Alien Contact

by Marty Halpern

  She had to admit she was kind of stunned by the whole thing. It had been a while since she’d seen another woman naked, not since she’d gone to work for the county, anyway. She saw herself, of course, when she showered, and like that, but she didn’t spend a lot of time on it. She’d rather look at Jack or whoever. When she looked at herself, she saw the kind of things they talked about in makeovers in the magazines: this too long, and that too short, and the other things too wide or narrow or the wrong color. It was more fun to have Jack or whoever look at her, because all the men ever seemed to see was what they liked. “Mmmm, cute,” they say, touching here and there and tugging this and patting that, and it was, on the whole, more fun than looking at yourself in a mirror and wondering why God gave you hips wide enough for triplets and nothing to nurse them with. Not that that was her problem, Louanne reminded herself, but that’s how her friend Casey had put it, the last time they skinny-dipped together in the river, on a dare, the last week of high school.

  But that woman. She could nurse anything, up to an elephant, Louanne thought, and besides that.… She frowned, trying now to remember what she’d tried so hard not to see. She hadn’t been particularly dark, but she hadn’t been pale, either. A sort of brown-egg color, all over, with no light areas where even the most daring of Louanne’s friends had light areas.… You could tan nude under a sunlamp or on certain beaches, but you couldn’t go naked all the time. But this woman had had no markings at all, on a belly smooth as a beach ball. And—odd for someone who smelled so—she had shaved. Louanne shook her head, wondering. Her aunt Ethel had never shaved, and Louanne had come to hate the sight of her skinny legs, hairy and patched brown with age spots, sticking out from under her shabby old print dresses. But this woman…the gleaming smoothness of her skin, almost as if it had been oiled, all over, not a single flaw.… Louanne shivered without knowing why.

  She stood and cleared the table, washing her single dish quickly. She started to get a beer out, and then changed her mind. If that man did come, she didn’t want to smell of beer. She looked out her bedroom window. Nothing yet. The sun glared off the gravel of the parking space and the lane behind it. She was about to turn away, when she saw the blue pickup coming. It turned into the space beside the trailer, and the big man got out. Today he wore a tan shirt, with dark patches of sweat under the arms and on the back. Louanne wrinkled her nose, imagining the smell. He looked sunburnt, his neck and arms as red as his face, all glistening with sweat.

  He went in. Louanne waited. Would the woman tell him at once, or wait, or not tell him at all? She didn’t want to go back there, but she would, she told herself. He couldn’t do anything to her in daylight, not if she stayed out of reach, and Jeannie Blaylock was home, if she screamed. She saw the flowered curtain twitched aside, and the man’s face in the window, looking toward her trailer. She knew she’d been careful how she set the blinds, but she still had the feeling he knew she was watching. The curtains flipped shut. Then the door opened, and he came out, his round red face gleaming. He shot a quick glance toward her lot, then looked down before he went down his steps. He opened the pickup door, leaned in, came back out, shut the door. Then he started toward Louanne’s trailer.

  Her heart was hammering in her chest; she had to take two long breaths to quiet herself. He was actually coming, almost right away. She hurried out to the living room and sat poised on the rented tweed sofa. It seemed to take a long time, longer than she thought possible, even trying to count the steps in her mind. Finally a knock at her door. Louanne stood, trying to control her knees, and went to the door.

  Even a step down, he was as tall as she, a man Jack might have hesitated to fight. But he was smiling at her, holding out a grubby envelope. “Sorry,” he said. His voice was curiously light for such a big man. “We didn’t mean to cause trouble.… The money is here.…” He held it out. Louanne made a long arm and took the envelope; he released it at once and stepped back. “The…the connection at our lot didn’t work,” he went on, looking slightly past her, as if he didn’t want to see her. His voice, too, had a strange accent, something Louanne classified as foreign, though she couldn’t have said if it was from the East Coast or somewhere farther away than that. “I have already taken our wire away,” he said, glancing quickly at her face and away again. “It will not trouble you again.… We are sorry.… It was only that the connection did not work, and yours did.”

  The money in the envelope was twenties…more than three. Louanne looked at his gleaming red face and felt a quiver of sympathy. Maybe they hadn’t known, if they were really foreigners. “You have to pay a deposit,” she said. “To the power company, before they turn it on. That’s why it didn’t work.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t know. Is that enough? Are you satisfied?”

  Greed and soothed outrage and bewilderment argued in her forehead. “It’s all right,” she found herself saying. “Don’t worry.” She wondered if she should give some of it back, but, after all, they had stolen from her, and it was only fair they should pay for it. Then her leftover conscience hit her, and she said, “It was only sixty, anyway, and if.…”

  “For your trouble,” he said quickly, backing away. “So sorry.… Don’t worry. If you are not angry, if you are not reporting this to authorities.…”

  “No,” said Louanne, still puzzled. Foreigners afraid of the law? Illegal immigrants? He didn’t sound Mexican. Drug dealers?

  “No more bother,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you.” And turned and walked quickly away, just as Curtis Blaylock drove in. Curtis looked at the man walking off, and at Louanne standing there with the envelope in her hand, for all the world like a whore with her pay, and grinned.

  “Trouble?” he asked in a silky voice. Louanne had to stop that right where it was, or she would have more problems than a big light bill.

  “Foreigners,” she said, allowing an edge in her voice. “He wanted to know where to find”—she peered at the envelope as if to read the address, and found herself reading what was written on it—“3217 Fahrenheit, wherever that is. Not in this town, I told him, and he asked me to look it up on the county records. Somebody must’ve told him I work for the county.”

  “Pushy bastard,” said Curtis. “Why’s he think you should look things up for him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Louanne, wondering why men like Curtis had a knack for asking questions you couldn’t answer.

  “Well, if you have any trouble, honey, just give us a call.”

  Louanne didn’t answer that, and Curtis went on into his trailer, and she went back into hers. It was real money, all right, all twenties, and there were five of them. She could smell a fainter version of the smell in the trailer on lot 17, but money was money. A hundred bucks. It was too much, and made her worry again. Nobody in their right mind would’ve paid the sixty, let alone more. She made up her mind to send some of it back, somehow. Probably the woman would take it; women usually did. She readjusted the blinds in her bedroom, so that no one could possibly see in, and had a cooling shower. And finally went to bed, wondering only briefly how the foreigners were getting along in their lightless trailer.

  She overslept, and had to run for it in the morning, dashing out of the door, slamming into her car, and riding the speed limit all the way to work. It wasn’t until noon, when she paid the bill at the power company with the twenties, tossed the crumpled envelope in the wastebasket by the counter, and put the change in her billfold, that she thought of the foreigners again. Something nagged her about them, something she should have noticed in the morning’s rush, but she didn’t figure it out until she got home and saw lot 17 as bare as a swept floor.

  They were gone. They had left in the night, without waking her or anyone, and now they were gone.

  All through the subsequent excitement, Louanne kept her mouth shut about the hundred dollars and the stolen electricity, and made the kind of response everyone expected to rhetorical questions like, Who do you suppose? and
Why do you think? and Whoever could have guessed? She figured she was thirty or forty dollars to the good, and didn’t see why she should share any of it with old Mrs. Thackridge, who had plenty already or she wouldn’t own the trailer park. They all knew she’d talked to the man (Curtis being glad to tell everyone, she noticed), but she stuck to her story about him wanting an address she’d never heard of, and wanting her to look it up in the county records. And she said she’d thrown the envelope away after not finding any such place, and not caring much, either, and after a while they all let her alone about as much as before, which pleased her just fine.

  But she did wonder, from time to time, about that foreign lady wandering around the country without any clothes on. Brown as an egg all over, and not a hair on her body, and—it finally came to her one day, as she typed up a list of grand jury indictments when the judge’s secretary was off sick—and no navel on the smooth, round, naked belly. She shook her head. Must have been there; everyone has a navel. Unless she had plastic surgery. But why?

  After a while she didn’t think of it much, except when she was wearing the red blouse…and after a while she was going with Alvin, who didn’t like her in red, so she gave the blouse to the other secretary, and forgot the whole thing.

  y name is Jill. I am somewhere you can’t imagine, going somewhere even more unimaginable. If you think I like what I did to get here, you’re crazy.

  Actually, I’m the one who’s crazy. You—any “you”—will never read this. But I have paper now, and a sort of pencil, and time. Lots and lots of time. So I will write what happened, all of it, as carefully as I can.

  After all—why the hell not?

  I went out very early one morning to look for food. Before dawn was safest for a woman alone. The boy-gangs had gone to bed, tired of attacking each other. The trucks from the city hadn’t arrived yet. That meant the garbage was pretty picked over, but it also meant most of the refugee camp wasn’t out scavenging. Most days I could find enough: a carrot stolen from somebody’s garden patch, my arm bloody from reaching through the barbed wire. Overlooked potato peelings under a pile of rags and glass. A can of stew thrown away by one of the soldiers on the base, but still half full. Soldiers on duty by the Dome were often careless. They got bored, with nothing to do.

  That morning was cool but fair, with a pearly haze that the sun would burn off later. I wore all my clothing, for warmth, and my boots. Yesterday’s garbage load, I’d heard somebody say, was huge, so I had hopes. I hiked to my favorite spot, where garbage spills almost to the Dome wall. Maybe I’d find bread, or even fruit that wasn’t too rotten.

  Instead I found the puppy.

  Its eyes weren’t open yet and it squirmed along the bare ground, a scrawny brown-and-white mass with a tiny fluffy tail. Nearby was a fluid-soaked towel. Some sentimental fool had left the puppy there, hoping…what? It didn’t matter. Scrawny or not, there was some meat on the thing. I scooped it up.

  The sun pushed above the horizon, flooding the haze with golden light.

  I hate it when grief seizes me. I hate it and it’s dangerous, a violation of one of Jill’s Laws of Survival. I can go for weeks, months without thinking of my life before the War. Without remembering or feeling. Then something will strike me—a flower growing in the dump, a burst of birdsong, the stars on a clear night—and grief will hit me like the maglevs that no longer exist, a grief all the sharper because it contains the memory of joy. I can’t afford joy, which always comes with an astronomical price tag. I can’t even afford the grief that comes from the memory of living things, which is why it is only the flower, the birdsong, the morning sunlight that starts it. My grief was not for that puppy. I still intended to eat it.

  But I heard a noise behind me and turned. The Dome wall was opening.

  Who knew why the aliens put their Domes by garbage dumps, by waste pits, by radioactive cities? Who knew why aliens did anything?

  There was a widespread belief in the camp that the aliens started the War. I’m old enough to know better. That was us, just like the global warming and the bio-crobes were us. The aliens didn’t even show up until the War was over and Raleigh was the northernmost city left on the East Coast and refugees poured south like mudslides. Including me. That’s when the ships landed and then turned into the huge gray Domes like upended bowls. I heard there were many Domes, some in other countries. The Army, what was left of it, threw tanks and bombs at ours. When they gave up, the refugees threw bullets and Molotov cocktails and prayers and graffiti and candle-light vigils and rain dances. Everything slid off and the Domes just sat there. And sat. And sat. Three years later, they were still sitting, silent and closed, although of course there were rumors to the contrary. There are always rumors. Personally, I’d never gotten over a slight disbelief that the Dome was there at all. Who would want to visit us?

  The opening was small, no larger than a porthole, and about six feet above the ground. All I could see inside was a fog the same color as the Dome. Something came out, gliding quickly toward me. It took me a moment to realize it was a robot, a blue metal sphere above a hanging basket. It stopped a foot from my face and said, “This food for this dog.”

  I could have run, or screamed, or at the least—the very least—looked around for a witness. I didn’t. The basket held a pile of fresh produce, green lettuce and deep purple eggplant and apples so shiny red they looked lacquered. And peaches…My mouth filled with sweet water. I couldn’t move.

  The puppy whimpered.

  My mother used to make fresh peach pie.

  I scooped the food into my scavenger bag, laid the puppy in the basket, and backed away. The robot floated back into the Dome, which closed immediately. I sped back to my corrugated-tin and windowless hut and ate until I couldn’t hold any more. I slept, woke, and ate the rest, crouching in the dark so nobody else would see. All that fruit and vegetables gave me the runs, but it was worth it.

  Peaches.

  Two weeks later, I brought another puppy to the Dome, the only survivor of a litter deep in the dump. I never knew what happened to the mother. I had to wait a long time outside the Dome before the blue sphere took the puppy in exchange for produce. Apparently the Dome would only open when there was no one else around to see. What were they afraid of? It’s not like PETA was going to show up.

  The next day I traded three of the peaches to an old man in exchange for a small, mangy poodle. We didn’t look each other in the eye, but I nonetheless knew that his held tears. He limped hurriedly away. I kept the dog, which clearly wanted nothing to do with me, in my shack until very early morning and then took it to the Dome. It tried to escape but I’d tied a bit of rope onto its frayed collar. We sat outside the Dome in mutual dislike, waiting, as the sky paled slightly in the east. Gunshots sounded in the distance.

  I have never owned a dog.

  When the Dome finally opened, I gripped the dog’s rope and spoke to the robot. “Not fruit. Not vegetables. I want eggs and bread.”

  The robot floated back inside.

  Instantly I cursed myself. Eggs? Bread? I was crazy not to take what I could get. That was Law of Survival #1. Now there would be nothing. Eggs, bread…crazy. I glared at the dog and kicked it. It yelped, looked indignant, and tried to bite my boot.

  The Dome opened again and the robot glided toward me. In the gloom I couldn’t see what was in the basket. In fact, I couldn’t see the basket. It wasn’t there. Mechanical tentacles shot out from the sphere and seized both me and the poodle. I cried out and the tentacles squeezed harder. Then I was flying through the air, the stupid dog suddenly howling beneath me, and we were carried through the Dome wall and inside.

  Then nothing.

  A nightmare room made of nightmare sound: barking, yelping, whimpering, snapping. I jerked awake, sat up, and discovered myself on a floating platform above a mass of dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, old dogs, puppies, sick dogs, dogs that looked all too healthy, flashing their forty-two teeth at me—why did I remember that number? Fro
m where? The largest and strongest dogs couldn’t quite reach me with their snaps, but they were trying.

  “You are operative,” the blue metal sphere said, floating beside me. “Now we must begin. Here.”

  Its basket held eggs and bread.

  “Get them away!”

  Obediently it floated off.

  “Not the food! The dogs!”

  “What to do with these dogs?”

  “Put them in cages!” A large black animal—German shepherd or boxer or something—had nearly closed its jaws on my ankle. The next bite might do it.

  “Cages,” the metal sphere said in its uninflected mechanical voice. “Yes.”

  “Son of a bitch!” The shepherd leaping high, had grazed my thigh; its spittle slimed my pants. “Raise the goddamn platform!”

  “Yes.”

  The platform floated so high, so that I had to duck my head to avoid hitting the ceiling. I peered over the edge and…no, that wasn’t possible. But it was happening. The floor was growing upright sticks, and the sticks were growing cross bars, and the crossbars were extending themselves into mesh tops…Within minutes, each dog was encased in a cage just large enough to hold its protesting body.

  “What to do now?” the metal sphere asked.

  I stared at it. I was, as far as I knew, the first human being to ever enter an alien Dome, and I was trapped in a small room with feral caged dogs and a robot… What to do now?