I’m Officially Being Stalked by an Extraterrestrial Life Form

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

He was waiting for me when I got home. Out on the balcony, behind the ficus, same as always. I slid the door open all the way and he squeezed through. Somehow.

“How did you know I was coming home early?” I asked him, rummaging in the cabinet for the bottle of rotgut I save for visits from Brithpth and days like this.

“I traversed the worldline entropically to reach the point where you returned to your apartment,” he said.

I changed the subject. The last thing I needed was another one of those talks. Two fingers of booze in a dirty glass. No ice this time. It burned like only cheap liquor can. It didn’t take the edge off, exactly. More like it just transferred the slicing, penetrating sensation from my head to a spot somewhere lower down.

When I got back to the living room he was … I don’t know how to describe it. He was the same as always, but somehow he seemed to be occupying less space. I was able to make my way around him to flop down on the couch without climbing over any manipulative tentacles. I didn’t even spill my drink.

I threw an arm over my eyes. “What’s the topic today?” I sighed.

“The lens of awareness,” he said. It almost made sense, unlike most of the things he said.

He continued, farting out words through a sort of inflated pouch thing on his second meta-abdomen. “I have been studying humanity intensely since our last conversation,” he said. “Your blindness continues to baffle me.”

I assumed he was talking about actual blindness. Silly me. I know he doesn’t use eyes to see, but something more closely akin to sonar or radar. I know that when he’s around the ice in my drink melts much faster than usual, whatever that means.

This time, by pure random chance, he happened upon a topic I know a little something about. I swallowed half of my drink, blinked away the burning in my nose and my chest and launched into lecture mode. “Our eyes include cells that are sensitive to certain electromagnetic emissions,” I said. That’s as far as I got before he interrupted me.

“I understand your physiology,” he foghorned. “I spent a great deal of time exploring your biology before I first contacted you.” I wanted to know more about what that meant, but then again I didn’t. People went missing all the time. And Brithpth’s manipulative digits were very dextrous.

“Okay,” I said. I said it very slowly. The bourbon was starting to make my lips feel numb. “So what’s the big mystery?”

The room shook a little bit. I opened one eye and saw him move in a direction my eyes couldn’t follow. You know that movie trick where the camera dollies in and zooms out at the same time? Or maybe it’s the other way around. The perspective shifts, and the actor sort of seems to get closer to the camera, but he doesn’t get any bigger in the frame. That’s what it looked like. My head spun. I blinked twice, hard. When I looked again, he was sitting there exactly as before, in exactly the same position, looking like the love child of a crashed 747 and a banyan tree. But he was different, somehow. More massive. More substantial. More there.

For my part, I was feeling less and less there every minute.

“Where did you go just now?” I asked, my eyes closed again.

“I apologize,” he said, perfectly polite, not at all like the hulking, universe-shattering horror he was. “My attention was momentarily divided.”

“Other experiments?” I asked.

Time froze for a second. I hate it when he does that. It felt like being embedded in lucite. “Experiments?” he asked with what I guessed was supposed to be an intergalactic air of feigned innocence.

“You’ve been doing experiments on me,” I said. “It would have been egotistical to think I was the only one. I just assumed you had other mazes and other rats.”

He seemed to get the metaphor. It’s not surprising. He’s memorized tens of thousands of hours of TV, in his own nonlinear way.

“Rats are an inapt comparison,” he rumbled. “A better analogy would be deep-sea creatures studied from within the warm safety of a submarine.”

“And the mazes?” I asked.

“Are still mazes, yes,” he said, rotating his cranial protuberance in a slow half-circle. I think he was laughing at me. Or himself. Or something in the distant past, or future, or maybe from another reality entirely. There was no way to tell.

I sighed. Why won’t he just go away? “We were talking about blindness,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “The lens of awareness. What is it like to be forever isolated from events that occur outside the range of your senses?”

“What’s it like not to be?” I asked.

“Glorious,” he intoned solemnly. “I have sought for much of my recent worldline to conceive of an existence in which my sense should reach out and find only darkness. I have failed. What is it like?”

“Quiet,” I said. “Sometimes it’s nice. I can come in here, lie down and put my arm over my eyes, and it’s like the whole world goes away. Especially if I have enough to drink. Speaking of which.” I wiggled my now-empty glass. Brithpth extruded a digit-thing into the kitchen. It came back wrapped around the bottle I’d left on the counter. I set the glass on the floor. I wouldn’t be needing it any more.

“But surely,” he said, “while you recline thus, isolated from external stimuli, events relevant to you are transpiring in other inertial frames.”

“Sure,” I said, drinking deep from the bottle.

“Yet you remain unaware of these events.”

“Yup,” I said drowsily.

“Does this not inflict great pain upon you?” he asked. When I didn’t say anything for a second he prodded me with his digit-thing, still extruded and hanging in the air an inch above my right shoulder.

“You have to not care,” I said.

He did the freezy thing again, for a lot longer this time than ever before. It must have been a solid minute, maybe even longer. The digit-thing just hung there like the limb of a dead tree. No, that’s not right. Even a tree moves in the wind. I felt like if I’d touched it it would have snapped off.

He was slow coming back. First there was just the sound of one of his exhalations, a reedy, whistley sort of noise, strangely distant in the tiny apartment. Then he inflated his speaking sack — the sound of a popping balloon recorded and played backwards — and said, “I have invested considerable subjective time in pondering the meaning of your words. As I understand your language, they are grammatical, but I cannot make sense of them.”

Ha. The tables had been turned. I felt a weird sort of satisfaction in it.

“You have to not care,” I repeated. “Sure, stuff’s going on all the time. Maybe somebody I know is dying. Maybe a bomb in the basement is about to explode. Hell, maybe people are talking about me behind my back. There’s no way to know. You have to not care.”

“Explain not caring,” he said. When he’s annoyed he tends to get a little terse. I felt the urge to giggle.

“Some things matter. Some things are worth caring about. Most stuff isn’t,” I said. “Some stuff’s just irrelevant.”

“But if these events are relevant to you, how can they simultaneously be irrelevant to you?”

“It has to be,” I said. “Otherwise we’d all go crazy.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d said too much. Dammit. I had him. I had him right where I wanted him. He was confused as hell, on the brink of giving it all up and rocketing off to Arcturus to spend the rest of his existence studying some species of alien mushroom. I had him. Then I had to give away the big secret.

“Clarity arrives,” he said smugly. How it was possible for a four-thousand-pound creature with more in common with a grove of spruce trees than with me to sound smug, I’ll never know. But he did. “Clarity arrives, and I welcome it. The natural state of humanity is one of profound mental disfunction,” he said.

I sat up. Too fast. Little invisible birdies circled my throbbing skull. “That’s not it at all,” I said. “We don’t care because we’re not crazy.”

He withdrew his digit-thing when I moved. It disappeared into what I’d been tentatively calling his footstool. It was a part of him, connected to his lower substructure in some way I couldn’t quite figure out, but it seemed to function more or less as a footstool would to you or me. “The lens of awareness is an artifact,” he said. “A cataract that appears in response to a cruel physiological handicap. The natural state of humans is insanity.”

“You’re full of it,” I said, but I knew the truth.

“Is it not known for some humans to be acutely aware of the limits of their perception?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Is this awareness not a common disorder among your species-bretheren?”

I still didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My throat was sealed tight, holding in a scream that I knew, if it escaped, would end worlds.

The sound that came next was like a sonic boom heard through studio-quality headphones. “Participate in dialogue!”

I jumped up. A digit-thing appeared out of nowhere and pushed me back down. “Participate!” he bellowed again.

The digit-thing hit me in the center of my chest hard enough to leave a bruise. “Participate!”

“Participate!”

“People like that are crazy!” I screamed. “They’re paranoids, schizophrenics, they hear voices! They think everyone is talking about them all the time! They’re not normal! They’re crazy!”

I went on like that for a while. I tried to get up. Brithpth’s digit-thing had me pinned in place like a moth on a piece of cardboard. I reached for whatever I could and threw it. The bottle bounced off of his pre-sensate nostril and went spinning off in a random direction, then two more digit-things appeared and wrapped themselves around my forearms. I couldn’t move. I could only scream.

By the time it was all out of me, I was a wreck. Snot was caked on my upper lip. Tears were dripping from my chin. The front of my shirt was wet with something brown and sticky; I must have vomited up the bourbon I’d drunk. My glasses were half-off my face, poking me in the lip, and as much as I might scrunch up my face I couldn’t dislodge them. I didn’t try very hard.

For a long time neither of us spoke. I didn’t have anything left to say, and he was silent for his own reasons. When he finally broke the silence, his breathy, slurpy voice was surprisingly gentle.

“I did not select at random,” he said, “when I chose to study you. I did not at that point in my history understand my reasons for observing you, but I knew that more than chance was involved.”

Without thinking about it, I reached up to replace my glasses. His digit-thing still held my arm, but he didn’t stop me.

“I understand now why you were an appropriate research subject,” he said. “It is because your existence is closer to the natural human state than your species-bretheren.”

I laughed then, and it came out like a sob. “You mean I’m crazy,” I said.

“Normative distinctions apply only within a common framework,” he said softly, almost in a whisper. Then he made a sound almost exactly like a deck of cards being shuffled. “I exist outside your framework,” he said.

I didn’t see where they went, but all of a sudden his digit-things were gone. The ones holding my arms, the one pushing me back into the cushions, a few more that I hadn’t even realized were there. He kept his fore-cranium pointed toward me, but the rest of him moved like an avalanche toward the patio door.

“Will I see you again?” I asked, embarrassed even as I said it.

He opened the sliding door with a manipulator tentacle, and a wave of sound hit me. Traffic, birds, voices from people on the street, a million little noises I hadn’t even realized were there. Behind each of them, I thought I could hear someone whispering my name.

And then he was gone.

It was a long time before I got up and shut the patio door. Even when I did, I could still hear the whispering.

The Glacier with Her Name Carved in It
and Other Stories
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