Alien Sex полностью

Once, only once, I thought I felt a reply, the slightest tickling just at the border of my mind. At the time it was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, more a textural thing: slick surfaces, cool, moist, one whole enclosing another. (A fist fills the glove. One hand, damp, warm: the wrist—twists.)

I tried to describe the sensation to some of the people on the street. I’m not sure who disbelieved me. I know Hawk believed. He stared at me with his dark raptor eyes and touched my arm. I danced skittishly away.

“You fit, Ricky,” he said. “You really do.”

“Not like that,” I answer. The conversation has taken place in many variations, in many bedrooms and on many streets, and still does. “No longer. No more.”

Hawk nods, almost sadly, I think. “Still going to leave?”

“I’ll dance again,” I say. “I’m young.” Dancing was the only thing the therapists ever gave me that I loved.

“You’re that,” he agrees. “But you’re out of shape.” His voice is sad again. “At least for dancing.”

“I can get back,” I say helplessly, spreading my hands. “Soon.” I try to ignore the fact that, as young as I am, I’ve abandoned my best years.

“I wish you could do it.” The tone is as gentle as Hawk’s voice ever gets. “It’s the sticks, kiddo,” he says. “You’re a runaway on the skids, just off the street, in the sticks.”

I don’t like being reminded. He makes me remember every foster home, every set of possible parents who threw me back in the pool.

Hawk nods toward the stairs. “Come up.”

I look at the darkness beyond the landing. I look at the faceted rings on the knuckles of Hawk’s right hand. I stare at the floor. “No.” I feel the circle tighten.

“Rick…” His voice shines dark and faceted.

“No.” But I follow Hawk up the steps and into freezing alien shadows.

I’m planning my escape. I keep telling myself that. But that’s all I do. Plan. If I left, I’d have to go someplace. There’s nowhere I’ve ever realistically wanted to go.

Come, ships…

At one time I thought about hitching to Montana. I’d seen Comes a Horseman on late-night TV. Then I made the mistake of turning to Hawk and mentioning my plan. He raised his head from the pillow and said, “Ricky, you want to be a dancer again and go to Montana? You’re maybe going to dance for the Great Falls Repertory Ballet?” I pretended to ignore the mockery. Someday I would leave. Just as soon as I made up my mind.

I gave up the Montana idea. But I still plan my escape. I’ve saved a few hundred dollars in tips waiting on tables at Richard’s Coffee Shop. I have a dog-eared copy of Ecotopia and a Texaco road map of Oregon. I think Portland’s probably a whole lot larger and more cosmopolitan than Great Falls. Certainly more cultural. Oregon seems familiar to me. I read a tattered paperback of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in that fragmented past when I bounced from home to home, always waiting for them to tell my case worker I wasn’t quite what they wanted.

If I really wanted to go, I’d leave. Right? Hawk jokes about it because he simply doesn’t believe me. He doesn’t know me. He never did find the passage to my mind.

Tonight I’m at a party at David and Lee’s apartment. There are plenty of times when I wish I had the kind of relationship with someone, loving and supportive, that the two of them share.

David and Lee’s apartment is on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise, rearing improbably out of a restored Victorian neighborhood. The balcony faces east and I can see all the way across the city, almost to the plains. There are maybe thirty people in the apartment, smoking, talking, drinking. Lee had laid out some lines he got at work on the big heart-shaped mirror on the coffee table, but those vanished early on. While some of the party guests watch, David is at his ham set, flashing out dah-dit, dah-dit, dah-dah-dit messages to the aliens.

Riley, resplendent in ermine and pearls, rushes up to my elbow. “Oh, Ricky, you’ve got to see!” I turn, look past him. People are thronging around the bar. The laughter rises and crashes uproariously. “Ricky, come on.” He takes my arm and propels me into the apartment.

I crane my neck to see what’s going on. For once unladylike, Riley climbs onto a chair. Somebody I don’t know, shiny in full leathers, is standing behind the mahogany bar. For a second I think he’s wearing a white glove, but only for a second.

It’s a chicken. The man has stuffed his fist into a plucked, pale chicken right out of a cello-wrapped package from a Safeway meat department. He wears it like a naked hand puppet. I find it hard to believe.