He lives in the house he was in when the last bomb fell. His house, with his parents in it, had been blown away two weeks earlier. He was ten years old that day and can still remember the way that his skin felt—smooth and pliable, tailored to every bone and joint—as well as the way he moved, the liquid gestures of his arms and legs, the painless molding of clothes to flesh, and the way the sun bristled along the tips of his eyelashes. When the sirens wailed he went with his sister and their neighbors into the basement. It was over in a couple of seconds. The narrow window above their heads enclosed a rectangle of pure fire that shattered the glass as it blazed into the room, converting everything into a jigsaw of white light and black shadows. They felt the hairs on their arms stand on end, then fizzle into nothingness, along with the first few layers of skin. Skin that rose, he remembers, like the top sheet of a pad of paper, blackening as it fell away. The cover of the book his sister was reading cleaved to her face, leaving the title printed on her cheek.
The blast made no sound.
Life was never the same. There were no more bombs, and those who survived were free to come and go as they pleased. After long, excruciating months, during which more people died, more layers of skin fell off, and he spat teeth bloodlessly onto his pillow every morning, their conditions stabilized. What was left of their community rallied. Like their bodies, they have spun out ropes of scar tissue to build a web between them, filling in gaps and covering naked joints as best they can. They hear little from the outside world and are glad of it. Before the last bomb, when the end of days seemed imminent, they stored enough provisions to last them a hundred years, and now it’s more than they need. The bomb rounded off their population. The very young and the very old died immediately or shortly thereafter; now everyone is about the same age and in the same condition: scarred but stable. They are also universally sterile, likening themselves humorously to the trees at the university that survived the blast intact only to lose their fruits, one by one, over the course of the next weeks. He recalls the hollow punching sound of rotten peaches as they fell, detonating in slimy masses on the ground. But it’s all right. Spared from the anxieties of procreation, they found other things to do. To begin with, they relearned each other’s faces, mentally grafting the purple welts and waxy white scars over the features they once possessed. Now they guard their damaged skin against the sun and wind, bandage their weeping wounds, and rake the fallout that continues to descend, like black leaves, slowly and silently over the city.
It shouldn’t have been me. It wasn’t supposed to be, but LeRoy lost his nerve at the last minute and so here I am, the balm for a public relations nightmare that is now seven centuries old.
I’m sitting on the steps of the Rockefeller Library, knee to knee with Ernest Gracey, the young man whose marbled hands with their seven gray fingernails are laced in his lap like the legs of a large, barnacled crab. There is just enough light in the thready dusk to plant shadows in all the little canyons of his skin. Behind us, the wind curdles in the empty eye slats of the Rock and peels feathers of ash from its black face. When I stumbled into the revolving door as a first-year graduate student, sending the contents of my bag pinwheeling across the floor, the Rock was taupe colored and there was glass in every window, admitting bands of autumn light that crisscrossed through the stacks.
I’ve explained it to him three times and he still won’t believe it.
“I was so sure it was a fortress,” he says, snorting a breath through his pinched nostrils as he shakes his head. “What with all the cement, and the narrow windows, and the subterranean chambers—it even has a perfect vantage point to see invaders coming.”
“Well, I never saw any invaders when I was here. Lots of weary students, though, lugging backpacks up the hill.”
“But what about the railing along the top—surely that’s defensive. I imagined sharpshooters balancing their rifles on it, picking out targets a thousand yards away.”
“Actually, it’s just decorative,” I tell him, and hear how ridiculous the words sound only in the course of saying them. He and I steal a glance back at the building, at the strips of cement pieced like Tinkertoys to form a squat ledge along the cornice, and both burst into laughter. He gives me that look, communicated through spasms of his eyebrowless forehead: Sure, Dr. Hamblin, sure. And I have to concede, as I always do, that his well-reasoned theories, built upon years of observation and study, make a lot more sense than my clumsy explanations, although the latter are, ostensibly, the truth.
The city is not all that different from how I knew it, for thirteen years in the first half of the third millennium. Its architectural underpinnings have barely been touched; the bones, as one of my old professors might say, are still there. But the skin and musculature are not simply aged but mutilated. Like the Rock: recognizable enough to those who knew it when (that is, only to me), it would not occur to anyone who saw it now for the first time that it had ever been a library. The golden letters at the entrance spalled from their surface so long ago that not even their shadows remain. And of course, the entire contents—every one of the millions of volumes—were atomized by a bomb before Ernest’s grandparents were born, leaving nothing but a shell, another scorched jungle gym for neighborhood children; another theater for a young man’s imagination.
In the absence of a future, he has wed himself to the past. Twenty years of searching, and all it took was one loud-mouthed time traveler to capsize all of his visions. So far not one of his theories has proven correct. He thought that the Graduate Center dormitories were barracks for slaves and that India Point Park was a wildlife sanctuary for dogs, which he surmised must have been a highly endangered species. He imagined that the soaring white spires of the Baptist and Congregational Churches were landing docks for flying machines and that the Van Wickle Gates barricaded against wild beasts. Finding statues of bears across the campus, some still erect, others toppled, he assumed they had been the objects of a shamanistic cult that ascribed mystical power to animals. He based his conclusions on careful induction and attributed any phenomenon that resisted easy categorization to ritual.
“You’re an excellent archaeologist,” I tell him.
I’m not lying.
We walk down from the steps and lean into the steep climb up toward Prospect Terrace Park. Once, half a dozen lifetimes ago, a pair of rabbits darted across the street in front of my husband (then boyfriend) and me in this very spot, chasing each other between cars until they came to a stop on a grassy patch near Lovecraft Memorial Square. I shrieked with laughter at the sight of them (I was young and carefree once, not that anyone would believe it now) and made sure that James was aware: it was the first time I’d ever seen wild rabbits in Providence. And it would be the last; no animals survived the bombs. Burnt-out cars lie stranded, one or two on every road, like the scorched skeletons of beached whales. Utility poles dip wearily, resting the pendulous arcs of their fried lines on the black cement. And the soft strands of the sunset wend smoothly up the hill, undiluted by electric lights, kindling an iridescent glow on the crumbling rooftops.
I wasn’t prepared for how changed it would be—not the city itself but the natural environment, the phenomena that I considered to be eternal and detached from time. The bombs scrambled the substance of the city on an atomic level. The air feels different, heavier, and somehow sharp and shiny, as though there were diamonds lodged inside every molecule. Darkness is not dark; it resonates with a radiant substance, colorful spots that occasionally resolve into patterns, triangles and pinwheels and castellations that brand the inside of my eyelids. And the sun and moon, refracted through nuclear residue, conjure kaleidoscopic visions: a different hallucination every morning, noon, and night. Just now, the barbed tail of a green aurora lashes across the horizon, lancing the sky from seam to seam. For a moment it appears to bleed, great red clots that glaze the hollow silhouette of the Omni Hotel and pool in the State House’s punctured dome. Then the entire canvas halts and dips, and slips l
ike a reel of film into a fresh image, this one purple and blue and crushed like velvet, pilled with soft yellow stars like the holes in Ernest’s face.
He casts a toothless smile at me over his shoulder as we walk, ropes of scar tissue pulling his mouth like the strings of a marionette. Two weeks after I arrived, sweaty and wild-eyed from the pod, he apologized for looking at me so much.
“That’s not the way my parents raised me, to stare at someone like that,” he said. “It’s only that it’s been twenty years since I saw a face like yours. A normal human face.”
He was the only one to apologize, but he wasn’t the only person to stare. They all do. It’s been an adjustment. I am no great beauty; I never was. For most of my life I slipped under the radar, relying on my words to draw people’s attention across a room. But now attention clusters around me. They marvel at my full head of glossy black hair, my seamless brown skin, my flat pink fingernails. They admire the fluidity of my joints. One man always asks to see my ears. His name is David Arnold, but naturally I think of him as the Ear Fetishist—not that I think there is anything lewd in his desire. It has been twenty years since any of them has seen a human ear that wasn’t melted. They all want to see, but most are too polite to ask. They look at my lips instead; lips are almost as rare as ears. Most of their mouths are undifferentiated openings, scarred-over slits that look as though they’ve been cut into their heads with a knife, and some must continue to cut them regularly to keep the scar tissue from pulling them shut.
When we take meals together (always the same gray nutritious paste, derived from a concentrate resistant to radiation and decay), I eat slowly, in order to keep pace with their labored movements, and I never begrudge them their stares.
There was a time, not long before I came here, when I loathed company. I accepted this one-way mission—five centuries in a metal pod, one hundred feet square, in which time would be slowed to a fraction of its normal rate—partly out of scientific interest and partly out of a vague and idiopathic misanthropy that had left me feeling empty and annoyed with the human race. To others, I would always attribute this feeling to the sudden death of my husband; in truth it had come about long before then, descending like a veil, then deepening until it settled beneath my skin. And now it’s gone, I suppose, back to the place from which it came. I suppose that’s what half a millennium in a pod will do to you.
I could say that it was my admiration for the patient suffering of the people of the future, their willingness to hope in the face of hopelessness, that finally lifted my melancholy, but that would be another lie. In truth it was Ernest Gracey: his wide-eyed curiosity, his stupid optimism, his undeterred joy for all the strange little things of the world. He reminds me of all the reasons I was drawn to cultural anthropology in the first place. Because I am, first and foremost, an anthropologist—the twenty-first century’s natural second choice for an ambassador.
When I first listened to Ernest spin his fantasies across the blackened landscape, I was struck by their divergence from the city as I had known it. Now, after seven months, I’m not so sure that his vision of the past is that different from mine. The absence of flying machines and bear cults aside, there was always something fantastical about Providence, some mystical current surging beneath the surface, rioting beneath the weathered bricks, and when it was dark, every old house glowed purposefully, as though it were lit from within by its own secret soul. Perhaps it was the lingering afterglow of Lovecraft, or perhaps it’s something deeper, which Lovecraft was able to tap into: a sense of wildness and vastness; of a universe that resists all attempts to impose order upon it; of the staggering depth of human vulnerability, like staring down into a black and bottomless well.
These fantasies are what sustain us; it’s no fun seeing what’s behind the curtain. And while I would never tell an outright lie, there are things about which I will never tell the whole truth. The people of the future think that the people of my century were just and noble, and that my passage here was orchestrated out of a pure-hearted desire to advance human knowledge. They think that I was the ideal candidate, hand selected from a pool of millions. They think that I volunteered for altruistic reasons, not because I was sad and frustrated and bored. And they think that more people from my time are coming.
I’m not sure yet whether that last one is false. There were supposed to be more, a year or less from my arrival. Even if they had taken decades to build another pod, the end point would be the same, rendering any passage of time between starting points insignificant. They could even have sent someone before me, to meet me when I arrived. It’s true that the calibration was thought to be imprecise. I was told that I could find myself a decade later or earlier than when I was expected, but I arrived exactly on time, within hours of my target. And here I remain, stranded in this century, my vessel having reached its programmed obsolescence.
Less than a year, they said, but the year is winding down—not that you’d know it. There are no seasons. Untethered from its accustomed rhythms, time spills where it once flowed, forming tributaries that grow into oceans where you can easily lose yourself. I try to reconnect to time, but it is difficult. I am living in a colony of ageless souls, whose skin sloughs off before it can sag, where youth and age cohabitate on a single face: those living patchworks of skin that evoke Frankenstein’s monster and faded quilts and the blood-colored rawness of something just hatched all at once. They are simultaneously more and less than human, and in my own way, so am I.
I live in University Hall. The entire building is mine: four stories, five chimneys, and thousands of bricks, some placed there by African slaves; two smashed pediments, a toppled cupola, and a hundred empty windows; gutters that dangle from splintered cornices; and all that’s inside too—dusty rooms, crumbling fireplaces, ceilings that sheltered Revolutionary troops and nineteenth-century undergraduates and Horace Mann, along with the little refuge I’ve carved into the top floor, furnished with my few possessions.
My pod was anchored in the middle of the Main Green with University Hall framed in its only window, a bubble of glass through which I watched the years peel back from the skin of the world. I saw oceans rise and fall: red oceans of leaves and white oceans of snow and, much later, black oceans of ash. I watched the buds on trees open and close like grasping fists and watched the pink blooms of rhododendrons yawn in and out of existence. And below the sun and the moon, taking turns scoring bright channels into the sky, millions of bodies swept like smoke up and down stairs and along the paths. Occasionally, they pressed their diaphanous faces into my window, though they were gone so quickly that I couldn’t tell what they looked like. I often wondered if they were still human. But more so, I wondered what they thought of me: the woman they observed frozen in the same pose every time they looked in, like a natural-history diorama, simulating the act of eating toast or reading a book or typing on my computer. With the years, the scene would seem increasingly strange. Students wouldn’t recognize the food I ate or the objects I used. The clothes that I wore would look dated, then retro, then exotic, until they passed the threshold of museum worthiness. I imagined a placard next to me: Anthropologist. Twenty-First Century. Please don’t tap the glass.
As it turns out, they had erected something, evidenced by the metal marker I found when I emerged, but the top had broken off. In the place of this explanatory statement, the people of the future maintained a mutated memory of me, a mythology cultured from scraps of the truth. They even had a name for me: Thalia Tamerlane. It felt like a betrayal—or at the very least a disenchantment—to introduce myself to them as Sarah Hamblin. Sarah Hamblin, PhD. No one knew what the letters stood for, but of course Ernest was ready to offer his best guess.
I walk home alone after leaving him at his place, which he still refers to as the Pagets’ house, though the elderly Pagets died shortly after the last blast. It’s a mid-nineteenth-century, mansard-roofed mansion that may at one point have been green. The inside is sparsely but tastefully furnish
ed in pieces plucked from the wreckage: a chipped dresser, an assortment of tables and chairs, and a startlingly well-preserved four-poster bed salvaged from the RISD Museum; a leather sofa, ravaged with tears, which he has painstakingly stitched with the same oily catgut the populace use for their wounds; and in every room, one or two of the Oriental carpets he found sealed in a Wickenden Street basement. The carpets act like rouge on the skin of the dead house, maintaining a facsimile of life over the decaying floorboards and gutted walls.
I take one last glance across the green as I enter University Hall. The first time I was here, I was with James; it was the end of summer, and cicadas scribbled their vibrations on the heavy air.
And the last time, the green was crowded with fanfare as I stepped into the pod. I took one last glance to survey the faces of all the people who would be dead before I needed to trim my toenails again: President Roberts and Dean Eyles and the entire Anthropology Department, including the one weasel-faced graduate student whom I hoped would be especially dead; a sea of undergraduates wielding smartphones and journalists wielding cameras; and John LeRoy, whose place I was taking in hell.
At least, that was how he appeared, his face awash with the species of relief native to the convict who receives a last-minute call from the governor. But it didn’t feel like a death sentence to me. I was already comfortably ensconced in my afterlife. Likewise the newspapers described mine as a willing sacrifice, verging on martyrdom; one said, She will enter into the small womb-like capsule on September 16, and close the door on the twenty-first century. They implied that I had all of the agency. But what had I done, day after day, as the walls pieced themselves together around me? Nothing but sit in my house, reading or writing, glancing through the door of my office to James on the sofa as the television spun electric skeins inside the lenses of his glasses; always alone, even when I was in a crowded room; always apart, even when I lay next to him. It was as though a sudden guillotine-like violence had severed the vessels that connected me to the world and left me raw and mutilated. Through my ribs I could see the empty engine of my heart spinning, still working tirelessly to send out warmth and affection, but its wasted efforts spattered on the ground. Likewise all the meaningful gestures of other people kept on hurtling toward me, only to spill before they could reach their mark. But hardly anyone noticed; my reflexes guided me aptly enough through the act of being human.
Other Aliens Page 29