The Great Masturbator

My wife moved out of the house and took nothing but her shoes. She had an enormous collection of shoes. Like she was Imelda Marcos. She left everything else. Her clothes. Her socks. Her underwear. Her vibrator, which she said she used for tension headaches. She left an elephant toothbrush holder in the bathroom that is made of pretend ivory and sells at IKEA for $45. Her toothbrush is still stabbed in its back as though it's waiting to brush her teeth again. It, too, betrayed.

The bathroom motif is West African Saharan, she called it. The walls – safari taupe. The tile – sand dune. The toilet, shower, and sink – ivory-colored porcelain. There is a framed print of an elephant above the toilet. There is a ceramic gorilla on a shelf staring at me while I jerk off. I had never seen a grass shower curtain before Macy hung it on our shower. The cabinet was real African mahogany, she boasted as though she pictured it coming over on a cargo ship just for her. One of those nefarious-looking rusty-old ships knifing through the Atlantic with billows of black smoke from ramshackle stacks above it. A box with her name on it under a cargo net that could ostensibly hold down a full-grown gorilla or a family of baboons. She said that to everyone who came over – that bit about real African mahogany – and everyone would go upstairs and into our bathroom and look to see what was so special about it. Then they'd run their hand over it and coo like babies coo.

The most curious piece, though, was the wooden tribal mask that hung on the wall by the shower. She insisted it was real since we didn’t buy it at IKEA. It was large and oblong with hair made from tufts of straw – African prairie grass – she said – which wasn't the same as American grass at all. The mask was part-man, part-zebra, which Macy always called zeb-ra that rhymes with Debra, though it should be said that she was not English at all. She was quirky in that way. Hoity or pretentious, rather. Like people who listen to NPR. I suppose I am not, which is probably why she no longer lives here, but which doesn't explain why she didn't take her things. You can’t wear that mask, she scolded me once when I goofed around with it, holding it over my face. It is décor she snooted, stressing the long “a." I stood there naked and groaned and grunted like a brooding cannibal.

It isn't important why she left, I don’t suppose. I imagine she was having an affair with someone from the office. The one guy she told me about who incessantly flirted with her and invited her to the axe-throwing place. I read in one of her old Cosmos that women will talk about the person they are having an affair with to their spouse by pretending to be repulsed by them, all the while fucking them, or fantasizing about fucking them. He was someone more exotic than me. Someone with a beard who wrestled tigers or took his shirt off while mowing the lawn to show off his nipple rings. Someone with tattoos, maybe a motorcycle – motorcycle she would rhyme with popsicle. Someone more like herself. Someone who liked the way she exotically said zeb-ra like Zsa Zsa Gabor said zeb-ra and who also had a passion for African décor. Maybe with some African from Cameroon or the Ivory Coast. Or better still – Nairobi. One of those Kenyans we saw working at the zoo. Skin as dark as coffee beans. Tan cargo shorts, shirts, and boots with great white teeth. I wonder what Nigerians think of African motifs at IKEA – of grass shower curtains and tribal masks that hang decoratively on bathroom walls — just as I wonder what Asians think of Chinese restaurants and oriental rugs — and aliens think of our movies about them.

I suppose she could have been abducted by aliens, so I felt bad for assuming the worst. Or she could have been kidnapped, raped, and murdered and is in a ditch being picked apart by buzzards and coyotes, waiting for one of those crime show documentaries to be made about her. Waiting to be identified by dental records and DNA. So after a few days I filed a police report – in case it wasn’t aliens, or that she left by her own volition, as I presumed. As I explained what happened, a lady cop looked at me like I was guilty of murder, and she would detect my lie by the way I said something or other. A slip of the tongue, as they say. And after a few minutes of questions, she made me wonder if I had actually done it. I began to doubt myself and my story. She resembled a Doberman Pincher with a thin face, beady eyes, and a long-pointy snout. I asked to use the bathroom and I masturbated because it was the only thing that ever made me feel better. Because it steadied my nerves so that I wasn’t so anxious. It was the first time I jerked off in a police station. It was a very uninspiring setting.

The cop said it was odd that I mentioned Macy in the past tense, and I said that I refer to all of my exes in the past tense. It’s abnormal otherwise. She asked when Macy became my ex and I said when she left me. But in truth it happened some time before. It always happens before. It’s never the moment someone leaves someone or gives them back the house key. It happens in bed one night when they turn the other way and sigh despondently. Or when they don’t call to say they’ll be late getting home from the office, as they normally do. Or the time they go out with a friend rather than coming home for dinner. When they flirt with someone who makes a pass. It is one of those times when the screen door is left open and the bugs get in. The house is never the same afterwards.

As I sat there in the interview room with a dying florescent light flickering and the Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee they’d given me out of courtesy, I realized I was dying again. The idea or thought that anyone dies one death was suddenly absurd to me. Life is a succession of deaths until the very last one. To live is to die. To sleep is to die. I’ve never been the same person who went to bed the night before as I was the next day when I woke up. There’s always been something a little different – too subtle perhaps to notice at the time – but different, nonetheless. I thought of me opposed to 6-year-old me. Somewhere along the way we changed. We are entirely different people and there have been numerous lives and deaths between then and now. Thousands of minor deaths. Deaths for which there were no funerals. No mourners. No obituaries written. The death of innocence; of youth; the death of my first marriage; of my hopes and dreams; the death of fear, and so on. There will be many more deaths until it is all over, I can reasonably presume.

I didn’t complain about it or whimper whenever I died. I didn’t solicit sympathy or tell anyone in lieu of flowers – this or that. I died like I had died many times before. Dignified. Quietly. I didn’t ask for anyone’s prayers when they told me I had testicular cancer. I just took it. I accepted it. I masturbated a few times and got over it. I wondered if it was from excessive masturbation, but I never asked. If I had beat my balls retarded like a boxer. Then they took one of my balls – the one with cancer – and I don’t know what they did with it. I wanted to keep it in a jar or something. Pickled in formaldehyde. Displayed on a shelf. The sunlight beaming through the window in such a way at a certain time to give it a charming entrancing glow. Macy tried to make the best of it, dourly looking around at the drab décor of that hospital waiting room, looking like a mouse in a glue trap.

“Sterile chic,” she joked of the room through gritted teeth. There were cheaply framed pictures of waterfalls and mountains and evergreens that all said something about perseverance and hope and faith. There was a wolf in a snowstorm on one which said something about resiliency. There were no pictures of Jesus. I suppose she ran away because she was unhappy – or maybe she didn’t want a man with one testicle. Maybe it somehow made me less of a man. Maybe I should have called about that prosthetic after all, but it seemed rather silly. And so I was left to wonder and my mind drifted, drifted, and drifted.

To leave no Dear John is an indignity greater than to leave a Dear John. Maybe she thought the cancer was contagious – despite what the doctor assured us. She died one of her many deaths when they diagnosed me and told me where we go from here – when they gave us a free-trial subscription to “Monorchism Today” and all those pamphlets – “Living a Normal Life with One Testicle,” “The Aftermath: Coping with Trauma and Stigmas of Testicular Cancer,” “How Will Orchiectomy Affect Me (and Our Sex Life)?” Or my personal favorite, “Famous People with One Teste.”

I never knew so many famous people had just one nut. I read the list to Macy, who pretended to give it thoughtful consideration. People of all walks of life, I boasted as though I were in some hallowed fraternity. Tom Green – the comedian; John Kruk – baseball player; Lance Armstrong – Tour De France cycling Champion; John Starks – NBA legend; Archibald Douglas, Earl of Douglas – magnate of the Kingdom of Scotland (who lost his nut in 1403 fighting in the battle of Shrewsbury); Jimmy White – English snooker player; Thurgood Marshall – Supreme Court Justice; Chairman Mao Zedong; Adolf Hitler – supposedly. Then there were the therapy coloring books. One cowboy hat-wearing teste in the honky-tonk of a nut sack crying, strumming a guitar, singing a country-western song: "The scrotum is a lonely place." In the coloring book, the missing testicle was doing all sort of adventurous things. It was having a better life than you. It was supposed to make you feel better about letting it go.

She didn’t seem to be impressed by the list of famous one-ballers. She said it was fine. “It was better than dying,” or “Your health is what really matters.” All those banal things people say and don’t really mean. My pastor joked perhaps that is why God gives us two. He was surprised about all the people who had only one ball and when I read off a certain name from the pamphlet, he would pensively repeat their name in a state of marvel and reply, “You don’t say?” There was a support group that met two Tuesdays a month at the hospital with some hokey name. Ball of Steel. There was an awareness ribbon magnet to stick on your car. I had unwittingly joined a fraternity that was much more extensive than I ever knew when I had two balls and took them for granted. But I felt as defective as a single engine passenger plane might feel. At first, somewhere inside of me the captain was shouting, “We’ve lost the starboard testicle!” But then he was not shouting anymore, and it became normal.

I waited for 30 days. It seemed adequate. I even left the porch light on despite the conurbation of insects – beetles that pinged against the siding – moths orbiting the light – and spiders throwing up webs for errant luckless insects that would become a cheap meal. Then I called a real estate agent from Jiffy Realtors, the prettiest one on the billboard. She told me we could list the house for eighty some thousand more than I owed, and it would likely sell in a matter of days because it was a propitious seller’s market. She didn’t ask what happened to my wife. It was probably in her professional handbook not to. She likely assumed it was a simple divorce. She smiled attractively and looked at me, evaluating my level of interest in what she was saying. She played me like a cheap guitar. She also cooed, running her pretty thin hand over the African mahogany of the bathroom cabinet. Her perfect red nails tapping the resounding melody of a tune at the very end.

A surge of carnal desire ran wildly through me for a moment while we stood in the bathroom in such close proximity, so I excused myself and beat my God-given tetherball to the thought of everything attractive I ever knew while she went to have a look at the bedrooms. The auxiliary fan ran so she couldn’t hear me. I was drifting, drifting, drifting away to that one perfect sexual figure that inexplicably reoccurred in my thoughts since I was nine – my maiden voyage on this autonomous love boat.

I didn’t flirt with the pretty realtor because I wasn’t one for casual sex, nor the failure to summit a mountain too high I endeavored to climb. She had died many less deaths than I so we would have little to talk about after sex, which mattered most to me because I loved the aftermath more than anything. People are their truest self after sex, stripped of all the pretenses beforehand in the antebellum of foreplay. Some people revel in that, while others favor the brutality of the physical consummation – the war. Then there is the peace – which is what I loved most – the aftermath. I longed for the conversations that arose while lying naked and exhausted, tangled up in the cotton skin of a sheet as a creature with two heads talking to itself in earnest introspection. She didn’t have that to offer. She had a few holes and some bumps. She was full of numbers and what ifs, commissions, and potential contractual obligations. And her voice was annoying as fuck.

I rented some tables from the VFW and sat up early Saturday morning for a yard sale and laid everything out. Macy's panties. Her tension headache vibrators – plural in that I found several spares in assorted shapes and colors in a drawer along with some dildos, which I was sure she only used before she knew me. The dildos didn’t have balls, I considered thoughtfully. That made me feel better for a moment. I laid out her jewelry like it was QVC. Her clothes. Her college degree from the University of Iowa, which was matted and in a nice frame. All her terrible books. Her vintage Barbie collection. Everything. Even the grass shower curtain and that tribal mask – which I asked fifty on. All her records. Her bizarre lamps. Her old flute from elementary school. It all sold piece by piece and I stuffed the money in a coffee can, which was soon full. What was left over I either carried back inside or put to the curb. The next owners would have to decide what they were going to do with it because I wasn’t going to be around anymore. I was moving to Mexico because I wanted to taste the difference between an American and Mexican taco. That is what my life had come down to for me. I half-expected that Macy would show up for the yard sale, but she never did. She had been gone for six or seven months and people and things don’t come back after that long. Her family never contacted me, so I figured they knew she had left and probably where she had gone. They didn’t like me anyway. They didn’t like that I wrote fiction. They couldn't take me seriously as they were all encyclopedia-type people. 

I ended up making love to that pretty real estate agent who sold my house before I left. I didn’t intend to, but she came over in a skirt after the yard sale when I was wrapping things up to give me a gift for hiring her and we ended up having shots from a last bottle of liquor in the empty house. I gave her a pair of curtain rods I forgot to sell. Her eyes twinkled a certain way in the amber-glow of the Edison bulbs and it felt as though we were the last two people on Earth. I told her about my testicular cancer and my monorchism and it was suddenly like I was Brad Pitt. She was fascinated and wondered if I could function properly. When I told her I hadn’t slept with anyone since, she bit her bottom lip asking if there was a scar. Then a little drunk she said, “There is something about an empty house that turns me on,” and so one thing led to another and we ended up on the last rug in the house in the living room in front of the fireplace. I imagine she still has rug burns on her back and knees. I was angry at Macy for leaving and I was tired of masturbating to old thoughts – to that mysterious woman I’ve conjured up for thirty years that didn’t exist at all except for in the universe of my mind from synapse to synapse. It was goodbye without saying goodbye. It was another death without the good conversation to follow. A brief annotated antebellum – a terrific and bloody war – then a terrible unpromising peace which left me unsatisfied.

A few days later, I bought an old Indian motorcycle and rode across the United States towards Mexico with about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a bank card and in cash. I figured I'd buy a small house on the Pacific Coast. Fix up some old boat like Andy Dufresne and start a charter fishing business for tourists. Una Bola Charter Fishing, I'd call it. The Pacific has no memory, they say. The bola on my shirts would look a little like the country-western teste in those hospital therapy coloring books. Only he would be wearing a sombrero and catching a big sexy fish.

I stopped every hundred miles or so to gas up and masturbate. Gas station bathrooms are hard to jerk off in. Mostly because of the smell. Even the clean ones have a strange odor to them and a lack of anything sexy. Sometimes I ate and sometimes I did something touristy. In St. Louis I saw someone who looked like my dad schlepping around The Gateway Arch and I recalled our dog named Jo-Jo that died when I was a kid. Jo-Jo simply ran away one day when she was old. But she couldn’t run. She barely even walked. I wondered if he had shot her. He often shot groundhogs because he said their holes would break one of our horses’ ankles, then he would have to shoot the horse. He was always shooting something or talking about it. He always had a reason. A justification. The deer would starve if he didn't shoot them. The coyote would eat our chickens if he didn’t shoot them. So on and so forth.

Then I tried to recall how many times I might have masturbated in my life, but it seemed silly and pointless to do so, so I gave up and masturbated again in a Cracker Barrell bathroom after eating dinner. The same image came to mind that came to mind when I was nine and doing it for the first time. Someone I have never met and someone that I cannot accurately describe. She was part woman, part devil, part robot. She had gold horns. Tattoos. White skin. She was bloody. She had skin that wasn't human — that wasn’t of this world — made of a different matter. I tried to draw her many times, but she never turned out as I pictured her in my mind’s eye. I was sure I met her. In a past life, perhaps. We’ve all had past lives. We all have next lives. I am sure of it.

I used to fantasize about being in a carnival. “The Great Masturbator,” the red sign with gold letters would read on painted canvas above my red-and-black striped tent. Torches out front illuminating the sign. For a small fee, people could go in a tent and watch me jerk off over and over. Perhaps, I’d shoot a target. Maybe a bell. Or the apple off someone’s head. I was so good at it that I could do so without touching myself at all. I simply just gripped the hips of the sink and closed my eyes tight and concentrated until I ejaculated like Mt. St. Helens. And after a few minutes or so, that pearly eruption flowed from my spasming shaft, and I was relieved for a little while. Normal like everyone else. I read about a woman in one of Macy’s Cosmos who could induce orgasms through yoga without touching herself. They wrote of her like she was a scientific phenomenon, and they were going to give her the Nobel Peace Prize. A university wanted to study her. She was heralded for her contribution to women's liberation. I thought of writing to the magazine about my ability, but they would probably just consider me a garden-variety patriarchal pervert and tell me to fuck off.

The only physical possession I had was the motorcycle and a backpack with some personal effects, clothes, and the African tribal mask which I kept because I didn’t get the fifty I asked for on it. Frankly, I began to like it. It was in a saddle bag. It came in handy when I was riding through Texas where the bugs were particularly thick. I strapped it on with a leather belt and it worked as a face shield. I wore it for several hours until my face began to sweat and I got tired. Then I pulled over to sleep. I got a room in a cheap motel and lied in bed and stared at the ceiling as though there were naked women all over it. I wondered how many people had lied in this bed and not given that ceiling a second thought. And then I turned on the TV and there were news stories about "The Vanishing," as they ominously called it. It was what the news channels were all talking about and they somehow colluded to name it the same thing. People were coming up missing all across the world, one at a time. It was a phenomenon that scientists couldn't explain. Religious zealots pounced and claimed that it was the long-awaited rapture.

I pulled out the Gideon's Bible from the side table drawer and read Revelations for a while until I got sleepy again. Then I masturbated and fell asleep. The TV was still on when I woke up and the news was still talking about all the people who were missing. I wondered if Macy had been raptured. If she was in Heaven right now. Maybe her vibrators were for tension headaches and her dildos were gag gifts from old girlfriends. Maybe she was good after all and when Jesus came to get her, he told her she could take her shoes and so they loaded them up in a Hefty trash bag and split. I was happy for her, convinced by the late-night televangelists that took over after the news went off that this is what happened to her. I wanted to call that policewoman and tell her all about it. To exonerate myself. I wondered if rapture was covered on her life insurance policy which I never claimed. I didn’t need the money, nor the undue suspicion. I began to feel bad for screwing the real estate agent whose name I already forgot. I wondered if Macy had seen us from Heaven screwing like dogs on the living room rug. God forgive me, if so.

I read more of The Bible. It was high time to brush up. To repent. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe the rapture would occur in rounds like the NFL draft. I wondered if Jesus would come for me Himself. Then I realized that He wasn’t going to. I had been caught masturbating when I was thirteen because I did it so often the odds of getting caught were a near certainty and concealing it was impossible. For four years I went undetected. No one uses the bathroom that much, my father finally balked. My mother scolded him for his insidious suggestion and told him I simply had an overactive bladder or irritable bowel syndrome. I could hear them when I shut the door behind me. When that strange woman showed up in the theater of my mind. I wrapped my penis in toilet paper afterwards like a mummy. 

There was no lock on the bathroom door and my brother walked in one day and proceeded to tell the world what I was doing in there. Then my mother walked in another time. Then it was no longer a secret at all, so I didn’t try very hard to conceal it. My father told me to go out in the barn, so I eventually went out to the barn to jerk off and so the horses and chickens knew it, too. Everyone knew when I excused myself to the barn what I was up to. Because I was a picky eater, my brother liked to say that I didn't eat my meat, but I sure liked to beat it. That was his big joke for a year or two.

My mom took me to the doctor when I was fourteen and he diagnosed me with an overactive libido and referred me to a psychologist who said I was a self-indulgent nymphomaniac like Jack Nicholson. My mom was fond of Jack Nicholson, so the comparison helped her cope. She said, "You don't say?" in such a way that she was almost proud of me. He said I had an imbalance in my brain and I compensated by masturbating which released certain chemicals that made everything alright. I could take medication, but those medications would have side-effects and so my mom told the family that I had a medical condition and it seemed to make it all better for her at least. She even had the doctor write me a medical excuse to take to school so I was permitted to use the bathroom whenever I wished to "relieve myself."

But my father insisted I was a sinner, so he called a Catholic priest to exorcise the horny demon out of me. But there was no demon in me, the priest revealed. So dad told me that every time I "relieve myself" to say a little prayer and ask the Lord for His forgiveness because when the time came, I will wish I had. I told him I would, but I didn’t ever ask the Lord for His forgiveness, so I imagine I wasn’t being raptured because I had jerked off too many times to be forgiven. I imagine I was going to be left behind while everyone I knew and loved was shot up to Heaven in holy troves. I wondered if my family was still on Earth as I lied there in the motel bereft on the bed, but it was late so I didn’t call. Besides, I didn’t bring a cell phone and I didn’t know anyone’s number to call from the rotary phone in the motel that was the color of asparagus.

I crossed the border and rode a while until I got to Chihuahua. I parked and bought a ticket and watched a bullfight and one of those bulls, slicked with blood, fought magnificently against all odds and a well-dressed matador, then died a tormented death. Stuck with a half dozen or so colorful sticks they call banderillos, it collapsed in the hot sand, its black silk hide shining as it breathed laboriously, spasmed, then died its last death in a cloud of hot dust. I felt obliged to watch. Not like one of those women who watch serial killer documentaries, but out of respect for the bull. A banderillo stuck out of its back which reminded me of Macy's toothbrush out of her elephant toothbrush holder in our faux-African bathroom. She was a beautiful woman. It is impossible not to miss someone who was once beautiful in your mind. Nothing can lobotomize the memory of someone like that.

I ate tacos in the patio of a nearby adobe and was impressed with the flavor of the tortilla and the sauce. It was much better than any taco I had in the U.S. I drank swills of wine from a leather bladder I bought from a lady who also sold belts, rosaries, handbags studded with rhinestones, wine, and roses. I bought a rosary and wore it, hoping I wasn’t too late, and a papier-mâché and wood marionette who wore a poncho, a sombrero, and held two pistols, which I pronounced pee-stols. I wasn’t sure what I would do with it. I named him “Taco” and I fiddled with him having drinks on the shady patio of a bar that was reasonably crowded. Several kids with dirty faces came over to see me playing with the puppet. They laughed at my bad Mexican accent and for the fact that I called them chalupas rather than niñas.

A young woman approached me and said something in Spanish, but all I understood was her smile and the word “gringo” and the familiar look in her eyes that I hadn’t seen in a long time. I asked her if she wanted a drink and she said, sí, so I ordered us a few beers. I put my wine bladder to rest in a chair beside me. I asked her why she hadn’t been raptured yet, but she didn’t understand what I was saying so I made a signal with my hand floating up to the sky and she got excited and nodded her head as though she realized what I was saying.

“Globo!” she cried. “Globo!”

“Globo?” I repeated ignorantly. 

She was beautiful and thin with caramel skin and large whiskey-colored eyes that were shaped like almonds. She dressed poorly, so I offered to buy her some clothes and hesitantly she accepted. We walked to a nearby shop and she smiled at me like I was her guardian angel, then timidly picked out a pretty white and yellow dress, tried it on, and looked at me for reassurance. She must have wondered if I was going to demand sex or steal her kidney, but I assuaged her suspicions with a benevolent smile that helped her to trust me. I told her she looked like a movie star, though she didn’t seem to understand. When she didn’t understand me, she smiled and giggled. I thought to excuse myself to masturbate, but I didn’t, and somewhere the woman I imagined whenever I did, grew angry and perturbed.

Then she made the same hand signal I made when I was trying to ask her about why she hadn’t been raptured. She cried, “Globo!” again as she grabbed my arm and pulled me to my motorcycle as though she wanted to take me somewhere. She climbed on back and put her thin arms around my waist like a belt, her hands for a buckle that she occasionally broke to point out directions. We rode through the old city for a while until we got on a road out of town and came upon a beautiful and enormous field of hot-air balloons of every color and distinction imaginable. “Globo!” she exclaimed pointing. It was my first Spanish lesson.

There were hundreds, if not thousands of balloons, all on the ground waiting to go up. She held her hand out and made the signal again, thinking this is what I was talking about, which amused me. We idled through and I told her to pick the one that she wanted to ride and we would offer the person money to take us up. She seemed to understand what I said and after a while she pointed ecstatically at one as she hooked my waist tight with her left arm so not to fall.

“That one?” I asked a little surprised.

“Sí,” she exclaimed. She shook her head emphatically and bit her bottom lip. And for $200, Claudia and I went up together in a balloon that looked like Spiderman’s head with the pilot and his little chalupa.

All the balloons rose at once, slowly. Up over the outlying mountains and the town. People were watching from below, snapping pictures and waving. Claudia looked at me and smiled. But the people below got smaller and smaller until they were like colored ants that didn’t seem real at all. As though they no longer had feelings, or thoughts, or dreams – mindlessly scattering in the dirt below. Playing, warring, fucking – it was too hard to tell from here. I shared the wine with Claudia and the pilot, Jorge Blanco, who was an obstetrician of some renown in Durango and who spoke perfect English. He gave me his card, making a joke about Claudia and I having a baby someday. He said he was educated at USC. His son watched us with big curious brown eyes. He was a skinny kid in a sleeveless Spiderman t-shirt and his arms looked like brown noodles falling out the sides. He smiled at us innocently then looked over the side happily exclaiming something in Spanish. Claudia put her arm around him and seemed to adore him as much as he adored her.

It was a paradise. I felt I had been raptured. Suspended somewhere between Heaven and Earth. Jorge and I spoke of the United States and then he asked me if I had heard the latest news. I shook my head no hoping to covey that I had no enthusiasm to, but he was going to tell me anyway. He said that it was all over the news and then I told him I hadn’t heard the news since I had been on the road for seven days and I purposefully sought to avoid it. He said that millions of people had disappeared. I replied that I knew – they had been raptured. He laughed, taking another swill of the wine.

“That’s what the religious say. Some of the pastors at the megachurches even went into hiding or are living anonymously so that their followers would believe that they were raptured, too. But that isn’t what happened. It was aliens.”

“Aliens?”

“Extraterrestres,” he said quietly so not to frighten his son. “They’ve been taking people. The latest estimated count is around a million, but no one can be sure of the exact number. No one knows why the ones they selected are selected. They’re from all over the world. No one knows exactly how they’re taken, either. They’re here one day and gone the next.”

I didn’t tell him about Macy. I didn’t tell Claudia, either. Not here, nor when we got to the Pacific and bought a small house on the ocean that was as white as the ocean was blue. Not when we lived and died a hundred paradisiacal deaths in the pale khaki sand that reminded me of those smiling Kenyans once at the Detroit Zoo with the great white teeth in contrast to their dark mahogany skin that was the color of our bathroom cabinet. It was pointless to talk about it — even more pointless to worry. There was no actual evidence that it was aliens. Some just chose to believe that it was, just as others chose to believe it was Jesus.

I have never masturbated in Mexico. I wrote a eulogy for The Great Masturbator, my former self, who I no longer am. Claudia and I fixed up a beautiful old fishing boat, Uno Bola, and as tourists trickle in, I take them out to sea. Some talk about the calamitous world news – I try not to listen for it doesn't concern or interest me. As they cast their lines out into the deep azure of the calm sea, I cast my memories, one by one, and the ocean swallows them. The fish might eat them. Or they drown and settle to the bottom. I don't know. But it is both the good and the bad memories because you can’t be discriminant. They all go, or they all stay. One or the other. Just as you either be the person you want to be, or you be the person you’ve always been. One or the other. 

I write sci-fi novels and short stories for a popular Mexican magazine. My latest is called “The Rapture.” I had originally called it “The Great Masturbator,” but Claudia nixed the title in that it was too vulgar. Each day I learn a little more Spanish and she learns English. Claudia translates my stories and illustrates the cover art. Maybe someday I’ll make the list of famous people with one teste and my name will be in that pamphlet next to Thurgood Marshall and Archibald Douglas. But I don’t care if I do. There is bliss in anonymity. We had a baby a year later. Dr. Blanco delivered her in Durango. Her eyes are as blue as the ocean.

Walking the beach one night, I thought about being raptured and what Heaven must be like. I’ve thought more about being taken and what aliens are like. I wrote of it in my mind. I was suddenly swallowed in a halo of light. There was a deafening vibration and a suction that filched me from earth in a torrent of water and sand. I struggled but could not break free from the pull. I was levitated fifty, a hundred feet, straight up into the light. There was a round door like an anus underneath the floating ship, the source of the light. It closed beneath me as I was suspended inside on a geyser of wind. Then the force shut off and I was dropped to the cold metal-like surface on the closed door. It wasn’t metal, though. And the air, though breathable, wasn’t oxygen. There was no one else in the room besides a woman who wasn’t human, but who had obvious human characteristics. She had gold horns, tattoos and part of her face was missing, though her body was enveloped in a clear flesh-like sheath like the skin of a jellyfish. She had no hair but had long eyelashes, long black dagger-like nails, and red fleshless hands. Her nose was pierced. She looked as though she was in battle and only partially survived. It was the woman who had been painted on the backs of my eyelids all those years I jerked off — in the quasi-flesh.

"Jodeme," she said.

"I don’t speak Spanish.” I replied. She looked at me, analyzed me.

“Fuck me,” she corrected. Then she told me she needs my sperm to populate her near-extinct planet.

“This will take a while," I countered, unsure of her ability to do simple math. Or maybe her gestation cycle is less than nine months. Maybe she has an advanced reproduction system, like that of a cat.

“There are 9,627 of me. I will take your sperm inside me, replicate it, and disseminate it to the others. Let us begin, shall we? Traditional human sex? Bondage? Rape?” She dropped her silk robe and stood there waiting for me to do something. No music. No dim lights. No dinner. No antebellum. It was no wonder her planet was nearly extinct. There was a round waterbed behind her. She stared at me. I wondered what happened to romance on her planet. It must have died a long time ago, deemed as being pointless, or maybe it never was at all. I looked at her for a moment and shook my head.

“No, ma'am,” I replied. “You’ve got the wrong gringo. I am a man in love.”

Enraged, she opened the anus-like door, and I was dropped into the ocean and the spaceship zipped away like an angry bee leaving embers of light that dissipate across the night sky. I swam to shore with the tide and rest on the beach for a moment, thankful to be alive. Then I made my way home where Claudia was sleeping in our bed, curled up to the bebé.

I showered and had a drink. She woke up as I snuck quietly into bed behind her.  I told her what happened. “A waterbed?” she laughed. I laughed. Then she burrowed back into my body and the sound of the ocean lulled us to sleep as I hope it will for the rest of our life. I was all wrong. People don't die many deaths. They live many lives.