After the Sun

by Jonas Eika

  But not tonight. Antonio reached the foot of Bald Mountain and trudged up the first stretch to the rock formation that shot vertically into the sky, and continued along it, letting his fingers slide along the surface, smooth, fluted, jagged—the fossilized irregularities like an ancient collage. Some geologists had hypothesized that a meteor had struck the shallow expanse of water that covered the whole area a good 370 million years ago. The rock face broke off, and Antonio continued in the direction it pointed, down a hill and a few hundred yards ahead, where the ground began to drop into the darkness in front of him. Guided by the beam of his flashlight, he located the tarp at the edge of the lake, pried it loose and uncovered a car battery and a lime-green carry-on suitcase.

  First, the lightning sound of electricity moving across a semi-vast distance, and then the dry lake was weakly illuminated by the lamps mounted on its shores. The lake bed a few yards below was level and white with salt deposited in layers. His hand on the suitcase, Antonio crawled down the small incline and set course for the Sender in the middle of the lake. The dark began to pulsate with crawling movements, and slowly, individual organisms appeared. First, the scraggy creosote bushes that smelled like rain and should not have been this far north—the call of the Sender must have reached them by wind and made them wander up from the Mojave. Next, the mugwort and snakeweed and evergreen goosefoot, which usually kept to the edge of the lake. A few plants had reached all the way to the Sender, where the animals were as well. A matted fabric of fur and snouts, they writhed and rubbed themselves against one another: a mountain goat, three pronghorns and a herd of black-tailed jackrabbits, kangaroo rats, rabbits and other mammals, all nuzzling the Sender.

  It had integrated all the forms of life that flocked to it, so completely that you could see it just by looking at the swarm of plants and animals. And as such, Antonio said to himself, the Sender was no more or less than the gathering it hosted. Still, he felt the urge to locate it under the fur, his gaze kept sliding upward, about five feet off the ground, where some of its surface was still visible between the lizards and reminded him of its dimensions: approximately two yards high and maybe half as wide, like a bale of hay, except parabolic on top. When he had discovered the Sender almost three years ago, its exterior—with the exception of a bulge it had acquired in its encounter with the desert soil—appeared perfectly whole and aerodynamic, crow-black and smooth, like an object meant to travel through the world oblivious to whatever matter it encountered. Now it was overgrown with a greenish-white fungus that had fused with its surface, making it spongy and porous. Its wound-like, almost breathing quality made you feel that you could stick your hand right through it—Antonio had tried once, and gotten to his knuckles. Below its outer, symbiotic layers, the Sender had perhaps retained some of its original metallic constitution.

  But it was a willing metal. At the bottom it had given in to the animals’ constant nuzzling and redistributed its mass so that there were small hollows and soft burrows that the rabbits and kangaroo rats curled up inside. Curlews and snipes had nested at the top, and at its base the metal had oozed into a trench containing just enough liquid for a cluster of fairy shrimp to hatch from their hibernation cysts.

  When Antonio first discovered the Sender, while out hunting rabbits a little farther into the desert, he kept his hands off. It must have come from Area 51, fallout from some aborted flight testing, and he wasn’t about to get involved in any of that. Whatever military exercises were conducted inside the barbed wire, they cared enough about keeping them secret to have ten uniformed men posted along a two-mile radius. Later that day, he sat with Fay at the Little A’Le’Inn, eating lunch before the weekly UFO club meeting. Should he tell her about the Sender? This was his chance to isolate her from the others—just the two of them in the desert, lonely, together—but she would probably insist that the discovery belonged to the club and everyone else searching for signs of alien life. So when she went to the meeting, he drove into the desert, hoisted the Sender into the back of their pickup truck and drove it carefully away from Area 51 to the dry lake at the foot of Bald Mountain. Five days later he returned, and when he reached the top of the hill and saw the Sender surrounded by birds and mammals, he screamed. And he watched how the animals tensed and hovered for a second above the white lake bed. He heard his own cry resonate with the call emitted by the Sender: a dark and clear metallic dissonance. With horror and pleasure, he felt an amorphous desert life unfold inside him with tectonic slowness. Then the animals fell to the ground and resumed their rubbing against the Sender. He imagined that it had been sent from Area 51 into space to attract alien creatures with its cry, but instead had crashed and was now calling out to the aliens of the earth: the waders, marsupials, wild rabbits and horned ruminants, ancient species with memories from before the earth was peopled. But it didn’t matter to him where the Sender had come from and why—all theories seemed irrelevant. Deep in his lungs he could still feel the scream that had just been in his throat, and that the Sender screamed without pause. And he felt the foreign life, simultaneously inside him and swelling in full daylight on the lake bed. It was as if the feeling he had had since their daughters’ death, of being completely isolated from everyone, had found its voice and finally become a thing in itself, a breathless, metallic longing. He had to become the Sender.

  Now, three years later, he was finally ready to go through with the operation. Five yards from the Sender, he parked the lime-green suitcase, unzipped it and arranged his implements: the scalpels, mouthpiece and spoons; they quivered with the sound of the scream. Fay was probably winding through the mountains that wrapped around Las Vegas to the north, he thought, following the train’s likely progress on a map in his head. What was she looking at right now? The closer he came to the transformation, the more he wished, the more concentratedly he prayed, that she would know what he was up to, even now on the train, before she returned home and found his note in the mail slot. He was so afraid of losing himself that he could only do it if he imagined her there holding his hand. And at the same time, he needed to be alone to come out here and do it. It had been like that since their daughters had passed away—he needed so badly to be alone, ideally somewhere deserted, and as soon as he was, he missed Fay and wanted her to be there with him. She had always seemed so calm and fearless in their relationship, as if she didn’t have any sense of being-an-I that could be destroyed. It was the same humility with which she met other people, like when they first settled down in Rachel. She had never been interested in aliens before; nevertheless, she started going to the Little A’Le’Inn, listening to people’s stories without judgment, participating in the weekly meetings and excursions of the UFO club, even studying the representation of extraterrestriality in Western popular culture on her own. You shouldn’t dismiss the actuality of these myths, she would say to Antonio when he couldn’t muster more than a laugh at that freak show, sad and frustrated to be spending yet another night alone in the camper while she was in the desert with them. He couldn’t help feeling that she was being unfaithful to him and their grief. But it’s all just business and projection, he would say, citing, for example, Ted Riddle, the owner of the Little A’Le’Inn, who in his own words started believing in aliens when he realized they were good for business, but also imagined them floating in collusion with the Feds and the UN, part of a conspiracy to take away good citizens’ right to bear arms, and that’s how they were preparing for the alien invasion, simply selling the planet. Or Antonio would cite the numerous unemployed priests in the area who had become mediums for life-forms from other solar systems. Or the self-proclaimed ufologists who numbered a good half of Rachel’s fifty-six residents, including Ted Riddle’s son Chris, who investigated the various cases of animal mutilation that occurred in the area. Horse and cattle corpses were found with their eyes, tongues and genitals cut off. In many cases, the rectum had also been removed with a razor-sharp hexagonal plug that had been driven into the animal’s ass
hole and ripped out with gut and flesh. Or the spine and the brain might be missing, it varied from case to case, as if someone or something was collecting the various parts necessary to re-create our species on their own planets, was Chris’s theory. And a lot points back to him, Antonio said. Think about how he’s always finding those animals before the ranchers, or that he’s just coincidentally around the corner whenever they call—he’s obviously the one mutilating those animals, but no one else sees it, because the prime suspect is some Scandinavian-type alien. In Chris’s case, thought Antonio, UFOs were a distant fiction that gave him license to commit these crimes, and even to make money off them, in the form of the beautiful, impressionistic identikits that he painted and exhibited at his dad’s bar. Wow, Fay said with a drawn-out sigh, you really don’t believe in other people’s belief, do you? Haven’t you noticed how people here, honest folks like Ted Riddle and myself, are staying up all night, staring at the sky and listening to radio signals? Haven’t you noticed the people painting and writing books and making music about aliens? They’re doing so much more than the bare minimum. Besides, all of the tourists nowadays want to see proof before they get here. And so it’s nice that we actually do see things, she said, and started listing the sightings she had been part of: an indefinable ray of light with a color and intensity that couldn’t have reached her from the stars; an object flying in bizarre fits and spurts across the sky, with none of the smooth continuity characteristic of human technology; and then again, a few months ago, another one of those unlikely plane crashes that seemed to occur around Rachel every six months. Each time, military personnel were at the crash site within a few minutes, quarantining the area, vacuuming the ground of wreckage for a day or two.

  Antonio opened his eyes with a start at having fallen asleep, looked down at himself and all around him, as if someone had been there and done something to him while he slept. Everything was the same as before, the lake bed golden white in the lamplight, and the bushes stretched out, reaching their roots toward the Sender. The animals nuzzled against it in their strangely patient way, quiet with the exception of their furry breath. He understood the people who believed that they had been zapped by aliens and subjected to experiments or sexual abuse. That alarming sensation of a rupture in continuity, having taken place without one’s knowledge, like waking up behind the wheel of a car about to collide with another car. Or the endangered elephants awakening groggy on a television show with chains around their necks. If anyone believed in aliens, it had to be those elephants. Antonio got to his feet and shook the images out of his head. It was time. Fay was probably standing in the concert hall among mothers and daughters, waiting for Karen Ruthio, “The Wandering Woman of the Desert States,” to come on. He set the suitcase upright, spread a paper tablecloth over it and laid out the implements in front of his right hand. The scalpels lay there, looking indifferent to the pain they were about to inflict. That’s what he told himself as he grasped the largest one. That to the metal it wouldn’t be violent, merely an encounter with a softer and more viscous material. He broke out in a cold sweat and trembled in all of his muscles. Of course his body would resist, but he couldn’t deal with that now. If he was going to go through with the operation, he needed to do so by willing himself into a state that he could now only perceive as a threat. The transformation demanded he put himself at a distance, he understood, that he disregard his body. With the index and middle finger of his left hand he located the two hard rings of cartilage right beneath his larynx, stretched the skin taut between them and made a horizontal incision. The skin opened with a slight delay, as if it first had to realize it had been sliced, and then came the blood and pain, sweet, acidic, warm. He tasted it as much as he felt it in his nerves. With a slightly smaller scalpel, he deepened the incision, working through the layers of skin, through the blood vessels and fatty tissue, while he held the wound open with a spoon in his left hand. The pain shot through his throat in fiery rays. But even if he imagined that his flesh belonged to someone else, there was still something impossible about maneuvering the knife, something unreal about the measured motions through layer after layer of human flesh. Almost in sync with his working hands, he had to reach for something to come, with an open hand like when you want to touch the rain, and summon all his courage from there. It felt like leaving the task in someone else’s hands. Suddenly his windpipe popped out of the wet flesh, distended and fluted with cartilage.

  Feeling his own breathing flow against his index finger through a thin wall—combined with the almost electric pain in his severed nerve endings—filled him with an animate nausea, an appetite he hadn’t felt since he was young. Wind passed through the open wound, thick as water.

  He raised his head and looked at the Sender, just like Fay and the others in the audience were looking at Karen Ruthio—how was a voice like that coming out of a seventy-nine-year-old woman? The scream was still a mystery to him, that dark, metallic tone that sounded like dissonance in itself, as if it were out of tune with the world. He hadn’t been able to scream that scream since that day almost three years ago when it suddenly quivered inside his throat. Not because it was outside the range of his vocal cords, but because it was located somewhere in the depth between two frequencies, a secret gap that broke with the mathematical principles they had always followed. One day, almost a year ago, after screaming at the Sender for hours, he squeezed himself between the mammals and laid his forehead against it. Through its outer, fungal layers he felt a weak vibration, deep and metallic like the scream, and suddenly knew that he needed to have some of it inside him. That the scream could only be produced by the specific composition of the Sender, which was both malleable and very hard. With his angle grinder, he had sliced off a small piece, squeezing his eyes shut at the brightness of the crystals that appeared at the incision site: half an inch in diameter, glowing clear green and citrus yellow, the likely result of a very slow cooling process. Something about the way the material liquefied above the Bunsen burner—the way the particles collectively yielded their solid form, as it changed from gray-purple to orange to smoldering sun yellow—made him think that the heating up was a kind of overture, that he was caressing the material with the flame, just like the animals were nestling against it, that it let itself be melted down because it had been touched with a tenderness that exceeded the bonds of its atoms. That’s the grace of all things, he thought, or for a moment sensed at the edges of his consciousness and, blinking, forgot again.

  Now the mouthpiece lay ready on the operating table: one and a half inches long and one inch in diameter, it came to a point at a fifteen-degree angle. The new crystals were not visible, but the material still retained some of the greenish sheen to which he attributed its ability to bond to other forms of life. He leaned his head back, located the two rings of cartilage beneath his larynx and cut a small entry to the windpipe between them. Leading with the narrow end, he pushed the mouthpiece in, and exhaled so his vocal cords gaped open. He felt the mouthpiece slide through the opening, then made a noise with the last of his exhalation so that his vocal cords tensed around it, holding it tightly in their V. Lastly, he mounted the respiration band: an eight-inch-long section of flexible plastic tubing, one end in his mouth and the other in the hole at his larynx.

  The mouthpiece was cold and hard and way too smooth for the mucous environment of his throat. He could feel his own vocal cords down there too, small reptiles rubbing against the instrument. He looked up at the Sender, listening to it, to the cry that radiated green through the fungus, the lizards, the scraggy mammals and plants, and bound them together in a drawn-out, mystical labor. Its meaning was hidden to him, but if he could transform himself into the Sender, if he could produce the Sender’s cry in his own throat, he would produce its meaning inside himself and so become part of the ritual. Tensing his lungs and throat as much as possible, he screamed, and then screamed again with a little less force, trying in any way possible to express the feeling in hi
s stomach, but mustered only a cough. The salt deposits lay like ancient puzzle pieces on the lake bed, which made him think about how the lake had both evaporated and drained into itself, how the whole desert was a massive basin emptying itself out like that, up into the sky and down through its base. He thought about the humility and zeal of that movement as he screamed again. After a few minutes, the mouthpiece began to vibrate in his throat. With varying force, he repeated the movement until a sound reverberated and the animals around the Sender stopped to listen. The scream swelled as much from his own mouth as back through his windpipe and down into his belly, where it was making his organs oscillate, a pitch-black dissonance that made it impossible for him to think of the cry as an expression of his loneliness or anything else inside him. It was more like someone or something was stimulating his throat into speaking, and as a side effect, was activating the memory of a distant, desert life.

  Antonio inhaled and accidentally broke the stream of air that sustained the scream. The animals turned back to the Sender and resumed their nuzzling overtures. The respiratory band was working well, though. Air flowed from his mouth into the plastic tube that led back into his windpipe beneath his larynx, and it would have probably continued if he had not gotten in the way. If he could only abandon his breathing, that eternal preparation. You take a deep breath to get ready for what’s to come, just like in the UFO club, where you couldn’t do more than wait and prepare. But he was tired of the waiting and wanted to enter the present. He wanted to create a streaming band of respiration—the continuous scream—inside himself. He envied Fay her belief. He had realized it six months earlier, up at the Little A’Le’Inn, during the last of her six lectures on aliens in the history of film. He was seated in the back of the room, admiring her above the heads of the members of the UFO club. It was strange and beautiful, sixty-one years into their marriage, to see her standing in front of the screen, with the remote control calmly resting in her left hand changing the slides in time with her speech, the complex and supple language that she had acquired over the course of her studies, and which she was now speaking with an ease that made a long academic career unfold out of a past she must have been living in parallel to the life they had lived together. Over the course of the last five Tuesdays, she had, through comparative readings of selected biblical passages and the most important films of the past sixty years about encounters with extraterrestrial life, put forth her theory that aliens signified the return of the Judeo-Christian God in Western popular culture. The key motifs in the representation of alien intelligence could all be correlated to specific biblical revelations, and the cinematic development of the alien-image roughly corresponded to the shift from the Old to the New Testament God, from the almighty, unpredictable aliens, punishing from above, to those who, in some biological form, had made their dwellings among humans and had to play by earthly rules. But for some reason everyone has skipped Paul, said Fay, and turned off the projector. Silence fell over the Little A’Le’Inn. Only the wheezing of the oldest members of the audience was audible. The overhead lights turned on, Fay squinted. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Why haven’t any of the sci-fi screenwriters read Paul? She looked out into the room and let her arms fall to her sides, sinking a bit into herself in front of the screen. I know I haven’t been here for as long as many of you. But what I’ve seen in this town, I have no doubt that it’s faith. I know that we’re waiting for spaceships just like we’re waiting for the Savior. And I know that those of you still working are praying that they’ll come and keep your businesses afloat. Just like you prayed you would hit a new vein in the mines when they were about to close. And what were we offered instead? New lights in the sky! Antonio watched her with a mixture of envy and shame at envying her her faith, as if it were something she owned. But it gave her something that he didn’t have; namely, the possibility of living with things that were as if they were nothing, or the other way around. Just as her belief that the souls of the dead were stored like information in the atmosphere made it possible for her—through long fasts and rituals that were supposed to open her up to cosmic radiation—to receive their daughters inside her, however transient and painful that might be. Maybe it was also possible because she had known them before they were born, and felt their bodies as a part of her own when she carried them, nursed them and bathed them, and since then, everything she had done with them had added to that feeling, filling the same place in her body, which had become empty and open when they died. To Antonio, they were gone, or in the best case existed in a realm that he could never access because he couldn’t believe in it, and it felt like a humiliation. It was humiliating to accept their definitive absence, but it was the only way he knew how to grieve: in solitude, like the residue left behind when they no longer existed in their own particular ways, but had fallen back into something dead and formless in the earth. Sometimes it felt like there wasn’t anything left for him to do on Earth. It was a demeaning form of consolation to call their phones, whose plans he had secretly kept paying, to listen to their voice mail greetings, at once so unreal in the breathless telephone receiver and corporeal with the sounds of their moving tongues and mouths, amplified by the microphone’s compressor. Fay concluded her presentation by suggesting an authentication of faith, an acknowledgment that aliens could manifest in here as well as out there, which over the next few months radically changed the practice of the UFO club. They started to supplement their sender and receiver equipment with a kind of spiritual technology, rituals in which each person renounced parts of themselves in the form of secrets, possessions, hair, nails, teeth and blood, and intimate visions of the coming life-forms. With these rituals, they generated a kind of communal energy, capable of attracting aliens in the night, and at the same time made space in themselves to receive them. At first, this had a calming effect, fostering trust among the members of the UFO club and in Rachel in general. The sense of spaceships as a looming danger or part of a cosmic-federal conspiracy ran slowly into the sand. But then a new nervousness started to quiver in town, as if the aliens, finally torn loose from their earthly conceptions—and especially from Area 51, lurking south of Bald Mountain—had once more taken on the violent potential of something, something that didn’t yet have a name or shape, but that you still, or maybe exactly for that reason, needed to prepare for. Ted Riddle stopped foisting monitoring equipment and badges onto UFO tourists because he honestly didn’t know whether the aliens were correctly depicted, or whether they even emitted radiation that would register on the electromagnetic spectrum. He carved the bar logo with its stereotypical gray, pupil-less alien out of the wooden sign along the highway, leaving behind a hole into the desert. The ufologists abandoned their theories and instead read the Letters of Paul aloud when they were sought out by tourists with accounts of paranormal activity. The residents of Rachel started to switch off the water supply and electricity in their mobile homes in the morning, break down their beds, reel in their awnings and repeat the whole process in reverse before bed. People developed a nervous relationship with their daily routines. Even the elderly, who were the majority, ran frantically around, fumbling their things in a state of nervous excitement that could seem almost pubescent except that it was soothed by a kind of shared impotence, a hesitation in all their desires. Hands had second thoughts on their way toward spouses’ hips or hands, toward grabbing their coffee cups at the Little A’Le’Inn. Feet left accelerators and let cars roll to a stop on the highway, on the way to the monthly shopping trip in Alamo. Should you dust off your camper, sweep the branches off the road, should you even shower today? There were flickers in the sky, meteoric red and yellow lights, and clear white light that moved in inhuman stutters, but only a few of them were filmed and business suffered, people gained and lost weight all at once.