Waiting for the Abductor

I’m staring at this guy all the way through class, realizing just who he is by the shape of his head and the yellow glow in his eyes, when Professor Rabinski says, “Do we have an attention problem, Miss Marineaux?”

They’re all laughing at me like I’m a teenager but I’m 24 and I’m taking night classes to get my A.A. so I can get a better job before I leave Jimmy’s ass, but Clah Oorel is in the back and I can’t stop thinking about him, or what to do if he comes up to me, or what to say if he wants to take me away. Professor Rabinski keeps glaring at me, and finally, he makes me turn my chair and face the other way, like I’m a little girl.

At break Clah Oorel doesn’t try to speak to me, but instead he sits down by himself on a metal bench and smokes. I try to float over there, inconspicuous like, and then I lean up against a tree and light up, but he just keeps on smoking. So I have to say something first.

“Don’t you recognize me?” I say. He’s in a different form than I expected, with his blonde hair streaked brown and his light skin, the color of dirty soap. Kind of like a scrawny kid brother or something. He puffs on his cigarette and smiles at me.

“I’m Jason,” he says. “Have we met before?”

No memory, I think. He said to expect that.

“Yes,” I tell him. “A long time ago.”

*

The first time the aliens abducted me I was only about fourteen, and I didn’t know too much about sex. I’d been watching TV, drifting in and out of sleep and they teleported me onto this slab on the middle of their ship and they were all long and didn’t have hair and their heads were huge and round like beach balls. They clucked at each other like chickens, and all my clothes disappeared, and I was embarrassed because my tits had barely started and I didn’t have my period yet, and the girls at school made fun of me sometimes.

And this one alien, he was the tallest but the least scary—he was real friendly. He comes up to me and keeps looking at my “no-touch” places my Mother always told me never to let people touch. I started crying but he smiled and glowed yellow like ET, and I woke up and damned if I wasn’t sitting on the couch, and I didn’t have to worry about my period anymore.

I never did grow my tits much, though.

They came back for me about two years later. This time I’d been out drinking beer with some girlfriends, and we smoked some reefer, and my friends left me in this field and suddenly there was this big white light up in the sky. It kept growing brighter and pretty soon I realized it was right above me and it was a light on a spacecraft and it just hovered over my head like in Close Encounters until I got teleported and found myself lying naked again on that big metal slab.

This time only one of them showed—the tall, gentle one—and he sees me and starts glowing yellow. And then he opens his mind to me telepathical, and says, “May I touch you?” And I said yes—I said it out loud, even though I knew he could read my mind—and he starts probing my body and climbs on top of me and I came for the first time in my life—over and over and over. Then I woke up in the field and I had my hand inside my…well. Down there. And that’s the first time I’d ever done anything like that. That alien guy made me a woman, and I fell mad in love with him.

And that was Clah Oorel.

*

“You gotta read that shit now?”

Jimmy’s looking at me as I read my assignment for Thursday. He’s just come home from the night shift, and he’s opened a Bud and wants me to sit on the couch with him and watch a wrestling tape with him. He thinks he could be a wrestler someday—he’s got big muscles and likes to run around wearing just his boxer shorts. He couldn’t be a wrestler, though—all the other wrestlers would have to do is pull his body hair. He looks like somebody down his family tree did it with a Grizzly Bear.

“I gotta be ready for class,” I tell him.

“You got all night to read that shit. How come you’re reading when I get home?”

I’m reading when he comes home because I’m gonna leave his ass. I was leaving him even before Clah Oorel came back. Ever since that time Jimmy hit me across the face and then took that pistol out of the drawer by his bed and said he’d kill himself if I ever left. That’s when I decided I had to leave—except I’m not gonna leave him when he’s waving a pistol in my face. I’m not stupid. I’ve got to have a place to go and all. I told Mom, and she said just don’t come back here, rent your own place, and that’s when I decided to go to night school.

Jimmy smiles and thumps his lap.

“Jimmy. I gotta work.”

“Just for a minute.”

“Jimmy—”

“One fucking minute! Is that so much to ask when I work all fucking night?”

I roll my eyes and sit on the edge of the couch.

“That’s it?”

“What?”

“You know what.”

I don’t get it. The bastard can work all night, sometimes double shifts, and when he gets home all he wants to do is watch wrestling or Sports Center and get a blowjob. Don’t men ever get tired of sex?

“I gotta learn the three branches of government,” I say.

“Hell, I’ll teach you that. There’s the crooks, the liberals, and the faggots.”

I’m giggling. He’s such a damned goof I just want to hold him like a little boy.

“There,” he says and runs plays with my hair. I close my eyes and think of Clah Oorel.

*

Clah—I mean, Jason—he’s looking at me from across the room while Dr. Rabinski talks.

“You okay?” he asks me after class. I’m staring at the test Dr. Rabinski passed back. He gave me a 54 and scribbled a nasty note at the top: Pay more attention in class or find something else to do with your free time.

“I’ll bet you don’t remember my name,” he says.

“Clah Oorel,” I say without thinking.

“Nope,” he says proudly. “Jason. I knew you wouldn’t remember!”

It’s you who don’t remember, I think. I just stand there and look at him.

“Want to go get a beer?” he asks.

We go to Smokey’s, a bar Jimmy hates over on the north side of town, away from factory row. They serve peanuts and cheeseburgers, and you can slurp beer all night and watch ESPN.

Clah Oorel has a nice body—about 32 or 33 years old—with more muscles than Jimmy and less hair. Considerably less hair—which, in my book, is a plus.

Clah Oorel didn’t really fuck me up there on his spaceship—not in that sense of the word, anyway. It wasn’t nasty like what Jimmy does. It was beautiful. He probed me with different parts of his body, over and over again. After he was done, he looked into my eyes and he was all glowing again, and he spoke to me through his extra-telepathy powers—you know, he didn’t even have to move his lips or nothing--he spoke and he said, I’ll come back for you.

I told Jimmy about Clah Oorel the first time Jimmy asked me to go home with him. He says, “you wanna go back to my place, baby?” He was kind of drunk, see, and I was kind of drunk, too, but I was sober enough that I could look him in the eyes and be completely honest with him. I said, “I’m not very experienced,” and he said “alright,” and I said, “no, really. I've never actually done a human being before.” And I told him about Clah Oorel, and I told him someday Clah Oorel would come back for me and I was gonna go off with him and there was no way that Jimmy or anybody else I ever met in human form was ever gonna change my mind. And he said okay, and then took me home and fucked the shit out of me.

“You enjoying the class?” Clah asks me as he pours Budweiser.

“It’s okay, I guess,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.” He pours it like a coke, and there’s a big foam head at the top. I hold back a giggle.

“What?” he says.

“You don’t pour beer much, do you?”

He smiles. “I’m a liquor man, myself,” he says. But I know the truth. Clah Oorel wouldn’t know how to pour beer. That’s something humans do. I’m wondering if he can actually drink it when he takes a big swig and gets mostly foam. I giggle and he kind of gives me a half smile. “Maybe you should pour the next one,” he says.

*

“What’d you do tonight?” asks Jimmy. “I tried to call you three times.”

“Yeah? How come?”

“How come? Cuz I wanted to.” He’s sitting on the couch again, with about five empty Buds lying beside him. I sit on the arm of the couch and try to touch his hair. “Where the fuck did you go after school?”

“I didn’t know I had to ask permission.”

“Are you paying for the roof over your head?” He stands up and faces me. Jimmy’s short—about five six. I’m as tall as he is when I’m in heels. “Huh?”

“Jimmy—”

“Answer the fucking question!”

I hate it when he gets like this. “No.”

“Who’s paying for it?”

“You,” I whisper.

“Huh?”

“You.”

“Damn straight!”

He weeps. Jimmy’s a crier—he cried like a baby after he slammed a beer bottle across a guy’s face in a bar two years ago. He got probation for that. That’s back when we made love every night. Making love’s when you both want to do it. It’s different from fucking. Where one person isn’t into it. Fucking sucks.

“It’s alright,” I say.

“I couldn’t live without you.”

“It’s alright.”

“You’re everything to me, baby. Everything.”

We sit on the couch and I hold him.

*

“I gotta check the messages on my answering machine,” I tell Clah—Jason. We’re in Smokey’s again, doing bourbon shots.

“Somebody checking on you?” he says. I blush. “It’s alright. I figured you had a boyfriend. Pretty girl like you.”

“It’s not that serious or nothing.”

“You love him?”

“No.”

“Then how come you’re with him?”

I don’t know what to say. I’m with him because I don’t have enough money to pay rent? Cuz Mom kicked me out? Cuz I love him? But I don’t. At least I know that. I love Clah Oorel. And as soon as Jason realizes he’s him, then…. You know. Then.

There’s no message from Jimmy. I’m relieved as I sit down next to Clah. He takes my hand. Kind of serious for our second date, I think. Not even a date, really, since I’m still with Jimmy. Even though he does not know. It makes me squirm.

“You gotta be back by a certain time?” he asks.

“Probably about midnight,” I say.

“Alright,” he says. “We’ve got until midnight.” He pulls me close and kisses my lips, all of a sudden, like we’re in a movie. I smell his beer and taste his cigarettes.

“Wanted to get that over with early,” he says.

“Oh. Yeah.”

“That way it won’t be so awkward if we want to do something else.”

“I’m not—that kind of girl,” I stammer. “Until…you know. We’ve had several dates.”

“Okay,” he says.

It makes me hotter that he pulls away, that he waits, and takes me back to my car without a fuss. I get home just minutes before Jimmy, time enough to open a book and act like I’ve been studying. I’m still a little hot, and when Jimmy gets home and wants action and I give it to him.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” he asks.

“I just saw something on TV.”

“What?”

“I dunno. People fucking.”

“On TV?”

“Make-believe fucking.”

“Where?”

Shit, I don’t know. I try brushing him off, I really do, but he finally pushes one button too far, and I tell him.

“I’ve met Clah Oorel,” I say.

“What the fuck’s a Clah Oorel.”

“A space alien.”

“Are you on drugs?”

I tell him I’m going to leave him soon, when Clah Oorel says he’s ready for me. Jimmy threatens and screams, then cries for awhile and we fuck on a bean bag. I just can’t let him sit there and cry like that. It makes me go to pieces.

That night I dream of Clah Oorel in Jason’s body, and wonder how it would feel for Clah to be inside me now.

*

Jason fucks like a pimpled teenager in the back of his parent’s car.

I discover this two nights later, after class, when Jimmy’s still at work. We’re having a beer and I’m hot, and we start kissing, and finally I say, “I can’t take it anymore, I want you inside me now,” and he takes me outside and first he can’t get the condom on, and then he can’t get it on right, and when he finally gets it in he shoots his load before I’m even warmed up again. It’s kind of embarrassing, standing there in the alleyway, making up shit like, “it’s alright,” and “it happens to everybody,” and “really, it will get better,” and all that shit you hear on the movies and you know isn’t true. What I want to say is, “what’s the matter, haven’t you touched a girl before?” because it seems to me like he hasn’t, because he pawed at my tits like he didn’t know if they were real and he bruised my butt when he slammed into me so hard.

It’s nothing like Clah Oorel.

When he drops me off at school I notice a car that looks a lot like Jimmy’s sitting in the parking lot. I’m giving Jason—Clah—a kiss and this car peels through the lot and the driver heaves a glass beer bottle through Jason’s windshield. I can’t wait to file a police report—Jimmy’s due home in a half hour, so I race home to find Jimmy on the couch.

“Where the hell have you been?” he says.

“Out.”

“With Cock Oral?”

“You’re drunk.”

“Answer my question.”

“No, I won’t.”

He’s up and in my face. “Answer my fucking question!”

I’m crying and he’s crying and we both lose control for awhile, and after it’s over my lip is bloody and I’ve hit him in the side of the face with a beer bottle and I’ve locked myself in my room. I look in the mirror and tell myself. I’m gonna get myself out of this. Even if it isn’t Clah Oorel come to rescue me. I don’t want to be with Jimmy anymore.

About 1:15 in the afternoon Jimmy’s on the couch snoring like a freight train and I think about all the things I could do to him and I take out the pistol that he keeps in his closet and I pull out all the bullets so I can’t really shoot it if I get mad, and then I climb on top of Jimmy like I’m humping him or something and I cock the gun and put it in his face and he wakes up and howls.

“Don’t you ever hit me again, motherfucker.”

“Alright! Alright!”

“I’ll blow off your motherfucking face!”

“Alright!”

I put the gun in my glove compartment, just in case.

*

I tell Jason I want to go to his home after class, and I don’t want to come out again, either. He’s kind of unsure and seems real nervous about it, but we get into his car with the spiders web glass for a windshield and drive to his place on the north side of town—a one-bedroom apartment across the street from the mall.

“Do you know who threw the beer bottle?” he asks.

I’m not gonna rat Jimmy out. He’d come find me, no matter what. He’s been to jail before, for pot, and once for robbing a store, and says he wouldn’t mind the pen, either, since you don’t have to worry about a job or shit, you just work out and let them feed you. No. I just want him out of my life. No police reports. No fighting over who has what. I’ll slip into his apartment while he’s at work and take my things—if Clah Oorel doesn’t reveal his spaceship and take me away soon. So I look up at Clah Oorel and say, “when are you gonna take me away from here?”

“Do you know?” he repeats. This is becoming a bore, I think.

“Nope.”

“You sure?”

“I said no.”

“Because—”

“Just shut up and let’s make love.”

He’s a little better when he’s in his own home—but it’s still not great. I wonder if I’m supposed to teach him—you know, maybe the aliens want me to train him to be human. So I try. I move myself up and down a little, and then I whisper in his ear, “maybe if you did’'t go so fast—”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” he says.

Then he gets real mad and goes into the bathroom to finish it off.

I’m up all night, while he sleeps, and then he leaves for work at 9:00 AM. I sit in front of the TV and watch soaps, then help myself to the beer.

He lives in a dump.

At 11:15 the phone rings and I know it’s got to be him—he’ll be sexy on the phone, the way he was on the ship, that deep voice—deep thought—penetrating my head, over and over, the way I want him to penetrate me. I grab the phone and try being sexy.

“I know where you are,” a voice says.

“Who is this?”

“I’ll kill anyone who comes between us. I swear.”

I take a taxi back to the school and find my car, still in the college parking lot, without a side window. Someone snatched my gun from the glove compartment.

“You’ve got to take me away with you now,” I tell Clah Oorel.

“Where to?”

“Wherever you’re from.”

“Dallas?”

“You know what I mean.”

And yet he doesn’t—he fiddles with my clothes and tries to get me in the mood again, pushing and prodding like a dog in heat. I try to play along but realize he’s just a child, coupling his awkward body with mine and pleasing himself—just himself—like a boy with a pinup nude. I let him finish and then grab my clothes.

I look at him and see him for the first time—some guy named Jason. I don’t even know his last name.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“You’re not really Clah Oorel, are you?” I ask.

“What the hell’s a Clah Oorel?” he says.

*

I arrive at my mother’s house on Friday, prepared to tell her I don’t give a shit what she thinks, I’ve decided to move out on Jimmy and I’m going to stay with her awhile, and she doesn’t have any choice about it, I’m moving in. Except she doesn’t come home, and then she calls one night to say she doesn’t care where I stay, since she’s staying at Fred’s or Frank’s or whatever the new guy’s name is. She tells me she’s in love.

*

Jimmy works a double shift on Saturdays, so I take a couple of boxes to his house to grab my shit. There’s an ocean of beer cans when I walk in, and a couple of bottles of JD, too, all thrown on the floor. He’s torn the shit out of my stuff—my CDs were microwaved—they’re all warped and bubbling, like the songs melted and left a big blue stain. I left two schoolbooks and he ripped them up and used pages from my History book to wipe his ass. He cut the tits and crotch out of my clothes. He’s torn the insides out of a toy bear and stuffed it with kidney beans. They’ve dripped all over the bed and onto the sheets.

I wonder if he’s slept in them.

It makes me dizzy when I see the shit, looking around at all the crap he’s left—all just for me, for when I came back. I’m about to cry when I realize—if he can play this game, I can, too. I grab a butcher knife and a pair of scissors from his desk and glue from his toolbox and then I lunge inside his closet.

Shirt? Rip it to hell.

Pants? Super glue the crotch.

Jacket? Cut it up the back.

But then I see the gun. My gun. It sits in the corner of the closet with a box of bullets—there’s just one bullet left, sitting on its side, a few inches from the muzzle. And wadded up in the corner of the closet is a set of clothes—dark clothes. A black T-shirt. A pair of black jeans. A pair of gloves.

Except they aren’t black anymore.

There’s something all over them—it looks like paint—and so I reach down and pick them up and see they’re wet slippery wet with blood.

The thoughts explode—Jimmy shot himself—except he’d still be wearing this shit. Or he shot Clah Oorel. The guy who masqueraded as Clah Oorel. I know better now. It wasn’t him. He wouldn’t be like that. And if it was, he wouldn’t die. He probably took Jimmy to the ship with him, and took him away somewhere, just like they did with me. Or maybe Jimmy did shoot Jason and he really was Clah Oorel, he just tricked me and the bullets bounced right off Jason and hit Jimmy instead, and then Jason brought the clothes back here and Jason put them in the closet and Jason has to be Clah not Jason, not Jason, not Jason oh my god Jimmy’s killed this guy and I don’t even know the guy’s last name.

That’s when I know.

Clah Oorel sent this guy, this Jason guy, to get me away from Jimmy until Clah comes back! And now he’s used Jason and he’s through with him.

Isn’t he?

Hell, I don’t have shit on Jimmy. I don’t even know he did anything. It’s probably a big joke on me, and he and this Jason dude are out someplace laughing over a beer.

Right?

It doesn’t matter. Jimmy’s just trying to scare me so I’ll go back to my Mother’s house and she can live with Fred or Frank or whoever the fuck he is because I’m out of Jimmy’s place for good and I’m not going back and I’m staying with my Ma even though it’s lonely as hell I’m staying there without Jimmy and without this Jason guy and I’m waiting and I’m not telling anyone what happened I’m just gonna be waiting.

Waiting for Clah Oorel to take me home.