Alien Pregnant by Elvis, page 4
ELVIS AFTER PLASTIC SURGERY
ROCKS TILL DAWN IN PARIS
Elvis, after the concert, meets the 103-year-old mother of newborn twins at the back of the bistro. She is one of his biggest fans, has followed him across the Continent, sent him messages of love and pleading, sent him photographs of the twins who, she says, are the products of a mad coupling with a descendant of Seurat on the left bank. Who could imagine that such consequence would come from the tumble of a 101-year-old woman? The realization of her pregnancy had been maddening. Nonetheless she had elected to carry the twins to term and, filled with francs and ancient mother’s milk has followed Elvis in his disguise from Berlin to Munich, Lyons to this back bar of Paris. She loves him devotedly and wishes nothing more than to meet him at last and obtain his signature upon her palm. Her name is Lily and her next oldest child, Georges the grocer, is 82 and will soon be dead of heart disease, she has written him. Crazy things like this seem to happen to Elvis ever more frequently as he tries to get his career going incognito in the bistros and back saloons of a Paris he had seen only once on a 48-hour pass when he was quartered in Germany as a Private E-2.
Guitar still clasped in his hand, he meets Lily in the small backstage area they have given him. He is Renard, the American rocker, or at least that is his billing and no one except Lily herself seems to have marked him for his true identity. Standing there in a deep hunch, surely the oldest woman Elvis has ever seen, Lily seems suffused with joy and then tenderness as she reaches out to him, beckons him to give her a kiss. He does so with the utmost revulsion and delicacy, hearing her little bird’s breath in his left ear. “I leave the babies with Georges,” she says to him in labored English. “They are too young, les bebes, to be in such a place. Oh, you are so handsome. You are even more handsome here than you were way apart in the room. It is a thrill. A thrill to touch you.”
“Well, yes,” Elvis says. What else is there to say? The original idea had been simply to go away, go underground, get away from the drugs and the guards and the press (to say nothing of the family troubles), and it had made much sense at the time. But after a dozen years the restlessness had set in; the plastic surgery had been too effective. No one recognized him at all and he missed the music, if only a little. So he had taken a stab at restarting his career, not for the money really or for the attention but just to see if it could be done. And now, after five years of singing Blue Skies and Prisoner of Love in some of the dumbest, shittiest places he had ever seen outside of an army barracks, he seemed to have found only one sincere fan, the 103-year-old mother of infants and even she did not know who he really was, merely thought he was an Americaine with nice features. The encounter, some dim paradigm for what Elvis had always felt was his truest fate, to be clutched in a back room by a circumstance so horrible that it could barely be defined, let alone understood, fills him with a despair which goes beyond even the revulsion he had expected. “You must pardon me,” he says, “I must prepare for the next show. I must go on the stage soon for yet another calling.” He disengages from Lily, trying not to be too abrupt because if he brings her sprawling to the ground, what will happen? What can happen to him? “RENARD THE FOX KILLS CENTENARIAN IN CAFE.” He would be booked, fingerprinted, seen under ultraviolet. The whole story would come out. Oh, it is sickening, sickening! Elvis, disengaged at last, turns from Lily, moves with desperate and clumsy haste toward that open spot in the wall marking the demarcation of the stage. He will go out there even now, unprepared and to empty seats, he will sing anything, say anything to be out of this. Behind he may leave her cries of love, he does not know, this is nothing with which he dares contend at this time.
MARILYN AND ELVIS WERE
SECRET LOVERS IN HOLLYWOOD LOVE NEST
“Oh, Norma Jean,” she imagines him saying. “Norma Jean, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, oh what might have been, with me and Norma Jean,” his heavy crooner’s voice thickened with rhyme and love in the late afternoon. She had played with the thought of meeting him for years, ever since he had come to make GI Blues in 1960 and had rented in the Canyon only a few miles from where she lived, but she had not done it. She was still stunned from the divorce at that time, and there had been men, other men, men without music or poetry in their voices, clamoring over her, making small and insistent demands which, in her way, she did her best to meet. But there had always been the thought of Elvis, just Elvis and Norma Jean locked together in long, shuddering afternoons of love after The Prince And The Showgirl or Viva Las Vegas and she had dreamed of his voice curling into her ear; at last she had asked Margaret to get the number and place the call, tell him that she wanted to speak with him. Margaret had tried and tried; she was loyal in that way. Marilyn had used other studio contacts as well, but somehow the connection had never been made, there was always one reason or another why he could not be reached and then at last the real troubles had come over her, and so much for her dream of languid afternoons. He might have saved her. He might have made all the difference. But there was no way now that she could ever tell him so.
“Oh, Elvis,” she dreams of saying as the Saturday night opera begins again, the blood coursing truly, frantically through her, carrying its own little messages of betrayal and transcendence. “Oh Elvis, Elvis, love me tender, love me true, tell me now the way you always do,” and it is so palpable at this moment that she can almost feel his touch. Or indeed that is his splendid and desperate body covering hers now and carrying her down, carrying her down and away to the ultimate Saturday night fuck on this dawn of her aborning.
“IT WAS THE DUKE OF WINDSOR!” SAYS
103-YEAR-OLD MOTHER OF INFANT TWINS
Lily knows that she would have said, would have done anything for him. Would have lied for him, would have died for him, would have placed her heart in the grasp of Elvis forever if it had been necessary. If there were a true way of proving her love and sacrifice, she would have said that the father of the twins was the Duke of Windsor, now doddering, probably homosexual, but still a believable if seedy crowned head who might have found a 101-year-old bedmate more of a sport than he could ever admit. Oh, those decadent English. But of course she could not die for him, could not lie for him; Elvis was gone. He had at last received her in his dressing room, cast his eyes over her, found her not pleasing to his sight, and had deserted. She had known in that moment of their embrace that she had horrified him, that her very touch was noxious and yet how could she have done otherwise? How could she have disengaged? He was her Prince of Song, the Renard of all of her necessity and she would have held him until the end until at last his hands had become desperate and she had been pushed from him. Now, standing in the dark, hunched in the dank alley outside the bistro, Lily hears his voice carry true into the night and hears the slow and abominable skittering of her ruined old heart. Les bebes. She must return to her helpless infants and yet, really, how can she leave? How can she leave this tender and terrible juxtaposition of her and her beloved Elvis, plastic-surgerized and masquerading as Renard? Her blood and brain function only thickly, only slowly, but they hammer out desperate and fixed truths. She cannot leave him.
And so Lily stands in the alley, listening to his voice cast on the night, dreaming in her old brain of Elvis and of the postures she might have assumed, feeling herself sway pendulously over the Parisian stones, knowing that she is at last now in the final months of her life and yet transfixed. She should return to les bebes but she cannot. She should shout for help but she cannot. She should stagger through the dust of the air and lurch onto the stage and grasp him, beg for his succor, but she cannot. Everything that she should have done lies behind her and there are only those last, intolerable moments in the dark to pace. The Duke of Windsor could not have done less for her nor treated her more rudely than her beloved Elvis.
But she does not love the Duke of Windsor nor he her.
JFK SENDS WARNING FROM MOON
“I WILL RETURN AND I WILL AVENGE!”
Grasping the edge of the crater, shuddering against the thin wall, the President feels that he can see for the first time the dimensions of the sin lodged against him, a sin more grievous and cunning than any of his liturgy can contain and breathing in the dust and silt which the windless Moon has laid in small deposits around him, he thinks that this, too, is ephemera, it is an aspect of the Trinity, of the Holy Ghost; against these walls of the Empyrian the spirit shall not contest in vain. He understands then or thinks he understands that reconstruction of another kind awaits him; that no less than the actress or the singer, a kind of transmogrification awaits him. Within his heart he feels a yearning so great that it cannot be codified and the President knows then with the fuming and resilient thunder of that heart that he will come back, that he will return in ways which cannot be judged. It is joy that he feels then in those leveling bursts and on the solitary landscape of the Moon, staring at the affixed and demanding Earth he knows that his time will come, his time will come again. Asking, asking, asking yet.
ELVIS AND JFK:
“WE’RE COMING BACK AND WE’RE GOING TO ROCK!”
In the hard cradle, awaiting the return of the Mom who, departed, will not return again, les bebes wail stiffly against the dense Continental night. The teenage nursemaid hired for a pittance for the evening while the crazy old woman living with them had hobbled into the night sullenly takes two bottles from the warmer and sticks them in les bebes’ mouths. Greedily they suck and with a hint of knowledge. The nursemaid stares at them idly and yawns.
Marilyn, Elvis, and
the Reality Blues
by James Brunet
In his own words: “Prior to perpetrating this story, Jim Brunet has been guilty of work appearing in Analog, Pulphouse, and Dragon, among other places. He claims to have never sighted Elvis (even when Elvis was alive the first time) and was born in a town named Salinas, which some pronounce ‘Silliness’.”
One hopes that wherever he lives now, he has neighbors as interesting as these.
Henry Kizmik turned off the coffeepot and then sat down at the breakfast table of the one-room apartment he rented just off Melrose Avenue.
The Los Angeles Times carried the headline: “SURVIVORS FROM ATLANTIS CONTROL STOCK MARKET”
Henry sighed, which was not unusual, for he sighed a lot. Idiotic. No evidence that an advanced Atlantean civilization had ever existed on the much-charted depths of the ocean floor, yet it was perfectly reasonable, at least to the mainstream press, that they were causing havoc in modem times after having remained secret for thousands of years. The only thing stupider was that having remained secret, they’d be playing the stock market and would get caught. He read the first few paragraphs; as usual, bunches of unsupported assertions, nothing that could be disproved easily on the face of it, but nothing that made any rational sense either.
Henry sighed again as he scanned the article, then turned to the comics, where the babies were still outwitting their parents, wives still outwitting their husbands, and then read the advice columns which today covered visiting mothers-in-law, teens outwitting their parents, and parents outwitting each other. Then he turned to the sports page. Chicago Cubs 14, Los Angeles Dodgers 2, he read. At least something was right with the world.
Showered and dressed, with the breakfast dishes cleared away and the beds made, Henry sat down at his word processor to continue his article entitled “The Case for Logic.” Just where it would be published hadn’t been determined yet. In fact, the editorial responses to his queries had been pretty lukewarm, one suggesting that “. . . it was a rather fringy kind of piece.” No matter, thought Henry, as he started to write. Finish it first, then worry about, where to sell it. The only way to make a living as a writer was to finish what you started.
He had been working for about an hour when a door squeaked as it opened across the hall. There was a knock at his door. Henry muttered to himself, looked at his computer screen, and called out, “Just a minute!”
When he opened the door, his neighbor stood waiting for him. A shock of platinum blonde hair swept across her forehead and she wore nothing but a red towel wrapped tightly around her body from chest to thigh, her face adorned by a smile that had once opened bank vaults and doors to high places. Actually, thought Henry, it probably still could, if people only knew that it was still around.
“Hi, Sugar,” she drawled.
“Hi, Marilyn,” said Henry, putting on his best face over irritation at being interrupted. “What’s up?”
“Well,” she said, “I was trying to whip up a little birthday cake for a dear, dear friend and I found myself a little short of ingredients. Could I borrow a cup of sugar, Sugar?” Her smile descended upon Henry like a wrestling move.
“Uh, sure, Marilyn. Just a second.”
When he pressed the cup into her hands, she blew him a kiss. “Thanks, honey. Maybe I’ll come by sometime and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ for you.”
“Uh-huh.” Henry’s eyes followed her as she turned away, the red towel stretching with every movement, until the door to her apartment closed with a click.
Henry exhaled softly. Even in her sixties, she looked better to him than a lot of women in their twenties. But the central mystery overrode everything else. Why no one else recognized his neighbor, he couldn’t imagine. It was remarkable—unbelievable, really—that the secret had lasted all these years.
He had known who she was as soon as she moved in, notwithstanding her wearing a dark wig that disguised nothing. Every week he’d expected hordes of reporters in the hallway. Now he guessed it was less likely, especially since the Secret Service detail had stopped cluttering up the building when her lover the ex-President dropped by, the one who’d supposedly been assassinated himself. Henry sighed again and shut his door to the accompaniment of clarinet notes sliding up and down the hallway. Mr. Konigsberg in 3-H again, thought Henry as he turned back to his desk.
Henry typed at the keyboard: As Galileo wrote, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. ” Whether these qualities are bestowed by God or not is for the moment irrelevant; if they exist—and however infrequently used to good effect, we must concede they do exist—how, then, are we to apply them in processing our observations of the everyday world?
Henry’s train of thought was abruptly derailed by an eruption of guitar chords and loud, exuberant singing from overhead.
Henry looked up at the ceiling. “Yo! Elvis! How about a little less noise? There’s people what’s trying to work down here!”
The chords of the guitar faded away. “Yo! Hank, buddy. There’s people what gots to try to work up here, too!”
But the guitar stayed silent and, near as Henry could tell, his upstairs neighbor contented himself with singing as he washed his dishes. It was somewhat quieter than with the guitar. For a man in his sixties, Elvis was remarkable. Henry sighed and turned back to his computer.
At half past noon Henry stopped to regard his progress. Not bad—three more or less smooth pages—he thought as the lines scrolled by on the screen.
The contemporary reluctance to accept an ordered reality, with cause and effect contributing to a coherent vision—
A key slid into the lock and turned and the door to the hallway opened. “Hi, Henry, honey. Brought some lunch.”
“Hi, Tiff. Be with you in just a sec.” He leaned over his keyboard to type another line.
Keys, purse, a carton of takeout and a small bottle of wine in one hand, two cartons of takeout in the other, Tiffany leaned back against the door and kicked it shut with her foot.
“I got Chinese,” she said as her heels clicked across the hardwood floor and she set the food down on the kitchen counter.
“Smells good,” he said, and leaned up for a kiss, brushing aside her frosted blonde bangs. “Mmmm. You, too. How goes the day of the wandering reporter?” he asked, glancing back at the computer screen as Tiffany kicked off her shoes.
“Oh, I interviewed one of those professors at USC who’s studying that lost Roman colony they found living in the depths of the Brazilian rain forest,” said Tiffany as she unbuttoned her blouse.
‘They’ve gone crazy with joy as they find out how Latin was actually spoken. Of course,” she said as she unbuckled her belt, unsnapped, unzipped, and stepped out of her shorts, “the Romans are a little bit shaken to find the sounds they thought were from Apollo’s chariot are really jet airplanes.”
“It sounds damned improbable. All the way around,” said Henry with a frown. “It doesn’t make sense that they could live in the Amazon for more than two millennia and have never run into an explorer or that some natives hadn’t encountered them and carried tales to the outside world.”
Henry turned to Tiffany, who had draped her panty hose over a chair and was sliding the straps of her bra down each shoulder. “I mean, does it make sense to you?” he said.
“Oh, my poor little dear,” she murmured as she unhooked the bra and let her breasts wiggle free. “I haven’t seen you this upset since they thawed that Arctic explorer—what was his name, Hammerschmidt?—out from the ice a couple of months ago.”
