It Starts With Teeth

The test pilot says, almost pleading, “What should my teeth look like?”

And the doctor (because that’s what the test pilot calls him with a seriousness like a careful landing) leans over and offers this test, asking him with breath stinking of deepwater brine and rotting kelp, “What would make you happy?”

The pilot thinks of the darting creatures he saw during that abyssal dive when he met the doctor. 

He thinks of the strange, lightbulb flashes of gossamer bioluminescence that outlined great passing forms in the dark, almost unseen, those living mountains swimming closer and then vanishing in a swirl of light like firefly snow as if their curiosity had faded, or they were just too full to eat anything more. 

The test pilot says without hesitation—needles. 

The doctor nods approvingly, preparing to tease apart the pilot’s gums—the flat and old are uprooted, the sharp and new planted. The doctor doesn’t need tools; his own bony fingers are sharp enough. 

There is exploding pain but there is also a rushing sound like the final flood that fills the bedroom and the house that the test pilot thought he would, one day, share with someone special. He never met anyone who could love him, anyone who could linger for more than a few hours, save for the doctor—the almost-man, the more-than-man—who takes up the space on the bed that no one had ever shared with the pilot before. 

And this wonderful, wall-splitting sound is the promise cascading from the doctor’s widening mouth and into the pilot’s waiting ear: you will see your reflection, in a mirror, in the celestial ice when you are millions of miles away from Earth on that moon, and you will know who you are, and you will not scream for once. 

* * *

The test pilot doesn’t have a name. 

His records are gone. 

Just like his nose and lips, fingers and toes. 

* * *

After, much later, the test pilot was on national television in the capsule that topped the rocket, giving his tour of the interstellar vessel, weightless and reciting the practiced points about oxygen and freeze-dried ice creams for watching families and obedient school children, nothing more but a public relations sendoff before departing Earth orbit for the years-long mission to Europa. 

At the last moment he took off his helmet to say goodbye to everyone on Earth, and to show off his new teeth, new saucer-plate eyes, new quivering gills, everything he had kept hidden beneath that spacesuit. “I hope you all find love one day too,” he said to the watching world, earnestly, dribbling saliva. NASA cut the transmission but enough people saw, and so TVs were thrown out second-story windows, children screamed for several days in a row, and parents sat sleepless and headachy on their beds as they searched for unblinking eyes in the dark, watching for the terror of imagined clawed shapes rising from the laundry hamper, and they shouted at the ones they love when the sun finally woke, simply because they remembered what it was like to dream of monster shadows crouching in the corner.

There were investigations, closed-door reassurances that this wasn’t an experiment gone wrong (he did what he did without us knowing; he never smiled, never took off his sunglasses!), then the CIA destroyed the evidence of his existence: speed records broken in experimental planes, military medals, West Point graduate, football trophies, birth certificate.

* * *

Before he became a fish, he was tall, beautiful, and blonde. 

But his eyes prevented him from not only being held but also, unfortunately, from becoming the American face of the Space Race. 

Because his eyes were as perfectly blue and vacant as the endless sky. Or the open ocean. 

When the news had been announced that he hadn’t been selected to travel to Earth’s moon as part of the Apollo program, his superiors in D.C. called him into a meeting room, looking to shake his hand, aiming to reassure him that there would be other missions, other moons, but when the test pilot came in and sat down, they all just stared, cigarettes burning. 

One of the men across the table had served on an aircraft carrier when he was younger and in that moment when his gaze met the test pilot’s, the man remembered what it was like to stand on the rolling flight deck and look out across that vastness of choppy, foaming salt and to carry that overwhelming fear that, if he fell and hit the water 200 feet below, first he would break his legs, because the water was harder than concrete at that height, but also there was a significant chance that nothing would rise up and eat him—no shark or unnamed thing with serrated teeth or grasping tentacle would tear him apart while he thrashed to stay afloat, because the middle of the Atlantic could be honestly lifeless. 

Instead, he would tire as the ship left him behind, and then he would silently sink, down, down into the vast dark below, and his bones would lie undisturbed on the muck of the sea floor, until Judgment Day, until the sun expanded and engulfed the world and boiled the seas and turned everything to ash. It made the man feel lonely, made him want to rush home and hug his children and quit smoking, and he knew the test pilot must feel terribly lonely too, floating like a castaway through his days, but he didn’t care enough to risk touching him.

The silence went on for an awful long time until the test pilot coughed politely. The test pilot was used to this kind of treatment. He knew what they saw. He had seen it too. He was a practical man who understood the intricacies of aerodynamics and air-fuel ratios and also that his eyes swallowed smiles and nods and questions like “How was your day?” like downed fighter planes because, for a while, he had practiced smiling in the mirror and even his own smiles were not safe from disappearing without a trace.  

 For years, he had tried to kiss people in parked cars to be normal. But when they saw the nothingness, they always edged away and clung to seatbelts like they were afraid of heights. He had tried to sit with squadmates at the bar and share a drink, but when he laughed like everyone did at the jokes he sounded like a rifle shot in a frigid, wingless forest and no one laughed with him. When he walked on the sidewalk to the grocery store people gave him a wide berth like they’d just seen a sinkhole open up and devour a car. 

He hated himself, felt so much shame, even though he had no control over his own strangeness, so when he flew, when he slipped into a cockpit, he found it easier to abandon his mortal frame behind, because he had some kind of control finally, and because he could become a part of the lovely machine. 

Once he was in a cockpit, he was no longer hampered by the fear of bleakness, and he was no longer made of sinew and lungs and tired muscles. Yes, it was true that his fingers moved, his eyes saw, that his body still controlled the fighter jet, but in his heart, he had also become aircraft-grade aluminum, scalding afterburners, accurate machine guns, proud tail fin. 

He was high-g turns to avoid incoming missiles. He was the trigger pulled. He was the split-second evasive maneuver before slamming into a mountain range. His blood barely stirred when he flew the X-1 and broke the sound barrier for the first time in history. He felt even further from human thinking when he flew, and it terrified and satisfied him in ways that were impossible to keep upright, because when he flew, he understood he was only wearing skin, only wearing hair and eyes and the perfect square jaw like a uniform, a costume. Whatever he was on the outside, it only hid whatever he was on the inside. 

“What we have for you is a different assignment: a delicate, difficult task, one that won’t receive, well ... as much publicity as the Apollo project, because it will take years of interstellar travel to accomplish,” said the man at the table who was terrified of the unknowable ocean. He didn’t look in the test pilot’s direction as he spoke about the mission. 

Europa. One of Jupiter’s icy moons.

The test pilot was going to drill through the miles of surface ice to sample the depthless sea below, for alien life, and they chose him because he could handle the solitude, because he was resilient, a war hero. And because he didn’t have a family. And he was a good pilot who didn’t, necessarily, have to make it back alive (though they didn’t tell him this part).

The test pilot was satisfied, and agreed to the mission, because in his head at least he would become a living part of the largest rocket ever assembled. 

But he would need additional isolation training, because the years of darkness would be trying, so his superiors placed him in a bathyscaphe and dropped him into the living void of the deep Pacific.  

* * *

“You’re going to miss the sun,” the sailors on board the research vessel joked, and the test pilot only shrugged. Because he was incapable of joking, but also because he was deeply nervous about what he might see in the water. 

He stood at the edge of the deck and peered down into the frothing blue, hands clinging to the railing on their own volition, a shaking, nauseating mutiny already brewing in his blood, and he knew then that down there he would see, finally, a great emptiness that was kin to the one inside of him. 

Down he would go in the bathyscape, and he would look out the tiny window and there would be only the murky fathoms, devoid of the concept of brightness, of squirming life, just like him, and he wondered if the endless absence of light down there might recognize the emptiness within him like a long lost sibling, and it would reach through the glass and steel and envelop him with an imploding embrace, and he would never become the machine he was supposed to be, never join the rocket of his body-dreams. 

But he had his orders, and he was used to denying himself, so down he went.

 The sailors tried to maintain contact when they dropped him into the sea, but the tele-chord snapped shortly thereafter. 

After a few hours he came back to the surface. 

When the crew cracked the bathyscaphe open, the test pilot was pale and shaking, but he reached out to the sailors and they froze as if they were being gripped by a dripping and curious cephalopod thing, because he gently pressed their knuckles, their shoulders, their necks, like a child waking in the middle of the night, touching and touching to see if any of this is real or are we still dreaming? 

Then he asked for water and drank it down as if he’d always been thirsty, and once he was finished he sat there on deck, looking solemn, contemplative, but at peace with his shoulders relaxed and head bent as if he might be praying (he never did that), as if he were grateful for the first time in his life, and the pilot opened his mouth, as if to speak to the crew again, as if to drink down the sky, as if to receive the Eucharist, as if to swallow something private meant to be shared behind closed doors, and he ended up just closing his mouth and nodding to them all, slowly, which is the closest the test pilot ever came with his human body to ever saying thank you to another person. 

When they asked what he saw down there he only kept saying softly that he’d seen life. 

He had been wrong. They said it would be death down there, but instead it was beautiful. There were lights, shadows too that moved impossibly as if they had been conceived during a fever, but also bursts of light that pulsed, almost privately, like a message he had been waiting years to hear—it was like watching your own heartbeat try to sing a song you had forgotten and missed terribly, like seeing that there was life where life was thought to have never existed. 

“It’s not empty,” he said, tasting the sweet fact, smacking his lips. 

Another man stepped out of the bathyscaphe.

He looked similar. Like every other handsome test pilot. 

But hadn’t the pilot gone into the cramped vessel alone? There was only enough room for one in there.

The test pilot reminded the crew that this was the doctor, the one assigned to watch over his vitals. He patted the doctor on the shoulder, leering and lingering a little. The doctor greeted each crewmember with a firm handshake, and every single one of them, later on when they were safely onshore and drinking hard, swore that the doctor’s touch felt slick and cold like a flatfish pulled from the silt by its tail. 

The doctor smelled of low tide, and he walked crookedly as if he’d only recently sprouted legs and that was all they would say about the matter, all they would consider, because each crewmember still had to go back out there—we have bills and mouths to feed—and at night they were plagued by nightmares of being pulled down into the crushing, unlit fathoms. After meeting the doctor they felt like the Pacific had eyes only for them, like the way sharks break the surface to rub their bare bellies against the hull and stare up at the sky, taunting the deckhands with the impotent hooks, and the waves they swore stilled when they walked about on deck, wind dying too, like the quiet before the violent strike, a warning saying, don’t do anything to ruin this chance for love. So they said nothing; they just went back to work. 

* * *

The test pilot started with his teeth because he never smiled anyway and he could hide them from NASA. 

But for the doctor he smiles now, bloody and stabbing with his new anglerfish teeth. Because the doctor knows him for what he is on the inside. 

The test pilot is still on his bed in his suburban home, and the doctor brushes back the pilot’s blonde hair tenderly, and he says that his hair is like sunlight, and where he comes from, sunlight is not a dream or a nightmare or even an idea—it simply does not exist. The sun could vanish tomorrow, the world could die and freeze in the always night, and no one down there on the sea floor would ever know and they would live on, because they made their own light, thank you very much. But it is nice, the doctor says, touching the pilot’s hair, to feel so much warmth, like a little gift. “Just for me,” he says.

The change will be sudden, the doctor reminds. 

When you arrive on that moon, you will drill, and then you will squirm down into that foreign sea, and he unbuttons the test pilot’s jeans, and he presses gently on the pilot’s stomach, because when you travel down into that vastness beneath the ice, you will find a great sliding form that has been swimming in slow circles since the first spark kissed the black, and you will use your new teeth to latch onto Her body, right here (the doctor presses again, just above the pilot’s belly button), and you will fade and melt and squirm into Her until you are nothing but those beautiful blue eyes, two dots of sky-color staring out from the arsenic-white underside of Her, and when it pains you, when your bones liquify to travel through Her bloodstream, absorbed and providing nourishment, remember the eggs that will drop and burn like private suns for you both. 

Remember the light you will both make. 

The pilot laughs, happy for once. It echoes in this suburban castle like machine gun fire. He quiets, awaiting judgement, because he is still (partially) the military man and outbursts are a rarity, but the doctor only reassures and continues with his work. Next comes the fingers sown together, optic nerves severed, gills sliced open into his neck. Everything can be hidden underneath a space suit. The doctor doesn’t smile, yet. He is gentle, because the pilot has never felt seen before, not until he slipped 20,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific. 

The pilot is not one to talk much but he does so now while the doctor works and ruins the bedsheets. He confides that he is being jettisoned into the dark of space because he wants to be the best (whatever that means), because the government sees him as living machinery, which he is, and because, he says, choking a little, he has never known what he truly wants beyond flying, beyond abandoning his shallow humanity. 

“That’s a lie,” the doctor says.

The test pilot looks at him as if he might get bitten in half. But the doctor says kindly, “You are going up there, to the stars, because you want to swim, and be held, forever, remember?”

* * *

As the test pilot transforms, becoming the fish he was always born to be, pain overwhelms, and he cries.

This was something he has never done before. 

“Soft men get eaten alive,” his father had often said, grinning like the constantly hungry, and had his eyes always been so vacant too? The pilot couldn’t remember, had forced himself to never remember. None of the test pilot’s squadmates would ever admit to weeping like that for fear of ridicule, of being devoured piece by piece by other men in bars and back alleys. But more importantly it was an action that the test pilot simply couldn’t do properly. It was as strange to him as running on all fours. 

But he isn’t ashamed for once about his own body. 

He is in love with his new form, his true form.

He can’t remember the last time he wasn’t tethered by shame. He will become Her, greater than himself, melting into purpose, into love driven to swim and swim, and he is pleased, which is a feeling as unfamiliar as being comfortable in his own skin.

He is teeth. He is fin. He is the bioluminescent lure.

This is what he was always supposed to be, was always deep down, swimming through the abyss of his own mind, patiently waiting like all the deep-sea things for that chance to swallow until near-bursting, to let fly that splashy surge of fin into the oxygen-stripped gloom, to one day be absorbed and to give rise to burning suns that bless the midnight desert-sea locked beneath the ice. 

He was never meant to be human, never meant to live on this world, and now he has this chance to build a family and be loved, and in between sobs, he looks at the doctor and he finally says it. 

“Thank you.”   

The doctor, delicately, with a bony tongue the color of fish belly, dabs and tastes the salt on the pilot’s cheeks and chin, and then, for reassurance, to show him he is family now, even when he leaves this world for good and starts anew, spreading the ancient abyssal star species across the galaxy, the doctor smiles, deeply like the maw at the bottom of this reality. 

There are no teeth in this mouth because he has given them all to the pilot, because life is centered around gifts to the ones you love. There is only a darkness in that gullet like the galactic edge, a crushing chill that is comforting to the ones that have needle teeth, to the test pilot that knows with sincere depth as he hurtles through the void that he will, finally, be okay.