’d once been so shiny he couldn’t have hidden in the deepest blind alley in the colony. Now, however, his careworn carapace absorbed all available light. The tips of his antennae hung over his forehead, wilted, as if even the memories within them had given up on being remembered. One of those memories, an unexpectedly resilient one, suddenly came back to him—of being bulldozed on unsteady, newborn feelers out of the nursery into the loud wide bright central shaft linking every tunnel and compartment in the colony—the song of the queen exploding brilliantly into his unimprinted mind like a synesthetic symphony, his pliant antennae spasming to capture even a fraction of that zooming psychedelic melody.
Now, his antennae were bald, bent, and blunted, and the
song of the queen was a background soundtrack hardly distinguishable from the susurrations of the slurping soldiers.
Rxgr-14 bent to the golden fluid and drew in a liberal sip. He closed his eyes, inclined his head toward the rotunda of Avern-Y6, and swallowed slowly. As the cold liquid rode down his esophagus, his thorax warmed, and then the warmth spread until he felt it creep up behind his eyes, and he opened them in pleasant surrender.
He looked down at himself in the liquid again. His mouth was open and grinning. His carapace didn’t look dull; it was rugged. The many lenses of his eyes weren’t chipped; they were distinguished. His antennae didn’t dangle sadly; they swayed laconically. He wasn’t debilitated by age; he was seasoned by experience, and he was at the peak of his powers. He was one of the most gifted tunnelers in the colony. Sure, he wished he was younger, but youth is its own prison too, he reflected with a nod. So is power. So is everything I want that I don’t have, he thought on. And a fuzzy thesis formed in his mind about why one tended to magnify beyond all proportion the superficial deficiencies of one’s own physique, but before it reached the point of clear articulation, the notion vanished into the same cognitive fog that high numbers did.
And the more he drank of the fluid made from the fermented ooze secreted by the sterile breeders of the royal caste in the capacious distilleries beneath the nursery, the less and less he minded his status as an exhausted laborer disgusted with the futility of existence.
A FOGGY NUMBER OF SIPS later, Rxgr-14 reflected happily that he still had several hours before going to sleep, and soon his friends Lnzt-16 and Tzara-9 would arrive, the latter of whom he was in love with, albeit unrequitedly. But was it not a gift to be in love at all? At least you knew what you were all about. Better to be subject to unfulfilled desires than to have the world at your feelers and falter in your will. Stacked as the odds of one-sided love are, thought Rxgr-14, aren’t stacked odds the stuff of legends? He looked around. What were any of us but the legend we tell to the audience inside our own mind? So why not tell a bold one? Why not start at the bottom? A worker like him, a soldier like her, separated by both caste and, he admitted, his own towering cowardice? What a story!
Rxgr-14 drank excitedly, hoping Tzara-9 arrived first so they could conversate alone. Tzara-9 was flirtier when Lnzt-16 wasn’t around, and Rxgr-14 reveled in her undivided attention and saucy personality. He liked Lnzt-16, too, but what he really wanted was to interlock mandibles with Tzara-9. He thought about it often, and he thought about it now as he plunged his mandibles into the amber liquid below him and slurped. A few moments later, a figure darkened the puddle. Rxgr-14 lifted his head partly, then stopped. He could tell it was Lnzt-16 from the extra-large shadow he cast.
“Mon frère!” Lnzt-16 bellowed. “You won’t believe what I must tell you!”
Rxgr-14 regarded his friend’s upside-down reflection in the amber liquid.
“Hey.”
Lnzt-16’s mandibles clicked excitedly. “Very big news indeed, mon frère.”
Lnzt-16 was three times Rxgr-14’s size, and his carapace was shinier by an order of ten. Beyond being an incredible physical specimen, Lnzt-16 was atypically conscientious, warm, and friendly for a member of the warrior class. To say that Rxgr-14 felt both envy and admiration for Lnzt-16 would be an understatement. Rxgr-14 lowered his head back down and slurped.
Lnzt-16 frowned at his friend’s apparent glumness, then threw a monstrous, spiky feeler around him.
“My news is big, mon frère, but, eh… not urgent. What’s wrong?”
“I had a bad day,” Rxgr-14 said flatly. “So I guess I got drunk.”
Lnzt-16 smiled brightly. “But that’s what drinking is for, mon frère!”
Rxgr-14 inclined his head at Lnzt-16’s reflection. “That was yesterday. Today, I was hungover, which made today a bad day too, so all I wanted to do all day was drink even more, so when I got off work, that’s what I did, and now I’m drunk again. It’s like a damn curse.”
“Oh,” Lnzt-16 said. “Well, what did you get up to last night?” He wriggled his feelers. “Nothing lifts the spirits like a sordid tale of woe and excess!”
“There’s no tale. You weren’t there. Tzara-9 wasn’t either. So I was drinking alone, thinking about how lonely I was. And am. Then some of your brethren started calling me ‘bug,’ so I left. It was humiliating. But, whatever.”
Lnzt-16’s head swiveled. “Who called you… that?” He reared on his feelers to get a better view of the others.
“Settle down,” Rxgr-14 said. “I deserved it. I was being a jerk.”
“What’d you do?”
“The big bronze dude? What’s his name?”
“Eybv-99?”
Rxg-14 nodded. “Yeah. He shit on one of the workers when they over-filled his divot. Literally covered him, abdomen to antennae, in hot, liquid shit.”
“Who?”
“Some worker. I don’t know his name.”
“And you stood up for him?” Lnzt-16 asked, impressed.
“Not really. I just told Eybv-99 he shouldn’t waste waste.” Rxgr-14 inclined his head toward the ceiling. “You see that?”
Lnzt-16 squinted up at the rotunda.
“See how cracked and dry it is? If everybody who drank here just did what they were supposed to do, this place would last forever. It’s just typical of… you know what? Nevermind. I don’t want to talk about it. I was hammered. I called him out. He called me ‘bug.’ I left before it got ugly.”
Lnzt-16 frowned. “And then you went home?” Lnzt-16 asked with a frown.
“No, I went to G2, and, uh, actually, ended up over at Z9.”
“Yeesh.”
Rxgr-14 shook his head. “I know.”
“Z9 is nothing but burnouts and… the laziest of workers, mon frère. No offense.”
Rxgr-14’s antennae swiveled. “I said I know,” he said sharply.
Lnzt-16 looked down, chastised.
Rxgr-14 shrugged. “It’s not all that bad, actually.”
“Oh?” Lnzt-16 lifted his head back up, then nodded amiably. “I suppose I’ve never been to Z9. I only know what I hear.”
“There’s a worker there I might have a thing for.”
“Oh yeah?”
“A minor thing. She’s a brilliant tunneler.”
“Did you two speak?”
Rxgr-14 shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know the scene there. They know I hang with you guys. I don’t even know why I went. I felt like a creep.”
“That’s why you should only drink here, mon frère.” Lnzt-16 glanced around. “Avern-Y6 for life!” Then Lnzt-16 seemed to get an idea. “Maybe you should invite her here. What’s her name?”
Rxgr-14 dismissed the idea with a wave of his feeler. “You don’t know her. Besides, this place is an acquired taste.”
Lnzt-16 shrugged, letting it go. Then he frowned at his friend and leaned in. “Look, you know I have your back. Eybv-99 knows it too. You’ll always be safe here, as long as I’m around.”
“I know.” Rxgr-14 smiled at his friend reluctantly. “I appreciate it.”
Lnzt-16 looked at him hopefully.
“Besides,” Rxgr-14 said with a smirk, “you guys do have the best booze.”
Lnzt-16 smiled.
Rxgr-14 bent down and took a sip. Then, coming back up, he wiped a long feeler appreciatively across his mandibles and said, “Down in Z9, it’s literally like drinking mud.”
They both gazed appreciatively at the clear golden liquid in their puddle.
“Anyway,” Rxgr-14 said, “you guys were gone last night. So I just ended up drowning in it.”
Rxgr-14 lowered his head to sip again, but Lnzt-16 stopped him with his feeler.
“No need to drown again, mon frère. I’m here! And I’m certain Tzara-9 is en route.” Lnzt-16 wriggled his bright, pliant antennae in a clumsy attempt at irony. “You’re not lonely anymore.”
Rxgr-14 pushed
Lnzt-16’s feeler away. “Loneliness was last night’s reason. Tonight, it’s social anxiety.”
Lnzt-16 frowned. “And if you ever relax, you’ll be drunk because you’re happy. If reasons to drink were reasons to live, mon frère, why, you’d be a prophet!”
“Would you please stop saying mon frère?”
Lnzt-16 looked at him, surprised. “You don’t like it?”
“You don’t even know what it means.”
“It’s… an expression.”
“Of what?”
Lnzt-16 lifted his head. His weaponlike mandibles danced for a moment as he thought. “Of friendship,” he finally said. He looked at Rxgr-14 melodramatically. “Or so I thought. Maybe I just don’t have your way with words.”
Rxgr-14 looked down. “No, no. I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m off tonight.”
“I don’t like you like this, m—my friend. If there’s anything I can do to lift your spirits, will you tell me?”
Rxgr-14 looked at Lnzt-16’s reflection. “I’ll be fine.” Then he looked up at the real him. “Where were you last night anyway?”
“Right!” Lnzt-16’s eyes suddenly lit up. “My big news! I had a date.”
Rxgr-14 threw up his feelers. “Wow. That is news. That’s huge. Who was it, your soul mate? Or just someone impossibly beautiful who only wants to interlock mandibles with no strings attached? Or something even better perhaps?”
Lnzt-16 scowled. “I have no desire to be cruel. I won’t tell you about my life if it hurts you so much to hear about it.”
“No, no. Goddammit, I’m being a jerk. It’s just that you’re always going on dates. No offense, but you’re literally always going on dates.”
“Not with a member of the royal caste, I’m not.”
Rxgr-14 looked at Lnzt-16 with genuine surprise.
“Wings?”
Lnzt-16 nodded, spreading wide his middle feelers and even fluttering them a little.
