The Enigmatologist (29 page)

“Don’t worry about that,” Louisa said, detecting his
doubt. “I’ll be around for a long time.”

The
Elvises
started walking into
the park. John didn’t look. He didn’t need to. He sensed them getting closer,
like he was inside their bodies, experiencing every footstep and breath and
heartbeat required for several hundred Elvis impersonators to move.

He felt the human emptiness denoting where Sheriff Masters
was making his way through the crowd. Professor Gentry followed, holding a
woman’s hand. John initially disregarded their conversation in Professor
Gentry’s home, but now, in a trailer park full of
Elvises
,
it took on a new meaning.

“They sent you the Wow! Signal, didn’t they? back in ’77,”
John said. “It was some kind of message from colonist central or whatever,
telling you they’re coming.”

“They gave us the date and time when the next wave will
arrive. They’ll be here in two-hundred years. We don’t have much time. We have
to start preparing.”

“I have a question,” Professor Gentry said, now standing
at the front of the crowd. “The day after the Wow! Signal was intercepted,
Elvis died.”

“That was just a heart attack,”
Leadbelly
said. “Not everything’s a conspiracy, man.”

“Even if it was a heart attack,” John said to Louisa, “you
still have a big problem. Hollister knows you’ve been watching him. He found
Leadbelly’s
photos. I’m sure he’s figured out the whole
body-doubles-are-aliens thing by now. He probably thinks you actually killed
Elvis. I made a deal with him. I’m not sure if he’ll stick to it. But it should
buy us some time.”

“We’re safe out here,” Louisa said. “We’ve adjusted the
atmosphere, obscuring us from the Air Force’s satellites.”

“It’s not just that. He’s got my dad.”

Louisa turned, startled.

“You didn’t know, did you?” John asked.

“When we lost contact with him, we assumed…” Weeds grew
between the cracks in the sidewalk. They had been trampled by foot traffic, but
still endured. Louisa brushed them with her Birkenstock.

“He walled his mind off, probably before they
cryonically
froze him.”

“That would keep a mental barrier in place.”

“Like what you did to me in the Winnebago,” John said to
Leadbelly
.

“He should have told us, man. We would a gone out there
and got him.”
Leadbelly’s
lip curled, jaw tightened.

“He was protecting me. If you rescued him, Hollister would
have gone after me and my mom.”

“So, he disconnected himself from us,” Louisa said,
folding her arms. “That poor man, alone and isolated. It’s a hard and painful
thing.”

“But my dad wasn’t alone,” John said, remembering a
lifetime of conversations with this father. “He’s been talking to me my whole
life. In dreams.”

“He must have built a mental bond with you, tethered his
subconscious to yours. He probably started when you were a baby, while your
mind was still forming. It’s the only way he could talk to you while his mind
and body were
cryonically
frozen.”

“Then he knew Hollister, or someone, was coming for him?”

“Or maybe he just wanted to be close to you,” Louisa said,
patting his knee.

“I have to get him,” John said, feeling the need to atone
for eighteen years of hostility.

“Now that we know where he is, we’ll send a team to do
some reconnaissance. Don’t worry, we’ll get him back.”

“My family, my mom, Rooftop,” John said, jumping up from
the bench. “Hollister will use them to get to me. I need to go back to Denver,
make sure they’re alright, get them out of there if possible.”

“Your family will have a home here.” Louisa nodded.

“And Rosa?” John asked.

“She’s been asking about you, too. She’s with her family…”
Louisa rubbed the spine of the journal with her thumb, searching for the right
words. “Taking care of some things, but you’ll see each other again, soon.”

John looked down and smiled. His cheeks flushed. When he
drove into the desert with
Leadbelly
, he wasn’t sure
he’d ever see Rosa again, or if she even wanted to see him. But she’d asked
about him, and that felt better than solving
The New York Times
Sunday
crossword with a pen.

“Al, you and Ricky take John, Sheriff Masters, and
Professor Gentry back to Las Vegas.”

“I’d like to stay here, if that’s alright?” Professor
Gentry asked, his arm around an older, Mexican woman, one of the original
colonists.

“You move quick,” John said. “What would Mrs. Morris say?”

“Elizabeth and I have an open relationship.”

“Very well. You may stay with us,” Louisa said in her
gentle way. “In the meantime, we’ll contact the other Sagittarian communities
and inform them about the recent developments.”

Leadbelly
and Louisa rose from the bench.
Louisa hugged John. She put her hands on his face. “Hurry back to us.”

“I’ll get back as quickly as I can.”

As the four men walked to
Handjive’s
Winnebago, the sheriff turned to John, grinning like his mind was full of trouble.

“John, when we get back, let’s drive around town. You can
tell me who’s human and who’s not.”

“You
wanna
kick the Sagittarians
out of Las Vegas?”

“Shoot, if they’re anything like
Leadbelly
and
Handjive
here, I just might kick all the humans
outta town.”

Handjive
turned the key.

Nothing happened.

He tried again.

Nothing.

“So much for good-old Sagittarian know-how,” John said.

Handjive
smiled, a blend of comfort and
seduction. He leaned over the dash, whispered into the air vents, then started
singing to the Winnebago, “…and I can’t help, falling in love with you.”

Handjive
turned the key again. This time
the engine turned over, humming its own song. The metal spikes holding them to
the earth detached and clamped to the side of the Winnebago, and they lifted
into the early dawn.

“You
gotta
know how to talk to
them, man, just like a woman.” He continued romancing the mobile home,
caressing the dashboard with his right hand.

They floated over the trailer park, the light of sunrise
spreading across the desert floor. John propped his hands on the bed above the
cab and surveyed the park out the front window. It grew the higher they rose
above it and John saw just how sprawling and expansive it really was.

“Holy shit,” he whispered.

When they landed, the park appeared to be smaller. Only a
few trailers were lit, those necessary for landing, but against the morning
light, he saw its immensity. Thousands of trailers covered several square miles
of lifeless soil. A town established in nowhere. Empty spaces were spread
throughout the park, awaiting absent trailers. And standing in the middle of it
all was the Elvis statue.

“Check it out, man,”
Handjive
said, pointing to the ground. Other
Winnebagos
dislodged from the surface, heading west and north. “They’re
gonna
go have a chat with the rest of us, man. All the
Sagittarians out there.”

“You can’t just talk to them telepathically?” John asked.

“
Naw
, man,”
Leadbelly
said, sitting at the table, drinking a can of lite beer. “It’s a distance
thing. We
gotta
be within a certain radius or the
whole dang thing won’t work.”

“What about dreams?” John asked. “I thought you could talk
to them that way.”

“Dreams are different, man. Your subconscious is more
open, more receptive to telepathy. It’s sunrise. No one’s sleeping now.
Besides, man, this is too important for dreams. Someone might misinterpret the
message.”

“I can see how a dream where a paranoid Elvis tells you to
hide from the government can be confusing,” John said.

“It’s serious business, man,”
Handjive
said. “We’re
gonna
have to lock down the park for a
while. Till we can figure this whole mess out. It’s
gonna
be hard, man. No women.”

“I saw women all over that camp,” Sheriff Masters said.
“Hell, Gentry found himself one.”

“Man, we’re either related to them or they’re too old,”
Leadbelly
said.

“Since when do you care about age?” John asked.

“When the women around here started turning four hundred,
man.”

“Hey,
Leadbelly
,”
Handjive
said. “What do you say, man, after we drop these
two off we make one last trip to Vegas. Do it up, Elvis style.”

“I only got one thing to say to that, man, Viva Las
Vegas.”
Leadbelly
smiled, content and excited, like
getting kicked out of Circus
Circus
and arrested for
public drunkenness at the Fremont Street Experience was how he wanted to spend
his last hours before being sequestered.
Leadbelly
and
Handjive
talked about all the off-strip casinos
they wanted to visit, recalling previous booze-induced escapades. Listening to
their stories, John chuckled and wondered if Vegas had a law against ‘drinking
while Elvis’.

Handjive
piloted the Winnebago away from
the park. As they flew away, John experimented with his new ability. He
extended his consciousness as far as possible, testing its limits. He sensed
the Sagittarians, the Hybrids, the
Elvises
fade like
stars disappearing at sunrise, all except the two in the cabin with him.

As they got closer to the mountains, roads started cutting
across the ground. John recognized I-25, the road they took to Professor
Gentry’s compound. They descended and, just for fun,
Handjive
flew over the plot of desert where the Air Force had ambushed them. John put
his hands and face against the window, looking for his wrecked car, but it
wasn’t there. The area was totally clean. A sanitized desert.

Handjive
hovered a few inches over an
empty stretch of highway outside of town. Metal grinded, hiding the frame and
the Sagittarian engine underneath the mobile home. Four tires moved into the
wheel wells.
Handjive
smiled at his passengers and
flipped the switch that lowered the RV onto the road. Caught by gravity, the
Winnebago dropped to the ground, bouncing as it hit. The inside of the cab
shook and John gripped the table, bracing himself.

Handjive
turned the ignition key to the
combustion engine, and where they expected to hear a motor turning over, they
heard only a slight breeze blowing eroding sands. The Winnebago didn’t start.
He tried it again and again with the same results.

“Sorry, man,”
Handjive
said.
“I’d fly you into town, but, man, we’d probably cause a riot.”

“And Mrs. Morris would be leading the pack,” John said,
“swinging vibrators like
nunchucks
.”

“Looks like we’re walking,” the sheriff said, rising from
the passenger seat.

Stepping from the Winnebago into the culvert, brown grass
tried to crawl up their pant legs. They said their goodbyes, and watched the RV
convert back to flying mode. The metal frame grew from underneath, enveloping
the tires, pulling them under the vehicle. The Winnebago floated for a minute
then lifted skyward. They waved to their friends until the Winnebago
disappeared, blending with the endless blue sky.

John held onto them with his consciousness as long as
possible, seeing, feeling them disappear simultaneously. He searched the desert
for alien life, but didn’t feel any. They were out there somewhere. Just not
near him.

“Hey, John. Check it out.” The sheriff pointed up,
smirked. “Elvis has left the building.”

* * * *

The
sun rose as they walked, reflecting off the road ahead of them. John squinted
and a thin membrane, like a second eyelid, grew over eyes. A product of his
Sagittarian heritage, it diffused the morning light.

Being in the trailer park, meeting the other Sagittarians
changed John, showed him he was part of something bigger, older, part of a
species that spread across the galaxy, reshaping the worlds they inhabited.
John knew they had plans for him, beyond what Louisa told him, but he didn’t
care about their internal invasion, or the impending second wave, he just
wanted to find Rosa and live a quiet life with her. He didn’t think he was
alone in his desire for solitude. When he was in the park, he’d heard
everyone’s thoughts, experienced their emotions. It was incredible, being
connected to the Sagittarians, peaceful. His uncertainty, isolation, loneliness
had vanished because he finally knew what it was like not to be alone. But he
had felt something else, like the peace they shared was a thick crust covering
another, equally prevalent emotion. They craved the unity that came with being
connected to other Sagittarians, but they also coveted that human fragment that
demanded reckless individuality, like
Leadbelly
and
Handjive
going to Las Vegas, trying to have as much fun as
possible before the next wave of Sagittarians arrived. John thought these two
desires would conflict, but he felt their symmetry and the contentment of
everyone in the park, like they had learned what it really meant to be part
Sagittarian and part human, something he was just starting to discover.

The sun beat down on him, was absorbed by the extra
melanin secreted into his skin, and John felt its warmth and smiled. For the
first time, John didn’t have a detailed plan regarding his future. When he was
younger he’d dreamed and plotted out his life, college, writing puzzles for
The
Denver Post
, a book deal that put his genre-bending work in the hands of
the next generation of
enigmatologists
, talk shows,
his own panel at Comic-Con, an Oscar winning biopic, but those fantasies no
longer mattered. John’s future was as open as the desert sandwiching the road.
He wasn’t sure what would happen to him, what he’d become. He just knew that
whatever awaited him in the centuries ahead, he didn’t want Louisa’s job, to
secretly organize a colonization effort from a trailer park in New Mexico.

John didn’t share his thoughts with Sheriff Masters.
Instead, they silently walked into town.