A week followed, and then a month, and we were soon into the dog days of summer. It occurred to me then that I hadn’t heard a single word about a follow-up flight. Neither had Karen.
When I mentioned this to anybody, I got the oddest reply. It was always something like this:
“Hey, have you heard any news about another trip to the moon?”
“The moon?”
“You know, to find the aliens?”
Usually at this point, whoever I was talking to would look at me with a puzzled expression on their face. Finally, they’d remember. “Oh, right, I think I remember something about aliens. On the moon? Sure, that’s right. Whatever happened with that?”
Before I could answer, though, the person would change the subject.
At first, I thought I was talking to maybe the only few people in the world who weren’t mesmerized by the whole thing. I mean, aliens on the moon?
It was the news story of a generation. Of course, Erika making that same moon vanish was the story of a millennia.
I kept asking. Whoever I’d meet, I’d hear the same thing. They’d have a blank expression, and then they’d eventually recall something vague but no details.
Nobody really remembered the aliens. Nobody really remembered the flight. They remembered Karen as an astronaut on the Skywheel, but they couldn’t say what she was up there for.
In my work talking about Erika, I had occasion to be part of interviews for the BBC in England as well as a half-dozen other countries. I took the opportunity to ask every person I encountered.
It seemed like the whole planet had collective amnesia. Nobody remembered the aliens. Not even NASA. It turned out they were concentrating on unmanned missions to the far planets, because there might be the building blocks of life out in those faraway reaches.
Ignoring the known life, right next door.
I only knew of three people who clearly remembered the mission to find the aliens: me, Karen, and of course, Erika.
Erika remembered it, but she wouldn’t talk to me about it. When I asked her, her face would cloud over. It was a subject she clearly didn’t want to discuss.
Why?
And how could that collective amnesia happen?
There seemed to be only two possible choices.
Either Erika had clouded everyone’s memories, or the aliens had.
I didn’t know which alternative was scarier, but I didn’t like either one.
During that summer, I reignited my love for Karen Anderson. We spent every spare minute together, talking, catching up on the time we missed, making love, trying to make sense of the weird set of circumstances that had brought us back together.
I could see the baby starting to poke her way around Karen’s belly, and by the end of the summer, it was clear to anybody who had any sense of their surroundings that Karen was pregnant.
We pretended there was nothing unusual about the baby, and really, nobody ever questioned things. We were a couple in every sense of the word, devoted to each other, and even though we hadn’t exactly committed to marriage, that was a clear event in our future as well.
So we thought.
Also through the latter part of the summer, Erika spent less time in public, more time in her own space. I know she liked to spend her private time praying and writing her sermons, but those sermons showed up on her website less and less frequently.
By the time she’d posted 300 of her 5-minute sermons, I think she was running out of steam. Somehow she’d managed to avoid duplication, so 300 different topics was an extensive and broad discussion of her thoughts.
It all boiled down to two things: people needed to love God, and they needed to love each other.
Her message wasn’t complex. But the ways she talked to her audiences was laser-focused. She was our rabbi—our teacher—and we could spend the rest of our days re-listening to what she wanted us to learn.
I know one thing bothered her a lot. For the past several months, surveys showed that she was no longer gaining large numbers of new converts. Estimates were around a hundred million Saboites.
She wanted to reach all ten billion people on the planet, but she was stuck at 1% of that number.
I remembered back before I murdered Jesus, that in the parallel universe where he thrived, there were 2.2 billion Christians.
Why couldn’t Erika get the same followers?
I think she knew, but nobody else knew. Erika was a smart girl, and she was always miles ahead of us in her thinking.
On the first day of autumn, she called her twelve disciples together and said she wanted to have a nice dinner with us all. We were thrilled with that idea, because it seemed like she’d been more and more distant from us. We all treated this as a reason to celebrate.
It was a warm evening, in the mid-seventies, and we collected at Gavin’s Choice, a small restaurant on the outskirts of Aynsville. Erika had arranged for us to have the entire restaurant, not that many others could have been seated anyhow. The place only had seating for about twenty people.
Gavin’s Choice was known for seafood, and when Erika ordered grilled tilapia, we all jumped on the bandwagon and called out the same dish.
Tilapia.
A vision of my trip living back in Galilee in the time of Jesus came over me. We had musht, the local fish from the Jordan river. Today, we call that fish tilapia.
I turned to Erika, “Are you remembering something?”
She smiled and playfully punched me in the shoulder. So, I don’t know.
What I do know is that the meal was marvelous. We had the fish, a Cobb salad, grilled asparagus, and some lovely red wine.
Lots of laughter, chatter, and praises to God.
I sat next to Erika, and Karen was on my other side. My two favorite people.
It was one of the happiest meals I’d ever had.
When the food was eaten, Erika stood.
“A toast,” she said.
We all raised our glasses, intent on hearing what she wanted to toast.
“It’s been my amazing gift to return to you all. I love each and every one of you, and I want you to always remember you are charged with taking my voice wherever you go.”
She paused and gave us one of her widest smiles.
“Soon, we must part, and you must be my apostles. I need you to tell my story.”
A sudden coldness swept over us. None of us knew what she was talking about.
Erika closed her eyes and then nodded. “One of you knows what must be done.”
She glanced up to the roof, and I knew she was looking for help from God. I don’t think any help came to her, because now she looked frail and afraid. Her eyes watered.
Down the table, I heard Chris. She tried to call to Erika, but her voice was feeble. “Am I the one?”
If Erika heard her, she didn’t answer.
“The only thing that matters is spreading the good word. You all know it. You must help me.
“And now, I toast all of you. Thank you for being my loyal crew.”
Then she glanced at me. We locked eyes, and a tear fell from one of hers. I wanted to hug her, but I was in as much shock as everyone else.
She had just given us some kind of farewell speech.
Erika broke the trance by clinking my glass with hers. That got everybody whispering and clinking their own glasses, albeit quite reluctantly. Nobody wanted to believe Erika was somehow going to leave us.
It was only later that night, when I was drifting off to sleep, that I realized why she’d given me that special look, why she’d drawn attention to me when she said one of us knew what had to be done.
The silence around me seemed to starve me of air, and I sat up in bed. I realized I knew exactly what she meant.