Boarding Instructions, page 3
“Morse code?”
“Hey! Maybe,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I wonder what I’m saying to whatever’s out in the back yard?”
“You don’t know Morse code?”
“No. Of course, I don’t know Morse code. Who knows Morse code these days?”
“As it happens,” I said, “I know Morse code. I did ham radio as a kid.”
“Of course, you did,” she said.
“Look,” I said. “Why don’t I go out in the back yard, and you do your flashlight routine, and I see if I can decode the dots and dashes and then tell you what you’re saying?”
“I’m not sure I want you to see me like that,” she said.
“Like that?”
“Tingly.”
Was she saying I’d never seen her all tingly before? I chose to think she didn’t mean that. She was talking about her flashlight and her alien and nothing more.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll be outside anyway.”
I let go of her hands and stood up.
A moment later, she got up, too. She put her hands on my shoulders and pulled me in for a quick hug, just a squeeze, really. There was a warm and dizzy smell of anticipation radiating from her.
“Okay.” She turned away and moved toward the refrigerator. My alien stepped aside for her, but that turned out to be unnecessary, because she was actually heading for the big flashlight on the counter between the kitchen sink and the refrigerator. It was the perfect spot for the flashlight if you wanted it to be always within easy reach of the window over the sink.
She grabbed the flashlight and stood at the sink with her back to me. If I expected some kind of sign that we should begin, she was not the one to provide it. She just waited for me to make the next move.
So I moved to the back door and opened it and stepped out on to the porch, or maybe you’d call it a stoop. It was somewhere in between because while it was covered and you could stand there without getting wet in the rain, it wasn’t big enough to lounge around in a lawn chair drinking lemonade.
Evangeline had a generous back yard with a tall wooden fence at the back and five big trees scattered about. Tonight they were hulking shadows, but I already knew they were two apple trees, a pear tree, and a couple of nut trees. I also knew just where the badminton net was, because one night I’d run right into it like a fly into a spider web. A swing made out of a tire hung from one of the nut trees.
I could see the broken trampoline. I remembered when it broke, and Evangeline tumbled off onto the ground and hurt her shoulder. She never did get the trampoline fixed after that. Whenever I mentioned it, she’d say, “And it was such good exercise!” She was permanently spooked when it came to bouncing on a trampoline.
I positioned myself to one side of the trampoline so I would be directly in front of the kitchen window, not so close I’d be blinded by Evangeline’s light, but not so far she couldn’t hear me if I had things to shout to her.
And there she was peering through the window. I was pretty sure she couldn’t see me, but I waved anyway. She just kept peering.
“Go ahead,” I shouted. “I’m ready.”
She pulled back and then a moment later appeared again with the flashlight. Nothing else happened for a long time. She just stood there pointing the flashlight out at me. I thought maybe she’d forgotten what we were up to, and I was about to shout again when she made her first flash. Just one flash and then nothing. I had no way of knowing if that first one was a dot or a dash until I had others for comparison.
A few moments passed and then there was a series of flashes.
Short short short long.
Dot dot dot dash.
The letter V?
Would she spell my name?
No. She sent the same series again, but this time aimed a little to the left. Short short short long. Then she did it again only aimed a little to the right, and it hit me she was doing the opening notes of Beethoven’s fifth symphony.
Ba ba ba Boom!
The oddly named “Fate motive.”
She grabbed the theme and ran with it, and I got lost. I couldn’t tell if she was sending letters or just playing the music. Horn calls and modulating bridges. A musical statement of purpose I could not interpret. The flashlight beam played all over the back yard in a frenzy pulling the trees and swing and oh look a birdbath in the rock garden from the darkness and then abandoning them. The trampoline. The badminton net with birds (surely not real birds) stuck into it like notes on a staff.
C minor wrestled with C major until one of them came out on top victorious.
It was glorious.
The flashlight flickered out and there was a deep quiet in the darkness.
Then she directed the beam at my face and began sending slowly, as if she were making an extreme effort to communicate with someone who could not keep up with her.
“Evangeline doesn’t realize I’m talking to you,” she signaled.
It was true she didn’t even seem to be paying attention to what was happening out the window. Her eyes were closed and she was swaying slowly from side to side. There was a dreamy smile on her face.
“Who are you?” I shouted.
“Evangeline’s alien, of course,” she signaled.
But why would Evangeline’s alien be talking to me? Did this mean my alien was collaborating? Was there some kind of joint experiment going on with Evangeline and me?
“What do you want?” I shouted.
“I want to know you,” Evangeline’s alien signaled. “I want you to come clean with me, tell me who you are, spill your guts, tell me what you’re feeling.”
“I feel watched,” I shouted. “Everything I do is being recorded by aliens!”
“No,” she signaled. “How do you feel about Evangeline?”
Hey, wait a minute!
I took a few steps closer to get a better look at her. But it was easy to see she was somewhere else. Besides which it was too much to believe that Evangeline had learned Morse code for this occasion. How would she know the evening would progress to this point? No, I knew I could be mistaken, but I was pretty sure I really was talking to her alien. Or at least some alien. I suddenly suspected this could all be a trick of my own alien.
“How would I know how I feel about her?” This question was designed to confuse my alien. I hoped he was flipping through his notes trying to figure out if humans are supposed to be able to know how they feel about one another.
In point of fact, however, maybe I didn’t know how I felt. No, that wasn’t quite right. I did know how I felt, but I couldn’t put it into words.
“Come on,” Evangeline’s alien signaled. “Quit stalling. Cough it up. Step up to the plate. Blurt it out!”
“This is too much pressure!” I shouted.
“Oh, never mind,” she signaled.
The flashlight went dead.
It suddenly hit me that whatever was going on here might have nothing to do with the aliens and their worldwide science projects. I saw clearly that this could be the most important turning point in my life.
“Wait!” I shouted. “I’m crazy about her! She’s a symphony, all lightening and thunder and wind, but then she’s warm rain and flowers blooming and birds singing! I can’t go more than a few minutes without thinking about her, and I can’t stop smiling while I’m thinking about her, but then I feel afraid that she’ll suddenly snap out of it and come to her senses and realize she doesn’t even like me. I’m afraid she’ll tell me to just go away.”
The flashlight came on again.
Ba ba ba boom!
“Okay,” she signaled. “You can come back in.”
The Wages of Syntax
1
Brainstorming
Shoot him.
Poison him.
Feed him to the alligators. Tie him up first. Make sure the alligators are really really hungry. Don’t feed them for weeks. Wait until they’re so hungry you’ve got to poke them back into their scummy concrete pond with a big stick.
Smother him.
Run over him with your car, and if you get caught, claim it was an accident. Be distraught. Cry real tears. My god, my god.
Burn the house down.
Sneak into his bathroom and toss a radio into his bath water. But everyone takes showers these days. Okay, so you search high and low for the perfect rubber ducky, palm-sized and yellow and so cute he’ll carry it around in a small brown paper bag so he can look at it now and then and run his fingers down its rubbery sides and pull down its cute little beak just to watch it flip up again, so cute no one could resist running a tub of water and floating the little guy between his knees and making big waves so the duckster wobbles and bobs up and down like crazy.
So he’s smiling and splashing and the rubber ducky is bobbing and riding the waves and you walk in and he says what the hell are you doing here and his blue eyes go wide with fright and you see he hasn’t shaved before he got in the tub and you notice that he’s getting a spare tire and him not even fifty, disgusting, and you say don’t get up! and you plug in the radio and tune in some big band music and then you toss the radio in and fissst! Wait. You might need to put pennies under the fuses before you go in with the radio. Okay, do you take the duck with you after he’s dead? Well, it’s a pretty neat duck, and you’d hate to be without it, and it could be evidence. Okay, so you take the duck with you being very very careful not to make it squeak as you steal into the night and disappear like a shadow.
Or maybe get the colonel to clobber him in the old mill house with a wrench.
Drop something on him from a tall building. Maybe a safe. Or a piano.
Sabotage his brakes.
Make up a story and get him in trouble with the mob.
Stifle him with gas. Fill a room with nitrogen by letting it boil off from dozens of Thermos bottles. So how do you get him to stay in the room? And how do you get all the Thermos bottles open? And how do you get enough Thermos bottles in the first place? Okay, so you go to this big discount store and you buy up the entire supply of school lunch boxes, telling the sales guy that you’re with this lunch for kids program and then you just throw the lunch boxes away, pick a dumpster far far away because it will look like a cartoon massacre, and keep the Thermos bottles.
Now how do you get the liquid nitrogen? Okay, so you cozy up to the guy, no, make that a woman, you cozy up to this chick who runs the liquid nitrogen place and every night you go over there with this big Thermos full of Daiquiris or Rob Roys or whatever it is you discover by asking all her friends that she likes to drink and you spend the evening pouring this favorite drink of hers and after she’s feeling no pain you fill the now empty Thermos up with liquid nitrogen and get on out of there only to come back the next night with a fresh Thermos.
So okay, you have all these Thermos bottles filled with liquid nitrogen, and you get a room and seal up all the really gross cracks; it won’t have to be absolutely tight, and you artfully arrange the bottles around the room, and you send him an invitation that says come experience the interactive art of this really famous artist whose name you can look up later and when he gets there, he reads the instructions that tell him he’s going on a journey around the room and that at each landmark he is to open one of the Thermos bottles and then move on to the next one following the lines you’ve drawn on the floor, and the lines go round and round and that’s what he thinks is making him dizzy and at the very end you have this painting by the famous artist whose name you will look up later and the final note which says sit right down here in this chair provided for that purpose and contemplate this famous painting and he does and he gets lost in the painting thinking that explains his wooziness and that as they say is that.
Toss him a grenade, and yell, hey catch!
Hit him behind the left ear with a blunt object.
Strangle him.
Mail him an exploding cigar. But he doesn’t smoke! So you hang out in front of the hospital and you have these cigars and he’s walking down the street and you run up to him and shout it’s a boy! and hand him a cigar and he puts it in his mouth and you light it and shout gotta run! and run and when you get around the corner you slow down and look casual, act cool, as the explosion rocks and rolls the sidewalk and the buildings around you.
Sneak up behind him and garrote him.
The guillotine.
A staple gun.
A cross bow.
A blowgun.
An ax.
A chain saw.
A rattlesnake.
Booby traps.
Ninja stars.
2
Spontaneous Competence
Henry Wolfe stopped joking with his classes that he couldn’t be killed until he learned Italian the day it hit him that someone might really be trying to do him in. On the way to class one day last week, just outside his office on the steps in the stairwell he always took down to the ground floor — he never used the elevator in Building 17 — there had been a roller skate placed where he would be sure to step on it. Whoever had put it there must have watched the way he walked to the left so he could lightly touch the handrail. He’d been doing that since his sight began to noticeably deteriorate due to macular degeneration, and him only in his forties — it was like the universe had it in for his eyes. He hadn’t told anyone he couldn’t see much these days. He didn’t want people to start thinking of him as the blind guy.
It had been a close call. Just before he put his foot down on the skate, he remembered that he had forgotten a book in his office, and he had turned back, but then he’d decided it didn’t matter, and he’d turned again to go on down, and all that turning had positioned him more toward the center of the stairs. His foot came down beside the skate instead of on top of it. He bumped the skate with his foot and leaned down and picked it up. He sat down on the stairs and turned the skate over and over in his hands. He moved it in close to his face and then held it at arm’s length trying to see it clearly. Where would anyone get a roller skate these days anyway? Didn’t skaters use roller blades? Had he somehow offended the curator of a museum? Maybe the skate wasn’t for him. Everything didn’t have to be about him. He took the skate downstairs and dropped it off at the lost and found table in the Cognitive Science office.
Today Henry would be talking to his undergrads. He would simplify, but he wouldn’t talk down to them. He wanted them to get the general idea and maybe see some of the wonder and mystery of language and the new wrinkle he had discovered.
These days, his glasses were mostly useless. The world was wavy, like looking through cheap glass or maybe like living underwater, and he counted on auditory cues to gauge how what he was saying was being received. He couldn’t really see his audience.
He had a line guaranteed to make them groan, and he was going to use it right away. He said, “It’s really all very simple.”
They groaned, and he grinned and wrote “Spontaneous Competence” on the chalkboard. With an audience like this, he needed something jazzier, something contemporary, something they could relate to, and since no one in the popular press was calling his effect “Spontaneous Competence” as it should rightly be called, he wrote what they actually were calling it underneath the proper name. He wrote “Universal Translation.”
He could hear them relax, a kind of good-natured settling in. This was more like it. Who knew, maybe the professor would even talk about aliens.
“First, I must convince you that the so called ‘universal translation’ you see on TV and in the movies is impossible in principle.”
And a one and a two and a three.
“And then I will explain how it can be done.”
He turned his head to the left and then to the right so they would think he was looking at them. They won’t listen to you if they think you’re not paying attention to them. But what was that? There in the sea of faces was a startling splotch of orange and peach and blond. The rest of the people were filmed in black and white in comparison. He squinted at the bright spot of color, and it smiled at him, and he was suddenly sure that Sydney Pavlenko had slipped into his class. After all these years. That couldn’t be right. He was pausing too long. He was staring at a stranger, and she was probably squirming in her seat.
Henry realized that he had lost his place, and he experienced a moment of absolute terror. When he’d been new to the teaching game, he’d had a recurring dream in which he’d come to class unprepared and had to stand up in front of all those people with nothing to say. In the dream, he was often dressed in nothing but his underwear.
But he wasn’t new, and he wasn’t really lost, and it was incredibly unlikely that the lost love of his life was sitting in on his undergrad course.
“A language is not a code,” he said. “You can’t just figure it out in isolation. When speaking to someone who doesn’t know your language, it won’t do you any good to talk louder or more slowly. If you’re the language officer on a starship, trying really really hard to understand a language that is totally new won’t actually help much.” He waited for the laugh and when it came he thought it was merely polite. Maybe he should update his references. Or get cooler ones. Nick Sherwood probably had cool references. Maybe he should ask Nick for a few tips — like that was ever going to happen. Nick would be too busy telling anyone who would listen that Henry was crazy.
“We saw how this works with the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II. The United States used native speakers of the Navajo language to radio information to the field. The enemy could never break this code, because it wasn’t a code.”
He gave them a moment to think about languages and codes.
“Now, imagine you and your ground team land on a strange new planet and a bunch of aliens run jabbering out of the bushes, and your language officer pulls out her trusty Universal Translation Device and starts twisting the knobs and pushing the buttons, and suddenly everyone can understand every word these guys are saying even though no human has ever met them before. In fact, let’s say no human has ever even met other aliens who have met these new guys before. Just how do you suppose this Universal Translation Device could possibly work?”
