What the Hell Did I Just Read

  Once, Amy and I watched a BBC documentary series about sea life called The Blue Planet, because sometimes you just run out of stuff to watch. There was one scene where the crew tracked a gray whale and its newborn calf up the Pacific Ocean. These whales carry their babies for thirteen months, then after giving birth, they have to laboriously migrate thousands of miles north to find food. So, they’re slowly swimming up the California coast to Alaska, mother and baby side by side the whole way, like characters in a Pixar movie. But then, a pod of fifteen killer whales comes along—a pack of hunters, silently coordinating as they stealthily surrounded the doting mother and her baby. They swam in and started pushing themselves in between the mother and the child, separating them, and then jumping on top of the calf to try to drown it (remember, whales are mammals that breathe air—they’re not just spitting up at the surface for fun). The mother frantically tried to push the baby back up, so it could get a breath. But the killer whales just kept at it, for six hours, pushing the sputtering calf down and down again, while its mother watched. Relentless. Finally, they started biting at the infant, the churning water around them blooming bright red.

  Then came the twist ending: as soon as the baby was dead, the killer whales just … swam away. They took a couple of bites out of it and just let its dead, broken body sink to the bottom. It turned out they weren’t hungry; they had just killed a child in front of its mother, purely for fun. The final shot was of this mother whale, drifting aimlessly in the middle of the ocean, utterly alone. The killer whales swam off to live the rest of their lives healthy and happy and completely free of any consequence. There would be no justice for what happened, or even revenge. No one would console the mother. She was now completely devoid of purpose, in an endless, cold, uncaring ocean.

  Amy had nightmares about it for six weeks after.

  She sipped her tea and said, “Fine, but let’s assume for the moment there’s more to it. What’s his goal?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe just what he said. To feed or breed. Or both.”

  John said, “And he kept taking the Master’s ‘food’ to the pond, which happens to be at the mouth of the old mine. So, being a highly trained expert in this subject, I’m going to go way out on a limb and say that the thing he’s trying to feed is in that mine.”

  I asked Amy, “And you’re sure you didn’t see anything while you were there?”

  “Well, there was this gigantic serpent with a million eyes and a thousand butts but I didn’t think it was important so I didn’t mention it.”

  “That’ll be enough sarcasm, young lady. That’s not helpful.”

  John said, “How did you get away, again?”

  “I had my stun gun, the one you gave me. I waited until David, or the thing that was pretending to be David, wasn’t paying attention and then I zapped him. Right in the crotch. Over and over again. Then I grabbed the girl and we ran up the hill. It didn’t follow, like I said.”

  Why is she lying?

  John said, “Is there any chance it let you get away on purpose?”

  “You guys seem to find it impossible to comprehend that I could have managed an escape without your help.”

  I said, “Come on, you know what we’re saying here. I can’t shake the feeling that everything we’ve done has been in service to what he wants. That this is all part of his plan.”

  “Either way,” said John, “you know at some point we’re going to have to go back to that mine.”

  “Unless,” I said, “that’s what it wants, and we’d just be opening Pandora’s box.”

  John said, “Now I’m sure there’s a porno called that.”

  “Okay, so how long until Ted goes to the cops with his story?”

  “If we’re lucky, he waits and gathers more information first. If we’re unlucky, he’s talking to them right now. If we’re really unlucky, he doesn’t go to them at all.”

  “Why would that be unl—oh, right. It means he intends to come gunning for me in a rampage of cold-blooded vengeance. So, uh, we’ve got to figure all this out before that happens.”

  “Okay, I’ll get this next cup of coffee to go.”

  * * *

  John wanted to stop by his house to “let his dog out” and neither Amy nor I pointed out that the unspoken second half of that sentence was, “And also do some of the drugs that let me stay awake for fifty hours at a time.”

  Amy and I waited in the Jeep. Once we were alone, I said, “When you were talking to my doppelganger or whatever—how long did it take you to figure out it wasn’t me? I mean, you had breakfast with it, right?”

  For the second time, Amy looked briefly like she’d been caught. She tried to play it off and said, “Not long. We ate and made small talk for a bit, but I was uneasy the whole time. You had a third arm but I figured maybe I’d just never noticed it before.”

  “I’m serious, Amy. You and I know each other better than we know anyone else in the world. It’s creepy to think you could talk to a fake me through a whole meal before figuring out what was happening.”

  “You were acting weird, but how weird would somebody have to act before you started thinking ‘supernatural imposter’ instead of ‘oh, they’re being a little weird today’? You just seemed like…”

  She stared at the rain for a moment.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you were in a really good mood.”

  “Okay.”

  “You said you had fixed the leak in the roof.”

  “Well, that should have tipped you off right there.”

  I expected her to laugh at this, but she didn’t.

  John reappeared at his door and, looking frantic, yelled that we had to come in and see something. As always, I felt that emotion for which there is no word in English—a momentary anticipation of something either incredibly dangerous or incredibly stupid. Whether he had found in his home a dozen mutilated corpses or a tomato that was sort of shaped like a dick, John would announce it in the exact same way.

  We entered to find Diogee in the corner playing with something—snapping at it and batting it around with his paws. I thought at first it was a little wounded sparrow or hummingbird, but it was, in fact, one of the insect-like flying creatures that had previously been part of Nymph’s human “body.” It was wounded.

  Amy said, “Don’t let him eat it!”

  I said, “Yeah, it’d probably make him sick, who knows what that thing’s guts are made of. Don’t touch it with your hands, either—find something sharp you can use to stab it from afar. John, which spears do you still have?”

  Amy said, “Wait.” She ran into the kitchen and came back with a clear plastic pitcher. “Grab the dog.”

  John was able to pull the thrashing dog away from its prize and Amy coaxed the little insect creature into the pitcher. She replaced the lid and John ran duct tape around the lip.

  Amy said, “I need a knife or something, so we can cut air holes for it.”

  I said, “Who even says it breathes air?”

  John said, “More important, who’s to say it can’t squeeze out of a hole, even a tiny one? Or that it can’t spit venom or something? No, until we figure out what we’re dealing with, let’s err on the side of keeping it sealed.”

  John sat the pitcher on his coffee table and we all gathered around. It was hard to get a look at the creature, in the way that it’s hard to look at the little bits of lint floating around in front of your eyes—it could almost perfectly blend with the background when it wanted to. Occasionally, it would drop its cover and for just a few seconds we’d glimpse its true body.

  It appeared to be a pink, greasy, segmented thing, about the size of a child’s hand, its body polka-dotted with shiny black spots (or eyes?) from one end to the other. The spots were hexagonal and, as we watched, they would expand until they covered the creature’s body. Then, they would change color and project its camouflage, somehow. Along the bottom were two rows of thin little legs that ended in flexing, hooked feet. It had a
large pair of translucent wings like a housefly, one of which had been damaged.

  Amy said, “I assume we’ve never run into one of these before?”

  John said, “It’s my turn to name it.”

  I said, “No, John. Not unless you give it a name that actually makes sense.”

  John is very big on having us name every species and phenomena we come across, insisting that we should take a scientific approach and create a Charles Darwin-esque catalogue of our discoveries. We have to rotate this task because, despite claiming that it’s all for science, John also insists on coming up with just horrendously unhelpful names. He was the one who classified a supernatural abduction as a “screaming clown dick,” for instance. An insect-like parasite we observed inhabiting a person’s mouth and speaking in their voice was dubbed the “flip whippleblip,” and the inky black entities with the incomprehensible power to shape reality according to their whims are now known as “night sharts.” You might have noticed that his names are too busy being whimsical or profane to actually be descriptive at all, rendering them impossible to remember and thus utterly defeating the purpose.

  John thought carefully, then said, “It’s limp and pink like a dick, and has wings like an insect. I hereby christen this organism ‘the fuckroach.’”

  Amy sighed.

  The fuckroach buzzed clumsily around inside the pitcher, its gimpy wing having been damaged during our encounter and/or while being chewed on by Diogee. Convinced it couldn’t escape its prison, it settled to the bottom and folded its wings over its body.

  I said, “Well, Dr. Marconi definitely needs to see this.”

  John said, “I’ll try his number.” Then he pulled out his knife and started cutting open the pitcher. He was doing it because he needed his phone, and his phone was currently sitting at the bottom of said pitcher, which was otherwise empty.

  Amy and I actually watched John slice around the tape and start prying off the lid. Then Amy shook her head like she was waking up from a trance and quickly reached out to snatch John’s wrist.

  “Wait. What are we doing?”

  John stopped and all of us stared for a moment. I blinked, and the cell phone became that bug thing again, the image of the phone vanishing into its cluster of black, shimmering eyes. It tried to fly again, bouncing off the lid.

  John said, “Okay, that was weird.”

  I said, “It didn’t just make itself look like a phone. It convinced me it was a phone. Like, against all other evidence to the contrary.”

  John said, “It’s like it can reach in and just turn off all the logic circuits in your brain. All of your critical thought goes out the window, like in a dream. Suddenly you’re back in high school and a parrot with the voice of your gym coach is pulling all of your teeth out with its beak, but the whole time your only thought is: How am I going to explain this to the dentist?”

  Amy said, “It happened when it put its wings down. I think its body can make it look like something else, but when it layers the wings it becomes … hypnotic. Or something. I think we need to cover it up. So we can’t see it.”

  John grabbed the American flag blanket from the back of a nearby armchair and tossed it over the coffee table.

  I said, “Well, do you even think it works by sight?”

  Amy shrugged. “If not, I wouldn’t even know where to start, as far as precautions go.”

  Still, John put it in the closet, just to add one more layer of protection in the form of a flimsy wooden door.

  Amy said, “All right, let’s shift back into Sherlock mode. The thing wanted out of the pitcher and so turned itself into something that would make us want to free it. See? Even an alien bug thing operates on logic. So, what can we deduce from the other forms it’s taken?”

  John said, “Well, we know it plays on fear. Ted is a father and he saw a pedophile. I saw a Wall Street type because, as you know, I am concerned about issues of economic justice and class exploitation. Dave, what did you see? A clown? Your landlord? Fred Durst? Vegetarian meatloaf? Your own sexual inadequacy?”

  “I saw myself. A cooler, healthier version.”

  John said, “Well, we’d be here all night unpacking that.”

  Amy said, “It couldn’t fool the dog. It was trying to eat it, so its camouflage couldn’t trick him. That’s good, right? We’ve got a, uh, fudge roach detector. He tries to bite somebody, we know to be suspicious.”

  “Assuming,” I said, “that there’s more of these things.”

  “There are. John was dealing with Nymph at the same time I was dealing with the fake you. So yes, there’s at least one more person’s worth of these things out there.”

  John said, “There could be at least two more, if they’re both midgets.”

  I could feel a headache coming on. I pressed my fingers to my temples and said, “Or a thousand. I mean, how deep does this go?”

  Amy sat back on the sofa and ran her hand through her hair. “Well, what matters is we got the little girl back. As far as I’m concerned, that means we won today.”

  9. ANOTHER CHILD GOES MISSING

  It was midafternoon when Amy and I got back home. The overflowing drainage ditches had brought burbling water just twenty feet from the foundation of the dildo store. For a moment, I was thankful we were on the second floor, but if the first floor flooded we couldn’t just keep living up there and mocking the peasants drowning in the streets below us. I assumed the power would go out as wiring got submerged, plus the roads would be impassable. So, if the rain didn’t stop and the floodwater kept coming, where would we go? I guess the first option would be to stay at John’s place, but his neighborhood didn’t seem to be on much higher ground than mine and about two days under the same roof would surely mean the end of our friendship.

  Amy got out of her wet clothes and collapsed on the bed as soon as we got inside. She had to be back at work at eleven. You know, to keep food on my table. I lay there with her for a while, my arm around her shoulders, her facing away from me.

  “Are you … okay?”

  She muttered, “As okay as is reasonable to expect a person to be after this particular day.”

  She lay in silence for a bit, while I tried to think of how to phrase this next question.

  I said, “The thing that was pretending to be me, my doppelganger … it didn’t, uh, hurt you, did it? It didn’t try to … assault you?”

  “No. No.”

  “Okay.”

  Silence.

  “But I know you’re not telling me something.”

  “I swear to god, David, that I’ve told you every piece of useful information I can remember and if I remember more I’ll tell you that, too. But no, I don’t feel like reliving every single moment of what happened today. That shouldn’t be this hard to understand.”

  “It’s just … you don’t keep things from me. Ever. That’s not you.”

  “I keep things from you that you don’t want to know.”

  “That’s … no. Like what?”

  “David, I need to sleep. When we fight, I cry, and I get this adrenaline rush and then instead of sleeping I lay here for six straight hours thinking about what we yelled at each other. Just … let me sleep.”

  “I don’t want to fight. But, like, what do you keep from me? Just give me an example. What do you feel like you can’t tell me? You told me how the painkillers make you constipated, if you were comfortable sharing that—”

  “I can’t tell you things that are going to send you spiraling into a depression. I mean, just what I’m saying now, I feel like that’s enough to do it.”

  “I’m sorry if I give that impression. But come on, if I told you, ‘Amy, there are really important things that I withhold from you,’ you’d drive yourself crazy trying to find out what it was. There’s nothing I could say that would be worse than what you’d guess. Give me an example, that’s all.”

  She sighed, rubbed her eyes, and said, “We didn’t have enough to make rent in February. I had to borr
ow it from John.”

  I felt a black ooze of shame bubble up from a drain in my skull.

  Hey, she was right!

  I tried to formulate the perfect response, one that would reassure her, one that would convince her that she was being silly, that I wasn’t so fragile. Twenty minutes later, I was still trying to formulate that response and by then Amy was snoring softly, like she does. I quietly got up and closed the bedroom door.

  I went to the bathroom, stood over the sink, just staring at myself in the mirror.

  Then it hit me.

  There is no drip.

  It was still pouring outside, but the ceiling was dry. Wait, did the David doppelganger actually fix the roof?

  I shuffled back through the kitchen. The breakfast plates in the sink, the syrup. I tried to picture Amy eating breakfast with a functioning copy of me, having a casual conversation with it. The junk had been cleared from the card table—the last round of crap I’d been mailed, the Rodman book and the demon marble, all of it was gone and I didn’t see it on the floor. I went to the junk room and, sure enough, the stuff had been stashed away, presumably by my doppelganger. It was now arranged neatly on a shelf right next to the one-armed concrete snowman we always kept in there.

  My phone rang. It was John.

  I answered, “Fuck you and all the child slaves who manufactured your phone.”

  “Shit just got real. Turns out there are more.”

  “More what?”

  “Maggie wasn’t the only kid to go missing last night. There was at least one more.”

  “Oooooh, fuck.”

  “Kid belongs to a single mom, report didn’t get taken seriously by police dispatch because she sounded out of her mind. Hers got taken around the same time, they think.”

  “What the hell, John?”

  “I got in touch with her, name is Chastity Payton. She’s willing to talk to us.”

  “Of course she is.”

  “She lives at Camelot Terrace.”

  “All right. You want to come pick me up?”

  “I’m downstairs, in the parking lot.”