Whitley Strieber - The Grays

“Marcie,” he said. He stopped himself, astonished by a shocking and completely inappropriate sense of desire for her. She was doing nothing to seduce him. He looked at her right hand, lying there on the desk. If he reached across that two-foot space and laid his own hand on it, what would happen?

“Yes?” Her voice seemed almost to tremble. But why? Did she have to tell him no, and was she afraid to do that? But why should she be? He was no friend of hers and bad news was job one in this office. Poor student evaluations and no faculty support, open and shut case, toodle-oo.

“Marcie, look, we both know what’s going on here.”

She laughed a little, the nervous tinkle of a girl. “I think the problem is that your courses aren’t sexy.”

He had arrived at the edge of the cliff: poor evals, no support, now a negative on his courses. The next step would be, sorry, I cannot vote for tenure. “It’s physiological psychology,” he yammered. “Give me a couple of sections of abnorm, I’ll bring my comments way up.”

“That’s unlikely until you’re tenured.”

“But I can’t get tenured without good evals, and I can’t get those without good courses.”

“You’re Yossarianed, then. As we all are. Bell Yossarians us all.”

For a moment, he was at a loss. Then he remembered Catch-22 . Yossarian was the character in the novel who was caught in a bureaucratic endless loop. Dan searched for something, anything, that might help him. He could drop a name. Pitiful, but it was what he had. “I knew a fellow when I was at Columbia—what was his name, Speed Vogel—who knew Heller.”

She made a note.

“What are you writing?”

“Knew friend of Heller.”

“Does it matter?”

“Not at all.”

He found himself watching her lips, the way she pressed them together, the slight and fascinating moisture at the corners of her mouth.

But why? Was he going mad? How could he feel this way for this woman who was about to wreck his life?

Did he want this so badly that he was willing to whore for it? Probably, but why would she want him? She had her pick of faculty masochists, eager to roll in the hay with their punisher. And yet, the only thing that was stopping him from leaping across that desk was the fear that any such action would backfire.

“Marcie,” he heard himself say, and he heard the roughness, the unmistakable sexuality in his tone. He almost slapped his hand over his mouth, but she looked up suddenly, blinking fast. Her eyebrows rose to the center of the forehead, her eyes filmed with tears that made them bright and awful.

“What’s the matter?” she asked in a horrible, low tone that made him think she feared him.

He remembered, suddenly, his seizure dream, going up into the dark womb of the sky, the cave in the silver moon. He shook it away, frightened for a moment that he was going into aura again. But no, it was only a memory.

She cleared her throat, lifted her hand, and brushed her lips with the back of it, smearing her lipstick a little. “Yes,” she whispered.

He said, “Is this the conference? My conference with my tenure advisor? We sit here staring helplessly at each other?”

“There’s nothing to discuss, Dan,” she said. She straightened herself, clasped her hands, and lifted her chin. She was beautiful, then, tragically beautiful. He could see her in the darkness, and she looked very afraid. But no, it wasn’t dark and she wasn’t scared. She looked across at him, her eyes steady. “It’s just—obviously, you know the student evaluations—well, you know, they’re often rather indifferent to the welfare of somebody they know has need.”

“They know I’m up for tenure?”

She nodded, her little mouth grave, her eyes flashing. “Oh, yes,” she said, and he knew, in that moment, that he must have her. He must do this, he could not help himself. He also knew that she was aware of the potential that existed between them. He went to his feet.

She looked down his body, then cleared her throat. Her cheeks had gone bright red. He stood before her like a little soldier at stiff attention. He said in his heart, Katelyn, I am so ashamed , but Marcie’s rising flush told him that there would be no escape for him.

She lifted her hand off the desk and reached toward him, her fingers extending.

They froze, then, remaining like that, him pressing his thighs against the edge of the desk, her reaching to the air six inches in front of his midriff.

Tears poured down her cheeks. She whispered, her voice an unsure murmur, “What happened last night?”

Something in him, some sort of inner door, fell open. He remembered the blaring confusions of his boyhood, the stars passing his face, the field of silver and the black opening, gaping.

“You heard about that?” He backed away from her desk.

Then he saw:

—A narrow steel cot, Marcie lying on it in heat, her face flushed and sweaty, her bush brown and touched as if by dew.

And he felt:

—His own nakedness delicious in the night air.

She gasped as if struck. “Dan,” she said, “Dan.” Her eyes widened, glistened, their green suddenly horrible to see, too glassy, too… hurt.

“Marcie, listen, uh—”

She stood up and came around the desk, entered his arms. She drew against him, drew close, and in the fur of his sweater he heard long and bitter sobs.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so damn sorry.”

She pressed herself against him harder. Then their lips were touching, asking one another if there should be more. If she—of all creatures, she—could be admitted to his sanctum?

He laid his hand on her back and pressed her closer to him, and delivered himself to her kiss.

LAUREN DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL feelings about Adam, of course, and the idea of him having such feelings for her was repellent. But there was something else there. He liked to explore her intensities—sexuality, anger, passion, loss, triumph, her slight kinks… those little fantasies that she sometimes relaxed with, of helplessness and ardor. And her childhood. Adam moved through her childhood memories like a tiger prowling the tall grass.

Normally, he was curiously empty of emotion himself. You’d almost be willing to believe he was a machine, he was so—not cold, that’s an emotion. Adam’s heart was empty. But earlier this morning, when he had been showing her the images of the dying cruise ship and the supermarket full of the starving, she had felt such a powerful sense of disquiet that she’d gotten the idea that they represented a great fear of his, and therefore of his whole species. They were a collective, connected in some esoteric way across the whole universe. She thought it had to do with quantum interconnected-ness. A gray could communicate instantly with a gray in another galaxy, but hardly at all with a human being.

She had come to feel that Adam’s ceaseless quest to share her heart was central to his meaning, and probably the meaning of them all.

They weren’t predators, like Mike thought, but people who had somehow become machines. They were smart enough to know that they were the most profound possible outsiders: they were functional, very much so, but had no access to the emotional universe that seemed to her to be the essence of being alive.

She lay staring at the living room ceiling, vaguely listening to Ted’s golf tournament on the TV. What was it? The Masters? She enjoyed golf, the precision of it, the struggle, the inner calm that was essential, as well as beating her dear Ted at a game… which she managed occasionally.

He was her shelter in the storm of desperation that defined Adam. She wondered if the grays had lost their souls. Was that their problem—they’d once been more fully alive than they were now, and they were searching the universe for some way to regain themselves?