Time passed. Shelby ordered Chinese food and they ate it in the living room, trying and failing to watch one of the old Japanese movies Oji had always put on at holidays. They were all three hours long and called shit like The Tale of the Dreaming Chrysanthemum. Jo hated them with every fiber of her being. Her aunts had always called her a banana, yellow on the surface and white inside. Maybe they were right. Maybe if she didn’t love watching handmaidens throw themselves into wells and samurai nobly sacrificing their lives for the shogun, she was betraying the memory of the man who’d raised her, who’d loved her even while she had the spins and puke in her hair, or when she’d crashed his car drunk the week before her nineteenth birthday, or flunked out of her GED program. Maybe she’d lose his memory, like she lost everything else. She was already on thin ice at her barista job at Bean Counter, and Rosalie at the print shop had taken her aside to let her know if she missed another shift they’d have to find someone else. More shitty jobs down the drain.
Three beers later she started crying again, sobbing into her lo mein as Shelby rubbed her back. “I’m a banana,” she wailed. “I’m a fucking banana.”
“What?”
Another beer and they were tearing at each other’s clothes, kissing so that snot and tears ran together. She pulled one of Shelby’s big, heavy breasts from her bra and took the other woman’s puffy nipple into her mouth, rolling it on her tongue, letting it slide through her teeth until Shelby moaned and squirmed beneath her. Not their first time together, but the way Shelby filled her mouth always surprised her. Her jaw ached, a blissfully all-encompassing sensation. Shelby’s fingers in her hair, pulling her closer while on the television Doug Bradley rasped, “Your suffering will be legendary, even in Hell.” Shelby and her scary movies. Lara and John couldn’t stand them, but Jo liked the thrill, the black cavern of a screaming mouth, the oozing drip of dyed red corn syrup. It made her feel naked. Vulnerable.
In bed, Shelby softening, easing Jo’s hand away from her dick. Lube, delightfully cold, and a husky sigh of satisfaction as she slid a finger up inside the other woman. Tattooed arms around her, thick and soft, Krazy Kat lighting his cigarette on the fuse of a bomb, a spray of hibiscus blossoms, mushrooms in a riot of strange colors. She wrapped her legs around one of Shelby’s thighs, grinding frantically as she built a rhythm, easing a second finger up the other woman’s asshole. The room was spinning, but just a little. Just in a soft, pleasant way.
Afterward they lay together, trading memories and sipping water, talking about the times Lara ran away and when Mal had gotten drunk and done stand-up at open mic night at the White Horse in Seattle. You guys remember when Bush got really mad at France for a while and it was all freedom toast and freedom fries? Imagine being the guy who had to explain that to the French parliament. Respected ladies and gentlemen of the assembly, the president of the United States has changed the name of that wet bread thing they have over there.
Shelby blinked, a tear falling from the corner of her eye to trace the curve of her cheek and then soak silently into the sheets.
“It’s okay,” said Jo. She kissed the other woman, tasting duck sauce and Pabst Blue Ribbon, and let Shelby’s plump lower lip slip from between her teeth. “It’s okay, baby.”
They slept. Jo dreamed of an ex-girlfriend, faceless and brooding, shaggy blue mullet and snakebites, and of hummingbirds swarming like iridescent wasps around a gigantic hanging nest of woven grass. She woke to her ringtone drilling at a pounding hangover. Ke$ha singing nasally about brushing her teeth with Jack Daniel’s, which didn’t sound like such a bad idea. She leaned across Shelby’s sleeping warmth to grope for the sound, layered with the irritating shudder of vibrating plastic against the fake wood of the bedside table. Gray morning light bathed her pigsty of a room, the floor drifted in takeout wrappers and dirty laundry, the bookshelf full of waxed paper coffee cups and used acrylics scabbed with glue.
She found her little Motorola brick under a stack of coffee-stained X-Men comics one of her hookups had loaned her and never taken back. The caller ID blinked: Felix. She rolled onto her back and held the phone up to her ear, wondering what he was going to ask her for, if he needed money or had gotten his car impounded or himself arrested again. Fuck you, she thought as the call connected with a hiss. I have my own problems.
“Hey, Felix.”
His voice was husky, the connection fragile and crackling with static, but she knew at once he was afraid. The same fear stirred inside her. It had spent the last fifteen years nestled in her guts.
“I found it.”
Brooklyn, New York
John had always thought he might get thinner as he got older, that as he stretched and grew his body would find what his younger self had conceived of vaguely as a kind of equilibrium. He’d felt then like he woke up only to make his notch in the wall of his cell, his prison of rolls and folds, waiting for the day when it would all, somehow, be over. There’s a very handsome boy in there, his stepmother, Sheila, had told him more than once as he stood on the precipice of some diet or another. Once he’s out, you’ll be beating the girls off with a stick. Just you wait.
Once he’s out. It always made him think of Alien, of John Hurt screaming in agony as that penis-looking snake thing burst out of his chest and splattered everyone around the table with its gory afterbirth. Shelby had probably borrowed that movie from the library a dozen times. His body was just an incubator for a form of life that owed it nothing, that would hollow it out from within and then slit it up the front with a sharp black claw and step out slim and muscular and perfect, glistening with the last of his vital fluids, to begin a real life, whatever that was.
It had never come, that joyous moment of liberation. Not with Mal, who had alternated tweeting body-positive word salad about their beautiful fat boyfriend and treating John like a sex toy they didn’t want anyone to know they owned; not with any of the chubby chasers or curious twinks who’d come after. Not even with Louise, who’d been with him since she swept into the bar where he’d been working odd nights at the time, a mountain of creamy, freckled curves poured into a white dress dusted with sequins, flushed and sweaty from her act at Whispers, wet with rain, and dropped herself onto a stool, chin resting on her tented fingers.
Who’s a girl have to do to get a drink around here?
More people flooded in out of the unseasonable rain. Regulars. Friends. He’d hardly noticed them. They’d gone home together. She broke two acrylics clawing his back before he even got inside her. She kissed his belly. Left dark hickeys printed on his breasts. Under the golden curls of her wig, her hair was fiery red and damp with sweat. Loose tresses tickled his thighs as she went down on him. She didn’t like to be touched down there, but they did other things, so many other things, and then it was rides to the airport, nights in instead of nights out, and the slow sliding together of their circles. He’d met her parents a year ago at Christmas, out in Sacramento. Kind people. Sweet and gentle. Matching coffee mugs and eight-hundred-piece Where’s Waldo puzzles spread out on the coffee table.
No release, no sense of finally shedding the weight he’d carried with him all his life, but he’d found a species of uneasy peace in his love for the expanse of her, for the warmth between her perfumed rolls and the sparse copper curls on the pad of milky fat beneath her belly and above her cock. The things he had loathed in himself since he could remember had become beautiful, had lost their power to curdle and suffocate him. How could he despise himself when he lay next to her, his arm around the swell of her belly, his face buried in the silky soft skin between her shoulders?
And now she was gone. He’d fallen apart after Felix called, and after the panic attack, after vomiting in the sink and shaking in her arms for half an hour, he told her everything, all of it, and she looked at him as though he were a broken-down old tramp raving on the bus about wiretaps and second shooters on the grassy knoll. She left a few minutes later, not saying goodbye. He wondered where she was now, which of their friends she was crying to, whether or not there were paramedics coming to perform some kind of wellness check on him. He had a ticketing site up on his wheezy little secondhand laptop, a red-eye flight to Reno ready to book. He could afford it, just about, with what he’d saved from temping in Punta Gorda and working at the Waldenbooks in the Cross Trails mall until it shuttered in late July. He’d be fucked for December rent, but he was already fucked.
He’d been fucked since the summer he turned sixteen. That first fall and winter together they’d talked about it constantly, gathering whenever they could between the collage of part-time jobs, all under the table, that had carried them through high school. The Cuckoo and its babies were the one inexhaustible subject they could always turn to, no matter how little they’d had to eat or what run-down shitbox they were living in. Where did it come from? Outer space? A government lab? The Earth’s core? Why had it singled them out as its prey, the queers and fags and transes, and what was it doing now?
There had been no manhunt. That had always surprised him, until he realized the thing would have had no problem producing bodies, and that it was probably tracking them itself. It had made them all paranoid, especially in those first few years and after Shelby’s first attempt. Any cop, any truant officer, any nosy neighbor could be one of those things. Their summer in Reseda had ended with all of them bolting in the night after Lara got herself arrested for solicitation and some fancy lawyer called the station to say he was representing her. Maybe it had really been a high-stepping pro bono type, but John could still remember the fear that had filled the station’s reception area when the officer on duty had relayed the call. Eighteen hours later they were sleeping in a warehouse in North Coast with six hundred dollars between them and no prospects whatsoever.
They’d talked about it less as time wore on. First Mal wanted to put it behind them, especially after they came out, and even more so after the two of them got together. Then Lara left. Then Felix. By 2000 it had all felt like a bad dream. There were other things to worry about, rent and work and Y2K and the Ebola virus. The president smirking and sweating at his podium and the towers coming down as though someone had killed the pumps in the world’s biggest fountain, concrete collapsing in on itself like water. The sky all full of dust and smoke. Wildfires and the ozone layer. Baghdad burning in the alien green glow of night vision while Fox News played “America the Beautiful.”
Except it hadn’t been a dream. He couldn’t pretend anymore, not with the girl’s name stuck in the back of his throat like a chicken bone. Abigail. Abby. Whatever its reasons, wherever it came from, it was back, and it had already started to wrap its tentacles around his throat. Louise was gone. She might never come back. He sipped his beer, long since gone warm and flat, and thought of the first time he’d climbed on top of her, the way she’d stroked his face with her plump little hand, pale and soft as fresh dough.
Don’t be afraid. You’re not going to hurt me.
We’re the same.
He bought the ticket.
Chico, California
Mal stared at the half-finished painting. It was their latest, the white arc of the nun’s wimple still blurry where they’d fudged around with the still-drying acrylics, rubbing their thumb over the canvas. The blunt iron hooks holding her mouth open were wrong somehow, the quality of the light on the burnished metal distracting from the dark glow of her skin, the empty pools of her eyes. I am never going to finish this, they thought. Which is fine, because nobody’s going to buy it anyway.
Their little canvas travel bag lay packed on their air mattress. They’d been sleeping on it since the guy in the apartment downstairs dragged that bedbug-infested couch into the building and they’d had to throw their mattress out. The thought of the hard-bodied little insects still filled them with revolted panic. The bites on their lower back weren’t fully healed yet. The bugs are gone, they told themself for the hundredth time. They tented and sprayed. They’re gone.
They’d have to hitch to make sure they could afford the train and the two bus tickets to get them to Reno, but at least they wouldn’t bring bedbugs with them. At least the others wouldn’t know how things were with Charlie, who they loved, they really loved, they loved so much it hurt sometimes, which was good because everyone says love hurts. The hurting’s how you know it means something. Not that they were hiding anything. People didn’t understand how sensitive Charlie was, how hard his childhood had been. Sometimes they thought Shelby knew. Not that there was anything to know, but still.
I’m here if you ever need to talk.
I know how hard things can get.
Been thinking about you lately.
They zipped up their bag. Fuck anything they’d forgotten to pack. Fuck the painting and the other six in the series under their little canvas shrouds against the wall, and fuck Felix for calling and telling them the one thing they couldn’t ignore—that for fifteen years it had been out there doing to other kids what it had done to them, that it was stealing lives and faces, insinuating itself into the fabric of the country, and they’d decided to look away and live their lives while it did. Years of therapy to convince themself they’d imagined it, then denial, then drinking, and somewhere in that sparkling haze they became Mal, clawing their way in a disgusted frenzy out of what was left of grinning, joking Malcolm, and Charlie came into their life.
They kept thinking of the smell that had washed over them in the basement under the Glover house. Cat shit and warm root beer, a rancid sweetness that had made their mouth water and their gorge rise at the same time. The summer Shelby showed them The Thing, all they’d been able to think about was what it smelled like, that tame little stop-motion monstrosity wreaking havoc against all those grown men. Had Childs and MacReady caught a whiff of boiling aspartame and diarrhea as they slunk through the claustrophobic halls of their research station? Had they smelled it on the thawing tangle of cooked meat dragged back from the Norwegian base?
In their dreams sometimes they saw the Gabe-thing sit up and open its baby-blue eyes. They had painted it once, though they’d later burned the canvas behind the Big Lots where they’d been working at the time. What if she saw it? John had asked them. They were in love with John, then, but already angry with him, suspicious of his kindness and embarrassed of his body. Fat and getting fatter. Overflowing. Not like Charlie, skin and bones and sunken cheeks, the knobs of his spine like the heads of pushpins. Mal couldn’t stay hard for him, not even before getting on spiro, but that was just part of being together as long as they had. Charlie’s body was like a model’s body, sharp and clean. It was perfect, and sex would only demean it.
“What the fuck are you doing? Are you leaving?”
He stood in the doorway in his sweats, dark circles under his eyes, his mop of curly hair disheveled. He’d been going shirtless ever since top surgery. Mal had once made xylophone sounds while tapping their fingers on his stark, protruding ribs. They could almost hear his giggle now. He’d loved that bit. They wished with a sickening intensity to be back in that moment, to be pleasing to him and not the thing making his face shake like that, his lips press together tight and bloodless. What could fix it? What could they say to make it right before it all spun out?
