The Next Couple

I had no idea where I was, or how long I had been here. I felt a 5 o’clock shadow on my face so I guessed I had only been here a day or less, maybe less than 12 hours. I don’t remember anything about what I had been doing prior to my arrival and how I got here.

I was in a supine position on a stainless-steel examining table, or at least I assumed it was stainless steel. It was cold, there was no cloth or paper covering to lessen the irritating cold on my skin, my naked skin. I sat up and saw a woman on another examining table about 4 feet away from me. She too was supine and naked. She was still sleeping. She was beautiful.

I got up and walked over to her. I shook her shoulder, gently at first, but I had to shake her harder to get her to wake up. She was groggy at first, but she soon realized what I was doing and screamed at me, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU PERVERT!”

I tried to explain, “No, you don’t understand. I don’t understand where I am. I don’t understand how I got here.”

She raised up on her elbows. She slowly recognized that she too was naked. She raised an arm to attempt to try to conceal her, you know, her boobs. She put her other hand down around her pubic area to try to hide it. “Where are my clothes? What are you doing with me?”

“Calm down, lady. I don’t know any more than you do.” A quick examination of the sparse antiseptic room revealed that there was nothing that could be used to help her, or even me, preserve our modesty. But it bothered me a lot less than it bothered her.

“What’s happening?” She started to cry.

“Do you know what an alien abduction is?”

“What, we’ve been kidnapped by Mexican drug dealers?”

Her reaction was much too stupid to require a response. But I foolishly tried anyway. “No. Intelligent beings from another. . ..” I stopped when I realized it would probably be futile. “What’s the last thing you remember before you were here?”

“I was watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians, when I . . .”

“Never mind,” I told her. I didn’t know if I was in an alien spacecraft or hell. . . if I was going to spend any time here with this intellectual giant. “How old are you?”

“I’m 22.”

“Last year I was twice your age.” As a mathematician it just seemed natural for me to express the difference in our ages in this simple formulaic relationship.

“So, you’re 44?” I should have stopped there and just been grateful that she knew how to multiply by 2, even if she didn’t comprehend the intricacies of the relationship of two numbers and how their ratio changes as each number is increase, or diminished, by 1.

“No, I’m 43. Last year when you were 21, I was 42.”

“But aren’t you still twice my age?”

Clearly there was a light on the porch, but no one was home. “Never mind,” I said.

She yelled at me, “Will you stop staring at me? Get me some clothes.”

“Lady, look around. There’s nothing in here at all, much less clothing. Besides, you’re staring at me!”

“What’s that?” she exclaimed. There was no sound, but apparently both of us received a telepathic message that said, “Do not be alarmed. We mean you no harm. We merely want to observe you and your habits.”

She asked me, “Did you hear that?”

“I don’t think ‘hear’ is the right term to use.” We compared what we heard; we heard the same thing. “Apparently they can communicate with us telepathically.” 

She addressed the unseen voice, “We want some clothes.” I guess I should have been bothered that she made herself our spokesman, but I admired her initiative.

The “voice” assured us, “You have no need for what you call clothing. That would interfere with our ability to observe you.”

She looked at me with obvious disappointment. “Are we going to have to stay this way?”

I redirected her concern, “Isn’t the larger question how long are we going to have to stay this way? Are we going to be here 2 hours, 2 days, 2 months, 2 years?” I stopped there but I thought to myself, could it possibly be for 2 lifetimes?

“We will return you unharmed when we have completed our observations.” Then, a platform emerged from the floor. On it were two instruments that obviously were designed to be worn like glasses. “For your protection, put on these protective instruments.”

We both did so. Then there was a blinding flash of light. It probably lasted 10 seconds and when it was over, I asked, “Can we take off the goggles now?” I didn’t ask it aloud. I was curious if they could read our minds. We both sensed the answer, “Yes.” I asked the woman if she had heard or senses what I had asked. She said she had not. So telepathic communication worked just in one direction. I said aloud, “You can take off your goggles.”

When we did so, we each saw that every strand of hair had been removed from both of our bodies. We were both bald and there wasn’t any hair on our bodies. She instinctively reached “down there” to cover up what had been partially hidden by pubic hair. “Eek, I’m completely naked.”

“Lady, you’ve been completely naked. Now you have no hair.”

She started crying, “I don’t like this. I feel so, so, violated.”

“Do you have a name? I don’t feel right in just calling you ‘Lady’.”

“That will do just fine. I don’t want us to establish any more familiarity than we have to.”

I laughed aloud. “What’s so funny?”

“Lady, we’re both completely naked, we’re both bald, we don’t have ANY cover, if you know what I mean. And you’re worried that if I call you by your name that will be a sign of too much familiarity? Well, my name is Steven, if you care to call me that.”

Lady and I talked; but we really didn’t have too much in common, other than this experience. I didn’t care about the Kardashians. I’m even ashamed to admit I know who they are. Lady had no knowledge and certainly no interest in differential calculus, a course I had been teaching as a college professor.

Lady wondered about food, but we both admitted that we were not hungry. We had no sense of time. There were no clocks. We could not see out the room, but I’m not sure what we would see even if there were a window of some sort. After what seem like perhaps 3 hours, the platform emerged again from the floor. There were two pills on it, one was pastel blue and one was pink. I wondered if our abductors had a sense of humor and intended them in a way that seemed obvious. Or had they just picked up the color scheme from other observations of humans and made the color association.

The telepathic voice urged us to swallow the pills, no it compelled us to swallow them. Much like Alice in Wonderland, I think we both feared the effect they would have. The color scheme compelled me to wondered it they may have something to do with sexual performance, either urging actions in that direction or affecting performance if we decided on our own to engage in such activity. I, and Lady, were both relieved when the telepathic voice told us to consume the pills as it was necessary to provide our nourishment.

Strangely, my pill had a satiating effect. I asked Lady and she assured me hers had the same effect. Now that one elementary bodily function was satisfied, I wondered, but only to myself, about other functions, such as sleep and waste elimination. The voice in my head assured me that elimination was not necessary as the pills made that function unnecessary. I asked Lady if she heard that, “Heard what?”

Good, I could communicate with our captors without being bothered about my concerns being shared with Lady.

After another while, I guessed it might have been about 4 hours, we were subjected to examinations by our captors. The probing was done by instruments which were inserted in all our cavities, I mean all of them. We could not resist this examination as our bodies were immobilized and we were involuntarily telekinetically manipulated to provide easy access to our cavities.

The probing probably lasted only 10 minutes. They had completely broken Lady’s will. “Steven, I’ve been violated.” I tried to reassure her that it wasn’t that different than a dental exam or an endoscopy or in her case a gynecological examination. Apparently, I was being too rational and clinical, and it only upset her more. For about an hour, she sat on the floor sobbing at what she had been subjected to. I thought of going over to her and consoling her by hugging her, but I thought it was much too risky in the mental condition she was in.

We fell into a routine with our captors. Pills were served up at what I guessed were 8-hour intervals in earth time. At 24-hour intervals we were depilated. We were assured that it was necessary because the light/heat killed bacteria on our bodies and destroyed habitats where they could thrive. Lady was slowly becoming acclimated to her nudity and her baldness. She no longer tried, as futile as it would have been, to cover her private parts.

Out captors conducted interviews with us. It was strange; my interviews were conducted by telepathy. Lady received her questions by telepathy, at least I never heard any communication. But she “elected” to answer the questions aloud. I could be snide and suggest that she didn’t have the mental ability to master the minimal talent requited to communicate by telepathy. But I won’t be cruel. The questions centered around our dietary habits, our exercising, our taking care of bodily functions, and our sexual activity. I could only “hear” one side of the conversations with Lady, when she answered aloud. Apparently, they could channel their telepathic messages narrowly. So, I received my questions telepathically and I delivered the answers the same way. Lady received her questions by telepathy, but she answered aloud so I could hear her answers. I could tell from the questions that they had asked me, and from the answers that Lady had provided that she had a very active and diverse sex life.

We discussed the interviews. I asked her if she was bothered that I could hear her answers but that presumably she could not “hear” mine. She looked up at me with sad eyes, “Steven, as much as I am bothered by those aliens knowing all about my most intimate bodily activity, it doesn’t bother me what you are learning about me. And, I, uh, no matter how hard I resisted at first, I simply could not resist revealing those details.” She started to cry again. We had had no physical contact, but I felt it would not be inappropriate for me to hug her to console her. Her reaction told me she appreciated my gesture.

About the fourth day of our captivity, the strangest thing started to happen. Lady asked me what I thought the aliens looked like. I assured her I had no clue. The room we were in was a bit cramped, but not uncomfortably so. I think we can infer from that that they are probably somewhat smaller in stature than us. I felt compelled to draw her a mental picture, “kind of like the extraterrestrials in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” She told me she knew the reference.

“You mean the diminutive grey entities.” I thought that was a rather sophisticated phrase for her to use. Then she continued, “So a small less massive frame would suggest that their native planet has a larger gravitational force than earth. More massive gravitational force would have dictated natural selection favoring smaller body types.”

“What if they were from Mercury?”

“Don’t be silly. Mercury would never be able to sustain the kind of intelligent life they manifest. They would have to be from a Goldilocks planet from outside our solar system.”

“Goldilocks?”

“Yes, not too cold, not too hot, but just right so that water could be found in abundance to foster and sustain life.” So here in the space of 5 minutes she demonstrated a quantum leap in intelligence so that she could do abstract thinking about gravitation forces, anatomy, evolution, astronomy and probably biochemistry.

I felt as if I had suddenly been relegated to the remedial class. Was the telepathic communication, or perhaps the pink pills, or the invasive probing causing her to increase her intelligence?

Finally, after what must have been three weeks, we were informed that our observation period was over and that we were being returned home. Was it my imagination or did Lady appear to be a little sad? Was it the Stockholm syndrome so that she was becoming attached to our captors? Before I could allow myself to think of an alternative explanation, Lady answered my unspoken question for me.

“Steven, I don’t want to lose you. How can we get together on earth?”

We couldn’t exchange addresses or phone numbers; we had no way to write that information down. Neither of us had a device where we could store that information. “Tell me your email address.” She did. I was hating myself for being clever and having an email address of LaGrange@ and my university’s email domain. She smiled, “Ah, your tribute to one of the early contributions to the calculus of variations. I like that. I’ll never forget it.”

Just how smart was she now?

Five minutes later, I was back in my apartment. There was no alien vehicle, no Lady. I was still bald and naked, but I could remedy the nudity quickly. I immediately fired off an email to her.

I decided not to disclose my adventure to anyone for fear I would be viewed as a raving lunatic. I want to class the next day wondering how I would explain my three-week absence. When I walked into class, it was as if no time has passed. The students were awaiting the examination I had told them I would give “the next day” three weeks ago. This led me to start questing my sanity. Had I hallucinated this? Was it real? I was bald, but had I simply subconsciously shaved my hair off as a part of my hallucination to make it more plausible?

I checked my email three, four times a day. Nothing from Lady. I sent another email but again no response. I was beginning to doubt my own sanity Was there even a Lady outside of my imagination? After a while, I checked my email less and less frequently.  

Then one night three weeks later, around 10:00, there was a knock on my door. I was puzzled who could be visiting me at this time of night. I opened the door and was surprised to see Lady. She was, of course, clothed, but her head was freshly shaved.

I must have looked astonished, but she said, “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

I joked, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.”

“We can fix that.” She then proceeded to present herself exactly as I had remembered her previously.

“How did you know where I lived? We really didn’t exchange email and I never told you my address.”

“I read your mind. Steven, I know what you’re thinking.” Was that a figure of speech or had she truly established a telepathic bond with me. “I know that you want to marry me.”

Although I wasn’t thinking it at this precise moment, I had to admit that the thought had crossed my mind, not just during our abduction, but also after our return.

She answered her own question without my uttering it. “The answer is yes.” She kissed me passionately, the only physical contact I had ever had with her except for a consoling hug. I kissed her on her bald head.  

For someone who had protested vehemently when I first saw her naked, she quickly adopted that state of clothing. In fact, we honeymooned in St. Tropez where that state of dress is more accepted than in the United States. Seeing her frolic in the nude on the beach was somehow more exciting than my observing her naked in the antiseptic environment of our captivity. While she would usually put on her bikini bottom, more properly, a thong, she would usually wear only that when we would dine in an outdoor café on the Riviera. And, oh yes, she adopted the bald look permanently.

We now have two children. Adam was our first born; and two years later Eve was born. Yes, I do know her name, but we just prefer to refer to her by that first appellation I learned to associate with her.  She is always Lady to me. And, oh yes, when she got her Ph. D in Astrophysics, I did start referring to her as Doctor Lady.