Tag: Midnite Moving Co

The only way I can confirm this story is by asking Michel. Or Kima. George is manipulating my natural curiosity.

Aloud, he said, “I notice you’re not keen on promises, so I don’t know how to put this.”

“You’re going to have to put it some way, if it’s about Michel,” George said.

Jesse thought it should be pretty obvious, but said it aloud anyway. “I want some assurance you, your hair or Michel won’t wake up some day, decide I’m an asshole, and kill me.”

George resumed his human appearance. Jesse’s relief was thorough enough to make him sag.

“I know looking at me’s a strain,” George said.  “You handled it very well, as well as my hair mauling you, and there’s no reason for me not to look human, now you know the truth. No! I’m not changing the subject.” He had, in his set of expressions, a close-eyed smile with a wolfish glint. “Michel won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you. You’re the fifth human being I’ve ever talked my hair into accepting, and I didn’t have to try too hard. It even told me when it decided to like you.”

“I wish I knew whether you were even telling the truth,” Jesse said.

“You guessed I was saying something rude when I lit up. If you can read me that well, and you’re kindly disposed, how can you be anything but my friend? Why wouldn’t I speak the truth to a friend?”

Thanks, chuckles, but I really don’t think I can read you that well. My guesses are getting luckier.

George continued, “I’ll tell you when it happened. My hair started its one-sided interspecies bromance with you the night you closed the tailgate and started the truck, during the British Properties move. One of the hairs was keeping an eye on you while I was indoors.”

“On your orders?” And how long can those little suckers get?

“I was quite preoccupied at the time; it kinda snuck out while I wasn’t looking. Caregiving behaviour is not common among my species. I thought it was cute, and it worked out well for me,” George said.

“Oh my god,” Jesse said. “You just never can tell what your hair is thinking! I know I have the same problem.” He grabbed a chunk of hair, pulled it down over his nose, and blew it away.

Jesse was growing it out again, mostly because it pissed Raven off. The only other people whose opinions mattered were too discreet to comment on his appearance, except to make practical or complimentary remarks.

He also hated wigs, and wanted it long for a decent Scythian warrior ensemble, which Raven had promised a fabricator hookup for.

“To recap,” George said.

“Does this mean you’re leaving soon?” Jesse asked hopefully.

“Tired of me, are you?”

“Exhausted. I used to be a tube made out of pain, but now I’m just one of — how many people is it exactly? — who know about this.” He took a quick breath and said, “I don’t expect an answer. I’m also happy you quit lying to me about one thing, and sad because all of a sudden what seemed like the truth appears to branch into whole new kinds of lying.”

“Could you call it ‘prudently concealing the truth for strategic purposes’ and ‘prevaricating’ instead? I don’t have the energy to lie to you. It’s far, far easier not to. I have to lie, and I do lie, but if I have an option not to, I don’t.”

Jesse felt a memory percolate to the surface.

“You told the client you could smell blood.”

George sighed, and made what Jesse secretly called his ‘Kermit face’. “I did, didn’t I. Wish I could have stopped myself.  I can smell it a long way off, if I’m expecting it.”

He suddenly stopped looking perplexed and seemed angry. “Just so we’re clear, I’m only going to say this to you once, and I’m not going to talk about it again, and I don’t want you to talk about it.”

“What painful revelations await our poor misguided young hero?” Jesse said, in a creditable imitation of Sideshow Bob. He was still happy he wasn’t looking at George the monster any more.

“Shut up, shut up! This is awkward and unpleasant for me, so give it a fucking rest,” George had sworn twice in one day, a new record. Grimly, he said, “I love the smell of human blood.  Although I don’t need to eat, every month to six months I get a tremendous craving and I ingest some.”

“Oh, hell no,” Jesse said.

“I’m not going to ask you for a tablespoon of blood just because I feel like a snack,” George said, frowning.

“That’s no way to make me feel better. I know you could yoink a tubeful faster than I can move,” Jesse said.

“But I won’t.  It’s all perfectly safe, legal and consensual, and it’ll never be connected to you,” George said. “I know how you feel about not giving consent, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who I am a lot earlier.”

“When’s the day.”

“Don’t ask.”

“When’s the day.”

“Not for years.”

“Seriously?” Jesse asked, disbelief overriding his good sense.

George lost it.

“As far as I can tell, your brain is functioning normally, and yet you say the most ill-advised, inutile things. I’m trying to bring a city to its knees, and then stand it up again, facing a different direction.  Nothing like this has ever been tried in human history, and I’m doing it on my own. You can mock me all you like, but my only meaningful goal in all this is that there be not a single casualty, not one, in the first seven days after the announcement.  If I can prevent a mass panic and evacuation event, keep major services including emergency and hospitals running, and not have Vancouver implode into a world-class dumpster fire of riotous hooliganism, then phase one of me coming out as an alien, including the rapid rollout of Michel and Kima, will be at an end.”

George stuck a finger, which Jesse knew was no finger, in his face.

“You have no idea the amount of coordination and planning will go into this. I could stroll down Granville tomorrow and announce my presence, but what would happen to the two police officers closest to me? Would they be killed in the crush? What would happen to the EMTs? How many people would be killed in accidents and road rage incidents as they flee town? What will happen at the airport, the train stations, the bus stations? What happens when the army’s called in and tanks roll up and down the Burrard Street bridge? What happens when the local phone system crashes and the internet slows down and the transportation authorities panic and cancel all the buses and shut down the Skytrain and you can’t get through to 911 to get your sister to the hospital and the entire city is gridlocked and the looting starts?”

Jesse shrugged. It all sounded a little over the top.

“Yeah, shrug all you want. The only way this works is if I keep the city safe; world leaders will see that I’m being responsible, and a city that’s already used to the world showing up and then leaving three weeks later will at least survive intact.”

“I don’t think it will be that bad.”

George was silent.

“It’s a good thing you’re not on the planning committee, then,” George said tightly. “I’ll leave you to your cup of tea. Call you in a couple of days,” he said, and left.

Jesse made himself herbal tea and went back to bed.

“I’m sorry, I can’t imagine what you mean,” George said blandly.

“I’ve just spent a day with my guts on the puke’n’poop seesaw. It’s pretty obvious it was Michel’s fault. Unless he confesses, I’ll never know for sure. What the fuck makes you think I’d want to work with Michel?” Jesse said, his patient tone fraying toward the end.

“Nothing. But Michel, who will probably admit it if you ask, is going to view it as you failing a test. You were tested to see if you’re really as tolerant a stand-up guy as you seem to think you are, and I’m being tested on my management skills for joint Sixer-human projects.”

All of the bitterness Jesse felt for having been used formed itself into a conversational spearpoint. “What am I bid?” he said.

“Fuck you,” George said, with completely unexpected heat. His hair rippled.

“What?”

“I said, a most hearty and convinced ‘Fuck you!’” George said, “And I’ve got plenty of reasons to say it.”

“Oh, really? You admitted you’ve put my life in danger every time I’ve been with you. Somehow that does not give me the right to some little consideration, maybe compensation.”

“For the physical work you do, you are compensated. For the secrets I hope you keep, you will be compensated. For you telling me that we can solve our trust issues with money, I think ‘Fuck you’ covers it.  You’ve never been motivated by money.  Money merely represents autonomy, the freedom to choose what you do next, the freedom to live your life within your health constraints as pleasantly as you can.”

Jesse, breathing a little hard, said, “Please feel free to tell me what you have to offer beside money.”

George started to jiggle all over. Under different circumstances, Jesse might have laughed. As if sensing this, George stopped, and then extended a tentacle and rested it, like cold, somehow fizzy, plastic, on his hand.

“Friendship,” he said.

Jesse didn’t flinch.

“Let me touch your hair,” he said.

George’s hair slowly gathered itself and then slowly extended itself so that it rippled above Jesse’s hand. Jesse reached out and touched it.

“Don’t touch the ends. They’re sharp as hell,” George said.

It felt smoother than anything Jesse had ever felt. Slowly, it roughened until it felt like burlap, and then like the surface of a brick. He pushed a finger into it; it pushed back.

“Is it computational?” Jesse said. He tried to imagine any brain or computer being able to run something so sophisticated, and then curiosity ran on ahead. “And how long does it get?”

A section of the hair gently but snugly wrapped around Jesse’s body. Four more sections wrapped around his arms and legs. It lifted him into the air, until he was staring straight down at George.  The springs in the sofa underneath George made protesting noises.

“I’m really sorry it’s fondling you like this,” George said.

“Why? This’ll be an awesome story for my memoirs,” Jesse said, trying to maintain the steady demeanour George seemed to like him for.  The hair re-oriented him so that he was coasting around the room. It was painless and almost pleasant, and he knew for a fact that freaking out or thrashing was a really bad idea.

“My hair is not a bad sort, but it’s —“ and here George paused.

“‘Of diminished moral capacity’ should cover it,” Jesse said, from a corner of the ceiling.  His voice sounded weird to himself.

“‘Inconsistently understood and applied moral capacity and extremely variable responses to perceived threats’ is more like it. I’m ecstatic you’re taking this so well. I’ve asked it to set you down gently, and it’s thinking about it.”

The hair, responding to George’s request, set Jesse back in his chair, and returned to home position.

“Remarkable,” George said. “My hair has freely promised never to injure you.”

“You can talk to your hair.”

“To a certain inconsistent and limited extent, yes. You have no idea what a relief it is.  When I completely let go and let the hair do whatever it wants, I have no clue what will happen next.  Sometimes it makes art. Sometimes it goes completely limp. Sometimes it stabs me repeatedly, and since it’s the only thing that can stab me it’s really not nice to have it on my head all the time. Sometimes it supersonically kills every flying insect within ten metres.”

“Hair that breaks the sound barrier — no gel on earth can restrain it,” Jesse said, theatrically. More seriously, he added, “Did your hair say why it likes me?”

“Because I do,” George said simply. “Now, do you really want to talk about money, or would you rather talk about perks?”

“Do I have to work with Michel?”

There was a long pause.

“I’m afraid of what Michel will get up to if you don’t. He likes the work, because it solidifies his defiance of Sixer norms, and makes him a hero to most humans who learn of it. Never underestimate Michel’s desire to be viewed as a devil may care hero.”

“That makes me wonder how you want to be seen.”

“As a protector of humanity,” George said.

“Oh, shit,” Jesse said, and fear sharpened his voice. “Sounds like we’ve got incoming alien troop ships.”

“Not that I’m aware,” George said, tartly. “I was thinking along the lines of big hunks of rock flying at Earth from the sunward side.”

“Rocks.”

“Space rocks. Planet smashing ones, which we haven’t seen yet. The Chelyabinsk event is pressing on my mind.”

“So, no spaceships materializing over Washington.”

“I have reason to believe that if my species ever had spaceships, they have cloaking technology and you would not see them on radar or with the naked eye. And if they haven’t shown up in eight millennia, which is how long we’ve been here, I’m betting they aren’t coming now.”

Jesse sat with this information for a while.

“Promise me you’re not lying.”

“I’m not.  Ask any Sixer about it.  They’ll all have opinions about the facts, but the facts will be more or less consistent. You know, Jesse, I’ll think more of you if you don’t ask me to promise that aliens aren’t coming. For all I know, a different species altogether wants to steal your junk food and toy with your women while threatening planetary extinction.”

You’re such a comfort, George.

Jesse found the hair the creepiest thing about George, so he stopped looking at it. Inspected more closely, George was splashed with freckles, which were not so much coloured as variably reflective. George, noticing (with what?) that he was looking at the freckles, lit them up.  George, puckishly, was lighting up the preliminary flash to request sexual access, which Jesse had no way of knowing.

Jesse was flippant. “You’re going to have to kiss me first,” he responded. George’s hair turned into a pompadour, pointed directly at Jesse’s face.

“Wow!” Jesse said. “Is your hair a watchdog? What did I say to get its attention?”

“You read the light flash correctly.  My hair takes exception to humans doing that.”

“So your hair’s a security guard?”

“I have not actually figured out what my hair is for, why it behaves the way it does, and how I can control it. If it thinks I’m under threat it can be — skittish?”

The hair soundlessly relaxed into its usual fountain shape.

“What can it do?”

“It could kill someone.”

“You’ve been working with me for —“ and Jesse’s outrage was mixed with a weird kind of acceptance.

George was soothing.  Jesse didn’t like it when George was soothing. “And if you don’t want to work with me in future, so be it.”

Jesse screwed up his face and nodded slowly. “Right.  So you’re going to fire me and work with Michel, but when you need your reference I’m supposed to cough it up like a good stooge.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” George said. “Why would you think I’d fire you? To have a human friend, who can provide cover for me while I perfect my tedious and safety-oriented plans? That would be the best possible outcome of this conversation.”

“You want me to keep working with you,” Jesse said.

“Well, no,” George said reluctantly. He didn’t know what to say and let Jesse work it out.

“You want me to work with Michel!?” Jesse squeaked. Full realization came. “And you told him first — and he fucking poisoned me! Thinking it would drive me off.”

“Thinking it was the lioness cuffing her cub at the commencement of a lesson,” George said. “We’re apex predators, and we’re not fantastically social. It was a warning that we’re showing a pleasant and constructive side, and we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you that others of our kind will be infuriated and possibly quite anti-social when they get wind of our plans.”

Jesse felt a cold blossom of fear in his vitals. “Somebody as strong as you and Michel could decide to take it out on me?”

“We’re not supposed to kill humans.  It’s a long-standing tradition.”

“I suppose you don’t kill each other.”

“Oh yes, sometimes.  By the numbers we’re more violent than humans, but if you examine what’s really happening, it appears that one of the more unpleasant members of my species is selectively killing males to improve his breeding odds.”

“Yuck,” said Jesse. “So he’s a serial killer.”

“I think so. I can’t prove it. I won’t visit him to find out.”

“You know where he lives?”

“Everyone does.”

“I don’t suppose your people have cops.” Jesse wasn’t hopeful.

George shook his head, for lack of a better term. It was what his hair grew out of, so, close enough. “Nor judges, nor governments, nor laws that don’t take the form of custom and precept, nor lawyers, nor social workers, nor court appointed anger management counsellors, nor —“

“Getting the picture, thanks,” Jesse said. “You folks are full-on anarchists.”

“Solitary people who’ve lived without authority for a long time evolve beyond theoretical anarchism,” George said. “Each of us is a sovereign territory, with our own chosen customs and languages. We have vastly different agendas, and with our different body types, we often don’t live close to each other.”

“So the short version of your social organization is: if things fuck up, you just go somewhere else and who cares, ‘cause you’re solitary.”

“We still have to have enough social organization to schedule breeding opportunities,” George said.

“Sounds about right, although I don’t want to breed,” Jesse said blankly.

“You and Michel share an outcome. You won’t breed, and he can’t,” George said.

“Neither can you, he commented on it,” Jesse said, wanting with sudden desperation to push George away from his usual lofty calm.

“He did,” George said. After a pause, he twisted himself in his seat and his arms stopped looking like wavy mannequin arms and started looking more like tentacles. It was rather unnerving and Jesse said, quiet and fast, “Holy shit.”  George’s round belly and doughy legs stayed the same, which was both comforting and weird.  “I find it interesting that he thinks you would care about it.”

“Care how?” Jesse said.  It had always been a possibility that he’d be discussing an alien’s sex life when he got up this morning, especially after he’d admitted to himself that George was either an alien or a really persuasive hallucination. “I don’t care about it enough to think it’s my business, that’s for sure. I don’t know why you’re convinced that having offspring is a big deal, because it isn’t, except to the offspring.  If the offspring’s never born, the problems associated with being alive never happen.”

“Your comments are all very pleasantly nihilistic, but that is not our deal. Kima and I are on a schedule, and this is supposed to happen so we can get on with our lives, and it hasn’t happened yet, and we’re stuck.”

“Stuck? Do you love her?”

“More passionately than human language can encrypt,” George said. Jesse was tempted to laugh, but George seemed dead serious.

Jesse splayed his hands. “You sure are good at changing the subject. I had you in a corner there for a second, and you sprang loose like a dirty great kangaroo.”

“Where’d you find him?” Jesse asked slowly.

“I didn’t, he came recommended, and I can’t otherwise speak about him because of some elaborate promises I made.”

“You weren’t really born on Earth, were you,” Jesse said.

George grinned. “Oh yes, I was. That part I’m quite sure of.”

Jesse got up to boil water for tea.

“Are you angry with me?” George said.

“Would you care if I was?” Jesse asked softly.

“I respect you. I like you. I can tell you’re angry, but I can’t tell what is making you feel thwarted, or lower on the hierarchy, which is what usually makes humans mad. So I’m asking because I’m curious, and it will affect what I say next.”

Jesse, unlike most people, tried to think before he spoke.  George, unlike most people, gave him the space to think.

“No,” Jesse said. “I’m angry because I feel ignorant. I want to know more than you can tell me.”

“I’ve made a lot of promises. Some of them you’d approve of, and some of them would likely —“ and here he paused.

“Piss me off,” Jesse supplied.

“No doubt,” George said, his tone broadening into derision. “I’ll tell you what I can, when I can.”

“What role do I play in your plans?” Jesse said, lingering over each syllable.

“What, you think I’m going to tell the cabbie to pull over so I can eat you? This isn’t a Supernatural episode; I have real world problems.”

“It is a Supernatural episode.  You don’t eat.”

“I’m physiologically different from other … Sixers.”

Jesse took a deep breath and said, “Show me what you really look like, because I know you don’t look like —“ and he waved his hand, fingers splayed.

“You really did figure it out faster than anybody I ever met,” George said. “And you kept your mouth shut.  Smart and discreet don’t always go together. You can laugh if you want to, but you’re my coworker reference.”

“What?”

“I need to have a coworker, so I can prove I can behave appropriately, provide customer service, put other people’s needs ahead of my own, be useful, show compassion, entrepreneurial drive and all those behaviours which placate various people. Also, I was told to do it by one of the people I made a promise to.”

“I don’t know, George, it sounds like you’ve made a lot of promises.  Why not just take what you want?”

George laughed.  He said something, probably in Greek, that sounded like a song and a moan. Jesse raised his eyebrows.

“Because I can’t.  I can’t take what I want, even if I thought I was justified in so doing! I need human help to get what I want, and I can’t do it in secret, because as limp and meretricious as contemporary journalism is in most places, I cannot keep it secret. All I can do is make the day it’s no longer a secret one of my choosing.”

“You think I’ll keep your secret?”

“Yes. Let me ask you a question.  When did you guess?”

“Weeks ago,” Jesse said. “I wanted more evidence.”

“Wise, and able to put off immediate gratification. Unusual. As for our secrets, for you know of three of us now, I know you will keep them, unless we do something violent or truly barbaric. Have you told Raven?”

“No,” Jesse said heavily. “She thinks I have mental health issues already, and she’s right. She’d march up to you and demand proof, and I don’t think I wanted to see what you might do to keep her quiet. You announcing ‘We’re here!’ could start a nuclear war.”

“I won’t mock you. I know that’s true,” George said.

“As for barbaric, don’t you think infecting me with something is barbaric? Or was that Michel putting you on the spot and I was just the way he could do that?”

“He’s testing both of us. I am very sorry he chose to be such an ass about it.”

They looked at each other for a while.

“It would be best,” George said, “If you didn’t expect Michel to apologize.”

“I’m used to that,” Jesse said.

There was another long pause.

George pulled at his nose, or pretended to.  “I’m not human.”

“Are you hideously ugly?”

“Not to my mates,” George said, and stopped whatever internal processes allowed him to generate his appearance.

The white man in Edwardian garb disappeared, and a blob, roughly the shape of a human, sat in his place.

“Hoo boy,” said Jesse.

George was naked. There appeared to be nothing that could be called eyes, nose or face; no external genitalia, no nails, fingers or toes. His skin was mottled; some patches were grey, some beige, trending to pink, and some cream, trending to white. The patches moved, slowly and steadily, as if his surface was a sped up map of tectonic plates moving above and below each other.

The only thing that seemed human was his hair. It, too, was moving, and it did not rest on his skin, but stuck up and out like one of those optical fibre fountains you see in Chinese restaurants sometimes. It was dense, and dark, and it was hard to see what colour it really was.

Jesse woke up around ten, his eyes full of gravel and his mouth stuck shut with something akin to bat guano. He felt like an island of life assaulted by a sea of death, in this case the heaving, slimy bag that currently restrained his guts.

He just barely made it to the toilet, and was very putridly sick from both ends for what seemed an improbable span of time. He was just about to call 911 before he passed out, when the door rattled and Raven came in. “Hello this house,” she called.

“In here,” Jesse said, his voice cracking.

She saw him, slumped against the toilet, and said, instantly, “When’s the last time you drank anything?”

“Beer last night,” he admitted. His throat was on fire; he hardly had the strength to push air past his voice box.

“I wonder if I caught this from the dog shit,” Jesse mumbled.

“What were you doing with dog shit?” Raven asked, disgusted, but also unsure she’d heard him properly.

“What indeed?” he asked an uncaring universe, and flipped ends while Raven stepped away from the bathroom to ‘give you your privacy and get some liquids happening’.

Jesse wasn’t much of a cook. His downtrodden refusal to learn to cook, no matter what his mother said or did, was one of the ways he stayed autonomous, and Raven had gotten tired of hauling what she considered staples to his house the odd time she’d cook for him. He had organic chicken broth, thanks to one of her shopping trips. She even acknowledged once that it was pleasant he had a Choices market so close. She nuked up a mug for him and asked him if he was okay with drinking it ‘in there’, where hideous gurglings still ruled, and she could hear the shudder in his voice as he said, “No, thanks.”

The cramping pain subsided enough to permit him to hose himself off. With the last of his strength, assisted with no nonsense by Raven, he crawled back into bed.  Raven had put down garbage bags to prevent him from destroying his mattress, and remade the bed, so he could sit up.  The broth was welcome, though he knew it wouldn’t hang around long, and he dozed for about half an hour before he woke up and puked into his kitchen garbage can, which Raven had repurposed into a lined emesis basin.

“How’d you know to come over?” Jesse said weakly.

“Some guy you work with called and said you’d been in terrible shape the night before and he was worried about you. I called and you didn’t answer.”

“I didn’t even hear it ring,” Jesse said. He had accidentally recorded the audio of his interpretive dance, although he would not know that until the next time he looked at his phone.

“So I called him back and asked where you were and he said he was sure you were here, because you’d texted him when you got home.”

Michel, you fucking asshole.

A thought occurred. “Did he say who he was?”

“No.”

“Did he have a French Canadian accent?”

“What? No, I don’t think so, just sounded like your average west coast working dude.”

I’ve heard him mimic George, so I’m sure he could manage without the identifying accent for a phone call.  Why he picked up that outrrrrageous accent has not been adequately explained. Of course, I say things with cartoon voices all the time, but not day in, day out…

Raven stayed with him until she was sure he could keep himself hydrated, and with a wave from the doorway, beetled off to make her afternoon shift at the shelter.

The illness poured through his body for twenty-four hours, and then trickled away to nothing but appalling gas. To his wonderment, the gas was completely odourless, but on consideration, and with a teensy ball of opium to calm his guts and soothe his nerves, that made perfect sense. Then he lost his train of thought. He prayed to his appendix, night and day, to recolonize his spent and flaccid tubes, which now accepted toast with a small amount of butter.

Thanks to Raven, he’d been able to sleep. Looking fierce, she had said, “I only brought one, I carry it for emergencies, only. You owe me twenty bucks or like in kind.”

“Jesus. Don’t you know I’m glad you didn’t bring me fentanyl? And I have no idea where to score opium, you’re better connected than me. You think I’ll get addicted?”

“Shush you. Bye.” The door banged and her key rattled and scraped.

He got a call from George cheerily asking if he was up for a move, and he said, voice still hoarse from puking, “No, thanks to Michel.”

A pause. “What do you think he did?”

“Infected me with giardia, or maybe it was radioactive tap dancing e. coli, but definitely something pathogenic that did unspeakable things to my colon,” Jesse said. “Perhaps if you mention dogshit to him his memory will work.”

“He is a prankster,” George said. “I take it you are too debilitated to work.”

Jesse was too tired to raise his voice, but the ire was unmistakeable. “I lost four pounds in one day and didn’t get more than groggy little naps the whole time, what do you think? But I suppose I should thank him for calling my sister, I might have gotten really messed up.”

The conversation ground to a halt.

George said, without particular emphasis, as was his custom when he was angry or alarmed, “Michel spoke with your sister.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t identify himself, according to Raven. And he wasn’t using an accent, so for all I know you called her.”

“No,” said George. “I haven’t contacted your sister. I don’t want to have this conversation over the phone. May I come over?”

“Why not?” Jesse said. “Whatever I’ve got, you can’t get.”

George arrived by cab about an hour later. It was midday, so Jesse was trapped in the house anyway.

Without preamble, George said, “I’ve spoken with Michel.”

“I’m sure him poisoning me came up.”

“I’m sure it did too, and I was a party to the conversation,” George said mildly. “You’re right to be annoyed. Michel is testing me in front of a mixed group of humans and my kind.”

“Your kind, which doesn’t have a name,” Jesse said. “I’ve taken to calling you ‘the great unknowable rubber and glue people’ since you haven’t gotten around to picking a name for yourselves.”

“We don’t have a legally enforceable or trade-markable name in English, as things are,” George said.  “My lawyer advises me that if we call ourselves Squids, there’ll be more race-hatred, faster, whereas Sixer calls out some of our architectural differences and doesn’t have as many negative connotations.”

“I don’t know which is worse,” Jesse said.

“What’s worse?” George said.

“I don’t know which is worse,” Jesse repeated, “that you have a lawyer, or that you’re an alien.”

“Oh, that,” George said. “You’re okay with it, right? When you’re hiding money in many places, you really need a competent and quite improper lawyer.”

They continued their walk to the Night Bus stop.

Michel pulled out a dark red plastic swizzle stick, with a stork embossed on it.

“A treasure of global significance,” Jesse said, glancing at it.

“We’re not much into stuff,” Michel said. “But I like this. It’s a souvenir. My capodecina took me to a nice club for whacking some guy.”

“From mobster to dog euthanizer,” Jesse said. “What a career you’ve had.”

“You can’t hurt my feelings,” Michel said.  “Kima’s here in town at the same time as me.”

“Have you stopped killing people?”

“I’m even a vegetarian now,” Michel said.

“What?”

“I used to kill and eat animals. I never was as fond of cats as … never mind.  Anyway, I don’t anymore,” Michel said. “And George says that while I was living in Montréal I had ‘diminished moral capacity’.”

“Montreal has that effect on some people,” Jesse said. “Mike Wilmot once said it was ‘like Disneyland for alcoholics’.”

“I didn’t understand why it was wrong to kill bad people,” Michel said, as if the matter still confused him, but he’d changed his behaviour to avoid trouble.

“Now you pistol-whip them,” Jesse said.

“You prefer I turn him off with a lecture? Guys like that don’t learn until they meet a bigger bully.”

“But you’re still glorifying bullying behaviour.”

“If your heart has no muscle in it, how can it beat?” Michel said, rhetorically.

Jesse took a breath, expelled it, and then said in a tight voice, “I don’t want to live in a world where masculinity and bullying are so close to being synonymous. I don’t think you’ve got a heart at all.” He added, “And if you do, I bet I couldn’t tell the difference between it and a rancid hunk of gristle.”

Michel sounded prim now. “If I got no heart, it’s cause I never had one. I started life with a different set of assumptions than you, and I can’t rely on a heart to tell me how to behave any more than you can.  I prefer George’s way of explaining things. I’m caught between two worlds. I love the human world of guns and cell phones and airplanes and loud noises and rockets. My love makes me an outcast.”

“You and Kima and George.”

“Ah, now you’re starting to see.  We’re all freaky like that.”

“You and George are sharing her,” Jesse said, and immediately wished he hadn’t.

Michel took his time responding, and spoke with care. “Kima is the one with the final say. You say you’re polyamorous. Why would you say that we ‘share’ her, like a pizza, rather than have an understanding with her and each other, like we’re all people?”

After a decent pause, Jesse said, “I truly and seriously fucked up, dude.”

Michel’s reaction to this continued to be calm. “Kima’s not like other people. She does her own thing, and she and George have a project.”

“The twenty million dollar plan.”

Michel was quiet again. 

More time passed than he would ever admit to before Jesse turned and realized that Michel was either gone or transparent.

He wasn’t that drunk.  He got home okay.

Before he went to sleep he thought, I can’t drink when I’m around them.  I get too desperate. I’m too obvious. I want to know everything. It’s the awkward stage. I know enough to be trouble, and not enough to understand what the hell is going on.

During his childhood, Jesse had eaten lies with his porridge, and splashed through lies in his bath. He expected lies, except from Raven, and his hyper-vigilance fought with his naïvety at every turn, so one minute he’d believe anything — and the next, he’d be back in his right mind, and filled with enervating cynicism.  Then Raven would kick his ass, with “Cynicism is the game you’re forced to play when you admitted capitalism won. Ya gotta get up and let the hope back in!”

Worse than the cynicism, which was a mood, coming and going like weather, were the times when he thought he might be lying to himself. He thought that his childhood was a cramped and poisoned container he could not escape. Everyone thought he had escaped. That was the biggest lie of all. He told himself it was okay to cry.

Fuck that noise.

He started his breathing exercises and worked backward through his day.

He sat straight up like a marionette, eyes staring.

What the hell happened to the gun?

He lay back down, breathed deeply, sighed deeply, and tried to calm himself again.  It didn’t matter.  Michel had it, or he didn’t, and even if he did have it, it had no bullets.

He was drifting asleep, in a sweet state of safety, knowing his mother was hundreds of kilometres away, and she didn’t have his phone number or address. He was thinking about how he sometimes missed the chickens, and the cats, and then one of the riddles from The Hobbit came into his mind, and like a clockwork toy, he was sitting bolt upright.

Michel was exactly the kind of person who would be carrying around ammo.  Perhaps even ammo for that bad boy Glock 17 that disappeared after the shooting.

He lay back down.  “So he’s got a gun,” he said to his ceiling. “And maybe ammo. Do I sound worried? I’m not worried.”

There were plenty of other things to be worried about. Or perhaps ‘concern’ was a better word.

How do they know where the cameras are?

What is the true relationship between the three I know about?

Who’s Hermes, and will I ever meet him?

Are there more of them living in Vancouver I don’t know about?

“I’m sure you’ll meet her sometime soon,” Michel said. “As for the getting shot part, it won’t happen if I’m around.”

“Duly noted,” Jesse said.  “Are you armoured?” He started feeling around Michel’s clothes and patting him.

Michel slapped him away and said, “I didn’t give no permission for you to fondle me. No! I am not armoured.  Not like you understand armour.”

“It must be built in, somehow. How can you feel so – bleugh!” Jesse exclaimed in disgust.

“Dogshit,” Michel said genially.

Jesse flung his hand away in horror. His upbringing had left him with very little ‘give’ when it came to nasty smells and bodily functions, which was part of the reason he’d been so traumatized by the hoarder move.

Michel was still working his head around it, too, but for different reasons. “I hate having to kill animals,” he’d said. Jesse was past being rational on the subject, except to thank Michel and George for doing what he had neither the strength nor the compassion to do.

Jesse loved a good prank, but dogshit was too much.  Michel tried to correct his error.

“Hold still, quit twisting,” Michel crooned. Jesse went rigid, and Michel somehow mopped him up, including the spatters of dung he’d gotten on his own clothes in his panic.

Jesse turned away, sniffed, and composed himself.

To the alley wall, he said, “I guess it should come as no surprise that you keep dog crap on your person. I’m sure you are full of surprises.”

Michel silently scanned for functioning cameras.

He pulled out a diamond engagement ring.

“You never know when you’re gonna meet the right girl,” Michel said.

“You can’t mate with humans,” Jesse said, perplexed.

“You worked that out by yourself… no, I can see George said something. Since reproductive sex is not the sine qua non of human marriage, and since inter-species marriage is probably only a couple of decades away, I’m taking the long view.” His voice became bland and professorial, and his accent shifted into a weird mid-Canadian/vaguely European blend, in open mockery of George.

“I’m sure Kima feels fine about that,” Jesse said. George had warned him that the best way to frame a genuine dialogue with his kind was never to ask a direct question.

“She feels fine about everything, because apart from learning new kinds of math and having babies, she gives precisely no shits about anything.”

“She gives a shit about you.”

“She likes the way I make her feel,” Michel said.  “I got more style than George.”

That was a difficult point to argue, as it bent the word ‘style’ like a pretzel.  Michel was a vision — if you thought a man forcefully stuffed into a beige and yellow polyester disco suit, hung with a kilo of garish chrome chains, and sporting a dirty blonde afro and matching pornstache was the height of masculine aesthetics.

“You look like you ran naked through a 70’s disco and randomly ripped clothing off strangers, including that colony of caterpillars catching z’s on your upper lip,” Jesse said.

“Zeds. Please,” Michel said.

Jesse got tired of pretending he was fine. He could hear sirens, and knew the pistol whipped guy was going to get medical attention, which was a relief.  His moral compass swung wildly.  Was it okay to pistol whip a rapist? Michel was so expansively casual about it, as if this was how to be. It fit a Hollywood narrative, but Jesse didn’t want to be an extra in such a violent view of reality, or to find himself taking such glee in someone else’s brain damage.

“I need to breathe for a while. I’m still flashing on the gunshots and the dogshit.”

“Sorry about that,” Michel said. He was often quick to apologize, without seeming in the least to have understood what an apology was supposed to mean, or its components.

“I’ll show you what else I got, while you get your vitals into spec,” Michel said.

“Kima gave me this,” Michel said. It was a gold coin, heavy and shiny and perfect. “Pirate treasure. Minted in Mexico City in 1716.”

“Wow,” Jesse said. The coin disappeared, apparently into a pocket. He began to smell trickery again. 

“From the same haul, she also gave me this.” It was an enormous pearl, easily 4 cm across. It almost looked like an eyeball.

“They look like expensive gifts. She must be one hell of a deep sea diver,” Jesse commented.

This struck Michel as amusing. “I’ll say,” he said, chuckling. “They weren’t expensive.  They were lying around on the sea floor. She can smell a wreck a long way off.”

“A useful skill,” Jesse said. “George has a highly accurate sense of smell too.”

“Oh, he’s the best. It’s the hair,” Michel said, as if that explained everything.

“I don’t understand, but that’s okay,” Jesse said. “It’s not like reality depends on my understanding.”

“That attitude is the best thing about you,” Michel said.

Jesse sent his eyebrows in opposite directions and then frowned at Michel.

“I’m sure you have more goodies to show and tell,” he said, after a moment.

“I got a lot of pockets,” Michel said.

He pulled out a syringe.

“Shit,” he said. “I picked this up a week ago and forgot to put it in a sharps container.” He hurriedly stuffed it back into a pocket.

Jesse said, narrowing his eyes and trying not to sound overly concerned, “I’m impressed that you walked around for a week with that in your pocket without giving yourself a good dose of Hep C.”

“I can’t get that. Nor anything else, from leprosy to syphilis.”

“You must have an amazing immune system.”

“So amazing I don’t even know it’s there,” Michel said.  “That’s one of the many things George wants to find out, when he finds his scientist.”

“You make it sound like he lost a scientist.”

“No, but he still hasn’t found one,” Michel said.  “Or he’s waiting on some other development, or he needs money.”

“That pirate booty must be worth something.”

“Oh sure. Mebbe ten grand for both of them if I had to sell in a hurry, more if I could take time to fake up provenance documents. That’s George’s trick, not mine.”

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

“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.

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.

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?

“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 moved like an automaton.  Morag had warned them about having gear for the job, and so he had thick gloves and a face mask, which would prevent the larger chunks of torn-off fur and caked dirt, faeces and urine from getting into his nose. His clothes, which he would not wear again — since he would throw them into the trash bins in the back walkway and traipse into his apartment naked before he ever brought them inside, and to hell with the landlady — were covered in dark green one-use coveralls with a hood, and he had waterproof booties, because Morag said they’d need them as well.

Jesse and Michel started the process of moving the dogs. They had put down tarps in the back of the truck at Morag’s insistence to keep the worst of the crap out of it. Michel started staging the largest of the animal carriers at the kennel entrance, carrying eight at a time, balancing them all like a waiter. 

Through a combination of craigslist ads, personal contacts and a couple of very helpful veterinary techs at the closest clinic to his apartment, George had lined up 40 animal carriers.

George and Morag walked over to the house.

George unlocked the front door of the house by pretending to use a bump key and Morag said, blankly, as the door had to be forced by the corpses of five cats, “I’ll cry later.”

“These two are alive, but their kidneys are shot and they’ll have to be euthanized,” George said, finding signs of life further down the hallway.  There were ten more dead cats by the back door.

They found seven live cats in the house and lost count of the dead ones.

“We didn’t need all those carriers after all,” George said. “There are only four here that are likely to recover.  Do you want me to euthanize the ones that won’t make it? The idea of moving them so they can die in relative comfort somewhere else has no appeal.”

Morag’s face crumpled.  Then, thinking of the suffering George meant to end, she said, “Okay, but I can’t watch.” In a stronger voice she added, “I’m taking these four and then getting some air, if there is any in this hellhole. God damn the man!”

George moved through the house and wrung the necks of all the dying cats.

Jesse, who was weeping behind his safety glasses, helped Michel put one stinking, almost lifeless dog after another into carriers.

Only two dozen of the cats and dogs had survived.  One of the horses had been forced into a tight one-legged hobble, and the wound it had caused had gone septic. The other horse and the pony, although they were merely matted coats over sacks of bones, looked more or less fit to travel. The only animal that didn’t seem to be on the point of death was the pig, and Jesse was too sickened to give much thought as to why that might be.

“Georgios,” Michel called as he emerged.

“Coming,” George said.

He saw the horse and sighed.

“I’m afraid I might make it suffer,” Michel said.

“What?” Jesse said in disbelief. “Can’t we save it?” He was still in the comfortable universe of calling a vet when you had a problem with a farm animal.

“I can’t believe the horse is still alive,” Michel said. You could hear its ragged, noisy breathing.

“Jesse,” George said, “The horse has a systemic infection. If we walk away it will be dead in hours anyway; if we transport it we’ll be making it suffer out of guilt and not out of a compassionate understanding of its true condition.” He gestured. “Some room, please; he’s going to fall over.  I’m going to stop his heart.”

George put his hand on the horse’s chest. The horse collapsed, stone dead.

“What did you do?” Jesse said, hardly breathing.

“What I said I’d do,” George said, without much emphasis. Looking at Michel, he said, “Are there any dogs too sick to be moved?”

Michel said, “Not anymore.”

“What?” Jesse whispered.

“Look a little green, kid. Are you gonna be okay to drive?” Michel said. “Don’t have a license but I don’t let that stop me.”

“You drive?”

“Sure, I’m not proud like George here.”

“You’re too proud to drive?” Jesse said asked George in disbelief.

“I’m not responsible for the constructions people put on my behaviour, only for my behaviour,” George said. “But if you will forgive my lapse, I know exactly how I’d behave if the owner of this property were to appear in front of me right now.”

“Me too,” said Jesse.

“Me three,” said Michel. “Mama told me not to kill humans but for him I’d make a very exceptional exception. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He led the remaining horse and pony out of the barn and up the ramp into the truck. Both beasts promptly lay down. “I’ll stay in the trailer with them,” Morag said, rejoining them. “My headlamp died, can I borrow yours?”

“Sure,” Jesse said, handing it over.  “I’m never going to want to look at anything again anyway.”

“Well, I hope you look at the road, going home,” George said, in that strangely toneless voice.

“If we are leaving, where are we going?” Jesse said.

“Fort Langley. I’ll text George the address.”

“And they’re expecting us at three in the morning?” Jesse confirmed.

“Yes. After that it’s only two more stops, though, since we didn’t get the number of animals we were expecting,” Morag said, “One in PoCo and the other in New West.”

The horse and pony rallied enough to get up and slowly come down the ramp. Morag’s riding buddy Deb burst into tears and put her hand over her mouth when she saw them. “Do they have names?” she gulped.

“Marta and JoJo.”

“I’ll call you, we gotta haul ass,” Morag said. They hugged and Morag got back in the truck.

“The vet’s coming in the morning,” Deb called. “He’s gonna want to know where they came from.”

“That part’s easy,” Michel said. “Some crazy animal rescue type did it, you have no idea who.”

Jesse, unable to help himself, handed over his earnings to Deb. “You’re going to need it for vet bills.”

The drop off in PoCo was for the dogs; New West was for the cats.

It was just dawn when they turned in the truck. To Jesse’s astonishment, George said, apparently to him, “Why don’t you crash on the couch?”

Michel said, “And in the morning I go to Kima?”

“You can go now, if you feel like swimming,” George said.

None of this made sense to Jesse. “I can stay at your place?”

“Sure.”

“Bet there’s no toilet paper. Or soap,” Michel said.  “Humans like toilet paper, they’re actually very fond of it, temporarily anyway.”

George checked. “Yes. We’ll be walking by a 24 hour grocery, so we can get a few things.”

“You’ll have to forgive me for how spartan my apartment is,” George said. Michel said something, probably in Greek, and George said, “There’s a balcony.  I know you don’t sleep indoors.”

The next midnight move was a tough one.  Morag, the client, was a woman in her mid-forties, short and dark and with an intense gaze that reminded Jesse of a squirrel staring you down at a bird feeder. Her ‘unqualified ongoing disaster’, as she referred to the job, wasn’t a case of moving some boxes between two points, but of locating, corralling, crating and moving almost one hundred domestic and farm animals from a hoarder’s property in Langley, to be distributed at the six different drop-off points in the Lower Mainland where animal lovers were prepared to take on at least some of the evacuees.

With his normal cold efficiency, George treated the Langley hobby farm move as a logistical challenge; for Jesse it was two shifts’ worth of PTSD flashbacks, mixed with the kind of molten, angry misery that sensitive souls feel when faced with the horrid evidence of extended cruelty.

Michel came along to help deal with the scale of the task, which dwarfed anything they’d previously attempted. Jesse heard a lot of colourful Québecois slang the first night. After a while, even Michel fell silent.

Legally, Morag had no claim on any of the animals, and had been escorted off the property twice by the local RCMP. With a voice like a glass-cutter, she outlined the stupidity and laziness of the officers who had seen the hoarding situation and done nothing, not even press ten digits on a cell phone to get the BCSPCA involved.

“Why didn’t you call the SPCA?” George asked, pointedly.

“Because my sister’s name is still on the title to the property,” Morag said furiously.  “So she gets dragged into the legal crap and all the fines and what-not. And now that son of a bitch is out of town — he didn’t even get somebody to come in and put down food.”

“How many crates will we need?”

Morag said, heavily, “All of them.” George shrugged.

“A number, please,” he said.

“Fifty,” Morag said. “We can get two or three cats into each carrier, and probably some of the animals have died.” With a great sigh, she added, “I have no idea what we’re going to do about the pony, the horses and the cow. They’re pretty beat up from being in the paddock with hardly any shelter, and two of them don’t even have bridles so we have to get that sorted out, and god knows how we’ll get them into the truck.”

“I can do that,” Michel said.

Jesse said, “I’m not understanding why this move has to be at night.”

Morag made a growl of disgust. “The next door neighbour is an animal hoarder too, although her animals are in better shape. She drinks herself to sleep every night around nine so if we move fast, we’ll be history before she staggers out of bed in the morning. During the day she could see us from the window that looks onto the east side of the property. She’d call the cops fast as lightning as soon as she saw me.”

“She may call the cops anyway if she gets up to take a leak and sees the lights,” Jesse said.

“If that happens, I’ll stay and you guys can leave.”

“It’s just theft under, trespass and mischief,” George said. “I’m sure we can handle that.”

“Stealing horses is not theft under,” Morag said. “Not if you’re stealing a trailer to move them.”

“I see your point,” George said, “But unless Jesse voices an objection, it’s a risk we’re willing to take.”

Jesse said nothing. It’s hard not to see yourself as a hero when you’re rescuing critters.

“You’re going to see a place no animal should live inside and no human should ever create through negligence.  I know my brother-in-law’s crazy and not fully responsible, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is going to be really, really hard. I’m sorry, because you are going to be seeing and smelling this for a long time, at least if you’re not mentally ill or a complete fricking sociopath.”

“We’ll manage,” George said soothingly.

“I won’t,” Jesse promised. “But I’ll keep it together for the job.”

When they arrived, the gate was locked.

“Shit,” Morag said. “I didn’t bring bolt-cutters.”

“Michel,” George said.

Morag watched with astonishment as Michel hopped down from the truck, walked over to the padlock and snapped it apart like it was a breadstick, dropping it with a theatrical flourish.

“He’s very strong,” Jesse said. Jesse had not been able to establish what the upper limit of Michel’s lifting capacity was, although it was easily three times what Jesse could manage. If he could tear apart a padlock, he had stronger hands than a human being should have, so it was comforting to know he wasn’t human. During the last move, Michel had been stacking boxes six high and dancing around with them in a hilarity-provoking imitation of a beefy, working class Fred Astaire.

“No shit!” Morag replied, watching Michel with admiration as he opened the gate and Jesse drove them through.  Michel leered at her, and her frown came back.

“That man’s not quite all there,” Morag said.

George and Jesse both laughed. “The part that’s here can lift half a ton,” Jesse said. “And likely has other talents we’ll need before the dawn comes,” George added.

As wrenching to the soul as to the organs of olfaction, their first task was to locate the animals which had a chance to survive.

“Shit,” Jesse said. A couple of cats approached them out of the darkness, mewing hoarsely. Morag turned her headlamp on. They were filthy and one of them limped, dragging a mangled foot. A kitten with a crooked tail, its eyes nearly swollen shut from flea bites, trotted up to Michel, wailing. Fleas leaped off it as he picked it up.

The dogs in the kennel were too weak to get up. Jesse’s heart broke as one attempted to wag its faeces-caked tail. Fleas moved in sheeted swarms in every direction. The whole property stank, but the kennels were an order of magnitude worse.

Jesse tried to work out how having romantic feelings was socially suspect, when every critter on earth with a spine had some variant on romance.

“So you’re asexual,” he hazarded. “As a rule.”

George wagged a finger.  “Don’t start.”

“Okay. But —“ said Jesse.

“Don’t start.”

“One more question.”

“I don’t promise to answer it.”

“Your people call themselves something,” Jesse said. “I just wanted to know what it is.”

“We call ourselves many things,” George said. “But I tell you what,” he added, pursing his lips for emphasis. “You can ask Michel when he comes by.” He changed the subject with an emotional clang like a jail door closing.

Jesse let all thoughts of conversation drop as he started asking himself what Michel would be like.  He expected, as one does, someone much like George in appearance and manner, thinking that two of George would be something to see, like finding out there are two sets of Niagara Falls, or two moons orbiting the earth. Perhaps not two moons; that seemed too remarkable even for George.

So he was expecting someone about five eight, with sharp, vaguely eastern European features, Edwardian clothing and Old World savoir-faire in manners and expression.

Jesse was sitting up in the cab of the truck when Michel got out of the taxi. Michel looked directly into Jesse’s eyes, and smiled an evil, knowing smile, as if he knew not merely what Jesse was thinking, but the full measure of how silly he was for thinking that he, Michel, could be anything like that little squeaker, George.

“Holy fuck,” Jesse said.

“Impressive, ain’t he?” George murmured.

The person approaching him stood just under two meters tall and was wearing stained blue coveralls, as a professional mover would. His black hair had been shaped into a mullet, which increased his height with something resembling an afro on the top, and fixed his resemblance to a motorcycle club member with a long wild horsetail at the back. He walked like someone who had carried more heavy loads, been in more mosh pits, told more tall tales and courted more fine women than anyone in the world, and that he’d as soon punch your lights out as share a jug of beer.

George had mentioned that Michel had lived in Montréal for a long stretch, but didn’t mention that he’d picked up his accent there. Michel sounded like a Canadiens player from the sixties, attempting his first interview in English. 

Michel opened George’s door and pulled him out onto the ground, “Weak ass’ little bugger that you are, you have to call on me.” Jesse threw himself headlong across the truck seat to get a glimpse of what was happening.

The two of them thrashed around, first in the street, then in the gutter, then on the sidewalk for a minute, insulting each other the whole time as they writhed and sought purchase, if their tone was a sign. Jesse couldn’t understand a word and reached for his phone to record it.  As soon as he turned on the phone George laughed, and Michel said, “None of that,” and faster than Jesse could believe, Michel was laughing at Jesse through the truck window and stood with the phone in his hand. George’s hand came up to touch the phone.

For a strange second it seemed as if having wrestled, they would now dance. The phone rested between Michel’s hand and George’s, as they stared each other down.

Abruptly, Michel tossed the phone at Jesse.  It described a perfect arc and landed in his jacket pocket.

“That was bracing,” George said, smiling fondly at Michel.

“I’m doing this before I go see Kima,” Michel replied, furrowing his monobrow. “Allons-y, I got girls to bang, places to be.”

“Uh,” Jesse said.

“I texted you the address,” George said.

“When?”

“Just now.”

Jesse looked at his phone.  Between the time he’d pulled it out to record the fight and the time Michel had tossed it back to him, George had texted him.

While he was wrestling on the ground with Michel.

“Uh,” Jesse said. “How —“

“Really Jesse,” George said, amused. “Have you never heard of multitasking?”

“Never touch the stuff,” Jesse said, fighting to maintain his dignity with a witty response. “It hurts your ability to concentrate.”

Michel said something, probably in Greek.

“English only,” George said. “Jesse’s a good man, very hard to fool.”

“Thanks,” Jesse said, with genuine gratitude.  Having extra help is great, but not if it means you have to listen to two other people giggle and pass notes in a language you don’t understand.

“That so?” Michel said, not impressed.

“I know you aren’t human,” Jesse said, tired of being the butt of this asshole’s rough humour.

Michel wordlessly turned to George.

“He guessed,” George said, shrugging.

“Timing’s the pits,” Michel said.

“No, not really,” George said. “Kima isn’t pregnant yet.”

Michel gave a shrug that seemed to span the roadway. “If you say so, cuz.  C’mon, let’s go, my balls are itchy.” He dashed around the side of the truck and hopped in next to Jesse.  Jesse felt his weight, and warmth, and realized that whatever the hell they were, they were quite different from each other.  And yet friends. And relatives.

Indecorously, inauspiciously, Jesse’s friendship with Michel had commenced.