“I take it from your tone of voice that neither a zoo nor Area 51 is a place I’d want to be,” Gorg said. “I know what zoos are. When I was entering your atmosphere, I thought I might want to see a zoo. I thought the octopi might have built one, but I do not wish to become a specimen in one.”
Ebenezer laughed. “You keep mentioning octopi. What is it with you and octopi? Is it a tentacle thing?”
“Are they not the most intelligent beings on your planet?”
“No!” Ebenezer laughed. “I mean, I hear they’re smart — they can learn how to escape their tanks and stuff, but humans are the dominant species here.”
“Huh. I wouldn’t have thought so from the lack of tentacles.”
Ebenezer shook his head. “Look, I have this big old overcoat. If you wear it, it’ll cover your tentacles, and we can go out. There’s an aquarium near here and I’m sure they have an octopus or two.”
Gorg clapped his hands. “I’d love to meet them!”
Ebenezer refrained from rolling his eyes and went to fetch the overcoat. It was an oversized costume from a movie he made called “Frosty’s Snowman,” in which he played, of course, Frosty, a man who builds a snowman that comes to life and fucks his brains out. In any case, he’d somehow come into possession of the snowman’s overcoat. It hung in one of his downstairs closets and when he brought it to Gorg, it fit perfectly, roomy enough to hide all eight tentacles. Gorg just looked like an extra plump, rather lumpy guy.
Except when the tentacles wriggled. Then he looked like he should be in aNightmare on Elm Streetmovie.
“Try not to move them, okay? Keep ‘em still,” Ebenezer implored. “I don’t want to have to tell people that we’re going to make a horror movie.”
He paused for a moment. “By the way, how are we supposed to hide your ship? Won’t the Air Force people be looking for you already? Wouldn’t they have seen you come into the atmosphere?”
“I doubt it. I keep my ship in camouflage mode. Nobody would’ve seen it,” Gorg said. “It’s so much easier to avoid detection when you’re entering a planet’s atmosphere without a direct invitation.”
Nodding as if to himself, not even recognizing that the whole situation was so bizarre that he accepted a spaceship as being in “camouflage mode” without question, Ebenezer led Gorg outside, locked the door behind them, and brought Gorgto the garage. He pressed his remote and the door swung up, revealing three vehicles inside. A Camaro, a Jeep, and a Jag. He chose the Jeep since the doors were already off, and he knew Gorg would fit more comfortably in it.
“Climb in,” he instructed. Then helped Gorg fasten his safety belt.
“Why am I being restrained?” Gorg asked. He touched the seatbelt. “Have I done something wrong?”
“No. It’s a safety thing. There’s even a song for it.Buckle up for safety, buckle up, show the world you care by the belt you wear…or some shit like that.”
“Really? How positively primitive!” Gorg sounded thrilled and repulsed at the same time. “We have antigravity beams for that.”
“Well, goody for you,” Ebenezer grumbled. He slid behind the wheel. “I guess we do things the old-fashioned way here.”
“I didn’t mean to insult you! I’ve never been to a planet where they have to tie you to your conveyance.”
“It’s the law. And try to keep those tentacles still, will you? They look like squirming larvae under there.”
Gorg immediately stilled. “I’m sorry. When I get excited about something, they move. I tend to talk with my tentacles.”
“Well, try to keep mum, huh? And you see that handle? I had it installed. It’s called an ‘oh shit’ handle. If we hit a bump or take a corner and you feel yourself falling out of the Jeep, you yell ‘oh, shit!’ and grab it.”
Gorg grabbed the handle. “Oh, shit. Yes, I understand.”
Ebenezer wasn’t sure Gorgdidunderstand but started the Jeep anyway and pulled out of the garage. He drove at the limit, trying not to fling Gorg too hard against the seatbelt that it would lock. The last thing he wanted was for Gorg to think he was being held prisoner.
He realized that somewhere over the course of the past couple of hours, he’d stopped thinking of Gorg as a delusion. Gorg was real, as real as he was, and wasn’t that just his fucking luck? An alien decides to crash land on Earth and it picks Ebenezer’s back-fucking-yard to do it in. Aholiday-lovingalien, besides, who seems to have some sort of weird fixation with octopi.
He negotiated the hills and valleys, driving more carefully and slowly than usual. He didn’t want to be pulled over for something as stupid as speeding or running a stop sign and have to explain to a cop what his seat buddy was smuggling under that overcoat.
He drove them to the Aquarium of the Pacific, a beautiful aquarium in nearby Long Beach. He knew it had several varieties of octopuses, so it should be able to satisfy Gorg’s curiosity.
He hoped.
Providing Gorg didn’t strip off his coat and do some sort of tentacle mating dance, that is.
And why in the blue fuck should the thought of those tentacles waving sinuously around, sliding softly against his skin make him hard? Why was he eventhinkingabout it?
