Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

I went on the walks with them, when I could. And lifted weights in the shed out back. I’d never felt stronger. I had my Ford pickup. She didn’t have the Mercedes, but she did have a pretty cool little VW station wagon, baby blue.

It was a good life. I was astonished and deeply grateful that we’d made it happen. Leo was growing into a strong and happy child, soon he’d be going off to kindergarten and school. I could see our whole lives ahead of us, peaceful and full of light. We were lucky.

I WAS STANDING ON our front porch looking out over the pasture at the end of a day, sun going down behind the pines and oaks and pale green sweetgum trees to the west.

Leo was inside reading Where the Wild Things Are to himself. He had learned to read just after turning four. Olivia and I had vowed to avoid treating him like a genius. No skipping grades, things like that. We would supplement his school at home, however we could. Give him novels, books about history and current events. Math problems from our old high school texts.

Olivia had a venison stew in a pot on the stove. I’d shot the doe not half a mile from our house, in the woods. Olivia had helped me butcher it. She was in her workroom weaving something new on her loom while the stew simmered.

The chickens pecked about the yard, an eye always on their rooster. He strutted the yard’s edge, very intelligent for a rooster. He’d killed two hawks in just the past month. Killed them before they could kill the chickens they’d swooped down upon to lift away. He and the hens fell upon the hawks and tore them to pieces.

Our dog, an Aussie mix, looked on from the other end of the porch. She kept away the foxes and coyotes. She understood the most subtle of questions and commands. I’d never owned a better dog in my life.

She was my first dog, in fact. I kept forgetting that.

I saw someone walking across the pasture toward the house. When the person got closer, he looked familiar, although I still couldn’t tell or remember just who he might be. He smiled and waved when he was just a stone’s throw away, maybe, and I waved back, and he walked up to the house and stood in the yard a few feet away from the edge of the porch and looked up at me. He was a tall man, dark hair cropped short and receding in a widow’s peak, heavy beard shadow, horn-rimmed glasses, a kind expression. He wore a conservative, narrow-lapeled suit and a modest narrow necktie.

“You look familiar,” I said.

He said, “I’m Lowell Bishop, your sixth-grade teacher.”

“Oh,” I said. “My God. Mr. Bishop. I always wondered what happened to you.”

Mr. Bishop had been a substitute, that year, for another teacher who’d gone on unexpected maternity leave. He hadn’t been a very good teacher, kind of lazy, actually, but I’d liked him and always hoped he’d had a good life after leaving our school and going on to whatever his next, probably temporary, job may have been. He’d been the only teacher who hadn’t treated me as if I were invisible.

“I did all right,” Mr. Bishop said. “I went back to school. Psychology. I was still fairly young.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “I’d kind of worried about you.”

He laughed. “I don’t doubt you did.”

Mr. Bishop had rented a garage apartment a block or so from my home while he’d lived in town. And on the day after school ended, I’d gone over there to say goodbye. When I knocked, he came to the door wearing his school trousers and an undershirt, the kind without sleeves, and he needed a shave, and behind him in the little kitchen area were two other men in similar shape, sitting at the dining table with hands of cards before them, a whiskey bottle and glasses on the table, and cigarette smoke filled the dingy light in there.

“Hey there!” Mr. Bishop had boomed at me. “Come on in!”

I declined and told him I just wanted to say goodbye.

“Suit yourself,” Mr. Bishop said. “But you be good, be a good student, now. If I come back through here in a couple of years and you’re not being a good student, I’m going to beat the crap out of you!” And he laughed. I all but ran away from his place.

So I had worried that Mr. Bishop was just an affable, unfortunate drunk.

I said to him now, standing there somehow in my front yard at our house in the country, some nine years later, “What are you doing here, Mr. Bishop?”

He smiled up at me in a curious and almost sad kind of way for a long moment before replying.

“I’ve come to tell you that now you have to go back to where you came from,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll know when you get there,” he said. “We just want you to know that we appreciate your cooperation.”

After a moment, I said, “With what?”

Olivia stepped out onto the porch beside me then. She smiled and nodded to Mr. Bishop. She was holding Leo against her hip, and he was clinging to her as if something had upset him, inside.

“Is everything okay?” she said to me.

I was gazing at them, my beautiful little family, and so in love I thought I might be drawn into their eyes and entirely absorbed, and disappear from the world, and be nothing but some barely traceable element in their very cells.

And then the light began to fade from the sky as if the arrival of evening had accelerated, the turning of the earth somehow sped up, and the image of Mr. Bishop before us darkened along with the rest of the world and was gone.

OLIVIA WAS STILL PREGNANT, of course. We’d been out for only a couple of days. Our parents stood next to our hospital beds. Our mothers were tearful, holding our hands. Our fathers seemed stunned, hands in their pockets, standing behind our mothers, rocked back on the heels of their shoes. The nurse disappeared and a few moments later came back in with a doctor.

“Well, well, what have we here?” the doctor said. He checked Olivia’s pulse, looked at her pupils, then did the same with me. He turned to our stunned parents and said, in a bright manner, “May we have a few minutes alone with these two?”

Our parents, like confused tourists in a foreign country, stared at him for a moment and then nodded and shuffled out of the room, bumping into each other trying to let one another out of the door before them.

The nurse stepped forward to stand beside the doctor. They stood there looking at us, smiling in an odd kind of way, I thought.

“Hello,” the doctor said then. Olivia and I looked at each other from across the little space between our beds.

“How’ve you been?” the nurse said then.

They looked nothing like the couple from the asylum, except there was something in their manner that was exactly that way.

Olivia watched them, a kind of vacant look on her face.

“I’ve been fine,” I said then, carefully.

“How did you like your experience?” the nurse said.

The doctor raised his eyebrows, waiting for one of us to reply. He tapped at his clipboard but didn’t necessarily seem impatient.

“What do you mean?” Olivia said.

The doctor laughed softly to himself, and scratched at an ear.

“Very different,” the nurse said, looking from the one of us to the other. “You’ll have to discuss that, soon enough.”

“What are you talking about?” Olivia said. “What are they talking about?” she said to me.

“You should have told her about us, I suppose,” the doctor said to me.

“Told me what?” Olivia said.

The strangest thing was, I was pretty sure I’d seen this doctor, off duty of course, around the old country club. He had a rather stolid expression, but also a head of neatly clipped, boyish blond hair. I’d never seen the nurse before. She was older than the doctor, with an old-fashioned perm, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, but with red lipstick and bright red nails, and a querulous expression.