by Yuvi Zalkow
My brother’s face and shirt were all marked up. And he held out his ink-stained hands, as if this gesture were proving his innocence, instead of sealing his fate. My father’s hands were tight in fists. My mother had already run into the room, and we both were too scared to say a thing, for fear of causing those fists to move.
And that’s when my little brother said with utter confidence, “The gorilla did it.”
It was unfathomable that my father would let go of what had just been done to his furniture. But my father’s next words were, “Where the hell is this gorilla?” And he yelled it like he was going to beat the hell out of this animal when he found him. “You just missed him,” my brother explained, and he pointed at the window.
“Well, he better watch himself,” my father said. And he left room while trying to hold in his smile.
Chapter Fifteen
Everyone Loves Me
It should be easier these days. My wife isn’t sleeping with napkin men. In fact, she even wants to have kids with me. I apologized for walking out in the middle of our last discussion. I told her I needed some time to think about it and she said that was okay. I told her, again, that I would stop cutting myself, again, and she was okay with this promise, again. Even my novel is going okay. I have fifteen chapters written so far. But I know better than to think I can sit pretty. Something ugly is coming on. So I spend a lot of time pacing around my house while Julia is away, which is a lot of the time.
Under the mattress, I have a picture of Julia when she was two years old. It was her birthday. She is wearing a paper hat that says “Everyone Loves Me” on the front. Julia is in her mother’s arms and she has a giggle on her face that is impossible not to smile at. I don’t need to hide this picture, but I do. I want it all to myself.
Now that she’s proven to me that napkins aren’t malignant and that she wants to have a family, I feel even less confident about our relationship. It’s even more unlikely for us to have normal sex. I’m even more obsessed that she is sick of me, wants me to be different than the me that I am. And she sighs too often. And our teasing seems more out of resentment than out of love.
I’ve never been to Florida or Louisiana or the Caribbean during a storm but I have this fictionalized image of what it’s like to be in the eye of the hurricane from watching too many disaster movies. And that’s what the quiet of my day feels like. Like a movie version of the eye of a hurricane. And when my beautiful wife who loves me and wants to have children steps into my office at a time when she should be busy with her job, I know she is the ugly hurricane that is all around me.
There is nothing ugly about Julia. Maybe this is part of the problem. I’m too nervous to pee standing up and she can arrange a meeting with the governor. I go to the therapist and she wins a salsa dancing contest. I want to be spanked and she wants a family.
My wife doesn’t stutter. She isn’t slow to speak. But her voice is so soft that it is hard to tell where in the room the words are coming from. “Honey,” she says. “I need some time off.”
“Well, then get off your feet,” I say. “Let me give you a massage.” For however soft and thoughtful her voice is, mine is loud and dumb-sounding. But I stand up. I’m ready. I’m ready to do whatever it is I need to do.
“It’s too late,” she says. She is too calm.
“No,” I say. “I’ll even put on a new pair of underwear. It’s only ten in the morning. I could give you a nine-hour massage before sunset. What’s hurting? Your inguinal ligaments? I just read a special technique for inguinal ligaments.”
“Honey,” she says. “I’m serious.”
“I am too,” I say. “Tell me what you need and I’ll do it.”
The fair skin around her eyes makes the red more noticeable, and I see that she doesn’t look great today, and I see she is tired, and I realize she’s been tired for more than just today, and I realize it’s more than just because of a busy week.
My wife, she looks around my office, a room that reeks of insecurity. “I don’t need anything,” she says. “Or at least nothing here.”
“I learned a new recipe for BLTs,” I say. “It involves putting the L before the B and the T. Technically it’s an LBT, but I think you’ll still like it. The Protestant Sandwich Committee gives it five stars.”
I can feel myself drowning. I’m grabbing for anything I can get ahold of. I’m trying to stay afloat. But it’s too late. All these stupid jokes when I should be saying: Please don’t leave. I love you. Let’s talk about it. Give me another chance.
“Honey,” she says in a tone as warm and kind as you could ever ask for. “I rented an apartment.”
And that’s when it hits me: not even a Protestant sandwich can save me now.
#
As Julia packs her things, she sings “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” Even though she is crying and she can barely speak, this song continues for what seems like forever. So I lock myself in the bathroom and cover my ears.
And I’d sooner tell you a story about Uranus than tell you more about the way Julia leaves me.
Book 3
URANUS
MEN ARE FROM MARS, JULEFS ARE FROM URANUS
Stories never take place on Uranus. But this one does. And it does so without a lick of mockery for the planet’s name, which typically finds itself in as many joke books as scientific journals.
The hero of our story arrives on Uranus for one simple reason: to save our solar system. Our hero is so famous that even an alien stationed on Uranus wants to meet him. In real life, our hero is a nobody who sits around in his torn underwear, trying to write a novel about a man trying to write a novel. But instead, he ends up writing silly stories about Uranus. In real life, this man is timid and scared. He weeps at night. He has problems communicating. In real life, our hero is impotent when it relates to the bedroom and his wife. But in this science fiction story, our hero is blond and bold and beautiful. He is virile. He is a brilliant tactician, and he is the last hope for mankind. Our hero is the most famous political advisor on Earth, and now he has one hour to negotiate with a JuLef alien creature who is tasked with blowing up our solar system. This creature is the last of his species.
It is worth mentioning that JuLefs look to us like monkeys. This is by design. It was the 1959 flight when we launched Able and Baker, a rhesus monkey and a squirrel monkey respectively, into space that the JuLefs first noticed our solar system and our cute little space program. So the JuLefs sent their first fleet of negotiators in the form of rhesus monkeys. As far as we could tell, they were identical to monkeys, arriving even with fleas in their hair. We would never have been able to distinguish them from our own monkeys—except they could talk.
#
At first, the JuLefs inhabited Uranus. Thousands of them. And they waited. They waited for our knowledge to progress to a point that merited communication. But after two hundred years, they grew impatient with our slow progress. “They should have kept the monkeys in charge of the space program,” the JuLef negotiators agreed. And so they decided to visit the crude Mars outpost we had recently built.
The story goes this way: we first met them on Mars; we last met them on Uranus. On Mars, it was charming. We were curious, awestruck. It was incredible. Intelligent life! Brilliant monkeys who traveled by thought, manipulated time by choice, and ate entire stars for lunch. They shared their knowledge with us, and we shared our classic films with them. For us, this meant mental-powered flight. For them, it meant Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. It was a grand time. The most saladacious of all our species’ salad days!
But on Uranus, the party was over. They saw us for what we were. Insecure, afraid of exposing our weaknesses, jealous and angry and destructive. We always wanted more than what we had and we would destroy ourselves to get it. To think that we would try to hijack the JuLef/Earth project when these creatures could see through space and time! It was either stupid or a death wish. Let’s say both.
On Mars, we were intriguing and
cute: funny creatures with that funny little digestive system and that way we liked to hump each other for amusement. But on Uranus, our species had been deemed unworthy troublemakers, doomed to sit in time-out for an eternity. It would take one JuLef thought to destroy the sun. There goes the neighborhood. And it was up to our hero to convince this last JuLef negotiator that we were worth saving.
In real life, this meeting didn’t take place on Uranus, it happened at the Urban Grind coffee shop on 22nd and Irving. In real life, he wasn’t trying to save all of humanity, he was just trying to save his measly little marriage. In real life, he wasn’t equipped with a neutron bomb. This man couldn’t even sustain an erection.
#
Uranus is composed of gas and ice. Surface temperature—if you can call it a surface—is negative 360 degrees Fahrenheit. Even with our newfound skill at M.P.F., it would have taken 10.5 years to make the trip. And it would have required the latest technology in thermal underwear. But this JuLef made it happen in a warm seven seconds, which is even faster than the speed of light. In the early days of our relationship, the JuLefs respected our laws of physics. But the honeymoon was over.
Our hero steps out of the spaceship and steps into what looks like an Earth coffee shop. Except instead of soothing café music, there is a screeching sound from the speakers. This screeching causes our hero to forget the tune he was humming in the spaceship, a tune he wanted to remember.
The JuLef negotiator is the only one in the place and he is sitting at a table waiting for our hero. This is the first and only time the JuLefs have made us visit them on Uranus. They used to come to us. Or meet us at a Mars café. In either case, they stayed politely in our neighborhood. But after the little incident—our failed coup—they no longer were interested in our convenience.
Our hero covers his ears as he sits down next to the monkey-shaped JuLef negotiator. The monkey snaps his monkey fingers and the noise stops.
“Your species’ auditory sense was always a tricky one for us,” the monkey admits.
Our hero looks around at the place. It reminds him of a coffee shop from back home, but he can’t quite place it. The café has the strange quality of feeling recently inhabited, but also it feels like it has been permanently abandoned. The cappuccino on the front counter is still steaming.
“Nice work on the café,” our hero says.
The monkey points all around but doesn’t explain what he’s pointing at. He picks at some fleas and then eats them. “They’ve strapped a neutron bomb to your genitals.”
Our hero adjusts his pants—the device is incredibly small, but he now realizes he wore the wrong underwear for the occasion. He points over to the cappuccino he’s been staring at. “That is exactly what I want,” he says. One flaw with the Earthlings’ plan to blow up this JuLef with a neutron bomb is that our hero has about as much interest in saving mankind as does this JuLef.
“Oh yes,” the monkey says. “The cappuccino is for you.”
On the way to the counter, our hero is surprised at how unfrightened he is by this meeting. But it’s not courage as much as apathy. In his time, our hero has advised four presidents, three chancellors, two planetary rulers, and one extremely controversial urologist. His résumé is brilliant but his heart is cold. Since he saw his father leave his mother alone with three kids and absolutely nothing other than a collection of useless stamps from our ancient First Civil War, our hero has been skeptical of the heart. It has left him as cold as the gases of Uranus.
So now our hero walks over to get his cappuccino, which he has been dreaming about for hours, for days—it seems like for his whole life. At the counter, along with the cappuccino, he finds a Lamy pen, which he decides to pick up, the monkey won’t be needing it anyhow, and then he comes back to sit with his monkey friend. But as he walks back, he notices one tile on the floor is missing. The hole in the floor goes straight through to the gaseous mass of Uranus. He takes the pen and drops it down the hole. It disappears without a sound.
“Stay clear of the hole,” the monkey says without looking back. For a minute, our hero thinks of jumping in.
Our real-life hero dreams of having such a detached coldness. But in real life, when our hero’s wife arrives at the coffee shop, our hero says, “I missed you so much,” because she left the house a month prior. She left him because she got tired of him, because who wouldn’t get tired of a man in his underwear who does nothing other than fail to write a novel? In real life, after the hero’s wife gives our hero a good, long stare, she sits down next to him and says, “You weren’t supposed to contact me.”
But our sci-fi hero doesn’t long for or beg from anyone. He sits down at that table, next to a flea-eating alien, and sips on his triple-shot cappuccino as if it is the only thing in the solar system that he wants.
“Did you know,” the monkey says, “that Brando improvised that scene with Eva Marie Saint?”
“What?” our hero says.
“On the Waterfront,” the JuLef says, disappointed again with our species. “The scene where he picks up her glove and tries it on. That was Brando’s improvised work.”
“Ahh,” our hero says, more interested in the coffee than a two-hundred-year-old movie.
“Do you know why I wanted to see you?” the JuLef says.
Our hero keeps sipping his cappuccino. He looks up at the monkey and wonders how much longer he has left to enjoy this drink.
“It’s because you just don’t care,” the monkey says. “You are unusual to your species in this way. You don’t care to save your people, your planet, or yourself. In twenty minutes, I will think your solar system into smithereens and you don’t give the ass of a r at .”
Our hero’s stomach starts grumbling in a crampy way and he knows he’ll have to go to the bathroom soon. Maybe it’s good, he decides, that he’ll be blown up before he has to confront this potentially troubling bowel movement.
“But since you are not driven by fear or longing,” the monkey continues, “you also have the freedom to choose what you want in any situation.”
“If you can see through time and space,” our hero says, “then why did you bother with us?” The cappuccino is strong, a little too strong, and he can already feel the agitation. “I don’t trust my species and I’m one of them.”
“We saw this coming,” the JuLef says. “But we still got what we wanted.” He takes a deep breath. “Would you like a scone before you finish that drink?”
So this is it, our hero realizes. This will be his last drink. This will be the last time he eats a scone and has to think: Boy, scones taste like dried cardboard.
In real life, our hero can’t get food properly through his system. All he thinks about is getting his wife back. Some days, he’s convinced he is too sensitive for the world. Even though his parents were loving to him, he still walks the Earth as if carrying a terrible burden and he doesn’t know why this is true. He has kissed every single goddamn photograph of his wife in the house. He hasn’t just kissed them, he has licked every one of them, front, back, sides, and corners. And for this, he has paper cuts all over his tongue. This man is nothing if not paralyzing melodrama. But in the science fiction story, when asked what should be done with the species, our hero says without a lick of melodrama, “Burn the whole lot of us to the ground.”
As much as our science fiction hero hated his father for leaving, he still kept his collection of stamps. This is worth noting. He isn’t melodramatic on the surface, but he has carried these fifteen VacuSealed books from apartment to apartment, city to city, country to country, as if the stamp collection were a burden important for him to carry. These stupid stamp books he’s never even opened to look at. Maybe he carries these fifteen books to remember how he hates mankind, or maybe he carries them to remember that even with all our unforgivable flaws, there is still something that we can’t help but carry with us.
Our hero finishes his coffee. He chews up his scone so that nothing is left but a pile of crumbs on the tab
le.
“So what did you want from us?” our hero asks.
The JuLef picks at the crumbs on the table and eats them. “The formula to free will.”
Damn it, our hero thinks. He doesn’t want a goddamn philosophy speech as his last conversation. A stomachache and a discussion about free will were not on his wish list. What he wants is another drink.
“I’ve refilled your cup,” the monkey says, and our hero looks down to see the cup is refilled. This pleases our hero so much that he is willing to listen to a little more philosophical manure.
“Your species,” the monkey continues, “actually chooses at any given moment what they want to do. They improvise,” the monkey says. “The sad thing is that 999 times out of 1,000, they do what we predict they will do and they do it because of fear.” The monkey shakes his head as if this were a new disappointment. “Your species isn’t as interesting as we had hoped, but we will still learn from what we have acquired.”
Our hero is skeptical that anyone could learn from watching Brando pick up a glove, even though he’ll admit it was a charming scene.
“So are y’all any better than us?” our hero says, a little less impressed with this brilliant monkey.
“No,” the monkey says and he checks his watch. Our hero realizes that the JuLef story is long and complex, and there is no time to recount it today.
“I guess it’s time,” our hero says.
“Yes,” the monkey says. “It’s time.”
Our hero laughs, thinking about how hopeful all those Earthlings were that our hero could save them. That silly scheme with the neutron bomb. In a way, our hero is disappointed—he had hoped this meeting would inspire something different in him. Inspire anything in him.