for Erin Fitzgerald
The little three fingered hand seemed complete. It was meant to be three fingered. Not mutilated or deformed, it appeared natural, albeit on its own little gray terms. But then David, an actor, was hardly an expert on biology or evolution. He was not an expert at anything except fitness and the constant need to manage existential moments. Whereas we might say it was like a movie to describe occurrences better remembered than experienced, David could not afford to play fast and loose with his various realities.
And he was a pretty good actor. But he had one hit show and he was type cast forever, a problem complicated by the need to live well. And now he was looking at an inhuman hand, a gentle dead thing, slipped out from under a tarp on a shelf inside a dusty metal hut in New Mexico. Another cliché. This whole place was a cliché.
Which was why he was here at all, to prepare for the cliché. To prepare to make an ass out of himself in another dumb movie. There were, David knew, original stories to tell, but no one wanted to hear them. So here he was, roaming around an abandoned military facility in the desert. His job, in essence, was to pretend something interesting had happened here once upon a time, even though it never had. Pretending is confusing and painful, especially if you can no longer afford to pretend for pleasure's sake.
The Army PR flak had promised there was nothing to see. Knock yourself out, Dave, pretty much sneering at his professionalism. But then he walked into this shadowed hut, wincing from the particulate-heavy air as sweat skated down his handsome back and across his handsome ribs. And of course, there were rows and rows of shelves, and piles of lumpy tarps all the way up to the curved corrugated ceiling of the hut.
Why would they say there was nothing when there was obviously something? As practical jokes go, this was very good, very expensive. But then he touched the little gray hand and squeezed it.
It crumbled. Shards of bone, flakes of skin like heavy paper, failing and breaking into pieces. A nub-a wrist bone?-left behind. David whooped, jumped back, but he still got alien dust all over his cargo shorts, collecting especially along the rumpled slope of his famous crotch.
The Private who had driven him out and a web reporter from VOA rushed into the hut. By that time, David had peeled back the tarp, as well as a couple of others, to reveal the mold colored bodies of beings that looked like adult sized, bloodless fetuses.
Frantic, David looked to his Army escorts for an explanation. And they looked to him for the same damn thing. As fans, they were accustomed to seeing the actor in such circumstances. There was a long pause, followed by screaming, followed by a series of interrogations.
Later, David tried to tell us about it, tried to alert the public, but his efforts were characterized as behavior chalked up to a life based on fantasy and indulgence. He became a punch line and checked himself into rehab. "Never to be seen again," except that he landed a series on premium cable.
Eventually the Army came clean. Their candor shocked us, and no one remembered to apologize to the actor. There were no aliens back in 47. But there were now, and no one knew why. Rows upon rows of bodies. More to the point, these bodies yielded no real surprises once we started taking them apart. That is, every detail of the alien corpse physiognomy had already been imagined and described, by scientists, artists, writers, etc. It was all very exciting, but ultimately, we learned nothing.
Which is what clicked it. The revelation came in our half-drunk dreams: Someone made those fuckers. The bodies were definitely manufactured. Hundreds of copies of an all too generalized ideal. The aliens didn't come from anywhere. They couldn't tell us anything we didn't already know. They were the perfect ambassadors of our limits.