Watch and Learn

There is an old radio shack, with an antenna sticking two hundred feet in the air, deep in Montana wilderness. It’s the kind one sees on the skyline but never up close. It stands out on the horizon, blinking purple in the night like a dying piece of galaxy. On the ground, pale blue light escapes under the cedar door and onto winter snow.

Inside the shack are two gelatinous figures, leaning on swivel chairs. They are the clear color of snot and have the expanded look of blobfish. In front of them is a slew of televisions, playing all types of content- surgical videos, sitcoms, history docs, Hamlet. One of the figures points to a screen where survival man Bear Grylls is eating a beetle larva.

“These creatures are delirious,” he says in his native language, which is a set of gargles and clicks. “Perfectly good fruit to eat, and they’re sucking on mud grubs.”

The other one kicks his feet up with a splat and reaches on the table for a Honeycrisp. “The more of these I taste,” he says, “the less I want to go home.” He bites through the apple skin, but against his sticky membrane, the sound is more akin to a slurp.

The pointing figure snorts. “Please. This planet? I’d live a better life blind in a neon galaxy.”

“I find it amazing. It’s like stepping back in time. The way those Amish folk do it on this world.”

“They’re the most delirious of all. Why do they scoop horse shit all day? They have cars!”

“It’s not about that,” the apple-eater says. He goes to throw the core above him. It sticks to the palm of his hand. “It’s the principle of it. They’re smarter than you think, I’m telling ya.”

The pointing figure swivels over. His dinner-plate eyeball is concentrated to a slit. On his chest is a wet sticker that reads “Hello, My Name Is DAEV.”

“’Smarter than I think.’ Really?” He points at a television in the top right, where a young boy attempts to jump his scooter over a wooden ramp. Upon impact, the plywood flattens out, and he flips over his handlebars. “There are millions of these videos, and they’re uploaded for free, willingly, every day. Failure is at the center of everything on this world. It’s a disease, like cancer…” He pauses, then with a quick remembrance, “WHICH they haven’t even figured out how to cure yet.”

The other one, who’s nametag says Phel, frowns. “Think of all they HAVE figured out, though. Agriculture. Airplanes. Vaccines, electric, the Internet. It’s quite a mark for six million years of existence.”

Daev goes back to watching the television. “Whatever. We did all of that in, like, half the time. Without bones.”

None of the televisions have sound- there is only wind and the hum of an electric generator. It seems to run cold through their little hideaway. Daev breaks through with a creak as he sits up in his chair. “Holy shit.”

“What?” Phel shakes his hand, trying to drop the apple core.

“It’s Jown. They caught him.”

A middle screen is running a town hall from CSPAN. In the center is a red-tied congressman testifying. He points at posterboard cutouts of grainy objects in the sky.

“How do you know?”

Daev rolls his chair closer. “See the lip at the end of the ship? Where it almost becomes a ring around the hatch window?” Phel nods.

“That’s his ship, an Amalgamite Quartzspeed. Three different shifters and two for Mach 100. He was probably joyriding when they got him.”

Phel sighs. “I love those ships. Almost brought my Clontzdale to the Milky Way. But the rules are clear.”

“No personal vehicles on business,” they repeat together.

“Do you think they’ll torture him?” Phel asks.

Daev changes the channel on the CSPAN screen. “Eh. Who cares. He was an asshole anyways. Guy gave me bad vibes.”

“How so?”

“He was never doing the job he was assigned. Was obsessed with ‘old-school scouting.’ You know-abducting, stripping, probing. Couldn’t come to terms with the fact that the humans already did the dirty work for us.”

“Ah. We have a word for those people in my hometown.” Then, Phil makes a trumpeting sound that goes higher in pitch and then drops off. Daev begins to laugh, which sends tiny ripples through his form.

“Yeah,” Daev says, “we use that word, too.”

“Do you think they know about the rest of us?”

Daev fishes a Camel from the corner of his station. “No, I don’t. Despite what you continue to think, humans are dumb. Whereas we evolved from brains to bodies, they took the opposite approach. From monkey bodies to what you see today. They know very little and think they know everything…” He strikes a match and places the Camel to his lips, the filter going wet upon placement. “…which is why they’ll never understand how many we have here.” Daev pulls in but coughs immediately. “Man, these are terrible. I love them.”

Phel is watching a rerun of Soul Train- he enjoys the dancing humans, the way they jibe and bounce in technicolor tension. His species has no such ritual. “Is it possible they know things we don’t understand?”

Daev pulls in a second time, this attempt much cleaner than the first. He blows a zephyr of tobacco across the televisions.

“Unlikely but not impossible. That’s the motivation, after all. Gather intel. Know them better than they know themselves.”

Phel is quiet while he scans over each television. A street camera of Times Square where a gold-painted man twirls a sign. The final charge at the end of Braveheart. Two Dobermanns eating kibble from a bowl. An episode of Real Housewives, where three glasses of wine are spilt. An episode of Cheers, where zero glasses of wine are spilt. He curls his fingers into a pudgy mass.

“What’s that?” Phel says.

Deav follows his gaze. In the lower left hand, right in front of Phel, is a screen that’s so dark it looks to be turned off.  It’s a live stream- the static bunches up like black frost on the clear glass, making it hard to sense all the details. There’s a bed, he can tell, and someone sitting up in it… a teenage boy. He seems to be rubbing something.

“A picture,” Phel says. “He’s touching a picture.”

 Deav looks closer. It’s a tiny one, barely big enough for a nightstand, but under the glimpse of moon that cuts onto the teen’s comforter, he can tell it’s a yearbook photo. A girl with blond curls.

“Ah!” Daev says, smiling as he ashes the Camel on the arm of his swivel chair. It squishes against it, the filter becoming part of his skin. “I know what he’s doing. Common at his age, although I’ve never seen it done live. It’s called masturbation. You don’t have to worry- it’s a happy thing.” Daev pauses and speaks again. “Well, actually, it’s not happy in the eyes of their religion. Sinful. But as we know, religions are nothing more than societal constructs, same as any species we find, meant to…”

Daev continues his tirade, but Phel keeps his eye focused. There’s more on the screen- crumpled tissues, a loose golden necklace. He wonders what it means and waits for an answer. It comes in the form of a car circling the neighborhood, possibly listening to the baseball game he has playing on another screen. As the car passes, it floods the room with slices of yellow light, and for just a second he can see two wet channels on each side of the boy’s nose. It is torture of the brightest kind, and then it is gone.

“I’ve seen that before,” Phel says. “On the sitcoms. Breakup.”

“Huh?” Daev says, breaking off his tangent. “Well, yes, I guess they go hand in hand. Masturbation and breakups.”

“No. This boy, he’s going through a breakup.”

“Yeah, yeah, breakup.” Daev’s mind has gone elsewhere. He changes a television to show explicit videos and watches them closely. “Woah! There’s a big one.”

Phel scoots into his command center, saddling up to an aquarium-sized PC with a big blue screen, and opens the E-Mail icon. They have faster forms of communication on his home planet, but he enjoys the deliberateness of human technology, each piece of his password making a sticky pop on the plastic keys, the refresh icon twirling on his cursor. Finally, he is able to write a message. He taps in slow movements, one key at a time, until it seems complete. Phel reads it one time over, then smiles as the message wooshes out of his inbox.

Daev doesn’t notice anything. He’s still focused on the one screen, making lude comments as if he’s the one getting aroused. “Oh yeah,” he says, sticking two Camels on his lips, “work that thing, lady. They don’t do it like that in the Creevstar quadrant, no they do not.”

Phel begins to nod off, his eye passing over each screen like hardening syrup, and soon he is looking at nothing, feeling only the crystalizing cold on his gummy skin. His eye only reopens when he hears the door begin to bark, the cedar creaking under the weight of something unknown in the dead of night. Daev looks at him- the two cigarettes are nothing more than gray dots on his lip, and he spits them onto the floor.

“Probably some fallen debris,” Daev says. “Or a nosy bear- I’ve seen those on Discovery, sneaking into cars and tents.”

“Don’t bears hibernate through the winters?”

Daev shrugs as he stands out of his chair, kicking the cushion which attempts to mold onto his behind. “Could be a person.”

Phel stares at the door, which is now silent in their presence. He wonders who the character might be- a woodsman or a ranger, lost in thick slurry, or a thief in search of forgotten goods. “Let’s hope not,” Phel mutters.

Phel and Daev nod at each other, and as they approach the door, a change occurs. Their gelatinous forms begin to shake, rippling over every inch, and their backs and arms begin to expand like bubbles of Bazooka. Their lower jaws protrude from their lips, and diamond-thin teeth begin to break through the flesh. More of these teeth creep out from every orifice, on their hands and spines and foreheads. Their skin turns a darker color, blending into the ash on Daev’s face. Scaly and wide, the two visitors open the door.

Phel has one final thought before submitting to his enraged state. He knows not what character he will face, but he knows for certain the part he plays. He will always be the creature, the monster. The blustering wind cuts deep against his skin.

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The night had been tough on Lance. Dreams were the source of it- in his mind he had won her back, had been laying with her golden plumage under his nose, an arm around her beating heart. When he’d awoke in his bed all alone, the realization had made him cry. They were ugly, wet tears that embarrassed him in the morning, and he looked back on them as if they were someone else’s- a drama geek’s, maybe, but definitely not the JV football captain’s.

Outside the morning strolled on. Mrs. Rodney ran across a purple dawn sidewalk, each step a strange sort of hop. The purr of defrosting cars was a natural sound, passing across his street like radiation. An owl would interrupt once in a while with a long hoot- the annunciation was good. The call was so hollow that it shocked Lance, and he wrapped his comforter around his shoulders as he stood.

He wondered when he would see her. That was the worst part- not that he would see her, which was a certainty, but hypothesizing how many times they would run into each other, how many times she’d ignore his sight, how often she’d reject his weak smile or passing comment. She was a wall he couldn’t help but knock his head against. It made Lance want to be sick.

Maybe he would be sick today. That’s how he felt, after all. Full to the brim with sickness and ache and that adult phenomenon his father called “depression.” He seemed too young for all this. The bed would take it away, he knew.

Lance grabbed his phone, half-expecting a text from her, and fully disappointed when he didn’t see one. There was only an email notification, and Lance opened it, another way to distract himself from where he was and where he had to go.

The title had no subject. It was only one line of text, from an email address that was a long string of spliced numbers. The text said “UeR gONA B OeK.”

He read it once, narrowed his eyes, read it again. Then, for good measure, he read it once more.

He knew it was spam. The typos were there. The fake email address was an added touch. But where’s the bait? He saw nothing to click on, no place to give the last four of his social. There was another hoot from outside his window.

Finally, he looked at the time. Delivered at 1:49AM. Lance hadn’t seen his alarm when he’d awoken last night, but he thought 1:49 was a pretty good guess on when the dream had dissolved. When someone else’s tears had begun to fall.

He clicked his phone off and stood up again. It was a strange message, and yet, wasn’t everything in his life strange right now? The girls, the feelings, the emails on his phone. None of it was easy. But he was still breathing, still walking. Still passing classes and pushing sleds across the field. Wasn’t the message true in that sense? That he was going to be OK?

Lance threw the comforter off his shoulder and stood on his feet again. Yes, he would be OK. Each toe felt solid on the hardwood, and he began to walk to the shower, letting the hiss of hot water fill up the room. In his bedroom, the owl hooted once more, but he wasn’t there to hear it.

Hundreds of miles away, where the owls were copious, a purple light in the sky continued to blink.