The Man Who Fell to Earth

Possibly because it was the Christmas holiday season, there were very few people at the zoo, which suited Bryce perfectly. The animals were all indoors, and the two of them wandered from building to building, talking pleasantly. He liked the big, insolent cats, especially the panthers, and she liked the birds, the bright-colored ones. He was thankful and pleased that she cared for the monkeys no more than he did — he found them obscene little creatures — for it would have dismayed him had she, like so many women, found them cute and funny. He had never seen anything funny about monkeys.

He was also pleased to find that he could buy beer from a stand at, of all places, the entrance to the aquarium. They took their beers inside with them — although a sign told them plainly not to — and seated themselves in the dusky light before a large tank which contained an enormous catfish. The catfish was a fine, solid, placid-looking creature, with Mandarin mustaches and gray, pachydermous skin. It watched them dolefully while they drank their beer.

After they had sat in silence for a while, watching the catfish, Betty Jo said, “What do you think they’ll do with Tommy?”

He realized that he had been waiting for her to bring up the subject. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll hurt him or anything.”

Betty Jo sipped from her cup. “They said he wasn’t… wasn’t an American.”

“That’s right.”

“Do you know if he is, Doctor Bryce?”

He started to tell her to call him Nathan, but it didn’t seem right to do that, just then. “I imagine they’re right,” he said, wondering how in the name of heaven they could deport him if they had found out.

“Do you think they’ll keep him long?”

He remembered that X-ray of Newton’s skeleton and the thoroughness of the FBI in testing him in the little dentist’s office and abruptly he understood why they had tested him. They wanted to make sure that he was not an Anthean, too. “Yes,” he said. “I think they’ll probably keep him for a long time. As long as they can.”

She didn’t reply and he looked over at her. She was holding her paper cup in her lap, with both hands, and staring down into it as if into a well. The flat, diffused light from the catfish’s tank made no shadows on her face, and the unlined simplicity of her features and her poised, solid position on the bench made her appear like a fine and solid statue. He looked at her silently for what seemed a long time.

Then she looked over at him and it became obvious why she had been crying before. “You’ll miss him, I suppose,” he said. Then he finished his beer.

Her expression did not change. Her voice was soft. “I sure will miss him,” she said. “Let’s go look at the rest of the fish.”

They looked at the rest of them, but there was none he liked so well as the old catfish.

When the time came to take a taxi back into town he realized that he had no address to give, that there was no particular place for him to go. He looked at Betty Jo, standing beside him now in the sunshine, “where are you going to stay?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have any people around Cincinnati.”

“You could go back to your family in… what was it?”

“In Irvine. It’s not too far.” She looked at him wistfully. “But I don’t think I want to. We never got along.”

He said, hardly thinking what it meant. “Do you want to stay with me? Maybe at a hotel? And then, if you wanted to, we could find an apartment.”

She seemed stunned for a moment, and he was afraid he had insulted her. But then she took a step closer to him and said, “My God, yes. I think we ought to stay together, Doctor Bryce.”

8

He began drinking heavily again, during the second month of his confinement, and he was not altogether sure why. It was not loneliness, since now he had confessed himself, as it were, to Bryce, he felt little wish for companionship. Nor did he feel that sense of intense strain he had labored with for years, now that the issues were simpler and the responsibilities almost nonexistent. He had only one major problem that might have served as an excuse for drinking; the problem of whether or not to continue the plan, should he ever be permitted by the government to do so. Yet he did not often trouble himself with that — drunk or sober — since the possibility of his having any further choice in the matter seemed remote.

He still read a great deal, and had taken up a new interest in avant-garde literature, especially in the difficult, rigidly formal poetry of the little magazines—sestinas, villanelles, ballades, which, though somewhat weak on ideas and insight, were often linguistically fascinating. He even attempted a poem himself, an Italian sonnet in Alexandrines, but found himself alarmingly ungifted at it before he had struggled his way through the octave. He thought he might attempt it some time in Anthean.