Fiction #5, So Long, Scully
A short story, with aliens
I really love this one. I’m thinking about making it into a novel, as it was an unadulterated pleasure to write and is set in such a fun, sexy, dreamy world— the early ‘90’s American South. The genre is alien romance. It's a short story, but too long to post in its entirety, so what follows is the opening.
PAUL
I remember you in black and blue. Cop lights against the night sky. Red and blue on your skin, dark at the edges, pale skin, shadow below your bottom lip. Why didn’t I know it then? That they would come for you. You did.
Did you?
*
The air was a swamp that fall in Tennessee. We were young, but appeared younger in the humidity. Skin dewy and swollen, puppy fat and wet eyes, hair curled around our faces like cherubs, cupid-babies, baby-teenagers.
I called you Scully. I wanted desperately for you to call me Mulder, but you refused in your soft burr, “Fuck off, Paul.”
The others were sheep, so they called me Mulder. I believed in aliens, and I was charming. I charmed them into doing what I wanted. You did what I wanted a lot, but only when it suited you. I never felt like I had won you over entirely. You would disappear when you wanted. Get up off my floor and leave. You just felt a little harder to pin down.
At school they called you Pamela, after Pamela Anderson, because you grew breasts aged eleven, huge knockers (I loved that word, heard it in on Doctor Who once and couldn’t stop saying it) that other boys asked me about. Had I touched them? Were they pillow-soft or hard like melon rind? I was not obsessed with your tits. They were not the least interesting thing about you, but the very fact of you distracted me from them. Sometimes, when some guy fucked you and ditched you and you looked sad, I wondered if that’s why you hung out with me. Because I didn’t look at you like something between a porn star and a joke.
When I picture our childhoods, I picture a very wide road. This road is near the center of town, but looks part-suburb part-jungle, so green and so surrounded by trees you want to know how anybody living there gets out. It’s a fair question.
This wide road I see in my mind’s eye; the wild, green, many-boughed trees; the white- painted clapboard houses set back from the street with their wrap-around porches; the seven lanky teenagers in flannel shirts and blue jeans cavorting down the asphalt—all are sweating. The kids wear the shirts to cover up the stink. Also, because their music idols wear them.
Music was kids’ culture then. TV was for parents. We watched The X Files because I was obsessed, and Wren & Stimpy when we were drunk. The Simpsons, The Cosby Show, whatever—all that shit was too heteronormative. We preferred Kurt Cobain in a dress. Kathleen Hanna, also in a dress.
The others were talking about a punk show that night at The Ground, a tiny club next to a tiny video store at the heart of town, both of which we often patronised.
“Paul, you comin’?”
“Are you crazy?” Back then, I only ever spoke with scorn. “Skies are clear. The show from my fucking window is going to be epic. It’s a once in a lifetime occurrence.” Thank god we lived in a backwater town, or I would never have been considered cool nor enjoyed the simple confidence being cool brought.
“I’ll leave the star-gazing to you, Pachowski.”
I turned to you. I knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “You comin’?”
“Long as there’s dip.”
“I’ll make my mom make my famous baba ganoush.”
“I’m in.” Your voice was like butter. Full fat. Warm. You reached into your top and adjusted the necklace you always wore, seeming, for a second, uncomfortable. I imagined the stone glinting beneath your shirt. I was so curious about that stone. You looked down your top. I pretended not to notice.
We broke off from the group, hollering goodbyes that seemed to grow and expand in the moistness of the air and then stick in the atmosphere, hanging in bubbles about a meter above our mouths. I could hear shouting from your place, over the boom-clatter of our Doc Martens running up the porch steps. Your house was across the street, two down. Your foster mom might have heard you, seen you with me. Maybe thought I was your boyfriend. Whatever, I never saw you call home and, like any respectable 17-year-old guy, I also never gave a shit why. I guess maybe I thought it was normal, that most of us had parents who we didn’t want to be around. I guess I thought you had it under control.
You always sat cross-legged like a kid, on the rug over the wooden boards of my loft room. It added to the desexualized vision I had of you. It helped me not look at your tits. You ate my mom’s home made dip with my dad’s homemade lentil chips and then went down to fetch a bag of Cheez-Its to soak up the rest of the dip. My parents didn’t let me have ‘em—they were health freaks—but they always kept a bag in for you. I looked up through the telescope, set it in position.
“Nothing yet. But it’s not due ’til nine. It’s the Orionids meteor shower. Falling stars. Ancient people believed the aliens rode in on them. This time of year, there’s a clear path from Orion.”
“I know, Paul.”
“Oh. Right.”
There was a lot that went unspoken between us. More than we said out loud. As a grown man, and not at all macho, I can’t quite get back into that mindset. Where I was afraid to say things for no reason I could articulate. Where important words were the least likely to be said.
“It’s where you said ancient people thought the aliens lived.”
I played along. “You’re learning.”
“You do so love to teach.”
I beckoned you over and you stood at the telescope. Like a perverted old golfer I slipped in close behind you, adjusted the tilt of your head, moved the scope to show you the area ancient texts simply refer to as “the gap”.
“There it is. Where... they came from.”
I played it straight-faced, but I was a teenage boy with a fairly hetero teenage body, apart from that one time after gym where I blew a guy. Not sure what happened there. Hormones. Still. I was oblivious to most things, but never to the warmth of a girl’s body. Didn’t really matter which girl. That’s what I told myself.
Here’s a truth I didn’t share with you at the time:
You thought I didn’t notice you, but I did. Your body radiated heat. I raised my arms to correct the focus, circled them around you, felt our bodies connect, armpit to shoulder, hip to hip. I smelt the dip on your hot breath, as you turned slightly to ask me a question and your breath connected with my neck. I felt the possibility of our bodies—mine hard, yours soft; mine tall, yours short; mine pale and Polish like an uncooked hotdog, yours peachy and caramel and freckled with constellations I had noticed years ago and traced only with my eyes. To anyone from our little backwater town, you seemed a mutt. Irish and Mexican. Scottish and Native American. Whatever, whoever, they had based it on, your skin looked so totally delicious and mismatched it was like two desserts dumped into a bowl together, like a hot lava cake and a buttermilk pie and maybe even a stack of pancakes served on the same plate, too much and hard to make sense of. As you spoke to me, I could predict the way your mouth would make the sounds of single letters. I had listened to you that intently. I did. I noticed you. The way you hung on my every word as if I wasn’t some dumb, teenage schmuck. The way you smelt of talcum powder, womanly and adult and medical all at once. The way you said my name, “Pol.” That moment at the scope. Other moments I remember so vividly despite not knowing the significance they would gain in the many lonely years to come, the doing of them, the being there, the being with you.
“Paul, do you really believe in that? Or do you just like talking about all this stuff?” You sounded low. Like you thought it could never happen. Like you doubted yourself. I understood.
Despite a bravado that seemed to kick in every time a girl looked my way, I didn’t believe in myself very fucking much at times. Does anybody at seventeen? Fresh outta acne and straight into face-pubes.
I gave you a look. “Can’t I choose to believe in something, even if I don’t believe in it?”
A long beat. You did not reply. You did not take your eyes from mine.
SCULLY
Just then, Brenda walked in. You let go of me and turned towards her quickly, as if to say, “I wasn’t touching that!” As if I were gum stuck to the underside of a school desk and left for weeks to form its own layer of grime.
“Your mom let me in,” Brenda said, and then smirked as if she’d caught us in flagrante delicto. “Was that okay?”
“Of course. You’re welcome anytime.” You went over and kissed her. It was gentle. You were of your time. A wolf in knitted clothing. All cardigans and curtains. All poetry and no muscle, so as not to emphasize the difference between you and women, the inequity between us, how quickly you could kill me if you wanted to, how you did.
Your voice got gentle with girlfriends. As you kissed her, you murmured something like, “Hey, baby, so glad you’re here,” and then, when you were done kissing, “Right, Scully?”
“Right. We’re very glad.” I threw myself on the rug, back by the dip. If I was unfortunate enough to be fat, I might as well enjoy eating.
Brenda sat close to the edge of the bed with her thin legs kind of piled in front of her. She didn’t have to act coy or nervous. That wasn’t who we were. You, back at the telescope of course, tinkered and mumbled to yourself, your focus on the darkening night.
“So, Lauren, there’s a carnival in town this summer. Seen anyone you like?”
“Leave her alone, Bren.”
“She doesn’t have to leave me alone,” I said. I turned to Brenda.
“I had sex with a guy I thought I’d already had sex with, but it turned out to be his twin brother.”
“Oh. Oh my god.”
I saw your lips twitch at the corner, and was pleased you didn’t let her in on the joke. The way you protected me, and not her.
I shook my head, the screwed-over hussy. “What are the odds?”
“About 1 in 75,” you said, and we each caught the other’s eye.
Brenda seemed to notice. Her voice grew thinner. “And there was me thinking you were gay.”
“Why d’you think that?” You asked, as if genuinely interested, as I said,
“I wouldn’t mind it.”
Brenda replied to you, of course. It didn’t matter what I said.
“You two are always together, but you know,” she wiggled her eyebrows. “But really not. A lot of people think she’s gay.”
“Maybe I am,” I said.
“You just said you slept with twins.”
You burst into a laugh. I loved your laugh. I mean, really loved it, Paul. It was easy and uncomplicated and free, cut wide across your face and beautiful teeth. I wanted to climb into your laugh. “She can be gay if she wants to be gay. Maybe I’m a little bit gay, too,” you added, which of course I knew you were because you had told me, and no one else, about blowing Mike Di Paulo after football practice one quiet afternoon in the locker room. “Sometimes my body reacts to a big dick or big tits identically. I don’t know what that’s about but,” you shrugged. “Whatever. It’s 1993, man.”
Brenda didn’t say anything. It was part of the charm of guys like you, the Ethans and Rivers and Kurts, the boy-men of the world, to be a little androgynous, to appeal to the side of us (me) that wanted to eat a cooked meal (made by you, naturally) in a bed of flannel and crocheted blankets before having comfortable sex, and the side of us (also me) that wanted to watch two men make out and fuck each other and then fuck them both. Brenda was on board. She stared at you hungrily.
“Shit, there they are!” you cried out suddenly. You leaned, opened the casing, to rid us of the glare from your lamps on the glass. Fresh, warm night air. You plugged the scope into your eye socket.
Brenda and I went to stand next to you, looking out the window.
“You gotta see this. Beautiful and awesome and...”
Who did you mean by you? Did you mean Brenda? Who you had gentle-fucked for only a month? Whose nipples you knew, could draw but whose middle name you did not? To whom you had said, “I love you”, but only saw after school once or twice a week? Or did you mean me, who practically lived in your room every evening, talking late into the night?
“Guys, it’s insane,” you were saying. “If you could see this...”
I nudged you, and you looked up from the scope. The stars were visible to the naked eye. And they were falling.
*
It’s not that I saw you as mine. It’s that you got something out of me, nurtured it, grew it, snake-charmed it out of me, that I didn’t out of you. I could tell you wanted me. But only to want you. And when I had come all that way and opened my heart to the skinny boy across the street... you would let go, turn around, and kiss a Brenda.
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