In addition to students and professors, activists and therapists, the cafés of Harvard Square attract perhaps the greatest concentration of romantic hopefuls in the Western World.
They’re the ones compulsively checking the dating apps on their smartphones, before rushing to meet other hopefuls, right hands outstretched. Though on the first Monday in February, 2018, none of them was consulting his or her smartphone remotely as often as a semi-rotund science writer who seemed able to do nothing but check his, pocket it, pull it back out and check it all over again.
Marshall Shmishkiss was so excited and nervous, he had come to Darwin's on Mount Auburn Street a half hour early, to make sure he wasn’t late. He had nabbed the best table he could find and was trying to compose himself with a chamomile tea. But it wasn’t working. He had simply not realized how many memories would be set loose merely by walking into this environment to meet someone from Match.com.
The memories took off like mortars, slamming one by one into his habitually positive outlook.
One moment he was sitting with his tea at his small round table, across from an empty chair, and the next moment the chair was filled—as it had been two years earlier—with a dark-haired woman in a mauve top and fashionably tattered jeans. “So you’re a tech guy, right?” she was inquiring hopefully, before he clarified and she left. Her face was replaced by another—by the one who had literally started to moan at the sight of him, over not being able to meet anybody—then by another and another and—
He clamped down on the whole dismal wallow.
This time is different, he reminded himself. This time a different kind of person has answered a totally different kind of ad.
And to drive the point home, he extracted his phone yet again, and again immersed himself in her emails.
Particularly the one that said . . .
I’ve been watching your videos and have no doubt that if anyone’s taken, it will be you! Any chance you’ll have some time next Monday, when I’m in the Boston area?
He now asked himself: If she’d been watching his videos, then didn’t she know what he looked like? And sounded like? And the kinds of views he expressed?
Of course she knew.
Then how could she be like those other women?
She could not.
Besides which . . .
He took himself firmly in hand.
Besides which, what business had he rehashing and resenting former encounters, as if he were superior to the people he’d met in this café? We humans, he reminded himself, are in this together. We are all tied to instincts that evolved eons ago, when physical size and dominance were key. So how could today’s females not be driven by those instincts, outdated as they had become?
And likewise, he too was impelled by such drives, and there was no denying it. Consider, for instance, that Fem-alien hadn't included a picture or physical description in her correspondence. Hadn't this caused a pang of regret? It had. And why? Because it showed that Fem-alien felt uncomfortable about her appearance and wished to avoid being rejected out of hand, before she could impress him with her personality.
Well . . . , he thought. If he, Marshall Shmishkiss, wished ever to have a fulfilling relationship, then he had better stop judging other people and concentrate on himself instead. He would have to root out his preference for one shape instead of another, one kind of hair or eyes, and commit to being a true humanist: that is, a person concerned solely with the inner worth of every other person he met. He would have to be ready, joyfully ready, to spend eternity with Fem-alien, even if she looked like . . .
He searched the café for an example to illustrate his thought, and found one. Seated off in a corner, she was alone, immersed in a paperback. Not fat, exactly. Just a tad overweight. Like him. With dark unruly hair and lavish eyebrows.
. . . like her, he told himself.
If Fem-alien looked like her, but was bursting with the desire to explore, then how could he not prefer her over someone with a different exterior?
In fact. . .
He stood up for a better view.
Didn’t that book have a spaceship on its cover?
He chose a new table—one right beside hers—then waited for what was surely soon to happen.
She’d gaze about, scanning the front of the café, and then . . . there he’d be, right there, at the next table, smiling pleasantly at her.
He liked the idea of that.
Trouble was, the rendezvous time approached, arrived and departed . . .
And still she kept on reading.
Perplexed, he twisted around, scanning the entrance himself to make sure no other plausible Fem-aliens were showing up.
None was. Though his eyes did attach themselves to a different kind of person entirely.
Standing just inside the door, she was a bit taller than him—five foot eight or so—and very straight and slender. Not that that meant anything, of course. She had cute pink earmuffs—not that that meant anything, either—that were partly covered by long and pointlessly lustrous tresses of hair. Blonde hair, as it happened, infused with a little red. So what? Blonde hair that cascaded over her snugly fitting lavender jacket, down her breasts and down her back, towards her waist, below which . . .
Below which there stood, what else? Legs! A pair of legs. But the way those legs flowed beneath her second-skin jeans—upwards, broadening, downwards into a pair of high boots—it was . . .
It was of no importance, that was what it was. None of it indicated a thing, except the boots, which exposed their owner as a person oblivious to meteorology, since the forecasters had been quite clear there was no chance of either snow or rain.
But still, he kept looking. Just as she kept looking. He stared at her. She stared about. Clearly searching for someone. Checking out the nearest seating, then the next nearest, then . . .
He untwisted fast, exasperated by his own hypocrisy. What was the matter with him? What had he just been telling himself? He looked again at the reading woman and realized the obvious. She was preoccupied—with literature, ideas. And without further delay he went over to her, holding out his hand.
“Hi, I’m Marshall Shmishkiss. Though you probably think of me as M-alien.”
She looked up, at first surprised and confused. Then still confused but not displeased—receptive even. Then puzzled. Then more puzzled. Then puzzled, annoyed and disappointed, all at the same time.
While Marshall, for his part, felt a slight pressure on the thorax of his segmented ski jacket, and, turning, found himself shockingly close to the blonde woman, who had come up behind him, who had touched him, and who was now smiling at him with a face that bore a light dusting of freckles beneath two gemlike blue eyes.
Not that that meant . . .
“M-alien?” she said. “You know who I am, right?”
“Fem-alien?” he said with growing astonishment. “Fem-alien from—”
“Oh, never mind that!” she said warmly. “Call me Gina.”
* * *
Gina! Her name was Gina! And he was getting her coffee and a cinnamon chip muffin at a café in Harvard Square. Had anything more incredible ever happened in his life?
Deep below his hairy halo, a stern voice was trying to remonstrate, pointing out, apropos of his earlier discussion with himself, that he had no reason to prefer this particular traveling companion over some other, that it was the inner person who counted, not the . . .
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
But no other part of his brain was paying attention, and eventually the voice gave up, leaving him swirling in delight. In all his years of “meeting people,” as the ordeal was called, never had someone like this turned out to be the person he was meeting. Could she be the key to his dream? Might she be more than that? And yes, he knew what she'd said in her emails: that she WASN'T available for a romantic relationship. But still, after six or seven months away? With no other human for light-years around? Wouldn't she see past the unimportant externals?
She would! Of course she would! How could she not?
Even so, he experienced an anxious interval when the crowd beside him grew so dense he couldn’t see her anymore. But then, having paid for his items, he shouldered through that crowd, and anxiety gave way to relief. Which gave way, in turn, to elation. For there she was, at his table, at their table, with the photocopied articles he’d presented to her while heading off for their order.
And not just sitting with them, but reading them, really reading them. Leaning over them, chin in her palms. Stroking them with pendent locks of hair.
“Which one is it? Do you like it?” he cried, hurrying forward with their snack.
“It’s incredible,” she said, looking up. “The idea of making dinosaurs from chicken DNA and using them to end hunger—how did you think of that?”
“Since birds are dinosaurs, and carry, as do we all, the vestiges of ancient genes, it just takes a willingness to think creatively about the nutritional implications,” he said.
“You have an amazing mind,” she said.
A tingling warmth filled his being.
But then, sitting, he looked down.
“Hey, what—? No, absolutely not. I won’t let you—”
But resolutely she refused to let him push the dollar bills that she had placed on his side of the table, back toward hers.
“Marshall, I saw your videos. I read your ad. You’re unemployed. How could I take food from an unemployed person? Besides . . .”
Lowering her voice, she spoke gravely.
“You do realize this isn’t about, you know . . .”
She pointed at him, then at herself.
“Of course,” he said.
“It’s only about . . .”
She pointed upwards.
“Yes, absolutely. I realize that.”
“Do you?”
“Yes!”
“Because I have to say, you seem pretty—how do I put it?—eager, for someone who’s meeting someone else one time to make arrangements for something that might not ever happen.”
“But the fact that you’re willing to commit yourself to a possibility that most people wouldn't—hold on. What was that you said? One time?”
She nodded solemnly.
“But couldn’t we at least . . .?”
She put a hand on his. It felt wonderful. But the words that came with it did not.
“Let’s just say I have a complicated life and can’t let it get more complicated,” she said. “Much as it would be so great if we could be friends and meet up and talk about those incredible articles of yours, it’s not really something I can—Marshall come on, can’t you accept that?”
It appeared, however, that he could not. His smile had run off. And he was scrutinizing her in the way that made him look more perceptive and vulnerable than she would have preferred him to be.
“So let’s see if I understand,” he said, with none of his usual enthusiastic inflections. “Having, say, a phone call with me every, say, month, would make your life complicated. But totally disappearing for years would be OK. Is that it?”
“No, of course not. I mean yes—of course yes. Going, you know, being taken, would be so huge, it would make up for . . . not that knowing you more wouldn’t be huge too, it definitely would, but . . . You understand, don’t you?
“Marshall?”
She trailed off because she could think of nothing to add. Surprised by his challenge, she was messing up big-time.
While he studied her from way back in his chair.
She began to feel disgusted. With the whole business. Like when they started pushing it on her, before she convinced herself it needn’t cause any harm. Screw Grant and the others. Another minute of this and . . .
Discreetly she began to reach for her jacket.
And he shot forward. “No, wait! I see what you’re telling me. That the . . . the . . . uh . . . transformative value of an ET experience would, uh, so outweigh any, uh, inconveniences that might follow, you’re willing to put up with them. Whereas simply making a new friend”—he attempted a smile—“doesn't merit the same level of sacrifice.”
“I guess so,” she said.
“Well, I have to admit”—he forced a chuckle—“it makes sense, once I take my ego out of it.”
And then, having rationalized the situation in this way, he was back. The Shmish was back. And boy would Grant and the others have been delighted to see how back he was. Immediately promising to make new videos—to make, in fact, the best ones ever, since how else could he get them to realize that, together, he and she were optimum humans? Totally committed to being taken. In no danger of succumbing to loneliness. Completely prepared to join a multi-species crew.
She was prepared to join a multi-species crew, wasn’t she?
“Uh, sure. I guess.”
“Because, you know, we have to convince them we can take care of our own needs, not to mention comport ourselves in a crisis.”
Whereupon Gina (or, if you prefer, Melody) collided with a grim truth known to favor-doers everywhere: namely, that when you do it, it is not done. When finally you pick up the phone, write the letter, clean the cellar, or, say, meet with an uber oddball so as to make your boyfriend happy, you don’t walk away free of additional obligation. Oh, no. Likely as not, you get a new letter to write, ten more calls to make, an attic that will only take another hour of your time, or . . .
“The most important thing,” he was saying, “is first aid. You have to find a really excellent course because, after all, who out there is going to know how to handle our cuts and scrapes? Then there’s self-defense—easier to master than you might think, by the way—and, of course, nutrition. Not weight-loss nutrition—not for you, that’s for sure—but standard nutritional biochemistry. ‘Cause face it, we aren't exactly going to be ordering cinnamon chip muffins. Probably we’ll have to list the compounds that make up a balanced—”
“But Marshall—”
“Gina, don’t worry! You don’t have to see me or talk with me about anything. Just write two lines in an email, two lines letting me know you’ve started a course or finished it or reached some other milestone, and then I can build a video around it, showing the depth of our sincerity.”
“But—”
“You are deeply sincere, aren’t you?”
“Oh, yes. Of course.”
“Well OK then.”
But Melody wasn’t OK. She had tensed up. For this was no minor chore he was requesting. This was months of work, hundreds in tuition, the end of her acting classes. It was, in short, something she absolutely would not do.
But if she didn’t . . .
Then he wouldn’t be making more videos, would he?
And if she pretended . . .
A surge of anger arose in her, since of course that's what they'd be expecting, wasn't it? Forget about one hour, one coffee, one time. From now until God knew when, they'd expect her to be churning out little two-line lies for someone who’d be telling the world about them. And the feeling she had—that queasy unease that had come upon her the moment she agreed to this wretched caper? It too would continue, possibly undermining her self-esteem, her creative focus. Possibly—
“Gina, what’s the matter? Are you ill? Do you need to visit the ladies' room?"
—possibly ruining my chances of making it! she moaned to herself in the ladies' room.
Then she slumped on the toilet, wondering how to bring this sorry encounter to a bearable end.
But it seemed impossible. She'd hurt either him or herself.
Unless . . .
She was out of the bathroom in a flash and talking right over his concerned queries about how she was feeling and whether there'd been something wrong with the muffin.
“I’ll do it,” she lied. “I’ll take those courses. But in exchange, you have to do something for me.”
“No problem.”
“I want you to write me two-line emails, just like I’ll be writing you two-line emails.”
His face became a huge smile.
“No! Listen. Nothing's changed. We are not going to be chitchatting. All I mean is that I will be writing to you about the courses I’m taking, on condition that you are telling me that you are holding down a job and writing and making a serious effort to publish your articles.”
“Wait, but”—questions flooded his mind; he chose one—“but suppose I don’t find a job right away. Do you really want to postpone our future, just because—?”
“Did I say it has to be an ideal job?” she said. “It has to be a job. And it doesn’t have to be a cover story, either. But I’m telling you, Marshall, we can’t let this dream of ours take over our lives. We can’t be responsible for that happening to each other.
“We have to live in the real world, too.”
* * *
Until that afternoon, despite unpaid bills and an ominous landlord, Marshall had still not downloaded the application to Circuit World. He could not bear to. Now he could. Charging into his apartment, he not only downloaded it but filled it out and sent it back, all in twenty minutes. Nor was he going to stop there. She wanted him to write more articles? Well, he would do that also. One way or another, he would land an assignment and have yet another reason to contact that amazing woman.
But feeling determined was one thing, finding the assignment something else again. He thought of all the publications he'd approached and all the rejections he'd received and all the times he hadn’t even received a rejection, only stabbing silence, and had to wonder: was there anyplace left to try?
For a time it appeared there was not. But then his friend came to mind. His friend Ethan Skyler, who, like him, was a science journalist, and who, back in December, had been so generous with his opinions.
Opinions like, “Face it, you're staying on this planet,” and “There's no escaping reality,” and “If you keep on obsessing over that website, you won't even escape from that basement.”
Come to think of it, the opinions had concerned freelancing, too.
“The key thing,” he remembered Ethan telling him, “is get off the beaten track. You write about science—great. But don’t only pitch to science magazines. Try business magazines, sports magazines. They’re all on the lookout for something different. Hey, what about the new Uprush?”
Well, what about it? Marshall had seen the new Uprush. Indeed, he couldn't avoid seeing it, much as he would have preferred to. It was waiting for him every time he paid at Walgreens: all glossy now and covered with pictures not of spaceships and robots anymore but of angry looking women in fancy clothes.
The new Uprush was, in other words, about the last publication that would want what a laid-off staffer from the old Uprush had to offer.
Unless . . .
Unless Ethan was right. Unless they got tired of thinking about fancy clothes all the time.
He could ask.
In search, then, of a phone number, he opened a new browser window on his laptop . . . and almost fell off his chair.
Though not because of anything to do with his old magazine. Rather, because of a news headline, which was horrendous.
Myron Crennick was dead? But how? He clicked on the headline and found out. That brilliant and kind doctor to whom he owed so much, had gone off alone to his fifteen-room cabin in New Hampshire, where he had suffered a fall, resulting in a head injury, and had only been found two weeks later when his wife returned from a photo shoot in Milan.
How awful. How sad for Mrs. Crennick and everyone who benefited from the great man’s wisdom and packaged snacks. So many were living improved lives because of him, while he himself, only middle-aged, was no more. It hardly seemed fair. It seemed—
It seemed, in short, like the type of news that could send Marshall into a plummet from which only Star Trek could rescue him—and might have on another day. But not on this day. On this day he was so sturdied with hope and optimism and erotic energy, that the information, terrible as it was, left only a faint psychic bruise.
And even that was fading a minute later as he dialed a number in New York City—the new Uprush’s new location.
“You’ve contributed previously?” said a busy sounding woman on the other end of the line.
“You might put it like that,” he said. “How does thirty-eight cover stories sound to you?”
For a moment she seemed confused. “I thought this magazine was—oh, never mind, I’m a temp. Fill in lots of places. No way I’m going to remember what started when. Anyhow, the instructions are . . .” He could hear paper rustling. “Here it is. ‘Inform known writers of pitch meeting tomorrow at three. Bring proposals. Think out of the box.’ Shall I put you down as confirmed to attend, sir?”
“OK, but I want to double-check: When you refer to proposals being ‘out of the box,’ does that include—”
“Look, sir, I don’t know. Everyone’s unavailable. If you want to call back tomorrow, I’m sure the usual receptionist will—”
“No, no, that’s OK. Put me down. The name is Shmishkiss. S-H-M-I . . .”
And when he hung up, the day had reached another incredible high point.
Would he attend? No question. Would he bring the right kind of proposals? No question about that, either. He’d bring proposals so outside any box of fancy clothes they’d ever opened, they wouldn’t believe it. And who knew? He might come away with an assignment. Or not. What did it matter? Merely having attended an exclusive meeting in New York, that would be what mattered, since it would be a reason to email Gina.
It would prove his standing as a writer.
Not to mention how seriously he took his promise.
She would have to be impressed.
And, speaking of individuals to impress . . .
He rushed to the Handycam and told the aliens . . . everything.