Adult Children of Alien Beings (2 page)

I don't have time to ponder this further because the meter cop is about to write me a ticket even though I'm right here, keys in hand, and we both watch the time run out together. It takes forever to talk him out of it. He makes a big deal, like world justice depends on me paying for my parking crimes. Several cars pass, coveting the spot while we bicker. He manages to be a total asshole before he finally relents. I get into my car, rattled from both encounters, loon and asshole. Sometimes I just don't understand people!

As the thought flits through my brain, I freeze, frozen in the process of shifting into Reverse.

Sometimes I just don't understand people.

I drop back into Park. Dad said that
all
the time. I can hear him saying it. It was like the chorus of my childhood. Like he really meant it, felt it deeply. And Mom would put her arm around his shoulders and murmur, “It's all right dear. Everything will be fine. You'll see. It will all work out.” And he would look at her like she was the only one on the planet who truly understood him.

Maybe she was.

I touch the brochure in my pocket, next to my heart. I owe it to them to check it out. I'm the Quester, after all. Nobody else is going to do it. I started this searching-out-my-roots business in the first place to find out where I came from. From another planet makes as much sense as from nowhere.

Someone honks his horn at the old man frozen in his clunker at the parking meter, his turn signal on like he's going somewhere, but too addled apparently to give it the gas. I understand the honker's feelings completely. I drop it into Drive and gun it.

*   *   *

I know what he'll say, but I have to talk to my brother about this. Everything Deetermeyer said was true about us and more besides, but this isn't like the Bushes or the wars or same-sex marriage or the NRA or roundabouts or Obamacare or NASCAR or climate change or the Dallas Fucking Cowboys. This is more like Animal Rescue.

Alien Rescue. Ourselves. That's the key. To accept who you are so you can move on in a meaningful way. Now that I've read the brochure, been to the website, and pondered the evidence at length, it makes more and more sense.

In fact, it makes sense of everything.

One story of dozens I could tell: When I was nine or ten, Mom did a Paint by Number of a mountain landscape, systematically switching all the paints. She had a list of all the numbers and their substitutes taped on the wall where she worked on it meticulously for hours. She was quite pleased with it and just sat smiling at the scene while it dried, smoking a cigarette. How about? This was a menthol day, Alpine or Newport, one of those. The sky was the color of the pack. All the colors were wrong. Under the deep turquoise sky, the snow was way too blue. The evergreens were brick red.

Dad traveled. District sales manager. He hadn't been around for the weird Paint by Number project. My brother ignored it, of course, like he ignored everything else that wasn't about him. I was there for the unveiling, when Mom showed Dad this goofy Paint by Number, and they
both
had a drink and a smoke and sat there smiling at it teary-eyed, holding hands. They hung it up in their bedroom and locked the door for a while.

My folks were noisy lovers. It was many years before I realized not everybody grew up listening to their parents fuck, trying to picture it, what would make them groan and thump in that distinctive rhythm. She would scream his name in a way that I knew meant, despite its volume and intensity, that she wasn't mad at him but the opposite, a mystery I pondered long into the night.

Turns out Paint by Number was wildly popular among the aliens, and that a code circulated among them to translate certain landscapes—specially designed by an alien who had infiltrated the design department—into the palette and contours of their home world. There's an image on the ACAB website of the scene my mother did that looks
exactly
like the one I remember. That's what was going on with Mom and Dad: They were remembering home, when they met perhaps, and fucked like crazy, like they were young and in their old bodies again. If you examine it closely, supposedly, the elk in the middle distance has three eyes. The JPEG is too tiny to tell. Unfortunately, Mom's painting hasn't survived. She had a big yard sale the spring before they fell into the abyss and practically gave away all her artwork.

I explain all this and more to my brother over the phone. We both hate talking on the phone, but we live five hundred miles apart. Face to face is reserved for dead, dying, or getting married again. We're both between. The last time we spoke was a couple of months ago when he called to tell me he was moving out and to give me his new address. That's when I told him about my early research, before Deetermeyer. Probably not the best timing.

It takes him a while to just shut up and listen, so I really lay it on when I finally get an opening, maybe give him a little too much to process all at once.

“Aliens,” he says. “Stan, I think you need help, professional help.”

“Dr. Deetermeyer
is
a professional, Ollie.”

I can feel the phone grow cold in my hand. “I told you not to call me that,” he says in his gruff Clint Eastwood voice. He thinks it's intimidating. It just makes him sound old.

“It's your
name
. It's what Mom and Dad always called you. It's what I called you until you got a pole up your ass about it. I can't remember. Was it Kristi or June who put the idea in your head there was something wrong with it? It's on your birth certificate, Ollie, the first
real
document in our parents' lives on Earth!”

“Our parents named us after a couple of buffoons, Stan!”

“They didn't know any better. They were aliens! Don't you see? They loved Laurel and Hardy, so why not name their sons after them? It's so typical for the elder son of aliens to resent their peculiarities and crystalize his rage in some trivial wrong like a naming that merely expresses the parents' true alien nature. They knew how to laugh, Ollie. Something you could stand to work on. Compassion. Understanding.” Aliens love slapstick too, but I don't go into all that. Ollie's at war with that side of his nature.

There's a long silence. I know my brother. He's struggling with his better self. He wants to tell me to fuck off and hang up, but he wants to rise above it and be the only rational member of his crazy family. You'd think after all these years he'd give that one up. He's just not that good at it. “I prefer
Oliver
,” he says icily.

Oh please. This is typical firstborn alien brother behavior, to feel betrayed rather than blessed by his alien heritage. They invest minutiae, such as a mere name on a birth certificate, with great significance. They're into vows, lines in the sand, all the rest of it. They have no control, the victims of their own symbolism. It's like waving a red flag in front of a bull. I'll demonstrate: “Ollie, Ollie, Ollie.”

He hangs up. It's just as well. There's no way I can convince him Mom and Dad were aliens without further proof. I email him all my evidence, direct him to the ACAB website. Maybe he'll read it, and maybe he won't, but most likely he's absolutely certain I'm just crazy. Nothing new under that sun.

*   *   *

As you might imagine, paranoia runs high in the ACAB community, so there's not a lot of face to face, but some of us aren't so comfy with the online thing either. Am I really chatting with a fellow ACAB member in Santa Monica, or is it some FBI guy in Quantico taking a little time off from pretending to be a thirteen-year-old girl entrapping sleazeballs to infiltrate a fringe group for a change of weirdness? How's that for a career choice? And I'm the crazy one? Anyway, the local ACAB group's fairly tiny. We meet at the dog park second and fourth Tuesdays at dawn. (Fifth Tuesdays, we take the dogs to the river in all weather). We're all early risers, and so are our dogs. We have the place mostly to ourselves. We watch the dogs play while we discuss alien issues, sitting in a row on top of one of the long picnic tables, our feet on the bench. Summer mornings, we've had as many as seven or eight, winter months it's usually just the four diehards.

Today it's Katyana and Bill and me. She's in the middle, I'm on her right, and Bill's on her left. Dave is on his fourth honeymoon. Most of the regulars are my age, fifties, sixties, born from the late nineteen-forties into the sixties. Katyana's thirty maybe. She mentions her ex now and then but never gives out any details.

She believes the aliens didn't all vanish one way or another within a month of each other like my parents did, but that some hung around longer, maybe even more showed up. She's proof, she says. Her next older sister's nineteen years older. Her parents were old. Katyana's intense, and so is her blue-gray standard poodle Avatar, so no one argues with her. Opinion's sharply divided in the ACAB community on the Departure Issue, but she's definitely in the far fringe minority. I don't like to get into that controversy. I've got enough to figure out in the mainstream fringe.

I tell them about trying to get through to my brother. “I don't want to give up on him.”

“Let it go,” Bill says, what Bill always says. He used to be a Unitarian minister. He gave a few too many sermons on aliens. Unitarians aren't as open-minded as they like to think they are. Now he has a pug named Clyde. “There's no convincing some. It's for a reason your brother is the way he is. It's all part of the plan.” You have to watch Bill. He'll get to talking about Shinto gateways and fail to notice Clyde's adding a lovely dump to the scene. On this issue he may be right, however.

To maximize dispersal of alien seed, the predominant theory goes, ACAB brothers don't get along, move apart, and take multiple partners in order to create a far-flung network of alien descendants in every walk of life to greet them when they return. Ollie's pig-headedness, Bill's saying, serves a genuine purpose, but I'm not entirely convinced. How is willful ignorance of one's true nature better than self-knowledge? What good will Ollie be when the aliens return, if he doesn't even know who he is? I sort of nipped the alien plan in the bud when I got a vasectomy after my second wife had to quit taking the pill because of terrible migraines. No regrets. No children except some wonderful steps. I don't think they figure in the alien design, though I might've brainwashed them in some way. I'll have to ask them next time I see them. I have them over for dinner a couple of times a month. They've developed alien palates. Like many ACAB's kids of multi-married parents, they've shown a reluctance to marry themselves.

Katyana shakes her head at Bill's advice as he elaborates. How you elaborate on
let it go,
I don't know. I'm not really listening. I'm not so much looking
past
Katyana at Bill, but at her lovely profile as she rejects Bill's wisdom, using his pious tedium as a pretense to admire her beauty. I have to look away.

Out in the barren wasteland of the dog park, my dog Myrna, usually a clever border collie, is desperately making a fool of herself to catch Avatar's attention—crouch, spring, whirl, dash—but he's having none of it, making his stately progress around the perimeter, pissing. He makes it look like a yoga pose. She does not exist to him. If she's not careful, he's going to piss on her head. I can't watch.

“You should devote your energies to finding one of the old aliens who stayed behind,” Katyana says to me. “They'll know whatever you wish to know. You shouldn't care so much what your foolish brother thinks.”

She gives me a mildly scolding look, and I'm unnerved at how much I wish to please her. Forget my brother? Not a problem. Dave's of the opinion, he confided before he left for Cancun, that Katyana's not ACAB at all, just crazy. I like her, though, and she does look like an alien, has all the telltale features. A beautiful alien. I like having a plan.
Let it go
doesn't feel like a plan. “How do you think I should go about finding an old alien still hanging around Planet Earth?”

Bill heaves a gentle ministerial sigh at my foolishness. Screw him. I interrupt his judgment to point out Clyde's taking a crap—part of the plan no doubt—and Bill trots off to tend to it. Katyana smiles, cocks an eyebrow. It's just the two of us. She has enormous eyes even for an ACAB, whose eyes tend to run large. “Think like one of them. That shouldn't be so hard for you. You're the most alien of us all. Who knows more?”

It's true. I've sort of thrown myself into it, like an abyss, researching the subject endlessly, contributing regularly to the ACAB blog. I don't know whether she's teasing me or has faith in me, but Katyana inspires me to ponder the issue like worrying a bone. If any of the original aliens are still among us, how would I go about finding them? They all supposedly died somewhat mysteriously within a few months of each other, leaving no bodies behind, which is generally held to mean they abandoned their human form, their mission fulfilled, and left the planet en masse, by wormhole or starship. Opinion is divided and not really relevant to the more important question—did any remain behind? Even the most ardent believers in the Stayed Behinds or the Left Behinds, depending on who you ask, admit only a handful would be living now. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack, like aliens finding Earth on the outskirts of the Milky Way. If you're an ACAB, you have to believe anything is possible.

*   *   *

Later on, I'm sitting at home watching a rehash of the Black Friday craziness on TV with Myrna's head in my lap, muttering, “Sometimes I just don't understand people,” as they run clips of folks trampling each other for deals to show how well things are going this holiday season, when it hits me: Christmastime. Peace on Earth. “Away in a Manger.” Hysterical consumerism and lots of sappy movies—the season for aliens to restock their freezers with peppermint ice cream and cry happy tears. I love Christmas. I'm not a believer, but I love the story—strangers in a strange land, the most important kid on the planet born in a barn. Come let us adore him. Nothing wrong with that.