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Let’s count it down from the top.
There’s ten friends of yours, currently coming to mid-step in and around the nice little house you’ve built for all of them on the lake. You picked the lake biome specifically because it offered the largest means of natural water, and also because you and Reg had come to the conclusion that yes, indeed, this was the one thing that all twelve of you would agree on, if asked: lakes were fucking great.
Your friends have nine hours ahead of them, give or take, before they figure out what’s going on outside the little confines of the house you’ve stuck them in. They’ll fill that time with chatting, and enjoying the house like you intended; Naya and Rick will find the piano, David will have an absolute blast at the pool, Ryan will watch everyone and you’ll not do a single thing to try and include her while you man the grill.
Eight minutes after Ryan checks her phone, you’ll—
Oh, to hell with this. It’s a bit too late for any of this, don’t you think? This is supposed to be your confession, your justification, your little attempt at—
No? Well, too bad. I’m telling this story.
So let’s rewind a bit.
Here’s how it goes: the planet was discovered lifetimes before your own personal inception. Discovered, catalogued, and then shelved for such a time where the appropriate, requisite amount of resources could be devoted towards its study and annihilation. It’s one among many, designated an internal number so high that even your kind has trouble casually saying it three times in a row, and how’s that for an apocalyptic tongue-twister? But it sits there, and it develops, and every once in a while one of your people checks in to see whether the planet has reached its turning point yet. There’s lots of those to watch out for, with war or climate collapse usually being one of the most common cliffs for any given civilization to dive off of; all intelligent life, in the end, will kill each other. It’s the one constant throughout all forms it takes. Your people just move things along when they deem civilization to be past the point of no return.
This moment has now come.
They stick you in a body and say, here, this is the next part, this is how you prove yourself. Show us you can do it. Show us what they can do.
And you are prepared.
You have your list all ready: you want to find an artist, a writer, a doctor. Comedian, accountant, scientist; a musician, a politician, a reporter and a spiritualist to round it all out. You figure that if the ten most extraordinary people you found to fill those categories couldn’t give your people the whole proper breadth of what it meant to be human, then nothing would. You’ve researched your starting point extensively, to the point of obsession; had put more thought into the way the rooms of your house should be set up, and the family history you’d be settling into, than you’d perhaps ever put into anything else. You’d thought about this in the days leading up to this, imagined this moment a million times.
Yet when you’re dropped down right smack dab in the middle of the lawn of your new home in Milwaukee, you can’t help but stagger from the sheer physical immensity of it all come crashing down on you.
One moment you’re you, and then you take a breath for the first time in all of your existence and you’re not quite you anymore. Instead you’re human. It’s beautiful, and terrifying, and utterly alien to what you were before—hormones and muscles and ligature and all the little knobbled bits and pieces of your frame holding you together from the inside, and it should be utterly horrifying—
You love it.
Because of course you do. You’ve always had a penchant for falling in love with odd little things – it’s how you ended up with all eleven of us, after all, isn’t it – and what is a human body if not the oddest, most internally confusing little mashed together bit of flesh?
“Like a fish to water” isn’t quite the metaphor that works here, I don’t think – much too gentle for your whole brand of fuckery – but it fits as well as anything, and we’re short on time here anyway.
You make a good run of it. I’m sure the fucking memory erasing helped, but fuck, man, can’t deny that you did pretty well for a flesh tornado twirling itself into a vaguely human shape.
Only one little problem though, wasn’t there?
Us. And you.
Because oh, here’s how it goes, in the end: You’re human, and you aren’t prepared for how much it’d hurt.
There’s the bones, for one. You haven’t really had bones before – not the way humans do, in any case. You can feel them shifting beneath your muscles whenever you raise your arm to high-five Norm, and the grind of all the fragile little bits of your hand against his is so deafening that you’re surprised that humans can even bear to touch each other. (It takes you a few days before to figure out that it isn’t supposed to be like that, that human bodies learn to be quiet to their own selves from an early age, and so you adjust accordingly.)
But here you are, wearing the flesh of a sixteen-year-old, and you have bones for the first time. It’s marvelous.
You’re adventurous with your newfound corporeality, because you can afford to be, and so you do the only thing that really seems appropriate for the incredible situation you’re in: two weeks into your physical existence you find the tallest, most isolated cliff that you can in the area, and you throw yourself off of it.
Here’s how it goes: The fall is deceptively short. Wind whistles past you and it’s beautiful, and then the ground, littered with pine needles and old leaves, greets you and that’s beautiful, too, in an entirely different way. The bones of your wrist crumble upon impact, because this is your first time falling anywhere and instinct dictates that you try to couch your fall. Your other arm fares no better, squished between your body and the solid earth; your head only escapes that same fate because the whole rest of you has already cushioned the fall enough that you only get a concussion rather than the head-splitting cascade you were going for.
A wet groan leaves your lungs as you heave yourself up into a sitting position. You’re already healing, and you’re debating whether you want to get back to the top of the cliff and do it again to see if a different angle of descent changes anything when there’s suddenly a rustling commotion from the forest to your left, and two figures come to a racing halt next to you, shouting unintelligibly at the same time as they’re trying to stub out the cigarettes still dangling from between their fingers.
It’s Norm and Reg. You’d met them early on, had been assigned seats next to them at your school. Talked a bit, just enough to decide that they were interesting enough, and that you’d like to get to know them better, but you figure that having to erase their memories of all of this isn’t exactly going to help that now.
“What the hell—“
“Did you jump?!”
“Walter? It’s Walter isn’t it—are you okay?”
They chatter quietly, intensely among themselves as they drag you up until you’ve got your arms splayed across their shoulders. Your right leg is twisted at the knee, you realize, and it hurts in a deliciously abject sense. The physicality of it all is still astonishing you, and you focus on all the little pains of your body knitting itself back together instead of on the way the two humans are taking you. Only when they gently scoot you length-wise into the back seat of a rickety old truck do you realize that the word they’d been muttering more frequently was hospital.
“I’m fine,” you force out between your teeth, affecting a slightly winded tone as you plead, “Can you just—can you just drive me home, please?”
There’s silence inside the car for a moment. Then Norm asks the one thing you know’s been haunting inside both of their brains since the moment they saw your fall: “I mean, I guess. You sure though? What in all the world made you walk off of a cliff?”
You consider this intently.
“I got lost in my thoughts, I guess,” you eventually mumble in between bumps in the road. You have the good grace to look embarrassed.
Norm scoffs, and from behind the wheel Reg lets out an incredulous laugh.
“Fuck, man,” Reg says after a moment, “what the hell were you smoking? Bring some of it along next time, so at least we’ll be jumping off of cliffs together.”
You laugh along in kind, because you know it’s expected of you, but privately you find yourself liking that idea.
The next day you thunk your way into school with your leg in a cast not because you need to, but because you’re not quite sure how you’d explain your sudden and inexplicable recovery to your new friends.
Also – and you don’t tell anyone this, perhaps don’t even admit it to yourself because God dammit, Walter, you’ve never been good at being honest even with yourself – you find yourself liking the way both Reg and Norm keep an eye on you in the school hallways, and how they offer you their shoulders to lean on when you pretend to falter under the weight of your cast, and how they’ll make sure you’ve safely made it back inside your house before driving off. It feels so nice.
Humans feel so much, it turns out.
A lot of it is that fuzzy nice glow you first felt when you were with your new friends, sure, but there’s more to it, you’re quick to find. Not all of it is good. Most of it – and you make it a point to seek that out, those frequent points of light that make it all so worth it while your heart already hurts with the thought of it all coming to an end decades from now – but there’s the ugly parts, too. They hide, like bits of rot in the core of an apple, but you can taste them always.
You try to hide from them at first yourself, reasoning that there’s no point in experiencing the worst of what humanity can do to itself if you’re only supposed to be bringing home its best and brightest; then you embrace that rot wholeheartedly, and come out all the worse for it. The things masquerading as your parents blame it on us, on our influence, and they hate us for it in that kind of abject way you’d hate a bug for scurrying across your pie set out to cool; but let’s be honest, you’ve never been pushed anywhere you didn’t want to go.
One lazy afternoon out near the creek, skipping stones with Norm and Reg while they get high off of the weed you conjured up – and you, perfect actor that you are, make a passable enough impression of being affected by it yourself – you look up at the sky of this world and you’re suddenly struck by how vast it is. There’s clouds littering the blue expanse, and off to your right you can feel a flock of birds take flight to tear across the heavens. Insects chirp in the tall grass around you, and below where you’re lying flat-back on a patch of red earth, you can feel the distant vibrations of all sorts of things burrowing.
It’s very beautiful. It’ll all be gone in twenty, thirty years tops.
“I just wish this would last forever,” you find yourself saying, your too-human mouth moving without any apparent input from your not-quite-human brain.
On your right, Reg lets out a high little laugh and you find his elbow in your ribs, nudging at you. “It’s been going on forever already, hasn’t it? Oh, wait, that’s just the weed talking I think.”
Norm, lying on your other side, pushes his glasses up his nose and gives you a sidelong glance that you can’t quite interpret. “Nothing’s meant to last forever, Walt, my man,” he says after a moment, sounding as suddenly-pensive as you feel, “The moment’d be ruined if it never ended.”
You nod in agreement you don’t feel, because you don’t quite trust your voice. It’s a novel feeling, not knowing what to say, and you treasure it in the same manner that you treasure the slick sliver of hurt worming its way into your heart at the thought of all of this coming to an end.
This is melancholy, you later find. It sticks with you.
Oh, does it stick with you.
Norm pushed you to do it, is what you’ll later tell yourself. (And here’s another human habit that’s come to stick with you: you’ve gotten very good at lying.)
You’d asked, “What would you think if I told you that I was in love with—Reg?”, because fuck it, you’re too human in this body after all, and you chicken out at the last instant, shying away from the you that’ll continue to burn on your tongue for the next sixteen years.
The look he’d given you was—strange, to the point that you’d found yourself questioning whether you didn’t actually end up telling him what you wanted to, after all. The cigarette between his lips had burnt away steadily in a thin cloud of smoke, and for a moment you had wanted nothing more than to pluck it out and replace it with your fingers instead.
“I’m an advocate of not bottling these kinds of things up,” he’d told you, carefully, eyes dark behind his glasses. He’d been uncomfortable, but there was a weird undercurrent to it that had taken you a moment to properly place: this is not a conversation he enjoyed having, but he was, you were startled to see, glad to have it with you. Proud, perhaps, that it’s him you’d chosen to confide in. “But you gotta figure out if that’s what you really want. Like, Antonia confessed to Lana a while back, and I don’t think they even talk to each other anymore—not that I’m saying that’ll happen with Reg but, just Walt. I don’t want you – either of you – to get hurt, you know?”
You do know. You also decide that you’ve already come too far to back down now, and that you’re not Antonia and whoever Lana is, and so you go for it.
But here’s how it goes: “Oh, man,” Reg says after a moment that takes entirely too long even to your non-linear perception, “Oh, Walter. That’s—that’s pretty big. Thanks for telling me, man. But I—“
He handles it with grace. You like to think you do, too, but the truth of the matter is that this is one of the few things he’s naturally better at than you. You’ve not had to deal with rejection before, and well, us humans swim in it.
Life goes on, after.
Things are awkward with Reg for a while, even though Norm does his best to try and mediate around the spots of silence that exist between you; eventually, you all live with it long enough for things to slowly fall back into their old places. You file it away as yet another thing to watch out for as you pick your candidates over the next few decades, and then that’s that.
And then one morning, a few weeks later after that disastrous conversation, you rouse yourself from that quasi-state of dreaming that you let yourself fall into on occasion, and you make your way over to that horrid little building they call a school, and Reg isn’t there to greet you from behind the wheel of his rickety old car and Norm is nowhere to be found, either, and it feels like for a moment you can’t breathe.
Ridiculous, of course. You’ve no need for air in the same manner that a fish has no need for legs, and so you swallow down around the unnatural tightness in your throat and head inside, alone.
Your mind’s abuzz with contingency plans already. Things to move, levers to push, people to toss around and rearrange until things are back the way they were before, the way they’re supposed to be because these are your friends and—
Reg and Norm wave to you from their seats as you enter homeroom.
The relief crashes into you like that cliff-bottom did, years earlier. And like that wonderful autumn afternoon, you find yourself coming out of it bruised for the impact.
Because: Norm’s sitting next to a beautiful human woman with dark hair. As you watch, the hand that he was just waving at you with brushes against her shoulders, and they share a glance that you have no idea at all how to interpret because surely not. He hadn’t said anything at all about—but, no, he had. You just hadn’t been paying attention, not as much as you now realize you should’ve, and when Norm introduces her as Ronnie, you remember that she’s in his Language Arts and Science classes, and has been helping him with the latter.
You smile at her and offer her a hand to shake and reformulate your earlier thought. These are your friends.
And regardless of what you – liar – tell yourself afterwards about having another eight spots to fill anyway, and of might as well starting with finding more people to do so, this is how you first learn of heartbreak.
You love them. You love them all so much. There isn’t enough space in all your heart – not the one of this stolen body, and certainly not the other one, the one that you wear on your sleeve but nobody ever really catches sight of regardless – to hold your love for them, and sometimes you feel so close to bursting with it—
Like maybe, if you’re not very careful, you’ll open your mouth one day and instead of some heartfelt remark it’ll be your whole damn heart itself forcing its way up your throat. You think that, if you could, if these human bodies hadn’t been designed against it, you would’ve thrown it all up in front of Reg and Ronnie and Naya and all the rest and that would’ve been that, the jig all done up, your decades of careful planning gone to waste because you just love them too damn much—
But you cannot, of course. Your heart is your heart regardless of how precisely it was created for you by someone else, and it’s stuck tight in your chest, beating against your ribs frantically, enveloped in tissue and pulsing arteries like a terrible cocoon. It’s sitting right there, just a bit below your left clavicle, and it’s going to continue occupying that strangely asymmetrical space inside you for all of the foreseeable future, and its pulsing walls will never touch the dangers of the outside world.
So your heart is safe, in that regard.
And only in that regard.
Because time is up, and your people are gearing up to wreathe the world in the sort of apocalyptic fire we’d considered in your parents’ basement after we’d finished watching whatever horror movie Reg had dug up that week – time is up, and you? You have a problem.
And like any time you have a problem that you well know the answer to but don’t like, you come to me with it.
We’ve not seen each other in a couple of months now, though we’ve talked over the phone every now and then, and man, you’d been sending me a startling amount of sad-faced kittens with markings around their eyes that looked like your glasses, lately. But I’d not expected you to just show up on my doorstep, and it must’ve shown on my face when I opened the door, because you so sheepishly raised your hand to give me a little wave, and said, “Hey there. Is now a bad time?”
And I swallow, and my fingers automatically reach for my cigarettes, and then – because you’ve trained us all so well, haven’t you – I snap out of it and raise an eyebrow at you. “Never for you, Walter. Come in—what’s up?”
Here’s how it goes: You talk around it. Twist your words so that only ten minutes in it’s getting difficult for me to remember that we hadn’t actually planned this, that I hadn’t invited you over to make the trip over to that house on the lake together the next morning. You’re slick like that. Always had been.
We end up on the roof, eventually. It’s not the same as it was when we were kids, different house notwithstanding – a terrace now rather than a moss-stained plane of tar, and we’re no longer in danger of staining our pants in embarrassing places because I’ve got money and actual chairs now – but it’s the same kind of comfortable silence, despite everything.
I smoke, you don’t. I have to glare against the sun while you, judging from the way you stare into it unfazedly, choose to be above such mundanities.
The silence between us lasts forever. And then you break it with a voice so quiet that it sounds almost alien to my ears.
“If you had forever,” you ask, up on that roof as you watch what may well be the last proper sunset this world will have, “what would you do with it?”
You watch from out of the corner of your eyes as I stub out my cigarette on the stained shingles. I take a while to answer, like you’d known I would.
“What good is anything if it lasts forever, really?” you hear me asking because some things, it seems, never change no matter how many times you wipe my memory.
And you think, as you often do lately, of our conversation too many sunset-decades ago, lying in the high grass together with Sam, and I’d like to imagine that your thoughts right then are somewhere in the vicinity of well, shit.
But perhaps that’s ascribing too much self-reflection to you.
In any case: you make a snap decision, then, sitting there on that roof.
“Remember,” you say, and I do.
All of which brings us here; that’s how it goes.
Now let’s be honest, you and I: this feels like a manipulative attempt at getting some absolution from me more than anything, Walter. I’m not going to give you that. Honestly, I don’t think I can.
Not on my own, anyway. You’d have to tell the others, but that means you’d have to come clean on what exactly you’ve been doing to them—us—and you’re afraid, aren’t you? You’re afraid, Walter.
Is it your own people? Those superiors you’ve talked about; the ones who’ll evaluate your little human ant farm project here? Or is it—
Hah. I see.
That’s one last human emotion that you’ve not had all that much experience with, I’d imagine. Sheer desperation.
But—sure. Sure. We’ve no other options left here, you and I. Not if we want everyone to survive.
Let me finish this off properly, then: here’s how it goes, one last time.
You keep your hands still at your sides, and you don’t reach out to lay a hand on my shoulder like you so desperately want to, in order to feel the warmth of that too-human body against your impostor glow, and you say:
“Norah. I need your help.”