Midnite Moving Co

“Oh, I know perzackly how messed up my memory is, I have PTSD,” Jesse said. “I dunno about anybody else, but I realized that a lot of what humans call memory is just what sticks in your mind from whatever it is that bullies yell the loudest.”

“I have no response to that,” George said. Jesse was three beers in, and getting a slight shine to him. It was good that he’d eaten something more substantial than the nachos. Most Sixers wouldn’t even be in the same room as an adult male human who’d been drinking, if they’d even managed to power through their distrust of indoors while managing sociability. Disgust and fear create a powerful barrier. There was that steady buzz of danger, danger, that flowed from Jesse with every vaporous exhalation. Sixer lore firmly held that drunken humans were the only kind of human you needed to fear. Sober humans, given a demonstration of Sixer capabilities, usually went yipe yipe yipe over the hill; drunks could be hard to predict, and on that basis alone were the most successful at killing Sixers. There were not often smart enough to avoid killing themselves in the process. But it had been done, or so George had been told, and he held it to be true.

There were always plenty of drunks with hunting experience; if the last Gianni killed himself while taking you out, his kid or nephew would pop up like one of those mole heads in a carnival game, seemingly made of chipped enamel and concentrated loathing.

So he sat with Jesse and watched him drink, and was pleased that he felt safe while he did it.  Jesse would never deliberately or voluntarily hurt him, and he wouldn’t give up on him either. The idea of having an attachment point in his life more important than his illnesses and family history had proved too seductive to Jesse. In one way it was a relief. In every other way, it seemed like the warmup for a spectacular betrayal.

It’ll be years before I go into space, George thought. Plenty of time to warn people about what could happen after I leave.

Jesse wasn’t upset at the comment; from what he knew of George it was more likely confusion than some variant of politeness that had made him say that.  He shot out his lower lip. “It’s what I experience.  A response isn’t really necessary.  I have always felt very isolated because nobody experiences the world the way I do, and they show they don’t experience it like I do in the words they use to describe it.”

“Some English words seem to guarantee the dopiness of the user,” George said. It was classic George derailment, but he went with it.

“Let’s pretend I know what they are,” Jesse said.

George made a small, non-committal noise.

“Shouldn’t be too hard, right? And let’s pretend that you won’t point them out to me when I use them.”

“I’m teasing. Words rise and fall out of fashion,” George said.

“I have a question,” Jesse said after a while.

“Really? A question.”

“I’d like you to answer something now, and you know it’s not just one question, it’s more gathering information toward a deep conversation on issues of substance.”

“I suppose, having taught you to be even vaguer than you already were, I can’t shudder when I get the same treatment. Ask away, young human.”

“Did your species have love before you came to Earth?”

“We had sexual predation and lifelong friendship. Not exactly a one for one mapping of how humans manage things.”

“I’ve heard you say that you love Kima,” Jesse said diffidently.

“No doubt you’ve heard Michel ask why’d he’d try to lean his feelings up against a word so small. ‘I love Cheez Whiz’, he’d say, ‘and I love Kima. They don’t belong in the same thought let alone the same language’.”

“He did say that, although I really don’t think he likes All-Purpose Industrial Paste.  I was asking about you.”

“A man I know whom you haven’t been introduced to said that I was the Apollonian lover, and Michel the Dionysian one.”

“Except that doesn’t really take anything about Sixer sexuality or gender expression into account,” Jesse said, and redeeming himself for his tiresome question. “It’s the kind of things humans say when they’re trying to dodge the responsibility for seeing Sixers as they are… mind you it doesn’t help that you assume a human appearance all the time.”

“What do you think?” George asked bluntly.

“I think I don’t know Sixers well enough to know. I do know that you’re closer to each other, somehow, than humans manage to be, even when you’re not in agreement. I think it has something to do with the language of light, and something to do with how matter-of-fact Sixers are, mostly, about their own abilities and sex lives.”

“I don’t disagree,” George said.

There was an uncomfortable pause. Jesse persisted. “If you do love Kima, why do you love her?”

“I can’t give a true answer to that in a human language.”

“That sounds kinda ominous,” Jesse said slowly.

“She’s a predator with her brain as well as her body,” George said. “She’s smart, fast, deadly and though she’s got an ego, it’s small and easily stroked.”

Jesse heard this as, She’s useful and easy to manage.

“The physical attraction, given your differences, is hard to understand.”

“Humans should be able to have sympathy for Sixers about attraction; it’s always a matter of surprise to all but the participants who bangs who if all are free to make their own choices, without regard to the wide human range of strictures, taboos, relative fecundity, laws and religious hangups. If I say a lover smells good and likes me, that should be more than ample reason for me to feel an attraction, and to subject my love to a media ‘means test’ of her attractiveness would make me puke, were I capable of puking.”

George was rarely so animated.  It felt wrong, odd.

“Are you practicing for the cameras on O-day?” Jesse said. “Something about you doesn’t feel right.”

George was gloomy. “You haven’t asked what Kima sees in me. I don’t know why Kima’s chosen me.  It’s as if she’s compelled to, even though it was against her best interest.”

That’s weird. “Was. As in used to be?”

“It was tempestuous. We’d spend time together and then she’d, as you put it, bugger off.”

“Is that a gendered slur?”

George delivered his opinion with his usual urbanity. “I can’t tell; human rules about sexual activity in and around the anus appear to me an immense pile of self-contradictory dogma, with the Don’t Do It Party ahead in the polls over the Gosh It’s Nice Done Right Federation.  My views may of course have been affected by watching humans enjoy it on video.”

The beer spoke. “I can die happy now, I’ve discussed porn with an alien. Although I suppose I should say something to make it a conversation. Did you enjoy it?” Jesse said, giggling.

The tone became quelling.  “It was research, damn you! I don’t want you to die, happy or not; I’d prefer you hung around for the thrilling dénouement. Of course, you know you’re as free as you can make yourself,” George said. Jesse shook his finger at him. These days George was always checking if Jesse was in the LARP voluntarily.

George took up the thread, narrating his fruitless love life. “She quit squirming when she decided she wanted to live in the Salish Sea, and that she would try to have children with me. Then I asked her if she felt like thinking about some of my problems if she had energy to spare and she did, and I benefited.

“I turned that benefit into technology to assist her in learning various subjects.”

Jesse started moving puzzle pieces around in his mind. “Which include wireless engineering, if Avtar’s to be believed.”

“Yes. She did all of this on a cell phone, by the way. She tears through things, when she wants to learn, with a heated concentration. Literally! — she runs hotter, a couple of times I thought she might be dying and burning from the inside out, and poor Michel got a scare once when she put her thinking cap on. Once she said she already knew how to do all of it but she had to be presented with the problems to understand that she could solve them.”

“That’s creepy.”

George shrugged.  Calling Kima’s behaviour creepy wasn’t useful. Untoward, unusual, eccentric.  All that applied. “Especially math — she said her experience feels like she’s remembering it and learning it at the same time. When I tell you she’s bigger on the inside, I mean it.”

There was a little pause.

“If you two love humans, do you s’pose your kids will learn to be that way too?” Jesse asked. “Will you teach them that?” He tried to imagine what the kids would be like, and his heart gave a little premonitory thud.

“I won’t teach them long; I’m not planning on hanging around this planet longer than it takes to put the resources together to leave it. Kima will; and I imagine any child Kima gives birth to will get Michel’s rough and ready support, once they’re old enough.”

Jesse gave his shock immediate voice. “Once they’re old enough? What? I thought you looked after your kids, you talked about your mother helping you hunt and teaching you to take the trail over the mountains to the Mediterranean!” Jesse said.

George shrugged, seemingly embarrassed. “Kima’s a water morph. Babies go in the ocean, to fend for themselves using nothing but their inbuilt survival instincts until they put on enough mass to grow a brain.”

“Are you telling me that you’re probably not going to meet any of your kids?” Jesse asked, distressed. Never having met his father was one of his on-going trials. It hadn’t occurred to him that George was going to enact this vacuum of grief on any kids he might have. They’d have Kima, but maternal was not the first thing that popped into his head as a descriptor for her.

George shook his head. “Not likely, no. Let’s talk about the ceremony.”

“Your human buddies go to the beach for a light show put on by Michel and Kima and we all get a participation trophy, the end,” Jesse said obediently.

George popped his eyes, but Jesse had braced for it. “Crap,” he replied. “I hadn’t thought about a swag bag.  Well, it’s not like this is costing me a lot of money. I suppose I could put together something. And I’m getting help from a Unitarian lay chaplain,” George said.

“George, you’re an atheist,” Jesse said, tenderly, as if telling him for the first time after he’d had a stroke and forgotten.

“Well, yeah,” George said with annoyance.  “I am. But I’ve been going to church in North Van, for various reasons.”

“What. The. Fuck,” Jesse said.

“It’s all part of the intersectional, international, interplanetary wackiness that is my life. The Catholics may be more catholic, but Unitarians have integrated atheists into how they do things, so I thought they’d be okay helping me with our little show, and there were quite a few on the contact list so I had a range to choose from.”

“So you go to church.” He felt like his poor little human brain was just a bony meat bucket for reality to sink its axe into.

“I told them I wouldn’t join. They’re used to that. I like the music,” George said. “It’s one of the many ways I differ from other Sixers. To return to our little stray logistical sheep, ceremony is different things to different people. For Sixers it’s novel. For humans it’s ordinary. I needed human help to shape it into something acceptable.”

“So it has a beginning, middle and end?” Jesse said.

“So it has context, content and closure,” George said.

“Same diff,” Jesse said dismissively.  “You just say it prettier.”

George heaved a great sigh.  His deft representation of eyes, large, liquid, brown and guileless, gazed with reproach upon Jesse. 

He would never have laid the burden of being his human conscience on anyone; Jesse was the person who came closest to taking on the role voluntarily. The man with the rolodex had been correct when he said George’d have to work, at a job, with human beings, before he could understand them well enough to trust them. Figuring out how to hawk artifacts for various kinds of money, and then working through proxies, would only get him so far.

His new friend had been the emblem of hospitable calm. He’d taken George into his home. Normally this wasn’t a problem, but if his hair said it was a problem, there’d be mayhem and possibly injury, and loath as he was to admit it, possibly even the death of a someone like his new friend here — until his hair said it was all clear and went back to sleep like a great unsnoring hedgehog who lived on your head.

He had to live with the terror that it would happen. It hadn’t happened yet. Most of the time he had to yell at it for fifteen minutes on an internal, private channel, before it would even wake enough to shudder and acknowledge its own existence.

Every once in a while, like on the night Jesse first got a gun shoved in his face, it would quietly partner up and help! and keep a perimeter — and keep an eye on Jesse. Being so useful and welcome and wonderful that he felt awestruck and happy and filled with the certainty that everything would be fine.

It was the way he felt when he embodied mania. It was a run of emotion and sensation that made the normal barriers between himself and others dissolve; he felt in that crystalline state of perception that no problem was insoluble, or behaviour unacceptable, because wasn’t he required by history? Who needed him more, humans or the planet most of them squatted on like a plastic turd? He rarely got that honest with his human friends; the man with the rolodex died, four days after he met him. The grief he felt was not assuaged at all by the gift of the connections on that whirling piece of paper and plastic; he threw the grief into investigating every one of the connections he’d been left with; there’d been cryptic and hilarious annotations, so he knew where to start.

And Kima had said, “It’s a loss. A profound loss. You wanted his oversight.”

It was terse, but so kindly meant that he came close to locking up every time he thought about it.  At the time, he had approached her and awkwardly started to pet her the way he imagined Michel did it.

“You hate being underwater so much,” she chided. “It breaks your ability to concentrate.”

He admitted to himself that she had gotten much better at criticizing him.

“I know it has to be on land,” she said with one of her diaphragms. He pulled away from the link. The language of light and the Greek were completely at odds with each other.

Nothing like the way his new friend had accepted his story with calm, his true appearance with a sincere, “Wow, do you ever look cool!” and his request for assistance with consideration.

In four days he’d done more to help George than any of his Sixer friends and, as he liked to think, allies.

It’s their planet, they can help pay for defence, he thought, and it was under that operating principle that he first started co-opting humans.

That friend was gone, and now, as if humans would continue to mindlessly and mechanically make offerings to him, it was Jesse, Jesse with his sly, self-deprecating humour, his almost unquestioning acceptance of the consequences of his friendship with George, his delicious-smelling sister, (and sooner or later he’d have to make his confession about that), and his thoughtful attitude toward work, and kindness, and complete and utter laziness when he wasn’t working, or working out, which made him seem more like a Sixer than virtually any human he knew, it was Jesse who sat in front of him, a man fondly smiling at a hurricane for being so awesome.

“I hope,” George said sadly, “That you will bring a somewhat more serious frame of mind to the ceremony.”

“You haven’t told me what I’m s’posed to do yet,” Jesse said, scratching himself in a way he wouldn’t have done with more people present.

“Refrain from scratching your ass, for starters,” George said.

“I can behave myself in public,” Jesse protested, “And this won’t be public.”

“Fine. We’re going to gather together, say why we’re helping each other, pledge to keep doing it, and then go eat,” George said.

“With effects storyboarded by Michael Bay,” Jesse said.

“Who’s Michael Bay?” George asked, to annoy Jesse. Then, cutting him some slack, he said, “He’d be taking notes from us if he was attending.”

“So in the middle, explosions?”

“I asked Kima to go easy on replicating the surface of the sun. It’s amazing how much light she can make when she’s linked to Michel.”

“The sun?”

“There’s a brief bit where the attendees cruise around the solar system and fall into the sun,” George said.

“Show me, don’t tell me,” Jesse said, annoyed.

“You’ll see,” George said placidly. Jesse’s knuckles itched.

“I’m going to need you to help offload the boat on the day,” George said.

“Sparrow’s piloting?”

“Yes, but he refuses to come ashore,” George said. The annoyance was obvious.

“Why?”

“He says the ceremony held previously between myself and Kima and his people was everything he needed and he’d be happy to do logistics. Participation was not advised as it was not consistent with the independence of his people.”

There was a long pause while Jesse ran this new fact through the accumulation of prejudices he called his brain. “Credit where credit’s due, the time to ask for favours is while your friends still like you,” he finally said.

“I think the Musqueam have figured out the shitstorm that’s coming, but are too proud not to support us in some way.”

“Do you think I’m gonna die?” Jesse asked in an overly placid voice.

“You’re far too entertaining,” George said. “Somebody will spare you to prevent a child from crying.”

“I’m childish enough, god knows, according to my sister,” Jesse said.

“About that,” George said. His skin stiffened and his hair started to rock from side to side.

Jesse frowned. “Everything okay? You look fucked up.”

George’s voice matched his body. “I am. I’ve been lying to you.”

Jesse’s expression went from worry to broad, drunken mischief. “Only question is, you wonderful critter, whether it’s something I know about already or not.”

“It’s about your sister.”

All the mirth vanished. “No.”

“I met her without telling her I know you.”

This time the silence went on for a long time.

“What do I need to know,” Jesse said tonelessly.

“I’ve been spying on her and I’m very infatuated.”

“Holy fuck.” The emotion came back.

“You’re taking it very well.”

“You’ve got a crush on my sister? Does she know you’re an alien yet?”

“No. But by one of those stupefying coincidences that living in The World’s Biggest Small Town encourages, she’s the former lover of the scientist and academic whom I have chosen to carry the Sixer’s research water.”

“Brendan,” Jesse said.

“You know him.”

“He was my sister’s boyfriend while I was living with her, so, yeah, I knew him. I really liked him, a lot and all that bullshit about her choosing to quit UBC after some fucker reported the affair to the university really grated on me. I’ve kinda hated on him ever since, but at the time I thought he was the coolest guy I’d ever met, and we smoked a lot of dope together.”

George looked at him pityingly.

“What? what?  I was seventeen!” Jesse said. “What the fuck had you accomplished by the time you were seventeen?”

“I’d gone through three morphs already,” George said.

Jesse splayed his hands. “I have no idea what that means.  You and Michel talk about morphs but you never stop to explain.”

“Imagine going through puberty and completely changing your shape and the way you think and process information three times in seventeen years when you have a lifespan of four to five hundred years.”

Jesse considered it. George let him do it.

“No, I really can’t,” Jesse said.

“While being forced to watch horror movies and getting yelled at by angry relatives and you lose control of your bowels and bladder and you lose social contact with everybody you know because you go from being sentient to non-sentient.”

“What the hell?” Jesse said.

“Welcome to my childhood,” George said.

“Having a bad childhood is not a contest,” Jesse said, almost as a reflex. “We experience these bad things as individuals, and share them in words. Does the person with the best words win?”

“Not in my experience,” George said. He was thinking of the language of light, and of course that was not what Jesse had meant.  There are a million avenues, he thought, for miscommunication.

Jesse pressed on. “No, because success in dealing with your past doesn’t come from talking about it, it comes from knowing yourself and making meaning from the life and energy you have left.”

“Very wise.”

“I had a therapist,” Jesse said. “He was amazing. I wanted the benefit of the life experience of someone who wasn’t a sexist asshole and who wasn’t a woman, nothing wrong with that,” Jesse said. “He taught me lots of things, like not to talk about the abuse without clear ongoing evidence that I was in a safe space first, which has turned out to be really good advice, because every time I ignored it, I paid for it. He told me not to let loneliness and alcohol loosen my tongue. He told me there are lots of people who take advantage of the damaged ones, and I’d have to learn to see it coming.”

One could argue that I’m one of the advantage seekers, George thought. “You didn’t see me coming.”

Jesse kept it light. “No surprise there — since you are invisible.”

“I’m hardly ever invisible,” George said, offended.

“No, not like Michel, who seems to think that a day without invisibility is a crime against Sixer-kind.”

George smiled.  “He sleeps invisible, which is traditional, and I don’t. Took me almost twenty years to learn how to keep my human appearance while asleep; when I was living with humans before, I had to sleep all kinds of crazy places to prevent them from tripping over me in the morning.”

“When was that?”

Always so keen on the details. “Back in Europa, in the gay mad revolutionary times before the Great War,” George said. When I was living with a sex worker and her asshole revolutionary wannabe boyfriend.

“And when else have you lived with humans?”

“You’ll find out during the ceremony.”

“Which is when,” Jesse said, his head sagging.

“I don’t know for sure, except at night, to suit you, my photophobic chum, and not for at least a couple of weeks since we don’t have all the bits and bobbles rented yet. I’ll be asking you to help with that, too,” George said.

“Sure, whatever you need. Can I sleep on the sofa tonight?” Jesse’s face split in a yawn.

“Yes. You snore, you know.”

“I’m sure you can ignore it, and so can your hair.” Jesse thought about giving George’s hair a condescending little pat, but knowing it could rip his hand off without effort killed the urge.

The final offloading for the ceremony brought George to the point of collapse many times. He remained courteous throughout even when he thought he was going to fold up. 

Michel and Kima were too busy finalizing the photons to assist, and they’d already done the bulk of the work setting up the awnings, screeching at other in Greek through the trees while Michel tried to entertain Kima by finding novel ways to scale and exit the trees, mostly Douglas firs and cedars, as he found attachment points. George was afraid of missing something or messing up, and the worry chewed through his normal list-making and list-completing prowess.

There had been no-one to delegate sound to, so he had that running in the background, whether or not he was conscious, and strangely, a week before the ceremony his hair took a special interest in it, poking about and being opinionated. “Whenever your morning is,” George finally thought hard at it, anger, jealousy and stupefaction being tamped down into a beggar’s plea, “Why don’t you take over the sound effects and music and leave me alone except to barf a report into my good ear once a day.”

“Take over sound, report once a day.”

His hair rarely repeated back instructions/requisitions/earnest pleas/grovelling. It was impossible to tell whether it was taunting him or being helpful and compliant, the better to seize the chance to make earthquake noises. Michel, who was as close as the phone he mostly refused to answer, would have made a good speech on why not both? George, staggering under a tangled and burdensome cognitive load, was happy to delegate something. Within seconds he felt more energetic. In fact, he felt springy. It was always dangerous, that springy feeling.  It made things more tangled by the time it faded away into his normal state of bureaucratized terror.

Have fun, my good, strange hair! George thought at it.

No reply was required. The hair was variably moody and capricious, difficult and tremulous, but George had long since come to believe that everything non-compliant about his hair was as a direct consequence of George being such an ineffectual person. Yelling at his hair would be as useful as yelling into a mirror. And yet, sometimes, when people are alone, they do yell into a mirror.

The music might be disastrous. It was a chance he felt he had to take.

It was going to be at night, and the weather, in human terms, was somewhere between ‘you gotta be shitting me’ and ‘ass-freezing cold’. No precipitation was expected, but on the coast that was possibly one of the funniest things you could say without swearing.  When Jesse had learned of the date he said, “The only good thing about it is that it won’t be mosquito season. But the first week of fucking April man, at night, are you nuts?”

“I am not a man, please stop saying that even as a joke, it’s racist. We’re trying to have the ceremony when there aren’t flotillas of summer sailors in pleasure craft motoring up and down the inlet. As for your tender heinies, there will be seating and braziers and places where people can congregate and stay warm while experiencing the Sixer part of the ceremony.”

“Do humans get speaking parts? I thought you only wanted me as a mule,” Jesse said.

“I’m thinking perhaps it should be recorded,” George said, as if he hadn’t heard him.

For a second Jesse was offended, and then Paddy’s face swam into his memory. “Oh, I can think of the perfect person, a former client, she would love the opportunity,” Jesse said. A heftier punishment for bewitching him and then turning out to be a complete goddamned phoney he could not imagine.

“Really,” George said.

“Yes, she’s a documentarian. She loved the idea of Midnite Moving Co. so much she said she’d do a free mini-documentary and we could use as stealth promo.”

“You never said anything about this.”

“I guess it was a mis-communication on my part,” Jesse said.

“Jesse must not tell lies,” George third-personned him, deadpan. With more emphasis, “Did she annoy you? You know you smell different when you lie.”

This brought out the toddler smile, his eyes almost closed, his mouth compressed. “It’s like having god in your pocket, a friend you can’t fool,” Jesse said.  There were things about George that were uncanny and inconvenient, but not being obliged to lie to him always felt good.

“For me to be able to tell that you’re lying I have to both know you and share your space; God is apparently not disadvantaged that way,” George said.

George diverted himself from his reverie. It was taking a very long time to unload the passengers.  The Sixers had worked like oxen at a mill, trying to get all the shelter and firemaking apparatus offloaded and set up the day before, while Sparrow rode at anchor just offshore. Michel and Kima had bickered all the way through the work in a fashion that would have heartened him if he’d had a thought to spare.