He sat down next to me. “You sure?”
I nodded, although at that moment I wished I could take my question back. For years I had carefully avoided such questions, because I had feared the answers would be too outrageous to believe. I had feared they would plant seeds of doubt in my mind that would grow into something I could no longer control. I loved Peter and didn’t want to think of him that way, as crackers or as a liar.
“The tribesmen would kill them,” he said. “Or they would force them to try to communicate with the thing and then kill them when they failed. I stumbled upon their village. They took me in. They gave me medicine that I later learned they had extracted from this object. And then they forced me to try to communicate with the object. That’s when I discovered it behaved as a computer would. It was preternaturally intuitive, and I quickly made progress with it. But not fast enough to satisfy them. For some reason, they expected more, as if they understood that someone would inevitably appear who would be proficient with it. But I failed. I tried to run away. They attacked me, and I knew they intended to kill me. But then I woke up. I was lying on the forest floor, naked.” He looked down at his abdomen. “With this body.”
I studied his face. I had heard most of that before. And as before, he believed he was telling the truth.
“How did you even know what they wanted from you?” I asked.
He picked some mud off his shoes. “One of them spoke English.”
I’m sure I was angry with myself, but this answer caused some of my anger to spill over onto him. I coughed out a brief laugh. “That was convenient.”
He snapped his head up and looked at me sharply. “Okay, goddammit. You want to hear it all—what I haven’t told you? There was a man with them, a British man named Samuel. And he was over 150 years old. Crazy, right? But he had been an explorer—a naturalist—in the mid 1800s, a contemporary of Darwin and Alfred Wallace. He actually knew those men, Rose! He had convinced the tribe to let him live, even though he was barely capable of communicating with the object. He helped me talk to the tribesmen—I call them that because I never saw a woman among them. The tribesmen were much older than he was. In fact, Samuel thought a few of them might be as much as ten thousand years old. How could that be? Because they had used the same medicine they used on me. You want to know where the object came from? I can tell you, because it showed me. In a dream. The most vivid dream I’ve ever had. The object was created long ago—and I mean long—by some sort of creatures that lived on a distant planet. They had technology far beyond anything I could comprehend. I can still hardly process what was shown to me. The object had been sent out into space, along with millions of others. Somehow this one ended up here, on this planet. Out of all possible other places. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know all it can do. But I saw amazing things. And it gave me this body. My mind feels like it’s the same as before, except that I remember everything that ever happened to me. But this body…”
He stopped talking. He was breathing hard and staring at me. Waiting.
I chose my words carefully. “That is a lot to digest. I should have asked you years ago.”
“Yes, you should have.”
I hesitated, cautious. “This object, did it have a name?”
“The tribesmen called it the Lamotelokhai.” He pronounced it Lamb-oh-tell-oh-kī. “I’ve never wanted to use that name because I was told the literal translation was, the end of the world. I suspect what the tribesmen meant was that it would bring the end of their world when someone inevitably comes to take it away.”
I gazed into his eyes. I thought I saw in him the same fear that I felt. We had crossed a line in this conversation and couldn’t go back. From this moment forward, I would have to live with the knowledge that Peter believed an alien artifact had repaired his body. And he would have to live with the knowledge that I had harbored doubts regarding his sanity.
I could think of nothing else to say, so I turned away and looked up the trail. Something was walking down the trail toward us. I squinted at it. It was a cassowary. The bird appeared to be my height, and it almost certainly outweighed me. It approached us at a fast walk.
I got to my feet. “Peter, it’s Blue Arrow!”
Blue Arrow was the name given to one of the last living cassowaries in Mount Whitfield Park, a female. She had a reputation for chasing hikers on the Blue Arrow track, aggressively demanding scraps of food.
Peter got up and stood next to me. Normally, spotting a cassowary would make my day. But the bird wasn’t stopping or even slowing down. When it was five meters away, its imposing size was too much for me. I backed away. Peter had started to say something about holding my ground when I tripped. I went down hard on my butt and began sliding down the slope next to the trail. The next thing I knew, Peter was on top of me, shielding me from an onslaught of cassowary claws. Blue Arrow was in full attack mode. I felt a sharp pain in my leg and let out a shriek.
Seconds later the bird ran off, and it was over. Peter rolled off me.
“Jesus, you’re hurt,” he said. He used both hands to close a gash in the flesh above my knee.
I looked at his legs and saw that the backs of both his calves were bleeding. I pushed his hands away from my knee. “I’ll hold this. You tend to your legs. They’re both cut.”
Sitting on his butt, he put his feet together and spread his knees apart. I could see at least one cut on each calf. One of the cuts gaped at least a centimeter as he contracted his calf muscle.
“Goddamn bird,” he muttered as he inspected his cuts. “Mucked up our legs.”
“We’re miles from the car,” I said. “What if we can’t walk back?”
He ignored this, crawled up the slope to his pack, pulled out the ground blanket, and tore off three strips. He crawled back down to me and wrapped one of them around my knee. I sucked in some air and raised my butt off the ground with white-knuckled fists as he knotted the blanket strip tightly enough to stop most of the bleeding. He then tied the other two around his calves.
“Sit tight,” he said. He then crawled up again and brought back the pack and the remaining portion of the blanket. He spread it out between us and started pulling out the food.
“You’re not serious,” I said.
“You think Blue Arrow can stop us from enjoying our picnic? Think again, sweet Rose.”
I stared at him and almost decided to refuse to be part of such an antipragmatic and perhaps foolish decision. At that moment the gulf between our sensibilities seemed wider than ever. My mind was still reeling from his outburst of fantastical details of his experience in New Guinea. And now, at a time when any rational person would seek medical attention, he wanted to proceed with our picnic. Peter somehow exhausted and invigorated me at the same time. On that day, the unnatural and relentlessly spreading gap in our ages became thirteen years. And for the first time, I felt much older than Peter.
I forced a smile, gritted my teeth, and shifted my weight onto the blanket. We ate our fritters and salad and talked about everything except the object Peter was now calling the Lamotelokhai, and how we were going to get back down the trail. On the ground beside our blanket, Peter found a feather from Blue Arrow. Apparently it had come loose during the attack. He smoothed it out between his fingers and then stuck it in my hair above my ear. He said it was a fitting ornament for someone who had survived an encounter with Blue Arrow. I gradually relaxed, and for over an hour we simply enjoyed each other.
My wound had bled enough to saturate the strip of blanket, and I wasn’t sure I could even stand. We still hadn’t seen any other hikers, so we would have to walk out on our own. Reluctantly, I told Peter it was time to go. I tried getting up, but my knee had become swollen and stiff.
He jumped up to help me. When I was on my feet, he removed the wraps from both his legs. He then turned so that I could not see the cuts on the backs of his calves.
“Let me see,” I said.
He looked at me and hesitated. Finally, he turned
. For what seemed like a long time, we both stared silently at his calves. He rubbed one of them with his hand, wiping away clotted blood. The gash appeared to be mostly healed. Pink, translucent skin covered the wound, having grown over it in the last hour. He wiped away the blood on the opposite calf. It was the same—mostly healed.
“What the hell, Peter?”
“No worries,” he said. “I guess they just weren’t as bad as they looked.”
In that moment the gulf between us widened.
4
Yonks Day – Year 22 – 1999
On the morning of our 22nd Yonks Day, I got out of bed early so I could go to work at the shop. Working helped keep my mind occupied. I showered, got dressed, put on my makeup, and sat down with black coffee and a bowl of Weet Bix in the tiny breakfast nook of my apartment. I gazed at the envelope I had left unopened on the table since it had arrived a month before. It was from Peter, but there was no postage on it, which meant he had come to my apartment to put it in my mailbox. A violation of our agreement.
It wasn’t that I had fallen out of love. Quite the opposite, I felt incomplete without him. But I couldn’t take it anymore—being uncomfortable whenever we were in public places, always being consumed by self-doubt. Everywhere we went we got that-nice-man-is-taking-his-mother-out-to-eat looks, and we-have-two-single-rooms-available-or-a-room-with-two-beds comments.
I was a young sixty-three. I used sunblock and walked five miles every day. I had a poster in my bathroom of a sleek swimmer in her seventies that said, ‘Growing old is not for sissies.’ Every day I stripped down and compared my body to the woman in the poster. I had worked my ass off trying to level the playing field with Peter. But it was a losing battle.
And there was another factor involved. Peter did not fight to prevent my leaving. It was important to him that I trusted and believed in him. But parts of his story were beyond my capacity to believe, no matter how much I wanted to. Perhaps because I had not seen what he claimed to have seen. Of course I couldn’t deny that something miraculous had happened to his body. But a computer sent by an alien civilization from a distant planet? Over time, my misgivings had chipped away at his determination to make our marriage work.
Did we love each other? Love has endless definitions. Peter and I were drawn to each other in a very physical manner. His close proximity to me satisfied me in a way that felt primal, almost instinctual. Like huddling near a campfire to ward off the dangers of the night. But it went beyond the physical. His words soothed me and stimulated me and almost always seemed right for the moment. His opinions mattered, and I sought them out in order to solidify my own. It may sound cliché, but we truly were incomplete without each other.
My pride demanded that I should feel physically attractive. Peter’s pride demanded that he should feel trusted. And so, due to my pride and his, I had left him, and he had not stopped me.
I finished breakfast and picked up the envelope. I considered tossing it away once and for all. But it was Yonks Day, and I couldn’t. So I opened it and pulled out the letter.
Sweet Rose,
I know you wish for me to stay clear of your flat, but I felt compelled to deliver this myself, rather than trust the postal service. I’ll get straight to the point. Please read this entire letter before passing judgment and throwing it away.
Ten months ago, you left me. I do not blame you for leaving, as the challenges we face are unprecedented. I am not going to offer an argument for why you should come back. Instead, I simply wish to share my experiences of the last ten months. Writing helps me feel connected to you, even if you don’t read it.
The day I helped you move out was a Tuesday. The breeze off the Coral Sea was mild, and the sky was clouded although it wouldn’t rain. We didn’t converse much, and your things were positioned in your flat by early afternoon. You held me, and you cried. And then I returned to our empty house. Perhaps you know this, but an empty house has different degrees of emptiness. This house was always empty on the days you would work at the shop. But there is another degree of emptiness. There is an emptiness that penetrates my defenses and strikes down my will to maintain composure. And then the emptiness mocks me by echoing my sobs. The echoes continue, even late into the night. The next morning brings new light and optimism. But I cannot forgive the emptiness—I hate it. Ten months later it still endures.
One day in April I had a revelation. The SETI Institute had introduced SETI@home. This software allows everyone interested to put unused CPU cycles of their home computers to work helping in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And guess what, Rose. Thousands of people have downloaded the software so they can participate. There is a high level of interest in being the first person to discover coherent signals from intelligent alien life. If people understood that there is an alien artifact hidden in the wilderness of Irian Jaya, they would be willing to master my Kembalimo software. For days I worked on ideas, scenarios for convincing people. But the emptiness of the house closed in around me. Ideas faltered as I second-guessed them. Without your presence, they seemed hollow. They were ideas without substance, without passion.
I left the house to work elsewhere. I worked on a bench on the street near your shop. But the emptiness followed me, as if it were not anchored to the house at all. One at a time the ideas were discarded. I could see no viable plan to convince others of what I know. I thought perhaps if doctors examined me they might see some proof, so I went to a doctor for the first time in twenty-two years. He found nothing unusual and complimented me for taking care of myself. I explained that I was sixty-three and then asked him to cut my arm so he could see it heal. He told me to leave and that I needed a psychiatric specialist rather than a medical doctor. Had you been there, you would have known how to convince him. But you weren’t.
Two months later, in June, I flew to Irian Jaya with a backpack of survival gear. In Jayapura I bought food. The next morning I hired a minibus to Wor, where I had started my journey in 1977. I hardly recognized the village, but as soon as I had hiked a few kilometers into the bush, the forest was as raw and defiant as it had been twenty-two years before. The vegetation had changed in the last two decades, but my perfect memory served me well. It allowed me to retrace my steps using larger trees that were still in place as landmarks. After three days I found the site where I had discovered the hidden village. I was sure of it. But the village was no longer there. Apparently it had been moved. I considered persisting, searching for the village’s new location, but instead I turned back.
My reason for giving up was I had made a promise to you that I would never return there. I know we’re separated, but I could not forget the promise. And there was more. On the first day I spotted a King-of-Saxony bird of paradise. But you weren’t there to see its beauty. I slept in a net-covered hammock, but it seemed too spacious without you. I crossed a river on the second day but had no hand to hold. I came upon an aboriginal hunter who spoke a bit of English. He had collected pandanus nuts, and he shared them with me. He said he had a wife and she would not allow him to return home for three more days because that’s how long her mother was staying at his hut. I told him my wife was waiting for me at home. I could not will myself to tell him the truth. After we parted, I retraced my steps to Wor and returned to Cairns.
On a Saturday in October I met a girl. I was sitting in the park trying to work, as the emptiness of the house had been particularly cruel to me during the night. She had a beagle that seemed to fancy my right leg. She apologized profusely and we began conversing. Turns out she likes Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov—all the greats. So there was something to converse about. I asked if I could see her again. I needed a friend, Rose. We met on the Esplanade the next day. Walked and had a bite. It didn’t help. She was just a girl, in her thirties. Half my age. I was ashamed, and I’m not going to do it again.
And so it has gone, one day after another, month after month.
Yonks Day is in a few weeks. I fear the emptiness will destroy me if I s
tay home that day. And so I will make fritters and salad, and I will picnic on Lumley Hill. If you are feeling the same emptiness, perhaps you will join me. I cannot express the joy it would bring me.
Blue Arrow has died. She was the last known cassowary in Mount Whitfield Park. If you come, perhaps we can pay our respects.
With eternal love, Peter
As I stared at the letter, my fingers stroked the loose skin under my eye. I shifted my gaze to the age spots and blue veins on the back of my hand. Peter was right, the emptiness could be cruel, and at that moment my apartment seemed as hollow as an empty cathedral.
“Damn you, Peter,” I said aloud.
I got up and called Sylvia. She said she was already dressed and ready to drive to the shop. She had anticipated that I would decide at the last minute to take the day off.
The Blue Arrow track was not intended for sixty-three-year-old hips. My lung capacity was adequate, but the steep inclines tested my pain tolerance. The trail was busy that day. It had become a popular route for trail runners, and they passed me with their athletic legs and smooth-skinned arms. Two twenty-something girls with glistening faces stopped and asked if I needed help. I smiled and said, “Thanks, but I’m fine.” Bitches.
I’d seen Peter’s car in the parking lot, so I knew he was ahead of me somewhere. I didn’t find him until I crested the summit of Lumley Hill, nearly three hours after I’d started. He was sitting on the blanket that had been diminished to make bandages nine years prior. He sprang to his feet.
“Rose, my God, you came! Here, take a load off.” He gripped my arm until I had settled onto the blanket. I didn’t protest.
We sat in silence and gazed out at the Coral Sea as I caught my breath. I watched the waves moving toward shore near Machans Beach. Each wave seemed to be pursuing the one before it but was never able to join it.
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