The Thing from Elsewhere

Saturday night, late but still early, an inner ring of Washington, DC. A man and a woman are in their apartment. It’s a typical east coast city dwelling: small, forced, cosmically unaffordable. The man and the woman are a couple. He thinks they’ve been together for “about two years,” while she knows it’s been two years and five months and a slender week. It is December 25th, known in most social circles as Christmas, and the usually rowdy downtown had been asphyxiated by the anti-vibe of deep December.  

The man—since we can call him anything, let’s call him something interesting and yet not too wayward: Jody—is naked and standing, staring through the living room blinds at an ambitious lightning storm and a steady but merciful rainfall that had besieged their Saturday night.

“Something’s out here,” he said, looking at the silhouette of a misshapen thing on the roof of the apartment building behind them. The top of the building was about thirty feet away and thirty feet up, which put it just about level with their window.

The woman—let’s call her Jodi, for consistency’s sake—took notice of his words but did not respond to them.

“They passed that Idiom Law thing,” she said, to neither really him nor herself. She was sneering at her phone, face aglow with algorithms, equally naked and splayed out across a plateau of chewy-looking rug. Jody and Jodi had only five minutes ago resurfaced from a vicious fuckfest, domestic fury, blowback from a double digits’ worth of hours spent apart from each other, and their bones and tendons and tendons and ligaments would remind them all about it in the morning.

“Idiot Law?”

“Idiom,” Jodi said, looking up at him. “Platitudes and aphorisms and all that.”

“Sad day for horses.”

“What?” Jodi said, immediately aborting the query when she realized it was just an unfunny quip. With a gymnastic panache, she sat up and shapeshifted herself into a tidy buddha position and started reading off her phone. “Offendable idioms in any context, either written or verbal, shall be punished by no less than a twenty-five dollar punch in the face…”

That secured Jody’s attention, so she continued, “….no less than a twenty-five dollar fine, et cetera, et cetera.”

“What’s an offendable idiom?”

“Any sort of jerky statement that is anachronistic to the current cultural climate,” Jodi said, now looking at an online menu of a nearby sushi joint. One of their bellies had growled nine times in three minutes.

“Give me an example.”

“Indian giver, rarer than a bald Bolivian, quicker than a Kenyan . . . ”

“You make those up?”

“Those last two, yeah.”

Jody strained his brain for a mean-spirited idiom but arrived at nothing. He said, “What human pothole came up with the idea of legislating this?”

“That senator from the Dakotas,” Jodi said. “Chief What’s-Her-Nuts.”

“I’m guessin’ Kill Whitey ain’t on the list.”

“That’s a mantra where I come from.”

That pissed Jody off a little bit, so he upped the ante. “It’s like this whole country’s twat started gushing blood all at once.” He could feel her glare on the back of his head, so he changed the subject. “I swear there’s something out here.”

“Rats is what’s out there,” said Jodi. “Rats and them busted-up lookin’ city squirrels.”

“No, no, I mean like some sort of night creature. Something that came in with the storm.”

Jodi looked up at him again and said, “You’re weirdin’ me out, Plaquemine.” This would be Jodi’s solution to the Jody and Jodi business: refer to Jody by his cumbersome, slapstick surname. (Jody’s solution was to simply lop off the second half of Jodi’s name and repeat the first half: Jojo.)

Jody fingered his mustache and said, “I guess my brain is restless from the crazy amount of electricity in the air. That and that freaky fucking movie.”

Before fucking, they half-watched some Eastern European thing about postmodern werewolves. Shaky and frantic and lacking any semblance of a story, the overall uncertainty of the movie succeeded (unintentionally) in doing a number on Jody’s brain.

Jodi said, “I liked that at the end you find out you’re the werewolf and not the, you know, the people that looked like werewolves.”

“They didn’t look like werewolves, they looked like languid Englishmen in dogboy costumes that had been patched together by their mums. They weren’t even fuzzy. ” Jody closed the blinds, quickly reopened them. “You hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That,” he said, “You don’t hear that?”

Jodi heard nothing aside the pianissimo rainfall. She looked at Jody and opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

“Nevermind,” Jody said. “My ears are being weird.”

“You’re being weird.”

Jody walked to his archipelago of clothes and began to dress. “I think I know what it is.” He put on his shirt and hat before boxers and pants. “In fact, I know I exactly know what it is.”

“What is thy reason for this great confidence?” Jodi said, with a sort of feigned annoyance.

“Lightning with no thunder.”

It occurred to Jodi there had indeed been no thunder.

“Lightning with no thunder isn’t that weird. It’s that other way around that’s weird,” she said, shimmying into her panties. “You sure there hasn’t been any thunder?”

“Positive. I mean, if there was thunder, we would have heard it, right?”

“Yeah, but we had the TV on, and it’s not like we were listening for it and—“

Without warning a thunder more thunderous than the most Hollywood thunder in history thundered…

“Jesus,” said Jody. “You okay? Ah, fuck…”

The thunder had toppled the bottle of red wine they had been sipping on. Jodi grabbed it and put it back on the coffee table.

Jody grabbed a roll of paper towels out of the kitchen and said, “Which book of the Old Testament did that shoot out of?”

“Every single one of them, plus Revelation,” Jodi said, ripping off a few sheets from the roll of paper towels and soaking up the tiny lagoon of wine. “It’s like the thunder had been lying behind the couch waiting for us to start yammering about it.”

Jody went back to the window and stood there for a little while, haphazardly dressed, looking at the lightning, which had grown much more frequent and more frenetic. Paparazzi flashes; unsympathetic, merciless spritzes of pure light.

He said, “There’s a succubus for the ages sitting on top of that house right there.”

“That’s not a house, that’s a bank,” said Jodi, joining him at the window. “And that isn’t a succubus, it’s a chimney.”

“The banks on this planet do not have chimneys.”

 “The ones in this neighborhood do,” Jodi corrected. “They just don’t have fireplaces. Or they used to, but they don’t anymore.”

“Still, that ain’t a chimney,” said Jody. “I’m tellin’ you, it’s some sort of night creature.”

Jodi squinted through the blinds. The dark lump was basically a silhouette of the poop emoji. Jodi could not tell if it was indeed quivering a little bit or if it was just the rain. “It’s probably crows,” she said, after ten long seconds of examination.

Jody turned and looked at her. “I’ll be fifty in four years and I have never not one time seen a crow at night. Not even dead.”

“Then what you are looking at is what you call expectant attention,” Jodi said to him, matter of factly. “You are misinterpreting visual cues because you want whatever it is to be one of your damn cryptids or whatever. All those Mothman and Bigfoot documentaries you drool your way through have at long last melted your brain.”

Jody swiveled to face her. “Come on, those documentaries are fun. Wholesome, noncommittal, soul-enriching entertainment. Plus, they’re as free as yesterday’s doughnuts.”

“They ought to be paying you fifteen bucks an hour plus gratuity to sit through them,” Jodi said, recalling the last documentary she had to yawn her their way through: The Wondering Eye of Biscuitville, it had been called. Why, Jodi had wondered while watching it, had it been wondering instead of wandering, also wondering if wondering was simply a huge fuck up by either the documentarians, as they optimistically called themselves, or just a manifest clerical error by the townsfolk of Biscuitville. Jodi also wondered how a whole community could get by without using a single syllable of honest-to-God English, as the film suggested, and she wondered how any homo sapiens with a cerebral cortex could even live in Biscuitville, which, due to the pure insignificance of the few neighboring townships, found itself as county seat of Sesquipedalianacana County—basically the hives-infested thorax of a comprehensively dilapidated region in the middle of United States. She also had wondered how the legend of the Wondering Eye of Biscuitville (affectionately dubbed Webby by the locals) had somehow existed for over two millennia without anyone actually laying eyes on it. (Half of the documentary consisted of whatever local they could prop up standing there staring at the ground and fidgeting like a hamster and muttering cryptic ten-car pile-ups like: “I know what I think I probably maybe saw.”)… The Native Americans of the region had allegedly called the Wondering Eye “Hwathachonkamathonk,” which directly translates to “Hoax of the White Devil.” Jodi, who was a fine surveyor of detail, had also wondered why the Biscuitville library, where the documentarians had done most of their shooting, had contained six books and eight televisions.

Jodi cupped her hand around Jody’s balls, which were sexed-out and in a state of retreat. “Do you actually think Mothman exists?”

“I don’t think he doesn’t not exist.”

“Jesus fuggin’ Christ.”

“I mean, generally I don’t recognize anything my Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize,” Jody said, reengaging the window. “But I do think those people are seeing something out there.”

“That’s silly. This whole world is basically one big film studio now—everyone has their own private cameraman right there in their hand, all day all week—yet we get nothing but blurry image after blurry image,” Jodi said, walking away from the window and sitting down on the couch. She opened a six dollar bag of potato chips, prompting the dog to come into the room.

“Let me ask you,” she said. “What if some good ol’ boy finally plugs Bigfoot, and they haul him down to the Smithsonian or wherever, and come to find out he only wears about a size 8½?”

“Moot point,” Jody said, joining her on the couch. “Most people call him Sasquatch, not Bigfoot.” He ate a few of her chips and threw a couple at the dog.

Outside a car horn blared, a small sounding dog barked, the lightning flickered, the rain kept hissing, and occasional thunder grumbled but there weren’t any more city razing sonic bursts like the one that rattled them earlier.

Jody’s imagination started doing its thing. He stood up and walked over to the window again and looked outside. “Whoa,” he said. “Come check this out…”

The lumpen silhouette thing on the roof had either grown a little larger or was now a few yards closer to them.

“It’s closer, right?”

Jodi agreed that the thing was indeed a little closer.

Jody asked Jodi where the flashlight was and she reminded him that it was on the floor next to his side of the bed, where he had put it only a few days ago.

Jody went in their bedroom and got the flashlight and when he got back to the living room, Jodi said, “What the fuck . . .” He was motionless, staring out the window. “I definitely saw it move. It’s coming closer.”

“No way.” Jody stuck the flashlight through the blinds and aimed it at the thing. He turned it on but nothing happened. Repeat, same results. No light. Jodi took it from him and tried it too. She snapped open the latch in its abdomen and took out the batteries and put them back in and tried to turn it on again. Nothing.

“Oh, well,” she said. “Wasn’t meant to be.”

“It’s gone anyway,” Jody said. “Check it out . . .”

Jodi confirmed it indeed appeared to be gone.

“So fucking weird,” she said. “Maybe it was a garbage bag or something.”

“I’m baffled,” Jody said. He looked at the dog, who was now asleep, his paw masquerading as a little pillow. “This dude’s not getting employee of the month this month, that’s for sure.”

“Does he need a walk? What time is it?”

They agreed he did need a walk so they continued getting dressed and then the three of them walked down their three flights of stairs and did a slo-mo amble around the block while the dog did its business. When they got back to their apartment, the sushi that they had forgotten they had ordered was waiting for them on their doorstep in a paper bag that was stapled together beyond belief.

Back in the apartment now, they sipped on wine and nibbled on sushi for a little while and then one by one worked their way into bedroom, where they capsized and dozed off.

In the morning, over coffee and scrambled eggs, they speculated very briefly about what the thing was that they either saw or didn’t see, mutually deciding it was nothing. (“It was nothing, babe. Probably a rogue garbage bag, like you said… Yep, for sure, either that or our eyes were screwing with us.”). The topic was never brought up again in their remaining forty years together. (They lived to be old but stayed relatively healthy and kept in great spirits, which was no small feat considering the world around them seemed to be exponentially atrophying both mentally and physically. The only pain they would really experience would last about a tenth of a second, when, on their third leisurely trip to Antarctica, the vessel that they were on smacked into a Soviet mine that had wriggled its way out of the Volta and been drifting around the ocean since the opening paragraph of the Cold War).

If only the batteries in their flashlight had not been dead all those years ago in their tiny apartment! Jody and Jodi would never know—and how would they know!—that the thing they had seen on the roof was indeed a creature, and not just a creature, but a monster, all claws and fangs and terrible intent. While they were watching it, speculating, bandying suggestions about what it was or wasn’t, the creature had been watching them, sizing up its chances against taking them both on, eagerly waiting for them to separate so it could attack them one at a time. When the dog entered the room, the thing reluctantly decided to abort and go eat rats and pigeons and stray cats and maybe take a chunk out of some homeless guy’s leg. And Jody had been right! For the creature had come in with the storm. And in the morning, it was back in the stratosphere, its appetite sated, riding the storm to everywhere and nowhere. Eventually it would need sustenance and it would again land in whatever city or town or neighborhood it ended up over, and it would snatch and chomp whatever or whoever it could, until its belly had no vacancy, and only then would it ascend back into the stormy sky.

We cannot fault Jody and Jodi for their desultory interest in the thing from elsewhere that had visited them that night. If there is one circumstance that a person is exempt from having even the thinnest membrane of ambition, it is the expanse of non-time after sex. Maybe next life, Jody and Jodi! For this queer opportunity shall indeed require another lifetime . . .

Once a lifetime the universe will open its mouth for you and let you look down its throat, the cosmos will slip off its nightgown and say come and get it, and you must be prepared for this moment, otherwise you will not recognize the opportunity. You will look directly at a thing you know in your bones is from elsewhere and tell yourself it’s a wayward garbage bag. For there is no bigger menace to humanity than the thing outside the realm of humanity’s experience. The thing that no human eye can recognize, no human nose can smell, no human ear can hear, no human tongue could taste, no human hand could touch, the thing that all the human speculation on the planet cannot identify because we are not equipped with the tools to detect it, the thing that evades not only our speculation but our sciences, each rubbernecking at each other, sniffing each other’s asses, or tonguing the mirror, like Narcissus . . . And this moment of cosmic candor shall—like the thing from elsewhere that came in with the storm—slip back into the uncharted and never present itself to you again...

(Or it will eat you and spit out your bones.)