A Lot Like Christmas

by Connie Willis

  “Where are you?” he demanded. “I thought you said you were on your way over here.”

  “There’s a lot of traffic,” I said. “What’s the ship doing?”

  “It’s aborted its ignition sequence and shut down its lights,” he said.

  Good, I thought. That means what we’re doing is working.

  “It’s just sitting there on the ground.”

  “How appropriate,” I murmured.

  “What do you mean by that?” he said accusingly. “Spectrum analysis shows the Altairi aren’t in their ship. You’ve got them, haven’t you? Where are you and what have you done to them? If—”

  I hung up, switched off my phone, and went back inside. They’d finished “Adeste Fideles” and were singing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” The Altairi were still sitting at Calvin’s feet. “ ‘…Reconciled,’ ” the assemblage sang, “ ‘Joyful, all ye nations rise,’ ” and the Altairi rose.

  And rose, till they were a good two feet above the aisle. There was a collective gasp, and everyone stopped singing and stared at them floating there.

  No, don’t stop, I thought, and hurried forward, but Calvin had it under control. He turned a glare worthy of Aunt Judith on his seventh-grade girls, and they swallowed hard and started singing again, and after a moment everyone else recovered themselves and joined in to finish the verse.

  When the song ended, Calvin turned and mouthed at me, “What do I do next?”

  “Keep singing,” I mouthed back.

  “Singing what?”

  I shrugged him an “I don’t know,” and mouthed, “What about this?” and pointed at the fourth song on the program.

  He grinned, turned back to his choirs, and announced, “We will now sing, ‘There’s a Song in the Air.’ ”

  There was a rustle of pages, and they began singing. I eyed the Altairi warily, looking for a lessening in elevation, but they continued to hover, and when the choir reached, “ ‘and the beautiful sing,’ ” it seemed to me their glares became slightly less fierce.

  “ ‘And that song from afar has swept over the earth,’ ” the assemblage sang, and the auditorium doors burst open and Dr. Morthman, Reverend Thresher, and dozens of FBI agents and police and reporters and cameramen came rushing in. “Stay where you are,” one of the FBI agents shouted.

  “Blasphemous!” Reverend Thresher roared. “Look at this! Witches, homosexuals, liberals—!”

  “Arrest that young woman,” Dr. Morthman said, pointing at me, “and the young man directing—” He stopped and gaped at the Altairi hovering above the stage. Flashes began to go off, reporters started talking into microphones, and Reverend Thresher positioned himself squarely in front of one of the cameras and clasped his hands. “Oh, Lord,” he shouted, “drive Satan’s demons out of the Altairi!”

  “No!” I shouted to Calvin’s seventh-graders, “don’t stop singing,” but they already had. I looked desperately at Calvin. “Keep directing!” I said, but the police were already moving forward to handcuff him, stepping cautiously around the Altairi, who were drifting earthward like slowly leaking balloons.

  “And teach these sinners here the error of their ways,” Reverend Thresher was intoning.

  “You can’t do this, Dr. Morthman,” I said desperately. “The Altairi—”

  He grabbed my arm and dragged me to one of the police officers. “I want both of them charged with kidnapping,” he said, “and I want her charged with conspiracy. She’s responsible for this entire—” He stopped and stared past me.

  I turned around. The Altairi were standing directly behind me, glaring. The police officer, who’d been about to clamp a pair of handcuffs on me, let go of my wrist and backed away, and so did the reporters and the FBI.

  “Your excellencies,” Dr. Morthman said, taking several steps back, “I want you to know the commission had nothing to do with this. We knew nothing about it. It’s entirely this young woman’s fault. She…”

  “We acknowledge your greetings,” the Altairus in the center said, bowing to me, “and greet you in return.”

  A murmur of surprise rumbled through the auditorium, and Dr. Morthman stammered, “Y-you speak English?”

  “Of course,” I said, and bowed to the Altairi. “It’s nice to finally be able to communicate with you.”

  “We welcome you into the company of citizens of the heavens,” the one on the end said, “and reciprocate your offers of good will, peace on earth, and chestnuts.”

  “We assure you that we come bearing gifts as well,” the Altairus on the other end said.

  “It’s a miracle!” Reverend Thresher shouted. “The Lord has healed them! He has unlocked their lips!” He dropped to his knees and began to pray. “Oh, Lord, we know it is our prayers which have brought this miracle about—”

  Dr. Morthman bounded forward. “Your excellencies, allow me to be the first to welcome you to our humble planet,” he said, extending his hand. “On behalf of the government of the—”

  The Altairi ignored him. “We had begun to think we had erred in our assessment of your world,” the one who’d spoken before said to me, and the one next to her? him? said, “We doubted your species was fully sentient.”

  “I know,” I said. “I doubt it myself sometimes.”

  “We also doubted you understood the concept of accord,” the one on the other end said, and turned and glared pointedly at Calvin’s wrists.

  “I think you’d better unhandcuff Mr. Ledbetter,” I said to Dr. Morthman.

  “Of course, of course,” he said, motioning to the police officer. “Explain to them it was all a little misunderstanding,” he whispered to me, and the Altairi turned to glare at him and then at the police officer.

  When Calvin was out of the handcuffs, the one on the end said, “As the men of old, we are with gladness to be proved wrong.”

  So are we, I thought. “We’re delighted to welcome you to our planet,” I said.

  “Now if you’ll accompany me back to DU,” Dr. Morthman cut in, “we’ll arrange for you to go to Washington to meet with the President and—”

  The Altairi began to glare again. Oh, no, I thought, and looked frantically at Calvin. “We have not yet finished greeting the delegation, Dr. Morthman,” Calvin said. He turned to the Altairi. “We would like to sing you the rest of our greeting songs.”

  “We wish to hear them,” the Altairus in the center said, and the six of them immediately turned, walked back up the aisle, and sat down.

  “I think it would be a good idea if you sat down, too,” I said to Dr. Morthman and the FBI agents.

  “Can some of you share your music with them?” Calvin said to the people in the last row. “And help them find the right place?”

  “I have no intention of singing with witches and homo—” Reverend Thresher began indignantly, and the Altairi all turned to glare at him. He sat down, and an elderly man in a yarmulke handed him his music.

  “What do we do about the words to the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’?” Calvin whispered to me, and the Altairi stood up and walked back down the aisle to us.

  “There is no need to alter your joyful songs. We wish to hear them with the native words,” the one in the center said.

  “We have a great interest in your planet’s myths and superstitions,” the one on the end said, “the child in the manger, the lighting of the Kwanzaa menorah, the bringing of toys and teeth to children. We are eager to learn more.”

  “We have many questions,” the next one in line said. “If the child was born in a desert land, then how can King Herod have taken the children on a sleigh ride?”

  “Sleigh ride?” Dr. Morthman said, and Calvin looked inquiringly at me.

  “ ‘All children young to sleigh,’ ” I whispered.

  “Also, if holly is jolly, then why does it bark?” the one on the other end said. “And, Mr. Ledbetter, is Ms. Yates your girlfriend?”

  “There will be time for questions, negotiations, and gifts when the g
reetings have been completed,” the second Altairus on the left, the one who hadn’t said anything up till then, said, and I realized he must be the leader. Or the choir director, I thought. When he spoke, the Altairi instantly formed themselves into pairs, walked back up the aisle, and sat down.

  I picked up Calvin’s baton and handed it to him. “What do you think we should sing first?” he asked me.

  “All I want for Christmas is you,” I said.

  “Really? I was thinking maybe we should start with ‘Angels We Have Heard on High,’ or—”

  “That wasn’t a song title,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, and turned to the Altairi. “The answer to your question is yes.”

  “These are tidings of great joy,” the one in the center said.

  “There shall be many mistletoeings,” the one on the end added.

  The second Altairus on the left glared at them. “I think we’d better sing,” I said, and squeezed into the first row, between Reverend McIntyre and an African American woman in a turban and dashiki.

  Calvin stepped onto the podium. “The Hallelujah Chorus,” Calvin said, and there was a shuffling of pages as people found their music. The woman next to me held out her music so we could share and whispered, “It’s considered proper etiquette to stand for this. In honor of King George the Third. He’s supposed to have stood up the first time he heard it.”

  “Actually,” Reverend McIntyre whispered to me, “he may merely have been startled out of a sound sleep, but rising out of respect and admiration is still an appropriate response.”

  I nodded. Calvin raised his baton, and the entire auditorium, except for the Altairi, rose as one and began to sing. And if I’d thought “Adeste Fideles” sounded wonderful, “The Hallelujah Chorus” was absolutely breathtaking, and suddenly all those lyrics about glorious songs of old and anthems sweet and repeating the sounding joy made sense. And the whole world give back the song, I thought, which now the angels sing.

  And apparently the Altairi were as overwhelmed by the music as I was. After the fifth “Hal-leh-eh-lu-jah!” they rose into the air like they’d done before. And rose. And rose, till they floated giddily just below the high domed ceiling.

  I knew just how they felt.

  It was definitely a communications breakthrough. The Altairi haven’t stopped talking since the All-City Sing, though we’re not actually much further along than we were before. They’re much better at asking questions than answering them. They did finally tell us where they came from—the star Alsafi in the constellation Draco. But since the meaning of Altair is “the flying one” (and Alsafi means “cooking tripod”), everyone still calls them the Altairi.

  They also told us why they’d turned up at Calvin’s apartment and kept following me (“We glimpsed interesting possibilities of accord between you and Mr. Ledbetter”) and explained, more or less, how their spaceship works, which the Air Force has found extremely interesting. But we still don’t know why they came here. Or what they want. The only thing they’ve told us specifically was that they wanted to have Dr. Morthman and Reverend Thresher removed from the commission and to have Dr. Wakamura put in charge. It turns out they like being squirted, at least as much as they like anything we do. They still glare.

  So does Aunt Judith. She called me the day after the All-City Sing to tell me she’d seen me on CNN and thought I’d done a nice job saving the planet, but what on earth was I wearing? Didn’t I know one was supposed to dress up for a concert? I told her everything that had happened was all thanks to her, and she glared at me (I could feel it, even over the phone) and hung up.

  But she must not be too mad. When she heard I was engaged, she called my sister Tracy and told her she expected to be invited to the wedding shower. My mother is cleaning like mad.

  I wonder if the Altairi will give us a fish slice. Or a birthday card with a dollar in it. Or faster-than-light travel.

  So here I am, stuck in Coppelius’s Toyshop, the last place I wanted to be. Especially at Christmas.

  The place is jammed with bawling babies and women with shopping bags and people dressed up like teddy bears and Tinkerbell. The line for Santa Claus is so long, it goes clear out the door and all the way over to Madison Avenue, and the lines at the cash registers are even longer.

  There are kids everywhere, running up and down the aisles and up and down the escalators, screaming their heads off, and crowding around Rapunzel’s tower, gawking up at the row of little windows. One of the windows opens, and inside it there’s a ballerina. She twirls around, and the little window closes, and another one opens. This one has a mouse in it. A black cat rears up behind it with its mouth open and the mouse leans out the window and squeaks, “Help, help!” The kids point and laugh.

  And over the whole thing the Coppelius’s Toyshop theme song plays, for the thousandth time:

  “Come to Dr. Coppelius’s

  Where all is bright and warm,

  And there’s no fear

  For I am here

  To keep you safe from harm.”

  I am not supposed to be here. I am supposed to be at a Knicks game. I had a date to take Janine to see them play the Celtics this afternoon, and instead, here I am, stuck in a stupid toy store, because of a kid I didn’t even know she had when I asked her out.

  Women always make this big deal about men being liars and not telling them you’re married, but what about them? They talk about honesty being the most important thing in a “relationship,” which is their favorite word, and they let you take them out and spend a lot of money on them and when they finally let you talk them into going up to their apartment, they trot out these three little brats in pajamas and expect you to take them to the zoo.

  This has happened to me about ten times, so before I asked Janine out, I asked Beverly, who works in Accounting with her, whether she lived alone. Beverly, who didn’t tell me about her kid till we’d been going out over a month and who was really bent out of shape when I dumped her, said, yeah, Janine lived alone and she’d only been divorced about a year and was very “vulnerable” and the last thing she needed in her life was a jerk like me.

  She must’ve given Janine the same line because I had to really turn on the old charm to get her to even talk to me and had to ask her out about fifteen times before she finally said yes.

  So, anyway, the Knicks game is our third date. Bernard King is playing and I figure after the game I’m gonna get lucky, so I’m feeling pretty good, and I knock on her door, and this little kid answers it and says, “My mom’s not ready.”

  I should’ve turned around right then and walked out. I could’ve scalped Janine’s ticket for fifty bucks, but she’s already coming to the door, and she’s wiping her eyes with a Kleenex and telling me to come in, this is Billy, she’s so sorry she can’t go to the game, this isn’t her weekend to have the kid, but her ex-husband made her switch, and she’s been trying to call me, but I’d already left.

  I’m still standing in the hall. “You can’t get tickets to Knicks games at the last minute,” I say. “Do you know what scalpers charge?” She says, no, no, she doesn’t expect me to get an extra ticket, and I breathe a sigh of relief, which I shouldn’t have, because then she says she just got a call, her mom’s in the hospital, she’s had a heart attack, and she’s got to go to Queens right away and see her, and she tried to get her ex on the phone but he’s not there.

  “You better not expect me to take the kid to the Knicks game,” I say, and she says, no, she doesn’t, she’s already called Beverly to watch him, and all she wants me to do is take the kid to meet her on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I had anybody else I could ask, but they said I needed to come”—she starts to cry again—“right…away.”

  The whole time she’s telling me this, she’s been putting on her coat and putting the kid’s coat on him and locking the door. “I’ll say hi to Grandma for you,” she says to the kid. She looks at me, he
r eyes all teary. “Beverly said she’ll be there at noon. Be a good boy,” she says to the kid, and is down the stairs and out the door before I can tell her no way.

  So I’m stuck with taking this kid up to Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth, which is the corner Coppelius’s Toyshop is on. Coppelius’s is the biggest toy store in New York. It’s got fancy red-and-gold doors, and two guys dressed up like toy soldiers standing on both sides of them, saluting people when they walk in, and a chick dressed like Little Red Riding Hood with a red cape and a basket, passing out candy canes to everybody who walks by.

  There’s a whole mob of people and kids looking at the windows, which they decorate every Christmas with scenes from fairy tales. You know the kind, with Goldilocks eating a bowl of porridge, lifting a spoon to her mouth over and over, and stuffed bears that turn their heads and blink their eyes. It looks like half of New York is there, looking in the windows. Except for Beverly.

  I look at my watch. It’s noon, and Beverly better get here soon or the kid can wait by himself. The kid sees the windows and runs over to them. “Come back here!” I yell, and grab him by the arm and yank him away from the windows. “Get over here!” I drag him over to the curb. “Now stand there.”

  The kid is crying and wiping his nose, just like Janine. “Aunt Beverly said she was going to take me to look at the windows,” he says.

  “Well, then, Aunt Beverly can,” I say, “when she finally gets here. Which better be pretty damn soon. I don’t have all day to wait around.”

  “I’m cold,” he says.

  “Then zip up your coat,” I say, and I zip up mine and stick my hands in my pockets. There’s one of these real cold New York winds whipping around the corner, and it’s starting to snow. I look at my watch. It’s a quarter past twelve.

  “I hafta go to the bathroom,” he says.

  I tell him to shut up, that he’s not going anywhere, and he starts in crying again.

  “And quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,” I say.