The transition of Clay meeting Mark turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined. There is a heap of information that has to be exchanged between these two and that's no easy task to do without it coming across as something like, "Please listen, Mr. Bond, while I divulge every sinister detail of my diabolical plan to you." I think I finally got a handle on it and here's a piece of dialogue between them which I wrote last night.
(clarifications)
“Listen to me,” Clay said, halting his advance. “I'm human like you. My name's Clay Middleton. All I want is a little information and then I'll leave you alone.”
The man stopped his shuffling feet, cocked his head to the side a bit, snapped his mouth shut, and said, “I've survived for what must be a month by staying high. Uppers at first, whatever I could find in the pharmacy. Liquor came next, fits my disposition better. Been drinking nonstop for … what's the date, don't really matter... Then you come along and suddenly I find myself sober as a judge. I don't even have a hangover to show for everything, not the slightest trace of a headache even. Now it's not that I'm not grateful, cause I am, but why on whatever world you're from would I believe you?
“You're sober?”
“That wasn't what you had in mind with your voodoo?”
“It ain't my voodoo. If anything had something to do with you sobering up, it was the damn crystal, not me.”
Clay pulled up his shirt and let the man have a look. Whether the nebula had grown more intense, Clay was not sure of, but he could now discern more color and movement from the light. (fragment of a larger crystal glowing under Clay's skin)
“Woe! Dude, that's the queen mother of all (alien) implants.”
“Glad you approve. Does that mean I can get some answers?”
“I've got to get a better look at that. My name's Mark, Mark Raft, damn glad to meet you. Untie me so I can get a closer look. That thing's amazing.”
Clay pulled his shirt down over the shard. The turnabout in the man's demeanor was so sudden and dramatic that Clay was, himself, uncertain that this fellow, Mark, was what he appeared to be. “Maybe later. You said something about aliens passing through town, did they have a child with them?”
“I said that? Sorry, my life's been in kind of a fog lately. The kid, was he human or alien?”
“Human. He's my grandson and if you can't help me I'm wasting my time here,” Clay said, flipping open the (straight) razor he had pulled from his pocket.
Mark pressed his back up against the bar and cried out in a whine, “Woe! You don't need to do that. Look at me; do I look like any kind of threat?”
“Oh, shut up and turn around. I'm not gonna just take off and leave you tied up.”
“I knew that,” Mark said in a more relaxed pitch. “If you'll just give me a couple minutes to think, maybe I can remember what it was I saw. Can you give me a hint what the aliens looked like. Were they grays, blondes, reptilians, or what? Something to help jar my memory.”
Mark turned his back and held his breath while Clay cut through the leather thong with the razor. Clay knew what a gray was, but blondes and reptilians sounded like something from a low budget sci-fi film. “I only got a good look at one. It has a human body but it's got the head of a coyote, sort of like that Egyptian god with the dog's head.”
“Anubis, god of the afterlife, and it's a Jackal's head, by the way.” Mark rubbed the circulation back into his wrists and hands. “Just let me have a couple drinks and we'll see what comes back to me.”
“I'm not hanging around here while you get loaded again. Goodbye.”
“Wait. I don't know how you've managed to survive for all these weeks, but if I don't stay a little high I'll be outside eating fruit like everyone else has done.”
“Weeks? What are you talking about, the trees only showed up today.”
“I suppose your being loony could neutralize the trees the same way the booze does. I don't have a clue what today is but it's been at least three or four weeks since the first tree appeared. Within two days, there were only a handful of us left who hadn't eaten the fruit. Me, Marleen, and a couple passing through were the only ones who'd figured out how to counter the narcotic.”
Clay could sense the truth in Mark's words but was not about to accept such insanity without a fight. “Stop! It's like you're talking gibberish. Today is December nineteenth and I was here in Bixby yesterday and everything was normal. There were Christmas lights and displays all round town and people and cars were rushing around like they do every year at this time.”
“Well, in case you haven't noticed, the last thing celebrated around here was Halloween. I'll take your word on the date being the nineteenth of December if you'll take my word that the planet went to hell on November second.”
Clay flopped down in a chair. “November second? How could .... I don't ... Aw hell, maybe you're right about that drink. Bring us a bottle of tequila, if there's any left. My brain needs a break.”
