Los Grises

After being fired from a job he had held for more than 40 years, this venerable old man went home. Days went by, and he still kept thinking about how unfair the supervisor had been in firing him. It was a very monotonous and repetitive job. His task was simply to fasten screws in a leather-working shop to make holes for synthetic-leather furniture. However, Manolo was an intelligent man, and although he didn’t aspire to a promotion, he was loyal to his job, hoping to be rewarded someday.

The boss always flattered the supervisor because he was his son. The head of the largest furniture company in the city was an older man with a large family. He lived on the outskirts and would arrive in his simple Rolls-Royce, always dressed in a clean, elegant white suit. He entered his office, which had a huge glass wall so he could watch his workers from above, while the supervisor went in and out, usually to argue about some personal family matter. Yet in work-related issues, it was generally the supervisor who handled employee positions.

This supervisor was somewhat malicious with them. One example was when a coworker—who was in charge of adding tacks and rivets to the wood so it could connect with the synthetic leather—couldn’t come in one morning and needed a replacement. The supervisor not only asked him for the reason he had missed work, but fired him with no justification at all. Days later, the supervisor found a letter dated weeks earlier saying the man needed an emergency colonoscopy because he had probably swallowed something that had to be removed before something worse spread through his body. He didn’t know this, and that was just one of several similar situations. Manolo didn’t know the supervisor was a cruel person.

One of his female coworkers had also had problems with the supervisor. He was especially arrogant with women. She worked in the sewing section, where her coworkers operated large, heavy industrial machines. This woman, very petite, short, and with an accent too unfamiliar to place her in any country, dressed humbly, and her slanted eyes suggested she might be from an Asian country.

At lunchtime, Manolo and his coworkers would go eat at the food truck parked in front of the company. This woman didn’t exactly stand out because of her appearance, but she didn’t go unnoticed by the supervisor. One day, he tried to take advantage of her, seeing her so humble, always looking down at the floor as if she couldn’t bear the weight of her own guilt. She seemed to have very low self-esteem, which attracted the supervisor even more, giving him the opportunity to abuse her physically and psychologically.

Manolo saw, that afternoon at lunch, how the supervisor ran his hand down her back and touched her neck with his filthy fingers, showing his power as he told her to follow him to the office. His father never noticed any of this because he was traveling that week at the World Economic Forum. Only certain businessmen were allowed to attend, but smaller entrepreneurs were often invited at random to fill the assembly and debate the future of the global economy. Curiously, the assembly was always held in different countries to demonstrate political hegemony—and that year, the event was being held in the country this coworker came from. Strangely enough, she was here working undercover.

The supervisor took advantage of her, did whatever he wanted, and minutes later, the woman disappeared forever. Manolo asked about her the next day, the next week, and one morning, the supervisor slammed his heavy hand on him and said he was fired. Manolo didn’t know that an accident might have happened to that coworker. Sadly, he couldn’t remember her name, nor could he describe her physically because she never looked up—always downcast, sad, submissive. He couldn’t compare her with other coworkers either, because for Manolo all women were the same. He had grown up in a somewhat machista household, raised among men, and was neither handsome nor educated, and lived in near-poverty. He had neither the confidence nor the imagination to approach a woman romantically, always constrained by what he believed was an unbreakable reality.

And yet that tiny, thin, humble woman with slanted eyes had left an impression stronger than he could understand. If he ever saw her again, he would recognize her instantly. But unfortunately, that would never happen—at least not while she lived.

Manolo remained at home, drowned in his thoughts. “If only I could get revenge… If only I had a reason to walk back into that factory and tear that company apart.” He no longer went to bed with the blank mind he used to have, nor with the hope of a new dawn and the same repetitive work.

Unable to sleep, he turned on his only valuable possession: a transistor radio with old batteries that barely produced static, a sound that gradually made him drowsy. But his worry was too great… Suddenly, he heard a voice—broken and faint: “Mayday… we lost the fuselage… we’ll impact in about five minutes…” Manolo froze. “I must be imagining things,” he thought, turned off the radio, got up, and placed it on the shelf. Then he walked to the kitchen for water.

While drinking straight from the jug, the refrigerator door still open, he approached the window—as usual, spying on his neighbors through the translucent curtains. Sometimes they slept peacefully, other times they argued or enjoyed moments of intimacy. But this time, the woman wasn’t there. The man was watching last month’s soccer match and seemed to have been there for hours, maybe asleep.

As Manolo looked at the other windows, a thick beam of light drew a line across the darkness of the night sky. “What is that?” The farther it fell, the closer it got—approaching him. He dropped the jug and ran outside in his underwear, where he could see better. A small plane seemed about to crash into his yard. Before he could understand anything, his neighbor came outside too. As the neighbor walked toward him, a massive flying saucer suddenly crashed down and crushed him, burying him almost entirely.

Manolo was the only witness; his neighbor didn’t survive. Approaching the craft, he heard a distress call: “Mayday…” Through one of the saucer’s windows, he saw that the computers were on fire. He grabbed a brick, broke the window, and immediately a gray hand—more like a lobster’s claw—reached out from smoke and flames. Disgusted but determined, he pulled out a strange humanoid with an enormous head and gray skin. After laying him on the grass, he pulled out two more, but one was dead.

Moments later, the ship exploded into micro-particles swept away by the wind. Manolo took the two survivors into his house.

They asked him for discretion, to reveal nothing of what had happened. Manolo was too confused to think clearly about extraterrestrials. As he tried to imagine strange beings, he mixed those images with reality. One of the gray men suggested that they erase his memory temporarily. “What if we just make him return to the last thought he had?” The other replied, “He’ll want to believe he can’t solve it.” —“Solve what?” —“His firing… He wants revenge.”

Manolo, who heard them clearly, said: “You don’t have to erase my mind. You can hide here if you want. Nobody ever visits me anyway.” The Grays made him rest and forget what had happened. Manolo slept five hours, then woke up staring at the ceiling. His mind returned to that woman—the injustices suffered by other coworkers, the firings… But she was the strangest part. Manolo had never cared about a woman besides his mother, who died when he was ten. His vague memories were of her smile, her loving hands, and how she let him be anything he wanted. But what stood out the most was seeing her beaten by his father while his uncle watched as if it were theater. Afterwards, she would clean the mess, wipe her tears, and continue working as if nothing had happened.

To Manolo, a woman’s pain did not exist. Women were beings different from men; though made of flesh, they were specters meant for care, entertainment, and male pleasure. Like alcohol intoxicates only when you drink it, women only “clouded your head” when you were entangled with them. In school, he avoided girls. Even with female teachers, he tried to pass their classes quickly to avoid their voices, their laughter, their mockery.

The next day, Manolo got up, took a pencil, found a sheet of paper, and tried to sketch her face. He saw her so clearly in his dreams that he knew he wouldn’t lose her. He would search for her throughout the city—he had all the time in the world now. That woman had many secrets and many things had happened to her.

He stopped at the gas station to buy a chocolate bar. While reading the newspaper, the cashier snatched it from him: “Buy it first, then read it.” But he had already read enough to learn that the company where he had worked was on strike. Many employees hadn’t received their paychecks. All because the supervisor had thrown a party the week his father was away at the forum. Manolo thought that since they were millionaires, these people could get out of any problem—they could hire lawyers, buy justice.

Manolo munched on his chocolate when he saw a semi-transparent figure: the Grays, using alien technology, could turn invisible thanks to chromatophore-like cells extracted from marine creatures. When they vanished, he walked toward the park dragging his feet. Suddenly, a cyclist didn’t see him and hit him. Manolo fell onto a police patrol car parked in front. The officer got out to help both men—and recognized Manolo. They had gone to the same school.

Immediately, the cyclist—who was also one of the Grays—saw the police uniform and ran off. Manolo asked the officer how life on the force had been. He replied he wasn’t a patrolman but a crime-scene investigator. Manolo had an idea. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the pencil sketch—clumsy but firm—and showed it to him. The officer looked at it attentively, took his pen, and added details. When he showed it back, Manolo was stunned: it was exactly his missing coworker.

The officer asked why he was looking for her. Manolo told him everything: she had been harassed, maybe sexually, by the supervisor, and then disappeared. The officer took him to the station, gave him coffee, made calls, and two more officers arrived. They began drafting a statement to investigate the company, taking advantage of the strike to search for clues. Another officer scanned the drawing and sent it by fax to the federal investigations office to run it through thousands of files.

Manolo waited for hours, playing with pencils and calculators, not answering the phone as instructed. Then he had an idea: he would test whether the caller ID could scare someone. He called his neighbor—but since the neighbor was dead and buried in his yard because of the saucer, which Manolo had forgotten—the neighbor’s wife answered in a trembling voice. Manolo hung up immediately.

Minutes later, his friend returned and handed him a folder with photos. Manolo was to identify his coworker. He asked who these people were, and the officer explained that many were from the largest Chinese magnate: Mr. Wong. This magnate had two daughters—both spies infiltrating micro-enterprises that sustained the country. Among those enterprises was the furniture factory where Manolo worked. The younger daughter, a pre-teen, had faked her identity by adding years and posing as an adult woman. Manolo immediately understood her low posture, bowed head, and submissive behavior.

Together with the other officers who arrived, they discovered that the petite woman had been found behind the factory, in a small rose garden. Although weeks had passed, she still had semen in her mouth. She had been murdered after being raped. The supervisor was the prime suspect.

Manolo jumped from his chair and demanded they arrest that bastard and shut down the company. But due to federal laws, they couldn’t proceed until the investigation was complete with solid evidence. DNA samples and semen tests were still pending.

His friend assured him they needed more proof and needed to speak to the Chief. This frustrated Manolo deeply. He thought so hard that something cracked in his mind, and images of the flying saucer and his dead neighbor returned. “What is all this madness?” He left the station and sat by a fountain in the park. As he washed his face, one of the Grays materialized:

“The amount of energy your brain is producing is overwhelming.”

“So you were in that craft that crushed my neighbor?”

“Which neighbor? This one?”

And he took the shape of the neighbor.

“What the hell…”

The Gray explained:

“I scanned your memories. You seemed to feel sympathy for him because he was dominated by his wife, right?”

“Well, most of the time she had him wrapped in illogical arguments…”

The Gray laughed and pointed:

“Look, there she goes with the police officer.”

Manolo realized calling her house from the police station had been a mistake. His friend approached him:

“Manolo… were you bothering people from my office phone? You act like a child.”

The neighbor’s wife approached her “husband,” not knowing he was a Gray.

“Dear, I didn’t know you were friends with the strange neighbor—”

But the officer interrupted:

“If I didn’t know you, Manolo, I’d arrest you for fooling around.”

This snapped Manolo back into frustration, blaming that woman for everything.

“Then arrest me! I was trying to do the right thing. And I wasn’t calling her—I was calling him!”

“The station phone isn’t for stupid calls.”

The Gray calmed him:

“Come on, Manolo, come have a beer with me and my wife.”

Days passed. Manolo argued with his police friend, who was now on a different case. The case of the young woman had been shelved due to political pressure: powerful people had ordered protection over the company because they were favorites of the World Economic Forum. Manolo grew frustrated, kicked the desk, and his friend calmed him down.

“Manolo, I have something urgent to do. I’ll leave you here for a couple of hours. If the phone rings, say I’m sick. I’ll see what I can do with this girl’s case before they take her to necropsy—her father still doesn’t know she’s dead.”

His friend said this to calm him, but Manolo remembered the scolding he received in the park. He knew his friend didn’t want to get involved with the government or the world elite. However, he left Manolo Mr. Wong’s information. Manolo called, but got an answering machine. He left a message: his daughter was dead in this city. He left his name and contact.

Nothing happened afterward. As usual, he saw the two extraterrestrial friends going in and out of his house, dragging the remaining spacecraft parts into his garage. They rearranged everything he had stored there, and all day long, sounds of hammering, metal banging, and welding filled the space.

Curiosity overcame Manolo and he entered.

“Get out, Manolo, we’re working!”

He looked tenderly at their useless attempts to put the pieces together.

“It’s fine… if you don’t need me…”

One Gray read something in Manolo’s words—the forty years of experience working with rivets.

“You idiot, this one can help us more than you think.”

The first argued:

“He can’t, he doesn’t have the necessary tools.”

Manolo cut in:

“I know where they are, but…”

His mind returned again to the girl… the youngest daughter of Mr. Wong.

One of the Grays approached him and assumed her appearance.

“She’s dead. She can’t come back. But I can become someone else and infiltrate.”

The other Gray retorted:

“Focus, idiot. Either you let this human manipulate you or you focus on the mission.”

Manolo sat down.

“I can’t get her out of my head. She was so…”

“Beautiful? Is that what you were going to say?”

“Don’t get hostile. His melancholy is mental tension caused by loneliness. Every man is incomplete without the toxic emotional chaos of a woman, understand?”

Manolo sighed. At that moment, someone knocked on the door. It was his neighbor asking for her husband.

“It’s her again. You go. I can’t keep this lie much longer.”

“And I can’t endure more humiliation,” said the female Gray disguised as the wife.

“What are you talking about, woman?” asked the other.

“With all the things I endure in this stupid mission, now you cheat on me with a human?”

“Hey, we caused her husband’s death, understand?”

Before the argument grew, the neighbor walked into the garage. The Gray appeared as her husband.

“Honey, you’ve spent two days moving cans from the garden to this—”

Then she saw Manolo with a voluptuous woman resembling a Sports Illustrated model.

“We’re having trouble connecting this—”

Disgusted, she slapped him.

“Connecting WHAT? I’m sure it’s because of her!”

The female Gray, still disguised, replied:

“You’re mistaken, ma’am. I may go through bad moments like the one you’re giving me now, but I do not have bad taste like yours. For your information, my boyfriend is Don Manolo. And I would never—ever—have the slightest inappropriate thought with someone as unmanly as him.”

The other Gray grabbed his “wife” and stepped outside. Then came back and muttered:

“Unmanly, huh? Look out the window and learn.”

Manolo removed the arms of the fake model:

“I don’t understand your problem. I’d better…”

Both couples left and spied on each other from the kitchen window. That night they did everything, and the next morning the neighbors came over.

“Guess what…”

Manolo sees that the Grey doesn’t have a human appearance.

“But you forgot to camouflage yourself,” he says.

The neighbor replies, “It was hard accepting my husband’s death, but…”

Manolo hands her a handkerchief. She continues, now with a smile, “this one has it even harder.”

The female Grey, on the other hand, presents herself as a far more beautiful swimsuit model.

“Well, good for you two, because we’ve been having an amazing time here. What exactly are we supposed to guess?”

The neighbor answers, “I’m going to that place to ask for a job, then I’ll hide, and when night falls I’ll let you in so we can finish the job.”

And that’s exactly what they did.

The neighbor went to look for work, and luckily they hired her. She worked all day and, as planned, when closing time came, she hid. She hadn’t counted on two alarms, but she also got lucky and managed to open a factory window without trouble.

Meanwhile, Manolo asks the Grey, “How did you convince her? Did you brainwash her?”

“She told me she’d known for days that I wasn’t him—that on the outside I looked like her detestable husband, but she wanted to know who I really was. So I revealed myself and she liked me.”

The other Grey, annoyed: “And here I thought you liked me. You’re such a flirt.”

“It’s all for the mission—remember what the colonel said. We mustn’t mix the mission with pleasure.”

She fires back, full of lust: “Pleasure? You? Don’t compare yourself to humans.”

He retorts, “What was it you were saying about humans last time?”

Manolo cuts in as he parks the car, “Alright, noisy extraterrestrials, enough. Let’s go find that machine and…”

But they never expected to run into the boss with Mr. Wong’s eldest daughter.

The supervisor arrives dragging the neighbor—severely tortured, dying—and throws her at Manolo’s feet.

“So you thought you could come steal from me?”

The boss adds, “You’ve been snooping around for days… maybe curiosity really did kill the cat.” He points a revolver at him.

Manolo doesn’t understand why his boss is speaking in the singular—because the Greys had turned invisible and escaped.

Once captured, Manolo is taken to the rose garden and given a shovel to dig his own grave—big enough for his neighbor too.

When he finishes, he’s forced to kneel while Mr. Wong’s eldest daughter tosses the barely alive neighbor into the hole.

“Now say goodbye…”

But the police arrive—many patrol cars—and from one of them steps Mr. Wong.

While they arrest the boss and supervisor, Mr. Wong’s eldest daughter freezes when she recognizes her father… the same father she had murdered so she could become president and head of all the international micro-companies.

“But I killed you myself! And I ordered my little sister killed too—I manipulated my father to send her as a spy. My plan was perfect!”

“But justice is even more perfect.”

Yet since they had never found Mr. Wong’s body…

It was a rainy afternoon, and the cemetery was crowded. All of Mr. Wong’s colleagues approached to offer condolences.

“Mr. Wong, your younger daughter will always be in—” someone tries to speak amid cameras and reporters.

“Excuse me, Mr. Wong, to whom will the micro-enterprise award be given this year?”

Another scolds him, “Don’t be insensitive—we’re in mourning.”

Mr. Wong answers calmly, “To Mr. Manolo. Without him I wouldn’t have discovered that my own eldest daughter was a murderer.”

“But he’s not a businessman.”

“He is now. I bought the entire factory myself and gave it to him.”

“But Mr. Wong…”

“And he will replace me while I take a vacation.”

Days later, a huge explosion in the sky left the world stunned, as the news announced two things:

the catastrophic airplane accident that took Mr. Wong’s life, and the new great leader of the World Economic Forum—Mr. Manolo.

Once alone, the neighbor says goodbye to her Grey, while Manolo makes the final adjustments to the ship.

“Are you sure you have to leave? Look, I have a lot of work and people are still investigating me.”

“You’ve done plenty for us, but this is the last mission.”

The neighbor can’t hold back her curiosity any longer. “What’s the mission about?”

“It’s about the Greens—they’re joining forces to start a revolution and they’re going to eliminate the monarchies. It’s a small planet and—”

“Well, something like that happened here and we survived.”

“Of course you survived—if it weren’t for our interference in confiscating the nuclear weapons…”

“What nuclear weapons?”

“The same ones you used to destroy Sodom, Gomorrah, Pangaea, Atlantis, Tartaria, etc.”

The neighbor hugs her Grey. “I’ll miss you.”

The female Grey does the same with Manolo.

“Don’t miss us too much. We’ll be back—and this time we’re staying.”

The neighbor hugs Manolo as the ship disappears into space.

THE END