A Second Date with an Extraterrestrial Life Form

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

It happened when I dropped the remote. I was flipping channels, looking for something good to watch, kind of playing with the remote with one hand, and I dropped it. I bent down to get it, and when I sat up again, he was there. Sitting on my balcony like a couple of bull elephants wrapped around each other, politely X-raying me with his radar.

I call him Brithpth. It’s the sound he makes when he’s got the sniffles. I can’t pronounce his real name. It’s a complicated dance involving at least three body parts moving on independent axes. He tried to show me once. I had a headache for a week.

I opened the door. “Where did you come from?”

“I was hiding behind the ficus tree,” he expectorated. Anatomical complications. Brithpth speaks in modulated static.

I opened the door wider, all the way. He began to squeeze through. Metal creaked. I began to worry about structural damage. But then he sort of juggled his second and third semitorsos and managed to slip his bulk through a gap a mere five feet wide. He shoved a couple of pieces of furniture out of the way like they were made of paper and got comfortable.

“Can I get you something?” I asked, ever the gracious host. “I don’t have any newspapers, but you’re welcome to some of this tasty junk mail.”

“No, thank you,” he said. Indoors, his approximation of a voice sounded like a distant explosion in a bagpipe factory. “I seek information.”

We’d been on this ride before. Last time it was anatomy stuff. There was a misunderstanding involving a pretzel and what I later learned to be three cracked ribs and a mildly dislocated collarbone. I tried not to make any sudden moves.

“What’s the topic?” I asked.

“Sorrow.”

And me without a drop of liquor in the house.

It took some explaining, but I finally convinced Brithpth to move just far enough out of the way to permit me access to the couch. I flopped down on it, one arm over my eyes, and listened to the air move softly in and out of his dorsal spiracles.

“Have you expired?” he asked. “Shall I attempt resuscitation?”

“Don’t attempt resuscitation,” I said without moving. “What do you want to know?”

“I have been studying you from afar,” he said. He’d said that last time too. I remembered. Radio and TV broadcasts, just like in the old science-fiction pulps. Hadn’t he said he’d gotten the idea from an old show? I never figured that one out. “Sorrow is a dominant theme in your transmitted communications. I seek understanding.”

“Of why it’s a dominant theme?”

“Of sorrow itself,” he buzzed. “My understanding of the concept is spotty at best. The contextual clues are inconclusive.”

“Your species doesn’t have sorrow?”

He shifted his weight around, I guess getting more comfortable, or maybe just responding to some exotic tropism. About a four and a half on the Richter scale. The neighbors are going to be giving me nasty glances for a while.

“Referring to me as a member of a species is an oversimplification,” he said. “I am a composite superposition of eleven distinct isocultural meme clouds and five cisdominant psychoentropic glyph collectives. But you have the gist of it. Sorrow is unknown among my hyperlocalized peer group.”

It took me a minute to sort all that out. Now you know why I try not to have these conversations sober. “Okay, where do we start?” I asked. “We need a common frame of reference. Do you have emotions?”

“Emphatically yes,” Brithpth said. “The successful accomplishment of a long-anticipated task is a source of great joy for me. Events contrary to intentions cause feelings of disappointment or frustration. Also, the absorption of certain isomers of argon triarsenide in the gill pouches of my pseudolung induces a state of euphoria not unlike what I gather your sexual climax to be.”

“But you don’t have sorrow?”

He whistled a tone that would have given Mozart nightmares. “I don’t know. I’ve been unable to correlate your expressions of sorrow to any similar experiences in my history. Maybe this is an inevitable shortcoming of my research methodology. That’s why I’m here.”

I sat up. My head was pounding, but I think at least some of that was from whatever Brithpth used to see me. Microwaves or accelerated positron beams or whatever it was, it always made me taste copper and feel vaguely feverish. It was probably giving me cancer.

“Okay,” I said, trying to take it slow. “Sorrow is … loss. It’s a feeling of loss.”

“Let me be sure I understand,” he rattled. “Loss is the experience of a negative transition in your personal worldspace?”

“Uh,” I said, “I guess so. When something you value goes away, you feel a sense of loss. Sometimes that turns into sorrow.”

A sound like an entire rugby team sneezing all at once. “Confusion!” Brithpth exclaimed, rattling my windows faintly. “An extrinsic event in one’s future light cone cannot alter events in one’s past light cone. How can losing something in the present change anything in the past?”

I wondered if a light cone was some kind of Christmas ornament. “Well see,” I said, rubbing my eyes with my thumbs, “it doesn’t. But it changes things in the future, sort of. Something you expected to have in the future goes away in the present, so it won’t be there in the future after all.”

Suddenly the room was filled with a thick, viscous silence. I opened my eyes. I’d seen this before. Brithpth was sitting there in the middle of my living room, supernaturally still. Boulders are more active than he was at that moment. It hurt my eyes to look at him. I closed them again.

After a few seconds it passed. “Comprehension begins to dawn,” he rumbled. “A false conception of future events leads to a discontinuity when the probabilities of those events collapse into discreet quanta.”

“Sure, whatever,” I mumbled.

“Is this the meaning of sorrow?” he asked.

“Well, it’s one meaning, sure,” I said, realizing as soon as the words were out that I was just making things more complicated for myself.

“Describe others,” he said with what I was pretty sure was gleeful enthusiasm.

I thought about it. “Okay, regret,” I said. “Sorrow comes from regret.”

“This is a word I’ve heard many times,” he said, “but have never fully understood. Regret is a sense of unhappiness with events within one’s past light cone?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, still pretty unclear on what a light cone was. “Regret is when you wish something had happened differently.”

Brithpth thoughtfully extruded a digit-thing from his homeostatic polygirdle and twirled it in the air in no discernible pattern. “Then why do you not simply make it happened differently?”

This threw me. For all his faults — and believe me, I could have listed plenty of them — Brithpth’s grammar had always been impeccable. I got the uncomfortable feeling that I was missing something. I told him so.

“I apologize,” he said. “I will rephrase. Why do you not simply traverse the worldline antientropically in order to recollapse the offending potentialities?”

Man, there it was again. Right behind the eyes. It was like syllable overload or something. “I’m pretty sure that was grammatically correct,” I said through clenched teeth, “but it still doesn’t make any sense.”

This time there was a subliminal hint of irritation in the wheezing of his spiracles. He said, “Why do you not simply change the past?”

I didn’t say anything for a long time. I guess he took it as a cue to dumb it down further. “Why do you not simply focus your attention on an earlier point in your history and alter the events that cause feelings of regret?”

More silence from yours truly. “Why do you not simply,” he began. I interrupted.

“I get it,” I said. I’d spent the past several minutes figuring out how to say this. “Don’t freak out or anything, but that’s not really something we can do.”

It was his turn to be silent, in that way only Brithpth can be silent. The temperature dropped a couple of degrees as his perfect stillness sucked the heat out of the room. Finally: “You deploy cognition on events only once?”

“Only once for real,” I said. “After that, only as memories.”

A polyphonic snort. “This is another concept on which I would seek your insight. Tell me now, and please tell me simply: What are memories?”

He’s been gone now for a couple of hours. I don’t really remember letting him out. I was crying pretty hard there for a while, and everything sort of went grey. When I came to he was gone. The balcony door was wide open, and it was freezing in here.

It’s still freezing. I haven’t mustered the willpower to close the door.

I tried to imagine it. I started with an incurable amnesiac. A lifetime lived in the perpetual now, skating from moment to moment with no sense of continuity. Then I imagined the skater skating backwards, forwards again, then backwards again, over the same moments time after time, recalling nothing, just creating the illusion of continuous awareness through eternal repetition.

I tried to imagine reliving parts of my life as easily as I would rewind and play a tape, back and forth, stretching it thin, wearing it out.

I tried to imagine rewinding the tape and changing things, writing a different ending. A million different endings.

And for a long time I just sat there, alone in the freezing dark, adrift on the frozen sea of my own memories.

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Harrell. All rights reserved.