Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

“We just woke up,” I said.

“It’s not important,” the nurse said to the doctor.

“I will attempt to be more patient with the patient,” the doctor said. “How’d you like the lion?” he said to me then.

After a moment, I said, “It was amazing,” and then I felt something like a deep sadness well up in me.

“Very creative,” the doctor said. “Impressive.”

“And the fish,” the nurse said.

“And the frequent, vigorous intercourse,” the doctor said, raising his eyebrows again and smiling.

That made me a little bit angry, that.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “We’re scientists. I was only joking.”

“I’m not embarrassed,” I said.

He seemed amused.

“The house in the country, though, and the various elements of sentimental perfection,” he said. “Something of a disappointment, there.”

“They’re very young,” the nurse said to him. “It’s a long shot, to expect much better.”

“Interesting, isn’t it,” he said to me, “how curiously time moves when it’s decoupled from physicality.”

“Yeah,” I said vaguely.

“What in the world are y’all talking about?” Olivia said. She looked frightened.

“The sixth-grade teacher, though,” he said. “That was a nice touch.”

“Touch ing, actually,” she said.

The doctor laughed his quiet laugh again.

“ You did that,” I said.

“Not exactly,” he said.

“It was all certainly more substantial than hers,” she said. “How did you like your experience, sweetheart?”

Olivia’s expression went flat again, but with something like irritation behind it.

“What experience?” she said.

The nurse had taken on an inscrutable smile.

“The mansion, the yacht, the handsome wealthy Greek husband.” She accompanied her words with a little swaying motion, a casual parody of romantic reverie.

“How do you know about my dream?” Olivia said in a small, quiet voice.

My heart got even heavier inside of me.

“Much more than a dream, dear,” the nurse said with a wry twist of her lips.

“No children, we noticed,” the doctor said in a pensive voice. He was looking down at the chart in his hand as if studying something there instead of talking to us.

“A little overload on the substitutions, maybe,” the nurse said. “Those strange house servants.”

“What do you mean?” Olivia said.

“That was actually pretty good,” the doctor said.

“Just a theory I have,” the nurse said.

“I was really upset,” Olivia said. She looked like she was about to cry.

“It’s all right,” I said to her.

“Nothing to be overly concerned about,” the doctor said.

“You simply have to approach these things with a measure of intelligence,” the nurse said. “Remove the emotional veil, so to speak.”

“That’s good,” the doctor said to her.

“I’ll make a note,” she replied. “Now we really must go.”

“The doctor and the nurse have many rounds to make,” he said.

“Would you like any drugs?” she said. “The doctor can prescribe.”

“Maybe some Valium,” I said. “For both of us.”

“Done,” the doctor said, writing something on the clipboard.

“Take care,” the nurse said.

Giving us those little sideways waves, they backed in shuffling backwards steps out the door.

IN THE MOMENT AFTER the couple from the asylum had left us that previous night, when I had begun to construct our little paradise in my mind, Olivia had awakened, dressed quietly, crept from the house, down the steps from the rickety deck, and walked away.

As she walked, and as dawn seeped into the cooled August air, the landscape began to change until she knew she was no longer in our little hometown. It was as if she didn’t know where she was, or where she wanted to be, and the landscape continually reshaped itself with the beautiful, disorienting whorl of a kaleidoscope turned by an invisible hand.

She put her own hand to her belly as she walked. It was flat and soft. Well, that was gone. That had ceased to exist. That was not a problem anymore.

She walked on. There was a vista now, improbably so. The trees had thinned out. There was a horizon, seemingly with nothing beyond the rise.

She heard a distant, quiet, susurrant sound, which grew louder the closer she got to the rise. And before she reached the rise she saw water, and when she stepped to the edge of the bluff she now stood on she could see it was the ocean, vast and blue-gray, with gulls sailing in the sky above it, and white breakers on the narrow beach below, and just beyond them in the water there was a very large yacht. There seemed to be no one on the yacht, which was at anchor in the swells. It was new, its hull made of polished, coffee-colored wood. And then there was someone on the yacht. She could see that a man dressed in a white jacket stood on the broad rear deck, facing her, a neat, sky-blue towel draped over his arm, which he held crooked in front of him in the manner of an old-fashioned waiter. Which he apparently was.

There was a stepped path down the face of the bluff and she took it, counting her steps as if she were a child with no more on her mind than the descent itself. One hundred and twenty-seven. She walked across the beach, the warm sand pushing up between her bare toes. She no longer had any need of shoes. She waded into the surf and swam through the breakers to the yacht, pulled herself onto the ladder hanging down from its gunnel, and climbed up onto the deck.

The waiter nodded to her. He was an older man, a soft and large and comforting man, dark-complexioned, and his expression was as somber as the expression on a tilefish. She wondered for a moment how she knew that, and then she remembered being amused by the photo of a somber tilefish in the margin of a page in her dictionary, when she was a little girl. And she had said to her father at dinner that night, when he seemed troubled by something and would not speak, You look just like an old tilefish! And after everyone had gotten over their astonishment at where this expression may have come from, they all laughed.

The waiter nodded toward a deck chair and said something to her in a language she didn’t understand. She sat in the chair and fell asleep and when she woke up her summer dress was dry and the waiter had placed a cold drink on the little table beside her. It was delicious and tasted like crushed watermelon on ice. The waiter was nowhere to be seen but there was another man across the deck from her, in another chair, watching her.

He was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. More beautiful than any man she’d ever seen in a movie. Or in a magazine photograph. Or on a billboard or the cover of a record album. He was impossibly beautiful and impossible to describe. She blushed and could not say any more to me about how beautiful this man was, and I didn’t ask her to try.

She said, We went away on the yacht to another country.

The country was something like she imagined Greece to be, or possibly southern Italy. It was very sunny, the warm air brimming with golden light, and there were mountains in the distance you could see from the villa on a hill above the shore. Below the villa there were steep rocky cliffs and a wide blue sea. The villa had a broad terrace that overlooked a white swimming pool. There were large, slow ceiling fans turning in all the rooms. There was a constant cool breeze that blew in from the sea. There were servants as beautiful and slender and brown and silent as some kind of near-human, intelligent animal. Their eyes clear and limpid with an animallike devotion in their gaze. They transformed into other, similar creatures when they moved from one room to another.