The Year of the Fruit Cake Read online

  “Are you going to make amazing jokes all day?” asked Trina.

  “I can and I shall, for there will be enough chocolate to cover your misery.”

  I’ve never tasted chocolate. I had the opportunity to do all kinds of things when I was pulling information together, but I didn’t see the use in tasting strange foodstuffs that were no doubt only suited to humans. Potentially dangerous. I still need to examine this subject. This note can be considered the beginning of my examination.

  One of the things that I least understand about humans is their obsession with certain foods and drinks. On this charming occasion, the women would be spending the whole day tasting different types of chocolate and making different types of chocolate and even, if I understand it properly, drinking different kinds of chocolate. I’ve seen mentions of drinking many times before, so this must be correct. It’s one of those things about a culture that can happen, but feels so very wrong when placed against one’s own culture that they are rejected out of hand, time after time. We should have been alerted when the drinking of an edible substance came up as an action any of our people observed on Earth. Native instincts were undermined.

  Even they themselves didn’t quite understand a whole day of chocolate, I suspect, and perhaps weren’t looking forward to so much addictive substance in so short a time period. I say this because they showed clear signs of discomfort.

  The first hour was a big meeting in a large room, and everyone present was given samples and ate samples while being given information. I have the words in front of me, but I can’t re-create the experience from the words. I can’t even do it from the additional data. They don’t mean anything to me. They’re just words and material surroundings. Humans have more senses than we record (as we do, but that’s not relevant) and this is, today, a problem. It is at this point in my study that I realise that reconstruction is not sufficient. I have called from the archives all the things I thought were important. I was very proud of myself for finding the texture of the table and the level of background noise. Five senses humans have, and I knew this and called up sensual material.

  This was hubris. I’m faced with a day that proved to be one of the six critical occasions, and all I can technically say is that it was possibly because the women spent more time together.

  If they bonded in any special way, it was over something I can’t call forward. Something that means nothing to me, emotionally.

  At this moment, I’m further from understanding than I’ve ever been.

  Since I made that last note, I’ve spoken to the supervisors. They can’t approve another trawl for information that covers a wider range of senses. Given the current state of Earth, it costs far too much and would, in any case, be unreliable. They indicated their disappointment in me not seeing that this was a possibility when the initial material was obtained.

  To the supervisors, reading my notes, it’s obvious that chocolate is already clearly a substance of critical importance. It doesn’t need verifying. Possibly the actual substance that lured the Judge into doing the impossible. Did I say “irksome chocolate fruitcake”, or was it “chocolate irksome fruitcake”? Or did I merely imply the chocolate? The supervisors think it was chocolate cake the whole time. Probably literally. They have no idea what cake is, and fail to understand metaphors.

  Ironic that English has the word “hubris” when it doesn’t have descriptors for the foodstuff these women were testing. Not specific descriptors that make sense to someone like me. One can describe cream with the words used for chocolate, or mousse, or ice cream. Anything fatty and mellifluent. The colour descriptions, likewise, refer to so many other substances.

  I am tripped up by an oddity of human culture. Obviously there isn’t a clear link between the specificity of vocabulary and the importance of something, for how could I possibly have ascertained the importance of chocolate from the limited vocabulary directly associated with the substance? Not even my five women have specific vocabulary for this substance that would occupy their entire day. And how can something be important without clear vocabulary to indicate this? Maybe my own vocabulary is not up to the task?

  Retrospectively, this makes sense. There are jokes on social media around the time of a Mad Max movie. A Mad Max movie—this is precise. It’s of clear cultural import. And yet the jokes relied on the word “girl” used atypically. “Girl” is a very common word.

  Human linguistics isn’t as simple as it should be, given their single brain. They have layers and levels of variants from the personal to the language, from one person to millions of millions. And my capacity to learn the language through immersion has obscured some of the distinctive features, for it has brought me into an idiolect, directly, without sufficient context.

  I shall take a break from this study. I will only return when I have determined how chocolate caused our simple and rational decision lines to fall apart so completely.

  I am so much more human than I was when I began this project. In no way at all is this a good thing. I understand now that chocolate is no more important to humans than sports or the place where one grows up. These all have changing importance according to the person and their lives.

  A simple description. Unfortunately, it makes no sense at all.

  I still have to examine chocolate because I’ve been told to, because I identified it as a potential trigger, and we’re still lacking potential triggers. That identification was quite real, even though I’m now ambivalent about how it could be so. I have confused myself.

  There are two possibilities as I see it.

  The first is that the chocolate has damnable effects. The powers think this is the issue, now that I’ve alerted them to the existence of the substance. I was depressed by this possibility a moment ago, but I suddenly find it inexpressibly amusing.

  The second is that it isn’t chocolate at all that is to blame. If it’s not chocolate, it has to be something else concerning that group of women.

  If it isn’t chocolate, what the hell is it? I hope it’s chocolate. Both the first and second critical events are focussed on chocolate. (It’s such a good thing that I have never tasted it, and will never have the opportunity to. Obviously, chocolate is a very destructive substance.)

  There is nervousness about spending the whole day in the company of chocolate. Chocolate has physical effects on bodies. The women know this. They didn’t talk about it as much as they talk about their hormones or their shopping, so it’s deep knowledge.

  If, at a later stage, it appears that I have misinterpreted, I shall return to this day and analyse it again. Yes, I shall leave it here at this time. I do not have to explore the chocolate-making, nor the indecorous moment in the women’s toilets. I have my tentative answer. The file will be just open enough to admit new ideas, for my supervisors said that when the situation is this obvious, one needs a potential second explanation to meet the briefing requirements, but mostly what I’ll do is find evidence to demonstrate that chocolate is the culprit.

  This will be a satisfactory outcome. All we will have to do in future is ascertain if the race under Judgement has an equivalent to chocolate. If it has, I can recommend we pull out immediately and put them on the no-go list. If it has not, we can proceed with advanced anthropological surveys leading to possible Judgement.

  A very satisfactory outcome, I feel. I still have to prove it, but chocolate has appeared in every single critical incident, so it won’t be difficult to demonstrate.

  Even if I don’t believe it myself.

  The Observer’s Notes

  “Human life is more about waiting for Godot than it is about waiting for God.”

  —overheard on a bus

  So few simple models fit this society. I use one, and then modify it and modify it until it digs its heels in and refuses to explain what I see. When it becomes stubborn, I reject it.

  I wish I’d studied
human anthropology. ‘Anthropology’ is the wrong word, but it’s the closest speakers of this language have. It might have helped. I also wish I was permitted to talk to my colleagues. Then maybe I’d understand what to do. They seem to have innate knowledge, regardless of the state of their memories: I lack this knowledge.

  My deficiency in knowing how I should go about my tasks is not our only difference. The longer I’m here, the more I realise how much of a failure I am. Yesterday I tasted my failure, when my husband gently pointed out that he was unable to eat dinner. He forgave me, he said. This was not the first time I’d forgotten his allergy. I don’t even know how to work within a human marriage, much less the tasks I am formally assigned.

  The point is, of course, that I consider these matters outside tech sessions, whereas everyone else seems to operate entirely as humans most of the time, and only know who and what they really are during those tech sessions. They don’t know they know, but I know I don’t know.

  Right now, it’s a waiting game.

  I need to develop systems to understand what’s happening around here, and I need to make interpretations, otherwise I am a waste of time and space. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, but I’m scared to ask. It may be that others fail the way I have and that they’ve lost their essential personality. That they’re aliens masquerading as humans, but hollow at the core.

  This is my biggest fear. This is why I can’t ask. That there’ll be nothing left of me.

  I make up a system, and apply that system to everything I possibly can until the system fails because it’s too complicated and too heavy and cannot sustain the data. My husband helps, for both our lives are easier when I remember the everyday and fail to poison him by mistake. When it becomes too complicated, my memory becomes more erratic and he warns me. I have notes that he gives me so that he doesn’t have to explain. Then I start all over again.

  It’s becoming easier now. I cause less damage. This is why he was upset with me when I nearly killed him by mistake. I think it was easier when I was needy, and it’s easier when I’m competent, but in-between is difficult for both of us.

  He doesn’t love me as much as he did (the look in his eyes when he gave me my engagement ring is long gone), but he’s there for me. He is scared for me, I think, if he leaves.

  My models help me forget this, most of the time. That’s something I want to forget. Or grow beyond. It’s lonely to be unloved but to occupy so much of a person’s waking life.

  I need to move on now. Be safer.

  I make descriptions of this culture. My new one is in terms of privilege and not-privilege, in terms of white and male. Fragments of the culture in which I currently reside. My memory takes longer to break down when I do this: the system is reinforced in my every day.

  My descriptions don’t look at Earth people, but Australians (and possibly other parts of the English-speaking world) at this time. It looks at those with advantage and those without. Those who are blessed and those who hurt. It’s very oppositional. And I am not one of those insiders who are blessed. There is some tension in this that I’m beginning to acknowledge. I suspect I wasn’t in a beta group back home. Alpha into beta does not go.

  Thus endeth the lesson.

  I cannot like this system. I cannot.

  Today is a day when I’m very pleased not to be human.

  The woman’s slow voice...

  was counting again

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.

  Summer holidays. That time between one university year and the next, where one replenishes one’s funds and rests one’s brain. This is the perfect theory of the summer holiday. It reflects an imperfect world.

  There were no jobs. The economy resembled the undead and so did most of the people in my vicinity. I walked into a dress shop, however, obviously not one of the walking dead produced by this undead economy. I asked if there was any work going, and was instantly employed. It was like something out of a teen novel. I sold semi-luxury clothes to strangers from just before Christmas until I was twenty-one.

  I learned so much about artificial skins, about hang and drape and feel and colour and texture and how to be politely off-putting to anyone who the boss thought would not give the shop the desired sense of fashion. If a woman had a poor complexion, was overweight, dressed down, and if I didn’t give her the polite rebuttal, then she would be faced with a much more direct and nasty one from the boss.

  Everything was to do with style. Nothing was to do with kindness unless style and shape and income were already present. Even the unkindness, however, was done with style.

  This is where I learned that cruelty could be soft and even sweet. The tool I acquired was the capacity to watch the slump of shoulders or the defiant intake of breath, the angry mouth or the cheeky “this doesn’t affect me” tilt to the head. There are so many methods women have of dealing with the gentle rebuff. There are so many ways of administering the rebuff. The fact that we used so many methods in the shop was the worst of all, however, for it taught these women that they were unacceptably large or sloppy or poor, and that the gates of heaven would be forever denied them.

  I spent my quiet time watching women walk past the shop, defiantly not looking in the window, or looking wistful and then resolutely turning their head away, or busying their body language with something else or… These were the women the shop had rebuffed so very much that they couldn’t bear to come in. No matter how successful their lives were, they had the memory of being hurt when innocently buying clothes.

  Working in a dress shop was quite possibly the cruellest and most educative job I could find. If anything hardened me and caused me to hate in my university years, it was this experience. Being cruel to others blunted my sensitivity, it lost me access to my gentle soul. I don’t know if I’ve ever found it again.

  The Observer’s Notes

  “It is impossible to eat elephants,” stated the boy to his father.

  “I told you, you eat it one bite at a time.”

  “The skin’s too thick.”

  —overheard on a bus

  I ought to be in a US sitcom. My life ought to be Third Rock from the Sun. And that ought to be an aphorism.

  Say it. “My life ought to be Third Rock from the Sun.”

  Look at it one more time. “My life ought to be Third Rock from the Sun.”

  Leave it to admire another day. “My life ought to be Third Rock from the Sun.”

  Real life doesn’t work like US sitcoms and it most certainly doesn’t work like aphorisms. It’s impossible to leave a situation static to return to and to admire another day. It’s almost impossible to admire even the first time. It’s too intimate. I’m pretty certain humans do these things as a giant pretence that their lives are under control. That everything can be explained, or laughed at, or both.

  Me, I’m making up my own techniques from this. A year ago I was lost. I was petrified. I latched onto anything that would give me answers. Including popular song.

  You can hear echoes of my music in my speech from time to time. I sing the songs sometimes, and my husband sings along. It’s one of the things that binds us. It helps a bit. I started chronicling my experiences in order to diminish the sense of vastness and impossibility the outside world gave me. Humanity was too much.

  Then I remembered that I’m here as an observer. That there are others. That I’m one of many, but I am the only one in this place at this moment watching humanity from whatever direction appeals. I feel alone and overwhelmed, but I’m neither. It’s like the male voice joining in when I sing. I’ve always been solitary, but I’ve never been alone. It’s the nature of the job. Maybe it’s the nature of me.

  I tried joining a self-help group, attending the theatre, doing Renaissance danci
ng. All these activities taught me is that humanity distrusts difference. Even polite humanity. Very nice people othered me in a series of very charming ways.

  My answer is generally science fiction. Also Flanders and Swann. Always Gloria Gaynor. Today’s theme is Flanders and Swann, for I yearn to stay in an elephant’s nursing home until I get my memory back. Flanders and Swann fit my internal self-understanding far, far better than Third Rock from the Sun.

  I like my cultural echoes. I like my jail, too. I don’t want my memory back. I especially like walking down the street of my jail and looking for weeds in the gaps in the pavement. Sometimes the weeds contain the prettiest flowers. I think that this is a symbol somewhere and sometime. For me it’s a good experience. Once, the pavement split and gave way to a miniature iris. Profoundly purple and exquisite. It really ought to be a symbol. Without most of my memory, would I even know?

  Gloria Gaynor, science fiction and Flanders and Swann, and, on a miserable day when I’m glad I’m not human and am tempted to poison pigeons in the park, Tom Lehrer. It wouldn’t harm for my old alien overlords to sing rousing Lehreric choruses.

  Science fiction always starts my list, for it means that whenever I feel particularly alone I can decide on a particular trope to apply to my situation. I can live the dream of the solitary alien on the planet Earth.

  Am I an ironic observer?

  Am I a judge who will decide the fate of humanity?

  Am I a bloody anthropologist observing everything and getting involved despite themselves?

  Am I a time-traveller, documenting the dead?

  Do I represent collectors, come to identify and steal the best humankind can offer?

  Do I represent a race of invaders, with the goal of destroying humanity and taking its place?

  Or am I simply barking mad, and are the days like today when I remember things actually the days when I’ve lost my connection to reality?