Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  And yet abruptly, after forty minutes, the commandant’s voice calmly informed him that the mission had been “suspended” for the time being and he was free to leave.

  What relief he felt! Or no, not relief, a sudden vast, insatiable hunger.

  In front of a vending machine on the ground floor of the courthouse Maada stood trembling. So many choices!—soft drinks, candy bars, chips. He could not decide what to purchase first. His hands were shaking so badly, he could not remove his wallet from his pocket. In a trance of euphoria he wept hot acid tears that ran in rivulets down his cheeks.

  And then, in late spring 2016 Maada began to misinterpret NTM signals. Willful neurons in the test subject firing in ways contrary to directives.

  That this was happening in test subject #293199 after months of subject’s near-total cooperation was in itself a significant if unexpected development. For no experiment is without valuable revelations!

  Of course, willfulness in the subject J. S. Maada was intermittent and inconsistent. Resisting programmed directives did not represent an altered pattern of behavior in #293199 for there was no (discernible) pattern to it.

  In the heat of early summer working with Adolpho’s Lawn Care crew, Maada was observed shivering violently while others complained of heat; subject perspired heavily, yet continued to shiver with (apparent) cold. When NTM activity was inoperative, subject began to “hear” voices of a new and inexplicable sort. Though he could not have known of the microscopic stents in his brain, still less the cluster of strategically placed computer chips, or the artificial “scalp flap” beneath a patch of hair, he began to obsess that there were “things” in his brain—grains of sand, staple-sized bits of metal, lice that crawled and sucked his blood. He came to believe that his heart had been replaced by “a kind of clock that ticks.” His blood was no longer red but of the hue and substance of mucus. His skin, which had always been so rich and dark, was lightening in splotches, like a kind of cancer—from working in the sun? Yet, Maada could not not work for he needed the money to repay the S_______family for their generosity to him and also to send back to his family in Nigeria (though his family had become distant and blank to him like faded faces on a billboard, and several messages from “voices” had called into question his actual blood relationship to them). Maada diverted his most anxious thoughts by scratching and peeling his skin, which seemed to give him an intense, sensual pleasure; beneath were patches of sickly pale skin, both repugnant and fascinating.

  Even when no NTM activity was initiated from the institute, subject began to experience “zapping” sensations in his brain and throughout his body. These came from a long distance, subject believed, traveling at the speed of light. His genitals were particularly sensitive to such signals—though in fact there were no signals. “Sex desire” for inanimate objects like discarded Styrofoam cups bearing a residue of coffee or cola, carelessly opened cereal boxes, unlaced work boots swept upon him at unpredictable times. He could not bear to touch the genital region of his body for such touch was forbidden, yet his hands moved of their own greed and willfulness, and were shameful to him. In the S______ family there was little privacy, which was shameful to him. You smell funny, Saidu, one of the older children said, wrinkling her nose. It was terrifying to him; the S______ family would evict him from their apartment; a voice not precisely but resembling that of the commandant suggested that it might be wisest to slash the S_________s’ throats in their beds some night when all were sleeping peacefully, and then to slash his own. Yet an instant later, Adolpho was shouting at him: Asshole! Wake up. So tired he was falling asleep in the truck—he was falling asleep on his (shaky) feet. Losing his ability to see himself in relationship to other (spatial) beings. For it is space that prevents us being crushed together—as time prevents everything happening at once—but what is space? Shut his eyes, space vanished. Much was becoming scrambled, dismembered, dissected. It was repulsive to him, to observe his own body dissected by (white) strangers with handsaws and bloodstained surgical instruments. And his jaw hanging slackly open, and his eyes but half closed. Those corrosive acid tears leaving rivulets on his cheeks, and elsewhere, on his body, splotches and peelings. So vividly he saw the strangers with their sharp instruments, their wrinkled noses at the smell of his sawnopen torso—Jesus, what a stink!

  Had it already happened?—or not yet? As if compressed on the head of a pin, everything was prepared to detonate.

  When Adolpho came for them on a street corner in Edison in the twilit hour at dawn Maada had to summon all his strength to climb into the truck with the others. Where once he’d been the youngest member of the lawn crew, now his youth had drained from him—he’d become the oldest. His back was stricken with pain. All of the nerves of his back had been strung to breaking. His brain was swollen with pustules. Lice scrambled through the hole in his head, and into his hair. His left eye was plastic. He had slipped back in “time” as clumsily as you’d slip in dog shit on the sidewalk—he had become his own ancestor, a slave. On the moon of Jupiter, slaves had revolted in open, deep crevice pits as their captors had flung livid torches down at them. It had been a slave uprising, which had propelled him to Earth, to save the others. He yearned to know more of his mysterious and forbidden origin but the words that would have brought him knowledge began to break and crumble like a column of ants when a booted foot descends upon them.

  Riding the massive lawn mower. A coworker had been kind enough to adjust the ear protectors against his ears. Yet hearing a babble and crackle of voices and laughter. Seeing figures amid the trees, which (though lifelike) he knew were not really there, for they were transparent like jellyfish; you could see through them.

  At the S_______estate working stooped in the sun. How many hours stooped and digging in the sun. Woman with a pig face. That skin—“white.” Snout nose. Pig-eyes lewd and laughing. Pig-eyes dared to descend to the gnarl of misery at his groin.

  What issued from the pig-mouth was confusing to him for he had already obeyed the pig-mouth. He knew. He was sure. Yet he was not sure for perhaps it had not happened yet.

  Yet, it had happened. The Floradora rose was to be dug up another time and another time replanted.

  Dug up and brought to the other bed, which is/was the first bed. And the azalea dug up, and hauled away to be replanted. It seemed to Maada that he had just performed these actions. He had performed these actions several times. The pig-woman had given him orders, and he had obeyed. Yet it was possible that the several times he had obeyed the pig-woman were collapsed to a single time and that time like the head of a pin, too small to see. Was there just one rose bed, and one hole?—but more than one Floradora rose? And what of the azalea? Trying to understand such a puzzle was like trying to push inside his head an object too big to fit inside his skull as well as oddly angled. Subject began to experience rapid zaps in brain, groin, fingers. Began to scream, grunt, tear like a ravenous animal with his teeth.

  Pig-woman screamed, screamed. His coworkers screamed at him, pulling him off her.

  It was the end. All of Ganymede would rejoice; a new martyr would enter the firmament.

  The night before, this had happened.

  Riki, who’d loved to cuddle with Saidu, shrank from him now, seeing something in Saidu’s face that was beginning to twitch, splotch, and peel like sunburn. The iris of one eye was inflamed, half again the size of the other iris. And the strange smell like something rotted.

  Riki laughed uneasily, and sucked his thumb, and began to cry when Maada stooped to play with him.

  Yet Maada had no clear idea when this was. Riki was running away from him before he’d run toward him.

  No! Go away, I don’t like you.

  Reached for the child, who was screaming with laughter. Or, screaming. Reached for the child, and the child’s legs thrashed wildly.

  Far away, on a moon of the great planet Jupiter, a remote control was being pressed. The detonation would be instantaneous.

  The Unriva
led Happiness of Otters

  S. P. Tenhoff

  There was always more than one of us, in those days. We were a plural proposition. We would huddle, Shem maybe on one side and The Collider, for instance, on the other—other combinations were possible—and confer over secrets important because they were secret. Or no longer secret. We would fill Tarsky’s battered Subaru, arrive somewhere, tumble out like clowns from a clown car. We spoke in code, spurned work and daylight. Our comings and goings were inexplicable even to ourselves, our snarled trajectories heroic, volatile, nonlinear.

  Who could stop us? People. People stopped us. Time stopped us, some of us, slowed others down. Tarsky drove his Subaru through fog, off a Big Sur cliff, into foam and rock and sea. Lance immigrated to Malaysia. Zurilla wed an eczemic orthodontist. Our happy many-ness was being erased at the margins. (We’d never needed to think of ourselves as happy.)

  We became numerable, our remaining trajectories easily traced and no longer sufficiently tangled.

  A point came when, near the sand-swept decay of Seaside, murder capital of Central California, I found myself residing alone in an apartment with an address that sounded like a joke at my expense. Which was not in itself the problem: I was used to making fun of myself and encouraging others to join in. It was what I’d always done best. The problem was that there was no one around anymore to share the joke with. Lance sent me a postcard once of Malaysian rain forest and printed 666 CASANOVA AVE MONTEREY CA in the address space without so much as a scrawled snicker, without the briefest parenthetical note of irony. On the photo side of the postcard an arrow pointed into serrated shadow below the blue-inked words I AM HERE.

  When I got The Collider’s e-mail I hadn’t heard from anyone in a long time. He was living up in Petaluma, and wanted to stay overnight while he took care of some business related to his mother’s house, which he’d been renting out since she died. I made up an itinerary, a tour of the places that had been most important in all of our lives. We would need more than a day, though. I e-mailed, telling him he could stay longer—he could stay as long as he wanted. He e-mailed back to say he could only come down for a day, and at least part of that time he’d be busy dealing with a real estate agent. My reduced itinerary included dinner at the Speckled Urchin, a Japanese/Mexican fusion place we all used to love. Now you needed a reservation. I had us for seven, but the day of his arrival he kept texting that he was running late, and finally that he’d decided to grab something on the way. I canceled the reservation, made myself a peanut butter sandwich, and waited at the kitchen table, where I had a view of Casanova Avenue. It was after nine when he pulled up to the curb. I rushed down to meet him. He looked more or less like himself, except for an unconvincing mustache that seemed to have been pasted onto his lip in an attempt to disguise himself as someone’s father.

  “The Collider,” I hollered in a carnival-barker voice, as if I was announcing his arrival to the entire street.

  “Wow,” he said. “Almost didn’t recognize you for a second.” The brief body scan his eyes gave reminded me that I might have put on a few pounds.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, making the face I’d always made in such situations to show—what? Large part deadpan humor, small part fatalistic resignation, a pinch of snarky displeasure … Something like that. I felt a little self-conscious doing it, as if I were trying to show him a face he could recognize as mine.

  “Find it all right?” But had I made that face in the past? Hadn’t it just been my face then?

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah. I used the GPS. Can’t believe you ended up all the way out here, though. What is this, practically Seaside?”

  “Still Monterey, technically. It’s not like I ended up here. This is temporary. Can you even believe my address? Six six six Casanova Avenue. Perfect.” And I found myself making the face again. I was expecting a smart-ass Collider dig, something maybe about me and my luck with women. But he just stood there with his overnight bag in his hand. Tired from the drive, probably.

  Once we were inside, the first thing I did was offer him a loaded pipe. I’d gotten a bud from one of the janitors at the aquarium. I wasn’t really much of a smoker, but this was The Collider visiting, and although I couldn’t even imagine him not bringing his own—I’d never known a time when he wasn’t stoned and holding—I wanted to be a good host.

  He waved it away. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m good.”

  “You’re good?”

  “I don’t smoke anymore. Haven’t for a long time.”

  “… You’re kidding.”

  “No, it gives me these … anxiety-attack sort of things.”

  “Seriously? I mean, seriously? Anxiety attacks. You’re The Collider. This psychotropic substance here? It relieves anxiety.”

  “Not for me. Not anymore.”

  I took the pipe into the bedroom.

  “But, hey,” I heard him say. “You go ahead.”

  “No. No, I’m OK.”

  After that I told him about my job. My hope was to be promoted to assistant otter feeder at the aquarium. This position was coveted and therefore the source of every species of nasty cloak-and-dagger. Assistant otter feeders didn’t actually assist in the feeding of otters; they assisted in the preparation of the food that would be brought to the otters by the otter feeders. It was, nevertheless, a step in the right direction. A step in the direction of the otters, which was the point. This was what we all dreamed about, those of us who fought and schemed and despised each other: the day when we could commune directly with the otters in yellow rubber boots and aprons, tossing fish from buckets at our new friends from our own gloved hands …

  “And that’s just the next step,” I said. “That’s not the ultimate goal.” My dream, I started to explain, was to eventually help rescue orphaned and injured otters. He kept shifting and fidgeting on the couch, looking more and more exasperated.

  “To do that?” he blurted out finally. “Get to feed them and all? Don’t you have to be like a properly trained oceanographer or something? How’d you even get that job anyway?”

  I outlined the steps in my progress: volunteer, janitorial trainee, janitor, current position as custodial assistant to the assistant sea mammal feeders. Talking about my work—or my potential future work—usually made me excited, but now I couldn’t stop thinking about properly trained oceanographers. What kind of thing was that for him to say? You didn’t need an advanced degree to feed otters fish from a bucket. Or to bond with them, to recognize their needs, to help them …

  “How about you?” I asked. “What kind of work are you doing?”

  He was a smog technician at an automobile inspection center in Petaluma. Smog technician: I couldn’t picture it. Or I could picture it: a mustached, greasy-jumpsuited Collider in an unlit concrete room, facing a row of rumbling cars showing their tailpipes and farting gray fumes … How had The Collider ended up as the sort of person who measured exhaust emissions for a living?

  “If you’re just going to be inspecting smog,” I said, “you don’t have to be all the way up there. Might as well be in Monterey. Come back, why don’t you? You can crash here until you get yourself set up.”

  “I’m not inspecting smog. I’m inspecting cars. And if for some reason I wanted to be back here, I could stay at my mom’s place instead of renting it out. I don’t know how you can stand it, man. To tell the truth. Stuck in this town.”

  I hadn’t realized until then that I felt any sense of betrayal toward those of us who had chosen to abandon our town. To change the subject, I said, “Sorry about your mom, by the way. Don’t know if I told you.”

  This was not the right way to change the subject.

  I tried again, this time talking about our friends. The way he listened, I might have been mentioning people I’d introduced him to once at a party. He hadn’t kept in touch with anyone. He didn’t even know about Zurilla’s orthodontist, for example. Or Lance and Malaysia. I handed him the postcard.

  He looked down at it for a
second—rain forest, arrow, blue-inked words—before setting it on the coffee table. Then he tilted his head and stretched in what struck me as a contrived way.

  I put a blanket and pillow on the couch.

  “Here you go. G’night.”

  “Night,” he said. “Hey. Thanks.”

  In my room, I sat cross-legged on the bed holding a lighter and the pipe I’d loaded for him. Eventually I lit the bowl, a tentative sip: it had been a while. It was like inhaling scented air; but as I held it in my chest it bloomed, swelling. I pinched my nose closed and hunkered down around it until I had to surrender, a blue coughball exploding across the bed. The Collider would have heard the sound in the next room. There was no reason to feel guilty about smoking alone: he hadn’t wanted any. Anxiety attacks. How was that possible? What had happened to him? I remembered him as he had been before and then I started thinking of the others, remembering our adventures together and how we had all been once. I was watching a film: I was a viewer and at the same time a participant captured and preserved there. The film wasn’t some Vaseline-lensed nostalgic blurring of the past; it was a documentary, everything true, everything revealed to me with an exact stoned clarity. That life was vivid and actual; it was my current life, and my current self, crossed-legged on a bed sipping a pipe, that felt dim and unreal.

  Once in a while I’d hear a sound coming from the living room, and each time, for a second, I’d panic, thinking an intruder had broken in. I wasn’t used to having people in my place. I’d remember that it was just The Collider, moving around, apparently wide awake even though he’d been stretching and making a show of how sleepy he was. I would wonder what he was doing in there. Then I’d start thinking again about The Collider I’d known, and that would start the documentary rolling again, and then I’d hear something, and again, for a second, before I remembered, I would freeze in alarm at the sound of the intruder stealing through my apartment.