I
First Contact was a tepid affair. No leviathan umbra from interstellar disks shadowing coiffed suburban lawns. No sieges. No Ransoms with stories from Perelandra. Not even the satisfaction of witnessing a mortally wounded Tom Cruise gurgling under his Malibu Beach home, praying for the miracles of Dianetics as alien pyrotechnics explode from under the ground and torch his home into the Neoproterozoic age.
Instead, one Visitor was discovered in an Oregon rain forest by two hikers named Candy Richmond and Herbert Melon (@candymelon). I had dated a girl named Candy Richmond once, but she didn’t live in Oregon and wasn’t much of a hiker. If it were my Candy, she would have been hiking in severely distressed blue denim shorts and high heels.
Anyway, the visitor was sitting on an immense fallen tree while eating another tree. He was quite large, this visitor was, perhaps 40 feet tall. The hikers posted an Instagram video of the interstellar traveler gnawing on a tree trunk with the comment, “What do you guys think of this?”
Comments ranged from “Noisy, slurping alien dude,” to “We are so hosed!”
His name turned out to be unpronounceable, so everyone called him CaddyShaq because Shaq himself tweeted that the visitor would make a great golf caddy on account of his impressive arm length. CaddyShaq responded by tweeting that he was simply “an old hollow boned dinosaur” (if we have time, we will perhaps visit the process CaddyShaq used for tweeting regularly without access to a computer).
CaddyShaq did, indeed, look a bit like a dinosaur. More like a cross between a dinosaur and a feathered ape, with a large brown beak and enormous, friendly, mammalian blue eyes. The top of his head sported a nest of small, unruly yellow feathers crisscrossed with red streaks as if his scalp had been the field for a gruesomely inconclusive battle between baby chicks.
His cerulean skin bore long, undulating scales that freaked some people out, but not more than the absurdly long arms that hung from his muscular shoulders and left spindly hands dragging along the ground. When the hands weren’t engaged with the ground, they exposed no discernible fingernails or claws, but instead small suction cups where fingernails should have been, rather than where the suction cups should have been (shouldn’t they be at the bottom of his fingers rather than the top? the social media stream wondered). The suction cups appeared randomly, like the thoughts of a mad king.
He did have five fingers, and this provided a sense of relief to many people. The structure of the rest of his body was quite ape-like, aside from the scales instead of hair. A long, thin strand of feathers adorned the middle of his back and would sometimes display into a much larger and fun to watch rainbow-colored crest of avian extravagance.
There were unproven rumors that he could fly, so UFO sightings began to include images of CaddyShaq soaring through the air, but these images and videos were invariably found to be AI-generated.
The squawk accompanying his feathery pageantries could shatter gorilla glass. His long, narrow feet didn’t seem to affect his gait, although it was difficult to confirm this, considering that his gait would carry him past most observers’ field of vision after a few steps.
Oh. And he was always naked.
He didn’t even understand the concept of clothes. Once he learned more about them, he seemed fascinated, tweeting once, “India! I love that place! Such clothes!” but he still declined to wear them.
CaddyShaq’s itinerary grew. He was invited to Davos and Austin’s South by Southwest and, if he was willing to wear clothes (he wasn’t), a Joel Osteen megachurch event in Houston. He was invited to the Super Bowl, and to throw out the first pitch of the World Series — if he was willing to wear clothes (he wasn’t).
He was a garrulous individual who gabbed incessantly about seemingly unimportant topics like candy bars and the composition of the rings of Neptune (which he stated without elucidation were much more scientifically interesting than those of Saturn).
Well, by now you may be wondering where the trouble started. Keep in mind that it’s difficult for me to be objective because I met him in a county jail, where I’d like to say we became good friends. Objectivity often takes a back seat in such circumstances.
It’s possible the timeline took its first dour turn when he announced on social media that he was changing his name to Mendez. He didn’t provide a reason other than to say that, along with the Spanish language itself, he liked the sound of it. This offended much of the nation, which was in the throes of mass hysteria over Spanish surnames.
The timeline took another turn when he was asked about the nature of God by a Christian podcaster. “It is not for me to determine where you find your heart,” he said. “What I can tell you is that all the terrible things you see on your planet are called forth by a being we call Insanity, who infiltrates the minds of all sentient creatures in the universe. Attempting to decipher Insanity’s intent will drive you insane.”
The outrage machine took over from there.
When Mendez gave a TED talk regarding climate change, forty percent of the American public claimed he had been weaponized. Before the TED talk, there had been a grudging acceptance of his presence on Earth by even the most notorious purveyors of intolerance. Most found his personality innately charming.
But he was also an alien, so fear sawed the nation in half. In retrospect, the honeymoon was brief.
Then he dropped the hammer, and he may as well have drained the earth’s core of its molten lava and spat it upon the social media ecosphere. He said during the TED talk that for a planet like ours to survive, a planet that had turned into an overheated virus sponge with acidic seas overtaken by jellyfish, there could be no more seemingly innocuous hikes taken by the likes of @candymelon. “Nature has revoked your hiking privileges,” he said with the first tone of bitterness he had ever uttered.
Outrage intensified to such an extent that it cannibalized itself, then regurgitated a billion conspiracy theories, many of them only tangentially related to Mendez.
Still, he roamed the Earth freely, exploring canyons with his long arms as they lifted him from one cliff to the next, leaping across sand dunes, chasing the source of tundra winds, gnawing on the forests of Georgia’s northern hills.
And there, my friends, is where Mendez discovered America’s esteemed immigration services.
Mendez was minding his own business, nibbling carefully on a one-hundred-foot eastern pine in northern Georgia, when a team of countless well-armed police from Homeland Security and a local county sheriff’s department screeched into view at the nearest trailhead.
They flashed an impressive arsenal of weapons as they dismounted their patrol cars and armored vehicles. The county sheriff’s department normally employed 500 deputies to protect the local golf courses and their abutting subdivisions, and they were itching for just about anything that went beyond the usual meth-fueled domestic disturbance.
After they marched deeper into the woods, one deputy stood astride a thick oak tree and clung to a megaphone while three grotesquely overweight ICE men wearing balaclava masks looked on. “Put the tree down and lie face down on the ground,” the deputy commanded. It was a very crowded forest, and lying down in this way was not possible for a 40-foot being, but that didn’t stop the deputy from barking out his command again.
There were approximately 60 Glocks and 40 long guns aimed at him, so the Visitor decided he should attempt to comply.
After a considerable delay fraught with confusion and clumsy uncertainty, they hauled him to the county jail in a logging truck. There, they charged him with terroristic activities, which is a general term used by many rural sheriff departments when there is no actual crime on the books for the behavior they want to control, and besides, when a rural county jail has 800 cells to fill, a little creativity is, as they say, the mother of invention.
II
My bunkmate had finally been released after about 22 months of confinement. Like most detainees in the county jail, he waited around for trial well past a year and finally gave up, pleaded out, and left with time served. I was lying on my bunk reading a John Grisham novel during my own 21st month when the familiar clatter of unlocking mechanisms forced my head to tilt towards my cell door.
A large-beaked creature’s head popped in, then the rest of his body was stuffed into the six-by-eight cell by a pile of cussing deputies. The beak smiled at me when it said in heavily accented English, “Luckily, I’m quite flexible.” Also, luckily, our ceiling soared high above, as he was able to sit down with his legs bent or folded over several times. He filled up the cell, of course, but I was in a lousy position to complain.
“I am not quite sure why I’m here,” said the thing with the beak. He looked like the creature we had been seeing on the news, but most of us only caught glimpses of him before somebody changed the channel to watch jail porn such as “Naked and Afraid.”
“Either do I,” I responded, picking a ramen noodle out of my teeth with a fingernail badly needing a trim.
“I would not expect you to know why I’m here, my friend,” the beak replied.
“No. I mean, I don’t know why I’m here either.”
“I see.” He tried to look around but had difficulty.
“No oranges that fit you?” I asked.
“Oranges?”
I pointed to my orange jumpsuit.
“Oh. Well, my people don’t wear clothes.”
“Huh.” There was an awkward pause, so I asked, “Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Ipshlghachtfustsitlamanchfidlepstiefflshgrrgretryiuyplamitntkyilwrpeelmfedelminestein.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Is there a shorter word for that? Like, Ipswich or something?”
“If you like,” he said, continuing his efforts to crane his neck to view his surroundings.
“Since when do these people respect culture?” I asked him.
“I’m sorry. I don’t quite understand your meaning.”
“Well, they make everyone wear the fancy orange uniforms. But not you? Is it a cultural thing? Or can they just not find a size that fits you?” It irked me that he didn’t have to wear the orange jumpsuit.
The beak didn’t answer. He asked, “What is this place?”
“Officially?” I asked.
“Well, I suppose officially.”
“Officially, it is a form of hell on earth. It is very possible that since you have found yourself here, you died and are in hell. You may want to ask yourself what you did in your prior lifetime to deserve this.”
“Oh, there is no hell, my friend,” he said. “At least, not for our people.”
I laughed. Snickered, actually. It was a snicker. “Oh no? Then explain your current circumstance.” I expected a long wait.
“Well, this appears to be a form of confinement by your species, so I suspect there is a misunderstanding.”
I laughed again. Snickered. “Well, this place is all about misunderstandings. In fact, there are about 800 misunderstandings here.” I wanted to spit a hocker into the steel toilet, but he was blocking my view.
“I see. Are you suggesting that if I request to leave, my request will be denied?”
I shrugged, wanting to get back to my Grisham novel. “See what the magistrate says. Maybe you can bond out.”
He was perplexed by the entire concept of a bond, even after I explained it to him several times. It was clear that not only did he have no money, but that he didn’t know what money was.
“You are trying to tell me, I believe, that I cannot leave this place without this money you refer to.”
“Bingo.”
“Bingo. That is a game played by the elderly of your kind?”
I was only able to respond with a blank stare, although I was slightly impressed that he knew this. For some reason, the dichotomy of his knowing about bingo and not bail bonds didn’t register with me.
“May I inquire,” he continued, “and forgive me if I sound rude, but may I inquire about the relationship between bingo and these bonds you are describing so helpfully to me?”
“Look, buddy, no offense, but I don’t really have time to give you lessons on all the nuances of the English language.” I had all the time in the world, but I wanted to get back to Grisham.
I knew, though, that without a bond, he’d be here for a very long time. He had already begun the transition from looking rather stately in his feathery countenance to looking a bit peaked. I began to feel bad for the guy, so I explained the next step, which was to meet with a court-appointed attorney so that he could set up a plea bargain with the fine folks in the prosecutor’s office. “But they’ll keep you in here awhile so they can make sure you do some time,” I added. Then I had to explain what “doing time” meant.
“Based on admittedly limited observation, the conditions here appear worse than the zoos on your planet. Are your planet’s non-sentient criminals afforded slightly better accommodations on account of their non-sentience?”
Answering that wasn’t going to be simple. “Well, there really is no such thing as a criminal, umm, animal,” I tried.
“But they are in cages,” was his obvious reply.
“For observation,” I tried again.
“Perhaps I could be considered one of these animals. It would be a small upgrade in my accommodations.”
“You’ll have to lawyer up for that, too,” I replied.
“This court-appointed legal individual will not accomplish that for me?”
“Fraid not. Their job is to make a deal with the prosecution on how much time you do.”
“I see. Very well.” I should have been disappointed in his easy capitulation, but it was routine for this place.
To borrow a word I’ve already used, we bonded, Mendez and I, then won every pickup basketball game we played for the next 13 months.
Finally, I guess Mendez had had enough. “Let’s bust outta this joint,” he declared in an accent he had acquired that sounded like a cross between Aryan Nation and South Central, for he had forged alliances during his stay with both factions of his incarcerated brethren.
Busting out was easy because he was not only forty feet tall, but also very strong.
He simply tore off one door after another.
“Why didn’t you tell me this would be so easy?” he complained as we stepped into the fresh air.
“I needed you for the pickup games,” I said. “What if you left without me?”
“Fair,” he said with stoic understatement.
With some difficulty, I climbed aboard one of his shoulders as alarms surrounded the gated facility from which we emerged. It seemed only minutes later that we were at his former dining spot in the Georgia woods.
We partied in the thick forest for days.
“Don’t tell anyone about these roots,” Mendez said as he unfurled some from their twisty origins. “Everyone will come here and ruin the place.”
“It’s our secret,” I promised before the roots launched my mind into a hallucinatory storybook.
I learned many things from Mendez during the next few months, things that would make you rich and powerful were I to share them.
You won’t learn what they are because Mendez announced, as a set of drones flew overhead, that it was time to go home.
“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” he said. “I arrived here bearing so many gifts, but your people never inquired about what I might offer them. No inquisitiveness about what great endowments a species capable of interstellar flight might extend to the primitive inhabitants of a beautiful planet.”
I was sitting on his shoulder during that moment, thinking how we would have simply fought over his gifts. I told him so.
“I assume that the scars humans leave behind will firmly establish themselves, like the Sea of Tranquility or Tycho Crater on your moon, like the gashes of Mars, until the wild volunteer blue bonnets and purple coneflowers and the coreopsis and the blue-eyed grasses cover the Malthusian graves of your species as the decades beyond your term here on Earth open themselves to the next dominant species, a more deserving one, I hope.”
He was silent for a moment before his voice broke through the buzz of the approaching drones. “Would you like to visit our fine planet?” he asked. “It’s a busy place, full of chattering hordes.”
“I would,” I said, not caring about a return date.
A vast plumage erupted from his body.
I held onto Mendez. I held onto him for dear life, such that if you’ve ever seen a lock of hair flying in the wind, and I know you have, attached to something you barely know, that was me, holding onto Mendez as we flew away, to a place I could not imagine.
Thank you for reading!
There’s way too much great content here to even try to comment on it all, but
“Not even the satisfaction of witnessing a mortally wounded Tom Cruise gurgling under his Malibu Beach home”. - Oh please let this be true. Tell our out of space friends to “Take Tom First”.
A naked alien in the Oregon forests? Except for the forty foot height, most would have thought it was another one of us aging hippies. The feathers in the hair (if s/he had any) no exception. We all go naked in the forest.
ET phone home