Central to his myth was his mythmaking. He made every story bigger. He could turn a dozen shoppers into a hundred, even a thousand at the turn of a phrase. Whereas other department stores were just happy being in the black, the way he talked up Holzinger’s, it wasn’t hard imagining they were minting money behind their wide window fronts. At least three times a week, the local newspaper ran a story about Holzinger’s and the latest sales record they had broken. Barry was never without comment, of course. He spread his wealth, too. He knew how valuable generosity could be. No man in town but Barry was a member of the Kiwanis Club, the Elks, the Moose, the Bruins, and the Knights. A few women’s clubs invited him to join too. No member was nearly as generous, either. At one point, two out of the three baseball fields in town had been named either after Barry, Holzinger’s, or some combination of the two.
Barry. Holzinger’s. Calumny. They were all intertwined in one fantastic, impossible fever dream. That it was real, that it had happened was solely a testament to Barry’s force of will and his imagination.
“Now, if you haven’t already been listening, I’d get those ears working.”
“Junior, what do you think she’s been doing? With all your blabbering, a person has only two options. Listen or perish. And it looks like she’s still breathing.”
“Could just be gas expelling from her gut. I’ve heard that happens to corpses.”
“Do tell us more about whatever drivel you’ve vacuumed up from the internet, brother.”
“I’ve been listening! I am alive and I have been listening.” Half-listening, if she were to be honest. But even half was more than enough with these two, she figured. Catch one out of every ten words and you would still hear too many. “But if whatever you’re about to say it's pertinent to why I’m here, then I will make sure to listen doubly well. Both ears. You’ve got my full attention.”
Neither Althea nor her brother minded Hillary’s impertinence one bit. Better to have a live one, they had always reckoned, even if it's more likely to take a bite at your face.
“It just so happens this part of the story does concern the case file the government had on our dear father.”
“Dear father? More like deer jerky.”
“Venison.”
Barry was in his early thirties and, so far as he was concerned, bettered by no man in the world. Of course, his world stretched barely further than Calumny’s city limits, but that was enough for him. He had his dream job, money to afford plenty of nice things, a sterling reputation, a pretty wife, and two young children.
“That’s us,” Althea added.
“He had plenty of mistresses, too. That’s not libel, either. It was a well-known fact. Nothing he was ever ashamed of. Didn't' matter to him how it made Ma feel to have the whole town know so vividly of her husband’s many carnal permutations.``
One night, not long after New Year’s, when the weather had a habit of being downright rude, Barry was the last to leave the store’s extensive back offices. Holzinger’s had already closed up hours prior. Likewise, the accountants and the merchandisers left the shop long before Barry was ready to go. Yes, one or two secretaries may have still been in the premises. And yes, they may have been preoccupied with straightening up their recently disheveled blouses.
No matter for Barry. He made sure he was last out the door. He gave a sort of breathy goodbye to anyone who might be lingering nearby and fumbled in his pockets for the keys to lock up the place.
“Let the record show we’ve paid proper lip service to the authorized story, as authored by our father.”
“A piece of fiction if there ever were one.”
Hillary cleared her throat.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” at least, not exclusively so. Her rudeness was bundled up nicely with a few other emotions. “But how about, from here on out, you just give me what happened. As far as you know, of course. If I want what your dad wanted people to believe, I can always look at the files I’ve already got, right?”
Normal people would have had to confer, but the twins were further from normal than the Earth is from the moon. They huddled with eye contact alone and made up their minds without having to spare a word.
“You’re doing something awful to our story, making us tell it on your terms,” Althea said, voice either hurt or angry or mixed thereof.
“But you’re not wrong. You’ve got all you need when it comes to the ‘truth.’” Junior mimed air quotes, intent on performing yet. “The real story is more interesting, anyhow.”
Still searching for those keys, a tap on his made Barry jump two feet high and three inches to the left. If his heart didn’t stop for a moment or two, it certainly had considered it. Scrambling to assume a kind of defensive position, he spun to face his interloper with his fists at attention, and his face contorted into a snarl. Whoever it was, he had been thinking, they better have had a good reason to sneak up on him like that. Friend or foe, it was no way to greet the most important man in Calumny.
“Could I have -- I mean, would you be so kind as to?”
Barry didn’t hear the rest because, for the first time in his life, he was in shock. He couldn’t listen. He couldn’t form words of his own. These were most unfamiliar feelings. A wave of nausea rolled over him, his body unable to come to terms with what his eyes were seeing.
“Sick. Physically ill. Mucked up the room with whatever he had had for a snack that afternoon. Probably pot roast, knowing Barry”
“Stains on his shoes. Stains on the walls. Was a real terror to get cleaned up.”
It was one of those aliens. Grey skinned. Big and hollow-eyed. No more than four feet tall and certainly no heavier than a fat goat. An eerie glow hung about it like yesterday’s hangover. The thing kept moving its mouth, and Barry might have heard sounds, but none of it made any sense to him. Because, of course, it was impossible. And you can’t hear impossible things. He hadn’t ever bothered much with philosophy, religion, or science; he figured that no book could ever tell him more than he could figure out on his own. What he was a practitioner in was the school of common sense.
“And just as fire can’t sing and a duck can’t giggle, I’d thought that there was no such thing as aliens. Hogwash. Triple proof hogwash.”
“One of dad’s go-to sayings. I’d say he went to it a little often, though. A few thousand times too often, by my count.”
He neither turned nor ran, though it wasn’t by dint of his courage or the sturdiness of his backbone. Instead, he was no longer truly in control of his feet. His legs either. They’d turned into cement, like bridge pilings, only wrapped up in not-half-bad slacks. Barry could do nothing but watch the thing’s spiny little lips move. Understanding the noises came slowly, but, gradually. Barry’s brain had scuttled together enough working parts to make sense of things like words again.
“Wa-ter. Wat-er. Am I saying that right? I swear, I studied and I studied but the look on your face tells me..”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“No, no. You’re saying it right.” Barry stammered, trying like hell to regain proper footing. “And I will most definitely get you some water. But, first, let me be the first to welcome you to our planet. We call it Earth.”
The alien eyed Barry sardonically. Admittedly, it might be hard to imagine what that kind of thing looks like on an alien. Suffice to say, it was plain to see that the alien already knew where he was and what it was called. He could tell you the barometric pressure, the gross domestic product of Bhutan, and how many inches were in a furlong, too, but he wasn’t there to brag. At that very moment, all he was there for was water.
Barry was unaware. The alien could have been poking him in the gut and calling him names and he might not have noticed.
“Fact is, dad was smitten.”
“Besotted.”
Well, perhaps not smitten or besotted, but certainly pleased. He felt like a boy again; he had the license to feel wonder. Authentic emotion felt a little foreign to him. So much of his life he spent as a spectacle. A showman. And it had served him well, no doubt. Everything he had he owed to the bombast he brought along with him in his wake, like the rolling echo of fireworks.
But it had been going on so long and he had gotten so good at it that, without even realizing it, Barry Barthashunas had forgotten how to feel a damned real thing He could command a room and demand attention. He could buy ludicrously low and sell stupendously, stupidly high. He could make fact out of fiction and turn it back the other way around, too.
But, it occurred to him, none of that moved him. Not like this strange little impossible alien could.
“Excuse me,” the alien intoned. “Water, we had discussed water. If you don’t mind.”
Barry, with difficulty, stumbled out of his reverie and unlocked again the door he had just shuttered.
“Of course, of course. I’m sorry. I’m just, well, I don’t know quite what I am at the moment. Speechless. Yes. That’s a start.”
Barry got the alien inside and brought him back to his wood-paneled office. And, at last, the alien got his glass of water. He declined whiskey or anything to eat, explaining that, as far as things on Earth went, water was the only thing unlikely to make him deathly ill.
Even scurrying off to the faucet filled Barry with some dread. He wanted to stick right next to the alien, for fear that if he looked away, even for the briefest of moments, it might disappear. Or, worse yet, it might turn out to never have been there at all. When he did return, having been so nervous that he’d spilled just as much water on himself as he’d managed to get in the glass, he let loose an audible sigh of relief upon seeing the alien still sitting there on his desk.
“Yes. Barry’s desk.”
Who was Barry to tell the thing to take a seat -- a real seat? And what did he care, anyway? The thing could take a shit on the desk if he wanted to. Barry wasn’t going to put up a fight or complain. He was content just watching the thing; never mind when it spoke -- that put Barry into an awe-filled stupor. Barry himself got up and sat on the desk just to be a little closer to the wonder.
Barry asked nothing in return for his hospitality and that’s very nearly all he got. He didn’t learn the alien’s name, how’d he gotten to Utah, or where he’d come from. Barry didn’t even think to ask why he was there or what had him so bone dry thirsty; not even after the alien asked for two or three refills of his glass. Nor did Barry feel chagrined that the alien didn’t share where he was headed next. Truly, few words were exchanged between them. Each of them felt special to Barry, and he wasn't willing to demand more than the alien felt comfortable giving.
Barry’s children, his last living descendants on account of Junior’s infertility and Althea’s apathy, were done. That was the story. Well, it was one of the stories. There were innumerable stories about Barry, but they were done with the one they’d set out to tell.
Hillary held up the Bluebook files that had brought her to them.
“So, what should I make of this, then? I guess there was no great dustup between the alien and Barry.”
“That’s right,” Althea nodded. “No argument. No fisticuffs.”
Hillary began to ask about what she had read in the old file but Junior cut her off.
“I thought you were interested in what happened, not what the record shows? You want to believe what they kept in those dusty filing cabinets for half a century? Fine. Then dad and the alien scuffled on account of the little guy trying to bust into the store. Why he was supposed to be going in there I never did figure out. But, fine; we’ll say he was after one of those fragrances. Dad doesn’t let him, the two come to blows but Barry gets the upper hand. Hence, no bruises or cuts on the old man. The alien, no longer so desirous of perfume, hightails it, and, by and by, a trinket of sorts falls out of his invisible pockets. That’s what Dad told the investigators. If that’s what you want to believe, so be it.”
Hillary didn’t feel comfortable putting stock in the official account or the one she’d just heard.
“It’s what he told everyone. Even us, for a long time. Took a while to get him to stray from that bunch of hogwash, family or no family.”
Junior shook his head, heavy with disappointment.
“But you come all the way here and all you want to go by is what some pencil pusher typed up…”
“It’s not that at all,” Hillary insisted. “I just don’t understand the lie. What did Barry get from not telling the truth?”
Junior eyed Hillary without saying a thing. He didn’t blink either. He was a dead ringer for a mannequin.
“You mean to tell me that,” he cleared his throat,” you can’t understand why an egotistical, self-centered lion tamer like Barry Batashunar would tell a fib or two, especially the kind no one can ever truly catch him in? You mean to tell me that you don’t understand why Barry Bartashunas would prefer to come out of the whole thing looking like a big strong tough rather than a starstruck dope? Well, if you tell me all that, you might as well tell me you don’t understand Barry at all. And never will either.”
Althea wore the grin of an old and soft jack-o-lantern.
“The other way to think about it,” she said,” is that lying was the only language Barry knew. He wasn’t capable of telling the truth.”
That was no succor for Hillary. Barry was about as unreliable a narrator as they came. She had no reason to believe any version of the story. Every last one of them might as well have been fabricated. Truth, by all appearances, held no water with the man.
“Fine, fine. So it was just another opportunity to boost himself up. To fatten up his big head. To take center stage. Fine. But why should anyone have believed him? I mean, it’s a pretty incredible, pretty unbelievable story, even for the town’s favorite son.”
Before answering, Althea took a look around the store.
“We didn’t have it. Whatever dad had, whatever power he called on to be able to wake up every morning and keep this thing afloat, we didn’t have it. Not long after he died, this place started falling apart. Barry Holzinger? He was the product. He was what people were buying. When we couldn’t sell him anymore, we found ourselves with nothing folks wanted. Now that we’ve got one foot out the door, I wonder why we thought we could walk in his footsteps at all”
“You remember the trinket the alien supposedly dropped in his hasty retreat?
Hillary nodded.
“‘Long opalescent trapezoid, constructed with beveled surfaces roughly two inches thick. Material appeared to be synthetic, but of an unknown origin,” she read aloud.
“Nothing does get past you, does it? Well, that description was right; its origin was the thing Barry lied about. The alien gave it to Barry of his own volition. Perhaps a form of payment. Maybe it was a curse. Who knows. We never did figure it out. But that’s how he convinced everyone he wasn’t just a loony.”
“Damned thing was his most prized possession, too. Had it behind bulletproof glass, right over there.” Althea pointed to a spot on the sales floor where a heap of old clock radios now sat. “Had a healthy insurance policy on it, too. You know, his last words, when he finally went, weren’t about me or Junior or his wife or even the store, his first love. All he did say was ‘Take care of the stone.’
Junior tried to shake off whatever bad feeling that memory left him with. His sour face seemed to say that it would take more than that to get rid of the hurt.
“It's all in the past now, though, isn’t it? Especially now that we’re almost done with this place.”
Hillary finally recognized that they wanted her to ask about the store closing and their imminent departure. Maybe even more than any yarn about Barry, it was the story they wanted to tell. They had do-si-doed around it long enough. And, in some ways, she felt like she owed them a little indulgence. True or false, they had spared no detail in their retelling. It was the least she could do to humor them by hearing one last story of theirs.
“So, what’s next for you two? I feel like I keep hearing something about shutting the store down.”
“Sold it,” Althea said with the finality of a last call.
“The store?”
“The store?” Althea laughed. “Not only does no one in Calumny have the money for a place like this, no one has the interest either. I’m not sure if you took any kind of look around before you came in, but this whole town is falling apart. What kids are born leave as soon as they got any sense in them. I can’t blame dad for killing this town, but it just so happens that Calumny hasn’t been the same since he died. No, we didn’t sell the store.”
“We sold the stone. Dad’s stone. Made enough money off it that we can both get out of here ourselves. Board up this little mess and bid it adieu. Me, I’m heading to Mazatlan. Whereas my dear sister tells me she’s gone country.”
“Nashville. I’ll never be further than three hundred yards from somebody playing the banjo or fiddle.”
“Well, congratulations. But how much did you sell it for that you can just up and move like that? And who had that kind of money, anyway? By your own account, it certainly couldn’t have been anyone local.”
Junior and Althea stole a long look at one another. The meaning behind it was unknown and undecipherable to Hillary. Chalk it up to the hidden languages of twins, especially two who had for so long remained in each other’s orbit. The most Hillary could do was wait for them to choose what details of their hidden dialog they might share with her.
“Not but two weeks ago, a few fine folks wearing fine outfits -- polo shirts, mostly, I believe -- rolled into town and found their way to our little store.”
“They came in asking about dad, too. Didn’t have nearly as many questions, though we entertained them with a retelling, not unlike the one we gave you.”
“Only difference is, in the end, they offered to buy that stone from us. We had never even considered selling it. And maybe we never would have if not for what they were offering.”
“There were lots of zeroes,” Hillary said wistfully.
“What did they want with the stone?” Hillary asked. It wasn’t what she wanted to know. Maybe, though, it was the most she was willing to find out. Maybe she was scared of the answers to all the other questions she had.
Althea shook her head.
“Didn’t find out. Didn’t ask, either. Didn’t much matter to us, either, on account of all those zeroes.”
“I can’t be sure if it’s what dad meant when he said to take care of the thing, but I do think he’d have smiled at what we got in return. Or not. What do I care? I just bought a condo in Mazatlan.”
Hillary started to back away. She had to find Sam and Dat Vinh. SHe didn’t know what any of this meant yet, and she needed their help figuring it out.
“Their only condition was that, were somebody who looks a little like you to come in and poke around with questions about Barry, that we provide a simple message.”
“There’s nowhere to hide,” Junior’s words came out sharply, ruthlessly. They left Hillary searching for her breath.