ALIEN EXPRESSIONS (part three) It was not the message itself that Everton had been waiting so long to receive, but merely the actuality of its presence. That the email had to be opened, and read, and dissected line-by-line was a given, but he never thought about what it would actually say; he never considered what his emotions would be when he read the last line. What mattered was its arrival. What mattered was its occupancy at the top of his inbox. What mattered was how his insides would rumble when he clicked on the message. Often he would sit at his desk and compose ten, twenty, thirty lines of ‘what matters is…’ statements, mumbling ideas to himself, occasionally jotting down phrases on the hundreds of yellow post-it-notes he had clinging to every available and stickable surface of his office. What matters is what matters. Expansion and discovery comes from emergence. Everything else is deflation. The infuriating and glorious reality was, despite all of the different scenarios he’d enacted inside of his head involving humanity’s first alien contact, an accidental email wasn’t one of them. Had never even contemplated such a mundane delivery system of cosmic interaction. Rumbling, looming motherships hovering over Times Square – of course. Dozens of extra-terrestrial tourists intensely interested in the Canadian political system wandering around Parliament Hill in the dark chill of an Ottawa winter – certainly. All scenarios had to be calibrated and considered, large and small, ridiculous and regimented, from an influx of randomly spreading, rapidly aggressive bacteria unleashed by a fallen meteorite in the backwoods of china, to radio waves fluctuating wildly on a computer’s blue screen in a Seattle family’s rec room. In that interim stage of possibility – ranging, roughly, from the nanosecond after the Big Bang to just a few hours ago -- anything was possible, absolutely nothing unlikely. You just had to open yourself. Now, Everton found himself closed. Almost folding in on himself. Sitting at his desk, staring at the computer, wishing he could will a reaction to his response into reality, he knew that he should be phoning someone, alerting the media, popping open some champagne with Evelyn and all the rest of the lab rats. (“Lab MICE,” they insisted on being called, in allegiance with the actual lab mice down the hell and to the left.) Even withholding the information at this point felt almost, well, criminal? Nonsensical, but he did feel somewhat shady, as if he was holding out info against humanity itself – and all because he had emailed an alien back only twenty minutes ago! History would be written about this moment. These exact seconds in time. As a young man, scuba diving had been a passion – an enthusiasm long since abandoned, replaced by alien obsessions – and these excruciatingly lengthy minutes reminded him of when he would patiently wade deep in the water as he ascended in stages, avoiding ‘the bends’, submersed both in the ocean and his own sense of self, nothing but a bob. Well, these empty moments were no different; if he rose up too fast, if he got ahead of himself and his data, if he began to believe that life as he knew it had entered its own altered era, a significant deterioration would take place within his own soul. Perhaps soul wasn’t the right word, as for Everton a true ‘soul’ was pretty much merely ancient bunk – a belief he had delicately, rather eloquently (in his opinion) made clear in his reply to the alien’s first query -- but looking at his inbox, waiting for answers, he wondered if there was some kind of sub-set to the soul, one that existed as adjunct to the science he lived for. Not a mystical thing in and of itself, but rather a deliberate, necessary deviation from the workings of the mind and the body that arose not from supernatural origins in the least, but from the body’s own excess. This was not the right time of night, nor the right moment of his life, to even begin to explore such concepts, even hypothetically, but he did have the distinct notion that the alien’s first message had something to do with his own belief in a portion of his mind that had attained its own, almost independent awareness. The mind watching its own mind, thus creating another level of mind, followed by another mind watching THAT mind, and so, was not a new notion to him, but he felt the familiar workings of an at-present unexplainable theory at work inside his head, one that would, at first, seem mystical in origin, and would then, through careful, even elaborate investigation, reveal itself to be the complete opposite – the machinations of solid, fleshy, bloody, smelly human ingredients meshing together. Add some alien intrigue to this scenario – and possibly first-hand examinations – and one had the possibility of years, even decades of fruitful research. It was all a mental glob of excitement and suppositions, and it would probably lead to nothing, but he could feel his rational majority and pervasive, irrational minority battling it out with one another, a healthy, aggressive duel that left a little elbow room for an alien to enter the discussion. (If it was smart enough, one assumed.) Oh, one of his ‘bad thoughts’. A moment of mild depression swamped over him, minute but potent nonetheless. He forced himself to sit up, back rammed straight against the rear of his chair, an abrupt physical shift that would, hopefully, tilt his mind somewhere else. Any time such a sharp attack of gloom jabbed him in the brain, he moved his body. Rubbed his legs. Whacked any part of his body within striking distance against any other inanimate object. A routine had been established, and if there was anything Everton adored, it was a routine. (One that just had been, and soon would be again, interrupted, extravagantly so.) This thought had brought with it some darkness: Perhaps this alien might not be, to put it bluntly, all that bright in the end. Smart enough to contact a distant race; compose in English; connect. And its very simplicity, being of unearthly origin, would make a fascinating psychological and physical investigation. Yet what if its mental capacities were incomprehensible? Or worse, just juvenile? A bore of a boor? Crinking his neck, slapping his thighs in a pretty much futile attempt to ward off any more negative concepts from overtaking his –gradually sleepy, bordering on exhausted – brain, he wondered for the first time if this lengthy quest for alien contact had been nothing but an expensive, elaborate ruse on his part. Perhaps, he worried, all this philosophical and scientific exploration, the years of heartaches and persistent dreams, was simply a convenient undertow that had subconsciously dragged him along in its well-funded wake in the name of the universe’s enlightenment, when what he was actually searching for was something more basic, and human -- someone to talk to, an intellectual equal. What you could even call a friend.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 11:59:49 +0000
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