by Cat Jordan
“Not your usual uniform?” I tease her.
She scowls at me. “We don’t have uniforms.”
I head for the basement, calling back to her. “No? Space travel isn’t like Star Trek? No one-piece-unitard things?”
Priya laughs. “That show is very unrealistic. Space is not like that.”
“Well, it is the future,” I say.
Of all the space worlds, I like the Trekverse best. Peace and community and a holodeck for all your fantasies. I’d ride into the final frontier if I had a replicator and a transporter.
When I come back from the laundry room with Priya’s fresh-smelling clothes, I find her collapsed on the floor of the living room. Her legs are twisted under her and her head lolls to one side. Ginger paces back and forth, whining.
“Priya!” I drop everything and run. I pick her up and carry her to the couch. Her long arms and legs are like the tentacles of an octopus, all rubbery and out of control.
Her eyes open, lashes blinking against the light and me. Confusion furrows her brow and her lips part as if she were about to say something.
“Priya? Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
Finally, she nods, forehead relaxing as she recognizes me. “I’m . . .” Her voice trails to a mumble.
“What did you say?”
“I . . . I will . . .” And then, more confidently: “I will be fine.” She pushes herself to a sitting position and slowly swings her legs over the side of the couch, trying to get up.
“Whoa, hang on.”
She shrugs off my help, irritated. “I’m fine, Matthew! Leave me alone!” She launches her body off the couch, as if defying me to stop her.
I don’t and she stumbles forward, catching her hand on the arm of the sofa and sort of lurching back and forth, drunkenly, before settling in an upright position. She winces and her hand goes to her head, massaging her temple in a circle.
Are you okay? I want to ask, but bite my tongue. She doesn’t want my help. It’s weird, this sudden change in her. She even walks differently. Her gait is awkward—more awkward than usual—and her head twitches as she cringes inwardly, at something going on internally.
I follow her at a distance out to the kitchen, picking up her clothes along the way. She pauses at the door, looking out at the field. Her hands grip the doorframe and her back shudders. She breathes heavily, her shoulders rising and falling. I don’t think she’s crying. Is she crying?
“Priya—”
“Matthew . . . I have a headache again. May I have an aspirin?”
“Just one?”
She clears her throat but doesn’t turn to me. “Maybe more.”
I leave her clothes on the kitchen table. “Yeah, sure.” I hurry to the first-floor bathroom and grab at the bottles of painkillers. “You know, maybe you need to see a doctor if you keep having headaches,” I call to her. “I know you don’t want to talk to my mom, but she knows stuff about stuff. I mean, it’s probably just the heat or something, but all those meds aren’t that good for you.” I run the water in the sink until it’s cold and fill a glass. “I read once that you can do some serious damage to your liver if you take too much—”
From the hallway, I see she’s gone. Back door wide open. Tutu and dog missing.
I really need to stop turning my back on this girl. Something always seems to happen when I’m not looking.
The sun is at the edge of the horizon when I get up to the field. Priya stands directly in the center of it, a stick figure against the glorious orange glow that fills the sky. Her head is angled to one side, and she cradles her cheek in her palm, her elbow crooked into her waist.
I hold the water out to her and pour some pills into my hand. She cups my hand in hers and tilts it toward her mouth; her lips brush my skin as her tongue flicks the pills from my palm. I feel a shiver roll up my spine and the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.
She finishes the water with an ahh. “I feel better.”
“That was fast.”
“I felt better as soon as I came out here.”
“Must be the fresh air.”
“Oh, Matthew . . . ,” she says with a shake of her head. You’re so naive, I hear in her voice, and that kind of pisses me off.
“What?”
“It’s the field. You know that.”
“It’s not. And I don’t.” I sound like a belligerent child. “The fucking field is just a field,” I add, profanity being proof I’m not a kid. So there.
“You’re not as skeptical as you think you are,” she tells me confidently.
“Like you know me?”
“I do. You love that telescope,” she says. “You loved it when you were a child. You looked at the stars, side by side with your dad, and imagined what was out there, what was beyond the Earth and the moon.”
I shrug. I have a telescope. Seems logical I’d like looking at things through it.
“And you wished you could go out there. You and your dad.”
“You know, you can stop talking about him.”
She stares at me blankly.
“Yeah, the stars were cool. They are cool. And I like looking. And I like imagining.” I look up at the moon that is beginning to appear in the sky. It’s that hazy time between sunset and night, that twilight moment when the world around us starts to shift. Which are we, I wonder, day or night?
“What did you imagine when you looked up at those stars?” she asks me.
“Me?”
“Yes, when you and your father watched the skies. What did you imagine was out there?” Her voice reaches to me, drawing me out like little Boo from under the Aokis’ porch.
I glance over at the telescope as if I could see my dad and me, years ago, when Ginger was just a pup frolicking in the dry grass.
Billions and billions of stars.
“I guess . . . I guess I imagined what it would be like to be out there, to sail from one planet to another. Not like Star Trek,” I add. “But real astronauts, real explorers.”
“And what did you think it would be like?”
“Magical,” I say. “Exciting. Transformative.”
Priya murmurs, “It is all those things.”
Before my dad ever had a blog, I was his biggest fan. I was his first follower. I believed the field we were in was a wonderful, magical place. I believed the fact that the aliens had landed there meant anything was possible, even for someone as small as me.
He told me to look to the skies. We were like the stars that glittered and glowed. We could find ourselves among them if we just looked hard enough. We could do great things. We could make a difference. We could be special.
But I grew up and things changed.
“I’m not stupid,” I tell Priya. “I know what’s real and what’s . . . not.”
“Real, unreal, Matthew—”
“The stars are real, the planets are real.” I point up at the sky. “We are real.”
“I know these things about you,” Priya says. “Because we are connected. Like my people at home.”
“Priya, I don’t think that’s it,” I say with a laugh and a shrug.
And then she kisses me. A full-on, mouth-to-mouth, resuscitate-the-dead kiss. Her tongue explores mine in a tangle of tastes—pizza and soda and the bitter aspirin dust. My arms wrap around her back and hers around my waist and we fold into each other like a pair of origami cranes. The last thing I see when I close my eyes is the fading sun over the field.
When I open them again, we are on the ground, my shirts—both the one I was wearing and the one Priya had on—are under us, the thinnest barrier between our skin and the dry earth. I run my hands along Priya’s side, from her thigh to the slope of her hip and waist, trailing my fingers up her arm and across her collarbone. My hand leads my lips and I kiss that same curving path from thigh to neck.
Priya’s fingers and then her mouth caress a trail up my leg and waist but her lips don’t stop at my neck; I feel her tongue gently lick my earlobe and
her teeth nibble behind my ear.
I do the same and she giggles.
“Ticklish?”
“Keep going.”
Don’t have to tell me twice.
I roll onto my back and pull Priya on top of me. Her hair falls across my bare chest and that should tickle, but no, it doesn’t. It feels weird and amazing and a little awkward, but mostly amazing and kind of scary and definitely absolutely fucking amazing.
I hold her by the hips as she rocks against me and I press her chest to mine. Our hearts thunder together, blocking out voices, cars, dogs, logic, anything that is not here, is not now, is not between us at this moment. I don’t care about anything else.
I gaze into her eyes, afraid to look, afraid to see what’s in there.
Fragments of thoughts echo in my head.
She barely knows me, she can’t love me.
She’s crazy, she’s beautiful.
She’s leaving.
She’s leaving.
She’s leaving.
My hand pulls her head to mine, and I inhale her, and my tongue goes deep inside her mouth. As we kiss, I see the birth of a new star far off in the universe, an explosion of color in the empty black expanse of space.
We created it.
We are the center of the universe.
3:06 A.M.
The stars are our blanket.
I stretch my arms above me as if I could expand myself beyond the Milky Way, fingers reaching toward Mars, Neptune, Venus—and Priya’s home.
Okay, sex with Priya has made me corny and sentimental and a little bit stupid.
That didn’t happen with Em. We just laughed a lot after the first time because it sure didn’t take long. And then we fooled around and did it again and that second time was better, but it didn’t turn me into a poetry lover. Didn’t turn me into a lover at all. The next day I didn’t feel any different. I wasn’t changed.
But this was . . .
Magical. Exciting. Transformative.
Star stuff.
I roll onto my side, feel Priya tucked into me, her back against my chest, and I let my arm dangle over her waist. I can feel her heart beating through her spine and a thin layer of sweat on her skin. I’m sure my whole body is drenched in perspiration. That’s gross—
“You’re not gross,” she says, answering my thought.
“No? You don’t think so?”
“It’s a natural function.”
“For you too, I see.” I trail my finger down her shoulder, through slick, wet drops. I flick my tongue out to taste them. “Mmmm, salty.”
Priya laughs as if I’d tickled her. “Are you happy?”
“Am I . . . ? Well, uh, yeah, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes, I am. Also a little cold,” she adds.
Our clothes are scattered behind us, and I gather them up without actually standing. We dress side by side, lying on the ground, and stay there, looking up at the sky. I take Priya’s hand and point it at the cluster of bright lights around the moon high above us.
“Most people think those are stars,” I say.
“They’re planets. You call them Venus and Mars,” she says, dragging my hand from one shining beacon to the next.
“I do? What do you call them?”
“I told you, we have no language. We simply communicate to one another. Our thoughts are shared.”
As I twine my fingers around Priya’s, I think how beautiful it sounds when she talks about it. Shared thoughts. Communicating without speaking. How different would life be if we didn’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing? Doing the wrong thing? Thinking someone meant one thing when they meant something else entirely?
Like I promise.
“That’s how the Universe works,” Priya says. “We are all connected. We help one another through the power of our thoughts.”
The cynic in me snorts. I can’t help it. “Sounds like prayer.”
Priya thinks a moment. “I suppose you might call it that.”
Yeah, okay, I have to laugh. “What, you pray to each other? Like, to God?”
I feel Priya smile. “We are all God.”
I push myself to sitting and stare into Priya’s face to see if she’s messing with me. “We are all God. You? Me? How about Ginger?”
My dog lifts her head, thinking I’m calling her for treats.
“Matthew, this is well-known throughout the Universe,” she says, a bit perturbed by my ignorance. “Just because something can’t be seen doesn’t mean it can’t be believed.” She aims a critical eye at me. “You seem to have a hard time with concepts that must be taken upon faith.”
“You mean, like God, aliens—”
“Love.” She smiles. “You can’t see it but you believe it exists.”
I feel my cheeks color. “Love is a theory.”
“Like gravity?”
“I can’t prove that either of those things exist.”
“Yet you believe the periodic table of elements exists, yes? You believe hydrogen and nitrogen and plutonium exist?”
I feel my head nod. The basics of chemistry. That was one class I didn’t fail.
“Then you know that every element in the Universe, every atom, every particle has always existed. Which means we have always existed. We are God.”
I spread open my arms wide. “I am immortal! Bow down to me!”
Priya laughs. “Stars are born, burn out, go supernova—and are reborn. Everything in the Universe dies and is reborn over and over again.” She sits up, grabs hold of my arms, and pulls them around her and we tumble back onto the ground. When I open my eyes, I am looking up into hers. They are vulnerable yet wise, calm, confident.
I’ve seen that look before: on my dad. Before he got caught up in the voices of the crazies, he was excited about science, about the possibilities of the Universe.
“And our souls?” I ask her. “Do we have them? What happens to our souls when we die? Are they reborn too?”
She looks at me with a question on her face. “Soul.” She rolls the word around in her mouth. “Your spirit is energy and energy never dies. It’s—”
“It’s merely converted,” I say. Because I know that is true. That is physics. Energy can’t ever be created or destroyed.
“We are energy,” she says. “We are matter. We are not created or destroyed.” And then she pulls me closer and presses her lips against mine and I feel a surge of energy between us.
This won’t ever die, I think wildly. We, us, this moment will never go away. It might be converted into something else—love? memory?—but it exists forever.
I gently release her and her eyes flutter a few times, sleepily. “Are you tired?”
“I must stay awake,” she says, trying to sit back up. “My ship—”
“I’ll watch for it.”
“You?”
“What, you think I don’t know what a spaceship looks like?” I kiss her forehead and her eyes close again. “I’ve got my eyes on the skies.” In a minute, she’s asleep and I slide my arm out from under her neck.
A few yards away near the telescope is Priya’s bag. I crawl quietly across the field to retrieve it and place it within arm’s length of her, in case she wakes up and feels for it. Naturally I grab it from the wrong end and something tumbles out.
Priya’s notebook.
It feels dense in the palm of my hand, heavy with import. To look inside this, to peel back the layers of this, would be an invasion of privacy, wouldn’t it? It would be like opening up her mind and poking around inside.
Or would it?
The notebook is nothing special: smooth black leather cover with lined pages. It’s worn and soft, like a well-loved jacket, and it has an elastic band attached to the spine to hold it closed. You’d think something as important as this is to Priya would be kept under lock and key instead of a thin strip of coated rubber.
On the first page is her name. Or rather, a sentence that declares her name: “My name is Priya.”
Directly below that is a series of symbols I’ve never seen before.
That’s it. That’s the first page. Okay.
Page two. Whoa. Line after line is filled with words spaced very tightly together, hardly any blank areas between or around the letters.
Red means stop.
A dime is worth more than a penny.
Hot dogs are NOT dogs.
The third page is the same, although the pen color is different.
Do not pick flowers from a strange garden.
Do not eat flowers from a strange garden.
Okay. . . .
And on and on. Some of the most inane things are written in varying degrees of penmanship. Some lines are printed very clearly while others are sloppily scripted. Black and blue pen, a few lines in pencil, but very little white space.
Drawings, too. Sketches of faces and eyes and hands, cars and cats and houses. A lamp, a teapot, a railroad crossing sign. Symbols below and their English translations, from what I can tell.
I flip to the very last page where she has written, “Ginger is a dog.” But “dog” is crossed out and “Labrador retriever” is written above it. In the margin, there is a hastily drawn image of a dog, my dog, with her wide face and her runty body.
But why?
Obviously this was new information to her and she needed to write it down in order to remember it. And the only reason these sorts of basic things would be new to her is if she wasn’t from a place that had them.
A place without dogs. A place without railroad crossing signs. A place without teapots or houses or cars. A place where the color red did not mean stop.
Where on earth would a place like that exist?
Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean you can’t believe in it.
The realization of what this could mean stuns me like a punch to the jaw. Are these crib notes? Cheat sheets? Important information a visitor to our planet would need to know?
No. Like, no fucking way. That is seriously not possible.
I hold up the notebook, inspecting it from all angles as if I might read into it some other explanation.