Alien Pregnant by Elvis, page 13
The point. I swear I’m getting to the point, okay? Here it is.
I don’t remember now where the story came from. I can’t imagine it was the cover story, and I don’t know why I would have bought the thing. It was an honest-to-Buddha supermarket press newspaper—I forget which one—which is not the sort of thing I read anyway, simply because there’s nothing better on the inside than the cover headlines on the outside, which you can get for free, and since Carol Burnett won that libel suit most of the news is about television-series-reported-as-real-news.
This particular story was, on the surface, pretty harmless: Is Your Co-worker A Space Alien (it wanted to know)? It then went on to give you a nice little checklist of Ways To Tell.
The main thing I remember is is all stuff that could apply to anyone; a masterpiece of supermarket press writing. There were warning signs like about space aliens among us not knowing how to eat Earth Food—tiding to drink Jell-O, that sort of thing, just like the National Pit to try to give millions of Americans paranoia over their table manners—wearing inappropriate clothes (like what, for God’s sake? Looked at Women’s Wear Daily lately?), having inadequate knowledge of language and local customs (in New York?).
And then there was my favorite, which was “trying to pump coworkers for strategic information on Earth’s defenses”. Yeah, just what we worried about down below 14th Street, all right.
But it was sort of apposite, since all of us at Houston dressed like mudlarks and navigated like zombies, so I cut it out of the paper and blew it up to about 11x17 on the studio stat-camera, and waxed the back and stuck it up on the wall along with the rest of the local color. It got a few giggles, and Mikey didn’t take it down, but that was about it.
And that was where the trouble started, because about a week after that Mikey hired Clifford.
It was 9:30 of a Wednesday morning and I was sitting crouched over my light-table in company of my fellow sufferers when an Apparition walked through the door.
I could tell he was an Apparition because he was wearing a suit—and not any of those wussy colors like charcoal or navy, either. The suit was black, the shirt was white, there was a one-inch-wide knitted tie (black) with a plain gold tie clasp (yellow-metal tie clasp, as our friends the police like to say) making sure it wouldn’t get away. The Apparition was wearing real shoes (black), not sandals or sneakers, and he was carrying a cheap black briefcase that had been shipped Air Express from Nerd Central.
But Apparition sightings weren’t what I was getting paid for, so I went back to work.
Mistake. Now was when I actually should have run screaming into the night, even if it was mid-morning. Well, that’s what they always say, but I guess They (giant ants?) don’t have to make the rent. And besides, everything looked as normal as it usually gets below 14th Street (Chester Anderson joke). There’s a story about the toad in the crockpot that’s germane to this argument, by the way, but if I told it I’d probably be picketed by PETA. Isn’t freedom of speech wonderful?
Well, back to Clifford—a.k.a. The Apparition. It turned out he wasn’t a passing fancy. No, Clifford was our newest employee.
“This is Clifford,” Mikey said, as Clifford set down his briefcase in the carrel next to mine. Mikey P. being the owner and operator of Houston Graphics, condign cash cow, he got to make intellectual policy statements like that And Clifford must have been working here, or he wouldn’t be taking his lunch out of his briefcase in a series of neat brown-wrapped parcels and piling them next to the box of razor blades and technical pen humidifier with which Houston was wont to provide its new employees (those things never work, by the way. Fill your ink reservoir with ammonia instead when your pen’s not in use).
I looked at Clifford. Clifford looked at me. Then Clifford uttered the statement that would forever set the tone of our relationship.
“Gentleman’s Quarterly says that the new narrower silhouette is the menswear look for fall,” quoth Clifford.
I know what you’re thinking, right? After a five-page buildup of great subtlety I will reveal that the Cliff-man is a space alien. Sure I will. And then I’ll jump into my temporal rheosimulator and bop off to sell this to Planet Stories circa 1950, right?
Not. Trust me; I’m a starving writer.
Fact: Clifford swore he wasn’t a space alien. Okay? Satisfied? I even asked him.
It went like this:
Here was me, and here was this Official White Boy From Hell poster child. Clifford looked like an FBI agent gone to seed. He looked like he was from Oklahoma. Clifford just didn’t fit the sub-14th-Street ethnic blend. Blue eyes, light brown hair, skinny, no beard or mustache or earring. Or visible tattoo. Clifford looked, as I have said anon, like a White Boy From Hell. Transparent in a strong light.
And he was weird, make few mistakes about it, because when was the last time you ever saw someone wear a suit to work? Even excecutives don’t wear suits to work any more, or if they do they wear them over stupid little polo shirts—or (yig) over T-shirts—and Miami Vice has been off the air for years.
Clifford wore suits. With cute white shirts with the regulation number of white fake mother of pearl plastic buttons. Always.
But what the hell—Royce wore dresses (very nice ones; antique rayon, but then Royce was into retro as well as Grailology, and besides he didn’t do it all the time). Seiko wore black leather and studs—all the time. Even in the summer, when the temperature in the studio hit one hundred broken air conditioner degrees, and powdered herself down with alum and cornstarch so she wouldn’t sweat (never let them see you sweat). Seiko looked like a constipated vampire or a refugee from a canceled British TV series. And Angela—well, the less said about what Angela wore the better. I hope it was because she was into performance art. I did not ask. Ever. I am not precisely a coward, but blue-eyed women have a lot of problems to deal with in this life, as I shall explain in a few paragraphs. Meanwhile I did my best to remain in ignorance.
So yes, Clifford was weird. For weirdness’ sake he fit right in. We were all weird, in those thrilling days of yesteryear, Even me (I guess), if we’re being fair, and listening to Rodger-my-ex’s opinion but how much credence can you put in the words of a man who’s in the process of leaving you for a Tudor corset?
But this is about space aliens. Remember that checklist? The one that, actually, most of my fellow inmates came up one hundred percent positive on?
Clifford came up negative right down the line. Like he’d studied for it.
Like the first day. Obviously a place like Houston Graphics didn’t have a lunchroom, and eating at your desk was not encouraged, as mayo and repro don’t mix. But sometimes you did anyway, and Mikey didn’t make too much trouble about it as long as you were discreet.
So here’s Clifford, putting his sandwich on an actual china plate and pouring his soda into a real silica glass and doing the knife and fork bit and everything.
It was strange. And he never stopped doing it, every time he ate at his desk. China plate, silica glass. Stainless steel tableware. That was what the briefcase was for.
Don’t you see where this is going—at least, where it was going, back in the days when I was young and foolish and looking for distraction? Back before I sold my first book and went to my first science fiction convention and developed all the distraction a body was ever going to need in life?
Allow me to lay it all out for you. Clifford knew everything there was to know about about how to eat Earth food appropriately. He knew exactly how to wear Earth clothes, and never did anything like come to work wearing a tom lampshade and some Hefty bags (or a tea-dress in cabbage rose rayon. Or—).
And he never asked questions. In fact, if you wanted to know more than you ever wanted to know about anything, get stuck in Clifford’s idea of a conversation. Which I did, having the misfortune to sit right next to him and own a face that has always convinced people I want to start a conversation. Or probably, like I said, it’s the blue eyes. I have thought of getting colored contacts, but with my correction I’d have to wear glasses, too, and I can’t deal with that. Maybe mirrorshades (prescription mirrorshades? How declasse.) but that would only make things worse. It’s the curse of the blue-eyed woman. Trust me.
And what it meant in this context was that at the end of a week I knew how many stories tall the Empire State Building was. I knew how many people rode the subways (on the average) every day. I knew how many professional baseball teams there had been in the five boroughs since 1906, how long they were there, how many games they won, and against who. I even knew who hadn’t patented the automatic typesetter (Mark Twain. It’s in his autobiography, and a salutary lesson on the necessity of financial management for writers. Go look it up.).
In short, not only was Clifford very weird, Clifford was very weird in a focused, disciplined fashion that none of the rest of us could possibly beat even on a good day.
So naturally, less than six months after Clifford was hired, it occurred to me that if there were space aliens, and if they had seen the article in the National Midnight Astronomical Object, they would be very careful to make sure that none of the checklist could possibly apply to them.
In short, what convinced me that Clifford was a space alien was that he had absolutely none of the qualifying requirements to be one. He hadn’t even asked me about Earth’s defenses.
Yeah, I know, I’ve already told you that Clifford wasn’t a space alien—or at least that he said he wasn’t, and I promise
I haven’t got any contrary factoids that I’m going to reveal at the end of this story. This is, nevertheless, a weird, starkly unbelievable pulse-pounding true story. Promise.
Besides, would it actually be exciting if Clifford really-o truly-o was a space alien? I doubt it. Probably it would be depressing and New Wave, because here would be all these strange visitors from another planet living clandestinely among us, and what would it have done to the quality of life on Earth or the free market economy? I personally predict that when we do dance the whole “klaatu burada nikto” riff it will get 72 hours of coverage on CNN and have no other impact on life as we know it. And anyway, I can’t do a ‘No Contact’ story as funny and depressing as Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah—the story. My story. One (Blue-eyed) Woman’s Encounter with the Cutting Edge of Reality.
I really think I could have had a normal life if I’d been born with brown eyes.
Onward. Lecture time on the nature of experiential reality. When weird things happen, your memory tends (in retrospect) to drop the setting of the events from the information it files (which explains why witnesses make such lousy witnesses). Case in point (Rod Serling homage alert): the last conversation I had with Clifford. I remember everything he said. I remember everything I thought. I even remember when—and a couple of isolated window-dressing details (I’ll put them in when I get to the events)—but as far as I can visualize it, it could have been a radio program being broadcast to an empty soundstage.
Which is where being a writer and an amateur of deductive reasoning comes in. I’ll tell you the way it probably was and how everything probably looked and what everyone probably did. But except for what Clifford said, think of it as a Best Guess; which is a sort of frightening take on the nature of reality, if our projections of it depend on our memories and our memories are like that.
Okay, here we go. It’s winter—I think it was November, because I remember the studio was always dead in December and Mikey always laid people off just before Thanksgiving. It’s dark, because it’s after six. Everybody’s gone for the day but me and Clifford. This is okay by Mikey, since I’ve been there a year and I have my own keys to the inside door so I can get into the studio whenever the building is open—which also means I can lock up. I remember I worked late a lot when there was work because freelance artists are paid by the hour and the more hours you worked the more money you had. I was also trying to rack up bucks while there was work because money will get you through times of no work better than work will get you through times of no money. To coin an aphorism.
And Clifford was there, too, but not for the same reason. Clifford was okay at layout and pasteup, but he was also slow, which meant that Mikey was looking to let him go, and I’d told Clifford that one way of delaying this was to work extra time and not bill for it, so it looked like you got through your piecework in less time than you actually did. That was why Clifford was there.
In six months I’d never found out what his last name was.
I finished up for the night—I know this, because I would not start a potentially stupid conversation in the middle of working—and put everything away, and turned off my table so it was just my tensor lamp and Clifford’s and the light over the stat-camera lighting up the big studio space. And I said:
“Clifford, are you a space alien?”
‘There are no confirmed reports of UFO sightings,” said Clifford, who never—now that I came to think of it—asked questions requiring answers.
“Yeah, but Clifford, are you a space alien?” I said, or something similarly witty and persistent.
Clifford looked at me. “Don’t you think that’s a suspicious sort of question?” Which was a rhetorical question, so it didn’t count. Behind him I could see my old stat of the “Is Your Coworker A Space Alien” article stuck up on the wall of Clifford’s carrel, having migrated there from the wall beside the door.
“You are so a space alien,” I said with the immense maturity that characterized my actions in those days.
Clifford sighed. “I am not a space alien.”
Which you would think would end the conversation, but you know how it is when you start asking stupid questions—it’s just like potato chips.
“So if you’re not a space alien, Cliffie, what are you?” I riposted.
Clifford sighed again.
“My name is Clifford Mutton-Jones. I’m an ethnographer.”
Now as we have all learned in later years, an ethnographer is someone who studies ethnogs. But at the time I must have looked like somebody who thought “ethnographer” was another word for space alien.
It’s the blue eyes.
“I’m an ethnographer from Aphasia State College,” Clifford expanded patiently. “I study cultures. Earth cultures. I’m not a space alien studying Earth cultures. I’m studying space aliens.”
It wasn’t really Aphasia State College, but I can’t remember the name and I don’t want to get sued if I get it wrong. Some place in Pennsyltucky, anyway. But at the time I gave Clifford’s statement all the serious consideration you would give to E-mail from the Twilight Zone delivered by someone who was between you and the door.
You may wonder why it was okay for Clifford to be a space alien and not okay for him to be a soon-to-be professor from Boombatz University. The answer to this is that academics are weird desperate sophonts capable of bizarre irrational behavior and space aliens aren’t any weirder than New Yorkers.
“And, um, where do you study space aliens, Clifford?” I asked. I reached for my purse and that changed my angle of vision enough that the Austrian crystal snowflake that Royce had hung on his tensor lamp hit the light by the stat-camera and made a gorgeous eight-pointed star prism against my glasses. I mention this specially because that’s the one thing I actually definitely remember seeing.
“Here,” said Clifford morosely.
Here.
The Cliff-man studied space aliens here.
Clifford was studying us.
We were space aliens?
Not since eighth grade, when I caused riots at the June M. Triplett Elementary School by proclaiming that I was an exchange student from Mars had I seriously considered the possibility that I was from another planet. It was an interesting thought. I did a severe brain-cudgel for corroboratory evidence, but actually I have never had any performance anxiety ingesting gelatin desserts of any kind and gave it up as wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, secure in my undivided attention, Clifford was expounding.
“You see,” said Clifford, “when I decided I wanted to do my doctoral dissertation on disenfranchised cultures—aliens living on Earth—I realized right off that the most important thing to do was to gain your trust. Paradoxically, this could best be achieved not by emulating your own culture patterns, but by maintaining an explicit ethnographic distance between interviewer and subject through the use of universal culture markers.”
This was the longest nonstatistical speech I ever heard Clifford make. I wanted to explain that he hadn’t interviewed anybody, much less gained their trust, and that he was in the wrong place besides if what he wanted was space aliens.
On the other hand, who was I to stand in the way of someone becoming a Doctor of Ethnography for the University of Gibberish? I said something mordant and witty like:
“Yeah, Cliffie, I see how that works. Absolutely.”
Which must have satisfied him because I honestly don’t remember any more of the conversation and if I could make anything up I would. I left (which means that someone else with keys showed up or else Clifford left with me), Clifford went back to work (or else left when I did), and if this were fiction I would never have seen him again, but since it isn’t, Clifford Mutton-Jones worked at Houston Graphics another two weeks (or so) and was fired as part of Mikey Pontifex’s Great Thanksgiving Massacre. (I was not. In fact, I worked at Houston for four more years, trivia fans.)
We did not, as far as I remember, discuss ethnography again. I didn’t mention it to anybody else, either, but I looked it up in one of the encyclopedias we had around the studio and there really is such a tiling—it’s where sociologists or anthropologists or some damn kind of academic go out and study weird alien (Earth alien) microcultures, like Trekkies or tattooists.
