The Visit
by Ken Liu
In the streets, roommates and neighbors stood around holding ice-cold beers as hundreds of bright streaks lit up the night sky in the direction of the constellation Virgo. Unlike meteors, they did not burn out in a second or two. Instead, they crawled slowly down the dome of the sky like rain on a windowpane, their fiery tails fading gradually into darkness.
“What do you think?” I asked the girl next to me—black hair, brown skin, a light sheen of sweat glistening on her face. I thought her ethnic background was Southeast Asian. The early summer breeze brought the faint scent of her perfume: flowery, but not cloying. Probably a law student from the apartment below mine, judging by the books she hauled around all the time. Lots of them lived in this corner of Cambridge.
“Like watching the end of the world,” she said. “You’re the one doing jumping jacks over my head every night during Letterman, aren’t you? I’m Lara.”
“It’s the only time I can find to exercise. I’m Matt.”
We shared a beer and watched the sky rain fire.
*
Four hundred
fifty-three probes arrived that night.
Each was the size of a small man. Five feet tall, a little
more than a foot across, the vertical black cylinders
tapered down to a rounded point at the bottom. The shape
and dull finish brought to mind cartoon bombs hovering a
foot or so off the ground, a millisecond before the strike.
All official attempts at establishing communication with
the probes ended in failure. They moved away when people
approached too closely, but, like wild animals, would stop
once they were at a safe distance. The presentation of
fundamental physical constants—via flashing lights,
clanging bells, pulsing radio waves, even the blowing of
gentle gusts of air against the probes—elicited no
meaningful response. Neither did the playing of music or
the display of art. Meanwhile, the probes’ shell seemed to
resist all remote imaging techniques (ultrasound, radar,
more exotic beams). Close up, you could hear them making a
humming noise like a wasp nest, but the sound seemed
random, patternless. If it was intended as communication,
we could make no sense of it..
For their part, the probes did not speak in a robotic
voice, collected no samples, abducted no one, projected no
holograms, and showed no interest in being taken to our
leaders. They floated among the walking crowd on busy
sidewalks or zipped along the highways, keeping pace in the
fast lane. Sometimes, they stayed in the same spot for
hours, motionless. Other times, they zoomed across the
oceans, trailing sonic booms behind.
What do
they want? The question
was debated endlessly. The probes were clearly interested
in us, as they were concentrated in population centers. But
they stayed away from war zones. Was it because they were
too fragile? Did whoever sent them abhor violence? Or was
it all an elaborate ruse designed to trick us into thinking
that they had no interest in our military capabilities so
that we would reveal our weaknesses?
Some argued that evolutionarily, a race that could develop
interstellar travel must be aggressive and dangerous.
Applying the Golden Rule in reverse, they said if we did
not want to follow in the footsteps of the Aztecs and the
Incas, it would be prudent to destroy the probes, salvage
them for technological advances, and then prepare for the
retaliatory strike. But the probes were scattered over all
the countries and continents, and it was impossible to
secretly secure the agreement of all the governments to
launch a simultaneous attack upon them. If we went at it
alone, those who did not like America could offer sanctuary
to the probes and hope to ally themselves with an alien
force.
The President announced that the safest course was to leave
the probes alone, make no threatening gestures, and keep
our doors locked and shades drawn where we didn’t want them
to look.
*
After a few
months, the camera crews stopped following them. The probes
never seemed to do anything but hover and observe, and
there were still hurricanes, floods, oil spills, car
chases, wars, and celebrities to cover. The military and
the scientists continued to monitor them, but most people
had lost interest.
But I remained obsessed with the question:
what do
they want? I logged onto
the Contact sites at all hours, where those like me
congregated to share sightings and to debate theories about
the probes. We plotted their movements across the
continents and analyzed the harmonics in the recordings of
their humming, trying to divine meaning out of noise.
Still, everyone tended to act more politely around the
alien probes, laughed louder, spoke with more animation,
picked up trash and disengaged from fights. Silly, when you
really thought about it. What did we know about how to make
a good impression on aliens?
Lara had accepted a position with a big law firm out in LA.
The great corporations of the world waged war not only in
the markets, but also in courts and capitols. Lara conceded
it was not a particularly meaningful way to make a living,
but that could be said about many jobs, and certainly few
paid as well.
“I went to law school because I once thought that someday
I’d stand in front of the Supreme Court and make an
argument about justice for the helpless. I wanted to work
in human rights. But law school loans piling up on your
credit report have a way of changing aspirations.”
She would leave in the fall. I wasn’t sure what I would do.
Things were going well between us, but we didn’t speak much
about the future.
It was a hot summer night. We were naked, my hands lightly
caressing her back and breasts. The window was left open
because I didn’t have air conditioning. And there was no
screen because my slumlord hadn’t bothered to install any.
A car passed in the street below, and then, in the silence
afterwards, a humming grew louder. Outside the window, a
probe rose to our level and stopped. Tilting until it was
horizontal, it entered the room through the open window and
straightened to hover in the middle of the room.
“Hello and welcome,” Lara said, in the way the President
had suggested on TV.
I pulled up a blanket over us, but Lara threw off the
blanket and got out of bed. Naked, unselfconscious, she
walked towards the probe. In the faint glow of the
streetlights below, she was beautiful.
The probe backed up as she approached, staying a few feet
away. Lara stopped.
“Woman,” she pointed at herself, between her breasts.
“Man,” she pointed at me. I waved at the probe, feeling
silly. “We are a peaceful and loving species,” Lara said.
“With much to offer your people, or whatever you call
yourselves.”
I thought about how Margaret Mead was duped by the Samoan
natives. When given the chance, we all like to craft and
shape how we’re seen, to engage in a bit of interstellar
propaganda.
“People have tried this kind of thing already,” I whispered
to Lara. “They never respond.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt to try.”
“This is how we make love,” Lara said. She came back to
bed, and straddled me. This was not part of the
government’s recommended protocol. Leaning down so that her
hair cascaded around my face, she whispered, “Maybe this
will be their first sex tape.”
I pictured the aliens huddled around their screens,
observing our slow, awkward, giggly performance, the way we
had watched on our computer monitors the alien landscape of
Mars through the lenses of the NASA rovers.
Things felt different when you were watched: more aware of
the intensity of everything. “This definitely qualifies as
a fantasy I never thought I’d enjoy,” I whispered back.
Lara laughed; we locked our lips in a kiss, a kiss I wanted
to stay in forever.
In the background, the probe hummed.
*
Once you got
used to the traffic, LA was not nearly as bad as I had
feared.
Since I freelanced as a database administrator, my hours
were far more flexible than Lara’s. I did most of the
chores and spent even more time on the Contact sites. We
continued to make no progress on understanding the probes.
Lara worked the long hours she had expected. Sometimes, at
night, when Lara called to say that she would have to stay
overnight at the office, I would drive over, pick up
Chinese or Thai on the way, and bring it up to her floor.
We would pick a conference room, close the door, spread the
food out on the smooth wooden surface of the conference
table, and make fun of the partners she slaved under as we
ate. Afterwards we would sit quietly and look out at the
sea of shimmering lights spread out below. Sometimes, as we
talked quietly during the contented haze after a good meal,
I imagined us growing old together.
One night, she was unusually quiet as we ate.
Aware that my repeated attempts to engage her had all
fallen flat, I finally asked, “What’s wrong?”
For a while, she continued to eat quietly, sorting out her
thoughts. I stood behind her, and lightly rubbed her
shoulder.
“I had my pro bono deportation hearing today,” she said. “I
figured I had to do something meaningful so I can live with
myself, you know? I spend my days selling myself, and I
wanted to try to make it up with these pro bono projects
that no one gives a damn about.” Her voice broke and she
dropped her face into her hands.
“Tell me,” I said.
The client was an undocumented Cambodian woman named Sang:
eldest daughter, poor rural family, chronically ill father.
Growing up, she heard stories of women providing for their
families by sending cash home from Phnom Penh and Bangkok’s
sex districts. When she was 14, a few men came to her
village to recruit, and she agreed to go to Bangkok with
them. The family was given an advance against her wages
before she left.
Once in Bangkok, she was told that earnings from the first
fifteen customers every night would be kept by her
employer, while the rest had to go first to pay back the
interest on the loan to her family.
The reality of sex work made her change her mind. She asked
to go home and promised to return the advance. In response
the men took turns raping her and then locked her into a
windowless room with a mattress on the floor. She did not
leave that room for a year.
When customers complained about her lack of enthusiasm, she
was punished until her smiles and moans were deemed
convincing. She was taught to beg for sex seductively in
English, German, and Japanese. When she tried to explain to
her customers her condition, she was told that men would go
to her home and retrieve her sisters. Whether a condom
would be used was up to the client, not her. Costs for
abortions were added to what she owed.
Now pliant, she was smuggled first into Macao and then
America through the Mexican border (the cost of these trips
were also added to her debt). Her owners could charge a lot
more in America for her services than back in Thailand. She
became the star attraction at a brothel that advertised
itself discreetly in the right places online. When the
police raided the establishment, the owners claimed that
she had paid guides to enter America illegally so that she
could make more money in LA.
“She was terrified of going home, where she thought her
owners would come for her again.” Lara said. “But she
didn’t qualify for a T visa since the government didn’t
need her cooperation to prosecute the brothel operators. I
tried to get her asylum, but she didn’t have a credible
fear of persecution on account of a protected reason—race,
religion, political opinion. The asylum laws don’t care
about her fear that once back in Cambodia men would come
and take her back to that windowless room.
“The Immigration Judge didn’t believe a word she said. The
Homeland Security lawyer explained that customers saw no
evidence that she was kept against her will. She had
stellar reviews on the message boards, in which she was
praised for being eager to please and going the extra mile.
She was just an illegal alien Asian hooker sneaking in here
to make more money. ‘Cambodia and Thailand are
democracies,’ the IJ said, and that was the end of the
discussion.”
I could see how much effort it took for her to keep her
voice so calm.
“I hear that a lot of asylum applicants do lie,” I said. I
wasn’t trying to be contrary. Just wanted to give her some
perspective. It was a sad story, but one that I thought an
economic migrant might well adopt if she thought it gave
her a chance to stay in America.
I should have been more sensitive. Lara had explained to me
that though she was born in Louisiana, her family, refugees
from Vietnam, could be considered Chinese, Cambodian,
Vietnamese, or perhaps even French, depending on who was
doing the considering. She felt a connection to that corner
of the world in complicated ways.
“Yes, that’s what I’m told,” Lara said, her voice perfectly
flat, emotionless. “Aliens lie because they want to live
among us. There are videos of her posted in some of the sex
forums as advertising. I’ll show you one.”
I started to object, but she stopped me. “If you’re going
to call someone a liar, you should at least see what she
looks like.”
She pulled up a video on her laptop. A naked Asian woman
was straddling and writhing on top of a man whose face was
outside the frame of the camera. She licked her lips
seductively and smiled into the camera, reaching up to cup
her breasts. She looked so young and thin.
I examined her face. Was she looking off-camera for threats
that prodded her to redouble her efforts? Or was she simply
enjoying the sensuality of her own performance? Or perhaps
those threats were embedded so deep in her mind that she
could no longer tell the difference between her will and
theirs. I thought she looked a little like Lara. With a
start and a hot blush of shame, I found that I was aroused.
We watched the video in silence. We behave differently when
we are being watched, or watching.
*
Lara took on
more asylum cases like Sang’s. She stayed later at work,
worked through more nights. The question consumed her: “How
do I help them?”
The laws provided no answers. One after another, they were
deported, sent back to their nightmares.
I certainly understood obsessions. I was a part of the
Contact community.
Maybe there
was a way to answer both our questions at the same
time, I thought. I
convinced Lara to take her first two-week vacation, and we
planned it out.
*
Mary Marshall,
forty years old, thin and wiry like a dancer, led us into
the one-bedroom apartment that also served as her office.
There was no air conditioning, and the heat and humidity of
Bangkok sapped my energy. Looking at me with pity, Mary
handed me a bottle of Coke. Her face was weary, hard, worn
down by years spent trying to change the implacable.
“You don’t get much funding, I take it,” Lara said, looking
around the small and cramped room: stacks of paper
threatening to fall over, an ancient beige computer,
photographs of young women, not smiling into the camera. We
had found Mary on the web and corresponded with her a few
times before we came.
“No.” Mary’s accent was flat, unobtrusive, comforting.
Somewhere in the Midwest. “Trafficking in Thailand is not a
cause that a lot of people care about. The Thai government
likes the money that Western sex tourists pump into the
economy, and most women being trafficked are from China,
Laos, Myanmar, or Cambodia, not Thailand, so why should
they care? Tourists think that there are only happy working
girls and ladyboys here, and often it’s hard to tell
because consent comes in shades of grey.
“Often Americans and Europeans tell me that I shouldn’t
impose my puritan values on the Asians, because Thai women
love sex and love farang
men
and their money even more. ‘It’s part of Asian culture!’
They deny that slavery still exists in this world.”
*
Mary was
skeptical of our plan, but she agreed to help since we
would fund it.
I logged onto a Contact site and confirmed that there were
two probes wandering around the city. One was presently
near the Chao Phraya River.
Mary sketched out on a map the path that we needed to
follow to get to the go-go bar that she had selected. Then
we took a taxi to the probe by the river.
It was hovering among the tourists and vendors bustling
along the riverbank. The Thai government had driven all the
beggars in the area away when the probe showed up, but now
no one was paying much attention to it. The three of us
fanned out and approached it purposefully.
Our deliberate movements alarmed it. The probe backed away
and moved towards a more open area. I gestured for us to
stop, adjusted our positions and directions of approach,
and then we walked towards the probe again. This was a
technique a few other posters on the Contact forums had
experimented with, and they had achieved good results.
Slowly but steadily, we nudged the probe in the direction
we wanted it to move.
It figured out what we were doing after a hundred feet or
so. Then it sped up, dodged around us, and headed back
towards the river. Some tourists had stopped to watch our
strange dance.
“If you draw the attention of the police now and make them
think we’re bothering the probe, we won’t get anywhere,”
Mary said.
Lara stopped moving, and waited until the probe also
stopped, now about ten feet away. She faced it and
whispered, “You have to come with us. We need to show you
something.” She bit her lips. As far as we knew, the probes
had never shown any response to spoken requests.
“I know you,” Lara said, her eyes widening. “Yes, that was
us back in Cambridge.” She grabbed my arm. Her grip was so
tight that it hurt.
I looked at Lara in disbelief. No one had ever been able to
tell individual probes apart. Was she fooling herself or
had she seen something the rest of us missed?
“Please come,” Lara said. She backed away from the probe,
away from the river.
Miraculously, the probe followed.
*
The go-go bar
was dimly lit and crowded. Dance music shook the floors and
a pungent mixture of perfume and sweat filled the air.
People shouted to be heard. I listened to the voices,
trying to identify the languages and accents: the customers
were English, Australian, American, German, French, with a
few Japanese. The women danced nude on stage or giggled
among the customers.
Mary handed small bundles tightly wrapped in cloth to the
two Thai bouncers who had let us in. Knowing that they were
with us, I felt safe enough to take out my video camera and
began to film. I panned around, taking in the crowd, the
nude women, and the probe bobbing along behind me. As
people noticed the probe, a circle of silence and stillness
expanded around us. Only the music remained. A barman took
out his phone and began to dial frantically.
She said something to the bouncers in Thai.
The men, large, bald, one with a long scar that cut
diagonally across his face, stashed the bundles from Mary
away. They walked towards the back of the bar, the crowd
parting before them. We followed in their wake.
“We’ll hand over the other half of their fee once we’ve
seen the girls,” Mary said to me. Lara glanced back at me
and the camera, her face frightened but also determined.
Down the stairs, through a warren of twisting hallways and
locked doors, we ended up in a short hall with more locked
doors on both sides. From behind one of the doors, we heard
a woman’s intermittent screams. Between screams came moans
that could be either pleasure or pain, and a man’s voice.
His tone was like a teacher’s.
There was a pause and the man behind the door shouted a
question, and the man with the scar on his face with us
yelled something back. Then he laughed, and the man behind
the door laughed too.
The men with us held out their hands, palms up. Mary shook
her head. The scarred man began to argue with her in
whispers. Mary shook her head again and pointed at her
watch, pointed upstairs, and mimed making a phone call.
The men sighed, and Scar walked over to the door with the
screaming woman inside. He knocked on the door.
A thin, naked man opened the door. He paused when he saw
us, and as his eyes took in the probe hovering next to
Lara, his mouth opened in surprise and the cigarette that
was dangling in his mouth fell to the ground. Scar brought
his arm down hard to strike him behind his neck, and the
naked man collapsed in a heap on the ground.
Behind him, we could see a naked girl strapped down on top
of a table, her legs spread open with a bar secured in
place between her knees. She was moaning theatrically, her
face locked into the rictus of an exaggerated smile.
Electrical wires extended from a machine plugged into a
wall, the naked copper contacts lying on the table next to
her. I continued to film.
“The electric shocks leave no marks to damage the goods,”
Mary said. “I tried it on myself once. It’s not something
you forget easily.”
The girl looked at us with no comprehension. She continued
to contort her face into a smile, and bucked her hips
suggestively. She moaned again.
Mary handed another two cloth-wrapped bundles to the men
who took us down here. They quickly left the way we had
come.
“Let’s hope that the police show up before the gangsters
do,” Mary said. “I put the call in half an hour ago and
they know this place very well. I annoy them, so I hope
they believed me when I told them a probe would be
involved.”
While Mary stepped around the unconscious man on the
ground, untied the girl, and wrapped a blanket around her,
Lara picked up the wires and gestured to the probe.
“Come and feel this,” she said. “So you know what she was
feeling. This is not making love, though maybe it looks
similar to you. But you must understand the difference. I’m
ashamed to show you this: something that members of our
species also do to each other.”
The probe drifted towards her.
*
Loud shouts
echoed down the corridors. We heard the sound of stumping
feet and slamming doors, closer and closer.
The door to the short hall banged open. A crowd of men
emerged, holding sticks and knives.
In the lead was a large man with cold eyes. He looked
around the space, glancing in turn at me, at Mary who
cursed at him, at Lara hugging the girl on the table. He
paused when he saw the probe. But after a moment of
hesitation, he gave an order.
The men rushed at me, for the camera.
Everything slowed down.
The probe flashed and disappeared from next to Lara. Then
it appeared in front of me. Bright electric arcs unfurled
from the probe, like spider silk, like strings of cotton
candy, like winter breath, and extended towards the men
running at me.
How can
this be? I
thought. Time is
moving so slowly.
The electric arcs struck the men in the chest. They fell to
the ground like puppets with their strings cut.
Time returned to normal. The probe bobbed.
The man with the cold eyes lay on the ground, trembling.
His eyes were focused on some horror that only he could
see. His lips twitched, but no sound came out.
*
The police
arrived a few minutes after the probe struck down our
would-be assailants. “What happened?” they asked.
I offered to play back the scene on my video camera. But
the electric arcs, so vivid in my memory, did not show on
film. My jerky camerawork only captured the men running at
us and then suddenly stopping.
“Guess they thought better about attacking a probe,” the
police captain suggested.
*
“Thank you for
convincing me to do this,” Lara said, when we were back at
our hotel.
“You cared about something important,” I said. “And I was
tired of the planet putting on a Potemkin village show for
the probes. I wanted to see how they’d react to another
side of us. It might tell us what they wanted.”
Rationally, my experiment was a failure. Even if I had not
imagined the probe’s attack, it probably had done so only
to defend itself. We were as much in the dark now about its
creators’ intentions as before.
“How did you recognize the probe?” I asked.
Lara lay on the bed, her hands laced behind her head. She
looked tired, but radiant. “Maybe I’m crazy. But I heard a
voice in my head. ‘Thank you for showing us how you make
love.’ And then later, after the lightning attack, I heard
the voice again. ‘Thank you for showing us everything.’”
I stared at her. “You saw them too? There was nothing on
film.”
She nodded, and smiled. I didn’t feel like a failure any
more.
“You think they understood everything?”
“I hope so.” Her face became serious again. “But sometimes
it matters less that the audience understands than that an
audience is present.”
*
“This isn’t
going to make any lasting difference, you know?” Mary said.
We were in her office again, the last day of our vacation.
“Corruption runs deep here. They shut down that bar and
arrested the owners, and the Prime Minister will make a few
speeches. People might pay attention to your video for a
few days, but things will go back to the old ways soon
enough. Many men are interested in paying to bed smiling
girls without wanting to look behind those smiles.”
“People behave differently when watched,” Lara said. “And
now that we’ve brought a probe in to witness it, maybe
other governments will apply more pressure on Thailand.
People care about the impression we give the probes, the
way you clean your house when guests arrive for a visit.
The gaze of outsiders has a way of letting us see into our
blind spots.”
Mary laughed. “You’re just talking about political
theatre.”
“No. The probes are reminders that whatever we do, we’re
always under the gaze of the universe.”
“Like being watched by God and angels,” Mary said. She
stopped laughing.
“Faith does not require religion,” Lara said.
*
The Contact
forums exploded with our news.
“You should both rot and die in a dark jail cell,” someone
wrote. “It was reckless to engage the probes without
knowing what they really want.”
“What makes you think involving outsiders will help our
problems?” someone else wrote. “Bangkok’s red light
districts began as R&R centers for other outsiders,
American soldiers in Vietnam. The aliens are not the
answer.”
But other activists began to adopt her model, bringing the
probes to mines in China worked by bought children, to
refugee camps Australia where men were herded like animals,
to places that the world preferred to forget, where the
probes could witness things that many did not want them to
see.
The governments of the world grew nervous and began to shut
us down.
*
On the
anniversary of their landing, the probes all over the world
lifted off. We stood in the streets again and watched as
the trails of fire and smoke slowly rose into the sky, like
caterpillars climbing up a wall.
We never did find out what the probes wanted. But the
answer didn’t seem so important now. It was enough that we
would behave differently, now that we had an audience in
the universe.
“Maybe they’ve seen enough,” I said. “And we’ll hear their
judgment soon.”
Lara held my hand. “I hope they keep on watching.”
Copyright
2011 by Ken Liu