8
The Trip
The thought of Ray and that blonde doing the business in my bed is driving me crazy. I slam my bottle of beer down on the table. Fuck! What the hell was I thinking?
I’m sitting in the dimly lit bar of The Carpenters Arms, not far from my apartment, but I’m really not in the mood for drinking, especially not on my own. It’s only been an hour since I left him to it, but already I’m itching to get back.
I hate this! I hate it! Never again!
I sit peeling the label off my beer bottle for another fifteen minutes before grabbing my jacket and hitting the pavement. The cool night air nips at my ankles like a snappy little terrier. Every few steps it whips up into a gust that pushes me in the direction of my apartment and I don’t offer any resistance. Maybe it’s too soon, but I’ve run out of patience.
I stare up at my living room window. When I left, the lights were dimmed and soft music playing, to set the mood. Ray told me he’d turn the lights up when it was safe to come back. I think the lights are on full, but I don’t trust my own eyes. Maybe I’m seeing what I want to see. It’s hard to tell when I’m partially blinded by the street lighting.
This is horrible. I feel like I’m spying on him. All I want to do is get up there, rip all the sheets off the bed and put them on the long wash. The one for extra stains. I hate feeling like this. Like a jealous lover. I should never had agreed to let him use my apartment. I’m a fool to myself.
There’s only one way to find out for sure if the coast is clear and that’s to get up there.
A few minutes later I’m standing outside my apartment, my heart shuddering with trepidation. I rap my knuckles on the door and wait. It feels really weird asking permission to enter my own home, but I don’t want to burst in on them and embarrass everyone concerned.
The door opens and Ray grabs my arm, yanking me inside. The next thing I know I’m in his arms, being crushed in a tight hug. I kick the door shut behind me. I wasn’t expecting this kind of welcome, but I’m not complaining. I guess this is his way of thanking me for letting him use the apartment.
“Went well, did it?” I say into his hair which smells of my apple shampoo. “Are you happy now? Can we finally stop talking about girls?”
His body begins shaking, as if he’s laughing, but when he leans back and looks into my eyes, I can see his face is lined with tears. “I’m a failure,” he sobs.
My stomach lurches. “What’s wrong?”
“Could you make me a sugary coffee, please, Blake?”
“Sure.”
He releases me and goes to sit on the sofa, while I quickly fix two coffees. By the time I join him, he’s dried his tears and he’s sitting cross-legged. I hand him his coffee and he offers up a weak smile.
“What’s the matter? Didn’t she turn up?”
“Oh yes. She was a bit late, but she turned up,” he sniffs. “We sat right here and chatted for a while and then she started kissing me, so I suggested we move to the bedroom, which she was fine with.” He takes a sip of his coffee.
“And then what? Did you…you know?”
He stares straight ahead, unblinking, in an almost catatonic state, as if the whole experience has traumatised him. “We both got undressed. I got on top of her. I kissed her.” He nods towards his groin. “She…touched me down there, tugged on it a few times, but nothing happened. So then she…she put it in her mouth. But still it wouldn’t grow. It didn’t get hard. It wouldn’t function properly.” A fresh tear trickles down his face and he quickly brushes it away. “I’m faulty, Blake. I thought I’d created the perfect body, an aesthetically pleasing form to attract the right female, but what use is beauty if it doesn’t function correctly. What am I going to do?”
“Don’t get yourself all worked up over one girl. She just wasn’t the one, that’s all. You rushed into it too quickly, put too much stress on yourself to find the right one straight away. You can’t force yourself to be sexually attracted to someone. You have to be more selective and take the time to find the right person next time. Then it’ll happen for you without you even having to think about it.”
“How long do you think it will take to find the right one?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I’d give yourself a couple of months at least.”
“But you don’t understand. I don’t have a couple of months. It takes a lot of energy for me to maintain this transient form.”
“Transient form?”
“Oh Blake,” he says on a weary sigh, “there’s so much I want to tell you. I can’t do this all on my own. I need someone I can confide in. This is much more complicated than I anticipated and I’m not used to all this emotional stress.”
“You can confide in me, Ray. You know that, don’t you? We’re friends.”
“I know, but this is super sensitive stuff and it has to remain our secret. Yours and mine alone.”
“I can keep a secret. You can trust me, Ray.”
“But will you ever trust me again after what I’m about to tell you?” He takes a deep breath, blows it out his cheeks and takes another deep breath. “I’m not who you think I am. I’m…different. I’m not from anywhere around here.”
I shrug. “I gathered that much. And I know there’s something troubling you that you’re hiding from me.”
“Such as?”
“My latest theory is that you’re carrying a torch for someone back home. A special someone you’ve been saving yourself for since you were a kid, hoping that one day they’d start looking at you differently, but instead they probably got married or moved away. There has to be some reason for you to run off to the big city, suddenly desperate to lose your virginity.”
He bows his head. “I see.”
“Well? Am I getting warm?”
He looks up at me. “I don’t know. Would you like me to open the window?”
“No, silly, I meant am I close to the truth?”
“Oh Blake, this is so hard to explain. You’d better put your coffee on the table. I wouldn’t want you to spill hot liquid down yourself.”
“Oh shit! This sounds serious. Don’t tell me you murdered your special someone and that’s why you ran off with only the clothes on your back!”
“Not quite that bad.”
We both deposit our cups on the table and then he twists to face me. “There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to come right out with it.” He pauses to take one last breath. “Blake, I’m what you would consider to be an alien.”
“Oh, wow!” I gasp. “That could make things awkward.”
He gawks at me in stunned silence for a few seconds before responding.
“Awkward? Is that all you have to say?”
“Did your visa expire?”
He scowls at me. “My what?”
“You’re an illegal, right?”
“Illegal?”
“Illegal alien.”
“I didn’t realise you made a distinction. What would constitute a legal alien?”
“One that had the proper papers.”
He frowns. “Where would I get such papers? Do you mean like docking papers?”
“I don’t know about that, depends if you came by boat, I guess, but you must need some kind of paperwork to say you’re allowed to stay.”
“I’m the Caretaker’s son. The only permission I need is my father’s.”
“But I thought you said you were here illegally?”
“No, you said illegal. I said alien.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Where did you say you’re from?”
“I didn’t, I was getting around to that.” He nods up towards the ceiling. “I’m from up there.”
“The fourth floor?”
He groans. “You know I don’t live on the fourth floor.”
“So, just spell it out for me because I’m getting really confused now.”
“Okay, Blake. I’m from outer space. Do you understand now?”
“Outer space?” I say, my lip twitching at the corner. “Oh wait, so when you said ‘alien’ you meant the little-green-man variety, not an illegal immigrant.”
He nods. “I’m an extra-terrestrial. You even got the colour right.”
“You don’t look very green to me.”
“This is not my true appearance.”
I hold out my hand, palm up. “Come on, hand them over.”
“Hand what over?”
“I told you not to bring drugs into my home.”
“I’m not taking any drugs.”
“But you think you’re an alien,” I sneer.
“I can prove it,” Ray insists.
“How? Are you going to show me around your spaceship?”
“I don’t have a spaceship.”
“Of course you don’t,” I say with a taunting grin. “I expect you arrived on the Tube. I hear they’ve extended the Northern line.”
“I created a funnel,” he tells me, his tone deadly serious. “I travelled through the funnel to get here.”
“A funnel? You mean like a wormhole?”
“The best way I can describe it is if you imagine jumping into a vertical chute that contains an extremely fast-flowing current of air. You ride the current at such extreme velocities it would literally tear a human limb from limb.”
“And your little air chute just happened to plop you out onto the streets of London, huh?”
“I’m not here by accident. I came here on a mission. Of course, I could have picked any major city in the developed world, but the way the Earth was tilted at the time, London caught my eye. It was like a sparkly little bauble floating on a sperm-shaped island. So here I am.”
“You must have weird-shaped sperm,” I grunt. “So what is this mission of yours? Do I need to alert the authorities to prepare for invasion, or did you travel all this way on your lonesome just to sample some human pussy?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Please!” I get to my feet. “Next you’ll be telling me you’re going to exterminate me if I don’t let you turn my apartment into a brothel. And I thought we were friends. This is very disappointing, Ray.”
“I’m not here to exterminate anyone. In fact, quite the opposite. And I very much hope you still want to be my friend.” He stands too. “Because every single word of what I’ve just said is true and I am determined to make you believe me.”
“How? You’ve already said you don’t have a spaceship and I really don’t like the idea of getting torn limb from limb in your funnel thingy.”
“You’re right, I can’t actually take you in it, you wouldn’t survive. But if you allow me to connect with your mind, I can give you a virtual tour of what the journey might be like, if I could take you home with me.”
I snort. “Oh brilliant! Now he wants to do a mind meld! This just gets better and better.”
“I’m not joking. We call it communing.” He holds out his hand. “Come. Let me show you.”
“Okay, alien boy, I’ll play along. Let’s commune.”
I take his hand and he leads me behind the sofa, to the empty space between it and the window. He sits cross-legged on the wooden floor and invites me to do the same.
“Now hold both my hands and close your eyes.”
I do as he says.
“Ready?”
“Of course I’m ready. This was top of my to-do list when I got home. Commune with my friendly live-in alien.”
He grips my hands tight. “I think you will not be laughing at me soon, friend Blake.”
In the next instant the air is snatched out of my lungs. Despite the fact my eyes tell me I’m still sitting on the floor with Ray, it feels like I’m being pushed upwards at a fantastic speed, like I’ve got a rocket booster lodged up my behind. The G-force stretches my mouth into a taut rictus and I cry out. “Aaaaaahhh!”
“Close your eyes,” Ray yells at me.
I force my eyes shut and then, against the backdrop of my eyelids, I see a sight of such magical beauty as could surely only exist inside a psychedelic high. The full spectral array of colours streaks by me in a blur, but then the G-force eases and the colours melt away into the blackness of space.
Now it feels like I’m floating.
“Keep your eyes closed and turn your head to the right,” Ray instructs.
I twist my head to see a massive swirling cloud of such amazing hues it looks like a work of abstract expressionism. As if the cloud is the canvas and the artist has splashed it with blues and violets, greens and pinks, and then finished off with pinpricks of the most brilliant white I’ve ever seen.
“Oh wow!” I gasp. “It’s beautiful. Is that where you’re from?”
“No. You call this M42. The Orion Nebula.”
My heart flutters and I feel faint.
“Blake, are you okay? I’m bringing you back now,” I hear him say, right before I black out.
◆◆◆
When I wake, I’m lying flat on the floor with a pillow tucked under my head and Ray sitting beside me, holding my hand.
“Hello there!” he says with a smile. “Good to have you back. You had me worried for a while.”
“I fainted.”
“Yes, I know. Do you remember what we were doing when you fainted?”
“We were communing.”
He smiles and nods.
“You drugged my coffee, didn't you, Ray?”
“No, I swear I didn’t. You were watching me the whole time. How could I?”
I sit up slowly, my head still feeling a little woozy. “Well, that's my rationale for what happened and I’m sticking with it.”
His face drops. “So you don't believe a word I said?”
“I don’t have to believe something for it to have had an effect on me. I don’t understand what happened, but I was deeply moved by what I experienced. As Oscar Wilde once said, both lying and poetry are arts. You’re a great artist, Ray.”
He gets to his feet. “So you’re saying I’m a good liar, is that it?”
I look up at him. “I think you’re confused, that’s all. Have you thought about seeing a shrink?”
“I’m not confused,” he insists.
I struggle to my feet and Ray grabs my arm to steady me until I nod to let him know I’m okay.
“Look, Ray, I don't have to believe everything you say to believe in you. Do you understand what I’m saying. Where you’re from isn’t important. It’s what’s inside of you that matters.”
“And what do you think is inside of me?”
“I think you’re fundamentally a good person. I think you truly believe what you’re telling me. I don’t know what’s going on in your head, but I don’t think you’re deliberately trying to deceive me.”
“But I did deceive you in the beginning. I let you think I was human.”
“On the day we met you said you wanted to save mankind. I thought it was a weird thing to say at the time, but I suppose it fits in with thinking you’re an alien. You’ve been dropping hints all along and I’ve just laughed them off.”
“You’re not laughing anymore, are you, Blake?”
“No. I won’t laugh at you again.”
“Good because I hate to tell you this, but I’ve only scratched the surface. I have so much more to tell you.”
“I’m ready to listen, but no more communing, okay? Whatever that was, it scared the shit out of me.”
He smiles and nods his agreement. “Are we still friends?”
“Of course.”
“That’s the only thing that matters to me, Blake. I’m not sure I could do this without your support.”
I squeeze his hand. “What are friends for?”