But this man…he isn’t like the other men.
Modesty.
That could be his name.
He calls himself homely but isn’t. The face is serviceable and his body is more than adequate. He apologizes for his English but talks like a dream. I can’t place the accent, but it’s exotic and lovely. And maybe he doesn’t speak much about himself or his situation. Not like other men. But what he shares is consistent and not unappealing. I don’t see the usual warning signs, not even when I mention the ex-husband that I always mention. As a test. Or the last boyfriend. Three weeks gone now, isn’t he? The modest guy just shrugs and smiles while he listens, letting me tell what I want to tell. So maybe he’s another sex addict. I think that. Maybe he cares about nothing except my body parts…except except except he isn’t giving me those vibes, even after two hours of fun and cuddling, with emphasis on the cuddling.
He has a warm body.
Funny as it sounds, his skin tastes remarkable, and so does his mouth. He says something about lotions popular in his native country. Which is a place I don’t know, by the way. But geography was never my strength, as my angry first husband would so helpfully tell me. And I don’t let my ignorance bother me.
There are certain pleasures that I like with my men.
Only he won’t let me have my fun, which is a problem. A little one. He insists on using condoms and taking his business to the bathroom afterwards. Both times. As if he’s disgusted by nature, while I’m pretty much the opposite in every way.
But the rest of the sex is nice. Almost good. He’s patient and seems eager, with more endurance than seems right for a man who looks to be in his early forties.
How old is he?
I ask.
“Forty-four,” he says quietly, warily. As if he’s afraid that I’ll think him too old, those black eyes darting while he smiles in that sweet, clumsy way of his.
“Forty-four is a perfect age,” I tell him.
He watches my eyes, saying nothing.
I tell him, “I hope to look as good when I’m forty-four.”
This is an opportunity, bringing up my age. Every man wonders. But my new lover has too much class or simple fear to touch that subject.
I assume.
Then the subject changes to polite noise. Movies, video games. And back to movies.
Then sleep.
In the middle of the night, feeling alone despite the body and its heat beside me, my eyes pop open and I lie awake, listening to his breathing, waiting for the wet rattle that comes when he snores. Except the man doesn’t snore, and for no reason I can name, I have the sudden need to put a hand on his wrist, secretly measuring the slow untroubled beating of a heart.
I’m not a person to suffer impossible thoughts.
My first husband – the angry man that I keep with all of my secrets – was quick to complain about my utter lack of imagination. But crazy ideas keep hitting me, and I’m awake until morning. Men are supposed to become familiar after a night together. But this man is more of a stranger than ever, an enigma of flesh and history, and with the sun rising I reach under the covers, examining the unclothed and quite familiar body.
My companion smiles at some part of this, or all of it, and then he apologizes for abandoning me. Off to the bathroom he goes, this man who hasn’t farted once that I’ve noticed, or snored. I let myself smile like I haven’t smiled in forty-five years. And then he returns, sitting on the bed’s lip, ready to say something fresh. That’s what his face tells me. That’s what the lack of a smile means. Some serious confession needs to be made. A past wife, a criminal conviction. But no, whatever it is can wait another few moments.
I say, “I have to pee.”
He curls his lips, nodding sweetly.
I don’t want to leave him. That’s why I hurry. But inside the bathroom, I smell him. I smell what he did just moments ago. The bowl is flushed, but the stink hangs in the air, and despite being unimaginative and criminally ignorant about the world, something clicks. Something stolen from a movie or maybe an old boyfriend. I’ve dated more than my share of smarties, and who knows where the idea comes from?
I don’t bother peeing.
Returning to the bedroom, I look hard at that non-homely face, and he returns the stare.
“Your skin tastes different,” I begin.
He nods but not like anyone else nods. How would describe that gesture?
“And your shit doesn’t smell normal,” I say.
At this point, he says, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” I ask.
But before he answers, I offer my wildest guess. “You’re not from another country. You’re from some other world.”
That exotic face doesn’t smile or frown or anything.
“You’re an alien,” I blurt out, not believing my words.
And then my new lover tells the lie, a huge lie. “I’m from another solar system, yes. I’m here doing research into your species.”
“Well,” I say, instantly giggling. “Let me tell you all about us!”
***
She talks and a cold piece of me looks at the situation, hunting for the humor. Because something about this adventure should be funny, and the chilly, clear-eyed part of me has the best chance of recognizing moments that deserve laughter.
Not that I would laugh aloud, of course.
Her voice is built from enthusiasm and proud ignorance. Admitting she knows almost nothing about her huge wonderful blue world, the creature nonetheless works hard to illuminate everything that she does know. Her life story. She mentions parents sitting in a distant room right now, eating their breakfast. She talks about her two years of college and how she’s thinking about returning soon, finishing that degree. She mentions a husband who loved her but they couldn’t make it work, so sad. But not so sad, because if she was married and happy enough, then she wouldn’t have met me and screwed me and can she tell her friends about me? “I mean, if that kind of thing is allowed.”
“I don’t know the rules,” I admit.
In the history of this world, nothing is as funny as the alien emissary confessing to ignorance.
Still laughing, she leaves to urinate, and a moment of solitude arrives.
Passes.
“So tell me about your world,” she says, emerging with a towel between her hands. Other than the towel, her body is naked.
“Only if you’re done describing your world,” I respond.
Is she finished? The question needs examination and a thoughtful nod. Then she says, “No, I hit the high notes. Everything important.”
The warmest part of me begins to speak. To lie. The idea of a star-traveler brings certain expectations: My home world is beautiful and ancient and filled with wise, caring souls. I say that it’s fifty light-years in that direction, pointing at the floor. According to every tradition, I came alone. Solitary travelers notice more than groups notice. Besides, I point out that individuals aren’t invasions, and I don’t want to scare anyone.
“Oh, I don’t scare,” she claims.
I want her to feel at ease. That’s why the lies keep emerging from my mouth. The starship that brought me is powerful yet very small. Everything about me is small, except for my newborn body. My manners and language were learned yesterday. My only wish is that this disguise was more convincing. But I’m new at this venture, this exploration business.
“You just stumbled across the wrong person,” she says with pride. And she laughs again, saying, “I have this gift. I see every lie. Get to be a woman of my age, with my life, and you learn to recognize things as they really are.”
The cold part of me enjoys the simple ironies while the warm part of me enthusiastically describes a galaxy populated with living worlds. These worlds know one another and love all life. Which might or might not be the truth. Who knows? I don’t know. In truth, I’m nearly as ignorant as this creature, but with fewer excuses. Between what is warm and cold about me is grief. Is misery. This innocent
creature sitting beside me couldn’t be more perfect for this task. That realization brings immeasurable sorrow, and sorrow threatens my disguise, ready to tear me open, exposing what is true.
Maybe she notices.
Or she notices nothing but her own need to interrupt.
“How old do you think I am?”
“In minutes or years?” I respond.
The next laugh is a cackle, loud and a little brittle. Then with a gasp and one hand on her bare belly, she says, “Years. From what you know about humans, what do you think my age is?”
I know everything about her.
Everything.
“Forty-one,” is what I offer.
“Forty-two,” she counters instantly. “And a half.”
She believes that she is lying. She counts a four-year discrepancy between her words and the date on her driver’s license, and her keen pleasure comes from the idea that the extraterrestrial trusts her. He will believe almost anything that she decides to share with him.
But there is an error inside her assumptions. Until yesterday, two moments before I approached her inside the loud tavern, she didn’t exist.
Hours old. That’s what she is.
The cold part of me laughs and enough laughter leaks to be noticed.
A guarded voice asks, “What’s so funny?”
“Oh I just like your voice,” I lie. “That’s all it means.”
“Good,” she says. Then her tone changes, and her stance. The naked lady straightens her back before saying, “There’s a lot more to my life, by the way.”
“Tell me whatever you want to tell me,” I say.
She’s hungry to share quite a lot. But first she has to take a deep and cleansing breath.
***
Confession is best when it begins with a large revelation. But not the largest, no. To a stranger, particularly this incredible stranger, honesty needs to be blunt, if only to convince myself that everything can be revealed.
Begin with my teenage years. That’s what I decide.
Mention drugs and drink and explain both afflictions with a teenager’s casual, careless voice. “Oh I did this I tried that it was fun I got into trouble I wish I hadn’t and I stopped, when I was twenty-something, twenty-eight, and I don’t do any of that anymore, except for beer and wine, and pot to be social. Unless of course I’m really, really stressed.”
The alien listens. No other man in my life has ever paid such strict attention to my biography.
Drugs lead to the first husband. The angry husband that I like to keep secret, even from those who last more than a few weeks. “He was gorgeous and vicious and sweet and cruel, and he scared me and tried killing me twice, three times, and I wanted to kill him. Sometimes I thought that if I didn’t cut his throat, he’d cut mine. And probably during sex.”
The alien is a wonder. Patient, unjudging, yet engaged with everything that I share with him.
He seems more handsome than he was last night.
Is his face changing?
If I wanted, could I coax him to change his looks one way or another? Is that how the magic science works?
I imagine my first husband’s face replacing his. Which is a stunning moment, though not as awful as I might have guessed. Arousal never embarrasses me, yet I am embarrassed. Hands and the hand towel cover parts of my body, even as I tell myself to relax and get a grip.
The alien nods, asking, “Did you?”
“Did I?”
“Kill the man,” he says.
Did I? It takes a moment to find the answer, which is peculiar as hell, and another few moments to piece together enough words.
“No. We divorced and he lives far from here, and I can’t remember when I last talked to the son-of-a-bitch.”
The alien nods, his mouth opening and then closing. Nothing said.
I intend to continue to other boyfriends, the long-term few, and maybe share some details about my parents and siblings and the people who I like to remember, ten or twenty or thirty years after they mattered to me.
Except.
For no apparent reason, the alien says, “Yesterday.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell me what you did yesterday,” he says. “Before I saw you sitting at the bar, I mean. Describe your day to me.”
“Why?”
“Husband and drugs are interesting,” he says. “But normal life matters more. That’s what I came to this world to learn about.”
I say nothing.
What am I thinking?
“Yesterday,” he repeats.
Nothing occurs to me. Nothing.
He sits and waits, apparently ready for a thousand years of silence.
And that’s why I’m suddenly offering my final confession, long before I imagined that I would.
Just to end this appalling Nothing.
***
“There’s a kid in the story.”
A few words brought with a cool, rather slow voice, and then she pauses. The way she straightens her back implies a burden, an old pain. An air of tragedy takes hold, yet the offhand “There’s a kid” implies that it could be someone else’s child, not hers.
I prompt her by asking, “What child?”
“Yeah, a boy,” she says. “He was born too early.”
A boy who doesn’t have any name besides “Him”, and whose father was neither husband, and equally nameless. Two months premature, the boy’s mother was in that phase of her life when nothing was easy and she had a lot more than she could handle, and life was proving itself far from fair.
And at that point, she hesitates.
Confession requires another few breaths and a lip chewed until blood starts to run.
“It was my son,” she says. “Out of wedlock. That’s the term.”
“Out of wedlock,” I repeat, as if taking notes.
“I was.” She hesitates. “Careless.”
“In what way careless?”
Indeed, what way? She rubs the lip and licks the cut and grimaces for a multitude of reasons. “Getting pregnant. I never wanted that.”
“No?”
“Mistakes. I’ve made my share.”
The cold part of me finds nothing funny. The warm part of my nature is deeply, dangerously sad. What exists between wants to abandon this place and this lost soul, forsaking every promise. But then all three portions speak together, repeating the word, “Mistakes.”
“Early on, I knew I shouldn’t have children,” she says. “Other women, yes. Every other woman should have ten babies each. But not me.”
“What’s his name?” I ask.
She says nothing.
“The infant child,” I prompt.
“I know what you’re asking,” she says. Although she hopes that the father’s name will suffice, and that’s what she surrenders.
I look about. I know the answer, but the question needs to be asked aloud. “Does your son live here with you?”
“No,” she blurts.
“Of course not,” I allow. “If you’re forty-two, and if he was born when you were quite a bit younger, then he must be nearly grown today. Yes?”
She says nothing.
“Where is your son?”
Humans are very much like me: The chilled and the hot live beside what is neither, and I can see the parts inside her warring with hard, inescapable facts.
“He was tiny,” she says.
“Premature,” I say.
“Closer to ten weeks early,” she says.
I say nothing.
“In a box,” she says. “They kept him in a glass box.”
A curious alien might ask about boxes and the care of premature young. But this isn’t an alien sharing her bed.
“I remember his hands,” she says.
I nod.
“One hand,” she corrects herself.
“Which?”
Her left hand releases the towel. But then she hesitates, working with her mind until she is certain enough to say, “The
left.”
“You remember it,” I say.
“I watched that hand. For as long as I could stand.”
I watch her left hand make a slow half-turn, and then it drops.
“Twenty seconds,” she says.
“Yes?”
“You don’t know tiny. Not until you see a hand like that. Each bone almost too small to see, all held inside that useless glove of skin.”
I don’t know what to say.
Neither does she.
So finally, I ask, “What happened to the boy?”
She shakes her head.
“Did you leave him?”
Her mouth opens and remains that way, saying nothing.
At last she whispers, “I don’t know.”
“Maybe you cut his throat,” I say.
The horror passes through her face, through her body. It infects the room and the entire world, which is exactly what is necessary.
“I don’t remember,” she says.
I wait.
“I think I abandoned him,” she admits.
“But you aren’t sure where,” I add.
“That sounds awful,” she says.
She says, “I knew I shouldn’t be a mother. So for his own good, whatever I did…I just can’t recall it now…whatever I did had to be for the best.”
Silence takes hold again.
The moment becomes quite a bit longer.
Then I say, “Now it is my turn to confess.”
She barely hears me, looking at my mouth while the words seep into her consciousness.
“I’ve been lying to you,” I tell her.
“You’re not an alien.” She says it and wants to be relieved. “You’re just a man who lies better than most.”
“If only I was,” I say. “If only I was.”
***
The voice isn’t as foreign as it was last night. Or it sounds more familiar and normal, and my ears have changed.
Interzone #265 - July-August 2016 Page 12