Meet Me in the Strange

by Leander Watts

  Cold light—they came to save our souls

  a brave crew, who came with lives from golden

  true night—that’s hovering high and solar

  a bright wave, that kneeling we behold.

  Flash Bang Baby, push the spheres.

  Yes, no, maybe and I’ll be your ears.

  Flash Bang Baby, push the skies.

  Yes, no, maybe and I’ll be your eyes.

  Warm noise—they come in silent storms

  a brave few, who circle round and swarming

  our voice—that disappears the normal

  girl-boys, that reeling are transformed.

  Flash Bang Baby, push the spheres.

  Yes, no, maybe and I’ll be your ears.

  Flash Bang Baby, push the skies.

  Yes, no, maybe and I’ll be your eyes.

  Anna Z had talked the night before about something she called the Alien Drift. Real aliens? Drifters from The-Far-Out-There? Nobody really believed in such things. The Apollonauts had found nothing but dust and rocks on the moon. And the Mars probe was sending back messages with pretty much the same info. Beings from beyond our solar system? That was all stories for feebs, guesswork and crackpot theories for space-spazzes. Still, there was Django Conn on the stage of the Maxima. There he was on the album covers and inside Creedo, looking more like an alien than anybody I’d ever seen. Thin and pale and cold as ether.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “It’s not just possible, Davi. It’s absolutely real. You were at the show. You saw it and you felt it. You know it and don’t try to tell me you don’t. The Alien Drift is real, and Django’s just a fraction of it, one bright scintilla. You know that word? A scintilla is a spark, or a trace of light, or a gleam. Aliens in the movies might be all gross and disgusting, with big, bulging eyes and sucker-tip tentacles, but that’s just to scare the little kiddies. They might come in blasting their death-rays and vaporizing everything they see. Explosions and fighting and big stupido noises. But that’s just for show. The moviemakers need something to spend their special effects budget on.

  “But the real aliens aren’t like that at all. They’re the cosmic drifters, the ones who come in like x-rays and pass right through. Nothing can stop them. Nothing can hold them back or push them away. And you know what happens when x-rays go through human flesh? They hit the DNA and scramble it up. You get mutations and that’s us.

  “They’re out there and maybe they always were. I don’t know why it’s happening now. But it is and you know it deep in your heart and your bones, Davi. You feel it, right? In your genes and in your DNA. The drift has reached us and they’re crossing over. Golden souls from true night, like Django says. Making the transit, a bright wave.

  “You said you saw me at the show looking like I’d lost everything. But that’s not all of it. There was more, a lot more, going on. Cold light—that’s what I was feeling right there at the edge of the stage. Silent storms, pushing the spheres, pushing the skies. It made the others disappear, not me. All the ones who were just there because they thought it was the place to be, or they wanted to be seen and have everybody think they were the Nazz and weren’t just normals dressed up like Django.

  “I was making the change, Davi. Kneeling and beholding the bright ones. Feeling the wave go through me. And you’re next. Your eyes, your ears. Your brain, your heart. And then all of you, Davi, all of you and more.

  “Impossible? So what? Django’s whole career, all his records, and his whole life are impossible. But there he was, right? Live and in person at the Maxima. You saw him and you heard him. What’s an Albino Reptile? Does that make sense to you? Where’s this Dimension X? Can you explain that to me? Is there such a thing? What in the world does ‘Girls Will Be Boys’ mean? Django made the wild mutation so why can’t we? He was normal once, with a normal name and a family and the whole boring nowhere deal. And now look at him. Now, listen to him and tell me he’s not impossible.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I thought about sneaking into the middle room again and listening in on Sabina. But I decided instead to go right to her door and knock. As usual, she gave me a disgusted look, as if it pained her just to be reminded that I existed. She stood in the doorway, not even asking me what I wanted, because she knew whatever it was, she wouldn’t like it. Her hair was wound into one black cobra-coil and her mascara had the steely gleam of a stiletto blade.

  “What was that music yesterday?” I asked, even though I didn’t really care about it at all.

  She just stood there, glaring at me, lovely and lethal at the same time.

  “I heard some music. Was that a harmonium?” Getting no answer out of her, I said I’d seen her friends going down the hall to the elevator. Sabina’s answer was the usual, silent, big sister I-can’t-stand-you stare.

  Carlos was there, too, in Sabina’s room. He opened the door the whole way and tried to be a bit friendlier, with his standard fakey, “Hey Davi, what’s going on?” He was dressed, as usual, in the best of fashion: expensive fabrics, styled sleekly and perfectly fitted. His hair was black and shiny, and he had a licorice whip mustache. The tips of his lizard-skin boots, and the heels too, had bright bands of silver on them. I guessed he was going for a cosmopolitan cowboy sort of look.

  He was playing it cool, pretending that we hadn’t seen each other in the hallway the day before. To him, I was a pest, a spy, and a squealer. To me, Carlos was a braggart, a showoff, and some kind of con artist I didn’t understand. He even let people think he’d spent time in jail, though I never knew if this was true.

  Sabina loved to show him off to her friends, but hate-hate-hated when my path and his crossed. That was easy to explain. I’d broken our deal. I was listening in on them once and found out they were planning to use the honeymoon suite in the west tower for something special and romantic. I never tattletaled to my father, but I let her know what I knew. Carlos thought it was a joke. He didn’t care much about getting caught. But Sabina never forgave me for messing up her big night.

  “What was that music I heard before?” Of course what I really wanted to ask was “Who was that girl? What can you tell me about her?” Carlos knew why I was there. He’d always been able to see through other people’s lies. I suppose liars have to be good at that. He knew why I’d come around now, asking stupido questions.

  “Buxtehude’s Prelude in A minor,” he said, as though overnight he’d become an expert in baroque music.

  “We’re really busy now,” Sabina said, which meant go away and stay away.

  “I really need to—”

  She cut me off with another “we’re busy” and I gave up.

  TWENTY-NINE

  On the way out of the Angelus, I stopped at the main desk. Armand made one of his little official bows, clicked his shiny heels, and handed me the piece of flimsy, pale green paper. It said just six words: “Meet me at the Tombola. Dusk.” It was signed with the letters A and Z.

  I asked Armand if the San Panteleone Fair was happening that week. He gave me a smug little nod, as though to say he thought the idea of street fairs and gambling and all-night revelry was a bit embarrassing. Almost no one who stayed at the Angelus would stoop to such common entertainment. Still, a few lowbrow tourists from the New World might ask about it, and as the desk clerk, Armand needed to know everything that was happening in the city. Music, plays, church services, art shows, and even street festivals.

  Sabina and I, when we were younger, had played some money away at the Tombola a few times. It was just a big wheel of fortune game at the San Panteleone celebration. There were other amusements too, of course: shooting galleries, ring-toss, knock-the-bottle, Skee-Ball, and lightning lizards. But the Tombola was the center of the fun bazaar and would be easy to find.

  I took a side hallway to get a glimpse into my father’s office. He was there, in the back, talking with two other men. A shiny, bald head, broad shoulders in a heavy black jacket. I waited a moment, thinking he might look up and give me a smile, or
even come out and talk for a little while. But he was busy and didn’t notice me there at the door. And even if he’d wanted to talk, what would I tell him? That I knew about the Alien Drift? That the light and the sound from beyond were making me into a mutation?

  THIRTY

  Dusk was still far away. I had hours to use up before seeing Anna Z again. I thought about going to the fair anyway, to wander around and spend my money and try to burn up the time with not-very-amusing amusements. I was sure, however, that this would just make the wait seem even longer.

  So I went to Luigi’s record shop, figuring I could poke around in the bins, and maybe soak up a little Anna Z vibe. She’d told me the night before that she used to go to Luigi’s, but she’d been staying away lately. When I asked her why, she’d avoided the question, starting in with another of her talk-talk-talking spiels.

  The kid from the day before was there again: the one with the wild shag, blue-green jumpsuit, and platforms. This time he was looking through the Django bins, muttering like a street crazy. He wasn’t exactly hostile, and he didn’t have the strung-out look of a kid on fly-spell. But there was definitely something wrong with him. “Lord of the Fleas, Keeper of the Keys.” He turned to look at me. “Kingdom Come, Deaf and Dumb.”

  “What?” I asked him. “Is that from a song?”

  His voice went way up, higher and louder. “Lord of the Fleas!”

  Luigi told him to cool it. So he backed away, giving me a sputtery snarl and whispering something about bad vibes. Did he feel something coming off of me, I wondered. Real vibes, radiation, the alien x-rays that were supposedly passing through? Or maybe he was just a little bent in the brain, not a real glister kid but sort of insano, dressing that way in the middle of the day, all by himself.

  There was a big poster on the wall, a blown-up version of the cover for the Witch-Babies’ new album. It showed an ancient ruined castle. The light was all blurry and throbbing, like one of those infrared shots that show what the naked eye can’t see. In the middle, facing the castle, was a pure white man totally naked, holding a pure white little kid above his head like he was giving her up as a sacrifice.

  Anna Z hadn’t mentioned the Witch-Babies last night. I didn’t know if she thought they were part of the mutation too. I was sure, though, that the new album’s art pointed in that direction. I went over to the Witch-Babies bin, luckily far from the freak-brain kid, and found there were ten copies of the record. Most of the song titles didn’t mean much. But the last cut on the second side was called “Aurora Borealis Uber Alles.” I had a blurry idea that the northern lights were some kind of magnetic radiation. Was this connected to the Alien Drift too? I didn’t know. But I could buy the album and find out.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I went from Luigi’s shop toward the wharves, thinking that the ripe, salty smell of the sea might clear some of the cobwebs out of my brain. And the sight of the ships that had come from around the world usually made me feel better. Sometimes I’d read the foreign names, watch the sun-blackened sailors at their work, and try to imagine the distant places they’d come from.

  That day, everything seemed to shimmer with weird light: purple and sunset-blue, dark crimson and indigo. The granite wharves looked as ancient as the altar on the Witch-Babies’ new album cover: gnawed by the salt winds, stained black with oil and the dried slime of a million dead fish. The iron rings in rotted pilings, the curls of greasy smoke, the heave of the waves and the thrumming of engines. It all seemed so wrong, not so much ugly as tainted.

  So I fled, back toward San Panteleone. I went past the Archbishop’s palace. It never failed—especially that day—to put me in mind of older, far-off times. There was a museum that I’d looked through a few times before. Mostly they had religious vestments, suits of armor, old books, jewelry, relics, and primitive stone carvings. There was, however, a new wing devoted to more modern collections. And they’d just put out for public viewing, I’d heard, one of the moon rocks brought back by the Apollonauts.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The entrance to the museum had once, many years before, been the doorway that the Archbishop himself had used. Since then they’d rebuilt and rebuilt again, and now there was a little booth where a man in a somber gray suit took money and handed out pamphlets.

  I paid, got lost and found and lost again in the winding hallways. Eventually I asked a guard, and he pointed me toward the science and natural history wing. A display of stuffed emperor penguins, standing like soldiers, was first. Then came radios, moviemaking equipment from the New World, lasers and masers and rocket technology. At last, behind tinted glass to keep the light from changing it, was the rock from the moon.

  There it sat on its red silk cushion. A rock, that to my eyes, looked no different than any rock I could pick up on the street. About the size of my fist, rough and pitted, it might have been a piece of broken concrete. Seeing the moon rock, so plain, so good for nothing and at the same time priceless, had a strong effect on me. Why was gold so valuable, I wondered. Why did shiny stones like ruby and emerald cost so much when they weren’t useful for much? It was about the light, of course, the shine. Silver and gold and bronze. Diamond and sapphire, topaz and carnelian. They all had a gleam or a glister to them, and that was what made them so precious.

  The moon rock was dull, with no shine at all. Still, it was more precious than diamonds or platinum because it had traveled across huge expanses of darkness and vacuum. And it had a kind of glow that the naked eye couldn’t detect. Infrared or ultraviolet or gamma rays, some form of radiation above or below the range of human sight.

  I was in a daze, I suppose, staring at the useless rock and feeling the glow, even though I couldn’t see it. That’s why, I suppose, I didn’t feel the presence of another person entering the room. I didn’t know he was there until he’d come up close and aimed those inky black eyes at me.

  THIRTY-THREE

  He came into the moon rock room, quiet as a shadow. He could be loud, as I later found out, loud as a storm. But right then it was just him and me and the lunar silence. I didn’t know his name then, of course, or what he had to do with Anna Z. He’d been following me. That much I could figure out—but why? I didn’t know anything about him other than that he could make me feel good-afraid and bad-afraid with just his eyes.

  I backed away. He let me have that space for a little while. Still, there was silence in the moon rock room. Soon enough the words would come pouring out. But he knew that silence is just as powerful as noise, or at least it can be if he was the reason for it.

  He was dressed mostly in black: jacket, pants, shirt. But his shoes were red. Not girly-red like the Ruby Slippers, but a much deeper, richer shade, like leather made from the skin of a killer squid. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but that’s where my mind went. I’d seen some pictures of big hungry squid. They were beautiful and horrible at the same time, sleek and grotesque like aliens that lived right here, hidden, on the same planet as me. When they were cranked-up starving, wild to attack and eat, their skin turned that same shade of killer red as those shoes.

  That’s what I thought of as I looked down at his feet because his eyes were too intense for me to bear. Then he spoke, and I had to look back at his face.

  “Why are you here?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. Because I wasn’t sure why I’d come, and why I should tell him even if I knew.

  More silence. More afraid. More looking down at his shoes, up at his face.

  Then he came closer, very close, and the words oozed out.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “I know you know what she knows. Don’t bother saying you don’t.” His voice was liquid. If sounds could be seen with the naked eye, then this would’ve been a rich indigo, like fine oily dye. Purple-blue with a faint rainbow sheen. “And I know you know where she is right now. I saw her sneaking out of the hotel last night, but she must’ve known I was watching for her, so she gave me the slip-slip-slide and now she’s nowhere to be seen.
So the first order of business is for you to tell me where she is.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t.”

  He sighed, as though very disappointed. “Here’s the way it’s got to work. I don’t want you to get hurt. You just go with me right now down the hall and out to the street, without making any fuss or getting the guards steamed, and you take me right to where she is. And everything will be fine. Do you think you can do that? Are you okay with that?”

  I just stood there, stupido, like he’d hypnotized me.

  “She’s not going to be your best friend. Trust me on this one. I can save you a lot of grief. A great deal of suffering. You do what I say, and you won’t get hurt. Trust me. I know her a hundred times better than you, inside and out, and she’s nobody’s friend but mine. Never was and never will be. She will lie and cheat and steal and trick you for all you’ve got and leave you like she thinks she left me. Only I’m not letting her get away with that kind of thing. Not now and not never ever. She’s mine, mine, mine. There’s no way but my way, you understand?”

  I nodded, even though I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

  “She’s pulled this kind of thing before and it didn’t work. So you might as well get it into your brain right now that you’re not special, you’re not her friend, and she doesn’t really want you. She’s just winding you round her finger with her lies and her spaced-out talk. What was it this time? No, don’t tell me. She gave you the mutation routine—is that it? Homo lux. The big alien transformation? Did she tell you all about the creatures of light from the realms of night? Was it angel-talk with you or was it monster movies? No, really, don’t tell me. I want to figure this one out all by myself. But in the meantime, you start walking out of the room and down the hall and out of this place. You understand? You do that and you won’t have to get hurt.”