Against You

The 25 Bus

It was a clear, warm, summer morning. Jim was doubled over at the bus stop catching his breath. His alarm hadn’t gone off—or he had turned it off in his sleep—so to make his bus he had to rush out the door and run all the way. Now he wasn’t sure, had he missed the bus, or was it coming any minute? He took out his phone to check the time, but—shit!—in his hurry he’d left it back at home.

Five and then ten minutes passed, or at least what Jim thought was ten minutes, and still the 25 bus didn’t come round the bend. It’d be another hour before the next one. Might as well go home, Jim thought. Call into work and tell them he’d be late. But just as he was about to leave, the 25 came toddling into view. Jim was relieved for a moment, and then not: There was something wrong with the bus. It was crawling down the road, limping, dragging itself. A broken-down bus wouldn’t get him to work on time, wouldn’t get him anywhere, so before it had even reached his stop Jim had given up on it and was headed back home.

The bus’s engine suddenly roared and it billowed a cloud of black exhaust and lurched forward, jumping the curb, flattening the bus stop sign—the one Jim had just been standing by—and running down the embankment along the highway. After a moment of stunned inaction, Jim followed the bus, running down the embankment muttering, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit”, as he went. The bus was still running, the engine still roaring and the exhaust still belching black smoke, but its tires were only spinning in place and digging into the earth now. A fir tree at the bottom of the hill had caught the bus and was holding it in place.

Jim couldn’t see inside the bus, the windows were tinted. He approached several times to try to pry open the doors, but the bus was growling and trembling like a wounded animal, and Jim was scared back. Eventually he did get hands on the door, but he couldn’t pull it open. Water was trickling out of the seams. His hands were left wet, and they smelled, a strange smell, like the ocean, and vinegar, and road kill that’s been left too long and popped.

Unable to do anything to help, Jim stepped back and could only watch. If he’d had his phone then he would’ve called for help, but he didn’t have his phone. Maybe he could flag down a car. He tromped back up the embankment. He looked up and down the street, but there wasn’t a single car. It’d been quite that morning, he recalled. He would’ve noticed if the streets were deserted, wouldn’t he?

Back down the hill, the bus started coughing and choking, and then it shuddered and died. The doors flung open and the water emptied out. The windows, it turned out, weren’t tinted, the bus was just filled with water so murky it looked black— or would a bus full of clean water look just as black? In any event the water that had filled the bus wasn’t clean. Seaweed spilled out with it, and sea stars, driftwood, barnacles… and body parts, human body parts, gooey and partially dissolved. The smell coming out with the water didn’t have the undertones of acidity or brine like the little bit Jim had gotten on his arms. Even from several yards away and up on the sidewalk, Jim started gagging on the smell of death and decomposition almost as soon as the doors were opened.

And still not a car to be seen, until, at last, limping round the bend, came the 25 bus—another 25 bus—with windows tinted black, and water trickling from every seam.

The Dangers of Sugar

The 911 Transcript

Dispatch: 911 emergency

Caller: Uh, hi, this is Mrs. Robert Cole calling on behalf of my husband. We’re at 1612 South Antoine Street.

Dispatch: What’s the emergency, Mrs. Cole?

Mrs. Cole: So… I don’t know— my husband thinks he got his head stuck in the dryer. He’s always doing this sort of thing though. We go to a lot of trouble and it turns out to be nothing. But we’ve tried about everything we can think of and— I don’t know.

Dispatch: You said his head is caught in a dryer?

Mrs. Cole: A clothes dryer, yes. It looks like the door slammed shut on his neck, uh, while he was pulling something out. Maybe? I didn’t see what happened; I just got back from the market. He’s standing in front of the dryer, kind of bent over, his head’s inside of it, and the door’s shut. i just— Robert, how did you even manage it?

Dispatch: He’s conscious then?

Mrs. Cole: Let me check. (passage of approx. eight words, indistinct)

Mrs. Cole: I can’t tell. I don’t think so.

Dispatch: Can you open the door?

Mrs. Cole: Let me check….

(Mrs. Cole can be heard putting down the phone. Approx. three seconds later she can be heard struggling to open the dryer door.)

Mrs. Cole: Oh God! (several words, indistinct)

Mrs. Cole (panting): There’s a lot of blood— He’s bleeding, from his neck.

Dispatch: Okay, an ambulance is on the way. You need to apply preassure to the wound, Mrs. Cole, and don’t disconnect. I’ll stay on the line.

The Coroner’s Report

IN THE MATTER RE THE DEATH OF:

I, HERMAN SYLVESTER, Sheriff-Coroner of the County of Washoe, State of Nevada, certify an inquiry and investigation was held in the death of ROBERT NICHOLAS COLE, a 42 years old male, born in New Mexico. The inquiry and investigation revealed that the decedent died on the 19th day of June, 1955 at 1612 South Antoine Street in Reno as follows:

MANNER OF DEATH: NATURAL CAUSES CAUSE OF DEATH: BLOOD LOSS due to PUNCTURE WOUNDS to the neck.

Sustained following INJURIES FROM EXCESS DIETARY SUGAR. The incident occurred at 1612 South Antoine Street in Reno at an unknown hour on June 19, 1955. I certify that death occurred from the cause and in the manner stated above in accordance with the written findings contained herein.

Signed this 15th day of March, 1955 HERMAN SYLVESTER, SHERIFF-CORONER

Recollection of Maurice Sinclair

When Bob died it wasn’t so much a shock, really. He was always getting into tight spots, something of a daredevil. He got himself out of ’em too, but, well, we all sort of knew, you know, that one day he wouldn’t. It was that daring that we loved about him. So when we finally learned what got him, that he died from eating too much sugar, I thought, you must be joking! Look at him, his head’s nearly ripped clean off. But now, looking back, you know he did have a sweet tooth? He must’ve drunk a half-dozen colas a day for as long as I knew him. My doctor— later on I asked my doctor about it, because I drank my share of cola too, and he explained how the sugar eats away at the lining of the throat, and if this goes on long enough your head’ll just come right off and all your juices’ll spill all over the floor, just like Bob’s did. Well, I hardly have to tell you I haven’t touched a soft drink since 1963. Not even once.

A Flea Amongst Giants

It’s before dawn and all the buildings are laying down, asleep, and among them a little flea of a child is seeing what she can scratch up to eat amongst the rubble when she finds a miracle: A sack of grapefruit, heavy with sweet juice and not even moldy, one of her very best finds. She might’ve found more, but the sun peeked over the horizon and the buildings started to wake, to pull themselves back up and go about their business, so the girl had to flee and hope she’d find that spot again.

Pet

Mr. Paper had been running out of money for a few weeks. He tried to get more money, and he tried to stretch what he had, but now all the money was gone. The first morning Mr. Paper had no food for his pet cat, Marvin, he felt so badly about it he tried to share the toast and coffee that was his own breakfast. Cats don’t care for toast though, and they don’t drink coffee. That night Marvin ran away. Mr. Paper was sad about it—he liked having Marvin around—but he was also glad for the cat. He imagined Marvin being taken in by a kind, rich old lady that would love him and spoil him and feed him gizzards and fish heads.

Mr. Paper could get bread from the bread line, and he could swipe a bag of coffee from the grocery store every so often, and between the two he could get through the day, but he couldn’t pay rent like that. He came home from a long day looking for money and found his apartment key wouldn’t open the door. His landlord had kicked him out and sold all his things to cover a little of the rent Mr. Paper owed him. Mr. Paper could still get bread from the bread line, but without a pot he couldn’t make coffee, and now when he was stuck out in the cold and could use it most.

One night, the smell of bacon wafted into Mr. Paper’s dreams as he slept uncomfortably on a park bench, and the smell stimulated in him visions of Christmas mornings like when he was a little boy. A sharp sound startled him awake, and the dreams fled, leaving behind them no memories. Mr. Paper shot up, expecting to find a cop or someone trying to rob him. Instead there was a cat, a couple yards away, sitting under a streetlamp. The cat sat placidly for a few beats as Mr. Paper met his gaze. Then the cat meowed, an urgent meow, and Mr. Paper recognized the voice— it was Marvin! He got up and approached the cat excitedly. They met in the middle and exchanged affections, Mr. Paper stroking Marvin and Marvin snaking around his feet, but then Marvin suddenly broke off and trotted back to his spot under the streetlamp. Mr. Paper followed.

He found a dinner plate sitting under the streetlamp holding two slices of toast, one buttered and one with raspberry jam; two fried eggs; and five pieces of pepper bacon, thickly sliced. Next to the plate was a mug of hot coffee with sugar and cream, steam billowing from it into the cold night air in great curls. He pounced on the food— more food than he’d seen at one time in weeks. He offered the bacon fat to Marvin, but Marvin wasn’t interested.

Once the plate had been cleaned, and the mug had been emptied, Mr. Paper sat cross-legged under the streetlamp a while, with Marvin curled up in his lap, purring happily. But again, after a while of that, Marvin darted off, trotting a few feet away and looking back at Mr. Paper, beckoning him. Again, Mr. Paper followed. They walked a long time. Eventually Marvin led him to a nice looking apartment building in a nice looking part of town. The doorman let Marvin in— Mr. Paper blew in with the wind. They took the elevator to the eleventh floor, and Marvin let Mr. Paper into a nice looking two bedroom apartment, with central heating and air, and HBO, and good internet service— Mr. Paper’s new home.

From then on Mr. Paper had it easy. He’d wake up Marvin in the morning when he was ready for breakfast. Marvin would feed him before going to work. Mr. Paper would hang out at the apartment during the day, napping and watching TV and internetting. Then, in the evening, Marvin would get home from work and make him dinner and chill on the couch, curled up in Mr. Paper’s lap and purring happily until finally turning in for the night. Then Mr. Paper would sneak out of the house to roam the streets, fool around with women, get into fights with men… but he’d always come back in the morning, hungry for his breakfast.

Based on a True Story

A clump of popsicle sticks and rubber bands somehow became animate and set out to free solo El Capitan. It did well until two thirds of the way up, when It was caught in an ice storm. The cold made its rubber bands brittle and they snapped and the clump was undone and the broken bits of rubber and wood were scattered. Someone would’ve gone out to recover the body, such as it was, but only one person knew anything about it, and he couldn’t be bothered.

And not a Sole for Miles

Halfway across the river, fifty feet of water beneath me, and I don’t think I can swim another stroke.

Workplace Anxiety

It was five minutes to eight on a Teusday morning, and he was up pacing nerveously around the bedroom, holding his stomach like he was about to vomit or have diarrhea. Typical behavior for him in the morning, at least on a work day. He really seemed to hate his job. I never learned what he did. There was a period of a few months during which he seemed much more relaxed, he slept better, he took care of himself, and during that time he never paced around the bedroom in the morning like that. He must’ve been out of work. Must’ve gone back to it when he went back to work.

He was doing especially bad on this particular morning. He always talked to himself, whenever he was alone, but always under his breath. On this morning he grew very agitated, talking to himself more and more loudly until he was almost yelling. Then he stopped, stopped pacing around and clutching his guts, and stopped talking to himself. He froze a moment, then hurried out of the bedroom. He must’ve gone to the kitchen, but I couldn’t see him. The kitchen was out of my field of view, and I was afraid that, if I turned the camera, he’d notice it. But he must’ve gone into the kitchen because he lived in this dinky little apartment where the kitchen and living room were on one side, and the bedroom and bathroom were on the other. He went through the doorway to the kitchen/living room area, and came back a few moments later with a pair of kitchen shears. He took them to the bathroom sink and stood there for a long while. I couldn’t see what he was doing; I could see him standing there at the sink, but he was in shadows and I couldn’t make out any details. It looked like he was cutting something— which, it turned out, he was.

He laughed to himself, a surprised little chuckle, and then came back into the bedroom. He’d cut off his left index finger and couldn’t have been happier about it. He tossed the scissors and his finger onto the bed, and called into work to tell his manager that he wouldn’t be able to come in, that there had been an accident in the kitchen and that he would be stuck at the emergency room all day. This seemed to go over fine. When he got off the phone he jumped onto the bed like a little kid and stared at the finger. It was moving, inching around his bed like an inchworm.

He cut off his left middle finger. He cut it off like he was snipping a corner off a piece of paper. He didn’t flinch, just, snip. There wasn’t any blood either. In quick succession, he cut off the other fingers of his left hand, snip, snip, snip. Five litle inchworms inched around his bed. He watched them all wriggling around there with a big grin on his face. He seemed satisfied… for a while. Then he took off his socks and snipped off his toes as matter-of-factly as if he were clipping his toenails: snip, snip, snip, snip, snip— snip, snip, snip, snip, snip.

Now he had fifteen little inchworms inching around his bed, and it looked like that would be all. He tried to cut his wrist, but it was too big a job for his kitchen shears. He couldn’t very well cut off the fingers of his right hand, because it was with his right hand that he cut. He pulled down his pants and seemed to contemplate cutting off his penis to make it sixteen little inchworms, but he pulled his pants back up without doing it. After that he seemed content to watch his new friends… for a while. Then he got the—frankly, brilliant, though also horrifying—idea to cut his face, opening his mouth wide and cutting off strips of cheekmeat and lips. These pieces added some variety to his menagerie: instead of inching around like inchworms, they stretched out long and pulled themselves forward, like earthworms.

He found he could use the same technique with any hole. He did his nostrils, making little maggot looking pieces, and his eyelids. Then he did his belly button, which turned out the be the mother lode. New creatures came pouring out of him. He didn’t have to cut them out anymore either, they cut themselves out, or each other. When it was all over, there wasn’t anything left of him, and all the pieces had scurried away to hide under the floorboards, down the drains, in dark corners and other places where no one looks and my camera can’t see.

The It

If you see it, you’ll always see it. You’ll try to ignore it, knowing as you do how much easier it is to get along if you don’t see it, but ignoring is seeing, and it will be so much harder to get along.

The Nehalem Pyramid

At first the pyramid over Nehalem was a little black chip in the sky. It had probably been there for weeks before anyone noticed, but once it was spotted it was only a matter of hours before everyone in the town knew about it. Which isn’t saying so much— only two hundred some people live in Nehalem. And, just being a speck floating up in the sky, it was forgotten before long, around the time the local paper ran their story on it.

“Is it getting bigger?”, people started asking a few days later, necks craned, squinting into the sky. Someone in town with a telescope made a time-lapse of it, and indeed it was gradually getting bigger. The local paper wrote a follow-up to their earlier story, which included the time-lapse video. The story quickly went viral. Journalists and tourists and ufologists started flooding into the town.

The pyramid got bigger over the summer and took on a definite shape to the naked eye. By September it was big enough that for two hours at midday the town was wholly in its shadow. The population of Nehalem grew along with the pyramid. People came from all over the world to see the it, this impossible thing. All these people came with their money in hand, and a lot of folks in Nehalem—not a wealthy town by any means—found themselves suddenly flush with cash. The military also came to town, with their scientists, to understand the pyramid and mitigate the risk it might pose, but the scientists managed only to learn that the pyramid was made of iron and the military, with no understanding of the pyramid, had no plausible means of mitigating anything.

For lack of any better idea, the town was evacuated. No one was allowed within a mile of it. There was a lot of grumbling about it, but only few people ignored the order to stay out, a group of tourists from California, and they all got caught and spent the night in jail. For a month the pyramid didn’t grow, didn’t do anything. A rich Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who had taken a keen interest in the pyramid and was used to bulldozing with money anything in his way, bankrolled a lawsuit against the government to get the ban lifted, and in mid-October it was.

People came flooding back into Nehalem, eager to have what they had been denied. There was some worry that the pyramid would start growing again with all the people returning, like one had something to do with the other, but the pyramid went on floating there as it had since the start of Autumn.

For the remainder of October the skies stayed clear, but the rain had to come eventually, and when it did the cloud cover meant no one could see the pyramid anymore. Sometimes a dark square could be seen through the clouds and remind the townsfolk the pyramid was still there. The tourists had left—taking their cash with them—and the military had become such a fixture that they went unseen. Everyday life in Nehalem resumed.

Miss Crachen’s Camera

By day, Miss Crachen was a second grade school teacher; by night she was an inventor, though not a productive one. She would give up on an invention once she saw that it would work, being interested only in the surprising, not the obvious. Having the keen mind that she did, one able to quickly see the implications of things, this meant that she didn’t often get to the point of even building a prototype to test. The problem was aggravated by the fact that Miss Crachen was arrogant—an affliction not untypical amongst people with keen minds—and so tended to trust the fullness of her understanding too much. All her life people tried to correct Miss Crachen’s arrogance. They would tell her, “You think you know everything, but you don’t. You think ‘this’, but actually it’s ‘that.’” Unfortunately they were always wrong. “This” was, in fact, “this”, not “that”, so their attempts to correct her arrogance only reinforced it.

Miss Crachen would receive an idea for an invention while cooking, or cleaning, or taking a bath, or on the drive to or from work. The idea would fall in her lap all on its own, and she would pick it up, she would look at it, examine it, turn it over, take it apart. When she could see the whole thing, hold it in her mind all at once, she’d throw it away. Once she’d eaten the flesh, she would discard the rind, and meanwhile five or six fresh, ripe ideas would have fallen into her lap.

Then, one morning, while buttering a slice of toast, an idea came to her for a very high-speed video camera, and this proved to be a very difficult invention. An artichoke, with not much flesh, and difficult to eat. It was difficult enough that it kept her wrestling with it. She couldn’t simply devour it like lesser ideas, and so she turned out an actual prototype— not her first, but one of only a very few.

Miss Crachen estimated the time resolution of her camera at roughly one trillion frames a second, or, to put it more precisely, she estimated the time between two successive frames was close to a trillionth of a second. This is an important distinction. There are what seem to be very high-speed cameras giving that kind of time resolution, but while it may be sort of fair to describe them as capable of capturing a trillion frames a second, you cannot honestly say that the time between two of their successive frames is a trillionth of a second. They work by capturing periodic phenomena, a laser repeatedly firing for instance, at slightly different moments, and then putting the frames together, kind of like stop motion animation combined with time-lapse photography. It could take minutes, or hours, or more to capture a thousand frames, whereas Miss Crachen’s high-speed camera was straightforwardly a high-speed camera, and if it ran for a second it would capture a trillion frames.

The first test was conducted in her living room. She set up a tent around her couch and smoked several cigarettes inside it, then she fired a laser mounted on the armrest of her couch and filmed its progress with her prototype camera. She filmed for only 125 millionths of a second but captured over two hours worth of footage played back at a hundred frames a second. Once the test had been performed—a fraction of a blink of an eye—Miss Crachen eagerly played back the result.

Miss Crachen had thought it would be cute if she were in the frame for the test, so the first thing she saw on her laptop when the video started playing was what looked like a still photograph of her smiling face. After several minutes of nothing happening, a little fleck of red appeared on the right side of the frame. Miss Crachen cheered the little fleck on as it slowly—agonizingly slowly—stretched out, but she ran out of enthusiasm when the beam was as long as the breadth of her thumbnail.

She could’ve quit watching at that point—the test had been confirmed a success—but she felt the diligent thing to do was to watch the whole video, to see with her own eyes the red thread of light’s journey across the frame. She took down the tent, microwaved a bag of popcorn, and made herself comfortable on the couch. For forty minutes she watched the video play only out of the corner of her eye while she snacked on popcorn and dinked around on her phone, but then something in the video moved suddenly, catching her eye. She looked from the little screen to the bigger one. She saw her face frozen like in a photograph—as before—and she saw the laser rolling steadily onward—again, as it had been—but over her shoulder she saw the zipper on the tent being undone shakily, in fits and starts, but swiftly, as if it had been filmed at normal speed. When a crack of a few inches had been made in the tent flap, in they all poured like baby spiders bursting out of their egg sac, swarming over every surface and blackening the very air: Monsters.