February 13, 2025
- “The main altar in the church, Trampas, N.M. There are paintings on the wall behind the altar.” Collier, John, Jr., 1943 Spring. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
Laying the Burden Down
Call it a confession, if you'd like: when the extraterrestrial life first made contact, I barely noticed. It had been a hot, draining summer and my son hadn't spoken to me in days. I stood in the kitchen, cleaning dishes, trying and failing to listen to a television broadcast in the other room. Rumors about a narrowband hum and a neighboring star. I returned to the breakfast table where D. talked into his phone with handfuls of cereal in his mouth. Again, call it a confession, but I didn't recognize his voice. It had dropped overnight or over several nights, and so here I was: the despised father to a new teenager, with no idea what to say.
For a moment, I wasn't sure if I was listening to the sound of his voice or static. I waited for him to hang up the phone, and when he did, asked whether he heard the report playing in the other room.
"Yeah, something about a hum or aliens playing music or whatever. There was a picture of some general in Tokyo with a guitar.”
"Why a guitar?” I asked.
"I don’t know. If these guys exist, why are we even sure they even listen to music?” he said. His voice remained unrecognizable. He threw a backpack over his shoulder, and left the room with an empty bowl.
“Everyone listens to music,” I said.
“No, you listen to music,” he called out from the kitchen. “And they might just want to visit…”
Our dog bounded through the other room, hurling a plastic duck against the wall, and I was unable to tell D. what I already knew to be true: these visitors weren’t visitors because they couldn’t visit. They seemed like us, isolated and unable to do much more than cast off a half-hearted radio wave into space. I’m not trying to make excuses, but it was this kind of a day: Light bent in surprising directions. The sink sprang a leak. D. had officially hit puberty and freshman winter formals and adolescent angst. It was easy to forget about any bodies or news located beyond the confines of our house’s stucco walls, and in only a matter of time, I was lying alongside my husband in bed, begging him to turn off his screen.
When D. was younger and occupied that odd nascent body where he was no longer an infant but the word child seemed an exaggeration, we used to lie in bed, the three of us. D. with his dark eyes, my husband with his farmer’s tan, and myself, paler and thinner than I’d ever be. We probably weren’t the best fathers. My eyes, tired from reading one screen, would turn to another and scroll through various streaming services, inventing excuses for why some news channel was every bit as useful—as formative—for our son to hear as a lullaby, as a verse, as a children’s book read out-loud. Something about word gaps. About turning the record player on for your children. We were not the best fathers, no, but we were younger parents than any of our friends, and while we were certainly misguided, we were at least performing a tableau reminiscent of domesticity.
Then, as now, we were familiar. We were exhausted. I slept that night unsure whether I would hear my son’s voice again. My husband didn’t listen; he kept watching the television.
*
It was around this same time when the visage of Christ bloomed with algae. I hesitate to call it an arrival (or a visitation as some have offered) but it was the first of several transformations. I suppose I also hesitate to call it the first transformation because it was really the first to demand my attention—an attention both scarce and sacred, the rare gift able to alter the object of its care.
Maybe this is obvious. Just meditate on the Pantokrator: Christ’s yellowed halo, his right hand raised in blessing, spores of freshwater algae sprouting from his robe. Linger long enough on the algae and you may witness a change in his expression. At times, he will appear distant. At others, judgmental.
I was at the church’s sanctuary, tuning the pipe organ when I discovered the errant portrait. It was a Wednesday between choral rehearsals, only the second since I was hired. The church air was stale, humid. I stood on a bench, slicing my tuning knife through the heat and into the pipe. An elderly woman, early for rehearsal, sat in the closest pew, chirping on about some hymn I didn’t know and didn’t plan to teach her, and when I stepped down from the bench ready to play at the keydesk, I immediately forgot why I was holding onto the knife or why I instinctively played those three notes. I checked behind my shoulder to see whether the woman noticed the same transformation, but she sat there rummaging through her purse, oblivious as before.
“You’re sweating,” she said, offering a handkerchief.
I lifted it from her hand, my eyes fixed on the green spores opening across Christ’s forehead, spilling through the portrait like acid into an inlet. “No doubt,” I said, dabbing the nape of my neck. “They never have air conditioning in these places.”
“It’s September,” she smiled, revealing a mouth of crooked teeth. At the church’s rear, the doors swung wide and two young mothers entered, each holding their child’s hand. I recognized them from our first rehearsal, where the Reverend identified them as two of their newest members—the reason I was hired, more or less. In the last month, he had seen an explosion in attendance (a polite way to say tithing). The daycare was full and the church felt bullish about their ability to fund new music programs. There were plans to construct an annex.
As the mothers guided their children toward the DAYCARE-stamped archway, I turned my attention from the neon green algae glowing on the wall behind me and toward the familiar irritated veins inside these women’s eyelids. They looked more prepared to lie on the floor than they did prepared to sing. Parishioners began to populate the room with rucksacks and chatter and I considered calling the Reverend from his office, asking him about the portrait, but I returned to the bench, eavesdropping on the mother’s conversation. How do you teach someone when you can’t explain one single thing?
“Afternoon,” I said. “It’s wonderful to see some of you again.”
Indeed, it was wonderful, the first hymn insisted. I tapped a single key, and, from there, began to play.
*
I don’t think I will describe any extraterrestrial life here. I hope you can forgive me. What I would like to describe instead is how an organism grows. During the last drought, my husband and I caught rainwater in our backyard and we were cautioned not to drink it. We were warned about the presence of algae should our rain barrel be exposed to sun. Any light that wasn’t green could transform carbon dioxide into sugars. Absorbed in sugar and warm water, the algae would inevitably reproduce. The handbooks recommended a teaspoon of bleach, or four parts chlorine for every million parts water. Unnerved by the idea of bleach, and unsure how to even find chlorine, my husband opted to paint the rain barrel and choke off the light. I’m not sure why I’m compelled to share these details, but it strikes me as important that when the rain stopped falling and the barrel dried out, we couldn’t look inside.
*
Every Wednesday, after rehearsal, I brought D. home from soccer, and every Wednesday, without fail, there was a good reason to close the highway. Cracks in the asphalt, water shortages, a semi-truck tipped on its side. Demonstrations by teenagers spilling onto the street. There were split lips and alien bongs. Staticky megaphones. Parents who demanded that the government hide itself, that they refuse contact with any unfamiliar lifeform. And then there were their children: waving homemade signs about Cortez and colonialism. They said we were the ones interested in annihilating the planet. We shouldn’t assume our visitors wanted the same. If this was because these extraterrestrials were a more intelligent lifeform, I didn’t hear them make the argument. I was in the red then blue then red light of a cop car, searching for an opportunity to turn the vehicle around.
Cutting the steering wheel, I allowed the tires to rotate forward. A kid, no older than sixteen, hopped over a traffic cone and slid against my hood. I slammed the brakes, and, when the car stopped once more, I motioned for D. to take out his earbuds. “I’m hoping you don’t know any of these guys?”
“Not really.”
I turned the radio down. “They’re acting like a bunch of lunatics,” I said, ignoring the fact he had implanted an earbud back into his skull. “It’s not as exciting as you think it is,” I told him. “Or, no. It is exciting. It’s just that after a while all these different forms of excitement will begin to feel the same.” He bobbed his head, and I drove.
On the remainder of the ride home we passed windowless schools and newly sprung churches. Buildings that teemed with exotic plants in the windows. Loose brick and spray paint. Another road closure forced us into making a wrong turn and we drove through a neighborhood filled with empty concrete fountains and manicured turf lawns. A row of Victorian homes lined the sidewalk, and the families populating their windows flipped through a cascade of television channels, moving from one news station to another at a frenetic pace. I wondered what they hoped to learn about. And I wondered if they felt some truth had been withheld from them until this instant. And I wondered if another form of life, the other form of life we cared about, the only one their smartphones droned on about that week, included bodies sitting in front of similar screens who were as obsessed with us as we were them, and if they were obsessed, whether they craved more information about our plans (inasmuch as there were plans) to part the void and travel to their planet or whether they were so alike that they questioned if we had already arrived and were hiding in plain sight: biding our time, examining their ecosystem, mischievously altering their religious idols. It seemed plausible.
When we arrived home, I tried to ease the car into the garage but D. swung open the car door halfway through and abruptly entered the house. I cupped my jaw with my palms until the automatic garage lights darkened. Inside, I found my husband and the dog curled on the sofa together. His auburn hair was wrapped into a topknot and his beard was in desperate need of a trim. And the dog, she was dusty—in equal need of a bath. The smell of garlic and butter wafted in from the kitchen. The light and the curtains were golden.
“What’s the deal with him?” my husband asked, gesturing to the stairs toward D.’s room.
I gathered a blanket from the ottoman and stretched out alongside him. “Like he’d say enough for me to know…”
Our dog yawned and I tried not to smell her breath. My husband began to knead the fur and loose skin around her ears. I joined in the same, steady motion. “I got an email from Lynne this morning,” he said.
“You mean D.’s Lynne?”
“He apparently found her phone number. I don’t know how, probably googled it. He left a couple of voicemails.” He looked up from the dog. “She asked me what we want her to do.”
I considered the question or at least I believe I considered the question. It’s hardest to remember what you thought or felt about any given moment. Easier to remember what was said.
“Why now?” I asked. “I don’t get it…”
“Not enough going on I guess.”
It may have been a joke, but my laugh was too bitter. Loud enough too where D. could hear me from upstairs. I unwrapped the blanket from my legs and stood from the sofa. “Tell Lynne we’ll follow her lead,” I said, turning my attention away from my husband and mounting the staircase. At its topmost step, I listened for a sign of life emitted from D.’s room. Nothing. I gave up and walked the opposite hallway toward the house’s deck. Outside, the sun had set and the sky was indigo. There were no stars.
Were I a younger version of myself, an incarnation I might recognize, I would have sat barefoot on the deck and smoked until my fingers were ashy. I would have put on a performance for myself, something lonely and romantic, listened for radio signals, satellites and space junk suspended overhead. But I wasn’t any younger. I didn’t have a cigarette. It was eight hours until my next alarm. I retired to bed early, and in the middle of the night, dreamed of a sunflower blooming from my spine.
*
When I arrived for the next rehearsal, my fourth at the church, I had already been warned about the stained glass windows—consumed by a sheath of either algae or lichen. It was the fungi they failed to prepare me for. The undulating orange spores growing within leatherbound bibles and the news vans clogging the parking lot. At the entrance, a scrum of influencers and television reporters crowded the vestibule and I elbowed my way inside. Our church was not the first to be visited but it was among the few to allow reporters to follow. And while I’m still unsure exactly why the Reverend welcomed the attention, I imagine it had less to do with Christian kindness than it did the intuition it might be profitable to satiate curiosity. Of course, the camera crews had little time for curiosity. As far as their reporters were concerned, the algae and lichen were either intricate pranks or ecological providence or a hostile intervention on behalf of extraterrestrial life. Few seemed willing to entertain the notion an explanation wasn’t required.
Let me be generous here, and say, I understand the desire to find an explanation for the weird and turn it into background noise. It’s uneasy to sit with mystery. I hurried into the sanctuary late for rehearsal, and when I did, I wasn’t thinking about intelligent life—whatever that means. I wasn’t thinking about the strangeness of the moon or deja vu. I didn’t pay mind to the gelatinous green lichen fermenting on the window and through the hall. If I had the capacity to wonder at or about anything it was the mound of dirty clothes accumulating on the laundry room floor or the expansive commute from the church to D.’s school—and D., would he bother to wait at school if I was late? He was fifteen and had limited patience for me anyway. The pews were as crowded as I would ever see them. They spilled into the aisle filled with some mothers I recognized and some mothers I didn’t though maybe they weren’t mothers at all. Maybe I didn’t think about D. at all but I thought about Lynne. I saw mothers where I shouldn’t. I saw mothers everywhere.
Above the organ hung a crucifix and on the crucifix hung a banana like fungus, overripe and yellow, begging to be picked. I seated myself on the bench and began to play a hymn from memory with my left hand, rummaging through my bag with the other for a disorganized folder of sheet music. I suppose we all respond to music in our own, deeply personal manner. Some in the audience sang in time, while others hummed along, disastrously out of tune. Some closed their eyes and swayed. My eyes weren’t closed, but I am told they might as well have been. I was too consumed by either the rhythm of the song or the rhythm of the day to notice the organism on the crucifix, dribbling.
I am told whatever leaked from the fungus looked less like liquid than it did ultraviolet light. I am told it ran like a slow viscous oil from its mouth, onto the floor. I am told—had I been paying attention—I would have noticed a sharp inhale or disgust on the parishoner’s faces before I felt the fungi’s drool radiating that odd alien glow.
*
No, I don’t think I will describe extraterrestrial life here. Terrestrial life is no more invasive, after all. In our first apartment, three years before D. was born, my husband and I kept a large aquarium in his office. It held angelfish. Rainbowfish. Neon guppies. A moss that looked like baby tears. Plants whose greenness was so green it existed on a spectrum of light impossible to process with human eyes alone. I don’t think I will describe extraterrestrial life here but I will tell you about the time my husband attempted to clean the aquarium at midnight. His algae scraper went missing and he went stupid and decided it was a good idea to take a small penknife to the tank’s edge. The glass caught, cracked, erupted into shards, and then flooded the office with forty gallons of freshwater, leaking through the floorboards and into our neighbor’s apartment downstairs.
*
The night D. went missing, we found him at Lynne’s. It was another endless Wednesday, and when I arrived at the pickup line for soccer practice, the coach informed me D. never showed. He wore a purple tracksuit and fizzled over, saying something indecipherable about a liability waiver. I should have performed some show of panic but my insides were certain where D. went. All I needed to do was call my husband to see if he had recorded Lynne’s address.
She lived in the city. A forty minute drive without traffic. “How would he have even gotten there?” my husband asked.
“He’s got a smartphone and a debit card for some reason. I’m sure he can figure out how to call an Uber. We might as well have dropped him off at the train stop ourselves,” I said.
I closed the side window with the phone clenched between my ear and shoulder, signaled goodbye to his coach, and pulled out from the parking lot. It was late in the day and the light outside took on a bizarre, almost holographic quality, where it became difficult to tell how far off any object stood in the distance: a parched hillscape, the ramshackle marina, sleek billboards for crypto or whichever new phone was released in the last couple of weeks. I cheated for a few miles, driving in the carpool lane, and when the city’s skyline emerged either weirdly close or weirdly far in my field of vision, I thought about the first time we introduced D. to Lynne, no more than a few years ago, and how when we returned him home from dinner with the four of us in the city, I asked him what he thought and he said she’s nice. That was all. She was nice. And I thought to myself, hey, maybe that will be the end of it.
It wasn’t. These dramas never ended. They grew into a shape we were comfortable with, and then they grew again. And then it was tough to remember a time when there was nothing to grow. A time when these pathetic little apocalypses didn’t exist.
When I parked at her house, Lynne was already waiting outside, her hand on D.’s shoulder. At some point during the drive, she called my husband to inform him about what I already knew: D. hadn’t disappeared. Her house stood plastered with antique windows and was painted an unnerving purple. Artier than any house I might pass outside the city. Lynne waved, gently, expectantly, before approaching the car. Her eyes were plasma dark. Not dark like D’s. Either darker than when I last saw her or darker than I remembered. A single chopstick punctured through her hair bun. She held onto a patchy cardigan, drooping past her kneecaps and over a pair of leggings, feigning a knock for me to roll down the window.
“Is he okay?” I said.
“He’s alright,” she said.
I don’t remember whether my eyes started to water or whether I swallowed hard down my throat, but I remember apologizing with my hands pressed to the steering wheel. “I’m sorry,” I said, and then, laughing: “I’m so exhausted.”
“Really. He’s alright,” she repeated. “And you are too. You’re not tired. Just a little burdened.”
Lynne offered for us to go inside, and I considered the offer, before grappling for a hold on the situation. For whatever reason, she felt guilty and guilt tends to spoil into excessive courtesy. She didn’t want us to be here; she didn’t want any of this. She gave D. a short, polite hug and escorted him into the passenger seat. As I pulled out from the driveway, she returned to my side of the car and spoke quietly either to me or to the evening: “I’d give him some time. He might need the silence.”
And—sure, call it a confession—on the way from the city, I found her composure infuriating. I considered turning back and informing this woman she had no right to tell me how to speak to my son. I wanted to turn on the car radio and play music at the highest volume—thrashing drums, whining guitars, it didn’t matter. If I could have screamed, I would have screamed until my throat went raw or until the vehicle careened into traffic. All anyone or anything knew to do lately was make noise, and so why—I wanted to yell at Lynne—should I act any different?
But I didn’t yell. Not at Lynne. Not at D.. Not in the privacy of my bedroom, hours later. The car cruised steadily across the bridge, and with D. in the passenger seat, we arrived home to a sky drained of light. Miniature bulbs poked out from the garden and I was reminded of the time when D. was nine years old and we told him we were moving houses. How when my husband and I returned hours later, we discovered he had torn out every single plant in the garden by the roots—the daffodils, the weeds. If we couldn’t sell the house, he sobbed to his grandmother, he wouldn’t have to leave.
When the car came to a stop in the driveway, D. made a move to escape, but I took hold of his shoulder and pulled him toward me. “Stop,” he said, wrestling away. “I don't want to talk about it.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay. Listen to me. I know you feel like an outsider here, but you’re not one,” I said, gently loosening my grip.
He stared into my eyes and nodded his head, and this time, I let him leave. He slammed the car door, passing my husband on the way into the house. I turned off the ignition. Exhaled. It was a quiet suburban night and the stars were mysterious as the streets: blue, weird, and empty. Televisions hummed, tires rolled, dogs yawned. Algae bloomed. On our living room window, a cluster of green spores had quietly begun to germinate and I must confess I didn’t notice. I wasn't looking at our house’s windows for life; I was looking for light. A flickering lamp or a phone’s cold glow. A faint signal from wherever D. was located.
In the weeks to come, the algae spread, obscuring the window and, soon enough, the entrance. But standing on that cold front lawn, I had no interest in describing how an organism grows. All I wanted to do was understand how every other living organism comes to receive it.
Garrett Biggs's recent fiction and criticism appears in venues like The Florida Review and The Rumpus, among others. He is a contributing writer to Chicago Review of Books, and a PhD Candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Utah. Read more: garrettbiggs.net.