The Everborn (28 page)

“Something’s not right here,” Mel told him in response, agitated, pressing further to the point. “Back up a minute. Tell me again, how exactly do you make a living?”

Numerous questions sprung from the inner wells of Andrew’s suspicions. Didn’t he make that clear to her? Surely he couldn’t have hinted of the
truth
during their discussion the other night! And why is she concerning herself so, over his income? Is her business hurting for a buck, is she spying around for the next great score with a good-looking guy and a notable meal ticket? Like Jessica, Ralston’s girlfriend, perhaps? Or is she behaving like
the journalist
, asking questions for media, while not really maintaining a personal interest in him at all?

Say it isn’t so!

“I’m sorry,” Melony told him and reached a hand out to his across the corner of the table that they shared. Andrew was quite oblivious in his momentary lapse of frustration. “I’m just asking. I’m curious. Maybe it’s the journalist in me. I wanna know more about you. It’s plain to see how working for Ralston Cooper upsets you so. You want to be a writer in your own right, and he just gets in the way. Doesn’t he? I’m sorry.”

Mel said nothing more than what she’d meant to and she knew nothing of the deep secrets kept between Andrew and Ralston. She was only too aware of other secrets even more unsaid and she would find her way towards them, regardless of how wrong or unfair it was beginning to seem. The interview was proceeding rather wel, and she was confident enough to request another brandy. Yet she had obviously struck a nerve in Andrew and it felt good to know she could ease whatever upset him outright and re-establish a bit of friendly trust between them both, as a good interviewer should.

But there was an element of mutual understanding growing here, haunting her with the realization of the obvious things they together held in common, of how the two of them had burrowed their careers into the unsatisfying comforts of two opposing mock-mentors, who each separately dictated the lives of Andrew and Melony to their highly successful demands, all the while denying the two of any success of their own. And to top it all off, one mock-mentor had virtually built a career upon pursuing the mysteries of the other.

And here was Andrew and Melony, on a date in Andrew’s apartment, the servile followers of two celebrity icons who wouldn’t be what they were today if it weren’t for what
Andrew and Melony
had done for
them
.

Andrew appeared to understand her, to accept her apology. Melony was beginning to understand all too well. She tamed herself from being so outwardly nosey. She had another forkful of wonton.

Andrew was absently busying himself with his chop sticks, toying with his soy-sauce-saturated chow mein. He was trying to read her, wondering what she was all about, but by now it was curiosity and not suspicion, which drove him to it. Mel was comforted to pick up on this, trying to read him as well but with fragmented triumph.

Andrew was the first to speak after the considerable unease of silence. “So, we both have questions about what the other does. Nothing wrong with that. We’re both starving for harmless answers about one another. You must like me, or you wouldn’t be here, and I’m sure you’re not here to win the Pulitzer Prize on
my
humble life. Tell me about yourself, or ask me anything you want. I’m sorry too, for that passing bit of awkwardness.”

Mel raised her brandy glass in a toast and Andrew raised his in turn. “Here’s to informal introductions,” she proposed. Glasses clinked, and spirits lifted. “Now, if you want to, ask me a question about
myself.”

Andrew sipped his drink. It was brandy also, and more of it, diluted with Coke in a tall glass. “What’s your favorite color?”

“Orange. It used to be black, but black is too common.”

“Like your hair,” Andrew noted. “But your hair is far too beautiful to be common. Come on, black is
supposed
to be beautiful. That’s
my
favorite color.”

“Okay, let me ask a question,” Mel said. “What turns you on?”

“Well....
orange
, now.” Andrew found himself less comfortable now than with the previous subject, though he tried his best not to show it. He hoped this was working. “And you?”

“What turns me on is how we have so much in common.”

“We do?” A sip of brandy-Coke, a mouthful of vegetables.

“Ask me more about
my
self."

“All right,” Andrew swallowed. “What
do
we both have in common?”

“We both serve two masters: ourselves and the one we’re servants to. We hate one, and despise the other. It doesn’t matter which. We hate ourselves for clinging to the other as much as we do and we hate our
other
for having us be that way.”

“Yet we don’t completely despise the other, do we?” Andrew replied, delighted by the depth of conversation the evening had submerged into and barely even an hour had passed since it began. “I mean, there’s something we appreciate in them still, isn’t there, important things that we have learned from them, throughout what they’ve turned into?”

“What I’ve learned is to not appreciate
my
master so much anymore,” Mel said, almost bitterly, mesmerized as she was by the utter honesty of it all, how she so desperately needed a release to her deep tremulous burdens like this. “I used to love him and part of me still does, but all I find lately is that I try too hard to keep that love going and he simply keeps defeating the purpose. All I ever wanted to do was paint, to be an artist, and to explore
myself
, not someone else’s obsessions, as intriguing as they always were,” and then, “...
are
.”

Perhaps it was the brandy talking. She only had three, or was it four? It was at least four when she asked Andrew for another. How many bottles of that shit did he hold there within his kitchen cupboards, anyway? This was not the direction the interview was supposed to have gone. Who was interviewing
whom
, here?

“So, Melony,” Andrew asked his date, curious and unaware of her struggle to maintain her preplanned interrogative approach to talking to him, “Who is this master you despise?”

A short distance behind Melony and from Andrew’s point of view, somewhere in the direction of the refrigerator’s car—shaped
Zat’s Auto & Body
promo magnet, a blurry distortion appeared. It was the left side of Bari’s head, displaying an attentive ear up and listening.

Bari was merely humoring him; Andrew knew she could hear just as well unseen. This was also an attempt to remind Andrew that she
was
listening and if there was anything else she was doing, she was
annoying
him.

What Bari was doing was more than that, Andrew realized. She was feeding Melony thoughts and ideas. This was not a manipulation, but an...influence. Bari was known to do this sort of thing.

He was going to have to talk to her about that.

He focused onto Melony, deliberately, despite Bari. To Melony, his expression suddenly hinted of determined concentration.

Thus her answer:
He
was interviewing
her
.

And her answer to Andrew’s last question: “Max Polito. You’re right, though, I don’t completely despise him and I’ve learned a great deal of good through him, a lot of insight in many areas. Maybe some insight into
you
.”

She was saying too much and she wasn’t sure why. Yet she was truly speaking her mind and it felt so intensely good to do so. This was a rare opportunity indeed and she instinctively longed for it. She’d wrestled with the notion of spilling her guts earlier that afternoon, but she didn’t expect
this
.

Yet, alas, there it was. Out there smack dab in the naked open spaces.

Andrew’s reply, after an expressionless stare and then a contemplative pause: “Who is Max Polito?”

Bari's distorted image disappeared. Most likely, Andrew would not detect any sign of Bari for the remainder of the date. Whatever Bari had done, she had obviously gotten away with it. And that was all it would take.

Melony looked at him as though she’d just said something
obscene
, as though she’d caught herself after the fact.

Now, it was
her
turn to answer.

Who was
Max Polito
? Didn’t he know? Countless people Melony never even
met
knew the celebrity’s
name
, at least, even if they mistook it for a sports announcer’s.

Surely Andrew must know who Max was, must know it was Max who had been trailing him and his antics throughout the past decade and earlier, dispersing tidbits of his research concerning Andrew’s “kind” in his PBS series and nearly every Polito publication that made the
Book-of-the-Month
Club’s alternate selection. Of course, Max took care to never mention specific names or references, but rather made use of general theories and a few unspecific facts. He knew how to watch his ass.

Except with his own wife.

Apparently, now, she couldn’t watch
hers
, either, and she was still on the spot to give a reply.

She gave one the way Max would. “I know who you are.”

To Andrew, Melony again appeared as if she just let something obscene escape her lips and he recalled how she’d asked him what turns him on. The Max Polito name sounded somewhat familiar to him with Melony’s odd and perplexing reply, and he could easily detect her uncertainty and regret in mentioning his name.

She was hiding something and attempting to force it out; it seemed as if Bari hadn’t fed her any ideas after all...she seemed to have released Melony’s inhibited temptations, to make her cough out the thoughts that were choking her after she had chewed on them for awhile.

I know who you are
.

He’d been told that before.

He’d been told that in his dreams, by his own self, or by someone who looked like him, by someone that maybe wasn’t him at all but someone else entirely, a mirror image of himself that dwelt independently and that returned his glare from a world parallel but opposite to his own. It was more than a reflective image before his bathroom mirror that told him
I know who you are
.

It was an image sullen and scarred, angry and full of pain, burdened with remorse.

I know who you are.

And whenever it spoke those words, it spoke with the voice of A.J. Erlandson, his father....

...confounding Andrew’s own certainty that he had never known the sound of that voice in his own lifetime.

Intently disturbed, he broke away from her eye contact and methodically impaled a diced bamboo shoot upon his plate with a single chop stick. He hoped she would continue on a lighter subject, with enough dialogue to earn a passing grade in Normalcy 101, with a Graduate Degree in
What Were We Talking About Before
.

Melony recognized the advantages of the soap box limelight Andrew had placed above her, with or without his intentions and it seemed so suddenly opportune that he would reveal more of
him
self the further she went into revealing more of
hers.

How ironic that the same principle applied to average first dates.

“Max is my husband and my boss,” she told him outright and boldly. “Although I’m not expecting him to last much longer as either one.
He’s
what we have in common, besides how similar my relationship to him can be to yours and Ralston’s. He sent me to meet you. You, and/or a few others he’s interested in. Max is famous for dealing with unexplained supernatural phenomenon, namely extraterrestrials and UFOs in our past and present culture. He...he believes
you
fall in line with the present kind.

“He’s been observing you and others like you for a few decades, seems like. I just happened along the bandwagon, and he got me fascinated. I know who you are, at least I’m betting on it, and unless I’m sounding like a complete asshole and you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about,
you know who you are, too.”

23.

A Strange Brew of Personality

....
you know who you are, too
.

In scenarios such as this one, there isn’t usually only one reason why one excuses himself so suddenly and awkwardly to go to the bathroom. If Melony knew what to think of this, she wasn’t so sure if she would’ve attained more firm of a grip of the situation.

The truth was, she
didn’t
know what to think of this and she was downright frightened to even wonder.

But what kind of a person would take such a wildly presumptuous statement from a woman he barely knew with a
would you excuse me for a moment, I gotta take a wizz?

After all, she had just told him outright that she believed him to be a UFO alien, and that a portion of her career was based on that belief, inspired by the larger helping of belief from her husband’s career’s main course.

How would somebody
take
that?

Especially if he
was
some sort of alien?

She had also just revealed to him that she had been sent to meet him; that her purpose of meeting him was due to the fact that he was the subject of journalistic inquiry, a serious research project, of a
story
.

She was genuinely scared of wondering, but nevertheless she found herself wondering anyway. It was inevitable, this damnable wondering, and the more she lapsed into it the more it consumed her.

She assumed dinner was over. She was finished and full, a remarkable thing when weighing the dinner conversation against the eating of the dinner itself.