We were out on the North Road three miles from the sound when we heard a distant explosion, sort of a vague pfoom. The guy in charge of sound effects clearly didn’t know what he was doing.
But even that little pfoom made me feel suddenly tired and sad. I thought we were supposed to be having fun. I’d just blown up a boat I’d owned and loved for more than twenty years.
And I began complaining to Louie. Now that me and my whole family were dead, our house and all our personal possessions would go to some distant relative we hadn’t seen since before World War I. Louie told me to relax, that since all four of us were now nothing but smithereens, we weren’t legally dead, that it would take years of haggling before that distant relative could ever manage to get us declared legally dead, and by that time the world might be a very different place. And we could keep the house as it was for years, and if we ever got the urge, we could get someone to break in and steal all the personal possessions we wanted and take them to our hideout in Antarctica or the eastern Congo or some other place the governments of the world hadn’t yet gotten around to bugging.
“What about my boat?” I complained. “You blew up my boat. I’ll never be able to steal that back.”
Louie just laughed. “I bet you got sick of that boat years ago.”
’Course when Louie said I had gotten sick of the boat years ago, I sputtered and fumed, but Louie just let out another “Ho-ho-ho.” Pretty irritating, I can tell you.
But after a few minutes I got to thinking. Sailors say that there are two ’specially happy moments in a sailor’s life: the day he first buys his boat, and the day he finally gets rid of it. So actually, after another few minutes, I began to alternate between grumpy complaining and occasional giggles. Lita and the boys might have thought I’d finally lost all my marbles, except they already knew I’d lost all I had to lose.
We didn’t drive home and have supper. In fact, I figured we’d never drive home and have supper in that house again. Or go out on the boat together.
Bummer.
* * *
Louie had Carlita drive us to a place on the North Shore of Long Island near New York City. I can’t give you the name of the town since it’s an FF military secret, but we holed up in a big mansion hidden away in some woods. The FFs had taken control of the security system, so the security company monitoring the cameras set around the house and grounds were fed a steady diet of empty lawns and empty rooms while we frolicked, and conspired to overthrow the world. Or at least watched TV.
Because for the next two or three days, it was big news that the famous TV stars and alien lovers Billy Morton and his two sons, and the brilliant lawyer Carlita Morton who had singlehandedly gotten the US Congress to actually begin passing a law they could all agree upon, had been blown up. And their remains eaten by seagulls.
We Mortons were again TV stars. Although no longer on live TV. Only in reruns. Scenes of small pieces of wreckage from my boat drifting up on Long Island beaches, and then scenes from our ABC TV appearance, or of Carlita talking to the press after her release on bail, were played over and over again, often to funeral music. It would have been medium-size news even if we were the total nobodies we’d been before Louie plopped into our lives, but because we were friends of Louie and other FFs—alien criminals and terrorists—we were important. And the big question that the cable TV channels kept asking their experts and scholars and retired corporals was: why did the terrorists murder the poor Mortons?
Yep, that’s how they played it. The FBI almost immediately announced that the explosion was caused not by propane or gasoline but by dynamite. And everyone agreed that the Mortons would never have any use for dynamite. They were murdered. By Louie and his pals.
And, of course, they were right—Louie was our murderer. In any case, the questions that Americans were asked to consider for the next several days were:
Why did the FFs murder the Mortons?
What did the Mortons know that forced the FFs to silence them?
Were all Americans who made the error of befriending an FF in danger of being blown up?
When would the FFs begin blowing up Americans who hadn’t made the mistake of befriending them?
Day after day, night after night, the same questions were asked, and the same experts gave the same pretty ridiculous answers. No one ever said he wasn’t sure. No expert in the history of the universe (our universe anyway) has ever answered a question on TV with “beats me.” They’re paid to answer questions even when they don’t know anything. So answers came flooding onto our TV sets, Twitter feeds, blogs, Facebook pages, and newspaper op-eds. Everyone had an answer. And the answers were real doozies. Various guys and gals said: The FFs used the same type of bomb they’d used to bring down Delta Flight 888 over the Pacific.
Poor Jimmy Morton had become so loved by one of the FFs that he’d been told about the single thing that could kill an FF. That made him a threat. Nice kid, but Boom!
The FFs had special suicide FFs who could go anywhere and, when they felt like it, explode. It was an FF suicide bomber who had taken out the Mortons.
Lucas Morton was a child prodigy computer genius who knew the trick the FFs used to hack government systems and had developed a way to block it. Smart kid, but Boom!
The FFs were anxious to test out their new remote-control explosive device, one they could hide in things as small as a golf ball, and the Mortons were the first victims.
Carlita had managed to access from one of the FFs’ computers their master plan for taking over the world, and though she had no written record of it, she knew everything. Nice looking broad, but Boom!
The Vagabond was the very boat on which Louie had made his first contact with human beings and, unbeknownst to humans, there were important traces on the boat that would reveal secrets about the FFs that had to be kept buried. Boom! Buried.
Billy Morton (hey, that’s me!) had been told the secret formula to get from one universe to another, and although Morton (still me) couldn’t make head nor tail of the formula, if it fell into the hands of an intelligent human being (not me), humans might be able to strike back at the FFs. Nice old guy, but Boom!
* * *
So, Carlita, me, and the kids spent half of our day laughing at the TV, and the other half being fitted for clothes that would be part of our new identities. The kids and Carlita loved trying on new things, while I snarled and snapped. I wasn’t interested in wearing a tuxedo or expensive boots or having my hair done in a new way. With only three hairs total, the styling options were limited. The hairpieces they tried to shroud me in looked like hairpieces. At best they made a seventy-two-year-old man look like he was seventy-one and three quarters. I was old and bald and wrinkled and I loved life and I loved myself just as I was. But somehow they had to create a Billy that was not easily recognizable. Lots of luck.
We lived in the west wing of the mansion. There were a few other human beings in the east wing working under the instructions of Baloney. Apparently they were the ones who’d set up a lot of bank and brokerage accounts on Long Island, Brooklyn, and Manhattan for us and other friendly humans. They were also making sure our false identity papers were in good shape and getting us written biographies of who we were supposed to be, biographies that we could study and memorize and forget all about as soon as we began to be questioned. The people in the east wing had no idea who they were creating these false identities for, nor that the famous Morton family had actually risen from the dead and were living in the west wing of the mansion only thirty feet away. It was important that the only people who knew the Mortons were still alive were us and the FFs.
The plan was for us to be a rich retired couple living in a Brooklyn condo. Lita and I both preferred to live in the country, but Louie said small towns or suburbia were out: Lucas and Jimmy would be identified in a second. In cities people didn’t bother to look at each other. I was to be a retired Wall Street exec. Yeah. Right.
The second night we were there, I stayed
up after Lita and the boys had gone to bed and had a couple of drinks with Louie and Gibberish, who began discussing some of the ways they hoped to get people to enjoy Forthehelluvit events and some of the big ones they were working on. They kept talking about playing and games and fun. I appreciated their communicating in English for my benefit, but frankly I wasn’t much into fun and games these days and told them so.
“I’m stuck being a human being with two boys I love, and I don’t see much fun in trying to create a new life when you keep telling me that they’re easily recognizable when seen together and so can’t be seen together. What kind of fun is that for them?”
“It’s a challenge,” says Louie. “And you should see it as a sudden shift in a game that means you have to develop new strategies. But you and the boys should have fun doing it.”
I thought about this awhile, got up and poured another drink on top of Louie’s “head,” and then sat back down and took a sip of my own. Gibberish had told me that he only drank on alternate Tuesdays. Except during leap years.
“Well, I can’t say I’m having much fun these days,” I says. “Boat gone, house gone, getting ready to pretend to be the sort of rich business asshole I’ve never wanted to be in my life—not exactly my definition of a barrel of laughs.”
Louie sat there on the couch for a bit and then jumps down and rolls over and bounces up into my lap.
“Billy, I’m sorry,” he says. “We are being unfair to you. It may have been a mistake to have killed you and Carlita and your wonderful boys. Molière and I were talking just yesterday about how we should have figured out a different way to do it. I’m really sorry.”
“You should be,” says Gibberish. “Your best human friend and you may have ruined his life.”
Well maybe that was an exaggeration, but I still felt that living a new life wasn’t going to work out.
“I’m sorry, Billy,” says Louie.
“Yep,” says I.
THIRTY-FOUR
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 258–263)
I don’t think Louie has any sense of what it means for a human being to get old. He doesn’t seem to realize that for me to have to travel for five or six hours on buses and planes as I did on the Cayman Islands trip is like a young man running a marathon. Now he was asking me to go with him on a quick four-day trip to Iraq on a mission that needed him to have a human companion. A fifteen-hour journey. I told him I figured he had plenty of other human friends, so why pick on me?
“Most of my other human friends, and I only have a few, I’ve kept out of my games that involve illegal enterprises, but from the moment you let me in your kitchen door, you’ve become so deeply involved in my games that another crime won’t make a bit of difference. Just add a year or two onto your ninety-year sentence.”
Louie wasn’t too good at sugar-coating.
“What makes you think they won’t recognize me going through security?” I ask.
“You’re dead, remember? And my other human friends are alive and known. No Fed is looking for a terrorist corpse.”
“So what crime am I going to commit now?” says I.
“Aiding and abetting me to get to the Middle East where I will aid and abet the alien terrorists who are doing damage to American planes and drones and intelligence operations.”
“So you guys have come down on the side of the Arabs, have you?” says I.
“Oh, no, we’re also messing with Al Qaeda, ISIL, and most of the other twenty-six Arab and Persian groups fighting the Americans. Actually, we’re a bit like the American military itself, getting involved in civil wars that should really be none of our business and ending up, just like the Americans, fighting against both sides. Your American Air Force was the first air force in history to end up in Syria bombing both sides in a civil war. When the Iranians moved in some ‘volunteers’ to fight ISIL in Iraq, the Americans bombed them and the Arab terrorists with the same planes on the same day. That’s efficiency. It does make bombing easier when you don’t have to worry about good guys and bad guys, because you’ve decided both sides are bad.”
“You going to be involved over there for some time then?” says I.
“Oh, no,” says Louie. “I’m just going over to give a few tutorials.”
“Tutorials!”
“The FFs in the area are trying to get everyone to stop fighting. But they have relatively limited skills in computer hacking. They need help. They’ve managed to reprogram drones to blow up where people won’t get killed, and they’ve totally messed up ISIL’s communication systems. Takes them days now to plan how to chop off a new head. But our FFs can’t stop the US fighter-bombers and cruise missiles sent from aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf over Iraq and Syria that kill some Arab men and the usual bunch of women and children.”
“Couldn’t you email them instructions?”
“Ho-ho-ho. If I tried to communicate with them in English it would take about six Encyclopedia Britannicas to give them some hints about how to proceed to hack the aircraft carriers and their missiles and planes. In person I can teach them in twenty minutes.”
“Aren’t there other genius hackers like you they could use?”
“Probably. But I’m the one they’ve asked for help.”
“And I’m the one that you’ve asked for help.”
“Yep.”
First time Louie had used my favorite word.
Actually, I’d noticed that all FFs tend to modify the way they talk depending on who they’re talking to. When talking to kids, they talked like a kid. When talking to an uneducated lout like me they talked everyday American, but when talking to Carlita they talked like brainy nerds. Louie told me once that it was just natural for them to speak in the language of the creature they were speaking to.
Lita agreed that she could handle looking for tutors for the boys and the condo hunting in Brooklyn. ’Course at first she resisted, but I guess she concluded that since I was dead I couldn’t get any deader. She didn’t see how I could be of much help to Louie and the FFs, but if they requested it, and it didn’t involve the boys, then she wouldn’t veto it.
* * *
The flight to Paris and then on to Cairo and finally to Baghdad was not as bad as I thought it would be. I was disguised as a rich socialite, I guess because that was about as far as the FFs could get from the roughneck fisherman I usually was. I was wearing an expensive toupee that was so good I thought I’d grown a head of hair overnight. I was also wearing under my suit jacket a really great furry vest. Only problem with it was that every now and then it would sprout a limb and begin tickling me.
Molière and Karen and LT were on the plane too, but I couldn’t sit with them or talk to them. Even in my disguise it would be a mistake for me to be seen with FFs. Molière and LT were allowed to travel without too much hassle because they’d become famous actors, what with their off-Broadway hit play. In fact, it was that success that had gotten them invited by some renegade general (who hadn’t gotten the memo about all FFs being terrorists) to entertain our boots on the ground in Iraq.
’Course we didn’t actually have any boots on the ground in Iraq; our soldiers were all wearing sneakers. Or if they wore boots, they made sure they stayed inside or, when traveling, went directly from steps to a Humvee or attack helicopter without letting their boots touch the ground. When desperate, they took off their boots and fought barefoot.
Molière had told me that they hoped to entertain more than four thousand soldiers and contractors during their four-day stay. Which was pretty good, since there were supposedly less than two thousand American military in the whole country. Apparently in their new shorter version of the play, Louie-Twoie was going to get to dance as a centipede, a chipmunk, a giant bumblebee, a six-inch cockroach, and a platypus. Not sure how interested our boys would be in dancing cockroaches, especially with Karen hanging around somewhere, but you never can tell.
Going through customs and security at the Baghdad Ai
rport was the easiest I’d ever heard of. Apparently the Iraqis figured that everyone who wanted to kill people was already in Iraq, and there was no sense in wasting time on screening latecomers.
We went straight to a fancy hotel in the heart of the city somewhere now called the Purple Zone, only a block from the American Embassy. It used to be called the Green Zone but had seen so much blood in the last couple of years it was now Purple.
If you’ve never seen the American Embassy in Iraq you should know that it makes the Kremlin look like a summer cottage. It’s so big that it’s said that more than fifty people have gotten lost in it and never been seen again. They’re always finding corpses in some obscure room no one has entered in years. Only cost a billion dollars, and we got it finished just in time for all the American troops and most of the other security guys to leave the country. ’Course lately they’ve been coming in again.
I slept for thirteen hours. Would have slept longer but Karen came into my hotel room and sat on my bed and began gently caressing my face. Not a bad way to wake up.
During our stay Louie sometimes disguised himself as Molière. That is, whenever he wanted to go some place he went with Karen, or Karen and me, so that everyone assumed he was Molière. ’Course Karen and I and anyone who knew either of them could tell the difference, but almost no one in Iraq knew them. And the CIA agents who were usually following us couldn’t tell the difference between them either. We figured they were following Molière because he was with Karen. He was thought to be a harmless clown, the lucky winner of a hot human babe, but not a threat to anyone unless they were homophobic and scared by someone who could have five stiff peckers at the drop of a skirt.
It was on the third day of our visit that Karen, Molière, and LT were supposed to give their first performance at the American Embassy. It was sold out—2,500 tickets, to both Americans and Iraqis, the Iraqis naturally all having to wear straitjackets when in the company of a large group of Americans. But less than six hours before the show was to go on, the commanding general ordered the performance canceled. I guess the bigger guys back in the Pentagon suddenly realized that in Iraq, with soldiers having their computers seriously fouled up by FFs, it wasn’t too hot an idea to have a performance celebrating a union between a human and a terrorist, all FFs being, in the Pentagon’s eyes, terrorists.