Sky Full of Mysteries

by Rick R. Reed

  Rory pictured himself at the parental table, wearing a bib.

  “Okay, can we bring anything?”

  His mother thought for a moment and then said, “See if you can get Cole to make us a batch of his chocolate chip cookies. You know how much your father loves them. I do too!”

  His father yelled, “Greta!”

  “I’ve got to go.” And without even a goodbye, his mom hung up.

  Rory sat down on the little stepstool they’d positioned under the kitchen wall phone and wondered what to do with himself for the night. He knew he could easily play Warcraft until the wee hours of the morning. Cole was amazed at how Rory lost himself in what he referred to as a “stupid video game.”

  In a way, he knew Cole was right. His gaming could sometimes border on the obsessive-compulsive.

  Maybe see what was on TV? He went into the living room, grabbed the remote off the coffee table. Sprawled on the couch, he aimed it at the TV and powered it up. He sighed. America’s Funniest Home Videos (lame), Suddenly Susan (lamer), or Melrose Place (Cole loved it; he should tape it for him). He switched the TV off within minutes of looking at the onscreen cable guide. He could pull out one of their videos and watch something. But he shook his head. He didn’t really feel like being so passive—and he knew it.

  He got up from the couch and looked out the window. The sky was getting darker, a mix of smoky gray and violet at the moment. He knew other gay men his age would probably use this free time as an opportunity to go out, to head down to the bars on Halsted, even if it were just to innocently watch videos at Sidetrack. And he knew Cole wouldn’t mind if he did that, but Rory had never had much interest in bars. He’d met Cole at the gym. And Rory didn’t much like the taste of alcohol anyway. Cole called him a lightweight. And Cole was right.

  Rory preferred his own company. Whenever he was dragged to a gay bar, he felt like he didn’t fit in, as though it were peopled with exclusive club members who all knew some secret word he wasn’t privy to. Despite sharing the same sexual orientation, Rory could never be one of them.

  Alone was good. He really didn’t mind it. Really.

  So solitude would be just what he would treat himself to for the night.

  He’d take a walk along the lakefront, appreciating the relatively clean air and the soothing sound of the waves, and head south—see where it brought him. When the mood struck, probably somewhere around the Edgewater neighborhood, he’d head west, find a place to eat dinner on Clark or Broadway. Rory had never minded eating alone, especially if he had a book.

  Which reminded him. He got up and went into the bedroom, where he snatched his current read, Stephen King’s Desperation, off the nightstand. He was finally getting around to reading it.

  After checking his back pocket for his wallet and his front pocket for his keys, Rory headed out for his own little night on the town. Maybe there’d be cheeseburgers involved. Moody’s Pub on Broadway?

  Once outside, Rory headed toward the beach. The nice thing about where they lived was that he could walk practically all the way downtown if he chose to without ever losing sight of the changing waters of Lake Michigan.

  Sheridan Road, behind him, was still alive with late rush-hour traffic. Buses spewed exhaust into the air, the hiss of their pneumatic doors a constant. Horns blared. A siren did its Doppler thing as it raced north or south on the busy thoroughfare. Distant conversations rose up as pedestrians made their way home from work.

  Rory felt grateful he was headed toward the lakefront. He felt a sense of liberation. As he descended the steps down to the beach, he noticed an immediate lowering of the urban soundtrack just a couple of blocks west of him. Here, on the sand, it was quieter, peaceful. Lazily, the surf rushed to shore.

  Rory sat down on the bottom step and watched as the last of dusk’s tepid light faded into complete darkness. Tonight there was no moon. There were a few clouds in the sky—cirrus, stretched out like long strands of cotton candy, gray against the inky dark of the sky.

  He remembered what he’d borne witness to here a couple of weeks ago. He kicked at some sand. Had he really seen anything? Wasn’t it just a bank of clouds his overactive imagination had transformed into something more? Rory shrugged, looking south as the sound of laughter came from that direction. There was a young couple, a boy and a girl, kicking their way through the water at the shore’s edge, holding hands.

  His imagination played tricks—that’s what he told himself—and he’d told himself enough times that at this point he pretty much believed his own self-delusion. Except not really. In his mind, maybe, he could fall for the lie. But in his heart, he knew he’d seen something strange and otherworldly.

  He got up and began walking south, a part of him on the lookout for the thing he’d seen in the sky that night. But all he saw were fellow travelers on the lakefront paths—people with dogs, people running, guys rollerblading despite the dark, a group of high-school-age kids smoking a joint on some boulders and giggling as Rory passed by. Somewhere distant, perhaps out of someone’s open apartment window, the sound of Oscar Peterson’s piano.

  As he entered the campus of Loyola University, he started to feel a couple of things. The first was simple—he was hungry. All he’d had for lunch was what he’d brought: a tuna salad sandwich Cole had made for him and an apple, which had been a little too soft. He hadn’t finished it.

  The second thing was that he felt oddly alone—and maybe just a tad lonely. As comfortable as he imagined himself in his own skin, Rory realized he longed for Cole’s company or, if he couldn’t have that, the company of his parents.

  Someone. Anyone.

  He walked south until he came to Thorndale and then headed west over to Broadway and made his way to Moody’s Pub. The place had been there forever. Rory could remember his parents taking him there as a kid for their most excellent cheeseburgers. Which was exactly what he craved right now.

  It was Monday night, so the place wasn’t busy, and Rory had his choice of tables outside on the patio. His waitress was a woman about his own age, with long blonde hair parted in the middle. She had a very 1960s vibe, right down to her peasant blouse and cutoff jean shorts. He supposed if he were wired differently, he might have found her attractive.

  He ordered a bleu cheese burger and a Diet Coke.

  “Aw, come on, man!” his waitress, whose name tag read Dora, exclaimed, laughing. “You got to have a beer with that.”

  Rory almost never drank. But he thought maybe a beer or two tonight might give him a little oblivion, cast away that slight blue feeling he had about being alone. He shrugged and told her to bring him a Bud Light.

  “Atta boy!” Dora hurried away.

  Rory ended up staying at Moody’s far longer than he’d intended. The warm air, the beers (he’d ended up having three—a lot for him), the heaviness of the burger and the hand-cut fries relaxed him and made sitting outside very pleasant. Even the traffic rushing by just beyond the fence on Broadway began to sound more liquid, like the sound of the lake lapping at the shore. That was, until some dick blew his horn and sent the fantasy into the garbage. Fortunately there weren’t many horn blowers out that night.

  Rory pressed the little button on the side of his digital watch to illuminate it and was surprised to see it was already 9:40. He knew Cole had said he might be home as early as ten, but Rory figured he was simply softening the bad news of actually being home later.

  Still, he didn’t want Cole to come home to an empty apartment, and he certainly didn’t want him slipping naked into an empty bed. So he looked around for Dora and realized he was all alone on the patio.

  When had that happened? The patio had been about half-full when he sat down. Between eating, downing beers, and squinting through a few pages of Desperation, Rory hadn’t noticed his fellow diners leaving.

  He stood, wobbled, and grabbed the edge of the table, letting out a little snort of laughter. He plopped back down, too hard, onto his plastic chair. That almost made him laugh
some more.

  “Whoa there, party animal!” Dora emerged out of the shadows. “You okay?”

  Rory snickered. “Great. I’m great. Just a tiny little inner ear problem. Can I get my check?”

  “Coming right up.” She opened a little leatherette folder, licked her fingers, and paged through a few different checks. There must have been other customers in the dark-wooded interior of the bar. “Here we go.” She set his check down in front of him, then snatched it back up, grinning. “Unless you want another Bud Light for the road?”

  That struck Rory as very funny, and he roared with laughter, slapping his hand so hard on the plastic table one of his empties toppled over, rolled, and crashed to the cement below, where it shattered.

  He looked helplessly at Dora. “As my mom would tell you, I need another beer like I need a hole in the head.”

  Dora nodded. “Don’t worry about the broken glass. I’m on it.”

  Rory peered at his check, decided it must be somewhere in the vicinity of twelve bucks, and handed Dora a twenty from his wallet.

  “I’ll be right back with your change.”

  He waved her away. “Don’t worry about it. Keep it.”

  “Really? Okay. Thanks!” She hurried away so fast Rory thought maybe she feared he’d change his mind.

  Outside, he wished he hadn’t been such a generous tipper, because all he had left in his wallet was a lonely one dollar bill. Not enough for a cab home, not even enough for the “L” over on Thorndale. He really didn’t relish the idea of walking all the way home now.

  What was wrong with him?

  Still, even if he staggered home slowly, most likely he’d beat Cole to their bed. And that was all that mattered.

  He headed east, for the lakefront.

  But before he got there, the beer began doing its work. Rory thought he could ignore the urge to pee and wait until he got home. He quickened his pace, trying to think of anything other than the fierce-and-getting-fiercer urge to urinate. He tried to map out his agenda for his workday tomorrow. He wondered how the characters in Desperation would get out of their jailhouse predicament. He tried to figure out just how one went about doing an inventory in a retail store.

  None of it helped. At the end of every thought, his physical need was there, like some sort of punctuation, reminding him in a needling way that attempts to divert the urge, to bury it under thought, would only cause the need to redouble its efforts, making it even stronger.

  He looked around for someplace that might have a men’s room. This was Chicago, after all. Certainly there should be a gas station, a bar, a restaurant. Hey, maybe even one of the academic buildings on the Loyola campus. But all he found to his dismay and aching bladder were businesses that had closed up shop for the day, signs in windows that warned Restrooms for Customers Only, and when he finally got to Loyola, that all the campus buildings were either locked or required key cards.

  He was through the campus and back on the path that bordered the beach and the lake when he decided he’d just be a guy and relieve himself outside somewhere. This was not the way Rory usually behaved, and certainly not how he was raised, but when one’s bladder was threatening to explode, well, it called for desperate measures.

  Rory made his way a little to the west and found the perfect alley. The streetlight had burned out, and there was a large dumpster for additional cover. High-rise apartment buildings rose up all around him for protective cover. Hand on his fly, Rory wanted to laugh with relief. The quiet and dark little spot appeared as an oasis, the perfect solution to an embarrassing problem.

  Rory stood next to the dumpster, unzipped his fly, and then, hand on the brick wall and leaning his weight into it, let go.

  The relief caused a deep sigh to issue from his lips. The release was so pleasurable it was a slice of heaven. His sigh approached a growl of contentment, almost sexual. He closed his eyes with delight.

  And then, from even the cover of his closed eyelids, he saw it.

  Bright light.

  Shit was the first thought that sprang to mind. The cops was the second. Rory opened his eyes, trying to make his stream go faster, to finish up, because there was no way he could stop himself now. He wanted to bark out some giddy, hysterical laughter, even as he imagined calling Cole from a police precinct to bail him out on a charge of indecent exposure.

  All this went through Rory’s head in a millisecond. When he finished—because he had to finish, it didn’t matter who was watching—he looked around.

  Sigh. There was no police car at the mouth of the alley, no beat cop shining a flashlight on him in all his unzipped glory.

  No, the light, Rory realized, was coming from above. He quickly shook off and stuffed his dick back in his shorts. He raised his head, shielding his eyes from the brilliant light and squinting into it at the same time, but even those measures were feeble against the blinding illumination. The light was so bright it ignited a shooting pain in his head, made him fear scorching his retinas.

  There was a grinding sound too. It took him a moment to notice that, because he was so stunned by the hovering light of a thousand suns above him. It was like the mechanical drumbeat of machinery going about its business. Boom, boom. Boom, boom—like the beating of a clockwork heart.

  Rory was too stunned to be afraid. He turned and leaned back against the wall, a little breathless, and closed his eyes to witness myriad suns, orange and red, pulsating on his inner eyelids.

  When he opened his eyes again, careful to keep them cast down on the bricks of the alley, he noticed how the shining illuminated everything at his feet—the crushed Old Style beer can, the used condom, the coffee grounds, and the oil stains. He took this in dully, like he was observing these mundane castoffs as someone who was studying them, but for whom they were foreign. Like an archeologist peering down at relics from an ancient civilization.

  For a jarring moment, he couldn’t, for the life of him, recall where he was.

  Maybe this way of occupying his mind was a defense, he realized at last. A defense against horror and recognition.

  Because, with a certainty that approached 100 percent, Rory knew what was issuing the bright light above him, knew without having to go to the trouble to peer into its blinding white light once more. The realization made him shiver, despite his racing heart and the light sheen of sweat that covered his face.

  It was it. The membrane, the cloud, the ship. It was not in the distance, as before, but directly above.

  The cold seized his limbs, paralyzing, like the very blood in his veins was slowing, freezing.

  And then he felt nothing at all, save for a few vague physical sensations—a pulling at the top of his head, so hard he could feel his hair rise, strand by strand, then faster, until all of it stood straight up. His limbs followed, arms stretching up above his head, but not of their own accord.

  And then, with a terror so acute it made him not scream but laugh hysterically, his feet lost contact with the ground as he rose slowly into the light.

  Chapter 3

  COLE DIDN’T get off work until almost eleven thirty. He’d given up any hope of meeting Rory at the Davis “L” stop. He was certain Rory would be home and in bed by then, but hopefully he wouldn’t be asleep yet. Even though Cole was bone-tired, so exhausted he could barely see straight, he still longed for the moment when he would slide into bed beside his Rory. He relished that future moment when he would caress Rory’s smooth body, tracing every freckle and mole on that alabaster skin. Just the thought gave Cole a second wind, a little more spring in his step.

  This late, the streets of Evanston were quiet. Cole ran across a Northwestern student or two, hurrying back to an apartment or dorm, but otherwise he found the streets deserted. There was a slight breeze that made the shadows of leaves dance on the pavement at his feet. He could smell the lake a few blocks to the east.

  Cole made his way rapidly to the “L” station and took the stairs up to the platform two at a time. His timing was spot-o
n—a train was just pulling into the station.

  “Lucky me,” Cole whispered and hopped onto the closest car. The doors hissed closed, and the train was in motion again seconds later. Cole plopped down in one of the seats near the door and looked around. He was one of only three people in his particular car. There was a middle-aged woman in a black Joy Division T-shirt and black jeans. She had dyed black hair, wore lots of mascara, and stared resolutely out the window at the backs of storefront and apartment buildings as the train trundled past. There was someone Cole assumed to be homeless. It made Cole sad because he appeared to be about Cole’s age, with stringy blond hair and a beard grown not out of fashion but necessity. His clothes, a flannel shirt and a pair of Carhartt pants, were grimy, the pants rolled up because they were far too long. His left shoe had a hole in it. Besides being filthy, the clothes were much too hot for the temperature outside, which hovered around seventy. He had a bunch of plastic Jewel bags piled up beside him. Cole’s heart went out to him, and as he always did when he saw a street person, he thought how easily it could be him riding the “L” through the night, just as a way to be off the streets. Cole made himself look away.

  The only other person in the car was an older guy with a buzz cut and a Loyola sweatshirt. He had white earbuds in his ears and was nodding to the beat of a different drummer, Cole thought, one only he could hear. His eyes were closed, and Cole thought he was probably the most oblivious traveler that night.

  Good for him.

  Cole leaned back and closed his eyes for what he thought would only be a minute, but before he knew it, he woke with a snort to the announcement that they were pulling into Howard Street station, the northernmost “L” stop in the city of Chicago. Everyone would have to get off the train and switch to another line. Except for Cole, of course, who could walk home from the station.

  A little disoriented and wondering how he’d managed to miss all the Evanston stops, Cole rubbed his eyes and looked around. The train was empty. Whether his fellow travelers had disembarked in Evanston or right here at Howard, he would never know. He’d also never know if other people had gotten on the train while he slept.