#heard three different languages tonight and the bartender is fluent in all of them

[queenlua]

i think my fave dumb live sports commentator thing is where they gotta pepper their soliloquies with random "{worst, best} [adjective] [adjective] [noun] since [year]" facts, eg "packers's worst five game start since 2012", because with the correct carefully-chosen adjectives you can generate a shocking-sounding stat from literally anything

[alarawriting]

Inktober #13: Ash

Here we are with “No Drama” again. The actual book is in first person, but I went with third and a different POV than John’s because I wanted to explore what he looks like from a human’s perspective.

***

Lailah arrived at the bar as quickly as she could, panting slightly. “John! What’s the emergency?”

“There’s no emergency,” her partner, John Deer, assured her, slurring slightly. He had a glass of bourbon in front of him, no ice, mostly empty. The fact that he was slurring, and the fact that he had called her insisting that it was an emergency and she needed to meet him at Gaetano’s right away and now he was claiming there was no emergency, suggested that it was not his first one, or likely, even his third.

“You said there was an emergency,” she snapped. She hated bar stools. She hated absurdly tall men who sat on bar stools and then looked down at her because she was very short and not on a bar stool. “Tell me now why I don’t just walk the hell out of here.”

“Because Heph was busy and Mike’s in his studio and he won’t let me call,” John said, “and it’s a funeral, so I need someone to drink with.” He grinned as if what he had just said was the most reasonable thing possible.

Lailah sighed and put her camera bag on the bar. “Buy me something, then,” she said. “Something light if you expect me to drive your ass home when you’re done.”

“Bartender!”

Despite the fact that the bar was fairly full, the bartender came over to him almost immediately. John had a weird magnetism that made everyone pay more attention to him when he wanted attention, ignore him when he wanted to be ignored, and assume he belonged anywhere he happened to be. Lailah was pretty sure the personal magnetism thing was dependent on the fact that he was a white dude – she couldn’t imagine a world where that trick would work for a black woman – but it went a lot farther than just being a charismatic and decent-looking white dude could explain; he’d gotten her into the White House once. Any time anyone had questioned what she was doing there, he’d said, “She’s with me.” No one had ever asked him what he was doing there.

“What’ll you have?”

“A hard cider for the lady, and another bourbon for me.”

The bartender nodded and bustled away. “How many of those have you had?” Lailah asked.

“Not enough yet.”

She sighed, mentally shrugging. She wasn’t his mom. If he wanted to drink himself stupid, that was his problem. She’d nurse her one cider, watch over him to make sure he didn’t do anything egregiously dumb, and drive him home when he was done, or when she was sick of putting up with him, whichever came first. She liked John, but he could be an amazing ass sometimes.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked. “Did we get a contract? Or did one fall through?”

“Neither,” he said, and waved at the front windows of the bar. “You can’t see it from here. I mean, you could see the star, maybe, if there was a lot less light outside and it was the right season or you were in the right place, and it’d help to have a telescope, but the point is. The point is. You can’t see the planet. It’s two hundred fifty-seven light years away from Earth, right now.”

“I’m sure that seems really relevant to you in your current state, but—”

“No. Listen. They killed themselves. You’d be seeing it right now if you could see it. Two hundred fifty-seven years ago they burned their entire planet to ash. There were single-celled organisms left alive, and some of their equivalent of insects. You know every single planet with multi-cellular life has something like a cockroach, right?”

“I’m sure it does,” Lailah said, wondering if a hard cider was going to be enough to get her through this.

John was weird. Possibly not all there, mentally. He was brilliant, he was amazing at persuading people to do anything – including answer his questions, which for a journalist was an incredible talent – he saw connections no one else could see, and he spoke so many languages, Lailah hadn’t yet been somewhere that John wasn’t fluent in the local speech. For a photojournalist, he was a great partner to have, and if she ever won a Pulitzer it would probably be for photos he got her in place to be able to take. But he was weird.

If he’d been frequently drunk, like he was tonight; if he’d sexually harassed her, or anyone else; if he was on illegal drugs… she wouldn’t have liked any of those things, and the sexual harassment thing would have been a deal-breaker for their partnership, but she knew a lot of journos with one or many of those particular flaws. Those, she would have understood. But John… occasionally talked about historical events as if he’d been there, frequently made off-hand references to other planets and then pretended he hadn’t, and often referred to humanity as “you” instead of “us.” She strongly suspected he was delusional, and overly influenced by science fiction.

Most of the time he stayed professional about it; an occasional slip, and then a bullshit excuse why he’d said it, an outright denial that he’d said it, or completely ignoring her questions, and moving on. She suspected that tonight wasn’t going to be one of those times.

“Nothing left,” he said, and took his new glass from the bartender, downing about half of it. Lailah winced. Her cider was cold, and tasty, and desperately needed with John turning weird up to 11.

“Okay, so let’s say for the sake of argument that I accept this. There’s a planet 257 light years away and they destroyed themselves. Why do I care? Why do you care?”

He blinked at her. “Because!”

“I need a little more than that to go on. Because why?”

“Don’t you care? They were people. Like you’re people. Like—” he waved his left arm to encompass the room, and narrowly avoided smacking the guy next to him – “this whole planet. All the creatures on it. Now imagine they’re gone. Ashes. Dead. Don’t you think it matters?”

“It matters while we’re dying, I guess,” Lailah said. “But after we’re dead, who’ll be there to know or care?”

“I will!”

“Right, because you’re immune to nukes. I should’ve figured.”

“I am,” John said, pointing at her as if he was imparting vital information, or dressing down an unruly student. “But that’s not the point.”

“I’m not sure what the point is…”

“They’re dead!” John snapped, and slid off his chair, staggering toward the door. Cursing quietly, since she expected her cider wouldn’t still be there when she returned, Lailah grabbed her camera bag and followed him.

Directly outside the bar, John pointed at the sky. “They were just like you. Six legs instead of four, radial symmetry instead of bilateral. They had three eyes, three vibrating membranes for picking up sound. Made noises like parrots do, they could imitate almost any sound they heard. They blew fiberglass into tapestries. Thick skin, it didn’t make them itch. Blanketed their world with fiber optics to communicate with each other. Laid eggs. The females used to go out and get food while the males cradled the eggs and kept them warm, but they’d developed sexual equality so both parents took turns cradling the eggs.”

“I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

“Because they’re dead. I tried to help them and it turned into a holy war and that was the last thing it should have been and I didn’t see the danger in time and then they hit the buttons and they blew it all up. You think nukes are bad. They had antimatter. It was going to be clean, pure energy, they were using the power of the sun to make the stuff, in space. Their sun was bigger than yours. Still is, the sun’s still there. Planet too. It’s the life that’s gone. So much ash.”

Lailah shook her head. This was plainly a mental illness. John was seriously distressed by the imaginary death of his imaginary planet. But it wasn’t going to do any good to tell him it was imaginary if he was delusional. Best for him if she played along. “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know what they were going to do.”

“But I should’ve! It was my job! I was… I was supposed to be guiding them. Helping them. It was going to prove to the Convocation that my way would work. Strong intervention policy, step in and help them reach the eschaton, right? But they never will because I fucked it up and they’re all dead.” He looked around himself. “I’m not drunk enough.”

“I think maybe you are,” Lailah said.

“Then why hasn’t it stopped? I look up in the sky and I know, if I had a powerful enough telescope, I could see it now. I could see them dying right now. Today’s the day. Two hundred fifty-seven light years, three light months, twenty-two light days. I can see it but I can’t change it. It’s in my past, you can’t break causality like that. You can go back but you can’t change things. Whatever happened, always happened, or things break. Worse things than one planet. But they were my charges and they’re dead and it’s my fault.”

“And you think you can drink enough to stop thinking about it? To make it stop hurting?” She wanted him to be sitting down so she could put a hand on his shoulder. He was way too tall for that when he was standing. “It doesn’t work like that. “Maybe you can blunt it some, but you aren’t going to make yourself feel better. Not if you’re carrying guilt like that.”

He swayed slightly, and sat down on the sidewalk, with his usual unconcern for whether something was socially appropriate to do. “I got them killed. They should have kicked me out of the Host forever. I thought ten years was bad, but that’s nothing. All those people have been dead for two hundred and fifty-seven years.”

Lailah had no idea what he was talking about, but now she could reach his shoulder. She crouched so she could look him in the eye. It wasn’t comfortable; her thighs started to burn immediately. But if she sat, she’d be shorter than him again. She reached toward him, two brown hands on the shoulders of the loud pink button-down he was wearing. “Listen to me. You’re a good man, John. You could make a lot of money doing celebrity bullshit or puff pieces for politicians, but you’re nobody’s lackey. You find stories about corruption and people getting hurt and you expose all that. Your reporting has gotten stupid laws repealed and people suffering from those laws support.”

“That’s supposed to make up for an entire planet?”

She shook her head. “Look, I don’t know why you’re carrying this much guilt. You know I think you’re having some kind of mental episode when you talk about alien planets. But I can see the guilt is real. No matter what actually happened, I know to you it feels like you got an entire planet full of people killed. But let me ask you, did you pull the trigger?”

“No, but—”

“Did you tell any of them to do it? Did you trick them into killing themselves? Did you rig things so that was the only way forward they saw, or did you make them think something different would happen?”

“No – no, I tried to tell them, I tried – but I could have done something! I have powers! I could have – I could—”

“I don’t know much about this situation, but it sounds to me like something you didn’t have nearly as much control over as you think you did, or maybe as you wish you did. Maybe you want to believe you could have saved them because you’re afraid for this planet, and if you could have saved them but you messed up and you didn’t, then maybe you could save us from ourselves and not mess it up. I don’t know. But it sounds to me like it wasn’t really your fault. I think you got a bum rap, is what I think. Like that woman who got charged with vehicular homicide because her son was killed in a hit-and-run while she was trying to cross the street. Maybe she shouldn’t have been jaywalking, but the crosswalk was half a mile away and the guy driving the car, he was a drunk driver. He was the one who killed her son, not her, but the system decided to blame her because it’s always gonna blame a mother for whatever happens to her kids and especially if she’s black. But it wasn’t her fault. And this whatever it is. I don’t think it was yours.”

“I want another drink,” he said stubbornly.

“Well, you gotta pay your tab, and if they threw out my cider while I was talking with you, then you owe me another one,” Lailah said. “But I think you should do beer or wine at this point, or you’re gonna be puking in my car when I take you home.”

She helped him back to his feet. “I wanna talk to you about the DC trip,” she said. “Tomorrow. We’ve got logistics to work out. I don’t want you driving.”

“I can drive,” John complained. “I mean, not now. ‘Cause I’m drunk now.” He laughed. “That’s the rule, right? You get hammered, you don’t drive. But I can drive. When I’m not drunk.”

“Yeah, but you drive like shit, so I am not letting you behind the wheel. Which makes things complicated if we’re getting a rental, because my credit cards are all maxed out.”

“And mine aren’t?”

“Well, I hope like hell that they’re not, because you don’t have a car and mine’s way too crap to drive to DC. But we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” She guided him to the bar, where, miracle of miracles, her cider still stood. “Come on. Let’s get a booth. I want a crab pretzel.”

“Only if. Only if I can have nachos.” He put far more import into his tone than the subject of nachos really deserved.

“Yeah, sure. You’re buying, right? So you can have whatever you want.”