"I don’t know how long we have left."
"You better get to the good stuff soon then. You better get to the S-E-X."
"I’ve got a headache."
"You’re hallucinating too."
~~~~~
The way I lost my virginity was tentatively, and it was in Brett Deacon’s parent’s bedroom. It wasn’t with Brett Deacon, or either of his parents. It was with a girl named Michelle. Michelle had short, brushy yellow hair and thin eyebrows. She could make them arch and I liked when she did that.
"Have you ever?" she said, covered in a gray sheet on a bed that was about as big as the universe.
"Not really," I said, pressing the words to her cheek with my mouth. At the time I thought the cheek was what some magazines I’d read called an erogenous zone. I was on the other side of the sheet.
"Ok," she said.
"Do you want to?"
"Maybe."
"Maybe means no," I said.
"There are lots people down stairs."
"There are."
"But you’ve never?"
"No."
"What’s your name?"
"Jonathan Coutts."
"That sounds made up."
"I can make a better one up if you like."
"No, that’s fine."
And then she moved the sheet, and we were doing it.
~~~~~
"You made that name up," Gus said. His tweed jacket had started to fill out a little in the chest. It didn’t look like it did when I first hallucinated him.
"I asked about her afterwards," I said. "Brett said he thought her name was Michelle."
"I don’t think that counts anyway," Gus sat up.
"It counts as much as anything."
"What about Lydia?"
"I don’t know who that is."
"You really are imagining things now," he said. "What’d you do before the apocalypse started?
"Physicist."
"What kind?"
"Theoretical kind."
"What does that mean?"
"I did math."
"How come those buildings can bend like that?"
"Light."
"How does that work?"
~~~~~
There was one girl I kissed more than once. Her name was Brenda and she was an engineer. Our first kiss was on the Campton University Greens, which is this big flat garden in the middle of tall, metal buildings. It’s also where I was when the apocalypse started. But before that, it’s where Brenda kissed me.
"I’m not looking for a relationship," she said. We were sitting on the grass, and looking up at the sky, which was still blue (before the apocalypse) and not purple (after).
"Neither am I," I said.
"Don’t."
"I’m not."
"You are."
"Before you leave?"
"Ok," she said, and then we kissed. I didn’t hang any paintings or gently applaud. Our tongues were mannerly enough to use coasters.
"Happy now?" she asked.
"No," I said. And then I wasn’t mannerly at all. Neither was she.
~~~~~
"You made that name up too," Gus said. His hair looked longer. Cleaner. More defined. His mustache was shrinking as well.
"Why aren’t I hallucinating you like before?"
"I don’t control it."
"You’re changing."
"How can light make buildings bend and wobble and not fall down?"
"I don’t know."
"Would Lydia?"
"I don’t know who that is."
"What about Brenda then?"
"She left, I think."
"She was going to."
"She changed her mind."
~~~~~
Brenda didn’t go anywhere because we started going places together. The places we went involved things we had in common. Like machines. And numbers. That’s because we were working together trying to make machines do things with numbers. We never wanted to sleep in in the morning because we were in love. That’s a pretty nice thing to be, I think — an early riser.
"It’ll never work," she said about our project.
"It might," I said.
"What then?"
"If it works, things will be different."
"Is that a good thing?"
~~~~~
"How’s the head?" Gus asked.
"Probably doesn’t matter since the world seems to be ending."
"It’s not ending though. Not ending ending, is it?"
"I don’t know. Things look different."
Buildings were moving like glass accordions tumbling down stairs. The ground was swaying like unbalanced jelly. If I had to describe the apocalypse, I would say it was squidgy.
"Things are different," Gus said.
"You have breasts now," I said.
"Yes," Gus said. His voice was softer, coming from behind thinner teeth.
~~~~~
I didn’t want to remember it, but looking the way Gus did, I couldn’t help it. Brenda’s eyes were close to mine, open. She had her arms around me. Her dress was the softest thing.
"Take care of yourself," she said.
"You almost left once before," I said. "But you didn’t."
"The project’s nearly finished. You’ll be ok."
"I won’t."
"You’re being stubborn."
"I’m not."
"It’s better if I go now."
~~~~~
Gus put his head in my lap and we watched the buildings slink around the soft and wavy ground under a dark purple sky. Only really he was Brenda. And really Brenda was a made up name for Lydia, because I didn’t want to think about my wife when the apocalypse started.
"I’m glad you’re here with me," I said.
"It’s not me," she said, "It’s you."
And that’s when I fell away into warm, fluffy bits. It was a very polite end. It was a golf clap. And I don’t really exist anymore. And these are ideas traveling on light. And that’s ok because things are different now.
Daniel Lynch has twice been shortlisted for the QUT Postgraduate Writing Prize, and his short fiction can be found in the national literary anthology REX. He likes to make things up. Accordingly, he lives in a jumping castle. His suspicious sounding Twitter handle is @kurt_lurps.
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Bombardier
by K. Edwin Fritz; published March 18, 2014
Winner of the Editor's Choice Award, March 2014
Not everyone knows it, but perpetual motion is possible. And to manage the feat you need only follow the five simple steps detailed below. But before you read on, be forewarned. Venturing into a world that defies the laws of known reality cannot be undone. It is enormous, this thing. Like an infection that never runs dry of food.
~~~~~
STEP ONE: GET DIRTY. You probably fell into the tar pits thinking you actually jumped. You didn’t. Nobody does. And nobody is prepared for what’s in store when that vile, viscous blackness covers you from head to toe and then gets inside. You’re probably surprised at how immediate the sickness invades you. But you’re even more surprised at how much you like it now that you’ve begun your actual journey into perpetual motion. And that’s what it is, isn’t it? A thing that produces more than it costs? A thing that grows with each passing day and will never, ever end? And since you didn’t want this, weren’t even convinced it was really possible despite the rumors you’ve heard, you sit there with the fresh infection burning inside you and wonder how long you have to live and if there’s a way to avoid the inevitable. Or at least delay it.
~~~~~
Benjamin Acevedos rubbed the side of his neck as he traversed the many sidewalk squares, looking for a place he only hoped existed. His tainted life had begun just a few days before, and though he didn’t realize it just then, he was already well into the second step of becoming perpetual.
He couldn’t help rubbing his neck. The damned thing itched something mad and he didn’t car
e that the skin there reddened more as the minutes passed. But that wasn’t the contagion. That was just his fingers and palm irritating the surface, and the surface was not the problem.
His eyes flicked quickly from storefront to storefront, studying each one in the millisecond he allotted it, seeing nothing of value and growing ever-more frustrated. His gait had been just as quick and fluid when he left his apartment more than an hour before, but now it was slowing, appearing almost casual despite his little limp. There had simply been too many blocks, too many windows, too many names to read without any coming close to matching the one he had written on the slip of paper in his pocket. He was coming to think he had passed the place and would have to go home. Or that it didn’t exist. Either way, if he didn’t find it soon he’d end up searching again tomorrow. And the next day as well. And probably the rest of his life.
"Damn," he mumbled as he rubbed his neck and looked up again to the next storefront. No good. Another Chinese restaurant, that was all.
Not that he had any idea what kind of an establishment the so-called Bombardier’s would be. Would pretend to be, he told himself. Though he had no address and only a guess as to the street, there was one thing about Bombardier’s that Ben was absolutely certain. Whatever it looked like from the outside, on the inside there was something else entirely. Almost like a body laced with infection.
There was a steady pressured spike in his hip now and if he went much further the limp would be more pronounced. He decided to go another two blocks. Just to 50th street, he told himself. His instinct proved a good one because with less than an eyeful of doors left to examine, he found it.
Bombardier’s turned out to be a very simple, very old-looking little bar and grill with a humble, dark green door just like any of a hundred others. "Damn," he said again. But this time with his voice full of disbelief.
Through the window he could see the people inside that he’d been seeking with such passion. There were close to a dozen of them, and they didn’t look any different than any other bar flies. They smoked. They drank. They watched sports highlights on the little TV in one corner. But he knew what they really were. Infected and dying, just like him. All that Average Joe stuff was just more painting of details on the façade that was Bombardier’s Bar and Grill.
And how good they were at it! They really did look perfectly healthy. Perfectly content, albeit in a late-afternoon-at-the-bar kind of way. Or was that why a bar had been chosen as their front? Because their deep-set misery could be passed off so easily as Average Joe trying to drown his Average Sorrows? Ben thought about this and decided this was not only accurate, but deviously brilliant.
He stood on the sidewalk looking in like that, afraid he would end up hating the place and he’d be truly alone, unaware that, again, he was rubbing at his neck. His eyes watched the bar flies, but soon he wasn’t seeing them anymore. Instead he remembered a large span of slate-black water. The lake from his nightmares. Too still, that water, even for the middle of the night. Too cold as well, even for late November. And far above was the thin slice of crescent moon with the screaming girl below—
He quickly shook the vision away. He couldn’t deal with that now. Instead he took a breath and stepped toward Bombardier’s green front door. "Damn," he whispered as his left hand reached up toward the door. Meanwhile his right was ... well, where else? Rubbing the side of his neck, trying to clean the dirt. Trying to stop perpetual motion.
~~~~~
STEP TWO: GET SCRATCHING. Once the infection has found and attacked the first of your blood cells, it’s going to be there for a while. Forever, really, and once you realize the war has begun and your body is the battlefield, it’s best to sit back and enjoy the show. You can’t do much anyway. There’s no medicine for this kind of thing. And as you revel in that deep itch that feels so much like a whole slew of inch-deep worms, you tell yourself that an itch is still a feeling associated with being alive. And since life as you’ve always known it is over now, every true life experience should be appreciated. It’ll remind you how food now tastes like mold, music now sounds like distant hollows, and colors are now varying shades of gray ... but that itch will be real, and that’s something. Real feelings will be harder and harder to come by. And the itch of perpetual motion is the strongest of what’s left. It won’t be fun, but at least it’ll be living.
~~~~~
Ben knew immediately that he had the right place from the smell alone. It was weak, that smell, but wrong for a bar of the Average Joe. Average Joe bars didn’t smell dank and moist and perhaps a little fetid in the deeper corners. Average Joe bars smelled like hops and peanuts and sweat, but that was all. Bombardier’s smelled old and deeply humid, like jungle captured in a jar.
But even if the smell hadn’t given the place away, the bar flies did. They turned as one when he entered. Their many eyes sized him up instantly, looking for the intruder that he wasn’t and somehow seeing the reciprocal disease that he was. One of Us, those eyes said, and most went immediately back to their beers, their show, or their low-key conversations. A few gazes lingered a moment, daring Ben to come forward with his stuck tongue and get the preliminaries out of the way. But when he only stood those extra two seconds, even these turned back to their former sullen distractions. Only the bartender seemed to have the right to keep staring, and Ben didn’t mind.
Instead of the traditional mirror, a giant antique airplane propeller stretched across the wall behind her. Somehow the thick layers of lacquer covering the wood shone prominently in the overall gloom, and he liked it instantly. He felt drawn to it, as he supposed it was meant to do. He stepped toward the barmaid, making a point to drop his hand from his neck and keep his eyes firmly on hers.
"Beer?" she asked. Ben straddled a stool but neglected to nod. He hadn’t heard her. Here was one of his own, the very people who likely had the answers he craved, and he didn’t know how to proceed. The musty odor grew in the moments after the door had closed and seemed to envelop him. Again, he liked it instantly.
"I was just..." he started. But the next words that came to mind were ridiculous, of course, so he had cut himself off and tried to think of another way. "My name is Ben," he said, and that felt fine, so he tried some more. "I’ve been looking ... for a..." but again there was nothing rational. Damn! He looked at the bartender’s patient eyes. He felt the dozen other patrons taking a mild but bored interest in him now. He thought about the screaming girl from his dream and the flat, black water that she had been drowning in. Enjoy the itch, he thought, and reached back up to his neck and rubbed.
"I’ve been ... bitten," he said. "Please tell me this place has people like me. I ... I need..." and here again he found himself floundering. But he saw the bartender hadn’t laughed or winced in confusion. She’d only gone on listening, an absolute pro if there ever was one. "I don’t want to be alone," he said finally.
Then the bartender gave him a little smirk from the left side of her mouth and a gentle hitch from her belly that could only be restrained laughter. She turned her head and pulled the elastic collar of her shirt away from her neck. The two dots of pinkish red looked as fresh as his own, though Ben was sure hers had been there for weeks, if not months. "It’s alright, Sweets," the bartender cooed as she released the collar and gave him a soft smile again. "You got the right place."
Ben exhaled a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding and the bartender poured him a thick, dark beer. "This one’s on me," she said, and Ben nodded his thanks. He pulled it to his face and inhaled. It was heady. Deep and nearly robust. One might say it was slightly dank. It was perfect. The exact drink he had been longing for.
Well, not ‘exact’, he thought. But close. Close enough.
Ben closed his eyes and took a hard sip. It tasted like jungle, almost thick enough to chew and teeming with life. "Daaaamn," Ben breathed, and the bartender laughed.
"Tastes like blood, doesn’t it?" she asked. Her smirk and lifted eyebrows were laced wi
th cockiness which he somehow didn’t mind.
"No," he said, but then suddenly the aftertaste did, and he found himself licking his lips and holding off the need to gulp the rest in five or six long hard swallows. "Well, yeah. A little."
"My own concoction," she said. "Takes the edge off."
Ben smirked back. "Sure does," he said, and poured back a long drink of the beer that tasted like life itself.
~~~~~
STEP THREE: GET CRANKED. This infection is like a drug. At first you hate it, but then you start wanting it because you don’t know anything else. It consumes you. So you go get more. Lots more. Of course, the danger is that you’ll be that much closer to death too, but perpetual motion rolls only forward, you understand? Some will try to hold off this next step, thinking they can withstand the need of it. But they can’t. Not forever. Eventually, every one of them will break and go get their fix. And not one of them will say they regret it the next day. And that’s where you are now. Your soul is slipping away and you care less every day, so eventually you just give in and indulge. It’s perpetual motion, after all. And you’ve come to accept that it strengthens each day even as you weaken.
~~~~~
"Ben..." Ben said, pointing to himself. Then he pointed to the bartender and lifted his brows.
"Miranda," she said, and offered her hand. He shook it, pulled again from his bottled jungle, and rubbed the two pinholes in his neck for the thousandth time.
"How long since you, uh...?" he began.
"Six months," Miranda said, and not without some pride. "Only one here any longer is the Jedi over there." She pointed her eyes to a corner table that sat deep in shadows.
"Jedi?" he said. The man sitting there looked anything but the physical prowess one would associate with science fiction heroes. He was old with grayed hair long enough to need more than just a trim. His head hung low over a beer that looked as tepid as the room. He didn’t move at Miranda’s mention of him.
"Says he’s ‘At One’ with it," she said. "Not that he ever explains. He ... doesn’t talk much. Probably he is, though. Got his over two years ago," she said. Ben’s mind did a low whistle of appreciation, though his lips didn’t actually move. He was thinking about how miserable he’d been for the three days he’d dealt with the itch at the skin on his neck.
Under the skin, he corrected.
He thought about how the itch had grown deeper even in that time. How his nights were filled with the black-water memory repeated over and over no matter how many times he woke from it dripping with sweat and on the verge of screaming aloud.