Abnormal Occurrences: Short Stories

by Thomas Berger

“The food,” I said. “I’m afraid on a Sunday night like this, I don’t have much. There’s a cold lamb chop, and of course some cheese, unless it’s too ripe—”

  “No,” Wonk said. “Forgive me, but did you not name some beasts that might invade your larder?”

  “Yes. Mice. Raccoons, even. They once tore a hole in the kitchen roof!”

  “I’m thinking of something smaller,” said Wonk. He held up a pair of pincered fingers.

  “Insects? We get all kinds. Ants are the worst: the little red ones that march in army-like columns. The black kind come as individuals. I don’t know which is worse.”

  Wonk was grinning. “What good fortune that by chance we landed in just the right spot on all this enormous planet!”

  “I think we’re fortunate, too,” I said politely, “that you speak English.”

  “Aha! We know it as Wattle. But it certainly does seem very similar to your tongue... Please don’t think me rude, but I wonder whether I might see these ants of yours.”

  “You certainly may, but it’s almost dark now. Won’t you come in the house and have a glass of wine, and we’ll see what we can work out with the food. How many people are on your ship? I’ve got a few cans on hand: pork ’n’ beans and so on. Sardines. Maybe even corned beef.” I gestured towards the porch. “Trouble is, I don’t have a car at the moment, or we could run over to the convenience store at Briceville.”

  He finally moved but seemed reluctant. I assumed he was shy or perhaps even suspicious that I might be luring him into an ambush. That was understandable. What must it be like to sail across the vastness of space to land on an alien planet and confront such a to-him exotic creature as I?

  I led him through the dimly lit front portions of the house to the kitchen, which was brightly lighted from the overhead fixture. I must say that seeing him clearly now simply confirmed my sense that, from the visible physical evidence, he and I could not have been distinguished each from each as to species.

  “Won’t you sit down?” I gestured at the table under the light, and then, when he made no move toward it, went there and drew out one of the chairs. He remained motionless.

  “Is something wrong?”

  Wonk showed embarrassment, coughing into a balled hand, “I’m sorry to say, I don’t understand what you want me to do.”

  “To sit here, if you like. Or perhaps you’d prefer the other side?”

  He lowered his chin. “I’m afraid I don’t know what ‘to sit’ means.”

  I wondered whether I should really buy this, but anyway went ahead and demonstrated. “This is sitting,” I said, feeling as foolish as I ever have my life long. “Do you have another word for it?”

  “Aha! No, we do not speak of it because we don’t do it. Is it as easy as you make it look?”

  I have what I take to be a normal reluctance to be made an ass of, but I could not detect a milligram of disingenuousness in the man, if I can call him that. “As falling off a log!”

  Bad choice of terms. Apprehensively he asked, “Does it hurt?”

  “Not at all!...Here, let me help. Just bend these legs.” I tapped him behind the knees. “Now, down, down—you’re all right. I’ve got you.” I was holding the chair with one hand and reassuringly touching his shoulder with the other. “There, you’ve landed. Now, isn’t that comfortable?”

  He looked up at me and made a smile of relief in which an element of fear could still however be seen. “I still can’t believe it,” he said. “This is an excellent compromise between standing and lying down. Now that I know about it, I find it hard to believe that we Wurtzels have never discovered what seems so obvious.” He leaped to his full height, then plunged his buttocks down onto the wooden seat. He did this several times, each more violent than the last.

  Concerned that the repeated impacts would soon loosen the joints in my chair, I informed Wonk that the orthodox procedure was to lower oneself gently, so as, among other things, to avoid damages to the behind.

  “Aha!” he exclaimed, looking down and wincing. “A good idea. My rump is beginning to ache.” He stayed standing. “Still another thing to thank you for! But now, may I just have a look at those ants? I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m afraid we’re famished.”

  “If that’s the case, then let me first fix you a sandwich.” I opened one of the cabinets. “Or soup. Perhaps you haven’t heard of Chicarina, but I assure you it’s tasty. We’ll have time enough to see ants.” I waved, a soup can at him and asked, “Are you an entomologist by chance?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I’m afraid not, and I beg you not to think me the glutton I must seem. Forgive me, your sculpture is beautiful. After the meal I’d like to see all your work.” He made a sweeping gesture to indicate the expanse of the kitchen. “Your studio is lovely. I love the arts. I was myself one of the leading poets of Wurtz before the famine.”

  I inserted the can into the electric opener. “Of course,” I said, “I don’t have any influence on our government, but I should think they’d want to give you people some assistance, hands across space as it were. Golly, I’d say Washington will be so relieved to see that the first visitors from outer space are nice, they’ll do anything for you.” This was finally beginning to seem normal to me, realistic, believable, as I saw the hairs in his nose, a tiny fragment of lint on his lapel. “Uh, which sculpture are you referring to?”

  “The object you are now polishing.”

  “This soup can?” I returned to the suspicion that he was kidding me.

  “Forgive me, Tony Walsh,” he cried desperately, and, springing to his feet, approached me rapidly. “I’m afraid that unless you take me immediately to the ants I shall be forced to give you a good tongue-lashing!”

  I put the can down. “I suspect we’re not in perfect communication, Mr. Wonk, but if you have such strong feelings, I’ll be pleased to do as you ask. Would you mind telling me what your interest in ants might be?”

  He threw up his hands. “To eat them, for heaven’s sake! I assure you being hungry is no joke.”

  This was really too much. Nevertheless, I switched on the floodlight that illuminated the rear yard and led the man, if such he could be termed, out into the weeds that ruled there. The saucer still rested on the adjacent meadow, silent as ever, its crew remaining unseen. “All right,” I said, pointing to a mounded, sandy place near the rotting stump of a bygone tree. “I believe you’ll find an ant hole there.”

  “That’s all very well,” said he, looking down, “but how can I get to them?” He raised his head and stared reproachfully at me.

  “Oh, come on. You wanted ants, and here they are. No doubt they’re asleep at the moment, but surely you can rouse them by taking that stick and digging... If, that is, you really do eat them and this is not some sort of hoax.” I was annoyed.

  Wonk raised his hands and backed away. “I’m no hunter. I told you I was a poet. Don’t you have any farms, where the ants are domesticated?”

  I was now in the mood to guy him, saying something like, Yes, but it’s the gameyness of the wild ant that is so prized by gastronomes, but I decided instead to play it straight for a while longer. There was a pathetic quality to him that it was difficult to see as feigned.

  “Toy stores often sell so-called ant farms, glass boxes filled with dirt. The ants can be observed as they crawl through their tunnels and go about their business. Kids are given these by childless friends who have been invited for the weekend.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that at least your children eat ants,” said Wonk. “From your reaction thus far I assumed you didn’t regard them as edible at all and you lived on the cans you spoke about, and felt quite superior because you can digest tin. Well, so be it, we are obviously a younger race and haven’t evolved as far as you. We need flesh for nourishment.”

  I picked up a stick with the intention of unearthing some ants for him, but then threw it down. “Mr. Wonk,” I said, “from what I can see of you, we belong to races that if not prec
isely the same are pretty closely allied. Now, there’s not going to be enough ants in this hole to feed a person your size, let alone your comrades in the ship. Why not try the soup I opened for you—not the can, but rather the contents, that red-colored water with the different things in it. Those are vegetables, and there are also some shreds of beef—that’s the flesh of a cow.”

  “Good gracious,” gasped Wonk. “Do you kill and eat things with a central nervous system and warm blood?”

  This point was not a new one to me. Before Myra, I had had a vegetarian friend. “You must try carrots and peas and celery, beans, cabbage, and so on: they are plants and grow in the soil.”

  “Tell me,” he asked, “are we anywhere near a shop where food is sold? If so, would it not be simpler for all concerned if we simply went there and purchased enough ants to take us on our way? We’re perfectly capable of paying, I assure you.”

  “Briceville’s five miles, but I’m afraid my friend has taken the car. Besides, you wouldn’t be able to buy ants there. People here don’t ever eat that sort of thing. You really must try other kinds of food. We have all sorts: grains and eggs and fruits of many varieties. Don’t you eat anything else on Wurtz?”

  “Some grasses and leaves,” said Wonk, “as filler, but of course they’re not very nutritional—to leave taste out of the picture.”

  “Please come back to the kitchen and try the sardines. They were coldblooded when alive.”

  Wonk put his hand out. “Darned nice of you to offer. But I think we’d better try elsewhere. I hope I wasn’t too rude earlier. I apologize.”

  “You’re not going to get what you want anywhere else in this country,” I said. “But I’ve seen pictures of eight-foot anthills in Africa. Perhaps you could zoom over there in your saucer.” I snapped my fingers. “Damn! I didn’t bring a camera along this week.”

  “Camera?”

  “I wish I could take a snapshot of your people and your spacecraft. Nobody will believe this otherwise.” But he was still frowning. “You don’t know what a camera is?” As it turned out, he did not. I explained.

  He shook his head. “I confess that Earth has consistently gone beyond our wildest expectations. We were prepared to find you had the wheel and the lever, things that even yet we haven’t mastered. Our wheel is still awfully bumpy, though we have been making some progress from the square we started with: it’s now hexagonal.”

  My suspicions about his authenticity had waxed and waned. This was too much. “Come now,” I said derisively, “you supposedly fly here from outer space in a vehicle that obviously has overcome the problems of gravity and friction and centrifugal force, etcetera, and burns a fuel that has no visible exhaust, and you haven’t perfected the wheel?”

  Wonk shrugged his round shoulders. “Oh, the ship. They left it behind. I don’t think it needs fuel. It just runs when you move a switch and stops when you turn it off. To make it go up, you move a stick back, forward to make it go down, and so on. These things are all clearly labeled, else we wouldn’t have the foggiest idea as to how to operate the machine.”

  “They? Who are they?”

  “The superior people who occupied our planet for a while and dominated us, making us do menial tasks for them.”

  “But they left?”

  “To conquer other worlds. They gave us up as completely hopeless, I’m afraid. Said we don’t even do a good job as flunkies.” Wonk smiled sweetly. “They had robots who did all the skilled work, and we were supposed to do the cleanup, sweep the floors, carry out rubbish, and so on, but we couldn’t seem to meet their standards. Finally they put us to digging ditches and filling them in, in a wasteland area, but hard as we tried, we’d end up with a series of holes with piles of sand between them. A shovel just doesn’t seem to do what it’s supposed to when one of us is wielding it.”

  His manner was so sincere that I could not withhold a belief that there was substance to the outlandish story.

  “Come along,” I said, leading him back to the kitchen. “Please try some of the tinned foods.”

  After a short refresher course in the technique of sitting, he took a chair at the kitchen table and satisfactorily lowered himself onto it, but fell off when trying to pull it, with himself, forward. He was not hurt, however, either in body or spirit. It would have been hard not to find him ingratiating; he was trying so hard to catch on to new ways.

  As it turned out, he preferred the oil to the sardines, licking the former off the latter and then dropping the fish onto the plate as one discards the cob when the corn has been stripped away. He was innocent of the uses of knife and fork, and wiped his greasy hands on the lapels of his suit. When I urged the paper napkin upon him, he polished the plate with it. With the worry that any beverage containing alcohol might affect him deleteriously, I found a can of Sprite and poured a glass of it, over ice.

  Suspecting that in the absence of instruction he might do anything with the liquid but take it into his mouth, I told him it was exclusively for drinking.

  He laughed politely. “Good heavens, you must think us even more barbarous than we are. I should say that drinking was instinctive and pretty much the same throughout the universe.” He plucked the ice cubes from the glass and tossed them onto the table, then poured some Sprite into his left palm and, lowering his head, lapped at it dog-fashion.

  I decided to let that go for a while, and was about to introduce him to peanut butter as applied to a graham cracker (one of my own favorites for which I would not have apologized to Brillat-Savarin), when I heard the slamming of the front screendoor. Before remembering that such was Myra’s preferred way of reminding me that the spring was too weak to do the job unassisted, I assumed that one or more of Wonk’s associates had become impatient for his report as to the local availability of food, and though Wonk himself had proved innocuous, I was not yet free of apprehension: they were after all the hungry crew of an alien space vehicle.

  But it was Myra who burst into the kitchen. She was at least as angry with me as when she had left, I’m sure, for it is a point of honor with her to hold a grudge interminably, but she was also by reflex a thoroughgoing optimist with respect to men she met for the first time. Irrespective of their age, appearance, or type, she could always project some association of value, if not lover then father or brother or just someone good with hammer and nails—and I found that an endearing trait, no doubt because I am much the same when it comes to women; perhaps we could be called pragmatists.

  In any event, Myra lost her glower on seeing my guest. “Hi,” said she, advancing with outthrust hand. “I’m Myra Clendenning.”

  “Myra,” I said, “this is Wonk. Wonk, my friend Myra. Now, Myra, you might find this hard to accept at first, but if you noticed on the way in, there’s a space ship parked in the field next door. Actually it’s a real flying saucer, from the planet of Wurtz. I didn’t believe in them, either, till this one showed up, but there it is, and Wonk here came with it. He and the rest of the crew are without evil intent. They landed because they’re out of food. Now, as you know, we’ve got a few tins of this and that, and I’m introducing him to things he has never tasted.”

  Wonk had sprung up when she entered the room and bowed elaborately, as he had not done for me, and kissed Myra’s wrist.

  I added, repetitiously, “You might find this hard to believe.”

  “Why should I?” Myra asked, with a sparkling smile for the benign-looking alien, obviously reluctant to let go his hand. “I’ve been expecting that one of these days someone like this would come to reach out to us in our ignorance.”

  “Thank you, Myra Clendenning,” said Wonk, “but I’m afraid we’re the ignorant ones. I’ve only just been taught by your friend how to sit down and that there are other things to eat than ants, though I hope I’m not being rude in saying that there’s still nothing tastier.”

  “What in the world has he given you to drink?” Myra asked, then glared at me and said, “Open the Talbot, for heaven’s s
ake.”

  “I think we might wait for that,” I told her. “Everything’s so new.”

  “It’s my property,” she said irritably though continuing to beam at Wonk. She went to the under-sink area that served as wine cellar and brought out the only bottle that remained there. She had bought it on sale somewhere. I suspected it was an off-year, though I can never find one of those little vintage-cards when I want to.

  Myra deftly extracted the cork with the two-pronged non-screw gadget that I have never mastered. “I know,” she said to Wonk, “that you undoubtedly have much to teach us, not only about technology, but the more important issues. Foremost among them would be how to live in peace with one another.” She poured some wine for him.

  “Myra,” I said, “he doesn’t drink from a glass. You’d better—”

  “Teach us,” Myra said. “Oh, teach us how to live together.”

  “Goodness gracious,” said Wonk. “I’m afraid we’re the last people who could do that. You see, we were able to come to power only because our old bosses went elsewhere in the galaxy to find new people to conquer and treat like scum. But now we’re in the lamentable situation of being on top, with nobody else underneath us, no inferior folks to despise and mistreat.” He gave me a sheepish look. “I must apologize for lying to you, Tony Walsh. We came here not only to look for food. We were searching for slaves. But it didn’t take me any time at all to see that if you are representative of Earth’s population, we would be savagely whipped if we tried anything here. You have every advantage: you can eat and drink anything, you tame and keep as pet an animal who would otherwise be ferocious, and you have a friend who smells sweet and speaks melodiously. I suspect she’s an example of your females.”

  Myra hated being spoken of as if she were absent, and she moved quickly to assert herself. “I admire your humility,” said she. “We can certainly learn a lesson from that. But don’t sell yourselves short. Let me suggest that you get more particular in your search: look for inferior individuals, not peoples. I assure you, the former are in abundance. True, collecting them one by one can be tedious, but the effort will be well worth it.”