Jacqueline Druga - Protocol One

“I’m headed to the store. Let me know if you need anything.” I walked back to my car.

“Can I ask a question?” The one shouted out.

I stopped. “Sure.” I turned. “Shoot.”

He took a picture.

I cringed.

“Is it true, that Senator Jenner is trying to rekindle a relationship with you?”

“Gosh, don’t get my hopes up,” I joked. “All kidding aside. That’s absurd. Why would he do that? He and Gwen just divorced two months ago.”

The younger of the two men shrugged. “I mean, it’s hard for a non family man to get into the White House.”

“He is a family man. Just not a married one. This isn’t news guys. Really, it’s boring.”

“People want the human side.”

“Just ask Gil.” I began to return to my car.

“There are reports he is calling you up to three times a day, every day.”

“We have a child.”

The other reporter called out, “His former wife said…”

That actually made me stop. “I am his former wife. If you are speaking about Gwen, that’s an ex wife and if you look around and wait, I’m sure you’ll find a future wife. But…it’s not me.” I grabbed the car door handle.

“Is it because the Senator is a womanizer?”

“No, it’s because he’s a great guy who deserves someone in his life.” Without further hesitation, I got in my car. They weren’t chasing me, in fact, they immediately started to converse. Maybe they agreed I wasn’t the story.

The reporters really weren’t that big of a deal. The worst they had behaved was when Gwen’s affair was discovered and they wanted to know what I thought. How ridiculous. Gil didn’t pull a Hillary Clinton. He left her, campaign trail or not. White House aspirations be damned. He left her.

Best move he ever made.

People loved him.

I still loved him. Not like the reporters believed. But I did. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be playing his crazy game of scavenger hunt shopping.

The current list of items would take me several hours of shopping because I just couldn’t go to one store and buy thirty rolls of foil. So I went to different stores in different towns. I was positive people thought I was a nut job.

Foil, toilet paper, zip lock bags. Good thing the reporters didn’t know what I bought or else they’d be thinking I was a hemp dealer supplying poor people that made their own pipes.

One time I lied at the store and said I was buying alcohol for my niece’s wedding because I had to order twenty gallons of vodka.

Oddly enough, a special delivery man picked up those boxes.

I had purchased so much stuff over the previous six months, that I lost track. It was almost like my job.

Often I wondered why Gil just didn’t have someone order directly from the distributor. But I guess it would have been odd. Thirty rolls of aluminum foil a week over the course of six months would hardly be noticed, but some private citizen ordering seven hundred might send up a flag. Why, I didn’t know.

My last stop of the day was Glicks Grocery. Six rolls of foil, two canisters of salt, and four bags of bleach tablets.

Macy was working the register. She was always pleasant enough but was that nosy cashier who tried to guess what you were making for dinner by what was purchased.

I knew she was going to say it.

She did.

“More foil?” She shook her head with a smile. “Never seen anyone buy so much foil. If you aren’t careful people are gonna think you’re doing some sort of drug ring.”

Damn Gil , I thought. We eluded the press long enough on my weird purchases. If they got hold of it, then what?

Quickly and figuring if I didn’t know better why would she, I covered. “Actually, to be honest, a friend of mine is a scientist and he’s using it for some sort of space thing.”

Her hand paused over bagging the item. I thought she was going to call me out on my tale. Instead she said. “For real?”

“Yep.”

She leaned over to me after looking around. “Is he one of them guys?”

I lowered my voice. “What guys?”

“The smart ones that they are asking for help.” She pointed.

I didn’t look to where she pointed. Not knowing what she was talking about and not wanting to find out more, I simply said, “Yes.”

“I knew it. Someone was going to do it.” Then Macy started speaking quickly as she scanned each item and bagging them after. “Is he making one of them space kites to try to fly it off course? You know land it there and let the solar winds take it? I saw it in a movie once, and thought it was brilliant, but who am I? I’m not a scientist, your friend is.”

“True.”

“For a while, I was searching the net and I couldn’t find anything legitimate about it. You telling me this is the first legitimate verification I heard of. But then again, if it was made legitimate, things would be crazy.”

“That’s true.”

“Not like it’s a secret, people know. I guess if the government claims they leaked it through one source or another it can’t be said they are covering it up.”

At that point I gave up. “What do you mean?” I asked.

Again, she pointed, only this time I took note. She was pointing to the rack of tabloid magazines, then asked. ‘Do you have your Customer Appreciation card?’ in a complete change of subject.

My eyes were immediately drawn to the headline on the black and white always over the top and sensationalized tabloid called ‘World Inquisitor’. For some reason it didn’t make me laugh or scoff. It sent a scary feeling through me and I didn’t know why. I grabbed the magazine and handed it to Macy.

“This is a good one,” she rang it up and placed it in the bag. “Seventy-three, twenty-two.”

I handed her the card.

I sat in my car parked just outside of Glicks reading that tabloid as if it were the Holy Gospel. Instead of laughing at the ridiculous possibility of it being the truth, it burrowed deep in my mind. What was causing my actual belief? Nothing about it should have. I mean, bigger than the ‘killer comet’ story was the headline piece about the President secretly hiding his alien child. It was the most outlandish tabloid out there and yet, there I was reading it.

The worst of the worst, the one people buy to laugh at.

The article talked about Dempsey’s Comet, or D114 as NASA called it, was a comet twelve miles wide. It was twice the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. It told how for decades they knew it was coming and the governments of the world decided, since there was nothing that could be done, they were hiding it.

Claude Fleishman, German astronomer was getting the word out. The comet was going to hit first week of September and it would strike Alaska. The picture of him did look like something from 1950’s and sitting there flipping through the tabloid, I realized how insanly I was acting at that moment.

Surely something that toted ‘Bigfoot made me his love slave’ wouldn’t be the sole reliable source of a doomsday event.

What made me react so intensely?

It was then I realized it was because Gil was being so secretive about why I was shopping and what I was preparing for. His lack of quick quizzes made me think it was something we covered before or something there was no preparing for.

Why wouldn’t he tell me?

It didn’t bother me before. In fact, I never took him seriously and believed him to be overly cautious. This time though was so different, why hadn’t I noticed?

I had to be overreacting and I had to put my trust in Gil. He would tell me, eventually. Maybe the notion of what he was preparing for was so outlandish he was embarrassed to tell me about it.