CHAPTER ONE
What do you do when you meet an alien in Central Park?
It coils up in the sunlight, fanged and beautiful, eating the turtles who live on the rocks. It tears them in half and plucks the meat from their shells with white-glove hands. There are red stains on its fingertips. It has eight heads and eight necks like adders.
Anna stares at it in delight.
What do you do?
Anna knows what to do. She daydreamed a plan while she was on jury duty, waiting to explain that she is unsuitable for juries, because she makes decisions too quickly and too finally. What will I do when I see an alien. First she’ll take a picture. Then she’ll sidle up to one of Central Park’s other inhabitants, a hot jogger or a purse-dog chariot or a fully descended finance ballsack. She’ll say, Check out that costume, which will keep bystanders confused and passive.
While they’re busy taking pictures and googling alien prank, Anna will walk right up to the entity and introduce herself.
What will she say to the alien? She has not planned that far. “Take us to your leader”? No, the alien’s supposed to use that one. “We come in peace” has the same problem, and would, anyway, be a lie. Anna has no peace to offer. “Invade us, I beg you.” At least this would resolve the problem of her Argentina-sized debt.
It’s the 24th of June in the Era of our Common 2013, a warm day, a day so nice that Anna wants to argue with it. Anna’s just been fired as a bad cultural fit. This happens a lot. Because of her background as a Kurdish war orphan, corporate hiring committees who want to satisfy their Commitment to Diversity in one affordable package see Anna as a real gem (a conflict diamond). So they hire her, onboard her, photograph her, put her on the pamphlets and the website and their customer-facing diversity campaign, and only then realize that Jiyan (Anna) Sinjari comes with a few items of defect:
She has an honesty problem, in that she’s too honest, like a German oncologist;She does a lot of disruption, but not in the cool tech-fucko sense: repeatedly and egregiously she will say, this is stupid, you are stupid, and I refuse to do it until you convince me otherwise;She has actually shot people (sometimes this comes out during the company paintball trip). What if Anna reads your No, Anna, What The Fuck email and pulls a Glock in the bathroom? That came up in an HR complaint once. The implied Glock threat. As if there is something in her which remembers that day, which broadcasts the memory of the Kurdish past to the American present. Though Anna cannot actually remember what kind of pistol the man in the red beret gave her. A Glock? A Makarov? Something Czech? Who gives a fuck.Fuck you, Glock hater. Fuck you, CFOptions Software (A Martin Company). Fuck you, New York City.
This brings Anna to Central Park, where there are no crosswalks or gym memberships to stop her angry run. The problem, she’s beginning to think, is that she doesn’t actually want a job. She doesn’t care about anything that matters to anyone else. She never will. She is trapped in that terrible day. The day when little Anna held the power of life and death in her sweaty hands, and did not refuse to wield it.
She wants that back.
She wants to be important again. That’s her filthy secret: she misses that awful power, because at least then she mattered. She earned it! The world made her a promise! If you carry heavy grief, if you’re real fucking tragic, if you grimace and refuse to speak your pain, then one day, one day, you’ll be offered a chance to redeem yourself. Suffering is debt and the universe owes you.
Right?
Wrong, of course, of course; a real adult would know that. (How can she be nearly thirty-two? She feels twenty-two, even her checking account is barely past twenty-two.) Congratulations on your mythically awful childhood, but it’s nothing to anyone here except a reason to dump you and tell your friends you need therapy. Keep your temper down and your credit score up, drink with the crew on Friday night and probably Saturday too, play office politics but say you don’t care. A necessity Anna hates, because she can’t help it, she treats every gossipy Oh, Rich said you weren’t a great fit for the position rumor as an actual fight-or-flight situation: her brain firmly believes that she’s seven years old again, that her people are being gassed and rounded up for execution. When the first Gulf War began she was ten years old and she thought it was happening to save the Kurds. It almost did: the fucking Americans told the Kurds to rebel and then didn’t show up for the rebellion! The American general even gave Saddam Hussein permission to fly his attack helicopters! What kind of limp-dicked Tinder-quality mixed messaging is that?
Anyway. They tell Anna these things. You make people uneasy in the office, Anna. Seek therapy, Anna. You’re fired, Anna. You’re fired. You’re fired.
Anna hops off the path to stumble down a stone slope toward the Turtle Pond. She growls back stupid angry tears, because she has a date with Roman tonight and she knows she’s not going to have the patience she needs to tolerate his unlimited and disgusting and basically genuine decency. And then, and then—
She sees it. There it is, on the rocks, in the pond, in the sunlight. Eating the turtles with its bloodstained white hands.
The alien.
* * *
She’s sunning herself on the rocks, belly up, stirring the pond water with her tail.
So vivid, so fuck-you-I’m-real undeniable, that she short-circuits all forms of critical thought, and really if you consider it Anna is the perfect woman for this situation: she’ll accept anything, everything, at face value, because it cannot be more absurd than what she has already done.
Behold: the visitor. Her muscular tail lashes idly, like a cat that cannot get at a bird. Her whole animal grace is sheathed in arrowhead scales, shiny black and fine as fingernail. Pretty much a naga, a snake-centaur: serpent from the waist down, scaly person from the waist up, slim and kind of ripped. Anna goes for she because of the gloves. Look at the way her arms shade. Satin-black at the shoulders, silver-white at the fingertips. Yeah. Like fancy lady gloves.
Instead of a head, the alien grows eight vipers. Snakes as long and graceful as swan necks.
One of the alien’s snake heads whips out and bites a passing turtle right on its beaky face. The poor critter falls over paralyzed and the alien scoops it up in her hands, grunts, and rips its bottom shell off. Anna stares in consternation. The poor turtle! With a delighted hiss the alien jabs three heads into the turtle gore and eats it like a bowl of meat. She has enormous hinged fangs, pale green-white in each milky mouth, limned with a sterling gleam of metal.
Anna whips out her phone and takes a picture.
One of the alien’s heads snaps right around to her, like she just farted at a party.
“Wait one moment,” the alien says, in a voice like Cate Blanchett speaking Sorani Kurdish—it is absolutely her home’s Kurdish, regal and precise—“you can see me?”
“Sure can,” Anna says. “Why do you speak—” Never mind. Some kind of alien translator bullshit. “Do you come in peace?”
“Aren’t you afraid?” One of her snake heads jabs at Anna, accusing. “Don’t you feel a malignant sense of absolute and infectious horror?”
“Nah.” Anna switches over to video. “Say hi to the internet. Where do you come from? Are there more of you?”
“This is all I need.” The alien sighs. Two of her heads stay fixed on Anna. Two of them circle around as wary sentries. The other four lash and rip and eat the hell out of the poor turtle in a spew of gore. “I need to consider what this means. Enjoy convincing anyone I’m real.”
Copyright © 2023 by Seth Dickinson
