Is Anybody Out There Read online

  Thus, Them. The aliens.

  “Where are they?” Dr. Lantz asked on a sunny October Wednesday. “If there are aliens who can travel across galaxies, wouldn’t they already be here if they wanted to come?”

  “I went to a convention once,” Topolski said. “This question apparently comes up a lot. I was there to get an autograph from my favorite writer when I was a kid. He was on this panel and it turned out that the panel discussion was about that question. Everyone just acted superior to everyone else and I never went to another convention. I like the books better when I don’t know anything about the people who write them.”

  “And what was the answer to the question?” Dr. Lantz prompted.

  “That there is no answer. Everybody chooses the things they’re going to believe in and bases all of their speculations on those. Articles of faith is what they are.”

  The aliens look like trees, and are biding their time. Or they are microscopic and nobody has ever seen one because they didn’t know to look.

  On Dalton’s way to work, radio signals passed through his body. Next to him on the freeway, people talked on their cell phones. Some of them used hands- free devices and some did not. Each of their conversations, transmogrified into electronic signals, passed through Dalton’s body. Radio signals passed through his body. Cosmic rays survived their passage through the Earth’s atmosphere and passed through his body. He was at the center of a million conversations and broadcasts that he would never know existed.

  Dalton swung off the highway and onto Table Mesa Drive. He could see NCAR at the top of the aforementioned mesa. In his office, just down the hill from there, his computer was running a SETI@home helper program.

  The aliens arrive unobtrusively, in twos and threes, dropping down in entry capsules designed to elude radar detection and aimed at unpopulated areas. Slowly they work their way into the small towns and farming settlements, traveling strangers taciturn and hard-working. Over a period of decades they put down roots. They work their way into the structures of power and governance. Eventually they are elected to positions in national governments. When they reveal themselves, it is too late for anyone to do anything but go along with their plans.

  Dalton debated calling his ex- wife. He felt fortunate that they did not hate each other. He was lonely without her, and she without him. Or so she said. Still, they both knew better than to try a reunion. Some events in every life leave a permanent mark. Nietzsche’s famous formulation, in Dalton’s opinion, was flat wrong. That which did not kill you often just crippled you emotionally to the extent that you might as well be dead because as things stood you were just permanently alienated from the possibility of ever having a reciprocal emotional relationship with anyone. Ever again.

  “Really,” asked Dr. Lantz. “Do you really think so?”

  The aliens are wavelengths of energy and probability, no doubt responsible for the timing of those dropped calls that created a tense miscommunication culminating in a bitter fight between two people who love each other.

  The problem was a daughter. Once he had looked at her face. Just once. But he and Marcia had already known they weren’t staying together when she got pregnant. She wanted to have the baby, sort of just in case, Dalton thought. He had agreed, sort of just in case . . . and then there she was, this tiny girl with dark, dark blue eyes. Dalton looked at her face and wanted to name her.

  It wouldn’t have been a good idea. They gave her to the social worker, who assured them that she would be adopted into a good home. She was healthy, white, and an infant. In the adoption market, that made her elite.

  “I’m glad we did that,” Marcia said as the social worker walked away. Then she checked her watch. She had an appointment with her lawyer later that morning, Dalton knew. He had an appointment with his, too. Their court date was coming up.

  So long, little girl, he thought. We gave you a start, at least.

  A giant disc-shaped spacecraft composed of a metal that returns a highly unusual spectrographic reading appears in the skies over Big Rock Elementary School in central Michigan. A teacher, Roger Flintough, vanishes out of his classroom, disappearing before the eyes of his second-graders. When he reappears in the classroom thirty seconds later, he tells the class to keep working on their art projects; they have been drawing colorful representations of the ecology in a rain-forest canopy. Walking down the hall to the principal’s office, Flintough announces that the aliens in the giant spacecraft are offering humanity a bargain. When media crews begin to arrive shortly thereafter, he repeats this. What’s the bargain, they want to know.

  “Servitude for survival,” Flintough says. Then he explodes into a bloody mist.

  She was in the face of every girl he saw. Didn’t matter what age.

  A ridiculous thing happens. Using machines vast and inscrutable, a race of starfaring aliens creates invisible barriers around the great works of humanity, preserving them for interstellar tourism. But the great works of humanity are not what humanity itself might have guessed. Among them are:

  a three-year-old girl, running down a beach to stop and gaze out over the Atlantic . . . over and over again . . .

  Las Meninas and everything else in its wing of the Prado . . .

  the color of five o’clock skies in December along the Continental Divide west of Fort Collins, Colorado . . .

  a museum of fish hooks in a tin-roofed shed owned by the fifth in a dynasty of fishermen outside Bolama, Guinea-Bissau . . .

  nine hundred and sixty-one square miles of the Mediterranean including two islands of the Peloponnese . . .

  a cleared and graded parcel of land outside Shenzhen, China, on which nothing was ever built . . .

  a cloud that happened to be hanging over the Grand Canyon the day the aliens arrived . . .

  two dead dogs lying nose to tail in a ditch outside Busia, Kenya . . .

  a jar of teeth sitting on the bedside table of a dentist in Manila . . .

  the first alien to land on Earth, forever waving and motioning toward the forgettable vista of southwestern Minnesota behind him . . .

  How the aliens are doing this, no one knows.

  We have already killed the polar bears, Dalton was thinking as he sat in traffic on the Boulder Turnpike listening to earnest, pessimistic voices on the radio. Even if they’re going to be around another fifty years or so.

  Who wouldn’t want someone to come and take all this away?

  This is what he told Lantz the next Wednesday. Outside, the bushes were flowering and full of bees. “Right? We screwed things up. Time for the deus ex machina. Or the alien ex space-ina, or something.”

  “I can see why difficult times make people want a do-over,” Dr. Lantz said. “But why? What good would it do? If you get a do-over, doesn’t that just encourage you to make the same mistake again instead of learning how to avoid it?”

  “If you’re talking about the polar bears, we know how to avoid it. We just didn’t.” It was almost the end of one of Lantz’s fifty-minute hours. Dalton slow-walked the conversation the rest of the way, preferring to keep his thoughts to himself. Lantz knew he was doing it, and let Dalton know in his oh-so-nonjudgmental-therapist kind of way.

  Then he went home and flipped through the phone book. She could be anywhere, he thought. Anywhere. I could be putting my finger on her right . . . now.

  He looked. The name under his index finger was Mahmood Qureishi.

  Maybe next time.

  “If there are Grays, let them come and get me,” he said to his shrink. “I’ll even deal with the anal probes. Whatever. Just let me know you’re out there.”

  “Why? Why is it so important to know they’re out there?”

  Dalton looked out the window. “Jesus, Doctor Lantz,” he said. “Don’t you ever get lonely?”

  The alien is discovered cold and hungry, dying, in the woods behind an ordinary exurban subdivision. It is killed accidentally—but not really—and when the police arrive, they and the landowner agree that
they’ll dig a hole and forget the whole thing. On their way home, the police debate whether they should have gotten in touch with the FBI. But who wants the feds involved?

  “It’s an idea of the human I can’t let go of,” he said. “I don’t think anyone should let go of it.”

  Silence on the phone as Marcia thought about this. After a while she said, “Dalton, I really never know exactly what you’re trying to say.”

  “What do you think she’s doing?” he asked.

  There was another long silence.

  “Sometimes,” Marcia said at the end of it, “I think you sort of died a long time ago.”

  On Dalton’s computer screen, a sinuous graphic told him either that the aliens weren’t out there yet or that the SETI people hadn’t yet learned how to look.

  A nine-year-old boy in South Portland, Maine, looking at the moon through a telescope he got for Christmas, says, “Daddy, there’s a building on the moon.” His father is looking in another direction, having vaguely untoward and thoroughly unoriginal thoughts about the positioning of the Orion Nebula. “Doubt it, pal,” he says. “But let’s have a look.” The boy’s older sister is already looking. “Yep,” she says. “There sure is. Who built a building on the moon?” The father looks. Yep. There sure is.

  Sometimes he thought Marcia was right, that what he was planning and trying to find a way to accomplish was nothing more than an acknowledgment of something that had already happened. He tried this idea out on Dr.

  Lantz, who said, “Listen. It’s a big empty universe out there. Right? Except no. It’s full of stars and nebulae and dark matter and mystery. Mystery, Dalton! That’s what the universe is made of, and it’s big enough that no matter how much we learn about it, it will always be made of mystery. If that’s what you’re having a problem with, stop talking about your ex-wife or this daughter you gave up for adoption.”

  Lantz flipped through his notes. “Here’s what you said about her back when we first started meeting. ‘We gave you a start,’ you said was your thinking then. And you did. In a way, it’s all anyone can ask. So why the guilt?”

  “Why the guilt? Do you have kids?”

  “I do. But you can’t expect that to mean that I understand why you feel the way you do.”

  Later that day, Dalton stared at his computer screen as his machine sifted through signals. It was inevitable, wasn’t it? That a signal would come, or had come, or was coming?

  The problem was that time was big, bigger than space, and Dalton Topolski was so, so small. All of the conversations in the universe passed through and around him. He could not stop them, couldn’t bend them around to come his way again.

  On a September Wednesday, military radars across the world detect a swarm of small vehicles descending into the atmosphere. Efforts to shoot them down are unsuccessful. Spreading out into a flight pattern calculated to overfly the Earth’s entire surface in a maximally efficient manner, these drones release an aerosolized nanovirus tailored to interfere with the absorption of oxygen into the blood. After that, there is little to report.

  “Ago,” he said to Dr. Lantz at the beginning of what he had already decided would be their last visit. “What a word.”

  Dr. Lantz looked at him. “It is a word that locates an event in time with respect to the speaker’s present,” he said. “I’m not sure what’s exceptional about that.”

  “How can we exist both now and then?”

  “What you mean is how can you still be so convinced that you did the wrong thing giving up your daughter,” Dr. Lantz said. “Listen, Dalton. You keep constructing this elaborate superstructure about alien life and time and space and the nature of the universe because you can’t face the fact that you’re not happy because when you go home at night, you’re alone. Until you face that and stop trying to put an extraterrestrial face on it, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

  “The tough- love moment,” Dalton said after a pause.

  “You leave me no choice,” said Dr. Lantz.

  “I thought you did that,” Dalton said.

  “Did what?”

  “The superstructure thing,”

  “No, Dalton,” Dr. Lantz said. “That might be the way you remember it, but it’s right here in my notes. That’s not how it happened.”

  “Yeah,” Dalton said, looking out the window. He loved spring. The problem with spring was that it turned into summer, which meant that fall was coming.

  The aliens are us, and our desire for them is the yearning of any sentient organism to know its origins. Where did we come from? We rode the chariots of the gods across the holographic universe, panspermiatically herding comets toward a universal amnesia that survives only as a longing we get when we look at the stars, for reasons we are never quite able to articulate.

  She would be fourteen years old. She would know that she was born in Denver, but she could be anywhere. In four years she might choose to find out who her birth parents are, and she might arrive bright-eyed and curious. Or she might arrive sullen and angry. Or she might not arrive at all. Dalton thought these thoughts while he watched his computer analyze the background noise of the universe. In his head he answered Dr. Lantz’s question. So what if I am, he thought.

  The mountains were high. The universe was big. The future was too uncertain to endure. Water was wet and prevented the proper function of the lungs. There was a place he knew where people were not supposed to climb near a waterfall because it was dangerous. It was in Boulder Canyon, not far from a sign that said in case of flash flood, motorists should climb to safety.

  Dalton Topolski thought that maybe irony was the last straw. The irony of her coming to look and him being gone, the irony of him holding on because she might come to look and then her never doing it. . . .

  The next morning he was still staring at his computer screen and it was still doing the same thing and nothing had changed inside Dalton Topolski’s head except a modulation of curiosity toward resolution. He thought he had everything worked out. What else was there to say? It was the easiest thing in the world to die. No one was out there who cared.

  When they’re standing at adjacent urinals in the men’s room of a Best Buy on Wadsworth Avenue in Lake-wood, Colorado, one man (who is actually not a man) says to another, “I want to tell you a secret.”

  The word he was looking for was hello. The universe was one big hello, said to everyone else but him.

  There are no aliens.

  The aliens are on their way.

  Residue

  Michael Arsenault

  They went outside, lay down on the grass, and looked up at the stars.

  Everything was quiet for about a minute, and then:

  “So . . .”

  “So?”

  “So what are we doing out here?”

  “We’re . . . nothing. We’re just out here.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. If you really need a reason I guess we could say we’re communing with nature. Or something.”

  “Since when do we do that?”

  “Since . . . tonight. Since right now.”

  “This doesn’t sound like you. Why are you being weird?”

  “I just want to be outside for a little while, okay? Out of the house and away from distractions.”

  “What distractions?”

  “Lots of things. Television, for instance.”

  “What’s wrong with TV?”

  “Nothing, just God forbid it should ever be turned off while we’re conscious.”

  “You’re touchy all of a sudden.”

  “Look, I just want to lie here, have a moment of peace, and see if I can connect with something. Stare up into the sky, and, I don’t know . . . ponder the meaning of the universe. What’s so weird about that?”

  “It’s not like you.”

  “Fine. It’s not like me. I’m different now.”

  “I think I feel bugs crawling up my legs.”

  “Maybe you should just go back insid
e.”

  “Don’t be so—”

  “No one’s forcing you to stay out here.”

  “I’m not . . .”

  “You’re not what?”

  “I’m doing my best, okay? I’m trying.”

  “I guess.”

  “ . . . Do you . . . ?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Don’t bite my head off. I was just going to ask if you know any of their names.”

  “Whose names?”

  “The stars. The planets. The . . . whatever those patterns are called.”

  “The constellations?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. Don’t really know their names. I mean, of course I know some of them, but I don’t know which is which.”

  “Me neither. I never really thought much about it before, but now that we’re here looking up I feel kind of ignorant.”

  “You’re not ignorant.”

  “I feel that way. Ignorant. Not to mention insignificant.”