Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature

by Jacob Weisman

  All of this was before 9/11. You can imagine what it’s like now.

  For a while Kenny helped out at Groom Lake as an engineering troubleshooter for a C-5 airlift squadron that flew only late-night operations, ferrying classified aircraft from the aerospace plants to the test sites. They had a patch that featured a crescent moon over NOYFB. “None Of Your Fucking Business,” he explained when I first saw it. He said that during the downtime he hung with the stealth-bomber guys with their Huge Deposit-No Return jackets, and he told his wife when she asked that he worked in the Nellis Range, which was a little like telling someone that you worked in the Alps.

  I’d met him a few years earlier when Minotaur was hatched out at Lockheed’s Skunk Works. He’d been brought in for the sister program, Minion. We were developing an ATOP—an Advanced Technology Observation Platform—and even over the crapper it read: FURTIM VIGILANS: VIGILANCE THROUGH STEALTH.

  It wasn’t the secrecy as much as the slogans and patches and badges that drove Carly nuts. “Only you guys would have patches for secret programs,” she said. “Like what’re we supposed to do, be intrigued? Guess what’s going on?”

  In the old days Kenny’s unit had as its symbol the mushroom, and under it, in Latin: ALWAYS IN THE DARK. The black world’s big on patches and Latin. I had one for Minotaur that read DOING GOD'S WORK WITH OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY. I’d heard there was a unit out at Point Mugu that had the ultimate patch: just a black-on-black circle.

  “‘Gustatus Similis Pullus,’” Carly said. She was tilting her head to read an oval yellow patch on Kenny’s shoulder.

  “You know Latin?” he asked.

  “Do you know how long I’ve been tired of this?” she told him.

  “I don’t know Latin,” Celestine volunteered.

  “‘Tastes Like Chicken,’” he translated.

  “Nice,” Carly told him.

  “I don’t get it,” Celestine said.

  “Neither does she,” he told her.

  “Oooh. Snap,” Carly said.

  “People’re supposed to taste like chicken,” I finally told them.

  “Oh, right,” Carly said. “So what’re you guys doing, eating people?”

  “That’s what we do: we eat people,” Kenny agreed. He made teeth with his forefingers and thumbs and had them bite up and down.

  Carly gave him a head shake and turned to the bar. “Are we gonna order?” she asked.

  It’s all infowar now. Delivering or screwing up content. We can convince a surface-to-air missile that it’s a Maytag dryer. Tell an over-the-horizon radar array that it’s through for the day, or that it wants to play music. And we’ve got lookdown capabilities that can tell you from space whether your aunt’s having a Diet Coke or a regular.

  What Carly’s forgetting is that it’s not just about teasing. There’s something to be said for esprit de corps. There’s all that home-team stuff.

  I heard from various sources that Kenny’s been all over: Kirtland, Hanscom, White Sands, Groom Lake, Tonopah. “What’s my motto?” he said, in front of his wife, the last time I saw him. “‘A Lifetime of Silence,’” she answered back, as though he’d told her in the nicest possible way to go fuck herself.

  What’s it like? Carly asked me once. Not being able to tell the people you’re closest to anything about what you care about most? She was talking about how upset I was at Kenny’s having dropped right off the face of the earth. He’d gone off to his new assignment without a backwards glance some two weeks before, with not even a Have a good one, bucko left behind on a Post-it. She was talking about having just come home from a good vacation with her husband and watching him throw his drink onto the roof because of an e-mail in response to some inquiries that read No can do, in terms of a back tell. Your Hansel stipulated no bread crumbs.

  The glass had rolled back off the shingles into the azaleas. By way of explaining the duration of my upset, I’d let her in on a little of what I’d risked by that little fishing expedition. I asked if she had any idea how long it took to get the kind of security clearance her breadwinner toted around or how many federales with pocket protectors had fine-tooth-combed my every last Visa bill.

  “I almost said hello to you two Christmases ago,” Kenny told me now. “Out at SWC in Schriever.”

  “You were at SWC in Schriever?” I asked.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Carly said. “Don’t talk like this if you’re not going to tell us what it means.”

  “The Space Warfare Center in Colorado,” Kenny said, shrugging when he saw my face. “Let’s give the bad guys a fighting chance.”

  “I didn’t know we had a Space Warfare Center,” Celestine said.

  “A Space Warfare Center?” Kenny asked her.

  At our rehearsal dinner, now three years back in the rearview mirror, during a lull at our table Carly’s college roommate said, “I never had a black eye, but I always kinda wished I did.” Carly looked surprised and said, “Well, I licked one all over once.” And everybody looked at her. “You licked a black eye?” I finally asked. And Carly went, “Oh, I thought she said ‘black guy.’”

  “You licked a black guy all over?” I asked her later that night. She couldn’t see my face in the dark but she knew what I was getting at.

  “I did. And it was so good,” she said. Then she put a hand on the inside of each of my knees and spread my legs as wide as she could.

  “What’s the biggest secret you think I ever kept from you?” she asked during our most recent relocation, which was last Memorial Day. We had a parakeet in the backseat and were bouncing a U-Haul over a road that you would have said hadn’t seen vehicular traffic in twenty-five years. I’d been lent out to Northrup and couldn’t even tell her for how long.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I figured you had nothing but secrets.” Then she dropped the subject, so for two weeks I went through her e-mails.

  “I don’t know anything about this Kenny guy,” she told me the day I threw the drink. “Except that you can’t get over that he disappeared.”

  “You know, sometimes you just register a connection,” I told her later that night in bed. “And not talking about it doesn’t have to be some big deal.”

  “So it was kind of a romantic thing,” she said.

  “Yeah, it was totally physical,” I told her. “Like you and your mom.”

  Carly had gotten this far by telling herself that compartmentalizing wasn’t all bad: that some doors may have been shut off but that the really important ones were wide open. And in terms of intimacy, she was far and away as good as things were going to get for me. We had this look we gave each other in public that said, I know. I already thought that. We’d each been engaged when we met and we’d stuck with each other through a lot of other people’s crap. Late at night we lay nose to nose in the dark and told each other stuff nobody else had ever heard us say. I told her about some of the times I’d been a dick and she told me about a kid she’d miscarried, and about another she’d put up for adoption when she was seventeen. She had no idea where he was now, but not a day went by that she didn’t think about it. We called them both Little Jimmy. And for a while there was all this magical thinking, and not asking each other all that much because we thought we already knew.

  That not-being-on-the-same-page thing had become a bigger issue for me lately, though that’s something she didn’t know. Which is perfect, she would’ve said.

  What I’d been working on at that point had gone south a little. Another way of putting it would be to say that what I was doing was wrong. The ATOP we’d developed for Minotaur had been an unarmed drone that could hover above one spot like a satellite couldn’t, providing instant lookdown for as long as a battlefield commander wanted it. But how long had it taken for us to retrofit them with air-to-surface missiles? And how many Fiats and Citroëns have those drones taken out because somebody back in Langley thought the right target was in the car?

  There was an army of us out there up to the same sorts of
hijinks and not able to talk about it. Where I worked, everything was black: not only the test flights, but also the resupply, the maintenance, the search-and-rescue. And the security scrutiny never went away. The guy who led my last project team, at home when he went to bed, after he hit the lights, waved to the surveillance guys. His wife never understood why even in August they had to do everything under the sheets.

  On black-world patches you see a lot of sigmas because that’s the engineering symbol for the unknown value.

  “The Minotaur’s the one in the labyrinth, right?” the materials guy in my project team asked the first day. When I told him it was, he wanted to know if the Minotaur was supposed to know where it was going, or if it was lost, too. That’d be funny, I told him. And we joked about the monster and the hero just wandering around through all these dark corridors, nobody finding anybody.

  And now here I was and here Kenny was, with poor Carly trying to get a fix on either one of us.

  “So what brings you to this neck of the woods?” I finally asked him once we were well into our second drinks.

  “You know how sad he was,” Carly asked, “when he couldn’t get in touch with you anymore?”

  “How sad?” Kenny asked. Celestine seemed curious, too.

  “I thought we were gonna have to get him some counseling,” Carly said.

  “It’s hard to adjust to not being with me anymore,” Kenny told her.

  “So did he ever talk to you about me?” she asked.

  “You came up,” Kenny answered, and even Celestine picked up on the unpleasantness.

  “I’m listening,” Carly said.

  “Oh, he was all hot to trot whenever he talked about you,” Kenny said.

  “Sang my praises, did he?” Carly’s face had the expression she gets when somebody’s tracked something into the house.

  “When he wasn’t shooting himself in the foot about you, he was pretty happy,” Kenny said. “I called it his good-woman face.”

  “As in, I had one,” I explained.

  “Whenever he tied himself in knots about something, I called it his Little Jimmy face,” he said. When Carly swung around toward him, he said, “Sorry, chief.”

  “That was a comic thing for you?” Carly asked me. “The kind of thing you’d tell like a funny story?”

  “I never thought it was a funny story,” I told her.

  “There’s his Little Jimmy face now,” Kenny noted. When she looked at him again, he used his index fingers to pull down on his lower eyelids and made an Emmett Kelly frown.

  “We started calling potential targets Little Jimmies,” he said, “whenever we were going to bring the hammer down and maximize collateral damage.”

  Carly was looking at something in front of her the way you try not to move even your eyes to keep from throwing up. “What is that supposed to mean?” she finally said in a low voice.

  “You know,” Kenny told her. “‘I don’t wike the wooks of this . . .’”

  “Is that Elmer Fudd you’re doing?” Celestine wanted to know.

  And how could you not laugh, watching him do his poor-sap-in-the-crosshairs shtick?

  “This is just the fucking House of Mirth, isn’t it?” Carly said.

  Because she saw on my face just how many doors she’d been dealing with all along, both open and shut, and she also saw the We’re-in-the-boat-and-you’re-in-the-water expression that guys cut from our project teams always got when they asked if there was anything we could do to keep them onboard.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ,” she said to herself, because her paradigm had suddenly shifted beyond what even she could have imagined. She thought she’d put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she’d just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn’t even crossed the moat yet.

  Because here’s the thing we hadn’t talked about, nose to nose on our pillows in the dark: how I’ve never been closer to anyone isn’t the same as We’re so close. That night I threw the drink, she asked why I was so perfect for the black world, and I wanted to tell her, How am I not perfect for it? It’s a sinkhole for resources. Everyone involved with it obsesses about it all the time. Even what the insiders know about it is incomplete. Whatever stories you do get arrive without context. What’s not inconclusive is enigmatic, what’s not enigmatic is unreliable, and what’s not unreliable is quixotic.

  She hasn’t left yet, which surprises me, let me tell you. The waitress is showing some alarm at Carly’s distress and I’ve got a hand on her back. She accepts a little rubbing and then has to pull away. “I gotta get out of here,” she goes.

  “That girl is not happy,” Celestine says after she’s gone.

  “Does she even know about your kid?” Kenny asks.

  The waitress asks if there’s going to be a third round.

  “What’d you do that for?” I ask him.

  “What’d I do that for?” Kenny asks.

  Celestine leans into him. “Can we go?” she asks. “Will you take me back to the room?”

  “So are you going after her?” Kenny asks.

  “Yeah,” I tell him.

  “Just not right now?” Kenny goes.

  I’d told Carly about the first time I noticed him. I’d heard about this guy in design in a sister program who’d raised a stink about housing the designers next to the production floor so there’d be on-the-spot back-and-forth about problems as they developed. He was twenty-seven at that point. I’d heard that he was so good at aerodynamics that his co-workers claimed he could see air. As he moved up we had more dealings with him at Minotaur. He had zero patience for the corporate side, and when the programs rolled out their annual reports on performance and everyone did their song and dance with charts and graphs, when his turn came he’d walk to the blackboard and write two numbers. He’d point to the first and go “That’s how many we presold,” and point to the second and go “That’s how much we made,” and then toss the chalk on the ledge and announce he was going back to work. He wanted to pick my brain about how I hid budgetary items on Minotaur and invited me over to his house and served hard liquor and martini olives. His wife hadn’t come out of the bedroom. After an hour I asked if they had any crackers and he said no.

  That last time I saw him, it was like he’d had me over just to watch him fight with his wife. When I got there, he handed me a Jose Cuervo and went after her. “What put a bug in your ass?” she finally shouted. And after he’d gone to pour us some more Cuervo, she said, “Would you please get outta here? Because you’re not helping at all.” So I followed him into the kitchen to tell him I was hitting the road, but it was like he’d disappeared in his own house.

  On the drive home I’d pieced together, in my groping-in-the-dark way, that he was better at this whole lockdown-on-everybody-near-you deal than I was. And worse at it. He fell into it easier, and was more wrecked by it than I would ever be.

  I told Carly as much when I got home, and she said, “Anyone’s more wrecked by everything than you’ll ever be.”

  And she’d asked me right then if I thought I was worth the work that was going to be involved in my renovation. By which she meant, she explained, that she needed to know if I was going to put in the work. Because she didn’t intend to be in this alone. I was definitely willing to put in the work, I told her. And because of that she said that so was she.

  She couldn’t have done anything more for me than that. Meaning she’s that amazing, and I’m that far gone. Because there’s one thing I could tell her that I haven’t told anybody else, including Kenny. At Penn my oId classics professor had been a big-time pacifist—he always went on about having been in Chicago in ’68—and on the last day of Dike, Eros, and Arete he announced to the class that one of our number had signed up with the military. I thought to myself: Fuck you. I can do whatever I want. I was already the odd man out in that class, the one whose comments made everyone look away and then move on. A pretty girl who I’d asked out shot me a look and then gave her
self a pursed-lips little smile and checked her daily planner.

  “So wish him luck,” my old prof said, “as he commends himself over to the god of chaos.” I remember somebody called out, “Good luck!” And I remember being enraged that I might be turning colors. “About whom,” the prof went on, “Homer wrote, ‘Whose wrath is relentless. Who, tiny at first, grows until her head plows through heaven as she strides the Earth. Who hurls down bitterness. Who breeds suspicion and divides. And who, everywhere she goes, makes our pain proliferate.’”

  ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

  Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover

  Robert Olen Butler’s first collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Among his other honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature, two National Magazine Awards in fiction, and the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award for outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran. He has published sixteen novels, most recently The Empire of Night, as well as six collections of short fiction.

  “Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover” is a postmodern riff on science fiction that was first published in Butler’s collection Tabloid Dreams. The story is a version of the science-fiction stories that regularly crop up in the guise of supermarket tabloid articles, extending the premise to its “logical” conclusion. He has written what is essentially its sequel in his novel Mr. Spaceman.

  I never thought I could fall for a spaceman. I mean, you see them in the newspaper and they kind of give you the willies, all skinny and hairless and wiggly looking, and if you touched one, even to shake hands, you just know it would be like when you were about fifteen and you were with an Earth boy and you were sweet on him but there was this thing he wanted, and you finally said okay, but only rub-a-dub, which is what we called it around these parts when I was younger, and it was the first time ever that you touched . . . well, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, that’s what it’s always seemed like to me with spacemen, and most everybody around here feels about the same way. I’m sure. Folks in Bovary, Alabama, and environs—by which I mean the KOA campground off the interstate and the new trailer park out past the quarry—everybody in Bovary is used to people being a certain way, to look at and to talk to and so forth. Take my daddy. When I showed him a few years ago in the newspaper how a spaceman had endorsed Bill Clinton for president and they had a picture of a spaceman standing there next to Bill Clinton—without any visible clothes on, by the way—the spaceman, that is, not Bill Clinton, though I wouldn’t put it past him, to tell the truth, and I’m not surprised at anything they might do over in Little Rock. But I showed my daddy the newspaper and he took a look at the spaceman and he snorted and said that he wasn’t surprised people like that was supporting the Democrats, people like that don’t even look American, and I said no. Daddy, he’s a spaceman, and he said people like that don’t even look human, and I said no. Daddy, he’s not human, and my daddy said, that’s what I’m saying, make him get a job.