The True Meaning of Smekday

  “Wait,” I said. “You lost me.”

  “Yes?”

  “Cover their ship—?” I said, then gagged. I remembered the way the big Gorg ball seemed to move on the surface. Its skin seemed to crawl, I thought, just like mine is crawling now.

  “You don’t mean they…”

  “Yes,” said J.Lo. “The shipskin is made of Gorg. Mixed-up Gorg, like from a blender. Is not even that hard—not hard like Boovish metals or plastics—but it heals. They can keep onto making more and more skin for replacing the old—”

  J.Lo stopped talking when he saw the look on my face. I wanted to escape from the tight little car and run for it, now more than ever, but there would still be a whole black ocean of stars all around, pressing close, closing in.

  “That is the grossest thing ever!” I shouted at the clear desert morning.

  I’d gone to sleep thinking about a ship covered in skin and woken up the next morning thinking about a ship covered in skin. In between I’d dreamed of being captured by Gorg, who all looked like Curly from Happy Mouse Kingdom. They demanded to know what made Slushious float, so I popped the hood, and the engine had changed to guts and organs, pumping and growling from hunger. I’ve had better nights.

  “The grossest thing!” I said again. “Look at it. Look at it back there. It’s closer than yesterday, isn’t it.”

  J.Lo, who was driving, glanced at the rearview mirror.

  “Yes. Closer, I am thinking.”

  We’d found our way through the desert brush to another wide, western highway. Down a six-lane road with a concrete divider big enough to have its own gift shop, we passed plaster box buildings and signs for chain restaurants. On the side of an antique mall, which I suppose was either a mall that sold antiques or else a really old mall, was a quote spray-painted in slashing letters:

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  T. S. Eliot

  It made me feel strange.

  “What happens when the Gorg get closer?” I asked. “What are they going to do?”

  J.Lo sighed. “When they arriveto Smekla—to Earthland, they will take some of the young and strong as for slaves, and some of the less young and strong for furniture.

  I looked again at the Gorg ship. It was definitely closer. But the Boov seemed to have done some damage—there were long red scars and a scattering of something like bits of toilet paper stuck with blood all over its surface. In the near distance I could also see schools of Boov ships kicking through the air like shining octopi.

  “The Boov willto hold them offs as long as is possible. Could be weeks, could be months.”

  “Make the next right,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  We passed out of the town and into the great wide nothing again. I wasn’t even sure what state we were in, until a sign passed that read ROSWELL 50 MI.

  “Huh. That’s funny,” I said.

  “Funnies strange or funnies ha-ha?”

  “A little of both. That sign just said we’re gonna pass through Roswell.”

  “Yes?” said J.Lo, watching the road. “This is a city?”

  “I guess so. It’s just that it’s famous for being where a UFO supposedly crashed like…sixty years ago or something.”

  “What is ‘you if oh’?”

  It was crazy that he didn’t know this. “It stands for ‘Unidentified Flying Object,’” I said. “A flying saucer. An alien spaceship.”

  J.Lo hit the brakes. I was dumped off my seat and hit my head on the dash.

  “Ow!”

  “Seat belts,” said J.Lo.

  “What was that for?”

  “We have to stop in the Roswell! We canto see the spaceship!”

  I winced. “Yeah…except…I don’t really think there ever was a spacesh—”

  “You said! Tip saidto it crashed-landed!”

  “No. No, it’s…there’s no proof. It’s just something people say, but there’s no proof. Like with Bigfoot, or Nessie.”

  “Bigfoot? Nessie?”

  I sighed. Then I explained about Bigfoot, and about the blurry photos. And I told him about the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland, and about the blurry photos of that. Then I had to explain where Scotland was, and he asked what was a loch, and I didn’t know so I made something up.

  Finally he sat still and nodded his head. “So no Bigfoot. No Nessie.”

  “Probably not,” I said. J.Lo sounded sad. It was sort of sad, come to think of it. Sad to admit that there wasn’t really anything so mysterious and great. And then I remembered for the eight hundredth time that I was talking to a space alien. I was trying to explain to a space alien that there were no such things as monsters.

  “If something that big lived in a lake in Scotland,” I said, “I think we’d have found it by now.”

  “Yes. It would haveto be very big to be a lochniss monster.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bigger even than the snakewhale.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Bigger than the what now?”

  “The snakewhale,” he said. “That lives in waters near Scot’sland. I am not knowing the right name for it.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I don’t either. I don’t know much about Scotland.”

  J.Lo began to drive again.

  “One of the Boov ships,” he explained, “it wasto collecting interesting Earthland animals, for like a zoo. The Boov had elephants, and the armadillo, and many bugs and fish. Many other things.

  “Say,” he said with a grin, “like your Noah’s arkboat.”

  “Yeah. Sort of. And this snakewhale was one of the fish?”

  “Yes. I am sorry I do not know the reals word. I only remember it was captured near your Scot’sland. Very pretty. Sixty feets long, if you are counting the neck.”

  I looked out at the road for a moment, mouthing the words Sixty feet long. Counting the neck.

  “Can you draw it?” I asked.

  J.Lo stopped the car, and I fished out his paper and pencils. And he drew the snakewhale:

  I stared at it for the longest time. I stared so long I must have hurt J.Lo’s feelings.

  “It is…not very good,” he said. “I made the flippers too small.”

  “No,” I said. “’Sfantastic. I bet it looks just like her.”

  Maybe there really was a spaceship, I thought. Way back then.

  “Could one of your Boov ships have visited Earth so long ago?” I asked.

  “I am doubting it. Earthland is not in a very nice neighborhood. Maybies it was the Habadoo. Say, do you wants to hear a funny joke about the Habadoo? It seems that a Boov, a KoshzPoshz, and a Habadoo all are walking inside a mahahmbaday. And the Boov sa—no. Wait. I am forgetting to say the KoshzPoshz is carrying a purp. So the Boov—no. The KoshzPoshz says—”

  I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about the whole UFO craze. It felt ridiculous, now that we’d been invaded twice, to think about all the Top Secret alien visitors we’d supposedly had all these years. It was all crop circles and mystery, when the truth turned out to be as obvious as a giant purple ball you could see from five states away.

  “…So then the Habadoo, he says: ‘That’s not your purp, that’s my poomp!’” J.Lo hiccuped with laughter.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “You are not a fan of ethnical jokes, ah? Look, is okay if I tells it, I am one-sixteenth Habadoo—”

  “Y’know, I don’t want you to get your hopes up too much about seeing a crashed spaceship. I was just thinking about all those old UFO stories, and they all agree that the army or NASA or someone hid the spaceship someplace called Area 51. I don’t know where that is.”

  “N’aasa?”

  “Yeah. NASA.”

  “In Boovish, ‘n’aasa’ means soft and beige.”

  “That’s not what it means here. It’s a name,” I explained. “It stands for something
else.”

  “The name…is standing?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “It’s a name that’s made up of other words and…stands for them,” I said. “UFO’s the same way. Or TV or…or J.Lo.”

  “What.”

  “What, what?”

  “You did to say my name,” said J.Lo, “but then afters my name you did not say anything—”

  “No,” I said, “that’s not what I meant. I was saying that J.Lo’s like NASA.”

  “Do not.”

  “Do not what?”

  “J.Los do not like the NASA,” he said. “We do not even know the NASA—”

  “Okay. No. Time out. I mean that NASA stands for something, just like J.Lo stands for Jennifer Lopez.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes.”

  J.Lo frowned. “I suppose I might do if he asked me.”

  “NASA,” I said, “stands for…National American Space…Association. Or National Air and Space…something. I don’t remember.”

  “I stand for Jennifer LOH-pez,” J.Lo whispered.

  “Or Never Answer Stupid Aliens,” I said. “Maybe it stands for that.”

  “Aaah.” J.Lo nodded. “You are meaning the NASA is an acronym.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then frowned and kicked the dash.

  “Yes.”

  “And it is being a kind of…space club?”

  “Yeah. It was part of the government. They built satellites and space shuttles and things.”

  “And the soft beige space club hided the ship?”

  “Maybe. Nobody knows. The government says that none of it’s true. There are people—were people—around here who claimed to see UFOs all the time, but the government always said they were just weather balloons. The UFOs, I mean.”

  “They are to hiding something!” shouted J.Lo.

  “Jeez,” I said. “All right.”

  J.Lo was still driving when we hit the highway sign and skidded over the shoulder. I was rooting around in the back for Pig’s food. But as Slushious hurtled forward, I turned to squint into the green reflected light from the road sign, which had impaled itself into something really important-looking on the car hood, and watched as we snapped the barbed wire, terrified the antelope, fishtailed past the all-too-accurate WRONG WAY sign, and barreled toward a fiberglass shed.

  “Hit the brakes!” I shrieked.

  “No working!” said J.Lo, pumping the pedal. “Sign pokery in they! ALARM!” His English got really bad when he was under stress. He swerved around the shed, and used his free hand to pound the dashboard again and again in the same spot, as if something good would come of it.

  “Activate!” he shouted at the dash. “Deploy!”

  He wasn’t watching the road, or rather the alpaca farm, so I stretched forward to slap his hand away from the tuner and grab it myself. I steered us through the animals and into what appeared to be someone’s homemade motorcross course. We ducked and dove through gullies, and launched over hills and ramps tall enough to keep Pig airborne most of the time and ensure that I bit my tongue at least twice.

  “Whah ah thoo twying to do?!” I asked as J.Lo kept punching the dash.

  “Yes, please!” J.Lo answered. “Feeds them to me as I drive!”

  “No…whath are hyoo twying to do?”

  “Ah! Trying to make! Safety! Devices! Work!” he said, punching after each word. “Work! Work! Work!”

  We were through the obstacle course and drifting toward what I would later learn was an arroyo, but could easily pass for a big ditch. But brakes or no brakes, we were running out of momentum, and I sighed with relief when we finally came to a stop right at the arroyo’s edge.

  “Yes,” said J.Lo. “Good. But still I am wondering—”

  There was a noise like boof, and a limp parachute farted out Slushious’s backside.

  “Aha. But that is still not explaining what happened to the—”

  Eighteen enormous pink beach balls sprouted out of Slushious in every direction and bounced us end over end into the arroyo.

  J.Lo smiled weakly as the cloud of dust and jackrabbits settled, and the beach balls began to squeal and deflate. I squinted at the highway sign that was still lodged in front of our windshield. NOW ENTERING ROSWELL.

  “Ha. Well,” I said, “the next time someone claims no aliens ever crashed here, I’ll know what to tell him.”

  “Is not my fault!” said J.Lo. “There was a boy human onto a bicycle!”

  “A boy hu—a kid?”

  “Onto a bicycle! Bicyclisting! I swerved to miss, and missed missing the green sign instead.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe you were just…what’s the word…hallucinating.”

  “I am assured.”

  “Look, J.Lo, once back in Florida I thought I saw a bunch of goats in little cars. I was just tired—”

  Then, in the distance, I heard a shout—maybe the word “Hurry,” but definitely a kid’s voice. J.Lo’s and my eyes met.

  “Ohmygosh,” I said. “We have to go.”

  “But…Slushiouscar cannot move until the Safetypillows unflate! And we have no brakes—”

  There were more voices, a group of people, a many-legged multiheaded thing coming to get us.

  “Go!” I whispered. “Hide in those trees!”

  J.Lo squealed something in Boovish and looked every which way, grabbed a bedsheet from the backseat of the car and forced a door open, then pushed his way through the hissing beach balls and ran, half shrouded like a billowing ghost, with Pig chasing after.

  I hesitated. Should I stay or go? The voices were close, right on top of us. Suddenly I was beating back the beach balls and pushing a door open, too. I ran halfway to J.Lo’s hiding place when I remembered his toolbox. If the weird car didn’t give him away, the weird tools certainly would. So I raced back, grabbed the box, and stumbled through the low shrubs and stones to the little copse of trees where I’d seen Pig and J.Lo disappear.

  I rustled through the leaves and stinging branches to find J.Lo small and huddled, clutching the bedsheet around his face like a shivering old woman. Pig squatted between a few of his legs.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” I whispered. “Like, should I talk to them? Try to explain about the—”

  “Sh!” said J.Lo.

  A group of people were shuffling down into the arroyo. They circled Slushious but kept their distance, like it was a strange dog. The Safetypillows were flat and waggling now like pink tongues, until they slipped with a Thwip! into the car’s cracks and gaps, and were gone.

  Everyone jumped—the kids, the women, the men—and took a step back. Slushious was quiet now, looking as innocent as a car can when it’s floating six inches off the ground.

  “Hello?” one of the men called out.

  “Shhh!” said another.

  “What?”

  “What if the driver isn’t human? What if this is an alien car?”

  “Kat, this is a Chevy Sprint.”

  “So what if it is?”

  “It is hovering….”

  “Shut up, you guys!”

  I counted two men, two women, two little boys, and a baby girl. The boys were peering into Slushious and calling dibs on our food.

  “It tried to hit me,” said one of the boys. “But I did…I did a jump on my bike and I jumped over the car, and the car missed me and it crashed. BKOOOSH!”

  “You weren’t supposed to be riding your bike this far out in the first place,” said the woman named Kat, and the boy scowled.

  “Dibs on the bug spray!” said the other boy.

  “Nuh-uh!”

  “Yes-huh!”

  “I called it first!”

  “Did not!”

  J.Lo leaned toward me. “But I called it first,” he whispered. “You heard me do, back in Mississippies.”

  “Shh,” I said.

  The adults were fanning out, trying to understand what they were dealing with. It was only a matter of time before they found
us. I looked at J.Lo’s sheet, and remembered that I was holding his toolbox.

  “Is there anything in here that’d be good for cutting cloth?” I asked.

  J.Lo quietly rummaged through the toolbox and produced something that looked like a fat ballpoint pen.

  “Squeeze the handle and draw the cut,” he said.

  “Good. Put your helmet up.”

  “Whatnow?”

  “Put your helmet up. I have an idea.”

  “I do not want my helmet up. It gets hot.”

  “Please.”

  J.Lo said a word in Boovish I couldn’t make out. Something like “Claap,” but with a popping sound in the middle. The clear bowl snapped up from all sides and met in the middle, above his head. There was a little circular vent in the front. I pulled the sheet all the way over him.

  “Ah, aha,” whispered J.Lo. “Good. With the sheets as this, we will not be able to see the mens. Here is my question: can not they still see us?”

  As he spoke I trimmed the excess sheet where it lay in the dirt. Then I cut a little circle where I thought J.Lo’s eye might be.

  “Oh, hello,” he said.

  I lined the hole up with his eye, then cut another.

  “Aha,” said J.Lo, then he made another Boovish noise. The glass of his helmet turned a dark blue. “Better?”

  “Yeah. Really good. Now follow my lead.”

  Then I walked out from the trees, bold as anything.

  The boys were still looking at the car. Some of the adults had formed a little huddle to decide their next move. Others searched the bushes. None of them were looking our way. I cleared my throat.

  “Hi!” I said.

  “Gaa!” said the closest man, and fell backward on the seat of his big khaki shorts.

  “Where did you come from?” he asked.

  “Pennsylvania,” I answered.

  Everyone gaped. A stout woman wearing a T-shirt that read, “Don’t blame me, I voted for Spock” stepped forward.

  “Well, hi there. I’m Vicki. Vicki Lightbody,” she said, offering her hand. “You don’t have to call me Mrs. Lightbody, you can call me Vicki.”

  “I’m Gr…Grace,” I said. I didn’t feel like having that conversation. “This is my little brother…JayJay.”