Songs for the Deaf: Stories

Xenophilia

Seated at the quiet corner table he’d reserved by phone, the scientist studied the alien—the sad eyes deep behind high cheekbones, the pouty lips and tiny nose, the movement of its ears as it sipped from its water glass, the tilt of its chin as it caught his glance—and he concluded it looked remarkably like his ex-girlfriend. He didn’t know for sure if those were eyes he was looking at, couldn’t possibly say without x-rays (effects unknown) or God forbid an autopsy that the alien had a skeleton, could only guess that “face“ was the correct term for the upper portion of the body across the table from him. Still, the likeness was obvious, and it surprised him that he hadn’t noticed it before. The familiar features, he supposed, had only gradually taken shape, Magic Eye-like, out of the alien’s untidy visage.

He’d chosen the restaurant on the hill, one of those converted farmhouses not advertised in the newspaper or listed in the phone book but always recommended to travelers and known simply as “the restaurant” to everyone in town— from the founders of the local country club, who had awarded the scientist an honorary membership after his Nobel Prize and who made the restaurant a part of their weekly meal plan; to the military officers and university faculty, who broke their budgets to eat there on special occasions; to the working villagers, whose frustrating dreams sometimes carried them to the threshold of the restaurant’s walk-in but left them pining there for the dated bins of ambrosia just beyond their reach. This outing with the alien, while undeniably risky, seemed to him the essential next step in his studies. Here, in the security of the dark and woody ambiance, he could observe the alien in a setting more conducive to spontaneity. If not exactly home to the alien, the restaurant was at least more natural than the cold, sterile laboratory with its bubbling beakers and pulsing lights.

The scientist opened the oversized menu and the alien followed his lead, resting the menu on its lap, its tiny bulbous fingers curling around the leatherette, its chin lifting just slightly.

“Don’t worry, I’ll order for you,” said the scientist, knowing that he need not say anything, that he only had to think it for the alien to understand, but enjoying anyway the primitive physicality of speech. The alien, economical in the extreme, said nothing, but continued to stare deeply and inscrutably at the scientist, who now felt a blush coming on.

He had taken his ex-girlfriend, a sociologist, to this same exquisitely overpriced restaurant once, to celebrate his Nobel privately. After the stiff academic galas, a quiet evening with his girlfriend seemed the best way to absorb the accolades, and also to ease himself back into his old lifestyle. They’d been dating for two months before he’d flown off to Stockholm, and he was anxious to pick up where they’d left off. She had never dated a scientist before and found his buzz cut and his hornrimmed safety glasses “categorically masculine,” his white lab coats “sultanesque.”

Like the alien, she was quiet that night, too, sneaking glances at him over forkfuls of linguini-wrapped prawns, smiling cat-like and seductive.

She revealed her secret only after cappuccino and raspberry torte: she wanted to make love in the lab.

“There may be graduate assistants analyzing data,” he protested. But that wasn’t the real danger. “And there are chemicals,” he added, “some of them explosive, some radioactive, some whose harmful agents we haven’t yet isolated.” But even those dangers, he knew, could not match the potentially cataclysmic mixture of science and love. The sociologist had proposed a new compound, something reckless and unstable, whose radiation, once released, might well be uncontainable.

But she had a way, and a look about her, and the scientist could not hatch a convincing excuse.

The lovemaking was operatic. Naked beneath their lab coats, they rolled across the stainless steel tables and Formica countertops as rows of gurgling beakers crashed to the floor. Bunsen burners ignited and doused and mysteriously reignited. Dangerous solutions pooled together on the linoleum, and harmful gasses billowed across the fluorescent ceiling panels. Condensation rained unchecked from the trembling copper coils. Switches were thrown and released, thrown and released, dials nudged to unacceptable settings, needles quivered into red zones, while the panels of multicolored lights pulsed out dangerous patterns and the warning tones glided up the scale, until finally, test tubes frothing over and noxious cumulus clouds raining blue ash, they were forced to pull the plugs and slink out coughing into the night.

In the morning, the university police suspected vandals, local villagers provoked by rumors and by misleading TV exposes of scientific amorality. Security was stepped up, but that only increased the thrill. Night after night they returned, he nodding to the security guard and flashing his faculty I.D., she donning tinted glasses and tight hair and the thick and elusive accent of a distinguished foreign scientist. Once inside, her hair sprung and their lab coats unbuttoned, they abandoned themselves to their decadent routine: “Oh, Professor, you must come look!” and the science brought them together like a force of nature, “What is it, Professor?” her hand reaching back between the folds of his lab coat, “I think I’ve made a discovery,” and he drew close, over her shoulder, the smell of her hair bursting and wild, a controlled experiment gone awry, and then, hands raising her lab coat in bunches, “Oh, Professor, you’ll compromise the results,” but with a sweep of his arm the gurgling beakers crashed to the floor and the stainless steel altars of science were theirs to defile.

But those crimes against science had to be paid for with trembling hands and ruined experiments. Mornings, he’d dial up the power on the control panel and be shaken by an ionized lungful of last night’s air—her hair, her skin, her breath, their sex—and for the rest of the day his concentration tottered on a knife-sharp fulcrum of shame and desire. Even after he’d stopped returning the sociologist’s calls, even after he’d been given the most absorbing scientific project of his career—the project of a lifetime, the study of a living alien—the ghosts of those carnal nights haunted him. He found himself more and more attracted to the alien, more and more casual about his laboratory decorum. And now that he recognized the creature’s resemblance to his ex-girlfriend, he wasn’t sure he could control himself.

The general had heard how the steaks here dissolved on the tongue like popsicles, sweet and bursting. He knew for a fact that his girlfriend would do the same at evening’s end. The only question was whether she would go for the breathless claustrophobia of the M-1 Abrams (“But General, I’ve just locked onto an enemy tank!”) or the apocalypse of the pock-marked artillery range (“But General, the troops need our support!”).

But those pleasures (“Let them die!”), he reminded himself, were secondary to the task at hand: to monitor the scientist’s increasingly suspicious relationship with the alien. He’d made it his special project, had code-named it “Hawkswoop,” though the label appeared only on a single, thin, card-sized file folder in the lockbox he kept in his wife’s hosiery drawer and was never muttered but in a close-lipped whisper in the dark. On a poorly lit street across from the university laboratory, he’d sit long nights in his baby-blue Mercury and listen through headphones to the one-way conversation between scientist and alien, imagining the scientist’s movements and position by the volume and quality of his voice as it reached the bug. As the weeks passed and the scientist’s diction tumbled slowly from lab jargon to prattle, the general understood that a breakthrough was imminent. One night there were long, nervous moments of silence, a phone picked up and re-cradled, a sigh, another attempt and a few numbers dialed, then, at last: “I’d like a reservation for two ...” And the general whispered his tight-lipped mantra all the way to the base: “The swooping hawk has fixed its prey ... “

“I recommend the prawns,” said the sociologist, scanning her menu, “sir,” she added, her voice thick with frisky mockery.

Tonight she wore a lieutenant’s uniform, the skirt hemmed short, and the perversion fluttered on the general’s tongue like a copped feel. He took a breath and tried to concentrate. Across the dusky ether of the cathedral-like dining room, the scientist chattered and smiled at the small, languorous, and human-like alien, whose tuberous neck hid behind a sporty red scarf. The scientist had clearly taken every precaution; in those clothes and in this lighting and in the peripheral vision of the self-absorbed patrons, the alien might well go unnoticed. Only a keen and interested observer would note that the rubbery arms lacked elbows, so that they bowed instead of bent, that the head quivered and pulsed like gelatin, and that the earholes tended to migrate. Those nubs on the scalp could easily be mistaken for a state-of-the-art hairdo.

Like so many other aliens, this one had crash-landed in the desert. But unlike the others, this alien miraculously survived. And then, incredibly, the President transferred sole, topsecret possession to this local scientist, whose recent Nobel had moved him to the top of the scientific pecking order— in the private sector, anyway. The President had said, in so many words, that the military could not be trusted to perform medical experiments within accepted ethical boundaries. But what did the President know about ethical boundaries? And what, in any case, were the ethics of alien testing? Hadn’t the aliens abducted humans and performed painful and humiliating medical procedures? In the military’s view—in the general’s view—those were acts of war. It’s never been proven, in any case, that aliens feel pain, or fear, or humiliation—that they feel anything at all. No, the only reason to restrain oneself around aliens was to protect oneself; self-abandonment was a weakness that aliens could exploit.

He’d seen their power, even in death. He’d lost three good officers, two of them top-notch military scientists, to the wiles of dead aliens. The first was a woman he’d personally appointed to lead the autopsy team. Before they opened the doughy corpse, she needed time to study its externals, she said, to understand what she could from its soft contours. She worked long hours in the lab, often by herself, and slept little. The general should have suspected something when he stopped by the lab on his way home one night and found his autopsy leader sponge-bathing the alien’s fragile-looking, pearl-white body.

“Oh! Didn’t hear you come in, sir!”

“The President’s inquired about the delay. When are we a go?”

“Soon. I’m in the final phase of preparations, sir.”

“Off the record, Miss Lundquist: are you in love with that alien?”

“No sir!” but the color came to her face, the sponge slopped onto the dead alien’s thigh, and the general should have known.

One morning a week later they found her curled up under a sheet with the alien, weeping inconsolably, caressing the alien’s leathery cheek. She had to be pried from it, one finger at a time. The room was sealed and quarantined, and the alien was frozen in a vault, its baby face veiled safely in rime.

Two more crash landings resulted in two more lovestricken officers, both of them still babbling and weeping in the psychiatric ward. And the President bestows on the private sector the first alien captured alive? It’s unconscionably stupid, the general thought. It’s blind.

“If he ever arrives, order me steak,” he said, pushing his chair back.

The sociologist tossed him a limp salute.

The general made sure no one was looking. He paused at the men’s room door, slipped the tiny camera from under his tasseled epaulette, and snapped three shots of the alien and the scientist together, the scientist leaning close, fingers full of a dumpling appetizer, hesitating momentarily as he searched for the alien’s mouth, laughing at his own awkwardness. He’s doomed, thought the general. His brain is a marinated dumpling.

At the head of the posse, the deputy sherif’s torch burned brightest, the eye of a fiery snake winding up the hillside switchbacks. The restaurant’s lights twinkled into view, still distant and fortress-like, but soon within their grasp. We are all torchbearers for the earth, he thought, and the idea filled him with the adrenaline his tired legs needed to set the pace.

“It’s better this way,” he told the man beside him, meaning on foot. “It shows them we’re a grass-roots movement, that there’s a groundswell of common rage.”

“You got that right,” said the man, slapping an oak cudgel against his palm.

“Just remember,” said the deputy, “this is about love.”

And it was, for the deputy sheriff loved the earth, both the idea and the thing itself. He loved the bigness of it. He loved the strength and permanence of it, but also the gentle curve of its horizon when it reached achingly for the setting sun. He loved its centrality and importance in the universe, neither of which was diminished by scientific models of this and that revolving around the other thing. He loved the soft blue sweetness of its breath. He loved the cool, moist soil, and when he came home from work each day he went straight to his garden and thrust his arms into the earth, cleansing himself of the rot and stench of humanity’s crimes against itself. He loved the taste of the earth, too, not just its fruits but its dark and gritty flesh. The vegetables from his garden he ate unwashed, for to wash off the soil, he thought, was like washing away the dewy traces of love. And gardening, after all, was an act of love.

He loved the earth, which is why he took the trespasses of aliens personally. Their very existence threatened the earth’s central position in the universe. Aliens demeaned her. And now, recently, they’d come calling, charming the earth with their bright little saucers and their babyfaces (he’d seen the video exposé), seducing her with technological panache, and threatening, in the end, to make of her a private satellite, just one more concubine in their orbiting harem. Others told him he was overreacting, that the evidence suggested the aliens intended only to study the earth. But those who did not love the earth could not be counted on to protect her. The evidence, he countered, suggested a long, lustful leer at the earth. Look at the shameful way they’d treated the abductees! Notice the suspicious nakedness of the little corpses pulled from downed saucers! No, the aliens’ intentions were far from honorable. (And the apologists were quiet then. They knew; in their hearts they knew.)

Some joined the cause once they learned of the reckless collaboration between government and science. The deputy sheriff wouldn’t have believed it himself if the security guard hadn’t brought him into the lab one night. They stepped quietly into the back room, where the guard raised his finger and cocked his thumb at the prophetic image entangled on the gurney before them: a living alien resting cozily in the arms of a bare-chested scientist. He touched his holstered gun—but no, he reasoned, there is a better way. The aliens must be shown what they’re up against. A crowd of angry humans must be assembled, and their fire and rage and collective strength must fill the viewscreens of every alien saucer and space station and planetary outpost until the message is loud and clear: we won’t let her go without a fight.

Armed with torches and clubs, the posse had marched first to the college, which for so long had stood with folded arms in haughty disregard for the world. The scientists, after all, had never loved the earth. They belittled her with theories conjured from the test tubes and copper coils and the rest of the pornographic hardware they secreted in their noxious, windowless, linoleum-floored laboratories.

The scientist and his little green consort weren’t there—the security guard thought he’d seen them drive off in the direction of the restaurant and an anonymous phone call confirmed it— but the angry mob sent a message, sweeping racks of colored chemicals to the floor, throwing beakers against the wall like Molotov cocktails, torching the control panels and melting the dials, burning notebooks and scholarly journals and other scientific smut, shouting and howling and clenching their fists in a climax of vengeance. The deputy had to pull himself together before he could collect the others.

Then they marched into the woods and up the hill, torches and fists raised to the hilltop fortress and the alien within. They climbed rocks and forded streams. Their shouts cleared away the nocturnal creatures before them, while a long trail of villagers scurried behind, some anxious to join the Cause, other curious to see the Effect.

“It’s about love,” repeated the deputy, the words directing his eyes to the hilltop, “love and a show of strength.”

Even in the restaurant’s dim light the sociologist recognized his thick safety glasses, his squarish coif, his weak jaw. And even now his classic features turned her on. The relationship was behind her, she told herself, and the feelings she had for him had moved on. She was having fun with the general now—well, not so much the general as the military. But in those last weeks with the scientist, there’d been something uncomfortably personal, some kind of sad, animal connection that transcended the idea, some kind of sticky Precambrian soup that flowed between them in the lab. It had scared them both. The general was just another uniform—granted, there were epaulettes—but a uniform just the same. And a uniform was simple and safe.

Now that the waiter had taken her order and her menu she watched with interest as the scientist grew more and more animated and giggly across the dining room. His date—a chilly, frumpy thing—sat stiffly, unresponsive but for the occasional wiggle of her ears—or were those lumps part of the scarf? What a homely outfit she wore—the scientist must have picked it out himself.

And when she tired of the military? When she’d completed her paper, “Womb with a View: Tanks and Gender in Today’s Military“? When she’d presented it at the ASA convention and published it in the Journal of Applied Sociology? What then? She’d done politics. She’d done sports. She’d done television, radio, and film. What was there left to do? “When will you settle down?” her department chair had asked her time and again. She’d scoffed at him but knew, too, that she was getting a reputation in her field—many of the colleagues who’d once dubbed her “The Naughty One” and found her gonzo, interdisciplinary approach groundbreaking and courageous now called her a “nympho-sociologist“ and found her studies showy, thin, and lacking rigor.

They were wrong, of course. The problem was her own failure to outdo herself. Revolutionary fervor is quickest to cool; only a more shocking revolution would quiet the critics and save her reputation. Then the doubts of many would ripen to affection.

So why hadn’t she taken the next great leap? Had she grown smug? Had she grown frightened? She could ask the questions, at least. The answers would show in her actions, as they always did.

And then she had a thought that made her gag on her cabernet. She could not deny that her feelings for the scientist transcended the idea of fucking his science. What if she let herself love him?

Love was the final barrier—of course. Love was the nebulous realm of warm, fuzzy subjectivity—the very antithesis of academic discipline. Could she love him and still write a paper like “Safety Glasses and the Volatility of Desire” (workin-progress) or “The Hermaphroditic Test Tube” (American Sociology Review, vol. 45 no. 1, spring 1995)? She had to admit some trepidation, for she was talking about a complete transformation of herself and her studies. Love, she knew, was often the kiss of death in her field; she’d seen the work of so many colleagues muddled by the vagaries of love. And loving the scientist—really loving him—meant, too, that the pleasures of the general’s tanks and artillery ranges and tasseled epaulettes—of fucking the military—might forever be lost.

She focused again on the scientist, who had leaned in toward his date, smiling dumbly, both hands under the table, playing a secret game.

That did it!

She threw down her napkin and strode across the dining room.

“Bitch, you keep your slut knees clamped and your paws off my man!” and she slapped the scientist’s date across the cheek, making a mental note of how cool and gummy that skin felt—a detail she might work into her paper, “Cat Fights and Doggie Bags: Public Displays by Jealous Women.”

The manager had just scrutinized and okayed some foreign traveler’s checks when the parking attendant rushed into her tidy, wood-paneled office with news of an approaching mob.

“PETA again?” she asked, shaking her head as she returned the checks to the patient waiter. “Just make sure he signs the back,” she told him. The local PETA chapter had threatened her over the phone and had once demonstrated in her driveway. They believed the rumors, apparently started by some disgruntled employee, that the restaurant served live monkeys in its banquet room for guests to club to death and eat.

“I don’t think PETA would carry torches through the woods,” volunteered the attendant. “Threat of habitat destruction.”

“Torches?” she asked, recognizing another daily threat to the thin stability she’d built from the wreckage of her divorce. Breathe, she thought, getting up slowly. Focus on your attitude. “You sure those aren’t just deer with flaming antlers?”

The attendant shrugged.

“That was a joke,” she said, breathing again.

The manager left her office and stepped out into the crisp night air just in time to see the torches bob over the rocks like flaming marionettes. And then she saw the arms that held them, and then the faces, and then, when they had fanned out in a semicircle in front of her, her ex-husband stepped forward. She swallowed, knowing this would be her greatest test yet. The torchlight showed off the ruddy complexion on one side of his face, left the other side darkened in mystery.

“Don’t make a scene,” she said instinctively.

“Honey,” said the deputy, “this is not a social call.”

“Oh,” she said, fists clenched tight to keep her in the moment. “I thought you’d brought the bowling league in for tea.”

“Let’s burn it down!” shouted a man in the crowd. “They’re killing monkeys in there!”

“Shut up!” yelled the manager. “There’s never been a monkey within a mile of here. Until now,” she added.

“You hear her!” the man responded. “There are monkeys!”

“Shut up!” said the deputy. “That’s not why we’re here.”

His voice was flat and resolute, as it was in their last months together, when the marriage had crumbled and he’d clearly given up, working late hours and then coming home to a pup tent he’d pitched in their garden. No matter how loudly she screamed, how many vases she broke, how many times she threatened to kill herself, he never once raised his voice or lost control. And that only made her want to scream louder, throw harder, show him a razor blade that she almost intended to use.

“Then why?” she asked him now. “Are you here to burn the place down? Is this part of your scorched earth divorce policy?”

“We’re here for the alien,” he said gravely.

She looked confused, then offended. She folded her arms self-consciously. “The kitchen staff all have their green cards,” she said. “I take no chances.”

“I’m talking about a guest,” he said.

She laughed, releasing the tension and spraying him, she noticed, with dots of saliva. “The little foreigner? He seems harmless enough.”

“He’s a threat to all we hold dear,” said the deputy.

“His traveler’s checks are good,” she said. “I’ll vouch for that.”

“Honey, I’m asking you on a personal level,” he said, covering his badge with three fingers. “Will you bring him to us?”

His oath would have seemed comical if he weren’t backed by dozens of glowering torches and strange, flickering faces. “You aren’t going to hurt him,” she said. “You’re just going to deport him or something, right?”

“That’s right, honey. We aren’t going to do to him what he’s done to so many of us. We’re humans,” he said, proud of the fact.

Their eyes locked for a moment, his gaze almost tender, until she looked away in fear. She couldn’t let him do it again. Her life had finally stabilized. She had to let go.

“Let’s burn it!” shouted the man in the crowd, and now a few others echoed his desire.

“As soon as he’s finished his cappuccino,” she told the deputy.

“Soon,” he said.

“You’ll wait,” she said, “like I used to,” and she spun and walked back into the restaurant, her steps decisive and her nails digging into her palm.

She closed and locked the office door behind her, pulled an egg timer from the top drawer of her desk, and cried for exactly three minutes. Then she returned to the dining room.

“Another cappuccino,” the foreigner called to the waiter, who paid no attention because he was busy breaking up a fight between two women. What the damn kind of place is this? he thought.

The foreigner used to receive prompt service and special attention wherever he traveled. That was when he had a country to love and when his love of country carried him to the upper echelon of international diplomacy. People respected him (“Can we getting you more béarnaise sauce, sir?” “Might you honor us by acceptance of a cappuccino gift, sir?”), and he floated with natural grace in the champagne of their diligent attendance (an urbane nod of the head, bestowing a courteous acceptance).

Then his country splintered, and the ennobled idea of his country crumbled into the basest kind of group attachments—religion, ethnicity, class, proximity—and for him the pride of patriotism, the hand-over-heart reverence and the high-stepping exaltation, was lost forever. Buildings, flags, constitutions, and bridges burned, and suddenly, in mid-diplomacy, the champagne stopped bubbling and the viewing stand collapsed and in the wreckage of his once-noble devotion a tuxedoed waiter stepped forward with an overlong leatherette portfolio: “Your check, sir.”

And now, a diplomat without a country, he wandered aimlessly from nation to nation and town to town, seeking out former haunts and cronies, hoping to recapture some of the glory—the velvet salons, the kitchen sink debates, the state dinners, the military parades—but most of the cronies no longer cared for his company, and most of the official state functions were now closed to him, and the white-gloved service revealed itself as just another paid performance that he could no longer afford. Which is how he ended up in restaurants like this— cock-a-hoop roadhouse diners staffed by pretentious bumpkins and patronized by belligerent women. Look at the one trying to strangle the other with the other’s scarf! America, he thought, always was I saying a doomed country was.

“Yes, another cappuccino for which I was asking,” he told the red-eyed woman who now approached his table.

“Sir, you’ll have to come with me,” she said.

“But I am not completed yet,” he told her sharply.

She touched his arm in an offensively familiar manner. “There are people outside who need to see you.”

There were two possibilities: either the intelligence splinter from his old country had cornered him for erasure, or some of his old diplomatic cronies had finally agreed to meet him. Either way, he was embarrassed to be found here.

As the woman rudely pulled him up by the arm, he thought he heard her say, “Forget the check.”

At least there was that.

The mob’s will had become one, and their fears fueled their passions. Their grumbles became shouts, and their shouts turned to chants, and the chants got crafted into a call-and-response:

“What do we want?”

“A-li-en!”

“How do we want it?”

“To go!”

Even the deputy sheriff joined in. At first, they laughed like collegiate tailgaters at their own cleverness, but as their impatience grew the song tightened into a sharp rhythm, and the blood thumped in their chests and their voices shrilled and their fears were overcome by lust. The nocturnal animals, who had edged up the hill out of curiosity, now scampered back to their dens in fear.

The mob edged closer to the double doors, fists, torches, and cudgels thrusting skyward, demanding satisfaction with their shouts and chants. Their distorted, angry faces glared in the torchlight, and the building trembled with their stomps.

Then, as if on cue, the heavy wooden doors split open and the foreigner popped out with a quick shove.

“What is this?” he seemed to mouth, but it was too late even to ask. The crowd converged, screeching through clenched teeth, their eyes wide with mindless lust.

The lawlessness! they thought. But when they grabbed the creature’s pinstriped lapels, their fists thought for them, bunching the fabric and strangling it in the name of the earth, though at that moment even the noble cause slipped their collective mind. They twisted and tore the fabric, hissing madly, gathering strength from the frenzy around them. They wanted to laugh and kill all at once.

To the extent they thought, they now thought only, Yes . . . yes.

And the foreigner looked up at them, eyes wide with terror, forearms offering meager protection, oiled hair spiking in disarray, bushy mustache stained with blood and mucous, split lips quivering, unable to speak. How could this be? he wanted to think. To die for no country, to give one’s life for no cause. The indignity! The humiliation! The senselessness! I cannot abide it, he wanted to say, or at least to think, yet the words could not form themselves out of the commotion of pain.

Just as he felt himself losing consciousness, he took a last look at his attackers and saw the deputy sheriff staring in slack-jawed astonishment at his own fists.

“It’s blood!” shouted the deputy in a voice so shocked that it roared above even the foreigner’s agonized screams and cut off the mob’s fury all at once.

“It’s human blood!” he said, still amazed, raising his stained fists for everyone to see.

And the foreigner, mouth open and drooling bubbles of blood, breath wheezing and hot, collected himself in the momentary silence and finally crafted a thought: No damn shit.

The parking attendant did as he was told, helping the manager to evacuate guests out the back door. “No need to panic,” the manager kept saying, which translated as, “Pay your bills first.” But when the guests tuned in to the shouts and the noisy scuffle outside, they panicked. Food was left uneaten and checks unpaid, chairs got kicked over, wine spilled on the carpet. And the staff panicked, too: a busboy dumped his tub outside the kitchen door, and cooks and dishwashers tripped over it, kicking its contents across the room.

The parking attendant did as he was told, distributing the keys quickly to the guests, opening doors when he could, accepting tips when offered, but thinking all the while, The light of justice will shine, and as the last guests wheeled away he grabbed his backpack out of the car and slipped unnoticed back into the restaurant. He rolled aside fallen tables, kicked a martini glass through the uprights of a toppled chair, then paused before the kitchen door, still swinging in and out, revealing the sauces still flaming on the burners, the soufflés beginning to collapse, the steaks now charring on the grill.

The kitchen was the inner sanctum of the evil that had thus far evaded justice. It had always been off limits to him. But now the light will shine, he thought, unzipping his backpack and pulling forth the video camera and flashlight that PETA had presented him when he’d secured a job in the restaurant.

It had taken months of demeaning labor, but tonight his patience would pay off. He would rip out the very heart of this evil and raise it to the light of justice.

He held the camera to his eye; he wanted to see it as the world would see it—the startled, shivering monkeys cowering from the light, their experience—yes experience, because monkeys think, monkeys learn—telling them that another one of them was doomed to have his neck clasped between the leaves of a table and his head malleted by sportive carnivores, his brains forked into the salivating mouths of his devourers. “What flavor!” the guests would say. “They must forcefeed them a spicy marinade!”

He pushed open the door and panned across the flaming steaks and saucepans, zoomed in on a half-cooked T-bone melting on the floor in a pool of its own pink juices, then zoomed out and tracked through the wreckage toward the stainless door of the walk-in. The staff had not only left the door unlocked but also cracked open, and the cold mist curled around the edges and condensed into droplets on the door’s bright surface. And now he heard the noises, too—the startled little grunts and gasps of their suffering, their fear of the light and the fate awaiting them. “No need to fear this light, little friends,” he said aloud, clicking on his flashlight, aware that at this moment his eye was the world’s eye, his voice the world’s voice, and his light the light of justice. “This is the light of justice,” he said, just to be certain his thoughts were the world’s thoughts, too.

At last he reached out and grabbed the cold, wet edge of the steel door and drew it open slowly, dramatically, his light at the ready for all the world to see. The grunts and gasps grew louder and clearer, and then—because he, like all the world, could no longer stand the suspense—he yanked open the door and shined his light inside at the quivering white buttocks and splayed legs of human copulation. The light and the camera panned up until the man craned his neck around and met the lens through thick, horn-rimmed glasses, and the woman leaned up on her elbows and shouted, “Don’t worry, Professor, our love’s no secret anymore!” The man ripped off his glasses, flung them into an open food bin, then resumed his thrusting.

The animals, the world wanted to think. But the world could not quite shape a thought out of the white noise of its fascination, and it could not turn its eyes away.

I have impressed even myself, the general thought. He had let the confusion of the rioting villagers work to his advantage, sweeping the alien’s soft body into his arms and dashing out the door with the panicked diners—“Excuse me! Excuse me! My wife needs a doctor!”—pushing through the genteel throngs to his baby-blue Mercury and depositing the docile alien onto the soft vinyl. He tore down the hill and took the back road that led to the base. The crescent moon hung sleepily above the mountains, and he opened his vent to let in the cool desert air. He took a deep breath, then looked over at the alien beside him, seatbelt fastened, quirky features softened by starlight and the glow of the dash. He couldn’t tell for sure if the alien was looking at him, didn’t know for sure that aliens “looked” at anything.

“Must get lonely for you so far from home,” he said, immediately regretting the stupidity of talking to an alien, but feeling thoroughly intoxicated by the success of Operation Hawkswoop.

In the silence, he planned his next step: he would take the alien to his private M-1 Abrams and guard it personally until he could make radio contact with the right people, the scientists on his own team, ones who could keep their mouths shut and their hands above the table, ones whose dedication to the military took precedence over their dedication to science or to other such perversions.

“You’ll be safe with me,” he said again, smiling now at his embarrassing adolescent vanity. He smoothed one of his graying sideburns, then laughed aloud.

“You must think me a fool,” he said, shaking his head, blushing, “but I’m not always this way . . .”

The alien smiled at the general’s words and especially the general’s thoughts, though the general could not see the smile, hidden as it was in the alien’s clasped palms.

We’re much the same, thought the alien. We live for love and die for lust.

In the distance, a flaming saucer arced romantically across the desert sky toward a fateful union with the earth. Inside, its alien pilot stared blankly at the viewscreen, transfixed by the primitive copulation it showed, the strange abandonment of two naked humans as they pulled food bins off the shelves of a walk-in freezer and soiled themselves in a strange primordial recipe. Yes, thought the pilot, oblivious to flames and impending doom. Yes.