The thing is, I couldn’t remember but I saw no point in getting them upset. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Where is she?”
“We thought you might be able to tell us,” their spokesman, the bald Asian said. “There was no sign of the ET when we found you. Did she say anything about where she might be going?”
We went back and forth in this manner for awhile, each of us assuming that the other was holding back information.
“We’ll find her,” they said on leaving, though their insistence was not encouraging. Each of them left me a card with a different phone number.
It was at that point that I realized that the nurse who had been standing to the side during the fruitless interview with the scientists was disconcertingly familiar.
There actually seemed like two nurses for awhile — the bang on my head had given me double vision — but as she came closer I could tell there was only one of her.
“Don’t worry, I no longer want your child,” she said, disconnecting my left leg from its traction device.
For an unexamined moment, I suffered feelings of rejection. Mary had cut her hair and dyed it black and somehow changed the shape of her nose. “You told me it was your life purpose to reproduce,” I said.
“That was another me,” she said. “I’ve changed since the accident separated us. I’ve been what you people call reborn. I took refuge in the Church of Laundered Money and I had a spiritual conversion. As my first good deed, maybe my second, I’m going to unite you with your former wife.”
I took pains to explain — most subtleties were beyond her alien comprehension. “I don’t want to unite with Molly,” I said. “I just want to rescue her from her kidnappers.”
“Whatever,” she said.
Before I could make sense of the implications of Mary’s conversion, she had gotten me dressed and was wheeling me down the halls of the hospital and out the back door to an oversized SUV (perhaps the one that almost hit us) waiting for us in the medical personnel parking lot in a space reserved for Hospital Chaplain.
Whatever else you wanted to say about my semi-alien companion, she had a cunning way of getting by the authorities.
52nd Night
Before we could continue our search for Molly, Mary felt honor-bound to return some items she had taken by force from a convenience store during her heartless pre-conversion period.
What she didn’t realize was that it was more dangerous to return stolen goods than to acquire them in the first place. Also, which no one had told her (and she probably wouldn’t have believed anyway), it wasn’t acceptable to return goods taken from one convenience store to another albeit in the same chain.
After three failed attempts, her faith seemed to be wavering.
When a cop confiscated her goods and threatened to arrest her for being a public nuisance, she zapped him with her reptilian tongue. At which point, his colleague sent a “police officer down” message to the nearest headquarters, earning us in short order a flock of pursuers.
We did what we could, traveled on side roads, exchanged license plates twice with parked cars, but every time we thought we had gotten away, there was someone else, some unanticipated pursuer behind us.
Mary alternated between rueful complaint and angry self-justification. One moment, she was ready to give herself up and the next she would chide me by saying, “If you had given me a baby this never would have happened.”
“I liked you better when you were heartless,” I said.
She stopped the car at the side of the road and told me to get out. When I refused, reminding her that I had a broken leg she said, “I hate you,” and got out herself and walked off in the opposite direction, which is to say the direction of the pursuing car, which I recognized as it got closer.
It was the scientists and they drove slowly alongside Mary, one of them talking to her through an open window, urging her or so it seemed to come inside.
I was watching through my rear view mirror, feeling anxious, but not sure on whose account. Mary stopped momentarily to say something to her interlocutor when a flashing light, blindingly bright, emerged from one of the windows of the car.
When after several minutes, the light dissipated, Mary was gone, which is to say not even a telltale ash remained in the wake of her disappearance.
I felt oddly rueful all things considered and rolled down the window of my car to shout something incoherent at the scientists who seemed to be celebrating their accomplishment.
“If it weren’t for you,” one of them called to me, “we never would have gotten to her.”
I tried to slide over into the driver’s seat, but for each inch gained, the broken leg threw off spasms of pain. It might have been easier to get out of the car and edge my way around, using the sides of the car for balance, as a way of getting behind the wheel.
When the head scientist asked me where I was heading, I felt I knew the answer, that it was there waiting for me to access it, but I couldn’t quite find the words to represent the thought. The encounter with the tree had scrambled my brains.
They offered to take me back to the hospital in their car, but I said I would be all right if they got me a walking stick. As it turned out, they had a spare one in the trunk of their van which they seemed pleased to give me. Nevertheless, I promised to return it as soon as my leg healed sufficiently to get around without it. I didn’t want to be in debt to these murderers.
It was hard to get rid of them and since I could no longer remember where I had been going, I agreed to accompany them to this private sex club one of them knew about. Killing the dangerous alien, they told me, would not seem like the accomplishment it was unless they celebrated it appropriately.
I left my car at the side of the road and joined them in their van and we all drank cheap champagne and toasted one another as we drove through the night to wherever it was we were going — I could no longer remember — figuring it would pass the time until the sense of purpose I had lost revealed itself once again.
53rd Night
You had to wear a mask to get into what the scientists referred to as the Nameless Club and if you didn’t bring one with you, you were asked to leave, or you wore the one they assigned you.
The scientists, who knew the drill, came prepared. The head man wore a mask of Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove. Another wore a mask of John F. Kennedy. The final two had on lifelike masks of vaguely recognizable second-line film stars.
Before we each went our own way, we agreed to meet at the entrance in exactly three hours.
I was issued the mask of an orangutan and I had to leave my driver’s license with the doorman as hostage to its return. It was an eerie place — it could have been the set for a vampire movie — and in short order I regretted my decision to come along.
For a while I wandered around looking for a place to sit, but there were no chairs in the main hall. So I ended up leaning against a wall, watching the passing scene through the slit holes of my mask.
The main room, which was of ballroom size, was mostly dark except for a couple of large spinning balls overhead, which created a retro psychedelic effect. Though dance music was being piped in from somewhere, there were no dancers visible. Occasionally a paunchy man would approach one of the long-legged women, mumble something, and the couple would vanish moments later behind one of the closed doors.
Every once in a while, a uniformed figure would wander through the room with glasses of champagne on a tray, and though I was eager for a drink, none ever reached my corner of the room. Either all the glasses were claimed before the tray reached me or the server was intentionally avoiding me.