The Everborn Page 23

  Time had been somehow unfolding and lately overlapping itself. Time was being manipulated, this present time and over the last day or so...in fact, ever since Andrew had awakened before his typewriter to that curiously disturbing finished manuscript he had labored in a marathon to complete on time for good buddy Ralston. Bari hadn’t exactly forseen this happening, but she was beginning to understand. She’d become increasingly convinced that whatever it was that was happening, that manuscript was the tootsie roll center in the sucker of a grander scale.

  Bari was also certain that if indeed it was time being screwed with here, there was a Watcher behind it all. If she could bet, she would bet her copper-toned transparent butt cheeks on it. She was relatively young in this business of being a Watchmaid, possessing less experience than the larger lot of Watchmaids scattered abroad, and her enhanced awareness of the time continuum was nothing more than knowledge at best. Here on Earth, the Watchers were the ones who did the Time Warp again and again with controlled access to its password.

  Time was being manipulated from a point in the future, in a benevolent effort it seemed, to obstruct the efforts of a sinister nature from imposing potentially climactic introductions between the secrets of the ‘born and billions of unsuspecting Homo Sapien folk.

  Clearly her Andrew was an instrumental pawn in this, which was all the more reason for Bari to deprive Melony the courtesy of the truth, at least through Andrew’s lips. It was also all the more reason to jettison Andrew from this mayhem, and quickly, into the next chapter of existence, into the next life. Before the creature of the Magdalene and her dreg Simon BoLeve could get to him.

  Before the evening began, Bari had decided to leave things concerning the interview up to Andrew, with Bari on her guard to regulate things if they got too hairy. She’d hoped that Andrew would give Melony the pre-rehearsed verbal view-master view of the answers Melony sought, developed for just such an occasion.

  Bari's good old-fashioned bathroom chat with Andrew didn’t seem to go over well. He failed contemptibly to understand her insistence to waste Mel’s time with bullshit; he thought Mel was worth more than that, and it made no sense that Bari should pair him and Mel together and expect him to lie to her after all.

  And after Mel had been so honest with him about herself.

  When Andrew reseated himself at the kitchen table, he was reserved, yet refreshingly guarded, obviously testing the waters for the absolute surety that his own climactic introductions to the tales of his young-man life wouldn’t explode in his face.

  Just as introductions to tales this climactic, could oh so easily do.

  He was succumbing more to his own honesty. Melony was drawing him in.

  She began with the long ago climactic incident at the school playground, when Andrew first met Ralston.

  And then she rose, stepped into the living room, only to return with a microcassette recorder which she set down upon the table, play/record buttons depressed and readied with red indicator light beaming.

  That was enough to ruin things personally for Andrew, then and there.

  Bari had been right again, as always.

  And Andrew, regretfully, decided to do what he did best:

  27.

  Andrew Is Not an Alien

  The obscure configuration of a slender shadow stood still before Andrew Erlandson’s bathroom mirror. It was confoundedly obscure, to Melony, as it would be to anybody after downing over two medium-sized bottles of E&J brandy with a new drinking buddy.

  Drinking buddy.

  She couldn’t believe she’d been allowing herself to drink. Like this and during an occasion such as this one, when her intentions behind the evening’s date were to remain inquisitive and aware and unbiased. For that matter, she’d gotten rather sloshed at The Crow Job Friday night, when she was first personally introduced into all of this, under the assumption that Andrew Erlandson was an alien.

  Yet, apparently, Andrew wasn’t an alien after all.

  Did that make it okay to be drinking?

  The things Andrew had told her were nothing like she’d anticipated. They were neither incredible or fantastic, at least compared to the norm of earthly things, and they didn’t reveal any ultimate hidden secrets hidden beneath the guise of humankind’s superficial awareness. They brought Melony down to Earth with a mixture of disappointment and relief but with a lingering skepticism somehow. Andrew had stripped himself of the fanciful awe surrounding his nonhuman mysteries, made himself into an average guy with a past of outlandish but explainable circumstances, and lowered her professional expectations just enough to make him far more accessible to her romantic curiosities. It was a dangerous and frightening concoction, but so was brandy and coke.

  Somehow, though, what Andrew had told her didn’t entirely ring true. But perhaps this was due to the utter let-down of how he was supposed to have been otherworldly and all.

  She could hear Andrew out in the kitchen. He was talking to himself again.

  Melony dowsed her face with cold water over the bathroom sink, resurfacing to meet her own glare within the wall mirror in front of her. She would go to great lengths to sober up about now, if only she could think of how to go about it. Anything for a comfortable frame of mind.

  A little while before, anything could have happened.

  Now, anything of a different sort could happen still, anything more down to Earth than she’d feared.

  She wasn’t afraid anymore of that anything, but as she gave her face one last tidal wave splash of water, she found herself fearing all over again, fearing that certain anything of a different sort, and what it could ever be.

  ***

  Melony had remained quiet and studious throughout the greater portion of the time Andrew shared with her the sugar-coated and carefully condensed tales of his life’s extraordinary highlights. He told her of the father he never knew and of the way he knew about him. Of his mother waiting in excess of several years, before she was engaged to be remarried to an inevitable stepfather for Andrew, after the pain of unexplained loss drifted into a celibate dormancy until the day arrived for her to accept the fact that her husband would never resurface from beyond stagnant yesteryear.

  Andrew told Melony of an imaginary friend named Bari, and how Bari would spend time with him whenever he needed her to be there, whenever he closed his eyes and wished really hard for her to appear to him when he was all alone. No one ever saw Bari but him, regardless of the numerous episodes of his attempting to prove her existence.

  No one ever saw, that is to say, but those unfortunate ones who blatantly threatened bodily harm to Andrew.

  And in the aftermath of such instances, nobody believed what Andrew’s assailants saw, anyway.

  And those were just human threats.

  This most interesting friend had supposedly protected Andrew from threats of another nature also; by Andrew’s testimony, one had to assume that for every imaginary friend there were evidently imaginary enemies.

  He slyly avoided giving Melony the courtesy of specifics. He bore a methodical rationality to his accounts, which swayed Melony towards believing that Bari existed solely within the mind of a fatherless child withdrawn into an irrational WalterMitty way of daydream living. It distracted her from all those theoretical versions of the truth that Max had compiled so convincingly for so long. She had slowly become unaware of forsaking even the more concrete examples of Andrew’s alleged nonhuman involvements. Whenever he made mention of an elusive twin, for example, whose existence could never be confirmed nor denied for the longest time, not even by Andrew’s own mother, Melony began to suspect that the elusive twin he spoke of was Simon BoLeve.

  Simon’s enigmatic origins and history were scattered throughout Max’s research but always remained inconclusive. It was by accident that Max even learned of his name to begin with and death had always surrounded him.

  Certainly the consideration of Simon’s dark deeds and manipulations was more sound by far than any conjured depicti
ons of ghost—like women beasts and aliens.

  Weren’t they?

  Max claimed to know for sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt. And he held all the convincing data to back him up. Could he be wrong? If he was, he was wrong despicably. And because of him, Melony was wrong despicably, too.

  It made Melony wonder what Matt McGregor actually saw of Nigel’s death as a boy so long ago, an event which Max’s pursuits were clearly indebted to, indeed.

  It made her wonder about a great many things.

  It also made it all the more easier to distance herself from the husband who dispirited her so.

  Enough was shared by Andrew to erase Melony’s fears of the otherworldly unknown and to replace them with an unknown of a different kind...the sort of unknown, which attaches itself like a parasitic leech to the evening of a first date in the home of a man Melony increasingly found herself wanting.

  Wanting?

  Yes, it was okay to admit that she wanted him by the conclusion of their conversation, just as long as she could impose most of the blame upon the brandy and nothing or no one else.

  Anything to smother the guilt, which such feelings often tended to resurrect, burdening any married woman upon the verge of infidelity.

  ***

  Andrew had taken Melony’s bathroom break as his cue to begin to clear the table, and Bari appeared to him fully as soon as it was safe. He couldn’t believe how close to the truth Melony and her husband’s findings actually were about him, and he couldn’t believe how dishonest he was in defending that truth behind preplanned lies and half-truths. He had done very well with the bullshit and Bari commended him on a bullshit job well done. Though she didn’t put it that way, Bari understood his feelings and attempted to console him by reminding him of the implications of telling Mel the truth...of how the truth could lead into a potentially harmful new frame of mind for Melony, and how it could upset Andrew’s anonymity in society, which Bari insisted was a necessity kept sacred.

  Bari was quite the bullshit artist herself, wasn’t she? Andrew truly wished he could have told Mel everything, for Andrew himself never totally understood what his life was all about. Bari had been forever elusive towards the more painfully enlightening subjects, the specific subjects, which would ultimately disclose to Andrew the nature of who or what he was.

  And it would have been nice to gather insight from an outside observer.

  Bari disappeared again, leaving Andrew to his dishes and frustrations and the kitchen sink.

  Andrew didn’t know it yet, but the truth was about to reveal itself fully for the first time soon, very soon.

  And to more than just Andrew.

  ***

  Melony emerged from the bathroom to find Andrew at the kitchen sink washing the dinner dishes. He appeared to be tilting at an awkward angle to the left, but then she realized that it was in fact she herself that was leaning a little too much over to one side. She didn’t say a thing. At first. Except a raspy achem to clear her throat.

  Andrew turned and saw her, his hands immersed in water and Dove dishwashing liquid and a sponge.

  “Hi,” he said to her, then, continued with his preoccupation.

  Melony approached him in a mismanaged stride and met him at the kitchen counter, on the way, retrieving the microcassette recorder she’d absently left, since the course of the interview, still recording upon the table surface. She depressed its tiny black flip button, then, lazily brought it into the living room as Andrew turned off the kitchen faucet and dried his hands, abandoning the dinner dishes to soak as he followed after her.

  Reaching into her purse on the black leather recliner she exchanged the recorder for her Nikkon. Andrew halted momentarily as she raised the camera, situated the flash, and snapped his photograph.

  Andrew stood back and flinched from the bright light.

  Melony took a few snapshots of his living room, turning this way and that. She was such the journalist, but then again her imposing was rather rude. It brought Andrew back to why he lied to her in the first place.

  He studied her for a moment, edgy and uncomfortable with this. He slumped against the archway between the kitchen and the living room, wiped his hands free of dish soap and scratched the back of his neck. “So.....um....you know, my home is not a tourist attraction,” he said to her calmly. Irritability was, with few exceptions, the closest Andrew had ever been able to come to anger or outrage. He was simply much too passive. “I got the feeling that your recording the interview and all was enough, Mel. I can see it all now: your husband’s going to scrutinize those pictures and discredit everything I’ve told you because of my father’s movie poster. And you know, I have way too many Playboys for an Earthling....”

  Melony stopped and turned to face him, so suddenly apologetic that it was almost enough to discredit her. “I’m sorry, Andrew, I didn’t mean to take advantage. Oh, God this is difficult, because I still have an obligation to my husband for tonight. I’m ashamed of it, but I’ve been honest with you about it and I didn’t have to be. You know, he’s going to have a hard time with how tonight went, with what you told me about yourself. If I could catch a few glimpses of how you live, it’ll only reinforce the issue. To be honest with you, I’m very afraid of how he’s going to handle it all. It’s kind of like his life’s work....”

  “From what you’ve told me, it is his life’s work,” Andrew replied, “and it’s okay, I guess. I still have a hard time swallowing why anyone would be obsessed with my life like that, but I understand....”

  I understand a lot more than you know, he found himself thinking.

  Mel was approaching him casually, arriving directly before him, her gaze inches away from his, too close for comfort, unexpectedly and enough to make him nervous. Her eyes looked into his, but it was difficult for Andrew to read her. Then she blinked once, twice, and he began to notice how much her head was tilting further and further backwards until she caught herself and regained her footing before she could stumble on her ass

  “Are you all right?” Andrew stepped forward, reached out in effort to assist her lest she managed to successfully fall the next time. She was obviously way more intoxicated than he’d first suspected. It was comical, in a way and Andrew was at once amused and concerned. “Want to sit for awhile, watch a movie? Want any aspirin?”

  “You got me drunk....” She couldn’t believe she said that, it simply came out that way.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to....”

  “It’s not your fault, I just don’t know how to handle you.” She couldn’t believe she said that, either. And she hoped he didn’t understand. It was time to gather her senses together and go, get. Before something serious happened. But as soon as she knew it, she toppled over to him. Well, it wasn’t exactly toppled, and she was certainly sure she didn’t want to do it, that it must’ve been because she was drunk, but somehow the, next moment she found herself in his arms.

  And she was still gripping her Nikkon.

  That brought her back to reality, the realization of how she better not drop that camera. A silly excuse to distract oneself, but nevertheless, it worked.

  More than a little embarrassed, she lifted herself from her view atop Andrew’s shoulder only to discover the delightful embarrassment she beheld from within his own eyes as she faced him yet again, yet again merely inches away. Before he felt safe to release her, she detected that he was trembling. She’d always found this sort of vulnerability attractive in a man. It was an honest reaction to the suggestions of intimacy, it showed that true feelings stirred from within, for when has anyone ever heard of a man who purposely trembled in the arms of a woman to impress her?

  On second thought, maybe it was she who was doing the trembling.

  Remember your Nikkon, Mel. Politely put it in your purse, compose yourself, bid him farewell, and leave.

  Andrew prepared himself for a kiss, for they together were in the position to do so, their predicament calling for it, the sudden closeness, the mutua
l attraction, the unspoken fascination for one another, and in downright spiteful defiance of the unwonted conditions of how all this came to be. Though from the unexpected immediacy of it all, he’d be damned if he was to be the first to act upon it. And he’d be damned to be the one to take advantage.

  Just in case he was reading her wrong.

  He had no desire to be the one to dare and he did not want to be the one to be said ‘no’ to if he did dare.

  He felt himself trembling.

  And he was embarrassed and nervous and....

  Melony withdrew, took a deep breath to calm herself, stood reserved upon her feet, and in a millisecond it was as though nothing between them had happened at all. She went for her purse upon the black leather recliner and inserted her camera inside. She lifted her purse, readying to bid Andrew farewell.

  “You should really stay for just a little while longer, let me fix you some coffee. You shouldn’t go like this. You don’t have to up and go right away...Mel...,” Andrew told her, concerned, though self-conscious of his pleas.

  Melony set her purse down upon the recliner and sighed, indecisive if but for the moment. Then she lifted her purse once again, shouldering it. This time, Andrew sighed.

  “It’s getting late, I’m sorry,” Melony told him, summoning the sort of blind determination the intoxicated often get when they truly want to ditch the scene but know damn well it’s inadvisable to drive. And part of her didn’t want to ditch the scene, anyway. “I’m fine, really. And I’ll be seeing you again. Soon. I promise. Thank you for a wonderful evening, Andrew. You were very understanding.”

  “Didn’t you just tell me that I got you drunk? Come on, stay just a half hour, at least for some coffee....” Andrew was pleading again, and aware of this as he was suddenly, he began to adjust to the idea that he might as well let her go. Though he sincerely didn’t want to. “Oh, all right. I’m just....”