Is Anybody Out There

by Nick Gevers

  “Wow,” he said. An alien invasion called for something more intelligent than “wow,” but all the good words were on his spiral pad and not in his head. “How’d the people die in Pocatello?”

  “They were fried to death. Apparently the aliens shoot lightning if you try to touch them.”

  “I always thought there’d be flying saucers and ray guns,” he said. “Take me to your leader stuff.”

  “Nope, no War of the Worlds. They just popped up in Europe, Asia, everywhere. Different colors, but no one knows why, or where they’re going.”

  “What do they want?”

  “Maybe they don’t want anything,” she said. She reached across him for the stop cord. “Maybe floating around is all they do. Anyway, what do you wanna do today?”

  “Good question,” Callum said, worried she’d suggest something that cost money.

  “Let’s hang out,” she said, and stood. He followed her from the bus, walrus-graceful lugging his saxophone and backpack. He tried to fall into step, though his stride was a foot longer.

  “I go to this rehearsal space to chill,” Abby said. She threw him a look. “Write poetry. Vocalize, sometimes.”

  He knew this street. They’d be passing Sid’s Music. “Okay if we check something out first?”

  “Onward,” she said.

  He walked ahead and felt dumb for forgetting to hold open the door. Sid looked up from behind his desk, where he was watching green balls of light dance across his portable TV. He wore a Mariners hat, a jersey with “Ichiro” across the back, and a sour expression. “Game’s supposed to be on,” he said.

  Callum pointed to the tenor sax hanging on the wall.

  Sid carefully handed it down. “No change: no rent, no layaway, no pity discount,” he said.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Abby said, touching the mother-of-pearl keys and the feather tracery on the bell.

  The lacquer was stripped in places but that didn’t matter. “It’s two thousand dollars,” Callum said. “All the great jazz saxophonists played tenor.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” she said, not in a mean way.

  Callum fingered a few bars, listening to the hollow thudding and clacking of the voiceless sax. In a while he said, “Let’s go,” and laid the shining instrument on the countertop. “Thanks, Sid.”

  “Come back when you have money.”

  The rehearsal space was around the corner, in a rundown building papered with gig announcements and offers for lessons. Abby pulled open the door, held it until he was inside. It smelled of old carpet glue, pot smoke, maybe a little cork grease. Candles and the glow of laptop screens instead of overhead fluorescents. A couple of figures lounged on the beat-up old furniture. Callum got out his phone to text Juarez, ignored two missed calls from his mom.

  “ . . . blowing it out of proportion. Obviously there are bound to be other species in the universe. Don’t be humanocentric.” Some guy, hunched over his laptop in the corner—Lex, king of the stoners.

  “Anthropocentric,” Meg from band said. She was one of those obnoxious kids who owned and played four different instruments.

  “Hey,” Abby said, taking off her coat. “Meet Callum. I rescued him from the 14 bus.” She squeezed two chairs together, and motioned for him to sit.

  “Boing Boing calls them lightning attacks. Says they only happen around high-tension power lines. The aliens probably don’t even mean to do it,” Lex said.

  “That’s bogus. They know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve been consuming rare earth minerals, like the ones China’s been stockpiling,” Meg said.

  “Cerium, used in fluorescents,” said Lex, proving only that he was a fast Googler. “Dysprosium, used in reactors. Neodymium for lasers. We need this shit or there’s no technology. They eat all our rare earth, we’ll revert to cavemen.”

  Callum scribbled, Rare Earth. In the dark room it was hard to focus. Abby leaned her shoe onto his boot.

  “You guys worried?” Abby asked.

  “No,” Meg said. “I can live without my computer.” She lit a bong, passed it around.

  Abby shook her head and said, “Not right now,” so Callum passed, too. She pointed to the sax case, said, “Wanna play something?”

  “Yeah, go for it,” Lex said.

  The horn always took a couple of minutes to warm. Callum held the neck and tried not to think of Abby and the way her slender arms crossed under her B-cups as she leaned in to watch. The space was small and he played as softly as he possibly could so he wouldn’t blast her away, his version of Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain.”

  When he finished, Lex said, “That’s dope.”

  Meg stifled a yawn, and said, “I’m more of a rocker chick,” and he thought, yeah, I bet you are, you stuck- up little shit.

  Abby rested her hand on Callum’s arm. “That helped,” she said. “It’s crazy to think about an alien invasion. I mean, we’re still in high school.”

  “Crazy,” he said. Grandma Vera coped by ignoring the obvious while Mom couldn’t stop worrying about everything. Grandma Vera’s way had its merits. “Don’t think about it,” he said, which must have been a good thing to say, because she oonched closer.

  Meg stood, and set the bong against the wall behind a chair. “Rose Festival?” she said.

  “Maybe later,” Abby said.

  “See you there,” Lex said, and walked out with Meg, letting the door bang shut.

  Abby’s hand was still on his arm. Callum found himself looking into her left eye, then her right, unable to meet both at once. Better than staring at her boobs, but still psycho. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, but then it wasn’t.

  The door swooshed open and it was his mother, glistening with rage and raindrops. “When school is over, you come home,” she said. “That’s doubly true when school is canceled because of a national emergency.”

  “Oh God, Mom,” was all Callum could say.

  “I knew you’d go to Sid’s and moon over that stupid instrument, and he knew you kids would be up to no good and hanging around here,” she said. She was dressed for collecting insect samples in the field, galoshes and mud-streaked overalls under the poncho.

  “Mom,” he said. “Be cool.”

  “Cool?” she said, waving her plastic-tented arms in prophetic frenzy. “There are aliens over Coeur d’Alene. There are aliens over Ashland and Olympia and Bend. There are aliens coming here.” As if she hadn’t embarrassed him enough, she switched to her sarcastic tone and said, “I don’t think I’ve met your friend, Callum.”

  “My mom does this, too,” Abby whispered, and they traded understanding glances.

  “Abby Reeves,” he said, “meet my mom, Lily Fitzpatrick. Mom, meet Abby. Abby edits our school literary magazine,” he said, because his mom couldn’t always look at a person and know she was about more than her hair.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. F.”

  Lily’s eyes swept with practiced suspicion over the broken-down chairs, the amp, the magazines on the coffee table, and stopped on the centimeter of bong peeking out from behind a chair.

  “There were other people here,” Callum said. “We weren’t smoking.”

  “This time,” Lily said, but at least she believed him.

  “Can I give you a ride anywhere, Ms. Reeves? I’m sure you have parents who care enough to worry.”

  “No thanks, Mrs. F. I’m good.”

  They stood, faced each other.

  Abby slipped a folded slip of paper into Callum’s palm and said, “Later.” She waved goodbye and flowed around his mom into the rain.

  He was left alone with his kick-drum heart and his motionless mother.

  “Car, Callum. Now.”

  She drove faster than usual. Callum adjusted his sax case so it didn’t squinch his boot against the door.

  “They’re really coming, Callum. I heard it on the news.”

  “I thought they were in Idaho,” he said.

  “They’re all over, not that y
ou’d know. You see a pretty girl, who cares about aliens?”

  Callum actually thought he saw her pull a smile. He unfolded Abby’s paper and read the ten digits and the cursive scrawl, “Text me.” He switched the stereo on, found it tuned to NPR.

  “Leave the dial alone,” Lily said. She didn’t usually protest when he tuned her out with music.

  “ . . . time it does seem clear that the phenomena, widely considered extraterrestrial creatures, will converge over Northwest Oregon. Area residents are encouraged to evacuate calmly, and to lessen traffic congestion through use of carpools,” said Kristian Foden-Vencil, OPB News. “FEMA recommends keeping a safe distance from the aliens. Should they approach you, abandon any smartphones, computers or other electronic appliances, which may attract the beings. Severe burns and electrical shock may result from physical contact.”

  Lily shut off the radio. “Jeez,” she said. “I can’t take this. It really would take the end of the world to separate you from your phone.”

  Callum programmed in Abby’s number and gave her a ringtone he’d pay attention to.

  “We need to focus,” Lily said. “Pick up Grandma Vera. Plan what to pack and where to go.” She chirped the horn at a Suburban stalled at the green light.

  “Focus,” he said. “On what to pack.” Like Lily was any good at that. Her closet was full of boxes of Dad’s clothes. Dad’s books. Dad’s tools. You could bring the past with you but it didn’t make it any less past.

  The sky was dark with clouds. “Finally,” Lily muttered as she turned onto their gravel driveway. “Now let’s get Grandma and get out. Go pack. Hurry.”

  He moved the sax case to the trunk and dragged the backpack up the steps behind Lily.

  “Grandma!” she bellowed. “Time to go.”

  Callum trudged up to his room, and replaced his Spanish and biology texts with the Tao Te Ching, found his dad’s Kershaw blade, bottled water to wash down Juarez’s dry venison. He wadded up underwear and socks, tee shirts, jeans. He opened the plastic file box where he kept his notebooks, dropped photos and sheet music onto the shifting heap of spiral-bounds, shut the box and wedged it under his arm. He gathered up batteries and ballpoints.

  His mom had been slamming cupboards in the kitchen, but now it was quiet. Then a flash. Thunder. A cloudburst and an ocean of rain.

  Callum stooped to look out the window at the sodden backyard and Lily running across the grass, toward the old garage where Grandma Vera stored a particularly rich deposit of clutter. Green light seeped from the open door. He was downstairs and out the back with his backpack before he could think about it. His shoes deepened the muddy dents Lily had left in the crabgrass lawn. “Mom,” he called, and heard her yell the same.

  Lily was standing just outside the garage, like she couldn’t make herself step in. And there was Vera, enthroned in an old caned rocker, surrounded by six green spheres as big as volleyballs. They had steadily glowing cores the size of ping pong balls, surrounded by swirling color. Points glinted and faded on their borders.

  Their light played on shelves piled with old boxes and broken trophies. Everywhere boxes overflowed with seashells, playbills, photographs ruined by mold. Grandma was holding a pickle jar full of her moon agates. She was all smiles, dressed in her Sunday clothes, hair Beetlejuice-frizzy.

  Callum grabbed Lily’s clammy hand. “We have to do something,” he said.

  The spheres rotated like electrons around Grandma Vera’s head. “Beautiful . . .” she murmured. She pursed her lips and made a humming noise that was not a melody or a background track or an Om. More the crackling, electric buzz of a cheap-ass amp.

  Lily dropped his hand and started forward.

  “Mom, what are you going to do?”

  She stared at him, but didn’t answer.

  “The radio said something about them liking technology. I’ll get my laptop. Maybe we can lure them off,” he said.

  “Yes, go get something,” Lily said, and he turned back to the house, grateful to be doing something. Then his mom’s expression registered, the way she’d totally agreed with one of his suggestions without even looking for a way to shoot it down. He headed back.

  Lily was in the garage now, blocking his view of Grandma. “Leave her alone,” she said, shrill above Vera’s gargling buzz. Callum saw her hand raised against the alien glow, then there was an explosive bang and Lily was thrown back onto the gravel.

  “Mom,” he whispered. He knelt beside her, and bowed his head over her open, still mouth, straining to hear a word or a breath. He shouted, “Help!” but his grandmother didn’t even notice they were there.

  It was Callum’s second ride in an ambulance. All that way with Dad on the gurney just to hear a doctor explain how sudden death was often the first sign of coronary artery disease. Callum remembered the beaten look on Lily’s face when she’d told him they were moving in with her mom. He felt guilty for hoping he didn’t live with his mother when he was forty. If he got to forty. Sometimes it didn’t seem like that would happen. He was holding Lily’s balled-up poncho. His dad had died in February, so he’d told the paramedics his mother was in her second trimester. There were two guys in EMT suits, one driving and the other EMT- ing. They crossed the Hawthorne Bridge into downtown.

  The paramedic sitting beside his mom said, “She’s back,” and he saw his mom’s eyes flutter open, blood-shot. They were yellow-brown, which had never struck him as creepy before. Predator yellow. His hazel eyes, part hers and part Dad’s—were they scary, feral too? A line of raptor eyes stretching back along the generations. Dawn. Spawn, he wrote. Things your ancestors left behind that didn’t fit in boxes.

  “You okay, Mom?” he asked, which was sort of stupid. She’d spent an hour unconscious.

  Lily nodded. Her hair had gone frizzy, like Grandma Vera’s. They’d bandaged her right hand, burned where she’d touched the alien or it had zapped her, whatever you wanted to call it. Intravenous raindrops dripped into her other arm, accompanied by a steady, flashing light. The light froze, an alarm sounded and the paramedic fiddled with the IV pump. Lily’s hands and face were swollen, her skin stretched and pale. Even lying down, her belly was pretty obvious.

  A motley mob spilled from the park blocks, stopping traffic. People carried signs: “The End Is Near,” always a classic; “Free beer in Valhalla.” A turtle guy brandished posterboard that said “TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN.” The windshield wipers threw gouts of rain off the glass. Callum heard a car horn nearby, brakes and metal crunching. The ambulance driver glanced back and said, “Just a fender-bender,” and kept driving. His uniform was dark under the arms.

  “What’s happening?” Callum asked, and the driver gave him a better not to know kind of look.

  “How’s she doing?” the driver asked. He was sweating.

  The paramedic tending Lily said, “BP’s down. She’s alert and stable.”

  The driver said, “Hospitals are closed to anyone who isn’t critical.” It was unclear if he was telling his partner or apologizing to Callum and Lily. He pulled into the downtown Fred Meyer lot. “We can’t take you home. We’ve got a hundred more emergencies all over town.” He slowed and whooped the siren, and the ambulance stopped beside an empty shopping cart corral. They pulled the IV, shrugged Lily into a wheelchair and lowered her to the asphalt.

  “She’s going to be okay. You’d better take her home,” the driver said.

  Lily said, “I want to lie down.”

  Callum said, “It’s okay, Mom. We’ll go back to Grandma’s.” He slid the poncho over her head, hooked his backpack over the wheelchair handles and took hold of the grips. Lao Tzu had said, “To lead people, walk behind them,” so he led his mother through the lot. The door of a metallic green Beemer was open, displaying the asscrack of a tweeker tangled in wires from the dash. The tweeker noticed them, glared, managed to start the engine and weave his way toward Burnside. A couple of blocks down, there were pirates on the loose, a turtle guy and regulation street crazies
. No buses went by. They passed an impromptu prayer circle. One of the prayercirclers broke off and hurried over to them, waving a plastic palm frond at Lily’s belly. “Look at you, at your age! Like Sarah and Hannah, blessed by God. Will you pray with us?”

  “Take me home,” Lily said, her skin the color of non-fat milk. “Please.”

  “You okay?” Callum asked. She wasn’t acting like the mom. And usually she’d be mad about the “at your age” thing.

  She nodded, held up one finger and said, “Hold that thought.” She doubled over and threw up. The palm frond woman backed away.

  “Good timing, Mom.” Callum said, and steered her east. They were still a long way from their side of the river.

  “I feel better,” Lily said.

  “Want something to drink?” Callum asked. He dug through his pack, located water.

  “Got any food?” Lily said.

  He hesitated. “Maybe a granola bar.”

  “Something salty?” Lily said. “I want savory.”

  “Savory,” he said. He hesitated. There was Juarez’s venison jerky, but maybe this wasn’t a day for vegetarianism. He offered her a thick strip from the bag. She mouthed it like a cigar to suck out the salt.

  They passed by the 76 Station, and saw the gas monkeys had abandoned their posts. Customers were pumping their own gas, just like it was some other state, not Oregon. Two chicks ran by carrying Nordstrom bags overflowing with shoeboxes. One smiled at Callum and he couldn’t not notice how her boobs jiggled under her shirt.

  A zombie flashmob had gathered at the corner of Third and Burnside. A dozen or so, dressed in a variety of tatters and crudely smeared green makeup. Lipstick painted on like blood drops. They did their zombie-mayhem thing and menaced some wasted pirates. One pirate ripped the stuffed parrot from his shoulder and pretended to eat it. Switching sides.

  He wanted to write, Embrace the rot, but he kept pushing. The zombies limped their Frankenstein-monster walk toward the river.