My fantasy was about to come true.
I was about to accomplish a life goal.
As I walked to The Girlbrarian’s apartment, escorted by her very own flesh-and blood-brother—noticing the increasing amount of trash and broken glass on the concrete and the rising frequency of abandoned boarded-up homes—I thought about all of the random seemingly unrelated events that had to happen sequentially to put me in this very situation, this exact moment in space and time.
I wondered, Was there really math for this sort of thing?
Like maybe some secret division of the government had worked out an equation for people’s lives—like you just plug in the variables of your existence and you get the guaranteed outcome.
fatherless + fat + jobless + ugly + Mom is your only friend x Mom dies – you are approaching 40 years of age
abused grief counselor + bipolar priest + in love with Girlbrarian x possible alien therapist + Guinness at Irish pub
Equals where I am right now!
Is that crazy?
I was never very good at math.
Regardless . . .
Who could deny The Good Luck of Right Now?
Who?
It was so obvious.
You appeared to me for a few strides and you smiled like you were proud. You gave me the thumbs-up, Richard Gere, and I could tell you were thrilled for me.
Just be yourself, you said, encouraging me. And then you laughed in this good Richard Gere movie-star way. And be confident. Women love confidence. Remember that. Give her the fairy tale. What your mother wanted, but never got. Like in my movies, but this time—in real life. Don’t overthink it. Trust your instincts. Break the cycle. I believe in you, Bartholomew Neil. Richard Gere believes in you! The Dalai Lama believes in you too. His Holiness told me himself.
I felt as though fate were finally on my side, and so I grew more and more confident with every step I took.
Thanks for being there, Richard Gere.
You are a true friend.
Your friendship makes me a better man.
And it’s nice to share all this with someone.
Your admiring fan,
Bartholomew Neil
12
TEKTITE FORMED WHEN LARGER METEORITES CRASHED INTO EARTH’S SURFACE MILLIONS OF YEARS AGO, ACCORDING TO SCIENTISTS
Dear Mr. Richard Gere,
I bet you are wondering why my last letter didn’t supply the details that collectively make up my first-contact story with The Girlbrarian, who shall be referred to from here on as Elizabeth because she does not like to be called The Girlbrarian.
“I’m a woman. Not a girl,” Elizabeth said from behind that curtain of brown hair when she found out I called her The Girlbrarian. “And I am not an official librarian either.”
Her voice was . . . reluctant and damaged and beautiful and maybe like a bird with a broken wing singing unfettered all alone in the wilderness when she thinks no one is listening, if that makes any sense, which it probably doesn’t.
Turns out she was only volunteering at the library—perhaps waiting for a sign, but more on that later.
Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened and the fact is, it all seems sort of unbelievable—like if I told you exactly what transpired, you would call me a liar; you might even think I’d gone insane or was making the whole thing up to sound more important than I really am. And maybe you will choose to believe that I am lying in the end, when I am finished telling you everything, but there is nothing I can do about that.
I’ve been taking a few days to process, before I committed it to paper.
(I’m afraid you might not approve of my recent decisions, because you haven’t appeared to me in days. Why? Are you shooting an important movie? Perhaps you are with the Dalai Lama? Planning one of your Free Tibet dinner fund-raisers? Maybe you are visiting Tibetan monks who suffer in the burn wards of some faraway hospital after failed self-immolation attempts, and if so, please tell the burned and healing monks I hope their efforts will prove fruitful and they are not in too much pain.)
Regardless . . .
You’re never going to believe what I’m about to say next, because I can hardly believe it myself: I’m writing you from upstate Vermont—although I don’t know what town we are in.
Max and The Girlbrarian are in a motel room together, sleeping in twin beds—I know because Max asked the motel manager several times whether the room had two separate beds “with fucking space in between, hey, because this is my sister”—Father McNamee is in our room praying, and I’m sitting here shivering on a wooden chair outside in the parking lot ringed by snowbanks, writing you next to our rental car, under the billions and billions of stars that make up the Milky Way, which I only just noticed because the motel owners shut off the big sign that reads FRIENDLY FAMILY MOTEL REST STOP HOSPITALITY in giant outer-space-green neon letters.
Max insisted that I wear a shiny brownish gold “fucking tektite” crystal on a leather rope around my neck while I sit outside at night in the country, because it’s supposed to protect me from alien abduction.
How, I cannot say exactly.
Max purchased it off a website called:
Fight Back! Protect Yourself from Aliens Now!
Apparently, your risk of being abducted by aliens increases swiftly the farther away you are from a major city, and so Max and Elizabeth are each wearing three tektite crystals of their own, but Max said you have to work your way up to three, and so I should start by wearing only one. Father McNamee said he would trust the Almighty to protect him and therefore is not wearing an anti-alien tektite crystal of his own.
Max also said that if I look up at the northern Vermont night sky long enough, I will definitely see a UFO at some point—“Look for lingering fucking orbs of lights that move too fucking rapidly across the sky and then stop on a fucking dime to hover,” Max said before he left me out here to write you, saying he was “crazy fucking tired” and had seen enough “fucking UFOs” already—but I’m not really interested in space or extraterrestrial life-forms, especially since Max has told me such horrific stories about these beings from far, far away and their plans for us.