Before my mother died I told her what had happened to me, thirty-eight years ago. About the eight little scars running down the shaft of my penis like tick marks. About the dream. That I had been abducted by aliens. I told her what had happened to me that night, and what had been happening to me since, as she lay gulping down her last breaths, slippery marble-like eyes rolling back into her skull, one shaky hand outstretched studying each of my scars with pruny fingers like they were braille, my secret codes. At this point her brain was all apple sauce, for years now it had not been good for much of anything and especially not for memory, but lying there moments before she died it all came flooding back through her, and as her eyeballs rolled around freely, her teeth chattered and her torso tremored like, she was being crushed by the weight of remembering the world, and she used what little fire she had left to tell of all that had happened to her, and all that had happened to her parents, and to theirs, going back generations, of experiences that so closely mirrored my own, and with my penis still hanging out of my jeans I cupped my hands together and held on to each raspy word like wet water from a spring in a forest with no people, slurping up as much as I could before it fell through my fingers and dripped onto the floor.
One
Here it goes again.
Even in my sleep I’m getting milked. It’s like when you get home from a long shift at work, fall asleep, only to find yourself back at work again in your dreams. Can’t catch a break. Milking takes place on a strictly enforced, bi-hourly schedule between the hours of nine a.m. to eleven p.m., but at night I was still there, Jelly was speaking to me, showing me images of a young brunette with meaty thighs on a big flat-screen TV, then she was out of the TV and she was stripping off her underwear and crawling on top of me with her shaved pussy and all, straddling the greenish dentist’s chair on which I reclined, and I was coming like the endless source of gooey stuff that I was. I couldn’t believe how much of it my body made. Jelly said that human bodies up production in response to demand, like how the economy works. Jelly is much smarter than me. This is because he is an alien. I ask him what he’s doing with this stuff again, and he tries to explain, but the words he speaks are like an advanced form of language, all twisted and hissy and angular-like, and I say I don’t quite understand and he says that there is no other way to explain it and I say okay. This happens with us sometimes. This is all in my head. Sometimes Jelly is nice to me and sometimes he is mean and sometimes I detest him and sometimes I accept him as part of the private insanity that has been my life for so long. In the end I am just a tired old well on the brink of running dry. Jelly says that when I do, he will have no use for me, that he will leave me. We have known each other for a very long time.
Two
I’m seven years old. Mom’s locked herself in the bathroom and is talking, more like mumbling, and then yelling like she does, banging the toilet seat up and down. The phone’s off the hook and the oven’s on but there’s nothing cooking. I’m crawling around panning for gold like I do. Reaching around the couch and under the fridge for crumbs and dust bunnies and anything else, putting it all in the colander I carry with me around the apartment that we live in on Greene Street. Every once and a while I find a penny or a button or a dead cockroach and I put it in the colander too and shake everything around and yell, EUREKA and Mom says, SHUT UP WITH THAT ALREADY GO TO YOUR ROOM, but I never do and she’s still in the bathroom and I’m hungry. That house had ancient, dense olive-green curtains that Mom kept closed because of the way her head was, but sometimes when she was locked in the bathroom like right now I would sneak a look through the dirty glass, down onto the street, naming each person as they walked past. Mr. Edwards Mrs. Snickers Little Bobo a baby named Freddy Sir the Third. Soon I will meet Jelly but not yet.
Three
I’m pretty sure I’m crazy, but I’ll answer your questions, anyway.
I’m a man of God, always have been. Pray before meals, keep my apartment tidy, work a nine-to-five, go four-wheeling on the weekends in the warmer months, skiing in the winter. Go to Mom’s for supper on Fridays, before she got sick and all that is. We used to always order out from the restaurant around the corner from her place, the Italian one that’s been there since forever. She would get minestrone soup and I would get spaghetti. Or else she would make baked chicken. On the outside, I am an average, middle-aged bachelor. It is a measure of practicality, my keeping a quiet life — being more adventurous would require a sort of inner stability that is near impossible for me due to Jelly and all. I have a few friends. I don’t date much as my sex drive is next to nonexistent on account of my milking schedule. It’s been like this for a long time now. Thirty-eight years. It’s difficult for someone like me to maintain relationships. Sometimes I go all quiet-like because Jelly is making so much noise and people don’t know why and they think maybe it’s because of something they said. There is pain, sure. I have grown accustomed to silencing my own thoughts to make room for Jelly’s. Then sometimes he is just too loud and too mean and too intelligent and I feel like I’m suffocating I feel like ripping my head off I just can’t take it, Jesus, help me, I want to suicide, I want to die and become nothing, nothing for Jelly to milk, I want to rid myself of this body and all of its gooey alien gold let my soul run free and wild in the mountains and the water and the trees, and I am banging my head on the carpet, Oh God, forgive me but why oh why did you make me this way, and I am wrapping a sheet around my neck and I am so ashamed because Jelly can hear all of this and is recording everything and will be sending notes back to his people for study and I’m such a miserable excuse for a man, Oh Jelly, why not give up on me and find someone else to milk? A doctor or a celebrity or a Buddhist monk, somebody interesting, worthwhile, and Jelly finds my talking to God quite interesting, and I am laying flat on my back on the shag carpet with the sheet draped over me like they do to a dead body at a crime scene, my ears ringing wildly and my chest closed shut, in my apartment, alone.
Four
Dad’s gone, always has been. I’m a quiet kid, I like reading and writing and such. Places for my dark thoughts to go. I love my mother. Sometimes I cry and I cry and I don’t know why. I wake up in the middle of the night screaming. I am scared that I am not normal and I am scared of death. Mom asks what’s wrong with me and I won’t tell her. I don’t tell her anything. Mom says my father’s a fucker and we’re better off without him. Mom says there might be something wrong with me, I need to learn to grow up and so she sends me to church to be an altar boy, to learn to be a man from the big man, God himself. Pastor Richard takes a liking to me immediately, takes me under his wing. He never locks himself in the bathroom he never yells, he talks to me real even and soft like a friend would and we are friends and he understands me. His office has red velvet on the walls and he wears a long white gown with gold stitching he doesn’t have any hair on his head and he sits at an enormous desk made of heavy dark wood. Part of my work as altar boy includes weekly meetings on Thursday nights. Each week I go to Pastor Richard’s office and he tells me to sit in the folding chair across from him. In front of the stained-glass window he looks like a mountain or a god. He asks me about my day, he listens to me real careful and then he comes around to my side and sits on the floor which seems like a funny thing for an adult to do, sitting on the floor, and from there he instructs me on The Bible while he does the weekly meeting ritual which is when he touches me while I read passages so that I can be closer to God while I read his words so that God will like me and allow me to enter heaven one day. It was during a weekly meeting that I first met Jelly. He came to me like a little garden snake slithering its way out of The Bible up my arm then through my earhole and into my brain. One moment I was in the pastor’s office, and the next it was all black.
Where am I?
You’re in Pastor Richard’s office.
Why can’t I see anything?
You’re in a dream.
Who are you?
I’m Jelly.
The first time, the first milking, was like what I have relived over and over in the thirty eight years since. It was my first wet dream. I was in a folding chair sitting up straight, I was in a greenish dentist’s chair reclining in a room with red velvet on the walls, in a room where there was nothing no color no shape no texture. That’s it, that’s right, good boy, came Pastor Richard’s voice, came an echoing voice from another galaxy, way above me. I understood that this was Jelly’s voice, whoever that was. Then I felt tugging and I looked down at my pants and saw that I wasn’t wearing any and there was a hand, no, there was a metallic silver device attached to my penis, a hand, no, a metallic device, pumping. White gelatinous stuff was coming out of my penis and going into a tube. I didn’t know what it was I was scared. Then there was a huge monitor in front of me and on it an unrecognizable woman, her face shadowy-like. Then she was off the monitor and she was crawling on top of me and I could see her boobs and what was between her legs and I had never seen that before in real life only pictures and I liked it but then she was real close to my face and I could see that her face was not like a woman’s, but scaly, demonic, snake-like, that’s right, and then I was feeling a strange shaky pressure overwhelming me, an explosion of pent-up sensation that started in my groin and emanated throughout my entire body and then everything went black again and then there I was walking down the street again with my backpack on and I was headed home, the street quiet, I don’t tell Mom anything, she’s locked herself in the bathroom again, that’s good, good little boy, again and again, I look past the curtains out the window at the starry night sky, it goes on forever.
Five
I am never alone, but I am so lonely.
Over time I came to understand that although Jelly resided in my brain he was not me but a separate creature, an extraterrestrial many times my own intelligence that had taken residence in my head. Once I got a little older I put it together that he was studying me, that he was collecting samples, listening to my thoughts recording my feelings and such. Most of what I knew about him I learned through images he would send me. I’m not sure if he sent me these images on purpose or if it was an occasional slip-up on his part. Like I think I saw his planet once. I was on the bus commuting to work on a Wednesday morning but then the bus went all blurry-like and the sounds around me faded out like at the end of a song and next thing I knew I was on a desolate planet, not Earth at all, with sand dunes and miniature purple crabs everywhere and no sun, just inky outer space but somehow I could see. I could feel myself floating, flying over sandy plateaus towards an old wooden door up ahead in the distance. I arrived, landing on two feet in front of it, and I could see now that it was covered with vines and that there was no building attached, just the door on this planet, nothing else but sand and crabs and black. I pried it open and on the other side was a very deep hole in the ground I couldn’t see the bottom I jumped down it and I was falling and falling, I fell right back down into the bus. Then I woke up on the bus but instead of people it was filled with medical equipment — chrome tables and vials and needles and plastic baggies stuffed with blood and such and the same miniature purple crabs crawling all over everything every surface the walls and the floor and the ceiling and then I woke up again and I had missed my stop.
Six
Jelly tends to be resistant to questions says he’s in charge. I’m the test subject after all and this is not to be forgotten not ever. Knowing more about him his planet his people might skew the data. But still. We are like lifers sharing a cell. You spend thirty-eight years in a box with someone and you get to know a few things. You become friends.
Seven
I am not right in the head, I know this. I know Jelly saved me in a way, the tortured child I was, plucked out bits of my sorrow, the little shards of broken glass stuck in my fingertips, helped me make sense of the world when I was so small. And I like to think I’ve done the same for him. Where he comes from, getting sent to Earth is the worst form of punishment. I don’t know what he did that was so bad to get sent here and he won’t ever tell me when I ask. All I know is that there is shame, I can sense it. I can’t imagine him killing a man. He does have his moments, his temper, but don’t we all? To pretend that humans don’t contain equal amounts cruelty as they do kindness is harmful in a way, a disservice to us all, because that’s not how things actually are and we have to go around pretending. I’m sure the same thing goes for aliens, for all intergalactic lifeforms. Nothing is entirely one thing or the other. If it were that simple, the world would be simple too. Or maybe if we were all more attuned to the spectrum of things, the subtleties, if we accepted that there is no way to understand all of the universe’s mysteries, there would be room for multiple realities to exist, together. I know Jelly must have people back at home who he yearns for though he never speaks of them. I sense pain there, as deep as space. I try to be a friend, to pull out his shards. I know he hates what he has done to me, what he has done to my mother and to my grandparents though he hasn’t ever said it. I don’t think he can. He acts all tough-like. He punishes me, he makes my life a living hell, he is there for me, he is my best and only friend, and I know he doesn’t have a choice, not until I’m out of milk.
The night that Mom died we fought. It was nine p.m. milking and Mom had died at 4:37. Her body was still in the other room, they hadn’t gotten around to picking it up yet. I thought of her in bed all cold and vacant. Breathless. I hadn’t called anybody because I had no one to call. I had no siblings and the rest of the family was dead. Oh well. I lay on the checkered couch in the family room with a hand on my stomach, looking up at a moth in the light fixture. Yellow from the street was coming in through the blinds and the refrigerator hummed like everything was regular but it wasn’t. It was nine p.m. and I’d forgotten. That day Jelly was unusually quiet like he was trying to give me space or something. I appreciated the gesture. But then there it was, time, and I had nothing more to give. The tube was around my penis and I reached down to try and pull it off and my fingers were burning on the hot metal, there was a hand on me like Pastor Richard’s no it was my own hand no it was my mother’s hand no it was Jelly’s and nothing was coming out and my soul was being sucked out instead, like there was a vacuum hose shoved down my throat, vacuuming out my organs my fascia my bones and I writhed around on the cushions in a fit of agony and using all of my strength I gripped the back of the couch and pulled myself upright, my knuckles white and my face burning red YOU FUCKING ALIEN SCUM GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM LEAVE ME ALONE LEAVE ME ALONE LEAVE ME ALONE I screamed at the refrigerator and I sensed pain there as deep as space and I fell back onto the couch and I was crying on my back and I loved him and I felt nothing.
Eight
In a dream I felt movement in my brain like a hamster on a wheel and a little garden snake pushed its way out of my ear hole onto my bed and sat there for a moment covered in wax and brain juice, coiled up peacefully, looking me right in the eyes like. I love you, I felt compelled to say to the snake and I said it, and the words sort of spilled onto the bed like loose change out of a pocket and then they echoed around, bouncing off the walls, and a warm glow filled the room like a blazing orange sunset over an ocean somewhere and my bed was a tiny sailboat and we lay there together on it and it was just us, the snake and I, and the whole rest of the world was very far away, lightyears away, and we were safe. After a while like that, no words, the snake turned around and jumped ship he swam across the room he swam across the sea all wavy-like and disappeared through the open crack in the window and disappeared into the horizon line and there was nothing around me except for water and my cheeks were wet and I drifted back to sleep as the ocean became all grainy-like, fading out. Then my alarm was buzzing and I was waking up just in time for nine a.m. milking and my brain was an unfamiliar expanse like morning air atop a mountain. Jelly? I asked, and his name melted into space there was nothing no response only birds outside and a lawn mower and a car going down the street and the low grumble of the vent and that’s it. The air around my face looked translucent, clear-like.
I grabbed my phone from the bedside table and typed out an email to my boss saying that I was sick and would not be making it into work. I stayed in bed all morning, waiting. Eleven a.m., nothing, one p.m., nothing, three p.m., nothing, five p.m., nothing, I waited for the usual but my mind was a blank canvas, wholly my own, then it was evening. I got up to pee but only a little bit came out. I got back into bed. Nine p.m., nothing, eleven p.m., nothing, I got up to eat something because I was starving. I ate crackers with cheese. Slowly as to not get a stomachache. I got back into bed and slept and the sleep was empty and untethered and new. In the morning my head was still all clear and quiet-like. I pulled the blankets up over my head to drown it out,squeezed them tight around me. Under the comforter I slid a hand down towards my crotch, ran my fingers over each scar and counted — one two three four five six seven eight, one two three four five six seven eight, and I waited for him to return, and he never did.
