Midnite Moving Co

“Indoors sucks,” Michel said. “I’m more like your dad that way.”

“What’s his dad like?” Jesse asked curiously.

“I’m right here.”

Jesse looked at George as they walked along.  Michel made a goofy face, and George said, “You know I can see you.”

“Do you have eyes in the back of your head?” Jesse asked.  It had always bothered him, how aware George was — while pretending not to be.

“And the top of his head, and the soles of his feet, and the tips of his fingers. Mind you he got no head, no feet and no fingers, but he doesn’t let that stop him,” Michel said.

“You are a mixer,” George said quellingly.

“Are you — are you a shapeshifter?” Jesse asked in horror.

George’s “No!” cut across Michel’s knowing laugh.

“We’re a separate species from humans, not a magical variant of them,” George said. “There’s nothing magical about us at all.”

“Bullshit,” Jesse said.

“He’s telling the truth,” Michel said, nodding soberly.

“If you’re not human, and you’re not supernatural — or what, I guess ‘folkloric’? — what are you?” Jesse said.  “Are you defrocked gods or something?”

George shook his head.  Michel was smiling again.

“Nope,” George said, making it two syllables. “We’re born, we live, we die, just like every other critter on this planet.”

The bottom dropped out of Jesse’s stomach. There was an explanation that readily covered George and Michel’s oddity, but he hadn’t thought of it until George said ‘planet’.

“Feeling okay?” Michel murmured.

Jesse started to feel that an invitation to crash at George’s place might come at a high cost to his mental health. He took a deep breath, expelled it noisily and said, “What is it that you are seeing, when you can tell I’m upset about something?”

“Blood flow,” George said.

“How do you see it?”

“Colour and heat,” George said. “That, and posture.”

“But you can’t read my mind.”

“We know where the blood’s going,” Michel said.

“Refinements in medical imaging have made it easier to guess what’s going on. We’ve had years of observation, but it’s always good to have them confirmed by science. Yes, we know you’re upset.  We can also guess why.”

“You have arrived at your destination,” Michel said. With smooth efficiency, he entered the variety store, and picked out six items: milk, Cheerios, instant coffee, toilet paper, hand soap and a two bags of corn chips.

George and Jesse waited outside.

“Why don’t you eat?” Jesse asked suddenly.

George took the question with urbane calm, and replied, “I don’t have to. If it makes you feel any better, Michel eats a lot.”

“Everybody has to eat,” Jesse said.  “You’re fucking with basic physics if you don’t eat, and heading back into supernatural territory.”

“I have vestigial hunger, but I’m not going to talk about it until I’m home, and maybe not then.  I’ve been good-tempered about your questions, but they are tiresome and unwelcome. Could we please change the subject?”

Michel exited the store and handed Jesse the bags.

“What do I owe you?” Jesse said, reaching for his wallet.

Michel shook his head. “Just make sure you drink all the milk. If it goes bad in the fridge it may be weeks before George does anything about it.”

“Can’t you smell it?” Jesse asked.

“Yeah, but he don’t care,” Michel said. “And you heard him, enough with the third degree.”

Jesse’s phone alarm for dawn went off with a croaking sound.

Michel hadn’t heard it before, and looked questioningly at him.

“Gotta get indoors,” Jesse said.

“It’s not far, maybe ten minutes.”

“We could go faster,” Michel said, and Jesse, sensing that he might be the victim of a practical joke, tensed a little.

“Nonsense.  We have plenty of time, and Jesse has the mask in his backpack,” George replied.

George lived in a condo rental in a modest (there was no concierge) twelve storey building.

It was as spartan as George had hinted. There was a very strange looking bed, a sofa, a lamp, a TV and a remote. There was literally nothing else, no kitchen table, no chairs.

“Shit,” Michel said. “Should I have gotten cutlery?”

“I have one of each in the kitchen.”

“I carry utensils and a coffee cup,” Jesse said. He went straight to the kitchen to put away the milk, and opened the fridge door.

It was empty.

There wasn’t even ice in the trays, or a lonely box of baking soda.

After a very long pause, enlivened by Michel rolling his eyes and shooting out his lower lip, Jesse said, “Has there ever been anything in this fridge?”

“Raw tuna, beer, raw salmon, sushi and Chinese takeout,” George said.

“Who was the beer for?” Michel asked.

“The phone guy.”

“Ah,” Michel said.

“Who’s the phone guy?” Jesse asked.

“For the love of fair play and good manners, can we please cease to use interrogation as a discursive technique?”

“Fine,” Jesse said. He walked out of the kitchen, closed the living room curtains, which he was unsurprised to see were perfectly opaque, and sat down on the couch. “Pillows? Blankets?” he asked. “Or is that too interrogatory for you?”

Michel fetched them from a cupboard. Jesse made up his bed and got his earplugs and sleeping mask out, and without further comment stripped off to his briefs and sealed his disgusting clothes in a camping bag.

George got into the bed, which appeared to have a rolling wooden top, said, “Good night,” and closed it.

“You should get one of those,” Michel said.

“Nah,” Jesse said. It was a handsome piece of furniture, for a roll-top coffin. “I can’t sleep in a confined space; believe me, I’ve tried.”

Michel put his hand on the balcony door handle. “I’m off to the roof. It’s not a bad balcony but it’s got too much of an overhang, and I like to feel the wind in my hairs.”

“How are you getting to the roof?” Jesse said in alarm.

“Climbing, of course,” said Michel. He vanished. The door closed.

Jesse lay back in the sleeping nest he had constructed. He put on his sleeping mask and carefully screwed up his foam earplugs and stuck them in his ears. He sighed.

Let’s recap, Jesse thought.

George and Michel are members of the same species, presenting as male humans. But are they really? They talk about a mate, or Kima, and refer to her as she, and themselves as male. Can I assume from this that whatever they are, they experience gender sort of like we do? Of course God help them if they do, because the way we experience gender is often extremely fucked up.

It annoyed him that there wasn’t enough evidence. People can say anything about themselves, and often do.  But Jesse had always thought, even if he couldn’t prove it, George told the truth unless he had a good reason. But he had no idea what that reason could be.

Why did George say ‘planet’ when he could have said ‘Earth’? But they both say they were born in Europe.

He’d confirmed that with Michel, while he was working with him, away from George.  But it was a weird piece of hearsay: “We were both born in Europa, him on land and me in water.”

He contemplated that for a minute, but realized that humans also have water-births, although it isn’t common, and decided not to worry about that part.

Both of them can vanish.  Are they moving out of my view or just disappearing, or are they somehow editing the light my eyes and brain turn into my perceptions? Is it a species-wide characteristic?

He wanted to start putting his questions into a notebook, except that he’d be viewed as a lunatic if somebody else read it.  He imagined laboriously writing in his childlike handwriting, “Ask Michel and George separately if Kima can vanish.” And then finding Raven looking at it, with one eyebrow going up like a wing.

Michel thinks Kima is real. So maybe — she is real. Michel certainly seems real.

I should start thinking of the questions I’ll ask her if I ever meet her.

“Hey Kima how does it feel to be referred to as a mate?”

Maybe that’s what she wants.

If she’s not a girl, she can’t be a girlfriend.

Michel was born in water.

George said, “If you feel like swimming.”

Kima lives in water? Or across a stretch of water?

He reviewed every weird or inexplicable thing he’d ever seen George do.  After almost six months, it was a sizeable list.

He can move impossibly fast and carry very heavy loads.

He always sighs and laughs and barks exactly the same way, like he doesn’t have a voice so much as a … playback button. He never yawns, or makes breathing noises, and he never farts.

That just ain’t right.

But if he doesn’t eat, why would he need to fart?

That still ain’t right.  Anything that eats, excretes. How can his appetite be ‘vestigial’? Does he eat but he’s in denial about it, like one of those wacky New Age folks who think they can live on air but their friends sneak them food?

You can’t sneak up on him.

He speaks medieval Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, English, a little bit of German and some other language that isn’t human. But if they have their own language why would they learn human languages? And if it isn’t a human language, what the hell is it and where did it come from?

Raven would say I’m going down a rathole.

He won’t say how old he is but talks about World War II as if he lived through it.

I need to find more ways to ask him about his family that aren’t like me grilling him.

Why did George pick me to work with?

That was really the heart of Jesse’s misgivings. He could not help but think that George had been very careful to select him, but could not understand the why of it.

__________

George arose after almost exactly four hours and walked over to look down at Jesse sleeping. Most of his kind are invisible when asleep; George had trained himself decades previously to look human while he slept, which no-one else had ever bothered with.  Michel and Kima disappeared when they were asleep, just like normal people.

He thought of going to the roof to see Michel, and then decided to wait.  Michel would come down soon enough, desperate to find out where Kima was. George tried to picture that reunion, but he already knew that Kima preferred Michel as a sexual partner, even if neither of them had managed to get her pregnant.

He smiled at Jesse, thinking that this man could have sex a couple of times with a woman and knock her up without even trying; the notion that George had been trying to become a father for forty years would confuse him, if he didn’t find it outright ludicrous. Or he’d tell him to go see a doctor, which was an occupation unknown to a species which could live for five centuries and had remarkably few ailments. The closest thing to a doctor he knew was his incredible busy-body of a grandmother, with her pretensions to being an expert on reproduction — when her own water brood had died. It was not a stellar record. Zosime had only managed one living child, and Psyche had only managed to give birth to George.

Humans, with their easy, casual, domestic animal rates of increase, filled him with gloom illuminated with overt envy.

He went out to the balcony, blocking all the light from the door as he exited, to be kind to Jesse, and moments later, Michel swung over the top of the overhang to stand next to him.  They spoke quietly, in English, in case Jesse awoke and was irritated they were leaving him out of the conversation.

“Today?”

“Today. You don’t have to come tonight, we’re not going to be moving that much, so we’re taking Morag’s truck.”

“What’s happening tonight?”

“The ex-wife wants all her photographs and memorabilia out of there.”

Michel chuckled.  “Out of that mess? Good luck. I’ll be doing something much more fun.”

“You hope! I know what a photograph smells like, even in that midden-come-charnel-house.  I’ll find them soon enough.” He looked over Coal Harbour, toward Stanley Park, and said, “I’m really glad you’re in town.”

“Lonely, are you?” Michel said. He sounded sarcastic, but George knew better. For Michel it was much the same. Few of their kind had any use for humans, whether they were forced to interact with them or not. George living as a human among them was bad; Michel doing it was worse, since it was general knowledge that George was a sadly irrational fool, but Michel was accounted to be more sensible, even though he was the current ranking expert at living human.

“Do you feel like running across town to the boat? I left a note for Jesse, and a key; he can let himself out.”

“You’re trusting.”

“And so are you!” They linked for a second, until Michel had it clear in his mind where they were going.

They ducked below the sightline of the balcony railing, disappeared and flung themselves over the side to surf down the row of balconies.  Michel did pratfalls all the way down, spectral bounces and stretches, only visible in their sideband vision, more than once banging into his cousin, who was expecting it and appeared to give no sign of noticing. George proceeded to the ground with speed and efficiency, but no style. 

Then they ran, flat out across town, invisible parkour maniacs who could lope along at thirty kph. Across yards, climbing buildings, dodging Skytrains, scaring the shit out of unwary dogs as they came through, all noise and no scent or sight, accidentally putting a tiny ding in a bus fender, knocking cell phones into the passenger footwell if the driver left a window open, and otherwise being giddy assholes.

“Hold up, hold up,” George said, pausing at a cop car and relieving it of a couple of zap straps.

He did not put it in a pocket, because he had none.  The hole that opened in the side of his body swallowed the zap straps, and then closed. It could not be said to have vanished, because it could not be seen, at least if George had had the sense to stand still while he was making a hole.

“Tell me again about the guy with the gun,” Michel said. They had switched back to Greek.  He dearly loved firearms, and George had promised time at a private range, where he would not be required to show ID, which he appreciated.

“What’s to tell?” George said.  “I told you once, has your memory failed since the last time we spoke?”

“I like the human way of singing the song more than once,” Michel said, unapologetic.  That was the deal.  He didn’t have to apologize for liking something human around George.

“Do you want me to do a cool jazz version of it this time?”

“No, more like John Woo, total fuckin’ chaos.”

“To be candid, every time I think of Jesse’s face as he got the gun shoved at him, it’s hard for me to bring myself to sing the song again, as it has quite unpleasant echoes for me.”

“I’ll ask Jesse.”

“He may be more forthcoming with you. He seems to like you already.”

“I think Jesse would like any man who didn’t try to hurt him,” Michel said.

“More fool him,” George said.

“Is Kima expecting me?” Michel said.  He would get increasingly single-minded as they approached the shore.

“I gave you her number. You didn’t text her?”

“I expected you’d tell her.”

George said, “This is awkward. Pull over, we’d better link.”

In the language of light, things made even less sense. Linking had always been painful with anyone except Michel and his mother. In his surprise he spoke aloud. “Nonsense!”

Michel dropped the link. “It’s true. I am scared of her.”

“Of course you’re scared of her, you’d be an idiot not to show her some respect.”

“Respect is not at all what I want to show her,” Michel said.

“You’d better not take that mood with you or you’re going to get your ass poked through your nose and tied in a knot.”

“That’s just a story,” Michel said.

“It’s a very good story.  Father says it’s true,” George said.

“That fucker barely registers gravity. The truth? I doubt it gets close enough to rub off on him,” Michel said, but there was no heat in his voice.  Laelaps, George’s father, was generally considered the second craziest individual to ever roam the planet.  Excluding humans of course, but they were very sociable about committing war and murder and theft and rape, and George’s people were not.

Laelaps’ crime had been against himself, and it had rendered him even more solitary, hiding far from the usual tracks and haunts. He no longer checked in with Hermes, everyone’s go-between, although Michel had hunted him down on his last visit home and hung out with him. To no purpose, of course. Laelaps had been impenetrable when his link worked, and now it was gone, he was a blob on a hillside, indistinguishable from the scenery, occasionally gesturing or lighting up. Sometimes they’d wrestle to stave off boredom.

“I never got the impression he was all that crazy,” George said.  “It was less than six months, the time I lived with him, but it was long enough to learn a lot more about him in his own words, to counter everything Psyche had said. He just seemed sad and always preoccupied, as if his thoughts could not be set aside for other activities.”

“I suppose,” Michel said.  He texted Kima.

“It’s a little late now,” George said, with irritation.  “She only surfaces twice a day to pick up her messages.”

“What?” Michel said.

“Deep water and cell phone coverage don’t mix.  If she’s not right at the surface, she might as well be on the moon.”

“Shit,” Michel said.

He thrashed around for a while. George stood out of the way, as was polite.

“I will be giving her a surprise,” Michel said, knowing this was a bad thing.

“I’m pretty sure she wants to see you.”

“I should warn her.”

“It’s not traditional.  She likes it traditional,” George said.  It was true, as far as it went, but he’d still get a scolding for not warning her.

“I have to see her,” Michel said dreamily, “Even if she thumps me the whole time.”

“That seems unlikely.”

They slowed to a more sedate pace.

It was a beautiful fall day, perfect for a boat ride. They found an inconspicuous place at the marina to reappear, and walked down the ramp. The boat was a 24 foot Sea Ray, adequate for a jaunt out into the Salish Sea on a sunny day. The boat captain was a First Nations man who greeted George by name and smiled at Michel. “Good morning,” he said. George introduced him as Sparrow.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” George said.

Michel linked with him, giving him a blast of shit for giving Kima’s location to a human. He’d been under the impression that they were going to hitch a ride on a boat, not be accompanied there by a nosy bonebag.

Aloud, George said, “My cousin is unhappy that you know the coordinates.”

“It’s only for today,” the man said, puzzled. “She doesn’t stay in the same place.”

“You know Kima?” Michel said, astonished.

“That’s one of her names,” the man said, frowning a little. “You have more than one name too, don’t you?”

Michel for once couldn’t speak, and ponderously moved his slate grey glare in George’s direction.

“Michel, I know who you are,” Sparrow said, with a calm that suggested coaching. “George, you shouldn’t tease him.” George said nothing, and Michel knew George was doing exactly that.

“What do you think is happening right now?” Michel said, slowly and carefully.

“You’re going to meet with Kima for a few hours, and then I drop you back wherever you want,” Sparrow said.

“Like I said,” George said.  “Have fun, play safe, all good wishes,” he added.

Michel called him a number of choice things in Greek, something unforgivable in Hungarian, and capped it with a biological slur in Romanian, but in a tone suggesting that everything was perfect and that he couldn’t be happier.

“Same to you, you miserable worm,” George said in Greek with a smile in his voice, and turned away with a wave.

Sparrow was under contract to George to provide him and certain associates with access to Kima. Michel, making conversation, learned that he was not the only human who knew about Kima, and that he had seen her dance on shore.

“What the fuck?” Michel said.

“George told you nothing about our arrangement? That doesn’t seem like him.”

“Oh no,” Michel said, his voice filling with gravel. “It seems as like him as anything I can think about.”

“George says you think you and he are competing for Kima,” Sparrow said.

Michel kept his temper, since there seemed to be more coming.

“But he said that she’s not a prize to be won.”

“No,” Michel said, looking ahead. “Kima and George have an agreement. Kima and me don’t.”

It took about an hour to get there. When they arrived at the coordinates, Michel thanked Sparrow and apologized for his harsh tone. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you,” he said.

“I’ll take you up on that someday,” Sparrow said, and watched as Michel went over the side and vanished beneath the waves.  He drew off to a more sheltered place, set a few fishing lines, and kept a watchful eye on the spot where he had last seen Michel.

Life in Vancouver was not the same after Michel arrived. He had no problem going to bars and listening to loud music. George had better things to be doing.

Michel didn’t drink alcohol — “It got no effect on me, at all,” he said — so if Jesse had a few, he’d look out for him on the Vomit Comet, the night bus that conveyed him back to Burnaby (Jesse had moved, but only one street over), and keep the pickpockets and jackasses away if he started to ‘nap’. Knowing he was with a person of considerable strength, skill and speed was sometimes enough to make Jesse giddy, no alcohol required.

Michel’s favourite watering hole trick was to wait until closing time, figure out which of Vancouver’s world-class supply of entitled young douche-nozzles was drugging the drinks of their marks, and tie him into diverse shapes in the parking lot, after surreptitiously punching out all the security cameras. Sometimes he just covered those prying eyes in gum, it being useful and pretty much lying around everywhere downtown. Threats were usually all it took to deal with jackasses, since Jesse was big and Michel was a small town in Saskatchewan¹, but there were always the nights when Michel allowed things to get lively.

After, he told Jesse he’d smelled the gun a mile against the wind.  It had been recently fired, within the last day, anyway, so Michel knew he was dealing with, at minimum, a hobbyist who probably wasn’t a bad shot, and at worst, a wise guy, who lived to achieve oneness with his gun.  Michel knew and loved wise guys from his early days in Montréal. The prospect of being shot at didn’t bother him, and he thought he’d take special pains to ensure Jesse didn’t eat a stray round, that being at least a possibility. Jesse, having survived, allowed himself to be amused.

Michel had caught a young man drugging a woman at closing time. His comments on the young man’s technique had led to a shoving match which Michel cheerfully took outside, with Jesse keeping Michel between him and the amateur druggist and his chums.

“So you’re telling me one of three things,” Michel said, punting each syllable across a chasm of disbelief, “You think you’re too ugly to pick up girls without drugs, you know you’re too ugly to pick up girls without drugs, or you just plain like girls who don’t move and can’t complain about what a sorry excuse for a penis you have.”

“You don’t get to say shit like that to me,” the young man said, with complete contempt. He pulled a gun from the rear of his waistband and shot Michel once.

Jesse yelled, and ducked behind a car. Michel’s voice, apparently in his ear, said, “Don’t worry, I’ll deal with the gun. Stay put.” Jesse couldn’t help himself and peered around the vehicle.  He could see three men, but only one with a gun.

The young man approached again and shot Michel, who had fallen over backward, twice more at point blank range.

“Well, you shot me, but you didn’t manage to kill me,” Michel said, conversationally. He got up. He was neither bleeding, nor gasping, nor anything really, except moving toward the gun as implacably as a golem. “Jeez, if you’re shooting at me, shouldn’t I at least know your name?”

Jesse yelled, “Don’t tell him, he’s got a really good memory!”

Michel said, “Now what the fuck would you say that for?”

The young man, eyes glaring and face stark with rage and disappointment, fired twice more.  Michel appeared to skid along on the ground on his ass, rotating slightly with each shot. The gunman’s two buddies, coming forward, murmured to each other.

“I dunno, dramatic effect?” Jesse yelled.

“You’re enjoying this too much.”

“You said you’d get rid of the gun,” Jesse yelled.

The young man emptied his clip, another seven bullets.

It was as if the gun hadn’t spoken with its deafening, soul-shattering voice.

“Oh yeah,” Michel said.  “That’s right.”

The gun disappeared from the shooter’s hand and reappeared in Michel’s.  Michel, apparently having been shot 12 times to no effect, pistol-whipped his assailant once and then tripped his buddies as they approached to help their friend. 

Michel said, as he stood over them, “Because you came forward to help this asshole” — here he toed his unconscious form with dainty disgust — “I’ll give you the chance to run away now.  By god if I catch you drugging girls or helping to haul them home, you’ll get drugged and wake up in a Saudi jail. Or maybe an Indonesian one, depending. You fucking understand me? Try to have fun without hurting women. It is possible, you know.” He then hauled them to their feet as if they were puppies, patted them both hard on the ass and they bolted. “Don’t forget to call 911 for your friend!” Michel called after them.

Jesse had reached for his phone.

Michel said, tucking a hand into Jesse’s belt to pull him along, away from the scene, “Don’t bother. If you call the cops you’ll be tying yourself to me in a police report and while I have very little respect for cops George does not share my opinion.”

“He could die,” Jesse said.

“I don’t think so.  It’s just a little depressed skull fracture over a part of his brain he doesn’t seem to be using, it’ll slow him down for a week maybe.  Let’s rewind! He shot me twelve times! Well, if you’re gonna get technical he shot me ten times and I had to stand in front of the strays to catch ’em so they didn’t hit somebody’s car.”

Or me.

This triggered Jesse’s interest in forensics. “Hey wait a minute,” Jesse said, turning to look one last time at the scene.  “Where’d all the shell casings go?”

Michel gave an exaggerated shrug.  For about half a second, he looked like a tall and infamous professional magician, and then, smiling at Jesse’s startled reaction, he theatrically spat out a shell casing.

“Jesus!” Jesse said.

Still smiling, Michel continued to spit. Eventually his left hand held all the shell casings, and his right hand held all the bullets, which had been flattened, as if they’d hit a wall.

“What in the ever loving fuck are you made out of?” Jesse breathed.

Again, that shrug.

“I don’t know,” Michel said.  “But George is made out of the same stuff, except for his hair, and he wants to find out what it is.”

“Why would any creature evolve naturally to be able to resist being shot at point-blank range?” Jesse asked, his brain ringing along with his ears.

“You think evolution did this?” Michel said, tapping himself all over.  He tapped his hand, and Jesse heard a cartoon bouncing noise.  Then he tapped his chest, making a great, hollow, metallic noise. Then he tapped his head, and it sounded like a tree being struck with a baseball bat.

“I can sound like anything too.”

“You can do anything,” Jesse said. It was hard not to sound envious.

“I can’t seem to make babies with Kima,” Michel said. The tone wavered between resentment and acceptance.  “It may be too much to ask, her commitment to George being how it is.”

“I wish I could meet her,” Jesse said. Then he said, as he started to tremble, “I really hate getting shot at.”

¹ Biggar