How to Make Yourself Attractive to Aliens

This was me on TV — all like — there's got to be a better place than here. Got to be people like me who just want to live in peace and not argue all the time and burn things down and blow shit up and step on other people to get what they want. A place without war and anger and commercials. A place without hurt and pain. Without heartache and misery. Without blame or excuses. A place full of love and comfort and an abundance of riches that have nothing to do with fame or money. Without self-absorbed narcissists. This place we call Earth is a crime-infested shithole full of murderers and rapists and sodomites and zealots and idiots who are a bunch of dummies glowing in the hypnotic trance of TV. Viruses spreading viruses. Consumers consuming material plastic things made in China and dumped in the ocean. Fake Christmas trees and bullshit Tupperware. If God were real, He would flood it, again. And no Love Boat will save you!

Calgon, take me away! 

Calgon, I had determined, was the name of the planet from where the UFOs came. I was well aware that it was also a brand of soap advertised on TV, but that was a matter of mere coincidence. The attractive reporter with the pumped-up lips, who looked remarkably like Jessica Lange, did the old slit-the-throat-thing to tell the cameraman to cut away. Her name was Cassandra Holt. She glared at me and simultaneously exhaled. 

She had simply asked me — John Q. Public — what I thought of the recent rash of reported UFO sightings in the area. I was the first person she spoke to in a crowd of hundreds. I suppose, I misinterpreted her question. Somewhere in my mind it was mangled. I suppose I should have felt grateful she asked me of all the people who lined Main Street when we saw the parade of news vans pulling in to town — a Vietnam vet in September 1979. A part of me was still in Nam, I suppose. A part of me will never leave there. I am still being bitten by gigantic mosquitoes and shot at by invisible people whose language I don't speak in a hot jungle that now exists only in the fog of my sweaty mind. My feet are still wet and sore and the smell of napalm and burning flesh clings to my skin like a bad cologne. 

I know what I am supposed to do and be, but I am not always that person. Nor do I always do those things I ought to do. I shouldn't deny God, or trivialize things, but the last twelve years of my life have been godless. My faith in humanity was exacerbated by my two year government vacation in Southeast Asia, and not restored in the least by coming home. So there I was on the TV, ranting like a mad dog until I was cut off and replaced by a little old lady, Mrs. Hutchins, who said she thought it was exciting that the aliens chose our town of all places and about how she baked them apple pies because who doesn't like apple pies? People were briefly glowing in my image all across the world. The one chance I had to say something significant and monumental I spent vomiting vitriol, all because I desperately wanted to get off this planet without blowing my head off.

Some people get fifteen minutes of fame — I got 15 seconds. Cassandra the TV reporter was hoping I was some TV with legs who gave the appropriate response that might earn her some acclaim. Maybe an Emmy. Maybe a job in a better city than Omaha. But I didn't, so she asked Mrs. Hutchins, fearing she was thick in a hick town of goofballs and kooks and nothing would go according to plan. 

There had been 17 reported sightings of UFOs in Lemon, Nebraska since August 11, 1979, a town of 7,682. There were reports of missing livestock, dogs and cats and a complete patio set from a Sears-Roebuck. Besides that, there was one abduction. Her name was Barbara Cooper, a night nurse at the local hospital who delivered babies and who was the love of my life. She was my only sanity in an insane world. She was my inspiration to continue when things seemed bleak and hopeless. Our potential love affair. Rekindling what never was except for in my imagination. 

Not everyone believed the flying saucers were real because anything out of the ordinary posed a significant threat to people who were just fine with the way things are. Rich people, powerful people, do everything thing they can to preserve the status quo. The president threatened nuclear war as casually as peeling potatoes. Some people insisted there was a logical explanation and repeated whatever the government said about weather balloons or a Russian hoax meant to disrupt the upcoming election. The President of the United States answered two questions about it during a recent press conference, dismissing it with a half-cocked grin. He said the disappearance of Barbara Cooper could have "a simpler and more logical explanation than little green men." 

He said the FBI was looking into her disappearance and there is "absolutely no evidence that she was abducted by the A-word." He insinuated the Russians may have taken her. The term "alien" was a point of contention and not a word to use lightly. "She could have been abducted just as easily by any garden-variety psycho here on Earth." Then he ranted about crime and some crime bill that would fix everything. Then he railed about Russia, Russia, Russia anda potential nuclear armageddon. 

I knew Barbara Cooper wasn't abducted by Russians, or by some garden-variety psycho, or some transient serial killer. I don't know how I knew. I just knew. Things like that don't happen in Lemon, Nebraska. We are a town on the way to nothing and that comes from nothing. You have to make a concerted effort to get here. We are off the beaten path, so to speak. I went to high school with Barbara and in 1967 she and I had danced one single dance at our high school homecoming our senior year. I missed prom the following May because I had already joined the Army to do my duty and was in basic training where they taught me how to kill people I didn't know for reasons I also didn't know. They told me I needed to do it for my fellow Americans and to preserve our way of life.

The thought of Barbara Cooper is what kept me alive though Vietnam. The feeling of her hands in mine. The smell of her perfume. The smooth touch of her silken hair as it tickled my cheek. The softness of her peppermint breath in my ear. But when I came back she was married and looked like she had swallowed a beach ball. She was divorced a few years later in 1974, which I read in the newspaper, and I saw her once at Sears-Roebuck around Christmas of that year and at the 1976 Fourth of July Bicentennial Parade. She smiled at me as I marched in uniform with the Veterans of Foreign Wars as people applauded, despite my lack of success in Vietnam. Her young son, Billy, the former beach ball, seemed pinned to the leg of her pants and saluted as I passed by as though he wanted to be a soldier himself. What a disservice I did him marching proudly in my uniform to get my comeuppance for not being wounded or killed. With my shiny medals pinned to my puffed-out chest. He wore camouflage pants and had a GI Joe doll stuffed in the crook of his noodle-like arm that looked like many of the soldiers I had known in Nam. Many that didn't come home. 

I thought to find her afterwards, but I didn't. I decided that I would wait until I ran into her naturally because love cannot be forced. Dear Abby says timing is everything. I didn't believe in forcing things. What is to be shall be in time or else it will not. I still believed in God despite everything. And I felt that God is the ultimate cupid matchmaker. He will set up our chance encounter or send a clear and definite sign that we should heed. Someday when He is not busy. When the stars align in our favor. Someday she will come into the bar and sit right next to me in the only open stool. Or someday she will be eating lunch at McDonald's when I am eating lunch at McDonald's. I had a job in a hardware store and hoped that she would come in sometime to buy nails or paint because at some point, everyone in town comes to the hardware. But sadly, she hasn't yet come. 

I thought maybe I'd run into her at the diner. Or in the library. Or Woolworth's. Or JC Penney when we got that in 77. But it never came to pass. And when we got a Burger King in 78, I thought we'd owe our love to the onion rings, but like everywhere else, so it wasn't. In a town of less than 8,000, I was seeing everyone it seemed besides her. Friends from high school said the last they heard she and her son lived in her grandparents old farmhouse just outside of town. They didn't go to church or do much other than camp and fish on occasion. The boy likes baseball, one person said he thought. So naturally, I volunteered as a baseball coach with hopes her son would play on my team or another team in the league — but to no avail. And I fished practically everywhere there was to fish, but still our paths didn't cross. I knew where they lived, but it seemed all too creepy to show up with flowers when all we had shared was just one dance and all my hopes and dreams. I was flummoxed. 

Dear Abby never answered my letter which I signed Sleepless in Nebraska. 

The Lord works in mysterious ways, a billboard outside of town reads. It is falling apart and has been up for as long as I can remember. The paint is faded and the wood is warped. I pulled off the side of the road and stared at it as I read the newspaper which said Barbara Cooper had been reported missing by her parents when she didn't pick her son up following her shift. She had helped deliver two babies the night she disappeared. The written word cannot adequately express their dismay, the reporter elegantly wrote of her parents' grief That night there were two sightings of UFOs, one near the hospital where she worked, another near the El Morocco Motel on Highway 9 which was 4 miles away, and where the majority of the sightings occured. No other details were available.

I got a room at the El Morroco, which is no easy task. Since the saucers had been seen, it had been booked solid and only occasionally was a room available. It was once a seedy rendezvous for shady lovemakers — doctors and patients — lawyers and clients — executives and secretaries — pastors and organists — homosexuals — and school teachers and wide-eyed students yet to understand the calamity of the world. But now it was full of UFO enthusiasts from all over the country. And there I was with a corner suite for the weekend, sitting in the bar with a smorgasbord of curious people hoping to catch a glimpse of something extraordinary because the world, we felt, was far less than extraordinary in 1979. Less than extraordinary since we grew up and everything has been explained to us and exploited and made of plastic and since there was seemingly nothing left of which to wonder. Particularly after you've been to war, commercialized, or had sex, or some seedy affair in a place like the El Morocco, or dissected a frog in biology class, or watched enough TV. 

I was having a whiskey highball and Marv, the old bartender, was telling jokes to some pretty tourists from Arizona about aliens. He was also wearing some sort of headband with six large googly eyeballs on gyrating jiggly springs that appeared to be popping out of his grecian scalp. I was in my best suit and my hair smelled potent and shined from a generous dollop of VO5 hairdressing. I rubbed my face that was freshly shaved and doused with Brut aftershave because I had run out of Old Spice, which I affectionately referred to as "the good stuff." I looked as though I were ready for the same homecoming dance that I had danced with Barbara Cooper at in 1967. Although it was only a dozen years before, it felt like an eternity that passed in the blink of an eye.

I was simply making myself attractive to aliens — a departure from my previous public plea for them to take me, having embarrassed myself on intergalactic airwaves for I was sure they intercept and watch our TV shows. I thought that now that they had Barbara Cooper, maybe they would want a suitable mate. Maybe we could be an exhibit like in some zoo. Like chimps in Cleveland. Or like Charlton Heston and Nova in "Planet of the Apes" which was released when I was in the mouth of a Vietnamese jungle and which I didn't see until I came out the other end in Hamburg, Germany, sometime in August of 1970. 

A simple life on Calgon, it would be. A 1950's sort of house with a white picket fence. With a trellis and monochromatic flowers. Like "Leave it to Beaver" or one of those Nuclear test-site bungalows with mannequins for neighbors and chalkware labrador retrievers that never bark. A convertible yellow Studebaker in the driveway and a perfectly-manicured lawn. Maybe that is why they had stolen that patio set from Sears-Roebuck. That is to be our patio set. A wedding present to us. Maybe on Calgon, in that zoo, we would have the life we never had here on Earth. A life that we couldn't have because everything is a damn mess and we never happen to meet, despite our close proximity on this godforsaken planet. 

I didn't figure they would want some desperate scruffy vet who sold hammers and nails for a living. Maybe they would take me for someone of substance. Some banker, or businessman, or scholar who might help them in whatever endeavor their's was here on Earth. Some enterprising young man with ingenuity and real gumption and pluck. Whatever they sought, I looked to be the fellow who could help them attain it. Maybe they wanted an ambassador. But now that they had Barbara Cooper maybe they were simply shopping for her zoo mate, I thought again. Zoos aren't so bad, I told myself. Free room and board. A controlled environment without chaos and disorder. There are amenities that are simply overlooked — safety and security — first and foremost. And love can flourish when one doesn't have to worry about being fleeced by the cruelties of everyday life. Less the lifespan in years one lives in captivity surely must be superseded by the superior quality of that modulated existence.

A man of means, I was by the looks of me. Demonstrating my hypothesis that I had made my self attractive to aliens and, thus, to others, a lady immediately sat next to me in the crowded bar as though I were a thousand-watt light and she a simple mesmerized moth inexplicably drawn to me. I didn't look at her at first to feign indifference, or so not to give her any indication that I was interested because I wasn't. My heart belonged to Barbara Cooper. But I was interested and pleased in the fact that my theory was sound. Marv was distracted by the lady's attractiveness and all eight of his kooky eyes looked in our direction. He grabbed a cocktail napkin and a glass and before she could settle in, he asked from across the bar what he could get her. 

"Gin and tonic, please. Not too heavy on the gin so that it tastes like you tapped a pine tree." She settled in and I could smell her redolence above my V05 and Brut and that permanent stench of my napalm skin. I glanced over and recognized her supple lips and her doe-like eyes which met me halfway. It was Cassandra Holt, the TV reporter from Omaha that looked like Jessica Lange. In fact, she looked even more like the actress in that she appeared to be firmly grasped in King Kong's palm in the black barstool beside me. She sat there, legs crossed tight and lighting a cigarette, smiling at me. 

"Mind if I smoke?" she asked, cigarette already lit. It's red-orange fireball head birthed to the world. Ready or not. 

"No. I don't mind," I replied.

"Do you smoke?"

"No." I thought at first she was kind and smiled due to not recognizing me from earlier or out of natural instinct, but then she swiftly ended that delusion.

"Thank you for your candor today. I don't get much of that in my line of work, you know. Usually I get a bunch of bullshit and grannies baking apple pies. They call me Ms. Fluff. That's what I get. Fluff. Ten years of fluff and you get dirt. Ten years of dirt and you get an Emmy. That's how it goes."

"I wouldn't know."

"So what's you're game? What do you do? You sell insurance. You a cop?"

"No," I said. "I thought I made you mad. I sounded stupid."

She chuckled. "Not at all. But of course when you said that part about people blowing shit up, or this crime-infested shithole, or when you referred to the viewers as a bunch of glowing dummies watching TV and dumping plastic into the fucking ocean — and especially that last part about the Tupperware, and then challenging God to flood the Earth, well, I had to cut you off. Sponsors, you know."

Marv brought her the drink. He stood there for a moment and stared at her in awe, neglecting his suddenly drab Arizona patronage. The six eyes on his head were moving in all directions and his personal two were fixed on her. She stared back until he got uncomfortable and he left saying that she is much prettier in person than in TV and that he'll start her a tab.

"I'm sorry. I've never been on TV before," I said. 

"Don't be sorry. I watched it a hundred times. You ought to have your own talk show. Like Phil Donahue. You got a TV face. I'm Cassandra Holt."

"I know."

"Of course," she smiled. "But that's my subtle way of asking you your name. I got nothing else."

"Bob Bright."

"The Bob Bright Show! I can see it now. You'd have a full studio audience. You can interview mother's abducted by aliens and people with haunted houses." She leaned back in King Kong's hand and imagined the whole thing, taking a long drag of her bouncing baby cigarette. The bar light in the smoke haloed her like in those old church paintings of a young Mother Mary. When the painter wanted to make her sultry but not too sultry to take away from her piety. They stop short of giving her the smokey eyes that Cassandra Holt has or the lips. Or by the deliberate psychosexual implications of having her puffing on a cigarette. 

"I wasn't made for TV," I dismissed.

"None of us are," she contended. "We're just put there like animals in a zoo."

I realized then I wasn't any good at conversing with women. Better clothes and a shave didn't help. Styled hair. Cologne. Didn't help. I never really had to talk to women. My mother died when I was young and my father raised me and he didn't find the need for another wife, having loved the one he had more than he could love anyone else, anyway, as he said of it. I had a sister, but sisters don't count as women. They're never attractive or beautiful to you in terms of sexuality and there is no expectation that you will ever have to insert your penis into them to make things right. To procreate. The fate of the world doesn't amount to siblings making love and there is no sense that you have to impress them in any sort of way to make them like you. It is much simpler selling tools to grumpy men. And drinking beer in bars with other men and throwing darts. Even fighting a war ten thousand miles away in a godforsaken country was less complicated than the war between myself and the opposite sex. I'd rather be under the influence of Agent Orange than perfume. 

I've been told I was an attractive boy and that I am an attractive man. I didn't have some strange look or quirk that complicated interactions. Women have flirted a time or two. But I looked at them as though they were lost or confused and I was lost or confused. Friends have tried to set me up with their sisters or cousins or with the wives' best friend who just needed to meet a good guy, but I've never agreed to it. I am sure I have been assumed to have had my fair share of love interests, or to have dated, maybe married, or had some seedy affairs in such a motel as this, or in Ho Chi Min City, or Okinawa on leave, or in Hamburg after the war. But I never had because I was paused in that moment at the homecoming dance all those years ago. A part of me never finished that dance. And as Cassandra Holt rubbed my leg after her third gin and tonic, I was still frozen.

"Come on, Bob. Live a little. We only live once. Aren't I attractive to you?"

"You look like Jessica Lange. The movie star."

"Well, thank you, Bob. That's very sweet and kind of you to say. Did you know that I was Ms. Nebraska in 1973? Six short years ago I was in the Miss USA pageant on national TV. You can't see anything when you look out because the lights are so bright. It's all darkness behind those cameras. You can't see the thousands of faces in the audience. Not a single one. I finished fourth. Don't think I really had a chance to begin with, but, you know, it was fun. 

"I thought of going to Hollywood afterwards, like I was some big shot, but how many women do that and wind up doing things they don't want to do? Some toothpaste commercial and porn to pay the rent. Next thing you know your banging some married dentist and slinging hash. So I finished school and became a journalist, hoping that one day I would get a story that would be beyond belief. Unlike anything else. But nothing interesting happens in Nebraska. Goddamnit. 

"You know, they asked me an interesting question in the Q and A portion of that pageant. A lot of people think that the contestants know what they're going to be asked in advance, but they don't. They asked me, of all things, 'What would you say to aliens if they ever came to Earth and you were Earth's ambassador?'"

I smiled at her. She smiled back. 

"You know what I said?"

"Yes. You said, 'I would tell them to go home.'"

"I would tell them to go home," she laughed. "So you did watch?!"

"I did," I admitted having another drink. "I was rooting for you, of course — a fellow cornhusker and all. I was in Germany at the time coming out of the army after Nam. I had to spend some time there before I came home. Deprogramming, or something, they called it. It was all that was on TV that day. No baseball or football. I had read all the good books. There was just that pageant. You were funny. I thought it was a really good response."

"A sense of humor goes a long way. But apparently they wanted me to say I'd give them a fruit basket and directions to Disneyland or some shit. So I naturally sympathized with you when you didn't say what you were supposed to say when I asked you about them. What's with Calgon?"

"That's the planet where they are from."

"How do you know that? Wait — like the soap?"

"I don't know. But yes. Like the soap."

"So you believe this is all real? Not some hoax like those crop circles in Indiana?"

"I do believe. Yes. Barbara Cooper has been abducted. And I intend to prove it."

"How so?"

"By being abducted as well."

"How will you do that?" she chuckled.

"By making myself attractive to aliens."

She paused and took a drink. Marv brought her another. His bug eyes bulging and bobbing. The more we drank and the longer the night went, the stranger he looked. 

"Who is this Barbara Cooper to you, Bobby?" At some point, she started calling me Bobby. 

I didn't want to tell her the whole story, but I told her anyway. Maybe it was the alcohol. Or maybe it was the desperation of it. Maybe I just wanted to hear myself say it aloud. Or that I just wanted to live it in words one more time. Or for the fact that she was just a damn good listener and this was the only way I knew how to make love. By talking and by listening. 

I had known Barbara Cooper vaguely for many years, but directly for only three minutes of life, the very short time she was in my hands at that dance to the song which plays subtly in my mind as though it might in an elevator somehwere. "Cherish" by The Asssociation. I knew it by heart and there I sat on that barstool next to the pretty reporter who I will never have another chance with in a million years, with all the fate in the world in my favor and a cosmos of gin tonics aligned perfectly to allow our most sacred and instinctive ritual. I could hear the song as though someone dropped a quarter in the jukebox and it played in the corner of the room to the relative indifference of everyone besides the one person who wanted to hear it more than anything else. That song had become my pulse, my psalm, my heartbreaking anthem. 

12 years ago was like an eternity now. How silly it seems at times when I think of it. But I can't help but to dream that the appropriate time has just not come for us and that circumstances be as they may, this might be it. That our chance was still to be had and it would come eventually. That I might have an opportunity to live with her on an alien planet, like Adam and Eve, free of misery and scandal and disease. Free of political rancor and no good scoundrels. With no Kennedy's or Nixon's. No CIA or Agent Orange. No oil spills or airplane hijackings. Free of pollution and babies being skewered on bamboo sticks or surgically removed from the safety of their wombs in sterile clinics promoting "choice." A world free of hate and pain. On and on. Maybe we would have kids and the aliens would watch us on TV at the people zoo. Maybe they would abduct others and we would eventually colonize their planet like we had in Jamestown. But all in a perfectly contained colony with better oversight. A new and more perfect Garden of Eden. A perfect eutopia.

The more I thought, the more confused I became. I could always take Cassandra to my room and finish the night. Open the curtains and make love as the flying saucers skip like flat rocks across the surface of the night sky. She was arguably the most beautiful woman in all of Nebraska and certainly the most attractive woman who has ever been to Lemon. I was the envy of the bar, it seemed by the way the men glanced over at me. It was not something I was accustomed to as I usually drank alone or with a friend from the hardware. But I couldn't because I was fixated on Barbara and to do so would disprove my love for her. I didn't know if she were 2,000 light years away or what they had done to her. But I knew I must do everything I could to find her and be with her. I told Cassandra she ought to find someone else, but she shrugged and said she was okay going without tonight. As it got dark, we decided to go outside. The aliens, it seemed, were nocturnal creatures. 

The parking lot was full of people in lawn chairs or sitting in the backs of their truckbeds wearing tin foil hats or plastic alien heads that Mr. Crabtree, the motel owner, sold for $12 at the front desk. They were all looking up. Most of them had cameras ready to capture the prize-winning shot. I offered Cassandra a chair and she plopped down in it and looked at me like I were an alien. It was dark and warm and we sat there along the interstate near the El Morocco Motel sign talking about our lives. She was a beautiful and fascinating person. She asked if I would be interested in doing a story about my experience in Nam and I said sure. She said her grandmother was Japanese, and I told her that I couldn't tell by looking at her. But then, in the moonlight, slightly I could. It was somewhere in the eyes. 

The longer the evening went, the more people disappeared back to their rooms. The aliens didn't keep a schedule, it seemed. Not like Dallas or The Love Boat or Little House on the Prairie or the nightly news. But Cassandra and I drank coffee and ate sandwiches and fries and were determined to make a night of it. We'd be here until dawn and if by dawn they hadn't come, we would go back to her room and make love because that is all there was. There are worse things than making love to a beautiful woman, I said encouragingly to myself. But in the meantime, maybe we would catch a glimpse of something and sometimes a glimpse of something can make all the difference. One way or another, I knew, this night would bring something to me that I never knew before.

It was 4:30am and Cassandra had fallen asleep in her chair. I got her a blanket and spread it over her. Some people slept in the beds of their trucks along the interstate or in the motel parking lot. Tents peppered the otherwise empty roadside like staked-down tumbleweeds, campfires dying in front of them. It seemed as though I was the only one still awake in the whole world. 

Around 6, I caught a glimpse of something shiny with the sunrise. It was around the same time Barbara was abducted from the hospital parking lot following her shift. I knew what it was before I could discern for certain. It flashed, hovered like an uncertain hummingbird, and I approached it as such, as though I might frighten it away when I only wanted to watch it drink. I knew not what else to do, so I stuck out my thumb, hoping it was some sort of intergalactic sign that would be understood. That would be an appeal to their benevolence like a hitchhiker appeals to the humanity of random motorists.

Soon, everyone would wake up, but right now, I was the only one awake. It was all mine. This was my chance. My moment. There I was in my best suit, hoping that the flying saucer wouldn't dart off, hoping that it would find something of interest in me as it had in Barbara Cooper. It seemed to get closer, as though to consider me, but just as it did Marv the bartender burst through the back door of the motel bar with two bags of clanging trash. 

"Holy shit!" he shouted. "Bob, look out you crazy sonofabitch!" The six eyes atop his head were at their googliest, frantically coiling and recoiling, bobbing up and down. His own two eyes fat as deviled eggs nearly popped out of their sockets. I thought he had scared the UFO away, but then I felt the force of the suction over me and the loud yet hypnotic hum of whatever propelled the spacecraft from whence it came. This is what it must be like to be a flea beneath a vacuum cleaner. My V05 being was put to the test. My tie came lose from the tack and flapped wildly in my face. Calgon, at last, had taken me away.

How rare and anticlimactic that it was just as I thought it would be. As I forecasted in about a million different daydreams that were never much different at all. That piggybacked upon each other. The same scenario as I had just told Cassandra hours earlier. There I was face to face with an alien who didn't have eight jiggly eyes or a giant green head. He was insanely tall and wasn't made of any sort of identifiable physical matter at all. Although I was certain I didn't know its molecular breakdown, it was only comparable to some sort of gas. And as we stood there, he changed forms. First, as one might construe an alien to look and then to something else entirely. Some magnificent form that could not be adequately described as anything but a tall slender shadow with no apparent origin or predetermined shape. It had cold black eyes and no other discernible feature. Then it morphed to something more human. More comfortable to look at. It became Richard Dawson from Family Feud and he was trying to sell me happiness in their zoo. He was trying to sell me everything I ever wanted. 

"All you have to do to go back is to take the ring off," he added. "Then you'll be back home...in a jiffy." I looked down at my finger and there was a wedding band on it. 

There Barbara Cooper was, putting a meatloaf in an oven as a I came home from work. She bent over the teal-colored oven. Her lips were ruby red like Dorothy's slippers. 

"Hi, honey," she smiled. "Did you have a good day at work today?" I was an advertisement executive, I knew. I had played hooky today, though. Trying to relive a childhood I lost. Her hair was done up and she was wearing a blue dress and an white apron. It was beyond surreal. It was so completely extraordinary that  I couldn't rationalize it. It was as though that function of my brain stopped working entirely. 

"Yes, dear. I had a wonderful day. The projects are coming along. How's the boy?" I don't know what I was saying. It was as though I were reading from a script.

"Georgie is being Georgie. Still wants to be an astronaut and is in the garage fooling around with his erector set. I think he is building himself a rocket," she smiled. "I told him to try not to blow the house up. I think we got another Buck Rodgers on our hands. Dinner will be ready in a jiffy. Would you like to read the paper while you wait?" 

"No, honey. I think I'll go say hi to Georgie."

She nodded and hummed a song I knew all too well. It was our song. But she didn't sing the words. She just hummed the melody. 

I found Georgie in the garage as promised. He was standing at my workbench, smiling. His hands hovered above a busy workspace of wrenches, screws and wires. But he didn't move. He didn't blink. Nor did he ever break that smile. That's because Georgie was a mannequin. He will never grow up. Never get old. Never get his heart broke or die in war. He will forever tinker with erector sets and toy trains and dream of being someone he will never have the chance to become. He was a beautiful boy. I wish I could have known him in real life. 

There were large windows in the house and I knew that outside there were eyes looking in. There were aliens laughing because we were their amusement. We were their Leave it to Beaver. Their new reality TV show. Perhaps, they called it On Earth. No. They would have come up with something far more clever.

"How's the meatloaf, honey?" Barbara asked me over dinner. Georgie sat at the table and sulked. I was a vegetarian but suddenly I wasn't. It didn't matter what it was. 

"It's good dear. It's really good."

"You hear that, Georgie? You're father likes it." 

Georgie said nothing.

"No," Barbara countered. "He doesn't have to say that!" Faintly, I heard laughter as though it were coming from the rafters. Coming from the hedgerow that never needed trimmed. Laughter in the dark. Georgie is an all-American boy who tinkers with things, who loves his dog, Buster, and who pulls pigtails and doesn't eat his dinner unless it is hamburgers or hot dogs — oh, boy! This is Georgie's show, I realized. It was apple pie and America as it ought to be. I was Georgie's father. I was Barbara's husband. At some point in time, credits roll and there might be a hokey theme song to go along with it. There might be a sponsor. 

Presumably we have sex. After meat loaf, the pineapple upside down cake, and Georgie's bath. We have a lot of sex. In bed that night Barbara bit my lip and hyperventilated as she tore my clothes off. She was like a feral cat in heat. Georgie is sleeping, she says. What else she said I cannot repeat. She scratched and bit and shook as she took me into her. This is what we have to ourselves, she cried wildly erratic, pulling me deeper into her. This is life on Calgon. Everything is controlled except for what we do in the privacy of our bedroom. She vulgarized the lovemaking. Defiled the bed. She spit and sucked and whistled and shouted and then heaved in exhaustion afterwards like she had been impaled or as though a demon was exercised from her. Every part of her shaking and dripping in sweat. Every part raw and worn out so she could sleep. I was living a dual life. That of Ward Cleaver by day and John Holmes by night. Day after day. Night after night. 

It was such a bizarre world — Calgon. Emotions were not the same as on Earth. Nothing was the same. The air you breathed made you feel euphoric and there didn't ever seem to be anything wrong. It was a perfect existence and never was their a headache, or a bad day, or a hair lost, or an extra pound gained. There was no bad news. No pain, misery, or grief. There was no feeling of sluggishness or lethargy, no melancholy or disorder of any sort. On weekends we traveled the planet in luxury. The people we met were kind and treated us as though we were royalty. They changed forms as we spoke to them. They watched everything we did in awe. 

I asked Barbara what she remembered. About our high school homecoming dance. She laughed and said it was alien-themed. It was called "Out of This World," or something like that. She didn't remember dancing with me. She didn't remember our song. She was in love with Tommy Keller, but it didn't work out with him. She was amused to hear we danced. She didn't recall. I asked her why she didn't take her ring off and go home. It was a giant diamond ring. She said she would never have another one like it. She did I was Georgie's second father. There was someone else before me. But she said I was better than him. I asked her if she loved me.

Someone said you should never ask a question if you don't want to hear the answer. I am happy here, she said blandly. I will never get old. Never die. This is a vacation. On Earth I was depressed. I was overworked and stressed. But here I am not. Here I am Georgie's mom and a celebrity. We can do anything, Bob! We travel on weekends and see things we never thought we would see. We can meet other couples and other humans if we want to. We can do anything and there is never a hint of bad news. Anything we want, they will get for us. It's like Christmas never ending. 

She didn't answer the question as to whether she loved me in words, but she answered nonetheless. I went to the bathroom and she watched me go. She asked if I was okay and I said I will be. Our song played in my mind as it had all those rainy nights in the jungle. All those nights in a muddy hole. All that time from there to here. I sat on the toilet and looked at my ring. I caught a glimpse of Barbara through the crack of the door lying in bed, exhausted. She was perfect. Then I took off the ring. Georgie would have to find a new father. Like Dick Sargent replacing Dick York in Bewitched, I too would be replaced as I had replaced someone else. The audience would hardly notice the difference at all. All humans pretty much look alike, they think. All those eyes waiting for us to wake up in Niceland. 

Your father's on an unexpected trip, Georgie, Barbara will say in the next episode as she makes eggs and toast. Buster will bark for bacon that Georgie feeds him under the table. The audience will laugh. He'll be back soon, but for now we must take care of the house. It's Halloween. Today's episode is called: The Ghost — Georgie thinks the house is haunted and hilarity ensures. 

When I got back I was dumped in the middle of Highway 9. The spaceship disappeared in the blink of an eye. Although I thought I was gone for weeks, or months, I had lost no time at all. In fact, I might have gained a few minutes. I looked up and Cassandra was still sleeping in the lawn chair under the blanket I got her. Her legs were tucked under. Marv the bartender crashed through the door with those two bags of clanging beer bottles and trash and his six googly eyes atop his lumpy head. He saw me and asked if I was okay. I nodded. He asked if I had seen anything. No, I said. 

I woke Cassandra up.

"What did I miss?" she groggily asked.

"I'll tell you later. Let's go to bed and make a mistake."

She smiled. "Well, what about Barbara Cooper?"

"I think she'll be fine."

Cassandra and I went to bed and made love. The air conditioning in the room exhaled as though it were bored of couples doing the same old thing. Here we go again, it complained to the drapes. Another couple getting naked and pushing against each other and romping around between the sheets like animals. Making a mess of the room and each other. The walls used to gossip about who came in and what they would do to each other, but for the past ten years or so they talk more about the people who don't make love. Or what they watch on TV. Or where they are from when they are from somewhere exotic, which is anywhere outside of the Midwest, according to them. Lovemakers and their lovemaking ceremonies are old hat. 

I thought of myself as King Kong when I was making love to her. I read somewhere to imagine that you are some enormous monster or giant, like you're twenty times the size of the person you are making love to and like you can toss them around if you wish and as though you might break them in half if you're not careful. But you're not to be careful. You're supposed to try to break them. You do it as hard as you can do it. Then you slow down and do it as though you care about them. As though it is some sort of art and you're Beethoven conducting a symphony. Like you're molding clay pots or blowing glass. Then back to the hard stuff for the grand finale. Like you're Nolan Ryan and each pump and thrust is the that of an 100mph fastball into her pink mit. No time to be tender. The last guy wasn't tender and the next guy won't be tender, either. You got to give her something to remember. Leave bite marks and bruises. If they're not into it, they are now. You're the teacher. Practice on hookers if need be, the book advised.  

"Goddamn," Cassandra groaned afterwards. "I feel like I just ran the Kentucky Derby. Was that Vietnam or what? I think my internal organs have been ruptured and rearranged. I am too sore to walk, darling. Can you get me some water, please?" 

I got up to get her water and Cassandra smoked a cigarette as the morning sunlight snuck in through a part in the drapes that were as thick as the led apron they drape over you in the dentist's office when they do X-rays. I don't know why they do it, considering your head is left exposed and what could be worse than having brain cancer? All so they can tell if you got a cavity for them to fill. All so they can bill the insurance company for X-rays. I don't know why I was thinking about X-rays at a time like this. As I walked naked around the room like I was King Kong, my knuckles practically dragging on the carpet, swatting a fly away as though it were one of those planes.

I didn't feel better for making love to Cassandra. I felt like I had punched a time clock and this was my shift for the next few hours. Getting her water. Sleeping in bed with her until it was time to get up and get dressed and check out and whatever awkward goodbye there'd be, maybe over a plate of French toast and hash browns. Laying in bed, hearing her shower, knowing she was cleaning me out of her so she can be brand-new again for someone else whenever the opportunity arose. I realized that I was no good at casual sex in the sense that I didn't enjoy it. It was like the Christmas music they play in department stores. Absolutely meaningless. It was like fake Santa Clauses who scare little children. The more there are the less special the real Santa Claus is. 

"So what happened? Did you see anything?" she asked raspily. Her throat was raw she complained as though she didn't recall why. She asked if I had a lozenge and I said no. She cleared her throat. This wasn't her first rodeo. She cleared her throat in such a deliberate way it was as though she was an opera singer preparing for a performance. 

I wasn't going to tell her the story because it was too bizarre. It sounded like a story you'd read in a dirty magazine. Or like something one of those guys in the bunker in Nam would tell when we all couldn't sleep because we were in the middle of nowhere surrounded by millions of people who wanted to kill us. Like of a dream they had, prefaced by plenty of "you'll never believe this, but..."

I didn't say "you'll never believe this but" once. She drank her water and winced because of her sorer than expected throat. I had violently spelunked deep in her mouth cave. I closed the curtain so it was dark. The air conditioner exhaled another bored breath but then perked up and listened intently. As did the walls. And the TV, which as off but still listening. As was the comforter that was in a pile on the multicolored and oddly-patterned brown and orange carpet that was made up of catawampus pentagons connected by a series of lines. It reminded me of the wallpaper of a room on Calgon. In our house. Where Georgie the chalkware boy was playing with matches. He accidentally burned something of his mother's and in that episode of our life, he had to admit it and I spanked him because fire was dangerous. Only I didn't spank him. The audience was simply led to believe that I did because that is what earthlings do. Everything is violent. There isn't a minute that passes on Earth where violence doesn't exist. And the damn fool people are so proud of it they have parades. 

Cassandra exhaled naked under the sheet having listened to the entirety of my story. It was as though it was coursing through her brain and body. Her brow furrowed and she bit her bottom fat lip tenderly. She had great teeth. Not too much gums or too much teeth. A wonderful balance. They weren't perfect and boring like those models orthodontists show off to patients of what a perfect set of teeth look like with successful orthodontia. But they were sexy because of it. They were straight, but in a different sort of way. There was something inexplicably different about them. I noticed when we were nearly at the third climax of our lovemaking and we were passionately kissing. My tongue first noticed as it ran over them, but then she closed her eyes and her lips parted and there they were. Like a chorus line of pretty pearly-white dancing girls in complete synchronicity. There wasn't a cavity among them. And in the production of her mouth, they were absolutely flawless. I wondered if other men had noticed that or if I was alone in my admiration of her teeth. I would probably forget to tell her how much I admired them. But I could always write her a letter if I did. That sort of thing is appreciated. 

"Are you for real? So you were gone for weeks maybe months, but they brought you back to the exact moment you were abducted when you took off your ring?" 

"Yes."

"I would say you are nuts, Bob. But I don't think your nuts. I believe you. As fucking bizarre as it is, I believe it. No one else will believe it. I mean, you could write a book and go on Phil Donahue or something, but no one else will believe it. A chalkware kid? A TV show? So if Barbara was your wife and you had her, why come home?"

"She didn't love me. She loved being who she was on Calgon. She was a celebrity and everyone watched her. She had everything she wanted. On weekends we could travel. We went everywhere and everywhere we went she was adored. The planet was magnificent. The things there was to see. The luxurious hotels. The food. It was all catered to us. Only I don't know that it was real."

"What do you mean?"

"It is beyond my capacity to understand." I opened the curtain and looked out into the morning sky. There was a quarter of a silver moon leftover. "I don't think reality exists anywhere but on Earth. There is a greater concept than reality that can be understood and had by people well above our intelligence. I think they were making fun of us. On that show. It was like we were Arnold the pig on Green Acres. She acted as though we were doing Shakespeare." 

"You ought to write a book, Bob — The Man Who Went To Calgon And Came Home Disillusioned. What if they abducted people and sent them back to Earth as cows and pigs or chickens? You know, like to give people a taste of their own medicine. That's like a Kurt Vonnegut novel or something. I can help you write it. Or maybe — Calgon Ain't All It Cracked Up To Be. 

"How to Make Yourself Attractive to Aliens."

"There you go."

We woke up at 12 and checked out and had lunch. I had the room for another night but didn't care for it and Cassandra was going back to Omaha. She said she would look me up when she was in the area but I didn't figure she would. She gave me her number and I stuffed it in my pocket. I'd probably wash it. But I guess I could always write her a letter. She ate a cheeseburger and fries and was astonished to find out I was a vegetarian. She said she was thinking about it but hadn't made up her mind yet. She seemed to have forgotten about the story idea she had where aliens turn people into livestock to teach them a lesson about violence and the ritual sadism of living on planet Earth. I wondered what animal she would be. And how they'd decide who was what. How it would be figured out — that "oh fuck" moment. She gargled some warm salt water saying she hoped she had her voice back by Monday. She wore a scarf on her neck and a long skirt. She kissed me goodbye and told me to call her. Maybe I would. Maybe I'd move to Omaha. 

Barbara Cooper came back a week later before my two weeks was up at the hardware. It was explained to everyone that she had been abducted by her ex-husband and she escaped. The ex-husband was arrested and charged. He was an alcoholic with a long history of spousal abuse. He probably would be convicted. The President of the United States said there were no little green men and that he was happy Barbara Cooper was home safe. 

She came in to the hardware and looked at me. I was at the register reading a magazine. She clucked something like a chicken and timidly asked if we sold bales of straw. In the back, I said. She asked if I was okay. I said I was. I asked if she was okay, and she said she was. She asked if I remembered anything in a whisper and I said that I remember that she wore a blue dress to the high school homecoming dance on September 30, 1967 and that we danced to "Cherish" by The Association. The Out of the World dance. 

"Out of this World," she corrected me. "It was called Out of this World."

"Oh." I nodded. I might have smiled. "I'll get your straw, Ms. Cooper," I said.

I threw it in back of her red truck and she poked her head out the window looking back at me. 

"I stopped at the record store before I came here. I bought that record. The one with our song on it. I heard from Eddie Gilbert that you, well, you might be interested in seeing me sometime. If you want to come up, I mean, I know, um, it's been a few years and I have a kid and everything. But I'd like to, um, well, I'd like to have another dance. Supper's at 7 tonight. I make a really good vegetarian spaghetti." 

I smiled. Maybe. Maybe I would.