Captain Myron, no stranger to throwing himself onto the ground in a dramatic tantrum, flung himself backward, thrashing and grunting as he flopped his arms and kicked his legs in tremendous spasms of infuriation.
Captain Myron pooped himself.
“I am so angry! I am on fire!”
Then Captain Myron stood up, unstuck the seat of his pants from his cog rear, and bit Clarence’s nose completely off the maître d’s face. And Captain Myron did not stop eating until he’d chewed away Clarence’s entire face from the cheekbones down to his Adam’s apple, and one of his ears.
The left one.
And Captain Myron, satisfied, his pants sagging with the weight of his cog turds, left Le Lapin et l’Homme Mécanique and went to the control room of the Tennessee, where, still seething with rage, he switched several of the ship’s key systems off and on.
Captains get to do whatever they want to do, including having the final say about who the victim is.
Right Side Up, Upside Down
Rowan knew right away. As my lifelong caretaker, he’d changed my diapers more than my own parents had.
I don’t think either of my parents ever actually did change my diapers when I was a baby.
I didn’t even need to open my mouth after I got back to my room, where he’d been waiting with Billy.
Rowan went into the bathroom. I heard the water in the tub come on.
“You’re messed up,” Billy Hinman said.
“Sorry. I’m ugly. I shouldn’t be seen near someone like you.”
It was a mean thing to say, I know. But I was in a terrible mood.
“Where did you go? Rowan was worried about you.”
“I found the girl,” I said. “Parker tells me she’s a cog, but he’s full of shit.”
“All cogs are full of shit,” Billy said. “What’s she look like?”
“Not like me, bud. Beautiful.”
And that was a stupid thing to say. What did it matter what she looked like? She was real—I knew it—another human being, and there would never again be a time when there were too many human beings anywhere. So I said, “But I know she’s real. I could smell her as clearly as I can smell the raspberry puree that was on top of the dessert you ate.”
Billy Hinman nodded, carefully appreciating my accuracy. “Well, you’ve always had the nose.” He leaned forward from where he sat on the edge of his bed. “Where did you see her?”
“Deck Twenty-One. But I couldn’t get inside. It’s only for grown-ups.”
Billy Hinman shook his head. “This place is fucked. What are we going to have to do? Wait five years to be able to see and talk to a real human girl? That Parker’s going to start looking pretty good to me in a few more days, if that’s the case.”
“I hate it here. I’m sorry, Bill. It’s my fault. I fucked us both.”
The water stopped running.
Rowan came out of the bathroom. “I’ll call down and have some hot tea brought up. Your bath is ready, Cager.”
* * *
I lay in the tub with the lights dimmed, submerged so that the water covered my ears and made my hair swirl like seaweed around my head. Motionless, barely breathing, I stared up. Or down. Or whatever the fuck direction the ceiling of my bathroom in the Tennessee was.
Rowan was the only person who could make me feel better when I got this way. And what was I going to do without him? As usual my panicked and obsessed brain continued its endless string of calculating finites and nevers, and I thought about the likelihood of Billy Hinman and me outliving my caretaker by decades—however such things might be measured from now on.
There came the inevitable two short knocks on the door—only, and exactly, two. I didn’t need to answer. Then Rowan came into the bathroom with a tray of tea, which he placed on the counter beside the sink. He put down a fresh towel, some underwear, and a bathrobe next to the teapot, and without saying a word, left.
I didn’t look at him; he didn’t look at me.
That was the routine.
Calm the kid down.
At least there were no marks on the kid this time. There never would be any of those again.
I closed my eyes and waited. I didn’t want to get out of the water.
Beneath the surface, I could hear the low, garbled murmur of a conversation taking place between Billy and Rowan on the other side of the door. And then I heard something else: a grating, rumbling sound that seemed to resonate inside the bones of my skull. It was a noise similar to what you’d hear in Southern California, just before the first waves of an earthquake stampeded through the ground beneath you.
Then there was a sudden jolt, like the Tennessee crashed into something—as ridiculous as that thought could be. Bathwater sloshed in a miniature tsunami over the tub’s edge and onto the floor. The next thing I knew, everything went completely dark. The tub, floor, walls, and all the bathwater twisted and undulated around me. I floated in the middle of the bathroom, swimming in the air and drowning in the water that swarmed over me like a mass of smothering, feeding insects.
The Tennessee had lost its gravity.
And then—Boom!—I splattered down onto the tile of the bathroom floor, a naked, human fish flopping in the mess of water and broken tea service and towels and clothing and everything else that fell back to where our artificial “down” was supposed to be. And all through the floors and walls I could hear and feel a symphony of crashing and breaking, the collisions of all the things everywhere on the Tennessee as they readjusted to the Grosvenor Galactic version of right side up.
Everything in the little room was soaked in bathwater. When I stood up, a sharp sliver of china teacup stabbed into the pad of my right foot.
“Fuck!”
The lights came back on slowly, glowing dim at first, like an ember of Woz catching fire inside a glass pipe. I wrapped myself in a soggy towel and limped toward the door, leaving dots of blood from the cut on my foot.
The blood drops marked a trail on the once-perfect tiles in the floor of the cruise ship to end all cruise ships.
Our stateroom looked like a bomb had gone off inside it. Everything that wasn’t locked away inside drawers and cabinets had been chaotically rearranged. Rowan lay on the floor, covered with the mattress from my bed. There were sheets, shoes, clothing, lamps, and framed artwork scattered all over the mess of the room.
The wall screen flickered a static-charged, soundless, and grainy episode of Rabbit & Robot that was suddenly interrupted by an automated video announcement with a soundtrack that had somehow become unsynchronized. I thought this was it: We were all going to die now.
Mooney and Rabbit were on the screen instructing us on what steps to take in order to stay safe on board the Tennessee. Mooney demonstrated how to remove the extravehicular spacesuits from their compartments under the beds, and Rabbit—true to his bonk personality—stripped completely out of his clothes and put one on, while Mooney sang a song about connecting your space helmet and finding your way to your deck’s emergency assembly location.
And it was probably not the most well-thought-out scripting for an emergency broadcast, but, naturally, Mooney did not put his helmet on in time, due to the fact that he was busy singing, and died a ghastly and painful death, which was dumb, since Mooney was a cog.
Still, the video fell far short of offering encouragement and hope.
We were stuck in space, and we were all going to die here.
Also, the extravehicular spacesuit compartments were no longer under our beds, which were located in places where the beds were not originally located.
I opened the compartment that had been under my bed. “Should we put these on?”
Nobody answered.
Billy Hinman sat in the corner of our room, holding his palm over an obvious cut across his eyebrow.
He said, “Okay. Now I really want to get off this fucking ride. What the fuck just happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you okay?”
&nbs
p; Billy shook his head. “Maybe.”
I held my towel on my waist and went over to Rowan. I pushed the mattress away from him.
“Rowan?”
Rowan sat up slowly. “That was interesting.”
“Is that what that was?” I was pissed off and scared, and it was all Rowan’s and Billy’s fault. “Interesting?”
I sat on the edge of the exposed bedsprings and opened the package containing my spacesuit. I wiped the blood from my foot. Then I unwrapped myself from my towel and slid into the emergency suit. It felt cold, like a reptile’s skin on my body.
I said, “So much for my fucking tea.”
I went back to the bathroom and grabbed another wet towel for Billy’s head. “Here.”
I pressed the towel into the cut above Billy Hinman’s eye and braced the back of his head with my other hand.
Billy said, “Cager, I know it doesn’t amount to shit that I’m telling you this, but I am really sorry for getting us all stuck here. Please don’t hate me. I don’t know what I’d do if you stopped being my friend.”
And I said, “Shut up, Billy. It would take a lot fucking more than you killing me for me to stop loving you.”
I pushed the start-up buttons on my suit and connected my helmet, just like Mooney told me to do in his death song. Then I felt the stinging cold rush of oxygen on my naked skin.
“I think you guys should put these on too, just in case.”
And I thought, Just in case of what?
There’s a Bright Side to Just About Everything
Lourdes watched the whole thing as it happened, right there in the middle of the abandoned and silent Le Lapin et l’Homme Mècanique.
She was happy.
Lourdes was always very, very happy.
She stood beside the aquarium. Aquariums made her happy. She was thinking about getting inside the aquarium with the miniature sperm whales, turtles, and seahorses the size of golden retrievers, but she didn’t actually know how to swim, which was something that most cogs couldn’t do very well.
Still, the thought of sinking and drowning made Lourdes very happy too.
When you got right down to it, there was a bright side to just about everything that could ever happen to Lourdes.
“I’m so happy, I wish I could douse myself in accelerant and put tangerines in my hair and set myself on fire!” Lourdes said, to no one in particular, since no one was there.
And Lourdes started to dance, wild and exuberant, when Captain Myron, in his perfectly white uniform and feathered bicorne, came into the restaurant, ranting and thrashing his arms at everything that inflamed his outrage.
Lourdes was so happy, she farted three times while she danced, which made her even happier.
“Captain Myron! Captain Myron! I am so thrilled to see you! I am tingling with the ecstasy of a tangerine tree!” Lourdes said. “Yeee! Yeee! Yeee!”
But Captain Myron didn’t notice Lourdes, on account of his being too busy eating the lower half of Clarence’s face.
“Woo! Woo! Woo!” Lourdes thrust her hips back and forth as she danced, making a chugging locomotive type of motion with her arms as her blouse came untucked and her skirt twisted around.
Lourdes danced and danced.
And Captain Myron, who had something terribly wrong with him, ate and cursed and got angry and disgusted. Then he left.
“Oh, Clarence! I love your face! Your face makes me so happy, I could vomit enough joy to flood us up to our knees! Yeee! Yeee!” Lourdes gushed.
And she kept dancing and dancing until, several minutes later, she realized she was fifty feet up in the air, dancing in swirling blobs of water, alongside little sperm whales and enormous seahorses, kicking her arms and legs, twisting her head back and forth wildly.
“I’m flying with the fish! I’m flying in sperm-whale water! Yeee! Yeee! I’m a squid! I’m a squid! I am so happy!”
Lourdes farted.
And then it all came crashing down.
Everywhere.
Unless You Happen to Be Dying to Die
Here’s a story for you,” Meg said.
“I don’t like where this one’s going, Meg.”
“Well, it has to be some kind of miracle.”
Across the street, a car that had landed squarely on its nose tipped over and crushed an already broken security cog. It was the same cog who’d frightened Meg away from the wicket at the entry to Deck 21. He split in two, just below his bubbling, seeping rib cage. Then his upper half crawled away, dragging a trail of goo across the street behind his two cog hands.
“This place is falling apart. Get me out of here,” Jeffrie said.
It was a miracle that Jeffrie Cutler and Meg Hatfield survived the Tennessee’s lapse in gravity on Deck 21. When Captain Myron shut the system off, the girls were out on the street, making their way back to the Memphis Hotel after running away from the Bank of Tennessee.
For a few seconds they floated upward, helpless, along with a dozen or so mid-fifties-model automobiles and the thirty or forty Deck 21 cogs who were parked offline and sleeping on the street. And when the system kicked back on, all those tons of useless machines and the two equally useless human being stowaways that drifted in a slow-motion tornado of flotsam came smashing back down to the floor of Deck 21 in an unbelievable commotion of destruction.
Some of the cars tumbled through storefronts, knocked down lampposts, and demolished porticos. Broken cogs spewed their gooey mess in the street and from ledges on buildings where they’d been impaled on gargoyles.
But the girls came through the calamity unmarked.
Meg and Jeffrie walked through the wreckage of Deck 21. They tried to stay as near to doorways and buildings as possible, so they could grab on to something or find a safe place to hide if the Tennessee lost gravity again.
Nearly everything was damaged or entirely destroyed.
Inside the lobby of the Memphis Hotel, wall screens played an endless loop of the Rabbit and Mooney emergency video. The cogs that had been parked there were strewn like corpses all over the place. Some of them had broken into grotesque pieces, the floor slick with cog glop. There was no telling how many of them would ever be able to function again.
“This is so disgusting,” Jeffrie said.
For some reason, the crash had woken a few of the cogs. Severed limbs flexed and relaxed, fingers opened and closed, detached heads moved their eyes and mouthed curses and exhortations.
Every step the girls took through the lobby made soft squishing sounds from all the jellified ooze that burbled out from the rents in the broken cogs.
And Mooney sang to them:
“I’ll bet you’re all wondering a big ‘What the heck?’
Don’t worry, we’ll explain it on the lifeboat deck!
Time for all on board to get our EV suits.
Does this make me look fat? Rabbit’s makes him look cute!
In case you haven’t heard, everybody else knows,
To put on your suit, first take off all your clothes!
Don’t get embarrassed, and don’t be shy,
Unless you really happen to be dying to die!
The zipper goes in front, in case you couldn’t guess.
Next, press the two green buttons on the sides of your chest!
Then hurry up and snap your helmet down tight,
And just in case it’s dark, there’s an automatic light!
If you put it on right, you’ll hear a little beep,
Like a Grosvenor Weasel, Cheepa-Yeep, Cheepa-Yeep!
No time to lose! You’ll need to take a breath!
Oops, I waited too long—Now I’m choking to death!
Oops, I waited too long—Now I’m choking to death!
Oops, I waited too long—Now I’m choking to death!”
Then Mooney died, which was dumb, because he was a cog, and cogs can get along just fine in the vacuum of space, without air or a reasonably maintained core temperature.
“We should probab
ly get those suits on,” Meg said. “Maybe the door will be open now, after whatever the fuck that was that just happened.”
And Jeffrie said, “I’m scared.”
“So am I, Jeff.”
Jeffrie followed Meg to their room. The door pushed open only about one-fourth of the way because it got caught up on all the junk that had been tossed around behind it, but the gap was wide enough for the girls to squeeze through.
The same emergency video that was playing everywhere on the Tennessee was running on their wall screen.
Mooney was alive and singing, and then he was choking to death again.
“I wish we could shut this thing the fuck off,” Jeffrie said.
We Raise Our Hands
I almost hated myself for worrying about Parker, who hadn’t come back from his hunt for my can opener.
“I kind of like that spacesuit song,” Billy said.
It was still playing. Over and over.
Rowan, Billy, and I, all in our extravehicular spacesuits—and, by the way, there was no way in hell either Billy Hinman or I was going to go outside the Tennessee—made our way down the hallway, which was still just as tidy as ever on account of there being no loose objects in it, toward our deck’s EAL, the emergency assembly location.
The EAL happened to be directly in front of the elevators.
We waited.
“Is something supposed to happen?” I asked.
Nobody came for us.
Nothing happened.
We awkwardly stood there, staring at each other in our suits and helmets in the silent hallway.
It was boring, and I felt naked and dumb inside my spacesuit.
The faceplates on our helmets were so dark that it was impossible to tell each other apart. It was probably the first time in my teenaged life that I realized the three of us were all pretty much exactly the same height, and if Billy Hinman hadn’t made the remark about how much he liked Mooney’s goddamned never-ending song, I would have assumed he was Rowan.