Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
If, however, you find yourself standing at your peephole again, then know that this is your old instincts rising. Not to camp at the scene. Not to chance luxury. Not to be weak.
You don’t need the ocean in your head, you need food.
You’re eating for seven, now. You’re eating for all of mankind.
Walk naked down the hall, daring the elevator doors to open, and knock on the door six down from yours, and across, and hold your thumb over the peephole lens.
That it’s the lanky man from the presentation can only mean that this was meant to be.
His clothes are going to fit perfectly.
~
Two days later, your affair with room service comes to an end.
It’s been scrambled eggs by the plateful, and club sandwiches with double sides of home fries, and chicken and chicken and chicken, cracking the drumstick bones open to lap at the black marrow.
Not beef, as your body rejects that now, but beasts of the air, anyway.
And you haven’t turned the lights on even once. And you’ve tipped well, have been presentable each time that knock comes to the door. And the trays, you walk them down to the elevator bay, so as not to draw attention, and each of those journeys through the light, they’re like walking through suspended motor oil, unburned motor oil, and the faces you see, the other hotel guests, they seem trapped in amber, there on display for your amusement.
You could harvest any of them, but only want chicken, for now.
And coleslaw, once you find it on the menu.
Coleslaw with ketchup, and the tap doesn’t have enough water, and still, you can already feel the long muscles of your thigh withering.
It’s good you’re going to have to use one of the backup names, now. It’s fitting, for the new person you’re becoming.
But now management’s calling. Not about the extended stay, but about the ringing phone. The lanky man’s wife, having a panic attack from five hundred miles away.
So be it.
Pack his suitcase, tie his understated tie and cinch it up to your throat, rasp your fingers over the stubble on your jaw and study your face in the mirror from every angle.
You killer.
Smile, tap the glass goodbye, and hang the
Do Not Disturb
sign on the brushed aluminum handle before leaving.
At the elevator, a cleaning lady is collecting your mound of dishes.
Pretend they’re not yours. That you don’t know what she’s thinking about you. That you don’t know she’s sneaking looks at you from under her bangs.
Twelve minutes and forty-seven seconds later, leave most of her in the supply closet, but bury the soles of her feet in the ice machine.
Because there’s change in the lanky man’s slacks, you might as well get a candy bar for the ride to the lobby, too. Maybe a soda.
While trying to decide which one, a bleary-eyed woman (nod hey to her, that you’re no threat, are just on your way out, here) will crack the ice machine open behind you, dig her bucket full in one scoop.
Don’t turn around. Never turn around. Just wait for your drink to fall.
~
In the elevator—brass hand rails but just wood paneling, no mirrors—you can study your hand. Opening, closing. Like a glove you’ve just pulled on.
It fits.
This is what you’ve been waiting for your whole life, like a word on the end of your tongue, one you know is there but that you can’t quite articulate the shape of, the sound of. This is what you would have been looking for, had you known to look.
But sometimes life finds you, too.
Swallow your grin as the lobby approaches—better unassuming than smug for the walk past Registration—and look away when the door dings open, one floor shy.
It’s them.
Him, her.
They step in, assume positions to either side of you, an errant moth trailing in behind them, fluttering dumbly against the roof.
The door swishes shut.
Well.
“You’re dead,” you say to the two of them.
No response.
It’s best that there aren’t any mirrors.
Too, there’s maybe eighteen seconds before the doors open again, on the crowd of humanity.
“Don’t,” the woman says.
What she’s talking about—you all know it—is the parking garage stairwell. What she’s talking about is the elevator doors opening onto the lobby, you stepping out in a borrowed suit, stepping out over the two steaming bodies you’ve just cracked open, straightening your tie, then walking away.
They wouldn’t fight back, you know. It’s not in their nature, somehow. It’s like a poem you read once, how animals that are born prey, when the shadow falls over them, they just arch their backs into it and close their eyes, bite the backs of their cheeks inward, in pleasure.
“Don’t listen to them,” the man adds, and you narrow your eyes about this.
Stick Man said it. The man said it before. The woman seconded it.
It must be how you found him all those nights ago, in the bar, telling his extravagant jokes, holding his drink so cavalierly. A fate you sensed, through all that smoke and regret. A destiny lined nose to tail in another man’s intestines.
Something only you could have picked up on. Something that was calling to you, and only to you.
This is nothing new.
Switch the lanky man’s briefcase to your other hand, now, to both hands, and let it hang in front of you like a rectangular scrotum, and flash that you’re the groom, now. That this is the rest of your life.
And that the ceremony, it’s almost over.
It’s best that there’s no mirrors for this ride.
It’s best that they can’t see your face.
Ask them, “What are you?”
Look over to the man when neither of them answer.
“We’re tired,” he’ll say, and you can see it in his eyes, that he’s not lying. The fatigue of ages, it’s heavy on him. On both of them.
That this elevator car can even shoulder this weight, man.
Grin a bit, with one side of your mouth.
Tell them you’re out.
Now they’re both looking at you in that direct, disconcerting way they have.
Heft the briefcase to show what you mean by “out.”
The moth flutters down from above your heads, lands near the handle. Near your hand.
Shake the case once so they can hear the heaviness inside.
Look from her to him, from him to her, the elevator dinging all around the three of you now.
He nods, once, and you nod once in return, just businessmen conducting their business, then you lower the case to the floor under the wall of buttons, the doors whispering open before you.
“Guess this is forever,” you say to them, to her, and step forward.
The woman’s already reaching for the case.
Step past, through, and, on the way out, reach back, tap the button for the top floor.
By the time they get there, they’ll have found the rest of the cleaning lady, smeared in with the lanky man’s business proposals.
And you, you’ll have four minutes on them, maybe five.
For someone like you, yes, that can be forever. Now shake the moth from the back of your hand, walk into it.
~
Five years is nothing, now.
Stick Man was right: your body, it turns to beef jerky, but beef jerky, it stays on the shelf forever, doesn’t it?
You don’t know how long you can go on, really. As long as you’re carrying, probably. Or until someone like you finds you.
That’s been the only fear, and the best lesson.
Before, you were always the wolf, weaving through the big sheep party. Now, though, now you want to keep your head down. Now you have something to protect.
You stay away from the bars, from the usual places.
You keep moving, too. Small town to small town. Because the Centurions, the angels, the keepers, the minders, whatever they are, they’ve got to be expecting you to follow the old patterns. But the city centers, the anonymous faces, that’s not for you anymore.
Or Thomas.
Another good thing about small towns is that the motel rooms aren’t clean in the first place.
This world was made for you, yes.
In a town with ‘Deer’ in the front part of it, not two months after slipping below the radar, dying your hair, injecting your lips, changing your name every week, developing a limp that needed a cane sometimes, when that’s when you wanted the clerk’s eyes to fall, in Deer Something, Thomas was born again.
You had the sterilized exacto knife hovered above your shaved stomach, were nodding to yourself that this was right, that this was the only way, but then your shoulders hunched around each other and you started gagging.
Something was crawling up your esophagus.
Hundreds of little wet feet scrabbling. Leathery eggshell in your gut, left behind.
On all fours between the wall and the double bed, you tried to scream into the carpet, instead threw up your little brother.
He was segmented, shiny, and shy of the light, humped his way immediately into the dark safety under the bed and stayed there for days, curled in on himself, hissing.
Because you’re a good big brother, too, a good father, you of course fed him. Not what you would have expected him to eat—what you could harvest from the kitchens of the farm houses all around, from the stream of cars passing through the gas station across the street—but leaves, and berries, and nuts when you could find them.
Three months later he stood up beside the bed you were sleeping on, tugged at the sheets, a little boy with pale hair and pale eyes and no saliva that you could detect, no scent whatsoever.
You pulled him under with you, kept him warm, made him promises.
His scalp smelled so new.
And then you left, and left the next place, and the place after that, driving slow into the future, both hands on the wheel, and you waited for him to say a word, to speak, to use his vocal apparatus at all.
But maybe that takes longer, when you’ve come as far as he has. And you could talk for the both of you, anyway. Instruct him on ways to avoid detection, how to harvest, how never to harvest. Who to select, who’s worth waiting for, who to let go. Your whole life has been training for this.
You always knew there was a reason, didn’t you?
But the city beckons.
Your rationale is that
their
reasoning, it has to be that you’ve been keeping to the rural parts. So, while they’re out there in the hinterlands, letting their moths go again and again—camphor in your pockets was all it took—you can come to where they aren’t. It’s logical. And, no, they’re not herding you. Rather, this is a merry chase, an adventure. No rush at all.