Some Possible Solutions Read online

  The astronaut seems touched. She gestures toward her heart. No one knew they would be so capable of charming us. She gazes at them, attempting to make eye contact with each. Her eyes meet those of a tall alien man on the outskirts of the group. He’s as handsome as she is pretty. His stare is intense and tender.

  She begins to wobble. He begins to wobble. She is elevated a few inches off the ground and her feet are dragged across the dry purple dirt, raising a cloud of lavender dust. The invisible force propelling her rapidly toward him also propels him toward her. The aliens step out of the way. A great black flash obscures the moment of encounter. The camera must have shattered, because this is all we have.

  It’s an amazing sight.

  * * *

  It is somewhat less amazing on the fiftieth viewing.

  The TV networks become addicted to this footage for the week following the incident. At first, we’re addicted too.

  “Look! Right there! In the middle of the black flash!”

  “How can there be a black flash? Isn’t a flash always white?”

  “Did you see it this time?”

  “See what? You’re getting crumbs everywhere, by the way.”

  “What I told you to look for!”

  “What?”

  “In the middle of the black flash there’s a naked woman! And a naked man too, but he’s harder to spot. He’s sort of—I don’t know—misty.”

  “A naked woman? Scoot over.”

  “How can she be naked? She was wearing her space suit a millisecond ago.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”

  “I told you to watch for it! Why do you never listen to me?”

  “Mind if I have the last gingersnap?”

  “Look, they’re showing it again.”

  “Big surprise.”

  “Look for it this time, okay? Look for the naked woman. And next time round you can look for the naked man. You’re not looking!”

  “You’re funny.”

  “Look really close. It’s up there for like one-billionth of a second.”

  “Honey, you’re funny.”

  “Are you watching?”

  * * *

  We mourn her. Wreaths of flowers are placed on the steps of the White House, as though it’s the President who has lost someone he loved. There are magazine features and TV specials. We learn that the astronaut grew up on a farm in the Midwest and attended the Air Force Academy. We applaud her accomplishments.

  After seven days, the astronauts get the camera up and running again. This means there’s new footage: a male astronaut standing beside the silver leg of the spaceship and confessing to everyone on Earth that before this happened he’d been planning to ask the pretty astronaut to marry him. They’d been through so much together, what with the training and the journey and all. He weeps. The camera follows as he wanders despondent among the hills and dales of the new planet. He sighs, and on Earth we sigh. Lounging on the couch, we rub each other’s feet.

  He comes to a stream. The water shimmers gold. A young alien maiden is standing there, her skirt tied up around her knees and a jug in her hand. She stoops to touch a pink creature halfway between a frog and a cockroach that’s sitting on a gray lily pad. The astronaut makes a noise, perhaps choking back a sob. She glances up at him, startled, and then it happens. The astronaut begins to wobble, and the girl begins to wobble. Some force rips her out of the water—golden flecks flying every which way—and up the bank. The same force tears him off his feet and straight into her.

  Once again, the black flash.

  On Earth, we grieve for the male astronaut. We imagine how sweet it would’ve been if the two astronauts had returned to Earth and married each other.

  * * *

  This time, the astronauts fix the camera in only three days. But it’s a subdued sight that meets our eyes. Only four of the original twelve crew members remain, huddled around the base of the spaceship. A middle-aged female astronaut with a gravelly voice explains that it’s happened to six more.

  “What do you mean, it?” The newscaster’s voice crackles across the vastness.

  “It,” she says, widening her eyes. “It.”

  Just as we become certain she’ll stand there silently staring until the cows come home, she whispers something. We strain to hear.

  “They’re all very happy.”

  Then she runs off into the woods, outside the scope of the unmanned camera.

  * * *

  Two days later, after forty-eight hours of footage featuring the least interesting crew members doing their daily business and avoiding questions about their lost shipmates, a strange creature ambles up to the camera while they’re making dinner in the spaceship. This creature is kind of like—well, it’s like two people back to back but with one torso and one head. The head has a face on either side, and two pairs of ears. Four arms and four legs. A single pair of buoyant breasts above the pearly little cunt, a tranquil dick on the opposite side. The creature’s skin is tan and luminous.

  We recognize the face of the pretty astronaut.

  This is the face the creature turns toward the camera. She does not seem aware that the entire world can see her nipples, which are as exquisite as we’d all imagined.

  “You have been lonely,” she says. Her voice is deep and grand. We who have seen the TV specials recall the clips from her parents’ home videos, in which she has a chirpy, if not squeaky, Midwestern voice. “You have existed as half of what you are. Please, come here. Be happy. Twe am.”

  “Twe?” we say, cocking our heads.

  Willingly, the creature that was once the pretty astronaut allows its former shipmates to strap it into the Emergency Escape Capsule, which reaches Earth in a single week. When the creature arrives, it maintains its infinite calm while subjected to a battery of tests by doctors, psychologists, and NASA scientists. Countless images of the two smiling faces, the serene sexual organs, the thick legs and glowing skin, are delivered to our living room.

  The face that used to belong to the pretty astronaut does all the talking, but a different brain seems to be at work. When her parents are brought into the room, the creature embraces them warmly. However, the creature warmly embraces everyone with whom it comes into contact. When the pretty astronaut’s full Christian name is repeated time and time again, the creature emits a low melodious laugh, but it is not the laugh of recognition. When asked to describe its feelings, the creature simply claims, “Twe am happy.”

  “Well screw you,” we say, throwing popcorn at the screen and wrapping the blanket tighter around ourselves.

  * * *

  A conference is held in Vienna, a gathering of our preeminent scientists and scholars. The creature attends; there are photos of it sitting in a chair especially crafted by an Austrian carpenter to accommodate its unusual shape.

  After the conference, a distinguished professor comes on primetime television to announce that humankind has discovered the planet to which our split hermaphrodite ancestors were deported by Zeus several thousand years ago. The professor, gesturing at an oversimplified graphic consisting of two globes connected by many multicolored lines, explains that if the theories and equations resulting from the conference are correct, every single person on Earth has a corresponding being on the new planet to whom s/he can be joined, thus returning to the original hermaphroditic state and achieving perfect happiness.

  “Fuck,” we say, looking at each other.

  * * *

  The hermaphrodite craze consumes our globe. The creature is all over the TV: ecstasy delight splendor glory harmony.

  We want to tear our hair out.

  The other hermaphrodites are delivered to Earth in the second Emergency Escape Capsule. We begin to refer to these creatures as the Joined. The new ones appear on TV. Whenever a word like “loneliness” or “dissatisfaction” or “boredom” comes up, they offer only kind, puzzled smiles. The Joined describe their experience of the world as clean, bright, fresh, fragrant. Ca
n this possibly be the same place where we live?

  We happen to be watching—as we so often are—during a glitch. The middle-aged female astronaut, the same lady who’d run off into the woods, is on a show in her Joined form, talking relentlessly about joy, when a guy with crazy gray hair bursts onto the set and starts yelling, weeping, and gesticulating.

  “Gertrude,” he cries. “Gertrude.”

  The hermaphrodite looks with bemused benevolence at this silly skinny man.

  “Dearest,” he says.

  “Excuse me,” the hostess says. “We’re going to take a short break for commercials but we’ll be right back!”

  When we return to the show a couple of minutes later, the old guy has disappeared, and the Joined is saying something about serenity, her bare breasts hanging above her belly.

  * * *

  The President announces that the new planet will be called Htrae. We soon realize how shortsighted his decision is when we hear the newscasters trying to pronounce it. In the past, this would have amused us, but a new anxiety has settled over our living room.

  The United Nations, eager to preside over a world of contented citizens and to boost the lagging SpaceBus industry, launches a program to match every person on Earth with his/her corresponding being on Htrae. The head of the nascent agency swears that through his own blood, sweat, and tears he’ll make sure everyone becomes Joined. Matches are based on six traits identified and tested by a fast-working group of doctors: (1) gender, (2) height, (3) birth date, (4) blood type, (5) shape of skull, (6) shape of intestines. If these six indicators are in place, the match is guaranteed. A team is sent to Htrae to collect statistics, which are then input into a vast computerized database. With increasing frequency, people from Earth travel to Htrae and become Joined. “Twe am,” they all say. On Earth, we celebrate for them.

  So this means if they found a female on Htrae who was five feet ten inches tall, who was born on October 11 twenty-four years ago, who had Z+ blood, who had a little dimple in the skull above her ear, who had God knows what kind of intestines, then—

  If they found a male on Htrae who was five feet five inches tall, who was born on February 9 twenty-three years ago, who had Y- blood, who had no irregularities in the skull, who—

  “Yes,” we say. “Then.”

  So we take our paperwork in. We do what we’re told. We, too, have been lonely and disappointed. We, like everyone, wish for something slightly different and better. Like everyone, we hope. We wait.

  * * *

  And one day we get home from work to discover a single official letter in the mailbox. A match has been indisputably located! The letter informs us that the matched citizen is invited to catch a SpaceBus to Htrae tomorrow.

  We gaze around the apartment, at our shabby couch and the small pile of unwashed dishes, at the seahorse lamp with the green shade and the bedspread that looks like it was stolen from a second-rate motel. One of us will be here, still watching the television, still wrapped in the dark blue blanket, still finding gingersnap crumbs between the cushions.

  We begin to pack the suitcase. We disagree about what should go in. The only thing we can agree on is that not much will be needed. Once you’re Joined, nothing matters anymore, or so it seems. You wouldn’t be able to fit into your old shirts and pants, obviously, and the Joined prefer nudity even when given the option of the fine new clothing being designed for their bodies. Their skin always looks radiant, so what good will cocoa butter cream do you? Halfway through, we resolve to forget about toothbrushes, shampoo, socks, books.

  Tonight, since it’s our last night, we decide to leave the living room and go walking along the river. Sure, there’s garbage and empty beer bottles down there, but with a lifetime of rapture ahead, it’s easy not to be bothered by such things. We carry the official letter with us.

  We stop and sit on a cement barrier where the bank of the river should be. The moon is yellow and slender. We try to spot Htrae, but our eyes aren’t good enough.

  We sit there in silence.

  No more nights when the tossing and turning of one keeps the other up. No more debates about whether Brussels sprouts should be steamed or fried. No more disagreements about the timer on the air conditioner. No more of those startling sneezes. No more weird smells. No more loud chewing, no more forgetting to clean up the honey when it explodes on the kitchen floor, no more slamming the closet door too early in the morning.

  We sit there for a long time.

  We use a method we learned in elementary school. We fold the letter in half and tear along the creases. We rip it again and again and again until it’s in so many tiny pieces it’s like it has vanished.

  * * *

  At home, you take a shower even though there’s mildew. I sit on the toilet seat. The toenail clippers are nowhere to be found. A whitish towel dangles off the sink. A smear of toothpaste on the counter. A piece of dental floss hanging from the trash can. The shower curtain’s red barbershop stripes move as you shampoo. When you knock the soap out of the shower and onto the floor, I pick it up. The bathroom fills with steam until we’re just a couple of blobs in the mirror.

  FLESH AND BLOOD

  It began on Tuesday morning; my landlord had been in Florida over the long weekend, and when I glimpsed him schlubbing around in the backyard two stories down, I was stricken by the extreme redness of his skin. Florida! The place where old white men go to turn bloodred. I stepped away from the window. I’d been to Florida once, a big group of friends, a happy bright blur of a week, so long ago.

  Showering, smoothing lotion onto my arms and legs, I enjoyed the healthy golden quality of my skin. In the mirror my face seemed almost to shimmer. I felt clean inside and out, my morning poop having arrived precisely on schedule, my immaculate stomach awaiting milk, granola, apple.

  It was not that there was anything displeasing about my life. Still youngish, still prettyish, a tiny tidy apartment, parents to visit and friends to complain to, a guy with whom I’d been on a series of lighthearted dates, a photography hobby and a hostessing job at a French restaurant where they deferred to me when it came to arranging the flowers, no great grief or heartbreak, a few moments of lonesomeness and meaninglessness here and there; it pleased me to think of myself as a person like any other.

  Somehow I managed to stay in my own world all the way to the bus stop. It happens in big cities. But then, boarding the bus and inserting my pass, I saw the bus driver’s arm and hand, his fingers tapping the wheel.

  First there was the instinct to gag, but, ever polite, I tamped it down. Second there was the rational explanation: He’s a veteran, how tragic, don’t stare. Yet the soothing logic of that explanation faded as my gaze moved up his arm to his neck, his face.

  I could see his muscles, his blood vessels, the stretchiness of his tendons, the bulge of his eyeballs, the color of his skull.

  The other passengers trying to board the bus were getting restless, pushing a bit and clearing their throats. I turned around to give them a look of compassion and warning. The woman behind me was wearing a light brown raincoat; I perceived this raincoat as I turned; atop the raincoat, the woman’s skinless head.

  Gagging, I stumbled forward into the bus.

  “Yaawlrite?” the bus driver said in some language I didn’t recognize, his bloodred muscles contracting to reveal teeth that appeared uncannily white.

  I grabbed a metal pole and clung to it. When I opened my eyes: rows upon rows of skinless faces, eyeballs bulging and mouths forming grimaces as they observed the little scene I was making.

  “Wanna sit, sweetheart?” one of them said, standing. A man, probably, though it was hard to tell.

  I shook my head and gripped the pole. I would never, ever sit among them. The idea was so horrifying, so absurd, that I half-giggled. The “man” shrugged and sat back down.

  There was hope. That this would end once I got off the bus. That this bus was cursed or fucked or something. In honor of this hope, I averted my eyes.<
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  * * *

  “What’s wrong, baby girl?” Sasha said, his grimace widening as he whirled past with a pair of wineglasses dangling from the sinewy complexity of his hand. I realized the grimace was their equivalent of a smile. “Table nine’s killing me, just sent back a bottle of cab sauv, Bo’s in quite a mood, shit the phone.”

  Frozen at the hostess stand, I gazed out over a scene from hell, well-dressed arrangements of tendon and muscle and bone sipping wine and poking at salads.

  I watched the shiny white fat tremble on Bo’s arms and neck as he yelled, “Arugula!”

  In the lavender-scented bathroom I puked—searingly aware of the bile as it passed upward through the caverns and passageways of my body—until there was nothing left, and then I wished I could puke some more.

  There was a knock.

  “Oh, pardon me.” A civilized British accent contrasted unbearably with the petite capillary-laced package that stepped graciously aside when I opened the door.

  They sent me away kindly, solicitous words emerging from their hideous mouths, advice to drink ginger tea and watch romantic comedies; I’d always been well-liked. As they spoke, I tried to focus on the clean, empty space above their heads. It was a relief to step outside.

  Yet the streets offered no respite.

  A squirrel without skin or fur or bushy tail, demonic; a dog stalking down the sidewalk like a creature from a nightmare, all its organs revealed.

  Upon passing a playground, I had to hold my face in my hands for some minutes. Skipping and hopping, pumping on swings and hanging from bars, unaware of the appalling interplay of their tissues and blood vessels. I witnessed an ice cream sandwich descending a child’s gullet.

  I attempted to take shelter in the pure white dressing room of a clothing store, but pulling a shirt over my head it occurred to me that probably one of them had tried on this selfsame shirt, had yanked it over the repulsive intricacy of the face, the gut.

  On the bus, an infant drowsed in its mother’s revolting arms; the infant slightly less terrible than everybody else, as one is accustomed to newborns looking bloody, almost transparent, when they emerge.