Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  My departure from the twenty-first century was not a separation. It was a last-minute, life-saving procedure, intended to treat an ancient and mortal injury. In burning down the world around me, I hoped to cauterize my wounds.

  I would emerge from the pod intact.

  “Will you open the chamber soon?” Ernest asked while we were walking in the North Burial Ground. The gravestones there are black on one side from years of air pollution and white on the other where they were bleached by the bomb. White spikes dart over the brim of each white side and onto the black, forming a jagged fringe like the mane of a lion around illegible inscriptions and partly effaced cherubs. The stones are luminous in twilight, their faces imbibing notes of green and orange from the spangled sky.

  I had no idea what he meant, and vaguely wondered if he was beginning to show symptoms of the brain sickness that overtakes most of them before they die. I’ve seen several dozen cases now, but my first encounter was the most severe. I had asked Ernest to introduce me to the oldest person he knew. He led me up Hope Street, to the Ladd Observatory, which sits on a shallow hillock circled by a bristly crown of splintered houses. Inside was an emaciated man, folded accordion-like against the wall, with his angular knees drawn into his chest and his arms tented on his knees like defleshed wings. The vault of the observatory above was pitted with holes, emitting channels of light that blistered his bald head with blue and yellow boils and pooled in the alcove of his missing nose. He didn’t move, except to roll his dust-colored eyes from the floor to the wall to the wormeaten vault and back again.

  “How old is he?” I asked.

  “Forty,” said Ernest.

  His name is Charles Dexter, and he was a junior at the university when the last bomb dropped. He had first started acting strangely in the weeks afterward, but it was only five years ago that he took up living in the observatory and wouldn’t let anyone near him, not even to clean the pile of filth he sits in or to brush away the ash that sticks to his clothes. Now he’s encased in it, like a bird bristling with black feathers. Emeline Gracey—Ernest’s sister, better known as Jane—brings him food and water twice a day.

  We went to the North Burial Ground to look for graves belonging to people I knew in the twenty-first century (we haven’t found any, but in most cases the stones are too difficult to read). Ernest was in poor spirits. His remaining ear fell off yesterday. The other, the one that had sat beneath the curtain of his brown hair, fell off a week before that.

  “Just when I thought I couldn’t lose any more parts of myself,” he told me.

  But they are all losing parts, rapidly. They look worse than they were when I arrived; worse than they were a week ago, like paintings whose colors are running in the rain. Each of them takes a different approach to the situation. Mary Ward planted her toes in her backyard like tulip bulbs, all ten in a row. Geoffrey Emlen keeps his right eyeball in a mason jar, where it turns like a murky planet in a blob of formaldehyde. And Jane tied her detached pointer finger back onto her hand with a bolt of ribbon until the flesh dried off and fell away; then she wrapped the ribbon around the naked bones to keep them in place.

  All this time, they’ve let me know them; let me share their meals, and lifted their shirts to show me the angry red ulcers where the tips of their lower ribs shred their skin from the inside out; they’ve idolized me, even apotheosized me, and fixed me inside loving and lingering stares, all the time thinking that I had something to give them in return, some secret panacea from the past hidden in plain view in a windowless vault on Brown Street.

  “Why have you never brought this up before?” I asked him.

  “They all cautioned me not to,” he said, as he wilted onto a box grave to catch his breath. “They said that I shouldn’t push it, that if you were planning on doing it, you would bring it up. And they thought maybe you were waiting for the others to arrive.”

  I hear the word others, and the force that implies—the people of my own era, my cohort, my comrades, with their smooth skin and supple joints and memories of Internet culture, of 9/11, of South Park and WaterFire and Blue State Coffee—skewers my gut and stays there, twisting, reeling my intestines around it.

  “Ernest, for the last time, I don’t know if there are going to be any others.”

  “But, Dr. Hamblin—”

  “Can’t you ever call me Sarah?”

  But I know he won’t, and the irony of my fury isn’t lost on me; I once spent half an hour ranting to James that I was never addressed as Doctor in professional correspondence, whereas my male colleagues consistently were. But that seems small and petty now, compressed like carbon from a mass of gargantuan portions into something small, hard, and shiny, rolling alone in some back corner of my brain, like everything else from the cold, vitrified past.

  And so we go back, tracing the swells and hollows of the heaving earth; through plains of slate tablets worn to nubs like rows of rotten teeth; out through the gate and down the dusty corridor of Hope Street and past the observatory just in time to see the red moonlight open its wilted dome. The wind twines together the sounds of nuclear static and the splitting of dry timbers and Charles Dexter’s sonorous howls. We don’t talk, hardly even look at each other, until we pass the ruins of the Moses Brown School and Ernest trips over his wobbly knee. When I catch him by the arm he pulls away from me, tears beading in the corners of his eyes.

  “We all thought you were sent here to save us,” he says. “I suppose we must seem like a bunch of half-witted freaks.”

  He keeps walking and I follow, my hands held out, pleading, my palms printed with his sloughed-off skin, like bloody leaves.

  “That’s not how you seem at all. I just don’t know where you got the idea that I was anything but an ordinary scientist—an ethnographer, really. If I knew some powerful secret, I would have told you. Ernest!”

  He’s lurching on his long, unsteady legs, out in the intersection of Hope and Angell with the mound of gray bricks that was once the Lippitt House looming in front of him like a pyramid, vast and shaggy with shadows. Then he buckles and sits down on the pavement, his sweater rippling over his back, and stares into the distance, toward the spot where the street winds down into a puddle of soft, roaming lights. It’s the fractured glow of all of Providence, tossed back to us on the river.

  “You think it’s all fun for me,” he says, between ragged breaths, “this digging around in the past. But it’s everything. We’re already dead—you must know that. We have nothing of our own.”

  I kneel beside him, and my shadow mutes the glare of the light on his scars. For a brief moment, the mask of his deformity breaks, and I see him as he should have been: young, intelligent, roguishly handsome, with a spark in his eyes that is not simply curious but searching, longing, aching. He recognizes the look on my face, as though I am caught in a spell, and as if to prove that what I have seen is real, that handsome rogue darts through the darkness—straight out of his skin—and presses his thick, lipless mouth to mine.

  I don’t reciprocate, but I don’t pull away either, and for a moment my eyes close, shutting me inside the busy universe behind my lids. The tips of my fingers and toes are tingling, so powerfully that it is almost painful. This, I think, must be what regeneration feels like: the stinging heat of nerves reasserting their pathways through paralyzed flesh.

  He pulls back, and sweeps a stray lock from my brow with his knobby finger.

  “Go on,” he says, in a low whisper. “Kill my last fantasy.”

  An hour later, punctuated by a brief detour to University Hall to bandage his arm and retrieve a few tools, we stand together in front of the chamber.

  It’s a long wedge of a building, one story, pieced out of granite blocks—once gray, now blackened and roiling with hints of the fluorescent blue air. The low, hipped roof bristles with layers of ash and dead leaves and long tendrils of scorched ivy. A short row of steps fans open in front of us, then narrows into the entrance: a pair of enormous bronze doors, spiderweb
bed with rusted chains, beneath an unadorned lintel and an unintelligible inscription.

  Ernest plucks the bolt cutters out of my hands and skips up the steps, as quickly as he can manage in his clipped, puppetlike gait. He trims back the chains, slowly and painstakingly, until they rattle into a pile at his feet. When the dust settles, he sweeps the black filth from one of the doors with the back of his bandaged arm.

  “There it is, just like my grandfather said—a woman,” he says, stepping back grandiosely, as a manic grin splits the scars on his cheeks. “She’s beautiful.”

  His gaze traces the cast bronze relief: a classical figure with a book in one outstretched hand, standing contrapposto so as to assert the forms of her shapely knees through her long, gauzy dress. Then he looks at me, his eyes scanning in sequence over my gray sneakers, torn jeans, and pilled green sweater, before finally settling on my face: oily and sunburnt, wreathed with frizzy, cropped hair, and soured by my permanently grim expression.

  “She looks a bit like you,” he says.

  I laugh, then realize he is serious. “Jesus, Ernest. Your imagination has taken a turn for the worse.”

  “Is it supposed to be you?”

  “It’s an allegorical figure.” I brush past him, the heat in my cheeks rising, as the threads of two opposing emotions coil together in my gut: anxiety, on the one hand, and on the other, embarrassment about the pinprick of juvenile pleasure that his words arouse in me. It isn’t simply the absurdity of feeling flattered by the attentions of a man who has spent his entire adult life amidst disfigurement; it’s also the absurdity of feeling anything at all in this dead universe, when all the vitality of the twenty-first century could not penetrate my cold, apathetic armor.

  I grab the doorknob. Several minutes of dedicated twisting and pushing and we are inside, transported into an expanse of dark so pure that only a few stray particles of light strain through, dipping over our shoulders toward unfathomable depths.

  Ernest brandishes his flashlight and jumps ahead, bolting through the long tunnel of rooms, the wan light glancing over grimy wood and peeling plaster and glass that glistens dully beneath a pall of dust.

  “It’s all here! It’s all here!” he chants as the flashlight exposes the rows of paintings that hang from the crown molding: portraits of grayhaired men in starched collars and women in ruffled bonnets, some intact, others with curls of canvas weeping over their shoulders. “It’s exactly how my grandfather said it would be. He said on the eve of the Third World War, all the brightest people in the university got together and gathered the most valuable knowledge and things they had, just in case they lost everything—so that it would be safe. And that’s why they sent you—isn’t it? To show it all to us in case we’d forgotten it. There must be enough material in here to remake the world.”

  I’m still in the entryway, one hand on the doorknob, while fractals of electric light, sweeping in from behind me, trace the profile of my body onto the darkness. This is a sanctuary of the past, but not in the way he thinks. It doesn’t belong to him; it is my own. Every surface is textured with memory, preserved like the frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum under layers of ash. As I look around, a sort of calibration occurs. The contours of the room conform to the landmarks marked out in my mind, and along with that specimen of mental cartography come the emotions in which its lines were drawn.

  James died in August, in the year I was on sabbatical to finish my second book. My publisher and the university were generous in allowing me time to mourn, but I was not. I pushed myself to my outer limits, too anesthetized to feel the pain of overwork, the ache of grief, or anything at all besides the dull weight of dread. I dreaded the places on campus where I was bound to run into some colleague whose mouth would instantly invert once I was in sight. I came to see the pinched face of sympathy as a type of disfigurement, an ugly mask of feigned emotion stretched over an uncaring interior, and so I shunned it, along with all of the corners of the university that held artifacts of my happiness, and sequestered myself inside the Annmary Brown Memorial.

  The word memorial implies a kind of peaceful, sanitized vacancy, but this one is not empty; it’s a proper tomb, containing a dead couple and the relics of their lives. Annmary Brown died in 1903, and her husband, Rush Hawkins—a lawyer and book collector, made famous in the Civil War as the colonel of Hawkins’ Zouaves—built an elaborate mausoleum for her on the outskirts of the university. Almost simultaneously, the Italian diplomat Paul Bajnotti built the ninety-five-foot-tall redbrick clock tower in the corner of the Quiet Green in memory of his own deceased wife, Annmary’s sister, Carrie. It seems the Brown sisters were the sort of women who inspired extravagant postmortem expressions of devotion.

  By virtue of its dual identity as a tomb and a museum, the Annmary Brown Memorial was, in my time, open to the public, though it was almost always empty. And so I settled there to write the rest of my book, all five hundred pages of it, erecting a temple of words to my sorrows because I couldn’t build one of stone or brick.

  I am on the verge of stepping forward and telling Ernest everything when he peels off the surface of the darkness like a specter, the glare of his flashlight crawling frenziedly in the hollows of his face.

  “There’s something back there!”

  He grabs my hand and pulls me through, all the way to the very last chamber, and I brace myself for the sight of the two stone sarcophagi, their edges furred with dust.

  Instead, his light flickers over something large and lustrous.

  I step forward and fish my own flashlight from my pocket. The markers in my memory have been scoured from my sight, and the forms that replace them refuse to come to order, bobbing and shaking like silvery liquid on the surface of my vision. I put my hand out and feel it—sheets of smooth metal knobbed with rivets; flanks that bulge gently, like the contours of a submarine; and a single round glass window, winking in Ernest’s trembling light. The voice that comes out of me feels like it belongs to someone else.

  “It’s another pod.”

  I glance around wildly, but there is no one. The dust on the floor is pristine, with no footprints but my own, and Ernest’s trailing close behind. But there is something written—engraved—on the pod door. I step forward, and shred the dust with my fingers, and read it aloud.

  To Dr. Sarah Hamblin,

  I’m so sorry, but no one is coming. The government shut down all time-dilation programs, and the university lost almost everyone in the war. I couldn’t stand the thought of you being stuck in some horrible future, but I’m still too much of a coward to join you. So I have spent the last decades of my life and my remaining sanity disassembling the one pod we had secreted away and reassembling it, piece by piece, in the place where you see it now. I never knew anyone to come here but you and hopefully it will stay that way. I can’t promise the future you find next will be any better than the one you have found, but at least you will have the choice to go or to stay.

  My sincerest apologies,

  John C. LeRoy

  Beneath his name, there is a date: four decades past my departure from the twenty-first century, almost to the day.

  “He would have been pushing eighty,” I tell Ernest, as he completes his second turn around the pod with his flashlight.

  When I sit down on the floor, he comes and sits next to me, and turns the flashlight off. So many radioactive particles have infiltrated the tomb that it is now possible to see clearly in the dark. They envelop the pod in a technicolor swarm, mustering along its seams until it looks as though it’s been outlined in static. Soon enough LeRoy’s words have been rewritten in light, nuclear blues and greens and yellows rippling from side to side along the length of the inscription.

  “Nothing is what I thought it was, is it?”says Ernest.

  I don’t answer. He’s known it all along.

  After a moment, he asks, “What are you going to do?”

  I still say nothing, but I suppose I’ve known that all along too.


  It’s early morning in Providence, and its residents are clustered on Brown Street, swarming beneath a sea of umbrellas intended to fend off the razor-edged sunlight. We’ve dragged the pod into the middle of the road, where it gleams in the shadow of the tomb from which it came. Its single window captures the short approach to the university. From inside, Ernest and I can see the fluted columns of the John Carter Brown Library and the dead tree that bends precipitously toward it like a skeletal hand with its fingers probing an open window; the bronze lampposts, with their exploded bulbs, weeping green rivulets down the short flight of steps; and beyond that, the ragged outlines of other buildings: Sayles Hall with its trio of vacant windows and Faunce Arch, beneath which dust clusters like cobwebs.

  The entire population—all six dozen or so who remain—gather to watch as we finish loading the pod with keepsakes and supplies, Ernest’s salvaged paintings and ancient sweaters, and my collection of things from the twenty-first century: anthropological texts and my parents’ silver wedding porringer and James’s favorite blue teapot.

  My eyes scan the sea of faces, fractured by bolts of shadow and light, of the people who will be dead before Ernest needs to change the bandage on his arm. They are a ragbag patchwork of humanity, sewn together from scraps; the threads that hold them in place are fraying quickly and they know it, but they smile broadly with their lipless mouths and raise their hands—those knobby, fingerless clubs—to wave at us as we enter the pod.