The Chronotope and Other Speculative Fictions

by Michael Hemmingson

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Nice tequila bottle,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “yes, it is.”

  I took a drink. She was just looking at me. “Would you like some?” I said.

  “Sure.” She tossed her beer away, took the bottle, and took a good long swig.

  “So,” I said, looking at all the people here.

  “Where’s Ginny?” she asked.

  “Not here.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s not—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “What?”

  We looked at one another. What the hell was going on here?

  “I know this spot,” she said. “Do you want to go?”

  Oh, yes I did.

  XIV.

  “She takes my hand,” I said to Craig. “My hand is in her small hand, and we’re leaving the general party area. She seems to know where she’s going. She knows this place well. I’ve only been up here a few times. She’s been up here many times. She’s gotten fucked-up up here, I know, she’s been drunk and smoked pot and maybe even had sex with a few guys. Then she says something to me which scares me. Like she’s reading my mind. She says, ‘Yes, I’ve been up here many times.’ We’re on the other side of the park, alone, and it’s dark, and we can see almost all of the city—at least this part of the city on this side. Helen and I sit under a tree, and we drink from the tequila bottle.”

  XV.

  “It’s nice here,” I said to her.

  “Put your arm around me,” Helen said.

  I did.

  She leaned into me. “That’s nice.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve seen it in your eyes. I’ve felt you looking at me.”

  “What?”

  “I know,” she said, and kissed me.

  I was nervous.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m being abrupt,” she said.

  I kissed her. It was a long kiss. She stopped me.

  “I know what you want, David,” she said.

  “You think I’m bad,” I said. “Here I am, with you here, and I have a girlfriend—”

  “And she’s pregnant,” Helen said.

  “What?”

  She smiled. “Come on.”

  “How’d—how’d you know?”

  “Girls know,” she laughed. “And I’m psychic.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  We were silent, and both took drinks from the bottle.

  “I’ve seen her sick in the bathroom,” Helen said. “I’ve seen her eating crackers. It’s so obvious.”

  “Oh,” I said, and drank.

  “You’re not ready,” she said.

  “No.”

  “It sucks.”

  “It does.”

  “I like you.”

  “You should’ve been my prom date,” I said suddenly.

  “No,” she said, “no. And,” she said, “you don’t love me.”

  “I do love you.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve been in my dreams,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “because you keep thinking about me. I feel your thoughts. So I go into your dreams.”

  We drank.

  I laughed. “Are you a witch?”

  “You’re getting drunk.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Get drunk with me.”

  “I will.”

  “And?”

  “And?”

  “And,” I said.

  “You want to screw me,” Helen said. “That’s all you really want.”

  XVI.

  “And?” Craig said.

  I was silent, which prompted him.

  “We’re kissing,” I said. “Man, are we kissing. Her lipstick is all over me, and her perfume. I’m grabbing at her tits and she’s rubbing my cock. I try to unzip her dress, from the back. Then something funny happens. Helen pushes me away, she has this weird look on her face. I ask her what’s wrong. She says, ‘There is much you don’t understand.’ She doesn’t seem drunk anymore. She says, ‘Look up at the sky.’ I look. And I see it. My God, I see it!”

  “The UFO?”

  “YES! It’s right there, hovering near us. Well—not at first. At first, it’s just this glowing dot in the sky, moving strangely. Then it gets bigger, coming toward us. Then it is there. Huge. Disk-shaped. Flying saucer, but really just a lot of glowing light. I look at Helen and she’s smiling. ‘I have to go,’ she says, ‘do you want to go with me?’

  “The light is intense, too intense. It hurts my eyes. I scream. I’m scared. NO! NO! THIS ISN’T WHAT I WANT!”

  I screamed.

  “David,” Craig said, “you’re coming out from the memory on the count of three—one, two, three!” He clapped his hands.

  I caught my breath. “Shit.”

  XVII.

  “Shit,” Anne said, “you’re bullshitting me.”

  “No,” I said, “I remember now.”

  “So there’s this UFO there, and she what?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “and she tells me, ‘I have to go home now, I have to return to my people.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ and Helen says, ‘I was hoping we’d have a moment, but my people are calling me back.’ The next thing I know, she’s standing under the ship, and this beam of light comes down, engulfing her, and she disappears.”

  “And?”

  “And then I watch the UFO fly away.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I remember walking back to the party. The cops were there, dispersing people. Mark grabbed me and said, ‘Let’s go!’ In the car, he said, ‘Where the hell did you take off to?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And I really didn’t. I was in a daze. Mark thought I was drunk off my ass.”

  “And Ginny was at the motel room.”

  “Yes.”

  XVIII.

  Ginny wasn’t in bed. The bathroom door was closed, and I heard her crying. The door was locked.

  “Ginny,” I said.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “Let me in,” I said.

  “No,” she said, crying.

  “LET ME IN!”

  She opened the door. She was a mess. She pointed to the toilet. There was blood everywhere.

  “It’s gone,” she said.

  XIX.

  Anne and I washed the dinner dishes together.

  “She had a miscarriage,” Anne said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “How’d you feel?”

  “I don’t know. Remorse, in a way. It was our baby. But also relief. I wasn’t going to be a father. I didn’t have to tell my parents anything. Responsibility was gone. I was free. I looked into Ginny’s eyes and I saw the same, but I also saw a mother who’d lost a child. I think I aged five years in that single moment.”

  “You were too young. You weren’t ready, either of you. Think of what your life, your life and her life, would be like right now.”

  “Sometimes I think about it,” I said.

  “So what happens next in the story?”

  “What happens next,” I said, my hands covered in soap suds. “We still lived a secret life. We couldn’t tell anyone, and I called an ambulance to take her to the hospital. They cleaned her out. Prom night was over. She started to go to church a few weeks later. She said God was telling us something. She became Born-Again. She wanted me to join. I wasn’t into Jesus and sin. We broke up, I guess. She met a guy in church, he got her pregnant. They got married. I went to state college.”

  “Helen?”

  “Never saw or talked to her again.”

  “She went back to her planet,” Anne laughed.

  “Sure.”

  “Sorry.”

  Anne and I went to the bedroom. We undressed, and got into bed.

  “Senior prom,” Anne said. “I went with a jack whose only interest was to shove himself up my
cunt. Do you want to make love?”

  My hand was on the wiry pubic hair of her sex. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not in the mood. I will if you want to.”

  “I’m not in the mood,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “Oh God,” I laughed.

  “Oh God is right.”

  “We’re talking like some kind of old married couple,” I laughed.

  “We’re comfortable,” she said, hugging me.

  We made love anyway.

  “What about,” I started to say.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  “Tell me, dammit.”

  “Solid Bill,” I said.

  “There is no Bill no more,” she said softly.

  XX.

  I drove up to Presidio Park the next night. It was mid-week and there were a few high school kids drinking beer and hanging out. I parked my car, and started walking to the place Helen took me to thirteen years ago. I hadn’t been up here since. I had a small bottle of tequila in my jacket. I found the tree Helen and I had sat under, and I sat. The tree looked the same, if memory serve me. Memory was my nemesis, this I knew. So I drank. I tried to think of Helen’s kisses, her skin, the way she smelled, the way her tits felt. I knew those sensations during my hypnosis sensation, but I couldn’t grasp them now. I could only think of the way Ginny felt, tasted, and smelled. I looked at the city. The sky was mostly clear, a few clouds. Lots of stars, as always. I imagined one star coming alive, and getting bigger, and coming near me. It’s a ship. And Helen gets out. “Hello, old friend,” she says, all dressed up in a silver suit.

  I finished the bottle.

  None of it ever happened, of course. It was just a way to escape.

  I needed to get more in tune with reality.

  Walking back to my car, I passed a young couple heading for my tree. I smiled at them. The boy looked away, the girl smiled back—bashfully. I was just some old geek to them, I’m sure.

  I got into my car, and drove home.

  From the sky, a flying, glowing disk appeared, and hovered for a moment over my car, and flew away.

  I got out, and watched it.

  I went to the flower store. They were just about to close. I bought a bouquet of tulips and sunflowers. I hate roses. Ginny loved roses. I remember, once, seeing Helen walking to a class, holding a sunflower someone had given her.

  Anne was watching TV when I got home. A game show.

  “We’re in the wrong universe, David,” she said.

  “These are yours, please,” I said.

  She took the flowers, and she kissed me.

  —May, 1998

  San Diego

  SOMETHING WEIRD HAPPENED ON THE WAY BACK FROM BORREGO SPRINGS

  OR, BUD THE MOTHMAN IN LOVE

  I.

  When the UFO passed over me, my entire sense of reality took a good crack in the jaw by the gnarly-knuckled fist of Fate.

  I was driving from the desert, a two-hour trip back into the city, being unfaithful to my wife—with a woman from my past.

  I’d been seeing Katie five months now; twice a week I went out to her desert home, spending the day with her, sometimes even the night—if it seemed right, if circumstances permitted. I was an investigative reporter for San Diego’s largest newspaper, and the excuse of an assignment or research allotted me time for extramarital activity.

  I’m not sure if my wife, Sheila, cared. Our marriage had been falling apart for some time; and was, I knew now, a mistake from the beginning.

  I didn’t know how to get out.

  I’d been unfaithful to her before: the impromptu one-night stand, the occasional married friend who also wanted a mutual break from the spouse. I didn’t doubt Sheila had done the same…I didn’t blame her if she did.

  I didn’t care.

  Katie was different. I knew her from before, another life; she wasn’t a lover, she was my first wife’s best friend.

  I was driving back from the Anza-Borrego desert, from a little town called Borrego Springs, heading into San Diego, not sure what reality was anymore, when reality got weird.

  The UFO was big, black, and triangular, the way some of these UFOs tend to be.

  II.

  “Just tell me,” I said to Katie, before I left, “and I’ll do it.”

  She smiled, pushing her curly blonde hair from her eyes. All she wore was a long beige skirt. Her breasts pressed into me. “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me to leave Sheila,” I said.

  “I’m not going to tell you to do anything. If you want to leave her, leave her. That’s a decision you have to make on your own.”

  “Don’t you want me to leave her?”

  “I want you to do what you feel you want to do,” adding: “and need to do.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that I’m married?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  We were lapsing into a conversation we’d had many times, as lovers tend to do. I just didn’t understand her position. And I told her this, too.

  She sighed, and slipped a t-shirt on. “I’ve been in a lot of relationships, Neil. Good, bad, beautiful, and ugly. What do we have? We have the good and the beautiful. We love each other. You’re in a bad marriage. Being here with me is good for you. And it’s good for me. I was celibate for three years out here, all alone. But do you really think if you got a divorce and came out here more often things would remain so nice and wonderful? One of the reasons it works is because we see each other twice a week, under a time constraint, so we’re always missing each other, and every moment is.…” She smiled. She didn’t have to go on.

  “I’ll still only come out twice a week,” I told her.

  “No, it’ll be more often. You’ll spend several nights, maybe a whole week, maybe two weeks. At first, it’ll be great. But then.…”

  “Then?”

  “I really need a lot of private time and space,” Katie said. “You haven’t seen my bad side.”

  “You don’t have a bad side.”

  “Oh yes I do,” she said, seriously.

  “I’m just confused,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “So am I. That’s part of it.”

  “Part of ‘it’?”

  Shrug, and, “Everything.”

  “Maybe it’s the mid-life crisis thing on the horizon,” I said. “I’ll be forty soon.”

  “Me too.”

  I hate these moments. I said, “Guess I should go.”

  She held out her arms. I went to her. We kissed.

  Katie said, “Then again, I could be wrong, and we might be able to spend life together in bliss, forever in an embrace.”

  “See you Thursday,” I said.

  “Thursday,” she said.

  III.

  It was a moonless, star-filled night. My car went dead. The black triangle was about fifty feet above the ground. I got out and looked at it. It was several hundred feet long. It didn’t make a sound. I’d heard about flying aircraft such as this, like on the Art Bell show. I’d read about them here and there, even through faxes that came into the newspaper offices late at night, often small towns with a great number of witnesses, outlandish stories that always disappeared.

  I told myself it was a stealth military craft. There were secret bases out here in the desert, the military had them everywhere. I never doubted sighting stories, there were just too many; but I also knew our military was testing a whole lot of goodies it didn’t want to make public.

  The black triangle disappeared.

  One moment it was there, the next it was gone. Poof. So long.

  A greenish-purplish ripple followed, like a jagged line in the sky, small at first, getting larger, coming toward me.

  The ground below me rippled as well, like waves, like a silent earthquake. I lost my balance. I saw my car shaking.

  Then it stopped.

  Everything was quiet.

/>   The stars twinkled, etc.

  I felt sick. I was dizzy; my stomach was twisting in on itself. I thought I was going to vomit. I tried. I didn’t.

  I sat there on the ground for a minute.

  I got up, went back to my car; didn’t know if it would start.

  It did.

  I slowly started driving away, back on course for home.

  Ten minutes later, I retrieved my cell phone from the glove compartment and called Katie. “You won’t believe what just happened to me.”

  “Neil? I can’t talk right now.”

  “What?”

  “I just can’t.”

  “You want to hear this,” I said.

  “Neil, I cannot talk.…”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Call me tomorrow.”

  “When?”

  “Whenever,” she said, and, “sorry,” and hung up.

  I saw what looked like a hitchhiker up ahead. It was. It wasn’t quite human, either. It wore a shabby suit, and stood on two legs, but had a long green tail and three elongated heads three times the size of a human being’s head; each head had three eyes and three mouths with rows of shiny sharp teeth, like something out of a wild Saturday cartoon. It held out a very long arm with a very long thumb and was staring intently as I drove by.

  I drove by fast and delirious.

  I saw it again a mile up. Or another creature like it. Better suit, same appearance.

  “HEY,” all nine mouths of the three heads yelled, “GIVE ME A LIFT!”

  “Right,” I said.

  My iPhone rang. I hoped it was Katie. “Yeah.”

  A robotic-sounding male voice said: “Take this advice: do not talk about what you just saw.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do not think about it, do not utter a word, pretend it was all a dream.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Listen and be smart,” the robotic voice said, “do not talk about what you just saw, to anyone. You called your girlfriend, you were going to tell her. Do not do that again.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “and what did I just see?”

  I passed another thumbing three-head, three eyed, three-mouthed, now wearing an Armani.

  “Do not play games,” said the voice.

  “Who the hell is this?” I demanded.