“Not poor,” whispered Tandy. “Lucky.”
“‘The pleasure of a noisy fart and the laugh of cowboys afterward!’” said Charmat. “And of course, Tandy had to include the smell in that transmission!”
In the firelight, Fletcher saw Wanda’s features tighten and a second later heard the unmistakable sound of a fart ripping through the air.
“I can’t believe you just did that!” he said.
“I know,” said Wanda, giggling. “I scold my kids for that kind of behavior, even while I’m thinking, ‘Is that all you’ve got?’”
The aliens—and Fletcher—thought this was near the top on the humor pyramid.
“Oh,” said Charmat finally, rubbing his backside. “Please.”
Fletcher explained to Wanda that the aliens’ bebobs hurt when they laughed too hard.
“Bebobs?” said Wanda, delight caressing both syllables. “My kids will love that word!”
Charmat, who was proving to be something of a party animal, regaled them with more stories of Tandy’s transmissions—“‘Ice cream cones, Charmat—ice cream cones! With a cold sweetness that leaves a softness in your mouth when it melts, and then you get the crispy hello of the cone!’”
“You know, you’re right,” said Wanda, nodding. “If ever there was a friendly food, it would be an ice cream cone.”
Fletcher would have loved the laughs and conviviality of this beach party to go on and on, but he couldn’t ignore the anxiousness that settled in his stomach like gas. He felt like the worrisome kid at the kegger who just knew the cops were about to close in.
“Tandy,” he said, leaning toward her from his perch in the sand. “Why are you here? Here at the Indian Ocean?”
The alien-cum-Jamaican’s dark brown eyes held Fletcher’s before looking straight ahead, toward the sound of the waves.
“I love the ocean, Fletcher, and I wanted to see all seven before I die.”
The air was punched out of Fletcher—he hadn’t meant to ask a question that would return that kind of answer.
“What do you mean, die?”
Tandy waved a hand, the bracelets surrounding her thin wrist tinkling.
“Die. Expire. Cease existing. Sign off. Cash in the chips. Kick the bucket. Buy the farm—“
“Tandy, this isn’t funny!” He looked to Charmat for some indication that yes, this was a joke, a bad joke but a joke nevertheless, but in the alien’s face—not exactly built for expressiveness—Fletcher only saw sadness.
“But you’re a superior being,” said Fletcher, forcing lightness into his voice. “You guys live forever!”
“We didn’t count on how much energy it takes to be human,” said Charmat. He looked mournfully at his half-full glass before flinging the beer out into the sand. “It was a gross miscalculation on our part.”
“Well, get off Earth, then!” shouted Fletcher. “Go back to your alien form and leave!”
On Tandy’s face was a tender mix of apology and amusement.
“I can’t, mon. It’s too late.”
“We had calibrated Tandala’s energy reserve to handle all the travel in and out of parallel universes and fantasies,” said Charmat. “We thought that’s where the depletion would occur—your fantasy life is pretty dense, Fletcher, sort of like being in the thick of a jungle without a machete. But it wasn’t the zamooshing in and out of time and space that proved destructive, but what she experienced in that time and space.”
“It was all so . . . beautiful,” said Tandy.
“Too beautiful,” pronounced Charmat. “We had no idea of the depth and breadth of your fun.”
Bowing his head, Fletcher squeezed his eyes shut, so that he missed the shooting star that fell from the sky like a dud firecracker.
“Charmat,” said Tandala urgently, “it’s time.”
“Yes, I saw it,” said the Lodge leader. Silhouetted in front of the fire, he held out his long spindly arm. “Fletcher, we must go. They’re warning us to make haste.”
Tandy’s laugh was weak. “It’s always rush-rush-rush with them.”
“Okay,” said Fletcher, rising. “Tandy, put your arms around me.”
Surprise widened Tandy’s eyes. “Fletcher, I’m not going anywhere. I can’t.”
Charmat shook his head. “She hasn’t the strength to travel where we’re going.”
The panic that had been nibbling and grazing in Fletcher now burst inside him like a racehorse through an open gate.
“Well, then I’m not going! I’m not leaving her here to . . . to die by herself!”
“Fletcher, it’s all right,” said Tandy. “Please, go.”
“No!”
Regarding the sky, Charmat said with urgency, “It’s time now.”
“I’m not going!” said Fletcher, grabbing on to the arm of Tandy’s lawn chair, as if that were enough to tether him to Earth.
The alien leader moved closer. “Fletcher, we need you to make our case—”
“Take me,” said Wanda, stepping forward to meet him. “Let Fletcher stay here. I’ll go in his place!”
Fletcher felt physical pain, as if he were being ripped in two pieces. One of the pieces wanted to tackle Wanda and tell her there was no way he’d allow her to go with the alien and the other piece shouted, “Thank you!”
Light pulsed in Charmat’s forehead and a weaker one in Tandy’s answered, and the molecules in the African air throbbed and shimmered and cartwheeled and turned colors, and Fletcher cried out as he saw Wanda Plum bid him a dimpled smile before she disappeared in a swirl of pink and violet sparkles.
The wind blew at the fire again and the waves rolled into shore, their sound like ten thousand librarians, warning everyone nearby to “Shhhhhh.”
“Oh, my God,” said Fletcher, and to him the night suddenly seemed a deeper, denser black. “What have I done? What have I done?”
“You made a decision,” said Tandy. “And Wanda made hers. Don’t worry, Charmat won’t let anything harm her.”
“But where did he take her?” He began pacing by the fire. “Where are they going? Where does the Universal Head Council meet?”
“They’ll find out when they get there,” said Tandy, her voice gentle. “Just know that all will be well.”
“How can you say that? You’re dying!” Fletcher plopped down next to Tandy’s lawn chair and took her hand. “Oh, Tandy, why is this happening to you?”
“You heard Charmat. It was too much. It was like an addiction . . . an addiction to pie and I couldn’t stop at one piece—I had to have the whole pie.” She chuckled. “The whole beautiful, fantastic, amazing, and immeasurably fun love pie.”
“I’d like to kill that Clarence!”
Tandy’s laugh was three low notes in her chest. “Don’t blame Clarence—you were an even bigger piece of it.”
Fletcher snorted, mucus burbling in his nostrils.
“Don’t tease me now, Tandy.”
“Fletch-aire.” Her voice was both a scolding and a caress. Pushing her elbows against the metal arms of the chair, she straightened up, but the effort tired her and she sunk back down.
“Would you . . . would you hold me, Fletcher?”
A sudden gust of wind ruffled through the air and the flames of the fire leaned sideways before rising up again.
“Of course, Tandy.” Fletcher wrapped one arm around her back and the other under her knees and when he lifted her, he forced himself not to cry out. The Jamaican had lost most of her curves and felt as light as a gourd.
He stood by the fire, his body naturally falling into the rocking motion parents use when comforting a baby. A light in Tandy’s forehead pulsed.
“Fletcher, I’m sorry you felt I deserted you sometimes—”
“Don’t even—
“It’s just that I knew you didn’t need constant supervision. And there was so much to explore!”
A sob rose out of Fletcher’s throat and Tandy placed a hand on his cheek.
“Shhhh,” she whispere
d and Fletcher smelled the beer on her breath, and underneath it, lemonade, strawberries, black licorice, and movie popcorn.
I bet I smell like all sorts of things.
“Umm-hmm,” said Fletcher, inhaling. “Jordan almonds and jasmine and lake water and rodeo dust, and—”
I’ve been collecting favorite scents as souvenirs.
“Hey!” said Fletcher. “You talked but I didn’t see your mouth move.”
That’s right, it’ll conserve energy if I communicate telepathically now. It saves me the strain of translation. She leaned her head against Fletcher’s shoulder. Let’s walk toward the ocean.
“Aw, Tandy.” He shifted her in his arms, and as he began walking, he thought that his sadness weighed him down far more than she did. “Can’t you do something—can’t I do something to make you better?”
Fletcher, you mustn’t worry about me. I’m leaving here wanting nothing—except more! Just because it was all so wonderfully . . . earthful!
Away from the fire, the air was chilly, and as he walked Fletcher held Tandy tighter, wanting to keep her warm. When he heard a rasping breath deep in his ears, he was alarmed and tipped back his head to look at Tandy’s face.
The alien tried to smile, but it was too big an effort, like setting a two-hundred-fifty-pound weight in front of an octogenarian and asking her to bench-press it.
Fletcher, let’s go to the water now.
He didn’t know why, but the request filled him with dread.
Don’t be afraid, Fletcher, there isn’t time. And the reason there’s not time is entirely because of me—I should have prepared you better, but I can’t seem to escape Lodge 1212’s reputation for screwing things up. I’d love to have a long, heartfelt good-bye and tell you all sorts of things—but you already know them. So I’ll tell you what you don’t know: your fate’s being decided right now by the Head Council.
“My fate!” Fletcher’s feet, in Mr. Plum’s patent leather loafers, slipped in the sand.
Don’t drop me yet, Fletcher!
The faint bells of her laughter rang inside his head.
And let me just tell you, Fletcher . . . oh, look, we’re here!
They were at the water’s edge, and the tide curled up around Fletcher’s feet.
“Tandy, I don’t want you to go!”
Fletcher—mystery and magic. They’re everywhere, in everyone. Notice them.
“Tandy, if I could just get you to a doctor—”
There was the faint sound of a calliope, Tandy’s laughter.
I’d like to see the face of the doctor who’d examine me!
Fletcher heard the sound of labored breathing in his ear.
That saying, ‘You’ll always be in my heart’? It’s true, Fletcher, I’ll always be here.
He felt the warm imprint of a palm on his chest.
“I don’t want you in my heart! I want you here in the world with me!”
Fletcher, I just want to say thank you . . . and congratulations.
“Congratulations? For what?”
Fletcher felt Tandy in his arms, saw Tandy in his arms, and a second later he didn’t. It was as if the water took her as easily as it tucked a shell into the pocket of a wave and took it out to sea. Where there had been two figures on a remote beach in Mozambique, there was now one, and Fletcher stood looking out at a horizon he couldn’t see, listening to the churns and sighs of the tide.
Finally, he kneeled and cupping his hands lifted a handful of water to his face. As the water dribbled out between his fingers, he remembered Tandy, on the boat at Lake WoogiWikki.
“It’s true,” he said. “The ocean tastes like tears.”
20
There was no way Wanda Plum could take in all that she experienced, but hers was such a sensible nature that she offered herself the same counsel she gave her students: you can only do what you can do.
I’m not an astrophysicist, after all; I’m a second grade teacher and I will call on all my skills as such!
Don’t make room for fear now—it is an unwelcome guest that demands attention you can’t spare!
This is the opportunity of a lifetime!
These and dozens of affirmations rang through her head as Charmat whisked her into the vortex of outer space, to a place where the air was so dense she felt she might smother and yet so light she felt it was dancing through her.
And when the whole mind-bending/-blowing experience was over, Charmat had, like a professional ballroom dancer, zamooshed Wanda back so smoothly that when she landed on her dining room chair, it was as if she had been swept in on a breath rather than by a tornado. She had been more jarred making stops at red lights in her Volkswagen Beetle.
Charmat resisted her offer of coffee as they tiptoed into the kitchen but did agree to a loaf of banana bread to go. Bowing with the courtliness that is inherent in many leaders, human or alien, he told her he had to get back to his Lodge to apprise them of what had happened at the Head Council and on Mozambique.
“Tandy is . . . ,” said Wanda and when Charmat nodded, her hand went to her chest, as if to stanch the hurt.
“But just because she’s dead doesn’t mean she’s done for,” said Charmat, his voice wavering. “For all the superiority of our cosmic Lodge brothers and sisters, no one has been able to answer the what-happens-next question.”
“I like that mystery,” said Wanda.
“And I like you. Fletcher did well to find you, for you are—even with your human handicap—a superior being.”
“Thank you,” said Wanda, and her smile was so pretty and her dimples so deep that Charmat’s forehead pulsed, taking a picture he didn’t want to forget. Taking one of her hands and pursing the slit that was his mouth, he kissed it.
“Until next time.”
“I hope there is one,” said Wanda, and after the alien leader whispered something in her ear, he—and the loaf of banana bread—swirled and sparkled into nothingness.
“I have got to write this down,” she said aloud, but first she washed her hands, because after all, she had no idea what she had just been exposed to, and it was always better to be safe than sorry.
Satisfied all outer-space germs had been scrubbed away, she set up her portable typewriter on the kitchen table.
Dear Fletcher,
she typed, her flying fingers keeping pace with her thoughts.
I wish I had had a film crew with me to document all I saw and heard, but I will do my best to relay what happened at the Head Council meeting. Right now I feel like a giant dryer and everything is tumbling and spinning inside me, but as I tell my students (and told you once), “Begin at the beginning.”
The zamoosh felt as if I were not just a rocket but a rocket whose propellant didn’t come from the fossils of some slow, plodding dinosaur but from the sun. Really, I felt a yellow blast that turned blindingly white, and then I was off into a darkness I didn’t know could exist. But that’s what the entire experience was often like. I’d feel like I was upside down at the same time I felt right side up!
When I felt as if motion had stopped (and yet felt movement I couldn’t see all around me), Charmat and I were in a room with no walls. He was no longer the alien who looked as if he’d stepped off a movie set; he was a ball of light. I was, too, and oh my, gosh, Fletcher, the sensation of my body being nothing but a glowing sphere! It was like being one enormous electric shock, only it didn’t hurt. It was as if I had the power of a volcano while my entire body weight was less than a gnat’s. There were twenty other balls (I counted) and they vibrated and hummed and dipped and darted in the room, and then I got a sense of weight, as if something very important—a cloud of knowledge—had descended on us. And then the room with no walls formed walls and the balls of light became shapes and we were all sitting at a conference table!
Looking into its reflective surface, I could see I was no longer a round glimmer of light but myself. And surprisingly, considering the speed in which I traveled, my hair looked none the worse for wea
r.
“All of this, of course, is a nod to you Earthlings,” said the apparent leader, waving a one-fingered hand at the thermos pots of coffee and legal pads on the table, a flow chart positioned nearby. Like the aliens that sat on either side of her (I took her to be female on the basis of her high voice—you of course know that these aliens manifest themselves with no marked characteristics denoting gender), she was wearing a cap—which looked, by the way, like those worn by the Green Berets—with the letters UHC sewn on.
Across from me sat an Asian gentlemen, quite nervous, adjusting his glasses every which way, as if pushing them a centimeter to the left or right would make all that he was seeing make sense. Next to him was an alien (all of them, except for slight color variations, looked just like Charmat and wore their lodge numbers) and next to the alien was a silver-haired woman, wearing a ski sweater and a bemused look on her face. Another alien, then a dog! A well-behaved golden retriever, who sat on his chair with great nonchalance, as if dogs everywhere sat at conference tables in outer space (although, come to think of it, humans are probably aliens to them anyway).
All in all, there were, including me and the dog, seven Earthlings. A beautiful woman with a headscarf and kohl-rimmed eyes. A very large man who shifted in his chair as if it were impossible to get comfortable. Another man tapped his fingers on the table—he was as black as Tandy but as thin as she wasn’t. And me. I think we would have been friendlier to one another if we weren’t so discombobulated. In any case, we sat silently, with our particular fidgets, until the alien who sat at the head of the table spoke.
“Welcome,” she said. “I am Borlot, Acting Chair of the Universal Head Council. And for those of you like me who appreciate knowing where you are, we are presently in between Saturn’s Ring A and Ring B because we find the light so flattering—but we could easily move if anyone gets chilly.
“We are aware you have traveled far and thank you for your participation in what we hope will be the commencement of a new age in Universal understanding. You were screened carefully, and we look forward to hearing what you have to offer us.
Mayor of the Universe Page 27
