Okay, so I know what you’re about to say: that unicorns aren’t real. Believe me, that’s what I thought, too, and I’ve got a BS in Cryptozoology—you know, the study of folk tale creatures like yeti or chupacabras. People ask me why I went into it, and the reasons come out to about fifteen percent genuine interest, twenty-five percent pissing off my dad, ten percent drunken bet with my girlfriend Yuka, and a good half because I figured I’d graduate college with an easy degree. I figured after graduation I’d make bank writing for some tabloid or other. Then after my sophomore year we all hear from our professors that unicorns have been sighted on several islands in Indonesia. You might remember the brief news stories about it. Hit all the airwaves for about two weeks and when no one could get any video, it all died down. There’s not much information, except that apparently they look like classical unicorns. You know, giant toy-set white horses with narwhal corkscrews sticking up out of their foreheads. They do a lot of shit that can’t be explained and they have a bad habit of disappearing without leaving even a hair behind.
So all of a sudden my bullshit degree gets real serious. We start getting deep into legends and folklore, translating old documents with sightings, that sort of thing. Figuring out what might be real and what might not, which if you ask me is never what cryptozoology was supposed to be about. I had to take a class called—swear to Buddha—Theoretical Biology. It’s all about how mythical creatures might have functioned. Believe me, you’ve never felt like you’ve wasted your life into you’ve read a giant treatise on how dragons might have been able to fly and breathe fire and leave zero trace in the fossil record. Meanwhile, there’s practically no information coming out about the actual real life unicorns which everyone swears up and down exists. Pretty suspicious, I thought.
Anyway, all of a sudden I have to do real work, and it’s a pain in the ass, but what am I going to do, fess up that I was never that interested to begin with after I swore up and down that no dad, this is serious, this is a real degree? So whatever, I bust my ass at it, and my senior year, my Unnatural History professor, Dr. Czerwienski takes me aside and asks how I’d like to make a trip to Indonesia to work with actual unicorns. And of course I’m skeptical this is all some sort of awful scam and I’m going to wake up in an ice bath missing my Islets of Langerhans. But of course you can’t say no when someone asks if you want to take care of a real live unicorn, especially when you’ve got one of the only actual degrees in cryptozoology in the country. Thanks, International University of Metaphysics in Phoenix.
So that’s where I’ve been the last three years. Keeping watch over a unicorn on a swampy little shithole island. Believe me, I know as much as anyone ever will about unicorns. A lot of the stuff you’ve probably heard is true. But it’s all worse. All of it.
1. Unicorns are not intelligent animals.
Here’s how my day normally starts:
Wham! Wooooonk! Wooooonk! That first sound is what wakes me up. It’s Ctesias, my unicorn, slamming his horn into the side of the little house they built for me here. The next noises are him bellowing because he’s stuck and too dim to know how to get free. Usually this is accompanied by the house walls shaking as he wrenches his powerful neck from side to side and, well, any direction except backward. He does this nearly every day, and no one can explain why. I think every night when he goes to sleep, he forgets the house exists, and in the morning mistakes it for a giant animal and attacks it. He’ll keep wonking until I roll out of bed and go pull him free, so I do. When I go outside, the sun’s barely up and Ctesias is glaring at me with one irritatingly violet eye like all this is my fault. His horn’s wedged good and deep in the wall, buried today in what looks like might be the backside of my refrigerator. I used to at least think about getting into my hazard suit first—a big, heavy, full-body thing that’s supposed to keep us from coming in contact with the unicorn—but let’s face it, that ship sailed a long time ago, and besides, he gets even madder if I don’t help him out right away. “Fuck you, Teez,” I tell him in my nicest voice, and then I grab onto his big neck and pull him out. He smells like key lime pie.
Also, the hole in the wall has healed up. Everything his horn touches heals. Which is good, because I have to pull it out of my house nearly every freaking morning and if it didn’t fix itself, my place would eventually have collapsed on my in my sleep.
He’s not grateful, though. He just gives me this haughty, annoyed expression like he had been doing important stuff with his head stuck to the wall. He gives this prancing trot away and gets his food bucket stuck on one hoof. The last few steps are a gangling, clanking stumble, until finally he gives up, stares back at me, and drools.
Once he’s settled down, I’ll go down to the dock and scan the water with a telescope they gave me to make sure there are no boats out there. We’ve got a sophisticated alarm that will go off too, but I try to keep that from happening because Ctesias doesn’t like it. So I spend a lot of my day staring out over the ocean. We can’t be seen here. That’s my main job, protecting this stupid animal. I’ll explain later. Anyhow, coast clear, I’ll go out on the dock where Putri will be waiting in her own little boat, one that doesn’t set off the alarm. It’s hard to tell how old she is. Her face looks like a lumpy potato, brown from the sun and red from windburn. I think she’s married, but she has no children. No one with children is allowed near the island. I'll get to that, too.
She’ll start unloading crates filled with food, like they weigh nothing. I used to try to help, but she gave me the impression I was only getting in her way. She’s tiny, but freakishly strong. “What today?” She asks like she’s bored. Even though she never says more than two words in a breath, you can tell she thinks there are way better ways for all us researchers to spend our time than farting around out here caring for a fantastical creature that appears to be able to do actual magic.
“Skittles,” I tell her. “And marshmallows.”
She nods. I’ve never seen her write anything down, but then, we’re not supposed to. No pen or paper near the island. The Skittles and marshmallows are what Ctesias has been eating most of lately. His preferences change from day to day, but they definitely focus on candy. As far as we can tell, that’s because it’s what he thinks unicorns are
supposed to eat. When the first researchers showed up, the unicorns ate mostly grass and leaves. Within about a day, they were demanding hamburgers and chocolate, and when no one gave them any, they began starving themselves to death. Like they just stopped eating until their ribs were showing, and refused any other food except hamburgers and chocolate.
The list of what I’ve had to feed them includes fried chicken, sushi, curries, marzipan, Turkish delight, pure molasses, and nearly every kind of candy ever made. Unicorns lose a lot of their romantic appeal after you’ve seen one terrified because its jaws are stuck together with Sugar Daddys. Stupid things.
2. Unicorns are science-proof.
When I first arrived on the island three years ago, the research team sends me up onto the island with basically nothing—no phone, no laptop, no notebooks. Nothing that could be used to record any information about this thing. I’m thinking shit, there’s no calling for help, nothing. I’m scared, the air is hot and muggy, bugs are biting me already, the ground is holding more water than dirt and squelching at my shoes, and there’s no doubt in my mind that this is all some sort of awful trick and I’m going to be held for ransom or something like that.
Then I head further into the island and I see it: gorgeous, like a horse-shaped opening into a world of light. It stares at me and I think it must be looking straight into all the awful things I’ve ever done, judging the absolute worst of me. It nickers, and I hear in the sound the traces of old songs from my childhood, the ones I can’t quite remember anymore. Then it shits this long, viscous stream of clear goo all over the ground. There’s a bonus fact for you about unicorns:
2a. Unicorns shit everywhere, and it’s super gross.
Anyway, Fauzi, the guy who was the keeper before me, comes down to meet me. He keeps giving me these long, wondrous looks, like I’m the first person he’s seen in a decade. Although that can’t be the case since he’s probably younger than I am. But every time I look over my shoulder, he’s staring at me. It starts to get creepy. He tells me about feeding Ctesias, shows me the little house, which is about the size of a college dorm, with a fridge and an old TV/VCR. There’s a little, uncomfortable cot at one corner, and a bare desk with a reading lamp. A tiny bathroom with a healthy supply of safety razors. I’m supposed to keep clean shaven because, Fauzi says, beards freak out unicorns. Like they think it’s a cat attacking your face, or your head’s turned around backward.
But there’s no computer. No phone. No easy way to stave off the boredom day in and out. Half-shoved under the cot, there’s also a stack of what is pretty plainly some kind of Indonesian gay porn. I look back over my shoulder and he’s staring at me again, and now I get it. Poor guy stuck out here on this island for God knows how long.
I shake my head at him. “It’s cool and everything but I’ve got a
girlfriend, you know?”
He just sniggers at me, which kind of pisses me off. What’s so fucking funny about that? Oh well, I tell myself. Isolation’s made him a bit bonko. I shrug it off and ask him about the job, so he explains about feeding, tells me about the hazard suit, and the water pump for washing away all the unicorn shit. And about the guns.
Yeah, guns. Because I’ve got to use them to scare people off from the island. Poachers? I ask, and he says yeah, maybe, but really it’s more for researchers. Scientists. Photographers. People who might come round to have a look and measure the creature. Unicorns can’t abide being reported or measured. As soon as you do, they disappear. Like, vanish into the aether. No one knows for sure if they just teleport someplace else, go to another plane, or wink out of existence, but seems that’s why it took so long to verify they were real, even after lots of confirmed sightings. We don’t even know why they do it, but there are some solid arguments that it comes from having a lot of plainly magical powers and a pretty dim understanding of quantum mechanics. As soon as they feel like they’re being actively observed, they’re not there anymore.
So Fauzi explains that because unicorns are this rare and amazing phenomenon that no one’s figured out how to study, I’ve got to guard them and scare off unscrupulous researchers, who I guess will be coming about with cameras and scales or yardsticks or something. I don’t know. Degree in cryptozoology, remember?
A couple times a week, more when it’s not monsoon season, the prox alarm will go off, scaring the literal shit out of Ctesias. While he’s wonking and galloping around in terror like dragons are attacking, I’ll grab my earmuffs, telescope, and rifle, and head down to the pier. I’ll check for boats and if they start coming close, I’ll fire a warning shot or two. The rifle’s got a muzzle brake that makes it sound way louder—that’s what the earmuffs are for. The sound goes cracking out over the water like I’ve just fired a damn cannon. If they were poachers, they might have come closer, but so far every boat’s been researchers, and they don’t like being shot at. Not like I’d actually shoot at any of them. Not for this worthless beast. There have been mornings when I’ve woken up to it stuck in the side of the house, wonking, and wanted nothing more than to run outside with a camera and stick that shit on the Internet. But on the island there are no cameras and no Internet, so no dice.
3. You never want to pet a unicorn.
I told you about the hazard suit we’re supposed to wear. See, coming into contact with a unicorn has consequences. This is where I have to talk about my girlfriend, Yuka. She’s sexy, smart, and edging out upper middle class into rich. Owns three chiropractor locations and she’s only twenty-eight. Killed in business school. She and I hooked up at my college during some metaphysical healing seminar and then fucked like bunnies. She wasn’t in town all the time, but we made the distance thing work okay, and she would make a point of stopping in during travel for a week or two here and there. We were supposed to get a place when the whole unicorn thing happened, and then I had to go. I think she was pretty mad that now I was the one traveling for work, which didn’t seem exactly fair.
Still, I’m missing her pretty bad those first few weeks on Unicorn Island. At first it’s all just libido. After a while that kind of ebbs, and I mostly just want her company, someone to talk to. Attempts to start up conversation with Putri don’t go far, what with her two-word answers to everything.
Then one morning, Ctesias is wonking like crazy because his horn’s stuck in the house, and he’s thrashing around so hard, I’m scared he’s gonna yank it down, so I don’t bother with the hazard suit. I run outside and put my arms around his neck to pull him free. His fur is rabbit-soft and warm, and as soon as I touch it, I get this kind of energy charge all over my whole body. Suddenly, all I can think about is sex. My head fills up with thoughts of women doing—well, I
really don’t want to get into detail, so let’s just say I felt like I was a teenager again. I get Ctesias free, and I run back inside and for the next week or so, I can barely keep my hands off myself. It’s like I’ve never yanked it before ever, you know? You remember those first few days after you figure out you can do it and it feels like a superpower you never knew you had? Like that.
And this happens to me every single time. Sounds pretty great so far, right? Wrong. Skip ahead about eight months.
Monsoon season. I head down to the docks to get Putri’s supplies. A little ways from the island, I can see the shadow of intense rain. On the sister islands, the trees are whipping back and forth. But here’s it’s blue skies and sunshine. It always is here, unless Ctesias gets crabby about his food or something. Putri dumps a big box of Oreos on the dock, and then Yuka steps up from below decks. “Lee!” she yells to me, bouncing up and down. “Surprise!”
I’m just speechless. There are so many reasons why she shouldn’t be here. She scrambles up onto the pier and runs up to me, smashing herself against me and giving me a kiss I’m too surprised to return. She smells a little bit like mildew—I’m guessing it’s not great below Putri’s decks.
“How did you find me?” I wheeze.
She frowns. “I knew you couldn’t tell me. You went so quiet. Every time you came back to visit, you were more distant. You wouldn’t ever talk about what you were doing, and I guess I got scared you were in trouble. So I hunted you down with a detective. We tracked credit card receipts, found plane tickets, and then eventually Putri led me here.”
I stare at Putri. “You did what? Why did you bring her here?”
With a grunt, Putri dumps a big box of powdered strawberry lemonade on the dock. “She pay.”
“Don’t worry,” Yuka says. “She explained everything on the way over.”
“She
explained things?”
Putri shrugs.
“Not that I totally believe her. I mean. . .” Yuka trails off, staring up over my shoulder. I don’t have to guess what she sees. I look back and there’s Ctesias, the farting, drooling beacon of light and magic. Mane billowing in the wind, and there isn’t a wind.
“Oh my god,” Yuka says, and she starts up the hill after him. “It’s real. I can’t believe it’s real.”
“Don’t get too close.”
“Why, is it dangerous? It’s so beautiful.” She keeps going.
“Not dangerous, exactly,” I say, and I hike up after her, because she’s plainly transfixed by the thing. Probably dreaming about riding it naked through a Trapper Keeper or something.
It whinnies and heads up the island, and she follows it into the trees.
I find her near my house, creeping up on Ctesias with her hand out, going, “Come here, boy!” like it’s a timid dog or something.
“Hey, be careful of the—” I say, too late to stop her from stepping in a big, clear puddle of unicorn shit. “Never mind, look, just don’t touch it.”
The unicorn nickers and bounds away from her. Multicolored light trails from its hooves, making an arc in the air.
She gapes. “Is that a—a—”
“A rainbow, yeah.”
“That’s so amazing, oh my god, Lee, you have the coolest job of anyone in the whole world.”
“I really don’t.”
“But it’s a rainbow just sitting there, it . . . when does it go away?”
“It doesn’t. Can you give me a hand with it?” I pick up one end of the rainbow. It feels a little like warm cotton candy. It’s not heavy; just awkward.
She babbles more to me about how all amazing this is as we cart the rainbow around the house and toss it down a hill, where there’s a big dump hole full of them all scattered and glowing and half-submerged in mud. No one’s sure what these things will do if they get out into the environment.
“Is that where you live?” she asks, in the same sort of tone of voice someone might ask if that’s a worm on your face. I’m about to invite her in to wash her hands—probably not great to get rainbow in your mouth—but then I figure I should tidy up a little. I say yeah, but ask her to wait a few. I run in, push stuff under the bed and put dishes in the sink, wash my hands and make sure my clothes aren’t gross.
When I get outside, she’s reaching out to Ctesias again, and he’s lowering his big white nose to be petted.
“No, don’t touch it!” I shout, but I’m too late. He nudges his nose forward, and I see her go all stiff and twitching like she touched a live wire.
She turns, staggering a little, and puts her hands down below her stomach, pressing in. “What—what was that?”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I say. “See, the thing is, unicorns? They can only be touched by virgins.”
“But I touched it, and I’m not a—” She stares at me. “Oh my god, you mean that thing . . .”
“You’re a virgin again,” I say. “Happens to me every time I touch it. It sucks.”
“Wait, so that means the last few times you came to see me . . .”
“I was a virgin every time.”
“That’s why you were so bad at sex!”
I cough. “Uh, yeah. Probably.”
She rounds on Ctesias. “What the fuck. I can’t be a virgin again, you piece of shit!”
Ctesias farts musically and trots a little distance away. I’m pretty sure he’s laughing at us.
4. If you’re a unicorn keeper, that means you’re gay.
So Yuka follows me inside the house to avoid hate-murdering Ctesias, which seems a reasonable reaction to me, and did at the time, even before everything else that happened. She sits down on the bed, trying to get used to suddenly being in the full blush of youth again, or whatever you call it when magic resets your biology to the cusp of sexual maturity. So I heat up some water for a soup cup while she’s asking all these questions about what happened and how it works, and of course I don’t know anything. I explain we have to learn this kind of thing really slowly and carefully or the unicorn disappears. She gets this awful, unhappy smile and says we should just make it disappear on purpose, and I point out that then I’d be out of a job.
Which of course brings up the old argument of why I’m here in the first place, why I can’t just quit and come back home and she’ll find a job for me somewhere. Only this time, for the first time, I can tell her the real reasons: that if I quit on this after I swore up and down it was what I actually wanted to study, everyone will know for sure that I’m just a lazy shit. I’d be eating crow for the rest of my life.
Then she calls me stubborn and I call her controlling and we have a little fight, which is usual for us. Only afterward, we usually fool around, and I really don’t want to. She’s all up against me, putting my hand under her shirt, and I’m not going for it. Then she gets really upset and starts shaking a little and says I’ve gotten so distant that maybe we should just break up.
And I say, “Quit making such a big deal out of everything. I just don’t want to right now, that’s all.”
“You never want to anymore!” she shouts, and she throws my pillow at me.
“Crap,” I say, and she sees where I’m looking.
“Lee,” she says in this quiet voice, like she’s really far away, “why is there
gay porn under your pillow?”
“It’s . . .” I try to think of a good reason. “The guy before me left it there.” This isn’t true, actually. I dumped all Fauzi’s magazines in the trash after he moved out. Then around a month later, Putri starts bringing them about once a month with the supplies. Says I’ll want them, and doesn’t listen when I swear up and down that I don’t.
“Under your pillow?”
Okay, so it was a dumb lie, but what was I supposed to say? I shrug.
“You came out here to get away from me, didn’t you? You couldn’t tell me you were gay.” Her eyes are angry and accusing.
I can feel the blush in my face. “That’s not true! I wasn’t gay at all then!”
“Then?”
“I mean.” I sit down on the floor, trying to think how to tell her what I can’t even tell myself. “It started about three months ago. I think it happens when you touch Ctesias. Or maybe just be around him. I think… I think he thinks unicorns are gay because we think they’re gay or something, and he makes it happen.”
She’s gone pale, getting half to her feet. “Should I be getting out of here now?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think it happens slowly. Like radiation poisoning or something.”
She sits down heavily on the cot. The magazine slides off and splays open to a particularly lurid display that I hate that I can’t stop looking at. “Maybe it’s just a phase, like, if you leave the island, it will stop?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think so. Even on vacations, it never gets any better.”
“There are doctors! Psychologists who can help you!”
“What, against magic? It’s not like I’m just confused, Yuka, it’s who I am now.”
Her eyebrows come together like two caterpillars that have decided to fight. “You’re an asshole, is what you are.”
Ctesias is wonking in alarm outside, but I ignore him. “You think I wanted this? This isn’t something I chose, it just happened to me! It’s not about you!”
“It’s not about you either. It’s just about whatever’s easiest. You never want to work at anything. You didn’t want a real job. You didn’t want to study a real field. You never wanted to work on our relationship. And now you’re just a—a gay virgin on Unicorn Island!”
5. You really never want to pet a unicorn.
In that moment, I hate her a little bit. “Yeah, well, you’re two of those three already,” I tell her. “So what does that say about you?”
She goes ice-cold. “That you’re pulling me down.”
Ctesias is wonking louder and more urgently.
“Honey?” a man’s voice says from outside, sounding concerned. “Honey, what’s going on here?”
She looks up. “Daddy?”
“What?” My skin prickles. “Your dad’s here?”
She looks out the window. “I don’t know how. He must have followed me.”
To this day, I don’t know why the prox alarm never went off. Maybe it got unplugged or short-circuited or something like that. Maybe her father’s boat just happened to be broadcasting on the same frequency that Putri’s boat uses, the one that shuts it off. I never find out. And in that moment, I can’t even think about it, because I’m scared to death.
Because I figured it out months ago, why no one with children is allowed near the island. I run out of the house. “Get back!” I shout. “You have to get away from here immediately! Run!”
Ctesias is freaking out, wonking and trotting back and forth, his eyes bulging, horn lowered.
“Easy, boy.” It’s Yuka’s dad. I’ve only met him a couple times, but I recognize him right away: tall, balding head, big black beard.
Remember before what I said about unicorns and beards? Yeah. Ctesias does a Muppet-flailing charge right toward Yuka’s dad. He scrambles backward, as anyone sensible would do when being charged by a solid ton of angry fantasy horse, but he slips on a big greasy pile of clear unicorn poo and falls backward.
Ctesias, incredibly stupid creature that he is, one lacking even the most basic concepts of object permanence, draws up short now that he can’t see the beard anymore. And nearly,
nearly, everything is totally okay. He turns around, giving a little trot like he’s pleased with himself for ferociously braving down the fierce facial hair, and flicks his tail. A few strands of that tail flick across the nose of my girlfriend’s dad. And that’s enough. I see him gasp like I did the first time I touched Ctesias by accident, and there’s a
whap! sound from inside the house.
That sound, I later figured out, was a miniature thunderclap from all the air rushing in where Yuka used to be. See, her dad’s now a virgin. And in Ctesias’s walnut-sized brain, that must mean that he never had kids. My girlfriend and her two brothers, never existed.
6. Unicorns don’t exist.
I know now it looks like I’m contradicting myself. But when I said unicorns are real and existed, I wasn’t lying. And by the time you get to fact number six here, as far as I know, I won’t be lying either. All that will have changed from the time you start reading to the time you finish.
Here’s the thing. Those monsters made me a virgin, turned me gay, and wiped my girlfriend out of existence. Except I can still remember her. We all can. Because unicorns were stupid. Why do I say were? Remember when I said unicorns disappear when you measure them? Yeah, well, look what you’re reading: everything I’ve learned and studied about unicorns. And if I get this up on all the websites I hope to—maybe Cracked, Buzzfeed, and a Reddit link would be helpful—even if you all think it’s fiction, I’ll have wiped those fuckers off the face of the planet. Because you all know what they’re like, now. There will be no place they can disappear to where they haven’t been “observed.” Maybe China or Siberia. And just in case this information isn’t really enough to make them disappear, here are a few more facts for you:
7. Unicorns stand about 16-20 hands at the withers and weigh approximately one ton.
8. Their eyes are typically pink, violet, or rainbow-colored, and their fur refracts a full color spectrum even when subjected to limited wavelengths of light.
9. At night, they glow in the dark, which is annoying when you’re trying to sleep.
10. When Marco Polo first witnessed unicorns in Indonesia, he was so horrified by their unearthly powers that he described them as having: “…a head like a wild boar's… They spend their time by preference wallowing in mud and slime. They are very ugly brutes to look at.” He hoped by doing so to deter anyone from seeking out these horrible creatures ever again.
