LANDSCAPE

The landscape shifts and we barely notice.

Breathe in.

Move your arm down to pick up your coffee mug, bring it to your lips. Shift. Something has changed. Pan back, take a snapshot. The scene is different than it was just one second ago.

Breathe out.

Replace the coffee mug on the desk. Now there’s coffee in your belly, some of it probably still sliding down your throat. The mug is no longer in the same place from which you picked it up. Shift. It’s different. You’ve impacted your surroundings; you’ve impacted yourself. The way you perceive things and, in turn, the way people perceive you from this point on has changed, and will never be exactly the same again.

This is all it takes to change the world.

Time doesn’t change the landscape, people do. The best indicator of this is not a clock, whose hands just go around and around, impacting nothing; the best indicator is your perception.

Take my wife, for example. She goes to work in the morning. Very, very early in the morning. Roughly 5 a.m. She works weekends, too, but doesn’t have to be up until 6 a.m. then. When she comes home each night, at about 5 p.m., her face tells the whole story. Written in every line of her skin, every shift of her body, every word from her mouth, I know exactly what she’s done all day. It’s always terribly boring, but I never tell her this. She enjoys her job, and is under the impression that it’s rather important.

These changes in her are not subtle; they are the furthest thing from subtle, but she perceives nothing. When she looks in the mirror, her landscape is unchanged. She might be in a different mood than yesterday, the last time she looked into the mirror, but otherwise, she thinks everything is the same. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that even her bone structure is changing. She no longer appears to be my wife at all. She’s almost an entirely new woman every day. But I don’t let on. I just smile, make us dinner, pour some wine, and stare across the table at a stranger.

Now, take my daughter. Recently, she began piercing every bit of flesh on her body that she could get a hold of. It started out how other teenagers’ piercings start out: ear, nose, belly button, maybe tongue. But it progressed from there, and now when she comes home from school, all I see is a tall strip of metal walking through the door, mechanically reaching into the cupboards, fishing out food. At about the same time I started getting a new wife each day, my daughter stopped going to the regular food cupboards. Hers is no longer human food, but is instead oil, grease, and any other kind of lubricant she can find in the garage. She dumps it into her head, rubs it all over her body, between cogs, along hydraulic rods. Anywhere and everywhere it can be used.

My daughter glistens.

She squeaks and pops while sitting at the kitchen table, headphones on, doing her homework, her pencil gripped between two chrome pincer-type claws. She scribbles endlessly, then finally packs up her work, floats by me on some sort of hover-suspension system, gives me a quick, cold-steel kiss and drifts up the stairs to bed.

I don’t know what she sees when she looks in the mirror. We’re unable to communicate now; I am not from her country, and she is no longer from mine.

Our pets have disappeared. What used to be our cat slithered on its belly out the front door one day when I’d left it open bringing groceries in. It left some kind of snail trail that I’ve not been able to clean from the floor tiles to this day. What used to be our dog crumpled up into a ball of thick, crinkled cardboard and rolled itself into a dark corner. It stayed that way for several days before I got the nerve to pick it up and toss it in the recycling bin.

I think we had a bird, too, but the last I saw of it, it had melted into a puddle of bright primary colors in its cage. I tipped its remains into a plastic bag and put it at the curb.

The garbage men wouldn’t touch it. It stayed out there for two weeks before a little boy picked it up and wandered away with it. He was smiling as he stroked the bag of goo in his hands, and though I’m pretty sure I miss the bird, I’m glad someone found something worth saving in it.

Perhaps something I was just no longer capable of seeing.

My chameleon wife and robot daughter went out together tonight. Bone structures shifting under various skins; whirligigs spinning, pincer-claws clacking. I think they went to see a movie.

My landscape seems to change faster when they’re out of the house.

They came home from the movie, beeped and shifted lazily past me, clucking and morphing—movements and sounds I cannot understand. When my wife lost the power of coherent speech, I don’t know. But all that emanates from her mouth now are clipped bursts of guttural barks.

Someone stole the refrigerator today. Don’t ask me how, but it’s gone. And don’t ask me when, because I’ve been home all day. There’re only dust bunnies and dead insects left to indicate where it once stood.

I tried to explain to my wife and daughter that the fridge had disappeared, but I couldn’t make either of them understand. I gave up, leaving them confused, babbling and squawking to one another in the hallway.

The job I used to go to sent me home the other day. Knitted eyebrows and lots of curious stares from my coworkers, so I guess I did something wrong. Maybe I was doing a different job from the one I was hired to do. Could be that the square I was trying to put into the circle wouldn’t fit. Another shift, blurring my perception. I’m usually quite good at recognizing when things change and can adapt pretty quickly, but it seems as though this one escaped my notice.

I packed up my things in a box, went outside and quietly waited for the bus. No one at the bus shelter looked in my direction.

One piece of furniture disappears every day now. The pictures on the walls stay, the carpet is still here, there’s no change in the ceiling—hanging plants, light fixtures, etc.—but the things that we all use on a daily basis, the things that support us when we sit down to speak to each other, are vanishing steadily.

From what I can make out when my family comes home, they blame me. There’s certainly plenty of harsh, quick sounds coming from them, and their respective limbs point to the places where the couch, the La-Z-Boy, and the kitchen table and chairs used to be. I try explaining that I don’t know what’s going on, either. I write it with pen and paper, shove it under their noses. I think they try to understand the words, but there’s no recognition in their eyes.

That’s when I wonder for the first time what I might look like to them.

The car my wife drives looks like some kind of demented metal pelican. I don’t know how on earth she controls it, or how she steels herself to even get in the hideous thing. When my wife pulls into the driveway and turns the pelican off, it shudders obscenely, flops to the concrete, deflated.

I sit on a milk crate in the middle of the near-empty living room. Indentations marking where the furniture used to be are like mirages to me, pockets of unreality that will reform and fill in if I just get something, maybe water, into my system. Good thing the tap still works.

I get up from the milk crate, walk into the kitchen, turn my head as the door opens and my wife comes in. Her face seems to be melting, the colors of her makeup shifting around on her face. She drops her purse on the ground, moves toward me. I freeze, drop the glass I’ve removed from the cupboard. It smashes on the floor, sending shards everywhere. My wife doesn’t notice, just comes closer, her face a churning mash of mascara, rouge, lipstick, and cover-up. I glance down quickly at her body. Her clothes seem to be crawling all over her, different sections of her outfit migrating from her arms to her chest to her legs to her stomach and back over to her arms again. A Ferris wheel of fabric.

Her voice takes on some semblance of human speech as her everywoman’s face fills my vision. Just beneath the abstract cluckings and bursts of deep-throated belches, I hear something that sounds like the human word “love.” Then she falls into my arms and smears herself all over my body in one smooth, sudden motion.

My daughter comes through the door, but doesn’t even make it fully over the threshold before she completely comes apart, claws and whirligigs and steel rods and metal pins clattering to the floor. In pieces, she says nothing. The section of stainless, blackened metal that used to be her head does not say “love,” does not say anything at all, but just stares at the ceiling, silent.

I am unsure what to make of this, so believing very strongly that the landscape can be controlled, I get another glass from the cupboard, run the tap, fill it with water, turn the tap off, and make my way through the debris back to the living room.

I sit on my milk crate again. The last of the furniture—and even some of the pictures and light fixtures—disappeared while I was in the kitchen.

I close my eyes and drink the water in long, smooth gulps, leaving traces of my wife’s makeup around the edge of the glass.

Inside me, I feel a shift like an entire continent being cleaved down its middle, fault lines giving way, massive internal eruptions peppering my organs. I puff out, bulk up, feel my soul sharpened by clarity, infused with the purest sunlight. I glow. I am fucking supernova.

I open my eyes.

The room is almost the same as it was before, except that the indentations left by the missing furniture are fading, the carpet filling out again, erasing any trace that the couch and the La-Z-Boy were ever there at all.

I stand up, move toward the kitchen, step through my daughter’s debris, then into a glop of my wife’s sad remains, put the glass in the sink. I reach down, pick up one of my daughter’s lynch pins, as well as one of her long, hydraulic leg rods. Put them in my pants pocket.

I rub my wife’s makeup deeper into my skin, hoping to hear her speak again in her own voice. The voice I fell in love with fifteen years ago.

But like I said before, time doesn’t change the landscape, people do. So it’s up to me.

I step toward the front door, look out at the shuddering metal pelican in the driveway, and wonder if I have the courage to start it up and just drive away, leave all this behind, start fresh.

Outside in the sunshine, standing in my driveway, the heat of the day beating on my back, I struggle with the lock on the bizarre contraption. Several minutes later, something clicks, and a portion of the pelican slides to the side. Inside are alien controls, flashing lights, and queerly shaped panels of buttons.

Panic rises inside my chest, creates a full body shiver that crawls over my scalp. But I steady it with the thought of the water gurgling in my belly, streaming through my system, the pure, cleansing water of insight, and the heat of the sun. I close my eyes to keep the panic at bay.

When I open them again, I do not recognize the hands at the ends of my arms. They are broader, full of strength, the fingers thicker, the knuckles bigger, and the arms they’re attached to longer and somehow more mine than before.

I have no idea who I am or what I look like, but I know I can control this machine.

I slip inside the pelican, push the strange buttons on one of the nearest panels in a sequence I have no way of knowing, but that starts the engine with a low, meaty growl.

The metal pelican inhales, its life pulsing around me. I back out of the driveway, try to remember the way my landscape used to look, and tear off down the road.

My wife and daughter with me, whispering to each other in their alien languages.

Wondering at my courage.