by Robert Cohen
“Chaos is the germ of life, according to the kabbalah. Even when there’s chaos, there’s an order below the surface. An egg, for instance, would be the chaos of the bird.”
“We must have read different bibles,” she said, pulling back her hair and compiling it into a loose knot. “I thought religion was about peace and love.”
Her cell phone rang. She picked it up without changing her expression. “This better be good,” she said.
“Okay, well.” He made a show of patting down his pockets, hunting for his keys. “Nice meeting you,” he mouthed, backing toward the door.
“Wait, hold on a sec.” It wasn’t clear if she was talking to him, or to whoever—this Vera person?—was on the other end of the phone. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bite your head off just now.”
“Forget it.”
“Down at the school. What you said before. Do they really think my husband’s gone crazy?”
“Yeah.”
“Too bad. Well, say hi to Zoe. Tell her to call me, okay?”
He closed the door behind him and made his way down the corridor to the elevator. He should have stood up for himself better, Oren thought, for the curiosities and hungers of his youth. But she was an angry person, anybody could see that.
The elevator was slow. By the time it came, a small group had gathered behind him: two residents, a nurse, and an orderly pushing a patient in a wheelchair. Only when they had all crowded in and were descending toward the lobby did he glance down to see who the patient was.
“Yo, Gates Brown, still here? Don’t you got nowhere to be?”
Apparently his sleep had not done him much good. His eyes were sunken and moist, his arms like slackened ropes.
“I’m on my way out,” Oren said. “And you? Are you being released?”
“Me? Nah. Down to the lab. Got to see a lady ’bout a test.”
The elevator stopped. The doors shuddered open; Oren had to step aside to let people out. A gurney went by, IV bag swaying like a metronome. Just before the doors closed again a young man in a lab coat slipped in, sucking the tip of his pen as he studied a chart. Tests, and more tests. Oren stepped back to give him more room.
5
Aliens
It was Mimi’s fault, of course, that business with the aliens, but then so many things were these days. She was the one who’d dragged her friends down to the lake, having heard about the eclipse on the public radio station that morning on her way to school. She was the one who’d told Jeremy at lunch and also mentioned it to Lisa, who must have said something to Yuko, who let slip to Marcus, who was hanging out after school with Kyle, who snuck out of his house around ten thirty and picked them up in the elementary-school parking lot in his mom’s Cherokee—the front end of which he’d already dinged up considerably, thanks to this unfortunate habit Kyle had of driving under the influence of pretty much anything he could get his hands on.
Anyway there they were. The lake was deserted, the air chilly and moist. In the paltry moonlight, the ghosts of old enjoyments—the rusted skeleton of a swing set, the boarded-up cinder-block refreshment shack—stood silhouetted against the trees. They had the whole shore to themselves. They proceeded to their usual place, a grassy inlet with a pale fringe of sand where the toadstools and lake scum grew thick. The Black Lagoon, they called it. Then they spread out some blankets and lit up a bowl and hung out waiting for the eclipse.
Earth science not being among Mimi’s better subjects, she’d been kind of vague on the details. She had no idea for example whether this particular eclipse was supposed to be lunar or solar, total or partial, brief or long-lasting. Nor did she care. Basically it was an excuse to hang out on the beach with her friends that night, scrunching her toes up and down in the cool weightless sand. Water slapped monotonously against the docks. Above them a thin layer of clouds had begun to curtain off the stars. Mimi shivered; for a second she was truly happy. Then Lisa said, “I’m bored.”
“Me too,” Kyle said. “Let’s go.”
“Be patient,” Yuko said. “The light’s about to change. Can’t you feel it?”
“You can’t feel something like that,” Kyle said.
Yuko shrugged. “Maybe you can’t.” She was sophisticated, you could see it in her clothes, her hair, her grades, even the food her mother packed her for lunch, those compact little sushis. It all seemed fed by some underground source, some hidden spring. Japanese people were extrasensitive, Yuko said; it had to do with the wiring of their brains. No wonder the guys turned to check her out in the corridors as she walked past, ticking off her features like a résumé. Her straight black hair, her sad little eyes, her flawless skin, et cetera. Even Mimi stared at her sometimes, like in French class, where she sat two rows behind, wondering over Yuko’s bare, unblemished shoulders, so slender, so pale, so incredibly smooth that even the knobs of her spine, as she wrote out her assignments in her tiny, meticulous script, hung low in her skin, invisible. Next to that tender and delicate assembly that was Yuko, she felt like some gross, clueless creature—a dog, not a cat, a clumsy white girl, out of place in her own skin.
“Wait, is that it?”
“Is what what? I don’t see anything.”
“That.”
If you could classify eclipses by gender, the way they did with hurricanes, then the one that night must surely have been male: it made a long, drawn-out production of arrival, peaked before they knew it, then slipped away like a thief. All they could see was a smear of half-light, vague and formless and runny, like eggs left on a breakfast plate.
“Wow, Mimi, thanks a lot,” Lisa said, in case anyone had forgotten who was responsible. “I’m so glad I skipped rehearsal for that.”
“Yeah right,” Jeremy said, “she’s the god of weather, she totally controls these things.”
“I’m just saying, she made it out like some big deal, and it’s not.”
“Whoa now.” Marcus was polishing his pampered skateboard. “Keep the peace. Make impermanence your friend.”
“What does that even mean, Marcus?” Jeremy said. “I never know what that means, when you say shit like that.”
“It’s all about focus, man.” Marcus bestowed upon them a smile of infinite tolerance. “Focus and detachment. Like the gatha says, in three hundred years, where will you be and where shall I be?”
“You’ll be stoned, Marcus. As usual.”
Marcus nodded amiably—the idea appeared to agree with him—and cradled his board in both arms. You could see the nicks and dents in the titanium bearings. Since his last trip to the emergency room, he’d been forced to cut back on the X-treme stuff, the ollies and Half Cabs and Gay Twists, and devote himself to the cultivation of transcendent consciousness instead. He still carried his board around with him though. It kept him centered. Seeds and stems could be seen sticking to the lacquer.
Marcus had showed Mimi a trick once—they were still going out at the time—called, fittingly enough, the Disaster. She’d spent the better part of an otherwise pleasant afternoon at the skate park watching him try to master the damn thing, his eyes all lit up as he shot down the ramp, a blue vein popping out from his forehead like a highway on a road atlas. Sometimes she envied guys their concentration. The way they wanted things so badly, the way they tunneled into that feeling and lost sight of all else. Even when they fell—and Marcus fell a lot—you could see they still thought they were flying.
“Yo, Lisa, about that play?” Kyle said. Lisa had won the lead role that spring in The King and I over about fifty other girls, something that in some circles, Mimi supposed, would have been considered an accomplishment. “I hate to tell you, but it’s totally racist.”
“You say that about everything, Kyle. You said it about Hamlet too, and everybody in it was white.”
“Dude, I misspoke, all right? I didn’t mean Hamlet. I meant the one with that big black dude who strangles his wife. Macbeth.”
“That’s Othello, dickhead.”
“My poin
t is, like, here comes the great smart white lady to teach the ignorant natives how to do things? That’s not cool. That’s just perpetuating racial stereotypes.”
“Well, you’re perpetuating retarded stereotypes, so we’re even.”
“This is not focus and detachment, people,” Marcus informed them. “In fact it’s pretty much the opposite.”
There was a pause. Everyone was thinking, what am I doing here? Why don’t I find some new friends? Marcus, when he came back from Burning Man the previous summer, told Mimi how people there referred to their home life as “the default world.” Mimi felt that way too. Except she had no other world to go to. She’d never been anywhere else. And if she didn’t get her grades up and do something about her shitty SATs, she never would.
Right then Jeremy put his arm around her and tried to kiss her again. That did it.
“Don’t,” she said, a lot louder than she meant to. Then, because they were all looking at her now, she blurted out, “I think my dad’s got cancer.”
The problem with being shy, in Mimi’s experience, was that whenever you finally did send up the occasional verbal flare, it was always too bright, too loud, too sudden, too loopy; it mesmerized for a second and then sputtered out. Really she hadn’t intended to say anything; it was just one of those involuntary reflexes, the random firing of some lonely twitching nerve in her head. Anyway, the result was annoying. You’d have thought that, given the general witlessness of the conversation, everyone would be glad to have a new subject introduced, something serious to talk about for a change. But instead they looked repulsed. At least Jeremy did, and he was the one closest to her, basically about a tongue’s length away in fact.
“Dude,” Marcus said, having pondered the matter for a while. “That’s tragic.”
“He went in for this biopsy last week. I don’t think he’s heard yet. But he like shaved off all his hair already.”
“I always liked Mr. H,” Kyle said. “He was pretty cool for a principal.”
“He’s not dead, dumbshit,” Jeremy said. “People go in for exploratory things all the time, and most of them turn out to be nothing. Right, Mimi?”
Mimi nodded. In truth it hadn’t occurred to her that most things turned out to be nothing, though she herself might well turn out to be nothing, she thought.
Yuko got up, brushed sand off her legs, and came over to where Mimi was sitting. “Let’s go in the lake. The water’ll feel nice. Maybe we’ll see some ospreys.”
“We’ll come down in a minute,” Jeremy said.
“I was talking to Mimi.”
But Mimi just sat there, avoiding conflict as usual. The world was full of personalities stronger than her own. She was tired of grappling with them. “Maybe in a while,” she said.
They built a fire out of driftwood, not so much for warmth as for light, then Marcus lit another bowl and passed it around. They sat taking hits and drinking beer and staring at the flames with something like smugness, because they had achieved for themselves some of what the sky had failed to provide them earlier, that reversal of darkness. Everyone partook but Lisa. She was cutting back on weed, she said, to preserve her voice for the play.
“Well, that’s one thing she’s preserving anyway,” Mimi murmured to Jeremy. It was beyond her that night to pass up an opportunity for meanness.
Jeremy laughed, nuzzling her ear with his soft, papery cheeks as he worked his fingers around the rim of her bikini bottom. It tickled, but she didn’t want to discourage him. He was working so hard.
“I’m going to really miss you this summer,” he told her for about the tenth time. “You know what I mean?”
She nodded. Then, having learned in geometry that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, she added, “Me too.”
“I never felt this way before. I mean about a girl.”
“Mmm.”
“I’ll call you every day, from work. We’ll have long talks.”
“Mmm. Except it’s hard at the pool. They don’t like it.”
“So we’ll talk at night then.”
“Mmm.”
They watched Yuko wading in the lake, looking for some beautiful winged seabird that eluded her. Mimi wanted to go down and join her, but she knew if she did, Jeremy would tag along, and anyway the bugs were out, and the water was really cold, and she wasn’t altogether clear, to be honest, what ospreys even looked like. Between the various opiates they’d consumed, and the fact that their parents had all gone to bed already and it was June and the school year was nearly over and none of the standardized tests they’d be taking in school the next day could possibly be either studied for or important, the consensus seemed to be that they had no reason to get up and do anything at all. So it became understood that they were just going to hang out there at the lake until morning, then grab some breakfast on the way to school. The sky was not exactly black and not exactly blue; it was, however, unpunctuated by light, as if someone had forgotten to throw the switch that turned on the stars. She leaned against Jeremy and closed her eyes. For a lacrosse player he had bony shoulders. But at least they were there.
“Uh-oh,” Kyle announced. “Company.”
Mimi opened her eyes. The aliens were coming out of the water one by one, staggering across the sand, chests heaving, like the last finishers in some ghostly marathon.
“Who are they?” she asked, yawning.
“Aliens. Space invaders.”
“I told you,” Marcus said, “didn’t I? We’re not alone in the universe. We have this huge circle of friends.”
“Hide the stash, just in case.”
A boat horn sounded in the distance, maybe coming toward them, maybe going away. The aliens huddled on the sand, rubbing their pale, sticklike arms together, shivering. Long ropes of algae coiled around their ankles. The moonlight was so strong you could practically count the bones in their rib cages.
“Spindly little things, aren’t they?” Lisa got to her feet and began waving her arms. If the aliens noticed her, this loud, red-haired, big-chested person braying at them from the little cove behind the swing set, they gave no indication.
“Yo, Lisa, be nice,” Marcus said. “We should befriend them. They’ve traveled all this way.”
“Course with alien creatures,” Kyle said, “you never know. They come on like E.T. and next thing it’s war of the worlds.”
“It’s weird,” Yuko said, staring at them thoughtfully, “but they kind of look Chinese.”
“Get real,” Kyle snorted. “There’s no Chinese people in outer space.”
“Maybe they’re not from outer space. Maybe they’re from, like, Canada.”
“Make up your mind.”
The visitors, wherever they were from, did not appear to be an attractive species. No doubt some life-forms in this universe looked good when they were naked and wet, though God knew Mimi wasn’t one of them—not with those blotchy, jiggling flesh pods around her thighs, passed down so considerately by her father—and neither were these emaciated little creatures who’d washed up on the shore like so much cosmic refuse, and now stood tilting and teetering against each other in an effort to stay vertical, as if gravity were a test for which they’d neglected to study.
As if to illustrate this point, one of the aliens now dropped to his knees and began retching noiselessly on the sand.
“Great,” Lisa said. “Just what we need around here. More puking.”
“It’s the atmosphere, man,” Marcus said. “All those petrochemicals? I bet breathing that stuff for the first time really blows.”
“Good,” Kyle said. “Maybe they’ll think twice, next time they go probing people’s minds.”
“Of course in your case that’ll take what,” Lisa said, “half a second?”
“Lisa’s not interested in minds,” Kyle said to everyone else. “She’s hoping they’ll probe, you know, that other thing.”
“Har har.”
“Maybe they lost their sun,” Jeremy said. He wa
s fitting a zoom onto the Nikon his parents had given him just for being, as they put it, himself. The photos he took would never come out—the light was too dim, he had no flash—but no way was Mimi going to say anything on that score. Jeremy’s self-confidence was precious to her. It was like a lever she held in her hand; with the tiniest movement she could steer it up or down. “Like that movie last year, remember? That alien planet lost its sun, and everybody had to troop into the spaceship to go colonize some other galaxy.”
“How do you lose a sun?” Kyle said. “Those things’re fucking huge.”
“All suns flame out eventually,” Jeremy said. “Even the big ones. It’s basic thermodynamics. They teach you that in AP.”
And the voice of the Honor Roll was heard in the land.
“I got another theory,” Marcus said. Palming the joint, he blew out two jets of smoke, one headed east and one headed west. Everyone had to wait for him to finish. It was a kind of quiet tyranny he exercised, keeping up his rep as the guy who laid down the big ideas. “They’re here because they’re here.”
“Say what?”
“They’re just here, man. There doesn’t have to be a reason. They’re just here.”
Actually,” Mimi said, “they’re here because we’re here.”
Everyone turned and gave her an unfriendly glare. Jeremy, who’d gone back to what he’d been doing before the aliens arrived—feeling her up—abruptly pulled his hand away, as if this sudden tendency of his girlfriend to make dumb, confounding statements might be contagious. He was applying early admission to Brown next year; he had to be careful. Finally Lisa, with her usual zero tolerance for ambiguity, said, “And what the fuck does that mean, O wise one?”
“It means, if we weren’t here, we wouldn’t be seeing them, right? And if we didn’t see them, then they wouldn’t be here. At least not to us. It’s like if an alien tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around to hear.”