Frankentown (24 page)

"Give me yo wallet, muhfucka."

Even though Allen obediently complied, Frank's flight or flight response sent him outside of his body once again. He could see the mugger's energy, a dark blue aura concentrated mostly around his Solar Plexus.
An attempt to kick him in this state would probably be futile, but Frank went for it anyway and the mugger fell to the ground, wind knocked out of him.

Allen was surprised at Frank's limp body falling to the ground and hardly had time to notice the assaulter's demise or the subsequent bounty-less escape. Frank came to as quickly as he fell back into himself, and felt fine.
"Do you have the keys? Let's go." he said, sitting up as though nothing had happened.

"What was that?" Allen repeatedly asked, but got no answer. It was hard to explain.
The traffic was heavy, but not at a standstill, as it was hours earlier. Even so, it took them almost an hour and half to make it back to Berkeley hills and arrived after 2am.

"Does Jen know you came to get me?"
 

Under regular circumstances, Allen would get a little pissy for such a question, for he was the master of his own domain, but now there were other things on his mind.
“Yeah, it's fine. What just happened?”
"I’ll tell you later. Let’s just get home first."

The house was undisturbed and cloaked in a thin veneer of dust. The mailbox was stuffed and neglected and several of the envelopes had red stripes on their side. So nothing had actually changed.

 
Outside the house you could hear several owls, which was several more than usual.

Frank now felt completely fine, as though he’d never hurt, and perhaps even a little more than that.
 

Brand new.

The key was still in the drain pipe, allowing easy access through the back-door to the kitchen.

He set the kettle for tea and started explaining. Allen quickly exploded in laughter.

He won't have a word of it.

Maybe if he refreshed his memory.
"Don't you remember the alien?"
Allen was a guest of honor at comedy hour.
“How much pot have you been smoking?” he said, laughing his lungs out one at a time.

"When did we last go squid tagging?"

The look in Allen’s face reflected that for him this was a total non-sequitur. “You know, Frank, looks like your drinking problem’s finally catching up with you.” Allen’s hasn’t quite yet.
“It’s not a problem! How long has it been since we tagged squid?”
 

"I don't know
…
three months ago?

You want to go squid tagging?

It is about time-"

"Wait."

How could it not have happened?

Did they stop it from ever happening?

Has the alien never died?

Can they cheat death like that?

Too many questions without answers.

"Sure,” Frank said, “Let's go squid tagging.

How about next weekend."

"Okay. Are you feeling okay?"
Frank looked a bit distressed and clearly tired, which figured.

"Yeah, no, yeah I'm fine. Thanks man."
Allen looked at his watch. It was half past three.

"I better head
…
"

"Yeah you should. It's late. Or early. Jen will be wondering where you are."
Frank wanted to banter a little, but Allen felt uncomfortable and clearly wanted to leave.
Everything was too weird for him, as it was for Frank, just in a different way.
The fact that he didn’t banter made Frank feel nervous and awkward. They exchanged polite goodbyes and Allen went straight home, to bed. Frank climbed the stairs into his bedroom and took a warm shower which he felt deserving of.

It felt better than any shower had ever felt before. He felt renewed. His recent endeavors had cast a new light on the way life worked. Every drop of water that hit his body bounced off his skin, individually, but as a mass. Everything was a part of a whole. It was all the same, even if not.
After drying himself off, putting on pajamas and a t-shirt he often slept in, he crawled into bed, but felt far too awake, alert and full of life.
His brain fried a little thinking so much about everything that has happened,

and even if he wanted to sleep, wondered if he could.

In the middle of wondering, he fell asleep.

Chapter Twentynine

Blue

With the morning came noon, and with noon the
afternoon arrived. A slow wake up at three in the afternoon gradually afforded him the luxury of getting up slowly and undisturbed, at least on this sunday morning.

There was nothing to worry about anymore.

No dead alien.

No radiation.

He was given a second chance.

He’d learned spirit flying.
His mind slowly came to with a cup of coffee while it still rained cats & dogs outside. The water came down in chains.
 
A welcome weather.
The following migraine, however, came wholly uninvited. After a hearty breakfast, still wearing
his robe and pajama pants, he stole outside to hide under his father’s favorite umbrella tree in the company of dozens of birds both small and large. His father had planted this tree to hide in the backyard and smoke a pipe. It was a decent little tree that fit the house nicely and provided perfect shelter whenever it had rained. He had many memories hiding out from the rain, private to the lucky few who fit under it.
In high school, Frank used to come here to smoke and get away from the craziness of the house. For as long as he could remember, the tree was always just a big umbrella, and he suspected the tree is doing very well with a natural mountain spring keeping it watered from the hill above.
Nearly no water came down through the thick hood of the tree’s waxy leaves.

He placed a long wooden pipe that his father used to smoke out of on his lips.

Once, his father taught him that the only way to go about lighting the tobacco was to use matches; otherwise the flavor would be ruined.
Walter Cabella was a connoisseur of tobacco and fine spirits, and his son was made in his father’s image; inheriting his hereditary dispositions. His wife was never fond either of his habits, and so he had mostly given it all up, only to restart a quarter-century later.

What more is that than an addiction?
he reasoned with himself, convincingly.
As a token of memory, Frank now used the pipe.
Though it was a warm gesture, using his dad’s pipe to smoke pot in his early 40’s is not what he had in mind. It was a lonely existence of denial. The inability to get along; always escaping reality, which though often cold and harsh, remained reality. All twenty years of it. There was something he had to do about it. The effect of the pot has not arrived as expected.
Instead he started lifting up from both the ground and his body. Spirit separated from body.

A whole different kind of high.
It was a free pass to do anything, anywhere, in the world. He could fly anywhere. Escape.
Everything he’s been through has humbled him. He was not at all his former self.
When he was rid of his body, he was not constrained to the mere dynamic range of his eyes.

He could see. Really see. Everything.

Even colors from outside the human eye wavelength spectrum. Around him, tall beings,
angels, were no longer transparent. They were messengers.

Staggering experience.
A thought it remained, for he had no intent to stay staggered. It was time to move on.
To check things out.
Places to visit.
And it was one that he’d already been to.

He flew through three stories and the roof of the house toward the late afternoon glow.

The sun hung low in the sky and blood-red sunset foretold either sinister happenings or sinister but beautiful pollution, or both.

As the town got smaller beneath him, the roads started to look more like strings than roads. He travelled east, a body-less spirit, toward Monterey. It was there, near Carmel, that they set off to tag squid before he changed everything. He couldn’t get to the exact spot from the get-go. Perhaps he could find a way if he started in the same place they have on the trip that ‘never happened’, but was about to.

The ship went southwest from the harbor for 45 minutes, then 30 minutes west. Knowing the relative speed, compared to the speed of the boat, he made an estimate of where they may have been before. When he dove underwater, he discovered he’d missed the mark only by several hundred yards, judging by the abyss in the middle of the kelp forest. He recognized the kelp forest and the position of things on the far shore. This was it.

The magnificent tall kelp trees towered ominously in the darkening ocean, and as a single point of reference on an otherwise plain horizon. The ocean was so deep here that even Frank, whose vision was not impacted by light in the darkness of the house on Euclid avenue, could not see the floor below at all. The kelp forest allowed very little light to bounce around in the depths and almost consumed all the surrounding light. Schools of fish danced around their bullies defensively, and the ocean, dark and wild, was a threatening jungle even without being in a physical body that could get hurt.

Large streaks of energy in the distance conjured up images of great white sharks in the distance, probably hunting baby seal mercilessly. Blood showed up very red even far off in the distance.

The infinite shades of blue refracting in the streams of energy were enough to induce shivers, only Frank’s body was too far away to feel anything more. The water itself wasn’t far from freezing, but the ocean was alive. There was no use denying or even pretending that it was less alive than land; it was more.

What was once but a stoned thought to ponder over hazily was now a self guided tour of the increasingly deeper ocean indigo lagoons, beyond belief and easily explained rationalization.

Soon he recognized the cliff where he and the aliens had passed by on the way down.
 
Down here there was almost no life, save for barnacles and ocean flora. Large rocks with perfect surfaces formed what may have been a temple, perhaps as early as a few millennia ago. Water currents have stripped away any detail that may have once
 
decorated the enormous monuments. By their size, they must have been worked on by behemoths or many at once.
The protruding reality dictated otherwise.
The large stone was made of a single piece, smooth as paper in the few places that barnacles have not clung to for their very life.

It was a sight to behold, but in the corner of his vision, Frank noticed something moving.
Several long tentacles curled up to resemble walking feet carried an enormous octopus striding by resembling a grocery-shopping pedestrian. This sent Frank into a blinding panic at first. Not having a body became far too easy to forget, though he faced no danger after all.
No harm could come to him.
He was free to explore and move around.

There was no telling how deep the chasm truly went. Scientific journals have claimed estimates and single readings which have been mostly increasing over the years. It was dark as night itself and there was no promise of a bottom for miles. Even if he did go down there, he wouldn’t be able to see a thing.

It was too dark even for his cat-like ethereal vision.
But what of it?

What would I gain in the abyss?

It was pretty, but it was time to go.

He lifted up with zero resistance and continued going on upwards inertia.
He mastered the flying eloquently.

It was hard not to be tempted
 
by the vastness, so he flew up to the clouds, which he has always wanted to feel and touch in both dreams and nightmares. This wasn’t worth it.

From up here he could see where he was, relative to the coast. Getting back to his body was not simply automatic unlike in a lucid dream.
He had to find his way back.
Fortunately, he moved very quickly.
Far quicker than cars on the road some of which were up to about 80 miles an hour. Going across without following roads was too abstract and would surely get him lost, so he clung to freeways all the way back home. Because he had no body, he could fly along with the traffic; follow a mustang speeding down around hundred miles an hour, cutting in front of everybody else, making several people swerve. It didn’t take long before the car was pulled over and the driver would get a greasy ticket. Frank considered staying behind to watch him pay for endangering other drivers, hoping justice gets served. The mustang stopped and a guy who could clearly afford the ticket climbed out.
No justice got served, only injustice underlined. That was life. You could be anyone, a drunk, a clown, or a respected hero of a community, everyone gets treated the same. No shame amongst thieves and liars.
And lying to himself was only foolish.
He looked forward to being awake again.
Lost in thought he stopped paying attention made a wrong turn several times.

Getting back to Berkeley was a piece of cake. Back inside himself, he got up and had to move around. He felt extremely energized and awake, even though it was already nighttime.

His body had perfect rest while the etheric, the spirit, roamed around. Just like in a dream.

Frank now understood it all, but to attempt to explain this logic to someone who has never experienced it was all too difficult.

He will just be another crackpot.
Like the guy who posts really fake looking videos of supposed UFOs he’s found everywhere, calling it ‘definitive proof’. What a chickenhead.

Proof was once again in the pudding.

Who would even care? The UFO nuts would say it makes for a good story and there’s no evidence. Informing the University and anyone else on it is out of the question if he wants to maintain his public status as ‘sane’, not to mention ‘employed’. After Walter and Lyle disappeared, everyone at the school knew and treated him different since. As a result, he must have started feeling different himself.

At first it was annoying but he got used to it by now, unwittingly enjoying the few perks that come with such a terrible tragedy. If he comes by claiming that he can communicate with aliens, the best he can hope for is that people would just accept that poor ole’ Frank finally lost his marbles.