Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Alice Sola Kim’s (alicesolakim.com) writing has appeared in publications such as The Cut, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Lightspeed , and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 . She has received grants and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award.

We spent the last two hours of Bonnie’s birthday drinks talking about shitty men and didn’t think to apologize to Bonnie about it until after we got kicked out of the bar, long past closing time.

The bartender had tried to wait us out. Our group had become way too terrifying and annoying to approach. Our faces were red and our eyes were red and our auras or spirits or vibes or whatever were reddest of all. A dank, singed red that dimmed to black.

Although the bartender was extremely built, he wore his bounty of muscle like an old woman carrying too many grocery bags. He sighed and leaned against the bar and we ignored him.

Phyllida had been sketching on a napkin with meticulous and confident strokes. She seemed exactly like a real artist as long as you didn’t look at what she was drawing. “It needs a really long handle,” she said. “For leverage.” On the napkin was Phyllida herself, as a stick figure with scribbled hair like black hay, standing on a beach and holding an enormous fork. At the end of each fork tine, she added eight stick figures who were being shoved helplessly into the surf.

“Ta-da!” She pushed the napkin in front of us. “The drowning fork! For all your drowning-more-than-one-man-at-a-time needs. Eight men maximum. You don’t have to use all the tines. But it’s such a waste if you don’t.”

“Motherfucker, I’ll take fifty ,” Devon said, slapping her wallet down onto the table.

We cackled, some of us actively trying to screech like evil witches because it was funnier, and the longer we cackled the more we just felt it was the exact right way to laugh—not laughing because everything was so joyous and unblemished but simply because you were all bitches in hell together, so why not laugh, why not understand that everything contains at least one tiny nugget of its opposite, why not find a socially acceptable way to shriek with rage in public?

After the bartender finally kicked us out, we lumped together on the sidewalk, awkward again. The spell was dead and our faces were melted candles. In our bodies the joy-poison had evaporated but the poison-poison had leached into our marrow. Most of us had work or class tomorrow, and worst of all, tomorrow was more than technically today.

Bonnie was the only one who looked alert. The birthday girl, she of the scary freezing blue wolf eyes. In everything else she conceded to softness and prettiness but her eyelashes she painted black and jagged. Each individual lash each day—that was how you achieved the look. She took so freaking long in the bathroom, where the light was best.

“Sorry, Bonnie,” I said.

“It was pretty downer there at the end,” said Nina. “Sorry, I feel like it was my fault.”

“No, yeah, sorry I got so intense!” we somehow all managed to say as one.

“Shit, my wallet,” said Devon, and went back into the bar.

Meanwhile nobody said, Haha, dang, isn’t it bad enough that rape and assault and abuse and harassment and boyfriends doing the emotional psychosexual whatever equivalent of sticking their beefy hand into your brain and wearing it like a baseball mitt or a puppet so they can just really move it around and infinity et cetera happens to so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so many of us, and we can’t even talk about it without having to apologize afterward?

Not that I had said much tonight! But of course I’d apologized too. Because even though Bonnie smiled and said she didn’t mind that her birthday drinks had been taken over by dark tales and infernal anti-man machines and despairing laughter, we knew she did . She liked it when things and people were happy, and when they weren’t it was as if they were being unhappy at her. To her. She was plenty sympathetic to a point, and past that she’d start to bristle and talk about wallowing and pessimism and—

“—you get back what you put in,” Bonnie said. “Just between you and me. I wouldn’t say this to the rest of the group, and of course I respect what they’ve been through, but there’s also such a thing as deciding to stop being a victim. Yes, remembering and talking about all the wrongs, that’s important for… healing, or some such. But you can’t stay on that same old subject and expect to be able to get anything new out of it.”

We were walking back to the apartment together. I decided to not respond. Facing the prospect of arguing with Bonnie was like, you were starving and in front of you was a long, long table full of cakes. But if you ate even one bite, then you’d have to eat all of the cakes, the whole goddamn table of them.

That was just how Bonnie was. She would not ever change. She was always how you expected her to be, which wasn’t really something we’d take as a compliment for ourselves, but it could be pleasant to know someone else like that.

Besides, she could be a great friend in the classical sense. Back when I’d been going through a hard time, she had invited me to be her roommate in her giant apartment, even though she had no need of a roommate, and only charged me a tiny bit of rent. In return for her generosity, I did not discuss this hard time with her in any amount of detail.

The street was busy, lots of bars, lots of people out, so in some ways you were more generally unsafe but the unsafety was thinned and spread out. The block was like a Halloween parade where everyone wore their costumes on the inside—slavering B.O. werewolves, droopy amnesiac ghosts, vampires coldly intent on doing it.

The next morning, we woke up depleted and dried out and dire. Those of us who were close friends texted each other, Was I okay??? and unfailingly responded, You were great!!! (Which was a double lie: No one had been okay. And, no one had been in any state to accurately judge.)

As for what we had talked about at the end of Bonnie’s birthday drinks, we psychically decided to never bring it up with each other again and to forget that we ever knew about:

—the time a man, a doctor at the college campus clinic, was feeling our heartbeat and/but cupped our boob and lifted it once, subtle and unmistakable—

—the time a man had followed us onto a subway car to expound on our beauty, and ignoring his request for our phone number caused his perspective to immediately flip as if by evil magic, and he darted from slimy kindness to incendiary outrage, shouting directly in our face like it was the next best thing to hitting us but who knew, any moment he could start doing the best thing, and meanwhile everyone on the subway car made like they were in fucking Derry, Maine, and looked straight ahead—

—the time a man secretly removed his condom during sex—

—the times we didn’t want to but we did—

—the times we didn’t want it that way but we did it that way—

—the times we wanted only some of it but we did all of it

—and so on.

There we were at the bar. Too many people who didn’t all know each other as well as they should crowding a corner table. We looked like a bunch of different species of birds eating something off the sidewalk together. Big birds, little birds, beauties and sadsacks, pecking away at invisible crumbs without touching or fighting or acknowledging their shared plane of existence like their eyes couldn’t even see each other—only the food.