STARSTRUCK   (Part 2 of 2) 

by Richard Banks 

         “Tell it to your folks,” he growls.

         We do, and that’s when we find out we’ve been missing for nearly a week. No one’s seen us during that time and no one believes a word we say.

         “Damn those drugs,” says my Dad, and that’s it. It’s all down to the drugs, and my allowance is cut and bank card cancelled. It’s much the same with Leroy and I’m told not to see him again. So I don’t for the next two weeks. After that we meet up in Allis where no one knows us and there’s little or no chance of our folks ever finding out. It’s me and Leroy against the world, at least that’s how it feels. All we want to do is move on and forget the whole thing ever happened, but that’s not the way it’s going to be – at least not for now.

         Someone’s tipped off the press and a ratbag of reporters turn-up on the doorstep wanting to talk to me. Dad calls the police and they’re sent on their way but not before they take my photograph and ask me a whole lot of questions I would have been better off ignoring. Next morning I’m on the front page of every comic pretending to be a newspaper, some of which have a picture of my head on the shoulders of this other girl who’s underdressed and over endowed. What’s more they’ve managed to get hold of our statements to the police, to which they’ve added some fevered speculations of their own. The headline in the Daily Reveal says it all, ‘College Kids Drug Fuelled ET Romp’ which picks-up on our exchange of tops. Dad goes ballistic and joins forces with Leroy’s old man in suing the Reveal and every other paper running trash stories. But that don’t help me and Leroy who are on the end of every bad joke going.

         But two guys who aren’t laughing are Griff and Theo who also claim to have been abducted, and are now founder members of an organisation claiming that aliens are not only in the skies above  but down below in every tier of Government up to and including the White House. This they tell us in the College car park, while looking furtively about them for those they call, the ‘Cover-up Crew’. They’re as mad as hatters but whose to say they’re wrong. All we know is that they’re not as entertaining as the X Files and we would rather they weren’t around reminding us of something we’d rather forget. Leroy says thanks but no thanks and, when they persist, tells them less politely that he doesn’t want to see their faces again.

         “Phone us if you change your mind,” says Griff. He hands me a card with a mobile number on it beneath the words, ‘Alien Survive.’

         It seems that for every Griff and Theo there are as many folks wanting to explain them away. No it wasn’t a space ship they say, it was, a satellite, a balloon, a meteor – you’ve heard it all before. Maybe it’s all in the mind others say. Hilary is a shrink from New York with a theory she’s determined to prove, and I’m just the kind of person she wants to include among her case studies. This might be someone who can help I think, so I arrange to meet her in a hotel lobby in Milwaukee. I tell her what happened and she nods her head and says she believes me - then come the buts. Subtle buts that play with words like ‘perception’ and ‘reality’ and muddle them up with guilt and other emotions I don’t have.

         “What do you think about the slave trade?” she asks. How is this relevant I think, but don’t say because I know she’s building up to telling me. Instead I tell her what she has probably worked out for herself, that I don’t approve of slavery, past or present, and that if she’s got a petition I’ll gladly sign it. I say this with sufficient irony to make her realise that I don’t like being played. If you got something to say just say it is the message I’m sending out and by the expression on her face she’s receiving it loud and clear. So, she gets round to saying, what she hoped, with a little prompting, I might start thinking for myself. As theories go it’s rather neat. It goes like this. I’m a white affluent American whose ancestors owned slaves or if they didn’t own slaves profited from their exploitation. This, she says, is deeply troubling to me. So, to overcome my feelings of personal culpability I have created a new power dynamic in which African slaves, now in the form of alien abductors, are oppressing me.

         “Could this be you?” she asks, “after all your boyfriend is Afro-American. Is it a co-incidence that your abduction occurred soon after you started dating?”                                                                                                                                                I tell her that I’m a second generation American whose grandparents came over from Norway. If I were to have guilty feelings it would be for the Viking raids in Europe. But as there’s nothing now I can do about them I’d rather concentrate on the here and now. “Anyway,” I say, “how does Leroy fit into your theory? He was there too.” Hiliary says she’s not sure; she will need to speak to him separately, but never does. She departs for another appointment and I don’t see or hear from her again.

         Whose next, I’m thinking and they’re not long in coming, two guys in uniform with short cropped hair and ID cards that say they’re from military intelligence. They’re not slow in coming to the point. The country, they say, is under threat from an enemy seeking to seize control of American airspace. But it’s not the aliens trying to do this, it’s the Chinese. First they sent over their lanterns, then the so called weather balloons and now it’s new aircraft types with advanced weaponry capable of reducing American cities to ash.

         “Are you sure?” I ask.

         It appears that they are and what’s more they have a dossier of unassailable evidence which proves that my abduction was only one of numerous incidents attributable to the yellow peril.

         “But my abductors were aliens,” I tell them, “eight foot tall reptiles with green scales. How can they be Chinese?”

         “Think about it,” they say. “Consider the evidence, one of them was called Chog and the other Mog. Aren’t those Chinese names? And when you say they were green, are you sure? There’s many shades of green and in the dead of night a dull yellow is bound to look darker than it actually is. Anyway whose to say they weren’t in disguise.”

         “This is evidence?” I say.

         “Everything you say Miss Gilsen is evidence. Now think carefully. Did you at any time hear them speak in a language that might have been Chinese?”

         I tell them that Mog didn’t speak once and that Chog spoke English - in a voice that sounded kind of familiar.

         “Familiar?”

         “Yes, couldn’t place it at first,” I say, “then I did. It was Jimmy Stewart, he was talking like Jimmy Stewart.”

         “But Jimmy Stewart was a patriot!” they exclaim in shock horror.

         “Perhaps the alien was too,” I say.

         They leave having probably put me on a watch list of alien sympathisers.

         When three weeks pass without any further visitors it seems that our ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ are over and we can get back to normal. Leroy’s folks get-together with mine and decide that they will allow us to see each other again providing we abide by a 101 conditions, chief among them being that we let them know, at all times, where we are and what we’re doing. This is good news and saves us the bother of sneaking off to Allis twice a week.

         Then after one accident too many we give our folks the ‘glad tidings’ that they are about to become grandparents. The fathers go ballistic again and our mothers silent and stony faced. When the noise subsides it’s the mothers that take charge and the two families meet to discuss ‘our options’. Number one on their list is,” I tell them, “one big no; I’m keeping my baby and Leroy’s standing by me.”

         “Then” says mother, “it will have to be a yellow wedding.”

         “A yellow wedding?” I say.

         “Well it can’t be white.”

         I don’t believe what I’m hearing, but when I say we’re not so sure about the whole wedding thing a compromise is struck and arrangements made for us to get hitched in a low key civil ceremony at the Court House. At first it’s going to be held at midnight in front of an uninvited audience of nil but gradually it becomes the big Cinderella event that both our mother’s want and my Dad can well afford to pay for. Then not to be outdone Leroy’s father announces that he has bought us a furnished apartment in Milwaukee near the university we’ll soon be at.

         I should be grateful, and I am. It’s going to be OK, better than OK, amazing! And all I have to do is buy a dress that isn’t yellow or white and turn-up on the big day. I choose a peach evening dress that’s fits loosely over my small but expanding waistline.

         All this is a vast improvement on being abducted by aliens. That’s yesterday’s news and from being in my thoughts every day of the week it’s now as relevant as a discarded email in Trash. Maybe Hilary was right, perhaps it was all in the mind, or maybe nothing more complicated than a bad smoke. Who knows, who cares, all that matters are the special things to come. I’m counting down the days. Bring it on!  

 

                                              *****

         Six months later we’re at Uni and my waters break two weeks early and I’m rushed off to a maternity hospital that’s only a few blocks away. This would be embarrassing if it wasn’t so painful and I pass out in the ambulance. When I wake-up it’s all over and no one’s looking pleased. I’m in a small, white tiled room with two nurses, and a fat guy sat down on a chair, smoking a cigar. He tells me that I’m in a temporary medical unit and that he’s the guy in charge. He speaks in a flat, southern drawl that has neither warm or empathic. This doesn’t feel right and I panic. “Where’s my baby!”

         The guy pulls a disapproving face and, cigar in hand, motions me to calm down; but there’s no chance of that.

         “I want to see my baby,” I scream. I try to sit up but there’s a searing pain across my stomach which throws me back onto the bed.

         “Best lie flat,” he says, “you don’t want to be straining those stitches. Want a pain killer? You only need ask.”

         I tell him that the only thing I want is my baby. “Please, please show me my baby!”

         “Wish I could,” he says. “The ambulance arrived too late, there was nothing we could do, nothing anyone could do, the child was stillborn.”

         “I don’t believe you,” I say. “I want to see it, hold it, I need to know if it’s a girl or a boy!”

         “And you will,” he says, “but not now, best you rest up for a while.”

         “No way,” I shout, “Not later, now! I want my baby, now!”

         He looks rattled and appears not to notice the ash falling from his cigar onto his shoes.

         “I demand to see my baby. My Dad’s an attorney, my husband’s father knows Mayor Stevens. If you don’t show me my baby we’ll sue you for every dollar you got.”

         “Yeah,” he says, “I know who they are, you don’t need to say. I also know you’re smart and feisty enough to keep shoving until you get what you want. Only wish I could oblige. Had you been expecting a black or white baby, no problem, even at this short notice we could have come up with something. But an inbetweenie, that takes longer and as of now we don’t have one.”

         “So my baby’s not dead. Is that what you’re telling me? Where is it then?”

         “There never was a baby.”

         “Then what the hell was inside me?”

         “I think you know the answer to that. It’s in the zoo with the other freaks. Want to be known as the mother of a freak? No way. So, you listen to me. This is what happened: your baby was a normal child, born dead. Be grateful we’re here to help you and make this whole thing go away. Do as you’re told and no one beyond you, me and these ladies will know how it was Your husband and family have been told the sad news and that you’re not well enough just now to receive visitors. When they come you tell them that you wanted the child cremated and, if by then we still haven’t got an appropriate stiff, we will say we messed-up and had it done before getting the father’s OK. After that you get some ashes and you scatter them, or do whatever. End of story, and you get on with the rest of your life.”

         “And if I don’t do what you want?”

         “It won’t be good, Missy. We can’t have you stirring up a panic. If you’re not prepared to co-operate we’ll have no choice but to declare you insane. People like that are put in institutions. Once in there you won’t be getting out. And before you start telling me again about all the important people you know let me tell you that they count for nothing next to the people I answer to. Believe me you don’t want to be on the wrong side of them. So, if you value your freedom the deal is this: you had a baby, a normal child, still born, cremated at your request. This is what you tell everyone, no exceptions, not Leroy, not your mother, no one.”

         “That’s a hell of a secret to be keeping to myself.”

         “If you want to live normal again that’s the way it’s got to be. Why settle for less?  Life’s good, especially for an uptown girl like yourself. Have fun, enjoy the glad times to come. And just one word from you will make it happen. So, what’s your answer? I’m asking you one last time. Do we have a deal?”

         “Yes,” I tell him, “we have a deal.” What else can I do?

         A nurse puts a needle in my arm. “You need to rest,” she says, “tomorrow evening you can have visitors, for now it’s best you sleep.” My eyes close shut, but for a few seconds more I hear them talking.

         “Is she out?” says the man.

         “She’s out,” replies the nurse.

         “Let him in,” says the man. A door opens and someone else draws near. He says no more than a dozen words, but that’s enough. Jimmy Stewart’s back in town.

 

The End.

 

Copyryght Richard Banks