The Bird Cage (8 page)

“They’re here among us, and have been since the forties! Maybe longer! What’s their purpose? What are they after? How many have come? Forty or fifty at a time! Year after year! For decades! There could be many thousands of them walking among us! Call your congressmen! Call the president’s office! Call your governors! America, we demand answers! They’ve had time to be assimilated, to have families, to infiltrate every level of government! Who’s in charge, us or them?” His voice became more and more shrill as he raved.

Mel was both fascinated and alarmed at the way conspiracy theories were advanced by mid-October. The invasion had to be world-wide, else why had the Soviets launched Sputnik? Had they been starting a search of extraterrestrials on the moon or Mars, or possibly a mother ship in orbit out there? And why had the United States launched a desperate push to get to the moon and to Mars if not to conduct such a search? And now, international cooperation on a space station. Advanced nations were cooperating in an unprecedented way. Searching for extraterrestrials?

A panel of experts in an hour-long television broadcast discussed the difficulty of detecting them. If they existed, they repeated often. DNA samples might possibly identify them. Autopsies were the only conclusive method, of course. One Harvard professor said: “Keep in mind that such advanced technology that allows them to navigate interstellar space would allow them to conceal their identities in a manner that we are unable to imagine.”

Another panel discussed what possible threats hostile extraterrestrials could pose, with the most obvious one being the release of a pathogen for which they had immunity and humans didn’t. Were they waiting for a predetermined critical moment of their own, sufficient numbers, for example, to launch an attack? Or were they waiting for sufficient infiltration of all levels of government and industry?

Mel had sent his original material to one senator and two representatives along with the others. The senator responded, as he had expected him to. A serious legislator, no doubt he had turned the matter over to one of the intelligence agencies. One representative, two bloggers, and Bob Fellowes also responded. Mel sent them all identical messages, taking the same care he had shown before, and mailing his answers in Manhattan again. His message was simple and short: “No more until I feel safe. The Whistle Blower Protection Act can’t protect me. My life is in danger.”

A week after he mailed his response, two congressmen demanded hearings in the House of Representatives. One of the bloggers demanded all memos, communications, records, reports, etc. regarding Project Skylight through the Freedom of Information Act. It wasn’t clear exactly which agency he petitioned. And Bob Fellows became even more hysterical.

By November Mel knew it was time to reveal the hoax, to prove to the country, possibly to the world, that the populace had been primed to believe any nonsense that was presented.

He sat at the computer to write his confession and stared at a blank screen. When the alarm sounded hours later, the screen was still blank, and he left to start dinner. Tomorrow, he told himself.

Day after day he sat at the computer and stared at a blank screen. Where to start? How to start? He felt as if his fingers had frozen, his brain had turned to stone. He had lost faith in words and had to consult a dictionary to look up the word
hoax
, which had become as alien as the invaders he had invented. All the phrases and sentences he thought of while sleepless in bed vanished by the time Ruth left for the high school.

—Project Skylight is a hoax!— He sat back and looked at the words, deleted them. They weren’t even his own words. Day in, day out various people were saying that, to no avail. Learned people, people in authority, officials were saying that, only to be drowned out like whispers in a thunderstorm.

No matter what single word he keyed in, it continued to exist as isolated as a pinpoint island in the middle of the ocean. Nothing followed. Nothing could logically follow. The screen remained blank.

Penny and Ryan came for Thanksgiving and although Ruth prepared a traditional feast which was as delicious as it always had been, there was an air of unease at the table. Laughter and banter, gaiety all seemed forced as if they were amateur actors in a poorly rehearsed play.

Serving pumpkin pie, Ruth asked Penny, “Is there something bothering you?”

Penny glanced at Ryan, and her forced smile vanished. She nodded. “Ryan talked to his folks about the holidays, to let them know we’d like to visit them over Christmas for a day or two.” She looked at Ryan again, then mumbled, “You tell them.”

He appeared as strained as she did. “Mother wanted to know if you two had your DNA sample done yet. If Penny had.”

“They don’t want me to come until I do it,” Penny said in a low voice.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Mel said. “The whole thing is a hoax. Some bored teenager having himself a joke. They aren’t buying that crap, are they?”

Ryan nodded. “They are, and a lot of others are, too. Everyone born after 1940 eventually will be tested, DNA sampled. That lets my folks out.” He put his fork down. “Do you remember my brother Jack? He was at our wedding and the reception.”

Mel had a vague memory of him. Older than Ryan, receding hair, quiet. He nodded.

“He works in the state department,” Ryan said. “He hears things, knows things. He said the government is taking this seriously, testing people, lie-detector tests, trying to find a leak. He said whoever started this business has to be someone who knows, and has taken sophisticated steps to protect his identity, changing details here and there, but the gist of it is on the mark.”

Ruth gasped and made an involuntary gesture that knocked over her wine glass. Hurriedly she left the table and for a moment Mel thought it was to bring paper towels or something to soak up spilled wine, but she headed for the hallway to their bedroom. Before he could follow, she was already returning with her handbag. Ignoring the wine spreading on the table cloth, Ruth took a folded paper from her bag and handed it to him.

“This came yesterday,” she said.

It was a memo from the superintendent of schools. Mel scanned it quickly then read aloud the concluding sentence, “All personnel are required to submit a notarized copy of their DNA results to this office before the winter semester starts on January 4.”

Mel felt as if the world was fading, or he was fading from it and only gradually he became aware of Ryan’s voice again.

“It’s happening all through the government. No publicity yet. But it will get out and then it will be hell. It isn’t a kid in a basement playing games, but someone who knows too much. They’ll track him down and he’ll never be heard from again, that’s for sure. Psycholinguists are studying the text. Analyzing it. Educated, proper use of grammar, repetition of words, use of certain words over others. If the guy ever wrote a thing that was published, they’ll track him down that way. Apparently he used a code that included a lot of Cs, Ys, and Os. Twice it was CY, a number, then CO. Pronounce it,” he said. Then he did so, “C Y C O, psycho. He’s mocking them. They’ve put cameras on every mail drop box in New York City. Tracking purchases of paper and stamps. Investigating photocopy shops, train and plane trips to New York. They’ve pulled out the stops. They’ll find him and he’ll have a fatal accident or disappear exactly the same way all those people who saw aliens come to earth did.”

Mel didn’t know when he had sat down again. He was in his chair, watching the blood-red stain spread on the white table cloth.

The Fountain of Neptune

SHE DID MOST THINGS RIGHT, got a second opinion, did not panic, did not go on a drinking binge, or search for a third opinion. What she failed to do was take a friend with her or tape record the conversations with both brain surgeons. Consequently, her memory of what one or the other said proved to be sketchy, but key phrases were ineradicable. Inoperable. A baseline cat scan. More blurred vision likely, more frequently. Possible double vision. Possible distorted images, illusions. Possible hallucination. Probable headaches.

“Live your life normally,” one or the other said. “I’d like to see you again in three months.”

“Why?”

“With another cat scan we can better predict what to expect.”

Her question had covered both parts, live a normal life, as well as a return appointment. A normal life meant working every day for a corporation that cared as little about her as she cared about it. She remained in her apartment for several days, spending time weeping, then she added up her assets, including the sale of her car, cashing in her retirement plan, selling most of her possessions. She bought a laptop computer, a beginner’s Italian language CD, and a new digital camera. And she made a reservation for a flight to Rome. At the last minute she made it first class.

She had been to Rome once for a three-day conference and one day of sightseeing. At the near demand of a tour guide, she and everyone else in the group, had dutifully tossed a coin into Trevi Fountain. “Rome will call you back,” the young guide had said.

She did not tell her mother, who would berate her for leaving a job with health benefits at a time like this. Nor did she tell her sister, who would scream and wail and insist that she come live with her and her family of four noisy children under the age of twelve and a husband who worked when it was convenient. She told them both that she was being transferred to the Rome office. She did not burden her few good friends who would grieve helplessly, or her ex, who would not. And she did not tell anyone in the office. She knew it would be on her insurance record, and she never would be insurable again.

She was forty-two years old and more than likely she would be dead within six months. So she flew to Rome first class.

She had found an apartment on the Internet, and chose it because it had Internet access, sparing her the search for a cyber café. Her landlord thought she was a writer, and in a sense she was. She had spent more than a decade writing meticulous reports for an R&D department, and now she began keeping a record of the progression of her inoperable tumor. At first there was no particular reason, but after she missed her appointment scheduled for early May, she decided to send the medical record to the brain surgeons.

The blurred vision came more often, sometimes embarrassingly in public, more often when she was in her apartment.

She spent one week in Florence, awestruck by David and the Pieta, overwhelmed by the Tivoli gardens, and the Ufizzi museum, but her call had issued from Rome and she was not tempted to leave again. There were days in the Vatican museum; operas in a gothic church; days wandering around the Colosseum, populating the arena with gladiators, the forum with politicians; a special exhibition of Leonardo’s work reproduced full size; a close-up view of the Last Supper…

She was in love with Rome, with the streets strewn with litter that came alive in any breeze, with the gelatos and pizza slices topped with anything edible, the espresso, all the food. And most of all she was in love with the magic of its sunlight, the complexity of Rome’s agelessness, where contemporary glass and steel structures stood side by side with those from a past of almost inconceivable antiquity—a monument here, a stele there, remnants of a temple, a statue, the juxtaposition of an ephemeral flicker in time and the mute eloquent endurance of millennia.

In the evenings she studied Italian, wrote her daily report, and downloaded her pictures onto her computer, deleted many, manipulated others, enhanced some, and put the saved images on a CD, to be sent to her sister eventually.

That evening, the last day of May, she gazed at her latest pictures of Neptune’s Fountain in Piazza Navona. It was her favorite so far and she had visited it several times. Neptune doing battle with an octopus and nymphs mounted on horses rising from the fountain basin. Neptune was as muscular as a body builder. All the male statues were, and the females were all lissome, willowy, with not a muscle or bone in sight. The steeds looked wild and beautiful. But something was wrong.

She looked for previous pictures she had taken of the fountain, then printed the versions to compare them, find the cause for her unease. It came as a mild surprise to see that she had been to that one fountain four different times. The pictures were dated, and the first one had been taken April eleventh, one in early May, one mid May, and the most recent on the last day of May.

After putting them in chronological order to examine them, she gasped, and stood up so quickly, so urgently that she knocked her chair over. Steadying herself with a hand on the table, she closed her eyes hard, rubbed them, and without looking again at the pictures yet, she backed away from the table, and only then opened her eyes and crossed the few feet to her tiny kitchen for a glass of water.

All the pictures were different. “It’s started,” she said under her breath.

Distorted images, one of the doctors had said. Illusions.

She had entered the next phase, she thought dully, and forced herself to return to the table, to study the set of pictures, seeking to learn when the new phase had started without her noticing.

Some of the views were from different places around the fountain, single shots, but the four she singled out had all been taken from the same location. She had been seated on the same bench for each of the four. The changes were subtle, but unmistakable. They presented a sequence in time. First the nymph’s head was turned away slightly, her hair streaming behind her; the horse’s head was lowered, and towering over them Neptune was straining in a struggle with the octopus that had one arm wrapped around the god’s leg. Next the nymph’s head was turned more to the front, and the horse had lifted its head. The octopus was lower down on Neptune’s leg.

They were not illusions, she realized, but full blown hallucinations. She was telling herself a story and providing graphic images to illustrate it. In the last picture the nymph had finished turning her head, and was smiling up at Neptune, and he was done with his mock battle, and now was looking down on the nymph, his hand extended toward her. Even the horse was looking at him in that picture.