The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  He wondered whether to ask Shankar out for a drink. He could pretend he wanted to discuss the morning’s events at the Debussy. But the sergeant was a family man. He had a wife and three kids to whom he was devoted, and Parry could not in all conscience drag him away from an evening with them. How about one of other the officers in his district? No. It would seem odd him asking any of them to meet him somewhere away from the workplace, out of uniform, out of hours. Odd and inappropriate. They did not know him socially. He was just the guvnor. Why did he know almost no one here who wasn’t FPP?

  In the end, he decided to finish his exercises and go out anyway. Better to be among unfamiliar faces than to be among no faces at all.

  21. Manual

  HE WENT TO High C’s, an open-air seafood restaurant on Copland Concourse. There, he ate a starter of crab au gratin followed by swordfish steak for main course, listening all the while to the strains of piped Siren music, the preferred background accompaniment at any self-respecting eaterie. Afterwards he made his way to a cinema on the banks of the First Canal. He had no idea what film was playing there, and was somewhat disappointed to find it was a new musical comedy entitled Snatched!. Still, better than nothing. It would kill a couple of hours.

  In the event, he enjoyed the film, which was based loosely on the Body Snatchers movies of old and even more loosely on the Jack Finney novel which had engendered them. Sharper and wittier than he was expecting, Snatched! was essentially a satire of pre-Foreign attitudes to creatures not of this world. It was set sometime during the latter half of the twentieth century in a generic mid-Western small town where the inhabitants were bitter, argumentative types who did not get on with one another, could never agree on anything, and sang like geese. The only exception was the film’s heroine, a spunky eleven-year-old girl whose sunny demeanour and superb soprano marked her out as an oddball and an outsider. She was one of the first to notice when certain of her neighbours began behaving out of character – laughing, treating others courteously, singing well – and in due course she discovered that an alien force was taking over the townsfolk one by one, assimilating them and improving them. No one would believe her about this. Eventually, however, the “bad” townsfolk did become aware of the presence among them of the “good” and, finding saintliness and tolerance unendurable, embarked on witch-hunts and pogroms. The conflict threatened to destroy the town but in the end was resolved when the girl, having nearly been killed by an irate mob brandishing torches and farming tools, sang about peace and understanding so beautifully that hearts melted and the “bad” townsfolk saw the error of their ways and agreed to be assimilated and improved by the alien force too. A rousing, hand-holding, smiles-all-round singalong finale ushered in the end-credits.

  There were half a dozen Foreigners in the audience, all of them ensconced in the back rows of the auditorium where the seats were larger (and more expensive). They sat evenly spaced out, no two of them adjacent, and Parry could not help but wonder what they made of the film. Did they understand the story? Did they get the jokes? Did they have even the first clue what was going on? A corner of the screen was set aside for a running commentary on the action with hand-symbols, but this per se was of limited assistance, able to illustrate the general tone of a scene but not much more. Perhaps the Foreigners simply enjoyed submitting themselves to indecipherable pieces of Earth culture, like occidental tourists watching kabuki theatre, at once intrigued and mystified by all the noise and colour and activity. It was hard to know for sure. For the most part the golden giants gazed at the screen, motionless, and could just as well have been serenely rapt as supremely bored. Only when the music struck up did they show any animation. The songs in particular – most of them old-fashioned songs with verse-structure and lyrics, in keeping with the movie’s period setting – set them swaying. They gesticulated and shuddered and rocked back and forth, sometimes so intensely that the swish and rustle of their robes was almost as loud as the soundtrack. (And when Parry heard the noise of this activity filling the auditorium, it was difficult, even for him, not to think of old men and macintoshes.) Once the film was over, however, and the lights came up, the Foreigners rose and filed out as diffidently as a church congregation after the final catechism of a particularly unenthralling service.

  In a slightly less gloomy frame of mind than earlier, Parry took a late canal-bus home. On the jetty outside his condominium he paused to watch an airship glide by overhead. With its balloon lit up from within and glowing, the airship made him think of a Chinese lantern drifting along a night-mirroring river. Its course took it directly in front of the moon, and for a few seconds the two gibbous globes of light, dirigible and lunar satellite, seemingly drawn to each other by their apparent similarities, fused and became one. Then they parted again, the moon remaining fixed, the airship continuing on its way.

  For some reason, Parry thought of himself and Anna.

  It was then that a Foreigner came lumbering towards him, appearing so suddenly and unexpectedly from the shadows beneath a nearby palm that he almost shed a skin.

  His startlement turned to curiosity as the golden giant configured its gloved hands into TRUST. It had identified him as an FPP officer, even though he was in civvies. How was that possible? Unless it had been lying in wait for him. That was the only sensible explanation. The Foreigner knew a Foreign Policy Policeman lived here, knew that Parry was him, and wanted to speak to him.

  He signed back TRUST, followed by SALUTATION.

  The Foreigner returned the SALUTATION, then folded its fingers into the knotty-knuckled manufold for ENTREATY.

  Parry signed ACCEPTANCE.

  FINALITY, said the Foreigner.

  Parry did not understand. He offered ENTREATY.

  The Foreigner repeated FINALITY.

  Parry was confused. He peered up, frowning, into the Foreigner’s mask, hoping to find elucidation there. But of course that worked only with humans. In the glow of the courtesy light that hung above the condominium’s front entrance, all he could make out in the Foreigner’s “face” was the reflection of his own face frowning back down at him, dimpled and distended by the contours of the mask’s pseudo-physiognomy.

  Then it came to him. FINALITY. The deaths. The Foreigner wanted to discuss the shinju deaths.

  He signed ACCEPTANCE.

  The Foreigner now offered RESOLUTION followed by ENTREATY.

  Parry responded with PROBABILITY.

  The Foreigner, with another ENTREATY, requested elucidation.

  Parry thought for a moment, wondering how to put it. He used TRUST, then CURIOSITY, then URGENCY, then RESOLUTION, in the hope that this would convey that the FPP were looking into the deaths and were keen for the matter to be cleared up as soon as possible.

  The more hand-symbols you used in conjunction, the greater room there was for misinterpretation. The Foreigner, however, appeared to understand. It signed ACCEPTANCE, then DOUBT.

  Parry questioned the DOUBT with ENTREATY.

  The Foreigner manufolded SUPERNAL and NEGATIVE. SUPERNAL stood for Foreign or Foreigner.

  Parry signed ENTREATY.

  The Foreigner repeated SUPERNAL, NEGATIVE.

  So, the Foreigners regarded the shinjus as a bad thing. Was that it? Well, of course they would. But in that case, why was this Foreigner using NEGATIVE when it could have used CONCERN?

  The Foreigner must have sensed that it was not getting its message across. It tried SUPERNAL, NEGATIVE once again, then added DIFFICULT.

  Parry concurred. DIFFICULT.

  The Foreigner offered TRUST, RESOLUTION, ENTREATY.

  All Parry could do was restate his earlier declaration: TRUST, CURIOSITY, URGENCY, RESOLUTION.

  The Foreigner hovered in front of him for a few moments more, as if engaged in inner debate, wondering whether to say more. Finally, offering him another SALUTATION, it turned away and lurched towards the jetty. Facing the canal, it fixed its hands in ENTREATY and began sidestepping back and forth, a few paces one wa
y, a few paces the other, waiting for a taxi-gondola to come by.

  It was still there at the canal’s edge when Parry got upstairs to his apartment. He stood at his window for a while, watching it perform its peculiar crabwise to-and-fro shuffle, and he thought of the old joke, coined within days of the Debut, about how, like God in the hymn, Foreigners moved in a mysterious way.

  A mysterious way indeed.

  Several minutes passed with no sign of a vacant taxi-gondola, and Parry was on the point of phoning FPP HQ to send a launch to ferry the stranded Foreigner back to its hotel when, happily, a vacant taxi-gondola did appear. The gondolier hove to beside the Foreigner, and the golden giant delved into a pocket in its robes and produced the name-card for its hotel. The gondolier peered at the card, handed it back and signalled ACCEPTANCE. He steadied his craft by planting one foot on the jetty, and the Foreigner stepped stiffly aboard, adding so little weight to the gondola that it drew barely a centimetre of extra draught. A jewel flashed in the darkness, passing from the Foreigner’s hand to the gondolier’s then swiftly disappearing into a purse that hung about the gondolier’s neck. The golden giant settled down on the cushions of the boat’s shallow, forward-facing seat, the gondolier twisted the throttle on his steering-pole, and they were off, whirring away into the night.

  Parry turned from the window and went to run himself a hot bath. Wallowing in the steaming, faintly briny water with a folded wet flannel laid across his eyes, he replayed in his mind the conversation he had had with the Foreigner. What the golden giant had been trying to tell him he was still not entirely sure, but he had the distinct impression that it had become exasperated at the end, either by his lack of comprehension or by its inability to communicate its message properly. But then what could you expect? Hand-symbols provided such a limited linguistic palette to work with. Even Professor Verhulst himself had been heard to complain that the manufold vocabulary ought to be at least five times as large – and this was the man who had helped codify hand-symbols in the first place!

  The story of Jan Verhulst had provided the basis for a couple of telemovies, one big-screen biopic, several documentaries and a handful of books. Parry had seen the biopic and read the most credible of the books, Verhulst’s own account – based on his personal diary – of the part he played in the development of hand-symbols. A musicologist at the University of Amsterdam, Verhulst had been generally regarded as a pre-eminent expert in his field. Before the Foreigners came he had also been something of a lost cause. The breadth of his knowledge of the classical canon was only equalled by the depth of his apathy towards the duties and responsibilities expected of him as an academic. Almost invariably he would arrive too early or late for lectures and tutorials, and sometimes he would fail to arrive at all. He had a similar attitude toward the articles and theses commissioned from him by specialist magazines and learned journals. When he could be bothered to deliver them, they were of an abstruse and almost wilfully wayward nature.

  All this he himself admitted in his book, with unusual candour for an autobiographer. He also described himself as a shambolic figure, something the biopic had made much of in its opening scenes, in order to engage the audience with the character and raise a few laughs. He favoured ill-fitting tweed jackets, and his hair and beard floated about his face in tangled twists and wisps like (to use his own words) mouse-brown candyfloss. Fond of bicycling, he chose to pedal around on the heaviest and most primitive of bone-shakers, rattling across the Amsterdam cobbles with his head held high and his trousers clipped tightly at the ankles and his mind on almost anything except traffic and pedestrians. He was unmarried, unorthodox, and unworldly. Otherworldly, some said.

  Which could well have been why the Foreigners chose him.

  A month after the Foreigners’ first appearance, while humankind was still getting over the shock and only just beginning to acclimatise to its new reality, Verhulst ambled into his study one morning to find one of the golden giants standing by his desk, apparently waiting for him. For several minutes Verhulst stared at the Foreigner across the room, and the Foreigner stared back. Verhulst could not fathom what the Foreigner wanted with him. It had been perceived that Foreigners understood and respected the distinction between public and private property, never trespassing onto the latter. Had this one lost its way? Or was a professor’s study not considered a private place?

  Verhulst was not perturbed by the golden giant. Rather, he was amused and fascinated by its presence, and, being an affable, trusting sort of person, he began to talk to it, chatting to it as though it were a stray cat. What are you doing here, then? How did you get in? That sort of thing. Meanwhile, the Foreigner continued to observe him silently with the empty eye-indentations of its mask.

  Soon the one-sided conversation petered out, and what happened next was something Verhulst would thereafter refer to, with typical humility, as his small stroke of accidental genius.

  He decided to play the Foreigner some music.

  After all, it had been noted that Foreigners gravitated towards places where music was playing, and here he was, a musicologist, in a room filled with sheet music, books about music, music on disc, a grand piano. Playing the Foreigner something seemed the most natural thing to do.

  He chose Mozart. Why not start with the best? Symphony No.41 in C Major came to hand. Felicitously, the “Jupiter” symphony. He slotted the disc into his stereo and pressed Play. The opening statement of the first movement, the allegro, issued from the speakers – the same chord repeated three times, the reiterations preceded by short rising glissandos.

  Immediately, the Foreigner became animated. As the music picked up pace, filling the room, its whole body began shuddering and swaying in time to the lilt of the music, while its gloved fingers described spidery patterns in the air. Verhulst looked on in astonishment, wondering if the creature was in pain. But no, it was not pain, he decided, that was causing the Foreigner to move like that. It was pleasure.

  When the allegro came to an end, Verhulst ejected the disc and excitedly cast about for another. He chose Beethoven’s Ninth, inserted it into the stereo, and track-selected the last movement, the “Ode to Joy”.

  This time the Foreigner responded with less bodily activity but a notably greater intensity of appreciation. It clasped its hands together and, quivering like a tuning fork, twisted its fingers into an intricate digit-origami which it sustained throughout the entire length of the movement. When Verhulst, more than a little intrigued now, played the movement again, the same thing happened. The Foreigner wrapped its fingers together in the exact same position. Verhulst would shortly come to identify that particular interlacing of hands as the manufold for HAPPINESS.

  The process of establishing all ninety-six hand-symbols began that day and took Verhulst and the Foreigner a further month and a half to complete. Once Verhulst had cottoned on to the fact that certain kinds of music elicited certain set configurations of the Foreigner’s fingers, it was not hard for him to figure out that each configuration represented an abstract commodity corresponding to the sentiment the composer was intending to evoke. After that, all he had to do was ransack his own collection of discs and the university’s music library for compositions and see which, if any, hand-symbol the Foreigner formed in response.

  Not every piece of music elicited a hand-symbol. Some works the Foreigner appreciated without being moved to link its hands together, and some works it did not react to at all, remaining obdurately stock-still for their duration. Verhulst was quick to perceive a distinct preference on the golden giant’s part for works featuring the human voice, which set it trembling and swaying more vigorously than did purely instrumental pieces. It enjoyed opera and chorales most of all. It also had a taste for sung jazz and a certain amount of pop music, although the more relentless, hardcore forms of dance music and heavy metal did not find great favour with it. It had an ear for a good voice, and a piece performed by one of the acknowledged recorded greats – Caruso, Callas, Schwarzkopf,
Gobbi, Pavarotti – was visibly more stirring to it than the same piece performed by a lesser talent (although it exhibited what seemed to Verhulst a sneaking penchant for the crowd-pleasing stylistic excesses of Mario Lanza).

  In very few instances was Verhulst able to determine right away the significance of a hand-symbol when he first beheld it, although he might make a guess which would later prove to have been on the mark. He had a feeling, for example, that the manufold the Foreigner formed when heading the final chorus of the St Matthew Passion was REGRET, and that the meaning of the finger configuration it held during the introductory bars of Zadok the Priest must be ANTICIPATION, and that the closing section of the William Tell overture inspired it to sign URGENCY, all three surmises being confirmed by subsequent data. Mostly, however, it was only through the slow, labour-intensive process of cataloguing which compositions incurred which hand-symbols that Verhulst was able to begin to interpret them.

  On sheets of paper, each headed with a sketch of a different hand-symbol, Verhulst would log the title of every work or portion of a work which the Foreigner greeted with that particular hand-symbol. As these lists lengthened, he was pleased to discover a congruence of form and theme in each. Certain key-signatures tended to group together, and the difference between the major and minor moods was reflected in the nature of the concepts they defined, words with positive connotations stemming predominantly from pieces in a major key, words with negative connotations predominantly from pieces in a minor key. Specific types of music recurred under each heading. Under SALUTATION, for example, were all sorts of liturgical works, aubades, and occasional pieces written for royalty. Under the hand-symbol which Verhulst came to understand represented ENTREATY were countless hymns and yearning arias. Under the hand-symbol for which he eventually could find no other name than NEGATIVE were funeral marches, winter songs, and a whole series of grumbling laments from the deep-indigo end of the blues spectrum. Painstakingly he fitted this peculiar vocabulary together, building it up in the manner of a lexicographer, music his etymology, compositions his supporting quotations.