Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

When she started to climb back into bed, he made the phone ring again. She answered it, found there was no one there, hung up, and was on her way back into the bedroom when he made it ring again.

He went through the whole thing three more times before he was satisfied. The last time he didn’t make the phone ring, just suggested she could hear it ringing—but then as she went back wearily to pick it up again he heard it ringing, too, as loudly and realistically as when he’d made it ring himself, though this time she had to be the one who was sustaining the experience’s reality. When she picked it up he suggested she leave it off the hook this time and come back to bed, go to sleep. As soon as she was asleep he told her that she wouldn’t wake up again until the alarm went off in the morning and that she wouldn’t remember having heard the phone ring when she did.

St. Jacques spent the rest of the dream-time practicing altering himself in front of the bathroom mirror. He added and subtracted tans and mustaches, changed his clothing, haircut, age, race, and features, made himself skinny, fat, and muscular, then tried on Russell Thomas’s form, face, and way of moving. Finally, feeling greatly daring, he went back to the living room and picked up the Evenement du Jeudi he’d been looking at earlier, and using it as a guide turned himself into the woman in the picture. The change was wholly convincing; in the mirror he looked like the woman and yet as real as his real self had ever looked; he could feel the weight of her breasts on his chest, a strange confusion of sensations where his penis and testicles should have been, but weren’t, problems with his equilibrium when he took an involuntary step back.

For some reason it was easier to make complex changes in himself than it was to change the things around him. But having a woman’s body was disturbing; he changed himself back to normal just before the alarm woke him.

It was Veronica’s turn to make breakfast. As usual, she sipped her tea, picked at her eggs, and left most of her toast untouched, finally offering what was left to him. He waited for her to mention Mother Isobel’s accusations or what had happened the night before; when she did neither he finally asked, “Did the phone ring last night? I had this dream in which it kept ringing and ringing—”

She thought a moment, concentrating, then shook her head. “I don’t think so. If it did I didn’t wake up either.”

So he could insert himself into people’s dreams without fear of the consequences, either to himself or to them. He could even visit Mother Isobel in her sleep, take her baseball bat away from her and hit her over the head with it, then tell her to forget all about it. Though the information would still be there in her mind, buried on some unconscious level, and would just result in more trouble later. What he really should do was sneak into her dreams and convince her he was the most wonderful man who’d ever lived, a veritable saint who deserved a raise, then let the idea percolate up through her conscious thoughts until she took it for her own.

He drank four more cups of coffee before he left for school, but even so he was dead tired, irritable, and almost unable to function all day, though he kept stopping off in the faculty lounge and knocking down Dixie cup after pink Dixie cup of the horribly bitter coffee they kept simmering there. When lunch came he didn’t go to the cafeteria, just curled up on the couch in the lounge and went to sleep. Dreaming, he relived his last hour of waking time—the correspondence between waking and dream time seemed exact—but was unable to in any way influence or change the backward flow of events. He was the only one asleep, all the others were awake and conscious: there was no way he could alter or escape from the collective reality they were maintaining.

But it was hard having to endure the gritty exhaustion of last hour’s class all over again. Hard to endure his frustrated lust and fantasies yet another time without being able to do anything about them. Hard, finally, to have to watch himself doing such a ridiculous, insensitive, and insanely boring job of teaching books that, when he’d first started teaching, had fascinated and excited him. He was in the same position as his students now, a spectator rather than a participant, and the combination of boredom, frustration, and acute self-criticism was intolerable. He’d have to do something about it, use at least part of the time he spent reliving class periods in reverse to not only think about his subject, but to study the girls’ reactions, think about what they needed, why they always learned so little, because if he couldn’t speed things up and turn in a performance he felt better about as spectator/critic, he was going to be unhappier than he was making any of his students.

It was ironic in a way: the very transformation that was going to allow him to satisfy all his forbidden desires would at the same time force him to become a better teacher.

He slept through the period bell, was awakened a moment later by Jim Seabury, the new psychology teacher.

“You’re going to be late if you don’t hurry.”

“Thanks, Jim. I didn’t get much sleep last night and—” He realized what he was saying, broke off suddenly, then added with what he hoped was the appropriate sheepish grin, “But if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention anything about it to anybody. Even Veronica.”

“Sure. Hey, did you hear Mother Isobel refused to renew my contract? Said I was atheistic.”

“I heard. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. I’ll be glad to get out of here. But anyway, you should watch out, make sure you get enough sleep. Most people don’t realize how dangerous not getting enough is. You can end up on the funny farm that way.”

St. Jacques stared at Seabury, trying to decide if the other had meant anything personal, then remembered belatedly that the psychology teacher had served as a subject in some sort of sleep-deprivation experiments once.

“How come?”

“REM sleep. Dreaming. You’ve got to get a certain amount of dreaming in every night. Missing a few days won’t really do you any harm, but after a while it creeps up on you.”

“I haven’t quite reached that point. Not yet, anyway. But I’ve got to get to class. See you later.”

“Sure. Bye.”

He spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding Mother Isobel while compiling for himself a new set of images and fantasies for the night to come, not sure whether or not his morning memories would be available, since he’d already slept on them once.

Marcia was back in class. She seemed to have reverted to her normal behavior—which is to say, she ignored him as completely as possible—though she was quieter than usual. He, in turn, neither called on her nor paid any overt attention when he saw her whispering and passing notes, but he watched her out of the corner of his eye.

Once, when he was staring unguardedly at June, he realized both she and Terri were staring quietly and intensely back at him. After he jerked his gaze away, though, he realized they had just been pretending to pay attention and that their thoughts had been totally elsewhere.

As he was leaving the school after his next class he glanced over at the swimming pool, saw the girls on the swim team all lined up watching Veronica demonstrate a back flip off the high board. They had a meet that evening; Veronica wouldn’t be back till long after he was asleep.

He finished his work early and went to bed around seven. He didn’t bother to switch pillows: the spices were once again stimulating his imagination and sharpening his senses—if anything, their effect was more aphrodisiac than tranquilizing—but he knew he was too tired to be kept awake by them.