On the Sudden Appearance of Many Large Invisible Floating Spikes

Their Sudden Appearance

They appeared without warning in our bedrooms and living rooms and shopping malls and fields and lakes and finished basements and saunas and everywhere else.

Those first hours took a bloody toll. Innocent people suffered injury or death. A young couple, engaged in lovemaking, rolled off the bed and landed on one, which impaled them both. A child stood gasping, interrupted in his sprint to the kitchen. On the highways: incidents and accidents. Spikes through front windshields. Spikes slashing tires. Drivers and passengers produced shocked, mortal hiccups as they felt their guts pierced, or their throats, or their fleshy splayed thighs.

For so many: an awful death.

But for so many others, for those not moving so quickly, for we sedentary lot: something else.

For example: Dad wanted to re-fill his coffee mug from the French press on the dining room table, and, in reaching, pricked his finger on nothing but air. He recoiled. He reached again. The black coffee wobbled as a light breeze, the barest draft, caused the French press to shiver, rocking on its uneven metal feet. Again, in reaching, his finger encountered something violent in the air. He reached with both hands. He felt the floating tip. He explored the perfect, tapering cone. The object was two feet long. The point quite sharp. A bead of blood decorated his finger. He sucked it clean and a new bead replaced the old one, as though the finger were dispensing these beads, thinking he wanted more.

He rose to call for us and, two steps across the living room, a sharp pain in his side caused him to jolt still. Again, he felt for it. He stroked its conical length; he anticipated its sharpness as his tracing fingers approached the tip. He shouted for us, yelling, “Blake! Lucille!” He told us to stay put. To stand still. “Don’t move,” he yelled. And then, like any good authority, he followed his own advice. He stood paralyzed in the living room, his black shape reflected in the television’s dead screen, his arms out, his legs crooked, looking like a stored puppet.

 

Slowly Now

Moderate injuries became fatal because we could not rush anyone to the hospital. No ambulances could blare through the streets. No panicked drivers could shout, “We’re almost there. Almost there.” No one could rush anywhere. Mere moments after the spikes appeared, no one was driving a car. Cars were much too fast. No one was running either. Running was much too fast. Even a brisk walk was perilous.

Either you knew, or you were dead.

Across the street from our house—by then, Blake and I had joined Dad in the living room—we saw Ariadne Peabody slumped against the spike that had opened her bowels. A sloppy stump of severed intestine tickled the pavement. Her hands moved along either side of the wound, around the invisible spike that peered like a spyglass into her innards, pressing and releasing. She appeared to be massaging herself. It reminded us of how we clutch our head when we bruise it. She wriggled and shimmied, her mouth working as though she would miss having lips and wants to get the most out of this last moment. When she flopped free from the spike, we felt grateful that the ordeal was over.

There was no blood left on the spike. It all dribbled off, leaving nothing to indicate where it was. Nothing can stick to them. In the following weeks, some fantastic statements would be made regarding the spikes and their relationship to the friction coefficient, insofar as they appeared not to have one.

Behind us, Mom came downstairs. We heard the steps creaking. There were a long few seconds between each creak. We heard her squeal. We turned from the window. “Mom,” Blake called.

“I’m fine,” answered Mom. “I just brushed one of those…”

“Oh,” said Dad.

“They appear,” said Mom, the next stair hissing with her weight, “to be giant floating invisible spikes.”

“Yes,” said Dad.

“I think you’re right,” I said.

We watched the wall bordering the stairwell for over a minute, waiting for her hand to appear on the little brown nub of banister that extends into the home’s foyer, where the small stained-glass window set into the top of the front door casts a colorful formless shadow on the black rubber mat we leave our shoes on when it rains. When we saw her, we began to move toward her. But she, seeing us move, said, “No, stay.”

We watched her come to us, moving with great care through the open space.

 

The Government Scientists

Scientists from the government addressed the public on television. The press conference was scheduled to begin at 10:30 but didn’t start until 11:15. “We apologize for the delay,” said the press secretary, once they got going. “We thought we’d set up quicker. But we had to move very slowly.”

“I won’t speak for too long,” he said. “But the first thing I’d like to say is that, to our knowledge, what has occurred does not constitute an attack by a foreign power. As far as we can tell, what has happened here has happened everywhere.”

Then he spoke for another ten minutes about what the President was doing and how hard the President was working “to address the situation.”

When he was done, the scientists spoke.

Unlike the Press Secretary, they did not beat around the bush. They did not say phrases like “what has happened” and “what occurred” and “what is happening” and “what is going on here” and “the situation.” Instead, they told it like it was. “Large invisible floating spikes,” they said. They said it over and over again. It was reassuring to hear them say it—here were our finest minds, and they were corroborating the conclusions we had already come to. “We are all surrounded by large floating invisible spikes,” they said, and we, watching, nodded, the four of us—Mom and Dad and Blake and me—nodding as if to say, “Yes, we thought that that was what was going on.”

 

Chores

Mom washed dishes. She stood at the kitchen sink with her hip cocked left. Perhaps a spike to her right forced her to stand like that, perhaps it was simply what was comfortable. The water splattered in the sink, flecked the sink walls, ricocheted off a plate and onto a batter-encrusted whisk that Blake had licked—slipping his tongue between the net of metal threads, slicking wet dough with saliva—before handing it over for cleaning.

“Can you start the laundry?” Mom asked Dad.

Blake and I watched him set down his book, stand, and move from the room. We heard his weight slithering from step-to-step up the staircase and oozing along the upper hall. After five minutes, he reappeared with the laundry basket from the bathroom. He traversed the living room, moving as though the air were a thick, sticky substance. A spike prodded his right shoulder, its point puckering the fabric of his shirt. “Oh,” he said. He stepped to the right. Another spike pricked him in the calf. The exposed skin—he was wearing shorts, the heat demanded it—showed a bit of blood. “Hm,” he said. He shifted left. The path cleared. Fifteen minutes later, he was sitting again, reading.

Mom transferred a soiled plate to the sink’s sudsy brimming left basin. A moment later, her hand searched for it in the water. She pulled it out. “This needs to soak longer,” she said to no one, though we all heard her.

The next morning, Dad went grocery shopping.

“It might take a while,” he said.

He returned after nearly seven hours, caked in sweat and with spoiled steaks. “Meat was a mistake,” he admitted. “But everything else should be good.”

 

Properties of the Spikes: I

The spikes never remain in place for long. They move. But they only move after you move away, when you won’t notice it. They do not move when you touch them. When you touch them, they are static ornaments hanging in the air. As long as you are next to one, it will stay there. Later, though, it will be gone. It will be somewhere else. You can never take it for granted that there is or isn’t one in any given location. They wait for us to go upstairs or to the living room or to step outside and breath the muggy summer air. Then they shift. We cannot know if they fly through the air like little planes or if they wink out of existence in one location and wink back in another. We do not know if one spike that prods us in the forehead as we move to sit on the toilet is the same spike that nicked our ear as we swept beneath the kitchen table two hours earlier.

 

Our Bodies

At first, unable to run or bike or exercise, we gained weight. We wobbled back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, carrying bowls of salsa and bags of chips, packets of trail mix, real fruit popsicles that we quickly learned not to lick while walking, peanut butter and banana sandwiches, jello cups, leftover ginger chicken, cherry tomatoes in a blue-glazed ceramic bowl, garlic-infused hummus and bags of chips. “We need to eat less,” we told one another. So we did. Our bodies became lean. Our muscles became ropey: permanently tensed in anticipation, primed for reaction. Moving with intention, we brought glasses of water to our lips or folded laundry. Working from home, on her laptop, Mom’s fingers flickered across the keys and their quickness startled us: an unwanted reminder of how we used to move. We all suffered anxious indigestion. We could no longer run but our food sprinted through our bodies and came spitting out our bottoms. Sometimes, our intuition anticipated a spike correctly and we stuttered to a halt. Then we reached out and touched, as we knew we would, that evil point. We felt a deep appreciation for our bodies, for their ability to adapt faster than our minds. They were already becoming accustomed to our newly jagged reality while we were still struggling with fear and paranoia. And we were impatient. The impatience was the worst. We wanted to run, jump, sprint, and go. We wanted a two-minute task to take two minutes again. Our impatience was like the back of new shoe, not yet broken in, rubbing against our heel, wearing away at us until it drew blood, and the blood was our exhausted patience and we would yell or shout or argue because what we wanted to do was move, really move, but we could not. After a while, we learned new ways to exercise. We held static positions. We lifted weights in slow motion. We sat on the edge of a wooden chair, tensing various muscle groups.

 

Intimacy

Mom shifts around Dad, slipping slowly. Dad makes little movements inside of Mom, exploring her in millimeters. No one indulges in a furious make-out. There is no vigor anywhere, for who can thrust without fear. Entwined, genitals twitch. Certain liquids still know how to burst.

 

Properties of the Spikes: II

Each spike is truly invisible. The government scientists study the spikes at length. They measure the spikes they encounter and conclude that every spike is one foot and ten inches long. The tip of each spike is incredibly sharp. At its base, each spike is a flat circle with a diameter of five inches. There is no kind of light under which the spikes appear. The spikes have no smell. If Blake put his tongue against one—and he has—he wouldn’t taste anything (and he didn’t). Nothing can stick to them. Not molasses. Not a sticker. They are so smooth. In fact, even saying that they are smooth is doing a disservice to their smoothness. Everything they touch falls away.

 

New Friends

We brought hummus, chips, margarita mix, and vodka to the neighbor’s house. We crept across our yard and into theirs.

“Come on in,” said Allen, holding the door open. “There’s one right in the middle of the entry-hall,” he said. “So, watch out.”

“We brought a snack and drinks,” said Dad.

“I’ll take the drink to the kitchen,” said Allen. “You take the snack to the living room. Diane is there.”

In the living room, we found Diane making a slow orbit of the coffee table, holding a dustpan and brush and clearing flecks of their breakfast off the top.

“Get comfortable,” she said, “I’m just cleaning up. Please sit. Watch out for that chair though, there was one there earlier.”

“It’s gone now,” said Mom, sitting.

“There’s one here,” I said, recoiling from the couch’s left side.

“Oh, sorry,” said Diane.

“Not your fault,” I said.

“I know,” said Diane. “But somehow I always feel responsible.”

Diane asked me how my classes were going. School had moved entirely online. The teachers taught over video conference calls and assigned homework over email. “Every test is open book,” I said, “so that isn’t so bad.”

“Do you miss your friends?” asked Diane.

“I do,” I said. I said this evenly, with a little nod, in the way in which one might say that they miss one’s grandparents or strange aunt—people that one loves, in a way, but does not like. But my family knows that I weep with the force of missing them. That I go to my room, clamber under my covers, and shake with sadness. Once, when I got into bed, I squealed because I found a spike there beside me, like an insect that had crawled in, and the only way for me to lie there crying was with my body contorted around it.

“I miss my friends too,” said Diane.

Her hand reached out, slow. The hand of a blind woman in a film, feeling for something just out of frame. I thought that she was going to try to take my hand. She grasped a chip. She dipped the chip in the hummus and returned the hand to her mouth, moving a little quicker on its return journey. Too quick. She started, shouted, and we saw a little red hole on the back of her palm. She moved the hand forward, around, and felt something in the air in front of her. “Spike,” she said, with a little smile. We asked her if she was alright. She nodded. “Allen,” she called, “when you come in can you bring a band-aid and some Neosporin?”

“Certainly,” his answer flew from the kitchen. “Spike?”

“Spike.”

“Not one of the kids, I hope,” he said.

“No, just me,” she answered.

When Allen arrived with the Neosporin, he turned to Mom and Dad and said, “You know, you two are lucky. You got to have this happen before they moved out.” He made a little gesture, with the hand holding his margarita, at Blake and me. “Our son is in Seattle,” he said.

“Oh dear,” Mom said.

“How will you see him?” said Dad.

“I don’t know,” said Allen.

“We're thinking of moving there,” said Diane. “Just to be near him.”

“How will you get there?” asked Blake.

“We’ll walk,” said Diane. “Very slowly.”

Dad whistled.

“All the way to Seattle,” said Mom, as though the distance were unfathomable.

 

A New Method

A new way to commit suicide is to suddenly start running.

 

Our One Great Hope:

Teleportation.

 

Sports

Dad sipped coffee at the window. Beside him: the half-empty French press.

Outside, in the street, a child raced an ant. The ant scuttled at top speed, not knowing what a wonderful competitor it was. The child moved with great care, her whole body tensed, in control at every instant of each step.

Dad’s gaze fell along his nose and into the black liquid in his The Late Show with David Letterman mug. He blew and the liquid rippled against the mug’s far rim. He blew harder. He tried to see if he could get the ripples to touch the top of the mug’s rim without any liquid falling out. He did this for over a minute.

 

Jobs

There is a small army of grocery delivery people. They wear armor on their legs, torsos, arms, and faces. They move slowly back and forth from the supermarket to peoples’ homes. They are paid only fourteen dollars an hour, and they have no benefits, but there is buzz about a strike and we can’t imagine them not securing their demands. They are, after all, absolutely necessary. Where would we be without them? They pull wagons stacked high with groceries and leave the bags by your door. There is no time for them to stay and chat or say hello. They must get to their next house. Their schedule is tight and no place is safe. We leave water-bottles for them on the front porch. Often, we know, they sleep on the side of the road, lying in the cool grass with their lightweight plate armor lying around them like the fragments of a shell from which they have just been born, their skin slick and tacky with sweat.

 

Going Away

Blake told us at dinner that he planned to move out. “I got job online as a content moderator for a social media company,” he said.

“What does that mean?” We asked.

“Mostly looking at swear words,” he said.

“Will that make you happy?” I asked.

“No, obviously,” he said. “I’m working so that I have enough money. Why does anybody work?”

“Mom loves her work,” I said.

“Well, Mom’s had a thirty-year head start on me,” he said. “But I need to move out. It’s time.”

“You’re moving out?” I said. My heart started to sprint. I felt a flush color in my face.

“Where are you going?” Dad asked.

“There’s a room I can rent over on Willoughby Lane,” he said.

“That’s almost five miles away,” protested Mom.

“I’m going to leave at the end of next week,” he said.

With eyes already clotted with tears and my nose already running, I said, “You can’t leave me here alone.”

I got up to run to my room but could not run. My body knew not to run. I moved with great care, but the intensity was evident.

“We’re never going to see you,” said Mom to Blake.

“God damn it,” said Blake. He raised a fist into the air and brought it back down, in a sudden blur, to bash against the kitchen table. We had not seen a movement like that in over a year. It had such power. It was so violent. So wild. It was incredible.

He raised his fist again.

By the staircase, I shouted, “Blake, no!” I put out a hand and recoiled as fast, red on my palm.

 

Properties of the Spikes III

The government scientists held another press conference. They stood behind the podium in a semi-circle behind the lead scientist. We—Mom and Dad and I—wondered what they would have to say.

“We have discovered something about the spikes,” said the lead scientist.

Moving with caution, he brought a glass of water to his lips.

What they discovered — “after extensive field testing,” they told us—was something that we all already knew. Something that either crossed our minds as we lay in bed, or sat on the toilet, or waited for water to boil in the electric kettle. What it was was that somehow the spikes are always at all times facing each and every one of us. Every spike in the world is pointing at every single person at the same instant. We are each, alone, the object of their total attention—and we are all this way all at once. This is why when we encounter them, we never bump into their conical sides or their flat backs. When we encounter them, it is always head-on, point-first.