Alien Nation #3 - Body and Soul

by Peter David

  Would she embarrass him in front of Matt? No. No, he couldn’t believe that of her. No matter how angry she was, no matter she was at odds with her husband . . . he couldn’t envision her deliberately trying to humiliate him in front of his friend and partner.

  He hoped.

  She appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and to George’s surprise, she was wearing the same slinky dress she’d sported the night before. He wondered if she’d completely lost her mind. Was she going to try coming on to him again? He wasn’t fool enough to fall for that again. And in front of Matt, for heaven’s sake? Not that George would have minded, especially, but Susan knew that Matt felt self-conscious about that sort of thing. And Susan prided herself on making her guests feel at home.

  When she saw Sikes, she said with what seemed genuine warmth, “Hello, Matt.”

  “Hi, Suze. Uh . . . you look great.” Which was an understatement. She was practically radiating sex.

  “Thank you, Matt.” Then her tone immediately became quite cool and she said, “I’m going out, George.”

  “Dressed like that?” said George in surprise. “Where are you going?”

  “Jessica and I are having a girls’ night out.” George looked in confusion to Matt. Sikes had his hand over his mouth, making a clear indication that he was not going to get involved in this for any amount of money.

  “What does that mean?” demanded George.

  “Oh, we’re going to meet some people,” Susan told him, sounding very off-hand. “Go to a club. That kind of thing.”

  Once again George looked to Matt, feeling completely adrift in a bizarre sea of un-Susanlike impulses. Despite his silence, Matt’s look said it all. What the hell is happenin’ here, George?

  “Are there going to be men there?” asked George.

  “Maybe.”

  “Susan . . . !”

  For a moment, George was rendered absolutely speechless, and Susan took the opportunity to blurt out everything that she’d been keeping pent up. It came out with staccato speed. “If you can go to bed with another woman, I ought to be able to socialize with other men.” And then she did the exact thing that Sikes was afraid she’d do. She turned to him and said, “Don’t you agree, Matt?”

  “Uh . . . well . . .” said Sikes, whose only goal had been to keep his head down and out of the firing line, and apparently wasn’t succeeding in even this meager endeavor.

  Susan was relentless. “Do you know what George is planning on doing with May?”

  “Uh . . . sort of . . .” Matt said, pulling at his shirt collar. It was actually a truthful answer. Even though he’d been aware of it in the conceiving of Vessna, he was still a little hazy on the whole “it takes three to tango” school of procreation.

  Buck, lacking Matt’s wisdom in knowing when to keep out of things, volunteered, “Mom, it’s not like Dad’s in love with her. He’s just going to have sex with her.”

  It was Buck’s lucky day that his mother was too focused on Matt to react to her son’s cavalier dismissal of her concern. Instead she used it for more fodder in her assault on Matt’s neutrality. “What do you think about that? Do you think that’s right?”

  “Well . . . actually, uh . . . no . . .”

  “Matt!” George looked mortally wounded.

  Immediately Matt tried to amend his statement. “Look, it’s not really for me to say! I mean . . . let’s face it, a lot of stuff you people do is pretty much skewed from the way we do things.”

  “Yeah, Mom, he doesn’t know anything!” protested Buck. “He’s human.”

  Matt glanced at him. “Don’t help me, okay, kid?”

  “Humans know more than you think,” snapped Susan. “There’s a lot they can teach us.”

  She headed for the door, tossed off a parting shot of “Don’t wait up” to George, and stalked out the door.

  “Susan!” called George, but it was too late. With Susan beyond the reach of his ire, George looked balefully at Sikes. “You were a big help,” he said.

  “She asked me!” Sikes said defensively. “Was I supposed to lie?”

  Buck shook his head and looked pityingly at the two adults. Vessna, showing remarkable flexibility, was not the least perturbed by the noise and arguing. In fact, she was nodding off. “You guys are a mess,” he said. He stood and picked up his baby sister. “I’m going to put Vessna to bed.”

  George gave a curt nod of thanks as Buck headed up the stairs. The moment he was out of earshot, Sikes said accusingly, “George, you told me Susan ‘wholeheartedly approved’ of you and May.”

  At first George was going to give a vehement response, but then he started to feel a bit sheepish about it. “I suppose I . . . might have exaggerated slightly.”

  “Yeah,” affirmed Sikes. Then he looked at his partner sympathetically. “Okay, look, George . . . we could beat each other up because we’re not paragons of honesty. But we gotta stick together, y’know? Especially if Susan’s doing this girls’-night-out stuff.”

  “We do?” said George.

  “Absolutely. She’s gonna have a girls’ night out? You have a boys’ night in. We’ll call some guys over for poker.”

  “Poker?” George searched his memory. “Isn’t that a card game?”

  He clapped George on the back and looked heavenward, as if addressing a heavenly choir. “It’s a lot more than that, George. It’s spiritual. It’s . . . men.” He started for the phone. “Phil just got divorced, so I’m sure he’s free. And that Newcomer ballistics guy, Harry . . .”

  “Bush?” George supplied.

  “Yeah.” Sikes started dialing. Phil’s number he knew from memory. And since Phil was the local union head for the precinct, he’d have everyone else’s phone number. “This is going to be great, George. Just wait’ll the guys get here. The evening’s really gonna take off.”

  “Take it off! Take it off!”

  Bumping and grinding, the stripper made his way down the runway of the club. Dressed in a cowboy outfit, he strutted through the smoke, gyrating as colored lights flickered over his sweating muscular body. Most of his outfit was long gone, and he was gyrating in only chaps, a G-string and a red checkered bandanna.

  The runway was lined with women, screaming and hollering, shouting suggestions, obscenities, and lewd observations. They were falling over each other to shove dollar bills into his G-string, for which in return he would plant a kiss on the giver.

  The air was thick was cigarette fumes and sweat. Conversation was limited to screaming, because the music was so deafening and the women so rowdy that it was impossible to communicate in any other fashion.

  Sitting at the edge of the runway, Jessica was watching, engrossed. Susan, clearly uncomfortable with the entire situation, was averting her eyes.

  “Wheeewww!” shouted Jessica. “Get a load of those buns!”

  Reaching the end of his routine, the stripper removed his bandanna, twirled it over his head like a lasso, and let it fly. It landed, naturally, on top of Susan’s head. There was applause, but Susan felt only mortification as she shoved the bandanna off her head as if it were crawling with ants. It fell into her lap.

  Apparently unaware of Susan’s discomforture, Jessica shouted, “Lucky you!”

  Holding the bandanna between the tips of two fingers, Susan picked it up and tossed it back onto the stage. The stripper grabbed it up and headed backstage, strutting all the way.

  “Can we go now!” asked Susan, taking advantage of the momentary lull in the hullabaloo.

  “There are three more acts,” Jessica informed her.

  “It’s so stuffy in here. And so noisy.”

  “Relax. Enjoy yourself.” Jessica took a swig of beer. Then she pointed and shouted, “Here! This guy! Here’s what I wanted you to see! Look!”

  A new stripper had appeared on stage. He was a Newcomer, dressed in a space suit that looked as if it had come out of the old Buck Rogers movie serials. He stood bolt still for a moment, and then pinpoint beams of light leap
ed into existence around him, crisscrossing him. The music swelled, the piece entitled “Also sprach Zarathustra” . . . although it was more popularly known to the women in the audience as the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  He started to peel off the space suit. Jessica turned to Susan and said, “How do you like him?” But to her surprise, Susan was barely watching. She was staring down into her sour milk, playing with it idly rather than drinking it. “Susan, what’s wrong with you?” she asked. “I thought your eyes would be riveted to the stage!”

  “That sounds like it would hurt,” Susan said.

  “I mean I thought you’d at least be watching what was going on!” Jessica was leaning over, practically shouting into Susan’s ear to make herself heard. When Susan responded to Jessica, she had to do essentially the same thing.

  “I keep thinking about George!” she shouted. “I know he must be worried!”

  “Baby, that’s the whole idea!”

  As the Newcomer continued his act, and as his apparel diminished, Susan still did not seem especially interested. “I don’t know . . . this all seems so . . . dishonest. Why can’t George and I just sit down and talk?”

  “Because men don’t understand talk!” said Jessica with the exasperated air of someone trying to convince a member of the Flat Earth Society that the earth was, in fact, round. She realized that the only way to get Susan to join in the fun was to lead her by the hand. So she took Susan’s hand and shoved a dollar into it. “Here! Have some fun!”

  Susan stared at the dollar blankly. Clearly she didn’t have a clue as to what Jessica intended that she do with it.

  “Give it to him,” said Jessica, pointing at the stripper.

  Susan looked up and really noticed, for the first time, the dollar bills that were already sticking out of the Newcomer dancer’s G-string. “No! I couldn’t . . .”

  “Bushwa!” retorted Jessica, and she signaled to the dancer. “Hey! Flash Gordon! Over here, honey!”

  “Jessica—!” protested an embarrassed Susan.

  The stripper danced over and dropped to his knees in front of Susan, putting his G-string within reach. And she also saw the look in his eyes, or at least the look she imagined she saw. Challenging, provocative . . . and also appraising her.

  “Go on! Go on!” urged Jessica.

  Resolving to end this nightmare as quickly as possible, Susan tucked the dollar into his G-string, trying to place it as far from any especially provocative areas as she possibly could. “Atta girl!” Jessica shouted, and the stripper danced off as the audience hooted.

  Susan felt unclean.

  “Jessica, I want to go home,” she said firmly.

  Slowly Jessica shook her head in obvious disappointment, swirling the red stick in her drink. “What am I gonna do with you?” She heaved a long sigh and said, “Okay.”

  Susan immediately started to get up from her chair, and then Jessica stopped her and added, grinning, “After the next act.”

  They’d come in Jessica’s car.

  Susan was stuck.

  She sat down again.

  The heady sounds of pasteboards being flipped through, shuffled, and then hitting the table with that distinctive flap flap noise, filled the air in a hymn to the male experience.

  Seated around the table were Matt, George, Phil, the union head, and Harry Bush, the Newcomer. The humans were on one side of the table, the Newcomers on the other. This was not out of any sense of segregation, but rather for convenience of the refreshments. George and Harry were not particularly interested in being positioned near the beer and pretzels, while Matt and Phil made it extremely clear that the farther away they were, from the sour milk and dried bugs, the happier they would be.

  “Man, this is great,” sighed Sikes, dealing a hand of five card draw. “A night without women.”

  “Can’t live with ’em,” Phil said sagely, “and can’t live . . . with ’em.”

  “I don’t know,” George said. “Susan’s an excellent card player.”

  Sikes rolled his eyes. “Man, has she got you whipped.”

  “I’m in,” said Harry, tossing in a chip. Phil did likewise.

  George frowned at his cards and said to Sikes, “Does a full home beat a flush?”

  “House. A full house. Yes.”

  “Oh, good.” He tossed in a chip. “What do you mean I’m whipped?”

  Rounding out the opening ante, Sikes said, “Susan leads you around by the nose.”

  “I’ll take two . . . today, please,” said Harry.

  Sikes continued to deal as he said, “It’s not just you, George. Women are calling the shots everywhere.”

  “Amen,” intoned Phil. “My ex-wife and her woman lawyer—boy, did they soak me good. And the judge just nodded her head and let ’em. Gimme three.”

  With two drinks already in him and feeling slightly more relaxed than usual, Sikes actually found the nerve to say, “Look at me. Cathy’s got us enrolled in a sex class.”

  “A sex class?” Phil sounded appalled. “Used to be, a woman didn’t like the way you made love, she kept her mouth shut.”

  Sikes realized that Phil had gotten an impression that he hadn’t meant to give. “Whoa, Phil, she likes it, okay? She likes what I do. It’s just . . . dangerous.” He glanced at George. “How many cards do you want?”

  “None,” said George, half smiling at his cards.

  Sikes took three.

  As Harry threw a chip in, he said, “You don’t need sex class. I can tell you everything you need to know right here.”

  This was quite conceivably the best news—in fact, the only good news—Sikes had heard all week. “Everything?” he said.

  Phil looked at the smug George and said, “Fold.”

  Harry nodded in response to Matt’s question. He leaned forward, speaking in a low, conspiratorial voice. “A lot of women just want to sync up, get their kicks, and go to sleep. But we like to take our time. We like to touch. To be held.”

  Phil was giving an ear to this as well, purely out of curiosity’s sake. But now he and Matt looked at each other, and then in unison said, “We do?”

  “Yeah,” affirmed Harry. “We don’t care about orgasm. It’s the time spent together that’s important.”

  Matt coughed politely. Phil was just gaping.

  George was simply nodding in agreement as he threw in a handful of chips. “I’m in.”

  “I’m gone,” said Harry, tossing down his cards. As Sikes matched and raised George’s bet, Harry leaned back and brought his foot up. “There’s a place on a woman’s foot . . . right here,” and he pointed to his instep. “Press it with your thumb. She won’t get in sync for hours. You can hug and cuddle all night long.”

  “All night. You mean like . . . hours and hours . . . of foreplay . . .”

  “Of course.” Harry looked puzzled. “Why? Isn’t that what you needed to know?”

  “Absolutely,” said Sikes quickly. “I mean . . . hey . . . I’m not just some quick fling in the sack, y’know?” He couldn’t believe this conversation. He looked at Phil, who obviously couldn’t believe it either.

  George wasn’t helping. He tapped his cards and said, “Does a full house beat a straight?”

  “Yes! Now will you just bet!”

  George pushed forward a stack of chips tall enough that he could have bungee-jumped off. “All right.”

  Sikes threw down his cards in irritation. “Aw, c’mon, George, I’m not going to walk into that!”

  “So you’re flopping, then?” asked George carefully.

  “Folding! Yes! I’m folding! You are zero fun at this, George. Western Union doesn’t telegraph as much as you. If you seriously think I don’t know you’ve got a full house . . .”

  George looked at him ingenuously. “No, I don’t.”

  “What?”

  Sikes turned over George’s cards, which he had placed carefully down on the table. A two of clubs, a four of hearts, a seven, a jack, a king—a garbage han
d.

  “Then why the hell did you keep asking about a full house?!” shouted Sikes in exasperation.

  Smiling like a toddler who had just walked across the room for the first time, George said proudly, “I wanted to bluff you.”

  “That’s not how you play!”

  “You get cards and try to win through bluffing?” said George, carefully.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then that’s how I play,” George said with satisfaction.

  “Sikes, remember,” said Harry of the all-night-endurance, “press her foot.”

  Sikes rolled his eyes. “Why do I bother with you guys?”

  As Sikes spoke, the phone rang. George went to answer it as the deal passed over to Phil.

  George was saying, “Yes . . . thank you,” into the phone, and immediately Matt’s internal feelers went up. Something in George’s tone was very disturbing. And his concerns were borne out when George returned to the table, but did not sit down. Instead he faced Sikes and said, “That was Zepeda.”

  “She got something on this Opsil—?”

  “No. But she thought you’d want to know. There’s a Purist demonstration at the sex clinic. It’s getting violent.”

  C H A P T E R 1 9

  CLOUDS HAD PASSED in front of the moon, throwing the scene outside the sex clinic into dark, forbidding relief. The area was partly illuminated by street-lamps, but flying rocks had busted some of these. Police flashlights danced across the area like handheld goblins, and the eeriness of the scene was further heightened by the red glow cast from the flashing domes atop the police cars.

  Everywhere there was shouting and screaming and vituperation. A mob of Purists were surging about, barely held in check by the cops who were doing their best with a combination of police barricades, batons, and linking of arms.

  “Two, Four, Six, Eight, slags and humans will not mate!” they shouted over and over again, an evil mantra. Over their heads, impaled on large sticks, were Newcomer baby dolls being waved about.

  The Purists’ ire was specifically directed at the sex class students. They were being ushered out of the building, escorted by uniformed cops while their brethren were fighting to keep the crowd at bay.