current

Living on Marxist Time

by Benjamin Chambers

      Forty years ago, the Overlords came in their great starships, parked them over the cities of Earth, and haven’t budged since. They brought world peace, prosperity, and big breaks on auto insurance. Yet no Earthling met or saw an Overlord until ten years ago. When they finally showed themselves, it turned out they were human, too. That was the first surprise.

      The second surprise was that they were headhunters.

      The third surprise – if not for Earth, then for me personally – came early one morning before sunrise, when I found one of the Overlords pissing on my front lawn and singing “We are the Champions” in a loud voice.

      (The fourth surprise was that Overlords, so accomplished at everything else, couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.)

      I’d never met an Overlord before – practically no one on Earth had. I knew he was an Overlord, though, because he was naked to the waist, a submachine gun was slung over his back, and on his belt, suspended by the hair, was the severed head of the Dean of the Business School, whom I hadn’t respected but had sort of liked.

      So I did what I had to: I went out and told the Overlord to beat it.

      This was difficult to do. I was in awe of the Overlords; we all were. They were filthy rich in comparison to us – they had a zillion starships the size of L.A., for starters -- and then there was the way they’d eradicated poverty and disease, and brought an end to spam overnight.

      Well! You’ll understand, then, why I thought twice before talking to the Overlord on my front lawn at all. I couldn’t just go up to him and say, “If you don’t get off my lawn by the time I count to three, I’m calling the cops.” There weren’t any cops to call, not anymore, what with the world peace business, and anyway, I didn’t want to get on an Overlord’s bad side, not when he was practically a god – if not individually, then at least in terms of what his culture could do to mine. Not to mention the fact that this particular Overlord was heavily armed and had a person’s severed head swinging from his belt. I had a family to think about, and I didn’t want to end up on his belt loop myself. While Overlords were as likely to take each other’s heads as ours, they couldn’t understand why we didn’t headhunt, and why we were always upset when they did it to us. So I had plenty of reasons to make nice.

      But I didn’t want a drunk on my lawn, whether he was an Overlord or not. And the fact that he was an Overlord only made me more determined to send him on his way. Okay, so the Overlords could park their starships over our cities with impunity, but that didn’t mean they had to personally come to my house and piss all over my wife’s begonias.

      Besides, I didn’t much care for them in the first place. I knew well enough we had plenty to thank them for, but no matter how badly we were screwing things up before they came, their arrival had made us permanent children. We were still slapping ourselves in the forehead over the simplicity of their solutions to our intractable social problems. It would’ve been easier if they’d been slime-mold creatures from Alpha Centauri, because then we wouldn’t have felt like such dolts. Having humans come along and get us all to behave made us rather depressed. Like we’d bungled it somehow, and would have to spend an exhilarating, blustery Sunday in the house at our mother’s skirts, instead of playing outside all afternoon … a Sunday afternoon that had already lasted 40 years and looked like it would go on forever.

“Go on,” I said to the Overlord. “Please. We’re trying to sleep.”

      “So schleep,” he said, “I’m not shtopping you.” Then he began to laugh. He put his hands on his knees and caught his breath, wiping his eyes. The submachine gun slid around front and he slung it back again.

      “I’m asking you to leave,” I said, eyeing the gun warily. And because it was unthinkable not to (he was an Overlord), I said it again: “Please.”

“I will wear earrings!” he said, beating his skinny, oiled chest. He had the ritual tattoos on his torso that were visible in every picture of an Overlord that I’d ever seen – colorful whorls and dreamy filigree – but they looked silly on his slight body. “Not a damn kid anymore.”

      “Just move along,” I said. It was four in the morning, and I was through saying “please.”

      “Up yours.”

      It was time to throw down. Thanks to world peace, however, which had arrived courtesy of the Overlords while I was in third grade, I’d never been in a fight. And now I was a cultural historian who couldn’t even get his students to turn their papers in on time. But I was damned if I was going to let an Overlord step all over me.

      I clenched my fist and started my wind-up. The Overlord laughed. “You won’t hit me,” he said.

      I really wanted to prove him wrong, but I wasn’t sure what the other Overlords would do if I hit their guy -- would a great laser shoot down out of the sky tomorrow, reducing my house and my family to a small pile of ash? So I checked my swing and said, “What makes you so sure?”

      He smiled. “My heart hash led me here.”

      He was invoking a solemn formula of Overlord hospitality. We all knew it from 40 years of Overlord virtual-reality soap operas. When someone said, “My heart has led me here,” you were supposed to reply, “May your heart find its ease in our home.” To say anything else was taboo.

      To hell with that.

      “Wasn’t your heart that led you here,” I said, my fist still raised. “It was the bottle.”

      The little Overlord looked shocked, but he recovered fast. He was cocky, not just from drink, but from some accomplishment. “My heart is no longer i’tepek.” I’tepek meant his heart had been heavy and filled with rage. Overlords’ hearts were always i’tepek before they went headhunting. Afterward, they were patak, happy -- literally, “filled with squid.” Something else we all knew from the soaps.

      He began to sing again. An aria from Don Giovanni, I think, though he was so off-key I couldn’t be sure. He stopped abruptly. “I’ve earned my hornbrill, I mean hornbill earrings. You gotta invite me in.”

      “I don’t gotta anything,” I said. “That head on your belt belongs to the Dean of the Business School. He didn’t use it much, it’s true, but it was the only one he had. So I’m telling you for the last time: go away. Your heart is not welcome here.”

      This was the gravest insult one Overlord could make to another.

      He reached for the submachine gun, then let go of it with an effort. “Your heart ish sick,” he said at last. “You do not know what you are shaying.”

      “I know perfectly well that you’re drunk, and that I’m telling you to go away.”

      He lifted his chin. “I don’t take ordersh from pongots,” he said contemptuously.

      “You will tonight.” Pongot was a derogatory term Overlords had for the rest of us. You never heard the term on the soaps, since theoretically we were all brothers, but everyone knew what the Overlords really called us in private. (The consensus among Earth’s anthropologists was that pongot meant something like “sticky goats.” We didn’t want to know any more than that.)

      The Overlord stepped closer, and then stood on his tiptoes so we could be nose to nose. “I have taken my firsht head and earned my hornbill earrings. Everyone knowsh I may demand your hoshpi, hospital      ity.”

      “Not this everyone,” I said. I bumped my chest against his. It should’ve felt silly, but instead it felt good.

      Just then, my wife called my name. I turned to see her standing on the porch in sweats, her eyes puffy with sleep. “Martin, what on earth are you doing?” she asked.

      I stepped away from the little Overlord. “Nothing, dear. Just –”

      “He wash gonna deck me,” the Overlord said. He put his skinny arm around my shoulders. “Werntcha.”

      And – I swear it – he chucked me on the chin like a baby. I nearly did deck him then, but after one look at my wife, I simply ground my teeth and nodded.

      “You were going to hit him?” my wife repeated, in the tone used by a hanging judge eager to skip the trial and get right to the fun part. But Margaret didn’t get dual doctorates in physics and chemistry by being a fool. She turned to the Overlord with narrowed eyes. Then she said reproachfully, “I didn’t know Overlords ever got drunk.”

      Now, I’d had a long-running debate with Margaret about the Overlords. I was against them; their promise that we would enjoy equal status with them had no definite deadline. Instead, the realization of this promise appeared to be set in some ever-receding point in the future. It reminded me of the Marxist idea of an end to history, when social perfection would at last be reached, so I called living under the Overlords “living on Marxist time” – though never in public.

      Margaret was pro-Overlord. Though it wasn’t in her nature to idolize, the Overlords could do no wrong in her eyes. It was her dream to be allowed to go aboard one of their starships and study its propulsion system. To finally meet an Overlord in person should’ve been a great gift. But now she’d met one, and I could see she was having doubts. I decided to press my advantage.

      The Overlord still had his arm around me, so I put mine around him and said, “Forgive me. A silly misunderstanding.” I waved an arm at our front door. “May your heart find its ease in our home.”

      His mouth yawned. At first, no sound came out. Then there was a hissing, followed by a deep, guttural burp that must’ve lasted twelve seconds. When it was done, he said in a small, pleased voice, “Okey-dokey, artichokey.”

      Margaret gave me a sharp look, but the Overlord and I shouldered past her and through the front door, still arm-in-arm. I helped him set his submachine gun down on the table in the entry hall, the table Margaret had gotten shipped from Ceylon. I covered the couch in the living room with a towel so the severed head wouldn’t get blood on it, and I had the Overlord lie down. “Pleased tameetcha, Misshush,” he said to Margaret, as she came in behind us, “damn pleased.”

      “You just lie there,” I said, because he was trying to get up again. “We’ll see you in the morning.”

      “Morning! Itsh morning now!” He was overtaken by a fit of the giggles. “Why aren’t you laughing? Too schtuck up to laugh whoosh, wi, with the Overlord?”

      He looked serious, so I mustered a sickly smile, and a chuckle that would’ve sounded anemic in a cat.

      “Gotcha! Didden I?” the Overloard roared, and began laughing so hard he fell off the couch. The Dean’s head, still on his belt, thunked to the floor with him, and got blood on the Persian carpet we’d gotten from Margaret’s parents. I could see Margaret wasn’t happy about it. Her gaze moved slowly from the carpet to the severed head, from the head to the submachine gun on the hall table, and then to me.

      “Hey,” I stage-whispered to her, “We’re hosting an Overlord.”

      Her expression didn’t change.

      “Thanksh for having me,” said the Overlord. He was holding the Dean’s severed head in his hands now, looking into the dead eyes. “Ol Porky face here don’ wanna smile. Sourpuss.”

      “That gun’s not loaded, is it?” Margaret asked.

      The Overlord grinned and wagged a finger at her. “That would be telling.”

      She shot me another look and I gave her my “What are you looking at me for?” look right back. I would have to be careful not to appear smug.

      We said our good nights and went upstairs and got back into bed. We were both quiet, and then Margaret said, in her steely way, “Martin.”

      “I tried to get him to leave.”

      “You nearly hit him – then you invited him in.”

      “Well … I was trying to make a point.”

      “More than one, I gather. But what were you thinking? We don’t hit people anymore, Martin. And that goes double for Overlords. Do you know what they could do to us? To Ellie?” Ellie was our daughter. She was studying Communications at the University of Denver, and she’d just come home for summer break.

      “What are you worried about?” I said petulantly. “I thought they only used their powers for good. Well – except for hunting people like game and chopping off their heads.”

      “Why do you always drag that into it? Think of all the suffering they’ve ended.”

      “Well I didn’t hit him,” I grumbled, “so you can stop worrying.”

      There was more silence while we studied the darkness. Then she said, “Why did he pick us?”

      “Pick us? He didn’t pick us. He’s just had too much to drink.”

      “Do you owe him money? He wasn’t the guy you sold the Dodge to, is he?”

      I burst out laughing, but she was serious. “An Overlord? Why would I owe an Overlord money? Besides, the Overlords could eat money three times a day and never miss any.”

      She didn’t say anything for a while. I started to drift off, but then she said, “Do you think he’d let me tour his starship?”

      I sighed. “That severed head on his belt? Belongs to the Dean of the Business School, or did.”

      “I thought he looked familiar.” She considered it awhile, and then she said, “I never liked him anyway.” And she finally went back to sleep.

      The next morning, the Overlord used up all the hot water taking his shower. He made polite noises when I served him coffee, but soon began talking about this great café back home where they really knew how to make a latte, and the bagels were like nothing on earth. Well they wouldn’t be, would they?

      He was less terrifying in the light of day. The severed head was in a box in our living room, his machete and submachine gun had been wrapped in an old towel and put out of sight in the hall closet. Margaret had given him one of my favorite dress shirts without asking me, so his tattoos were no longer visible. The shirt was too large for him, sagging across the shoulders and dangling to his knees. He’d rolled up the cuffs so his hands wouldn’t disappear altogether. He wore little wire-rim glasses and you could see his hairline was receding. All in all, he looked like an accountant on a discount beach trip.

      During breakfast, the Overlord ignored me and Margaret, preferring to read The New York Times while he addressed his poached egg with a long-handled spoon that Margaret had found for him in the back of the silverware drawer. (She even found him an egg cup – an egg cup!) I stuck to my usual scrambled eggs on toast and pretended I didn’t understand Margaret’s silent facial contortions meant to get me to strike up a conversation with our guest. When she finally broke the silence, his responses were so monosyllabic and distant that even she might not have gotten anywhere if it hadn’t been for our daughter, who came storming into the dining room in her bathrobe to accuse us of hogging all the hot water.

      Margaret stood up gracefully. “Ellie, we have a guest I’d like you to meet.”

      Ellie retorted that she didn’t care if we had head lice – and then she caught sight of the Overlord.

      “Arthur!” she squealed. “You’re here!” And before Margaret or I could react, she’d dashed across the room and jumped astride him. His narrow face popped out from her wild embrace, grinning, eyes darting from me to Margaret.

      “What are you doing here?” Ellie asked him. “You brute! I was text-messaging you all last night, and you didn’t answer! I thought you were ignoring me!”

      “No, I -- ” he started to say, but then she kissed him full on the lips.

      “You know each other?” I stammered. Ellie was usually demure, so this display of affection was particularly surprising.

      “Of course, silly,” Ellie said, after breaking the kiss. “Arthur was a guest lecturer in my Introduction to Human Resources seminar.” Later, we would learn that his full name was Arthur Pimm, and that he was a minor functionary in the Overlords’ Department of Prosperity. But at that moment, what she was saying didn’t seem possible.

      “This is a practical joke, isn’t it?” I said to him. “You’re not really an Overlord, are you?”

      Margaret weighed in before he could answer. “An Overlord came to your class, Ellie, and you never mentioned it?”

      Ellie shrugged. “Well, his lecture was so boring -- ” She poked him in the stomach, teasing.

      The Overlord laughed dutifully, but he seemed a trifle hurt. “I assure you,” he said to me, “I am an Overlord. I don’t engage in jokes with Earthlings.”

      “You’re not here by accident, either,” Margaret said. She wasn’t asking.

Arthur shook his head. “Ellie, my sweet,” he announced, kissing her gently on first one eyelid, then the other. “I have earned my hornbill earrings.” She squealed again, and threw her arms around his neck. He winced and disentangled her. “Be gentle: I have a splitting headache.”

      “Nothing like the Dean’s, I bet,” I muttered.

      “Hush,” said Margaret, stepping on my foot. To Arthur, she said, “What’s the significance of these earrings?” Margaret asked. “I’ve heard them mentioned, I think.”

      “A young man earns the hornbill earrings when he takes his first head. Now that I have earned them, it means I can marry.”

      “Hch?!” I said. I think.

      But Margaret, the light of my life, smiled in a way that I can only describe as professional. “Are we to understand that you and Ellie are engaged?”

      I continued to sputter. The three of them laughed at me in a good-natured way.

      “Your father’s having a little trouble keeping up,” Margaret said to Ellie. “But we’re both very happy for you.” She and Ellie embraced. “Do you suppose we could have the reception on an Overlord starship?”

      “What?” I said. A roaring was filling my ears. “What?”

      “Daddy,” Ellie said. “Arthur and I are getting married.”

      “Oh no you’re not,” I said. After a lifetime of hearing the term, I finally understood what it was to have one’s heart become i’tepek. Full of rage and pain. Margaret wouldn’t meet my eye.

      “Daddy’s such a kidder,” Ellie said to Arthur.

      I wasn’t, and she knew it. “Let’s talk about this in private,” I said.

      “Mom!” Ellie cried. “Tell him this isn’t the Dark Ages!”

      I ignored her. “Arthur, I think it would be best if you gave us some privacy.”

      He lifted Ellie off his lap and stood up. Then he removed his glasses and began polishing them on my borrowed shirt. “You can’t interfere with the right of a free citizen of Earth to marry,” he said. “There will be trouble.”

      “Let me get this straight. I can’t have a say in my daughter’s marriage, but you can interfere with the right of a citizen of Earth – we’ll agree to disagree about whether he was free or not -- to keep his head attached to his body?”

“You speak of a contest of hearts, in which all men take part. Those whose hearts become i’tepek must … manage them.” He scowled. “It’s common sense, yes?”

      “Not in the least.”

      He had put his glasses back on, and was glaring at me over the tops of the rims. I glared right back. We were standing chest to chest again, much as we had been the night before.

      “Oh for heaven’s sake,” Margaret said, taking my arm and pushing me ahead of her into the kitchen. Over her shoulder, she said, “Arthur, Ellie -- let me handle this. Ellie, will you please see our guest out?” Ellie’s cry of outrage was cut off as the door to the kitchen closed.

      I paced the length of the counter. “I cannot believe how smug that sonofabitch is. He takes a head and expects us to embrace him as our new son-in-law?” I stopped. “You realize that if Ellie goes through with this, Arthur’s family would be our inlords -- I mean overlaws? Ridiculous!”

      Margaret folded her arms and waited for me to wind down. When I finally did, she said, “Our daughter would be the first Earthling to ever marry an Overlord. First on our block, first in the nation, first worldwide. Do you realize what that means?”

      I scoffed with real bitterness. “Is that all you care about? Our daughter is about to marry a murderer, and all you can think about is what you’ll learn about their propulsion systems?”

      A flush came into her face. “That was not,” she said carefully, “what I meant. I want to see Ellie happy just as much as you do. But as the first person to marry an Overlord, there’s an extra burden of responsibility that falls on her, and us. We are talking about the marriage not just of two individuals, but two peoples. We need to accept them, warts and all, just as they accepted us, warts and all.”

      “I hate to nitpick,” I said, “but they were carrying one hell of a can of wart medicine when they first showed up.”

      “And we should be glad they did. They brought us peace, prosperity, an end to acne, and—“

      “—big breaks on auto insurance,” I said. “Yes yes yes, I know all that. We can list the benefits in our sleep. But they’re headhunters,             Margaret. What right do they have to tell us how to behave?”

      “If they were morally corrupt, do you think they’d have built the starships they did, or come to earth with such gifts?”

      All these arguments had been made before. The Overlords’ headhunting had been debated over and over on TV and in the press. But I didn’t have anything new to say, either. “Headhunting is not a minor foible! What if Arthur hadn’t run into the Dean before he came here? Suppose that was my head on his belt last night?”

      “Stick to the point,” Margaret snapped. “Your daughter wants to marry an Overlord, and we need to support her. You can’t stop it, and if you put your foot down, I’m telling you, there will be consequences.” With that, she left the room.

      I went back out into the living room. Ellie was curled up on the couch, staring out the window.

      “The Overlord went home?” I asked.

      “Arthur went home,” she said, “because you made him.” She uncurled suddenly and slammed her coffee mug down. “Daddy, you can’t forbid me to marry.”

      I smiled sympathetically. “I know it’s hard to hear.”

      She narrowed her eyes just like her mother. “You don’t want me to be happy.”

      “Of course I do. But I can’t believe you’re surprised. There’s a very long tradition of fathers forbidding their daughters to marry murderers.”

      “He is not a murderer! And you better not let him hear you say it or–“

      “Or what? He’ll chop off my head?”

      Her eyes were fierce. “He’ll have to satisfy his honor.”

      Oh, boy. Right then I was wishing that we’d gone to church more (or at all, frankly), and spent more time drilling her in the sixth commandment. “Look. We’ve got the head of the Dean of the Business School in a box in our living room, and do you know why? Because your boyfriend took a submachine gun and killed him, and then chopped off his head with a machete.”

      Ellie stared at me fixedly, then said in a hoarse, shocked voice, “You bigot!” Then she ran out of the room.

      The day of the wedding drew near. The ceremony was going to be held at the Crown Point Observatory in the Columbia Gorge, but the rehearsal dinner was held on one of the Overlords’ starships – on the starship, it developed, of the Ox, the leader of the Overlords. “Ox” was our nickname for him, not theirs. A New York Times columnist had dubbed him “O-squared” because he was the Overlords’ Overlord. This had caught on. At first people called him “Oxy,” before settling finally on “the Ox.” No one knew if he minded.

      The dinner itself was nice enough, but we were all tense. No Earthling had ever been on one of the Overlords’ starships before, and they weren’t letting the press on board. In fact, they wouldn’t let anyone in our extended family come, either. So it was just us and a small group of Overlords, including the Ox. We were in a small room, not that different from the conference room at a Holiday Inn.

      The Ox sat at the head of the table. He was, if anything, even more unremarkable a physical specimen than Arthur. Balding, his nose was squashed flat on his face as if put there by a child; when he moved, though, it was with slow majesty, as if he were moving under stronger gravity than he was used to. The other Overlords were smaller and lighter-skinned than I, but very good-looking.

      Conversation faltered. Margaret was waiting for a chance to sneak off to take pictures of the hull’s superstructure. Ellie, who had not yet forgiven me, was unhappy that she had to sit by me, as was the Overlord custom, instead of Arthur, and was quite frosty whenever I tried to be fatherly with her. I had an additional reason for being uncomfortable, as I’d consulted a colleague in the anthropology department and learned something about Overlord customs that had given me an idea. The Overlords, too, were quite stiff and their condescension was papable.

      Dinner began at last, and an Overlord quartet covered our discomfort by playing something that sounded like Dixieland, written by Bach. The Ox toasted us repeatedly, and we drank a lot. The Overlords were fond of a brand of corn liquor that went down smoothly, but turned out, over time, to have quite a kick – I could see why Arthur had been so drunk the night he came to our house. After a while, it became apparent that the Overlords were secretly playing a drinking game. Any time Margaret, Ellie, or I used certain words, like “happy,” or “planet,” one of the Overlords would shout for a toast. Then we’d all have to raise the plastic skull-shaped mugs we’d been given and down the contents.

      Almost without our noticing it, the conversation flowed more easily. As we got more and more tipsy, the music grew louder, and the Overlords expanded the number of words and phrases that required a toast, so more toasts were called for, and pretty soon we could barely get a sentence out without having to drain another mug of the powerful stuff. Arthur thought it was hilarious. “Is my culture!” he kept shouting, pushing his mug at me. I bided my time.

      At last, the Ox stood up. By this time, all of the Overlords, male and female, had removed their shirts. The Ox’s tattoos glistened across his small chest and drooping paunch. Hornbill earrings had been stabbed into his earlobes. A machete hung from his waist in a ceremonial scabbard filigreed with fine jewels.

      “The time has come,” he said, when everyone had quieted, “for the bride’s father to welcome Arthur’s heart into his ancestral home.”

      All eyes turned to me: the Overlords’ and my daughter’s with calm assurance, and my wife’s with shrewd surmise. “Don’t screw this up,” Margaret hissed.

      Ellie shot a smug glance at Arthur, then looked back at me.

      “Arthur,” I said in the formal phrases we’d all learned, “your heart must be very large to have earned my daugther’s kopok.” I wasn’t sure what “kopok” meant, but I’d been drilled in what to say. “Before tonight, only three hearts have gathered in our hut, have swelled and shrunk with the seasons. Now I ask that yours join ours. I ask that you bring your spear to our hearth so that we may eat. I ask that you bring us your penis-sheath so that we may have grandchildren—“ (Ellie blushed at this) “—and your machete so that our enemies will never best us.”

      Ellie threw her arms around my neck and squealed with happiness into my ear. Everyone else roared and lifted their mugs, but I shouted them down.

      “I offer you this, Arthur, on one condition. As the bride’s father, I have this right.” This was my surprise, the obscure detail I had learned from the anthropologist.

      There was a tense, puzzled silence. Overlord looked to Overlord; Margaret looked at Ellie, then at me.

      “That is an old custom,” said the Ox slowly. “It is no longer in fashion.”

      “I must insist,” I said. I did not take my eyes from Arthur.

      “Daaad,” said Ellie slowly. “What are you doing?”

      I stared at Arthur and said nothing.

      He stared back, uncomprehending at first. Then he leaped to his feet and banged the table with his fist. “You cannot ask it! It is an insult! I refuse to let my machete grow dull,” he declared. “That is no life for a man. I would not deserve the name.”

      Around me, the other Overlords bristled. Even the women seemed to have sharp knives ready to hand. Margaret kicked me hard again. I ignored her. To Arthur, I said, “I must insist.”

      The Ox stood slowly, one hand on the hilt of his machete. He stared at me, looked me up and down as though wondering how I’d ever come to be in his dining hall. “Let us have a word,” he said. “In private.”

      “I’m within my rights,” I said.

      His lip curled, but all he said was, “Nevertheless,” and pointed toward the door.

      I nodded, and he led the way out of the hall, escorted by a pair of armed Overlords. We went into a small office that appeared to be a control room. Banks of video monitors glowed on two walls, where images bounced and flickered.

      The guards went out. The Ox leaned against a desk, arms folded across his oiled chest.

      I stood awkwardly in front of him, my cloth napkin from the dining table still in my hand. I started to speak, but the Ox held up a hand.

      “We may look the same but we are not, as you’ve found out, to your grief.” He looked at me levelly. “We are speaking frankly.”

      I swallowed. My head swam from the corn liquor. “That’d be my guess.”

      “We are well aware of your inexplicable distaste for headhunting. I mean your collective distaste, as well as your personal antipathy. But you should know that we cannot jettison it lightly. Arthur will never lay down his machete. He has only just become a man. It is also how I became a man, and my father before me, and my three brothers. Our women play their own part in the ritual, and it defines them too. You wonder how we came to you in peace? Headhunting is where we put our rage and shame, our hatred of others and ourselves. You have nothing like it, and so your condition of peace is artificial. You are not quite ready.”

      “Ready for what?”

      He laughed without apparent mirth. “Do you think I really want Arthur Pimm to marry an Earthling? Of course not. But it is necessary. Only forty years go, all your people knew was war, poverty, and telemarketers. Your civilization was only a few decades away from total collapse. We saved you. From your own violence and ingenuity.”

      “And you think we’ll soon be rid of these faults if Arthur marries my daughter?”

      “It is a necessary step.”

      “One of the last before we are free of you?”

      “One of the last.”

      So much for Marxist time, I thought to myself. If he were to be believed, history would come to an end after all. Not that I believed him.

      “More importantly,” he went on, “we will be free of you. It has been our duty to help you along, to allow conditions to ripen – we haven’t enjoyed it, but we have done our duty. You will soon be like us—“

      “Never!”

      “—like us,” he repeated, “and when you are, we will be free of our responsibility here, and we can carry out more meaningful tasks.”

      “You sound as though you don’t have a choice.”

      He shrugged. “We have been told it is necessary.”

      “Told? So you have your own Overlords?”

      “Did you never suspect? I can see you didn’t. But it is immaterial. This marriage will happen, whether you want it to or not. We are tired of       babysitting.”

      It wasn’t my fault. The guy must’ve had a glass jaw. All I did was tap him lightly with an uppercut, and he folded right up and headed for the floor a second later. Unfortunately, he hit his head on a corner of the desk on the way down. There was a sickening thud, a spray of blood, and his body came to rest on the floor.

      He was dead. I know; I checked.

      I could only breathe very shallowly for a while. First, there was the physical shock of actually hitting another human being, Overlord or not. My skin felt weird, my hand hurt, and remorse followed right behind the adrenaline.

      I stared at the Ox’s hard face, quickly going gray. The monitors around me blinked. There was no sound.

      I tried to think. I hadn’t killed just anybody; no, I’d killed the Ox, leader of the Overlords. How could I have done it? Could it be undone?

      I was surprised to realize that my rage had not drained away. It was still there, simmering. Everything the Ox had said to me had been like a kick in the head: it was exactly what I’d always known the Overlords felt but would never say in public. The condescending bastards. How dare they come to us and pretend to be morally superior? When everything they did was predicated on a system of random murder and decapitation?

      But I’d done the very thing an Overlord would have done in my shoes: murdered my antagonist. Not intentionally, maybe, but it didn’t matter, as he was still dead. I’d done wrong.

      Then there was the practical side of it. No one would believe it had been an accident. What would happen to me? To my family? Would the Overlords visit reprisals on them, or even on my neighbors and acquaintances? Would their Overlords step in, disappointed that I had scotched their great, mysterious plan?

      My gaze fell on the Ox’s machete, still in its gleaming ceremonial sheath. It symbolized the difference between us, the Overlords’ strangeness. Their willingness to embrace their own inhumanity. Their power over us, the knife edge at our throats. The way in which they casually insisted that their culture was better, more relevant than ours. Because of this, my daughter thought I was a bigot. My own daughter.

      I spat on it.

      I spat twice, three times, four. I spat until I had no spit left.

      It wasn’t enough.

      The only way I can explain what I did next is to say that my heart was i’tepek. All I wanted to do just then was to visit upon the Overlords a little of what they’d done to us.

      Slowly I got up and stepped to the door of the Ox’s chambers. I told the guards to summon Arthur. Then I went back to where the Ox’s body was laid out and I drew out the machete.

      When in Rome ... The thing is, it’s not clear what you should do when Rome comes to you. The Overlords had taken away our worst problems, but left us with an existential one: how to live as children in their care, the entire planet being, in effect, a ward of the state. Why that should’ve bothered me so much – me, I mean, as opposed to anyone else – I don’t know. And maybe I was only a conduit for the anger and humiliation of billions of Earthlings. Maybe all that’s just an excuse.

      I was hoping to be arrested, perhaps executed. It would’ve been easier. I figured I’d lost my wife, my daughter, and my own self-respect.

      The funny thing is, I wasn’t jailed, tried, killed or executed. My family wasn’t threatened, no reprisals were made, no laser beams came out of the heavens to vaporize my house.

      Instead, I became a minor celebrity.

      Arthur had told me it would happen when we were still at the rehearsal dinner, after everyone found out what I had done to the Ox. He was still drunk from all the toasts. “You’ve pashed the final test to join the federashion of shivilized rashes … I mean races.”

      “We’re the same race,” I protested. “We’re both human.”

      He sneered. “No. You’re pongots. But never mind. Earth’s childhood is now over.”

      “Uh-huh,” I said. “Why do I get the feeling that we’ll still be in your shadow?”

      He grinned nastily. “As our masters say, ish a matter of hishtorical necessity.”

      “Wait,” I said. “Your masters are Marxists?”

      He quickly shushed me, putting a finger to my lips. “Don’t say it. Is a dirty word for ush.” He looked quickly around to see if any of his fellow Overlords had overheard. When he saw they hadn’t, he relaxed and added, “They want us to become dialectical materialishts. Be glad you don’t have to do that yet.”

      A tiny suspicion flared. “What comes … after that?”

      “Free trade,” he said gloomily.

      I grabbed a plastic skull-mug of the corn liquor and took a healthy draft. It didn’t help: the whole business was still unbelievable.

      Arthur chucked me under the chin. “That schtupid look on your face really works for you. Very nice, for the cover of Time, eh?”

      That was how he told me I’d be a celebrity – and that my wife and daughter would be, as well.

      Under the circumstances, what with Earth’s childhood being over and all, Ellie and Arthur had an even bigger wedding than they’d planned on. It was held on the Overlord starship, the press was invited, and it was broadcast all over the world, along with the news that we were no longer in thrall to the Overlords.

      I guess it means we’re going to be shipping out soon and meeting other rashes – I mean races – from around the galaxy that we never knew existed. We always thought the Overlords were it. Perhaps we’ll be asked to do babysitting duty for others, just as the Overlords did for us, and we’ll be able to bring them the glories of our own civilization: fish tacos, for example, and infomercials.

      It’s not all bad. Margaret is quietly proud of me, and is quite happily studying up on Overlord technology. Ellie and I have reconciled, and Arthur and I sometimes go out for a drink. Best of all, after news got around about what I’d done, I no longer had any problem getting my students to turn their papers in on time. Lots of people wanted to interview me. One journalist asked me about the Ox, and how I felt about “going all Overlord on his ass,” but I’ve kept quiet.

      You see, my heart is not patak, even though my car insurance rates just recently dropped again. I feel like I got away with – well, murder. And reports of Earthlings engaging in headhunting have increased dramatically. That saddens me.

I feel it most when I visit Ellie and my new son-in-law at their home. I wouldn’t go at all, except for Margaret, who makes me. I hate sitting in their living room near the fireplace, because on the mantel is the Ox’s shrunken head with his squashed nose and sneer, staring down at all of us. The thing is, whenever I look at it – and I try not to, but how can I help it? – I swear the bastard’s grinning at me.

Benjamin Chambers' work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Mississippi Review, ZYZZYVA, American Foreign Service Journal, and many other journals. He edits The King’s English, an award-winning online journal that specializes in novella-length fiction, and writes a guest column on New Yorker fiction at Emdashes.

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