Mostly Skin

 

Chris Tannhauser

 

When you bite a wiener, you’re tasting history. 

 

The Ambiguous Meat Company was founded in 1862, a time when the intersection of hungry customers and freshly slaughtered meat scaled simultaneously—but without a market intermediary to yin-yang the flesh-to-cash flow.  Ambiguous Meyer, the son of Puritans, slotted himself into the gap in a way that would have made his ancestors simultaneously proud and flagellent—and secured for himself a position as one of history’s most ruthless Gilded Age barons, not just rich, but piss-on-the-president’s-head-while-laughing fuck-it wealthy.  Meat was money.

 

In order to compassion-wash his notorious and brutal excesses, Meyer commissioned an infinitely swappable mascot—the Meat Maiden—to peddle his sausage.  The original was a comely young woman driving a placard-clad donkey cart; she was armed for obvious reasons, a shroud of innocence with bodice blades.  As time marched forward, the cart became motorized, and the mutable young woman, swapped out whenever the “young” descriptor seemed strained, was armed with ever bigger guns.

 

And so the Ambiguous Meatmobile was born—a great Peyronic tube arched achingly upward, blood-red and nestled into the bun of a fat-tired chassis, with a horn that sounded like scream-yodeling.

 

In 1917, the Meatmobile was decommissioned and donated to the war effort, where it was up-armored, mounted with guns, and driven straight into the mouth of Hell.  The Huns quickly branded it Der Teufelwurst and were known to flee positions when its hungry treads churned the mud and corpses of no man’s land.

 

It was back on the streets for the Roaring ’20s, with an Art Deco facelift and a louche flapper behind the wheel—and something like a speakeasy operating out of the toilet stall.  But it wasn’t until the 1930s that we got the familiar meat whistles, the “I’m in the wiener and the wiener’s in me!” stickers, and newborns getting free rides home from the hospital.

 

Officially, the Meatmobile was scrapped for World War II, but all they really did was lop the wheels off and put wings on it instead of melting it down into firing pins and grenade dimples.  Now she was a heavy bomber, flying over 214 missions, each swastika dotting her nose a terrible story, either banal, or nonsensical, or genocidal.  She was at all the big ones—including Dresden, and, yes, even Berlin—chewing through crew with shrapnel teeth and gaping metal mouths in her hull.  While very few survived her—being rotated out after 35 missions—no ball turret gunner ever made it back.  They’d invariably lose contact with the cockpit during the scrum, voice lost in the engine drone, the chatter of guns, the thump and gravel-on-a-tin-roof rattle of flak.  And in the end, the ball gunner was dead in a butcher’s fishbowl, or dead with their oxygen hose wrapped around their neck, or dead for no clear reason—or just plain gone.

 

She did have one crash landing in Belgium, the whole shebang on fire, the ball gunner calling out their emergency descent, a decent-enough replacement for the shattered altimeter:

 

“Boys, seriously, you need to get me out of here.”

 

and

 

“Why isn’t the gear down? I’m seeing fucking trees!”

 

and

 

“OH GOD OH GOD OH MOTHER—”

 

When they hit, everyone, including maybe the ball gunner, expected the turret to just get pushed back up inside, but this bit of gear was designed by a 4-F bed-wetter with a face that never made a woman think of locomotives, ever, so it was the most robust turret carriage in the entire war, theoretically able to bear the total weight of the aircraft proper during a crash landing.  The ball gunner’s final scream got pinched into a racing stripe and a wet flap of hair on the tail.

 

After the war, the fuselage was recovered from a mothball facility in Arizona and repurposed back to mascot and marketing duties—but all they really did was lop the wings off and put wheels on it, leaving the yoke, the throttles, and the bomb bay doors.  And while she was still mildly radioactive from when she nuked Berlin, a couple coats of red ‘n yellow lead paint fixed that right up.

 

And that’s pretty much it until today, outside of a few covert scrapes during the Cold War, some secret nuclear stuff, and that one time in the 1990s when the Meatmobile was briefly used to transport Olmec heads to a hasty dump site—but the less said about that, the better.

 

Right now, the Meatmobile was pegging 140 miles-per-hour on I-84 near Boise with at least five police APCs and a technical made from an ’85 Subaru BRAT and an Ebay’d Russian anti-aircraft gun in hot pursuit.  The current Meat Maiden, whose dainty foot was putting the pedal to the metal, was Madison, and if you knew her, none of this would surprise you.  Just ask Lionel, her co-pilot.  He’s terrified out of his mind, but not the least bit surprised.  (Technically, he was her third co-pilot—the other two had been completely fucked out, eyes gone dead like old whores—but Lionel had staying power, and a farmboy bod complete with horse cock and a thresher-accident IQ.)

 

Madison’s specialty was reverse cowgirl—the lazy man’s doggy style—so she could just “grind dick without the stupid face.”

 

“I don’t bend like that,” Lionel panic-barked the first time.

 

“The hell you don’t,” she replied over her shoulder, pelvising his dick in half to rub her G-spot.

 

When it was clear she was done, he asked the dumbest question of his dumb-question life:  “What about me?”

 

Madison sneered.  “Finish it like your mom does.”

 

Lionel didn’t know about the look in his eyes, the utter devastation of This is my girlfriend? welling above his cheeks, but Madison sighed like she just smelled a dirty diaper, wadded up her red ‘n yellow polyester jumpsuit, pressed it into his face and finished him with a gorilla grip handy that would confuse him for the rest of his life.

 

If Lionel had a thing for Meat Maidens (and who didn’t?), Madison had a thing for the Meatmobile itself.  The Meatmobile made Madison horny; she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, it wasn’t that she wanted to fuck the Meatmobile, or be fucked by something like the Meatmobile—she wanted to fuck in the Meatmobile, to embody the matryoshka dick mantra of the sticker:  “I’m in the wiener and the wiener’s in me!”  She liked Meat Maidens just fine (and who didn’t?), every last one with the innate predator’s balance of a Russian gymnast, and that jumpsuit with the big zipper, you can slide right out of it and clean it up with a hose—but it was the cockpit that called to her.  Even though most of the history was occulted—forgotten or spun—she knew in her bones that piloting the Meatmobile would be like strapping yourself to an angel’s sword.  And she would do anything to get herself there.

 

On the first day of tryouts, when asked her name and little bit about herself, she addressed her cohort bluntly.  “I’m going to fuck all of you.  And not with my pussy.”

 

Sassy from Alabama made a tattletale face, cocked her head and raised her hand.  “Shouldn’t that disqualify her, Mr. Bun General?”

 

The Bun General, resplendent in his shaggy epaulettes and medals from at least 14 wars, considered this.  “No,” he replied to incredulous gasps, “I want to see how this plays out.”

 

It played out with elbows to the face at the finish line, laxatives in the cupcakes, pantsing on the ropes course, fake letters home.  Madison climbed a big fat pile of broken bitches to get into that seat.

 

So now you’re thinking that this high-speed chase near Snake River Canyon on I-84 is all Madison’s fault—an angry eight-year-old who didn’t get a sticker, a girl who knew how to throw a punch, a young woman who fucked like a man in the sense that she took what she wanted—but really this is all about Nazis.

 

Nobody knew the rented panel truck at the railroad crossing was full of Nazis—well, I mean the Nazis knew, but it’s not like it was a Nazi truck (though I suppose any truck full of Nazis is a Nazi truck), it was just a random rental from a company with a happy name and a cartoon pangolin mascot, though most people have no idea what a pangolin is, much less a cartoon one.  So that whole pangolin bit was a waste of time.

 

Nobody knew it was full of Nazis—but the Meatmobile sure did.  It could smell the stench of the camps inside their skulls.  And so when she pulled in behind the truck as the red ‘n white striped gate arm came down and the bells dinged and the lights flashed Madison may have set the brake, but the Meatmobile lurched forward three feet and kissed bumpers.

 

The thing about trains, they may look ponderous—dodgeable, even—but they are furiously working the mass side of the equation like a moon bending an orbit.  They come over the horizon in an implacable arc, sloppy to the brim with a king tide of inertia, and being magnanimous, are more than happy to share a little bit of that with you.  Vehicles evaporate into clouds of fist-sized debris.  Bodies come apart at the major joints, mostly just a burst of torsos and spinning limbs.

 

The truck vanished.

 

The Meatmobile slewed sideways, scraped hard down one side, and then the train horn was doppler-blasting into the distance.  At first Madison felt stunned, then awful when she saw the arm pinwheeling against the sky, a feeling that downshifted into a merely queasy “huh” when she saw the swastika armband.  She wanted to do the right thing and pull over and maybe vomit, but the Meatmobile wanted to go go go like this was mission 215 and it was ready for motherfucking takeoff.  She was plugged into it and it was plugged into her.  The sensation was crazy, as if the dainty foot that floored it was wearing a discarded Auschwitz shoe.  The Meatmobile’s tires screamed smoke at the asphalt and she took off down the road with a mean shimmy, speedometer seeking that peg.

 

Now, getting pulled over was something Meat Maidens were trained for—take your foot off the gas, signal, let the Meatmobile bleed speed gradually as you drift to the shoulder.  That gave you time to grab a couple stickers and take the safety off your drop gun.  Most just wanted the tour—but sometimes you had to show them why the Ambiguous Meat Company was still a going concern, horsemeat rumors (true) notwithstanding.

 

The cop waddled over, masked, swaddled and bristling with tactical bric-a-brac, each buckled piece a dime-store confidence, another mile between suffering and the retina of his soul.  

 

Madison made a stern face at Lionel, hand-signaled for him to stay the fuck out of it, and popped the hatch.  The steps extended with a hiss, and she exited the vehicle stickers-first.

 

“Ma’am, why are there a bunch of swastikas and a lady leg on the Meatmobile?” asked the cop.

 

“We-ell,” Madison drawled as she tugged the zipper ring on her jumpsuit from ticket to warning to no ticket to waistband, “the better question is, ‘what’s that behind you?’”

 

And BOOM.

 

There was a number to call—or tap out, actually, on the Meatmobile’s telegraph, the only piece of original equipment from 1862—a number that would summon vast corporate energies to warp reality itself, making things disappear while conjuring others; lives erased or enriched, depending on how gullible and useful one was.  In the end, all was meat, and meat was money, in an endless, recursive loop.  

 

Lionel had done as he was told and dutifully tapped out the number, but if the current situation was any indication, this band of sting-crazy cops had yet to get the memo.  In addition to the six chase vehicles, they had set up a roadblock ahead, complete with a tow vehicle to capture their prize—and some genius, Madison noted, had already put the tow platform down at an angle in anticipation of the asset forfeiture.

 

While the APCs were exceeding their limits, Madison was nowhere near hers.  She switched the nuclear pile to manual, laid her hand on the tripartite throttle.  “We’re gonna make this jump,” she said.

 

Lionel blanched.  “Or die trying,” he squeaked.

 

Madison frowned and elbowed the emergency passenger safety harness release.  Lionel’s crash rig retracted into his seat like a startled monkey.

 

“Cowards go bareback,” she snarled as she feathered the control rods into a prompt critical excursion.

 

Normally, this power would be used to flash water to steam to drive an electric turbine which would then crank the six supercharged Edison motors—but this was the goddamn Meatmobile.  Instead, the entire mustard magazine and septic tankage dumped straight into the nuclear pile itself, and, so energized, out the nozzle at the back in a huge blue-white blowtorch of pure hate that slagged the closest APC into a metal-vapor donut and spanked the Meatmobile forward with a spine-cracking surge.

 

At the dawn of the Nuclear Age there was this thing called “tickling the dragon”, where all you needed were six kilos of refined uranium and a screwdriver to play rock-paper-scissors with the Devil.  The goal was to twiddle things to see where the line of criticality was—how close you could get to a runaway, sustained reaction without going over.

 

When the infernal gambler with the screwdriver fucked up and the flash happened nobody said, “What the fuck was that?!” because they were all scientists.  But they were also hot dogs in a gas station display—tubes of meat rolling, rolling, rolling until they were cooked through—they just didn’t understand exactly what that meant yet.  Their skin would discolor, pucker and slough.  They would shed their hair and nails and humanity and enthusiastically shit their organs out both ends.  How long this took depended on where they stood when Satan crowed, “Always bet on rock!” and they saw the light.  Someone smart marked where their feet were on the floor with chalk so they could do some science when the suffering was done.

 

The Meatmobile hit the tow ramp and gunched down hard, burying the shocks and blowing at least one tire—then up, up, and away, Snake River Canyon small out the windows as Lionel starfished into the ceiling at the top of the parabola.

 

Down below, the technical screeched to a halt and Unidentified Cop Number Fourteen long-armed the cocking lever on the Russki gun, took the grips in fists and double-thumbed the triggers to light ‘em up.  The massive gun thudded a death beat, shell casings as big as dicks dancing everywhere.

 

Flak puffed into black stars all around the lurching Meatmobile, cracking windows and zipping bright spots of shrapnel through the crew cabin.  While Madison was trying to predict the landing, Lionel shit himself.  But the Meatmobile was a creature of war, and the haphazard shots were like the taps of a Shinto shrine maiden, waking the awful Pokémon within—Enola Gay uses BONE SHADOW: it’s super effective!  The Meatmobile ripple-fired the explosive bolts on the undercarriage where Greatest Generation mechanics had merely folded her wings so they could get to the “drink ‘n forget” part of their day—and something beneath the toilet, curled and withered... stirred.

 

Silver wings unfurled even as the flak ate holes in them, the whole affair juddering with tenuous, gut-queasing lift—but the Meatmobile was more comfortable in the air after all, and deadlier there, too. Madison could intuit the exo-atmospheric mid-course kill envelope; she could feel the engagement solution.  Comms crackled.

 

“Pilot,” wheezed the mummy under the toilet, “give me a fifteen-degree roll to put me on target.”

 

Madison brought the Meatmobile over, and the Last Ball Gunner engaged the clusterfuck of APCs with his twin fifties.  A rolling wave of dust puffs turned to sparks as it overtook the APCs, blowing tires and punching holes and knocking people to pieces.  The technical was obliterated and the flak stopped.

 

But the damage was done.  The Meatmobile was leaking every kind of fluid, some of them from what was left of Lionel, looking strangely serene and not at all surprised.  Madison fought the increasingly stiff controls as the horizon tipped and dipped and she realized she had never crash-landed a plane before—but by God, she was a fucking Meat Maiden, and she wasn’t going to be the one that lost the Meatmobile.  She worked on instinct, followed the machine’s lead, and lined up with the freeway just in time for the weirdly quiet glide before all hell broke loose.  Metal shrieked and she cracked her teeth and felt her kidneys in her hips.  Her spine did a weird thing she never wanted to feel again.  The Meatmobile ablated around her, shedding belly skin and sparking superstructure as she slid.  When she finally lurched to a stop, twisted head-down, Madison struggled out of her crash harness and crumpled into the asphalt.  She staggered from the smoking wreckage, her jumpsuit blackened and torn, face and hair streaked with blood, some of it hers.

 

The surviving cops were there, a startled arc of automatic rifles.  Nobody said a fucking thing.

 

The unspoken question:  Why didn’t they just shoot her?  Well, she was a white lady, and a Meat Maiden, to boot.  Trigger fingers were stayed by lifetimes of operant conditioning.

 

It was then that the last of the most important fluid drained from the battered Meatmobile.  No, not blood—reactor coolant.

 

It was a flash you could feel in your fluorescent teeth, one that made flesh transparent and tingled your bones.

 

“What the fuck was that?!” somebody said.

 

Madison took a deep breath, exhaled, and reached into her pocket.  “You should all hold still and use this chalk,” she said, a good-sized piece of it in her hand.

 

“Is it—is it magic chalk?”

 

“No,” she shook her head sadly for so many reasons, “it’s science chalk.  Because when this is all over, we’re gonna need to make some kinda sense out of it.”

•

 

Dreams.

Sleep...

 

2000

You arrive suddenly at a shallow river flowing through thick jungle. On the other side, a silverback gorilla with a spear, and a mask of mud and straw.

 

You regard each other silently for a moment.

 

“What is this place?” you call out.

 

The gorilla-man pauses. “We both know where we are.”

 

It’s true. You do know. But you do not want to accept.

 

“You must be thirsty,” he says. “Come down to the water and drink. It’s very sweet.”

 

You want to drink, but you do not like the tone of the gorilla-man. He would snatch you, you know.

 

(The mud mask is there because he is fucking rotting away dead! There is only fetor-slick skull beneath it.)

 

Many more times you find yourself back here, and each time there are more gorillas in mud masks, watching you, imploring you to cross over... One in the ford, close enough to snatch you...

 

You surmise, after a time, that they are in the Land of the Dead.

 

You are wrong.

 

You are in the Land of the Dead—they are in Limbo.

 

They want what you have, an afterlife.

 

 

2015

 

Garbage trucks downshift and gun black pennants from the pipes in order to crawl up the slope of a Möbius strip highway; as they invert across the sky the trash begins to spill out and rain down, only it isn’t trash, it’s babies, and people run to catch them in buckets and tubs (some padded with hasty quilts, some not) and as they thump down into the lucky bins and unlucky ground some onlookers get creamed with a six-story baby to the head, knocked flat, and the rest begin fighting on the gore-slicked pavement over the best parts, feeding and pulling hair as the first truck comes unstuck from the asphalt clouds and begins its ponderous, energy-gathering descent toward the crowd below...

 

 

2016

 

I had a cut on my arm, and as I investigated with gentle fingertips I felt a strange lump inside. I pressed and prodded and finally expressed the thing with not inconsiderable—but curiously pain-free—effort. Turning it over in my hands and wiping away blood and tissue the thing suddenly resolved into a weird teratoma: conjoined fetal skulls.

 

Being hollow, I decided I’d use it as a dice cup.

 

⁂

 

 

I was in an Ace of Base cover band.

 

I’d like to think we were called something cool like “Ass of Bass” but I didn’t have time to figure out the band name what with our whirlwind international stadium tour. Actual dream-thought: “Wow, fifty-thousand people are about to be deeply disappointed.” But somehow they loved it even though we weren’t nearly as good as the source material and I seemed to be organically predisposed to being incapable of remembering the lyrics.

 

⁂

 

 

2018

 

the man-frazzle on the throne leered from the smoke

 

⁂

 

 

a bikini rod is a lead dildo designed to prevent bikinis from going critical

 

⁂

 

 

Vacuum had become currency, and all the mines were in the sky. 

 

Everyone carried around little metal flasks, and you paid for something by letting air hiss into your flask. 

 

Using a pump to create more vacuum was counterfeiting.

 

 

2019

 

I went off-roading in deep desert canyons with J.K. Rowling. Afterward, she invited me to a party for billionaires, where I stumbled into a couple making hasty love in a bathroom. The man was in a hospital bed, complete with incomplete gown, tubes and wires. The woman invited me to join in but I just wasn’t sure how that might work, so I demurred.

 

⁂

 

 

I was in Italy, and there were no bathrooms.

 

⁂

 

 

My wife woke up, stretched, and said, “I was having a good dream, so I wanted to finish it.”

 

“What was it about?” I asked.

 

“We were swinging—”

 

“???”

 

“—but it was for a good cause. We did it to break up an international spy ring; we were having the press conference about it when I woke up.”

 

Upon further questioning I learned it also involved Disneyland, numerical tattoos, animatronics, me taunting the animatronics and the animatronics painting me with goo—a goo that would allow them to track us anywhere in the world.

 

This is pretty much why we’ve been married 30 years.

 

 

2020

 

The dreamgirl said I fucked better than Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I got that going for me.

 

⁂

 

 

The board game I designed in my sleep last night had two resources: chrome & blood.

 

⁂

 

 

Fog is actually ghoul urine—they piss it into air after they devour a corpse, and in enormous quantities.

 

⁂

 

 

The good news: The Fountain of Youth has been discovered! Peel back the years! Live smooth and bendy and pain-free like you did in an earlier onion-layer of yourself!

 

The bad news: It requires threading a throbbing lumpy-chunky vat-grown umbilicus from a lady’s hoo-ha to a man’s belly button, and they have to remain within five feet of each other for months and months and months like an eye-rolling performance art piece.

 

The worser news: It only works for men, and for some reason men are having a hard time finding women who will put up with that shit.

 

⁂

 

 

The dog has dog toys that contain microscopic pixel art made from individual atoms which require a special viewer to see. Patrick Stewart warns me that I shouldn’t look at them too much, as every time you look—aw, shit, there goes another one.

 

⁂

 

 

Riann Wilson had a ludicrous horse penis, and wanted to shoot some hot “lucky Pierre” action with his girlfriend and another man who also had a tentacular member. The kink was that this wouldn’t be any mere x-rated movie, but an x-ray movie, so really just grindy skeletons with ghost-meat wafting around them. I’m not sure if I was the director or coffee boy, but at one point I accidentally walked in front of the beam and stood there, gawking, for something like four astronauts’ worth of chest x-rays.

 

⁂

 

 

a fragment: 

 

by concentrating really hard, like so hard I could only hold onto it for the briefest of moments, I could shapeshift—not into terrestrial animals but things completely alien and unknowable... 

 

and then my mind would flag and I’d pop back into a people shape

 

⁂

 

 

The aliens were ultradense gray prisms, man-sized, thin and angled—but I didn’t know that yet as they were wearing people-suits. They were very helpful, nudging me in all the right directions as I tried to figure out the mysterious flight characteristics of the UFO I saw. It spun with a wobble due to the hideous mass of the pilots themselves! When I saw through their ruse (imagine a pry bar as heavy as a truck inside a blowup doll) they showed me another human who knew them, one they had convinced to build his house over a volcanic vent which they then triggered. And that’s how I came to do all this petty shoplifting, officer—they demand Slim Jims and nail polish, and they’ll kill me if I don’t!

 

Then there was a hazy part about my hotel room, and how one entire wall was open to a busy shopping mall, which made getting dressed interesting.

 

⁂

 

 

There is a robot crawling toward Las Vegas. It used to walk but somebody smashed its legs. What will it do when it gets to Vegas? No one knows... but it won’t be good. People drive out into the desert to see it, to stand on its back, to attach their cars by ropes and chains and have a picnic while it drags them ever on. Some people put things in its way for it to crawl over or around or tunnel under, stunts it pulls with dogged, machine-like tenacity. There is a robot crawling toward Las Vegas...

 

⁂

 

 

The mariachis—hundreds of them—were dead in the park because the cartel had glued their faces shut. I drove over a few, with great wincing regret, in my efforts to flee the scene.

 

⁂

 

 

A titanic moth, dead, gliding still in the upper atmosphere... A city built upon its back, flight maintained by the Pinion Guild. No one talks about the Antennae People... or the Mouth Mines.

 

⁂

 

 

The guy in the disco cowboy outfit wore an undergarment body rig that vibrated him into invisibility so he could shoot people at the party... Luckily for all of us Will Smith had a head clamp that vibrated his head at the same frequency, so he shot him first.

 

⁂

 

 

The Melungeons who were hosting the convention in the swamp had bred two enormous hamsters—like the size of mid-size sedans—to act as guardians. As I was making my way out of the swamp I saw that they had killed a stag, and though they ignored me (perhaps I still smelled of the convention?), I kept my souvenir cardboard tube pointed at them, knowing it wouldn’t do a goddamn thing if they decided to charge.

 

⁂

 

 

This is what happens when you flip randomly through the choose-your-own-adventure dream:

 

- The robot was a three-foot black chrome skull suspended between two wagon wheels, and it wanted my burrito. We fled (the burrito and I), but the burrito was so scared it shit itself, beans down my forearm, tortilla gone floppy, as we hurriedly picked through the ruins, and that terrible, hungry robot rolled impossibly ever on...

 

- As the armored troop carrier screeched to a halt in front of me, its angular door scything upward, I shook my lunchbox, a self-constructing mini-missile launcher that unfolded over my shoulder and into my hand, placing the trigger over the pad of my right index finger—I squeezed and popped a pencil-thin missile that tracked for the vehicle interior in glorious super slo-mo...

 

- I slid toward wakefulness in the middle of a confused ramble about the Second Amendment with a female firearms instructor who was infatuated with my beard (she was a staff member of a post-apocalyptic CITADEL OF KNOWLEDGE where handsome and beautiful young people in uniform yoga pants learned to shoot real good); I clawed at the fabric of sleep to haul myself back in to add nuance to my point, which was far too blunt—

 

⁂

 

 

Super stoked to have coined the word “intranquil”—woke to find it already in the dictionary. Somewhere, somehow it darted in through the eyes or ears and lay dormant in the sediment of the unconsious, needing only the stick of sleep to stir it up...

 

What else is down there?

 

WHAT ELSE

 

⁂

 

 

On Mars, no one is interested in my new book, Astrology on Mars.

 

⁂

 

 

When you’re the only human in the room on the pregnant vampire’s due date, run.

 

⁂

 

 

I am the walking life support for a killer whale. His heart has failed him and so the arm-thick red and blue hoses plugged into my chest mean my heart is beating for two. I can go places, but not very far. Outwardly, I worry that my meagre monkey heart can’t possibly serve us both—but it’s somehow working, I feel his ocean-bullet strength in me and am secretly proud.

 

 

⁂

 

 

...and wake.

I Bludgeon the Ghoul with a Sack of Skulls

Setup: Please follow the numbered steps precisely—failure to do so will result in degenerate play and embarrassing Internet posts.

 

She liked farming; he preferred stabbing things in the neck. They always sat at separate tables, never together because they both played with yellow: the color of the sun, of bananas, a certain flower, happy faces; yellow: the color of liver failure, of pus, a hobo’s tooth, cowardice. Beyond this they were barely aware of each other. She knew he was there because he was comfortable around women; he knew she was there because of the unfortunately insistent wetware in his head that was constantly pointing out that her shape was THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE UNIVERSE, a living, breathing Venus of Willendorf constantly snagging the corner of his eye. That, and she said things that made him smile inside.

 

But on this night they arrived simultaneously late at the Are You Game? café, a bright, well-lit place, appointed in blonde wood, spacious, yet pleasingly cluttered like a benevolent wizard’s study, smelling of subtle cleaning products, gurgling espresso, and washed bodies. It was trafficked mostly by young, unattached professionals and a small, but hard, knot of grumpy wargamers possessed of gray beards and social mores that might have been shockingly progressive when they were young but were now, buried as they were under a mass of calendar pages, vaguely unsavory. They gathered, that ancient coterie, to silently squint at the most unappealing games imaginable—four-color paper maps with stacks of carefully trimmed cereal-box cardboard squares—meetings punctuated by frequent smoke-breaks where the primary topic of conversation seemed to be upcoming funerals.

 

And so, through the sin of unpunctuality, it was just the two of them—and the Disaster Twins, the two guys no one ever played with if they could help it. They weren’t twins, exactly, but they made no effort to not dress alike, all the while sporting identical barber college haircuts. Perhaps they cut each other’s hair. Simultaneously. It was hard to tell. One of them was an unabashed nose-picker who would have done well to channel that fastidiousness into other areas of hygiene; the other held eye contact too long and too hard, the way tigers watched crowds at the zoo—only without the comfort of a glass-and-steel barrier. From all this it would be easy to assume that they were merely neurodiverse, processing the world differently at a fundamental level, but it was more likely they were choosing—as much as one can call it a choice—to be the living symptoms of a parade of fucked-up Christmases, Santa a no-show, or drunk and gropey when he was there, and the kind of person that might come out of all that. Times two.

 

She looked at him, and the Twins. “Well,” she said, “if we’re gonna do this, we might as well farm.” She indicated a copy of Loam Lords: 1401 AD on the table.

 

The Twins groaned. He shared their sentiment but kept it to himself.

 

“1401? Everyone knows 1937—‘Golden State’—is the superior version,” said one of the twins with a snotty lilt.

 

“Yeah,” said the other one, “the one with the retard and the rabbits.”

 

“Charming,” she replied. “Look, none of us are happy about this. But we make do or no one plays anything.”

 

He raised a hand slightly. “I’m—a little bit happy,” he said.

 

She raised an eyebrow slightly. “Don’t get too happy,” she replied.

 

They sat and unboxed the thing. Everything was double-sleeved in bespoke plastic like a dubious boner at Howard Hughes’ grandma’s house. You could spill an entire beer or murder an incontinent hagfish on it and still resell it as mint.

 

She fumbled a shuffle and cards sluiced across the table. “Jesus, sleeves?” she said, “Someone’s afraid their game’s gonna get the herpes.”

 

He glanced at the nose-picker. “It might.”

 

Of course everyone knew how to play—who doesn’t know how to play Loam Lords? It was, after all, the game that had cracked the code for heavy strategy gamers and casual non-gamers alike. High rollers and wheelchair-bound luminaries fought million-dollar duels over it in Vegas even as Internet celebrities noodled with the bits while frying on MDMA. It was every baby’s first game, and great-grandpa’s last; it was the only non-chess game known to have caused a chess master to cane another one into a coma. It had decisions so meaningful they made grown men weep, and yet it was so accessible that even the stupid could wrap their insufficient minds around it. It was quantum mechanics with a sparkly-pink pistol grip.

 

Setup was perfunctory—eight hands wove the thing precisely, perfectly, out of the chaos of box contents; the first player was obvious, and wordlessly chosen, the first card-fall and chit-push a combination of historically safe opening and shockingly novel gambit. Gasps and nods all around. And so they played, the game neatly compressing time and hypnotically transporting them into separate heavens of pure thought, math giving rise to movement and music, to dance and worlds, and a distantly ticking cosmos...

 

When he chanced to glance up he kept his eyes on her eyes, but not too much; it’s like the sun, like looking at the sun. You only get a couple seconds. No wonder perceptive women thought all real men were rape-beasts—but hadn’t he read something about how it wasn’t his fault? That there were ancient monkey circuits whose only job was to wait and wait and wait and then fire like mad when they saw breasts? Circuits that were cultivated, like carnal bonsai, by higher-order Puritan programming, reaching down through the murk of evolutionary history to pull it out by the roots, but instead strangely reinforcing it, making it smaller, but far tougher, bent against the wind? And so heterosexual American males got erections when they saw a baby eat.

 

Besides, the article was probably written by a lecherous old adjunct professor on his way out the door astride one too many sexual harassment complaints, peer reviewed by other creeps who realized they were going to need something for their lawyers to wave in the faces of an irrational jury. “Blame God,” they’d say, “blame the muck we rose from. Blame Science.”

 

“What are you doing?” she asked.

 

He jumped. “What.”

 

“It’s your turn.”

 

He looked at her blankly.

 

“Sow, reap, prima nocta, something, anything.”

 

He blushed, scanned the board, nudged a cube without really thinking—and kicked the game square in the nuts.

 

“Seriously?” yelled one of the Twins, “Seriously? You’re gonna ship sorghum now?!”

 

“Sweet Jesus,” breathed the other Twin.

 

“I’ll—I’ll take it back,” he said.

 

“Oh—oh no, no takesies-backsies. If you’re taking it back then I’m taking like my last ten turns back, shipping fucking sorghum.” The Twin spat the words. “Like you haven’t been playing this game your whole fucking life.”

 

“Disrespectful is what it is,” said the other Twin.

 

He didn’t look at her again as she used the last of the game to wipe his mess off the board with their stupid faces, tripling all their scores.

 

 

1: If you’re reading this you’ve already opened the box, so we’ll just skip that part.

 

How to describe her beyond a simple sigh?

 

She wore her long, thick hair in sculptural braids that were never the same twice; her deep, bright eyes taking it all in from behind minimalist glasses; her curves draped in loose blouses and skirts that were just this side of Renfaire garb: wide belts, pouches instead of a purse, knee-high leather horse-riding boots. She smelled of vanilla, peaches, and sometimes peppermint. The total effect was intoxicating, amplifying, the difference, he imagined, between merely looking at cocaine and freebasing with a comedian. She was Richard Pryor on fire.

 

And it made him wish he were that brave. He wore what the other engineering students wore in college, what they still wore at work entirely out of habit: whatever their mom bought them, whatever they found in the drawer, paired-up and color-coordinated, blue with blue, brown with brown, nothing black at all. A frisky day might involve cargo shorts and flip-flops with socks, like Cool Craig down in Compliance Testing. He was a dork, too, but somehow he could put it in a box and get laid. They would have built a solid-gold statue of him, to the absolute limits of the catastrophic intersection of mass, malleability, compressive strength and structural integrity (which was precisely 3.14158 meters tall, including, of course, his upraised arm calling all dorks forward to bang) if they hadn’t hated him in equal measure. There were only two thoughts whenever Cool Craig sashayed into a room:

 

1) That’s totally what I’m wearing for Frisky Friday, and

 

2) I bet his alarm clock is a blowjob.

 

It only took him three weeks to realize that being on time meant they would never play together again—on account of the lack of overlap in their preferred gaming styles, and that whole “yellow” thing—so on the fourth week he began to show up late on purpose. It was a carefully calibrated lateness, 17 minutes past the hour, the precise moment they had first found themselves at the same table. It may have been the purest of chance, or an artifact of her situation—the amount of time it took to neatly fold someone else’s work mess so it could be unpacked in the morning, or catching every traffic light between there and here, or even how long it took her to make and eat a hasty sandwich. And so he bet it all on reproducibility, spending those extra 17 minutes—after he was ready to go—sitting bolt upright on his couch, rubbing his adrenal glands smooth like worry stones.

 

For another three weeks he arrived precisely late—where he would notice she was otherwise engaged and then peel off as the Disaster Twins mucked their game of Magic and vectored for him. Three long weeks of no gaming whatsoever, which was the non-gamer equivalent of not breathing until you get brain damage. He could actually feel himself growing stupid, a sensation that began to gnaw at his resolve.

 

On the fourth week, she met him in the parking lot.

 

 

2: Carefully place the board in the center of the play area; having read that, you are legally prohibited from contacting us for a replacement if you screw it up.

 

“There’s something I want to try,” she said as they strode purposefully toward the café, “but the designer’s kind of a dick.”

 

“Oh, a game,” he said too quickly, then, “What makes you say that?”

 

“Internet would know, but I don’t wanna look. Kids, racism, something like that. Either way, he was found dead in Bangkok of misadventure poisoning.”

 

He squinted. “Someone poisoned him?”

 

“No, it’s—” she hesitated, “—the polite way to say ‘autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong’.” Her pronunciation was delightfully precise.

 

“So you mean autothanotic asphyxiation,” he replied.

 

She broadcast a quick emoji, eyes rolled above a small smile. His heart caught it like it was eggplant and peach stamped over by unicorn and the red, double-underlined 100, all of which he slapped away hard, replaced with a brief sum of Holocaust survivor tattoo math to keep himself steady.

 

Once inside, they cut straight to the pyramid of loaner games, tall enough that it made his palms sweat.

 

“Here we are,” she said, pulling a box out from under the pile. Lesser games clunked into the gap.

 

“‘Star farm’,” he read aloud.

 

She gave him a look. “That is not how it’s pronounced.”

 

He looked again. “Sure it is. ‘Star farm’.”

 

“Read it,” she said.

 

“‘Star farm’.”

 

“Read it!” she demanded.

 

“‘Star farm!’” he exclaimed quietly.

 

She threw her hands up over her head and shouted “STARFAAARM!” at the entire room.

 

“We’re game,” said one of the Disaster Twins.

 

The four of them sat together out of common courtesy, and the distant twang of empathy, and a little bit of social anxiety, and a feeling—held weirdly out of phase by all of them—that they were making friends. The box lid came off with a loud fart, and the Twins snickered; he hated himself for his reflexive approval.

 

Beneath an archaeology of baggies, the board was one of those scary six-folders where no matter how you tried to unfurl it there was always at least one panel hanging by nothing more than paper and glue and angst. What started with two hands quickly involved all eight, and to no good effect, the Disaster Twins struggling to invoke mad shearing forces even as he and she worked to minimize them; no one present had an ownership stake in the game, making half of them super-careless and the other half super-careful. The overall effect was like watching a crow with a broken wing trying to get into a brightly colored snack bag. Miraculously, they got the thing flat without a tear and only the merest hint of profanity.

 

Laid out, it was quite a thing to behold, beautifully rendered, a massive art piece first painted on canvas by a delayed suicide, then delicately overlaid with game-boundaries, selection boxes and subconsciously evocative icons. It was the sort of spread that made a True Gamer’s breath catch in the throat.

 

Half of the board was lavish with an asteroid bubble farm, a dome of life on a lonely rock, bright with bucolic colors, sectors for fields and crops, cube corrals and control panels for monitoring atmosphere, water tankage, soil pH, and orders for programming the limited number of robot brains to plow, sow, reap and load outbound shuttles; the other half was dead space, a forbidding void where a science fiction protagonist’s parents might go missing, a minimalist star-sprinkled black, sectors for outbound shuttle lanes and occult enemy vessels, dice docks and control panels for monitoring station integrity, railgun tracking, nuclear munitions, and orders for programming the limited number of robot brains—shared with the farming side—to scan, intercept, direct weapons fire and recover inbound shuttles. And the whole shebang, for some reason, bounded entirely by a whimsically-scrolled roll-and-move track around the perimeter.

 

As the eye lingered, further details emerged, creating the illusion of descending toward the station, nose pressed to the fogged glass of a rad-hard porthole. The landscape was alive with tiny activity, people and thinking machines working hand-in-glove to produce the raw foodstuffs necessary to make million-credit hamburgers for distant pockets of human life where scarcity and circumstance allowed for the neat intersection of need and greed—you think you wouldn’t do much for an apple, but you’d be surprised at the indignities you’d suffer if your only other option was yet another bowl of your fellow colonists’ hydrolyzed feces. And there, in a nascent star-lit orchard, stands a robot offering that red, shiny apple to a human in an orange jumpsuit and straw hat, the look in their eyes the whole of human history come to this moment. This is a goddamn space apple, and you will pay handsomely for it.

 

“Damn,” someone breathed.

 

“I know,” one of the Twins said, “roll and move? Really?”

 

“And paper money,” said the other one, throwing a fat wad of varicolored cash on the table, a kaleidoscope of tiny portraits of the first—and last—robot president staring enigmatically back at them, “Cool.”

 

Someone flipped open the rulebook.

 

“Does… anyone know how to play?” he asked.

 

The Twins gave him the I thought you did look, and she shrugged.

 

“We’ll figure it out as we go,” she said.

 

He died a little inside.

 

“This’ll be interesting,” said one of the Twins.

 

“Always is,” said the other.

 

As they started sorting through the baggies, he noticed the game wasn’t sleeved.

 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa—everybody,” he said, “the game isn’t sleeved, so be super, super careful. What are you—”

 

She paused, halves of a deck bent backwards in anticipation of the weaving waterfall. “Shuffling,” she said.

 

No no no no no, something inside him screamed.

 

He took a deep breath. “You have to pile shuffle.”

 

She slowly tilted her head to one side. “Pile shuffling isn’t shuffling. It’s pile sorting. Use your math, nerd.”

 

He gurgled. “Look I know you’re right—but the cards!”

 

“The cards will be fine,” she said, riffling a scrotum-clenching waterfall and return bridge. “They’re made to be shuffled.”

 

And so they learned the game in the worst way possible, one person reading inexpertly from the rulebook while everyone else interrupted with their own interpretations and assumptions brought in from other games and a vast experience with games in general, everyone convinced of the superiority of their own mastery, most of it right—after a fashion—but the wrong parts were really wrong, so much so it can be said they didn’t really play at all.

 

The game began with one of the Disaster Twins lighting off a nuke, to which other one replied by lighting off two, “Just to see what would happen.”

 

“Well, what you’ve done,” she said slowly, “is waste three nukes while irradiating this entire swath of crops.” She hovered a splayed hand over much of the arable land beneath the dome.

 

“Sorry,” said one of the Twins without meaning while the other stamped a hard-edged resource marker across the board like a child’s thimble rounding Go.

 

The rest of the business went as you might expect: two alpha gamers and two desperate damage control drones at each other like people with hands around throats in a house fire, pulses dwindling beneath fingers better served by calling emergency services, but no one willing to be the chump who let go first... So they burned in the plasma flash that breached the hull completely, the explosion reversing as the farm rudely evacuated itself into space. Four more alien destroyers decloaked in the debris cloud, within 500 meters, strafing the fleeing shuttles with impatient smart munitions, signals lost one by one as a chorus of screams became a band, and then a trio, a cruel duet, a solo—heartfelt and affecting—and finally the solar radiation hiss of an unheard John Cage piece.

 

It was unclear exactly what the aliens did with the survivors holed up in the emergency shelters, as the game handled that hideous denouement behind a mercifully blunt YOU HAVE LOST curtain.

 

After a bit of nonsensical math the final tally showed a score of… √-1.

 

He and she cleaned up the game in silence as the Disaster Twins bickered over the details of the After Action Report, finding fault almost entirely in the fact that while she had farmed alone she had done so ineptly; and that the two of them could have handled the defense of the station if only he hadn’t interfered.

 

He tuned them out, replacing their hectoring with the artistry of her hands, small birds in flight, moving with practiced ease across the gamescape, perfectly proportioned, smooth, scarless, the color of good health, her nails done in a sparkly gunmetal, not chewed to nubs like his were. 

 

“Somebody’s gotta get home and bludgeon the ghoul,” one of the Twins blurted.

 

He fumbled the moment, watched it fall away, sickeningly, to shatter against reality. “Excuse me?”

 

“You know,” said the other one, “wander the labyrinth of the Internet until the ghoul peeps out, get your hands around his neck and beat him until his ichor spatters the flagstones. Then see if you level up. Basic D&D, my friend.”

 

He flushed, tried to say something in the negative, found the pipeline between his disordered head and his tongue to be hopelessly jammed with competing verbal activity. He looked at her and felt like he always did. She frowned.

 

 “He won’t level up,” said the other Twin.

 

 

3: Shuffle them decks till it hurts—till their edges are worn smooth, their backs curled, their faces greasy with hand-jam; if you use sleeves, don’t.

 

He stopped going to game night. Being near her was an exquisitely specific pain, proof he was incomplete, like finding out you were supposed to have three arms but you only had two and a freshly-shorn, unresolved stump, nerves still vibrating with the shock of disconnection. Part of him wanted to go back to the stump-blind past where he could just sleep and eat and work without knowing, without feeling—whatever this awful thing was.

 

Another midnight bike ride, more of these lately, pounding into the dark, gliding from pool of light to pool of light, the physical meditation of the body like a Sadhu’s mortification, unmooring the mind and allowing it to float free

 

—the car ran the red light at speed; he was dumped back into his body like a shock of ice water, the brakes squealing low on everything: his skinny tires, the GTO’s fat ones, time itself; the reflections of the bright red orbs of the traffic lights floated across the car’s glossy candy coat, languorous as bloody soap bubbles, drifting up the windshield to a frozen emoji—sleepy look of nascent surprise—half-lit in the blue of a raised phone showing some random social media feed, thumb poised over a LIKE button, the confluence of time snapping suddenly 1:1 as his front tire kissed the rear bumper of the car, snatching the bike out from under him and flicking him to black—

 

he woke at the end of the ragdoll sequence, one final roll onto his back beneath a sky punctured by the hard points of actual stars. Fuck it, he thought inside his ruined helmet, I’m going to tell her.

 

 

4: Select the start player using any suitable method; but probably not the first one you thought of, because that’s kinda stupid.

 

Being bereft of sophisticated moves, he reached all the way back to elementary school for his next one, a folded note he passed to her without fanfare. She took it easily enough, a part of him reporting that her hand lingered a microsecond too long for such a transaction. Her face gave nothing away.

 

They played at their usual tables, separated by space and approach, and though he tried he never caught her looking at the note. Or at him.

 

She returned it at the very end of the night, last minute in the parking lot, coming up behind him as he was stacking boxes in the backseat of his car.

 

“Hey,” he said in surprise.

 

“Hey,” she said, and handed him the note.

 

He palmed it like an illicit tip and went back to sorting, his face hot. He could feel her receding into the night.

 

Back at home—sleepless hours later—he finally bolted from bed, snapped on the lights and looked at the folded paper on the dresser. It was curled slightly with the essence of her, from the pleasant moisture of her hands, from resting against small belongings in one of her impossible pockets. He could almost smell the vanilla, or peaches.

 

Slowly, he reached for it and opened it in the same smooth motion—

 

—and just about fainted.

 

 

5: Roll the dice to determine zxk17unm.   

 

A week later and seventeen minutes after the hour, they were in the parking lot again.

 

“Let’s play,” she said with an openness that struck him dumb.

 

They went straight for STARFARM!, and the Disaster Twins met them there.

 

“Let’s play!” one of them said.

 

He and she barked a simultaneous “No!” that shocked everyone.

 

“Maybe next time,” he said in response to the hard, but familiar, hurt on their faces.

 

And so he and she sat across from each other at the end of a long table thrumming with activity and began the eternal dance of play.

 

The world receded by degrees, the problems that are other people, numbers on spreadsheets, doubt and meaning, being a bewildered child in a rapidly putrefying vessel—these things grew small until it was as if they had never existed, replaced instead by a universe where the whole of the rules was smaller than a human mind, a sensation of godhood. In this microcosmic playground they extended, tentatively, the machinery of cooperation; naked, whirling gears seeking their complimentary counterparts in order to mesh without grinding. And in that moment where the expectation was for terrible noise, a fountain of sparks, smoke, the smell of burning metal—there was instead a soundless smoothing out, the glide of machinery connecting with its purpose-built supercharger, action at both ends seamlessly amplified.

 

It only occurred to him to be terrified later.

 

But in the all-consuming now they played together, every alteration of the gamestate distorting the whole, causing disparate parts to fall inexorably into place, succumbing to the gravity of the thing. You grip, you twist, and everything slides. When he moved he could feel her reciprocating, and weirdly found himself anticipating just what she needed almost simultaneously with her subtle call. If this wasn’t telepathy, then there was no magic in the world.

 

How many hours became a murmur of minutes? It was over too soon, having only just begun—when the chatter of recounted victories, defeats, calls for cheap beer and cheaper food, just-one-more-game-somewhere-else rose around them like an obliterating tide. The owner flashed the lights.

 

They looked at each other with identical expressions, then looked at the board. The mass of cards and cubes and chits and minis and dice were all smeared into the last four-panel page of a graphic novel about people trying to do people stuff where people aren’t supposed to be: growing food inches away from black vacuum and hard radiation—a logistical nightmare anyway—further complicated by an inscrutable alien presence acting on principle, or hatred, or raw instinct.

Perhaps, he thought, the aliens fought for what was curled at the core of this nondescript asteroid—a star-scouring artifact hidden away by a failed civilization; or a slumbering god; or their Voice, stolen by that god, leaving them incapable of anything but annihilation, only understanding the exclamation points of nuclear weapons. Maybe humanity plunked this farm down in a simple graveyard, and the fact that we were absorbing their sacred dead and shipping them off to be consumed by other starfaring apes was an ultimate taboo whose only possible response was genocide. Or they were future humans come back through a web of wormholes to stop the birth of Space Hitler—

 

“You know why we lost,” she said.

 

He scanned the board. “I got overwhelmed. Expended too many nukes too early. Sorry.”

 

“Hmmn,” she said, doing that eyebrow thing.

 

He woke suddenly in the small hours, pulse quick with realization. They lost because they both kept overextending for each other. Instead of masterminding the end of the game, or take-take-taking and leaving the other person to fend for themselves, they kept shoveling resources—turns, cards, robot brains—to the other side of the equation, thoughtlessly, leaving it in a perpetually shifting state of unbalance. He settled back into sleep’s embrace, intrigued, strangely comforted, because he could see it there, the outline of a vast continent in fog.

 

He wondered if she could see it, too.

 

 

6: You invited her over? Tell your roommate not to stare. On second thought, give him a movie ticket and an inverse curfew. Also, buying condoms isn’t creepy, it’s caring.

 

“Holy shit, your place is clean,” she said, marveling at the dentist-office presentation of wiped surfaces, perfect proportions, and horizontal spaces clear of stuff.

 

“And yours... isn’t?” he asked.

 

“Well, it’s not like the bathtub’s full of poop or anything; more like, ‘lived in’ by three cats and a couple monkeys.”

 

“I—see,” he said, slightly disappointed, then disappointed at his disappointment.

 

He produced a serviceable dinner of spaghetti and meatballs from scratch as they spoke deeply, intensely, about games, gaming, and online gamer culture. Over the last of the wine he steered conversation toward the topics recommended by his mom: God, UFOs, babies.

 

“Goddamn babies,” she muttered, shaking her head.

 

“What? I thought women... loved babies.”

 

“Because we have boobs? C’mon.”

 

“The way they smell,” he said matter-of-factly.

 

“Like dirty diaper?”

 

“The way they cut through the armor and go straight to the thing inside us that goes stupid with cute.”

 

She ignored his unironic earnestness. “Even the ugly ones?”

 

“There are no ugly ones,” he said.

 

“Internet says otherwise. Google that shit. ‘Dot dot dot only a mother could love.’”

 

“And you don’t... want to be a mother?”

 

She regarded him coolly. “No—”

 

His face fell; she caught it.

 

“—but maybe I just haven’t met the right sperm donor yet.”

 

The evening proceeded as one might expect. They shook hands when she left.

 

 

7: You invited him over? Tell your roommate so she can do the thing. Also, condoms, because this guy is clueless.

 

“Where’s your roommate?” he asked.

 

“She knows not to be around. We have a system.”

 

“Oh,” he said with a minor twinge, “You must do this a lot.” He instantly regretted saying it.

 

“I’m going to ignore that.”

 

Her place was “lived in”, but not psychotically so; more “Victorian garage sale” than an episode of Hoarders.

 

She whistled and the cats arrived in sinuous single file and sat in a mild semicircle, regarding him expectantly.

 

She pointed at them one by one. “Tardis, Artoo, Meeple.”

 

“Aw, how cute—Meeple!”

 

“Of course his name’s not Meeple,” she rolled her eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

 

He looked at the cats and they looked at him.

 

“Mr. Darcy, Bechdel, and that one has no name.”

 

“No Name the Cat?” he asked.

 

“No, he doesn’t have a name. Please don’t refer to him otherwise. It’s rude.”

 

“Poor guy doesn’t have a name?”

 

She sighed. “He doesn’t give a shit. He gets pets and treats and the mouse-chow keeps coming; nothing’s going to eat him. He’ll probably die of some weird geriatric cat disease his ancestors couldn’t dream of. A name isn’t even on his list.”

 

“What do you do at the vet?”

 

She snorted. “They gave him a number.”

 

“What’s his number?”

 

“Nope, not falling for it.” She waggled a finger at him. “You will not call him by a number.”

 

Secretly, he dubbed the nameless cat c, not for “cat” but as shorthand for 299,792,458 meters per second, the speed of light in a vacuum.

 

The evening proceeded as one might expect. They shook—

 

That’s not what happened at all. Exactly how it happened he wasn’t even sure of; all the usual stuff was going on, easy conversation that shifted between light and heavy topics the way a ridiculously expensive sports car might traverse ess curves up and down a mountain, dinner, some wine, then sitting on a magnetized couch that acted on them like helpless nuts and bolts, sliding inexorably closer until they clacked and there was no getting them apart, a change in the tenor of the evening that took him entirely by surprise even as a part of him realized she knew exactly what she was doing.

 

She left the lights on, transformed by nakedness, her frame rising proud, as if daring him not to be aroused.

 

He failed.

 

She rolled him over, straddled and sat on him. His entire being was wonderfully, horribly, wadded up and yanked out of himself, like a banquet fastidiously laid with white-gloved hands suddenly leaping out a ruptured airlock—you thought you were sitting down to a sumptuous twelve-course meal but instead you got the shock of empty lungs.

 

She stopped moving and cocked her head at him. “Are you a virgin?”

 

He hesitated, hated himself for it. “No,” he said. “Not anymore.”

 

“Oh, honey,” she said and kissed him harder and deeper than he thought possible.

 

I can’t breathe, he thought, and I like it.

 

“Now it’s my turn,” she said, and like most gamers he was very good at following directions.

 

 

8: GET READY FOR FOREVER

 

He got them their own copy of STARFARM!, carefully punched, sorted, bagged, laminated and double-sleeved—the thing was absolutely bulletproof, good for a lifetime of plays. In print, out of print, it wouldn’t matter. They had their own copy—never to be played by anyone else—a forever game, never the same twice, a nexus of life stages and memory. At least that was the idea.

 

She farmed; he stabbed things in the neck. Once, they almost switched roles; once, and almost. But the rest of the time they sat down in habit-worn seats, took possession of their respective unworn bits, and meshed their minds like it was nothing in a way that should make you jealous, right here, right now, searching to see if you have ever known this thing in your life. She managed the farm at the edge of optimal, adjusting deftly to shortages, the timing of lifecycles and shuttle schedules, the occasional burst of radiation and breached hulls. She implored him to spare a returning shuttle, incongruently heavy with unknown cargo, “on a hunch”—it turned out to be stowaway refugees. He managed the never-ending war beyond the interface, feints and ruses, ships decloaking, shuttles returning full of ravenous boarders. He husbanded dwindling nukes, finally convinced her to give up an ocean’s worth of water for a single ice ship—the Assumption of Humanity, starship-class but rigged with rapid-vectoring spaceship motors, a spinal mass driver that could accelerate payloads to a good chunk of c, and the ability to take a pounding the way an ocean swallows storms. She used the calm he afforded to quadruple their foodstuff tonnage.

 

In celebration, he ordered the five robot brains in charge of the crater-pocked Assumption to execute a pants-shitting flyby of the dome—he switched the screen up for an old-school telescope, wanting the photons burying themselves in the back of his eyes to be real reflected light. He saw her then, in her orange jumpsuit and straw hat, handing the apple to a robot, saying, “Look at what you have done, this entirely unlikely thing, to bring a taste of Earth to a far-flung Earth-child.”

 

This was the dance of years.

 

 

9: Check for game end condition.

 

It only took six weeks for the cancer to take her.

 

The whole time, the whole time, filled with the horrible mixture of what they did for each other and the fear of losing it. Of hope against hope, thinking this time will be different because it’s us, all the way up to her final shuddered breaths, a look of blind terror on her face even as he held her hand and wished fiercely, with everything he was, it wasn’t so.

 

 

10: I got nothin’.

 

Something he had never considered: the perfect dance around funerals, guaranteed with every birth—we howled on the savannah, we howled in caves, we howl in buildings and we will howl tomorrow on distant worlds. This was a groove worn deep by your ancestors; even if you don’t know the tune, the groove knows your feet. The first step suggests the next, and so on to the end.

 

Their families, joined—however tenuously—by what he and she did for each other, brought together now in grief for a long, dull, tearing grind of the grief in others reaching blindly for the grief in him. He endured this black reinforcement until it seemed to suddenly attenuate on its own, and he was alone in their home with the scent of her.

 

He loosened his tie, stripped it out in a recently practiced motion, discarded it to the floor. He shed his suit coat as he walked to their game room, to the shelves of just the ones they loved, boxes rimmed white with shelf-wear. He ran a finger down their absolute favorites, aware of the slight buzz of texture under the pad, and stopped at STARFARM!, removed it from the shelf and set it gently on the table. The top came off like butter and he began to set it up according to the directions, precisely and without the need for reference—on autopilot, really—until the whole thing was good to go, every last sheet, card, pasteboard bit laminated and double-sleeved. Absolutely bulletproof, good for a lifetime of plays.

 

It was like she had never been there at all.