Joe Haldeman - The Coming

It took Ybor about half an hour to set up the program that would assemble a cybernetic image of the private life of Aurora Bell. It just took a few minutes more to have it do the same for Deedee Whittier, insurance. He pushed a button to start it running and went out to get some lunch.

Good timing. José y María did make you feel famished about an hour after you popped. It was a healthy hunger, though; felt good.

He walked down tree-lined Second Avenue to downtown, studying the undergraduate girls. His appreciation of their beauty had an exquisite purity, partly because he couldn’t do anything about it until a day or so after the drug wore off. But that was not really a problem, he told himself. For every thing there is a season. He tried to ignore the persistent itching pain at the injection site, the slight numb erection.

It wasn’t just the way they looked, moving in their soft summer clothes. He could smell them as they passed; smell the secret parts of their bodies as well as the public perfume, the astringent sunblock. He could feel the heat from their bodies on his face, on the back of his hand, as they passed. He could almost read their thoughts, at least when they were thinking of him.

What a wonderful day. He even loved the heat, the blast that glowed up from the asphalt as he floated across streets. It was as if he walked on the heat. Cars stopped for him respectfully, their horns music. Brakes squealing in beautiful unison as he triggered the street’s emergency mode.

As he approached Hermanos, the smell of meats frying was almost too much for him. He swallowed saliva and walked into the cool and dark.

What were all these people doing here? Usually Hermanos was uncrowded until after one, when the Cubans and Mexicans started drifting in. There were only two tables unoccupied. Ybor sat down at the bar.

The owner Sara waited on him. She made him uncomfortable. He had known her before the accident, when she was a lifeguard at the Eastside pool. He had studied her body for hours when he was eleven and twelve, and it disgusted him to think of what it must look like now. But he always went to the bar when she was serving.

“Hola, Ybor. What’ll it be?”

He didn’t have to look at the menu. “ Ropa vieja y vino tinto.”

She wrote it down. “Old rags and new wine, coming up.” She poured him a glass of red wine, cold, and went back to the kitchen.

Ybor took a sip of the wine and then held the glass between his palms, warming it. Like everything, the bar was transformed by the drug, made more real and more fantastic at the same time. The cheap paneling became a whorl of frozen life, tropical trees microtomed over and over. The liquor bottles with their rainbow of colors and flavors; from yards away he could smell them individually. The slow ceiling fans pushed gentle puffs of cool air over him, like slaves waving palm fronds. The mirror showed a young man capable of great things. Thirty-five was still young.

Sara brought the stew with a plate of warm tortillas and the green hot sauce Ybor liked. Ropa vieja, literally “old clothes,” was beef slowly cooked in tomato sauce and peppers, until it fell apart into shreds. Ybor liked it but had chosen it mainly because he knew it would just be ladled out and brought to him. He could have starved to death while they were fixing a hamburger.

Sara watched him tear into it with a spoon in one hand and a rolled tortilla in the other. “I like a man who likes to eat,” she said, smiling, and went off to fill a bar order.

This drug could make eating a cracker into a sensual experience. The spicy stew played an ecstatic symphony in his mouth, nose, palate; the act of swallowing was a complex and delightful counterpoint.

Sara came back. “So how about these aliens?”

“¿Cómo?” She going to carry on about immigrants again, interrupt this symphony?

“Right next door to you.” She waved a hand at all her new customers. “All these reporters. All because of Aurora Bell.”

That got his attention. “What’d Dr. Bell do?”

“What, you live in a goddamn cave?”

“Working all morning. What she do?”

“She got some signal from outer space. Some aliens coming to Earth, like in the movies.”

“Aw, bullshit, Sara. You’re bullshittin’ me.”

“Like you’d know bullshit if you stepped in it,” she said cheerfully. She whistled at the set over the bar and told it CNN. “Just watch for a few minutes.”

Now what the hell had he gotten himself into? The way Whittier had talked, of course she’d thought he knew.

The stew turned sour in his mouth and he swallowed with difficulty. Shit, what if they expected some newsie to hack the system and beefed up the watchdogs? They might catch the tap and it would point right back to him.

A live reporter standing in front of the building next to where he worked delivered a one-minute summation of the alien thing. There was Dr. Bell, sitting in her office with all the old paper books, talking about, Jesus, a million megatons? Okay, relativistic kinetic energy. Still. One hell of a bang.

There was some commotion behind him and he turned around to see Aurora Bell walk in with Pepe Parker. They were good-naturedly telling the reporters no interviews; this was lunch. The big guy who runs the coffee machine in the morning came out to stand behind her with a cast-iron frying pan. Subtle.

Pepe raised a hand in greeting and he returned it. They saw each other every now and then at the dance clubs. Not a bad guy for a Cubano.

“Something wrong with the ropa ?” Sara asked.

“Oh no, it’s great. Let me have another wine, though.”

“Tinto,” she said, and refilled his glass.

Wonder if he’s a drunk. If he is, he’s a cute one. Late for him, actually, he’s usually in here for a wine or cerveza by eleven. Work all night, drink all day, but he doesn’t seem to drink that much, just unsteady and bright-eyed from fatigue and coffee. He was a cute kid back in high school, junior high, always down at the pool looking at me, I wonder does he remember, does he know I remember? I looked at him, too.

José was taking the order of Dr. Bell and the guy who came in with her. Funny Ybor didn’t know about Dr. Bell and the aliens, right in the building next door. Physics and astrology. Astrophysics, they just said, probably a combination.

Astrology had helped her a lot. Some of it was just made up, maybe all of it, but you had to make a decision one way or the other, might as well ask your chart. She carried hers in her purse usually, but this morning the battery light was on, so she left it plugged in at the house. She could get along without it for a day. Maybe when she got home she would ask it Is Ybor a drunk? Would he fuck a woman with a body like hers? She knew the answer to that and looked away from him as she pressed her knees together and felt a small helpless ripple of desire, not for Ybor in particular. Time to go to a feelie, or maybe back to Orlando to get serviced for real. There was a place in Gainesville but if she used it Willy Joe would find out. She would have to kill him. It would be a public-health measure, but they’d probably put her in jail anyhow. She thought about last time in Orlando and felt warm and wet and knew she was blushing, the big black man who called her his little doll. What was the name of that place, the Bluebird, the Blackbird? She knew where it was and knew the man’s name, John Henry, claro.

José was in front of her. “Two Tecates on five?” he asked. “Preparadas. I’ve got my hands full.”

“Tecates,” she said slowly.