"PAUL"

by john soutter

It had been a few weeks since any of us'd seen Paul.  The summer was ending, but it seemed to be getting hotter every day.  Every day another sweat-streaked t-shirt, peeled off of my back, flung into the hamper.  

We hadn't heard from Paul's brother, either.  Was he back from Massachusetts?

Jack (a friend) said: "Shit, it's fucking baking in this car right now!"

But we kept moving.  By this time, Paul's head must be in a jar.

One day, the last day of July, I think, the temperature peaked at a hundred and eleven degrees.  A lot of old people died, and it was basically plastered all over the TV that it had become dangerously hot outside, and that we shouldn't go out there if we valued our lives.

So this is what it's come to.  I suppose we'll have to die out in lieu of a more heat-resistant human.

Homo flame-retardus.

Ha ha ha.

It was on the seventh day of August, twenty days before I was due to start college, that Paul came back from the hospital.  He was obviously strung out on psychiatric drugs, but he wasn't trying to control the weather or summon space aliens or anything so we assumed he was in a better state of mind.

We hoped.

We all waited for him at his house the day we found out he was coming back.  His mom invited us, and I don't think she would have done that if she wasn't happy with Paul's progress.

So when Paul stepped out of his mom's purple Jeep and onto the sneaker-melting surface of the pavement, we all applauded and cheered--met with a vacant stare and a lopsided smile--and then encouraged Paul to go inside, where the A/C was at.

He shambled in like a bum, embarrassed to be living.

When we sat down (in the much cooler room) I could see his eyes clearly.  They were half-shut, presumably from the sedating effect of the various drugs they put him on.  But the way he was looking--he wasn't looking at anything.  He was clearly preoccupied.

Travis said: "So, Paul, how are you feelin'?"

Paul said: "Fine."  A pause.  Then: "I bet I've done more drugs than all you guys."

An off-putting statement, yes, but childish and (it was intended to be) provocative--that's our Paul!  Of course, when came the inevitable, "Why?" and "What drugs?" Paul said:

"LSD, mushrooms, weed, DXM, Salvia, ecstasy, painkillers, Risperdal, Lithium, Abilify, Geodon, Seroquel, Thorazine, Zyprexa, aaaaand.... that's it."

We all laughed a bit, and I said, "Paul, I bet you I've still done more drugs than you," you know, just to chap his ass.

Paul said, "Well, you don't count, because you're an imbalance."

What?

But the moment passed and we ended up going out to play basketball.

* * *

It was in the sweltering heat that the sun first seemed to crack in half.  I had just bricked an easy shot and my whole team was groaning when the groaning of the sky overwhelmed them and the very sun itself expanded, split, and presumably achieved full mitosis in the sky--though by that time, we were already onboard the spaceship.

Let me back up.

The sun began to groan, and at first we thought it was the basketball hoop ready to fall down, until it got so much louder--and so much fucking hotter--that everyone knew it had to be coming from that fat old sun in the sky, and the air itself turned wavy and orange.  My skin was screaming sweat.

Paul stepped away from us, facing the expanding sun, and said, "This is it.  This is what I've been talking about!"  He spun around to face us.  "This is the end of the world, and now I'm gonna guide you guys!  I knew it!"

No response.  Paul turned back to the sun.

It was then he started to change.

First a black rectangle appeared in the sky.  It made no sound.  Then several joined it.  At first I thought the extreme heat was fucking up my eyes, but no, there were just a bunch of fucking black rectangles, chillin' longways in the air.

Paul's head was getting bigger, and it made a sound like a balloon rubbing against another balloon.  His hair began falling out, and collected itself around his feet.

His feet, meanwhile--lucky he was barefoot--seemed to splay out, like frog's feet.  This was accompanied by a sound not unlike a fruit being smashed.

His eyes, when he turned back to us again, took up at least half of his head, and made great loops up into his forehead to form large, almond shapes.  His pupils were the size of a child's palm, and he blinked from side to side.

"I told you guys I was from space!  Now do you believe me?"

Quite frankly, no, I didn't believe him.  I thought I was suffering some kind of heat stroke delirium.

That didn't stop the spaceship from landing, though.

The first black rectangle advanced--the sun meanwhile, was bright red by now--and the thing made its first noise: this shrieking metallic oscillation, WUM WUM WUM WUM WUM!!  Each throb had a certain tone to it, descending tones as it neared the ground.  It was almost musical, the tones were that well-defined.

The top of the rectangle slid open like a cigar box, and four pale blue/grey things that looked an awful lot like Paul--not just the weird extremities, but the facial structure, and the way of walking--they stepped out into our atmosphere and padded up to us on the basketball court.

They seemed to look intently into Paul's big, almond eyes for awhile, and my head began to ache.  I saw from Jack and Travis's expressions that they were hurting, too.

It abruptly stopped.

For me and Jack, anyway.

Travis fell screaming to the ground, rolling on the pavement--which was bubbling soon after he stood up, lucky thing he did--and clutched his head, his eyes squeezing out hot tears.  He began babbling, and blood started to trickle out of his nose.

Then it stopped suddenly for him, too.

Paul turned around:

"They purified you guys, so now you can get on the ship.  We have to go before the sun splits, and earth's gets sucked into the alternate orbit!"

Travis jumped up and beat us all into the spaceship.  He clambered down what seemed to be a set of stairs (it didn't look tall enough for that) and beat us all to the punch.  So much for fear and trepidation.

So we got in.

It was irrationally spacious.

Where we had seen black walls, from the inside, there were windows.  So we rose up again--WUM WUM WUM WUM WUM!!--and watched our lives bend, warp, and ultimately crackle in the explosive heat--our houses, our families, our belongings, our pets--dead or ruined, irrelevant anyway, and for some naughty reason, we'd all been saved.

To what end?

* * *

This is at least the hundred and fortieth time I've written this story.  I have nothing else to do.  It runs in my mind like a river off a mountain, impossible to contain, and impossible to change or to end.  It erodes me.  

I'd rather be dead!

Cruising through space gets boring after awhile, especially when your only three friends onboard are uncommunicative; Travis being near catatonic (he must have had some heavy "purification,") Jack being morose and unresponsive, and Paul, well, Paul being a fucking space alien and using telepathy all the time.

So sometimes I stand and I look through those big black walls and I see the big black opposite of walls.  And we just shoot through that shit, forever.  There is no home planet to come back to, we just cruise here.

What a life.