Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (42 page)

Outside, I breathed raggedly. Barely made it to my car. At the apartment, hands shaking, I ran a diagnostic. Maybe one of the implants was breaking down. Maybe, after all this time, my
Lasarént
immune system was rejecting the grafts, or it could be an acquired allergy. I had too many symptoms, but the equipment reported nothing wrong. Everything normal. For the first time in my field experience, I sedated myself and remained unconscious for several days.

On a Wednesday night, I returned to the Sleepy Jean. Same red lights. Same soothing murmur under the boat. No one in the bar besides the bartender, a cook and myself. I took notes idly about peanut shells on the floor, and how they cracked underfoot, about lingering odors beneath the obvious ones: perfumes, sweat, detergents, petrochemicals. The chair’s surface was cool and smooth, and I realized for the first time that it was an imitation of leather.

Around the room, numerous fakes and imitations. On the walls, old movie posters, but, on close inspection, not the originals. Baseball mitts hanging from the ceiling, just like ones I’d seen in several other bars to provide “atmosphere,” along with old road signs, car license plates, a pair of snow shoes, a boat oar, a stuffed peccary, several fishing poles: all pretending to be random, as if the bar grew to be this way instead of being designed. The beer mugs done in an old-fashioned style. The bartender dressed as a riverboat captain. Fakes. I scribbled into my notebook. So much of the integral human experience involved fakery, which was no different from what happened between them. For years I’d watched them come into bars, pretending to be at ease or happy or interested or interesting, and it all covered something else. Like their language.

I put my notebook down and shut my eyes. If I ignored the glassy clink behind the bar, shut out the alien cooking smells and odd gravity; if I concentrated on the river’s swishy passage under the boat and the dim red light through my eyelids, I could almost imagine faraway
Lasarént
. What season was it there? Would the rivers be running high now on their winding flow to the shallow seas? Would the hills be oozy and wet under the reddish sun? I licked my lips, tasted the river’s moisture on my tongue. Rested my head on the chair’s back to feel the moving water better.

I stayed that way for a long time.

Footsteps thudded on the floor. I felt them, and I scrinched my eyes tighter, trying not to break the feeling, but a chair scraped back, and someone joined me at my table. The problem with the vacant chair is it invites company. I thought about sending the person away. Another specimen for the database didn’t seem that important right now. What would be the use of one more tagged woman, moving through her life, tracked by invisible
Lasarént
field scientists? What would be the good of me committing one more act of human fakery?

It was Trudy.

“I expected to find you here,” she said.

I touched her hand. “That’s good work.”

She held it up to herself, fingers straight. “They hurt all the time, you know.”

I didn’t, but I said I did.

The bartender asked her if she wanted something, and she ordered a beer. When he turned away, she said, “Enzyme treatments make it palatable—even my digestive system was changed—but they drink it too cold.”

“Mine too. When I started, all the food was shunted to a storage stomach. I emptied it after meals, but they decided that was too cumbersome—shipping food to me twice a month—so I have earth-analog bacteria implants and a processor that converts it for me.”

“Ouch,” she said. “All that biologically?”

“Most. I’d attract a lot of attention in an Earth hospital if they X-rayed my insides, though.”

She laughed. I admired the perfection of her guise. No evidence of vestigial scales. The missing limbs. The loss of height. The loss of eye stalks.
Trosfrilla
biotechs must be true artists.

The door opened and a dozen men and women poured into the bar. A coed softball team, wearing black and yellow T-shirts, talking excitedly.

I didn’t want her to go again. The players settled around two tables, calling for beer and pretzels. One of them plugged money into a juke box, and the Sleepy Jean suddenly became noisy and too crowded.

“Can we go someplace quiet?” I asked.

She nodded. What thoughts were going through her
Trosfrilla
brain? We were no longer enemies, technically, but she could learn nothing about Earth people from me. I could learn nothing from her. Our conversation made no scientific sense. We’d gain nothing from it. She was not a human woman. I could take no readings or plant a tag. Still, I wanted to stay with her.

She followed me in her car to my apartment. I turned the equipment off before she entered. No point in letting my superiors know I’d entertained a
Trofrillan
operative.

I said, “Can I get you something to drink?”

Trudy moved into my apartment unlike anyone who’d entered before. She dropped the human role; her feet slid across the carpet, more like her own gait, and her hands went to her jaw line that she rubbed hard. She said, “Water is fine, if it’s warm.” The heels of her hands ground into the side of her face. “It hurts all the time, here. I’ll be glad to go home.”

I poured the water and one for myself. Through the door I could see her examining my things. She pushed aside an art print to study the thin plate of scanning equipment behind.

“What’s your range?” she called.

“About fifty feet.”

She grunted and let the print swing back into place.

“Do you have any music?” she said. “Real music?”

I had several CD’s of recordings I’d made from
Lasarént
. The stereo couldn’t do the full tonal range justice, but it captured the mutating harmonics and asynchronous rhythms well. We sat beside each other on the couch. Through my picture window the sun set, a red sunset, and I smiled at that. Trudy stayed motionless, her fingers curled on her thighs, her wrists bent slightly, like a Preying Mantis. I smelled nothing
Trosfrillan
on her, only shampoo and perfume.

Around us the human city teemed with its activities. In the building, doors slammed—I felt their distant echoes—feet pattered down the hallways. Outside, traffic pushed past, all individually guided, most cars holding only one person. Busy. Horns and engine noise beat against the glass. A siren whining. But in my apartment, the red sun bathed everything warmly, and the music currents swept by, gentle and chaotic, like the river beneath the Sleepy Jean, like the far
Hydrash
. My scanning equipment was off. My position was no longer clinical. I wasn’t collecting.

Trudy rubbed her face again. Underneath the mock skin (Beautifully engineered! Only a well equipped lab that knew what to look for would be able to detect its extraterrestrial origin), I guessed her reshaped skull ached along its alien lines. She grimaced, a very human gesture of pain.

“Here, let me,” I said. In the kitchen, I filled a pan with warm water and found a washcloth. She watched me soak the cloth, then press out the excess moisture.

“I don’t think we should,” she said. Her hand rested on my forearm. “Thank you for the thought, though.”

Still, she didn’t resist when I placed the cloth against her cheek, let the warmth rest there for a moment, and then pushed my thumbs gently into the muscles. Her dark eyes locked on my own. When I went back to the bowl to reheat the cloth, she sighed and shut her eyes. I straddled her on the couch so I could massage both sides of her face equally. She moved her head against the pressure, so I could tell where she wanted it. Gradually, the apartment darkened, and the red sunset behind me went from vermillion to purple to sable. My thumbs kneaded her cheek bones, pushed into the ridge of her jawbone, circled under her ears—the skin caressed the covered bones, a whole tiny landscape of knobs and valleys and smooth plains, over and over.

She said, “Do you miss winter on
Lasarént?
”

My back ached with memory’s loss. The den filled and dark and close. The hormonal changes engendered in the moist soil and shared air, and the timeless eruption of tendrils in my back, burrowing through the mud, finding other tendrils, growing and intertwining until we joined, all of us, in one organism; one birthing, breathing, thinking organism that waited out the winter in warmth and communion and unity. The integration.

I couldn’t say anything, but swallowed the human sob in my throat while my thumbs orbited endlessly on her face.

Her hands went to my shirt, unbuttoning. In the darkness I saw her eyes glinting, staring again at me. I massaged the skull above the ears; her hair tickled my wrists. She held my ribs and pulled me closer, her breath hot on my chest, then she reached around and put her hands on my back.

“Here?” she said, her voice mellow against the music.

“Higher,” I said, and moved down so she could reach.

The
Trosfrilla
know our anatomy; they know us. One can’t go to war for generations without learning of the enemy, and she knew. She knew. Her fingers traveled up and down beside my back bone, digging until she found the buried tendril-pods, chemically suppressed, but still there, sensitive to stimulation, and she rubbed them gently.

When the music ended, I fell away, exhausted.

We breathed deeply in the now silent room, city lights glittering beyond the window, the traffic slowed to its night time murmur.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Does it hurt as bad?” I touched the side of her face.

She didn’t look at me. “Not as bad. And you?”

Of course there had been incomplete satisfaction in what she’d done, not like a full nesting, but she knew the tendril-pods were there. She’d touched them and reminded them they were alive.

“That felt good,” I said. “Thanks.”

Trudy rose from the couch, and I knew she was leaving.

She got to the door before I said, “Will I see you again?”

By the dim city light, she paused, her back to me—things remained that way for many heart beats—then she shrugged.

“Why?” she said.

I tried not to weep, my alien form overwhelming me with reflexive emotion, and I suddenly understood something human.

“Don’t mind me,” I said. “It’s all blather.”

Classroom
of the
Living Dead

T
hey came for me on a Monday morning when I was too exhausted to hear the back door caving in. Only when their hands were on me did I realize that all was lost, but the dead didn’t consume me. They dragged me out of the house, shambled the three blocks to the school, holding me tight in their rotted hands, shuffling in that loose-limbed, broken way that they had, until they’d pulled me up the stairs, through the front doors with their glass knocked out, down the hall strewn with books and abandoned backpacks, until we came to my room.

Here, too, windows were broken, and the Venetian blinds hung askew. Morning sun slanted through the uneven slats. They pushed me toward my podium. I clung to the top, sick with fear. When would they kill me? Would I become like them?

They stumbled against the desks, former students, all of them: Daniel, who used to play his guitar at lunch; Lisa, with her pierced lip and blue-dyed hair; Landon, who read manga and drew big-breasted girls in the back of his notebooks, all my students. They bumped into the chairs, moaning low in their throats, until they were sitting, a terrible parody of the class they once had been.

What did they want, with their white-washed eyes and bruised faces? They looked at me, blank-faced, but ravenous, expectant, somehow. Hands gripped the sides of their desks. A breeze stirred a loose paper on the windowsill.

Finally, Joselyn, a girl who used to look like she ran a brush through her long, brunette hair a thousand strokes before she came to class, raised her hand, her hair a knotted mess, now, her blouse, torn and stained. She raised her hand and waited.

“Yes, Joselyn,” I squeaked.

She opened her mouth, and for a while nothing came except a strangled gasping, until she forced the word: “Braaaiiins.” Her hand dropped with a thud. “Braaaiiins.”

“That’s what you want?”

She nodded. They all nodded.

Was this what remained, after they died, after they reanimated? A desire to continue, to be a little bit of what they once were? Was it all habit? Would the athletes head to the gym after school to make layups? Would the marching band tramp across the field, their tuneless instruments dead in their grips?

Joselyn said, “Braaaiiins,” a third time.

I found a marker in the desk. What could be more surreal, but who was I after all? The world had ended. The apocalypse had arrived. Still, I was who I was. They were what they had become.

I turned to the board. “Today, I will show you how to diagram sentences.” I wrote on the white surface. I drew lines and made connections and spoke the arcane language of grammar. When I faced the class again, they were silent and attentive.

“Braaaiiins,” someone in the back groaned.

By the time the sun had traveled to the horizon, I’d filled the board and erased it a dozen times. It didn’t matter what I talked about. They didn’t answer questions. They didn’t move.

But they let me live.

Tomorrow I think I’ll teach literature. Some Dickenson, some Poe. Tomorrow I’ll teach to the dead and for the moment pretend that the world will go on.

Tomorrow they won’t have to drag me to school.

Savanah is Six

F
or as long as Poul could remember, he’d spent the summer at the lake where his brother drowned.

This year, as they climbed in the van, Leesa said cryptically, “Savannah is six.”

Poul held his hand on the ignition key but didn’t turn it. “I know.”

Each year since Savannah was born, it got harder to come out. The nightmares started earlier, grew more vivid, woke him with a scream choked down, a huge hurting lump he swallowed without voicing. Poul took longer to pack the van; he delayed the day he left, and when he finally started, he drove below the speed limit.

They pulled into the long, sloping driveway down to the cottage just after noon. Leesa had slept the last hour, and Savannah colored in the back seat, surrounded by baggage and groceries. Her head was down, very serious, turning a white sky into a blue one. She always struck Poul as a somber child, for six, as if there was something sad in her life that returned to her occasionally. Not that she didn’t smile or didn’t act silly at times, but he’d catch her staring out the window in her bedroom before she’d go to bed, or her hand would rest on a favorite toy without picking it up, and she seemed lost. She was quick to tears if either parent scolded her, which happened seldom, but even a spilled drink at dinner filled her eyes, the tears brimming at the edge, ready to slip away.