Lightspeed: Year One

turkey baster, fills it up with slushie and lets it volcano into her mouth. Half goes in. Half gets all over, which makes the ants come back. But this is kind of great, just like before when we hated each other and Skippy was a stalker. Back when Bibi studied all the time and didn’t care about parties or drinking or boys.

The new Bibi is completely different. She dances all over the room, begs me to go with her to clubs, says, “You gotta teach me that booty bounce thing.” She puts on a sparkly shirt and lipstick, a short skirt and heels. She tapes a paper bow tie to her stomach and says, “Skippy Junior’s ready.”

So that’s what we do. We go to the only dance club in town, Freaky Willy’s. And I teach her to dance the American way. I show her how to grind like a skanky ho.

We run into Skippy at the club. He’s there with some guys. His acne looks a bit better. He buys us both drinks, Coronas all around. You’ve got to give him credit. At least he got us good beer. Then he wants to dance with Bibi. He seems genuine enough. Anyhow, there’s no way he can get sex with her funnel closed up. One of those really bouncy songs comes on with the flashing lights, and Bibi drags Skippy to the dance floor and rocks it out.

I sit at the bar and watch. She’s picked up the booty bounce, no problem. She looks kind of sexy gyrating her tiny hips, her shoulders bopping with the music. In this light, she doesn’t even look green. Skippy puts his hand on her back and tries to shake his pelvis too. But you can tell he’s not the dancing type.

Later, he walks us home, and Bibi invites him in. I go to Emily’s room until he leaves.

When he’s gone, I ask, “So does he want you back? Is it his baby?”

“It’s nobody’s baby,” she says. “On Jupiter, no one belongs to anyone else.”

That was the last time I saw Bibi. When I woke up, she was gone. There was a note on my desk that said, “Thanks for teaching me to dance. Thanks for sharing your family.” Most of her stuff was still there. I assume she went back to Jupiter, but who’s to be sure. I don’t like to think of other possibilities.

After that, there were lots of policemen and school officials who wanted to know where Bibi went. I told them I didn’t know. Word got out to the papers. Skippy came by our room and put a bouquet of weedy flowers by the door.

He said, “I really loved her. I don’t know why she had sex with all those other guys.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sure it was your baby.”

I invited him in. We sat on Bibi’s bed real close, and it felt better, that warmth, being next to someone who understood. We stayed like that for hours, shoulder to shoulder, not even talking. When it got dark, we slid under the covers. I was wearing those sparkly panties, the ones Bibi tossed on the floor that first night, the ones that were Jupiter. Skippy slid his hand down the front, brushed his fingers against what I imagined to be Bibi’s moon. I didn’t even mind when he aimed his boner at my belly button. I guided it lower, and he found the right hole.

“What if she comes back?” he asked.

“She’s gone,” I said, and kissed him hard.

He moved his hips back and forth and buried his head in my neck. My eyes locked on the turkey baster on Bibi’s dresser, and I tried to imagine that she had never been here. That she had never existed. That I had gotten here on my own.

ELIOT WROTE Nancy Kress

“Not only is the universe stranger than we

imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”

—J.B.S. Haldane

Eliot wrote: Picture your brain as a room. The major functions are like furniture. Each in its own place, and you can move from sofa to chair to ottoman, or even lie across more than one piece of furniture at the same time. Memory is like air in the room, dispersed everywhere. Musical ability is a specific accessory, like a vase on the mantle. Anger is a Doberman pinscher halfway out of the door from the kitchen. Algebra just fell down the heat duct. Love of your sibling is a water spill that evaporated three weeks ago.

Well, maybe not accurate, Eliot thought, and hit DELETE. Or maybe too accurate for his asshole English class. What kind of writing assignment was “Explain something important using an extended metaphor?”

He closed his school tablet and paced around the room. Cold, cheerless, bereft—or was that his own fault? Partly his own fault, he admitted; Eliot prided himself on self-honesty. He could turn up the heat, pick up the pizza boxes, open the curtains to the May sunshine. He did none of these things. Cold and cheerless matched bereft, and there was nothing to do about bereft. Well, one thing. He went to the fireplace (cold ashes, months old) and from the mantel plucked the ceramic pig and threw it as hard as he could onto the stone hearth. It shattered into pink shards.

Then he left the apartment and caught the bus to the hospital.

Eliot’s father had been entered into Ononeida Psychiatric Hospital ten days ago, for a religious conversion in which he saw the clear image of Zeus on a strawberry toaster pastry.

Ononeida, named for an Indian tribe that had once occupied Marthorn City, was accustomed to religious visions, and Carl Tremling was a mathematician, a group known for being eccentric. Ordinarily the hospital would not have admitted him at all. But Dr. Tremling had reacted to the toaster pastry with some violence, flinging furniture out of the apartment window and sobbing that there was dice being played with the universe after all, and that the center would not hold. A flung end-table, imitation Queen Anne, had hit the mailman, who was not seriously injured but was considerably perturbed. Carl Tremling was deemed a danger to others and possibly himself.

A brain scan had failed to find temporal lobe epilepsy, the usual cause of religious visions. Dr. Tremling had continued to sob and to fling whatever furniture the orderlies were not quick enough to defend. Also, the psychiatrist on intake duty, who had recognized both the Einstein and Yeats quotes, was puzzled over the choice of Zeus as the toaster-pastry image. The usual thing was either Christ or the Virgin Mary.

The commitment papers had been signed by Dr. Tremling’s sister, a sweet, dim, easily frightened woman who had never been comfortable with her brilliant brother but who was fond of Eliot. She was leaving the hospital as her nephew arrived.

“Eliot! Are you alone?”

“Yes, Aunt Sue.” In Susan Tremling Fisher’s mind, Eliot was perpetually nine instead of sixteen, and should not be riding buses alone. “How is he?”

“The same.” She sighed. “Only they want to—he wants to—Eliot, are you eating enough? You look thinner.”

“I’m fine.”

“You shouldn’t stay in that apartment alone. Anything could happen! Please come and stay with Uncle Ned and me, you know we’d love to have you and I hate to think of you alone in that big apartment without—”

If Eliot didn’t stop her, she would start her Poor Motherless Lamb speech. “What does Dad want to do?”

“What?”

“You said ‘They want to—he wants to’—so what do the doctors want to do?”

She sighed again. “I wish I had your memory, Eliot. You get it from poor Carl. That doctor with the mustache, he wants to try some new procedure on Carl.”

“What new procedure?”

“I can’t recall the name . . . ” She fumbled in her purse as if the name might be among the tissues and supermarket coupons.

“Was it Selective Memory Obliteration Neural Re-Routing?”

“Yes! The very words! Your memory, Eliot, I swear, your mother would have been so proud of—”

Eliot grabbed her arm. “Are you going to let them operate? Are you?”

“Why, Eliot! You’re hurting me!”