Once More Into the Abyss

by Dennis Danvers

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  I just changed, aged, got older, however you want to put it. Isn’t that how every story should begin? Even if the sucker’s in present tense, it got written and revised after what really happened—or was imagined to happen—hopelessly entangled—actually happened. Our present past is a reinvention, a reimagining of the facts. That’s not just old age. The boundary’s always been more than a little slippery. Still. The story you’re about to hear changed your narrator. Isn’t that the very definition of getting older—change? Of a story, for that matter. We change until we die and become other people’s memories, and of course they change too. Might as well get over yourself now. Once you’re dead, other people get to decide who you are. Why let them get started on that now?

  Getting older doesn’t just glide along, however, smooth and easy at a steady pace. It’s like a clogged-up little creek for many years, quiet and tranquil, same old trickle downstream, but when the hard rains come, then watch out, because then everything changes all at once, and washes your little world away.

  Don’t mean to sound grim. It’s just the way it is. I’m the happiest, luckiest, happy-go-luckiest guy I know. Everything is perfect. Everything, as it always does, is happening now:

  * * *

  Katyana and I are sleeping in, or trying to. We’re both early risers and would rather be up and out enjoying what looks to be, through the window, a beautiful day. We can hear Dylan in the kitchen laboring furiously to make us breakfast in bed before we have the bad taste to get out of it, so naturally we stay, trade nostalgic memories about him, about us. It’s our anniversary. What started out as a marriage of convenience, I believe it’s called, has turned out to be quite wonderful for all three of us. Dylan’s twelve. I’m seventy-nine. That’s coming up on 2.5 billion seconds. Time flies when you’re having a good time. Katyana’s lived a mere 1.4 billion seconds or so, but she’s wise beyond her moments. We’re holding hands. We do that a lot. Mine are leathery and old, a rainbow of liver spots arcing from pinkie to thumb, hers tattooed and still graceful looking like a beautiful tropical bird.

  We squeeze and release when we hear Dylan trudging up the stairs, freeing our hands to make a fuss. He totters in with a huge tray heaped with food. Anticipating this, Katyana and I have cleared a space for a landing on top of the dresser, usually covered in random crap and piles of change. We’re not the tidiest couple, but we’re happy. He sets down the heavy tray with a cringe-making clatter, and we shriek with delight for the feast our wonderful son lays before us, applaud his presentation, the aromas, his thoughtfulness.

  He serves us a spicy tofu scramble with lime-cilantro-mango salsa and fresh tortillas, zucchini muffins, grapefruit slices, and lots of hot coffee—this is my kid we’re talking about. He’s the best cook in the house, twelve-year-old earnest. The food radiates love. We dig in. I’m snuffly—from the salsa, or from the moment, I can’t say—but everything is perfect.

  When people say I love God, this is how they feel.

  Then Katyana’s phone bleats, and she says she has to take it, leaps out of bed and takes the call in the master bath.

  Dylan’s as surprised as I am. What’s so important to interrupt our good time? We’re a spoiled pair. She likes to spoil us—that’s our story anyway. We listen intently. The bathroom amplifies everything but muddies it up too. It’s her excited voice, but restrained a little. She’s speaking up even though she’s standing in the bathroom staring into the shower. A lot’s riding on this call. We can tell that much. Dylan and I trade a look. Neither of us has a clue. You can’t make out enough of the words to get the sense. Then out of nowhere, an unmistakable eruption of joy, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” It’s positively orgasmic. It’s overwhelming to hear it. Her joy is the world to me.

  She bursts into the bedroom, her phone clutched to her breast like it’s responsible for her good fortune. “I got a job! They must’ve had hundreds of applicants. Thousands! It’s a real dig—I’ll be an archeologist again! There’s even a place for all of us to live!”

  “What about the dogs?” Dylan asks. If he hadn’t, I would’ve. The dogs are ancient. Avatar’s fifteen and Myrna sixteen. Though she’s a little more with it than he is, the best they can manage some mornings is to stumble around the neighborhood without bumping into anything, sleeping and farting together in whatever sunlit patch of rug they can find. I’m not sure how well they’ll travel.

  “The dogs will love it!” Katyana declares. “It’s beautiful. You said so yourself when you drove us all the way out there and back.” Her eyes meet mine, and she lets that last part sink in a bit.

  Holy shit. “We’re talking about the abyss?”

  She nods excitedly. “It’s an incredible opportunity! The first serious archeological exploration of the site!”

  Oh joy, the incredibly weird and scary site. “That’s wonderful!” I declare and hop out of bed, wrapping my arms around her. She beckons to Dylan, and he pops inside our circle and smiles up at us with perfect love and trust in his eyes. You poor kid, your parents are alien looneys, I want to say but don’t. He already knows. His mother and I try to practice total honesty with the kid, a perilous policy if there ever was one, but so far it’s worked out spectacularly. Someday, before I die, I aspire to be as together as my kid. “We’re going to New Mexico!” I tell him. “It will be a wonderful adventure!”

  Katyana used to be a working archeologist with the highway department, then the recession hit, road building ground to a halt, and any archeological digging would have to be done the old-fashioned way. Funding was scarce to nonexistent. Thousands of archeologists chased a handful of jobs. For the last twelve years she’s worked at mostly shitty, lifeless jobs. To see her like this fills my heart with joy. I’ll follow her anywhere. And I wasn’t lying to Dylan. This will be an adventure. Filled with wonder. Alien portal, geological oddity, or archeological treasure trove of enigmatic artifacts—take your pick—any journey to the abyss is an adventure, though in my two previous visits, I never managed to make it all the way. Third time’s the charm, they say.

  * * *

  The sun hasn’t even set on this news, and the three of us are gathered around a battered road atlas on the coffee table to show Dylan where we’re going. It’s the atlas Katyana and I took before he was born to call on Dylan’s biological father who lived just shy of the abyss, who didn’t care to get involved in Dylan’s pending birth or his life thereafter.

  So when he arrived, I took on that good fortune, much to my continued delight, relishing each second—his and mine. We’re telling him our version of this epic journey, and he’s enthralled, though he’s heard it all before, when Katyana’s phon
e rings again. She sighs when she sees the source, but this time doesn’t leave the room, and we can all hear the tinny voice on the other end. Is she the daughter of Simon Deetermeyer? she’s asked, and she confesses, bows her head, wondering what trouble her wacky old man’s gotten himself into this time, only to learn he’s dead in New Mexico, an apparent suicide. By this time, she’s sobbing so hard I take the phone away from her. “This is Katyana’s husband. She’s devastated. May I ask how did this happen?”

  He tells me in a deadpan cop voice from a thousand miles away: “We have him on security cameras breaching the perimeter of an archeological site known as the abyss, and at exactly noon our time, he jumped.”

  “Has the body been recovered?”

  Is that a chuckle? “You can’t recover nobody from the abyss. Too deep. Too dangerous. I’m terribly sorry for your loss. Would you have your wife call us when she feels ready?”

  You bet, Chuckles. “I’ll pass that along.” I take her in my arms and hold her. After a while, I put her into bed, continue to hold her, and she cries herself into a fitful sleep. Every once in a while she wakes up and cries some more, clinging to me. Dylan, who never knew his grandfather, takes care of us with tea and snacks. I read, look out the window, watch the beautiful day’s progress, reminisce. The day I was told my folks had disappeared into the abyss, I wanted someone to hold me, but there wasn’t anyone. There’s nowhere I would rather be than holding her. Dylan pops in to check on us, and I tell him to go to bed. It’s been a long day.

  “Was it a good anniversary?” he asks.

  “The best,” I say.

  He glances nervously at his sleeping mother. “What was he like?” he asks me. “Was he…”

  “Crazy? Good question. I wish I knew. Crazy or not, I think he was right about some crazy things, like aliens.” Dylan’s familiar with my weird notions and remains undecided about them, but Simon Deetermeyer was way weirder than me. He was on a mission. Some would call it obsession. Like John the Baptist, he said once in a story Katyana narrated to me: the night her father shared his theories with the assembled family for the first and only time—that aliens had come to Earth and taken on human form, then fled en masse leaving behind a network of adult children of alien beings struggling to understand their enigmatic identities. It was his mission and purpose in life to set them free, so that they might return to their home planet.

  You don’t get any more wackadoodle than that. Unless you become one of his followers. Like me.

  “He was incredible,” Katyana said. “He was on fire!” That night her mother packed the three kids in the car and left him. Katyana’s the youngest, the only one who ever had anything to do with him after that night. He was crazy. Whether it was John the Baptist crazy or not, you can decide for yourself.

  As for me I’m an old man child of aliens. I’m past adult. It’s okay to be childish again and believe in nonsense when you look like me. People practically expect it. An old man who isn’t totally daft and frail is a bit scary to most folks. Dodder and dither, and they know who you are and treat you like a child.

  Dylan asks, “Is that why Mom never went to see him, and he never came to see us? Because of the alien stuff?”

  “No. It was just better that way. He needed to hide, and not just because he was a hermit by nature. He had a habit of getting himself into trouble. He would do things to serve the cause that weren’t always wise, like lying about his academic credentials. Your mom was always the one to help him get through it all. She reached a point where she needed peace, time with us, you especially. She enjoyed the silence, because it meant he was okay, that he’d finally found his niche, that he was finally happy. That’s where he wanted to be, just down the road from the abyss, where he believes aliens came and went, and just might come back again. Now she may feel guilty for letting him live out his dream, but it was really the best thing for both of them. Your mother’s a wonderful daughter.”

  “I think Mom’s awake,” Dylan says. “She just squinted.”

  “Busted,” Katyana says without opening her red, swollen eyes. “I have to be at the site by Friday.”

  “We can start packing in the morning.” I rock her in my arms.

  “You’re the sweetest man who ever lived.”

  “It’s the alien in me.”

  * * *

  Next morning, we haven’t even finished our usual oatmeal breakfast when an envelope arrives express mail for Katyana. It’s from her father. Sent about an hour before the time Officer Chuckles told us he jumped.

  It’s handwritten on the Institute of Advanced Alien Sciences stationery. “At long last, the aliens are returning to recover their lost children and bring them home!” it begins. The rest is just the usual messianic jibber-jabber, until the end, when he says, “By the time you receive this I will have gone on ahead to meet them, to show them the way, for it can be a frightening passage, from one world to another! Be brave, my child! See you on the Home Planet, my beloved one!”

  As you can see, he’s been working on the John the Baptist thing. The heartbreaker about Simon is, he was never 100 percent sure he was an alien child himself, which put Katyana’s status in further doubt. (She’s more or less sure she’s not; I think she is.) But her father desperately wanted it to be true. So that they could return to the stars where they belonged—the two of them. It’s not as if the rest of the family would notice or care if they left. Whatever happened to the weird ones? they might ask at Thanksgiving, then entertain themselves inventing cruel stories, feeling all thankful and festive because they aren’t the aliens. At my age, it gets too easy to dismiss my wacko beliefs as dementia, which is not quite so jolly. Poor old codger. Be kind.

  Alien codgers rarely experience dementia. Heart attacks and cancer we’ve got covered. We don’t always have the best diet and abhor organized fitness, smoke to excess and guzzle caffeine and alcohol. But dementia almost never shows—course we rarely live past eighty, though my brother Ollie is eighty-four through no fault of his own. His body’s a slothful battleground for the pitched battle between his drugs and his diet to keep his heart beating. Or not.

  I eat a vegan diet and practice yoga four times a week, having cleaned up my act after my heart attack a decade and a half ago. My blood is a mighty river. My breath tireless. The interior of my colon is as immaculate as the future in 2001. Too bad we never got that future. I wouldn’t mind seeing Jupiter. Instead we’ve got this poor fucked-over planet.

  Most alien men my age are liberals, if you’re wondering. Not all. Not Ollie. Ollie’s an anomaly, which is kind of fun to say. Unfortunately he still insists on Oliver, even though our alien parents named us Stan and Ollie—not Stanley and Oliver. Aliens love comic duos. Abbott and Costello. Burns and Allen. Yin and Yang.

  I’ve got to call and tell Ollie we’re moving. I brace myself for battle, though at his last wife’s funeral, I sensed something softening in him. I never thought he’d fully accept that Mom and Dad were aliens, but in recent years he seems to have come around.

  “What do you want?” he answers.

  “I love you too, Oliver.”

  “I’m sitting on the can.”

  “Why answer?”

  “Because I can’t figure out how to get my messages on this fucking phone, and if I miss the wrong one, everybody assumes I’m dead, and the next thing I know I’ve got the fucking rescue squad banging on the front door. I never wanted the fucking phone in the first place.”

  “Constipated?”

  “Of course I’m fucking constipated, Stan. I’m eighty-four years old.”

  “Are you eating enough fiber?”

  “Fuck you and your fiber!”

  Definitely constipated. “How are the dogs?” I ask him, to change the subject to a safe haven. We both love animals like crazy and always have; so did Mom and Dad. One of the strongest indicators of alien identity is intense interspecies empathic bonding. Ollie has a thing for big dogs, usually two or three at a time. I prefer a dog and a c
at. I’ve let it go so long now grieving over my last cat that getting one now that I’ve only got a few years to live seems unfair somehow. We aliens kids are big grievers. Of course, Dylan might want a cat. He’s entitled. Avatar was Katyana’s dog and Myrna was mine when we met. For the last twelve years they’ve been ours.

  “I’m down to one dog,” Ollie says like this is some catastrophe. It might help with the aches and pains he’s always on about if he didn’t regularly get pulled like a wishbone with a Doberman on one hand and a Husky on the other.

  “What is she?” I ask. We both prefer females, like most alien males.

  “It’s a boy, actually. He’s six months, and he’s already a handful. I saw him where I used to volunteer, and, you know me, I took him home. He’s a Dane. I always wanted one, but never took the plunge because they don’t live so long, and it’s hard enough having your heart broke every few years. But I figure we can make it a contest—he and I—see if we can both make a decade.”

  “I like it. What do you call him?”

  “Horatio.”

  “He does survive the play.”

  “Exactly. How’s yours doing? Still the standard poodle and the border collie?”

  “That’s right. They’re both getting to that rickety arthritic stage, though Myrna may be doing a touch better than Avatar. If one goes, the other one will not be far behind. They’re tight. They stick around for each other.”

  Ollie laughs. It echoes in his john. “Are you one of those crazy alien motherfuckers with a soft spot for animals?”

  “I am.”

  “Me too. How’s the family?”

  “That’s why I called. Katyana’s father died.”

  “Shit, I’m sorry to hear that.” I can hear the wheels turning. “He was kind of crazy, wasn’t he?”

  “He committed suicide. New Mexico cop just called. He jumped into the abyss.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “There’s more.”