Terry Neale: Jo-el

A strange man’s face appeared on my laptop computer while I was skimming the internet. It was early Tuesday afternoon, too soon for a Scotch and I was trying to find something of interest to arrest my boredom. Nonchalantly I used alt-tab to return to my browser, but the face wouldn’t go away. Nothing I did would remove the image from the screen.

I was annoyed and on the brink of closing the lid. I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with a computer problem. I gaped inanely at the man’s unusual features and as I did so he slowly opened his wide mouth, his beady eyes seemingly staring right at me and said in perfect English, “David, the people of Cirion have selected you to rescue the people of Earth.”

My right elbow, solidly planted on the kitchen table was holding up my sluggish head. A moment passed, my head raised slowly to the upright position, my right wrist was still bent backwards, I felt the pain as I straightened it out. He called me by my name, that was weird, how could he know my name? My first thought was I’d been hacked and the little piece of viral software had picked ‘David’ as my most likely name from my emails. Very smart. But then I realized that most of my friends used ‘Dave’ and not David to address me. Was the software so clever that it converted the name to my given name? That thought amused me enough to continue listening. What was this guy selling? Damn peculiar looking dude, too. His eyes appeared too big for his face, however closer scrutiny indicated they were simply bright and almost cylindrical. It was as if he could see me through the screen. His ears were flat and perfectly round; his nose scrunched in, like a boxer, but sort of small, while the nostrils were larger than seemed proportionate to the rest of the nose. His hair was white, or what I could see of it, protruding neatly from the sides of a strange, blue hat that bulged ungainly at the back of his head. He must have had a lump on the back of his skull. His skin was tanned and unblemished; my impression of his age was sixty plus, but his complexion was perfect, like a young girl. He reminded me of a troll without the quaff of thin hair protruding into the air. That was it, he’s an old troll. He smiled, his forehead creased with neat lines, even with all the oddities it was a kind face. I glimpsed his teeth they were perfect.

I gawked at him for a moment, speechless. Then I looked away and just as I did so he began talking again, as if he wasn’t talking to me on Skype or Facetime, I was simply watching a video. How did he know my name?

“You are a reasonable man, David.” He paused. Strange thing to say, what on earth did he mean by that? I reached up to close the lid of my computer. Russian hackers came to mind. Don’t they lock your files out and then request thousands of dollars for the password? But what files do I have that I’d pay two cents for? There were my ‘excel’ files of stock trades hidden away in the cloud; surely they couldn’t succeed hacking Microsoft. I’d heard these guys were small fry, collect a thousand here and a thousand there.

The old troll started speaking again. “David, this is a recording. My name is Ka-el, please allow me a little of your time.” He spelt out his name for me, maybe because it was somewhat odd and then he paused again. My right hand was hanging ungainly in the air over the top edge of my computer. I felt silly and withdrew it to my lap. Ka-el, continued. “I probably appear different to you?” Another pause, as if he was about to say something surprising that he knew would shock me and he was trying to ready me to hear it. I was alone and yet I felt nervous. That didn’t make any sense, I mean what could he do, leap out of the screen and strangle me? Calm down Dave. I swallowed hard. Nothing happened. I waited, trying in vain to read something in his expression. I could not. “I’m not from your world!”

That brought a loud staccato laugh from my mouth and I grinned widely. That’s funny, such a different approach. So, it is a hack and this is the moment he explains to me that all I need to do is deposit ten thousand dollars in some West African bank account, and I’d be rich. I reached out with my right hand and clicked the top down on my laptop. I stood up and moved the computer to the sofa next to where I usually sat watching television, and went back into the kitchen. I would eat something, that should keep me amused for a while. I munched on chips, smothered in garlic humus, my breath would stink but I had nobody to offend, at least one advantage of living alone. I kept glancing up and through the door to the family room where Ka-el hid within my computer on the sofa. I guess closing the lid ended that, Ka-el was gone. My brain whirled with that last sentence, definitely a hack.

I fixed myself coffee and returned to my worn seat on the sofa, not touching the computer. I looked over to the armchair where Mary used to sit. I wanted her to be there now. I wanted to share with her what had appeared on my computer screen, even though I knew she would just laugh and say something derogative, probably calling me an idiot. ‘Don’t be silly, Dave. It’s a hoax!’ I missed Mary, I missed her badly, a lot more than I realized. She had passed away three months ago, colon cancer. I closed my eyes tightly and a picture of her pained face, during those awful last weeks, came to mind.

We had been married for thirty-four years and we were as content as anyone could be after so long. I had been very successful financially, progressing from uninspired accountant in my early twenties, bored and directionless, to a hard-fought career at a small car-loan broker five years before the housing market went on its rip-roaring tear. Eventually I was promoted to division manager in the Bay Area. Car sales were a byproduct of the housing bubble, but it seemed as if the whole world threw caution to the wind to impress their neighbors with their latest selection in motor vehicles. ‘Look what I just bought, beat that!’ Lenders spewed out money to anybody who owned real estate. We made obscene amounts of money from fees and marginal interest rates and my Division led the company in profits. It was a private company and I purchased shares when the owner wanted to raise cash for himself, disposing of a small piece of his personal investment. Soon thereafter, the company was sold to a large conglomerate from Europe and I was handed a check for close to three million dollars. The government took their cut but still left Mary and I with enough to be very comfortable. Our lives were frugal and we had managed to avoid the pitfalls of materiality.

I could see the housing market was overheated and when the crash came, I was dismissed along with most of the staff. There were no jobs in lending, or just about anywhere else at that time, so I retired. Why not, in my book I was rich. The children, I have two, had left home. We purchased a fifth-wheel recreational vehicle and took off to visit all those places we’d talked about. Then Mary got sick, and sicker and she died in January, following the most miserable Christmas of my life. And so, I was alone, searching for answers in a Scotch glass and popping Advil during the night to straighten me out for the day to come. Deep down I knew I would stop drinking eventually; I just wasn’t the alcoholic type. I even wished at times that I’d become an alcoholic just so I could prove to myself that I could sober up just when I wanted.

‘Rescue the world!’ From what? ‘I’m not from your planet!’ Jeez! What was he smoking? I allowed myself to glance at the computer on the sofa next to me as if it would speak to me. It hadn’t moved. Shouldn’t it have turned into a robot by now, one of those transformer things? then leapt up into the air and called me master. It brought a childish grimace to my face. The temptation to open the lid and turn it back on squeezed at my insides. What am I thinking? The whole episode was ridiculous. I finished my coffee and went out to the garage. My two motorcycles shone brightly alongside my sensible Volvo wagon, I dreamt briefly of the summer of riding I was planning.