"Baby?” I called. “Sabile? Something is happening."
Maybe she didn't catch what I said, or she didn't hear the urgency in my voice, because after a moment she called lazily, “Come get in the bath too."
"No, get out of the bath,” I said. “Something big is happening. Come see."
A moment later she stood beside me at the window, wrapped in a damp towel, watching it rain spaceships.
"Oh my God,” she said.
Using my cell phone, I tried to call my parents. There was no signal. Sabile was trying the house phone. “I get nothing,” she said.
Some of the ships were landing now. They landed vertically, like gleaming monuments, their tops pointed at the night sky from which they'd arrived. You looked at them settled there and sensed unimaginable power. Not human power of conquest, as if they'd come to kill our leaders and take our children, but overwhelming poignancy, as though they were something barely remembered from earliest childhood, from before you could really remember things, that meant everything to you. As if they were mothers.
The closest one had landed now in the woods behind the house, less than a mile off. It was taller than the trees, and its white shaft shone far above their tops. The green phosphorescence followed it down and settled around it, seeping through the woods like fog, spreading.
Sabile said, “They're majestic."
I agreed.
In the far distance, we could still see them falling in other places, hundreds now, perhaps thousands. Even where we couldn't make out the needles—the obelisks—we could see the ghostly green streaks on the darkness that marked their descent.
I wondered, “Is it happening all over the country?"
She added, “All over the world?"
They were majestic, but of course I was afraid. I put my arm around Sabile. Her body was warm and her arms still moist from the bath. With shining eyes she stood beside me at the window, hugging me back, afraid too.
After a while, it seemed to slow down. In the distance a few green trails were still descending, but now the landscape was studded with white towers, like sudden stalagmites. It felt like looking at a landscape on which fresh snow had fallen, a changed world. We wanted to get news, to find out what was happening elsewhere, but the TV was still full of silent static.
"Your laptop,” I said suddenly.
"I'll try,” she said. “But it's dial-up, it'll just use the phone line."
Of course, that didn't work either.
What was there to do? We kept watch by the window for a long time, but nothing happened.
* * * *
In the early-morning darkness, we tried to drowse on the sofa. Sabile had dropped the towel over a chair, and she was naked. On the coffee table lay a stack of paperbacks, damp-looking and stained from being read in the bath, and she reached instinctively for one.
"You're going to read?” I said. She always read herself to sleep. “How can you read now?"
"No, of course not,” she said, putting down the book. She was tall and had reckless freckles on her shoulders and cheekbones. Her hair, a startling black, had dried funny from her interrupted bath and was flattened around her face flapper-style.
Although her name sounded French to most people, she was Jewish and had been born in Israel, living there until her parents moved to America in the 1990s. I had first seen her in the John Jay dining hall, moving thoughtfully down the dessert bar, poking at yogurts and mashed strawberries. She had loaded her tray with ice cream, with almonds, with chocolate syrup. Criminally lovely.
I lay beside her on the sofa, the lights off, a faint green glow visible in the window.
"Wow,” she said. “My parents must be terrified."
"We all are,” I said. “Who isn't?"
She said nothing.
Eventually we must have fallen asleep. My dreams were strange, full of green smoke and blood, and several times I woke in terror. Around six a.m., suddenly alert, I heard scratching.
I rose, terrified, opened the window, peered out. Nothing.
"Want to go see it?” said Sabile, making me jump. She hadn't risen.
"What?” I said. “See what?"
"Don't mind me,” she said. “I'm asleep."
I closed the window, locked it, and lay back down beside her. We held each other and at last slept again, lightly.
* * * *
Just before noon, the house was suddenly filled with a terrifying racket. It was the TV—the TV had come back on. We hurried to watch. Every channel had a news broadcast on. Anchormen were stationed by the ships, providing live continuous coverage, talking over themselves to catch us up on what was happening.
People had been taken during the night.
They were in the ships now, these people. All young men and women, twenty-somethings mostly. Like us.
We saw a girl being interviewed; her boyfriend had disappeared. It pulled him through the wall, she said. It pulled him through the wall? said the reporter. Well, she said, he went. She seemed less panicky than bitter.
"What is this?” I said. “Are we being conquered by these things?"
Sabile, chewing her fingernails, didn't say anything.
I went to the window. The obelisks were standing just as before. It surprised me that the sky was not full of helicopters—army, media, anything.
Soon, we called our parents. “Yes,” they said, “there are some here, too. Right near us. No, they're not doing anything."
But people on our street, the street where I grew up, had disappeared in the night. “Stay in the house,” my dad told me. “They're taking people your age. Don't let them see you."
When I got off the phone, Sabile was crying. Her nails were chewed down to crimson nubs, her face flushed. I sat with her on the sofa and kissed her swollen eyes. She was wearing soft jeans and a tattered workman's shirt, looking more beautiful than I had ever seen her, and protective affection swelled in me.
"We'll be okay,” I said. “I love you. I won't let anything happen to you."
"It's not that I'm scared,” she said. “It's that I'm not scared."
I didn't understand.
She added, “I love you, too,” and looked out the window. It was a beautiful nearly-autumn day.
I said, “When we go to France, where should we go? What's that town you told me about, in the countryside?"
But she didn't seem to hear me; she only said, “I love you,” again, in the same wistful tone.
* * * *
Around five p.m., someone—a handsome young man—returned from one of the ships in Arkansas. It was on every channel. They showed him wrapped in a blanket, forlorn, listlessly sipping coffee. He had been naked when he emerged.
Did they hurt you? he was asked.
No.
How did you escape?
I didn't escape. And he looked over the reporters’ heads at the white top of a distant obelisk like an old man looking back on his unrecoverable life, on days of unimaginable richness.
Something cold went over my skin, a chill of fear.
Another thing happened about an hour later, and that was on the news, too. They began finding naked bodies. One or two around some of the obelisks—a few of the people who had been taken in the night. Their heads had been half-eaten.
Faces gone, scooped out along with their brains as if by a giant spoon, only the backs of their skulls remaining. One imagined creatures with huge, convex mouths, like deep-sea fish, the teeth protrusive and razory.
Sabile and I watched this on the news, not talking.
As night fell, the TV abruptly cut out again. Terrifying snow filled the screen. The phones went dead again, too. The first time, it might have been a temporary side effect of the ships’ descent, some unavoidable disruption of signals in the atmosphere, but this felt more calculated. More ominous.
"We better stay away from the windows,” I said.
Sabile, hugging herself, said, “Okay."
Helplessly, we went to the window.
&nb
sp; The obelisk shone white in the darkness. When I put my arm around Sabile, I felt all the tiny muscles in her body trembling, as though some faint electric current were being channeled through her.
"I'm hungry,” she said, pressing her body against mine. “We've hardly eaten all day, you know that?"
"So am I,” I said.
Silently she pulled away and a moment later I heard her in the cramped upstairs kitchen. I understood her need to distract herself, to do something quotidian, to forget the naked bodies with their devoured faces.
Idly, in the dark—we had never turned the lights on—I stood at the window, a frightened sentry. For several minutes, I had been watching two smears of whiteness, very faint, moving in the woods, imperceptibly growing larger, before it finally registered on me what I was seeing. “Oh, shit,” I said. They could have been giant dying fireflies.
The trees at the edge of the woods grew sparsely, and among them the two aliens lurked. They moved slowly, like men walking on the moon, and they were very tall. They were wreathed in faint white phosphorescence.
A hundred feet from us, perhaps less.
"Sabile,” I whispered. “Sabile, I see them. They're right outside."
Two figures approached the tree line. Their physical characteristics became easier to make out. They were perhaps seven feet tall, spindly, pure white—like coconut ice cream—and they had huge, intelligent eyes. Eyelids, too; I could see them blinking.
One left the woods, entering our backyard. With deliberate, undersea movements, it looked around.
"Sabile,” I whispered.
Though its presence inspired fear, the sight of the alien made me want to approach and examine, perhaps touch. There was grace in the way its limbs moved, a wrenching erotic quality in the dolphin-smooth physique. It stepped toward the house, its attention focused on something.
"Sabile."
I saw her then, just as I finished speaking her name. She was walking across the grass, away from me, without hesitation. Toward them, and they were waiting for her. For a second, I felt sure she must be under their control, that they must be doing something to her mind.
But I didn't really believe that.
When she got to the creature in the backyard—the other was watching from the woods—she stopped, and looked at it. It looked at her. She stood still while it walked around her in a half-circle, head bent to her height, like a dog sniffing another animal. Then, straightening, it turned and walked into the woods. She followed.
Only then did I remember that I was part of this scene, too, that I had a voice.
I opened the window, yelled her name.
She stopped, looked briefly back. “Sorry,” she called. “I can't not go.” Then she turned and kept walking.
I was staggered by disbelief. They were stealing the woman I loved. No, not even stealing! After a moment I could no longer see her, only the glowing outlines of her companions getting dimmer, dimmer.
I found myself bolting out the back door with no memory of descending the stairs, my heart slamming against my ribs like it wanted to splinter them. I ran halfway across the backyard and then stopped, hesitating. Nothing was visible among the trees.
Should I follow them? I was afraid, bewildered. I remembered afternoons in her dorm room, listening to an old record player, the coffeemaker rumbling on the bedside table, a love so easy and unadorned.
She had betrayed me.
I took a step back from the trees. With my own eyes I'd seen how she went with them freely, uncompelled.
* * * *
The night passed, sleepless. Perhaps I drowsed, in the chair by the window.
Sabile. Good God. It felt insane, being jealous of extraterrestrials.
By dawn, nothing had changed. The obelisks towered with inscrutable majesty over the landscape.
Just as it had yesterday, the television came back on a little before noon. It was all the same, more of the same. They showed photos of the disappeared. More people had gone in the night, a small percentage of them reappearing in the morning as nude, discarded corpses, faces gone, skulls emptied like bowls.
Noises downstairs distracted me from the newscast. I leapt up, my heart pumping something that was not blood—panic, adrenaline. Footsteps came up the stairs, and then Sabile was standing in the doorway at the far end of the room, her hair in loose tangles like she'd just been fucked.
She said, “Hey."
I didn't speak.
She said, “Don't be worried."
Her freckles were darker, as if she'd been tanning. And she looked radiant, fresh.
"Tell me what happened,” I said. “You're okay?"
"Yes."
"They made you go with them, they controlled you. You were like a zombie."
"No, I wasn't,” she said. “I mean, yes, they came into my head. Or, no, it was more like they sent me an invitation. I could go or not go."
"And you went,” I said. “The ship. What was the ship like?"
"I didn't go in the ship."
"Then what happened?” I said. “Tell me."
"I went into the woods with them,” she said. “You saw. I don't really know where the time went. They touched my face."
She walked to the window, looked out. The television was still on. Someone else who had been in one of the obelisks and somehow returned, a beautiful young woman, was saying, They don't hurt anyone on purpose. It's more like a kiss, a hungry kiss that goes too far. All the people who had been taken, it seemed, were beautiful.
"What?” I said. “Touched your face? What do you mean, they touched your face?"
A hand rising to her throat, Sabile said, “It felt good."
"Oh? And what else? What else happened?"
She flung up both hands, a sudden, angry gesture. Tired of my questions. “I don't know, nothing else; we walked, then I wanted to come home, so I did. I don't know where the time went. I wasn't even afraid.” She hesitated, staring out the window. “They led me through the woods. They touched me. It was like ... flirtation."
"And on the second date, they eat your head."
She lapsed into sullen silence, as if I'd slapped her. I could always tell when Sabile was angry because every part of her body grew still except for her lower jaw, which tensed and shifted like a restless child's.
I went into the little kitchen, turned on the water, then turned it off. I wanted to do something, but there was nothing to do. I wasn't hungry.
When I returned to the den, Sabile was on the couch, watching the news. I sat beside her. The newscasters had begun using the term selective abductions, and live newscasts from the obelisks were being punctuated by more interviews—not with those who had been inside a ship, because almost none returned, but with the loved ones of the disappeared, their fiancés and fiancées, their boyfriends and girlfriends. Those not selected.
"Was that your interview?” I said. “The selection committee? Did you get approved?"
"I don't know what it was, Rob,” she said. “I don't know why I went out there."
She looked at me, reached across the distance between us, took my hand. She said, “I love you.” Her gaze was frightened, perhaps apologetic.
We had talked all summer about getting married in a year or two. The night before we left for the country, I'd lain beside her in our apartment in Brooklyn, wondering where my life would be if I hadn't seen her that day at nineteen. I couldn't imagine an alternate trajectory, only the same life but without her. Half the life.
* * * *
Through the afternoon, we waited. We spoke by phone with our parents. “I want to get out of here,” I told my dad. Sabile looked up, startled. “Tonight; drive back to the city. Out here, isolated, we're more vulnerable."
"Traveling, exposed, that's when you'll be vulnerable,” he said. “Don't let them see you. People are hunkered down everywhere; the roads are empty. Wait it out."
Out of shame, I hadn't told him about Sabile's leaving. To me it seemed a moral lapse, one to be hidden.
Her standing in my parents’ eyes was high.
A new feeling, not to trust her. A drowning feeling, my breath uncatchable.
Slowly for a time, then with frightening speed, the sun slid down the sky and burst like a yolk, turning everything yellow. Then orange, then red. Night again. The TV went dead.
I heard an ominous, insistent scraping. Though I moved from kitchen to bedroom to den, I could not find its source. I stared out the window, certain they were coming.
"What are you looking for?” Sabile said. “What do you expect to do against them?” I realized the sound was coming from her; it was her fingernails dragging anxiously across her corduroy pants, over and over. She wasn't even aware.
"They don't mean any harm,” she said, brushing dark hair from her eyes. “They're not here to hurt anyone."
"Sabile,” I said, “the bodies? The heads? They eat the heads?"
"Only a few,” she said. “Not on purpose."
The air felt strange, thick. “Not on purpose,” I repeated. “Well, I guess it's all right if it's not on purpose."
She said, “There are risks you take."
Abruptly I turned to the window, thinking I had glimpsed something luminescent in the darkness. Again, there was nothing. Then, suddenly, Sabile was on her feet and had both arms wrapped tightly around me from behind, a violent and honest embrace, murmuring into my shoulder soft words I couldn't hear. My muscles slackened; I went still. There's an embrace only a woman who loves you can give.
For a minute or two we didn't move, the two of us resting like that.
Her body was quivering, just a little, as if in anticipation.
"What is it?” I whispered.
Then I heard quiet feet on the stairs.
* * * *
After they had gone, taking her, I had to laugh a little.
No, that isn't true. I didn't laugh.
I sat on the dry grass of the backyard, feeling the kind of exhaustion that seems like it could last your whole life.
GUD Magazine Issue 3 :: Autumn 2008 Page 19