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Spaceship | Jan 11 2003

Last Friday while walking home from work (I work every Friday at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, doing web stuff), I noticed a spaceship in the Shakespeare Garden. At first I thought it was for one of the Garden’s cutesy community events (Plants from Outer Space perhaps?), but couldn’t figure out what it was doing in the Shakespeare Garden. Without question the Children’s Garden would have been the place for a spaceship. Was it being built it in the Shakespeare Garden with the thought of moving it later? If so, this was a stunningly dumb idea because the damn thing was blocking the path and had crushed several flower beds.

I should describe what it looked like. It looked like a flying saucer. That is, it was shaped like a giant frisbee and had a bubble-like dome and a ring of round red lights along its circumference. It stood on three stilt-like legs and had a hatch underneath, which I noticed was down.

Later I learned why it looked so much like a flying saucer, but at the time I was impressed that the Community Events people, who I presumed to have built it, had worked so hard to make it seem “realistic.” I walked closer to see what it was made of and was surprised to discover how smooth the surface was. I had never touched anything that smooth.

But the real shock came when I climbed up the hatch. In the vague way one imagines such things, I had expected to find a cramped room with a bunch of hokey alien spacecraft controls and navigation screens. Instead what I found was a space that looked exactly like my own apartment. Stranger still, it really was my apartment, only I didn’t understand this at first. What I understood was that it resembled my apartment. Precisely. The pot I’d used that morning to cook oatmeal was still soaking in the sink, and the clothes I’d worn the previous day were exactly where I’d left them, in a pile on the floor by my bed.

About the only thing that had changed was that a woman was sitting in my green chair, watching me. She was an alien, but again I didn’t realize this at first.

Hi, she said.

Hi, I said.

I’m an alien from outer space, she said. I’ve come to study you.

I don’t know why, but she reminded me of a certain former girlfriend.

Really, I said. That’s awesome.

I didn’t believe she was an alien, so I was playing it cool until I figured out who she really was.

Assuming a casual tone, I asked if she happened to know why there was a spaceship in the Shakespeare Garden.

There isn’t any more, she said, indicating the hatch with her eyes.

I climbed down. The hatch led not into Garden but the apartment of my downstairs neighbor, an older guy I always see drinking Coca-Cola. Whenever I see him, he’s got a can of Coke in his hand. Or Coke Classic, actually. I recognized his apartment because it was shaped exactly like mine and had eight cardboard boxes of Coke Classic stacked against the wall.

I climbed back up the hatch and pulled it shut behind me.

Nice trick, I said.

Thanks.

Who are you?

I’ve come to study you. I will sleep in your bed but I won’t have sexual relations with you.

I don’t remember asking you to have sex with me.

It is expected. I have assumed a physical form that you in particular find hot. Did I use that right, “hot”?

It’s more like hottt, I said, with three t’s.

I thought it was just one t, she said.

She had a space between her two front teeth, just like that certain former girlfriend.

Hot is fine, I said, but it’s a bit flat. The extra t’s add a level of irony by referencing how the word is used in phone sex ads and the like. It is ironic because phone sex ads that spell hottt with three t’s are so moronic as to render their sexiness moot. To refer to this is a kind of wink. You are saying, I recognize how moronic and unsexy it is to spell hottt with three t’s, but I am going to do it anyway. By some roundabout logic, this sort of stubborn self-consciousness is itself sexy.

But how can anyone know how many t’s you’re using when you say it?

They don’t, so you have to find other ways to indicate this.

Like how?

Gesture, intonation, facial expression, anything.

This conversation is not very hottt, she said.