I.

             Jack Cousteau wanted the aliens to want him as much as he wanted them. Which, as far as he knew, was impossible. He had spent years winnowing down the varied alien forms and representations from books and movies and his own home-spun imagination into a distillation, a look codified out of the dark of space and Jack’s mind. They were pale yellow, like quartz, and looked more or less like people. Jack felt it only fair to go with the old urge, Made in the likeness of the Creator. But try as he might, he couldn’t open their mouths, not even in his mouth. He tried telepathy a few times, scanning the noise of his own head and trying to spin from that a meaning. Nothing. So he was content with the wanting, which he could handle. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t impossible, of course, to break through, bridge the gap. Some brief moments, usually before waking, he envisioned a Water, Helen, Water scenario with the aliens. The usual celebrations followed, the crying, the collie in the yard, It has a name!

             His mother recalled over a family occasion, maybe Thanksgiving, that Jack really loved those depressing space movies a lot. His mother, idiot, refused to see the grand beauty of alien life, its essential Ockhamness, rather content to philosophize from behind the glittering barricade of lipstick on glass. She, and his father, dutifully bought items from the Space Museum and NASA online in attempts to foster an interest in space in general, rather than just aliens. An astrophysicist, they knew, could rake in more dough than a “Believer.” But neither could grasp firmly on their son’s obsession. They never found any morbidly sexual drawings or anything indecent, and it should come as no surprise that his mother took great liberty with the notion of privacy under her roof.

             But Jack, now thirty and in an apartment of his own, could dawdle away the off-work hours in thoughts of meeting the tribe, as he privately referred to them. Jack knew that his position at the local used bookstore in Wyatt, Wyoming would appear to the unenlightened as an impossibly small place from which to aspire to be first contact with life from beyond the firmament. Jack, of course, knew better. They had come to him in a dream, or maybe he had come to them in a dream—it didn’t really matter. Anyway, the whole thing was settled in a weird open plain with faint purple light. What appeared to echo from the undulating clouds was the I Love Lucy theme. Buh-nuh-nuh-nunna-nuh-nunna. Faint though, very realistic. Knowing how unlikely this would seem to others, Jack, of course, kept quiet about the whole matter. Sometimes he would hum it, though, when he thought no one could hear him.

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II.

             At 4:13 A.M. on a Wednesday during the Obama administration, Jack woke up and knew it was time. He knew he didn’t need to bring anything with him, so at the foot of his bed, he undressed in the darkness and smiled and felt completely whole. He kept whispering, I know, I know, to himself as he walked slowly from his room, down the hall, past the kitchen, and outside. A light shone outside and from it, he heard a voice, and he cried there, during his final steps into the enveloping whiteness from his house.

             According to the police report, when they found Jack on his front lawn at 6:47 A.M., he was naked, foaming at the mouth. The paramedics said if the neighbors, the Straits, hadn’t called when they did, he could have bitten off his tongue and choked on all of the blood. After running some tests, the doctors released him, with an order to take Lorazepam when he felt anxious. Jack flushed the pills down the drain when he got home. His parents told him that all of this anxiety about space and aliens and whatever was really his own body trying to tell him to find someone here, on Earth. Jack thought about calling his ex-boyfriend Evan. He always thought about Evan whenever his parents were on his ass and sometimes when he was alone in bed at night and needed something to masturbate to. But he never thought about Evan, for instance, at the grocery store or while reading the paper. There was no Oh Evan would find this interesting—I’ll remember to tell him. That didn’t happen.

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III.

             Of course Jack called Evan up that night when he got home. He didn’t tell him about the hospital visit or anything, because Evan thought he was a bit of a loose cannon. That was part of the reason Evan liked him though. Whenever they had sex, when they were together and after, Evan would squirm beneath Jack, who pounded into him, and think there was no greater happiness. Jack was a fantastic lover, and because of this, Evan, even though it was kind of late, came over when he called.

After Jack came inside of Evan, the two laid in silence.

             I heard from the Straits that something happened today, Evan said.

             I don’t want to talk about it.

             Okay…that’s fine.

A few more minutes passed. Jack thought about the yellow hand of an alien man caressing the insides of his cheeks. Evan thought it was time to reconcile.

             Jack, I think we should get back together.

             What?

             It’s just—things are different. We’re both thirty. We need each other.

             Jack didn’t want to say he’d been called for a higher purpose, or that he had just wanted to have sex because he was afraid of why he hadn’t been taken. Jack was intensely scared. While having sex with Evan, he just went to that place in his mind where he was a dot falling into an infinitely expanding square of whiteness. Why did he wake up on his lawn, the ambulance screaming? Why didn’t they take him? They had come for him—why didn’t they take him?

             Why what? asked Evan

             I’ll think about it, he replied, turning over to face the wall.

The next few days, Jack slept very poorly with fevered half-dreams of the yellow aliens coming and leaving, coming and leaving, as if through a universal revolving door. He would wake up, his legs jerking, his breath hot and hard in his silent apartment. He wasn’t too worried about the hospital visit, the foaming at the mouth, the helpless insect feeling of writhing naked on the lawn. He viewed that as a test. Evan called, but Jack didn’t pick up. His parents called, but Jack didn’t pick up. He had leave from work for a week, so he sat in his living room, on the rug, willing the universe to take him, please. He had nothing without this.