Dating : Home Planet

When we finish, I’m hot and panting, I want the cold sheets. I want to detach and close off, fatigued from exposure. Privately, it’s easier to think my satisfied thoughts, replay how it felt to me, picture myself as a cowboy. I drift away smiling, but in my dreams, the insecure chaos seeps back in, and I reach out again for the stranger.

But she’s not there. I guess she’s in the bathroom; the light is on. I can see the gap beneath the door is glowing and broken into Morse code by her shuffling. Her steps are tense and I can hear her rustling. Something hard plastic drops to the ground. In the silence of dawn, the sound is a boom.

I think about who she is in there, trying to be quiet. She might be one of the considerate ones. I remember Jade, who destroyed my bathroom tile with barf, and Kate, who shoved me out of my own bed for snoring. Maybe you CAN find a wife in a club I say aloud, elbowing the visual projections of my boys, smirking back at me in my mind’s eye.

Not that I was looking for a wife. Not at all. I had been lonely. I can admit that after the fact. Slamming ten beers against the despair had worked, but letting my wet mouth loosely drag on a blurred, soft stranger in a smoky club had been better. We were grinding for a good four tracks before she yanked my lapels to the exit sign. Sure, I was fucking drunk, but the smooth relief that I now had permission to leave the club got me into a cab home. Then, I finally relaxed, let myself grab and grope into the shadows of hair and eyelashes and S-shapes with the smug excitement of having caught another one. I hadn’t gotten her name, and it was only after that she said something that she developed a third dimension, became separated from the other specters that had been in her place before. With her mink eyelashes glued shut, she emitted a fermented little sigh. I peeled my eyes open and watched as her cupid lips rounded to say,“Thank you, sir.” It seemed to come out despite herself, and she had clapped her hand over her mouth. I dozed off.

Sir! She’d called me. I woke up laughing about this weird formality. With someone charming in my house, my life seems more interesting. Without knowing me, she had honored me. I feel like returning the favor, and the idea sobers me. I can stand up now. I tiptoe to the bathroom door, try to give my knock a friendly tone.

No answer. Maybe she didn’t hear. I wonder if she’s the type that’s wifey that she’d do something extra, like clean up while I’m sleeping. I’m suddenly horrified at what she may have already discovered (fleshlight), so I sing out a little “heeeeeey,” trying not to scare her.

There is a click, and the glowing crack goes dark. There is still no answer. Now I take this is a sign of unwelcome. I’m turning back to bed when the tiny me-with-devil-horns appears on my shoulder. But she’s in YOUR bathroom, he sneers. The astral, sainted version of her I had created implodes, and she becomes a thief, a witch, a black hole. A sheer panic pricks my nerves as I realize I wouldn’t be able to even describe her face to the cops once she robs me. That’s enough, I think. With one thrust, I jerk the knob and bust the door open, attempting an unpanicked, “Hey, did you fall in?” just in case I’m overreacting.

She’s there, facing away from me, but I can see in the mirror that her head is bent and her hair is covering her face. She’s holding her belly in her hands and her skin looks gray. Oh no. I think. Another barfer.

I flick the light on. “Are you okay?” I ask, but I don’t get close. “Are you sick?”

She finally responds. She shakes her head, but I can’t decide which question she is answering. I step forward and take her by the elbow, still desperate to get another look at her. “What’s wrong?” I ask, now demanding.

The freckled tip of her nose pokes out of the hair curtain. She answers, but her hair stays so still that I can’t see her mouth moving.. “Nothing’s wrong,” she says in a dry whisper. “It’s just that we forgot to use a condom.” She doesn’t sound sorry. She sounds like she is smiling.

My teeth ice over and my head pounds. Fuck I think fifty times, but I know better to say that in front of a female. Instead, I translate: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say. “I was drunk. I am sure it’s fine.” We stand in quiet for a beat. I try to find her eyes in the mirror so I can give her my puppy look, and convince her to go to the drugstore, but she’s still hanging her head. And just as my affection for her is transforming into the redhot fear of unwanted attachment, the universe splits in two.

There is a screaming, mechanical whir and her hair flies back in all directions. At first, I think she’s turned on a blowdryer, but the wind is fierce, and it condenses all around us, pulls up the loose end of the TP off the roll, and lifts the shower curtain off its rings. But what she has in her hand is not a blowdryer but some kind of staff, upon which revolves an uncased, cloudy orb, glowing blue, with pink lightning crackling inside it. The orb is charged, magnetic, every object in the room teeters with its power. Her face finally emerges from behind her hair, and she is beautiful, but her beauty slips through my fingers as the skin pulls back at her eye sockets and mouth. The flesh keeps receding until it flaps away from her jaws and stretches beyond her ears. The loose mask wafts in the wind for a beat before the last tendon is broken and her scalp rips off her skull, to flies around the room untethered. Revealed beneath is a layer of sweaty amphibian skin, shaggily striped, with one enormous amber eye framing the black, breathing slit of her pupils. The glow warms what is left of her face.

I am shocked into nothingness. I am no longer a person; I am no longer in my own home. I do not react; I do not speak. I can only bear witness. I swear this is what I saw.

The wind gathers into a tunnel of opaque vapor. It twists, wraps around the orb. She closes her eyes, and fingers of pink lighting reach from the orb and strike her, right in the belly. The crash forces the wind up into a crushing gale that takes off the roof. It leaves behind only a gaping portal into the night, shattering a few shingles on the floor in its wake. The wind’s howl is then replaced by the eager chirp of machinery, as an enormous, breathing starship fills the sky. It is twinkling like a Christmas tree, and its winding searchlights swerve and nail us. We glow orange. The light heats up, saturates, disappears everything else but her and me. It pulls, and the pressure undoes gravity. We both levitate.

As I watch, she sheds the rest of her disguise. Her tiny underwear rips away, and her smoking body contorts into backward angles. Her joints soften as if melted, her shapes lengthen, her lizard musculature emerges. She opens her newly webbed fingers to reveal her resplendent, true form. As I watch, the scaly belly swells. The alligator skin shines and her purple membrane lips smile. As she ascends, her black tongue lassoes out, torquing against the tractor beam. It wraps wetly around my neck and slaps against my cheek. Then the light lifts her back to the source, and both disappear behind the hissing sphincter of the airlock door. It’s as if she is kissed me goodbye.

Then ship sputters away, grows infinitesimal and more improbable before it fully disappears beyond the clouds. I look past the bathroom door onto my bed, in the same rumpled condition I left it in, the only evidence of her departure a layer of sawdust and a hole in the roof. I am left shivering nakedly on the bathroom floor a stray newspaper wafts in through the ceiling. I stare in the mirror, consider whether I have been drugged.

I take maybe two deep breaths before a team of police, a couple of fire engines and a fleet of ambulances arrive. A helicopter is hovering over my bathroom, chopping up the air and sending everything not nailed down flying again. Officers are screaming at me to get out, tell me there won’t be enough time to get my shoes. They threaten to shoot me when I explain that I didn’t do it! so I don’t say anything after that. With two sunglassioed policemen flanking me, and a marine, I swear to God, holding an AK-47 to my back, they lead me past my bedroom, where they were already running yellow tape and taking flash-blub pictures. Later, the guy in the ambulance gives me one of those aluminum blankets, and I feel a distant pleasure that I finally warrant one, as I had always thought they were reserved for life’s biggest victims. Still, I hide my face as my neighbors come shambling out of their houses in their slippers and glasses to see what the fuss is about, hear their guesses that I must have had “quite a night.”

Soon, two silent officers drive me to the police station in the city. I have to walk from the parking lot barefoot and my balls are freezing. The cops escort me through security and past the drunk tank to a row of desks, where they tell me to sit in an office chair with a busted pleather back. I am handed a wax cup of warm water, and told to wait, that the detective would come. Then, for some reason, the officers leave me alone in the dark. It’s still late, and the ticking clock gets loud.

Still, I’m glad to be in a police station now. I’d assumed that no one would believe me; I didn’t believe it myself. But the police had taken it more seriously than I’d seen them take anything. They hadn’t needed any convincing, wanted me to give my statement directly to a detective. I am quietly rehearsing my statement when the door clicks and the fluorescents buzz on, one by one. I hear the click of high heels on linoleum and whip around in my chair to see who’s coming.

A fox, stone-cold, the hottest cop in the hottest cop fantasy search results, someone who makes me very, very aware I am only wearing dingy Hanes and a little aluminum, is approaching me as if in slow motion, smashing a brown folder hard enough against her chest in a way that makes her titties bulge. She’s got her hair done up with a chopstick and she’s wearing a little skirt that makes her steps small and perky. I blink and try to find a cooler way to sit.

She swings the folder onto the desk and ass into her chair, doesn’t look at me yet. She pulls the chain on the desk lamp, and in the new amber light I see her fingernails are fake, long, and plastic. She sticks out her candy tongue and licks her finger, opens the folder, gives at least the impression that she is reading. It’s only when she tosses off her nerd glasses and pierces me through with her violet eyes that I notice that my knee has been bouncing.

“Mr. Rundgren, am I pronouncing that correctly?” She asks. Her voice is like the smell of leather. It riles me, makes me want to act both bad and good.

“Yes,” is the response I achieve, finally.

She reaches behind her back, tugs her blazer off at the elbows. She reveals the warm, baseball-glove brown of her gun holsters, the dark matter of two pistols. She may be encouraging me to be truthful by showing me she’s strapped, but I was already going to tell her anything she wanted.

“Mr. Rundgren,” she begins again.

“ALEX,” I accidentally scream, remembering, blasting myself up from my seat with the force of my chivalry. “You can call me Alex,” I add, fake naturally, each word parsed like an American on a Slavic sitcom.

She recalibrates, restarts her spiel. “Alex,” she says. “Why don’t you tell me what happened in your own words.” Apparently expecting a long one, she folds her hands and leans back in her chair. Even in my state, my eyes snag a glimpse as she crosses her legs.

Then I tell her everything, every detail I told you, don’t even leave out the parts about the condom. Actually, to be honest, when I tell her that part, I feel kinda funny. And even though she had her professional poker face on, her eyes sort of sizzle, too. At least I think.

When I am done, she turns her attention back to my folder. She reads, her brow furrowed, her boobs rising with each breath. When she closes it again, she tells me she’s so sorry for what I’ve been through. She doesn’t seem concerned, just tired. She yanks the chopstick out so her glossy hair falls loose. I wait. The appropriate pause time lapses, but her expression stays blank. I want to ask if she believes me, but I don’t. She knows that’s what I’m waiting for.

She turns to me, her face softens. “You must be tense, huh?” And then, I swear to God I’m not lying she reaches and touches my penis bulge through my shorts. The touch cuts through the fabric of my sanity. I am shocked into blindness, but before I can get a grip, she pulls her hand back, takes up the phone. She doesn’t dial.

“He’s all right,” she purrs, “He’s just had a few too many. Just needs a good night’s sleep.” She smiles sadly.

“Wait, what?” I shake my head, try to focus. “You don’t believe me?”

“Not at all,” she answers, and her eyes glow.“I just think you’ve had a bit of a wild night.”

I’m devastated. “But you saw my roof! Who do you think ripped a hole in my house?” I can hear that I’m squealing like a baby. “I saw what I saw!”

“I’m sure you did.” She answers and bites her lip. “But what I also know is that tonight a goose, unseen in the night sky, flew into the propellor of a Cessna Skycatcher that a trainee pilot had taken for a joyride off the airstrip on the coast. In his attempt at an emergency landing, he skidded past a subdivision and scraped the roofs off a couple of houses, and one of those houses was yours.”

I think about the aircraft I had seen, the breathing twinkling city of lights that took the lizard girl away. I try to remember the drunkest I have ever been (New Years’ 2008, puked into the quarter catcher in the subway window, screamed “Unhand me, dogs,” when the cops cuffed me). No way I was that drunk tonight.

But maybe because I’m still shocked she touched me, I don’t argue. I just ask, “So what happened to my date, then?”

Her look had pity in it. “When you said someone had flown away, the cops were

concerned that there had been a casualty. They looked for a girl, scoured the neighborhood for a trace of a body. But they didn’t find anything. So, unless she took off to Timbuktu…” she finishes with a shrug. The detective looks duller, less glossy now.

I try to remember which cop I had said that to. The cops hadn’t let me talk very much. Plus, she hadn’t really flown. I wouldn’t have said it like that. I wouldn’t have said she had flown away.

“But, she didn’t just go, she.. she changed,” I was losing my words, my tongue was thick. Maybe I was still drunk.

“I’m sure that’s how it looked,” the detective said, her thin smile hardening. “You’ve been through a lot. But think about it. Let’s take this to the logical conclusion. According to your story, she morphed into a reptile and beamed out into a spaceship, is that fair?” Her brows knit.

Hearing it like that, I can’t give the YES I want to give.

“So what, Alex, you think you’re the first man on Earth to not only discover, but also sleep with an extraterrestrial?” She tilts her head to the side. I look down at the floor tile.

After a beat, she puts a finer point on it. “You think some hot lady alien wanted to repopulate her home planet with little Alex Rundgrens?” I could hear her conviction that no woman, human or no, would choose such a fate.

“I didn’t say that,” I protest. “I just know that I hooked up with someone last night. And she’s gone.”

She sighs. Her patience expires. “Well, Alex,” she says. “Maybe if there was some evidence? Like a condom. But, alas,” Here she shrugs, pouts. “You say that you didn’t use one.”

I can see that she thinks I am a scumbag. I can’t stand the way she is making me feel like my mind is melting and my penis has Vaporub on it. The whine comes out again, “Hey, listen!” I say. “If you think I’m such a crazy liar, then why did you touch my penis?”

Her face ices, the light goes out of her eyes, her skin goes sallow. “Pardon me?” she asks, disgusted, almost breathless. “Touch your what?” She places one hand on her chest, where her ancestors once clutched their pearls, and picks up the phone again. “I think we’re done here,” she tells the other end and then raises her eyebrows at me.

She follows us out of the station into a cab. I keep my eyes on the floor. I’m rattled. I haven’t even begun to think of calling my insurance adjuster to explain I need a new roof. She thanks the cops as we pass and tells me she’s just going to see me out. She hails a taxi and holds the door as I duck in. I peer back out the grimy window to get one more look at her. She stares back, shaking her head with disgust. But guys, as I’m looking, I swear to God and all that is holy, you have to believe me, her eyes turn black.