Contraband

by George Foy

  ‘This is what they are; they’re a life that’s so comfortable we don’t need anything. If we don’t need anything, we don’t have to relate to our surroundings, we lose our relevance as a species. And how do these aliens work? Aaah, I’ll tell you. Through a network of conglomerates that sell us, I don’t know, paella-makers in exchange for our souls. A bureaucratic monster that gives us VR-sitcoms in exchange for power. That tells us our earwax smells, to make us buy ear deodorant, and all the while they pump growth hormones into our food, and transmit X rays through our VDTs, and, aaah, dump acid rain, and spray chemicals, and bury nuclear waste in our backyards, so our children end up with spines like jelly and little animals in the bloodstream. Making monsters on our own swing-sets. Turning our wives into fanged slimy creatures that crawl into the cesspool out back to breed. Body Snatchers. Aliens. Dawn of the fucking Dead. Shit, man, they’re not coming, they’re already here, they’ve taken over Washington, they kill whoever finds out, they—’

  ‘Holly Drive,’ PC interrupted. ‘Didn’t you say, Holly Drive?’

  Rocketman stood on the brakes. He switched on the dome light. He took out a notebook. ‘14 Holly Drive, North Lakewood,’ he said softly. He was out of breath. ‘That’s it. Mr and Mrs Roger Taylor.

  ‘Eleuthera Hawkley Stanhope Taylor.’

  But there was no one at number 14. A TV hummed and flashed at number 16 but no one came to the door. Number 12 was dark and shut down. They walked back to 14, sauntering casually around the house. From the back you could hear the hum of voices and music but it was all treble with the tweeter twist of synthesized stereo. The porch furniture was covered. A light blinked on in back of the house. Still no movement was visible. Very likely the house’s security program was turning on different lights and appliances at preset hours to create the illusion someone was home. This was supposed to deter prowlers.

  ‘There’s a car in here,’ PC said, peering through a porthole in the garage. ‘Lexus. Nice.’

  ‘They have two cars,’ Rocketman told him. ‘Everybody does, in towns like this. It’s a psychological thing. One is for your day-to-day life, and one is for the alien that—’

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ PC told him.

  They returned to the Chevy. No one said anything for a long time. They were all tired of driving. The radio was tuned to KMAL, the ’90s oldies station. It was the only station that came in clearly here. After forty-five minutes of cruising in no particular direction, listening to Alanis Morissette, they found a mini-mall with a Vicious Vindaloo franchise. They ate dinner, noses running from the spice, watching tough guys with leather jackets and car-jousting scars devour the Nero’s Special (Triple-Hot) 18-Alarm Lamb Curry. The tough guys, adding red pepper sauce, laughed bravely. The tears coursed down their cheeks.

  Then they got back in the car. The pilot fed the Hegel bird and cleaned up the mess he’d made in back and took God out for a scamper along the empty sidewalk of the mini-mall. When he returned, Rocketman and PC were asleep. Even the Hegel bird, perched on the back of the passenger seat, had his gaudy head tucked under one aquamarine wing.

  The pilot got in his seat and looked out over the orange stain of street lighting and the gas station signs and the careful fringe of trees protecting the suburbs of Lakewood and the vast bulk of the Lakewood Wall-Mall squatting like the mothership behind. The atmosphere in the car was lightly tinged with tandoori and garlic.

  He, too, fell asleep.

  *

  The next morning they ate breakfast at a Dairy Donut. The three men were stiff and irritable. They paid long visits to the bathroom and sat gingerly when they came back. The pilot said he would go alone to Holly Drive. It would look suspicious for three men who weren’t Mormon missionaries to sit in a parked car in the streets of a town like this.

  He found the street after only half an hour and parked twenty yards away from number 14. It was a nothing day – no rain, no sun, no wind; haze, cirrus, mid-range temperatures. It looked like a low was stalled overhead, the pilot thought. The Hegel bird made constant snoring and farting sounds, it was what he’d been listening to all night. The pilot found a college station that came in faint and scratchy but occasionally played a refreshing burst of Shift-shin and in any case covered the digestive noises made by the macaw.

  Forty minutes after he had parked, the front door of number 14 opened. A medium-sized man in chinos and a sports jacket came out and slammed the door behind him. It made a noise like a rifle shot, but apparently that was not loud enough, for he unlocked the door, opened it wide, and slammed it once more, harder. The garage door opened by itself. The man went inside, the Lexus came out, the garage door came down, the Lexus took off down the street, squeaking its tires somewhat. After that, calm returned to Holly Drive.

  The pilot waited twenty minutes, then got out and walked over to number 14 and rang the doorbell. He rang for ten minutes but no one answered and he heard no sound and saw no more movement than the night before.

  *

  That day passed the way nothing days pass. The pilot found an easy way back; if you did a quick dogleg out of the cluster development and got onto Willowbend Avenue, it was almost a straight shot to the mini-mall.

  Avoiding the Vicious Vindaloo, they ate food that was nothing food and talked about nothing to avoid voicing the fear that they’d left everything behind and driven almost nine hundred miles for no reason.

  PC obtained Roger and Eleuthera Taylor’s phone number from information. He called and a machine answered. It said the owners of the house could not come to the phone right now.

  Rocketman stood guard at the Taylor house for part of the afternoon. They all ate dinner at a QuikThai. Over shrimp in peanut satay they agreed that they would go back together to number 14 and if Roger Taylor was there, they would ring the bell till he answered. Then they’d ask him point-blank where Eleuthera was.

  On their way back down Willowbend they passed an ambulance wailing in the opposite direction. A cop cruiser following behind the ambulance slowed and the cop stared at the Chevy, then sped up after the rescue vehicle. Number 14 looked exactly the same and they got no more response than before, but as they stood uncertainly on the brick walk an old woman called to them through the cracked and curtained window of number 12. The theme song from Pain in the Afternoon strained through the crack. ‘She’s at Fairview Hospital, the ambulance just picked ’em up,’ the woman said, and quickly slammed the window and locked it shut again.

  They got back in the Chevy. The pilot took the wheel. He turned left at the end of Holly Drive and opened her up. The twin carbs sucked air like a ramjet. At the junction of Willowbend and Bella Vista Drive a flatbed truck full of ten-foot fiberglass ‘hamburgers’ was backing into the parking lot of a new BAADBurger restaurant and the traffic was jammed up so solidly even the shrieks and lights of the ambulance could not dissolve it. The police car was gone, off on a tangent to guard the softer suburbs. The pilot ruthlessly cut around the jam, over the divider and back to slot himself into the emergency lane, directly behind the waiting ambulance.

  The burger-truck sneezed itself backward, into the parking lot. The ambulance, freed, picked up speed. The pilot kept the Chevy ten feet from its rear fender. As they followed the emergency vehicle, they could all see, through the left rear window, a woman strapped onto the gurney inside.

  The gurney was set at an angle. The woman was very lean, almost too thin. She had a wide mouth and cheekbones. Her hair was light brown, and damp, and stuck to a large forehead. Her face was small, elflike, and absolutely void of color. She lay in the square frame of the ambulance window, with the plastic straps and EKG screens and tubes and bottles above her, pinned to her helplessness by the cold blue lights. She looked like a sea creature long taken from water.

  ‘God, is that her?’ the pilot muttered wonderingly to PC, who was sitting beside him.

  ‘She looks dead,’ PC answered. ‘Maybe she is dead,’ he continued, ‘but she sure is cute.’

  It
was as if she’d heard them. The woman opened her eyes and looked directly at the Chevy. Her eyes were very dark. She could not have seen much through the glare of headlights, but the pilot sensed, nonetheless, that their gazes touched, very briefly, and that she saw them, and wondered who they were.

  *

  The hospital looked like a wall-mall that sold health services. A sign read ‘Fairview United Hospital: A Division of MicroDyne/Siemens Wellness Systems AG.’ The ambulance pulled up at the emergency entrance. The gates closed behind. A guard pointed the Chevy to guest parking. The pilot got out, ran Brian Veitch’s UCC-card through the scanner, and trotted around color-coded corridors to ER reception. The paramedics were filling out forms on a MicroDyne workstation. He sat in the waiting area while Eleuthera’s husband answered computer questions fed to him by a white-smocked Rwandan. Eleuthera Hawkley Taylor, maiden name Stanhope, had a pneumonial condition, complicated by asthma. Her condition had deteriorated drastically over the last couple of hours. Seen up close, Eleuthera’s husband was fair, with a short nose and little cheek pockets, like a chipmunk. He wore chinos with a white belt, white shoes, and horn-rim glasses. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair as he worried. His age was thirty-four, his profession ‘businessman,’ his insurance comprehensive. He took out a wallet and swiped three different cards through the scanner to prove it.

  An hour later they wheeled Eleuthera Taylor past the pilot on the way to a private room on the third floor. She was breathing through an oxygen mask. The pilot looked for doctors’ gowns to steal but this hospital seemed much smaller and tighter than Bellevue. He would have to wait till the next day, for visiting hours, to make contact. He went back to tell the others.

  They ate dinner at an all-night doughnut franchise. The place was filled with SCORE guards and overweight, incurious cops. The doughnuts bore names like ‘Swizzle,’ ‘Cheree,’ and ‘Parfait.’ Rocketman asked a trucker where to find a motel and he said there were none in this area but there was a truck stop on US 36 where they could get showers and a bunkroom. They found it in less than an hour and cleaned up for five dollars apiece. The price included a small bar of soap and a thin towel. Another ten dollars in UCC credit bought them each a bunk with sheets that rasped like sandpaper.

  The pilot wanted to see the Indianpolis Raceway. It took them an hour and a half to find it. They drove around its acres of parking lots, in slow-motion parody of the activity the place was famous for. They found no easy way inside. They went back to the truck stop.

  *

  Visiting hours at Fairview United started officially at one p.m. the next day. The pilot, whittled sharp by impatience, went back in at eight a.m., with PC but without Rocketman, who refused to go through the doors. He was finished with hospitals, the big man said.

  Around eleven a.m. the pilot managed to slide into a men’s staff room and rip off an intern’s gown and a surgical cap. At 11:06 he found six or seven yards of hospital computer printout discarded in a waste trolley. By 11:15 he was on the third floor, pretending to look through the printout, asking nurses for Taylor, Eleuthera.

  There were voices in her room. Roger Taylor’s, a doctor’s, another woman’s.

  The pilot found a wheelchair and sat down, still madly leafing through the printout for the benefit of the nursing staff, who looked in his direction and gossiped to each other, possibly about him, possibly not. In the haze of his own hoarded fatigue intuition was dull and could not decode their body language. Eventually Roger Taylor, the medic and a woman in her mid- or late forties came out of the room and stood around the elevator bank, talking in sentences with long pauses on either end.

  ‘There’s no clinical reason she shouldn’t be responding,’ the doctor said. ‘Her fever’s down. Her vital signs are good, very good, considering. Fatigue is a factor, of course. Psychological stress, posthyperthermic shock – I’ve seen it before.’

  ‘But she won’t even nod,’ Roger Taylor complained. ‘She doesn’t even know I’m here. She doesn’t do anything.’

  ‘She ran very high fevers, as a child,’ the woman said.

  ‘Children do,’ the doctor said.

  The pilot looked curiously at the woman. She had light-brown hair, the same color as her daughter’s but streaked and teased in a hollow perm. She wore clothes in very bright colors, cut like tubes to disguise a body that was losing the last of whatever tension youth once gave it. She wore big diamonds in gold and platinum settings on three fingers. Her perfume was Lebensraum, expensive, commanding. Her mouth was drawn in a tight hard line, to control and dominate the eyes, which were very big and gray and full of enthusiasms, every single one of them tied down and tightly muzzled.

  ‘There won’t be a problem, Mr Taylor, Mrs Crane,’ the doctor said, flashing a smile like a traffic light. ‘Trust me.’

  The pilot went downstairs, taking off his gown in the staircase. He found PC eating fried chicken in the cafeteria.

  ‘She’s unconscious,’ he told PC, ‘they don’t know why. But I think her mother’s with her.’

  ‘Maffa?’ PC said, spitting batter.

  ‘Martha Cahoon,’ the pilot agreed. ‘Hawkley’s girlfriend.’

  ‘Then why don’t you ask her?’

  The pilot shook his head. ‘I didn’t like her mouth.’

  PC nodded. It was the kind of argument he understood perfectly.

  The pilot went back to Eleuthera’s ward twice during visiting hours, and three times overnight, between snatches of sleep caught in the waiting room. He snuck into her room, once, when her husband was in the cafeteria. He saw nothing but the unhappy hair, the oxygen mask, a slope of chinbone, a curve in the counterpane.

  Rocketman grew unhappy. He was sick of sitting in the car. It was cold. The backseat smelled of parrot droppings. The Hegel bird was not happy either. Louder and louder, it imitated their flatulence, grumbled to itself in Portuguese, snapped its beak at their fingers.

  God was bored. He too had bad gas, from a constant diet of curry and QuikThai and doughnuts. To relieve the pressure he ran around and around the backseat, farting. He drove everybody so crazy the pilot ended up taking him along on his hospital visits, lying doggo in the big pockets of his intern’s gown.

  PC had found a pediatric nurse to flirt with – casually, he claimed, just to keep in shape – but the pilot was growing despondent. Their journey was too tenuous, the results too uncertain to suffer a loss of momentum with any degree of grace. The brain-pictures of Roberto and Eltonjohn asked soundless questions to which he had no answers. His stomach was beginning to sour with the strain. And the hospital was getting to him: the plastic food; the out-of-date magazines, like TV news printed on glossy paper; the chairs too long to sit and too short to lie on, the constant undertone of climate-controlled agony . . .

  Late in the afternoon of the following day the pilot decided to force the issue. He waited till Roger Taylor and Martha Cahoon went to the cafeteria together, then snuck into Eleuthera Taylor’s room.

  She was in virtually the same position he had seen her in last. Her chest rose and subsided, very slow, very regular. An IV dripped. A half-sucker was propped on a tiny bump halfway down the thin ridge of her nose. The jack ran to a private Virtix set propped on the chipboard dresser. The set played a rerun of Pain in the Afternoon. Carrington MacBride told Amy Dillon that he was leaving her, again. Amy responded by telling him she was pregnant, by Carrington’s brother. Their dark histrionics filled the room.

  The room smelled of bedpans, and Lebensraum.

  He sat in a chair, watching her face, reading her chart. The fever was down; it stood only one degree above normal. Her red-blood-cell count was low. A medic’s note read ‘Subject exhibits early classic dependencies of TDF, but none of the neurological symptoms are present.’ He registered a sense of displacement, brought on by the confinement and smells. He felt that he was back with Carmelita, talking to another shut-down woman, locked down over mental pain as opposed to fever but shut down nonetheless. He tho
ught of his own belief that despite the shock, mental or physical, Carmelita could still hear his voice and his message, carried on the low frequency of his concern and caring. There was a level, he’d thought with Carmelita – maybe not conscious, but still active – where words spoken in affection and hope were never totally wasted. Not for fetuses, not for old people in comas. No matter what the doctors said.

  ‘Eleuthera,’ he said. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder. ‘Eleuthera.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ he continued. ‘I’m a pilot. My name’s Sk— my name’s Joe. Joe Marak.’

  No response. Not a flicker of skin reaction. Her breathing was unchanged.

  ‘I’m here,’ the pilot went on, ‘because one of my friends was killed, and two others were thrown into Oakdale Penitentiary, which is an awful place where they might die, too. They’re smugglers, or outlaws, but they were all good people and they never did anything really bad. But they got sent to Oakdale, and so did a lot of other people like them.

  ‘I want to stop this from happening to these people, and the only person who knows how to stop this is Forrest Hawkley Stanhope. Your father. You see—’ He knew he was going on too long, he knew that even if the girl heard anything she heard it from so deep, at so many removes, it would not do any of them any good, but as with Carmelita he needed to repeat this stuff if only to convince himself his motives were valid and this trip was worth it and he was not totally losing his mind. ‘You see, I know you prob’ly haven’t seen him in awhile, but maybe he writes to you, an’—’

  He stopped. His lungs seized. The girl’s head had moved. She swallowed. But these were the reactions of sleep.

  ‘Anyway, I was hoping you might help me find—’

  This time her head turned. All the way around, to look, with eyes that were open and blinking dark gray through the half-sucker at him. The pupils defended themselves against light, and focused. They took him in – the surgical cap, the gown, the contradiction of his face.