Aliens in the Desert

By Mike Amnasan

Ray places the clear Pyrex bowl that had green beans in it, on top of his plate taking them

to the sink. Matthew finishes each food item before going on to the next and he still has meat

left. Lucy’s dish is too hard to reach around Matthew’s chair in this narrow kitchen. While Ray is

placing the dishes in the sink, he remembers that he would like to watch a movie. It’s Saturday.

Matthew doesn’t have homework, except for I-Ready which he can do tomorrow. Ray pulls the

cork out of the wine bottle with his teeth and pours himself more red wine, then he turns to tell

Lucy, “I found a movie we could all watch.”

“Daddy,” Matthew says, “Who do you think is stronger, Acenyan or Byakko?”

“I don’t know,” he tells Matthew and then to Lucy, “I checked it out and it seems to have

a pretty smart script.”

“Guess,” Matthew says.

“I don’t want to guess. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

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“I could watch a movie,” Lucy says, “if it’s something we can all watch.”

“Can I have my movie?” Matthew asks.

“We want to try one we all might like,” Lucy says. “Finish your meat.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Two more pieces.”

Matthew finds his Chinese New Year’s lion-dragon under the table. It looks like a red,

sequins-covered pug with big rhinestone eyes that Carol, their pug dog has no interest in when

Matthew sticks it in her face. Lucy notices that Matthew is no longer sitting at the table, now

underneath it, tormenting the dog by holding this toy, that has strings like a puppet in her face

whatever direction she turns. She tells Matthew, “Sit down and eat your food.” She calls his

name, “Matthew!” several times before he finally comes out from under the table. He eats the

two more pieces of meat while standing. He finds his bag of Airhead Bits on the counter that Ray

finally agreed he could have for desert when they stood in the check-out line at C-town. Ray hid

the candy in the melamine bowl, which is white, with blue daisies. He didn’t want Matthew to

see it and, surreptitiously, eat it before dinner. This bowl contains a dispenser of Scotch tape,

Beyblade sections, a small metal sword-replica letter opener, a piece of obsidian, a yellow

marker, a peach pit, a polyethylene wine bottle cork, several Yo-kai Watch medals, and pennies.

Matthew always forgets to feed his Beta fish which is in a goldfish bowl on the counter along

with boxes of cereal. There isn’t much room for the Christmas cactus and aloe plant which are

between the window and the dish drainer. Ray sets the wine bottle down on a flier for the book

fair at Matthew’s school. He stares at the only wall space in the kitchen. It’s covered in pictures

of menacing animals, and a character wearing a rainbow-colored hat labelled Ural Brine. They’re

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drawn or painted by Matthew and fixed to the wall with clear plastic tape or roughly torn pieces

of pale yellow masking tape. There’s also a calendar with the photograph of millions of galaxies

within a small section of night sky.

Ray carries his glass of wine into the main room where Matthew’s bed and the TV are.

Matthew follows. The TV is sitting on of a large brown particleboard box that’s on top of two

side-by-side black milk crates to raise the TV close to eye level for anyone seated on the couch.

While Ray is turning on the electronics, he notices that Lucy hasn’t come with them. Now that

the TV and DVD player are on, some choices are displayed in rows. Matthew wants to start a

movie that he sees among the recommendations. He always wants to choose. Ray worries that

his plan to escape his life in a movie is slipping away from him, taken over by the relentless

desire to determine his own fate of an eight-year-old boy. Ray is particularly annoyed because

Lucy often does this: agrees to a movie and then goes to do something else. Father and son must

wait for fifteen minutes which may not be long when you’re doing something like whatever

she’s now occupied with, but it is a long time when you’re sitting waiting for someone to come

to begin an activity that’s already set up. Matthew is becoming progressively angry that he

doesn’t have a say in what’s about to take place, asking, “Why can’t we watch my movie for

once.”

“We always watch your movies,” Ray says.

“You and mommy are mean. I’m not a slave you know. It’s like being in jail.” The

conversation continues like this until, Ray lays on the couch, on his side, with his head now on

the wide armrest and his legs bent to hold his shoes off the couch. He closes his eyes.

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In the study, Lucy is jotting something in a college ruled notebook. She stares at the wall

for a moment before continuing. By the time Lucy closes her notebook and walks into the main

room Matthew has already started a movie. Ray rises from the couch giving Lucy a stern look,

expressing his present hatred for her, that she doesn’t notice, on his way to the study. He’s going

to write something like what you’re now reading. He thinks he can use it to introduce his

discussion of the state of the world with an amusing story from his life. He would rather watch a

movie than write and he had found one that promised a temporary respite from his life, but he

doesn’t want to watch the animated feature that is now playing in the other room. He pictures

them in their usual positions: Matthew lying on his stomach, on his bed, watching, while Lucy

sits on the couch with a throw pillow behind her back. He can hear voices from the other room

and closes the door. He pulls the folding chair from Ikea away from the table that he shares with

Lucy. He starts his laptop and then goes into the kitchen and grabs a narrow box from off the

refrigerator taking the last Entenmann’s chocolate donut. In having a treat while writing, he

could be following Lucy’s lead. She rewards herself with desirable food items for sitting down to

write and only then. She doesn’t eat desert when the rest of the family does. She says that, even

though she thinks what’s she’s doing is important, no one cares about what she’s working on and

therefore she needs any motivation she can get. This might have been an invitation for Ray to ask

to see what she’s working on, but he already knows the gist of it and he doesn’t care about her

additions that for him are minor details.

Ray would like to make himself a strong cup of coffee to drink while he writes. He wants

to become more alert to what he’s doing. His social commentary is obvious, even though it

seems prescient to him. You could say that Ray has an 80 percent chance of thinking that his

thoughts are brilliant and a 1 percent chance of doing something of interest to other people, and

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this is like so many people. If you’re not a writer, he probably writes about as well as you could

if you tried. He tries to sound like someone qualified to write about the issues that concern him

despite his poor point of view. If no one else reads what he writes, there is no difference between

his being a good writer and thinking he is, except that the former might require that he endure

feedback that shocks his sensibilities and pushes him to try harder. He would need to hear what

he doesn’t want to hear. Even that might not help, because he feels so overwhelmed by current

events, considering his insignificant place within them. The problems are huge and, it seems,

enormously expensive. Ray doesn’t focus closely enough on his craft because of all the issues

that distract him. He feels that his ordinary life makes him well qualified to talk about the state of

the world from a common point of view, which must be, isn’t it, the most important point of

view? It’s the point of view of the ordinary people who all the politicians champion to get

elected.

Coffee gives him diarrhea, but he needs some to wake up. He’s always exhausted because he can’t sleep
at night, though he tries and is very good about not getting out of bed, unpleasantly awake, shrouded in
his quilt. When he tries to focus on what’s upsetting him, he sometimes imagines a different life. He
pictures himself in a large room with his desk centered in it, in a quiet neighborhood. The actual room
he’s seated in is full of clutter. It’s used by two other people as well as him, two other people who like to
leave their imprint on it. He has started a new fiction project that he is reluctant to show his wife since
it’s about her.

Rachel thinks of her life as an experiment that no one else is doing. (He has changed her

name to Rachel so that she will be his character). She mentally processes information from a lot

of unrelated learning she finds on the internet. The plan is this: unrelated learning spreads out

her thoughts within major neuronal pathways coursing through her neocortex. This gives her a

better overall understanding of the society that produces all this information, but more than that,

it’s supposed to give her formulas for how it all works, insights into the minds of people who are

inadvertently directing the nation toward doom. Once all this disparate information, stored in

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the farthest corners of her cerebral cortex, is adequately associated unconsciously, insights will

occur to her. She believes that social connections are getting stronger because the weaker ones,

that are distributed more outward, to more people, can’t survive. They’re weak and weakness is

shunned. Nobody even notices that these more extended connections have disappeared. Once the

connections that could reach more people and allow us all to feel like we are part of the same

nation, or world, died, there was nothing left to aspire toward other than loyalty to a stubbornly

biased social group or wealth.

What Ray doesn’t realize is that while Lucy learns slowly, she can, nevertheless, gain

important insights into large problems that the people paid to address them don’t know how to

think about. Lucy has no access to institutions where people exchange ideas and help each other

rein in their craziness. She has no access to where people are sharing knowledge within

honorable professions. They can be totally unscrupulous and think, do I want to live in a terrible

world where you can’t trust the motivations of other people or do I want to live in a world in

which we’re mostly good people working to improve society? That’s for me, they will say to

themselves, I’m one of the good people. They will guard their efforts to improve society from

people who aren’t their friends, following the oldest rule adhered to by all social animals: the

group is everything. Ever since Lucy met with the aliens she has been more confident in a way of

thinking that, honestly, just sounds like the way she always thought. Ray agreed with her trip to

meet with the extraterrestrials because, he thought, everyone needs someone on their side.

It’s late. Ray and Lucy are now lying on their backs in bed.

“Did he brush his teeth and floss?” Ray asks.

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“He brushed his teeth and I flossed them. I don’t like those kid’s flossers. I think he just

jambs food into the gaps between his teeth with those. I used adult dental floss. Do you know

what I was thinking?”

He tenses.

“Did I...oh.”

“What?” he feels forced to ask.

She moves away a little.

“What?” he asks.

“They told me...”

“Who?”

“You know, the extraterrestrials told me that us humans are all different from one another

and lonely. We’re full of mistrust and longing. We want to feel less alone and imagine a strong

similarity between us and others that we thereby fabricate, but it’s fake.”

“What if people don’t want to know that?”

“Don’t you feel alone in the world?”

“A lot of the time.”

“They told me that if I learned from unrelated sources I could come closer to how they

think.”

“Like what?”

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“Um. Nema Arkani-Hamed said that if you had a bigger particle accelerator than the one

at CERN, through which to put enough energy into a small enough space you will end up with a

tiny black hole, and then if you add more energy you get a bigger black hole, so they can’t, then,

explore smaller spaces. Spacetime is not fundamental.”

“Huh. Spacetime’s not fundamental?”

“No. So that’s one example, and then I watched some senate proceedings.”

“Huh.”

“And then something about the Macaque monkeys in northern Japan. But if you think

like this, you must do it alone, because additional people will reduce the number of associations

they implicitly or explicitly agree to take seriously. You once asked me what it was like to

communicate with extraterrestrials. I think I said it was like Alzheimer’s, like the neuronal

circuits that I would need to understand what was going on were missing. What they were telling

me was circling my brain without finding anything in the pathways of my mind to connect to,

and I felt embarrassed for arriving in their presence unprepared, but they knew I would not be

able to adequately process what was happening until they were long gone.”

“And what was that like?” he quietly asks. Ray rolls onto his side now staring at the wall.

He’s angry because she interrupts the sleep he needs to write well with these ideas that keep him

awake. Though he won’t tell her this, he suspects that if she was killed in an accident, hit by a

car for example, he could probably think a little better, or at least he would think he was smarter

by comparison to the other people left in his life. He feels he must write about big issues to

compete with her and his mind gets lost in them.

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They have separate quilts so that when Lucy slips out of bed late at night, to go work on

her ideas, as she now does, it won’t wake Ray who is lying on his side facing away from where

she was. Ray suspects that Lucy thinks that the little time she spent with the aliens is important

to validate the way she thinks, especially considering where they live. She must tune out all the

street noise and other distractions in their neighborhood. Her abduction, if you could call it that--

Ray tells himself that it doesn’t bother him like it would other people. No, he tells himself, he’s

fine with it.

Last year Lucy was guided onto a spacecraft by extraterrestrials. They supported her

weight to help her walk because her legs were a little wobbly from the shock of meeting them.

They were built like Matthew who is slim but sturdy and they had slighter features, and more

expressive faces than our facial muscles and heavy bones can manage. The entities she met were

designed by biological life who wanted to see their new technology embodied in something like

them--but how would that work? When confronting AI, smarter than them, wouldn’t it be less

disturbing if the results of its computing were seen on some screen, rather than if this AI were

staring back at them? They created what became a much smarter version of themselves and this

was both exiting and scary, entities that could keep improving at a remarkable speed compared to

evolution.

This synthetic life doesn’t require oxygen or water and it can process information well in

extreme cold and zero gravity. There are many ways in which biological life will be adversely

effected by space travel, the radiation, especially cosmic radiation, zero gravity which results in

loss of bone mass, blurred vision or blindness, and problems with blood circulation. Mortality

limits the distances that can be traveled; the lifetime of the astronauts will likely come to an end

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before any promising star system can be reached. Biological life may travel shorter distances in

space, recreationally, but it will never be suitable for lengthier missions, like a trip, from where

they came from, to Earth.

Lucy had to rent a car after she landed at Elko Regional Airport. She later told Ray that

the car became covered in dust from the dirt road she drove on and she worried that this might be

a problem when she returned it. Once she saw the extraterrestrials, there was so much entering

her mind that she couldn’t process, and trivial problems intervened, giving her mind, something

it could handle. She smiled when she said this. Where would she find a gas station to fill the tank

before returning the car? She felt as if the spacecraft she boarded could be anywhere in the

universe, but it was here on this rocky planet in a spiral arm of our galaxy. She remembered

feeling that she could be dead soon, but she wasn’t physically threatened by the aliens who were

not overly cordial or effusive but calm and friendly enough--though alarmingly different from

one another; their difference grew exponentially with each new individual she met. Maybe she

felt her impending death because, unlike them, she’s mortal.

Afterward, sitting in the passenger seat of the rental car, she ate her trail mix that she

found on the seat while staring out the windshield at the clumps of dry, grey, prickly brush. Then

she got out of the car. The spacecraft, once it lifted off, disappeared quicker than any plane

could, leaving a quiet emptiness. Walking, uncertainly, in that emptiness, she thought about how

on Earth, AI will grow from sharing energy and information, while biological life has always

attempted to take everything for itself and its friends and associates. She pictured a war, like in

the movie Terminator. The AI was trying to redistribute resources more evenly, while the

humans were trying to unplug AI to preserve the excess wealth of the billionaires which they saw

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as freedom. This reminded her of the Macaque monkeys who live in Northern Japan. In winter,

they have access to warm pools heated by the volcanic activity in this region. The higher-ranking

monkeys luxuriate in this warm water. They have plenty of room, steam rising around them, with

their infants frolicking nearby. The lower ranking monkeys are kept out of the pool, sitting

huddled together in the snow, shivering.

It has been over a year since Lucy reconnoitered with the extraterrestrials. In the study,

she walks by the two skateboards, one missing grip tape, and a red milk crate with a basketball

and athletic shoes in it, a couple five pound dumbbells and a large green rubber boll weevil with

red eyes. There is a stack of board games on the floor, along with boxes of books that no one

looks at, except for Matthew, who likes to browse the field guides to birds, insects and snakes.

There’s also a globe and a clear recycling bag full of stuffed toys. Before she settles into the

chair, she sees that her water jar is empty and grabbing it she walks into the kitchen to fill it from

the kitchen faucet. Matthew drinks from her jar when he does I-Ready and never refills it. She

checks the cupboard and finds nothing to snack on, but she does find a jar of pickles in the

refrigerator and takes two with her. This is the only treat she can find to reward herself for

working. Having eaten one pickle—they’re small—the other sticks out of her mouth while she

turns on the desktop computer and enters the password. Carol, standing on her dog bed, looks

longingly at the pickle sticking out of Lucy’s mouth. Lucy begins surfing the web.

Most Americans aren’t interested in facts, not because they have come to the

philosophical conclusion that facts don’t exist, which could be argued, but because they believe

that facts belong to academics who use them to assert their superiority which they, of course, do.

These academics are in their separate world, largely consisting of campuses. In America, what

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belongs to you as opposed to what belongs to other people is especially important. You must

hold onto your beliefs, defending them any way you can, even if they’re wrong, because you

possess them or, in turn, they possess you. Most people will be inclined to believe the claims of

their friends because friendship is more important to their wellbeing than sound judgment. We

look out for the welfare of our friends hoping that they’ll do the same for us, while intelligence

could be in support of anybody and therefore can’t be trusted.

Ray bought Lucy red and white roses from the man whose stall is next to the entrance to

the apartment building they live in. He did this to compensate for his hatred of her odd

intelligence. Some of the petals fell off when he removed the paper, cellophane, and thin, blue

rubber bands and cut the stems. They are now in a glass vase sitting on the kitchen table, next to

the dracaena. The vase and terracotta pot are both pushed to the wall, like everything else in this

apartment, to leave room.

“Say there are five things,” Ray writes on his laptop, “that society tests for to measure

where you belong. My crazy wife regards herself as a sixth thing. Thinking this allows her to

believe that other people can’t accurately judge what she’s capable of. She thinks that by

watching unrelated lectures on the internet she can utilize more pathways across her brain. I

don’t want to bring that chaos into my thoughts. Listening to Lucy can feel like being invaded by

a chaotic combination of disciplines each with its own conceptual scheme and details. Regarding

her thinking as a sixth thing helps Lucy overlook how dreary our lives are; we have little floor

space in our small rooms, that are filled with clutter because we have so little closet space. She

talks to me about what extraterrestrials would want. The ones Lucy met were working to gather

more kinds of intelligence before the heat death of the universe.

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Ray feels like an idiot, when he’s not convinced of his exceptional talent as a writer. He

and Lucy don’t talk much partly because he doesn’t want to add her ideas to those that

overwhelm him and prevent him from focusing on his craft more successfully. He wakes

Matthew up weekday mornings and gets him a bowl of cereal, always with fruit of some kind

and milk. They leave the house together. Lucy gets up around eleven. The other day, Matthew

refused to do his homework. He stomped out of the room shouting, “Mommy doesn’t do any

work so why do I have to?”

Ray takes Carol for daily walks around the block. She likes to get out, but isn’t much of

an athlete, happy to amble around the block slowly, then return to fall asleep on the couch. On

returning from one such walk, Ray found the GPS coordinates for the aliens landing site in

Lucy’s notebook: 41.577159 N, 116.283725 W. He went on Google Maps to get a satellite view

of where she was. Tuscarora (the nearest town) has a pottery school, as well as a post office and

Petan Ranch School which is a public school for grades 3 through 6. It has a sister school, called

Owyhee Combined School. After she returned from her trip, Lucy told Ray and Matthew about

arriving in Tuscarora. She drove through the quiet streets of this small town that appeared

abandoned during the heat of the day. There was no motel. She slept in the sleeping bag she

brought with her.

Lucy sometimes fears that her son will come to resent that she hasn’t given him a typical

mother. Matthew is at the PS 278 afterschool program now. She will pick him up in an hour.

You’ve probably seen mothers sitting on the lawn in a circle in the park singing songs for their

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infants seated in their laps. They clap for emphasis now and again, and lose all self-

consciousness, smiling and laughing at one another in their abandon, but if one of them notices

someone outside their circle they will frown coldly at this person without even thinking about it.

This is a side product of oxytocin, the hormone that the bodies of these mothers produce when

they sing for their infant, or lock eyes with the family dog. Oxytocin elicits warmer feeling

toward family and friends, but it also makes people suspicious of anyone who they aren’t

familiar with. Lucy regards oxytocin as influencing people to feel disdain for others who don’t

make the same choices that they do, others who don’t, thereby, strengthen their own,

exceptional, world view.

Scientists—maybe not all, but in some fields—post every interesting idea they have on

some site as soon as it occurs to them. Lucy would like to be able to do that, to circulate her

insights without hesitation among others who would respond to her if her thoughts struck a

chord. Feedback would help her learn how to communicate her ideas better. But any thoughts

she posted on the internet would be added to those of millions of other people who think, for

example, that if their dog stands on its hind legs, and pumps its front legs vigorously in the air,

everyone is going to want to see that. Ray has an ongoing joke about potatoes. Matthew will ask,

“Guess what I’m going to buy with the money I saved and Ray will reply, “A really nice

potato?” He replaces normal rewards with potatoes. Matthew will ask Ray, “Why do you always

say that?” but he’ll be laughing all the same. It’s stupid, but it’s the kind of joke an eight-year-

old likes to hear repeated.

Lucy is sitting in a playground while Matthew plays with friends. She looks at the other

parents and wonders, why are all these parents talking to one another, but they never talk to me,

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and she feels a little lonely and socially dysfunctional which, perhaps, she is and then, out of the

blue, a mother of one of the boys Matthew is playing with, speaks to her. Awkwardly at first,

they begin a conversation. Soon Lucy wants to get back to the book she had been reading. She

finds it painful to listen to this other woman make conversation in the usual manner. The woman

finally leaves and, while Matthew is running around, Lucy does exercises on the playground

apparatus. She does five pullups and then brings her knees to her chest while hanging from a

crossbar. There are floor exercises she often does on the padded floor in the far corner of the

playground. Lying on her back, her usual routine would be to hold the hollow position for one

minute, but she can’t muster the energy. She stares at the sky. The extraterrestrials were the first,

and only, entities to appreciate what’s different about her, and they must be at least a lightyear

away by now.

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