Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  “Forty-four … sixty-six …”

  “But they were home. In the backyard. Angenot and two women … naked! In a blue bubble!”

  “What is this, some kind of kids’ cartoon?”

  (It should be noted that Antoinette was merely voicing a thought that, but a few hours earlier, had crossed Cecile’s mind.)

  “No, I swear! Naked, in a blue balloon! Look, here’s the letter. Pascal Angenot, Turtledove Lane.”

  She started at him, a wicked gleam in her eye, a mocking grin. “And you claim you saw them?”

  “With my own eyes!”

  “And they were having sex?”

  “I didn’t say that! They were lying down, not moving.”

  “It’s their business, isn’t it?”

  “Well … of course,” Firmin could only concede. He seemed to hesitate, then, having walked right up to the window, he leaned toward the clerk and whispered, “Sure. Their business. You’re right, Antoinette. It’s just … I think they’re dead.”

  “Indeed,” remarked Inspector Jacques as he stepped from the van, “quite a peculiar aroma.”

  “Carnations,” said the taller of the two patrolmen.

  “Verbena,” said the other.

  They walked into the backyard, passed before Balthazar, who harassed the boys in blue; then, with the mailman in the lead, all four of them headed for the red cedar, whose shadow was invading the lawn.

  “The culprit!” Firmin declared.

  Before them: the heap of bluish Jell-O, still brilliant and firm, it tenants intact.

  “The naked guy,” Firmin specified, “is the addressee, Mr. Angenot.”

  “And the others?”

  “His wife … their maid, Irene … those two over there are neighbors, and the smaller young man is Martial, the butcher’s boy. As for the priest and the cyclist, I have no idea. Probably people passing through.”

  “At any rate,” said the inspector, “contrary to your allegations, they don’t seem to be dead.”

  That much was obvious. Irene and the butcher’s delivery boy, in unison, were humming something like:

  Come, my darling little fly

  Dally in my lullaby

  We’ll flitter-flutter fly to fly

  Darling little fly!

  “They don’t even seem to be in pain! Should’ve called narcotics!”

  There was something like a sigh, an easeful cooing, an ample swoon: one of the patrolmen, the one who’d said it smelled like carnations, had just lain down, arms spread wide, hugging the maternal substance.

  “He slipped,” said his fellow patrolman, a glazed look in his eye. “But he didn’t hurt himself.”

  “If you ask me,” Firmin piped up, “I don’t think you’re going about this the right way.”

  “Oh, really? Is Mr. Know-It-All the Postman going to teach us how to do our job?”

  “Look, don’t fly off the handle—”

  “Ahhh!” bellowed the other patrolman, the one who’d smelled verbena, tumbling into the elastic bliss.

  Come, my darling little fly

  Dally in my lullaby

  Flitter-flutter fly to fly

  “You shouldn’t criticize them,” said the inspector. “They’re just civil servants, like you … employees of the state … They’re doing their job … just like me … Professionally, I am … forced to give this closer … examination …”

  Firmin grabbed his arm. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me all alone!”

  “You can come with.”

  “Detective, I don’t think you’re going about it the right way.”

  “Well, don’t you just think you’re the bee’s knees! So what is the right way?”

  “Hold your nose!”

  “Hold my nose? If that doesn’t fly in the face of all—” He burst out laughing, reeling like a wino, legs akimbo. Firmin, still holding him by the arm, delicately pinched his nostrils shut. For a moment, they stayed like that, anxiously awaiting whatever was to come.

  “You’re right,” said Inspector Jacques. “My mind’s clearing up.”

  He couldn’t get over it.

  “How very right you were! That aroma is a drug! May I?” Relieving Firmin, he took charge of pinching his own nose, and straightened up with assurance. “But my dear fellow, however did you resist?”

  “I suffer from anosmia, Mr. Inspector. Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes. Not exactly.”

  “I can’t smell a thing. No olfactory sense. Especially in spring, when the almond trees are in bloom.”

  Come, my darling little fly

  Dally in my lullaby

  Flitter-flutter fly to fly

  They made a slow circuit of the bubble, stopping several times, nodding like experts.

  “Curious, isn’t it? Ten victims, but who’s behind it? Or what? Not to be too on the nose—heh—but no violence or indecency …”

  “Except the naked guy, Mr. Inspector.”

  “He’s at home, on his own property. Careful, don’t step on the cyclist! Have you noticed that the grass all around is burnt? Maybe some kind of chemical fertilizer in blue plastic packaging that somehow mutated? Just a theory. And right in the middle of the lawn! What a bunch of nincompoops!”

  Dithering nasally, in utter agreement, coldly eyeing the mysterious orgy, they experienced an intense feeling of superiority. Men, men they were, and upright! All they had to do was hold their noses.

  At their feet, from the mush sparkling in the sunlight, came a higgledy-piggledy humming. And in the air was a strange tension, more than vernal, a new pigment, as if life hung suspended a bit above itself, suddenly glistening with a surfeit of obviousness.

  In his pen, the dog was gazing at the sky.

  There’s nothing left to tell that isn’t utterly ordinary. Really, we should stop here, on the image of Balthazar gazing at the sky. The rest, alas, is but denouement.

  The bubble was removed by men from the Department of Public Works equipped with mentholated breathing masks. In the hour that followed, each of the ten victims recovered his or her verticality and dignity. It might be observed, on this occasion, the degree to which the average Westerner, no matter how conceited, refuses to be a celebrity of the inexplicable. As we have said, Mrs. Angenot was the only one who gave in to the temptation for wild confession, and for just a few weeks—up until the day when the mayor, who was almost a friend, summoned her to his office. The meeting lasted more than two hours.

  “I wonder,” Cecile admitted the next day, “I do wonder if I didn’t dream it all. At least a little bit. I didn’t have my glasses on, so … They say it’s pollution.”

  And why not? Who is to say she didn’t dream it, that we didn’t all dream this little episode? The grass has grown back on the lawn, the man of the house is back in charge, Irene is busy sweeping and Firmin pedaling. As for the bluish Jell-O, it’s long since been sealed in lead-lined drums and sent off to high places for study. Places so high we’ve quite lost it from sight. Just like the biker in his white leathers. No one’s ever seen him again. Has he too—who knows?—gone to a higher place?

  “Just like my childhood,” Mrs. Angenot reflects dreamily, gazing at the sky. Those stars, by the thousand, unattainable as little green peas.

  Two Poems

  Jonathan Thirkield

  SUPER FRAGILE CATALYST

  our child was the size of a hummingbird

  neatly glued to the stomach lining

  blur of liquid metal sunshine

  purring through apse and radial cells

  a gently rising submarine

  in the unsettling before sleep

  a hologram of your next self

  will break into a new body

  building a raceme hierarchy

  from which the hummingbird sips

  *

  a race disappears around the corner

  I hear their voices another two blocks

  colors at sunset go from the schoolyard

  skin duste
d shades of cobalt

  river sounds flow out of eyeshot

  a heart-based curvature of time (language)

  a contraction of time (systole) in the heart

  hearing the kids fly from imaginary beings

  the filling of time or blood (diastole)

  in a name you dream walks by you

  *

  new love flutters at seventy wingbeats

  a new movie flickers at twenty-four flames

  a thousand fine gradations of happiness

  performing a lice check on my daughter

  testing all twenty-six teeth

  in the Latin alphabet

  the tongue like a Ouija planchette

  points to the letter it licks

  a silverleaf-faced angel pricks

  her finger with a sterile need

  *

  missing rivers of bodies flow

  through channels of the blood

  are you so different having seen the second

  beating of a wing across the shoulder

  a woman once came to our apartment

  all the bones in China wouldn’t bend

  a vivid pink against the cheek that way

  a swan rustles in the neoprene

  our minds better at absorbing

  fictions than new realities

  *

  shivering snare drum

  phantom living lung

  flawless sun-like figurines

  sea-level dreaming azimuths

  synthetic hyacinth junk derivatives

  finite winter maize red party

  black famine roulette station pilgrims

  live hierarchical prunings in the brain

  diving bells locked in palatine eardrums

  a serpentine train set carries us off

  *

  decidual trans-cysteine life machines

  cosmetic metalinguistic surgery prongs

  sword forged consanguine molecular

  carbon substitutions on a benzene ring

  polyphonic fucking data strata erotics

  sugar tongs orange gin red sangria

  funny how gallium melts in the palm

  how a human head melts in the mind

  anything can be anything else after burning

  the key to metamorphosis is turning

  *

  drawn without learning the lettering

  the alternate editing the director’s cut

  written in heaven among the bodies

  of the 24 episodes to come

  and bead upon be cloned among

  other things a turnip plant an explosive device

  the impulse to cloak the exposed girl

  super fragile catalysts

  to rout to expel the red cross

  wear whiteface be cow-eyed to desert to echo

  *

  a corpse looks nothing like a robot

  the sight of corpses is commoner

  in less industrialized nations

  the presence of the illusion

  of distance deepens the assimilation

  of the angel’s silver leafed plane

  the wind’s a substitution for the sonic gulf

  where water ran above us

  but then again upon waking I lose

  the conviction

  *

  where the wind farm is now

  not far from the radiowaste tanks

  a man once returned to the edge

  of a battlefield made silver

  by meadows filled with bodies

  whose noses or ears were severed

  as tokens by victors and carried

  in sacks to later match to the kill

  the man filled with hunger

  held a yuzu rind against his teeth

  *

  the unimaginable being

  the reality I choose

  not to process the eyes’

  aversion to the thing I

  cordon off whole sections of

  the body rendered herded

  speechless unheard of zoned

  imagining reality as it cones

  in the quarter-second brain delay

  by the phenotype’s deficiency

  *

  where does the mapping end

  all the thoughtless forms formed from foam

  glaring indifferently like 1000 toys

  glaring happily like 100000 toys

  unimagined casualties

  rolling through watery air

  freshly minted tongues for kissing

  behind the schoolyard

  fuck and dream of continuities

  between impassable mirrors

  *

  I worry when you lift your eyes to this you

  won’t find a satisfying mirror

  I was reading about kindness last night

  the currency in the early minds of kids

  I thought the animals outside

  were dressed in human conditions

  I thought of writing a treatment

  for an animated sitcom

  in which everything is normal as hell

  but everyone’s all dressed up as animals

  THE ATLAS OF VIRTUAL

  Constantly recorded, listening through loops

  Of string of blue with fraying fibers webbing

  The walls of the kitchen, climbing like ivy

  Into the ears of our loved ones, channels

  Playing whales and spinning light-up

  Jellyfish, lipstick headed tubers by the ocean’s

  Vents, music making modulated intimations

  Of the lives of minor species, brown and golden red

  Across the white-paged sky, a tablet

  Of numbers spiraling out from one like trapdoors

  Beneath a stage where a table stands with settings in Dutch blue

  Of Japanese castles, cypresses, blue brick walls

  Dividing the pastures, cows, sheep, a stray deer

  Nibbling at an apple, and a huntsman in sandals

  Drawing his bow, the feet of children showing

  Beneath a fence by the stable playing

  Harpsichords, samisens, and sitars on the service

  Platter, tiny sketches of robotic spy insects

  Twitching in the marsh, and I grew hungry, I ripped

  The greenest lowest branch and loosest chips,

  The skin of moss at its foot, forgetting that trees

  Are others, forgetting people are always close

  And listening, the mountains drilled through for

  Fiber-optic trains, hidden suns speeding a desire for

  Water, speeding the sleepless heart with particulate

  Matter, the regions of dust in the visual apnea where

  Mother and starlet and cow blend within the segmented

  Caterpillar rushes, all seeping into the deepest troughs

  Of the river systems of Mars, beneath the Olympus

  Mons, the pyramidal tracts, a system of green men

  With leaflike pinnate ears harvesting root crops

  In the sub-rosa villages. During my abduction, the one

  I’d prayed for all those years under the painted girl

  Whispering, you are special, you really are,

  Not an apparition in my night window, the six lights

  From the hydroelectric plant making a crown

  Above her many eyes. I toured the catacombs

  Under the sandy planetary face, nothing was

  Illusion, they called my guide Virtual, their towers

  Modeled on a neurotransit system, trains

  Passed from axon to dendrite, the supple liquid

  Walls teeming with krill-like ground creatures,

  They said, snack as you please. The taste bordered

  On pork rinds and blueberries, the redder ones were

  Sweeter, almost cotton candy, for a minute every

  Word rhymed with every other one, the poison ones

  Are irresistible and equally unstable
, they said,

  Approaching the planet’s nuclear heart or amygdala,

  Its marzipan scent covering field upon field of dark

  Tentacular flowers or ideas, I couldn’t tell, the smell

  So enveloped my senses like a boat crashing through

  The snowy skullcap of a Western child, I thought

  Briefly the Martians wore Japanese teddy bear

  Suits, even heard the zippers close up their spines and felt

  Myself being enclosed in one as well, it was difficult

  To see through the pinhole eye, my head became

  A camera obscura, I watched the film of a mariner

  Eating bodies he carved with an LCD glass machete

  That played video collages culled by a spider

  Algorithm: a roulette of babies, cats, mirror

  Soliloquies, violinists in short dresses, cooking

  Instructions, nuptials, snake v. mongoose, poverty

  Trials, cucumbers on the eyes, centers getting

  Posterized, and a very long song about May. I may

  Have been in the bear head for seconds or years being fed

  By the mariner. The many men, so beautiful,

  I feared, but I ate and ate, because they reassured

  Me it was a dream, all of it, the scented watermelon

  On the shoulders of the women, the scent of quinine

  On their feathers, the myriad reductions—wine, cherry,

  Anise—bubbling up from the skin, the fading purgatory

  Impulse as my hunger and joy took hold. I felt perfect

  Complicity with the mariner, he was the reason

  I thought, the reason words gave way to pictures again,

  He was the manager of the bodies. I came to

  An oasis, Virtual let me surf the liquid plasma,

  The buttons on her face went purple-pink, the doctor lost

  His horse in the snow, and a trainer applied oleoresin

  To his client’s thighs. The answer to every office pool,

  The runoff from every dye job, the diminishing, ever

  Diminishing trees and catalysts and rare earth

  Materials seemed to extend their private wilds

  Into an infinite number of vanishing points. It