‘Outcast’ by Saoirse McCann Callanan

He decided that she was extraterrestrial on their first date.

He had met her on the internet two weeks before, something his grandmother had put him up to. He had no job to speak of and lived in the furthest reaches of the city with his grandmother, a small and petulant woman who hated him for reasons she would not disclose.

It had been months since she had first suggested he try to find himself a nice girlfriend (‘or boyfriend,’ she had judiciously added). He knew this was nothing more than another of her schemes to be rid of his company, and he prided himself on possessing enough self-awareness to understand what his grandmother didn’t seem to: that some people were destined to be alone. He had entertained his grandmother’s plan anyhow, feigning great enthusiasm, if only to put a temporary halt to her passive-aggressive tirades about the dishes.

She was the only woman to respond to his message. She suggested an Italian restaurant with velvet-lined booths, and they sat apart from the crowd. With increasing suspicion, he noted the nervous way her eyes flickered from him to the table, the hand that scratched the back of her neck periodically, the instant laughter in response to anything he said. It stunned him – it was a textbook depiction of the way a woman acts when attracted to a man, at least according to the articles and books he had used to pore over. He had never evoked such a response in a woman; the best he could remember mustering was a grudging sympathy.

He could not help but distrust the situation, and several times his eyes roamed the restaurant in search of a camera crew or an overzealous gameshow host lurking in the shadows. He gave generic, unthinking answers to her every inquiry. His hands shook beneath the table.

As the evening drew on the windows became misted with rain and he watched, dazed, as her face shapeshifted under the candlelight. She was vague about her past and her future. She claimed to have no family. She spoke of insecurities, of loneliness, of a declining belief in fate and universal order. Strangest of all, she expressed a thus unparalleled interest in the minute particulars of his life.

This last point confused him the most, and he found himself in the bright and cramped men’s room, his mind racing. He scoured his memory for any indication of derision in her soft words, he considered whether she had issues with cognition. He wondered if his grandmother had not been sarcastic, after all, when she had called him a fine young man. No; the answer came to him suddenly, with a flash of clarity.

She was extraterrestrial.

Of course, he thought. He should have known from the start.

He returned to the table renewed, eager to play his part. He told her what he thought she would like to hear, that he was lonely, too, that his faith in the world had been waning, too, that he, too, was searching for a spark of meaning. He tried successfully to convey a portrait of an outcast, someone more than willing to be manipulated and possibly indoctrinated by an extraterrestrial lifeforce. Her eyes brightened; she appeared intrigued. Despite himself, he felt a giddy happiness.

‘This has been really nice,’ she said. ‘We should do it again soon?’

‘What do you want from me?’ he let out, immediately regretting it.

She smiled without pause and squeezed his hand. ‘I just want to see you again.’

They kissed before parting outside. He walked in the opposite direction to her with a feeling of apprehensive discovery. The sky had cleared, and he tilted his head to the stars, scarce but luminous, and wondered from which vantage point she had first noticed him.

*

They slept together for the first time after their second date, and she called him a tease for how long his fingers lingered over her body, tracing each curve and bend, searching in vain for bodily anomalies. He insisted they kept the lights on despite her feigned shyness and undressed her slowly and precisely, turning her body under the light. She was a marvel of technical design, it was true, but their mistake had been in making her too attractive. He knew that a woman this beautiful, this well-crafted, would not sleep with him. She reminded him of the girls in the explicit videos he had stolen from his grandfather, or the realistic sex dolls he had considered buying; but she was softer, more natural. The silver stretch marks inside her thighs that she pretended to be self-conscious about, the birth mark on her stomach, the faint acne scars on her back – they were nice touches, he had to admit.

When, with undertones of nervousness, she asked if they should use protection, he almost laughed. He couldn’t help but admire her makers for their exhaustive research of the human condition, of their refinement of the purely human expression of concern and vulnerability that was now on her face.

‘I can’t have children,’ he lied with ease, ‘don’t worry.’

‘Okay, but do you have – are you clean?’

He nodded, not bothering to go through the act of reciprocating the awkward question.

He was surprised by her lack of expertise, considering her creators had all the sexual knowledge in the world at their fingertips. But he supposed it made it more natural, along with the vague expression of pain on her face, the fingernails clumsily scratching his back, the inconsistent guttural noises. As it went on, he grew reflective. Had she wanted to use a condom out of a rooted desire to appear human, or because it might serve as a barrier between him and any extraterrestrial signs he might find inside of her? And would a sexually transmitted disease, while not harming her in the usual human way, maybe cause her hardware to fail? And did she have physical hardware, or was she constructed completely of human parts but just with a different form of consciousness?

This had begun to lead him down a complicated path of philosophical inquiry when he was ripped out of his mind by a particularly loud noise and a scratch which broke the skin on his back. He looked down at her flushed cheeks, felt the rise and fall of her chest under his. She must have sensed that he was thinking too much and had decided to give a bad impression of an orgasm.

Afterwards, when they were lying together on discoloured sheets, she said that it had been her first time.

‘Me too,’ he said.

With an extraterrestrial being, he wanted to add.

Instead, he repeated, ‘Yeah, me too.’

*

One day, spurred on by curiosity, he said, ‘I love you.’

Her face gained a new kind of light, an expression he had not yet seen – he imagined it was some form of relief, that another box had been checked, that she was a step closer to completing her mission. She put her fingers on his neck and announced that she loved him too.

The following morning, to further test her agreeableness and because it was increasingly difficult to pretend he did not live with his grandmother, he suggested they live together. She agreed with such enthusiasm that he could not help being caught in it too, and let her pull him into her arms. And when she kissed him, her mouth warm and decidedly human-like, he allowed himself a further moment of indulgence and leaned into her, letting his concerns fade to a disagreeable hum.

*

He chose an apartment situated precisely between two large police stations, just in case. He had put his sci-fi books into storage. He did consider leaving a stray Asimov in the drawer of the bedside table, like a bible in a hotel room, but decided against it. He remembered a news story he had read once about a Jewish woman who had gone home with a man and found a Nazi flag hanging above his bed and wondered if it would be a similar offence – it was difficult to know what was culturally appropriate, without being able to ask.

The morning they moved in, she asked him to carry her over the threshold ‘like they do in films’, and he obliged, although she was heavier than she looked. When they collapsed on the naked bed, she smiled and held his face for a long time.

*

After a series of unsuccessful interviews, he secured a job as a bank teller in a dark and quiet institution. He put on a suit every morning and she kissed him goodbye, smiling as he left; she loved his suit, probably because it reminded her of the uniformity of her former life. The sense of routine, too, must have made her nostalgic; he made efforts to leave the house at exactly 8:00 every morning and return at 17:30, even if it meant standing listlessly in the cold for half an hour if he was ahead of schedule. He was sure she must have adequately adjusted to human life by now, but even so he found it necessary to make her as comfortable as possible; if nothing else, it would give him an advantage when the overlords arrived.

*

One night he took her to a planetarium, hoping he would see a glint of recognition, confusion, nostalgia in her eyes when she looked at the artificial night sky. He watched her stare upwards from the comfort of the worn chairs, her eyes glazed with the reflection of the stars. The cavernous room was soft and stuffy, empty but for them. The atmosphere made him drowsy, reminding him of his childhood, when he had sat in probably these same seats with his mother. She turned to him, eyes bright with tears, and touched the hand lying flat on the armrest.

‘This is beautiful,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

You would say that, he thought.

When they walked to the bus afterwards, she said that it was a shame there was only one or two stars in the sky now due to the light pollution from the city. ‘They must be lonely.’

‘Maybe it’s not pollution,’ he said. ‘Maybe the other stars are avoiding them because no one likes them.’

She laughed. ‘Outcast stars?’

‘Maybe.’

They walked on in silence for a minute or two. At the bus stop, shivering and with her arm wrapped around his waist, she said that the stars made her feel small and insignificant. He figured that she meant her role on Earth was insignificant and understood with what difficulty she must think of her cousins and acquaintances and ex-boyfriends duelling among the stars, undergoing real hardship, securing places in extraterrestrial history, while she was stuck on earth, gathering intel on a lonely human. He wondered if she had done something in particular to deserve this boring exile. He wondered if there was as many of her kind on Earth as there was stars in the sky, lowly agents wandering around until they made acquaintance with whatever desperate person would humour them, would look beyond the obvious signs of artificiality and invent a tale of reciprocated love.

Poor bastards, he thought.

He could see why it would be easy to fall for it, how the soft looks and touches and confessions of admiration and vulnerability could cause someone to think they were loved. He knew better, of course, but he couldn’t blame people who didn’t.

*

Occasionally something would remind him of the finite nature of their relationship – an advertisement for a special rerelease of E.T., for example – and he would feel an unpleasant jolt in his stomach. When these moods struck, he would overcompensate, remembering his duty to teach her what little he could. He took her to funfairs, zoos, galleries and circuses. He scoured dusty bookshops for religious and atheistic texts, encyclopaedias and technical manuals and Russian novels. He read them to her as she lay on his chest, one hand placed on his accelerated heart. She said she loved the way his mind worked, and, as all her compliments did, it brought on a dizzy feeling of weightlessness that he found difficult to shake.

There were moments of desperation, such as when she was pretending to sleep and he would be overwhelmed by the strange innocence of her face in repose, when he wanted to shake her and confess to her what he knew and ask if there wasn’t some pocket in the universe, equidistant between their worlds, where they could live uninterrupted by responsibilities and the inevitable clash of their respective civilizations.

He was always led from these reveries to the same conclusion, that someday he would run out of things to tell her, knowledge to bestow upon her; that eventually she would have her fill and leave him for her own world. When this would occur to him, he would spend at least two days in a state of irritable alienation and she would stare confused as he refused to look at her, left the house without a word, slammed doors and spent hours in the bath with the slow, persistent drip of the faulty tap acting as a miserable reminder of time. When she would begin to cry and beg, he would cover his eyes with his hands and think of self-preservation.

*

When she was pregnant, he would spend hours awake beside her, staring with fascination at her growing stomach. He would speculate about what would come out: would it be the same type of superficially beautiful, anatomically human type being as her? Or would it be like the alien toys he used to buy in volumes as a child, an amorphous blob that came cocooned in grey slime and a plastic egg? And was this a first in both human and extraterrestrial history?

He imagined presenting it to his parents, their first grandchild, telling them to be careful when they cracked open the cheap egg so as not to let the extraterrestrial baby fall on the floor. Not that it mattered much, he would say, because the baby, in fact, probably didn’t have the capacity for injury or death. He laughed to himself at the image of his confused parents gingerly holding the egg, treating it with the same indifference and disgusted caution with which he had been treated throughout his childhood. He thought she would laugh too, amused by their process of bewilderment, an exclusively human activity.

They would probably stop talking to him again, and he would continue to live in confused domesticity with his extraterrestrial wife and sticky, formless child. He would hold the thought in his mind until he fell asleep, hand resting on her swollen stomach.

*

When she told him the baby was lost, blurting out the words the moment he walked into the flat, he could have applauded her performance. He could almost believe this depiction of a grieving woman, one distraught hand holding a crumpled tissue, the other the ultrasound. Bravo, he thought and for half a moment he wondered if extraterrestrials had their equivalent of a performance awards ceremony. But his amusement was uneasy, and as a numbness beginning to weigh down his body he went to her, wrapped his arms around her.

‘We can always try again, can’t we?’ he said.

He was sure he had not delivered his line as convincingly as she, and her shoulders began to shake with long wailing sobs. He tightened his grip, struggling against a creeping feeling of despair. End scene, he thought, please, let it end.

*

In the following weeks she became at once more clinging and more detached. She walked him to work every day. She would stare balefully at him while they watched television. She would disappear for hours, returning late at night or sometimes not until the morning. She did not offer an explanation and he did not ask.

She created a collaged shrine of sorts in the corner of the bedroom: blu-tacked pictures of babies and prams cut from magazines, the sonogram at the epicentre. He avoided eye contact with the shrine when he put his tie on in the wardrobe mirror every morning. He thought it was a tacky prop after what had been a poignant and quiet portrayal of grief. One night, after three glasses of wine, he told her as much.

‘What?’

‘I just think you’re overdoing it. It’s an over-dramatization.’

She stared at him over the table, glass trembling in her hand.

‘It’s just a bit of constructive criticism,’ he said, taking one of her wrists and smiling. ‘You were doing so well up to now.’

‘What do you mean I was doing well?’

‘Fine, fine. Be stubborn.’ He let go and returned to his plate. ‘I’m just saying I don’t think they’ll like it.’

She was gone before he could look up. The front door slammed behind her and the whole flat seemed to shake.

He walked over to the television, turned it on, and returned to the table holding the remote control. It was the first time he had criticized her performance and he had expected her to take it with more tact. Her ego was probably overblown after delivering her magnum opus, but he could not help but feel injured on his own behalf. Hadn’t he played his role to the best of his abilities, too? Had he not suffered for her, cried and laughed for her, hoped and wondered and dreamed with her?

He swallowed back the beginnings of bitter tears.

It didn’t matter anyway, he decided, flicking through the channels without seeing them. She would thank him for it one day. She would return and thank him. He had a brief daydream about an extraterrestrial Oscars speech in which he was tearfully acknowledged as being the key inspiration. He imagined a brood of half-terrestrial children, who would have her luminous eyes and his unassailable skills of detection.

These indistinct fantasies did not last. He began to feel strange, unable to focus on the moving pictures on the screen or the suddenly tasteless food in his mouth. He retired to bed early, after cleaning the flat in a strange act of penance, after leaving all the lights on for when she returned.

He could not sleep. The shrine was just discernible in the dim light from the moon. Her absence felt heavy. In the morning, after an empty two hours of sleep, he found the lights still on.

*

She called him at work for the second and the last time two mornings later, telling him she was sorry and would contact him when her head was ‘a bit more together’. When he placed the phone down it was damp with sweat. He tried to put the matter out of his mind.

But still he went home on his lunch break, studiously ignoring the rising nausea. When he opened the building’s main door the hallway seemed empty and one dimensional, devoid of character or light. He could not picture her walking up the carpeted stairs; could hardly imagine that she once had. The stains on the walls and floor loomed, playing in his peripheries as he stumbled upstairs and unlocked their door.

The hall of their flat stretched for miles, sinking into black. There was a roll of Sellotape and scissors on the welcome mat before his feet.

In their wardrobe, the pair of blue suitcases and three-quarters of the clothes were gone. The colourful stack of books had disappeared from the table on her side of the bed. The shrine had been removed, only trace amounts of blu-tack remaining on the wall. She had taken both her toothbrush and the toothpaste. He retrieved an old receipt and a pen from his suit pocket and, leaning it against the bathroom door, wrote ‘LIST: toothpaste’ on the back.

He sat on the bed, stripped of the floral sheets they had bought together. It seemed inconsiderate to take everything, when he assumed she would need none of it when she returned to her home planet. But maybe it was only necessary that everything involved with him was gathered up, to be dissected and examined in celestial laboratories. Looking around, he felt suffocated by the black mould in the corners of the ceiling, the condensation on the windowpanes, the coat of dust on the skirting boards.

He spent the afternoon in the same position, making a mental list of home repairs and trying not to let his thoughts rest on her. He regretted criticizing her performance; she had probably left to seek counsel and had been advised to move on to another target, one who was not as keenly perceptive. He tried to abandon thoughts of what could have been if he had not showed his hand too soon, disparate images he had cultivated of various weddings and funerals attended together, trips to hospitals, engagement rings, talks of fertility and children’s names, holidays on remote mountains, hotel rooms with panoramic views of the heaving sea.

Eventually it grew dark, and he walked outside, expecting to be assailed by visions of shooting stars and constellations, galaxies bristling with reunion, a vivid full moon lighting each corner; but the sky was grey and silent, and he could see no sign of her.

From issue #12: autumn/winter 2021

About the Author
Saoirse McCann Callanan is from Galway. This is her first published story.