Alien Contact (29 page)

“Idiots! Fools! Assholes! She’s…” I screamed.

“You’re alive!”

“What happened?”

“Are you all right?”

“How do you feel?” some of them asked. The rest just looked scared and perplexed.

“Shut up!” I said. “There’s so much… I can’t… Let me out of this!”

“No!” Calvino said. You have several broken bones and internal injuries!”

It hurt like a bitch, but I didn’t care, gritted my teeth, and slid myself off the bunk. They tried to stop me, but a few throat-rupturing banshee-screams kept them at bay. The floor hit me like a macrocosm of pain. Damn gravity—even the centrifugal force, fake kind!

After a while they watched me with awe and dread as if I was a rotting corpse that suddenly sprang back to life. Luckily, my right arm was working in a cast, but I could move it at the shoulder, where it counts. I reached under my gown and tore off the hospital diaper.

I needed something to paint with. Something that would smear and leave a mark. It had been years since I’d painted with my own shit. It’d have to do.

And it did nicely.

Before they shot a sedative into my veins, I managed to smear one vision onto the floor.

When I woke up, I was strapped down, re-tubed and wired, watching that vision in caca come to focus before my face.

Calvino was holding it. He’d had that section of floor torn out and sealed in acrylic. My work mummified for posterity.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Shit on laminated metal,” I smartassed.

“No,” he said, being unusually patient. “The subject matter. What is it?”

“It looks like some kind of soft, lovely tree that is rooted to the ground while it grows, but breaks free and flies around when it’s full-grown.”

“Where did it come from?”

“The Sirens. They made me see it. Made me
be
it.”

“Was that all?”

“Hell no! It was a constant flow of images, all at once and all jumbled together. I could see, hear, feel, and taste it all. I wanted to paint it. I could spend my entire life on it!”

“Notice anything strange about it?”

“Doc, it was
all
strange!”

“Surely your artist’s eyes can see it. Mr. Cortez, you always have been a mystery to me, almost as if
you
were from another planet, but I did learn to recognize your style.”

I was stunned. “Yeah. The style! It’s different! Not my usual high-power scribble, it looks…”

“More detailed, and more alien.”

“But I couldn’t help it, it just happened…”

“Like Willa’s death,” a nurse said, cool as a sip of liquid nitrogen.

“She’s not dead,” I said.

“All vital functions stopped. No brain activity,” Calvino said, bringing those fuzzy gray eyebrows together. “She’s dead.”

“She’s alive,” I insisted. “Maybe not in that cute body, but I can still feel the presence of that insatiable suction-pump of a mind.”

Calvino smiled, with some effort. “I didn’t suspect you of having
any
religious beliefs, Mr. Cortez.”

“Damn right I don’t,” I snapped. “Even the Aztec gods I’m always babbling about are basically a joke to me—I like the way it bothers the hell out of the believers… I guess the only thing I really believe in is myself.”

“And that Willa Shembe is alive,” he shot at me.

“I can feel her. She’s the source of the images that still parade through the back of my mind. She went through me to get them. Her mindtracks are permanently etched into my nervous system. I’m always going to receive her signals.

“…She had this fantasy that she never told anybody. She probably didn’t even want me to know about it, but to get to the Sirens she gave me a grand tour of her mind. She wanted to be invisible and fly through the entire universe, faster than the speed of light, and see and
be
it all. And that’s what she’s doing.

“…I couldn’t have done it… I’m an egomaniac. I’m too much in love with being the great Pablo Cortez to ever let go the way she did. I could never give myself totally. I’m hanging on too tight.”

They all just looked confused.

“In the name of Tlazolteotl, give me something to paint—or at least draw—with! These images are driving me crazy! If you don’t let me paint, my skull will swell up, pop, and leave you covered with a sticky-slimy masterpiece! These images will open up the cosmos! Transform our way of life!”

“You’re too weak,” Calvino said, real sincere.

“Bullshit!” I screamed. “I could paint with the bloody stumps right after my arms and legs were hacked off! The pain is nothing compared to my need! If I were decapitated, I could roll my head around and leave a blood-trail that the world will cherish!”

They brought me a pad and a marker. Nothing like a little hyperbole to get your point across.

The scientists were fascinated. They’d see things I didn’t notice. Soon they were anxiously waiting for my next piece. As soon as I could move around, they let me paint, sloshing colors on whatever I could for a canvas. Some high-decibel hyperbole got me my zero-G studio at the center of Ithaca Base.

Grumblings of prosecuting me for the murder of Willa Shembe eventually petered out.

And the work came effortlessly, rapidly, ecstatically—I’d revel in it for hours, and hate myself for not being able to keep up with it, for getting tired, and needing sleep. I’d beg Calvino for drugs so I could work for weeks at a time (he refused, of course—hyperbole won’t get you everything).

I’m now the most important artist of the Solar System. Scientists analyze my work for clues about the nature of other worlds. The art world hails me as the new master. Calvino hung that first shit-smear painting in his office. The Space Culture Project began making policy changes—the murals on future space colonies and starships will show my influence.

And Willa—a Siren in her own right, perhaps my most important Siren—keeps showing up through it all. Her face. Her body. Dancing through the universe. Dancing with the universe. Dancing the universe. Showing everybody that I’m not the only one responsible for all this great art. It embarrasses me—but I must acknowledge that Willa and the Sirens are my collaborators. I’d like to ignore it all and hog all the glory for myself, but she keeps showing up in the patterns of the flying paint.

In a way I enjoy painting her, as much as the rest. She’s so beautiful. Her classic Zulu features. Her bold, quiet, unending curiosity. The way she sacrificed herself, willingly and without hesitation, when others simply were torn apart and I hung onto my ego with a death-grip. She alone had the courage to truly hear the song of the Sirens, and join them in their cosmic dance.

Maybe she was the only human being I could love more than I love myself. Maybe…

I’ll never know. I’ll never be able to touch her. I can only paint her.

And the cosmos she’s rapturously exploring.

tand with me awhile, Angel, I said and Angel said he’d do that. Angel was good to me that way, good to have with you on a cold night and nowhere to go. We stood on the street corner together and watched the cars going by and people and all. The streets were lit up like Christmas, streetlights, store lights, marquees over the all-night movie houses and bookstores blinking and flashing; shank of the evening in east midtown. Angel was getting used to things here and getting used to how I did, nights. Standing outside, because what else are you going to do. He was my Angel now, had been since that other cold night when I’d been going home, because where are you going to go, and I’d found him and took him with me. It’s good to have someone to take with you, someone to look after. Angel knew that. He started looking after me, too.

Like now. We were standing there awhile and I was looking around at nothing and everything, the cars cruising past, some of them stopping now and again for the hookers posing by the curb, and then I saw it, out of the corner of my eye. Stuff coming out of the Angel, shiny like sparks but flowing like liquid. Silver fireworks. I turned and looked all the way at him and it was gone. And he turned and gave a little grin like he was embarrassed I’d seen. Nobody else saw it, though; not the short guy who paused next to the Angel before crossing the street against the light, not the skinny hype looking to sell the boom-box he was carrying on his shoulder, not the homeboy strutting past us with both his girlfriends on his arms, nobody but me.

The Angel said, Hungry?

Sure, I said. I’m hungry.

Angel looked past me. Okay, he said. I looked, too, and here they came, three leather boys, visor caps, belts, boots, keyrings. On the cruise together. Scary stuff, even though you know it’s not looking for you.

I said, Them?
Them?

Angel didn’t answer. One went by, then the second, and the Angel stopped the third by taking hold of his arm.

Hi.

The guy nodded. His head was shaved. I could see a little grey-black stubble under his cap. No eyebrows, disinterested eyes. The eyes were because of the Angel.

I could use a little money, the Angel said. My friend and I are hungry.

The guy put his hand in his pocket and wiggled out some bills, offering them to the Angel. The Angel selected a twenty and closed the guy’s hand around the rest.

This will be enough, thank you.

The guy put his money away and waited.

I hope you have a good night, said the Angel.

The guy nodded and walked on, going across the street to where his two friends were waiting on the next corner. Nobody found anything weird about it.

Angel was grinning at me. Sometimes he was the Angel, when he was doing something, sometimes he was Angel, when he was just with me. Now he was Angel again. We went up the street to the luncheonette and got a seat by the front window so we could still watch the street while we ate.

Cheeseburger and fries, I said without bothering to look at the plastic-covered menus lying on top of the napkin holder. The Angel nodded.

Thought so, he said. I’ll have the same, then.

The waitress came over with a little tiny pad to take our order. I cleared my throat. It seemed like I hadn’t used my voice in a hundred years. “Two cheeseburgers and two fries,” I said, “and two cups of—” I looked up at her and froze. She had no face. Like, nothing, blank from hairline to chin, soft little dents where the eyes and nose and mouth would have been. Under the table, the Angel kicked me, but gentle.

“And two cups of coffee,” I said.

She didn’t say anything—how could she?—as she wrote down the order and then walked away again. All shaken up, I looked at the Angel but he was calm like always.

She’s a new arrival, Angel told me and leaned back in his chair. Not enough time to grow a face.

But how can she breathe? I said.

Through her pores. She doesn’t need much air yet.

Yah, but what about—like, I mean, don’t other people notice that she’s got nothing there?

No. It’s not such an extraordinary condition. The only reason you notice is because you’re with me. Certain things have rubbed off on you. But no one else notices. When they look at her, they see whatever face they expect someone like her to have. And eventually, she’ll have it.

But you have a face, I said. You’ve always had a face.

I’m different, said the Angel.