AlliterAsian (12 page)

“You called it
he
early on,” Evans remarked. “How did you know it was a male alien?”

Kyra and Nicole giggled. “He did what every male tourist to Florida does at Hooters,” Kyra explained. “He took photos of us.”

Aboard his spaceship, Argon put the chicken wings into the cryogenic suspension chamber and wandered back to the control room. He looked at the photograph of himself between the two smiling Hooters Girls, evidence of contact with the inhabitants of the blue planet. Finally, all those years of learning their language from their television signals had paid off. At the next song festival, the Science Academy would sing his praises.

He would have to visit Planet Florida again, if only to try the cheese burrito.

       
A
UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

I got the idea for this story during my travels to science fiction conventions in the US. There was a Hooters near each convention centre, and like many guys, I liked the fast, friendly service. Carl Hiaasen had used a Hooters Girl as a character in his novel
Lucky You
, and so I wrote my own tribute to the delightfully tacky, yet unrefined restaurant chain.

Some plot events came from the real lives of Hooters Girls whom I knew: going to a car show, autographing posters, and posing for photos for the customers. Other plot events came from science fiction stories; the crashed alien spaceship whose crew sneaks away is an old genre trope. Movie monster Godzilla inspired the lizard-like appearance and elephant-like bellowing of Argon. The name Argon came from the title of “The Eye of Argon” by Jim Theis, the worst fantasy story ever written. The name Kyra came from Olivia Newton-John's character in the movie
Xanadu
. Some day, I will write a sequel in which Argon returns to Earth for a cheese burrito. —
Derwin Mak, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Derwin Mak lives in Toronto. His short story “Transubstantiation” won the Aurora Award, Canada's national science fiction award, for Best Short Form Work in English in 2006. He and Eric Choi co-edited
The Dragon and the Stars
(DAW Books, 2010), the first anthology of science fiction and fantasy by overseas Chinese. It won the 2011 Aurora Award for Best Related Work in English. His two novels are
The Moon Under Her Feet
and
The Shrine of the Siren Stone
, now republished by Weird and Wondrous Press.

Mercury, Messenger of the Gods

Ricepaper
18, no. 1 (2013)

Kim Fu

When you were seven, you talked to God as you walked to school. You had trouble explaining this later: that you didn't pray out of hope or obligation or thanks or fear. He was your friend. You read the Bible alone, on the floor, for hours with the slivered pages. Early on, you asked your mother about the God of Abraham and the God of Nahor. Were these multiple gods, different deities? No, she said—it reminds us that He is the god of each of us, individually. “You may say, ‘the God of Adrian freed the Israelites.' He was their god, and He's your god, too.”

Mercury, your roommate, is not named for the planet or the Roman god; his namesake is Freddie Mercury. Mercury's father comes to visit, bringing things he noticed you were missing: a plunger, a dish rack, a set of dishtowels, a good bar of chocolate, and a one-quart bag of weed. An enormous amount of weed, it seems to you.

The three of you sit by the window, smoking up and eating chocolate, in what is technically your room: the living room sectioned off from the kitchen with a curtain rod. Mercury has the one bedroom in exchange for a larger cut of the rent. His father's head sits directly beneath an arched-shaped woodcut Mercury has made of your names, MERCURY & ADRIAN, that hangs from the ceiling by a piece of kitchen string, spinning at a glacial pace.

Until you met Mercury, you assumed every nonbeliever you met had left the church as you had, and carried that wound for life. You didn't know people could be raised without religion, that your parents' generation had atheists too—a realization so obvious you're embarrassed to think of it now. You ask his father if his parents were religious.

“Mennonites!” he replies, like it's the punchline of a joke.

“The horse and buggy kind?” You're watching Mercury's mouth, his lips pursed and wet around the joint.

“I never met them. No, moderates. This might surprise you, kid, but Mennonite pacifists are easy converts to top-of-the-bus hippies.” He grins. “At least I was.”

Mercury cooks a lot of fish and there's no vent fan above the stove. The apartment smells like it has been wallpapered in fish skin, washed with dark, bitter oils. A stretch of silence—the whole afternoon, the fading, milky light through the dirty glass—passes.

“What shape is god?” you ask. He left you as a cartoon character busts through a brick wall, leaving his outline. “Is he shaped like a man?”

“I always pictured him as a big, glowing disc. A circle,” Mercury's father says. He seems to age as he frowns, calling attention to his weather-stripped face and brittle movements. “Or a saltshaker. Sprinkling humanity onto the earth. Like it just needed a little flavour, and then.” He sighs, deepens his body in the cracked armchair. “And then.” Mercury stands and starts pacing, broadcasting his boredom.

Mercury is straight or, at least, it's always women who wander into the kitchen in the middle of the night, who wake you with the door light of the fridge as they poke at the shrink-wrapped tilapia filets, the whole headless salmon. More than once, they've drawn the curtain and
jumped back when they saw you there, staring at them in the dark.

After his father leaves, you climb in the shower together, high. Mercury rubs your back and jerks you off with such tender efficiency that you realize, in that moment of post-ejaculation clarity, that it wasn't sexual for him. A loving ministration: You think of Jesus washing his disciples' feet.

Your mother washed her mother's feet. Your grandmother perched at the edge of the bed she'd chosen to die in, regal and unsteady. You filled the plastic tub and came running down the hall, splashing out the sides. You stood to the side as your mother squeezed warm water from a rag over your grandmother's swollen feet and curled, yellow nails, murmuring soft words of comfort.

After it was over, your mother climbed into the bed, her face red and bloated. Your father brought her juice and porridge twice a day. You woke her on the fourth day to tell her you were out of clean underwear. Her voice was hoarse and dry. “Get the Bible.” You found it in her bedside table, a massive tome with a gold-painted, cardboard cover, black stripes over the spine,
INTERNATIONAL GOOD NEWS
in block letters.

Her pale face and a tuft of dark hair were visible, the rest hidden in a heap of blankets. “Read me Psalm 23,” she said, pulling the pink duvet up over her chin, like a child preparing for a ghost story.

You knew how to find it, approximately how deep into the gilded pages the psalms begin. You balanced the book awkwardly on one of your skinny arms while your free hand flipped to the right spot, and your voice boomed in the midafternoon silence, your childish intonation unusually rich and crisp: “The Lord is my shepherd. I have everything I need. He lets me rest in fields of green grass and leads me to quiet pools of fresh water.”

When your father died, your mother stood over his hospital bed
and read Corinthians 1:13, from the same big, gold book. “I may have all the faith needed to move mountains—but if I have no love, I am nothing.” She drove you home with dry eyes, composure at the speed limit: slow but not dangerously so.

In the morning, you went to church together, and the pastor called you both up to pray for your loss. You stood at the front with your backs to the congregation, eyes squeezed shut, as Pastor Rick asked God to welcome your father into His arms. Your mother began to wail, as she had not wailed in eighteen months of treatment, or even as you stood over his lifeless body and she pulled away from the nurses who tried to hug her. She wailed like the women on the TV news in faraway war-torn places, like the cry of an abandoned animal rising up to the high church rafters, the squares of painted glass in the skylights. And then they started to sing, the voices behind you. You were not aware of the guitar or the organ or the PowerPoint slides of lyrics, not aware of their bodies, their grotesque human sneers, only of their voices. And of eternal life. They sang, “We will meet again.”

Sarah Brown, the leader of your youth group, was four years older than you. You thought her name was funny, ordinary to the point of parody, like the title of a book series. Sarah Brown, girl reporter. Sarah Brown, girl detective.

She was seventeen when she came back from her first mission in Ghana. She gave a presentation in the church basement, a cold room with a projector and a dusty foosball table. Pictures of her sitting among African teens and children in one-room schools, smiling in her bandana and khaki shorts, all with Mark 16:15–16 running along the bottom: “He said to them, ‘Go throughout the whole world and preach the gospel to all people. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.'”

Your legs are tangled up with Mercury's in the empty tub, trying
to cram both of your long-limbed bodies in somehow, his beard and braided necklace beaded with shower water. He talks of evil and hell as though you've never thought of them, never woken in the night to pray for lost souls. “How can that be an all-loving god?” he asks.

You fumble for the words: You were going to be Sarah Brown—freckled, thick-bodied, unpopular at school, middling grades, and a hero to the people. You were going to hold babies as they were vaccinated in rural Ghanaian clinics; you were going to dig wells and weave chairs, drag suitcases full of bandages from the roadside. The God of Sarah Brown saved lives. What have you done today? Wrote a paper titled “Foreign Aid and the New Colonialism.”

You tell Mercury, instead, about the first breath after rising from the baptismal pool. A temporary dissolution of fear, of thoughts you could not control. Your knowledgeless body, thinking it would drown, pushing back against Pastor Rick's meaty hand as he palmed your head like a basketball. So glad to be alive, sucking in air, the other kids—there was gossip, of course; why were you old, why did your parents wait so long?—in their white robes, afraid, and then joyous, like you.

You remember Joshua, a boy your age who had the air of a grown-up, compounded by the small, round glasses he wore at the end of his nose and his hunched-over walk like he was trying to develop a hump. He invited you to “bring a gentile” night at the Jewish Community Center. You didn't go, but you ended up eating lunch with him under the back stairs at school. He said Jews didn't believe in heaven and hell, exactly, or not the fire and torture version. He said when you died, you were either with god, or you weren't. That's all hell was, His absence.

The next day, you asked how “bring a gentile” night went. He said, “We made a map of Israel out of ice cream and ate it.”

Nicolai, a boy at school you hated, who was the opposite of Joshua—an adult body, long-limbed muscles, violent, and unpredictable as a toddler—said he fingered Sarah Brown in the woods behind the bowling alley. He told this story in the boys' locker room, to his friends and anyone who would listen: She wouldn't do anything to him, but she let him lift her shirt and bra, let him slip two fingers inside her and pump. Sarah was a legal adult and Nicolai was, in spite of his height and bulk, a child like you. You didn't believe it, not for a second. Not with the faces of newly saved and sated children in Ghana projected onto a concrete wall. Not with Sarah's slender hand waving back and forth during musical devotion, tucked inside a chatty dog puppet during the children's prayer, clasping both of yours when you told her you wanted to go, as soon as you were old enough, you wanted to spread the good news.

You stand on the coffee table, wearing a crown someone made from a cardboard six-pack holder. Your not-bedroom is the party room, the electric standing fan pointed at the window to blow out the fish smell, maybe, or the smell of your unwashed knit blankets. Everyone else sits cross-legged on the floor. The vibrations of the stereo—through the wood of the table, through your feet—rattle your flabby skin from your bones. Mercury is thrilled that the music is new to you, that you grew up in the nineties and had never heard Radiohead or My Bloody Valentine, that your youth passed without the slow, sad strange music that was popular then. Did you never listen to the radio? Did you never go to the mall?

You hold out your wine glass, stupidly full with red. “I am the bread of life! Those who come to me will never be hungry. Those who believe in me will never be thirsty.” A girl raises her empty mug and you pour some wine from your glass, sloshing onto the floor and her blouse.

“I am the light of the world,” you say, and you feel as you used to
feel, aglow from the inside. Guitar grates on itself in the background, a drum machine, a rattling sheet of aluminum. You look down at the slaves to sin, at your bare, wine-stained feet.

You wake up late for the bus, late for work at the gas station, late for maybe the last time. You look forward to a Long John donut and a stick of jerky. The location of the security camera makes them the only things you can steal.

You had Sarah meet you at the other entrance to the woods, closer to the mall, told her you were in need of guidance only the youth leader could provide. You walked together through the blackened trees, scorched and bare against a pale sky. You searched for some kind of tell. You thought once you got close to the bowling alley end, she'd tear up or wince at the memory. You talked lamely of the boys at school being mean to you, even of Nicolai in particular, hoping she'd roll her eyes and laugh, “That kid? He keeps following me around. I think he has a crush or something. How pathetic.” Or better yet, “Isn't that adorable?” Putting Nicolai in the same sexual realm as a kitten or a teddy bear.

But somehow you said too much, implied more than you meant to. Sarah breathed, “Oh,” and took off running. You watched her go, and it seemed like the trees closed up behind her, sealing the turns in the path, past where you could see the ground.

You were no longer welcome at youth group. In one version, you lured Sarah into the woods to rape her. You thought people would see how nonsensical this was; Sarah could have tossed you aside with one arm. In another, you flashed her. Like you'd want to stand with your pants down and your bony legs and little thread of a penis on display—Nicolai in the school showers, unabashed as a tree trunk—so a teenage girl could point and laugh or just look on in horror.

Only your mother believed you. You had her, and you had God.
Not Jesus, who was already slipping toward caricature in your mind. You had sorted too many colouring sheets for the Sunday school, where Jesus had blank doe eyes and wore a toga. He was becoming something like Santa Claus—who you still half-believed in but understood was for younger children, made real through the effort and good will of adults. Parents put presents under the tree, volunteers at the postal service answered letters, malls across America hired someone to sit in a chair. And in this way, wasn't Santa inside all of us?

You had God, the Father, the weary, bearded figure of the Old Testament, who gave the world so many chances, but it just kept fucking up. You did not blame Him for the actions of Sarah Brown; you did not think he took away your dad. You didn't blame the devil, either. You understood it as the price of free will. God sat at the end of your bed, put his arm around you, confessed that He was tired, too. Your child self would have done fine against Mercury—what of starvation war genocide rape disease atrocity—or the great philosophers of the nineteenth century and the professors who made you read them. It's the twenty-two-year-old you who falters, steals donuts as a matter of course.

Mercury asks what year you were born. He wants to find what would have been the albums of your teen years, what should have played in the background as you lost your virginity or got drunk for the first time. You tell him you liked your mom's CDs, because it's the only music you can think of. Abba and Boney M. and Ella Fitzgerald. In the chaos of his bedroom, clothes and moulding food containers nested as though for warmth, his albums are alphabetized: He chooses Massive Attack, Modest Mouse, and Mogwai in a single pull. “The first time I heard this song, I cried for three hours,” he says.