Alien Virus Love Disaster Read online

  Tesla is walking into the ocean. The water is up to her neck. Waves rear up and come down over her head and she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t duck, just keeps heading out. It’s almost too dark to see her.

  Moongirl, come back! They scream through the seabreeze. Hurl themselves into the ocean. At first the water is something to fight, but then it gets deep enough that they can give themselves over to it. They paddle to Tesla, surround her, tug on her arms and kiss her cheeks. Big sister. Best friend. Why would you leave us? The fuck you thinking?

  That first moment when they catch her, Tesla’s eyes are dead. But she sparks under their touch and her mouth makes a smile.

  “I’m okay.” Her lips shape the words but her voice is barely a sound. “I’m. I’m okay.” Her eyes snag on something beyond all of them.

  Colleen and Trespass and Ibiza, they turn and follow her gaze.

  A full moon is rising. It catches them off guard. In the ocean they fall silent, still.

  Look at them now, only their heads bobbing above the water, four dark bumps breaking up the white shine of the moon reflection. Cradled by the warm ocean, they don’t have to be moonkids. They could be round and embracing as Luna herself. They could be slender as the breeze that licks the sea surface. They could be regular Earth boys and girls, loving the feel of water on skin. They could be sea nymphs. They could be four seals.

  Ibiza’s face is hard and set. She stares at the moon like a challenge. Trespass is quiet, his arms winging back and forth just under the surface. Paint runs down his face and makes a pool of smoke around his throat. Tesla lets out one gasping sob and chokes on sea water. Colleen reaches through the black water and finds her hand. They clutch each other in the darkness.

  Colleen leans her head back so water creeps cool onto her scalp. Around her and beneath her, the ocean pushes with hands like continents. Push, drag.

  With her head tilted, her vision is filled up with moon. White and brilliant and huge as the sound of blood in her brain. Huge as the pull of home. Can she see the cities on the surface? The pale tunnels that hash through the face of Luna? Can she see her parents sitting down to dinner, bloodshot, sunstarved, their fingers still tapping out equations? Could she notice the extra place setting at the table, the one they look at but never touch?

  Oh come on now. Girl doesn’t see any of that. Doesn’t even imagine it. This time of night, with water lapping at her cranium, the moon is no longer a place. The moon just is, bigger than everything, her light flowing out and lifting them up until they are no longer even floating, their bodies have vanished, they are nothing but light.

  If we cried out loud enough, Colleen thinks, maybe the moon would turn her eyes back down to us. If we beat ourselves against the Earth, if we let our bones break and our flesh split, maybe that would jar her memory. Her exiled children. Maybe she would fall in love with us again. It is not enough, this warm dry dust, these rocking waters. We will not last very long. Luna? Please? Hold us. Let us go. Let the squalls in our minds grow quiet. Let our bodies gentle. Let all the knots untie.

  If You Could Be God of Anything

  Can’t remember if I was nine or ten when the sex robot fell from the sky. Just after my sister ditched, when mom was twenty-four-seven plugged into her chair, plugged out of her grief. The only ones left to watch me were my brothers Floro and Bello, scarred princes of the scrounge and salvage, which pretty much meant I was left to watch myself.

  We were cul-de-sac kids, born in the burbs, sprawled into the sprawl. We lived in the master bedroom of a house so identical to every other house it didn’t matter what it looked like. Two-story foyer with water ripple-rotting down the walls. Burns on the ceiling. Flagstone façade that dropped off in chunks and beaned you. The burbs had been spiraling down for sixty years. Hiding holes for sea-rise refugees and space rejects. Shame-shaded wastelands ringing the city pretties. Our lawns were neat because the grass was all dust. Our streets were clean because there was nothing to throw away. City-dwellers flew overhead in their decked out cars, looking down even less often than we looked up.

  My brothers had not been home for a week and I spent every morning waiting on the front step, imagining each head that rounded the bend to be one of theirs. That day I was hunkered against the heat, scarfing a pseudosnacker, pink flavor, licking spilled frosting off my shirt. The burbs in summer are the cracked eggshell colors of the houses, the flat dog-belly tan of the dust, the worn-out grey of asphalt and sky. The streets smell like carpet glue.

  Dark shapes came round the bend and my heart leapt. Til I realized there were not two but three of them. And how short they were. And that they were Corry, and Leave Alone, and Scram Pha. Skinny boys with scabby elbows, chests concave (though so was my own), mistrusting eyes dark and long-lashed. Never judge a burb boy by his eyelashes, babydaughter, my mother told me. I did, and look what I got.

  The three plowed up the street, Corry trying to keep up with Leave Alone, Scram a cool step behind. Leave Alone would have barreled right past my house but Scram hopped up on my curb.

  “Hailo, we saw it fall. Saw a body.” He flung a pointing finger toward the west end of the neighborhood, where a century earlier the man had run out of money to build houses on spec and so just quit. Now half-framed colonials speared out of the ground, weathered whale skeletons. They would have been declared hazardous if anyone had felt like making declarations. Instead they became our playground.

  “We think s’in one of the houses and we’re a find it.”

  Things fell from cars all the time. Tumbled down from the skyways, burst through the flat clouds. Crumpled-up computers and blipping baby toys and food wrappers that shrieked as they fell. The trash we shrugged off like weather. The treasures we crowed over like manna from citygods.

  “You’na come?” Scram cocked his head so far one jug ear touched his bony shoulder.

  I had never seen a body. I couldn’t have imagined, back then, what it meant to fall. I jumped up, snagged for just a moment on the thought of my still-absent brothers, and ran after the boys. Down one curving street and then another, across cracked-up, bleached-out lawns. Past houses and houses, identical fat white houses, torn-up walks and sagging vinyl and garages with the roofs kicked in because time wore heavy boots. After three streets we were wheezing and the houses were slack-jawed and vacant. This one without windows, this one without a roof. Then no siding, then no Sheetrock.

  Then only bones. The bare frames of squat McMansions, their two-by-fours gray and wormy, their foundations crumbling. Something obscene about them, half-birthed but decrepit. Like fetuses left to yellow in jars. The walls were ghostly, permeable, revealing everything. Pipes and wires speared up at strange angles.

  We clambered through one and then another, scanning the ground, swinging on the framing. It gave me a nervous thrill to twine in and out of the splintery pine beams, like I was tracking dirt through the soft vessels of someone else’s dream. The houses, the neighborhood, everywhere I had ever been my whole life squirmed at my footfalls, breathed out, we do not want you.

  And we asked, So?

  I was the one who found it. The body. Crumpled between cracked valves from which copper piping had been looted. One glimpse and all the motion went out of me. Because it wasn’t a body. Not quite. I opened my mouth to call to the others and found my voice fled. I wanted to turn away, bury it deep—but Scram came up behind me.

  “Ossht!”

  Which made the other two hop over. Oh! Woh-woh!

  None of us, then, knew really what it meant to fall.

  Amid the rusty pipes in the unfinished bathroom of the half-built house, we squatted and stared at the robot’s broken form. Naked except for what must have been a gauzy robe, jewel-bright turquoise, now shredded and bunched around her neck. Her skin luminous brown like it was lit from within, like she would be hot to the touch. It was a glow that people lose when they die, but this thing kept i
t even now, even shattered.

  She looked so human my breath caught in my throat. Something made me think of when my mother shooed us from the room and filled the enamel tub. I never left all the way, peeked through the cracked door, watched her tilt her head back, eyes closed, sluice water over her bare breasts. Mom never looked so happy as when I was gone.

  This body, she didn’t look happy. Her white eyes were way open and bugged out like some restraint had snapped inside her skull. Her blonde hair much lighter than her skin, snarled by the wind into a single mat that puddled on the concrete. Her wrists and elbows bent the wrong way. One of her legs must have hit the framing as she came down because a beam overhead was splintered and her left shin was missing. Her knee ended in a raw haze of wires, plastic-coated viscera that looked gray until you got close and realized they were every color. Scram got up and ran through one of the unfinished walls, came back holding the shin. “This is a very serious matter.” He shook the foot at us like a gavel. “I want you all to do what I say.” He shoved the foot right up in my face. Its toenails were painted, hot pink.

  He broke the spell and we all quit genuflecting, crowded up around the body. Her torso was punctured by two lines of pale dots, which were, I leaned in and realized, the nub ends of her pseudoribs, driven through her skin by the impact. Corry and Leave Alone crouched together, giggling over her chest. Her breasts lay long and blobby like something inside them had burst and was seeping away. Her nipples large and dark, spooned strangely over jellied flesh. Corry reached out a single finger to press her tit like a button then snapped his hand back. Leave Alone fell over laughing.

  I moved to one of her flung-out arms and realized she was missing a hand as well as a foot. This one wasn’t ripped but smoothly severed, the edge dark and puckered like someone had sliced through it with hot wire. Unthinking I reached out to stroke her wrist and recoiled. How utterly like skin it was—supple softness with strength underneath. Yet I could see her severed wrist, the mass of wires, no bone no muscle no blood. I reached out again and managed to clasp her wrist, and the realness made my eyes grow hot.

  “Hailo, cmere.” Scram crouched at her foot. “Cmere lookit this.”

  I dropped the wrist and walked to him. Scram was two years older than me and I liked it when we got close enough so his arm might brush mine by accident. I knelt and he pointed, “Look.”

  Between the robot’s legs there was nothing. No vagina or skin or hair, just a wide square hole. Her illusion of humanity ended in a gaping plastic port that extended up inside her into darkness. Something in my brain clenched. My stomach roiled. Later my brothers would teach me that those kinds of robots are left empty there so you can plug in whatever apparatus you want, but at that moment a blank terror was blotting out my brain. I was shrinking, the night was encroaching. I squeaked and Scram grabbed my knee. “Shh.”

  No idea why we had to be quiet but I shushed. And thrilled at his hand on my leg. And we crouched together and stared into terrible shadows.

  “Oh man.” Leave Alone nudged her with his toe. “We should take her back to our fort.”

  Corry snorted. “How we gonna move her, dummy? She’s not walking anywhere.”

  “We could carry her.” That was Scram, standing up. “I bet. If we all helped.”

  We stared at the body for a moment. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Snot like we can leave her here.” Which was true though no one knew why.

  “Cmon,” Scram tugged one of her arms. “Help me.”

  We joined him. Terrible to feel her loose weight move under my palms. Her body bent in too many places, a bag filled with broken pieces. Eventually we hoisted her onto Scram’s back, Corry and Leave Alone bracing her on either side. Her leg dragged on the ground. Her head lolled on Scram’s shoulder. Her breasts smushed into Scram’s back. I wanted to cry.

  We started out of the house, tiny steps, wobbling. Her robe fluttered behind her, gleaming turquoise amid the dust and concrete. “We should get her some clothes,” Scram announced. “She can be our queen.”

  The fort was away from the whale skeletons, away from the homes, in a gully where the power lines used to run. Against two real trees we had piled up branches and boards and the door off a wheelie car. It had started out as a place to hide the things we stole. Crinkle packs of food and broken tech bits. One time Leave Alone made off with a whole case of gel candy from someone’s front room store. We gorged ourselves for three days until we all shit glowing green. There wasn’t much that made it to the burbs that was worth stealing. Sometimes we nabbed photographs, old music players, dug up the only tomato plant in the yard, somebody miss it, please, someone. Miserly place, wouldn’t even let us be criminals.

  The robot we dumped outside the fort. Scram groaned as her weight eased off him. Propped her up against a real tree and straightened the shreds of nightgown around her body. I tried to close her eyes but her eyeballs bulged like balloons when I pushed the lids down so I left her to gawk.

  She gawked as we dragged a dirty skirt out from the fort and covered her legs. She gawked as we draped tattered plastic around her like a smock. She gawked as I twisted her a crown out of TV cable.

  Scram and Leave Alone went off to search for rocks. We were going to build a second room for the fort. Corry and I stayed to dig a circle in the dirt. I scraped the ground with a piece of window frame. Beads of sweat crawled down my arms. As I dug I stared at the robot’s leg. Her skin was butter smooth and dry.

  “Yeah.” Corry rocked back on his heels. “I think she’s beautiful.”

  I stared at him. “Shut up.”

  “What? I do.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say to this. “Huh. You would.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing. Don’t talk to me.”

  “What?”

  But his mind was on the robot, I could feel it, on the little band of belly flesh that showed every time the breeze lifted her smock.

  As we worked the boys looked for excuses to touch her. Corry kept brushing his arm along her ankle as he dug. When Leave Alone came back lugging a hunk of cinder block, he heaved it down and staggered, catching his balance by grabbing her neck. Scram kept adjusting her crown, her shawl, brushing his fingertips over her collarbone. Their sweat rubbed off on her, left smudges bright on her poreless skin.

  In the distance the deep-down hum of scooters, and my ears perked. My brothers, maybe, on some late-night errand that had dragged into morning. I didn’t understand what my brothers did then but I knew it was important. I knew bad things would happen if they messed up. I knew they stayed awake when everyone else grown-up was plugged into games.

  About once a month Bello blitzed out on too many tabs, forgot his rule about not letting me on his scooter, pulled me onto his lap and roared onto the highway. Vroom. He talked as we sped. “You scared yet, Hai-girl?” His spit flecked my neck before the wind whipped it away. “You gotta get scared sometime.” Vroom. “How about now?”

  He steered with one arm, the other around my waist, the scooter careening crazily across the empty road. My front was numb in the wind but my back against him was warm. His fingers dug so hard into my side that the next morning there would be four parallel bruises. Warehouses and empty lots flew by. Vroom. I bit the noises back so hard I tasted blood. “How—about—now?”

  Eventually he veered around and dumped me on the outskirts of the neighborhood. If I closed my eyes I could still see him speeding away, dark dot on the static country of my eyelids.

  I mounded the dug-up earth. Scram and Corry slung down big chunks of cinder block, pried like molars from the McMansion foundations. Every so often I pressed my mouth to my arm, tasted sweat. Feeling my muscles move, it made me happy in a way I couldn’t name.

  Sometimes when Mom was plugged in I would touch her. Drape her arm over my shoulders, lay my head on her knee. It made me nervous and safe at the same
time, to feel her body without her. Here was weight, here was warmth that couldn’t leave me, even when all the rest could.

  When our stomachs’ knuckling could no longer be ignored, Scram dove into the old fort and pulled a phakecake from under a board. It was squished flat but the metallic icing still shone. Divided into quarters, one for each. Scram got the back wrapper, I got the front. Leave Alone and Corry split the cardboard tray, licked it until the paper sogged.

  As we ate we asked the robot questions. We had a big metal ball bearing from the construction site and we set it on her sternum. If it rolled off her left side that was yes. If it rolled off her right that was no.

  “You have to be very polite,” Scram told us like he’d been doing this for years. “You have to say, O Queen, first.”

  “O Queen, will I marry someone rich?”

  No.

  “O Queen, will I ride in a skycar some day?”

  Yes.

  “O Queen, will my uncle who lives in the basement die a horrible death that makes his dick shrivel up and fall off?”

  No.

  “O Queen, will there be plastipatties for dinner?”

  No.

  “Yeah that’s a big lie.” Leave Alone stood up and prodded the robot’s thigh. “She’s tilted to the right. It’s always gonna fall this way. This is stupid.”

  He went back to piling rocks. I stayed by the robot and asked her more questions in my head.

  Are my brothers okay?

  No.

  Will I ever get out of here?

  No.

  I picked up the ball bearing and hurled it at her throat, hit her so hard that her head bounced and flopped to the other side.

  Again, the dog-growl of scooters, whistles and hacking laughter. “Kid-kid-kiddos! Lookit! That’s a big doll you got there, little boys. Sure you can handle it?”

  Almost I spun around to say I wasn’t a boy but my thumping heart kept me staring at the dirt. “Whatever,” Scram mumbled, tearing up a real leaf with his nails. The scooterjocks revved and skimmed away but two whiny trails remained, wound closer to us. They cut out right by our fort and I finally looked up. Against the white sky, a squat gnarled silhouette and a lean restless one. I knew those shapes. Floro, Bello. They were back.