I, Alien

AORTIC INSUBORDINATION by Batya Swift Yasgur & Barry N. Malzberg

I DON’T WANT TO go, I said. Let someone else do this. Not me. I never wanted it. Please don’t make me—

Ah, they said, you will change the world. The needle twinkled. And the world certainly needs changing; we have had enough of this.

But, I said. Speaking as I did “(speech” of course is a converted term for what I did). But no, not what? They said. No change so great ever started with one so small. The syringe poised, hovering lovingly.

Until we understand what we are doing, I said.

We understand, they said. The syringe struck. I was propelled into the River of Memory. Swimming along its currents.

Was that how it happened? It is my best approximation. It must have been something like that as the Priests methodically unlocked and sent me on. Surely it would not have been in silence; surely I would not have gone without protest. And yet who is to know? Out of circumstances we create consequence, link a chain of events to a source, even if that source is a dream. A dream from which I will awaken safe and warm, no enclosure, no lessons, no orientation, no Priests, no mission, only circumstance itself.

Circumstance, I can handle. Haven’t I always? That is why they chose me, but perhaps I was not chosen, maybe it was just a dream that I was taken to change the world.

A dream that I begged for this cup to pass (my capacity for protest was inexhaustible then), a dream that my plea was ignored, a dream that I found myself—

—Falling, falling and rolling and tumbling and bouncing, bounce and jounce, tumble and jump, roll and folderol, surrounded by the thick, viscous, oily fluid. So they did it after all, they really did make me go and it had worked, the protocols correct.

—And disbelieving to that last scoop, swoop, loop, and whoop, I thought they would desist, that someone else would be taken to prowl the darkness. But no, no passing cup, so there I was falling and rising in that tunnel, propelled by rhythmic pulsation.

Thump. Thump: it’s dark, I said, and I miss my—

—Best not to think of them. Of origins, of the way it had been before and of what had been taken from me. I must live in this new world. This world, my mission.

Orientation Chamber earlier. Lecture topic: Meet Your Neighbors. You will be coursing through tunnellike vessels in a stream of blood. You will be surrounded by discs, oddly concave at the center. Red blood corpuscles. These new neighbors are important, yes, but not as important as the white blood cells: Leukocytes.

Remember those. That’s what you’ll be.

And even before: I don’t want that, I said. I don’t want that. Silence, I was told, and shattered and complied I acceded.

Follow your fellow leukocytes: watch and copy them. Then at a crucial moment you’ll make that one critical change and then—

And then what?

And then you’ll see what is needed and why.

And then they obliterated me.

Into that blood of memory. Leukocytes, corpuscles, my new family. Two cells in front, fellow members of the White, fellow soldiers of the Immune System. Behind, a mass of them: some round, some ovoid, and some horseshoe shaped—as, fetchingly, am I. Eccentrically located nuclei too like mine, surrounded by cytoplasm that glistens in the slick and random darkness of the blood. Cytoplasm just like mine, except for that one crucial difference, the infinitesimal message of change given this humble Voyager to carry.

I, Voyager, greet them as they greeted me. We communicate in the bloodstream’s ancient code. Their language comes easily as we signal and call to others of the Family: Monocytes. Macrophages. Eosinophils. All that instruction I have endured facilitates communication. I mask my origins and darker, higher purpose with the words of cells, commonplaces hiding the deeper codes of exile and ruin. The Leukocytes and I, burbling small confidences as we await the call: the true summons.

The call.

A nasty virus this, they say. Herpes zoster. Kill it now is the command. So it’s off to the hand where Herpes Zoster has pitched camp. We are armed and ready for battle. We jog and swim to the Herpes Fort. My own substance is grim with the knowledge that my battle is not with Herpes. Not at all. Herpes is not the enemy. I know this.

I plan my address, then.

Herp, I will say: Herp, old pal. We’re allies. Friends. Herp, I will say, you are the smallest life-form known, nothing more than a package of DNA with a dirty assignment. I have an assignment, too, and these missions are not dissimilar. Your mission is to replicate yourself and so is mine. You will use the body’s own reproductive process by taking over a cell’s internal machinery. And I—

—And I

—I stop. That would be too blunt. I might have said that I would take over Herpes’ own machinery, but that would alert him and then I would have to take him by force then instead of having his cooperation. Try this, Herp, I will say instead: I will assist your takeover by sending false signals to the Leukocytes. They will disperse, the dumb things. By the time my deception has been discovered, Herp and I will be sharing a cell and the process will begin.

This seems more reasonable.

Accordingly, I volunteer to lead the attack. The Leukocytes agree. Why not? They are so dumb, so gullible, so easily led after all. Furthermore, they are relieved. Let someone else lead the charge to the enemy camp. Find someone as willing as I.

Wait ten heartbeats I say to them. Then move to the fifth capillary along the digital crease of the third right interphalangeal joint. I will be waiting for you there.

They are dumb but imprinted. They waver. It should not be, they suggest. This seems peculiar, they bleat. We are not at all certain, they whine. We have doubt, they mumble.

I am persuasive, intense as I have been trained. This is the best way, I say. This is the source of the signal. They grumble and mumble a kind of agreement. They bounce and jounce, hobble and bobble.

I will be waiting for you there, I say. Go ye heroes, etc.

Mutual salutes, wishes of luck, and then I forage my way to the fifth capillary where Herp perches, indistinguishably.

I speak to him just as I planned. It goes as I knew it would. Herp is persuaded.

“Mommy, it itches!”

“Itching is normal when you have chicken pox. Let me prepare an oatmeal bath for you.”

“Oh, that feels better. Can I sit in the tub all day?”

“If you want.”

“I want. But, Mommy—”

“Yes, dear?”

“There’s one spot that is still itching. Like it’s on fire. And the oatmeal isn’t helping.”

“Show me.”

“Here. The middle finger of my right hand.”

“Oh, my, that is some blister. I’ve never seen one quite like this. Let’s try some lotion and see if it helps.”

“But, Mommy—”

“What is it?”

“I feel weird. And all the other blisters are starting to itch more. Something is happening. Something’s happening! The blisters—look, they are getting bigger and bigger. Help, they’re growing and growing! Look at that one on my pinkie, it’s as big as my whole finger. And that one over there—”

“Oh!”

“Mommy what’s wrong with me?”

“I don’t know. Hello? We need an ambulance immediately. Something terrible. Terrible!”

“Mommy!”

Of course I don’t kill him.

That was never the assignment, of course. Never. What would be the purpose of that? The mission can be accomplished only through a Uve carrier, an active host. And a good thing, too, because killing him— well, that would have been malevolence, nothing else.

Seven years old: innocent and adorable. Cute as a button. That’s what the nurses have been saying, now that the swelling has receded.

But before that: doctors in and out of the room, the kid’s little face now a bowling ball, his fingers and toes fat little sausages. And the arms and legs unrecognizable in their edemic monstrosity. Massive does of be-nadryl to control the itching, sedatives to help him sleep in the fever’s furnace, antibiotics to kill the alien invaders… if only they knew, if only they knew.

No one told me that it would be this way. The Priests, they kept me in the dark. That was certainly wise of them. I was already protesting and if I had known it would be this way, would I have still gone on with it/ The burning, the excruciating itching which has made the merge possible.

The merge possible. The next step.

The transitional step as the host and the Voyager become fused.

Now I am him: now he is me. I am Mikey in the fire, here we are in the flame, close to death, but we won’t die. We sill survive. We have survived and are so cute once again.

They say we are cute again. Cute as a button.

Merged to Mikey in the fire. Mikey the fiery, Mikey the funny, Mikey the redeemer. Listen to our song:

So that’s it. Laughter. My mission. From the solemn emerges the irreverent, and it is the Road of Redemption. Make ‘em laugh. Shake ‘em up. Sacred sounds, as their bellies jiggle, the hips wiggle when they giggle.

Like the vase. It’s funny. That’s what it is. To watch that vase sail across the room, banging into the wall and then the little pieces of glass showering the floor. How they twinkle in the sun, those colors streaming in rainbow splash as they fall. The rainbow shower is ever so much prettier than a dumb old vase sitting on the shelf.

A flying vase is funny. As funny as telling my teacher that I was born in China, adopted by Mommy, had plastic surgery to make me look American, but couldn’t do the homework because my English skills were still poor. And talking fake Chinese the rest of the day. Ong. Pong. Ching chong. The other kids laughed. They liked it. The rest of the day, we were all going around saying Ing, Ping, Ong Pong, Ching Chong. Only the teacher didn’t think it was funny. Why?

It was as funny as the sound of tinkle in the kitchen sink. Sinkle. And watching the mailman slide along the path on the yellow thing I left there just for him. Squeal on a banana peel!

Why won’t Mommy see that?

Because she just won’t. Not when I’m the one doing it. Oh, she laughs at the guys on television—or at least she used to. The big fat man and the short man. She laughs when they get pie in their faces and when they slip on banana peels and when they throw things at one another. She laughs at circus clowns, doesn’t she? So why won’t she laugh at my red nose and my cheeks? My flying vase and banana peel. And if I can’t make her laugh, how will I make the rest of the world laugh, too?

Because that is my mission, to make them all laugh. Clever of the Priests to make it so serious—classes and lectures and that scary injection—when it’s really all about being funny. Your mission will emerge, they said. You will learn by going where you have to go. And so it has. To turn everything topsy-turvy. To get them to shred their assumptions. What makes a vase pretty on the shelf and ugly in pieces on the floor? What makes a banana peel funny on television but not in real life? Only those stupid beliefs passed from parents to children. Change those and you can change it all.

How will they learn to change their assumptions?

By laughing at everything.

Everything!

Down the railing and up the stars, bet you can’t catch me, Mommy! Funny, how you run! You weren’t made for this, were you? Whoops! And when you put the salad on the plate, I suddenly whisk it away so the salad goes right on the table. And when you try to catch me, I say you can’t catch me. No one can catch me! Catch us, I should say. Catch me and Mikey.

And the look you give. Oh, Mikey, you’ve changed, you say. Your forehead wrinkles and that new annoying line comes between your eyes. Tears on your cheeks. I was supposed to make you laugh, not cry. What’s going on? Why do you take me to that lady, Mrs. Burton, the one who tries to look so important with her silly dolls dressed like doctors and nurses. Why do you get so angry when I make the dolls fly across the room? I’ve got great aim, haven’t I? And Mrs. Burton herself when she reaches clumsily for them. A flying Mrs. Burton!

Oh, ladies, stop whispering. All those long, serious words about “trauma and adjustment,” “aggressive tendencies,” “repressed rage,” and “inappropriate affect.”

Laugh and dance. Dance and laugh. Light and fun. Come on, Mommy, watch me run. Mommy, you can help me change the world. Get everyone to see everything different. Hey, is your world so great? War and terror and cheating and pain. Wouldn’t it be better to just laugh and laugh? Mommy, you’re not laughing—

Mommy is crying.

“I understand, ma’am,” he says. “There’s nothing more painful than having to institutionalize a child. But you’ve tried everything for this boy. Thirteen years since that bizarre early childhood illness. Thirteen years of treatment. Individual therapy. Family counseling. Psychotropic drugs, acupuncture, herbs. There’s nothing more you can do. But your son is in good hands here and he’ll do very well. Won’t you, Michael?”

I thought it would be simple once Mikey and I became one. To get them to laugh. To turn sadness into happiness, to change the world, shatter their assumptions, break their idols and make them happy. Simply happy. They were so aggressive, so destructive, but laughter would solve it all.

But they wouldn’t laugh. Why didn’t the Priests understand, in Orientation Chamber, that they could not laugh? They are not like us. Their complexity, their convoluted, crazy world, it cannot respond to laughter.

The Priests didn’t know. They did not understand the situation. They had misappraised. But I know now. I have learned.

The question is—what do I do now? To get it back. Retrieve the mission. A serious mission, to bring frivolity? Infect with laughter, infect the world? What can I do, stuck away in this loony bin, with all these—

Then all at once I know what to do. And fall down

in awe, for the Priests understood after all. How to bring the mission, where to execute it, my very failure the necessary stepping stone to my success.

Begin right at home, of course. What better place than a nuthouse for laughter?

So I hold a meeting after lights-out and before the meds kick in. Tommy is sleepy and mumbling as usual about the Government. James is preparing for his Second Coming. Arnold is moaning and rocking. Dorian— Well, you don’t want to know what Dorian is doing. The orderlies are somewhere down the corridor, of course. They don’t care. A typical night.

“Well, folks,” I say, “Do you want to change the world?

They become quiet. No more Government or Return of the Son. They have never heard me say anything serious before. They have barely heard me speak. I sure have their attention. The orderlies yap on, I hear their voices from down the hall.

“If we change the world, will you change the Government so they won’t be after me anymore?” Tommy asks.

“We’ll have a different Government, sure,” I say.

“But will they show any compassion? Will they leave good citizens alone?”

“Great compassion. All the compassion you could possibly want and more of it.”

Tommy considers this. James says, “Government can’t change. The world can’t change until the second coming.”

“I am the second coming,” I say. “I begged pass this cup and they did not listen and now I am here.”

They say nothing to this.

“Blessed are the light of heart because they shall uplift the world.”

“Amen,” James says and crosses himself.

“The Lord God is a God of Laughter,” I tell them. “Just read the second Psalm.” Psalms had occupied a lot of my time years ago. When Mommy went off to cry.

“You get a lot of good information from the Psalms,” I say. “You’d be surprised what is in there. Harps and lyres and whatnot.”

“I don’t know what lyres are. What we gotta do?”

“We laugh,” I say. “That is how it begins. And then we do things to make everyone laugh. If each of us make two others laugh, and each of those take on another two, we can take over the world.”

“Just laugh?” James says doubtfully.

“That’s it.’

‘Seems pretty silly to me,” Arnold says. “But it beats the crappy therapy and basket weaving. Sounds like more fun than Basic Living Skills, too.”

Carlo, Ben, Jamal, Kenneth, Dorian, and the others come to join us. The whole men’s ward. “Try it,” I say. “Ha.”

“Ha.”

It begins so feebly.

Ha.

But it builds. Piece by piece, sound by sound, we give to the world the sounds which the world deserves, which it has always needed. Ha and ha and ha again. And the orderlies come with their syringes and restraints, but there are too many of us, so they call the nurses, but there are still too many of us, as we hear the sacred syllable of redemption from Wards 3 and 4, so they call the doctors, but there are still too many of us, as the women’s wards begin, ha and ha and more ha.

And the plates go flying, the people go flying, until the top of the nuthouse itself is levitated by our laughter, lifted by that sound, twinkles and twirls at that sudden elevation and as Arnold and James and Jamal and Carlo and Ben and Dorian and Kenneth and I continue that levitating laughter it seems to overtake the world itself; manifest silken strands of light and laughter penetrating the closed and open spaces.

There is much more to this, but it is not for me to tell that story. My story is of origins, masques, and the sudden flight of running blood. Of contagion, cell to cell, voice to voice, echo to echo. From here, it is for the Kings and the Popes, the Presidents and the Preachers, the Priests and the Headquarters to take over that fierce obligation of laughter, laughter as hot as the sun, burning into all the spaces and places of human habituation.

Hi, Mikey.

Good-bye, Mikey.

Finita la commedia.