Once More Into the Abyss (2 page)

As for me I'm an
old man
child of aliens. I'm past adult. It's okay to be childish again and believe in nonsense when you look like me. People practically expect it. An old man who isn't totally daft and frail is a bit scary to most folks. Dodder and dither, and they know who you are and treat you like a child.

Dylan asks, “Is that why Mom never went to see him, and he never came to see us? Because of the alien stuff?”

“No. It was just better that way. He needed to hide, and not just because he was a hermit by nature. He had a habit of getting himself into trouble. He would do things to serve the cause that weren't always wise, like lying about his academic credentials. Your mom was always the one to help him get through it all. She reached a point where she needed peace, time with us, you especially. She enjoyed the silence, because it meant he was okay, that he'd finally found his niche, that he was finally happy. That's where he wanted to be, just down the road from the abyss, where he believes aliens came and went, and just might come back again. Now she may feel guilty for letting him live out his dream, but it was really the best thing for both of them. Your mother's a
wonderful
daughter.”

“I think Mom's awake,” Dylan says. “She just squinted.”

“Busted,” Katyana says without opening her red, swollen eyes. “I have to be at the site by Friday.”

“We can start packing in the morning.” I rock her in my arms.

“You're the sweetest man who ever lived.”

“It's the alien in me.”

*   *   *

Next morning, we haven't even finished our usual oatmeal breakfast when an envelope arrives express mail for Katyana. It's from her father. Sent about an hour before the time Officer Chuckles told us he jumped.

It's handwritten on the Institute of Advanced Alien Sciences stationery. “At long last, the aliens are returning to recover their lost children and bring them home!” it begins. The rest is just the usual messianic jibber-jabber, until the end, when he says, “By the time you receive this I will have gone on ahead to meet them, to show them the way, for it can be a frightening passage, from one world to another! Be brave, my child! See you on the Home Planet, my beloved one!”

As you can see, he's been working on the John the Baptist thing. The heartbreaker about Simon is, he was never 100 percent sure he was an alien child himself, which put Katyana's status in further doubt. (She's more or less sure she's not; I think she is.) But her father desperately wanted it to be true. So that they could return to the stars where they belonged—the two of them. It's not as if the rest of the family would notice or care if they left.
Whatever happened to the weird ones?
they might ask at Thanksgiving, then entertain themselves inventing cruel stories, feeling all thankful and festive because they aren't the aliens. At my age, it gets too easy to dismiss my wacko beliefs as dementia, which is not quite so jolly. Poor old codger. Be kind.

Alien codgers rarely experience dementia. Heart attacks and cancer we've got covered. We don't always have the best diet and abhor organized fitness, smoke to excess and guzzle caffeine and alcohol. But dementia almost never shows—course we rarely live past eighty, though my brother Ollie is eighty-four through no fault of his own. His body's a slothful battleground for the pitched battle between his drugs and his diet to keep his heart beating. Or not.

I eat a vegan diet and practice yoga four times a week, having cleaned up my act after my heart attack a decade and a half ago. My blood is a mighty river. My breath tireless. The interior of my colon is as immaculate as the future in
2001.
Too bad we never got that future. I wouldn't mind seeing Jupiter. Instead we've got this poor fucked-over planet.

Most alien men my age are liberals, if you're wondering. Not all. Not Ollie. Ollie's an anomaly, which is kind of fun to say. Unfortunately he still insists on Oliver, even though our alien parents named us Stan and Ollie—
not
Stanley and Oliver. Aliens love comic duos. Abbott and Costello. Burns and Allen. Yin and Yang.

I've got to call and tell Ollie we're moving. I brace myself for battle, though at his last wife's funeral, I sensed something softening in him. I never thought he'd fully accept that Mom and Dad were aliens, but in recent years he seems to have come around.

“What do you want?” he answers.

“I love you too, Oliver.”

“I'm sitting on the can.”

“Why answer?”

“Because I can't figure out how to get my messages on this fucking phone, and if I miss the wrong one, everybody assumes I'm dead, and the next thing I know I've got the fucking rescue squad banging on the front door. I never wanted the fucking phone in the first place.”

“Constipated?”

“Of course I'm fucking constipated, Stan. I'm eighty-four years old.”

“Are you eating enough fiber?”

“Fuck you and your fiber!”

Definitely constipated. “How are the dogs?” I ask him, to change the subject to a safe haven. We both love animals like crazy and always have; so did Mom and Dad. One of the strongest indicators of alien identity is intense interspecies empathic bonding. Ollie has a thing for big dogs, usually two or three at a time. I prefer a dog and a cat. I've let it go so long now grieving over my last cat that getting one now that I've only got a few years to live seems unfair somehow. We aliens kids are big grievers. Of course,
Dylan
might want a cat. He's entitled. Avatar was Katyana's dog and Myrna was mine when we met. For the last twelve years they've been ours.

“I'm down to one dog,” Ollie says like this is some catastrophe. It might help with the aches and pains he's always on about if he didn't regularly get pulled like a wishbone with a Doberman on one hand and a Husky on the other.

“What is she?” I ask. We both prefer females, like most alien males.

“It's a boy, actually. He's six months, and he's already a handful. I saw him where I used to volunteer, and, you know me, I took him home. He's a Dane. I always wanted one, but never took the plunge because they don't live so long, and it's hard enough having your heart broke every few years. But I figure we can make it a contest—he and I—see if we can both make a decade.”

“I like it. What do you call him?”

“Horatio.”

“He does survive the play.”

“Exactly. How's yours doing? Still the standard poodle and the border collie?”

“That's right. They're both getting to that rickety arthritic stage, though Myrna may be doing a touch better than Avatar. If one goes, the other one will not be far behind. They're tight. They stick around for each other.”

Ollie laughs. It echoes in his john. “Are you one of those crazy alien motherfuckers with a soft spot for animals?”

“I am.”

“Me too. How's the family?”

“That's why I called. Katyana's father died.”

“Shit, I'm sorry to hear that.” I can hear the wheels turning. “He was kind of crazy, wasn't he?”

“He committed suicide. New Mexico cop just called. He jumped into the abyss.”

“Holy shit.”

“There's more.”

So I tell him the whole story right up to the last message from Simon Deetermeyer himself.

“So y'all are just uprooting and going to New Mexico? To that place of all places? Jeez, Stan, this is the loopiest thing you've
ever
done.”

“I thought that was marrying Katyana. That's turned out so horrible I can hardly begin to describe my suffering to you.”

“You don't have to get snippy. I'm happy for you. How's Dylan?”

I tell him about our anniversary breakfast. He doesn't snicker once during the whole thing, and tells me what a sweet kid I have.

So I'm not exactly surprised when he says, “Can I come with you? I don't know how I'd get out there otherwise. I mean, if Deetermeyer's right, I don't want to miss it. I'd drive myself, but they took my license away.”

“Of course, Ollie. The more the merrier.”

He doesn't even tell me not to call him Ollie.

*   *   *

When Ollie and I were little, we used to ride along with Dad summers, in the back seat of the company car. He was a traveling salesman with a five-state territory and was away a lot. According to Simon Deetermeyer's research, traveling salesman was a favorite job among the original aliens. They were ideally suited—restless chameleons with tons of empathy and a ready wit. In Dad's case—a pharmaceutical representative, aka prescription drug peddler, aka detail man—his work may also have been research on humans. You can learn a lot about a species by what ails them, what they choose to treat, the medicines they'll take and the ones they won't.

In Dad's day, ulcers were big. Now, I suppose it's failing hearts, failing minds. Then, as now, the gatekeeper to many a medical professional was a woman. Dad had a way with women, as most alien men do—maybe one of the reasons Mom traveled with him in the summers, so all his girlfriends on the road could have a look at his happy family. There was a waitress in a Mexican restaurant in San Angelo who knew Dad by name, knew what he ordered, and was pretty nervous the whole time, Dad too, but that was one time out of thousands of restaurants, and Mom seemed to find the whole thing amusing. We were often a happy family, and we were happiest, seems to me, those summers on the road. We loved it. Me more than Ollie maybe, since it began to compete with his interest in girls. When he hit sixteen I mostly had Mom and Dad to myself, crisscrossing his territory. Ollie missed a lot.

We stopped often, which Dad didn't usually do when he was working. He would take note of anything that looked interesting to him, or might be interesting to me or Mom, during the year and wait till we were along to take it in. It might be an enormous model train layout or an impressionist painting or a snake farm or a hot blues band or a cemetery. Mom and Dad had a thing about cemeteries. All of us would wander around like they were sculpture gardens. I was always on the lookout for angels. Ollie bellyached about it, and we all ignored him, but I didn't miss him when he quit coming along. Sometimes when it was just the three of us wandering among the dead at sunset, Dad would say,
I wonder what Ollie's up to now
, all wistful, like he wished he was with us. Mom would answer his question with the name of some girl Ollie was screwing, half of whom I never met. He was five years older, in a different universe where people actually fucked. There was plenty of drama—angry girls on the phone who would even talk to me to relay a pleading message to Ollie—so I kind of believed him when he'd say he wished he'd been there to see the Monet, the 76 Deadly Rattlers in a Pit, or the Plains Indian Museum.

Now here we are two old geezers in the back seat of Katyana's Outback, rocketing through Texas, Katyana at the wheel, singing along with the music Dylan (riding shotgun) has selected from his phone, some band I don't know the name of but I like. Alien men like to keep up with what's current, hate oldies stations with a passion.

Katyana has a beautiful voice. Alien women often possess beautiful singing voices. Dad once bragged to me and Ollie that our Mom sang
Madame Butterfly
to a standing ovation in her youth, and she told him to shush and soon left the room, tears welling in her eyes. Aliens are often tortured by unfulfilled artistic ambitions. Mom had several—painting, singing, poetry. Dad was a failed mystery writer and standup comedian. He loved to tell jokes. He was a master at it.

They were a talented pair. But they knew they weren't ordinary humans, and when their mission was completed, they would have to return home and turn their backs on all things human, starting with the human form all the art was about in one way or another. Who knows why an alien would love opera? Did Mom love it because it was alien, or because it was not? Maybe she was weeping because she knew when she shed her human body she would sing no more and live in a world without arias.

I know I sound crazy. I've honed the skill over the years, along with a near total disinterest in what others may think of me. It's one of the major perks to being an old fart, and don't underestimate its value. Wish I'd learned the skill years ago.

Avatar and Myrna sprawl across our laps, twitching and dreaming, making little yippy noises like they could still chase anything. Ollie's goofy Dane, Horatio, crammed in the back with the luggage, can't seem to sleep either. He's not half-grown, already bigger than Avatar, but he's all legs he can't get to work together. He's a clumsy, excitable boy. But once we hit the road something magical happened. I suspect this is his first highway drive with the windows down. Ollie always wants them up. Horatio stares into the wind, transfixed, his ears aflutter. His gyrating nose sucks down the smells until he's numb with the smell of Everything! Bliss!

With Katyana at the wheel, the windows are cracked so we can all smell the night air, hear the screeching rush of our passage! Be where we are! That was Dad, when the weather was nice, or we were driving through something he wanted to smell—flowers, horses, the dawn—crack would go the windows. As a kid, I used to close my eyes and imagine I was on a rocket ship bound for Heinlein's Mars. What a swell place that was. Ollie used to complain he couldn't hear himself think and Dad would reply in the shout necessary to make himself heard over the roar, like a voice out of a whirlwind—
Don't you get enough of your own thoughts already? Maybe you should listen to the wind instead of your busy little brain.

I know Ollie didn't like having his brain called little, because it certainly wasn't, but the point Dad was trying to make went right by him. It was often like that with those two. Dad would try to pass on some wisdom to Ollie who could give a shit, while I hung on his every word. Those were great times. But this is better. Everything is perfect.