The True Meaning of Smekday (Smek 1)

Finally he sat still and nodded his head. “So no Bigfoot. No Nessie.”

“Probably not,” I said. J.Lo sounded sad. It was sort of sad, come to think of it. Sad to admit that there wasn’t really anything so mysterious and great. And then I remembered for the eight hundredth time that I was talking to a space alien. I was trying to explain to a space alien that there were no such things as monsters.

“If something that big lived in a lake in Scotland,” I said, “I think we’d have found it by now.”

“Yes. It would haveto be very big to be a lochniss monster.”

“Yeah.”

“Bigger even than the snakewhale.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Bigger than the what now?”

“The snakewhale,” he said. “That lives in waters near Scot’sland. I am not knowing the right name for it.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I don’t either. I don’t know much about Scotland.”

J.Lo began to drive again.

“One of the Boov ships,” he explained, “it wasto collecting interesting Earthland animals, for like a zoo. The Boov had elephants, and the armadillo, and many bugs and fish. Many other things.

“Say,” he said with a grin, “like your Noah’s arkboat.”

“Yeah. Sort of. And this snakewhale was one of the fish?”

“Yes. I am sorry I do not know the reals word. I only remember it was captured near your Scot’sland. Very pretty. Sixty feets long, if you are counting the neck.”

I looked out at the road for a moment, mouthing the words Sixty feet long. Counting the neck.

“Can you draw it?” I asked.

J.Lo stopped the car, and I fished out his paper and pencils. And he drew the snakewhale:

I stared at it for the longest time. I stared so long I must have hurt J.Lo’s feelings.

“It is…not very good,” he said. “I made the flippers too small.”

“No,” I said. “’Sfantastic. I bet it looks just like her.”

Maybe there really was a spaceship, I thought. Way back then.

“Could one of your Boov ships have visited Earth so long ago?” I asked.

“I am doubting it. Earthland is not in a very nice neighborhood. Maybies it was the Habadoo. Say, do you wants to hear a funny joke about the Habadoo? It seems that a Boov, a KoshzPoshz, and a Habadoo all are walking inside a mahahmbaday. And the Boov sa—no. Wait. I am forgetting to say the KoshzPoshz is carrying a purp. So the Boov—no. The KoshzPoshz says—”

I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about the whole UFO craze. It felt ridiculous, now that we’d been invaded twice, to think about all the Top Secret alien visitors we’d supposedly had all these years. It was all crop circles and mystery, when the truth turned out to be as obvious as a giant purple ball you could see from five states away.

“…So then the Habadoo, he says: ‘That’s not your purp, that’s my poomp!’” J.Lo hiccuped with laughter.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“You are not a fan of ethnical jokes, ah? Look, is okay if I tells it, I am one-sixteenth Habadoo—”

“Y’know, I don’t want you to get your hopes up too much about seeing a crashed spaceship. I was just thinking about all those old UFO stories, and they all agree that the army or NASA or someone hid the spaceship someplace called Area 51. I don’t know where that is.”

“N’aasa?”

“Yeah. NASA.”

“In Boovish, ‘n’aasa’ means soft and beige.”

“That’s not what it means here. It’s a name,” I explained. “It stands for something else.”

“The name…is standing?”

I thought for a moment.

“It’s a name that’s made up of other words and…stands for them,” I said. “UFO’s the same way. Or TV or…or J.Lo.”

“What.”

“What, what?”

“You did to say my name,” said J.Lo, “but then afters my name you did not say anything—”

“No,” I said, “that’s not what I meant. I was saying that J.Lo’s like NASA.”

“Do not.”

“Do not what?”

“J.Los do not like the NASA,” he said. “We do not even know the NASA—”

“Okay. No. Time out. I mean that NASA stands for something, just like J.Lo stands for Jennifer Lopez.”

“I do?”

“Yes.”

J.Lo frowned. “I suppose I might do if he asked me.”

“NASA,” I said, “stands for…National American Space…Association. Or National Air and Space…something. I don’t remember.”

“I stand for Jennifer LOH-pez,” J.Lo whispered.

“Or Never Answer Stupid Aliens,” I said. “Maybe it stands for that.”

“Aaah.” J.Lo nodded. “You are meaning the NASA is an acronym.”

I stared at him for a moment, then frowned and kicked the dash.

“Yes.”

“And it is being a kind of…space club?”

“Yeah. It was part of the government. They built satellites and space shuttles and things.”

“And the soft beige space club hided the ship?”

“Maybe. Nobody knows. The government says that none of it’s true. There are people—were people—around here who claimed to see UFOs all the time, but the government always said they were just weather balloons. The UFOs, I mean.”

“They are to hiding something!” shouted J.Lo.

“Jeez,” I said. “All right.”

J.Lo was still driving when we hit the highway sign and skidded over the shoulder. I was rooting around in the back for Pig’s food. But as Slushious hurtled forward, I turned to squint into the green reflected light from the road sign, which had impaled itself into something really important-looking on the car hood, and watched as we snapped the barbed wire, terrified the antelope, fishtailed past the all-too-accurate WRONG WAY sign, and barreled toward a fiberglass shed.

“Hit the brakes!” I shrieked.

“No working!” said J.Lo, pumping the pedal. “Sign pokery in they! ALARM!” His English got really bad when he was under stress. He swerved around the shed, and used his free hand to pound the dashboard again and again in the same spot, as if something good would come of it.

“Activate!” he shouted at the dash. “Deploy!”