by Brad Watson
I opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. The fridge was a small old Frigidaire, with the locking handle. It cast its chilly bright block of light onto me and into the tiny kitchen, which still smelled strongly of fresh paint and Formula 409 and Comet from all our cleaning. The cold air rolled into the hot room in a little cloud of condensation and rolled away toward the huffing fan. I closed the fridge, sat at the table in the dark, and drank the beer. It was so cold, and bitter, and delicious. I was bathed in sweat. I drank the beer down in big long gulps, then sat there blinking my eyes from the cold, the carbonation, the alcoholic buzz.
I set the empty bottle on the kitchen counter and took off my clothes and laid them on the chair, then went into the bedroom. Olivia breathed long and slow in her sleep. I carefully pulled the covers away from her, so as not to wake her. It was still so hot in the place. She made a little sound and smacked her lips, rolled herself slowly over to face the other direction. She was so pretty. I lay down beside her and snuggled up, rested my hand on her hip, and we slept, the fan rocking the attic apartment like we were inside some gentle engine, cradled and safe.
SOMETHING WOKE ME UP a few hours later. I saw I’d left a light on in the living room, so I shuffled in there to turn it off. That’s when I saw the man and woman sitting on our sofa. They wore identical pairs of white cotton pajamas and looked sleep-rumpled, and older, in their forties or fifties. They looked familiar, though I couldn’t say I’d ever seen them before. I didn’t know them, that’s for sure. A rush of fear went through me. My scalp prickled, I felt myself shrink up in my boxers. I kind of hunched over, ready to run or fight. But then the woman raised her eyebrows like she’d forgotten something, and waved a hand at me, as if passing something before my vision, and I felt myself relax somehow.
“Who are you?” I said.
The man and woman just sat there smiling at me.
“I don’t want any trouble,” I said. “My wife’s pregnant. She’s asleep.”
I felt foolish and confused. I realized it was the first time I’d called Olivia “my wife.”
“Oh, we know all that,” the woman said. She had a kind of grumbly voice that, even so, wasn’t unpleasant. And it sounded kind of familiar, I didn’t know from where.
“That’s right,” the man said.
“I really think you need to leave,” I said, wishing Olivia and I had a phone, but we didn’t. We couldn’t afford it.
“I’m very thirsty,” the woman said.
“Who are you?” I said.
“We’re what you might call aliens,” the woman said.
“Really,” I said. “You’re from the hospital, aren’t you?”
“No,” the man said. “We’re from a planet in another solar system only about five million light-years from here.” He held his hand up, palm toward me, and then slowly pointed a finger upward as if toward the very solar system he was talking about.
“Really,” I said, feeling so strangely calm all of a sudden that I didn’t quite know what to do with myself.
“If we fizzle and fizz out on you, don’t be disturbed,” the woman said.
“If we get a CME, we might revert,” the man said. “Kind of like a solar flare, but worse.”
“Much worse,” she said, as if bitterly amused.
“Why don’t you get yourself a cold beer,” the man said, “sit down and join us for a while?”
“Would you like one?” I said.
The man seemed as surprised as I was that I’d said this, then said, “I sure would love a beer, come to think of it.”
“Yes, I’m just dying of thirst and I would love a cold beer,” the woman said.
I went into our little kitchen and got three bottles of Budweiser from the refrigerator. On the way back to the living room I looked in on Olivia. She was still sleeping soundly, on her back, her mouth slightly open. At least she looked peaceful, though. The furrow was gone from her brow. I took the beers into the living room, opened them, and gave one each to the man and the woman. We raised them slightly to one another, in a little toast.
“How did you get here from that far away?” I said. I didn’t know much about physics and astronomy, nothing, really, but I was smart enough to know how long it would take even a ray of light to get here from five million light-years away.
“Can’t really explain it,” the man said. “We don’t normally have bodies like this, not limited to this.”
“Are you normally made of light?” I said.
“No,” he said, shaking his head and laughing, not unkindly.
“It has more to do with the fabric of the universe,” the woman said. “Sort of.”
“Negative energy,” the man said.
“Cosmic inflation,” the woman said. “Kaluza-Klein.”
“These are just terms some people are using these days,” the man said. “Their ideas are a little wacked, but they’re going in the right direction.”
“Okay,” I said. “But if that’s the case, where did you get those bodies you’re in?”
The woman grinned.
“Well, we did get these from the hospital, so in that sense we came from there.”
“It’s just easier, logistically,” the man said. “If there’s trouble with the police, or if the hosts have a little problem with the occupancy. And it’s just down the street.”
“I thought you both looked a little familiar.”
“I used to be an usher at the Royal Theater,” the woman said. “This body did, I mean.”
“I was a policeman,” the man said. “A homicide detective, actually. Busted down to traffic cop. I may have given you a ticket.”
“How did you end up in the hospital?” I said. I’d almost said “asylum,” and just caught myself.
“Drugs,” said the woman.
“Depression,” said the man. “Really bad depression.”
I said, “Do you know the old man who hunts imaginary lions on the grounds?”
“Oh, sure,” said the man.
“Imaginary?” said the woman, and she laughed.
“Mr. Hunter, believe it or not,” said the man. “He never got to hunt, before he went crazy.”
“He’s bagged two since then,” the woman said. She laughed again.
“Really.”
“You wouldn’t be able to convince him otherwise,” she said.
“You’ll have to forgive us,” the man said. “Sometimes we take on certain characteristics of the hosts.”
“Like crazy,” the woman said, bumping her eyebrows up and down. “You’re awfully young,” she said then, grinning. “I’ll bet you two ran off.”
“Yes,” I said. “We did.”
“Where are your parents?” she said. “Are they in another state?”
“No.”
The man and the woman looked at each other for a moment, then nodded. Whatever they were thinking seemed to make them very happy.
“May we have it, when it’s born?” the woman said.
“What?” I said. “No. Of course not.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed.
“Well, let’s think this over,” the man said. “We don’t have to actually have it.”
“No, I suppose not,” the woman said, cheering up just a bit. “But you could let us have it now,” she said, leaning forward. “We could take it, and it would be like it was never there.”
“Not like an abortion,” the man said.
“No, not like an abortion,” the woman said. “Just zip, gone,” and she snapped her fingers. “Gone! Into me, I mean. This lady’s not as old as she looks.”
“No side effects,” the man said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We want to keep it.”
“All right,” the man said.
“But if you change your mind,” the woman said, “just let us know.”
“Okay, but we won’t.”
“All right,” the man said. “But maybe you could let us be close
to the child, somehow.”
“Like godparents,” the woman said.
“Yes,” the man said. “We’ll be available for advice. And if anything happens to you, we can take care of it.”
“Or help take care of it.”
“We’re from a very advanced civilization, for lack of a better term.”
“All right, sure,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” the man said, “we won’t interfere.”
“We have so much to offer,” the woman said. “And this place is our interest. It’s our subject, if you will. Like God.”
“You believe in God?” I said.
“Of course,” the man said.
“Well, not in the same way people here do, of course,” the woman said.
“Did you come from God?” I said. It seemed a logical question at the moment.
“Oh, let’s just not get into that,” the woman said.
“Right, yes,” the man said, laughing, closing his eyes and shaking his head, “let’s not.”
None of us said anything for a moment, me standing there in my boxer shorts holding the sweating beer bottle, them sitting on the sofa in their aged bodies and white pajamas, seeming to glow with heat and a strange satisfaction.
“It’s a glorious time for us, you see,” the woman said. “I suppose you could say we’re in the prime of our lives.”
I didn’t know what to say. I turned up the bottle and finished my beer. When I looked down at them again, they were still there, looking at me. Then she sighed and looked at the man.
“We should go now,” she said.
“Thanks for the beer,” he said.
“It was delicious,” she said. “Nice and cold.”
They said goodbye again and stepped out onto the deck. I hadn’t noticed earlier that they were barefoot. They made their way carefully, even tiptoeing on the balls of their pale, blue-veined feet, down the rickety staircase. They crossed the yard and walked down the street in the hazy light of the streetlamps, now blueish with the mist of early morning dew. I watched them from inside the screen door. At one point she turned and gave me a little wave, and I waved back.
AFTER SHE WAVED, and I had waved back, something changed. It didn’t look as if anything had changed, but it felt as if something had changed. I looked back down at the street. The strange crazy man and woman were gone. Everything else looked the same.
I went out onto the deck. If there had been a breeze, the old structure would have been swaying in it. But everything was very still. Almost as if before something terrible, like an explosion or the ground collapsing in on itself, sucking everything in. The trees stood massive, dark, and still, not daring to tremble their thin hard leaves. A vast cloud limned about its edges with moonlight seemed not to move even glacially across the sky.
I remembered my best friend Scotty and I once saw the strangest thing on a night that wasn’t so very different from this. It was clear, we could see lots of stars, and we lay on our backs on my parents’ patio, in sleeping bags, looking up. We were camping out in the backyard. And then, as we lay there, an odd thing zipped across the little opening of sky above us between the clusters of tall neighborhood trees. It was, or seemed to be, the lighted outline of a rocket, a classically shaped rocket I should say, heading from south to north, there and gone in less than a heartbeat.
We leapt from our sleeping bags and stared, and then began shouting, and kept shouting until my parents shouted at us from their bedroom window to pipe down.
It never made any sense. An illuminated outline of a cartoon-style rocket, zipping by faster than the speed of sound, without a sound, not even in its wake? A lighted outline of a rocket? Not even anything in the middle? It made no sense whatsoever. But even to this day we both still agree that we saw it, saw the same thing.
I went back inside. I was feeling hungry now. I opened the refrigerator, even though I knew there was nothing in there but beer, an aging tomato, and some milk, maybe a couple of eggs. We’d forgotten to go shopping on our wedding day. But I was wrong. There was a wide bowl of cold fried chicken down on the bottom shelf, and a Tupperware container of potato salad next to that. I rejoiced. Olivia must have gone to Kentucky Fried Chicken that morning, thinking ahead. I didn’t know just when she could have gone, but that was the only possible explanation.
Or maybe Curtis and his fiancée had brought it, and in all the anxiety of their visit I just hadn’t noticed.
I sat at the little kitchen table in the dark, and ate three pieces of chicken and two servings of potato salad, and drank another cold beer. It was delicious. I sat there for a while, digesting, feeling good, and finishing the beer. I checked the clock on the wall. Three o’clock in the morning. But I didn’t feel sleepy. I crept into the bedroom and looked in on Olivia. In sleep, her face seemed younger than ever, like a child’s. Just down the hill from the mental hospital, a few more blocks away, was the city park where each of us had spent time when we really were children, with our parents, swimming in the public pool and riding the famous old carousel. It seemed a long time ago, though of course it wasn’t. Now we’d be taking our own child there, soon enough. I crept back to the kitchen, got another beer from the fridge and took it into the living room, sat on the sofa and drank it. The apartment was much cooler now. In fact, it didn’t seem hot at all. All the heat from the day, the blasted fucking insane heat in that attic apartment, was whooshed out and replaced by what seemed a perfect temperature, somewhere in the seventies, a nice cool breeze now gliding through the place. That was a fine development.
I started thinking about Olivia lying in there, so pretty, asleep. I wished she would wake up, come into the living room, and start to love on me a little bit, even though she’d recently called a halt to fooling around. I waited for a few minutes, actually thinking against reason that this might happen, and then I gave up and crept in to have another look at her lying on the bed, asleep.
But she had wakened, atop the rumpled covers, and had removed her sleep-creased clothing, and lay on the bed in a pale beauty, in the scant light through the open window.
“Come on over here,” she said, barely louder than a whisper.
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke before Olivia and lay there in bed beside her for a while.
It was still August, school hadn’t started yet, and I was working full-time at the construction job Curtis had gotten me in June. But I didn’t feel like going in, so I just lay in bed with Olivia. When she woke up and snuggled against me, I said I thought we both should skip out today, and she didn’t give me any argument or worry about it. She just said, “Okay.” She sat up against the pillows and roughed her tangled black hair with both hands, bunched it up on top of her head, and held it there a moment. It brought her nice face out, like an old painting.
“What are you thinking about?” I said.
She seemed a little surprised by the question. Then she smiled in a kind of goofy way and said, “I don’t know. Blueberries, I think.” We had to laugh at that.
I said, “Why don’t we just go on a picnic up at the old pond on my grandparents’ property? It’s nice up there in summer. Maybe I’ll catch a fish.”
“That sounds good.”
“We’ll take that chicken and potato salad along, and a few beers.”
“Okay.”
“It’ll be our honeymoon,” I said, and laughed.
She was still half asleep, lying back against the pillows. I pulled myself up onto an elbow and faced her.
“Did you know we had fried chicken and potato salad in the fridge?” I said.
Olivia opened her eyes and seemed to think about it for a moment.
“I think so,” she said. Then she shrugged and closed her eyes again.
I went into the kitchen. The chicken and potato salad were still in there, minus what I’d eaten the night before. There were several eggs, too, and an unopened package of bacon.
“Wow,” I said. I called out to Olivia that I was going to make us a nice breakfas
t.
“Okay,” she said. “I could eat. I’m starving.”
I put the bacon into a pan and began to heat it, and waited for the smell of it to make Olivia sick. I listened for the sound of her getting up and running into the bathroom, but it didn’t happen. When I called out that the bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee were done, she came shuffling into the little kitchen in her robe, still sleepy, sat down at the tiny table across from me, and began to eat as if she were indeed the hungriest I’d seen her in a long time.
When we finished, she smiled at me across the table, and I smiled at her, and we went back into the bedroom for another little romp before making the preparations for our picnic.
She was beautiful, hungry, glowing, ecstatic. I’ve never felt more in love in my life. I wanted to swallow her whole, like a loving, cannibalistic god.
WE DROVE UP INTO the country in the VW bus, trundled it down the two-track path to the little lake, hardly bigger than a pond. I parked in a clearing beside the bank, and spread out a blanket on the grass.
We went for a walk in the woods and along the edge of the pasture on the nearby hill. Cattle grazed on the green slope there. A small herd of deer trotted through the trees in the ravine below us. A flicker chattered high up in an old pine, and flew away down the wooded decline, flashing the spot on its tail.
We went back to the lake and Olivia sat on the blanket and read a thick, steamy romance novel while I walked the bank and fished for bass. I was fishing with an artificial worm, one of the long thick purple ones with the big hook. Nothing was happening in the middle, so I walked on down to the narrow end, and cast across to the opposite shallows.
It was a beautiful day, cloudless, cool in the shadows along the bank. The trees filtered light where they stood on the gentle hill across the water, releasing it in stripes and patterned patches onto the leaf- and pine-straw-carpeted ground. Back where I’d walked from, at the other end of the lake, Olivia lay on her side, up on an elbow, and read her novel. She’d worn a light blue sundress, and it lay easily across the barely perceptible mound of her belly. I hadn’t noticed it this morning, for some reason, the dress. I hadn’t known she’d even owned it. Looking at her in it, reading there on the blanket in the shade, made me feel happy.