We Are the Ants

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  For Matt, my favorite alien

  TWO POSSIBILITIES EXIST: EITHER WE ARE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE OR WE ARE NOT. BOTH ARE EQUALLY TERRIFYING.

  —Arthur C. Clarke

  Chemistry: Extra Credit Project

  Life is bullshit.

  Consider your life for a moment. Think about all those little rituals that sustain you throughout your day—from the moment you wake up until that last, lonely midnight hour when you guzzle a gallon of NyQuil to drown out the persistent voice in your head. The one that whispers you should give up, give in, that tomorrow won’t be better than today. Think about the absurdity of brushing your teeth, of arguing with your mother over the appropriateness of what you’re wearing to school, of homework, of grade-point averages and boyfriends and hot school lunches.

  And life.

  Think about the absurdity of life.

  When you break down the things we do every day to their component pieces, you begin to understand how ridicu­lous they are. Like kissing, for instance. You wouldn’t let a stranger off the street spit into your mouth, but you’ll swap saliva with the boy or girl who makes your heart race and your pits sweat and gives you boners at the worst fucking times. You’ll stick you tongue in his mouth or her mouth or their mouth, and let them reciprocate without stopping to consider where else their tongue has been, or whether they’re giving you mouth herpes or mono or leftover morsels of their tuna-salad sandwich.

  We shave our legs and pluck our eyebrows and slather our bodies with creams and lotions. We starve ourselves so we can fit into the perfect pair of jeans, we pollute our bodies with drugs to increase our muscles so we’ll look ripped without a shirt. We drive fast and party hard and study for exams that don’t mean dick in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

  Physicists have theorized that we live in an infinite and infinitely expanding universe, and that everything in it will eventually repeat. There are infinite copies of your mom and your dad and your clothes-stealing little sister. There are infinite copies of you. Despite what you’ve spent your entire life believing, you are not a special snowflake. Somewhere out there, another you is living your life. Chances are, they’re living it better. They’re learning to speak French or screwing their brains out instead of loafing on the couch in their boxers, stuffing their face with bowl after bowl of Fruity Oatholes while wondering why they’re all alone on a Friday night. But that’s not even the worst part. What’s really going to send you running over the side of the nearest bridge is that none of it matters. I’ll die, you’ll die, we’ll all die, and the things we’ve done, the choices we’ve made, will amount to nothing.

  Out in the world, crawling in a field at the edge of some bullshit town with a name like Shoshoni or Medicine Bow, is an ant. You weren’t aware of it. Didn’t know whether it was a soldier, a drone, or the queen. Didn’t care if it was scouting for food to drag back to the nest or building new tunnels for wriggly ant larvae. Until now that ant simply didn’t exist for you. If I hadn’t mentioned it, you would have continued on with your life, pinballing from one tedious task to the next—shoving your tongue into the bacterial minefield of your girlfriend’s mouth, doodling the variations of your combined names on the cover of your notebook—waiting for electronic bits to zoom through the air and tell you that someone was thinking about you. That for one fleeting moment you were the most significant person in someone else’s insignificant life. But whether you knew about it or not, that ant is still out there doing ant things while you wait for the next text message to prove that out of the seven billion self-centered people on this planet, you are important. Your entire sense of self-worth is predicated upon your belief that you matter, that you matter to the universe.

  But you don’t.

  Because we are the ants.

  • • •

  I didn’t waste time thinking about the future until the night the sluggers abducted me and told me the world was going to end.

  I’m not insane. When I tell you the human race is toast, I’m not speaking hyperbolically the way people do when they say we’re all dying from the moment our mothers evict us from their bodies into a world where everything feels heavier and brighter and far too loud. I’m telling you that tomorrow—­January 29, 2016—you can kiss your Chipotle-eating, Frappuccino-drinking, fat ass good-bye.

  You probably don’t believe me—I wouldn’t in your place—but I’ve had 143 days to come to terms with our inevitable destruction, and I’ve spent most of those days thinking about the future. Wondering whether I have or want one, trying to decide if the end of existence is a tragedy, a comedy, or as inconsequential as that chem lab I forgot to turn in last week.

  But the real joke isn’t that the sluggers revealed to me the date of Earth’s demise; it’s that they offered me the choice to prevent it.

  You asked for a story, so here it is. I’ll begin with the night the sluggers told me the world was toast, and when I’m finished, we can wait for the end together.

  7 September 2015

  The biggest letdown about being abducted by aliens is the abundance of gravity on the spaceship. We spend our first nine months of life floating, weightless and blind, in an amniotic sac before we become gravity’s bitch, and the seductive lure of space travel is the promise of returning to that perfect state of grace. But it’s a sham. Gravity is jealous, sadistic, and infinite.

  Sometimes I think gravity may be death in disguise. Other times I think gravity is love, which is why love’s only demand is that we fall.

  • • •

  Sluggers aren’t gray. They don’t have saucer-wide eyes or thin lipless mouths. As far as I know, they don’t have mouths at all. Their skin is rough like wet leather and is all the colors of an algae bloom. Their black spherical eyes are mounted atop their heads on wobbly stalks. Instead of arms, they have appendages that grow from their bodies when required. If their UFO keys fall off the console—boom!—instant arm. If they need to restrain me or silence my terrified howls, they can sprout a dozen tentacles to accomplish the task. It’s very efficient.

  Oddly enough, sluggers do have nipples. Small brown buttons that appear to be as useless to them as most men’s. It’s comforting to know that regardless of our vast differences and the light-years that separate our worlds, we’ll always have nipples in common.

  I should slap that on a bumper sticker, © HENRY JEROME DENTON.

  • • •

  Before you ask: no, the sluggers have never probed my anus. I’m fairly certain they reserve that special treat for people who talk on their phones during movies, or text while driving.

  • • •

  Here’s how it happens: abductions always begin with shadows. Even in a dark room, with the windows closed and the curtains drawn, the shadows descend, circling like buzzards over a reeking lunch.

  Then a heaviness in my crotch like I have to pee, growing painfully insistent regardless of how much I beg my brain to ignore it.

  After that, helplessness. Paralysis. The inability to ­struggle. Fight. Breathe.

  The inability to scream.

  At some point the sluggers move me to the examination room. I’ve been abducted at least a dozen times, and I still don’t know how they transport me from my bedroom to their spaceship. It happens in the dark space between blinks, in the void between breaths.

 
Once aboard, they begin the experiments.

  That’s what I assume they’re doing. Trying to fathom the motives of an advanced alien race who possess the technological capacity to travel through the universe is like the frog I dissected in ninth grade trying to understand why I cut it open and pinned its guts to the table. The sluggers could be blasting me with deadly radiation or stuffing me full of slugger eggs just to see what happens. Hell, I could be some slugger kid’s science fair project.

  I doubt I’ll ever know for certain.

  Sluggers don’t speak. During those long stretches where my body is beyond my control, I often wonder how they communicate with one another. Maybe they secrete chemi­cals the way insects do, or perhaps the movements of their eyestalks is a form of language similar to the dance of a bee. They could also be like my mother and father, who communicated exclusively by slamming doors.

  I was thirteen the first time the sluggers abducted me. My older brother, Charlie, was snoring his face off in the next room while I lay in bed, translating my parents’ fight. You might believe all doors sound the same when slammed, but you’d be wrong.

  My father was a classic slammer, maintaining contact with the door until it was totally and completely shut. This gave him control over the volume and pitch, and produced a deep, solid bang capable of shaking the door, the frame, and the wall.

  Mom preferred variety. Sometimes she went for the dramatic fling; other times she favored the heel-kick slam. That night, she relied on the multismash, which was loud and effective but lacked subtlety.

  The sluggers abducted me before I learned what my parents were arguing about. Police found me two days later, wandering the dirt roads west of Calypso, wearing a grocery bag for underwear and covered in hickies I couldn’t explain. My father left three weeks after that, slamming the door behind him one final time. No translation necessary.

  • • •

  I’ve never grown comfortable being naked around the aliens. Jesse Franklin frequently saw me naked and claimed to enjoy it, but he was my boyfriend, so it doesn’t count. I’m self-­conscious about being too skinny, and I imagine the sluggers judge me for my flaws—the mole in the center of my chest shaped like Abraham Lincoln or the way my collarbone protrudes or my tragically flat ass. Once, while standing in the lunch line waiting for shepherd’s pie, Elle Smith told me I had the flattest ass she’d ever seen. I wasn’t sure how many asses a twelve-year-old girl from Calypso realistically could have been exposed to, but the comment infected me like a cold sore, bursting to the surface from time to time, ensuring I never forgot my place.

  Part of me wonders if the sluggers send pervy pics back to their home planet for their alien buddies to mock. Check out this mutant we caught. They call it a teenager. It’s got five arms, but one is tiny and deformed.

  It’s not really deformed, I swear.

  • • •

  When the sluggers had finished experimenting on me that night, the slab I was resting on transformed into a chair while I was still on it. During previous abductions, the aliens had locked me in a totally dark room, attempted to drown me, and once pumped a gas into the air that made me laugh until I vomited, but they’d never given me a chair. I was immediately suspicious.

  One of the sluggers remained behind after the others disappeared into the shadows. The exam room was the only section of the ship I’d ever seen, and its true shape and size were obscured by the darkness at the edges. The room itself was plain—a gray floor with swirls that gave it the impression of movement and that was illuminated by four or five lights beaming from the shadows. The slab, which had become a chair, was obsidian black.

  My limbs tingled, and that was how I realized I could move again. I shook them to work out the pins and needles, but I couldn’t shake the impotence that rattled in my skull, reminding me that the aliens could flay me alive and peel back my muscles to see how I functioned, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do to stop them. As human beings, we’re born believing that we are the apex of creation, that we are invincible, that no problem exists that we cannot solve. But we inevitably die with all our beliefs broken.

  My throat was scratchy. Even caged rats are given water bottles and food pellets.

  “If you’re testing my patience, I should warn you that I once spent three weeks in a roach-infested RV with my family on the antiquing trip from hell. Twenty-one days of Dad getting lost, Mom losing her temper, and my brother finding any excuse to punch me, all set to the glorious song of Nana’s deviated septum.”

  Nothing. No reaction. The slugger beside me waggled its eyestalks, the glassy marbles taking in a 360-degree view. They were like one of those security cameras hidden under a shaded dome; it was impossible to know where they were tracking at any given moment.

  “Seriously, it was the worst trip of my life. Every night we all had to lie still and pretend we couldn’t hear Charlie polishing his rifle in the overhead bunk. I’m pretty confident he broke the world record for the most number of times a kid’s masturbated while sharing breathing space with his parents, brother, and grandmother.”

  A beam of light shot over my shoulder, projecting a three-dimensional image of Earth in the air a few feet in front of me. I turned to find the source, but the slugger sprouted an appendage and slapped me in the neck.

  “I really hope that was an arm,” I said, rubbing the fresh welt.

  The picture of the planet was meticulously detailed. Feathery clouds drifted across the surface as the image rotated leisurely. Tight clusters of defiant lights sparkled from every city, as bright as any star. A few moments later, a smooth pillar approximately one meter tall rose from the floor beside the image of the earth. Atop it was a bright red button.

  “Do you want me to press it?” The aliens had never given me the impression that they understood anything I said or did, but I figured they wouldn’t have presented me with a big shiny button if they hadn’t intended for me to press it.

  The moment I stood, electricity surged up my feet and into my body. I collapsed to the floor, twitching. A strangled squeal escaped my throat. The slugger didn’t offer to help me, despite its ability to grow arms at will, and I waited for the spasms to recede before climbing back into the chair. “Fine, I won’t touch the button.”

  The projection of the earth exploded, showering me with sparks and light. I threw up my arm to protect my face, but I felt no pain. When I opened my eyes, the image was restored.

  “So, you definitely don’t want me to press the button?”

  Under the watchful eyes of my alien overlord, I witnessed the planet explode seven more times, but I refused to budge from my seat. On the eighth explosion, the sluggers shocked me again. I lost control of my bladder and flopped onto the floor in a puddle of my own urine. My jaw was sore from clenching, and I wasn’t sure how much more I could take.

  “You know, if you just told me what you wanted me to do, we could skip the excruciating pain portion of this experiment.”

  They restored the planet again; only when I tried to sit, they shocked me and blew it up. The next time the image was whole, I scrambled to the button and slammed it with my hand. I was rewarded with an intense burst of euphoria that began in my feet and surged up my legs, spreading to my fingers and the tips of my ears. It was pure bliss, like I’d ejacu­lated a chorus of baby angels from every pore of my body.

  “That didn’t suck.”

  • • •

  I lost track of how many times I pressed the button. Sometimes they shocked me, sometimes they dosed me with pure rapture, but I never knew which to expect. Not until I saw the pattern. It was so simple, I felt like an imbecile for not seeing it sooner. Being shocked until I pissed myself probably hadn’t helped my problem-solving abilities.

  Those shocks and bursts of euphoria weren’t punishments and rewards, nor were they random. They were simply meant to force me to see that there was a causal relationship between whether I pressed the button and whether the planet exploded. The sluggers were
trying to communicate with me. It would have been a much more exciting moment in human history if I hadn’t been wearing soggy underwear.

  I decided to test my theory.

  “Are you going to blow up the planet?”

  SHOCK.

  “Am I going to blow it up?”

  SHOCK.

  I finally gave up and stayed on the floor. “Is something going to destroy the earth?”

  EUPHORIA.

  “Can you stop it?”

  HALLELUJAH!

  My eyes rolled back as a shiver of bliss rippled through me. “How do we stop it?” I looked to the slugger for a clue, but it hadn’t moved since slapping me. What I knew was this: when I pressed the button, Earth didn’t explode. When I didn’t, it did. It couldn’t be that simple, though. “Pressing the button will prevent the destruction of the planet?”

  UNADULTERATED RAPTURE.

  “So, what? All those other times I pressed it were just practice?”

  BABY ANGELS EVERYWHERE

  “Great. So, when is this apocalypse set to occur?” I wasn’t sure how the aliens were going to answer an open-ended question, especially since they’d never answered me before, but they were capable of interstellar travel; providing me with a date should have been cake. A moment later the projection of the earth morphed into a reality TV show called Bunker, and a hammy announcer’s voice boomed at me from everywhere at once.

  “This group of fifteen strangers has been locked in a bunker for six months. With only one hundred and forty-four days remaining, you won’t want to miss a single minute as they compete for food, water, toilet paper, and each other’s hearts.”

  “You guys get the worst stations up here.” The commercial faded and Earth returned. “So, one hundred and forty-four days?” It took me longer than I’ll admit to do the math in my head. “That means the world is going to end January twenty-­ninth, 2016?”

  SWEET EUPHORIA.