What we were told about the project was little enough to be written on a napkin.

I can say this with some confidence because I did write it on a napkin.

I got the call in a Starbucks, and scrawled some barely discernible notes from my barely discernible conversation with my deep-voiced, disembodied interlocutor.

An extraterrestrial species (humanoid, intelligent) had been discovered on Earth. The agency (governmental, top secret) was looking for adoptive carers.

‘You want me to adopt an alien?’ I looked up from my phone to raise my eyebrows at my fellow Starbucks regulars, who smiled sympathetically.

‘The preferred term is Guests.’

It wasn’t a joke. They were choosing potential Guest-adopters from a bank of experts (biochemists, neuroscientists, psychologists). My area is linguistic anthropology. They wanted to know about Guest languages.

They’d named my Guest Ella. I put her in my daughter’s room. (She lived with her father now and never came home.)

I wished I’d adopted more than one Guest. I couldn’t learn anything about Ella’s language because she didn’t have anyone to talk to. Also, she’d achieved native-level proficiency of English within several weeks, which made it harder to make hypotheses based on her acquisition patterns.

One anomaly gave me a clue, though—her use of pronouns. She acquired the first-person singular (I, me, my) without any trouble, but she never used second, third or first-person plural.

The implications of this hit me one night after dinner. Ella had just polished off a generous bowl of ice cream (Madagascan vanilla with dark chocolate chunks).

‘I’m hungry,’ she said.

She didn’t eat the second helping I gave her. Instead she held the bowl out to me. 

‘That’s for you, Ella,’ I reminded her. I don’t eat ice cream. (I stopped eating sweets when Pieter left.)

She placed the bowl in front of me with uncharacteristic stubbornness. 

It was then that I noticed how malleable her facial features were.

‘That’s for me,’ she repeated. ‘I want it so much.’

I tried not to stare as her face morphed. She was starting to look like someone I knew.

‘It looks so delicious,’ she said, and her longing nearly broke my heart. ‘I’m empty inside. Maybe ice cream would help.’

I stared longingly at the decadent chunks of chocolate speckling the soft cream. (My weight was one of the reasons Pieter left.)

‘I miss ice cream,’ she said. 

It was not until the first spoonful passed my eager lips that I understood.

Guest language had no second person pronoun. 

‘I miss myself,’ she continued, ruthlessly. ‘I don’t know who I am, now that I’m all alone.’

Ella had no way of saying ‘you’. 

Which meant she probably didn’t even have a concept of ‘you’.

‘You’re not alone,’ I said.

Her uncannily familiar face made it clear that she was not reassured. 

I tried again. ‘I’m not alone,’ I said. 

Her eyes glowed with warmth, like light in a guest house. (Inviting. Welcoming.)

The relief in her smile mirrored my own.

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