Other Aliens Read online

  Sylvia rang Irene and asked her to come over.

  “I have something important to tell you,” she said.

  Sylvia once again showed all her landscapes to Irene, and carefully described all the recent changes that had taken place in them. She said she suspected someone had managed to make a copy of her key or Anja’s, and entered her apartment when she was away. This person had not stolen anything, however, only destroyed her artworks. Why on earth someone would do such a thing, she could not fathom. It was probably simply vandalism. She had decided to report it to the police.

  Her friend was pensive and unusually silent as she observed the sorry-looking gardens. She left soon after drinking her coffee, without her usual chitchat on the latest developments at work.

  “Don’t report this to the police just yet,” she turned to advise Sylvia at the door.

  The next day Irene rang to say: “Sylvia, I’ve booked you an appointment with my therapist. She helped me a lot after my divorce. I’m worried about you. Go and talk to her about your problems. They seem serious to me.”

  Sylvia was astonished. “I’m not sure I understand. It is a problem, yes, that there’s some vandal secretly entering my apartment, creating trouble, and destroying my artworks. But it’s a matter for the police, not a therapist. I mean there’s no point in me discussing it with a therapist; it’s a different matter if the person is apprehended. Then they should definitely start having therapy.”

  “Go and see her anyway, for my sake,” said Irene. “Tell her everything just the way you told me. Please! I’ll come and see you tomorrow. We can think it over together.”

  When Irene arrived, Sylvia was pale and unsettled.

  “Come and see,” she said, and led Irene over to the windowsill.

  Sylvia’s latest landscape was on the windowsill. It was built into a long copper baking tin, and its theme was “River of Death.” The water was made of cobalt-blue shards of mosaic glass, and a black glass swan swam on the river. Sylvia had found the swan at the local flea market. The banks of the river were lined with dark-green haircap moss. But the swan’s long neck was broken. Its head lay on the mossy bank.

  “When did this happen?” Irene asked.

  “I found it this morning,” said Sylvia morosely, placing the swan’s head on her palm. “Someone must have come in during the night. I will have to install a chain and safety locks.”

  “Sylvia, dear, no one has been here. No one!” said Irene.

  “What are you saying? What do you mean?” Sylvia asked, at first surprised, then angry.

  She turned the swan’s head over in her fingers. Irene didn’t answer, but Sylvia had begun to understand. Her face grew dark and she pursed her lips.

  “Don’t be afraid, it’ll all be sorted out,” said Irene, and she tried to hug her. “I’ll come with you, we’ll make you well again.”

  “Why should I go anywhere? It wasn’t me who did it,” said Sylvia, pushing Irene away. “That’s ridiculous. Why would I damage my own artworks?”

  “I don’t know. But who else could it be?” asked Irene.

  Sylvia squeezed the little piece of glass in her right fist so hard that a drop of blood swelled up between her index and ring fingers.

  “They can all be fixed. You can glue the swan’s neck back together, and redesign the gardens, make them even more beautiful than before,” Irene comforted her.

  “But what if—,” Sylvia began and then fell silent. She opened her fist and placed the head back on the hairy moss of “River of Death.”

  “That’s it! How could I not have understood it earlier?” she said, and stroked the moss with her bloodstained finger.

  “Understood what?” asked Irene.

  “What if there is no vandal?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” said Irene.

  “You were trying to tell me that I am the vandal,” said Sylvia drily, in a voice that was not at all kind. “But it’s not me. This is about something else altogether. I’ve only just begun to see.”

  “What’s it about then?” Irene asked, frustrated by now.

  “It’s about my landscapes transforming themselves, from the inside. It has to be. Because it’s time for them to change. Because they’re not islands. I always thought they were. I believed they would remain intact, exactly as I made them. But of course they can’t. And it’s no one’s fault. It’s just something I have to accept.”

  Sylvia distractedly opened the music box and the author’s house began playing Es ist für uns eine Zeit angekommen.

  “That’s absolutely insane,” said Irene, and this time it was she who lost her temper. “Be reasonable now! And stop that plinking noise!”

  Amid the tiny, changing landscapes the two of them glared at one another like enemies. The swan swam along the river headless. The laundry was ruined. The linden was felled. The author had received some bad news in the garden and his manuscript lay unfinished.

  If the Thinker had any thoughts, he kept them to himself, as always.

  THE LIGHT IN THE GUEST ROOM

  The shallow bay was slowly becoming overgrown. A belt of wetland rushes ran along its banks, every summer encroaching further upon the bay and providing shelter for both the Eurasian bittern and the grey heron. The call of the Eurasian bittern sounded like the foghorn of a distant ship, but the bleak cry of the grey heron sometimes made Essi jump. It sounded like the wail of someone at death’s door. Essi never saw the great birds, only heard their calls.

  When it was windy, the rustle of the rushes carried right up to the old white-stucco house. Essi knew that the rushes were technically common reeds. On windy days she recalled Pascal, who once wrote that a human being was a thinking reed. Essi herself firmly believed that every reed, of which there were billions growing in a curve along the shoreline, was a sentient being in its own way. If they didn’t think, they were thoughts in themselves, and the rustle in the rushes resembled a murmur so remote that it was impossible to make out the words.

  The house was on the north shore and it was always cool, even in a heat wave. During the summer, the yard rested in the damp shade of the tall deciduous trees, and under their cover, the house’s roof tiles had gathered plenty of moss.

  When there were no leaves on the trees, the view stretched as far as the strait. The room was wallpapered in a slightly powdery bluish gray, and just below the ceiling ran a white border printed with blue sailboats. The bookshelves were stacked with books inherited from Bert’s father, law books, dictionaries, and nonfiction that no one had needed in years, as well as annuals from the Philosophical Society. It was rare for anyone to stay overnight in this room. The children, who had long since moved away from home, slept there two or three times a year. Essi sometimes used the room to write letters, sometimes simply to lie down for a moment in the narrow wooden bed, with her eyes closed, as free from thought as possible. A Buddha from Nepal was placed on the windowsill, as well as a blue-glass vase that currently contained bulrushes. In the spring and summer, if someone was coming to stay in the room, Essi would put wildflowers in the vase, or peonies and hollyhocks from the garden if they were already in bloom.

  Sometimes Essi spent the night in the room, or at least part of the night. She would climb upstairs whenever Bert, who suffered from asthma, was snoring with exceptional gusto and failed to stop even after obediently turning over at his wife’s request.

  This was the very reason Essi had climbed the stairs after midnight that night. She was hoping to spend the rest of the night in peace and quiet in the guest room, and she wanted a lie-in the next morning. That’s why she had hung a dark sheet in front of the thin white curtains, even though it was a moonless, cloudy night. If the clouds dispersed in the morning, the rays of the rising sun would shine straight onto her bed. The additional layer also cut out the glimmer of the distant streetlamp on the harbor road, and so the room was pitch-dark when Essi went to bed. After turning off the lamp on the bedside table, Essi noticed there wa
sn’t the slightest gleam of light in the room, not even so much as a wisp emanating from the cracks around the curtain or the door. It was the kind of obscurity that the eye never gets used to. No matter how long you stared into it, no shape emerged from beneath its tenebrous weight, no hint of color or contour, not the vaguest shadow of a shadow. Darkness like that is not simply the absence of light, it is a substance, a mass of its own. Its pull had sucked in all the color, shapes, and dimensions of the entire guest room with all its books and sailboats and vases. Essi felt she had never before seen such absolute darkness. Except that you can’t see darkness.

  Essi had always imagined that blindness must be the same kind of coal blackness. But someone she knew who had gone blind in later years had corrected her misconception. She had pointed out that it was quite the opposite. That blindness, at least as far as her blindness was concerned, was not black at all. It was a brume cloud, shreds, dark patches, flickering membranes that shifted as the eyes moved.

  Essi had never been afraid of the dark anyway; she fell asleep easily and succumbed to a deep, dreamless slumber. Nevertheless, in the small hours, when it was still just as dark as when she had gone to bed, Essi was awake again, and she couldn’t understand why. She was sure she hadn’t even slept for an hour. As always, she had fallen asleep with her left hand under her ear and her right arm along her side, with her face to the wall, but as she woke she turned onto her back. As usual, Essi was fully awake at once and aware that she wasn’t in her own bed but in the guest room.

  The darkness in the room was unbroken except for one spot. Below Essi’s left breast, on the blue-and-white-checked bedspread, which Essi used as an extra blanket because the room was cold, there was a bright splash of light. This was surely what had woken her. Where did it come from, this splash of light? There was no television in the room, no computer or even a phone charger. There was an old portable radio that had stood on the dresser for years, but its batteries were dead. Essi couldn’t think of any source of energy capable of casting such a light effect onto her bed. The sheet was still tightly stretched over the window just as she had hung it. This bright, crisply defined light shining just below her breast didn’t seem to come from anywhere, and neither did it illuminate its surroundings. It was an evenly distributed, pure white glow, a carefully delineated perfect circle, as if a torch were being held close under the cover. If the light were coming from a different direction it would never have been as round. It was still and steady, about five or six centimeters in diameter.

  Essi lifted the checked coverlet, which was lined with dark-blue fabric. In between was a thin layer of cotton padding that the light penetrated. The snow-white luster made the threads in the fabric stand out. The light wasn’t on the coverlet, it seemed to be inside it. It came from nowhere, not from within the room or from without; it had no source. It was just a glow, a light of its own, a spirit creature. It was like a miniature full moon, but its luminosity was not borrowed light, like that of the moon in the sky.

  Essi lifted and lowered the coverlet over and over, looking at the round glow from above, through the coverlet’s checked fabric, and below, through the lining. Even though she moved the coverlet around, the silver medallion stayed firmly in place.

  So far, Essi had simply marveled at the manifestation, now she was afraid. Fear shot through her diaphragm, right at the point where the strange moonlight glow lingered, and it numbed her arms and legs. Her petrified limbs were an indication that the light was an unnatural, abnormal phenomenon, one that should not exist. Although it didn’t move, it seemed alive in some way. It was like some creature that had descended upon her in her sleep and had perhaps been watching her for hours. Or perhaps it was sucking energy from her heart?

  Essi sat bolt upright and fumbled for the light switch on her bedside lamp. Once the ordinary electric light had reclaimed the familiar room from the dark, along with all its objects well-worn by human hand, she calmed down. There was no longer any gratuitous glow visible on or in the coverlet. But Essi didn’t dare turn off the light. She got up and switched on the desk lamp as well and began reading the letter she had left on the desk the day before, which she hadn’t yet had time to answer. It was from her friend Hiroko, who had just gotten married to Mr. White Stone. Hiroko wrote:

  We spent our honeymoon in Shikoku, three days in the Kagawa Prefecture on Naoshima Island, one day visiting the Konpira temple in Kagawa, and a couple of days visiting the hot springs of Ehime in Dogo-onsen, following the Shimanami Ocean Road, through the archipelago of the Seto Inland Sea. The islands grew ever more beautiful in the changing landscapes created by the light, the stars, the wind, and the surf. The evening shifted gradually from burnt orange to lilac, the morning from glowing red to bluish white. As I watched the changing landscapes of the inland sea, I also saw something unchanging. The horizon.

  When Essi had finished reading, she dimmed the light on her bedside table by placing over the lampshade a colorful silk scarf she had received from the writer of the letter. It cast patches of yellow, red, and green across the wall, and none of pure white. Essi finally managed to fall asleep to the colors and the thought of the horizon’s eternity.

  Over morning coffee, she told Bert about the incident.

  “There must be some explanation,” said Bert.

  “I think so too,” said Essi. “Perhaps some kind of electromagnetic phenomenon?”

  Later that day, Essi went upstairs to examine the bedspread. There was nothing remarkable about it; it was a thinly lined polyester coverlet, whose label indicated it was to be washed at 40 degrees. Over the following nights Essi used earplugs long before Bert started snoring, to be on the safe side. She wasn’t keen on the idea of climbing upstairs at midnight.

  When her stepson, Max, a student of energy technology, came over the following weekend, she described the night’s incident to him.

  “I suppose it could have been static electricity,” he said doubtfully.

  “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “What fabric is the bedspread made of?”

  “Polyester, hundred percent, I checked,” Essi answered.

  “Hmm,” said Max, “polyester has a negative electrical charge and a human body has positive. That can create static electricity. Were you touching the cover?”

  “Yes, I was, I was twisting and turning it every which way. But I don’t remember touching the light itself. Which is a shame, because now I don’t know if it was hot or cold.”

  “It wasn’t just a flash of light?” asked Max.

  “No, nothing like a flash of light. It was a persistent light, which stayed in one place. I think it must have been lying on my chest for goodness knows how long before I woke up.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Max. “Then it can’t have been static electricity. That kind of force discharges in a split second. There may be a buzzing sound and small sparks if it’s a strong charge. Not a persistent light, that’s impossible.”

  “I saw what I saw,” said Essi.

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Max, “but perhaps what you saw was a dream.”

  The incident troubled Essi for a long time and she also told her childhood friend Irinja about it. Irinja was Orthodox by religion. Irinja said that a pure white light is holy, sacred light, and that there were certain churches where similar manifestations had been witnessed. In Irinja’s view, Essi should be glad that such a light had visited her room, in a perfectly ordinary house. Essi felt this was a beautiful, comforting thought, but she couldn’t understand why a holy light would have chosen her, a nonbeliever.

  But her cousin Kirsti, who claimed to have a lot of experience of the other side, had a completely different view.

  “If you see it again, turn all the lights on immediately,” she urged, “and whatever you do, don’t try and make contact with it. Never have anything to do with that kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “The demonic,” said Kirsti gravely.

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bsp; Even though she was amused by Kirsti’s warning, Essi couldn’t help feeling a flutter of fear. She felt it especially between her shoulder blades, as if someone were pressing an icy hand to her back. Her husband by contrast merely snorted and repeated that of course there was a rational explanation for the light.

  “You tell us what it is then,” Essi suggested.

  And he did, he said exactly the same thing as his son. Essi was amazed that a dream was the only rational explanation they could come up with. She guessed, however, that another theory they had the delicacy not to mention was that she was hallucinating. To them a dream or a hallucination seemed logical, but not to Essi. She knew she had been completely awake and alert as she examined the little light. Why had it visited her? If it was a message, a premonition, a warning, or a promise, she failed to comprehend it. What was the point of a message, if its recipient couldn’t fathom it? It still lay there in her memory, lingering on her chest, near her heart, round and unblemished as a shiny silver coin, peaceful and almost fond, but as strange as ever.

  Perhaps it was ridiculous, but on a couple of winter nights Essi plucked up the courage to climb the stairs to the guest room once again and she slept under the checked coverlet. She lay awake for quite some time before she could fall asleep, dozing off lightly only to awake with a start every now and then, wondering whether the light had returned. She both hoped and feared the unwavering moon would reappear, and her breathing quickened at the very thought of its manifestation on one of the longest, darkest nights, when cloud cover along the shoreline rested like a roof over the treetops. It was as if she were waiting for something forbidden but long missed. But it was all in vain, as the light never appeared.

  The next spring, there were unusual halo effects in the sky. When Essi was driving along the highway from town, an immense spiral-shaped cloud hovered over the verdant fields and the edge of the forest. There was a clear glow at its center, from which a pillar-shaped rainbow stretched to the ground. She saw a number of cars parked by the roadside, and many people got out of their cars to stare at the horizon and take pictures with their smartphones of the rapidly fading phenomenon.