"The Others" by Albert Goldbarth

The Others

Albert Goldbarth In a calm, dark nook of the night, unpeopled by anybody except my wife and myself, and far from the world’s intrusive tumults, I bring my current worries to her (I’ll tell you, too, within limits: surgery awaits me in a few days); and we rest together, side by side, in bed, and I do grow comforted by this as we ride the currents of a speechless understanding, toward the first rose-pink horizon-spill of dawn.

Meanwhile, and somewhere else, the twin of this occasion—a twin connected by some gossamer ligature hundreds of miles long, and yet a twin none the less—is taking place, more publicly.

On an evangelical Christian talk show, preacher Sharon Gilbert reveals emphatically that “an alien impersonated her husband and tried to have sex with her as her husband slept beside her.” When she grabbed its face, calling out for Jesus’s intervention, the face came off in her hands “to reveal a reptile creature . . . [and] a pack of gargoyles.” (No word on the depth of her husband’s slumber, but he doesn’t seem to have stirred. “It startled me,” she said.)

I’m coming to see: no matter what, there isn’t any person, any event, that doesn’t have its jaw-dropping-end-of-the-spectrum twin. No matter how astronomically distant from you that twin is, floating ghostly amid a maze of unmapped constellations . . . you’re connected. In a universe of infinite bounty, how could it be otherwise? In a cosmos of quantum entanglement, where proton-remaining-on-Earth and proton-rocketed-into-the-deepsof-space react as one, simultaneously, when a stimulus is cued . . . how could it be otherwise?

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The sordid; the apocalyptic; the freakazoid; the UFOafflicted/addicted; the glossolalia-chanting; plus the channelers of Elvis and of the Virgin Mary; the punch-drunk and the werewolf-furred; the jubilant past any recognizable point of the everyday emotional compass, as well as those so silent and infurled in the cave of their misery that simply asking what time it is might send a web of crazing across the careful shellac of their surface . . . all of these, and more than these, the infidels and the polyfidels, the Nobel chemistry geniuses in their own (and only their own) minds, all of the gutter-crawlers, all of the chummy consorters with angels; rabid haranguers, oily lickspittles, endless self-proclaimed savants . . . . . . are attracted to the skillet and wok in your kitchen, attached to your rolled-up socks and your refrigerator magnets and the vials of your prescription meds, are bonded to the jumbo bag of kitty litter, and hovering over the sex toy in your bottom drawer—even if that attachment is so ethereal and attenuated, its weight is less than a breath’s. That a Neanderthal is loitering residually in your genes is a fact; and every minute your body emits approximately three antimatter particles.

At one time Mina’s greatest shame and courage was: at the monthly meeting of Foodie Women, when Ashley adamantly wouldn’t share how she made her apple crumb cake so deliciously creamy, Nina snuck into the archive of recipe diaries, tore out the salient page from Ashley’s book and then (trembling a moment) she snuck it into her purse and smuggled it out past everyone’s unaware gaze.

A lackluster incident, some would say. But isn’t it the drab relative in a family of compelling mutations?

Example: a sibling story is, when Nettie was an agent of the Resistance in a long-ago war-torn land, she made her way (by dark, by a series of cells the underground maintained)

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through enemy-occupied terrain, and the major fear was not being captured and raped (an accepted risk) but being raped and therefore it would be discovered a capsule containing sensitive information had been inserted up her vagina.

And the stupid loser contrast-story to that is Sean Anaya’s: who was apprehended at LAX while walking very gingerly, then found to have a comatose exotic (and expensive) snake he had hung from a hidden belt in his pants, dangling down each of his pants legs, and (as a kind of coda) a sloshy plastic bag of rare (and expensive) exotic tadpoles in his underwear. “He kept on,” said the woman who waited behind him in the security line, “twitching somewhat suspiciously.”

But who am I to assume my life and yours are the normative ones in these equations, are a centrist metric that outliers and the outré get measured against. For that matter, who am I or you to be the arbiter of defining “outré” in the first place? If my thesis is that alternate existences surround our own . . . the very idea of “alternate” implies our recognition of some viable degree, no matter how faint, of similarity.

We know so little.

I do know that my wife falls into the steady rhythm of peaceful sleep, while I’m beside her all night in a restless semidoze. I watch her wake the way she always does, extending her arms above her as if stretching an invisible, resistant net to its limits; spreading her fingers as if regarding the mechanical wonder a hand is, for the first time; and then turning to me with a goofy smile that’s half-formed, still, by the physics of dream.

Outside, the sky has gone from black, through pearl, to the ingenue version of blue that hasn’t known experience—hasn’t yet looked down to witness exactly what humankind is capable of. A blue not yet complicit. Everything is poised on the cusp of busyness and urgency, but for this moment remains in a hush.

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Meanwhile on the other side of the planet, the sun is setting.

The sky has modulated from eggshell blue, through gradations of gray that eventually become the black of night, with an almost-full moon that’s familiar to us, and mythic patterns of stars that are familiar to us, and the nighttime griefs and wishes and pleasures of people who are familiar to us.

Although, of course, they walk upside-down.