The Starry Sphinx Read online

  The Starry Sphinx

  V.X. Lloyd

  Copyright © 2019 V.X. Lloyd

  All rights reserved.

  For Deb

  Important Author’s Note

  Much controversy has stirred up around this well-loved story. Many have wondered whether, in addition to its entertainment value, The Starry Sphinx contains prophesies regarding the future. Some vision, perhaps, of the unseen forces that hold dominion over our world? What are we to make of our role in the cosmic drama that it depicts?

  Alas, I do not hold the keys to this tale’s many mysteries, because I am not its original author. I found this story in manuscript form under peculiar circumstances during an extended nature hike a few miles outside the small town of Why, Arizona. I was there accompanying a team of environmentalists as they searched for the grave of Ed Abbey on some rumors that his remains were buried there. As to whether they found what they were seeking, I am not permitted to tell.

  During an early morning bathroom break, I wandered off from our circle of tents and hammocks, and in a surprisingly deep arroyo I discovered the wreckage of a 1952 Ford convertible like no other. This old car had been modified to have long steel wings. Never before or since had I seen such a vehicle. I can not imagine how such a weighty device could be made to fly, but because the car boasted such wings, the vehicle had remained securely lodged in the arroyo despite the occasional rush of flood water that pushed all other matter downstream. Judging by the rust on its body panels, the car had been there for decades. I was overcome with curiosity, and I searched every nook and cranny of the old Ford. In the glove box, wrapped in a strange material, I discovered a manuscript entitled Stewardry of the Cosmic Sphinx. Once back at the camp, I began reading the manuscript, and I found it both puzzling and captivating. The text was dated in the early years just after the turn of the second millennium, yet by all rights appeared to be the same age as the old convertible. Much remains mysterious about this book.

  I offer it here to you, that you may behold its mysteries yourself. I have taken great care to preserve as much of the manuscript's original form, altering only for punctuation or to fill in missing words that had been lost due to the bleaching of the paper in the desert sun.

  As to the identity of the original author of this book, none can say. The text was typewritten, unsigned, and I found in the car no forms of identification. While my initial study of the manuscript led me to believe that the work may have been autobiographical, I do not wish to publicly assert that this is a work of nonfiction except in the widest possible sense. The reader is encouraged to draw her own conclusion as to whether the narrative contained herein is believable.

  More important to me than the work’s verity are the questions about consciousness that it raises. The story’s style is sparse, sporadic, and occasionally limpid. I believe it to be that of an undisciplined academic, indeed perhaps one in contact with alien consciousness.

  Many have asked me for proof of the Ford convertible, among them Gary Winslow, my former publicist. Gary even went so far as to arrange a trip to the desert, just he and I, to provide photographic evidence of the car/airplane. We spent a week combing the area, using metal detectors and drones. I recorded our experiences in a travelogue which may yet see publication. As for the Ford, we found no trace of it. No trace, even, of the deep arroyo where it had been lodged. After all these years, I can only conclude that the Ford has been earthed over by some of the more recent and uncharacteristic bouts of high rainfall that caused a great deal of flooding in that region. One wonders what other great finds remain hidden there.

  I offer this fascinating tale to you, reader, with the hope that it may bring you entertainment and enlightenment. Your patience with its peculiar storytelling style will be rewarded.

  VX Lloyd

  Buenos Aires, 2019

  --

  Table of Contents

  Important Author’s Note

  1. Many Meetings

  2. First Encounters

  3. Double Agents

  4. Search for the Sacred Cave

  5. The Spirit World

  6. The Awakened Return

  7. Very Long Epilogue

  1. Many Meetings

  DENVER, COLORADO. THE YEAR 2006.

  The weather on Earth these days was warmer than Moony had expected. But the clothing was every bit as awkward and constraining as he’d remembered from his visit here in years past. He struggled to remove his gloved hands from his fleece-lined coat pockets. It was a novel experience to be in a human body. Though its potential for physical sensation was frustratingly limited, he marveled at the elegant sense experience flowing through his nervous system.

  His girlfriend, Celia, was swinging herself along on his arm as they walked across the snowy parking lot. She was chatting on the phone with her other lover, Deb. Moony’s mind, performing a passive analysis of his audio input, registered a mild alert. Celia’s words flickered in his consciousness as he recognized a phrase which usually called for a response from him. She had said “I love you” into her cell phone. But she wasn’t speaking to him. She had another lover.

  According to Universal Standard Human Documentation, 21st Century Edition, having multiple lovers was generally regarded as problematic, or at least challenging, because of how humans burdened their relationships with expectations of undying fealty and completeness. Affection and time were believed to be finite resources. For Moony’s part, he knew better. He was an alien human. Though biologically identical to terrestrial humans, his true home was in a distant galaxy, and he was endowed with access to advanced documentation and a special form of telepathy that allowed him ready access to the thought-streams of those in his vicinity.

  The two of them made their way across the parking lot of Sod Hill, the obnoxiously golf-themed apartment complex where Moony lived. Sod Hill’s parking lot substituted artificial grass for asphalt, which was still adequately verdant despite a few years of tire wear. The apartments themselves were what most tenants recognized as “bare” and the apartment managers called “customizable.” A few renters took advantage of the blank facades to flaunt sports banners, since it raised their spirits during different playing seasons.

  Moony's own spirits were filled with a sense of foreboding and impending doom. Despite all the knowledge he had access to, all the hoards of Universal Standard Documentation that he could call into his mind on demand, he felt surrounded by an existential crisis. It wasn’t normal for him to have gone for so long without his supervisors giving him a mission, and that could only mean bad news somewhere along the chain of command. Something absolutely terrible might be upon him any second.

  He turned his attention to Celia, merged into her consciousness, and found comfort in doing so. She was thinking about her other lover, Deb Infield. Deb was co-manager of Sod Hill, whom Celia had met and subsequently made eyes with while lounging alone near the apartment complex’s golf club-shaped pool. The two women, one (Deb) much older than the other, had the sorts of things in common which set them into high echelons of archetypal attractiveness. They found each other endlessly mesmerizing and psychologically beautiful. To gaze at each other, they glimpsed something of their own depths. Each woman saw the effects of time and generation, how their tastes and affectations had influenced the secret and sumptuous core of femininity that each embodied for the other. The pairing afforded both women with an opportunity to striptease the boundaries of common relationships: mother, daughter, lover, competitor, confidant, seductress, protege.

  Moony linked his arm with hers, partly because he was in a romantic mood, partly because he wanted to soothe her incessant swinging. The joining of arms infected him, though, and her happy motion spurred him into silliness, and they began tr
otting to the bar like underworked horses put out to graze.

  Put simply, Celia was stoned. Scanning lightly into her cerebral activity, Moony cognized that she was imagining that the two of them were innocent civilians in World War II-era Germany. For her mind, the plastic backdrop of suburban Denver took on a menacing hue. The sky grew dark with a distant red imminence. She wanted to continue this fantasy. Squinting her eyes, she saw a myriad of swastikas and mustard gas. Fumes rose from the artificial turf to her nose in ferocious wisps. For comfort, she squeezed the bicep nearest to her hands, looking at Moony as her one-man army, soldier and lonesome hero. His bomber jacket was not just for looks -- she glanced down at his acid-washed and artificially-worn designer blue jeans -- he would need to get some new pants.

  “Oh, Bomber, I don't know if we’ll make it into France alive,” she said to Moony, squeezing his shoulder in goofy desperation. He looked at her without a clue, wondering if this was a hint that she needed something. Thanks to his ever-ready access to Universal Standard Human Documentation, he understood very well how to navigate the eddies and flows of mentation, though emotions remained mysterious to him. If he thoroughly known what she was up to, he would have played along and been happy to be with a girl who used him to entertain fantasies.

  She deftly maneuvered herself into a hug. Consistent with Moony’s habit of pulling his face into unconventional expressions without being aware of it, he rolled his lips toward his teeth and kept them pressed together as he brought his jaw down. A person standing at a distance might have seen in him a well-groomed Tom Waits. Celia’s face pressed into his shoulder, she tightly observed his leather jacket. She felt his male hand against the small of her back and exhaled. If she had been drinking, her fantasies would have bloomed into the need to remove clothing, to kiss and grope, but she had not been drinking. It was 11 AM on a surprisingly warm and cloudy winter day, and at this point in Celia's life, she had not yet found her way to an alcoholic beverage before noon.

  They trotted into the Frog Regal as Perry, the bar’s owner and co-manager of Sod Hill, dimmed the lights to a romantic level in preparation for the screening. The dimming was ineffective, due to the abundance of lumens flooding in through the bar’s floor-to-ceiling windows. A morass of plasma and big-screen rear projection televisions all showed the DVD menu of the classic King Kong. The proposal to screen movies in the bar owed its existence to Perry. The plan was to screen an old movie, hold a discussion break, and then show a remade version of the same film. This, he believed, would bring in a more diverse and artistic crowd to the bar, which lately had not been doing well at all. Twice a week were the Guaranteed No-Patron Days -- the bartender went to work when the bar opened, he turned on the lights to make it appear as if he was present, but actually he had gone back home. He would return when it was time for the next shift to begin, when usually the next bartender would do the same. Perry’s employees had shown him strong disagreement regarding the notion that screening movies this early in the day would be a good idea. Perry defended himself from this abuse by altering his self-image as pioneer of an idea. Any idea, once owned by a pioneer, could become something enduring and worthwhile.

  Moony’s scans of Perry had revealed to him that Perry was actually an alien human as well, though Perry’s ineffectiveness at life indicated that he wasn't availing himself of his alien abilities. Nearly all alien humans needed to have their abilities unlocked in some way, or else they simply lived a forgetful life, trying harder than most to simply blend in with the rest of society. Moony made a mental note to introduce him to The Gypsy at the nearest discreet opportunity.

  Deb, Perry’s ex-wife and Sod Hill’s other co-manager, did not have any business connections to the bar, yet there she was, wrangling with the cords behind the DVD player to get the audio to work with the bar's sound system, peacock-feather earrings tickling the delicate blue veins of her cleavage. Today was the third of January, which meant that she should have been preparing the list of tenants who had not yet paid their rent so that they could be telephoned and appropriately reprimanded, but having heard Perry go on about how he had pioneered the idea of early morning barroom screenings prepared her to think twice about spending another few hours on something she’d only repeat in a month. She decided instead that she would stop being the bad guy. It was a plus for her to see that Celia had arrived.

  *

  Waiting for the movie to begin, Moony’s body was restless, even though he had just done all the things which, according to the documentation about his personality, were supposed to make him happy. He’d had sex with Celia and afterward they had both played Double Dragon, a video game he believed centered his chi, provided he performed well at it. He was having a hard time adjusting to his move into Sod Hill, his first step toward independence on Earth after graduating from college back on his home planet.

  It wasn’t going well. The usual forgetfulness had struck him again. Some form of alien human amnesia always happened after he traveled back from his home planet, but this time it had left him in a real slump. He couldn’t for the life of him reconcile what had convinced him to move into this apartment complex. Was it part of some mission that he was no longer aware of, some post he had been appointed to? Or had this been a free decision he had made from his own gut?

  Nowhere in his documentation could he find any clues as to what his next move should be. Instead of the luxury he was used to, he had landed in a hotbed of overlapping dramas of sex, drugs, and mediocrity.

  Being an alien without a clear terrestrial mission could be problematic. If someone were to spot him as an alien, he would have no chain of command to call on for help. He was on his own, and he didn’t trust himself with his own self-awareness. His personal gravity and energy flow were so out of whack that, in his own words, they sucked. But he was becoming accomplished at the terrestrial human arts of relaxation, and so his present situation was not effective at disturbing him in a long-lasting way. He was a person who ate when he got hungry (lately, a lot) and slept when he got tired (ten hours a night on a luxuriously-padded mattress). He left all the other things to take care of themselves.

  As it will turn out, Moony will live healthily to the ripe old age of 91.

  Celia, who was more present for the sex than the video game playing, was not in the mood for complaining either – she had just narrowly escaped a troubling situation involving an old flame, Heath Johannson, the Swedish-American who manufactured designer drugs in the apartment across the hall from Moony’s. Heath had arrived for the screening early, not because he was punctual, but because he was really high and had trouble telling accurate time. You see, he was uncertain whether the minutes went forward or backward as they approached 10:30. He had some skill with a pencil and could draw a diagram to explain this phenomenon, but the resulting illustration would never be sufficient grounds to prove his theories on space-time to anyone but himself. Heath’s brain had trained itself to misfire synapses and cross-link neurons. At 10:03, Heath wrote this note and taped it on Moony’s door, apartment Q303:

  King Gong ! Knock Knock ! one one You are reading this note

  Heath rang the doorbell and retreated into his own apartment, which bubbled like a laboratory. He licked his lips, caked in a powdery substance which resembled baking soda except for its bitter taste. He looked out the peephole. Moony’s green wooden door remained closed. Heath felt footsteps tromping up the stairs. A hand rapped lightly on his door. He flung it open.

  Shadrack, a four foot seven alien human, entered Heath’s apartment.

  “I telecommed with Leelee today,” Shadrack beamed proudly as he entered, “and that lady can sure talk spacecraft. I asked her whether I should hook up the conversion kit to my Dual-Nine.” He winced and snorted as he screamed the words “conversion kit.”

  Moony, sporting six-pack abs and army-green boxer briefs, opened his door and nodded to Heath, who watched manically from across the hall. Moony’s physique was hard to beat, considering the amount of disc
ipline he put toward perfecting it, which was none. Such generosity on the part of his genetics was actually uncommon for alien humans, who more often than not had bodies full of subtle anomalies that set them apart from terrestrials.

  Come to think of it, it is quite possible that you yourself, dear reader, are an alien human. But let us continue with our narrative for now.

  Moony shook his head at Heath’s face (emphatic, yet stone-still) and returned to his apartment. Heath hopped to life and rang Moony’s doorbell, standing unacceptably close to the door. Moony answered. Heath motioned toward the note.

  “Somebody left this for you,” Heath said, and nibbled his dirty knuckles. His teeth looked very straight because they had all fallen out. He wore dentures.

  Though Moony was well aware that Heath was not a fellow alien, he had been getting some alarming signals from the Swede's cranial cavity that indicated major pan-galactic communication. How a non-alien could accomplish such things, Moony was suspicious. He hadn't yet been able to establish any reliable direct line of communication with Heath, so he couldn't be sure whether they were batting for the same team or not. Certainly Heath and Shadrack weren't putting as much effort into being discreet as Moony did, and that made him distrustful. Governments of Earth were not kind to alien humans who were exposed as such.

  Shadrack continued as if Heath were listening, “She said I just might be dumber than Heath when he put a Hydroniun mushroom slug in his own Corvette's tailpipe. Remember that?”

  Moony read the note aloud in a smoky monotone voice, “‘King Gong, Knock knock, one one, you are reading this note.’ Hmm.” His average eyes inquired at Heath, inches from his face; Heath’s body odor was extreme. He smelled so bad it was nearly audible. Moony turned down his olfactory sensors.