The True Meaning of Smekday Page 4

  For days afterward, nothing seemed right. I didn’t comb my hair or brush my teeth. I never even opened my Christmas presents. Why bother? Now there were aliens. I wouldn’t listen to music. It made me cry. All of it, it was too beautiful. And I’m not just talking about Beethoven or something. Old *NSYNC albums made me cry. The song the ice-cream truck played made me cry. I couldn’t laugh, and hearing other people laugh made me angry. It was selfish and sick, like burning money. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The ship landed. There was no landing gear. The six hoses just spread out like legs and held the ship’s weight. Then it…walked. There’s no other way to describe it. The whole great thing walked on hoselegs like a beetle toward us, picking its way through monuments and headstones.

  I looked around for help, but there was no one else on the street.

  “Mom! Wake up! Wake up wake up!” I screamed. She was standing still, and I ran to her side, clutched her leg. “Mom! I love you! I’m sorry! Let’s go home!”

  The ship raised a leg, and it flexed out like a worm toward us. And as it got close…I let go. I let go of my mom. I let go and hid behind a mausoleum. Because I was scared. And I know I deserve whatever you think of me for that.

  The hoseleg pulled itself over Mom’s head and half swallowed her, down to her waist. She didn’t move, or make a sound. She still had my Christmas stocking on her arm. Then there was a noise like:

  Foomp

  and she sailed into the air; she sailed away, sucked like soda into that big humming head.

  I don’t know if I can write about everything afterward. It’s going to sound like I’m trying to be dramatic, but it’s not like that. It isn’t for anyone else. You only fall because your legs stop working. And you don’t fall to your knees, you fall on your ass into a patch of crabgrass like the Idiot of the Year. You scream for your mom because you really think it will bring her back. And when it doesn’t, your skin feels too tight, and your lungs are full of cotton, and you couldn’t call her again if you wanted to. And you don’t get up, and you don’t think up any clever plans, because you’re only waiting to burst like a firecracker and die. It’s the only thing to do.

  That’s all. There’s more, but that’s all I’m going to write about it. You asked me to write about the days before the invasion, so there’s my answer, though it was sort of a personal question, and you maybe shouldn’t have asked it. But that’s all.

  Anyway.

  I wrote “ass” a couple paragraphs ago. Pardon my language.

  So I sat in that graveyard for a while. I don’t remember getting up and I don’t remember going home, but there I was. I made myself a sandwich, and afterward I sat in a chair. I forgot to breathe. I didn’t know you could do that. From time to time it came to me that my chest was empty and my head light, so I gaped like a dying fish until I was full again. Then I stared and I thought about nothing. Nothing. That got boring, and I felt my stomach growl, and I thought, Wasn’t there a sandwich? So I returned to the kitchen to find it still on the countertop, a cockroach sitting right in the center like a baseball pitcher.

  And this is when I finally started to plan, but all of my plans were stupid. I think there’s a part of the brain, probably somewhere in the back, that won’t give up believing in magic. It was the part that made cavemen believe that drawing elks on stone would make for a good hunt the next day. And it’s still chugging along, making you think you have lucky socks, or that your kids’ birthdays will win the lottery. It made me think I could stop time in the cemetery with a wave of my hand, or summon Mom to my side with her name. Currently it was very busy, thinking over and over about how to go back in time, and what I should do when I got there.

  The spaceships, by the way, didn’t stay secret for long. They were all over the television, every channel, except for channel 56, which was still showing reruns of The Jeffersons.

  There were news stories about the ships, and there were stories about how people were reacting to the ships. Some people were happy, and that made me nauseous. Folks everywhere shot their guns up at the sky in celebration. Most people were panicking. Some were looting, because I guess they thought that with aliens invading they were really going to need new DVD players. I suppose nobody knew for sure then that the Boov were bad news, because they hadn’t had their mothers vacuumed. I might have gone out and told them, but I was pretty sick. It seems you can’t really go for a walk to the graveyard in the middle of a late December night with bare feet and no coat without spending the next few days sweating and shivering and kneeling in front of the toilet. I tried to reach 911, the FBI, the White House, anybody I could tell about Mom, but the phone lines were pretty much worthless. My guess is a lot of folks were calling their friends and family and saying,

  “Have you heard about the aliens?”

  And then their friend would say,

  “What aliens?”

  And the first guy would say,

  “Turn on your TV!”

  “What channel?”

  “Any one but 56.”

  And as a result, I couldn’t warn anybody. But they figured it out soon enough.

  As it turned out, the ship that took Mom was one of the little ones. There were ships the size of Rhode Island in the skies over my city, New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas, not to mention London, Tel Aviv, Moscow, and about a hundred other places. At first they just hung there like jellyfish. But then the jellyfish began taking bites out of things.

  Nobody understood at first. I sure didn’t. We didn’t know then about the guns. The crazy Boov guns that don’t make a flash or a sound. We only knew that, hey, the Statue of Liberty’s head is missing. So’s the dome of the Capitol, and the top of Big Ben. Oh, look, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is now the Totally Unremarkable Stump of Pisa. The Great Wall of China is the Great Speed Bump. The Boov ships had big guns. And the Boov themselves had a knack for knowing just what to shoot. They were pushing our buttons.

  I have to talk about this. I can’t get it out of my head. You future people, you probably don’t remember the invasion at all. You weren’t even born. But maybe something else really bad has happened since then. A hundred years is a long time.

  When it happened, I’m sure you felt terrible. You were probably scared, and sad, and you wanted it to stop. That’s how I felt during the invasion—that’s probably how everyone feels. But were you excited, too? Just a little? Were you on the edge of your seat, wondering what would happen next?

  And I wonder if you were a little proud. Proud to be living through something so important, something to tell your grandchildren. Did you watch yourself watching the television, making certain that you looked brave, and stoic, and just sad enough?

  I think other people felt like this. For so long afterward, on the TV and radio and on the street, everyone kept telling each other, “Everything has changed. The world will never be the same. The aliens changed everything.”

  And the thing is, of course they had. It should have gone without saying. But we went right on saying it, and after a while it sounded like a pat on the back. Everything had changed, but we had survived, so we must be strong. With each terrible newsbreak and emergency broadcast signal we thought, Now we have a story to tell.

  I’m sorry—forget I brought it up. I have no idea what other people were thinking. It was just me. I’m awful.

  When there was nothing new to report, the news channels took to showing the same footage over and over. The headless statues, the missing buildings, their absence so bizarre you swore you could still feel them there, like phantom limbs. And I have to remember that there were people, too, rubbed out as cleanly as the faces on Mount Rushmore. There were tourists in the Statue of Liberty when it happened. There were people on the Great Wall. They were gone, erased. I believe in heaven because of these people. I want to imagine them shuffling through the gates, blinking, confused, like travelers who fell asleep on the train. I want there to be a place where they’re pulled aside by a kind stranger who says, �
��Okay, here’s what happened.”

  But I’d be lying if I said I thought of them then. I couldn’t concentrate on the loss of anyone, even Mom. My head was too numbed by the pictures. My brain was packed in pictures, stored away, waiting to be used again. I was probably impatient for something to happen.

  All this intergalactic vandalism eventually drew out all the armies of the world, and we fought back. I can’t really say much about that. Nobody handed me a gun and sent me off to fight. I was sort of busy anyway, trying to keep down fluids. But I watched it all on TV, like a movie. With the right sound effects, it could have been a comedy.

  So it was like this: we brought out our tanks, our jets, our soldiers with guns. We brought out our Bradley Fighting Vehicles. I don’t know what those are, but we had a lot of them. There were helicopters, aircraft carriers, and a thousand cold, deadly missiles peering out like monstrous eyes from their underground burrows. It might have looked impressive if not for the size of the Boov ships hanging just above the clouds like new moons. But then, in the end, it wasn’t about whose guns were bigger. The Boov had a surprise.

  This surprise quickly came to be called the Bees. They flew, most of them were about bumblebee size, and they buzzed as they passed. They were covered in tiny wires that looked like antennae, or legs. But they were silver, wingless, and had a strange mess of eyes in their fat heads. One of them would have looked cute on the end of a key chain.

  They swarmed down from the ships in dense clouds, then split off into groups according to some hidden plan. Some were as big as pickles, and some, if the TV news was to be believed, were too small to see.

  Our soldiers fired up at them, stupidly. They might as well have been hunting hummingbirds. They tried to disperse them with concussive grenades. I think they tried this. I’m sorry, I’m trying to get this right, but it’s really not my area. Teachers never ask me to write essays about jazz, or my shoe collection.

  Anyway.

  The important part is that the Bees didn’t go after our people, they went after our things. They flew down the barrels of tanks. Down the muzzles of guns. They wormed into engines, squeezed through cracks to get at our computers, and were all over our satellite dishes like bees on a sunflower. I assume they did something to the Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

  Then they all blew their lids. They used up every bit of energy they had all at once and popped like popcorn. They were white hot, and when they cooled they left behind a kernel of steaming metal slag. Every weapon, every computer, every communicator we needed to fight the aliens was suddenly gummed up with lumps of shapeless metal, like shiny turds. Pardon my language.

  I like to think we would have picked up rocks, or sticks, or done something else at this point, but that was when the Boov finally decided to talk. They beamed out a message to all the TV and radio stations that still worked. It was a long message, and in pretty good English, but with that same pinched whine that J.Lo had. J.Lo the Boov, not J.Lo the singer/actress/perfume.

  I’ll spare you all the details of the broadcast. The important parts were:

  A. The Boov had discovered this planet, so it was of course rightly theirs.

  B. It was their Grand Destiny to colonize new worlds, they needed to, so there really wasn’t anything they could do about that.

  C. They were really sorry for any inconvenience, but were sure humans would assimilate peacefully into Boov society.

  And D. If anyone had ideas to the contrary, they should know that there was now a Bee up the nostril of every president, prime minister, king, and queen on the planet.

  So that was it. The human race was conquered by lunchtime. People everywhere shot their guns up at the sky in sadness.

  That almost brings us back to where I started. Shortly after they conquered us, the Boov began to come down from the ships and move into our cities. Mostly people fled, and the Boov just walked right into modern-day ghost towns, all the while praising their glorious Captain Smek for providing so many pretty, empty houses in which to live. Some people resisted with whatever they had, but these efforts were put down. Maybe you’ve seen the famous video footage of a mom with three kids, defending her house with a baseball bat, swinging madly from her front steps as the uniformed bodies of the Boovworld home team strode slowly toward the infield.

  Some people didn’t leave town when the Boov came in, but this almost always ended badly. It ended badly for my upstairs neighbor.

  I saw her out on the front stoop one afternoon with her arms full. She held a jewelry box and a stack of photo albums and her teacup Chihuahua, Billy Dee Williams.

  “Ms. Wiley!” I shouted from my bedroom window. She halted and squinted up at me. “Do you need help with all that? Where are you going?”

  Ms. Wiley stood beneath my window and set down her things. Billy Dee stumbled through the tall grass and ate a bug.

  “’Lo, Gratuity. I’m leaving, I guess,” she said.

  “Leaving where?”

  “Lived here twenty-five years,” Ms. Wiley sighed. “You know that?”

  “I know. Why are you leaving?”

  “Not my apartment anymore. Belongs to them now, I suppose. One of them claimed it. One of them just came to my door and told me to get out and claimed it in the name of Captain Whoever-He-Is.”

  I tried to understand what she was saying. There was an alien in our building? Right now, right above me?

  “I thought they were only settling in towns down the shore,” I said. “It was on the news.”

  Ms. Wiley just shrugged her shoulders. She looked near tears.

  “Your ma home?”

  “No, she’s…no.”

  “Tell her I’m sorry. I still had her big casserole dish, and I don’t think she’s getting it back now.”

  I told her it was okay, and asked if she needed a place to stay, but she was going to her sister’s. There must have been scenes like this all over—the Boov just showed up on your doorstep, no warning, and kicked you out. Or maybe you’d find one already in your garage, eating things, and eventually he’d just make his way into the kitchen, or the bedrooms. And like a stray cat, he was there to stay.

  Speaking of cats, it was around this time that the Great Housecat Betrayal came to pass. That’s my own name for it; you can use it if you want to.

  It wasn’t exactly covered on what was left of human broadcasting, but word spread quickly. Cats loved the Boov. They left their human owners in droves, pouring out of windows and through tiny doors like it was the last day of school, rubbing up against the invaders, licking their legs.

  Pig wasn’t an outdoor cat, but she tried everything to get out. She always made a break for it when I left the apartment, but there were two more doors to get through before leaving my building, so she never got farther than the stairwell. When a Boov passed by on the street, Pig gazed out at him forlornly and put a paw up to the window, like some tragic heroine.

  I almost just let her go a couple of times—but she was really more Mom’s cat, and not mine to give away.

  Anyway.

  In a ridiculously short amount of time, the Boov determined that humans were unwilling to mix peacefully into their culture. They pointed out all the people who fled instead of welcoming their new neighbors, even those whose homes had been taken outright.

  Captain Smek himself appeared on television for an official speech to humankind. (He didn’t call us humankind, of course. He called us the Noble Savages of Earth. Apparently we were all still living on Earth at this point.)

  “Noble Savages of Earth,” he said. “Long time have we tried to live together in peace.” (It had been five months.) “Long time have the Boov suffered under the hostileness and intolerableness of you people. With sad hearts I now concede that Boov and humans will never to exist as one.”

  I remember being really excited at this point. Could I possibly be hearing right? Were the Boov about to leave? I was so stupid.

  “And so now I generously grant you Human Preserves—gifts of
land that will be for humans forever, never to be taken away again, now.”

  I stared at the TV, mouth agape. “But we were here first,” I said pathetically.

  Pig purred.

  The ceremony went on for some time. The Boov were signing a treaty with the different nations of the world. It all looked strange, and for more than the obvious reasons. Usually big political events are full of men in suits, but the Boov were joined now by totally ordinary-looking people. The woman who signed on behalf of the Czech Republic was carrying a baby. The man who signed for Morocco wore a Pepsi T-shirt. When it came time to sign with the United States, our country was represented by some white guy I’d never seen before. It certainly wasn’t the president. Or the vice president. It wasn’t the Speaker of the House or anybody else I’d ever noticed on television or elsewhere. It was just some sad, nervous-looking guy in jeans and a denim shirt. He stooped. He had a thick mustache and glasses. He was wearing a tool belt, for God’s sake, pardon my language. We learned later it was just some random plumber. I think his name was Jeff. It didn’t matter to the Boov.

  So that’s when we Americans were given Florida. One state for three hundred million people. There were going to be some serious lines for the bathrooms.

  After this announcement, Moving Day was scheduled and rocketpods were sent. I decided to drive instead, and got shot at, and later went over an embankment because the highways had been destroyed. Pig and I hung out in a convenience store, and I hid from a Boov named J.Lo, but then I trapped him, and let him go when he promised to fix my car. Which now hovers instead of rolls. And has big hoses and fins.

  Everybody on the same page? Great.

  We packed up the hovercar, which I was now calling “Slushious,” and settled into our seats. Somehow J.Lo had talked me into giving him a ride to Florida. His scooter, it seemed, was not for long trips, and he’d already gutted it to rebuild the car. He also argued, pretty persuasively, that I was a lot less likely to get shot by any more Boov if I had one of their own for an escort.

  I almost balked when J.Lo sat up front, next to me. It was too friendly. But if he sat in the back it would have been like I was his driver, and anyway it was easier to keep an eye on him. Pig lay down on the Boov’s headrest. I imagine she would have preferred his lap, but he kind of didn’t have one.