Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 30

Baptism in Fire

"Oooh, here he is! Mr. Midnight. Ready to roll on your debut show?"

"Roll over and play dead maybe, Leticia."

"Oh, come on, Matt. Don't be shy. You do this every night at ConTact." Leticia took his arm and steered him toward the control room.

When they reached the door, she had to hang back and give him a playful push inside. And she could push.

"I'll be right here, baby," she promised, following him in. "Mama Ambrosia."

In the background, an ad pitchman pushed a fistful of consonants over the microphone.

"Can we talk?"

"You let me worry about when and what, until you get the hang of it."

He sat in the rolling steno chair and then sat up straighter so his mouth would have a clearer shot at the mike. Leticia perched on the mobile rolling stool she used.

"I can hardly wait to see the contact sheet on those photos of you. Now don't pretend to be so shy. I'm even thinkin' 'bout trying my ugly mug on camera for some promo."

"Your ugly mug? You're . . . unbelievably gorgeous. Why haven't you done photographs before now?"

The question stopped her effusiveness. leaving Matt feeling he'd committed a huge faux pas. Which he hastened to correct, naturally only making it worse. "Is it because you're African-American, but your voice isn't?"

"Now there is where you are wrong. I am not African-American."

"I don't mean to--"

"Of Course you don't. But any fool could see l am not African-American. I am black, and white, and Cherokee and French and Spanish and Arabian. Yeah. I can trace all those tiny trickles in my bloodstream. No. I've just always felt that Ambrosia must be universal. But if this billboard gig works for you, and I think it will, then maybe I'll come out myself, hmmm?"

"You ought to," Matt said. "We can't have shy people on an advice show."

"You are so tight, honey, now sit back while I do my intro and get ready to rock and roll."

She 'd finessed him into the opening moment so he hardly felt it. Then her voice, as magnificently velvety as her black/white/Cherokee/French/Spanish/ Arabian skin, segued into a spiel about meeting Mr. Midnight, magic man of milk and honey who would listen to every hurt and offer every help.

Even while Matt cringed at the blatant pitch, he felt the soothing poultice of her perfect voice. If only everyone could medicate with words. . . . He had done it before, now he had to do it in front of an invisible audience.

"Mr. Midnight?" came the first voice, quavering and female.

"Yes?" he said self-consciously.

And then it took over, the process. She poured out the thises and thats of her life. Anxieties and hopes. She was a bubbling spring of doubt and indecision. He was the unseen but well-felt rock she effervesced all over.

He used the leading question like a lawyer. He soothed and probed. He discounted her failures and suggested successes. He did all the things he had done at ConTact for months. She chirped her thanks as she said goodbye and he wondered what he had given her besides air time.

Leticia was nodding approval and cueing the tech guy to run a commercial. She turned the sound clown to a drone.

"Wow. Okay. Fine. We're cooking. Remember those tryouts.

Those naughty callers. They all won't be easy."

"You thought that was easy?"

"You make it look easy; that's the trick. Easy."

After the commercial, three more calls came in, all people Dr.

Laura would have sniped into sniveling apology for existing. Matt hated that old-time derision. Backing people into a comer and then forcing them to repeat the old self-abusing truisms like the rote little robots they were expected to be. Dr. Laura was popular the Way Don Rickles was popular: Everyone liked to see someone else raked over the coals.

Matt didn't believe in dispensing hellfire; there was enough of it here on earth. He wanted to build up rather than tear down.

Maybe that didn't sell. Maybe that didn't make for a good show.

"That was he doing here? He glanced at Leticia, smiling and nodding as if she were listening to jazz only she could hear.

He was all wrong for this. This "gig." My God. how could he hack out of it, with all the money they'd spent on photographs and Temple so proud of her art direction and his palms sweating genteelly and his voice going out where everyone could hear and yet he could hardly hear his own thoughts? What good could he do here, except to his bank account, and what was his bottom line but arrogance and greed?

Out of here. He needed out of here.

And then her voice came on the line. The woman-girl who would change everything.

"Mr. Midnight?"

So hokey. So hopeless. How had he been seduced into this travesty?

"l--l don't know where I am," she said.

"You mean in your life?"

"No. I mean . . . right now. I'm in this strange place, and I don't know how I got here. It's like, um, a bedroom, only it's got its own bathroom and we never lived in a house like that, and it's got a radio and a TV in the bedroom and we never had "a house like that. I mean, our radio was in the kitchen, only it was broken, and the TV was in the main room, along with the extra beds."

"Why don't you know where you are?"

"Because . . . because I feel so sick!"

"Sick, how?"

"It's cramps, you know. No, you don't know. The worst cramps in the whole wide world."

Her breath caught, and then a shriek came over the phone line that seemed to pierce his eardrums.

He stared at Leticia, whose limpid dark eyes rolled with uncertainty.

"And my breathin', it's so rough. Like I had the fever that time, when l was small. I'm not so small now. I don't understand. I'm all swelled out and I feel like I got the runs."

"Listen. Where are you? You got there somehow. You must remember."

"Remember? No. l just remember turnin' on the radio and rockin' to the music. It was the only thing that made the pain seem even-like. I don't understand. I'm sweatin' all over. It must be the fever."

"The room sounds like it's in a . . . motel, is that right!"

"I don't live in no motel. I got a home. Had one. I can go back. If I can just get over feelin'

sick like this, I can go back."

"Of course you can."

"I'm so glad you said that. I was listening and I heard you talking and you sounded so calm. I knew you'd say I could go home, just as soon as I get out of this X-Files scene."

"X-Files? Like the TV show? What makes you think of that?"

"I don't know. Mulder's always waking up somewhere weird and someone weird brought him there and his sister doesn't remember. Do you think I could he Mulder's sister? I don't remember my family much, except for yelling and screaming. I don't want them to yell and scream anymore, maybe that's why I'm doing it now--"

"No, you're talking now. You're talking to me, Mr. Midnight. On the radio. Remember?"

"Oh, yeah. I dialed the number. Even the phone works here. I think a man helped me. A man brought me here. Cigarette-smoking man. I don't think that's good. Cigarette-smoking. It's not good for you."

"But he's gone, the man?"

"Uh, yeah. I'm alone. All alone. Except . . . l think the aliens are with me. That's why it hurts so much, like Im tearing apart."

Out of the corner of his eye, Matt saw Leticia's hand chop down through the air. Relief surged through him as he realized they were off the air, that a commercial or a song was waiting out to the world, not his voice and hers.

Leticia was hissing directions into her mike, then glaring at him while her luscious fuchsia lips mouthed words he could hardly make out.

Where? they pantomimed. Find out where!

Where? He was just beginning to comprehend what.

"Breathe deep," he advised the caller, "and if it hurts, short and Shallow."

"Oh, it hurts. It hurts!"

During the commercial break her shouts grew into shrieks.

He'cl never seen, heard a woman giving birth before. He'd read a bit on natural childbirth.

He was aware of activity around him. He was aware of unthought-of activity over the phone line. But he was basically lost in the umbilical cord of communication that connected him and the woman, the girl in the nameless room.

She was panting now, silent.

"How are you?"

"All right."

"Not so much pain?"

"No."

"And what else?"

"I know it's aliens now." Her voice was strangely removed. Remote. Alien.

"How?"

"There's one in the room with me."

He was speechless.

"It's slimy. Aren't aliens supposed to be slimy? And small?"

"No. That doesn't sound like an alien."

"I know it is. It hurt me, like a needle in the navel. I've got to get rid of it! Before it . . . gets me. I've got to, to . . . tell me what to do, Mr. Midnight."

"First, you must remember where you are. Tell me where you are and I can send help." Leticia was nodding frantically.

Matt glanced at the console through the glass window and saw a Christmas tree of lit red and green lights. They weren't off the air! He wanted to shout at Leticia, the sound man, condemn them as ghouls, but it would disturb an already too-disturbed girl.

His hands strangled the mike stand as if it were a mechanical throat.

"I know," she was saying. "I've got to . . . drown it. Kill it. It's an alien. There's slime all over it."

"No. That's just an illusion. Remember when Mulder was slimed? You've got to brush it away and then you'll see it's not an alien."

"It's so icky! So stringy. And . . . yes, there's a face in there but it's unshapen. It's trying to scream. I've got to stop it, because the other aliens will hear and they'll know where l am and they'll come in and slime me and take me away in a ship. I'll be locked up where the bad girls are."

"No, no you won't. Listen, you're on a phone. There's a . . . secret code on a label. Numbers.

Read me the numbers."

"Yeah. You're right. Maybe you are right. Do you know what these numbers mean?"

"I do, and if you give me them. I'll get them to Agent Mulder."

"Not Scully. She doesn't believe. She's a doctor. She'd lock me up. With this alien-thing, attached to me like a leech. It's not part of me, it's not!"

"No, but you don't want to . . . destroy the evidence that will help Mulder, do you? The evidence that will help me. I really need those numbers. What's your name?"

"Name? l don't want to say, they might find me."

"What's a name I can call you? Say of a favorite doll, or pet."

"I had a doll. Once. Daisy."

"Daisy. Read me the numbers on the telephone, Daisy, and help will come."

"I've got to kill this alien first. I've thought of how to do it, in the toilet. It's still small, but it's getting bigger every day, every minute. I tried to kill it before, but it didn't work."

"The numbers, Daisy, please, the numbers."

"Uh, all right, Mr. Midnight. I could really use some help. it's, um, 5556389."

"Wonderful! Wonderful, Daisy." Matt glanced at Leticia. Her face was set, but her beringed fingers were circling on each side of her mouth. Matt tried to interpret her sign language. Talk, keep talking. Keep her talking?

"Help is coming, Daisy. You don't have to kill the alien. The government wants it for experimentation. You know the government."

"Oh, yeah. And they can have it. Except, it's moving! I'm so afraid. I've got to kill it, or it'll . . .

eat me. I'll be right back."

"No, don't leave me! I have to know you're all right."

"But if l don't go and kill it, l won't be all right. Listen, it's screaming now, such an icky-eerie scream, just like in the movies."

Matt heard the faint whine of a siren over the line.

"Hang in there, Daisy. That's the good guys coming. They'll help you."

"Oh, l don't know. I don't know."

He heard a jackhammer pounding. Fists and feet on a door. A sudden cessation of all noise.

A girl's shriek. The sound of heavy breathing.

"It's all right." A man's breathless voice hummed over the line.

"We've got her. We've got the baby. It's alive."

"Thank God. Be careful with her."

"As careful as she'll let us."

The line went dead.

Matt felt he'd been catapulted out of a plane into a free-fall to earth.

The silence was deafening.

Then music came on. "And I Will Always Love You." The Whitney Houston version of the Dolly Patton chestnut. The Ambrosia touch.

He looked at his watch. Eleven-forty-eight.

Leticia came in from the control room.

"Relax, Brother John. Mr. Midnight is off-duty for the evening."