The damned kid just keeps grinning.
“There! There it is again! That expression on his face. It’s the same one he had this morning when I stopped by to tell him I might get a crew slot on the space station.”
Alan’s expression turns inward a bit, puzzled and not afraid at all to show it.
“It’s as if he knew something I didn’t,” he murmurs. “As if he thought all that was somehow child’s play.”
If Alan were sitting just a little closer, I know I’d strangle him. If a bright young idiot like Alan Fowler can see through Chuck… what about Them?
My face is made of sleet-swept granite. I don’t move, but let the world turn beneath me.
Child’s play. Indeed.
Imagine a year of rumors… of strange lights in the sky…
The supermarket magazines carry a spate of UFO headlines. Several famous psychics report getting severe headaches along with alternating feelings of claustrophobia and exaltation.
An amateur astronomer reports another of those mysterious “ventings” on the moon…
Imagine flashes in the sky…
The mental processes are slow. I feel tired and cranky. It’s been a long night and only at intervals have I had relief from this ridiculous internal monologue… describing everything I think or feel to an unseen audience. It’s an audience I’d rather show my backside, but that’s physiologically impossible.
It’s just past one. I help Joey close up while over by the door Elise flirts with Dan and Jase of the band. Thank heavens the role never required that Chuck be the jealous sort. It’s good to hear her laugh. She has a nice laugh.
When I’ve finished, I say good night to Joey and meet her at the door. The fog has disappeared, leaving a starry night that’s cool and slightly damp. I sniff, picking up the faintest strange touch of musk from the street.
We walk slowly to my car, around back past the garbage cans. I let her in and like clockwork she leans over to unlock my side. The cold upholstery squeaks as I slide across the bench seat to put my arm around her. She shivers slightly, slipping down a little and looking up at me as if all the world depends upon my kissing her here and now.
Her lips are soft and they move with an infectious hunger, drawing passion out of me. My hands have a volition all their own, and she responds to every caress—matching the effect on me with the little things she does with her fingernails on my back.
Our loving has been good in the past, but never quite like this. Even with Janie it was different, but…
I jerk my head up and moan, squeezing her against me. I pray that she thinks it’s the loving.
My eyes squeeze shut to block out memory. Yet they fail even to stop simple tears.
Imagine flashes in the sky…
Parmin suggests the group’s orchestra hold a farewell concert for the entire Cabal. He asks specifically for a Beethoven concerto.
Then it is time.
The Arks lift in battle formation, and take the picket ships completely by surprise, high above the jagged highlands of the moon’s limb. The jailers barely get out a distress call before they are annihilated.
One Ark developed engine trouble, didn’t it? Its crew and supplies were transhipped and it was buried in a cave… Then, one by one, the Arks peeled off to seek their diverse destinations …
Imagine a young pilot who locks his controls, then rises to face the woman standing behind his chair.
“Marry me, pretty lady. Will you? I’ll put the stars in your ring. You shall have a galaxy for a tiara.” He takes her by the waist and raises her high, to the cheers of his crewmates.
Laughing gray eyes… She strokes his hair and bends over to kiss him. “Silly boy. We’re already married. Besides, I don’t want galaxies. Just one planet. That’s all.”
He lowers her and holds her close.
“Then a planet you shall have…”
Her breath against my neck is very warm. Her breast rolls silkily against my side.
I chose Elise because she seemed the antithesis of my former life. No one would expect to find me—to find my former self—with her, just as They would not look for someone fixing motorcycles in his living room and watching pimply kids in a country bar.
Yet she is life to me now, is she not? Where would I be without you, Elise, to anchor me to this world?
By their own laws They are sworn not to harm the innocent, though they would kill me on sight. Perhaps, though, when the manhunt ends and I am found, they may find it expedient to bend their rules and eliminate her as well, in case I had talked.
I shudder at the thought. That was one of the reasons for Chuck’s antüntellectualism in the first place, to keep from letting even a word slip. Perhaps the best thing to do, the most honorable thing, would be simply to leave.
I seem to be oscillating between flashes of painful memory and numbing calmness. Right now the pendulum is swinging back again. Suddenly everything is stark and shimmering. My head feels light, like crystal.
Over the night sounds of the suburbs I can hear horns of the boats on the distant river. I can feel Elise’s heartbeats as I hold her. The textures that I see, in the car, in the brick wall outside my window, are vivid and intricate… like a pattern of hieroglyphs whose meanings dance at the edges of understanding.
Would reliving the past help Janie? Or Parmin or Walter, or any of the others? How would it help to remember a terrible, useless, one-sided battle that stretched over kiloparsecs and climaxed in smoke and stench and roiling flames under a lonely mountain?
Calmness settles in for real. The unwelcome acuity drifts away, unlamented. Holding Elise in the dark, I hardly sense the passage of time.
After a nameless interval I return, cursed still with this compulsion to narrate. It is getting a bit chilly in here, and I long for sleep.
Gently I disengage Elise and fumble the keys into the ignition lock. She, with her eyes far away, straightens her clothes. “We ought to get some of the other bikers together and throw some kind of going-away party for Alan,” she suggests. I nod and grunt amiably as I turn the keys.
Nothing. “What the…?”
Check neutral, try again.
Zilch.
My gaze drops to the headlights switch. They were left on six hours ago, when I came in for work. Now, why did I do a fool thing like that?
There’s Elise’s old Peugeot across the lot. Typically on Fridays we come to the Yankee separately and go home together. The Yankee’s lot is safe.
“Come on, we’ll have to use your car tonight, Elise.” I open my door.
She looks up with a sleepy smile, then her eyes widen. “But… but my car is a mess!”
For as long as I’ve known her she’s always been reluctant to let me near her car. When we use it she always has to “straighten it up” first. She finds excuses to keep me from driving it.
Can you beat that? She’d give me her entire bank account if I asked for it, but I don’t have a key to her frigging car. She stands up to me there, though while she’s making excuses her voice quavers. I can’t figure it, but I recognize guts when I see it. Maybe that’s why I went along with it until now. For standing up to Chuck on this one small point I think I love her a little.