Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth (8 page)

People wept, reached to the sky for these creatures they’d never known to worship. The usual story.

Like I cared.

There were endorsement deals, talk shows, new digs for a while. My name was even on a toothbrush.

Everything dies, though.

Except me.

Evidently, the unregulated pressures inside a mentally-hijacked space lobster’s stomach, especially when that space lobster’s taking on its interstellar dragonfly form, they’re unique and transformative, to say the least.

And then there was the chemical wash part of that ride, and the exposure to cosmic rays, and whatever else nobody’s been able to replicate, especially since all our gods have abandoned us.

What did it all add up to?

I had died in transit. I was still dead. All my measurable life processes were flatlined, but it didn’t matter. I walked up out of that crater on my own, smiled for the cameras, winked at this one cute little number in the front now.

And, when that parade was all over months later, I went to see the queen.

Your mom.

“You,” she said, standing in the doorway, her voice sharp enough to draw blood.

I handed her my bill.

She laughed, wouldn’t take it.

“I don’t traffic with the dead,” she said.

“People pay for this bite,” I told her, snapping my teeth to show.

“And does it work?” she said.

I found somewhere else to look.

We figured out how to live forever, sure. Just be dead, but walking around.

Now that there are no more space lobsters left to hitch rides in, though—well. I’ll be at your funeral. I’ll be at all your funerals.

“You were supposed to bring him back alive, anyway,” she said, her hand to the door like she had no time for this.

“Bring him back so you could kill him again?” I asked.

My skin by then was pretty decayed, I guess, so it was hard to get a good smirk going. But I tried.

It made your mom’s hand reach up to her own face. For the wrinkles she’d pancaked over.

They’re showing even more now, aren’t they?

Good.

“You can’t prove I put him up there,” she said, smoking a cigarette she’d lit herself. The atmosphere somehow not turning to fire.

She passed the cigarette to me and I breathed deep, couldn’t even begin to feel it charring my lungs.

“That he came back is proof,” I said, blowing smoke. “If Earth’s gravity hadn’t found him again, he’d have snipped you in half.”

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” she said.

“You sent me to the moon to die,” I told her, just like I’d rehearsed on the drive over. “Just to tell the house detectives you’d given it an honest effort. You’d even have a receipt to enter into evidence.”

“I don’t need a receipt anymore.”

“I could tell them what you did.”

“You’d trade your version of fame in for that? You’d just be a passenger then. A victim. It would be my husband’s revenge that made you like you are. Not your own . . . what did you call it?”

“They were putting words in my mouth.”

“We needed a hero.”

“Needed,” I said.

“Very past tense,” she agreed, and then I felt that tap on my shoulder I always feel about this time in a case.

This time it was a pair of giant, vatgrown butlers.

The one on the left came at me with a hot katana.

It flashed out of nowhere, split me from my cheek, here, down to my armpit—is the feed picking this up?

Here, I’ll lean in.

Yeah, pretty ragged.

Turns out when you’re dead, though, they can just sew you right back together.

Anyway, in case I go infectious at some point, can make everybody else live forever just like me, the Service keeps agents in the bar, now. So I won’t go getting cut in half anymore.

That doesn’t mean I’ve forgot, though.

That first time your mom strutted in? I was on the phone, collecting a payment.

That’s what this recording is about.

If I did it live, I’m sure they’d find a way to stop me. And, I would be leaving this on your mom’s machine, but she won’t accept my calls anymore.

With me, though, you always pay. One way or another.

Here, let me . . . recognize this?

Yeah, you do.

Cute little crawfish. Been keeping it in a tank under my desk all this time.

Oh—I mean
him
, not ‘it.’

When I crawled up from that crater your dad made falling from the heavens, I’d crawled up alone, yeah. But now
I
had a rider. In my pocket.

Gravity had found your father again, just like I told everybody.

In low-grav, with the stars as backdrop, he was a monster, a giant, a space god.

Here on Earth, well. As you can see.

Was that a rocket in my pocket or was I just glad to see your mom again?

The first.

Take a transport up, open the airlock, let Daddy here float out, and, bam, instant spaceship. Immortality. Eternity awaits. Live forever,
ma
dame.

Or don’t.

Funny thing about this is, I don’t even really need to eat anymore, right?

But—here goes, here goes, into the hangar—I can still chew, as you can see.

Legs and all, baby.

Nice, good. Tastes like hope. No, no. Tastes like
justice
.

So, if you need my services again, you can find me in the Directory, I expect. I’ll be filed under Dead, probably.

Dead and Loving It.

Bye, now.

THIS IS NOT WHAT I MEANT

What Paula tells us at the Saturday morning sales meeting is that we won’t know who it is, this inspector from Corporate, a place so remote from our little corner of things that it might as well be another world. And then, after saying that, she leaves a silence we all know how to interpret.

For her last round of training, she spent three weeks at Corporate, and so may just recognize this inspector, this interloper, this—Corporate’s word—‘visitor.’

“And I’ll be on the floor myself, of course,” she adds, managing somehow to look each one of us in the eye.

Maybe it’s a trick she learned while she was away, or maybe it’s a natural ability all the women in her family have. Either way, when she doesn’t smile, I feel compelled to grin, like I’m making up for her seriousness, just trying to maintain some balance here, keep us from tipping all the way over into the absurd.

Of course my efforts go unappreciated, but, too, it’s not like that’s in my job description either. All I’m supposed to do is man my counter, wipe away the smudges, show the customers the sunglasses they want to see, and maybe the ones that cost ten dollars more too.

Before I know it, the week before the visit’s smeared past, simply gone, and, like we’re secret service agents, coiled white wires snaking up to our ears, we all know that the visitor is in the store. His presence crackles across all of us. Nobody whispers, but—it’s like the whole store has suddenly taken on the whimsical consistency of a watercolor, and the visitor is wading through it, stepping down deeper into the floor than any of us can, leaving swirls and eddies and ripples down whatever aisle he chooses.

When Paula walks past my counter, her smile is so mechanical, has so little to do with her eyes, that I smile almost to the point of laughing, have to clamp my hands over my mouth. Then, standing like that, I see what Paula’s doing: walking in advance of the visitor for us, telling us with her presence to be on our best behavior, that the moment is here. That he’s coming. That we should be casual, like her. Natural. Ourselves.

For a long moment I have to close my eyes to compose myself.

When I look back to the store, the only place I can even remember anymore—did I ever have a mom, even, or did Paula just raise me in the stockroom?—I see the visitor for the first time. Like we’ve been told, he’s not wearing a suit. Nothing that obvious. Like we’ve been warned about, though, he does have an otherworldly carriage, his head turning from Casuals to Intimates as if they’re wholly new, each rack and rounder a complete and total surprise, a wonderful new artifact to catalogue.

From last Saturday’s sales meeting, and from the handwritten notes Paula’s been leafing into our reshelves, we know to smile and grin no matter what this visitor does. Because he’s from the rarified atmosphere of Corporate, yes—we can’t forget that—but, too, because there may be some new protocols in place this visit: perhaps he’s been told that it’s not enough to observe us in our routine. Maybe this time, he wants to see how we react under stress, in sales situations we haven’t been specifically trained for.

The way Paula put it in the breakroom while I was eating my pimento cheese sandwich was that, if I’m asked to give the visitor, say, a chimpanzee, my response should be along the lines of ‘With or without sign language training, sir?’

What this means is that, as the visitor approaches, my mouth is so full of answers and smiles and possibility that I’m afraid to do anything, really, am more than thankful when, for reasons only he knows, he stops with his hand on the shoulder of a clearanced pullover, a look on his face of total and absolute detachment. As if he’s communing with Corporate, possibly, or channeling the board of directors somehow, through the lines and ridges in the palm of his hand.

But it’s deeper, too. The way his lip trembles.

What—what’s he thinking, remembering, reliving?

Have we marked that pullover down too much?

After checking to make sure I haven’t put the same one on at some point in the day—it’s happened, and more than once—I arrange the hangers under my register and stack all my receipts by length, and don’t say anything.

Whoever acts the most ‘retail normal’—Paula’s term, grafted over, we presume, from ‘business casual’—whoever pulls it off the best for the visit is supposed to get a twenty-five dollar gift certificate to the store.

Not that there’s anything here I want anymore—have I really been here that long already?—but still, hidden under that brass ring is a spike: if whoever does the best job is rewarded, then what of that person who messes the whole visit up?

Paula is capable of anything, we suspect.

So what I do is smile, just not too wide, like I’m guilty. And keep my hands always touching something, so they won’t visibly tremble. And, because of all that, maybe, because I’m projecting such a vision of control, of ‘retail normal’—or because I’m an obvious weak, shrieking link—the visitor sidles up to my counter, looking up at me with just his eyes, as if already suspicious here. His fingertips hover over the glass just above my five rows of sunglasses, arranged first by brand and then by price.

He’s just a customer.

“Something you remember from the island, maybe?” I hear myself say.

Above me, my security camera focuses down on the back of my neck. I can feel it like a spinal tap.

The
island?

“How can you know about that?” the visitor whispers back, a hiss almost, looking at me sidelong now, as if about to walk away, pretend not to have heard.

I open my mouth to speak, to lie with all pleasantness, to explain how of course I know about that weekend when even his wife doesn’t, but then—then I don’t know where that comes from either: that he’s married; that the island is a secret, a treasure he’s buried so deep it’s making him sick.

Maybe it’s the way he hovered his fingertips over my glass. Yes. That has to be what it was. I’ve seen so many thousands of people place their fingers there that I can read their lives now from the way they splay their hands.

Because otherwise.

Otherwise I don’t know how I could know.

And I don’t anyway, or only ever did in order to say that one thing. Like he
needed
me to say it.

Only, now, there’s nothing left. I can feel my mouth moving, and my face around it.

The visitor angles his head over, his eyes boring right into me now.

“Candace?” he says as much with his face as with his mouth.

Though it’s not a thing I do or have ever done, as far as I can remember now anyway—which, granted, isn’t that far at all—I touch my hair, look at it.

It’s still brown, still me. But not, too.

I laugh, don’t cry, thrust a pair of suddenly-red sunglasses across the counter at him.

When he puts them on, as if that, really, is the only thing to do with them, as if I’ve left him no choice in the matter, I see that the red-tinted lenses are bubbled, that this is the demo-pair we use to sell the leather, heat-resistant cases.

Before me now, blind to all this, maybe literally blind with those glasses on, the visitor has his head tilted back, is studying all parts of the ceiling at once.

“How much?” he says.

“Eighteen months or two quail eggs,” I say, like it’s a thing I say every day. Like that pair’s even for sale.

“Not the—not the whole quail?” he says back, his fingers to the glass in some configuration so dense and elegant I almost lose my breath: what I can see is sand, matching up with other sand, and children’s feet, a freckled girl even he’s forgotten by now, except insofar as Candace is, to him, her, grown-up.

What the freckled girl and the visitor found in the sand that day was . . . I don’t know. Something to do with a bird, maybe? That he thought of the whole ride home, and then never again?

Am I really going to cry now?

“You’d have to talk to financing about that,” I tell him, nodding across the store to Customer Service, trying to tell him with my eyes that
that’s
where he really wants to go here.

He looks with me, nods. Doesn’t see the tears running hot down the back of my throat. What I’m wishing with every fiber of my being is that I was Candace, whoever Candace is, my hair sun-bleached and impossible, perfect, my cheeks dusted with freckles I secretly don’t regret. That I was anybody but me.

What the visitor does after looking across the store to fix Financing in his plans is touch the rack of cheap sunglasses, their arms oily from being tried on so much. He touches it and it starts spinning, only, instead of just going around, it goes up and down
and
around. Like a carousel.