LUCKY TOOK HIS BIKE to the Cold Kiwi every year. He liked the way the red dirt glowed when the sun went down. Girls in white muslin dresses and black Doc Martins stomped in puddles and splashed each other while the rocket–ship ride rose and fell, hissing at the sky. There were pools of motorbike oil on the ground, and drugs, and campfires in the night.
He was at the Cold Kiwi when he realised that the windswept Central Plateau was the perfect place for alien landings; lonely, cold and spat on by volcanoes. It was full of potholes and craters, and no one would ever notice imprints made by alien craft when they landed, or pay attention to blast marks left behind when they took off again.
It was Adrienne who sent the first text. Someone had told her that Lucky was interested in alien landings, and she wanted to make contact. They texted back and forth a few times, and then he went to Taupo to pick her up. He had afternoon tea with her parents. They were Dutch undertakers; fair, with big bones. Her father was full of talk about the funeral business. Her mother looked as though she’d been crying, but maybe her eyes were always washed out.
Adrienne was fair too, but skinny and underweight, like a rat with stringy hair. You could see her bones. Her mother offered her food, Dutch doughnuts on blue–and–white willow china. They were like raisin scones shot with icing sugar. Lucky liked them. Adrienne refused to eat any. ‘You’ve got to eat, Adj,’ said her mother.
‘I’m not hungry,’ said Adrienne, stroking the fat, white Dutch cat. Afterwards she came with him on the bike.
As they left town Lake Taupo looked like a big puddle; the mountains at the far end were like sandcastles scooped together by a child’s hands. The white snow glistened as Lucky and Adrienne got closer, and the brown and gold plateau tussock contrasted with the blue sky. The hard–packed earthen banks on the side of the road were burnished into shapes like wind-blown iron.
They camped out like Lucky usually did, looking up at the sky for lights. ‘Hey, cool, see that,’ said Adrienne. But it was just the headlights of a car, as big as two glowing white moons. Beams flooded forward like searchlights, until they were nearly on top of them. But then, suddenly, the car turned a corner, and the glare flicked away to the right, like a kid playing chicken who had suddenly decided to make a run for it. The light receded, leaving the real moon as its memory; cold, full and perfectly round.
Lucky had scars on his chest, smooth, raised lines that he didn’t know how he’d come by. A girlfriend had asked him about them once, and he’d told her that they’d just grown there. But the more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that they must have been put there during an alien examination.
He had more scars, fresh ones from when he’d come off his bike. He’d had time to think while he was lying in the glaring white of the hospital room, smelling that sour hospital smell of phlegm in paper cups, and he realised where he must have acquired those original marks. He remembered the bright lights in his eyes. Lying on his back and looking up at them until black spots floated across his vision. He was supposed to go back to the hospital sometime so that they could check his head, but he was happy with the way things were.
It was quite handy having Adrienne to help set up the aerial and the equipment. He’d lost three fingers in the accident, and now his left hand, his main hand, had just one finger and a thumb, no good for the tricky twiddly bits. She was better with the tweezers too, picking up small bits of burnt metal, or a blasted rock, or the cigarette butts of those he knew had stood in waiting, determined to cover things up. One day the mouths of the people who’d drawn that tar and smoke through their lungs would be identified through DNA analysis, because Lucky saved the butts in a plastic bag.
He had a portable receiver which sucked in the whistling and scratching noises of the universe. It was made from a barbeque grill and tinfoil, and lots of expensive electronic equipment. Sometimes they heard truckies exchanging stories about girls they’d fucked, or what they’d had for breakfast. It all got mixed up in the sounds of the outer atmosphere and beyond.
One afternoon, Adrienne woke him to point out a small circle of shimmering silver, like a high–up, out–of–reach bubble of spit in the blue air. Lucky shook his head, disappointed. ‘A weather balloon,’ he said. They watched it for a while. ‘Without the sky,’ he asked her, ‘how would aliens get here? The sky is the aliens’ pathway towards us.’
In case he ever came across any burnt body parts, he kept jars of formaldehyde in the luggage carrier on the back of his bike. Jars full of liquid as clear and ethereal as the water of Lake Taupo. The water in the lake had no colour, and took its shading from the sky: grey on a grey day, bluer than blue on a blue day. Following his theme through, Lucky wondered what colour it would be if there was no sky.
‘Maybe like a big puddle of colourless plasma,’ said Adrienne.
Adrienne spotted the cemetery on a grey day. It could only just be seen from the road. The iron fence palings and the tip of a gravestone arched like a wishbone caught her eye. The forsaken square was situated in a sea of pale tussock grass, which was all that would withstand the weather in that place. Pākehā settlers’ graves probably. The faces of the stones were so worn that the inscriptions couldn’t be read.
‘There’s something wrong with this picture,’ said Lucky. ‘We’re miles from anywhere. Who did these people belong to? And see that fantail flitting and chattering around on those crumbling gravestones? There’s no bush near here. It’s come to the middle of nowhere for nothing but old death.’ He took notes.
Adrienne used his camera to take pictures further down the road. Burns. Small cylindrical holes packed with ice, where they’d filled with rain, and the earth had frozen. Empty bullet shells. The army would have known about it, of course. They practised in secret with their guns and tanks and combat nets, ever aware of the threat of what was out there in the sky. Lucky had seen them leaving the road at no point in particular, trundling out into the wasteland, shouting instructions at each other.
Adrienne was always cold, even when the sun was shining. If they rode on the bike, and the wind got into her bones, she felt like the mountain snow, and it took her all day to warm up again, hugging herself close, wrapped in a thick jersey. Her bum got sore from resting on the hard ground too. It was bony, and sometimes it bruised, just from sitting down. ‘What’s touched this place to make it so cold and blasted?’ she wondered aloud.
Lucky kept in communication with Alphaeus, who was writing a book about the positions of ‘sentinel rocks’ placed in special patterns by other civilizations. The positions of Sirius, the brightest star, and Canopus, its bridesmaid sister star, in relation to these rocks at certain times of the year were highly significant. Alphaeus could show how lines connected seemingly random outcrops.
Like Lucky, he roamed the Central Plateau, but unlike Lucky, he got himself noticed. He annoyed the tangata whenua, going to their sacred places and digging things up without permission, looking for buried rock formations. He’d had a few threats on his life, but he focused on a bigger picture. Alphaeus showed Lucky and Adrienne how there was to be a special conjunction of planets later that year, and Adrienne got a rush because it might just be the signal that the aliens were waiting for to show themselves. Her eyes came alive when she talked about it.
Lucky was more doubtful, inclined to think that aliens were hidden infiltrators who had no plans to show themselves at all. The rocky floor underneath the smooth surface of Lake Taupo was teeming with kōura, crawling about and stretching their pincers, but most people knew nothing about them, unless they noticed the broken bodies and empty shells spat up on the stony shore after a storm.
Kōura were nice to eat, but not their usual kai. Adrienne religiously ate two prunes and half a piece of Vogel’s bread spread with Japanese mustard every day. (‘Why not Dutch mustard?’ Lucky asked, but she just shrugged.) She took each mouthful as if it was hard to swallow. Lucky lived on takeaways, burgers with lovely greasy sauce from roadside diners. The lights were always too bright in burger bars; glaring bare neon tubes that stunned and blinded the drunks.
Once, Lucky had walked into a diner in the early hours of the morning, and everybody there had had a double, except him and the girl taking orders behind the counter. The man in the suit smoked a carnival cigar with his left hand, his double did so with his right. The girls with the fuck–me boots and black leather skirts both had one blue eye and one brown eye, in mirror–image reverse of each other.
Lucky had a strange dislocated feeling as he looked around and watched them all eating their burgers, as if he was floating slightly outside himself. He was unable to take control and do something about the situation, so he contented himself with making notes.
Afterwards, he kicked himself for not asking the girl behind the counter whether she could see two of everybody too, and if she could, whether she knew why this should be. Lucky frequented the place for quite a while, but he never came across the same girl serving again. He asked after her, but the new girls shook their heads and looked blank.
He was glad he’d taken his notes, because the doubles had surely been from worlds that were not his own. Perhaps even now, he was passing them on the street, or sitting next to them while they waited for appointments at WINZ. Some of them were probably doctors in hospitals.
He always had the feeling that they were near when he got the metallic taste in his mouth. It came over him suddenly, usually after he looked up and found somebody watching him. Sometimes even a cat, or a little boy on a bike in a driveway.
Before Lucky had his accident, he’d been a boxer. He remembered bright white lights on high ceilings, and the sweat on men’s skin and the back of their necks. He remembered the long, bright, satin shorts that they’d worn. The referee with his fist in the air. The square ring with its elasticated ropes, and the footwork that had danced like the fantail flitting around the gravestones.
Adrienne would not have made a boxer. Boxers had to eat all the time when they were in training. A special diet to bulk up; food every hour until it got boring, and they had to force it into their mouths without bothering with the taste. Lucky couldn’t remember his last fight, or quite why he’d stopped. Maybe it was something to do with his fingers after the accident, or maybe he’d just gotten old.
They stopped in a little, cold Central Plateau town, and Lucky went to sit in the church for a rest from riding. There were hand–embroidered tapestry cushions on the pale varnished pews, depicting native birds and flowers. Pinks, blues and greys. He chose a tui on some clematis, with an olivey yellow background. There was only one other man sitting in the church. Lucky asked him what his opinion of the sky was. ‘Where would Jesus be without the sky?’ the man replied. ‘There would be no heaven, and no place for God to hide.’
Adrienne tried to explain to Lucky about eating. ‘It’s like being a foodaholic,’ she said. ‘You need to swear off the addiction that makes you feel ugly, hateful and miserable. Food is poison in my body. When I was an eater, I ate when I wasn’t hungry. I ate to feed boredom, sadness and anger. I craved food, and it controlled me. Now I’m controlling it, so that it doesn’t engulf me and swallow me up instead. Little bits of food can make me fat.’ She stopped and thought about it some more.
‘My addiction is the only one where addicts are forced into continual exposure to what harms us. We have to make ourselves vulnerable to it every day. With strength, alcoholics can keep away from alcohol till their bodies forget the desire for it. But if I go without my addiction entirely, I will die. And without the sky, where would the rain come from to sting the skin of my face with the cold, wet lashings that let me know I’m alive?’
It occurred to Lucky that Adrienne looked a little like an alien herself now. Her eyes were large in her face, and her cheeks had sunken underneath her bones. She had given up the bread and the Japanese mustard. Her limbs hung limply at her sides, and her body was so wasted that her head looked big, even when she had her clothes on.
He tried to encourage her to eat, but she wouldn’t even touch the onion from out of his burgers. ‘Adj, it’s clear,’ he said. ‘It barely even exists. Invisible food.’
‘Laden with fat,’ she answered. ‘You should know that just because something can’t be seen, that it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’
Eventually, she couldn’t sit up anymore, and he took her back to Taupo in a borrowed car. It was the liquorice–stained time before dawn, and as they came closer around the edge of the lake they could see the lights of the town, like sparkling orange marmalade spread with a blunt knife on the dark bread of the land.
‘What’s Holland like?’ he asked her.
‘It’s not called Holland now, it’s the Netherlands,’ she said.
‘I like that,’ said Lucky. ‘It’s like Never–never Land, or nether the twain shall meet.’
‘Neither,’ she said absently. ‘I’ve been back there once. There are lots of black girls in Amsterdam.’
He had to carry her into the hospital. He didn’t like doing it, because he didn’t really like hospitals. Bad memories. ‘Don’t stop looking,’ she said. She knew it was still sixty–one days until all eight planets were aligned, leaving only Saturn in opposition.
When it happened, Lucky stayed up all night, thinking about Adrienne, who was gone. It was a cloudy evening, and he noticed nothing. He suspected that it was just another trick of misdirection, and that the real action was happening elsewhere, unreported.
He wondered if Adrienne’s parents would do their daughter’s funeral service. He pictured big, broad, blonde Dutch brothers with bread–and–butter pudding skin, hoisting a coffin filled with little more than scraps of a self: wishes and bones and some clinging shreds of skin. Maybe the whole thing would be so light that it would drift off their shoulders and no one would even notice, and they’d all just keep walking to the cemetery. And if a breath of wind caught it, it might blow away into the sky, which really was colourless anyway, and not blue or grey as some people thought.