Unusual Attention

by B. G. Thomas

  “I think maybe it’s true….”

  The teakettle began to whistle.

  Adam let out a gasp and staggered. He almost fell on the floor. Would have if he hadn’t fallen against the threshold, sending strings of beads clattering.

  The scream was just the teakettle.

  But it was too much like those high, piercing, brain-stabbing ice picks he’d experienced with Shane.

  Shane. God, I miss you, Shane….

  Ms. Minden looked at him with an unreadable expression.

  “It’s a teakettle,” she said flatly.

  Adam sighed and felt completely stupid.

  Ms. Minden turned back to the stove and turned off the flame. The whistling wound down, and she took the teapot and began to pour.

  “Orange pekoe,” she said. “Not Earl Grey.”

  She took the cups and put them on a silver platter and added a sugar bowl and a creamer from an ancient refrigerator. She headed out of the kitchen, and when he offered to take it, she looked at him as if he were insane. For a moment she looked like she might hiss at him. She chose to walk past him instead.

  He followed her back into her very full living room to find her setting the tray down on a fancy coffee table with gold-painted scrollwork. She sat down on a delicate-looking chair covered in burnt orange and lime green fabric. Leaned in and poured.

  “Cream? Sugar?”

  “Both, I guess.” He hadn’t had hot tea since he was a boy, and that’s the way his mother always fixed it.

  She pointed at the love seat. “Sit. You’re making me nervous.”

  Somehow he didn’t think that was difficult. He sat.

  That’s when he saw the scar by her left eye. There was a shaft of golden light coming through a small window, and it spotlighted that side of her face. It stood out pink and white, but he thought it might not be too noticeable if not for that light. He hadn’t seen it after all.

  That eye twitched. She rubbed at the scar with an arthritis-clenched hand. Then she picked up one of the teacups. It had a gold handle and some kind of flowers—roses?—painted on its surface. She sipped.

  Adam took his own cup. His hand was shaking. He willed it calm and took a sip. Nope. Not Earl Grey. It was good.

  He looked.

  She was staring at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You tell me, Mr. Brookhart.” She was caressing the black stone around her neck. Squeezing at it.

  Adam put the cup down. His hands were trembling again. For some reason he suddenly felt like crying. What was happening to him? “I want to know if it’s real!”

  “Of course it’s real,” she snapped.

  Adam flinched.

  Ms. Minden started to take another sip of her tea, and he saw that she was trembling. Why?

  She peered at him over the rim of her cup and then carefully put it down.

  “Yes, young man. They’re real. Why else would I have spent my entire life in one way or another studying them? Written the books I have? Lectured? Traveled the world? Investigated? D-don’t you think it is rather insulting to ask me such a question?” The twitch in her left eye had turned into a tic.

  “I didn’t mean to offend y—”

  “Why would you insult yourself?” She rubbed at the twitching with two fingers in small circular motions. “You know it’s real.”

  “I don’t know it’s real! It sounds insane! It sounds crazy!” Wackadoodle. Bonkers. “How can it be? If they were real, we would know by now. It’s like Bigfoot. If he was real, it would have been proven by now. Someone would have found him. If there were a Loch Ness Monster, it would have been found by now. We have the technology. We have satellites that can see a penny on the sidewalk and tell which side is facing—”

  “Nonsense,” she said and reached for her tea. “That’s utter twaddle.”

  “Huh?” It was all he could say. Twaddle?

  “Our satellites are good, but not that good. At least not the ones our government will admit to having. If—as my husband suspected—we are using alien technology derived from the crash site at Roswell, then perhaps we do have such surveillance capability.” She looked at him unblinking this time, the twitch finally gone. “Keyhole class satellites have an imaging resolution of somewhere between five and six.”

  “Huh?” he repeated and wondered if he was becoming a human echo again.

  “That means they can photograph something five inches or so lying in the ground. They may be able to read the license plate number on your car, and please note I say may, but they can tell whether there is a lawnmower in your backyard. This penny story? It is—what do they say?—an urban legend. A modern myth.”

  “K-keyhole?”

  “Kennan ‘Keyhole-class’ KH reconnaissance satellites,” she said. “Always check your facts. I do.”

  “Do you think we’re using alien technology?”

  “I do not deny the possibility. But I think that they are so advanced that there is little chance that scientists in 1947 could have figured out anything from their technology. Remember that the closest star to ours is 4.24 light-years away. A ship traveling at the speed of light would take over four years to get to us. This isn’t even taking into account Einstein’s theory of relativity. Which isn’t practical. What kind of civilization would it have to be that their astronauts are away for hundreds of years? And Betty Hill said that her abductors came from the Zeta Reticuli system, which is thirty-seven light-years away—220 trillion miles away. That means their ships—at light speed—would take thirty-seven years to get here. And that long to get back. And we’re worried about the time it will take us to get to Mars and back? And again, that’s not even taking into account Einstein’s theories.

  “Time marches on,” she continued. “So they must have a type of space travel that skips these passages of time. Some people think they travel interdimensionally. The extraterrestrials would have to be incredibly advanced. More than we are from tribes along the Amazon River. A hundred times more. A thousand. Maybe a thousand thousand.”

  She rubbed at her temple again. God. Would her eye start twitching? But she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Let’s say a tribe of people who have lived for generations along a river in South America came into possession of, say, a cell phone. Could they understand it? Could they take it apart and use it to change their way of life? Of course not!”

  “But… that’s not the same thing. They wouldn’t have any technology at all. They wouldn’t even know to try and take it apart. They wouldn’t be able to understand what it was.”

  “Mr. Brookhart—”

  “Call me Adam. Please.”

  She gave a single nod. “Adam. Then call me Mary. I believe these beings are much more advanced than us, so ahead of us that they don’t even consider us to be much more evolved than monkeys. Think on it. When we capture animals in the wild, then tag them, then release them again—do we explain to them what we are doing to them? Do we say, ‘Sorry, Mr. Bear, we’re doing this to track your behavior.’ When we tag tigers to see about their migratory habits, do we tell them what we’re doing? Or sea creatures. Do we tell them we are just trying to learn about where they travel in the ocean? Of course not! And that is what is happening with these beings. They don’t explain what they’re doing to us.”

  Doing to us?

  “They wouldn’t even be able to explain. They don’t think to explain. They don’t consider us… human, for lack of a better word. They probably consider us only barely sentient.”

  Barely sentient? “But…! But they can see we’re more than bears or tigers,” Adam exclaimed. Crazy. “They would be able to see we have technology. We have satellites, for God’s sake. We have cars. Cell phones! We’re going to Mars. That isn’t monkeys!”

  She nodded again. While she grabbed at that goddamned stone around her neck. “But that is how far advanced beyond us they are. Forget about Star Trek, where the only difference between us and them is pointed ears or wrinkled no
ses. Where in a few centuries we’ll have ‘warp drive’ and be able to zing all over the universe in a few hours. I think they very well may think of us as monkeys. Why else would they abduct us? Why else would they feel all right about abducting us?” She was rubbing at that scar again. “Tag us.”

  “Tag us?” he asked. Like implants? Did she believe that crazy stuff too?

  “Implants.” Now she was scratching at her scar, and it was making him very nervous. What if it started bleeding? What was she doing?

  And then he was rubbing at his temple.

  Stop it. He made himself stop.

  “What do they want?” he cried, and realized that as insane as all this was, he was believing it. Or believing it was possible.

  All because he saw a weird man from his balcony? A guy holding his hands up in front of him?

  “To study us. There is something they want to know. Something that makes us different from them, and they want to know what it is.”

  Adam shook his head. “Why? What do they want? Are they going to invade us? Like in the movies?” He was shaking now. Sweating.

  “Oh, my dear young man,” she said. “They’ve already invaded. They’re here now. And they’re not going anywhere.”

  22

  INVADED.

  That was the word that did it. That sent him into a panic.

  Shane.

  Adam didn’t wait to pack. In fact, the only stop he made between Terra’s Gate and Buckman was to get gas. He’d had to pee, but it was only the gas gauge hovering over empty that made him pull off the road.

  He wasn’t sure how he didn’t get a ticket.

  Adam wasn’t sure when he went from thinking that Mary Minden was a wackadoodle—a very intelligent one, but crazy anyway—to quite suddenly believing her, or believing enough to send him rushing from her apartment to his Subaru.

  “INVADED? REALLY?”

  “In every way there is. Mentally—once they’ve taken someone they can read their minds. Sometimes they can beforehand, but afterward? Afterward there is almost nothing you can do to stop them. They can control you. It’s in all the books. Not just mine. Have you read Communion?”

  “I’ve read it,” he said.

  “And spiritually. Why do you think that some people think the Greys are heavenly beings? Beautiful angels with pale skin and long blond hair and huge blue eyes!”

  Adam remembered them. The Venusians. Who spread their hippie messages about how we should all live happily together and stop waging war. And deadly gases and sulfuric acid rain.

  She laughed. “Norse gods even. They use their mind-reading powers to invade people spiritually and make them think they’re benevolent. Those people are the so-called contactees. People who think the aliens are here to help us. That they want us to stop hurting each other. Stop waging war. Of course they want us to stop waging war. They want us. They need us. I just haven’t figured out why.”

  It had been all Adam could do not to shake his head. Mind control? Really?

  “And physically. Do you think all those stories about—” She swallowed hard. “—anal probes were all jokes?”

  Like Cartman from South Park? And the radar dish that came out of his ass? It was all he could do not to burst into laughter.

  “Something that many abductees have in common is the same with many rape victims. Abductees have trouble with relationships, with trust, with sexuality and their own bodies.”

  Adam jerked.

  What had Shane said?

  “I can’t. I. Can’t. I just can’t let anything…. I can’t.”

  That’s what he’d said just as Adam was working his cock inside him.

  Shane had quite suddenly, well, panicked.

  He’d even been crying.

  Adam had held him close until he’d calmed down. Normally it was the kind of thing that would have sent Adam running—somebody freaking out like that in the middle of sex—with thoughts of “weirdo” in his head. Instead, for some unidentifiable reason, it had made him feel closer to Shane.

  And normally that would have sent him running as well. Feeling closer. Letting someone close—in—was one step away from being invaded. But when you let them invade. Like when France let the Germans in during World War II without so much as a shot being fired. Or Poland.

  Was that what he was doing with Shane? Just letting him in?

  Why? Why?

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he had said.

  “If the aliens… invaded their victim’s bodies…. After something like that…. H-how easy can it be for the abductee to allow anyone inside them? It’s just like rape.”

  God. Oh my God.

  Could it be? Could it be true? Ridiculous! Shane couldn’t bottom because aliens had anally probed him? Adam wanted to laugh.

  “There are studies,” Ms. Mendin—Mary—told him, clutching her stone so tight her knuckles were white, “that indicate that as much as six to ten percent of the population have been abducted.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he’d cried. “How could that be? How is that possible?”

  “Young man, for them it would be easy. Who amongst us has not driven a deserted road late at night?”

  He had.

  “How many of us live in small towns?”

  Shane said they wouldn’t come for him in Buckman. That even in a small town someone would notice if a spaceship came hovering over his house.

  (Spaceship! I just said spaceship! He never said spaceship!)

  “How many of us have gone camping?”

  Fourth grade. Camping in pup tents when he was in the Webelos. Skip wanted to go skinny-dipping. He’d been so excited that he’d followed Skip to the lake, and his penis had been as hard as stone. A full moon was rising over the trees, reflecting on the surface of the lake. And then a second later, it was high overhead.

  Why do I keep thinking about that?

  You know why.

  You’ve always known why.

  Faces.

  Faces in his dreams.

  WHILE HE was at the gas station, Adam thought it would take forever to fill the tank. He almost didn’t fill it. Almost just threw in five or six dollars’ worth of gas and hit the road. But then his bursting bladder told him he’d never make it, and so he ran inside and took care of business and let the tank fill on its own—even though Daphne would have had a fit about it. Lectured him on how someone could take the nozzle and fill their tank as well.

  “HOW MANY of us have lost time?” Ms. Minden had asked him. “And convinced themselves that it was because they were so busy that the time just flashed by? Or that they’d fallen asleep and hadn’t realized it?”

  Or been hypnotized by the oncoming headlights of assholes with their high beams on, maybe?

  “Or told themselves—convinced themselves—they must have fallen into some kind of trance while driving all by themselves in the middle of nowhere—”

  This isn’t real.

  “—because the alternative is just too horrifying to accept?”

  It’s crazy.

  Then why was he racing at a ridiculous speed to Buckman to see Shane?

  Because I miss him.

  But that wasn’t the only reason.

  There’s lots of reasons!

  He had to talk to Shane. Tell him the things that Ms. Minden had said. Even if it was crazy.

  Because sometimes crazy things were true—were real.

  But aliens? Aliens invading Earth? “You honestly think they’ve invaded?” he’d asked her. “Like in fucking Independence Day or something?”

  She winced, and the tic started again… but it lasted only a second. One, two, three…. It stopped at four. “I don’t like that word.”

  “‘Something’?” he asked. She didn’t like the word something?

  “That word you kids called ‘the F-bomb.’ It’s tacky. Unnecessary. Unprofessional. Juven—”

  Kids? Kids? He was thirty-two. “It’s just a word!” he snapped.
/>   “Nevertheless, I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t use it.”

  Fine. “Fine,” he said. Whatever she wanted. Because she had information he needed.

  She was looking at him that way again. Like he was something in a petri dish.

  “I won’t use it.”

  “No. Not like Independence Day. Or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not even that series from the sixties—The Invaders.”

  He didn’t know it.

  She sighed. “Long before you were born, I suppose,” she said, taking up her tea again. “It starred Roy Thinnes. He was very handsome.”

  The comment surprised Adam. It seemed so incongruous.

  “I was a young woman once,” she said. Goodness. Was that a blush?

  “Okay,” he replied.

  “It was a scary show. Aliens posed as humans. But ours? Our aliens? Posing as humans? No. Nothing like that. But they’re here all right. And the government isn’t doing anything about it. That’s why Stephen thought we were using alien technology.”

  Stephen Neary. Her husband.

  “He thought the government was in on it. That they turned their heads and let people be abducted in exchange for advanced technology. In the end he more than half convinced me. They tore the CSSU apart.”

  The Committee for Secret Studies on UFOs—or something like that. The organization she was in that investigated UFOs.

  “They didn’t like what we were finding out. What we were proving.” She began to shake and rub her temples, both of them this time. “Stephen was growing more and more frantic. Until he had a stroke!”

  “Ms. Minden.” He reached out to her, which only made her bolt back in her chair.

  “They killed him. I don’t know how. But I know they did it!” A tear spilled down her cheek. “And ever since, they’ve done all they could do to discredit me. Make me look like a crackpot. Humiliate me. They planted reviews on my books telling people my books were ridiculous. Crazy!”

  “Mary….” He took a deep breath. “You said that patchouli could keep aliens away. You advised people to pray. You said if we loved ourselves that aliens would leave us alone. That tinfoil could keep them from reading our minds.” He pointed at the ceiling.