[The following story is the winner of the first August Van Zorn Prize for the Weird Short Story, awarded to the short story, by an emerging writer, that most faithfully and disturbingly embodies the august tradition of the weird short story as practiced by Edgar Allan Poe and his literary descendants, among them August Van Zorn. "7C," Mr. Roberts's first published fiction, was selected from over six hundred submissions, many of them of considerable literary merit, and disturbing indeed. The editors are grateful to everyone who participated in the contest.]
7C
by JASON ROBERTS

I'M CLUMSY, I guess. Or self-oblivious. I suppose those are two ways of saying the same thing. Point is, damage just shows up on my body. Please, please don't struggle like that. We are exactly where we're going to be.
Thank you.

Damage just appears. My wife Eun-Ha had a routine. I shave in the shower, because the steam is good to soften up the stubble. They have special shower mirrors but they don't really work, so I'm just mostly shaving by touch. Which is not a problem-I know my face-but with all that warm water you don't feel the cuts so much, and anyway the blood gets washed right off. She gets the bathroom after me, and passing in the hallway she cups, would cup, my jaw to turn it for inspection. A slap slowed down to a caress. "You've sprung a leak," she'd tell me, if I had.
Since I was naked but for the towel she would, of course, notice other things going on with my skin. A deep beginning bruise, yellow like a spot of jaundice, just above the elbow. Fresh welts on my knuckles. Once a dark purple mass on the outside of my thigh, marbling and swirling like a weather system, big as a fist and spreading. Accident-class, assault-class bruise. You'd think I'd remember how I got it, but no.
She'd trace the outline, raise an eyebrow. "Yolanda's playing rough," she'd say. That was the running joke, that I had a Yolanda and she had an Orlando.

One morning she says, "How did I miss that one?" She guns out a finger to touch my temple.
I had to step back into the bathroom and angle the mirror toward the window light to sec it clearly. It was slight and faint, just a line of paleness against hale. Once I saw it I could lightly draw my fingers across and feel it, the smallest of interruptions on my skin. It was thin like a blade slip or a paper cut, but those are straight lines. They don't rise from your left eyebrow to arc down your cheek, then swoop back up to terminare below the edge of the mouth, just a tremor's length from where the lips meet and end.
She stepped in close. In addition to her residency she does LifeWing air escorts of critical patients, and this has given her a tendency to snap our assessments. "That's an old scar," she said. "Very old. You were little when you got it, and it healed almost perfectly but it's grown with you. A crescent like that means you probably ran into the edge of something round. I'm going to guess closet rod." I didn't remember.
"Then it must be ancient. From before you can remember. Which is probably a good thing, considering it must have been a pretty traumatic smack. You're lucky it wrapped around your eye instead of putting it Out. Your parents never mentioned it?"
I didn't remember. "Maybe it's not a happy story."
She was pulling my head down, closer to her, closer to the light. "Maybe they're a little bit ashamed. Some moment of neglect. You should tweak them on it. It's probably the oldest thing you have, and it probably always will be. Something you'll take to the grave. So what, did you do some sunbathing? Is that what brought it out?"
That was her tweak on me.

Did you know I'm an astronomer., I'm sorry, we should have gotten to know each other better. Maybe if we weren't next-door neighbors. If you were down the hall, or not on the seventh floor, we might have chatted up in the elevator. But there's something comforting, I guess insulating, about staying strangers with the people right on the other side of your walls. You hear a sound, you don't have to extrapolate based on personal knowledge what it's all about. I'm just realizing this myself.

I'm an astronomer. Which is why my wife joked about sunbathing, although it's no longer true that we stay up all night peering through telescopes. Our instruments hardly ever have eyepieces, just capture fields, and we don't look at the results until we run it through what's called data reduction, which is software designed to throw away everything except what we want to see. Our scopes aren't here, anyway-they're in Utah, and the talk is of Ecuador next. Light pollution keeps chasing them farther out. But the Astronomy department is still in the same building that was built for it in I927, when they were poking refractors through the roof and speculating about canals on Mars. The very few windows are little art deco slits, and having one in your office is a perk of seniority. I will never have one.
My specialty is primordials, the mechanics of how our universe got underway. I always get one response to that: Oh. You mean you study the Big Bang. No, I don't study the Big Bang. Nobody does. The Bang is a point stabbed on a chalkboard. It doesn't really exist, or more accurately it is outside of existence. It doesn't exist in the way the rest of existence does. I'm sorry, I'm not much of a popularizer. Let's just say it's like ballistics-you can trace the path of the bullet, but only to the point where it emerges from the gun. You can't follow it back to the ammo box, or the mind of the bullet maker. I study distant and therefore early objects, because farther out in space is farther back in time-the longer it takes light fo travel to us, the older that light is when it arrives. And the earliest objects are encapsulated in the oldest light.

Good, you're starting to settle down. I'll bet you can't even walk anymore, much less run. Here, I'll let you go. Try with all your might. Go ahead.
Thought so.

Something was up with the scar. Two days later it had stopped looking like a white thread, a flick of fishing line. It was starting to redden and bump out slightly, like a minor burn. By now even Harlan noticed, or rather everyone at work noticed but only Harlan was comfortable pointing it out. We were at lunch, and with his mouth full he reached across the table into the space between us and made a counterclockwise motion with his finger. I didn't understand, so he muffled out, "It's like you were looking into a coffee can."
I would say Harlan is like a brother to me, but I have a brother and it's nothing like that. My brother sells Industrial safety supplies and seems to make a hobby out of indignation. Harlan and I were postdocs together, and we just got along, even when we weren't agreeing on something. Never spoke about it, but eventually it was understood that we were going to, I don't know, live companionable, alongside lives. That kind of friend. We've published some papers together. Eun-Ha always said she liked him well enough, which I think was supposed to mean she respected our closeness without particularly wishing to share it. It's a closeness of like minds, not personalities, though. He's Mutt to my Jeff, nervousquick and smart-mouthed, whereas I have always been shambling and sparsely worded.

Here's the thing about looking at old light. It's like watching a young woman in one of those early silent movies. You see she's beautiful, laughing, so animated and vivid the screen barely contains her, and you think: Dead. Gone to dust, before I was born. I have spent the last three and a half years mapping spectrum variations in high-redshift quasars, the farthest objects we can see. They're also the brightest things we've ever seen, the energy of a thousand galaxies packed into a space as small as our solar system. We're pretty sure that their brilliance comes from a black hole at center, drawing the stars together and swallowing them. And since the light I'm seeing left about ten billion years ago, that means the last star was swallowed long before the Earth was formed. Not even gone to dust or gone to dark matter, just gone. A negation.
What's strange is that quasars don't belong in the beginning. They should be signs of an old universe, one winding down. It takes vast amounts of time for a star to collapse into a black hole, then an even more immensely long time for the black hole to congregate whole galaxies into a mass dense enough to look like a single star. That's where the word comes from-it's short for quasi-star. So why is it when we capture the light from the young universe, they're already there, Every schema has to strain, if not backflip, to account for it. One theory is that everything happened faster back then. Another is that quasars are, somehow, just born old.

So I stop shaving in the shower. The scar is getting a little tender, and I'm going to the mirror first thing anyway. Eun-Ha comes off her shift at the clinic with a handful of the tiny free samples they give to physicians, little tubes of something called Dermex. I let her rub one in.
"It looks angry today," she says. "That's the term, right? An angry scar. I don't know why they call it that."
People are staring outright now. People I know do it pointedly. I'm expected to explain, like a guy hobbling into work on a fresh cast. "I was looking into a coffee can," I say.
I start coming in at night, ostensibly to oversee the new Utah captures but really to stay clear of that look I'm getting. Just until it passes. Harlan and I still eat together most days, but it's my break fast and his dinner. Eun-Ha doesn't complain. Standard procedure for an astronomer's wife, and the residency and the LifeWing flights play enough havoc with her own schedule. The building has a good quiet late at night. It's never entirely empty-at least three or four people rattling around-so you don't get that creeped-out, aloneand-therefore-victim kind of quiet. I caught up on my work. I thought happy, pleasant, healing thoughts. I did not examine my scar, strange, sourceless and spreading, more than a dozen times a night.

Look, I'm really sorry that I had to stick you with that needle. But it didn't hurt a bit, did it? Shake your head, yes or no. What did I tell you? Not a bit.

I went to a specialist. I had a theory it was an allergic reaction or something environmental, some spin on Toxic Building Syndrome. But the dermatologist was adamant. "It's just an old scar," she said. 
"But it's getting worse," I said.
"It's inflamed, not infected. My guess is it's getting worse because you don't stop touching it. Use the Dermex. Try not to scratch or rub."
"I'm not touching it, and it's not an old scar. It appeared out of nowhere. It's getting worse."
She was silent for a moment. She wore glasses with clear plastic frames, as if that would somehow make them disappear. When she spoke again, it was slower, with a quiet earnestness and lots of eye contact. "It's like the little pits in your car windshield," she said. "They're there all along, but you only see them when you get the idea to look for them. This is ... maybe taking a little too firm a hold on your awareness. Are you familiar with the term obsessive-compulsive disorder? I have some pamphlets."
She was right: it's amazing what you notice only when you're keyed into seeing it. As we traded passing nods in the corridors, I saw for the first time that Tim Callien had an unmistakable jag across his throat, and Amy Holzer had a half dozen ragged-looking slivers on the undersides of both forearms. At some point, something had happened to Guresh Subrahamian's right ear.
Those weren't the only small things I was beginning to notice. At my next breakfast-slash-dinner with Hartan, I noticed how he shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and how he could hardly look me in the face. I noticed that when he was paying the bill at the register he reached into his pocket and pulled out not just change, but a little tube of Dermex. The physician-only sample size.

I'm not a jealous man. I'm not a paranoid man. But I was all caught up on my work, and time on your hands late at night turns your head into an echo chamber. By now the crescent on my face had bloomed to the thickness and pinkness of a pencil's eraser tip, with darkening scarlet-tinged edges. I thought of how repellent it made me, how even my best friend won't look at me straight. I thought of Eun-Ha's hands, gently rubbing in the medicine. I thought of the tube in Harlan's pocket.
I was getting back at dawn, and I'd do my best to not wake Eun-Ha. I'd walk slowly into our bedroom, spend some time looking at her asleep, assess her sprawl so I could enter the bed without dis turbing her. One morning she was on her side, one arm flung out, the other pushing down the sheet. She usually wears an old T-shirt of mine but ir must have been a warm night. She was just in panties.
Sunlight from the break of the drapes was shafting on the rise of her breast, and for the first time I could see her own faint white-thread scars. Six vertical lines, exactly parallel, about half an inch apart.
I crawled in beside her. I never mentioned what I saw. I reached our to stroke them, but in her sleep she turned away. When I awoke I started wearing a bandage on my face.

Obsessive-compulsive. Kind of an awkward term, isn't it? Two big words handcuffed together, one meaning can't stop thinking, the other can't stop doing. I did some reading, especially about a subset called dermatitis artefacta, "self-induced or self-aggravated bizarre lesions without an obvious cause." Clearly, I wasn't going to get the help I needed until I disproved this ridiculous, this specious diagnosis. I wasn't touching, couldn't bear to touch, during my waking hours, but who knew what happened while I slept? The bandage kept rubbing off against my pillow.
I wore gloves to bed, wrapped my face in gauze, even asked Eun-Ha once to bind my wrists, a request that brought only a stare and her quick exit from the room. By then it was moot, because I was hardly sleeping at all. I started coming home later and later, until I was getting back long after she'd already left for the clinic. That made it easier, some nights, to not come back at all. I stopped showing up for breakfast-slash-dinner as well, and it was telling that Harlan didn't press the matter beyond a thirty-second phone call.
In the gaping hours of solitude I turned to make-work tasks. Correlated infrareds and radios by spectrum spikes, just to sec what might pop out. Toyed with the math on every approach to the quasar-creation mystery. Thought a lot about old light in new time.

You're trembling. Are you cold, or trying to cry? It's okay. It'll all be over soon. I promise.

Amy Holzer's arms became my revelation. She was pushing a floor button when I noticed how her little shrapnel-like marks had changed. At first I thought it was just the low fluorescents of the elevator, but I stepped in and saw clearly the red coruscations, felt the hard ridge of scabbing. She yelped and jumped back, and before I could apologize for my abruptness the doors had opened and there was Tim Gallien, his throat-jag glaring like a second smile. Also gone to scab. He gave a confused shout but I was already pushing past him, heading for one office in particular.
Guresh Subrahamian opened his door wearing a bandage on his ear.
It was pointless to explain. They were the wrong specialty, them and everyone else in the building. Only another primordialist might understand, and there was only one I truly wanted to understand. I was halfway to Harlan's when I pulled to the curb, took a deep breath and let the long-suppressed thoughts come flooding in: You know he's not there. You know where he is.
I headed back here, to our apartment building. In the car I tore off my own bandage, and reached up to touch where I had been forbidden to touch. I could only catch quick glimpses of my face in the rearview mirror, in the flashes of streetlight, but they were enough to serve as a final confirmation. By the time I parked in my slot alongside Eun-Ha's I was crying, breath-gasping voiceless sobs.
I found the spare key she'd given me and opened up the trunk of her car. Air transport doctors need to be ready at a moment's notice, so Eun-Ha drives around with a dedicated bag just for LifeWing calls. I shouldered it, and as I walked I shuffled through its depths to find the K-Sticks. I couldn't find a scalpel, so some trauma shears would have to do.

I've gotten used to entering my bedroom quietly, to navigating The almost-darkness. They were sleeping. Side by side and skin to skin, flat on their backs, his hand resting on the juncture of her hip and thigh. I tugged the drapes a little ways apart, just enough for a strong spill of moonlight across their bodies. Enough to reveal the thin rubying of their scar lines. There was a whir and hum as the air-conditioning; kicked in; it was another warm night. I looked straight up and saw the familiar grille of the ceiling air vent, right above our bed.
Dropsticks are single-use syringes of Droperidol. They're used lien a patient starts thrashing around on a LifeWing flight, and needs to be immediately immobilized for everyone's safety. That much Droperidol is not a tranquilizer; it's a paralytic. You're awake, able to look around and understand what's happening to you, just temporarily disconnected from voluntary control of your body. Eun-Ha calls it "cutting the strings," because the patient collapses like a marionette. It was, she said, an unsettling thing to do to someone. She didn't like their eyes while it was happening to them.
If administered patiently, through the desensitized pads of the foot, a Dropstick does not awaken a full-grown man deep in postcoital sleep. It is almost a pinprick, a stingless bite of some nocturnal insect.
After a while I knelt, and gently prodded Harlan with the trauma shears. His lids fluttered and opened, and I understood what Eun-Ha meant about the eyes of the suddenly paralyzed. Before he could try to speak I put a hand on his lips, leaned in close and whispered, "Please don't wake her up. I don't know if I can be strong if she wakes up, and I don't want her to suffer."
Like I say, he's Mutt to my Jeff. It was no trouble to carry him into the tiled quiet of the bathroom. I sat him on the floor of the shower, propped him up as best I could.
"Look, I'm really, really sorry about this. But I knew that if I came barging in you'd think it was about your sleeping with my wife, and it would be unpleasant. What I need is for you to listen, okay?"

His eyes were getting to me. You're looking at me the same way. Can you possibly stop, or even just turn away? No, of course not.

"Thought experiment, Harlan. Let's say the independent-causality theories are roughly correct. Quasars aren't part of the Big Bang; they're little bangs, bullets from a different gun firing through time in a different direction. They're born backward, born old, at least that's how it reads to us. It's like languages-some read from left to right, sonic from right to left."
He shivered a bit, still staring. The shower stall was damp and cold, and he was naked.
"So. With that as a given, let's assume that a new quasar was coming into existence. How would it manifest itself? No, don't try to speak just yet. You'll just exhaust yourself. Let me run with it. How would such a quasar makes its debut?"
I splayed and cupped my fingers, mimed an expanding ball. Kaboom.
"Explosively, yes? Of course. But there's more to be considered, because now we're not just talking matter hitting antimatter, but timelines colliding. One arrow hitting another arrow in mid-flight. Okay. Now, how would that impact manifest itself? I'll give you one hint. I'll give you two."
I pointed to the scars on his bare chest. Angry scars, as Eun-Ha would describe them. Then I ran my finger along the counterclockwise half circle on my face. It was no longer a scar but a fullfledged wound.
"Collisions send out shock waves. There would be damage, maybe even annihilation, but it would creep up on us. Remember, we're reading backward. The injury that kills you would show up as an unhealing scar, one that goes on unhealing until it's a fresh trauma, until the moment when it's actually inflicted. I don't remember getting this, because I haven't yet. But I will. Soon."
He could only speak by exhaling in the shape of words, and only with great effort. I took his face in my hands and turned it closer to my ear.
we were/just getting/it out of/our system
"Of course. That was my assumption."
please/you need help/please delusional
Goddamn it. I was crying again. "It's going to hurt, Harlan. I just want to be with Eun-Ha when it happens. I was hoping you would understand."
But he was unconscious now. I found a towel to wrap him in, and laid him on the floor in what I hoped was a comfortable posit tion. I looked at his prone form and thought, I'm sorry  I really am. But one of us has to die alone.
I was getting ready to flick out the light when the towel rustled and twitched, and Harlan lurched his torso upright. His eyes were still closed. His head lolled slack on his shoulders, as if the neck were just a sheaf of skin. In a roil of blind motion, betraying no awareness whatsoever, he simply propelled his body toward the loor. Ills hand was on the knob before I flung him down.
His head hit the tiles with an audible crack, but it was just a moment before he was moving again. Eyes still shut, thankfully, still utterly limp but with a strange momentum just the same. A marionette struggling to draw himself forward despite the cut strings. Half in panic, half in rage, I emptied another Dropstick into him, then another. It slowed him down some, but still he moved. I bear-hugged into a collapse, throwing my weight on him until I heard the snap of bones.
Still he moved.
I grabbed syringes randomly from Eun-Ha's bag, stabbed and plungered them in without bothering to read what drugs they were. The fourth needle broke off in his chest. He got the door open anyway.
I couldn't tackle him again without waking Eun-Ha. I could only watch as he made his nerveless disarticulated way back to my bed, to my wife's side. He climbed back in, assuming the same easy position I'd found him in, draping his hand over her exactly as before. She wriggled slightly, moving into his touch. With the opened bathroom door spilling soft light down the hallway, l could see them both more clearly. I could see how their scars fit together.
On her, in the pale expanse below her breast: six vertical lines, exactly parallel. On him, bisecting the sternum and pectorals: five more. I didn't place the pattern until another whir and hum led my eyes upward. The ceiling air vent grille.

I loved them both, but I Couldn't let it happcn. I was not going to be the one to die alone. I waited until he was absolutely still, then summoned all my strength and plucked him straight up, right off of her and the bed. I slung him over one shoulder, held tight to the LifeWing bag and kept closing doors behind me until we were here. Outside the apartment, in the seventh-floor common corridor, just shy of the elevator landing.
Trauma shears are designed to cut the clothing off an accident victim's body. They're nicknamed pennycutters, because they're strong enough and sharp enough to do exactly that. Jeans, leather jackets-they just slice right through. The skin above an artery hardly taxes them at all.
I don't know why I went to the trouble. If he could quietly, ceaselessly clamber his way back on broken ankles and half a pharmacy in his veins, I don't know why I thought a slit throat was going to stop him. It didn't. I rummaged around the bag, and found what I was looking for still packaged in its sterile plastic, never used. An amputation saw.

That's when you heard the commotion, isn't it' My neighbor of how many months? Anonymous until now. I suppose it was the muffled thumps outside your door. You were curious. You investigated. I suppose I must have looked a fright.
Boy, I'm full of apologies tonight! But I'll say it again: I'm sorry. I had just finished up with Harlan and there you were, with your face inflamed with a scar of your own. I took one look at the door behind you and I knew that it was meant to be. This is where it'll happen. It took a Dropstick and some explanation to convince you. But you're convinced, right?

You're giving me that look again. That trying-to-wake-up look.

I tried to do my own waking up. I tried to convince myself that Harlan was right, that I was sick, a seriously deluded man spinning jealousy into fantasies of a starburst apocalypse. I would rather be blithely insulated by insanity. That would be a better thing to bear than this.
But there he goes. Harlan-I'd rather just call it Harlan's body by now-collecting himself. Piling and sliding the pieces into a semblance of a man. There: he's found both hands. Now no doors can keep him, not from the fate that draws him like a sideways gravity. The ceiling vent will kill them. Nothing else can.
It's my last profound hope that Eun-Ha doesn't wake up beforehand, doesn't discover the approximation lying by her side. We don't die alone, either. That's some consolation. See the door numbers, the numbers for apartment 7C? See how the pointed slash on your face exactly matches the 7, and how my curve-cut, my half-circle, will be created by the C? It won't be long now. Our wounds will tell us when.
Oh, good. We're finally starting to bleed.

scanned from the pages of McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories