Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

  He tells himself not to flip out, not to be a sissy, but he knows it’s not doing any good, and then a movement, just a little one, drags his attention back to the tent-flap, and he realizes Livingstone’s still standing there, arms folded and one hip canted. She doesn’t trust the doc, either, and she isn’t going to leave. And he thinks he shouldn’t be as relieved by that as he is—you fucking sissyboy—but he can’t do anything about it.

  And finally the doc straightens up and steps away and says, bored, “Nothing wrong here.” He gets his jacket and boots back on, and feels better for it.

  “Good,” Livingstone says. She jerks her head at him and he follows her back out into the camp. He tries to identify things as they pass: the showers, the quartermaster’s tent, and oh Christ somewhere in this mess is her tent, Cluny’s tent, and what the hell is he going to do about that?

  Burn one bridge at a time. Which is something his own sergeant says, and God he hopes Sarge is okay, and the other grunts, and it was just him that went down in that rockfall. And the Koth didn’t get them.

  And then he remembers he is a Koth.

  Livingstone comes to the mess-tent, and he follows her in. Sees her unit—his unit?—at one of the long tables, and they wave and make space. He follows Livingstone through the line and over to the table. They sit down, and Livingstone says, “We should donate Cluny to science. Hardest fucking head in the universe.”

  “You okay, Miriam?” One of the other grunts, guy named Chang. Bald-headed, slant-eyed, big motherfucking tattoos. And Cluny’s first name is Miriam. Good to know.

  “I’m good,” he says, and keeps his attention on his tray, listening to them talk about Yoggos and trying to make himself process that they’re talking about guys like Sarge and Riley and Markowitz. And him, before. They sound about like Sarge and them talking about the Koth, like they’re tired of the war and wish the enemy would just sit down and surrender already.

  And then dinner’s over and he’s still wondering what the fuck he should do with himself, when Chang comes up to him and says, “Come on and hit the showers with me.”

  “You saying I stink?” he says, and the grin feels a little funny on this face. He wonders what he looks like.

  “I’m saying you’re covered in dirt,” Chang says.

  “Jesus, you’re picky,” he says, and Chang laughs and jerks his head at him in a come-along kind of way, and he goes along because, well, he is covered in dirt, and it itches.

  Koth camp doesn’t have much more in the way of showers than what he’s used to, but he’s glad for at least a little privacy for his first face-to-face with his new body. He goes in the cubicle—corrugated iron, bare bulb, nasty draft, just like home—shuts the door, strips off boots, socks, jacket. Bare feet on the wet unevenness of the floor, grit against his toes. Hesitates a moment over the t-shirt, then yanks it off over his head. No bra. He feels the dog-tags shift against his chest, feels something pulling, binding, as his shoulders move, and surely even with tits it shouldn’t feel that weird, and he looks down.

  And just about pukes. He knows the difference between scars you get in a fight and scars you get because someone holds you down and makes them, and these are the second kind, Xs of knotted gray-white tissue, crossing over what used to be her nipples and are now just lumps.

  He stares, the same way he’d stare if it was a woman in his unit and she’d taken off her shirt in front of him. He doesn’t want to, but he reaches up with one hand, and god his fingers are shaking, and he touches the lump where her left nipple used to be. He can feel his own fingers, sort of, or at least he can feel that something’s there, but even though he knows his fingers are like ice, they don’t feel cold or hot or anything against the scarring. He moves his fingers to a bit of unscarred flesh, puckered and strained by the ugly mess around it, and swallows a yelp because his fingers are like ice, and that piece of skin isn’t shy about saying so.

  He knows, in a distant sort of way, that he’s got to keep moving, that Chang’ll be waiting for him and how long can you take in the fucking shower anyway? He watches his hands—her hands—unfasten her pants, shove them down over her hips, and fuck she’s skinny, he can practically count every fucking rib and her hips are like caltrops, and then there’s just her undies, and it’s weird to think that this morning a woman named Miriam Cluny pulled those things up and now it’s him hooking his thumbs in them and pushing them down. Weird and scary and sad, and if he could give Miriam Cluny her body back, he would.

  And then, staring down at scarred chest and long skinny legs, he realizes that if her tits look like that . . . Fuck. He’s got to check out his own cunt.

  He’s no virgin, so he at least knows what it ought to look like. He bends his head, cants his hips forward. From the pale tangle of pubic hair, he’s probably a blonde now. And he’s not . . . he doesn’t have . . .

  He swallows hard.

  It’s a woman’s body. And he knew that as soon as he looked at that arm that wasn’t his, back in the tunnel with his own dead body. So it’s not like he’s surprised that his balls and cock aren’t between these long, pale, skinny legs, but it’s still . . . it’s just . . .

  He bites the side of his hand to keep from moaning loud enough for Chang to hear through the partition. With his other hand, he reaches to touch the folds of skin between his legs and feels like he ought to apologize, although he’s not sure who to.

  “Sorry, Miriam,” he whispers, and then his cold fingers part the lips of his pussy, and he bites down hard on his knuckles, hard enough to taste blood.

  Clit’s still there, at least, but Jesus God what did they fuck her with? A chainsaw? He reaches and feels more scars around her asshole. She must’ve been damn near fucked to death, and he’s never going to ask who did it, because he knows. Wasn’t his unit—and he gives a dizzy little giggle when he realizes he doesn’t have to worry about whether he raped himself. Sarge doesn’t like that kind of thing, and the grunts do what Sarge tells them. But it might’ve been friends of his.

  It might have been Charlie, big red-faced balding Charlie, strong as an elephant and the nicest guy in the battalion. Might’ve been Ahira or Ratcliffe or Young. Or all of them. Probably all of them, and he could imagine it if he let himself think about it, imagine that shoving pack of bodies in the dark, holding her down, probably with a knife to her throat because everybody knows those Koth bitches are hellcats, calling her slut and whore and cunt. Come on, you cunt, we know you want it. They’re the enemy. You call the women cunts and the men fags, because it’s war and it’s what you do.

  He wonders why they didn’t kill her when they were done, and then he does puke, bile burning his mouth and nose, and he spits into the drain, over and over, because he knows why. They didn’t kill her because they thought she was already dead.

  He turns on the water and shoves himself under it, knowing it’s going to be ice cold and feeling like he deserves it. He scrubs himself roughly, trying not to think about it, trying not to think about hands on his body, holding him spread-eagled, fists slamming into his stomach. Trying not to remember the jeering voices, the things they called him. Trying not to remember the doctor’s uninterested voice tallying up his broken bones. He’d been lucky—they hadn’t cut on him. He hadn’t had scars like Cluny’s.

  But now he does. Now they’re his scars.

  Ain’t no difference, he thinks, coming out from under the shower, grabbing the standard-issue strip of toweling, harsh as sandpaper. Me and her. Us and them. Ain’t no difference except somehow we ended up picking sides. Like kids playing softball.

  And he wishes that was all there was to war: kids playing a game, and at the end of the day you pick yourself up, brush the dust off, and go home.

  He wishes he could go home.

  He wishes Cluny could go home, too.

  But they can’t, so he gets dressed and goes to war instead.

  National Geographic on Assignment:

  Mermaids of the Old West

&nbs
p; The mermaid pressed her hands flat against the wall of the tank, baring her teeth at the crowd. There was a surprised murmur, and several people near the front stepped back hastily. She was from Lake Mead, hauled writhing and screaming out of its clear blue depths by a DNR-crewed boat, and you could see that she had been a catfish, before.

  Now she was an aquarium attraction in San Francisco.

  I wanted to tell her it wasn’t so bad; if she’d been netted by private interests, she might have ended up like her sisters I’d photographed in Las Vegas, decked out as Mermaids of the Old West. Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. They’d been taught to do tricks, like the orcas at Seaworld. It was enough to make me want to hand out prints of the photograph I’d taken in the North Atlantic, a mermaid stretched out dead on the deck of a trawler. She’d been a shark, before. They hadn’t wanted to kill her, the trawler-crew told me, but she’d bitten one of them before they realized she was trapped in their net, and they’d had to break her jaw to get her to let go.

  It had killed her. Mermaids are more fragile than you’d think.

  The Lake Mead mermaid beat her fists against the glass, a curiously human gesture. I sighed and trained the camera on her clenched hands, on the cold fury in her small, shining eyes, on the shadows of the crowd against the glass.

  And took the picture.

  A Night in Electric Squidland

  Some days, Mick Sharpton was almost normal.

  Those were the good days, the days when he did his job and went dancing after work, days when he enjoyed eating and slept well and sang in the shower. Days when flirting with a good-looking man was fun, even if it didn’t lead to sex, and he didn’t lose his temper with anyone unless they deserved it. Those were the days when he liked himself and liked his life, and some months there were more of them than others.

  The bad days were when the world wouldn’t stay out of his head, when everyone he looked at wore a swirling crown of color, and everything he touched carried the charge of someone else’s life. Those days were all about maintaining his increasingly precarious control, snarling and snapping to keep anyone from getting too close. Trying not to drown. Sometimes he succeeded; sometimes he didn’t.

  Today was a good day. He could almost pretend he wasn’t clairvoyant. His head was clear, and he felt light, balanced. He had not remembered his dreams when he woke up, and that was always a positive sign.

  Mick and his partner were wading through a backlog of paperwork that afternoon. The sheer monumental bureaucracy was the downside of working for a government agency like the Bureau of Paranormal Investigations; left to his own devices, Mick would have let it slide, as he had always done with schoolwork, but Jamie had a stern, Puritan attitude toward unfinished reports, and it was useless to argue with him.

  It was always useless to argue with Jamie Keller.

  But the perpetually renewed struggle to find the right words—where “right” was a peculiar combination of “accurate” and “decorous” as applied to descriptions of interrupted Black Masses and the remains left on the subway lines by ghoul packs—was both tedious and frustrating, and Mick was positively grateful when the phone rang, summoning them to Jesperson’s office. Jesperson would have something for them to do.

  “It’ll just be more paperwork later,” Jamie warned.

  “Oh, bite me, Keller.”

  “Not my thing,” Jamie said placidly.

  When they came into his office, Jesperson was leaning over a ley line map, spread out on the big table and weighted down with a fist-sized chunk of the Tunguska meteorite, two volumes of the Directory of American Magic-Users, and a lumpish pottery bowl with a deep green glaze, made for him by his daughter Ada and used for keeping paperclips and sticks of red chalk in. Ada lived with her mother in Seattle; Jesperson saw her for one week each year, at the Winter Solstice, and nothing was more sacred in the office than Jesperson’s annual week of vacation, even if most of his employees politely pretended they had no idea why.

  Jesperson looked up and said, “There you are,” as if they should have known to be somewhere else, and waved at them impatiently to sit down.

  They sat; Jesperson stalked over to stand between them and glowered at them both impartially. “What do you know about Electric Squidland?”

  “It’s a nightclub,” Mick offered. “Goth scene. Lots of slumming yuppies.”

  “And?” Jesperson said, looking from one to the other of them.

  Mick had told him all he knew—Electric Squidland had always been too trendy for his taste—and it was Jamie who finally said, reluctantly, “They get into some heavy shit on the lower levels.”

  “You’ve been to Electric Squidland?” Mick said.

  “Used to work there,” Jamie said and became unaccountably interested in the backs of his own hands.

  “You worked at—”

  “Sharpton.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Jamie said, not looking up, “This is about Shawna Lafayette, ain’t it?”

  “It might be.”

  “Who’s Shawna Lafayette?”

  “A young woman from Murfreesboro. Three years ago—just after the Carolyn Witt scandal, if you remember it—she disappeared off the face of the Earth.”

  “Just like that?”

  “She went into Electric Squidland,” Jamie said in a low voice, “and she never came out.”

  “Vanished without a trace,” Jesperson said, “and now it’s happened again. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Jamie said. “You mean somebody sorta disappeared?”

  “Actually, yes,” Jesperson said and allowed himself a small, crooked smile at their expressions. “What we have are the remains of half a person.”

  “Um, which half, sir? Top? Bottom?”

  “The right half, I believe, Mr. Sharpton.”

  Mick and Jamie looked at each other. “Well, that’s a new one,” Mick managed after a moment.

  “Quite,” Jesperson said dryly. “We got a tip this morning. Anonymous, of course. Here.”

  He pressed the play button on the tape recorder that sat, as always, on the corner of his desk, and a woman’s voice, drawling with a hard nasal edge, spoke into the quiet room: “There’s something y’all need to see. Right now it’s out in the Sunny Creek Dump in a big black garbage bag, but I don’t know how long it’ll be there, so you better hurry. And if you wanna know more about it, go to Electric Squidland and ask ’em what happened to Brett Vincent.” A solid clunk of metal and plastic as she hung up the phone, and Jesperson pushed the stop button.

  And then both he and Mick were staring as Jamie lurched to his feet and said in a strangled voice, “I’ll be right back.” He almost fell against the door on his way out. Mick glanced at Jesperson for permission and followed him.

  Jamie hadn’t gone far; he was leaning against the wall next to the water fountain. Dark-skinned as he was, he couldn’t go pale, but he was definitely gray around the edges. “Jamie?” Mick said, half-expecting his friend to slide to the floor in a dead faint.

  “Sorry,” Jamie said. His eyes were closed, and Mick thought he was doing one of the breathing exercises he’d learned from practicing yoga.

  “About what, exactly? Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be fine. Just wasn’t expecting . . . ”

  “Well, I wasn’t expecting any of it, so I’m not sure how that gets you out here in the corridor looking like you’re about to have a heart attack. You’re not, are you?”

  That got Jamie’s eyes open. “Mick!”

  “You look bad enough. And if you are, I want enough warning that I can call down for a gurney or something.”

  “Christ. No. I am not going to have a heart attack. I just wasn’t ready for . . . ”

  “Oh,” Mick said, feeling like an idiot. “You knew the guy, didn’t you? Brett whatsisface?”

  “Vincent. Yeah, I knew him.” Jamie smiled, but there was neither mirth nor pleasure in it. “All too well.”

  After a moment, Mick said, “
I didn’t know you were bisexual.”

  “What I am is monogamous,” Jamie said—mildly enough, but it was a clear warning to back off.

  “We’re going to have Jesperson out here in a minute,” Mick said obediently.

  “Yeah,” Jamie said. “You go on. Lemme get a drink of water. And, yes, you can tell him about me and Brett.”

  “Okay,” Mick said, touched Jamie’s shoulder lightly, awkwardly, wanting to give comfort but knowing he was no good at it, and went back into Jesperson’s office.

  “Jamie, um, had a relationship with the deceased,” he said to Jesperson’s raised eyebrows.

  “Did he?” Jesperson said, and added just as Jamie came through the door, “Then perhaps he can identify the body.”

  An hour ago, this had been a good day. Now, it was beginning to feel more like a nightmare.

  Mick and Jamie were in the BPI morgue. Cold, echoing, the lights harsh on gray tile and metal, the psychic residue of death like dirt on every spotless surface. Mick hated it.

  He hated it more today, watching Jamie’s grim impersonation of a hard-as-nails, ice-cold BPI agent. He wasn’t fooling his partner, and Mick doubted he was fooling himself, which meant he was hanging onto the act because it was either that or go off in a corner and have a meltdown.

  Mick spared some hate for Jesperson while he was at it.

  He understood the logic, and Jesperson wouldn’t have been competent to run the BPI’s southeast hub if he didn’t grab every advantage he could get and wring it bone-dry. But knowing that didn’t make it any more bearable to watch the way Jamie’s hands, carefully clasped behind his back, tightened and released against each other again and again, like the beating of some murderously overworked heart.