Haulden in Roswell (UC, ADULT) (Complete)

[Patroclus76]

POSTSCRIPT
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Jamie Ralph’s diary: Seattle, Washington.

January 22nd, 2006.


The curious thing about what I am about to tell you, is that I thought of Max first, before the phone call. It was one of those weird but genuine moments where effect really does precede cause. I had woken up just before the alarm in one of those unfocused moments, half in this world, in my room, and half somewhere else, someone warm and intensely erotic, familiar. Willy boy was sitting up right for attention, but I was distracted. Jonathan, my boyfriend of three days and twenty-one hours seventeen minutes was laying out cold next me.

It would be bad etiquette to start stroking away without him. Furthermore – and perhaps – more to the point – the memory and image of Max was too intense, too – fuck I can’t believe that I am going to say this – too spiritual – to jack off to! Max had walked through my head with such intensity that I had woken up transfixed, like a guy who has had some sort of hallucination in broad daylight waiting for a bus or queuing at the bank.

Pre-dawn greyness smudged up the window and the sound of heavy rain added a sense of drama, even foreboding. Yet for a moment, for one extraordinary moment, a brilliant summer light, a memory of something beautiful, had poured into the room.

Max Evans.

Like a man getting over an addiction, I had deliberately not thought of Max Evan’s for a very long time. In fact I had sealed off the Roswell years and sort of put them away, in a deep private place safe from discovery, at times scarcely able to believe that any of it had been real. Like the kids from Narnia, the further away I got from the wardrobe, the more difficult it was to believe that I had ever been to Roswell, the full on alien version that is, with Max as the Antarian version of Hamlet and Liz the geeked up, all singing all science version of Juliet. It has all gotten really complex, and really, really nasty, incidentally.


Sitting up in bed, contemplating the chill of a Seattle winter, I felt the buzz of my addiction all over again. I couldn’t help it. It just happened. I thought back suddenly and vividly and it was as if, in some parallel dimension, my memories and my feelings had never really left me. They had co-existed with me, living curled up in my own tedium. Jonathan – who clearly would sleep though the end of the world – snorted to himself as if in a private joke. I then thought I heard him say `Daniel’. Who the fuck was Daniel? I let the matter go, sitting up, remembering. Someone, something had thrown open a wide door and there was no way I could at this particular point slam it shut.

Jesus what adventures! What an insight to human and alien morphology! No wonder I had wanted to become a geneticist! What an inspiration, encouraged for a while by Liz as well until she too changed, became sadder, greyer. My mother, incidentally, never really recovered from her moment of `roof top madness’, but we were all relieved to find that daddy was alive and not buried in the garden. With a lot of help from my friends, (fuck that sounds like a song) we tried to regain some normality as a family, but it never worked. I mean what the fuck was normal? My loved ones were being chased by FBI agents with a proclivity for live dissection, and my father took up alien hunting at weekends and worked in thr UFO center! Can you believe that! He got bored though, in the end, and announced there were no aliens in Roswell like a man who has lost his faith in god. I remember the day he announced this. I almost choked on my Cheerios. I thought he was being IRONIC! But his love affair was over and they were closing the military base he worked on.

We moved again off to Texas in 2001, just before Alex Whitman died. By then my natural geekness had secured me a scholarship to The University of Washington, Seattle, despite my age. So after graduating a year early in 2002 I moved again, on my own, and acquired a place at the Human Genome Institute. I ended up working with a group of gene mappers who, taken by my precocious genius, treated me like a sort of departmental mascot and let me in on all the interesting stuff and even the faculty bar. My doctoral supervisor was a Louis DeMarr, a strange man with no hair and no social skills who, apart from being a world class scientist, was regularly mistaken for a down and out, on account of his inability to dress properly. He had worked under Professor Julian Grey, one of the leading geneticists of his generation, whose work I was vaguely familiar with, and who had some sort of curious (and typically absentee) emeritus link with the Institute.

Things had gone swimmingly since then, well sort of. Academically I was being promised the earth. And I mean the sex was awesome if not always quite as I had imagined it to be. I had finally done something with the match stick insect physique and could catch the odd jock, but curiously it was in a vague way sort of disappointing. I mean it was hot and wild but – but fake, somehow. I hate admitting that, but it was true. Even with the most gorgeous guy laying butt naked in front of me I was thinking – or if not careful, WOULD think, of someone else. I was living and breathing but somehow I was dead. Have you ever had that feeling? I lived a sort of life, a life without the one man I loved.


The death of Alex was a trauma. I came back for the funeral, but I was sort of out of the loop by then. And frankly – I have to be candid – I disliked Tess, the genuine, real life version of the fourth alien. In fact I hated her. And she hated me as well, almost as much as she hated Liz. It was a pretty close call. The funeral was weird, and I sensed incredible tensions between my old friends. Some bizarre row broke out in Alex’s bedroom while I was talking to Jim Valenti, who along with his son, has crossed over to the Antarians. I returned to University full of gloom and depression, as if I had returned to paradise to find it full of Walmart outlets and loud hip hop radio stations. Max had gone dark, dangerous, in some senses mad. Max-Zan was becoming Zan-Max.

He had barely spoken to me at Alex’s funeral although he had watched me all the time and had tried, on several occasions, to say something to me. It was as if he had lost the knack of speaking. Or perhaps he had lost the will to communicate with humans. I remember watching him, so incredibly beautiful in his dark suit, thinking ‘he is lost, he has gone to a place I cannot follow’. And in many ways of course, that was true. I also remember a moment, just as I was saying goodbye to Kyle and to Liz, when I realised that what I felt for Max was something that could never be changed or taken back, no matter how painful or how difficult it would be. We had sworn an oath, or even perhaps a curse, that would never be diminished. Perhaps that is what Max had wanted to say to me. Later he drove me to the airport alone, utterly wretched over Alex and in tears. It was the first time I had ever seen Max cry. He sat hunched up in darkness, remote and cold in the departure lounge and as I left he said, simply and oddly: ‘I am so sorry, Jamie.’ He had kissed my forehead, like a priest absolving a sin. His or mine, I had wondered. I stood holding his hand, sickened to the core. People had been watching. I said, softly, my voice breaking, `Just keep the faith, Max.’

By mid 2002 I was hard at work and in Roswellian detox. I would get the odd postcard from Max, pictures of trees or of star clusters, always written neatly as if he was using a foreign language. He would always sign it LOVE Max, and the LOVE would be underlined, as if part of him was using code, something that Zan would not understand. I got cheap straight porn mags forwarded from Michael, with captions pencilled over them like `go on Jamie, give it a go man!’ and general gossip, all avoiding mention of aliens. Opening Michael's presents always gave me a hard on, and a sense of inner joy. It was partly the smell of the mags, that cheap shiny paper I associated with my first exciting sexual adventures, or was it still the idea that Michael had sat with them first, test driving them for me! Liz sent me letters asking for me to tell her about my work at the Institute, as if she could now live her ambitions vicariously through me. None of these bits of news told me anything – they were all deliberately, studiously irrelevant.

Yet they stopped in 2002. It all stopped suddenly. I then heard the story of the guns and siege at the graduation ceremony in the autumn just before my semester started. I heard it on a radio in a store trying to decide whether I should have a grey shirt or a sort of white one. I had flown to Roswell via every possible airfield in the pacific North-west only to find that they had gone. Valenti senior had found me weeping hysterically out on the old road, scene of another turning point in my life, and he had told me then that they were alive. `You loved them as well. Its only fair that you know.’ He did not tell, or did not know, where they had gone. Part of my life ended that day – a good part, the non-geek team player, the non-alien mid-fielder. And then there was four years of silence.

A spatter of rain hit the window, bringing me back into myself. Jonathan had turned and was showing off a very appealing slab of ass, but I felt preoccupied, sort of haunted. I slipped out of bed, shivering in the chill, and made my way to the bathroom. As I put the light on, my mobile phone rang. It was some awful techno tune, downloaded in a moment of madness. It went silent and then it rang again.

[Patroclus76]

Jamie's diary 22nd January 2006 (continued)
_____________________________________

Jonathan wakes up slowly, and like a sort of idealised mannequin rolls an arm out and picks up my cell phone. He is very cute, blonde, a corn fed mid-westerner, with a great mane of blonde hair and a firm, slightly overworked body. Odd to say this but he is a little over defined, and a little too conscious of it as well – a working illustration of the narcissus dilemma that confronts gay men (I speak as a victim, of course). When we are fucking I sometimes see him looking at himself, and I often wonder if I am in his mind during sex at all, or whether there are just two of him, mirror imaged, one inside the other. He is in reality older than me, although as a jock of course he has a mental age of 17.

He flicks the phone open and says ‘yo’ without any sense of self-consciousness at all. (I for instance, always answer phones as if I am taking a piss or something, as if I am compelled through owning a cell to do something that you would normally do in private! I always whisper and always switch it off when in shops). I stand in the bathroom door, taking in the scene. It’s a bit like a camp painting of Tyrisius and Diana with no hounds. Whoever is on the phone has now hung up, because Jonathan is looking perplexed, as if he cannot comprehend that anyone would do that to him.

‘Hey’ he sees me looking, possibly half-censoriously, ‘how’s you?’ he smiles sleepily. I walk over and run my hand over his shoulders as if he is a giant dog. I take the phone off him. ‘I am fine, and you? Sleep well?’ I look at the display – number withheld. The prospect of an early morning shag sits between us for a moment and then goes as I become conscious of the time. Jonathan slides off the bed and goes to make coffee, butt naked, his muscles heavy and statuesque as he strides off. Instead of admiring every conceivable tendon I am thinking about the phone, and I also thinking about someone else. Shit, why now?

The bathroom is a gay man’s shrine of pointless tubes,sprays, expensive bottles and lotions. My mother would be proud! My moisturising mountain is not quite as impressive as hers, but it’s getting there. As a jock, Jonathan is of course rather cruder in his consumption of metrosexual toiletries than myself, and I have had to confiscate some of his more shocking body sprays or use them on my plants as fly repellent. I shower and fill the room with pleasant warm steam, but I feel tense, almost unwell. Towelling down in the bedroom I hear the rain lashing now, remorselessly, even rather gleefully, against the sash window. I dress slowly, opening a drawer and peeling out a pair of fresh socks and underwear. I suddenly feel conspiratorial. I look behind me, and then go to a shirt box at the back of my wardrobe and fetch out a small plastic bag, knotted tightly. I undo it quickly, my heart racing until I am holding a small pair of white lycra-cotton mix boxers. I press them to my face, like a fresh damp towel. Max has almost gone. I slip them on, semi-erect at the thought of him, the memory. Like a magician, I close my eyes tightly and pray. `Where are you?' I feel a great rush of joy.


Jonathan is still naked by the time I hit the kitchen. He is spooning cereal into a curved, beautiful mouth while watching some morning newsflash. He nods in the direction of the coffee. I have dressed in my sort-of-geek ‘Young Scientist of the Year` outfit. Seeing Jono sitting, his buttocks pressed onto the seat of his chair, and his tackle manfully out, gives me a hard-on. With Max pressed neatly against my ass and around my balls I feel slightly apologetic. I ignore both of them and watch as some rather over-made up anchor woman shouts into a camera about some sort of siege in a downtown hotel. As I focus on the background, I notice it’s not too far from the University district, in Laurelhurst.

I am sort of intrigued, in part through the prospect of my trip to work being disrupted. This seems unlikely, since I live in the other direction, in a fashionable warehouse conversion just west of the shipping canal. ‘What the fuck do terrorists want in Seattle, man!’ Jonathan says this with the trace of an Iowa accent. My hard-on remains, stubborn little bastard, as I imagine Jonathan’s nipples in my mouth. ‘Terrorists?’ I ask, distracted.
‘Yeah, the FBI have been covering this hideout for international terrorists for some time and they just stormed the place about two hours ago.’ Typical I think as I drink life giving coffee. And no doubt like all the FBI raids I have ever read about, they no doubt found the building empty or terrorised some poor innocent property owner.

‘Really?’ I try the sort of tone my supervisor uses when I come out with something that the entire genetic world ALREADY knows, light boiled sarcasm, but I am thinking hard. I don’t like this news. I don't like it at all. The word FBI, terrorists, and above all the timing of the raid, disturb me. Jesus I am becoming some sort of superstitious freak! Then I feel a wave of panic, more fear than tension, as if I am not going to be able to breath properly. Then, suddenly, I have this very odd feeling, like really weird feeling, a sort of light headedness, the sort of buzz you get when you inhale some weed too quickly, and I grip hold of the table. Jonathan is wiping a small dribble of milk off what he claims to be a goatee. ‘You ok, Jamie boy?’
I shake myself. ‘Yes, I think so – I’ and then as I straighten up to answer him I see Isabel.

She is standing near the bedroom door, looking about her intently and then at the windows. She walks across the room towards them, and looks down to the street and about her as if she is trying to work out exactly where she is int he city itself. She looks tired. Her face is wet. She has short, dark hair. She is shockingly changed from the last time I saw her, weeping at Alex’s funeral. She takes in Jonathan (with a sort of double take when she sees he is entirely naked) and then she sees me. In that instance she realises that I can see her and freezes. ‘Isabel!’ She looks startled, her mouth open.

‘Jamie? Jamie can you see me?’

‘Sure I can fucking see you! How the hell did you find me – hey how are you!’ The Ice Women Returneth! And god am I glad to see her! I cannot hide my joy. `Its been ages - ’ I want to ask for Max. My spell has worked! Awesome!

`Jamie?’ she says though, cautiously, looking completely freaked out in the way she used to when I confessed to envying Liz Parker for having Max tongue her in the jeep. Her eyes are wide, her hands stiffly out to one side, `You can’t see me, I’m not really here! But - we’re looking for you – we need your help!’

`Isabel what are you talking about! You’re standing right in the middle of my – .’ I then become aware than Jonathan is looking at me, then at the window, all bug eyed and open mouthed. One look at jock boy and I understand immediately that he can’t see her!

`Jamie man what the fuck have you been taking? You been hitting the k again?’

Isabel looks at me her head moving perceptively. Then I understand.

`Oh My God, you’re dream walking me! What’s happening – are you in danger!’

Shit – the siege! Isabel goes to move, fades from the feet up, says `Wait for us’ and then literally vanishes. I turn, blinking, looking at boyfriend who is sweetly anxious I have lost my marbles. `Fuck its ok, it was some sort of flashback.’ I gasp, my heart racing. He holds me to him for a while, the smell of his body soft and warm. `You want me to fuck you better?’ I smile, incredibly excited: `Not yet man, but later – definitely later!!’

[Patroclus76]

I set off to work through sheeting rain. The city is greyed by low cloud and fume, and the air is raw cold. I catch my bus from Fremont and sit watching the black smudges of pedestrians and cars bleed by in the wet. My mind is racing - I feel sick with excitement and also with genuine fear: I cannot quite believe how much Isabel has changed. I cannot quite believe that Max is here, in this city, so close to me! This thought sends me into a cold shiver, and I feel like howling or running off the bus in a full on panic attack.


As we crawl our way towards the University district, I keep opening and closing my cell phone willing for a message. I have yet to sit down and think why I managed to see Isabel during her dream stroll - something I had seen her do on other people, most effectively the day - the truly awful day that Max was captured by the Feds. Max is here - in this city - he might be in danger. My mouth is dry and my heart is banging away as if I have run up several flights of stairs holding my breath. What can it mean?


The only visible signs of the siege are a few stray news vans and camera crews driving back towards the shipping canal. My bus halts for lights and I look across the grey waters - almost indistinguishable from the shore. I can faintly make out, like the giant tripods of Well’s War of the Worlds, the gaunt cranes and automated davits of the docks. In the winter pall they look ruinous, like the remains of ancient cities or the bleached skeletal forms of long dead carnivores. Suddenly, oddly, I think of my research and of the extraordinary abilities of transfer-RNA, assembling and constructing a living morphology to a coded, minute genetic blueprint. An astounding mystery, miraculous – like Max and the hybrids And I remember looking into a microscope long ago and seeing a great tessellation of green cells where there should have been blood red human cells. Fuck. Even now, perhaps more so than then, I am shocked. I am so shocked I even say ‘fucking hell’ under my breath and several people look at me.


I get off near the main Arts building, where the bus terminates and then starts its trip back west. It is still pissing it down, and I turn the collar of my coat and nuzzle down, clutching my satchel and my (well wrapped) lap top. How the fuck am I going to get any work done - waiting - waiting for what? What am I going to do with Jonathan as well? (and what do I think of Jonathan, more to the point? God is he sexy, but does he mean anything, do we have anything in common apart from a massive surplus of testosterone?) I guess what I am fumbling at is: could I love him? The Human Genome Institute is next to the science park and is a glittering, elegant single story building designed like a Moghul pavilion (at least that is what it says in the entrance lobby, on the plaque next to the grumpy porter, the one who always demands your ID and then doesn’t even fucking look at it). It is all reflective glass and exterior metal superstructures, although the university wags call it Kingdome II, after the infamous Seattle landmark.


As I scramble towards the entrance I pass an exquisite vintage car, breathlessly elegant, parked on the Strictly No Parking bay in full view of the porters. Anyone who parks here is immediately wheel clamped before they can kill the engine and open the door. I sneak a look at the brave, reckless soul who has dared defy what is frankly an immutable law of the universe. Yet perhaps the majesty of this car defies reproach. It is a Rolls Royce Silver Phantom, a rare inter-war model, probably (judging from the sweep of the mud guards and the side of the wheels), mid 1930s, with a light blue metallic finish and silver trim. I stop and stare, my mouth open. There is something so incongruous about it being here, a mid the glittering utilitarianism of the Science Park, a powerful, evocative symbol of a lost, a more hierarchal age. Fuck what a geek – I am almost moved to tears. It demands to be stroked, or touched furtively. It should contain a man with a large wide brimmed hat and a massive big coat made of racoon pelts. It speaks of an age of extremes, fascism and communism, a world sliding into war.


As my eyes focus and refocus in awe I become aware that there is a man in the driving seat reading a paper. I want to see inside, to look at the upholstery and the hardwood finish. I dawdle, pretending I have something in my eye. The guy at the wheel is definitely a flunky of some kind, probably a chauffeur: I wonder if it’s the Vice Chancellor’s car? The city Mayor? (no, he would never dare drive a foreign car!). The rain has eased off and I stick my neck out a bit, looking at the polished metalwork dappled with millions of droplets of water. It is a stylised sweep of metal, a line of beauty. I notice that flunky man is looking at me intently while pretending to read the paper. He suddenly winds down the window.

`What are you up to?’ he asks sharply. He is an elderly man with white hair and a bold roman nose. He startles me with his voice, which is bigger than I imagined.

`I am not up to anything!’ I say tartly. `If you want to know I was admiring the car and your bravery for parking here in a strictly no parking bay and – furthermore – a clearway for Emergency vehicles.’

I flare my nostrils slightly to convey some annoyance. Miserable old bastard! To my surprise he gets out the car, rather stiffly. He is tall, less like a flunky than when he was sitting behind the wheel. His hair is like snow, almost luminous in the grey morning.

`Alright, alright, young man. There is no need to adopt a tone.’ He looks at the car with evident affection. `She is a beauty is she not?

`She is indeed!’ (Why do men refer to cars as women?) `1934 silver phantom?’

He looks at me keenly, and I see the flash of dark tawny eyes beneath bushy, slightly eccentric eyebrows. `1937 actually, but well guessed – you are a car enthusiast?’ I look slightly alarmed by this question – so open and in such a public space – as if I am confessing to being a kit model enthusiast or a professional stalker.

`I am intrigued by the period.’ I say, with rather too much effort, and he smiles at me.

`By the period?’ There is something in the way he says this, just something in the intonation, that sets all the hairs on the back my head on end. I cannot explain why. I feel a deep chill sweep over me – a powerful, tingling sense of déjà vu. We are looking at each other directly, both in silence. I am utterly incapable of doing anything. What the fuck is wrong with me today! Then suddenly something snaps and I nod curtly and turn to walk into the building. I am blushing for some bizarre fucking reason, a problem I have not had for years.

I walk quickly with my head down and collide into an elderly man carrying an attaché case coming out of the institute. Our combined speed is not great but we fall into each other, he drops his case and my satchel goes flying through the air, discarding my cell phone, which breaks into about five separate parts on hitting the pavement. I struggle to stop him falling over by grabbing his case, while at the same time trying not to fall over either. Fuck its like being on a bouncy castle. He is slightly winded and says sharply

‘Do look where you are going!’ His accent is odd, I think possibly British. I retrieve his case and apologise profusely in my special soothing voice for old people. ‘I am so sorry, I was –‘

‘You were looking the other way, I believe!’ He takes the case off me and I see his glasses are slightly skewed. Bizarrely I adjust them and he jumps back at this rather sudden intrusion into his personal space.

‘Thank you, but I can see to that’. He has an intelligent face with strange, rather vulnerable eyes as if he is either very shortsighted or permanently anxious. He clothes are expensive and oddly dated, with heavy tweeds and a tie pin. Over an exquisite jacket he is wearing a massive dog toothed winter coat of dark green wool. Here is evidently the owner of the car. He seems strangely from the same period.

‘Its all right, Wilcox’ He is speaking to someone behind me, and as I turn I see the driver has appeared silently from behind his wheel. Having readjusted his coat and once more checked his glasses, the old man notices my smashed cell phone and my satchel and his face relaxes slightly. `Oh dear, I think you’ve come off rather more seriously than I have. Wilcox – ‘

I am conscious that several people inside my institute are looking out of the windows at us. Then I notice that DeMarr, my supervisor, is running out of the building looking panic stricken.

`Professor Grey, is everything alright?’ DeMarr, better turned out than I have seen him in years (with no sign of breakfast on his tie or pullover and with hair combed if not washed) is standing like a Retriever in front of us.

`Yes, nothing broken, well – except this boy’s cell phone. Is he a student here?’ The question is addressed to DeMarr, as if I am suddenly invisible or inanimate. I feel like clearing my throat and going `Hello!!’

`Yes, yes this is one of our brightest students, Julian – he is specialising in base sequences.’ The Professors eyes become less harsh. It hasn’t occurred to DeMarr to give me a fucking name yet – jesus, scientists! I have seen more social skills in a pickle jar.

`Really?’ Professor Grey – THE Professor Grey, the man who narrowly missed the Nobel Prize for Bio-Chemistry in 2000 for his mapping of Chromosome 22, a man of mystery linked to some scandal in Boston, the man I have just winded – looks at me with sudden interest.

`Oh dear. I ought really to contribute to the phone, I assume it isn’t insured?’

`Its alright’ says Wilcox. He is holding my satchel and the phone out to me like he is a long lost Uncle and I am about to go on a picnic to the Zoo. `I think its working’

`Wilcox it can’t possibly be working – ‘ Grey looks at his flunky but oddly defers when, rather stubbornly, Wilcox says again `I think it is working, the top unclipped – here.’ he looks at me and smiles a conspiratorial smile. Shit this man gives me the creeps! I take the phone and find to my surprise that, despite having seen it disintegrate on impact, it is intact and working. I narrow my eyes suspiciously, as if I am being tricked by a cheap conjurer.

`Thanks, Wilcox’ I say slowly, as if this is not his name at all.

He smiles suddenly, a great ray of light, effortlessly, almost boyishly. He seems almost on the point of laughing. Deep memories stir in him.`

`Not at all James, it’s a pleasure!’

How the fuck did he know my name! Grey says something to me but I do not really hear it. I hear the sound of the sea in my ears. DeMarr stands next to me as Wilcox sets the Professor down in the back pf the Rolls and then starts the car. With a ghost like whisper, they drive her away. People stop and watch.

`Good god Jamie, you gave us a start there’ said DeMarr as the car swings out of view. `What a way to meet our Emeritus! I thought you had mugged him!’

`Who is Wilcox?’ I ask. We are walking into the institute. DeMarr is dribbling on about Greys Greatness. He has not heard my question. Suddenly my cell phone vibrates. I snatch it out and see a text message. I get into the in box. The message is from a unknown number. The message says

Meet me tonight at 7.30 in Old Possums Wine Bar, near the campus book store. Come alone.

[Patroclus76]

January 25th, 2006. Seattle, Washington.

My life is weird now, seriously weird: and I have forgotten how to deal with weirdness. I have only just got down to writing up my journal. Two days of renewed alien chaos later, I am barely able to keep my head above water: and this is just the beginning. I know it. So why am I so exhilarated? Ought I not to be afraid? As Yoda once famously said to Luke Skywalker: you will be, you will be.

Ok, where were we. Oh yes. After being utterly freaked out by Wilcox and Co, and then driven to distraction by DeMarr reminiscing about his time with THE Professor Grey, ad nauseam, I was already feeling wired – as if I had snorted an entire packet of coffee or sat in the sun for two days listening to ABBA. Grey was DeMarr’s god, he could literally do no wrong, and any suggestion that he had been involved in some dubious experiments on children was part of a complex media conspiracy to discredit his work.

I sat for most of the day TRYING to download and re-calculate data sets from crystalline DNA files, tedious but intricate stuff. It was hard enough concentrating with all the gossip and the excitement Grey had left behind him. But my mind was already BURSTING with images of Max and the prospect of seeing him again, as well as the anxiety of never seeing him again because the alien hunting FBI brigade had got to him first! Then there was the continuous anticipation of meeting Isabel tonight at Old Possums, incongruously for her, a gay bar and one well know for its lesbian pool players. Fuck had Isabel `turned' I wondered? Come out? Could that explain the short, dyed hair?

Would 7:30 pm ever come! I was constantly checking my mysteriously repaired cell phone, and I had reached the point where I was CONVINCED I was missing messages somehow. Typical paranoia, is it working, is it switched on? Did it just vibrate? In the end I hid it in my locker, because DeMarr warned me about it affecting the computers and it was detracting him from his own stories. Jesus. Bla bla bla. As I poured over log tables I kept hearing about Grey. This was the final coda of weirdness to my Symphony of Weirdness in C major. I heard stories about Grey ALL FUCKING AFTERNOON. I had never heard DeMarr talk so much. By 5pm, propped up against an electronic microscope and a spectrometer, I knew that Grey was a) a genius, b)his wife had recently died of cancer c)he was living in a ridiculous pile of a mansion out somewhere in the state which he was now trying to sell d)he had retired from Boston after some explosion at a secret facility and had narrowly missed prosecution oh and e) he was probably mad.

E seemed pretty self evident, although the image of Grey, a rather remote, pre-war figure, oddly foreign, blinking at me through skewed glasses struck me as remarkably sane somehow, and shrewd. I struggled not to think about Wilcox at all. I had worked out the plausible but unlikely theory that I had met Wilcox in some dubious gay context best not remembered although god knows where! Or perhaps he was a friend of my fathers? Fuck knows. Anyway, by 5:30 all of these subplots had morphed into a massive headache and a need for silence. I went outside for a fake smoke. The weather was cold and razor sharp, odd for Seattle. The rain has eased off and as dusk approached a thin high line of cold sunlight appeared, arching over the Sound. As darkness fell it was chilly, even frosty and people were looking at the sky talking of snow. It rarely snows here but when it does everyone goes collectively mad.

I stayed in the institute until 6:30 pm when DeMarr usually went home. Tonight he lingered for a while though, somewhat over excited. When I told him I was meeting an old friend for a drink he tried, rather eccentrically, to invite himself. When he found out it was Old Possums he looked conspiratorial and said he didn’t want to spoil my fun so left rather sadly and shapelessly in a duffel coat. I felt rather mean about that. I mean, DeMarr was very kind to me and I was terribly fond of my supervisor. He was a sort of surrogate parent, or rather given his general lack of competence, a surrogate child. My boundaries with him had long since extended beyond work. I drove him to meetings because he didn’t like driving on freeways. I even rang him sometimes to remind him of important events like his mother’s birthday or when to change the clocks. In fact, I secretly managed his life. I had even taken to trying to improve his wardrobe by insinuating new clothes whenever I went around to see him and making sure he ate proper food. I saw him rather a lot actually, on account of being Book Reviews editor of an in-house medical journal on gene therapies, which DeMarr lovingly crafted from his spare room. I would make it up to him later, I would take him to Sea World and let him tap the glass walls of the giant fish tanks, which was really against the rules.


I made my way towards the Humanities and Social Studies Library, and then lingered outside the bookstore. My heart was pounding at the prospect of seeing Isabel again. Of all my hybrid friends, old Ice Queeny had been the hardest to crack, but in the end, especially in the wake of Alex’s death (to whom I had been a real and genuine friend) she let me in. Underneath all the glamour she was as cautious as Max. I was still shocked at the image of her earlier, standing in my apartment, utterly changed. How were they dealing with being chased again? Had they been chased constantly since leaving Roswell in 2002? What sort of life had they lead, all of them, Michael, Maria, Liz, Kyle, Isabel and…and Max? God my stomach churned at the thought of him. Had his dreadful darkness lifted? That brooding Zanness? Tess was with them as well I guess. God how I disliked her, how she had resented me and tried to exclude me towards the end. She had even tried to stop Max driving me to the airport after the wake. But if they needed my help I had to make an effort now and get on with her! If Liz could manage, I could. Jesus my head was full of questions! I knew so little. I had been so long out of the frame. My conversation with Jim Valenti the night after the shooting had been vague, disjointed; as if I had been hallucinating. Or perhaps he told me and I simply never heard him.


It was nearly 7:30 pm. I crossed over the wide boulevard. As I did so I was thinking suddenly why had they kept in touch with me but never mentioned anything? Had they all decided to keep me out? It had seemed that way? Only now, in shock from Isabel saying that they needed my help, did I realise how hurt I had been. I knew almost nothing about what had been going on. Others had been hurt. How had Liz (or Kyle) for that matter managed to be in such close proximity to each other, to Max and Tess, and not be pained by the awful memories of that summer? Liz and Kyle, and then Max and Tess – I had sat and watched everything go horribly, horribly wrong. Perhaps in their fight for survival they had put all that behind them?


I pushed my way into Old Possums and made my way to the bar. It was pretty quiet. Gay bars are either fantastically vibrant and amusing places, or rather sad and dreary. Possums was sad. It tried too hard and looked like a Pride Parade on a wet sunday somewhere in the Bible belt. There was also an odd furtiveness about it, or was that just my mood, trying to spy out Isabel and look calm and rational. Try not to scream with excitement, Jamie boy. Please! And don't try to impress her I ordered a beer and moved away from the glare of the halogen lights above the counter. Most of the tables were empty. There was no sign of Isabel unless she was disguised as a pillar or hidden under a drape. I sat down in a prominent place feeling like I was on a blind date or on the look out for a one night stand (or both). I started playing with my cell phone and texted Jonathan who had, oddly, not messaged me all day. I told him not to wait up. I was never quite sure what Jonathan did with his time. He played a lot of ice hockey and he spent a lot of time in his gym and he had a sports scholarship to a local college but – odd I had never got around to asking him. I took my time with my beer. I didn’t want to look pissed when Isabel appeared. I kept expecting herl to sidle up to me disguised as a parlor palm. I needed a calm head. Fuck knows what plan they had hatched to escape. Had they escaped? It was nearing 8 pm.


What to do? I felt sick with anxiety. How long should I wait? The last bus was at 11 pm. I contemplated switching to mineral water. Someone tall pressed themselves against the glass doorway. There was an icy blast of air, and Wilcox, wearing a heavy coat and scarf, appeared like an apparition in front of a group of young men wearing tight t-shirts and attempting to line dance. Even as I tried to shrink my head into my collar he spotted me and smiled. His grey face was pinched with cold, and his hair was swept back, showing a high, rather aristocratic forehead. He looked younger than at our first meeting, curiously different, authoritative, almost – almost wizard like. I sat gawping at him in sheer horror while he unwound his scarf (which appeared to be ludicrously long) and removed his coat, which cloak like, he draped over his chair at my table!

What the fuck! So I was right about my intuitive linkage of Wilcox to Gay World, but – it still didn't explain this spooky sense that he knew me and – oh god – why now! Isabel was trying enough without having to get rid of some old dude who either has the hots for me or thinks I am his nephew or something. When I came out of my panicked induced stupor, Wilcox had gone to the bar and was ordering tea! Knowing my luck now, Isabel would come swinging by on a rope with half of the US secret service behind her! Wilcox returned, amiably navigating his way through the serried ranked of the gay tribe with his tray, nodding at them as if he drank tea here all the time. What was going ON! I had decided on the direct approach.

‘Wilcox, look – I am here because I need to see an old, dear friend who is in a spot of trouble, personal stuff and – well’ he went to interrupt while pouring his beverage but I pressed on, ignoring the fact that he was the chief flunky to the leading emeritus Professor of my institute and personal GOD to my poor supervisor,

‘And I know that you know my name Wilcox, somehow, and I know that well, you might fancy me as a MUCH younger and attractive man and all that, and, I mean I am not ageist but.’

He had an odd expression on his face by now, a sort of concentrated frown as if he might burst out laughing at any moment and this just made me feel incredibly insecure and more anxious. Perhaps he was a little mad? He sipped his tea and raised his eyebrows which were un-naturally large and vegetative. I felt I was about to hyperventilate.

‘Wilcox what I am trying to say is that this is NOT a good time for any personal journey or sexual adventure, you know, uncles and nephews stuff, I mean I have read about these things –‘

‘Jamie’ he said, very matter of fact, like we had lived together or ran a book shop for forty years.

‘Look Wilcox I really don’t don’t want to be rude but –‘

‘Jamie –‘

‘What!’

‘Isabel didn’t send you the message, I did, so just relax. I am a bit late, because of the traffic and the weather. You don’t have to worry, Isabel is miles away’. There was a very odd buzzing in my ear, as if I could suddenly hear a dog whistle in Central Park, New York or on the fucking moon. My mouth had gone completely dry. I recalled seeing my mobile smash to pieces and then reappear reincarnated, with Wilcox looking not unlike Father Christmas. Shit! I felt like a chess player who, three moves from mate, realised the board had be stolen from underneath his very nose.

‘OK’ I took a dramatic swig from my beer and looked at his straight in the eye but they were too knowing somehow. ‘So let’s cut to the chase Wilcox. How do you know my name and how did you know I was waiting for Isabel? And why do you want to see me by the way?’ I felt that covered the essentials. It ignored how he had saved my cell phone. In the back of mind a fear was taking shape that he was in fact some sort of alien. I had seen the skins – I knew about them – although Tess claimed to have killed them all. Wilcox sipped more tea and then, placing his elbows on the table, rested his head in his hands and looked at me. He seemed rather frightening actually, somehow slightly larger than life. I looked at him, looking at his face but avoiding his eyes now because they somehow distressed me the most.

‘Jamie what I am about to tell you will find very hard to believe. Even you, who know about Max and the hybrids, about Antar and about the siege, will find my story literally unbelievable! Yet I desperately need your help, as much as Isabel and the gang need your help, perhaps even more.’ He said this without excitement, with a sort of precision as if he had practiced it. I felt like I had been hypnotised. What could I say? I said simply and directly:

‘If you are a Skin, or an enemy of my friends, you will have no help from me. I would rather die now than continue with whatever little charade you have planned for tonight. I will never betray my friends and I will never betray Max’. Several people looked over, suspecting an argument. I was tensing, preparing to run to the door or just do my full on Grade-A scream (extremely effective at close range). To my surprise Wilcox looked at me in silence.

‘If you help me, you will be helping Max, and I know how much Max means to you, as much as I know how important you are to him.’

I felt winded. Good try - appeal to Max - but was that true - was I ever that important to him, if I had been why the silence and the omissions? Wilcox leaned forward slightly, ‘I am not trying to trick you. For instance, I know that you are wearing a very, very special pair of under garments that, in fact, Max stole from Michael because when he wanted to make a gift of his to you as a surprise he was ashamed of his underwear!’ I felt myself blushing, very slightly. I had heard of Nicholas but had never met him. Some Skins could read minds but they had to touch your head, I was sure of that.

‘I am not a Skin, Jamie. But I can read your mind. What can I do to get you to trust me? Incidentally, I should say that since Max never told you the full story of the tighty whities, I am not technically mind reading because you didn’t know, did you!’

Again, as with the incident by the car earlier in the day, the way Wilcox spoke at times covered me in goose bumps, as if he was a ghost and someone had just literally walked through him. I sat staring at him like an astronomer trying to see a dim object by just looking off centre.

‘Is it true, about his pants?’ I asked, rather redundantly.

‘Yes, Max was ashamed that his mother still bought his underwear in packs of twelve from the local store. And they were all grey and –‘ he whispered theatrically ‘Very non(-)designer! Michael had much better taste, until he met Maria that is. Max was so desperate not to disappoint you!’

‘You’re just making this up!’ I said weakly although it It sounded eminently plausible. The image of Max slipping his pants down rushed into my mind until, from the look on Wilcox’s face, I was aware it had rushed into his as well.

‘Ask him tomorrow,’ Wilcox seemed to be enjoying himself just a little, ‘When you meet him.’

`I meet him tomorrow!’ I almost shouted this out.

`Yes, you meet him in a park in deep snow and..’ his voice turned serious, profoundly affectionate, ‘and you cry. In fact you both cry, rather a lot.’ I was stunned by this; utterly stunned. I was trying to think incredible hard.

`How on earth do you know this?’ I felt part of the answer was very close to me indeed.

Wilcox ignored my question. Instead he asked: ‘So what do I have to do, Jamie, to get you to help me?’ He leaned back, his elbows off the table, and smiled a small, epigrammatic smile, but it was an anxious smile as well, one of doubt and uncertainty, like a boy out of his depth, a smile I had watched and adored over the years. It was a smile Max used when he was unsure and uncertain and, deep down, afraid. Something in the back of my brain snapped softly, like a twig under foot.

‘Well. Let me see. You would have to show yourself to me as you really are Max, and then you would have to explain how you became Wilcox, and how, as now seems likely, there are TWO of you! You will have to explain this methodically, what the problem is, and how you propose to solve it. And then I can see what I can do’

His smile broadened, but I saw his eyes water slightly, as if deep emotions stirred him. It was an exquisite expression. I suddenly felt utterly washed out, exhausted. ‘Well met, Jamie. Never did I have a truer friend. God it’s good to see you again, after all this time, more time for me than for you, infinitely more time, more than I care to remember.’ He stood up, pulling up his coat onto his broad shoulders, and then he held out his hand to me. ‘Let us go for a walk and I shall tell you the problem as I see it.’ We got to the door. As we stepped into the street, Wilcox held out his free hand and said `I believe it is going to snow.’

[Patroclus76]

I took his hand, a bizarre; surreal moment, and yet when I felt his fingers lock through mine I realised immediately that my intuition had been right – here, somehow, was Max. Changed, weathered, like some material of the earth, transformed and altered by great heat and pressure and time, but quintessentially still Max. Now there were two Maxes, as if one was not enough to drive me to the point of an existential breakdown! No one in Old Possum’s batted an eyelid as we left; linked together. Outside the air was bitingly cold. From the deep darkness of the sky stray tiny, rather serious looking snowflakes were tentatively falling to the ground. The air had a strange, thick quality to it, as if the clouds were very low. Our voices sounded muffled.

‘So how old are you, Max, or should I call you Wilcox?’ despite having a warm coat on, the icy wind was gripping my shoulders and stomach and making me tense to keep warm.

‘You’d better call me Wilcox, or we shall get terribly confused, especially when my younger self storms into your life and sweeps you off your feet.’ He laughed softly, ‘and technically speaking, I am middle aged – I came back to Roswell in 1999 from 2044, which would make me in my mid fifties. I have aged Wilcox a little, actually, so to throw off the enemy, and to have some authority over Grey who can be difficult to manage! But of course I have been many people.’

‘How does Grey fit into all this, you know he is a super genius scientist –‘ I stopped, partly because a great shiver went over me, and partly because it occurred to me that Wilcox knew as much about Grey as anyone on the planet, even probably more than Grey himself! We had crossed the main campus road and were walking into a tree lined drive, dark and empty. In the summer this was a beautiful place of dappled shade and laughter, now it was drained of color, almost formless in the night. Wilcox paused, and let go of my hand.


‘Here, share half a scarf Jamie –‘ he started to unwind it from out of himself and coiled a big white and blue patchwork of knitted wool around my neck, several times. ‘Liz knitted this and almost screwed it up completely - but she was very bored and Mrs. Grey kept giving her more wool so she kept knitting as not to offend –‘He finished wrapping it about my neck and tucked it in my sweater like a napkin and then pulled my collar up. We must have looked the weirdest pair, snaked together. Wilcox then took my hand again as if I was a schoolboy and resumed walking.

‘Grey has everything to do with this in a sense, and of course he is already involved, with the Boston experiments, but he doesn’t know about Max yet and Max has yet to really know about him. I have been Grey’s handyman since 2003. Oh by the way, there are two of Lizes as well, but she is in Roswell having had to fake her own death here in order to get away from Bone Hill House.’

‘That’s Grey’s estate isn’t it, somewhere in eastern Washington, some weird house or something? You’ve been here since 1999, following yourself and the gang?’

Wilcox nodded and then added ‘Bone Hill House is a folly, modelled on a an Elizabethan mansion in England, it’s beautiful – my sons grow up there, and Maria and Michael get married there as well!’ He laughed. `Some time’s its fun knowing the future! You’re taking this all very well Jamie!’

‘Well,’ I said, my voice muffled by Liz’s excess of creativity, ‘as you know I am a very clever young man, I mean you were always attracted to my brain since nothing else I had managed to attract you – ‘ he chuckled to himself ‘ And I am not not easily shocked, but time travel isn’t really my thing. Although I understand it a little with reference to physics - so you are going to have to explain this very carefully Wilcox, and from the beginning – if there is a beginning of course! However I assume that something terrible has happened and you are here to correct it?’

I said this as a random guess, surreally based on my detailed knowledge of Start-Trek Voyager. I was momentarily Captain Janeway. ‘Temporal mechanics is not my area of expertise. I am researching on work pioneered by Grey under the supervision of his
former student Louis DeMarr, on base sequencing and gene activation in hybrid formations. You know that as well, I guess?’ It was now very dark. There was virtually no street lighting here and the snow, invisible, was falling in an even, dense curtain, grainy and dry, like fine wet flour. Through the utter, intense silence of the falling snow, I felt the world had literally melted away and that in some curious way Wilcox and I were outside Time.

Wilcox was silent for a moment, and then he said. ‘I know about your research, and so does Max and the gang – or – as Grey will call them, the Roswellians. It’s funny Jamie, listening to you reminds me of Grey sometimes! Max – I mean I – know how clever you are! That is why they want to meet you, incidentally. They want your expertise on genetics. Max has an idea, a rather bad one.’

‘Really?’ we have stopped in a sort of clearing where, dimly in the near distance, I could make out a park bench, a ghostly negative on the grey white landscape. Wilcox raised his hand and a great stab of light evaporated the water and general crud from the seat and, after feeling it to be dry, he invited me to sit. I ignored this rather impressive, private firework display as best I could.

‘They would be better going to Grey if Max has need for genetic advice. Hybridity is his area – he is working on a form of gene therapy called `switching’ 'I then added softly, `is Grey safe? I mean, is he one of the good guys?’ I remembered the stories and rumors of his involvement in unethical experiments, and Wilcox had mentioned Boston without going into details. Before I could finish Wilcox said

‘Yes, Grey is safe. Grey is a good guy, although he is a little lost at the moment, he is ashamed of himself without knowing it, and he has lived so long without love that he is almost at the point where he can love nothing or no one. But’ he sighed deeply, `all that is about to change. Poor Grey! He has not the slightest idea what is about to happen! Max does know something of Grey, but its just a vague contact provided by Isabel’s ex-husband.’

‘Isabel’s ex-husband?’ I stammered this. ‘This is from your time? The future?’

‘No, from your time. Isabel got married a few years ago to a young lawyer’ he evidently felt my surprise and – I did not try to hide it – my hurt. Suddenly, rather childishly in the circumstances, I couldn’t help blurting out

‘Why was I never told anything useful in your post cards, Max! Or Michael - I mean I aprecciated the porn mags - but really! What else should I know! Oh god – I mean – it doesn’t matter – she could have invited me!’ God this was no time to start throwing a tantrum but really, it wouldn’t have hurt – I could have been an usher or carried glasses around.

‘Jamie it was all a bit rushed, and –‘

‘She never liked me anyway' I said petulantly `Nor did Tess for that matter!’ My lower lip trembled EVER so slightly. Bastard Isabel. Bastard Tess. The long years of silence hung about me like a reproach. Wilcox squeezed my hand, and I sensed him smiling at me affectionately.

‘We wanted to protect you. We talked about you a lot, and as you suspected, I was an ass for a time. More than that Jamie, I was lost, utterly lost.’ The air was thick with snow now, dense, fog like, it deadened all sound and as it gathered quickly in drifts on the ground the light began to change, slowly at first, but as more settled, the blackness of the night became a sort of cobalt blue. I was about to apologise but Wilcox said before I could speak,

‘It doesn’t matter Jamie. Max will tell you everything tomorrow, a lot of things have happened since you left Roswell, and since you last saw your friends at Alex’s funeral.’ He seemed serious and thoughtful.

‘Can’t you tell me now?’ He put his arm around me and I put my head down on his shoulder. In doing so I gained a few more inches of precious scarf.

‘No, I tell you tomorrow Jamie, and it was painful enough telling you once. And when Max tells you, you must understand where Max is coming from, Jamie. He loves you more than he realises and when he sees you, remember this – that whatever you feel – he will be feeling the same – so go easy on him, on me!’

I smiled to myself, thinking of Max and the way he would sometimes say nothing for hours. I lived in that silence with him. He would just sit there thinking and agonising, and when he finally came up with a plan it was always to find that Michael had done the opposite or everything had changed!. And he would then have this beautiful puzzled expression on him that made me want to melt.

‘So what is all this about?’ I asked, conscious that Wilcox had been smiling with me at my own memories.

‘Well, you just mentioned that something terrible must have happened and that I had come back in time to stop it – well actually I have come back to make sure that everything that did happen, happens again – although perhaps for different reasons, but: in Shalloth speak, ‘I am here to maintain the time line’ and that has taken a huge amount of effort!’

‘Shalloth?’

‘Skins to you, Shalloth to me. One of the races of Antar. By the way, everything we say and see and talk about must NEVER be known to Max or any of the gang, otherwise we are in trouble. Do you understand Jamie – it is the basic rule of time travel. Be careful with Max, your love for him places you at a disadvantage, and of course, be careful with our beautiful and loyal Michael, he knows more than he lets on! You’ll have to get used to keeping secrets. Try and imagine you have found Liz’s journal all over again but that it contains much more serious information than the secret love life of Max and Michael!’

I jabbed him in the ribs, but the force was lost through the various layers of his coat.

‘Ok, point taken. Although you can now safely confess to me that you enjoyed every minute with Michael in the Eraser room! Anyway, skins, bad guys, the enemy?’

‘Yes, sort of, although I have one with me who accompanied me back from 2044 who is a good friend and a technician, so most but not all are enemies. I also have two Seeth with me.’

‘Seeth?’ Fuck, I felt I ought to be taking notes.

‘Another Antarian race, we’ll hear a lot about those soon, but – Jamie – Max is hybridised from the Royal House, but’ he thought carefully’ `I think the best thing for both of us is for you to know exactly what I need you to know and then, over time, if you can pardon the expression, you will grasp the bigger picture! Otherwise it gets very complex. I need you to act as a catalyst.’

It was snowing so heavily now that I can hardly see Wilcox’s shoulder.

‘OK. Speed up a reaction, or more like an enzyme? Can’t you just give me a short pithy synopsis?’

‘Ok, we had better start walking back though. Tonight Seattle has the heaviest snow falls in a century.’ he pulled me up by my arm. He then started to speak very slowly.

‘Max and Liz are going to have a child, well, they are going to have two children, and while both are very important, one of them is especially important to Antar as the future saviour of the Seeth race. The birth of this child, which Grey will largely oversee, will lead to a huge change on Earth and on Antar. Not everyone wants that change to succeed and because of that, a shalloth conspiracy, aided by some humans, devised a way to come back in time to prevent the children from being born. We are very close to, how shall I put it, the conception of Max and Liz’s child, and I need you to give exactly the right advice to Max when you meet him tomorrow!’

‘Christ!’ I stammered.

‘Well yes, I guess it does sound a bit biblical,, with saviour babies and –‘

‘No, I meant as in fucking hell, what a story!’

‘Oh, I see’ said Wilcox. We had got back to the path but it had almost vanished under great round drifts. Dark inky webs of trees stood laced across the wilderness of falling snow. Everything was magically transformed.

‘Is Max back with Liz?’ I asked expectantly before realising of course that Max and Liz must be back because the children are to be born to them – oh god, you get the picture! Time travel! `What happened to Tess? Or is that another episode of Roswell I missed out on!’

Wilcox sighed in such a way that I felt slightly sick in my stomach. There was a silence and I changed the subject.

`How have they gone about trying to prevent the births? We are talking twins here, or separate babies?’

‘Murder and assassination, help from the FBI, and anything else you could name that might achieve their objectives. And we are talking twins,’ said Wilcox, ‘One is human, the other is a restored Antarian Seeth Genome’ I stopped in my tracks.

‘What? That can’t be right Wilcox, you can’t give birth to two different species – I mean –‘

‘Jamie! I have two sons. One is a beautiful human called Julian Evans, named after his godfather, Julian Grey, and the other is Seeth Sia Om, who we call Gabriel, of Gabs for short! That was Kyle’s idea. A very beautiful male Seeth who is about to become a very beautiful female.’

‘Wow, you mean he is going to start cross-dressing or something!’

‘No! I mean he is going to become a she – its part of a very complex reproductive cycle!’

‘Wilcox – this is not possible!’ yet even as I said this, I suddenly realised how some of the pieces of this strange puzzle were falling into place already. Grey was the leading expert on genetic hybridization and cloning. Max was a hybrid, half human. Antarian DNA must be relatively close to human DNA for a fertile hybrid to form, and fertility was – evidently – not a problem for Max. OMG! The image of Max having sex loomed uninvited into my mind. Bastard Liz! (Did Wilcox read all my thoughts?) I panicked slightly, and thought quickly of money.

‘Ok, still – I would be curious to know how Liz managed to produce the pre-requisite compatibility to allow Max to –‘ I stopped so suddenly that I pulled Wilcox’s half of the scarf taut.

‘Wait! Max altered Liz’s DNA when he saved her life in the Crashdown! Didn’t he!’

Wilcox looked surprised. ‘Yes, that’s right! Jamie you really are a genius! Grey works that out, incidentally, so you better not mention that to anyone! The shooting in the Crashdown was very ironic, of course.’

We resumed our walk through the open tundra. No one was around, and we were following the fading trail of our earlier journey towards the bench, two sets of footprints, leading back to the past, or was it the future?

‘In what way, my dear Wilcox?’ I am feeling exhilarated and rather pleased with myself.

‘Because it was the first of many un-successful attempt to kill Liz and to prevent her from meeting Max! The two men in the café that day were Skins, but they actually brought about the transformation that would enable Om to be born!’ Wilcox feels my mind reeling from shock. ‘I believe it is called a time paradox’ he added, thoughtfully.

‘I feel a headache coming on, Wilcox. And I cannot feel my feet.’

`OK, you had better get home. Isabel is going to dream walk you again in a few hours but given your new found powers you can have a nice bedside chat with her before bed and Jonathan!’ his voice sounded like he winked at me. So he knew about Jonathan.

`That’s weird incidentally, the dream walking – how come I can see her?’

`Well that’s my fault again, young Max sticking his hand into everything!’

`What?’ I feel a wave of excitement – had I missed Max sticking his hand somewhere!

`Jamie!’ Wilcox sounded rather parental. `You have such a vivid imagination! When you discovered I was an alien and went AWOL you were much closer to a serious overdose than you imagined. They were not M&Ms you threw up, but half your mother’s sleeping pills.’

`Shit – you – you healed me?’

Wilcox unwound the remaining scarf from his neck and gave it to me.

`Have this scarf Jamie, I have three others Liz made. I half cured you Jamie, you were half dead. I suspect that accounts for your abilities to see Isabel. I suspect you can also dream walk as well. You are in a sense still the fourth alien!’

I smiled, a big smile, big enough for both of us. I took the scarf gratefully. Mrs. Grey must have horded all the wool in Washington State.

`I shall see you soon!’ Wilcox hugged me, and when he put his arms around me I could smell Max. It was an extraordinary moment. Perhaps until then I had still had my doubts, that this was all one big hallucination, one great daydream. Then, at that moment, I knew.

`Wilcox, what am I supposed tell Max tomorrow, something about his idea being bad? What is the idea? I really feel I need a bit more briefing.’

But Wilcox had gone.

[Patroclus76]

But Wilcox had gone. So, incidentally had the campus and the brilliant white silence of falling snow. I was standing in my bedroom. Fuck! I had experienced some rather odd things in my life but effortless spatial transportation was quite new. I quickly felt myself over to make sure I had all arrived in one piece. I then checked the time: it was 10:40. Luckily, by the sounds of it, Jonathan was in the shower, so I was able to walk swiftly into the hallway and slam the entry door closed and make the appropriate noises of someone who has just successfully made it home despite a national crisis and the widespread abandoning of cars across Seattle’s many hills. The apartment was incredibly cold, actually – or had Wilcox-Max chilled me so much that I would need at least an hour in front of the fire, thawing out my mind? Wilcox as Max. God that spooked me!

‘Jamie boy, is that you?’ Jonathan was standing, erotically backlit and glistening with water, leaning out of the bathroom door. A great smudge of steam seeped out into the hallway.

‘Yeah J, sorry I am so late. I texted you.’ I turned the thermostat up and removed my new scarf with difficulty. I then walked into the bathroom, ambushing Jonathan who had one leg on the bathtub and was drying his cock and balls in a sort of absent minded way, as if he was thinking of money or a math problem. I slipped a hand between his buttocks and stroked under his balls. For some bizarre reason he screamed.

‘Fucking hell, your hands are freezing!’ he almost lost balance and I started laughing.

‘Don’t be such a baby or I shall be forced to use the other hand as well!’ I did my splendid and utterly unsound German accent, and he backed off, rolling up his towel in self- defence,

‘Jamie! No – fuck off – you’re cold, cold, cold!’

I cornered him in between the sink and the toilet and thrust both hands onto the small of his back and felt him writhe with ecstasy. God he was so horny like this, his blonde mop of hair wet and dripping and his shoulders smooth, every muscle separated. I confess to having a thing about shoulders. As I removed my hands I noticed he had a splendid corn fed stiffy pointing elegantly in my direction. ‘Well, what is this? You know what this means?’

He laughed, half laughed, his eyes seductive. When he smiled his mouth looked so adorably kissable, ‘Jamie man, I am really tired, its been a fucking nightmare of a day, I am not sure I am up to much.’

‘Well something's looking up! Your testimony is undermined by startling physical evidence! Besides’ I whispered in his ear, ‘You don’t have to do much!’ I pushed him back against the wall and before he could complain, I had his cock somewhere between my tonsils and the back of my throat. His hand slipped onto the back of my throat and stroked my hair. Well, at least that made me feel normal again – Wilcox, 2044, and heavenly twins fell into some sort of perspective after that. Although I was rather worried I would sit up to find Isabel standing on the bath scales, looking censorious, or tapping her watch, or coughing.

I went and watched the news which, predictably, contained endless shots of Seattle under snow with people doing stupid things like trying to walk their dogs or going to get a takeout and never coming back. Jonathan was still in the bathroom for some reason. It had been a habit of his recently, or perhaps it had always been his habit and I had only noticed it since he moved in with me a week ago. After all, I hardly knew the guy. I got bored of the news and anchor people saying things like ‘OMG here is another missing takeout’. I shouted my good nights through the bathroom door (after having a good listen to see if he was jacking off, which was against my house rules, at least unaccompanied). Did Jonathan hold the secret of the multiple male organsm?

The bedroom still felt like it had been mysteriously refrigerated. Either that or the roof had gone missing. I climbed into bed, exhausted but with my mind wheeling over the day's events. Eventually, as I drifted into sleep, I felt Jonathan climb in and, after some curious convulsing to find the right equilibrium between the pillows and the duvet, (which involved him beating the pillows flat and then ruffling them up again) he turned his back to me and stuck his peachy ass cheeks against my thighs. These mid western boys are indefatigable. I lay thinking of Max, of Wilcox, of time, about time as a curved space without beginning or end. What I couldn’t understand was how Wilcox could bear to be close to his younger self and not give himself away! It would be fucking useless! If I came back and saw my younger self – fuck the advice I would give! The warnings! God at one stage I thought my head was going to explode. All the time the room seemed to get fucking colder. After about half an hour of lying thinking – hearing Wilcox – 1999, 2044, twins, Max – I half clambered over Jonathan’s back and found his ear.

‘You got any weed?’

He feigned sleep, but I started to lick his ear lobe. In the end he half rolled over, allowing me to kiss him and then repeat the question.

‘Fuck I thought you’d given up?’

‘Well I have but this is a national emergency– come on – we might both die of hypothermia in our sleep. I’ll roll just a little one and smoke it in the sitting living room.’ For a reliable smoker of weed Jonathan was very odd about where and how you smoked it.

‘Jesus – there’s some in my gym bag, inside one of my shoes. And I am not fucking rolling one for you – ‘

‘Ok baby – I’ll be back shortly! Love you.’

‘Yeah, right. You just love my weed and my cock.'
‘You have a great ass as well, oh and personality Jono! You have a fantastic personality!’

Getting out of bed was like skinny dipping off Cape Cod. I found a shirt and made my way into the living room where, after working my way through the intricate mysteries of Jonathan’s sports bag I found some green and, despite my inner disapproval, I rolled myself a very thin smoke – the sort that goes up in flames at the first draw and burns your nose. I put the gas fire on and settled to inhaling the first (and last) hit before I burned my finger. As I relaxed and sat back, I saw Isabel sitting on the sofa.

‘Fucking hell, Isabel, will you stop doing that!’ She seemed equally startled as I did. She put her hand on her throat and jumped back like she had just swallowed something hot.

‘Shit, Jamie, I’m sorry – normally people can’t see me – what are you doing?’

‘What?’

‘You’re smoking!’ She looked accusingly at the world’s smallest spliff in my hand.

‘I am not –it's not for me –it's for Jonathan! He’s my man and he’s -’

‘I know who Jonathan is, give it to me –‘ and before I could protest she removed it and snubbed it out in her fingers.

‘Isabel, you fascist! As a matter of fact I needed that to relax!’

‘Nonsense, it causes dementia –‘

‘Yeah sure, it also makes me hallucinate and see people sitting on my sofa! Weird or what!’ She started to laugh. She was really beautiful when she laughed, actually, and it was the only time she looked remotely like her brother. I started to laugh as well. I got up and sat down besides her. She looked at me warmly.

‘It’s good to see you Jamie, you’re looking good!’ I was naked except for Jonathan’s shirt.

‘Its really good to see you, Isabel – I have missed you all so much. I was so excited to see you!’ I worried that my tone betrayed a certain resentment, but before I could think further Isabel was speaking.

‘Do you know why you can see me? I mean that's too weird? But it makes this a lot easier! We’ve been trying to find you for about a week, ever since things got heavy again with the feds. We had such a good run, we were kind of settled here, and then – well..’

‘I guess you were the cause of the so-called ‘terrorist siege’ earlier?’

‘Yes, we were – it was very close. When things get difficult we usually separate into pairs, it’s a tactic we devised in 2003, and it always seems to work. This time it went wrong and we almost got split up. It’s been pretty scary since. ’

‘Is everything ok now? Is everyone safe?’ Isabel smiled at the concern in my voice. She touched my knee, which was very Un-Isabel like, or at least the Isabel I remembered.

‘Yes Jamie, thanks. Max and Michael came to the rescue. We were careless and I guess tired. Jamie we need your help. Can you meet Max tomorrow? He is pretty hemmed in around the University district and can’t risk moving, although the weather may help us there. It would be easier if you went to him.’

‘Of course I can meet Max, I can meet him anywhere – ‘ I tried not to sound desperate at the thought of not seeing him immediately.

Isabel stood up, ‘Can you suggest somewhere close to the Institute, Max and Kyle are actually disguised as cleaning staff in the Medical School –‘

My mind raced. ‘We could meet outdoors, there is a park leading off from the main library. About thirty meters off the road there is a bench – no one will be around – they’ll probably close the campus.’ Isabel thought about it for a moment.

‘Ok, the place is quite open?’

‘Yes, the trees line the footpath and there are a few copses but nothing heavy – good sight lines everywhere.’

She nodded and smiled her quick, efficient smile. ‘It sounds perfect. Ok, when? You might have problems getting to the Institute yourself with all this snow.‘

‘I’ll get there Isabel, even if I have to walk from here. Let’s meet at 12 noon?’ Isabel stood up and seemed ready to leave. I thought I saw her beginning to go slightly transparent. But as she started to fade she looked intently at me.

‘Max will be alone, and Jamie – he’s had a hard time since you last saw him, I mean, we all have but perhaps Max most of all. You might find him a little changed.’ I looked at her anxiously, as if she was trying to warn me. I thought of Wilcox.

‘Ok, thanks for the warning, but we have all changed a little I guess?’ She smiled knowingly, and then vanished. After she had gone I thought how strange it was that I had suggested the very bench where I had just sat with Wilcox. But what was stranger still was that Wilcox must have remembered he met me there, all those years ago. I felt a shudder of anticipation go over me.
I thought of rolling another but went back to bed instead. Jonathan was out cold again, with the entire duvet on his side and anchored under his arm. I tried to unhook it, but found he was actually leaning on it as well. I thought about waking him but then I just pushed his shoulder gently but firmly and, like magic, it made him move and I whipped out the covers as he rolled. Triumphant, I snuggled down to sleep but as I did so I felt something dry and light touch my face. It startled me, in part because of the texture. I sat up quickly. Jonathan was turned away from me, so I turned my bedside light on quietly. It was dim, a 40 watt bulb. I sat away so the light fell onto my side of the bed. On my pillow was a long piece of skin, textured and desiccated, as if shed from the body of a snake. When I looked at my hand I realised I had pulled it off Jonathan as I lifted him off the duvet. I knew exactly what this meant.

I think I did.


OK, so what the fuck did it mean? That Jonathan, ice hockey stud, was an alien? That he had infiltrated my affections to be – what – close to Max? That didn’t figure. I wasn’t close to Max when I found myself licking blonde boy’s arm pits at a party a few weeks back. Max was history, a deep personal coda in the back of my mind. Or did he know that I would get to know Max, that Max would seek my out, and if that was the case, then he was in on the ‘the future’ plot business. Wilcox had mentioned that he had a skin working for him. Was it Jonathan? Or was he one of the other skins – part of the conspiracy to prevent the child – with a rather chilling thought I realised that they too would know the ‘future’ business.

I sat upright in bed with the light off panicking like fuck. I mean wall climbingly, full on, blood churning panic, the sort you get in airplanes when the pilot says ‘we’ve got a massive hole in the fuselage and I am afraid it’s all over, its so over you can all smoke’. What was I to do? Keep faking great sex until he shed so much skin I could over-power him, or wait until I had spoken with Wilcox. At about 3 am I resolved on the Wilcox plan, although I had the irritating thought that I had no way of contacting him. I suspected the cell phone would prove useful in this regard. All the time my mind was whirring I kept looking at Jono boy spread out before me: I was fucking a fucking alien! Wow! That might explain some of his special moves! Yet something in the back of mind cautioned against panic, or driving a stake through his heart (or breaking the seal that skins had between their bodies and the husk – something I had never really understood). Wilcox had mentioned Jonathan, and in such a way as to imply that he knew him. Would Future Max, Wilcox dude, handyman and general dogsbody to the great man Grey allow me to fall for someone dangerous? I thought not. But then what did I know about these things?

I fell asleep eventually, at least I think I did, but in my dream I saw myself sitting on the bench watching and waiting, so I am not sure I slept well. I think I also dreamed of Max, that he was coiling a great length of scarf over his naked body and holding out a lose end for me to cover my cock with. When I woke up, the bedroom was full of bitingly cold brilliant light, and Jonathan was in the shower again. This time, of course I knew what he was doing. I quickly scrutinised the bed. No signs of any shedding, but I guessed that the sudden cold was playing havoc with his moisture content. I slipped out of bed and ran screaming into the living room to put the fire on. Once on, and sufficiently emboldened, I knocked on the bathroom door and asked my alien boyfriend how long he might be in there.

‘How’s it going, Jonathan?’

‘Hey Jamie – ok man – did you sleep ok?’ he sounded normal, above the hissing of water.

‘Yeah sure, I skinned up a small one’ I nearly added ‘only to see it snubbed out by the Ice Queen Nazi herself’.

‘Kewl, won’t be long – you’ll never get into work today baby, we may as well stay in bed and fuck’. God he had a way with words. Yeah sure, Skin man.

‘Sounds very tempting, but I have an urgent appointment with an old mate of mine, he needs some help.’

‘Yeah? Ok – but I think I am going to stay in for the most of the day – that kewl with you?’ The water had stopped.

‘Of course, you moisturise away!’

There was a rather ominous silence and then Jonathan said in his puzzled voice ‘Excuse me?’

‘Moisturise! Against the cold – I shall – this wind chill destroys your skin you know, especially if you’re from the Mid West!’ I wondered if I had gone too far, and my heart was pounding somewhere next to my chin. He laughed – rather oddly – and said

‘Ok, will do! It snows in the mid west as well’ Moments later he emerged looking pink, human and very fuckable. Or did he look a bit sheepish? Whatever, he looked rather enticingly vulnerable. I felt my cock begin to stir irritating below, like a fire in the hold.

‘You still high or something?’

‘No, it’s the light content of the bedroom – its over stimulating me’ he looked at me suspiciously so I was forced to kiss him to the point at which he relaxed slightly and said in a husky voice ‘Hey, come to bed.’ I frowned and pointed my finger at him. ‘Later, I’ll ambush you this afternoon! Be warned! An no alien nonsense either!’

‘What!’ he said, seemingly genuinely alarmed.

‘You know, nothing too perverse until I get back – don’t start with out me!’ I kissed him leaving him looking rather phased. Phew that was close.

I dressed, watched more news (what is it with 24 hour non-stop repetitive news?) and wrapping Wilcox’s scarf twelve times around my neck I stumbled out into the main street. It was a bit like a still from The Day After Tomorrow (or This Time Next Week or whatever). What was so extraordinary, was the light. The sky was a profoundly delicate blue, and the sunlight was dazzling, painful, like a revelation. I have never seen a city so transformed in my life! Something had attempted to clear the road, and I could see further up, across the main intersection, traffic moving slowly put stubbornly through the white canyons on the sidewalks.

I started to walk along the bus route, and eventually, after about an hour of staggering and slouching my way through solid hard packed snow, I managed to squeeze myself onto a packed bus bound for the Campus. It was like a remake of some disaster movie alright. Everyone was over-excited and talkative. People, complete strangers, who normally would not even give you the time of day, were telling you WHERE they WERE when it started. WHAT they were watching. WHAT they were wearing. Jesus. Humans!

At 11.34 am we reached the campus, and after slipping and falling about two hundred times on my ass I eventually managed to make it to the doors of the institute to find, predictably, it was on a skeleton crew and that most of the research staff had stayed at home. I rang DeMarr and made sure he had remembered to put his heating on. I told him we would go to Seaworld when the Crisis was over and he started singing as I hung up.

As the time to meet Max approached, I began to feel sick and oddly terrified. I had no idea why. Part of me was worried about Isabel’s curious tone, part of me was terrified that, having not quite grasped all of Wilcox’s narrative, I wasn’t entirely sure what it was I had to do! I felt like an actor about to go on stage without any lines! But most of all, I was afraid of showing him the intensity of what I felt, the sheer joy of seeing him, of betraying my anguish over the years of silence. I felt like Madam Butterfly, someone who had waited all this time for something that would never come. I was afraid he would see my disappointment. Only then, as I walked through the deep white landscape did I realise how desperately I had waited for him, and how complete my solitude had been. The enormity of my love was all about me.


The trees that lined the path were cased in white, like the pillars to a vast and ruinous Temple, each twig and bough intricately carved by light and shadow. About me children ran throwing snowballs, screaming and laughing with delight. My eyes were watering with the cold and the brilliant glare. I looked about me, trying not to search, afraid he would not show up, afraid he would. As I approached the bench I had not the courage to look up. Instead I looked at the deep drifts of snow and as I did so I heard a voice, a deep soft growl of a voice, a voice I felt before I heard it, a voice I knew, say ‘Hey, Jamie!’ Breathing deeply I raised my head.

Standing before me, ink black for a moment, solid against an infinite canvas of white, was a man. He was wearing a dark long coat over a grey hoody, worn, faded jeans and equally worn sneakers. His head was bare, and thick black; shoulder length hair lay shadowing his face. The translucent, ambient light made Max look pale, and it caught his eyes in such a way as to make them look almost luminous, alert yet tired, exhausted but attentive. I looked at him for what seemed an age, my eyes blurring with tears. Gone was the pretty boy I had known and obsessed about, stalked and worshipped. And yet in his place was someone more beautiful than I could ever have imagined, someone ethereal, not of this world, someone I had not prepared myself to meet. I tried to look at him bravely and logically, as he would have wanted me to, resolute in his hour of need. And I think I could have managed it, faking a control I did not have, holding his eyes with a detachment I had long abandoned, if I had not seen a single gossamer tear streak his cheek. At that moment my self control abandoned me and I ran, stumbling towards him, as if he was life itself.

[Patroclus76]

As I felt his strong arms embrace me I started sobbing. I had no idea where this anguish came from, but it weld up from deep inside me

‘Jamie, Jamie man, its ok – everything is going to be ok!’ he pulled me gently away from him and looked searchingly into my face. He was so changed, so dark, as if he had been recast into a darker metal, powerful. My eyes, pink and swollen, looked away as if from a brilliant glare on water.

‘I am really sorry Max, I was just so overwhelmed to hear from you, and to see you here, –‘ I had to look away again. The pain was too intense. Max put his arm around me and led me to the bench where his future self had sat, wise and magnificant. ‘I will be ok in a minute, really –‘ but part of me felt almost annihilated by this encounter. I struggled for a while, as Max sat looking over me, his hand holding mine. I kept reminding myself that I was here to HELP Max. In the end, with effort, I composed myself and looked at him. Max was smiling ruefully, like a proud father willing his child to succeed at something especially hard. There was a familiar curve in his cheek when he smiled like this, one that had always made me melt. I leaned my head into his and kissed it, furtively, like DeMarr tapping the fish tanks with guilty, stolen pleasure in SeaWorld. I felt his stubble on my lips, his warm smell screwed up my courage.

‘Sorry’ I said again, breathing deeply and blowing great clouds of steam from my lips. ‘I have missed you so much, Max.’ my voice wobbled and jumped – fuck Jamie – please get a grip, please try! .

‘And I have missed you, too, more than you could know. And I have been a shit Jamie, for not keeping in touch and for not knowing that you would be worried and angry that I had excluded you. And now because I need you, here I am! What kind of friend am I?’ There was a still authority to his voice that I could not remember. I felt ashamed that he was reiterating thoughts I had myself entertained, wedged between strangers on a crowded bus. God how I missed his voice!

‘It doesn’t matter, Max – you’re here now. Isabel said things have been hard recently.’ Max nodded slowly. He was stroking my hand and I could feel the calluses on his palm. I realised then, that what emphasised his beauty was this sharp edge, this hardness that was not there at Alex’s funeral.

‘It does matter. It matters to me.’ He looked away, and went to put my hand down.

‘It’s ok, you can keep doing that for a while, Max, I mean only if you want to that is!’ He grinned, looking at his hand in mine, as if it was a memory of something. ‘You always made me smile Jamie, even in the darkest of places, and I have been to some incredibly dark places since we last met.’ A shadow seemed to fall over him. ‘I have so much to tell you Jamie, and so little time – I have a child now, somewhere, out there.’ he looked about him, throwing his long hair back from his face. I felt my stomach tighten.

‘Already?’ I stammered. Fuck Wilcox mentioned that the conception was about to happen – could he have miscalculated, and so badly!

‘With Liz?’ I said, tentatively. Max looked at me with deep amber brown eyes and said in a quiet voice

‘No, with Tess. A son.’

A sudden dart of anger flared up within me, jealously to some extent, upset for Liz (who I liked and respected), a dislike of Tess. The idea that Max had slept with her was almost too much. I felt unsure what to do or say. I looked up, scanning the trees, perhaps hoping to see Wilcox with a pair of binoculars and a thermos. I sighed, unable to contain myself,

‘Are you with Tess now?’ Max looked at me, his eyes cautious, as if he could sense my anger.

‘No, Tess is dead. And my son has been adopted and taken away to a place I do not know, for his protection.’

My mind was utterly blank for a moment. I felt his growing anguish. I went to say something but he continued speaking, quietly, still looking at our hands together.

`Jamie, Tess betrayed me, us, all of us. She was part of a conspiracy made between Nasedo and Ki’var long before we came out of the pods. Once she was pregnant she pretended that the child could not survive on Earth and she persuaded us all to return to Antar through the Granolith. She planned to hand us over to our enemies and let our son rule. That had been the arrangement made all those years ago’

I sat open mouthed, speechless; almost unable to think. Part of me thought simply, childishly ‘that evil bitch’. Part of me had always known she was wrong. Always. I said after a while, ‘You found out what the Granolith was for?’

‘Tess found out what the Granolith was for, through Alex.’ He sighed deeply, his breath coming unevenly, as if he was in physical pain. There was more, horrible, unendurable silence.

‘Jamie, Tess murdered Alex, she mind warped him to decode a book Nasedo kept hidden in the public library of all places, a sort of manual that clearly should have been given to us long ago, explaining who we were and how, above the Pod Chamber, was a device that would enable us to return home. But it was written in an Antarian script. Tess mind warped Alex to use a highly advanced computer to translate it over a period of weeks, but it proved too much for him.’ His voice threatened to break ‘It destroyed his mind. When he died, she contrived the accident to cover her tracks and the original conspiracy but – ‘ he faltered, ‘Liz found it out. Just in time. We had activated the Granolith but Michael announced he could not leave Maria, and as he went to leave the chamber, Liz, Maria and Kyle were outside with the truth!’

He started to cry. His face crumbling silently. It broke my heart.

‘I knew that bitch was no good Max, I knew it!’ I stopped myself. This was no time for a rant about Tess. I put my arm around him, putting my head onto his, smelling his hair.

‘Max, she failed, her plan failed, and I know – I know Alex is dead, and that nothing can bring him back, but it’s not your fault.’ Tears started again, for my dead friend, for Isabel as well but mostly for Max, for the pain he had carried in him.

‘Max please don’t cry, it is more than I can bear.’

‘It is my fault; every one I have loved has been hurt, their lives changes, all because of me and because – because I can’t do this on my own, Jamie.’

`Max, you’re not on your own! It’s our choice to take the risk of knowing you, of being with you. It isn’t just blindness that drives us on this journey. We need to be with you. You must understand that, Max. You must understand that’ I struggled for words, ‘that love can see.’

I felt him calm himself, and then with a certain resolution, he looked at me keenly.

‘I haven’t really explained myself very well, Jamie. It was so complex. I was so horrible to Liz, and so horrible to Isabel and then Liz left me and we were apart for a while, and then ’. I was not sure I could bear to hear any more.

‘Listen Max, its ok, come on – I am here now. What do you want me to do for you, how can I help?’

‘I want you to forgive me for not telling you this earlier, –‘

‘Max there is nothing to forgive, I have been selfish and demanding, I had no idea what you were going through.’ I stroked his hair, the sheer joy of being with him beginning to sink in for the first time. He looked up at me, his face still, streaked with tears.

‘Jamie, can I touch your face?’

I sat, startled by his request. And then I recalled Wilcox saying, ‘Remember that what you feel, he will feel also’.

‘Of course’ I said cautiously, scarcely audibly. I glanced down, coyly, like a lover. Max said softly, ‘You have to look at me!’

I looked at him, daring myself to look straight into his eyes, feeling myself winded as he put his hands to my face and held it, the cold of his long fingers shocked me like electricity. For a while I saw only his deep, tawny eyes, ringed with gold, but then gradually I felt like I was staring unblinking into the sun, hot, luminous. Around me formed the sort of distorting beads of glare you get when a camera lens refracts light, and creates circles of multi-colored sparks, splinters of the spectrum scattered in the blue. The illusion deepened and suddenly I was falling into a deep dark circle, its black circumference ringed with stars. As the sheer vertigo of the vision hit me – as if I was literally standing above a huge collapsing space – I felt Max’s memories, his mind, his soul, his very being, rush into mine. For a while I could hardly breath the experience was so overwhelming, and I started to panic, in part because I was afraid that I would think of Wilcox, or that I would betray some foreknowledge of events that had not yet happened. In part because I knew this would change me forever.

Max said something soft and calming. And then I knew everything. I knew everything there was to know, about Tess, about the human child, about Liz, about the transformation that Liz had undergone, and even about the death of Max and his astounding re-birth, through Liz, through her faith and her love for him. Every last detail of the missing years flashed through my head. I saw Isabel’s wedding and the dark figure of Jesse standing next to her in a sunlit garden. Then there was the horror of the graduation and then the exile, a great blur of sound and color and then a brilliant whiteness. It was as if I had been snatched up and carried high above the Earth. Whirling into focus was a white chapel with pine trees, mellow in weak watery sunlight. Max was holding Liz’s hand; newly wed. I felt his joy, and I felt his love for Liz – vast and without reservation - a burning hot flush on my face where his hands held me, cold and with effort now.

A great brilliant whiteness seeped into my mind.
I have no idea how long it lasted. A lifetime, a few seconds. I became aware that the whiteness was the sunlight hitting the snowfields about us. Max removed his hands from my face gently. We were both trembling slightly and both crying again. He took my hand and kissed it, blowing onto my fingers.

‘Did it work?’ he said after a while. I sort of nodded.

`That was probably a bit intense, Jamie, but it is better you know everything’. I looked at his hand on mine, and then I looked at him again.

‘You held up a bank? You died?’ it was a whisper.

‘Yes, but I am here now’.

I stood up, and walked about a bit, my hands on my head. I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream with horror but also with joy. Max sat, his hands folded on his lap, looking at me, waiting for me to calm down.
‘Fuck, Max!’ I said, walking around a bit and shaking my head, I felt close to sobbing again. ‘I feel like I had just received a mega download straight into my cerebral cortex!

‘You have.’ he wiped his eyes and shivered. ‘Let’s walk for a bit, we haven’t much time’

We set off, away from the bench and out into the wide vast spaces between the trees. He put his arm through mine and we walked in silence for a time, both lost in our own thoughts. I knew he was allowing me to catch my breath, to come down from a great height. ‘Ok, I am ok now, Max.’

‘Yeah? You sure?’

I started to laugh, looking across at him, and he looked at me, a quizzical smile on his lips, broadening into a grin. His face had lost its paleness and was pinched pink with the cold. I knew how he tasted now, in a some weird way I knew what it was to be Max. It felt awesome! And then I just couldn’t stop laughing, although tears were still weeping from my eyes as if I was in a high wind.

‘What is it Jamie?’

‘Nothing’ I lied. He tugged my arm with his and said in a soft growl.

‘Jamie?’

‘No, it will spoil the moment, it's too personal, Maxwell’ I said mischievously, raising an eyebrow, doing my best impersonation of Michael, with that quirky quick smile Michael had when he was up to something. Max laughed really loudly, catching my drift.

‘He says Maximillian when he is really pissed, or when he knows he has been caught out!’ Max reminded me, laughing and then he looked at me

‘Nothing could spoil this moment, but let me guess. Does it involve a reference to sex?

I giggled and shook my head, trying to keep in my mind the seriousness of all this, but I just had to say: ‘for a straight alien you are such a fucking flirt, Max, and you have just given me the best virtual orgasm I could have wished for! You’ve probably ruined my sex life forever!’

He stopped in mock horror. ‘Virtual? Are you saying I fake my orgasms?’ we both laughed. In some profoundly ontological sense, Max had just made love to me. And he knew it, bastard! It was the nearest I would get to sex with this man, the most he could give me out of his love and his friendship. Yet it was more than enough, for this life, for many life times. We started over again from that moment. We did not set aside the Roswell years that had brought us together, nor did we ignore them. We retook our oath of friendship, yet in some deep intimate sense we went well beyond where we had left off, with Max in tears in an airport departure lounge, me cold, bemused, excluded. We renewed ourselves not as children but as adults. For gay men, sex is often an illusion of intimacy, the apparent point of arrival, a false premise on which we build love and seek to possess something that is beautiful. With Max I had to have an intimacy that could not include sex, and because of that, in some curious rather paradoxical way, it was far more intense, far more personal, and vastly more important to me.


We walked, arm and arm into a brand new day. For a moment I even forgot about Wilcox, for a moment, but then I sensed Max’s anxiety returning. In the end I asked him again what it I could do for him and my friends. ‘Everything I have is yours, you can come and stay with me, I can fit you all in, I know it will be dangerous, Max, but I can’t bear to think of you all be hunted down like this!’

‘But we shall always be hunted Jamie. The last few months have shown that. It has been really hard. Harder because we felt a year back that things were improving. We have been heading for Canada, and we stopped here only to sort out our final plans, but we liked Seattle, and we were beginning to talk about settling here – ‘

We were walking through deep drifts, it caked our legs in white and burned our calf muscles as we stepped in and out of the snow.

‘But then the feds found you again?’

‘Yeah. And since then they have been relentless. It's like they have a new lease of life or something. And we are tired, Jamie, really tired. And I am afraid we are close to breaking.’ I stopped and looked at him.

‘Breaking? You mean separating?’ Max nodded his head in confirmation but said nothing, as if to say anything was too much.

‘Are you and Michael fighting?’

He smiled at something, and looked at me with such affection my heart nearly stopped. ‘No, not this time, he has been a real star. I mean we still have the ‘I am your first in command’ act and ‘no one listens to me’ AND he is still fucking impetuous at times, but without him, I could not have coped at all. No, it runs deeper than that. We are exhausted. Isabel misses Jesse, and she recently heard rumor that he is getting remarried. She now wants us to head east. Maria is tired and beginning to, well, sort of shut down. She puts on a brave face for me, and she wills herself to go on for Michael, but its beginning to kill her spontaneity and joy and all those things that make her Maria!’

‘And what of Liz?’ I ask. I sensed Liz in me still from the vision, the sheer power of her.

Max looked up ‘Liz is a pillar of strength, but she wants a child, Jamie, she wants to start a family – she wants us to have lots of children!’

I frowned knowingly. ‘That’s perfectly understandable Max, I mean I want you to have lots of children, it’s sad they won’t be mine of course, but –‘ our laughter was brittle in the cold air. ‘You want children as well?

‘Yeah!’ he said with real enthusiasm, `Hundreds! But Jamie, I can’t have a family on the run. I don’t think we can ever have a family until we settle down, and for the first time in my life I just don’t think we are going to win this battle with the feds. I am afraid it’s almost over.’ The finality of his words brought me up sharply.

‘What are you saying?’ I felt cold now, chilled. ‘You’re not thinking of giving up are you, I mean, handing yourself in?’ Max didn’t say anything for a while. He brushed his hair back and tucked some of it behind his ear. In the vivid reflected light I could see every strand of it, as if it was under a microscope. ‘Max – they will kill you!’

‘Not if we’re normal, Jamie?’ it was a question, it was the question that had brought Max to me.

‘I don’t understand?’ I asked, understanding perfectly.

[Patroclus76]

‘Your work, Jamie. I need your expertise. I mean Liz has explained it to me, sort of, she follows you more than you know and she thinks you are a genius! The guy you are working with, DeMarr, he is working on gene switching?’ He said this oddly, as if it was a foreign word. ‘I and all the other hybrids contain human DNA. Unlike Nesado, much of our physiology is human: isn’t DeMarr working on a technique to modify living organisms at the genetic level?’ He sounded so hopeful.

I looked at him and breathed deeply though my nose. ‘He is, but its mostly theoretical stuff Max, I mean he is years away from experimenting on living tissue in a lab, let alone some poor hapless mouse, or something as complex as a human-Seeth hybrid!’

‘Seeth?’ Max asked, but not with any particular emphasis. My heart surged and wobbled like I had just stepped on a sharp object. For fuck sake!

‘Oh it’s a technical word for a hybrid between two closely related species – I mean’ fuck my mouth started to go dry. ‘I mean your Antarian DNA must be close to human DNA or you would have died with some congenital defect at birth, and you would certainly be infertile, I mean which you aren’t, I mean, with Tess..' my voice trailed off as I dug rapidly to get out of my latest hole. We stood apart looking at each other.

‘Isn’t DeMarr also looking at some form of experimental work aimed at recoding base sequences through viruses?’ asked Max again, as if approaching the question from a different route.

‘He is’ I said carefully. It was beginning to dawn on me that this was Max’s BAD, really bad idea. It was also dawning on me that Max was actually confusing DeMarr with Grey, which was not hard to do since DeMarr was a prodigy of Grey’s and they had collaborated on work together until about 1999. Both had been involved in mapping chromosome 22 for the Human Genome project.

‘How realistic is this idea, Jamie, of somehow getting our Antarian side to be switched off, to make us fully human?’

‘Its hard to say Max, I mean it could be a really good idea – but given how things stand in research terms, it could be really bad, I mean a really bad idea’. I said this self-consciously, as if Wilcox was standing behind a tree with a clipboard evaluating my performance. Max looked puzzled. ‘I will have to go and find out – discretely – and see what can be done.’ I added. Max was looking around us.

`Run through the idea with me again, Jamie’ he looked at me earnestly.

‘Ok, sure.’ I switched over to Geek mode. I took his hand again (fuck I loved holding his hand!) Any excuse.

`As you know, viruses can only reproduce by altering the DNA of a host cell to replicate themselves. They insert rogue nucleic acid into the host cell’s ‘normal’ genetic blueprint and over-ride it to change the nature and properties of future cell division. De-Marr has, in theory, identified a technique involving designing retroviruses with specific instructions to re-code minute parts of the human genome: it’s a bit like inserting a ‘designer’ computer virus into software to change it into something you want. But its very, very risky. Viral RNA is known to be a bad ‘proof reader’ of any pre-determined DNA base sequence, and as such is very prone to mutation. It is not clear, for instance, how long a predetermined designed base sequences would remain before being randomly recoded. They have to remain stable – it's a vital principle for the normal evolution of life – geneticists call it the principle of conservation. So far nothing has enabled the altered cell to reproduce itself effectively after a few hours’.

Max quietly took all this information in. ‘Wow Jamie, that sounds really sexy! The way you say that!’

I laughed, the bastard! `Yeah, it beats phone sex, anyway you would die' I said. We both stopped smiling.

`You're sure?'

`At the moment, without a doubt! Complex modelling shows that a lethal virus results in just two or three hours. You would be dead before you left the operating table’

He sighed desperately. I hated to disappoint him.

‘I am very close to DeMarr, he is a good friend of mine as well as my supervisor. Let me go and find out for sure, but Max it is very, very unlikely this could be done soon safely – we’re almost light years away from this’ I saw his face sink further, like someone who having set their faith in something sees it falling from view. ‘And even if it worked, and you would lose your powers, all of you.’

‘I don’t want them!’ he said bitterly, ‘I want to settle down and live with Liz and let her reclaim some of her interests and passion. She loves talking about you, Jamie, and your work, and I know it’s because she lives her ambitions through you, because of me, -‘

‘Max, don’t say that. She made a choice, we all made a choice. And we would make it again. You have to believe that!'

‘Would you? I am not sure I would, if I had this life over again?’ he smiled to disguise his anguish. I touched his face.

‘Let me find out exactly what DeMarr is doing – where are you staying at the moment?’

‘We’re sleeping out in the Medical School, myself and Kyle, we work there and hide in the basements. Michael is with Liz and Maria is with Isabel. We work quite well in that combination. Poor Maria is the only human left now!’

‘You can all join me – Isabel has my address – come in pairs or something – I can’t bear to think of you roughing it in this weather!’

He looked undecided, as if this exposed me to further danger.

‘I had better go Jamie, can you move quickly on this?'

‘I am already on it, Max,’ I said smiling. My heart was clouding up with anxiety. ‘Come and stay with me Max, bring Kyle, we can get back to my place easily enough – or are you still being followed? Please, please, please!’

Max looked tempted at my the offer, smiling at my insistence.

‘Ok, thanks Jamie. We’ll try and get out later today – it might start thawing soon, you know what Seattle is like.’ I felt relief – and then I thought about Jonathan. What if Jonathan was a `bad' skin? Was I not leading Max straight to him?

We hugged each other. ‘Max, I just –‘

‘Jamie – its fine. I love you’’ I looked taken aback. He said it so simply, the smallest and most powerful word in the universe. He looked about him and started to walk away.

‘You can always start a family with Liz now, Max, take a chance, trust to the people who love you?’

He shook his head as he turned back to me. ‘No, we shall start a family when I can rejoin the rest of you, and not until!’

I watched Max walk away, his shoulders rounded, his hands in his pockets, drawn into his own mystery. I watched him go until he was lost amid a blur of people playing and laughing, their cries carried far over the cold, clear distance. I felt the extraordinary, indescribable joy that comes from knowing that your love for someone is reciprocated. And yet I also felt, disconcertingly perhaps, a sense of dedication. In touching him I had sworn him an oath not just of love, of friendship, but perhaps most disturbingly, of allegiance.

He drew away from me, until as small dot of black he merged into the black charcoal line of trees. Or perhaps he just vanished. I stood, stamping the cold out of my feet, thinking hard, trying to sort my head out. It was all over the place. In a way I felt like I had felt years before, looking into a microscope to see what? Definitive and incontrovertible proof that we were not alone in the Universe and that, more to the point, what we knew about the universe was partial, hesitant; provisional? Or was it all just wrong? With the added mystery of time, and the bizarre doubling up of Max and Wilcox, I felt like I had been living all of my life on a flat, two-dimensional planet, or cocooned in some soft, safe, elaborate illusion. But it was Max, seeing Max again and having Max inside my head that had been so profound, so unlooked for. Perhaps it was only at that moment that I fully comprehended who Max was.

Somehow that scared me, really scared me. I am not religious. And yet the only way I could approach my whole experience earlier, that first searing image of Max holding me in his arms, was to think of the divine. It was absurd, fucking embarrassing really (to a guy with a wild ambition to be a scientist!) but somehow necessary. There was also another thought though, something again disconcerting: Max in the Garden of Gethsemane. I had no idea why I thought of that, but the image stuck with me, it rattled about my head, along with the sensation of his hands upon me. Like a premonition.

After wandering about aimlessly for what must have been hours, loved up, with my eyes wildly dilated, I started to think about Max’s plan. At least that bit of the puzzle seemed to be a little clearer! Well, sort of. I mean, it seemed odd, the idea – I mean where the fuck did Max come across an idea quite like that? Although a bit off the wall, the more I thought it through the more surprisingly well informed it became. Too well informed to be gleaned from a casual reading of my interests, or even DeMarr’s published works. Liz was perfectly capable of following it, in outline, but of thinking it out from first principles? Using viral RNA to strategically recombine DNA was pretty advanced, indeed almost entirely theoretical (and I suspected, wrong). And then there was the possible confusion between Grey and DeMarr? I worried about that, too. It seem plausible but somehow contrived, as if someone (or something) had deliberately given Max false information. None of it seemed right. I am no great detective, but even I could work out that if someone wanted to stop Max having the child he was supposed to have (or had already had in some alternative time line?) they would persuade him to change his DNA before conception? To be normal? But hadn’t the child with Tess been human (like Julian Evans would be?)

Fuck this was complicated! I needed to speak to Wilcox. I sensed a conspiracy lowering itself around Max. Again my mind turned slowly to Jonathan. The more I thought about him the more I began to suspect that his recent and sudden decision to move in with me was not coincidental. Was Jonathan part of this? Fuck that made me feel really unwell. Where was Wilcox when I needed him!! I took out my cell phone and looked at it suspiciously. I then glanced about me furtively as if I was about to piss up the nearest tree or something. No one was around. It was getting dark, another knife cold night under a vast dome of stars, shimmering in anticipation. I switched on my little gizmo and said – rather stupidly – ‘Wilcox?’ as if it was an intercom. Nothing happened (obviously). God I have lost it! I checked missed calls. I keyed Wilcox’s name and just stood glaring at it on the small LCD screen. I thought of ringing Bone Hill House – Wilcox was bound to answer in his role of crypto Butler. But what if Grey answered? I said ‘Wilcox? Come in, Wilcox?’ and then laughing with embarrassment, I ran off towards the bus stop.


As I passed the Human Genome Institute, I noticed some rather curious activity outside. Several police cars were parked close up to the curb and one had pulled up almost into the foyer. Behind it, next to the porter’s desk, I could see some university security guards talking to someone who resembled the Michelin Man. I walked crabwise towards the main entrance, fishing for my ID card. The Michelin man turned out to be DeMarr, wearing almost every possible sweater he owned and also sporting what appeared to be tennis rackets attached to his feet. Two rather unsavory looking policemen closed in as I approached holding out my ID like a crucifix.

‘I am afraid that the Institute is now closed, young man.’ said one of them, the fat one, who probably eats doughnuts and lots of them and has no wife, or at least a clutch of ex-wives.

‘I am a student here, and I really need to collect some work, officer sir.’ I did my best prep school accent. Id – prep school accent – gratuitous use of sir, come on, swallow it! DeMarr heard my voice and waddled towards me.

‘Jamie, oh my god Jamie, thank god you are here – thank god you got my message!’

He looked not unlike one of those old-fashioned deep-sea divers in a massive pressure suit and with weights on his feet. I could tell from his voice that he was particularly upset. I had not heard him this upset since his pet parrot – Herodotus – escaped last winter and was found dead in the local deli.

‘I came as soon as I could, Louis’ I lied, god – I lied so effortlessly! The fat policeman gave way, but a narrow faced one appeared, dark and rather more persistent. He turned to DeMarr, who was breathing great fonts of steam like a fire extinguisher. ‘I am afraid, Professor, that the institute is now a crime scene and no one can go in and out until the software team have arrived to go over the computers.’

DeMarr made a sort of clicking noise, a sort of protest, like a Geiger counter. I said quickly ‘Louis, the officer is quite right – lets go and grab a coffee and leave everything to these extremely capable gentlemen here!’ Fat policeman smiled beautifully. I had a vision of him as a pink, cuddly cherub with wings stuck up somewhere in the Sistine Chapel. The narrow faced one looked at me as if I was being far too fucking clever. I took hold of what I thought was DeMarr’s hand, it was hard to tell with all the gloves on, and led him away, by default, towards Old Possums.

`Jamie, really, you’ll never guess what has happened!’
Daniel, the barman, owner and main driving force behind what passed for the University `gay scene’ (all six of us) was trying to lock up when we appeared at the door. I knocked and used my special pleading look. After some wild gesticulation from me (and more clicking from DeMarr, who might, on reflection have been trying out his dolphin impersonation) he relented and let us in. ‘You can have a drink while I clean up and then you’re out of here!’ He poked my chest playfully. I had a theory that Daniel rather fancied me. DeMarr sat down and started the laborious job of removing his outer layers while I went off to get us some hot life giving coffee. An attractive man in his mid forties who worked out with me sometimes at the nearby gym, Daniel gestured me to come behind the counter as he heated and frothed the milk.

‘What the fuck is going on Jamie, are you on the game?’

‘Game?’

‘Yeah? You were in here last night with some old dude and left holding his hand, and now you come in with another - ’ he looked across the bar to where DeMarr had just removed a tennis racket ‘I’m not sure what that is - and I saw you making out with some hot stud on a bench earlier – I hope you’re being careful! What does Jonathan think of all this!’

‘For fuck sake, Dan, they’re friends – I’m not’ I lowered my voice, ‘On any game thank you. This man is my doctoral supervisor. He has the mind the size of a planet and despite being an adorable human being has the sexual attraction of a small mollusk’ I had an awful feeling that DeMarr had probably never had sex at all. Daniel pulled a face.

‘Why, are you jealous or something? Is hearing me shout `strong’ and sweating over you while pushing up 75kg no longer enough?’

`Whatever – who was the rock star outside in the hoody, incidentally?’ He raised his eyes and smiled.

‘The lead singer of Oasis.’ I said. `If you must know, he is an ex of mine!’

`An ex! Fuck what’s wrong with you!’

I colored slighty and ran off. Note to self: I would have to diversify my venues.

I told DeMarr to leave some of his coats on as it would probably take too long to put them on again and he had already almost knocked over several things swinging his arms about. He’d clearly been watching too much of the History Channel or something. He looked like Scott of the Antarctic. But he was distressed I think. I put some sugar in his coffee as an extra stimulant. Daniel started brushing about behind the bar whistling loudly and muttering to himself.

‘Dear oh dear, that’s better Jamie, much better, thanks. The sugar helps so much’ It was best not to rush DeMarr unless he was working on fifteen simultaneous equations. He was inclined to stop talking and do a sort of computer `freeze’ routine. I half expected a little ‘hour glass’ to appear on his face.

‘So what’s happened?’ I said in my slow voice as if he was a dog. `I hope they haven’t stolen any of the computers!’

DeMarr gulped down more coffee. ‘They haven’t stolen anything – indeed rather oddly they have left stuff, extraordinary stuff Jamie, I mean, this is not so much a break-in as a sort of breakout! Or’ he said, thinking hard, ‘a break through!’

`Really? A computer break through – that’s interesting!’ Fuck this was going to be hard work. ‘I don’t understand?’

DeMarr looked about him like a villain in a silent movie. Stupidly so did I.

`Someone hacked into the mainframe and deposited a series of encrypted files relating to some highly experimental work on gene manipulation! Davies, that new director man, called the police thinking it was a computer virus, but while he was fussing about and closing down networks I managed to get hold of them and - it is really a series of position papers on – you’ll never guess!’ I looked at him carefully. I changed DeMarr’s status from distressed to highly excited.

`Viral RNA and gene recoding in hybrids?

DeMarr dropped his cup, a look of startled ecstasy crossing his face. Daniel complained loudly from behind the bar.

`Tell him to take his gloves off, he can hold the cup better!’ Jesus!’

‘Jamie! My God, I hope you are not behind this – I mean – good god’ he looked at his cup and said ‘Good God’ again for good measure. A black inky pool of coffee was puddling the table.

I had gone very cold. I focused on my hands in front of me as I tried to look very calm.

`Oh, just a wild guess, Louis. I mean there has been a lot of speculation about this recently', but DeMarr cut me off.

`Jamie this is not speculation dear boy, nothing of the kind! I have never seen anything like it, I mean its light years ahead of where we are.’ He leaned over towards me and whispered in such a way that Daniel clearly thought he was talking about him.

`It’s the Japanese, I have no doubt about it! I can’t even begin to tell you – the break through we needed was so simple! Like everything Jamie, the answer is never complex, it is the secret of life, simple, parsimonious,’ He started wobblingly slighty. Perhaps the sugar had been a bad idea. He then looked at me craftily.

`How did you know about this, seriously, Jamie please be patient with conventional methods of research! I hope you are not up to something’

`It was just a guess, really – everyone has been talking about this since Grey published his criticism of Giddon’s work? Where are the papers now?’ I asked innocently, like a porn merchant in need of a fix. ` Have you run off hard copies? Do you have any ideas where the downloads originated from?’

At this moment DeMarr threatened to get very, very excited. His knees started vibrating. Suddenly he started to peel away several more layers of coats. `Here,’ he produced a great wad of paper. ‘Have a look at it, but destroy them afterwards, I have another copy hidden in my left arm.’ I snatched the papers off him greedily, and would have kissed him had not Daniel walked over and said ‘Guys I really want to get home now, is that ok? Sorry’ He mouthed some words at me but I ignored him. DeMarr and I moved to the door.

`Cheers Daniel’ I kissed him on his lips. I liked flirting with him.

`Anytime, see you at the gym, and leave flipper behind next time, ok?’
He was apparently referring to DeMarr. who waved excitedly.

We stepped out into a tundra like landscape. The cold slammed into us like needles.

`Why did you take illicit copies of the papers?’ I asked, juddering as the first shiver kicked in. DeMarr was replacing his outer layering carefully, like a man trying on a suit in a store, as if we had all fucking day.

`Well – ‘

`DeMarr that’s inside out, the other way, the OTHER WAY’

`I have always have a deep-seated dislike of authority, Jamie. I inherited it from Grey. He is not the great establishment man he makes out, you know. Underneath all those tweeds is a rebel, like his father. And he is secretive, very, very secretive. Moreover’

`Leave off the tennis rackets, you only live a block away! Louis! Oh ok’

`I didn’t like the way the police dropped in so quickly, I mean it looked all rather contrived. I don’t like Davies either, I mean who is? He turned up two weeks ago and he has been changing things and looking about and reorganising the research agenda, he’s changed my desk and taken down my picture of FDR. And moreover – you asked me earlier where the download originated from – ‘

Fuck DeMarr was an extraordinary source of information tonight.

`Yes?’

`They came from Boston.’

`Boston?’ I said, vacantly. Then I remembered Grey and his secret work.

`Shit! Are you sure of that - you don’t think Grey is behind this?’

`Good god, no – well not immediately – but Boston is revealing. He never speaks of it, but something happened there that frightened him, and he was into something very deep, so deep he has contrived al these years never to leave a trail back to what he was doing. For instance, he donated all of his research papers to the institute except those from 1998-2003. He keeps them with him in his library.’

`Have you ever seen them’ I asked, fascinated.

`No’ DeMarr sounded hurt. `He keeps them under lock and key, he never discusses his research involving the children’

`Children? He really did do experiments on children!’ Fuck what was he, some sort of Nazi! `DeMarr, what do you know of this? Tell me!’

`Not here, Jamie, not know. Later. But I think this download is part of that research, somehow, I have a hunch. Someone else has leaked it here, now.’

We were standing, both lost in thought in the biting cold.

`Why was Grey here the other day, DeMarr, when I ran into him?’

`I don’t know. He was talking with Davies for a ages. I thought I heard an argument. He wanted to loan some equipment I think, to resume some work.’ I had visions of DeMarr with his ear pressed to the door. `Anyway’ he said decisively, `go and cast your young analytical mind over these papers and lets compare our notes – we can advance our own research here by years if it adds up – but tell no one.’

`Don’t mention it to Grey yet, Louis,’ I said delicately. `Until we look over it properly – it might cause him un-necessary anxiety, especially if it looks like its been stolen from his library.’

To my relief, DeMarr agreed. `But we will need Grey’s genius on this, eventually.’

He then sauntered off to his apartment, quite close to the University. I sat blowing steam and banging my hands together, wondering what the fuck to do! My brain had, momentarily overloaded, shut down completely. My face was probably playing the emergency MAX EVANS screen saver.

[Patroclus76]

DeMarr vanished, whistling energetically to himself. My head felt like it was going to explode! Everything was coming together rather quickly, too quickly, rushing in from all sides! Max gets, from somewhere, a fantastically advanced idea about gene manipulation claiming to make him normal. Almost at the same time, someone hacks into a series of computer files at the Genome Institute and donates the information – about 30 years ahead of its time – and aimed at DeMarr! I could see that DeMarr was both horrified and yet fascinated! I knew of his respect and friendship with Grey, but I also knew that he could not resist a puzzle, an intellectual challenge! He had already taken the bait completely! And I still felt unsure about Grey’s involvement – Boston, the experiments, the rumors. Could he be trusted with Max? Wilcox seemed to think so (but he implied somehow that his involvement came later, with the birth of the children?) Oh fuck!! I tried hard to recall what Wilcox had said – what Max had said – but they all merged into a sort of babble.

God I should have been paying more attention! To calm myself I thought directly of Max, his image, his face. That was weird! Thinking of Max wasn’t an externality anymore, it was more that he was inside me, like my own memory, and when I thought of him there was a sort of light in me, fuck – like sunlight coming through low cloud. Despite the awful cold and my exhaustion I felt a huge surge of joy when I thought of him. I breathed evenly and deeply and then resolved to get home as quickly as possible, in case Max turned up at my apartment, or Kyle. Yet the bus stop looked like the fucking moon – deserted and white and glacial. I half expected a team of Huskies to run by with a sled attached to them. No one was around. It must be one of the coldest nights on record. I started to get this weird paranoid feeling that the cold and the snow were all part of some plan, some slow alien take over, to trap Max and freeze his semen so he couldn’t impregnate anyone. Jesus, get a grip! Max’s semen was fine!

But I had to speak with Wilcox. I took out the cell phone. Now I wanted to pee as well. I telephoned my free pre-paid operator's assistance. I asked for Professor Grey’s phone number, Bone Hill House Estate, Breslow, Wenatchee. I wasn’t sure if the voice on the other end was real or some sort of automated device.

`I am afraid Professor Grey’s number is not listed’ said the sort of animated voice after a while.

`Are you animated?’ I asked.

`Sorry? Am I what? As in excited? Are you being obscene?’

`Oh it doesn’t matter. Cheers’. As I clicked the cell phone shut it vibrated. When I opened it, the message was a number 423-326-1446. What the fuck! I spun around and then looked at the cell phone again. I should not have had that second coffee.

`Wilcox?’ I said out loud. Ever since Wilcox repaired this phone I suspected he was intimately involved with it. He was probably monitoring all my calls, even my obscene texts to Jonathan! My voice sounded un-naturally loud. I rang the number quickly with cold, raw fingers. I pressed it to my ear. There was a weird, electronic sound of static and great distance as if I was ringing Antar. I have expected some sort of robotic voice to say

`Welcome to the Antarian Imperium – due to the war there is no one available to take your message – please leave a m’ then someone answered it abruptly.

`Hello?’ It was Grey. I recognised the voice, reserved, subdued but alert, attentive if not slightly distracted like he was in the middle of trimming his nasal hairs or something.

`Hello! Hello, I am – ‘

`I hope you are not trying to sell me anything?’

`No, not at all, I –‘

`Because if you are I shall report you to the police’ – fuck this guy was tense for a near hit Nobel prize winner.

`I want to speak with Wilcox actually, if he’s around?’ There was a silence.

`Wilcox?’ the voice relaxed but now seemed curious. `Of course, he’s in the cellars sorting something out, can I get him to ring you back?’

`Yes, that would be great. It’s rather urgent. I’ll give you my number.’ He asked me to wait. I could picture him shuffling through some vast desk littered with paperweights and pictures of his wife with a pen stuck behind his ear all the time. I gave him the number.

`What is it about?’ he asked. I panicked, my mind racing. I almost said ‘It’s about another date’ but I thought that sounded well too weird.
`It’s about the food he ordered, there’s been some delay because of the weather.’

`Food? Oh I see, Ok, I’ll let him know. Have we met?’ he asked suddenly, unexpectedly, just as I was about to switch off.

`Oh no, no – I only manage the weekly shops on the phone, I am relatively new here –‘ My mind was not prepared for any elaborate deceptions - please don’t ask me about where here is!

`I see. I just thought your voice sounded familiar. I am afraid I have reached an age where everyone sounds familiar to me. I’ll ask Wilcox to call you’. He rang off, although for a moment I sensed he wanted a conversation. Shit I hid the cell in the back of my pocket and breathed a huge sigh of relief. At that moment a bus appeared slowing crawling into the terminal.

It took ages to get home. The freeze was so intense that the salting of the roads was undone in just a few hours. I texted Jonathan several times to say that I had invited some friends around for drinks, and that they might turn up before I got home. I wanted to give him some forewarning if Max or Kyle turned up.

Thinking about skin boy now filled me with terror. Why did he never fucking reply to my texts! What if he was waiting to kill Max, knowing that he would come to me? Wasn’t that the easiest and most economical way of stopping the children? Max was probably able to look after himself, but where was Michael! I felt safer when they were together. Kyle was ok in a normal fight, but if any serious alien crap went down, I would rather have Michael hurling his stone shattering bolts of energy around and swearing magnificently. And why wasn’t Wilcox closer instead of stuck out in the middle of nowhere! Wilcox realised the danger more than anyone. And why hadn’t he returned my call! (I had visions of Grey looking at the number myopically and thinking later ‘who is this for? What was the message? I can’t for the life of me remember!’) bastard scientists!

As the bus lurched and stopped towards home I looked at the rolled up manuscript in my hand, like a baton. I had been gripping it so hard that my handprint were embossed on it. I had no doubt what it contained, no doubt at all. It contained EXACTLY the answer to the question that Max had, only hours ago, asked me: a schematic blueprint to recode Max’s DNA through a controlled viral infection. This, like Wilcox, was from the future? More to the point, it was from Boston, and was somehow already linked with Grey’s research. Did that mean that’s Grey’s work in 1999 was genuinely his, or was that also, in some senses, from the future as well? Who had closed down Grey’s research and why? How many people had come back from the future to stop the births? I played with my cell phone, no messages from anyone. Fuck!

I looked out at the docks again, through the complex distorted reflections on the window, of myself and, behind me, the pale misshapen interior of the bus. Had this timeline happened before? It must have, in some senses, to enable it to be altered? Had I made this journey before, would I again, without any knowledge of repetition? If Max were killed tonight, Wilcox would vanish? And the whole future of the Antarian-Earth ‘thing’ that Wilcox had said was about to happen would never come to pass. Was there a world in which, a time line somewhere, where none of this had happened! No Roswell in 1947. no Crashdown shooting, no pods? I felt a bit weird then, slightly nauseous. I had too many questions without answers; always bad for clear scientific deduction. I wasn’t even sure what the date was anymore. I clambered off the bus, hurled myself over several small canyons of snow, and made it to my front door without falling over. Inside, the elevator wasn’t working so I jogged up stairs talking with myself loudly to confuse any muggers.

`Yo Jamie man, how’s you!’

`Hey cool, how’s you!’

Fuck it was cold! I put my keys in the lock but found the entrance to my apartment oddly open. I pushed open carefully. Alert, my heart racing, I stepped quietly into the hallway, looking towards the front room, with the kitchen just out of sight, and the bedroom and bathroom doors to my left. I could hear the TV, and see it shadowing up the room, which was otherwise in darkness. I stupidly rolled up DeMarr’s papers into some sort of weapon and prepared to run in and kick the first thing I saw violently (I briefly saw the headlines, `alien killed by future manuscript from child genius’) and at that moment, quite appropriately, someone laughed.

They laughed really loudly at something and then, after a pause, they laughed again. I recognised the laugh. It belonged to Kyle Valenti. I felt a slight flicker of annoyance over a huge wave of relief, turned the hall light on and said `Honey, I’m home!’ in the campest voice possible. As I turned the corner Kyle and Jonathan came into view, sitting on the floor, their backs on the sofa, eating popcorn and watching a basketball game. They looked like they were best fucking friends! Their feet were even touching! However on seeing me, Kyle leapt up, knocking the bowel over,
`Jeez, Jamie! You scared the life out of me!’ So much for fucking alien alertness!

`And me!’ chimed in Jonathan, who had not actually moved his attention off the TV or the popcorn.

`Oh my god, Kyle!’ He too was changed. Not as dramatically as Max, perhaps, but he had grown, become part of something else, some other, dangerous dimension. I felt it all about him. His blue eyes twinkled in their old ironic way but there was a reflectivity in them, a stillness now, which spoke almost of wisdom and of great patience. He grinned at me and then slid his eyes down to Jonathan who was fishing about for the remote.

`He’s quite a catch, Jamie!’ but before he could work up any more Valenti sarcasm I was hugging him and, he in return, hugged me with genuine affection.

`Jamie, I think I felt muscle there!’ he squeezed my arms, `God is that legal?’

`He has muscle alright’ Jonathan was watching the nth replay of a penalty in slow motion with a look of professional horror on his face.

`Kyle you’re looking great man, really great – ‘ I felt my emotions close to the surface again, as I had all day. `I have missed you all so much!’ Very carefully, almost indiscernibly, Kyle’s eyes cautioned me. Was this just normal caution, or did he suspect Jonathan? Had he worked out he was a skin! I suddenly remembered Wilcox’s insistence that I had to keep Max and the normal time separate from the time conspiracy – or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it! Easier said than done! It was all coming together in my fucking apartment! I smiled, slightly apologetically and then he embraced me again.

`You are looking the part man, Max said you were on form today!’

`Did he!’ I said, half seriously. `I bawled my eyes out!’

`And so did he’ said Kyle softly, `He was in quite a state when I got to him. Alas we didn’t have Michael to slap him out of it!’ we both laughed.

‘I was so taken aback Kyle, I mean, so shocked by everything, and all the news – ‘my voice trailed away. ‘But he looks magnificent!’ Kyle winked at me.

`Hey guys, don’t exclude me from this reunion!’ said Jonathan with obvious good will. He stood up and said `I can’t wait to meet this Max guy!’

‘Yeah?’ Kyle crouched down, digging out a handful of popcorn. ‘He is a great guy Jonathan, he was the leader of our little school gang in ye olden times!’ I sat on the chair, relieved and now hungry as fuck. I was relieved so much to see Kyle. ‘It was a great gang, we each had special roles – like a secret society!’ he said, and my memories of all his little gestures and tones came flooding back. I sat thinking that whatever appalling, highly complex, adn indeed (in terms of temporal mechanics) deeply un-natural events awaited us, I WAS SO FUCKING HAPPY! I felt like some old veteran, called up to renew the war! And I have to say I also thought - no Tess this time. I felt a bit ashamed of tht thought.

Jonathan looked away from the TV (which had cut to commercials), he had already bonded with Kyle in that weird spooky, sporty straight man way that jocks do. Fuck soon they would be getting drunk together and vomiting into the same bowl! ‘What was Jamie’s specialty?’ he smiled spitefully.

‘My geekiness.’ I said to preempt anyone. ‘And my cunning ability to blend into any background.’ Kyle laughed again, lost in memory.

‘Jamie? He was our special biter! Jamie could jump onto people’s arms and bite them like a fucking weasel – he had a special brace, it was impossible to shake him off once had a vein in his mouth’ I started laughing. Kyle was rolling up his sleeve. When shown the scar of our first glorious encounter Jonathan looked massively impressed.

‘You should be careful what you put in his mouth, Jono boy!’ I thought Jonathan winced slightly.

I proposed we ate and then we had the drama of trying to find a takeout that could still take anything out to anyone. In the end we settled for several large slab like pizzas, which, predictably, arrived stone cold. Oddly Kyle didn’t drink, which Iput down to his spiritualism, so Jonathan and I finished off some beers and sorted out the sleeping arrangements. I finally, unobtrusively, managed to get Kyle on his own when Jonathan retired to his ‘shower’ and emergency moisturising session. I wanted to know when Max was turning up.

‘It should be tonight, but he is trying to work out where the others are and get them here in the most complicated way possible!’

‘Will they all come here?’ I was excited and yet appalled at the idea of eight of us in this apartment! Jonathan would have to be limited to half an hour a day in the one bathroom or we would never survive. I was hoping that Isabel had also changed sufficiently to make such co-habitation bearable.

‘Possibly, we’re not sure yet – we were half way through debating our next steps when the feds broke in on us.’

‘Kyle’ I took his arm. ‘This idea of Max’s, about being made normal..’ I whispered this, ‘how did he hit upon it?’

‘I don’t know. He’s been thinking about it for some time I guess, and you know what he’s like. He mulls things over. He must have come across it, and he and Liz started finding out what you were up to, because Liz remembered you were working with this genius guy,’ I nodded but said nothing. Kyle looked towards the bathroom and said quietly ‘You think its possible?’

‘No, I don’t. If you want my view, I think it’s a trap’ I said this suddenly and without thinking. Kyle’s eyes narrowed but he said nothing.

‘Ok Science man, Liz isn’t that convinced either, but she is afraid, I guess we all are! We’ll have a conference later when the delegates turn up.’ He smiled but noted my evident anxiety ‘Jamie, he’s fine, he’s a big boy now, you of all people know that!’ I smiled sheepishly, not quite sure what he meant! Had I missed something in the vulcan mindmeld?

I organised the arrangements as best I could, with all the joy of someone putting out stockings at Christmas. Four people could sleep in the sitting room, two could, with the use of cushions from the back of the sofa, sleep in the hallway. I fantasised innocently about having Max in with me and Jonathan, but then couldn’t quite resolve where (in the middle? Or no, me in the middle? Max across us both, Max underneath us lengthwise?) Kyle showered and after a few more pleasantries, lay down with extraordinary economy and fell swiftly asleep before I could even turn the TV off. I looked outside. The Great Freeze had fogged up with windows and there was a chilly mist low over the skyline. The streets were weirdly deserted. Kyle was right; Max could look after himself.

I clambered into bed and threw myself on Jono boy who was reading something, his torso twisted into the light. As I snuggled my head into his smooth, hard shoulders I realised with horror he was reading DeMarr’s download. Stupidly I had forgotten all about it!

‘You must think I am really thick Jamie, what does this stuff mean!’ It sounded a genuine deprecatory remark, the sort that Jonathan had often indulged in once he realised I was involved in a doctoral thesis. I felt relieved, but why had he picked it up? He normally never looked at, or showed an interest in, my work.

‘You’re not thick, and that is hard going – it’s a project I have to go through for tomorrow – I forgot in all the excitement!’ Skin boy yawned and stretched out a fine arm that allowed me to snuggle deeper under it, my front fitting neatly into his side. He seemed talkative. ‘Kyle’s really cool. I like him, man. How come you’ve never mentioned any of these guys earlier?’

‘It’s a long story – we sort of drifted apart, and it got a bit sort of incestuous for a while –‘ I wasn’t sure that was exactly the right word to use. I could feel Jono boy’s brain whirling and clicking.

‘Were you and this Max guy lovers?’ I laughed, partly to myself and then, seeing that Jonathan was genuinely anxious about this, stopped and leaned up, so I could look down on him. I smiled and started pawing his side, the flat wash board abs and down to the side of his back where I now suspected a small flap of skin covered his seal. As I neared the top of his thigh he grabbed my hand playfully but firmly, and smiled back

`Hey!’ it had sounded like a warning. I desisted.

‘No, we were never lovers.’ I continued, `at least not in the conventional meaning of the term. Max is straight and he is married to another good friend of mine, Liz Parker’ I kissed his ear. Jonathan sighed oddly. I thought for a moment he was just relieved, and then he said, very softly to himself as he turned the light off ‘Yantra Parker’. It was quite distinctive. It was almost like a catechism, something private. I fought back a real urge to confront him there and then, whatever the consequences, but I needed to play for time.


I fell asleep, burrowed down, feeling Jonathan’s extraordinary warmth radiate out into the bitter cold sheets. It was so fucking un-naturally cold that I could only warm the space immediately around me, and if I shot out a limb beyond this I had to snatch it back. I lay awake for a while, thinking about Jonathan. What was he really like? What was I sleeping in the arms of? Eventually I fell asleep and predictably enough in the circumstances, I dreamed of Max, a strange, unearthly dream, insinuating itself into me like a poem or a song.

Max was standing on a terrace next to an old man in a wheelchair. He wore a magnificent red cloak, over a tunic covered in strange devices, like letters from a bold yet alien language. The letters seemed to move and shimmer. Max’s hair was long; profoundly black, and blowing gently in the open air, as was his cape; unfurling about him like a great banner. His very presence was a proclamation. There was such a peaceful feeling inside the dream, an utter sense of stillness, as if it was in slow motion or in silence. And vast, unlimited power. Max’s beauty had transformed again, here he was a king, universal and wise. The old man was holding his cloak as if asking forgiveness. I thought it looked like Grey, eaten away through great pain. Max re-arranged the blanket on the old man’s knees against the cold wind and then, sweeping his hair back, he looked at me. His gaze literally took my breath away. I looked back at him, and as I did so, I became aware that I was holding a ball in my hand, a child’s red ball, and that behind me was a young boy. Max spoke to me, in shapes – not words – inside my head, as if he traced out the letters on my skin with his fingers. Illuvatar. I frowned, confused. The child ran to me for the ball. Max turned towards the old man, and then I saw behind him, strobed by the red lick of the cape, a vast army spread far and wide. The soldiers were not human. They were tall, grey-blue youths with boned faces and cuirasses of bone across their shoulders. They held aloft a forest of spears and their eyes, grey-green, were fixed on Zan.

I awoke suddenly, shocked out of the vision. For a while the sheer ecstasy, the sheer scale of the vision lingered, the smell of autumn, my sense of Max’s enormous power. I sat up quietly. I could hear Jonathan snoring. Awake, I was anxious to see if Max had arrived, as if the dream could be so easily and literally translated. Was he here? Had he come? I slipped out of bed, suppressing a giant scream as my feet touched the wooden floor and grabbed my overcoat that had been on top of the duvet. I crept into the hall and peered into the sitting room. I listened hard, afraid to breath. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out two shapes on the floor. Then, with my heart racing, I saw Max’s leather coat across the chair and his sneakers and socks scattered about him. I crouched down and saw his head, the mane of hair, and the nape of neck just above the blanket. I fought back the urge to touch it, to trace a mark on it, a soft gesture of possession. Yet I was afraid that he might wake up quickly. I sat cross-legged for a while, listening to him breathing, thinking of the dream.
`I would do anything to be with you, Max’ I whispered softly. Eventually, chilled, I took his coat and lay it over him gently, glowing with relief at his safety. For no apparent reason, and to my rather shocked surprise, I whispered the word illuvatar. I had no idea what it meant. He moved slightly, as if listening, and then curled in on himself. He said sharply ‘no Michael, leave it!’ I tiptoed out, trying not to laugh.

I took a pee in the dark (since the light activated the exhaust fan which sounded like a coffee grinder), fought down the desire to flush, (it made a fucking dreadful noise and the cistern took an hour to fill, which made even more noise) and walked back into the bedroom. At least that is what I thought I was doing. When I pushed open the bedroom door, however, I realised immediately something was wrong. Very wrong. The bed had gone and there was just vast pitch darkness before me, without detail or variation. I clung onto the door but as I did so this too transformed itself into something huge and vast, expanding upwards as if it had become a tree and was now proceeding to grow rapidly. I stood rooted to the spot, realising that I was no longer in my room but in a vast stone chamber of some sort, like a cathedral or a tomb. I was standing on a stone floor, and through the darkness about me I sensed great height and distance. I felt with my hand. Where my simple plywood interior doorway had been was now a massive carved wooden panel of intricate design, lying flat against a wall. I realised I was standing on a threshold, with an archway high above me. I looked behind, to where the bathroom and the hall had been, and made out the dim image of a long stone corridor, lit by moonlight through high narrow windows. In these slabs on freezing white light I saw the traced outlines of high walls festooned with portraits and landscapes in oil, dark and lost within heavy gilded frames.

‘Jamie’ said Wilcox, coming from behind me, from inside the vast space that had been the bedroom.

‘Wilcox for fuck sake! – what are you trying to do – kill me before we start! Whose side are you on!’ my fear made me angry but Wilcox rather characteristically started laughing.

‘Sorry Jamie, but you said it was urgent, I am not very good at this yet. It’s a bit hit and miss.’

‘What is!’

‘Getting you back and forth over distances but in the same time frame.’

‘Wilcox, you could have rang me, man!’

[Patroclus76]

Wilcox looked at me rather apologetically. I felt distinctly psyched out by my surroundings, and utterly un-nerved by my mode of transportation

‘Have I gone insane?’ I asked rhetorically. I sat opposite Wilcox, whose face appeared to be covered in coal dust. He smiled ruefully at me, and yet at the same time rather seriously. ‘Not yet.’
I smiled back, hearing and seeing in Wilcox the outline of Max. He must have sensed my déjà vu because he leaned forward and asked ‘Our reunion was not a disappointment to you then?’

I shook my head slowly, closing my eyes, even to recall it was to feel its immensity, a huge surge of energy, an indescribable joy.

‘No.’ I said softly, more to myself perhaps. ‘To remember you are a live and in love is not a disappointment, Wilcox, and to know that he – ‘ I hesitated – ‘that you, felt the same was just so –‘ I stopped, my voice threatening once more to break and betray my emotion. Sitting in this strange place filled me with the sheer wonder of everything that had happened to me since Isabel first appeared in my apartment. I wanted to say something, something that would come close to clarifying how I felt.

‘I thought about God, actually, which is really weird and – ‘ I hesitated, seeing Max in the park, black against white, a haze of dark stubble on his cheeks, a curled ribbon of long hair across his face. My recollection then merged into the enigma of a king, his cloak rippling in the wind, the unspoken word, the man in my dream.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Wilcox asked softly, as if he sensed my thoughts but thought it impolite to say so directly. Or did he sound puzzled, as if he could not understand what he was seeing?
‘It’s nothing really, I mean, for fuck sake, its about a dream I had – before you snatched me from the consequences of a weak bladder!’ I laughed weakly, like a man trying to make light of his own execution. Wilcox persisted. In outline, I told him about Max and the cloak and the old man and the army. ‘Sorry’ I said at last, ‘I am sure we have far more important things to talk about!’

I looked at Wilcox and saw that he was either profoundly disturbed or deeply, deeply moved by something. For a moment he looked so fucking weird that he threatened to set off a panic attack.

‘How extraordinary’ he said eventually, and then he reached into his pocket, which seemed rather commodious and deep. He fished out several bits of string, a pocket knife, what appeared to be an apple, a very worn copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and then, judging by the look on his face, he found what he was looking for.

‘At some stage, when you have time, I want you to read this – it will help set the context of the next few weeks as it might be.’ He pulled out a small metal disk, no bigger than one of those old dollar coins, and flicking it as one indeed flicks a coin, he caught it and then handed it to me. It was warm to the touch.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s the Roswellian Codex, the journal entries of Professor Julian Grey, the unedited version, or rather one of the unedited versions. Max visited Grey before his death in a scene utterly in keeping with your dream, minus the army. It must have been around 2018 or there about. That is very, very curious. I wonder what it can mean?’ He looked at me with a certain awe.

‘It’s a dream, Wilcox, dreams mean nothing..’ but my voice trailed away. I held up the disk in my hand, wishing to change the subject. ‘A codex?’ it seemed a curious name for a journal. ‘Will it work in a normal PC?’

‘No. Just hold it in your hand and think aboutit – but for god’s sake let none of the gang see it.’ He seemed suddenly to turn his attention to the immediate business to hand. ‘So Jamie, you wanted to speak with me - let’s compare notes. Debrief me, young man!’ he smiled and raised his eyebrows, as if trying to change my mood. I felt the cold oppressive silence of the great library close in about me, all ears. It seemed almost alive.

So I did indeed debrief Wilcox, metaphorically that it is. I told him everything about DeMarr and the download, including DeMarr’s conversation in Old Possums, and then, as he sat hunched up on the sofa listening very carefully, I told him about Jonathan. He stood up at that stage and, walking behind one of the sofas, put on a low rather shabby looking standard lamp. Its dim arch of light made the library seem even more sinister and eccentric, like a sort of gothic film set on some impossible scale. It seemed unnaturally large. No house could contain a library so big – such a place would have to look like the Vatican or something! I finished with a censored version of my exploration of Jonathan’s lower thigh.

‘Oh dear.’ said Wilcox, his hands deep in the pockets again, a habit I associated immediately with Max.

‘To which bit?’

‘All of it, actually.’ I felt tired and panicky, as if somehow this was already my fault, or I had missed something crucial. I looked at Wilcox sideways, hopeful.

‘You said that one of your fellow time travelers was a skin, is this Jonathan?’ but all hope had failed me when Wilcox did not respond to the news of Jono boy's excessive moisturising. I felt sick and cold. ‘So I am sleeping with a fucking assassin?’

‘You could be, or more likely a spy at this stage. I half suspected it. The Shalloth who returned with me in 2044 is dead, he was unfortunately killed in 2002 ensuring that Max met with Clayton Wheeler and saved his life – a complex mess that took a lot of sorting out.’

‘How many people came through with the conspirators?’ I was beginning to feel very seriously spooked. Perhaps it was the cold? I stood up and walked to stand along side Wilcox, both of us with our backs to the fire. The result was rather comical in that we continued to talk looking up and away as if we in a urinal or expecting something to attack us from the reference section of Grey’s library.

‘Three skins came back, one was the former Antarian Ambassador to Earth, who knew Bone Hill House well and was familiar with Seattle. There were two others, a Valaen, one of the humanoid races of Antar, although with varying psychic abilities, and a human –‘

‘As in earth human, a local?’

‘Yes, I guess that is one way of putting it. We suspect it is the attorney general of the Federated States, a man called Henry Maitland, but we can’t be sure yet. I came ‘back’ before that was confirmed.’

It suddenly dawned on me how bizarre, how truly important this conspiracy was to involve fucking ambassadors and attorney generals whizzing about and turning up back in time, and yet every time I tried to think it through – especially from the perspective of Wilcox - I became profoundly confused. I was half inclined to request another mind meld job but I feared it would prove too much for me.

‘Wilcox, I am really embarrassed to ask this, being as you know, clever and all but surely your existence here, now, with me is evidence that they fail?’

‘No, Jamie, it's more complex than that. Time is always now, it is always moving forward, you must think of it always as a moment of becoming. If I took you back to your 16th birthday, it would be your 16th birthday again, de novo, and you would not be determined by anything that had happened before. If Jonathan killed Max tonight I would not exist, my version of time would go – ‘ I looked at him in genuine alarm

‘Jonathan is in the same fucking apartment as Max! I have to go back now and confront him!’ Wilcox held my arm.

‘Patience, Jamie! The Shalloth would be loath to kill Max, and only if all else failed. In 2040 I and my good friend, Seeth Sia Ova first became aware that a conspiracy was a foot, and from what we found out, we came to know that the leading Shalloth offered to help Ki’var on the express condition that Max-Zan was spared. They agreed to prevent the birth of the children, that was all. The Shalloth are a complex race, they both love and hate the Seeth for giving them life –‘

‘The Seeth made the Shalloth?’ I gasped.

‘Yes, the High Seeth made all four races of Antar, and the Shalloth were forever their favorites and closest to the royal houses until they sought to change their status and advance themselves, and before the Seeth fell from grace into the evil of genetic experimentation and genocide.’

Wilcox must have sensed my utter bewilderment, because he looked at me decisively as he released my arm. ‘Don’t worry about Jonathan, remember Michael once ALMOST slept with the enemy, and she remained loyal to him as things turned out. Watch him – and see how he reacts when he meets Max and stay close to him for the next few days. You know how to kill a skin, I take it?’

I nodded, preoccupied. `When I mentioned Liz, he whispered the word Yantra in front of her surname?’

Wilcox pursed his lips. ‘Interesting, Yantra is an Antarian word for changed person, someone who has been touched from within by a Seeth lord. I am not sure why he said it, perhaps he was superstitious? Some of the Shalloth worship Liz.’

‘Worship? Wow – do they worship Max?’

Wilcox ignored this and asked suddenly ‘Do you love this man?’

I made a sort of startled expression. It was not the sort of question I had anticipated. ‘I’m not sure – I mean – I am very fond of him, I don’t really know him’ fuck this was going to sound either massively superficial or just sad. ‘I am not sure. I mean’ I was about to say ‘not like a love Max’ but I left it unsaid. ‘He has a great body on him!’

Wilcox coughed politely, like a schoolmaster politely correcting one of his students.

‘He is not what he appears to be, Jamie – he is a skin, the body you enjoy is a husk!’

I shuddered involuntarily. ‘I don’t want to sound perverse here but, what does a Shalloth look like? When I helped out during the skin attack on Roswell that time, with Nicholas, I got to know about the husk thingy? So what are they like, in the raw?’

‘It would be difficult to describe, but the host that you think is ‘very fucking sexy’ is a mere vessel bred on Antar, grown in fluids.’

‘Shit!’ I had visions I was having hot alien sex with a lobster or a giant squid or something (and come to think of it Jonathan’s arms and tongue managed to get in the most unusual places!). Wilcox was laughing with me.

‘Does it matter? You loved me while realising that on Antar I would have looked very different, and you love me now knowing that I am an ‘old dude’ past my prime! Remember our conversation in Alex’s bedroom young man, long ago, when I said that you would not have been obsessed with me if I had been ugly or fat –‘

‘Alright, alright Wilcox, don’t get heavy – I have hidden shallows! I am a sucker for muscled bodies and shoulders, and men with dark brown eyes –

`Jonathan’s eyes are blue, Jamie?’ said Wilcox, sounding very much like Max, ‘Perhaps you are thinking of someone else!’

`Don’t start flirting Wilcox, its too cold! But I have no idea how I am going to act normal now with Jonathan, no way at all – now I know he might be a giant beetle or a fish or something.’

‘You must! And on no account must you let on to the others that he is an alien, I want to keep the only alien encounters to the arrival of Seeth Sia Ova in about six weeks time, on board what is left of the Seeth Imperial Fleet.’ Somewhere deep in the house a clock struck the hour. I thought it struck five but it was hard to tell. Jonathan had delayed us and we still had so much to discuss. I pressed on.

‘Ok, right – so what about DeMarr and Max’s Big Idea? It’s not his, Wilcox. Someone has given it to him, I suspect the same person who then very conveniently leaked the relevant scientific breakthrough to the institute in a download from Boston. Which I haven’t read yet, incidentally.’ I was beginning to feel the cold set into my legs and feet. Wilcox put his arm around me and rubbed my shoulders vigorously as if he was trying to start a fire with a stick.

‘Well, this is all very troubling. And complicated. For a start, it is partly Max’s idea, Jamie. I agree that the details are part of a plot, some sort of entrapment. But the gang had a discussion in 2005, when we decided to try and stay in Seattle, that there might be a way of making us normal, of stopping our powers. It came up because Liz had watched a TV interview with Grey and a German scientist, discussing gene manipulation and ‘designer’ babies. I forget the other man’s name.’

‘Von Giddon, or Giddon for short.’ I said, ‘I watched it as well. They collaborated together for some years when Grey headed up the virology unit at CDC in Atlanta. They disagreed over the ethics of using viral RNA and over the creation of a new regulatory authority in Geneva to monitor possible eugenic programs.’

Wilcox nodded. ‘And indeed, the morning of our first meeting with Grey, here outside on the terrace on the 15th March this year, I want to put the proposal to Grey then, but the pregnancy dominates everything so the matter is touched upon but left unexplained. Later I am to ask Grey, in this very chair, to turn the Antarian side of us off, but the children have already been born and he refuses –‘ his voice trailed off, as if he was thinking hard, remembering the future.

‘Clever.’ I mused, ‘to insinuate a variation of an idea already in Max’s mind – who would have known that?’

‘Anyone. In 2055 the Codex is published for the first time by the government of the Federated States, and Grey relates the whole thing – you’ll find it yourself on your copy.* Our conspirators have the benefit of foresight, as we do, to some extent, but the timeline is beginning to diverge significantly, as we approach the event horizon.’

‘Event horizon?’ It was a term I was familiar with, but in a radically different context.

‘Yes, it’s a term borrowed from astro-physics: the Shalloth use it to refer to the immediate sequence of events that lead to the incident that needs to be altered or eliminated – in this case the birth of the children.’

‘Wilcox, it's getting late, I had better get back or our cover is blown. We need a plan of some sort!’ I sounded rather desperate.

‘Of course, Jamie, of course. But listen,’ he grew serious. ‘In this library is all of Grey’s research. He keeps all of his papers locked in cabinets on the second gallery. No one has been near them, so the downloads are copies of the work from Boston. Our conspirators were there. I know for a fact that they experimented on one of the cloned babies produced from the Phoenix children without Grey’s consent –

I looked bewildered again – a sort of scowl with my lips pursed.

‘You will read about it in the codex. I did not at the time understand what they were doing – I was too involved with Jesse, now I suspect they were testing out their theories on gene manipulation–‘

I stood horrified, half hearing Jesse’s name. ‘What happened to the baby?’

‘She died, all of the cloned babies died, they were blown up by the government –‘

‘Fuck Wilcox!’ I felt momentarily overwhelmed by this revelation. ‘I am not sure I am going to keep this together, man – I mean..’ I felt myself trembling, and not just from the cold, but the sheer enormity of what was infolding around me. What was I going to be asked to do? And if asked, could I do it?

‘You will, Jamie. You will. Trust in Max as he trusts to you. Whoever is behind this knows of you as well, they know that Max has come to you, and they probably know of your links to DeMarr. Is DeMarr trustworthy? Do you think he has been compromised in any way?’

‘Absolutely!’ I said, weakly, knowing full well that I thought the same of Jonathan until about half an hour ago. DeMarr was mad and weird and, oh god, the more I thought of it, most likely an alien as well, I mean he made dolphin noises and tapped fish tanks and ran across freeways.
‘DeMarr is too fucking weird to be an alien, Wilcox. I mean, wouldn’t you try and blend in or something. DeMarr is utterly incapable of blending in anywhere. I mean, he can hardly dress himself! Davies is by far the leading suspect – he is the new head of the institute and has only been around since Christmas.’

‘Ok, right! You had better go – here’s what we shall do. Read the download and see if it makes sense. Find what you can about Davies without arousing suspicions, and keep an eye of Max – the rest of the gang will be in your apartment by the weekend, so things get a bit crowded. Keep an eye on Jonathan as well. Keep an eye on DeMarr as well.'

‘Wilcox I only have one pair of fucking eyes, man!’

‘I will keep my eyes on Davies then, but I might need your help. I will call in some backup, I have two Seeth warriors that will prove useful, and I might get Liz back from Roswell.’

‘Warriors?’ I asked, doubtfully, ‘Aren’t we supposed to be downplaying the alien stuff until your mate turns up? Say Over?’

‘Sia Ova – you are forgetting – the Seeth are shape shifters, they will ‘blend in perfectly’ – I have the perfect disguise in mind!’

I looked at Wilcox in sudden surprise. ‘How stupid of me – how else could you not look like Max!’

‘Indeed, although I might look rather different now’ he said, teasingly, pinching my arm. I ignored him, too exhausted to take the bait for now.

‘OK, but make sure I know who these Seeth dudes are, and make sure they are close to me – I am worried about Jonathan. How long do you think we have until they follow up on the download? Max can be such a stubborn bastard!’ I said without thinking.

‘He can indeed!’ said Wilcox, unhelpfully. ‘They will act soon. In the first instance our conspirators will try and get Max to work on his idea and come to them. But I and Liz, my Liz that is, from the future, Future Liz, have worked out a cunning plan of our own, its time to throw the final dice.’

‘You have?’ I desperately wanted to go to bed. `Does it involve Michael throwing a tantrum?'

`Not necessarily!' The fire started to dim and, as if on queue, Wilcox took my hand and walked towards the vast closed doors. ‘Although Michael will have his uses. It need not concern you yet. You have enough to do for the moment. You have to stall Max or dissuade him but I have no idea what they will try,’

‘Wilcox, darling, I think a brief outline of your plan would be helpful at this stage. I think we have to work on our communication!’

He patted my back and laughed, like Max would have laughed, eerily it sounded exactly like him.

‘Very well, but do not let it distract you. Our conspirators are literally running out of time, the time line is coming to an end and so far they have failed to change anything of significance. Max has the double chromosomes within him from Wheeler, Liz has been saved and modified, they are in love and married - and Liz will conceive on the 16th February’

`Fuck!'

`Quite.' said Wilcox.

‘I mean, that isn't long! Will the conspirators not get more desperate as the event horizon approaches? They might be forced to try and kill Max or Liz or something horrible!’ It was the morning of the 25th January, of that I was sure.

‘They might – but they might also try and go back and start again!’

I stopped, completely stunned by this new revelation.

‘You mean they have some sort of fucking time machine or something! How many times are we going to have to do this!’ I thought oddly of my revelation on the bus home, endless repeated time, endless sequences and recombination of sequences, bits of life thrown together like an alien version of Ground Hog Day!

‘The Shalloth have a Granolith –‘

The word froze my mind, it sparked off a series of memories, Max’s memories, implanted in my head by Max earlier that day, images of a departure and a betrayal. Images of great pain. For a while I could not even speak.

‘There is another one?’ I asked redundantly.

Wilcox turned to me. We had walked out of the library and down a vast series of corridors. The cold was indescribable. I literally had no sensation in my feet.

‘Yes. When the conspiracy is further uncovered in 2044, it is realised that the Shalloth under Ki’var’s direction built a massive Granolith which, unlike the one in which Tess made her return to Antar in, could be reused. We know it is here, somewhere on Earth, but we have no idea where. I believe it is here, somewhere, in this very House. Long I have looked for it’ He sighed.

‘You are going to try and force them to reveal where it is when they try to use it again, is that it?’

‘Yes – and destroy it once and for all.’ He paused and smiled. ‘Then it will be over. There is one other thing you should know. Incidentally, make sure you allow Liz and Max the comfort of your bed on the 16th.’ I looked at him frowning, shivering violently again.

‘Jesus am I in there as well! ’ I said, unable to suppress my excitement.

`Jamie!’

`Always willing to lend a hand!’ We had entered a huge ornate hallway, dominated by a vast flight of stairs. Wilcox led me to what was clearly the main entrance to the House, and opened it slowly and with effort. We stepped outside into freezing night. For a while, before my eyes adjusted, it seemed utterly dark, sheer nothingness. Then I made out the great acres of snow about me, and above a vast panorama of stars, trillions set deep in the void. I had never seen so many. We walked out onto a terrace and a small flight of stairs to a driveway and then I realised that this indeed was the terrace of my dream. The revelation shook me.

Wilcox was standing behind me, starring up to a small cluster of stars in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale. He seemed anxious and suddenly vulnerable. He out his arms around me and rested his head on the top of mine, as if he was balancing a telescope. I felt like a child with my father, long ago.

`What is it?’ I asked gently.

`Nothing much, and yet everything. That brilliant blue white star is Tau Ceti, the star of Antar. Seeth Sia Ova is about to severe the head of Ki’var off with a knife and place it in a casket to bring to Max as a token of surrender. He will also hide something in the head, the key to our misery! A long era of war and terror is coming to an end. In their despair and self-loathing, the Seeth will reclaim themselves and free the worlds they have long enslaved. It is an act of compassion.'

`It will work out, Wilcox. Hey, by the way, what does the word Illuvatar mean?’

I felt Wilcox’s surprise.

‘Did Jonathan say that? Did Jonathan use that word?’ He was surprised, even possibly taken aback. His voice was almost a whisper.

‘No, I heard you say it to me in my dream.' Wilcox let go of my hand gently, and he said affectionately, even lovingly, ‘how very strange the universe is Jamie. Remember that always, even when all else fails.. ‘ but before I could politely remind him to tell me what the word meant I was holding my door – my plywood bedroom door – and Jonathan was snoring. From the fading warmth of my own imprint on the bed, I had been gone about ten minutes.