ONE
If there were a planet of horses, would we race them? A planet of dogs, would we train them to sit and stay?
The aliens asked to speak to Jesus. That surprised everyone at first, but it turned out they’d gotten one of our time capsules some time back (we never really effectively communicated about how time works. The aliens would just say, time is transcended by progress, which made no sense to anyone). The time capsule had a Bible in it. The aliens spoke English because they studied the Bible. The Pope was called and declared the arrival definitive proof. A movement by western nations to declare English the official language of the galaxy gained momentum. It was Jewish logicians at one of the big universities who got to the root of it. They believe in Jesus because you believe in Jesus, they said. But, the Christians replied, how could the Bible have gotten so far without the will of an omniscient, beneficent, capital G-o-d? And on and on.
The arguments stopped after a few weeks because we had more pressing concerns. Specifically, the aliens had told a gathering of select world leaders that we looked very, very familiar to them. “We have you on our planet too,” they said slowly in a recording leaked on YouTube and subsequently watched by every breathing man, woman, gender nonconforming individual, and child with a pulse and an internet connection.
They were so patient when we didn’t understand. How could they have us? We’d never made it past Mars on our own. No way, no how could there be a colony of us somewhere else. But the aliens persisted. “Ours too have stringy heads and four limbs. They worship a man in the sky. They build homes and cluster in small family groups. They tinker. They are, in sum, very much like you.”
TWO
If there are only so many shapes in the galaxy, then when the others come, they might look like hats. Bowler hats. Navy. No ribbons. Bulbous. Lipped. They might fall silently. They might land on, say, 100,000 people across America. People of different races, classes, genders, hair colors. People who put the milk in the bowl before the cereal and people who put the milk in after. People who wear band tees. People who wear berets. There really is nothing tying them together but their new felty headgear. Magrittes for all.
The people might think they are chosen - or marked? Everyone will stare at the sky. The hatted few will become priests of a new religion. They will give speeches to the UN about why they think they were picked. They will never, ever take off the hats, and when they die the hats will be bequeathed to their favorite children or nieces or mentees or what-have-you. Scientists will hold conference after conference to understand the evolutionary benefits of being shaped like a hat. They will commission people with liberal arts degrees to imagine planets that would make one want to look and act like a hat. The president will personally rig the Empire State Building to wink up at the sky in human military code:
WHY DID YOU COME HERE? ARE THERE MORE OF YOU? WE WOULD LIKE MORE. WE CAN PAY. WE CAN TRADE. HAVE YOU DISCOVERED SUPPLY AND DEMAND?
The skies will stay silent - and more importantly, hatless. Over the course of a generation, it will dawn on people that the hats have changed us. Old folks will talk about the before times, all the ways of being and talking that changed. Nobody will walk a red carpet or schmooze at a black tie event without a bowler hat.
Orchestras will look like a sea of buzzing, nodding navy hats from above - nosebleed seats at Lincoln Center will be the closest one can get to picturing the type of civilization that might have sent us the originals. All bowler hats will come to stand in for those original 100,000. A hat on one’s head will signify chosenness and oneness with the cosmos as well as perhaps a je ne sais quois held by the hat-wearer. We will build thousands of hat factories. We will make tens of millions of hats. A president will run for office, successfully, on the slogan “A HAT ON EVERY HEAD, AN AMERICA WELL FED.” It will turn out that we like being worn. We will dream of other beings that might come to wear us: patent leather shoe aliens, extraterrestrial neckties, a platoon of silky space pajamas that will put us on to go stargazing.
But the hats from space will never come back.
THREE
May I ask what it is that you have foregone in the name of others? Obligation came from a dying star and met the Obliged atop a tall rock. I gave my thumb willingly, my pinky toe. I gave it two of my twenty pairs of shoes. I gave it 1.5 of my fifteen cousins. When I go to sleep, my dreams are missing key narrative points. There is always something left to take.
I climb Mount Tam to demand answers of Obligation. With a tone both threatening and hopeful, Obligation says, “You are responsible.” I float critically above my neck, dripping in obligation which pools where it can be taken up. Each puddle is warm and blackred.
Going now here and now there with my dripping, I ask of you, where is it that you have gone in the name of others? If, as I float above you, you say to me a word, I will send to you a dying star to nurse.
FOUR
If, when you are sleeping in your bed with me who you love during the night and you hear sounds like the sounds friends make but shriller, perk up your ear and pull back the sheets.
In the corner of the room in which you are sleeping there is a cellist, and, hanging from the ceiling fan, a violinist. I have tried to warn of this possibility by ululating at strategic pitches during the morning time before you are yet awake. I can see now that you are sleeping and have heeded none of my shrieks. I will not wake you.
When the harpist pokes her head through the door to the room in which you are sleeping, I am sorry. When the harpist arrives, hope is lost.
I will be like a tune in that the sounds you hear like the sounds that friends make will carry me away. In the open window, a mandoline playing the mandolin, and my severed head in a hat.
If, when you are sleeping in your bed with me who you love during the night and you hear sounds like the sounds friends make but shriller, cover your head, for they have come.
FIVE
A man comes down in a spaceship and says, “For King and for Queen, I claim this land!”
All who are present at the point of the man’s invasion cock their heads calmly to the side. “No,” they say, “No, we’ve done this before.”
The man unholsters a gun.
“No,” the people say, “It is not noon, we cannot do this either, we are sorry.”
The man from space demands, in Biblical English, to know where the lepers are. “I am in need of limbs,” he says.
The people hold their limbs sturdily aloft, and the man sees that they are an intact people.
SIX
The elephants went first. In Botswana and Bhutan and zoos and plains around the world, at one moment, the sky opened for the elephants. Spotlights - the sort humans aren’t used to sharing with other living things - fell on the elephants alone. For a moment every elephant in the world was frozen in their own beam, 400,000 stars who had, at the worst possible moment, forgotten their lines. Then, they floated up, so many elephants like dust particles in the glow of an old lamp. Where did they go? God knows.
And then the ants. The sky was bright with billions upon billions of tiny beams, like a moon colony and a sun colony were competing to shine the most penlights on our scorched earth.
When the dolphins went up, immediately followed by the humpbacks, blue whales, belugas, crabs, marine microorganisms, and sea cucumbers, no coastal city survived Archimedes’ backlash.
Emus. Possums. Wolves. Termites. Pomeranians. Sloths. Moths. Chimps. And so on.
When the bees were gone, and the butterflies, and the birds (which mostly disappeared without fanfare, just flew up and up and up), everything green died. Animals that hadn’t been plucked from the ground/sea/air/swamp/desert/forest and hadn’t the foresight to create superstores and shelf stable food items were bones and shells soon. We almost didn’t know what to do with ourselves, except relocate small towns to local Costcos, allow city folk to eat each other up, and let the rural parts of the world fade into memory. We used yarn to navigate labyrinthine stores and tore at bulk, plastic wrapped snack food like hungry rodents. We missed hungry rodents. We held each other. We forget what everything looked like. We read our old books, told our old stories. We left the heavy metal doors open during the day and sometimes, a breeze would blow through.
When everything was gone except for us, the rain started.
SEVEN
Personally, my prayers were answered, when the praying mantises flew down like bundles of hummingbirds taped together. They landed on trees and we could see them they were so large. They clipped the leaves with their legs and made elaborate shapes. They made shapes no human had ever before conceived. The art critics hailed them, and the artists paid large sums to fashion their arms into spiked limbs. Their sensibility grew larger, until the mantises tied themselves to one another to form a scythe the size of a field. They cut the earth into a new shape, one even the mantises could never conceive individually. The earth, subsequently, fell through space like eight billion hummingbirds taped together.