He Is Other
by Jeffrey Greene
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
In various interviews conducted on the march, security officials expressed gratitude for the fact that, although his origin, nature and purpose remained unexplained, there was at least a certain consistency in the Stranger’s behavior, which gave them cause for optimism. He had not, after all, killed the President, though it was certainly in his power to do so. He had made no threats or demands and appeared to be acting alone. Therefore, they concluded, the possibility of reasoning with him remained viable.
The official wisdom was that the Stranger did not fit the profile of any known assassin, living or dead. He was not a religious or political fanatic or an embittered loner or the agent of a foreign power, at least any that they were aware of.
In fact, the apparent randomness of his attack suggested an “unintentionality,” to quote the Secretary of Defense, giving them hope that he might at any moment “become aware of his mistake and release the President.” This theory was openly ridiculed by a Senator from Georgia, whose comment was to the effect that if the Stranger’s attack was random, then why hadn’t he chosen a cab driver, since there were a lot more cab drivers than presidents?
The fact that the situation was unique did not prevent an alarming number of “experts” from indulging in promiscuous speculation on all the television networks. The chairman of the International Friends of Mu, a self-appointed welcome committee for extraterrestrials, deplored “the barbaric attacks on the distinguished Visitor from the Stars,” and begged the leadership to “give him air,” whatever that meant, suggesting quite seriously that the headlock was a form of greeting, “naturally strange to us.”
And of course it surprised no one that the doomsday cultists were quick to recognize in the Stranger the prophesied coming of the Beast. One conspiracy theorist voiced the startling idea that the Stranger was an “assassin android” manufactured by the Japanese, the culmination of a top-secret, eighty-year plan of retribution for Hiroshima. A man claiming to be telepathic offered his services as a negotiator, and another, pushing the envelope of lunacy, revealed to the world that his mother had been abducted and impregnated by aliens in 1951, and he sadly recognized the Stranger as his half-brother.
In retrospect, it seems astonishing that this flood of tabloid journalism did not result in mass panic. While isolated pockets of hysteria were reported, not unlike those that occurred during the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938, the most common initial reaction to the President’s abduction was an appalled but edgy watchfulness which, as the hours, days, and eventually months of uninterrupted coverage wore on, decayed to a numb acceptance of the impossible.
Historians have written that the pivotal moment in human history came when a non-human being clearly from Somewhere Else — they contend this in spite of the fact that no space craft has ever been found — not only appeared but remained solidly in our midst. Personally, I think the real sea change was suffered when the Stranger became old news.
He continued his progress through east Washington until about noon, when the overhead position of the sun seemed to cause a momentary uncertainty. He turned in all directions, squinting and sniffing the air, before choosing a northerly course. By this time some of the world’s most gifted linguists had walked beside him, addressing him in every conceivable dialect, including pure mathematics. That he visually noted the presence of these people was repeatedly observed by witnesses, but he neither spoke nor gave any sign of understanding. Having failed to free the President by force and now by negotiation, the rescue committee launched a campaign to charm, beguile or, failing that, to confuse the Stranger.
A violinist from the National Symphony was recruited to walk beside him, playing pieces that ran the gamut of moods, from Bach to Copland to Penderecki, and finally, a medley of pop favorites. While he never slowed his pace, he seemed to give ear to most of the music, on occasion even moving his head slightly in time to a more infectious rhythm.
A soprano sang arias from Madama Butterfly, poets recited, priests read from the Scriptures, astronomers pointed inquiringly to various positions on star maps-and all went away discouraged. Having noted that the Stranger willingly moved around cars and trees, officials tried the experiment of arranging a line of soldiers with linked arms across the road but, when he reached the line, he neither slowed nor stopped, and the soldiers were forced to break ranks or be borne along helplessly.
As the first day dragged to a close, a stretcher on wheels was provided for the President, who by this time was extremely tired and uncomfortable. The chafing of his ears after hours of contact with the Stranger’s arm was causing him quite a bit of pain, but he had maintained his sense of humor to a remarkable degree.
Rarely letting go of his hand was the First Lady, who sat alongside the stretcher in a wheelchair being pushed by a soldier. The procession had come to resemble a disorganized parade, with thousands of people lining both sides of the street, some crying, others cheering and shouting encouragement to the President, and of course vilifying the Stranger, who was oblivious to everything.
The first and most celebrated Disappearance occurred precisely at sundown, which was recorded at 7:59 p.m. The Stranger stopped and turned to stare at the red disk of the setting sun, an amazed expression on his face. He had turned so abruptly that the President was pulled off the stretcher and his grip dislodged from the First Lady’s. Witnesses — and there were thousands — noted that his eyes and face seemed to brighten, and then he raised his left arm and stretched it towards the sun, as if trying to grab hold of it.
What happened next has been as minutely examined as the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, without advancing one jot our understanding of the event: he simply disappeared, taking the President with him.
Anticipating the attacks from fellow historians, I must now blasphemously depart from the accepted reading of the next twenty-four hours. While allowing for the worldwide shock, grief, and bewilderment that followed, I suggest that the political leadership — excepting the First Lady — breathed an immediate, albeit secret, sigh of relief.
Why? Because the confounding object of all their efforts had left the stage; because instead of a President abducted and humiliated in plain sight, they now had a President kidnapped by person or persons unknown; because a metaphysical crisis had been exchanged for the more familiar — and acceptable — political crisis.
Even as the director of the FBI vowed on national television “to search every corner of the globe” until the President was found, preparations were being made for the smooth transfer of power to the Vice-President. I mean no disrespect to the memory of a brave man, but it is my belief that they would have happily traded the life of one President for the continued absence of the Stranger, who, in spite of his mockingly ordinary appearance, had in one short day overthrown ten thousand years of human sovereignty on this planet.
But the Stranger, as always, failed to conform to our collective wishes. A Kansas farmer spotted him the following morning walking through his cornfield, the President still in tow, and notified the authorities, who descended in their hundreds on his quiet farm. Dirty, disheveled, hungry, his neck and back cramping badly, the President nevertheless took the opportunity to address the nation.
His extemporaneous speech is too well-known to need quoting here. In essence, he pleaded for calm, expressed his love for his wife and children, and although he hoped it wouldn’t be necessary, prepared the nation to accept the leadership of the Vice-President.
When asked about the disappearance, the President quipped: “You wouldn’t like it. I feel like my feet are on backwards.” He also characterized the Stranger as “lousy company.” At the same leisurely pace as the day before, the Stranger towed his prisoner all over the farm, clearly sightseeing, while the President’s physician had him placed on a wheeled stretcher and provided with food and water. The First Lady had been flown in and was on her way to the farm when the Stranger disappeared again.
He did not reappear for three days, this time in a remote town in northern Alaska, and the President was in a terrible state, suffering from severe exposure, frostbite and sun-blindness. It was becoming apparent to everyone by now that the slowest, strangest assassination in world history was taking place. Again the First Lady prepared to fly to her husband’s side, and again the President and his abductor disappeared, this time after only three hours.
After that, the appearances and disappearances occurred so frequently that they became the stuff of worldwide rumor. Sightings were reported in rapid succession in London, Paris, Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo, Honolulu, San Francisco and Kansas City, indicating a more or less straight easterly path around the world. Aid in the form of food and water was offered to the President whenever possible, but the ever-shorter duration of the appearances made that increasingly difficult.
Some experts speculated that the Stranger’s behavior implied a growing impatience, as if he were becoming bored with the sights Earth had to offer, and suggested that he might soon release the President and depart for other destinations.
Merely by saturating the airwaves with twenty-four hour coverage of the story, the international press — unintentionally, of course — probably did more to diffuse panic than the combined pleas for calm from the world’s governments. While rumors of a mass invasion of bland, invincible Strangers who would seize every man, woman and child on Earth in unbreakable headlocks did spread through the major population centers, often fanned by copycat headlock abductions, these “Strangers” were all quickly exposed as cranks or criminals trying to capitalize on the terror of the moment, and the unruly exodus out of the cities so feared by the authorities never occurred.
It was, after all, one “man” who had done this, one five-foot ten-inch man with a soft, round face and ordinary clothes, and whatever strange powers he might possess, his image, as seen on television — as it had already been seen to the point of overexposure — was decidedly unscary. Unless death rays began to beam out of his eyes, no one was going to panic over this alien abductor. He looked too much like a next-door neighbor, a schoolteacher, or a mattress salesman. Even though the broad mass of viewers knew that something strange and unprecedented had occurred, something “historical,” Appearance — to the immense relief of the civil authorities — had won out, at least for the moment, over Reality.
The flurry of sightings all over the world — it was impossible for the rescue committee to sort the actual from the imaginary — peaked on the fifth day, and then, suddenly, ceased. For more than a month there was no word anywhere. The U.S. government and its allies waited impatiently, their armies on standby alert for any eventuality.
The Vice President, now the President pro tempore, made frequent broadcasts from an undisclosed location, assuring his listeners that everything was being done that could be done. The media drained the story of its last drop of blood, and then inevitably, if somewhat guiltily, returned to regular programming.
Recalling my own feelings at the time, I remember being outraged by the resumption of sitcoms and sporting events, and then, later, making the shamefaced realization that my vociferous rejection of “normal life” in the face of the New Paradigm, as I pompously termed it, ushered in by the Stranger was becoming forced and self-conscious in direct proportion to the elapsed time since his last appearance. In other words, I was fighting against my own human nature, which is simply not to resist the ceaseless current of oblivion, but to live and function, much as the insects do, within the flicker of each new day.
This is not to say that I or anyone else had for one moment forgotten what had happened. A new element had been added to the human condition, something that forced itself on the mind like an occupying army, and like the hydrogen bomb or the Holocaust, thinned the ground under one’s feet. The Stranger, whatever he was, existed. One could deny it only so long as one’s skepticism held out against the mounting weight of evidence.
But this overwhelming idea of unknown and ungovernable forces visiting Earth, one supposed, from the larger Universe had little if any impact on Everyman. Beings like the Stranger were definitely out there — we’d seen it on TV — but so far there was only one, and one being could not significantly impact the daily routine of billions of people. Life, after a fashion, went on.
Then came the tragic reappearance of the Stranger at Daytona Beach, Florida and, for a time, our complacency was overcome by grief. He stepped ashore from an apparent sojourn across the sea bottom, still bearing in a headlock the President’s now-lifeless body, which, by its bloated and partially eaten condition, had clearly been underwater for some weeks, and began a southerly course down the beach that was not hindered by inlets or waterways and eventually took him the entire length of the Florida coastline.
This “murder of indifference,” as the new President called it, did not go unavenged. Angry mobs dogged every step of the Stranger’s march, shouting curses, pelting him with rocks and bottles, and when they realized that he would not retaliate, began to attack him with every weapon they could lay their hands on.
The military authorities, having exhausted their own resources, decided to let the civilian populace have a go at it. But while a healthy degree of rage was vented by these public hatings, the Stranger was as invulnerable and indifferent as ever to human assaults. Sadly, although death had released the President from further suffering, his battered corpse remained in that unbreakable headlock, dragged along the sand, presenting a grim spectacle to beachgoers and striking a heavy blow at national and human pride.
I have before me a recent photograph, cut from the back pages of the Washington Post. It shows the Stranger, seated alone on a park bench in Logansport, Indiana, being watched from behind by a pair of grinning teenagers. Except for his clothes, which have long since rotted and fallen away, he is exactly the same, down to the enraptured gaze, as he was on the day of his first appearance.
Tucked under one arm is a skull, with a wispy lock of hair still attached, and depending from it is part of a spinal column and a broken rib cage. To the right of the Stranger an elderly woman is placing a wreath of flowers bearing the President’s name at his feet, and to the left a middle-aged man with a briefcase is standing by a bus stop sign, looking at his watch.
What chills me about this picture is not that Mystery, embodied in the form of a naked man with half a skeleton in a headlock, is seated on a park bench. What frightens me, what hardens my hopeless faith in human nature, is the allegorical arrangement of the people around the Stranger.
The woman could be Remembrance in the face of annihilation. The man looking at his watch is the Drone of Familiarity, who reduces the daily miracle of existence to dull routine, and the gawking boys might represent, respectively, Ignorance and Futurity. The Stranger may change, but we will not.
If the Stranger leaves tomorrow, we will both remember and forget him in equal measure, but he will not enter our mythology like the Gods of Olympus. They cared about their mortals. The Stranger, as far as we know, does not care, does not hate, does not love, is not even indifferent. He may not experience time as we do. He may be unburdened by death. He may rise up from his reverie and slay us all or he may disappear forever, but whatever he does, it will be without our consent or understanding. He is Other.
Copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Greene
