“What you got them bags for?” Jessica asks after the man drives her car into the garage. She wasn’t lying that it jerked and the man wondered if he could help her. Jessica stood next to all of the man’s possessions in two bags leaning against a wall.
“Actually, I was on my way out.” The man continues despite his hesitation; he has never been one for offering details about himself that weren’t solicited, but Randy had told him to put himself out there. Even though he is not happy that Randy’s love life left a mess that he had to clean up not only with a broom (a jealous man had smashed the glass walls of Randy’s office and his ribs), but also with his preternatural ability that he swore not to use again, the man knows that Randy knows women and he could trust his advice for making nice with a woman.
“I’m leaving TX tonight.” The man says.
“Where to?” Jessica finds a chair and the man admires her cleavage when he looks in her direction and forces his eyes away to make proper conversation.
“Nowhere in particular, just leaving TX.”
“You a roadie or something? Hitch hiker?”
“I don’t know what a roadie is, and I got a car so I won’t be hitchin a ride. I’m just on a trip across the US, seeing the sights. I was here long enough to make back some of the money I spent so far and get my head together.”
Jessica is excited at the premise. “I always wanted to do something like that. I’m headed to NM myself, got some artist friends that’s showing in a festival. But that’s nothing, here to there, not compared to cross country. Where’d you start?”
The man tells Jessica all about his journey so far, leaving out the details that had maimed him. He wanted to be a whole man for her. She was very knowledgeable of art and she was also really into science and science fiction.
“I was born in TX but I been out to NM a whole lot. Don’t think I’m crazy, but every time I go I hope I see an alien. They must love it out there, the scenery is amazing, the mountains and all. Maybe it reminds them of home, like they crashed here and can’t get their warp speed thrusters to work, but they can still zip around our solar system and they adopted the scenic San Pedro Mountains as their home.”
The man loves her whimsy and in the time he spends with her, he forgets all of his frustration with Randy, the disappointments he has met to this point; he is only interesting in moving forward.
“How do I ask to go with you to NM without sounding like a crazy stalker?” The man asks sheepishly, hoping that he isn’t misreading Jessica’s interest in him, but those scenic mountains sound appealing to him; he’d loved his time in the Appalachian.
“Of course you can come! The more the merrier. I’m glad you got a car too, in case you can’t get mine working.” Jessica smiles, obviously ashamed, but also relieved that her plans would not fall through.
“Oh, I fixed your car already, I was just looking busy so we could keep talking.” Jessica’s car was a relatively easy fix with the man’s know how; luckily it wasn’t Randy who worked on it, he would have held it for a week.
They prepare to leave the garage and Jessica drives out into the day that is waning; the moon is prominent in the sky. The man locks everything away and then the door to the garage, and he looks at it one last time. He’d decided to leave a note for Randy that he taped to the frame of his office door. The man was kind in the note, he thanked Randy for his generosity and he promised to stop by the next time he was in town.
Jessica and the man drive to a nearby diner for dinner before they get back on the road. Over steak and pork chops, the man and Jessica talk and laugh, at one point Jessica tears up, and the man feels like a real person for the first time in a long time. Jessica doesn’t feel at all like a stranger and he talks to her with the same ease he felt when he joked with his sister.
“Are you into drugs at all?” She asks him and the man is honest that he only knows the taste of beer and he had only ever had enough to feel kind of light headed.
“I’m not a hippie or nothing like that, I’m an art teacher so I don’t go crazy, but my friends, I have to warn you, they get into some things. Everybody’s cool and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Stick with me, I’ll look out for you. This is going to be a cool, artistic experience for you.”
The two caravan on I-40 late into the night. Jessica is not a bad driver, but she’s extremely quick with her turn signals, so by the time the man notices them, she is whipping over into new lanes to pass cars that she complains are going too slowly, and the man has to find her car lengths ahead.
When they are in NM, the man knows that he is far from home. He sees adobe buildings and the lay of the land is flat when there are no rock formations, and he realizes that there are very little trees compared to his home in NC. Jessica leads him off the interstate and heads towards a motel and the two arrange their cars like police officers to talk.
“You wanna sleep? I talked to my friends, they said it’d be cool to meet them late afternoon.”
The man eyes the hotel that is more substantial than the motel where he’d stayed in TN, but its all the same to him and he struggles not to let his anxieties get the best of him.
The two decide to get one room with two beds and as soon as he walks through the door he remembers the inside of Sandra’s motel room in TN, the pain of the bullet in his gut, and the man’s face flushes pale behind his brown skin. When Jessica notices, she sits him on the bed and the man tells her about the shooting.
“Let’s relax,” Jessica says and she pulls four bottles of red wine from her bags. “Its basically two for each us, but we don’t have to show off, this being your first time and all.”
They drink and talk and the man is fine with the taste of the wine that reminds him of very bitter grape juice.
Eventually, in the early morning hours, the man and Jessica share the same bed and drink from the same cup of wine, taking turns. Jessica is telling the man why she became a teacher and it makes the man sad.
“At some point, its obvious things don’t work out the way you thought they would. I bet you didn’t think you was gonna get shot. I thought I was gonna be famous, everybody said I was good, but I couldn’t sell anything. So I found a job and now I pass out construction paper and scrub paint off of really small tables. That’s my life now, that’s what I got going on. But I was so good, right?”
The man watches Jessica through whatever sensation the wine has him feeling. He has definitely never been this drunk before, but he likes it, it makes him experience things differently than he was used to. She is pretty, the man thinks, she shouldn’t be sad.
“What kind of art did you make?” The man manages and he is surprised at his own clarity.
“What can I say, I like aliens. Landscapes of alien worlds, portraits of alien dignitaries. It was cool looking stuff, but the academics said it was too cartoony. I don’t know.” She reaches for her phone and shows the man some pictures; alien worlds and their leaders.
“This is cool,” the man laughs with delight, and before he realizes his mistake, he gleefully brings one of Jessica’s aliens to life. Jessica stares at it in disbelief and the man has a realization; “you finally got to see an alien in NM!”
It takes another couple of seconds for the other shoe to drop.
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