Alien encounter

 

April 5, 1980

 

The door was open when I got there, swung back, flat against the wall as if someone had flung it open.

I wondered if I should go in or get away.

It wrong, even violent – like an invitation to a police station, and not the kind of invitation I thought I was getting from her glance at the bar.

But me being me, I had to go in.

Maybe more out of curiosity than attraction.

While the woman at the bar was extremely pretty – maybe too pretty for someone like me – she also had something odd about her, some mysterious thing that differed from all those gals that claimed to be mysterious.

Had I been anybody else from the band, this would not have been a problem.

Mysterious meant something else to them, and only added to the moment, where as I didn’t believe in one night stands and so needed to know more.

There was nothing mysterious about the room, a typical highway motel room with a dresser, TV, phone stand and bed.

She was on the bed. Lack of light made up for her lack of clothing, but I could still tell in the slanted light from the street that she was naked.

Her eyes glinted with a greenish glow I could not explain since the light coming from the street had an amber tint.

“You should shut the door,” she said. “We don’t want everybody knowing what we’re doing in here.”

“And what are we doing in here?” I asked, but complied in closing the door, making the darkness more complete, but did nothing to extinguish the glow of her eyes. This seemed to grow more intense.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Why do you think I invited you here?”

“To show me your etchings?” I asked.

She laughed, but it was a bit shrill, as if to suggest she didn’t think I should be making jokes at a time like this.

“Come over here and sit on the bed?” she said.

I heard her hand pat the bed and I headed in the direction of the sound and the green glow.

The unusual scent of her perfume that I had noticed vaguely in the bar grew overpowering, and I staggered a little, as if drunk, when I knew I could not be drunk the one beer I had washed down the pretzels with.

My knees hit the bed in the dark. Her hand curled around my arm and forced me down – until I half lay on the bed with her.

She drew my hand to her chest, palm curling around the curve of her like a baseball mitt – but this baseball had a tight little knot at its center, and felt just a little moist.

“Squeeze it,” she whispered.

I did. The knot sprouted a few more drips.

“Lick it,” she said, and I drew my fingers to my mouth.

The moisture tasted sweet and then, like a vapor, it vanished.

“Lick it,” she said again, this time, her hand circling my nick, drawing my face to where my hand had been, so that my mouth closed around that moist little knot and I tasted the sweetness again.

A strange sweetness, I thought, like something minty, and I wondered if she had coated it with something, but my mouth became too enmeshed with it to release any words, and the licking turned to sucking and this drew even more of this into me, a taste turning to vapor, which immediately went to my head.

I might have been ingesting pot or some other exotic drug, so overcome was I by it. And I couldn’t get enough. The more I got the more I wanted, and the more she let me have, until finally she touched my hand and drew this down to her thigh.

“Touch me,” she said.

And I did, feeling even more moisture there as my fingers explored, and she moaned.

No, an odder sound than a moan, like something I hadn’t heard before in this or any other context.

“Taste it,” she mumbled, and I again drew my fingers to my mouth.

The taste was hot. Not warm like blood, but hot like lava or some exotic spice I had not encountered in any dish I had tasted on this side or any other side of the border.

“Lick” she said, and drew my head in that same southern kingdom, where the intensity of the taste was even more potent than the one I had sampled above. But instead of making me drunk, it started a flame inside of me, so I became like she was, and no longer needed to taste or touch, only feel the in and out of things, hearing yet more unusual sounds that even before, and the rasp of my breathlessness as if I was running and could not stop.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I heard her voice in my ear, a whisper between my huffing and her moans, “Am I your first alien?”

“You mean as legal or illegal?” I said, trying to sound coy.

“No,” she said. “I mean the other kind.”

It took a long time for that to sink in – maybe I hadn’t heard it at all. Maybe I had had more than one beer at the bar or someone had spiked the pretzels. Maybe I just misheard something in the heat of it that later explained how I felt when I woke up alone – she no where to be found, nor was my clothing, or my wallet – although she did leave me the car keys.

I never saw her again at the club. Some of my friends when I asked them about her, said they’d not seen her at all.

I did not report any of it to the police.

I didn’t know what to say or how to explain, and thought maybe I had imagined the whole thing, especially those things I felt in the dark, the touch and being touched, the tasting and being tasted, and other things that I could not explain or describe, except to think if she was telling the truth, then her kind of found a much better way to probe my kind, and worse, I wanted to try again.

Maybe some day, I thought, in some far off universe.
But I won’t hold my breath.