The Egg's Journal
By Richard Raucci

ogos.

That means "the Word, the producing of words."  It's funny that this is the first time the thing on my back has given me what seems like a direct command.  Usually it's a gentle suggestion, a pull in a certain direction, along with the glowing feeling of well-being that suffuses my life nowadays.  But as the months go by and the blood seems to quicken, I feel driven to record the experience.  I suppose it's just another way of being a puppet, but I have no feelings of resentment or anger anymore, so I'm going with it.

*     *     *     *     *

I should start at the beginning.  I suppose most of you know all about The Visitors, but bear with me.

They came down in the spring, all 7000 of them, 18-foot tall monolithic humanoids, apparently made of a metallic type of stone.  They moved into random spots around the world, floating down somewhat evenly over the globe.

It was impossible to ascertain their objective.  They seemed to have none.  And in the most galling fashion, they just totally ignored us.

They were interested in different types of patterns.  A ring of them, in New York, set up around the Chrysler Building, and just stayed there and stared up at it.  They liked the works of Louis Sullivan, American architect, and moved into downtown Chicago to set up camp around the former Carson Pirie Scott department store, and into the Midwest to circle some of the banks he designed.

They weren't only interested in architecture.  They also liked nature, and spent time in the redwood forests and along the Sino-Asian steppes, and in the Middle East desert ranges.
I suppose that was where the real trouble started.  Generally, they just pushed over anything in their way.  You couldn't damage them, and the time they had been attacked by gangs in the US, they had just stood there, immobile.  And as they had been not doing anything but look around, it was hard to justify any major plan to get rid of them.

Then the Palestine-Israel debacle happened.  A group of the visitors had gone to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, just to stare.  This didn't go over well.  The next day, a group in the desert were attacked by Israeli warplanes.  On the same day, a suicide bomber from the PLO detonated himself at the group that had surrounded the Pyramids from the start.

There had been some weird reports about people disturbing the visitors simply disappearing over the past few months, but they were hard to corroborate.  A military-obsessed sheriff in Atlanta had used a war-surplus tank to knock one of them down; he and his tank were gone the next morning.  A contingent of Chinese troops had made a mortar attack at the Great Wall of China; when the dust cleared, The Visitors were still there, but the troops were gone.

But nobody was prepared when Israel and the Palestine simply ceased to exist the next morning.  Reports from near the scene stated that towards midnight, the view of the border towns got wavy, and faded out.  Surveying the area, observers found nothing at all, just more and more desert.  Jerusalem was no more. 

In Saudi Arabia, more room was made for The Visitors at Mecca, and life went on.

The pressure for the human race to get involved is strong, however, and the officers in the US military were hard-pressed to be told that there was nothing to be done. Meanwhile, The Visitors continued to view art and architecture, experience nature, and ignore us.

It hit us personally in the United States off the Antarctic, when the Air Force used a small tactical nuclear weapon to try to destroy a group surrounding the magnetic North Pole.  The bomb never went off, and you all know what happened next, how the Air Force and all of its planes, the White House, and the Senate and the House Of Representatives all ceased to exist the next morning.

There was mounting panic for a while, as the government restabilized around the Supreme Court.  At least they left us the Army and the Navy.  We had finally got the point, here and abroad, that they wanted to be left alone.

Then they went and changed their paradigm.

*     *     *     *     *

Paradigm.

That's a funny word.  You'd never think, looking at me, that I'd be able to use such a word. 

I'm a big guy, the husky kind, linebacker-sized.  I've always been big, with a broad strong back, and a beetling brow.  A former girlfriend called me a "Cro-Magnon" once.  I didn't know what it meant, but I liked the sound of it.  I looked big and stupid, and I guess I was, at that.

I suppose being picked for an egg, and having them mess with my brain, is changing all that, giving me the power of words.  The Logos.  Just another thing they want from us.  But I don't mind.  They've pickled my brain so that I don't mind.  I can't even mind not being able to mind.  I just write.

*     *     *     *     *

The second phase of The Visit came when the aliens stopped sightseeing, and moved into the parks in pairs. Around the world, they'd showed up in large areas like Hyde Park and the Grunenwald, to small city parks in Moscow, Beijing, Paris, and all over the United States. They just stood there, facing each other, not moving.

Locally, here in San Francisco, I saw them in Dolores Park, in the Mission District, where I live.  We'd go down there with a picnic cooler full of beer and a radio blaring Mariachi, and throw empty cans at them.  For us, it was macho, and they didn't seem to mind.

Then, one day, I was leaving work late (I used to be a damn fine mechanic, despite my size), skirting the park in the twilight.  There was a commotion around the two figures, facing each other.  The skin of their fronts was beginning to grow soft, gelid.  I could see it shine in the moonlight.  There seemed to be small veins shot through with gold running through them.  The skin softening ran all the way from the top of their featureless heads, down the neck and the torso, down their massive legs, to the ground.  There was a smell of ozone in the air as the twin surfaces, only a foot apart, began to roil and spark and smoke. 

Then they moved together, slowly, with lighting discharges between them, sealing up, head flowing into head, torso to torso, arms to arms, legs to legs, in a huge shuddering mass. 
It was then I realized I was watching them have sex.

*     *     *     *     *

There were reports of this kind of activity from around the world, with slight variances as to time.  It became an attraction for a while, and then we got used to it.  After about a week joined together, they came apart in great steaming masses, and just stood there again.  One of the figures of a pair had a small six-inch lump on their front that the other didn't, that was the only change.  It was speculated that they were going to reproduce, and the world moaned, for a while. 

If some of us had realized what that had meant, we would have kept on moaning, and never stopped.

*     *     *     *     *

Once you get used to having something ignore you, it becomes a great shock to have it start suddenly paying attention. 

I was hanging with my boys in the park again, playing music, ignoring the lumpy devils.  Then I noticed my compadres packing up the cooler, stealing away slowly, and avoiding my eyes.  I must have been high on cerveza, because I couldn't figure it out.  Then I felt that prickle on the back of my neck, like the cavemen did when the sabre-tooth was nearby.

I turned around, and the two monsters were looking at me, appraisingly.  I moved back, and they moved forward, flanking me.  I knew I'd never get out of the park.  There was a helicopter overhead, and newsvans were pulling up, but I knew no one would interfere.  Not if they wanted to go on existing.

They pinned me down, and I started praying to Mary Magdalene and any of the saints I could remember.  One of the aliens ripped the shirt from my back.  I figured I was going to be a post-coital snack, a tidbit.

Suddenly there was a commotion, a rending, tearing sound.  I twisted my head round, and saw a slick, dripping, curiously wet mass being pulled from the second alien.  It was the lump on her chest.  I only saw it for a second before I was pushed down again, but as it came loose, I could see thousands of tiny small slender tendrils reaching forward, trying to hold on.  Then there was a thump, and the thing was on my back, and the tendrils were digging into me.

I suppose I must have screamed and gone into shock.  I'm fairly sure that my heart stopped, I died, and floated above the scene for a while, looking down.  But the thing started pumping something calming into my bloodstream immediately, and soon I felt fine, better than ever.

I stood up, and went home.  That's when everyone started giving me a wide berth, like all of the other hosts in the world.  A medical team from NYU tried to pry one off a Central Park subject for analysis; it wouldn't come off, and the team went home dejected, knowing that they wouldn't be there in the morning, and neither would their hospital.

So there were no doctor visits during this pregnancy, but I seemed to know exactly what to do.  I began to eat, ballooning up to 370 pounds in a few weeks.  I brought home bushels and bushels of food, just plowing through supermarkets with everyone avoiding me.  There was a welter of shopping carts at the foot of my house in the Mission; I'd just push them to the side, dump the next one on, and drag my food upstairs.

I felt great.  There was a panorama in my brain, with several areas I could dip in and out from.  One was a continual orgasm, a direct feed to the pleasure center of my brain.  Another was a scenario of a world where The Visitors had never come, where I could go live my old life, and know that The Visitors were only a dream (who said faceless bastards didn't have a sense of humor?).  There were also superhero and barbarian fantasies, where I could rule a world for decades in my mind.  There was a time limit on the pleasures, however, and the pod on my back would kick me out and render me lucid when it was time to get food or go to the bathroom.

In the lucid times I'd watch television, and see how my other hosts were getting along.  The reporting was done from a distance, but it was still being covered, because the world, or what was left of it, wanted to know what would happen next.  Curiosity, the human disease.

The other hosts were being isolated, collecting food, blissing out, just like me.  Some of them were becoming thick and stiff, though it wasn't hard to figure out why. The lumps on their backs were growing into them.

Then they disappeared, all of the hosts were off the streets, the few news crews that followed them home never coming back.  This formed a news blackout that kept me to myself.  I knew I could become morbid, but the thing inside my head wouldn't let me.

I smiled.  It was all going to be okay.  I had noticed the thickening, as if my parts were all coming together.  I slept naked, in a fetal position.  It appeared that my body and limbs were becoming beveled, the lower and upper legs neatly tucking into each other, the upper and lower arms curving into my chest, the head ducking down into my chest.

Each morning, as I awoke, it became harder and harder to unbend.  My limbs came apart with a sticky sound, pulling out of their cavities.  My head untucked with the same sort of squishy feeling.

This morning, it took all of my strength to pull apart.  I doubted I'd be able to do it again.  I didn't really want to do it again, either.  I was in love with this process, in the same way that a person with a broken leg can love the attention they get from the injury.

 There was also a change in the program running in my head.  There had been some kind of an impersonal direction to this whole affair from the thing on my back.  The alien placenta management system had kept a distance.

Now the egg was calling me, and it was personal.  The child inside me wanted me to know that it appreciated me being its egg!  It may have just been the drugs in my head, but I felt like crying.  But my eyes were scaly and chelated, and I seemed to have lost my tear ducts along the way.

*     *     *     *     *

I've spent the last day before going under writing this journal.  I know she made me do it, but I don't care, because at least it shows that my child is capable of being grateful.  And maybe she got that from me, from the human race.

I don't know.  The moon is full, and I seem to be an egg.  Time to lie down now, and unshoulder my burden.

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