Fifty-nine dollars of the five hundred bought a second-hand (or third- or fourth-hand) 1952 Crosley Station Wagon with a full tank of gas and fresh oil. Old Man Williams made the deal with Hank of Hank’s Auto Repair, and Tuto went to pick it up. Tuto had no driver’s license, but he could drive. Old Missus Williams made them a bunch of ham & potato salad and tomato & cheese sandwiches for their big trip.
Johnny lay spread out on the back seat, out of sight, with a blanket ready to hide under in case they were pulled over for some reason.
Tuto gripped the wheel with two hands, a big smile on his face. He absolutely loved to drive, and now he would drive all the way to new York city. He glowed with excitement.
“You can also start a new life in new York, if you want,” Johnny said from the backseat as they cruised on the interstate north.
“No way! You said I keep the car to drive back home. I sure like the car, amigo!”
“Hell, you can keep it anyway. What am I going to do with it?”
“But there too many cops in New York. They pull me over, they go on and take the car. No, I go back home. I got good job now, and can’t leave Old Man Williams with all the rats, nohow!”
“Well, you’d better come and visit,” said Johnny.
“You bet I visit,” said Tuto.
“You’d better come and visit when the baby’s born, amigo!” said Faye from the passenger’s seat.
Johnny had looked up Faye that very night, hours after her father had left in the police car. He had waited around, his nerves on edge, even though Faye’s father had commanded him to leave immediately. But Johnny wasn’t going to let a couple of rednecks tear through the village and clobber the elderly lemurians. He, his mother, and two more adult lemurians were ready for them. But no posse came. So either Faye’s father had been true to his word and had made them turn around, or there never was a posse to begin with, and it had been nothing but a ruse to get rid of Johnny.
He climbed easily up the cast iron drainpipe and tiptoed over the roof tiles to Faye’s bedroom window. She had left it open, and Johnny believed she might have been expecting him.
She was sound asleep, it was past 1 A.M. He took a moment to look at her calm face in the dark, heard her breathe slowly, and took in her scent. Could he smell she was pregnant like his mother had? He detected a vague odor of river clay and boiling water in her scent that hadn’t been there before. He supposed he had smelled it before on people, but hadn’t known how to interpret it. Now he knew.
He switched on Faye’s desk lamp, and then gently shook her awake. She awoke languidly, but when she recognized him, she grabbed him and said, “Oh, Johnny!” and he had to shush her—her father slept in the next room and wouldn’t appreciate him being here, nor what he came to do. Faye kissed his face, his nose, and then they kissed for real. They hadn’t seen each other for over a week.
When Faye had settled down, Johnny told her about her father visiting him, and handing him money to leave town for good. This angered Faye mightily, and he had to quieten her down again.
Then he told her about how his mother had called him ‘son’, and had told him her life story, and how she hadn’t been raped by a human after all, and now Johnny didn’t quite know how to feel about that—deep down he had felt responsible for her misfortune for so long. It was the whole reason he had become interested in Lemurian religion and mythology in the first place. He had wanted to understand why she disliked him so… And now it turned out she had actually fallen in love with a human, and she had blamed him for that!
Faye listened attentively, but Johnny was talking so fast, some of his points didn’t seem to register. He was rambling, and he realized he was staving off the inevitable. He wasn’t telling her why his mother had told him all this. He wasn’t telling her the main reason for this visit. He had to tell her. He took a deep breath.
He told her.
“Pregnant?” she whispered, looking suddenly like a confused little girl.
Johnny apologized profusely, and said how he really hadn’t known he could conceive children, how he had always been told it was impossible—half-breeds were infertile, and she was so young, he’d never meant for this to happen…
But Faye didn’t seem to be listening to him—she was deep in her own thoughts, eyes staring into the distance. Then she looked up, and focused her gaze on him.
“I’m so sorry,” he said again, “I know you told me you didn’t want a child, and I understand that if you had known you would never have— I mean, we shouldn’t have—”
“I did tell you that,” she said. “And you did tell me it was impossible for you to make me pregnant. But if this child wants to be born so badly that it doesn’t care what’s possible and what isn’t… well, that’s one child I do think I’d like to meet.”
She’d been surprisingly chipper after that and, boy, was Johnny relieved. He had no trouble asking her to come with him to New York after that, and she easily agreed to it.
Johnny had already made a plan. They filled a suitcase with her stuff, and Johnny took it with him when he left her. She would act as normal as she could that morning at breakfast, go to school for the full day, and after school ride like the lightning to the Meteor Crater where Johnny would be waiting for her with a car and chauffeur.
Pearly had been there to see them off. She hugged Faye tightly, called her big sister, and told Johnny he was a dumbass.
“If my parents come to look for me or ask you where I’ve gone,” Faye told Pearly, “tell them I’ll write to them once I’ve settled. Don’t tell them about me having a lemurian baby. I don’t think they can handle that.”
Pearly waved like crazy.
In the car Faye grew more quiet and more thoughtful. When Tuto heard she was pregnant he acted very kind and considerate towards her—perhaps the news made him think of his own mother and her fate, and he was aware of the fact that giving birth was no walk in the park.
Johnny said to her, “I can imagine having a baby must be a scary prospect, especially seeing you’re still so young, but it’ll be fine, you know. People have been having babies since forever.”
“Me being young isn’t what’s worrying me,” said Faye, turning around in her seat to look Johnny in the eye, “and I’m not worried about giving birth, not yet anyway, but I’m worried about what kind of world we’ll be bringing the baby into. All the trouble we’ve been having, she’ll be having. It doesn’t seem fair.”
“Isn’t that what we’re hoping to find?” said Johnny. “We’re going to New York to find another world. A better world for our baby.”
It was another world, all right. Where time in Texas seemed to have come to a standstill and the people were still stuck in the 1950s, here in New York the sixties were roaring.
“Do you think,” Faye asked Johnny, “if maybe the Great Current flows faster in some places?”
And when they were welcomed by Brick into a rundown former Catholic School at the edge of Greenwich Village, they entered yet another world. A world within a world. This was to be their new home. Brick showed them to their room and introduced them to various colorful residents on the way. Brick wore a shirt and pants, but these were customized to fit his lemurian frame and his tail was proudly exposed.
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The great big nineteenth century building with three floors and countless rooms was a refuge for all types of people who didn’t quite fit in regular society—a community of misunderstood artists, revolutionary musicians, avant-garde poets, freethinkers, vagabonds, beatniks, hipsters and hepcats. And quite a few lemurians from all over the country. There was always something happening somewhere in the building: philosophical and political discussions, bands were formed and music was played, parties would sometimes last for days and lots of alcohol was drunk and all sorts of drugs were taken. Not the ideal place to raise children, though many did—whole families lived there.
When after a few months Faye’s pregnancy started to show she became the most famous girl of the whole community. It was then that Johnny learned that in this community not only lemurians believed in the Great Current and the traditional Lemurian teachings, but that it was also very popular among the humans, especially among the long-haired hippies who seemed to live on marihuana smoke.
“The Great Current is everywhere, man,” they told Johnny in that slow sing-song way they had. “It’s in the flow of our blood, and in our breath, it’s in the beat of the music and the rhythm of dancing. We are nothing but tools of the Great Current, man, like our hand and eyes are our tools. Change and creativity flow through us into the future.”
They would eat hallucinogenic mushrooms or take LSD believing it would give them visions of the Great Current. Johnny tried it once, and threw up.
They prayed to the Sun, the All-Mother, and some said it wasn’t her eye in the sky, but the sun was a hole in reality, through which the First Mother could see us from the other side, a dimension of warmth and love and life.
And they all spoke of the miracle child, born from woman and hybrid (which was what they called a half-breed). This child would bring together humans and lemurians, two species would become one people, they said, and it would all start with this child, this wonder of nature. A New Age was upon us.
They treated Faye like a saint, and one evening she said to Johnny, “I feel like I’m giving birth to the Baby Jesus!”
When Johnny was told another hybrid had arrived to stay a couple of weeks in the building, he immediately looked him up. He had never before met another halfling!
He couldn’t believe his eyes. The combination of human and lemurian genes had produced a completely different permutation. This man, too, had a hairdo, but that was where all similarity stopped. His hair was a great big afro and it looked wonderful on him. (Johnny hadn’t put grease in his hair for months, it had grown longer, and soon he would look like a lemurian hippie.) The man was the size of a tall human, but his face was decidedly lemurian, with almost no human features, except for his large eyes, which weren’t orange, but a deep brown. The man’s tail was about half the regular size, and not fluffy, but sleek. And he was the first lemurian Johnny had seen that wore shoes.
The first thing the man said to Johnny was, “Don’t call yourself a halfling, brother, or a half-breed or a half-blood. We got two halves, just like anybody else, and two halves always make one whole in my book.”
The man was intrigued when Johnny eagerly told him about his child that was on the way, but he wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as everybody else.
“I don’t know, man,” he said, “humans often give us hybrids a pass, because we’re not supposed to have any sexual drive. Ha-ha, how little they know, huh? I for one wasn’t going to tell them any different. But when word gets out about this baby, fathered by a hybrid, many will see it as an excuse to treat us as badly as they do regular lemurians. They won’t be too appreciative to learn we can get their daughters pregnant, after all. You get my drift?”
“One of the hippies (a guy who didn’t wash, but regularly rubbed patchouli oil over his body, thinking it got rid of the stink (it didn’t)), pulled Johnny aside and conspiratorially told him of the ‘Masters of Men.’
“The who?” Johnny asked.
“The Masters of Men,” the guy said. “You never heard of the Masters of Men? That’s because they don’t want you to hear about them. But they real, man, they out there! These are the secret lemurians that rule over mankind. People think lemurians are weak and poor. But you know. You’re much stronger than any human, and you have these supernatural powers, don’t you? Sure you do. You can smell if I’m lying, you can smell if I’m hungry or sad, or you can smell if I’m bluffing at poker, can’t you? So imagine a lemurian going into a casino, right? That’s what I’m talking about. There’s rich lemurians, man, but they don’t want you to know they exist.
“And they not only rich, they powerful. They can influence businessmen, politicians, movie stars. They influence the course of mankind, man, that’s what I’m talking about! It’s all hormones and pheromones, you dig? You can smell hormones. You know that, I know that. But what most people don’t know is that you can also sent pheromones, and we can smell that, subconsciously, see? You can make people trust you, you can make people fall in love with you! That’s all pheromones! If you want, after some practice, you can make the president of the United States fall in love with you!”
Johnny was stunned. He talked to Faye about it, and wondered if it was truly possible lemurians were coming out on top in the struggle with humankind.
“On top?” said Faye. “Why would you want to come out on top, when our child could be the start of a future where there’s no segregation between humans and lemurians, at all?”
Brick told him, “Damn, Johnny! Don’t listen to that guy! That cult of the Masters of Men and that uber-lemurians jive is a damn story humans made up! It’s nothing but an excuse to persecute lemurians, to make people fear us! It’s like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the persecution of Jews. That’s been proved to be a hoax long ago, but there’s still people who choose to believe it!”
Johnny had never heard of the persecution of the Jews, so Brick got him a book on it from the library.
Johnny was given many history lessons by a variety of people, both human history and lemurian history. But he could never be sure what was true and what was made up. He had never had this problem collecting lemurian tales and legends. A story was a story.
There was one hippie who believed lemurians came from the moon. This turned out to be something some ancient Greeks and Romans believed, because at that time lemurians were said to come out only at night.
He was also told how lemurians had been lucky when the humans believed them to be spirits or ghosts. When they went back to their island and decided to have nothing more to do with humanity, no Roman or Greek adventurer ever looked for their home, because it wasn’t believed to be a real island.
Generations later the lemurians would believe the tales of a human world to be nothing but tales. The sea was endless and there was nothing beyond the horizon. To go beyond the horizon was to leave the First Mothers field of vision, and to go without her benevolent gaze.
These believes from both sides had kept the lemurians safe on their island for many centuries.
Others said it was the Endless Sea that had kept the lemurians safe all that time. There had been adventurous ancestors that had built boats and canoes, but sunken ships and drowned sailors were the Sea’s way of teaching them no good would ever come from exploring the world. Sadly, humans weren’t the type of species to listen to the Sea.
One clear winter evening Faye and Johnny sat outside on the steps of the building looking up at the sky. Faye had flowers in her hair, her belly bulged, and she was wrapped in a colorful blanket crocheted by one of her devotees. Johnny had been making a name for himself in New York as a ratcatcher extraordinaire, and had started teaching the trade to two young men (human men), who would start working for him soon. Humans working for a hybrid. The world was changing.
“Sometimes I wonder,” Johnny said to his truelove as he looked at the stars, “about all the babies that weren’t born. With all the lemurians scattered all over the world, I wonder about all of those who never met their truelove even though they were supposed to. Who would have met each other freely if we had all stayed on our island. The stars may try to get their parents together, but there’s only so much they can do if these two live on different continents. All those babies will be still up there, looking down on us, forever.”
Faye said, “You can be such a human sometimes! Dwelling on the past, wondering what could have been and what should have been… Focus on what’s here and what will be here. Focus on the babies about to be born.”