The reporters said they understood that, but they were frightened. The whole world was frightened!
Trust me, the Senator said in his soothing western drawl, we are ready for this. We have planned for it. Even as he said so, he was himself convinced of it. Meanwhile, as the Martians are not in the way, he added, they might as well stay where we can watch them. There may be a few loose beeves wandering around out here on the open range, but it’s mostly unpopulated. If the Martians give us any trouble, we’ll just—he winked reassuringly—nuke the damn things. He was generously applauded by everyone, as he strode away, limping slightly for the cameras.
The ladies will be gone by now, he supposed, so he texted two or three more before jetting back and invited them over. He loved all women, and they loved him. He found, upon landing at the ranch, that the Secretary of the Interior had indeed departed, evidently flying straight back to Washington. On television, primly dressed and bespectacled, she was holding her own news conference in her office, acknowledging the internal-security threat posed by the intruders, while praising the Senator’s manly intervention and proud resilience.
The young intern, however, was still squatting there in his living room, bobbing dreamily, eyes closed, in front of the news reports. She had not yet dressed, so the Senator took her hand and led her into his bedroom with its swings and toys and giant bed, which he and his guests called the Back Acre. The intern was bright and fun-loving, one of his favorites, though at the moment he couldn’t remember her name. She helped him strip off his spacesuit and dropped to her knees. Oh! she exclaimed, and began to giggle.
What—? Holy moley! What she was looking for wasn’t there!
In a confused rage, the Senator tossed the giggling girl out of his ranch house, locked the door against incoming traffic, and called Washington. Science be damned, those goddamn lizards must be exterminated, he shouted at the President. He was mad as hell. We have to atomize the slimy bastards! All of them! Now!
He hit the networks with a message of alarm, his white Stetson set defiantly on his brow. He watched himself on his giant television screen as he spoke, square-jawed and determined. It seems the Martians may be bringing viruses that could wipe out the entire human species, he announced gravely. They must and will be utterly destroyed! It is, finally, the only solution! This was what everyone wanted to hear.
Almost everyone. The breaking news report that followed was interrupted by an interview with a prominent scientist who argued that Martians might not be born the way humans are, but may be made or grown. Attempting to eradicate them, especially with nuclear weapons, as the Senator was proposing, might actually cause them to replicate. The scientist suggested spraying them with herbicides instead. This idea was not popular with the viewing audience. For the Senator, it was the next thing to treason, and he returned to the news channels to say so, accusing the scientist of intellectual bullying, and questioning his loyalty for having even suggested that the nation’s weaponry might not be up to the task.
The Senator was aware, however, that, as famously cool in a crunch as he was, it might have been a serious mistake not to tell the intern, when he threw her out, to keep her mouth shut. He clicked apprehensively through the social-media websites and TV news channels, and, as he had feared, there she was, dressed in a gauzy white frock, answering a brassy interviewer’s impertinent questions about the Senator’s missing manhood. Nothing but a pimple! the stupid child squealed, lifting her skirt and pointing. No, he didn’t give me time to pop it!
He went on social media to ridicule the intern’s mischievous claims, accusing the opposition of cynically exploiting the child for its own dirty tricks. Never laid eyes on that poor deluded girl, he posted. And, if she is not deluded, then she is a malicious, scheming little liar, bought and paid for by my unscrupulous opponents. She needs to have her fantasies popped, he tweeted. His righteous anger convinced the people. Nevertheless, they remained curious. They wanted him to show his member on TV.
“The Yellow Rose of Texas” was binging on his top-security phone. It was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an Air Force general who was a frequent overnight visitor to the ranch and its Back Acre. The President had ordered him, the General said, on the Senator’s recommendation and owing to the failure of conventional weapons, to strike the Martians with a nuclear missile. The deployment of atomic weapons was an international no-no, the General said, though that wasn’t really an issue, as we’d be bombing our own country. But the Secretary of Health and Human Services had bought into that dissident scientist’s horse poop that atomic bombs might cause the weird creatures to proliferate, and now the President has turned chicken and left it up to the General to nuke or not to nuke. You’ve met them, he said. What do you think?
The Senator replied that the aliens were indeed dangerous and had to be neutralized. If it was a targeted strike, there shouldn’t be a problem. Add in firebombs and a few chemical warheads, just to cover the bases. Also, that scientist’s background needed to be checked, not to mention his decidedly sickly color.
The General said they’d had the wacko under surveillance for some time. He was ideologically suspect, having whined too much in public about the recent wars, but he wasn’t a Martian mole, just a dipshit eastern egghead. The General was more worried about the relentless pressure from the big networks and the pesky online bloggers to provide a public and verifiable extermination of the invaders that the whole world could witness. How could he do that without irradiating a lot of people?
Mark out a hundred-mile-radius no-go zone and use hovering camera drones to watch the strike, the Senator suggested, wondering if there were some way that a drone could be useful in his own predicament with the intern.
That might work once, the General said, but what if the goddam Martians just keep coming? If they got through our early-warning system this time, they can probably do it again. What if they land next in an urban center? People are saying that, since we have no border to seal, we should cover the homeland in vast overhead nets. At a stretch, I suppose we could do that, but—
Hide under a damn blanket and give up our freedom to come and go wherever the hell we want? the Senator snapped. Never! Free exploration of the universe is our God-given constitutional right! We have to face the enemy square on! You guys had better start preparing now for a preventive war!
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sighed. Okeydokey, he said, assuming a more convivial manner. By the way, that supposed weapon of theirs turned out to be just what it looked like, a potato. It was apparently injected with some kind of artificial gravity that evaporated when they cut it open at the lab. A decoy to keep us distracted for a while. They’re not completely stupid. Which seemed to remind him of something, and he abruptly asked about the Senator’s wound. There were rumors . . .
The Senator winced, but brushed off the General’s sniggering insinuations with a dry laugh. Party politics, he said. They’ll say any damn thing. You know that.
The General grunted to acknowledge he did know that. Nevertheless, the Senator should be aware, he warned, that out on the Internet those rumors were spreading. Ducking them was going to get harder. He figured the best way to stop them might be to get a certification of anatomical wholeness from somebody like the Army Surgeon General. He said he could arrange a private physical. The Senator promised to take his suggestion under advisement, and hung up. Damn that kid!
He’d been treating his crisis as a kind of extraterrestrial political issue for which he was only an interested consultant, but the pimple, as she called it, was beginning to itch, and could no longer be ignored. He was afraid to touch the thing, even to look at it, much less scratch it, but it had a sharp worrying bite worse than jock itch, and finally he couldn’t stop himself.
Meanwhile, plague fears and conspiracy theories were erupting everywhere. Are we assuming they’re from Mars only because they’re green? a news pundit asked. Maybe they were made in China in a plot to rule the world! Others f
eared that the Martians were offspring of the devil and had cannibalized all the angels, fulfilling an ancient Biblical prophecy. Next come the locusts and the man-eating toads! Then, a veteran newscaster at the landing site sickened suddenly and died. A doctor explained the illness, but he seemed evasive. People were convinced that the doctor was covering up the truth so as not to cause panic, which then did cause panic. We’re all going to die! they cried.
A small group of noisy ill-dressed university students gathered at the state capital for a Save the Martians protest. Greenness is not a crime, they chanted. They were met by a large, patriotic Snuff the Martians anti-protest. Fights broke out. It would feel good to hit somebody, the Senator thought, watching them go at it on TV, while he scratched his itch. The Save the Martians protesters were arrested as rioters and alien sympathizers, but other subversive peace groups were said to be forming.
The opposition party, meanwhile, accused the Senator of moral weakness and catastrophically poor judgment. Why did the damn showboat go and meet with them in the first place? It compromised him and compromised the nation. Now those freaks were here, and there seemed to be no clean way to get rid of them. And what had really happened when the Martians shot him? Why wouldn’t he show his member to the nation to end the disquiet? What was he hiding? The Senator wondered if the conspiracy theories about China could somehow be used to deflect the mounting curiosity. Then the Chinese started asking the same questions.
Back at the ranch, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” was chiming like a circusy call to arms. It was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff again, calling to say that the Martians had been taken care of. Had he used nuclear weapons on them? Well, sort of, the General said. They made themselves an easy target for us, massing suicidally into a wobbly green blob. It was hard to tell whether they were wobbly with fear or laughing at us, the General added, but, after we dropped the bomb, they weren’t there anymore. Our report says that we obliterated them, but the only kills we could be sure of were a few illegals sneaking North.
The Senator was feeling a bit wobbly himself, and finally, he made an appointment with his home-town family doctor, a fellow Texan whose discretion he could trust. He submitted to X-rays, brain and bone scans, blood tests, an endoscopy, cardiograms, throat swabs. During the hands-on physical examination, the doctor fingered the pimple thoughtfully, his mustache twitching slightly. Probably trying not to laugh. He sighed, applied an ointment against the itchiness, only making it worse, and admitted that he was baffled. And, no, the Senator’s member wasn’t likely to grow back on its own.
But the nation and the media are demanding to see it, the Senator said, his voice breaking. His mother had once read him a story about a prince who forgot who he was and became a poor flea-infested beggar for the rest of his life, and he’d cried and cried in his mother’s arms, just as he was crying now. How could a person not know who he was? I’ve got to show them something, Doc. How about surgery?
X-rays suggest that we’d somehow have to replace the whole apparatus, the doctor said, inside and out. Potency afterward could not be guaranteed, needless to say, and I don’t know if an implant is even possible. Nothing much to anchor it on. Things have got rerouted in there. I couldn’t even find your prostate, and I’m not sure where your water goes. There might be something growing in there, though it looks more vegetal than cancerous. There were anomalies with the blood tests, too, so if you needed a transfusion during the operation we might not be able to find a donor. The doctor said he might, however, be able to provide a temporary silicone prosthesis with inflatable testes and real pubic hair, affixed with a reliable medical adhesive. Packers, he explained, have more or less worked for thousands of emasculated war veterans, and they look and feel to others almost like the real thing. It wouldn’t solve your problem, any more than it solves theirs, but it should look OK on TV.
The Senator tried one on. It had the sensitivity of a dead mouse, but, with a little hidden switch under the fake testicles, it could be moved through seven degrees of flexibility and stiffness. At the seventh level, it pointed straight up and was bigger than his own had been. He felt oddly proud of it, playing with the switch.
He called the host of a popular late-night television talk show, a fellow Texan and golfer with whom he sometimes enjoyed a friendly all-day mixed-doubles nineteen-holer, and offered to expose himself on the show to satisfy the public demand. Should at least be good for the ratings, the Senator said. The talk show host har-harred. It’ll be the biggest damn thing since the Creation, he said. I missed that whoop-de-doo, so I definitely want to grab hold of this one, so to speak. Shall I book you for the next show?
I’ll be there, said the Senator.
There was rapturous applause, loud whistling, when the Senator, a national hero, came onstage that night in his leather vest, string tie, jeans, cowboy boots, and silver spurs. He lifted his white Stetson and waved it at the audience, while the studio band played his college spirit song, “The Eyes of Texas,” and everyone clapped and cheered some more.
When prompted by the show’s host, the Senator, his thumbs hooked in his holster belt, trying not to scratch, described in detail his engagement with the Martians, whom he called vicious little bug-eyed creeps. I offered them the hand of friendship, he told the audience, and in thanks they shot me—and when they shot me, they shot the nation! God created mankind, like you and me—like all of us here tonight—in His own image, but He sure as heck wasn’t a model for those squeaky little green things. They don’t even smell good. A muddle of laughter and cheering and booing at the same time.
The talk-show host reached under his table and came out with a green rubber mask. He pulled it over his face, hunched his shoulders, rolled his eyes, stood with bowed legs and wagged a dill pickle, drawing more hooting laughter. Then, peeling off the mask and taking a bite out of the pickle, he asked the Senator what had happened when the Martians shot him. A young woman appeared recently on a colleague’s show and claimed to have had intimate relations with you shortly after you were shot, he said. Here is what she said. He played a tape of the interview. Was that how it happened, Senator?
I’m afraid she’s an opportunistic little liar, the Senator said. I’ve never seen her before.
Can you prove she’s lying? the host asked.
The Senator looked uncomfortable. The house was hushed. Well, I’m a conservative Christian, he said solemnly, and I reckon you are, too, sir, being a Texan. We conservatives have nothing against normal sexual behavior. In fact we’re pretty good at it. But we don’t like to see private intimacies turned into public pornography. To provide the only real proof I have, I’d have to expose myself to this audience and to all those watching your show around the world. As I’m sure you understand, that’s fundamentally against my religion. But don’t worry. I can personally assure you that everything’s just fine.
I’m afraid the world needs more than your assurances, Senator, the talk-show host said. This is not pornography we’re talking about, but a substantive response to an alarming human crisis. As a species, we are facing an unknown threat, perhaps extinction. In a word, we’re scared spitless. And only you can give us our spit back.
The Senator shook his head and stood, tall and manly, tipped his Stetson at the audience, and prepared to leave the stage. The murmur of disappointment billowing up seemed to give him pause. He gazed thoughtfully out upon the auditorium, then removed his hat, held it reverently to his chest, pressed his hands together at the brim, and bowed his head to pray. An expectant silence fell. Perhaps others were joining him in prayer. Then he tossed his hat where he’d been sitting, unbuckled his holster belt, and dropped his jeans and boxer shorts. There were gasps and nervous titters as the prosthesis flopped out. He’d set the switch at semi-tumescent, but it was still impressive.
Amen! exclaimed the talk show host. I believe! The audience broke into wild cheers and thunderous applause. The Senator moved the switch to the seventh position as a kind of triumphant salu
te, and melancholically left the stage to a standing ovation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Stories in this volume first appeared in the following publications:
American Reader: “The Goldilocks Variations,” 2013
Cavalier: “The Elevator,” 1966
A Child Again (McSweeney’s): “Stick Man,” 2005
Conjunctions: “The Early Life of the Artist,” 1991 “Punch,” 2000
Daedalus: “Grandmother’s Nose,” 2005
Elements of Fiction: “The Tinkerer,” 1981
Esquire: “The Magic Poker,” 1969
Evergreen: “The Brother,” 1962
Frank: “Top Hat,” 1987
Harper’s: “Beginnings,” 1972
Harvard Review: “The Return of the Dark Children,” 2002
Iowa Review: “Aesop’s Forest,” 1986 “The New Thing,” 1994
Kenyon Review: “Riddle,” 2005
New American Review: “The Wayfarer,” 1968 “The Gingerbread House,” 1969
The New Yorker: “Going for a Beer,” 2011 “Invasion of the Martians,” 2016
A Night at the Movies (Linden Press/Simon & Schuster): “Inside the Frame,” 1987 “Lap Dissolves,” 1987 “The Phantom of the Movie Palace,” 1987
Playboy: “The Hat Act,” 1968 “In Bed One Night,” 1980 “You Must Remember This,” 1985 “The Invisible Man,” 2002
Pricksongs & Descants (E. P. Dutton) : “The Babysitter,” 1969
Quarterly Review of Literature: “The Dead Queen,” 1973
TriQuarterly: “The Fallguy’s Faith,” 1976 “Cartoon,” 1987
ALSO BY ROBERT COOVER
Huck Out West
The Brunist Day of Wrath
Noir
A Child Again
Stepmother
The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut
The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell)
Going For a Beer Page 35