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Show ce 136. he caught a reflection in the glass. Without thinking, he pivoted and grabbed the kid by the arm. "Chic!" He pulled his hand back like he'd been burned. "Oh, I'm sorry! I thought you were someone else." He'd backed away, his face red, and hurried on down the street. Other days it was his father who tracked him. A whiff of familiar pipe tobacco, an old sweat-stained hat that looked like the one his dad wore fishing, the sloping shoulders of a man walking ahead of him . . . It made JD sick to think his father might be tortured by the same longings he felt. One thing he did know now. His experience with the UFO was indelibly part of him, like a tatoo that can't be removed. And once he had quit denying it, the reality lost some of its terror. JD sighed as he stopped to wait for a red light to change. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," he said aloud. As always, the thinking was the hardest part. Sometimes it was just easier to talk to himself -and he'd noticed he was doing it more and more lately. Usually nothing so profound as Shakespeare. "Hell, where's the toothpaste?" he might ask himself in the morning, or "Another boring day" he'd conclude at night. He couldn't worry about it. His own voice offered some distraction, at least. One of the librarians talked to him sometimes if she wasn't rushed. She was Japanese and she had lovely eyes and consistently sweet answers. He sometimes held his breath when she spoke to him because her voice was so soft. She thought he was researching UFO's for a college paper and JD let her think that. Once when he'd bought lunch at the cafe across from the library she'd had her coffee and roll at the counter beside him; that conversation particularly he remembered. "You are such a hard worker," she'd said in her precise way of speaking. "You must know all about UFO's by now. You believe in them, do you?" "Do you?" he'd countered, never sure which foot to put forward. "Perhaps they do exist. But I have never seen one." He wanted to say "I_ have." He wanted to tell this woman with the soft eyes that he had seen one, that he'd been taken in one, and that he'd been in a state of hellish limbo ever since. |