“I promised I’d take Max to Cat Parliament for his fortieth birthday,” Elizabeth said. “We’ve rented a car. We’re leaving in a few days. Once we’re officially evicted. And then we don’t know what we’ll do. Isn’t that exciting?”
Elizabeth’s sarcasm was frightening—she was like a cornered animal lashing out, her words like claws.
“Why are you getting evicted?” I asked.
“We fucking ran out of money saving up for this trip. We didn’t pay the fucking rent.”
“What if you did that study with Arnie? Didn’t he offer you—”
“He’s a fucking alien, remember?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “I forgot.”
“We have just enough money to get to Cat Parliament,” Elizabeth said. “We don’t have any idea what will come after that.”
Max looked at me nervously and raised his eyebrows. He covered his mouth and whispered, “What the fuck, hey?”
“Did my brother tell you about my . . . abduction?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Do you believe in alien abduction, Bartholomew?”
I knew what they wanted me to say, so I said, “Yes.” I didn’t not believe in alien abduction, and I understood that it was important that I believe at this point—that this was a deal breaker for Max and Elizabeth. If she was ever going to be my girlfriend, I needed to give them this absolute right now.
“We can fucking trust him, Elizabeth. He’s a good fucking person,” Max said, which made me smile. “I screened him over Guinness. What the fuck, hey?”
“Okay, then. Why don’t you tell him, Max?” Elizabeth said. “Tell him my story. Why not? See what he says. Maybe he can even save us, like Prince Charming. Why not?”
I swallowed hard, because Elizabeth was invoking fairy-tale language, Richard Gere, just like Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman.
Synchronicity.
Unus mundus.
“O-fucking-kay,” Max said and went on to tell the story about how his sister was walking along the “Dela-fucking-ware River” one summer evening when over the water she saw a “white fucking ball of energy” that seemed to pulse and radiate—“like the most beautiful fucking star you have ever seen had floated down to earth gently as a fucking dandelion seed dancing in the fucking wind.”
It was so “fucking mesmerizing” that she followed it thoughtlessly for hours, completely captivated by its beauty, but she never really seemed to get any closer to it—no matter how fast she walked, the “giant fucking orb of light” remained the same distance away from her. She walked for what seemed like an eternity without getting tired or thirsty. And then suddenly—“FUCKING POOF!”—she found herself at the exact place where she had first seen the bright light, as if she hadn’t been walking at all. She looked at her “fucking cell phone” and realized that no time had passed. In fact, she was pretty sure it was five or so minutes before she had seen the light—which is when she suspected that she might be going “fucking crazy.”
She couldn’t sleep that night. Elizabeth kept trying to remember what had happened during that space of time when she followed the beautiful light in the sky, but the more she tried to remember, the more it receded into the dark forgotten part of her mind—almost like “a fucking dream” that is vivid in the morning, but completely forgotten by “fucking lunch.” Try as she might, Elizabeth couldn’t recall any of the details, and yet she suspected that so much more had happened to her than simply seeing a “fucking light in the fucking sky.”
She became so anxious, the tightness in her chest became unbearable; Elizabeth began to worry that she was having a heart attack.
The next day she went to the emergency room, and after a few tests that proved nothing was wrong with her heart or her circulatory system, she took the medical advice she was given. She checked herself into a mental health facility, where they gave her medicine and bed rest and “fucking mandatory singing classes,” and therapists conversed with her in “great fucking detail” about her childhood, teen years, and adulthood too.
After a few weeks in the mental health facility, she began to remember what really happened.
On that fated night she was pulled up into a UFO by a “fucking tractor beam” of sorts that teleported her from the river walk up into an all-white educational mind laboratory. There were space men with “elongated fucking heads” and “shiny black fucking eyes” and “tiny fucking bodies”—their arms and legs were thin as pepperoni sticks and their skin was lime green and spotted like that of “fucking frogs.”
She was strapped down to an operating table by “ropes made of fucking electricity,” and even though they experimented on her, she didn’t feel any pain and was not afraid at the time. The aliens’ mouths didn’t move, but she heard their voices in her head, which were deep and “fucking sonorous.” They said, “This will all be over soon. There is no use struggling. Just relax. We’re doing this for the good of your species. You are what’s known as a ‘scientific hero’ where we come from, because your brief discomfort will result in many great advancements that will benefit millions all over the galaxy. Do not worry. You will be returned to your planet shortly.”
Max added a “What the fuck, hey?” here while opening his eyes extra wide and nodding enthusiastically.
I looked over at Elizabeth, and she seemed to be studying my reaction to the story, but when she caught my eye, she shrugged, which seemed odd.