CHAPTER ONE
MARGARITA Rosen sat in her car, idling. Not that she could really afford to, what with the gas prices, and the not having a job. But she couldn’t go inside yet. She’d been in the car for hours, now. First just driving around, trying to outrun the fetid feeling of another failed interview (this one to be a sales associate at PepBoys, in which she couldn’t seem to stop herself from mentioning that she’d always been more than a little bit turned on by the three men in the logo), and then just sitting here, in front of her very own Hollywood hellhole. Well, not her very own, she was obviously a renter, and shared the place with a middle-aged straight crossdresser named Felix (or Felicity, when the stockings were on), but her very own in the sense that she lived there, and at least some of the bras on the floor were hers. She’d pulled up when the sun was setting and had had every intention of turning off the car and going inside when The Feeling hit her.
It was a feeling she’d been plagued by her whole life, particularly on clear, warm, windy summer nights, or crisp autumn ones where wisps of cloud dance over the moon, or, apparently, on nights after she admitted to having erotic feelings for three men in an auto body shop logo, before also pointing out that they bear a striking resemblance to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. That particular shame shrank before her, in the face of this feeling. It was like the feeling that Halloween used to give her as a kid, as if some veil to another world was on the precipice of pulling back, or that the door in fact might already be open and was just waiting for her to figure out how to step through it. Like something was going to happen, something cosmic and extraordinary and inexplicable. It was strange and thrilling and nagging. It tugged at her stomach, her throat, her nipples, insisting that she wait and she be ready for… something. It was never anything, of course. The feeling would fade, as it always did. But it had been so long since she’d felt it. Uncomfortably, it occurred to her that it might have something to do with The Dream. She pushed the thought away. Fuck The Dream. The Dream did not bear thinking about. She stayed in the car, watching the clouds turn orange and then blue and then black, unwilling for the familiarity of her walls and her floors and her things to drive away the electric tingle of possibility on the night air.
She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Even if something did happen to happen, regardless of how The Feeling made her feel not merely ready for it, but borderline impatient, the truth was that she was more or less incapable of doing anything about anything at all. Several months ago, a piece of gravel had flown off a truck and made a tiny dint in her windshield. In the ensuing weeks it had grown to a sizable crack, and she had just watched it happen, not even really grasping that she could do anything about it. Maybe if she’d gotten the PepBoys gig, someone would’ve just done something about it for her. Rita rolled down the windows and considered the crack, wondering if it haunted her, its lingering presence serving as a constant reminder of her many failures and her myriad failings. The problem, she thought, was that it didn’t bother her at all. It just sort of faded into invisibility and became a fact of her life, like the single Cheerio that had survived on her living room floor, between the back of the couch and the mirror, for two years. She had meant to pick it up, and then she didn’t. And then it wasn’t so much that she consciously avoided stepping on it, so much as that she knew it was there and simply didn’t step on it. Then she was forced to take on a roommate, and within a week of moving in, Felicity crushed it beneath the heel of one of her Jessica Simpson pumps while trying to gauge whether or not a fedora worked on her as a woman or a man. And then the Cheerio was gone, and she wondered whether its presence or its absence meant anything, to her or at all. Rita sighed. Maybe everything would’ve been different if she hadn’t been born with an old lady’s name. A light breeze drifted through the open windows, carrying the smell of tar and exhaust, lifting the hair on her arms and the back of her neck.
1
The stars began to come out. Rita gazed at them for a moment; or at least what she could make of them through her grime-spattered moonroof, past the palm trees and power lines, against the light pollution emanating from the massive “SCIENTOLOGY” sign that shone over the blue building towering above her in the near distance. She fished her lighter out of the cupholder and ran her thumb over the spark wheel. Was she actually waiting for something to happen right now? Or just relishing the feeling that something could happen, something she didn’t have to make happen, for something to drop out of the blue that would imbue her life with meaning and purpose? She made to grab her cigarettes and then abruptly, as if guided by some other hand, changed course, jabbing the radio on. She flipped through waves of static, tuning into the only AM station she still knew, playing the only show she still knew. It was a nationally syndicated program, one she had started listening to as child on the little Sony boombox in the room she shared with her sister back East, with the de-bunked bunk beds and the black standing lamp that everyone’s mother had from the early nineties that roasted alive any bug that flew within a foot of it. The program trafficked in conspiracy theories of all kinds, but tended toward the supernatural. Ghosts and Bigfoot and aliens and human spontaneous combustion; though she’d noticed that one had suspiciously fallen out of fashion alongside polyester, shag carpet, and the national pastime of falling asleep in your EZ chair with a lit cigarette and a can of beer you had to open with an actual can opener. She turned up the volume, and the host’s familiar voice came through; he always took a vaguely patronizing tone with his guests, as though he knew just a little bit more about their areas of expertise than they did. That he, in fact, knew all the secrets of the universe already, and would happily share them with the rest of us if only he thought we could handle it. But there was something comforting about it, too, like a mildly patronizing grandfather in a soft green chair who occasionally allows you a puff of his pipe. Though perhaps not at the moment: They were talking vaccines, and that always irritated her. Somewhere post-9/11, conspiracies had taken a turn to the right, and had continued down that road until what was once the domain of the anti-government far left had become one of the stranger arms of far right fascism. Which really kind of took the fun out of it, as fascism tends to do. The show went to commercial, and she turned the dial down until the grating ad for commemorative Kennedy coins became nothing more than a pleasant muffled buzz.
She lit a cigarette. In the haze of the smoke and the lull of the white noise, her thoughts strayed back to last night’s dream. Well, it wasn’t just last night’s dream. It belonged to many nights, mostly in childhood, making appearances throughout the entirety of puberty, and then even the memory of it fading through her young adulthood until it existed only at the edges of feeling when she was a particular kind of stoned. So why now, again? And why should it disturb her so much, anyway? It was really kind of stupid, in the way that dreams often are the second you try to explain them. Nothing even happened in it. Though that was kind of the thing, wasn’t it? As far back as she could remember, The Dream was the same. She’d be at home – not this one, but her childhood home, as it was when her parents were still together – waiting for something to happen, though it was never clear exactly what. For something to come on TV, for guests to arrive for a party, for her parents to finish getting ready, as if they were all preparing to go on some fabulous trip together. And not just to that one motel in the seedy part of Montauk where the pool was always closed for some reason or another. Something much grander and more important and less damp than that. It was, in short, The Feeling, but then it would corrupt: Suddenly something was about to happen, but it was not the thing she was waiting for. And it was bad. Very bad, and they had to hide from it, but her family wouldn’t listen. No, in fact, they seemed to be almost part of it, whatever it was, and then there would be planets outside her window, huge and strange on the horizon and wrong, very, very, wrong somehow – and then she’d wake up in a cold sweat, blood pounding in her ears. She’d check the windows – no planets – but this feeling, this creeping dread that she had not so much dreamed something but witnessed something, that something terrible and true was being shown to her that had come from somewhere other than her own subconscious and she was supposed to do something about it would linger the rest of the night, until the morning sun chased it away. It always scared the shit out of her, but the more she thought about it, the dumber it seemed. What the hell is so scary about big planets? It was just a metaphor for the unknown, and for the terrifying, mystifying, massive forces that control our lives far more than we do. It was just some sort of anxiety dream, and it figured she’d have it the night before a job interview during a time where she had zero handle on what her life would become or how.
2
“…on the line, from Arizona.” She turned the radio back up. The call-ins were always the best part. She’d listen to the callers and then head inside. Felix would be out for the evening, meeting with his fantasy football league, a concept Rita still couldn’t manage to wrap her head around. She knew this wasn’t right, but she always imagined a group of balding guys with beers, sitting in a circle with their eyes closed and fighting over an imaginary football game. “…but no one believes me, on account of the midget part. Now, I can’t tell ya why Lincoln would appear as a midget in his spirit form, but that’s just the way it is, Jer.”
She took a long drag on her cigarette, smiling. The host seemed skeptical. Just why would the famously tall Abraham Lincoln have become a little person in the afterlife, he wondered? Stupid question, Rita thought. Obviously, if he had been that short in life, Booth would’ve missed his shot. Classic afterlife wish-fulfillment shit. The more interesting question would be why the hell he’s appearing at all. What’s his unfinished business, and why’s he telling it to a retired glassblower from Arizona?
The caller paused for a minute. “Well, Jer, only way I can figure it is that if he were a midget, JWB woulda missed.” She flicked off some ash, satisfied.
“But the height don’t concern me, I know it’s him. He says it’s him, and he was called Honest Abe, wasn’t ‘e? Thing is, why is he coming around at all? Says he’s worried about the civil war, and I had to tell him, ‘hey, man, that thing’s over. Finished about a month after you left.’ Then he got all agitated, said I didn’t know my ass from my elbow – I mean, he didn’t say it like that, that ain’t his way, but—“
She leaned in, interested, just as the host cut him off to put through the next caller, a woman from Michigan. Typical. Rita was overcome with the feeling that she never got anything. Not a job, not a decent mattress, not even the end of this guy’s story. A jolt of fury ran through her, and she flicked her cigarette, forcefully. So forcefully that the cherry popped right off, singed her thigh, and then rolled onto the fabric seat between her legs, where it promptly started burning a hole. Yelping, she grabbed the remains of that morning’s coffee and dumped it onto the seat. And, incidentally, onto the crotch of her pants. On top of everything else, a wet ass. She smacked her steering wheel, which did nothing to relieve her frustration but did successfully hurt her hand. Shaking it off the sting, she sighed and reached behind the center console to dig around the passenger seat for the towel that’d been in her car since a beach trip six months prior. She finally landed on a corner of it, and then –
3
“…planets. And they’re huge, Jer, just huge, and they’re mean. I don’t know how that is, but they’re mean.” Rita froze. Moldy towel hanging limp in her hands, cold coffee seeping into her crotch, she turned the volume up another couple of ticks.
The host cleared his throat in a way that managed to come off both patronizingly authoritative and bemused. “And this is a premonition you had? Now, do you happen to live near a military base, Alice?”
“No! Well, no, that’s not it, I— Oh, I don’t know! It’s just a dream I used to have, and I had it again last night, and I just knew I had to call, Jer. I just knew it. I feel like I have to warn people.”
“Of what, Alice? Big planets? Are there aliens on these planets, Alice? Are they ships, Alice? You know, I’ve heard—“
“No! No, I don’t know.” Alice had suddenly become shrill. She took a deep breath, audible over the phone line. “I just know it scared the daylights out of me and I had to call because I thought people should know. I don’t know what they should know, I don’t know what it means, maybe it’s just a dumb dream, and now I feel dumb for calling.”
“Is it The Greys, Alice? Is it grey aliens?”
“I… I just don’t know. I really have to go, I’m sorry to waste your time.”
The line went dead. The host announced that he was patching through Mark from St. Louis, who had apparently inherited a haunted VHS copy of The Little Mermaid, but Rita couldn’t take in a word of it. She shut the radio off, ears ringing in the silence. That was her dream. And she’d just been fucking thinking about it. That can’t be a coincidence. Or could it? It might be a very common dream. Actually, come to think of it, she suddenly remembered a Reddit thread about it. Or had that been about the shadow man in the hat that everyone saw as a kid? Well, she’d definitely read that, but probably this one, too. She turned the car off, rolling the windows up. She wasn’t altogether sure she really had read a Reddit thread about it. She’d never looked up the dream before, she’d hadn’t even thought about it in years. She patted herself and the seat down with the towel halfheartedly, her mind racing. If it wasn’t a coincidence, was this the “thing” she had always been waiting for? It didn’t seem very much like a “thing,” really. Weird, sure, but just a distant voice on a radio program for lonely nutcases, of which Rita was undoubtedly one if she was going to get so worked up by what was probably the outer-space-themed equivalent of that dream where you’re back in high school about to take a test you haven’t studied for. Not something she had to do something about, surely. She relit her cigarette, and found her hands were shaking.
Who the fuck was Alice, and why were they having the same dream?
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4
Alice hung the kitchen phone up in its wall cradle, feeling the fool she knew she must’ve sounded like, in her tatty grey sweatpants and her lime-green windbreaker and her asinine notion to open her mouth and talk about that damn dream. She sat down at her little white vinyl-covered table, trembling. Why the heck did she even call? She’d messed up the whole thing. She’d wanted to get on the line for years. She’d tried once before, in the early 90s, after she’d seen some lights out over the lake and found the next morning that the cow’s spots had switched sides, but they’d never put her call through. And that, at least, had been a real story! This dream didn’t sound like a thing at all, especially after darn Jerry Northrop started asking all those questions. God, did he have a sexy voice, though. That’s half what threw her off! The thing was, she really didn’t have any idea what it meant. She never had. She always figured it was just some kind of recurring dream that meant nothing at all other than her own worries, and she had plenty of those right now.
Jason had just finally cut her off completely. He’d had a son of his own, her very first grandbaby, and he cut her out of his life. All because of that lousy jab she wouldn’t get. That had always bothered him, but he respected that she made her own choices. But then the baby came along, and he wouldn’t let her get near them at all unless she got vaxxed. Well, sad as that made her – and it really did, it just about broke her heart into pieces – she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Alice’s nails worried at a little hole at the corner of the table, where the vinyl bunched up a bit. Not everyone always agreed with her, but she always made her own choices, Alice did. Like how she never did get one of them cellphones. Nasty little spy devices, mindmushers, she called them. They’d rot your brain even if they didn’t give you cancer, which they did. And besides, the government and lord knows who else could hack their way right into them and watch you, the perverts.
Alice glanced over at the sink. She’d forgotten to do the dishes from dinner. She soaped up the sink, scrubbing the remnants of mac and cheese and mashed potatoes off the single plate, and the imprint of her lips the chapstick had left on the single glass. She felt like she knew where she’d gone wrong with her daughter; she never should’ve let her dye her hair blue, for starters. But where had she gone wrong with her son? He thought she was crazy, she knew. But he himself was the one who noticed the cow had changed spots, his Smuckers covered kindergarten hands handing her the Polaroid to prove it. It was the damndest thing: The cow had the same spots she ever did, there was this big heart shaped one on her left flank; only now it was on her right, and all the rest had switched, too. Alice figured it had something to do with the dancing, impossibly fast trio of lights she’d seen over the water the night before, but she couldn’t figure exactly what. Had the aliens abducted it and left them a bad clone? Or was it the same cow, and they’d just switched the spots for some darn reason? Jerry might have known something about all that, but she never got through. And then, tonight, she actually gets on the line, all to say a whole lot of nothing.
5
There was something about the dream, though, that just made her sick. Years ago she had taken to calling it That Dream, like with capital letters, and the kids soon learned to steer clear of Mom the mornings after she had it. She’d be jumpy as all heck, hardly able to slap together a PB&J for their school lunches without scaring herself silly over something as harmless as the clang of the knife hitting the bottom of the sink. Al would give her a comforting squeeze of the shoulder and take over, and she’d hate herself for getting so worked up over nothing. Just some big planets she invented in her sleep. She hadn’t had it in forever, though, at least not since the kids moved out of the house. And then she’d had it again last night, and she woke up jumpy as ever, but with another feeling, too: That she had to spread the word. Like it was her destiny, or something. Not that Alice Parker-Runnels had a destiny. Destiny was for important people, like Jesus and Olympic ice skaters and Cher. She’d just gotten carried away, she guessed. What so got to her about the dream was just the wrongness of it all, and the sense that the dream didn’t belong to her. Not that it was being implanted or what have you, but just this crazy feeling that the dream somehow belonged to everyone. She’d never met anyone else who’d had it, though. Not that she’d ever asked anyone. She never liked to dwell too long on it, afraid that if she did, she might look out the kitchen window and see Uranus hanging low in the front yard. Her anus might be hanging low these days, but that was a problem she could manage. Alice finished wiping the dishes dry, her chuckle turning into a long, tired sigh.
Alice zipped up and stepped out onto the front porch. She turned to Al where he sat, in his flannel and his jeans in his rocking chair, just like he used to when he was flesh and blood. “Well, Al, I hope you aren’t mad, but I just got off the horn with another man. A real handsome one, too.” Al’s wooden slash of a mouth smiled at her, just like it always did. “Think I made a real butt of myself, though, so I don’t think you’ll have to worry about someone taking over your side of the bed just yet.” She patted his carved hand and looked up at the clear, star-speckled sky, laughing softly. She felt better already. Venus was shining right above her, spitting distance from the moon. She spoke right to it. “Just don’t get any closer, you got that?” Venus winked in response. Alice didn’t know which way to take that.
Just then, the motion-activated light on the side of her house lit up. Alice tensed, grabbing Al’s wooden forearm. “Who goes there? Show yourself! I have a gun, you know!” She always went shrill when she meant to sound stern, but at least she’d thought to mention the guns.
Someone snorted. “Oh, don’t have a conniption, it’s just me.” Alice exhaled, relieved when she recognized the smoky gravel of Francine’s voice. Francine never had any trouble sounding stern. She had trouble not sounding like a truck driver, which made sense, seeing as that’s what she used to be up until she retired three years ago. The acrid burning smell of Francine’s Kool arrived a moment before she did, and then there she was, trudging up the porch steps in that denim hoodie with the Tasmanian Devil on the back, shaking her head.
6
“And like hell you have a gun. At least not with bullets, anyway. Which is just as well, you’re wound so tight you’d shoot a fuckin’ fruit fly if it made sudden move.” Francine had her cigarette lodged firmly between her teeth as she spoke, as she often did. She took it out now, taking care to blow the smoke away from Alice’s face. She clapped her hands on Alice’s forearms, and gave them a gentle squeeze.
“Just heard you on Truth Talk, Alice. Shit. What the fuck was that?”
Alice closed her eyes and covered her ears. “I don’t know, I don’t know! It was awful, wasn’t it? I don’t know what came over me, I just— I…”
“It was that S-O-B Jerry Northrop. Didn’t let you get a word in edgewise.”
For a moment, Alice was so scandalized she forgot she was upset. “Don’t you talk like that about Jerry! Oh, I think he’s handsome.”
“Bullshit, you don’t even know what he looks like.”
“I do, too! He was just on the History Channel, hosting a show about that army compound the Nazis had up on the moon.”
Francine scoffed. “The moon? I must’ve missed that lesson in school.”
Alice sighed. Francine could be so frustrating this way. It wasn’t like she trusted the government or anything, but there were some things she just refused to wrap her head around. “Well, of course they don’t teach us that stuff in school, Francine. They don’t want us to know.”
Francine looked like she wanted to argue, but she puffed on her cigarette, instead. “We’re gettin’ off the point, Alice. I came over here to check on you. You sounded… I don’t know. You okay?”
Alice glanced up at the stars. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m embarrassed.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t worry. No one even heard it.”
“You did!”
“Fine,” Francine said, not unlovingly. “Me, a couple hundred truckers, and the handful of freaks who still think there’s something they might’ve missed in the Kennedy footage.”
For half a second, Alice felt relieved. Besides Francine, no one who listened to it even knew who she was. She could put the whole brief, sorry episode behind her, forget it ever happened. And then she saw – or did she? Maybe she just felt it – Venus wink at her.
“But they have to hear it! Everyone does!”
The words hung in the air a moment. Francine took a step back, alarmed. Alice seemed just as surprised at her own outburst, like she wasn’t sure if she actually said it or if someone else had, and she looked around wildly, as if to find them. Her hand flew to cover her mouth, trying to trap the words there.
Francine softened, putting her firm, calloused hand on Alice’s shoulder. “Deep breaths, Alice Parker. Right into the belly. Come on, let’s go inside.” She tossed her cigarette over the railing and guided Alice back into her house, patting her on the back.
7