by Ben Adams
Oscar Ramirez took me to a tent by the lake which was to become my home. My belongings had already been arranged inside. I tossed my jacket on the canvas cot and walked outside to survey my new surroundings. The lake was very inviting. It wasn’t very large, and I could see land on the other side and the mountains in the distance. Men were net casting off canoes and some were hauling their catches back to shore.
Feeling thirsty, I walked down to the water. I knelt and scooped some water with my hand. It was cool, and stung my dry, cracked lips, and soothed my throat as it slid down. I drank another handful, and then another. The more I drank, the more I wanted. Eventually, I succumbed to my thirst and submerged my head in the cool water. When I couldn’t drink anymore, I lifted my head and coughed for air.
I collapsed with joy on the grassy bank of the lake. My head was soaked and my belly was full of liquid. And I laughed, not at myself, or anything, really, but rather at life. For the first time in a long while, I felt alive. These people were fisherman, farmers, not Mrs. Lincoln’s spirit army. My mission was the fool’s errand Secretary Seward suspected it to be, and I did not care.
When I sat up to let the sun dry my face, I was approached by a mysterious creature. Its silhouette blocked the sun. I held my hand above my eyes and shielded myself from sunlight, but still couldn’t make out what was before me. Then it bent down, revealing itself to be the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She smelled like lavender on a spring morning.
I tried to introduce myself, but stammered repeatedly. Finally she spoke, saying that she’d come to invite me to breakfast on behalf of her father, Oscar Ramirez, and that she was his daughter, Louisa.
At breakfast, I sat next to Oscar Ramirez, who was to become my benefactor. I was to go to him if I needed anything. I planned on visiting him often, although it would be to visit his daughter, Louisa.
December 18, 1862
I had been living in this new community for a few months and was trying to learn as much as I could about them, but so much remained a mystery.
My afternoons and evenings were spent with Louisa. She apparently taught astronomy. She would tell me about the constellations, how far they were from Earth, how their light took millions of years to reach us, and how those stars no longer existed. In the evening, she would teach the children about celestial bodies. She pointed out one in particular, Sagittarius, telling them to look to it and to wave when they felt alone, that someone was waving back. I thought it was mere whimsy, but the children took the lesson to heart, waving to the night sky.
One evening, a young girl named Rosa Jimenez approached us. She asked me if I wanted to marry Louisa. I had the sneaking suspicion that others had been discussing this topic. I told her that, yes, I did indeed wish to marry Louisa. Rosa became very excited. She jumped up and down and ran back to the village.
After dinner, Louisa and I walked hand in hand by the lake. The sun had set and stars shot across the sky. I told her I intended to ask her father for her hand. She smiled and put her head on my shoulder, saying that would make her very happy. I kissed her. Louisa sighed and we spent the rest of the evening making love under a meteor shower.
That night, I was woken by the sound of an animal growling outside my tent. I grabbed my pistol and pointed it at the tent’s entrance. I am not a brave man, but Louisa was sleeping next to me, and I was not going to let anything happen to her. I summoned what courage I could and got out of bed. I opened the flap of the tent and walked outside.
Standing outside my tent, I looked around, the pistol shaking in my hand. My ears throbbed with the sound of my heartbeat. My breath, quick and heavy, floated aimlessly in the cool night air. In the black night, a set of red eyes approached. I was about to fire, when I grew suddenly calm. My breath slowed, as did my pulse. My hand stopped shaking and I lowered the firearm.
A mountain lion walked out of the shadows. It growled and hissed as it approached. It paced back and forth in front of my tent. Then it raised itself onto its hind legs. Its snout receded and its hair shrank. The front paws split, forming five fingers. However, the most jarring transformation happened to its hind legs. The mountain lion’s knees dislocated, moving forward with a loud, popping sound, forming human legs. In a matter of seconds, the beast had transformed into a man I knew very well: Jonathon Deerfoot.
Jonathon Deerfoot addressed me, saying it was time he answered my questions. We walked in silence to the one-room building I’d been in when I first came to the village. Clothes were bundled on the desk. Once dressed, Jonathon Deerfoot sat behind the desk, putting his elbows on it, and folding his hands. I sat in a chair opposite him.
I thought Jonathon Deerfoot intended to discuss my desire to marry Louisa, but I quickly realized there were other matters requiring discourse.
He told me his people’s history. He said they were colonists from another world who had arrived here one hundred and two years ago. They traveled across the galaxy instantaneously by opening a hole in space, bridging the distances. They were required to leave most of their technological devices behind, including the device that helped them bridge space, and, as a result, were stranded here until the next wave of colonists arrived. However, he added, what foreign machinery they were able to bring enabled them to make the desert hospitable by manipulating and reshaping the natural landscape.
I wondered what else they could do.
He sighed deeply and said that before they left for Earth, his people were given certain abilities that aided in colonization. They could alter their appearance to resemble the indigenous life of whatever planet they were colonizing. They could heal from wounds and had learned to slow their aging process. Jonathon Deerfoot confessed that he was roughly three hundred years old. He also said that they could communicate telepathically and could send their minds anywhere they chose, that they could even affect our dreams, which is how he was able to visit me in Texas, and how they were able to convince the Lincolns that the ghost of their late son wanted them to send someone to find a spirit army, but they couldn’t control the minds of others. Instead, he said, they were given an advanced pheromone system, enabling them to release pheromones that affect our moods, making us calm, afraid, or amorous, all with merely their scent.
I asked him why they had chosen Earth to colonize. Jonathon Deerfoot said they chose planets where the indigenous population was still in its technological infancy. These planets were easy to infiltrate because the inhabitants hadn’t developed the mechanisms to detect the colonists, and that by the time they did, his people were already positioned to take over.
I asked if he intended to make war on humanity. He told me that I misunderstood him, that they didn’t colonize through violence, the way we had been colonizing the West. They colonized through an involved, selective breeding process, creating a new species that would eventually replace humanity. However, the process took time, and it was often centuries before they prepared a world for the next wave of colonists. They had colonized thousands of planets this way, and it brought peace to many troubled sectors in the galaxy.
I asked him if humanity should have a choice in the matter. He asked me which would I prefer, peace, or the destruction of the planet. I told him, if those were my options, then I’d choose peace, but there are some who will not make that concession, that their independence is important to them, even if it means their demise.
Jonathon Deerfoot said there will come a time when the planet’s population is connected telepathically, and that this connectivity will help them realize that they are not isolated groups, separated by land or language, religion, or access to resources, but that they are one people, the inhabitants of a planet whose unified efforts toward their advancement are stronger than a few, loud voices demanding autonomy. He said this is why they chose to colonize Earth, so that one day we will understand the peace that comes from unity.
And then I realized that my initial assessment of our conversation was correct. We were discussing my desire to marry Louisa. Jona
thon Deerfoot wanted me to mate with Louisa so that our children would be the first generation of a new species.
I asked him why he chose me for this. Jonathon Deerfoot said when they initially visited the Lincolns’s dreams, it was to convince them to send someone who his people hoped would be suitable for crossbreeding. After my visit to the White House, they visited Mrs. Lincoln again. When she told them she’d sent me to find them, they searched my mind while I slept and found I was someone who was relatively intelligent, with a gentle temperament, ideal qualities for a crossbreeding candidate.
I asked if Louisa knew about their plan. He said she did. I then asked if she altered her pheromones so I would fall in love with her. Again, he said she did, but quickly added that Louisa volunteered for this mission because she loved me, that she fell in love with me the first moment she entered my mind, and she only used the scent because she was unsure that I would reciprocate her feelings.
I told him she didn’t need to do that. I would have fallen in love with her regardless, and added that I will love her until I die.
Jonathon Deerfoot smiled and walked me outside.
My wagon was waiting for me, stocked with enough supplies to last several months. Louisa sat on the bench seat, looking beautiful. She had a flower behind her ear.
I pulled myself onto the wagon, next to my bride. There was no official ceremony. Louisa told me that their culture did not require formalities, that devotion of the heart was enough for a union.
We decided to ride north to Denver City, in Colorado territory. On our way out of town I asked Louisa if she would miss her family. She looked at me and said that they would always be with her and she could visit them anytime she wished. I asked her how she could do this. She replied by tapping the side of her head and saying, the same way she fell in love with me.
John flipped back a few pages and found it buried in a paragraph. Her name made the surrounding scribbles inconsequential. He overflowed with joy and hope, anxiety and inadequacies. He read the section again, making sure he’d read correctly.
Rosa Jimenez.
Archibald had written her full name.
John put the journal away as the sheriff turned onto I-25, an interstate road running north-south, separating town from wasteland. But the road had failed to keep decay from consuming homes, mobile or otherwise, and parts of town had broken and drifted into endless desert. History decomposing.
“This is where the world comes to die,” John said.
They turned east, onto Highway 104, then onto a dirt road, and stopped in front of a rusty fence, waist-high, with thin, iron bars running its length. It looked fragile, like an autumn leaf breaking between fingers, red flakes ready for ground. The old gate was sealed with a chain and a rusty, unbolted Masterlock. John got out, opened it. The hinges screeched under pressure.
They followed bald earth for a few miles, unsure if they were on a road or were lost, two more victims of the desert. Then, on the horizon, a growing blackness absorbing everything, grass, light, dirt.
Professor Gentry’s home.
From a distance it shined like black steel. As they drove closer, they saw that it wasn’t steel, but old tires, steel radials.
Stopping in front of the tire wall, they got out of the squad car. Professor Gentry hadn’t built a home, he’d built a fortress. Out of used tires, staggered and mortared. The wall was over twenty feet tall, at least fifty yards wide, running in a circle, like a structure in John’s Found Object Architecture 103 textbook.
John put his hand on it and pushed a little, testing its sturdiness. He could climb it like he did the trees in Cheesman Park when he was younger and his mother would take him there for weekend picnics of baloney sandwiches, Shasta lemon-lime soda, and off-brand pudding pops, and tell him stories about his father, hoping John would grow to love the vanished man based on her recollections and not recent events. Instead, John would run and climb the oaks and maples, escaping story time. John slapped the tire wall and decided against climbing it. Whatever hermit lived on the other side was hiding from something, possible everything, and they needed his help.
“So, how do you think we get in?” Sheriff Masters asked.
“Knock,” John joked, pointing to another iron gate that led inside, only this one looked new, a crisp, metal barrier. It was the height of the wall and solid steel. On the left side of the gate was a small speaker with a little red button with the word ‘Press’ on it.
The sheriff pressed it. Nothing happened.
“I knew this was a waste of time,” John said, walking back to the car, convinced that Mrs. Morris intentionally gave them the wrong address so he’d be forced to go back to her home, and she could tell him about her dream Roswell getaway, an all-inclusive vacation including crotchless spacesuits, alien themed sex toys, and scrapbooking.
“Hello,” said a crackly voice from the speaker.
“Uh, hello,” the sheriff said.
“You have to…button…talk.”
“Oh, okay,” the sheriff said. He pushed the button and began speaking. “Hello, Professor Gentry? My name is Sheriff Masters. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“There’s no…here by…name. Please…away.”
“Professor Gentry, we’d really like to ask you some questions about Elvis and the government.”
“Like…said, there’s no one…name. Please...away. Thank you.”
“Professor Gentry, Mrs. Morris seemed certain you were the guy to talk to. Could we please come in for a moment? It’ll only take a second.”
“Mrs. Morris? Why…you say so. Get…your car…park next to…”
The speaker buzzed and they heard sound of iron gears turning, like a giant watch winding. The large iron gate slowly opened, revealing a hill covered in dry New Mexico grass, brown and dead.
A small mobile home sat on top of the hill like an old man in a beach chair watching alternative news reports on his phone. Aluminum-foil-wrapped bars barricaded windows. Several satellite dishes of mixed sizes were planted on top of and around the home. They were pointed skyward, receiving transmissions. A stone path led from the bottom of the hill to the trailer.
“Jesus. This place looks like a meth lab,” John said.
“Where the hell did he say to park?” Sheriff Masters asked, driving through the gate, scanning the brittle weeds and compressed rubble in the lot.
“I don’t really think it matters. Just park over there.” John pointed to an old, beat-up Chevy pick-up rusting at the foot of the hill. They’d hiked halfway up the path when the door opened.
A large head with thick gray hair emerged from behind the screen door. A dense beard climbed his cheeks, covering over half of his face. Pop-bottle glasses guarded the only hairless skin. His eyebrows, like fuzzy pipe cleaners, swept across his forehead as he scanned his yard, suspicious of something that wasn’t there.
“Professor Gentry?”
“Sheriff Masters?” he asked. “Were you followed?”
“No.”
“You sure?” He scrutinized the yard sealed in Goodyears, Michelins, Firestones, and other brands.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
“Yeah, right. They always follow. Who’s that with you?”
“John Abernathy, Professor. Nice to meet you,” John said, attempting to compensate for whatever phantom threat had put Professor Gentry on edge.
“Abernathy?” Professor Gentry stepped onto the yard. He was short, around 5’3”. Thick, black hair poked above the collar of his black t-shirt like weeds next to a fence. “Son of a bitch.”
“Cape Canaveral. Nice.” John pointed to Professor Gentry’s black t-shirt. The logo and setting of the popular sixties TV show was printed on it.
“You know, I used to work for the actress that played Lieutenant Megan Strata. She had a pair of Bichon Frises. Adorable animals, but noisy. They barked at everything.”
“What exactly are you a professor of?” John asked.
“Elizabeth didn
’t tell you? Good. I knew she could keep a secret.” His eyes darted between Sheriff Masters and John. “I’m not a professor of anything. I’m a dog walker.”
“A dog walker?” John said, thinking he shouldn’t be surprised that Mrs. Morris would trust a phony professor over common sense.
“But you wrote that book?” the sheriff said.
“I was Elvis’s dog walker. He called me ‘The Dog Professor.’ I used it on my books so the fans would know it was really me, not some imposter. Let’s get inside. I’ll explain everything. Elizabeth sent you to me because there are things you need to hear.”
“Yeah,” John said, “I know what she wants me to hear.”
“Now, we can stand out here all day while they listen to us.” Professor Gentry pointed up. Instinctively, they followed his finger. “Don’t look. Or you can come inside where it’s safe.”
Sheriff Masters turned to John and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘We came all this way, might as well.’ Professor Gentry ushered them in. He grasped the aluminum handle next to his door and climbed up the steps. Standing in the doorway, he surveyed his dirt and rubber yard one last time before closing his trailer’s door.
Unlike Leadbelly’s trailer, this place was spotless, like a laboratory. The kitchen appeared to be ordinary, a yellow stove, tan linoleum, plastic cabinets designed to look wooden. However, the living room refused to be unremarkable. A series of monitors hung from the walls, displaying a live feed of the outside wall, the endless desert beyond.
Professor Gentry offered them seats at the kitchen table.
“So, you know Elizabeth?” He smiled and gazed past them. “She does the most incredible thing with her tongue.”
“Aagh, I don’t want to hear that,” John said, convulsing.
