When the music stopped, Koji scanned the room, his gaze resting momentarily on each of the five alien faces. They did not appear inured to Koji’s chalky serenity, but then, he wasn’t entirely certain what that would have looked like. As it was, the aliens returned Koji’s gaze, intently, as if waiting for a cue on how to proceed from the temporal belly flop the present had landed them all in.

Then something mysterious happened. It didn’t start out all that mysterious, but Koji was soon caught in the echoing aftershocks. Suddenly and for no apparent reason, the alien calling himself Jerry began to weep. Susanna, as she called herself, made what Koji took to be several attempts at engaging Jerry in light, amicable conversation, but her efforts only seemed to increase the flow of Jerry’s tears. Seeing that her ministrations were counterproductive, Susanna abruptly removed her clothes, tied herself into some kind of mega-radical yoga knot, and began to vibrate audibly, emitting a kind of carbonated-beverage fizzing sound. As the effervescence grew gradually louder, Koji plunged into a methodological nosedive reminiscent of pre-Copernican marriage counseling. Not exactly hallucinating, he was nevertheless convinced that large groups of neurons in his hippocampus were wiring themselves together into larger circuits for the sole purpose of throwing themselves out an imaginary window. Squinting through a polka dot pattern of vertigo in which he kept seeing little bits of pavement accelerating toward his face, he backed up fast, caught in mid-retreat by the love seat.

The situation was apparently as traumatic for the aliens as it was for Koji. Two of them, Larry and Diana, rushed for the bathroom door in what was, judging by their velocity and crimped gait, clearly a bowel-related emergency.

The only one who seemed unaffected was Dorothy, the fifth alien, the one who had earlier jettisoned Trapper’s sangfroid in the elevator. Dorothy, it seemed to Koji, held rank of some sort over Jerry, Larry, Susanna, and Diana. She didn’t issue orders exactly. Not verbally, anyway. But she left brief notes on the coffee table encoded in an austere and indecipherable notation that never failed to cause a flurry of formalized echolalia among the other four.

Susanna’s vibratory contortions had lopped off most of Koji’s personality, leaving a rebarbative stub of unserviceable Kantian-like pretensions. When Dorothy joined him on the love seat, she positioned herself as a kind of instruction, like a gene encoding a protein, initiating a sequence of precise posture changes that somehow served to re-augment Koji’s fizzled frontal lobes. At the very moment he was sure he’d recovered, all his lights went out and he collapsed face down in Dorothy’s lap.

“I had a peculiar experience earlier today,” Trapper said, after swallowing with obvious satisfaction the first bite of his Stratosphere Wrap.

Spin had ordered a Library of Congress, and was working on it with the studied devotion appropriate to the national archives.

“A passenger in the elevator at my apartment building,” Trapper continued, “a young woman whose conduct indicated a gap in my understanding of entropy.”

Always cautious around entropic deficits, Spin chewed attentively while Trapper continued.

“It wasn’t so much that she removed all her clothes. I was, as they say, cool with that. But as she was exiting the elevator, she made a suspicious allusion to Koji.”

Spin stopped in mid-bite. “Allusion?” he asked, as if nudged ex nihilo. “What’d she say, exactly?”

“She said, and I quote, Koji is going to love this.”

Spin whispered the words to himself several times, like a man trying to convince himself he was in possession of evidence for something invisible. “What’d you do?” he asked Trapper.

“Do? I didn’t do anything,” Trapper said, taking another bite of the Stratosphere.

“Maybe we should establish contact,” Spin suggested.

“Yes,” Trapper agreed, “the problem is, I don’t who she is, where she came from, or where she was going.”

“How many people live on the top floor of your building? She must have been going to see one of them.”

Trapper thought it over. “There are four apartments. One’s vacant. Two others are occupied by people I know pretty well. I don’t think they’re connected to this woman. They’ve lived there for years.”


“What about the other apartment?”

“That’s a possibility. Two guys rented the place, and there are a couple women living there, too. I’ve seen the women a few times. The woman today wasn’t one of them, but that must have been her destination.”

A waitress approached the table at high speed. With one hand cupped tightly in her crotch, she thrust a loaf of French bread at Trapper’s head, accusing him at the top of her voice of being a bellicose philistine. This done, she backed off demurely and returned to the kitchen.

“Did you see that French bread?” Spin asked.

“Yeah, I think I might order a couple slices. You want some?”

Celeste Boursier-Mougenot Zebra Finches from alistair Ramsay on Vimeo.

Jack stepped uninvited into the room, one arm raised as if to shield himself from objections, and began to square the circle. “Personality,” he began, “is a byproduct of the confrontation with death. Language is not a suitable tool for marking the distinction between truth and fiction. When I look at other people, I see a kind of moving container full of strange configurations of mental fluff, most of it remarkably standardized, insipid, if not downright stupid. What I don’t often see is any good reason to expose myself to that fluff. On my good days, I’m like a bold excursion into the realm of pure cinema!”

When Jack paused, he was standing in front of the calendar Laura had been reading. “If I were Spin,” he said, as if his tirade was already lost in time, “I’d boost the vitamin C and add some Ginkgo.”

Laura was trying to decide if this maniac was a sign that her life had taken a turn into uncharted topographies. “Is there something on your mind?” she asked, removing her shades.

The only Jack in the building, suddenly aware of the situation he’d propelled himself into, looked like he’d been caught sniffing the Queen’s poop. The moment had come for some tricky footwork of the sort Jack knew he was decisively incapable of. So instead, he simply said what was on his mind. “I’m looking for someone with whom to crossbreed my reality principle.”

Laura, finding herself once again in the wiggly crosshairs of someone else’s blinkered vision, asked the only Jack in the building if he would you like something to eat. Jack, nodding in the affirmative, followed Laura into the kitchen, where, surrounded by modern culinary technologies, his objectives were quickly normalized and he got chatty.

“Have you ever heard of SOFA?” he asked Laura, while she evaluated the contents of the refrigerator.

“A longish, upholstered piece of furniture?”

“S-O-F-A,” Jack clarified. “Society Of Friends of the Abductors.”

Carrying a jar of peanut butter and a box of soda crackers, she joined Jack at the table. “Sounds like an organization aflame with fortuitous affinities.”

“Yeah. They’re like a cartoon of something fundamentally unfunny. Anyway,” Jack continued, as Laura spread thick dollops of peanut butter on several crackers, “these SOFA potatoes have been trying for years to come up with convincing evidence for alien abductions. Not surprisingly, they haven’t had much luck. Apparently they’ve gotten desperate enough to change their tactics. Now they’re looking for anything, human or otherwise, they can accuse the aliens of abducting.”

Laura placed three of the crackers on a dish and slid it across the table to Jack. “Like what, for instance?”

Jack picked up one of the peanut butter crackers and examined it with pious affection. “Well, first they claimed that the aliens were abducting the planet’s frog population. Then they switched to honey bees. Now it seems the aliens are responsible for our children’s impoverished vocabularies.”

“They’re abducting our words?” Laura asked, amused.

“Yeah. And the SOFAs say they have objective proof in the kids’ declining reading skills.”

Laura and Jack both popped a peanut butter cracker into their respective mouths, glad to have something to chew on while considering the implications.

Still, there was a languid rhythm to the aliens’ life, and Koji welcomed it as a respite from the lunacy endemic to his own. The aliens spent the majority of their time sleeping — about sixteen hours a day. Most of the remaining eight hours were devoted to arguing followed by sex followed by music videos of someone called X-pek d’Laze. According to a CD jacket Koji had read, X-pek d’Laze was a ‘musical phenomenon merging the razor-edged social commentary of rap music with the formal elegance of ancient Japanese Noh drama.’ The CD consisted of a single cut entitled ‘Epistemological Ascent.’ He listened to it once out of curiosity, a second time in order to count the words, a third time to confirm that only twelve words were spoken in the entire sixty-plus-minute composition, and a final time trying to understand why he found the music so moving.

Music aside, Koji sensed that life among the aliens was nudging something into place, either in him or through him, and because of that he wanted to think of himself as their guest, even though he suspected that he was, in some indefinable way, their hostage. What he didn’t realize was that he was neither. The aliens were completely baffled by his presence in their already overcrowded apartment.