Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

When I got out of the hospital, I would see other people with these lost, somewhat sad looks on their faces, and I would think that similar things were happening to them. But you didn’t ask. You didn’t want to get them started. There was the fear of the destabilizing admission. We left one another alone.

I went through a brief period when I wanted desperately to see Olivia again, and not just to see her but talk to her, too. But her parents would hang up on me when I called. A couple of times she answered the phone, but she wouldn’t speak after I said hello. And then her mother or father would take the receiver from her, tell me not to call again, and hang up.

I sneaked up to the house one night. I didn’t really know what I was going to do. Maybe I fantasized that she’d step outside for something, to take out the garbage or just sit out in the night air looking up at the stars. She didn’t, of course. I crept into the shrubbery near their their living room window and peeked in. Mrs. Coltrane was on the sofa, knitting something, and Mr. Coltrane was watching TV. I crept out and around to what used to be Olivia’s bedroom and peeked in there.

She was sitting on the bed, reading something, dressed in a pink nightgown, her legs beneath the covers. My heart fluttered. I stared for a long time, trying to see what she was reading, before I realized it was that green, faux-leather edition of The Living Bible. Her brow was lined with concentration. She seemed to be moving her lips a little bit as she read. I backed quietly from the window and crept to my car and drove home, to my own parents’ house, and went to bed.

I could see her whole life ahead of her, then, and it seemed kind of simple. She’d been saved, from me and from everything else. She’d been pretty shocked by the whole affair, and wanted to do everything the proper way now. She’d marry, eventually, someone safe and predictable, and kind. Fold herself into her parents’ church. Develop a particularly amnesiac cartography of her past. Our past.

Obviously, I haven’t done that so well. I haven’t wanted to. Even now, when I think of Olivia, I’m looking at her sitting naked and unselfconscious on our creaky old bed in the attic apartment, lost in some thought that is destined to escape her. Maybe it’ll wander in the breeze and lodge itself in some poor thought-crazed head in the asylum down the street, maybe worm its way into the bitter landlady downstairs, maybe squeeze into the head of a scatterbrained cardinal in the pecan tree just outside the gable window. She wrinkles her pretty brow in thought, literally puts a finger to her bottom lip, but it’s hopeless, the thought is gone, never to be aired before me or anyone else in her line of mortal acquaintance. Her pale skin is beautiful, smooth and lightly blue-veined, a barely visible pale blue line at one temple, another across her growing tummy, and one on the back of the hand that holds the finger to her moistened lower lip, which cannot voice her fleeting thought, lost now to her before she even knows it.

I wondered what our lives would really have been like, had we gone on together, stayed married, kept the child, tried to deal with the kinds of things that always work like an underground river to undercut people’s happiness. I wonder if she ever wonders the same.

I DID, ONCE, live out that life. It was while I was in the hospital, early on in my stay.

We stayed married, for a while anyway. Instead of becoming a professional carpenter, I worked a wood-shop job and attended the local branch of the university in my spare time, because Olivia and her parents and my parents convinced me to do so. Olivia stayed home and took care of our child, who was a boy but whose name was Jackson, we called him Jack.

I was good at academics, as it turned out. This surprised me, but pleased me, too. I’d never thought I was very smart. You might think I’d have studied the hard sciences, maybe astronomy, but I chose anthropology, a so-called social science. I wanted to know about people.

The more I studied, of course, the more my sense of who I was began to change. It changed who I thought I was or was becoming, anyway. Olivia clung all the more stubbornly to who she thought I was, or had been. Naturally my skepticism toward organized religion only continued to deepen and grow. I began to lose interest in Olivia, who it seemed to me had no interest in growing, learning, changing with the times. We grew apart. And one day, though she did so kindly and without anger, she took Jack and moved back home to her parents’ house. We were still only twenty-two years old.

She remarried a few years later, to a prosperous local businessman, had two more children, belonged to the newer, richer country club, the larger and more exclusive Episcopalian church in town, and drove a Mercedes station wagon. I was amused to see that.

I eventually finished the PhD and did fieldwork for a number of years in Wyoming on prehistoric settlement sites, then took a job at a university not too close, but not too far from our hometown, so I could visit Jack more easily when he was visiting his mother during holidays from school. He was a sensitive young man, with a forgiving nature, and we were close. I remarried, twice, but neither one worked out. I fathered no more children, though I kept in touch with the daughter of my third wife, a girl she’d had during her first marriage, under circumstances not so different from mine and Olivia’s.

I grew old not so gracefully. I was a little bitter, though I had a dark sense of humor my students seemed to like. I drank far too much, pretty much every night. Stopped and started smoking in what seemed like regular seven-year intervals. I had an old dog, a pound mutt of inconceivable lineage. I died while out on a walk with the dog one afternoon in winter, of exposure, because of a mild heart attack that nonetheless left me unable to get back to my vehicle, parked half a mile away.

When I woke from this one, who should be sitting on the hospital cot across from me but Wendell Sparrow, looking strange as ever, but worse. He seemed to have aged to something like forty or fifty, though he was surely only twenty, just a couple of years older than me. Judging by the white orderly uniform he wore, and his crew-cut, balding head, he was now an employee of East Mississippi. He was smoking a cigarette, in the same famished way, and looked to weigh about a hundred and ten pounds. I couldn’t imagine him overpowering even the tiniest crazy person.

No, he said when I asked, he was a respiratory therapist. They need that in here, too, he said.

“Ever use the machine on yourself?” I said.

“I figure it’ll come in handy, one day,” he said.

“It’s good to see you,” I said then. “Even if it is in here.”

He didn’t answer for a moment, just watched me with a kind of detached or absent look on his ravaged face. I figured he was doing a lot of speed, maybe junk. Or maybe something he could only get in here.

“So,” he said. “How was that?”

“How was what?” I said. And then a little chill ran through me. He was looking at me in that way.

“That was real,” Sparrow said then. “That’s the way it would’ve really been.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute.

“What about the rest of it?” I said. “All the stuff after the divorce.”

Sparrow put out his cigarette on the floor, dug into his therapist coat pocket for the pack, niggled another one out of it, and lit up, put the pack back into the pocket.

“Yeah,” he said. “Could be pretty much that way. Probably a few minor differences. Might look a lot different at times, along the way. But in the end, not a whole lot.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“Gotta go,” Sparrow said, getting up. “So many lungs, so little time.”