Dollar For Your Thoughts, Part 6/14

            “Wha’d ya dream about?”

            I was sitting in the passenger side of my state-of-the-art mid-sized Imno 400 with lunch in my lap. I told Connie that I’d been lining shelves.

            “Sounds constructive.”

            “I just slapped it on. Not only did I leave bubbles, I left entire wrinkles.”

            “Doesn’t sound like you, Merle.”

            “Where’s the spaceship?”

            “It followed the tornado. I couldn’t keep up. It looked like a huge suppository.” Connie motioned to a shop we were parked near. “They said the tornado touched down in Lone Oak. Let’s switch!”

            We met as we walked around the nose of the car, each carrying our deep-fried claim.

            “I’m bushed,” Connie said, in passing. “We do more before our Turkey Ts’ than more people do in a day.”

            We sat and I started the car.

            “I believe you now about the aliens,” she told me.

            “So now you do.”

            “Somewhat.” She followed a turkey bite with one from the handy brown. “I guess I didn’t need much proof. But now that I’ve seen them, I think they might be involved.”

            I turned out of the Oak Plain strip mall and took us back north on 65.

            “So, spill!” Connie told me.

            “Spill what?”

            “What more do Imnans believe about these extraterrestrials?”

            I told her that there wasn’t much more to tell. I told her that if she just spent more time looking up, she would see the ships, sometimes flashy in the night, sometimes streaky, or, just out of the corner of one’s eye- floaty. And the green people could be seen peering from around corners or lounging behind trees. I told Connie that a colleague of mine had even found one in the closet of her motel room during a symposium in the Azores. He excused himself and departed, claiming that he’d gotten lost.

            “Hold on,” Connie said abruptly.

            “Yes?”

            “Give me a minute.”

            I drove us through Oak Crest, with its water tower painted to look like a huge tomato plant, as Connie had her trance. The tank itself had been painted red, with a succulent set of leaves on the tower for the city tricentennial, but now everything had faded and looked past-harvest. I hit the speed-up zone just past a chair factory.

            “Ok, I’m back!” she sang.

            “Ok.”

            “Packing frozen turkey chubs. Turkey Ts’ on the hoof! Your turn next. I’m sure we’ll get a chance to switch at ‘Oak Something’.”

            “Or ‘Something Oak’.”

            “You’ve never seen one?”

            “An oak?”

            “An alien.”

            “Oh! Not only have I seen them, I’ve been introduced.”

            “Oh.”

            “Once you get over the shock, they’re very open.”

            “I see.”

            “They run a bit arrogant, though. From what I could tell.”

            “I’m not surprised.”

            There was a bit of a lull in the conversation which was replaced by the hiss of tires and the whistle of the wind as we passed through a stretch of fallow bean fields. We had finished up what lunch we had left, and I settled in with the details.

            “One of my colonels plays lawn darts with them,” I told her, as she sat there with the lunch wrappers, which she had nicely secured in a bag resting against her shin. “They’re very competitive. And I hear they’re partial to Beatles music.”

            “Now, Merle, I...I believe you…”

            It was nice to be believed.

            “But I’m the same grade as you are, and I’ve never met Fred, the little green economic minister.”

            I had my theories why, but I held my tongue.

            “No extraterrestrials bunking down in our wardrobes…”

            “He wasn’t bunking down. He was lost.”

            “…or sipping champagne at eco-summits.”

            “They’re silicon-based. Champers would go right through them.”

            “Be that as it may.” Connie jerked a bit, betraying a protective attitude toward the bag full of wrappers. Which, according to law, had to go. “I think they’re only down here to distribute economic aid.”

            I reached down and snatched the bag away from her.

            “You’re being colonized… Dammit!”

            She leaned forward and saw my intended target. It was a roadside litter bin which had been sitting there next to a cottonwood tree for eons. It had some sort of international symbol for ‘place your litter here’ stenciled on it. I could only oblige. Of course, I only recall such demonstrations like this with remorse. Connie’s knee jerked, and she tried to grab the bag, but not fast enough. I executed what is called ‘The Redneck With Shake Container Cross-Auto Variation.’ Jettisoning everything at once with the bag floating above the lane beside us, disgorging its contents. The featured attraction was the shake cup, which had the required half-measure of cold treat left in the bottom. It spun on its wobbly axis, spurting strawberry goo from the straw over the hood before us for an eye-watering second. Connie could only watch, transfixed. Behind us, the bag and wrappers joyously joined the highway, scattering upon the road like a ten foot long, badly drawn comma. With two clicks, I already had tended to the goo with cleaner and wipers following. The departing cup could now be fully viewed through the passenger side. Connie swung her head to watch, and the cup bounced up, off the inside-facing rim of the roadside can, and then exploded, with cup, straw and shake scattering everywhere but in the bin. Now my colleague couldn’t help but be impressed. But, no.

            She reached down and flicked a handy brown crumb off her knee.

            “Show off.”

            Was it a Tenger thing? I wondered.

            After that disappointment, that lack of confetti and balloons, I was well-nigh ready for a trance. We switched at Glen Oak, which was full of do-gooders, apparently. The park we pulled into also had a bin, and, as I was walking to the passenger side of the car, Connie went to it. I swear I saw her pick up a wrapper nearby and put it onto the pile welling up from it. However, the choice of cleaner for range-tops is always a crucial one. Some choose a soft scrub for the enamel, but that’s a compromise. A strong liquid cleaner is best, and it is sure not to leave scratches, which harbor gunk and bacteria, which only makes for tougher cleaning on down the line.

            “My colonel barely squeaked out a win against them.”

            “Huh!” The other party responded, with interest.

            “He’s our lawn dart champ. They made him an honorary Betelgeusian.”

            Was that me talking?

            “That sport can be dangerous.” A woman’s voice I’d never heard before.

            “Well,” Connie told them, “we earned their respect that way.”

            “Huh!”

            I was closest to that voice, near the canvas legs of his coveralls and his shit-kicker boots.

            “They gave him a medallion and sang a chorus of ‘Nowhere Man’. Which could only be taken as a complement.” 

            Connie kept bullshitting.

            “We signed the eco-accord that evening, and they toasted us with the contents of a lava-lamp.”

            “Oh! You can get sick on that.” The woman said. The man looked down at me.

            “We weren’t expected to join in,” Connie told them. “But they downed it. It’s close to what they drink on Betelgeuse.”

            “How ‘bout that!” The woman said.

            “You okay, buddy?” The man asked me. I was sitting, propped against the front fender of the car.

            “What’s in those, by the way,” the woman asked. And Connie couldn’t stop.

            “I don’t know, but they prefer it hot. They’re silicon-based, you see. It’s like mother’s milk to them.” Then, and only then, did she look down at me.

            “Back with us, Merle?”

            We thanked the mother and son for their concern, and they began to take their leave. The son complemented me on the mess I’d left further down the highway.

            “Guilty,” I said, standing up and raising a hand.

            “I knew,” he said, “that I’d seen the work of a master.”

            They started walking back to their truck, which was one of those shed-sized jobbies modified to run on coal oil. Connie and I stood next to my Imno 400, which was the worse for wear and without a brain, and waved. But the couple dawdled. So we hopped in and I fired up my baby. We hadn’t even spoke about who would drive. By then it was: ‘whoever had a trance last gets behind the wheel’. As I pulled off the shoulder I looked at the mother, now in the truck, and I could’ve said what she was saying along with her-

            “She’s letting him drive?”

            I chuckled at that, but Connie brought me back down to Earth.

            “We’re fucked, you know.”

            “How?”

            She sat forward, tense within herself.

            “The trances are coming faster. At this rate, we’ll end up just tending to each other before our own comes on, and then they’ll start to overlap.”

            “What do you think causes it?”

            “I don’t know. I’m so tired, I can’t think. Eventually, we’ll starve or thirst to death, or they’ll send us both off to the loony bin. Where you goin’?”

            I had turned into the nearest parking lot, which, luckily, had a few extant shops.

            “We need to confer and stop rushing about.”

            “I guess that’s a good short-term plan.”

            “Have you thought about what I’ve been saying? Both our gloms may be behind this, but I think it’s alien technology.”

            “Fred the economic monster?”

            “Something like that.”

            We parked next to a surplus/resell shop, which was part of a passable strip mall. I could see a coffee lounge nearby. Inside the shop in front of us, I saw a few shoppers and clerks. They seemed alright.

            “You may be close,” Connie said. “This may not be malign, but it certainly has a negative effect.”

            “That’s for sure.”

            “I think that our brains are simply being borrowed. To process data.”

            “How? There’s no physical connection. Our minds have little in common with machines at this point.”

            “Well, keep an open mind!”

            “That’s ironic.”

            We were getting a little loud, sitting there in a parking lot, like a couple that had the presence of mind to pull over before they had it out. But we had to get all the theories on the table before Connie went into her trance.

            “For example,” she said, “Remember your trance with the shelf paper?”

            “Yes.”

            “You said something like you’d left some wrinkles.”

            “I did?”

            “You were happy about that.”

            “I remember! That’s strange, too. Because I always try my best. Whoever’s using our brains are getting diminishing returns.”

            Connie clutched her knees, trying to stave off the oncoming trance, a tactic which had never worked for either of us.