The Invasion

In Autumn, the neighbour's Labrador came into my kitchen smelling of cinnamon and frothing green at the mouth, and lay down and died. Dan wasn't home yet. I looked to my stove for guidance.

It looked back with hot flat hamburger eyes.

I phoned the neighbour, feeling dreamy.

"Hello?" she said.

"Jenine?"

"Hi, Carol. How are you?"

The scent was going to my head: cinnamon, with a touch of something else, nutmeg, or roses, or peanut butter, or gasoline. Something familiar and delicious and intoxicating. "Ruby's dead," I said dumbly.

Jenine said, really quietly, "How do you know?"

"She came into my kitchen and just lay down and died in a second. She looked real sick."

Jenine made a funny little noise. "Ruby -- you mean the dog. God, Carol, I thought you meant my sister. She's Ruby."

"I don't know your sister," I said. I heard Dan shut the car door outside.

"The kids named the dog for her. At least I think they did. She lives in Australia now. That was dumb, I don't know why I thought that. Oh God. The dog."

"It's still sad," I said.

"Yeah. We didn't think it was sick. The kids'll be sad. Is it there now?"

"Yeah. I'm sorry, Jenine." I was in ecstasy. The smell was solidifying around me. Like I was trapped in honey. Ruby's corpse lay in a growing green puddle. I heard Dan come in the front door.

"It's okay. It was the kids’ dog, really. We didn't know it was sick, though. I'll come get it, right now."

"Dan's home. He can sort it out. Do you want to bury her in your garden?"

"Yeah, I guess. Thanks. The kids'll -- I'm going to phone Ruby now."

"Poor thing." I tried to keep the joy out of my voice.

"Yeah."

"Bye."

"Okay."

I put down the phone. Dan came in. "It smells good," he said.

I shook my head. "No Dan," I breathed. "No, no Dan."

Twenty minutes later, I sat on the bed staring at the strangest thing.

It was a hamburger. It was on a plate on my bedside table, next to the lamp. The bun had sesame seeds. And there was ketchup. Ketchup!

A dog had died at my feet and I'd still scooped myself up a hunk of meat and dabbed it out some thick red ketchup. I must have been very hungry. Except I wasn't hungry. What if a cow had come in and died? Maybe as I grew older I became less sensitive to these things.

My head was clearing to the extent that I could ask myself why it had been fuzzy in the first place.

I had better give Dan a while. My Dan wasn't big on decisive action – the shed, for example.

Dan was in construction. He actually physically built sheds every week, but he couldn't build even a little one in our back yard. It stayed timber. Perhaps my head wasn't clear after all.

I hoped he didn't leave Ruby as long as he'd left the shed.

I must have fallen asleep, because I don't remember Dan coming in. But I was lying on the bed and he was standing at its foot.

"I put the dog in the garage," he said.

"That smell . . ." I said.

"I know," he said.

"We're going to take her next door and bury her."

"Now?"

"Now, I think."

"Okay. I'll go get her."

I went into the kitchen again. No dog. Not even a chalk outline. No smell. I breathed in deeply: perhaps a hint of bleach. The hamburgers were gone. The pan was in the sink. Next to the sink, a single white plate was stuck in the ribcage of the dish drainer, drying in drips. The counters had been wiped down. There was a new empty bag in the dustbin. Okay, I could cook here again.

Dan came in, carrying the dog, neatly packaged in blue plastic, but still clearly and fundamentally the dog.

"For God's sake," I said.

"What?" Dan said.

"Nothing." I looked at the clock above the fridge. "It's nearly half past five. We've had their dead dog for an hour. They'll think we're performing experiments on it. Come on."

"They won't mind," observed Dan, as I pushed him through the doorway.

"I'll say we got stuck in traffic."

Jenine was in her driveway.

"Hey Jenine," I said. "How's your sister?"

"Ruby's fine. Her eldest just got grade seven in the violin. Hey, Dan."

"Hi," he said.

"How'd the thing in Summerfield go?"

Dan still wanted to be a rock star. He hung around with a band called The Fiddly Bits as a kind of fifth almost-member, plonking infrequent keyboards and making tea and doing all the hard and boring work just so that they wouldn't get rid of him. Very occasionally they'd let him get up on a stage and strum a few chords with those long clumsy fingers of his. But he'd been doing it for years, and he never got anything done, the band didn't go anywhere, he didn't get any better. The band was a lot like the shed.

"They did pretty good. I think the crowd liked us," he said.

"That's nice. Big crowd?"

"No," I said.

"No," Dan said.

"Is your sister's eldest a boy or girl?"

"Girl," Jenine said.

When we went into Jenine's back yard we found a crater near the swimming pool. There was a lump of metal in its centre, waving a thin rag of smoke, and a kind of big metal seashell perched on its edge, oozing onto the lawn something like what Ruby had oozed onto my linoleum. The whole thing glowed like a barbecue.

"Wow," Jenine said.

"We should phone someone," Dan said.

I was impressed. Garden shed – sticks and stone. Band – neither here nor there. No man's land. No band for Dan. And so on. So I pushed my luck: "Who?"

"Dunno," he said, staring into the heat.

I went into Jenine's kitchen and called the fire station, and they told me that about half an hour ago a woman from the national authorities had contacted them and told them to refer all queries on crashed satellites, meteorites, grounded UFOs, the end of the world, etc., to this other number, which I wrote down on the whiteboard Jenine kept by her phone. Then when I called it some man put me on hold. I don't know how long I waited. They didn't play music. They played silence. I shook the phone.

Jenine's son David came in.

"Hey David," I said.

"Hi. How are you?" he said, very polite.

"Fine thanks, and you?"

"I'm fine thanks. My mom wants to know what they say." Jenine was still in the yard. I could see her through the kitchen window, staring suspiciously at her lawn and clutching what looked like a garden rake. She turned and looked at me, shrugging inquisitively. I shrugged back.

"I've been put through to some kind of Sky Is Falling Hotline," I told David. "I'm on hold. I think."

Dan came in. "What do they say?"

"I'm on hold."

Just then a woman said, "Hello?" and then, "have you been helped?"

"Yes," I said sweetly, "I've been helped, I've just been hanging around to thank you for doing such a great job. Thank you."

David grinned. Dan said, "They'll put you on hold again for saying that." I looked at Dan and he looked at the linoleum.

The woman said, "What? Ma'am?"

"There's a satellite or something in my neighbour's yard. It killed her dog."

She took my name, and Jenine's name and address and telephone number, and then told me they'd send someone round and that they'd be there in three to four hours. I laughed. "Three to four hours? Who are you people anyway?"

"The government," said David.

"The government," said the woman.

"What branch?" I said.

"Men in black," said David. "Cover-up crews."

"A special branch," the woman said.

"A magic branch?" I suggested.

"Three to four hours. It isn't dangerous, but please don't touch it. It's not your property. Thank you."

"Why? What's so important? What is that thing? This is pathetic, if you don't mind me saying. Or even if you do."

She explained to me, rather nastily I thought, that it was a section of a space station that had been broken up – by what, she wouldn't say – and fragments were now falling like Tetris pieces all over Parkview and surrounding suburbs. "Your situation is of relatively low priority," she added.

"Please hold," I said. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told Dan and David what she had said.

Dan swore calmly. "They don't care," he said. "They honestly don't care."

"Go tell Jenine," I said, meaning it for David, but Dan lumbered out, cursing quietly. David hoisted himself onto the kitchen counter.

"Hello?" I said.

The woman said, icily, "Is that all?"

"It's leaking poisonous goo onto my neighbour's lawn."

There was a pause, then she said smoothly, "What colour?"

"Ha! Green."

"We can have a team there in about two hours. But there is no danger. Thank you ma'am."

"Wait – it's kind of blue. Well, yellow? Which would you say is the most radioactive goo?"

She hung up.

I shrugged. "They'll be here in two hours."

David said, "What do you think the other chunks are doing that is more important? If a normal chunk is three to four hours, and a poisonous goo chunk is two hours, then the really important ones are probably joining up into one super-chunk and terrorising the city."

"These guys are probably too busy vacuuming astronaut out of people's living rooms."

David smiled. "Yeah."

"Hey," I said suddenly. "I'm sorry about Ruby."

"Yeah," he said.

"Do you think I should get our rake, too? That way, when it jumps us, we can get it from both sides."

Jenine looked a little embarrassed. "You never know," she said.

Dan coughed. "Hey," he said. His face split into a warm grin. Then it disappeared. His brow wrinkled. "Uh. Hey."

"Hey, Dan!" I said.

"Uh. I was just going to say . . . you can use that rake on those FBI agents, when they come. I think it's, disgraceful." He coughed again. He looked shiny, unwell.

I rubbed the back of his neck. "You okay?"

"Yeah," he mumbled. "Just angry. It's, it's . . ."

"Disgraceful?"

"Yeah."

"I bet it's not FBI agents," said David. "I bet it's some guy named Bobby-Joe in his rusty pick-up."

"One of his rusty pick-ups," I corrected him. "Dan, you okay?"

"Yeah."

Dan went to a corner of the yard to dig a grave. David helped him for the first five minutes, then came back to Jenine and me. We stood there and talked about work, the war, school and the falling sky. I was distracted; I wished I'd eaten that hamburger. I heard the front gate swing open and said with uncharacteristic optimism, "That was quick."

It was Ron Donaldson from across the street. "Hey!" he called, waving, and jogging up the lawn to meet us – except it was really to meet crater. "Wow," he said, his gaze fixed somewhere in the goo. "Yeah. I heard you folks got one too."

He had grown a moustache since the last time I saw him. It looked silly.

"Did you bring your rake?" I asked.

He dragged his gaze away from the crater. "Huh?"

"Never mind."

Jenine put her rake on the ground. "News travels fast, huh?"

"Yeah," Ron said bitterly. "We didn't get one. The Jeffreys' got one right through their skylight. Not as big as this one, though."

"Jeez."

"Yeah. I know. Almost as if it had been aimed."

"What if our little planet was just the ninth green in some great intergalactic game of golf?" said David.

"Hello David," said Ron.

"Hi, Mr. Donaldson. How are you?"

We all went inside and ate Jenine's biscuits, except Dan. Dan went inside. He just didn't have any biscuits, or say anything, either. He brooded.

Jenine made a little tower of plates and crumbs and took it through to the kitchen. She wasn't back right away, so I followed to see if I could help. I found the kitchen empty, and saw through the window that Jenine was taking the long way back to the living room. A route which had somehow taken her out into the yard. But no, I was wrong – from the way that she was equipped, it seems she had a perfectly rational excuse. Raking leaves.

Raking leaves.

Dan came into the kitchen.

"It's really freaking her out," I said.

"I've had enough," he said.

"You didn't even touch those biscuits."

"No. I'm getting rid of it."

The next hour was a blur of men with tools, which I can roughly divide into two stages. The first stage was frenzied but sensible. The second stage was perhaps no more frenzied, but, being less sensible, certainly seemed it.

Dan and Ron dug the thing out of its nest and bundled it in enough plastic sheeting for it to quite possibly survive another entry through the atmosphere (though this time, rather than make a crater, it would probably bounce). Nobody touched it. I wouldn't let them. Not a scrap of metal remained outside the package. Not a drop of extraterrestrial goo was spilt. Shylock would have been green with envy, if not with goo.

I poked around Jenine's shed for longer than I should have (she had two lawnmowers – why?), eventually emerging with the ropes from an ancient patchwork quilt which might once have been a two-man tent. Watching Dan set about binding the package with Boy Scout-ish gusto, I thought about years of unwrapped birthday presents.

Then Dan and Ron drove away with it.

That was stage one.

Stage two began with their return from the local dump. They no longer had the fallen fragment. Safely disposed of. What they did have – an idea – may have been worse.

It had to do with revenge, and I don't know how I was persuaded to go along with it. Maybe it was something about taxpayer's money. Maybe I just didn't want to explain to men with guns why we'd thrown away their bit of space station. We'd already done one stupid thing – hey, why not hide it behind an even stupider thing?

"We're going to make a fake for the government people," said Dan.

"Cool," said David.

I don't know why I went along with it. I don't know.

"Really," Ron explained, "we should really be giving them a weather balloon. But this will have to do."

I don't know.

Dan did the best he could with some forks and things and a welder.

"What about the goo?" I said. "I told them there was goo."

It was Dan's proudest moment. He produced, from his jacket pocket, a little plastic bag. The type I pack his sandwiches in. Inside was a handkerchief, with one heavy spot of green goo.

In the failing light, it almost seemed to glow.

We attached the handkerchief to the end of a slightly bent tent pole, and Ron enthusiastically smeared our lump with its extraterrestrial booger. The giant paintbrush was bundled almost as extensively as the fallen fragment had been, and put in the back of the pick-up.

By then it was time for more biscuits.

Two guys arrived half an hour later, just as the sun was setting, and stared suspiciously at our lump of metal and its spot of goo – though no less suspiciously than they had stared at the driveway, the garden gate, the lawn, or me or Jenine or David or Dan.

They didn't stare suspiciously at Ron. Ron had gone home.

They scooped up our fake, along with some dirt; asked us some questions, sounding bored; then they left in a van. Ten minutes later, as I queasily contemplated even further biscuits, the same van pulled up in the drive way. There'd been some mention of a pet which had died. Had a pet eaten some goo?

I told them Ruby had been hit on the head, and it was pretty messy.

Could they take a look?

The dog was buried. They could dig her up if they wanted.

They looked pleased for the first time. No ma'am. That was fine. Sorry for the trouble.

They left and didn't come back. We stood around the crater in the dimming light, discussing the viability of making it into a water feature of some type.

"You know," said Jenine, "I wish I'd seen it fall."

"You could have made a wish," said David.

A breeze chilled my arms and took hold of the front garden gate to slam it shut. I wrapped my arms around myself. "We should go home," I said.

"'Kay," said Dan.

The lawn stretched in the dark wind.

#

Dan talked in his sleep. He'd move his head on his pillow and murmur, "Buy another hammer, it is broken." "You like the song I wrote?" Sometimes he'd yell. "Wan' peanut butter san'wich!" "No!" "Roadshow!"

It was touching. I knew there was nothing more to my husband than what I saw and what I guessed.

He spoke in his sleep so I knew.

Except one night, about two weeks after we donated our old cutlery to the government, Dan began to quietly recite a list of numbers. Most of the numbers were less than one hundred. Eighteen. Sixty-two. Forty-seven. He sounded so earnest and measured that at first I thought he must be awake.

But he wasn't.

Later on, more new subject matter revealed itself in Dan's subconscious. One night he claimed either "I am not coming to ask for peace" or "I am not covered in axle grease." One night he instructed either "do not make me just Dan again" or, "doughnuts, make me Justine again!"

And one night he said, quite distinctly, "They will fight us on the beaches; they will fight us in the movies; they will fight us with that paint stripper; they will fight us with diminishing strength; they will be tired and die; they will never live in that sin."

That one woke me up.

At one in the morning.

Half an hour later, I decided I should decide to stay up for a bit.

Five minutes later, I got sleepy, so I decided to make myself some coffee.

Then I couldn't find the coffee, so I decided to go back to sleep. Then I went back into the bedroom, and Dan was awake standing staring out of the window with his back to me.

I said, "Hey. Can't sleep?"

Dan tilted his head, looking at a new thing through the same window. "Yeah. I think you woke me up." Perhaps he was speaking to the new point in space. Perhaps to me.

"Sorry."

"No. It's okay. I probably woke you up, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Then we're even."

"Do you know where the coffee is?"

"No." He yawned. "Sorry."

"You did some magnetic fridge poetry. From carapace film as cunning as crass. I didn't think you even knew we had that."

"Yeah. Genius edition. Don't remember doing that, though."

"My first thought was, we've been burgled. By a Dadaist."

"Maybe he took the coffee. Oh. There was a band practice. It went late into the night. I had to get us coffee."

"Oh. When was this?"

"Tuesday. I didn't stay for the whole time."

"Quit the fucking band, Dan," I said, as brightly as I could.

He looked at me then. And he smiled briefly and sadly and walked past me and out of the room.

I waited until I heard the torturous pluckings of his acoustic. I yelled, "Grow up, Dan!" and went to buy coffee at the supermarket.

Every other place was shut.

The supermarket was white and cool and tiled and organised; there was only me, two cashiers, a security guard, and a man who padded up and down the aisles in his socks and dressing gown with a basket full of jars of jam. I thought, buddy, it's late, but it's not that late. I kind of wanted to follow him around, see what he was looking for. Perhaps he was looking for more jam, because he had all the jam.

The woman who sold me coffee short-changed me. I hope my fifteen cents brought her happiness.

It was two AM.

In the morning I had to go back to buy the groceries I should have bought during the night, but didn't, because I would have felt silly pushing a trolley of practical things out into the car park in the night, when I knew someone wearing a dressing gown was prowling around behind me with a lot of jam.

I watched a little girl who had learnt to run before she had learnt to walk. She fell down every time she lost momentum. Her mother loaded one of two baskets with cereal boxes and smiled apologetically when the girl wrapped her arms around me.

"She's two," the woman said.

As if the little girl around my legs could be explained like that. As if the supermarket and the looks we were giving each other inside it could be explained like that. As if that explained the can of green beans I was holding, which lurked at the edge of vision and tried to drag my attention to itself. Like I had never seen green beans. All explained. The girl was two.

I wondered if the cat would ever come back.

During that Autumn I thought Dan changed; he looked sicker to me. In mirrors I looked sicker too, though not as bad. Maybe with me it wasn't sick, it was old.

I started thinking that a lot of people I knew were looking sicker. Mostly the ones living round Parkview. Too little blood in the skin, too much in the eyes. I had this vague memory of reading about a condition which made you think the people around you were getting sick, but I couldn't remember where I'd read it and nobody I asked knew anything about it.

When Dan would come in and find me standing in the middle of the kitchen or the living room and crying, he'd act like I wasn't crying. I couldn't complain. When he used to find me crying, and try to comfort me or ask me questions, I'd always yelled at him and told him to pretend I wasn't crying. That Autumn, he started to pretend I didn't cry. That was a good thing, I guess.

Dan also started doing the washing-up sometimes. The first instance was the day Ruby died. I remember being so surprised to see that single plate, drying in drips in the rack next to the sink. Dan never used to wash up.

Another good thing.

Nothing else fell out of the sky, except some injured or tired sparrows, and a kite which should have been attached to a child, but wasn't, and instead settled on the fence between our yard and Jenine's yard, with the string draped over my laundry. Obviously looking for a friend; it must have thought the clothesline would be its friend. It would have been smarter for it to try to find a child. Dumb string. I rescued the kite and kept it around the house for a couple of days. Eventually I took a scissors and cut it in two so it would fit in the bin.

#

When Autumn ended we went to visit Dan's brother's farm for ten days. Construction work all but disappeared in the winter months. My little job was flexible and I could let the work pile up.

Dan drove up to see Jack every two weeks or so, but the last time we'd both stayed there had been two summers previously, when Jack had hurt his leg and Dan had thought he might have needed help running the farm. Jack told everyone the leg had been trampled while he was recovering runaway cattle, but Dan told me the real story, how one pregnant cow had swayed and overbalanced and fallen on another pregnant cow, how Jack's leg had been crushed under two pregnant bovine dominoes.

Jack hadn't needed help. He had propelled himself vengefully through his territory on steel crutches and yelled abuse at his employees; this worker was doing his work wrong, that worker was doing his work lazily, if he had both his legs in working order he'd kick this worker's ass, that worker was fired for ambiguous reasons. Over-compensating, I had assumed. Dan swore me to secrecy about the cows, though I couldn't understand why.

I'd spent most of the last visit avoiding Jack and not wearing shoes. I'd wriggled my toes in the sun. I'd dipped them in the river and thrust them into a haystack.

We arrived on Monday. I spent that week watching Jack stride up and down his farm and yell abuse at his employees. This worker was doing his work wrong, that worker was doing his work lazily, if it wasn't for the unions he'd kick this worker's ass, and yes, on Tuesday, that worker was fired for reasons which, though perhaps not entirely clear to Dan or Jack or any of his transient employees, were becoming clearer to me.

To hell with it, I thought. If he could be perversely consistent, so could I. I stuffed my socks into my shoes and tiptoed through the light snowfall. I went down the hill towards the long barn, where I had put my feet in hay during my previous visit, but which had been locked up all through this one.

Since the haystacks were gone this time around, it wasn't long before I stood on a needle. I sat down on the snow. There was a tiny drop of blood in front of me.

It wasn't a needle. It was a thorn, stuck in my big toe. I eased it out.

It wasn't a thorn. It was the body of a lizard, tiny, brittle, dried in the sun or frozen in the snow. Its tail had gone right up into my skin. It was so tiny. It was so pretty. I laughed. I said "my God" to nobody in particular.

My hands were clumsy with cold, and I knew I'd break it if I tried to put it down and pick it up again, so I didn't put my shoes on again. Instead I picked them both up in my other hand and started walking. I had to show someone.

I went down the hill and round the corner of the barn, stopping at the crack where the two huge doors met in a padlock embrace. One door was ajar. By the evidence of weight and rust, I had always assumed that the padlock was a remnant from the era of the titans or giants or whatever scaled-up supernatural beings used to farm cows in this area. But here it hung open, and the parts that it usually hid inside itself were clean and shiny silver. There was a scent.

I was barefoot in the snow, but a few seconds in that smell and I was back in my kitchen in the Autumn. I breathed and breathed and breathed. I breathed right into the barn, where the ground was covered with wet straw, and something glowed all along one wall. I stood there stupidly and breathed, looking at all the different types of light which somehow still failed to illuminate the huge gloomy space. Cold bright light slanted in behind me. The same kind of light snuck in through cracks all along the opposite wall. Along the left side, what looked like animal feeding troughs were filled with something that shone, dimly, but in an unmistakable green. Hanging above the troughs, at regular intervals, were light bulbs of different sizes and strengths. Most shone. A couple were dark. There was something that looked like a lampshade. They made me think of street lamps.

The smell came from the troughs. Each time I breathed in, rather than the air moving into my lungs, I was moved through the air in the direction of that wall.

I touched the edge of one of the troughs. It was a beautiful little path, heaving slowly, glowing dimly, held in something probably meant for pig fodder. The light bulbs above it swayed.

I dipped my little finger in. It didn't fall off. I pulled it out again. The goo didn't suck me in. My pinky glowed greenly. I didn't feel myself developing any super powers.

I stuck my tongue out, teasing myself. Well, maybe just a taste.

There was some peculiar dust on my palm. I realised it was the lizard. I made myself walk to the other end of the barn before I knelt down and scrubbed my finger with straw, then dusted my hand on my jeans. I pinched my nose as I passed near the troughs again on my way out.

I thought about leaving the door slightly ajar, but Jack or Dan probably hadn't realised it had been left that way in the first place, so I shut it.

I ran into Jack a couple of minutes later. I didn't say anything about it then. I was too flustered. I was probably a little too friendly. I had to think.

I went and sat in the snowiest place I could find until my head cleared.

I planned to be relaxed about it; to mention it in passing. Perhaps even in passing the salt? Yes – do it at dinner. Casually. With a smile. So, husband, you've lied to me, you've concealed things from me, and you and your horrible sidekick are doing something terribly dangerous which I don't understand, and which I very much doubt that you do?

I'd be so cool, then I'd sort everything out. Dan knew he could rely on my judgement better than he could rely on his judgement. I'd told him so. Jack was just Jack. Dan once told me Jack always peed sitting down, just because.

I'd sort everything out.

I fidgeted the afternoon away, avoiding more than usual, while in my head a ghostly Carol muttered cool, crushing, crisp mantras which couldn't calm me down.

Perhaps they sensed something was different. Usually when the three of us sat at Jack's inappropriately huge table, we were divided by expanses of oak. Marooned on my atoll in that sea of wood, I would pick at simple but unwholesome cuisine, and listen to a slow conversation of monosyllables. Not tonight. Dan moved his chair around next to mine; more improbably, Jack came through in an apron, looking domestic and ridiculous as he carried a hot heavy tray of the most delicious smell I had experienced since . . .

I calmed as the confrontation approached. The air was so warm, the food so hot and delicious, I was so hungry. My husband and his brother were chatting, nervous, happy, friendly. A few hundred metres away, vicious green light was quietly churning. Like pasta simmering.

And I actually felt relaxed and natural. The topic was there, just under my tongue, and I could talk about it so easily, and any minute I would. So calmly. I felt so relaxed that I eventually allowed them to bring it up. So naturally. As the glow settled and thickened around me, we talked calmly and happily and naturally about the organism, about the little that we knew, that we needed to know. About what had happened when Dan had fed it to chickens, and when Jack had fed it to pigs and cows. The first host always died, Dan told me with a smile, and it was probably a good idea to cook its flesh, although you didn't have to, and lately, they hadn't been doing so quite as often. Did I like the feeling? I liked the feeling. If you left it too long, Dan continued to explain, it would convert that vast expanse of dead flesh into more of itself. That's how it grew.

But if you didn’t leave it too long, you could eat it, taking it into your body, taking it into your mind . . .

Dan told me how the organism knew each person, how each person would have a task appropriate to his abilities, part of a plan which unfolded, how Dan's tasks so often had to do with music, how a chord from his guitar was such a tiny piece, but such an important piece, how Jack's tasks so often had to do with farm animals, with cruelty and vigour. He told me how David next door had known about it for almost as long as Jack. I laughed when I heard that.

It was as if all the bad things in me were suddenly too embarrassed to even try to be important.

We sat long after the last scraps of food were gone, but not before its smell was, talking warmly about a different but undefined long term. We also talked about a short term, about expanding, bringing the warmth to the suburbs completely, about our neighbours and friends, about whether we could take it for granted that a particular person knew the norms and standards of an alien invasion, about whether we could take for granted that a particular person was sad. I'd sort it all out, I told them.

Jack said very little, but he was with us. In the group. We were together. To swim in honey was one thing. To drown in it . . .

We cut the visit short, driving home the next day across miles of tundra, dragging one of Jack's trailers behind us. We didn't say much. Near the end of the journey I was sickened by the realisation that his was probably a contented silence. But then again, it didn't really matter. What I wanted were compulsions – commands. Orders.

We got home and Dan cooked dinner, and everything was all right again.

Then we unpacked.

I quit my job by telephone.

For a while I believed what they believed, and said things like, today, thirty-seven dollars, and tomorrow, the world. For a while I believed an external force guided my thoughts, like God. I also believed Parkview would swell with people like me, that we would succumb to an alien goo, possibly growing gills on the back of our necks, or a sixth finger. We might glow. We might read one another's minds.

I really did manage to believe these things.

If the Invasion did not exist, it would be necessary to . . .

But I've lost my touch.

I don't believe them any more. I don't believe that our humanity will necessarily waste away to be replaced by things alien and incomprehensible.

Nor do I believe that all the wonderful things I have arbitrarily cared about will be destroyed in a foreign growth, or that my mind, an increasingly unfocused bundle of sensory experience, will have its vague pains eased by the chemical touch of invisible invaders. Good puppy, they won't murmur to me. Biscuit. Biscuit.

No. It's drugs. We're just peddling drugs; just taking drugs. Drugs from the sky. Drugs from the stars. Drugs from the gods. Drugs that haven't been tested by men in white coats. Drugs that haven't been tested by generations of disaffected students scheduling their research between Dungeons & Dragons and communist revolutionary meetings. Drugs that haven't been tested by anyone, except us.

"Us" including some friends. And some farm animals. And Ruby.

But she's dead.

I keep turning the events of the day Ruby died over and over in my mind. I keep trying to work out what happened when and why and who was watching.

I keep trying to remember how much of that day was Dan's idea.

Dan was sitting on the bed, holding his guitar. His fingers were brushing the strings, softly, without making any noise.

I sat down next to him. He looked at me. I wish I had said, "Play something," or asked him to teach me a chord. I wish I had asked him to teach me G. I already know it, and he doesn't know I know.

We sat on the bed and looked at his guitar. I thought, perhaps he really is getting better. A little better. That would be something.

I suppose I'll have to stop. I should write down a date and stick it on the fridge, or I'll never quit. Then what? I'll find something to do. Maybe I'll have kids. Oh God. There's a thought.

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