On October 14, 1992, Ronnie Sullivan was driving home on a small two-lane road in northern Minnesota. It was a cool, crisp night and the stars seemed close enough to touch. He had spent the majority of the evening boozing it up at a local bar. He left alone and told everyone he was heading to his house to wake his wife up and “make a baby.”
Ronnie didn’t make it home and he was never seen again.
Until 2005. In Kaiserslautern, Germany.
Ronnie jerked awake as a gigantic C-130 cargo plane thundered overhead toward its landing strip. Ronnie tried desperately to take in his surroundings. All he could discern was that he was clothed in a hospital gown and sitting in a vacant lot. Looking in the direction that the C-130 had landed, he eyes came upon a sign that read, “Ramstein Air Base: United States Air Force.”
Ronnie tested his legs, decided he could walk, and made it across the street to the main gate of the air base where he was greeted by a very serious airman.
“Can I help you?” asked the airman with a coldness that indicated no help was forthcoming regardless of what Ronnie said.
“Yeah. I need help. I’m an American citizen. I have no idea how I got here, where my clothes are, what year this is. Nothing. Please help.”
The airman looked Ronnie over cautiously before directing him to stay put. The airman entered his guard booth and picked up the phone. “Colonel Miller. ASAP.”
Col. Miller picked up the phone on the first ring and barked, “Speak to me.”
“Col. Miller, this is Airman Thomas at the main gate.” Airman Thomas lowered his voice to a whisper. “Sir, we have another one.”
Ronnie was led to a small, non-descript interview room with the clichéd one-way mirror facing him.
Col. Miller and Lieutenant Daniels entered the room through a door behind and to the right of where Ronnie sat. “Mr. Sullivan, right?” Col. Miller was cheerful and warm on the surface, but boiling underneath.
“Yes sir. Ronnie Sullivan.”
“Well, Mr. Sullivan. I understand that you’re an American citizen, but you have no idea how you got here or how it came to be that you’re in that gown, correct?”
“That’s not exactly right. In the hour that I’ve been waiting in here, a lot of stuff has come back to me. In fact, I remember things pretty well. Just not sure I want to be talking about them.”
Col. Miller sized up Ronnie. “I can’t help you unless you tell Lt. Daniels here everything you can remember. I’ve got to tend to something, but you cooperate with him and we’ll help you as best we can.” With that Col. Miller left the room.
He walked down the hall to another plain room and entered without knocking. Before him sat Bob.
“Dammit Bob! What the hell’s going on?”
Bob was not his real name. In fact, Bob wasn’t really a “he,” but more like an “it.” Bob was an amorphous blob of a creature. The creature had a discernible face, but was otherwise featureless. Bob was an extraterrestrial.
“It was an accident,” Bob said.
“An accident is when two cars run into each other. An accident is when I spill coffee in my lap and scald my nuts. Abducting an American 10 years after we signed the Cessation of Abduction Treaty is not an accident,” Col. Miller seethed.
“We thought he was a Canadian. He lives close to the border and our scientists thought they were in Canada,” said Bob.
“You traveled 40,000 light years; past Neptune, past Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars to find Earth. You’ve been amongst us for 60 years now. And you can’t tell whether you’re in the U.S. or Canada?” Col. Miller was now beside himself.
Bob shrugged as best an amoeba-like creature can. “If I had fingernails, I’d let you shove toothpicks under them. What do you want me to do about it now?”
“Why did it take you 13 years to bring him back here?”
“It’s somewhat like how you humans are about giving presents. You buy the present, you know you’re going to give it to the recipient, but then something comes up and you forget to drop it off or mail it. Next thing you know months have gone by and you still haven’t given away the present. So you feel guilty. Another 3 months go by and you realize it’s been a year. Now you feel so bad that you determine that you can’t give the present to the person because that would be rude. Finally, you bite the bullet, give away the present 15 months late and make up a ridiculous, unbelievable cover story about how you were rooting through the lost and found at your kids’ school searching for your child’s left mitten and lo and behold there was the present. ‘Sorry for the delay.’ Well, that’s how we were about Mr. Sullivan. We kept him so long that we felt bad about returning him.”
Col. Miller shook his head and left the room.
Lt. Daniels was finishing up some preliminary questioning as Col. Miller reentered the room. “Where we at?”
Ronnie had fully regained his senses and was speaking with more confidence. “I was about to start talking about the night I disappeared.”
“I had just emptied a fifth of Jack Daniels at my local watering hole. Basically, I’m a drunk. I’ve tried several times to get through a twelve-step program, but I can never complete one. I always jump off the wagon at Stage 2 or 3, you know, ‘Eat smaller portions.’
“I believe that’s a weight loss rule,” interjected Lt. Daniels.
“Oh. Well, I have a fat wife who always put slips of paper on the fridge with those slogans. I get them mixed up with the 12 steps. Normally, she’d just use the slips of paper as napkins while she dug into another cheeseburger.
But anyway, I left the bar. I call it “The Tarantula Titty” because they got strippers, but most of them have hairy nipples and their fat rolls feel like arms all around you during lap dances.
So, I was driving down the road when this flying saucer looking thing landed right in front of me. The door opened and out came this monster that looked kind of like a bear. I may be a drunk, but I knew there weren’t no such things as flying saucer driving bears.
I know this sounds crazy, but I could just tell that there was no way for me to get away. I seen that Close Encounters movie so I knew I couldn’t outrun them. I also knew they wanted me aboard that spaceship, so I got on.
It didn’t take them long to start doing all these tests on me. I read the National Enquirer every week, so I knew what to expect. Truth be told, I wasn’t really that scared.
The worse of it, of course, was when they stuck a tube up my butt. It was covered in this sticky stuff like glue. I’ve had a clonosc-, cologneosc-, that thing where the doctor looks up your butt with a telescope, so I didn’t mind the pain so much. It was the after effects.
Every time I far-, passed gas, my ass blew bubbles. You remember that room in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory that had all the bubbles? Well, that was my ass for days at a time.”
Ronnie took a sip of the Ugandan coffee that Lt. Daniels had given him. “This ain’t no Folgers,” Ronnie thought to himself.
“So, back to the ship. There was this one main alien that seemed to enjoy all this butt probing. He was kind of like that dude that did all that torturing a long time ago to get people to convert to Christianity. I don’t know his name.”
“Torquemada,” said Lt. Daniels.
“Yeah, him. They would also shoot me full of something they called radioactive isotopes just to see which colors I would glow. Now, a man has been brought low when he has a tube shoved up his poop chute, but sitting back and laughing while he glows all the colors of a Skittles bag is just downright wrong. That was plain humiliating.
One time that had me glowing fluorescent green. All the damn flying bugs they had collected kept running into me like I was a bug zapper. That’s just not right.” Ronnie paused. “The next thing I know. I’m lying right outside your base. I don’t know how long I was up there.
Well, I ain’t got much else to tell you. I know you don’t believe me.”
“It is a pretty amazing tale, Mr. Sullivan. We can get you back home, but I don’t think this is the story you want to be telling people to explain your disappearance for the last 13 years. When you went missing, your car was found on the side of the road. It looked like you’d wrecked. People assumed you hurt your head, wandered off with amnesia, and never recovered your memory. They believe you’re who-knows-where doing who-knows-what. You can show up back home, but if I were you, I’d let them believe just that. I wouldn’t mention any space rides. Oh, and I hate to break this to you, but your wife remarried.”
Ronnie thought for a moment, smiled a bit upon learning that his wife had remarried, and said casually, “That works for me. I was a drunk back then, so no one would believe me anyway.”
Col. Miller walked back down the hall to talk to Bob. “Ok. He’s not going to be a problem. You know, Bob, I’m getting too old for this shit. I think I’ll retire. I’ve been reading about micro-lending; where you lend small amounts of money to small groups of people and hold them accountable to each other. Perhaps I’ll retire to Rwanda and give that a shot. Now that my daughter has graduated college – she was captain of the soccer team, you know – maybe she’ll come help me get things started.”
At the Frankfurt Airport, Ronnie grabbed his ticket and shook Col. Miller’s hand. “Thanks, Colonel, for helping me.”
“Sure thing, Ronnie. But tell me, why on earth would you want to go back to your dinky hometown when you know your wife has remarried?”
“That’s easy, Colonel. Revenge. If that fat heifer had been with me that night like she was supposed to be, I wouldn’t have been zipping around the universe glowing like a neon sign while blowing bubbles out my ass.”
Ronnie winked at the Colonel, got out of the car, and disappeared into the throng of people entering the airport.
[Read here for the origin of the Random Topics Writing Series.]
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