The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (10 page)

Then the cataclysm passed and silence and warmth returned to the bathroom. Joe was left with new knowledge; it had just been dropped off to him, as if from a helicopter hovering above a catastrophe site—though this had been no helicopter or something that made only stops upon the Earth; this had been at least the idea of a spaceship, the one that had brought George to this planet, for he was an alien from “elsewhere,” George number-for-name, or however he really was known.

It made perfect sense. He was here to destroy it all. Joe’s only question was: how long had George been here like that? He hadn’t seemed distant and detached as a kid, so had he been abducted later, snatched and then returned, with some crucial part of him gone? Were the two years they had lost touch the time when the transformation took place? Or had he actually been exchanged entirely for another creature (one thinner, better dressed, famous, and of course, with inhuman priorities)? Or had George-not-George been there all along, playing the “person” he had been and preparing to strike, a one-man sleeper cell from outer space? There were so many questions.

There were more questions than he had answers—or pills, for that matter, for Joe now saw he was running even lower than he thought, and he could have no more answers (or come to any more of these kinds of conclusions) without them. But he felt this knowledge demanded action, and he was the only one who could take it, since he was the only one who knew.

When he came shakily downstairs, George was already by the door, blinking a bit more than usual and moving side to side in a restless style that suggested impatience. In his hand was a train schedule he had obviously ripped from the kitchen cabinet, for tape was still stuck to its edges. He no longer had trouble deciphering it, had instead become an instant expert.

“It’s 8:55,” he said. “If we miss the 9:16, there’s nothing again until midnight.”

Joe was nearly amused by George’s opportunistic sense and non-sense of such things as a train schedule; obviously he could have any ability, be any character he wanted, was adaptable as no one on Earth was. Too bad he had given himself away by his coldness. Too bad Joe had deduced the truth!

Yet Joe concealed his own cleverness with a clueless “Sure, sure, let’s go,” fighting to form the words with both his lips going every which way at once for reasons he attributed only to fatigue, the fact of the pills evaded shamefacedly since he had never admitted to a soul he took so many—not even to himself.

George tried to quickly say goodbye to Michelle and Tad, his earlier admiration for them now replaced by a single-minded desire to leave. Yet he had to agree, with a grimace, to be pulled close and hugged by Michelle, who held him as if embracing for a final time any appreciation of her as a person. George appeared to get no pleasure from her fleshy press against him, more evidence of his alien-ness: who didn’t enjoy a little feel of a friend’s full-breasted wife? Joe endured whole dinner parties for them, and he didn’t begrudge Michelle the same small treat for herself, sometimes even pimped her out for it, especially if it meant he could avoid having sex with her himself later (though, to be honest, between the two of them whose indifference was greater in this regard was hard to figure out). For his part, Tad only looked away once from the TV, with a small yet terrifying smile, his thumbs still shooting with deadly accuracy independent of him, seeming to consider the day when he could kill George, too, and everyone else on earth.

“We’ve only got sixteen minutes,” George said as they came outside, so eager he only carried and didn’t wear his coat in the nippy air.

“No problem,” Joe replied, gunning the car. “We’ve got six minutes to spare, if we don’t hit traffic. I’m going to take a different way from the way we came.”

Joe knew this would do little to assure George; he wanted to watch him squirm. George’s determination to go was exhibit B (or C? Or D?) against him, this feverish need to flee normality as if he feared being infected by it. (Or had he already laid his eggs and so completed his mission? Or left behind his slow-ticking, invisible-to-the-human eye, made-of-other-planet-particles bomb? Or would he at a certain hour turn back into a giant snake, his slick, dripping skin bursting through his sweater, jeans, and leather sneaker-shoe?)

“You sure you’re okay to drive?” George asked nervously as Joe backed screeching out of the driveway, knocking over a trash can as he hit the street.

“Sure. Don’t worry so much,” Joe said, pronouncing it “woolly” and so being of course a comfort only to someone as obsessed with exiting (and willing to absurdly accept such an answer) as George.

“Okay, good,” George said.

After his initial burst of speed, Joe purposely dropped down to a pace below the limit on the passing signs. He noticed George’s foot pressing on the passenger side of the floor, as if willing Joe to pick it up, after sneaking a peek at the watch beneath his glove.

“Think we’ll make it?” George asked with desperate hope.

“I haven’t missed one yet,” Joe replied; then to remove any relief, added, “Of course I’ve never cut it this close.”

“You haven’t?” George’s voice was shrill.

“No, but there’s a first time for everything.”

Beyond the slowing of his speed, Joe was also swerving wildly around the roads. This was no ploy but a defensive reaction to seeing supernatural cars and caravans—some with wings, others with huge, twice-tractor-size wheels—coming at, then racing right through his car.

“That was a close one,” Joe said, after a near miss.

“What was?”

“Nothing.” Why tip his hand? If Joe could see such oncoming “traffic,” he could see through George as well, and he wanted to ease slowly into this revelation.

“Oops,” he said, starting to do just that. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That thump. Like a flat tire. Oops. There it goes again.”

“I haven’t heard a thing.”

“Really? Jeez, let me pull over for a second and see.”

“
What
? But, no, we can’t—”

Not signalling—there were rarely real cars on the near-black back road, the reason he had chosen it—Joe pulled over to where a shoulder should have been but was instead just grass bordering the woods beyond. Then he killed the lights, turned off the engine, and got out.

George was too stunned to say anything besides a beseeching “The time—.” The words echoed in the empty area and seemed to refer meaningfully to their pasts, the changes they had made in themselves, and a world they could no longer recreate. Or was it the start of an explanation for his years-long masquerade—or sudden subterfuge—or however long it had taken him to alter himself, that Joe didn’t stay for him to complete?

His breath visible, stumbling not on ice but from drug-caused clumsiness, Joe pulled on the gloves he had removed to drive. Then he knelt and made to “inspect” the back tires. After a long enough pause, he called, “Just what I thought!” knowing that George’s closed windows limited how much he could make out.

“What’d you say?” George asked predictably, emerging to learn the answer—and then stopping, suddenly, when he saw that Joe had popped the trunk.

“Hey, we don’t have time to—” he said, advancing. “Can’t we just drive on the tire until we get there? I never heard anything myself anyway.”

George’s voice had returned to one rougher, less recent and more recognizable than the one made soft and feathery by the lofty thoughts it had to convey. George more resembled his old self, too, looked goofier, less the grand man of letters. Were these reversals caused by panic? Joe’s imagination? Or was George purposely shape-shifting to put Joe at ease and off the track? Joe had no time to choose an answer; he was too busy searching in the trunk for the implement he wanted.

“This’ll only take a minute,” he said.

He saw it immediately, but scrambled more for show. Then saying “Got it!” he turned and looked up. George was right beside him, his expression one of total confusion and complete understanding, if that made sense, which it did to Joe, the way many strange things did now. Then George said, as if realizing something crucial in his life had ended and would never again begin, “I’ve missed the train.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.” Now it was resignation—though not exactly acceptance, which meant there was also the quiet start of rage.

To forestall it growing—for who knew what monster this emotion would turn George into, and how many heads and grabbing hands he would have—Joe revealed what he had found in the trunk. It wasn’t what he assumed George assumed it to be, a jack. It was instead a shovel Joe had bought as a gift for Michelle, for her to start digging that garden she always said (past the point of tedium) she wanted. He had hoped that her creating one would occupy her for hours on end each day, without ever needing his company. But he had (out of pure indolence) forgotten to give it to her, and the tool still had a price tag like a cardboard noose tied around its neck. He stared, deciding whether to peel it off, for appearances sake.

“What’s going on? Are you drunk?” George asked, his anger growing, though luckily waiting until it had all the information it needed to explode.

Then Joe thought he had no time to lose, there was a world to save. So he lifted the shovel and smacked George square in the face with it.

George staggered back, slightly, his hands out to signal stop, his nose and lower brow caving in. Before he could escape, Joe hit him again, this time on the side of his head, harder than he’d ever hit anything in his life. He dented George’s skull right above his left ear. After George went down, standing over him Joe finished him off with a final smash—like a last hammer blow to nail—that flattened the rest of his face. Then he stood there, panting, before deciding he better drag his body into the woods.

He dragged George by the foot, the leather half-shoe coming off in his hand and making him cry out as if he held the foot itself. The journey was arduous in ways he hadn’t imagined, and he felt new aches in his lower back and wrists as he finally got the one hundred and sixty-pound corpse (if only he did as many push-ups every day as George obviously had!) to a forested area suitably remote from the road—plus he had the shovel to contend with, which he pulled along with one pinky hooked into the hole of its handle, the price tag still stupidly shaking against his skin.

The woods where he was were obviously part of a hiking trail, for the moon revealed paint marks on trees, which tipped travellers on which way to turn. For a second, Joe was sure he saw a troop of boy scouts wearing uniforms from Depression-era Norman Rockwell paintings parade past, but they disappeared as quickly as he had made them come.

Then he was left with just the digging and burying and the worrying about his health—and finally the cutting of corners by covering with leaves the parts of the body he could not submerge. At last, he approved of the job he’d done, a public service for the human race that would forever go unknown.

Dragging the shovel behind him, Joe found his way back to the car, necessity giving him a better sense of direction than he’d ever had. (His lack of it was a sore point with Michelle on quarrelsome family car trips full of cranky U-turns, reluctant asking of directions, and silent miles with front seats full of angry Mommy and Daddy, while in the backseat, with his thumbs, Tad destroyed more helpless people on a portable, lap-sized death machine.)

Joe waited a second before re-entering the car—but how many cooling-off minutes would discourage a coronary? (It had always been an hour between swimming and eating, but that was cramps and who had an hour?) Then, deciding if he died he died and the car must be kind of cold anyway, he began to get in.

The second his key was inserted, the car started screaming, as if telling everyone what was happening on the dark, abandoned road. To his horror, Joe realized he had pressed with his palm the red security thing on the key chain (something which he had once done to devastating effect in front of the town’s Farmers’ Market, setting off what sounded like a siren and briefly ruining his local reputation). Now, knowing only that closing and re-opening the door would stop the Subaru’s shrieking, he frantically, hands shaking, tried to make this happen. Only after a too-loud second slamming of the door did the alarm, with a final infuriated croak, actually end.

Sweating uncomfortably, Joe stood near the silent road, waiting for the authorities or anyone else who had something against him to appear, but no one did. So he entered the car, immediately locking the door, fearing retaliation from George’s interplanetary partners once they’d learned of their (if this was what he was) leader’s demise.

Before he turned on the motor, he looked down and saw grim proof of his suspicions: blood that had obviously spurted from George as he was dying now stained the front of Joe’s big down jacket. Yet it wasn’t red or frankly any colour he recognized, but a kind of sick-making amalgam of all colours, with white the dominant shade in its weird little rainbow: confirmation that George had come from (and now perhaps returned to) another universe. Joe would have to hide the jacket—or maybe secretly keep it, in case he had to appear in an intergalactic court. Then he drove home fairly competently and facing no traffic.

He assumed no one would be the wiser or none the wiser or whatever the expression was; he was home free, in other words. He pulled into his driveway, wondering who’d knocked over his trash can—probably that nasty kid from next door, hyperactive Billy. Then he got out, went in, and walked right into Michelle, who was wearing her nightgown, had been worried that he’d been gone so long, and immediately said to him, “My God, why is there so much blood on your coat?”

In the harsh light of the hall, Joe saw that his jacket had indeed been colour-corrected, the liquid now truly red—or the dark brown blood becomes when it starts to dry. Discombobulated, yet with an even faithful married man’s mastery of lying (about everything from how he doesn’t watch internet porn to how he didn’t gamble away his paycheque to why he
was
just paying attention), Joe immediately began improvising a story, one about a dark highway, a deer, and its accidental death by their car. It was so convoluted that Michelle interrupted, as he planned, with, “Okay, okay, as long you and George are all right. Let’s just get that jacket off.”