“Her name’s Lily,” he replied.
Ordinarily, Jason wasn’t one to get caught up with infatuations, but Lily had an uncanny effect on him. Just the mention of her name was a delight, which was a strange sensation for someone who normally kept himself aloof and saw relationships as a luxury rather than a necessity.
Earlier that morning, Jason had taken Lily’s photo with his smart phone and printed the image on paper, making a flyer with his cellphone number on it. He used tape to stick several copies to the traffic lights on the corners, as that was the only way he was going to get Lily away from the intersection and over to Mario’s Diner for breakfast. Even then, she had asked if she could hold onto his phone as she didn’t want to risk missing the call.
Jason and Lily had met up with Mitchell and his girlfriend Helena outside Mario’s. Mitchell hadn’t stopped grinning. He’d been waiting to drop that pearl on Jason as soon as the girls were out of earshot.
Jason and Mitchell slid into a booth overlooking Central Park while Helena and Lily went to the bathroom. Helena had insisted on having Lily come with her, and Jason figured she was grilling Lily on all the juicy details of what she imagined had gone on last night. There was nothing, of course. Lily had sat there staring out the window into the night as Jason had drifted off to sleep. He’d woken a couple of times, which was unusual, but each time he’d seen her still sitting there staring out into the night. When he awoke with the dawn, Lily looked like she hadn’t moved all night. Helena wouldn’t believe a word of it.
“How did you meet her?” Mitchell asked. “How long have you guys been going out? And how the hell did you keep her secret from me?”
Jason opened his pill case and took a swig of water, swallowing a red capsule followed by two dull blue tablets. He suffered from a rare genetic disorder known as Cander’s Syndrome and needed to watch his meds to avoid ending up in the hospital. He slipped the case in his pocket as Mitchell continued.
“Where is she from?”
Jason wasn’t sure which question he was supposed to answer first, but he decided the last one was the simplest.
“She’s Korean, from some place called Sun-Way-Do.”
“Sunwi-do,” Mitchell replied. “You’re fucking kidding me!”
Jason shrugged. He wasn’t sure why Mitchell was so excited.
“Dude,” Mitchell said, opening his backpack and pulling out his tablet computer. “That’s the peninsula from the Incheon Incident. Sunwi-do is in North Korea.”
“Isn’t Incheon in South Korea, just outside of Seoul?” Jason asked, knowing he was going to regret asking.
Mitchell switched on the tablet, saying, “It’s called the Incheon incident because that’s where the rescue helicopter was based, but if you want to be technical about it, it’s the Yellow Sea incident, although that’s confusing as well, as the Chinese weren’t involved.”
“Weekly World News? Seriously?” Jason said, catching a glimpse of several poorly photoshopped images as Mitchell opened an application and flicked through virtual pages.
There was an image of a man with three heads, or was that three people with one body? Another shot showed a classic, bug-eyed, hairless alien with a bulbous head sitting behind the President’s desk in the Oval Office. In another, UFOs sat outside the departure gate of some anonymous mid-west airport.
“This stuff is gold!” Mitchell said, overacting, knowing he was goading Jason. “It’s serious investigative journalism.”
Jason shook his head, trying not to laugh.
As Mitchell flicked through the pages, Jason spotted an image of a hairy man running through a child’s playground.
“Hey, that’s a monkey suit,” Jason cried, but Mitchell kept running his finger back and forth over the glass display, turning pages.
“Oh,” Mitchell replied. “You gotta separate the wheat from the chaff, but there’s some great stuff in here. Most of this stuff has been classified top secret for decades!”
“Yeah,” Jason replied dryly, pretending to agree with him. “It’s real Pulitzer Prize material.”
Mitchell turned to a page near the back of the virtual newspaper and pointed at a grainy picture. He slapped his finger on the screen, exclaiming in triumph.
“There!”
From what Jason could make out, the image showed someone pulling a young child from the ocean into a rickety old fishing boat. There was something beneath the water directly below the boat, but it was impossible to make out what the object was. He reached over and touched the glass screen, pinching with his fingers and enlarging the image.
Lights appeared to glow from beneath the waves, but he thought they looked like they’d been added to the photograph.
Jason read the caption beneath the photo.
“Two decades have passed since the Incheon Incident, when a UFO crashed into the sea off the coast of North Korea. The only known survivor of this extraterrestrial contact was a young girl of three or four, rescued from the ocean by North Korean fishermen as the UFO took on water and sank.”
“I don’t see what this proves,” Jason said.
Mitchell turned to another virtual page, crying, “Look at that!”
He pointed at an image of a UFO flying past the Empire State building. Apart from the appalling lack of chromatic balance, Jason didn’t see anything noteworthy in the picture.
“It’s the same UFO,” Mitchell announced.
“It’s the same poor photoshop skills,” Jason conceded. He pretended to peer closely at the screen, taking the computer tablet from Mitchell and holding absurdly close to his face until the glass touched his nose. He squinted, adding, “Oh, yeah. That’s definitely been doctored by the same guy!”
Mitchell laughed as Jason gently placed the tablet back on the table.
Jason loved Mitchell like a brother, ever since they’d met during their first year at college, but his gullibility for the outlandishly absurd was astonishing to Jason’s rational mind.
Mitchell said, “Look at the facts: twenty years ago, a UFO crashes and a young girl survives. Today, you meet a roughly twenty year old woman from the same province. What are the odds that they are one and the same person?”
Jason thought about it for a second and said, “Zero. One’s fictitious, the other’s real. There’s no chance they’re one and the same person.”
“Come on,” Mitchell pleaded. “Think about it. All life on Earth follows circadian rhythms, with a day/night wake/rest cycle, but by your own admission little old Lily sat up all night. How do you explain that?”
“Two words,” Jason said, watching as Helena and Lily walked over to join them. “Jet lag.”
Lily smiled. She slid around into the booth and sat next to him. For someone who had dropped into his world barely a day ago, having her beside him felt both comforting and refreshing. Jason couldn’t express why, but it felt natural to be with her, as though they belonged together. He wasn’t one for the old cliché of love at first sight, but Lily was different from any other girl he’d ever met. She seemed almost disinterested in a physical relationship, and he found that strangely appealing. Perhaps it was the lack of expectation that disarmed him, the absence of any pressure was welcome. Rather than trying to make something happen between them, it felt like it had already happened years ago.
Was this déjà vu, he wondered? Jason wasn’t one to buy into superstitions. He preferred to think of the two of them as somehow complimentary at a hormonal level. Yes, he thought, compatible chemistry, that was a better explanation.