Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  The Collider had grown up in one of those magazine-cover gingerbread houses in Pacific Grove, the kind with hummingbirds suspended above year-round perfect flower gardens. Whoever had been renting the place had let it go a little, though: there were weeds in the garden and it needed a paint job. A real estate agent was waiting for him when we pulled up. He got out and they circled the house together. She rang the doorbell, another woman answered, and they all went inside. After a while The Collider and the agent came out and he followed her SUV to a real estate office in a strip mall. I waited in his car for about an hour before he finally returned.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “How’d it go. It went. It’s gone. Will be. I’ve got a buyer.”

  “… Wow. That must feel …”

  “Like what a relief. Like: finally. Cut that string.”

  It was still early; he didn’t have to drive back up to Petaluma until evening. That left plenty of time for him to see the aquarium. Even though The Collider had grown up in Monterey, he’d never actually been there. Besides, it would give me a chance to show him the important work I was doing there, or would be doing in the future, once I was promoted.

  On the way, we passed Lovers Point Park.

  “Remember that time?” I said.

  “What time?”

  “You know, the time with Waltzer. We’re all blazed, but Waltzer, he’s just, I mean, supremely shit-faced and trying to climb the rocks and he slips and—you remember that.” I looked at him. “He’s in this puddle in the sand and can’t get up and the tide’s coming in. Right? And we’re pulling him up by those four gangled limbs of his and threatening to throw him out to sea … I know you remember …”

  “I wasn’t there,” he said.

  “You were there,” I said. “We come back and our picnic table, it’s, those seagulls, a gang of them, in the middle of scarfing our munchies? And they fly off, all our food, bags, and wrappers in their beaks? You remember that.”

  “It wasn’t me.” He was gazing out at the bay, where iron pools melted and reformed across the lit water. “I missed that one.”

  He drove down Ocean View Boulevard to Cannery Row. We started searching for a parking space.

  He was there. I knew he’d been there that day and I was convinced that he remembered it too. It wasn’t like it was necessarily such a major event in our lives. Absurd and improbable things were happening to us all the time then. But even taking into consideration the fact that we were all in assorted stages of chemical disrepair at the time, it seemed impossible that he could have forgotten the entire incident. It was as if, by denying his presence there, he was trying to take the memory from me, the certainty that it had happened at all.

  The aquarium allowed every employee one free guest a month, but I’d never actually had cause to use this perk before. I led him across the atrium, through the barred shadows of the whale skeleton overhead. Molly was working the entrance, smiling and putting dolphin stamps on children’s tickets. She’d been awarded this position because she was good with people, one of her many annoying qualities.

  “Who’s your friend?” she said.

  “This,” I said, “is The Collider.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “We go back.”

  “Collider,” she repeated with a smirk.

  He shrugged, looking embarrassed. “Old nickname.”

  “And you’re getting the complete guided tour, I guess.” She was still smirking at him. He smirked back. There seemed to be some sort of collusion in the way they smirked at each other.

  “See you, Molly,” I said.

  “Enjoy the tour,” she said to The Collider.

  We went through the gate.

  “Not completely unacceptable.” He’d turned to examine the back of her khaki shorts. “Have you …?”

  “No. Not even a possibility,” I said, making the old face again in spite of myself. There was a long history with Molly, not the romantic kind but the kind that, whatever I might have been inclined to feel for her otherwise, made romance inconceivable. Molly was one of the cloak-and-dagger assistant-otter-feeding rivals, the main one possibly, because of the way she curried favor with Terrence, the sea-mammal supervisor most susceptible to flattery. I felt unable, though, to explain this to The Collider. It would require a further explanation of my ambitions involving otter feeding, a subject that, after his mention the previous night of properly trained oceanographers, seemed too precious to share with him. So instead I said, “You know the story with me and women.”

  I was the one among us who never had a girlfriend, and, probably as an emotional defense, I’d always exaggerated this role for my friends’ amusement, grumbling in a comically despairing way about my mutant special power: the ability to repel any potential female partner. This was why my address, 666 Casanova Avenue—the anti-Casanova—had seemed so ridiculous and so apt. The Collider, on the other hand, was the one who, without any overtures or seductive techniques or, well, without doing anything at all, had found himself constantly surrounded by beautiful women simply by being his disheveled and deeply stoned self. When I’d complain about my women problems he would always laugh and then give advice. Now, though, he didn’t even seem to be listening.

  He’d stopped at the touching pool. Children lined the edge, arms in the water. “Oh, this,” I said. “Kids can feel the whatever, stingrays and starfish and stuff.”

  I nodded to Celeste, the old woman who supervised the touching. “A friend of mine.”

  “Well, welcome,” she said to him. “Dip your hand right in there and feel for yourself, if you like. Don’t be shy.”

  “You know what? I think I will.”

  He pulled up a sleeve, kneeled, reached in.

  “Lovely, isn’t it? The feeling,” Celeste said to The Collider. “Almost like satin.”

  “It’s amazing.” He looked up at me. “Right?”

  I saw him study my face.

  “Oh. Oh, no way. Don’t tell me you’ve never done this before.”

  The truth was I’d never liked touching sea creatures. Furred ones, possibly yes, certainly yes, certainly I would enjoy stroking sleek, shimmering otter fur if given the opportunity, but this was …

  “Come on. You work at an aquarium, right?”

  “We don’t usually go around grabbing fish with our bare hands. We have these things we use. They’re called nets. Or gloves.”

  “You work at an aquarium, man. Come on. Stick your arm in here.”

  I was aware of Celeste there on her stool.

  “Go ahead,” he said, grinning under his implausible mustache disguise, the old Collider, daring me to do something I shouldn’t. Or something that maybe I should do but wouldn’t ordinarily have the courage to. “What’re you afraid of?”

  I rolled up my sleeve. The water was warmer than I’d expected. Below my hand a starfish. I reached for it, but a black shape glided like a shadow between the starfish and my fingertips and as it brushed past, I shuddered at the touch of living flesh …

  I pulled my arm out of the water.

  The Collider stood wiping his arm with a paper towel, grin even wider.

  “Right?” he said.

  I dried myself off. My fingers tingled at the aftertouch. The brush of a black wing tip, soft and alive and …

  The Collider wasn’t there. I found him at the tropical fish tank. “I can’t believe they don’t all just eat each other, together in there like that.”

  My fingertips were still tingling. “You have to choose carefully,” I heard myself say authoritatively, as if I were involved personally in the selection process. “The ones that can get along.”

  We passed moon jellies, skeleton shrimp, leafy sea dragons. He paused at the octopus tank. Clyde, our resident giant Pacific octopus, was suckering his way across the front panel.

  There was a story I’d heard from a janitor when I first started working there. According to the story, fish started disappearing from their tanks. Fish, or maybe it was crabs
. One day it would be there and the next it would be gone. After ruling out the possibility of mutual predation, management began to suspect that the culprit might be one of the aquarium staff, stealing the fish or crabs at night. So they set up a hidden camera. And what they found was that it was the octopus who was responsible: it would slip out of its tank and go to another one and eat the fish or crab and bury the bones or shell in the sand and then return to its own tank. It was unlikely that the octopus was Clyde: they only live for a few years, and when I’d heard the story a few years before, it was already well established. I wasn’t even sure that the incident had happened at my aquarium, or that it had really happened at all. It was one of those stories that gets passed along. But as I told it to The Collider, I described it as if Clyde was the culprit, and—without actually saying so—I let it be understood that I’d been there myself, involved in noticing the missing fish or crabs or possibly even in coming up with the idea of using a hidden camera. And then, as if to legitimize the tale with a story that really was true, I added that Clyde was very clever, intelligent enough to recognize his feeders and prefer some to others, touching the ones he liked with a tentacle and squirting the ones he didn’t.

  “What’s he think about you?” The Collider asked.

  “I don’t feed him,” I said. “Remember, I told you I’m hoping to feed the otters. I’m on the otter team.”

  “Yeah, but you said he recognizes all of you. How’s he react to you?”

  “He doesn’t, really. I don’t know. He just … It’s hard to say.”

  Clyde’s head, as it moved in front of me, resembled a submerged scarf being whirled around.

  “Isn’t he lonely in there?” a little boy was asking his mother. “He doesn’t get to be with the other fish.”

  “Actually, he’s not a fish,” I said. The boy and his mother turned. “He’s a mollusk. Clam family. He’s basically a very smart clam. They like being alone. Octopuses. Octopi. Not like us. Clyde there is probably enjoying his solitude.”

  The mother pressed her hand to the boy’s back and ushered him over to a tank across the room.

  “Jesus,” I said. “You see the way they looked at me? I guess I should have told them I’m aquarium staff.” But The Collider wasn’t paying any attention. He was watching Clyde settle in a bed of his own tentacles.

  “Why doesn’t he make a run for it?” he said.

  “What?”

  “The octopus. He’s such an escape artist, why doesn’t he wait for dark and make for that emergency exit? It’s right there. Squeeze his way under the door—they can do that, you know? Fit through anything. Then flop off the pier into the bay. Freedom. If he’s so smart.”

  “Maybe he likes it in there.”

  I was tired of talking about Clyde. I remembered that the next otter feeding was at four. My watch said five after. I rushed The Collider over to the viewing area, but tourists had already claimed the best spots at the railings on both tiers. I’d planned a schedule that would allow us to see everything at just the right time. Then The Collider had decided we needed to touch stingrays and stand around looking at an octopus. As we watched the backs of the heads of the tourists who were watching the otters getting fed, I couldn’t stop thinking about Clyde … To focus myself, I began narrating to The Collider the procedure that I knew, from countless viewings, must be taking place: the feeder standing there in yellow rubber boots, a fish-filled can holstered on each hip; the otters leaping on command, one at a time, from the pool onto the imitation rock platform … I described it all for him, a detailed play-by-play, even though I couldn’t see a thing.

  On the way back to my apartment, as we drove down Alvarado, The Collider pointed to a bar. He asked if I remembered a particular incident that had happened there. Before I could answer, he started recounting it for me. I was surprised—he’d been avoiding talking about the past ever since he arrived. He would ignore an in-joke, pretend he didn’t understand when I used our coded language. But now he seemed eager to revisit the memories. He wasn’t reminiscing, though; whatever he was doing felt like the opposite of that. He pointed at a bus-stop bench, the scene of another incident, a minor one, in reality, he argued; hardly the legendary event we’d all chosen to remember. That was the gist of what he was saying as he drove: the ridiculous and noble and unrepeatable things that had happened to us were not as we’d remembered them. The Collider, I began to understand, intended to take apart the story of our lives together until it was a manageable size, until it was small enough for him to destroy its remaining glamour completely. Maybe I wouldn’t have minded if he’d been trying to prove that we’d all been immature or reckless or misguided. But what he was saying was something else: that none of it had meant what we thought it did. We passed Monterey Peninsula College, where we’d all nominally been students, and there were memories there too that apparently needed dismantling. It wasn’t clear whether he was attacking or pleading. The closer we got to my place the more agitated he became, rapidly unearthing memory after memory as if he’d just realized how much more he needed to say and how little time we had left together. His arguments made me feel weak. They didn’t persuade me but they drained the energy to oppose them.

  “… See?” he was saying as we pulled up to my apartment building. “Now that’s a perfect example. Do you remember how I got that name?”

  “… There was a reason.”

  “Yeah. There was. Do you remember? Do you remember what that fucking reason was?”

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t remember.

  “From now on? Let’s just go back to Todd. OK?”

  “Todd,” I repeated. “Sure: Todd.” Forcing myself to say it out loud, the blunt and ordinary monosyllable he’d been stuck with once before we’d given him something better.

  “All right then. I should hit the road. Long trip back and all that.”

  We shook hands. I got out of his car, and then The Collider—I was tempted to shout it out defiantly, his real and permanent name, a final wild call—drove down Casanova Avenue while I stood waving idiotically at the curb.

  As soon as I was in my apartment I realized I didn’t want to be there. I went back outside and took a bus downtown. From Fisherman’s Wharf I followed the Peninsula Trail, passing joggers and rollerbladers. It was going to be another one of those Monterey sunsets they say can’t be beat. Out past the shore, a pair of sea lions lazed on a crag of rock, looking like rock formations themselves. In the sea around them, invisible to me now, otters would be congregating, clam diving and circling each other in otter play and floating together companionably on the waves. They didn’t even need to swim. They could just float together in water like they were floating in air. A raft of otters: that’s what you called a group of them. There was nothing wrong with this town. People came from all over to see this town. This pristine, otter-filled bay.

  The sun burned orange and a scorched red, then extinguished itself in the distant water, leaving its colors behind. What had they seen, those who had abandoned this town? Other sunsets, other bays: no matter how hard I tried to visualize them, I could only see deformed replicas of this sunset, this bay. Out there, in the direction of the vanishing colors, far out there somewhere was Malaysia. I thought of Lance, squatting unseen in jungle shadow under his hand-drawn arrow. I AM HERE. I thought of Zurilla, kissing the red eczemic neck of his orthodontist. Tarsky at the wheel of his Subaru. I thought of Shem, Zachary, Dangling Jim, Waltzer, Mitch, Eric, The Collider … until I wasn’t actually thinking of them so much as listing them, enumerating them, resurrecting through naming, even though, except for Tarsky, they were all still alive.

  Cannery Row was clotted with tourists milling around under blinking lights, putting food in each other’s mouths and loitering in front of souvenir-encrusted windows. There they were: the people who came from all over to see my town.

  The aquarium was dark. I used my key at the service entrance. Inside, underwater light wavered across the walls and floor. Shapes be
hind glass glinted and slid and turned.

  There was nobody in the otter enclosure. Jack, the abandoned pup rescued a few months before, no longer needed twenty-four-hour care. He was in the pool aboard his surrogate mother, Effie, nestled in her furred chest, where he looked as content as an infant rocking in its cradle, although it occurred to me that otters in general always looked content, maybe because their faces were incapable of showing any other expression. I took a mask from its hook on the wall and put it on. We wore these masks—a headband attached to a tinted visor that could, like a welding helmet, be raised or lowered over your face—to prevent otters like Jack, who might eventually be released back into the wild, from becoming too familiar with humans. Better for them to fear us, or to see us as, at best, benign but faceless creatures. Only the otter feeders and handlers were allowed to show the otters their actual faces. I stood at the pool’s edge, watching them bob on the unruffled water, oblivious captives. As I watched, I noticed for the first time something unsettling about them, their placid animal contentment suddenly alien and incomprehensible.

  I left the enclosure and made my way back through the underwater light. I was stopped, though, before I reached the exit—the octopus tank was empty. For a second I experienced a thrill I didn’t understand; then I spotted him, compressed in an upper corner of the tank like a partially deflated balloon. One eye was visible. I moved closer, waiting for a sign of recognition—an uncurled tentacle, a shift in the angle of his enormous head …

  I remembered that I still had my mask on. I lifted the visor. We looked at each other, or I imagined that we did. He didn’t move. Who knows what he was thinking there behind the glass? Who knows if he recognized me as an ally, as a creature like himself?

  At the control panel on the wall I entered the code to deactivate the alarms. I raised the lid of Clyde’s tank. Took a step back. Waited. Clyde seemed disinclined to leave his spot in the corner, let alone make his escape. Finally I walked to the crab tank, held open the lid, and looked over at Clyde meaningfully. Nothing. Rolling up my sleeve I stood on tiptoe and plunged my arm in. Bubbles shivered across my skin. I felt a shell graze my fingers: it was rough and at the same time lightly slimed, as if coated with a thin gel, and punctuated at the rim with small spikes …