46 Directions, None of Them North by Deborah Coates
Deborah Coates lives in Ames, Iowa, and works at Iowa State University. She has had stories published in Strange Horizons and Scifiction. Deb is wholly owned by her dogs, John Henry and Charming Billie. In her first story for Asimov's, she gives her enchanting character...
* * * *
I have to get to Alaska this summer. I so, so, so have to get there! I don't want to tell my parents the real reason--that aliens will be landing seven miles outside Fairbanks on June twenty-first--so I'm trying to come up with something, anything, that they're likely to go for.
I thought about a marching band trip. I play clarinet. Right outside corner. Maybe Fairbanks has some kind of solstice celebration. Maybe we could march in the parade. And if you think that's going overboard--trying to get a 108 piece marching band invited to Fairbanks so I can be there when aliens land--I have to say that you don't know much about sixteen-year-old girls or about wanting something bad enough to just about split yourself in two.
I bet you're asking yourself how I know. What makes a sixteen-year-old girl who's lived all her life in same-old, same-everywhere suburbia, think that aliens are landing outside Fairbanks, Alaska this summer? You think I got it off the Internet, I'll bet. Well, you are so wrong.
It was text messages on my cell phone.
* * * *
I called the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce and asked about a solstice celebration.
"A what?" the woman said.
"Solstice. You know, like beginning of summer, beginning of winter."
"We don't have that here," she said as if it was something kids got into when their parents weren't watching or a lower forty-eight sort of thing that people moved to Alaska to avoid.
Four Reasons I Totally Know that Aliens are Landing This Summer
1. Text Messages
2. Dreams
3. Lights in the sky at night when it's clear
4. Because I Really Really Want them to
Why I Want to Go
1. Well, duh! Aliens!!!
Five Reasons My Mother Will Never Let Me
1. She's the meanest, most boring person on Earth.
2. She never listens to what I say (actually, this could be a good thing).
3. She has no imagination.
4. It's her job (she actually tells me this) to say "no."
5. She never lets me do anything.
About three months ago I started having this dream. It was before I even had a cell phone. Can you believe that? A sixteen-year-old girl without a cell phone! I mean, I told my mother and told her, but she kept saying, oh no, wait for your birthday and ... well, anyway, I had this dream. I sort of forgot about it, figured it was too much pizza or something. But then I actually did get my cell phone and I started getting messages. And the dreams kept right on coming. They vary a little, the dreams, but mostly it's the same thing at least three times a week and sometimes every night.
I don't realize that I'm dreaming at first. I feel good. Excited, like Jason Stemple has just asked me to the junior dance or I just ran the thousand meters in my best time ever. I look around for my friends--Molly Miller or Stacy Urbanski--and that's when I realize that I'm not really anyplace. There's just blue, all around me.
I realize that I'm floating, really high, above the clouds so I can't even see the ground. And right when I realize that I'm in the air I start falling. Only it's not scary, not like rushing wind and cold and like it really would be if you were falling from that high up. Just falling, and looking around at all that blue.
And then, like it's always been there, even though it hasn't, there's a space ship. It's all around me, even though I'm still floating in the sky. There's still the blue and everything. But there's also this spaceship--you know the kind of thing that happens just in dreams, maybe. The sky and the spaceship and me. There's writing on the walls--all over the walls-and it looks like alien writing, but when I get close to it, I can see that it's regular words. I only get to read a little bit of it each time. It's all coordinates and kind of lousy spelling, but after a couple of times, I start to get what they're saying. Then, the aliens come and I think, in my dream, that I can see them. But I can't. I never see what they look like. I think I do, the whole time I'm dreaming, I think I'm seeing them. It's only when I wake up that I realize that I don't know what they look like and that I didn't really ever see them at all.
The Messages
WE R CMNG (we are coming)
RU RU CMNG (are you are you coming)
AL S GO (all is go)
DNT B L8 (don't be late)
SUS (see you soon)
My brother and my dad are going to some stupid restaurant convention in Las Vegas in June. He wanted Mom to go with him, but she wouldn't. "We're divorced now," she says. "We don't go places together anymore. Remember?"
She's trying to pick a fight when she says things like that, but my father always just looks at her with a kind of lazy smile on his face. "Besides you have to work," he says.
"Someone has to."
"I want you to be happy," he says, like that has anything to do with the conversation.
She throws up her hands then and says, "Yeah, right. Happy. That's what you're all about, isn't it? All about wanting and needing and getting. Well, life doesn't work like that. What do I get?"
And my father says, "What do you want?"
And sometimes, not all the time, not even usually, but sometimes, she'll get this look on her face, like she's actually considering the question. And if you watch her real close you can see her face change and for just a tiny second, she looks vulnerable. Sometimes in that split second, my father almost reaches out to her. Then it's gone and the old look, that closed up, not-quite-angry look returns. "I don't want anything," she says.
* * * *
The aliens send me email. They have free accounts, I guess.
Will u be ther? We will bee arriving soon and we are telling everyun. We are being at these coordinates. You come okay?
It's like those guys that send spam with the words all misspelled so no one blocks them. Except this isn't spam. It's really real. And I'm going.
* * * *
Here's an alien concept--even thinking of talking to my mother about aliens.
You have to understand that I totally don't get my mother, okay? I mean, my dad's cool and she divorced him, just like that, like it was easy. She didn't cry or anything. "We want different things," she said, like that made any sense.
There's this old movie she watches all the time, like on Saturday afternoons when it's raining, or late on Sunday nights. It's called The Natural and Robert Redford's in it, from when he was younger, you know. There's this one part in the movie when he's talking to his old girlfriend who he was all set to marry early in the movie but then lost track of in a tragic, but kind of stupid way and he tells her later when they finally meet up again, "My life didn't turn out the way I planned."
My mother doesn't ever say anything, but I can tell she feels just like Robert Redford's character, that her life didn't turn out right. She's got a job she doesn't like. She lives in a place she doesn't want to live. And though she's never outright mean to me or my brother or even my dad (not even when the divorce was going through), I can't always tell if she likes us.
Some days, I feel like saying to her, "Hey! Your life! Totally in control here!" You get to choose, you know. She could choose, like my dad did, to have a different job. I mean, when I was in middle school and I found out Sally Banger told everyone that she saw me eat a worm, I chose not to be friends with her anymore. It was simple--except for the shouting match in the cafeteria. Everyone said it was about time someone told that Sally Banger what for. People like my mom choose stuff they hate, and then gripe about it endlessly. That's never happening to me. I'm never going to be her.
* * * *
Molly Miller tells me she's getting all these "crap" messages on her cell phone.
"Spam," she says. "And not even spam you can understand."
I kind of--just casually--suggested that it might be messages from aliens. That she could, like, reply and see what happened. And, geez! You'd have thought I'd suggested she join the Spanish Inquisition or something.
"Messages from who? Who spells like that?"
"Well, they're text messages, Molly."
"I wouldn't answer them if I were the only person on earth and I hadn't had a conversation with a live human being for twenty years!"
"What if it was, like, the most extraordinary thing ever?" I asked her. "Wouldn't you be sorry you didn't answer?"
She just looked at me as if I was still the same dopey kid I'd been in middle school. "It won't be," she said.
But won't she be sorry when she's wrong.
* * * *
Introducing my Dad to the idea of Aliens:
"Can I talk to you?"
"Sure, honey." My father stops what he's doing, changing the oil in the car, and looks at me in anticipation.
"I want to go to Fairbanks this summer." The words come out all in a rush, tumbling over each other like a snow-fed spring creek. The whole speech I meant to give him is all lost somewhere in my head.
"What?" my father says, sounding almost like my mother when she isn't listening. But I know that isn't it, my father always listens. It's one of those things he prides himself on, perfect souffles and always listening.
"Okay, see, I know this is going to sound crazy, but just listen, okay? I'm getting these messages and I think they're from aliens. I'm pretty sure--well, almost really sure--that they're from aliens and they're coming to Fairbanks this summer and they want me to come there too and I really, really want to go and please can you help me, please?"
He sits on the asphalt and looks at me with a big wrench in his hand. "Like, illegal aliens?" he asks. "You want to help them?"
"Not exactly."
"Like, across the Bering Strait? Like, escaped from Siberia?"
"No!"
"Well, not from outer space." He says it as if that--aliens from outer space--is too ridiculous to ever even consider.
My dad is mostly pretty cool. He used to be a corporate lawyer, went to work every day in suits, but he quit a couple of years ago to start his own restaurant and now he goes around all day long in T-shirts and jeans. He moves slower and he smiles more and he's mostly fun to be around, like when he cooks my brother and me fancy pancakes late on Saturday morning and never says anything about cleaning the house or getting our chores done or being responsible. But even though he's all about dreams, he's not much on out of this world kind of things.
Once he found an old stash of paperbacks of my mother's--fantasy and science fiction--he pulled them out of the box one by one and laughed at the dragons and the spaceships and the swords. "Is that what you wish," he asked her, "for a knight in shining armor?" Then he laughed. "I guess you got me instead," he said.
"I guess I did," my mother told him.
So, when he says, "not from outer space" I get that what he's really saying is, "I'm never going to believe a whopper like that." And even more that, as much as I love him and think he's like the coolest dad, he doesn't have what it takes in his head to understand.
How to Write a Persuasive Essay:
State the theme: Why I want to go to Alaska to see Aliens
Paragraph One--define the problem--The opportunities for human-alien interaction are big. We learn from them. They learn from us. We all learn from each other.
Paragraph Two--(to be written)
Paragraph Three--(to be written)
State your conclusion--Helping aliens is, like, a duty. They've asked me to come. For the reasons all laid out above, I need your support to proceed.
* * * *
"I need your support to proceed." That sounds dorky.
Jason + Me
Me + Jason
* * * *
Whoa!
I thought the aliens had this weblog--Aliens in My Backyard--which is all about aliens landing and going into this guy's house and being all weird and stuff. And I thought--oh my god, they lied to me and they already came and they didn't even come to Fairbanks and I missed it.
But now I think it's a hoax.
I'm pretty sure it's a hoax.
It better be.
* * * *
Molly Miller told her MOM!!!!! Hasn't anyone ever heard of SECRETS!!
* * * *
My mom comes home from work and actually slides into the house sideways as if she'd rather be anywhere else than here. I know that Mrs. Miller has told her what I told Molly. I mean, geez, can't parents ever mind their own business? So, my mom slides into the room, and stops in the kitchen doorway, looking around to see who's there. My brother's down at the storefront with Dad, though, so it's just me and her. And I can't decide if I should say it, right out loud, before she can, or if it'd be better to just wait and see what she's going to say.
"Is your homework done?" she asks as she comes all the way into the kitchen and drops her keys on the kitchen table. My mother was pretty once--in a big hair and disco kind of way. And every picture I've seen of her when she was in high school and mostly through college too, she's laughing and doing something--water fight or skiing or showing off something that she did. My mother went to the biggest science fiction convention in the world by herself when she was seventeen--she wanted to be a comic book writer--can you even imagine that! But now, she doesn't hardly smile anymore and she just looks worn out and disappointed, as if the whole world's let her down.
"Look," I say in a big rush as if talking fast will make it all work out. "I have proof and everything."
She sits down at the kitchen table and looks at me. "You can't possibly have proof."
"Why not?"
"Why would you be the person who knows that aliens are landing?"
"Why not? Maybe I'm just smarter than everyone else. Maybe I just listened!"
"Maybe you are just the most credulous."
I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I know it isn't a compliment. But before I can reply, my mother goes on. "Look," she says in what I think she thinks is a kind voice. "You're sixteen and you get to make a fool of yourself once in awhile. It's okay, we should all believe things that can't possibly be true once in our lives." Though she says it as if it's something she rehearsed in the car on the way home, not like it's something she actually believes. "But you can't go to Alaska."
"Dad would take me." Which I know is exactly the wrong thing to say, but why does she have to be so mean? Does she practice at night in front of the mirror? I can see her face getting that closed-up look it gets when she's mad and hurt at the same time, but I don't care.
"Your father is not taking you," she says.
"I hate you," I shout. "You are cranky and mean and you want everyone to be as miserable as you are!" Then I run out of the house. I am so tired of talking to people who don't even want to listen. I'm going to find someone to pay attention to what I'm saying.
* * * *
Why Jason Stemple is a great big STUPID and I hate him
1. He won't take me to Alaska
2. He laughed at me
3. He told Sally Banger
4. She laughed at me
5. They will be sorry!!!!!
* * * *
Why I Don't Care
1. Because Jason Stemple is a great big STUPID
2. And I hate him
* * * *
I hate my mother. I hate Jason Stemple, but I hate my mother more. She just wants me to grow up to be as boring and mean as she is. That'd make her feel good, I bet. If I just shriveled up and died.
"I don't want people to call you a fool," my mother says when I finally come home.
"You don't want people to say you have a crazy daughter, you mean."
"You have to have reasonable dreams."
"Why? Is that what you have, reasonable dreams? Does that get you anywhere? You and Dad are divorced but you still love him. You have a job you hate, but you won't quit. You complain about everything. You never have any fun. Be a fool for once, Mom! We'd all like you better."
* * * *
Six Reasons I Will Not Feel Like a Fool (no matter what my mother says)
1. I'm right
2. Aliens are coming
3. Everyone else can eat dirt and die
4. Dreams are worth dreaming even if they don't come true
5. There's nothing wrong with wanting Aliens whether they come or not
6. Because I am not the foolish one
* * * *
"I thought my life would end up anywhere but here."
I wake up and it's, like, the middle of the night and my mother is talking to me. I look at the clock. Ohmygod, it's three o'clock in the morning! "Mom?"
She's sitting at my desk and I can only see her as a dark shadow in the half-light that sneaks through the window. "I just ... you make decisions, you know. I'll take this job or study this in school and you mean for your life to go in one direction, but everything you do, every little decision you make leads you somewhere else." I can't tell if she even knows I'm awake. "And you don't even know it." She goes on as if it doesn't even matter if I'm here or not. "You don't even know you're not ever going to go on great adventures or change the world or even do the things you love anymore. I never meant, I never wanted--I did what was in front of me. And now..."
She stops talking and I'm just savoring the notion that I'm in bed and I'm warm and maybe this is all a weird dream where I learn to get my mother better, when she slaps her hands on her knees and says, "Let's go."
I don't say anything because I'm still working on the "it's all a dream" thing until she crosses over to my bed and shakes me and says, "Come on. Get packed. And hurry up because I'm leaving right now."
Then she's gone again, leaving me sitting up in bed going, "Wha--?" And then, "ohmygod." And "no, she would never." And, finally, "ohmygod, this is so totally cool!" And I jump out of bed like it's ten o'clock in the morning not three and I grab clothes and get dressed and all the time I'm not sure that what I think is happening is what's happening and it's not still some weird dream. I'm half thinking that I'll run downstairs all dressed and dragging my knapsack and there won't be anyone there. I'll just be an idiot who believed a dream. But I keep packing anyway because, who knows?
* * * *
Three Reasons my Mother is the Coolest Woman On Earth
1. She totally gets me
2. She writes comic books
3. She's going to Alaska for the aliens!!!!!!!
(c)Copyright 2006 by Deborah Coates