A Sound Like Wind Chimes

Marianne was reading by the fire when the starman came in with the fishing rod. For a moment, she had to stifle a laugh. The image of him standing over her, decked in the cargo vest and bucket hat hung with fishing lures (where had he gotten it?) was simply too ridiculous, too unreal. He looked at her with that same mild look of confusion and she shook her head, smiled up at him. “Sorry, it’s hard to explain. Going somewhere?”

The starman opened his mouth and there was a sound like wind chimes. That meant “yes.” Or maybe “weather.” She thought back to the notebooks, the homemade flash cards, the Skype call with the MIT linguist. “Speech for him is completely different on a conceptual level,” the linguist had said. “It’s like a bird that can sing in multiple keys at once.” She didn’t remember much else after that, but she liked the idea of birdsong, the notion of polytonal communication. Not that theoretical cognitive science was much help in figuring out what exactly the starman was doing in the dead of winter dressed looking for all the world as if he’d held up a Bass Pro Shops. 

Marianne watched from the kitchen window as he trooped down the road, pole slung over one shoulder. In the distance, the bay was a dark wedge striped with whitecaps. When the sky grew dark and he still had not returned, a sudden panic seized her. She imagined the starman standing waist-deep in frigid North Atlantic surf, grasped by a riptide and dragged out to sea like a doll. Did he know how to swim? Now that she thought about it, did he even know what drowning was? She pulled on her coat with shaking fingers, retrieved her plastic flashlight from the dresser in the hall, and dashed out. 

When she found him, he was barefoot in the damp sand, staring out at the stormy horizon. A nor'easter was kicking itself out against Maine’s coastline and the wind tore at her hood and hair. The bucket hat lay crumpled a few yards behind him, and Marianne distantly worried that he might trod on the upturned hooks. The starman was surrounded by fish, all in varying states of expiration, flopping and gaping in the gloom. She waved the flashlight’s beam across his face and he startled, skittish and deer-like. His jaw hinged open and tinkling chimes floated through the storm to her. 

“Home!” she called. “You’re going to catch cold.” 

The starman smiled, not with recognition but something more distant. 

Marianne looked around at the fish, dark marks in the sand. “Did you do this?”

The starman’s throat sang. 

She eased up to him and put a hand to his cheek. They shared feelings, sometimes. In the early days, it had been startling to brush his hand and feel an eruption of sadness or contentment or confusion. But now, it was almost better than talking, easier. She gave her favorite feelings names, kept a list of them as a sort of starman dictionary. The starman pulsed, radiating heat against her palm, even in the December chill. “Hydrogen fusion,” someone once told her (the biologist? The chemist? The clinician?). Somewhere in the starman’s core, atoms fused and melted together, a miniature sun. A heart designed to burn. There in the cold and dark, looking up into his face, she remembered the first weeks after he fell to Earth. The feeling they shared, her favorite, the one she called “orange”. She threw the few fish who were still moving back in and gently tugged him away from the shore. “Home,” she said. 

• • •

He was always doing things, the starman. Once he climbed a plum tree down the street, shook plums from their branches until Marianne coaxed him down. Every so often, he walked into stores and stood silent in front of the salesclerks. If she left her keys around the house, she might find him hours later, sitting motionless behind the wheel of her sedan, engine running. 

Her friend Lisa found the antics endearing. After the other women in book club had gone home, she and Marianne stood in Lisa’s kitchen, discussing the starman. “He wants to be normal for you,” she sighed. “I wish I could find a man like that.” Somewhere downstairs, Lisa’s husband Will hurled expletives at the television, cursing the entirety of the Red Sox franchise management. Lisa refilled her glass of Kim Crawford pinot.

“Did I tell you he hums?” Marianne asked. “At night, I mean.”

“He’s musical,” Lisa sighed again. “Do they have songs where he’s from?”

“I’m not sure,” Marianne had tried so many times to picture the starman’s home. Some nights, she played movies about aliens and watched him out of the corner of her eye for signs of recognition. Nowadays, she imagined him drifting in space alone, a home unto himself. Maybe she didn’t want to think of him yearning for a different world. “It’s not really music. It’s more like—” she thought for a moment. “—white noise. Like bees.”

“Bees?” For once, Lisa didn’t sigh. She sipped her wine then gave Marianne a sly smile. “Maybe it’s a mating song. Like hummmpa-hummmpa, you know?” In the basement, Will shouted something about second base. 

“Yeah, maybe,” Marianne finished her drink. The wine left a cloying taste on the edge of her tongue. 

• • •

There was one story that she had never told Lisa. She wasn’t sure how she would tell it, even if she wanted to. One night, she had come home from work late—another rush to meet deadline. By the time she arrived at the house, it was steeped in shadows. When she opened the door, the orange streetlight fell aross the starman, standing in the dark. He was facing the hall mirror, but his eyes were closed. His mouth was open slightly, and when she got close, she could hear the hum. Thinking that he had not heard her enter, Marianne went to take his hand. As their fingers brushed, a feeling jolted through her entire body, one which the starman had never shared with her before. It was a hunger, darker and emptier than she had ever experienced. A desire to consume endlessly. She pulled away and he jolted as if startled from sleep. The touch broken, the sensation faded and she could only say, “Sorry, I—I wasn’t sure—” For the rest of the night, she felt as if she were being watched from every direction. She had slept with her bedside lamp on ever since. 

How do you share that hunger? What would Lisa with her invisible husband and book club wines understand?

• • •

A week after the starman went fishing, they were visited by an amateur filmmaker making a documentary. By that point, the starman had moved on from fishing to a new hobby: origami. Methodically, he filled their bedroom with intricate cranes and blooming white flowers.

The filmmaker arrived with a stack of notebooks and a camerawoman who was also his girlfriend. Marianne went to offer them refreshments and realized for the first time that she did not keep snacks around the house. They set up for an interview in the living room. The filmmaker and his girlfriend spent thirty minutes rearranging Marianne’s furniture, searching for the best lighting. 

Interviews had been common early on, an endless parade of tabloids, podcasters, and student journalists all eager to get a part of the story of Earth’s first (known) extraterrestrial visitor. But once people realized that the starman did not or could not talk, they lost interest. Now, Marianne only heard from people like the filmmaker—people who thought they might find answers. 

The filmmaker had a stack of questions written on bright yellow index cards. He began as all the interviews did, with the discovery. Marianne told him about her jogging, the way she found the starman facedown at the side of the path overlooking the Bay, the initial neurological link when she went to turn him over. No, she didn’t know where he came from. No, she didn’t know what his name was. Yes, they could feel each other’s emotions. No, she’d never seen Star Trek. Behind him, the girlfriend popped gum and stared with half-lidded disinterest at the camcorder’s flip screen. 

“Okay, um,” the filmmaker shuffled his index cards. “Last question; do you consider him a living thing?”

“Well,” Marianne tugged at the sleeve of her sweater. “I’m not sure I get—”

“Sorry,” the filmmaker smiled apologetically. “I guess I mean in the sense of being a single organism.”

Marianne laughed. “As far as we know, he’s not a robot, if that’s what you mean. Completely organic—at least, that’s what the biologists tell me.”

“I was thinking more like a—” the filmmaker snapped his fingers. “—a mushroom.”

“You think he’s a mushroom?”

“Like a mushroom,” he corrected her. “The plants we think of as mushrooms are actually just nodes connected by a huge underground network of roots and mycelia. Together, they make up the actual fungus. It’s the same with a lot of forests—all the trees talk to each other. Like nerve cells in the brain, or—”

“—bees,” Marianne said. “In a hive.”

The filmmaker smiled. “Exactly.”

Beside her, the starman pressed one of the filmmaker’s index cards into the beginnings of a butterfly. 

“Could there be more out there?” she asked. “A network, like you’re saying?”

“Who knows?” the filmmaker said. “I was thinking I might just present some potential explanations to the audience, and let them be the judge.”

“Everybody’s got a theory,” Marianne said. The starman placed something in her lap. A tiny, folded yellow insect. She glanced at him but he returned her gaze emptily. 

“Oh, I also had a thought related to starfish,” the filmmaker told her. “Has he ever lost a limb?”

• • •

That night, Marianne lay awake listening to the starman hum. How could you tell if a body held a single mind or many? She thought about colonies and anthills and unseen things. All this time, she’d worried that the starman yearned for home. But what if he’d never left? What if she was right, and he was nothing but a node of an immense network drifting alone in space? Communication was a multilayered melody, a thousand notes played at the same time and she had only been listening for one. 

Beside her, the starman shifted. Maybe there was no way to know, she decided. Everybody had a theory. She watched the shadows of the trees shiver in the orange light from the street. She reached over and slowly turned off the bedside lamp. Somewhere, there was a distant sound like wind chimes.