“How’s Mark?” the driver asks as the bus pulls away from the curb.
“He’s fine.”
“He’s dead,” I say, snapping those words into the conversation. I can’t help myself. This is absurd.
“He’ll be fine,” Sharon insists, gesturing to the seat opposite Mark.
I slide in against the window and Sharon sits down next to me.
Turning sideways, I look at the other people on the bus. There are a couple of teenagers making out in the back, a middle-aged man wearing a business suit, a nurse still in uniform, and an old lady sitting two seats behind Mark’s body. His feet stick out into the aisle.
“What is wrong with you people?” I ask, desperately hoping someone’s dialing 911 with their phone hidden out of sight. “Dead body? Gun? Tinfoil hats? Anyone?”
“Shhh,” Sharon says, trying to soothe me. Softly, she corrects me yet again with, “A-lu-min-um foil.”
I want to scream, but I compose myself.
“You need help—professional help, Sharon. Turn yourself in to the police and I’m sure we can work this out. No one has to get hurt.”
Sharon sighs.
“Do you know what I hate about all this?” she asks.
She gestures with the gun, waving it around as though she’s stirring soup with the barrel, only the barrel is pointing at my crotch. When Sharon asks if I know what she hates, I think she means our general predicament, but the direction that gun is pointing in seems awfully personal.
“Not being honest with you people,” she says. “We should trust you humans. Perhaps not everyone, but some of you. We should find people we can trust and we should trust them.”
“Yes,” I say, feeling like I’m finally getting somewhere with her. I’m hoping my nonverbal body language is saying something along the lines of—dialogue is good, crazy lady, now point that fucking gun somewhere else.
“Do you trust me?” she asks.
It’s the second time she’s posed this question. I’m tempted to say yes to curry her favor, but a loose hold on a loaded gun and a dead body in the next seat gets the better of me.
“No.”
“See, that’s what the world needs—honesty. You don’t trust me, but I trust you, and do you know why?”
I shrug my shoulders.
“Because you’re honest. You can trust someone that’s honest. You can never trust someone that lies to you because you never know when they’re lying.”
She leans in and kisses me on the cheek, saying, “Thank you for not lying to me.”
I flinch, steeling myself to make a grab at the gun, but she puts her hand around the back of the seat, and I can feel the warm barrel of the gun resting on my shoulder. I can picture things getting ugly if I lunge for it. The idea of a lead slug tearing through my body doesn’t exactly thrill me, so I focus on my breathing, trying to relax.
I decide to play along.
“So what is it with you aliens?” I ask, trying to soften my trembling voice. “When you said we were being picked up by a shuttle, I’ve got to say, I was expecting something with a few more rockets.”
Sharon laughs. She’s got a beautiful smile. Why is it always the pretty ones that turn out to be psychos?
“Well,” she begins, sounding utterly sincere and genuine, “we’ve been here for about three hundred years.”
“Really?” I say as the bus turns down a darkened street. The lights are out. There must have been a blackout.
“Oh, yeah. We’ve got a base hidden on the far side of the Moon.”
“The dark side?” I ask, thinking Sharon’s been paying way too much attention to Ancient Aliens on The History Channel.
“Actually, there’s no dark side. The moon has days just like Earth, only a day up there is a month long. The sun rises and sets over the Moon just like it does here on Earth.”
“Oh,” I say. “I didn’t know that.”
The natural, relaxed tone in her voice is such that she could be giving me gardening tips, or talking about tides before going fishing.
“Our mission is to use non-intrusive means to initiate social change. We can’t introduce any new technology, but we can guide scientific discovery as a means to effecting social stability.
“Our focus, though, isn’t on any one science so much as promoting the concept. We’re advocates. We’re trying to coax rather than push—to inspire people to give up on superstitions and traditions. We want humanity to see reason for itself.”
“Huh,” I say. As far as delusions go, this one is pretty good. It’s got just enough plausible elements to avoid a sense of cognitive dissonance in her mind.
“It’s a slow process,” she says, talking to me as though I’m a child. “We’re fighting against hundreds of thousands of years of natural instinct compelling your species to war. You war against everything—skin color, gender, culture, country of origin, any kind of change. I swear, if given the chance, you’d war against eye color—fighting over blue or brown eyes.”
“You’re probably right there,” I concede.
She’s relaxing. I’m thinking about grabbing the gun, but I’m only going to get one chance at this. I don’t want to blow the opportunity.
“Our job is to encourage enlightenment—to help you see the folly inherent in your own nature, to see your own biases and prejudices. And that’s not easy for people to accept.”
I nod.
“So what about me?” I ask. I wonder, how do I fit into her paranoid delusion? I’m hoping she’s going to say the good guys get to return to their people with the gospel of good news, or something.
“Oh, we normally wipe and replace.”
That doesn’t sound good.
“Like Men in Black?” I ask, making a flashy sign with my thumb. “You know, erase memories and implant new ones?”
“Something like that,” she says.
This is good. For the first time, I think I just might make it out of this alive.
“We hide in plain sight,” she says, running the barrel of the gun across the back of my neck. “We discredit anyone that gets too close to the truth.”
“So you plant conspiracy theories in people’s heads?” I ask. “They think they’re on to something. Everyone else thinks they’re crazy.”
“Exactly,” she replies. “We give them false memories. Usually, we let them pick. Anal probe, alien space tentacle porn, things like that.
“You’d be surprised how many people opt for a field trip to Mars, but there’s nothing to see there other than rocks. Seriously, you humans have the most interesting planet in the system and everyone wants to go to the dry, cold deserts of Valles Marineris.”
She laughs, adding, “We give them something just crazy enough that no one will ever believe them.”
“And no one ever does,” I say, astonished at how immersed she is in her role-play. I had no idea Mark and his sister were this wacko. That her delusion can contemplate yet another layer of complexity is madness. Her nonchalant attitude scares me more than the gun.
“But I won’t do that to you.”
Oh, that sounds like good news. I hope. I relax a little.
“So,” I ask, my curiosity getting the better of me as I wonder just how thoroughly deluded she is, “Where are you from?”
Sharon points into the darkness. With the lights out, the stars are just visible through the light pollution thrown out by the rest of New York. She points at a star just above one of the buildings. Like an idiot, I follow her gaze. What the hell am I looking for? What am I expecting to see? There’s a faint hazy dot, barely visible in the sky. It could be Venus for all I know. I feel stupid.
“Artellac,” she says, as though that’s supposed to mean something, but I’m pretty sure she just made that up.