- VI -

* * * * *
         "Nobody still shows up on time, do they?" Carl is commenting to Will, who is standing nearby. Carl is leaning up against a makeshift bar, all wood and hard lines, something twisted sideways it seems. Bottles and glasses, some empty, some not, litter the expanse behind him, with more lurking in the shadows of the kitchen counter beyond the bar. The lights have been dimmed in the entire apartment, he can see shadows draping themselves over the stairwell leading to the upstairs bedrooms and from somewhere he keeps thinking he's seeing a protracted flashing light but that's it. Not that he minds, he's found that the dark corners like this are the best for everyone. There are prying eyes everywhere but if you can't see them it makes it all so much easier.
         "Nah, for the life of me I can't figure out why," Will states. He's nursing a glass of something, but obviously doesn't want to finish it just yet, doesn't want to start the real drinking until the party is in full swing. Wouldn't be good for the host to be smashed before the party even really fully begins. Others aren't so frugal and Carl can see one of a pair sitting on the couch on the other end of the apartment upend a beer down his throat, placing it down on the floor and a wolfish look pervading his face as the desire for another one surfaces. Carl hasn't really had anything yet, he's trying to pace himself, he wants all his wits about him for as long as he can manage. For a while at least.
         "Nobody seems to want to be the first one here," Will continues, taking a sip of his drink. He shifts on the barstool, shivering a little, a combination of the cold drink and the slightly chilled temperature. Carl can hear the air conditioner humming from somewhere, a droning bellow. It'll be drowned out eventually but he knows that it'll be useless eventually as well. The heat's going to nail the ceiling in time, cram enough warm bodies in one space and transporting the Arctic into the apartment wouldn't make a damn bit of difference. In the end. When you come down to it.
         "Someone's got to be though," Carl replies, a bit lamely really. He really doesn't like to deal in cliches but his mind really isn't on this conversation, it's floating freely elsewhere, down corridors of possibilities, avenues of events. A lot of things could happen tonight and they might all depend on him. Him and the rest.
         "That's just it," Will says, gesturing with his glass at the empty air, where perhaps the proof to his point is drifting. "Everyone wants it to be someone else. So they all wait for as long as they can, figuring after a while that someone had to be dumb enough to blink first and come." He chuckles a little, a laugh tinged with the faintest scent of alcohol, and says, "But give it time, I always start out cursing everyone for not showing up, and then by the end of the night I'm thinking that we're having the time of our lives."
         "So be patient, is that what you're saying?" Carl asks, again not really paying attention but figuring the question will give that illusion. He's staring at the girl on the couch, having an animated conversation with a black clad dopey looking sort who really isn't making eye contact, though he is staring elsewhere. Carl can see what that guy has on his mind, as much as he's wearing a blinking sign on his back stating his intentions. No subtlety at all, Carl thinks. She'll probably fall for it too, he can see that her eyes are saying things not in her voice and every so often her hand reaches out to touch his arm. He can see where this is going, throw both of them in a heated room stinking with beer and hormones and it'll be like they didn't ever have any choice at all.
         He doesn't want it to be like that for him, he wants to have all the choice in the goddamn world. To orchestrate every angle, if he can, play up every road and compass point. That would suit him best, he thinks. That would make the entire night worthwhile.
         Will is swishing his drink around in his glass, watching the meager light play with the liquid, fracturing it and curving it around. Proving Einstein right. "Actually, to be perfectly honest with you," Will begins, not even realizing that Carl could care less whether every word that fell out of his mouth was a blatant lie, "I don't even much care if this is just an okay party." He sits back, placing his drink on the bar and looking very pleased with himself. "I managed to get a friend to come tonight that everyone swore I could never get to a party. Getting him to come is quite the feather in my cap. People will be wondering how I did it for years."
         "Oh?" Carl's interest rises a little, but Will is talking like he's some sort of glorified magician, pulling rabbits out of his ass and pretending that it's some sort of great feat. "What was so hard about getting him to come here? Not the party type?"
         "You might say that," Will replies, though he's got the hint of a knowing smile on his face. "He's just stubborn I guess, he figures that nobody wants to be around him, especially lately."
         "Bit of a depression thing going on, then?" Carl can't even imagine any reason at all to be depressed, he's talked to people like that and they just confuse him. As long as you're alive there's no reason to be depressed, because you're alive and as long as you have reasonable health there's always a chance that things might get better. Generally they often do, he's found that people often get themselves into trouble through no actions of their own and can often get out of that same trouble by doing absolutely nothing and just letting the situation correct itself. But people always have to muck things up, pretend that they know what they're doing. Nobody ever does, that's just the truth. Carl lives by that but refuses to let it rule him.
         "Nah, nothing like that," Will responds, waving his hand dismissively. "It's a bit . . . complicated, actually . . ." he's hesitating in his speech, as if he's about to let Carl in on some sort of dread secret and isn't sure if the other man is worthy. But in reality he has no idea how to start explaining.
         "I'm not sure how to say this really . . ." Will says, taking a longer swig of his drink than normal and continuing. Fixing Carl with a near one eyed stare, he asks, "What do you think of . . . life . . . not on this Earth?"
         If there was any sort of question that Carl didn't expect to get asked tonight, this was definitely near the top of the list. He expects to be asking simply questions to the fairer sex tonight and perhaps field some questions from them, he expects to talk about lots of things that fall between highly interesting and frustratingly boring. However, he never expected to be asked if he basically believes in aliens.
         "What the hell kind of question is that?" Carl finds himself asking, feeling that he really needs a drink and maybe thinking that he should take Will's away, if he thinking about stuff like this.
         "Told you it was hard to explain," Will shrugs. "All I know is that my friend someone got into contact with some of them and-"
         "Whoa, hey, how the hell do you know about this?"
         "Because I saw one," Will states quite calmly, though his hand is shaking slightly. "I saw one," he says again, as if repeating the sentence somehow makes it more believable. "In a restaurant, we were all there." His voice has become staccato, as brief and biting as the flashes of a strobe light, dancing in and out of pauses. "We were meeting there and . . . someone, someone at our table pulled a knife on one of the girls . . . to this day I'm not even sure why . . . and my friend, he . . ." he shudders a bit, turning back to pour himself some more of a drink, any drink, he's not even looking to see what he's mixing, he's caught in the story, reliving it, staggering through the filmy flimsy coating of the past to a time that isn't far enough away yet. "It wasn't my friend," Will says in one clump of words. "It was . . . something else that was pretending to be my friend and as soon as that guy pulled the knife it stopped pretending to be what it wasn't and . . ." Will gives a choking stuttering laugh, glancing up at Carl as if expecting him to run away shrieking at any moment. "You must think this is all bull, right? That I'm making all of this up, right?" He has the desperate look of someone who wants to be believed, because it would validate what he saw, it would mark him as sane.
         "Let's say the jury's still out," Carl replies. Something about Will's voice is drawing him in. He's not playing the showman now, he's not posturing and posing for anyone, he's simply telling the story as best he can about something that scared the absolute living hell out of him and affected him so deeply that he's not even sure why he feels that way. Carl wishes he could relate to that but he can sit here and drink it in, he can live it through Will and perhaps get a sense. Maybe.
         "Good to hear you're keeping an open mind," Will says without any sarcasm at all. He's staring down at his lap now, staring down into his drink, finding the past there and seeing it poking back up at him, mocking and relentless. It never goes away. "Yeah, so anyway . . . this thing that's . . . that's supposed to be my friend and who we all think is still my friend just acting completely crazy . . . he . . ." Will gives another one of those stuttering laughs. Carl is beginning to find the noise annoying. "He said that if he thought that the girl was going to be hurt, the guy would have already been dead." Will's hands on the glass are bone white. "I don't think he was lying, he sure as hell didn't sound like it. He was just stating some damn fact and really didn't care if we believed him or not. Almost like he was daring . . . daring the guy to try and prove him wrong."
         "What happened?" Carl asks, something about this tingling at the edges of his memory. Something in the paper. An incident at a local restaurant, some weird things happened but nobody can explain and nobody is talking. Nobody seems to know. But here's someone who appears to know and doesn't appear any better for knowing. "Did it kill him?"
         "No," Will says almost silently, shaking his head to accentuate the point. "But it might have done other things to him, I never found out." The glass is shaking now, trembling from the pulse of a psychic earthquake that hit months ago. "It . . . said something . . . something to the effect that we weren't necessary here and the next . . . the next thing I know is that the world goes all funky and I'm standing in my living room, feeling like the world just rammed me and turned me inside out." He blinks, and looks like he wants to get very very drunk very quickly.
         "What . . . how . . ." this part of the story has Carl confused. This is the only part that he can barely wrap his mind around. Teleportation? Is that what they call it. That seems to be what Will is describing. Instantaneous transportation.
         "Oh God, I don't know, Carl, I thought it was a goddamn dream, I thought that I had been dreaming and sleepwalking and I woke up in my house." He swallows, downing the last of the drink in one swift gulp. "Until. Until the other phone calls started coming and everyone else seemed to have the same goddamn nightmare." There are layers peeling away from his eyes, haunted emotions boiling to the surface. "The worst phone call was the one I got from the girl who had been attacked. She was hysterical, nearly out of her mind, thinking that she was going crazy. It . . . it had touched her and then sent her away and . . . I've never for the life of me heard someone so freaked out in my entire life. I thought she was going to . . . to jump out a window right then . . . with me still on the line listening to her crash and fall."
         "I hope she didn't," Carl notes, hoping he sounds sincere, figuring that by this point that Will won't notice the difference.
         "No . . . no she didn't, thank God, but I don't think anyone's talked to her since . . . we didn't see her that much to begin with and I guess . . . guess that just did it for her." He shrugs again, as if to dismiss his story as something that happens to people all the time. "It was rough on everyone, really. We got over it together but . . ." he just shakes his head again, not even bothering to finish his sentence. "Hell of a time, thought we were all going to go stark raving bonkers for a while."
         "What about your friend? The one that these . . . things apparently hung around with? You still seem to talk to him, being that he's coming here tonight. I figured you lot would have killed him right then." Carl gives a sort of laugh. For some reason, he finds that thought funny. This whole conversation is laced at the edges with something surreal. It's not a feeling he can admit that he completely hates.
         "Oh we confronted him about it. Trust me." Will draws a deep whistling breath and gives a shaky smile to Carl. "Not our finest hour, in retrospect." He pauses, seemingly to collect his thoughts and while Carl is curious about what exactly transpired during that discussion, he realizes that it's not for him to ask or even know. He can live with it. After a second, Will continues, "But he explained it . . . everything . . . and . . . if I hadn't lived through it, if I hadn't experienced a small piece of it myself, I would have thought he was absolutely out of his mind and had him committed." He shrugs again, as an apparent gesture against something inevitable. "But there was no denying it. I don't like it and I don't understand it and even worse than not understanding I can't even fathom it . . . but it's real.
         "I don't know," Will finishes, rattling on before Carl can even comment. "I think we all wanted to just walk away from him but . . . we're his friends," Will is looking straight at Carl now, like this speech will make him a friend too. Carl is just finding this an interesting story, frankly. Something to pass the time with before the more attractive company shows up. It's probably a shallow idea but he was never one for labeling things. "We're his friends," Will says again, "and a hell of lot of times he stood by us for no reason other than he was there and we needed help. In the end, we couldn't walk away, we just couldn't. He needs us, but we sure as hell don't know how to help him."
         "He sounds like an interesting person," Carl replies noncommittally, not wanting to waver emotionally either way.
         "Yeah . . . but hell, this is a depressing conversation for a party, isn't it now," Will says suddenly, seeming to sit up straighter in his chair. He looks at his drink and fills it up a bit more, taking a drink and then hopping off the stool. "And it's too damn quiet in here," he announces.
         Several of the folks dotting the room in little clusters glance up at that but say nothing. The black clad gent on the couch looks up and shouts across the room, "I'll put something on" and then jumps up to apparently do just that.
         "None of that crap you normally listen to though!" Will shouts back across the room, laughing a little toward the end of the sentence. The other guy gives no indication whether he has heard or not, simply popping what appears to be a random disc into the player. Seconds later a syncopated clash of guitar and piano shred the room.
         "That's better," Will states after a few seconds, nodding his head a bit to the beat, pronouncing it proper and right for the party.
         Carl turns back to his drink, going over his plans for the night, figuring that all should go well, if everything falls into place like it's supposed to. Something shifts in his pocket but a subtle hand there puts it back into place. In the distance and what seems to be only moments later, a buzzer sounds over the music.
         "God, maybe people decided to arrive finally!" Will says almost to himself, brushing past Carl to head for the door. A swift second later it opens and he's gone.
         Carl eases himself away from his seat, casting his eyes about the room, taking in the extremes of light and dark. His eyes linger for a moment on the stairs. Perhaps it's time for a trip to the bathroom. Don't want to be surprised at an inopportune moment now, hm? He sets off for the stairs, passing the couple on the couch as he does so. The girl glances up at him and gives him a shy smile in greeting. Carl smiles what he thinks is something encouraging.
         Girls and gin and men who talk to gods. With luck, this could be an interesting night.
         "Listen you, take your hands from her hair . . ."
         the radio tells him.
         He doesn't listen, nor does he plan on starting.