Men Are From Mars,
|
Part 1 appears in this issue. |
| conclusion |
Our hero adjusts his pants — the device is incredibly small, but he now realizes that he wore the wrong underwear for the occasion. He points over to the cappuccino that he’s been staring at. “That is exactly what I want,” he says.
One flaw with the Earthlings’ plan to blow up this JoLan with a neutron bomb is that our hero has about as much interest in saving mankind as does this JoLan.
“Oh yes,” the monkey says, “the cappuccino is for you.”
On the way to the counter, our hero is surprised at how unfrightened he is by this meeting. But it’s not courage as much as apathy. In his time, our hero has advised four presidents, three chancellors, two planetary rulers, and one extremely controversial urologist.
His resume is brilliant but his heart is cold. Since he saw his father leave his mother alone with three kids and absolutely nothing other than a collection of useless stamps from our ancient First Civil War, our hero has been skeptical of the heart. It has left him as cold as the gases of Uranus.
So now our hero walks over to get his cappuccino, which he has been dreaming about for hours, for days — it seems like his whole life — and he comes back to sit with his monkey friend. But as he walks back, he notices that one tile on the floor is missing and the hole in the floor goes straight through to the gaseous mass of Uranus.
“Stay clear of the hole,” the monkey says without looking back. And for a minute, our hero thinks of jumping in.
In real life, our hero dreams of having such a detached coldness. Because in real life, our hero cares about every little detail. In real life, when our hero’s wife arrives at the coffee shop, our hero says, “I missed you so much,” because she left the house a month prior.
She left him because she got tired of him, because who wouldn’t get tired of a man in his underwear who does nothing other than fail to write a novel? In real life, after the hero’s wife gives our hero a good, long stare, she sits down next to him and says, “This better be quick.”
But our sci-fi hero doesn’t long for or beg from anyone. He sits down at that table, next to a flea-eating alien and sips on his triple-shot cappuccino as if it is the only thing in the solar system that he wants.
“Did you know,” the monkey says, “that Brando improvised that scene with Eva Marie Saint?”
“What?” our hero says.
“On the Waterfront,” the JoLan says, disappointed again with our species. “The scene where he picks up her glove and tries it on. That was Brando’s improvised work.”
“Ahh,” our hero says, more interested in the coffee than a two-hundred year old movie.
“Do you know why I wanted to see you?” the JoLan says.
Our hero keeps sipping his cappuccino. He looks up at the monkey and wonders how much longer he has left to enjoy this drink.
“It’s because you just don’t care,” the monkey says. “You are unusual to your species in this way. You don’t care to save your people, your planet, or yourself. In twenty minutes, I will think your solar system into smithereens and you don’t give the ass of a rat.”
Our hero’s stomach starts grumbling in a crampy way and he knows he’ll have to go to the bathroom soon. Maybe it’s good, he decides, that he’ll be blown up before he has to confront this potentially troubling bowel movement.
“But since you are not driven by fear or longing,” the monkey continues, “you also have the freedom to choose what you want in any situation.”
“If you can see through time and space,” our hero says, “then why did you bother with us?” The cappuccino is strong, a little too strong, and he can already feel the agitation. “I don’t trust my species and I’m one of them.”
“We saw this coming,” the JoLan says. “But we still got what we wanted.” He takes a deep breath. “Would you like a scone before you finish that drink?”
So this is it, our hero realizes. This will be his last drink. This will be the last time he eats a scone and has to think: Boy, scones taste like dried cardboard.
In real life, our hero can’t get food properly through his system. All he thinks about is getting his wife back. Some days, he’s convinced that he is too sensitive for the world. Even though his parents were loving to him, he still walks the earth as if he is carrying a terrible burden and he doesn’t know why this is true.
He has kissed every single goddamn photograph of his wife in the house. He hasn’t just kissed them, he has licked every one of them, front, back, sides, and corners. And for this, he has paper cuts all over his tongue. This man is nothing if not paralyzing melodrama. But in the science fiction story, when asked what should be done with the species, our hero says without a lick of melodrama, “Burn the whole lot of us to the ground.”
As much as our science fiction hero hated his father for leaving, he still kept his collection of stamps. This is worth noting. He isn’t melodramatic on the surface, but he has carried these fifteen VacuSealed books from apartment to apartment, from city to city, from country to country, as if the stamp collection were a burden important for him to carry. These stupid stamp books that he’s never even opened to look at.
Maybe he carries these fifteen books to remember how he hates mankind, or maybe he carries them to remember that even with all our unforgivable flaws, there is still something that we can’t help but carry with us.
Our hero finishes his coffee. He chews up his scone so that nothing is left but a pile of crumbs on the table. “So what did you want from us?” our hero asks.
The JoLan picks at the crumbs on the table and eats them. “The formula to free will.”
Dammit, our hero, thinks. He doesn’t want a goddamn philosophy speech as his last conversation. A stomach ache and a discussion about free will are not on his wish list. What he wants is another drink.
“I’ve refilled your cup,” the monkey says, and our hero looks down to see that the cup is refilled. This pleases our hero so much that he is willing to listen to a little more philosophical manure.
“Your species,” the monkey continues, “actually chooses at any given moment what they want to do. They improvise,” the monkey says.
“The sad thing is that 999 times out of a thousand, they do what we predict they will do, and they do it because of fear.” The monkey shakes his head as if this were a new disappointment. “Your species isn’t as interesting as we had hoped, but we will still learn from what we have acquired.”
Our hero is skeptical that anyone could learn from watching Brando pick up a glove, even though he’ll admit it was a charming scene.
“So are y’all any better than us?” our hero says, a little less impressed with this brilliant monkey.
“No,” the monkey says and he checks his watch. Our hero realizes that the JoLan story is long and complex and there is no time to recount it today.
“I guess it’s time,” our hero says.
“Yes,” the monkey says. “It’s time.”
Our hero laughs, thinking about how hopeful all those Earthlings were that our hero could save them. That silly scheme with the neutron bomb. In a way, our hero is disappointed — he had hoped that this meeting would inspire something different in him. Inspire anything in him.
Just then a song starts playing. It isn’t screeching like before. It’s a regular song. In fact, it is a song that his mother used to sing to him when he was a child. Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. It was the song he was humming earlier. How much he misses his mother and her soothing raindrop voice.
“Ahh,” the monkey says. “They fixed it. We wanted to play something that would make you feel sentimental during these last moments of life for your species. This song is playing all across Earth in your honor.”
The song gives our hero a strange feeling inside of himself. It is a feeling he hasn’t remembered feeling for a long time. He wants to cry. Not because he is sad. But because he just wants to cry.
“We have always liked you,” the JoLan says, “and we wanted to make you more comfortable in these last few seconds than the stinky mess of your species.”
Although our hero isn’t impressed with his own species, he doesn’t often think of them as stinky. It is the JoLan species that stinks. In fact, they smell like the ass of a rat if you get in close enough. Which he tries not to do often. He considers telling his companion a few of the famous “Smelly JoLan” jokes that humans tell, but then thinks again.
The JoLan takes a moment to smell his own chest and shoulders and armpits and then looks at our hero again.
“We even thought,” the JoLan continues, “to bring your father back to life, so that you could enjoy watching him suffer one last time. But we decided that that would be too ghoulish.”
In real life, our hero doesn’t get quite this much respect from his coffee shop companion. In real life, our hero’s wife tells our hero to stop weeping. In real life, our hero is on his knees begging — until his wife walks out of the café.
The meeting is over within five minutes and our hero is left alone again. He feels like a giant meteor has blown straight through his heart and lungs. But unfortunately, the real-life solar system is not in the least bit of danger.
In the science fiction story, at the sound of his father’s name alongside his mother’s song, our hero is filled with a rage for this JoLan creature. He feels a lifetime of anger bubbling over. He hates this creature for trying to evoke a feeling inside of him. He is particularly offended that this creature would suggest that it knows how our hero feels about his own father. That our hero would want his own father to suffer more, regardless of what he has done in the past.
Just then, the monkey sits more erect. He makes a gesture as if he smells something bad. He takes a few more sniffs. The air is still wrong. “This can’t be,” the monkey says with a surprise our hero has never seen in a JoLan before.
Even though the JoLans can perform actions just by thought, even though the JoLans can perform in a fraction of a second what would take us humans years to perform, even though this JoLan creature could simply destroy our hero the second he realizes our hero’s change in heart, the JoLan leaps for our hero in the same clumsy way that an Earth mammal leaps for another Earth mammal when feeling threatened.
When the monkey clutches onto our hero, our hero still has the wherewithal to say, “Take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape!” and he feels a childlike pleasure in getting to say such a line from such a film.
And then, our hero lets out a stream of hot, caffeine-induced urine from his penis, setting off the explosive device that blows up our hero, the JoLan, and the entire planet of Uranus.
The plan, strangely enough, is executed exactly as the Earth leaders have planned it.
In real life, our hero doesn’t get the opportunity to save the solar system. He walks home from the coffee shop with a horrible burning in his chest. But even though his wife is all but finished with him, he is somehow glad that he still loves his wife. He even considers writing a story about his wife and her beautiful giggle. For a moment, he is glad to be able to have such emotions even though on some days it feels like he carries the burden of his whole species in his chest.
The book isn’t closed for our hero. And even though he doesn’t know how to save his own marriage, he believes it is this tremendous emotion inside of him that allows our science fiction hero to save the solar system — other than poor Uranus.
Before our science fiction hero disintegrates at the center of a 400 gigaton explosion, his last thought is this: I wish I had opened even one of those stamp books before it was too late.
Copyright © 2009 by Yuvi Zalkow
