Larry and Stoom, though, they were pretty sharp. “You mean, for aliens?” Stoom asked once, with that sneer he always had. Paul thought for sure he was curling his lip, like in a cartoon. That was how he knew they must have lips, because of Stoom’s sneer. Stoom was the only one who still used his alien name, and he was the nastiest (but not as pig-eyed mean as Roman). He was always ragging on Paul, telling him what a loser he was.
“Then why’d you pick me?” Paul yelled back once, a long time ago. “I didn’t invite you. Why don’t you just go the fuck back where you came from?”
Stoom said it was none of his business and then whammo, the headache.
But as far as the sharp-for-aliens thing, Stoom and Larry were actually pretty sharp for anybody. It was Larry who suggested Paul do his preliminary reconnaissance (“Casing the joint!” Roman bawled. “Call it casing the joint!”) in sweats, jogging past a place a couple of times, at different hours. That was good for a whole bunch of reasons. For one thing, Larry was right: no one noticed a jogger, except other joggers, who were only interested in sizing you up, figuring if they were better or you were better. If they could take you. Of course, if it came to it, any of them could take Paul and he knew it. Real runners were all muscle and sinew. Paul looked like them, lanky, with short hair and sunken cheeks, but his skinniness was blasted out of what he used to be, drained by junk. As though the needles in his arm had been day by day drawing something out instead of pumping it in.
But he still laced up his running shoes and made himself circle whatever neighborhood it was, every time he was ready to plan a job. Which was pretty much every time the rent was due or the skag ran out. Even if he had the whole job ready to go in his head and didn’t need to, like now, he still ran the streets around it. For one thing, The Guys liked that he did it this way, and as awful as the wheezing and the fire in his legs were, the headaches when they got mad were always worse.
Another thing: suiting up and going by a couple times over a couple days stretched out the planning part. That was Paul’s favorite. He liked to learn stuff about his marks: who they were, how they lived, what they liked to do.
“Oh, please,” said Stoom, about that. He sounded like he was rolling his eyes, though Paul didn’t know if they had eyes, either. He’d asked once, what they looked like, but that turned out to be another thing that was none of his business. “You’re a crook,” Stoom went on. “You’re a junkie. You’re a loser with aliens in your head. All you need to know about people is what they have and when they won’t be home.”
“Maybe he wants to write a book about them,” Larry suggested, in a bored and mocking voice. “Maybe he’s going to be a big best-selling author.”
That had burned Paul up, because that was exactly what he’d wanted before The Guys showed up. He always had an imagination; he was going to grow up and be a writer.
He never talked about The Guys anymore. He had, at first. It took him awhile to figure out no one else could hear them and everyone thought he was nuts. “There are no aliens, Paul. It’s all in your head. You need to get help.” Stuff like that.
Well, that first point, that was completely wrong. Paul used to argue, say obvious things like, “You can’t see time either, but no one says it isn’t there.” All people did was stare and back away, so he stopped saying anything.
The second point, though, was completely right. That’s where The Guys lived: in Paul’s head. Where they’d beamed when they came to Earth on some kind of scouting mission, Paul didn’t know what for. Or from where. They never did tell him why, but Stoom had told him from where. It’s just, it was some planet he’d never heard of circling some star he’d never heard of in some galaxy really, really far away. Magribke was the closest Paul could come to pronouncing it. The Guys laughed at him when he said it that way, but they didn’t tell him how to really say it. They didn’t talk about their home planet much. Mostly, they just told Paul the Loser what to do.
They first showed up when he was fourteen. He supposed he’d been a peculiar kid—God knows his mom always thought so—but he wasn’t a loser then. (“Oh, of course you were,” Stoom said, but Paul knew he was wrong.) It was them, making him do weird shit, distracting him so he started flunking out, giving him those kick headaches—they were the ones who screwed him all up.
And the third point, get help? He’d tried. What did people think, he liked it like this, these bastards giving him orders, making him hurt really bad when he didn’t do what they said? When he was sixteen and he knew for sure The Guys weren’t leaving, he went looking for someone who could tell him what to do. Somebody at NASA or something. But NASA didn’t answer his e-mails and his mom dragged him to a shrink. The shrink said she believed Paul about The Guys, but she didn’t. She gave him drugs to take but the drugs made the world all suffocating and gray, and they didn’t make The Guys go away, it just made it so Paul couldn’t hear them. They were still there, though, and he knew they were getting madder and madder, and when the drugs stopped working he’d be in bad trouble. So he stopped taking the drugs, and The Guys were so pleased he’d done it on his own that they only gave him a little kick headache, not even a whole day long.
What The Guys liked best was Paul breaking into places and boosting stuff, so that’s what he started to do.
He didn’t live at home anymore, not since he stopped seeing the shrink and taking her drugs. He knew his mom was relieved when he moved out, even though she pretended like she wanted him to stay. He still went home to see her sometimes. She acted all nervous when he was there, which she tried to hide, but he knew. She especially got nervous when he talked to The Guys. He’d asked them to just please shut up while he was with his mom, but of course they didn’t. So he still went, but not so often.
He had a basement apartment in St. George. It had bugs and it smelled moldy but it was cheap and no one bothered him and it was easy to get to whatever neighborhood The Guys wanted him to hit next. It was also easy to get to his dealer, and it was a quiet, dark place to shoot up.
The first year after he moved out was the worst of his life. The Guys wouldn’t shut up, and they were really into the headaches that whole year. It was part of some experiment they were doing for their planet. Even sometimes when Paul did exactly what they told him, they’d just start kicking. Sometimes he thought they wanted to kick his brains out from the inside.
Sometimes he wished they would.
That year it especially sucked to be him—until he discovered heroin.
Damn, damn, damn, what a find! The only bad thing: he hadn’t thought of it years ago. Shooting up wasn’t like taking the shrink’s drugs. The Guys liked it. A needle of black tar, and everyone just relaxed, got all laid-back. Made him laugh the first time, the idea of a bunch of wasted aliens nodding out inside his head. He was a little afraid right after he laughed, but while they were high The Guys didn’t care, didn’t get mad, were so quiet they might as well not have been there at all.