Marianne looked at her gaping colleagues, at the wide-eyed grad students, at Dr. Curtis, who was already figuring how this could be turned to the advantage of the university. She freed her hand from Evan’s, and managed to keep her voice steady.
“Please excuse me, Dr. Curtis, Dean. It seems I’m needed for something connected with… with the aliens.”
One more time, Noah Jenner rattled the doorknob to the apartment. It felt greasy from too many unwashed palms, and it was still locked. But he knew that Emily was in there. That was the kind of thing he was always, somehow, right about. He was right about things that didn’t do him any good.
“Emily,” he said softly through the door, “please open up.”
Nothing.
“Emily, I have nowhere else to go.”
Nothing.
“I’ll stop, I promise. I won’t do sugarcane ever again.”
The door opened a crack, chain still in place, and Emily’s despairing face appeared. She wasn’t the kind of girl given to dramatic fury, but her quiet despair was even harder to bear. Not that Noah didn’t deserve it. He knew he did. Her fair hair hung limply on either side of her long, sad face. She wore the green bathrobe he liked, with the butterfly embroidered on the left shoulder.
“You won’t stop,” Emily said. “You can’t. You’re an addict.”
“It’s not an addictive drug. You know that.”
“Not physically, maybe. But it is for you. You won’t give it up. I’ll never know who you really are.”
“I—”
“I’m sorry, Noah. But—go away.” She closed and relocked the door.
Noah stood slumped against the dingy wall, waiting to see if anything else would happen. Nothing did. Eventually, as soon as he mustered the energy, he would have to go away.
Was she right? Would he never give up sugarcane? It wasn’t that it delivered a high: it didn’t. No rush of dopamine, no psychedelic illusions, no out-of-body experiences, no lowering of inhibitions. It was just that on sugarcane, Noah felt like he was the person he was supposed to be. The problem was that it was never the same person twice. Sometimes he felt like a warrior, able to face and ruthlessly defeat anything. Sometimes he felt like a philosopher, deeply content to sit and ponder the universe. Sometimes he felt like a little child, dazzled by the newness of a fresh morning. Sometimes he felt like a father (he wasn’t), protective of the entire world. Theories said that sugarcane released memories of past lives, or stimulated the collective unconscious, or made temporarily solid the images of dreams. One hypothesis was that it created a sort of temporary, self-induced Korsakoff’s Syndrome, the neurological disorder in which invented selves seem completely true. No one knew how sugarcane really acted on the brain. For some people, it did nothing at all. For Noah, who had never felt he fit in anywhere, it gave what he had never had: a sense of solid identity, if only for the hours that the drug stayed in his system.
The problem was, it was difficult to hold a job when one day you were nebbishy, sweet-natured Noah Jenner, the next day you were Attila the Hun, and two days later you were far too intellectual to wash dishes or make change at a convenience store. Emily had wanted Noah to hold a job. To contribute to the rent, to scrub the floor, to help take the sheets to the laundromat. To be an adult, and the same adult every day. She was right to want that. Only—
He might be able to give up sugarcane and be the same adult, if only he had the vaguest idea who that adult was. Which brought him back to the same problem—he didn’t fit anywhere. And never had.
Noah picked up the backpack in which Emily had put his few belongings. She couldn’t have left it in the hallway very long ago or the backpack would have already been stolen. He made his way down the three flights from Emily’s walk-up and out onto the streets. The October sun shone warmly on his shoulders, on the blocks of shabby buildings, on the trash skirling across the dingy streets of New York’s lower East Side. Walking, Noah reflected bitterly, was one thing he could do without fitting in. He walked blocks to Battery Park, that green oasis on the tip of Manhattan’s steel canyons, leaned on a railing, and looked south.
He could just make out the Embassy, floating in New York Harbor. Well, no, not the Embassy itself, but the shimmer of light off its energy shield. Everybody wanted that energy shield, including his sister Elizabeth. It kept everything out, short of a nuclear missile. Maybe that, too: so far nobody had tried, although in the two months since the embassy had floated there, three different terrorist groups had tried other weapons. Nothing got through the shield, although maybe air and light did. They must, right? Even aliens needed to breathe.
When the sun dropped below the horizon, the glint off the floating embassy disappeared. Dusk was gathering. He would have to make the call if he wanted a place to sleep tonight. Elizabeth or Ryan? His brother wouldn’t yell at him as much, but Ryan lived upstate, in the same little Hudson River town as their mother’s college, and Noah would have to hitchhike there. Also, Ryan was often away, doing field work for his wildlife agency. Noah didn’t think he could cope with Ryan’s talkative, sticky-sweet wife right now. So it would have to be Elizabeth.
He called his sister’s number on his cheap cell. “Hello?” she snapped. Born angry, their mother always said of Elizabeth. Well, Elizabeth was in the right job, then.
“Lizzie, it’s Noah.”
“Noah.”
“Yes. I need help. Can I stay with you tonight?” He held the cell away from his ear, bracing for her onslaught. Shiftless, lazy, directionless… When it was over, he said, “Just for tonight.”
They both knew he was lying, but Elizabeth said, “Come on then” and clicked off without saying good-bye.
If he’d had more than a few dollars in his pocket, Noah would have looked for a sugarcane dealer. Since he didn’t, he left the park, the wind pricking at him now with tiny needles, and descended to the subway that would take him to Elizabeth’s apartment on the upper West Side.
The F.B.I. politely declined to answer any of Marianne’s questions. Politely, they confiscated her cell and iPad and took her in a sleek black car down Route 87 to New York, through the city to lower Manhattan, and out to a harbor pier. Gates with armed guards controlled access to a heavily fortified building at the end of the pier. Politely, she was searched and fingerprinted. Then she was politely asked to wait in a small windowless room equipped with a few comfortable chairs, a table with coffee and cookies, and a wall-mounted TV tuned to CNN. A news show was covering weather in Florida.
The aliens had shown up four months ago, their ship barreling out from the direction of the sun, which had made it harder to detect until a few weeks before arrival. At first, in fact, the ship had been mistaken for an asteroid and there had been panic that it would hit Earth. When it was announced that the asteroid was in fact an alien vessel, panic had decreased in some quarters and increased in others. A ship? Aliens? Armed forces across the world mobilized. Communications strategies were formed, and immediately hacked by the curious and technologically sophisticated. Seven different religions declared the end of the world. The stock and bond markets crashed, rallied, soared, crashed again, and generally behaved like a reed buffeted by a hurricane. Governments put the world’s top linguists, biologists, mathematicians, astronomers, and physicists on top-priority stand-by. Psychics blossomed. People rejoiced and feared and prayed and committed suicide and sent up balloons in the general direction of the moon, where the alien ship eventually parked itself in orbit.