Other Earths (collection)

I drove Percy to the doctor in Crib Lake. The doctor was an old man with pinch-nose glasses and dirty fingernails. I told him I had shot my servant accidentally, while hunting. The doctor said he did not usually work on colored men, but an extra ten dollars on top of his fee changed his mind.

He told me there was a good chance Percy would pull through, if the fever didn’t worsen.

I thanked him, and I went off to buy myself a drink.

THE GOAT VARIATIONS Jeff VanderMeer

It would have been hot and humid in September in that city, and the Secret Service would have gone in first, before him, to scan for hostile minds, even though it was just a middle school in a county he’d won in the elections, far away from the fighting. He would have emerged from the third black armored vehicle, blinking and looking bewildered as he got his bearings in the sudden sunlight. His aide and the personal bodyguards, who had grown up protecting him, would have surrounded him by his first step onto the asphalt of the driveway. They would have entered the school through the front, stopping under the sign for photos and a few words with the principal, the television cameras recording it all from a safe distance.

He would already be thinking past the event, to the next, and how to prop up sagging public approval ratings, due both to the conflict and his recent “indecision,” which he knew was more analogous to “sickness.” He would be thinking about, or around, the secret cavern beneath the Pentagon and the pale, almost grublike face of the adept in his tank. He would already be thinking about the machine.

By the end of the photo op, the sweat itches on his forehead, trickles into his eyes, burns sour in his mouth, but he has to ignore it for the cameras. He’s turning a new word he learned from a Czech diplomat over and over in his mind. Ossuary. A word that sounds free and soaring but just means a pile of skulls. The latest satellite photos from the battlefield states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Idaho make him think of the word. The evangelicals have been eschewing god-missiles for more personal methods of vengeance, even as they tie down federal armies in an endless guerilla war. Sometimes he feels as though he’s presiding over a pile of skulls.

The smile on his face has frozen into a rictus as he realizes there’s something wrong with the sun; there’s a red dot in its center, and it’s eating away at the yellow, bringing a hint of green with it. He can tell he’s the only one who can see it, can sense the pulsing, nervous worry on the face of his aide.

He almost says “ossuary” aloud, but then, as sun-spots wander across his eyes, they are bringing him down a corridor to the classroom where he will meet with the students and tell them a story. They walk past the open doors to the cafeteria—row on row of sagging wooden tables propped up by rusted metal legs; and he experiences a flare of anger. Why this school, with the infrastructure crumbling away? The overpowering stale smell of macaroni and cheese and meatloaf nauseates him.

All the while, he engages in small talk with the entourage of teachers trailing in his wake, almost all overweight middle-aged women with circles under their eyes and sagging flesh on their arms. Many of them are black. He smiles into their shiny, receptive faces and remembers the hired help in the mansion growing up. Some of his best friends were black until he took up politics.

For a second, as he looks down, marveling at their snouts and beaks and muzzles, their smiles melt away and he’s surrounded by a pack of animals.

His aide mutters to him through clenched teeth, and two seconds later he realizes the words were, “Stop staring at them so much.” There have always been times when meeting too many people at once has made him feel as if he’s somewhere strange, all the mannerisms and gesticulations and varying tones of voice shimmering into babble. But it’s only lately that people’s faces have changed into a menagerie if he looks at them too long.

They’d briefed him on the secret rooms and the possibility of the machine even before giving him the latest intel on China’s occupation of Japan and Taiwan. Only three hours into his presidency, an armored car had taken him to the Pentagon, away from his wife and the beginnings of the inauguration party. He’d told his vice president to meet the press while he was gone, even though he was now convinced the old man had dementia.

Once inside the Pentagon, they’d entered a green-lit steel elevator that went down for so long he thought for a moment it was broken. It was just him, his aide, a black-ops commander who didn’t give his name, and a small, haggard man who wore an old gray suit over a faded white dress shirt, with no tie.