“Fuck you, Arnie! Fuck you!” Max pulled me out of the yellow room, down the steps, through the alley, and onto Walnut Street.
Arnie hurried after us, saying, “This is unfair. Don’t I even get a chance to explain? Bartholomew, I can help you. You don’t even know what happened yet. I can help you achieve your life goal.”
Max just kept saying, “Fuck you, Arnie. Fuck you, Arnie. Fuck you, Arnie,” over and over again, like it was a magical chant that could protect us while we escaped.
“Bartholomew,” Arnie said. He grabbed my shoulder, spun me around, and looked into my eyes. “Don’t you think you owe it to me to just listen? Don’t you owe it to yourself?”
“He’s a fucking liar!” Max yelled, grabbed my arm, and pulled me down Walnut Street. “Can’t fucking trust him! No fucking way!”
Since he was The Girlbrarian’s brother, and I had already had such a terrible time with Wendy and therapy in general, I decided to go with Max, thinking I could talk to Arnie later if need be, and that Max was much more likely to help me accomplish my life goal of having a beer with his sister, because they were kin.
“Sorry,” I said to Arnie.
“Well, then. You know where to find me, Bartholomew. When you come to your senses,” Arnie said, and then he finally stopped following us. “You need help. Help that Max can’t possibly provide.”
“Fuck you, Arnie!” Max yelled back over his shoulder.
I wondered how Arnie knew what I needed, when we had met only once before and had hardly even talked. Mostly we listened to Max talk. Arnie didn’t really know me at all.
I had a funny thought—since Mom died, besides you, Richard Gere, no one really knows me. No one on the entire planet. Even Father McNamee doesn’t know as much about me as you do. And there really isn’t anyone else.
Do you find that strange?
Sad?
Pathetic?
Interesting?
“Where are we going?” I said to Max, once we were far enough away from Arnie.
“To the fucking pub.”
“What happened between you and Arnie?”
“The fucking story of that requires the consumption of beer. Much fucking beer.”
We ended up in the same pub Max took me to before, at a little table in an empty corner, drinking Guinness and looking at framed photographs of the extremely green, rocky, and often misty Irish countryside. Max downed an entire pint with one tilt of his wrist, pushed his big glasses to the top of his nose, belched loudly, and ordered two more Guinness, even though I hadn’t even taken a sip.
“You’ll fucking need another, once you hear this,” Max said. “Trust me!”
I took a creamy sip and then listened to his tale.
According to Max, Arnie had called him on the phone and asked if he’d like to be part of a study. “What’s a fucking study?” Max asked, and Arnie explained that sometimes therapists put patients in a “controlled fucking environment” to study their behavior, advance our “fucking knowledge” of the “human fucking race,” he said, and help the test subjects in the process. “Arnie hit me in my fucking weak spot, because he said there’d be a cat to pet, and there fucking was too!”
Apparently, Max was instructed to meet Arnie in West Philly at a “fancy fucking college,” and when he did, he was taken into a “large fucking building that looked like a hospital but wasn’t a fucking hospital, because Arnie called it a laboratory fucking facility,” which creeped out Max for many reasons, which I will explain a bit further on.
Max was taken to an office and introduced to a man wearing “a white fucking lab coat” who inquired about the possibility of asking Max questions and “digital-fucking-recording” his answers, as the lab coat turned on the camera stationed on a “fucking tripod.”
Max asked when he would be able to see the promised cat, and the doctor said that would be “the fucking dessert.”
They asked Max all sorts of seemingly random questions, most of which he refused to answer because they were “way too fucking personal.” Max said they asked him whether he had had sex with any men or women recently, and Max said, “Fucking whoa! That’s a line crosser! What the fuck, hey?” And they didn’t seem to mind that he hadn’t answered the questions, which was “fucking weird” because they kept telling Max that he was doing fine, even though he was just getting mad and refusing to answer and sweating in his chair. “I don’t fucking like this. Where the fuck is the cat?” Max kept asking, and they kept promising Max that he was very close to the part where he got to pet the cat. Max said they asked him even stranger questions next, like did he ever have “suicidal fucking thoughts,” “extreme fucking reactions to criticism,” “vivid fucking dreams,” and “did he really believe in fucking aliens,” which freaked him out because of what happened to his sister. The doctor said he was particularly interested in Max’s belief that his cat Alice had been telepathic.
Max ordered another two beers, because he had finished his second.
I had only managed to drink half of mine, so I soon had two and a half pints of Guinness lined up on my side of the table.
“What happened to your sister?” I asked.
Just the mention of The Girlbrarian made my mouth dry—it felt like someone had poured hot sand down my throat.
“I’m not at that fucking part of the story yet. Fuck!” Max yelled. He then said they took him to the end of a “long fucking hallway” that had no windows or doors or anything at all—just white walls, ceilings, and lights overhead. At the end of the hall was a “weird fucking box” on the wall. The doctor touched the box with the tip of his right index finger, the box started to glow green, and then a voice said, “Recognized. Door opening. Hello, Dr. Biddington,” as the door automatically unlocked and slid with a hissing noise, as if the inside atmosphere “were pressure fucking controlled, like a fucking airplane or a subma-fucking-rine.” The doctor walked in. Arnie and Max followed. Inside there were no windows and no clocks and “no fucking TV.” Everything was white—the chairs, the rugs, walls, the counters, “every-fucking-thing!” There were black balls in the ceilings of each room, and when Max asked about them, he was told there were cameras inside.
“Meow!” Max heard, and a medium-sized “short-fucking-haired calico” appeared and began to purr and rub up against Max’s leg. The doctor said Max could name the cat “whatever the fuck he wanted” and she looked “a-fucking-lot like Alice—too fucking much like Alice!” She even had a black patch of “fucking fur” around her “fucking eye!” Max began to worry that they’d cloned his “dead fucking cat,” which made him “sweat fucking buckets” because “what type of mind-fuckers go around cloning people’s dead fucking cats? What the fuck, hey?” Then he began to worry that maybe he was on a spaceship, because the insides of spaceships are always “all fucking white.” And the long hallway seemed like a “fucking entrance ramp,” like “getting onto a fucking airplane.” And if he were on a spaceship, he feared that Arnie and Dr. Biddington were not human—but aliens.
Max asked what they wanted, why had they brought him to this place.
The doctor said, “How would you like to live here with the cat for a few weeks—say . . . three weeks?”
Max said he “would fucking not!”
And then Arnie started to sweet-talk him, saying that they would pay him ten times the money he would make in an entire year working at “the fucking movies” and that he could keep the cat at the end and they would give him complimentary pills that would help ease his “fucking anxiety” and the food would be “gour-fucking-met” and all he had to do was stay in the room for twenty-one days with the cat, but without coming out or having any contact with the rest of “the fucking world.”
“We would observe you,” Arnie had said. “And ask you questions from time to time. But that’s it. You wouldn’t have to do a thing, except play with the cat.”
I was amazed, and wondered if Max’s story could possibly be true.
I said, “
So they just wanted you to be in the room with the cat?”
“What the fuck, hey?” Max said, nodding, his eyes open wide. “Fucking weird, right?”
“Why would they pay you to play with a cat for three weeks?”
“I don’t fucking know. But suddenly, while I was standing there fucking frozen, with the fucking clone of Alice purring at my fucking feet, I realized that the room was definitely a space-fucking-craft. Math. That’s what I used to figure it out. Fucking math.”
“Math?” I said.
“What the fuck, hey?” Max said, nodding confidently. “Three weeks was just enough time to travel to a different fucking galaxy if they put the craft in hyper-fucking-warp speed.”
I didn’t understand what type of math Max was using here, but he seemed so excited that I didn’t interrupt him. Maybe you understand, Richard Gere, because you are so much smarter than I am.
“So it all made fucking sense. And that’s when I fucking knew . . . that fucking Arnie . . . was a goddamn . . . fucking . . . alien,” Max said, throwing in the pauses for dramatic effect. “A yellow-color-loving alien from outer-fucking-space. They’re everywhere, you know. And I won’t let you or me go through what my sister fucking went through. No fucking way. Not going to fucking happen. Not on my watch.”
“Did you say alien?” I asked Max.
“Don’t you fucking believe in aliens? The universe is so fucking huge. Probability is on the aliens’ side. Those fuckers exist! How can you not fucking believe?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never really thought about it much.”
What I was really interested in was finding out more information about The Girlbrarian, so I said, “Max, have you ever read Jung? Have you ever read Synchronicity?”
“Synchronicity? Isn’t that an album by the Police? ‘King of Fucking Pain’ is on that fucker, I think.”
“No, it’s a book written by Carl Jung. It’s about coincidences and how there are none. Unus mundus.”
“Unus-what-the-fuck-dus are you talking about here, hey? And what the fuck does it have to do with aliens? Or the fucking spaceship I almost ended up imprisoned in for three weeks?”
“Hear me out,” I said. “Before we met, I saw your sister at the library. Many times. You might say I felt a certain connection with her. I’ve been watching her working in the library for years and—”
“My sister? Eliza-fucking-beth?”
“I had always wanted to speak with her, but I was too afraid.”
“Why?”
“That’s not the point,” I said, because I didn’t want to tell Max I was in love with his sister. I didn’t know how he would take that information.
“What the fuck is the point, then?” Max said.
“My mother died a few weeks ago, which led to my having a grief counselor named Wendy, who recommended I see Arnie, who just so happened to pair me up with The Girlbrarian’s brother. Think about it. What are the odds?”
“Who the fuck is The Girlbrarian?”
“The girl I have wanted to meet for years now! Your sister!”
“What the fuck, hey?”
“Synchronicity!”
“You want to fucking meet my sister?”
“More than anything in the world.”
“You don’t need synchro-fucking-nicity to meet my sister. I’ll take you to meet her right fucking now. No problem. And she can fucking tell you about the aliens who abducted her. What the fuck, hey?”
Richard Gere, I couldn’t believe my good luck.
It was hard not to think about my mother’s philosophy—The Good Luck of Right Now.
More proof, as the bad of Mom’s death would directly lead to the good of meeting The Girlbrarian for the first time.
Maybe Arnie had been an alien who tried to trick Max into boarding his spacecraft, but the good that balanced out the potential bad of his deception was surely taking place at that moment.
I had never been more certain of anything in my life.
I didn’t care what The Girlbrarian said to me as long as I finally got to speak with her. She could have recited the Declaration of Independence seventy-six times in monotone and without making eye contact once, and my eyes would be riveted on her beautiful plump lips. And now I didn’t have to worry too much about coming off as a freak or failing to say anything at all when I first met her, because Max would be with me.
Max is very talkative.
Max would explain why I was there, providing me with a legitimate reason to be in the same room with The Girlbrarian.
Max would provide a natural bridge for me—a cause for The Girlbrarian and me to speak, even if we ended up talking about aliens.
My fantasy was about to come true.
I was about to accomplish a life goal.
As I walked to The Girlbrarian’s apartment, escorted by her very own flesh-and blood-brother—noticing the increasing amount of trash and broken glass on the concrete and the rising frequency of abandoned boarded-up homes—I thought about all of the random seemingly unrelated events that had to happen sequentially to put me in this very situation, this exact moment in space and time.
I wondered, Was there really math for this sort of thing?
Like maybe some secret division of the government had worked out an equation for people’s lives—like you just plug in the variables of your existence and you get the guaranteed outcome.
fatherless + fat + jobless + ugly + Mom is your only friend x Mom dies – you are approaching 40 years of age
* * *
abused grief counselor + bipolar priest + in love with Girlbrarian x possible alien therapist + Guinness at Irish pub
Equals where I am right now!
Is that crazy?
I was never very good at math.
Regardless . . .
Who could deny The Good Luck of Right Now?
Who?
It was so obvious.
You appeared to me for a few strides and you smiled like you were proud. You gave me the thumbs-up, Richard Gere, and I could tell you were thrilled for me.
Just be yourself, you said, encouraging me. And then you laughed in this good Richard Gere movie-star way. And be confident. Women love confidence. Remember that. Give her the fairy tale. What your mother wanted, but never got. Like in my movies, but this time—in real life. Don’t overthink it. Trust your instincts. Break the cycle. I believe in you, Bartholomew Neil. Richard Gere believes in you! The Dalai Lama believes in you too. His Holiness told me himself.
I felt as though fate were finally on my side, and so I grew more and more confident with every step I took.
Thanks for being there, Richard Gere.
You are a true friend.
Your friendship makes me a better man.
And it’s nice to share all this with someone.
Your admiring fan,
Bartholomew Neil
12
TEKTITE FORMED WHEN LARGER METEORITES CRASHED INTO EARTH’S SURFACE MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO, ACCORDING TO SCIENTISTS
Dear Mr. Richard Gere,
I bet you are wondering why my last letter didn’t supply the details that collectively make up my first-contact story with The Girlbrarian, who shall be referred to from here on as Elizabeth because she does not like to be called The Girlbrarian.
“I’m a woman. Not a girl,” Elizabeth said from behind that curtain of brown hair when she found out I called her The Girlbrarian. “And I am not an official librarian either.”
Her voice was . . . reluctant and damaged and beautiful and maybe like a bird with a broken wing singing unfettered all alone in the wilderness when she thinks no one is listening, if that makes any sense, which it probably doesn’t.
Turns out she was only volunteering at the library—perhaps waiting for a sign, but more on that later.
Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened and the fact is, it all seems sort of unbelievable—like if I told you exactly what transpired, you would call me a liar
; you might even think I’d gone insane or was making the whole thing up to sound more important than I really am. And maybe you will choose to believe that I am lying in the end, when I am finished telling you everything, but there is nothing I can do about that.
I’ve been taking a few days to process, before I committed it to paper.
(I’m afraid you might not approve of my recent decisions, because you haven’t appeared to me in days. Why? Are you shooting an important movie? Perhaps you are with the Dalai Lama? Planning one of your Free Tibet dinner fund-raisers? Maybe you are visiting Tibetan monks who suffer in the burn wards of some faraway hospital after failed self-immolation attempts, and if so, please tell the burned and healing monks I hope their efforts will prove fruitful and they are not in too much pain.)
Regardless . . .
You’re never going to believe what I’m about to say next, because I can hardly believe it myself: I’m writing you from upstate Vermont—although I don’t know what town we are in.
Max and The Girlbrarian are in a motel room together, sleeping in twin beds—I know because Max asked the motel manager several times whether the room had two separate beds “with fucking space in between, hey, because this is my sister”—Father McNamee is in our room praying, and I’m sitting here shivering on a wooden chair outside in the parking lot ringed by snowbanks, writing you next to our rental car, under the billions and billions of stars that make up the Milky Way, which I only just noticed because the motel owners shut off the big sign that reads FRIENDLY FAMILY MOTEL REST STOP HOSPITALITY in giant outer-space-green neon letters.
Max insisted that I wear a shiny brownish gold “fucking tektite” crystal on a leather rope around my neck while I sit outside at night in the country, because it’s supposed to protect me from alien abduction.
How, I cannot say exactly.
Max purchased it off a website called:
Fight Back! Protect Yourself from Aliens Now!
Apparently, your risk of being abducted by aliens increases swiftly the farther away you are from a major city, and so Max and Elizabeth are each wearing three tektite crystals of their own, but Max said you have to work your way up to three, and so I should start by wearing only one. Father McNamee said he would trust the Almighty to protect him and therefore is not wearing an anti-alien tektite crystal of his own.