Two aliens, their spindly legs gripped around each other’s waists, were swinging from the small domed light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. Another did backflips up and down the side of the wall. Still another jumped on Fletcher’s bed, gaining enough altitude to execute several graceful somersaults.
“Tandala, dance with me!” said Charmat, grabbing an alien. In seconds they were dancing a slinky tango with each other, their bodies pressed together like hands in prayer.
Fletcher pleaded with himself for some inner instruction but in this crisis state his mind was a weak receiver, able to pick up only the signals, Bolt! and Excuse yourself to the bathroom! Instinctively, he knew that he could not outrun these athletic aliens, but might they not be sympathetic to a man in need of a toilet?
“Excuse me.” His voice wavered like a loon’s. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Bathroom?” asked one of the aliens on the light fixture.
Charmat dipped his partner one last time and sighed.
“Remember, Revlor, we covered this in our Good Neighbor seminar: humans void. Their waste products are not disposed of internally.”
Fletcher’s fright did another strange arabesque with curiosity. “And yours are?”
“Of course,” said Charmat. “And in fifty thousand years or so, you’ll catch up to us. You earthlings will have disposed with the need of disposal.”
The aliens tittered at what Fletcher thought a rather weak play on words.
“But please,” said Charmat, bowing slightly, “be our guest.”
Fletcher slipped out of bed, pushed his feet into his waiting slippers, and made a dash across the room and to the bathroom down the hall.
He pushed the little button lock inside the knob and sat down on the toilet, where he began to shake convulsively, to the 4/16 rhythm of his chattering teeth.
Think! was his panicky order. Think, think, think!
He obeyed himself; an idea sprung to his mind as soon as he looked up at the small window above the hamper. Hours earlier he had stood at it, carefully sealing the seam where the sash and the sill met.
Wait a second, he thought, was I somehow trying to keep these aliens out? Did a part of my brain know my home was about to be invaded by spacemen?
Despite his terror and disbelief, he began to snicker. The idea that he, Fletcher Weschel, practical as masking tape, was clairvoyant tickled him.
He went to the window and saw that the lights were still on at Beckerman’s house. Earlier that evening he had seen a young woman carrying a Food Palace grocery bag (containing her negligee, surmised Fletcher) storm out of the house while Beckerman, his velour robe opened to reveal leopard briefs, pleaded with her to “come back, Trudy, I was only joking!”
Beckerman’s house offered something he needed at the moment—refuge—all he had to do was climb out the window and scamper across the lawn. Aliens wouldn’t mess with a 220-lb. butcher with a pork chop tattooed on his bicep, would they?
Fletcher thought not, but he remained standing, staring out at the rectangles of yellow light shining through Beckerman’s windows. Have they hypnotized me? he wondered as, to his great surprise, he found himself turning his back toward possible escape. He used the toilet, washed his hands, and brushed his teeth, scrubbing away the scent of Ovaltine.
He stood in the hallway, trying not to make the floorboards creak as he tried to pinpoint the strange sensation that had come over him. He snapped his fingers—of course! He was feeling what he had when WW announced he was going to lead the Cub Scouts—the anticipation that something wonderful was about to happen.
Fletcher sighed and shook his head as the memory of his father banging away in the Bel Air with Miss Shirley came into his head, reminding him of how it really was.
At his bedroom door, he squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and opened it. Disappointment was as stinging as a slap on the face: the room was empty.
Fletcher turned around helplessly, feeling as hurt as a host whose guests run out of the party while he’s still in the kitchen refilling the bowl of onion dip.
He sat heavily on the bed, wondering what terribly boring thing it was that caused them to roll their bulging eyes and telepathically plead with one another to “ditch this joint.” He cocked his head to listen; perhaps they were at Dodd Beckerman’s right now, whooping it up with the bodacious butcher, dancing with lampshades on their heads to music Fletcher had no idea existed. (He hadn’t seen fit to change the radio dial from the station his mother listened to, a station that might as well have aired public announcements for war bonds and ration cards for all the big band music it played.)
Fletcher couldn’t understand why he felt like crying: he should be thrilled, he told himself, that the aliens were out of his house—hadn’t he nearly been scared to death?
“Awwww.”
Snorting in surprise, Fletcher looked up to see the aliens slowly take on form as they emerged out of the walls.
“I thought you were gone! I thought you’d gone to Beckerman’s!”
“We had,” chuckled Charmat. “We short-sheeted the dweeb. While he was downstairs, watching Cagney and Lacey.”
The aliens nodded, twittering as was their fashion.
“You short-sheeted him?” repeated Fletcher. He’d been thrown for so many loops, he felt limp.
“That’s right,” said Charmat, sitting next to him. “He’ll get into bed feeling like the least popular boy at camp.”
“But why? What did he ever do to you?”
The other aliens sat down around them, folding their Gumby-like legs underneath themselves.
“He bothers us,” said the lodge leader. “We don’t like how he treats people—particularly you.”
“Wow,” said Fletcher. “I’m not used to people sticking up for me.”
“We’re not people,” said Tandala, the alien who had tangoed with the alien leader.
“Remember I told you we all have jobs?” asked Charmat. “Lodge 527 likes to scavenge—”
Fletcher nodded. “And conduct the occasional scientific experiment.”
“That’s right,” said Charmat, pleased at his quick study. “Now take Lodge 809, they’re partial to landscaping. They’re the ones responsible for those strange patterns in British cornfields.”
“But I thought two guys owned up to doing that,” said Fletcher. “It was on the news—it was all a big hoax.”
Charmat’s eyes glowed. “The hoax is that those guys are Brother Zoltan and Brother Yadlac of Lodge 809!”
“They’re aliens? But I saw those guys on TV! They looked as normal as . . . as I do!”
“Fletcher, please, give us some credit. If we’re able to come to earth, if we’re able to disappear—”
On cue, Revlor faded into a blank space, waited a few seconds, and reappeared again, looking exactly like Albert Einstein.
“If we’re able to do all that,” said Charmat, smoothing Mr. Einstein’s wild white hair with his finger, “don’t you think we might be able to transform ourselves into a couple of nondescript-looking farmers . . . or a descriptive-looking scientist?”
It took a moment for Fletcher to regain the ability to speak.
“I guess so. I just never thought about it much.”
Albert Einstein shimmered away, and as Revlor resumed his alien form, a scowl appeared on Charmat’s thin mouth.
“That’s the trouble,” he said. “The pond of human thought is a shallow one—most of you just don’t think.”
Fletcher felt himself began to sag—now he was being insulted by an alien—but a flash of anger flared in him, straightening his spine. “Hey,” he said, defending his species, “we think!”
A furrow appeared on the alien leader’s ample and browless forehead. “About what?”
Fletcher leaned forward and his bedsprings gave a little squeak. “About a lot of things! About . . . about aliens, for instance.”
The room vibrated with the aliens’ humming laughter, but Flet
cher was not about to be cowed.
“We’ve done a lot of thinking about you guys. We’ve created books and movies with aliens who look exactly the way you look, who wear the same funny jumpsuits you do, whose names—Zoltan, Relvor—”
“—Revlor,” corrected the alien.
“—are even like yours! That’s pretty good thinking, if you ask me!”
The single finger of Charmat’s right hand stroked his chin. “The thing about human thought is that even though it’s often in the ball park, it’s usually way off base. Don’t you think we might have reconfigured ourselves into beings that are consistent with your limited imaginations? Do you think as evolved as we are, we seriously would look like this?”
Feeling baited, and not willing to be knocked out of Round One in Universal Debate without a fight, Fletcher said, “So you guys went with the cliché? You didn’t think I—with my limited imagination—could handle anything more than that?”
Suddenly the room went dark, but the deepest blackest darkness was inside Fletcher and he moaned, sadness like a death grip around his heart.
In a flash, the lights returned and the aliens clustered around Fletcher.
Fletcher groaned. “Oh, my. What was that?”
“That was us,” said Charmat. “In another configuration.”
“You can be feelings?”
“We can be anything we want.”
“Despair,” said Fletcher. “That’s what I was filled with and it was awful.”
“Sorry,” said Charmat. “But we don’t like to be called clichés.”
“I apologize as well.”
There was an awkward moment of silence that sometimes follows apology, and then with a wave of his one-fingered hand Charmat drew the other aliens to him.
Like a benched player, Fletcher strained to hear what was being said in the on-field huddle.
“You’re right, Fletcher,” said Charmat as the small group broke up. “We should have presented ourselves in a manner more befitting the mission of our lodge.”
The aliens’ rubbery luminescent bodies began to shimmer and within seconds they had reconfigured themselves into forms that made Fletcher gasp . . . again.
“That’s a fine welcome for a ghost, but we were maybe expecting applause,” said one of the six Groucho Marxes wiggling his greasepaint eyebrows and flicking cigar ash on the bedroom floor.
“I have had a perfectly wonderful evening,” said one, “but this wasn’t it.”
“A man’s only as old as the woman he feels,” said another.
“I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.”
“Is this more to your liking?” asked the Groucho Fletcher presumed was Charmat.
“Actually, I—”
Another paced in front of the bed. “Marry me and I’ll never look at another horse.”
“Actually,” continued Fletcher, “this . . . this is a little disconcerting. The way you were before was just fine.”
The half-dozen Groucho Marxes shimmered away and were replaced by the aliens in their original, albeit clichéd, form.
“That was really . . . something,” said Fletcher, and at that moment the absurdity of aliens taking on the body and the bon mots of Groucho Marx struck him, and he began to laugh.
As he was to find out, the manners of Lodge 1212 of the Delphinus Constellation insisted on responding to any laughter with equal or greater laughter of their own. And so Fletcher Weschel’s boyhood bedroom, with its pilly cowboy bed linens and rickracked curtains, with its dusty album covers and movie star pictures and baseball pennants thumbtacked to the wall, rocked with laughter. And when Fletcher had laughed so hard he complained of an aching stomach, the aliens claimed that yes, their bebobs hurt, too, and rubbed a flat curveless part of their body.
“Wait a second,” said Fletcher, “your bebobs are your rear ends? It’s your rear ends that ache when you laugh too much?”
“Remember, this is an alien incarnation to us,” said Charmat without apparent irony. “We’ve formulated ourselves to make it easier for you to see us. And as it’s obvious our backsides lack the curvature of those belonging to earthlings, we’ve created our own word for them.”
“Oh, that’s priceless,” said Fletcher. “P-riceless.” Glee made the atoms of his body bounce off one another; he was a flat soda that had been charged with a burst of effervescence. He felt he had been given a wonderful gift, and innately gracious he invited everyone into the kitchen for the homemade cranberry bread he had baked the night before.
After nearly unanimous compliments (only Revlor said tartness was a better concept than a flavor), the conversation returned to jobs. They made Fletcher explain his three times.
“People actually sit in small windowless cubicles?” asked Charmat.
“Calculating statistical risks?” asked Revlor.
“To figure our premiums?” said Tandala.
“Excuse me, but I had to study hard to become an actuary,” said Fletcher. His voice lost its defensiveness before he finished his sentence and he sighed. “You’re right. It’s not really my true calling.”
“What is?” said Charmat, a light pulsing in his forehead.
“I guess I haven’t figured that out,” said Fletcher, uncomfortable under Charmat’s intense, glowing gaze. Refilling the aliens’ milk glasses, he said, “Now, you—tell me more about Lodge 1212.”
“Our jobs,” said Charmat, flicking cranberry bread crumbs off the table with his finger, “our jobs are to be goof-offs.” The aliens nodded and tittered and, as if to underscore the point, Revlor pulled the corners of his mouth in a ghoulish grin and stuck out his tongue, thin as a viper’s.
A low wave of resignation rolled over Fletcher.
“Don’t feel bad,” said Charmat, reading his thoughts, “not everyone gets visited by Lodges 103 or 720.” The alien leader didn’t wait for Fletcher to vocalize the question in his head. “The brothers and sisters of Lodge 103 are the healers. You can’t be in the same room with them without being cured of whatever it is that ails you.”
“But then,” whispered Tandala in a voice Fletcher found oddly attractive, “you smell like baked-on oven grease.”
“They’ve been trying to iron that bug out for light years,” said Charmat. “If you’re cured by Lodge 103, you’re going to smell like baked-on oven grease. The two go hand in hand.”
“What about Lodge 270?” asked Fletcher.
“720,” corrected the alien leader. “They’re the spiritualists. They claim that one visit from them and you can never doubt the existence of God.”
“Gosh,” said Fletcher, “have you been visited by them?”
“Oh sure. Every year at the annual Interplanetary Mixer.”
“All they do is pass out pamphlets,” scoffed Revlor. “Pamphlets and little memo pads that say, ‘Eternally Yours, Lodge 720.’”
“We don’t believe in their particular God,” said Charmat with a little shake of his big head.
“Do you . . . believe in any God?” asked Fletcher.
“Certainly. According to our belief system, God is fun, laughter. After all, isn’t that when you feel the most holy, when you laugh?”
“I don’t laugh much.”
“So you’d say you’re an agnostic.”
“No! I . . . I like to laugh. It’s just that things haven’t struck me as funny lately.”
“So tell me about the God you believe in,” said Charmat.
“Well, He’s—”
“Oh, so he’s a he. Does he have a penis?”
Fletcher blushed. “That’s not a very nice question to ask.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . because it’s sacrilegious. A person doesn’t go around talking about God’s privates.”
The aliens tittered.
“We’re not laughing at you,” said Charmat kindly. “Well, maybe we are. But in a loving way.”
“720s hardly ever laugh,” said Tandala. “That’s
why we tend to doubt their claim of having a free pass to the Great Beyond.”
“The Great Beyond,” said Fletcher. “What’s the Great Beyond?”
“Nobody really knows. Although it’s where we’re all headed, eventually.”
“Where is it?” asked Fletcher, hugging his knees to his chest.
Charmat pointed his finger toward the window. “It could be out there past the Galilean moons or”—he pointed downward—“it could be underneath your bed. We know as much as you do on that one, good buddy.”
Feeling overwhelmed and not sure what to do with all this strange information, Fletcher said, “Shouldn’t I call a news station or something? This really should be shared with a wider audience.”
The aliens tittered.
“You humans endear us with your need to share,” said Charmat. “But your world isn’t ready for such knowledge. Our philosophy is to work like the Mayans—one brick at a time.”
Leaning back against his pillow to quell a wave of dizziness, Fletcher said, “If the world isn’t ready for ‘such knowledge,’ what makes you think I am?”
“He may have a point,” Revlor said to Charmat.
“Fletcher, in this case, don’t ask why so much. Try why not instead.”
“So let me figure this out. You’re not here to show me that God exists or to heal me of some disease, but to . . . ”
The silence was long and deafening.
“Well,” said Charmat, “we really haven’t figured that out yet.”
“We’re usually the last of the Lodges to be told anything,” said Tandala.
Fletcher concentrated on digging out a sliver of putty from under his fingernail.
“Oh dear,” said Charmat, “you’re starting to feel insignificant. You’re feeling as if goof-offs are the bargain basement of the alien world.”
“No, I’m not,” stammered Fletcher. He rolled the piece of putty into a tiny ball. “Yes, I am.”
“For heaven’s sake—and I mean that in the literal sense,” said Charmat crisply. “Here you get an alien visit—how common an occurrence do you suppose that is?—and you’re sulking because you’re not being visited by what you consider a more elite Lodge!”
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