CLUTE: This seems increasingly evident as we approach the present day; I really don’t think it’s only the speed with which I’m becoming venerable that makes me feel that the old days were more real than they are now. I really do think that the fragrant analogue difficulty of the world we once knew has become increasingly simplified—or bar-coded—into fungible product; and I think this is reflected in an ontological reversal in the stories we write now. Density of being is a characteristic I think I may actually add to my entry as one of the ways of identifying a Mysterious Stranger (which is to say an Alien or an Other) in the twenty-first century. The terror of the alien story today is that aliens are no longer less real than we are—that they are now more real than we are.
CROWLEY: I think that’s really interesting. And the Paul Park story in this issue of Conjunctions is exactly that: the alien is more real than the humans and knows it.
CLUTE: The first Mysterious Stranger in fiction that I could identify (over and above “The Serpent in the Garden,” which is kind of a joke) is Odysseus in The Odyssey. We see his narrative mostly through his eyes, though he may be lying because he tells his own story three or four times in different ways; but certainly as a Mysterious Stranger he is a prelude to our own times, for he is ontologically more dense than the suitors. He is returning, he is reclaiming, he is upsetting, he is ready to breed again with his wife. He is a massively paradigmatic Mysterious Stranger. And I think it odd that he hasn’t been described in exactly those terms for centuries. Maybe it’s because we have not wanted to have our homesteads reclaimed by the likes of Odysseus.
CROWLEY: He has certainly become monstrous in the course of his returning. But can a Mysterious Stranger remain mysterious when seen from his own point of view?
CLUTE: Sections in The Odyssey are told through omniscient narration.
CROWLEY: I think the Nausicaa scene is like that: she and her women come upon a being that they don’t understand.
CLUTE: Parts of the story almost seem to be channeling Pallas Athena. We are teased because we know its dramatic irony, we know what they don’t know about who this beggar is, but we see the beggar quite often from the viewpoint of the suitors and from other viewpoints. So it squeaks into the Mysterious Stranger paradigm.
CROWLEY: Powerful magician figures who show up in Victorian novels or even hypnotists and mesmerists and others of spiritual power drawn from popular culture seem to have that same quality of being able to project—until they are unmasked, which they sometimes are—an entirely solid being, unlike the people whom they unsettle and change and whose lives they upend with their supposed powers.
CLUTE: Part of the defensive posture of European popular literature of the nineteenth century is that you can unmask the Mysterious Stranger as a fraud.
CROWLEY: Or as one of us.
CLUTE: That is a defense mechanism.
CROWLEY: I think it is. And though they are sometimes unmasked, those they deceived are not then restored to their sense of self.
CLUTE: A subcutaneous implication of early fantasies in which a Mysterious Stranger is reborn, or revealed as immortal, or just mysteriously arrives, is that the prior is more real than the present. A Mysterious Stranger typical of relatively recent science fiction, the forerunner character who’s part of the race that founded us and then left, may be clearly realer than we are. Once again we have a sense of astonishing insecurity, an upwelling of what one might call the ontology shakes: a sense that reality is suffering osteoporosis, the old load-bearing world weakening into broth.
CROWLEY: Reality is conditional, while the Mysterious Stranger does not depend on conditions. Bram Stoker’s Dracula arriving in England is definitely a Mysterious Stranger in exactly the terms you’re talking about.
CLUTE: And in Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, Merlin is a Mysterious Stranger.
CROWLEY: You could even call the big bug in Metamorphosis an alien, a Mysterious Stranger who suddenly shows up one morning. Its parents assume that their son is gone, but we know better. In a violation of the trope, we see that story from inside the Mysterious Stranger.
CLUTE: The story form itself is violated and I keep on violating it in my descriptions because it’s necessary to do so to extract this terrifying figure out of stories that coat them over. You can’t easily describe something that is more real than you are, or that has a terrifyingly better right to the farm you just claim jumped than you do. There’s a term nostos, which I think is etymologically related to nostalgia and is defined as the drama of return. The Odyssey is a nostos. The drama of return is a very threatening drama for a usurping culture. In essence, I guess, what I’ve been saying here is that the Mysterious Stranger story is a nostos.
CROWLEY: But Odysseus, like all the people he returns to, was a Greek, and it would seem to me that the aliens that we’re talking about are going to be not of our makeup in any way. They will have come to confront us. They may not speak our language, or they may speak to us in ways we fend off because we can’t understand them or because we worry that they will challenge us. The magicians of those nineteenth-century novels were Jews or Jewish Italians or some other species or “race.” Will the ones we are talking about now, who come to talk about usurping what is ours or about what we usurped from them, have that same element of difference?
CLUTE: Maybe creating stories that project an element of difference could be seen as displacing our inner apprehension that the Other is realer than we are. You and me, we’re elderly white males with no particular gender issues, and are in general well-behaved. We kind of float, or I think I do. I think I kind of float on the osteoporosis of the fungible world, hoping not to stamp too hard. But I kind of dread to think of the moment when I find somebody more real than me.
CROWLEY: Then you have to unmask him, John, show him proof that you’re more real than he is, watch him crumble before your eyes.
CLUTE: I would not look forward to that contest. We are very wise not to think we can win. The light at the end of the tunnel may be brighter than we are.
CROWLEY: The Mysterious Stranger also has something to do with the punitive, as do aliens when we come upon them. They’re out for something even if they don’t end up expressing it; we assign it to them. There is this story by Steven Millhauser, “The Slap.” In a small, ordinary suburban town, a character, an ordinary human dressed in an overcoat and hat, comes up to somebody on a train platform and slaps him in the face and then walks away. He appears again and again to one person after another, delivers the slap, and walks away. Now there’s a Mysterious Stranger, purely punitive, who sets up uncertainty and blame and can’t be characterized. He’s perfectly normal, meaning that he’s not in any way different from me, he’s not from outer space, he’s not creepy, and yet he is out to punish people. At the end of the story the plague of slapping diminishes and he’s gone, he just never appears again, which I’m not sure I think of as a quite satisfactory ending—but in another sense it’s key to the Mysterious Stranger, who appears, shakes everything up, calls into question the basis of the other characters’ existences, and then goes away to leave them to deal with it.
CLUTE: That would be the good news. The bad news would be that the Snark was a Raven, you see.
CROWLEY: Is it common for Mysterious Strangers to pose riddles? I think it is. Having taken a pause here to ponder, I decode this as: an episode of sly or nasty upbraiding may be salutary—even comic—but if the alien becomes one that departs nevermore, we are in a different and far worse case. It will be interesting for readers of the issue to see where the majority of writers are aligning on this.
NOTE. The authors and editors wish to thank B. Diane Martin of the Readercon Committee for making the documentation of this conversation possible. The authors have edited this transcript, and are responsible for the form it now takes.
Undocumented Alien
Very Rough First Draft Report PROJECT JRD
Joyce Carol Oates
LOST IN TIME
Te
st subject #293199/Joseph Saidu Maada (undocumented alien, home country Nigeria, b. 1990, d. 2016).
Most immediate and long-lasting effect of the neurotransmitter microchip (NTM) inserted in the cerebral cortex of the human brain appears to be a radical destabilization of temporal and spatial functions of cognition. (See Graz, S. R., “Temporal and Parietal Functions of the Human Brain,” Journal of Neuroscience Studies 14:2 for a detailed description of normal functions.)
In test subject #293199 temporal destabilization was immediate and (seemingly) permanent; spatial destabilization was sporadic and unpredictable.
For instance, upon several (videotaped) occasions in the PROJECT JRD laboratory (Institute for Independent Neurophysiological Research, Princeton, New Jersey), test subject #293199 J. S. Maada demonstrated confusion and panic when asked to list events in a chronological sequence. Even those events that were made to occur within a single hour in the institute laboratory, which he had observed, were virtually impossible for Maada to “list” (it was noted that the subject seemed to have lost comprehension of what the term “list” means). If subject was allowed to view a videotape of the hour, he could list events on a sheet of paper as he observed them occurring, though after the elapse of a half hour, he would not remember their sequence except by consulting the list. Also, Maada did not appear to recognize himself in the video, or would not acknowledge himself. (Who is that black face? Maada would ask, sneering and anxious. I see him. He does not see me.)
In the last several months of Maada’s life, partly as a consequence (it is believed) of deteriorating vision, hearing, and cognitive functions, subject’s paranoia was heightened so that he became convinced that a team of black spies had been sent to abduct him and return him to Nigeria to be imprisoned and tortured in collusion with the CIA. (See Lehrman, M., “Learned Helplessness and Conditioned Paranoia in Thirty-Year-Old African American Male,” Johns Hopkins Neurophysiological Journal 22:17. Though this paper [attributed to Dr. Lehrman but in fact 90 percent of it the work of his postdoc staff at the institute] is based upon PROJECT JRD classified experiments, it does not contain information that reveals the identity of the test subject or the laboratory in which the cycle of experiments took place. Thus, the age of the subject has been altered as well as other details pertaining to the subject’s ethnic identity and legal status in the US, in conformity with Department of Defense regulations stipulating classified scientific material revised for publication in nonclassified journals.) Simultaneously, and with no awareness of the contradictory nature of his assumptions, test subject Maada was made to believe that he was a “privileged alien agent” sent to Earth on a “secret stealth mission” from one of the orbiting moons of Jupiter and that the nature of this mission would be revealed to him at the proper time, and not before. Am I a ticking bomb? Maada would ask slyly. Or am I just a ticking clock? A heart?
Over a duration of several months, Maada so lost his ability to register the sequence of what we call “time” that he was continually expressing surprise at encountering members of the S_______ family (with whom he was living in Edison, New Jersey; their name is redacted, at least in this rough draft of our report, since the entire S_______ family is “undocumented”/“illegal”) in their cramped quarters in a brownstone tenement on Ewing Street, Edison. When the older children returned from school, if Maada was in his room and heard their voices, he would rush at them, demanding to know why they weren’t at school, for it seemed to him (evidently) that they had just left, or had not left at all; concepts of “earlier”—“previous”—“subsequent”—“consequent”—were no longer available to him. The several children in the S_______ household, ranging in age from three to eleven, were very fond of “Saidu” (as they called Maada), because he was “kind” and “funny” with them, like an older brother, and “very smart,” helping them with their homework; but over the course of PROJECT JRD, as Maada’s personality was made to “plasticize” (i.e., alter in a “melting” way) and other features of the experiments were initiated, the children did not know what to expect from their “Saidu” and began to avoid him.
When the several adults in the S_______ household returned from their low-income jobs in the Edison area, Maada frequently expressed great anxiety for them, and occasional impatience, that they had failed to go to work at all, and were risking their jobs, thus their livelihood and ability to pay rent, which would lead to their arrest and deportation, and his own.
For the “undocumented alien”—“illegal alien”—it is arrest and deportation that is the prevailing fear, and not, as it is for others of us (who are US citizens) a more generalized fear of the impenetrability of the future: Death, we can assume; but not the how of Death, still less the (precise) when of Death.
As early as 6/11/15, within three weeks of the start of his participation in PROJECT JRD, #293199/J. S. Maada began to have difficulty listing the chronology of events in his previous life: his arrival in the US as an engineering student at Harrogate University, Jersey City, New Jersey, at which time a student visa was granted in his name by the United States Department of State (8/21/07); his withdrawal from Harrogate on “academic grounds,” at which time his student visa was declared null and void and he was issued a summons from the Department of State ordering him to report immediately to the Newark Immigration Authority (2/2/08); his (unlawful, unreported) move to Edison, New Jersey, as an “undocumented alien” given temporary shelter in the small, fiercely protective Nigerian community; his sporadic (and undocumented) employment in the Edison/Newark area as a cafeteria worker, busboy hospital and morgue custodian, sanitation worker, construction and lawn-service worker, etc.; his (first) arrest by law enforcement officers (Newark) on grounds of creating a public disturbance, refusing to obey police officers’ commands, and resisting arrest (5/21/15); his release from police custody dependent upon agreeing to participate “freely and of his own volition” in the National Defense Security (Classified) PROJECT JRD (5/24/15); his (second) arrest, Montclair, New Jersey (6/19/16) on more serious charges of sexual assault, aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon (teeth, shovel), assault with the intention of committing homicide, and assault against (Montclair) law enforcement officers.
Following the altercation with law enforcement officers in Montclair, test subject J. S. Maada did not return to participate in the PROJECT. Injuries sustained at the time resulted in (emergency) hospitalization at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, New Brunswick, New Jersey, with the (federally mandated) proviso that no medical information regarding the patient could be entered in any hospital computer, and that access to the subject’s room was restricted. Following the subject’s death (6/30/16), his room was declared a quarantine area accessible only to the PROJECT JRD medical team, which performed the autopsy establishing cause of death as “natural”: hypothermia, brain hemorrhage, respiratory, cardiac, and liver failure. (7/2/16) Per the contract signed by the test subject at the start of his participation in PROJECT JRD, his “bodily remains” became the property of PROJECT JRD and are currently stored in the research morgue at the Institute for Independent Neurophysiological Research on Rt. 1, Princeton, New Jersey.
(Information concerning NTM inserts, stents, surgical and chemical alterations to J. S. Maada’s brain and body is not indicated in the [official] autopsy that has been sent to the test subject’s family in Nigeria but is to be found in the [classified] autopsy on file with NDS (National Defense Security).
Though hundreds of pages of data have been recorded in PROJECT JRD computer files, the participation of test subject #293199/Joseph Saidu Maada in the cycle of experiments at the time of his demise is considered incomplete and unsatisfactory.
NOTE: As indicated above, this report is a rough first draft, a compilation of lab notes with some expository and transitional material put together by a small team of postdocs assigned to Dr. M. Lehrman working late at night in the depressing and ill-smelling quarters of the institute. If you have read this far, please do
not be offended by our plea (of a sort) that allowances might be made for our (relative) lack of data concerning test subject #293199/Joseph Saidu Maada, whose full name was not available to us until this morning when we arrived at the lab to learn to our surprise that 1) #293199 was not coming today, as he had been coming every Thursday for months, and 2) #293199 would not ever be coming again, for any scheduled Thursday.
Oh. Shit—one of us murmured.
Weird. We’d got to know the guy kind of well, and now—
It is common practice in laboratories under the auspices of PROJECT JRD to refer to test subjects by their (classified) ID numbers and not by their (actual) names; so too test subjects are not told the (actual) names of the research scientists and medical authorities who work with them over the course of the cycle of experiments. (So far as Joseph Saidu Maada could know, the names on our badges—Dr. R. Keck, Dr. M. Lui, Dr. J. Mariotti—indicated who we actually are, and in addition to this (quasi) information we encouraged the subject to call us by first names closely resembling our own, actual first names: “Rick” for “Rich,” “Michelle” for “Millicent,” “Jonny” for “Jonathan”). In this way, a desired atmosphere of trust was established, a crucial goal for all PROJECT JRD labs.
Also, as postdoc assistants to Dr. M. Lehrman, director of our institute lab, and not director of PROJECT JRD itself, we could not access some essential files without arousing suspicion. Each rank at the institute, as at PROJECT JRD, as at the Department of Defense, carries with it a degree of “classified clearance,” and postdocs are of the lowest rank. (Just above lab technicians—we are sensitive about being confused with lab technicians who do not have PhDs as we do.) Hence the haphazard nature of this report, which we intend to correct in subsequent drafts, before submitting it to Dr. Lehrman, who will slash through it with a red pencil, correcting our mistakes (as he sees them), revising and excising, and providing (restricted) information of his own (which we will never see), to the director of PROJECT JRD, whose very name is not known to us but whose office is in the Department of Defense, Washington, DC.
Other Aliens Page 34