Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

It’s nearly my height, lying on its side. I put my hand on it. It courses through me: that feeling of a rising illness, of a sway. I have been out here for too long, I tell myself, but then I know that this is a different feeling. My hand feels numb where it rests on the hull, dead with pins and needles. I peel my glove off and look at it, trying to steady myself, and it dissipates. As I watch it, it seems to pick itself apart. I can see into it; through it, even. I can see millions of tiny parts, glimmering fragments. It’s like staring at a screen up close and being able to see the pixels. It is like mist, or fog, or smoke. My hand passes into the ship. It passes back. I gasp, and I scream, because there is something very wrong with me.

I scramble backwards, to the floor, to the grit and stones, and I stare as my hand pulses: from this vague approximation to something resembling normality. I turn and run, and I grab the bike. The hand still works. When I want it to, it is still my hand. Nothing more, nothing less. Turn around when possible, Jane says, but I ignore her, and I leap onto it, and I start pedaling. I am going, furiously, but then something goes wrong, and it feels as if my suit has caught on the gears; but when I look down, the bottom half of my leg is not there. It is gone, and the fabric dangles, and my shoe has fallen off behind us. We fall, the bike and I, and I push away from the frame and wheels, so I can see myself completely. I pull my trousers off, and it feels as if my leg is still there. They say this, in amputees; and they call it a phantom limb. When my bottom half is out of the trousers, I see my leg, or what remains. Molecules, something, move around the space. They swirl. This is my leg, now: innumerable tiny pieces, every part that makes up my being. I stare at my leg and it comes back. It comes back to me, and it looks as it always did.

There, lying in the road, I form and reform; and I change. I watch this spread up my leg, a rash that’s inside me, that makes me who I am.

I feel so, so vague.

I take my clothes off. I don’t need them, or I can’t use them. I look the same as I always did: the same colour of skin, the same body hair, the same everything. I smell the same. I walk, then, and it’s the same. The same logic to make these parts move.

And then I stop, and I do not concentrate, and I am not my body any more. I am something else. I am everything.

Turn around when possible, Jane says.

I do not know how I got here, to the supermarket, but I am outside it. I feel my body reconstitute itself, pulling itself back into its form.

I think about magnets: about holding them near each other, and feeling that tug as they want to be back together.

I need supplies. I had a shopping list. I cling to this. I walk through the doors, not needing to open them. My body gusts through and then reforms itself. I look to see if there are any water bottles, but there are none. I walk to medicines. There’s a noise from the other end: the people that I heard here before. Ravagers or scavengers or whatever they call themselves. They’ve lived out here too long, and they get sick and diseased, and they wait for death, and then they get used to it, some of them. They have nothing to lose in trying.

One of them runs at me. He passes through me, and he falls to the floor. He howls at me, and I see that even his tongue is pustules and mess. I reach out and touch him, and he begins to burn up. He sweats, and the pustules burst, and he lies there. He’s not dead, I don’t think, because his eyes are open, and they are swirling, miniature galaxies.

The countryside looks like another planet entirely: as if we could roll out the camera crews and start filming, and we could pretend it was Pluto or Jupiter or wherever, somewhere else that we’ve never been, that we never even dreamed we could go. I have a name on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot say it. I cannot say the word, because it’s not in my language. I rearrange myself◦– my throat, my mouth, the words◦– and I speak it. It sounds like nothing else. It is indescribable.

I don’t need to open the airlock. We are not as secure as we thought; and I feel the molecules of the doors as they pass through me. It’s as if I am learning from them. Inside, I feel thirsty. I drink water from a bottle, and I let it sink into me. Yesterday◦– and I can feel it now◦– I was rejecting it. I couldn’t assimilate it. Now, I can. Now, the liquid can be a part of me, and the walls and the wind. I pour the rest of the water over my head. It feel it sink in, and I am already dry. I go to the mirror, and when I look, it is as if I am not even there. I come back. I leave. I can be any part of this room. I come back, and I examine myself. It’s curious: how alien this body feels already.

Paul comes in and stares at me. “When did you get back?” he asks. “Jesus, put some clothes on.” He picks up the towel that I had left there and throws it at me again, only this time it passes through me. I feel myself come apart and then reform. I know what the towel is made up of, now: its fibers, its molecular structure. Paul doesn’t say anything else, then. He stares, and he clutches at his head, because to look at me causes him such pain when I am like this, and he turns and he runs. He makes this noise, like I’ve never heard. I wonder if now, somehow, my ears are different? If I hear noise in a different way?

I chase him, and I hold him. I tell him it will be alright. This is not like with the ones in the supermarket: this is different. I want this to be gentle for him: a coalescence. I pass into him. My self finds the holes in his skin and I pass into them. I take him; I make him a part of me, or of us. His clothes fall to the floor, and his body; or what it is now.

Is it still a body if there is no form? If it is just a part of everything?

The others do not hear me, but they fall the same. I touch Ella first, and she joins with me. She doesn’t even seem that surprised. They try to talk, but I am too quick for them, and I am learning how to make them turn faster and faster. I tell them, when they are with me, that I am saving them. That what I have done, it’s for the best of us all. We needed to find a way to survive this. The odds were too slim.

This is a gift, not a weapon. It is not a retaliation.

The remains of the disc are here. I take it into me, or me into it. I can feel the others in here: all of their component parts. They set themselves in here. We set ourselves. I spin it inside what I now am. Hello from the children of planet Earth . I remember that happening, once. I remember everything, now: where we were. How we were. How we dredged the craft from the atmosphere and saved it. How excited we had been; the thought of what it could mean. We prayed that it was another race, come from the stars: first contact. But it ruined us; we were forced to adapt.

I spit them out, the others: my parts fragmenting, my being divided. So many millions of pieces. They stand around me, and it doesn’t hurt any more to look at them. I remember being me, still. I remember it all. What happened.

I step outside and I let myself be taken on the wind. I dissipate.

I wonder how far I will be carried; how far I can go.

Archie Black won second place in a writing contest when she was twelve years old. Her mother is still very proud.

So far this year, David Bryher has written about ghosts, knitting, pigs, Daleks, ballroom dancing and Cleopatra. Not all at once.

S.L. Grey is a collaboration between Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg. Based in Cape Town, Sarah is a novelist and screenwriter and die-hard zombie fanatic. She writes crime novels and thrillers under her own name, and as Lily Herne she and her daughter Savannah Lotz write the Deadlands series of zombie novels for young adults. Louis is a Johannesburg-based fiction writer and editor. He was a bookseller for several years, and has a Master’s degree in vampire fiction and a doctorate on the post-religious apocalyptic fiction of Douglas Coupland.