Songs for the Deaf, page 9
“I’ll go,” she said.
Frank bought the tickets and reserved the room. They got their shots and passports together. He hoped the trip would help him celebrate his divorce and the beginning of a new life. Then the date for the divorce got pushed back, and Frank asked her to hold the tickets so his wife wouldn’t find out. She knew what was coming.
Five days before the trip, Frank missed their Thursday golf date. He didn’t call, and he didn’t stop by the golf store to chat. When she tried to reach him, he didn’t pick up.
She felt taken advantage of, like she’d accepted something less than she deserved out of politeness. Having reduced her wants, she found even those were too much. It was the mistake she’d made when she was young, when falling in love with a poet had tricked her into thinking her life would be more meaningful.
She went to India by herself.
On the long flight that passed through Frankfurt, she could sprawl out because the seat beside her was empty. She could look her worst and no one would care.
After the ordeal of the Delhi airport and the long bus ride to Agra, she laughed when she finally got to the hotel. Frank had reserved a room with twin beds. They’d have kissed with one foot on the floor, held hands across the nightstand in the dark. Like an old TV show.
When she showed up for her tee time at the Agra Golf Club the following day, the Taj Mahal’s marble dome and minarets rose above the tree line in the distance, as promised. From this angle, they were pale in the too-bright morning sun. While beautiful, they weren’t life-changing the way she’d hoped.
“The view is different late in the day,” her caddy told her. “I could get you in.”
The tall, young caddy had a peach-fuzz moustache and a wide, bright smile. A tangle of dark hair curled out from under his white cap and spiraled over his forehead. He kept a respectful distance and, after his bold first promise, spoke only when spoken to. Under his watchful eye, she played nervously and lost an historic number of balls in the trees and golden marshes. The whole trip seemed a waste. She’d expected to feel independent and worldly; instead, she felt disappointed and out of place.
Only a vague promise in her caddy’s eyes kept her from quitting. When the round was over she asked him if she could try again tonight.
“At sunset,” he said, “the Taj Mahal shows its colors. You will fall in love.”
She smiled as she tipped him.
That evening he was waiting for her when the cab dropped her outside the club. He took her bags, and they bypassed the clubhouse for the first tee. He was right; on the Taj Mahal’s marble skin, the pink and blue sky gave the illusion of life. To watch the colors change and move and slip into shadow was to fall in love with everything and nothing; it didn’t matter which. Here was the poetry her young beatnik had promised and never delivered.
Her caddy waited until the third fairway to touch her. He came up behind her and placed his fingers on the waist of the golf skirt she’d bought with her employee discount.
He was half her age and smelled of cardamom and coriander and the thin, musky cologne he’d applied over a day’s sweat. He led her off the fairway and under the spinning leaves of a Peepal tree, where he pinched open her waistband and bra and laid her down naked on a bed of moist brown leaves. She kept her eyes open and watched the play of light on the Taj Mahal’s dome and spires, the great slow magic trick that made everything worthwhile.
“Do you love me?” asked the light.
“I love you back,” she said.
Xenophilia
1
Seated at the quiet corner table he’d reserved by phone, the scientist studied the alien—the sad eyes deep behind high cheekbones, the pouty lips and tiny nose, the movement of its ears as it sipped from its water glass, the tilt of its chin as it caught his glance—and he concluded it looked remarkably like his ex-girlfriend. He didn’t know for sure if those were eyes he was looking at, couldn’t possibly say without x-rays (effects unknown) or God forbid an autopsy that the alien had a skeleton, could only guess that “face“ was the correct term for the upper portion of the body across the table from him. Still, the likeness was obvious, and it surprised him that he hadn’t noticed it before. The familiar features, he supposed, had only gradually taken shape, Magic Eye-like, out of the alien’s untidy visage.
He’d chosen the restaurant on the hill, one of those converted farmhouses not advertised in the newspaper or listed in the phone book but always recommended to travelers and known simply as “the restaurant” to everyone in town— from the founders of the local country club, who had awarded the scientist an honorary membership after his Nobel Prize and who made the restaurant a part of their weekly meal plan; to the military officers and university faculty, who broke their budgets to eat there on special occasions; to the working villagers, whose frustrating dreams sometimes carried them to the threshold of the restaurant’s walk-in but left them pining there for the dated bins of ambrosia just beyond their reach. This outing with the alien, while undeniably risky, seemed to him the essential next step in his studies. Here, in the security of the dark and woody ambiance, he could observe the alien in a setting more conducive to spontaneity. If not exactly home to the alien, the restaurant was at least more natural than the cold, sterile laboratory with its bubbling beakers and pulsing lights.
The scientist opened the oversized menu and the alien followed his lead, resting the menu on its lap, its tiny bulbous fingers curling around the leatherette, its chin lifting just slightly.
“Don’t worry, I’ll order for you,” said the scientist, knowing that he need not say anything, that he only had to think it for the alien to understand, but enjoying anyway the primitive physicality of speech. The alien, economical in the extreme, said nothing, but continued to stare deeply and inscrutably at the scientist, who now felt a blush coming on.
He had taken his ex-girlfriend, a sociologist, to this same exquisitely overpriced restaurant once, to celebrate his Nobel privately. After the stiff academic galas, a quiet evening with his girlfriend seemed the best way to absorb the accolades, and also to ease himself back into his old lifestyle. They’d been dating for two months before he’d flown off to Stockholm, and he was anxious to pick up where they’d left off. She had never dated a scientist before and found his buzz cut and his hornrimmed safety glasses “categorically masculine,” his white lab coats “sultanesque.”
Like the alien, she was quiet that night, too, sneaking glances at him over forkfuls of linguini-wrapped prawns, smiling cat-like and seductive.
She revealed her secret only after cappuccino and raspberry torte: she wanted to make love in the lab.
“There may be graduate assistants analyzing data,” he protested. But that wasn’t the real danger. “And there are chemicals,” he added, “some of them explosive, some radioactive, some whose harmful agents we haven’t yet isolated.” But even those dangers, he knew, could not match the potentially cataclysmic mixture of science and love. The sociologist had proposed a new compound, something reckless and unstable, whose radiation, once released, might well be uncontainable.
But she had a way, and a look about her, and the scientist could not hatch a convincing excuse.
The lovemaking was operatic. Naked beneath their lab coats, they rolled across the stainless steel tables and Formica countertops as rows of gurgling beakers crashed to the floor. Bunsen burners ignited and doused and mysteriously reignited. Dangerous solutions pooled together on the linoleum, and harmful gasses billowed across the fluorescent ceiling panels. Condensation rained unchecked from the trembling copper coils. Switches were thrown and released, thrown and released, dials nudged to unacceptable settings, needles quivered into red zones, while the panels of multicolored lights pulsed out dangerous patterns and the warning tones glided up the scale, until finally, test tubes frothing over and noxious cumulus clouds raining blue ash, they were forced to pull the plugs and slink out coughing into the night.
In the morning, the university police suspected vandals, local villagers provoked by rumors and by misleading TV exposes of scientific amorality. Security was stepped up, but that only increased the thrill. Night after night they returned, he nodding to the security guard and flashing his faculty I.D., she donning tinted glasses and tight hair and the thick and elusive accent of a distinguished foreign scientist. Once inside, her hair sprung and their lab coats unbuttoned, they abandoned themselves to their decadent routine: “Oh, Professor, you must come look!” and the science brought them together like a force of nature, “What is it, Professor?” her hand reaching back between the folds of his lab coat, “I think I’ve made a discovery,” and he drew close, over her shoulder, the smell of her hair bursting and wild, a controlled experiment gone awry, and then, hands raising her lab coat in bunches, “Oh, Professor, you’ll compromise the results,” but with a sweep of his arm the gurgling beakers crashed to the floor and the stainless steel altars of science were theirs to defile.
But those crimes against science had to be paid for with trembling hands and ruined experiments. Mornings, he’d dial up the power on the control panel and be shaken by an ionized lungful of last night’s air—her hair, her skin, her breath, their sex—and for the rest of the day his concentration tottered on a knife-sharp fulcrum of shame and desire. Even after he’d stopped returning the sociologist’s calls, even after he’d been given the most absorbing scientific project of his career—the project of a lifetime, the study of a living alien—the ghosts of those carnal nights haunted him. He found himself more and more attracted to the alien, more and more casual about his laboratory decorum. And now that he recognized the creature’s resemblance to his ex-girlfriend, he wasn’t sure he could control himself.
2
The general had heard how the steaks here dissolved on the tongue like popsicles, sweet and bursting. He knew for a fact that his girlfriend would do the same at evening’s end. The only question was whether she would go for the breathless claustrophobia of the M-1 Abrams (“But General, I’ve just locked onto an enemy tank!”) or the apocalypse of the pock-marked artillery range (“But General, the troops need our support!”).
But those pleasures (“Let them die!”), he reminded himself, were secondary to the task at hand: to monitor the scientist’s increasingly suspicious relationship with the alien. He’d made it his special project, had code-named it “Hawkswoop,” though the label appeared only on a single, thin, card-sized file folder in the lockbox he kept in his wife’s hosiery drawer and was never muttered but in a close-lipped whisper in the dark. On a poorly lit street across from the university laboratory, he’d sit long nights in his baby-blue Mercury and listen through headphones to the one-way conversation between scientist and alien, imagining the scientist’s movements and position by the volume and quality of his voice as it reached the bug. As the weeks passed and the scientist’s diction tumbled slowly from lab jargon to prattle, the general understood that a breakthrough was imminent. One night there were long, nervous moments of silence, a phone picked up and re-cradled, a sigh, another attempt and a few numbers dialed, then, at last: “I’d like a reservation for two ...” And the general whispered his tight-lipped mantra all the way to the base: “The swooping hawk has fixed its prey ... “
“I recommend the prawns,” said the sociologist, scanning her menu, “sir,” she added, her voice thick with frisky mockery.
Tonight she wore a lieutenant’s uniform, the skirt hemmed short, and the perversion fluttered on the general’s tongue like a copped feel. He took a breath and tried to concentrate. Across the dusky ether of the cathedral-like dining room, the scientist chattered and smiled at the small, languorous, and human-like alien, whose tuberous neck hid behind a sporty red scarf. The scientist had clearly taken every precaution; in those clothes and in this lighting and in the peripheral vision of the self-absorbed patrons, the alien might well go unnoticed. Only a keen and interested observer would note that the rubbery arms lacked elbows, so that they bowed instead of bent, that the head quivered and pulsed like gelatin, and that the earholes tended to migrate. Those nubs on the scalp could easily be mistaken for a state-of-the-art hairdo.
Like so many other aliens, this one had crash-landed in the desert. But unlike the others, this alien miraculously survived. And then, incredibly, the President transferred sole, topsecret possession to this local scientist, whose recent Nobel had moved him to the top of the scientific pecking order— in the private sector, anyway. The President had said, in so many words, that the military could not be trusted to perform medical experiments within accepted ethical boundaries. But what did the President know about ethical boundaries? And what, in any case, were the ethics of alien testing? Hadn’t the aliens abducted humans and performed painful and humiliating medical procedures? In the military’s view—in the general’s view—those were acts of war. It’s never been proven, in any case, that aliens feel pain, or fear, or humiliation—that they feel anything at all. No, the only reason to restrain oneself around aliens was to protect oneself; self-abandonment was a weakness that aliens could exploit.
He’d seen their power, even in death. He’d lost three good officers, two of them top-notch military scientists, to the wiles of dead aliens. The first was a woman he’d personally appointed to lead the autopsy team. Before they opened the doughy corpse, she needed time to study its externals, she said, to understand what she could from its soft contours. She worked long hours in the lab, often by herself, and slept little. The general should have suspected something when he stopped by the lab on his way home one night and found his autopsy leader sponge-bathing the alien’s fragile-looking, pearl-white body.
“Oh! Didn’t hear you come in, sir!”
“The President’s inquired about the delay. When are we a go?”
“Soon. I’m in the final phase of preparations, sir.”
“Off the record, Miss Lundquist: are you in love with that alien?”
“No sir!” but the color came to her face, the sponge slopped onto the dead alien’s thigh, and the general should have known.
One morning a week later they found her curled up under a sheet with the alien, weeping inconsolably, caressing the alien’s leathery cheek. She had to be pried from it, one finger at a time. The room was sealed and quarantined, and the alien was frozen in a vault, its baby face veiled safely in rime.
Two more crash landings resulted in two more lovestricken officers, both of them still babbling and weeping in the psychiatric ward. And the President bestows on the private sector the first alien captured alive? It’s unconscionably stupid, the general thought. It’s blind.
“If he ever arrives, order me steak,” he said, pushing his chair back.
The sociologist tossed him a limp salute.
The general made sure no one was looking. He paused at the men’s room door, slipped the tiny camera from under his tasseled epaulette, and snapped three shots of the alien and the scientist together, the scientist leaning close, fingers full of a dumpling appetizer, hesitating momentarily as he searched for the alien’s mouth, laughing at his own awkwardness. He’s doomed, thought the general. His brain is a marinated dumpling.
3
At the head of the posse, the deputy sherif’s torch burned brightest, the eye of a fiery snake winding up the hillside switchbacks. The restaurant’s lights twinkled into view, still distant and fortress-like, but soon within their grasp. We are all torchbearers for the earth, he thought, and the idea filled him with the adrenaline his tired legs needed to set the pace.
“It’s better this way,” he told the man beside him, meaning on foot. “It shows them we’re a grass-roots movement, that there’s a groundswell of common rage.”
“You got that right,” said the man, slapping an oak cudgel against his palm.
“Just remember,” said the deputy, “this is about love.”
And it was, for the deputy sheriff loved the earth, both the idea and the thing itself. He loved the bigness of it. He loved the strength and permanence of it, but also the gentle curve of its horizon when it reached achingly for the setting sun. He loved its centrality and importance in the universe, neither of which was diminished by scientific models of this and that revolving around the other thing. He loved the soft blue sweetness of its breath. He loved the cool, moist soil, and when he came home from work each day he went straight to his garden and thrust his arms into the earth, cleansing himself of the rot and stench of humanity’s crimes against itself. He loved the taste of the earth, too, not just its fruits but its dark and gritty flesh. The vegetables from his garden he ate unwashed, for to wash off the soil, he thought, was like washing away the dewy traces of love. And gardening, after all, was an act of love.
He loved the earth, which is why he took the trespasses of aliens personally. Their very existence threatened the earth’s central position in the universe. Aliens demeaned her. And now, recently, they’d come calling, charming the earth with their bright little saucers and their babyfaces (he’d seen the video exposé), seducing her with technological panache, and threatening, in the end, to make of her a private satellite, just one more concubine in their orbiting harem. Others told him he was overreacting, that the evidence suggested the aliens intended only to study the earth. But those who did not love the earth could not be counted on to protect her. The evidence, he countered, suggested a long, lustful leer at the earth. Look at the shameful way they’d treated the abductees! Notice the suspicious nakedness of the little corpses pulled from downed saucers! No, the aliens’ intentions were far from honorable. (And the apologists were quiet then. They knew; in their hearts they knew.)
Some joined the cause once they learned of the reckless collaboration between government and science. The deputy sheriff wouldn’t have believed it himself if the security guard hadn’t brought him into the lab one night. They stepped quietly into the back room, where the guard raised his finger and cocked his thumb at the prophetic image entangled on the gurney before them: a living alien resting cozily in the arms of a bare-chested scientist. He touched his holstered gun—but no, he reasoned, there is a better way. The aliens must be shown what they’re up against. A crowd of angry humans must be assembled, and their fire and rage and collective strength must fill the viewscreens of every alien saucer and space station and planetary outpost until the message is loud and clear: we won’t let her go without a fight.
