“I got a question for you.”
“What’s that?”
“How come you gave up singing?”
“Who said I gave up singing?”
“I’ve heard it all over. You ain’t sung a goddamned note since you fucked up on dope in Paris.”
Jim couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “That’s bullshit.”
Long Time Robert shot him a sidelong glance. “Yeah? So when did you last sing, Rock and Roll?”
“I don’t know. I have this problem with my memory.”
“So how do you know what I’m saying is bullshit?”
Jim shook his head in bewilderment. Maybe it was true and Long Time Robert Moore was right. He didn’t know anything for sure. That’s why he’d wanted to hang around Doc’s town for a while and sort out a few of these problems. “I need to think about that.”
“Well, don’t take too long, boy. We’re coming up to the Crossroads.”
Jim peered through the windshield. It was just as Robert Moore said. Up ahead, a second country road intersected the one they were on. As far as he could see, the two made a perfect right angle, slap in the middle of unsignposted nowhere. As they came to the place where the two roads met, Long Time Robert Moore slowed the car to a halt. “So I guess this is far as we go.”
Jim was tempted to ask Moore what he was expected to do now, but he knew that he was unlikely to receive anything but some down-home bit of Zen by way of an answer. Either that or the question would be countered with another question. The bluesman shut off the Cadillac’s engine. “Think I’ll take me a look around.”
Before he got out of the car, Long Time Robert Moore reached around behind his seat and pulled out his guitar case. He took it with him when he climbed out. This puzzled Jim. Was the old man intending to serenade the deserted Crossroads, or maybe try to play the music of the crop circles again? Jim couldn’t believe that he didn’t intend coming back to the car. After he made his exit, Long Time Robert Moore didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He walked a short distance from the Cadillac and then stopped and looked up at the sky. Jim turned to the blonde in the back. “You have any idea what’s going on?”
Marilyn merely shrugged. Her face formed into the familiar, extended upper lip pout. Still Jim couldn’t fathom what she was. Some oddity who had taken Monroe’s form along with a vow of submissive silence? A sex toy that Long Time Robert took on the road with him? Jim knew this was another puzzle to which he would probably never have a solution, and he decided the best thing he could do was get out of the car himself. He walked slowly to a spot near the old man, but maintained sufficient distance so he would not be accused of crowding or following him. Without Jim having to say anything, Long Time Robert turned and looked at him. “You’re wondering what I’m doing, ain’t you, Rock and Roll?”
Jim half smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I’m wondering, but I didn’t want to ask.”
“I’m just waiting for my next ride.”
“What next ride?”
Long Time Robert Moore pointed to a spot on the distant horizon. “Look there, Rock and Roll, it’s coming now.”
A small orange light had appeared at the horizon. It performed a swift, jittering dance and then came directly toward where they were standing. After experiencing the arrival of the Haitian Mysteres in their blaze of static, Jim watched the fast-moving light with a certain apprehension. The object halted directly over them, silently hovering. Jim looked up at it in baffled amazement. “This is a joke, right?”
Above the two of them, some forty feet in the air, nothing less than a flying saucer floated in total silence. Long Time Robert Moore’s face was expressionless. “I don’t see no joke. All I see is that there UFO.”
Still Jim couldn’t believe it. The saucer was the classic design, the kind that was supposed to have crashed at Roswell in 1947, a large disc like an inverted soup dish with a kind of upper turret mounted at its center. The orange light was just the glowing domed top of that turret. On the underside were three large hemispheres that were supposed to have something to do with its means of propulsion. Jim could feel his hair starting to stand on end, just as it was supposed to around flying saucers. “That’s an Adamski saucer.”
Robert Moore looked blank. “I don’t know too much about the makes and models. Just looks like a saucer to me.”
“George Adamski. Back in the early fifties, he was the first guy to claim he was contacted by aliens.”
“He wasn’t the first guy.”
“He claimed to have taken pictures of saucers just like that one. They were all discredited as fakes.”
Long Time Robert seemed unconcerned. “Looks pretty real to me.”
“But what would real aliens be doing here in the human Afterlife?”
Robert Moore grinned. “Them aliens get everywhere. Here, life-side, everywhere.”
“You’re going off in that thing?
“Sure am.”
“Jim could hardly believe this. “You gonna be singing the blues on Zeta Reticuli?”
“I got friends in high places.”
“Can I come, too?”
Robert Moore shook his head. “I don’t think so. Them alien guys are kinda choosy about who they pick up.”
No sooner had the bluesman spoken than a beam of white light stabbed down from the underside of the spacecraft. Long Time Robert Moore was in the exact center of the beam, but Jim was also caught in its periphery. The saucer started to descend, and Jim, now definitely awed, backed quickly away. Robert Moore also took a couple of steps back. The beam of light was shut off and the saucer dropped to just a few feet from the ground, creating tiny dust devils on the surface of the road. For almost a minute, it remained perfectly stationary, and then a hatch slowly opened. Blue light streamed from its interior, and a narrow ramp extended until it was touching the ground. Long Time Robert Moore turned and looked back at Jim. “So I’m gone, Rock and Roll. I’ll be seeing you.”
Carrying his guitar case, the bluesman walked quickly up the ramp. At the precise moment that Robert Moore set foot on the ramp, the Cadillac simply vanished, as though it had ceased to exist now that the bluesman had no more use for it. Jim could only assume Marilyn had gone with it. As Jim watched Robert Moore disappear into the interior of the saucer, a sudden angry impulse took over. Screw the bunch of choosy aliens. He’d had enough of aliens during his life on Earth. They’d always been out there somewhere, lurking in the shadows, materializing and vanishing, bothering pilots, annoying the government, kidnapping travelers on lonely roads, scaring Vern and Bubba while they were fishing in the swamp. The guppy-eyed, gray-skinned, three-fingered little bastards had never deigned to reveal themselves. They never landed on the White House lawn and said, Take me to your leader. (Although, in Jim’s lifetime, the leader would have been Richard Nixon, so who could blame them?) They’d teased him enough. Finally a saucer had appeared and Jim Morrison was damned if he was going to be left behind wondering. He’d find out the truth once and for all. Either he’d see the aliens as they really were or, if the whole thing was sham, he’d know who was behind it.
Without weighing the possible consequences, he darted forward. The ramp was beginning to retract, but Jim jumped, gaining a footing on the moving metal. He swayed for a second like a surfer, struggling to get his balance, and then he dived after Long Time Robert Moore, straight through the entrance and into the craft.
Say what you like, aliens can be a goddamned pain in the ass.
All of Semple’s instincts told her that the jail had been deliberately designed the way it was, ludicrous inefficiencies and all, and that its creator had done his work with an abrasive attention to viciously absurdist detail. Confirmation was all around her. It was born on the tepid air, thick with the reek of ammonia and dirty plastic mattresses. It was swallowed morning and evening with the gray cardboard slop that passed as food. It came with the mass of contradictory regulations that regularly ground everything to a bureaucratic halt for hours at a time. The very walls vibrated with it, along with the waveforms of sighing misery, and the constant undertow of confined penitentiary echoes. It was even underlined by the way all color had been washed out of the equation. In many respects, the perfect summation of the entire oppressive ambience could be compacted into the form of the four-hundred-pound female guard in the reinforced glass booth who was currently staring at Semple as though she were a logical impossibility. “You have no paperwork. How can I process you through when you have no paperwork?”