“This dog? What to do now?”
“Send all the other dogs back.”
The cages sank into the floor. I walked over to the feeding trough, scooped up handfuls of dog food, and put the pellets into my only pocket that didn’t have holes. “Make all the rest of the dog food go away.”
It vaporized.
“Make this dog’s cage go away.”
I braced myself as the cage dissolved. The dog stood uncertainly on the floor, gazing toward Mangy, who snarled at him. I said, as commandingly as possible, “Ruff!”
He looked at me.
“Ruff, come.”
To my surprise, he did. Someone had trained this animal before. I gave him a pellet of dog food.
Green said, “This dog behaves correctly.”
“Well, I’m really good,” I told him, stupidly, while my chest tightened as I thought of Not-Too. The aliens, or their machines, did understand about anesthetic, didn’t they? They wouldn’t let her suffer too much? I would never know.
But now I did know something momentous. I had choices. I had chosen which room to train dogs in. I had chosen which dog to train. I had some control.
“Sit,” I said to Ruff, who didn’t, and I set to work.
Not-Too was returned to me three or four “days” later. She was gray and hairless, with an altered bark. A grub hung onto her elongated tail, undoubtedly the same one that had vanished from its cage while I was asleep. But unlike Mangy, who’d never liked either of us, Not-Too was ecstatic to see me. She wouldn’t stay in her grub-cage against the wall but insisted on sleeping curled up next to me, grub and all. Green permitted this. I had become the alpha dog.
Not-Too liked Ruff, too. I caught him mounting her, her very long tail conveniently keeping her grub out of the way. Did Green understand the significance of this behavior? No way to tell.
We settled into a routine of training, sleeping, playing, eating. Ruff turned out to be sweet and playful but not very intelligent, and training took a long time. Mangy’s grub grew very slowly, considering the large amount of glop it consumed. I grew, too; the waistband of my ragged pants got too tight and I discarded them, settling for a loin cloth, shirt, and my decaying boots. I talked to the dogs, who were much better conversationalists than Green since two of them at least pricked up their ears, made noises back at me, and wriggled joyfully at attention. Green would have been a dud at a cocktail party.
I don’t know how long this all went on. Time began to lose meaning. I still dreamed of Zack and still woke in tears, but the dreams grew gentler and farther apart. When I cried, Not-Too crawled onto my lap, dragging her grub, and licked my chin. Her brown eyes shared my sorrow. I wondered how I had ever preferred the disdain of cats.
Not-Too got pregnant. I could feel the puppies growing inside her distended belly.
“Puppies will be easy to make behave correctly,” I told Green, who said nothing. Probably he didn’t understand. Some people need concrete visuals in order to learn.
Eventually, it seemed to me that Ruff was almost ready for his own grub. I mulled over how to mention this to Green but before I did, everything came to an end.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
I jerked awake and bolted upright. The alarm—a very human-sounding alarm—sounded all around me. Dogs barked and howled. Then I realized that it was a human alarm, coming from the Army camp outside the Dome, on the opposite side to the garbage dump. I could see the camp—in outline and faintly, as if through heavy gray fog. The Dome was dissolving.
“Green—what—no!”
Above me, transforming the whole top half of what had been the Dome, was the bottom of a solid saucer. Mangy, in her cage, floated upwards and disappeared into a gap in the saucer’s underside. The other grub cages had already disappeared. I glimpsed a flash of metallic color through the gap: Blue. Green was halfway to the opening, drifting lazily upward. Beside me, both Not-Too and Ruff began to rise.
“No! No!”
I hung onto Not-Too, who howled and barked. But then my body froze. I couldn’t move anything. My hands opened and Not-Too rose, yowling piteously.
“No! No!” And then, before I knew I was going to say it, “Take me, too!”
Green paused in midair. I began babbling.
“Take me! Take me! I can make the dogs behave correctly—I can—you need me! Why are you going? Take me!”
“Take this human?”
Not Green but Blue, emerging from the gap. Around me the Dome walls thinned more. Soldiers rushed toward us. Guns fired.
“Yes! What to do? Take this human! The dogs want this human!”
Time stood still. Not-Too howled and tried to reach me. Maybe that’s what did it. I rose into the air just as Blue said, “Why the hell not?”
Inside—inside what?—I was too stunned to do more than grab Not-Too, hang on, and gasp. The gap closed. The saucer rose.
After a few minutes, I sat up and looked around. Gray room, filled with dogs in their cages, with grubs in theirs, with noise and confusion and the two robots. The sensation of motion ceased. I gasped, “Where…where are we going?”
Blue answered. “Home.”
“Why?”
“The humans do not behave correctly.” And then, “What to do now?”
We were leaving Earth in a flying saucer, and it was asking me?
Over time—I have no idea how much time—I actually got some answers from Blue. The humans “not behaving correctly” had apparently succeeding in breaching one of the Domes somewhere. They must have used a nuclear bomb, but that I couldn’t verify. Grubs and dogs had both died, and so the aliens had packed up and left Earth. Without, as far as I could tell, retaliating. Maybe.
If I had stayed, I told myself, the soldiers would have shot me. Or I would have returned to life in the camp, where I would have died of dysentery or violence or cholera or starvation. Or I would have been locked away by whatever government still existed in the cities, a freak who had lived with aliens, none of my story believed. I barely believed it myself.
I am a freak who lives with aliens. Furthermore, I live knowing that at any moment Blue or Green or their “masters” might decide to vaporize me. But that’s really not much different from the uncertainty of life in the camp, and here I actually have some status. Blue produces whatever I ask for, once I get him to understand what that is. I have new clothes, good food, a bed, paper, a sort of pencil.
And I have the dogs. Mangy still doesn’t like me. Her larva hasn’t as yet done whatever it will do next. Not-Too’s grub grows slowly, and now Ruff has one, too. Their three puppies are adorable and very trainable. I’m not so sure about the other seventeen dogs, some of whom look wilder than ever after their long confinement in small cages. Aliens are not, by definition, humane.
I don’t know what it will take to survive when, and if, we reach “home” and I meet the alien adults. All I can do is rely on Jill’s Five Laws of Survival:
#1: Take what you can get.
#2: Show no fear.
#3: Never volunteer.
#4: Notice everything.
But the Fifth Law has changed. As I lie beside Not-Too and Ruff, their sweet warmth and doggie-odor, I know that my first formulation was wrong. “Feel nothing”—that can take you some ways toward survival, but not very far. Not really.
Law #5: Take the risk. Love something.
The dogs whuff contentedly and we speed toward the stars.
t sat in a cold room.
Outside that room a marine handed me an insulated suit. I slipped it on over my street clothes. The marine punched a code into a numeric keypad attached to the wall. The lock snapped open on the heavy door, the marine nodded, I entered.
Andy McCaslin, who looked like an overdressed turnip in his insulated suit, greeted me and shook my hand. I’d known Andy for twenty-five years, since our days in Special Forces. Now we both worked for the NSA, though you could say my acronym was lowercase. I operated on the margins of the Agency, a contract pla
yer, an accomplished extractor of information from reluctant sources. My line of work required a special temperament, which I possessed and which Andy most assuredly did not. He was a true believer in the rightness of the cause, procedure, good guys and bad. I was like Andy’s shadow twin. He stood in the light, casting something dark and faceless, which was me.
It remained seated—if you could call that sitting. Its legs, all six of them, coiled and braided like a nest of lavender snakes on top of which the alien’s frail torso rested. That torso resembled the upper body of a starving child, laddered ribs under parchment skin and a big stretched belly full of nothing. It watched us with eyes like two thumbnail chips of anthracite.
“Welcome to the new world order,” Andy said, his breath condensing in little gray puffs.
“Thanks. Anything out of Squidward yet?”
“Told us it was in our own best interests to let him go, then when we wouldn’t it shut up. Only ‘shut up’ isn’t quite accurate, since it doesn’t vocalize. You hear the words in your head, or sometimes there’s just a picture. It was the picture it put in the Secretary’s head that’s got everybody’s panties in a knot.”
“What picture?”
“Genocidal carnage on a planet-wide scale.”
“Sounds friendly enough.”
“There’s a backroom theory that Squidward was just showing the Secretary his own secret wet dream. Anyway, accepting its assertions of friendliness at face value is not up to me. Off the record, though, my intuition tells me its intentions are benign.”
“You look tired, Andy.”
“I feel a little off,” he said.
“Does Squidward always stare like that?”
“Always.”
“You’re certain it still has the ability to communicate? Maybe the environment’s making it sick.”
“Not according to the medical people. Of course, nothing’s certain, except that Squidward is a non-terrestrial creature possessed of an advanced technology. Those facts are deductible. By the way, the advanced technology in question is currently bundled in a hangar not far from here. What’s left looks like a weather balloon fed through a shredder. Ironic?”
“Very.” I hunched my shoulders. “Cold in here.”
“You noticed.”
“Squidward likes it that way, I bet.”
“Loves it.”
“Have you considered warming things up?”
Andy gave me a sideways look. “You thinking of changing the interrogation protocols?”
“If I am it wouldn’t be in that direction.”
“No CIA gulag in Romania, eh.”
“Never heard of such a thing.”
“I’d like to think you hadn’t.”
Actually I was well familiar with the place, only it was in Guatemala, not Romania. At its mention a variety of horrors arose in my mind. Some of them had faces attached. I regarded them dispassionately, as I had when I saw them in actuality all those years ago, and then I replaced them in the vault from which their muffled screams trouble me from time to time.
Andy’s face went slack and pale.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. All of a sudden I feel like I’m not really standing here.”
He smiled thinly, and I thought he was going to faint. But as I reached out to him I suddenly felt dizzy myself, afloat, contingent. I swayed, like balancing on the edge of a tall building. Squidward sat in its coil of snakes, staring…
Now return to a particular watershed moment in the life of one Brian Kinney, aka: me. Two years ago. If years mean anything in the present context.
I was a lousy drunk. Lack of experience. My father, on the other hand, had been an accomplished drunk. Legendary, almost. As a consequence of his example I had spent my life cultivating a morbid sobriety, which my wife managed to interrupt by an act of infidelity. Never mind that she needed to do it before she completely drowned in my legendary uncommunicative self-isolation. The way I viewed things at the time: she betrayed me for no reason other than her own wayward carnality. You’d think I’d have known better; I’d spent my nasty little career understanding and manipulating the psychology of others.
Anyway, I went and got stinking drunk, which was easy enough. It was the drive home that was the killer. The speedometer needle floated between blurred pairs of numbers. By deliberate force of will (I was hell on force of will) I could bring the numbers into momentary clarity, but that required dropping my gaze from the roller-coaster road sweeping under my headlight beams—not necessarily a good idea. Four. Five. Was that right? What was the limit?
Good question.
What was the limit?
I decided it wasn’t the four whiskeys with beer chasers. No, it was the look on Connie’s face when I waved the surveillance transcript at her like a starter’s flag (Race you to the end of the marriage; go!). Not contrite, guilty, apologetic, remorseful. Not even angry, outraged, indignant.
Stone-faced. Arms folded. She had said: “You don’t even know me.”
And she was right; I’d been too busy not knowing myself to take a stab at knowing her.
Off the roller-coaster, swinging through familiar residential streets, trash cans and recycle containers arranged at the curb like clusters of strange little people waiting for the midnight bus. I lived here, when I wasn’t off inflicting merry hell upon various persons who sometimes deserved it and sometimes didn’t. These days I resorted to more enlightened methodologies, of course. Physical pain was a last resort. Guatemala had been an ugly aberration (I liked to tell myself), a putrid confluence of political license and personal demons unleashed in the first fetid sewage swell of the so-called War On Terror. Anyway, the neighborhood reminded me of the one I wished I’d grown up in. But it was a façade. I was hell on façades, too.
And there was Connie, lifting the lid off our very own little strange man, depositing a tied-off plastic bag of kitchen garbage. Standing there in the middle of the night, changed from her business suit to Levi’s and sweatshirt and her cozy blue slippers, performing this routine task as if our world (my world) hadn’t collapsed into the black hole of her infidelity.
Connie as object, focal of pain. Target.
Anger sprang up fresh through the fog of impermissible emotion and numbing alcohol.
My foot crushed the accelerator, the big Tahoe surged, veered; I was out of my mind, not myself—that’s the spin I gave it later.
The way she dropped the bag, the headlights bleaching her out in death-glare brilliance. At the last instant I closed my eyes. Something hit the windshield, rolled over the roof. A moment later the Tahoe struck the brick and wrought-iron property wall and came to an abrupt halt.
I lifted my head off the steering wheel, wiped the blood out of my eyes. The windshield was intricately webbed, buckled inward. That was my house out there, the front door standing open to lamplight, mellow wood tones, that ficus plant Connie kept in the entry.
Connie.
I released my seatbelt and tried to open the door. Splintered ribs scraped together, razored my flesh, and I screamed, suddenly stone-cold and agonizingly sober. I tried the door again, less aggressively. My razor ribs scraped and cut. Okay. One more time. Force of will. I bit down on my lip and put my shoulder to the door. It wouldn’t budge, the frame was twisted out of alignment. I sat back, panting, drenched in sweat. And I saw it: Connie’s blue slipper flat against what was left of the windshield. Time suspended. That bitch. And the Johnstown flood of tears. Delayed reaction triggered. As a child I’d learned not to cry. I’d watched my mother weep her soul out to no changeable effect. I’d done some weeping, too. Also to no effect. Dad was dad; this is your world. Lesson absorbed, along with the blows. But sitting in the wreck of the Tahoe, my marriage, my life, I made up for lost tears; I knew what I had become, and was repulsed. The vault at the bottom of my mind yawned opened, releasing the shrieking ghosts of Guatemala.
You see, it’s all related. Compartmentalization aside, if you cross
the taboo boundary in one compartment you’re liable to cross it in all the others.
By the time the cops arrived the ghosts were muffled again, and I was done with weeping. Vault secured, walls hastily erected, fortifications against the pain I’d absorbed and the later pain I’d learn to inflict. The irreducible past. Barricades were my specialty.
The Agency stepped in, determined I could remain a valuable asset, and took care of my “accident,” the details, the police.
Flip forward again.
You can be a drunk and hold a top secret clearance. But you must be a careful one. And it helps if your relationship with the Agency is informally defined. I was in my basement office carefully drawing the cork out of a good bottle of Riesling when Andy McCaslin called on the secure line. I lived in that basement, since Connie’s death, the house above me like a rotting corpse of memory. Okay, it wasn’t that bad. I hadn’t been around enough to turn the house into a memory corpse; I just preferred basements and shadows.
“Andy,” I said into the receiver, my voice Gibraltar steady, even though the Riesling was far from my first libation of the long day. Unlike Dad, I’d learned to space it out, to maintain.
“Brian. Listen, I’m picking you up. We’re going for a drive in the desert. Give me an hour to get there. Wear something warm.”
I wore the whole bottle, from the inside out.
The moon was a white poker chip. The desert slipped past us, cold blue with black ink shadows. We rode in Andy’s private vehicle, a late model Jeep Cherokee. He had already been driving all day, having departed from the L.A. office that morning, dropping everything to pursue “something like a dream” that had beckoned to him.
“Care to reveal our destination?” I asked.
“I don’t want to tell you anything beforehand. It might influence you, give you some preconception. Your mind has to be clear or this won’t work.”
“Okay, I’ll think only happy thoughts.”
Alien Contact Page 39