“What’s the joke?”
I moved past her to the fridge.
“No joke,” says I. “The thing jumped into our boat off Fishers Island and then followed me home.”
When the “thing” rolled four feet to stay closer to me, Lita took a step back away from it. She followed it with her eyes, still not decided whether to laugh or scream or start yelling at me to get the damn thing out of her kitchen. She was a lawyer once, so she’s careful not to make quick decisions.
“What is it?” she finally asked.
I took a beer out of the fridge, popped it open, and looked down at the thing.
“Beats me.”
She looked at me, then the thing, and then went back to her frying pan.
“Well, until you figure out what it is, keep it in the basement.”
I nodded. Lita always has been the practical one.
* * *
Actually I’d converted a small part of the dark, damp basement into a sort of rec room for the kids, putting in a couple of windows, a plywood floor covered with wall-to-wall carpeting whose color had originally been an off-white but was now, after a decade of kid use, closer to an off-brown. When I got to the bottom of the steep stairs, the thing bouncing behind me, Lucas was at his computer and Jimmy was feeding his goldfish. Lucas is almost twelve and the serious sort, always reading books and wanting to chat about ecology and karma and things that I sometimes have to look up to find out what he’s talking about. Jimmy’s only eight and is all imagination and impulse. Thinks his brother is dull.
Lucas is built pretty much like me: wide shoulders, strong upper body, a mop of wild, dark hair. His skin is even darker than Lita’s, having a lot of Hispanic genes from Lita’s mom’s Cuban side of the family. Except for coloring, Jimmy’s more like his mom, small, lithe, and cute. Jimmy’s a little darker than me, but not much. So Lucas is the only family member who occasionally gets called “nigger” or “wetback.”
After they’d greeted me with “Hi, Dad” they noticed the hairy ball. At first they were both amazed, especially when it bounced up onto the back of the settee.
“What is it, Dad?” Lucas asks.
“It’s some sort of newfangled pet I picked up today at a tag sale,” says I. Since they were used to my saying things that had no particular relation to reality, neither of the boys believed this for a second. They just stared at it up there on the back of the settee.
“It looks yucky,” says Lucas.
But then the thing rolled off the back of the couch onto the cushions and then to the floor and finally up close to Jimmy. The kid stood his ground. The thing stopped right up against his legs and, after only a brief pause, Jimmy reached down and petted it. Gotta hand it to the kid: he was a lot cooler about it than I’d been.
Well, in the next few minutes something happened that changed our lives forever. Damned if it didn’t turn out both our kids liked the thing. Within minutes of my bringing it down to the rec room, they were acting as if it was a toy. They played with it like with a puppy, the thing rolling and bouncing as they chased it, the boys laughing away until, after ten minutes, they began to get frustrated. The next thing I knew—I’d been sitting at the foot of the basement stairs watching all this—the thing abruptly let itself be captured and rested without fuss in the arms of Jimmy, as Lucas patted and petted it. I think it was then that I realized that this thing might be pretty smart.
When the boys got tired of playing with the “Funny Fish” as they called it, Lucas went back to his computer and Jimmy turned on the TV to watch some documentary about seals in the Antarctic. For reasons I suppose I’ll have to get into later, Carlita didn’t let the kids watch much regular television, so for Jimmy and Lucas, documentaries were their sitcoms and thrillers. The Funny Fish sat on the sofa next to Jimmy and seemed to be “watching” too—although how a creature watched with no eyes, I hadn’t figured out. But I felt the thing was no threat to the kids, so I clomped back up the stairs to have some supper.
* * *
In the den that first night after the boys had been sent to bed, I sat on the couch with the thing watching some boring TV program about the benefits of nuclear energy, when I decided it was time to try to find a few answers.
“Mind if I touch you?” says I, knowing that the thing had no ears that I could see but figuring he must be absorbing info from some source in his hairy body.
Naturally the thing didn’t answer.
So I slowly reached out with my right hand and touched it with my four fingers. The hair was very soft and fine, and there seemed to be more hairs per square inch than on any animal I’d ever seen or felt. The hairs were only about a half-inch long.
I pressed my hand against the thing a little harder and damned if my hand didn’t sink into its body as if it were made of tapioca pudding—hairy tapioca pudding—something soft that partially swallowed up my hand when I pressed it in.
I had thought the thing would be hard, so this softness was a bit unnerving. Still, I didn’t say anything but pressed my hand in further. The next thing I knew my whole right arm was buried right up to the armpit. Scared the bejesus out of me—thought I was going to be the first human eaten by a beach ball. I tried to pull my arm out, but the thing seemed to have me in an iron grip. I stood up and the thing lifted off the couch still wrapped around my arm. It had lost its beach-ball shape and was now a sort of oval, about three foot long, with more than half of its body wrapped around my arm. It felt like a furry, eyeless alligator was swallowing my limb—no pain but the whole arm felt squeezed.
I wanted to scream and shake my arm and run the hell out of there, but screaming and running is not cool, and running is something that at my age I try to avoid, so I just stood there and let my arm and the thing fall to my side.
Then this “Funny Fish” let go of my arm and, resuming a spherical shape, bounced twice away from me, then up against the brick façade above the fireplace, then back to the floor and then off the opposite wall and then, before I’d absorbed much of any of this, back to wrap itself again around my arm exactly as before.
I plopped back down on the couch and laughed. This thing was a real card. What it seemed to be telling me was “Hey, old man, don’t worry about my grabbing your arm ’cause it doesn’t mean any more than my bouncing off walls. It’s just one of the fun things I can do.”
Next, the thing let go of my arm and again became a beach ball sitting on the couch beside me watching television. After a few seconds I reached out and put my arm around it the way I’d seen the kids do once or twice. Damned if the thing didn’t snuggle closer to me.
I just sat there for about half a minute and then gave it a little squeeze.
“Louie,” says I, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
I hoped Louie would laugh, but I guess he’d never seen Casablanca, so my joke went right past him.
Which is where most of my jokes go.
* * *
The boys called the thing “FF” for “Funny Fish,” and my wife called it, “that interesting something,” and me, I didn’t call it anything at first but began to think of it as “Louie.” I knew it wasn’t a fish and was a lot more than a beach ball, and a lot more than anything I’d ever known. I would have thought it was a creature from outer space, but they all had big ping-pong-ball eyes and big heads and skinny arms and legs, and didn’t look at all like Louie.
It watched television most of the first day in the house—my wife even let him watch the junk TV on the networks—but late in the evening of the second day I caught it reading Penthouse. I was a bit surprised and disappointed and wondered how he planned to get his end into one of those sexy gals when he didn’t have any end to get in with, but a couple of hours later I found him reading one of the volumes of an old encyclopedia set we had down there. And later I caught him leafing through an old Progressive Magazine Lita had left lying around.
I say “reading” but of course what I actually saw was the thin
g on the couch, the magazine or book lying in front of it, and every couple of seconds it somehow configured its belly into a limb which reached out to turn a page. Then another.
I wasn’t scheduled to take the boat out again until the following week so had a lot of free time, but it wasn’t until noon the next day that I figured maybe I ought to Google this strange creature.
You might wonder what an old geezer is doing knowing anything about Googling, but that’s the advantage both of marrying a young wife who’s brainy and educated, and having two kids in the house. Both my boys can Google circles around me, but still I think I’m pretty good for someone who wasn’t brought up suckling on an iMac, didn’t have a computer in my teens to watch porno, don’t use one in my business to do spreadsheets, and don’t have an iPhone or iPad attached permanently to my hand so I can communicate with anyone in the universe whenever I get an impulse.
So I went into my study (our bedroom) and Googled “hairy beach ball.” Well, I’m proud to report that that request pretty much gagged Google. Top on its list was this:
“A larger woman’s hair-covered pubic area bulges outwards creating a spherical shape. Add the vaginal slit and that area looks like hairy wedges tha…”
You gotta hand it to Google: they’ll give you something even if it has nothing to do with what you said you wanted to look for. I browsed through a lot of irrelevant things like a “woman’s hair-covered pubic area” but didn’t get anything that had anything to do with FF. They came up with a lot of links that wanted to discuss “hairy balls” but that was a subject that didn’t catch my fancy so I moved on.
I tried: “round hairy fish”—although I was pretty sure Louie was no fish.
Google struck out again. There was one link to a site that said “avoid hairy fish” that I thought I ought to check out, but it didn’t really tell me why I should avoid hairy fish.
So I began to retreat and Googled “strange-shaped fish.” No big hairy round fish. Got a nice picture of a big blowfish that looked exactly like FF except it had eyes, a mouth, a tail, fins and no hair. And I bet it didn’t cuddle nice either.
So I figured that our creature was a one-off.
And I liked that.
I told Lita and the kids that I was pretty sure that our new friend wasn’t a fish so we couldn’t call him FF anymore. We agreed we couldn’t call him “beach ball” because that really didn’t capture what we knew about him or the way we were beginning to feel about him. My wife suggested we call him “the hairy computer,” but the boys still wanted to call him FF ’cause they were used to it, so I surrendered and told them FF could stand for other things besides “Funny Fish.” They asked for an example, and I says “Well, ‘Fat Friend,’” and Lita says “How about ‘Fun Friend,’” and Jimmy says “‘Fantastic Friend!’” which we all liked, and then Lucas suggests “How about ‘Fucking Funny Friend,’” but Jimmy pointed out that would mean FFF and be too big a mouthful.
We finally agreed that our new buddy was FF, which, depending on what mood we were in, could mean anything from “Fun Friend” to “Fucking Fascist,” to “Fierce Foreigner,” to “Furry Flip-flopper.” We came up with more than fifty possible meanings of FF before we got bored and realized we weren’t making much sense.
* * *
That night lying in bed with Carlita, I realized that both of us were wide awake, and sure enough, soon as I had that thought, Lita spoke up.
“I think FF is a lot smarter than he looks,” she says.
I looked over at her in the dim light and, thinking of how FF looked, we both laughed.
“I think FF is a very special being,” she says. “Really, it’s something of a miracle creature.”
“Yep,” says I.
“But I think it might be dangerous,” she says.
“Hasn’t been so far,” says I.
She was quiet for a bit and then says, “Not so far. But when I went down to pick up the kids’ dirty clothes, he was working the computer, and unless he was just randomly hitting buttons he was surfing that computer faster than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
“Yep.”
“I think he understands us much better than we understand him.”
“Yep.”
For a while the two of us stared up at the ceiling.
“I think it means trouble, Billy,” she finally says.
“Yep.”
And we turned to each other and went into a big hug.
TWO
(From THE OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE ALIEN INVASION, Volume 1, pp. 66–69)
(BEING AGENT MICHAEL JOHNSON’S INFORMAL NOTES ON THE FORMATION OF UNIT A.)
The National Security Agency didn’t develop a special unit to investigate alien terrorists until 2015. Were they asleep at the switch? I don’t think so. The idea that visitors from outer space might work secretly against the United States was not a common train of thought, so when the idea of a special unit to investigate such a possibility was first raised there was much healthy skepticism. But the desire to leave no stone unturned and no bureaucracy unexpanded in our War on Terror was too great. A unit was formed.
At first the primary task of the unit was to determine the right name for itself. This was three weeks before I was assigned to the unit, so I plead “not guilty” to all the wasted time. After two weeks they finally settled on a brilliant compromise: they named themselves Investigations Unit A.
Notice how much is achieved with this title: there is no mention of aliens. The “A” of the Investigations Unit would appear to be a simple letter to indicate primacy. Moreover, as the unit evolved, it became clear that their initial investigations were into anomalies: patterns, usually patterns involving violence that could not be explained by normal human activity and motivations. So the “A” could stand for anomalies and did so until the discovery of actual alien terrorists justified coming out of the closet.
Initially, Unit A combed the internet and worldwide media for stories that were so strange that the possibility of alien interference had to be considered. For a while they investigated all the reported abductions by aliens, interviewing many of the abductees to see if previous questioners had overlooked something.
In the first two years there were two “anomalies” that garnered our time and analysis. The first was the death of almost one hundred tribesmen in Bongulu, a remote village in the north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Since only three of the villagers had survived whatever had killed their kinsmen, the United Nations Health Organization sent a small team of specialists to investigate. The specialists were unable to determine what had killed the tribesmen. “Unknown causes” concluded the report. Now this particular tribe was not involved on any side in any civil war. The people had lived in peace and poverty for almost two centuries—since the last slavers had retired. They were Muslims, and thus unlikely to be the victims of ISIS terrorists or their brethren.
So the question naturally arises: could this be aliens trying out lethal methods on some obscure tribe in some obscure location in order not to attract attention to their experiments? Unit A looked into it. But found nothing.
The second anomaly occurred in Siberia. In a remote village in the Sredinny Hrebet Peninsula, a strange creature suddenly appeared in the village that neither the villagers nor anyone else could make head nor tail of. This creature was brought to the attention of the more civilized world when a Russian health worker went to the village on his semi-annual visit to see if he could improve public health. The villagers claimed that the creature continually changed shape, could form a ball and roll at fifty miles per hour, could stretch up like a giraffe and pick fruit from the tops of trees and seemed even to be able to read, although the villagers disagreed on this point. The creature seemed to love to play hide-and-seek, although neither the villagers nor the creature had ever heard of the game. In any case, when the health inspector went to see this strange being, it couldn’t be found. Or rather, it could be seen by a villager, but the moment he pointed it out to t
he health inspector, the being would disappear. He reported that once he saw a silver-gray beach ball roll very rapidly across the muddy street fifty feet away that the villagers claimed was the thing in question, but he believed they may have been trying to fool him by rolling a big muddy ball for him to see.
After three days of fruitless efforts to see the little bugger, a little bugger that the villagers, especially the children, seemed to see all the time, the health inspector had to leave. In his report on the village’s health he said the most serious new development was a bad case of mass hysteria, with group hallucinations uncommonly common.
His report was picked up by an enterprising reporter for the Ubiskitan Times and News Report Herald with a medium-sized headline reading: “Alien Being Visits Odipac.” The Investigations Unit A Google Sweep Team picked up this article and reported it to unit headquarters.
But nothing much came of our investigations until it was my good fortune to come upon a new development that was to make Investigations Unit A the biggest guy on the block in all of the NSA.
THREE
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 18–25)
Louie loved water. He hopped in a bathtub filled to the brim with cold water at least three times a day and just lay there underwater like a round gray rock. So Jimmy asked if he could take Louie for a walk through the woods to the sound. If there was no one on the lonely stretch of beach then Louie could go swimming to his heart’s content.
So Jimmy set out walking in the woods behind our house with Louie rolling along beside him. The woods run along the winery property line almost to the Long Island Sound, which is only a half mile away. The rich guy owned the woods but didn’t send in a SWAT team when me or the boys went hiking through it. Jimmy didn’t normally go to the sound without either me or Lucas because twice over the last year he’d run into two or three slightly older kids who liked to tease him and threaten to rough him up. Once when he was walking his Aunt Juanita’s dog, the bullies began to hit the dog with sticks, and when Jimmy tried to stop them, they began beating him up and sent him running full speed for home with their laughter trailing after him.