Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

David and Lee’s apartment is on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise, rearing improbably out of a restored Victorian neighborhood. The balcony faces east and I can see all the way across the city, almost to the plains. There are maybe thirty people in the apartment, smoking, talking, drinking. Lee had laid out some lines he got at work on the big heart-shaped mirror on the coffee table, but those vanished early on. While some of the party guests watch, David is at his ham set, flashing out dah-dit, dah-dit, dah-dah-dit messages to the aliens.

Riley, resplendent in ermine and pearls, rushes up to my elbow. “Oh, Ricky, you’ve got to see!” I turn, look past him. People are thronging around the bar. The laughter rises and crashes uproariously. “Ricky, come on .” He takes my arm and propels me into the apartment.

I crane my neck to see what’s going on. For once unladylike, Riley climbs onto a chair. Somebody I don’t know, shiny in full leathers, is standing behind the mahogany bar. For a second I think he’s wearing a white glove, but only for a second.

It’s a chicken. The man has stuffed his fist into a plucked, pale chicken right out of a cello-wrapped package from a Safeway meat department. He wears it like a naked hand puppet. I find it hard to believe.

The man holds the chicken close to his face and talks to it like a ventriloquist crooning to his dummy. “That’s a good boy, you like the party? Want to entertain the nice folks with a little dance?” I realize the headless chicken has a small black bolo tie with a dime-sized silver concho tied around its neck. Tasteful, basic black. The drumsticks are wearing doll shoes. The sheen of chicken juice on the rubbery, stippled skin starts to make me queasy.

It ought to be funny—but it’s not.

The man addresses us, the audience. “And now,” he says, “the award-winning performance by a featherless biped.” He nods toward David, who has come away from his radio set to watch. “Maestro, if you please.” The expensive stereo cackles and we hear a tinkling piano version of “Tea for Two.” The man with the chicken half crouches behind the bar top so that most of his arm is hidden. The chicken stands onstage. And starts to dance.

Evidently the joints have been cracked, because the dancer’s limbs swing loose. The little shoes clatter on the Formica bar. The wings flap up and down wildly. Fluid drips to the bar.

“An obscene featherless biped,” someone says accurately. But we all keep watching. The pimpled skin catches the light wetly. I don’t think this is what the Greek philosopher who defined human beings as featherless bipeds had in mind.

The tune changes, the tempo alters—faster—“If You Knew Susie”—and the dancer is in trouble. It seems to be sliding off the manipulator’s hand. The man behind the bar impatiently reaches with his free hand and screws the chicken down firmly on his fist. It makes a squelching sound like adjusting a rubber glove. Now I can smell the raw chicken. I turn suddenly and head for the balcony and the clean air that should steady my stomach.

I walk by Hawk. He lightly touches my wrist as I pass, but his eyes don’t deviate from the scene on the bar. He doesn’t have to look at me.

On the balcony I lean over the railing and retch. It’s dark now and I have no idea who or what is fourteen stories below. Crazily I hope it will all evaporate before it hits the ground, like those immensely long and beautiful South American waterfall veils that dissolve into mist and then vanish before ever hitting the jungle floor.

Travelogs again. I want to escape.

My mind skips erratically. I also have to find a new doctor. My appointment this morning arrived at the point I’ve come to dread. There always comes a time when my current doctor looks at me quizzically and says, “Son, those aren’t ordinary hemorrhoids.” I stammer and leave.

Leave.

Good-bye, Hawk.

I’m leaving.

“But what do they want?” someone is saying as I walk across the floor. Oregon is, more or less, on the other side of that door. What do they want? Alien ships are still sliding silently between us and the stars. The watchers are out on the balcony, no longer discreet now that I’ve finished my purgation.

Ship, come to me …

Inside the apartment, the dancing chicken episode is triggering debate. I am amazed to see a confrontation between David and Lee. That they would fight is enough to make me pause.

“Sick,” says Lee. “Tasteless. How could you let him spoil the party? You helped him.”

“He’s your friend,” David says.

“ Colleague. He stacks boxes. That’s all.” Lee’s expression is furious. “The two of you! What sort of people think it’s amusing to stick their hand inside a dead chicken?”

David says defensively, “Everyone was watching.”

“And that makes it real!” Lee’s amazement and anger are palpable. “Jesus! We’re part of the most technologically sophisticated civilization on Earth, and yet we do this.”

Riley has come up to us, looking cool and demure. “All societies are just individuals,” he says reasonably. “You have to allow for a wide variation in”—he smiles sweetly—“individual tastes.”

“Don’t give me platitudes!” says Lee angrily. He stalks off toward the kitchen.

“Sulky, sulky,” says Riley, and shrugs.

The three of us hear a chorus of ooh’s and aah’s from behind. We turn as one toward the balcony.

“I’ve never seen one so close,” says a voice suffused with wonder. I imagine it’s like sitting helplessly in a rowboat being passed by a whale. It seems as though the shining metallic skin of the alien ship is gliding past only yards from the balcony. The ship is so huge I can’t accurately gauge the distance. The whooosh of displaced air flows through the windows. Chilly currents cocoon us.

The cold breaks the spell.

“I’m leaving,” I say to the people around me. Lee and Riley seem fixed in place by the passing ship. They don’t hear me. But then I don’t think they ever did. “Good-bye,” I say. “I’m leaving.” Nobody hears me.

So, finally, I carry out my plans, my threat, my promise to myself.

I leave, and it feels better than I’d expected.

Someone does notice my departure, and he catches up with me at the elevator.

I try to ignore Hawk. He lounges beside the door until it slides open. Then he follows me into the car. I slap the ground-floor button with my fist.

“Stay,” Hawk says.

I look at the sharpness of his eyes. “Why?”

He smiles slightly. “I haven’t finished using you.”

“At least that’s honest.”

“I’ve got no need to lie,” he says. “I know you well enough, I can say that.”

The sureness in his voice and the agreement I feel combine internally to make me feel again the sickness I felt upstairs watching the chicken dance. But now I have nothing left to purge.

The elevator brakes and I feel it all through my gut—it’s the burn you get gulping ice water. The door hisses open. Hawk follows me into the apartment lobby. “Just let me go,” I say without turning.

His words catch me as I reach for the outer door. “You know, Ricky, in my own way, I do love you.”

I wonder if he knows the cruelty of that. I stare at him, startled. He’s the first I remember saying that to me. Tears I haven’t felt since childhood slide down my cheeks. I turn away.

“Stick around, kiddo,” Hawk calls after me. “Please?”

“No.” This time I mean it. I’ve made my decision. I don’t look back at him. I stiff-arm the door open and lunge past a pair of aging queens; I am running as I hit the sidewalk. I barely see through the tears as a shadow deeper than the surrounding night envelops me. Rubbing eyes with wet knuckles, I look up to see an alien ship cross my vision and recede into the east. There are other ships in the sky now. Huge as they are, they still seem to dance and dart like enormous moths. What I see must be true, because others around me on the street are also gawking at the sky. Perhaps we all simply share the delusion.