Mike Resnick - I, Alien

A flying vase is funny. As funny as telling my teacher that I was born in China, adopted by Mommy, had plastic surgery to make me look American, but couldn’t do the homework because my English skills were still poor. And talking fake Chinese the rest of the day. Ong. Pong. Ching chong. The other kids laughed. They liked it. The rest of the day, we were all going around saying Ing, Ping, Ong Pong, Ching Chong. Only the teacher didn’t think it was funny. Why?

It was as funny as the sound of tinkle in the kitchen sink. Sinkle. And watching the mailman slide along the path on the yellow thing I left there just for him. Squeal on a banana peel!

Why won’t Mommy see that?

Because she just won’t. Not when I’m the one doing it. Oh, she laughs at the guys on television—or at least she used to. The big fat man and the short man. She laughs when they get pie in their faces and when they slip on banana peels and when they throw things at one another. She laughs at circus clowns, doesn’t she? So why won’t she laugh at my red nose and my cheeks? My flying vase and banana peel. And if I can’t make her laugh, how will I make the rest of the world laugh, too?

Because that is my mission, to make them all laugh. Clever of the Priests to make it so serious—classes and lectures and that scary injection—when it’s really all about being funny. Your mission will emerge, they said. You will learn by going where you have to go. And so it has. To turn everything topsy-turvy. To get them to shred their assumptions. What makes a vase pretty on the shelf and ugly in pieces on the floor? What makes a banana peel funny on television but not in real life? Only those stupid beliefs passed from parents to children. Change those and you can change it all.

How will they learn to change their assumptions?

By laughing at everything.

Everything!

Down the railing and up the stars, bet you can’t catch me, Mommy! Funny, how you run! You weren’t made for this, were you? Whoops! And when you put the salad on the plate, I suddenly whisk it away so the salad goes right on the table. And when you try to catch me, I say you can’t catch me. No one can catch me! Catch us, I should say. Catch me and Mikey.

And the look you give. Oh, Mikey, you’ve changed, you say. Your forehead wrinkles and that new annoying line comes between your eyes. Tears on your cheeks. I was supposed to make you laugh, not cry. What’s going on? Why do you take me to that lady, Mrs. Burton, the one who tries to look so important with her silly dolls dressed like doctors and nurses. Why do you get so angry when I make the dolls fly across the room? I’ve got great aim, haven’t I? And Mrs. Burton herself when she reaches clumsily for them. A flying Mrs. Burton!

Oh, ladies, stop whispering. All those long, serious words about “trauma and adjustment,” “aggressive tendencies,” “repressed rage,” and “inappropriate affect.”

Laugh and dance. Dance and laugh. Light and fun. Come on, Mommy, watch me run. Mommy, you can help me change the world. Get everyone to see everything different. Hey, is your world so great? War and terror and cheating and pain. Wouldn’t it be better to just laugh and laugh? Mommy, you’re not laughing—

Mommy is crying.

“I understand, ma’am,” he says. “There’s nothing more painful than having to institutionalize a child. But you’ve tried everything for this boy. Thirteen years since that bizarre early childhood illness. Thirteen years of treatment. Individual therapy. Family counseling. Psychotropic drugs, acupuncture, herbs. There’s nothing more you can do. But your son is in good hands here and he’ll do very well. Won’t you, Michael?”

I thought it would be simple once Mikey and I became one. To get them to laugh. To turn sadness into happiness, to change the world, shatter their assumptions, break their idols and make them happy. Simply happy. They were so aggressive, so destructive, but laughter would solve it all.

But they wouldn’t laugh. Why didn’t the Priests understand, in Orientation Chamber, that they could not laugh? They are not like us. Their complexity, their convoluted, crazy world, it cannot respond to laughter.

The Priests didn’t know. They did not understand the situation. They had misappraised. But I know now. I have learned.

The question is—what do I do now? To get it back. Retrieve the mission. A serious mission, to bring frivolity? Infect with laughter, infect the world? What can I do, stuck away in this loony bin, with all these—

Then all at once I know what to do. And fall down

in awe, for the Priests understood after all. How to bring the mission, where to execute it, my very failure the necessary stepping stone to my success.

Begin right at home, of course. What better place than a nuthouse for laughter?

So I hold a meeting after lights-out and before the meds kick in. Tommy is sleepy and mumbling as usual about the Government. James is preparing for his Second Coming. Arnold is moaning and rocking. Dorian— Well, you don’t want to know what Dorian is doing. The orderlies are somewhere down the corridor, of course. They don’t care. A typical night.

“Well, folks,” I say, “Do you want to change the world?

They become quiet. No more Government or Return of the Son. They have never heard me say anything serious before. They have barely heard me speak. I sure have their attention. The orderlies yap on, I hear their voices from down the hall.

“If we change the world, will you change the Government so they won’t be after me anymore?” Tommy asks.

“We’ll have a different Government, sure,” I say.

“But will they show any compassion? Will they leave good citizens alone?”

“Great compassion. All the compassion you could possibly want and more of it.”

Tommy considers this. James says, “Government can’t change. The world can’t change until the second coming.”

“I am the second coming,” I say. “I begged pass this cup and they did not listen and now I am here.”

They say nothing to this.

“Blessed are the light of heart because they shall uplift the world.”

“Amen,” James says and crosses himself.

“The Lord God is a God of Laughter,” I tell them. “Just read the second Psalm.” Psalms had occupied a lot of my time years ago. When Mommy went off to cry.

“You get a lot of good information from the Psalms,” I say. “You’d be surprised what is in there. Harps and lyres and whatnot.”

“I don’t know what lyres are. What we gotta do?”

“We laugh,” I say. “That is how it begins. And then we do things to make everyone laugh. If each of us make two others laugh, and each of those take on another two, we can take over the world.”

“Just laugh?” James says doubtfully.

“That’s it.’

‘Seems pretty silly to me,” Arnold says. “But it beats the crappy therapy and basket weaving. Sounds like more fun than Basic Living Skills, too.”

Carlo, Ben, Jamal, Kenneth, Dorian, and the others come to join us. The whole men’s ward. “Try it,” I say. “Ha.”

“Ha.”

It begins so feebly.

Ha.

But it builds. Piece by piece, sound by sound, we give to the world the sounds which the world deserves, which it has always needed. Ha and ha and ha again. And the orderlies come with their syringes and restraints, but there are too many of us, so they call the nurses, but there are still too many of us, as we hear the sacred syllable of redemption from Wards 3 and 4, so they call the doctors, but there are still too many of us, as the women’s wards begin, ha and ha and more ha.

And the plates go flying, the people go flying, until the top of the nuthouse itself is levitated by our laughter, lifted by that sound, twinkles and twirls at that sudden elevation and as Arnold and James and Jamal and Carlo and Ben and Dorian and Kenneth and I continue that levitating laughter it seems to overtake the world itself; manifest silken strands of light and laughter penetrating the closed and open spaces.