Songs of Love & Death

Nothing changed on the screen for some time. Martin occupied himself primarily in praying that Lorraine would not return just then; but also in marveling that a face so beautiful could simultaneously reveal itself as obviously unhuman, yet lose none of its appeal. Nor could he pinpoint the exact reason he knew what he knew—but he knew, and he went on waiting for an answer.

The laptop screen changed again. The face vanished—Martin found himself reaching helplessly toward where it had been—and the screen filled once more with the characters of that otherworldly language. Martin groaned… but in almost the same moment, the words dissolved and reformed themselves into something approximating English. He leaned close to the computer, squinting to read them.

Me what

You

Hel who lolo

Me me

First Contact! Martin had seen enough science-fiction movies to know about first contact. The ludicrousness of a computer—a laptop, at that—connecting a suburban produce manager with another world and another life form was not lost on him, as stunned and overwhelmed as he was. “Why me?” he demanded aloud. “Why not a scientist, an astronomer, whatever? Come on, for goodness’ sake!” But all the same, he typed into the screen Where are you? What is your name?

There was no response for what seemed a very long while, as excited and impatient as he was. He tried to calm himself, thinking that he and the alien—his alien, if he was the first to discover her, like an island or a mountain—might likely be communicating over light-years, not mere miles. This was hardly Instant Messaging, after all. Even so, he was fidgeting like a child, unable to sit still, by the time the reply came back.

You what

Talk

Who no gone gone

Me

The next word, which Martin thought must have been an attempt at a name, dissolved back into a flurry of words—or sounds? or mathematical symbols? or plain lunatic gibberish?—in the original possibly cosmic tongue. In turn he went back to his own first contact cry: I don’t understand.

“Story of your life, Gelber,” he said aloud to the computer. “Find a girl to go to the prom with, she lives too far away for a cab ride and she doesn’t speak English. Your life in one line, I swear.”

The computer said back to him in what was still a braver try at his language than any attempt he had yet made at hers:

Me belong Kaskia

Belong who you

Kaskia. Her name was Kaskia, or else she—belonged? a slave?—to someone of that name. Martin refused to believe that anyone who looked like that could be anyone’s servant, let alone a slave. He took a long breath and typed back Martin. My name is Martin.

He heard nothing back for the rest of the day, even though he forlornly pressed the One Key again and again. Lorraine came home in a good mood, the one benign side effect of her shopping expeditions, and they enjoyed a relatively placid evening, practically together. Martin yearned to get back to the laptop, and Lorraine clearly had phone calls to make—Martin knew the look—but instead they watched a public-television documentary on the history of the Empire State Building, even sitting still through the semi-annual fundraising supplications. Maybe having a special secret makes you nicer, Martin thought. Easier to get along with. He wondered what Lorraine’s secret might be.

When Lorraine went to bed, he booted up the laptop and tried, cautiously and apprehensively, to contact the being who called herself—itself?—Kaskia, but to no avail. Applying the One Key repeatedly summoned no starry crackle to his screen, nor did appealing directly to the computer’s elaborate message-tracing systems produce any unearthly footprints at all. The entire contact—the entire vision—might never have occurred.

Martin mourned it all through the next day’s work at the supermarket. Unlike the protagonists of any number of films and stories, he never for a moment took his encounter with the unearthly for a hallucination or a dream. There had been a connection, however fragmented, with a creature from another place or reality; and the idea of such a wonder never occurring again for the rest of his life made that life seem to him even duller and more pointless than he already knew it to be. “I won’t stand for it,” he said aloud to himself, while showing Jamil the proper way to stack the red cabbages. “I won’t.” Jamil took it as a slight to his cabbage-stacking technique, and was deeply wounded.