Startoucher

by C. J. Odle

  The young woman seemed to be making more of an effort at interaction with the people who strolled past. She was shorter than the other two, slightly built, with a bob of hair dyed electric blue. He watched her talking to a middle-aged woman in a flowery skirt who gestured with her hands as if to emphasize a point before picking up a leaflet and wandering off.

  With no one else browsing, Jake took the opportunity to cross the aisle and approach the stall. The woman looked up and smiled, her porcelain skin framing green, catlike eyes. She had a penetrating gaze for someone so young.

  “Hi,” she said, and continued staring.

  Jake scanned a small pile of leaflets that accused the government of hiding the truth about aliens, but compared to the other stalls he’d seen, there was very little information openly on display.

  “You believe the government keeps the truth from us?” Jake asked, picking up a leaflet and playing for time. He couldn’t quite manage asking directly about the outfit.

  “More than believe. We know.”

  As she spoke, Jake felt sure it was the same woman from the night before.

  “Hang on a sec, you’re the man from the party last night,” she said, smiling. “You looked really freaked out by my costume. How come you were at the party?”

  “Sarah invited me. And you?”

  “A friend of mine, Jimbo, told me about it. I thought it would be a cool place to hand out some fliers after going around the main bars. Guys… guys.”

  The two behind their computers looked up for a moment. The one with Asian features wore a gray tracksuit and had a mop of dark hair, while the dark-skinned guy had a short Afro and a bright-orange T-shirt.

  Jake introduced himself, and the young woman replied,

  “I’m Marina. This is Billy and Adam.”

  “Gemini,” Billy, the Korean-looking one insisted.

  “Gemini?” Jake asked, noticing Billy had a small tattoo on his middle finger. He peered at it and realized it was the mathematical symbol for pi.

  Marina explained, “The guys call themselves Gemini, and together we’re a collective dedicated to exposing government cover-ups. We find the evidence of alien contact on Earth they don’t want us to see.”

  “And there’s a lot of evidence, is there?” Jake asked, glancing up at the hanging costume. Under the bright lights, the collapsed face of the latex costume looked silly and harmless. His skepticism surged to the fore.

  “The government’s been covering it up for years,” Billy said, his eyelids blinking rapidly as he tapped away at his laptop. “But if you know where to look… there’s stacks of stuff online.”

  Adam looked up and winked at Jake with a wide smile.

  “She’s seen aliens,” Adam said, nodding toward Marina.

  Jake looked at her. “Face-to-face?”

  She shook her head. “I… have visions of things sometimes.”

  Jake’s pulse quickened and his mind raced. “Visions of things? What else apart from aliens? Have you seen anything in a desert?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  Jake clammed up, despite meeting for the first time someone else who had visions.

  “It’s OK,” Marina said, swiping at her electric-blue bangs which had fallen across her eyes. She looked directly at him. “It’s getting more common. Some people even think we’re collectively going through a kind of evolution of our sixth sense.”

  Jake tottered on the brink of telling her about his experiences.

  Marina bent down and opened a leather handbag to take out a colorful pack of cards. “Would you like a tarot reading?” She asked this as naturally as if offering him a cup of coffee. For a moment, Jake actually considered it, wondering what would happen if he—

  His phone went off. He didn’t recognize the number, but he picked up anyway.

  “Hello, who is this?” he said, stepping away from Marina.

  “No need to sound so put out,” said the woman’s voice. “You did give me your number.”

  It took Jake a moment to realize who it was, and then his voice softened. “Sarah, hi.”

  “I’m just calling to see if you’d like to hang out tomorrow.”

  “I’d love to,” Jake said, glancing across at Billy and Adam tapping away, while Marina slowly turned over a tarot card.

  “I’m a bit tied up right now, but I’ll call you later. It’ll be great to see you.”

  Jake hung up and stepped back to the stall. Talking to Sarah had broken the fragile arc of him opening up to Marina. He looked down at the three cards laid out on the table.

  “I’m going to have to decline your Tarot reading. Sorry. I’ve got to run.”

  “Sure, no problem.” Marina smiled and flipped over another card from the deck.

  “You can always get in touch if you need us,” Adam said, grinning.

  “But I don’t have your—”

  His phone beeped, and for a moment the shape of a business card was clear on it, white edged and pristine, with the word “Gemini” in the middle. Below it was a web address appearing to be little more than a string of numbers.

  “And we can always find you,” Billy assured him.

  After leaving the convention, Jake’s lack of sleep finally caught up with him; he felt exhausted and drove back to his apartment in a daze. He slept heavily for a few hours, then woke up groggy and hungry around five p.m. He got up, and ordered some food from a local Chinese restaurant before calling Sarah to arrange to meet for lunch the next day. The food arrived, and he ate while sitting on the sofa watching a favorite Clint Eastwood film. He cleaned up, and as night fell, sat in his leather-and-chrome chair in front of the window with a bottle of beer, sipping it slowly and thinking about the convention.

  So other people did have visions. He’d read about it but had never met someone like himself before. Jake took a longer pull on the beer. He’d been that close to telling Marina about his experiences. He wondered what had stopped him. He sighed and put the bottle down on the hardwood floor before instinctively glancing toward the far left of the sky where the lights had first appeared. Nothing unusual could be seen.

  Jake leaned back in the chair. At least he was going to see Sarah again. She was the one bright spot in the otherwise disturbing chain of events of the last few days. If Giles hadn’t forced him to take a break, they would never have met. He felt too tired to try and untangle the other thoughts scrambling around in his mind. He just wanted to sleep, and so he walked to his bed and crashed for the second time.

  Chapter Six

  Jake woke up at nine the next morning after sleeping well, and after lazing around for a couple of hours listening to music, he drove to the Italian restaurant in Santa Monica by the ocean where he and Sarah had agreed to meet at noon. As a salty breeze played across the veranda, they sat at their reserved corner table, elegant with its linen and single white rose. A waiter brought the menu and a bottle of chilled mineral water and then promptly withdrew. Too early for the main lunchtime crowd, the other tables were unoccupied. Jake only knew about this place because he had done some work for the owner when he’d first started out.

  “This is great,” Sarah said, stroking the tablecloth. “It looks expensive, though.”

  Jake smiled. “For such amazing food, it’s a steal.”

  “It must be nice, not to have to worry about money.”

  Jake laughed. “Do you reach a point where you magically have enough to stop worrying? If so, I haven’t found it.”

  The waiter came back to take their orders as a few more guests drifted onto the veranda. Sarah looked up from her menu, and Jake noticed that she again wore the turquoise pendant, this time over a stylish blue off-the-shoulder top. She looked sensational with the sun shining on her wavy brunette hair as it brushed her bare shoulders.

  “I’ll have the poached sea bass with green pepper and fennel relish, and the summer salad as a side,” she said.

  The waiter turned to Jake.

  “And I’ll have the beef wi
th truffle gnocchi, please, also with the salad as a side.”

  “Something to drink?” asked the waiter.

  “A glass of chilled Burgundy,” said Sarah.

  “A glass of the house Bordeaux,” said Jake, and the waiter nodded and collected the menus.

  Sarah turned around to look out over the ocean as more people arrived and the tables began to fill up.

  “The sea is so beautiful.” She took a sip of her water and then gazed over Jake’s shoulder at a table on the far side of the veranda. A plump middle-aged man sat with his much-younger female companion, who seemed to be hanging on his every word. Sarah leaned forward to speak quietly. “Isn’t that, you know, the famous producer?”

  “This place is a favorite with Hollywood types,” Jake replied without glancing to check.

  Sarah looked at Jake and then snapped her fingers together.

  “Talking of well-known people, it was you on TV the other day, wasn’t it? I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”

  The waiter appeared with the drinks and set them down on the white linen.

  Sarah raised her glass in a toast.

  “To Jake. That’s nuts!”

  He clinked his glass against hers, and they both took a sip of their drinks, laughing.

  “You know the really crazy thing?” he said after putting his glass down.

  “Go on, tell me.”

  “I love almonds, can’t get enough, especially organic. And I can only afford them because of clients like the water bottlers.”

  “That’s so twisted. I can see why you’re a lawyer! She fingered her pendant, and her expression became more serious. She looked into his eyes. “Tell me your story.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got a New York accent, so how did you get from A to B? From being a young child with dreams of the future, to living the dream here, under the bright lights of LA?”

  Jake smiled ruefully and looked to Sarah’s left across the ocean before turning back to answer. The restaurant was full now, but with plenty of space between each table, the buzz and chatter afforded privacy. He glanced at her and decided to be open.

  “I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Queens, raised by my adoptive parents who were basically decent people, but dirt poor. I was an only child.” He looked up and smiled. “That’s point A.”

  “Sounds like a tough place to grow up,” Sarah said.

  “It was. I had a hard time until I took up martial arts.”

  The waiter arrived with their food and set the plates down skillfully before leaving.

  “Buon appetito,” Jake said, raising his glass.

  “Buon appetito.” Sarah clinked his glass in return and then tucked into her poached sea bass and summer salad. Jake ate a little more slowly but with equal enjoyment.

  “I see what you mean,” Sarah said. “The food is incredible. So tell me,” she continued between mouthfuls, “what happened after point A?”

  “You’d make a great trial lawyer with that kind of persistence,” Jake replied, smiling. He downed the rest of his Bordeaux before dabbing his mouth with his linen napkin.

  “My parents scraped together enough money for me to go to CUNY. I also got some grants and a large student loan.”

  “The City University. Right. What did you study?”

  “Philosophy. It’s one of best degrees if you want to be a lawyer. Believe it or not, I majored in knowledge and reality with a minor in ethics.”

  “You’re kidding me?” Sarah held her cutlery in midair, eyes wide in surprise.

  Jake shrugged. “It was fascinating, actually; I almost didn’t want it to end.”

  “So you’re not only well known but also an ethical brainbox.” She drank the rest her wine, and her expression again became serious. “What happened to the ethics? How did you end up bullying small almond farmers?”

  Jake finished his mouthful of gnocchi before replying. “You’re relentless!” He sighed and rested his elbows on the table. “It’s complicated. I can wheel out all the clichés, but I know what you’d say.” He turned around to catch the waiter’s eye, who gave a small nod and promptly came over. Jake and Sarah both ordered another glass of wine.

  “Harvard changed me. Somehow the youthful ideals got swept away by the deluge of work and materialistic fervor. By the time I graduated from law school, the only thing most of us cared about was getting a high-paying job and paying off our enormous loans.”

  Sarah finished the last of her salad and put her cutlery down. “That was so good. If materialistic fervor means meals like this, count me in!”

  The waiter appeared with their glasses of wine and cleared away their empty plates.

  “Something for dessert?” the waiter asked. Jake and Sarah studied the dessert menu and both chose the mixed berry gelato. Lunch on the veranda was in full swing, and the refreshing breeze carried hints of the wonderful flavors being served.

  “From New York to Harvard, and now Los Angeles. The journey from A to B,” Sarah said, chilled glass of white Burgundy in her hand. “And what’s next? Where is point C?”

  Jake took of slug of his Bordeaux and looked at her. Her eyes flashed with that beguiling mixture of challenge and enticement. She knew his life could be more than it was.

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said as the waiter returned with their gelatos, carrying the elegant glass dishes on a small silver plate. He set them down and withdrew.

  Jake took large spoonful. “This is amazing, bursting with flavor.” Sarah nodded in agreement, too busy eating to speak.

  He finished his gelato quickly and looked up. “That’s more than enough about me. What’s the life of an artist like?”

  Sarah scooped out the last of her gelato from the bottom of her dish. “Underpaid, mostly.” She laughed and then popped the spoonful into her mouth.

  “I bet seeing people enjoying your art has its upsides.”

  “That part is good. And I like the sense of community the gallery provides.”

  A few of the other diners were finishing their meals and leaving. Sarah sipped her wine and leaned back in her chair with a contented expression.

  “And the fact you can have a party just because you feel like it?” Jake suggested.

  “There should never have to be a reason to have a little fun,” Sarah said, touching her pendant with her right hand.

  He gazed at the circular stone encased in silver, its turquoise blue streaked with delicate threads of a darker hue.

  “That’s a beautiful pendant. It’s obviously very special to you.”

  Sarah looked him in the eye before holding the pendant between her thumb and forefinger. “It is, my grandmother gave it to me. She’s a half-blood. The Native Americans say that many, many years ago, the rains came after a long drought. The people were so happy, they wept tears of joy. Those tears soaked into Mother Earth with the raindrops to become Skystone. Turquoise.”

  Sarah looked at him again, her eyes moist. “Stone of sky, stone of water, stone of Mother Earth.” She released the pendant, and it fell softly against her chest. A single tear fell down her face.

  “Sorry,” Jake said, “I didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s fine,” Sarah replied, her face brightening as she wiped away the tear. “When my mother died a few years ago, I went off the rails. We were so close. I just couldn’t handle it. I ended up getting into trouble with the law, and my grandmother suggested I go stay with her on the reservation for a while.”

  “The year you spent outside of Venice Beach?”

  “Right. She and the other elders on the land taught me so much. It was there I first saw mustangs. I grew up and became strong. I learned to follow a path with heart, a path with spirit. When I left, my grandmother gave me this pendant so I would always be connected to her, and to the land.”

  “That’s a beautiful story,” Jake said.

  “Thank you.”

  Jake reached over to stroke her cheek, and then it seemed obv
ious he should kiss her. He leaned forward, his lips barely brushing hers at first. No need to—

  No, not now, Jake thought as pain shot through the base of his skull, and he jerked back in his chair.

  “Jake, are you all right?” Sarah asked, her eyes wide with shock. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No… no… I’m fine,” he said, clutching his head in his hands.

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “I’m all right,” Jake said, although he was far from it. The throbbing pain was making him feel as though he were about to pass out.

  He lurched to his feet and rushed across the still-busy veranda for the exit, almost knocking down a waiter by the door. Jake clenched his temples and tried to squeeze the pain away, and it subsided just a little. In a mad panic he fumbled for his wallet and thrust some hundred-dollar bills into the waiter’s jacket pocket.

  “Look after her!” Jake said and hurried outside, searching for his car, while behind him he could hear Sarah calling out.

  He reached the safety of his car and clambered in, clenching his temples and biting his lip until it bled, trying to force back the sprung jack-in-the-box of pain. Wincing, he drove off quickly, pulling out of the parking lot and then swerving like a drunk for two hundred yards before pulling into a small turnout that offered a semblance of privacy. He buried his face in his hands, and braced himself by resting his forehead gently against the leather of the steering wheel.

  If Jake thought the desert had been detailed before, it was nothing compared to this. He was there. Absolutely, completely there. His car nothing but a distant memory as his feet sank into the sand. Heat rained down, and Jake could feel the sweat rising on his skin as he turned toward the spot he knew the figure would be coming from.

  It walked out of the haze as before, obscured by the heat at first, the shimmer distorting its shape. It glided over the sand between the two dunes, a clear blue sky overhead. The figure began to resolve, its thin arms and large head distinct, and then the white translucence of its skin. This time, though, Jake didn’t wake up before it came into sharp focus. The figure kept walking until just a short distance away from him, close enough for Jake to have spoken to it if he’d had the words.