Astounding! (16 page)

“But I have to tell you, Freddy, I’ve never in my life been so thankful for doing something so idiotic. I felt so terrible about the letter that I drove to Portland to apologize, and that’s how I met John. And God, I’m really glad I did.”

John leaned over to kiss the tender skin beneath Carter’s ear. “Me too,” he said quietly.

Keith
awwwed
at them. “Guys, if the point of this chitchat was to share your meet cute, you’ve done your duty. You’re adorable.”

“That wasn’t the point,” Carter said with a sigh. “The point is what came next. Because when I showed up at John’s door, I told him I’d publish his godawful story if he’d just explain why the hell he kept sending them to me. And they were all pretty much the same—an alien trying to get home.”

“Like E.T.?” Keith asked.

John laughed. “Much less charming. Carter’s right. I’m a terrible writer. He only made me the deal because he felt sorry for me. And guilty over the letter.”

“And curious as hell,” added Carter. “Plus I knew by then that
Astounding!
was drawing its last breaths, so why not? I could go out with a bang.” It occurred to him that even now, people might be receiving their issues of the magazine. They’d tear through Freddy’s story with glee before tackling the others. Eventually they’d get to John’s. He wondered how they’d react.

“So,” Freddy said, and he had that piercing expression again. He would have made a good interrogator. “Why
did
you keep sending bad stories to Carter?”

“Because I needed to send a message,” John said.

“To whom about what?”

John bit his lip and looked at Carter. It must be hard, Carter thought, to pour your heart out to people knowing they’d just think you’re nuts. How many times had John thought about doing that? Carter decided to spare him another round. He squeezed John’s hand before turning to make eye contact with Freddy and Keith. “John’s stories are autobiographical.”

“Meaning?”

“John is an alien.”

Dead silence fell. Keith carefully placed his spoon inside his bowl and pushed the bowl away. “Do you mean that John is a Canadian citizen desperately wishing to be repatriated to the Great White North?”

For a moment Carter considered going with that. It was a cousin to the truth, after all, a sanitized version of the real thing. And Vancouver was a great city. It would be easy to understand a man’s eagerness to return there. But John was looking at him, all big blue eyes, and Carter couldn’t leave him hanging. If Keith and Freddy were going to hang John for being a lunatic, well, they’d have to hang Carter too.

“Not that kind of alien,” Carter said. “He’s an extraterrestrial.”

Freddy’s response was surprisingly mild. “He looks pretty standard-grade human to me. No green skin and not an antenna in sight.”

He felt human too, and smelled human. Carter could have assured Freddy of that. But instead Carter shook his head. “He’s not. He’s actually a nonphysical entity. An energy being. This body is….”

John finished for him. “A creation. Camouflage. A costume I’ve worn for fifty years.”

Keith’s mouth had dropped open slightly, but Freddy’s expression remained blank. Both men’s gazes flitted back and forth between Carter and John, as if they expected one of them to admit this was all a weird practical joke. But of course no such thing happened. John sighed and leaned heavily against Carter, then rested his head on Carter’s shoulder. It felt nice.

“You’re serious,” Keith said after a few moments had passed.

“Deadly,” responded Carter.

That led to more staring, until finally Freddy scrunched up his mouth slightly. “You’ve always had a pretty strong grasp on reality, Car. Remember when I used to try to get you to write stories too? You’d get two paragraphs in before getting hung up on whether to use subjunctive mood or whether the sentence needed a semicolon or an em dash.”

Carter nodded. “Yeah. I’m a good editor but a crappy writer. Worse than you, John.”

Freddy had more to say on the subject. “And you’ve always been fucking sane. When your so-called family treated you like shit, you just moved on. You were only a kid, and a lot of people would have flipped. But you didn’t. Yeah, these last couple of years you’ve been drinking too much. It worries me. But even when you’re shitfaced, you just get really quiet. You don’t confuse what’s real with what’s not.”

“True.”

Now Freddy laughed. “And remember when we used to get stoned? I’d go off on rants about the nature of the universe or I’d engage in pothead philosophy. But not you. You’d sit there quietly, maybe staring at the carpet. Or you’d eat.”

“Yep.” Doritos had been his poison of choice when he got the munchies. He’d wake up to find orange fingerprints all over the furniture.

“You,” Freddy said, pointing at him, “are too stubborn to lose your mind. And I find it really hard to believe that you have experienced a psychotic break and are engaged in a folie à deux with John.”

“I didn’t believe John when he first told me. How could I? I just figured he was crazy. But, um, harmless crazy. And sweet.”

“You two slept together, didn’t you? As soon as you met?” Freddy’s tone wasn’t accusatory or judgmental—just factual.

With his head still on Carter’s shoulder, John answered. “Not right away. It was several hours later. He spent the night at my house because it was late and it was raining, and… we bumped into each other in the middle of the night.”

“Things that go bump in the night,” Keith muttered. Freddy gave him a friendly poke in the arm.

“So. What finally convinced you that you were sleeping with an alien?”

“It didn’t happen that night,” Carter said with a shake of his head. “And even when I invited John to join us on this trip, I still just figured he was a little eccentric. I can deal with eccentric. I have before.” He grinned slightly at Freddy, who grinned back.

Keith picked up his spoon and held it in front of himself like a talisman, maybe to ward off the insanity. “You don’t think he’s eccentric anymore?”

“John is a lot of things. Psychotic isn’t one of them. He really is… something else.”

“How do you know?”

John lifted his head and leaned forward slightly. “I showed him. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it, but I could. I entered him and found his… his essence. His energy. And I held it close so we could fly together. We’ve done it more than once now. It’s amazing. It’s so much better to dance with him than alone.” He sounded as overcome with wonder as Carter had felt the first time. As Carter
still
felt.

“You did a mind-meld?” Keith asked skeptically.

“We
flew
!” Carter snapped. “And it was—is—the most goddamn amazing thing that’s ever happened to me. I don’t have words for it. Nobody would. Not even you, Freddy. It was a revelation and a miracle and pure joy.”

He might have said more in his eagerness to get them to understand. But he didn’t get a chance because John let go of his hand, cradled Carter’s face in his palms, and kissed him hard. He tasted of lemon and mint. If Carter had been the swooning type, he’d have been out cold.

When they broke the kiss—both slightly breathless—the other men were smiling. Freddy shook his head fondly. “That was a distraction. Okay, so John proved to you he was an alien. Can you show us, John?”

John ducked his head, but not before his face went bright red. Even his ears flushed. “It’s… intimate,” he mumbled.

Carter agreed. He felt closer to John after flying than he’d ever felt with anyone after sex. Even Freddy—and he and Freddy had genuinely cared for each other. Not only that, but Carter also realized that he’d be jealous if John tried to enter anyone else. Which was stupid and petty, but there it was.

Keith still held his spoon, and Freddy tapped his fingers on the table. Carter wanted to beg them to believe this tale. Not for his sake, but for John’s, because John deserved to have someone else believe in him. He deserved friends who saw his true self.

“Maybe,” Freddy said, “it’s something in the air. Or something we ate. But I’m inclined to believe you both.”

Everyone else gasped in unison. “Really?” John asked.

“I’m a writer. The stories I tell, every one of them is absolutely real in my head. My characters exist. Not only that, but they’re real to thousands of other people. I get letters begging me to let certain characters live and then spewing hate when I kill someone off. If all that can be true, why can’t you be a creature from outer space?”

He seemed sincere. Carter felt slightly lightheaded with relief. But John…. John was wiping away tears with the back of his hand and then hiding his face in the crook of Carter’s neck. “Thank you,” John whispered. Carter held him close and rubbed his back.

Perhaps Keith would have put up an argument, but Freddy gave him a stern look. “You have proof too. None of your photos of John turn out.”

Keith’s phone was at his side. He picked it up and began to scroll through the pictures as if verifying what Freddy said. Then, with his brows drawn in a V, Keith pointed the phone at John and poked at the screen. He looked at the results. “Nothing. Just digital static.”

“He interferes with electronic stuff,” Carter informed him. “He can’t use a computer either.”

“Oh. My. God.” Keith leaped out of his seat and began to bounce on his toes. “An alien! A real, genuine alien life form! And he’s here right in front of me and he’s been eating my food and going hiking with me!” Carter might not have been the swooning type, but Keith was, and he looked dangerously close to falling into a dead faint. He hopped around the RV in an excellent imitation of a thirteen-year-old meeting her favorite boy band. The RV squeaked and shook under his feet.

Poor John looked stunned, and at first Carter assumed it was the sight of a large man fanboying over him that caused his astonishment. But then John turned to look at Carter, and his eyes were wet. “They believe us,” he said in a tiny voice. Carter realized that the number of people John was out to had just tripled. Remembering how goddamn good it had felt when he’d admitted to his friends that he was gay—and when his friends accepted him as a matter of course—Carter caressed John’s cheek.

Eventually Keith calmed down enough to sit at the table again. But then he had a million questions for John, so many and so fast that John couldn’t keep up despite his best efforts. Carter wondered if John was beginning to regret his revelation. Most of the time, Freddy just listened. Quite possibly, everything John said would end up in a future story. Carter had the impression that John wouldn’t mind.

It was Freddy who finally put a halt to the interrogation. He placed a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “Honey? The clock’s ticking. Why don’t you let John recuperate from the third degree while we start driving.”

Reluctantly, Keith agreed.

P
ACKING
UP
took a little while, especially since Keith kept stopping to gape at John and, once or twice, poke him as if testing a mirage. At long last, however, they stowed everything carefully and Carter sat behind the wheel. He detoured briefly to the dump station before pulling onto the road.

“Which way?” he asked Keith and Freddy, who sat in the dinette. John rode shotgun, a pleased smile still playing at the corners of his lips.

“We have choices,” Keith replied. Carter couldn’t look behind him to see, but he guessed Keith was probably staring at his phone. “But since we came in through the northern entrance, do you mind if we leave via the south? Google Maps says it’s only a few minutes longer.”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Carter said. He didn’t really care where he was or what roads he traveled, as long as John was with him. Oh God, he was so, so fucked.

Traffic crawled through Yosemite, and once they exited the park, the twisty road had tall trees uncomfortably close on either side. The RV’s responsiveness felt balkier than it had before, but maybe Carter was projecting his own reluctance to see time marching on. He took the curves slowly and carefully, causing a long line of frustrated motorists to form behind him. Most of them glared when the road widened and they could finally pass. An older man in a Ford Focus flipped him off.

They stopped for gas in Mariposa, a tiny town with a couple blocks of Gold Rush-era buildings. A large banner over the main street announced that the Butterfly Festival would occur in early May. Briefly Carter pictured himself and John, incorporeal, fluttering among the monarchs.

The hills began to smooth as they left Mariposa, and the terrain became drier and barer. Cattle and horses grazed at the roadside, not at all scandalized by the cars in the fast lane zooming past the RV.

The diminutive hamlet of Jelley’s Valley didn’t look big enough to merit a name, but it did boast a Mexican restaurant next to a combined general store and post office. Carter would have driven right by, but Keith poked him in the shoulder. “Would you mind stopping? I want ice cream.” And really, ice cream was almost always a good idea, so Carter pulled into the gravel lot. He wanted to get a good look at the RV tires anyway—the monster had really felt as if it were fighting him for the past number of miles.

“Hey!” Freddy said with unusual animation as the RV came to a shuddering halt. “I saw a documentary about this place!”

Carter looked around skeptically. “Are you sure? Doesn’t look like there’s anything here to make a film about.”

“There’s a mental hospital here. Or there used to be, anyway. They closed it down some time ago. The movie was about the patients. It was heartbreaking, Car. Some of them were sent here just for being gay, and they never got out.”

Carter shivered. He’d heard of shit like that, of course. Being rejected by his family had shredded him, but even worse fates existed. Impulsively, he grabbed John and gave him an earnest kiss.
Take that, homophobes
, he thought.
Gay interspecies smooching.

The tires looked fine to him, but he was hardly an expert. Since he was out of the RV anyway, he decided he wanted an ice cream too. Leaving Freddy and John in the vehicle, he followed Keith into the store. It was small, but the shelves were crammed with a wide variety of items, and cooler cases tottered along the walls. Carter headed for a freezer and, after considerable internal debate, selected a pair of Cherry Garcia bars. He took them to the counter, where Keith was deep in conversation.