“I don’t think he’s lying about this.”
She held the elastic hair band in her mouth as she collected her ponytail again. I watched, jealous of the dexterity of her hands looping the band in her hair. Then she went and put her feet into a pair of my Nike high-tops and pulled a fifth of Jack Daniel’s from her duffle, held it up so I could see it and said, “I’m not keeping this very sophisticated.” She got two glasses from the bathroom, shook the protective covers off, and let them fall to the floor as she plodded back. She pushed the martini glass out of the way and put the glasses down too hard.
“What’s the matter with you?” I said.
When she poured, the brown liquid washed up one side of the glass, left an oily after-wave that slowly retreated.
“You got your head so far up your daddy’s ass. You and Du.”
“Why are you angry?”
“Do you understand the magnitude of what is happening to me? People like me have been chosen. I don’t know why. Something comes to me and takes me away. I fly. It has happened when I’m in my apartment, and once recently when I was staying at this motel in Twentynine Palms, okay. It happened once when I was driving through the Muir Woods in a goddamn rental car. This was last month! Whenever I’m alone. Do you understand? They take me. I fly, I mean, just my body. Van Raye might hear something but he’s about five hundred years behind. There are dozens, hundreds, whatever, of civilizations out there. So what? Something is here,” she said.
We waited in the relative silence of the airport hotel room. She took her feet out of the shoes and sat on the other bed. She said, “I’m here with you because I don’t want to be alone.”
“Stay with me as long as you want,” I whispered.
“Don’t get weird on me, okay?” she said.
We took a sip of our drinks.
She lifted her glass. “To life somewhere else in the universe. . besides here. To aliens.”
“Don’t ever let Charles hear you use that term. I think he’s coming here.”
She turned and put her legs up on her bed and crossed her arms. “I’ve never met the man,” she said. “When you’re not around, Dubourg tells me what an ass he is, but Dubourg is totally in love with him. Dubourg put his own name on Van Raye’s Wiki page. He put himself under ‘children.’”
“Why?” I asked. “He’s a pathetic excuse for anything resembling a father. Dubourg’s got Uncle Louis. I can’t think of anyone but Uncle Louis as Dubourg’s father.”
“Would you trade Van Raye for Louis?”
“Louis is great,” I said.
“No, that’s not an answer. Think about it. Van Raye’s a son of a bitch but he’s bigger than life.”
We sat still. I listened to the hotel room, felt the humanity around us, the rooms full of lives.
She got up and went to the bottle on the dresser and poured us both more whiskey. I watched her calves flex when she adjusted the thermostat, and the Sanctus bells stirred in the nether lobes of my brain. I hadn’t had an erection in weeks, not even the healthy morning kind, and I’d begun to wonder if it was the depression.
I glanced at my phone and saw a whole conversation from last night that I had no recollection of, Randolph asking me:
Any sign of Raye?
You are not God
I am not God
You are God
I am God
What is your favorite Elvis movie?
I prefer Martin and Lewis movies. Jerry Lewis:)
Ursula came back with the glass and got on the bed beside me, pushing the comforter tight over my body. I turned the phone quickly to her and she studied it, and then shook her head, said, “Nothing. Yes, you are crazy.” She put legs straight out on the covers.
“Sandy, do you remember that you once flew down to Sopchoppy because Dubourg left a pair of pants in Baltimore?”
I twirled my whiskey in the glass before gulping some. “Yes. I was like twelve.” But there was the memory emerging from the background. “It was actually a pair of swim trunks,” I said. “And it was in Washington. That was after you stayed with us at the Marriott. I remember it because y’all wanted to run up and down the hallways.”
“Right!” she said.
“You and Dubourg sprinted up and down the hallways because you said that you could run faster inside than you could outside.”
“I still believe that, by the way,” she said.
I realized how good it feels to have a shared experience with someone and told her, “Isn’t family about having someone around to share experiences with?”
She said, “Then Elizabeth caught us and jumped all over our asses, and Du and I went back home, and the next thing we know you flew down with his pants.” She laughed. “You looked pathetic standing on the porch holding the bag.”
“All right,” I said.
“You stayed for weeks.”
“I know,” I said, “I’ve always wanted to be part of y’all.”
“Not that you couldn’t have just come down and stayed if you wanted, but we all thought it was a little weird.”
“I wish you would just forget that,” I said. “I was twelve or whatever.”
She handed me her glass to take a sip and crossed her arm over her eyes. “Can I tell you something? This is the best I’ve felt in a long time. Right here. I love you,” she said.
She took her arm down to see me.
I said, “You know I love you. . ”
“Like a sister?” she said.
“Of course.” The whole room was quiet.
She said, “Do you remember we used to believe that the Creature wouldn’t come after us if we were all together in the kids’ bunk room?”
“Of course,” I said.
“It was a great comfort being together, wasn’t it?”
After a few seconds of silence I thought she’d drifted off to sleep. Without opening her eyes or removing her hand, she said, “This is the same thing, isn’t it, except it’s only us, and it’s not the Creature from the movie. It’s something else that we are scared of.”
“And that we make ourselves want to believe in,” I said.
I got the remote and turned on the TV, the light filling the room. I searched the movie menu until I found The Creature from Outer Space, and when she saw, she said, “Seriously?”
“When was the last time we’ve watched it?” I asked.
We took turns sipping out of the same glass as the credits played and the music started, and she got under the covers against me.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Watching the movie that scared the hell out of me when I was little.”
We sat, the length of our bodies touching. I could feel her heat trapped beneath the blanket with mine, and I could smell her, and this feeling reminded me of once being alone with her in a pub in Dublin years before, and we’d started holding hands because we had realized that the patrons who’d befriended us in that pub thought we were traveling college students who were lovers. We simply held hands in the pub, her thumb rubbing my hand, and we drank our beers, and people went in and out of the door like life was normal, and a man at the end of the bar asked if he could sing us a song, and as he sang to us, we let go of each other’s hand because holding hands while he sang so beautifully would have been like stealing something that wasn’t ours.
“Even this music starts to freak me out,” she said as the movie began.
The voice-over narrator said, “Since time began,” and Ursula and I recited along with him, “man has looked toward the heavens with wonder. . wonder and fear. The interstellar distances have kept us safe. . until now,” and her voice and his voice made a tingling, a good tingling, spread from my back into the base of my skull.