Adam's Apple

Why they picked me, I don't know. I was a smalltown criminal defense attorney. I had a bilboard, but I was nothing special. It was amazing I even made it through law school, drunk as I was. But I was only a periodic drunk, which means that I was a drunk for a while then I got sober and healthy only to be a drunk again. I go to an AA meeting every Tuesday and everyone calls me Chuck, though my name is Charles and I don't like the name Chuck. Chuck has become my alcoholic name—a name of absurdity and regret.

I failed out of law school seven times and then I went back and finished at Indiana State University. I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be an artist. A painter who paints still lifes. But painters who paint still lifes don't make money. I am now in terrible debt and I have herpes. Chuck must have got them from some girl at the bar called Hooker's. It is a fish-themed bar and sits on the banks of the Wabash River. There's all sorts of fish-related things hanging on the wall and ceiling. Every lure you can think of dangles there off the ceiling. There is a fish mounted on a mahogany plaque on the wall I named Billy Bass who talks and sings karaoke, occasionally. He makes more sense than most people I know. Sometimes he speaks to me, but only when I am really drunk. He knows French and will often say, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir."

To which I reply, "Non, merci, Monsieur Poisson."

I rent an office/apartment above a food market in Wabash, Indiana. I was in love with the second shift clerk at that food market for a while, but she she died of breast cancer. Her name was Gwen. Gwen had freckles on her nose and I am a sucker for freckles. I went to her funeral, which was strange because I never asked her out and I barely spoke to her. She meant far more to me than I ever meant to her it is safe to say. They gave out pink breast cancer ribbons and I wore mine for a week.

I got Covid and nearly died five years ago. They hooked me up to a respirator which they said meant I was near the end. However, the end never came. I was certain that I was I going to die. I thought I saw angels coming with harps to get me and all that sort of thing. They were not in white robes. They were in silver tunics with enormous wings that made a deafening swoosh when they flapped them. Then there were demons who looked like lesbian women. Vile, venal, disgusting. Rosie O'Donnell sorts of beasts. Kathy Griffins. That black bitch on Wicked. Then they all went away and I woke up in a hospital and they said I could go home. I wasn't going to die after all. I was all better.

I am not sure that I survived. Maybe I died and this was the result. This dystopian orgy of abstract thought. Maybe I am on meth and don't even realize it. Perhaps, I became an addict and was so burnt that I forgot I ever started. Maybe the waiter at this Mexican restaurant slipped me some psychedelic mushrooms. It all seems normal to me, but it isn't normal. It is very abnormal. The waiter calls me Gringo and I call him Amigo, drunk on five margaritas and two piña coladas. Outside the window is boring life as usual—a still life of waxed fruit and taxidermy. Of clay figurines that look like people. Bones and flesh.

I have no doubt that I have two distinct personalities caused by my alcoholism that live their own seperate lives within my one body like Jekyll and Hyde. Charles is the good Dr. Jekyll, and Chuck is Mr. Hyde. I have no doubt that this is true and I write today, of coherent mind, as Charles Theodore Hamm, Esquire. No one hates Chuck more than Charles, and vice versa, I suppose. Chuck had the heart attack. Chuck got the herpes. Chuck blew out his knee diving naked into the Wabash River to impress some fluzy. Some walking taco.

My mother called promiscuous women fluzies because she would never use the word whore or slut. She had different words for everything. Words you could say on TV, I suppose. We could never say the word fart in my house. We had to say stinker. My mother committed suicide long ago. The world, and all its filth and meanness, was too much for her.

My billboard has a picture of me and says: "In a jam? Call Hamm." I am smiling on it. I am wearing a suit. I look absurd. My face should never be blown up that large. Sometimes I climb up the ladder and sit in front of the bilboard and stare into space. The cops caught me doing so a few months ago, but then I showed them I was the guy on the bilboard and they figured it was okay since I was paying for it.

I am a terrible attorney. I am not a narcissist or a blow-hard. I don't think that anything I say is any better than anything anyone else says. I am no better than anyone else. A lot of people claim they believe in equity, but they believe themselves to be better than other people, even if they don't say so aloud. People with less money or those who have different political views. To me, I am a nobody like everyone else is a nobody and when someone pretends they are something other than a nobody, like they are something special, I feel ill. No one is special. No one is worth more or less. That is true equality.

Practically everyone in Wabash drinks and most of my cases are DV's or OVI's resulting from alcohol. Budweiser basically pays me through their customers who get retarded on alcohol. Nothing ever exciting happens to me, I often lament. Getting herpes was the last exciting thing to happen to me. My penis turned into a dill pickle. The Wabash Tickler, as it is known. But then, like the Indians, my herpes went away, and with daily medication, they will never come back. My herpes are now like modern Indians who call themselves "Native Americans" and who still have Indian-like names but speak English, wear blue jeans, and shop at Walmart. They live on a reservation somewhere in my bloodstream and rarely make an appearance. Yes, they are herpes, but are they really herpes?

Though I am no Sherlock Holmes, I was quite sure who gave me herpes, but I didn't confront her about it because I figured I deserved it for sleeping with her when I was Chuck. Her name was Theresa Prawn. I was sure that someone gave them to her in much the same uneventful and drunken way, and so I looked at it as all one inglorious game of tag. A Wabash initiation. Still life of earwax and flies fucking other flies. Still life of pickle dicks and fish lures and Billy Bass, the talking fish.

Billy was the one who told me about Theresa Prawn having herpes. She was not bad looking, but had skin like leather and rode a Harley-Davidson. She is also the reigning women's arm wrestling champion, for what it's worth.

Then the aliens took over. But they didn't call themselves aliens. Instead, they called themselves Starlings, which sounds good and all even though starlings are an invasive bird that has been known to take over and destroy crops. One of them gave an interview with 60 Minutes—the alien— not the bird. He said all the same sorts of things you just might expect an alien to say. We come in peace. We don't want to hurt you. We are here to help. On and on.

They insisted they were regular people, though they weren't regular people at all. They were the sort of people who kept spotless microwaves and swept under their refrigerators. People who kept their secrets. We all knew they flew here in saucer-like spaceships which floated miles and miles out to sea spinning above the surface of the water like Norelco electric razors. They looked like people—sure. But their skin was glittery gold and they all had black and gold eyes and gold hair. They looked like upgraded people. Like people dipped in vats of liquid glitter gold. They never looked tired or worn and none of them were deformed or lumpy in any sort of way. 

I'm pretty sure they didn't have bones and they were shapeshifters, only mimicking us so to fit in. So not to cause alarm or panic. Maybe they were mocking us. Maybe they wanted our bone marrow or our spleens. No one knew what their true form was or what their motives were. It was anyone's guess. It was said that they plopped out of the spaceships and swam to shore in the shapes of some sort of impervious jellyfish. I don't know. Maybe they were octopuses or squids. Or maybe they were dolphins.

"Anyone's Guess" is a board game I developed. For the longest time I thought board games were actually bored games because they were something you do when you are bored. I was practicing my sales pitch to Parker Brothers when the aliens came and ruined everything. However, imagine my grief when I learned there was already a board game from 1990 called "Anybody's Guess." Everything has already been done—my constant lament.

The Starlings were a highfalutin sort of people, that is for sure. They talked in proper English and there wasn't an Earth language they didn't understand or couldn't learn in a matter of minutes. It is hard to say how many of them there were in human form and how many more in other forms. Some estimate about a million or two. Some say far less. Nothing was known about them with any certainty. No one knew why they came. They just talked about it. Speculated. Their motives seemed to be a reflection of the person who guessed as to them. However pessimistic and negative or optimistic and positive a person was usually dictated what they thought.

People thought the usual sorts of things. Their planet was dying. They ran out of water. That sort of thing. I think they came just because they were meddlers and wanted to meddle in our business. It was all some sort of game. Or maybe everything had already been done on their planet so they sought to broaden their horizons.

They don't talk about them on the news, though, because they are always listening and they control the news. Not a single one of them ever set foot in a newsroom of any sort, as far as I know, but it was known that you ought not speak poorly of them or you would disappear because many people had disappeared. The males dressed plainly in black suits while the females wore modest black dresses.

They don't ever seem to get hot or cold and they never lose their tempers. They are cool as cucumbers and they do little more than sit around and observe. You might see them at the zoo or the park. Or maybe at a play or riding the subway aimlessly. It's been said that no one can harm them. They have some sort or defense mechanism that prevents anyone from violently acting upon them in which the would-be perpetrator falls down before reaching them, suffering a paralyzing seizure. It is as though they have an invisible protective orb around them making them impervious to attacks.

No one knew what they wanted or what they planned to do. Some said the police should have arrested them, though it would not be possible if that business about their defense mechanism was true. Others said we ought to just ignore them like we ignored the other starlings—those invasive birds who have decimated crops for generations. No one made any real effort to eliminate them, either. Perhaps, in both cases, with hopes they'd get bored and go away—which they didn't.

But then things turned dramatically. Everyone was frozen. At some time or other, every single human being on the face of the planet, at least that I know about, was frozen where they were. In the middle of their workday. In the middle of a game of baseball. In traffic. On the toilet. Shopping. Eating dinner. Praying at church. You could go anywhere, walk for miles, and all you'd see is people in the middle of various sorts of ordinary activities, completely frozen.

Except for me—I wasn't frozen. I took my camera and took pictures of the unusual sight of tourists being tourists, suspended in motion. Of people pumping endless tanks of gas. Of construction workers pouring concrete or high above on scaffolding. Of families taking eternal walks. Of people kissing on park benches or making love in seedy motels. The seasons didn't change, either. It was a constant summer day that repeated every morning, as though the Starlings controlled Earth's every move. 

For months I traveled around unsuccessfully looking for someone else who wasn't frozen and trying to evade the Starlings until I came upon one of them quite accidentally. A female. A beautiful female. She was watching birds in Central Park. Smiling slightly. Her eyes wide-open and mouth agape. Breathing moderately. Gazing heavily. In a trance. Her gold and black eyes following each bird they encountered as if taking note of a particular feature or eccentricity of every bird she saw. Some feature or admirable quality that differentiated it from the others. Or maybe in envy of their ability to fly so free and effortlessly. To glide so gracefully upon the wind.

She was young. The outlandish inherent itch that I had to make love to her even in my doldrums was swiftly demoted in the order of my thoughts by the cold reality of its absurdity in our obvious age difference, and for the fact that we were an entire species apart. Human and non-human. But still, it is that undeniable part of being human in me, or perhaps because of my human desire to consume, that as absurd as it was, I could not simply admonish my desire, and it remained lodged within me, welled, rather, as I watched her, like a hunger that could only be satisfied by eating that which it craved. I desired to mate with her, if I were to be honest of my own irrepressible desires and manifesting thoughts that were true to my very core, primitively speaking. 

But that beautiful and odious desire was peeled back and what remained was something like I had not felt before. I figured that I was entranced by something that emanated from her like poison. Some deadly benefit of her species. Something that lured me in only to kill me.

She was the first thing I'd seen alive in days other than some rats who ran rampant and seemed to be on holiday with the freezing of their human oppressors. Rats, who one might think would take advantage of this supernatural boon and feast upon their human overlords with such a splendid opportunity and banquet of idle bodies as they had in medieval times. But whatever means it was by which the Starlings froze those unfortunate souls, they seemed protected by the elements—impervious to any external danger—and rodents and scavengers alike, who might otherwise enjoy a nibble, thus, did not indulge more than a sniff or two.

I could have watched her all afternoon, until my hair fell out and I aged to my grave, there in her black dress, hands folded neatly upon her lap, with perfect posture, and seated still on that forest green park bench. She might have been seventeen if I am generous with age—maybe nineteen. Or maybe not quite, either. Miserably, maybe not. From such a distance, I could not tell.

But I had no desire to ravage her like an attractive stray girl I might encounter at Hooker's back home in Wabash. I had no desire, suddenly, but to know her, to know the scent of her hair, and the softness of her skin, and the tone of her voice. Her cheek upon mine, perhaps, only for a moment. What warmth there was in her hand. Her fingertips tickling up my inner forearm in a warm coffee shop in winter. The sound of her giddy laughter frolicking in my ear. And perhaps, a nibble of her lip. What must those gold lips taste of? What must she dream of? What must excite or dull her senses? What does she believe and not believe? What does she do when no one is looking? What is her most terrible secret? What does she admire and despise? What was her true form?

I couldn't possibly know any of this from forty feet away or so, nor could I keep my position without her at some time or other noticing me—likely labeling me a loon in the classifications of birds. A sort of pedophile of the mind, depending upon the generosity or frugality of her age, of course. One way, I was, the other, I wasn't. It depended all upon where her birth fell over that invisible line of legality. To my fortune or to my misfortune, one way she would fall. If only in my dreams, she would fall to my benefit. 

But why not simply preserve this moment for as long as I could and not ruin it? To simply pray that it was to last and milk it from afar until her amusement was no longer captured by birds on a planet relatively new to her. Until she got up and walked away. And maybe the memory of her would last in me and spark a desire to live when the doldrums of mundanity of everyday life inevitably returned to consume me.

But I knew that I must know why it was that I am here. Meaning, why am I fully functional and not a statue like every other human on Earth, or as far as I know. And as I looked at her, her golden eyes full of fleeting fall sunlight, I felt a warmth in her and an assurance that I might know the truth by asking, though I feared approaching her for the defense mechanism all Starlings possessed and the prospect of myself, laying on the ground in a pool of my own piss, writhing in pain and embarrassment.

So, deterred by cautious thought, I simply sat upon a nearby bench and watched the same birds, hoping she would approach me. It was a recipe that had never worked with any other woman in my life, bar one who was as desperate as me, broken-hearted with nothing to lose, who approached me in the Orange Bar and who swiftly introduced herself. To whom, I offered a drink and which subsequently led to us returning to my apartment that I shared with my father who had in his life made a series of poor decisions of a similar nature, yet who served as no sort of precautionary tale for me in my ignorance. I was blinded in my passion, or arrogance, or indolence, divorced from only one wife at the time and with an insatiable appetite that no one woman could satisfy, or if so, only for a small while.

My father must have been awake and heard the muffled joyous exuberations of lovemaking he knew all so well, but through the apartment wall, two walls of half-inch drywall, four inch studs, and equal space, and the ceiling fan squealing above us, as she squealed beneath me, this enslaved drunken divorcee, what sounded somewhat like an ill-played bassoon.

I wonder since his death many years earlier, when I was away chasing faraway vaginas in Boston, Massachusetts for the romance of distance, if he recognized that I was made in his misfortunate form, cut from the same cloth, as though our defect was a matter of genetics little different than at present my slowly balding head or our pale blue eyes. His name was Adam, but how rarely I said his name or thought of him as such. We wound the personality of our parents by not ascribing them any sort of individuality or automomy. By thinking of them only in relation to ourselves.

I wonder if he ever wished to counsel me against the bad choices he had made, which I was repeating and scathed as he had been scathed in his relative youth. How could he not see it on me? Girl after girl. Each making a disappearing act, murdered from my life, as I was a murderous rogue in my affairs. Not that I had killed anyone in the physical sense, of course, only that the parting was as permanent as if I had and sometimes as harmful. A part of someone died. It was as egregious in some way, and they no less rotted in my mind. My heart is a cellar full of corpses.

I like to think that my father simply hadn't the right words to offer me, and not a lack of courage to offer those words. I like to think he had the desire to, but since he couldn't speak towards the end as life began to take everything from him, that it disuaded him from the effort and subdued the urgency he felt to warn me of the perils and consequences of being a cad. The loneliness, such that I know now, he knew all too well. Making dinners of condensed soup and bologna sandwiches.

It was loneliness that drew me to this park bench and to the young Starling who captured my attention and who I was now sure that I loved, as flippant and reckless as that might seem to anyone besides myself. I loved her not in the way I had loved anyone else before her—that unsavory sort of primal desire—but in a way I have before not known. In a new way that brought me a sense of peace and comfort just to look at her. I need not touch her at all to feel her. I was not obsessed with her in a sexual way, I realized, but in a wholesome sense, like an animal it's mate. Sanctity is a word I was foreign to, but I had burrowed in the thought of it and it became me. On this bench, I realized the sacrosanctity of morality.

My plan to sit and hope that she saw me and found some interest in me was desperate. I simply could no longer exist on the sort of platitude I had been existing on for the past fifteen or so years. But after a while, she seemed to notice me and every so often as her eye would catch a blue jay or a finch that flew in my general direction, she would glance at me. It was as though my eyes were full of colorful birds and she smiled because of them. My head was an aviary through which she walked.

Before long, she came to sit beside me and she said hello and I realized that I had never spoken to a Starling before and it had been five years since I had spoken to anyone that could speak back. Anyone at all but for that puckered-lipped model in the Plaza I lived with since living in New York. Botox and all.

I have neglected to mention that prior to this moment, rather, between the time the Starlings came and now, there had elapsed some years—seven years, if I'm accurate in my recollection. And it was two years from then, five years ago now that all of humanity was frozen, bar me. And since I had free reign over life and could do whatever I wanted and go wherever I wanted to go, I spent those five years traveling and taking photographs of the strange positions people found themselves in when they were frozen as though I might someday publish an anthology of time lost, assuming that life would one day continue.

I drove thousands of miles in random cars that I would stop and trade along the way for something else. I committed numerous felonies, in that respect, but it didn't really matter, I don't suppose. I half-expected that I would end up like everyone else when they caught up with me. So I was half-running, half-hiding, but mostly just interested in seeing the world and the strange ways that people were left when the unexpected occurred. "The unexpected" is what I called it, for lack of anything better. There was no savvy news man or political official to tell me what to call it—what the agreed upon term would be—so that is what it was.

I began in Wabash, Indiana and ended up in New York City. In numerous cases, the Starlings had the courtesy to suspend not only the person, but also the vehicle in which they were in. Most animals were frozen—all but those birds and some rats. Planes were suspended in the air at 30,000 feet. Cars traveling at 90 miles per hour were suddenly traveling not at all. Everyone safe and sound. People pumping gas were not standing in gas puddles. The gas in the pump froze, too. Canoes froze in lakes. Kayaks in white water rapids inexplicable like oil paintings. Parachuters suspended, on and on. Baseballs dangled between pitcher and catcher. Batters mid-swing. Bullets in midair. No one was murdered, mugged, or assaulted. No one kissed or hugged except those in the act of exchange when the unexpected occurred. Those perpetually in the act or forever cock-blocked by the indignation of a superior and meddlesome race. The world, at last, realized world peace.

From town to town I traveled and it never got old. In motels there were children swimming in pools. Riding frozen bicycles. Still as garden gnomes. Their mothers sunbathing poolside, laying in lounge chairs. Dads firing up the barbecue. Men in bars and pool halls surveying the infinite break of pool balls over the green felt of the table and the bleak prospect of women. Drinking beers they'd never finish. Smoking cigarettes that had burned themselves out years ago. Jockeys on horses suspended and still as a broken carousel. Men in strip clubs tenting dollar bills for lewd, wild buck-naked women with lurid smiles on a stage full of provocative mannequins with silicone milkies. People mid-trip or fall. Mid-vomit or sneeze. Suicides prevented. Accidents paused, yet to happen. People pardoned from their natural or unatural death. From the consequence of their last action.  Babies half out the birth canal. Doctors waiting, hands open. Abortionists yet to kill the unwanted. Slaughterers not slaughtering innocent animals. People smiling. People bawling tears like icicles.

I had seen it all. I snapped pictures thinking one of them would win me a Pulitzer if everything ever went back to normal, when everyone woke up and I was heralded for my effort from when I was the only man alive. But I realized the pictures didn't do anything any justice. The camera only did that which the unexpected had already done. It froze everything where it was. It provided a still life.

In all that time I saw very few Starlings. I hid from them as best I could, figuring they had some sort of freeze-ray gun they would blast me with, at which point I'd be like everyone else. So five years I spent alone—yet not alone at all. Looking. Watching. There was a beautiful woman in the Plaza Hotel named Sasha who was undressed for the shower and looking at herself in the mirror in a sort of despondent kind of way, with pity and anguish in her eyes. Bent over the bathroom sink cabinet with silk underwear wedged intimately. Her lips puckered in vogue style. She was an aging supermodel of some kind, I'm to presume, searching her face for wrinkles, or for her face amid the wrinkles. It looked as though she was looking for her soul.

I stayed with her for a while. Sat on the toilet in the bathroom and spoke to her about my day as though we were a couple pretending that her silence equaled interest. But the conversation always waned and ended when I ran out of things to say and inevitably asked, if only to be equitable, "So how was your day, darling?"

Nothing at all.

New York is strange without the sound of traffic out the window and the grate of subway cars.

In another room there was a reasonably attractive couple making love. I was their photographer. The train was in the tunnel and her face was in a state of ecstatic bliss I'd never noticed before because I never had a chance to regard it in that stage for as long as I had now upon hers. The still life of orgasm, I called it. Her face was perfectly preserved like a Picasso painting on a museum wall. It was 5:37pm., eastern standard time, and the man whose face was buried in the lady's bosom was suspended in a state of euphoric orgasm. I presumed she was a hooker, but she might have been a secretary for he was a wad of old gray dough and she was young, and very deliberately attractive.

The most curious spectacle of all, though, came from atop The Empire State Building. I had never toured New York before so The Empire State Building was on top of my list being that I had seen King Kong scale it many times over in all the movies. There were people in the elevators, stuck as they were, and I had conversations with them, very one-sided and unsatisfying conversations. There was a very attractive woman I might have kissed if I was so bold. A portly-old black man who seemed to be entertaining a family from Topeka, Kansas with a yarn. I know, for I checked dear-old dad's license, curious as to where they were from, wondering if I was amongst ex-patrioted frozen Hoosiers.

Atop the building there was a young attractive woman who had managed to climb through the rigging they had to prevent such a sad sort of thing, and flung herself off the building. She was completely off by a good two feet and had begun to fall when all progress towards her demise was abruptly suspended by fate. The look of terror upon her face was haunting. Her eyes were impreganted with fear and regret.

I watched her for a while. Like someone in an art museum stares at a piece of art trying to learn something. Her bootlace was untied. For hours, I watched her, not knowing when everyone would be unfrozen, if ever. Maybe it would happen while I was watching and she would fall. Then pity welled in me and I couldn't help but to wonder what it was that caused her to jump. No amount of heartbreak ought to render that conclusion, I resolved.

So, as carefully as I could, I climbed out to pull her back in to force her to reconsider— once thawed—if ever. And after much effort, I suceeded, dragging her back over the fencing and to the safety of the 102nd floor. I thought she would be frozen in her sprawled out form as she was when she was jumping, but, much to my surprise, I learned that they were maleable. So I moved her arms and legs as to make her more comfortable where she was. She was safe. And maybe, if ever unfrozen, she might reconsider the act or be confused as to how she ended up back where she had begun, thinking perhaps it was a godsend—a gust of divine wind that blew her back onto the safety of the floor. Perhaps, she will only think it was a hallucination, and with a second thought, she will decide rather to live. I don't know. I knew somehow that it was a story whose ending I would not get to read.

But that was then and here I sat on the green park bench in Central Park watching birds with a Starling. Her gold hair and face aglow in the sun that patched through the canopy of the aged trees. Her eyes were black and gold, but how remarkably human she appeared other than the obvious distinction of mere complexion. I knew Starlings to be shapeshifters. I had little more to do than to study their behavior over the past five years as I lived most of that time in the Plaza Hotel. I took pictures of them carrying on simple as quakers in their plain black suits and I had witnessed several strip their clothes off and change from human form to that of something else entirely, seemingly for pleasure. They had no shame in nudity.

I wanted to say hello, to say anything to her. To ask her her name. But as I sat there entirely stumped and intimidated, she came and sat next to me and smiled. She had nothing in the world for me besides that smile. And I had nothing in the world for her besides a childlike genial admiration and curiosity that I could not rightly express. I felt reduced next to her, though not in a terrible way. Reduced in a wholesome way—unburdened of custom and by sin. I was a man without worry, without bills, without a job, without age, without responsibility or duty, without anything at all but for this fortuitous afternoon—but for this moment that I needn't do anything but live. It was as though all there was to do in the world was to watch birds dart in and out of the leaves and listen to them sing.

"You want to speak?" she smiled.

"I—do," I offered, nervously.

"I do as well. So speak to me. If I were a human girl, what would you say to me?"

"Um. Well, maybe, hello. I am Charles Hamm. I'm happy to meet you."

She smiled watching me, looking into my eyes as though they were full of birds. I regretted instantly giving her my real name and wished I would have said I was Billy Bass. The big mouth. I might have failed to mention that Billy was not one of those talking novelties. Billy was a smallmouth bass I caught in the Wabash River when I was eight years old. He was taxidermied and mounted and so any singing or talking was only a hallucination—rationally explained, anyway.

"Your eyes are blue—as the sky," she described faintly absorbed in the novelty of me for a moment. It was as though I were one of her birds. I got the feeling that she was curious, but that she hadn't spoken to a human before. I wondered if she looked at me like I might have looked at a raccoon.

The iris of her eyes were dark gold and the sclera was black to be more precise. It was, perhaps, to tell themselves apart from humans. Why else when every other detail was so perfectly duplicated down to their fingerprints? Her hair appeared with less of a sheen than the others, slightly less gold with a hint of brown and the bridge of her nose bore a rash of subtle freckles that aroused in me an inexplicable attraction.

"What is your name?" I asked.

She smiled. Then after a moment or two said she had no name and that names are a simplistic human system of categorizing and identifying. She went on until she realized she sounded woefully foreign to this world, which isn't as she wanted to sound, so she reclaibrated. She desperatley wanted to belong, I somehow knew, while she took this form. When I asked how they differentiated each from the other on her planet, she balked and said they found no need to for they were all one, and that individualism was a human flaw, rather, a human characteristic. Then she smiled and asked me to give her a name. And I thought quickly of a name—Isabelle Finch—and proposed it.

"Isabelle Finch," she considered, assuaging my concern that she would not approve with a quick smile. I couldn't stop looking at her and I wondered what she would look like if her eyes were not black and gold. If they were white with hazel irises, or green, or brown, or blue. I wondered what her natural form looked like. If her species was male and female, or they simply adopted the human condition of sex for the purpose of replication. All this wallowed in my mind as she breathed next to me and captured more birds with her relentless birdwatching eyes.

"You must wonder why you are as you are—and not as they are. Do you not?"

"No. I wondered for a while, but it's been five years. I assume it's because I have not been—discovered."

She looked at me with an inquisitive expression, a hint of disbelief, and a wry smile.

"So, you presume you have evaded detection which is the cause of your ongoing liberty?"

"Yes," I replied.

"But now you have voluntarily surrendered—to me. Risking detection and the suspension of all your senses and the deprivation of your freedom? Why?"

"Do you ask as a Starling, or as Isabelle Finch?"

"As Isabelle, of course. I want to be nothing other and have ceased to be anything else since the name was given to me."

"Well, then, I will say that when I saw you, I knew that I had to talk to you or else I would wonder what would have happened if I had for the rest of my life. I have never seen a more beautiful thing in my life and something about you made me feel alive again—as though I've been dead—or not yet born."

"Am I but a thing to you?"

I hesitated to answer. Resisting the urge I had to answer truthfully or imprudently for fear of scaring her away, yet failing miserably, I felt.

"No. You are not a thing. You are everything. I do not believe that anything is just a thing."

She smiled at me. Pleased by my words, at least, in appearance, though I knew not truthfully if she felt an inkling of that which I felt, or if she was even capable of human emotions. That of love, admiration, amiableness, fondness, desire, hope, pleasure, or anything else. Perhaps, she felt nothing at all and her smile was simply subterfuge. It could be that she was only acting and wasn't sincere at all. I was skeptical, not because she had given me cause to be, but because it was inherent.

"You exist not because you have marvelously evaded detection, but because you have a purpose, Charles Theodore Hamm. Your mother called you Teddy when you were a boy, but she killed herself when you were eight because your father was unfaithful. So no one else has called you Teddy since."

"How did you—"

"I know—everything. Unless I do not want to know. You are here because humanity needs an attorney. Humanity is in a jam, thus, they need to call Hamm."

"I don't understand."

"Oh, I think you do. Humanity has been indicted for being inhumane. For a litany of unspeakable crimes against its own kind and other species. Thus, a trial needs to occur, and at a trial, as you well know, there needs to be legal representation—the prosecution and the defense. If you win the case, people go back to being people. Life as you knew it five short years ago will carry on. If you lose, however, it will end. Everyone on Earth will turn to dust and a new species will emerge. One less violent and cruel. Less destructive and antipathetic."

"You have the wrong guy, Isabelle."

"We make no mistake. You are the best of your kind to defend your species."

"Are you kidding me? I barely graduated law school. I handle a bunch of OVI cases and court-appointments. And, usually, I am drunk when I do. I wanted to be a painter, for godsakes. I'm by no definition a top-notch attorney. I've never handled anything all that serious. Not a murder or a rape case. The worst I've ever had was a felony DV that I lost at trial. How could I possibly handle all the crimes of the world? How could anyone?"

"That is a good question. You will have to search your soul first, I suppose. Then your mind. The trial will begin in a week. You must travel to Washington DC where opening statements will begin at the US Supreme Court Building. You can pick up the indictment at the court's office.  Congratulations, Charles. And good luck."

She then got up and walked away. As simple as that, she walked out of my life.  Humanity is in a jam, she said. I laughed thinking of it. Thinking of the romance I whipped up in my mind of the two of us. Though she was an imposter in a costume. Not even human. How ridiculous I was in all my dreams. Just as Billy Bass had said, "You are a ridiculous man."

I walked back to the Plaza Hotel where I would have to get a car and head to Washington DC. I said goodbye to Sasha who said nothing back. The world was my oyster. Whatever car I wanted was mine. Whatever place I wanted to stay, I stayed. Though preparing all my meals myself was a pain, and finding non-perishable food to boot. I wasn't much of a cook, but I learned how to cook some things well enough to eat them. I ate a lot of microwaveable oatmeal and crackers. It had been five years since there was any sort of food production.

I picked up the indictment at the Supreme Court clerk's office, suddenly no longer in fear of being frozen by a spaceman's ray gun. I walked in and announced that I was counsel for the defense as matter of factly as I could, clearing my throat. Looking a bit disheveled in my wrinkled suit. But my voice tightened and I felt my blood pressure shoot through the roof and I thought I was going to have a stroke. But I settled down and drank some water and the Starlings in the office who looked like busy golden law clerks buzzed about like bees in a hive in which I was an insignificant part.

The indictment must have weighed twenty two pounds, so I lugged it to my borrowed Mercedes and sat there and read until it got to be about dusk. I didn't know of a place to stay in Washington so I figured I might as well make myself comfortable at the only address I really knew—1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—the White House. I drove right up like I owned the place.

The president was in the Oval Office when I walked in talking on the phone to someone who, like him, became a stiff somewhere. That is how I decided to refer to them—my 40 billion clients—as stiffs. There were secret service agents around who would have shot me if they had the chance. I rolled the president away from the Resolute Desk and rolled another chair in its place and sat there with a pad and pen thinking of what my opening statement would be. Tapping the pen on the pad. Thinking of how absurd it all was. Then I thought of Isabelle. How she just got up and walked away from me. I supposed I'd never see her again. But who knows. She might be a squid by now, or maybe a bluebird in a prepetual summer sky.

A short while later, after I had fallen asleep in the Oval Office with nothing writen on the legal pad other than "In Defense of Humanity dot—dot—dot," I was awoken to the sound of a woman calling, "Hello," repeatedly and at an interval so not to cause annoyance. She found me as though she were on an Easter egg hunt. For the first time in five years, I was not alone.

More importantly, she was human, and more important than even that, she was extremely attractive. I yawned against my will and welcomed her to the Oval Office as though it was Chuck E. Cheese and it was her 8th birthday. And just as I did when I first walked in, she gawped at the walls and the ceiling and spent the better part of the next half hour or so taking it all in. This vaunted and illustrious room we both had only seen on TV and movies.

"I am Cecily Mutiny," she said. "The Starlings sent me saying that you'd need a legal assistant for the trial—presuming that you are in fact, Charles Hamm, esquire."

"In fact, I am. Hamm I am." I smiled at her, fumbling a simple joke. It was my lone defense mechanism against beautiful women—a quick and preemptive guiless grin upon making eye contact. If they smiled back, I was doomed, but if they frowned or ignored me, it was safe to assume there was no attraction at all on their part and we would remain perfect strangers, safe and sound. If they smiled back, however, I'd buy them as many drinks as it took or spend time flirting until I was all out of flirtations, or we ended up in bed. Time is a most valuable resource, I knew now.

Ms. Cecily Mutiny, a lovely lady of maybe 26 or 27, smiled back at me and a door was opened to the zoo of my primal instincts and all the animals came running out, naked and wild. What a strange last name—Mutiny.

"I am confused, however," she admitted looking over a bust of JFK's perfectly preserved skull in all its bronze glory. "They never told me what the trial is about? Or how—or why—it was that I was choosen."

"Forget the latter part, Cecily. I am a drunk attorney from Wabash, Indiana. Why me of all people? But as for the former, well, simple, really. You've been conscripted by the great powers that be to be a part of a legal team that is to defend humanity from charges of unspeakable and irredeemable crimes against itself, the punishment for which is death. That's all. Or dissolvement, as they call it. They've given me a thousand page indictment. It's over there on the president's desk."

"May I read it?"

"May? You must. And what can I call you other than Cecily. Three syllables everytime I need to address you will exhaust me."

"You can call me Jane. It's my middle name, and what I've gone by for much of my life."

"Cecily Jane Mutiny. That is a fine name, indeed. Jane, though. That's goood. Simple. To the point. That's a name that doesn't play around in the mouth. And you can call me Hamm. But never call me Chuck. Never."

Jane set to read the indictment and her face contorted into monstrous expressions of shock and indignation throughout. As her eyes danced across the page like a soldier avoiding the unavoidable hell of a field of grotesque battle. One strewn with landmines and barbedwire and pestilence. Rotting hordes of horse corpses and riddled grisly soldiers in various states of decomposition, poisoned, shot up, burnt with flamethrowers, and otherwise mutilated in all the ingenious ways man invented ways to mutilate one another. That is the best metaphor for the indictment unless I was to call upon the bubonic plague to assist. A still life of the Black Death—two skulls, a rat, and a burning candle. It is the only still life I ever painted as much as I wanted to be a painter.

And though she uttered not a word, the exasperated grunts and expressions she offered were indicative of her complete dismay. And I commiserated, having myself walked that thorny pestilent path only hours before. Her appalled visage must have resmebled my own. Things we knew. Things we didn't know. Genocides. Wars. The slaughtering of women and children. Animals. Intentional diseases. Induced famine. Seven variations of slavery. You name it. We had done it all.

"The Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Armenian genocide, the actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Stalin's purges of millions in Siberian gulags. The Mongolian conquests, thousands of wars, two world wars, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I mean, where do you even begin... Hamm?"

I had dozed off. It was a strange reaction I had to bad news or things. A sort of narcoleptic shut down button within me. A defense mechanism to evil and horror that my mind could not process. If I heard or saw anything bad, I'd fall asleep. Surely, there was some medical term for it. It was sort of like being a human opossum.

I had fallen asleep when I was in grade school after they shoved us in front of the TV to watch the towers blow up and fall down. When tiny figments of people dropped like fleas off a dog's tail from the burning World Trade Center buildings. I fell asleep when my dad died riddled with cancer. When my cat of 15 years died of kidney failure. If ever I couldn't sleep, I just watched something terrible. Some natural disaster that would put me to sleep better than a glass of warm milk. Like the Challenger exploding. The Zapruder Film. Out like a light. I fell asleep to Schindler's List and The Titanic, my grief-o-meter going haywire. Give me a tragedy and I sleep like a fucking baby.

I apologized to Jane and explained it to her and she gave me the look practically everyone has ever given me when I told them—that of two skeptical eyeballs.

"How are you supposed to defend the world if reading about bad things puts you to sleep?"

"It isn't reading about bad things. It's watching them. Visually. Or hearing of them so that I imagine them in my mind."

"Oh. Well, then what's our defense?"

"That's a very good question."

I smiled at her and she smiled back. I knew I was doomed. I wouldn't work on a defense tonight. We raided the White House kitchen for non-perishable food and found a honey hole. Canned goods stay good long after the expiration date. The FDA has to put a date on them so they do. But we didn't care. We had to eat and eat we did.

We found the liquor and Charles went to bed and Chuck came out. I was depressed about everything and we got drunk and made love. We made love everywhere. In fact, we spent the next seven days and nights making love until I had a herpes outbreak from all the friction and I had to stop. But she said she didn't mind because she had them too, and so we continued, my pickle in her prickly lovehole, making love like animals in heat. Nervous. Scared. Doomed sort-of-love. End of the world love.

What else was going to happen? What else was there to do? Jane was much more attractive than me, but all she had to gain was the euphoria of an orgasm and I was all there was. Orgasms was all there was left. Flooding her brain with dopamine from sex so she could briefly feel that everything was going to be okay, though it wasn't. There was no chance we would win the case. There was no defense for humanity, I knew before I ever admitted it.

We had to go to court the next day for opening statements. I hadn't prepared anything. Jane and I didn't need to drink anymore to make love. We needn't be drunk. We made love like we ate breakfast. We just went to it. Taking off clothes was like pouring milk into the cereal bowl. We had plenty of mouthwash and toothpaste to keep fresh and soap to keep clean. We made love naked on the south lawn where they did the Easter egg hunts and all that stuff. There was no one watching us. For whatever reason the Starlings found no interest in the White House, though they were all over the US Capitol like ants on a picnic.

The day of opening statements I made love to Jane for what was the 57th time. She told me because she was a counter. A sort of quirk of hers. She counted everything. It was practically all we did. She was my drug and I was hers. If the world hadn't stopped and the people hadn't been frozen, there was no chance she would have given me the time of day. She said she was dating some minor league baseball player in Denver and she always had a thing for athletes. I, however, was not an athlete unless beer pong, fishing, and darts were considered sports. And I was at least twenty years her sloppy senior. She was fit and into yoga. I preferred piña coladas.

The judges were clearly all Starlings, as was everyone else in court besides Jane and myself. There was no jury. There was an audience of a handful of Starlings, though I expected more. I expected the court to be jammed packed, but I suppose they didn't find as much interest in the prospect of humanity ending as did we. My hands were clammy and I swallowed my weight in spit, clearing my throat nervously until I realized I was.

After the prosecutor made his opening statement, Justice such-and-such asked if I was prepared to make my opening statement. I declined, much to Jane's surprise. She looked over at me and gasped. The justices looked at each other seemingly puzzled, and they then asked the prosecution, a flummoxed Starling of considerable weight and age, if he had anything further. He, seemingly confused by my lack of groveling, shook his head and looked over at his co-counsel who shrugged her delicate shoulders.

Then as we left, I caught a glimpse of Isabelle Finch in the front row, who was no longer looking at birds, but who looked up at me as I walked past her much in the same way. Much in the same way Scout looked at Atticus Finch as he walked out of the courtroom, at least, in my mind.

She smiled and the warmth of her smile shot through me and dethawed something inside of me that was fozen. I sensed something in her that I hadn't sensed in anyone or anything in all my life. An amiableness. A genuine goodness of character. A comfort that had always been foreign to me. That had eluded me. It seemed in that instant, that I had always made love as though it were a bareknuckle brawl. A violent encounter of choking and biting and ramming and bludgeoning. Something to be ashamed of. To conceal. It was always that way. It had never been sensual—always hostile. It had never felt easy or relaxing.

I tried to make love to Jane that night sensually. Soft-like. Tenderly. As though I wasn't taking hostages or trying to cannibalize her. But I didn't know what I was doing and she acted as though I was disinterested and she was bored. Humans simply know how to gore and be gored. Fuck and be fucked. And then she took over the act and grabbed and pulled and scratched like a feral cat. I knew then that I had a defense. I had something, and as they say, something is better than nothing.

The prosecution laid out a good case. I was bamboozled. I was flummoxed. There was nothing I could say or do to rebutt the charges against mankind. I didn't object at all. The sheer stupidity of our species alone, particularly in the post-Covid era, would have been itself enough to doom us. Our basic eating habits. Farming. Raising and slaughtering animals for food. Men pretending to be women. Women pretending to be men. People pretending to be animals. Shoving tails in their assholes and using litterboxes. We weren't only evil, we were retarded and evil.

I simply began my case by admitting it. By acknowledging that the allegations were undeniably true. We had slaughtered billions of innocent animals and continue to do so without remorse or regret. We kill our own offspring before birth when we don't want them. Sometimes we even kill ourselves when we are bored of life, or depressed because of it. Then there are those who destroy themselves with drugs. On and on I went.

But there is no self. We are mistaken in that characterization and the charge is, therefore, baseless. If we are not individual beings, there is no victim. We are both the accused and the victim. We are one being as the Starlings are one being, but we've lived under the false concept and presumption of individuality, therefore, we aren't culpable for genocide or murder or any of the allegations set forth in the indictment because they have been done to ourself and ourself only. There is no other. There is only the sole being of humankind that is comprised of billions of pieces and parts. Every living thing on this Earth is of one living thing—that which you define in the indictment as humanity. We are no different than cells composed upon one single body. Further, it would be akin to charging healthy cells for that which cancerous cells do. That would be a gross injustice.

Jane looked upset and glared at me. But she had run her course, I knew. You know it before it's over. I didn't love her. I was only screwing her because that is what people do to stave off loneliness. They eat when they're hungry and fuck when they're lonely. It is just another retarded human thing. Wasting time. We were essentially the last two people on Earth. What we did was stupid and instinctual and meaningless. I knew if they froze her again, I wouldn't miss her. I'd forget her in a day or so as she would forget me. It wasn't her that I was interested in and I had to stop cheapening everything in my life, chasing something or someone who likely has never even been born.

The judges heard my argument and said they would deliberate on the matter and respond tomorrow. That night, Jane slept in the Lincoln bedroom. I didn't dismiss her out of pity and for her fear of being frozen. I simply let her be. I let her live a while longer though she wasn't helping me with the case, but I was certain that the trial would not go well and we would all be dust soon anyway.

The next day the judges gave me the opportunity to further explain my defense. I brought a glass apple with me. A perfect red glass apple. I held it in the palm of my hand as I spoke. I explained Christianity to the judges as it was explained to me in Sunday school. I was no theologian. Nor was I a very good Christian. I never claimed to be a reverend or a pastor. I told them the story from Genesis of Adam and Eve, as I remembered it. Whether it was a fig or some other fruit, or something metaphoric didn't matter. For the purpose of my story, it was unapologetically and simply, an apple.

God told Adam and Eve to do one thing. To not eat the apple from the tree of knowledge. And Eve, of course, ate the goddamn apple, dooming humanity for all of time. If guilt is to be rendered, let it be rendered upon Eve. Or better still, let it be rendered upon me. Punish me for the sins of man, and reaffirm Christianity for what it is, and what it has always been—selfless and about love.

I sat the apple on the desk in front of me and waited at the table for the verdict as everyone else left the courtroom. I waited there alone for hours, simply thinking of all that I was guilty of myself. I asked God for forgiveness of my sins.

The judges returned and rendered their verdict of guilty, as I had expected they would. But the punishment they decided to enforce was that which I recommended. Stirred by the emotions of my arguments, as they said, they decided to render punishment for humanity against me. I would be executed and I was taken into custody. I looked for Isabelle, but could not find her. I thought seeing her face would bring me a sense of peace. Jane smiled sympathetically then made her way from the court, presumably to find her loved ones, all of whom were to be released from their condition immediately and reanimated. What chaos and anarchy would ensue, I could not imagine. They'd soon be looting Targets.

It was a mad, mad world. People went back to being people again as though nothing happened at all. I know this because I was allowed to watch TV in my prison cell which wasn't a prison cell at all. It was a room with a view. The Starlings packed up and took me with them back to their home planet where they would carry out my execution, they said. When? I asked. When it was time, they said.

I would never see Earth again, but I watched it on TV. They subjected me to hours and hours of TV news. Earthlings didn't learn a thing. I was not remembered, though that didn't matter much to me. There was no Charles Hamm Day. The guy who took our punishment for us. They carried on like nothing happened at all and went back to warring and slaughtering, raping and stealing, cheating and lying, all while I was shipped away in a tube to die for their sins. It was the second time they got a reprieve, but like the time before, they wasted it. Then, someday, I'm sure, they will simply doubt that it ever happened at all.

Yet, the Starlings honored their commitment. When we got back to their planet I was amazed. It was not Earth, I quickly learned, but it was similar to Earth. The atmosphere, the forests, the oceans. It was Eden. And the true form of the Starlings was similar to man. That as they were on Earth when I thought they were only mimicking us. That was their true form, after all.

I waited for days to be executed. Then days turned to weeks, and weeks turned to months. I was hopeful that it would be in some humane sort of way and that I would not be skinned alive, or electrocuted, or burned at the stake, all of which seemed contrary to their character. But that day never came. Instead, what came some months later, was my unconditional pardon and release. I was asked to take a job as a solicitor for the government and I accepted. In truth, I did die in that my personal identity was lost. I was no longer Charles Hamm. I was simply a Starling as they demanded of me complete assimilation, the reward for which was that I got to live in paradise. It was as though Eve had never bitten the apple.

Some time later, Isabelle came to me and we made love. She came in a desperate sort of way. She clung to me and cried sometimes but never said what was the matter. She came back often and we made love and I told her stories—some were true, others were fiction. She didn't know any stories to tell me, she said. She didn't know how to tell a story.

We asked nothing of each other. There was something wrong with her, I felt. It was as though she was afraid of something. We floated in and out of each other's life and didn't talk about whatever happened in the time we were not together. I believe she was in college or worked in a government office near where I worked, but we never spent time talking about such boring things as work or the government. When I asked her what was wrong with her, what was it that she feared, she wouldn't answer me. She cried in my arms before she fell asleep.

Despite there being no names here, I called her Isabelle and she smiled when I did. When I ran my thumb over her cheek and down her lip. When I undressed her and ran the back of my hand slowly down her naked body. I also called the planet Eden, though I could have called it Heaven. There were no birds, I soon realized. Then I understood why Isabelle sat in Central Park and stared at those birds, being they were so foreign to her. So strangely wondrous to her eyes.

It is strange, a place without birds. Without grief or anger. Without pain or doubt. Without worry or concern. Without disease or death. I became an artist of still lifes. Of things I remembered from Earth. It is strange, this world, where no one seems lost or to wander. Where everyone but me seems to belong.