The Lesson

by Cadwell Turnbull

  Lee sighed and got up. She would have to go out into the backyard to get lemongrass to make the tea. Henrietta knew that Lee hated picking lemongrass—she sometimes came back with little stinging cuts from sticking her hand in kasha—but the tea was the only thing that helped Henrietta feel better and got her to sleep.

  She tried watching her soaps for a few minutes before Lee returned with lemongrass in hand, and a fresh cut from the jagged spikes of the kasha vine that threatened to choke her backyard garden. Lee chupsed her teeth in aggravation as she bent the stems of lemongrass into the pot and began boiling the water.

  “So did they find something wrong?” Lee asked. She was fishing. Henrietta ignored the question.

  The credits for All My Children rolled, and after a few commercials, the news at seven came on. On the news, Mera issued a statement about a recent riot against the Ynaa.

  “Again?” said Lee from the kitchen.

  On the screen, Mera apologized for the altercation and asked humans to use restraint when meeting any Ynaa in public. She expressed concern that her people wouldn’t be as diplomatic as she. This was code for if you aggravate any Ynaa, they will kill you.

  The Ynaa. That was what they called themselves. When they first arrived, Henrietta was in the middle of an early-afternoon nap. Her granddaughter had shaken her awake and brought her out onto the porch to see the spinning blue-white seashell hovering out in Charlotte Amalie Harbor. The hum was so loud, Henrietta was amazed she hadn’t woken up on her own.

  The first images of them were of Mera, the Ynaa ambassador. Those piercing eyes. Those tidy dreadlocks. That false smile. Henrietta knew immediately who she was. Mera had not arrived with the other Ynaa.

  Henrietta had quoted Revelation when she saw Mera’s face.

  “So the great dragon was cast out of heaven, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.”

  The Ynaa came promising medicine and technology in exchange for cohabitation. And for research. They had outgrown their world, they said. But Henrietta knew better, though she kept how she knew to herself. Let God deal with the devil.

  “It’s a little hot,” Lee said, setting the cup of bush tea on the living room table in front of Henrietta. She dropped down beside Henrietta on the couch, holding a glass of milk in one hand and cookies in the other.

  Henrietta picked up her tea and blew over it.

  “Be careful, Grandma,” Lee said.

  “Don’t worry yourself, child. I’ve drank a lifetime of hot bush tea. I’m not decrepit.”

  Henrietta could feel the throbbing pain of the cancer in her cervix. Now she knew for certain what it meant for her future. She adjusted herself on the couch and took a sip. She groaned through the throbbing and focused on the soothing hot tea coating her throat.

  Her mother had died in her sleep at the age of ninety. She was never as devout as she had been before meeting with Maria. Henrietta’s father died of a stroke, both her husband and her son of complications from diabetes. In the last weeks of her husband’s life, he had cried all the time. Both his legs were cut off above the knee to stave off infection. He was a hollowed-out man. He whispered to himself. He called out in a wailing voice she had never heard from him before. He had always been a quiet man, not prone to such strong emotion. When her son slipped off into a diabetic coma without a word, she saw the silver lining. At least he hadn’t had to suffer like that. He just lost consciousness and never woke up again.

  Henrietta had outlived them all.

  When she did die, she hoped to go just as quietly as her son. Not wailing. Not pleading for more life. Her granddaughter was a year away from eighteen and college. She hoped to last until then, see her graduate from high school.

  Then she could let the thing take her. She wouldn’t mind one bit. She would go off to where she belonged, where she had always longed to be. She would be welcomed in because she hadn’t compromised herself. She was faithful. She had trusted in God.

  For Tony

  When they were younger, Shawn and Anthony got into a whole mess of trouble all the time. Kid shit. Roughhousing, they would break a plate or a glass or a piece of their mother’s “special” china. She’d be spitting mad for a day or two, then replace it with some crystal dolphin or other breakable thing. They would also stay out too late in the neighborhood and get caught throwing rocks at a neighbor’s window or beating up neighborhood kids.

  “How did I get such terrible children?” their mom would say.

  Shawn would feel a momentary pang of guilt, but Anthony would always say something smart or hurtful like, “Because you’re a terrible mother.”

  Mom would get really quiet and disappear to her room, and the next day she would be back to yelling at them for something new that they had done.

  Shawn was the big brother by three years, but he spent a lot of time with his little brother. Anthony often seemed older than Shawn, braver and more defiant. Shawn remembered that he himself was usually the one being led into trouble, and also the one who had to clean things up.

  Despite how old and cocksure Anthony seemed, he was a kid. When Shawn started his senior year, Anthony had just started ninth grade. He wasn’t a big kid. Shawn had expected him to grow tall and menacing, but he was still short, with a big mouth and a hot temper.

  When Shawn turned eighteen, Uncle Bennett approached him.

  “You a man now,” he said. “You’ll need money.”

  This was not a question, but Shawn nodded anyway.

  “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, and handed him a big bag of stinking weed. Shawn’s uncle did not have a license, but that didn’t matter. Soon enough, his uncle was handing him harder drugs, ones that had not been legalized.

  Shawn became the guy people called when they needed some molly dropped off or they wanted to pick up a little ganja for their party. Anthony, being the quick kid he was, would ask, “Unc need another weed guy?”

  “No,” Shawn said. “And mind your damn business.”

  Shawn knew that Anthony wouldn’t listen to him. He expected him to graduate and have the same talk with Uncle Bennett and get himself shot up somewhere for having a smart mouth and a quick temper. Shawn was preparing himself for that day, the day he would have to tell Anthony that he had to go to college and that Shawn would beat his ass himself if he tried otherwise. A fight would ensue, which Shawn would win, and then Anthony would go quietly off to the University of the Virgin Islands so he could stay on island and live with Mom. Shawn would talk to his uncle, explain it simply to him that Anthony would get himself killed if he got into this sort of work. Uncle Bennett would agree. Shawn had it all figured.

  What he didn’t expect was that Anthony would attack one of those fucking aliens with a stick and get his neck snapped.

  Immediately after it happened, the ambassador of the aliens, whatever the hell her name was, issued another of those fake-ass apologies.

  “We are so sorry for this tragedy,” she said. “We are still adjusting to life here. We come from a planet where we learned wrath as a defensive mechanism against hostile threats.”

  “Bullshit!” Shawn yelled at the television screen. His very skin burned with rage. Something about how she said the words, as though their lives mattered more than his brother’s death. Murder was merely adjustment issues? “Fuck this bitch!”

  His mother sat on the couch near the door, the one Anthony liked to kick up on when he came home from school. It was an indication of her emotional anguish that she didn’t tell Shawn to watch his mouth. She just sat there shaking, as if there were ice in her bones she couldn’t get out. Fire and ice—that was what home felt like for months after the funeral: Shawn in a rage, his mother shivering in corners.

  Shawn didn’t like staying up in that house. And he didn’t have to, once peopl
e got wind of Anthony’s death. St. Thomas was in an uproar. When people gathered and marched the streets, Shawn was at the head, screaming chants until his throat ached. The people wanted the aliens to leave or be subject to human laws. Shawn wanted both. He wanted Old Testament justice—a neck for a neck.

  What happened was the opposite of all he desired. The alien who killed Anthony never even made a personal apology. Cops came to stifle the protests, as if the protesters had done something wrong. Shawn couldn’t believe that shit. And within a week, people went back to work. A few weeks after, they stopped showing up as much at sunset marches. Eventually, it was just a sad story people told. “These damn aliens,” they’d say, and then get back to whatever else they were doing.

  Shawn learned something from it all. Protests were useless. It was patting yourself on the back, bullshitting around on a sidewalk with a sign in your hand until you were tired and ready to go home. Anger was exhausting. Better to let it go. Move on. What else could you do?

  Shawn spent a long time thinking about that very question. What could be done? Maybe before, people could yell and scream at their problems and something would change. But not now, not with them. People couldn’t yell at a wall and expect it to fall.

  It took a year before the answer came to him, before he knew what he must do.

  • • •

  It all started when his mother planned a one-year remembrance ceremony at Anthony’s graveside a year after he was killed. For the community.

  Shawn didn’t want to go. The fucking community could all suck salt and die. He said as much to his mother, but she wasn’t hearing it. She literally pushed him out the door.

  “Don’t disrespect your brother because you angry.”

  “Impossible to disrespect someone if they dead,” he muttered under his breath. If she had heard him, she pretended not to.

  A lot of people showed up at the cemetery. Maybe over a hundred. His mother took her place at the front with Uncle Bennett and his cousin Zeke. Shawn stood behind them, watching the crowd. Faces of family and friends. People who never did a damn thing when Anthony got murdered, standing there as if it were nothing. There should be riots in the streets. He would have done it all by his damn self if he could. VI people didn’t know how to fight for anything. He could feel the sting of tears in his eyes.

  The church pastor led everyone in song. Shawn couldn’t remember the last time he had gone to church. When he was still a kid, his mother had made him go, but now she didn’t even bother trying. She would get dressed and walk right out the door without him. He welcomed that freedom of choice. As far as he could tell, going or not going didn’t change the state of affairs in his life.

  He wondered whether there was a verse somewhere in the good book about invasion by aliens. It was all a fucking charade, if you asked him. A big lie. Shawn pretended to mouth the words as he stared blankly at the hymn sheet.

  In the middle of Aunt Gena singing “Amazing Grace,” someone tapped him on the back.

  “Hey, man, you won’t believe this shit,” the someone said, lowering his voice at the end.

  It was Ricardo, one of his boys from high school. Shawn hadn’t hung out with him for a good while, but these things were a damn magnet for out-of-touch acquaintances.

  “What?” Shawn asked.

  “What’s that little punk’s name? Derrick? Well, that pahnah is parked right over there, sitting in his car.”

  “So?”

  “So? Well, guess who’s with him.”

  Shawn didn’t need to guess. And in the blinding-hot rage that followed, he took off running in Derrick’s direction, screaming expletives at the top of his lungs.

  Behind him, he could hear Ricardo shouting something, and by the time he reached the line of cars parked between graveyards A and B, he had a certified mob of angry people behind him, yelling words of encouragement.

  “Get ’em!” someone yelled.

  “How dare she!” said another.

  Mingled in with the voices, he could hear his mother yelling something, but he was too enraged to care.

  Derrick’s car was parked under a lamppost. The sun had nearly set, and the light shone right into his car. Derrick sat in the driver’s seat, the ambassador in the passenger seat.

  Shawn picked up a rock. He rushed toward the car, and by the time they noticed him—the ambassador turning first and saying something in a panic—he had already hurled the big stone through the windshield. There was a crash, audible above all the screaming.

  Shawn searched the ground in front of him for another stone. He found one near an old tree that had grown out of the road. In a flash, Mera was out of the car. Before he could throw another rock, she had him by the hand.

  This would have scared a man with any sense, but it only made Shawn angrier. Under the streetlights, a crowd shouting behind him, he lost all grip on himself. He struggled against her with no success.

  The expression on the ambassador’s face wasn’t human; he could see the creature she really was. Her fingers stabbed into him like blunt metal rods. The ambassador watched him, unblinking, and with a swift, effortless motion, she threw him. He felt his feet leave the ground, held up by some inhuman power, and then he was flying. He soared through the air backward, toward the crowd. He crashed into them and sent several people tumbling like bowling pins. Shawn was swimming in legs, arms, heads, and torsos, voices clamoring all around him, people yelling and screaming. He was completely disoriented, trying to find his place again in the world.

  “Get back!” said a voice far away. The ambassador’s, perhaps; he wasn’t sure. He crawled on the ground and felt the softness of flesh under his left foot as a woman screamed out. He stumbled sideways. And then he could see again. She hadn’t moved from where she was standing, but it was farther than he had thought. She had thrown him a full twenty feet.

  “Fuck you!” he yelled at her. He searched for another rock. He would bash her head in. He would not let her leave this place alive. Not finding any rocks, he tried to get up. He would use his fists, then.

  Arms wrapped around him.

  “Let go, dehman,” Shawn said.

  “She’ll kill you,” said Uncle Bennett.

  “Not if I kill her first,” he said.

  “You stupid, or what?” Bennett said. He pulled Shawn down to the ground and gripped him tightly. “This is not your day to die.”

  • • •

  Shawn was fourteen, on the steps outside his apartment building in Hidden Valley, when the aliens landed. This was 2019, and he had just gotten with this Trini in his class, to the horror of her conservative parents. He was sitting there on the phone with her, telling her sweet and terrible things—things he knew about only from X-rated movies he had stolen from Uncle Bennett’s house—when the spaceship appeared in the sky with a loud boom and a hum that made his teeth clatter.

  After the bone-rattling fear subsided (calmed mostly because the aliens promptly got themselves on TV and proclaimed their peaceful intentions), Shawn thought the idea of aliens was actually pretty cool. He felt as though he was in the greatest moment in history! They would make movies about this for years to come. They would have to make a whole new genre.

  His youthful enthusiasm swelled as he listened to the first broadcasts, played in a loop for twenty-four hours on CNN. The aliens stood stone-faced next to the president as one among them spoke into the microphone. Shawn and Anthony could see the film of sweat on the president’s forehead. Anthony laughed and called him a pussy.

  The aliens’ message was as short as it was prompt. They would stay. They would offer technology in exchange for staying. There was something they were looking for, and they needed some time to research on a living planet with lots of diverse life. In a few short years, they would leave the planet as they had found it.

  The entire message was cryptic, lacking any valuabl
e information, but what did Shawn care about stuff like that? This was aliens!

  Next, the alien ambassador Mera came to the stage. She greeted everyone in perfect, fluid English, and she even smiled. “We mean no harm,” she said. “We hope that our peoples can live together peacefully.”

  The aliens weren’t tentacled or slimy. They weren’t green. They didn’t have extra eyes shaped like long black ovals, like what Shawn had seen on UFO Files. They looked human. Perfectly human, in fact. But there was something off in how they stood and how they moved. Their movements were wooden, like still images spliced together, and at other times, smooth and lightning quick, as if they were barely solid at all. Totally cool to an eighth-grader looking at something new and exciting on a television screen.

  They settled next to Water Island. They liked the tropical climate and the water, they said. They got comfortable, living mostly in their ship, but also in a few places on the island. They offered humans tech that cured diseases they had been seeking to cure for decades. They provided new ways for humans to power their cars and their cities.

  And when they were offended or felt threatened, they ripped you to pieces.

  It became immediately clear that the Ynaa were terrible at cohabitation. Shawn’s attitude toward them soured.

  Every once in a while, someone would make the paper. Torn in half. Head removed from body. Guy takes a drunken swing at alien in bar and gets his heart ripped from his chest. No one arrested. This was always the story. The Ynaa were outside human justice.

  “They can’t really be doing this,” said Anthony. “Why aren’t we killing them?”

  Shawn didn’t really have an answer. When Anthony got his neck broken, Shawn felt relief mixed in with all his anger and sadness. At least, their mother would get to bury him whole.

  • • •

  A week after the whole mess at the graveyard, Shawn’s uncle texted him a name and an address. He will get you what you need, he wrote.

  It turned out that this he, whoever he was, lived in Dry Yard. Shawn had a difficult time finding the house, because the roads looped in on themselves and led off onto dirt paths packed tight with small houses and old cars. The area had a large Rastafarian population. Shawn had to ask a guy sitting on a wall overlooking a gutter where he could find the house.