The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [81]
Well, not today, but tonight. Today, she must prepare for it, while waiting to hear the outcome of Max’s own engagement with Matt.
An hour after she awoke, she showered, all the while thinking to herself how she would prepare, how she would handle it when it happened, this date with Andrew, at Andrew’s own apartment.
It didn’t seem like a professional interview with a suspected nonhuman being. And then it did. But then again, it felt oddly titillating in a butterflies-in-the-stomach kind of way, as though she were a high-schooler on the threshold of a first date, a first and nearly intimate date, with a young man she’d had a crush on since her pubescent focus on a desire for men began to blossom.
She was confused as to how to feel emotionally, yet something told her there was nothing to be confused about. She wasn’t sure if that something came from her professional side or her romantic one.
She thought she heard the phone ring while showering, but her first instincts were to let Max deal with it later. She’d been feeling that way lately and was so engrossed in her thoughts as she showered, until she realized, hey, that probably is Max calling.
When she emerged and dried herself, she didn’t think at first to check the answering machine but instead checked her pager. She was so used to being paged by numerous people including Max that it was a force of habit, although Max himself rarely carried a pager and thought it to be trendy, which was what he thought of her allegiance to it. She’d afterwards listened to the answering machine’s recordings of his two messages to her while at his desk in the upstairs office, but by the time she returned his call to his cell phone there was no answer. He’d said to call her immediately or she’d miss the boat and would have to wait.
So setting that matter aside on the backburner of anticipation, Melony proceeded to spend that afternoon in preparation for the imminent evening with Andrew.
She sat in shorts and an oversized white t-shirt parading the words “I (heart) My Attitude Problem” engulfed by Maxwell’s U-shaped desk. There was a series of file cabinets to the far right of her and she rolled her husband’s wheeled desk chair over to them and opened one of the drawers. Each drawer was comprised of a portion of historically sequenced, documented information of the events and misadventures of Maxwell Polito’s industrious career, each tidbit in pale, plain folders indexed by year and then alphabetically by subject. The revised and condensed versions were available via Max’s computer CD ROM files, but Melony preferred the physically tangible old-fashioned way.
She let her fingers walk to 1980.
She withdrew a file captioned with the words ERLANDSON, ANDREW (COOPER, RALSTON). The file was an inch thick, the second file in the system’s year-by-year sequence to mention the name Erlandson, the first to mention Cooper. She knew what it contained, but she was in need of a refresher course brush-up.
When she opened it and studied the separated the pages, she got more than that.
It was almost like reviewing outdated police files. If there ever was such a thing as outdated police files. Maxwell Polito files, nonetheless, were never outdated. Melony’s husband always collected and stored information and historical data relevant to his personal interests to the point of obsession. This file was not an inch thick for nothing. Maxwell-authored reports and second-page newspaper clippings with paper-clipped notes stamped with Post-its like leeches containing nearly illegible scribblings. All pertained to a remarkable occurrence at an elementary school playground in Southern California’s Anaheim, home of the Happiest Place On Earth, home of the location of Andrew Erlandson’s and Ralston Cooper’s initial confrontation together, on a night when Ralston himself witnessed the deaths of his closest eleventh-grade buddies by a creature described as a “woman-like thing with arms and a chest but no legs, with golden skin, like a genie that kid Erlandson conjured up to defend him when we were giving him a