Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth (16 page)

Ronald throws the dolphin head at it, misses.

My hand is shaking from something— from
this
.

When Ronald collects his precious dolphin head he finds the cricket lodged in the basal ganglia and stares at it for an unhealthy period of time. Embarrassed, I look away. Zipper Boy’s water is 92 degrees Fahrenheit. The phone rings fourteen times, and fourteen times, we don’t answer it.

When the human race ends, this is the way it will happen, I know.

That night I kidnap Mandy a little bit then sit with her— bound hand and foot in the trunk of my car— and watch the city bats coalesce above the three-inch exhaust pipe of the lab. Insects are swirling up out of it, clockwise, and I smile, rename the insects
manna bug
,
moses beetle
, and realize I can’t take Mandy into this place. That I either love her too much or I could love her too much, which, really, is the same thing.

I inject her with a non-lethal dose of sodium pentathol and lead her into her building, careful not to ask her any questions, even in a disguised voice. Her doorman takes her without question, nods to me once, and I fade back into the night.

The green butterfly from the girl in high school was the one I found on her windshield one day at lunch, when I’d finally got my nerve up to wait for her, say something.

From across town Zipper Boy says into my head, in her voice,
Hungry there?
and I sulk away, my hands in my pockets.

Love isn’t a spoon
, I say back to him from the parking lot, the next morning, and this time when I walk in Ronald has the dolphin head on a long, metal stick.

“Scarecrow,” he says, about it, then explains in his most offhand voice how bats are really just mice with wings, meaning the mouse part of their brains must still remember the long winters spent under the snow, walking lightly, because the coyotes were up there somewhere, listening, listening, finally slinking off to the water’s edge, for clam, then fish, then they keep going out deeper and deeper, testing their lungs, until they’re dolphins. “Look at the teeth,” he says, running his finger along the dolphin’s jaw line.

I close my eyes to think.

“They— they weren’t coyotes then, though,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand.

“Doesn’t matter,” Ronald says. “They didn’t know they were mice then either, right?”

He stares at me until I nod, hook my chin to the tank.

“You fed him already?”

He shrugs— maybe, maybe not. This is kindergarten. The new title of his article on Zipper Boy is “Tidings from the Tidal Pool.” Even I know it won’t translate well— that, being a scientific article, it
needs
to— but before I can tell him, something pops above our heads.

Ronald doesn’t look up from his paper. I have to.

“Security,” he says.

It’s a row of cameras, motion activated.
Bat
-activated.

“What?” I ask.

Ronald shrugs. “Scuby here says their REM patterns are— unusual for rodents. Like how when a dog dreams about chasing a car, its leg will kick?”

“Maybe it’s having a karate dream.”

“Whatever. It’s a luxury bats don’t have, right? One kick, they’re falling . . .” He shrugs again, already bored with this. “ . . . think it has something to do with circulation to their brain. Probably need to get an opossum in here to see, though— upside down, all that. It’s a marsupial, though, I don’t know . . .”

“I’m not doing it,” I tell him.

“What?”

“Sleeping upside down.”

“I’m not asking.”

“Okay.”

“Well.”

“Yeah.”

I work at my table counting salmon eggs into vials, careful to keep my back to the leering dolphin.

Love isn’t a spoon, I know. It’s got to be something, though

That night while I’m gone, Ronald somehow manages to spray the dolphin head with liquid nitrogen, to keep it from rotting.

Over lunch, from his office, I call Mandy’s work number to report a crime but she doesn’t answer. I hang up, hold the phone there for what I know is too long.

Through the plate glass of Ronald’s open-air cubicle, Zipper Boy watches me, manages to rewind my memory to the movie about the submarine family then play it again, without the zero-g amniotic fluid. This time, the birth is achieved through a primitive but functional teleportation device: one moment, the baby isn’t there, and the next it is, the mother’s stomach already deflating, the father guiding it back down like deflating a raft.

I shake my head no, don’t want to see anymore, but Zipper Boy forces it on me, in me, and I have to watch this infant grow into an adolescent who appears normal until we follow him into his cabin. There, he reads books on what appropriate emotional reactions are to certain social stimuli, then, as a young man, standing over the father he’s just slain, we understand that the reason he is the way he is is that he was denied the essential violence of birth. That his whole life he’s been searching for that.

It’s Zipper Boy’s story. He’s never been born either.

I’m sorry
, I think to him, but it’s too late, he’s dreaming with the bats again, flitting with them through their night made of sound, his small, atrophied feet perfectly still.

I envy him, a little. But the rest of me knows what’s happening.

The mechanism I’m reduced to is ridiculously simple, as most are: I simply take Ronald’s mother’s mother’s silverware down to the pawn shop, get a ticket for it, then leave it on the bulletin board.

Ronald sees it first thing after lunch, stares at it, and walks away, then comes back again and again, until he looks across the room to me.

“You do this?” he says.

“We needed supplies,” I tell him.

Zipper Boy’s water gurgles. Ronald looks from it to me.

“
Supplies
?” he says.

“Guess the lab fairy skipped us this month,” I say back.

Ronald smiles; it’s what he told me my first week here, when I forgot to pick up everything he’d ordered—that the
lab fairy
wasn’t going to bring it, was she?

I have no idea what Zipper Boy is telling him.

Ronald shrugs, stands, looking in the direction of the pawn shop already.

“It wasn’t really as great as you thought it was,” he says, in parting. “Number four’s trick.”

Danger Bob, on his wheel.

My right hand wraps itself into a fist and I have to look away, swallow hard. Science isn’t cold. Not even close.

Ronald laughs on his way out, trailing his fingers over his shoulder.

“Stay off the roof, too,” he calls back. “I think it’s shaking the cameras.”

I stare at him until he’s gone then track up to the cameras. Because there’s no way in a world of brick and stone that my footsteps could come through the ceiling. But Ronald was just saying that, I see now; what he wanted me to see was that each camera is on one of the old, radio-controlled servos. That he still has the trigger out in the parking lot. That the guidewires their board is hanging from are the perfect antenna. That he’s going to be documenting whatever I wanted him out of the lab for.

Zipper Boy smiles, with his real mouth. His teeth dull from disuse. From never-use.

But his mind.

I take a step towards his tank and the room fills with pale green butterflies, the dust on their wings graphite-fine, and I have to breathe it, can hear the cameras snapping me in sequence, one after another, down the board, and the butterflies start to fill me. Light-headed.

But no.

Like the girl from high school said,
meant
, I take the first one I can catch, take it between my teeth, and swallow, and then the next, and the next, until they’re all gone, and I say it to Zipper Boy. That every experiment needs a control. Someone to exercise it. That I understand that now.

He’s just staring at me now.

Love
, he says in my head.

You understand
, I say back.
That’s why I’m doing this. Please.

In his water, for me, Zipper Boy tries to do Danger Bob’s trick with the wheel, to save himself, but he’s not a mouse anymore, and there’s no wheel anyway, and it’s too late in the game for gymnastics to save us from what we’re doing here.

The tears he cries for himself are bubbles of carbon dioxide— spent breath, his infant lungs still new, uncoordinated. The bubbles seep from the corner of his eye, collect on the surface of his water, and he nods, looks away to make this easy on me, but it’s not.

Through the cameras, in what will be time-capture, Ronald is watching me, a future Ronald, an hour-from-now Ronald, and I’m sitting by him, trying to explain, to keep my job.

Listen
, Zipper Boy says. It’s a kindness and I do, and the-me-from-then knows, has it right: what I have to do now is what I can feel myself already doing—move my arms from the wrist, my legs from the foot, my head from the chin, so that, on film, when I take the salt shaker, empty it into the tank, it will look like suicide. Like Zipper Boy had made me his puppet. Chose me instead of Ronald because I was weaker.

It’s a thing Ronald could buy. That he would buy.

But then, without meaning too— scientific curiosity, the reason I responded to Ronald’s ad in the first place, maybe—I look too long, another hour into the future, past him accepting my explanation for homicide, to the way he stands up from his chair smiling, holding one of the early bat-dream negatives up to the light, so that the colors are reversed. This is one of the images from the camera on the end of the board, which was aimed wrong. Instead of the bats, it had been snapping pictures of the dolphin head, only—looking along his arm I can see it in the modified television set— the dolphin’s teeth in the reverse-color image are silver, silver nitrate,
metal
, and from the angle the camera was at the dolphin isn’t even a dolphin anymore, but a predator that can never die, not if Ronald builds it right, this time. Not if it keeps moving.

ROCKET MAN

The dead aren’t exactly known for their baseball skills, but still, if you’re a player short some afternoon, just need a body to prop up out in left field—it all comes down to how bad you want to play, really. Or, in our case—where you can understand that by ‘our’ I mean ‘my,’ in that I promised off four of my dad’s cigarettes, one of my big brother’s magazines, and one sleepover lie—how bad you want to impress Amber Watson, on the walk back from the community pool, her lifeguard eyes already focused on everything at once.

Last week, I’d actually smacked the ball so hard that Rory at shortstop called time, to show how the cover’d rolled half back, the red stitching popped.

“You scalped it,” he said, kind of curling his lip in awe.

I should mention I’m Indian, except everybody’s always doing that for me.

The plan that day we pulled a zombie in (it had used to be Michael T from over on Oak Circle, but you’re not supposed to call zombies by their people names), my plan was to hit that same ball—I’d been saving it—even harder, so that there’d just be a cork center twirling up over our diamond, trailing leather and thread. Amber Watson would track back from that cracking sound to me, still holding my follow-through like I was posing for a trophy. And then of course I’d look through the chain link, kind of nod to her that this was me, yeah, this was who I really am, she’s just never seen it, and she’d smile and look away, and things in the halls at school would be different between us then. More awkward. She might even start timing her walks to coincide with some guess at my spot in the batting order.

Anyway, it wasn’t like there was anything else I could ever possibly do that might have a chance of impressing her.

But first, of course, we needed that body to prop up out in left field. Which, I know you’re thinking ‘right,
right
field,’ these are sixth graders, they never wait, they always step out, slap the ball early, and, I mean, maybe the kids from Chesterton or Memphis City do, I don’t know. But around here, we’ve been taught to wait, to time it out, to let that ball kind of hover in the pocket before we launch it into orbit. Kids from Chesterton? None of them are ever going pro. Not like us.

It’s why we fail the spelling test each Friday, why we blow the math quiz if we’re not sitting by somebody smart. You don’t need to know how to spell ‘homerun’ to hit one. You don’t have to add up runners in your head, so long as you knock them all in. Easy as that.

As for Michael T, none of us had had much to do with him since he got bit, started playing for the other team. There were the lunges from behind the fence on the way to school, there was that shape kind of scuffling around when you took the trash out some nights, but that could have been any zombie. It didn’t have to be Michael T. And, pulling him in that day to just stand there, let the flies buzz in and out of his mouth—it’s not like that’s not what he did
before
he was dead. You only picked Michael T if he was the only one to pick, I’m saying. You wouldn’t think that either, him being a year older than us and all, but he’d always just been our size, too. Most kids like that, a grade up but not taller, they’d at least be fast, or be able to fling the ball home all the way from the center fence. Not Michael T. Michael T—the best way to explain him, I guess, it’s that his big brother used to pin him down to the ground at recess, drop a line of spit down almost to his face, the rest of us looking but not looking. Glad just not to be him.

That day, though, with Amber Watson approaching on my radar, barefoot the way she usually was, her shoes hooked over her shoulder like a rich lady’s purse, that day, it was either Michael T or nobody. Or, at first it
was
nobody, but then, just joking around, Theodore said he’d seen Michael T shuffling around down by the rocket park anyway.

“Michael
T
?” I asked.