nonlocalmemorytxt

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

Episode 7567

Ignacio Rojas was seventy-two when the doctor told him he was dying. He had three children, nine grandchildren and a long-term starring role on the soap opera (“Filmed live before a studio audience!”) Passionista as Don Ignacio, the poor stable boy who had risen to become dictator of a fictional banana republic. Now in his senior years, he was keeping power by playing his devilishly handsome sons, Jorge and Luis Garcia, against one another in a high stakes game of scenery chewing.

All this was going through Ignacio’s mind when during a meeting, the show’s producer mentioned the idea.

“We want you to die on the show.”

The producer continued, “Not just die, but really die. I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out…”

And Ignacio did. In exchange for Ignacio’s live on-screen death, the producer was going to pay [censored], more money than he had made in the last twenty years.

Thinking of his family, Ignacio agreed.

The scene, once written, was somber. Ignacio would be in a hospital bed, his sons kneeling on either side, and as he took his final breath their hands would meet across his dying body, symbolically ending their terrible feud. Power would be shared. Family would prevail over politics. The show’s viewers would join in a now-genuine mourning, and afterwards there would be a half-hour live tribute to the departed.

On the day of filming, after everyone had said their goodbyes, Ignacio gave a wonderful performance, culminating in his hospital bed scene. A real nurse hooked up a fake IV, through which the real killing drug would be administered, and as he said his final lines and closed his eyes, Ignacio prepared to die.

But instead of feeling arms meeting in truce, Ignacio heard shouting!

Jorge and Luis Garcia were arguing.

First about dictatorship, then brotherhood, and finally childhood.

Dulled by whatever had been pumped into his veins, Ignacio was unable to speak.

He barely sat up in bed—

Before Jorge’s fist cracked his cheek!

Luis Garcia turned on him too, jerking him up by his hospital gown, and the two brothers performed a hateful dialogue as they took turns pummeling him.

They knocked him out of bed and beat him mercilessly.

“The face! The face!” the producer instructed.

And the actors obliged, taking turns on Ignacio’s face until it was but a bloody quagmire with teeth.

“Now!”

Sputtering meekly on the floor, Ignacio could only watch as they picked up a heavy piece of machinery, no doubt bought for this very purpose, and smashed it against his head—once, twice, three times!—fragmenting it as audibly as a hollowed-out melon.

The music swelled. The credits rolled.

Blood pooled.

Followed by a message:

What you saw today was real. Welcome to the future of television. For more information, visit [URL removed] or support us on Kickstarter. Fuck [network name removed]! Be part of the entertainment revolution.

Passionista Episode 7567: In memory of Don Ignacio Rojas.

“And cut!”

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

As I Lay Decaying

I remember sharp morning light piercing the trees.

Glacial wind.

The voluminous silence.

I remember the heaviness of my backpack, the crunch of the undiscovered under my boots, and the awe of solitude in the mountains.

Then—

Sudden emptiness underfoot—

My body descending while my mind lingers, immobile for a few more sensations of its final landscape, as my soul, or whatever binds mind to body, stretches like an elastic...

Until the downward pressure is irresistible and my mind snaps back:

The unfathomable sensation of impact.

The horrid pain.

Followed by the merciful snapping of the neck. Audible, echoing…

Blackness.

The coarse sound of my own breathing.

No feeling below the jaw.

No mobility except the eyes, through which the darkness slowly dissipates, revealing the grey sky of an autumn afternoon across which scatter the black crows of despair.

When you've nothing but thoughts, thoughts achieve a terrifying dimension.

I should have told someone where I was hiking.

They won't find me in time.

I expect to die because such is the rational expectation. If not coldness, dehydration, or eventually starvation. Perhaps an animal ripping apart my throat. Perhaps madness.

But my body does not die. My cognition endures.

The minutes fall away.

Hours.

A rain shower passes, moistening my face and throat. Although I have no voice, my mouth must be open.

Night chills me.

I hear ruthless nocturnal predation.

I persist.

On the break of the seventh day, a bird perches on my weathered face and drops a split worm into my mouth.

Insects follow, and I imagine them as a parade of nourishment marching single-file within me.

My broken body begins to decay.

At night, wolves tear away the dead and dying flesh.

Ants eat skin off my face.

Autumn cocoons me in her fallen leaves.

But always a creature drags them from my eyes, so that I see the clouds, the fluid sky, the surpassing of time by time. Months. Human legs step over without stopping, without identification. The leaves disintegrate. Snow accumulates like dust. Spring reveals dirt, moss and a mound with eyes. Years. I must be consciousness in a skull by now. I remember:

As I lay decaying, the wolf with the woman's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.

I lose time.

So many skies have passed.

When the she-wolf gazes down upon me as if at her own reflection—

I understand.

That night I prowl through her eyes.

I learn to bend my fingers: roots, branches; my arms: trunks; and feel through my antennae: swaying grass…

How good the first taste of human meat, lashed by vines and ripped apart, consumed in the darkest caves. But humanity is mere appetizer. What I crave is civilization. To grind flesh and skyscrapers into sludge, to spear tanks and eviscerate data centers, to pull down airliners as effortlessly as a frog catches flies. But I am young, and long shall on your decaying world I feast.

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

Seedhead

Even among my more troubled patients, Richter was unique. The level to which he was disturbed without any known cause or stimulus was unprecedented, and so I considered him my prized patient, the broken mind upon which I would sail to psychological stardom. This was even before I personally witnessed him bloom and unseed.

The primary cause of Richter's psychosis was nightmares. He experienced them constantly, cyclically and, when they reached their inevitable crescendo, with such completeness that to describe them as his counter-reality would be an injustice to his terror. They were hyper-reality, more real than the everyday world for you or I.

Each nightmare gripped him for weeks, first whenever he slept but soon creeping into his waking life, so that he had no respite. Indeed, the nightmares gained power over time, adapting to his emotions and evolving to maximize their own atrocity, until they attained peak horror and released him, never to return.

Sometimes a few peaceful days would subsequently pass, but even those were stained with the dread of a new nightmare to come.

However, it is this act of peaking, which I shall in my professional capacity call the bloom, and which I first witnessed two months ago, that has shaken me to the core, not only as a psychologist but as a human being.

I witnessed the following through a secret window in a clinical room mocked up to resemble Richter's bedchamber:

After suffering several hours of unrelenting mental anguish manifesting itself almost grotesquely in the physical realm as perspiration, tremors, self-mutilation and incomprehensible muttering, Richter falls suddenly to sleep.

The slumber, which to my observations appears deep, lasts two hours and thirty-four minutes.

It ends abruptly as Richter leaps to his feet, tears off his clothing, digs his nails into the top of his scalp, and proceeds, in much the same brutal manner, to tear the skin off his skull.

His screams are unbearable, although it is unclear whether they are the result of mental pain or the physical pain of his auto-deskinning.

Once his skull is exposed, he proceeds to tear the skin off his face, which, in the most unbelievable way resembles less human bone and musculature than the petals of a bloody dandelion.

No longer veiled by skin, this face-flower achieves a gloriously yellow colour and blooms before my eyes!

One madness of flora and fauna!

But swiftly, as the screams intensify, the flower begins to wilt, the hanging veils of skin climb his face, enclosing it—

Before bursting forth to reveal a spherical seed head.

As a wind of screams rages within the chamber, breaking the blowball and dispersing its multitude of nightmare seeds, reality ripples.

Finally the wind subsists, silence returns, and Richter stands: an immobile, headless body.

The veils of skin form an orb above his neck, he falls, and when he awakens in the morning his head has been biologically re-created. His memories of the entire incident are faint, fading…

The entire process leaves no visible scars and no physical evidence.

Thus my hypothesis: Richter is not only man, but an organic manifestation of the nightmare impulse, a sentient host for a parasitic nightmare laboratory whose creations are perfected in his mind before being disseminated into humanity at large. The nightmares we experience, often dulled as if through a fog, Richter has already experienced countless times at an impossible clarity.

Whether he is the only one of his kind I cannot say.

In the coming weeks, I must complete my written study and submit it for peer review. I predict it will revolutionize the field of psychology, the understanding of the mind and introduce finally the notion of horror as a living entity: an incubus among us.

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

The Pyramid at the End of the Street

I lived with my parents on a suburban street ending in a cul-de-sac. Our neighbour, Mr Maxwell, was a widower who brought us home baked pies and helped my sister with her math homework. My high school crush, Natalia, lived in a brick bungalow three houses down. On Sundays we all went to church, and twice a month during the summer there was a street-wide BBQ. In the winters the kids went sledding on a nearby hill. Growing up, I considered it boring. Looking back, it was paradise.

The Abaroas moved in in November. From the beginning it was obvious they were different. They didn't attend our church or make small talk by the community mailbox. Instead, they smiled and spoke about their own faith, Aknaism. "Buddhist and Maya thought is connected," Mr Abaroa once told me, "because the Maya crossed the Pacific and colonized Asia."

Although they were never aggressive in their proselytizing, it was their one topic of conversation, and we quickly learned to avoid them altogether. However, this didn't seem to faze them, and many of us recalled their polite but ominous refrain: "Unfortunate, but you will soon see the truth."

Those words echoed in my head when on a particularly dark February night the pyramid appeared at the end of the street.

It was ethereal, an effervescent volume of red mist, and one by one we came out of our houses to gaze upon its impossible appearance until every house was empty and the street was filled with silent awe.

The pyramid pulled us toward itself.

And like human ice breaking from a glacier, individually we went, freeing ourselves from the loving grips of our neighbours and families.

I watched as Mr Maxwell drifted toward the pyramid and disappeared into it.

Then it took me.

Despite its tangible exterior dimensions, the pyramid was infinitely vast on the inside. Its crimson redness pulsed, and space itself hummed, and from the hum emanated the voice of Mr Abaroa. "Welcome, Norman. Tonight you shall know enlightenment."

I fell.

On impact, I arose and saw before me an axe and the kneeling, crying figure of Mr Maxwell.

"Don't," he sobbed.

Bloody spray adorned his face.

"Take the axe," instructed Mr Abaroa. "This is your destiny."

I hesitated.

Mr Maxwell cried hysterically. His hands were bloody too.

"Understand, Norman. Everything up to now: it has been for you. All life has been for you."

My heart pumped hotly. I picked up the axe.

"You are the one."

And somewhere deep inside I knew he was right. I was special. Mr Maxwell raised his eyes to look at me—

I crushed his skull.

His body crumpled. His blood painted my face, and I fell to my knees, tossing the axe aside. I had done it!

Mr Maxwell's body disappeared.

Natalia landed in front of me.

Our eyes met.

"Take the axe," Mr Abaroa instructed her out of the hum. "This is your destiny. All life has been for you."

"Don't," I sobbed.

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

I Had an Angel Once

I first saw her near the bus station in Brown Hill when it was bad but not as bad as it is now. I was sitting on the bench coming off a high. She had the cleanest hair I’d seen in weeks. It was sitting beside me, shining. I didn’t think it was real until she spoke and her voice cracked, and she said, “Vin Procter?”

The bus came. People got off. I didn’t get on. Then the bus went and I nodded my head, all the time hearing things like under water, even my own voice: “Vin Procter, that’s right, what’s it to you, you Kenny’s?”

“I’m sorry to meet you in public like this,” she said. Her hands were shaking. “But that’s the way for first times. Later, we’ll see each other everywhere.”

We were alone in Brown Hill. Only the wind blew garbage across the street. The garbage stuck against the curb. Plastic cups and paper fast food containers and other dirty unidentifiables. She reached out a hand and put it softly on mine. It was warm and wet as the insides of my head. “Who are you?”

The words bubbled.

“I’m your addiction,” she said.

I got up before it got dark and she followed me home.

I lived in an abandoned building on Merryweather Street. In the winter I moved elsewhere, but it was late September and not cold yet. Addiction followed me through the front door and closed it. When I opened the fridge, she looked over my shoulder. I wasn’t hungry. I looked around. My furniture was damp, dusty and unappealing. My drug paraphernalia stood on a silver platter on the worn carpet. I curled up on the floor next to it and went to sleep.

The afternoon light burned my pale skin so that I flinched, then pulled opened my lids and I gasped. Little sound came out but my eyes bugged. I ripped the blanket off my body and stared at the woman in the kitchen. My brains were arid now. A train went by somewhere and the paraphernalia shook on the platter. I smelled fried eggs.

“You’re up,” she said without looking at me. “You slept for a long time. I made breakfast but it cooled and I ate it for lunch. I’ll make another egg in a few minutes. Maybe you’d like coffee first?”

I crept toward her.

She continued, “I bought eggs and coffee, and milk. You had milk but it was old. I poured it out. Your toilet doesn’t flush properly.”

The heat radiated from the stovetop. I thought about heating my spoon, but the woman was stressing me. I rubbed my knuckles into my eyes.

“There was money in the tin in the cupboard but I didn’t use it,” she said.

For a second I was searching frantically through the containers under my bed where I kept all my stuff, maybe she’d taken it, thief, then the mellow came with the egg smell again and the woman said, “I didn’t touch anything else.”

She cracked a shell and poured the contents onto the burning butter on the frying pan. The white sizzled and turned hard. She did another, then tossed both shells into the garbage. I had forgotten I had a garbage. I never took it out. The raccoons snuck in and got it sometimes and I hit them with the broom handle but not hard enough. The raccoons scampered out. Sometimes I thought about eating one.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She finally turned to look at me. “I’m your addiction. We met yesterday on the bench in public. I’ll be living with you openly now.”

The eggs finished frying and she slid them onto a plate that she set on the table in the kitchen where a fork was already lying. “Sit.”

I sat and ate quickly with little chewing. After licking the last moisture from my fingers, I asked, “What do you do?”

She laughed and spun her head such that her hair sparkled round her face. It was clean and shiny, I thought. “I take over your life,” she said or smiled. And I smiled too. It had been a long time since I’d had a woman and it was good to have one. I could start a new life now. I was happy. The stress was gone. The shakes were gone. I wished I could shower but the water was turned off and I said, “You can wash the pan and dishes in the yard. There’s a little hole I dug to catch the water. There’s always a puddle in it.”

When she went outside I whistled and sat with my back against the sofa. I picked up the silver platter and put each piece of paraphernalia carefully on the carpet. I wasn’t wearing a belt but pulled a spare from under the sofa. The flint clicked. The flame from the lighter was nice, not like the light from outside, which made my eyes narrow and skin hurt. I pulled my sleeve up to where the inside of my elbow was polka dots and heated the stuff and then pricked myself until the world rolled back into my skull.

The world rolled in dark, with crickets.

Addiction was sitting in a chair reading a book by candlelight. I stared at her until I coughed and she put the book down and said, “That’s the last time.”

I nodded off to sleep.

I woke up with a headache and the shakes. The stress was back bad. Addiction was gone and I rummaged through the tins in the cupboards where I kept my money. But there wasn’t any so I threw the empty tins across the room, then slid onto my heels and bit my fingernails till they bled. I had a woman now, I thought, I had to support her and love her and be the man for her. It was a family. I determined to get a job. I crawled to the sofa and took out my stuff. There was enough left. I’d sell part of it. I didn’t want to be a deadbeat anymore. From now on, I would be responsible. I picked up all the pieces of paraphernalia scattered on the carpet and placed them on the silver platter. Tomorrow—I set the alarm on my watch—I would sell, then we’d have a baby and the crib would go in the other bedroom where the raccoons sometimes slept.

The alarm beeped.

I felt lips against my cheeks. She was back. She smelled good, like not at all. Her face was close to mine but her clothes were different. “I’m going to work today,” I said.

But when I got to my feet my knees seemed to crumble and I dropped to the carpet. I needed my stuff. I started to crawl but a reflection pushed me back. I shied away and saw her put the silver platter at my feet. I loved her more than I’d ever loved her as I put my things in order and heated up the stuff and pricked deep into the polka dot spot, letting my thumb press the receding world into me.

Someone slapped me before the world came back. And then it came back firm like the time Kenny pushed my face into the highway. I checked my nose for blood but there wasn’t any. There was just the woman in front of me. She slapped me again. And again, until I lifted my legs and wrapped my arms around them and the blows hit only the outside of my body. I tried to close my eyes and hum a song but I couldn’t get the feeling back. I was stressing out. I was afraid my mouth was going to foam. Then cold water hit me. It flowed onto my tongue and I knew the taste of my own puddle. “Up,” she said and I obeyed. But when I stood I stood on the needle. My foot hurt and the needle cracked. I cursed. I would have to get a new one from that place.

I threw a coat over my shoulders, put a pack of the stuff under my arm and went out through the front door. She followed me. I meandered until people thickened, which meant I was closer to downtown where the place was. Eventually I got there. The sign said “Cole Recovery Centre”. I went inside and cried until the people gave me a new needle and a card with phone numbers on it. I had to be careful. The stuff was still in me and my eyes wanted to give along with my balance, which meant I almost dropped the stuff onto the floor.

Outside, the breeze was picking up and my nostrils opened to let it in. The woman smiled at me. I smiled back. I wanted to use the new needle but I had a family now. I felt responsible. I knew the best place to sell. I’d been going there for months and had never seen a dealer. It was open territory. I walked in long strides with no shuffling of the feet, hands buried in my coat pockets, knowing the woman would be proud of the money I’d make.

The very young ones I wouldn’t sell to, but the older ones had money and they could steal more. It wasn’t right in the schoolyard either. I wasn’t unprincipled. It was behind, by the chain link fence, where the older ones went to smoke cigarettes. One was there now, in jeans and a baseball cap. I banged on the fence with my fist until the kid saw me and came cautiously nearer.

“You wanna buy some?” I wheezed.

The kid stepped closer. He made sure no one was watching. He had a tough face and an earring and smelled like smoke. I knew the kid wouldn’t ever be anybody.

“What you selling?”

The kid’s voice was strong and he kept his eyebrows slanted inwards like he was angry all the time. They straightened only for a second when he saw the woman when she moved closer to me.

“Stuff,” I said.

I took it out from under my arm and held it against the fence where the kid could see it and smell it and touch it through the chain link.

“How much?” the kid asked.

“However much you got,” I said. “You don’t got enough for the whole.”

The kid’s voice cracked just like the woman’s had done in Brown Hill. He said, “Fifty,” and fished through his pockets to gather up the bills. When he had them, he crunched them into a ball and raised his voice, saying, “Give me the stuff first, then I’ll give you the money.”

But I only laughed and the kid lowered his eyes to the ground.

“Cash first.”

As the kid moved close enough to put the fifty dollar ball through the chain link, the woman leaned in and whispered close to my ear, “Are you sure you want to sell that? Won’t you miss it tonight on the carpet?”

Suddenly the shakes returned and I grabbed the fence and made it rattle. The kid dropped the cash and jumped back. I was abruptly aware that the kid and everyone else but the woman was trying to cheat me out of my stuff. The muscles in my body tightened so bad I couldn’t get my fingers off the fence so I kicked at the fence until the muscles relaxed and I pulled my hand free. Then I laughed again almost like a howl and put the stuff back under my arm. The wind was picking up and it started to drizzle. As me and the woman walked away the kid was on his knees trying to put his hand through the chain link to pick up the money but his wrist was too thick and he couldn’t get it through but pushed so hard the skin on his hand started to raw.

When we got home I sat with my back to the sofa and heated up my spoon. But every time the heat was good the stuff fell off and I got angry. I realized it was the woman knocking the stuff off. “What’s the idea?” I moaned, though she just knocked it off again and told me I wouldn’t have it easy anymore.

In the morning it was the same and in the afternoon the silver platter kept moving and I couldn’t get a solid read on it. By the evening the foam was starting in my mouth, my teeth were itchy and all the woman did was sit in her chair and read her book and wait for me to try to get at my stuff, which I couldn’t do because I couldn’t remember where the silver platter was and the spoon had a big hole drilled in it.

I hated her now like I’d never hated anyone.

“What’s the idea, what are you, get out of my house!” I screamed at her.

“I’m your addiction,” she answered.

I wasn’t an addict, though, that much I knew, so I screamed, “You’re not real,” and asked everyone who was around whether they could see the woman. When no one answered I said, “See, you’re not real,” and went to the kitchen to pick up the frying pan that the woman had fried eggs in and swung it hard at her head until she fell and the sound of the pan against her head was dull and she didn’t move anymore.

I was sweating so I went outside and washed my face in the puddle. When I came back in, I heated my stuff on the red frying pan and pressed the plunger of the new needle into a pulsing vein.

The light that woke me was worse than the light from outside. The stars were out. Someone had taken the belt off my arm and shrunk my house. I was on the sofa. There were men and windows all around. The lights flashed red and white. Someone knocked loud against the glass and I looked and there was a flashlight shining into my face. I closed my eyes and brought my knees high and wrapped my arms around them.

“Junkie,” the flashlight said through the window—

Then shut off.

And in the darkness I knew I had an angel once, and she was no more.

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

I think I screwed us in the 1960s

I've started writing this hundreds of times and never gotten to the end. The first few times I tried, I did it on paper in a notebook because the internet hadn't been invented yet. I burned the notebooks. This is the first time I've finished and not destroyed what I'd written. If nothing else, this act of creation without destruction is a small victory to me, but I know you hardly care about that. Nor should you. You should care about what you're about to read because if what I say is true, your generation may be in some serious shit. I'm in my late 70s, no wife or kids, not many friends, and although I'm not quite on my death bed, I'm certainly nearing the end of my life, so my personal stake in this is low, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't weight heavily on my soul in an existential kind of way. We all keep secrets, some darker than others, and this has been my darkest.

The story starts in California way back in the 1960s. For those unfamiliar with that period in history, the one word I'd use to describe it is turbulent. Just imagine the straight-laced world of the 1950s you know from television crashing head-on into what you probably associate with hippie culture, namely radical politics, protest, heavy drug use, rebellion against authority, and conspiracy theories, but also comradery, selflessness, and the genuine belief that it is possible to change the world for the better. I was a university student at the time, so you could say I was in the thick of it, but I wasn't at one of the true hotbed schools like Berkeley. That said, there was almost no way to be young and alive in California and to keep away from the upheaval. It was literally all around you, and it sucked you in. There wasn't a Friday night when you didn't listen to a speech by Abbie Hoffman, take LSD, or hazily conspire to take down the establishment to a background of folk tunes, and then go out to bar where long past midnight some guy in a black suit tried to recruit you for a plastics corporation or the CIA. Or so he said, or so you remembered the next morning.

It was actually at one of these bars that I met my first real girlfriend, whom I'll call Edna. Edna wasn't a hippie, she was in town taking typing classes and working part-time as a receptionist, but like me she had become infatuated with the scene. Edna was only the second girl I'd slept with, and after a few months of going with her I started having trouble maintaining, then even getting, an erection. Back then it wasn't like it is now, when even polite people talk about erectile dysfunction and you can get medication to help with it. Back then there was nothing except a whole lot of embarrassment. At first, Edna and I thought it might be stress or lack of sleep causing my problem, then we suspected alcohol, but despite taking a fairly systematic approach and eliminating the possible causes one by one, we couldn't figure it out. Within weeks, my sex life just stopped. You can imagine how devastating that was to a young man.

Let's rewind a bit. About six months before meeting Edna, I had met a guy named Jerry in one of my political science classes and we'd quickly become friends. Jerry and I would regularly meet up, talk about everything from music and world revolution to UFOs, and generally goof off together, and he'd always have a decent supply of weed for us to smoke and Grateful Dead bootlegs to listen to, which was fantastic. Although I've never had a truly best friend, Jerry was definitely my closest friend during my early student days in California, so he was the person I eventually turned to for help with my sexual problem. I remember that it was late at night after getting stoned immaculate, as Jim Morrison would say, that I told Jerry about my erectile dysfunction. He listened as I struggled mightily through the telling of it, and without laughing or making light of the situation told me not to worry too much, that it would probably go away on its own, but if I didn't want to wait and wanted help now, I should go see a man he referred to as Gerbil.

Gerbil was about ten years older than us, originally from New Mexico and had been studying chemistry at Berkeley until about a year prior, when he'd been expelled after being caught synthesizing hallucinogens in a school lab. Faced with the possibility of going back to New Mexico without a degree, Gerbil had decided to pursue the American Dream instead. He set up his own lab, kept his clientele, and expanded his operation. Drugs, incidentally, is how Jerry had first met Gerbil. And through Jerry is how I met the guy. That's one other unique thing about Gerbil: even compared to the regular paranoiacs, he was paranoid. You couldn't just see him. You had to be introduced by someone he trusted and he had to "vet" you, which included a brief interrogation and sitting silently while he "read your mind." My vetting lasted about half an hour. After it was over, Gerbil relaxed and I explained my problem to him. It was easy because he was like a magnet for deep truths. You wanted to tell him the embarrassing stuff. Long story short, he told me I was far from the first guy to be suffering from this type of condition and that he had a tried and tested solution.

I'll never forget the moment when he held out the pill bottle to me. His smiling, unshaven face, the sunlight streaming in through the dirty windows, and the pills themselves, oblong and delicately off-white in their little glass home. When I asked how much I owed him, he shrugged and said that for a friend there was no cost, then laughed and added that he had more than enough money anyway. After all, he said, he was making truth serum for the CIA. "Just make sure you follow the instructions," he said. "And remember: you were never here."

When I got home, I read the instructions, which had been typed out on a strip of paper and taped to the outside of the pill bottle. They were simple enough but odd: Insert one (1) pill into urethra at least one hour prior to intercourse.

I'll spare you the awkward details of my first time doing the insertion. What you need to know is that the pills worked. God, how they worked! Never before, and never since, have I had an erection as hard and for as long as when I used those pills. In the past twenty years I've tried Viagra and all the others, but nothing even comes close. It was like fucking with the world's most sensitive steel rod, and you could go for hours!

Edna and I sure made up for lost time, but pretty soon Edna wasn't enough. We'd go at it two or three times, she'd call it quits for the night and I'd still be raging to go. I'm not proud of it now, but I started meeting other girls just for sex. Any girls who'd have me, really. At bars, meet ups, between classes, at concerts, everywhere. There was no emotional connection but physically it was bliss. I loved it, they loved it, and I guess later they dubbed it the Summer of Love.

I wish I'd counted how many pills Gerbil had given me, but I didn't. All I knew was that I was going through them like a knife through reheated butter. From what I remember, one pill was enough to last up to forty-eight hours, but I was using them almost non-stop, and the supply was depleting. I was probably addicted. It was after I'd used about half of my initial supply that Jerry asked over coffee one morning whether my "problem" had gone away. I told him it had and more than hinted at how my sex life had exploded, and he told me that was fantastic news. Then he lowered his voice and told me Gerbil wanted to meet up. I agreed, he told me the time and place, and I never saw Jerry again. But I'll get to that in a bit.

Gerbil and I met a few days later in what remained of a hangar on an abandoned airfield. It was beyond city limits, and Gerbil seemed to make a big deal of that fact. He told me he'd recently purchased the land way under value and was planning on building a bunker on it. Because that sounded like just the craziness he'd be into, I took him at his word. When I told him how well the pills had been working and that I wanted more of them, he wasn't surprised. He said he was thrilled and handed me another bottle of pills identical to the first. This time, however, they had a price. But it was the kind of price that wasn't paid in dollars and that made my horny young mind spin with possibilities. Gerbil was organizing a series of orgies and he was giving me the pills in exchange for taking part in them.

Back to Jerry: disappearing for a few days wasn't unusual. He went on benders from time to time during which he'd unreachable and absent from class, but those usually lasted a few days, after which he'd show up groggy and with stories to tell. After a week, I started to worry, but even then it's important to remember the times, both in terms of technology and perspective. We didn't have cell phones you could call anytime you wanted, and it wasn't unheard of for people to "drop out" of society. I had a professor who suddenly disappeared for half a semester, and when he came back he told us he'd gone on a walkabout. Still, I expected Jerry to tell me if he was planning something like that. He'd said nothing and now he was gone. I started asking around but realized I didn't actually know much about him. From what I gathered, he was still enrolled in university and still living at the same address. He just wasn't there.

My relationship with Edna was falling apart at the same time. I was bored with her, and she was getting bored with life in California. She was honest about wanting to move back East, and we both knew I wouldn't be going with her. And although she never said a word about it, I'm sure she knew I wasn't being faithful. Hell, even free love has a cost. I can't say we broke each other's hearts, but I will say that as I've aged, I've imagined more and more often what my life would had have been if we'd stayed together. I went on to love again but I never found a true love. Edna, especially in those early times, may have been the closest I ever got. Ironically, we loved each other most when we couldn't be physically intimate.

The first of Gerbil's orgies that I attended was held in the middle of the desert. There was music, drugs and absolutely no inhibitions. It was the most exciting experience of my life, and I loved it. Gerbil himself was never at the orgies, but almost everyone seemed to know him, at least by reputation. I don't remember how many orgies I ended up going to, but it was over a dozen, each in a different location with new women, many of them intoxicatingly exotic to me. Foreign students, bored housewives, groupies, intellectuals, stewardesses, and wanderers from all around the country and the world: India, Russia, China, Europe, Latin America, everywhere. I still have no idea how Gerbil organized these things or convinced so many women to go to them, but he did, and I must have fucked nearly all of them. The pills were my fuel.

Sometime during this hazy period of hedonistic pleasure, the police found Jerry's body in New Mexico. Apparently he'd hitchhiked all the way down there, spent a few weeks living on a ranch and overdosed on a cocktail of drugs so strong he must have been halfway to heaven by the time his organs failed. Foul play was ruled out, and no one in New Mexico cared if a longhaired hippie had killed himself accidentally or on purpose. There was no funeral as far as I know. About a week after Jerry's death, I received a letter from him in the mail. Judging by the gradual degradation of his handwriting, it had been written in several sittings. Most of it was personal and there was a lot of pain behind the words, but it was the last sentence that has stuck with me because of it's plain brutality. Four words: They've fucked us.

I fucked away my breakup with Edna and the loss of my friend. Orgy after orgy.

It was while sitting in a bar on a hot Wednesday night in the middle of July that I discovered something that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. I was down to my last pill and imagining the best way to take advantage of it, waiting for the perfect piece of ass to walk in through the door. I had a mug of beer in front of me, not my first, and I was absentmindedly walking the pill up and down the tops of my fingers, when suddenly I lost control and it fell straight into my mug. I must have been too drunk to react, because instead of fishing it out, I watched instead as it descended into the murky depths while giving off a spray of infinitely fine bubbles. I didn't know how a pill should react in beer, but something about this reaction seemed off. When it had settled at the bottom of the mug, the pill started shedding something other than bubbles: namely itself. Tiny pieces flaked off and floated to the top, and the pill began to tremble. Soon, dark spots became visible beneath the off-white colour of what I instinctively began to conceptualize as a shell, until the entire casing was gone, leaving only a trembling black insectous creature! Immediately I knew it was organic. Even more: alive! I watched mesmerized as it struggled in the liquid, scurrying towards the edge of the mug but unable to climb the glass sides. Finally, I put my fingers in and lifted it out. It was small but unbelievably hard between my fingertips. I couldn't crush it. I held it briefly against the overhead light, its body wholly opaque, before it slipped out, hit the unswept floor and scurried away. I scrambled after it, much to the cruel amusement of the other patrons, stomping forward on the floor before falling to my knees, but with no luck. It was gone. Returning to my seat, I thought, Just what the fuck have I been pushing into my urethra?

I had no pills and the only evidence of anything abnormal was my own boozy memory, so I had nothing. Except a feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was horribly wrong. I tried contacting Gerbil in my usual ways, hoping to get more pills to experiment on and either put my mind at ease ("You hallucinated, idiot.") or get my hands on something I could send to a lab, but all my usual ways were indirect, like asking for permission to speak, and permission was being denied. Gerbil stopped responding. Eventually I grew desperate enough to visit the abandoned airfield, which was the only address of his I knew, but it was empty and unchanged. When I went to the land office and asked about ownership, the clerk told me the land belonged to a man named Beaconfield who was mostly likely long dead. Because I didn't know anyone other than Jerry who'd known Gerbil, I had nowhere else to turn. There's only so many times you can ask a stranger if they know a man named after a small rodent. Eventually you give up.

And so Gerbil was gone, my pills were gone, Jerry and Edna were gone, and soon the 1960s themselves were gone, metamorphosing into a sexless 1970s for me, then the 1980s, 1990s and the new millennium. All as if someone had snapped their fingers. To say my life was dull would be an understatement. I had work, and followed it around the country, but I had little else. Forged at a time when we all wanted to remake the world, I had remade nothing and found myself leading a life of comfortable insignificance. But despite my memories fading, they never completely disappeared, and I spent many evenings wondering, trying to piece together clues, and always unable to shake those four words of Jerry's: They've fucked us. Was I scarred by a friend's suicide? Sure. But it was more than that, often in the form of sweat-inducing nightmares about tiny black insects crawling around my insides.

In the early 2000s, I saw a political ad for a candidate vying for the U.S. Senate. There was nothing unusual about the spot, but a few seconds caught my attention. They showed a series of photos of the candidate as he was growing up, attending school, graduating, etc. In one of them, he was with his mother, and my heart nearly stopped when I recognized her as Edna. I don't know what emotion I felt first, but I settled on hesitant happiness as I jumped online to confirm what my eyes had shown me. Although I didn't find the ad itself, I did find an interview with the candidate, including one with a gallery of photos, and in one of them was the confirmation I was searching for. Edna's face, older but still beautiful, stared at me from behind her son's electable smile. I was breathless. My happiness became joy. It was wonderful not only that Edna had done OK for herself but that she'd done extraordinarily, because it takes a certain kind of success to raise a future statesman.

On election night, I made popcorn, drank beer and cheered on Edna's son as if he were my own. Shortly after the polls closed, CNN projected him as the winner. For one night, my own insignificance didn't matter. I shared secretly in someone else's relevance.

A few months passed in the afterglow of this beautiful discovery. Sometimes I even had fantasies about contacting the senator to offer my congratulations, which would be a reconnection with Edna, but I always knew this was impossible. I was nobody to her, a shadow from the past. She probably didn't even remember me.

The reason why I mention this is two-fold: because I want to write and relive the happy moments, despite their way of decomposing into dread; and because Edna was merely the first of many. Over the next year, I recognized the faces of three other women I'd had sex with in California in the 1960s. I may not have known or recognized their names, but I do have a memory for faces and I was certain about theirs. All three were the mothers or grandmothers of successful people: a politician, the CEO of a pharmaceutical corporation, and a lawyer. What are the chances?

Over the next months and years, I started to actively research the background of anyone who had recently attained a high level of success, or more accurately, a high level of influence: of power. Most were guarded about their pasts, many enigmatic, but some made public just enough of a thread of information for me to pull loose, and whether in photos or on video, what I kept finding were the faces of my former lovers, women I had met while cheating on Edna or, more often, women I'd fucked at Gerbil's orgies.

In time, I realized that the web extended beyond America. I found world leaders, generals, economists, industrialists and policy makers scattered about the globe, yet whose foremothers had all been in California with me! It was insane. I felt insane, wacko like the worst conspiracy nuts I'd met in the 1960s. Yet, just like them, I was convinced I was right, and what was right was too weird to be coincidence.

Today, the people whose mothers and grandmothers I fucked rule the world, and the singular way in which they are all working toward the same goals terrifies me to the very core of my being. To everyone else, they are unconnected individuals. To me, they are connected, and it gnaws at my mind, this question that I know I will never be able to answer: What are they and to whom do they owe their allegiance?

But I no longer search for them. I have accepted reality, and I don't know what difference it makes to know exactly how many of them exist. I still have no evidence. I can't go anywhere with a story relying on an old man's memory of his own LSD-fueled sexual exploits. I've tried, and gotten laughed out of the room. The best reaction is sympathy for being a senile old man whose mind is playing tricks on him about his past. And that's without mentioning my own theories involving parasites, mind control or aliens.

Yet those words: They've fucked us.

How I wish I had been able to hold on to that tiny black creature!

Or stopped myself from putting it in my body.

But I couldn't and now I'm here, posting my story somewhere at least a few people will read it. Maybe you'll believe me, maybe you won't. I don't know if I want to give a warning or a confession, but either way I've done it now. What finds its way to the internet stays on the internet.

I hope for your collective sake that when you find this years later, you'll be able to have a good laugh.

I know I'm not laughing.

I truly believe that in the 1960s I participated in something whose conclusion will be the ruin of mankind.

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

The Fertile Earth

The foam began washing up on our shores two years ago. At first, it was sparse, resembled barely beaten egg whites, and most of us paid it scant attention. Because it posed no immediate threat, we relegated it to "scientific interest." Over time, however, as it persisted, flowed and thickened into the consistency of properly steamed cappuccino froth, stories started appearing in the news: online, then on television. We traced its origins to deep within the Marianas Trench. But foam is boring, even as it subtly changes hue from ghostly white to green tea. Thus the first images of the foam most of us remember were mechanical, of urban plows pushing it back into the sea. That worked, for a while. But the foam inevitably returned, subtly thicker, greener and more expansive than before. By the time the plows ceased their effectiveness, we had already identified the asteroid ("Isaacasimov") but had not yet made the connection. The foam, albeit having covered much of our coastline, remained more of a nuisance than a threat, for it did nothing. As Earth worked to track the asteroid, then scrambled to destroy it, the foam crept silently inland. As you may be able to deduce, we were successful in neutralizing the asteroid. The world watched united as our international mission broke the asteroid apart and diverted its larger chunks safely away from our planet. We expected the atmosphere to deal with the resulting debris, to watch the pieces burn as they descended, but our expectations proved incorrect. Instead of a display of shooting stars we witnessed a rain of cosmic dust. The atmosphere proved porous. Most grains fell upon the dry earth, but some landed in the now luminous green foam. Protected, they sprouted as seeds. Fertilized, they grew. There was an elegance to it: ancient nutrients from deep within the Earth and life from outer space. The resulting organisms, alien in the true sense of the word, were impervious to our weapons and excreted tiny spore-like particles as they matured. Within weeks, our skies were so polluted we could barely see the sun. We choked, and our immune systems reacted: we began foaming. Like our planet, our bodies betrayed us, and the particles took up residence in our moist and fertile viscera. They fed on us to breed. Once infected, an individual had only days left, but as a species we adapted, segregated and furiously engineered. I am one of the final survivors and personally witnessed the completion of the wormhole generator, via which I shall within the hour send this, my final communique, into an unknown past. Or should I say your present. But I, too, am foaming now, and my fate has already been sealed. I am by nature a pessimist, but if my pessimism is misplaced, heed my warning: Beware the foam!

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

Terminus

I found the two-headed baby deer dying on a bed of soft pine needles under cover of an overturned oak not five kilometres from my cottage. Its lungs still pumped, and its crimson heart beat weakly through a thin, translucent skin that decayed before my eyes until there was no skin and all the organs lay warm and still in a heap upon the earth like waste.

A god evaporated.

It is human nature to disbelieve that one may be witness to epochal events, so I did not believe that I, of all people, should be witness to the death of time.

Epochal: the concept itself is dead.

How lucky we were to know time at its cleanest and most linear!

We know now that such constant linearity was the consequence of a living entity. It followed the creature like stench follows a skunk, and we basked in it as if it was the natural state of the world.

No more.

Time no longer heals. Things do not pass, or pass only to return.

At first we believed this would be manageable. Yes, we thought, we will relive our pain but also our love. Everything shall be magnified! Welcome to an age of great emotions, a new Romanticism!

Yet we overestimated how much we help. We failed to accept how much we hurt.

And we did not realize the nature of evil, which accumulates in a way love does not. To re-experience our love is to know it again and again at the same intensity, but to re-experience pain is to increase its volume until it overpowers us, deafening us to everything else.

I will never forget the creature's eyes, full of hatred or hubris yet seeking aid it knew I could not give.

How does one save a dying god?

It was not my fault!

I was but a child asked suddenly to solve a deathbed equation expressed in an undiscovered mathematics. I had to fail, yet in failing I have brought it all upon us.

I relive it constantly.

Every time its eyes are louder.

But it is the hour for my afternoon walk, so I will take a pause and enjoy what remains of living.

I will go to my favourite spot overlooking the city and sit on the iron bench, from where the view is magnificent. Above me, the clouds will form, a tangle of pain and human corpses, and I will sit and ponder until the first blood drops fall. Then the screaming will begin and the final storm will rage. Beating, crimson corpse-clouds under a thin skin of dissipating reality, raining blood until we are left warm and still upon the earth…

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

The Salt Hollows

During funerals I often imagine I am a salt shaker. The salt shaker is empty and someone is shaking it, but, because it is empty, no salt falls out. There’s a meal under the shaker: fried liver with onions. Because no salt falls out, because the shaker is empty, the meal tastes plain. The person eating is disappointed. He curses his luck and blames others. Sometimes he gets angry. Sometimes the angry man is me. It’s an impossibility that my therapist says is significant; but I pay my therapist. If I stopped paying, she’d stop saying I am significant. I know it’s an impossibility to be a salt shaker in the first place.

I sleep well after funerals. The sleep is deep. Someone finally shakes me awake, but at least once I’ve been thought dead. It made my mother cry. When I came downstairs for breakfast she didn’t recognize me. I’m glad my mother is alive. She’s the last of us, but she’s in her eighties and will die soon, too. At her funeral I will imagine I am a salt shaker and afterward I will sleep long and well.

In my physical life I don’t like salt. It is unhealthy and its taste overpowers. In your eyes it stings. When I was a girl, salt was expensive even though we lived near a salt mine. The mine was famous and tourists came on buses. The buses were black and yellow like the mine workers. The tourists gave us candy. I much prefer sugar to salt. Sweetness complements though it, too, is unhealthy. Salt comes from the underground, which is close to Hell. Sugar can be the product of bees, which are animals like humans, who are sinful but can ascend to Heaven. When I was a girl I liked to lie on the grass and trace the paths of bees with my finger. If one landed on my stomach I let it walk and tickle me all over.

My mother lived with a man named Henry. Henry wasn’t my father but that’s what I called him and when I did my mother smiled and gave us both hugs. Henry died eleven years ago. He was a salesman and my mother loved him. For a long time I thought Henry was my real father. When I knew the truth, I told and it made my mother cry and Henry mad. Henry called the police and my mother hit herself until her fists turned red. I wasn’t to sleep in my bedroom after that. The truth was that my real father worked in the salt mine. I don’t know his name but for one summer he came every night to visit me through a window. After the truth my mother hit me, too. And the policeman asked me serious questions.

One day Henry and the policeman drove in the police car to the salt mine. The road was dusty and I saw the rising dust from my bedroom window even though I wasn’t allowed there anymore. The newspaper wrote that my father didn’t come out. It wrote that the manager of the mine let out all the workers but my father stayed underground and when the police went in with their pistols they found my father dead. I know because the newspaper has an archive. When I was older I went there. The mine closed soon after that. The buses stopped coming. There was no more candy.

That was August. In November I am sent twice a week to a schoolmate’s house overnight. My schoolmate’s mother looks at me and tells me that I of all people should understand. Everyone treats me differently. I hate going there. Sometimes I run away home and sleep in Henry’s storeroom. He stores tools and car parts and also blankets, with which I wrap myself to keep warm. The storeroom has two windows: one faces home, the other the forest. There’s an old tree close to the second window and when the wind picks up the branches hit against the glass. The sound wakes me. Winter has come early. There’s a storm. Through the window facing home, I see light in my mother and Henry’s bedroom. Henry is on business. My mother must be worried. I don’t like when she worries, so I hope the weather is not dangerous. I go to the second window. Outside, the world is white but I see three shapes. Two are standing. One is the policeman, another is Henry.

Henry is holding a pistol and his hand is shaking. There’s a third shape under the pistol. The third shape is thin and on its knees and is chained to the trunk of the tree whose branches rattle against the storeroom window. The third shape is barely moving and I can’t tell if it is the shape or wind that howls. Henry puts the pistol close to the third shape’s head and fires. I barely hear the sound but see the third shape stretch, then fall, limp, onto the fresh snow. The policeman pats Henry on the back and Henry gives the pistol to the policeman. They turn and I fall away from the window, scared. I shouldn’t be here, I remember. I should be at my schoolmate’s house.

I wrap myself in Henry’s blankets but the blankets are cold and the cold makes the fear worse and I suddenly imagine all of them standing in front of me—all four of them: Henry, my mother, the policeman and my father. They are silent but breathing yet no steam comes out of their nostrils. Instead, they spew salt. The salt flows out of their ears and over their eyes, which turn pink, and from under their fingernails, which fall off, and the salt is bloody. It stings them and hurts them and even before they fall apart like dolls I know it is eating them from the inside like corrosion. I imagine that all the salt the miners ever took out of the mine is in their bodies, so that when it is done and they are broken, all I see are four thin shells filled with salt. But I also know that that is an impossibility, so they are people, too, and they put each other back together, but now that I’ve seen their salt I know they are nothing but painful containers.

When the sun comes up the body is gone. I wait until nine, then pretend I have returned from my schoolmate’s house. My mother is nervous and Henry is not feeling well, so my mother suggests I spend the day outside playing. She helps me put on a coat and hat. The sun melts the snow and the ground turns softer. My shoes get muddy so I play in the forest where the ground is harder and the snow persists. Between the roots of trees I find an injured bee. Maybe it was surprised by the snowstorm. I reach down to help it, at least to touch it and help it feel loved, but it stings me. I run home where my mother rubs cold alcohol on the swelling. She says that once a bee stings someone it dies but I don’t know if that’s true or just a fairy tale.

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

The Circular Logic of Space Exploration

Appleton rushed to scratch the message onto the back cover of a magazine lying face-down on a table near the telephone. Scratch—because the pen didn’t want to cooperate; the ballpoint stuck. Appleton’s fingers shook.

It was a prank, surely. The conversation had been recorded. He would end up on a website somewhere, the anonymous out-of-touch butt of some teenager’s joke.

Yet there was something in the quality of that voice, a voice that didn’t belong to any teenager, that forced the shapes of the letters through his wrist, onto the paper. Even as he felt the fool, he also felt the chronicler. The words could be historic.

The words: after a plain “hello” the voice had excused itself and muttered something about a wrong number and galactic interference. Then it had said, exactly, “No matter, you will have to do. My name is Charles R—and I am calling from Mars. First, record the date and time of this communication. Second, please bring it to the attention of one Mrs Mary Clare of 34 Wentworth St, Nottingham. Pass along also that I am doing fine and that, though food is scarce, I have had my fill, and that water is plenty once one digs past the red surface of things.”

That was all. Then the phone went dead. The connection had not been good to begin with, but there was no doubt about any of it. Nothing had been made up. There was no uncertainty.

Having written these five sentences, Appleton let go of the pen, wiped his forehead and retreated to the safety of his customary evening chair. It was a few minutes after six—his regular reading time—but Appleton gave no thought to books. Today, he sat silently in his chair until the clock struck seven. His neurons fired incessantly.

By eight, he had made up his mind: in the morning he would fly to Nottingham and personally deliver the message to Mary Clare.

There was only the slight problem of the wife.

She would arrive home tomorrow afternoon and find it empty. She would worry. Appleton’s greatest fear was that the wife would worry. She was of good breeding and delicate constitution, and worry might weaken her system enough to allow otherwise harmless bacteria to set up residence, which would lead to complications and eventually a prolonged bedridden death. He shuddered at the mere inkling. Right, he would have to compose a note: “My dear, I am off on a scholarly pursuit. Do not worry. I will return by Wednesday. Sincerely, your devoted husband.”

He folded the note and placed it on the dining room table. That, he realized, was more writing than he’d done since his tenure at Oxford. He felt productive again.

- - -

The plane skidded as it touched down, but the flight was otherwise without incident. Outside, grey clouds produced a cold mist that collected drops of water on the brim of Appleton’s hat as he waited by the terminal. Although no one could say so by looking at him, he was nervous.

He nearly misspoke while telling the driver the address. In the taxi, he caught himself rubbing his thumb compulsively against his forefinger like he hadn’t done since his rugby days.

- - -

The house at 34 Wentworth St was made of pale yellow brick. It was smaller and set farther from the road than neighbouring houses. A stone path led to the front door, on either side of which bloomed a well-kempt garden. Appleton walked the path slowly, cherishing the smell of wet flowers and realizing that over the last twelve hours he’d developed a particular mental image of Mary Clare. It was something like the opposite of the wife.

He stood for a few moments before the front door and deliberated whether to ring the electronic bell or use the bronze knocker. Eventually, he rapped his knuckles against the wood. A woman opened the door.

“Yes, hello,” said Appleton.

The woman looked suspiciously at his hands, but he wasn’t carrying anything except the back cover of the magazine on which he’d written the message from Mars.

“I’m not selling,” he said. “I’m looking for Mrs Mary Clare. I’ve been informed that she lives at this address. I have a message for her from Charles R—.”

“Did he send you, the scoundrel?”

Appleton blinked.

“Well did he or didn’t he, speak up. All these years and he can’t even come back to show his face, sends some other poor fool.” Her eyes studied Appleton’s hat. “Or maybe he’s dead. Maybe that’s what you come to tell me. Last of kin or some such.”

“No, Mrs Clare—“

“Simpson, but one and the same as you’re looking for.”

“Mrs Simpson.” Appleton fumbled the correction. He’d shoved one hand into a cloak pocket and was furiously rubbing his fingers together. “Yesterday evening I received a phone call. I wasn’t meant to receive it, you see, there was a mistake with the connection. The call was from Mr Charles R—. He asked that I deliver this message.”

Appleton read aloud what he’d written on the magazine cover.

The woman laughed and stomped her foot. She was in her sixties, Appleton realized. Sections of her hair were greying. The lines under her eyes were deep and permanent. Her laughter was not a joyous laughter.

She said, “Whatever trick it is you’re playing, and whoever you’re playing it with, I’m too old for it, you understand? The past is dead. Mr Charles R— is dead. And I deserve to be left to my own peace. Don’t come back here.”

But before she could close the door, Appleton put his hand on her shoulder. It was a soft shoulder. Appleton gasped. Never had he been so forward with a woman.

“Please, Mr Charles R— is not dead. I spoke to him. I heard his voice. I’m telling you the truth. He’s alive. He’s just on another planet. It’s utterly remarkable!”

Mrs Simpson looked at Appleton with suddenly sympathetic eyes and, even as she removed his hand from her shoulder, kept her voice calm:

“He’s dead to me.”

Appleton’s hand fell limply against the side of his cloak.

“There are certain things you do that, once you do them, their consequences are permanent. There is no pretending and there is no coming back. Take care now, Mister.”

With that, she shut the door.

- - -

Upon returning home, Appleton’s life returned to normal—at least in all superficial respects: he smiled to his wife, he kept to himself, and, at Six O’clock each evening, he retreated to his customary chair to read his customary books. The magazine cover on which he’d written the message from Charles R—, he placed in a private drawer in the desk in his study, underneath unfinished essays and research into particle acceleration and magnet engine propulsion and other old academic bric-a-brac.

For weeks, whilst trying unsuccessfully to locate more information about Charles R—, he kept the drawer unlocked. But, once he’d given up hope, he turned the key and, with one click, banished all thought of Mars from his mind.

Or at least that’s what Appleton intended. For there are certain neurons that, once they start firing, are impossible to stop. At most, they can be slowed—their work delayed. They are not obtrusive neurons: they do not prevent, say, smiling to one’s wife or reading customary books. But they are persistent and every so often they make the results of their operation known. This happens most-of-all at unexpected times, as, for instance, when Appleton, having bent to retrieve a particularly large pine cone from the grass, stood up with the complete schematic for the Magna-IV Engine before his eyes, or, upon having been asked by the local lady grocer for his opinion about a recent stretch of fair weather, replied, “My God, Ruthenium!”

Once such ideas made themselves known to Appleton, he began putting them to paper. Once they were on paper, he tasked other, more compliant, neurons with dividing and conquering any problems that the papers made apparent; and, once those had been solved, what else was there to do but gather the necessary materials and construct the first prototypes?

Appleton kept mum about this, of course. To his physicist colleagues, he was still at work on the same book he’d been working on for the last decade. He was still irrelevant. The wife, as long he smiled to her, suspected nothing. It was only his books that could have given him away—lying unopened on their shelves, their regular Six O’clock appointments long forgotten, their yellowing pages gathering dust—but books by themselves cannot speak. Appleton’s secret was safe.

Even as the project approached completion, not one soul suspected.

When launch-day finally dawned and Appleton, having composed a note to his wife indicating that he would be away until Wednesday on a scholarly pursuit, packed the pieces and prototypes into the back of a rented truck and drove to an old farmer’s field, from where he would blast off that very noon, the whole world was still naïve to the history that would soon be made.

In the field, Appleton worked diligently. He filled the shell of the rocket with each of the separate machines he had designed and constructed. He had a life support system, a navigation system, a communications system. He had propulsion. He had fuel. He had everything that was necessary. Nothing had been overlooked. As the sun rose, it rose on years of endless effort that, today, had physically and for the first time come together in the middle of such a previously insignificant English spot on Earth.

By Ten O’clock, the rocket was nearly complete. All that was left was the installation of the final ingenious detail: the captain’s seat: Appleton’s own customary evening chair.

That done, Appleton looked for one last time at the earthly sky, its thin clouds moving slightly across an orange sun, then climbed into the rocket and closed the hatch. The pneumatics sighed. The inside air was warm. As he set the navigation, every click and beep audible as if within his own skull, Appleton wondered what became of Mary Simpson. But just as it had come, the wonder passed. He confirmed his intended destination on the small liquid crystal display and took a deep breath.

The destination was unbelievable: Appleton felt feverish. He maneuvered into his chair and strapped himself in. Space was tight but he was not uncomfortable. Besides—he thrust a needle into a vein in his arm—he would be asleep for most of the journey. The sedative began to flow. He activated the countdown sequence. When he awoke, he would already be in Saturn’s orbit.

- - -

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

The communications equipment produced only a monotonous hiss punctuated by crackles. Appleton scratched his head. He’d programmed the system to link directly to the telephone in his home. The signal was strong enough. It should be working. He tried another connection.

This time, there was a faint click and the echo of a voice.

“Darling! It’s me. Please say something,” Appleton spoke into the receiver.

The voice wobbled.

“I hope you can hear me. I hope you haven’t been worrying. I hope I haven’t caused you harm. Please, darling, say something so that I know there isn’t a malfunction.”

The echoing voice suddenly came into rather clear focus. “Who is this? And do you want to speak with my mum?”

Appleton knew right away that it wasn’t the voice of the wife. In fact, it wasn’t even a female voice. It was the voice of a boy.

“My name is Appleton,” said Appleton. “I am attempting to contact the wife. Unfortunately, I may have miscalculated. Nonetheless, if you’d be a good lad and please make a note of the following: I am calling from Titan, which is the largest moon of the plane—

“Saturn, I know. I’m not stupid.”

Appleton cleared his throat and adjusted his headset. “Yes, that’s mighty good of you. As I was saying, I am on Titan, having only just arrived, you see. But the situation thus far appears manageable. I predict I shall make a fair go of living here.” He remembered his reason for calling. “Right, then, if you could tell as much to the wife, whom you will find living at 11 Golden Pheasant Lane in Beaconsfield, I would be much obliged. Her name is—“

The connection went dead. The communications system went offline. Try as Appleton might, no amount of banging, prodding and reprogramming ever brought it back.

- - -

Phil Jones replaced the telephone receiver.

“Who was that?” his mother asked.

Then disappeared down the hall without waiting for an answer.

Phil went back to the homework spread out on his bedroom floor, whose doing Appleton had interrupted. Geography lay beside history, which bordered an island of English. Phil tried all three subjects—cross his innocent heart, he did—but all at once the history was too boring, the English too imprecise and the geography too much pointless memorisation. He rubbed his eyes. Next year he’d be in high school. The homework would only get harder.

T-I-T-A-N

He typed the letters almost absent-mindedly into a Google image search.

The moon stared at him.

Somewhere inside his head, certain neurons were beginning to fire.

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

Don Whitman's Masterpiece

It was Danvers who finally pushed him in. We’d been feeding the fire with hardwood since the afternoon and it had gotten big as the wind picked up by nightfall, flickering cross our faces and warming our cheeks better than a gas heater. He didn’t even scream when he fell. The flames just swallowed him up—sparks shooting out like hot vomit. He knew what he’d done. He knew it was wrong. When he lifted himself up and came out of the fire he stood dead still, staring at us, smiling like we’d done him a favour. Maybe he thought he deserved to turn into ash. Maybe he did deserve it. I know I kept my fingers tight round the handle of the axe just the same till he keeled over and Cauley had touched the corpse with his foot and we knew he was dead. The three of us, we kept silent for a long while after that. There was just the sound of wood burning and it was better that way. None of us touched the body but none of us looked away, either: you could still make out his face, unmistakable, when the rest of him was dark and formless. He was a face on a pile. Then the wind started taking bits and pieces and carrying them away. Like I told the police, he didn’t touch me, but I knew some of the kids he’d done it to. He’d done it to Danvers. I remember once when all the other kids were gone, I’d stayed after class, Mr Gregor bent himself close to my ear and told me the real story. “You’re a wicked one,” he said when he was done, “just like Don Whitman.”

They used to scare us with Don Whitman, the adults: the other teachers, our parents, the priest. But no one ever explained it. They’d just say, “You better do what we want or else Don Whitman will come back and get you.” Mr Gregor was the only one ever to tell it to me with details. He told it different, too. He said he remembered because he was the same age as Don Whitman and they went to the same school. He said that what the others say they remember is like Cain and Abel or Little Red Riding Hood. Even the landscape tells the fairy tale. After it happened, Don Whitman’s school got torn down, then his house. And the bells in the Church got changed: the ones they rang after Elizabeth Cartwell had come back hysterical with the news.

You can’t tear down or change a man’s memory, Mr Gregor told me.

Once you see, it’s forever.

Elizabeth Cartwell’s parents moved away as soon as the police investigation finished. A lot of people moved away. But Mr Gregor showed me a newspaper from Hill City, North Dakota from some years later. The paper was yellow but you could read the black print fine. The story was about a girl who’d killed herself. The photo was of Elizabeth Cartwell. As he held it out for me to see, his hand shook and I felt his breath grow warmer against the skin around my neck. Nothing made him shake as much as what happened to Elizabeth Cartwell, not even the details.

Don Whitman was seventeen when he did it. He was handsome, with wide shoulders and played football. All the girls liked him. He was going to go to college. Maybe that’s why they thought he was ready: they thought he was a man. They thought he’d be with them. It was a school night when they woke him and drove out to the old pumping station, so that he could see everything for himself. They wanted to make him a part of it just like they were. If he saw, he would want it just like they did. I was always told that he drove out there by himself, but Mr Gregor told me that’s part of the lie. He said Don Whitman’s father was in the car with the mayor and the chief of police. He said, “How would he have found the place by himself—why would he have gone looking?”

The place is in a wood not far from the border. Of course, the whole underground is filled with cement now, but you can still see where the opening used to be: a fat tube sticking out of the ground, just big enough for a man to crawl down into. There was a hatch on it then, and thick locks. The hatch was sound-proof. If you stood right beside it, you couldn’t hear a thing, but as soon as you opened the hatch you could smell the insides and hear the moans start to drift upwards into the world. A steel ladder led down. Mr Gregor says they all knew about it, everyone: all the adults. They’d all been down that ladder. All of them had seen it.

Don Whitman went down the ladder, too. He must have smelled the insides grow stronger and heard the moaning echo louder with every rung but he kept going. On the ground above, his father spoke to the mayor and they both felt proud. Don Whitman must have been more scared of coming up and disappointing them than of not going down to the limit. But when he reached the bottom, the very bottom, and put his feet to the hard concrete and saw it before his own eyes, something inside of him must have broken—

“They sugarcoat it and they make a child’s game of it because they’re too scared to remember the truth,” Mr Gregor told me. “They can’t forget it, but it’s a stain to them, so they cover it up and pretend that everything’s clean.”

Don Whitman saw the vastness of the interlocking chambers and, within them, the writhing, ecstatic, swollen no-people of the underground, human-like but non-human, cross-bred mammals draped in plaster-white skin pinned to numb faces, men, women and children, male and female, naked, scared, dirty, with humans—humans Don Whitman knew and recognized—among them, on them and under them, hitting them, squeezing them, making them hurt, making monstrous sounds with them, all under slowly rotating heat lamps, all open and together, one before another, and then someone, someone Don Whitman knew, must have put a hand on Don Whitman’s shoulder and Don Whitman would have asked, “But what now, what am I supposed to do?” and then, from somewhere deep within the chambers, from a place not even Don Whitman would ever see, a voice answered:

“Anything.”

Mr Gregor pulled away from me and I felt my body turn cold. Icy sweat crawled under my collar and below my thighs.

I’d been told Don Whitman had found the old pumping station and lured the police to it, that they’d called others—including Don Whitman’s father—to talk him out of any violence, but that he’d snapped and murdered them all without firing a single shot, with his bare hands, and dumped the bodies into the metal pipe sticking out of the ground, the one just wide enough for a man to fit through. Then he’d disappeared. It wasn’t until days later that Elizabeth Cartwell found the bodies and there was never any sign of Don Whitman after that. The manhunt failed. So the church bells rang, the school was torn down, the pipe was filled in and, ever since, the adults scare their children with the story of the high school boy who’d done a terrible, sinful thing and vanished into thin air.

“And why would she decide to go out there?” Mr Gregor asked—meaning Elizabeth Cartwell—his eyes dead-set through a window at the raining world outside. “It’s as transparent as a sheet of the Bible, every word of it. They all pretend to believe because they’ve all made it up together. But the police reports, the testimony, the news stories, the court records, the verdict: a sham, a falsification made truth because a thousand people and a judge repeat it, word-for-word, every night before bed.”

I tried to stand but couldn’t. My heart was pounding me back into the chair. I was thinking about my mother and father. I had only enough courage for one question, so I asked, “What happened to the no-people?”

Mr Gregor turned suddenly and laughed so fierce the rain lashed the windows even harder. He came toward me. He put a delicate hand on each of my shoulders. He bent forward until his lips were almost touching mine and, his eyes staring at me like one stares at the Devil, said:

“Buried in the concrete. Buried alive, buried dead—”

I pushed him away.

He stumbled backward without losing his balance.

I forced myself off the chair, praying that my legs would keep. My knees shook but held. In front of me, Mr Gregor rasped for air. A few long strands of his thin hair had fallen across his forehead. He was sweating.

“He was a coward, that little boy, Don Whitman. Without him, we wouldn’t need to live under the whip of elaborate lies designed by weaker people turned away and shamed by the power of the natural order of things. They trusted him, and he betrayed us all. The fools! The weakling! Imagine,” Mr Gregor hissed, “just imagine what we could have had, what we could have experienced down there, at the very bottom, in the chambers...”

His eyes spun and his chest heaved as he grew excited, but soon he lost his venom and his voice returned to normal.

Finally, he said without any nastiness, “You’re a wicked one, just like Don Whitman.”

And I ran out.

Danvers prodded me awake. I must have fallen asleep during the night because when I opened my eyes it was morning already. The sun was up and the flames gone, but the fire was still warm. Mr Gregor’s dead face still rested atop a pile of ashes. Cauley was asleep on the dirt across from us. I could tell Danvers hadn’t slept at all. He said he’d been to a farmhouse and called the police. We woke up Cauley and talked over what we’d say when they got here. We decided on something close to the truth: Mr Gregor had taken the three of us camping and, when he tried to do a bad thing, we put up a fight and knocked him into the flames. Cauley said it might be suspicious because of how easily Mr Gregor had burned, but Danvers said that some people were like that—they burned quick and whole—so we needn’t say a word about the gasoline. When the police came, they were professional and treated us fair, but when they took me aside to talk to me about the accident, every time I tried to tell them about the bad things Mr Gregor had done, they wouldn’t hear it, they just said it was a shame there’d been an accident and someone had died.

At home, I asked my parents whether Mr Gregor was a bad person for what he’d done to Danvers and others. My mother didn’t say anything. My father looked at me like he was looking at the Devil himself and said morality was not so simple and that people had differing points of view and that, in the end, much depended not on what you did, but who you did it to—like during the war, for example. There were some who deserved to be done-to and others whose privilege it was to do. Then he picked up his magazine and told me it was best not to think about such things at all.

I did keep thinking about them, and about Don Whitman, too. When I got to high school, I was too old to scare with monsters, but once in a while I’d hear one of the adults tell a kid he better do as he’d been told or Don Whitman would come back and get him. I wondered if maybe people scare others with monsters they’re most scared of themselves. I even thought about investigating: taking a pick-axe to the pumping station and cracking through concrete or investigating records of how much of it had been poured in there. But I figured the records could have been fixed and one person with a pick-axe wouldn’t get far before the police came and I didn’t trust them anymore. I also had homework to worry about and I started seeing a girl.

I’d almost forgotten about Don Whitman by the time my mother sent me out one evening with my dad’s rifle to hunt down a coyote she said had been attacking her hens. I took a bike, because it was quiet, and was roaming just beyond town when I saw something kick up dust in a field. I shot at it, missed and it scurried off. I pedaled after it until it seemingly disappeared into nowhere. I kept my eye firm on the spot I saw it last and when I got close enough, I saw there was a small hole in the ground there. I stuck the rifle in and the hole felt bigger on the inside, so I stomped all around till the hole caved and where there’d been a mouse-sized hole now there was an opening a grown man could fit through. It seemed deep, which made me curious, because there aren’t many caves around here, so I stuck my feet in but still couldn’t feel the bottom. I slid in a little further, and further still, and soon the opening was above my head and I was inside with my whole body.

It was dark but I could feel the ground sloping. When my eyes accustomed to the gloom, I saw enough to tell there was a tunnel leading into the depths and that it was big enough for me to crawl through. I didn’t have a light but I knew it was important to try the hole. Maybe there were no-people at the bottom. Mostly, though, I didn’t think—I expected: that every time I poked ahead with the rifle, I’d hit earth and the tunnel would be done.

That never happened. I descended for hours. The tunnel grew narrower and the slope sharpened. Fear tightened around my chest. I lost track of time. There wasn’t enough space to turn my body around and I’d been descending for so long it was foolish to backtrack. Surely, the tunnel led somewhere. It was not a natural tunnel, I told myself, it must lead somewhere. I should continue until I reached the end, turn around and return to the surface. The trick was to keep calm and keep moving forward.

And I was right. Several hours later the tunnel ended and I crawled out through a hollow in the wall of a huge grotto.

I stood, stretched my limbs and squinted through the dimness. I couldn’t see the other end of the grotto but the wall curved so I thought that maybe if I went along I might get to the other end. My plan of an immediate return to the surface was on hold. I had to see what lived here. Images of no-people raced through my head. I readied my rifle and proceeded, slowly at first. Where the tunnel had been packed dirt and clay, the walls and floor of the grotto were solid rock. There was moisture, too. It flowed down the walls and gathered in depressions on the floor.

Although at first the wall felt smooth, soon I began to feel a texture to it—like a washboard. The ceiling faded into view. The grotto was getting smaller. And the texture was becoming rougher, more violent. I was thinking about the texture and Mr Gregor’s burnt body when a sound sent me sprawling. My elbow banged against the rock and I nearly cried out. My heart was beating like it had beaten me into my chair in the classroom. The sound was real: faint but clear and echoing. It was the sound of continuous and rhythmic scratching.

I crawled forward, holding the rifle in front. The scratching grew louder. I thought about calling out, but suddenly felt foolish to believe in no-people or anything of that kind. It seemed more sensible to believe in large rodents or coyotes with sharp teeth. I could have turned back, but the only thing more frightening than a monster in front is a monster behind, so I pulled myself on.

In fact, I was crawling up a small hill and, when I had reached the top, I looked down and there it was:

His was a human body. Though hunched, he stood on human legs and scratched with human hands. His movements were also clearly a man’s movements. There was nothing feminine about them. His half-translucent skin was grey, almost white, and taut; and if he had any hair, I didn’t see it. His naked body was completely smooth. I looked at him for a long time with dread and disgust. His arms didn’t stop moving. Whatever they were scratching, they kept scratching. Even when he turned and his head looked at me, even as I—stunned—frozen in terror, recoiled against the wall, still his arms kept moving and his hands clawing.

For a few seconds, I thought he’d seen me, that I was done for.

I gripped the rifle tight.

But as I focused on his face, I realized he hadn’t seen me at all. He couldn’t see me. His face, so much like a colourless swollen skull, was punctuated by two black and empty eye sockets.

He turned back to face the wall he was scratching. I turned my face, too. The texture on the wall was his. The deeper the grooves, the newer the work. I put down the rifle and put my hand on the wall, letting my fingers trace the contours of the texture. It wasn’t simple lines. The scratching wasn’t meaningless. These were two words repeated over and over, sometimes on top of each other, sometimes backwards, sometimes small, sometimes each letter as big as a person, and they were all around this vast underground lair, everywhere you looked—

Two words: Don Whitman.

He’d made this grotto. I felt feverish. The sheer greatness, the determination needed to scratch out such a place with one’s bare hands. Or perhaps the insanity—the punishment. If I hadn’t been sitting, a wave of empathy would have knocked me to the wet, rocky floor. I picked up the rifle. I could put Don Whitman out of his misery. I lifted the rifle and pointed it at the distant figure writing his name pointlessly into the wall. With one pull of the trigger, I could show him infinite mercy. I steadied myself. I said a prayer.

Don Whitman stopped scratching and wailed.

I bit down on my teeth.

I hadn’t fired yet.

He grabbed his head and fell to his knees. The high-pitched sound coming from his throat was unbearable. I felt like my mind was being ripped apart. I dropped the rifle and covered my ears. Again, Don Whitman turned. This time with his entire body. He crawled a few steps toward me—still wailing—before stopping and falling silent. He raised his head. Where before had been just eye sockets now there were eyes. White, with irises. Somehow, they’d grown.

He got to his feet and I was sure that he could see me now. He was staring at me. I called his name:

“Don Whitman!”

He didn’t react. Thoughts raced through my mind: what should I do once he comes toward me? Should I defend myself or should I embrace him?

But he didn’t step forward.

He took one step back and lifted his long fingers to his face. His nails, I now saw, were thick and curved as a bird’s talons. He moved them softly from his forehead, down his cheeks and up to his eyes, into which, without warning, he pressed them so painfully that I felt my own eyes burn. When he brought his fingers back out, in each hand he held a mashed and bleeding eyeball. These he put almost greedily into his mouth, one after the other, then chewed, and swallowed.

Having nourished his body, he returned to the wall and began scratching again.

As I watched the movements of his arms, able to follow the pattern of the letters they were carving, I no longer felt like killing him. If he wanted to die, he could die: he could forego water, he could refuse to eat. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to keep scratching his name into the walls of this grotto: Don Whitman, Don Whitman, Don Whitman…

I watched him for a long time before I realized that I would have to get to the surface soon. People would begin to worry. They might start looking for me. And as much as I needed to know the logic behind Don Whitman’s grotto, I also needed food. I couldn’t live down here. I couldn’t eat my own eyes and expect them to grow back. Eventually, I would either have to return to the world above or die.

I put my hand on the grotto wall and began to mentally retrace my steps. A return would not be difficult. All I would need to do was follow—

That’s when I knew.

The geography of it hit me.

The hole I’d entered was on the outskirts of town. The tunnel sloped toward the town. That meant this grotto was below the town. The town hall, the bank, the police station, the school—all of it was lying unknowingly on top of a giant expanding cavity. One day, this cavity would be too large, the town would be too heavy, and everything would collapse into a deep and permanent handmade abyss. Don Whitman would bury the town just as the town had buried the no-people. Everything would be destroyed. Everyone would die. That was Don Whitman’s genius. That was his life’s work.

I picked up the rifle and faced Don Whitman for the final time.

He must have known that I was there. He’d heard me and had probably seen me before he pulled out his eyes, yet he just continued to scratch. Faced with death, he kept working.

As I stood there, I had no doubt that, left in peace, Don Whitman would finish his project. His will was too powerful. The result would be catastrophic. It was under these assumptions that I made the most moral and important decision of my life:

I walked away.

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

Dear Bette Davis

Don't get me wrong. If I remember anything from The Big Sleep it's Lauren Bacall with a cigarette between her lips. And Bette Davis had gloriously sad smoking eyes when Paul Henreid lit up a deuce in Now, Voyager. Later, there was Monica Vitti, Giulietta Masina and Anna Karina. I don't remember if that trio smoked, but, if it did, I'm sure the puffs were sensual and glamorous (and possibly heartbreakingly tragic in Masina's case). So don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the movies. I spent a good part of my childhood lusting over dead and aging actresses. But besides the time I put an end to my mom's cassette deck with a copy of Nights of Cabiria that I borrowed from the library and never returned, the movies lie. The stench and the irritation of the eyes and the bad teeth don't penetrate the silver screen. The story ends before the skin yellows and tightens into the leather they use to make fake Italian sofas. And don't get me started on the clothes: saturated with an entire history of matches and lighters and Saturday afternoons spent coughing in the garage.

Listen, I don't mean to sound like a smoking infomercial. The truth is that I don't care how many people die from throat cancer or if underprivileged kids have to suck in second hand smoke because their parents get the shakes if they don't light up every hour on the hour. All I care about—and what I can't get out of my head—is the sweet mouth of Ginnie Peters in the eighth grade, open and waiting for me and my tongue in a little nook on the southwest wall of St. Bartholomew's Elementary. I'll never forget that first taste of saliva. No lingering mintiness of sugar-free gum, no taste bud memories of a winter morning’s bitter black coffee. Just sweet, warm and fresh saliva replenishing itself with the swallow-swallow frequency of a nervous teenage girl. If you happen know the album cover for King Crimson's In The Court of the Crimson King or maybe Edvard Munch's Screams, you know that once adulthood hits, open mouths become the gaping maws of monsters. But back then it was still the pinnacle of burgeoning eroticism to see those jaws spread and the spit coming down the sides of Ginnie Peters’ teeth like my own private Niagara Falls. I stuck my tongue into that beautiful cavity and lapped up the taste.

Recess and noon hour and sometimes after school, weeks upon weeks, we spent in that spot with our faces joined at the lips, exchanging fluids. Of course, it wasn't all about the saliva. There were also the teeth and the tongues, and the hotness of breath making the tiny hairs on your upper lip stand up. Sometimes there were the hands, too, but we didn't do much of that. It was other young couples that snuck off to explore the insides of each other's underwear. We were mouth people.

Even before our lickings and suckings started we'd been friends. Ask my mom where I was when I wasn't home and she'd nine of ten answer, "He's probably off with Ginnie somewhere." Nine of ten she was right, too. Probably in Ginnie's basement, where she and her brother Felton had set up a room especially for audio-visual pleasures. A giant rear projection TV against the wall, a Japanese stereo and, in both corners, big Bose towers with enough bass to restart your heart. Although Felton generally left us alone, he was our primary source for movies. He was older than Ginnie—in his last year of high school. A couple of his friends were already in college, so he'd raid their college libraries for us, bringing back 70s rock albums and the classics of Hollywood and European cinema. If there was anything more appealing than sucking out every last drop of Ginnie Peter's unspoilt saliva, it was feasting on that saliva while Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham fell in love on screen.

The trouble with Nicholas Ray films, however, is that they usually don't end well for the lovers. You see, brother Felton picked up another thing from his college buddies: the taste for nicotine. I first caught on from the faint smell on his jacket. He was discrete with his habit and good at airing out his clothes, but versus someone with an acute sense of cigarette smell like me it wasn't enough. When I sheepishly asked him about it one day while Ginnie was in the bathroom, his face turned red to match the colour of the popped blood vessels in his eyes and he begged me not to tell Ginnie or his parents. Cigarettes weren't all he was smoking, and he was glad to buy my silence for a pack of Camels that I didn't even particularly want. I wasn't going to talk anyway but he pushed them into my hand and nodded like we'd just concluded an international arms deal, so I kept them.

Which brings me back to Lauren Bacall with the cig dangling from her lips in The Big Sleep, me and Ginnie on the couch, our lips mutually wet, and Ginnie's hands making a rare trip under my shirt, then down my body to the tops of my jeans and toward the front pocket where I'd stashed my Camels that day so that I could brag about them to a friend at school. She didn't actually stop kissing me until she pulled out the pack and smiled, saying, "I didn't know you smoked." I was about to say that I didn't when the shot came up—Bacall sucking on that filter-less piece of shredded dry tobacco—and I let my pulsating youth get the better of me.

"You should try it," I said, "I bet you'd look good with a cigarette."

She laughed and took one out of the pack. She held it up and looked at it, then spun it round a few times before sticking one end between her lips. I felt a pang of jealousy, but only a pang. Then she smiled and struck a Hollywood pose. There she was: my own personal Vivian Rutledge. I told her to stay right there and I ran to my book bag, where I carried the cheap camera the school had given me to take pictures for the yearbook. She struck another pose and I got a decent shot. And another. And she said, "Wait, it won't look the same without the smoke," paused, then added, "but there's probably a lighter around here somewhere."

There wasn't. So she came back with an old book of camping matches—the kind that supposedly work underwater—which worked just as well above it. She lit the cigarette, inhaled, and exploded into a sandpaper-coarse cough. She took another drag and it looked good to see her struggle with it. When her coughing calmed down a little I took some more shots. She'd been right: she did look better with her softly moving lips cushioning the smoke up toward the ceiling. The only regret I had was that the world wasn't in 35mm black and white.

After she'd smoked the cigarette down to the nub, she handed it to me like an urn of human remains and with the utmost reverence I put it in the garbage, even wrapping it in a used tissue to make sure it wouldn't be found.

The movie had already finished and no one had shut off the television when I got back on top of her and licked her lower lip. She stunk bad up close, that much I could tell right away. But it wasn't until I actually tasted the inside of her mouth that the full horror of what I'd done stuck its talons into the tender underbelly of my heart and ripped me open. I didn't throw up in her mouth. I at least managed to pull away and run. But I didn't manage the bathroom, either. I stopped somewhere between the kitchen and the dining room and flung out my dinner onto the Peters' faultless hardwood floor.

Ginnie helped me clean up. She was sweet as usual. That was probably the worst thing about it. I could handle the embarrassment and the lack of self-respect that comes with throwing up in front of the girl you're in love with, but to see her unchanged sweet exterior while knowing that inside she was changed—charred. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. I looked into her eyes, "Promise me, Ginnie, promise that you'll never smoke another cigarette." She promised and sealed the promise with a kiss on my cheek. I clamped down on my teeth till I tasted calcium to stop from shuddering at the smell of her smoke-infected hair, but I believed her.

July 24, 1945. Potsdam. President Harry S. Truman leans over to Joseph Stalin and whispers that the Americans have perfected the atomic bomb. Stalin nods in understanding. Truman scratches his head at the lack of a reaction, Stalin makes a mental note about the expediency of spying. Consequently, while I was never one to advocate peeping on one's allies, espionage among friends is a little like torture: condemnable, but with benefits. And so the Monday after next I decided to sleuth after Ginnie after school. Where was she going, I asked. To her aunt's for dinner. Where did she go? To our little nook on the southwest wall of St. Bartholomew's Elementary.

By now we both think we know how this ends. There is no other boy. There is no secret lesbian girlfriend. There is only Ginnie and her fingers fiddling with a pack of Camels that she paid her brother to get for her.

Or at least you think you know how this ends. What you don't know is that every second that it takes her fingers holding the cigarette to reach the level of her lips is a punch to the liver. What you don't know is that each sniff as she runs the cigarette under her nose and delights in the smell of that putrid paper is a dull knife scratch to the wrists. By the time she takes out a lighter and ignites the flame, my knees are buckling. Blood is coming out of my nose, my ears. And when she touches the flame to the tip of the cigarette, my limbs catch fire.

Suddenly her eyes move to look straight at me across the schoolyard. She takes a step toward me. I want to run. I want to get away, but I can't move. All I can feel is the heat. She takes a drag. The sound is unbearable: like my soul being sucked out. My skin crackles and starts to melt from my bones. She comes closer. I think people are starting to scream. Or maybe I'm screaming. I touch my face but there isn't one anymore, only a hard, white skull. She smiles. There are two cigarettes in her mouth. She puffs on both. Then takes one from her lips and holds it out to me. I don't want it, but I can't swat it away. My arms are charcoal. She pushes the cigarette between my teeth. My body burns out from under me. I feel myself getting shorter and shorter. Soon, I am nothing but a skull resting on a hill of ashes.

"Don't let's ask for the moon," she says as she picks me up and holds me in her hands. "We have the stars."

She gives me a kiss and our teeth clatter against each other.

There is no saliva. There is no wetness.

If I am ever properly buried, please write the following on my tombstone:

Dear Bette Davis, Fuck You.

[nonlocalmemorytxt]

The Boy Who Spoke Mosquito

Once in third grade they held Duey Pepper's head inside a terrarium for seven minutes while Mr Winters went out for a cigarette. The yellow snake hissed and slithered and looped itself around Duey's neck as everyone sat silent and watched. When Mr Winters came back Linda Martins put up her hand and answered a question about the geography of the United States. Duey didn't put up his hand. Duey never put up his hand. Duey never talked except to Oliver, though no one ever heard them. Oliver was Duey's only friend. By fourth grade they started on Oliver, too. I saw it. Pushing and slapping him in a circle, asking him, "What's Duey sound like, I bet he says he loves you, does he talk like a faggot?"

Duey didn't have parents. He had grandparents. They were from somewhere else and didn't speak English. In the spring they planted rows of tomatoes and gave Duey sandwiches with horseradish that smelled across the cafeteria. Once in fifth grade the other kids held Duey down on a long plastic table and pressed the horseradish into his face. He didn't say a word. He just took it. His eyes got real red but he didn't rub them, and he didn't cry. One of the teachers saw. In the teachers' lounge she said "boys will be boys," and drank coffee. Duey's grandparents didn't complain to the school board. They didn't speak English. And Duey didn't have parents.

Before that fall, no one ever took Duey Pepper's picture. It wasn't like it is now, with all the news people around, pointing their black lenses and eating city lunches. Sometimes at recess the bolder ones climb fences and set off flashes while the kids play footy on the cement. Goal after goal and all they probably hope for is that it happens again. Those pale bloodless young bodies. Duey doesn't play footy. Sometimes they put his picture in the paper all the same, with no story or caption. Just a boy's picture. A boy by himself, standing. A boy just like any other boy except for the stitches across his mouth.

But just watch as Duey gets too close and they scatter like frightened seagulls. Everyone's afraid of Duey now. Not everyone scatters.

If Oliver was alive, Oliver wouldn't scatter. He'd write to Duey in a secret notebook and Duey would write back and they would stand beside each other at recess while the other kids played footy. In the newspaper they wrote under one of the pictures that Duey can't smile because of the stitches, but that's not true. Duey can smile if he wants to. If Oliver was still alive, Duey would want to smile sometimes. If he read something nice or funny in the notebook. In the newspaper they also wrote that Duey's grandparents aren't there anymore and that Duey lives alone. That's a lie, too. The tomato plants are still planted in the spring. Everyone knows Duey's too young to plant tomatoes.

During the trial when Duey spoke they left a camera in the room and no one else because they were so scared. The judge and the lawyers and the jury and the rest of them. It was just one boy and a camera. They say you can't see anything on the recording, just a black cloud, but I don't know if that's true. You can hear Duey talk. They played part of it on the television. He must have taken off his stiches. It was Duey's decision to put the stitches in, most people don't realize that. He did it himself. But he carries a knife, too. A little pocket knife that's just sharp enough to cut through the thread. He must have had it at the trial when they left him alone with the camera. He must have cut through and spoke.

Duey talked about how the boys took him to the bathroom, about how they punched him and held him down and called him names. Duey's voice stopped sometimes. He said the blood tasted like horseradish. He said there were five but he didn't say their names. Donny Nelson and Augustino were there for sure. I saw through the window. Nobody knows, but I saw them hit Duey. I saw Duey hit them back. The blood looked like tomato juice and Duey said it tasted like horseradish. It was on his eye and around his lips. Donny Nelson hit him hard and they all said bad things. Duey fell and he didn't move anymore. But Donny Nelson said bad things and Augustino was bleeding, too, and he grabbed Duey by the sweater and dragged him into one of the stalls. Donny Nelson kicked Duey in the head. Augustino spit blood. Then they picked Duey up by the hair and they hit his face against the toilet. It was loud and Duey's teeth were all on the floor. Duey was bleeding. Duey wasn't moving. Augustino was laughing and they left Duey there.

The window was open and I flew in when it was quiet. I landed on Duey's soft brown hair. I walked across Duey's forehead and down his twitching eyelids. Blood was dripping from his nose but I didn't try any. The breath from his nostrils pushed against my wings. His lips were moving and inside all the teeth were broken. There was a lot of blood in his mouth. It was open. I flew in and sat on his tongue. I pricked the flesh and took a drink. The blood tasted good, the tongue was warm. I called the others and they came. So many came in through the window like the darkest fog until the room was night. All were swarming and settling around Duey's face. On the tongue, inside the ears, behind the eyes, up the nostrils and flying under the skull, around the brain. Through the throat to the lungs and swimming down arteries to the very beating heart. Buzzing, we feasted. Fed, we stayed.

The ambulance siren wailed.

"You shouldn't have done it to Oliver," Duey said on the tape. Everyone was watching on television. They'd hanged Oliver on a coat hook. This was before. Donny Nelson and Augustino and the other boys. It was an accident, the school board said, but Oliver couldn't breathe and he flailed his legs until he suffocated. The janitor found his body in the morning. Nobody asked why they didn't take him down. Nobody asked why they'd hanged him up. It was an accident, the school board said and Oliver's mom cried loudest at the funeral.

Months later when Duey came back to school everyone left him alone. Even the teachers left him alone. His teeth were fixed but all the new parts were a different colour and they looked jagged like a shark.

Once in seventh grade Duey Pepper put up his hand. It was afternoon and Mr Winters was talking about the capitals of Asia. Linda Martins was there and Donny Nelson and Augustino and the others. Duey Pepper put up his hand, Mr Winters asked, "Yes?" but when Duey opened his mouth instead of the sound of any word it was we that came out. A trickle into a string, into a neverending black buzzing ribbon that wound itself around every tender neck until not one more gasp was heard. Suffocation and punctuation and frozen terror in their eyes. Outside, the first graders played on the grass, across the hall, the fourth graders learned the basics of civil responsibility, and we filled throats and eyes and sucked out seventh grade blood until not a drop was left. Fattened, we returned to our host.

When the bell rang, the classroom door stayed shut. Minutes passed. Duey sat in his seat. Someone finally knocked. Finally, a teacher opened the door. And she saw. Then they all saw. Those pale bloodless young bodies. And Duey, in the back row, alive and innocent, with a closed, quivering, peaceful mouth—smiling.

Now the news people are always around. Every day they eat lunches and wait, climbing fences and setting off flashes at footy games. Sometimes they take pictures of the boy standing alone with stitches across his mouth. The vampire boy, the butcher boy, the bloodletter. Duey has no friends and doesn't smile, but no one teases him anymore and nobody says bad things. At lunch, he eats sandwiches with horseradish that smell across the cafeteria. He never puts up his hand and he never talks.

When he gets too close, the news people scatter like seagulls.