“Not so much,” she admits, looking as though she’s explaining something complicated to a child.
“They do this stuff all the time. Autopsies and things. All based on actual case work. Well, they take reality to an extreme, but the principle is roughly the same. If someone’s shot in the chest, they’re not going to bother examining his toes or his head. At least, not beyond a cursory glance to check everything’s normal. They’re certainly not going to slice open his skull cap and look at his brain cells under an electron microscope. They don’t even have that kind of equipment.”
“Huh?” Sharon says, sounding genuinely surprised. “But we still need to retrieve his body. At the very least, we have to cut off his head.”
I can feel my stomach churning already. I really, really want to talk Sharon out of decapitating a corpse. I do not want to be standing there sawing off a dead man’s head when the cops finally catch up with us.
“They’ll release the body to next-of-kin,” I say. Seems obvious enough to me.
“Huh?” Sharon says, sounding even more surprised than before. Us dumb Earthlings have our moments, I guess.
She stands there for a moment staring at me. I raise my eyebrows, saying, “So you can simply arrange for a funeral director to collect his body.”
“Ah,” she says, subconsciously mimicking me. “I guess I owe you an apology.”
“For what?” I ask, “For getting me falsely imprisoned for assaulting a police officer?”
She grins sheepishly.
“Ah,” I say. Fourth time. Fifth if I count hers. I smile, saying, “It was worth it for a trip to the Moon.”
Sharon nods. She has tears in her eyes, which surprises me. She doesn’t cry, but she looks as though she’s about to. Aliens. Emotions. Who would have thought it? And here, in a janitor’s closet deep inside the basement of a police station.
“We did go to the Moon, didn’t we?” I ask. “I mean, that wasn’t a hallucination, right?”
“Right,” she says.
“Can we get out of here now?” I ask. “Without cutting off anyone’s head?”
“Sure,” she says, and we creep back into the hallway. Sharon leads me to a side door. A sign reads—Emergency Exit. Door alarmed. But Sharon doesn’t hesitate. She pushes on the bar, opening the door, and we step out into a narrow stairwell leading up to the street. She must see my eyes darting around, waiting for sirens to sound, as she says, “Mark,” by way of explanation.
“Right,” I say. “Nice.”
We emerge from the basement and walk briskly away from the police station. I’m curious. I have to know.
“So,” I ask, still a little drunk on the whole my-girlfriend’s-an-alien thing. “If we couldn’t get out of there, what would have happened? I mean, you know, if someone had walked in while you were slipping between the bars?”
Sharon takes my arm, snuggling into my shoulder as we walk along. She doesn’t reply. Aliens are complex. The term weird springs to mind, but they probably think the same about us.
“Would Mark have sprung us with a UFO? Could we teleport out of there or something?”
Sharon laughs, saying, “You watch too much TV.”
She’s got me there.
Chapter 03: Sharon
There’s a grocery store on the corner.
“I need to report in,” Sharon says.
“Time to get some more bananas, huh?”
She shrugs her shoulders and walks into the corner by the potatoes. Holding her hair back behind her ear, she bends down and whispers to the spuds. An elderly woman picks up some tomatoes from the next display. The woman stares at Sharon with bewilderment. I smile, speaking softly as I say, “She’s in therapy. Doing much better. We’re on a day trip.”
The old woman smiles and nods, apparently being supportive, but she quickly finishes her shopping and heads straight for the cashier.
“We could just buy some potatoes and take them with us,” I say.
Sharon ignores me, picking up an apple as we walk up to the cashier. As she pays for the apple, the cashier notices the chrome handcuffs around her wrist. The chains linking the handcuffs might have broken, but the cuffs themselves are still firmly wrapped around our wrists.
The cashier is a young girl of maybe sixteen. She has a stud through her nose and long, dangly earrings. Seeing her interest in Sharon’s cuffs, I say, “Cool jewelry, huh?”
“Sweet,” the cashier says, smiling at us. And I make sure my cuffs remain hidden in the sleeves of my jacket.
Sharon mumbles, “Well played,” as we walk away from the store.
“So?” I say, “Placing another call are we? But using Apple FaceTime?”
Sharon laughs, taking a bite of the apple and saying, “Just hungry.”
As we cross the road, Sharon says, “Mark’s going to get Joe to collect the body.”
She’s silent, and I have a fair idea why.
“It’s about trust, isn’t it?” I say, confident I have a good read on what’s happening at a broader level. “You didn’t trust me, did you? Not really. Even after all that happened last night.”
Sharon shakes her head. She looks down at the grime mixing with the snow and ice. She’s still got her arm around mine, holding onto the crook of my arm as I keep my hands buried in my pockets, but she’s staring at her shoes squishing in the slush on the road.
“That’s why I woke in the cafe, right?”
She nods like a child admitting to stealing cookies from the pantry.
“That’s why you wouldn’t tell me about the plan to snatch Mark’s body. You didn’t trust me.”
She nods again, biting her lip. Tears roll down her cheek. It’s funny. I should be mad, but I’m not. Her alien heart is so tender. She feels bad. It’s hard to realize I’m walking and talking with an extraterrestrial—someone from another world. She seems so human.
Neither of us say much for the next few minutes. I guess it takes us both some time to process everything that’s happened over the past few days. My life is in ruins. Simultaneously wrecked and revolutionized. I’m not sure what I think about that, and yet my eyes have been opened to a new world, and that seems to outweigh any harm done. I’m not sure I could ever explain any of this to anyone here on Earth. I really would end up in the Brooklyn Psychiatric Hospital.
“Where are we going?” I ask as Sharon leads me into the New York Cemetery with its stunning wrought iron gates.
“Trust, right?” Sharon says softly. “I want to show you something—to show you that I do trust you.”
The cemetery is enclosed in a vast courtyard beyond the street-front buildings. We walk down a narrow alley, passing beneath an elegant archway. Old New York has been carefully preserved in this remote corner of the city. In some ways, it’s like stepping back in time. The snow is pristine, which is a rarity in New York. Bright, white, virgin snow is a stark contrast to the grey sludge out on the road. That there are no footprints other than ours reinforces the notion that we’re on hallowed ground. The snow is angelic, glistening in the sunshine.
“I thought you should know,” she says. “I thought you should see her.”
“Her?” I ask as we walk across the snow covered ground. Marble headstones and various stone monuments dot the enclosed courtyard. Rough-hewn stone walls surround the park, reaching up ten feet in height. Sharon leads me to a tiny, weathered obelisk standing barely three feet high.
“She died the day before her fifth birthday,” Sharon says, reaching out and touching the cold marble.
“This is… you?” I ask.