Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

He checked that his son was still sleeping deeply, then poured himself a plastic cup of neat bourbon and went down to the pool to smoke and sit alone for a while in the dark. He walked toward a group of lawn chairs in the shadows beside a stunted palm, but stopped when he realized that he wasn’t alone, that someone was sitting in one of the chairs. The Gypsy woman sat very still, watching him.

“Come, sit,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

He was afraid. But the woman was so still, and the look on her face he could now make out in the shadows was one of calm appraisal. Something about this kept him from retreating. She slowly raised a hand and patted the pool chair next to her, and Loomis sat.

For a moment the woman just looked at him, and, unable not to, he looked at her. She was unexpectedly, oddly attractive. Her eyes were indeed very dark, set far apart on her broad face. In this light, her fierce nose was strange and alarming, almost erotic.

“Are you Gypsy?” Loomis blurted, without thinking.

She stared at him a second before smiling and chuckling deep in her throat.

“No, I’m not Gypsy,” she said, her eyes moving quickly from side to side in little shiftings, looking into his. “We are American. My people come from France.”

Loomis said nothing.

“But I can tell you your future,” she said, leaning her head back slightly to look at him down her harrowing nose. “Let me see your hand.” She took Loomis’s wrist and pulled his palm toward her. He didn’t resist. “Have you ever had someone read your palm?”

Loomis shook his head. “I don’t really want to know my future,” he said. “I’m not a very optimistic person.”

“I understand,” the woman said. “You’re unsettled.”

“It’s too dark here to even see my palm,” Loomis said.

“No, there’s enough light,” the woman said. And finally she took her eyes from Loomis’s and looked down at his palm. He felt relieved enough to be released from that gaze to let her continue. And something in him was relieved, too, to have someone else consider his future, someone aside from himself. It couldn’t be worse, after all, than his own predictions.

She hung her head over his palm and traced the lines with a long fingernail, pressed into the fleshy parts. Her thick hair tickled the edges of his hand and wrist. After a moment, much sooner than Loomis would have expected, she spoke.

“It’s not the future you see in a palm,” she said, still studying his. “It’s a person’s nature. From this, of course, one can tell much about a person’s tendencies.” She looked up, still gripping his wrist. “This tells us much about where a life may have been, and where it may go.”

She bent over his palm again, traced one of the lines with the fingernail. “There are many breaks in the heart line here. You are a creature of disappointment. I suspect others in your life disappoint you.” She traced a different line. “You’re a dreamer. You’re an idealist, possibly. Always disappointed by ordinary life, which of course is boring and ugly.” She laughed that soft, deep chuckle again and looked up, startling Loomis anew with the directness of her gaze. “People are so fucking disappointing, eh?” She uttered a seductive grunt that loosened something in his groin.

It was true. No one had ever been good enough for him. Even the members of his immediate family. And especially himself.

“Anger, disappointment,” the woman said. “So common. But it may be they’ve worn you down. The drinking, smoking. No real energy, no passion.” Loomis pulled against her grip just slightly but she held on with strong fingers around his wrist. Then she lowered Loomis’s palm to her broad lap and leaned in closer, speaking more quietly.

“I see you with the little boy — he’s your child?”

Loomis nodded. He felt suddenly alarmed, fearful. He glanced up, and his heart raced when he thought he saw the boy standing on the balcony looking out. It was only the potted plant there. He wanted to dash back to the room but he was rooted to the chair, to the Gypsy with her thin, hard fingers about his wrist.

“This is no vacation, I suspect. It’s terrible, to see your child in this way, in a motel.”

Loomis nodded.

“You’re angry with this child’s mother for forcing you to be here.”

Loomis nodded and tried to swallow. His throat was dry.

“Yet I would venture it was you who left her. For another woman, a beautiful woman, eh, mon frère ?” She ran the tip of a nail down one of the lines in his palm. There was a cruel smile on her impossible face. “A woman who once again you believed to be something she was not.” Loomis felt himself drop his chin in some kind of involuntary acquiescence. “She was a dream,” the woman said. “And she has disappeared, poof, like any dream.” He felt suddenly, embarrassingly, close to tears. A tight lump swelled in his throat. “And now you have left her, too, or she has left you, because”—and here the woman paused, shook Loomis’s wrist gently, as if to revive his attention, and indeed he had been drifting in his grief—“because you are a ghost. Walking between two worlds, you know?” She shook his wrist again, harder, and Loomis looked up at her, his vision of her there in the shadows blurred by his tears.

She released his wrist and sat back in her chair, exhaled as if she had been holding her breath, and closed her eyes. As if this excoriation of Loomis’s character had been an obligation, had exhausted her.

They sat there for a minute or two while Loomis waited for the emotion that had surged up in him to recede.

“Twenty dollars,” the woman said then, her eyes still closed. When Loomis said nothing, she opened her eyes. Now her gaze was flat, no longer intense, but she held it on him.

“Twenty dollars,” she said. “For the reading. This is my fee.”

Loomis, feeling as if he’d just been through something physical instead of emotional, his muscles tingling, reached for his wallet, found a twenty-dollar bill, and handed it to her. She took it and rested her hands in her lap.

“Now you should go back up to your room,” she said.

He got up to make his way from the courtyard, and was startled by someone standing in the shadow of the Gypsies’ doorway. Her evil man-child, the boy from the pool, watching him like a forest animal pausing in its night prowling to let him pass. Loomis hurried on up to the room, tried to let himself in with a key card that wouldn’t cooperate. The lock kept flashing red instead of green. Finally the card worked, the green light flickered. He entered and shut the door behind him.

But he’d gone into the wrong room, maybe even some other motel. The beds were made, the television off. His son wasn’t there. The sliding glass door to the balcony stood open. Loomis felt his heart seize up and he rushed to the railing. The courtyard was dark and empty. Over in the lobby, the lights were dimmed, no one on duty. It was all shut down. There was no breeze. No roar of rushing vehicles from the 5, the roar in Loomis’s mind canceling it out. By the time he heard the sound behind him and turned to see his son come out of the bathroom yawning, it was too late. It might as well have been someone else’s child, Loomis the stranger come to steal him away. He stood on the balcony and watched his son crawl back onto the bed, pull himself into a fetal position, close his eyes for a moment, then open them. Meeting his gaze, Loomis felt something break inside him. The boy had the same dazed, disoriented expression he’d had on his face just after his long, difficult birth, when the nurses had put him into an incubator to rush him to intensive care. Loomis had knelt, then, his face up close to the incubator’s glass wall, and he’d known that the baby could see him, and that was enough. The obstetrician said, “This baby is very sick,” and nurses wheeled the incubator out. He’d gone over to his wife and held her hand. The resident, tears in her eyes, patted his shoulder and said, for some reason, “You’re good people,” and left them alone. Now he and their child were in this motel, the life that had been their family somehow dissipated into air. Loomis couldn’t gather into his mind how they’d got here. He couldn’t imagine what would come next.