Avery drove on, listening as he slammed the bedroom door behind him. She didn’t feel any resentment. She knew all about guilt and grief, and how useless they made you feel. Lionel’s behavior made more sense to her now. He was having trouble distinguishing between what was happening to him externally and what was coming from inside. Even people skilled at being human had trouble with that.
The national park Henry had recommended turned out to be at Cumberland Gap, the mountain pass early pioneers had used to migrate west to Kentucky. They spent the night in the campground undisturbed. At dawn, Avery strolled out in the damp morning air to look around. She quickly returned to say, “Lionel, come out here. You need to see this.”
She led him across the road to an overlook facing west. From the edge of the Appalachians they looked out on range after range of wooded foothills swaddled in fog. The morning sun at their backs lit everything in shades of mauve and azure. Avery felt like Daniel Boone looking out on the Promised Land, stretching before her into the misty distance, unpolluted by the past.
“I find this pleasant,” Lionel said gravely.
Avery smiled. It was a breakthrough statement for someone so unaccustomed to introspection that he hadn’t been able to tell her he was hungry two days ago. But all she said was, “Me, too.”
After several moments of silence, she ventured, “Don’t you think Mr. Burbage would enjoy seeing this? There’s no one else around. Doesn’t he want to get out of the bus some time?”
“He is seeing it,” Lionel said.
“What do you mean?”
“He is here.” Lionel tapped his head with a finger.
Avery couldn’t help staring. “You mean you have some sort of telepathic connection with him?”
“There’s no such thing as telepathy,” Lionel said dismissively. “They communicate with neurotransmitters.” She was still waiting, so he said, “He doesn’t have to be all in one place. Part of him is with me, part of him is in the bus.”
“In your head?” she asked, trying not to betray how creepy she found this news.
He nodded. “He needs me to observe the world for him, and understand it. They have had lots of other helper species to do things for them—species that build things, or transport them. But we’re the first one with advanced consciousness.”
“And that’s why they’re interested in us.”
Lionel looked away to avoid her eyes, but nodded. “They like it,” he said, his voice low and reluctant. “At first it was just novel and new for them, but now it’s become an addiction, like a dangerous drug. We pay a high metabolic price for consciousness; it’s why our lifespan is so short. They live for centuries. But when they get hooked on us, they burn out even faster than we do.”
He picked up a rock and flung it over the cliff, watching as it arced up, then plummeted.
“And if he dies, what happens to you?” Avery asked.
“I don’t want him to die,” Lionel said. He put his hands in his pockets and studied his feet. “It feels… good to have him around. I like his company. He’s very old, very wise.”
For a moment, she could see it through his eyes. She could imagine feeling intimately connected to an ancient being who was dying from an inability to part with his adopted human son. What a terrible burden for Lionel to carry, to be slowly killing someone he loved.
And yet, she still felt uneasy.
“How do you know?” she asked.
He looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“You said he’s old and wise. How do you know that?”
“The way you know anything unconscious. It’s a feeling, an instinct.”
“Are you sure he not controlling you? Pushing around your neurotransmitters?”
“That’s absurd,” he said, mildly irritated. “I told you, he’s not conscious, at least not naturally. Control is a conscious thing.”
“But what if you did something he didn’t want?”
“I don’t feel like doing things he doesn’t want. Like talking to you now. He must have decided he can trust you, because I wouldn’t feel like telling you anything if he hadn’t.”
Avery wasn’t sure whether being trusted by an alien was something she aspired to. But she did want Lionel to trust her, and so she let the subject drop.
“Where do you want to go today?” she asked.
“You keep asking me that.” He stared out on the landscape, as if waiting for a revelation. At last he said, “I want to see humans living as they normally do. We’ve barely seen any of them. I didn’t think the planet was so sparsely populated.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to have to make a phone call for that.”
When he had returned to the bus, she strolled away, took out Henry’s card, and thumbed the number. Despite the early hour, he answered on the first ring.
“He wants to see humans,” she said. “Normal humans behaving normally. Can you help me out?”
“Let me make some calls,” he said. “I’ll text you instructions.”
“No men in black,” she said. “You know what I mean?”
“I get it.”
When Avery stopped for diesel around noon, the gas station television was blaring with news that the Justice Department would investigate the aliens for abducting human children. She escaped into the restroom to check her phone. The internet was ablaze with speculation: who the translators were, whether they could be freed, whether they were human at all. The part of the government that had approved Lionel’s road trip was clearly working at cross purposes with the part that had dreamed up this new strategy for extracting information from the aliens. The only good news was that no hint had leaked out that an alien was roaming the back roads of America in a converted bus.
Henry had texted her a cryptic suggestion to head toward Paris. She had to Google it to find that there actually was a Paris, Kentucky. When she came out to pay for the fuel, she was relieved to see that the television had moved on to World Series coverage. On impulse, she bought a Cardinals cap for Lionel.
Paris turned out to be a quaint old Kentucky town that had once had delusions of cityhood. Today, a county fair was the main event in town. The RV park was almost full, but Avery’s E.T. Express managed to maneuver in. When everything was settled, she sat on the bus steps sipping a Bud and waiting for night so they could venture out with a little more anonymity. The only thing watching her was a skittish, half-wild cat crouched behind a trashcan. Somehow, it reminded her of Lionel, so she tossed it a Cheeto to see if she could lure it out. It refused the bait.
That night, disguised by the dark and a Cardinals cap, Lionel looked tolerably inconspicuous. As they were leaving to take in the fair, she said, “Will Mr. Burbage be okay while we’re gone? What if someone tries to break into the bus?”
“Don’t worry, he’ll be all right,” Lionel said. His tone implied more than his words. She resolved to call Henry at the earliest opportunity and pass along a warning not to try anything.
The people in the midway all looked authentic. If there were snipers on the bigtop and agents on the merry-go-round, she couldn’t tell. When people failed to recognize Lionel at the ticket stand and popcorn wagon, she began to relax. Everyone was here to enjoy themselves, not to look for aliens.
She introduced Lionel to the joys of corn dogs and cotton candy, to the Ferris wheel and tilt-a-whirl. He took in the jangling sounds, the smells of deep-fried food, and the blinking lights with a grave and studious air. When they had had their fill of all the machines meant to disorient and confuse, they took a break at a picnic table, sipping Cokes.
Avery said, “Is Mr. Burbage enjoying this?”
Lionel shrugged. “Are you?” He wasn’t deflecting her question; he actually wanted to know.