Mayor of the Universe

  Light surrounded her and in the shimmer the alien transmogrified into her old familiar green form, before changing back into the smiling black woman with the braided beaded hair.

  “Don’t worry,” she said as Fletcher gaped, clutching his chest. “No one saw that. I measured my risk factors and they were only 20 percent.”

  “A 20 percent risk factor?” said the insurance man, his eyes bulging. “Don’t you think that’s sort of high?”

  “You needed to see me in alien form,” said Tandy. “You’re still doubting what has occurred to you, and we of Lodge 1212 have no time for doubters.” She smoothed her floral skirt and her bracelets jangled. “It hurts our feelings.”

  “I don’t doubt you,” whispered Fletcher, standing on tiptoes to look into Marv Gates’s cubicle. “Thank goodness,” he said, relieved. “He must be at the water cooler.”

  “What a good idea,” said Tandala, and for a second Fletcher thought he was squinting at the brightness of her gummy smile. A second later he realized he was facing a hot tropical sun, and instead of sitting in a small office cubicle he and the alien were reclining on thickly padded chaise longues, facing a carpet of white sand and the flutter of ocean waves.

  “What is it with you people?” asked Fletcher, realizing their states of undress. “What is this thing with naked bodies?” He tore off the lei around his neck and piled several gardenias over his genitals, looking from side to side for unwanted spectators.

  Tandy laughed, passing him a frozen daiquiri. “You should see your face.”

  “It’s not my face I’m worried about you seeing!”

  Tandy laughed again, and because her laughter mimicked bells, or a chorus of songbirds, or the essence of happiness (Fletcher couldn’t decide which), he had to laugh with her. Being whisked away from an insurance office to a tropical paradise was worth a laugh or two, at least.

  He settled back in his chair, and with the scent of salt air and suntan lotion in each inhale, he felt nearly boneless in his complete relaxation.

  “I must say,” he said, after nearly finishing his very refreshing drink, “I do enjoy this extracurricular stuff.”

  “But do not get spoiled,” said Tandy. “It’s not as if we’re going to zamoosh to vacation hot spots all the time.”

  “Zamoosh?”

  “I’d put it into English if there were an equivalent, but there is not. Zamoosh! To skip across time and/or space in the blink of a human eye.”

  In the midst of all that Fletcher’s mind was trying to absorb came the idle thought that the word zamoosh was certainly onomatopoeic.

  A breeze intensified the scent of gardenias, suntan lotion, and salt air and blew forth the calls and songs of a dozen birds, and maybe one monkey.

  “Okay, then—why did you choose to be a black woman with such, such—”

  “Such what? Please, always say to me what is on your mind, Fletcher.”

  “Well, you’re so curvaceous,” said Fletcher, embarrassed. “So va-va-voom.”

  “The va-va-voom was not planned,” said Tandy, better adjusting the blossoms of her lei over her pendulous breasts. “All I know is your boss had just this morning read a memorandum about the need to hire more minorities. I thought I would ride in on that directive.”

  “And your accent? Where are you supposed to be from?”

  “I was born in Jamaica but became an American citizen on my thirtieth birthday.”

  “So you’ve got a whole history mapped out?”

  After taking a lusty sip of her drink, she answered, “I guess so.”

  “You guess so?”

  “Fletcher, look, Lodge 1212 is advanced but not so advanced that we know all the answers. Colors and zamooshes and auras are a piece of cake, but earthling transmogrifications and all that that implies . . . to tell you the truth, all I did was shut my eyes and dig into the grab bag of human identities and this is what I got.”

  “I was hoping for something a little more scientific.”

  Tandy sighed, and Fletcher, who didn’t like disapproval from anyone—even aliens—was about to apologize for his snotty tone.

  “I am sorry, Fletcher,” said Tandy, beating him to the apology. “But to explain the hows and whys of my earthly presence would be to explain something your brain is not capable of processing. No offense, of course.”

  “No offense taken.”

  “And please remember that I’m new to this, too. I am certain there will be many situations for which I have no explanation.”

  Fletcher sighed, and the two nude tourists with their strategically placed gardenias reclined in silence for a moment. When Tandy spoke again, her voice was soft. “I must tell you, Fletcher, it took a lot of faith on Charmat’s part to send me here.”

  Fletcher pondered this statement before asking the question he’d wanted to ask since the night before.

  “Are you and Charmat lovers?”

  Tandy let out her sweet musical laugh.

  “Oh, Fletcher, if you mean has he been my sex partner, yes. But who hasn’t? Lodge 1212 enjoys sex, Fletcher, and we should. After all, we’re practically the only ones left in the galaxy that still have two sexes.”

  “Oh my. The others don’t?”

  Tandala shook her head and her beaded cornrows clattered.

  “A few light years ago, the UHC—the Universal Head Council—decreed that we had become evolved enough to do away with the fuss and bother of the male-female thing. Lodge 4 Squared—they’re the big eggheads—had come up with a method of reproduction that involved skin grafts and telepathy—well, that is the simple explanation. It’s a bit more complicated, but we couldn’t be bothered to look at the schematics. We couldn’t be bothered to participate either. We upheld our right to sexual congress, to the beauty and terror of the yin and the yang, and most importantly, our right to have fun.”

  “And they agreed to that?” asked Fletcher, unable to imagine standing up to Marv Gates, let alone a Universal Head Council.

  “Hoola, baby,” said Tandy, as she blotted perspiration above her lip with one of the pads of her long-nailed fingers. “The way you humans purge liquids is really something.” She looked down at the rows of sweat trickling down her chest. “Look, my mountains have little rivers running over them!”

  Fletcher couldn’t help but laugh at her childish delight, but still curious he asked if there’d been any repercussions over the lodge’s rebellion.

  “Oh, sure, we were gossiped about, disinvited to the Mind Games on Uranus. But we’ve never exactly been embraced by the intergalactic lodges. You know how it is when you’re having fun—those who aren’t resent you.”

  “I guess I’ve never really known that kind of resentment.”

  “Well, my friend, those days are over!”

  He raised his glass to return her toast, but it vanished from his hands and along with it, the heat of the sun on his body and the smell of the tropics. He was sitting in his off-white office cubicle again, and never had off-white seemed so constraining.

  “Why are you so abrupt with those transition things?” he asked, clinging to his desk as if it were bobbing in the ocean and he’d just been through a shipwreck. “I was just getting used to the idea of an all-body suntan.”

  “I only zamooshed us there to get your attention, Fletcher. You seem to be resisting our collaboration. We believe in you—the question is, do you?”

  There was no harshness to her voice, no reproach, yet all of Fletcher’s favorite nervous tics converged; he pulled at the skin between his nostrils, bit the inside of his cheek, tugged at his cowlick, blinked his eyes, cracked his knuckles, cleared his throat, sniffed, sniffed again, chewed a cuticle, and tapped his foot. Then, as if he needed reminding of how frightened he was, his testicles drew up like a window shade.

  The little red light on his phone blinked and he lunged for the receiver, grateful for the distraction.

  “Fletcher,” said Cindy Dahlberg, “Mr. Rockman wants you and . . . whatever her name is in
his office, stat.”

  Under normal circumstances, hearing the voice of the comely receptionist, however bored or accusatory, would be like a kiss in his ear, but these were not normal circumstances. He didn’t appreciate Cindy’s tone at all and said as much.

  “Wha . . . ?” said Cindy, shocked by Fletcher’s scolding.

  “Her name’s Tandy,” he said, “and it’s a shame your acquaintanceship with her might be limited, because she could teach you a lot about what it is to be a woman.”

  Cindy’s words came over the line in sputters. “How dare you even—”

  Fletcher hung up on her midstammer. The snide voice of the receptionist was a slap of reality in the unreality that had become his life, and even though the flesh and bone of his legs had turned to rubber, he managed to stand tall as he unplugged his computer and puts its plastic protective cover over it. Watching him, Tandy held her hands above the shelf of her chest and clapped them.

  Off his desk, he picked up a photograph of himself as a boy with his still intact family, a spider plant that never flourished but would not die, and his clock, shaped like a pyramid, its hands little Egyptian pharaohs.

  As he searched the room for something to pack up his valuables, Tandy handed him a nearly empty box of copier paper.

  “Thanks,” said Fletcher. He grabbed the half-ream of paper and flung it out of the box and for a moment the air was filled with confetti sized for a giant’s parade. Something was happening to him, something was mixing in with the fear he felt—a truant’s joyousness, an explorer’s thrill.

  “Hey, Weschel, what gives?” asked Marv Gates, looming above his side of the wall, watching the pieces of copier paper drift to the ground.

  “Everything,” said Fletcher, putting his semi-valuables into the empty box. “Everything gives,” he repeated. “It’s a discovery I’ve just made.”

  Marv Gates scratched his temple, releasing a sprinkling of dandruff. “What the h-e-double-toothpicks are you talking about?”

  Tandy leaned closer to Fletcher’s desk, eager to hear herself.

  “I guess, Marv, what I’m trying to say is that if you butt up against something long enough, it’ll give.”

  “So what,” asked Marv as he watched Fletcher rifling through a file cabinet, “in your case gives?”

  Pushing the drawer back on its casters, Fletcher stood tall, to his full 5' 9-¾" height. He smiled, and Marv later said to his wife, “It just lit up his face, Margie. I never even knew boring old Fletcher was capable of a smile like that. I wonder if he’s on some kind of medication.”

  “Marv, I’m going to miss you,” said Fletcher, snapping shut the latches of his briefcase. “I won’t pine for you, but I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too,” said Marv, totally befuddled, “but where are you going?”

  “Yes, ensign, where are you going?” asked Ralph Rockman, who didn’t get into his position of management without keeping his ears and eyes open as to what was happening in his office. “Just what the Sam Hill is going on?”

  He stepped toward Tandy, giving her the once-over, and her breasts the twice-over.

  “You,” he said. “Miss Tammy, wasn’t it?”

  “Tandy.”

  “Sure,” said Ralph Rockman. “Didn’t I send you in here to get to know our friend Fletcher? I mean, seeing as you’ll be handling the Dight Properties account together.”

  “You did, sir,” nodded Tandy. “I believe that was the original intent.”

  “Then why does it look as if you’re packing up?” said Ralph Rockman, with a smile so tense it seemed his teeth might crumble.

  “Because I am,” said Fletcher, taking a cursory look around the office to which most of his identity had been for so long attached. “I am packing up and moving out, skipper.”

  His mouth opened horizontally in a big grin while Ralph Rockman’s mouth dropped vertically into an oval. So did Marv’s and those of other curious employees who had gathered around, and the only thing breaking the silence was the white noise of fluorescent lighting and data-displaying screens. When Ralph Rockman recovered his power of speech, there was a tinge of meanness that most people only heard inside his closed-door office.

  “Are you telling me that you’re quitting?” He looked at the black woman and her double-D chest. “Is it because of her? Because I can let her go like that”—he snapped two thick ruddy fingers—“because to tell you the truth, I’m not exactly sure why I hired her in the first place. I hadn’t planned on hiring anyone today.” He replaced the look of bafflement that uncharacteristically skirted across his face with his usual stern, in-charge one. “Is that really what you’re telling me, Wushchel?”

  “I guess I am, Rockhead,” said Fletcher. “Although hiring Ms. Tandy was probably the smartest thing you ever did, and it would have been a privilege to work here with her. But the bigger privilege will be to work with her away from here.”

  “Whatever are you babbling about, boy?” snarled Ralph Rockman.

  Handing Tandy his briefcase, Fletcher grabbed his box of personal items.

  “Excuse me,” he said, passing in front of his former boss.

  “Where are you going, Fletcher?“ said Marv Gates, and in his voice was the yearning unspoken question, Can I go, too?

  “We’re off on a mad adventure,” said Fletcher. “Off to follow the fun.”

  “Don’t you mean the sun?” asked Marv helpfully.

  Ralph Rockman folded his muscular arms over his muscular chest. “Whatever you’re following, it’s not going to lead you back here, Watchell. You leave this office, you leave it for good.”

  “Thank you,” said Fletcher pleasantly, and as he led Tandy down the hallway to the elevators, the only sound breaking the stunned silence was the snapping of Cindy Dahlberg’s grape bubble gum.

  A bell sounded and the elevator door opened onto the small lobby that smelled of the homemade beef jerky Frank the handyman kept in the breast pocket of his coveralls. For the last time, Fletcher passed by the radiator that wheezed in the winter and clunked in the summer, passed by the small mural of the Black Hills painted by WPA artists, and pushed Tandy through the door into the cold November day. He felt as light and unbridled as a paroled felon, his fear for now pushed aside by the specter of possibility, and he would have danced a jig on the street, if there’d been a street to jig on.

  Instead he’d have to make do tripping the light fantastic in a shorn wheat field outside town.

  “Jeepers, Tandy, you can’t have us zamooshing right off Capitol Avenue and onto—” he looked around at the flat expanse of land that lay in all directions.

  —“onto your old dance floor?” smiled the alien.

  “Sheesh,” said Fletcher, embarrassed to think Tandala had watched him do the Boogaloo, the Jerk, the Pony, the Twist, and all the other slick dance moves in what he had thought was a private arena.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” said the alien kindly. “You always put on an excellent show.”

  “I haven’t been out here since high school.”

  The wind flapped Fletcher’s pant legs as he slowly turned in a complete circle, surveying the view. Fields stretched out in all directions like a patchwork quilt made by a seamstress with an engineering degree, and other than a moving speck in the distance—a farmer picking up hay bales—he and Tandala were alone in the mown golden acreage.

  “Practically every time I got the car, I drove out here,” he said. “It’s funny when a kid feels he can only be himself in a deserted farm field.”

  “But not ‘funny ha-ha,’ right?”

  “Right. Funny strange. Funny sad.”

  “And yet you have good memories of this place?” said Tandy, burrowing her chin inside the pelt of the rabbit fur jacket she now wore.

  Fletcher nodded. “My dad used to take me out to these fields. Well, twice. Once was after a hailstorm and the other was after a fire.” He inhaled sharply, surprised at the way his heart thrummed at the memory. “I was s
o proud of him—thrilled, really—these farmers had suffered such big blows, and there was my dad swooping in to make everything all right.”

  “What was he—a magician?”

  “Better than that to a farmer who’s got crop damage,” said Fletcher. “An insurance agent.”

  The two days his father took him out to the fields were bright coins in the stingy pocket change of his memories. He had walked side by side with WW, his hands clasped behind his back like his dad, nodding his head like his dad, stopping when his dad stopped to squint out at the beaten-down corn or burned soybeans.

  One of the farmers had stopped to mop tears off his red-leather face, and Fletcher had watched transfixed as WW patted the farmer on the back and told him in a gentle voice, “There, there, Anders. It’ll be all right. You’re covered—in fact, I’ll bet you a hot beef sandwich at Bunnie’s that next year’s beans will be your best crop ever.”

  The farmer had leaned against WW for a moment accepting his pats and then, gathering his strength, took a deep breath and hitched his thumbs in the metal fasteners of his overalls and nodded.

  “Thanks, WW,” he said, standing tall now. “It’s a comfort to know I’m in good hands.”

  Fletcher ached for the kind of manly tenderness his father so easily showed the farmer, but he’d gladly take (what choice did he have?) the second prize of bearing witness to it. Seeing that WW was capable of supplying aid and comfort made Fletcher vow to be the kind of son who would earn it from him.

  He wouldn’t have believed that the day could have gotten any better, but it did. Afterwards, they had stopped at Bunnie’s themselves, not for a hot beef sandwich but for malted milks, and as WW flirted with the old and arthritic restaurant namesake, Bunnie giggled and said, “If I were thirty years younger, you’d be in big trouble, WW.”

  “You look taller, Fletcher,” said Tandala.

  “Huh?” Shaking the sweet memories from his head, Fletcher looked at the cornrowed woman standing so incongruously in the wheat field.

  “I was thinking of going to a tavern for a send-off but think this was a far better idea. Although I wouldn’t have minded a Harvey Wallbanger.”