by Lewis Shiner
5. Something else had happened to Danny in the endless time since he’d been brought into the ship. Wispy, colorless hair had begun to grow on his face and body, and his voice had started to crack. The thing he still thought of as his weenie would sometimes swell up and become very sensitive, especially in the mornings. He found that by lying on his stomach and moving a certain way he could relieve the pressure, though he felt guilty afterwards about the mess.
He went through a period of severe disorientation. He spent hours touching the fine hairs on his face, longing for a mirror. It seemed to him that he spent more time sleeping than awake, but without a clock he couldn’t be sure. He forgot his mother’s middle name.
He worried about his teeth and gums until he developed sores inside his mouth. He showed them to one of the aliens and told it he was sick. The alien took him back to the hospital room and filled his mouth with the gummy pink stuff. “You are not sick,” the alien said, after the stuff had been fed to the wall. “It is in your mind.”
Danny went a little crazy. He lunged at the alien. Before he could do more than raise his arm to throw a punch, he felt a vibration go up his spine. He passed out and woke up in his cell. He beat on the walls and screamed until he was too exhausted to move.
In time they let him out again. He had learned not to assault them, but it hadn’t made him less sullen and irritable. He was close to trying it again anyway when something more interesting came up.
It was another planet, blue-green, hazed with clouds. He refused to leave the area in front of the screen, staring endlessly for the first sight of something that would tell him he was home. Instead he finally woke from a doze to the sight of a single vast, unfamiliar continent below the ship. He went to his cell and cried helplessly from one meal to the next. When he came out again, it was to watch the ship descend over a city of cubical white buildings.
Three aliens led him from the ship to a maze of hallways. It ended in a room that had clearly been designed for him. It had a bed, even though the bedspread, pillows, and sheets were all part of the same molded piece. It had a desk with paper and pens, shelves with real books, and best of all, a bathroom with a toilet, a shower, and a toothbrush. Several sets of loose cotton pants and shirts were laid out on the bed. Two screens set into the wall showed an Earth-like field and a clear blue sky. When the overhead light was turned off the screens showed a moonlit version of the same scene. He had day and night again, even if he had to make them himself.
The door, of course, locked behind the aliens when they left.
He washed and put on new clothes and started on the books. Most of them had multiple copies, as if the aliens had hijacked a trainload of them and piled them on the shelves without thought. One group seemed to be a shipment of war novels, another was diet and exercise books. Other clusters were science fiction, Peterson field guides, and one entire shelf of paperbacks in French.
He went through the novels first, skimming, looking for the parts where men and women were together. He learned a little, only enough to make his curiosity worse.
He’d been there long enough to be tired of the books when the door opened and a girl walked in. Danny was sitting at his desk, writing a letter to his parents that he knew they would never see.
He was stunned by the sight of her. He thought at first that he had made her up. Then she combed through her dark, curly hair with one hand and pulled it back, kept pulling it back until he could see her entire hairline, and still she pulled on it, until tears came up in her eyes.
Danny knew he couldn’t imagine anything that strange. “Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?”
She was maybe a little older than Danny, her small breasts just showing under the long, shapeless dress that she wore. She did not seem to be all right at all. Her eyes were puzzled and her mouth was slack. Her body was thick with excess weight. Danny wondered how she could have gotten fat on the aliens’ tasteless food.
He went over to her and gently worked her fingers loose from her hair. Her eyes followed him, but she didn’t show any real interest until he started to back away. Then she made a bleating noise and threw her arms around him. She smelled clean and Danny found himself getting excited by the touch of her, even though the weird way she acted made him nervous.
“Can you talk?” he asked her. He worked her arms loose and sat her on the edge of the bed next to him. “Can you say anything at all?” Now that he was over the initial shock, he could see that she was not all that nice to look at. Her eyes were small and puffy, her nose flat and thick, and her skin was shiny with oil. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Muh-muh-rnuh...” the girl said.
In a moment of insight, Danny realized that she hadn’t survived the things that he’d been through, the repeated shocks, the isolation, the horror of the aliens always around.
“Mary?” he asked. “Is that your name?” When she didn’t answer he tried to smile at her. “Well, that’s what I’ll call you, okay?”
She seemed calmed by the sound of his voice. When he stood up she let him go. He kept an eye on her as he walked to the door. “Hey,” he said loudly. “What am I supposed to do? Can you hear me? There’s something wrong with this one. You understand? She’s broken. I can’t fix her, if that’s what you want.”
He got no answer. He went back to his routine of reading and drawing and pacing the room. When he tried to talk to her she simply stared at him.
Eventually he took a bath and went to bed, dressed for once because the girl was there. She had fallen asleep on the bed. He lay down carefully so he wouldn’t wake her and turned off the light.
Sleep wouldn’t come. Every time the girl shifted her weight his eyes came open and his heart beat loudly. He felt like he’d been lying there for hours when he noticed that she wasn’t asleep any more. By the sound of her breathing he could tell that she’d turned to face him.
Then she began to touch him. Danny was embarrassed at first, then a little frightened. But her hands were knowing and insistent, and he felt sick and feverish and could not make himself pull away. She took his trousers down and began to stroke his penis. He felt the pressure build up inside him but before it got messy she rolled onto her back and began to pull at him.
“What?” he whispered. “What do you want?”
She kept grabbing at his waist and his legs until he finally rolled on top of her. She took hold of his penis and began to pull at it. He started to lose his erection, not understanding what she wanted, ashamed because he didn’t know what to do.
She took his right hand and placed it over her breast. He felt the end of her breast get hard and it made the same thing happen to his penis. She pulled at him and he felt his penis slide into something warm and wet. Her hips moved jerkily under him and he exploded inside her.
Lights flashed in front of his eyes. He gasped for breath. He smelled something he’d never smelled before, an earthy, exciting odor that at the same time left him repelled and sad. The girl groaned and started to snore. Danny’s head cleared. He was appalled at what he’d done. He had made sex with this ... this thing, that was ugly and brain damaged, little better than an animal.
He went to the bathroom and washed himself, then lay down on the part of the floor that was sculpted to look like a rug. To his own surprise he was asleep in seconds.
The shame was still with him when he woke up. He ignored the girl all day, and when he was ready for bed he turned out the lights and lay down nervously where one edge of the bed met the wall. She reached for him and he pushed her away. The second time she came for him he pushed her so hard she slid off the bed and sat on the floor, crying quietly. Danny stayed on the bed, arms folded, unable to sleep. After a while he turned the lights on and read. When he absolutely couldn’t stay awake any longer he put his head down and slept on the desk.
When he woke up she was gone.
6. After that, whenever he found himself thinking about the girl, remembering the smell of what they’d done, or the feeli
ng of her breast in his hand, Danny would exercise. One of the health books was about something called “yoga,” and Danny found out the harder he practiced at it, the better he felt.
He began to build himself up. He knew he was getting taller by the way his clothes fit him, and before long he could see the shape of his body change, his stomach flattening and the muscles turning to hard outlines under his pale skin. He would cover the drain in the shower and look at himself in the pool of water there, sometimes until he forgot where he was. He was fit, he thought. Fit and ready. But for what?
He had nicknamed the alien who brought his food Fremount, after the character in Pogo. The little alien wouldn’t reveal his real name and answered only the most direct questions. One day another alien brought the cup. This one had more wrinkles around its eyes and a forward tilt to its walk. Danny named him Howland Owl.
“Where’s Fremount?” Danny asked.
“Drink this and come with me.”
Danny swallowed the food in two gulps. The alien led Danny down a series of white corridors. At the end was a room divided in half by some kind of glass. On the other side was a dwarfish, naked creature with a face like a Neanderthal. Its entire body was covered with long, widely separated black hairs.
“You may talk,” Howland said.
“Hello?” Danny said.
“He gives you greetings,” Howland translated, looking at the dwarf. Danny guessed that the mind-talking worked the same for the dwarf as it did for Danny. Both of them could understand anything the aliens thought.
Howland turned back to Danny. “It asks you how you retain your water.”
“What?”
Howland repeated the question.
“I don’t understand,” Danny said. “What does he mean?”
Howland made no response.
“Ask him...” Danny said, “...ask him if he has a family.”
Howland relayed the question, then said, “It says it will have had. It asks if you are light.”
“Light?”
Howland moved its hands as if it were stroking a large globe. “Light,” it said.
Danny felt his eyes begin to sting. “Tell him to make sense. I can’t understand what he’s asking me. Can’t you see that?” He wanted to hit something. Mostly he wanted to hit the hairy little dwarf. He would have taken a swing at Howland if he’d thought he could get away with it.
Howland brought him back to his room. His next meal was brought by Fremount, as usual.
7. Danny made a calendar. Every time he slept he marked off a day. He knew it wasn’t accurate, but it helped tie him to the passing time. By his reckoning, the visit with the dwarfish alien was followed by nearly two years where nothing broke his routine. He exercised. He read. He sat in the lotus position, thinking about as little as it was possible for him to think. In the dark he dreamed about his parents, his best friend Tom, about pot roast and candy bars, about snow and forests and mountains, about dogs and fish, about school, about half-remembered girls and women he had known.
Waking up was always the hardest part.
He seemed to have stopped growing. His beard, when he didn’t use the depilatory cream the aliens gave him, came in dark and full. Dark hair covered his legs and crotch. Whenever he asked them, the aliens cut his hair with some kind of pistol that had no blades and made no noise. Lately one or two of the fallen hairs would be white.
He read and he exercised and he wrote letters and drew and he tried to keep the voices in his head quiet.
Until the woman came.
His first reaction, when she knocked on his door and simply walked in, was shyness. His brain was numb. Eventually he realized that she had been talking for some time and he hadn’t heard a word she’d said, or even noticed what she really looked like.
She was at least pretty, by anyone’s standards. Her hair was long and reddish brown, her eyes a clear gray. It seemed to Danny at first that she was younger than he was, but it turned out they had taken her in 1957 also, and she had been 12 at the time.
Her name was Autumn.
“That’s a beautiful name,” Danny told her.
“Yes,” she said, “it is.”
Danny couldn’t think of anything worth saying. When his silence went on too long, Autumn stood up. “I’m just down the hall,” she said. “Come and see me sometime.” As if they were two people who’d met in a hotel somewhere.
“I can’t,” Danny said. “I’m locked in.”
Autumn opened the door. “No you’re not,” she said, and left.
Danny stood where she’d been and sniffed the air. He believed he could detect a lingering sweetness there. He felt flushed and off-balance, and his heart beat so loudly and so strangely that he thought it might give out any second.
He sat in the lotus position and fought for control. He concentrated on not moving until enough time passed that it didn’t seem so urgent any more. Then he waited a little longer. Then he got up and went to her.
Miraculously his door opened to his touch. The corridor had changed since the last time he’d seen it. Now there was only his door and one other, twenty yards away. He walked to the other door and knocked and Autumn opened it.
Her room was identical to his, except that the books on the shelves were different. She sat on the bed and brushed her hair, over and over, while he looked through the books.
“You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Long enough to read all those books of yours?”
“Three or four times.”
After a while he sat on the bed and touched her hand. She didn’t pull it away, but she didn’t move closer to him either. She just sat there and smiled at him in a vague sort of way. He wanted to put his penis in her, but she was so self-possessed, so alien in her own way, that he didn’t know if he should try. He didn’t even know if he should ask her.
They talked about other things until they both were falling asleep between sentences. She told him how she’d been on a ship the entire time until she met Danny. That she had grown up in Chicago, that her parents were musicians, that she would have been a dancer but she’d grown too tall.
When Danny went back to his room he dreamed about the two of them in a huge house that had grass for carpets and slow, strange animals for furniture. He woke up refreshed and excited and went to her room, but he could see around the edges of the door that her lights were still off. He went back to his room and exercised until he was tired enough to sleep a little more. On top of all the other strangeness, it bothered Danny to see how different their rhythms of day and night were.
They spent another day talking, some of it reading quietly, and another long night apart. All the time a peculiar tension built in him, and on the third day it broke.
They were looking at his books together when her shoulder brushed his. He turned and put his hand around her elbow. She looked at him and smiled. He touched her breast, his fingers shaking, and she smiled again. He put his arms around her and kissed her clumsily, and she put her arms around his waist. He led her to the bed and took her clothes off. He almost wanted to cry when he saw how soft and smooth and tautly muscled her body was.
“Have you ... have you done this before?” he asked.
“No,” she said. Her eyes were a little out of focus and her voice shook.
As he knelt between her legs he was suddenly frightened. He turned off the lights but it didn’t help him get hard again. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t really know what I’m doing either.”
“It’s okay,” she said. She held him and he ran his hands through her hair, wondering at the way it smelled. Love, he thought. I’m in love. Is it really this easy? What happens now?
He never fell asleep, just seemed to float, and thoughts went spinning around in his head. After a long time he wasn’t afraid any more. Autumn’s place was tight and very dry and not at all the same as Mary’s had been. Afterwards there was blood on the bed. Autumn sai
d that was all right, that it was supposed to be that way.
For a long time Danny couldn’t get to sleep. He wished he had somebody to talk to, somebody to explain the things he felt. If he was grown up now, why did he still feel like a little boy? If it was right for him to do what he did with Autumn, why did he feel so guilty?
In time the sex got better and the guilt just went away.
He told Autumn that he loved her. He told himself it didn’t matter that she didn’t say it back to him.
It was about two of Danny’s months later that Autumn told him she was pregnant. It had been a happy time for both of them, Danny teaching her yoga, Autumn teaching him to dance. They read together, slept together, even showered together, and now they were going to have a child together.
“Are you sure?” he asked her.
“Pretty sure. I didn’t bleed last month and I feel sick when I wake up, and, well, I can just feel it.”
“That’s wonderful!”
“Is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
“Look around you! Do you see any doctors? Anybody who knows anything about human medicine at all? And if the baby is born, if, then where is it going to grow up? In these two little rooms? And never see a real sky or trees or birds or other people?”
He held her until she cried herself out. “It’ll make us a family,” Danny said. “That’s all that matters, that we’re a family and that we love each other, right?”
Autumn didn’t answer.
During the pregnancy they quarreled more and more often. Autumn would only make love after Danny sulked for days at a time. She was clearly frightened that something would go wrong, and any time the rhythms of her body changed she would panic.
When her labor began in earnest, she began to scream hysterically. Danny was in his own room, where he’d been spending most of his time lately, and he got to her about the same time the aliens did. One of them looked like Howland Owl, the one that had taken him to see the dwarf. They said nothing to Danny, just led Autumn away.
Time slowed. Danny waited uneasily in Autumn’s room. Everything he tried—reading, meditation, sleeping—ended with him pacing the floor. When Autumn finally came back she was pale, exhausted, and no longer pregnant.