Theodore McCombs
Alien vs. Bachelorette
Noemi’s boyfriend, Paul, worked for the New York City Division of Human Services and at the holiday party, she and Paul had ended up alongside the decimated cake with his co-worker, Gregory, gossiping about The Human Bachelorette. “You know, I know her.” “Who?” Gregory asked, and Noemi, smiling, wiping her fingertips with a red paper napkin, said, “Jen, I know Jen. We were at the same salon in LA a bunch of years ago.” Gregory said, “Oh my God,” and made a low click in his sternum. “Then you have to come to our Bachelorette watch-party,” he told Noemi. “We have a whole group. We love Jen.”
Paul didn’t want to go. On the bus home, he slumped and rubbed his sore face. It’s so fake, he complained, and Noemi agreed, reality TV was super fake and dating shows the worst of all, but no, Paul meant Gregory and his crowd. “You don’t get what they’re like,” Paul said—as if this wasn’t nonsense, as if there were a human being left on the planet who could fail to know what Gregory’s crowd was like.
It was surprisingly bitter for Paul. Noemi was by nature the cynical one, and Paul the one who said Tloxtelians were as diverse as humans, and some of them, humans could work with. To make life better for all of us. Noemi loved Paul, in a harsh way, for thinking that.
They’d met at a summer street fair in Inwood. Paul was registering voters, which seemed to Noemi a fundamentally decent and pointless thing to do. Paul grinned and said, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain later your alien didn’t get elected,” and she’d laughed. Two dates later, when Paul walked her home, they discovered they rented in the same building. “Howdy, neighbor,” he said mildly, and Noemi said, “Only in New York!” A year later, it occurred to her he must have known all along, because he’d seen her address on the registration form. But by then, she had fallen in love with Paul, with his large and friendly nose, with his lanky, vaguely muscled farm body. With his way of saying things that were so hopeful, they made her ashamed for knowing better.
They lived together in a one-bedroom off Dyckman Street, with cracked tile in the kitchen and, in the bathroom, a tub jury-rigged into a shower, with a rickety tin halo supporting a curtain. They kept it tidy because they had applied to DHS’s Sustainability Office for permission to have children, and Paul knew there’d be an unannounced inspection. In the bedroom they’d fit a Skyrex crib that Paul had built in one enthusiastic sprint, along with baby-proofing the kitchen cupboards and reinforcing the shelves. Most nights, though, after an unbroken ten hours of case work trying to persuade beaten-down humans not to be terrible to each other, he was so drained, when he came home he spread himself starfish across the floor and watched her do all the chores. Noemi even walked Paul’s dog, a nervous, walleyed mini-Aussie named Grizabella, and when the sidewalk was too cold or they crossed a grate, she scooped her up and wrapped her in her jacket.
In the same way, Noemi would go to Gregory’s watch-party for him and ingratiate herself with the people who would decide their baby application. Noemi would tell them about her old friend, Esther, who was “Jen” on the show, and rehash the phrases she’d seen on celebrity glossies: THE CHOICE OF HER LIFE—I CAN’T LET MY HEART BE BROKEN AGAIN. She would say things like, “Thiago’s super cute, but Etgar’s better for Jen as a husband,” or, “I just hope she doesn’t get hurt again.” She couldn’t think of any time when Esther was really hurting. But aren’t we all hurting, anyway?
Inside the lobby of Gregory’s apartment building was a tall Christmas tree in gold lights, reflected in the clean, waxed floor, and a manger scene, with a fourarmed Mary and four-eyed Joseph gazing lovingly at the baby Jesus, among the ox and ass and sheep and a stern ceramic turkey in a pilgrim’s hat. Noemi was late, because the buses on Broadway were late. That, and she’d been knocked flat in the street by a Tloxtelian cop who thought “alien” was a slur and had a grudge for jaywalkers. (“The audacity,” the cop had hissed, crouched over Noemi in the slush, his rostral eyes dilated and flashing. “You saw me, and you crossed anyway!”) It had taken her twenty minutes to redo her eye makeup in the side-mirror of a parked car. Gregory Bradley answered his door, cried, “I’m a hugger!” and grabbed her. “Oh, you’re wet, aren’t you?” he said. Noemi burst into wild, gross laughter, and Gregory joined in like it was an old joke between them.
Gregory’s look was casual, neither entirely alien nor mimical. He’d pulled his face into a human configuration but didn’t flatten his muzzle or hide his lateral eyes. He kept two horns of his crest unshaved in the middle, like a mohawk, and his skin was a light, mushroomy brown. He wore a loose Thundercats tank top and skinny black jeans. He stared at her mammal breasts and didn’t pretend not to.
In the huge, overheated living room, other guests sat in summery clothes on a green sofa and a blueberry oval rug. Noemi was self-conscious over the cold and wet she’d brought in, but it amused them: “Feel it?” they said. “She’s colder than me.” “Paul’s girlfriend,” Gregory explained, with every introduction, and every guest offered a pleasant hum as they remembered how much they liked Paul. Except, when Noemi told them why she was wet, and who had bowled her into the gutter, she sensed a certain unfriendliness, so she played it up as a farce: “The audacity,” she groaned. “Who says that?” And the Tloxtelians relaxed, because one uptight cop was nothing to feel bad about. Noemi managed a smile, and their plastic faces smiled back.
On the TV, a commercial played for Garbagia, another reality show, about humans on boats cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A man in a banana-yellow rain slicker was being hauled onto the deck, tangled in nylon netting.
Unconsciously, Noemi tugged her shirt, which kept clamming to her back, and Gregory insisted she take a change of dry clothes. She didn’t, but accepted his bathrobe. It made her look like an insane person, even putting aside the two extra sleeves. He fretted over the food he’d set out—locust tacos, fried spiders— and Azalea, his wife, said, “Look, you’re embarrassing her.” Gregory’s big, fishy lateral eyes blinked slowly, and Noemi forced out a tiny squeal: “I am addicted to fried spiders, are you kidding? You’re going to have to hide these.”
Azalea towered over Noemi at six-foot-five, in a cream tunic and a choker of New Mexico turquoise, and wore her horns shaved to stubs, with no hairpiece. Noemi almost liked her. There was something honest in her jumble of alien and human traits, a sense of self-possession. She smelled like Chanel and almonds.
On the sofa was one other human, a woman in her late forties who everyone called Human Julie. The other Tloxtelian female, curled on a leather recliner, was Cersei, Paul’s boss’s boss. Noemi remembered her from the holiday party; she was on a shortlist for the new governor’s cabinet. And by the drinks cart stood, surprisingly, the only full-blown mimic, named Chance. A moptop hairpiece covered his lateral eyes, his hind-arms were bound in his gingham shirt, and he’d pulled his muzzle into a perfect human face, down to the scoop of his nostrils and the philtrum over his lip. Noemi knew what to do here: “Wait,” she said, knitting her brows, “I am so stupid—you’re human, right?” And Chance panted happily, even remembering to send red into his cheeks. “Me? Do you think so?” he said. “No, I’m not human. Oh, ha-ha-ha, no. What an idea.” When Noemi shook his hand, she felt his scales, as fine as sharkskin, and subtly cold, like a vinyl cushion in a restaurant.
When Noemi was seventeen, a male Tloxtelian had slipped into her college dorm room and crawled into her bed. She’d woken rough-brained, darkly, sensing his chilly body stretched alongside her own and odd joints pressing into her back. For the rest of the night, she lay awake, holding herself still, breathing tightly, picturing the way their talons curled like exotic knives and remembering the piled bodies that she’d stumbled on in the hazy, bombed-out streets, bodies shredded to ribbons by those talons. Each hour she’d spent unmoving crumpled her into a smaller wad of herself; her classmate slept. When, after the second night this happened, she petitioned the administration for a lock, a university lawyer explained to her that, because Tloxtelians were primarily ectothermic—cold-blooded— they sought warmth in physical contact. They could go into shock if they got too cold. The lawyer took pains to clarify that the student’s actions weren’t sexual and asked Noemi to be culturally sensitive. When it happened a third time, Noemi dropped out of school and got her cosmetologist’s certificate. Ever since then, she’d associated the aliens’ mimicry with their cold-bloodedness, as if they as a species had sidled up to humanity for its heat.
On Gregory’s TV, The Human Bachelorette had started. They were showing clips from the previous episode, a group date on the set of Harry Potter XX: Harry Potter and the Cup. The producers had let Jen and her six remaining bachelors dress up in robes and chase each other up the castle steps with wands, shouting, “I’m going to spell you!” Jen looked straight at the camera and said, “I still believe in true love—even after everything I’ve been through.” She smiled to herself in a pretty way Noemi had never got right; she cocked her head as if talking into a phone against her ear, then did something magical with her lower lip. “I’m taking a leap of faith,” Jen said, “and I’m asking the guys here to take that leap with me.”
“Leap, leap,” Cersei tested the word on her mouth. Her muzzle pulled tight like a fist.
From the couch, Gregory looked up at Noemi with a low, guttural click in his sternum.
Everyone in the apartment was drinking. The aliens gave tipsy displays of facial flexions: muzzles went long, ears shrank into the head. Human Julie went bright red, and everyone went bright red trying to match her. Noemi downed her flute of Prosecco like a shot. In Malibu, The Human Bachelorette’s host sat down with Jen and brought in her friend Maya, from last season’s Bachelor. Maya looked like a woman having a terrible birthday.
“Jen, you’ve been looking for true love your whole life,” said the Tloxtelian host, whose name, horribly, was Harrison Chris. “Now you’ve narrowed it down to five amazing bachelors—well, Maya has something to say about that. Maya?”
And Maya blinked literally one million times and said, “Jen, I’m so sorry, I’ve just learned that one of the final five bachelors is Tloxtelian. He’s a mimic. But I don’t know which one.”
The camera zoomed. Jen’s head ducked forward; her mouth jutted open.
This was the moment the show had built to for months. It was this season’s twist: in the premiere, Harrison Chris had told audiences at home—but not Jen—that this year, some of the men were Tloxtelians passing for human, and if Jen picked one in the finale, he’d win fifty thousand dollars. But what made the twist so much worse was that the mimics were bad. Really, truly bad. Thiago, the Brazilian bachelor, looked like a nightmare, a man-sized doll come to life. None of the mimics came close to Chance, for example, sitting properly human-like on Gregory and Azalea’s couch. Noemi wasn’t sure how obvious the fakes were to Tloxtelian viewers; her clients said they didn’t know. But Jen knew—of course she knew. And for the gimmick to work, she’d had to pretend not to know all season.
Maya, too, had to deliver the news like it was some giant shocker. She wasn’t great at it. Her gesture for stunned compassion—flat hand to mouth, three glossy nails covering her lips—looked like she was hiding a burp. Jen was amazing, though—incomprehension, tears, disbelief, but carefully. Not disgust, never disgust.
“I had no idea. I had no idea.”
Jen talked the same way she had in the LA salon—when she was Esther—that eager upspeak that made everyone think she wanted their advice. Esther did faces, and Noemi did hair, or horns if the client grew out their crest. Noemi was the senior style-engineer, but Esther had outpaced her, moving to a station by the front window. They didn’t compete, but they noticed each other. Esther was thinner and a little taller, but Noemi considered herself the prettier one. Esther dressed down, wore strappy sandals and men’s shirts like smocks, gobbed in flesh tones, like she was the sexy painter girlfriend in an old movie. She seemed immune to the relentless micro-insults of the clientele—“They’re just such dorks,” she said. “They want to be our friends, that’s all that matters.” She’d posted this same line to her socials, with a selfie of her and her client laughing so hard the camera angle went up their nostrils.
Noemi and Esther hung out after closing, over drinks, working their way toward confessions. Noemi leaned in so close, she could make out the grain of Esther’s eyeshadow; her drink smelled like bubblegum. In fifth grade, Esther said, there was this alien boy who liked her, so his family had her over to play. She ate as much as she could stuff down, and he listened to her talk like no one at home ever listened to her; he heard her. But on his birthday, when he read her card, he threw a fit because her handwriting was better than his. Esther showed the scar on her shoulder, moon-white and fine as thread, where his talons had got her. She’d told the boy her mother had written the card. She proved it by writing it out again, using her left hand, and from that day on, she wrote left-handed—she laughed at herself. “Ugh, I’m the worst.”
Noemi told Esther about the coldblood who’d crawled into her bed in the dorms and how the administration had done nothing about it. But as Noemi spoke, Esther’s focus slid somewhere else, and her face closed up—gentle but definite, like someone tidying a kitchen and clicking the cupboards shut, and Noemi realized she must have misunderstood the point of Esther’s story.
Now, lately, whenever Paul tuned out or listened to her absently, Noemi feared some similar misunderstanding had put a distance between them. He wasn’t present; he locked the bathroom when he showered, even though her friends said that a year in they should be peeing in front of each other. Yet he couldn’t tolerate the idea of her not being in his life: some days, Paul told her, he forgot humans had once had Earth to themselves, had been their own people, and it was Noemi’s stubborn anger that brought him back to himself.
At work, in New York, she kept her walls up, but inevitably, she talked strangely under her client’s questions. Are you happy? “Not really.” Do you hate us? “No, I just get frustrated sometimes.” Do you have a lover? “Yes, and he’s everything I ever wanted.” What, in addition to the perfect lover, would make you happy? “A million dollars.” Do I look human? they would ask, without fail. “Yes, definitely.” Like which human? “Like Diana Ross. Like Louise Brooks.” Her clients would chortle and duck their heads—No, no, you’re just saying that because it’s your job—and each time Noemi cranked out a laugh. “Are you crazy? Stop it, you’re stunning, you know it.”
On Gregory and Azalea’s TV, The Human Bachelorette played clips from previous episodes, inviting viewers to speculate: Which bachelor was the Tloxtelian? There was the group date at the mattress store, a vast warehouse of beds, where the mimics had talked firmness and prices with Jen, and the human men all lay down and slept. The New Zealand ranch, where the sheep had shied from the Tloxtelians, trotting sideways, and Jen kept a straight face the whole damn time. The time she and Etgar (human) had dug this hole, this big hole in an empty, brown field, and made gooey eyes at each other over it.
Now alone with Maya, Jen wiped her tears with the tips of her middle fingers. “It’s just, I have this paranoia some of the guys weren’t here for me,” she said, sniffling. “That they’re doing it for the show? And now I know it’s true? Why would they do that? Aliens don’t—Tloxtelians, I mean—they don’t even need money.”
“They want to be on TV?” Maya suggested.
“Do they think I’m stupid?” It was no longer clear whether Jen was talking about the alien contestants, or about her alien producers too. Her voice took on a gritty, wet, raw tenor, like the humiliation she’d buried all season long was bubbling up through her floors.
“Guilt? What about guilt?” said Maya. In Gregory’s living room, Noemi held herself still and her expression neutral.
“What about guilt? Do you think they feel any guilt? Do you think they feel shame?”
The show played a clip where one of the men had tried to warn Jen, Don’t some of these guys feel “cold” to you? Jen sent him home that episode, telling him he was the real cold-hearted one. He backpedaled—there must have been some off-screen talk with the producers––there was something thick and uneven under his shirt, and the camera never showed his right arm. He’d said it out of jealousy, he confessed. “Oh, brother,” Chance said. “Jealousy, seriously? You don’t go on the show if you don’t know what you’re getting into.”
“It’s all so fake,” Cersei agreed.
Then Chance turned to Noemi and for a second, he looked at her wearing Paul’s face. It was quick, but her reaction was immediate: she threw up a bit in her mouth, then had to swallow it back, salty and citrusy. Chance-as-Paul had smirked at her, she thought.
On TV, Jen was still crying, her long, lovely, pale hands covering her nose. But what if I accidentally slept with one? she asked Maya, and Maya’s eyes basically fell out of her head.
This was Jen’s most brilliant play yet; this was why the producers adored her and talked in trade interviews about her instincts. In the apartment, every crest and horn-stub pulled toward the screen. Titillation and arousal were human emotions, too warm to describe what aliens felt; but they had something taking up the same space. Now Noemi was hearing that sternum click all around her, not just from Gregory. But Gregory’s lateral eye tracked her sidelong, anyway. She pulled his bathrobe tight over her chest.
Cersei got a call that looked like the governor-elect’s number, so Gregory paused and let the cable box record, while Cersei crept off on all fours. Human Julie stacked the used plates and Noemi followed her into the kitchen. Over the blasting faucet, Noemi asked, “But how do aliens show sexual interest? Their libidos are different, right?” Human Julie glanced at her strangely, and Noemi regretted she hadn’t been subtler.
In LA, a client had once asked Noemi on a romantic date—that’s how he’d said it, a romantic date, wary of comic misunderstandings. He told her, “I will fly you in my hydrogen-fueled private jet to the San Francisco Opera, and in our seats, you will lacrimate with emotion.” She said she’d think about it. He was an incredible mimic, the best she’d ever worked on, handsome, porcelain, eerily correct. Glamorous, because that fineness of detail suggested an inconceivably intense devotion to human beauty. Aggressive, as a kind of breaking and entering of her erotic imagination. She’d asked Esther: Tloxtelian libidos were seasonal, it wasn’t like she would have to do anything with him, right? Esther gave a bawdy, penetrating laugh: “Coldbloods are weird,” she said. “Like weird weird.” It made Noemi feel prissy, girlish—as if Earth hadn’t already lost everything, as if her squeamishness weren’t tiny and delusional compared to what billions had suffered. She’d moved to New York, to avoid finding out what she’d do.
Once Paul, all in tears, had asked her why she never cried in front of him and Noemi, struggling to open a pocket packet of tissues, laughed and said, “Why I don’t lacrimate?” She never saw Paul cry again. She’d done something terrible, that night, she’d crushed him down. A few months later, when he’d said, shyly, he wanted to be a father, she at once had said yes. Yes, before she could be nasty about it.
Because, let’s be honest here, Paul’s wanting kids was an astonishing statement about the kind of world he thought they could provide a child. It made Noemi a little wild, seeing Paul not see that. But she knew her reservations were rooted in ugly feelings; she was a cynic who longed to be proven wrong. In neighborhood parks, she hid her eyes behind dark glasses and watched the mothers with their children: defiantly, passionately adding to the shattered human species. It was the truest act of resistance there was; the most important thing she could ever do, though it made her feel like a zoo panda.
“Do you have kids, Julie?” Noemi asked. Human Julie said no.
Back in the living room, the paused TV screen showed a promo still of Jen reclining in a bikini, surrounded by her bachelors. Her frozen face looked into Noemi’s, as if challenging her to take stock and wonder why her life had never gotten beyond a salon-mirror reflection.
Noemi leaned down and tapped Gregory’s shoulder. “Can you show me your bathroom? I get lost in this place.”
In the bathroom, she asked Gregory to take down her hair. When he handed her barrettes to her, his palm was a chilly, cakey texture. He was a head taller than her and lean, like a racing dog. His mohawk horns shone a watery shade of ivory, and his rostral eyes were human in their expressiveness, also like a dog. She started to sweat, and he felt it. “I think you ate Chance’s taco back there,” he said, faltering, then clammed up.
Noemi said nothing, only brushed out her hair shamelessly slowly. Gregory took her in with worshipful alien attention, dazed by her sturdy body, but also by the stroke of the hairbrush, how she twisted it; how her nose tensed in concentration. Humans were bad at stepping outside themselves, orienting toward others, but for Tloxtelians that was true religion. They’d traveled twenty light years to look at Earth, its promiscuous wonders. Wasn’t that something—to be cosmically seen, cosmically heard?
“You know about Paul’s baby application, right?” she asked him.
“Progeny license,” said Gregory.
If she had Paul’s child inside of her, then a part of Paul, of his gentleness and goodness, would be a part of her too. His vision of that future she didn’t believe in would grow and grow, warping her body around it. Transformation requires audacity. “I’ll take you up on that change of clothes,” she said.
In his bedroom, Noemi undressed and pulled on Gregory’s shirt, his boxer briefs, his sweatpants and hoodie, taking care with each item, considering its grain on her skin. Her good blouse and skirt, in a damp pile. She turned her back to him, as if that was anything; she saw him in the dark glass of the bedroom window as Azalea joined him in the threshold of the door. Noemi shivered and a sympathetic shiver rippled over her hosts. She remembered what Paul had told her once about the Tloxtelian God; cheerfully, as if he were reading a brochure aloud. The alien god was an oversoul generated by their species’ life force, who saw through their eyes and infinitely remembered, so intently that Its memory was a type of immortality. From this faith came a duty to propagate into the universe, to see all life and in this way, preserve it. Wasn’t that beautiful? Only later did Noemi think to point out how many lives had been lost to this looking. In the moment, she’d said, You talk like an alien sometimes. Which had hurt Paul unfairly. She cut him down when he wasn’t ready, when he’d forgotten how cruel she was. Now the Tloxtelian God, gazing out through Gregory and Azalea’s eight eyes, would see and know her badness, and remember it forever.
Everyone was waiting in the living room to restart the show. No one remarked on Noemi’s change of clothes, though they noticed. Human Julie met Noemi’s gaze wearily. “It’s Thiago,” Chance was saying. “It has to be. I know a mimic. Noemi, isn’t it Thiago?” Azalea slunk in on all fours. She crouched beside a china cabinet, head bobbing as she judged its height, tensed, and sprang to the top without even a rattle of cups. She settled on a blanket there, which Noemi had been unable to explain but hadn’t thought to worry over.
Noemi said, “I think it’s Thiago.” She felt drunker than she was, at the far end of a much longer night. She watched herself move and speak with soft confidence. Azalea on her cabinet looked splendid and mythical, like something Noemi had made a magical wager with, a dragon in chunky turquoise.
On the TV, Jen and Etgar rode elephants over desert scrub in eastern Utah. They shouted and reached their fingertips absurdly toward each other from the backs of their mounts.
The doorbell rang. Gregory answered it and Noemi heard, from the hall, “I’m a hugger!” A tiredness kept Noemi’s gaze fixed on the TV, long after she should have turned to see who’d come in. It was Paul, squinting from the cold night air, in his hooded anorak and his heavy work boots.
“It’s Paul,” Gregory announced, and the guests answered, “It’s Paul,” with the same mild pleasure. Cersei paused the show again. They asked Paul how cold it was and expressed dismay at how cold he reported it to be. “Hi, babe,” he said to Noemi, and he sat beside her on the couch, bringing down with him a brisk wash of air. He kissed her on the side of her lips. Gregory said, “Look what the cat dragged in,” then, “Feliz Navidad!”
“How was the Bronx?” Noemi asked Paul. She was surprised to find him here, in front of her, but felt tipsy and fearless. She loaded a cracker with spinachartichoke dip and slotted it into his mouth.
“Amazing. Really great,” Paul said, chewing. “My four o’clock made me hot cocoa. And they had a dog named Coco. Very kind people, very dysfunctional situation, they use humiliation for discipline, so we’re putting them all in family therapy, like, stat.”
“Stat, stat,” Cersei repeated uncertainly.
“You finished early?”
“Mm. Last family wouldn’t open the door. So, I thought I’d come here.”
“I had this one family—” Chance started, but then he saw no one was listening.
Human Julie and Gregory gave Paul a recap of Maya’s bombshell reveal, sitting at his feet like schoolchildren. Paul checked Noemi’s face for confirmation they were supposed to not know Thiago was the mimic. Chance sulked off, fed up with all the attention being so much on Paul, and Noemi wondered if all mimics were in the end just attention-seekers, longing to be the object of fascination after so much time spent fascinated.
“You were right,” Paul whispered to her, as the episode restarted, “coming here. We have to be smart.” Only then did his gaze fall on the clothes that were clearly not hers: the four-sleeve hoodie, the “Virginia is for Lovers” t-shirt, the maroon sweatpants straining over her hips. He smiled confusedly. Only then did Noemi finally feel shame, not for what she’d done so much as for how it would reduce her in Paul’s eyes.
Jen took her suitors to a turbine farm in South Dakota, where vast arrays of fans sucked carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turned it, in one plant, into slabs of a durable plastic called Skyrex, and in the other plant, diamond-equivalents for jewelry and lasers. The episode had filmed in late summer, and a glimmering drowsy light washed over the dim prairie beyond the factories and cottonwood stands. Jen told the contestants to pick a stone from the diamond-equivalent plant that best represented her to them, and in this way, she’d know who was being honest.
The task was, of course, nonsense. But it had fairy-tale drama and the producers’ green light. Precisely because it was nonsense, Jen could declare anyone to have passed or failed, and because she was smart, maybe she would keep the mimic bachelor around until the finale, for maximum suspense, at which point, just maybe, the producers would let her choose a man she might actually love and who might actually love her.
“This diamond was pulled out of the sky,” Etgar said, placing a milk-white lump in Jen’s palm, “made out of the same pollution we dumped into it.” Etgar managed a forest carbon sink in Georgia and was passionate about remediation. “Jen, being a human being means owning up to our failures and reclaiming happiness out of them. That’s why this stone symbolizes not just you, but all of us.”
Thiago presented Jen with a perfect brilliant stone and said it was beautiful, and she was beautiful. That was how it represented her. It was hard to watch.
In the apartment, Paul rose to his feet, distressed. “I’m—just going to put my coat down.” He rounded the couch and miserably, Noemi let him go. His face winced and furrowed its way through that clutter of bewilderment and self-accusation that he fell into instead of anger—an emotion he leaned on Noemi for, so that it was difficult when he should be angry at her. She should let him have his space and then they’d talk it out later. But she needed to explain herself and see Paul accepting her explanation, in the exact way they’d never done before. The show’s pathological faith in scenes, where everyone hashed out their drama in gruesome high definition, had got under her skin and made her think clarifying herself was something vital and heroic.
She darted from the couch and into the hallway. And at the long end of the hallway, in front of the glowing tree, was Paul kissing Chance the mimic, whose face had pulled into a copy of Paul’s own. The two Pauls saw her. Her Paul looked completely opaque, like someone she’d only just seen in a crowd.
“Keep your coat on,” Noemi told him, trembling.
Paul drew the anorak zipper slowly up his neck. Chance said, in that maddening lizard flatness of voice, “You won’t see how the episode ends.”
Noemi squeezed past to grab her own coat from the closet. “Over it.”
Paul and Noemi broke up after another month of trying not to. Another apartment in their building opened, and Noemi took it. In the end she pulled it off briskly, devastated but enlarged, convinced it was the most hopeful thing she’d done in years. She kept Paul’s dog, and whenever she introduced the mini-Aussie to a man she was dating, she pretended she’d always had her. In February, her and Paul’s baby application was approved, and even though there was no question of it now, they shared a beer in the snowy park.
In the season finale of The Human Bachelorette, Thiago and Etgar both proposed to Jen. After two drawn-out hours, she picked Etgar, and America was delighted and relieved to find out he was the human, Thiago the mimic all along. “All I’ve ever wanted from the beginning,” Jen told the camera, “is to show people that love is still the most powerful force on Earth. We’re all on this beautiful planet together, and we can heal it together, if we don’t give up on love.”
Noemi watched it alone in her empty apartment, under a sheepskin blanket, the blue glow the only light in the room. She rolled her eyes and snorted.
On the night of Gregory and Azalea’s watch-party, on the bus ride up Broadway, Paul and Noemi had sat in wretched silence beside each other, under the glare of fluorescents. “It’s not what it looks like,” Paul said. Face so red, he looked feverish, infarcted. His voice died in his throat, and he quickly gave up on saying what it was. Noemi stared, daring him to elucidate, until she was disgusted with herself. Chance wouldn’t do that; no alien would stare without looking. Across the aisle was a young man who, from the waist up, was a beautiful blond idiot, he could have walked off a hashtag; but from the waist down he was wrapped in a dirty white towel, his legs and his feet were bare and red with cold in places, and in other places covered in brown filth that could have been mud but smelled worse. His pupils were dilated and ecstatic. Paul couldn’t look, or entirely look away. And Noemi thought, that’s us, that’s the human race today.
When they got home, enough time had passed that Noemi understood Paul would never tell her what exactly his relationship with Chance was. Part of her got that he didn’t want to lie to her and couldn’t give her the assurances she’d demand; but mostly, he couldn’t handle being the bad guy. Or, who knows. We’re all coping maladaptively, Paul had once said.
Paul crumpled up the newspapers he’d put down for Grizabella, who whined and sang and danced in circles as he sprayed the tile with vinegar.
After the Bachelorette finale, Noemi, a little drunk, texted Esther’s old number: so happy for u! if you’re ever in nyc… and gave her address. Noemi never got a reply. But the next December, she got a holiday postcard with a photo of Jen and Etgar holding hands in a moss-hung forest. The handwriting on the back was sweetly clumsy. Noemi taped it to the fridge and sometimes borrowed its happiness by lingering on the two figures as she passed. Or if a guy she had over saw it and asked, “Who’s that? She seems familiar,” Noemi would smile privately, with the benevolence of letting someone else have the last bite of cake, and say, “She’s a friend from LA, but it’s funny—you know how it is—close enough for Christmas cards, but we’re not really in each other’s lives.”