When they were abducted by the extraterrestrials, nothing was expected of them beyond mating once per day with one day out of every thirteen off. Mating for study? Sport? Some cross-terrestrial fetish? They never knew. The extraterrestrials were nothing but vague suggestions of eyeballs – they looked just like human eyeballs! – but eyeballs strangely penumbra-ed by the light – like in a dream where you know who or what you’re looking at but you can’t quite see them. Penumbra-ed not being a word but being the only actual description available to us for the aliens…
It was their 25th time making love when she fell in love with him, on the cold surgical table provided for them each day. They were provided the surgical table to have sex on but they had a shared cabin where they slept and spent their off hours. At first, they had practically divided the room down the middle, each side of the room having a chair on either side of the bed. He slept on the floor for the first few nights out of some misguided sense of chivalry. On their second night off, he had asked to hold her, to sleep in the bed with her, and though she was reluctant, she let him. The next time, their 25th, as she would tell him much later, once they were back on earth, that was when she felt something… shift.
He had loved her with a physical ardor, an intensity she hadn’t expected from him.
He was a virgin when abducted. He had not told her, except maybe by apologizing for his fumbling their first couple of times together. She on the other hand had been with several men – she never said how many and he never asked – but never once with a complete stranger who couldn’t help but make love to her.
How do you know such passion? she asked him. …without sex?
Their cabin was made up like a luxury hotel suite on Earth. There was even room service. They called down for oysters and champagne, were brought a divine risotto and shampoo. Both were excellent, decadent examples of their type, perfect for the human appetite and the revitalization of human hair respectively. But apparently there were problems with the Beta of the universal translating algorithms, at least with the English translation, and the shampoo was served alongside the risotto. Nonetheless, they ate the risotto, then showered together, washing each other’s hair.
Contrary to popular rumor, there were no anal probes. Though it became a joke between them in their cabin in the dark before sleep, one of the few private acts they were allowed.
After several months, or what seemed like months, they came to love the eyeballs that weren’t quite human eyeballs, but instead the suggestion of a life form they couldn’t fully perceive.
Stockholm syndrome, he said.
Probably, she agreed.
But they were taken care of: they had unlimited access to any television and movies from any period of the past and somehow even 81 years into the future; the time when, per the aliens, earthlings would no longer need television because implants in the brain now replicated whatever experience was desired as it was desired and triggered by subtle blink commands.
When she became pregnant with his child, they dumped them in an empty field back on earth. The same field where they were taken. Apparently, the aliens had only been interested in the sex itself, not the reproductive process. They were returned to the same empty field where they had been taken. There had been a carnival there that night, they had seen the turning wheel of light overhead, and from the many-colored wind, emerging from the unseen constellations overhead, they were caught in a beam, and both of them had awoke aboard some alien vessel.
But she was pregnant now, the field was empty, the trampled grass grown back but for patches. There was no moon.
They had 100,000 American dollars between them, earth money, given to them by the extraterrestrials, but there was no room at the town’s one motel, so they slept in a broken down tractor trailer behind a shut down meat packing plant, patches of grass and weed breaking through the asphalt. It was nearly pitch black, all but two of the parking lot lamps burned out, and one of them dimmed and became brighter throughout the night as it too was failing.
Huddled in the dark, in the back of the truck, he felt like he was next to her in a womb of their own.
The next night, she went into labor. At the hospital, she delivered the child, but it was a stillborn. He sat beside her bed, holding her hand. She asked to be alone, and so he left her in the hospital room, went outside, and looked up – but the stars formed no constellations.
A few days later, when she was released from the hospital, they sat in a diner over coffee talking about what was next. What if anything there was between them.
They stayed together.
They were married in a small town called Providence by a justice of the peace. They bought a house in the suburbs using the money from the aliens. This was when you could still buy a decent house for under 100,000 dollars in America.
They never told anyone what happened. Instead, they told people they had hitchhiked out to Hollywood to try their luck in the movie business. That he won some money in Vegas at the roulette wheel. You always have been lucky, his mother said, smiling at his new bride.
If nothing else, his father added, grinning.
His parents did not understand his disappearance or the elopement but they understood 100, 000 dollars and it made them strangely proud. This was at Thanksgiving. She refused wine because she was pregnant again. Her own parents had yet to forgive her the long unexplained absence.
Their first child wasn’t even born when they stopped talking about it entirely. The Abduction. They found jobs in local municipalities, jobs with benefits and retirement plans. Their children grew up. They grew old and gray. Towards the end they didn’t need to talk about much at all. Just whatever the report was when their son and daughter called, from whichever one of them picked up the phone to the other. That’s nice, the other would say, almost invariably. They didn’t talk about it, but for the rest of their lives, they would often have the sense they were being watched, though by a benevolent curiosity as opposed to something cold and distant or something surveillant and malicious.
The night he had indigestion, she drove him to the Emergency Room. She truly believed he was having a heart attack, though he insisted he was fine. In his delirium upon being given a tranquilizer, he blabbered about an alien abduction many years before. The doctor pulled her aside and warned her of the signs of dementia.
It was the first night in forty years they spent apart.
The next night, home from the hospital, they sat together on the front porch swing without turning the porch lights on. It was almost pitch black and looking out from under the roof, they had a lovely view of the night sky. She never could pick out a constellation for the life of her, and soon their hemorrhoids would be complaining, and they’d go in for the night.
But for now, he traced with his finger, in her eye line, Diana The Huntress and Orion’s Belt, as he had many times before – and they would remember, without having to speak it, how their destiny too, as simple as it turned out to be, would forever be mapped out by those same stars.