I think he believed I was somewhere deep within the costume, that my feathered head was empty, my blinking pink eyes controlled by a battery. Otherwise I doubt that he would have tried to kill me in front of twenty thousand fans.
The bat flattened my ruby-red comb. I was in terrible pain, but tried not to let on. I danced like a maniac. The fans loved it. I flew to the top of the dugout and leapt into the arms of the best-looking woman in that section of the stands.
“Kiss it better,” I wailed.
The woman obliged. I massaged her breasts with my free wing. She didn’t object, in fact she clutched me to her. I love the smell of perfume. It has not yet been invented on my planet.
The fans roared their approval. But if the bat had struck a half inch lower it could easily have disabled me. What would have happened if a doctor had attempted to remove my head in order to examine me?
How I got the name Mike Street. When I walked into the Mariners corporate offices at 100 South King Street and went to introduce myself, my mind went blank. Martin Gardiner was the name the bureaucrats had chosen for me. It was the name I had used in New York, but in New York I had pretended to be mute. For the first time, my speech would be monitored. Suffice it to say that speech on my home planet is fraught with zs and vs and a sound, uuvvzz, that is not quite comparable to anything in English.
“Good morning,” I said. “My name is . . .” and I panicked. All I could recall was an advertisement I’d seen for the Pike Street Market. “. . . Pike Street, I’d like to—” but the secretary cut me off.
“About ten or twelve blocks straight north on First Avenue,” she said, assuming I was asking directions.
“No, no,” I said, “my name.”
“Your name is Pike Street?”
“Yes. No. Mike Street,” I said in desperation. And so it was. I didn’t get to see management that day. In fact, they were down-right rude to me.
“The contest isn’t until Sunday,” the secretary said, eyeing me up and down, her eyes getting large as I riffed the indigo feathers around my neck.
“Contest?” I said.
“The Mascot Contest,” she said, her voice incredulous. “Sunday afternoon at the Kingdome. Here are the rules.” She handed me a mimeographed page containing several paragraphs of dark print below the Mariners logo.
A contest. I was going to have to compete for a job.
“You shouldn’t wear your costume now,” the secretary was saying. “You’ll get it dirty before Sunday.”
I wandered out onto the street, where, instead of trying to be inconspicuous, which was impossible, I flaunted myself, nuzzling children and attractive women, taking pratfalls, pretending to swallow a parking meter.
On Sunday there was a large crowd at the Kingdome. A mascot’s costume was good for free admission. There were about forty of us, from children dressed in Halloween costumes to two or three dressed in elaborate and expensive getups that rivaled my own real self. There were also three or four very odd individuals who, I suspect, were inmates, escaped or otherwise, from some institution.
We were herded in a flock, or whatever a collective of mascots would be called. Perhaps a plush of mascots would be appropriate, for many were direct imitations of the San Diego Chicken, the Phillie Phanatic, or B. J. Bird.
The contest was a fiasco. The majority of participants had no stage presence whatsoever, and, after we were admitted to the playing field, merely plodded across the outfield toward second base.
Besides myself there was a man on stilts dressed as the Space Needle, a magnificent and imaginative creation, but he was not cuddly or lovable, and was ill equipped to run or take face-first dives into the infield dirt.
Perhaps the most unusual was an entry I called Mr. Baby, a middle-aged, bald, pudgy man, who was dressed in a massive diaper with the Mariners logo stenciled on the back, and a frilly bonnet. We talked briefly while we waited to be admitted to the playing field.
“A dream come true. A dream come true,” he kept repeating. “It has always been my fantasy to appear as a baby in front of the whole world. I dress like this in private all the time. My wife is really very understanding. Sometimes she dusts me with talcum powder while I lay back on my blanket and kick and gurgle. Tell me, do you wear your costume in the privacy of your own home? Does it have sexual meaning for you?”
“I do wear it at home,” I said, “and I suppose it has as much sexual meaning as any other costume.”
“I think perhaps we understand each other,” Mr. Baby said, with what I interpreted as an ominous tone.
When the limping, slovenly parade of mascots began, Mr. Baby dropped to his hands and knees and crawled slowly, like a grotesque toy, toward the infield. Unfortunately, the sharp bristles of the artificial turf soon proved too much for Mr. Baby’s tender hands and knees, and he began to bleed. Our bedraggled troupe of would-be clowns was not monitored in any way. While I and several others in our group, including a girl dressed as Raggedy Ann, waited for someone to intercept Mr. Baby and say, “That’s enough,” he continued to crawl like a huge slug across the toothbrush-like carpet until he began leaving a trail of blood behind him on the pale green surface.
“I think you should stop now,” I said to him, but he stared up at me, his big baby eyes overflowing with tears, but filled also with pain and ecstasy.
“A dream come true,” he repeated over and over as he crawled beside me, a fine spray of blood spattering on my plush feet.
A man wearing a moth-eaten satyr’s head and a canvas raincoat stopped along the third-base line, and, flinging open the coat, exposed himself to six or seven thousand fans. The fans booed his efforts until eventually a couple of security guards appeared and escorted him off the field.
The judges were Miss Elliott Bay, a toothy girl in a blue and white bathing suit and a Mariners cap, and a disc jockey named Dr. Slug, whose stock in trade was slime jokes: “What is a slug’s favorite song?” Slime on My Hands. “What is a slug’s favorite novel?” Slime and Punishment. “Who is a slug’s favorite playwright?” Neil Slimon. “What creeps slowly toward the new year?” Father Slime.
The judges chose seven of us and lined us up at second base, where the baseball fans were to choose a winner by means of applause. There were prizes to be won, with the final winner getting to be Seattle Mascot for one game.
The applause set three of us apart: me, the Space Needle, and something called the Kitsap Carp, a person of indeterminate sex dressed in a fish costume. A large and vocal group of fans kept chanting, “We want the flasher,” and I can’t help but feel that he was the people’s choice, for after all, what is it we value most but when people expose themselves unashamedly to us, though we also fear them for it?
I could tell that in spite of my alabaster feathers, my endearing pink eyes as big as sunflowers, and the indigo and violet shading along my neck and wings, that I was not going to win the contest unless I did something spectacular. In the first round the Space Needle had received more applause.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve narrowed it down to three finalists,” intoned Dr. Slug, who was short, with slick hair, piano legs, and an obscenely protruding belly.
He then proceeded to introduce each of us briefly. The Kitsap Carp turned out to be a woman with a thick accent who said her ambition in life was to make people happy and bring peace to the world. The Space Needle, a professor of economics at Western Washington State University, was active in Big Brothers and a currently fashionable branch of evangelical Christianity. The only all-American thing he hadn’t done was give birth.
When my turn came, I pantomimed an inability to speak. I spread my wings to their full span, ruffled my neck feathers, and did a jigging, spinning dance from second base to the pitcher’s mound. Flapping my wings, but being careful not to give the impression of actual flight, I ran toward the backstop and leapt—actually I flew about eight feet in the air—and clutched onto the wire mesh. I scaled the screen gracefully, all the time making birdlike
whirring sounds. The fans at first cheered my exploits, then became silent as they do in the presence of a daring circus act. I climbed the screen until I could reach a guy wire and proceeded up it claw over claw—or at least I hoped I gave that impression, for I was actually flying. I climbed up to theconcrete roof of the Kingdome. Giving my loud natural call, “Uuvvzzz,” I leapt from the guy wire to another that controlled the raising and lowering of the baseball scoreboard. The crowd gasped. From there I jumped and, with one flap of my delicate wings, was able to grasp onto a piece of the red, white, and blue bunting that hung down from the compression ring at the top of the Dome.
I then made a complete circle, swinging from one piece of bunting to the next. I must have looked like a feathered monkey. I crowed loudly as the fans cheered and applauded. The circle finished, I leapt back to the guy wire and descended, claw over claw again.
When the applause was monitored I was virtually a unanimous winner.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mike Street, the Seattle Albatross,” cried Dr. Slug.
It was a woman who was my downfall, or perhaps I should say it was her downfall that led to my downfall. Her name was Virginia and she was much more persistent than most of the young women who flaunted themselves and fluttered after me like butterflies.
She was waiting for me after a game, in the passageway behind the Mariners dugout. How she got there was anybody’s guess. She wanted to take me to dinner. She flattered me. Residents of my planet are all susceptible to flattery. I finally agreed. Without asking, she chose a fish restaurant, pointing it out as one of the many things we had in common. And we did have common interests. What she had that interested me was intelligence, something one seldom encounters in players, fans, or mascot groupies.
“Why do you like me?” I asked.
“You’re mysterious,” she said.
“So are a lot of people who don’t hide in albatross costumes. What if I took this off and you found me horribly disfigured? What if I was really an alien with skin the color of chianti, several eyes, and a tail?”
“You have a cute lisp, Mike,” she said. “Your trouble is you’re just shy. I can tell. I can also tell when someone is very lonely.”
She was certainly right about that. I was desperately lonely. And she was extremely pretty. She was twenty-two years old, with blue eyes and a beautiful tan, and she also wore an exotic perfume that made my heart beat like a motorcycle engine. Her dress smelled freshly ironed, and she wore tiny white shoes with her red toenails peeping out.
It had been three months since I had heard from my home planet. After my first dinner with Virginia, I went against rules and contacted them. Someone unknown to me answered. The line was full of static, like a million throat clearings.
“We’ve updated our equipment,” the voice told me. “Your communicator is obsolete.”
“Then bring me home.”
“There seems to be a problem,” the voice went on. “Someone is working on it. We’ll be in touch in due course.” I demanded to speak with my previous contact. “He is no longer with us.” I asked for any of the joint chiefs of staff, for the prime minister. “All gone,” I was informed. “Retired or replaced. Space exploration is not a priority with this administration.”
“Then send me a female for company,” I pleaded. “I could live here if I had a partner. We could work as a team—”
“Impossible,” replied the voice. “We suggest you attune yourself to interstellar living for the foreseeable future. And, incidentally, don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
I had no sooner hidden the communicator among the sprouting potatoes when Virginia came tapping at my door. I was charmed by her. She talked in bright bursts of sound like splashes of bird song. I didn’t let her inside, but I took her out for ice cream. All the time we were together I was rationalizing that since she was sweet and intelligent I might be able to forget for once that I was an alien. I mean, our method of sexual gratification is not that different from what is engaged in here on Earth.
We had dinner for three consecutive nights. Virginia was a public relations trainee for Boeing. She wrote optimistic press releases in what she called “media-oriented language.”
Each night, at the end of our date, I clowned a bit in the lobby of her apartment building, bowed, hugged her in a friendly, brotherly way, pecked her cheek, and bolted out the door before I lost control of myself.
“Can we go back to your place?” Virginia asked after our fourth date. We had been interrupted about ten times during our meal as I signed menus, napkins, scraps of paper, and children. Adults produced cameras from unlikely places on their bodies and then thrust reluctant older children into my arms for picture-taking purposes.
I should have turned Virginia’s request aside with a joke, but I didn’t. I was thinking with my reproductive system.
“Rather than my apartment, why don’t I show you my special place? I’d like you to see the very top of the Kingdome at night.”
Though I kept the apartment for show, I actually had lived for four years in the compression ring at the top of the Kingdome. It was a perfect aerie for a large, solitary bird.
Inside the Kingdome, two dim night-lights burned.
“Once your eyes become accustomed, it’s like deep twilight,” I said to Virginia.
“You mean we’re going up there,” she said, after I pointed to the compression circle at the top.
“It’s two hundred and fifty feet,” I said. “But my nest is there. I’ve never told another soul about this, Virginia.”
She laughed prettily.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “I can’t wait to see what you really look like.”
“Then let’s not wait,” I said.
“How do we get up there? Is there an elevator?”
“There is a traditional mechanical way to get there. But let’s not be traditional.” I scooped her up in my wings. “Hang on tightly to my neck,” I said. I ran a few steps to gain momentum, then my long blue wings flapped like blankets snapping in a strong wind, and we soared toward the roof of the Kingdome. I landed with great agility, not even ruffling Virginia’s hair.
“How did you do that?” Virginia squealed.
“It’s all done with mirrors,” I said.
“Wow!” She looked about at my few possessions, the pole I used as my roost. Unfortunately, there was rather a mess below the pole. I hadn’t been expecting company.
“God It looks like a giant bird lives here,” said Virginia, and then the significance of what she had said struck her. She stared at me with a new curiosity, a curiosity mixed with fear.
“I was hoping you’d roost with me,” I said, knowing as the words escaped how strange and futile I must have sounded. Virginia stared searchingly at me a moment longer; her expression changed; she stepped back two steps and screamed. Her voice reverberated eerily through the empty dome, which frightened her even more.
I could see that she would be in serious danger if she stepped any farther back. I lunged at her. She, of course, misinterpreted my movement as one of hostility. An instant later, she was hurtling toward the baseball field, her death scream a small, sad sound in the heavy air.
I launched myself after her, but there was no way I could catch up with her falling form. When I reached the artificial turf, she lay dead near second base, blood seeping outward from her grotesquely sprawled corpse.
I knew at once that I couldn’t risk involvement. Panic-stricken, I ran, not even thinking that my secret living quarters would surely be discovered, that Virginia’s small, red-and-white striped handbag was lying on the floor of the aerie.
At first, the police were very nice, cordial even. I was contacted routinely about Virginia’s death. But I am a very bad criminal, or at least I am very bad at concealing information. I didn’t have a story.
“Do you know Virginia Knowlton?” they asked. “We were good friends,” I said.
The police had the Kingdome maintenance people take
them to the top of the dome. There they found my roost, the evidence that I used the space as living quarters. But for some reason the connection was not made. Police deal with cold facts; the fantastical seldom crosses their mind.
Virginia’s death was given sensational treatment by the press. I was dogged by reporters, radio and television crews. It is very difficult for someone as colorfully unique as I to hide, anywhere.
I maintained silence. I shrugged my shoulders at all questions. I pecked at microphones and licked the lenses of probing TV cameras.
At my apartment, I went against orders and contacted my home planet. If anything, the static was more tenacious than ever. I explained my predicament.
“Carry on as usual,” came the reply.
“Bring me home,” I wailed.
“We find your situation interesting,” the garbled voice replied. “We will study your request and get back to you in good time. Please don’t try to contact us again. We are changing frequencies to something beyond the capabilities of your communicator.”
I was interviewed a number of times at police headquarters. They were very nice. I think they believed me. I admitted to taking Virginia up to see the top of the Kingdome. She was overcome by the height, fell before I could save her. I panicked and ran.
Since there were no other marks or wounds on her body, and since we were known to be good friends, the police finally announced they were closing the case, marking it as “death by misadventure.”
“There is one thing,” a detective named Art said to me. “You’ll have to let us have a look at the real you. You know, just in case you fought or something. Wouldn’t want to find you with scratches all over your body.”
“But this is the real me,” I said plaintively.
“It’s only a formality,” said the detective. “Please don’t give us any trouble at this late date, Mr. Street.”
“I can’t.”
“You mean won’t.”
“I never let anyone see me. I carry pictures . . .” I fumbled for the ID I kept taped out of sight.
Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Page 22