by Douglas Lain
He turns away from me, toward the other patrons, apparently through with this conversation, but I’m struck by a wave of courage and grab the man’s shoulder, pull on his polyester collar, and turn him back in my direction.
“Who am I? I mean, am I somebody? Am I my own person, can I be confident in that much? I don’t need to know whether I really did fall off that Big Wheel bike, I don’t need to know whether I really did fall in love with Virginia in a sushi bar back in 1987, but I just want to know if I’m me. Tell me that much. Am I here at all? Is this Memorex or something?”
The Space Brother steps away and I’m left standing next to the dusty starboard engine, left watching the orange dots and blue lines on the computer monitor as the same explanation for interstellar flight repeats itself.
“This is how,” the narrator explains, “we reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.”
15
surrender
My twenty-four hours are up and I’m in Central Park for the light show. The flying saucer is here with me, of course, silently hovering over the neat and tidy lawn of North Meadow. And while I’ve been mentioning these “lollipops” or “hubcaps” or “saucers with Christmas lights attached” all along, I might as well take a moment, here at the end, to describe this one in a bit of detail.
This particular flying saucer looks like two sombreros that have been attached at the rim so that the two crowns are pointing in opposite directions. That is, there is a bulb on top and a bulb underneath, and on that top bulb there is what looks like a clasp. A person could easily thread a fishing line through it. To be brief about it, the saucer looks cheap, fake, and maybe even a bit flat, like it’s been inserted into the New York skyline, as if the scene was set via not-too-competent photo manipulation. Yet there it is, hovering there. I can hear it humming. I’m sure that, soon enough, I’ll be able to touch it.
I’m unzipping my jeans now, as is the protocol for surrender, and I worry that somebody is watching me. I look back, at the gravel trail behind me, thinking there will be others coming, more fictional characters who want to surrender, but there is no one.
I take off my boxer shorts, remove my favorite green and red plaid Fruit of the Looms, but nothing happens. The grass is cold with morning dew, and I wish that it was a bit later, that the sun was higher in the sky and I could feel it on my back, or alternatively I wish I was in a field of wheat or corn, something that would give me cover as I wait for the disc to receive me.
It’s just half past six in the morning and I’m waiting for the ship to open. Maybe the problem is that I’m still wearing my watch and my socks. I unlatch the black plastic band of my water-resistant Casio W59 1V, drop it onto my crumpled-up Levi button-downs and try not to care as the watch slides onto the wet grass. I bend over and remove my tube socks, realizing for the first time that they don’t match. One sock has green stripes while the other’s stripes are bright yellow.
And it’s these, the unmatched socks, that change my attitude. I’m not ashamed anymore. I actually hope that one of them, maybe even the President of the United States, Ralph Reality himself, is on the craft watching me. I don’t have such a great body but I do want to be seen. I can accept being a fiction, but if I’m going to go through with this, if I’m going to leave the University, New York City, the whole world behind, I’d like it if somebody would pay attention.
The saucer is spinning faster now and the red lamps on the underside of the rim illuminate. Taken all together it looks as much like an amusement park ride, like something from Coney Island, a newer ride probably, as it does like a craft.
If there are people aboard watching me they’re probably those clean and kempt tourists. Maybe all of them are in IZOD shirts rather than jumpsuits. If I’m just an idea, an image on a screen or a string of words in a story, then the people aboard the flying saucer aren’t any more real than I am, they can’t be because they’re on the screen, the page, with me. I stop worrying about whether there are Space Brothers enjoying this sad spectacle. Sure I’ve got goosebumps and I’m shriveled up, but I’m also free.
Standing naked with my gut hanging out and my dick retracting up into my pelvis like a mollusk looking for its shell, I scan the horizon, examine the underside of the craft, and wait for some kind of sign.
The underside of the craft doesn’t have a clasp or anything else attached. It’s just smooth silver down there, a muted grey really in the gloomy morning light. From where I’m standing there don’t appear to be any seams, but then, as promised, the underside does open. A door pops free and swings down, and a plank emerges. After all, I am invited.
Once I’m under the disc, as I approach the escalator, I find that I’m not alone after all. I don’t know where they’ve come from, these other two nudists, but here they are. Now there are three passengers lining up in a queue. Directly in front is a black-haired woman, relatively short, and I figure she must be Virginia. She’s either Virginia or Carole, or some other character who I don’t know about, an actress maybe. Somebody who was paid to play those parts. I recognize her, anyhow. She’s pale and covered in goose pimples like I am. And I notice that she has stretch marks on her otherwise attractively round hips.
I grab her elbow and turn her toward me so that I can see her face, and it is her of course, but she doesn’t seem to recognize me.
“It’s me,” I tell her.
The old man in front of her turns to face me, to intervene, and it’s Harold obviously. I wasn’t sure when he had his back to me. He has a large mole on the back of his neck apparently, one I’d never noticed before, and his bare shoulders are slumped. The look on his face is fierce. He doesn’t want me to speak again apparently, but I wouldn’t say that he recognizes me either. His eyes are blanks.
Asket and Charles Rain appear at the top of the ramp waiting for us. They’re dressed in sequined jumpsuits, holding pamphlets that we’re encouraged to take from them. These are our instructions.
“Faster-than-light travel can be difficult for a human being,” Charles Rain explains. “While the Pleidiens guarantee your physical well-being during this journey, everything you need physically will be provided, you will be responsible for protecting your mind.”
Opening the pamphlet I see it’s a cartoon. Rather than writing the story, our upcoming journey is told in pictures. On the first page there is an outline of a UFO and all around there are figures, just outlines of people like the icons you see on restroom doors. These figures are standing under a beam of red light, just like the beam of light we’re under now, and they’re queued up too. The triangle and rectangle people are surrendering, and on the next page we get to see them aboard the ship. They’re stacked on each other in rows, neatly piled along the outside edge of their cartoon saucer.
Asket gestures to Charles. She makes a karate chop motion in the air and then steps forward toward us, toward Virginia, Harold, and me.
“You will not be able to protect your minds,” Asket says. “That is what you must be prepared to accept. What will be required of you for this journey is an acceptance that you won’t be able to protect your minds or your identity. That is, in fact, the very reason you’ve agreed to make this trip. That’s why you’re here. You’re here to surrender.”
“Good luck,” Rain says to Harold. “Good luck. Good luck.”
It’s clear that Charles isn’t coming with us. This enlightenment stuff isn’t for him. Not yet. “I envy you,” he tells me as I walk past. And then, right before I step onto the escalator he says it again. “I envy you.”
Now, when two people switch bodies what happens is that one personality is transferred to another and vice versa. Nothing physical really changes, or at least that’s how it seems.
“The people aboard that craft are no more real than I am,” I say.
“That’s right,” Charles says. And Asket is beaming a smile in my direction as Harold takes his first step up onto the plank. He’s moving away from us, up what is basically an escalator.
“The people aboard that craft are no more real than I am?” I ask.
“That’s right,” Asket says. Her smile falters a bit.
“What about you, Charles?”
“That’s right,” he says mindlessly.
“And them?” I ask, gesturing up at Harold and Virginia.
“That’s right,” they both say. They’re getting impatient with me now, I think. It’s time that I got aboard the ship.
“Take that first step,” Charles says and he points to the ramp.
When Asket and Carole switched bodies, or started to switch bodies, at the MUFON conference they told each other stories, they told each other their history. When the two boys, that fat kid in the purple sequined jumpsuit and the TV personality, when they switched they did the same thing.
“That’s right,” Asket says.
But the thing is, I have a story to tell too. Mine is like theirs. Those other stories were about the moments in life when those people—the fat kid, and the alien, and Harold’s wife, and the television personality—about when they felt free. They shared how it was for them, as individuals, to feel free. And that helped. That helped the switch happen.
“That’s right,” Charles says.
The thing is this is the moment I want to share. This is the story I want to tell. Right now. This moment is what I have and I’m giving it to you, Charles. This very second. I’m giving it to you freely and for free. I’m giving it to you and not asking for anything back. Do you understand?
“I…”
Charles is wearing a dark blue button-up suit jacket with gold buttons, dark blue slacks, a light blue shirt, navy blue tie, and leather loafers. I start with his shoes.
“What size are you?” I ask him.
He’s a size nine, which is a pretty good fit, and while the pants are a bit tight around the waist they’re close enough for now. I can have a tailor let them out.
Charles runs up the escalator as I button up the front of the jacket. He takes the escalator steps two at a time and then he’s inside the ship, right behind Virginia.
“There they go,” Asket says. “That went very well I think, Charles.”
“It’s Brian, actually,” I tell her. She just smiles.
The flying saucer hovers there for just a moment or two longer, spinning like a top and humming, and then it flies away from us. The UFO skips away from us through the air, like a saucer skipping across water.
And as it goes I wonder about the people aboard. Are they going to end up like us, like me, or am I the last of the Ufologists now that the saucers have landed?
Also available from Douglas Lain and Night Shade Books:
Last Week’s Apocalypse
Gore Vidal meets Philip K. Dick in this collection of lit-fabulist stories. Douglas Lain’s work has been attracting high profile attention throughout the field, and this collection features some of his finest and most controversial fiction.
The stories herein present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even nuclear Armageddon as comic foils for Lain’s everyman characters. He is an America where the packets of Sea Monkeys that arrive in the mail contain secret messages and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week’s Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.
“The stories in Last Week’s Apocalypse are like a series of short, sharp shocks. Lain’s writing is unsettling, ferociously smart, and extremely addictive.”
—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble and Magic for Beginners
$14.95 trade paper • 978-1-59780-034-1
Also available from Douglas Lain and Night Shade Books:
In the Shadow of the Towers
In the Shadow of the Towers compiles nearly twenty works of speculative fiction responding to and inspired by the events of 9/11, from writers seeking to confront, rebuild, and carry on, even in the face of overwhelming emotion.
Writer and editor Douglas Lain presents a thought-provoking anthology featuring a variety of award-winning and bestselling authors, from Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation) and Cory Doctorow (Little Brother) to Susan Palwick (Flying in Place) and James Morrow (Towing Jehovah). Touching on themes as wideranging as politics, morality, and even heartfelt nostalgia, today’s speculative fiction writers prove that the rubric of the fantastic offers an incomparable view into how we respond to tragedy.
Each contributor, in his or her own way, contemplates the same question:
How can we continue dreaming in the shadow of the towers?
$15.99 trade paper • 978-1-59780-839-2
about the author
Douglas Lain is a novelist and short story writer whose work has appeared in various magazines including Strange Horizons, Interzone, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His debut novel, Billy Moon, was published by Tor and was selected as the debut fantasy novel of the month by Library Journal in 2013. After the Saucers Landed is his second novel.
Lain is the publisher of Zero Books, which specializes in philosophy and political theory, and hosts the Zero Squared podcast, interviewing a wide range of fascinating, engaging people with insights for the new millennium: philosophers, mystics, economists, and a diverse group of fiction writers. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children.
