Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  WEBSITE: http://karenhaber.com/

  Carol Carr was born in Brooklyn, New York, discovered Greenwich Village at age 15 and was immediately told by her friends that she would “never be one of us” again. Thus pulled untimely from her roots, she turned leftwardly political at Brooklyn College before finding herself trapped by circumstances in the early 1960s in the dubious world of science fiction, where she knew everybody and everybody knew her, and from which she has never completely escaped. While trapped there, she became known for writing hilarious pieces for fanzines, plus short science fiction stories for more professional venues. She moved to California in 1972, when home ownership was affordable, and is now retired in the East Bay hills with her husband and a series of repair people who come around every week to remove her dying trees, and replace her rotten siding and rusty plumbing. She has always been a writer who dabbled in this and that and, recently, emails. She stubbornly refuses to dabble in Facebook or Twitter. She recently published a selection of essays, evocative stories, and poems in the book, Carol Carr: The Collected Writings, a book highly recommended by yr. hmbl. editor.

  The Terran was in a telephone booth on Telegraph Avenue when the invisible alien scout from Rigel 9 wafted along on a breeze and noticed him.

  A likely prospect, thought the alien. It pulled in its pseudowing, settled to the pavement, and turned up the amplifier on its transspecies transponder.

  “No, no, no,” the Earthling squealed in its peculiar dialect. It was speaking into a quaint audio transmitter which it held in front of its mouth with clever pink articulated front paws. “I lost a quarter. Q-U-A-R-T-E-R. What I want from you is simple, Operator, so simple that a child could do it. Perhaps you could find a child for me? No? Well, would you like me to find a child? Then perhaps it could ask you for my money back. I don’t care that you don’t believe me. If you won’t give me a quarter, how about a dime? A nickel? Hello? Hello?”

  The alien padded closer on soft, mutable pseudofeet.

  If it had had lips it would have smacked them. Yes—yes. This creature was the one. The perfect sample. Probe the enemy for weaknesses, that was the Rigelian’s mission. And here was this nice little Earthling all alone in its box. Even more important, its mind was as chaotic and closed a system as the alien had ever scanned. It would never know what had hit it.

  With a sound halfway between a purr and a sob the alien slipped on the earthling. Ah, thought the alien. Almost a perfect fit.

  Such cunning little fingers: almost as nice as that otter in Monterey. But this creature didn’t seem to think as well as a sea mammal. Fast, but not well. Maybe it was the lack of salt water.

  Not a bad body, really. Surprising upper torso strength and nice stretchy muscles. All the necessary parts seemed to be present. The alien scanned the external area as well. The Terran seemed to have little awareness of its outer aura. Perhaps this was a potential weakness to be exploited. How pliable was this species? Investigate. Probe. Learn. The alien directed the earthling to return to its nest.

  The dual-lobed brain was a bit slow in processing the order: there seemed to be a great deal of peripheral noise and interference.

  Inside the phone booth Wendell Davis was on hold, waiting for the supervisor of Information. As the seconds ticked away he had mentally redesigned the booth to include a little toilet complete with bidet and modesty panel, expanded the concept to provide miniature living quarters for the homeless, added wheels and a motor and . . .

  . . . he couldn’t understand why he felt such an overwhelming compulsion to go back to his apartment.

  I just got out here, Wendell thought. I haven’t even had a decaf cappuccino yet.

  But he couldn’t shake the sudden yen for his own four walls. Okay, he thought. Okay. I’m going, I’m going. Jeez. He hung up and slammed open the door of the booth.

  It was about 2:30 on a cold post-Christmas day and the sky over Berkeley was a glorious canopy of bruises. Wendell was immediately cheered by the sight and considered stopping in to see Verna and Henry, but changed his mind when he remembered that he had borrowed Henry’s portable television and accidentally dropped it to death and Henry didn’t know yet. Besides, he was going home.

  He caught the very next bus with none of his usual arguments, detours, or complications. Sometimes you just have to get on the bus and go home, Wendell thought. He liked the phrase. It had simplicity. Directness. He decided to adopt it as his new mantra.

  His door was still unlocked because he had not yet found his key but nothing inside was missing—at least nothing Wendell noticed.

  He took off his jacket and started to drop it on the floor. Suddenly, his arm twitched, he spun around, opened the closet, and pulled out a wire hanger. His eyes bugging out of his head, Wendell neatly hung the jacket in the closet and closed the door. His mouth was dry.

  I need something to drink, he thought. Right now.

  Somewhere in the room the phone began to ring.

  Don’t answer it, Wendell thought. You don’t even know where the phone is.

  The phone rang again.

  He scanned the mounds on the floor but didn’t see anything that looked remotely like a telephone, just bunches of dark clothing, the tools he used for fixing things when they didn’t act right, parts of radios and sandwiches.

  Geological, he thought. I never have to wonder what I was doing yesterday. Yesterday is the top layer of the heap. Speaking of which, hadn’t Susan left her pregnant calico cat here yesterday when she had stopped by?

  Wendell managed to find the phone on the third ring, right next to Susan’s cat, who hissed at him, gave an odd twitch, and begin to extrude a shiny pink ratlike kitten.

  Emergency mantra: just deliver the kittens.

  By the time Wendell had midwived all five births, put together a makeshift crib from an old shoebox from which he dumped half a lifetime’s accumulated yellowed check stubs and two mattress tags, and placed the newborns in eight new homes, (some of his friends would only agree to shared custody), he was weary and sweaty and still extremely thirsty.

  He shambled into the kitchen, turned on the faucet, cupped his hand under it and slurped. In mid-slurp a wave of dizziness sent him reeling against the counter. Damned water additives, he thought. Probably all that fluoride.

  Wendell felt peculiar, almost as if he were standing across the room watching himself. He did a quick mental inventory. Arms, legs, nose—yes, everything was still attached, still in place on his body, and he was still inside of it. His skin itched like a thousand ants were commuting across him to the breadbox. He scratched madly without relief.

  But the itching was nothing compared to the odd compulsion he suddenly felt. Eerie. Not like him at all, not a bit. He felt the urge—a ravening need—to clean.

  Under the sink he found a rotting pair of once-green rubber gloves with four fingers left on one hand and three (with tooth marks) on the other. Wendell pulled them on, grabbed the half-full container of cleanser, and upended it over the sink. A few flakes drifted down. He rapped the can hard against the counter. The top fell off and the remaining cleanser fell into the sink. He grunted and turned on the water.

  Long after the gloves had fallen away from his hands, his fingertips had shriveled, and the hot water had turned tepid, Wendell was still scrubbing. He had moved on from the dishes to the large appliances and was now on his hands and knees in that no-man’s-land between the refrigerator and the counter. He was tired, he was hungry, and he had to go to the bathroom. But every time he tried to concentrate on anything other than cleaning his thoughts skipped back to it like a needle caught in the groove of an old long-playing record album.

  What’s happening to me? he wondered.

  Was it something he had eaten? Sugar in the granola or too much caffeine? He had heard about people getting stuck on dangerous cleaning jags and waking up three days later to discover that they had been washing the ceiling, stacking the dog food cans by color, or retyping the phone book according to asson
ance.

  He didn’t even like cleaning. But he couldn’t make himself stop. He was tired but even worse, he was frightened because this mind that he had lived with for thirty-two years had suddenly narrowed down into one infinitely exhausting, unremitting track. Where was his creativity, his sidelights and highlights, his familiar digressions and enticing permutations? He couldn’t even think of a new mantra to make sense of his confusion and calm himself. Still, his arm scrubbed on.

  Wendell moved from the kitchen to the rest of the apartment, dusting, polishing, vacuuming. It was three a.m. before he had finished and he was worn beyond a frazzle.

  When he awoke, ten hours later, his bed felt unfamiliar. The sheets were crisp, smooth, firmly tucked in place, and—he opened his eyes—oh God, they were even clean.

  The sun poured through the window onto the brown rug. Wendell sat up in bed. Yes, it was brown. He remembered.

  He felt a driving need to take a shower. To shave. To wash and rebraid his long greying hair. He itched in a thousand places. But when he opened the door to the bathroom, he froze.

  The room was spotless. It smelled fresh and minty. The blue (ah, blue!) towels were folded neatly over the towel rack. The pale pink (pink!) shower curtain was tucked inside the tub. The sink was white. He could see his reflection in the chrome faucet.

  Wendell began to gulp air. Calm, he thought. I am completely calm. I have never been calmer. It’s my new mantra.

  He stepped inside the bathroom. He might even have made it all the way to the toilet. But he noticed the grout, and that was his undoing.

  Even the damned grout was clean.

  Mantra forgotten, Wendell sank to his knees on the green threadbare rug and sobbed his heart out for the death of his old self, a self that never, in a zillion millennia, would have had it together enough to clean the mildewed yards of purple-splotched grout in his bathroom until they shined with the fervid whiteness of a public monument in a fascist state.

  When he had emptied his tear ducts, panic took over and shook him like a slab of landfill in an earthquake.

  The Rigelian awoke to the myriad sensations the human body afforded. Distracted by various reports from the nerve relays, the pores, the aural levels, the vascular pressure, all the workings of the basic human machine, the alien did not at first notice the earthling’s dismay. But it soon became apparent that something was seriously wrong.

  The alien peeked out of the earthling’s eyes and saw the small room that the human had cleaned before going to sleep. Something about it seemed to be troubling the human, and the resultant respiratory and digestive distress made him uncomfortable to reside in. The alien groped around inside its host, trying to find a way to reassure him.

  It hit the adrenaline trigger. No, that only seemed to intensify the agitation. The human shook harder.

  Next it fiddled with the serotonin levels.

  The human burst into tears yet again.

  The Rigelian sighed and reached for the endorphin controls.

  Ah, much better. The earthling relaxed, smiled, and emptied his bladder into the water-filled receptacle called a toilet. The alien nearly swooned with the pleasurable sensation. It tried to get the human to do it again, but apparently there was some restriction on the number of times this function could be repeated. Well, the alien could wait.

  The earthling turned on the water sprayer in the enclosure next to the toilet, took off his sleep costume, and got under the spray. The Rigelian felt the delightful bombardment of a thousand tiny watery collisions with epidermis. No wonder this human being was in such mental disarray, it thought. With such a distracting variety of sensual input, each day must be too full of pleasure to allow much concentration on anything else.

  The Rigelian was tempted to stay in the shower for several awareness periods. But it reminded itself that it was here for a purpose, and as pleasant as this water spray might be, it was time to get down to the serious business of testing the enemy. Investigate the target population’s psychological tolerance for foreign matrices. There would be time enough for bladder-emptying and other delights once the Earth had been conquered.

  Wendell felt peculiarly cheerful as he stepped out of the shower. He toweled off, dressed in his cleanest jeans and shirt, and decided to organize his paperwork.

  He had never done anything like this before. “Don’t think,” he told himself. “Just do.” Situational mantras seemed like a good improvisation. But once he lit into the job, he didn’t have time to think, even about not thinking.

  Three days later, Wendell sat upright in a straight-backed chair, surveying his domain.

  The place was spotless. His papers were alphabetized and color-coded; his clothing had been washed, dried, folded, or hung. He didn’t owe anybody any money. His apartment key was in plain sight. The kittens had all been given away and their mother returned to Susan. He had gotten a haircut and bought a pair of slacks. He was thinking of looking for a job. He was terrified.

  He needed a friend, and in a hurry.

  Emergency mantra time. “Find a friend,” he intoned. “Just find a friend.”

  “Susan,” he said, staring at the back of her head, which was bent over her keyboard. “You’ve got to help me.”

  “What’s happening?” she mumbled, not turning around, not even looking up.

  “Nothing. Everything.”

  “Beg pardon?

  “My grout is spotless, Susan.” Wendell paused meaningfully. Surely she would intuit the problem.

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  She sighed and turned to him. Her blue eyes were bloodshot and her short dark hair was frazzled. “Wendell, are you getting weird on me?”

  “No. Yes. I mean, I don’t know.”

  “Well, look. I’ve got a really gnarly deadline here. Since we can’t seem to find anything wrong with you, or your grout, why don’t we just agree that you’re okay. Want to go to a movie next week? I’ll call you.”

  Wendell found her patronizing attitude offensive, told her so, and left, pausing only to insult her cat.

  He went back to his apartment, but the sight of it—neat, clean, finished—unnerved him. He needed fresh air, fast.

  Out on the street, between the Palm Reader’s bay window and the Sierra Club picket line in front of the Whole Bark pet supply store, Wendell bumped into a street person. The street person’s hair might once have been blond but it was now a strange beige mat that sat high upon his head at an angle like a beret. He was wearing a purple shower curtain and pulling a shopping cart along behind him.

  Wendell admired the shower curtain but thought that it needed several pockets and at least one zippered compartment with expandable accordion pleats.

  “Goddadolla?” said the street person.

  “Yeah.” Wendell felt around in his pants and, with a familiar sense of apprehension, found a wad of neatly folded bills. He peeled one off. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” The man put the money into an aperture in his curtain and leaned closer. His stench was amazing, like barbequed sneakers. Old ones. “End times are near.”

  “Oh, sure,” Wendell said. But he couldn’t help wondering if that was the reason why things—his life in particular—felt so peculiar, suddenly.

  The street person nodded. “Be ready. They’re coming.”

  Wendell wanted to walk away but he couldn’t help asking, “Who?”

  “The ones from up there.” The bum pointed to the sulphurous five o’clock sky.

  “Pilots?” Wendell said.

  “Angels, you jerk. They’ll eat our brains, spit out what they don’t need like peach pits. Already eaten mine.”

  “They have?” Wendell stared at him. Just because the guy was crazy didn’t mean that he was wrong.

  “Yeah. So be careful. Get straight with Him-or-Her-or-Whatever.” The street person paused, scratched his head as though he had lost his place, shrugged, and said, “Goddadolla?”

  Bu
t Wendell was no longer listening. The idea of making peace with Him-or-Her-or-Whatever was suddenly very appealing. Compelling, even. There was just one problem. Wendell was sort of secular and eclectic and heavily nondenominational. He didn’t particularly believe in one—or even several gods—although he hoped that his nonbelief wouldn’t offend any or all of the theoretically omnipotent beings who might or might not take notice of it.

  “Find a religious person,” Wendell thought aloud, mantra-like. “Find a seriously religious person.” And he began walking swiftly uphill toward the University’s seminary complex.

  A young blond man in a red and white rugby shirt was wedged furtively between two rose bushes outside the Albert Schweitzer cafeteria. He was puffing on a cigarette and, when Wendell walked by, apologized profusely for any smoke that might have drifted into Wendell’s lungs. Wendell assured him that he was okay. Well, sort of okay, except for this spiritual problem he was having.

  The young man, a seminary student named Jason, listened raptly, nodding between puffs.

  “Grout?” he asked.

  “Grout,” Wendell said.

  “Okay,” Jason said, when Wendell had finished. “I think I know what’s wrong with you.”