“Harry, open up. Hurry!” I heard the hollering. And
the loud pounding on the door.
I’m always cranky when yanked out of deep sleep in the middle of the
night and that night was no exception. I
hauled my left wrist in front of my eyes and tried to focus on my
glow-in-the-dark watch that wasn’t glowing right then.
“Harry,
wake up! Come on, man. Let me in.” I groaned when I recognized Ted’s voice. He
was getting louder by the minute.
“Ted, what the hell?” I hollered back and switched on the
lamp at the side of my sofa bed. “It’s 4
am!” I squinted at my alarm clock
incomprehensibly.
“I
know you’re in there. You gotta let me in.”
Ted whined. This was a side of him nobody liked.
Ted
was my best friend back then. We had an
unspoken pact that we could come to the other with any problem, great or small
– even at four am. Ted took advantage more than me. My problems tended to be financial and could
wait till morning. Ted’s were more
commonly of a romantic nature. Women
weren’t kind to Ted. He suffered from broken hearts with the frequency other
people suffered from the common cold. But only a week earlier he’d lent me five
grand to pay off one of my ex-wives for back child support. That act of
generosity kept me out of jail, at least for a while, so I got up to let him
in.
I
unlocked the door and he fell across my threshold flat on his face.
“You drunk?”
“No,
no. Come on, Harry, turn on the TV.” He
pulled himself up with a surprising urgency and lunged for the remote. He was a disheveled maniac, stabbing the
device towards the TV, pushing buttons frantically, his eyes wild.
“Battery’s
dead.” I took it from his hand
gently. “Turn it on the old fashioned
way.”
Instead,
Ted grabbed my shoulders with both hands and shoved me around to look him straight
in the eye.
“Harry,” he said with
dead seriousness, “Aliens have landed.”
I
stared back stupidly.
“It’s
on CNN. There’s aliens
in New Mexico,”
he said.
“Yeah?”
Ted
made a noise that clearly meant he was disgusted with me and squatted down in
front of the TV trying to turn it on by hand.
I never pay for cable, the conglomeration atop my TV looks like a
nuclear physics science fair project gone awry.
I shoved Ted out of the way and began my ministrations. The ancient set glowed slowly to life and I
fiddled with what stood in for a cable box to switch it to CNN.
That’s
when I first saw them. It was about one
in the morning in New Mexico. At least that’s what the CNN clock at the
lower left read, along with the word “Live”.
But it was bright as day in New
Mexico. A sunrise of sorts shone pink and orange
against the desert hills. What was
spectacularly odd was the news reporter on the scene wasn’t talking. He stood there, just inside the camera’s
frame, mouth agape, with a look of rapture on his face. What he was watching; the main focus of the
camera’s lens was a small group of 20 or so aliens.
“They
look like people,” I said, and they did. They were completely human in
appearance. Even to the clothes they
were wearing. They wouldn’t have been
out of place in a mall, or a subway platform.
But they were different, and I didn’t know how I knew that.
There
was no sound but the desert wind whistling through the reporter’s
microphone. No one seemed to mind, least
of all Ted and me. We were transfixed,
even via TV.
The
aliens weren’t doing much of anything. They stood there watching the sky or
looking at the camera, occasionally squatting down to touch the earth. Every so often one would reach down and take
a handful of sand and let it trickle through his fingers. The sand falling back
to earth; It felt like a caress.
There
was no spacecraft in evidence. Even now
we have no idea how they got here – or where they’re from. I guess that doesn’t matter anymore. You couldn’t tell how that red and gold
sunrise light was generated. I assumed
there was some sort of huge lamp or lighting equipment out of the sight of the
cameras, but people who were there have since told me no. The light was lovely.
We
watched for a long time. Eventually someone
in the Atlanta Headquarters at CNN came on, with sound at least – they didn’t
cut away from the picture -- and began a commentary. The “Live” clock at the lower left of the
screen showed nine am
New York
time, six am
New Mexico. I realized then that neither Ted nor I had
moved since we turned on the set. We
hadn’t even sat down to watch it. We’d
been standing for five hours in rapt attention.
The
aliens are beautiful.
That
was all I kept thinking, when I was thinking.
They’re not like supermodels, or star athletes or people in tobacco
ads. They have a beauty of the soul, I
guess, or spirit -- something, that surpasses understanding, that surpasses
anything human. I’m a writer – a good
one in my not so humble opinion – and I can’t come up with the words. Few of us can. Few of us even bother to try these days. Most human endeavors that exist apart from
the aliens seem pointless – including writing about them.
All
I want, indeed all anyone wants, is simply to be in their presence.
It
would be enough.
The
only reason I can write this at all, the only reason I bother to make the
attempt is that I’m buried alive within the bowels of a mountain. I can’t get
out to go be with the aliens and that’s the overriding
sorrow of my life. I was given orders to
complete this. I am told somewhere,
someday, someone might read it and understand what happened to us.
I
don’t remember much of what the CNN commentator said that morning. I do know it helped break the spell I was
under. I had enough presence of mind to
shut off the set. It hurt to do so. A deep hurt, like a broken heart, but part of
me knew it had to be done. Ted made a
sound of anguish when I did it. I knew he felt it too.
We
both sank to the floor too dazed to sit anywhere else. After we caught our breath for a few moments
Ted whispered, “Now what?”.
It
seemed idiotic even saying it but, “I guess, go to work. I have child support
to pay.”
“And
you owe me money,” Ted attempted a smile.
It was more like a grimace.
Never
the less we got up and started doggedly getting ready for work, both of us
pointedly ignoring the TV set. While Ted was in the shower I made myself unplug
the whole contraption. At that point
doing so was the most difficult thing I’d ever done in my life. I was cut off from them now.
I
had to go to work. Some part of me
remembered that I’d just gotten a really good job a few weeks ago. I’d been hired as a journalism writer for the
American Psychological Institute. It was
to be the big turning point in my so far lackluster career. I was a good writer, but I didn’t play well
with others and managed to piss off too many people far too frequently to ever
to hold a steady gig. I’d been freelancing
for years but earning only sustenance.
This job was the first to pay me serious money. I had to go to work to get it.
Getting
there was half the battle. Many people
chose to stick by their TV’s that morning.
Subways were running, but not regular and there were only a few buses. Cabs were scarce or taken by others more intrepid
then myself. I
eventually turned back for my bike and it became my chief mode of
transportation that whole first week.
Only
about half the institute showed the first day, then less and less people came
in each day following. Different people
came in on different days. The only guy,
besides me, to show up every day was the big cheese himself, Dr. Evan Hartwig. I was there
for the money. I think he came in just
to make people miserable. The man was all over the institute, badgering people,
berating them for not showing up the day before and haranguing those who were
there for whatever work was left undone.
He was demanding, hypercritical and harsh. He made enemies. He reminded me of me.
Because I was always
there – and others weren’t – he came to rely on me in a big way and it wasn’t
too long before he had me following him around and doing all his dirty
work. I resented it plenty, but there
wasn’t anyone else to help him, not regular like anyway,
and even I could see the old guy was determined to be of use during the crises
and was pulling strings to make sure he wasn’t left out. Turned out he had clout. The idea gradually
forced it’s way through my thick skull that if he
managed to get involved I’d get a front row seat at the festivities.
And the festivities
were getting closer to New York. The day after the New Mexico landing, aliens appeared (and stayed) in Utah and Wyoming.
The day after that there were twenty more visitations in the surrounding
states. The closest to us was in Illinois. It took only thirty-six hours for them to
make it from there into New Jersey
and by that time sightings were in the thousands. I couldn’t watch it on TV of course (my TV
being all disconnected), I read about it in the paper until the papers stopped.
After that the only way to get news was to be in on it. And that’s where I was - in the very center
of the brain trust running the country.
It became clear that
we were about the only country running, albeit poorly. The rest of the world was also hosting the
aliens and most were worse off than us.
China
was the first to go under. In each city, province or town, millions of Chinese
stopped whatever they were doing and hied themselves
to the nearest alien and stood in worshipful silence, basking in the alien’s
presence. It wasn’t too long before we
had reports of massive famines and the dread diseases associated with them, as
people ceased caring for themselves and died of
neglect in crowds of adoration. China
was done for in days.
Next came Europe.
Germany,
France
and Italy
fell in a week. India
lasted only three days. Iraq,
Iran,
Israel
and Egypt,
indeed the whole Middle East,
fell apart over a weekend. The African continent was an early unknown as
communications ended two days into the crisis. We assumed the worst. Japan
and Great Britain
lasted a week and a half, but only because the aliens arrived there later.
It seemed to take the
aliens longer to reach islands. Hawaii
was the last state of the union to receive a visitation. Australia
was the last country we ever heard from.
The Aussie’s were alien-free until the day before we lost them.
We didn’t know how to
fight the aliens. The trouble was we
didn’t want to. Even the thought of
harming them was difficult to think. We
couldn’t get anyone to pull the trigger.
The military tried to send out fighter pilots as a last resort, but the
guys refused to even get in the jets. The mechanics refused to load the
weapons. We were doomed.
People all over the
world fell in love with them. There was no other way to describe it. We became
addicted, all of us craving any mention of them, any viewing, and to be in
their presence was sheer ecstasy. No
one was immune.
Washington
moved en masse to New York
the second week. Or what was left of Washington. The President was prohibited from seeing them
live, though I understand he had to be forcibly restrained when they appeared
in the Rose Garden. The Marines had
surrounded the White House by this time, camping out on the grounds. When the aliens walked among them, they too,
threw down their arms and worshipped. A
few guys from the secret service pulled the President kicking and screaming out
the front door and into a waiting helicopter.
He was flown to Manhattan
and attended some of our meetings the following week, but he wasn’t much good
to us. He tended to blubber and cry and
beg us to let him go back and be with them.
The institute became
one of the centers of resistance, as much as it was possible to resist, because
of Hartwig’s influence. The government was trying to figure out what
it was about the aliens that caused us to feel this way. This alien obsession
wasn’t natural, but it felt like the most natural thing in the world. A psychological institute was a logical place
to be looking for a cause and Hartwig became the man
of the hour. He was one of the few.
To keep us at it,
everyone left in the institute was drafted into the army the beginning of week
two. The Marines were everywhere,
enforcing our obedience. Hartwig became a one star general, though I had the
sneaking suspicion that he was actually the defacto
head of the government by that time. I
got the exalted rank of lieutenant. My
father, if he could have put down a drink long enough to remember I existed
would have been proud.
“What are you doing
about them? You gotta
stop this.” Ted stomped into my office
one afternoon and pounded on my desk in indignation. He was unshaven, clothing askew and by the
smell of him, drunk.
“Hey, I’m not in
charge. I only work here, remember? The good news is I can pay you back the five
grand. Then you can get out of here and
let me go back to work,” I snarled. “How’d you get in here anyway?” I shuffled
through the papers piled on my desk, searching for my buried checkbook.
To my surprise Ted
threw himself into my guest chair and burst into tears. I hate it when men cry. One of my cherished beliefs is that
sensitivity ought to be left to the chicks, and even then it’s annoying.
“Alright now, alright.” I patted his shoulder
awkwardly. “It can’t be that bad. Whoever she is, she wasn’t good enough for
you anyway.”
“No,
no, It’s not that,” Ted shook his head miserably. “I can’t sleep, I can’t
eat. I just want to be with them. They won’t let us out of the city. I can’t get to where they are. TV doesn’t
work anymore – I mean everybody’s – not just yours,” he blubbered up at
me. “I can’t stand it. You’re here with all these government
types. I pay my taxes. What are you doing about this?”
“Uh, me?”
“Yeah,
I demand answers.” He sat up straight and rubbed the tears from his eyes. Then
he jumped to his feet and began jabbing me in the chest with his finger.
“Either let us go and be with them – or make them go away.” He shouted at me,
eyes ablaze with righteous fury.
I
shoved him away and stared at him in awe.
He stared back, silently fuming, but since he’d stopped crying I decided
to humor him.
“We’re trying to make
them go away.” I winced as I said it.
“How?” He sort of barked and his left eye began to twitch.
“First
we tried negotiating,” I sighed. Suddenly I felt the exhaustion that had been
creeping up on me for days. Talking
about this was making me tired, a frequent symptom we’d all been feeling every
time we attempted to discuss the aliens and solutions. It made decision making difficult and
meetings unbearable. But I felt weirdly
intimidated by Ted’s uncharacteristic behavior, so I labored on. “It’s
impossible ‘cause people can’t seem to talk in their
presence. Anyone who gets close just
sort of stands there looking at them and gets all weak in the knees.”
“They
speak English?” Ted demanded.
“Who
knows?” I shrugged. “Since we can’t talk in person, we tried phoning them. We sent a cell phone in by a robot cart we
requisitioned from some automaker in Detroit. One of the aliens answered when we rang, but
everyone who tried to talk on the phone just sort of blubbered when they heard
the voice.”
“What
about the recording?”
“Yeah,
we recorded it, but we can’t listen to it without becoming incapacitated. They had computers analyze it. But one of the
technicians ended up by framing the graphical output and setting up a sort of
shrine. We can’t get him to quit staring at it and get back to work. You try to take it away from him and he
becomes homicidal.”
“This
isn’t right. What right do they have to come and do this to us?” Tears crept
out the corners of his eyes again.
“At
first we thought it was just the sight of them so we sent in some blind people.
That didn’t work. Then we drafted some
people from the Helen Keller Institute and had gave
them a pack of papers to deliver.”
“You
sent in the handicapped – I mean, the differently abled? That’s harsh,
man.” Ted shook his head reprovingly.
“They
were happy to do it!” I protested. “When
we explained the mission to them they all got these goofy grins on their
faces. We sent them in and never heard
from them again.”
“What
about technology?” Ted asked.
“We
sent in army guys in radiation suits, thinking it was some sort of psychic
wave, guys in space suits, people with titanium helmets, everything we could
think of. We’ve lost more people to
alien adoration than we lost in the Gulf war.
Nothing works.”
“Saint
Bernards,” Ted said.
“What?”
“You
know, like the Swiss use to rescue people in the Alps. Send in Saint Bernards.” He beamed with self-satisfaction.
“Yeah,
might work,” I considered. “Animals
don’t seem to be affected. Or if they
were, I guess we’d be seeing big herds of livestock surrounding the aliens in Texas.”
“Or all the wild life in the Rockies.” Ted pointed out
It
was officially dubbed the Saint Bernard Solution and it earned Ted a medal. We
drafted packs of Saint Bernards and outfitted them
with doggie-backpacks. We also used
sheep dogs, German shepherds and the more intelligent varieties of giant
poodles.
The dogs proved adept
at their delivery duties. As a matter of fact, they proved uncannily
cooperative and it was generally acknowledged that the pup’s obedience and
efficiencies were in some way being directed by the aliens.
Now we could write the
aliens letters and get replies in return.
The trouble was in how to read what they’d written. Language wasn’t the problem. It was in our addiction to anything connected
to them. To actually handle a piece of paper and read the words written on it
by an alien was more than most people could handle. It made us swoon. The text became sacred and craved. The first guy who opened a packet ate the
letter inside. The aliens must have
considered that because they sent us a backup dog with a duplicate packet at
the same time.
It took us a day to
rig up a robot to open the packet, fax it to a computer, make
a printout of the letter, then photo-copy it half a dozen times. Even then, another computer had to read us
what was written there with a mechanical voice.
It sounded like a
symphony.
I can’t tell you what
the exact text was. We didn’t really
hear it so much as experience it. But we
did understand what was wanted of us, that much was
clear. They wanted us to become an
agrarian society. They wanted us to
leave our cities -- and somehow we understood that cities were cesspools to
them – each of us in the room felt a sensation of physical uncleanness when the
letter discussed cities. They wanted us
to move to the countryside and participate as an earthly family – and here we
understood warmth and light and love among our brothers. We looked at each
other with new fondness when that part was read. We were to grow fruits, vegetables and grains
from the land. We were to gather produce
from the seas. We were to store up our harvest and give it to the aliens. We were to love one another and join together
in joy and healing and harmony.
Then the letter
stopped. The silence was deafening.
Suddenly Hartwig started swearing a blue streak. He was eloquent and articulate and expressed
himself with perfection. It felt like
being drenched by a bucket of ice cold water.
“Damn it, they’re just
grocery shopping,” he stormed when he’d run out of profanities. “The rest of it
is just to get us to feel good about the whole thing. New age crap!
Brotherly love, huh! It isn’t
human and it isn’t natural. Now how’re we gonna
prevent it?” He looked around the room furiously.
None of us had the
slightest idea.
I left the institute
that night in a foul mood. I unlocked my
bike from the stair rail and pushed it past a homeless guy sleeping under the
steps. He sat up the second I neared
him.
“Ho, wait a minute,
bud,” he clutched at my jacket.
“I gave at the office,” I snarled. “Let go of
me,” and yanked my sleeve out of his hands.
“No, no, we’re
brothers. I don’t want anything from you. Come with me. Let’s go together. We’ll grow things. We’ll be happy,” he
implored. He sounded sober.
His sobriety scared
the hell out of me.
I knew this guy. He
was a human wreck. He was filthy and
smelly and hadn’t spoken a coherent sentence in all the weeks I’d worked at the
institute. Some of my co-workers had
taken pity on him and left him food and given him money. I never had. I’d thought of him as a waste of space, and
if I ever considered his welfare it was to wish he’d been institutionalized and
out of my sight, as it was obvious he couldn’t care for himself.
But here he was,
surprisingly articulate, with an intelligent look in his eyes. He had a deep rich voice and excellent
diction and he was looking at me with unbearable compassion.
The weird thing was I
understood it was because he could see I had the knowledge – and just by
looking at me he was accessing it. He
knew now too, and he had learned it from me.
I was completely creeped out. I tore my
coat out of his grasping hands, threw myself on my bike and peddled for my
life.
I careened up the
street, dodging taxicabs and busses. But
it was the people who really got in my way.
They’d take one look at me and dart out from the sidewalk and try to
grab at my bike. They’d didn’t mean any
harm, they merely wanted to know. They ran after me, calling for me to
stop.
But they didn’t need
explanations from me. I understood that, too.
Just by setting eyes on me some transference was taking place. I was broadcasting the alien’s message just
by being there. My doorman actually
hugged me.
I barricaded myself in
my apartment that night. I didn’t answer
the phone or open the door even to Ted’s insistent knocking. What would I do if my best friend, after
taking one look at me, left New
York to go live in the country? Funny, I never thought I’d miss him
before. But now the thought of him gone
was painful to me. I couldn’t let him
look at me, or even hear my voice. I didn’t want to chance it.
Even I was feeling
compelled to go to the country (and grow things?), and I hate the country. Under normal circumstances I get the heebie jeebies whenever I’m
forced to leave Manhattan,
even if it’s just to visit to Brooklyn. If Brooklyn
was the hinterlands, how would I handle St.
Cloud, Minnesota?
The only way to deal
with the torture of my thoughts was to get totally and completely drunk. I spent the night with a bottle of vodka and
yet another attempt at The Brothers Karamazov.
Morning found me with a stupendous hangover and a deep sense of
loneliness.
This time I was going
to work because I wanted to be with Hartwig and the
gang. I was even looking forward to
hanging out with the Marines bivouacked in our halls. It was the first time in my life I found myself doing something for reasons other than money.
It was a good thing too, otherwise I’d have been in Central
Park with the rest of the city. The aliens finally appeared in Manhattan
that morning. The sky was afire with their signatory, gorgeous, sunrise
glow. The population was flocking to
their presence. Despite that, the city
was eerily quiet. I couldn’t figure it
out at first. Then I realized – there
was no traffic. There were no horns
honking or sirens blaring. When I turned
onto Lexington
I was confronted with a sea of yellow taxis all completely empty, the doors
left open and motors switched off. Left
adrift amidst the sea of cabs the city busses looked like big white islands.
They were also completely empty. People
were hurrying past me on foot, almost all going north towards the park. Every person had a look of rapture on their
face.
I’d encased myself in
a parka and ski mask and covered my eyes with dark sunglasses, trying to avoid
spreading the alien’s countryside message.
I guessed that now that the aliens were actually in Manhattan
they didn’t need me anymore. Or maybe my
disguise worked, because few people paid any attention to me.
There were others
though. People with
looks of grim determination on their faces. They forced themselves, whether walking, or
on bikes, or rollerblading -- they were going south, away from the park. They were going to work. They moved like automatons or marionettes,
robotically driving themselves away from the aliens through sheer force of
will. They gritted their teeth and
clenched their jaws and made their hands into fists. I saw my reflection in a shop window after
I’d taken off my ski mask and my expression mirrored theirs. We walked or rode or skated with each other,
afraid almost to look at one another, as if we were in secret complicity, in a
conspiracy to disobey the call we all felt tugging at our hearts. It was horrible.
“Why can some of us
resist and show up here? I don’t understand it.” Susan Frieburg
whined, her face pale and sweaty. She
was chain smoking and nobody objected. Hartwig was patting her shoulder with uncharacteristic
fondness. Dr. Susan Frieburg,
a famed and much published, radical-feminist psychologist, had been Hartwig’s chief nemesis only three weeks before. She was the only person who ever daunted the
old man and they’d hated each other with a passion even few ex-lovers ever
achieve. But now he was lighting her
next cigarette with a flourish worthy of Don Juan and smiling at her with the
warmth of a lap dog. I’d always
considered her a walking illustration of the dictionary definition of
bitch. But even I was looking at her
with new eyes and it wasn’t because of her beauty. She weighed at least three hundred pounds and
she looked as if her hair and her teeth were brushed by the same
implement. Still, at the moment, she was
behaving with a certain charm.
“As near as we can
determine, my dear,” Hartwig said softly, “it has to
do with the personality. Congenial types
are the most affected. They tend to
crack easily. It’s the people with,
let’s say, a little less gentility in their make up, that seem to be less
susceptible, and then only by degrees.”
“You mean jerks and
assholes are immune?” I interrupted.
“Well, Harry, how do
you feel about the aliens?” Hartwig asked.
I should have been
offended, but I was oddly flattered.
Except, “I love them too, it’s just that I’m not in love with them.”
“You can feel love?”
Susan asked me with evident surprise. I
could barely see her through the cloud of cigarette smoke veiling her
face.
“Depends what you
mean. I want to be accurate about this,” I thought for a moment. “I guess it’s
a matter of semantics.” She looked blank, so I continued, “Take a woman, when
I’m with a woman I do feel a certain affection for her, especially in bed,” I
grinned. “But it’s not like that for my friend Ted. When he loves a woman, he’s gone. He loses
himself, he loses perspective. Forgets to be a man.
It doesn’t ruin my life when I’m done with ‘em.
With Ted it’s different. He feels each one is the only one.” I shook my head.
“Stupid.”
“You mean there are
men who are capable of falling in love?”
Susan leaned forward, like she really wanted to know. It was a sexy
move.
“Sure, lots of guys. Whimps mostly. What they don’t get is that the chicks’ll turn on you anyway, eventually,” I shrugged.
“Once you figure that out, then you realize they’re all disposable.”
“Perfect!” Exclaimed Hartwig, “I told you he’s just the man we’re looking
for. Him, and people like him will be
the true survivors.”
“And you two,” I
pointed out.
They looked at me with
utter incomprehension.
“You’re here, aren’t
you? Not up in Sheep’s Meadow with the
rest of them. Even most of the Marine’s
have taken off, or didn’t you notice when you came in this morning? The President left last night -- the janitor
told me – you know, the guy who’s a secret neo-nazi?” I explained in answer to their quizzical looks.
“Most of the Secret S ervice is gone too. It’s only the three of us in this meeting.
Figure it out.” I finished smugly.
They were speechless
for a few seconds. Susan looked furious. Then they burst into uproarious
laughter. It was delicious to hear them
so I joined in and pretty soon we all had tears of joy streaming down our
cheeks. Our emotions were on the highwire, it wasn’t
that funny.
“Ok, now all we have
to do is make a list and collect those people who can resist,” Hartwig said as he tried to stop laughing.
“We
have a plan, Harry,” Susan chuckled. “And it involves you. We’re going to put you to work saving the
human race.”
Oh,
great.
“The
aliens are leaving,” Hartwig started to explain. I felt an instance of supreme sorrow. “No,
no,” Hartwig patted my arm, soothing away my grief
when he saw the expression on my face. “They’re only going away for six months.
It’s the new plan, the way it’s going to work from now on. They explained it to us this morning before
you got here. They’ll be here six
months, then away six months. The summer months, mostly, so the humans can work
the farms and grow things. We can’t seem
to do anything when they’re around so they’re going to go away and come back
for the harvest. We can use the time they’re gone to make arrangements. We think some of us will be able to
accomplish something for ourselves.”
“We
figure if we can get a group of babies,” Susan said, waving the smoke from her
face, “infants unaffected as yet by the aliens, and secret them away
underground in a mountain out west and raise them up….”
“For what?” I demanded before she finished. “There’s no proof that being buried underground
they won’t feel the affects of the alien’s nearness. What, you think they won’t scrabble to the
surface, clawing their way up and out to reach the aliens once they’ve grown?
This is a long term solution?”
“I
don’t know.” She said miserably. “It’s
what we’ve come up with.”
“We
just need to find people to take care of them.
People to raise them. But the caretakers themselves need to be
resistors.” Hartwig pointed out.
“And
hopefully be able to impart that personality to their charges.” Susan added.
“To raise a group of jerks and assholes.” I stated glumly.
“Well,
if you want to put it that way.” Hartwig frowned.
“I’d
choose prison guards,” I considered, “and postal workers, police officers, some
cab drivers and terrorists.”
“Writers,”
Susan said meaningfully to me.
“Psychologists,”
I spat back venomously, “the feminist variety.”
“Children,
children,” Hartwig shushed us both.
“What
about criminals?” I asked.
“They
turned out to be pansies, most of them. A very emotional bunch,” Hartwig shook his head.
“Same with sailors and soldiers and construction
workers.”
“Lawyers
might be good,” offered Susan.
We
spent the rest of the day gathering the list and the rest of the night combing
the city for appropriate people. Then we
took people’s infants from them and they didn’t seem to mind. We saved the
babies’ lives actually, me and all my like-minded pals who had no sense of
compassion, no kindness or goodwill. We found babies
abandoned in their cribs, newborns left to languish in hospitals and infants
tucked into strollers left alone on the streets where their parents left them
in their haste to go be with the aliens in Central
Park. We set up a daycare in the institute and all
my jerks and assholes became nannies and babysitters. They weren’t very good at childcare but I
guess that was the idea.
At the end of the week the aliens
left the planet. We knew they would
return. At first there was a prolonged
period of mourning, then a mass exodus began to the
countryside. Ted left for Kansas.
The exodus went far
more smoothly than expected. We didn’t
anticipate that the farms and small communities could have absorbed the numbers
of people they did so readily. Logistically
it seemed unsupportable. There was no one organizing transport or directing
people to specific locations. How could the little towns and
villages, feed, clothe and house the masses that invaded?
It
worked because people wanted it to work. They shared and they helped each
other. They cooperated. No one panicked,
no one complained. When people fell ill, their neighbors helped out. When
someone was hungry, others fed them.
When someone lacked clothing or a place to sleep, someone else opened
their doors and invited them in. We
heard in some places hundreds of people lived together in each of the little
houses in the towns. Others slept in
barns, or schools or municipal buildings, or even under the stars huddled
together like cats in sleeping bags loaned to them by new friends. They ate together, bathed together and every
morning, bright and early were out in the fields,
working the land.
It
was weird.
The
harvest that year was the best it has been since they’ve been keeping
records. And all
without chemicals or technological advances or modern farming methods. Everything was organic. The people were healthy and happy and felt
fulfilled in their work and their new lives.
Then
the aliens returned.
It
was the same story all over again.
Though this time the aliens skirted the now empty cities and spent their
time in the countryside. People ceased
their happy new lives and gathered only to worship the aliens and to starve to
death en masse. The aliens took the food
from the harvest. The people gave it gladly, but saved nothing for
themselves. People uncomplainingly let
their children die of hunger. Then they
died themselves. Most people died. The
aliens were clever though, and made certain a skeleton crew was sustained in
each township. The aliens arranged it so
there were sufficient people left alive to work next year’s growing season and
eventual harvest, but not too many to need all the food the aliens were taking
for themselves. It was brutal, only the
strongest survived. And yet people worshipped.
Hartwig had
commandeered a military transport and had it piloted by a Colombian drug runner
he’d gotten released from federal prison. We flew to the Kansas
wheat fields. We saw Americans
emaciated, reminiscent of scenes from Biafra. We didn’t find Ted.
It
worried me when I started to feel compassion for the remaining people. I wanted
to feed them. They didn’t ask us for food, they barely noticed our
existence. I tried to hate them, because
if I felt if I developed tenderness I might end up just like them, unable to
tear myself away from alien love. I
managed to hold on to my defective personality long enough for the jet to take
off as we made our way further west. I
broke down when one of the infants we rescued started bawling. I had to be
drugged to stop me from jumping out of the plane.
We’re
beginning our seventh year hidden within the complex under the mountain. The infants are now children. Not all of them are nice kids so there’s
hope. We let them hit each other,
encourage them not to share their toys and teach them to tattle on one
another. Some are already getting to be
good liars and we have a few bullies who look promising. We reward bad behavior and punish the little
angels. We neglect most of them to make
them feel alienated, insecure and hostile.
As
for the adults, nobody likes each other, nobody gets along and any one of us
would stab each other in the back given the opportunity, metaphorically of
course. We’re all we have.
We’ve
locked and barricaded ourselves under this mountain and fixed the exit so we
can’t figure out how to get out. All of
us want to. All of us, every day, want
to go find the nearest alien and be with them.
There may be hope for us. I figure once the rest of humanity is
completely wiped off the face of the earth by starvation and disease, the
aliens won’t have anyone to grow their groceries and they’ll go find some other
planet to plague with love. By that time
our brats will have grown up and they can go out to meet the new Eden.
But we might not last
that long. Yesterday afternoon I caught little Teddy trying
to dig a hole through a low roof of one of our caves. In my day we dug
for China,
Teddy was digging for the skies.
