7-17-21

Sweet Blindness

A thirty something guy walked into the bookstore and picked up a book that looked interesting. A photo of himself he didn’t recognize fell out. On the back was this: "I am stranded. I am being hounded by searchers. I know things that will soon affect this city, this entire planet! I am standing right behind you.

Do not turn around!"

He froze, looked around at the few customers and had an urge to get out of there fast. He read the next sentence.

"On page twenty-five there is a note in the margin with directions to a park near here. Meet me there in ten minutes. Please."

He found him at the park, in a heavy black overcoat, strange since it was a mild autumn afternoon. Children were screeching at a nearby carousel.

"You have come, good!"

"I almost didn't."

"You have read War of the Worlds?"

"Seen the movie."

"Welles, he was one of us...but he did not know it."

"You could very well be a delusional street person."

“Negative, but your gravity doesn’t really agree with me.” He turned a whiter shade of pale and shivered.

He pointed at a bench. "Come, let us sit. You may call me Morph."

“I'm Riley and very skeptical Mr. Morph."

"It's rather complicated but I will say-"

Morph vanished before his eyes. Riley leaped up and frantically scanned the park. His heart pounded.

He broke out into a sweat and found a water fountain to splash his face with cold water.

"Must be the gravity.”

That night Riley ran into Morph...in a dream. He was sitting in an old world cafe, when Morph walked up with an espresso. Riley stared while the cafe went in and out of focus. Morph sat down.

“I was worried you were upset by my disappearing act. “

“That would be accurate.”

“It was actually their doing.”

“Whose?”

Never mind. They can’t reach us in your dream state. Rather like a safe space.”

“Then how did you get in here?”

“I tapped into your unconscious.”

Riley blushed three shades of red. “You mean you can read my innermost thoughts?”

“Yes.”

“And desires?”

“Affirmative,”

Riley sweated profusely and whistled like a tea kettle. People fell silent and stared.

Morph put his palm, which was quite cool, on the poor guy’s forehead.

“You’re no doubt upset I have seen all those scantily dressed women and other sexual fantasies. They are mere curiosities to my ancient disembodied self. Entertaining but nothing more.”

Riley slumped in his chair. “Ohhhhh...”

The other patrons politely applauded.

The next morning Riley groggily went into the bathroom and studied his face in the mirror, touching his skin, looking for signs of dream trauma, but all was as it should be. He dressed quickly and went back to the bookstore. He looked everywhere for the book but it was not there. He found the park bench where they had met. He sat down, got up, sat down again.

“This is all real. This solid, the wood, the grass, the kids on the carousel.” He laid on the grass and stretched out, breathing in the scent of honeysuckle blooming nearby. “The good earth”. He caressed the grass and felt protective of his planet. “Spores...cyborgs...harnessing emotions. Where did those come from?” He sat up abruptly. “Maybe I should call the FBI!” Paranoia descended. “I wonder if he heard that.”

“Of course I did, old man. I’m right behind you.”

Riley flew up like a startled cat. A strange woman stood a little behind Morph. She wore a slinky black sleeveless number, and a shiny black locket. He took her hand and gently brought her up beside him. “May I introduce Fria.” She cautiously extended her pale arm and whispered, “Tra la la.”

Riley was immediately mystified...make that smitten. She looked very much like the girl he had a crush on back in the fifth grade. “Tra la- I mean, hello.”

Fria is my Radar Girl. She sees trouble coming better than I.”

While Riley gazed at the pleasant aspect of Fria, the park vanished. He was standing in front of a jukebox playing “I can’t get started.”

Fria stood opposite, swaying to the music, rather provocatively.

“Riley, where are you?” called the disembodied voice of Morph “Fria played a trick on you. Concentrate on your bedroom.”

Instead he concentrated on Fria’s lithe figure. She pulled him against her and gave Riley the orgasm of his life.

He found himself staring at his ceiling fan slowly turning. Riley wondered if he might be slowly losing his mind, and none of what had occurred was true. And yet, the sexual exhilaration was quite real. “She makes me feel light as a feather,” he chuckled, then dressed and walked aimlessly through the neighborhood.

He walked into a bar he had never seen. He hated bars, the smoke and the noise, but this one was quiet, cool and dark. Morph waved from a booth and Riley slowly shuffled over.

Riley put his elbows on the table and leaned closer.

“Dream, right?”

“No, this one is real, actually.”

Riley sighed.

“Now pay attention, Riley. We exist in a nonphysical dimension, but created a physical planet for experimental purposes. Not nearly as interesting as yours. Morals for example... astounding concept!”

“And you’re going to borrow ours? Good luck with that.”

“Be wary of Fria.”

“I thought she was your Radar Girl.”

Morph looked around, then whispered. “She only appeared the day you met her.”

All of this occurred over the weekend and sometime on Sunday evening Riley remembered he was employed at Buffalo Bill University’s media library. Next morning he was switching the lights on in the viewing rooms when he nearly fainted at the sight of a ghost sitting in front of a monitor. Fria stood up and revealed herself.

“What the hell, Fria! Give me some warning...cough or something.” She raised her eyebrows.” He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. "Well, c’mon. You can’t hang out in here and freak out the students.”

She strolled blithely behind him, lit a cigarette and set off a smoke alarm.

Riley grabbed it and doused it in the water fountain. An angry security guard came sprinting upstairs,

“Who set that alarm off?”

“Uh, my friend here...she’s visiting from... Estonia...no smoke alarms there...right, Fria?

“Tralala.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Uh, that she regrets upsetting you.”

“Not quite, sweetheart”, hissed Fria. She lightly slapped the guard who promptly crumpled to the floor.

Riley’s mouth hung open. He confronted Fria. “What did you do to him?”

“Not much...just erased his memory. You people are so soft.”

Just then a campus cop came running up the stairs. “What was that alarm about?”

“Uh, my friend from...”

“What friend?”

Riley had enough. He wanted to hide from these crazy aliens, but of course he couldn’t, so he fell asleep to Elgar’s Enigma Variations until Morph showed up. Instead, he was staring at Fria in a spooky, candle lit cafe. Ominous creatures sat silent at a few tables and glared.

She gazed intensely into his eyes as if about to hypnotize.

“I was ejected from a pair of stars and then nurtured on a glass smooth plasma lake in complete darkness for an epoch of your time. My personality was rather long in coming and physically I’m still forming. Something raised me, though that’s not the word for it, but I learned how energy creates life...they dance. When I take a form I carry my secret in this, pointing at the locket, so it keeps me connected with my origin.”

“How does that figure into the right now?” Riley muttered impatiently.

“Your life on this planet is rich in, shall we say, colorful emotions we are not familiar with.”

“Like Morph’s envy of our morals?”

“Yes, crude as they might be, they are immensely powerful...something like your atomic power for instance, but your people seem to have never noticed that.” She stopped and stood up, agitated as Riley had never seen her. “These zombies are what I’m up against!” She hurled a burst of energy that obliterated all of them.

“Okay, okay...calm down You have to give me more details...why you picked me for instance?”

She leaned on the table with her hands, looking impossibly seductive, a glassy eyed femme fatale straight out of a film noir flick.

“My dear Riley,” she hissed, “we are a predatory race, we crave your soft, moist hearts and minds. We want to grope your bodies and ravage your deepest desires. We can extract latent energy that you never knew you had and rule this part of the galaxy from your sweet mother earth! We have been keeping track of your painfully plodding evolution for eons, waiting until we could wait no longer Your climate is going to Hell!”

She pause breathing heavily.

Riley was calm, but visibly upset. “I get the feeling that Morph is not on board with these ideas.”

“He is a fool, and a scared one, which makes him dangerous. He keeps ruining my day. Has no savoir faire.”

Fria, you remind me of my sister.”

That caught her off guard. “In what way?”

“You’re a spoiled brat.”

“What does that mean?” she asked, somewhat crestfallen.

“I’ll let you figure it out. I’m going to wake up and go back to sleep.”

The next morning he was driving toward his favorite place, his hideaway, the Ghost Mountains, sitting in the center of a faraway desert on the border. His heart gladdened as he slowly descended into the valley, parking at the trail head. It He hiked seven hours to reach the precipice and camped on a ledge of forested magma, from which he could see forever.

The sun was breaking up the sky in unearthly colors. Riley had a light dinner of a can of beans and a slice of pizza he had brought for the occasion, and now sat on his perch with a glass of Merlot.

Morph materialized in jeans and a flat brimmed cowboy hat. He gazed toward the Rio Grande. “Some view.”

“I was wondering when you’d arrive.”

“Fria is upset. You have her off balance, and that is unusual.”

“I’m thinking you better lay it all out, so I can make plans, not to mention the rest of the world.”

“She tends to exaggerate. There are various factions in this operation. As she implied, we are all running out time as your climate instability escalates and we become unable to gather what we need to sustain, and perhaps advance, our own society. There are two ways to go: aggressively, by manipulating human memory and rendering everyone docile and cooperative. This plan can be translated as, Sweet Blindness.”

“A mass lobotomy!”

“But it’s not necessarily...necessary... and yet, it seems inevitable. I don’t care for it a bit.”

Riley reached into his pack and handed Morph a gun.

“Then you may as well shoot me now.”

Morphs eyes widened. “I could never do that, Riley. There is time. This will encompass centuries. There are ways to resist, but it’s...complicated. I wish we hadn’t chosen your lovely blue planet. It really is a gem and there’s nothing like it for light years around. You people don't realize just how lucky you are...a stable star, exactly the right distance, just the right axis tilt to create your glorious four seasons, and most especially the staggering abundance of life forms. Thousand of planets have nothing to show for themselves except dull, monotonous weather and dim witted creatures that exist on slime. Why a rainbow, a snowstorm would astound them!

Don’t come back for awhile, Riley. There are others like me; I may even be able to win Fria over. She’s still young, and I get the feeling she admires you behind all the bluster. I think we can do better. Do nothing until you hear from me, compañero, as they say across the river.” He winked.

The sun disappeared, and so did Morph.