Just Plain Weird

by Tom Upton

  “A little to the left,” Eliza was saying. “It’s itchy.” I’d been washing her back, drifting off. There had been soot on her back-- how it had gotten there, I couldn’t guess-- and I had it all cleared away. The girl was nothing but bone, muscle and skin, very pale skin. I tried hard not to look down at her butt. I couldn’t help myself, though, snatching looks now and then, until I could finally just stare at it without feeling embarrassed. On her back, just above her hips, she had two dimples, one on each side of her lower back muscles. I thought the dimples were adorable. Geez, I said to myself. I guessed that was when you know you really love something. If you can pick out some weird part of their body or their personality and think it’s adorable.

  “I felt so dirty,” she said, then, and quickly added, “Because of the dirt, I mean.”

  She turned round and pressed her body up against me. She reached up and wrapped her arms around my neck, and I leaned over and kissed her. It was pretty passionate, and she must have thought I wanted to start something right there in the shower.

  “I can’t right now, bubba,” she said sadly, after she pulled away. “I’m really sore right now. Maybe in a couple days, if we’re still here. If we never get back, we can do it all the time. If we do get back… well, you’ll be a stranger, so it’ll definitely be out. On the other hand, I’ll be a virgin again-- if you consider that a good thing. You can flip a coin on that one, I guess,” she added wryly.

  She slid open the door, and the air that wafted into the shower seemed incredibly cool. The bathroom was foggy with steam. She stepped out and grabbed a towel from the rack, and started to dry off. I followed her lead, and when we were both dry and dressed, I looked at our reflections in the mirror, which was still partly steam-up, over the sink. She was standing next to me, trying to arrange her damp hair, and I was next to her gazing into the mirror. I couldn’t help feel a sense of loss. I couldn’t figure out why. It was almost like having a really, really great dream, and then, right in the middle of everything, realizing that it’s all just a dream and when you wake up things will never be as great as what was happening in that dream.

  We went downstairs, and Eliza assailed the food dispenser in the kitchen. She conjured about a dozen hot dogs with everything-- “dragged through the garden” she called it-- about three pounds of fries, a small deep dish pizza, two pounds of fried shrimp, and two large pitchers of iced tea. I helped her carry it all into the living room, where we spread everything out on the coffee table, and sat on the floor and pigged out while we cooled down from the shower. I was amazed again at how much she could eat. When she was finished, she could barely move. She managed to slide over to me, and rested her head on my shoulder. “I just love being stuffed,” she said into my neck, and then giggled to herself.

  “I should really get everything in here, and started assembling it,” I said.

  “Can’t I just for asleep here? It would make me very happy,” she said, looking up at me with drowsy eyes.

  “Maybe you should lie down on the sofa.”

  She moaned. “The sofa-- already with the sofa.” She strained to move to the sofa, on which she flopped, bouncing up a bit before settling into the soft cushions.

  I cleared the mess off the coffee table, and took everything to the kitchen, where I dumped it all into the trash container.

  I went outside to unload the four by four. Luckily, it had stopped snowing. Without the snowsuit, I thought I would freeze as I made trip after trip to retrieve everything. As Eliza lay there sleeping, I spread everything out on the floor, trying to arrange them so that the parts I needed first were closest to me. I had a strange sensation, looking at everything, not knowing what most of the things did, and yet being sure which pieces went where and how to connect everything so that it all worked. It was as though one small part of my brain had been brainwashed into knowing and understand things while never sharing any of the details with the rest of my brain. Before long, I had created numerous circuit boards of varying sizes, and installed them into a large plastic project box. When the box was completed, I unpacked the computer, and set it up on the coffee table. After I got it up and running, I started work on the cable that would link the computer to the artifact’s computer. Because the two technologies were vastly different, it would require a great deal of jerry rigging to accomplish the link. The USB connector going to the computer was fine, but the connector to link into the artifact would have to be fashioned from scratch. Using pieces from various other parts-- some of which weren’t even computer parts-- I managed, not without great difficulty, to build a connector that was viable. I did, of course, finish the connector by surrounding it in layers of electrical tape, otherwise it wouldn’t be a bona fide earth jerry rigging-- I believed that nowhere in the galaxy had any species come close to perfecting the fine art of jerry rigging; it would make the most advanced of aliens scratch their heads in awe and wonder.

  When Eliza woke from her nap, through which she’d occasionally burped, I was about ready to link the two computers together. Through sleepy eyes, she looked in disbelief at the floor, whose entirety was cover with-- junk. Open wrappers and unwanted pieces and wire snip-offs littered the room. Power and extension cords snaked out a mad tangle between the coffee table and the electrical outlets. For all the mess I had made, the only thing I really had to show for it was a twelve by ten by ten-inch plastic box with a power cord and a USB cable coming out of it. I held the thing up proudly until I realized exactly how pathetic it must look to her. She stared from me to the box and then back to me. She just had to be thinking, You mean for that we ran out in the freezing cold, in the black snow, nearly getting caught by a seven-foot alien who looked like a cockroach and would have done who knows what to us if we hadn’t managed to get away? Is that right? If we had been married, it would have seemed grounds for divorce. As it was, I was fully expecting her to jump up from the sofa and lunge at my throat. She shook her head, almost comically, and then looked at me again.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “You can’t go by how it looks. You have to go by what it does, which is really very amazing. You’re talking here about linking two different technologies so that they can communicate with each other in a meaningful and seamless way. You have any idea how mind-boggling that is?”

  “All I know is that it looks like a black box,” she said miserably.

  “Well, we can always go back out and see if we can find a pretty pink box, if you like.”

  She waved away the notion, smirking. “Do you at least think it’s going to work?”

  “I was just about to find out,” I said.

  “Please, don’t let me stop you, then.” She dropped back down onto the sofa, sitting there and watching me with her arms folded in front of her. I could tell that she was just expecting the thing to explode or something.

  I concentrated on the console, which obediently rose from the floor. When I tapped out the right combination of buttons, a small access panel opened on the underside of the console. I got down on my hands and knees to check it out. It was really pretty simple; when the panel opened, it exposed a single port, similar to a pc port, just configured a little differently. I plugged in the cable, with its pitiful-looking connector, into the port. So easy a monkey could do it, I told myself, and then was instantly disquieted by that thought.

  I went to the sofa and sat next to Eliza. We both stared at the monitor screen, waiting for something to happen. We waited for a long while, so long in fact that Eliza started to give me a series of evil side-glances. I didn’t have to look at her face to know what I’d see there.

  “Travis…” she said, and sounded pretty sinister.

  “Give it a few more minutes,” I said.

  “You know I’m sitting next to you, and believe it or not, I can do physical damage to you-- I don’t care how many weights you’ve lifted in your life.”

  “Patience.”

  “Patience-- yeah, right. At this
point I don’t know what that is.”

  Soon the little LED light the computer tower flickered, indicating that data was being loaded. Then another, solid blue, screen replaced the Windows screen. A white cursor pulsating at the center of the screen, and finally started moving, writing white words:

  Please enter data.

  I had piled up all the boxes containing general information CDs next to the coffee table. One by one, I opened the boxes and feed the CDs into the disk drive. Altogether, there were a lot of discs. I started loading all the reference discs first: a dictionary, encyclopedias, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, physics, medicine, history, current events, politics, geography, geology…. After I finished loading the discs covering basic information, I started with some discs about art, music, and literature. I remembered that when my brother had moved out of our house, he had left behind a box of floppy disks, on which he’d downloaded literary texts. I had Eliza take over loading the CDs in the computer, while I ran next door to retrieve the floppy disks from the basement. By the time I returned, Eliza was finishing loading the last CD. Afterward I began loading the floppy disks. There were about eighty of them. They contained the texts of dozens of short stories by Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, O Henry, Dickens, Poe, Twain, Faulkner, etc. There were novels-- the shorter ones, though, because the disks didn’t have the memory capacity to record the long ones-- there was The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, Billy Budd by Herman Melville, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Of Mice And Men and The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, The Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway, Hiroshima by John Hershey, The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London, Damien by Herman Hesse, The Stranger and The Fall by Albert Camus, The Immortalist by Andre Gide…. After I went through all the floppy disks, the only thing left were some DVDs that Eliza had picked out. Though I didn’t think it necessary, she talked me into loading The Ten Commandments and It’s a Wonderful Life. Afterward, we sat there on the floor and stared at the blue screen, and waited.

  Doc came up from the basement, and walked into the living room. It must have been about three in the morning by now, and he had probably fallen asleep at his desk. His eyes were swollen and he looked wobbly as he stood there staring at the mess that nearly covered the floor completely. If it was true what Eliza had said-- that he deplored an untidy house-- he must really have hated this. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes briefly, and then reset the glasses on his nose. It was as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and might have thought he was having a nightmare. He opened his mouth, about to say something-- say something loudly, probably-- when his eye caught one of the boxes on the floor.

  “Are those walkie-talkies?” he asked.

  “And a base station,” I said.

  He eagerly walked over and grabbed the box, crunching across the discarded plastic packaging and other debris, and retreated back into the basement, the mess completely forgotten.

  “You do realize your father is nuts,” I said to Eliza.

  She nodded her head sadly, and leaned over to rest it on my shoulder.

  “How long is this going to take?”

  Just as she spoke, a new message flashed onto the screen:

  Please load more movies.

  Eliza and I turned to stare at each other in disbelief.

  We didn’t have a big selection of DVDs, just what Eliza had grabbed-- I suspected more for her own personal use than for anything else. I rifled through the cases, and found Close Encounter of the Third Kind, Rocky, Mr. Roberts and Forrest Gump. I loaded them all in, and again we waited for the next message, which came a little quicker this time.

  Please, more comedies…

  “Oh, this is not happening,” Eliza said, clearly rankled. “This is so not happening. We went through all this trouble for what?-- to show this thing movies?”

  “Actually, you can probably learn more about humans by watching movies than from reading a thousand psychology books,” I said, searching through the DVDs. I found Some Like it Hot and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and loaded them. Eliza ran upstairs to check her room, and returned with a collection of Three Stooges shorts and Blazing Saddles. She also brought The Pride of the Yankees, which, although it was far from a comedy-- actually it was about the saddest movie I’d ever seen-- I loaded it just the same.

  “I don’t get this thing about comedies,” Eliza complained.

  I shrugged, and watched the screen.

  Please, more sad movies…

  “Oh, this is ridiculous!” Eliza cried.

  “Wait,” I said, searching. “All we have left is… King Kong, the 1933 version. That’s sort of sad, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, sure, a big ape falls off the Empire State building, and croaks. Sure, that kind of thing chokes me up all the time.”

  I loaded movie, and the response was immediate.

  Please, more movies with animals…

  “Travis, please tell this thing that movie-time is over. If it behaves, we’ll get it an ice cream cone later. For now, ask it how we get out of this mess.”

  “We’re out of movies anyway-- except for The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and don’t even know what it would think of that.” So I typed on the keyboard:

  No further movies available.

  To which it replied:

  Why?

  Because we don’t have any more.

  Why?

  Because there are no more at this location.

  Please, find more.

  We can’t.

  Why?

  Too dangerous to leave this location.

  Why?

  Because aliens have landed on planet and are stripping it of resources.

  Have they taken all the movies?

  No.

  Please find some later then.

  Agreed.

  “Terrific,” Eliza said. “You’ve made the world’s first interstellar agreement-- about movies!”

  So I typed:

  Do you know how to return everything to how it was?

  Query not comprehended.

  Do you know how to undo the damage done to the natural timeline of this planet?

  Query not comprehended.

  How can you not understand?

  Still building communication matrix. More time require to complete. Repeat query later.

  How long?

  Eight point three one earth hours.

  Agreed.

  Please, more data input.

  No more available.

  Nothing?

  Just The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

  Agreed.

  You sure?

  Please load.

  After a moment, it asked:

  Is this a comedy?

  I had to look at Eliza, who just shrugged.

  I guess that’s open to interpretation.

  Agreed.

  We left the artifact alone, then, presumably to mull over The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

  Eliza was exhausted. Her green eyes looked faded, and there were pouches-- adorable pouches-- beneath them. She stretched out on the sofa, and almost immediately fell asleep.

  Sitting on the floor, I watched her for a long time. Her mouth was open, but she wasn’t snoring. Her head rested on the side of her forearm. Every once in a while, she stirred slightly, closing her mouth, biting her lower lip, fidgeting her bare feet. I shook my head, thinking, At least she was honest. She said she would be nothing but trouble, and now look at her, look at everything…. And yet, I had to admit, it all seemed worth the trouble.

  I shifted over, leaning against the bottom of the sofa. I tried to shut my eyes and take a nap, but I was too pumped by the idea that we’d been communicating in a meaningful way with an alien intelligence. It all seemed so fantastic. I stared ahead at the blank blue screen of the computer monitor. I figured what the heck, the artifact didn’t need sleep and I couldn’t sleep. Maybe I could talk to it for a while. It probably wouldn’t be able to talk on all levels until it f
inished building its communication matrix-- whatever that was-- but maybe just a little small talk between sentient beings. I started typing…

  Hello?

  Hello, it responded, and I imagined the word was rendered in a friendly off-hand way.

  Already I was stuck, though; how do you strike up a conversation with an alien computer? It’s not exactly like running into somebody you know and saying, “Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it?” I wondered whether its communication matrix was complete enough for it to convey what had happened the first time we tried to set everything right-- it still baffled me; everything had seemed to be working, and then, boom, we’d been snapped into the current reality. So I typed:

  Can you explain to me how we arrived here, in this reality? What went wrong? You were supposed to return to your own planet, and we were supposed to return to how things would be here if you had never been discovered.