Padgett Powell - Aliens of Affection - Stories

“You sodiers have good shit, it looks,” Mr. Albemarle said.

“We have very good shit,” they said. They each searched themselves and gave to Mr. Albemarle a piece of gear. He received from them, all of them standing all along the watchtower and blowing exhales of white smoke into the white fog, a collapsing titanium mess cup with Teflon coating on it that was very sexy to the touch; a boot knife that was too sharp to put in your boot; an O.D. green tube of sunblock, a jungle hammock, with roof and mosquito netting, a pair of very fine, heavy socks (clean), a box of 9 mm shells, an athletic supporter, a flak vest, and a jammed M-16 rifle that the sodiers thought was easily fixable but for the life of all of them they could not fathom how.

Mr. Albemarle put on and strapped on all his new gear and passed around more cigarettes in a truly warm spirit. “Do you sodiers,” he asked, “know anything about all along the watchtowering?”

“What do you mean?” they asked.

“Like, what I’m supposed to do.”

The sodiers looked at Mr. Albemarle and briefly at each other. “You doing it, dude,” one of them said, and the others agreed.

“All right, I can accept that,” Mr. Albemarle said. “But there is a certain want of certainty regarding just what it is I’m doing.”

“Well put,” a sodier said.

“We are in a not dissimilar position ourselves,” said another, to general nodding all along the watchtower.

“We worry it not,” a third said.

“A constituent of the orders—”

“To not know—”

“Precisely what we are about.”

“So we just, as men with balls and ordnance must, go about the business at hand, whatever it is.”

“And we suggest you do, too.”

This made fine sense to Mr. Albemarle. “One more question of you fine fellows, then,” he said. “Down there”—he pointed down and over the edge of the wall—“any idea what’s down there?”

“Moat,” a sodier said, “with something dangerous in it.”

“That’s what I thought,” Mr. Albemarle said. “Any idea what?”

“Crocodiles.”

“I think badly deteriorated scrap metal, like thousands of bicycles, cut you to ribbons.”

“Get tetanus before you hit the water.”

“Definitely.”

“Get a booster, dude, you plan on swimming in that moat.”

“I don’t plan on swimming in that moat,” Mr. Albemarle said. At this the sodiers laughed solidly and loudly, approving of Mr. Albemarle’s prudence.

They all shook hands, and Mr. Albemarle thanked them for the gifts, and they him for the smokes, and the sodiers decamped. Mr. Albemarle was feeling good. It had been a fine rendezvous all along the watchtower, and as he resumed his pointless patrol, he patted and slapped all his fine new gear, more ready now than ever before for whatever it was he was ready for.

“I prefer the cloudy day to the sunny day,” he announced toward the moat, trying to detect from any echo if it was crocodiles or bicycles down there, or anything at all. No sound came back.

Some aliens showed up. This was clear, immediately, to Mr. Albemarle. That they were aliens made sudden eminent sense of his theretofore murky task. He had been all along the watchtower watching for aliens. No one could have specified this without appearing to be crazy. Mr. Albemarle understood everything, or nearly everything, now.

The aliens were very forthcoming. They looked perfectly alien, no bones about it. All gooshy and weird, etc. They made calming hand gestures, inducing Mr. Albemarle not to raise his jammed M-16 in their direction. They slid up to him as if on dollies and said, “We are aliens. We are aliens of affection.”

“What?”

“We are the secret agents, as it were, in cases of alienation of affection.”

Mr. Albemarle said, “You mean, when a man finds his wife naked on another man’s sailboat and he sues the yachtsman for alienation of affection—”

“Yes. We are in attendance.”

“We are on that boat, usually,” said another alien of affection.

The first alien slapped this second alien upside the head with a flipper-like arm. “We are always on that boat.”

Mr. Albemarle offered the aliens of affection cigarettes and looked at them closely. In terms of gear, they were without. In terms of clothes, they were without, yet you would not, Mr. Albemarle considered, be inclined to regard them as naked. The slapped alien appeared ready to accept a cigarette until he received a stern look from the first alien and put his arms, or flippers, approximately where his pants pockets would have been had he had on any pants. Mr. Albemarle reflected upon — actually the thought was exceedingly brief, but trenchant — the apparent absence of genitalia on these aliens of affection. To his mind, affection and genitalia were closely bound up. The notion of secret agents of affection without genitals struck him as either ironic in the extreme or extremely fitting. He looked closely at the slapped alien, up and down, to see if there were misplaced genitals, if that would be the correct term. He saw none.

“What do aliens of affection do?” he asked, aware only after he did so that he might be forward in his asking.

“We alienate affection,” the first alien said.

“There’s Cupid and there’s us,” the second said. Mr. Albemarle expected him to receive another slap for this remark, which struck him as impertinent, or low in tone, but there was no objection shown by any of the other aliens. There were nine of them, as there had been nine sodiers. Mr. Albemarle was unable to detect the status of missing incisors because he could not determine, watching them speak, if they had teeth at all, or, really, mouths. They were weird, as he supposed was fitting. They were so weird that they weren’t weird, because aliens are supposed to be weird, and they were weird so they weren’t weird. He liked them, rather, but he was not as fond of them as he had been of the sodiers. They did not give him any gear, but beyond that they did not give him any comfort. Why should they? he thought. He had mismanaged his affections, and now it appeared feasible these guys might have had something to do with it. Every time he had broken a heart, or had his broken, maybe one of these gremlins had been there aiding and abetting, helping him fuck up. Perhaps this was the enemy. Perhaps these thalidomide-looking wizened things were why he was walking all along the watchtower in an ill-defined mission, preferring cloudy days to sunny.

“Let’s take a reading on Loverboy here,” the first alien said, and very quickly the slapped alien was very close to Mr. Albemarle. He had, in the popular expression, invaded Mr. Albemarle’s air space, as had once a homosexual photographer who stood inches from him with wet lips and gleaming eyes and asked, “Do I make you nervous?” Nervous, Mr. Albemarle of course said no. Another time his air space had been invaded by a turkey in a barnyard, a big cock turkey, or whatever you called the male, which could in raising its feathers expand itself about 300 percent and make you pee in your pants if you were, as Mr. Albemarle was, disposed to be frightened of all things in a barnyard. Mr. Albemarle was not similarly afraid of a wild animal, but all things in a barnyard had been husbanded there by a human malfeasant who wore Wellies and had relations with the things in the barnyard, which consequently would bite you or kick you or step on you when they could.

The slapped alien stood next to Mr. Albemarle with a gleam in his eye and had a lip-smacking expression, if a lip-smacking expression can be had by a party without, apparently, any lips. As he had with the photographer and the turkey, Mr. Albemarle held his ground, standing erect and turning ever so slightly askance to the alien so there would not be a clean, open shot to his private parts if it came to that.