And I wonder if you were a little proud. Proud to be living through something so important, something to tell your grandchildren. Did you watch yourself watching the television, making certain that you looked brave, and stoic, and just sad enough?
I think other people felt like this. For so long afterward, on the TV and radio and on the street, everyone kept telling each other, “Everything has changed. The world will never be the same. The aliens changed everything.”
And the thing is, of course they had. It should have gone without saying. But we went right on saying it, and after a while it sounded like a pat on the back. Everything had changed, but we had survived, so we must be strong. With each terrible newsbreak and emergency broadcast signal we thought, Now we have a story to tell.
I’m sorry—forget I brought it up. I have no idea what other people were thinking. It was just me. I’m awful.
When there was nothing new to report, the news channels took to showing the same footage over and over. The headless statues, the missing buildings, their absence so bizarre you swore you could still feel them there, like phantom limbs. And I have to remember that there were people, too, rubbed out as cleanly as the faces on Mount Rushmore. There were tourists in the Statue of Liberty when it happened. There were people on the Great Wall. They were gone, erased. I believe in heaven because of these people. I want to imagine them shuffling through the gates, blinking, confused, like travelers who fell asleep on the train. I want there to be a place where they’re pulled aside by a kind stranger who says, “Okay, here’s what happened.”
But I’d be lying if I said I thought of them then. I couldn’t concentrate on the loss of anyone, even Mom. My head was too numbed by the pictures. My brain was packed in pictures, stored away, waiting to be used again. I was probably impatient for something to happen.
All this intergalactic vandalism eventually drew out all the armies of the world, and we fought back. I can’t really say much about that. Nobody handed me a gun and sent me off to fight. I was sort of busy anyway, trying to keep down fluids. But I watched it all on TV, like a movie. With the right sound effects, it could have been a comedy.
So it was like this: we brought out our tanks, our jets, our soldiers with guns. We brought out our Bradley Fighting Vehicles. I don’t know what those are, but we had a lot of them. There were helicopters, aircraft carriers, and a thousand cold, deadly missiles peering out like monstrous eyes from their underground burrows. It might have looked impressive if not for the size of the Boov ships hanging just above the clouds like new moons. But then, in the end, it wasn’t about whose guns were bigger. The Boov had a surprise.
This surprise quickly came to be called the Bees. They flew, most of them were about bumblebee size, and they buzzed as they passed. They were covered in tiny wires that looked like antennae, or legs. But they were silver, wingless, and had a strange mess of eyes in their fat heads. One of them would have looked cute on the end of a key chain.
They swarmed down from the ships in dense clouds, then split off into groups according to some hidden plan. Some were as big as pickles, and some, if the TV news was to be believed, were too small to see.
Our soldiers fired up at them, stupidly. They might as well have been hunting hummingbirds. They tried to disperse them with concussive grenades. I think they tried this. I’m sorry, I’m trying to get this right, but it’s really not my area. Teachers never ask me to write essays about jazz, or my shoe collection.
Anyway.
The important part is that the Bees didn’t go after our people, they went after our things. They flew down the barrels of tanks. Down the muzzles of guns. They wormed into engines, squeezed through cracks to get at our computers, and were all over our satellite dishes like bees on a sunflower. I assume they did something to the Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
Then they all blew their lids. They used up every bit of energy they had all at once and popped like popcorn. They were white hot, and when they cooled they left behind a kernel of steaming metal slag. Every weapon, every computer, every communicator we needed to fight the aliens was suddenly gummed up with lumps of shapeless metal, like shiny turds. Pardon my language.
I like to think we would have picked up rocks, or sticks, or done something else at this point, but that was when the Boov finally decided to talk. They beamed out a message to all the TV and radio stations that still worked. It was a long message, and in pretty good English, but with that same pinched whine that J.Lo had. J.Lo the Boov, not J.Lo the singer/actress/perfume.
I’ll spare you all the details of the broadcast. The important parts were:
A. The Boov had discovered this planet, so it was of course rightly theirs.
B. It was their Grand Destiny to colonize new worlds, they needed to, so there really wasn’t anything they could do about that.
C. They were really sorry for any inconvenience, but were sure humans would assimilate peacefully into Boov society.
And D. If anyone had ideas to the contrary, they should know that there was now a Bee up the nostril of every president, prime minister, king, and queen on the planet.
So that was it. The human race was conquered by lunchtime. People everywhere shot their guns up at the sky in sadness.
That almost brings us back to where I started. Shortly after they conquered us, the Boov began to come down from the ships and move into our cities. Mostly people fled, and the Boov just walked right into modern-day ghost towns, all the while praising their glorious Captain Smek for providing so many pretty, empty houses in which to live. Some people resisted with whatever they had, but these efforts were put down. Maybe you’ve seen the famous video footage of a mom with three kids, defending her house with a baseball bat, swinging madly from her front steps as the uniformed bodies of the Boovworld home team strode slowly toward the infield.
Some people didn’t leave town when the Boov came in, but this almost always ended badly. It ended badly for my upstairs neighbor.
I saw her out on the front stoop one afternoon with her arms full. She held a jewelry box and a stack of photo albums and her teacup Chihuahua, Billy Dee Williams.
“Ms. Wiley!” I shouted from my bedroom window. She halted and squinted up at me. “Do you need help with all that? Where are you going?”
Ms. Wiley stood beneath my window and set down her things. Billy Dee stumbled through the tall grass and ate a bug.
“’Lo, Gratuity. I’m leaving, I guess,” she said.
“Leaving where?”
“Lived here twenty-five years,” Ms. Wiley sighed. “You know that?”