Abnormal Occurrences by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page A

who did all the skilled work, and we were supposed to do the cleanup, sweep the floors, carry out rubbish, and so on, but we couldn’t seem to meet their standards. Finally they put us to digging ditches and filling them in, in a wasteland area, but hard as we tried, we’d end up with a series of holes with piles of sand between them. A shovel just doesn’t seem to do what it’s supposed to when one of us is wielding it.”
    His manner was so sincere that I could not withhold a belief that there was substance to the outlandish story.
    “Come along,” I said, leading him back to the kitchen. “Please try some of the tinned foods.”
    After a short refresher course in the technique of sitting, he took a chair at the kitchen table and satisfactorily lowered himself onto it, but fell off when trying to pull it, with himself, forward. He was not hurt, however, either in body or spirit. It would have been hard not to find him ingratiating; he was trying so hard to catch on to new ways.
    As it turned out, he preferred the oil to the sardines, licking the former off the latter and then dropping the fish onto the plate as one discards the cob when the corn has been stripped away. He was innocent of the uses of knife and fork, and wiped his greasy hands on the lapels of his suit. When I urged the paper napkin upon him, he polished the plate with it. With the worry that any beverage containing alcohol might affect him deleteriously, I found a can of Sprite and poured a glass of it, over ice.
    Suspecting that in the absence of instruction he might do anything with the liquid but take it into his mouth, I told him it was exclusively for drinking.
    He laughed politely. “Good heavens, you must think us even more barbarous than we are. I should say that drinking was instinctive and pretty much the same throughout the universe.” He plucked the ice cubes from the glass and tossed them onto the table, then poured some Sprite into his left palm and, lowering his head, lapped at it dog-fashion.
    I decided to let that go for a while, and was about to introduce him to peanut butter as applied to a graham cracker (one of my own favorites for which I would not have apologized to Brillat-Savarin), when I heard the slamming of the front screendoor. Before remembering that such was Myra’s preferred way of reminding me that the spring was too weak to do the job unassisted, I assumed that one or more of Wonk’s associates had become impatient for his report as to the local availability of food, and though Wonk himself had proved innocuous, I was not yet free of apprehension: they were after all the hungry crew of an alien space vehicle.
    But it was Myra who burst into the kitchen. She was at least as angry with me as when she had left, I’m sure, for it is a point of honor with her to hold a grudge interminably, but she was also by reflex a thoroughgoing optimist with respect to men she met for the first time. Irrespective of their age, appearance, or type, she could always project some association of value, if not lover then father or brother or just someone good with hammer and nails—and I found that an endearing trait, no doubt because I am much the same when it comes to women; perhaps we could be called pragmatists.
    In any event, Myra lost her glower on seeing my guest. “Hi,” said she, advancing with outthrust hand. “I’m Myra Clendenning.”
    “Myra,” I said, “this is Wonk. Wonk, my friend Myra. Now, Myra, you might find this hard to accept at first, but if you noticed on the way in, there’s a space ship parked in the field next door. Actually it’s a real flying saucer, from the planet of Wurtz. I didn’t believe in them, either, till this one showed up, but there it is, and Wonk here came with it. He and the rest of the crew are without evil intent. They landed because they’re out of food. Now, as you know, we’ve got a few tins of this and that, and I’m introducing him to things he has never tasted.”
    Wonk