Angela Li rolled over in bed, tangling her legs further in her lace-fringed off-white bed sheets. Without opening her eyes she noticed that last March sunlight was shining directly onto her through her south-facing window. Which meant, she knew from a lifetime of experience, that it was after nine in the morning. Which meant that her mother had already been awake for a couple of hours.
Which meant that she was currently disappointed in Angela.
Angela Li: twenty-five years and seventeen days old, five foot six, fifth-generation United States native but still largely 100% Chinese/Japanese genetic heritage, overweight but no more so than anyone else, ambiguously proud owner of a newly minted Bachelor of Arts degree in English and no desire to pursue the subject any further, academically speaking at least — Angela turned her head away from the window and resolutely kept her eyes closed. In fact she had graduated last June, but due to overly involved financial entanglements that can best be summed up in that she graduated owing the university a moderate sum of money, they had withheld the actual sheepskin until the entire list of debts had been all been reset to zero zero zero. She was now awake enough to notice that the bed sheets were uncomfortably warm. She shifted her body over to a cooler position, not yet ready to face the world beyond her bedroom. To say nothing of her mother, though her mother would only get more annoyed the longer she put off getting up. Which debts had been paid in full less than a month before attaining her quarter-century, and having tied off that set of loose ends, Angela had found herself remarkably unable to remain motivated to continue working at the temp agency, Busy Beavers, and after she had completed the current office assignment, she had quietly chosen not to put her name back on the roster for a new one. Angela's body was once again over-warm, and she shoved the thick duvet off onto the floor, trying to keep cool. Actually, leaving the temp agency hadn't felt like a voluntary choice, or at least no more than she might choose to start swimming for shore if she fell out of a boat. It had only been a couple of weeks later that she and her then-boyfriend Reuven had broken up, after a relationship of seven months, perhaps not long in the grand scheme of things but longer, and more serious, than any of her previous relationships.
Saturday. Angela opened her dark brown eyes. Her brain refused to pretend that she was not completely awake by now. She disentangled her legs from the knotted sheets and let her feet rest upon the floor. She was now sitting up. No doubt it was going to be a beautiful day today. The wallpaper was a pattern of pink and purple flower blossoms, relieved here and there by photographs of friends, family and herself, and one or two posters of kittens. Bending down, she pulled the duvet up off the floor and laid it roughly across the top of her bed. The sheets were in a wad at the foot. The passing of every day of the last two weeks was eroding her long-standing nearly-subconscious faith that she'd be moved out and adultly self-sufficient by the time of her twenty-fifth birthday. She was wearing an oversized T shirt, flecks of silver-sparkle paint still visible across the front that long ago spelled out, in thick sans serif letters, "Made In China". Shafts of dust floated in the middle of the bedroom she had lived in, sans interruption, for the majority of her life. It was time to get out, Angela thought. She swallowed experimentally, wincing at the taste in her mouth, and scratched at an itch just below her armpit, absentmindedly feeling for hairs that might have finally grown long enough to be visible. It was time to get out, Angela thought, but she had been thinking that thought every morning for probably eight years now.
Angela's mother, Mrs. Emily Cheng Li, was at the dining room table when she came downstairs. A quarter inch of milk remained in the bowl on the table before her, forgotten behind the newspaper she held before her. The dining room's TV was tuned to a morning news/talk show.
"Morning, Ma."
Her mother replied in a voice too quiet for Angela to hear over the other voices in the room. Angela normally hated having to compete with a TV show over a family meal, but since becoming unemployed she had come to appreciate it in a small way for how it reduced the need for making conversation in the first place.
Angela filled a bowl with cold cereal, a cereal heavily marketed as being a healthy alternative but was really no different than the usual run-of-the-mill cereal made with too much sugar. The bowl rang with a noise like a bell trying to imitate radio static. "Can I see the comics, Ma?"
Her mother's habit was to read one section at a time while keeping the other sections in her lap, so this request was a family ritual. Her mother looked sideways over at her daughter. Her hair hung straight to just about her shoulders, and was, Angela noticed, solidly black. She must have dyed her roots yesterday while Angela was out. "How about the classifieds, Angela?"
"The classifieds are junk, Ma. All the good job listings are online." Angela occasionally wondered if her mother was actually taken in by the cereal company's advertising, but hadn't brought it up for fear that she in fact had, and if she disabused her mother of her illusion she might stop buying it.
Emily cleared her throat and removed her reading glasses, which were attached to a bring red fabric cord that hung around her neck and clashed with her jewel-green silk blouse. "You say that, Angela, but you know it doesn't hurt to look."
"Later, then, okay?" Angela had looked through the classified ads in the newspaper, and had been appalled at the dismal miasma that permeated the whole section. Data entry, construction, paperwork management, sales, and column after column of temp agencies offering vague promises that failed to preclude any of the above — the job offers were uniformly for people whose skills were either obsolete or nonexistent. Reading through the whole section left her demoralized, and so she had stopped doing so.
Her mother silently passed her the whole paper, minus the section in her hand.
"Thanks."
"After the break, we'll have some more news about last week's sighting, and." said the show host. Emily Li pressed a button on the remote, changing the audio channel to her favorite radio station, leaving the image of the talking head mouthing silently. She looked over at her daughter with a critical eye. "With that loose sweatshirt and those old blue jeans, it's as if you're intentionally dressing to look like an unemployed person."
Angela shrugged. "I'll get dressed up if I need to, Ma. There's no point in it otherwise."
"You wouldn't dress like that if you still had a boyfriend." And you won't find a new one looking like that: that part was left unsaid.
Angela shrugged. "I'm not ready for a new boyfriend yet." There was a muffled tweedle, which Angela recognized only after a moment as her phone. She looked around, trying to locate it.
Mrs. Li stood up and walked over to the kitchen counter, where Angela's black nylon purse shapelessly listed, opened it and fished through it, retrieving Angela's deep purple phone. "Here, Angela."
"Please, just hand me my purse next time." Angela looked at her phone's display. It was a message from Elwyn: "Got any plans for the day?"
"Why, what's the matter? You hiding secrets in here?" She continued to poke through the contents, as if hoping to exhume something noteworthy.
"Ma! That's my purse." Angela scribbled a reply: "Not really. How about you?" She looked up; her mother still had an index finger within. "You know, I don't go poking through your bedroom closet or anything."
"It's just your purse, honey," said the elder Li, but closed it up and returned to her seat.
"It's the principle of the thing."
"Did you ever call Mr. Yuen about working in his office?"
"No, Ma. I told you last week, that's not going to happen." A response from Elwyn arrived: "Meet us for brunch at The Cinnamonella?" Angela frowned. "They don't want someone with an English degree; they want a receptionist."
"Oh Angela. Do you even want a job?" Her mother rattled her newspaper open again to indicate that her question was rhetorical. "I just don't feel that you're in a position to be choosy."
Angela wrote: "Who's us?" but she had already decided to go, despite already having a breakfast meal, in the form of cold cereal, before her. Saturday meant that she needed to leave the house, for there was no guarantee that her mother would, nor when if she did.
Elwyn wrote back: "Me, Derrick, Tina, Reuven," then added: "And you."
Angela was a bit put off by the inclusion of Reuven but not enough to test her resolve. "Okay, what time?"
Another rattle as her mother closed her newspaper. "Angela, dear, I can see you're getting ready to leave the house, so before that happens we need to talk."
Angela felt a soft twist in her belly. Mrs. Li was a calm and forthright woman, and not prone to use guilt as a crowbar, but Angela was vulnerable to it for all that.
Her mother wore an expression of pure business. "You're twenty-five years old: you can't keep living in your uncle's house like a little girl. I'm willing to keep feeding you for the time being, and clothing you, for a little while longer at least, because I'm you're mother, but you can't continue to take advantage of your uncle in the same way. Beginning next month, if you're still living here, I want you to start paying him rent."
Angela said nothing, knowing that there was little she could say that wouldn't sound defensive or childish. Her phone showed the message "Never mind, I'll come get you. You're on my way."
"And what that means is, if you don't have a job, you're going to need to do chores around here. Enough to earn your keep."
Angela felt as if a bluff somewhere had been called, that she had been playing chicken with some part of her mother and now the cliff's edge had arrived. "Ma, I understand why you're doing this, but it's just that I'm really confused about my options, and I need time to, to —"
"Angela, there's nothing wrong with that. We all need time now and then, especially when you're young. But that doesn't mean you get a free pass from your responsibilities." Her mother was becoming brisk now, and Angela realized that arguing was likely futile now, and had been to begin with. "You'll find that it's possible to sift through your confused priorities and work for a living at the same time. Everyone else does it, and so can you. Now, do you have any job interviews currently lined up?"
Angela looked over at the TV image. An clip from an amateur shipsighting video was playing. "No."
"Then I think you should start worrying about next month's rent right now. I want you to pay a visit to your uncle and ask him what you can do today to start earning some money."
Angela winced. "Seriously?"
"Yes seriously, Angela." Mrs. Li felt a sudden pang for her daughter, the look on her face indicating that Angela really hadn't foreseen this, hadn't fully grasped that it was the inevitable result of her current situation, and that as her mother she really should have done this sooner rather than later. Emily's father had told her several times as she was growing up that on her eighteenth birthday she was going to be either paying rent or getting tossed into the street. It was a harsh and unloving thing to hear as a child, and Emily had vowed to be a better parent than that — if she did nothing else right she could at least do better than that. She had been lucky enough that she was able to graduate from high school and move into her college dorm less than a week before she turned eighteen, and of course that meant student loans which took decades, literally decades, to pay off, and she had still had to get a job anyway, but at least the money from the job was hers, and wasn't going to her father, to pay for something he had been freely providing for years before that. And so now the irony of history had come around, and she fretted that she had made the wrong choice in ignoring her father's example, and allowed her daughter to continue living at home while getting her degree, and then after she got her degree, and then after quitting her job, all the while waiting patiently for Angela to start showing any evidence of forward progress. Birds pushed their children out of the nest for a reason, Emily reminded herself, reinforcing her resolve, or otherwise they never learn to fly. "I've already discussed this with John, so I'm sure he'll have something lined up. I want you to talk to him before you go anywhere today."
Angela considered whether she should let Elwyn of her uncertain circumstances, but while she was staring at her phone a new message arrived. This one was from Derrick, and was accompanied with an image, a photo of himself, his left arm growing large and dark before disappearing into the bottom right corner of the shot where he held his phone up before himself, pitched downward from several inches above his own head. His face was arranged into a toothy smile and in his right hand was an out-of-focus silver ring. The text following this read simply, "Will you marry me?"
"Oh, Angela?" her mother said. "Are you planning on being home for dinner?"
"Uh." Angela looked back up at the image and realized that Derrick was down on one knee. "Yeah, Ma. Definitely." She got up, turned her phone off, and stuffed it back into her purse. She might not want to go to brunch after all.
"Knock knock." Angela opened the door to the apartment over the garage. "Hey Uncle John." As usual, her uncle was well ensconced behind a heavy maple desk that dominated one end of the small apartment. Piled over with books and papers, not to mention paper bags and cups left over from fast food meals, he preferred to avoid having to squeeze around it, and so Angela and Emily had long learned to just let themselves in.
"Good morning, Angela." John was leaning back in his wooden chair, slightly slumped forward, holding a thin stack of papers in his hand, titled to the left to catch the sunlight. He carefully sat up straighter and scrutinized his niece over his gold rims, then removed his spectacles, carefully folding them and placing them down on the desk atop the papers he had just been reading. His usual smile was ringed with seven days worth of stubble. The stubble was gray, even though the hair running around the sides of his head was still black. He ran a hand unconsciously across his starched white shirt, smoothing away the wrinkles, and smiled at her in a way that Angela could not help but think of as avuncular. "I assume you're here because your mother sent you."
Angela nodded only, unsure which side exactly her uncle was on, her back still touching the doorknob. To her left was the apartment's kitchen, really no more than a sink with enough counter space to hold a microwave. Plus some cupboards. The kitchen had the only large light fixture of the apartment, however, and even a spring morning like this couldn't squeeze enough light through the one narrow window to illuminate all the corners of the apartment.
"Well, come in then," John said without moving. Angela stepped forward and sat down heavily in the stuffed chair before the desk. A cloud of dust raised in response to her presence and the springs squeaked. The smell of unwashed clothes was in the air, familiar enough to be not quite unpleasant to her. Angela was entirely used to John casual attitude towards cleanliness, and would have felt less comfortable if the dust bunnies that accumulated along the wainscotting were to one day go absent.
John picked up a thick-barreled fountain pen and twirled it between his fingers. "My dear girl, I hope you understand — you do, I'm sure — that if it were up to me I could never ask you to pay me rent for staying here. You're my only niece, you know, and as far as I'm concerned you could stay here the rest of your life and I wouldn't complain. Indeed, I would count myself lucky."
Angela allowed herself to relax a little bit. "Thanks, Uncle John."
"But." Her uncle suddenly poked at an open book with his pen, fortunately capped. "That would be doing you a disservice. It would be putting my casual comfort above your need to grow." John leaned forward, for a moment clearly relishing his role as the wise elder. "You're a woman now. You shouldn't be wasting away in your uncle's house. You need to find your own path. Your own man to live with. Or a place of your own."
Angela wanted very much to explain that she understood all that, understood why they were doing this, even understood the timing of it, though the timing still seemed to her a bit callous, and really the whole thing was mortifying enough without having it spelled out, so the most encouraging thing they could do would be to just say as little as possible and get it over with. But she couldn't, and instead found herself asking, "Couldn't you say the same thing about Ma?"
John shook his head. "Angela, that's different. Your mother had her own home, and her own place. You're young, you've got your whole life ahead of you. And we all hope that you'll wind up with a better man." The fountain pen tapped a little louder. "Besides which, your mother does help pay for this house. So your comparison is spurious."
"Say, uncle John? When I move out, are you going to move back into the house?" Angela thought of the posters and lacy bed sheets, wondered if she would even want to see them installed in another room, in another place.
Her uncle paused for a moment, switching gears. He put down the fountain pen and stroked his rough jaw. "Well now, I don't know, Angela. I haven't really thought about it. I mean, I didn't really move out here to begin with just because of you. I could have stayed in the house, you know. You could have, I don't know, shared a bedroom with your mother, or I could have slept on the couch. But I like this room. It's a good place for thinking. A man needs a place to think." The thumb on his left hand idly riffled the corner of a stack of pages. John thought back to the first month that they had come to live in his house. He had invited her to move after her husband had left so suddenly, and though Emily had always been his bright and resourceful little sister, raising a baby had forced her to leave her last job, which in any case had hardly paid enough to take care of her own expenses, much less those of a family. Angela was in first grade by then, and quite capable of looking after herself in many ways, but she still needed more supervision than Emily could hope to afford. John invitation to move in with him had at first been intended as a temporary measure, assuming that Emily would not want to live with her older brother for an extended period of time, and he likewise would eventually find it a bit stifling, or not exactly stifling but wearying, over time. But Emily had suddenly felt a need be close to family after her husband's abrupt desertion, and John had surprised himself with how much he enjoyed feeling needed, not just by Emily but also by his articulate young niece. Still, after a month of their being in his house, though he wanted nothing less than for them to leave again, he found himself worn down by the opposite of loneliness, and realized that he needed to find a solution if this situation were to continue working, and he had wanted to make certain that it continued to work as long as Emily needed it to. And Angela, for that matter. The loft apartment over the garage had presumably been built many decades ago, to be rented to college students needing a dirt cheap place to sleep. The room had been neglected for many years, and John would not be able to rent it now without spending a fair sum of money to bring it back inline with the current city code, but as a place to retreat from the house he found it entirely acceptable. He liked the freedom to be able to control how much time he spent in the company of his sister and niece, according to his whim and their current moods. "So no, I don't really have any reason to move back inside. On the other hand, Emily might find the house becoming rather lonely without nobody to come home to every night." He leaned back in his chair. "Of course, I could be wrong about her. If she doesn't have you to keep clothed and fed, she should find it easier to save money. She might even be able to work less, have more free time. She might find herself with another husband, finally, without — well. I didn't mean to paint you to yourself as a burden on your mother, Angela." John leaned forward and waved a hand vaguely towards her. "But your mother has in fact worked hard to raise you. The time has come to repay her by getting your own life started. Anyway. Enough of this." John opened a drawer low on his right-hand side and pulled out a blank sheet of typing paper. He uncapped his fountain pen and began writing. "I'm setting your rent at three hundred a month."
"Three hundred!" Angela repeated despite herself.
"Yes, for now. That's much less than a furnished room goes for in this neighborhood, Angela, so you have no room to complain. I'm starting it low because you're my niece, and because I know you don't have any money saved up."
"Starting?"
"Yes. If you decide to stay here long-term, you are welcome to do so, but that number will eventually have to be made commensurate with other rentals in this market. That means that you'll need to have a job."
"It's not like I'm not looking for a job. I look at listings every day. They're just not out there."
"In my day, it was always possible to get a job as a waitress, somewhere."
"That would pay even less than my last job, Uncle John."
"It would still be income. Something to live on. And so until you do have a job you'll need to do work around the house. I will pay you a fair price for doing laundry, yard work, cooking, and the like. I'll draw up a full price list this evening, but you should feel free to get started now. The month will be ending soon enough and you'll want to have your rent earned by then so you don't wind up in debt."
"I can't do any of that today; I'm already supposed to be meeting friends in town."
"And that is more important than earning some money?"
"I made arrangements with them before all this. If I cancel our plans at the last minute, they'll think I'm not a friend they can rely on."
"All right. Tell you what; you can stop by Chinatown and pick up some deer velvet. Your mother's almost out. And get me a packet of chrysanthemum tea while you're there."
Angela watched her uncle's pen as it squiggled across the page. She shook her head. "You know that stuff doesn't really do anything, right?"
Her uncle didn't look up. "Your mother's arthritis is no joke. If it weren't for deer velvet, she would have been forced to quit her job long ago."
"It's just a placebo effect, uncle John. She could get the same effect without the pills if she wanted to."
"A degree in English doesn't make you an expert in qi, my dear." Uncle John gave her a serious look. "And don't forget to bring back the receipt."
Part of the reason Angela had owed the university money at the time of her graduation was her mother's reluctance to finance her extra fifth year of studies, which in turn was caused by Angela's late discovery, during her first year as a junior, that English was boring. Or not boring per se but that its subject matter was amorphous. English literature itself was perfectly fine, but when turned into an object of study it became fuzzy, so much so that Angela found it hard to believe in her schoolwork. She could see the term paper she had written, and if she printed it out she could feel it as well, consider its weight and at once recall the long nights written, consider its length and instantly recall the long nights spent writing it, not to mention the arduous process of marshalling the citations to support various points that served the central thesis; and in fact she could even read through the pages of commentary and feedback her professors would write in response, to say nothing of the dense red thickets of positioned notes inserted into the margins of her pages, and understand (for the most part) the sense behind the challenges to her statements, and suggested changes to her delivery, and could see, with heartening clarity, how the next thesis might be improved thereby. All that she could believe in; what she could not quite believe was that any of it mattered to anyone. Not even herself: it had mattered to her while she was writing it, and afterwards ... but she could see, from the corner of her eye, that if she did not stay resolutely focused on that feeling, that one day, and soon, it would start to slip, and fade, and before many years had passed she would find herself looking at this same thesis and finding it strange and pointless. No doubt uncoincidentally, that first junior year was also when she became enamored-slash-jealous of her friends (though at that point they were only acquaintances) who were in various science degree programs, mostly biology. Curiosity was roused, which led to her taking a number of science electives that year, to the neglect of her English credit requirements (both in the classes she didn't take and in the classes that she did), which in turn resulted in her having to take several third-year English classes during her fourth year, making it flatly impossible for her to avoid a fifth year in order to earn her B.A. Her acquaintances (now friends) told her that she was suffering from a well-known malady called "physics envy", though she later learned that this was a stretching of the term. Mrs. Emily Cheng Li had not budgeted for a fifth year of Angela's higher education, and though she was as maternally supportive as ever it was clear that she couldn't quite sympathize with the situation that Angela had created for herself. "Physics envy" more typically referred to people studying the soft sciences pining after the unambiguities of the hard sciences, rather than people like her: standing entirely outside of the sciences looking in.
As Angela was walking from the garage apartment back to the house proper she caught a glimpse of Elwyn walking down the sidewalk, his gangly six-foot height accentuated by the long straight overcoat he wore unbuttoned, and she jogged around the house to meet him out front.
"Good morning, Elwyn."
"Ms. Li, Ms. Li, wild and free." Elwyn chanted as he closed the distance between them. His hands stayed in his overcoat pockets, but they flared outward briefly in a manner that could be taken as a greeting. Elwyn wore a black T shirt, the front of which showed the bones of the human rib cage in thin white lines, tucked into a pair of rumpled khaki slacks. "You look like you're in a good mood." Elwyn had a high forehead and wore an old fedora pushed back far enough so that a thin line of yellow curls poked out from under the brim.
"Do I? I'm not, I'm in a terrible mood."
"Really? I must be in such a good mood that you're smiling for me, then. Are you hung over?"
"No, no way. I don't get hangovers, you know that." It was true; Angela's first hangover was yet three years in the future. "I'm just bummed because my mom is cracking down on me to get a job. Why are you in such a good mood? And does it have anything to do with you being in walking distance of my house so early in the morning?"
Elwyn leaned his head back and laughed gently. "Wow, you don't miss anything." He raised a gangly arm and twiggy fingers scratched at the curly blond hairs covering the back of his head, just under the brim of his fedora. "Well as a matter of fact yes." Elwyn grinned impishly, then his face returned to its usual blank repose. "Do you remember Lia from the party last night?"
"Yeah, I think so. Real short hair, with the neon scarf?"
"No, you're thinking of Lisa. Lia had dark brown hair with the wavy curls tied up in a ponytail."
"Yeah, okay."
"You remember her?"
"No, but it doesn't matter. What about her?"
"Come on, you know. She asked you that question about Christopher Marlowe."
"Okay, yeah, I do remember that."
"Right. Well, I think we hit it off last night."
"You think? You're not sure?"
"Okay, what I meant to say is that we slept together last night. That doesn't prove anything by itself. But it's a good sign, right?"
"Okay, I need more details, but first: let me just run inside and get my purse. We're going to grab Tina next, right?"
"Yeah, and the others are going to meet us at the restaurant."
"Great. Why don't you go on and get Tina and I'll be just a second." Angela had a nagging feeling against bringing Elwyn back inside the house, for reasons that she couldn't quite pin down, other than he would have to offer at least a few polite conversational exchanges with her mother, and Angela didn't entirely trust her mother not to say anything embarrassing. Alone she could say that she was leaving to run errands in Chinatown for her Uncle John and leave it at that.
Angela's phone had two more messages showing. As she walked out the front door she read the first one, from Reuven: "Are you joining us for brunch?" It was almost ten minutes old. She sent back a brief affirmative as she crossed the empty street and cut across the lawn to the Goldberg's house. The front door was ajar, so Angela pulled open the screen door and walked in. The second message was from Phoebe. "The student collective ice cream is the best ice cream ever." Angela didn't feel that this warranted a timely response so she stuffed her phone back into her purse. The living room was empty, save for the TV quietly chattering in the corner. Angela walked in between the couch and coffee table and found everyone sitting in the dining room. Tina's parents were sitting at the table, talking and eating. A skillet bearing the remains of an omelette sat in the middle of the table. Tina sat at the table as well, but instead of a place setting she had her purse before her, and was currently applying eyeliner while using her phone's screen as a hand mirror. Elwyn was standing by the bar separating the dining room from the kitchen, playing idly with the sleek salt and pepper shakers. The Goldbergs almost never used salt, or pepper for that matter; the shakers were kept solely for the benefit of company, and so their usual home was off in the corner.
Mr. Goldberg looked over his shoulder and smiled familiarly. "Hello, Angela. Sit down. Would you like some omelette?"
Tina spoke, without looking up. "Dad, we're on our way to a restaurant for brunch." Tina's squinted at her reflection, testing the eyeliner for smearing. Tina had tied her hair into a braid, and it hung six inches down her back, becoming nearly invisible in the thick yellow stripes of her shirt. She tilted her head sideways, and Angela knew from past experience that she was verifying that the green rhinestone studs in her ears brought out the green in her eyes.
Angela smiled. "Thanks anyway, Mr. Goldberg." Angela and Tina had been friends for over ten years, when the Goldbergs had first moved in across the street. Angela had lost her virginity to their eldest son Roger, a fact which had nearly sunk her friendship with Tina at the time but now seemed like nothing more than a quaint artifact of history, an embarrassing story that your mother likes to tell your friends when you're trying to act grown-up. Even so she had never become fully comfortable around Roger after the forty-four-hour-long affair had ended, and it was a relief when he was accepted to a technical college in another state.
Elwyn began juggling the salt and pepper shakers with one hand, carefully holding his left hand behind his back. "On the way over here I saw this crazy guy yelling to himself. I honestly couldn't tell if he was happy or mad."
Mr. Goldberg continued to smile politely at Angela. "Any luck with your job search yet?"
Tina finished working on her right eye and switched to the other side. "What, like some homeless guy?"
Angela smiled and rocked her head noncommittally. "Not quite yet, but you know. It's going okay. Thanks for asking."
Elwyn lunged after the pepper shaker, which had gone a little too far to his right. "No, I don't think he was homeless." He carefully retreated back to his upright position. "I kind of got the impression that this was a new thing for him. His clothes were clean, for one. At least I assume they were his."
Tina's mother Sarah looked up at Elwyn. "You mean you think they may have been stolen? You know, the Dunning's had their house broken into last month."
"No, I meant I assume they were his because he wasn't wearing them when I saw them. The clothes I mean." He fumbled a catch and the glass salt shaker clattered against the linoleum. He bent down and quickly picked it back up. "When I first saw him, he wasn't wearing anything but a ski cap, pulled way down so that it almost covered his eyes." Elwyn held his hands against his temples to demonstrate. "And he was yelling about how the aliens were going to come get him and take him away, but like I said, I couldn't tell if he was complaining about it or celebrating." Elwyn looked at the scatter of white crystals on the ground, and began sweeping them into one corner with the inside of his foot. "A few minutes after I walked past him, I started seeing clothes lying in the grass along the sidewalk. First some boxers, then some wool slacks, then a white shirt. Probably in the same order he had put them on in the morning. I think there might have even been a tie hanging from a tree."
Tina looked up and began putting her makeup into the pocket of her backpack. "This wasn't close by, was it?"
"Hard to tell with the shadows and all. Yeah, it was pretty close by. A few blocks that way." Elwyn gestured at the right-hand wall, sending a few grains of pepper into the air.
"I wonder if it was old Mr. Morris. I've always said that he was going to lose it someday. Haven't I dad?"
"Oh, I don't believe Mr. Morris would hurt a fly, Tina."
"Yeah, but he's not hugely sane either. Did the crazy guy by any chance have auburn hair, in kind of a crewcut?"
Elwyn shrugged. "Dunno. The hair I could see was white. You ready yet?"
Tina stood up and shouldered her purse, a small dark blue bag that fell precisely to the level of her waist. She pulled briefly on her black cotton tights, straightening them where they had started to sag at the ankle, and pulled loose her green skirt where the hem had gotten caught on an invisible thread, allowing it fall back down to her shin. "Yep. Let's go."
"Good. I'm starving." Elwyn carefully returned the narrow shakers back where he had found them and walked back around the breakfast table, after stopping to swipe his right foot one last time at the salt crystals still scattered on the floor.
Mr. Goldberg put down his fork and stood up, offering his hand. "Elwyn, good to meet you again." He turned and smiled at Angela. "Hang in there, Angela. And don't get discouraged. Looking for a job is hard work, but I know a young woman with your talents will have no problem finding a job. It just takes time."
"Thanks, Mr. Goldberg," Angela said, wondering if he knew about her new arrangement at home, and then wondering if there was any sincerity to what he said, or if it was just the usual sort of pleasant emptiness that people tell you when you're down on your luck and it's no one's fault but your own. Angela definitely wanted to believe that he was right, and that someone with her skills would have no problem finding just the right job, sooner or later, but she suspected that she had been riding on that hope for a little too long already.
The Cinnamonella was the sort of restaurant that was usually described as a hole in the wall, on a street that was full of Indian restaurants of various levels of quality. It sat on the outskirts of of a neighborhood full of off-campus student residences: the grimly suggestive name that would have scared off the clientele in most neighborhoods managed to pull in a certain class of sardonic college students that kept it in business, despite the poker-faced and occasionally surly staff.
Seated around a fake marble table near one of the windows that gave the incoming sunlight a soft unfocused quality that was actually quite pleasant until one saw that it was mostly due to the layer of pollution clinging to the outside surface of the glass, Angela looked around. The wall facing the restaurant next door was brick, and lined with high-backed booths, with benches covered in bright red plastic beneath yellow Formica tables. The outside of the booths were real wood that sported decades of battering and scratches. Strings of multicolored Christmas lights were taped up near to the ceiling along the dirty-yellow walls, below which hung a series of photographs showing the storefront at various points in the past. The floor was covered with glossy black tiles flecked with bits of silvery shale that occasionally reflected the overhead fluorescents, and made the footsteps of the waitresses' heels reverberate as loud woody clopping.
The three friends perused their menus. Angela fretted. The food was relatively cheap here, but cheap still didn't beat free, which is what the food at home was. For now anyway. But when the waiter came round Angela found herself poised on the knife's-edge of indecision, and then found herself ordering a full meal. Perhaps it was a need to deny the full force of her financial situation, or a wish to avoid having to answer her friend's questions which they would certainly raise if she ordered nothing.
"So, Elwyn." Or perhaps she was just hungry. "Tell us about Lia."
"She's hot," Elwyn said.
"Lia from the party last night?" Tina injected. "Did you sleep with her?"
"You could say that."
"Slut."
"Not a slut," Elwyn countered impassively.
"Slut."
"Not a slut."
"What about Janice?"
"Janice and I have an agreement."
"Sure you do."
Elwyn gave Tina a laser-like look of seriousness. "I'm not just saying that. Janice and I really do have an agreement. She and I are both free agents. In fact as per our agreement I will be telling her all about Lia this evening."
"No way. You're not kidding?"
"Of course not. I never kid about these sorts of things, Tina. You should know that about me by now."
"So wait. Does this agreement of yours mean that you and Janice are doing the poly thing, or are you just agreeing to see other people because you're not sure yet that you want to settle?"
"Settle?" Elwyn demanded, and that moment his phone twittered.
"Settle down, I mean. Sorry."
Elwyn pulled his phone out of his overcoat pocket, a narrow silvery model with a fold-out set of keys. "That's actually a really good question. It could conceivably go either way, really, at this point. At least as far as I'm concerned. It's possible that Janice might be thinking strictly one or the other, though." Elwyn began tapping out a reply. "Looks like Reuven isn't going to be joining us."
Angela was quietly relieved, but nonetheless said, "Why not?"
"Says he's busy."
Tina tsked. "I'm just as busy as he is."
Elwyn said, "Well, to be fair, his term project sounds pretty labor-intensive."
"He should have picked something involving plants like I did. Handling bacteria is a huge pain in the ass."
Elwyn put his phone down in front of him. "Okay, but that doesn't mean he isn't validly busy, it just means it's his own fault. You know, for his lack of foresight for wanting to study bacteria. When he's developing new antibiotics and you're writing your nth research paper on pine cones I'm sure he'll be kicking himself."
Tina ignored this. "The one good thing about bacteria is that they live and die fast. If he screws something up tomorrow and contaminates all his dishes, he'll still have time to start over and get something turned in at the end of the quarter."
Elwyn picked up his spoon and began tapping the bowl gently against the bone of his left wrist. "Scrub everything and go back to square one, that is to say."
"Meanwhile I'm past the point of no return. If a janitor comes into my lab and leaves a window open and a bunch of aphids get in from the entomology lab and eat all the leaves off of my marigolds, I'm screwed. By the time I got everything budding again it'd be the deadline. I'd be stuck in that lab all summer long trying to make up my grade so I didn't flunk out."
"That's not going to happen. The janitors have been working there for centuries, I bet." Elwyn's phone rang. He picked it up.
"I know, I'm just saying."
"Hey, Reuven. Yeah, it's me and Tina and Angela. You sure you can't join us?"
Angela suspected that Tina was right; that Reuven wasn't all that busy, but did want to avoid her for a while longer yet. Angela was surprised that Elwyn seemed oblivious to that factor.
"Okay, but you gotta eat sometimes too, you know."
Angela's phone rang, a chiming sound softly muted by her purse. She pulled it up off the floor and onto the table, and dug out her phone.
Tina leaned over and said, not too loudly. "Oh, Angela, I've been meaning to ask you, where did you get your purse? It's so pretty."
Elwyn said, "Yeah, until it rains."
Tina rolled her eyes at Elwyn. "Just don't take it out in the rain."
Elwyn looked away. "No, Reuven, I'm listening. Keep going."
Angela saw that the phone call was from Derrick. She hesitated, staring at the glowing pink boldface letters on her screen spelling his name.
Tina leaned back to Angela again. "Can I see how big it is? Do you mind?"
Elwyn: "Well, so it didn't affect anything then?"
Angela looked up, momentarily confused by the conflicting demands on her attention. "Uh, whatever." Angela answered the phone. "Hello?" Immediately she wished she hadn't. Tina pulled the black velvet bag over to her and dumped its contents out on the table.
"Angela! Hey! This is Derrick!" His voice sounded faint, as if his phone was on the other side of the room from him. "Good morning!"
"Good morning to you too," Angela said, automatically raising her voice in response. Then in a hiss: "Tina, what are you doing?"
Tina laughed at the heterogeneous spill of items. Pushing aside a squat tube of clear lip gloss and a red-brown fabric wallet, she picked up a small plastic box of breath mints labeled in multicolored pastel. "Oh, Angela. Do you actually like these?"
Derrick: "So! Angela! You got my message right?"
Elwyn: "Reuven, I really don't think so."
"Tina, don't go through my stuff." Angela tried to remember if she had left any condoms floating around in her purse. "Derrick ... uh, no." The moment she said this Angela felt her face going hot. "I mean, I saw that you sent me a message, but I mistyped something and I wound up deleting it before I had a chance to see it."
Derrick responded with a moment of silence, followed by: "Oh."
Elwyn: "Well, can't you just put it back?"
Tina was feeling around in Angela's now-empty purse. "This bag is huge. I love it."
Derrick: "But can't you undelete it?"
He's not buying it, Angela thought. But maybe that was what she wanted? Telling him a lie that he could see through might be the most diplomatic way possible to tell him that his message wasn't appropriate, giving him a chance to take it back without coming out and saying it. Wasn't that better than just hurting his feelings directly. Or was she just fooling herself because she didn't have the guts to be up front with a guy like Derrick? "Tina!" Angela hissed.
"I want this purse, Angela."
"Will you stop that and help me? I've gotten myself into a mess." Back into the phone. "Derrick, uh. No, I couldn't. I turned off undelete a long time ago when my phone ran out of space, and I never turned it back on."
Elwyn: "Oh man. That's not good. So what did you do?"
Tina looked at her quizzically. "What's going on?" she whispered.
Angela leaned closer to Tina, keeping the microphone side of her phone tilted away, then realized the impossibility of explaining the current situation in a few words.
Derrick: "Oh. You should have called me and let me know."
"Tina — just put my junk back in my purse, will you please?" She leaned back into her chair. "You're right. I should have. Completely should've. I was just distracted with everything else going on, my mother was talking to me at the same time, and it slipped my mind."
Elwyn: "I see. Sure thing. Hey, Reuven wants to meet up with us later on at the Tourmaline. You folks up for that?"
Tina was leisurely refilling Angela's purse. "Why not. I gotta go to the plant lab this afternoon, so I can hang out any time before or after that."
Derrick: "Okay. I guess, uh, I guess I should resend it then huh? I have a copy on my phone, I'm sure."
Elwyn nodded at Tina, then looked at Angela expectantly.
Angela said quickly, "Derrick, a bunch of us are going to be meeting up at the Tourmaline this afternoon. Why don't you join us? We can talk then." Angela felt again a twinge of guilt for avoiding having to directly acknowledge the situation, but she also felt that this response had been a bit inspired on her part. It was the sort of thing, she thought, she might have actually said to Derrick had she been truly unaware of the content of his message. And she hoped that seeing her among a large group, she could easily deflect him enough to let him see that she wasn't interested, and in this manner discourage him.
Derrick: "Uh."
Elwyn: "We are in fact up for it. Sounds like Derrick might be joining us, too. What time are you thinking?"
Derrick: "Okay. Sure. I'd love to see you today. Or any day. You know. When are you going to be there?"
Tina unfolded her napkin and used it to clean her fingers. "Angela, what's up?"
Angela tried to communicate her thoughts with a couple of involved hand gestures, then dropped it. "This afternoon. I'm not sure when yet but you know. Coffee shop time. Just drop in whenever and I'm sure someone will be there."
Elwyn: "Okay. No problem."
Tina handed Angela back her purse. "Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining that."
Derrick: "Okay. Nice. I mean it'll be nice to see you. In person and all."
"Right," said Angela, a little too brightly, unwilling to let him read anything into her tone of voice. "Whatever. Okay. Talk to you then."
Derrick's voice suddenly turned normal, as if he had suddenly found himself standing on an open road after thrashing through a heavy jungle. "Yeah, see you then!"
"Bye." Angela hung up.
Elwyn: "Yeah. Thanks for asking."
Tina stared at Angela. "So, what was that all about?"
Angela folded her arms and sighed heavily in reply.
Elwyn said, "Okay. See you there." and closed his phone. "He says he'll be there by two o'clock. I'm glad Reuven called. I think he's feeling a little isolated by his work. Some enforced socialization will do him good."
"So come on, Angela? What's up with you and Derrick?"
Angela looked up darkly from her lap. "Derrick tried to propose to me this morning."
Elwyn's blond eyebrows slowly floated to the top of his forehead. "Tried to?"
"He proposed to me via a message, and I pretended I hadn't got it."
Elwyn barked. Elwyn had one of those loud, sharp-edged laughs that can be heard for miles.
Tina smirked and took out her phone. "Phoebe owes me twenty bucks."
Angela frowned. "What for?"
"I told her last week that I thought Derrick had a crush on you, and she said no chance, and so I bet her twenty bucks that I was right." Tina began scribbling out a message.
Angela quickly put her hand over Tina's phone. "Whoa! Don't tell Phoebe about this."
Elwyn leaned back in his chair. "Derrick proposing to Angela over the phone. That's too perfect to be believed."
"Well, believe it," Angela said grumpily.
"Angela. Why can't I tell Phoebe?"
"Because I lied to Derrick and pretended I hadn't got his message! If you go telling her and it gets back to Derrick then I'm a complete asshole."
Tina rolled her eyes. "Derrick's not going to find out."
"Look, you can't talk about this with anyone else right now. Promise."
Elwyn nodded. "Sure, Angela, We understand. You can trust us."
Tina shook her head, but closed her phone and put it away. "So why did you lie to him? I can't honestly say I would have done the same thing in your position."
"I don't know. Because I panicked? He wanted to know why I hadn't sent him a reply and I didn't know what to say."
"Tell him the truth," offered Elwyn.
"What truth? Just, sorry Derrick, the very idea makes me uncomfortable and panicky?"
"Well, not quite that bluntly. But basically. Why not?"
"I don't know. It just seems — you know, when someone comes to you with heart out on their sleeve, they deserve a little more in the way of diplomacy than that."
"Okay. How about, thanks, I'm really touched, but I'm just not interested in getting married."
Tina winced. "That sounds like you're suggesting that you should date. Shouldn't you make it clear that you're actually not interested in him?"
"If you say it right, he'll get the message. Derrick's not an idiot. I don't think anyway."
Angela looked at Elwyn. "What do you mean, if you say it right?"
Elwyn rested one elbow on the table and looked up at the ceiling. "Oh, you know, in that meaningful tone of voice that says: I'm too polite to come out and say it, but I find you loathsome."
"Elwyn! I don't loathe Derrick. That's just it. If I did loathe him I wouldn't be as worried about being nice and this would be a lot easier."
"Sure, sure. But you want to make sure he gets the message, right? So there needs to be an undercurrent of loathing in there, or else he'll just come back and try again later."
Tina leaned forward. "Elwyn, are you making fun of her situation?"
Elwyn sighed. "Okay, tell me Angela: what do you intend to do?"
"I don't know yet. That's why I lied to him; I'm trying to buy some time." The waiter appeared with their breakfast plates balanced on his left arm in array formation. The conversation was suspended while the food was delivered and Tina's coffee was refilled. Then, Angela continued, "The idea I had was to see him at the Tourmaline. If everyone else is there too, then he won't get a chance to talk to me in private and he'll see that I'm not particularly interested in him."
Elwyn froze in a comical pose, a forkful of eggs before his open mouth. Carefully he lowered the fork and said, "Is that really what you think will happen?"
Tina picked up her purse and dug out her warbling phone.
Angela stared down at her pancakes and poured syrup. "What do you mean?"
"Inviting him to hang out and then not giving him a chance to get you alone. You think that will make him think that you're not interested?"
Tina interrupted, "Hey, is it okay if I invite Ari to join us?"
"Well." Angela considered. "It'll at least be a little discouraging. Won't it?"
Elwyn shook his head. "All that's going to do is make him more determined."
Tina said, "I'll take that as a yes."
Angela swallowed and winced. "You think so, huh."
"Of course. Guys don't give up that easy. If we did nobody'd be alive today."
"Right," said Tina heavily. "Because women never make a move."
Elwyn waved her off airily. "If you want to discourage him, you have to be the one delivering the discouragement. So to speak. Not being able to talk to you alone isn't you pushing him away; it's just bad luck."
Angela said, "Well, yeah but. I mean it's kind of like a discouraging sign. Just coming from the universe at large instead of from me personally."
"And therefore to be ignored. No, not even to be ignored. A challenge, to be overcome. As proof that his love is true."
Tina sighed without looking up from her phone. "I hate to say it, Angela, but I think this time he's right."
Elwyn scowled. "Hugely untrue. I'm always right."
Angela emitted a huff of frustration. "This would be a lot easier if I even knew him half well. But I don't. He hardly knows me, either. Who proposes to someone you hardly know?"
Tina put her phone down on the table and took up her fork. "Men."
Elwyn barked a short laugh around a mouthful of eggs. "I hate to say it, Tina, but this time I think you're right."
"I wish I wasn't single," muttered Angela.
Tina glanced out the window. "How are things with you and Reuven, by the way? It's not weird or anything, is it?"
"I'm not sure. I haven't really seen him since we broke up."
Elwyn looked surprised. "But that was like a month ago."
"Not even. Three weeks at most."
"Have you been actively avoiding him?"
"No. But I'm not in school anymore either."
"Yeah, but you still hang out with us."
Angela shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe he's the one who's avoiding me."
"He has been busy," observed Tina.
He considered this. "Well, you okay with seeing him today?"
"It's fine, Elwyn. Don't even worry about it." Angela said. And silently hoped that it would, in fact, be fine.
To be honest, Angela still was unsure how she wanted to feel about Reuven, which somehow wound up leaving her feeling very little of anything. She wondered if this absence of feeling was due to her feelings being on hold until they sorted themselves out, something like the state people describe as being "in shock", or if the cause and effect were the other way round, and that she was unsure of which emotion was dominant because, frankly, none of them were particularly strong to begin with. Perhaps her emotional state was simply a cauldron of blandness, and it would be a matter of some time before one bland flavor could finally overpower all the others.
Or maybe tomorrow she would wake up and find herself no longer "in shock", and realize that she was suddenly very, very angry.
She did have good reason, she suspected, for being angry at Reuven, at least a little bit. The last couple of weeks of the relationship had been when things really fell apart, and Angela had found Reuven more difficult to talk to than ever. He became withdrawn, from Angela's perspective. Not obviously so, but the cumulative effect was undeniable. Conversations tended to peter out into silence more frequently. Reuven normally took pauses in a conversation as an chance to start talking about what was on his mind, usually something related to his graduate thesis, or some other biological subject matter that he thought was fascinating enough to interest a non-biology student like Angela. Angela, becoming aware of this asymmetry in their conversational styles, used this change in his behavior to change her own, and tried to start little conversations about matters of English literature. She had no real success with this, however, and on the third attempt, when trying to tell him about the various conspiracy theories surrounding the true authorship of Shakespeare's works, Reuven had gone from taciturn to a stony silence that was statue-like, and Angela had abandoned the experiment, feeling chastened in a way that she distinctly disliked.
The day after that event Angela had gathered up her courage and initiated a conversation to Discuss Their Relationship, diving in headfirst, eyes metaphorically closed, telling herself that she was an adult and grown-ups weren't afraid to have these conversations, or maybe they were afraid but they did it anyway, because they knew that to ignore problems is to run from your responsibilities and that never leads anywhere good, enticing as it may be in the short term. The conversation didn't go at all as she had expected. Reuven had agreed that "things had gone kinda sour" between them lately, but instead of taking this as an opening to investigate the details about what was wrong and why they were annoying each other and how could they be addressed in a manner that left both of them if not happy at least feeling that they were making progress towards happiness, Reuven interpreted the various issues, not to mention the very fact that they were having this discussion, as a sign that the relationship had run its course and it was time for them to part ways, and wasn't it great that they could do so amicably, in such a civilized fashion, with of course regret but all the same with mutual consent that it was ultimately for the best, just like a couple of mature adults?
Now that they had been separated for a couple of weeks Angela had begun to suspect that Reuven had truly been the one to initiate the breakup, that after enjoying six months of dating, the novelty of having a reliable girlfriend had worn off and he had become nervous about getting trapped in a long-term relationship, but that instead of coming to her and voicing these feelings and concerns, he had just shut down around her until she got exasperated enough to be the one to complain first. (Which she had done with no idea in her mind that anyone was keeping score.) Whereupon he had taken this as an invitation for him to suggest that they break up. Not for himself, mind you: for her. Because she was unhappy and far be it from him to keep a woman he cared for and respected like Angela in a situation that made her unhappy. He didn't quit; he was let go, and so was free to collect unemployment or ask for a recommendation. Or something like that: Angela wasn't entirely certain what his motivation might be, but the basic idea sounded entirely plausible to her, once she had formulated it, and though the evidence was circumstantial she couldn't now make herself forget it.
Not that she wanted Reuven back or anything as pathetic as that. Mind you. But she did feel a desire for something, a confrontation, or some kind of contrived situation, something that would force him to acknowledge, perhaps even for the first time realize, that he had in fact done this thing, and out of very immature, unadult motivations. Out of an actual desire to fool himself into thinking that he had been sensitive and chivalrous when in reality had just hadn't had the basic nerve to be up-front with her.
And maybe an apology. Though honestly that wasn't nearly as important as his regret. She wanted to see him demonstrate that he had enough awareness to be embarrassed by his own actions; whether or not he tried to subsequently make amends was of much less concern.
Angela's longest relationship besides this one had lasted six months, though in her mind it was really more like three months because the last three months had been during the summer vacation after her sophomore year and he had gone back home to his family in Maine. They had talked and corresponded with a healthy frequency for the first month, and then he started dropping the ball. A week before the school year was to start her broke up with her over the course of a fifteen-minute phone conversation. She had had much higher hopes for her relationship with Reuven.
A message from Phoebe: "Hey! Are you still asleep?"
Angela scribbled a reply. "I'm on the bus with Elwyn and Tina."
Elwyn was talking to Tina. Something about proteins. The bus was nearly full. Typical for a weekend afternoon. Angela had long since tuned out her companion's conversation, waiting until the subject changed. They were seated all the way in the back, as usual, jammed into the left corner. "So the Krebs Cycle really only generates GTP, but along with that it also makes NAD and FAD, and then that stuff gets turned into ATP." The chitchat between various passengers surrounded them like a bubble. Angela could barely hear the announcement of the street names as they passed. "That part of the process is where the all the phosphor gets hooked up." Mostly it was Elwyn doing the talking, and Tina listening. Either he was explaining something to her outside of her sphere of study or else he was going off on a didactic tear and she was listening just to be polite. The woman in the right-hand corner seat had a dolly cart with her, empty but for some canvas grocery bags, and its metal cage rattled over the potholes in the road. "If you don't need to go into the details, just say oxidative phosphorylation and leave it at that." The weekend bus was newer than the one that covered this route during the week, and its bell was a pleasant silvery ring than sounded out over the murmuring crowd. "The whole process is actually pretty cool, but there's like a whole bunch of steps to it, way more than you'd think there'd need to be." Elwyn now accompanied his monologue with gestures, holding an imaginary set of molecules in the air before himself. "Every time I have to deal with it I always get it out of order and I have to go look it up." The bell of the weekday bus was a lower-pitched tone, with no effort expended in disguising its synthetic nature. The silvery bell rang again, accompanied this time by a chime from Angela's phone. The bus decelerated noisily and she felt the familiar pull forward as she read on her phone. "Why didn't you respond to my message this morning?"
The bus rolled to a stop and the doors clanked open. Angela had to scroll down before she remembered that Phoebe had sent her that message about ice cream.
"It doesn't help of course that all these different molecules have acronyms for names, and that they all sound alike. ATP, ADP, NAD ..."
The bus began moving again, and the engine's hum shifted into a low growl as the street gently turned uphill. The sun was high in the sky, turning everyone's lawns and bushes a brilliant green. The only clouds were visible were distant balls of muddy fluff, hugging the horizon.
Tina suddenly interrupted Elwyn to wave her hand in the air above her head. "Ari! Back here!" Elwyn's hands remained in front of him for a moment, as if unsure where all his proteins belonged without his audience's attention.
Angela wrote back: "Didn't think you wanted a reply." Actually, Angela had suspected that Phoebe was expecting a reply, but this version of the truth seemed the more diplomatic answer.
Ari squeezed between people milling about in the middle section, which had few open seats by now, and threw himself down into the empty seat next to Angela, almost sitting on her purse. "Hey, Tina." Ari smiled a wide smile. Angela pulled her purse out from between them and placed it carefully on the floor, behind her legs. "I was just on my way to the coffee shop." Ari was dressed in jeans and a pale gray short-sleeved shirt that said "fcuk taht siht" in small white letters. The woman with the dolly cart stared at the four of them blankly, slowly rubbing her hand forward and back on the cart's clear plastic handle.
Tina said, "I thought we might see you on the bus. Not like there's a lot of other buses that go there." The bus was now technically SRO, with four people standing along the aisle's length, though in theory another person could have squeezed in next to Elwyn if they didn't mind having a dolly cart in their lap.
Phoebe's replied appeared: "I always want a reply. Are you going to coffee?"
Angela looked out the window at the houses across the street. They were nearing the crest of a long gradual uphill road in an expensive part of town. There were several old two-story houses in this area that no longer had views, thanks to the box-shaped modern condominium buildings that had recently rose up around them, reaching up four and five stories and blocking their view, like trees in a dense forest competing with each other for sunlight. Nonetheless the old houses remained: if they were torn down and replaced with newer, taller buildings, they would still be worth less, due to the popular preference for older houses. The horns of a dilemma.
Angela had had a vague idea that she would split off from the group somewhere along this point, take a bus over to Chinatown, get the deer velvet pills, and then take the bus going back and meet up at the Tourmaline not too long after the others arrived. But now it looked like there was going to be a fair number of people there already by the time this bus arrived. A quorum, socially speaking. By the time she finished her errand and returned the group would probably already be on the verge of disbanding, if it hadn't already fragmented and/or moved elsewhere.
Ari had pulled a computer out of his canvas book bag and laid it upon his lap, letting the bag drop heavily to the bus floor. He tossed his head sharply sideways to coax his long brown bangs away from his eyes, released the catch and raised the computer's lid. The bag's shoulder strap noiselessly folded down upon itself, a tiny patch of fabric at the curve's apex bending over and touching the soft denim covering Angela's left leg. Angela looked down at her phone as Ari's fingers scrabbled across the keyboard surface. "I gotta tell you folks, I am so excited about this project with Professor Crofts."
Angela began forming a reply to Phoebe: "Yes. Are you still on campus?"
"Excited in a way like I've never been about a project before. This has the potential to be so serious. I've been working nonstop since I talked to her."
Tina leaned forward. "Cool! So you hit it off with Barbara?"
"Oh yeah."
"She's great, isn't she? She's super smart."
"And she's very serious. I can tell her grad students get stuff done."
"They do."
Elwyn pitched his head in an oversized nod. "Barbara Crofts the myrmecologist, right? So what's the work you're gonna do for her? Some kind of hard-core statistical number crunching?"
Ari's eyes remained focused on his laptop screen. The screen was almost perpendicular to Angela's eyesight, rendering it invisible to her. "Nope. Hardware."
Elwyn gently drummed his quadriceps with the fingers of each hand. "Really? What kind of hardware?"
Another reply from Phoebe: "Yeah, but I don't want to be. I'm by myself in the library doing homework and I'm bored."
"Check it out." Ari turned his screen ninety degrees, giving the others a clear view of a series of molecular models. Angela was relieved to see that Elwyn and Tina both seemed just as unenlightened by the images as she was. She quickly wrote a response to Phoebe: "Come join us. We'll wake you right up."
Ari pointed at the images on the left side of the screen. "So there is this class of quasicrystal molecules that have more than one stable resting state. So they're in one state, and they're stable, so they stay in it, but if you shake them briefly at just the right frequency, they get jostled into a different state, and then they stay in that one until some other frequency moves them back again." The flow of Ari's words began to speed up. "Each molecule has its own specific set of frequencies that work to nudge them around. Most of them are really high frequency, but a few of them use really low frequencies, like microwaves or some even as low as radio waves. Now Professor Crofts had this idea, which was to find molecules that have low frequency triggers, and in which some of the state they can function as catalysts for certain proteins."
There was a pause in the flow of speech. The bus shuddered over a washboarded section of the road. The canvas strap vibrated against Angela's pant leg, just enough to transmit a vague sense of being tickled. Finally Tina shrugged and said guardedly, "Okay?"
Angela glanced down at her chiming phone; Phoebe's reply consisted solely of a smiley face.
"Okay. So what if we found the right kind of molecules, right? We could make a little lattice of these quasicrystals doped with a bunch of proteins, held inside the lattice so they don't like fall out. Now we hit them with one of the magic frequencies, and so the molecules in the crystal change state, which winds up shoving a hydrogen group up a notch along the protein's backbone. Bang: different configuration, it winds up folding itself into a completely different shape. Get it?"
Elwyn leaned back. "Yeah, as far as that goes I get it. But what's it good for?"
"This is where Crofts' idea comes in. To build a doped quasicrystal like this about the size of a bread crumb. The proteins in the crystal start out with say a glycine molecule poking out at the end. An ant happens along, checks it out, says hey glycine, I like glycine. Picks it up and brings it back to the ant hill. Right? Then when it's inside, a radio signal is broadcast, the crystal changes state, and the proteins all fold over, exposing a silicate group, and now the thing tastes like a rock. Instead of eating it, the ants just walk around it, it's just another pebble or chunk of sand."
The press of people began to reach to the back as more people boarded. A tinny thumping beat could be heard over the conversation as a scruffy college student's earphones threatened permanent hearing loss.
Tina nodded. "I see. So you can control how the ants react to your mock bread crumb?"
"That's the basic idea. Ideally the crystal can also have a radio reflector on the inside, so that its location can be seen by sending out a different signal. So you leave a pile of these out next to an anthill, wait for the ants to find them and carry them back to the hill. Then you turn them into dirt, and see exactly where they all wound up going. Turn them back into food for a five minutes, and see how they got moved. Over time this should be able to provide serious, high resolution detail about stuff like the division of resources."
Elwyn crossed his legs and began to jiggle his left foot, as if trying to get his shoe off without touching it. "That's pretty slick. And when you're done, I suppose you can use the radio signal to retrieve them again."
"Maybe, although Professor Crofts seemed to think that's unlikely to work in practice. The idea is that she wants to use this in the wild, with found anthills, as an alternative to setting up artificial anthills with plastic windows inside a lab. So if we want to get our crystals back at the end we'd have to pretty much tear apart the hill. She's more interested in trying to find a way to make these things cheap enough that they can just leave them in there afterwards." Ari turned the screen back towards himself and started typing again. "Which actually has some advantages for me. Like if we're just going to throw them away, then it doesn't matter if the protein change can only be done a couple of times before it stops working. The real trick is just to find a match for one, a quasicrystal that works as an organic catalyst, two, a protein that has the necessary structure for the crystal to manipulate, and three, a low-cost manufacturing technique that can be used to make these things." Ari looked up at the others and grinned. "Oh, and also it can't be much heavier than a bread crumb. So no metals. Which might make the radio reflector part a huge pain in the ass to build. But I've been doing a massive search through a bunch of molecules, and I think I've got a number of possible candidates. Hopefully one of these has all the features we need." Ari waved a hand at his screen. "I'm meeting with Professor Crofts this evening after dinner and we're going to go over them in detail."
Another oversized pothole sent a wave through the bus and its passengers. Ari grabbed at his computer as it threatened to slide frictionlessly over his knees and onto the floor. Angela regained her balance and nodded. "I guess that does sound like a fun project." Her voice came out somewhat hoarse and she quickly cleared her throat.
"If I can pull this off, it'll be the coolest project of my graduate studies to date. Maybe even my entire life. It could make all kinds of new techniques available for doing research. If only there was Nobel Prize in entomology. You know?"
Angela felt a sting of jealousy towards Ari. His certainty of the importance of his work, not to mention his certainty of the recognition by others of said importance, was something that she was clearly missing in her current situation. It may have even been the magic ingredient missing from her college career as a whole. Not that that had bothered her at the time: to study something important to herself had at the time been all that she could want.
"Professor Crofts is even hoping we might find a protein that can also give off the scent of garbage, so we can track how the ants dispose of it. But that's going to be a lot harder, since there's a lot fewer ways to make something smell like waste. It would have to be something like a critical ingredient of the escovopsis fungus."
But just because something was important to you did not mean that studying it in detail was the necessary next course of action.
"Did you know that ants have specific areas set aside as garbage dumps, and the ants that handle the garbage are like untouchables? If one of them tries to re-enter the colony the other ants will rip it to pieces. Ants are serious about garbage."
Much less making a career of studying it.
Elwyn laughed. "You might even be able to set up a business making these things and selling them to researchers at other universities."
Angela moved her leg so the strap was no longer tickling her. She needed to stop dwelling on the past and think about what she ought to do next, making use of what she did have.
Ari rocked his head left and right. "Maybe. I'm not sure I'd be ready to go into the business side of things."
However little that may be.
"Why not?" Elwyn asked.
"I'd rather ride the wave into doing more research work. Building stuff for money would be a full-time job. But you're right, if there are enough researchers interested in mock bread crumbs that could be profitable. That's how these kinds of things get started."
Tina squinted up at the roof of the bus. "Does this project really count as research for you, though? I mean it doesn't really sound like there's much in the way of computer science involved."
"Well like I said, it's a hardware project. I'm not really into the programming side of comp sci anyway. It's all about discrete math and proofs of correctness and theoretical running times. Boe ring. But nano engineering is seriously hot right now; everybody's into it. I just need to focus on the engineering side of this project when I write up my project thesis." Ari tapped one foot in time to a triumphant march playing in his head. "All that molecular state change stuff is going to make my thesis paper light up like a Christmas tree."
Angela decided, though practically speaking the decision had already been made by the bus's current location, to stay with her friends for the time being and visit the TCM pharmacy later. Chances were her mother still had a few more days' worth of pills yet.
"How's your project going, Tina?"
Tina laughed. "It's fine. But it's so boring compared to yours that I don't think I can bring myself to talk about it."
Elwyn chuffed, signifying a sardonic laugh. "Tina, your stuff is cool too." Short pause. "Even if it is about plants."
Or, worst case, her mother could go without for a day. Angela vaguely disliked the scent of the velvet antler pills: for some reason they made her think of ground-up bones. The smell of a dentist's drill. The pills didn't really do anything, Angela was certain, though she had learned not to try to argue with her mother on that matter. Traditional Chinese medicine was cultural heritage: asking her to deny it was like asking Angela to stop using computers and phones.
Ari slumped a bit in his seat. His hands moved away from the keys to hold his computer gently on the sides, to keep it from sliding down. "I heard Derrick was going to try to go shipsighting today. Does anyone know if he went?"
Elwyn said, "I would guess not, seeing as Angela says he's gonna be at the coffee shop."
"Too bad. I was kind of tempted about going with him, except that I've got this meeting with Professor Crofts. That's kind of more important."
Tina laughed. "Derrick was going to go shipsighting? Does he have an inside scoop or something?"
"Something like that, actually yeah. He found some kind of analysis someone had put up. I don't remember the details now. It actually sounded pretty interesting."
"I dunno." Elwyn uncrossed his legs and folded his arms. "Derrick's a smart guy, I don't dispute that. But he's also kind of foolish; you know what I mean? I've often thought that, but especially today, after I learned that he proposed to Angela over the phone."
Angela sat up and tried to force Elwyn to spontaneously combust using her eyes.
"Excuse me, tried to propose."
"Elwyn!" Angela growled.
Elwyn looked at her, and with a quick motion put his hand over his mouth. "Oh, hell. Sorry, Angela, I forgot."
Ari laughed and sat up. His hands moved back to his computer keys. "He tried to propose to you over the phone? As in marriage? Wow, I didn't know you two were even going out."
Angela glared balefully at the floor. "We aren't."
"Whoopsy daisy!" Ari sing-songed. "Somebody jumped the gun."
"And it's supposed to be a secret," Angela added, throwing another look at Elwyn.
"Oh." Ari stopped typing. "Okay."
"What? Were you going to tell someone?" Angela leaned into Ari's personal space, trying to see his screen.
"No." Ari moved his computer screen away. "Not at all."
"You people are awful." Angela straightened up again so she could glare at Ari.
"I wasn't going to tell anybody anything," Ari insisted, but a smirk undermined his plausibility in Angela's eyes.
"Look, you can't say anything to Derrick. If any of you act like you already know about this in front of Derrick, I'm dead."
Tina said, "Come on you guys, be serious. You act like it's all a joke or something."
Elwyn put his palms out. "I am taking it seriously. I didn't tell Ari because I'm not taking it seriously. It just slipped out. I'm not used to being asked to keep secrets."
Ari put in, "And I took this seriously as soon as someone informed me that it was a secret. Okay? Don't be jumping on my case so quickly."
Angela shrugged, and the tension sagged out of her. "I'm not jumping on your case. I'm just getting a little paranoid."
"So can you tell me why is it such a big secret?"
"I'd really rather not go into it. Maybe after it's all over." Though, Angela reflected, if Derrick did behave as she had initially hoped, backing down and not telling her about the nature of the message she claimed to have deleted, then it wouldn't be all over, in that she'd be relying on her friends to keep the secret indefinitely. Time for a change of subject, she decided. "If you did wind up making and selling these little ant-monitoring things, would it have to be a full-time job? I mean, couldn't you pay other people to do most of the work? That way you'd still have time to do other things."
"Well, yeah I suppose. But I seriously doubt that there's enough money for that. I mean, to hire people, you have to be pretty sure there's going to be a steady stream of money coming in, right? So there needs to be a lot of people out there who are willing to buy these things. And how many people doing field research in ant colonies can there be?"
Elwyn leaned back in his seat. "Well, if it's too hard to retrieve these things after you use them, then you can keep making new ones and selling them to the same people."
Ari looked up at the ceiling. "True. But if we're talking about disposable mock bread crumbs, then I think they'd need to be hugely cheap. I seriously doubt most entomologists have budgets to blow on high-tech equipment. So they'd have to be really cheap to make. Maybe if I'm lucky and find an easy process for creating the stuff, but that's not likely." Ari shook his head and stared back down at his computer screen. "It all just seems like it could become a huge time sink if I got started down that path. Let someone else do it."
Angela's last office job was for a small business, tucked into a handful of offices in the middle of a six-story building in an anonymous-looking business park. The bus ride was nearly an hour each way, leaving her very little time for any other activities for the six weeks that it lasted. Angela hated the work, but the end of her debt was finally in sight and so she stuck with it, working extra hours whenever they were available and she could bring herself to do it.
The front room was an open space, without even cubicle walls, furnished with three desks, the smallest of which was Angela's. There were two other women in the room, both full employees. Adrianna was in her late twenties. She was engaged to be married in six months' time, and her desk was adorned with three framed photographs of her fiance, which all looked to Angela like they had been cut out of a men's clothing catalog. She had eventually met the fiance, whose name she could no longer remember, when he had come by the office to pick her up for a surprise dinner at an expensive restaurant, and Angela found he was actually quite handsome and friendly in person, in a way that the framed photographs completely obscured. Constance on the other hand was past her fortieth birthday, and how far past she coyly refused to divulge. She was separated, possibly even divorced, although Angela noticed after a while that she never referred to her husband as her "ex"; he was always "that bastard Kevin" or occasionally just the bastard.
The other six members of the company were all male, and each had his own little office lining the short narrow hall that led out of the front room. Angela had been brought in ostensibly to overhaul their paperwork, a long-term project since paperwork seemed to be the heart and soul of their business: they were themselves contractors of a sort, paid by other companies, mostly single-person corporations, to handle various aspects of their paperwork load. Employee records, receipts, financial data for tax records. Everything except payrolls: the owners desperately wanted a piece of the payroll contracting business but apparently it was almost impossible to break into it, as the existing companies had sealed it up tight. Angela had been brought in because they had taken on the task of moving a number of their clients' paperwork over from an older system, one that occasionally required the transfer and storage of documents printed on actual paper, to a newer system that adhered to the fresh new ISO standards and therefore you were guaranteed that everything you could possibly need to do could be done one hundred percent online without a single printout, as long as your transactions were all with other businesses who were also adhering to these standards, and so naturally this system was being rapidly adopted by small businesses everywhere. And so in order to take advantage of this sea change and attract more clients and cement the loyalty of existing clients, the company had offered a service to transfer the paperwork of their customers from the older system to the newer system for what effectively amounted to a flat fee. This in hindsight was probably a serious mistake, as the amount of effort involved varied so wildly from customer to customer that there was no way to avoid losing huge amounts of money from the offer. And then the work proved to be far more than they could handle without missing deadlines and no doubt losing the customers that they had lost so much money to attract and retain. So they brought in a temp worker, namely Angela, hoping that they could pay her for a couple of weeks, get past this little one-time crisis, and then get on with business as usual only a little worse for wear. But of course there was far more than two weeks' worth of extra work to do, and Angela, being largely ignorant of the world of business, had to learn a great deal of new terminology and priorities before she could become productive. She was in fact a little surprised that she hadn't gotten fired in the first three days, after one of the owners kept shouting at her for not remembering this or that acronym that they used daily if not hourly, and in the end she concluded that the man needed someone to yell at as much as he needed an efficient office worker.
So the work was stressful, and very detail-oriented, and the pressure to work quickly was high. So naturally there was a good deal of camaraderie between Adrianna and Constance, and they quickly included Angela in their little circle.
Though not as a full member. Angela never asked outright what their job descriptions actually covered, but the men of the company clearly considered them to be part-time secretaries, occasionally emerging and offhandedly asking someone to do sundry tasks. And there were, Angela learned, an unwritten hierarchy of tasks, and the lowest of them automatically devolved onto her, the temp. Making coffee, replacing the printer toner, and calling auto mechanics to make appointments for their bosses. Angela found it a little ironic, since she had seemingly been brought on to complete a specific set of tasks that had proved to take longer than they had budgeted time for. But after a while, she realized that it made sense, in a way: She had become the secretaries' secretary, and she was now in charge of doing the worst of the menial tasks, freeing the other two up to do more of the real work. Once Angela framed it like that, in her own mind, she found she no longer resented the jobs. Adrianna and Constance, she thought, certainly deserved to have a secretary more than any of the other members of the company. Also, anything that involved running errands automatically fell to her as well, and Angela enjoyed those jobs because it gave her a chance to leave the cramped little office, to stand up and stretch her legs.
Nonetheless, she was not sorry to leave there, and when her debt to the university was paid off, she quickly lost her motivation to continue working there. Before long she found herself again resenting the stupid little chores that were her share, and even when she was working on the important jobs, the ones that she had ostensibly been brought in to do, she could barely get anything done. And likewise her mental opinion of Adrianna and Constance deteriorated. The plucky, silently suffering pair, not only putting up with an office environment that was clearly less than ideal but even doing what they could to brighten it up and make it a nicer place in which to spend half of one's waking hours, if not more — Angela began to see them instead as part of the problem, part of their own problem maybe. Adrianna obviously had a great deal of her internal self-worth wrapped up in the fact of her engagement, and Angela shuddered to imagine what the office would be like if her honey suddenly called it off. Constance was a little more grounded, but Angela couldn't shake the feeling that she was now doing little more than skating through her life, putting effort into keeping everything as it was but nothing more than that, nothing that would make it a life worth living. Angela didn't know if office environments attracted that sort of person, or if it ground people down until they fit into that mold, but ultimately Angela decided that she wasn't going to stick around long enough to find out. She finished out the week, and then threw her Busy Beaver lapel pin in the garbage. On Monday some other Busy Beaver sent another young woman in her place and Angela slept in.
The bus started to empty out again as they reached the first stop nearby the university. By the time they had reached their stop, the bus was again half empty. The woman with the dolly cart remained with them in the back, occasionally looking over at them and obviously annoyed at being privy to their conversations. As Angela swiped her bus pass she remembered that when it ran out and she had to renew there would be no school discount this time: another reminder that life was easier when she was a student.
The bus stop was two blocks east of the Tourmaline. There was another coffee shop right next to the bus stop, a larger one in fact that was relatively popular, if only for its position (it was widely told among the students that the company had paid through the nose to buy the location from the prior owners, five years ago). But the coffee shops were always crowded on weekends, when classes no longer forced students to come and go in a steady stream, and on spring weekends, when everyone was simultaneously weighted down with deadlines and very much wanting to be outside now that the weather was once again hot but not too hot, people would sit down in coffee shops and cover their tables with computers and books and spend the day studying, not outside but at least not in their dorm apartment. So Elwyn and the others naturally gravitated to a less popular venue like the Tourmaline for meeting places. And the coffee was not significantly different from the Tourmaline's, although Reuven had always insisted he could tell the difference and there was no comparison. Angela couldn't remember at the moment which one was supposed to be the superior.
The Tourmaline's high windows were all propped open a few inches, keeping the temperature comfortable, even occasionally cool as a breeze dispersed the latent heat from the customers. A sizeable awning hung over the windows and door, keeping the sunlight out of everyone's eyes as the afternoon drew to a close. The floor was a dark brown terra cotta that on dry days felt slightly gritty underfoot. The line stretched halfway back from the register to front door, and the four of them added their length to it.
"Over there." Elwyn pointed to a corner in the back where Phoebe and Derrick were bravely holding one of the larger tables by themselves.
Ari said, "We should go join them." Even as he said this someone approached the table, and Derrick and Phoebe were assuring them that all the seats were already taken.
"Good idea. I'll stay in line and get our coffee. Angela: medium drip, cream no sugar?" Elwyn rattled off her order like a musician describing a desired bass line.
Tina said, before Elwyn could ask, "Iced americano, black like my heart."
Ari said, "I'll stay and help you carry all the coffee. Angela, will you take this?" He held out his computer, which he had been carrying under his right arm instead of replacing it in his shoulder bag.
Angela nodded and accepted the computer. Two men dressed in identical black leather jackets walked by, side by side, on their way to the door, unlit white cigarettes poking out between fingers in opposite hands. They passed and Angela walked over to the table where Tina was already sitting down.
"Angela, you're finally here," said Phoebe. Phoebe was wearing oversized silver hoop earrings that threatened to get tangled in her sand-colored hair. Angela usually associated such earrings with young girls who were trying to look exotic, but on Phoebe they drew attention to the round silver-framed lenses of her glasses, so if anything they accentuated her overall bookishness.
Angela took a seat on the other side from Derrick and put the computer in front of the chair next to her. "Yeah, I'm here. Were you waiting for me?"
"I'm just glad to see someone else who isn't a science nerd. Derrick has been telling me about weak particle interactions and reminding me how stupid I really am. Now you're here, I won't be alone."
"Um," Angela began, then thought better of it.
"Whoa. Is that your computer?" Derrick said quickly. Derrick's hair was short and black, and tended to stick upwards in various directions when he neglected to comb it. He had classic Indian features and a long thin nose, and when he was being serious he looked like it was an effort for him to not smile. Angela had rarely seen Derrick wear anything but a solid-color T shirt and jeans. Today's color was a dark kelly green.
"No, that's Ari's computer."
Derrick pulled it toward himself. "Check out the transparent lid," he said. "It's clear as glass." Carefully he unlatched the computer and brought the lid up. From where she sat, Angela could see the light from the display reflecting off the keys and Ari's shirt. "Oh, that's sharp. The colors are perfect. I gotta get me one of these." Derrick grinned at the others. "This is perfect for hanging out. You know how you get a bunch of people with computers sitting together and it's like there's a little wall around the table? From all the open lids? This is like the perfect solution to that. Everyone should have one of these."
Without looking up from her phone Tina said, "Not everyone can afford one of those."
"The school should just give them out along with your ID cards."
"No argument from me there." Tina's last portable computer had died two months ago and her inability to save money meant that she yet to replace it. The others expressed amazement that anyone could get anything done at school without a portable computer, but she honestly didn't seem to miss it much.
"Wow. Ari's got some serious molecular diagrams up here. I didn't know he was into biology."
Angela suddenly remembered Ari's typing on the bus. "Derrick, you shouldn't look at his screen. There might be something personal on there."
"Yeah yeah. I'm not trying to pry or anything. Just couldn't help noticing." Derrick stared at the screen for another agonizing moment, and then finally closed the lid with a gentle click. Derrick pushed the computer back in front of the unoccupied chair next to Angela. "So," he said, tapping a couple of fingers on the slate tabletop in a brief rhythm.
Angela felt that the monosyllable had been directed at her, but just then Tina set down her phone and looked up. "So. Good to see you all. Derrick, I heard from Ari that you had been talking about going shipsighting today. Was that true?"
Derrick pointed a finger at Tina and smiled. "It was true." He reached down into his backpack and pulled out his own computer. "In fact," he added, setting the computer down and opening the lid, "It still is true." The lid, being opaque, hid his hands as they rested on the keys. "I'm planning on leaving here later this afternoon. Anyone wants to join me is welcome. There's going to be a ship landing forty, fifty miles to the east this evening."
Angela frowned. Tina said, "Oh, you don't know that. Nobody knows where they're going to go."
Derrick smiled. "A guy in the statistics program did a new analysis of the ships' flight patterns, and he published his results last night. Nobody's paying any attention to him yet, because right now he's just another guy online, but I have this friend Woody, who lives with this guy, and Woody swears up and down that this guy predicted last week's ship movements with like an error margin of less than five percent. He didn't put any of his predictions up because he wanted to see how they played out before he did anything public, but Woody thinks his model is for real." Derrick tapped at the keys.
Phoebe looked back and forth. "I dunno, Derrick. There's so many people out there claiming that they know what the aliens are doing, and the thing is that none of them agree with each other."
"Yeah, but that's just it." Derrick stopped talking abruptly as Elwyn and Ari appeared by the table. "Hey, guys."
Elwyn nodded and carefully handed a steaming mug across the table to Angela. "Derrick. Phoebe."
Derrick turned back to Phoebe. "This guy doesn't claim that he knows what the aliens are doing. He's just applying statistics to their motions and he's found a model that fits the existing data."
Ari sat down next to Angela and opened up his computer. "Are you talking about the guy who says that the ship flight paths are actually spelling out words in Arabic?"
Derrick winced. "What? No. That's ridiculous."
Ari shrugged. "No more ridiculous than anything else people say about them."
Elwyn sat down in front of his latte and took off his hat. "I read somewhere that some folks showed that the mothership is completely transparent to X rays. They think that the reason they're staying in orbit and not coming down is that the aliens actually require X ray radiation in order to survive. Which works in space because the universe is full of it, but our atmosphere screens out X rays, so if they actually came down here, they'd die. So all they can do is send down little shuttles for short visits before they have to go back up into space again."
Phoebe said, "Really? Hey, maybe the aliens can only see in X rays. Like how we can only see in visible light? If they need X rays to survive, then maybe their eyes are tuned to X rays. So like if their ship is transparent to X rays, maybe they think they're invisible. Maybe they don't even realize yet that we know they're up there!"
Elwyn leaned back and laughed. "Hilarious. But you're assuming that they haven't contacted us. And who says they haven't?"
Derrick looked at Elwyn. "What, you think they're talking to the government and they're keeping it a secret from us?"
"Well, wouldn't you, if you were the government and you were talking to the aliens? Would you come out and say, hey everybody, the aliens are talking to us, we're chatting on 554 kilohertz, tune in and listen if you don't believe me?"
"Point taken, but then what would be their motive?"
Tina rolled her eyes. "More to the point, how would they even know how to contact just the government and nobody else? And why our government instead of the Chinese government or Kenya for that matter?"
Elwyn held up two index fingers. "One at a time. Derrick: one possible motive is that they've come here to observe us, to decide if we're advanced enough to become a member of their government, some sort of galactic union or something. I don't know because they're not talking to me. That's just one possibility; the point is that there's no shortage of motives. And besides that, your question exposes an unspoken bias on your part."
Derrick half closed his computer lid. Soft light spilled out along the cracks on either side. "I'm sorry: a bias on my part?"
"Yes. You want to hear a plausible motive, forgetting that we're talking about the motives of aliens here, aliens about which we know diddley high doo. Who knows what the hell motivates them? Not me, and not you."
Phoebe shook her head. "I think it's obvious they're just trying to study us. If they wanted to contact us, they'd have done something more than just sit in orbit for nine months."
Elwyn ignored this. "And Tina, I don't think they contacted our government; I think our government contacted them first."
"How? Everybody's second uncle has tried to communicate with them, and there's no indication that they've received a word of it."
"Probably a good thing, too," Angela put in. "You know at least half of it is crazy people ranting at them."
"The government knows how to contact the aliens because they have an alien communication device from a previous ship."
Phoebe looked at Angela. "You're not kidding. Just the other day I saw a guy on the street who was convinced that he could send messages to the aliens on his phone."
Tina said, "What, you mean like from Roswell?"
Elwyn conceded. "That's one possible source, yes. There have been others."
"He said it worked because the aliens had given him an implant in his head that boosted his signal."
Derrick shook his head. "Come on. Roswell was a weather balloon and a bunch of hicks telling stories."
"That's exactly what the government wants you to believe."
"Okay, this is getting into conspiracy theory territory. My point is that this guy, a student at the university, has sound mathematical reasons for his predictions, and he predicts a eighty percent chance, plus or minus fifteen percent, that this evening one of the ships will be less than fifty miles east of where we're sitting right now. And I for one want to be there to see it."
Phoebe leaned forward on folded arms. "Even if he did get one set of predictions right, that doesn't really mean anything, does it? It could still be a lucky guess, couldn't it? I'm no statistics major, but."
Derrick frowned, as if eating something bitter. "Well, look at it this way. He's been right once so far. Nobody's paying any attention to him now because he doesn't have proof, and the world is full of people claiming that they predicted something after the fact. But his stuff is online now, and if those predictions turn out to be right, then that's it. Wherever the aliens go next, there's going to be millions of people there already, and the police are probably going to blockade predicted sites." Derrick leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Think about it. This could be our last chance to see an alien ship, up close, in person. Ever."
Phoebe put down her glass. "Okay, you've convinced me. I'm in."
Derrick smiled. "Great. Do you by any chance have a car?"
"No. Are you serious?"
"Don't worry. I'll rent a car if I have to; I'm just keeping my eyes open for a cheaper option. Elwyn?"
Elwyn quietly sipped at his coffee. "Derrick?"
"You interested in joining us?"
"Sorry. There are things I want to do tonight that don't involve driving around in circles in the desert."
Ari said, "That goes double for me."
Tina smiled. "I'll come along. It sounds like fun, and I don't have to get started on my homework until tomorrow."
Derrick said, "Angela? Are you interested?"
Angela gave the offer serious consideration, but only for a moment. "No thanks. I mean, it sounds fun and all, but I have too much to do this weekend at home." Belatedly it occurred to her that she should have just said "no thanks", maybe adding in a "not really my thing". That would have been what Elwyn would have recommended, she felt sure, and it probably would have gotten her intended subtextual message across. Appending excuses only made it sound like she was trying to be nice. Not that she wanted to be rude, but she did need him to understand that her ideas about their friendship were not running along the same tracks as his apparently were. Abruptly she found herself asking, "So what was that message you sent me this morning?"
Derrick did not appear to be taken aback by the question, asked in front of everyone. "Just that: if you were interested in going shipsighting."
"Oh." Angela straightened her shoulders, which she had unconsciously hunched while sitting at the table. Slowly she allowed herself to believe that his feelings were not seriously hurt after all, and despite her questionable handling of the matter was willing to let it pass without further discussion.
Phoebe said, "How about you, Tina? Want to come along?"
Tina had pulled her mini-sized computer out of her purse during the discussion. She looked up from the screen at her name, taking a moment to digest what she had half-consciously heard. "Oh, I don't think so. It's a lot of driving and I get carsick so easily. Plus I really need to spend some time going over my plants tonight. I skipped doing that last night."
"You're not going to spend all of Saturday night by yourself in the lab, are you?"
"Not all of it, but it does take about four hours. But there's a party over at Bill's place tonight, and I think I might go to that afterwards."
Phoebe stuck out her tongue. "Bill's a nice guy and all, but his roommates are complete jerks."
"Oh, they're not so bad. You shouldn't take them too seriously is all."
"Well, whatever you do, don't let them mix your drinks for you, or you'll be throwing up tonight anyway."
Ari grinned. "Is that the voice of experience?"
"You would not believe. I went to a party there one time. Okay: so they had this huge thing of popcorn in the living room, and so everyone was eating popcorn. I think one of them had somehow wound up with an industrial popcorn popper, and so they were putting it to work. It was really good popcorn, actually. But they had put way too much salt in it? So everyone was really thirsty. And one of the guys there, I forget which — it was probably Claude I bet — comes around with drinks, some kind of ice tea. And it tastes pretty good, don't get me wrong, but I'm like halfway through my second one and I suddenly realized that I am completely bare-faced hammered."
Elwyn leaned back in his chair. "Yeah, those guys are all hard-core alcoholics I bet."
"But it hit me so fast, you know? I can't really believe that the drinks are as strong as all that. And I'm still really thirsty, so I'm almost finished with the second drink before I realize that I really need to stop drinking." Phoebe stopped talking briefly and looked up at the ceiling. "I think then I went outside to get some air, and I swear everybody on the front porch is smoking weed. And the smell just — hits me — so hard, and the next thing I know I'm running to the porch railing and puking over into the bushes."
Ari chuckled. "Blowing chunks."
"Everything in my stomach just came up at once. It just launched itself. I had all these little shards of popcorn kernel embedded in my sinuses afterwards."
Elwyn offered, "The technicolor yawn."
"It was really uncomfortable. I spent the next half hour making weird hacking noises, trying to dislodge all these sharp bits from out of my nose."
Tina shook her head. "The worst that ever happened to me was when Angela and I were still in high school. It was a Friday night and my parents were out of town and they left the car at home. We were going to go out party-hopping all night long."
Ari stated, "The liquid yodel."
Angela winced at the memory. It wasn't that many years ago, and yet it felt like it had almost happened to someone else.
Elwyn returned, "The three-D belch."
"We were so excited. We started getting ready as soon as we got home from school. We got dressed up, put on way too much makeup. We ate these awful microwave burritos so we wouldn't have to stop partying to eat dinner. And then we both had a couple of shots of vodka from my parent's bar, so we wouldn't, you know, waste any time at the first party being sober."
Derrick winced. "So you drank a bunch of vodka and then you got into your parent's car?"
Angela interjected, "No, we weren't the ones who were driving. It was Tina's parent's car but we had this friend with us, Caryn. She was too scared to drink alcohol, but she wanted to come with us and see a college party. Weird girl, but she was nice and it was useful to have her as a friend."
Tina said, "So we go to the first party, and it's actually pretty cool. There are all these college guys and most of them don't figure out that we're still in high school, and there's lots of beer, and I think we even had a jello shot on top of that."
Angela said, despite herself, "At least one."
"We should have just stayed there, in hindsight. But at the time we're all thinking, this party is great, so the next one is going to be even better. Right? Though maybe it's for the best that we left, because who knows what we might have wound up doing if we'd stayed there all evening. But anyway so we get in the car to go to the next party, and Caryn takes a wrong turn. She doesn't really know where we're going, so I'm in the passenger seat trying to navigate, but then all of a sudden we make a turn and we're going down this gravel road, and we're obviously not anywhere near where we thought we were but the road is too narrow to turn around in, so we're going down it trying to find where it ends, and there's all these potholes and Caryn is going too fast because we're trying to get off this road, and suddenly I'm really carsick."
Ari said, "What you're saying is that it was time for you to review your last meal."
"So I say, Caryn, can you slow down? And she says, why, what's wrong? And I start rolling down the window, because I'm too scared to open my mouth and say anything. And Angela sees me doing this and she says, Tina you're not going be sick or anything are you?"
Elwyn said, "It was time to throw it into reverse gear."
"And just then the dirt road merges with an asphalt road, and Caryn makes this really sharp left turn onto the road and floors it, and I'm already leaning out the window when she does that, so I'm like halfway flying out of the car when she makes that turn, and I open my mouth to yell at her, and ..."
Ari: "You jettisoned the chunky cargo."
Angela shook her head in a sudden access of sensory recall. "The air blew the whole mess back into the rear window of the car where I was sitting. I got puke in my hair, on my clothes. I almost got some of it in my eyes. Caryn freaks out and pulls over, and I turn around and look behind me and there's this splatter all over the inside of the rear window."
Elwyn: "The call of the buffalo."
"And it just reeked of sour alcohol and burritos."
Tina leaned back in her chair. "We drove home and I swear it we spent hours trying to clean the car. By the time we gave up we were exhausted and we all went home and crashed. The next day my parents confronted me. They were so angry with me. You could still smell it in the car. And after that whenever we were in the car on a hot day, you could smell the smell of burritos. They had to avoid leaving the car parked in direct sunlight for months before the scent finally went away."
"Sharing your innermost thoughts."
Derrick shook his head. "I never had any really awful accidents with vomit. I've always had plenty of warning to get to a toilet."
"Call Ralph on the white courtesy telephone."
"The thing about puking that I think is funny is how you feel immediately afterwards. You know what I'm talking about? You're feeling sick, and you're feeling sick, and it goes on like that for a while, and then finally you throw up and immediately this amazing sense of calmness just washes over you. It's almost like you're floating. And you hit the lever and flush, and it all goes away and everything's clean again, and it's like everything's okay."
Phoebe smiled and pointed at Derrick. "Yes! That's exactly how it feels. You know, they say that bulimics get addicted to throwing up and you can almost see how that happens."
"The catch-and-release meal program."
"My cousin and I sometimes played this game when we were kids. You lie on the floor, side by side, about three feet apart, and you each try to make the other person puke."
Derrick frowned. "How?"
"You talk about puking, anything gross that you can come up with. My cousin could make these upchucky sorts of gagging noises that were surprising realistic and unpleasant sounding. Just having listening to them made me half want to puke."
"Tossing out the salad bar."
Derrick shook his head. "Does that really qualify as a game?"
Phoebe said, "The first person that actually pukes loses. Except then we later added the condition that if you puked but you managed to puke onto the other person, then you won and the other person lost. That's why it's important to make sure the distance between you is three feet. You can't get up off the floor while you're playing the game."
"Wow. That's really more — adversarial — than most games I've played."
Phoebe shrugged. "Well, I should mention that we never actually managed to finish a game. Our parents would always notice that we were lying on the floor and make us get up before we got far enough to actually puke. I got pretty close to puking once or twice, though. Our parents didn't know what we were doing on the floor, of course."
"Delivering a pavement pizza."
"I don't think they would have understood if they had ever found out what the purpose of the game was."
Elwyn interrupted the back-and-forth he and Ari had been maintaining by saying, "Hey, look. Reuven finally showed up." He gestured lazily towards the line at the register, and everyone looked and saw Reuven standing at the far end. Reuven waved back at them, then gestured at the line of people before him. "I was wondering when he was going to arrive. He only lives a block away from here. I was starting to think we should go knock on his door if he didn't get here soon."
Ari turned around. "He looks like he's been pulling an all-nighter."
Elwyn nodded. "He's been serious busy with his term project."
Tina added, "Bacteria research. You know what's that like."
"Not at all, actually," said Ari breezily.
Derrick put his hands up to his temples. "That reminds me. I lied. There was this one time I had a puking accident. Wow. This was back when I was in community college. I lived in this ugly apartment with two other guys and the place was always filthy. I wake one morning feeling sick and so I go to the bathroom to puke. I figure it's no big deal, probably just drank a little too much yesterday. I don't have classes or anything so I'm just hanging out on the couch watching TV and waiting for my stomach to calm down so I can eat something. But then I go and puke some more. And then half an hour later I puke again. I can't follow any of the shows on TV because I keep having to get up and puke."
"Redecorate the bowl," offered Ari, but Elwyn didn't rise to the bait.
"And each time I'm puking up less and less, until finally it's just dry heaves. And now finally I'm not throwing up any more, but I don't really feel any better. So I give my girlfriend a call, and tell her what's been going on, and she gets all worried. And she says, have you had anything to eat today? And I say, no, I've just been throwing up. And she says, have you at least drank anything? And I say no, I've just been throwing up. And she freaks out and says, you must be totally dehydrated. And I think about it, and I realize that since I started talking my mouth has gotten really dry. And so I say I guess I am. And now she's upset at me for being stupid, and she ask, do you have any food at all in your place. And of course I don't, because we live entirely on fast food and beer. And so she tells me to drink a bunch of water right away, and then come over to her place and she'll give me something to settle my stomach. So I hang up and drink a big glass of water, and I kind of have to force myself to drink all of it because I still feel sick, but I can tell that she's right, that I'm really dehydrated from all the throwing up, and I'm starting to imagine all these symptoms. I put on some clean clothes, and I'm feeling a little better. Then I go outside, and I manage to get about two blocks when I start to realize that maybe this was a mistake. My stomach's starting to heave again, and I'm standing there, wondering if I should keep going or turn around and walk back home. And while I'm standing there this guy walks up to me and ask me for some spare change. I like shake my head at him, and he comes a little closer and is all, come on man, I haven't eaten anything all day. And when he gets close to me I get a whiff off of him, and he simply reeks of alcohol. My body can't take it anymore, and I lean over and I throw up, right in front of him, but it's nothing but water. It's perfectly clear puke, with a thin little thread of mucus running through it. There's no stomach acid to be found anywhere. pH seven point oh. And the guy says, you think that's funny? And he starts swearing at me, like he thinks I puked up a bunch of water in front of him intentionally, just to piss him off. I wanted to laugh but I didn't have the energy. I just turned around and dragged my sorry carcass back home again and laid down on the couch. Took about another four hours before I stopped feeling sick and could eat and drink again. My girlfriend and I broke up a week later."
A few seconds passed in which nobody spoke. Finally Angela said, "You're saying you broke up because you were sick?"
"Well, she got mad at me for not showing up and then not calling. And I think she might have taken it personally that following her advice just made me puke some more. I know that sounds stupid but it was that kind of relationship." Derrick shrugged.
Reuven had meanwhile progressed halfway up the line. The conversational pause allowed Angela to hear the music playing in the background. A female singer groaned something about squeezing and pushing and the utility of same in bringing her satisfaction. The music was the only thing that Angela didn't like about the Tourmaline. She found herself in the habit of associating the music with whichever employee was at the register at the time. Today it was a wiry guy with a stony tough-guy expression on this face. Tattooed around his neck was a string of spiky Chinese character. It was easy to imagine him sitting in a sparsely furnished apartment with giant stereo speakers framing an oversized TV, playing this song while he drank expensive high-alcohol-content beer and tried to convince his Asian girlfriend to take pole-dancing lessons. But this was unfair. In all likelihood the music was supplied by some generic business satellite channel. Angela thought about the idea of working a service job and being unable to turn off the music even when it bugged you.
"I need a career. What should I do?" Angela found herself throwing this question out to the table at large. Having tried her best not to think about this very question for nearly a month, if not longer, she suddenly found herself unable to not think about it.
"Being an English major not working out for you, huh?" Elwyn asked.
Tina said, "Didn't you have a plan for your career, Angela?"
Angela folded her arms and slumped in her chair. "Not any more." Her plan, inasmuch as she had thought about it, was to get a job as a copyeditor, preferably for a small neighborhood-specific newspaper, or an online newsletter for some terribly worthy cause — and in the evenings she would sit in her tiny little apartment, which in her imagination looked something like an old English garret, and write her novel, after the publication of which she would be able to afford to purchase a snug little house all her own, but she would continue to work for the newspaper/newsletter because even though she was successful she didn't want to lose her connection with The Real World. (Alternate plan: marry a rich man and become a full-time writer, but that plan wasn't worth mentioning aloud.) Unfortunately, her plan was formulated back before she learned, firstly, just how little copyeditors make, and secondly, despite the first fact just how few copyediting jobs there were and how much competition there was for them. Not for the first time Angela had to marvel at the lack of correlation between a job's compensation and the number of people wanting it. Having worked a wide variety of office jobs while at the temp agency, Angela had become well acquainted with how little breadth of variety there was in said variety, and how little her English degree mattered to any of it. "I don't want to go into academia," she finally elaborated, "and that appears to be the only career for an English major."
Ari said, "You could get a job at a bookstore, couldn't you?"
Phoebe said, "That's true. You won't use your degree there any more than you would as a waitress, but your degree will help you get the job in the first place. It's insane. I know this woman who works at the Border's downtown, and she says half the staff have master's degrees in English, and all they do is shelve books and look things up on the computer. It's completely brain-dead but they'll hardly even look at your resume if you don't have a degree because of the competition."
Ari tsked. "That's harsh. I guess the lesson there is not to get a degree in something people don't need more of."
Tina scowled at him. "That's real helpful, Ari."
Angela tried to ignore Ari but silently she couldn't help thinking he was right. She should have studied biology. Her biology friends moved in a completely different world than she and Phoebe. Industry jobs were plentiful, so much so that a number of Reuven's friends had left school without a master's degree because the job offers for a bachelor of science graduate were already tempting enough. Was the answer to go back to school and start over again? She couldn't afford to do that. There would be no financial help from home. Student loans would be the only option, meaning she would owe huge amounts of money by the end of it.
And what if it turned out she was no good at it?
Ari tapped at his keyboard. "Are you any good with computers?"
Angela shrugged. "Okay, I guess."
"You can still get decent jobs doing server administration without a degree. Give yourself a crash course in computers and you might be able to start a new career. So long as you know how to keep the machines running, they don't care what you did in school. The big down side is that you gotta work all kinds of crazy hours. But they pay pretty well."
"If it's money you're looking, medical school is still the way to go," said Elwyn. "Surgeons get paid huge cash."
Angela shook her head. Medical school was definitely out of the question. "I don't need big bucks. I just need a job that won't make fill me with loathing after six months."
"And likewise a boyfriend?" said Reuven quietly. He had come up behind her, a glass of iced coffee in one hand. He placed the coffee down on the table next to her. "Sorry, bad joke. Don't take it seriously." Reuven quietly borrowed a chair from a nearby table. Angela realized the others were scooting around to make room for him to sit next to her. Reuven sat down in his chair and then squeezed it forward until he had joined the group. "How's everyone doing?"
Elwyn leaned onto his elbows, a conspiratorial expression on his face. "We're all fine, but you look like hell. What's going on? Are your bacteria okay?"
Reuven considered this question gravely. "Actually, they might not be. I haven't checked on them today. I was supposed to but I've been distracted."
Tina bent forward to see around Angela. "Seriously? You're not just joking?"
Ari groaned. "Let me guess. I know what's happened. There's only one thing that distracting enough to make someone blow off their term project."
Reuven scowled at Ari. "It's not what you think. I don't have a new girlfriend."
Ari scowled back. "I was referring to computer games," he muttered.
Phoebe raised an eyebrow. "Did no one else here think Ari was referring to heroin?"
Reuven chose to ignore those comments. "Look, I got something going on, and I want to tell you about it, but you need to promise me that you won't tell anyone else about this, okay? It's my thing, and I haven't decided yet if I want to wait for my thesis, or to publish something early. It might be too big to sit on that long. But whatever happens, it's my decision to make. Got it?"
Elwyn looked confused. "Sure, Reuven. No one's going to tell you what to do with your thesis."
Tina said, "Maybe if you stumbled across a cure for cancer or something, I might make you bring in some experts. Otherwise, Elwyn's right. We're not going to make you do anything. But what's the big deal?"
Reuven seemed to be satisfied by this. He visibly relaxed. He lowered his voice a bit and hunched over his coffee. "I've got a life form in my living room completely unlike anything any human being has ever seen before."
Elwyn frowned, but his voice showed no surprise. "Reuven, are you sure about that?"
Reuven nodded. "Yes. Absolutely sure."
"Is it contagious?" Phoebe asked worriedly.
"Contagious? No. I'm not talking about bacteria."
"Okay, then tell us about it." Elwyn said. "We're listening."
Reuven drank slowly from his coffee, as if savoring their attention, or else having second thoughts about spilling the beans. He put down the glass, and finally spoke. "Yesterday evening I was out in the desert with Gladys. We were out there because she's studying some parasite that infects rat snakes, and they only come out at night to hunt during this time of year. Some kind of mite, I've completely forgotten what it was. So we were out there, and it was pretty dark. The moon was only a quarter at most. She's looking for snakes, and when she finds a rat snake I'm supposed to help her capture it so she can take it back to the lab and test it for parasites. She's been doing this all school year, and she's running out of people who owe her favors to spend the night out in the desert trying to catch snakes. I agreed to help her in exchange for her helping me count bacteria populations." Reuven looked up at the ceiling. "Maybe I should call in my favor now and ask her to check on my bacteria for me. No, she wouldn't know what to do if anything was wrong. Anyway. So we're out in the desert. It's late and it's dark, when I realize that there's this funny shushing noise coming from somewhere. I turn to Gladys and I whisper, do you hear that? And we're both holding still and listening, and I can still hear it, but it's getting quieter, and then suddenly there's a bunch of thumping noises. They're not very loud, on account of them happening a ways off from where we are, but we're listening so intently that we're both startled. I almost shouted when it happened. By the time we've recovered from the surprise and we're listening, the noise is gone, but Gladys then tells me that she thinks she heard it, too. And she thinks that it came from overhead."
At this Derrick sat up in his chair. He looked at Reuven closely, then reopened his computer lid and began stabbing at the keys.
"So curiosity eventually overcomes us, and we start poking around in the general direction we think the thump sounds came from. We're still looking for rat snakes, ostensibly, so we're keeping our flashlights turned off as much as possible, but we're both thinking more about what could have possibly fallen out of the sky."
Derrick looked up from his computer screen. "You said this happened yesterday evening?"
Reuven stared at Derrick. "Yeah."
"Are you sure?"
Reuven's eyes unfocused for a moment. Finally he said, "Oh wait. I guess it was the day before yesterday. My sense of time is off because I've only been to sleep once since then."
Elwyn frowned. "Does that mean it's actually been two days since you've looked in on your bacteria?"
Reuven looked worried, then waved that away. "Never mind, that's not important right now."
Derrick said, "Actually, when it happened is important. Thursday evening at 11:53 P.M. there was a confirmed report of a ship flying east-north-east over the university. I can't find any information on its altitude or overall path, but if it stayed on a relatively straight course it would have gone over the desert."
"Yeah, I'm not the guy who didn't already know that."
"Looks like there were a total of four ships confirmed that night, worldwide. That's more than usual."
"Whatever. Let me finish my story."
"Did it land?"
"Let me finish, Derrick. So Gladys and I are poking around for a long time in this area, and we're not really finding anything on the ground. I was thinking, I don't know, we might find some craters or something. Nothing like that. On the drive home, however, Gladys tells me that she did see two creatures, or one creature two different times, that she says looked just like naked mole rats."
Ari asked, "Do naked mole rats live around here?"
"Hell no. I mean, I suppose there might be some that some zoology major was keeping as pets which got loose. But they don't normally live in North America, and they don't spend a lot of time running around above ground in any case. Gladys couldn't be sure they really were naked mole rats: she didn't get a good look."
"But you don't think they were," Angela said quietly.
"No. Or not as such, anyway. The thing is, I actually did find something. After stumbling around the desert all night, I came across this, well, this ball. It was definitely something organic. I thought at first it might be some giant piece of dung, but as I touched it I realized it had a fleshy sort of feel to it. And it wasn't dried-out the way dung is. And it was big, like at least two feet across."
Phoebe held her hands out, judging the reported size. "A giant ball of flesh? And you just picked it up?"
"I guess it sounds kind of disgusting the way I'm describing it, but trust me it wasn't. It was just sort of — nondescript, really. It wasn't dry, but it wasn't wet or slimy or anything like that. It wasn't warm or cold, or much of anything, really. So Gladys and I look at it, but neither of us can figure out what to make of it. By now we're both getting sleepy, and she still has to drive back. So we decide that I'll hold onto it for the night and after we get some sleep we'll take it to the lab and look at it in detail. So I bag it and throw it in my pack and we drive home and say goodnight."
Reuven paused again and sipped his coffee. Nobody spoke.
"I wish I could say that I kept to my agreement, but by the time we got home I was too curious about the thing to go to bed. At first I just wanted to look at it in decent light, and my roommate's out of town until Monday morning, so I've got the place to myself. So I went into the living room and took it out of the bag."
"And it was alive?" Phoebe asked.
"I'm not sure." Reuven said quietly.
"You said at the beginning you had a life form in your living room. Did you mean a dead life form?"
"No, I mean, it's alive, don't get me wrong. I'm just not sure if it was alive all along, or if it came alive after I found it."
"No way. It was an egg, wasn't it?" Elwyn said. "It was an egg and it hatched right there on your coffee table."
Reuven shook his head. "It's weirder than that, Elwyn."
Elwyn eyes were round. "Did it imprint on you?"
Reuven winced. "No, I mean it wasn't an egg. It was, I think it was a prefabricated organism."
Elwyn stared. Derrick scratched his head. Tina said quietly, "What does that even mean?"
Reuven ran a hand through his hair. "See, I started messing with it. And I kind of wish I hadn't: I probably shouldn't have, but at the time I had no idea that anything like this was going to happen, and then I was too blown away to think about what I ought to be doing, and then it was too late. The thing is a do-it-yourself creature. Or it was. See, I picked it up off the table, rolled it around, looking to see if it was solid flesh all over. It really did look like a ball of flesh, and it was even sort of the right color, though maybe with a touch more gray. Maybe closer to the color of freshly dead flesh. But so anyway I noticed that my hand was leaving impressions in the ball. Where I had been holding it was these shallow handprints. And so I started pressing on it, gently at first, just to see how firm it was, and — well, I discovered that I could mold it."
"Mold it," Tina repeated flatly.
"Yeah. I could poke a hole in one side, and pull a lump out like a tentacle on the other. And this is where it gets really weird: every time I did something to change its shape, that part of it became solid and sort of, just, sort of activated. Like it turned on. I didn't realize it at the time, but as I messed with it, I was giving it its shape. I didn't fully understand what I had done until I tried to undo one of my changes and found out that it wouldn't mold any more."
"And it's alive."
"Yeah. Every time I did something to it, it seemed to sort of get a function assigned to it, or something like that." Reuven paused briefly. He had been about to go into more detail, attempt to describe how he had pressed one careful index finger against the fleshy ball, now a lopsided sphere from where it had rested too long on one side upon the table, apparently molded by the fact of its own weight, and how the substance had resisted, feeling very much like a familiar animal body as the epidermis and subcutaneous fat compresses against the underlying muscle, but then as he had pressed further, to the point where one might expect the bone to finally resist further pressure, the flesh had suddenly yielded, and the sensation was more like clay as his finger had sunk inward, the flesh suddenly responsive to his pressure as if seeking its guidance, and first one joint and then the second had disappeared from view as the finger fell inward, so easily that it almost felt like it was being drawn in, finally stopping at the knuckle, and the flesh gently tightened around him, letting the full shape of his finger mold the interior contours of the opening, while the inner end of the hole continued to retreat away from his fingertip, going inwards he knew not how far, and there they stayed for the moment, frozen in place, man and creature-to-be, until finally he had gently began to pull his finger back, the slightest twinge of fear for his finger's well-being intruding upon his thoughts and fighting with an instinctual desire not to make any sudden moves, and finally the force of his pulling back reached some critical point and the sides of the hole all around retreated from his finger ever so slightly, with a wet sensation of released suction, and as he slowly removed himself from the newly created orifice, which was now ever so slightly larger than his finger, he saw that the interior was a glistening grayish-red, and he felt on his skin a sticky dampness that registered the merest fluttering of air exhaling from within. But, on further reflection, Reuven instead said only, "By the time I understood what was going on, I had a full-on living thing."
"Okay. This is kind of hard to believe, Reuven," said Ari.
"I know. Keep your voice down, okay? I know it's hard to believe, but that doesn't change the fact that it happened."
"And you're saying that it came from one of the alien ships?"
"Well, it sure didn't come from this planet. I know that much."
"But why would aliens just drop one of these in the middle of the desert?"
"I've been thinking about that, naturally. The thing is, we heard more than one thump. I think the alien ship actually dropped off a bunch of freshly made creatures, like the naked mole rat thing Gladys saw. But the thing I found was an accident, got mixed it with the already-formed creatures by mistake."
"But that just raises the question of why they would dump a bunch of freshly made creatures in the middle of the desert."
"I realize that, and I don't have a good answer for you."
Derrick piped up. "Maybe they're running some experiments on our environment."
Ari countered, "Why? To what end?"
Derrick shrugged. "Because they're aliens? I don't know. Is it more plausible that they came all this way just to orbit our planet and do nothing?"
Phoebe spoke up. "What about Gladys? Has she seen this thing?"
Reuven shook his head. "No. I blew her off. She kept bugging me and calling me, so finally I told her I'd see her on Monday. I think she was more worried that the ball had come alive and killed me somehow; she calmed down once she heard my voice. I felt guilty at first for not involving her, but it was an honest mistake. I didn't know anything like this was going to happen when I started looking at it."
"So why are you telling us about it?"
"I'm torn. Should I bring someone in on this now, instead of keeping it to myself until after I publish? I mean, this thing might be huge. Who knows what we could learn by studying this? It's bigger than I can handle. I'm not sure that the university has the resources necessary to study this thing properly."
Elwyn laughed softly. "How do you even know what's necessary to study it?"
Reuven turned to face him. "Yes! My thoughts exactly. I can at least keep him until we've determined whether or not the university has the resources. It I mean. That's reasonable, isn't that reasonable?"
"You really want the credit for this thing, don't you? That's what's bugging you?"
"Of course I do. Come on, Elwyn, this organism is going to make my career. It's probably going to make careers for dozens of people at this university. I mean, it almost doesn't matter what we find out when we examine it. Even if this thing dies tomorrow, the autopsy would make headlines. It's practically guaranteed to be the biggest graduate thesis this university has ever published. I'm gonna be set for life."
Angela stated, "Which explains why you're neglecting your bacteria."
"Exactly. To hell with the bacteria. Someone else can take over that experiment. This is something new like you've never imagined. We could be creating a whole new branch of exobiology."
"We?" said Elwyn. "Are you inviting us to get involved?"
"Sure. Well, you and Tina. I mean, Gladys gets first choice of how much she wants to do, but I'm betting there'll be no end of work for anyone who wants to get involved. I'm just giving you a chance to, uh ..."
Tina stared at Reuven, who had stopped speaking entirely. "To what?"
Reuven stood up. "No way."
Angela asked, "What is it?" Reuven didn't answer, and after a moment she followed his gaze.
Standing in the doorway of the coffee shop was a young woman with a lock of bright green hair above her right eye that gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. She had pressed herself flat against the outside of the door, holding it open to maximum wideness, and gazed down at the floor, eyes wide. Before her feet was a thin stain where something damp had soaked into the tile, smeared into a track that led inward. Dragging across the floor towards them was something that no one else at the table had ever seen before.
The creature was between two and three feet tall; its body was roughly oblong. It had two limbs at differing heights along its lumpy barrel of a torso. The right-hand limb was rigid-looking, with an unmistakable joint at the two-thirds mark, though it appeared to flex more like a shoulder than an elbow, and ending in a featureless stump. The second, lower limb was a long, sinuous tentacle that flopped on the ground like an eel. A third limb trailed behind and to the left of the creature, straight and unjointed, but bent into a shallow curve as it anchored against the ground and pushed itself forward, the apparent means by which it had travelled to this point. There was no waist or neck on the creature, but there was a circular hole right about the point where imagination expected to see a mouth; the skin around the hole was puckered and wrinkled. There were no other clear features where anthropomorphic imagination wanted a face, but a large stain of greenish discoloration covered a square foot of skin above the mouth, with a vague pattern of mottled spots that to a biologist suggested possibly that it consisted of light-sensitive cells. Placed at arbitrary points on the lower body were two or three more orifices, none wider than a thumb's width, and at least one of them sported a drooling leak of slimy yellow fluid. All over its body were marks and shallow depressions in the unmistakable shape of handprints and fingertips. As the entire coffee shop watched, the thing wedged its hind limb against the floor and pushed itself forward, leaving another few inches of dampness trailing behind. No one said a word in that moment. Only the background music kept the establishment from floating in dead silence. As the hind limb began to move again, Reuven stepped away from his chair and walked over. As he approached it, the two forward-mounted limbs rose, the left one flailing the air like a cut rope, and a repeated sequence of staccato, wheezy whines could be heard over the music, like someone letting short bursts of air out of a balloon.
"Oh, hell," Reuven said.
Angela realized that she was standing, as was everyone else at the table.
Elwyn found his voice first. "Reuven, is this a joke? Because it's not funny if it is."
"Not even close to funny," Phoebe added.
Reuven quickly bent down and gathered the creature into his arms. The whining continued for a second or two, then suddenly stopped. All three limbs flailed about briefly, each with its own unique pattern of motion, and then calmness seemed to settle in and they stopped moving and hung limply down.
"Oh my god, oh my god," muttered Tina.
Phoebe put her hands over her mouth and nose. "That thing is ... so. gross."
"Don't say things like that," snapped Reuven.
A murmur of conversation began to buzz around them.
"What? It can't understand us, can it?" Elwyn demanded. "Can it?"
"I don't know! I don't think so but I don't know any more."
"How did this happen anyway? Did you just walk away and leave it sitting on your coffee table?"
"I didn't think it could move." Reuven hefted the creature and switched the position of his arms. The sleeve of the arm that had been supporting the creature from below was now damp and discolored a pale brown. "I fell asleep at one point, I was so tired, and when I woke up it hadn't moved an inch. I thought it would be okay for a few minutes."
Angela saw that the tattooed employee was leaving the cash register and coming around the counter.
"So you just assumed that it couldn't move at all?"
"Much less open a door."
"For crying out loud, did you even bother to lock up when you left?" Elwyn gasped.
"Much less be able to follow me here. It didn't seem to even notice when I fell asleep, I didn't think it would care if I got a lousy cup of coffee."
The tattooed employee was now standing in front of Reuven. He was a couple of inches shorter than Reuven but somehow seemed to have the advantage despite this. "Dude," he said in a stern voice, "I don't know what that thing is, but I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to bring it in here."
"I know, I'm sorry, this wasn't supposed to ..." Reuven fished for words, then suddenly seemed to think better of it and instead started marching towards the door, which was still being held open by the green-haired woman, now startled to see the creature rapidly approaching her again, but before she could react Reuven had passed through the door and was clumsily jogging down the sidewalk.
Elwyn grabbed his hat. "Reuven, damn it. Wait up!" he called, and then he too was out the door. Without saying a word Tina followed them both, her purse held clumsily in her left hand.
The nervous buzz of conversation became a full-throated racket. The tattooed employee glared at the remaining four standing around the table, then walked briskly towards the back.
Ari finally spoke. "That was the most messed-up thing I've ever seen in my life."
Derrick looked at Ari, and then at Angela and Phoebe. "What should we do? I mean, should we go follow them?"
Ari barked a laugh. "What for?"
Angela muttered, "If they want our help, they'll ask." That sounded like a weak response to her own ears, so she added. "They're biologists, we aren't."
Phoebe sat down and laughed weakly. "I'm going to have nightmares about that thing tonight."
Ari closed up his computer and returned it to his book bag. "Next time I see Reuven I'm not sure I'll be able to look him in the eye."
"I just know I am," continued Phoebe.
Derrick looked around at the other people, many of whom were staring back at him. "Maybe we should get out of here."
Ari laughed again. "What do think I'm doing?" He shouldered his bag. "See ya round, folks."
The tattooed employee reappeared, still glaring, pushing a mop and a bucket of soapy water over to the trail.
Phoebe stood up again, her backpack hanging from her left hand. "Later, Ari."
Angela followed Phoebe and Derrick out the door, carefully avoiding the vigorous mopping as they went.
Phoebe winced and pointed down the sidewalk to the left. "Look," she said. Angela turned and saw the thin trail of darker concrete leading all the way down the block. Across the street a knot of three people were talking to each other and pointing.
Angela cleared her throat. "Hey, Derrick."
Derrick looked up at her. "Yeah?"
"You still think you're going to go shipsighting tonight?"
Derrick considered this carefully.
"After seeing that thing, you mean, do I still want to go?"
"Basically."
Derrick smiled. "Heck yeah. More so than ever."
Angela nodded. "Then I guess I'll be joining you after all."
Phoebe stared at them. "Are you both crazy?"
Derrick hung up his phone. "Okay. Now I'm starting to get really discouraged."
Angela and Phoebe were standing on the sidewalk, half a block away from the Tourmaline. They had walked away, looking for a place to sit down, but Derrick, having realized that the afternoon was already half over, had become impatient with formalities and sat down on the curb.
"This will only take a couple of seconds," he had said. "I just need to find the closest car rental place and make a reservation." But that was several minutes ago. Angela and Phoebe stood nearby, hovering over Derrick as he investigated various businesses. Across the street, a thick stream of water ran down the street's gutter, originating from a bar at the other end of the block, where one of the bartenders had dragged a badly dented aluminum refrigeration unit out onto the sidewalk. He was holding the presumably broken appliance over at an angle, and water was spilling out of its front door. The sun was lower in the sky but no less potent, and the afternoon air was at its warmest. Angela unselfconsciously flapped the hemline of her sweatshirt up and down, fanning a gentle current of air across her belly.
"I had no idea that renting an automobile when you're under 26 was such a chore," said Phoebe, putting her hands on her hips. Phoebe was wearing a long gray dress that hung to her knees, with a line of large colorful buttons running down the center from the neck to the hem. Each button was a different color, and in the sunlight they looked oversaturated against the flat gray fabric.
"Me either," replied Derrick. "Nope, this place also wants three thousand dollars in collateral. Excuse me, damage deposit. That's just ridiculous."
Angela said, "Isn't there anybody we know who owns a car that they'd let us borrow for the evening?"
Derrick shook his head. "My dad has a car, but he lives over an hour away and he probably wouldn't loan it to me anyway. Rats. This place won't even rent to anyone under twenty-eight, period. What a bunch of crap."
Phoebe asked, "What about you, Angela?"
"My mom sold her car years ago."
Derrick interrupted. "Angela, try calling this place. They don't say that they'll rent to us but they don't say they won't, either." Angela retrieved her phone from her purse and called the number that Derrick gave her. An automated answer instructed her to enter her driver's license ID. Another visit to her purse to retrieve her wallet. She wiped her fingers on her jeans while her information was being "securely retrieved from the state records". Meanwhile Derrick was calling another business on his phone. Phoebe watched them silently for a moment, then sighed pulled out her phone as well.
After a long moment the voice returned. "In order for you to rent a car from us, you will need to supply a damage deposit. If you would like to provide this using your credit card, please enter your credit card number now."
Angela lowered her phone. "Hey Derrick, is it possible that we could get away with paying for the damage deposit using a credit card? As long as we don't total the car we get the money back tomorrow morning, which should allow us to pay off the card. Right?"
Derrick looked up at her with a tinge of disbelief. "My credit card has a limit of five hundred dollars. Do you have a credit card with a three thousand dollar limit?"
Angela hung up. "I don't even have a credit card. My folks don't trust credit card companies, and it never occurred to me that I might actually want one." Angela shook her head. "I'm too young to be spending time worrying about managing my credit card debt. I just got out of debt with the stupid university."
Derrick looked at his computer, then stared up at the sky, as if double-checking the clock display on his computer with the sun's location. He returned his attention to his phone. "Hello? Yeah, okay, that's what I thought. Thanks anyway." He shook his head. "It just blows me away. I had no idea that age discrimination was so rampant in the car rental industry." Derrick slammed his computer lid closed. "I can't believe that this much trouble is needed just to borrow a car to drive forty miles." He leaned backward, putting his hand flat on the sidewalk behind his back and stretching his legs out straight. "Well, and back again." He pulled his legs in again before anyone could drive over his feet.
"What are our other options? Can we take a bus?"
"No, I thought of that yesterday. There aren't any buses that go out to where we're going. I mean, it's just a spot in the desert; there's nothing out there for a bus to go to. I suppose it's possible that there's a bus that happens to drive past that spot, but then we'd have to convince the driver to let us off in the middle of nowhere, which I don't think they be willing to do."
"And then we'd have no way to get back again."
"Exactly. What else is there? A taxi?"
"A taxi would be way too expensive."
"Maybe not. The driver might be willing to cut us a deal. It'd be a guaranteed fare there and back again. If we split it three ways, it might not be so bad. A lot less than three thousand dollars."
Angela fretted. "Yeah, but at least with the deposit we'd get it back afterwards." She looked at Phoebe, but Phoebe was turned away from them, talking on her phone and staring up at the tops of the buildings.
Derrick put his computer down on the pavement and scrambled to his feet. "It doesn't hurt to ask, right?" And with that he jogged away. Angela looked down the sidewalk and saw that a yellow taxicab was parked in front of a fast food place. The driver was sitting on the hood, feet braced against the sidewalk, eating a hamburger. French fries spilled across the top of a flattened white paper bag next to him.
Across the street a woman with hennaed hair was carrying a folding chair and a cracked cello carrying case. Angela watched distractedly as she unfolded her chair in the middle of the block, sat down, pulled out instrument and bow, and began tuning the strings.
"Wait, say that again?" Phoebe was holding her right ear closed against the noise and shouting into her phone.
The woman across the street was apparently satisfied with her D and began tuning her A string.
"All right, thanks again. What? Sure. Okay, bye. Bye." Phoebe hung up her phone and turned to Angela. "Well."
"Well what?" Angela asked, and as she said this her phone chimed. She pulled her purse forward and reached in to get her phone, causing the strap to slide off her shoulder. "Did you find a place that will rent to us?"
A conspicuous-looking man wearing a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled up onto his head, as if he expected rain at any moment, suddenly shoved his way in between them. Before Angela could move out of his way, he grabbed her purse and took off running.
Phoebe was the first to react. "Stop him!" she yelled. Angela shook herself out of her paralysis and turned to give chase. Vaguely she noticed that the cello had fallen silent. She felt like she ought to yell something informative at the man, in hopes of recruiting assistance from passersby, but all she could think to say was: "Asshole!"
In the next moment the man was knocked sideways as Derrick threw himself into a flying tackle. The thief barely managed to remain on his feet, but in doing so he lost his grip on the purse as Derrick fell to the pavement, the shoulder strap tangled around his left arm. The contents of Angela's purse spilled out. The man paused for a moment, knees bent low and apparently tempted to try to grab something from the ground, but then thought better of it and took off running just as Angela and Phoebe reached Derrick.
Angela kneeled down. "Wow, Derrick, are you okay?"
Derrick rolled over and got to his feet. "Yeah, I'm fine. Too bad he got away though." He began rapidly collecting Angela's things and returning them to her purse. "I almost had him. Did you see? I had one arm around his waist, but he did this twist and slipped right out of my grasp. Ow, my knee. Slippery guy. I got the purse back, though." Derrick stood up and assumed an oddly formal pose as he handed the black velvet bag to Angela. "Your things, my lady."
The cab driver, who had yet to move from his perch, shouted over to them, "Hey you kids should call that in to the police."
Angela smiled a bit ruefully, but accepted the purse from Derrick with good grace. "Thank you so much for doing that. I really do appreciate it." Derrick's smile was wider than Angela could remember seeing before. "You're not hurt or anything, are you?"
Phoebe walked up, carrying Derrick's backpack computer. "That guy was an idiot. He should have tried to steal your stuff instead. It was all just sitting there on the curb."
Derrick shook his head and accepted his possessions from Phoebe. "I thought it would be safe for thirty seconds."
"You know, if you only report guys like that when they get away, then the cops can't prevent crimes before they happen."
"Wow, he sounds like a commercial," said Derrick, only half under his breath. He heaved the backpack onto his shoulder and tucked the computer under his arm.
Phoebe punched him on the upper arm. "Don't be rude. We need his help."
Derrick shook his head. "Ah, it's no good. He won't give us a discount. The whole thing would cost us almost a hundred dollars each."
Phoebe looked confused. "What? No, we need to take a cab across town I mean."
Derrick leaned over and rubbed his left knee with one hand. "We do? Why?"
"We're in business. I got us a car."
Across the street Angela could hear an E string being tuned.
Derrick's eyes lit up. "Seriously? Where?"
"My big brother is going to loan me his truck. We just have to go and get it."
Derrick straightened up again. "Phoebe, you've saved the day. Let's go."
Angela looked at Phoebe. "Phoebe, I thought you had changed your mind and weren't going to come."
Phoebe shrugged. "It was a temporary failure of nerve. The moment's passed, and I've changed my mind back. I'm in the mood for an adventure."
Derrick raised his free hand and made a fist. "Road trip!"
The cab driver looked up. "Yeah? You're going?"
Derrick started and turned around. "Oh, no, sorry man. I told you; we can't afford it."
Phoebe stepped forward. "But we do need to go to St. Matthew Hospital. Do you know where that is?"
The cab driver raised his eyebrows. "You need to go to the hospital? There's a hospital just a few blocks over. Really close. I'll take you there." He stood up and carefully picked up the bag. "No charge. All of you get in."
Phoebe said, "Wait, no. We need to go to St. Matthew specifically."
The driver stared at her, frozen in position, holding the white bag level between his hands, trying not to spill any fries, a puzzled expression on his face.
"I mean, thanks for offering; that's really kind of you. But we just need to go to St. Matthew because that's where my brother works."
The driver looked down at the food in his hand, and then slowly put it back on the hood of his car so he could wrap the fries up into a package. "Okay. So there's no emergency, right? You just need to get across town? I can do that."
"Yes, that's right; we're just meeting my brother."
Without looking up the driver said, "If there's no emergency then first you ought to call the cops and make a report." But he put the wrapped-up fries into the pocket of his windbreaker, put the last bit of hamburger into his mouth, and walked around to the driver's door. "Get in."
"So, you kids are heading out east, huh? What's out there besides the desert?"
Angela and Phoebe were in the back seat of the taxi. Angela was looking out the window and thinking about nothing in particular. Phoebe had her phone out and was composing a message. Periodically she would look up and make sure they were going in the right direction. Derrick was sitting in the front seat of the taxi, his computer open on his lap. Without looking up from his screen he replied, "Uh, we're going shipsighting."
"Oh, yeah? Well, that could be interesting. You think the aliens are going to be out buzzing the cactuses tonight?"
"That's one way to put it, yeah. Buzzing the cactuses. Cacti."
"So what makes you think they're going to be there when you get there? You got some inside information?"
Derrick looked up at the driver for a moment, then returned to his computer. "Well, maybe. There's this guy at the college who's being doing some statistical analysis. He's built some models in an attempt to find a pattern in the visitation events."
"No kidding, eh? And he thinks there'll be one of those ships out there tonight?"
"Well, it's not really what he thinks. He's just built up a set of potential models of various types, and so if you start with the assumption that the pattern of visitations can be modeled, then you crunch the numbers to see how well the models do, you end up with a set of probabilities for each one. You use those probabilities to weight the predictions that each one makes for the future, and that gives you something that you can test." Derrick smiled politely at the driver. "It's actually a lot more complicated than that, but that's the general idea. So we're going out to see how well this particular test does."
"No kidding. And your friend, he doesn't go out and look for anything? He just sits at home and crunches a bunch of numbers."
"Basically."
"Get a load of that. So you're gonna go out in the desert and look for aliens. What happens if you don't find anything? Is it back to square one for your friend?"
"Well no, he's just saying there's a good probability that a ship will appear here. It's not a sure thing. And likewise, if we do see something, that doesn't prove that his models are right, either. But he'll take all the new information and feed it into his model and crunch the numbers again, and over time we'll see if his predictions improve. If they don't, then he's probably barking up the wrong tree, and then maybe he'll have to go back to square one."
"Right, I get you. Those mathematicians do some weird stuff with their statistical analysis, eh?"
"Yeah, I guess they do."
"Like predicting elections and stuff. It sounds so simple, but when you try and look at the details of it, it's all so complicated. You think they could just ask a bunch people how they're voting and do some multiplying, but no."
"Yeah, statistics is hairy stuff. That's why casinos makes so much money, you know. Because people don't understand how to calculate statistics."
"You think so, eh?"
"Yeah. If everybody understood how to calculate statistics, bam." Derrick cut his hand through the air. "Nobody would every gamble, and Las Vegas would be a ghost town." Derrick returned to his keys.
"So you're a mathematician type too?"
"No," Derrick replied. "I'm a physics major."
"Yeah? You do like particle collider stuff?"
"Fat chance." Derrick sighed. "There's like a million physics majors and like twenty-three good jobs. The infighting is ferocious. I'll be lucky if I get a single grant approval before I'm thirty. I should have gone into biology like the rest of my friends." Derrick looked up briefly. "Whatever you do, don't go to college and study physics."
The driver chuckled. "Well, there's not much danger of that happening. Lucky for me, it's not too hard to get a job driving cabs."
Angela spoke up. "How is cab driving? Does it pay well enough?"
The cab driver glanced at Angela in the rear view mirror. "Oh, it's not too shabby. It depends on a lot of things. Weekends I do pretty well. Airport days are good. Today for example is a pretty slow day, and I'd be worried about it, but it's a Saturday night, so I should be able to make up for it by the end."
"Is it hard work, driving a cab?"
The driver laughed genially. "Guess that depends on what you find hard, doesn't it? I like it, myself. You get to meet lots of different people, talk about statistical analysis and whatnot. Learn all kinds of stuff."
Angela thought idly about trying to get a job as a cab driver. Her driving skills weren't particularly good, but no doubt they would rapidly improve with so much practice.
"The trick to making good money as a cabdriver is making good conversation. Even if you get a fare who's a real prick, if you keep the conversation friendly you can still get a decent tip. Not every time, of course. Some people are just assholes. But most people are decent, and if you treat them decently, they'll give you a decent tip."
Angela let her thoughts wander again. She didn't mind talking with friends, but she doubted she'd be a good cab driver if it required her to make good conversation with total strangers. Well, that and she didn't currently know how to drive.
Phoebe piped up. "I just let Donald know that we're almost there. Driver? Can you drop us off at the east entrance?"
"Sure thing, sweetie. Christ, look at that idiot in the Honda. Can't decide if he really wants to be driving or not."
Phoebe led them through large automatic doors and down a short hallway into a small cafeteria. The cafeteria was only half full, but felt cramped nonetheless. The tables were close together and each one was surrounded by four low-backed plastic chairs. Angela thought of hospitals as quiet places, but in here there was the familiar buzz of casual conversation. She overheard discussions about glucose levels and car payments as Phoebe squeezed between the tables, leading them across the room to where a burly man in blue-green scrubs was sitting alone with a disposable coffee cup.
"Phoebe," he said when he saw them, standing up and letting one hand fall familiarly atop her hand as they hugged briefly. "How are you doing? It feels like I never see you anymore."
"Hey, Donald. Yeah, college keeps me hugely busy, I know. I only have time for you when I need a favor. Hey, these are my friends. Derrick. And Angela."
"Nice to meet you. Sit down, sit down." Donald shifted his coffee cup to the inside seat and Phoebe sat next to him. Angela and Derrick awkwardly squeezed into the chairs on the other side of the table.
"Okay, let me just make sure I understand this. You want to borrow my truck and take it out into the desert. In hopes of spotting some aliens, am I correct so far?"
"Well, Donald, it's like this. We have reason to believe that ..."
Donald held up a hand. "Hey, I don't really care why you're doing it, just so long as you realize what you're doing. You're a free agent, Phoebe. But you do understand that if you crash my truck out in the middle of the desert, I will come after you with a chainsaw. Right?"
"I would be disappointed in you if you didn't."
"Just so we're clear on that. No off-roading, got that?"
"No off-roading."
"And if you do get into an accident, do not be the party at fault."
"I know, Donald."
Donald looked around the table. "You guys are all registered as organ donors, right?"
"They are," Phoebe said smoothly. "I checked with them even before calling you."
Angela opened her mouth, but caught herself before saying anything.
"Good. You're good people," Donald said, pointing at them, then turned back to Phoebe. "And you're going to have it back here tonight, right? There's no danger of you people trying to set up camp or anything, right?"
"The car will be back well before midnight."
"Oh, you don't have to hurry. I'm not getting off anywhere close to midnight. One of the operations has been delayed already, and the day's just getting started. Transportation issues. Hey, do you guys want to see something cool?" Donald stood up. "Follow me. This will just take a second."
Donald strode out of the cafeteria, tossing his not-quite-empty coffee cup in a waste bin by the door. The other hurried to catch up with him. Out in the corridor Donald led the way over to the elevators.
Derrick cleared his throat. "So, you do surgery?"
Phoebe spoke up. "Donald's an anesthesiologist."
"Greatest job in the world," Donald confirmed.
Angela looked at him. "Really?"
"Really," Donald focused on her. "Are you thinking of studying medicine? Becoming a surgeon?"
"Well." The elevator dinged and the doors opened. Angela was about to add "not exactly", but Donald started talking again as they were filing into the car.
"Don't be a surgeon. Become an anesthesiologist instead." The doors closed and the elevator began to slowly rise. "We anesthesiologists are a critical part of the surgical team, so we get paid the big bucks. Not quite as much as surgeons, but enough. But: we don't get anywhere near their share of the risk."
"The risk?"
"Yeah. Over the last fifty years anesthesiology has gone from being just another medical subject to being a science. Rock solid. Surgeons are still groping around in the dark, still trying to figure out how to do surgery right. We got it down cold. Do you know how many patients in this hospital died last year due to an error on the part of the anesthesiologist?"
Angela and Derrick answered with blank looks. Phoebe watched the indicators above the elevator door.
"Zero. Do you know how many died the year before that? Zero."
Derrick nodded. "That's cool."
"And if an anesthesiologist does make a mistake, and there's a complication, we don't let it go until we know exactly what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. And, if applicable, how to avoid it happening again. But now, you ask a surgeon, how many people died in this hospital last year due to surgical errors? They don't even know the number. They're not even keeping track. Hell, half of them probably couldn't even tell you how many people have died by their own hand."
Phoebe said, "That's not fair, Donald. You've told me yourself that it's often hard to tell who's at fault when a patient dies after surgery."
Donald nodded. "Yeah, okay maybe that was a little harsh. The point is that we've mastered anesthesia techniques in a way that surgeons can only dream of. Doctors and surgeons come in to work every day, they know that for a lot of patients there's only so much they can do. A big part of their job is telling people that they can't help them, because they don't know how, because nobody know how." The bell rang again, and the group stepped out. The floor they were on was much quieter, and Donald pitched his volume down accordingly. "Meanwhile we just sit in the background and come when we're called, and every day I get up knowing that I know exactly how to do my job right. I'm not bad-mouthing surgeons, mind you; god knows we need them. But I'm very happy to be an anesthesiologist. Like I said, it's the perfect job."
He stopped just outside of a room with a white curtain was drawn across the doorway. "Speaking of," Donald said in a soft voice, "let me just go in and make sure there aren't any MDs in the room first. They can be real prissy about having non-personnel around. Be right back." With that he ducked into the room.
"Phoebe," said Derrick in a stage-whisper. "he's not going to show us anything, well, icky, is he?"
"No," she shook her head confidently. "I don't think so. Though you can never be sure with him. He's gotten used to a lot of icky stuff. In any case, he's not trying to be gross."
Donald's head reappeared and he held the curtain open. "Come on in. It's just nurses. Nurses are cool."
Inside the room was a single hospital bed, surrounded by machines. There were no sheets on the bed, just an unconscious man. His hospital gown was half open, exposing most of his pale torso. Tubes and wires were attached and inserted at various points of his body, as well as his arms. The expression on his face was completely blank. His cranium was wrapped in a thick layer of snowy-white bandages that extended down to his eyes. His mouth was held open slightly by a breathing tube. His right cheek was covered with tape holding the breathing tube against his face. Some of the tape covered the dark moustache that ran around either side of his mouth, stopping just short of the jaw line. An older man in white scrubs was vigorously rubbing the patient's left leg between his hands, then holding it up and flexing it, bringing the knee almost up to the chest then down again. He turned and smiled briefly at the visitors, then moved over to the right leg.
Donald kept a respectful six feet of distance between him and the bed. The others stood around him. "Wow," said Derrick quietly. "That guy's on a lot of machines."
Donald stared at the patient. "Yes, he is."
"What happened to him?"
"Car accident," Donald said matter-of-factly. "Really bad one. His car turned sideways and sideswiped a tree. He was wearing a seat belt and everything, but the tree just plowed through the windshield like it was butter. Shattered his skull."
Angela winced. "Ouch."
Donald rocked his head from side to side. "If it's any consolation, I suspect he didn't feel much pain."
"Oh yeah?" Derrick asked cautiously. "Are they going to reconstruct his skull? Can they even do that?"
"No, no. He was pronounced dead as soon as he arrived in the hospital. His brain is all shot up with skull fragments. Probably died almost instantly. Not a bad way to go, really. In that sense he was lucky." Donald finally turned to look at them and smiled. "And lucky for us, the guy was an organ donor. What's going on here is that we're keeping the rest of his body running while we wait for the recipients to arrive and get prepped for surgery."
"So he's completely dead," Derrick said carefully.
"He's completely brain-dead. There's nobody left upstairs to run the show. But the flesh is still willing. We just gotta keep the blood oxygenated and moving. You see, keeping organs healthy after they've been pulled out is tough work. No matter how careful you are, they suffer from being frozen and thawed out again. They're much happier if they can just stay attached to a working circulatory system." Donald turned to stare at the patient again. "This is really the ideal transplant scenario. The donor is unequivocally a lost cause, but the rest of the body is almost completely unharmed. He's been on the machines for —" Donald glanced at the clock on the wall opposite the bed. "— seven hours now."
"Seven?" Angela repeated, despite herself.
"Yep. And we'll keep him like this through at least three operations. Heart, liver, and kidneys, to three different patents. They're hoping they might also be able to salvage his corneas, but they may have been damaged in the accident. They won't know for certain until they go in and have a look."
"How long can they keep him like that?"
"I'm not sure, actually. It depends on a lot of factors. If they did a good job fixing up his injuries, then we should have a good shot at avoiding infections in the blood. It also depends on how long we can put off the first operation. Once we cut him open, we won't be able to close him back up. Hopefully we'll be able to have all three operations overlap, but that depends on how soon we can get everyone here. The heart patient is supposed to be on a red-eye flight, but apparently there's fog at the airport. So who knows."
Phoebe finally spoke up. "Donald, are you showing us this because you're worried that I won't be careful with your car?"
Donald looked at her, surprised. "No. I just think that it's a really interesting. Don't you think so?"
"Yes, of course it is. I was just wondering if you had an ulterior motive."
Donald reached into his pocket and pulled out a small ring holding a small metal key and a black plastic remote key. "That actually hadn't occurred to me. But since you bring it up." He held out the keys to Phoebe, and then grabbed her hand as she reached to take them. "If you get in an accident with my truck, then you'll be lucky if it kills you instantly, because otherwise you're going to be in a lot of pain. One way or another." He let go of her hand, leaving the keys in her palm. "And if you do get in an accident bad enough to kill you, then for god's sake make sure you're wearing your seat belt. If your organs can be salvaged then your life won't have been a total waste."
"Thanks, big brother."
"All right. Now get out of here before a surgeon walks in and chews me out."
The three friends slipped out of the room, and Phoebe led them back to the elevator, where they waited in silence. Once inside the car, Derrick spoke up. "That was pretty weird. I had no idea they did that with dead people."
Angela shook her head and said, quietly, as if Donald might be able to hear her, "I'm so glad now that I'm not an organ donor, because I sure as hell wouldn't want to end up like that."
Phoebe looked surprised. "Really? Do you actually care that much? I mean, you'd be dead in that situation, so what does it matter?"
"It's just gruesome, is all."
"I think it's kind of sweet, myself. Putting in all that effort to keep the body alive."
Derrick said, in a surprised tone, "I guess in some ways it's sort of the ideal situation for the nurses. They've got a patient, they're taking care of him. There's no risk that he's going to wake up screaming in pain, or that his mother's going to run in and demand to know why the doctors haven't fixed him yet."
"Ugh," said Angela. "I can't even imagine what my mother would do if I died in a car accident and she saw me all hooked up like that. She'd freak out so hard."
Phoebe rolled her eyes. "You guys are so lucky Donald didn't try to tell you some of his war stories. This was nothing." The elevator stopped and they disembarked into the basement parking level. Phoebe gestured with the remote and a distant beep-beep echoed around the concrete space. Angela couldn't tell where the sound had originally come from, but Phoebe started walking confidently to the left, and they followed. Phoebe half turned her head to face them and said, "One time when I was still in high school, Donald comes home from work after we had started eating dinner, which was lasagna ..."
"Actually," Derrick interrupted. "Can we maybe skip the war stories? Sorry, but I can see where this is going. I was totally okay with the dead guy covered in tubes, it was actually pretty interesting. But let's just talk about something else now."
Phoebe laughed, but said nothing.
The truck was the kind that had an abbreviated back seat. Derrick halfheartedly volunteered to sit in the back, but Angela politely insisted, citing her shorter legs, and Derrick quietly deferred. Once Phoebe got out on the city streets, Derrick turned on the car stereo. Classical music began playing out of a speaker very close to Angela's head.
"Oh boy," Derrick muttered. He pulled out his computer and set it open on his lap. "How old is your brother again?"
"Huh?" Phoebe replied. "Why?"
"This music is for geezers."
"Hey. Don't you start making insinuations about my brother's taste in music."
"Don't get me wrong," said Derrick, fingers scrabbling over the keys. "I like your brother. He's got a rough exterior that makes burlap look smooth, but I'm sure he's a really cool guy underneath all that. That doesn't change the fact that he has some dusty taste in music."
"You know, Derrick. I like this music too."
"Okay, whatever. No offense. But you like other music as well, don't you? You wouldn't mind if we listened to something else instead, right? There we go." Derrick tapped his computer and the music changed to a song that had been very popular last year. Angela recognized it immediately, though she didn't recall the name of the song or the band that had recorded it.
"Where did you find that?" Phoebe asked.
Angela's first association for the song was Reuven. He had become fond of that song, oddly enough, only after it had started waning in popularity. He had bought the album, which had that song as its opener.
"It's good music for a road trip. Don't you think?"
Reuven had always insisted on playing music while they were having sex. It was a sensible habit, actually, considering how much noise leaked through the dorm walls. But after purchasing that album, he started cueing that particular album up first. So they would start off with that song.
"Not especially, since you ask. But what I mean is that from the radio or what?"
After a couple of repetitions of this, Angela began associating that song with having sex with Reuven. At first that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
"No, no radio. It's just playing shuffled music from my computer."
Soon after her Reuven made the same association. Which gave him the idea of using the music as an icebreaker, of sorts. They'd be sitting in the living room watching TV, or just reading, and he would get up and go into his bedroom, and a moment later that song would start playing. And Angela would know that she was being summoned.
"Well, I'm driving, Derrick, and I don't want to listen to that."
But the problem wasn't with the song. The root problem was what happened after sex, not before.
"If the driver gets to pick the music, then let me drive."
Angela was in the habit of going to the bathroom and cleaning up after sex, after which she would put on an old T shirt and return to bed. His dorm apartment had no heat, and would get very cold at night, so Angela couldn't sleep comfortably without putting something on.
"You can't drive. I promised Donald that only I would drive his truck."
At some point Angela became aware that Reuven was in the habit of rolling over and watching her leave the bed and walk into the bathroom. And continue to stare at her as she returned to the bedroom, until she put on clothing.
"And so therefore you pick the music. How very convenient."
This made her feel self-conscious, to the point of discomfort. She couldn't ignore the fact that Reuven was staring at her. Which only made her avoid his gaze until she was dressed. She imagined him ogling her body parts with a casual air of entitlement.
"I'm just saying we can do better for a compromise. Do you have any Philip Glass on your computer?"
She hardly felt that she could object to this behavior. She was his girlfriend; how could she justify refusing to let him see her naked? For goodness' sake, they had just finished having intercourse. How could such a complaint be sensible?
"No. I can't say that I'm particularly fond of Philip Glass. To be honest I'd rather listen to that geezer stuff than Philip Glass."
And yet it bothered her, and her own intuition that her objection was indefensible only made it harder to put it out of her mind. She came to dread those tense moments after sex and before donning the nightshirt, when she would feel, for those few moments, that her body didn't entirely belong to herself anymore, and that she was a bad girlfriend to feel that way.
"Okay, then, turn it back to the Baroque channel. We can just keep it on low volume so it won't bother you too much."
There was a friend of her mother who had gone through chemotherapy when she was in high school. The radiation treatments always left him nauseated for days afterwards, and Angela remembered him telling her mother how the anticipation of nausea had been so strong that he had started to feel sick just before the treatment, to the point of getting ill at the sight of the highway exit for the hospital, hours before the treatment itself. In much the same way, Angela began to dread Reuven's orgasm and the completion of sex, which then became extended to the initiation of sex, and the sound of that song in particular, as Reuven cued it up on the stereo all unknowing of the disastrous effect it was beginning to have on Angela's libido.
"All right, all right." Derrick shut down his computer's connection to the stereo, and the classical music returned. Angela relaxed the shoulders she hadn't realized were tensed up. Maybe she was being too uptight about sex. Maybe she still needed to loosen up and unlearn her subconscious sex-negative stereotypes. Maybe she had never really trusted Reuven, and it had only manifested itself with this one issue. Or maybe she had just overreacted to a minor issue, and blown it out of proportion by her feeling that she couldn't talk about it.
Or maybe Reuven had just been kind of a jerk, and she would see that more clearly when she finally met the right boyfriend and learned what true love was like.
"You know what?" said Derrick to Phoebe. "This part here is actually kind of cool."
"Oh my god. You actually like this?" said Phoebe, glancing away from the road briefly to flash Derrick an expression of horror. "You are so old."
The trio got onto the main street going east. As they got closer to the city's edge, the residential districts and student-oriented businesses gave way to strip malls, furniture stores, and hotels fronted by signs sporting graphic designs popular in previous decades. Dotted throughout were various fast food establishments of nearly every variety.
"Let's stop and grab some food. You folks okay with hamburgers?"
Angela shrugged. "Sure." She wasn't picky, not about fast food at least. It was all so mediocre; how could anyone really care about it?
Derrick grunted. "Why don't we just keep going? I can wait until after."
"That's fine. I'm not asking you to get anything if you don't want to."
"But we can just get dinner afterwards. It'll just be a couple of hours later."
"We might be out there a lot longer, depending on what we see. The time is really vague, isn't it? We're not just going to turn around and come home if we don't see anything right away."
"But we shouldn't waste any more time getting out there. We're already behind schedule. I'd rather put off dinner than get out there and find out we missed them."
"I'm hungry, Derrick, and I say we're stopping for hamburgers. It'll take five minutes."
"Can we get tacos instead? I had hamburgers for dinner yesterday."
"I can't eat a taco while driving. Are you willing to park while we eat?"
"Fine. Let's get hamburgers."
"Actually," Angela interjected. "Let's go inside to order. I need to use a bathroom."
"That'll take even longer," Derrick complained.
At that moment Angela heard her phone chime. She reached down by her feet and felt around blindly for her purse.
Phoebe reached over and slapped Derrick on the arm, more gently than she wanted to due to not being able to get any leverage. "Derrick, she's not going to hold it until we get back to town. There aren't any bathrooms in the desert. We all need to make a pit stop."
Angela's fingers finally found the slick plastic casing of her phone and pulled it out. There was a message from Tina: "Reuven's asleep finally. I'm babysitting Oscar while Elwyn gets supplies."
"Okay, okay, you're right, but let's make it fast. No lingering in front of the mirror powdering your noses or anything."
The name "Oscar" gave Angela a little irrational chill, but she ignored it and wrote back: "Is the creature behaving?"
"Do I have your permission to change my tampon? It might take another thirty seconds."
"I just don't want to get out there and find out we missed the show while standing in line at the restaurant. I'm anxious, that's all. You don't have to bite my head off. Man —"
"Don't even think about making a crack about PMS."
Derrick said nothing in reply. He had been about to do just that.
Angela's phone chimed again. "He's watching Reuven sleep. Quiet as a lamb."
"Stupid semi nearly cut me off," groused Phoebe. "Is traffic on the highway always this busy?"
"I guess it's not like there's a lot of different ways to get across the desert," said Derrick.
"Whoa," said Phoebe. "Is that actually somebody hitchhiking?"
Angela and Derrick looked out the car windows. Sure enough, walking backwards on the shoulder of the road was a stocky man weighed down with both a book bag and a backpack. He had disheveled wavy hair that hung down below his shoulders, and his bushy facial hair completely hid the shape of his jaw. There was dust on his jeans.
"I don't know if I've ever seen somebody hitchhiking in real life before," said Angela as they passed him. Then she realized that they were slowing down and pulling over. "Phoebe!"
"What?"
"You're not going to actually pick him up, are you?"
"Why not?" Phoebe brought the truck to a stop on the shoulder.
"He could be dangerous!" Angela risked a glance back and saw that the man was jogging over to them.
"You might say he looks a bit sketchy," Derrick observed.
"He's harmless," Phoebe said. "Besides, there's three of us. What's he gonna do?"
"She has a point," Derrick said to Angela. The stranger was now standing outside the passenger door. Derrick opened the door and took off his seat belt. "Hi there."
"Thanks so much. You folks are totally awesome. I didn't think anyone would stop for a scruffy guy like me. Hey, my name's Gustaf."
Derrick stood up and bent the seat forward. "I'm Derrick. Climb in."
Gustaf clambered heavily into the back seat. He had to take off his backpack and give it to Derrick to throw into the back of the truck in order to squeeze into the narrow space. Even so, with his book bag laying across his knees, it was all Angela could do to make space for his legs.
"All set? Good enough," said Derrick cheerfully, climbing back into his seat and getting the door shut just as Phoebe gunned the engine.
"Hey. My name's Phoebe," she said, after she had turned back into the right lane. "And that's Angela you're sitting next to."
"Phoebe, thanks for picking me up. You really saved my life."
"Oh, don't mention it. I won't be able to take you very far, I'm afraid. We're going to be turning off this highway in about a half hour."
"Oh, don't apologize. That'll help me a lot. In fact I'm not going much farther than that anyway."
"Well, then I guess this is your lucky day," Phoebe replied.
"Hang on," Derrick interjected. "You're not going much farther east than we are? But there's nothing out there. Is there?"
Gustaf opened up his book bag. "Well, I guess that depends on what you're looking for." He pulled out a computer which he managed to squeeze down between his legs and stomach, forcing him to contort his arms to reach the keys. "I'm sort of guessing that I'm going out there for the same reason that you are."
"Yeah?" Derrick replied guardedly.
"Shipsighting?"
"Yeah!"
"I thought so."
Derrick was suddenly excited. He turned around in his seat so he could see Gustaf around his headrest, holding onto his computer with one hand to keep it from falling onto Phoebe's hand resting protectively on the gear shift. "This is great. You know, I told all my friends about how there was a really high chance that the aliens would be flying overhead not too far from here, and we should go out and see them while we still could, and hardly anyone would listen to me. In the end I could only convince these two friends to let me bring them along."
"Excuse me: who's bringing along whom?" Phoebe said.
"Fair enough. Phoebe came through and supplied our wheels. Without her we'd be stuck in the city while all the action was going down."
Gustaf chuckled. "Believe me, Derrick, I can relate. See, my girlfriend was giving me a ride out to the desert. But the moment I got in her car, we started arguing. To be fair to her, I did kind of spring this on her at the last minute, but I didn't you know hold a gun to her head or anything. Quote unquote." Gustaf redundantly traced air quotes to accompany the words. "But she's like that. You know? You know how some people are like that? You ask them a favor and they always say yes, and you don't find out that yes really meant no until after it's too late to go back? If she had said no right off I would have been okay with that. I could have tried to find someone else to take me. I do have friends, you know. Aah." Gustaf seemed to run down at that point. He shook his head and returned his attention to the computer.
"So ...?" Angela asked, in spite of herself. "You had a fight in the car, and she threw you out and left you on the side of the road?"
Gustaf looked up, momentarily surprised. "Oh. Well, so what happens is that the disagreement flares up and starts to spill over into a bunch of other things, and before you know it we're sort of breaking up right then and there. No," Gustaf pre-emptively held up a hand, "don't be regretful. It's a mutual thing, and probably long overdue. But so once we've both said and there's no taking it back, she wants to turn around and go back home at once. She wants to start separating our things and toss me out of her place before nightfall. She doesn't want me to even try to crash in her bed tonight, she says. Of course I can't do that, because it's already too late for that. By the time we got back to her place it would already be too late for me to return here. Much less after sorting out my possessions, and finding some other ride. So then she says that she doesn't see why she should have to spend all this time driving her ex-boyfriend around the middle of the desert, and I say fine. If that's how you feel, fine. Nobody's holding a gun to your head. Stop the car and I'll get out here. So she did, and so I got out and started hitchhiking." Gustaf let loose a laugh that Angela found a bit too jolly for the tone of the story. "And so here I am."
"Well, that's too bad about your girlfriend."
"Don't be sorry. Long time coming. The way I look at it, the relationship was already dead, it just hadn't stopped moving yet."
Derrick said, "Well, so I guess you're really headed out to that spot about five miles north of the highway, where there's a hill?"
"That's the one. I know a few amateur astronomers who tell me that hill's a nice convenient place for doing some stargazing. Of course they're mostly worried about getting away from the light pollution and the trees. But from there we should be able to see for several miles all around. If a ship goes by anywhere near there, we'll spot it."
"Yeah. Wow. I'm starting to get a little excited."
"Well, of course remember there's no guarantee that there'll be anything to see."
"Oh, of course. Yeah. So I'm guessing you read the same analysis that I did?"
"I've probably read all of them. Which one are you referring to?"
"I don't remember what it was titled. It was just published last night, by a guy at the university here."
"Could it possibly have been, Statistic Modelling of Ship Visitations and Possible Patterns, by Gustaf Vebeln?"
"Yeah, that was it." Derrick said. "Wait a second: Gustaf? That was you?"
"That was me."
"Oh man, what a coincidence. This is awesome!"
"I was ri-ight," Phoebe said quietly. Angela poked the back of Phoebe's seat as a silent retort.
For several miles Derrick and Gustaf kept up a running conversation about statistics that pretty much excluded everyone else. In fact Angela got the distinct impression that Derrick was unable to follow Gustaf after a couple of minutes, after which he became glassy-eyed and just nodded a lot. At one point Angela tried to strike up an independent conversation with Phoebe, but she found it hard to hear Phoebe clearly over Gustaf's baritone voice, and so dropped it after a while, and amused herself by staring out at the desert landscape and trying to ignore the chatter. Mathematical jargon gave way to a discussion about various data sources for alien activity and their reliability.
"No doubt the governments have the best data, of course, but they're not publishing it."
"Do you think that's true, though?" asked Derrick. "I hear that their aerial monitoring is mostly on the borders, and they don't have good up-to-the-second coverage of the interior."
"Maybe that was true back in the day, back when computers were the size of a building, but it's not true nowadays. Plus don't forget, any ships that fly overhead have to first come down from outside the atmosphere, where the mothership is parked. You better believe that every time anything enters the atmosphere, sirens are going off in secret bunkers all over the planet."
Angela once again found herself drawn into the discussion. "That's funny. I heard the opposite; that everyone was having a hard time tracking the movement of the ships once they got down inside our atmosphere. That's why everyone's so nervous about the visits."
"Pure disinformation. Don't believe it."
"In any case," Phoebe interjected, with a brief glance in her rear-view mirror, "I think it's a complete miracle that nobody's tried to bomb the mothership yet. You would think that at least one country would get so jittery that they'd just freak out and push the button."
"Yes, you would think that, wouldn't you? So then you need to ask yourself, why hasn't that happened? And I'll tell you why I think that hasn't happened. I've been reading a little bit about this whole subject, as some of you here may have already gathered. And I think it's pretty clear that this little international crisis has precipitated the unveiling of the One World Government. The Bilderberg Group has preferred to sit in the shadows, maybe tug on a puppet string now and then, but mostly just lay down the foundation. So when they do make their move, everything falls into place and they seize complete control. They're serious control freaks, so they want to make sure there's no chance of a screwup once they show their true faces. But now something's happened that they couldn't possibly have predicted. Aliens from another planet! It's the ruin of all their plans. So they're forced to act now, to get in there, and do what they can to make sure that the aliens talk to them. Because they need the aliens, you see? If the aliens are talking to one set of crusty old white men, and they decide that they don't like them, now they want to talk to some other crusty white men, what do you think happens?"
Angela offered, "They hang up and call the other guys?"
Gustaf failed to hear her sarcasm, or at least he didn't acknowledge it. "They get to talk to the other group. No question. The aliens hold all the cards here. So the Bilderberg Group has to establish their government now, so the aliens believe that they're the only ones in charge. So the aliens believe that they have to talk to them, because there's no one else to talk to. But the Group knows that they can't just stage an overt takeover, because the people would rise up in a huge worldwide revolution. Because their plans aren't ready yet. So they have to do it all behind the scenes." Gustaf squinted and held out his hands like a marionette puppeteer. "They're pulling strings left and right, trying to gain control of the situation without letting too many people know what they're doing. It's total chaos."
"Huh," said Angela after a while. The lack of response from the other two reassured her that she was not alone in her assessment of Gustaf's ideas. "Guess that's a lucky thing for us, then?"
"You know it, sister," Gustaf proclaimed. "The aliens coming here are the best thing that could have happened to us. That's why I'm trying to keep track of every move that everyone is making over these last several months. If the Bilderberg Group manages to pull the wool over the alien's eyes, we as a people will need to rise up and take them down, fast. You know, if we ever want to taste freedom again."
"Well, that's one theory," Angela said. "I guess I personally think that nobody's tried to bomb the aliens because they're scared of what would happen next if the aliens weren't destroyed."
Phoebe put in, "Or even if they were destroyed. The aliens might send a whole fleet next time."
Derrick said, "You know what I think? I think this visit has actually brought out our better sides. You know how it is that people will do petty little stuff when they're all alone, but when they're in public where they know they can be seen, they get all good and generous? That's like exactly what's happened to the entire planet. The aliens show up, park their little craft in orbit, suddenly we realize we're not alone, and in fact we're probably being observed closely. And now everyone's all paying attention to the UN and trying to make sure that they don't do something that might make the entire planet look bad. In the last nine months it feels like half the wars going on have stopped, and peace treaties are getting signed like I never heard of before."
"That's the Bilderberg Group's influence. They need the UN. They need to concentrate power into one place so they can seize it all in a single stroke. What is a peace treaty, what is any treaty, but a piece of paper that takes autonomy away from a government? It's power that a government voluntary gives away."
"But the UN is a good thing. I mean really. When I was a kid the UN was a joke. They'd try to get people to stop fighting and nobody paid any attention. Now they're being taken seriously, because everyone is figuring that'll be how we decide how to handle the aliens, assuming they ever show themselves."
"Assuming they ever show themselves?" Gustaf shook his head. "You've got your head in the sand, my good friend Derrick. The aliens have already shown themselves. For quite some time, probably."
"Oh yeah," Angela said. "I think I saw a headline about that when I was buying beer last week."
"You laugh, but it's true. There no doubt about it. The aliens have been down here, on the planet surface if you will. I don't know why they've allowed their presence here to remain a secret, but it won't for much longer. You simply can't keep something that big from the public. You can only silence so many people before it becomes too big to control."
Angela dropped her sarcastic stance. "So wait. You're saying that the aliens have actually landed?"
"Maybe, maybe not. I've heard a handful of reports of them landing, in the process of collecting all available flight pattern data, but none that I'm willing to stake my reputation on. They all lack the necessary corroborating evidence. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened, of course. Just that I can't prove it."
Phoebe put in, "But that doesn't mean anything, does it? They might be able to just beam down, like in Star Trek. Maybe they've been doing it all along?"
Derrick asked carefully, "Do you really think that?"
Phoebe shrugged. "Just saying."
Gustaf said, "But the details don't change the fact that aliens have been seen among us. In fact, I strongly suspect that there's a clandestine group hiding here in the city, possibly working with the university."
Derrick frowned. "How? You're saying they're in cahoots with the dean?"
"I'm not clear on the details. But I have incontrovertible proof." Gustaf pulled his computer up and handed it to Derrick. "Here. Look at this video. It was made publicly available by a fellow alien-activity-watcher. A friend gave it to him only after he promised not to reveal any information about its source. So he won't say who took it or even where it happened. But I'm going to show it to you, and I think you'll agree, there's just enough visible in the background to identify it. Look. Pause it right there at the beginning. Now, you've probably seen this video already. It's pretty popular at the moment."
"Well, I don't recognize it from the three-quarters of a second that I've seen so far."
"Okay. Well, even if you have seen it, I bet you haven't looked closely at this part right here at the beginning. It's pretty blurred, but study it for a second. Now I don't know about you, but I'm fairly certain that I walk past that storefront at least four times a week."
Derrick held the computer up close to his face and squinted. After a moment he said, "Huh." Derrick then touched the keys and started the video again. "Hey, Angela."
"What?"
Derrick held Gustaf's computer up so that she could see the screen. On it was a shaky video showing a misshapen and pale three-limbed creature slowly inch down the sidewalk.
"Uh oh," she said quietly.
Phoebe glanced over at the others. "What is it?"
"So much for secrets," Derrick observed.
"Looks like it." Angela avoided meeting Gustaf's curious gaze as he looked back and forth at the others. "Reuven's going to be so pissed."
Derrick slapped at his computer screen. "I just can't get any decent bandwidth out here. Too far away from the city, I guess."
"Well, can you tell me anything about what I should be looking for? Like will there be a sign?"
"I don't know, Phoebe. I'm going entirely on satellite photos. There are no driving directions for how to get to hills in the middle of deserts."
"Gustaf? You said you knew people that came out here."
"I do."
"Did any of them give you directions?"
"I'm afraid it never occurred to me that it would be a problem. My girlfriend's car — excuse me, I mean: my ex-girlfriend's car has navigation and I figured the GPS would be sufficient."
"Well, even if we did have navigation it probably wouldn't show the road we're looking for, since it's not on the maps online. Angela, are you keeping your eyes peeled?"
"Yes, Phoebe, but you can see the road a lot better than I can back here."
"Understood. I just don't want to be the only one looking."
"We can't get lost, Phoebe," said Derrick. "My download speeds may be crap but I've still got GPS."
"Yeah, I know. I suppose we could just strike out in a straight line towards our destination, but I really don't want to go roaming around the hills if there's a perfectly good road around here. It's going to get dark before too long and I don't want to risk hitting something and catching a flat tire. Or worse."
"Well, from what I can see, it looks like we're right on top of where the road is. So if we don't see anything that looks like a turnoff in the next mile, we should probably assume we've missed it."
Angela spoke up. "Wait. Look at that."
Phoebe slowed down. Up ahead, heading off to the left at right angles from the highway, were two parallel ruts in the dusty ground, grooved in a pattern that revealed their identity as tire tracks.
"Not exactly a road," admitted Angela.
"But certainly suggestive," said Derrick.
Phoebe nodded. "This must be it." She made a left turn, slowing down and followed the tracks.
Derrick shook his head. "I'm not sure we would have seen this if it weren't for the fact that someone else came out here first. Someone clearly better prepared than we were."
"Not just someone," said Phoebe. "There's a couple different set of tires in these tracks."
Gustaf craned his neck to look past the front seat. "You know, I noticed an increasing number of people viewing my analysis after that video was published. Perfectly natural, of course, but I'm starting to think that we shouldn't expect to be the only ones out here this evening."
"No," said Derrick. "I don't think we should."
"Well, we'll find out soon enough," said Phoebe. "I'm guessing another ten or fifteen minutes, if the ground stays like this."
Angela folded her arms. "Couldn't those tire tracks be old?"
Phoebe shrugged. "Maybe the bottom one is old, but the top one is so clear. Wouldn't it be all blurry and indistinct if it was old? Out in the desert and all?"
Derrick said, "Well, I certainly don't mind having other people along. It's like extra company. Like Gustaf. We're all out here for the same reason."
Angela muttered. "We are?"
There was a pause, until Phoebe said. "I don't know about the rest of you. I came along for the hell of it. A little bit of adventure. While I expect Gustaf came out here to test his predictions."
Gustaf piped up. "Not really, no. The results of my predictions will be clear enough from the data that other people provide, worldwide. The results of my prediction for one single location wouldn't be enough to confirm or disprove anything, by itself. And anyway, the data online is far more detailed than what I could gather."
Derrick said, "Then why did you come out here?"
"I wasn't planning to, originally. I decided to come after seeing that video." Gustaf's tone became a little arch. His companions had been surprisingly close-mouthed about what they knew about the video, claiming that they had promised to keep a secret, and while clearly they felt that that secret had already been compromised by the posting of the video, none of them felt comfortable, or so they claimed, in sharing what they knew until the persons to whom they had given their words absolved them of further silence-keeping, a situation that was made the more aggravating by the realization, after a few minutes of thinking during a lapse in the conversation, that the three almost certainly did not believe that the video was of an alien, a fact Gustaf had deduced by the way that they had been so openly scornful of that hypothesis when he presented it, an attitude so completely different from their embarrassed close-mouthedness after seeing the video that Gustaf could not believe that it had not been genuine, so leaving him completely baffled as to what the figure in the video could have been, and what it did have to do with the aliens, or perhaps the Bilderberg Group. "If aliens were in the neighborhood, it seemed likely some of them might be planning a rendezvous here."
"So you are pretty confident of your predictions, aren't you?" asked Derrick.
"Of course I am. I'm always confident of any statistical analysis I do. I'm never pleasantly surprised by my successes, only reassured that I was right all along. By the same token, I am inevitably terribly disappointed by my failures, for I never see them coming. So you see my confidence is no measure of the analysis's likelihood of being sound." Gustaf shrugged. "I take solace in the thought that many brilliant mathematicians were the same way."
"Well, I came because of you and your analysis. I saw the odds you gave for them being here, and I thought, I've got a chance to see something only a few people have ever seen, and I may never get another chance again. You do realize that if any of your models turn out to be accurate and we figure out how to predict where the ships are going to be, the police are going to start keeping people away from the sites."
"I've worried about that. But the police haven't shown any interest in trying to keep people away from the ships so far. At least not in this country."
"That's because they've been so infrequent and unpredictable. Now that they're showing up more often, if people have the ability to plan for when they'll see them, all kinds of things could happen. People with radios will camp out hoping to make contact. The Earth Frontliners will probably show up with bazookas hoping to blast one of them out of the sky. The police are going to do whatever they can to keep any of that from even getting started."
"You may very well be right. Still, if I hadn't published my analysis, someone else would have done the same thing and gotten credit for being first. The data's been sitting there, just waiting for someone to apply the right approach."
"Assuming it is the right approach," said Angela quietly.
"Assuming that, yes. And how about you? What's your reason for coming?"
Angela shrugged. "Curiosity." In fact Angela had been driven to the decision by the same thing as Gustaf, i.e. Reuven's bizarre creature, although not at all for the same underlying reason. Angela leaned her face against the wall of the truck and stared out at the sliver of desert she could see through the windshield at this angle. That morning she had listened to Ari's project and felt that his coming into the project that excited him so had been rather fortuitous for him, that he had gone looking for something worthwhile and had found instead a plum of an assignment, right off the bat. It had almost fallen into his lap. And then, sitting there in the coffee shop while listening to Reuven's bizarre recounting of events, she had heard what it really meant to have a no-miss opportunity for fame and notoriety all but literally fall into your lap. And she had felt that surely, if anything in the universe was fair, surely it ought to be her turn next. She needed this more than Ari and Reuven; they already had working careers mapped out for them. She had nothing, and no time left in which to recover her footing. If anyone needed a new direction to fall from the heavens, it was her. She didn't need anything as exotic as a do-it-yourself organism. Any kind of never-before-seen artifact would do just as well for the likes of her. Even something as mundane as a clear, unblurry shipsighting video, capturing the approach as well as the retreat, would be enough to distinguish her, give her a chance to be known for something. It would give her a new direction, a new doorway that she could walk through and get a start on the rest of her life. "Plain old curiosity." But now she realized that this idea of hers was even less likely to bear fruit than she had originally dared to hope. If they weren't going to be the only ones there, then even assuming that aliens did make an appearance she would have to compete with them for whatever fortune there was to be gained from the evening. The clouds were evincing a pinkish hue as the sun dropped lower in the sky. Angela hadn't imagined the possibility of needing to fight with strangers over possession of whatever detritus might be left in the craft's wake. And even a flyby video taken with her phone's camera would become worthless if someone else there had real video equipment. "Like what killed the cat."
A contemplative silence followed the last conversation in the truck, ultimately broken by Phoebe. "Well, there you go. We're definitely not going to be out here alone."
Angela looked out the windshield. In the distance she could see the low hill standing on the horizon. It was still to far to see clearly, but there were definitely at least three vehicle parked near the top. One of them had the unmistakable shape of a van. Probably a dozen people were milling about.
Derrick grinned. "This is cool. I knew we should do this. Even if it turns out that we don't see anything, we'll probably get to meet some cool people."
"Or at least a lot of crackpots," muttered Angela. She could feel Gustaf giving her a look but she ignored him. She was starting to feel like she had been acting like a crackpot herself, coming out here.
Phoebe stopped the truck at the base of the hill, next to an old hatchback, and pulled up the parking brake.
Derrick said, "Why are you parking here? Let's park up near the top. You can park next to that car up there. See it?"
"I'm not parking my brother's truck at the top of a hill. If something happened and it started rolling down, it would almost certainly flip over at some point."
"We can find some rocks and put them behind the wheels. You know, like chocks. It'll be safe."
"No way," said Phoebe, completely unmoved.
Fortunately the southern side of the hill sloped up gradually for the most part, so the walk up to the top was not difficult. As they reached the flat circular area at the top they could see there were well over a dozen people present. Some of them greeted them with friendly waves, then standing up as the four walked over, offering their hands to shake and their names to memorize. Angela noticed that several of the remaining people looked only briefly at the newcomers, sideways, and then returned their focus intently on whatever friends or equipment accompanied them. She realized that these people were, likely, just like her. Opportunists who had come hoping for a shot at easy overnight notoriety. Cameras were everywhere, hanging off of belts or around neck straps, or being passed from hand to hand as everyone compared hardware. And yes, there was a very expensive-looking video camera mounted on a tripod and pointing expectantly northwards. Someone had even brought a small searchlight, sitting in the bed of a pickup truck parked off on the east side of the hilltop, currently off and blindly facing straight up at the sky.
Angela found herself standing, a bit south of the hilltop's center, and having little interest in mingling with the other people here on the hilltop. They were a little too much like herself, and right now she didn't want to be around people like herself. She looked around for somewhere else to be, and finally sat down on a nearby rock, a foot or so off the ground and not uncomfortable, away from where her companions were still getting acquainted with the spontaneously assembled group of shipsighters. She stared up at the sky. The sun was setting in a haze of gentle shades of red and lavender. One or two points of light were already visible. And she knew then, deep in her gut, that no aliens would appear there that night.
Angela idly pulled her phone out of her purse. As she expected, there was no reception out here. But, to her surprise, she saw that she had two messages waiting that had arrived some time ago. The chime had presumably gone unheard in the noisy confines of the truck.
Both messages were from Tina. The earlier one read: "Remember BTW not to tell anyone. We're going to try to convince Reuven that he can't keep Oscar a secret any longer, but you can't say anything before then." Angela shook her head, wondering if any of them knew about the video. Angela would have to talk to them as soon as her phone was back in range. The next message said simply: "Reuven's still asleep. I'm bored. Call me?"
Angela put her phone back in her purse and closed it up. She would have liked to be talking to her old friend at that moment. Tina would probably have something very sensible to say about all of the hopes and fears that had been driving Angela forward ever since Tina disappeared out the door of the Tourmaline.
Angela remembered their sophomore year in high school. Tina's boyfriend had broken up with her near the end of summer, and while she hadn't been emotionally invested in the relationship enough to feel seriously hurt, she was irritated by the rejection and inclined to see the merits of single life for a time. Angela meanwhile had yet to have a boyfriend that lasted more than a few weeks, and so while their friendship had always been solid, they found themselves spending most of their free time in each other's company.
Not that being single meant that there were no boys — just no boyfriends. Angela in particular had strongly conflicting feelings about her own virginity, or not the virginity itself but her own general inexperience. There was a complicated course to navigate when it came to physical activities. In some ways boyfriends were actually not ideal partners for sexual exploration. If you green-lighted a particular activity with your boyfriend, Angela found, and he liked it, it seemed that that activity was now permanently on the menu of available options. Adults talked incessantly about the importance of compromise when it came to relationships, but sex seemed more like a front line, and the boys hated to relinquish any territory once they had occupied it. For some things it seemed better to seek out a brief hook-up and experiment on them. Whether you liked it or hated it, either way you just walked away from it afterwards. Of course such one-time meetings had their own set of dangers, and to Angela she much preferred to risk having a reputation of being inexperienced and prudish than one of being loose. At least when it came to the other girls in high school. Inexperienced girls got treated badly, but loose girls were flatly shunned. Coupled with the other dangers, real and imagined, that accompanied sex with unfamiliar boys, and Angela found it impossible to navigate this world with any kind of confidence.
Tina, however, seemed to have no difficulty here. Maybe it was just that the other girls gave her the benefit of the doubt, but she never seemed doubtful of what she wanted to do, or worried about what would happen to her reputation. That sophomore year in high school she had tried to absorb Tina's knowledge and experience, hoping to find in it the keys to her confidence and assurance. Partly, she suspected, it was simply that Tina was extremely pretty, and therefore got better treatment from everyone, boys and popular girls alike. But she also just seemed to know what she was doing, as if she had already been an experienced woman once before and was now just retracing her steps.
One night there was a slumber party, to which Angela had been extended an invitation as well as Tina. The girl who hosted it, Candice, had somehow earned an unwarranted level of trust from her parents, and they left them all largely alone in the rec room of the basement without any visible degree of suspicion. As evening turned to night and the parents fell asleep, the party's true reason for being held was revealed: nearly all of the other girls had plans to leave the house and attend parties at various fraternities and other residences where college men could be found within walking distance of Candice's house. Angela stuck to Tina like glue, unsure of how to proceed or whether Tina knew what she was doing or if she had even known beforehand that this was the true goal of the evening and if so why she hadn't told Angela beforehand, but probably whatever Tina was thinking she probably had a good reason for it. (Angela learned, years later, that Tina had in fact known what was going on, but hadn't told Angela ahead of time for fear that she would get cold feet. Tina had instinctively guessed, and correctly, that Angela would be more pliable if she wasn't forewarned.) And so Angela found herself in a dilapidated one-story house that apparently had three people living in it, not to mention a fourth person using the living room couch as a bed, though possibly not long-term, and which was now crammed full with dozens of people, mostly men, all of whom were older than Angela. It was an exciting experience, but also nerve-wracking, and Angela felt like she was stumbling through the place half-blind the entire time. Despite what she had been expecting, most of the guys seemed to find her just a bit too young, either physically or experience-wise, and instead gravitated towards Tina and the other two girls that she had come with. There were a surprising number of smokers at the party, and Angela fretted continuously about the smell getting in her hair and clothes and tipping off Candice's parents the next morning. She eventually found herself in a corner of the kitchen with a guy with a wide face and a dense thicket of facial hair, and didn't smoke but had a voice like a smoker. He tried to talk to her about various topics, none of which Angela found engaging or memorable — manga was the only one she could remember now — but at least he seemed literate. Angela tried to let herself warm up to his conversational advances, though in part she worried that the fact that most of the men at the party had passed over her might say something about the one man who hadn't. But it seemed quite possibly worse to be the pariah of the party, and return from it with no more experience than when you arrived. But then Tina walked into the kitchen, as far as Angela could see just passing through with a guy, the pair hoping to find some relative privacy on the back porch. But instead Tina walked over to Angela and asked her to could the boys please excuse them for a moment, and gracefully pulled Angela outside instead, where Tina quickly informed that Angela that the guy she was talking to was bad news, that he had invited himself to the party, and the other boys disliked him, though not enough to eject him outright, and had told her some stories about a tendency to force himself on girls, possibly in service of some kind quasi-non-consensual fetish, and Angela had suddenly had a failure of nerve that left her feeling ugly and hopeless, and rather than deal any further with that labyrinth of social mousetraps that the party now seemed to her, she sat down on the back porch in the cold night with the intent of waiting there for the other girls to be ready to leave. But Tina had sat down there with her, and they had spent an hour there, talking about nothing but what best friends talk about. And then finally the other two girls came out and found them, and told them that the party had come to an abrupt end, as one of the guys who actually lived there had gotten really sick from too much alcohol, and was now throwing everyone out, over the protests of the other two men who also lived there but apparently did not have equal standing with the decision-making process, due to some complex sociopolitical situation that in reality probably just boiled down to how much everyone paid towards the rent. They managed to get back into Candice's basement without incident. Which was more than the select group of girls that included Candice herself, who had returned well after three in the morning quite unsober, as Candice had vomited profusely into the hydrangea bushes in the back yard underneath her parent's bedroom window, and the next morning there was a bit of a scene with Candice and her parents, and the expected morning-after breakfast was by unspoken agreement cancelled, and Angela clearly remembered, as she was making perfunctory thank-you-for-having-us exchanges, Candice indignantly telling her parents that they had unfairly jumped to conclusions, and what they suspected was evidence of serious wrongdoing had just been the result of a truth-or-dare involving syrup of ipecac, to which Candice's parents were responding with the optical equivalent of oh sure.
Angela looked around at the open space of the hilltop and the people, all standing over on the north side, chatting and looking outwards. Maybe Angela would just sit here on this rock. Sit here and look up at the sky. Off to the west, the sun had descended further and now was beginning to fall below the hills in the distance. Until the others were ready to give up, she would just sit and patiently wait until she could once again have a long talk with Tina. Tina may have become involved with taking care of a malformed creature of uncertain metabolism, but at least she had enough sense not to be where Angela was right now.
Gustaf walked up to Angela, still sitting on her low rock. "Hey there. Angela, right?"
Angela smiled perfunctorily. "That's right."
"Great. I'm terrible with names." Big smile, hands clasped behind his back. "You know, uh, the flight path predicted at eighty percent for the ship, plus or minus fifteen, has it moving roughly north to south."
Angela nodded, not sure what to say to the statement.
"I guess that's why everyone's over there." He pointed vaguely to his right. "Watching."
Angela thought she saw what he was getting at. "Yeah. I'm comfortable over here, though."
Gustaf nodded. "Oh yeah. Well, you got your own rock to sit on and everything."
"I can see the sky just fine from here."
"And, you know, it is away from the crowds. I certainly see the advantages of that. You know, it may not look like it, but I hate crowds myself. Normally." Gustaf looked around at the people, then at the cars. Two more had arrived since then, each one full. There were at least thirty people on the hill now. "But clearly this is a special situation. Not just for me. It's different. Everybody's here for the same reason. There's a shared interest. A common goal, even." The most recent car had shown up with a trunk full of beer, which was now being shared with the crowd at large. Angela disliked the idea of serving beer when everybody had a long way to drive to get home, but on the other hand it was probably not a serious concern, as there wasn't really enough beer to go around. The people who had brought it had clearly been surprised at the size of the crowd already assembled. "We're all driven by the same hope."
Angela smiled. She disagreed: hadn't the conversation in the truck shown that they had all come out here for quite different reasons? But she didn't really feel like discussing it, so she left that unspoken.
"Plus, I mean," Gustaf began, glancing at his boots. "Well, think about it, really. All these people are here, after all, because of me. I mean, for other reasons, too. But still, when you think about it. If I had found an eighty-percent flight path that took a ship over city hall, I daresay there'd be a crowd of people camping out on the steps right now. Or if I hadn't decided to go ahead and write the paper up yesterday? We certainly wouldn't be here right now."
"So you're feeling powerful," Angela suggested.
Gustaf chuckled softly, but then it went on a bit too long, making it sound forced. "No, not at all. I don't feel powerful. Powerless would be closer to the truth. Think about it, Angela my friend. I had no say in the matter, really. This is history in the making. How long have human beings stared up at the sky and wished for someone else to be there looking back? We're in the middle of history, and we're not just watching it happen on the news. We're in the thick of things. We're helping it to take place. If my analysis turns out to be completely incorrect and useless, that's still progress, something we didn't know before, something we don't have to try again later. But I've digressed. My point is that I didn't create the analysis, not really. I discovered it. I dug it up. Mathematicians aren't like writers, you know. They're more like archaeologists. So no, I don't feel powerful at all. I feel more like —" Gustaf twirled a hand in the air, thinking, then returned it to behind his back. "I feel like I'm inside the cogs of fate."
"Like this thing just fell in your lap," Angela offered.
"Yes. Thank you. I didn't go looking to for a crowd of people to listen to me. It just sort of happened."
But that wasn't the real truth, Angela thought. It hadn't just landed in his lap. He had spent years as a math student; he had gone out and collected data from many sources, evaluated them, done whatever minute and detailed examination that had made his analysis as accurate as it had been so far, taken the time to present his findings in a way that would get heard. Maybe he hadn't gone looking for a crowd of admirers, though he was certainly enjoying the one that he had now, and in fact he was now rejoining it with a polite excusing, having no doubt concluded that Angela was not in the mood for holding up her end of a conversation. Maybe he hadn't gone looking for a crowd, but he had gone looking for something.
The last sliver of sun fell below the uneven line of the horizon. The sky was a giant bowl sealing in the world around her. Angela stared up at it and waited for something inside her to congeal.
Cars continued to show up and disgorge groups of people. Angela got up and walked around for a while, feeling restless and needing to stretch her legs. From the various conversations that swirled around the hilltop gathering, it seemed like everyone had come out here, at least in part, because of the video. Angela wondered about the person who took the video. It ended soon after the creature disappeared into the coffee shop, door held open for it by the petrified woman with the green lock of hair, and Angela wondered why it had stopped there. Had the video taker run off immediately afterwards to phone the police? Or did they leave to send the video off to friends and TV networks? Had they been tempted to follow the creature into the coffee shop? If they had, the video would have captured all of them, their expressions as they stood up from the table, gaping at the thing. Would their faces have shown that they knew what the creature was, even though they had never seen it before? Would the video have captured the uneasy realization that flowed across them as the abstract figure in Reuven's narrative suddenly became a solid and leaking living being shuffling across the floor?
The sky's colors were fading back to solid blue now that the sun was below the horizon. A dozen stars were now visible in the sky. Angela found herself back by her rock once more, and she silently resumed her seat.
Off to her right Angela saw movement. A woman dressed in a flowing skirt was leading a young boy down the hill a short distance. Angela couldn't see much but he was certainly younger than six. They stopped, and the woman kneeled down beside him. Angela heard a quiet voice. "Okay, honey. Go ahead go peepee."
"But you said I have to go peepee in a toilet."
"That's right, but this is different. This time it's okay to go peepee on the ground."
"Why?"
"Because there aren't any toilets out here. Just pee on the ground, it'll be okay."
"I can't."
"It's okay, Timothy. No one can see you."
Angela wondered if she should go somewhere else, out of deference for the boy Timothy's need for privacy, but since she couldn't see anything, on account of the fact that she had no desire to actually turn her head and look, it would only draw attention to herself if she got up and moved.
"Why can't we go home, mommy?"
"It would take too long to get home, baby."
"Why?"
"Besides we're here to see the ships. We can't leave yet."
"Why?"
"Because the ships haven't arrived yet. We're here to see the ships, maybe even make contact with them."
"Why?"
"Just you wait. It'll be so much fun when they go whooshing by. Faster than anything you've ever seen."
"Why?"
"Timothy, you love to see videos of the alien ships. Now we're finally here and we're going to see one for real and you want to go home just so you can pee in a toilet?"
"Why?"
"Timothy." The name was spoken with that lowered tone that children everywhere recognize as the end of all compromise. "Go peepee."
A preverbal whimpering sound was eventually replaced with the sound of running water.
"Good boy. Timothy's a good boy. Okay. Now pull up your pants. Show mommy how you're a big boy who can pull up his pants."
"Wipe my butt." Angela glanced over despite herself, and saw that the boy had bent over double, hands on the ground, presenting his unclothed posterior up to mommy and the sky.
"Timothy, you just went peepee. You don't need me to wipe your butt. You know that."
"But I want you to wipe my butt."
"Timothy." A heavy sigh. "I can't wipe your butt. I don't have any toilet paper."
A long pause ensued. Angela kept her gaze resolutely on the stars and the people gathered below them.
"That's a good boy. See what a big boy you are. Now come on. We'll get some water and wash our hands, and then we can go back and wait for the ships to come."
"When are they coming?"
"Soon, honey."
"Why?"
"Nobody knows why aliens do what they do, honey, not yet anyway."
"Why?"
"Why not?"
"Why?"
"Why not?"
"Why?" This time it was said with a giggle.
"Why —" A pause, broken by more giggling, then: "— not!"
"No tickling mommy!"
"I'm going to get you!"
"Hey there, Angela."
Angela blinked and realized that Phoebe had walked up to where she was sitting. "Hey, Phoebe."
Phoebe sat down on the rock next to her. "How come you're all the way over here?" She held out the can of root beer she was drinking. "You thirsty?"
"Just in a mood," Angela said, declining the offered can with an open hand.
"Well you should come join us. It's like a party, only without people trying to get blind drunk. Everyone's so civilized. You can just strike up a conversation with strangers, because we all have something interesting in common just by being here. It's sort of what I imagine a modern-day cocktail party ought to be like, only without the nice clothes."
"Eh. I just kind of feel kind of like a wet blanket right now. I don't really want to try to mix with a bunch of strangers."
"Wet blanket? How come?"
"I just sort of lost interest in being out here right now."
"You don't think there's going to be a ship?"
"No, it's not that. I honestly have no idea. I just don't really care if it comes or not. You know?"
"Not really," Phoebe said hesitantly. She frowned. "You honestly think it wouldn't be a big deal to see a ship tonight? Just flying silently overhead?"
Angela shrugged.
"I can't imagine feeling that way. I mean, we've all seen videos a million times, but that's just not the same as being there, and seeing it with your own eyes. It'll be awesome. No, not awesome really. That's a stupid word. More than that. Stupefying. Shocking, actually. It would be shocking."
"I don't know. Seeing Oscar for the first time, that was already pretty shocking."
"Who's Oscar?"
"Or that time I walked in on my uncle having sex on his desk with a girl my own age."
"Okay, that was more than I needed to know about your uncle."
"I recognized her from high school. The alien ships are going to have a tough act to follow, for me, don't you think?"
"Seriously, Angela, I'm not interested in this latest change of subject."
"I'm just saying that I already have all I need of shocking. I don't feel the need to go and find some more."
"Angela. Just think of all the people in the world who would love to trade places with you right now. If you really don't care about it, then at least come over and socialize. Take your mind off it."
"No thanks. I'd just bring everyone else down. I really just want to be alone with my thoughts."
"Okay, well, I guess I should take that as a hint. I'll check back with you later, just to make sure you haven't died or anything."
"I'm fine."
"Yeah, but it's going to start getting cold now that the sun's down."
"I didn't think we'd be out here very long after sunset, Phoebe." Angela realized that she hadn't put much thought into any part of the logistics of the expedition. "If the ships don't put in an appearance, how long are we going to wait before we give up and go home?"
Phoebe, now standing, looked down at Angela and shrugged. "Hard to say. Right now everybody else is having a good time. Probably not for a while, Angela."
Angela nodded. "Okay. I won't sit over here forever, you know. I just need some time to clear my head."
"You do what you need to. The bunch of hippies that came in the blue van brought a portable heater, so remember to come join us before you freeze solid."
The cars and people came in more frequently now. The stars were clearly visible now, and Angela mentally traced the lines of the Big Dipper, the only constellation in the sky that she could find. And she could just make out the Milky Way's trail angling across the sky, fading in the west as it merged with the light pollution from the city. She came out of a reverie and realized that the population of the little hill had doubled, at least. It had snuck up on her, she realized, in part because everyone was being quiet. There was plenty of conversation going on around her, but the noise level hadn't noticeably increased with the increase of people. Everyone was talking in low voices, cheerful but nonetheless with an eye on the sky to the north.
The people as a group were also avoiding turning on unnecessary lights. The huge spotlight remained in place, but turned off. One or two people had the little red flashlights used by astronomers to preserve their night vision. The air was noticeably cooler now, and a gentle breeze from the west was blowing strands of her hair into her face. She shifted around on the rock so that she was facing into the wind and her hair was being blown backwards. The rock was noticeably cooler where she was sitting now. She wondered how much longer it would be until her friends were ready to turn back and return home. Angela wondered if she shouldn't perhaps force herself to mingle with the others. It wasn't that they she found them objectionable, after all. When her unhappy mood had passed she might be kicking herself for not having taken advantage of the opportunity to socialize with a completely new group of people.
On the other hand, Angela knew with certainty that talking to people right now would not do anything to help her taciturn mood to pass.
One of the few memories Angela had of her father before he left was being with him and her mother in a campsite along with another family. She no longer remembered where they were, but it had been one stopping spot in a string of them that made up a rather elaborate vacation. They were with another family who lived in their neighborhood, who did a lot of camping. Angela remembered that they had their own camping trailer, which sat in their driveway when they weren't on vacation. Occasionally she would play a cramped version of House inside it with Mathilde and Clothilde, their twin daughters who were almost exactly Angela's age. Their family and Angela's mother had conceived of the idea of inviting the Lis along on a two-week vacation. Angela remembered little of it directly, but she knew that it had been an alloyed affair, beautiful forests and scenery punctuating long, tense car rides from place to place. And her father, whose decision-making role in this vacation was murky at best, had been argumentative with Emily, and had not made any effort to improve his behavior when the other family were around, making Emily feel at times that he was, consciously or otherwise, testing her limits. Again, Angela remembered none of that: what she did remember was the boring car rides, trapped in the back seat, her rump sore from sitting all day, utterly uninterested in her whatever coloring books or toys she had with her at the time. But she also remembered her father putting her up onto his shoulders, something he hadn't done much recently as she was getting too big for him to lift, and as she held onto him by his ears he pointed up at the night sky, at the Milky Way, and said, "See there, Angie? That's the Milky Way. The Silver River that flows directly through Heaven." And Angela had stared at that foggy stream of stars and wondered why she had never noticed it before. It seemed so bright and prominent just then. Some time later, back at home in the city, she had gone looking for the Milky Way and been unable to find it, and in her mind the hypothesis naturally formed that the city was farther away from Heaven than where they had been. She might have asked her father if that was true, but by then he had already left, and as an adult Angela couldn't help but suspect that, if somebody were to ask him, he would point out that camping trip as a noteworthy factor in his decision to leave.
"Hey there."
Angela looked up and saw with surprise a woman she recognized. "Hi. Long time no see." Who was she? Dark hair, very frizzy and kept short. Average height and attractively slender: she was no doubt cold in the thin top she wore to show off the incurving of her waist.
"Yeah, what a surprise seeing you here. So how is school going?"
"I graduated last year, actually." Angela remembered now; she was another student. Angela had seen her nearly every day for three months when they had been taking the same bus to morning classes.
"Oh yeah? Congratulations. I've still got another year to go after this one."
After a few weeks of seeing each other they had started engaging in genial small talk while waiting at the stop, which then continued as they sat together on the bus. Topics included the weather, the lateness of the bus, classwork, the occasional news regarding school politics, and little else. "Right. Film theory, wasn't it?"
"That's right. And you were majoring in ...?"
"English." The next quarter Angela had wound up with an even earlier morning class and found herself taking the same bus as Tina, which was nice. Angela and the film major would see each other briefly on campus and wave at each other. This was probably the longest conversation they had ever had away from a mass transit line.
"So you're here shipsighting, too, huh?"
"Kind of. I'm here with friends who are shipsighting, really."
"Yeah. I guess we all are."
"Angela." Derrick walked up out of the dark. It was getting hard to see people. "Oh, sorry, I thought you were alone."
"Oh, no problem," said the other woman. "I need to catch up with my friends while I can still find them. I was just passing by and I saw you and wanted to say hi."
"Yeah," said Angela brightly. "I'm glad you did. I'm sure I'll see you around again later."
"Okay, bye." This last bit was addressed to them both generally, and then the woman was gone.
"Bye," said Derrick, then turned to Angela. "Sorry to interrupt and all. Mind if I sit down?"
"Don't apologize. We were just chatting." Angela paused and Derrick took this as an affirmative response to his latter question, seating himself where Phoebe had been earlier.
"Your friend's really cute. Why didn't you introduce me?"
Angela looked at Derrick. "Oh." She thought. "I don't actually know her name. In fact, I'm not sure if I ever knew her name. We just got to talking at a bus stop a few times, back in my junior year. I don't think she knows my name either."
"Mm." Derrick paused. "Hey, did you notice that we've got our own cop here?"
"Really?" Angela turned around to look over at the cars parked just below the hill's apex. She had stopped noticing each car that arrived some time ago, and was surprised to see one in the back clearly painted in white and black sections.
"Yeah. Just showed up like ten minutes ago."
"How did they even know to come out here?"
"I have no idea. The cops probably monitor all kinds of online activity. Either that or moles. In any case, Roger went over and chatted with the guy for a while. Sounds like he's being really cool about everything. Says he doesn't want to bust anything up; he's just making sure nothing bad goes down. I can understand that, even though we are way outside of city limits and all. He's even been real careful about keeping his lights off, without us having to ask and all."
"That's nice," Angela offered. "I don't mind having him here, actually. Everyone seems friendly so far, but you never know."
"Oh yeah, I am too. Not everyone here is necessarily cool, either. See that guy over there?" Derrick pointed and Angela saw, dimly, a man standing alone. He was reading a book by the light of a small flashlight, of the normal white-light variety. "Apparently some people here know him, and they say he's a Christian wacko. They say he goes to parks and preaches that the aliens are signs of the apocalypse. Or the minions of Lucifer. I haven't actually gotten around to asking him myself."
"He doesn't really look dangerous," said Angela, though she knew that she was reacting to the fact that he looked suspicious in part because he was standing off by himself. Was that how she looked to everyone else?
"Yeah. I'm not saying he is, I'm just saying I don't mind having a cop around to make sure he behaves. You know, people spread rumors and that doesn't mean they've got to be true. But a little insurance never hurts." Derrick folded his hands and leaned forward on his elbows.
There was a lull in the conversation that Angela felt unable to fill.
"Phoebe told me that you were hiding out over here, trying to be alone."
"So you decided to come over and join me?" Angela asked.
"Yeah. Well, not like that. But sort of I guess. But not really. I mean, well," Derrick coughed. "I just wanted you to know that I know that you got my message this morning."
Angela felt a knot in her stomach. "Derrick, I'm sorry." She put her hands over her face. "I shouldn't have lied about not getting it. I just didn't know how to deal with it."
"Yeah. Yeah," Derrick agreed, then added: "You shouldn't have lied. But I mean I guess I understand that you did it because you were trying not to hurt my feelings."
"Exactly." Angela looked up at him. "I really wanted to not risk hurting your feelings and I didn't know how to do that."
"Yeah. Well, that didn't work. Just FYI."
Angela looked away and said nothing.
"In case it ever comes up again."
"Derrick, I'm so sorry."
"Yeah, I know. You don't have to say it again."
Another pause, which this time hung between them for too long. Angela, feeling compelled to break it, finally said, "Derrick, I really mean no offense, but — were you expecting me to say yes?"
Derrick shrugged and looked down at the ground. "One of my shoelaces has become longer than the other. It's really weird. The long one always winds up dragging on the ground and getting dirty."
"We've never even dated, Derrick."
"Yeah. I know. I guess I was hoping for a yes, but I wasn't honestly expecting it. But I wasn't expecting you to not say no, either. For that matter."
"I understand. I'm sorry."
Derrick didn't respond.
"I know, I just apologized after you asked me to not do that anymore."
"Actually, I didn't mind it when you said it again that time."
"Okay, fine. But listen to me: proposing to women that you aren't dating doesn't usually work."
"I knew it was a long shot."
"FYI."
"But, Angela, I had to give it a try. I just know that we'd be great together. You and me, Angela, we just work really well together."
"You don't know that. We've never tried to work together."
"Everything is just easier for me when you're around. I consider Elwyn to be my best friend now, because I never would have met you if it weren't for him."
"Derrick." Angela found her heart going out to him. "I'll admit that that's a very sweet thing to say."
"Sweet enough for you to reconsider? No, sorry, that was just a stupid joke. Never mind."
"You're just doing everything backwards. You should have asked me out on a few dates, so we could get to know each other better, and then told me sweet things like that. And then you could have tried proposing to me."
"Yeah."
"But not over the phone. You really want to do that in person. Another FYI I guess."
"I realized that I was doing it all backwards from how it's usually done. But all that rigamarole takes time, and I could just tell that I was going to lose you in the meanwhile. You're out of school now, and any day you're going to move on to something else and I'll lose what little chances I have to hang out with you. I had to make my move. It was now or never. And I was telling myself to act, and I kept chickening out, or the right opportunity never came up, and then another day was gone, and I kept doing this over and over." Derrick was gesturing in the air before him, moving imaginary objects around. Whatever they were meant to illustrate was lost on Angela. "And then a month had gone by, and I still hadn't made any progress. I didn't have time to do it the right way anymore. So I suppose that was my own fault. But I felt like it was either cut to the chase or do nothing at all." He threw his hands up. "I told myself, it's better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. Right?"
"I understand."
"And, you know. I told myself, even if she says no, at least we'll be talking. So yeah I was kind of upset when it didn't work out that way." Derrick smiled briefly, perhaps for the first time since the conversation began. "Not to beat that one into the ground or anything."
Angela nodded. In a thoughtful voice she said, "I don't know if it will make you feel any better, but I probably would have still said no even if you had gone about things the right way round."
"Uh. Thanks?"
"Well, maybe you can take comfort knowing that you probably didn't lose anything by trying."
Derrick thought about it. "Well, I didn't like it when you were evasive and duplicit, so I guess I can't complain now that you're being upfront and honest." Derrick heaved a sigh. "Hey, Angela."
"Yes?"
"If I've been doing this whole thing backwards, does that mean I can ask you out on a date now?"
Angela smiled wanly. "Maybe."
"Just a coffee date, nothing big."
"Maybe. Ask me again later. Tomorrow for example."
"Okay." Derrick smiled. "Fair enough. Sleep on it. That's a good idea." He clapped his hands to his knees and brought himself to his feet. He put his hands in his pockets and stood there for a moment, looking out at the horizon, appearing unready to leave her company but unsure what else there was to say. After a moment he smiled at Angela and pointed down. "You know, that's actually a really comfortable rock, as rocks go."
Angela laughed politely, and felt the tension start to drain out of her.
"You sure you don't want to come join the rest of us over here? We're playing word games, where you don't need any paper or anything. Have you ever played Ghost before? It's actually really fun."
"I might join you later. Not just yet though."
"All right. Just don't wander off, okay? It's cool that you're by yourself, and all, as long as we know where to find you."
"Thanks, Derrick, but you honestly don't need to worry about me. I'm not going to wander off and get lost."
"I just don't want us to get separated or anything if something happens."
"Nothing's going to happen."
"Probably not. You don't know that for sure, though."
Angela felt that she did know, but left that unsaid.
"Whoa. Did you see that. Was that a rat?"
Angela looked at the ground where Derrick was pointing. "I don't see anything."
"It must be the food those guys brought. I bet it's attracting rats."
Angela scanned the ground, but it was almost entirely in shadows. She resisted the urge to pull her feet up onto her rock like a frightened housewife in an old TV show. If only she could spot it. "Where is it now, Derrick?"
"I don't know. I lost track of it. Anyway, I should go tell the others to cover up the food."
Angela heard Derrick's footsteps as returned to the others. Her eyes were focused on the ground as she scanned for a flash of movement. After a minute went by and seeing nothing, her eyes began to water from the strain. She forced herself to look away and stop thinking about rats running across her feet. She stared out at the southern horizon, back in the direction of the highway. Maybe some of them would start getting tired of being out here. Surely it had been well over an hour now since they arrived. If people started leaving, maybe she would be able to get a ride back home from someone else. Her eyes slowly tracked upwards from the horizon to the stars. It was definitely quite dark now, and faint stars were everywhere. Not that she particularly wanted to be at home right now. What she wanted was to be alone, and her mother might not be in the mood to let her be if she came in so late. There was no moonlight tonight, and Angela could see the round absence of stars marking its invisible location in the sky. Oh god, the deer velvet. She had completely forgotten. The glum prospect of what she would have to contend with regarding her family when she got home settled over her as she stared up at the empty hole in the sky, now touching the lower edge of the Milky Way's dusty glow. Slowly Angela realized that the black circle was visibly edging its way into the Milky Way. And that it was not quite a perfect circle.
"Hey. Everybody?" Angela's voice sounded loud in her own ears. The quiet murmur of the crowd dropped quickly. Attention was turned to her. Somebody shone a beam of red light at her. She turned back south and pointed upwards. "Look up there."
The effect on the crowd was slow but unmistakable. People quietly put down cups and plates, while others picked up binoculars. A few people stepped over towards Angela, as if hoping the extra yard would give them a better view. Then, as one by one people saw the black patch, clearly ovoid in shape, slowly cutting its way towards them across the fields of stars, silent and calm and looking completely unlike something from the movies, excited shouts and cries went up and people began bustling about the hilltop.
Derrick reappeared next to Angela. "Is that really it? It's supposed to be coming from the north."
"What else could it be?"
"I don't know. People have been mistaking things for flying saucers for years."
"Well, it's definitely not swamp gas, or the planet Venus, or a flock of geese, so that rules out the majority of flying saucers right there."
"Could still be a weather balloon, though."
"Do they still have weather balloons?"
"I don't actually think it's a weather balloon."
"Well, we're going to find out soon enough," said a gruff voice behind them. They turned and saw a beer-bellied man jump into the car parked alongside the searchlight. Leaving the door open, he turned the engine over a couple of times until it caught. After pumping the gas pedal to reassure himself that it was running stably, he jumped back out and got behind the searchlight. He pointed it upwards and turned it on. The light was almost invisible in the dry air, but there was enough dust to see a faint white beam in a perfectly straight line, angled forty degrees above the horizon. He carefully moved it around, trying to zero in on the black oval overhead, and the beam moved wildly about. There was a flash of something a little less dark than the sky, and in another moment the searchlight shone directly upon an alien ship.
"There she is," came an approving voice.
"Whose searchlight is that? You should turn it off."
"Are you insane?" This was from someone behind a tripod, taking a video of the ship as it moved silently towards them. "Whatever you do, don't turn off that light."
"Don't worry," rumbled the man behind the searchlight.
"What if the aliens mistake it for a threatening gesture?" said the disapproving voice. "Or what if they're susceptible to white light?"
"Then the sun should have fried them nine months ago. Don't be ridiculous." Everyone in the crowd was participating in the discussion.
"What's ridiculous? You don't know what they're like. They're aliens."
"They've been parked in outer space for three fourths of a year. They aren't harmed by bright lights. I think we can safely conclude that from what we already know."
"Angela," said Derrick. "Look at that. Look at that. You still think that you shouldn't have come?"
Angela said nothing in reply. The ship was definitely moving closer. At times it seemed to almost stand still, and just grow in size. There was no sense of perspective, unfortunately; Angela couldn't tell how big it was or how far away. She tried to remember if she had heard any reliable estimates about the average size of sighted ships.
"Just look at it," Derrick repeated.
"It looks, well, dirty," someone observed.
The ship did indeed have a certain absence of exoticness about it. Its overall shape was oval, or rather ellipsoidal. There didn't seem to be much in the way of external detailing. The color, as best as they could see, was a reddish-brown, like rusty iron or red clay. All over the ship were tiny lines, pale filaments that ran parallel to each other in small bunches, but overall curved randomly in all directions. To Angela they looked like sloppily executed paint strokes.
"Well, they have travelled who know how far. It's allowed to look a little dirty," someone else replied.
"Or maybe," came Phoebe's voice, "Maybe it looks really clean in some other part of the spectrum."
Angela grinned, despite herself.
"It's definitely coming this way." That was Gustaf's voice.
"Gotta hand it to you, Gustaf. You called it."
"I didn't, actually. I predicted a ship travelling north to south. This ship is travelling almost exactly opposite that."
"Maybe you just dropped a sign somewhere in your calculations."
"Well, no," said Gustaf in a tone of voice that no doubt implied, it doesn't work like that you idiot. "It means that my analysis failed to predict this ship."
"But it did predict a ship would be here."
"Not this one."
"So your model is wrong?"
"I can't say yet. Have to wait until all the data is in. Heck, for all I know there's going to be a second ship later on tonight."
"It really does appear to be coming right for us, though. You have to admit that."
It was now much larger than the moon, and Angela could see that the surface was not perfectly smooth. Rather than being covered in little bumps and extrusions and windows, which she would have found entirely natural, its surface was just slightly out of true. Much like the desert floor, it had low, gentle hills and depressions across its surface. Like a dented toy, perhaps. Although Angela was also reminded of the irregularly placed indentations covering the torso of Reuven's creature.
"Just look at that thing."
"Quiet for a second," the man taking the video said sharply. "Can anyone tell if it's making any noise?"
Complete silence fell across the crowd. Angela looked around at them. Even the police officer had exited his vehicle and was standing with his hands on his hips, squinting up at the ship as it moved through the air. Its motion was familiar from the short videos that everyone had seen before, but at the same time it wasn't quite like anything they had ever seen before.
"Our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come ..." The Christian that Derrick had pointed out earlier was rapidly chanting the Lord's Prayer. Angela looked over and saw the man, face upwards, and improbably holding a large cross upright. It was over six feet tall, cut from four-by-fours and painted a glossy white. He held it before himself like a walking stick, with his other hand held straight out, palm forward, like a traffic cop insisting that the ship come to a complete stop.
"Hey buddy, will you put a lid on it?"
"Forget it, he won't listen to you," a woman muttered.
"It doesn't matter," said someone else. "The ship is completely silent."
"For now it is. It's still getting closer to us, though."
"Seriously though," said the camera operator without moving his head. "Dude? Can you just pray silently? God can hear you just as well, you know."
The Christian man muttered in response, "Get thee behind me." But after this bit of insolence he continued his praying in a quieter mumble.
The camera operator shook his head and said quietly, "Well, gotta be thankful for small favors I guess."
Angela turned back around to watch the ship again. There was no question but that it was coming closer, almost directly towards them. It hardly seemed to be moving at all, just slowly growing larger. The white filaments covering the ship were actually pale bluish-white in color, she could see now.
"Does anyone know how big these things are?" Derrick called out.
No response.
"Gustaf? Nothing?"
"Eh," Gustaf called. "I have this vague memory of people getting confirmed measurements, but all I can remember is that it was more than a hundred feet across."
"Sweet Mary, Joseph, and Jesus," said a new voice quietly.
"It's slowing down." Phoebe's voice again. "Isn't it? I think it's slowing down."
"No, that's an illusion," Gustaf's voice answered. "It just looks that way because it's coming right at us."
There was a pause. Then a woman said, "It also looks like it's coming lower."
"Yeah, it looks that way to me too."
Gustaf replied, "I agree, it does. But it's just the angle of approach. Well, hm. Maybe not."
"It is slowing down," insisted Phoebe.
"It's too hard to tell for sure. I would give anything for a radio yardstick right now."
"I've been trying to get a reading off of it for a while now," said a new voice. "I've got an infrared yardstick setup I built myself. Unfortunately I'm not getting anything reliable off of it. It's either too far away still or its surface isn't reflective enough on infrared."
"Probably both."
"It's coming down. It's coming down right towards us," said Phoebe.
"Okay now folks," said an authoritarian voice. Angela glanced over towards it, and saw that it was the police officer. "Don't let's start to overreact or panic here. If it is coming at us, and I'm not saying for sure that it is, just get out of its way nice and carefully. I don't want to see people start to run around or else someone's going to get hurt."
"Needs to reassure himself that he's really in charge," somebody very close to Angela muttered.
The man behind the searchlight cried out, "Oh wow. Oh wow." He was pointing the light directly upwards. Angela looked up and had a sudden shift of perspective. There could be no doubt about it now: the angle of its motion made it clear that the ship was in fact very close to them. It was now almost directly overhead, and moving so slowly as to almost be still. And just as clearly, it was also descending towards them.
"Okay, I want everybody to move out from under the ship. Slowly! Be careful. I don't want anybody falling down off the hill because they didn't look where they were putting their feet down."
The man with the searchlight was scrambling around it to the other side so he could keep it on the ship as it descended. "Will you ease up on the lecture, officer? This isn't high school shop class."
"Sir, it's my duty to ensure the safety of everybody here."
"Oh god, stop arguing, all of you. This is an incredible moment!"
It was indeed difficult to believe, but the ship seemed to be trying to land right on the top of their hill. People had moved out to the edges, circling the fringe of the top. Others were scrambling to move their telescopes and other equipment away from the central area, lest it get crushed under the ship. Someone had been resourceful enough to set up a little tent on the hill, not far from where the portable heater had stood, and he was now trying to get his sleeping bags and other equipment out of the tent as quickly as possible, the police officer all the while yelling at him to leave it and move away from there. It was still difficult to be sure, but the ship seemed to be fifty yards across the wide diameter, at least, and roughly twenty yards across in the other direction. On the ground directly below the ship appeared a tiny but ferocious dust devil, churning dirt up into a haze. Angela stared at it and realized with amazement that she felt nothing more than a gentle breeze on her face.
"It's so quiet," someone near her said.
"Maybe it's some kind of blimp?" Phoebe's voice, somewhere to her right.
The dust devil's position now made it clear that the ship was coming down closer to the north edge of the hill. Angela found herself almost in the exact middle of everyone as the everyone slowly found themselves edging around to the southern side.
The ship continued its slow, measured descent. The searchlight remained pointed directly at it. Angela could see various large dark gray marks on the surface, looking like giant stains where the craft had rested for too long in the dirt. The camera operator had got his tripod anchored in his new location, only a few feet away from the searchlight operator.
"This is unbelievable," he said aloud.
"I know."
"I can't believe how close it is. It's gotta be less than forty feet above us."
"I know."
"Maybe more like thirty."
"Tell me about it."
Suddenly the police officer ran out under the slowly descending ship and grabbed the arm of the man in the tent, still in the process of breaking camp. "Sir, you will come with me now!" he shouted in his ear. The man visibly jumped, then looked up at the ship, the blue-white filaments now easily individually distinguished, and allowed himself to be pulled away from his tent.
"Oh man, did you get a shot of the police officer dragging that guy away?"
"A few seconds of it. I didn't realize he had gone out there until after he yelled the guy."
"No big deal. The ship is the real show here."
"You're not kidding."
"Hey, buddy. Your recording would be worth a lot less if I hadn't been here with the light."
"You want credit, is what you're saying."
"No, I want credit and a cut of the profits, is what I'm saying."
"You know what? No problem. You, me, and Gustaf Vebeln, we're all going to be rich."
"I want something in writing."
"After this is over."
"Well, obviously not right this moment."
"The three of us will sit down and draw up an agreement before anybody leaves this hill. That's a promise."
"Buddy, you're all right."
"You just keep that light shining."
"Full tank of gas."
"Music to my ears."
The ship continued to descend. Angela watched it intently. Was it really going to land. She jumped as Derrick nudged her right arm. "Hey, Angela," he said. "We ought to be recording this. I left all my stuff in the truck. Do you have your phone on you?"
Angela hesitated. For a moment it seemed to her almost beside the point to try to record it. She didn't want to be like the guys with the camera and searchlight, their minds already on what would happen afterwards. She wanted to just stand there and take in the moment. To just be, while this thing was going on around her.
But Derrick nudged her again, and the moment passed. She then realized that she would in fact be kicking herself the next day if she didn't try to get at least part of it recorded, if only to prove that she really had been here. Possibly even to herself. Without taking her eyes off the ship that was now appeared to be only twenty feet overhead, she put her hand in her purse and felt around for her phone. She was now definitely in the middle of the crowd, which had compacted as the people in front were made nervous by the ship's proximity and began to shuffle backwards, while the people in back pressed forwards, trying to get a clear view over the heads of everyone else as the ship got closer and closer to the ground. Angela was suddenly reminded of being at a concert. She took a quick look around and noticed that, indeed, just like at a concert, most of the people were holding up their phones and recording the event. With a few exceptions talk had ceased. The police officer had posted himself at the front of the crowd, and was holding his arms out, as if he expected the people at any moment to rush forward and throw themselves under the lowering ship.
Angela's fingers found the familiar slick plastic surface and brought her phone up to just above her head before she realized that what she had in her hand was not her phone. She brought it back down to eye level and angled it sideways, trying to hold it in the bit of light reflecting off of the ship. The object she held was vaguely rectangular like her cell phone, but it was featureless: there was no display and no keys. She turned it over, thinking she was holding it upside down, but the other side was identical. Angela looked up at the ship. It was now ten feet above eye level. She looked back down at the thing in her hand and felt a sudden chill.
"Derrick? Do you know what this is?"
After a long moment, Derrick tore his eyes away from the ship and looked down at Angela's hand. He frowned. "No. What is it?"
"I don't know, but I found it in my purse."
"In your purse?"
"I was trying to find my phone." Fearful realization suddenly gripped her and she plunged her left hand back into her purse, searching.
"I don't think I've seen it before. It's hard to be sure, though. It's not exactly memorable looking. Are you sure it was in your purse?"
Angela's left hand emerged from her purse, holding her phone. She turned it over once to be sure that it was in fact hers. "Okay. So I still have my phone. I was beginning to think ... well, I don't know what."
Derrick looked up at the ship. "I think it's slowing down."
"Yes," confirmed someone else nearby. "It's not going to land after all."
"It's just hovering."
Angela looked up at the ship, but found herself unable to stop thinking about the unfamiliar object she was holding. "Derrick? Do you think you might have put it in my purse by accident when you picked up my stuff this afternoon? After that guy tried to steal my purse? Maybe it was there on the sidewalk and it got mixed in?"
"Maybe," Derrick shrugged. "I don't remember seeing it, but it's not like I was trying to examine your stuff."
Or, Angela realized, when Tina dumped out her purse in the restaurant. Or maybe even when her mother had gone poking through it this morning. Maybe she herself had accidentally grabbed it at some point, thinking it was her phone, and put it there without even looking at it. And that was just for today: who knows how long it had been in there? Angela examined it more closely. The shape wasn't quite even, she realized now, but was a bit deformed in places. Lumpy, actually. Angela turned it over and transferred it to her left hand. Yes, there were shallow dents where she had just been holding it. She ran her fingers together and realized that something slightly greasy was on them. Almost like sebum. Angela looked at the object. It was hard to tell in the reflected light but it occurred to her that the object's grayish color had an underlying greenish tinge.
On impulse she held the object up to her face and sniffed at it. The odor was definitely organic, and the first thing it reminded her of was ear wax.
"Oh, yuck!" Angela shivered in a sudden access of revulsion and threw the thing away from her as hard as she could.
"Angela, what did you just do?" Derrick said.
"What did she just throw?" somebody said loudly.
"It's disgusting!" Angela said at Derrick. She hadn't really intended to shout but a shiver ran through her at that moment and her voice carried.
There was a yell, and Angela suddenly saw the thing, silhouetted briefly against the brightly lit ship, which was now hovering motionlessly, less than ten feet of air between it and the ground. It spun in a lazy arc over the heads of the people in front of her and landed, still inside the crowd. Angela heard a third person yelling abruptly in surprise. "Something just fell on me!"
"It's a bomb!" someone nearby shouted. "Get it away!"
The effect on the crowd was swift. In another moment nearly everyone was shouting. The people in back stopped pushing forward and began trotting down to the base of the hill. Most people were pushing back to get away from the alien ship, but here and there individual people ran blindly in random directions. Angela tried to hold her ground against the tide of people now pushing her backwards. She was pretty certain that however hideous the object was, it was not a bomb. "Calm down everyone!" she shouted, but her voice went unheeded by those who heard it at all.
The police officer was shouting as loudly as he could, holding his hands around his mouth. "People, please be calm! Move carefully away from the hill! If you see someone who's fallen down, stop and help them back to their feet! Do not let anyone get trampled! Do not —" His instructions were suddenly cut short as the object, thrown wildly after being found by one of the panicked hippies, hit him in the face. The police officer fell to his knees with a loud scream, and stumbled away in the direction of his vehicle.
Angela, seeing this, tried to move forwards to where the object must be laying in the dirt, but it was all she could do to stay standing upright. Angela wondered briefly if the little boy was still with his mother, but she could see neither of them over the heads of the people around her. "Stop panicking, everyone!"
Then, approaching from the right came the Christian man, his face contorted into an expression of wild determination, holding his large white cross in both hands. With a loud, prolonged cry, he planted himself next to the stop that the police officer had just vacated and swung the cross like an oversized golf club. Still working to keep her balance, Angela saw the small rectangular object fly upward, spinning end over end, in a wild arc that brought it smack against the bottom of the alien ship. In amazement she watched as the object melted into the ship's underside. A ripple spread out from where the object had been, as if the ship were nothing more than the surface of a lake, and the object was no longer to be seen.
"Back to hell with you, Satan!" the man roared in an agony of triumph, swinging his homemade cross back and forth in one hand. "You have come against me with sword and spear and armies, but I come against you with the Lord Almighty, whom you have defied!"
In the next moment the police officer tackled the Christian. Straddling his torso and holding him face down by the shoulders, he shouted, "Sir! Put down your weapon and come with me peacefully or I will place you immediately under arrest!"
Motion caused Angela to look up again. She cried out. "The ship! It's going away!"
The backward pressure of the crowd at last began to diminish with her words, as people looked back and realized that it was true. The ship was now slowly ascending, and gaining speed rather more quickly than it had arrived. In another moment it was outside of the beam of the searchlight, for its owner had retreated along with the rest of the panicking crowd, and suddenly it was once again nothing more than a silent black shadow occluding the stars, shrinking rapidly and moving once more towards the north.
Angela moaned aloud as she watched the alien vessel go.
Phoebe suddenly was next to her again. "Angela! Is everything okay? Is Derrick still here? Are you hurt?"
"No, I'm not hurt." Angela said mournfully. She wanted to drop down where she stood but the crowd was still uncontrolled enough to make trampling a possibility.
"Phoebe?" Derrick's voice came from several feet away.
"Over here!" Phoebe answered.
Derrick carefully moved through the crowd, trying not to push the other people and risk initiating another stampede. Finally he appeared next to them. "Did you see that?"
"Yes," muttered Angela.
"No," said Phoebe. "What happened? There was a bomb?"
"I don't know."
"It wasn't a bomb," protested Angela.
"Well whatever it was, the crazy guy threw it onto the ship! I think it got stuck to the side. That's when the ship flew away."
"Oh my god," said Phoebe. "Do you think the aliens got mad at us?"
"Well, the guy sounded like he was trying to destroy them. I mean even if it wasn't a bomb, I think he thought it was."
"It wasn't a bomb."
"But so what if the aliens were able to understand what he was trying to do?"
Phoebe blanched. "It was probably going to be the first interstellar diplomatic mission, and we screwed it up before they even showed themselves!"
Angela had been staring back and forth at her friends. Now she laughed ruefully. "No, I don't think it was anything like that. It wasn't a bomb."
Derrick frowned. "Then what do you think it was?"
Angela sighed heavily. "I think that thing was a mock bread crumb."
Phoebe looked at Derrick, but saw that he was as confused as her. "Angela, what does that mean?"
Angela scowled. "It means I really do have to go get a job, after all."
Angela, Phoebe, and Derrick wound up leaving the hill not too long afterwards. Most of the crowd was still there when they drove away. Several people were hopeful that the unsatisfying conclusion was just the first act, and the aliens would return, this time coming from the north, moving in accordance with prediction. Other people were simply not yet ready to leave their new friends and return to business as usual, and stayed to continue processing the recent events and what they might mean. Gustaf had already decided to spend the night there, having no particular reason to hurry home, and get a ride in the morning with the man with the tent. The Christian man sat in the back of the squad car, handcuffed, peacefully waiting for the police officer to confer with his colleagues over the radio to determine if the man ought to be arrested, and if so on what charges. He was the only person who left there entirely satisfied with the events of the evening, his soul resting in a repose of perfection.
Angela's phone registered a minor flurry of messages and missed calls once they returned in range of her phone service. Most of the latter were from her mother, starting around the time that dinner was usually served in the Li household. It was going on ten by the time she got home, and a small argument ensued once it came out that Angela had gone shipsighting instead of doing the only chore that had been assigned her. As the argument progressed, Angela made a diplomatic decision not to reveal further details, such as where she had gone and what had actually happened. Her mother would very likely find that out once the TV news got their hands on the footage, and hopefully by then she would have calmed down again.
Remarkably, there was very little reaction to Reuven's creature, or at least not that Angela could see. Reuven, Tina, and Elwyn all moved out of town within the next few days. She got a chance to talk to Tina on the phone once, but Tina could tell her nothing but that they had all signed non-disclosure agreements. Angela got the impression, without Tina saying anything explicit, that the others had let their new employers believe that no one else knew any details of Reuven's discovery beyond what was in the online video, otherwise they all might all have found themselves entangled in a corporate confidentiality suit. Angela appreciated the consideration, and carefully let Phoebe and Derrick know that they had to pretend that they knew nothing of the matter. At least for the foreseeable future.
Much to Angela's surprise, the news of an alien ship nearly touching down in the desert outside of town was somewhat diluted by the fact that the same thing had happened in at least four other places around the world, and at roughly the same time. All five were different in the details, but all five involved a mysterious object, of varying description, being absorbed by a ship. Angela devoured the eyewitness reports and the videos that were taken at the other locations. None of the other videos were as clear and professionally mastered as the one done at Angela's site, though, and it was this one only in which you could clearly see an object contacting a ship and disappearing, just before the ship begins to rise again. The man with the cross was eventually released without any actual charges. Nobody seemed to know how the object had first arrived at any of the sites, and Angela decided not to volunteer any information on that matter for the time being.
However, the days went by and nothing particularly worrisome happened. The aliens returned to their original pattern of brief overhead flights without getting near the ground. No negative ramifications seemed to be forthcoming from the events.
Gustaf's predictions for that week proved to be only slightly better than chance, just barely outside of the margin of error. He cheerfully reported this result and continued to work on refining his models.
In the meantime, Angela returned to the Busy Beavers temp agency and managed to earn enough money to pay her rent before the end of the month. A couple of weeks later she got a job as a copyeditor for a newsletter published by an informal group of biology students trying to keep up with the latest news in their particular field, namely the functions of the homeotic Hox gene family in evolutionary development in vertebrates. The readership was barely above double digits and the only pay was a vanishingly small stipend, and trying to proofread the papers when so much of the content were obscure and unfamiliar gave her headaches. But it was something that she could put on her resume. It was a foot in the doorway she had hoped to find.
And a few months later, Angela sat down and wrote an essay, entitled "How I Went Looking For an Alien Artifact And Gave One Away Instead." She originally meant it to be no more substantial than a newspaper article or a diary entry, but once she got started it wound up being several pages long. After editing it a few times, she submitted it to a number of online news journal that actually paid their writers, and managed to get it published. Sometimes, Angela decided, opportunities really do fall in your lap, but it's still up to you to recognize them for what they are.