Once More Into the Abyss Read Free Page A

medicines they’ll take and the ones they won’t.
    In Dad’s day, ulcers were big. Now, I suppose it’s failing hearts, failing minds. Then, as now, the gatekeeper to many a medical professional was a woman. Dad had a way with women, as most alien men do—maybe one of the reasons Mom traveled with him in the summers, so all his girlfriends on the road could have a look at his happy family. There was a waitress in a Mexican restaurant in San Angelo who knew Dad by name, knew what he ordered, and was pretty nervous the whole time, Dad too, but that was one time out of thousands of restaurants, and Mom seemed to find the whole thing amusing. We were often a happy family, and we were happiest, seems to me, those summers on the road. We loved it. Me more than Ollie maybe, since it began to compete with his interest in girls. When he hit sixteen I mostly had Mom and Dad to myself, crisscrossing his territory. Ollie missed a lot.
    We stopped often, which Dad didn’t usually do when he was working. He would take note of anything that looked interesting to him, or might be interesting to me or Mom, during the year and wait till we were along to take it in. It might be an enormous model train layout or an impressionist painting or a snake farm or a hot blues band or a cemetery. Mom and Dad had a thing about cemeteries. All of us would wander around like they were sculpture gardens. I was always on the lookout for angels. Ollie bellyached about it, and we all ignored him, but I didn’t miss him when he quit coming along. Sometimes when it was just the three of us wandering among the dead at sunset, Dad would say, I wonder what Ollie’s up to now , all wistful, like he wished he was with us. Mom would answer his question with the name of some girl Ollie was screwing, half of whom I never met. He was five years older, in a different universe where people actually fucked. There was plenty of drama—angry girls on the phone who would even talk to me to relay a pleading message to Ollie—so I kind of believed him when he’d say he wished he’d been there to see the Monet, the 76 Deadly Rattlers in a Pit, or the Plains Indian Museum.
    Now here we are two old geezers in the back seat of Katyana’s Outback, rocketing through Texas, Katyana at the wheel, singing along with the music Dylan (riding shotgun) has selected from his phone, some band I don’t know the name of but I like. Alien men like to keep up with what’s current, hate oldies stations with a passion.
    Katyana has a beautiful voice. Alien women often possess beautiful singing voices. Dad once bragged to me and Ollie that our Mom sang Madame Butterfly to a standing ovation in her youth, and she told him to shush and soon left the room, tears welling in her eyes. Aliens are often tortured by unfulfilled artistic ambitions. Mom had several—painting, singing, poetry. Dad was a failed mystery writer and standup comedian. He loved to tell jokes. He was a master at it.
    They were a talented pair. But they knew they weren’t ordinary humans, and when their mission was completed, they would have to return home and turn their backs on all things human, starting with the human form all the art was about in one way or another. Who knows why an alien would love opera? Did Mom love it because it was alien, or because it was not? Maybe she was weeping because she knew when she shed her human body she would sing no more and live in a world without arias.
    I know I sound crazy. I’ve honed the skill over the years, along with a near total disinterest in what others may think of me. It’s one of the major perks to being an old fart, and don’t underestimate its value. Wish I’d learned the skill years ago.
    Avatar and Myrna sprawl across our laps, twitching and dreaming, making little yippy noises like they could still chase anything. Ollie’s goofy Dane, Horatio, crammed in the back with the luggage, can’t