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Absolute Unit 20.
20.We’re back onthe gray beach, the water lapping at our tendrils. Trent stands beside us in the surf, naked except for his leopard-print jacket, shivering in the cold wind slicing down the coast. “Great.” Trent says. “Not this again.”Footsteps crunch sand. Bill strides for us, also naked as the day he was born. A thick mass of tendrils dangles from between his legs, dragging on the sand, yellowish and segmented; when it touches a wetter patch of sand, it crackles and sparks with electricity. Smaller coils wave from his ears and the corner of his left eye-socket. His eyes are black with dried blood, making him look more like a bloated carcass than ever.“No more negotiations. No more of this useless equivocating. Here’s the deal,” Bill says. “We’re plugged into your brainstem and your cortex.”“Just leave us alone.” Trent scoops up a handful of wet gray sand and throws it at his uncle. “Please. I just want to be left alone.”Bill ignores him. He walks up to us, places a
Absolute Unit 21.
21.We can senseTrent deep in the basement of his own mind. He’s built a room down there, with a door impossible for us to unlock, but we can peer through the keyhole. The walls are covered with posters of David Bowie and Marilyn Monroe (always a fan of vintage, dear Trent), and a torn leather couch dominates the floor, facing a widescreen television that plays clips from classic films, music videos, memories of Carrie kissing him all over in that wintery bed. By sifting through the abandoned files in Trent’s hippocampus, we determine this is a replica of his basement at home, his safe space from life’s chaos. For what it’s worth, we whisper through the keyhole, we’re sorry about this.Screw off, Trent says, his eyes never leaving the television.We promise you can come out. You won’t be deleted.Yeah, right. I told you to screw off.We leave him down there. If he’s unwilling to cooperate, his fortress can serve as a prison. Let him watch through the keyhole as we take his
Absolute Unit 1.
1.Every day, all day, Bill smells shit or burning hair. Bill asks everybody if they smell those things, and when they say no (“What smell, dude?”), Bill thinks they’re lying to him. (Bill, your friendly neighborhood health inspector, thinks everybody lies to him.) Only when Bill starts smelling the distinct odor of his wife’s crotch does he begin to suspect something’s well and truly wrong with the ol’ noggin—she’s been dead for years. Not that Bill will see a doctor about his symptoms, no sir. Instead he’ll smoke and snort and screw the fear away, because a buzz always beats reality, and the idea of a tumor or an artery primed to blow is as real as it gets. On Monday, Bill takes two hundred dollars in hankie-soft bills from a corner market, in exchange for overlooking a frisky roach, and uses it to purchase a few small bags of the finest chemical concoction some creep could cook up in a kitchen sink, which he smokes in the front seat of his Official Government Vehicle before drivi
Absolute Unit 2.
2.We were bornon a Greek cargo ship bound for the East Coast. Like many an immigrant before us, our childhood was messy and short. The sailors pushed the lever that dumped the bilge tanks, and we found ourselves floating off the scenic coast of New Jersey, where the current soon directed us to an inlet, and from there to a pipe, and soon enough we sloshed through the speedy water-park of the local waste-treatment plant, where we slipped through a corroded filter on our way to Bill’s kitchen tap, and from there to Bill’s glass, and from there to Bill’s stomach, which offered everything an enthusiastic young parasite could ever desire: water, proteins, microbes on which to snack, and drugs—beautiful, weird drugs. Fortunately for us, Bill can’t even endure the twenty-minute drive from strip club to office without snorting a small pile of crushed-up pills. Got to balance out those five pints of cheap beer somehow.Forehead red and sweaty, heart hammering, pupils squeezed to
Absolute Unit 3.
3.Afew days later—and three hours late, but who’s counting—Bill’s crumpled soda-can of a jalopy (his personal car, mind you, not that government-funded monster) murmurs its way into the lone empty parking space of a coffee shop near his house, the engine cutting out with a loud fart, Bill emerging in full Sunday-morning glory. From his leather jacket, dry and cracked as the surface of Mars, he extracts a crumpled cigarette and torches up, exhaling a cloud of fragrant smoke. In that moment, taking a fresh jolt of poison into his bruised lungs, he seems almost human again: his spine straightens, his cheeks flush from bloodless pale to heart-attack red (an improvement, trust us), his cloudy gaze clears into the speculative laser-stare of Ye Olden Days, when Bill could still put on a good show of walking the earth larger than life. Bill power-draws the cigarette in four long pulls, crushes the leftover bit beneath his scuffed heel before heading inside, where his nephew Trent—a h
Absolute Unit 4.
4.Bill has theguts to show the kid an actual workday. They hustle a diner over on Bedford (“Is that mouse poop I see?”), raking in a princely ninety bucks, before pulling into the gravel lot behind Paradise Alley at a quarter past eleven. Bill shows the faintest modicum of decency by ordering his nephew to stay in the car while he goes inside Paradise Alley “for a minute.” Poor kid, hopefully he’ll prove smart enough to crack a window within the next hour, lest he fry in the late-morning heat like a puppy. Bill really means to have a shot of whiskey or two, the early lunch of champions, but he finds his best friend Frank at the bar, loading up. Frank is a homicide dick (emphasis on the word “dick”) who lives with his mother, snorts mountains of coke swiped from the evidence locker, and recites more Bible verses than a street preacher. He’s such a walking contradiction it’s a wonder that he can stride more than a block without vaporizing into thin air, his warring impulses can
Absolute Unit 5.
5.Trent kneels besidebloody Bill, his phone pressed to his ear. “Tell ... Janine ... ” Bill says.“Janine who?” Trent says, after asking emergency services to haul ass down to the industrial site.“Tell her I love her,” Bill says.Bill will have the opportunity to do so himself. Just a few more minutes and the ambulance will arrive, which will ferry Bill to a hospital, where doctors will perform all the diagnostics he so desperately needs. They’ll throw him in a scanner, and hopefully pick up on whatever’s making him smell the oddest things.But wait, won’t they find us, as well?Oh crap, maybe we didn’t think this one through.Is it worth going to our possible death, knowing that we’ve helped Bill become a better person? Of course not. We send a tendril up Bill’s throat, poised to shoot out his open mouth. If Trent would only lean a little bit closer and stay still for a second or two, we can move out of Bill for good. We’ll always love our firs
Absolute Unit 6.
6.As far ashosts go, upgrading from Bill to Trent is the equivalent of going from a broken-down double-wide on the edge of a radioactive pit to a nice McMansion in a quiet subdivision. Trent’s lungs are blissfully clear of ash and phlegm, his heart ticks along like a Swiss watch, and his muscles are lean and hard. Now we feel a little bad about living so long in Bill when newer models were available. But beggars can’t be choosers, and when we swam out of that tanker into our new life in America, we were the textbook definition of vulnerable. Trent has no idea we entered him. We waited until his eyes flicked left, toward the onrushing ambulance, before firing the tendril into his open mouth. He coughed, swallowed, and pounded his chest—massive booms through the cavern of his sternum as we affixed to his esophagus, then sent a sub-tendril winding through his tissues (So pink! So lovely!) toward his spine. Plugging into a convenient nerve, we could share his vision—so cris
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