The Starry Sphinx Read online

  Shadrack wasn’t to be ignored. “Remember the mushroom slug?” A dot of mucus dripped from his nose onto the floor.

  Moony read the note again. He doubted that it held any additional layer of meaning, because he knew that Heath's brain was a junkyard of chemicals. He had the notion to probe Heath’s mind, but thought better of it. Any attempt to read someone’s mind carried the risk of alerting the person to the fact that he was telepathic. When the relationship between two people was not amicable, the person being scanned often experienced a subtle yet unpleasant tingling deep in the convolutions of their sinuses. Merely perusing his inter-cerebral copy of Universal Standard Human Documentation wouldn’t carry the same risks. Moony sent a quick request for insight to the broad-spanning database, and it issued the following response:

  Para-cognitive contextual analysis of terrestrial human Heath Johannson. Suffers from manic depression. Often enamored with labyrinthine numerology and wordplay. Has achieved level 42 in the synthesization of psychedelic substances, some of which bridge the pan-galactic communication divide.

  A known “person of interest” to the Gypsy and other ambassadors of dark arts.

  The last line left Moony brooding. The Gypsy had reintroduced him to his telepathy after his most recent bout of amnesia. He hadn’t found her likable, exactly, but this was the first mention he had seen about any dark arts being associated with her.

  Heath broke the silence, gesturing toward the note as if it were a bird about to fly away. “Go to the Frog Regal, ishh you want to sswatch the King’s Gone.” He blew a hard kiss to the note, and it flew from Moony's hand. Shadrack tugged on Heath's pant leg. He laughed. He sneezed, he laughed some more.

  Moony considered the note's proposition for a moment. It was a gathering of humans, and according to his Universal Horoscope, any human gathering carried a generally positive likelihood of meeting his next important contact, someone with whom he could maybe catch a ride with to some other, more interesting destination besides Earth. He looked at his wrist, where there was no Tag Heuer watch anymore. Perhaps Celia had borrowed it, he thought.

  Heath saw Celia in Moony’s apartment, lazily attempting some sort of yoga. She was not naked but had the tousled look about her which implied that she had been recently nude due to sexual circumstances. Celia had been regularly sleeping with Moony since two days after moving in, which was about three months ago. Heath had not slept with Celia for about two months. Despite his telepathy, Celia hadn’t given Moony any signs of her previous entanglement with Heath. Only Celia and God himself were aware of the overlap. But when Heath matched eyes with Celia in Moony’s apartment and deduced that she had been naked and/or tousled, he started to wonder. Celia recognized this as a troubling situation, though she judged the turn of events as fair, recalling that Moony had, months ago, accidentally backed his car into Heath's Corvette. Moony did not have insurance, and neither did Heath. It was a sticky situation for a few days, and then Heath forgot about it. Heath’s condition had taken a radical turn south in a remarkably short time. When Moony had moved in, the Swede greeting his neighbor with a handshake and a grin had the appearance of an upstanding citizen. But his psychedelic quests had gotten the better of him in a very short span of time, so one day, instead of knocking on Heath’s door, Celia chose Moony’s instead; beginnings can happen just like that.

  While Celia, amidst her yoga, pondered this, something Biblical happened. Flames erupted from inside Heath's apartment, possibly caused by a heavily-modified electric blanket in the bathtub which was near an overfilled and uncorked bottle of ether. The look of horror in Moony’s eyes was mistakable, considering it was a look he had constructed in imitation of Bruce Willis’ role as Officer John McClane in Die Hard. But the whoosh, coupled with the pupils of Moony’s eyes shrinking to pinpricks at the brightness of the flame, were enough to make Heath's brain forget that he had seen Celia in his apartment. He rushed to one of the six commercial-grade fire extinguishers in his living room and finished off the blaze like a professional.

  Moony took a few slow steps toward Heath’s apartment to feign assistance, but stopped when Celia called for him to come back and close the door. The brief discussion he had with Celia revealed that Heath was in fact a professional fireman who began taking various blends of designer drugs as a means to stay awake and ready for danger. She also took this chance to open up to Moony about her past relations with Heath, which Moony found immensely surprising, because of the basic formula he used for such things: Celia was immensely attractive, and Heath wasn’t. She told Moony that he would be jealous if he knew they were together. As it goes, this led to even briefer lovemaking. At 10:56, Moony and Celia were dressed and in the mood to see the original King Kong movie.

  *

  Moony sat in The Frog Regal waiting for the movie to begin, his skin pricked by the metallic reverberations of the room’s dull conversations and the awkward heating ducts. He was bored, and he felt like toying around with his telepathic sense. “Oh, home on the ranch. . .” he sang to himself, and nudged several of his internal calibration dials towards an experimental configuration, one that privileged the energetic currents flowing around his nonphysical heart center. Though historically his experiments with heart-centered flows had yielded little more than confusing waves of conflicting emotionality, he had a good feeling about trying again now.

  He flicked his inner dials into their new configuration.

  At once, he felt a surge of clarity within him. The colors in the room seemed more saturated. He felt his heart swell, and for a brief moment, he could sense many qualities about the current emotional state of each person in the room. This was far richer than the usual cerebral telepathic scans he had experienced. These were definitely emotions he was picking up. Emotions conveyed whole worlds of texture and flavor. And, fascinatingly, he found that each person had their own custom blend of emotional gravitation, a unique recipe of emotional states that they tended click into. Some people had a happier baseline, and everyone had in common that they rested their sense of contentment on a variety of factors, many of which seemed outside their control: whether they had a bank balance, if they were on good terms with their significant other, and these reached different peaks at different times of the day. Celia, he noted, led the charts for highest sum total of causeless joy, though right now she was feeling either apprehensive or anxious about something. Moony really enjoyed the sensation of tuning into Celia. He had felt something like this when making love with her, though never so purely. His heart swelled with satisfaction at being in her life. He sidled closer to her and nuzzled his upper arm against hers. They matched eyes and made a face. He could feel her emotional state shift into -- was that annoyance? Surely it couldn't be boredom. He looked down at his hands. Then, something in him fizzled, and he forgot how he had achieved that previous state. As suddenly as it had come, his ability to spread his empathic sense throughout the room faded. In fact, his sense of telepathy and supernatural sensory abilities had blinked away. Just like that, he found himself in the familiar terrestrial predicament of it being a struggle to even know his own emotions.

  Such a thing was bound to happen. He knew the risks of experimentation. But he trusted that after a few hours, it would all come back to him. At his age particularly, energy had a way of re-balancing. His telepathic sense would recover, and he would be back to normal, able to consult the Universal Standard Human Documentation like he always did whenever something confusing came up.

  His mind turned to ruminate about his younger brother Alex, who he realized must now be on his way to a death metal concert in Chicago because, as Alex had put it when they had spoken a week prior, he wanted to “elope into rebellious despair.” When they had spoken, Alex had mentioned that his desire to elope had come about after Yvette, their sister, had told him that she would commit suicide. When it turned out the attempt was successful, Moony had been the first to know, since, months before, when he had entered his number into her cell phone,
he had assigned the name Daddy-Pops. So, Daddy-Pops got called and Daddy-Pops broke the news to the rest of the family.

  Yvette, in seclusion on the other end of the phone, drove to a hill a few miles north of town. She responded to her brother in a clear voice, “Which do you think is better, being alive or dead?” The breeze at her elevation blew yellow pollen-filled debris onto her windshield.

  Moony’s first thought had been a desire to mention that, unlike terrestrial humans, alien humans didn't experience death as a profoundly disruptive experience. But as he and his terrestrial sister had never really been close, he had never been open with her about his alien abilities. “I might shoot for something in between life and death as my ideal.”

  “I’m not afraid of death, I don’t think.” Her car’s tires crunched over the gravel as she turned onto a familiar road.

  “That's cool, Sis. Being afraid at your moment of death makes it more challenging to navigate in the after-death space.” A long pause. “I should let you go.”

  “Yeah, you should let me go,” had been her last words to Moony. Within an hour, the average blue sky saw her spirit leave its body.

  When their mother had found out, she locked herself in the guest home and cried for the better part of two days. She decided there would be a cremation and absolutely no funeral service. She never questioned Alex as to where he was during her daughter’s suicide or wondered why Moony was the first to know. She preferred to live within her own bubble. It wasn't happiness, but at least it was familiar.

  As the terrestrial parent to an alien human, she'd had to artfully ignore all sorts of anomalous happenings. Her son came and went back to his home planet for years at a time, leaving her to explain his time away, because Moony himself never remembered much about where he had been. He just knew that when he got called, he had to go.

  *

  Deb cheered for herself after hearing the bark of audio which could only mean she wired the equipment correctly. At the sudden flash of the blue DVD menu, she became self-conscious of her excessive cheer. She thought of herself as appropriately inhibited. She spotted Moony and Celia.

  “You got the note!”

  She ran toward Moony, arms outstretched. Still seated, he gave her a one-handed hug, wondering why she had said that, since he hadn’t gotten a note from her – but then he remembered other times Heath had removed a message from Moony’s door only to replace it with one of his own. Out of principle, Moony tried to enjoy the feeling of Deb’s surgically-enhanced breasts against his head as she embraced him, but it didn’t elicit much feeling. He was not happy about this temporary loss of reception between Earth and his home planet. Without that bond, he was no different from any other human, and in many ways worse off, since he relied on this ongoing connection for answers to life’s ongoing quandaries. Deb was twice his age, and you might say that it showed in her face, but her body was, for obvious reasons, that of a boisterous twenty year-old. Celia smiled at their hug; what she saw looked endearing to her.

  But Perry, standing in the center of the room, smacking evenly on cinnamon chewing gum, knew enough about Deb to feel jealous. The two of them had gotten into the business deal as husband and wife seven years ago. Three years ago, Deb decided to divorce Perry and remarry her first husband, the man who Deb was cheating on (with Perry) since day one of their marriage, though she and Perry still saw each other on occasion, since they were so proximal. And now it looked possible that Deb was not being exclusive with Perry.

  Perry stretched his hands out and welcomed everyone for coming, then paused for a moment, realizing that he recognized every face he saw. Anyone who cared could detect his disappointment at giving a free movie screening to the same audience the bar had been supporting already. His heart was sick with years of unarticulated sadness. He gave a big smile anyway and said “Enjoy!” Moony believed this was good advice.

  Perry drew the blinds to darken the room. The Frog Regal’s plasma screens bounced light off the faces of the dozen tenants who had come here on Sunday morning to watch a free movie. Light refracted off the bar's emerald walls and floor, soaking into the black ceiling. Moony paid close attention to the screen to learn what he could from King Kong. He compared himself to the ape and approved the results. He felt both like a giant and an outcast.

  Though Moony’s parents had taken him off their payrolls, he still earned a living by visiting the ATM to withdraw a reasonable portion of the inheritance money which came from his great-grandfather, Thurmon Bloodgood Adams, who had the luck and keen eye to profit from Depression-era troubles. Moony shared all the good genes as his great-grandfather, and before moving into Sod Hill, had seen himself as having evolved to the point of realizing that if he did not need to work for money, he would not.

  But then, divorced as he was from his alien abilities, he landed on a strange idea. If only there might be some way of making some use of himself. Not just enjoy life, but do something for the greater good. Taken in earnest, as it was, it was an altogether foreign notion to him, yet this peculiar notion felt good. Clean. Fascinating. He wanted to make something of this impulse, even if it meant risking his own hide.

  Grinning inwardly, he realized he hadn't been paying much attention to the movie. A fair amount of time had passed without much of a sense for what had been happening in the world outside himself. A strange glow came over his senses. Trying anew, he found it difficult to concentrate on the movie. Despite how solidly well-rested he was, he found himself growing both drowsy and elated, and before he knew it, right there in the uncomfortable metal chair, he let himself pass into a sort of sleep.

  He woke to a very, very different scene.

  He was alone in a large, domed room, the walls of which coruscated with geometric patterns and many broad washes of color. He felt a sense of peace and wonder, and it seemed that he was floating. As he scanned the room, the quality of light gradually changed. It grew brighter and brighter. Before him stood a radiant, brilliantly gold presence. The presence would have scared the bejeezus out of him except for how it felt so incredibly familiar.

  Without using words, yet without his familiar sense of telepathy, the presence greeted him and welcomed him to what it said was a House of the Celestial Steward.

  “And I,” said the presence, “am the Sphinx.”

  The Sphinx was, as far as Moony could tell, somewhere between two and 120 feet tall with immense golden wings. Though he had the clear sense that the presence was female, specific features about her head, torso and limbs were hard for him to make out. She filled the huge room with an aura of peace and power and spoke to him with a perfection that could never be reached using words.

  “I greet you on behalf of the truth within you. I have received your intention to be a force for good and a vessel of truth.”

  The Sphinx's presence filled him with a bliss that towered over any such feeling he had ever experienced. It was pure magic, a peace that spread him into the vastness of space. At the core of that bliss, he sensed a familiarity that lit up the center of his being. This flavor of brilliance was not an isolated incident happening only now -- the Sphinx carried an understanding that she was behind so much of what had seemed like beautiful circumstances. In the best moments of his life, when he had been most awake, most clear, most full of causeless joy, the Sphinx had been with him.

  They had been separated by some mysterious circumstance, and now of all times, they were reunited. Somewhere in the vaguest distance, Moony knew that his physical body was seated in a metal chair watching King Kong. And yet, that part of him now seemed faint and insignificant. He drank deeply from the richness of the Sphinx which surrounded him. Hers was a sun-bright brilliance that conveyed many mysteries. Her aura flooded his mind with intricate patterns and puzzles. The movements of eternity traced all forms of consciousness through mazes which the Sphinx knew how to navigate in an instant.

  “A time of awakening is upon humanity,” the Sphinx continued, making her luminous thoughts known to him.
“And though true awakening is joyous beyond comparison, many who are not ready are being awoken -- not into a true wakefulness but the locomotive sleep of other forces.”

  Despite the perfection of the Sphinx’s superior telepathy, Moony didn't understand the concept of ‘locomotive sleep.’ He pictured a dozing freight train.

  Without hesitation, the Sphinx cleared Moony's confusion. “Some people look like they are awake, because they move around and seem to be lit up by something. Yet, in truth, they remain asleep. They are motivated only by materialist needs.”

  ‘Like zombies.”

  “Yeah, sure. Zombies, Wal-Mart shoppers. Like all that. Don’t get hung up on appearances. It is time for those whose hearts are aligned with the Celestial Stewardry to form an alliance.”

  Moony wondered whether his thickheadedness was annoying the Sphinx. Something about her felt so incredibly familiar -- above and beyond the angelic sense of her, she reminded him of a woman he had once known, perhaps on Earth.

  “The enemy is at work, and the enemy’s minions most often do his bidding unwittingly,” she answered. “Moony, you must hear what I am about to tell you. Long ago, the Dark One seduced many among the alien humans to his side, and they gave him access to secret pathways of knowledge made by the Hall of Stewards. Many of these pathways, these fountains of illumination were my creation. I used them to bring awakening to all humanity, but they were corrupted and stolen by the Dark One, and lost to me. In return for this secret knowledge, the enemy gave the alien humans the ability to join in his network of minds, and for many generations, they enjoyed this telepathy without any understanding that it was polluted by the enemy. There is much to say, dear one, and little time to say it in. Since my communication channels are compromised, I risk everything by making myself known to you. I have pierced the veil of darkness for this, and through you the enemy has glimpsed my sanctum.”