ABOUT AN HOUR LATER my older brother showed up, with his fiancée.
They came into the little living room, and I turned on the bare, bright bulb again, and after some sympathetic and concerned small talk from them, questions about how this came about and what our plans might be, they got down to business.
Olivia and I knew that his fiancée, Ruth, had been whisked to New York the previous year by her parents for an abortion. We knew what was coming. As soon as they even hinted at the idea that we should consider doing the same, Olivia leapt up and stomped to the bathroom and slammed the door. Immediately, the house began to shudder from the force of the chugging fan in there trying to pull wind through the little space under the door, which made a weird kind of howling sound.
Curtis and Ruth seemed astonished, looking from the hallway where Olivia’d disappeared, back to me, back to the hallway. Almost instantly after Olivia shut the bathroom door, cutting off the fan breeze, our sweating increased, beads popping out on our foreheads and running down our faces. It tickled me trickling from my armpits down over my ribs.
I went into the tiny hallway and knocked on the bathroom door, having to shout to be heard over the noise of the fan and the wind howling through the little space below the door.
“Olivia, would you just come out, please?”
“Tell them to go away!”
“Don’t worry, we’re not going to do that.”
“I’m not listening!”
I made my apologies to Curtis and Ruth and, after a moment, realizing that Olivia was not coming out of the bathroom until they left, and maybe worrying that the fan’s desperate huffing might destabilize the old frame house itself, they got up to go. When Ruth had stepped out onto the deck, Curtis came back to me.
“Just think about it, okay?” he said.
“Curtis, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “Were you here just now? Did I imagine that you and Ruth were just in there talking to me while Olivia shut herself in the bathroom and lost her mind?”
He frowned, gave me a hug, and they left.
“Are they gone?” Olivia shouted from the bathroom.
“Yes!” I shouted back.
She opened the door and stalked back to the bedroom and fell onto her side into the bed. The house stopped shaking and the hot air in the apartment began to move again. When I followed her into the bedroom she looked up at me, her face puffy and streaked with tears.
“I’m not going to do that, I’m not,” she said.
“It’s okay,” I said, “I know. We’re not.”
“I couldn’t do that,” she declared.
“Me, neither,” I said. “And it’s way too late for that, anyway. They didn’t realize. Don’t worry.”
There was a knock on the door.
“Tell them to go away,” Olivia said, and burrowed herself beneath the bedsheet, clamping a pillow over her head.
It was the landlady from downstairs, standing in the weak yellow glow of the deck light, her scrawny arms crossed, a scowl on her face.
“If every night is going to be some kind of commotion like this,” she said, “I am not going to stand for it. You can take your kind of behavior to some other place.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I promise we’re not usually like that.”
“Or loud other kind of behavior, either,” she said, narrowing her eyes and arching her thinning brows.
I nodded, mumbled, “Okay, right.” Then she stomped down the deck stairs.
“Was it them?” Olivia said, her voice muffled beneath the pillow.
“Just Curtis,” I said. “Forgot his keys.”
Olivia stayed beneath the pillow. I watched her side move up and down with breathing for a moment, until it began shaking with sobs, and I went into the darkened kitchen and sat there alone for a while, sweating in the warm breeze the fan pulled through the kitchen window. I smoked a cigarette. I’d been there a good hour, knowing Olivia had cried herself to sleep, when an old Chevy Bel Air station wagon idled up to the stop sign on the quiet street below. I couldn’t see who was in it but I recognized it from the student parking lot at school. I knew the boy who drove it. I heard loud stage-whispers, and made out some girl’s voice saying, Is that it? Is that where they’re living? And other loud whispers, unintelligible. And then the wagon rattled off down the street.
This is about as strange as it gets, I said to myself.
But for the sound of the fan huffing away, then, the apartment was quiet. It was quiet on the little streets in our new neighborhood, down below. The streetlamps stood silently above their diaphanous pools of yellow-gray light. The neighbors’ houses were quiet, sleeping. The inmates at the asylum down the street were quiet, sleeping or lying awake, wondering how this had happened to them, or who they were, or where. Our parents were home, in their beds or sitting at kitchen tables, drinking coffee, sleepless.
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.