“Dude, they’re awesome,” he says. “Harajuku pop. Yeah, I know, you’re thinking about that Gwen Stefani crap, like, ‘I totally thought Jack had better taste,’ but don’t worry, this is the real stuff. It’s all ironic and postmodern. James Bond on a Nipponese acid trip in a bukkake club.”
“Wow,” you say, ’cause honestly you can only deal in monosyllables at this point.
“Hey, we can walk to my place from here. You wanna come over? I have a few of their albums.”
So you don’t get anywhere near Route 25. Which is good. You don’t want to eat him, and you can still smell your leftovers there. The whole thing is weirding you out.
You—I don’t know—you like him. Like like him. You think you had a little sister once who would say it just like that. You don’t remember eating her, but you can’t be sure. And what would Jack think if he knew you were some monster who couldn’t even remember if he ate his sister alive?
So you try to be engaging and charming and basically not stupid. You get into an argument about Belle and Sebastian.
“Sure, I like some of their stuff,” he says, smiling as though he knows you don’t agree. “The Life Pursuit has some great songs on it.”
“Twee copies of the Smiths aping Jonathan Richman’s airy earnestness and none of his insanity.”
He laughs, and you stumble on the grass. “Hold back, Grayson,” he says.
Jack gives you a long look, and there you go again, your heart beating too fast, pupils dilating, and you don’t really understand it, but that smell of his? That crusty mac-and-cheese aroma? It just got about a hundred times better. When he breathes in and out, it’s like he’s exhaling the essence of his marrow, the rough gristle in his joints, the blood that pulses as it rushes past the tanned skin by his collarbone.
He’s cutting through some woods behind the school, down an old deer path or something, and you’ve been too busy ogling his ass to pay much attention.
“Hey, what street do you live on again?” you ask.
“It’s off of Boward. I just like to cut through here sometimes. ‘I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.’”
“Dylan?” you guess.
He stops abruptly in between two trees that still have about half their leaves. His smile is sort of sad. “Robert Frost,” he says, and you don’t think this is a good time to mention that you’ve never heard of him. Probably some emo folkie like Sufjan Stevens.
“Grayson,” he says, his hands deep in his pockets. With anyone else it’d be fidgeting, but with Jack right now, the gesture is more like Please fuck me.
“Yeah?”
Your voice is sort of a squeak. You can smell the impending sex like it’s a bum in the park.
Then Jack goes and starts laughing again, and takes his hands out of his pockets. “It’s funny. Everyone thinks you’re weird,” he says. “But you’re all right, Grayson.”
“Hey, you, too.”
And you think, okay, a fuck would have been better, but you sort of like the idea of listening to this Nipponese acid trip album with him. He still smells like the best meal you’ve never tasted.
2. Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together
in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict
The sad tale of how I, Philip A. Grayson, became infected with a brain-devouring prion and was subsequently partially cured.
Part the first. I don’t know who I was. I don’t know how I caught it. The prion, I mean—this twisted, misshapen little bit of protein with even less autonomy than a virus, but one hell of a bigger punch. Ever heard of mad cow disease? They told me my prions are only found in bacteria that gestate at the bottom of landfills at high temperatures. It has to enter the host through the mucus membranes. That means it has to be drunk, snorted, dripped, or anally inserted. Yeah, I don’t want to know what the fuck I was doing either. It’s too bad, really, that I remember my name.
Part the second. I’ve killed a lot of people. I ate all of them, brains first. Not because I live off of gray matter or something, but because that’s the best part.
Don’t believe me? Just ask the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. They loved brains so much they nearly killed themselves with this other prion: transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. They called it kuru. Laughing sickness. Talk about dying happy.
Part the third. My prion is too rare to have a name. Like kuru, it mods my behavior in a major way. Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but it makes me want to eat people. Most of the time it gets rid of all of its host’s higher brain functions to make the whole devouring people compulsion work better. Frontal lobes and Joy Division obsessions tend to be pretty incompatible with the sudden overpowering urge to eat your girlfriend’s eyeballs.
Part the fourth. These scientists got to me before the mad proteins had a chance to do more than nibble. They gave me this drug that half-worked. My prions can’t reproduce, and they can’t devour my brain, but they still rattle around in there, jumping up and down on my amygdala every time I smell a human. The prions gave me these hyperactive pheromones, so I can do this thing where I lean in and smile and people go all bug-eyed and it’s like they turn into zombies or something. Well, until I start to eat them. You’re probably wondering why these benevolent scientists would part-cure me and then let me go into the world to seduce/eat people with my mostly intact brain functions. Don’t be stupid—of course they didn’t. When they figured out what had happened, they locked me in some padded cell. I ate the security guard and escaped.
The End
One last thing: About that frontal lobe the parasite didn’t quite devour? I lost enough that I don’t feel too bad about killing people. The way of the jungle and all that. It only bothers me sometimes. Like when they love Joy Division. Like when they laugh.
3. Behind Blue Eyes Jack’s place is a little intense. It’s a stone mansion on a cul-de-sac of its own, with Pentagon-style security. One ten-digit code to get through the gate outside, a different twelve-digit code to get through the front door. You half-expect the knob to check his fingerprints.
“Dude,” you say when the fort seems to have been breached, “this place is scary.” There’s not so much furniture, but every beige and mauve piece looks like it cost a fortune.
Jack shrugs, a little uncomfortable. “My dad,” he says. “He’s obsessed with security. His friends keep calling him about some escaped nutcase that might be in Colorado. He’s gotten paranoid.”
You feel sick, but try not to show it. Those scientists have tailed you for a year.
What are the chances they’ve finally caught up now? “What’s your dad do?”
“Ex-CIA,” Jack says. “Shattered his hip five years ago, so now he mostly does consulting.”
When you climb the staircase, you catch a whiff of gunpowder, but the only weapons you see are older—a row of antique and modern swords mounted on the wall.
“You know how to use these things?”
Jack sighs. “Sure. Dad’s made me do weapons training since I could walk. Guns, swords, martial arts. So long as there’s a potential for violent death, he’s interested. It’s all bullshit, really. Fake heroics so you can pretend you’re not really killing people. ‘One, two! One, two! And through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!’”
“Frost?” you say, though you know you’re wrong and you can’t wait for him to tell you so.
He smiles. “‘The Jabberwocky.’ Lewis Carroll. Dad likes that one ’cause it’s all about slaying an evil beast. You know, I think he’s happy about this nutcase on the loose? Always before it was rabid animals and no-kill tournaments and—Yeah. It’s a fixation.”
He looks away, holds himself too still, and you wonder what he’s not telling you about his dad’s “fixation.” Then he shakes his head and leads you the rest of the way up the stairs. Jack’s room is like a huge middle finger up the ass of the rest of the beige-on-white medicated-Vail-yuppie house. Every inch of wall space is covered with posters. A few sports stars but mostly musicians. Pete Townshend holding up a bloody hand; Gorillaz with their animated tongues lolling; Johnny Rotten grinning like a redheaded demon pixie; all of Devo with their weird space suits and jerky, vacant expressions. There’s a walk-in closet in back, and when he opens it, you see a few thousand CDs and vinyl albums lined neatly against the wall.
“I’ve got a few hundred gigs of MP3s, but vinyl is better, I think.”
And if you weren’t turned on before. “Fuck me,” you say. “This is amazing.”
He grins at you, awkwardness forgotten. “I’m lucky. So long as I practice, Dad tends to leave me alone.”
His killer sound system includes a subwoofer about the size of your torso, so the first notes of the recording are suitably deafening. He lies down on his thick beige carpet and then looks up at you, a gesture that might be an invitation if it weren’t so wary. You wonder what he thinks of you, and if you needed more evidence that something weird is happening here, that would clinch it. Part of the benefit of frontal-lobe-devouring prions is not needing to worry what the hell other people think. That’s a human thing. Not whatever you’ve become.
You sit down next to him. He smiles a little and leans back on his elbows, closes his eyes. You watch him. The floppy ginger hair falls over his forehead, almost concealing a long, thin scar that runs from his hairline down to his left ear. He nods in time to the screeching, childlike vocals, the swinging sixties rhythms, the psychedelic atonality.
“James Bond on a Nipponese acid trip,” you say, softly.
He opens his eyes, and now they’re not buggy at all. They’re hard and fierce and iced. He looks like he might kill you or kiss you. You hold your too-slow breath and realize that you don’t care which.
“I knew you’d like it,” he says.
The air comes out in a rush. You lean back against the carpet and look at the inside of your eyelids. You see red, like always. Muscle and bone and the crunch of your oversize molars tearing through. That’s what Jack would have become if he hadn’t mentioned Joy Division at the end of class. And even now you can feel the heat of him beside you, the soft exhale of his pores, the smell that’s a little sweat and a little detergent and some shampoo with a surprisingly girly flavor—coconut?
Hibiscus? How could someone who uses hibiscus shampoo look so suddenly dangerous? He moves abruptly. You wait like you might fall on a blade.
But no, the door is opening, someone else is in the house. Slowly, too slowly, you turn around.
“Jackson,” says the man who must be the father. He wears khakis the color of his furniture, and a brown polo shirt. “Your target is still clean.”
If Jack was icy, his dad is absolute fucking zero. His eyebrows are so large and thick they cast his recessed eyes in deep shadow, like a pit. His mouth is pursed, not enough to be called a frown, but damn if you don’t want to run straight out the window and make excuses later. Jack glances at you and then back at his dad. He turns off the CD, and the sudden silence is louder than any high-decibel subwoofer.
You can hear his dad’s breathing, as slow and icy as the rest of him. Ex-CIA. He was probably their go-to for those “enhanced” interrogations.
“Sorry,” Jack mumbles, unrecognizable. “I was getting to it.”
“I can see,” says the ice man. “I’ve just heard from Miller again. That creature they’re tracking definitely passed through here. I need you to be ready.”
“Sorry,” Jack says again.
The dad turns to you now, all cool speculation. You know without even trying that there’s nothing your special pheromones can do to thaw this guy. He thinks you’re a cockroach. He wants to stamp you out. Can he tell what you are just by looking?
But no, it’s impossible. If he knew, he’d shoot you on the spot and tell Jack to clean the mess.
Ice man leaves, a slight hitch in his step. Jack takes a deep, shuddering breath and slams the door shut.
You whistle. “He like that every day?”
Jack glances at you and then away. His blue eyes dilate for no reason, and blood blossoms in his cheeks like roses. You swallow.
“He’s … you know.”
You try to imagine life with someone like that. Your failure to do so feels like something broken, something sucking and desperate. Because you know the ice man—as only one cracked soul can recognize another.
“‘But my dreams, they aren’t as empty.’” You can’t sing, so you just say it. But you remember the rest of the line: “ ‘As my conscience seems to be.’”
Jack starts, like someone poked him, and then sags against the wall. He laughs, but it doesn’t sound like laughter.
“My dad hates The Who,” he says.
“Your dad’s a dick.”
For a moment you think he might take your hand.
4. Maps
I said I don’t know who I was, but that’s not strictly true. No invading twist of genetic code is that efficient. My hippocampus has been wiped pretty clean, but fragments remain. Hell, for all I know I remember everything, and just suppress it, like Iraq vets who can barely find Baghdad on a map. But here’s what I think I know. I had a sister. She was younger than me and dumb in that dumb little sister way, which means that she’ll probably grow up to be a neurochemist and invent the cure for spongiform encephalopathy. But I remember her loving Boy Meets World and High School Musical (all three) and the direct-to-DVD Olsen twins movies (in particular Passport to Paris). We had a dad, but I don’t know what he did. No mother, as far as I can tell. Dad had a thing for banana plants. He refused to buy regular Chiquita bananas, but he’d bring home any other variety he could find: tiny brown ones, giant green ones, skinny orange ones with flesh as hard as an apple and as sour as a lime. He had a greenhouse filled with banana plants that fruited about once every two years, and the fruit was never edible. “They’re going extinct, you know,” he would say to me and my sister in the supermarket, tapping the clusters of normal yellow Cavendish bananas he’d never allow in the house. “A few more years and human carelessness will have destroyed every banana plant on earth.” Why?