Author Bio

BRETT A. RILEY

ALIEN

When the UFO hovered over the Bellagio, the fountains shut down. The billboards and high-definition screens flickered and winked out. Traffic lights died, and, for a three-block radius, so did every car engine. Turquoise and jade and sienna and chartreuse lights swirled around the ship, glowing brighter and brighter until they turned white, like Klieg lights, and coalesced into one big circle that looked like it could bore through a mountain. The wind gusted, sending ball caps and litter careening down the road. An engine thrummed, louder and louder, until you could feel it in your bones. Then, just as people began to scream, the lights and sounds faded. The saucer-shaped ship descended, the chassis breaking light poles and bending trees. My phone and its seventy-eight-percent-charged battery had died, so I pulled a pad and pen out of my purse and wrote down a description.
       Black as the sky. Flawless surface. No markings.
       What is this? somebody said. A publicity stunt?
       Not with that property damage, someone replied.
       A panel on the saucer’s side opened. A ramp extended to the ground. After a moment, a man stepped onto it. He paused, then descended to the street and looked around. The gathering crowd pressed inward, and he shrunk back, as if we were carrying torches and pitchforks.
       Mid-thirties. Clean-shaven. Dark hair, short and neat. Threadbare suit decades out of style—like something from Mad Men season 1—gray coat and slacks, white shirt, tie, fedora, dull loafers. Resembles Jimmy Stewart in Rope, but grubbier.
       The ramp popped back inside the chassis. The panel closed. The saucer started to spin, that head-splitting thrum cranked up again, and the contraption shot skyward, out of sight in half a second.
       The crowd gasped and oooohed. Car engines came to life. So did the stoplights, the signs, even the fountains.
       The man stood in the middle of the street, confused and scared. Someone leaned out of their car window and suggested he get the hell out of the goddam road. Holding onto his hat, he trotted to my side of the Strip, where he looked around like a lost kid. The crowd, seeing he was not a celebrity, had mostly lost interest.
       Some effects, a woman said to her friend as they passed me.
       Kind of anticlimactic, the friend said.
       They pulled out their telephones anyway, holding them up. The flashes alarmed the man. The women asked rapid-fire questions.
       Who are you?
       Did George Lucas’s company do that shit?
       Do you have a Facebook page?
       How about Instagram?
       The man pushed past them, pulling his hat low.
       I stood in his way and said, Excuse me. I assumed he would stop, or at least look up.
Instead, as if he hadn’t heard, he bulldozed me, shoulder to sternum. I stumbled backward, but he caught me around the waist, my back arched like a dancer being dipped. More flashes—we trended on Twitter that night, #OddCoupleLasVegas. He goggled at my mini-skirt and heels, my V-neck and décolletage, the three piercings in each ear and the hoop in my right eyebrow.
Is he clumsy, or the smoothest dude I’ve ever seen? somebody said. Laughter from the crowd.
       Eyes wide, a vein thumping in his temple, he said, What are these people talking about? What are those things they’re holding? Where am I?
       Dude, I said. Chill.
       What? he said, as if I were speaking Klingon.
Hands off.
       He let me go. Then the Bellagio fountains burst upward, and he backpedaled so fast he nearly knocked a half-dozen people off the sidewalk. Two of them shoved him in different directions, but he seemed not to notice. Instead, he turned in circles, bathed in the glow of billboards and headlights, the Strip in all its wattage. His mouth hung open. Then he bent over and puked into the gutter. A passing taxi honked.
       I went to him and patted him on the back. He straightened up and wiped his mouth on his cuff. What is this place? he croaked.
       Okay, cut the bullshit.
       What?
       Still in character? Okay, I’ll play along. We’re in Las Vegas.
       He stared at me for a long time. You’re lying. I don’t see Binion’s, or the Sahara, or the Sands.
       Come on. Binion’s is still downtown. The others have been gone for years.
       Gone? Years? But I’ve only been away six months. I counted every day.
       Uh huh. So what’s with the fancy show? You advertising some new alien invasion movie?
       What year is it?
       Dude. Enough.
       What year?
       Okay, easy.
Half a dozen burly men in plain clothes shouldered their way through the crowd from three different directions, homing in on us. They could have been anybody, but smart money said Homeland Security. Whatever had just happened, it hadn’t been authorized.
       The year, he said.
It’s 2018. We hate Russia again? An idiot reality show star is President?
       What’s a reality show?
       Dude.
       He took off his hat, wiped sweat from his brow, and put it back on. I’ve got to find my wife. He pushed past me, headed toward Caesars.
The crowd closed around him. The plainclothes people craned their necks and jostled pedestrians, but they seemed to have no idea where he had gone.

***

I found him inside, dumbstruck by the casino’s scale. People eddied around him. I tugged on his sleeve. He let me lead him, his head still on a swivel. We’re on camera. Sooner or later, they’ll connect him to me. In that cut-rate Sinatra suit, he stood out among the tourists in their evening wear and resort attire, their tan legs in shorts that stopped just above the knee, their sport coats and blue jeans, their dresses revealing bellies and ribs and entire backs and perfectly symmetrical wedges of boob, tattoos dotting chests and breasts and arms, ear gauges that could hold a coffee cup. I led him to the Chorus Café, a 24-hour coffee-and-pastry place tucked between banks of buzzing slots. He took off his hat and fanned himself while I got us coffees. When I sat and pushed one across to him, he picked up the cardboard cup and turned it around, scrutinizing every detail. He seemed to linger on the Café’s social media information, hashtags and web addresses and semi-clever usernames.
       So, I said. I’m Caitlyn Grove. I blog for Las Vegas Nights.
       He sat the cup on the table. You do what for whom?
       I blog. You know, a weblog?
       I’m not familiar. What’s in this cup? A steak dinner?
       Just coffee, dude.
       My phone was working again, so I checked Twitter. Nothing yet from The Sun or the Review-Journal, Las Vegas Weekly or Seven. Their bad luck, or a DHS media blackout?
The man watched me with what looked like genuine awe.
       What is that? he asked.
       Drop the act for a minute, Christian Bale. You know what a phone is.
       That can’t be a phone. Where are the wires? Or the dial? It looks like a little television, except it’s not plugged in. No rabbit ears.
       Uh huh. I guess you never heard of Wi-Fi or the Internet, either.
       It’s like you’re speaking Japanese.
       Well, Japan makes a lot of this shit.
       That language isn’t very ladylike.
       I’m not much of a fucking lady.
       I meant it as a joke, but he looked like I had popped a squat on the table. Either he’s the best actor I’ve never seen before, or he’s been living on the moon.
       He reached across the table and took my hands. Is it really 2018?
So damn earnest. I looked for his seams, a thread I could tease out until his façade unraveled. Zippo, nada, niente.
       I just got my driver’s license renewed, I said. Check the date. I dug it out of my purse and slid it over.
       He examined it. Then he handed it back. I don’t want to believe it. But everything here is so strange. And after the last six months—God, anything’s possible.
       I put my license away. What’s your name? 
       Gavin Schultz. My wife’s name is Ruby. She’s four years younger than me. I have to find her.
       He seemed so real and sincere and heartbroken and prudish and conservative. I couldn’t make myself believe that he had just stepped out of a real UFO, but I wanted to help him, like he had sucked me into his act through some kind of personal gravity.
       What the hell. Maybe whatever he’s up to will make for good filler.
       You hungry? I asked.
       Starving.

***

I made him Uber with me to the Mirage so we could stay off the street. He kept his hat pulled low, but I didn’t know how much that would help. Inside, we ducked into a little Italian place.
When he saw the prices, he tossed his menu aside and declared he had no intention of being robbed. I told him I was buying. We split a shrimp cocktail and an Italian sausage pizza. Then I ordered after-dinner cocktails, turned on my phone’s recording app, and sat it on the table between us.
       So, Gavin. What’s your story?

***

June 1958—in their brand-new Chevrolet Bel Air Impala Sport Coupe, the Schultzes drove toward Los Angeles, their first vacation since Gavin started working for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. He wore his new gray suit, Ruby her best summer dress. Gavin’s fedora and Ruby’s sun hat lay between them on the seat because they drove with the windows down, taking advantage of a relatively cool evening. In the back seat, their six-year-old son, George, played with his toy trucks. He was skinny and tall for his age, his neck long like his mother’s, his jet-black hair parted to the left and pomaded into a state that even the wind could not dislodge. As they drove, they talked of the bigger house they might buy someday, the new university, the Stardust, the bright world they were helping build in the desert.
       It’s all in my head like a photo, Gavin told me. George wore green shorts, a white shirt, and knee socks. Ruby’s red lipstick matched her hair. There was a small burn on her right forearm from brushing against a hot baking sheet. Just after dark, probably halfway to Los Angeles, George had to go. He couldn’t hold it. You know how kids are. No other headlights in sight, so we just pulled over. Something you could do a thousand times in your life.
       When Gavin shut off the headlights, George bolted from the car. He stood yards away, outlined against the moonlit sky, sighing as he urinated. Ruby took Gavin’s hand and kissed his knuckles.
Sometimes, he said, I can still feel her lips.
       The stars shone, one brighter than the rest. The North Star, Gavin thought. Ruby let go of his hand. George trotted back toward them. But then the star grew brighter, bigger, expanding like a brush fire. A wind like Gavin had never felt whipped the car, driving sand into their eyes. Ruby screamed.
       Daddy! George cried.
        From the sky a low humming surged, increasing in frequency until it threatened to burst their eardrums, their eyeballs. The world was made of light, pure white and pulsing, strobing, searching. It swirled around them, spotlighting George. The boy stopped as if frozen. Gavin got out and ran through all the wind and grit. For some reason, probably habit, he grabbed his fedora. When he reached George, he shoved the hat over the boy’s eyes and pushed him to the ground and lay over him, telling him, it will be all right, Daddy’s here.
       And then Gavin was ripped skyward, hat crushed in one hand, the boy and the ground and the car getting smaller and smaller. Ruby ran to George, holding him with one arm and reaching for Gavin with the other, her mouth open in a scream he could not hear. Sand coated Gavin’s mouth and ground into his eyes. He called Ruby’s name, and then everything went dark.
       When he awoke, his head pounded and his throat burned, but he seemed otherwise unharmed. There was no trace of dirt on his clothes or skin, though his suit had sustained a few shrapnel wounds. The featureless room’s grayness matched its material almost exactly. The walls and floor were made of something he had never seen or felt before, like a hybrid of glass and metal that somehow felt as comfortable as a mattress. No door, only an opening the size of a car window set into the far wall. Beside him sat a carafe filled with water and made of the same material as the room. He drank half the water, some dribbling down his chin. Then he got up and examined the window. He tried sticking his hand through it, but the air crackled with energy. Pain shot up his arm. A force shoved him backward three steps. He rubbed his throbbing arm and peered through the opening. Nothing on the other side, not even empty space. And though he looked every day, hoping for some glimpse of his captors, his location, he never saw anything, not even his reflection.

***

Okay, let’s assume aliens abducted you, I said. What did you eat for six months?
       Nothing, he said. Not once. I was never even hungry. And yet I seem to weigh the same. I drank water from that pitcher every time I woke up. I never bathed. I never needed a restroom. I just sat there, staring at nothing, or slept. Until today, when the opening in the wall grew to the size of a door—just expanded like something was carving it an inch at a time. I walked out. And then I was here.
       So they didn’t experiment on you? No anal probes?
       His nose wrinkled. Anal—? What are you talking about?
       Never mind. I’m just surprised that they didn’t, you know, do stuff to you.
       Maybe they just wanted to listen. I talked a lot, asking where I was, when I could go home, what they wanted. I never heard a peep. I couldn’t even hear any engines.
       Huh. Alien eavesdroppers.
       What about Ruby and George? How do we find them?
       He looked at me like he had been lost in the mountains for a week and I was the rescue team. I scooted my chair around to his side and opened Google.

***

As bands played in bars all over town and nightclub lines filled with up with men in blazers and women in six-inch stilettos, Gavin slumped on the table, weeping. He pounded his fist. And here is where I truly began to believe, because I imagined what it would have been like. If he had really come from 1958, he would have lived through major cultural shifts—women joining the workforce in record numbers, the country’s worsening racial divide, Communist witch-hunts, and more. So-called traditional values metamorphosed as the nation rushed toward the 1960s. Plus, Gavin lived in Las Vegas, which changes its face as often as most people change their underwear. Everything in flux, nothing certain.
       And then, when you pull over one night so your son can take a piss, you’re ripped from the life you’re making and the family you adore. You spend what seems to be half a year in a formless room, held captive by God knows what. Then, for no reason you can understand, they let you go, and you drop into the same town you left, only it’s almost sixty years later and the world has shifted and restructured in ways you couldn’t have imagined. You meet a woman who buys you a drink and shows you what must seem like a science-fiction device, which informs you that your wife remarried and moved to Boca Raton, Florida, in 2002 and died in a car accident a year later. You last saw her as a vibrant young woman, most of her life still ahead, but she died at the age of seventy-four. Your son still lives in Las Vegas with his wife. He is a father of three, a grandfather of seven, a professor at the same university that was brand-new when you disappeared. He is twice your age, only one or two years from retirement. If you were to approach him now, you would be an alien, a visitor whose very presence signals upheaval.
       Was this the experiment? Maybe whatever watched him in that room was still watching.
I didn’t share this thought with Gavin. It seemed cruel. 
       We had stayed in the restaurant too long, but I needed more time to check his story. I offered to get him a room for the night.
       We took a cab to Binion’s. He wanted a shower, so I went out to buy him a robe and some fresh underwear. By the time I got back, he had fallen asleep under the covers. I put the clothes on the bed and took my iPad out of my purse. Using the Nights’ databases, I found a newspaper article from 1958. It reported that a local woman, Ruby Schultz, was resting comfortably after driving into town half-crazed, claiming a UFO had abducted her husband. The details in the article matched Gavin’s tale. A picture of the missing man ran beside the column. He looked just like the fellow sleeping a few feet from me, one arm wrapped around the empty pillow.
       I researched for twelve hours while he slept.
Gavin Schultz had been declared legally dead in 1968. Ruby Schultz married a contractor named Mateo Hernandez in 1970. Upon his retirement, they moved to Florida. As for their single-car accident, Florida state police speculated Hernandez fell asleep at the wheel. They crashed into a light pole. Ruby was not wearing a seatbelt. She smashed through the windshield and hit a tree. The impact nearly decapitated her and severed her left arm at the shoulder. No one ever found it. Likely, an alligator took it.
       I decided not to tell Gavin. He knew she was dead. That was enough.
       George Schultz lived in Summerlin. He had earned his Astronomy Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Columbia and his Ph.D. at Yale. He had spent a dozen years teaching in the northeast until the University of Nevada at Las Vegas lured him home. He had won three research awards, written half a dozen books, and achieved the rank of full professor.
I stepped out of the room and called my editor. Moments later, I had an address.

***

Gavin sat in my Honda Accord’s passenger seat, sipping a soft drink and eating an In-N-Out Burger. A block down and across the street, George Schultz’s two-story home stood wedged between others just like it, right down to the paint. George’s place, like the others, sported desert landscaping—a rock yard, a bottle tree on one side of the drive and a mesquite on the other, Tuscan Blue Rosemary, and rosebushes. The lowered garage door was the color of Dijon mustard. The cobblestone driveway looked clean.
       So what now? I asked.
       Gavin laughed. I have no idea.
       Maybe you should go over there.
       And say what?
       I drank a bottle of water, another new-fangled item that puzzled Gavin. Why would anybody pay for water when you could just turn on the tap? The sun climbed higher. Gavin finished his meal. The morning wore on. My eyes ached from watching for anything that looked like a government car. Twice, I almost nodded off.
       Then, around eleven AM, a child trotted around the corner of George’s house. His jet-black hair hung to his shoulders and waved in the breeze. He wore shorts and sports socks and sneakers and a red T-shirt bearing a picture of Captain America.
       Gavin sat up straight, his hands on the dash. My God, he said. That boy. He looks just like George.
       The kid ran to one of the rosebushes and dug around in it, pulling out a bit of plastic caught in the branches. He held it up like a prize and said something I couldn’t make out. Then a man ambled into view. His gray hair bore streaks of that same jet. His white-collar paunch bulged against his khaki shorts and tan button-down shirt. He wore sandals. His forearms and calves looked strong, his shoulders straight. When he smiled at the boy, I could see the resemblance, even at a distance—not just between this older fellow and the child but between them and Gavin.
       My little man, Gavin whispered. Where did your life go? He fell back, one hand over his mouth.
       George disappeared around the corner and, a moment later, came back with a small pair of clippers. He handed them to the kid, knelt, and pointed to a certain branch. The boy placed the clippers and snipped off a single rose. He smelled it and handed it to George, who put his nose against it. He took the clippers back and stuck them in his pocket.
       I brought Gavin there thinking that perhaps he would go to George and talk. Not necessarily to say Hi, I’m your father, and I got kidnapped by aliens. Want to play catch? Maybe just to hear George’s voice. Maybe George would recognize his father from old pictures, demand an explanation, somehow reconcile all the absurdities in Gavin’s story. But I think a different narrative unfolded in Gavin’s mind—a scene in which George drove him off or called the authorities, who might arrest him for his role in violating Las Vegas airspace or, worse, believe him. Then they would commit him or throw him deep in some black-ops site where scientists would study him for the rest of his days. Or what if George accepted Gavin, loved him like mad for the next twenty or twenty-five years? Sooner or later, George would begin to fade. Gavin would have to care for the man as he once cared for the infant, wiping away drool and doling out medicine, bathing and dressing and feeding from a spoon. Vigils in a sterile hospital room, a graveside service, all the banalities and horrors of age spun out of time and reversed.
       A woman walked out holding two glasses of water. She handed one to George and one to the boy. She put a hand on George’s shoulder. He gave her the rose.
       That must be George’s wife, Gavin said. They look happy. Don’t they?
       Yes, I whispered.
       And they did, too. George had lived a good life. Gavin had seen him at six and at sixty-five, bookending his life while missing the book.
       Let’s go, Gavin said, his voice husky. Please.
       All right. I started the car.
       I shifted into drive and pulled onto the street, expecting Gavin to duck and pull his hat over his face as we passed, but he didn’t. Instead, he watched the trio, one palm pressed flat against the window. And just as we pulled even with them, George looked up. I couldn’t swear to it—I was driving and could only glance in that direction for a second—but I believe he locked eyes with his father.
       Recognition must have dawned.
       Gavin turned to me. Go faster, he said.
       Gavin—
       Go. For Christ’s sake, please get me out of here.
       I sped up, not knowing what to say. Gavin leaned forward, hands covering his face, breathing hard. At the intersection, I looked into my rearview mirror and saw George running in the street, shouting, waving his hands in the air. The grandchild ran after him. The wife chased the boy and pulled him back to the sidewalk. When I turned left and accelerated, George dropped to his knees on the asphalt, one arm outstretched as his mother’s had once done, as if he could grab us and pull us back, erase the distance like the aliens had erased Gavin’s years. Then we passed out of sight.

***

I had no idea what to do with Gavin next, so I decided to take him home with me. I could introduce him to satellite television until the government found us or I came up with a better plan. Along the way, I stopped for gas at a Terrible Herbst.
Gavin got out and leaned against the car, watching traffic. After a moment, he said, Do gas stations still have public restrooms?
       Yeah. Just go inside and look around. You’ll find it.
       All right.
       He crossed the parking lot, shoulders slumped like a hung-over film-noir detective. He pushed open the doors and went inside. I turned back to my pump. Once I got my receipt, I parked near the doors and waited. I turned on the radio and left the car running. I sat there through ten songs, fifteen, long after realizing that Gavin wasn’t coming back, that he had disappeared like fog burning off pavement. Maybe he changed his mind and went back to that subdivision without me, wanting privacy for the world’s weirdest reunion. Maybe he hitched a ride out of town. Maybe Homeland Security found him. Or maybe he just walked until something swallowed him, the desert or the mountains or the night sky in which he had spent both six months and sixty years, sailing past comets and black holes and all the Earth’s upheavals.