“Stay where you are,” the officer says. “Kick the gun over to me.”
He shines a bright light in my eyes. I can just make out the barrel of his gun next to the light, and I know his finger is on the trigger.
“Quit stalling,” he says. “Kick the gun to me.”
I don’t think the officer has thought this through. I’m sitting on the concrete floor with my legs outstretched before me. The gun is sitting in front of my crotch. I could flick it to him with my hands, but not my feet.
“Now!” he demands.
With my hands still in the air, I shimmy backward in little bounces, shuffling back on my ass until I’m far enough away from the gun that I can reach it with my feet.
“Hurry up,” the officer yells.
I want to plead with him and tell him I’m doing the best I can, but that’s probably not wise. I get the side of my foot on the gun, and with a couple of awkward kicks, the gun slides over to him.
“Face down,” he yells, gesturing with his gun for me to lean forward and lie prostrate before him.
Again, not thinking it through, Officer Whoever. The way I’m seated, without months of Pilates practice and intense yoga training, the only way I can lie face down is to turn around. I decide this is what he really wants and turn away from him only to have my head slammed into the wet concrete floor as another cop pounces on me.
Mark’s body is still leaning against the far wall. His eyes are staring at me again. The duct tape has been ripped from his head, leaving fine lines vaguely matching adhesive tracks running across his face.
The window’s open.
Sharon’s gone.
I wonder if Sharon was ever really here. Is all this just me having a psychotic breakdown? Did I fabricate all of this as part of some shock-induced delusion? Is this whole episode a fantasy of my own dark mind?
My hands are wrenched behind my back. Steel cuffs lock in place around my wrists, keeping my arms pulled tight behind me.
“What have you done to him?” one of the cops asks.
“Nothing, I swear.”
“Wise guy, huh?”
The last thing I hear is one of the cops saying, “Taze him.”
Fifty thousand volts surges through my body and into the wet floor. The tinfoil on my head burns into my scalp as my eyes roll into the back of my head.
Doctor Not-Quite-Rock-Hudson pulls my right eyelid open and shines a bright light in my eye.
“His pupils are responding,” he says, pulling the light away momentarily and then flashing it back in my eye again. He does this several times, which is really annoying. Just when I think he’s satisfied, he switches to the other eye.
I’m not sure what happened over the past few minutes, but I feel as though I’ve relived the entire day while lying here on the hospital bed, and yet there was no running naked through Central Park. No alien space octopus tentacles probing the various orifices of my body.
“Listen,” the Army officer says, appearing on the edge of my vision. “Answer our goddamn questions, or I swear, you’ll spend the next decade sunbathing in a chicken coop at Guantanamo Bay.”
The doctor steps to one side, allowing the officer to grab my cotton gown by the neck. He pulls me half out of the bed. He’s on the verge of throttling me.
“The aliens. What do you know about them?”
“Nothing,” I say. The Army officer throws me back on the mattress.
“Get him on a waterboard,” the Navy officer barks.
I can’t take any more. I snap.
“What the hell do you want to know?” I yell at them. I’ve lost it. I’m pissed. I’ve done nothing wrong. “You want to torture me? Go right ahead. What do you think you’ll learn? Do you seriously think I’m going to tell you about little blue/green midgets from Mars, or lovesick sirens from Venus? Do you think torture is going to give you anything even remotely meaningful?
“You want to know about aliens? I’ll tell you about fucking aliens. They’ve got ears like Dr. Spock and acid for blood. And tentacles, lots of goddamn tentacles. But the porn. Oh, the porn is exquisite!”
The officer steps back, but I’m not finished.
“Congress is full of reptilian aliens! Go on, peel back their skin and take a look. But you know that already. You’ve been covering this shit up since Roswell.”
“I think we’ve heard enough,” the doctor says, ushering the officers out of the room.
“Wait,” I yell. “I’ve got more to tell you. I haven’t told you about the Jedi Knights, and Yoda—Yoda comes to me in the shower! Clean, we must be. Dirt leads to grime. Grime leads to filth. Filth leads to the Dark Side, where they have cookies!”
The nurse closes the door behind her as she leaves, leaving me alone in my 1950s hospital room.
I sink back into the mattress feeling frustrated. I’m in deep shit. My life will never be the same again.
Someone claps slowly from out of sight in the adjacent bathroom.
“Bravo,” a man’s voice says.
I’m confused.
“See,” Sharon says, stepping into the room, “I told you we could trust him to keep our secret.”
Mark walks in behind her, only he has long scruffy hair. He’s still clapping slowly, which is more than a little creepy given he’s dead.
“Wh—what? How?”
I sit up on the bed. My feet hang over the edge of the mattress as I turn to face Sharon and Mark.
“You’re alive?” I say.
“Thanks to you,” Mark replies, reaching out and shaking my hand.
“I—I… What the fuck?”
I’m hallucinating. That’s the only possible explanation. None of this is real.
I push off the bed, only my feet barely touch the floor. My head spins. I feel as light as a feather. The world around me seems to twist and turn. I reach out and grab at the bars on the window to steady myself as I step forward.
“Easy,” Sharon says, but I’m distracted by my feet. Rather than walking, I’m drifting, floating between footsteps.
I look outside. The light is blinding. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to focus on the craters. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands, stretching out into the distance. The ground is dusty and grey, covered in pits and boulders.
Where’s the grass?
In the distance, a vast mountain rises up from the plain, reaching up thousands of feet in a smooth curve. There are no cliff faces or sharp angles. Everything looks old and worn. The sky is black. The ground is white, but I’m not looking at snow. The surface looks like ash. A brilliant, blinding white light reflects off the rocks, making it hard to keep my eyes open.
Sharon says, “Welcome to Luna One.”
She slips her hand around my waist and kisses me on the cheek again, only this time she lingers a little longer.
“One question,” I say.
“Sure.”
“Do you have tentacles?”
Sharon laughs, hugging me affectionately as she says, “No.”
“Good.”
Chapter 02: Normal Life
“Coffee?” Sharon asks.
“Huh?” I say, suddenly becoming aware I’m perched on a set stool in a cafe next to Central Park. I wobble, grabbing at the wooden counter, trying not to keel over onto the floor.
Sharon smiles warmly, holding out a brown to-go cup with a white plastic lid. Steam rises from the tiny slit. I take the cup, feeling the warmth radiating into my palms.