Immortal Clay

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

A MORNING in Julie’s room, sitting on her unmade neglected bed, clutching the brown teddy bear she swore she didn’t need but wouldn’t get rid of, faint echoes of her clean baby-powder smell filling my nose, staring at track trophies and posters of boy bands with offensively cute haircuts and folded clothes piled atop her baby-sized dresser, thinking of the new bed set Sheila and Kevin had wanted to buy her and how Julie was going to be a veterinarian or a musician or an engineer. All lost. The teddy bear’s single blue crystalline eye held no comfort for the hole in my heart. Afternoons in the family room, leaving the curtains closed, watching photos flicker past on the mantle, wedding album open on my lap. Or the scrapbook, faded Disney park passes from the winter before Julie was born and a yellowed novelty photo of the three of us as Old West characters in a faux saloon and an ultrasound of our miscarried first child.

Over days, the outside tears slowed and stopped. The chasm inside didn’t grow any deeper, only more defined.

Kevin had moved through his life with certainty. Growing up wanting to be a police officer. Twelve years in the Detroit PD. Meeting Sheila, a marriage in the city hall, moving out to Frayville, a police detective in a town without much crime to detect, building a future for their daughter. His life now seemed inexorable and unstoppable, as though a tow chain attached to his heart pulled him into a future. Kevin had known what he wanted next, and worked towards it with unhurried certainty.

I didn’t have that. I didn’t even know if I was Kevin. I only knew the past hurt, and I couldn’t stop wallowing in it.

The wedding band burned on my ring finger. Had the alien built a copy of Kevin from raw dust and water before abandoning the carcass? Or had it infiltrated Kevin’s body, exchanging living cells for its own like changing a car’s tires as it rolled down the freeway? Replacement or suffusion? Did I materialize beneath the ring, or had I pulled it off Kevin’s cold carcass? Did it really matter?

I cursed myself for pulling the trigger. And felt obscurely proud of Kevin for having done it.

No television signals, either over the air or cable. The computer said it was late May, only four weeks after we’d fled the town, but the data feed had died with the television.

When I ate, it was leftovers in the fridge. Wrinkled apples, eaten unwashed, and desiccated grapes in the plastic carton. Water straight from the tap. Stray cans of cold beans or fruit cocktail. I heard shouts and screeches and the occasional car from outside the house, and occasionally smelled smoke or trees through narrowly open windows.

Once or twice a day, alien thoughts rumbled up somewhere from the back of my brain. I remembered riding in the back of a truck, ignoring the rain lashing my face at fifty miles an hour. More than once, words rose from the same hollow place. Legacy. Immanence. The alien had named itself Absolute for good reason, and I knew that it had let me go because there wasn’t anything left to conquer.

The gun-metal blister beneath my chin didn’t heal. Maybe it never would.

Days, maybe weeks, I sat in darkened rooms and tried not to feel. I’d probably still be there if the doorbell hadn’t rang.