Year Zero (6 page)

Manda’s shelves are way more interesting, and most of her living room walls are lined with them—mainly particle-board kits that she nails together herself. All are heavy with reading matter that she’s devoured in the three scant years since she graduated NYU. There are classics, modern novels, graphic novels, dozens of issues of
Vice
magazine (a fire hazard she can’t bear to toss), evolutionary biology (she was a premed for two years),
evolutionary psychology, scholarly musical histories, and an entire shelf dedicated to weighty art books.

My pocket hummed briefly as Manda responded to my text:

Cool m coming byy now w my new man

My new man?
The phrase punctured my heart, and brought my post-Singha rally to a crashing end.

Moments later she was knocking. I braced myself for the worst and opened the door, and … she was alone. And as always, she was a vision. She does some careful hair and makeup work before going onstage, and always looks incredibly put together after a show. Her hair is a satiny, full-bodied mahogany. It falls to her shoulders in big, soft curls, and marches across her forehead in short, uniform bangs, framing her bewitchingly dark eyes. Manda’s also
fairly tall, and is curved in the ways that artists, sculptors, and designers idealized from Sumerian times until the bulimics’ recent rise. All this was wrapped up in a cute, fuzzy Radiolab sweatshirt.

“I see you haven’t had time for a wardrobe change since you left the stage,” I teased. Below the sweatshirt she was
wearing a pair of skinny black jeans that I’m a huge fan of. Those she probably did wear onstage.

“I haven’t had time for a wardrobe change since I left college.”

I smiled. She did wear that Radiolab sweatshirt a lot. The jeans she didn’t wear anywhere near enough.

“By the way,” she continued, “it sounds like you’re fighting quite a cold.”

“It would kill a lesser man, but it’s no match for me.” I struck a mock-heroic pose. My wimpy nasal voice upped the comic effect, and Manda smiled. “So, uh,” I continued, “where’s the new man?”

“He’s being shy all of a sudden.” She bent down and leaned off to the left of my doorway, extending an arm. “C’mon little buddy—Nick doesn’t bite.” And with that, an exceptionally long and slender cat strode regally into view. He was coal black, with bright green eyes. The vise of tension that had clutched my shoulders since the
coming byy now w my new man
message instantly released.

“Awesome—I love cats,” I said, bending down for a closer look. I actually love them about as much as I love Robyn Amos romances. But no way was I going to blow the moment by admitting that. And of course, any creature was better than the fashionably tattooed Lothario that I was expecting to see. “What’s his name?” I asked as they entered, and I shut the door.

“I’m calling him Meowhaus. Say hi, little buddy.”

Meowhaus dutifully let off a full, perfectly rounded
Meow
.

“He’s wonderful,” I said. At this, Pinocchio’s nose would have impaled the little beast and burrowed clear through to China. But mine didn’t betray me. “When did you get him?”

“He turned up in the dressing room tonight before the show. Maybe five-fifteen, or six? I’m not really sure.”

“A fan, huh?” I asked, forcing myself to squat down and pet him.

“More like a stalker. He’s followed me ever since.”

“Around the dressing room?”

“Around everywhere. I hit a couple stores on the way home, and he tagged along like a little brother.”

“You did
errands
? Coming home from the biggest show of your life?”

“I was hunting for your thank-you gift,” she said, smiling like a deity. And with that, all thoughts of aliens and schizophrenia left me for seven seconds straight.
Sweet respite …

“So the cat came into the stores with you?”

“Yeah, like he owned them. No one minded. They let dogs into most places these days. A smart cat can just slip in like a spy.”

Like a spy
. Respite over. The events at Eatiary had made me highly suspicious of large, charismatic animals.

“Hey, I think he likes you,” Manda said as I rubbed a reluctant finger against Meowhaus’s left cheek. He shut his eyes, and leaned hard into my hand. As Manda looked on, I fought off a Tourette’s-like urge to make childish puns about petting her pussy. After months of meticulously gaining her trust, the thought that a single moronic phrase could dash it all was giving me a sort of verbal vertigo.

Manda joined me on the floor and gave Meowhaus a little neck massage. This prompted a low, smooth rumbling that sounded more like the purr of a top-end sports car than of a stray cat. For the first time since I met her, Manda and I were hovering cheek to cheek. And that was all it took for
me to renounce decades of bigotry and realize that cats were awesome after all.
Really
awesome! And as for Meowhaus—why, I’d take a bullet for my
wingman! I rubbed his cheek a bit harder. He purred a bit louder. I quietly wished he had a twin that I could adopt. Or a septuplet, or whatever the little monsters came in.

“So he doesn’t have an owner?”

“Not as far as I can tell. No collar. Tomorrow I’m gonna go to a vet to see if he has an ID chip, look for flyers around where I found him, check Craigslist—that sort of thing.”

“And if your new man’s really single, is he a keeper?”

“Hell yes!”

“Great. And the two of you can come by for a drink and some catnip whenever you want.” A brief, cuddly montage filled my mind of Manda and me watching TV with Meowhaus; of Manda and me reading on the couch with Meowhaus; of Manda and me screwing athletically with Meowhaus nowhere to be seen.

“Cool—and we can get started on that right now.” I tried very hard to believe that Manda was miraculously referring to my montage’s glorious finale. But she just pulled a bottle from a canvas bag that she’d brought in. “Is this the stuff you were talking about?” she asked, handing it to me.

By God, it was. When I poured her a humble glass of Maker’s Mark the night before, the conversation turned to bourbon, and I mentioned that the best stuff I’d ever tasted was this twenty-three-year-old hooch named after a guy called Pappy Van Winkle. A classmate of mine at law school who’s part hillbilly on his mom’s side sourced some out of Kentucky once, and I hadn’t tasted the stuff since graduation. Now for the umpteenth time since meeting
her, I fell in
love with Manda Shark. “How in the world did you find this?” I asked.

“I shouldn’t admit it, but it was pretty easy. I only had to go to three places. They’ll cough up the good stuff if you bat your eyelashes the right way.”

I nodded. Bat them the right way, and the Librarian of Congress would cough up the Gutenberg Bible for you, I thought. “You need to try this. I’ll get us a couple glasses.” I headed into my kitchen, which is about the size of a jet’s galley. A normal person would find it maddeningly small. But anything beyond a fridge and a cereal cupboard is wasted on me.

Just as I was grabbing the glasses, this crazy sound started coming from the living room. I dashed out and saw Meowhaus squaring off with my bedroom doorway. Crawling toward it in a low, predatory posture, he was hissing like a cracked airplane window. The bedroom was dark. The door was half open. I was starting toward the bedroom myself when the lights suddenly cut out in the rest of the apartment. Then Manda screamed. I pivoted and saw a pulsating red orb emerge from the
floor in front of her.

The orb was maybe
three feet wide, and it rose majestically. Heavy gray smoke poured from its surface and oozed to the floor. There it spread, until we seemed to be adrift on a roiling, fog-choked sea. The orb was translucent, and a deep, red, pulsating glow emanated from its core. It rose to chest height, then stopped.

“Smoke on the water,”
it boomed in the sort of voice that Zeus might use if he were auditioning to play Satan in a Russian speed metal video. The fog beneath our feet churned and convulsed.

“Fire in the sky!”
Bolts of flame shot up from the fog. Searingly bright, they weirdly gave off no heat.

Manda was deeply spooked, but also bedazzled by all this Sturm und Drang. And I wasn’t unimpressed. But this was my third alien encounter, and so far they had been harmless. So my main feeling was one of relief.
Manda was
seeing this, too
—and I no longer had to worry about my sanity!

“What … are you?” she managed, gazing at the orb.

“I’m jet fuel, honey.”
This odd claim was followed by a blinding red flash, along with an infrasonic thud that rocked my innards but was barely audible.

This seemed to render Manda mute, so I leaned forward. “You’re
what
?” I asked.

“I’m …”
The orb paused awkwardly, clearly expecting more shock & awe, and less Q&A. Then,
“I’m TNT. I’m … dynamite.”
At this, it unleashed a cool explosion effect, with flames in the shape of a skull.

“You’re not the first to make this claim,” I said, affecting an urbane calm that I hoped would fluster our visitor. I’d heard the TNT/dynamite thing before, although I couldn’t quite place the source amid all the excitement. “Try being more original.”

“I’m … a mean go-getter,”
the orb sputtered. That one I knew. It was a lyric from that Quiet Riot song. Not “Metal Health”—the other one. “But enough about me. I’m here to learn about you, Carter. To start with—why did an alien infiltrator just cross the universe to visit you in your office?”

At this, Manda fixed me with a look of unbridled awe, which was most welcome. No way was I going to admit that I’d been mistaken for a Backstreet Boy moonlighting as a copyright lawyer.

I was thinking up a response when the orb’s form started distorting madly. First it stretched violently into a tall, narrow oval. Then it jerked into a short, wide oval. Then it smeared into an S shape, then an arch. As it shifted forms, it cycled through colors—blues, oranges, yellows, and countless others beyond the Crayola basics that I can name.

Suddenly the silhouette of a cat appeared in the orb’s center. This was accompanied by an angry
screeeeeeech
, which came from right behind us. I spun around, and saw that Meowhaus was battling a waist-high, Tinkertoy-looking contraption just inside the bedroom door. Actually, “mugging” may be a better word. His foe was a sleek metal skeleton made of brushed steel, with a giant purple sphere at its base. It almost looked like a Dyson vacuum cleaner—only it had spindly arms and wiry hands. It was clutching a small, glimmering object that Meowhaus was clawing for. The object fell after a brief struggle. As it hit the ground, an explosive
crack
sounded from the orb in the living room. At that, the orb jerked upward—then it shrank, until it looked like a harmless, shriveled disco ball hanging from the ceiling.

“Stupid cat!” High-pitched and nasal, the vacuum cleaner sounded like a cartoon rabbit with asthmatic lungs. He retreated deeper into the bedroom, rubbing one wiry hand with his other wiry hand. Meowhaus ignored him, utterly transfixed by the strange, alien lump on the floor. As the glowing object cycled through colors in perfect sync with the shifting colors of the shrunken orb, he batted at it repeatedly. Each time, I could see a little silhouette of a paw flash through the orb’s center. So the lump was a projector of some sort. And Manda’s new cat had a violent weakness for shiny things.

Seeing that Manda was taking all this in with the thunderstruck gaze of a geek on the holodeck, I turned to the vacuum cleaner and pointed theatrically at the lump. “Tell me about your little toy,” I commanded, showing off a bit.

“It’s a stereopticon,” he answered in that wheezing squeal. “It makes projections.”

“So it projected that … globe thing? How?”

“Self-organizing light. It bounces in a way that forms solid-looking images before the eyes of every conscious being in the room.”

“I assume it also does something similar with sound?” I asked, starting to miss the orb’s orotund boom. The vacuum cleaner’s squawk really savaged the ears.

“Clearly.”

“That aside, breaking and entering is a serious crime,” I said, suddenly very harsh. This guy seemed to fluster easily, and I wanted him back on the defensive.

“But I didn’t break
anything
,” he wheezed. “I came in through a Wrinkle.”

Wrinkle
. Carly and Frampton had used that word in discussing their transit to a distant star. “Whether you slip in through a Wrinkle, or barge in with a bulldozer, it’s still breaking and entering. Not to mention—” I groped for a more serious charge, but criminal law isn’t my thing. “Aggravated attempted ambushing.”

“But I didn’t even mean to lay
eyes
on you,” he whined, and started pacing—or something like that. He’d roll a few feet in one direction, do a hundred-eighty-degree pivot, then roll back. “My boss sent me here a couple hours ago, and a Wrinkle’s scheduled to pull me out in ten minutes. I honestly didn’t think you’d be back this quickly!”

“Oh please. That orb of yours was clearly designed to give us heart attacks.”

Our visitor started pacing faster. “Was
not
! That was just a stupid animation that came with the stupid stereopticon when it was assigned to me. It’s a harmless cartoon! And I wouldn’t even have projected it at you if that
stupid cat
hadn’t assaulted me before my Wrinkle took me away!”

I turned to Manda. “Wrinkles are … kind of like teleporting.” Might as well start the explanations somewhere.