ABDUCTED!

Chapter Three: Telling Stories
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I knew the person sitting across from me was not my grandpa, even through I was in my grandparent’s living room, and the person was sitting in my grandpa’s recliner. But he was not reclining with his mouth open, snoring loudly, he was not wearing a ratty cardigan sweater, slacks held up with a rope, and house slippers, and he did not have my grandpa’s familiar old-man smell. Plus, well, a guy knows his grandpa when he sees ‘em, right? This guy didn’t look like anyone’s grandpa. He just looked like one of those artist’s articulated models of a human.

I was studying the guy. Should I say something, ask him who he was, what he was doing in my grandparent’s house, what I was doing there, for that matter? Then he sort of shimmered and I thought I might recognize him. He looked a little like Grandpa Vinnie, and then he got wrinkles, a mole on his right check, and five o’clock shadow, and he looked a lot like him, and pretty soon we were talking about “old times;” me staying with my grandparents when mom and dad went to Elko to gamble, me helping Grandpa with the yard work, picking the swiss chard in Grandma’s garden. 

After what seemed like just a few minutes, Grandpa shifted in his chair and I was looking at Mr. Mattingly, my high school algebra teacher. What the hell is he doing here?

Actually, where is here? This looks like a school classroom. Mr. Mattingly used to hold me after class just to tell me that he felt I could do better. He told me that if I buckled down, I could make something of myself. He told me that understanding algebra could be useful to me someday.

It suddenly came to me that Mr. Mattingly wanted to know all about my college math courses. I couldn’t seem to stop talking, surprising myself with all the stuff I knew about math. I rattled on and on until I suddenly found myself back in the tube. I guess all that talk about math got to be boring. Just like this story, right? Well, whet happened next isn’t so boring. Not to me.

I aced my midterm in differential equations. Yeah, I was back. Everything seemed normal. Students wandering around campus, between classes. A sunny day, slight breeze, nothing out of the ordinary, but I remembered all that stuff that had happened to me and I knew I’d been abducted and I knew I wasn’t supposed to remember it, but somehow, maybe because I’d been stoned when it happened, I remembered. And I knew that my sudden genius math ability came from the aliens messing with my brain. So, okay. Now what?


Next week: On the road to Area-51

ABDUCTED!

Chapter Two: Grandma Giuseppina's Meatballs
[Go to beginning]

I was walking across campus sometime in the wee hours when they grabbed me.  Grabbed isn’t the right word -- I was just sort of enveloped and transported. Hey, I thought it was because I was high, stoned, really. Thought I was just floating in the cannabis smoke. Coming back from my girlfriend’s dorm room, where we’d smoked pot and done the deed. I was feeling very good, although starting to worry about my midterm in differential equations that started in five hours. Why did I sign up for an early morning math class?

All of a sudden there was complete silence and a feeling as if I had a head cold. Then I saw my Grandmother Giuseppina cooking up a storm at her old GE range and the next thing I knew “Grannie Jo” was throwing meatballs at me and I was ducking right and left, but one hit me square in the middle of the forehead and everything went black. What a strange thing to go through one’s mind while being abducted by aliens, and don’t I know it, but hey, that’s what happened.

I woke up in some kind of vertical glass or plastic tube. I was upright, but as far as I could tell, I wasn’t standing on my own two feet, as the expression goes, just floating, looking out on a very sterile, small, greenish-gray room. The first thing that went through my mind was that I was in a morgue. But I wasn’t cold. Comfy really.

Gradually the tube starting rotating. After a few rotations, it tipped until I was horizontal, still just floating there. The tube rotated again and I started feeling woozy. The tube stopped rotating and returned to vertical. Then I went to sleep.

When I woke up I was sitting in my grandmother’s living room on her old, threadbare green couch with the fuchsia pillows. There was a smell of mildew, mothballs, and meatballs. A man was sitting across from me on the recliner that my Grandpa Vincenzo used to sit in. He was not my grandpa.

Next Week: Algebra Could Be Useful To Me Someday

ABDUCTED!

Chapter One: They had no corporeal presence

I was twenty when they first abducted me. In college, enrolled in aeronautical engineering, but studying women. Not a serious person at all, but they thought that in me they’d latched onto a representative member of the species. They hoped to learn something about the strange biped that seemed dominant on the planet, if you didn’t count bacteria.

I was to learn later that I was one of many humans they’d abducted over the years; they never took too many at once because they didn’t want to raise an alarm. And they could afford to take their time, because it turned out they lived forever, more or less.

I never met another “experimental subject,” on the ship, but I met several people back on planet earth who swore with great vehemence that they’d been abducted, as well. This usually happened when I’d been drinking and forgot to keep my mouth shut about my abduction, especially if I was in a bar somewhere in the midwest, where apparently people are more prone to being abducted.

I was one of only two people to remember having been abducted on several occasions. The other person, a middle-aged, divorcee, was bat-shit crazy, however. You could tell just by looking at her hair, which was incredibly frizzy and which she had styled in the shape of a flying saucer.

I wish I could describe for you the alien beings who abducted me, but they had no corporeal presence. I can’t even describe the sound of their voice, because their communications didn’t involve written or spoken language of any kind. I just became aware of what was being asked of me and responded. It was really very weird. I found myself formulating a variety of thoughts, or carrying out activities -- once I found myself doing the standing broad jump -- without knowing why I was doing any of it.


Next week: Giuseppina's Meatballs

Float Trip

Helen rolled carefully to the edge of the king waterbed – California Sail King, the hotel called it. She felt as if she were disembarking from a raft after a Nile float trip. Thank God this was their last night in Luxor. She glanced at her husband. He was lying on his stomach, with his arm thrown to the side where she’d just been. He’d started to sputter -- putt, putt, putt. Pretty soon he’d be grating air across the tremulous tissues of his throat and making a sound like the chainsaw he used to cut logs for their fireplace back home. She rose from the wobbling bed and went to the bathroom. She stood and looked at her naked body in the wall-to-wall mirror.

“This is a mistake,” she said. Her comment applied to both looking at her 40-year old naked body, and to the “second honeymoon” Harold had insisted they take. At this point in her marriage, Helen almost wished there’d been no reason for the first honeymoon. She showered quickly, toweled off, combed the water out of her hair without drying it with the blower, and tiptoed into the bedroom. She threw on the same wide-leg gaucho pants and long-sleeved linen blouse she’d been out in with Harold earlier in the day, grabbed her shoulder bag, and snuck out the door, concentrating on closing it very gently behind her.

Outside the air was still full of heat, humidity, and dust, the sky was just beginning to turn a darker shade of blue, and clouds across the Nile standing over the Valley of the Kings had a pink hue. Helen walked south along the side of the road. Twice taxies pulled alongside her, but she waved them away. An old man rode by on a small donkey. The man was tall and very thin and his feet practically dragged in the dusty road. He and the donkey had the same look of resignation on their dark faces.

People she passed stared at her with what seemed undisguised contempt. A woman in a chador made a hissing sound as she passed. It was then she realized that she’d forgotten her headscarf. She came to a field on her left. Mud huts were scattered about. Grasses swayed in the slight breeze that came off the river.

Suddenly a hoard of little ragamuffins hollering “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!” surrounded Helen. She tried to ignore the children, but they were persistent and aggressive. She was reminded of her husband’s words, “Never show them where you keep your money.” She pulled her bag tight across the right side of her body. She hurried along, making a point of avoiding eye contact with the begging children. She was sweating.

She came into a block with stores and homes lining each side of the street. The children were now blocking her way. A small, dirty boy with fierce black eyes pulled at the strap on her shoulder bag. Someone yelled at the boys, and Helen saw a man, only a little taller than some of the older boys, charge out of a shop and begin swiping at the boys with a crude broom made of reeds or hay. They scattered, laughing and shouting. The man approached Helen.

“You are fine, missus?” he asked, his head cocked to one side and his watery brown eyes searching her face.

Helen put her hand to her chest and took a deep breath. “Thank you,” was all she was able to muster.

“Please, you will come in my shop. Rest?

Helen could feel her heart beating. Perspiration tickled down the middle of her back. She shook her head, “No, that’s alright.”

During their morning walk, she and her husband had been assailed by countless shopkeepers, vendors, street merchants, calèche drivers extolling the virtues of their “bootifull” carriages, felucca cruise boat brokers, and the ubiquitous beggars from the very young to those who seemed to have dug their way out of the Valley of the Dead. She was loath to follow this man into his dark shop and be badgered into buying a cheap soapstone scarab made by “skillet artist sands.”

The man looked closely at Helen, “I will sell you nothing. You have tea. Soon it will be cooler. Then you will go. Yes?”

Helen glanced into the shop. Like most shops she’d seen on her morning walk with Harold, it was packed with goods of every description. But it did look cooler, certainly better than standing out here in the heat and dust.

“Come,” the man gestured towards the entry and bowed slightly, the setting sun highlighting the white in his thick thatch of hair.

Helen allowed herself to be ushered into the shop.

The man led her past the shelves facing the front of the store to a small, carpeted space in the middle of the store. A hammered brass tray decorated in the center with modeled plant ornaments stood on a cone-shaped base similarly decorated. Large pillows lay around the tray.

“Please,” the man gestured for her to be seated. Then turned to a samovar and began pouring tea.

Helen was glad to be sitting down. She hadn’t realized how shaky she’d been. And the shop was a lot cooler than outside. She glanced around and noticed that this secluded space was surrounded by Egyptian artifacts that looked considerably nicer than the cheap copies she’d seen in most stores.

The man brought tea in glasses set in filigreed silver holders. He pulled his galabea up and sat opposite Helen. He reached over and offered her rough cubes of raw, brown sugar from a bowl set in a holder shaped like a crocodile. She said, “No thank you.” The man smiled, took a cube of sugar and put it between his teeth. He slurped the tea through the sugar cube. Helen closed her eyes and savored the strong, aromatic tea. She thought of the river, and the reeds, and the date palms.

“This is very good, thank you,” she said to the man. He smiled and bowed his head.

They sat sipping their tea; the only sound the man’s slurping, which he did unabashedly. Helen gestured towards the sugar, “May I?”

The man offered her the sugar and Helen put a cube between her teeth and slurped her tea. “Hmm,” she murmured.

“Ah, you are a woman willing to try new things,” said the man.

“I wonder about that,” said Helen.