Thirty-two

The number thrums in my head. Not the words, but the number itself. It’s hard to explain, except that I keep feeling these figures embossed on my thoughts: two squares, each composed of four smaller squares two units to a side. I’m no idiot, but the state of the world has me a little scatter-brained and I had to work it out on the kitchen counter tiles. Sixteen plus sixteen. Thirty-two.

I know what it means, more or less, because it took them longer to tear down the internet than it did the phones, television, and radio. I am thirty-two on someone – something’s list. When exactly that places me on the calendar, I don’t know, because Mr. Larson in 2A had number seventeen and they came for him yesterday evening. The Ramirezes downstairs had sixty-one and sixty-two, once I helped them figure it out, and they were taken this morning. Thirty-two.

Maybe Jenny is thirty-one or thirty-three, if the Ramirezes were numbered sequentially. And the kids… God, I miss the kids. It figures they would come on field trip day.

Three days ago they announced themselves by moving into the L1 point in front of the moon, completely eclipsing it. That was afternoon London time, and 10am or so here in San Diego; by noon Pacific they had ships – or whatever those huge slug-shaped things were – in fixed orbit above earth. It takes your whole thumbnail to cover them in their orbit – that’s how big they are. By early afternoon they were on the streets. Probably took them twenty minutes to knock over the navy base, and another hour before the cops surrendered and they finished ripping up the cell towers.

It’s hard to say what they look like, except that they’re colorful. San Diego’s landing ship came down right in the bay. The tail end of it took out Coronado Bridge. It was segmented, like some hybrid between one of those plump, spiny caterpillars and a dryer vent hose as big as National City. Bands of bright green, yellow and white outlined in black marked each of the segments, but between the bands were incredibly complex patchworks of colors and shapes. Before the water in the bay settled, those patchwork bulges detached from the main body in clumps that broke again and again and again until there were – I don’t know – a million of these individual things swarming up the beach. I don’t know if it was really a million, because I couldn’t count that high in the hour of news coverage I watched before the TV stations were shut down, but I’d never seen so many of anything except maybe grains of sand on the beach, or stars in the sky on the nights I spent out on the desert. They looked like insects, some of them, or loping cats the size of a minivan. Some of them stood on two legs. Some of them sprouted a pair of tendrils from their back that warped the air around them and flew them away over the mountains to T-J and Escondido. Some of them changed shape – not like amoebae or magic or something, but like freaking Transformers.

They swarmed up onto the beaches and into the streets, and they only gave trouble where they got it. The news chopper couldn’t get a clear view of the Navy base, but you could hear the cannons fire from here, and there was some big explosion beneath the water on the other side of Coronado, out in the deep ocean. I think it was a sub. From my apartment window, I saw what looked like a two-trunked, purple, armored elephant and a fifteen-foot-tall otter in a biohazard suit take apart a SWAT team on B Street – just stomp, and swipe, and smash, and six guys are smudges of blood on the asphalt. Just smudges, because they peeled the splattered bodies up off the ground and shoved them in what I guess was their mouth right after they killed them. And I mean right after – like they took dozens of rounds in the back so they could pounce on the poor guy and scarf him down while he was still twitching, before they would move on to the next.

Thirty-two. Damnit. It’s getting harder to ignore. If it was a sound, I would say it’s getting louder. For a little while there I could kind of ignore it, the way you don’t notice that instant of black when you blink.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t made any heroic effort to spend the last couple of days with Jenny or the kids. She took the car downtown, and the kids were all the way up in Capistrano with their middle school seeing the swallows, but if I was Bruce Willis in the movies instead of an unemployed network security officer, I would grab the ax out of the old fire alarm box downstairs and make my goddamned way to my family, leaving a wake of alien carcasses behind me. Instead, after the news shut off I just stayed inside, like we all did. I don’t think the news announced it or anything, we all just know that’s what we’re supposed to do, just like I know thirty-two.

Three days is a long time to stay inside the apartment alone and without TV. The last I heard from Jenny she was fine, but that call was more than fifty hours ago. That’s a long time to wait when I feel like I’m defying the predestined order of the universe just to stick my head out the window. Sometimes it’s hard even to go to the peephole in my door when I hear them moving out there, coming for one of the neighbor families.

Thirty-two.

That time it was definitely louder, more insistent.

Thirty-two.

I hear loud shuffling outside, like someone is dragging a pair of trash cans on the second story walk. It stops outside my door.

Thirty-two.

The door rattles, like there’s a weight settling against it.

I can’t move. I mean, I really can’t move! I was just leaning against the kitchen counter, but now I can’t touch the water glass an inch from my finger, much less reach for the knife block. I can’t even blink.

The door knob turns. It’s locked, the same way Jenny left it when she took the kids to school three days ago, but after a moment of hesitation the door splinters around the knob and swings inward. My inability to flinch is awful, like not being able to sneeze when I really need to.

It comes in.

Thirty-two.

It’s something like a four-legged spider, with an extra pair of limbs hovering in the air like mantis claws about to strike. Its thorax curves upwards, too, like the lengthened body of a mantis, but in place of the head it has what looks like a single, massive bulge of an eye beneath a barely opened eyelid. Instead of eyelashes, it has teeth like a Venus fly-trap guarding the pearly bulge beneath. An abdomen as big as a refrigerator sways in the air behind the rest of the body – that’s what gives it the spidery look. That and the way it scuttles toward me. Most of the body is covered by armor, or an articulated shell, or something rigid that gleams in the afternoon light but wrinkles like latex where it joins the softer body beneath. The hard pieces are white with thick black zebra stripes, but the stripes fade to red, and then to a solid white near that eye-mouth. The softer flesh is white fading to a translucent vermilion; when the sunlight catches that swollen abdomen I can see a hint of yellow-orange light shining through it – at least between the dark shadows inside. I can’t get a really good look, but the shadows have the familiar shapes of human bodies.

I still can’t move when it stops before me. “Stops” is the wrong word, because it continues to skitter and shuffle while those mantis claws swing at me like scythes.

Whatever else it is, it’s careful. The claws move quickly, but I barely felt the slick curves slide along my skin as they slice through my shirt and my flannel pants, and even my slippers. Ruined cloth falls to the ground around my feet. When the claws finish their work, they draw back to hang menacingly above my shoulders, but I can’t even move my eyes to follow them. In my peripheral vision, though, I can see that they’re not going to swing down to murder me. They click, and they shift, and they fold back somehow into their limbs. Dozens of tendrils like jellyfish tentacles withdraw from the folded-back claws – I’m reminded of the way Jenny pulled her fingers from her wedding gloves – and wriggle and stretch in the open air before reaching for me. One arm reaches down, and a limp sheath of warm spaghetti noodles brushes over my belly and hips before cupping me as though to verify my sex. The other hand of tendrils spreads wide before attaching itself to my face. There is a warm, wet wriggling, and then tendrils begin worming their way into each of my orifices – down my mouth, through each nostril, into my ears. A pair of them wriggle under my eyelids and behind my eyes. I swear I even feel them trying to find a way into my pores, but they don’t get far. They aren’t painful, exactly – just unsettling. The one creeping its way into my urethra is the worst, but only because of something Jenny did once back when we were young and reckless, and probably high.

Thirty-two.

The tendrils are gone, I think. I can move again, but I don’t. I’m pretty sure I’m freaking out or in shock – I really should be – but I feel calm. I feel like all of the tension and dread has drained from the room.

The thing is still in front of me, and its eyelid/mouth gash has opened. What I thought were rigid teeth at its lips bend away when a bulge of pearly white stuff beneath pushes out between them. I think it’s an eyeball at first, until it extrudes further and begins to reshape itself. Limbs appear, and hands – human hands with fingers – unfold like flowers on the ends of their stalk. The bulge on the top pinches off into something roughly head-shaped. Colors bubble to the surface of the pearly white – blacks and purples, reds and greens in smaller blotches and a splash of creamy flesh. I blink, and the shape has become Jenny from the hips up, dressed in her Maleficent costume from Halloween. She smirks at me and says something very un-Jenny-like.

“Two of two-squared-squared.” There is absolute certainty in her voice.

I blink, not certain what to say. I don’t know much about alien conceptions of personal space, but she is in mine in a way that Jenny usually means as “meet me in the bedroom in five seconds”.

Her fingertips caress the outline of my cheeks, and the texture of spandex against my peach-fuzz stubble has remarkable fidelity, even to the shift of fabric over her fleshy fingers beneath – fingers with bones and nails that didn’t exist moments ago. Her fire-engine red lips are only inches from mine. “You are non-violent. We are pleased.” Her voice is pitched just like Jenny’s, but her pronunciation and cadence are weird, like she’s affecting an accent. She’s a perfect mimic of the way Jenny’s eyebrows arch suggestively, but her mouth hangs ajar and her pink tongue squirms inside in a way I only fantasized about when we first started dating. Her head cocks, and I know we are about to kiss. She has a different idea of what that means, apparently – her tongue slathers over my lips and face, even testing for access to my nostrils and eyelids.

I endure, because what else can I do? She has me pinned against the counter top, and her arms hold me more firmly than Jenny could have. It’s unusual, but not really unpleasant. Maybe even a little kinky. She smells of fruit and vanilla, and she makes excited moaning sounds like some of the girls I knew before Jenny. When her tongue finally presses into my mouth and her lips close against mine, she delves beneath my tongue like she lost something down there. She tastes like apple cider. At the moment, I’m glad that the real Jenny isn’t here; I wouldn’t want her to see how receptive I am to this alien invasion.

When she pulls away and I get a chance to breathe, she isn’t Jenny any more. Somewhere along the way her face took on the features of that barrista down at the Starbucks on B Street – Dani. She nibbles her plump lips just like Dani does, and when she laughs her generous cleavage jostles; that’s how I realize that Jenny’s Maleficent costume has become a “Sexy Maleficent” costume. My cheeks and ears burn, now I’m really glad the real Jenny isn’t here, especially when I let the Dani-shaped thing lean in and kiss me again. I don’t even want to imagine the details of Jenny’s encounter with these things.

I know I should probably just keep my mouth shut and accept whatever is inevitable like the non-violent thirty-two I am, but when she breaks away again, I let my morbid curiosity get the better of me. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

She pouts, as though she’s letting down a child who wants to bring his Hot Wheels into the bathtub. “Your body is not appropriate for unification. It’s fragile, and dull, and very static. You will not miss it. It has limited ability to experience sensuality.”

But her promising smile can’t completely eclipse my view of the swollen abdomen behind her, or the shapes within. “You eat us?”

She nods in just the way Dani did when she got me to agree to whipped cream on my chai, but since she is dressed as a Disney villainess from the hips up and attached to the body of a space spider, the affect is a bit more sinister. “It aids with integration. You’d rather we wasted your flesh?”

I’ve watched too much sci-fi on Netflix since I lost my job to have a good answer for her there. “I’d rather everyone didn’t have to die.”

“Die?” She strokes my cheek. “Oh, you silly thing.” She pulls me to her for another kiss, but even once our lips have met she keeps pulling, pressing me right up against her – right up against Dani’s barely contained bosom. I marvel that I can feel the beat of a heart behind her breastbone, but only for a moment. I realize as she pulls forward – awkwardly and off-balance – that she has begun to recede through the eyelid-lips from which she bloomed. She clutches me tighter against her. I am going in, too, it seems.

I’m too proud of being deemed non-violent to kick or writhe – well, writhe much, anyway – even after her tongue in my mouth splits open to gush a syrupy, apple-tasting fluid down my throat. What was her face and torso and arms until moments ago melts into a sac that stretches to envelop me and drag me inside her. For a moment I feel like I’m drowning, but the urge to cough and vomit up the fluid filling me passes. The pearly-white sac around me stretches thin enough to be translucent, but once the eyelid-lips swallow my arms and head I am drawn into utter darkness. My legs are slurped in like so many soggy noodles. The darkness presses around me from every side and angle, but with my lungs and stomach pumped full of the fluid, I don’t feel crushed. One by one, pockets of air around my skin belch away until I can feel the sac – a slippery warm surface like half-melted taffy – over every square inch of my body.

I know when she moves on to number thirty-three, because I’m tossed and squished around inside her like she’s kneading me into a lump of dough.

I’ve heard how easy it can be to lose track of time in sensory deprivation, so I count to myself.

I lose track somewhere around six hundred and fifty and don’t feel like starting over. What’s the point?

You know what’s strange? I see my own body – just a red-black silhouette that’s already starting to dissolve around the edges – squeezing through a sphincter into that abdominal cavity. I’m completely sure it’s the body that was mine, but I can’t feel anything when it jostles around between the other disintegrating bodies and settles into her abdomen. It’s not me anymore. I’m not even sure that I am a me at this point, not even a thirty-two. There’s this bleed at edge of my mind, and things – little, unimportant things – are slipping away. Memories become holes that belch away from mind until I can feel the edges of me merging with new thoughts. It’s the other thirty-one of them.

I feel like I should resent this, but I don’t have the capacity. Besides, it’s not so bad.

The thirty-one are a jumble of experiences and memories and points of view inside her. We’re losing our names. We’re just a “we” – a we being compressed down to a useful lump of significant details.

She is definitely a “she”, and she has a name, though her sex and name are both ephemeral – a fiction she created specifically for this assimilation invasion when she cinched herself off from the unity vessel and became a personality. Her personality, her mind, are more substantial than we can explain, or that words will do justice to. She’s a nation. She’s like all of the best of the Greeks – Homer and Laertes and Odysseus and Aristotle and the rest of them – all bundled into a single brain, without all the meanness and pettiness that doesn’t make it into the history books. As our thirty-two, then thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five and so on personalities merge within her and excrete out all of our overlap, only then do we begin to achieve the substance of personality needed for us to unify with her.

Our former minds were too limited to have comprehended the scale of the personality within the unity. We were only incorporated within her well enough to have some sensation of her resumption/consumption and digestion by the lander ship, but as we millions of dissolved human essences all churn in the slurry of personalities melting together inside our lander, we can better appreciate the sensuality with which the orbiting creature resumes his child, and the unity vessel us all. It is a sexual act – the most intimate congress of personalities – completion of a teleological duty with all of the psychical reward that should go with it.

We sling away from the sun in the orgy of integration.

We are one as we reach the next signaling star system. As we have done countless times, we subdivide into orbiters and landing groups. We know these creatures will only contribute a drop in the sea of our unity, but all minds must be claimed.