“You know, I really do like your wristband.”
“Redheads rule!” I whisper. “I like it! You do rule, Mom! So what’s next?”
Monica does her best pas de chat, pointing to the scuba equipment. “We’re going down, my friend. Down, down, down!”
“Okay, I’ll follow you into the fiery pit of hell,” I say.
“Don’t be so dramatic, Michael; we’re just taking a dip into the unknown.” We both laugh.
She throws me the wet suit and places the mask on the ground. “It’s called the Ghost, Michael. It’s for people who’d rather stay down in the bottomless pit forever.”
“Do you think we’ll find any ghosts down there?”
Monica puts on her rubberized Magmadrop. “I’ve got your back, buddy. Don’t worry; it’ll be Monica to the rescue.”
“Mom, why are we really doing this?”
My mom flops her red hair over her wet suit as she glares up at the brilliant rays of the sun.
“Why?” she says, sounding a little angry. “Because I’m tired of lies. I’m tired of not knowing what’s going on in my life. I’m tired of hearing that everything’s going to be okay. This isn’t Bob Marley time, Michael.” Mom pauses as she stares down at the placid blue waters enclosed within the three islands that surround us. “Those islands might as well be called Curly, Larry, and Moe! No one on them knows shit! Besides, I’m tired of ETs living like stealthy spies under my house. I’m tired of my son being kidnapped by some unknown force that I can’t communicate with. I’m tired of receiving phone calls from an anonymous caller who seems to know more about my husband than I do. Most of all, Michael, I’m tired of lies. I need truth to go on with my life. Got it?”
I point to my hat. “Go Deep!”
CHAPTER 27
July 7, 2378
9:57:02
I see you comin’ through the door
Creepin’, it’s a quarter past four and
I smell the scent of cheap perfume
Who is she?
—Toni Braxton (ancient songwriter)
“Tell me, mom, how in the world did you and Dad hit it off? I mean, what was the attraction?”
Mom leans downward, looking into the dark water beneath us. She takes a deep breath. “I came from an artistic family, Michael. My father, my mother, and my sister were all artists pursuing truth; that’s what artists do, right?”
“Sure, Mom,” I say as I try to wedge into my extremely tight wet suit. “What about Dad?”
Mom places her rubberized hooded top over her head. “Your father was different: strong, bold, and decisive. You’ve heard the expression “opposites attract,” right, Michael? I was going to tell my truth through my art and music; your father was going to boldly protect the country from outside forces.”
“How did that go?” I ask somewhat dismally.
Monica laughs nervously. “Well, instead, your father began protecting us from him. And I could no longer pursue my art, because my world had turned into a lie.” She gasps. “You’re the only thing that is real, honest and true. I can count on you, can’t I, Michael?”
“And Dad will get good and ticked once he finds out that we’ve stolen his stuff and we’ve gone into a prohibited area, right?”
Monica completes the task of putting on her wet suit. “I want truth, Michael; that’s all I care about.”
I squeeze into the top of my wet suit and walk over to my mom’s side.
“You want to know something, mom? I respect you. I truly do.”
She smiles as we both lean backward on the side of the boat, flipping into the watery abyss.
I check my instruments to make sure everything is all right. The look on my mom’s face before we dived in was like that of a woman possessed. Before taking the plunge, I punched in the coordinates 34° 1’ 23.31” N, 118° 59’ 45.64” W.
Mom sends me an underwater text: “We’re not going there! We’re going much lower.”
Great, we’re going on a death mission. All right, what the hell. If I die, at least I’m making my mother happy. We descend quickly through the epipelagic zone. We’re down 656 feet. I can still observe sunlight. Mom is concerning me by going down far too quickly. What the hell is she thinking?
I send her an underwater text: “Slow down!”
Her response is “Keep up, space traveler!”
I start to breathe faster and more consistently. I’m thinking Mom is crazy. My assessment? I blame my dad for being such a prick!
We’re going too fast and too deep. I’m beginning to wonder if Monica is on a death mission. I hope we haven’t reached the mesopelagic zone; I’m not sure I want to die today.
Light is extremely faint, but Mom has turned on her supercharged flash light. It’s called the Torch because it has incredible wicked laser light. I observe an entire school of red and black fish swimming casually in what I’m now thinking of as the twilight zone. I believe these creatures are called bioluminescent aquatics. The light is getting fainter and fainter. It’s now turning pitch black. The only thing I can see is Monica’s laser torch. I’m beginning to wonder who the hell my mom is—Super Woman?
I know that she’s taken a thermal imaging camera with her. It can take pictures or project pictures onto a screen, and it’s completely water resistant. It also offers something called acoustic imaging. You guessed it; she can pick up images over a football field away. What the hell is she looking for?
Damn! I think. Are those actually tectonic plates shifting, moving outward, creating an actual underground river within the ocean? Is she crazy? She has to be suicidal! We’re actually headed in between two geomagnetic plates. Mom is crazy!
I observe a variety of colors. Where are they coming from? What else is down here? I remember my father talking about something called Edges of the Rainbow, which is an underwater place he visited with a team of scientists over a decade ago. Is this it? I wonder. I’m beginning to feel a little queasy. I hope I’m not getting sick. I hear a beep coming from my acoustic gamma ray wristwatch. It’s what mom is using to communicate with me. It projects words in front of my face. Nope, not on a screen—in my glasses. Mom sends “Hang in there! We’re almost there!”
I text back to her, “The redhead is crazy!”
I’m sure she’s laughing, I muse. I get another beep and another text: “My sonar is picking up an underground structure. Follow me!”
I see stones. One of the structures has a carving of a mastodon on it. My God, where are we? What did my dad find out about this structure? It’s obviously not the work of humans. I see stone circles and petroglyphs. I observe a circle that is approximately fifty feet wide. There are smaller stones all around the circle. Why?
I receive another underwater text: “Amazing! Are you looking at this?”
I send her a hologram instead. It’s a picture of Keith Richards smoking dope underwater. I know she’s laughing now.
Moving on, we come to a huge structure that looks like a temple. Mom told me that she has a subatomic sealer that will protect us from any impurities inside the structure. I’m beginning to feel better. It’s as if the temple has spiritual, if not aromatic, qualities to it. I smell something glorious and revitalizing.
Has my dad been here? Has he talked to the extraterrestrials who were here once? What did they want? Was he negotiating something? About someone?
Mom is swimming around inside this monstrous computer. Can it actually be a prehistoric computer? Yes, it appears as if it’s a complex system consisting of analogues with symbols and interesting petroglyph notations. Oddly, it has dials and cogs and stuff I don’t really understand.
I see Mom actually swim inside this massive, lifelike computer. She’s connecting a USBEE piece of equipment inside the computer. I swim close to her. Immediately I see a photo upload onto a translucent screen.
Dear G
od! No.
Mom swims up right next to me, looking confused and alarmed. She hits a button, and I see an image pop up in my glasses.
This can’t be true! It can’t be right! What trick is someone playing on me?
“What is it?” I text. “I don’t get it!”
Monica stares at me. I can see her unwavering eyes through her scuba mask. She hasn’t even blinked. She looks petrified.
“This is a surveillance operation, Michael. They are spying on the person in the picture.”
I stare at the picture, disbelieving what I’m seeing.
“It’s you, Michael. The picture is you!”
I feel as if I’m going to throw up.
Monica grabs my arm. She glares right at me when she sends, “Why do you look ten years older? And why would the ETs spy on you? Don’t lie to me!”
I don’t know how to answer her. I can’t answer her. Ezekial swore me to secrecy. I send her another underwater text that simply is a question mark, hoping she will let it go.
My mother places her face right next to mine and sends another text written in large letters: “WHY ARE YOU LYING TO ME?”
CHAPTER 28
August 6, 2378
Daybreak
I wake up the next morning feeling like my brain is swimming inside of a maelstrom of swirling, suffocating fluid. My psyche swells like a helium balloon and then crashes onto the craggy rocks at Bone Falls. Perhaps that’s the effect of 350 years of mass-murdering ancestors. The effects of my own genes ravaging a war-torn brain can certainly be pronounced.
Getting out of bed is a chore, but getting out of my brain is an impossibility. One of the side effects of my bipolar mania is a sort of a migraine effect. However, instead of flashing lights, I get flashing fragmented memories. Honestly, whatever Copernicus and Ezekial conjured up on Coppy’s planet that strange day may have just complicated things. Why? My mind won’t rest.
Has your brain ever whirled and swirled into a frenetic spiderweb of conflicting dilemmas? I walk into the bathroom and splash cool water on my face. I try to calm myself. I didn’t just have ghostly nightmares last night; It was more of a kaleidoscope of odd images. Somehow my extended mind seems to be absorbing all the fears and paranoia that manically envelop my brain.
Yet it is the image of my own face that bothers me most. I observed myself ten years in the future. My face looked worn, gaunt, and terrified. What had I done? Who was I competing with? Was I trying to keep up with the centuries of mass murders that my ancestors had inflicted on the world?
The pounding in my head continues. I feel like I did the day I tried to scale Bone Falls. My brain feels like water pounding against sharp rocks. Yet it doesn’t end; the seething fluid keeps crashing over the falls relentlessly. There is no way to stop it from pounding and pounding and pounding.
The look on my mother’s face was horrifying. What son brings that much terror into the life of his mother? Who would do that?
I strip off all my clothes and turn on the water in the shower, hoping to cleanse myself of all my sins. I place my head under the driving force of water cascading over me like the waterfall at Bone Falls. I’m stripped naked and vulnerable. All I have left is a cloudy vision of 41.25 seconds with a time traveler named Ezekial.
I can’t escape my mother’s horror; nor can I escape the thought that I have to make things better. Ezekial’s face comes at me like a ghostly fabrication. Is he real? Is Copernicus real? Damn it, I guess I have to ask the question, am I real?
I reach up, turning off the cascading water. I stand isolated and naked in the shower; there’s nothing to shield me—nothing to protect who I am. I take a deep breath. The throbbing in my head seems to have subsided for now. I place a towel over my cold, shaking body. I’m still shuddering. I feel like my entire being is freezing, chilled to the proverbial bone. I stare at my face in the mirror. Something needs to be done.
As I walk back to my bedroom, Terby’s little body is flashing like a strobe light.
“What’s going on, Terbs?” I say.
I hit the flashing light and see a telecast of a woman talking into her microphone.
“Tele Services is reporting that an ET has been apprehended at Mirror Cove. Police, as well as the FBI and CIA, are requesting that everyone stay out of the area!”
I switch on my hologram technology. Instead of watching a screen, I see a live 3D image of the newscaster, Kelly Morosque, holding a Gidget USB microphone right in Bone’s face.
Dear G_d!
As usual, Bone looks like he’s got a fifteen o’clock shadow going on. His gruff beard, mixed with his gruffer voice, makes him sound like a mountain man in search of a good shower.
In the background, I see a full-grown seven-foot reptilian ET murmuring in another language. It sort of sounds like the ancient Bob Dylan speaking in Mandarin. I hit zoom away on my multifunctional hovercraft remote, allowing the seven-foot reptilian to appear in all his holographic splendor in my bedroom.
Damn! At least they have him restrained, I think. Honestly I’m a little scared to be viewing this monster reptilian in my bedroom—simulation or not.
Anyway, the camera pans back to the Kelly Morosque’s face. The reptilian seems to be spitting some sort of disgusting greenish fluid. Kelly continues talking.
“This can’t be real,” I whisper. It occurs to me that this broadcast is being sent from every satellite in the world.
How many people are sitting in their houses, looking at the image of Kelly Morosque talking to this seven-foot monster?
Ms. Morosque turns her attention back to Bone.
“Mr. Bone, we owe you a great deal of thanks for apprehending this grotesque—”
Bone gruffly speaks into the amped-up Gidget microphone. His face is stern, and his demeanor is oddly noble. “He is a man, not a monster or a novelty, and he needs to be treated with respect.”
CHAPTER 29
August 9, 2378
1:03 p.m.
You know hard times, just an old friend, just an old friend to me.
I say hard times, just an old friend, just an old friend to me.
Tell me now old friend, oh when you gonna let me be?
Can you feel a cold wind howlin’ down, blowin’ in my song.
Can’t you feel a cold wind, it’s howlin’ down, blowin’ my song.
Well I ain’t an old man. But you know my time ain’t long.
—The Allman Brothers Band (ancient songwriters)
“Careful on that bike, Michael; I don’t trust it!”
I turn around only to see an old friend of my father’s in the driveway.
“Is that you, Uncle Solly?” I say, squinting at the ancient dirt bike my dad had refurbished.
“That’s quite a set of wheels, my friend,” Solly says, ambling toward me.
“Oh no, my father sent you, didn’t he?”
Solly pats my back. “I’m here,” he says, shrugging. “Your father is busy, you have to understand.”
“He’s always busy.”
“Michael, he wanted to come home. You know how it is. But I certainly don’t mind spending some time with my favorite adopted nephew.”
“I wish you were my uncle,” I say. “Actually, I wish you were my father.”
Sammy held out his hand, signaling me to get in his old, rusted-out Peugeot.
“When are you going to get yourself a real car, Solly?”
“When are you going to get yourself a real motorcycle?”
We both laugh, sharing a moment we’ve had a number of times in our lives.
“Sexy Sammy’s?” I ask.
“You mean Sammy’s Nova and Nachas?”
I nod. You see, Sammy’s bagel restaurant was one of the most popular eateries on the island. It was colorful, and of course there was Sammy. Everyone on the island knew Samm
y. It was the ultimate hangout. People would spend a day at the beach and go on their boats. Sometimes there would be a party over at someone’s mansion; people would get hungover, and they’d all end up at Sexy Sammy’s Nova and Nachas.
“Ya know, Mikey, your father isn’t so bad,” Solly says casually.
I shake my head. “You’re still at it, aren’t you, Solly. What in the world do you owe my dad to keep doing this? I mean, c’mon, you can’t exactly think he’s a great guy.”
“We go back a long way, Mikey. Long before we were hired as scientists for Fermway and before we got jobs working for the government, we were childhood friends in the old neighborhood. Sure I owe your father, Michael. He’s a great guy.”
I watch Solly steer his ancient Peugeot down Highway 3 along the coast. I can see a few motorboats lifting off and flying in the air. Yet Solly won’t go faster than fifty miles per hour.
“So tell me, Solly—what in the world is my dad doing in Austria now?”
Solly places his foot on the accelerator. He may be going around fifty-three mph now.
“There was a terrorist act in Salzburg, Michael. You know that your father is good friends with the president of Austria and a number of the cabinet officials. They need his help, Michael.”
“So, he’s still there?” I ask.
Solly clears his throat. “Not really. He was called in an emergency to go to one of our secret military bases. I don’t know why.”
“I see. You’re a good friend, Solly. My father is lucky to have you. You’re loyal.”
Solly looks at me, smiling gently. He pulls in to a spot right in front of Sexy Solly’s Nova and Nachas.
“Humph. Why isn’t anyone here?” he says as he closes his front door with a clap.
“Gosh Solly, wasn’t The Clapper in a very long time ago?”
“It works, doesn’t it? Who else has a car that locks when you clap? It’s the rage, isn’t it?”
“It’s your rage,” I say, wondering exactly what century this guy is from.
As we walk in, a mildly plump middle-aged lady walks quickly toward us.
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