I wasn’t kidnapped by aliens. That line sells tabloids, but it wasn’t true. No, I went with the aliens of my own free will. The night it happened I was drinking in this bar I go to sometimes. The place was too far from downtown to be popular with college students, and that’s why I go there, especially when I’m feeling low. My dissertation, a semiotic study of package labeling in the United States (1946 to 1959), was bogged down in the third chapter, and I’d been avoiding my dissertation …
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CHAPTER TWO
The tall guy reached us as the Englishman turned around. The Englishman didn’t seem all that happy to see his buddy, which dimmed the wattage on the tall guy’s smile. Now that he was close, he didn’t look all that much like Elvis Presley. Or rather, he looked more like an Elvis impersonator than like the King himself. His crooked smile pushed his cheeks up under his eyes and gave him kind of a goofy look. “I’ve been waiting a long time,” he said to the Englishman, a little reproachfully, I …
CHAPTER THREE
Elvis wanted to know how far we were from Memphis, Tennessee. “Not too far by plane,” I said, “but we’re headed in the wrong direction. We’re too far north.” “Is there a highway that goes there?” he asked. “Our map is broken.” He gestured toward a darkened screen. “The best thing, in that case, would be to follow the rivers,” I said. “If we fly south, we’ll intersect the Ohio River. The Ohio meets the Mississippi at Cairo, and you can follow the Mississippi down to Memphis.” Elvis …
CHAPTER FOUR
“Elvis is right,” Lawrence said over breakfast. “We came to warn your leaders about the consequences of deploying nuclear weapons in outer space. We went to New Mexico to investigate—to see how much progress they’d made.” We were sitting in a diner somewhere off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I was feeling surprisingly rested after seven hours on some kind of bubble bed that moved like a water bed. If I hadn’t drunk so much beer the night before, I would’ve felt downright swell. I could use a …
CHAPTER FIVE
How I came to be in charge of the logistics, I don’t know. It just happened. I was busy as a campaign manager on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Take money. Lawrence and Elvis had eleven dollars and twenty-three cents between them, plus a stash of diamonds that could send the world diamond market through the cellar. Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but they can’t help you at the automat—they don’t fit into those little slots. I didn’t have much cash left after breakfast, and the credit of …