Cube-ism Is Not a Style

by Jeffrey Greene

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

My wife and I had passed the age of sixty when our friendly next-door neighbors, a decade older, noted a disturbing milestone. Always observant and an avid walker, Ruth informed us that she had counted the number of Cubes in a ten-block radius of Morgan Drive and realized that the figure now stood at exactly one hundred. She also noted that, although the tear-downs in the entire neighborhood had continued unabated, other styles were beginning to predominate, most particularly a more traditional, white-washed, peaked-roof model.

She seemed to believe that no more Cubes would be built now that the “target number” had been achieved, and she was determined to read something sinister into this even number of Cubes, which she, like us, tended to blame for the decline of the neighborhood from a true community into a mere assemblage of houses.

It was true that the area seemed to have settled into a long winter of isolation, the streets nearly devoid of the sound of children, the hermetic silence of the Cubes an ongoing admonishment of their neighbors’ well-lit houses, seasonal yard decorations and campaign signs posted during election cycles.

I tried countering her implied, if not quite stated, conspiracy theory of a construction goal of exactly one hundred Cubes per ten-block radius with the suggestion that it might be a coincidence. After all, I told her, the trend of the last twenty years was that infill construction in the neighborhood would proceed until the last original house was replaced with some variation of what we’d already seen.

Ruth and Ivor’s decision, the following spring, to sell their house and move to the same retirement community to which our neighbor south of us had relocated some years before came as a shock to our complacency, what little we still had. They’d been our closest and best neighbors since we’d moved in, and it was hard to see them go. We couldn’t argue with Ruth’s stated reason for leaving: “It just doesn’t feel like home anymore.”

Things got very quiet on our street after that. We still walked every day, still enjoyed a drink and a grilled dinner on the deck when the weather was fine. But beyond the obligatory nods and smiles of the neighbors who’d stayed on, we had no one to whom we felt we could turn in an emergency. All of our close friends lived elsewhere.

It was early June when I began receiving anonymous messages on my desktop computer, not emails, more like hacks. These statements — pronouncements, really — would just appear in upper-case black letters on the screen, superimposed over whatever I was reading or writing. The first one was a simple declaration in capital letters, though with a hint of something sinister behind it: “PROFOUND CHANGE IS ALWAYS UNEXPECTED.” It remained on the screen for about ten seconds, then disappeared.

Two days later, another one popped up: “CUBE-ISM IS NOT A STYLE. IT IS A CHOICE.” I quickly wrote it down before it vanished, wondering if the writer had meant to write “Cubism” instead of “Cube-ism.” Given the unsettling changes that the Cubes had brought to our neighborhood, it wasn’t much of a leap to assume that the writer was a Cube dweller himself, maybe even our next-door “neighbor,” and had intended “Cube-ism” as a definition of the reclusive life-style of those who lived embedded like queen termites inside their Cubes. And if so, were these one-way assertions as close as I was likely to get to communicating with this person I’d never seen? I could try answering in my own way, by knocking on the door, or leaving a note on the doorstep, but knew how futile that would be.

So I waited, and twenty-four hours later there was a new message, the most unsettling so far: “WHAT CHOICE?? TO LIVE OR DIE.” These messages always seemed to occur when I was using the computer, leading me to believe that the writer had considerable technical advantages over me and, although I’d installed up-to-date security software, had easily hacked into my computer, using it to... what? Harass, threaten, or warn?

I told a friend more knowledgeable about computers than I was about these messages, but he seemed more curious about how it was done than the content of the messages themselves. He suggested that I take a picture of the next one on my phone. It was three days before another one appeared, and by this time I’d dropped my guard and left the phone in another room. This message was even more upsetting than the last one: “PREPARE FOR CHANGE. BE AWAKE AND DRESSED ON JUNE 11 AT 4 A.M.”

I had been telling Christine, my wife, about the messages, but she believed we were being hacked and that the messages were either a sick joke or a distraction while our essential information was being stolen. But there was no evidence that any of our financial data had been compromised, and I was less and less certain that it was a joke, although I hoped it was. She was amused by the latest one.

“I suppose you’ll be awake and fully dressed at Zero Hour,” she said.

“Probably,” I admitted. “Doesn’t take much to keep me awake these days.”

“Well, if I’m lucky, I’ll be asleep,” she said. “Try not to wake me up.”

Maybe it was the slight paranoia that had been with me ever since Ruth had counted a hundred Cubes in a ten-block radius, or the gradual attenuation of fellow-feeling on our street, but I couldn’t suppress a growing anxiety. Something told me that the sender of those messages was obliquely reaching out to me and, probably, others, to warn us that something new, something hitherto unknown but directly connected to the construction of the Cubes, was about to happen.

If we older folks ignored these warnings, we pre-Internet people, the ones who had the necessary working knowledge of computers but also remembered rotary phones and unlocked doors and people on their porches having drinks with next-door neighbors while watching their kids playing together, we might come to regret it. I didn’t necessarily believe that some terrible event was about to occur, but still planned to be awake on June 11th at four in the morning. At worst, I would lose a little sleep.

Well before June 11th, I began to experience insomnia, like our sleepless neighbor, and I, too, began sitting on our deck at three and four in the morning, or taking walks up and down the street, trying to exhaust myself. Very late one night I left the house, opening and closing the door quietly so as not to wake Christine, intending to walk to the bottom of the hill and back.

As I stepped onto the sidewalk, I peripherally glimpsed someone standing in front of the Cube. With startling quickness the figure leapt backwards inside, as if yanked by a rope. My brief impression was of a squat, pyramidal person, thin-shouldered and bottom-heavy, with tent-like black clothing, a small, hairless head, and skin the color of a toadstool.

I remembered that our neighbor had seen, in the brief instant when the back door was opened, a blinding light, but the open door this time revealed complete darkness. I stood there a moment longer, strangely unnerved by this first and probably only sighting of my next-door neighbor, then continued out into the street and began walking. Nothing else happened, but I couldn’t get that tail-eyed glimpse of the Cube dweller out of my mind.

I told Christine what I’d seen, and although she had a habit of making gentle fun of things I found disturbing, it was obvious that it bothered her. Still, on June 11th at four a.m. she was asleep and breathing deeply, probably made possible by the diazepam she took most nights. I was sitting in a lawn chair on the deck, enjoying the coolness and clear sky. A crescent moon had already set. The street lights were on, as they always were throughout the night, if dimmed during these empty hours before dawn. Then it occurred to me that it wasn’t the streetlights that had dimmed, but the sky.

I looked up and saw something I couldn’t understand. It was a black, square-shaped blot against the stars, perhaps as high up as a passenger jet, although I couldn’t have said what it was. At first it didn’t appear to be moving at all but, as I stared up at it, as curious as I was frightened, I saw that it was getting larger. It took me a while to accept the fact that something really big was slowly descending.

Did I think it was a space ship? Why wouldn’t I? Isn’t that always in the back of our minds, implanted there in childhood by innumerable science fiction movies?

I went back inside and out through the front door. Surprisingly, there was a small crowd standing in the street, and everyone was fully dressed, and I realized that they, too, had received the anonymous message to be prepared for an unspecified Change.

We were all looking up in awe at the black thing coming down, the perfectly square base of which kept blocking out more and more of the sky. It was beginning to seem that whatever it was intended to land rather than hover, and panting for air over the realization of what that meant, I ran back inside and woke up Christine, told her to dress quickly and meet me on the front lawn.

The edges of the square now almost extended from one horizon to the other. Some desperate people were getting in their cars and roaring off, but it seemed obvious that trying to drive out from under it before it landed wasn’t going to be possible. It was completely black, featureless and silent, without the faintest hum of engines. It can’t land yet, I thought. It has to wait for us to get out from under it.

By now, the civil defense authorities had set off their rarely heard sirens, and lights were coming on in many houses. Then I noticed something else that only augmented my rising panic. With a low, eerie drone, the Cube next door, as well as the one up the street and no doubt all one hundred of them in our neighborhood, were slowly descending into the earth.

Now I understood why the pit for the cube’s basement and foundation had been dug so deep: it had to accommodate the entire house. And it wasn’t a leap to conclude that what was about to crush every house, tree, car, animal and human for miles around was the Cube of Cubes, the Mother Cube.

I bounded upstairs and found Christine dressed, confused, angry and as terrified as I was. Then I heard a loud whooping noise from my office computer, and a message in large black letters appeared on the screen, flashing on and off: EVACUATE TO PROXIMATE CUBE IMMEDIATELY. Christine wanted to bring jewelry, medicine, additional clothing, but I very loudly assured her that there wasn’t time.

Grabbing her by the hand, I all but dragged her outside. She looked up and began to shake, as I did. A black ceiling that seemed to go on forever was a couple hundred feet above the tall pine tree in what had been Ruth’s yard, and the early-morning darkness deepened with it.

Seeing a flashing red light emanating from the now ground-level roof of the Cube, we stumbled toward it, as did other neighbors whose houses were “proximate” to this Cube. People with stricken faces, crying, shouting, panicking, people I didn’t really know beyond years of nods, waves and hellos, crowded around a door-shaped opening in the roof, leading to a circular metal stairs equipped with tiny footlights that led down into total darkness.

There was, I’m sorry to say, a good deal of pushing, especially after we heard, then saw, the tallest tree in the neighborhood, a tulip poplar two houses north of us, snap like a kitchen match as the descending Cube reached it and kept coming. There was no escape from it, none at all, except downward, so we, too, descended, unhesitatingly, all twenty-five or thirty of us.

Parents with young children, the periodontist who lived across the street and her leashed German Shepherd, a family of Sikhs, an Italian family of four, older couples, one with a grandchild in tow: every face was familiar, yet made new and strange by fear. Some had weathered major snowstorms, even a long-ago hurricane, as we had but, in the extremity of the moment, we knew that we had entered a new phase of our lives, thrown together like refugees from a war, and as uncertain of the outcome.

When we reached the bottom of the ladder and stood huddled together in the unwelcoming darkness of the Cube, pierced by the echoing shouts, screams and tearful outrage of children and adults alike, we both heard and felt, mere yards above us, the settling down of a mountain’s weight on what had been our neighborhood, and who knew how many others?

As we, the involuntarily colonized, awaited the first appearance of our rescuers — or were they our conquerors? — we blindly searched the blackness and saw reflected there, in our outraged imaginations, our flattened houses, trees, cars, power lines and the obliterated minutiae of our lives, and knew that, whatever was going to happen to us, that however and wherever we went, if indeed anywhere at all, it would be inside the walls of a Cube. We were all Cube-ists now.