She Came From Beyond! Read online

  Mildly chewed crumbs dusted across the keyboard in the very early morning, and I had settled into a comforting thread about zombie films. Fast vs. slow zombies, the new Dawn of the Dead vs. the old Dawn of the Dead, ironic zombies vs. non-ironic zombies. I mentioned that I had once seen an Italian film called Island of the Dead in which an actor dressed as a zombie had engaged an actual living shark in an underwater fight scene. It was crackly and fever dream-like, the poor shark biting the same rubber zombie arm that was shoved in and out of his maw like a toothbrush. Of course I had seen this film; I was a student of the world!

  A commenter who called him or herself Brain_Damage67 was very quick to correct me: “That movie’s called Zombi 2, not Island of the Dead. There was a film called Island of the Dead that came out in 2000, but it was garbage. Malcolm McDowell was in it. And Mos Def. In the end it wasn’t really zombies but a kind of cannibalistic fly. So.”

  It was the “So” that I could not abide.

  I was not used to being posted to unless I did the posting first, and certainly no one had ever had the gall to correct me to my own avatar. Brain_Damage67’s avatar was of Han Solo in his white shirt and black vest, looking like some delicious intergalactic maître d’, aiming his pistol behind his back with Fosse-like flair. My own avatar featured me, of course, lest anyone forget with whom they were discussing The Watchmen. It was from the episode in which I was dressed as Ann-Margret in The Collapse of Planet Cat, in barely more than fuzzy cuffs and a collar. It was taken about a year after I was hired, during what I like to call my golden abs period. In that year I did no wrong. My producers parodied a lot of bad Raquel Welch movies during that time, sometimes more than once.

  But of course, I had taken notice of Brain_Damage67. But of course. It was my domain. I heeded every ripple in the water, every Big Lebowski quote, every argument for or against the Jack Nicholson Joker. It was my job, and after getting the boot from ICFB! I’d begun taking it very seriously. Like RoboCop seriously. I’d noticed a certain swagger in this Brain_Damage67, even without taking the Han Solo avatar into account. He eschewed network television, praised Brit-coms, referenced books that none of us had ever heard of, or, upon being made aware, would ever read. He didn’t need the place and he didn’t need any of us. Even me—ME—he’d sized me up and looked away, perhaps to his Millennium Falcon.

  I didn’t know what to say about the zombie/shark matter. He’d been correct, of course—I checked—plus he’d one-upped me with Malcolm McDowell. So, I simply did not answer at all. I stood and stared at the computer for a while, and no one needed to know that. As far as everyone knew, I could have left the computer for personal, or even sexual reasons. Perhaps I even left to thwart and hog-tie a burglar. I brushed the crumbs from myself and went to bed. Case closed, as easy as when, at age four, I had become frightened by the art on the cover of one of my fathers’ KISS albums and simply slid it beneath the clean towels on the tank of the toilet. Gone. Perhaps it was still there twenty-six years later. Of course I had no idea.

  But Brain_Damage67 didn’t stop. Once he’d corrected me, he couldn’t stop himself correcting me. You spelled Yaphet Kotto’s name wrong. Yaphet Kotto wasn’t even in that movie. You’re means “you are”; it’s not the same as the possessive “your.” It was relentless, brutal as boot camp. I did my best to avoid him completely, but his hubris had weakened my stranglehold on Cool News. I wasn’t a tawny, unattainable knockout in a cat’s collar, I was just a thirty-year-old woman who couldn’t spell Yaphet Kotto’s first name. And at the end of it all, he emailed. The email was Hjrice67, a Gmail account. He wanted me to know that he’d watched a compilation video of my skits on YouTube, and that he thought I was really funny. He thought I had fabulous timing. I wrote back that I’d never heard them referred to as “timing” before. LOL. LMAO. ROTFLMAO.

  He suggested we IM.

  HJRICE67: You should have your own show. Will ICFB! let you out of your contract?

  LOLASTARR: Oh, they’ll let me out of my contract all right—let me out of it two months ago!

  HJRICE67: what are you talking about?

  LOLASTARR: It seems I’m too old to don the sacrificial hot pants.

  HJRICE67: bullshit.

  LOLASTARR: there’s always someone younger, stupider and cheaper, that’s a sad fact of this sad world.

  HJRICE67: that was the subject of my thesis actually.

  LOLASTARR hooboy.

  HJRICE67: What?

  LOLASTARR: I think I’m in big trouble, is what.

  My housemates, Sybil and Richard, fought all the time, in a way which was both horrible and kind of a relief, because seeing marriage as a big scam could really let a person off the hook in advance, as far as trying was concerned. What was the point in trying if the person you loved more than anything was constantly reminding you about that one time you went to Hooters or didn’t give them an orgasm? Or the fact that you own a Spice Girls CD?

  Really stupid shit. I was on the computer most of the time, or in my little bedroom on this stationary bike from around 1974, and I always had my headphones in, listening to hilarious R&B from the nineties, a time in which a man could wear suits made of green space-age taffeta and still bang any woman in the club, and still I heard every word of every fight.

  “Oh, Lord, this again? Can you wash your own underwear if you’re not gonna bother wiping your ass?”

  “Hey, this is a vacuum, ever seen one? It uses suction to clean dust and crap off the floor. Yeah, you know it, you bought it off the TV for two hundred bucks in the middle of the night and then it arrived! In less than two days! Because you paid for the extra shipping! And then it sat in its box next to the door for a month!”

  “You think this is a game? Is this a game to you? I’m so sick of your games!”

  If it was a game, man, it was a horrible game, like a big, boring version of Jumanji with additional screaming and alcohol. The fights between Sybil and Richard lasted about forty-five minutes in general, and ended with one of them knocking on my door to ask if they could hang out in my room, like a kid after a nightmare, too scared to go back to bed. Sybil, usually, but sometimes it was Richard. Sometimes he would lie on my bed and smoke and read something deep like Naked Lunch or Gravity’s Rainbow, and I could never tell if he was actually into it or just flipping pages. He laughed a lot, though, and never tried to explain what was so funny.

  I PICTURED HJRICE67 AS COMPACT, THIN, WITH LICKS OF BUTTERMILK blonde hair that flopped over his eyes, and those eyes would be a certain shade of amazing green, like the green on a package of Mystic Mint cookies. He would be my height—short for a woman, tiny for a man—with graceful musician’s hands. Very shy. A thrift shop dresser. Everything organic. He would say things that would make other people uncomfortable, just to make them uncomfortable. We would be able to watch Troma films and see the hard, ugly art of them.

  All he’d told me was that he lived north of Boston, in the blue-collar fishing mecca of Providence. Of course by then I had made a point of not believing anything typed. I’d met too many lesbian travel agents claiming to be male clairvoyants. It was a tough game, a game of Clue with no clues. In the end you were left fingering the outside of that tiny envelope, not sure if it was a noose in there or a candlestick.

  And he said that he was forty-one, which I actually did believe because I could not for the life of me imagine someone pretending to be forty-one. It is one of those ages that just drowns in the weight of itself, of its blinding reality, too old to be exciting, too young to convey any gray-at-the-temples distinction. Forty-one seemed an odd, trying age for a graceful musician, but I took that in stride. I’d found that small people tended to age exceedingly well, like small dogs. It was the big dogs in life, tongues lolling, the areas under their eyes slick with mudslides of unidentifiable gunk, that showed wear the most easily. Everything in their environment hurt them.

  He would often IM me after work and tell me about the disgusting things he was eating.

 
HJRICE67: God. This whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s: chocolate ice cream with white chocolate chips and a hidden core of pure caramel. Disgusting. One sitting.

  LOLASTARR: “a hidden core of pure caramel” you say?

  HJRICE67: yep. Right to the bottom of the container. Like this deadly tornado of caramel. Just waiting there like quicksand.

  LOLASTARR: when I was a kid, I chose a book about quicksand from the Scholastic Book Club. It told about what to do if you were ever trapped in it, how to survive. I was a pretty nervous kid.

  HJRICE67: well, you looked for solutions, at least? Can you remember how to save yourself from quicksand? Seems a fairly handy thing.

  LOLASTARR: I actually do not remember at all. I think it may have involved a vine, or something? I think it would be more situational. You know, vines might not always be available in the worst case scenario.

  HJRICE67: Not in the worst case scenario, no.

  LOLASTARR: I actually think that one of the solutions was just to scream really loudly.

  HJRICE67: Geez.

  LOLASTARR: the thing that I remember really clearly is that if a horse is trapped in quicksand it will fold its legs up and sort of float to the edge of the pit and just jump out.

  HJRICE67: That’s all very well and good for horses, I suppose.

  LOLASTARR: I think the main point of everything was to not panic.

  HJRICE67: Yes, well, that’s generally the main point of everything.

  Finally, in the cruel, Sweet Valley High plotline that was my life—Richard revealed to Sybil that he was having an affair.

  Apparently it was the girl who worked the front desk at the Golden Auto where he worked. Days later Sybil and I would don ridiculous disguises and stake the woman out from the Carl’s Jr. next door. She was a bit soft, not a fatty, with frizzy hair and an overbite. Sybil did a speech about how “this was the woman that my husband chose over me and our unborn babies” and cried bitterly into her onion rings.

  And Richard made things worse by not really wanting to make things better. He was full of logical, painful excuses for his indiscretions. He was lonely. He didn’t feel valued. He didn’t feel desired. He felt taken for granted.

  “Well, welcome to the real world, Boy-O!” shouted Sybil, her face a dark Pollock of mascara and tears, “because that’s the way you’re supposed to feel!”

  We moved out, as angry women of the world, to an apartment complex/project called The Aloha Terrace, and we took the computer. This was how I was able to regale Hjrice67 (who I now knew as Harrison) with my bright tales of humorous poverty. Sybil and I cloistered ourselves in our one-room apartment and judged men for a while. That was fun. We discussed the things that they were good for (sex, nothing) and watched things like Married … with Children to back up our defense. Well, of course! Men hate women! They just want cold beers and orgasms! Nothing of value was valuable to them.

  To make Sybil feel better, I purchased naughty novelties from the adult superstore and erotic bakery; we wore penis hats and ate penis cake. We mocked and cannibalized, as though this would somehow make up for everything, for the stupid kids we’d been only weeks before with our Glamour magazines and quizzes and secret storybook endings. Who among us had not assumed that Sybil and Richard would be rocking back and forth on their patio ages from now, their gaggle of babies unleashed to a benevolent world, fingers clenched against the cold lies of everything, that maybe nothing mattered in the end, ever. Now Sybil and I lived our sad lives in our sad apartment, listening to cats and humans fuck loudly and incessantly, hijacked the minute we opened the apartment door by sad ladies who wanted to remind us where the fire exits were.

  LOLASTARR: I think it maybe used to be a very nice place to live, actually. The colors, the original paint seems very cheerful. Like sherbet.

  HJRICE67: Oh, the slums are generally the most colorful places from an architectural standpoint. It’s to get people’s minds off bettering themselves and revolting against the system. No offense.

  LOLASTARR: It’s not exactly a slum. It’s just more … I guess, working class.

  HJRICE67: is there water in the pool or just a bunch of trees?

  LOLASTARR: just a bunch of trees.

  HJRICE67: yeah, it’s a slum.

  Harrison and I knew very little about each other, and there was comfort in that. He knew that I did comedy with robots at one time, and that my friend and I were living out a Norman Lear sitcom in Southern Oregon; I knew that he was forty-one and lived and worked in the north shore of Massachusetts. He knew that I was single, I guessed, and I guessed that because I felt that I exuded singleness. I never talked about men in a wanting or possessive way, certainly not in the shoot ’em all and let God sort ’em out manner in which I lived my life with Sybil. Harrison and I lived 3,000 miles from each other. By the time I dragged my sorry ass out of bed every morning at times he was just leaving work for the day. It seemed natural for me to assume that he, too, was single. It seemed illogical that a married or, at least, attached man would have so much free time to spend on the internet.

  In hindsight, of course, I realize that I was just taking my own irrational, insecure musings about marriage and applying them generally, scooping up fistfuls and hurling them in all directions like so much domestic confetti. Innocuously, I had always imagined that my future marriage would be tight and concise, punctuated only with small hilarious fights that always managed to right themselves in thirty minutes or less. Maybe I imagined myself wearing a flouncy skirt through this marriage, and saw myself often serving my husband glasses of beer and cheese sandwiches. For a man to choose a computer (the Pet Rock of the nineties!) over his bride, the woman with whom he had stood before God and done the whole bit about sickness and health like a kind of forever-binding insurance, seemed incorrect and only a very small part of my brain would accept it. This tiny portion of my brain would slump in its chair in its cramped little cubicle and speak to me in the worn, weary voice of Droopy Dog. Don’t you think it would be best to ask, Easy? Easy? This is getting pretty serious, Easy. Don’t you think you should at least ask? Easy?

  And of course I didn’t want to ask. Harrison and I had played this game so far with an incredibly even keel. We joked and half-flirted, neither one of us committing to anything, and I was damned if I was going to be the one who made that awkward. Oh, that was so funny, the thing you said about Gymkata. I know! Why would a primitive village of mostly zombie immigrants have a pommel horse right in the middle of town?! Do you have a wife? Just curious. About wives. LOL.

  I very discreetly brought the conversation to Sybil, very hypothetically. I asked, “So, if a person was chatting with another person online and they suspected that this other person might be … let’s say attached in some way or another …”

  “Who are you messing with, you whore?” said Sybil, who’d worked a double shift at the groom shop and was in no mood for my tentative bush-beating. She didn’t even look up from counting that day’s tips.

  “Nobody. Jesus.”

  “Oh, really? Then what is all this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Magazine survey.”

  “Whatever,” said Sybil. “Just answer ‘B’ to everything, and call it a day.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks, that’s helpful.”

  LOLASTARR: what are you doing this evening?

  HJRICE67: having supper with my parole officer, why do you ask?

  LOLASTARR: No reason.

  HJRICE67: why so glum, chum?

  LOLASTARR: I feel pretty pensive, I guess. You know this whole Internet thing.

  HJRICE67: you don’t have to capitalize it, Easy. I won’t tell anyone.

  LOLASTARR: I’ve kind of been up my own ass about this for a while. You know that thing that people are always using on the internet, IRL?

  HJRICE67: In real life, yes.

  LOLASTARR: the distance between the two, between the internets and IRL, has really been getting me down. Did you ever see the movie Hollow Man wi
th Kevin Bacon?

  HJRICE67: Skinless gorillas, Kevin Bacon using his power to undress sleeping interns, sure.

  LOLASTARR: Well, it occurred to me like a year after I saw it that that movie was actually about the internet. Kevin Bacon was invisible, and he didn’t have to take responsibility for anything. He could do anything and not get caught, do you know what I’m saying? He could trespass on anything or anyone and then just disappear, and once he had that ability he discovered all these dark things about himself, that maybe he wasn’t the most moral of people when he didn’t have to be.

  HJRICE67: I don’t really feel like this is about Hollow Man anymore.

  LOLASTARR: I just don’t want you to think that I don’t take responsibility for this.

  HJRICE67: for what?

  LOLASTARR: for this friendship.

  HJRICE67: I’m not asking anything of you and you’re not asking anything of me, and that’s what is so good about this, the fact that you’re the only person in my life who doesn’t expect me to do anything.

  LOLASTARR: okay

  HJRICE67: well, okay.

  And it just sort of hung there that way, a cliffhanger of okay-ness. I remember it ending there, but it probably didn’t. We probably made some jokes about things that were easy to joke about, and we probably behaved in a way that was very superior to everything else. After that we ducked and hid our faces, the only faces we had to show.

  THINGS FELL OFF FOR A WHILE. HARRISON AND I STARTED LOGGING ON TO Cool News at times when it seemed logical that the other would be asleep or working. I would sit down at the computer at one in the morning, 4:00 a.m. to him, and read the comments and quips he’d left earlier, each a small revelation, a tiny joy, bright and snug as an Easter egg. I would never answer, but instead always behaved as though I were being watched. I flounced a lot. I side-eyed. I committed to nothing. IRL I sniffed and ate horrible, unmonitored things, such as fifty-percent-off cinnamon rolls right from the box, their cream cheese frosting, a glycemic time bomb on the tongue. My fingers were stained constantly—orange by Cheetos or white/yellow by Smart Food. I watched infomercials with sugar-crashed weariness, floating in and out, in and out to testimonials about juicers, baby food makers, and little plastic devices that enabled one to make perfect sushi, every time. Even sushi for kids! Using Rice Krispies and Fruit Roll-Ups! I would slip into dreams of flight, of preparing to fly. Glass ceilinged terminals with motorized walkways and such sun, such blinding white sun, and I would wake to the applause of a studio audience who now truly believed that they could finally drain pasta without ending up in the emergency room.