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“Happy day of your origin!” were the first words I heard as I opened my eyes.
“What?”
“The day you were created is today.”
Victoria was sitting cross-legged on the bed. She had a big smile on her face and a mug of black coffee in her hand, which she moved in my direction. As my eyes focused, I reached for the mug. My birthday... right. Thank you.” I said as I slowly pulled the mug to my lips and took a sip.
“How did you know?”
“We are on the same wavelength. I felt it.”
“You felt my birthday? Like in the whole birth canal thing?”
“No. I did not feel the biological birth. I felt the intellectual awareness that you feel on this date. We should do something to immortalize today.”
“You want to celebrate my birthday?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t usually make a big deal about it. What would you like to do?”
“I want to eat and dance.”
“Excuse me?”
“On your television. I watched people eat and dance. They seem to get pleasure from it.”
“Have you been watching the Lifetime channel?” I asked, half kidding.
“I watched a chronicle of your history, Kate & Leopold.”
“Okay, there’s something you should know. That’s not history. It’s fiction, not real life.”
“The people weren’t real? They were not human?”
“They were human, but they were fictional characters. A writer created them.”
“Writers can create humans?”
“Yes... uh, no... they can’t actually create humans. Well they can, but so can anyone. They were just characters created from a writer’s imagination. The actors are real people playing people who aren’t real. Do you understand?”
“They are real people, but they are not real people?”
“Yes and no. You see...” I could tell from her expression that my explanation was only making things worse. I took another sip of coffee.
“How about The Cheesecake Factory?” I said with a sigh. Victoria smiled.
“And then we can dance?” she asked as if there wasn’t a reason why that might even be a problem.
“That could be a problem. It’s difficult to dance when you can barely walk,” I said.
“I can fix that,” she said, as if I had just told her that I had nothing more than two left feet.
“I’m afraid to ask,” I said, knowing where this was probably going.”
“You’ve done it before.”
“For ten seconds. That’s not even long enough for the Minute Waltz.”
“That’s because the change came from within you, not around you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If you are outside and the temperature is 100 degrees Fahrenheit, what do you do to cool down?”
“Drinking something cold usually works.”
“But that is only temporary. To stay cool for a long period, you need to go into an air-conditioned environment.”
“What does the temperature have to do with my ability to dance?”
“Think of your ten second walk as a cool drink.”
“So how do we get from a cool drink to an air-conditioned room?”
“By entering into the same dream state that you have already used to travel around the planet.”
“But even in the dream state, I still need crutches to walk.”
“Not if I am in the dream state with you. If I am in close proximity to you, I can create an electrical exoskeleton which will allow you to walk without crutches.”
“You and I will exist in the same virtual reality. That is too cool!”
“Only if we are in an air-conditioned environment.”
“No. The phrase ‘too cool’ is slang. It means good.”
“Why do you not just say it is good?”
“Because using slang is fun.”
“And fun is good?”
“Having fun is very good. Eating and dancing is fun.”
“Then we shall go eat and dance and it will be too cool,” she said, with a look of pride on her face at having mastered slang.
That night, Uber picked us up for the 10-minute ride to the restaurant. The driver was friendly, as usual, but I got the feeling that he thought Victoria was my caretaker. If he only knew how much of a caretaker she really was.
Victoria liked eating out because it was an opportunity to observe humans in their natural habitat doing what humans enjoy doing most. I imagined that, through her eyes, it was probably not unlike humans observing the primate habitat in a zoo. She took it all in like a starving child and, like a child, her questions always began with why? It made for some very interesting dinner conversations.
“Why are those humans sitting over there?”
It was a very strange question, even for Victoria.
I looked over to see a couple in their twenties having a conversation.
“If I had to guess, I'd say that they were about to have dinner. Why do you ask?”
“Because he is thinking about going to sleep and she is thinking about another human.”
“Sounds like they’re on a first date. Actually, it sounds more like a last date. Do you do that mind reading thing of yours often?”
“I am always gathering information,” she said as she took another bite of her medium rare steak.
A big meal tends to slow people down but during the ride home, Victoria was like a giddy schoolgirl. I must admit that there was a certain degree of excitement on my part as well. As soon as we got in the door, she asked when we were going to go dancing.
“I just need to change. What about you?”
“Do you like surprises?” She asked, with that Mona Lisa grin of hers.
“That depends. you're not planning on turning into a man, are you?”
“No, I do not. This body seems to be sufficient for my needs.”
One of these days, I really must sit her down and have a serious discussion about sarcasm.
Twenty minutes later, I was lying in bed wearing one of the two suits I have hanging in my closet.
“Which one of us plays tour guide?”
“You go and I will follow.”
“In that case, I’ve found the perfect place for us to dance. We have reservations at The Starlight Room,” I said, as Victoria touched my forehead and I slipped into a dream state.
The “Starlight Room” was protected by Victoria’s electrical dome, similar to the glass enclosure over an antique clock. The silence of the Bolivian mountain top with an entire universe above me was breathtaking, that is, until I turned around. It was a good thing that the dome also kept out the frigid cold because Victoria was wearing a skintight red evening gown with a slit up to her hip and cleavage down to her navel.
“Where did you find that dress?”
“I saw it on the Internet,”
“But how did you buy it?” I asked, knowing that she had no money.
“I just copied it. It is by someone called ‘designer’.” She did a quick twirl. The back was as low as the front.
“Do you like it?”
“Do I like it?” I answered as if the question was irrelevant, because it was. “It’s... you're... beautiful.”
She flashed the Mona Lisa smile that I had become so accustomed to seeing whenever she was proud of having mastered anything a human might do.
I reached into my outside jacket pocket and slid the power switch to play on my digital recorder. Then I rotated the volume thumb wheel up as high as it would go. The stillness of the night seemed to amplify the music. I put my arm around her waist and two people who had never danced before, swayed to the music and the universe above them. .
“So tell me, when is your date of origin?” I asked, as Diana Krall serenaded us.
“I exist on a perpetual cycle without beginning or end.”
“An existence within a complete absence of time is a difficult concept for humans to fathom.”
“There will come a point when the realization will come to you.”
“That sounds very mysterious.”
“Existence, what you call life, is not a mystery. It is a personal reality”
“Well, in this personal reality, there is a timeline. If you’re going to act human, you’re going to need a date of birth to celebrate. Let’s make it today. At least I won’t forget it.”
There were two other people who also wouldn't forget that day. John Major and Dianne McLendon had just arrived at the Chacaltaya station satellite dish for a routine calibration check. Its primary purpose is deep space observation, specifically multiphase resonance sounds. On this particular night, Dianne heard a totally unexpected sound.
“Where is that music coming from?”
“What music?”
“You’re going to think I’m crazy, but it sounds like someone singing. Don’t you hear it?”
“It’s hard to hear anything with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones battling it out,” John said with his trademark sarcasm. “We’re 17,000 feet above sea level and our closest neighbor isn’t anywhere close to us. Maybe the music is coming from the mother-ship.”
Dianne pulled binoculars out from the messenger bag around her neck. Scanning the terrain, she noticed movement in the distance. Turning the bezel, the blurry scene slowly came into focus.
“John, you’ve got to see this.” She handed him the binoculars.
Two people dressed in evening wear and totally oblivious to the thinner atmosphere and frigid temperature, were slow dancing as “... We're dancing in the dark and it soon ends. We're waltzing in the wonder of why we're here. Time hurries by, we're here and we're gone...” drifted across the landscape. After a few minutes, the music stopped, and two bolts of lightning shot into the night sky. Dianne looked at her partner.
“What the hell was that?” she asked.
“You mean the lightning strike?” he replied.
“No, the...”
“The what?” John said, interrupting her. “The two mountain lions stalking each other? That’s part of the beauty of this job.”
“But the people and the music,” she said
“I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I had to sit in a cubicle all day long, can you?” he replied as he handed the binoculars back to her. “Now let’s get to work. It’s late and we still have to write up our daily reports.”
Dianne took one last look in the direction of the “mountain lions” before heading into the dish housing. Despite the altitude, she knew that her eyes hadn't played tricks on her. And yet, people dancing in evening wear would have been impossible in the frigid cold. She didn't want a desk job and mandatory shrink visits, but she knew what she had seen.
Maybe John could dismiss it as a hallucination, but she couldn't.