The Lowest Heaven (29 page)

“I brought her back,” Enyo said.

The woman jabbed Enyo in the chest. “Get back in the fucking satellite,” she said. “And do your fucking job.”

Back to the beginning. Around and around.

Enyo wasn’t sure how it happened, the first time. She was standing outside the escape pod, a bulbous, nasty little thing that made up the core of the internode. It seemed an odd place for it. Why put the escape pod at the center of the satellite? But that’s where the thing decided to grow it. And so that’s where it was.

She stood there as the satellite took its first snapshot of the quadrant they moved through. And something shifted. Some core part of her. That’s when the memories started. The memories of the other pieces. The snapshots.

That’s when she realized what Enyo-Enyo really was.

Enyo stepped up into the escape pod. She sealed it shut. Her breathing was heavy. She closed her eyes. She had to go home, now, before it broke her into more pieces. Before it reminded her of what she was. War criminal. Flesh dealer. Monster.

As she sealed the escape pod and began drowning in life-sustaining fluid, she realized it was not meant for her escape. Enyo-Enyo had placed it there for another purpose.

The satellite took a snapshot.

And there, on the other side of the fluid-filled pod, she saw her own face.

The squalling children were imperfect, like Enyo. She had already sold Reeb to some infertile young diplomatic aid’s broker in the flesh pits for a paltry sum. It was not enough to get her off the shit asteroid at the ass end of the Mushta Mura arm. She would die out here of some green plague, some white dust contagion. The death dealers would string her up and sell her parts. She’d be nothing. All this pain and anguish, for nothing.

Later, she could not recall how she found the place. Whispered rumors. A mangled transmission. She found herself walking into a chemically scrubbed medical office, like some place you’d go to have an industrial part grafted on for growing. The logo on the spiral of the door, and the coats of the staff, was a double circle shot through with a blue dart.

“I heard you’re not looking for eggs or embryos,” she said, and set Dysmonia’s swaddled little body on the counter.

The receptionist smiled. White, white teeth. He blinked, and a woman came up from the back. She was a tall brown-skinned woman with large hands and a grim face.

“I’m Arso Tohl,” the woman said. “Let’s have a look.”

They paid Enyo enough to leave not just the asteroid, but the Mushta Mura arm entirely. She fled with a hot bundle of currency instead of a squalling, temperamental child. When she entered the armed forces outside the Sol system, she did so because it was the furthest arm of the galaxy from her own. When a neighboring system paid her to start a war, she did so gladly.

She did not expect to see or hear from the butchers again.

Not until she saw the logo on the satellite recruiter’s uniform.

Enyo ate her fill of the jellified colonists and slogged back to the satellite to feed it, to feed Enyo-Enyo. Reeb’s annoying voice had grown silent. He always stopped protesting after the first dozen.

She found him sitting in the internode with the prisoner, his hands pressed against the base of the pod. His head was lowered.

“It was enough to make the next turn,” Enyo said.

“It always is,” he said.

“There will be other crews,” she said.

“I know.”

“Then why are you melancholy?” If she could see his face, it would be winter.

He raised his head. Stared at the semblance of a body floating in the viscous fluid. “I’m not really here, am I?”

“This turn? I don’t know. Sometimes you are. Sometimes you aren’t. It depends on how many snapshots Enyo-Enyo has taken this turn. And how she wants it all to turn out this time.”

“When did you put yourself in here?” He patted the prisoner’s pod.

“When things got too complicated to bear,” she said. “When I realized who Enyo-Enyo was.” She went to the slick feeding console. She vomited the condensed protein stew of the colonists into the receptacle. When it was over, she fell back, exhausted.

“Let’s play screes,” she said. “Before the next snapshot. We might be different people, then.”

“We can only hope,” Reeb said, and pulled his hands away from the prisoner.

MATT JONES

No one had heard of our dumb ass town before the comet came. Afterwards, the whole world knew the name Meridian. Those of us who called it home would come to wish they hadn’t, and no one more than me.

They say Meridian is the sixth biggest city in Mississippi, but before you go getting all impressed, take a look at the competition. Exactly. If you ask me, calling Meridian a city is giving it airs and graces it has no business putting on. Main Street may boast a dozen stores, but the smaller streets that run parallel to it and the railway track have never filled all their plots. There’s a movie theater, a library and a lot of bars, none that a woman with half her senses would venture in alone. There’s the stone Municipal Building that must’ve been built in a grander age. Opposite that is a prefab office where Meridian’s six Democrats eat pizza and talk about how they’re gonna bring Reagan down.

But for a couple of weeks, during an otherwise uneventful spring in ‘86, Meridian was packed with reporters and cameramen, and you couldn’t get a room at the motel or even rent a spare bedroom, not for love nor money. And everyone was talking about the comet and the thirty-six people that lost their lives on account of it. One of the dead was Jordan Danes. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone as much as I loved him.

He was seventeen when he died, two years older than me. He’d been held back twice, so we could’ve shared some classes but we didn’t. He’d been in so much trouble that half the teachers wouldn’t have him in their class. As far as I could make out, he did double Shop and not a lot else – not that I had memorized his whole schedule or nothing.

Jordan would disappear from school for weeks, there were always talk as to why – mostly people decided that he was in juvenile detention or had overdosed. People were always talking about Jordan Danes. I’d never spoken a single word to him, although I’d imagined whole conversations, so you can guess how relieved I was when he’d show up, I guess just to prove to the world that he wasn’t dead or in jail.

He’d done another of his disappearing acts that winter. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of months until I spied him on Main Street with the flying saucer people, looking a little sheepish and holding a placard that said “THE ASCENSION IS NEAR”.

Just seeing him made my stomach drop like a bowling ball. You’re wondering if I’m a fag, right? I’m gay. There. I said it. I don’t go around telling folk, obviously. Meridian isn’t New York City. There was a guy working at the movie theatre. He let slip to his boss that he was moving in with his boyfriend and got fired on the spot. Two days later someone painted “AIDS SCUM” on his door. Last I heard he was making a living as a female impersonator down in New Orleans.

So, no, I don’t go around telling folk.

Jordan saw me coming and surprised me by calling out my name. I had no idea he knew who I was, or that I’d made the tiniest impression on his life. I acted all nonchalant, told him I hadn’t seen him in school, but all the while I was sneaking looks at him, just soaking him up.

“They made it clear that I wasn’t welcome,” he said. “Some shit went missing from the A/V closet,” he shrugged, and looked away with what might have been regret.

Jordan was mixed-race – black, white and maybe something else, something exotic like South American or Egyptian. Tall and lean, but shy of lanky. His skin was the color of caramel and flawless, his hair was black and curly, but loose, like it didn’t have the will to wind itself up into an Afro, and so it hung down to his shoulders in corkscrew curls. He was beautiful alright, big brown doe eyes and sculpted lips, the lower one a pale rose pink. Beautiful and troubled boys – I still got no defense against them.

“You gonna come or what?” he asked.

I blushed, thinking he had caught me looking at him, before I realized he was holding out a leaflet.

“Huh?” It was cheaply printed, black ink on blue paper. There was a photograph of a flying saucer. Not a real one obviously. I’m not a total dick. It was from one of those 1950s films, that always look like the color’s been turned up too high, and where the sexy space aliens look like those women from the B-52s.

The leaflet read “PREPARE TO ASCEND”. It told me that there was a meeting tonight for anyone who was ready for “the trip of lifetime”.

“Are you gonna be there?” I asked, before kicking myself for how desperate that made me sound.

Jordan chuckled, and for a second I was sure he’d seen straight through me, then he looked a little sad and shrugged.

“It ain’t like I’ve anyplace else to be,” he said.

“How dumb are you?” My father yelled and waved the leaflet in my face. “Those folk are as crazy as snakes and twice as dangerous.”

Well, at least now I knew for sure that he was going through my things. I wouldn’t be hanging my jacket in the hall again anytime soon.

“Are you done?” I said, recklessly.

“No, I am not done. I will tell you when I am done. And get your hand off your hip,” he said and slapped my arm loose, “What kind of boy are you?”

“Tom!” My mom interjected.

I felt hot shame sting my face. Shame for what my father thought of me, and for my mother’s need to protect me from it. I stalked off to my room not saying another word, and laid low for a couple of hours.

My father and I hadn’t seen eye to eye since, well, since I could walk and talk. You don’t have to wear gold eye shadow for your Pa to know you’re never gonna be a quarterback. And as much as I act like I don’t give a twirly fuck what he thinks about me, it ain’t always easy to live with that look of disappointment on your father’s face.

I waited til I heard the opening music to “Highway to Heaven”, the only TV show my Pa said was worth giving the time of day and snuck out the front door with my sneakers in my hands.

The meeting was in an old plantation house on the outskirts of town. It’d been converted into a luxury holiday home – the Flying Saucer People were clearly living in style. I rode out on my bike, abandoning it amongst the wisteria that hung from the trees and veranda. The sun had only just set and the front yard was still warm and full of the noise of crickets and the heavy sweet scent of gardenia. There was the sound of a party coming from the back yard and I followed the veranda around. There were forty or fifty there, more than I had thought, but they were exactly the kind of oddballs, lonely and lost you’d expect.

Jordan was in charge of a small trestle table of refreshments. He’d tied his curls back into a ponytail, and was wearing dungarees that made him look like he was what my grandma would’ve called “slow”. For a horrible moment, he looked like he belonged among the all the other sideshow freaks of Meridian life.

Then he caught sight of me, grinned and waved me over. His smile lit me up like a toy turned on for the first time – blazing into action, lights flashing, motor whirring. My heart pounded. A bead of cold sweat was making its way down past the small of my back by the time I got over to him.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hay’s for horses, ass-bite,” I squeaked in a high voice I didn’t recognize. Could I have sounded more like a moron?

“They got me serving juice,” he said, and then lent in conspiratorially, “but I can modify yours.”

He tugged a flask of whiskey from the inside of his pants.

“I’m good,” I said and took a sip of juice. My folks don’t allow alcohol in the house and the unpopular girls I hang out with don’t go near it. Hooch ain’t so big in Bible Study. While I was pretty sure I wouldn’t go crazy after one glass, uninhibited was the last thing I could risk feeling around Jordan Danes.

Someone called the meeting to a start. Jordan touched my arm as he guided me over towards a makeshift stage in the back yard, where a well-dressed couple was preparing to address the human detritus. The warmth of his hand left an impression long after it was gone. I could feel the memory of his fingertips against my skin.

Carlton Ray and his wife didn’t look like UFO freaks, more like TV evangelists, but they sure knew how to work a crowd. He was maybe fifty, with broad shoulders and a wry smile that somehow made you feel he knew what you were thinking. His wife was an off the shelf Southern Belle, with a huge, immobile hairdo and shoulder pads that made her as broad as her husband. She glowed with confidence and a salon tan.

“You may be wondering why you’re here,” Carlton Ray announced to the weirdoes, who inched forward, anxious for the answer. “Well I ain’t gonna make your life easy for you and tell you. I want you to search deep inside yourself for the answer to that question. Why aren’t you out in the world – living, loving, succeeding? Why is it you feel you fit no place at all?”

Carlton turned his attention to me, “you got an answer for me, son?”

I was so surprised by him addressing me directly I froze and looked away.

“You think you’re out of step with the world? Well I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong, it’s the
world
that’s lost its footing and lost its way. The solution is not in the size of your paycheck or the car you drive. A few of you are wise souls, sensitive enough to know this – and
that
is why you’re here.

“What can we do? How do we turn back the tide and get the human race back on course? I have bad news for you. We can’t. There is no hope for them. They have de-evolved into selfishness and selfism.

“But there is help for
us
. You are here because you are still on the true path. You are still evolving. I have good news. Those of us still alive to generosity of spirit, those of us desiring a simple, unselfish connection to another person have a way out.”

He looked to the heavens. “Above us a comet is heading towards the Earth. A thousand tons of stone, a three hundred mile cloud of dust and ice in its wake. Zooming past the Earth to be flung around the sun and back out into the farthest recesses of the solar system. But hidden in the comet’s tail is our way out. A space ship is there, avoiding detection from NASA and the CIA. Slipping into the solar system without any scientist or politician being any the wiser. As I speak to you, Zedekiah is piloting his ship, dodging the chunks of rock and glaciers of ice that break away from the comet. He’s travelled light years. He’s coming. He’s coming for us.”

I had to stop myself from laughing. The idea of a spaceman playing Asteroids in a comet’s tail was so much bullshit. I smirked and turned to Jordan to make a joke, expecting to see my expression reflected on his face, but he was staring at the night sky, tears in the corners of his perfect brown eyes.

Afterwards, we retreated to a peeling white swing chair on the veranda, which creaked ominously beneath our weight. I leant forward and blocked Jordan from view as he rolled a joint on the sly. He palmed it like a conjurer when Carlton and his wife came over, and winked conspiratorially at me.

“Evening Jordan, I see you’ve found yourself a friend.”

Jordan introduced me and I shook Carlton’s large, warm hand. He had a grip like a vice.

“Good to meet you son,” he said, and looked me right in the eye, “Are you ready for the ascension?”

“No sir.”

“Oh, and why is that?”

“Well to start with, Halley’s Comet may travel at one hundred and fifty thousand miles per hour, but it still takes seventy-six years to orbit the sun. Your friend Zebedee is going be very old or very dead by the time he gets here.”

Carlton just laughed. “Well, we have a real live wire here, don’t we?”

“Just saying,” I shrugged ungraciously.

Carlton ruffled my hair like I was a Shih Tzu. “Well you don’t seem to find any hardship fitting in on Planet Earth, no need for Jordan here to save you a place next to him on Zedekiah’s ship.”

“No sir,” I said, feeling an inexplicable pang of loss. If there was a seat next to Jordan, I wanted to be sitting in it, even if it and the flying saucer it were attached to were so much baloney.

Carlton’s wife was staring at me with none of her husband’s bonhomie. “Your folks know where you are, son?” she asked, scrutinizing me. She didn’t wait for an answer but instead turned to Carlton, not bothering to lower her voice.

“He’s underage. We don’t need that kind of trouble.”

Before Carlton Ray could respond, a woman rushed into the garden, dragging two bewildered kids in her wake. She charged up to an apple-shaped loser with a comb over who’d been busy chatting up a middle-aged woman with saggy breasts and a disappointed frown.

“Randall!” The new arrival yelled. “Randall, look at me, I’m talking to you.” The man with the comb over didn’t even turn to her, like he was stone deaf.

The angry woman had dyed blonde hair that hadn’t been done in a good while. There were dark circles under her eyes.

“You emptied the checking account. How am I supposed to pay the rent? How am I supposed to put a roof over our children’s heads? You tell me that?”

Randall was putting on a great show of being invisible, but the way he stiffened up told anyone looking that he knew she was there alright.

“Look at me! Will you look at me? I’m standing right beside you!”

Carlton Ray and his wife made a beeline for the woman. She got so agitated on seeing them that the frowning woman had to restrain her.

“You stole all our money!” Randall’s wife screamed at Carlton Ray.

If he was surprised in the slightest by her accusation he didn’t show it.

“How am I supposed to feed my kids?” The anger went out of her. She staggered and almost fell, sobbing hopelessly.

I felt just dreadful for her. I turned to Jordan. He wasn’t paying the scene any attention, but it was taking some effort.

“Happens a lot,” he said eventually and lit the doobie. He took a toke and exhaled discreetly into the darkness.

“You really believe you’re gonna go hitch a ride on a meteor and go bouncing around the satellites?”

He shrugged, “Stranger things have happened.”

When? I thought but didn’t say. “What do your folks think about it?”

“Not a lot. They left.”

“What do you mean, ‘left’?”

He took another long, sorrowful toke on the joint. “I came home. I’d been away a few days. They’d moved out of the trailer. Handed back the keys. No address. No note. Nothing.”