New Wave Fabulists Read online

  The Devil shivers. He’s never liked dead people much.

  “So, okay, what about monsters?” the cheerleader says. “Vampires? Serial killers? People from outer space? Those old movies?”

  The Devil shrugs. “Yeah, sure. Boogeymen. Formaldehyde babies in Mason jars. Someday someone is going to have to take them out of the jar, unpickle them. Women with teeth down there. Zombies. Killer robots, killer bees, serial killers, cold spots, werewolves. The dream where you know that you’re asleep but you can’t wake up. You can hear someone walking around the bedroom picking up your things and putting them down again and you still can’t wake up. The end of the world. Spiders. No one was with her when she died. Carnivorous plants.”

  “Oh goody,” the cheerleader says. Her eyes shine at him out of the dark. Her pom-poms slide across the floor of the closet. He moves his flashlight so he can see her hands.

  “So here’s your story,” the cheerleader says. (She’s a girl who can think on her feet.) “It’s not really a scary story. I don’t really get scary.”

  “Weren’t you listening?” the Devil says. He taps the flashlight against his big front teeth. “Never mind, it’s okay, never mind. Go on.”

  “This probably isn’t a true story,” the cheerleader says, “and it doesn’t go backwards like we do. I probably won’t get all the way to the end, and I’m not going to start at the beginning, either. There isn’t enough time.”

  “That’s fine,” the Devil says. “I’m all ears.” (He is.)

  The cheerleader says, “So who’s going to tell this story, anyway? Be quiet and listen. We’re running out of time.”

  She says, “A man comes home from a sales conference. He and his wife have been separated for a while, but they’ve decided to try living together again. They’ve sold the house that they used to live in. Now they live just outside of town, in an old house in an orchard.

  “The man comes home from this business conference, and his wife is sitting in the kitchen and she’s talking to another woman, an older woman. They’re sitting on the chairs that used to go around the kitchen table, but the table is gone. So is the microwave, and the rack where Susan’s copper-bottomed pots hang. The pots are gone, too.

  “The husband doesn’t notice any of this. He’s busy looking at the other woman. Her skin has a greenish tinge. He has this feeling that he knows her. She and the wife both look at the husband, and he suddenly knows what it is. It’s his wife. It’s his wife, two of her, only one is maybe twenty years older. Otherwise, except that this one’s green, they’re identical: same eyes, same mouth, same little mole at the corner of her mouth.

  “How am I doing so far?”

  “So-so,” the Devil says. The truth (the truth makes the Devil itchy) is, he only likes stories about himself. Like the story about the Devil’s wedding cake. Now that’s a story.

  The cheerleader says, “It gets better.”

  IT GETS BETTER

  The man’s name is Ed. It isn’t his real name. I made it up. Ed and Susan have been married for ten years, separated for five months, back together again for three months. They’ve been sleeping in the same bed for three months, but they don’t have sex. Susan cries whenever Ed kisses her. They don’t have any kids. Susan used to have a younger brother. Ed is thinking about getting a dog.

  While Ed’s been at his conference, Susan has been doing some housework. She’s done some work up in the attic which we won’t talk about. Not yet. Down in the spare bathroom in the basement, she’s set up this machine, which we might describe later, and this machine makes Susans. What Susan was hoping for was a machine that would bring back Andrew. (Her brother. But you knew that.) Only it turns out that getting Andrew back requires a different machine, a bigger machine. Susan needs help making that machine, and so the new Susans are probably going to come in handy, after all. Over the course of the next few days, the Susans explain all this to Ed.

  Susan doesn’t expect Ed will be very helpful.

  “Hi, Ed,” the older, greenish Susan says. She gets up from her chair and gives him a big hug. Her skin is warm, tacky. She smells yeasty. The original Susan (the Susan Ed thinks is original—I have no idea if he’s right about this; later on, he isn’t so sure, either) sits in her chair and watches them.

  Big green Susan—am I making her sound like Godzilla? She doesn’t look like Godzilla, and yet there’s something about her that reminds Ed of Godzilla, the way she stomps across the kitchen floor—leads Ed over to a chair and makes him sit down. Now he realizes that the kitchen table is gone. He still hasn’t managed to say a word. Susan, both of them, is used to this.

  “First of all,” Susan says, “the attic is off-limits. There are some people working up there. (I don’t mean Susans. I’ll explain Susans in a minute.) Some visitors. They’re helping me with a project. About the other Susans: there are five of me presently—you’ll meet the other three later. They’re down in the basement. You’re allowed in the basement. You can help down there, if you want.”

  Godzilla Susan says, “You don’t have to worry about who is who, although none of us are exactly alike. You can call us all Susan. We’re discovering that some of us may be more temporary than others, or fatter, or younger, or greener. It seems to depend on the batch.”

  “Are you Susan?” Ed says. He corrects himself. “I mean, are you my wife? The real Susan?”

  “We’re all your wife,” the younger Susan says. She puts her hand on his leg, and pats him like a dog.

  “Where did the kitchen table go?” Ed says.

  “I put it in the attic,” Susan says. “You really don’t have to worry about that now. How was your conference?”

  Another Susan comes into the kitchen. She’s young and the color of green apples or new grass. Even the whites of her eyes are grassy. She’s maybe nineteen, and the color of her skin makes Ed think of a snake. “Ed!” she says. “How was the conference?”

  “They’re keen on the new game,” Ed says. “It tests real well.”

  “Want a beer?” Susan says. (It doesn’t matter which Susan says this.) She picks up a pitcher of green foamy stuff, and pours it into a glass.

  “This is beer?” Ed says.

  “It’s Susan beer,” Susan says, and all the Susans laugh.

  The beautiful, snake-colored, nineteen-year-old Susan takes Ed on a tour of the house. Mostly Ed just looks at Susan, but he sees that the television is gone, and so are all of his games. All his notebooks. The living-room sofa is still there, but all the seat cushions are missing. Later on, Susan will disassemble the sofa with an axe.

  Susan has covered up all the downstairs windows with what looks like sheets of aluminum foil. She shows him the bathtub downstairs where one of the Susans is brewing the Susan beer. Other Susans are hanging long, mossy clots of the Susan beer on laundry racks. Dry, these clots can be shaped into bedding, nests for the new Susans. They are also edible.

  Ed is still holding the glass of Susan beer. “Go on,” Susan says. “You like beer.”

  “I don’t like green beer,” Ed says.

  “You like Susan, though,” Susan says. She’s wearing one of his T-shirts, and a pair of Susan’s underwear. No bra. She puts Ed’s hand on her breast.

  Susan stops stirring the beer. She’s taller than Ed, and only a little bit green. “You know Susan loves you,” she says.

  “Who’s up in the attic?” Ed says. “Is it Andrew?”

  His hand is still on Susan’s breast. He can feel her heart beating. Susan says, “You can’t tell Susan I told you. She doesn’t think you’re ready. It’s the aliens.” They both stare at him. “She finally got them on the phone. This is going to be huge, Ed. This is going to change the world.”

  Ed could leave the house. He could leave Susan. He could refuse to drink the beer.

  The Susan beer doesn’t make him drunk. It isn’t really beer. You knew that, right?

  There are Susans everywhere. Some of them want to talk to Ed about their marriage, or about th
e aliens, or sometimes they want to talk about Andrew. Some of them are busy working. The Susans are always dragging Ed off to empty rooms, to talk or kiss or make love or gossip about the other Susans. Or they’re ignoring him. There’s a very young Susan. She looks like she might be six or seven years old. She goes up and down the upstairs hallway, drawing on the walls with a marker. Ed isn’t sure whether this is childish vandalism or important Susan work. He feels awkward asking.

  Every once in a while, he thinks he sees the real Susan. He wishes he could sit down and talk with her, but she always looks so busy.

  By the end of the week, there aren’t any mirrors left in the house, and the windows are all covered up. The Susans have hung sheets of the Susan beer over all the light fixtures, so everything is green. Ed isn’t sure, but he thinks he might be turning green. He might be getting ripe.

  Susan tastes green. She always does.

  Once Ed hears someone knocking on the front door. “Ignore that,” Susan says, as she walks past him. She’s carrying the stacked blades of an old ceiling fan and a string of Christmas lights. “It isn’t important.”

  Ed pulls the plug of aluminum foil out of the eyehole, and peeks out. Stan is standing there, looking patient. They stand there, Ed on one side of the door, and Stan on the other. Ed doesn’t open the door, and eventually Stan goes away. All the peacocks are kicking up a fuss.

  Ed tries teaching some of the Susans to play poker. It doesn’t work so well, because it turns out that the Susans all know what cards the other Susans are holding. So Ed makes up a game where that doesn’t matter so much, but in the end, it makes him feel too lonely. There aren’t any other Eds.

  They decide to play spin the bottle instead. Instead of a bottle, they use a hammer, and the head never ends up pointing at Ed. After a while, it gets too strange watching Susan kiss Susan, and he wanders off to look for a Susan who will kiss him.

  Up in the second-story front bedroom, there are always lots of Susans. This is where they go to wait when they start to get ripe. The Susans loll, curled in their nests, getting riper, arguing about the end of some old story. None of them remember it the same way. Some of them don’t seem to know anything about it, but they all have opinions.

  Ed climbs into a nest and leans back. Susan swings her legs over to make room for him. This Susan is small and round. She tickles the soft part of his arm, and then tucks her face into his side.

  Susan passes him a glass of Susan beer.

  “That’s not it,” Susan says. “It turns out that he overdosed. Maybe even did it on purpose. We couldn’t talk about it. There weren’t enough of us. We were trying to carry all of that sadness all by ourself. You can’t do something like that! And then the wife tries to kill him. I tried to kill him. She kicks the fuck out of him. He can’t leave the house for a week, won’t even come to the door when his friends come over.”

  “If you can call them friends,” Susan says.

  “No, there was a gun,” Susan says. “And she has an affair. Because she can’t get over it. Neither of them can.”

  “She humiliates him at a dinner party,” Susan says. “They both drink too much. They go out in the backyard, after everyone has gone home. He throws up the dirty dinner plates and she shoots them down with a BB gun, and the whole time she just wishes she could shoot him. They’re both barefoot and there are plate shards all over. Someone’s going to get hurt. They don’t have a time machine. We know that they still love each other, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Then the police show up.”

  “Well, that’s not the way I remember it,” Susan says. “But I guess it could have happened that way.”

  Ed and Susan used to buy books all the time. They had so many books they used to joke about wanting to be quarantined, or snowed in. Maybe then they’d manage to read all the books. But the books have all gone up to the attic, along with the lamps and the coffee table, and their bicycles, and all Susan’s paintings. Ed has watched the Susans carry up paperback books, silverware, old board games, and musical instruments. Even a kazoo. The Encyclopaedia Britannica. The goldfish and the goldfish bowl and the little canister of goldfish food.

  The Susans have gone through the house, taken everything they could. After all the books were gone, they dismantled the bookshelves. Now they’re tearing off the wallpaper in long strips. The aliens seem to like books. They like everything, especially Susan. Eventually, when the Susans are ripe, they go up in the attic, too.

  The aliens swap things, the books and the Susans and the coffee mugs, for other things: machines that the Susans are assembling. Ed would like to get his hand on one of those devices, but Susan says no. He isn’t even allowed to help, except with the Susan beer.

  The thing the Susans are building takes up most of the living room, Ed’s office, the kitchen, the laundry room (The Susans don’t bother with laundry. The washer and the drier are both gone and the Susans have given up wearing clothes altogether. Ed has managed to keep a pair of shorts and a pair of jeans. He’s wearing the shorts right now, and he folds the jeans up into a pillow, and rests his head on top of them so that Susan can’t steal them. All his other clothes have been carried up to the attic), and it’s creeping up the stairs, spilling over into the second story. The house is shiny with alien machinery.

  Teams of naked Susans are hard at work, all day long, testing instruments, hammering and stitching their machine together, polishing and dusting and stacking alien things on top of each other. If you’re wondering what the machine looks like, picture a science-fair project involving a lot of aluminum foil: improvised, homely, makeshift, and just a little dangerous-looking. None of the Susans is quite sure what the machine will eventually do. Right now it grows Susan beer.

  When the beer is stirred, left alone, stirred some more, it clots and makes more Susans. Ed likes watching this part. The house is more and more full of shy, loud, quiet, talkative, angry, happy, greenish Susans of all sizes and ages, who work at disassembling the house, piece by piece, and piece by piece, assembling the machine.

  It might be a time machine, or a machine to raise the dead, or maybe the house is becoming a spaceship, slowly, one room at a time. Susan says the aliens don’t make these kinds of distinctions. It may be an invasion factory, Ed says, or a doomsday machine. Susan says that they aren’t that kind of aliens.

  Ed’s job: stirring the Susan beer with a long, flat plank—a floor board Susan pried up—and skimming the foam, which has a stringy, unpleasantly cheeselike consistency, into buckets. He carries the buckets downstairs and makes Susan beer soufflé and Susan beer casserole. Susan beer surprise. Upside-down Susan cake. It all tastes the same, and he grows to like the taste.

  The beer doesn’t make him drunk. That isn’t what it’s for. I can’t tell you what’s it’s for. But when he’s drinking it, he isn’t sad. He has the beer, and the work in the kitchen, and the ripe, green fuckery. Everything tastes like Susan.

  The only thing he misses is poker nights.

  Up in the spare bedroom, Ed falls asleep listening to the Susans talk, and when he wakes up, his jeans are gone, and he’s naked. The room is empty. All the ripe Susans have gone up to the attic.

  When he steps out into the hall, the little Susan is out there, drawing on the walls. She puts her marker down and hands him a pitcher of Susan beer. She pinches his leg and says, “You’re getting nice and ripe.”

  Then she winks at Ed and runs down the hall.

  He looks at what she’s been drawing: Andrew, scribbly crayon portraits of Andrew, all up and down the walls. He follows the pictures of Andrew down the hall, all the way to the master bedroom where he and the original Susan used to sleep. Now he sleeps anywhere, with any Susan. He hasn’t been in their room in a while, although he’s noticed the Susans going in and out with boxes full of things. The Susans are always shooing at him when he gets in their way.

  The bedroom is full of Andrew. There are Susan’s portraits of Andrew on the walls, the ones from her art class. Ed had fo
rgotten how unpleasant and peculiar these paintings are. In one, the largest one, a life-size Andrew has his hands around a small animal, maybe a ferret. He seems to be strangling it. The ferret’s mouth is cocked open, showing all its teeth. A picture like that, Ed thinks, you ought to turn it towards the wall at night.

  Susan’s put Andrew’s bed in here, and Andrew’s books, and Andrew’s desk. Andrew’s clothes have been hung up in the closet. There isn’t an alien machine in the room, or for that matter, anything that ever belonged to Ed.

  Ed puts a pair of Andrew’s pants on, and lies down on Andrew’s bed, just for a minute, and he closes his eyes.

  When he wakes up, Susan is sitting on the bed. He can smell her, that ripe green scent. He can smell that smell on himself. Susan says, “If you’re ready, I thought we could go up to the attic together.”

  “What’s going on here?” Ed says. “I thought you needed everything. Shouldn’t all this stuff go up to the attic?”

  “This is Andrew’s room, for when he comes back,” Susan says. “We thought it would make him feel comfortable, having his own bed to sleep in. He might need his stuff.”

  “What if the aliens need his stuff?” Ed says. “What if they can’t make you a new Andrew yet because they don’t know enough about him?”

  “That’s not how it works,” Susan says. “We’re getting close now. Can’t you feel it?”

  “I feel weird,” Ed says. “Something’s happening to me.”

  “You’re ripe, Ed,” Susan says. “Isn’t that fantastic? We weren’t sure you’d ever get ripe enough.”

  She takes his hand and pulls him up. Sometimes he forgets how strong she is.

  “So what happens now?” Ed says. “Am I going to die? I don’t feel sick. I feel good. What happens when we get ripe?”

  The dim light makes Susan look older, or maybe she just is older. He likes this part: seeing what Susan looked like as a kid, what she’ll look like as an old lady. It’s as if they got to spend their whole lives together. “I never know,” she says. “Let’s go find out. Take off Andrew’s pants, and I’ll hang them back up in the closet.”