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No response.
Butch took another picture. I leaned forward and put my hand on her neck. I thought she might pull away, but she didn’t. It looked like skin (unless you looked closely), but it didn’t quite feel like skin. I held my hand there for maybe twenty seconds, then took it away. “She has no pulse.”
“No?” He didn’t sound surprised and I didn’t feel surprised. We were in shock, our processing equipment overloaded.
Butch tried to slide his hand into the right front pocket of her corduroy pants and couldn’t. “Not a real pocket,” he said. “None of it is. It’s like… a costume. I think she’s a costume.”
“What do we do with her, Butch?”
“Fucked if I know.”
“Call the police?”
He lifted his hands and then dropped them, a very un-Butchlike gesture of indecision. “The closest phone is Brownie’s Store. That’s miles from here. And Brownie closes at seven. I’d have to carry her across the bridge to the jeep…”
“I’d take a turn.” I said this stoutly enough, but I kept thinking of how my fingers had sunk into what looked like boots and weren’t.
“It would mean testing the bridge again,” he said. “As for moving her, she’s stable now, but… what? What are you smiling about?”
I gestured to the woman—what looked like a woman—on the couch. “She has no pulse, Butchie. She’s clinically dead. You can’t get much more stable than that.”
“But she’s breathing! And she’s…” He checked to make sure. “She’s looking at us. Listen, Laird—are you prepared to be on the front page of every newspaper and the lead story on every TV station not just in Maine or the U.S., but in the whole round world? Because if we take her out, that’s what it’ll come to. She’s an alien. She came from outer fucking space. And not with a lust for Earth women, either.”
“Unless she’s a lesbian,” I said. “Then she might, you know, lust for Earth women.”
We started laughing the way you do when you’re trying not to go crazy. She was still looking at us. No smile, no frown, no expression of any kind. A woman who wasn’t a woman, who had no pulse but was breathing, who was wearing clothes that weren’t clothes but looked more like clothes all the time. I had an idea that if Butch tried her pocket now, his hand would go in. He might even find some change or a half-used roll of Life Savers.
“Why did she end up on the bridge? What do you suppose happened to her?”
“I don’t know. I think—”
I never heard what he thought. That was when light flooded in the east-facing window of our cabin’s main room. Thoughts came to me, knocking each other over like dominoes. The first was that time had slipped somehow and the sun was coming up. The second was that sunrise was never that bright in our cabin, because there were too many trees on that side. My third was that some government organization had come for the woman and those were searchlights. The fourth was that someone had come for her, all right… but it wasn’t the government.
The light grew brighter still. Butch squinted and raised a hand to shield his eyes. I did the same. I wondered if we were taking a hard dose of radioactivity. Just before the room grew so bright that my vision whited out, I looked at the woman on the couch. Remember me saying that, like old Rennie Lacasse, these pitchers never excaped my memory? There’s one exception to that. I can’t remember what I saw when I looked at her in that awful brilliance. Or maybe I blocked it out. Either way, I don’t think I was looking at her at all. I think I was looking into her. As to what I saw, I can remember thinking just one word: ganglia.
I covered my eyes. No good. The light shone straight through my hands and through my closed lids. There was no heat, but it was going to burn my brains to a cinder just the same. I heard Butch scream. That was when I lost consciousness, and I was glad to go.
When I came to, the awful brilliance was gone. So was the woman. Sitting on the couch where she’d been was a young man—maybe thirty, probably younger—with neatly combed blond hair, the part as straight as a ruler. He was wearing khaki pants and a quilted vest. A small shoulder bag hung at his side from a strap across his chest. My first thought was he was an out-of-state hunter, a flatlander with ammo in his bag and a scoped rifle nearby.
Probably not was my second one.
We had half a dozen battery-powered lamps and he’d turned them all on. They gave plenty of light, but nothing like that unearthly (literally) glare that had invaded our cabin earlier. How much earlier was a question I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t even sure it was the same night. I looked at my watch but it had stopped.
Butch sat up, looked around, saw me, saw the newcomer. He asked a question that was both mad and—under the circumstances—completely logical. “Are you her?”
“No,” the young man said. “That one is gone.”
I tried for my feet and made it okay. I didn’t feel hungover or dazed. If anything, invigorated. And while I’d seen a dozen movies about evil invaders from space, I didn’t feel that this young man meant us any harm. Nor did I believe he was actually a young man any more than the woman from the bridge had been a young woman.
There was a pitcher of water and three leftover cans of beer in our little coldbox. I debated and took a beer.
“Give me one,” Butch said.
I tossed it and he caught it one-handed. “What about you, sir?” I asked.
“Why not?”
I gave him the last can. Our visitor looked normal—like any young man on a hunting trip with his friends or his dad—but I was still careful not to touch his fingers. I can write what happened, but as to how I felt… much more complicated. All I can do is reiterate that I didn’t feel threatened, and later on Butch said the same. Of course we were in shock.
