Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

There were dogs the size of small slender horses that roamed the grounds and guarded them against intruders, and killed rabbits and could be seen loping across clearings with these rabbits in their jaws.

There were great outsized housecats that lay draped over balustrades and the arms of stuffed sofas and chairs and they didn’t seem to acknowledge the existence of other creatures, not even the dogs.

The birds in the trees in their gardens watched her as she walked beneath them and they spoke to her in a silent language about things she could not translate to normal speech or even thought, and so these things remained entirely between her and the birds.

She and her Greek or Italian lover never spoke to one another, and yet they grew older, without appearing to. They only became more beautiful.

I became more beautiful, she said, until I wasn’t at all the person I had been before. I was entirely changed.

And that was good? I said.

She nodded, her attention distracted in the memory of her dream.

Yes, it was.

OUR PARENTS, HAVING BEEN terrified back to their senses, wasted no time seeking an annulment of our marriage. We’d lied about our ages, had no parental consent. Seeing us unconscious and possibly dying (as far as they knew or feared), they were sure we were being punished by God for being so young and so foolish, for thinking we could bring a child into the world when we were nothing but children ourselves. We were going to serve as a ghoulish example to other young people, the young couple who eloped and went to sleep and never woke up. Their child delivered by the doctors although the couple themselves would never know. Would never see that child, who would never see his or her parents, either — not awake and in the world, in any case.

Within days of our awakening, we were no longer married, no longer legal tenants of our apartment. Olivia was taken away to live with relatives in another state, I was never certain if it was Louisiana or Texas. I suppose it could have been a state even farther away, with a relative she’d never happened to mention in our brief time together. I don’t really think she put up much if any resistance.

I heard from someone a year or so later that she — we, I guess, but it no longer felt like that — had delivered a little boy, after all.

Then someone else told me they’d heard it was a girl.

In any case, I presume it went straight to adoption.

On the other hand, I once heard she never even had the child. She either miscarried or had what people called a phantom or false pregnancy.

I never spoke with Olivia again, so I never knew for sure.

Once, a few months after she’d been taken away, I saw her downtown, on the sidewalk, walking along as if nothing like what happened to us had ever happened to her, as if she were just another one of the people walking along, window-shopping, another person with no history at all.

It was winter, January. She wore a long, heavy coat and some kind of colorful hat, from which her dark hair just peeked at the bottom, even shorter than before. She wasn’t pushing a stroller or anything like that. Just by herself.

I looked different. I’d gained a lot of weight and some of my hair had fallen out, ridiculously, just from stress. I was depressed, I guess, what a joke of a word. And I was just driving by in a car, not our old VW bus. She wouldn’t have recognized me, anyway.

I tried not to worry or feel guilty about the child. He would always have someone looking after or over him. She would most likely have some very interesting fairy godparents, for lack of a better term.

LOOKING BACK NOW, of course, it’s obvious we got off pretty easy. There was always some young mindless dying in that town, those days. Cars flinging themselves into groves and against large stalwart roadside trees, the residents in their myopic ranch-style houses hardly bothering to venture out to the carnage.

During the year all this took place, one boy I knew was flung from a friend’s truck and crushed between the truck and a tree. A girl I knew and liked a lot died when an addled motorist drove the wrong way on the interstate. Another night, a guy who’d been on my Little League baseball team heckled a drunk stumbling into a pizza parlor and the drunk walked over and shot him in the heart. He’d been bored, the boy had, hanging out with a bunch of other bored boys in the parking lot, and too easily amused by potentially violent drunks hungry for pizza. Not long after all this, my own brother Curtis died in a head-on collision with a car driven by another young man his age. They’d gone to high school together, had known each other most of their lives.

I knew a boy who shot himself in the head, in front of his mother, in their front yard, because he was so sick and goddamn tired of her drunken bitching cruel ways.

The funerals of these young people were awful affairs, with parents wailing, suffering, siblings slouching about in angry grief, not a little frightened over their own suddenly looming mortality, friends fairly creeping around as if to avoid the contamination of bad luck.

Then of course there were the teen couples who ran off to get married, so alluring the delusion of greater freedom. They were so phenomenally bored with being nothing, and high school seemed little better than a minimal-security prison. They were almost literally mad to chain themselves to lives of eight-to-five jobs, punch-clock paychecks, puttering home to the little postwar starter bungalow, and having a couple of beers, cooking burgers on the grill, being grown-ups.

I was kind of mad to find something of significance, anywhere, though I was into the delinquency, too. It was the most obviously interesting thing going. There was plenty of good, cheap marijuana, the kind that made you laugh a lot. Quaaludes. Mescaline. Plenty of acid. A few people blossomed into full-blown junkies. It even went that way for my little brother, Mike. But, instead of smashing up my car and friends, or overdosing on one concoction or another, I fell in love with Olivia Coltrane.

IT’S NOT LIKE THAT anymore in that town. There’s more to do, inside the house, inside the magnificent motherboards of the new machines. Young people don’t just drive around, bored, drinking beer and crashing into trees and other vehicles, slashing and flailing away at one another in parking lots and vacant lots out of rage or boredom. If they get pregnant, they get a quick and easy abortion at the local clinic, the boy waiting outside for the girl who doesn’t want him to come in, and then she staggers slightly back to the car, a stunned look on her face, something in herself suddenly evaporated, beyond her ken. No one seems to get all excited over the drugs, even though there are more of them to choose from. They’re just not the big deal they were. I suppose there’s the usual brittle coterie of meth-heads, if you look.

You can get just about anything you want, these days.

But nobody runs off and gets married anymore. Nowadays, if you did that, you’d be greeted upon your return as if you were declaring, after an unexplained absence, that you’d been abducted by aliens, taken aboard their spaceship, and probed in various humiliating ways.

THE YEAR OR TWO after we woke up was a kind of limbo. I would live out some alternative life, and then come to on a park bench, or in the hospital again, or in my car somewhere, ignition on, engine dead, gas tank empty. I’ll admit that at one point my family had me admitted to East Mississippi. That was ironic, I thought. The old man who hunted lions, Mr. Hunter, was no longer around. None of the inmates remembered him, and no one on the staff would discuss him with me. I’m not sure how long I was in. I may have been used, myself, for a visitation or two. Fuzzy memories, as if from deep dreams. I was disciplined, once, for going AWOL and walking around. I was in a locked, padded room for two days. It was like being inside a white dream, or in a pure fog or cloud.