The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion Read online

  Driver pushed a long, flat lever with his foot, and the bus began trembling violently, rivers of electricity running over its outer shell.

  “Good Lord, man, shut that window,” said Cad, running over and closing the window where I’d been looking at the cop. “If you leave one open, we’ll be sucked outside. In space you have to pay attention to these sorts of details.”

  “Space?”

  “You’re coming with us, right? I assumed you were because you’re wearing a trucker hat and I noticed the crutches in your car. You must have wanted somebody to abduct you.”

  I felt the bus lift off the ground. The back end pitched upward first, nearly sending me somersaulting into Driver’s flabby chest, before its front finally lurched upward as the vehicle balanced itself out.

  “I’d normally suggest you buckle up!” yelled Cad over the sound of the engine. “But Driver ate the seat belts last week when we got stuck in an asteroid field and couldn’t get to a decent restaurant before closing.”

  “I mistook them for fruit leather at the time,” said Driver. “I was buzzed.”

  “You were drunk out of your mind,” said Cad.

  “I don’t think anybody here can pass judgment on me for that,” said Driver.

  “When I drink, at least I don’t destroy the bus,” said Cad.

  “Just marriages,” said Driver.

  “Please shut up,” said Skark. “Everybody in this band drinks, everybody has been with each other’s lovers, there’s no sense yapping at each other about it.”

  Skark turned to me. “Hold on and try not to get any blood on the couch. There are no decent upholsterers where we’re going, which is an unending source of irritation for me. I can’t even think about how I would redo the interior design of the bus without feeling woozy and overwhelmed.”

  For the briefest moment, the bus became still, hanging in the air above the In-N-Out drive-through, and I heard Officer Welker one more time: “Put that bus back on the ground. License and registration. Where are those license plates from? The Yarkson Cloud? What is that? Is that a state I don’t know about? Some East Coast place?”

  The engines roared and the bus shook like it was about to come apart at its joints.

  “There’s still time to get off if you want,” said Cad. “Space is no easy place to visit.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m looking for someone up there.”

  “Always good to have a goal,” he said. “You’re stuck with us now, young Bennett.”

  The front of the bus jerked sharply upward, as if doing a wheelie. Through the window, I could see currents of power running over the bus and changing color from blue to green. On the other side of the windshield, stars blinked like ocean phosphorescence.

  “Welcome to the tour,” said Cad.

  And with that, we shot into space….

  BANG!

  In the hours following my departure from Earth, I learned that the Perfectly Reasonable, the one billion sixteenth greatest band in the universe, had been in America because they were looking for a record deal anywhere they could get one.

  “We drove this bus to every record company in Los Angeles and dropped off old demos,” said Skark, filing one of his fourteen fingernails into a sharp point. “Nobody responded, no doubt because they found our sound confusing. You see, we can do anything—a cappella, dream pop, reggae fusion, Tropicália. It’s the natural instinct of humans to want to categorize everything, but that is quite impossible when it comes to my band, and I refuse to be categorized by something as asinine as just rock. The goal should always be to move an art form forward.”

  Skark used his fingertip to extract the cork of a wine bottle, removing it with a twist and flicking it aside.

  “But we’re broke, so we need any record deal we can get,” said Cad.

  “It’s not my fault that the cost of travel has gone up. Inflation is bad everywhere,” said Skark.

  “It is your fault all our other labels dropped us,” said Cad.

  “I admit no such thing. Foreign businessmen have no patience when it comes to nurturing genius.”

  “I think it’s more that they have no patience when one of their artists has stopped writing songs and is spending all his money on Spine Wine,” said Cad.

  “Oh, shut up,” said Skark.

  “Is that what the wine is called?” I said, pointing to the bottle Skark was holding. “Spine Wine?”

  “Ah, sweet siren Spine Wine,” said Skark, wistfully looking over the bottle. “Friend, lover, inspiration, companion. That is its name.”

  Skark explained that Spine Wine got its name from the tingle felt at the base of the neck upon drinking a great deal of it—provided the imbiber had a neck, which was by no means common among all alien races. Made from the triangular grapes of the Blado Constellation, Spine Wine was expensive because it was meant to be an after-dinner drink—a small glass helped with digestion following a large meal—though apparently there were also cheaper blends, the existence of which Skark dismissed with a wave of his hand.

  Spine Wine was also what Driver had made me drink when I got on the bus, but I hadn’t consumed quite enough to get the treasured tingle.

  “If you drink several glasses, the world brightens and the ego disappears—or so I’ve heard, I’m afraid my ego is a bit too large to ever be fully displaced—and the mind begins operating independently from the rest of the body,” said Skark. “It’s a marvelous liquid, and fully non-habit-forming, which is its finest quality.”

  “But you’re all drinking it constantly,” I said.

  The band reacted like I had sprung a licensed interventionist on them.

  “Easy there,” said Cad.

  “Whoa now, addiction is a strong word,” said Driver.

  “I didn’t say addiction,” I said.

  “I’ve met addicts,” said Skark. “And we are not addicts.”

  “All right, I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right, I’m an outside observer, I don’t know anything about the dynamics of your band. And as much as I appreciate hearing about the difficulties of securing a record contract in the modern universe, I’m not here to go out on tour. I’m here because I’m looking for someone, and I need your help navigating that.”

  I pointed out the window of the bus at the universe.

  I’d always imagined outer space would look a lot like it did through the telescope in my backyard—thousands of pinpoints of white light, with the occasional comet whizzing past—but the endless horizon here was glowing with clouds of electric blue gas and newborn galaxies shaped like seashells and red-and-purple nebulae that made me feel like I was staring into the eye of a god-sized feline. The universe was on fire with color.

  “Here’s my situation: On Friday, I’m supposed to go to prom with a girl I have wanted my entire life. She’s beautiful. She’s unique. She’s got the cutest laugh I’ve ever heard. She is cooler than me, and I still have no idea how she ended up agreeing to be my date. Everything was going perfect for once in my stupid life—and then she was abducted by aliens.”

  The members of the Perfectly Reasonable nodded their heads, seemingly unsurprised to hear Sophie’s fate.

  “What did the guys who grabbed her look like?” said Cad.

  “A lot like Driver, to be honest. No offense, Driver.”

  “None taken. People always think I look like someone they know. I have one of those faces.”

  “They had a van, and they tossed this stuff at her that looked like confetti and caused her to roll around on the ground.”

  “Brainsnuff,” said Driver. “It grows naturally on Jyfon, and incapacitates any creature with an IQ of less than two hundred.”

  “Jyfon?”

  “The planet where he’s from,” said Cad. “He’s a Jyfo.”

  “I hate to say this, but if your girl got kidnapped by the Jyfos, kiss her goodbye,” said Skark. “Or I suppose you should imagine yourself kissing her goodbye, because you’re not going to see her again.
”

  “Knock it off, Skark,” said Cad. “The kid’s emotional.”

  “I don’t think the reality of the situation needs to be disguised from him,” said Skark.

  “What are you talking about?”

  With that, Skark explained that the Jyfos were a well-intentioned yet inept race—always trying to save and preserve species but accidentally destroying them in the process.

  To illuminate his point, he told a story about how, years before, the Newman Solar System had been suffering from mild solar warming. All the planets in the system had seen their surface temperatures tick up a couple of degrees, which concerned the Jyfos greatly, so to fix the problem, they simply blew up the solar system’s sun. This stopped the solar warming—and by definition also stopped the solar system from being a solar system—but rendered the thirteen planets in the system lifeless granite spheres floating forever in limbo, sailing silently across the heavens.

  “What does that have to do with Sophie?” I said.

  “Pretty name,” said Cad.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say she’s been taken by the Ecological Center for the Preservation of Lesser Species,” said Skark.

  According to Skark, the Ecological Center for the Preservation of Lesser Species was Jyfon’s primary charitable cause—or at least he assumed it was based on the amount of mail they sent him asking for money. The Ecological Center for the Preservation of Lesser Species was a rescue operation for species the Jyfos viewed as close to extinction, in which they tried to make the species feel like they were at home.

  The problem was, in researching what kind of environment might be best for humans, the Jyfos looked at the wars that were constantly taking place all over Earth, they watched movies depicting people getting blown to shreds for the audience’s entertainment, they read books about games of death and unsolved murders, and from all that information they gleaned that what humans really enjoyed was violence (and plentiful access to low-quality foods, which was another issue, separate from what we were talking about).

  Furthermore, Skark explained, the reason the members of the Perfectly Reasonable were so knowledgeable about the Jyfos and their misguided conservation efforts was that the Ecological Center for the Preservation of Lesser Species had its own in-house documentary team broadcasting the various creature environments the Jyfos had created, day and night. The Jyfos’ public relations rationale behind these broadcasts was that allowing the universal population to see their efforts helped with fund-raising—but, Skark said, in reality they were simply gluttons for credit who wanted to show everyone how morally superior they were because they “cared” about the miserable animals everybody else ignored.

  “So wait…if it’s a conservation society, that means she’s safe, right?”

  The band looked at each other. There was something they didn’t want to tell me.

  “What?” I said.

  Cad went back to the idea of violence. Though the Jyfos generally liked to keep a well-managed, docile herd of humans at the Ecological Center for the Preservation of Lesser Species—having people sedentary made it easier for the documentary crews to record their behavior—every now and then, to spice up their programming, they would drop someone who didn’t look like the other residents—a pretty girl, a weight lifter, a couple of twins—into the compound and tell the rest of the inhabitants to hunt the newcomer down. Cad told me to think of it like a National Geographic special that showed predators stalking an animal that the audience wasn’t used to seeing flee for its life—for instance, a group of leopards going after a sick lion—with the exception in this case being that the predators here moved slowly. However, there were so many of them, they were impossible to avoid forever.

  “So you’re saying she’s bait,” I said.

  “Most likely,” said Cad. “Next time we’re around a TV, I’ll show you what I mean.”

  I felt sick, but there was one thing I didn’t understand. If the humans at the Ecological Center for the Preservation of Lesser Species had all the food and clothing and cigarettes they could ever want, why would they even care if the Jyfos brought somebody new into their environment?

  “Is there a prize or something?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Cad. “The Jyfos tell them that whoever hunts down the new blood gets to go home.”

  “Oh God.”

  It was even worse than I had allowed myself to think it might be. Sophie wasn’t just having to deal with her abductors—she had been dropped into a population of individuals who were after her. I felt desperate.

  “This is insane,” I said. “We need to go get her now.”

  “We won’t be anywhere near Jyfon until next week,” said Skark, finishing off his bottle of Spine Wine. “We’ve got two gigs to play before Dondoozle, and we can’t afford any distractions.”

  Skark pointed at a schedule hanging on the wall above my head:

  MONDAY

  Berdan Major Arena

  TUESDAY

  Dark Matter Foloptopus

  WEDNESDAY

  Travel Day

  THURSDAY

  Leisure Day

  FRIDAY

  Dondoozle Festival (Opening)

  “I still can’t believe we have to play the opening slot,” said Skark. “We used to close festivals, and now we’re playing first.”

  “It was the only slot offered,” said Driver. “We’re lucky they’re letting us play at all.”

  “Tour aside, Bennett needs our help, Skark,” said Cad.

  “If he requires help, it will be provided after the Dondoozle Festival. I didn’t know he had ulterior motives when he got on this bus, I think I’ve been very accommodating in welcoming him, and for now, this discussion is over. If you need me, I’ll be chatting with the ram. I must get my head straight before my performance.”

  Skark pivoted on his heel, opened a door, and disappeared into what looked like a walk-in closet, where he was greeted by a long baaaaa, followed by a sarcastic “Hello, Skark. Really good to see you.”

  “There’s a goat in the closet?” I said.

  “An adult ram,” said Cad. “That’s Walter. Skark kidnapped him from the Nevada desert a few years back. He thinks Walter’s his spirit guide, but he’s clearly only a ram. It’s a side effect of Skark constantly battering his brain with wine.”

  It seemed strange that Cad kept bringing up Skark’s drinking, considering he himself had also been steadily sipping wine for the past few hours.

  “I’m going to help you figure this out,” said Cad. “Nothing is going to happen to your girl. Let’s go to the bar in back and talk. I’m sure you have a bunch of questions.”

  “Yeah, the first is, how do I help Sophie?”

  “You can’t help her right now. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We will come up with a solution, but right now you need to relax. You drink?”

  “As of a few hours ago, apparently.”

  “Good. It looks like you could use something to steady your nerves. The weirder you allow yourself to get up here, the better you’ll fit in.”

  —

  In an attempt to keep my mind off Sophie, Cad told me about the Perfectly Reasonable’s bus, which the band had named the Interstellar Libertine.

  During the 1970s, the bus had been owned by Led Zeppelin, which was how Skark had become interested in it, his rationale being that if it was able to stand up to the hardest-partying band in Earth’s history—hence the “Libertine” moniker—it would most likely be able to endure the difficulties of touring deep space.

  After purchasing the bus at an auction house in London, Skark had had its exterior retrofitted with compound silica-fiber ceramic tiles and the floor redone with a gravity-producing surface. Air was produced by something called a True-Atmosphere Atmosphering Apparatus—I don’t know why the name was so redundant, maybe the manufacturers were trying to distinguish it from a rival product—which was the box to which Cad had attached his pull-up bar. Skark had installed the unit so musi
cians from a variety of alien species could ride along.

  Cad explained that the True-Atmosphere Atmosphering Apparatus had been designed by a superior race—boringly called the Millers—to produce air that all carbon-based life-forms could breathe, though the air it created was deeply poisonous to silicon-based life-forms. That was fine with Skark, who considered most silicon-based life-forms to be both tone-deaf and poor technical musicians and therefore made a point of never having them in his band.

  The functions of the True-Atmosphere Atmosphering Apparatus were easier for Cad to explain than the mechanics of the bus’s engine and the means by which we were speeding through space. When the bus was really moving, it looked like space was simply folding around us as we traveled, one astonishing vista of distant stars or brushstrokes of color giving way to the next, almost like flipping through a book of photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope. Each time my eyes would focus on a cluster of periwinkle planets blanketed with neon green clouds or a supernova throwing out pulses of nuclear white light, the image would swiftly melt out of existence and be replaced by an equally incomprehensible panorama. It was a little jarring, never quite knowing where you were or what you were going to see next, the only guarantee being that it would be something spectacular.

  Cad—doing his best to explain concepts clearly beyond him—likened the way the bus moved to passing through a series of little doors, one after the other, which is why it felt like we were jumping from place to place. The leaping required great speed, and while more technologically up-to-date engines allowed ships, buses, sedans, and whatever else aliens were driving to simply leap from one place to their exact destinations, the Interstellar Libertine was old and hadn’t been built for this purpose in the first place and could only make its journey in lurching increments. In a final effort, Cad told me to picture it as a smaller, crappier starship Enterprise that had to keep taking breaks as it stumbled its way through space.

  “It’s why it takes us forever to get anywhere,” said Cad. “If we had money, we’d be able to get a new engine, but the band has barely paid this one off.”