Aliens on Aventine Hill

Ghost Stories [Part 6]

Joseph stared down at the letter, yet unsent, and gritted his teeth. He could still see the look on Gray's face. The pang of guilt was so fierce it squeezed the air from his lungs. He folded the letter in half and then in half again, pressing sharp lines into the paper like those on Gray's body.

Joseph gnashed his teeth as he imagined them—the hundreds of tiny white scars—and wondered if this morning there had been one more.

Once. They'd taken him once.

Joseph tossed the paper airplane and rubbed at the back of his neck, feeling the small, neat mark that ran the length of his spine. It was faded now, nearly imperceptible beneath his fingertips. No one had ever noticed it, much less asked about it.

It would've been easy to pretend it had never happened—if not for what he had pulled out of his neck the next morning. Joseph had thought the years would dull the trauma as they had the scar, but as he thought over those 36 hours, gooseflesh prickled across his skin.

Prom Night. 1968.

He'd gone with his girlfriend, Lucille Barba. She'd worn pink chiffon and perfect raven coifs with baby's breath woven in. It was the prettiest Joseph had ever seen her; he remembered the guys all night punching him in the arm and waggling eyebrows. Well, aren't you a lucky guy?

Dinner and the dance had gone smoothly, sneaking sips of whiskey from Artie Giordano's silver flash and clinking champagne flutes at the afterparty in the cemetery. One by one, their friends had disappeared to do what all Prom couples did.

Then had come their turn.

Closing his eyes, Joseph could still see her face flush with embarrassment and then anger and then disgust—But we've kissed!—just as clearly as he could feel the blood burning in his own cheeks. Please, you can't tell anyone. It'll ruin me...

The desperation he had felt was paralyzing even now, but Lucy had been a good girl, willing to pretend for just a little longer. Still, she'd sent him walking home with his hands stuffed in his pockets and his shoulders shrugged.

Joseph had been kicking a pebble along the sidewalk when the lights had blinded him.

He had woken up hours later back in the cemetery, as if from a bad dream, and dragged himself home to his bed. He'd gone to undo his button-up, only to find it had been slit almost all down his back.

He'd gingerly explored the similar slit in the back of his neck, trying to get a good view of it in the bathroom mirror. The slice terminated in a small, hard lump over which the skin was stretched so tightly it split the moment he scratched at it.

Underneath had been a long, slender piece of flexible metal which Joseph had pinched between his fingertips and slowly dragged out from underneath his skin. He had studied the thin, feather-shaped object and its several long razor-sharp protrusions for all of two seconds before dropping it into the sink. Bits of bright red blood and greyish gore had splattered the white porcelain.

Joseph had spent the next forty minutes dizzy and waxen on the tile floor or hunched over the toilet bowl—and he had spent the afternoon pinging back and forth between sleep and trying to decipher what exactly had happened to him.

He'd woken up with blood on his pillowcase.

What's wrong with you, Joey? Enzo had cornered him with guilty frowns and pleading eyes. Food poisoning, Joseph had said. A week later, Vinny had sat him down with a cigarette and a stabilizing glass of liquor: Look, if you're in some kinda trouble... Lucky had woken him up from his night terrors, while Freddy and Gino had watched with wide, terrified eyes.

One by one he'd confided in each of them: "... I think I was abducted by aliens."

Enzo had heard him out, but Joseph knew he hadn't for a moment entertained the idea. Vinny had taken the liberty of looking at what psychiatry the university had to offer, while Lucky had laughed him off. Freddy had taken to telling his friends the story with Joseph as the butt of the joke. Only Gino had believed him; only Gino had been willing to look at the proof, sealed up in its little plastic baggy still covered with blood.

But none of his brothers had sat out on the porch with him, chain-smoking cigarettes while he flipped through the phone book searching for someone who could tell him what had happened to him.

School—and its lunch table politics—no longer held his attention. He traded beer-filled Fridays and cinema Saturdays for afternoons searching the library. Gradually his friends stopped calling. Bit by bit, the world had moved on without him.

There had been one constant in his life: a boy eating lunch in the corner of the library desperately trying to finish his chemistry homework or reading something by Bradbury, Dick or Heinlein. Joseph hadn't known him, rather of him and what had happened that April, but one day, against better judgement, he had gone over to this boy, cleared his throat and asked:

"Do you know anything about aliens?"

The nights that followed were the nights Joseph preferred to think about, the ones spent at Arnold's house. Gray and Arnold had hung on every word of his recounted experience; Arnold had examined the implant with the gravity Joseph had longed for, while Gray's face had shared Joseph's own horror.

He and Gray had spent the summer on Arnold's back porch, looking up at those unforgiving stars. Laughing. Talking. About the aliens. About Aventine. About the drowning and the police investigation. About renegotiating the truth. About D'Angelo's the restaurant and about the D'Angelo family and about how hard it was to balance four plates at once or remember orders. About new ice cream flavors at Milton's and 2001: Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes...

Gray had been different then. Shy, but sweet and witty and creative. He had loved sci-fi novels and Star Trek reruns despite his own brush with extraterrestrials. When he thought of Gray then, Joseph thought of that smile.

Then Gray had been abducted again.

And again.

With every little piece they'd carved out of him, Joseph thought, they had taken a little bit more of that Gray. When Freddy had started spilling family secrets, Gray had been nearly unrecognizable.

The paper airplane spiraled and then crashed into the carpet. Joseph picked up the paper and ironed it out on the desktop. He thought once about tucking it in his pocket before exchanging it for his car keys.

Creeping out into the living room, Joseph turned to say goodbye to his parents who were watching Marcus Welby, M.D.

Neither of them looked up as he approached. Joseph grimaced and kissed his mother on the cheek, turning his head so he wouldn't have to see her wipe it away a moment later.

"Don't wait up."