Strange Brain Parts (3 page)

Stetson Joe pulled up his jeans and scratched himself like he was checking that everything was still where it was supposed to be. I couldn't help but feel the same urge myself. This is a mighty unpopular topic for men to be discussing.

"Maybe they roll them around in their hands to relieve stress," said Cindy, giggling.

I chuckled at that one, and it was right then that I felt this ticklish feeling behind my left ear. Couple of scratches and the sensation went away. For a few seconds I got this feeling that something was wrong. Couldn't place what it was, though.

I shook it off the feeling as Stetson Joe said, "What about all them abductions, hunh?"

"Been a lot of them around these parts," agreed Buford, nodding his bull head.

"Hell," said Cindy, "half the men who come to me for a fast poke say the got abducted to explain to their wives where they been for the last hour."

"What do you figure they want us for?" asked Stetson Joe. He was shuffling in his seat, maybe feeling uncomfortable because the Betsy Rocker jukebox in the corner was feeling hungry. Then again, maybe he had hemorrhoids.

"Medical and scientific experiments," explained Buford. "They pull us apart, look around for a while, and then sew us back up. Being so advanced, they can do it without leaving any scars."

"Yeah, but what're they looking for?" I asked.

"Hell if I know," shrugged Buford.

"Way I hear, if you can believe this," started Cindy, "is they're cataloguing the entire human race. Putting little tracking devices in our bodies so they can follow us around. Spying on us. Watching everything we do."

"Maybe they cut us up to put in the tracking devices," I said as Stetson Joe got up to give Betsy Rocker a quarter.

"Maybe," agreed Buford.

Stetson Joe got back to his stool just as the jukebox spit out a Johnny Cash song about an oddly named boy. He said, "I tell you, all them abductions wouldn't be happening if it wasn't for the government."

"Don't get me started on them jerk-offs," said Buford. "Bunch of shysters. Making laws that don't make any sense at all. Why the hell I got to register my guns for, hunh? They want to control us is all."

"Amen," said Cindy.

"That's the truth," agreed Stetson Joe. "The government wants to control us. But, you got to ask, who controls the government?"

"Corporations?" I said, taking an honest guess, trying to work a word in on the conversation. None of this political stuff fired me up like these older guys. I paid my taxes, voted if I remembered, and otherwise didn't give a shit.

"Aliens," said Stetson Joe. "Aliens control the government. Have since the 40's when the government made a deal with them."

"What deal's that?" I asked.

It was then I realized that the tickling sensation had returned. The back of my ear was starting to get all raw from the scratching I was doing. There was some skin and blood under my fingernails. The taste you get when you have fillings put in your teeth suddenly appeared in my mouth. For some reason I started thinking about a new Ford Cavalier. Light grey. Black interior. I have no idea where that thought came from.

I was going to wash the odd taste out of my mouth when Stetson Joe leaned on the counter, a real serious look on his face, like he was about to tell us something that'd get him killed if the wrong people heard him speaking it. He said, "Back during World War Two, our government got hold of a crashed flying saucer. Two aliens still alive inside. The government agreed to let the aliens go, but only if they gave them the secret to the A-bomb."

Buford nodded his head like it all made sense to him. Cindy took a big gulp of her coffee, a look on her face that said she was still deciding whether Stetson Joe’s stairs went all the way to the attic or not.

"That started it all," continued Stetson Joe. "When the A-bomb worked, the government started dealing for more information. And the only thing they had left to trade that them aliens wanted was people. The more abductions, the more technology the government folk get."

"Lasers is definitely alien," said Buford.

Stetson Joe nodded and said, "Bet you a thousand or more people got abducted for that information."

"Microwave ovens," said Buford, making a list on the fingers of one hand. "Them fiber optics. CD players. All kinds of that technology. Bet it's all alien.”

"What about stuffed crust pizza?" I asked. "Figure that's alien too, Buford?"

"It's a known fact that aliens don't eat," scoffed Buford. "Why the hell would they be handing out recipes?"

I shrugged. Galactic cuisine didn't seem that far-fetched to me at this point. "Just wondering."

"Well, forget your wondering and bring that coffee pot over here. Feels like refill time to me," said Buford.

"Ditto," said Cindy.

"That there's a fine idea," said Stetson Joe.

I filled their cups and decided against one for me. The coffee just didn't sit well with me tonight. There was something about the taste of it that set me right off. I even found the smell kind of nauseating. No one else seemed to mind, so I figured it was just me.

At the time I was also more than a little distracted by a series of images that flashed through my head. A lonely stretch of road. I’m in a car. There’s a funny light up ahead. The light is above me. I’m looking into the light and feeling scared.

I tell myself that the conversation is just getting to my head and I’m thinking things that never happened.

Cindy said, "All these abductions don't make sense if they're doing all this stuff just to let us go after they capture us."

That wrong feeling hit me again, and the new filling taste came in strong. There was a sudden jolt of pain in my ear and I heard two small clicks, like distant deadbolts popping open inside my head. Then there was a feeling of clarity. A weird but distinct moment of understanding.

"Maybe not everyone is let go. Maybe specific types of people are kept behind and experimented on after we’re abducted,” I said.

It was then that I noticed the stranger in the booth turning to look at me. His skin looked a lot grayer than I remembered it being a few minutes ago. His eyes were blacker than anything I had ever seen. His face had no expression. His appearance and manner lacked any sense of recognizable humanity.

From somewhere I can’t place, I hear a flat, unemotional voice say, “Malfunction. Terminate. Preserve subjects.”

Words start spilling out of me like a priest at an important point of an exorcism. I don’t know where they come from, but as I’m saying them I know them to be true.

"All those abductions aren't for cataloguing people, but for cataloguing people’s
personalities
. They’re stealing our personalities and putting them on little computer chips."

"Our?" asked Cindy. She sounded light years away.

"Yes. We're test subjects," I said, still not really knowing how I knew this, but knowing I wasn't wrong. “Not only have they stolen our personalities, but they’ve inserted chips in our heads to give us
new
personalities.”

The stranger stood up, coffee mug in hand, and started walking towards me.

"I think we're being used to work out the kinks in these personality chips so it'll be safe for them to use," I said, trying not to think of the stranger, wishing the thoughts in my head would stop. "Once the chips are proven to be good, they'll do some fine tuning for their brains. Then they can finally walk amongst us unnoticed. It has to be something they can't do yet. They can alter their shape to look like us, but they can't act like us because they don’t have identities of their own."

The stranger stopped at the counter. He placed his coffee cup on the counter and stared calmly at me for a few seconds. He started walking around the counter, eyes trained on me. I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life.

"When each test is done," I said, backing away from the stranger, "they wipe our minds clear again, insert another chip, and start all over."

Everything went silent, and I noticed for the first time since I started on my little rant that Buford, Cindy and Stetson Joe were just staring at me. Actually, not staring at me, but staring period. It was as if their minds all seized up spontaneously. They were blank minds in inactive bodies.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” I ask the stranger. “That’s what’s going on here, right? This is just a test scenario. And none of us are who we think we are.”

My shoulder was wet. A stream of blood oozed out of my left ear. There was something green and meaty mixed in with it.

The stranger smiled. A smile I recognized from somewhere.

"Did I get they smile correct?" he asked in a voice that was so calm it bordered on monotone. "It's the one we originally downloaded from you."

I screamed. A high-pitched, girly scream. The kind of scream you hear in the movies, but don't believe anyone would make until you let one out yourself.

I felt a little jolt of electricity run through my head and my body instantly stopped working for me. My screaming faded out to a dead groan. I slumped against the nearest wall trying to stay upright, but my limbs felt leaden and inert, and I know right then that I’m going to lose this fight to gravity. Suddenly, the wall collapses backwards as I fall into it for support, and I go crashing to the floor with it.

From where I am on the floor I can see things I can’t even begin to describe. I see shiny wires and tubes, and other shapes that look like pieces of flesh machinery. I’m struck with the idea that I’ve fallen behind the scenes of an alien television show...into a controlled environment the aliens use to simulate human settings.

A shadow falls over me and I see the grey stranger kneel down in front of me. He puts a hand in his pocket and pulls out a jelly-like mass that was about the size of a tennis ball. I couldn't help thinking it looked just like a cow's testicle covered in translucent green slop.

The grey stranger moved in closer and shoved this mass into my mouth. A second later I felt an electric twinge in my brain and, against my better judgment and gag reflexes, I swallowed. It tasted a lot like coffee grounds.

I go numb.

* * *

I seem to be suspended in a state of euphoric and ambivalent nothingness. My eyes are wide open, but I’m not exactly awake. I feel quite detached from myself. Not quite dead, but not quite alive. Not quite anything, to be truthful.

A motorized metallic arm of alien design crosses my field of vision, but I think nothing of it. Grey shapes move around me with the speed and intention of slow insects. There are voices as well, but I can’t place their specific source.

“Failure?”

“Yes.”

“Recondition?”

“Yes.”

“Proceed.”

“Yes.”

The metallic arm comes into view again, and I catch a glimpse of a silently spinning drill on its end. It moves with well-mannered precision to a spot on the left side of my head. A few seconds later I feel some pressure behind my left ear. The drill biting into my flesh and through my skull doesn’t hurt in the slightest. There’s a slight smell of alien machine oil and finely ground bone, but that’s all the sensation I experience.

I realize I’ve gone through this operation before.

My real name is lost to me, but I do remember some things with certainty. I once had a wife and two children. I used to work for a company that designed consumer websites, and day-traded on the side to make some extra income. I took multivitamins and worked out three times a week. I was a regular guy who did regular things.

Then one night, while driving alone to a camping spot some friends and I had reserved for a weekend of fishing, drinking and being irresponsible men, I saw a light in the sky. Everything after that comes in patches, flashes of memory that come torn out from the root.

I remember being taken by little grey hands. The operation just like this one. The insertion of something behind my left ear. The tests. The fluids being pumped into my body. Feeling everything I knew being compressed and everything I never was being added.

“Insertion?”

“Yes.”

“Activate?”

“Yes.”

Once again, I stop being me.

* * *

Cynthia and Joseph are throwing the most divinely decadent affair in a roadside diner. They are celebrating Joseph’s recent acquisition of the property this squalid restaurant stands on and his future plans to develop a low cost, high rent bohemian suburb. His current philosophy, which I agree with in caustically amusing terms, is to engender a community of celebrity and charge them outrageously for the privilege of living amongst their own.

Joseph has quite the unique and mischievous sense of ironic humor.

At this late hour there is only myself, the aforementioned hosts, a Texan investor named Colonel Buford (an honorarium that most suspect he placed on himself, for he has no known military record) and a pale man in a grey suit who’s name I never caught. Regardless, this grey suited man seems quite content by himself, sipping a sparkling glass of champagne, and staring out into the dark wilderness that will soon be leveled into concrete and prefabricated condominiums.