Little Green Men (18 page)

"Saturday," Banion temporized. "Saturday. Of course. Well, what about the following Saturday?"

Banion heard a flipping of thick. English diary pages. "That's Nini Ferguson's thing for the Organgorfers."

"Umm. So it is," said Banion, regarding the blank Saturday in his own diary.

"What are you doing later tonight?" Burt said. "Tonight?"

'After the sun goes down. Celestial phenomenon, repeated daily."

"Nothing, far as I know. Just me and Bitsey. Bitsey's deep into that twelve-parter of Eleanor Roosevelt on public TV. Thought I might work on my Franklin book."

"I'll swing by around six-thirty, pick you up, we'll have a drink at your place."

"You don't have to do that, Burt."

"I
want
to!"

Banion hung up feeling good about Washington for the first time in a while. That imperious Magyar Williger might dump him, but he still had friends like Burt Galilee.

At six-thirty on the button, he heard the moneyed honk of Burt's Mercedes. He had replaced the radiator ornament with a miniature Negro jockey of the type once commonplace on American lawns -Burt's little joke, a thumb up the ass of the Establishment. They drove over bumpy cobblestone streets and the remnants of trolley tracks to Banion's house on Dumbarton, the former residence of a distinguished, if ineffectual, secretary of war.

Banion's first inkling that something was amiss came when Lucretia, the maid, met him in the vestibule and announced that the
"invit
ados"
(guests) were in the living room.

What
invitados!

He rounded the corner into the step-down room and saw, sitting in a hushed semicircle, as if at a wake: Tyler Pinch, Bill Stimple, Bob Newcombe (no wonder he'd had to run), Val Dalhousie, Karl Cuntmore (hugely successful writer of techno-thriller novels), Sid Mint, and a man he did not recognize. He felt Burt Galilee's large hand on his shoulder and heard the deep molasses voice say. "Jack, we're here because we love you."

There's really only one way to face an intervention - with a stiff drink in your hand. Under the glum stares of the assembled, Banion calmly walked to the bar and, taking his time, mixed himself the mother of all martinis. No one spoke as he shook and poured the gelid liquid into a glass and, with a certain melodramatic air of defiance, dropped one, two, and three vermouth-soaked olives into it. He took a sip, feeling the divine vibrato up and down his cortex. This, he knew, would be the only moment of pleasure this increasingly gruesome day was likely to afford him.

"So." he said, not moving from the behind the f
oxhole of his bar. "To what do I
owe this
pleasure!"

"Jack," Bitsey said, "don't be angry. Burt's right. We're here because we love you."

"I'm grateful to be an object of such mass devotion. Does this gentleman" - Banion motioned with his drink in the direction of the unknown man sitting on a chintz armchair - "also love me?"

"This is Dr. Blott." Bitsey said, "from Well Haven."

"Aha. Of course. Rancho Risible."

"What?"

"The funny farm. How do you do. Doctor? Do the men with steel nets lurk behind the arras, or are you packing a tranquilizer gun?" Dr. Blott. a mild, balding man with a forehead creased by perpetual empathy, said in a soothing voice that would have cajoled King Kong down from the Empire State Building, "Mrs. Banion asked me to come tonight because she's concerned about you."

"Of course she's concerned. Erha
rdt Williger just dumped us. Um
," said Banion, "now
that's
a martini. Dad used to say you could always tell when an angel had been to visit because there would be a faint whiff of vermouth in the air. So, who wants to register concern next?"

"Jack," Bitsey said sharply, "this is important." Tyler Pinch, curator of the Fripps, was, Banion thought, sitting rather closer to her than he would have thought necessary.

"Comfy, Tyler?" Banion said.

"Bitsey asked me to be here, Jack. There are a dozen places I'd rather be right now." "Philadelphia?" "Don't be hostile," Bitsey said.

"Cet animal,"
Banion said,
"est tris mechant. Quoad on l
'attaque, il se defend. "*

The remark left a third of the assembled looking perplexed.

"But I speak in tongues. Well, enough sparkling repartee. You've come to tell me that I have gone mad and am making a spectacle of myself. Or, more to the point,
of you."

"No one doubts that you underwent some kind of traumatic event," Dr. Blott said.

"Like being kidnapped by aliens?"

"All right, let's talk about that."

"Don't try to teach a pig to sing. Wastes your time and annoys the pig. No comparison intended, Doctor."

"Why don't we talk about the affairs you've been having?" Bitsey said.

*
French sign: "This animal is very naughty. When you attack it, it defends itself."

"Oh, Bits, puh-leeze."

"Every time I call your hotel room you have some
bizarre
excuse why you're not there. Spending the night in the lobby with janitors so aliens wouldn't get you? You expect me to believe that? I don't want to get some
disease,
Jack."

"I'm not having sex with them." He didn't have the heart to point out in front of everyone that she wasn't likely to get a disease from a husband she hadn't slept with in quite a while.

Into this momentary vacuum lumbered bullish Karl Cuntmore, techno-novelist supreme. And yet, for all his tens of millions, he still looked like a man who had just been told there was a dead porcupine in his water tank.

"To date, there's no credible evidence that aliens have landed on earth. NORAD* can track anything bigger than a football. I know Bud Walp personally. He's the four-star in charge of the whole show. He's as straight as they come, and
he's one of your biggest fans. I
talked to him at oh-eight hundred this morning, and he told me there is just no way Jose any flying saucer could get through his net without his knowing it. He'd blow 'em out of the sky like clay pigeons."

"Well, Karl, then I'd say we're in very deep poo-poo, because these spacecraft were significantly bigger than footballs. Though they were slightly smaller than your ego."

"Back off, Mister," Cuntmore snarled.

"Oh, don't play soldier with me. The only uniform you ever wore was a Cub Scout outfit, with a merit badge for pulling the legs off insects."

There was this to be said about an intervention: you learned who among your friends you really didn't like, after all. But now it was Val's turn. Poor Val, they must have had to drag her here, screaming.

*
North American Aerospace Defense Command. The military headquarters that operates America's radar and satellite warning system.

"Darling Jack, I couldn't care less
what
happened to you on the golf course. Jamieson used to come back from Burning Bush and Augusta with the most outrageous stories."

'About being abducted by aliens?"

"No, no. Of shooting under eighty. I never believed a
word.
He was an appalling golfer. Men lie about golf scores, women about their age. The first kind is
far
the more serious."

"Val,
I
appreciate your concern, I really do, but I'm not sure Jamieson's lies about golf are in the same league as being kidnapped by creatures from outer space. Or am I being obtuse?"

"The
point,
sweet, dear, darling,
adorable
Jack, is that you've become a dreadful
bore."

"You're right.
Touche.
But what am I supposed to talk about? Medicare? NATO expansion? The Middle East peace process?" He looked about the room at all the earnest faces. "Does this remind anyone of the play scene in
Hamlet!"
He picked up a miniature plastic cocktail sword from the bar. "So, who wants to hide behind the arras and get run through?"

Sid Mint spoke. "Personally? I don't give a shit what happened on the golf course. But we're losing a fortune! We're getting more cancellations than bookings! You know what the ITT vice president said to me? 'We hear he's gone nuts! We've got major clients coming to this conference. We can't have him up there at the podium chewing on his necktie.'"

"My ties are too expensive to eat." Banion turned to Stimple. "Bill? Doubtless you have something lugubrious to add."

"We're taking the show away from you, Jack. Al Wiley called me an hour ago. I can't tell you how I regret this."

"I know. You fought for me tooth and nail. You even offered to resign. To ritually disembowel yourself, right there, in the big guy's office."

"Jack -"

"Not your department."

"Burt?" Banion said, "any grace notes to add? Personal message from the president? Ultimata? Bottom line? Balm in Gilead?" "I'm just very sad, Jack. That's all I have to say." "An honest statement. Accepted at face value." "Suppose," Burt said, "it did happen the way you say it did." "For the sake of argument."

"So here you are - we are - at the fork in the road. The road in the dark forest in the middle of your life. You know your Dante. Now you have to ask the question: Am I going to let this ruin my life?"

Banion looked around the room, slowly, from face to face. "I suppose I could say it was all a bad reaction to some medication, right?"

They looked like faces in a crowd below, willing the man on the ledge to jump. But the moment came and went. The next step had obviously been rehearsed.

"Jack," Bitsey said, "I'm going to leave you if you don't agree to be treated by Dr. Blott."

The two of them looked at each other as privately as they could in the amphitheater of eyes.

"I was never one for epiphanies," Banion said. "If it had been me, two thousand years ago. I'd probably have gotten back on my horse, gone on to Damascus, and hanged a few extra Christians just for good measure. I mean, bad enough to have an epiphany in the desert when no one's watching, but on a golf course? Or in Palm Springs, on your way to make Japanese car dealers feel better about themselves."

He sighed. "But, you take these things as they come, even if they come in the form of little green men. I don't know what happened out there. But it happened. And your response to my telling you that there is something very strange going on is to pack me off to Well Haven to mainline Haldol and do origami. Don't you
see!
This is big! This is the biggest thing that ever happened! You all ought to be helping me find out what it is. And all you can do is wring your hands about how it might affect your seating at Erhardt Williger's next dinner party."

And so Banion left his house in Georgetown. Outside, on the sidewalk, he started at a car noise, half-expecting to be wrestled to the ground by men, not in black but in white.

PART TWO

September

ELEVEN

". . . Saturday,
with John Oliver Banion . . . a discussion of millennial issues, with top leaders from the UFO world
..."

Except for the name, time slot, announcer's voice, theme music, set, graphics, guests, and sponsor. Banion's new television show was just like his old one. The press was treating it with whooping derision and Prozac jokes, but this Saturday, even as the general presidential campaign was ending its second week and all the talking heads in town were getting ready for sweaty pontificating on the weekend shows, a number of TV sets in town were tuned in for the debut of
Saturday,
out of curiosity. Self-immolation makes for fine viewing.

". . . brought to you by Gooey-Lube. When your car starts to make that grinding sound, drive on into Gooey-Lube. They'll grease your moving parts so fast your wheels will spin! And now, the host of
Saturday,
John Oliver Banion."

The Washington Post
had run an article about the new show illustrated with a caricature showing Banion dressed in a pointy-shouldered robe of the kind associated with
intergalactic shamans, but the John O
. Banion who appeared on the scr
een was every bit the old John O
. Banion, owlish in his horn-rims, still boyish, and yet - viewers noted - less solemn. Instead of the usual dark suit, he wore a sports jacket, with a little green ribbon pinned to the lapel. He seemed buoyant, sprightly, almost - one Georgetown dowager remarked -
happy, if that was the right word.